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Education as Event: A Conversation with John D. Caputo by T. Wilson Dickinson

John D. Caputo

Syracuse University and Villanova University Email: [email protected]

Keywords Academic protocols Asceticism Disciplines Environment Event

Abstract

This interview with John D. Caputo conducted by T. Wilson Dickinson discusses the implications of the event for the philosophy of education. It addresses various aporias the event poses for academic standards, protocols of writing, teaching as formation or transformation, the post-secular, the new technologies, the old versus the new asceticism in the face of the environmental crisis.

Contributor Note

John D. Caputo, the Watson Professor of Religion Emeritus (Syracuse University) and the Cook Professor of Philosophy Emeritus (Villanova University), writes and lectures in the area of postmodern theory and theology for both academic and general audiences. His latest books are Hoping against Hope: Confessions of a Postmodern Pilgrim (Fortress, 2015), The Folly of God: A Theology of the Unconditional (Polebridge, 2015), The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps, 2013), and Truth: Philosophy in Transit (Penguin, 2013). His major books have attempted to persuade us that hermeneutics goes all the way down (Radical Hermeneutics), that Derrida is a thinker to be reckoned with by theology (The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida), and that theology is best served by getting over its love affair with power and authority and embracing what Caputo calls, following St. Paul, The Weakness of God, which won the 2006 AAR book award for works in constructive theology. He has also addressed wider-than-academic audiences in On Religion and What Would Jesus Deconstruct? He has an interest in interacting with church and community activists and has long been interested in Emergent Church. He is currently working on a book entitle Interpretation from the Margins: The Pelican Guide to Postmodern Hermeneutics, which should appear in 2017.

Citation

Caputo, John D. (2016), ‘Education as Event: A Conversation with John D. Caputo by T. Wilson Dickinson’, JOMEC Journal 10, ‘Teaching and the Event’, ed. Éamonn Dunne. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.18573/n.2016.10082

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Education as Event: A Conversation supporting a particular confessional with John D. Caputo1 religion. We do not want to be ‘post- secular’ if that would mean undermining that constitutional restraint. In that T. Wilson Dickinson: Decades ago, sense, the Christian Right, and their Heidegger presciently observed that claim that the United States is a information – and the positivist episte- Christian nation, could claim the mantle mological framework that accompanies of post-secular. That is very dangerous it – was coming to serve as a and I do not want to be post-secular in constricting limit for thinking (Heidegger that sense. Again, when it comes to 1996: 29). This constriction does not universities, citizens without a religious seem to be due merely to some kind of affiliation have the right to study free cognitive mistake or conviction, but it from religious proselytizing or mandatory seems to be constantly reinforced by the religious practices. So in the practical practices of the university, extending order, this word ‘secular’ protects us, from the classroom practice of lecture even as it allows religiously minded and examination, to the self- people to found religious institutions understanding of scholars as researchers from their own resources. Of course, this (Heidegger 2002: 64). It seems that one is easily said but carrying it out in reality of the more common forms of resistance involves difficult negotiations. to this tendency is to counter this secular model of the research university But as a philosophical theologian there with a more confessional approach to is another sense of ‘secular’ and ‘religion’ education. So rather than simply serving that interests me, and in this sense I as a conduit for the accumulation and think the university should not try to be communication of information, ‘secular’ and should expose itself to a universities redirect their concern toward certain ‘religious’ impulse. In fact, I think the formation of students. Might there be that if it does not, it will destroy itself. I a third way forward, or one that would go so far as to say that, in this hauntingly inhabits the boundaries sense again, not only the university but between these secular and religious also the political order should be ‘post- options? Could you imagine a sort of secular’. Here everything depends upon post-secular university? seeing what I mean by ‘religion’, since I obviously do not mean ‘confessional’ John D. Caputo: The first question for religion. What I mean is what I call the me would be: what is a ‘secular’ religion of the ‘event’, a word that university? Today this word means a circulates felicitously among the great person or an institution not affiliated with philosophers of our times. Without the or sponsored by a church or religious ‘event’ I would run the risk of forgetting organization. We define it negatively but that I exist, as Johannes Climacus it is very positive. It is very important in quipped. We must not forget the event, the political order, where the constitution for it is the event that ‘forms’ or restrains the government from ‘transforms’ our existence. So if we search for a third possibility between 1 The following interview first appeared in JCRT secular ‘information’ and religious (Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory) 12. 2. ‘formation’, this would be the possibility Fall 2012. We are grateful to John D. Caputo, T. of the event. The crucial distinction for Wilson Dickinson, and Victor Taylor for permission to reprint this interview here. me is between the event and the lack of 5 http://cf.ac.uk/jomecjournal @JOMECjournal

the event. To be post-secular means that student’s life is changed. The teacher I do not want to lack the event, where does not know she did this, and at the this lack is what ‘secular’ would mean for time neither does the student. That is the me. event.

Let me add a word about ‘event’. This WD: I am thinking here not just about word is all over contemporary philosophy the idea of such a university, but about but I mean it in Derrida’s sense of the its practices. In The Weakness of God coming of something we cannot see you drew a distinction not simply coming, the coming of the unexpected, between an overly abstract theoretical unprojected, unprogrammed, which of reason and practical reason, but within course we hope will make everything practical reason you differentiated new but may make everything worse. Aristotelian practical judgment (or With the coming of the event, things are phronesis) from the heart (or kardia) of reopened, reinvented, undergo a the disciple of Christ. Whereas the paradigm shift, a new being, and this former is capable of adroitly applying a happens everywhere, in history and general schema to a particular situation, everyday life, in philosophy, in art, in the latter gives oneself over to ‘the science. The Copernican Revolution, demands of singularity’ (Caputo 2006: Picasso’s cubism, the recent ‘Arab 142-3). So while the pedagogy of Spring’, these were transformative and formation might exceed the limitations of unpredicted. Of course, we cannot make information, it seems to still lead to events happen – we cannot even see some kind of conformity. I wonder what them coming. But we can prepare the a pedagogy of radical transformation conditions under which they happen by might look like? Is it possible to speak keeping things relatively unstable, in a about the practices of a pedagogy of the state of optimal disequilibrium, not too heart? much but enough, and this requires judgment and discernment. That I think JC: I do not know if you intended just is the condition in systems theory where now to use the word ‘transformation’ the system is capable of innovation and instead of ‘formation’, or even in contrast reinvention without simply collapsing. If to formation. If so, I approve. I think that the system is too tight, too ordered, the university must provide the milieu for nothing new can happen. I admit this is the event and therefore I would prefer risky business. But the point is that not to say a place of ‘formation’. It must playing it safe all the time is also risky allow the event to happen, which is why I business – it risks the prevention of the myself would speak of ‘transformation’ future, of the event. Nothing is safe. rather than ‘formation’. I think ‘form’ and Everything is risky. Now having said this, ‘formation’ work against the event. The we can ask, is this structural exposure to coming or incoming of the event – in the event not a perfect way to describe French, this is l’invention de l’événement the institution in general and in – is the occasion of a transformation. So particular educational institutions – the instead of ‘forming’ ‘habits’ (literally administration, the curriculum, teaching ‘havings’) we have to do with ‘methods’, testing and evaluation, transforming happenings, with events, everything that goes on in education. A and what we seek is a certain readiness teacher gives a class, or maybe just for the event, which is paradoxical since makes a comment in class, and a the event is what we cannot see coming 6 http://cf.ac.uk/jomecjournal @JOMECjournal

