Cosmopolitan Theology

Reconstituting Planetary Hospitality, Neighbor-Love, and Solidarity in an Uneven World

Namsoon Kang

• Publisher: Chalice Press
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9780827205352
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

In Cosmopolitan Theology, author Namsoon Kang proposes a theology that embraces and at the same time moves beyond collective identity position and group-based allegiances. It crosses borders of gender, race, nationality, religion, ethnicity, sexuality, and ability. Kang offers a vision of a global community of radical inclusion, solidarity, and deep compassion and justice for others. Blending theology with philosophy, she crosses borders of academism and activism, and the discursive borders of modernism, postmodernism, feminism, and postcolonialism.

Cosmopolitan Theology sheds a new light both in academia and the community of Christian believers by providing a public relevance of Jesus' teaching of neighbor-love, hospitality, and solidarity in our world today.

1

Dreaming the Impossible: Thinking, Judging, Acting Otherwise

Only write here what is impossible, that ought to be the impossible rule.

—JACQUES DERRIDA¹

“Nothing will be impossible with God.”

—LUKE 1:37

From Metanarratives to Glocalized Narratives

Jean-Francois Lyotard characterizes postmodernity as “incredulity toward metanarratives,”² and it is a general condition of the contemporary world. Metanarratives of legitimation and representation are no longer plausible. Where, then, can we find a discourse of legitimation in this postmodern era? According to Lyotard, legitimation becomes plural and local, and an overarching theory for justice comes to lose its political relevance. What he proposes is a “justice of multiplicities.”³ In this postmodern context, what we hold together, according to Lyotard, is the social bond, an interwoven thread of discursive practices, but not a single overarching theory that runs throughout the whole.

In this postmodern context, general social categories such as gender, race, class, or sexuality can be too reductive of the complexity of social identities to be effective. Instead of attending to the localized narrative, as postmodernists such as Lyotard suggest, I would like to fashion a glocalized narrative that vindicates the intersected and interconnected nature between the grand narrative and the small narrative, between the global and the local, while it questions and resists totalizing power and theories that have institutionalized, normativized, and naturalized various forms of social inequality. One of the significant contributions that postmodern discourse has made is its complex, sophisticated, and influential criticisms of foundationalism and essentialism. It is, however, important to maintain a place for transversally based relations of imperialistic dominance, oppression, and injustice along the analytical axes of gender, race, class, sexuality, ability, or citizenship, etc. The binary approach to the grand versus small, the universal versus the particular, or the global versus the local makes one incapable of dealing with the complex reality of human life in this contemporary world. The question is not, therefore, whether a theory is grand or small, or whether it is universal/global or particular/local, but what function a theory plays and whose interest it serves. Here, theory/discourse such as cosmopolitanism is not about an abstract world but about the very worldliness in Edward Said’s sense, a way to engage the public world. Said says about his worldliness: “[W]hat moves me mostly is anger at injustice, an intolerance of oppression, and some fairly unoriginal ideas about freedom and knowledge.”⁴ In this context, the theories Said produces, for instance, are ways of engaging the public world and movements for transforming the world. Through this book, I want to affirm that thinking and living, knowing and doing, theory and practice intersect. I also want to commit to the theological task of reconciling the binary clash between the two poles that have always existed in human life. Gilles Deleuze articulates theory as practice and further contends:

A theory is exactly like a box of tools. It has nothing to do with the signifier. It must be useful. It must function. And not for itself. If no one uses it...then the theory is worthless or the moment is inappropriate. We don’t revise a theory, but construct new ones; we have no choice but to make others.…A theory does not totalize; it is an instrument for multiplication and it also multiplies itself. It is in the nature of power to totalize.…⁵

Deleuze employs Nietzsche as a tool to challenge a dominant philosophical voice today, and Jacque Derrida also uses Nietzsche to deconstruct the logocentrism of Western metaphysics. I find cosmopolitan discourse to be an effective tool for theologizing, since it offers a possibility of thinking, judging, and acting otherwise in the contemporary world, where neo-imperialism and globalization permeate every sector of life on the globe. A discourse as a tool can effectively function only if it elaborates the utopian urge to think, judge, and act otherwise.

