Theology and Contemporary Continental Philosophy

The Centrality of a Negative Dialectic

Colby Dickinson

• Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield International
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781786610614
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy of Religion

This book aims to put modern continental philosophy, specifically the sub-fields of phenomenology, existentialism, hermeneutics, deconstruction, critical theory and genealogy, into conversation with the field of contemporary theology. Colby Dickinson demonstrates the way in which negative dialectics, or the negation of negation, may help us to grasp the thin (or non-existent) borders between continental philosophy and theology as the leading thinkers of both fields wrestle with their entrance into a new era. With the declining place of “the sacred” in the public sphere, we need to pay more attention than ever to how continental philosophy seems to be returning to distinctly theological roots. Through a genealogical mapping of 20 th -century continental philosophers, Dickinson highlights the ever-present Judeo-Christian roots of modern Western philosophical thought. Opposing categories such as immanence/transcendence, finitude/infinitude, universal/particular, subject/object, are at the center of works by thinkers such as Agamben, Marion, Vattimo, Levinas, Latour, Caputo and Adorno. This book argues that utilizing a negative dialectic allows us to move beyond the apparent fixation with dichotomies present within those fields and begin to perform both philosophy and theology anew.

69Chapter 3

The Gap within Existence as
Theological Motif

Opening Up the Complexity of Existence

To better capture the fullness of the plane of immanence that Adorno set himself toward inspecting, perhaps we need to focus on the complexity that actually does exist in our world, in the human beings and other creatures that truly comprise it. There is a vastness to this complexity that often escapes our comprehension altogether. It is certainly not reducible to an easily represented dichotomy or antinomy, and it sustains our interdependent and intersubjective relations in whatever world we occupy. In this sense, perhaps Heidegger’s and Levinas’s claims that animals do not have a world or do not have an ethically recognizable “face” needs to be replaced by a more ecological viewpoint that accounts for a complexity to life that we have failed thus far in history to take seriously. To get at this truth, we need only follow Adorno a bit longer in this direction, as his commitment to material existence prompted him to respect the complexity of relations that has often gone unrecognized.1 This is something that has guided political and liberation theologians who have followed in Adorno’s wake after him to be sure.

These are the insights that lie at the base of Adorno’s negative dialectics and gave rise to Jürgen Moltmann’s political theology, for instance. This goes some ways too toward explaining why we have not really surpassed Moltmann’s political theology, but only continue to see his initial claims unfold in the various contextual and liberation theologies that abound today. Indeed, Moltmann’s delineation of political theology as a form of “permanent iconoclasm” seemingly confirms more recent developments of theological forms that return us directly to the question of whether such a discourse that seeks to permanently upend theological discourse can even exist in the first place (such as takes place within so-called queer theology today).2 To 70comprehend these dynamics is to behold the return of a permanent antinomianism that lies at the heart of any messianic religion, and which is situated within the permanent tension that exists between law and grace. This is what I have been trying to get to the heart of in the present study. Any religious tradition that takes seriously its own claims to justice, and hence to the desires for reform, must be willing to discover its own tradition as containing within it an interruption of its normative representations.

In Adorno’s Minima Moralia, for starters, we hear this incisive reflection concerning the need to open up our epistemological claims that much wider toward the complexity of knowledge as it exists in itself, and beyond our ability to fully comprehend it:

[T]he demand for intellectual honesty is itself dishonest. Even if we were for once to comply with the questionable directive that the exposition should exactly reproduce the process of thought, this process would be no more a discursive progression from stage to stage than, conversely, knowledge falls from Heaven. Rather, knowledge comes to us through a network of prejudices, opinions, innervations, self-corrections, presuppositions and exaggerations, in short through the dense, firmly-founded but by no means uniformly transparent medium of experience.3

In commenting on this passage, I want first to note the myriad sources of experience that, in reality, contribute to our knowledge, which Adorno lays out without suggesting how exactly they are interrelated: prejudices, opinions, that which stimulates us, those moments when we catch ourselves “in the wrong” and make the significant self-correction, those presuppositions we develop or are handed to us and even exaggerations, the extreme thoughts and suggestions that push us in one direction or another. Each of these things becomes the bedrock of our experiences in life, and they are what, together, constitute our knowledge, which is really our plural “knowledges.” (It is intriguing, in this light, that knowledges, in the plural, is generally not a recognized word, for even our comprehension of knowledge is typically singular: a person has knowledge, or is knowledgeable, even though we must realize that a person, in truth, is only knowledgeable about certain things, certain areas of experience, etc.4) What is striking about this formulation is that such a network is not described in detail: no indication is given for how exactly prejudices are sorted out in terms of self-correction, and no linkage is unveiled for how presuppositions might be exaggerations. Adorno simply makes a list that would be, in practical terms, almost impossible to categorize in terms of the relations between sources. This complex network is theoretically impossible to systematize, to disentangle from the knot that it is woven 71into (and which, to my mind, constitutes the subject itself—the subject as an untidy knot of complex interactions).

Second, we should take note of the imperative that pushes us from behind most emphatically—and especially in academia where the boundary between philosophy and theology holds fast for many—in order to maintain a certain credible, often disciplinary, “intellectual honesty.” Certain things have their place in intellectual matters, and other things do not. Imagine, for example, a philosopher who tries to bring their autobiographical narrative into their performance of being “a philosopher.” Such actions would be tantamount in some circles to professional suicide.5 Theology, for its part, is torn on the subject. It currently recognizes the necessity for contextual theologies (in the plural), but it also contains rather skeptical, traditional elements that often view such contextual platforms with suspicion, distrust, and dismissal. Adorno’s point, however, is that true “intellectual honesty” will involve some portion of “intellectual dishonesty,” or at least it will appear as such. I...