and hence something for which we So if we say the university must be a cannot be ready. We must make ready scene of the event, not a place of for what we cannot be ready. formation, then it must take every precaution not to the prevent the event. Although I see a certain limit in Aristotle, This means it risks a certain anarchy, an still it was Aristotle who first taught us open-endedness of thought – the right to about this aporia and in this sense he ask any question – and a proliferation of was the first philosopher of the event. practices, a rainbow coalition, as Jesse The phronimos is not merely the man Jackson says, of people of many different (and we know he did not mean women) sorts, different cultures, etc. That is more who knows the ‘rule’ and can ‘apply’ it. If easily accomplished with the resources the situation is rule-governed, a machine, of the larger urban universities. a computer, a robot could apply it. The Furthermore, something like this is much phronimos is the one who knows what to more likely to happen when ‘information’ do when faced with an idiosyncratic flows freely, across closed borders. So I situation, when the rules do not simply do not think we should engage in apply but have to be ‘reinvented’ in order caricatures about big universities – the to respond to the demands of the large state university, large classes, no ‘singular’ situation. I have always thought personal contact, a degree-processing of myself as some kind of an Aristotelian factory, as opposed to a small on this point, a dissident or heretical confessional college, more intimate, Aristotelian, to be sure, with all kinds of more concerned with the personal reservations about the conservativism by character of the students – or even which we are threatened in Aristotle. But about ‘information’. We would also need I am always trying to reinvent this to rethink ‘information’ beyond phronimos, to expose a ‘more radical Heidegger’s criticism. I agree it was phronesis’ (Caputo 1987: 262). One way I extraordinarily prescient of Heidegger to do so is to say this phronimos fellow is a single out this word – not only did he little too cool, too smart, too aristocratic, thematize the ‘T’ in ‘IT’, but also the ‘I’ – and that he needs a little less ‘insight’ but we cannot forget how reactionary and a little more ‘heart’, to be ‘melted’ by Heidegger was about democracy and the demands of the other, not simply to technology, and we need to recognize coolly see what the demands of the how much democracy requires the free situation are. There is nothing ‘unmanly’ flow of information. Furthermore, in in being tender. Now the ‘heart’ is the quantum physics, ‘information’ may turn Biblical model, the prophetic model, and out to be the very nature of the universe. it shows up in the Christian ‘Fathers’ of It may be that on the most elemental the Church – here we must add ‘sic!’ – level, the most basic units of existence above all in St. Augustine’s Confessions. are bits of information, even as in genetic Its opposite is ‘hardness of heart’. That, I theory, the very basis of life lies in some think, breaks the grip of the elitist and kind of information system. That is what conservative streak in Aristotle and turns is so prophetic in the way that the young our hearts (and our minds) to what Paul Derrida singled out the paradigm of a calls ta me onta, the little nothings and generalized archi-‘writing’, coded bodies, the homeless and the hopeless, differential systems, which led him to the the ‘rogues’ and marginalized who never Heideggerian heresy that a ‘techne’ lies make an appearance in Aristotle’s ethics at the very heart of the ‘physis’ Heidegger (except as ‘slaves’ and ‘women’). celebrated. Maybe information is an 7 http://cf.ac.uk/jomecjournal @JOMECjournal

auto-deconstructing system of trans- (Foucault 1995: 140). What seems to be formation and there is no difference at at stake, then, is not an opposition all between them. between an overly theoretical way of proceeding and one that is practical, but But to return to the issue that you are a complex and contested differential concerned with in this question, no field of practices. As your own education college or university can neglect the has its roots in De La Salle’s order of ‘heart’ because it cannot neglect the Christian Brothers, I wonder if this event, which is its heart. You see this historical connection was something that quite vividly in Quaker and Anabaptist was readily apparent to you as a student colleges, institutions of distinguished and then a teacher, or do you see a stark academic achievement that also have a divide between the life of the academic heart. I remember once that a man and that of the religious life? And on a named John Coleman, then president of more personal note, how have these Haverford College outside Philadelphia, various formations come to inform your took a leave of absence in order to work? spend time working as a trash collector, reminding himself and everybody around JC: Now you have exposed my allergy to him of the privileged circumstances of the word ‘formation’ and why I prefer to most academic communities. This speak of ‘transformability’ to signify an extraordinary act also reminds us also of alternate order of practices. Yes, the mission of community colleges and ‘practices’ is not a panacea. We must public urban institutions to serve the distinguish among different sorts of least privileged students. Our institutions practices, as we have already done by must be open-ended and if ‘open distinguishing phronesis and kardia. I admissions’ has not worked, we need a was born in 1940 into a church that had massive commitment of resources to not changed in any significant way in prepare the least advantaged to meet four hundred years and, as you point out, admission standards. The Christian Right I entered a Catholic religious order. That would object to this, of course, on the was in 1958, the year that Pius XII died grounds that they do not want the and was succeeded by John XXIII. This Sermon on the Mount to mean that we seemed at the time to be the beginning are going to raise their taxes. of the end of a very conservative period in the Church. My novitiate life was, if I WD: This distinction between information may say so, a very ‘formative’ experience and formation is quite obviously a for me, quite literally, especially since we heuristic schematization that easily were still steeped in the culture of the breaks down. Foucault, for example, pre-Vatican II church. What will interest traced the genealogical roots of modern you to learn is that, in a religious order, disciplines of knowledge to the monastic the time spent preparing for entering the technologies and Christian spiritual active ministry is called ‘formation’ and exercises. He often cites none other than the novitiate is called a ‘house of Jean-Baptiste de La Salle as an formation’. And they mean it! We might intermediary figure between the ascetic think of this as a Nietzschean camel attention to detail in the ‘mystique of the stage or alternately, as you indicate, a everyday’ and the ‘discipline of the very Foucauldian space and time. The minute’ that organized ‘the school, the hours of each day, the days of each barracks, the hospital or the workshop’ week, are rigorously articulated and 8 http://cf.ac.uk/jomecjournal @JOMECjournal

structured, even as the grounds are houses of formation, will be more walled in. Here the young person is welcoming and open-ended places. (In ‘formed’ in the ‘spirit’ of the ‘Order’ by fact, the places where teachers expected means of obedience to the ‘Rule’. This is to ‘form’ students are called ‘normal’ quite like a military boot camp, as your schools, normalizing, inculcating norms.) reference to Foucault on the ‘barracks’ Now the baroque, counter-Reformation indicates, and it works best with eighteen pre-Vatican world in which I grew up – year olds. The individual novice is four centuries of Catholicism from the ordered, formed, disciplined, by a blanket Council of Trent to the opening of of practices and micro-powers, affecting Vatican II in October, 1962 – everything from what one reads and disappeared quite quickly. Today, the studies to clothing, a change of name, Catholic Church in the United States and bodily posture, modes of expression, diet, Western Europe, as well as the religious table manners, including the very orders, are today in a state of crisis. condiments one uses at meals, Orders like the Christian Brothers, which prescribed times when one is allowed to are ‘active orders’, have abandoned old speak, even relaxation. One never relaxes models, which were taken from the the rule but the rule provides for fixed ‘contemplative orders’, and have tried to times of relaxation, where as a matter of ‘reinvent’ themselves for a modern or religious obedience, one is told to relax. rather postmodern world. They have, I Of course, the idea, the ‘form’, is the would say, abandoned the paradigm of imitatio Christi. They want to engender monastic ‘formation’ for one more suited someone Christ-like not produce a robot, to contemporary life, but this may be too but it is a massive disciplinary operation little too late. They are beset with a crisis which reaches down into the bones, of numbers that may finally see them all ‘forming’ ‘habits’ that last a lifetime. but disappear.