One’s judgments on the existing reality always come from a utopian reality. Here utopia signifies the viewpoint of the ideal but fundamentally realizable, running against a general perception of a utopia as merely an unrealizable dream. Paul Ricoeur rightly illustrates in his engagement with Karl Mannheim’s notion of utopia that “a utopia shatters a given order; and it is only when it starts shattering order that it is a utopia. A utopia is then always in the process of being realized.”⁶ In this sense, the absence of utopia is the death of society because “it would no longer have any project, any prospective goals.”⁷ A discourse cannot be a mere acceptance of or compliance with the status quo, where one experiences a “deep sense of marginality” because one “knows what it is to suffer absolute emotional and intellectual devaluation, to die unfulfilled and still isolated from the world’s centre.”⁸ A utopian discourse such as cosmopolitanism can earn its legitimacy only if it provokes and invokes the passion and longing for the impossible, the impossibility of ever-enlarging the decentered center so that everybody can be the center but no one claims an absolute ownership of the center. Such a utopian discourse opens up a new space for transformation by confronting the problem of power and offering an alternative view of the reality that is in between the world-as-it-is and the world-as-it-ought-to-be, between the world-of-already and the world-of-not-yet. Ernst Bloch talks about human utopic longing and the function of utopia that “each and every criticism of imperfection, incompleteness, intolerance, and impatience already without a doubt presupposes the conception of, and longing for, a possible perfection.”⁹ Cosmopolitan discourse involves dreaming of the world that fulfills what is missing or lacking in our reality: It provokes us to dream the impossible.

If a discourse can effectively function as a tool, it should be neither trapped in the world-as-it-is (reality) nor indulged in the naive vision of the world-as-it-ought-to-be (ideality). Cosmopolitan discourse provokes us to think about what Derrida calls the “question of a justice to come,”¹⁰ offering the cosmic scope of conviviality, justice, peace, and equality among/between all beings, including both humans and nonhumans. As a reemerging discourse, cosmopolitanism resituates, refashions, and relocates who one is in the world and how one is to be in relation to the other. Therefore, as Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak says, “[T]he production of theory is in fact a very important practice that is worlding the world in a certain way.”¹¹ Spivak goes on to say:

Who speaks and acts? It is always multiplicity, even within the person who speaks and acts.…Representation no longer exists; there’s only action—theoretical action and practical action which serve as relays and form networks.¹²

Cosmopolitan discourse that captures the spirit of planetary conviviality is what we need in our uneven world of power-differential and multiple forms of oppression, worlding the world in an altogether different way. One’s gender, class, race, age, ability, nationality, sexuality, or religion has been affecting humans’ lives in the world in a serious way. The question one comes to ponder in an uneven world follows: Is there a hierarchy among different forms of social oppression in terms of their significance and urgency? How would one’s victim experience function in one’s life? I have learned from my life experience in various regions of the world—i.e., South Korea, Germany, the United Kingdom, and the United States—that all forms of oppression and discrimination play out in different ways and on different levels of reality, and that it is dangerous to establish a hierarchy of oppressions among the different forms of oppression. However, people often think that there is a hierarchy of oppressions. People in advocacy movements for different causes, for instance, often work against each other, claiming the more urgency and significance of their cause over others. They offer different readings of the signs of our times. The discursive emergence of cosmopolitanism has led me to encounter deep sociohistorical ironies about what it means to live our times.

Reading the signs of our times is one of the most significant tasks of theologians. However, the questions of who constitutes we and who/what defines times in our times are complicated to answer. The answers to these questions vary depending on one’s geocultural location and socio-politico-ethicotheological position. The we in our time has mostly consisted of Euro-U.S., white, middle-class, male, heterosexual Christians with able bodies. I believe decentering this centered we is a precondition for, and urgent task of, offering a reading of the signs of our times. People ground a desire for purity in the process of constructing we in the antagonistic dualism of we-they, civilized-primitive, Christian-nonChristian, male-female, abled-disabled, heterosexualhomosexual, Black-White, West-nonWest, and so forth—a process that does not allow the space for in-betweenness, mestizaje, hybridity, many-ness, heterogeneity, or beyond-ness. The construction and universalization of the monolithic we is the product of modernity in Europe. Given the critical awareness of the role of both Christianity and Enlightenment philosophy in relation to colonialism/imperialism, it may sound odd for me to claim that cosmopolitanism is an effective discourse for constructing contemporary theology today, especially when the genealogy of cosmopolitanism ordinarily lists Immanuel Kant as a key figure for articulating and popularizing it, and scholars have criticized Kant for his Eurocentric, white suprematism and androcentrism.