Foucault was interested in the way De la That would be a loss, and this brings me Salle transcribed analogous practices to to my second point. The old monastic the modern elementary school, the model of formation and the ‘distribution of bodies’ in ‘grades’, ‘technologies’ it deployed were construed arranged by age, gender, etc. At the time, around a ‘vow’, a promise, an affirmation, we were very proud of the place ‘St. La which I would now describe as a Salle’ held in the history of education, response to an event. So while I shed no and in fact the American ‘Christian tears over abandoning the old Brothers’ today run first-rate schools. I disciplinary system and its ascetic ideal, would say two things about this. First, as which I think is a world well lost for all I have been saying, I would distinguish but a very few people, the loss of these the practices of ‘formation’ in the orders will mean the loss of the religious singular, which suggests a single form to passion that drives the members of be inculcated – Christ, the warrior, the these orders to run schools and shelters good Christian child, the good citizen, the and clinics in neighborhoods from which good socialist, etc. – from the practices the rest of us keep a safe distance. It is of ‘transformation’, which suggests a kind these people above all else who serve ta of endless transformability or me onta. That is also where celibacy reinventability. The latter for me is closer (voluntary not mandatory!) has a role to to the ‘event’. Schools organized about play. If you have children to raise, it is the paradigm of transformability, not very difficult to live and work in such 9 http://cf.ac.uk/jomecjournal @JOMECjournal

dangerous neighborhoods, the way poetics of salt, which is always a little celibate priests, nuns and brothers do. befuddling to my students when I teach The De La Salle Brothers take a fourth the book in my introductory classes).2 If religious vow, the Christian education of this is the case, then even the seemingly the poor. They renounce the choice of secular practices of the classroom and the priesthood in order to be completely academic life could be interpreted in committed to teaching, undistracted by religious terms. This is also something the priestly duty to administer the that Augustine does throughout the sacraments. For them teaching is a pages of the Confessions – interrogating religious vocation, a vow they have taken, the manner in which intellectual their ‘apostolate’ or calling, and not only disciplines shaped his desires. This leads a job. That is the most precious thing I me to wonder, then, what is it I love have learned from them, and it is when I undergo the typical practices of something I still believe, although I would academic life? How do the specific now use the word ‘religious’ in a more practices of the classroom educate the open-ended way. Here you clearly see desires of our students? What are the workings of the event and of people different disciplinary mechanisms (tenure galvanized by the event. The committees, accreditation reviews, and disappearance of these people means peer-reviewed journals) training us to that schools that serve the poorest of the love? poor are being closed and increasingly scarce resources are shifted to the JC: I appreciate the irony of your prosperous suburban schools. question. You return us, in the context of Furthermore, the nuns are the most the schools, to one of Derrida’s most radical women in the Catholic Church famous aporias, between justice and the today, women who both are deeply law, but now the aporia is set between religious and acutely conscious of the our love of philosophical and theological violent patriarchy of the Catholic searching and the tenure committee, hierarchy. The bishops know that and which is the law. Let us say, the aporia of they don’t trust them and well they the philosophical and theological quest should not. Some nuns are being and the quest for a job and tenure. So let ordained in open defiance of the us go back to the event. Teaching and Church’s prohibition – a kind of Christian writing, reading and learning, teachers disobedience, not civil but ecclesiastical and students, all are about the event. We – which is at least a first step in may even speak of a pedagogy of the overturning the violent misogyny of the event. Everything is about the event, Church. Perhaps these nuns will be the inside or outside the academy, religion, Rosa Parks of Catholicism. everyday life, in sacred space or secular space. Indeed, since the event as I have WD: In On Religion you reject the division been discussing it has an inherently that is often drawn between the secular religious force, I would say there is no and the religious on the grounds that it strictly ‘secular’ space, if that would appeals to the largely cognitive mean a space without the event. For me, opposition drawn between reason and all the ‘professions’ – medicine, law, faith. Instead, taking a page out of education – concern the event. The Augustine’s Confessions, you propose that religion is about passion and love 2 See especially Caputo (2001), ‘Religion is for (more specifically you appeal to the Lovers’ in On Religion, New York: Routledge. 10 http://cf.ac.uk/jomecjournal @JOMECjournal

professions are made up of people who religious calling, whether or not the have been ‘called’ by one event or institution has any relationship to a another; they are vocations, callings. As I confessional ‘religion’, as many hospitals have just said, I have no hesitation in in fact do. In Great Britain, in fact, the calling them ‘religious vocations’. I once nurse is still called ‘sister’, and the garb was sure I had a religious vocation in the of a nun and of a nurse are similar. You strict or narrow sense. But I have come will recall that when the ministry of Jesus to see that I had, that we all have, or is first introduced in the New Testament, should have, a religious vocation in the it is said he came ‘teaching and healing’. terms that I have been discussing, which means being visited by the grace of the The questions you are raising arise from event, in any of several orders. We can an experience of the same aporias, the see this in the legal profession, where same structural conflict between the the event that galvanizes the law is the events to which we in the university are passion for justice, which give rise to the all responding and the monster of laws, aporiae of the passion for justice and the the flow of the academic power chart rule or force of law so powerfully from the administration to the students, elaborated by Derrida. The law deals with the requirements placed upon the matters of life and death, in the most students for graduation, the ‘grading’ literal sense, and so it deals with sacred system, etc., and upon the faculty to or solemn matters, which is the event. meet the standards of tenure and promotion. This is the conflict between The same aporias are found there as in our vocation, our religious vocation, and all the professions. In the medical the disciplinary system, the distribution profession, the event that insists in the of micro-power across the bodies who name of ‘healing’, to which they all take make up the university, the administered an ‘oath’, by which everyone in that society of the university. On the one profession has been summoned (I am hand, I am writing from my heart, writing speaking optatively, I am dreaming), has something because my life is at stake, to contend with a monster of laws – of because I am confounded by the hospital regulations, professional codes mysteries of my existence, and on the of conduct, health insurance company other hand, I need another publication regulations, malpractice litigation, for tenure. I am doing both of these hierarchical conflicts among hospital things at the same time. Is that possible? administrators, physicians and nurses, It seems not. I am not sure. Maybe we and even the laws of the market, so that regularly do things like that, something hospitals now advertise for patients. I like the Knight of Faith who looks for all have been invited to speak several times the world like a tax collector. by nurses and nursing educators, and they have helped me see the religious I am not sure I can improve upon quality of the medical vocation of the Derrida’s solution to such aporias, which nurse. The nurse is relatively low on the is to say that we do not solve them but hospital power chart but no one is move in the distance between the two closer, more intimately involved, with extremes. We must at one and the same patients, with the singularity of the time both prove ourselves according to patient’s situation, which lies below the the protocols of the university and also rules up above. Those who nurse the transform them from within. There are dying in a hospice have a palpably many experimental institutions, not 11 http://cf.ac.uk/jomecjournal @JOMECjournal

enough, which treat the rules with a opportunities, albeit risky ones. Of measured suspicion, but those are at course, churches, courts, hospitals, best limited solutions. They are not going museums and schools are structures, to replace mainstream institutions, which institutions, economies, jobs, and they cannot be replaced but can be renewed need money and they need rules. But by inventive administrators and faculty there must always be something unruly who can devise new unprogrammable about the rules, some anarchic energy, ‘programs’, new ways of meeting some event, for these institutions contain requirements, new ‘requirements’ that something they cannot contain, are duties without duties, new courses something uncontainable, which is the not merely in content but in method, event. The justice is always found in the new courses that do not proceed as a opening, the crack, the crevice. The rules simple matter of ‘course’. We must find must be ‘plastic’, to borrow Catherine new ways to weaken the protocols Malabou’s word; they must be without jettisoning them, new ways to welcoming, open-ended. Everyone must break down the barriers between the understand that the task is not to apply disciplines and the colleges, etc. One the rule but to reinvent it, that the danger I see is the growing individual is never a ‘case’ that ‘falls professionalization of people who run the under’ (cadere, casus) a rule, but the rule universities, a separate culture of is a finger pointing at a moon of upwardly mobile professional singularity. administrators who move from university to university in search of higher This can all be written down quite positions. They do not arise from the elegantly, of course, but the reality is faculty and return to the faculty and so never as elegant. I spent over twenty they risk insulating themselves from the years on promotion and tenure event, which can only take place in the committees and time and again we were classroom, which is the heart of the presented with idiosyncratic situations. university. How do you evaluate the ‘research’ of a professor in the performing arts if, So the idea is not so much to eliminate instead of writing critical essays the these aporias but to make them maxims, professor actually performs, as an actor the impossible conditions under which or a director? Is a published book of we must make something possible. We poetry, or a text book, ‘published cannot, we ought not to try to separate research’? Those are the easy questions. justice and the law, the gift and the The hard one is, how do we truly economy, the event and the systems in evaluate a teacher? How do you measure which it is always already found. Instead, whether the students have been touched we want to make them porous to each by the event of a teacher who has herself other. The aporias are inescapable, been transformed by the event? If this irreducible; we could even say happens at all, it may not happen until ‘structural’, albeit in the paradoxical many years later when someone realizes sense that the structure is de- how a teacher has changed her life. But structuring, that the event prevents the we cannot let such impossible structure from closing over, from conundrums turn us into ‘beautiful enclosing the event by submitting the souls’, as Hegel called them, too event to rules, to the program. That beautiful for the harshness of the world. means that the aporias are openings, 12 http://cf.ac.uk/jomecjournal @JOMECjournal

WD: In my own work, I have suggested prevent the event (and also makes for that the writings of a number of good teachers). The event is the most continental philosophers, like deadly serious thing of all and so it can Kierkegaard and Derrida, can be be approached only or best in the comic interpreted as contemporary trans- mode, as when Climacus tells us about formations of ancient and Christian the man who accepts an invitation to spiritual exercises and technologies of dinner with the proviso that he is not in the self.3 So rather than being nihilistic the meantime killed by a slate falling off theorists, they could be thought of as a roof as he passes by. Everyone laughs practitioners of a radical pedagogy. In but he is ‘deadly serious’. The comic is what way do you think it is possible to the incognito of the religious. The style of recover and re-interpret these resources their work is of course completely of philosophy and theology, and in what incommensurable with modernity and way would such a turn to the past run the rule of method, which is why we have the risk of repeating its mistakes and both found in them echoes of shortcomings? premodern figures like Augustine, where the passion of the event is palpable and JC: I like this expression ‘radical the rules of modernity had not yet been pedagogy’ and I think you do well to formed. I am not saying that Augustine or single out Derrida and Kierkegaard as early Christian writers were humorists, of prototypes. They are the most important course, but that they write from the philosophers in my work as well, in my heart, I would say ‘autobiographically’, own search for something radical: not as a strict literary genre but in the Kierkegaard because of his articulation sense that they were not writing papers of the ‘single individual’, which we today to deliver at conferences or for the call ‘singularity’, and Derrida because of advancement of academic careers. They the account of the event, of the coming were writing with their blood about of the singularity of the other, as a basic matters of life and death. The earliest structure of our experience. They are for theologies were forged in the closest me the prototypes of thinkers who write collaboration with the communities of from the passion of life, who are touched faith, as opposed to the gulf that today by a transformative event, and that I separates the ‘bishop’, the official think has been the source of our shared teacher of the faith, and the ‘theologian’, interest in them. They also share who is writing books and papers for something in common that I very much fellow theologians and for tenure. treasure – they are both comic-tragic Kierkegaard exposed the fraudulence of writers, both laughing through their tears, the academic setting in which which I think the only style that is philosophy and theology are housed in congenial to the event, that does not modern times and he recalls for us the apostolic passion of Christian antiquity. He once went so far as to question the 3 See T. Wilson Dickinson (2011), ‘Repeating, Not Christian credentials of anyone who is Simply Recollecting, Repetition: Kierkegaard’s Ethical Exercises’, Sophia 50, 4: 657-675; (2012) not martyred! ‘Teaching with Fear and Trembling: On the Classroom as a Space of Dramatic and You ask about dangers inherent in such Bewildering Trial’, Journal of Cultural and a retrieval of the ancients. For me, in Religious Theory 12, 2; (2011) Specters of Truth: every case the danger is always that we Exercising Philosophy and Theology, PhD diss., Syracuse University. will prevent the event, that mundane 13 http://cf.ac.uk/jomecjournal @JOMECjournal

forces, the powers of the world, will still breathed with the breath of the prevent the event, and so it is worth event, where you would risk your life to contrasting the different dangers in be a Christian. So Kierkegaard did battle Christian antiquity and in the work of with the mundane powers of the Church Kierkegaard. The times are different, the and the politics of the modern university. task is different, and so the danger, the Accordingly, Kierkegaard ran the forces of the world, are different. The opposite danger, and by the end of his early theologians were engaged in an life I think he succumbed to it, a deeply apostolic struggle to construct a memory anti-institutional condemnation of the of Jesus in a theological edifice that church and the university which leaves would house a way of life, a way of no room for any institution, along with an repeating Jesus in their life. As you have elitist distrust of modern democratic shown, they are writing from an institutions that he shared with existential passion, which is why we love Nietzsche and Heidegger. I do not mean them. The danger here – a danger to to set Derrida on a white horse at this which I think they finally succumbed – point but I have to say that Derrida does was the institutionalization of their not make either mistake. He is insistent passion. I think they allowed their about the inside/outside structure, about passion for the event that took place in the roguishness of democracy, and the name of Jesus to freeze over into an about the need for ‘negotiations’, for obsession with the construction of moving in the space between justice and ‘Christianity’, with imposing doctrinal the law, events and institutions. He is a rectitude, as you have pointed out in lover of heretical dissent while at the your work. That allowed their theology, same time he can even say that which is supposed to be a theology of deconstruction is a philosophy of the originating event, to devolve into institutions. Still, it pains me to oppose heresiology. Although this may sound Kierkegaard and Derrida, because what I strange to orthodox ears, ‘Christianity’ love about the two of them, what you was the mundane force that suppressed and I both love, is that they pose to such the event by which they were driven. a ‘scandal’ to the business as usual of Practically everything we know about the philosophy and the university. Their very ‘Gnostics’, for example, comes from names are a summons to do things citations in the writings of the people differently, to reinvent the university who were denouncing them as ‘heretics’, under the impulse of the event, which is the old story of history being written by itself a heresy to the spirit of objectivism the winners. I think that the fear of that hovers over the university today. heresy is the fear of the event. They are consciously, intentionally eccentric and incommensurable figures. Kierkegaard, on the other hand, lived in That is why I love them both and will not an almost perfectly opposite time – not a choose between them. church ‘militant’ but a church ‘triumphant’, a post-Constantinian time – WD: In Against Ethics you drew a when Europeans thought they were all distinction between bodies and flesh – Christian. That led Kierkegaard to make with the former designating the aspects his famous distinction between a of our existence that are characterized fraudulent and complacent ‘Christen- by intentionality, agency, and strength, dom’, which is a power of this world, and while the latter is associated with that a genuine apostolic ‘Christianity’, which which is weak, vulnerable, and subject to 14 http://cf.ac.uk/jomecjournal @JOMECjournal