I do not, however, have a desire for purity in any kind of form. After all, humans and their institutions, whether religious or socio-political, do not possess purity whatsoever. As Spivak argues, “[I]nvoking any of the so-called great religions of the world” for reaching the internationality of justice might be impossible “because the history of their greatness is too deeply imbricated in the narrative of the ebb and flow of power.”¹³ Desire for purity has resulted in holocaust, crusades, witch burnings, excommunication, and acts of violence in the name of purifying and cleansing the impurity, whether it is racial, ethnic, religious, or sexual. Even seeking a theoretical purity sometimes results in picking up “the universal that will give you the power to fight against the other side, and what you are throwing away by doing that is your theoretical purity, while they keep themselves clean by not committing themselves to anything.”¹⁴ One of the great lessons of the history of sin is the plain truth that virtues and vices are inextricably intertwined, whether in humans or institutions. What I would like to seek for, therefore, is not purity but the possibility for an alternatively liberative way of perceiving the world and humans in it. Retrieving the cosmopolitan spirit from Immanuel Kant, for instance, does not mean that he is immune to scrutiny for his blind racism, white superiorism, androcentrism, or inherent Eurocentrism. I do not wish to totally abandon a philosophy or a religion simply because it is polluted or impure. If one looks for a thinker or a theory that is pure in the sense that one cannot find any limit, flaw, ignorance, or epistemological blind spot, such a desire for purity would leave us with nothing to spare. In this sense, a blanket judgment that encourages either a total rejection or a total acceptance of a theory or figure is too naïve and pointless. My desire is to scrutinize the possible vices in thinker(s) or discourse(s) and, at the same time, retrieve the virtues that may have possibilities to help us widen our perception of the world and get out of our comfort zone so that we can enlarge and complexify our understanding of who we are, what we are capable of, what we ought to envision, or how we are to perceive and to be in solidarity with others.

As Michel Foucault claims in his articulation of the “author-function,”¹⁵ one could in fact circulate a discourse such as cosmopolitanism without any need for an original author, and the author will disappear at the moment it begins to affect one’s thinking and acting in one’s own context. Cosmopolitanism has offered me an ethical perspective and a conceptual framework with which to read the signs of our times as a theologian and intellectual who has a public responsibility for constantly offering a way to engage in this rapidly changing public world. In order to concretize the very spirit of cosmopolitanism as theological norms and practices of global justice, one must start with provincialization and vernacularization of the universalized monolithic West-centered we in signs of our times, because cosmopolitanism is to reveal the greatness of all humanity, with their differences and similarities. Cosmopolitanism is a defense for a simple commonsensical notion that all beings are equal and therefore deserve rights and dignity in their full sense—both in the private and public, and in the political and religious world.

There is no discourse or utterance that is not context specific. One should locate and interpret even a single word that one uses in its own specific context. One day I wrote a quote from Michel Foucault on the board in my class: “Do ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Preface
• 1 Dreaming the Impossible: Thinking, Judging, Acting Otherwise
• 2 Cosmopolitanism as Mobilizing Discourse for Doing Theology
• 3 Cosmopolitanism: Philosophical and Political Discourses
• 4 Cosmopolitan Trans-Religious Solidarity: Beyond Religious Tourism
• 5 Cosmopolitan Theology of Natality: Toward Neighbor-Love 106 as Passion for an Impossible Community of Justice
• 6 Cosmopolitan Theology of Planetary Hospitality
• 7 The Impossible Necessity of Dreaming the Kindom: Toward a Public Theology-to-Come
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index