suffering (Caputo 1993: 203). You have turn. Teaching is a matter of being used this distinction to criticize the touched by the being-touched of the philosophical and theological fantasy of a teacher, not mind to mind but flesh to body without flesh, of a form of existence flesh. that is able to rid itself of its limitation, weakness, and vulnerability. Are there As you can see I am putting the student pedagogical practices that reinforce this and the teacher or professor in the same fantasy, that imagine the professor to be position, in the position of responding, of an authoritative font of knowledge, that saying yes to something by which they presume the classroom to be a place have been touched, of receiving the where fleshless intellects interface, event, rather than positioning the teacher where frailty and limitation are as a sovereign subjectivity who has examined, graded, and if found wanting, ‘mastery’ of her field. This is the position failed? How might the body and the flesh of flesh not body, of the patient not the remain integrated in the classroom? agent, of receptivity and responsiveness, of being exposed, vulnerable to the JC: When I write, and when I teach, I coming of something unforeseen. Of always want to touch the event, or rather course, it is dangerous for the young to let the student or the reader be teacher to assume such a posture touched by the event, and so there is a because the sociology of the modern ‘homiletic’ element in my ‘pedagogy’, for university is centered on a series of which my writing has been criticized agencies, of teaching ‘effectiveness’, of (instead of being congratulated). I want to having a mature research ‘program’, and evoke the event, to let the event happen, having credentials that assure everyone but of course I cannot and I do not want that she is a ‘master’ and a ‘doctor’ of to abandon my ‘training’, my ‘formation’, her field. But, the truth is that we serve in the ‘discipline’. I want to be faithful to the event, are in bonds to the event, and the discipline while not allowing the we are not a ‘master’, just as we are not discipline to prevent the event. First and a ‘doctor’ of the event but a patient. But foremost, it is the event that has confessing on such non-agency, assembled the students and the receptivity and non-knowing is not a professors in the same classroom, that recommended course at a job interview has assembled us as colleagues in the or a conference presentation and it is ‘college’, meaning those who associate not a path to tenure. At such times we under a common calling, who have are expected to be upright bodies not responded to the event. That is the beings of flesh. The best advice I can give ‘religious’ dimension of the college or you on this point is this. For a long time, university. It is like a religious assembly, at least, this confession may be an ‘ekklesia’, meaning that it is the event permitted only as an aside, an that calls (kalein) and assembles the apostrophe, when for a moment, an students and the professors who Augenblick, in the midst of a lecture or a respond, who are the ones that are dialogue one notes, by the way, just in called together, the ekklesia. That is why, passing, as if this were not a serious and we all know this, the teacher point, almost as if we were joking (the teaches by contagion, by contact, which comic as the incognito of the religious), means by touching. It is the evident fact that we none of us know who we are. that the teacher has been touched by Then we get back to ‘business’. the event that touches the students in 15 http://cf.ac.uk/jomecjournal @JOMECjournal

By the way, just as an aside, allow me to is impossible to identify who is making note in passing the presence here of the promise and impossible to deny that what Derrida calls the implicit we are being given a promise. That is theologeme that accompanies this what Heidegger meant when he said distinction between body and flesh. I am ‘language speaks’, although ‘democracy’ not modeling the teacher after a was not a word of promise for him as we sovereign, strong God, a supreme ‘agent’ all know. (actus purus) the governor of the universe, who creates things ex nihilo, WD: Do you think there is a desire for which would in turn be the model of the bodies without flesh that is often ‘magisterium’, the teaching authority of operative in academic writing, which the church, as well as of the college, as demands complete authorial control, an administered society, administered of and pursues the ideal of clarity (of course by the administration from the making the fleshy matter of our language top down. The implicit theologeme is transparent for the sake of rather to think of the teacher as one who communicating meaning)? What would it has received a ‘grace’, as a patient not mean to abdicate the assumed authority an agent, who has said yes to a grace, of the author and to admit one’s who welcomes it, and that I think is not weakness? Are there ways that you try to merely an analogy. It is the grace of the perform this type of pedagogy in your event. That is what ‘binds’ – if we accept own writing? the old and now questionable etymology of religion as re-ligare – the teacher and JC: As I have just said, such authorial the student as such, and it is their command is expected and it is therefore common bond to the event, so that dangerous, especially for young neither is a master. As you know, I do not professors, to assume a position of non- think of either God or the event as an knowing. But your question allows me to ‘agent’, as ‘somebody’, ‘someone’, some add an autobiographical point which ‘thing’ doing something, but rather as a may be of interest to others. When I happening, as the happening of a started teaching, I was more interested promise and a memory, which is wispy in teaching than in publication, and I first even spectral thing. Both agent and felt impelled to publish in order not to patient need to be rethought in terms of perish, because it was expected of me. the grammatology of the middle voice, as But I have always loved to write, ever we have learned from Heidegger. That since high school, where I learned I was means an intermediate state between a better writer than an athlete. So it was the much vaunted ‘autonomous very easy, almost natural, that the work individual’, the self-sufficient agent, and of publication took on a life of its own for pure passivity. This is the state in which me and I became quite swept up in it, something is getting itself said in a which is one of the marks of the event. discourse, or getting itself done in a But it was not until I got to Radical series of actions, but it is impossible to Hermeneutics, where my first sustained identify the one doing it but it is encounter with Derrida took place, that I happening. Something is happening in even conceived a desire to write what is going on, but no one individual differently, to push up against the limits can be said to do it. For example, a of academic propriety. So Radical promise is getting made in language with Hermeneutics, was something different words like ‘democracy’ or ‘justice’ – but it for me, both in terms of style and of 16 http://cf.ac.uk/jomecjournal @JOMECjournal

content, of what I said, when I spoke for instructively homiletic about the event, the first time in what Derrida would call and in theology what is true of the event a ‘circum-fessional’ way. This is seen as such is all the more salient. clearly at the end when I say, we do not know who we are, none of us, not if we At that point in my life, I was a tenured are honest, or whether we believe in full professor and I was annoyed but God, or whether what we believe when unphased by such criticism. The only we say ‘God’ is God at all. I make a viable way for a young person, who still confession of not knowing, a profession depends upon ‘peer review’, is to of learned ignorance. emphasize the learned in the learned ignorance and to make sure there are If you look at my first books, I was plenty of footnotes. In my own case, this already very much interested in was neither cowardly caution nor a apophatic theology, but the authorial cunning strategy. I was not waiting until I voice is different. It is much more the was in a protected position as a full assured voice of the scholar, of the professor. Before that, before I got to dispassionate investigator, of someone know Derrida well, I did not conceive or whose ‘research program’ is that of the nourish a desire to write differently, relationship between philosophy and which means for me at least to write apophatic theology. The voice of Radical more directly from the heart. It is this Hermeneutics is circum-fessional. I incommensurability of the ‘heart’ with speak from the heart and I was criticized the institutional system that, I think, is for this. An academic friend at a behind all your questions. seminary once told me that when he read What Would Jesus Deconstruct? he WD: In your more recent work you have said to himself, ‘that will preach’. This noted the uncanny resonance between was meant as a congratulation, but for the medieval theological imaginary many, perhaps for most people, in the concerning bodies without flesh (in both ‘academic’ community, this would be an resurrected bodies and angels) and accusation, a violation of the protocol, a recent scientific breakthroughs in the kind of pandering or purple prose, fields like robotics, biological replacing thought with edification, etc. engineering, and computer technology.4 Am I to be ‘accused’ for what sometimes As you observe, these technological sounds like preaching – or breakthroughs are often accompanied congratulated? Should I, like Kierkegaard by hopes of bodies without suffering, separate works of edification from the individuals without place, and of life other works? I write in such a way that without death. Computer technology is the objective and the edifying are mutually contaminated by the other. 4 See, for example, John D. Caputo (2010), ‘Bodies Each has its own danger, but I think that Still Unrisen, Events Still Unsaid: A Hermeneutic it is the one without the other that is of Bodies without Flesh’, in Apophatic Bodies: most dangerous. I think that the Negative Theology, Incarnation and Relationality, ed. Chris Boesel and Catherine Keller, New York: ‘homiletic’ is a risk, that the danger of Fordham University Press, 94-116; and (2011) ‘On preaching, is real but I think it is a the Wings of Angels: Post-humanism and Info- salutary risk, because there is an technotheology’, The Twenty-Sixth Annual opposite risk in simple academic Symposium of The Simon Silverman propriety, which is greater. There is Phenomenology Center, ed. Jeffrey McCurry, Pittsburgh: The Simon Silverman Phenomenology always something dangerously and Center Duquesne University, 8-28. 17 http://cf.ac.uk/jomecjournal @JOMECjournal

already transforming the organization been thrown in question, thoroughly and practices of the contemporary revolutionized, which is why it is classroom, sometimes locating the entire nonsense to say that science does not educational experience within the virtual think. It may very well be that what we domain of the internet. In what ways do call ‘matter’ in ordinary experience you think that these technological comes down to vibrating filaments called changes hold the risk of seeking to form superstrings, which is not so very far bodies without flesh? Could fears about from the image that the Franciscans had such changes simply be a repetition of of angelic bodies. The old mockery of the ‘metaphysics of presence’? Does this medieval angelology, how many angels technology also hold promise of can dance on the head of a pin, has a transformation and hospitality? close contemporary counterpart in computer miniaturization: how much JC: This is a complicated question and it information can be stored on a is one that I am still thinking about. I microchip the size of a pinhead? Mock keep promising to say what I have to say that! In both cases, medieval Franciscan in a book on bodies without flesh, which angelology and contemporary info- I keep postponing. In the simplest terms, technology, the model of the body is it is the problem of the dangerous pure agency, action and activity, supplement. My point of departure for insulated from suffering and even this discussion has been to develop the mortality itself. analogy between the new information technologies and the figure of the angel, The advances made by science and which I first learned from Michel Serres’ technology are steady, swift and book on angels. What is the angel irreversible (unless we blow ourselves off (angelos, messenger) if not an instant the face of the earth). They are changing message system? When the Lord God everything and pushing up against the needs to get an instant message to horizons or thresholds of our very Abraham to stay the patriarch’s hand, carnality and mortality, producing a and there is no time to lose, he sends series of what Donna Haraway calls his angel. Nowadays the Most High could ‘border breakdowns’. The seemingly have used an iPhone. The analogy is crazy sci-fi idea which we see in elaborate. It is not just ‘information’, a Battlestar Galactica (the new series, word about which you and Heidegger are 2002-2005) of ‘downloading’ ‘conscious- very suspicious, but also ‘guidance’ ness’ onto computer chips and (guardian angels, global positioning ‘uploading’ it into shiny new robot bodies systems), war (warrior angels like Michael (which would mean that one could store and ‘smart bombs’), and interestingly the a back up ‘copy’ of yourself in case of an nature of the ‘body’ itself. Thomas accident or computer crash) is actually Aquinas said angels are purely being pursued by perfectly respectable immaterial, not bodies at all, while the scientists. I am not a specialist in the Franciscans said they were made of analysis of popular culture, but I find some kind of ethereal matter, which is Battlestar Galactica quite instructive in quite like what I call bodies without flesh. this regard. The new technologies are On this point, the Franciscans are more meant to be supplements but they interesting because today, in age of threaten to take over, like the ‘Cylons’ quantum physics and relativity, the very who were created by humans but who meaning of matter, space and time have overtake their human creators. The 18 http://cf.ac.uk/jomecjournal @JOMECjournal

obvious ‘battle’ in the title, then, is this Cylons is also theological. They both have war between the humans and the religions and occasionally they argue Cylons, whom (which?) the humans mock about theology. The Cylons are by calling them ‘toasters’, stupid monotheists while the humans are machines. This is something that always polytheists, which suggests that religion comes up, the fear that we will be survives even when ‘consciousness’ is enslaved by our own creation. But there digitalized, where it takes a monotheistic are several other battles going on in this form, while ‘flesh’ is polytheistic. That is series that I find instructive. One of the worth thinking about. more interesting things is that the Cylons have the ability to synthesize human The current transformations taking place bodies for themselves, which they do in in info-technology are deeply order to infiltrate the human race and confounding. What we can be sure of is spy on them. But in the process of so that everything we think about birth and doing they discover human feelings and death, about sickness and health, about the pleasures of the human flesh. Then materiality and carnality, sexuality and the Cylons have another battle on their gender, will be affected, and maybe even hands, between their rationally totally transformed or even ‘overcome’. programmed Cylon self and loyalties to We are approaching a technological their ‘race’ and their acquired human ‘event’ which, interestingly, has been feelings and passions, making them dubbed the ‘singularity’, using a word something of a ‘monstrous compound’, (inadvertently of course) that has a we might say. The quite voluptuous special prestige in continental woman in red on the cover of the CD philosophy, to describe a radical collection is a Cylon and her sensuality is technological transformation that will central to the story, as is the sympathy of render debates like the current one another Cylon character whose between zoe and bios obsolete and ‘sympathies’ lie with the humans. When parochial. Here would be the ultimate the Cylons assume human form, they body without flesh, pure deathless expose themselves to human suffering agents, achieved not by the ‘resurrection and death. It is possible to kill a Cylon, of the body’ but by information but only temporarily, as he or she will be technology; theology, angelology is reduplicated and in the process get very realized by technology. But is this truly annoyed at you for being put through an ‘event’? The futurists and the sci-fi such a painful ordeal. The suggestion is writers can see it coming already. They that even were info-technology to realize say the singularity is near, and some this seeming fantasy, it would retain the techno-apocalyptic prophets even have a life of flesh as an available option, almost date in mind, predicting it will take place like a vacation one would take or in 2045. So it is not an event. But what is nostalgic visit to an outdoor museum coming, perhaps, is a change so vast and like Williamsburg, Virginia, which tries to transforming that we cannot see what it reproduce a by-gone world. The is that we think we see coming. That pleasures of the flesh are made would be the event. Furthermore, if we available, and even death and suffering object that this will be a disaster, that are possible, but they are reduced to does not mean it is not an event. There strictly temporary inconveniences. Finally, is nothing about the idea of the event and this is also very interesting, the that says it will not be a disaster; indeed battle between the humans and the 19 http://cf.ac.uk/jomecjournal @JOMECjournal

the event is constituted by the risk of advantages for many people in different disaster. situations but it is also very dangerous, threatening to produce atomized, Now, as professors of the ‘humanities’, unsocialized and unhappy people and you are asking what are we to do? We stunted learning, learning without heart. cannot afford, as a pragmatic matter, to Do the new technologies induce the be reactionary and to fall behind the illusory ideal of the perfectly pace of change or we will quickly fall out programmed autonomous self, a digital of touch with our students. My little four version of Descartes’ res cogitans? That year old grandchild is completely is also a real risk. But the risk will not be comfortable with remote controls and averted by cupping our ears and saying touch-screens. Whether we like it or not, that science does not think. It will be we must incorporate the new averted by understanding science better technologies as far as possible into the and differently and by abandoning this classroom, with all the attendant dangers reactionary slogan. For those of us who this poses. As a theoretical matter, we – are interested in religion, I think that the and here I have particularly in mind right posture has been struck by the those of us in the ‘humanities’ – must Dalai Lama, who loves contemporary get past obsolete ideas of science as physics and sees all kinds of atoms-in-a-void mechanism and come convergences between his meditative life to grips with the profoundly revolutionary and speculative physics, where he thinks character of contemporary speculative that what we call the ‘mystery of Being’ is physics. As a curricular matter, I think alive and well and flourishing. Please do this means we need to make sure that not tell me that these are ‘problems’ not humanities students get a level of ‘mysteries’, which I think is a kind of scientific education that is at least at the postmodern dualism. These are level of being able to read the works of investigations into the very make up of people like Brian Greene. One cannot matter, time and space that leave us understand these matters thoroughly breathless. Of course these without mathematics, but there is a great mathematical problems are problems, deal we can and must understand. There but they are also mysteries and they are are ‘picture theorists’ and ‘equation latent with the event. That is why I think theorists’ and we can understand the that continental philosophers must look ‘picture theorists’. Sean Carroll, one of to new models, to people like Catherine the popular expositors of these ideas, Malabou, whose work represents puts the equations in the footnotes. something genuinely continental but importantly new, and Zizek, despite his But where is the ‘event’ in this amazing outrageous caricatures of what he calls scene? Does the coming of the new postmodernism, and Michel Serres and technologies spell the death of the Bruno Latour, who was deeply influenced ‘teacher’, of the person to person by Serres. When Malabou discusses the contact, of students touched by teachers neurosciences in terms of ‘plasticity’, and who have been touched by the event? when Zizek speaks in terms of parallax We cannot imagine that happening but it shifts and the non-all, and when Latour is a real threat. ‘Distance learning’ means describes the historical construction of one learns in isolation, by staying at the natural sciences, they provide home, on a computer, removed from openings within which the event can human contact. This has many take place. In my recent work, The 20 http://cf.ac.uk/jomecjournal @JOMECjournal

Insistence of God, I have tried to think a demand that we begin to take certain the event as an event of grace, and to limits seriously? extend this model beyond a theopoetics to what I call a cosmo-poetics, where I The in-breaking of the event in our treat the sheer stupid luck of life on future, then, might be less the possibility earth, a completely fortuitous happening, of angelic bodies, and more a matter of cosmically speaking, as the stupidity of the unpleasant reminder of our flesh – of grace, the grace of the event. It just our frailty and vulnerability. In this might be that God does play dice with configuration, philosophy might not the world, or rather, since God is not an simply need to study up on the natural agent who does things like play dice, it is sciences, but it might provide resources better to say that the dice game, the that would help people cultivate simpler being-played of the dice game, in the forms of living. This might mean that middle voice, which is not being played theology needs to be less systematic and by someone, the element of play or more ascetical (while remaining skeptical chance, or what Derrida calls the of old modes of discipline and ‘perhaps’, peut-être, is the divine element formation). So might there, then, be a in things. This I believe was first pointed different Franciscan legacy – one not of out by Heraclitus, in a saying that was angels but of apostolic living – that is beautifully interpreted by Heidegger in needed to accompany the findings of the same book in which he frets over the science? age of ‘information’. JC: Your anxieties are well founded. As I WD: I must confess that the recent said above, nothing guarantees that the findings of the natural sciences that have event will not be a disaster. The event is gripped my imagination speak of a the very possibility of disaster. So your different future. The emerging accounts anxiety is integral to the picture I have of global climate change seem to just been imagining. My guess is that, confront us with the material realities although I have not done an empirical and limitations of human life. In this case survey on this matter, the scientists are it is the presumption of science – or its on your side. It is they who brought the use by other cultural forces – that there threat of global warming to our attention are no limits to what we are capable of before anyone noticed it and they who that have led to immense destruction have been alarmed and who can prove and waste. So I wonder if this notion that we have reason to be alarmed. The roots our material limits are coming undone is of the problem are multiple. It is first of more the business of science fiction than all the cooptation of science by techno- of an inevitable future. When my capitalism, the vast amount of money physicist brother and I have our that is to be made by exploiting the perennial science versus theology environment, and the politicians whom debates I like to chide him that I am still that money has baldly, brazenly bought. waiting for the flying cars and It is also the refusal of the people who teleportation devices. All I have seen live in the technologically advanced coming out in my lifetime are smaller societies to restrain their indulgence, and computers, bigger televisions, and wider so you are right to call for a new kind of varieties of Viagra. So when we look to asceticism. And we cannot forget it is the future, should we assume that also the result of very poor people in everything is up for grabs, or is there not poor nations to get out of poverty by 21 http://cf.ac.uk/jomecjournal @JOMECjournal

exploiting their national resources. The universes. The more we learn, the more solution is to be found in the optimal we should appreciate our limits. Science mix of conservation and vigorous is on your side; it tells us we are very research into new clean technologies. finite, all headed for entropic oblivion. That would require a degree of Even were we in some unimaginable enlightenment in public policy that we future to come up with robot bodies and find impossible to imagine in the manage someday to escape the earth, degraded politics of today, where the that would be temporary – we can run common good is up for sale to the but not hide from entropy. N. T. Wright highest bidder. I myself am worried that tells us that the coming heaven is the steady advance of miniaturization actually earth, that when Jesus comes along with Moore’s Law, that we double again, we will not go up to heaven, but computer capacity about every two he will come down to rule here on earth. years, is hastening the advent of hand- Therefore we should conserve the earth. held nuclear weapons, which will make it Well, I agree we should conserve the all but impossible to prevent a earth, with or without this story, but even catastrophe. that would provide only a temporary residence for Jesus, since in five hundred I am trying to imagine the ‘to come’, million years or so the earth will be toast! what today many theorists do not shirk I think we should see our lives on this from calling the ‘post-human’ age, or little corner of the universe as an event what Donna Haraway called the coming of grace, the grace of an event, a lucky age of ‘cyborgs’, in which the rigorous break – the stupidity of grace – nothing distinction between the human and the but a passing moment in the immense technological breaks down, which is also history of something, we know not what. a point upon which Derrida has insisted In the meantime, we should show some right from the start. But I am not gratitude for this grace and foresight endorsing everything I can see coming in about the planet we leave to our children this future we cannot see coming. What and grandchildren. But I think that you are saying tests the faith that I have science gives us new reasons for saying in what Derrida once said, that ‘the that. I think that science is on the side of future is always better’, not because it is, the philosophers, accompanying them, which is certainly false, but because that as you say. is our hope, our faith. So this is a hope against hope, a faith in something WD: In a recent essay, ‘Theopoetics as impossible to believe, which is what faith Radical Theology’, you differentiate and hope are, just the way love means between confessional theology – which loving the unlovable, loving the enemy. I ‘reports back’ to religious communities – think that what we have called God up to and radical or postmodern theology that now means a kind of immensity against reports back to the academy. Surely, this which we measure ourselves and then relationship with the academy is one feel our finitude and mortality. I think that is fraught with ambiguity. In Radical that the work of that immensity, that Hermeneutics, for example, you spoke of infinity, is now done by the infinitival ‘to the necessity for reason and come’, the vastness of what lies before philosophers to be ‘able to slip back and us in history but also, as we are forth’ between the confines of an beginning to realize, in the universe, in institutional setting and roaming freely universes endlessly spawning other on the streets (characterizing these two 22 http://cf.ac.uk/jomecjournal @JOMECjournal

possibilities as ‘forms of life’) (Caputo presumes they are lucky enough to find 1987: 228-9). What is the relationship a job. So even though they do not have between theology and the academy, and to report back to a confessional in what ways does embracing the task of community, that does not mean they do theology (rather than just philosophy) not report back to anyone. They do not make this slipping back and forth have to deal with bishops but they do between both more necessary and more have to deal with search committees, difficult? tenure committees and deans. They do not have heresy trials, but they do have JC: Yes, there is ambiguity from ‘referees’ who read the manuscripts they beginning to end and it is precisely the submit for publication and scrutinize ambiguity that allows for the event, and it them for ‘errors’ of method or content, is precisely the event that calls for the which makes for a certain counterpart to nimbleness of slipping back and forth. To the Vatican’s ‘Syllabus of Errors’. answer this question, let me start by saying that I like this expression ‘reports Both the confessional theologians and back’ because it suggests the circle of an the radical theologians are in an economy, reminding us that the ‘ambiguous’ position. It is never a ‘expenditure without return’ is inevitably question of simply and unambiguously drawn back into a certain ‘contract’, and leaving behind an economy but of hence is expected to return a dividend making the economy more open-ended after all. The ambiguity is that there is no and auto-revising, of giving economy a question or possibility of simply leaving chance, as Derrida says. Give economy a an economy behind; the question is break and do not dismiss it as the work rather of making economies more open- of the devil. Construct an economy that ended and flexible and less contracting. allows for the event. Of course, that is a When I say that radical theologians paradox, since it demands that we report back to the academy I am saying provide for the unforeseeable, which is a this as a reminder, a qualification, which grammatical contradiction as well as a comes after first contrasting them with real one, since to provide is to foresee. confessional theologians. The latter do So we are always negotiating these theology within certain confessional ambiguities, everyone, not just constraints and their livelihood (and theologians. sometimes even their very life) depends upon the ability of the community to The confessional theologians know about recognize itself in their work. By contrast, the need for constant negotiation very the ‘radical’ theologian seems free as a well. I say this because their work, when bird, no bishops, no excommunications, it is sustained and earnest, very often no heresy trials. But then to be free as a causes them to test confessional limits, bird is an illusion, even for the bird itself, think up against the borders of the as Kant once pointed out, since the bird community, skirting the edge of ‘heresy’. is inclined to feel the wind by which its My own explanation for this is that flight is sustained as a resistance without radical theology is implicit in which it could fly all the more freely. For confessional theology, that when we dig if the truth to be told, when we speak of deeply enough, we find it lying there in radical theologians, if we started to make wait for the confessional theologians to a list, we would find that virtually all of stumble upon it, expose it, expound it them have day jobs as academics, which and maybe even espouse it, and when 23 http://cf.ac.uk/jomecjournal @JOMECjournal

they do that, it can cost them their jobs. is another kind of orthodoxy, to be sure, Radical theology spooks the confessional but it is real. One must meet certain theologian, and the confessional standards, submit to a ‘discipline’. It is theologian spook their communities, and not an accident that we use the same ideally this can take place without a word to describe both an ominous heresy trial or exorcists to drive out the ‘disciplinary’ power, a force of spooks. Many confessional theologians normalization, and to describe our reach a point where they say things like, chosen field of study, the ‘discipline’ we ‘we do not know what we mean when love and to which we devote our lives. say “God”’. They are not saying this in a One must learn to operate within the safe way, as a higher form of praise for university. That is not the devil. It is only God, but they are saying, we really do not diabolical if it is totalizing, if it encloses know what we mean. Perhaps it is an everything, for then the system will only illusion, a neurosis, a projection, etc., and produce clones, more of the same. Then this ‘we do not know’ qualifies everything there is no event. So I would advocate else we say. If they say this clearly and the ‘weakness of the university’, meaning publically they risk the wrath of the that the system, the discipline must be community. Elizabeth Johnson, a weak, open-ended, pliable, reinventable, distinguished Catholic theologian at which means eventive, while the Fordham University, has recently run individuals are called upon to be bold, afoul of the American Catholic bishops. inventive, reinventive. Sometimes bold This is testimony to the authoritarianism young people can break the molds and and ignorance of the bishops and it has still manage to break into the system. managed to make them look even worse More often, I am inclined to think, there than they did before, if such a thing were is a sliding scale here, that with each possible after the recent scandals by step along the academic way, each which the Church has been engulfed. In hurdle scaled on the academic path, the the course of this controversy a more freedom there will be to speak and spokesman for the Bishops said that write and act differently, to blur theologians are sometimes a ‘curse and established disciplinary borders. The idea a plague upon the Church’. That to me is is to violate academic protocols but not a sign that the theologians are doing to simply smash them, neither idolatory their job. To be a curse upon such power nor sheer iconoclasm. As Aristotle says is a blessing and the church should be about the phronimos, we start by always grateful for blessings. imitating the one with mastery, and his example is learning archery by first The radical theologians on the other imitating the skilled archer. Or we can hand are negotiating with the disciplinary use the example of a good metaphor: we systems of the university, with external bend the rules, shock the system of systems like the politics of state established use, while drawing upon the supported public universities or of the resources of the very system we are wealth of donors to private universities, shocking, which we must first learn. First but also with systems internal to their the camel, then the lion, then the child, discipline, like the normalizing force of Zarathustra says. the scholarly protocols, of standards for tenure and promotion, the standards of Now what I am saying holds true for journals and academic presses, every academic, not just for academic professional societies, and the rest. This theologians, confessional or radical. But I 24 http://cf.ac.uk/jomecjournal @JOMECjournal

think it is especially true, or let us say name (of) ‘God’ can take place with or revealingly true – it’s a revelation! – in without religion. the case of theologians because what they are talking about, theos, God, is in I think the question you are raising, all an especially poignant way not reducible your questions, circulate around the to an object of disinterested scholarly tension between the event and the research. I hasten to add that such ‘object’, purely objective, disinterested disinterest is an illusion in any research, thinking, which I think is what ‘secular’ any discipline. Latour shows that Louis would finally mean. In that case, the Pasteur was deeply and passionately event is the ultimate resistance to the devoted to his faith in microbes (and in ‘object’ and ‘secularism’. Were there to protecting public health)! God or be such a thing as a pure object, that microbes, either one, spells passion. But would mean something devoid of an it is easier to see with God. The name of event, and that would be possible only if God is the name of an event, or of a we were dead. Objective thinking means, deed, Johannes Climacus said, to quote we try to think of how things are if or a hero you and I share. That means it is when we are dead. This has its place. I a matter of life and death, of what Tillich am not trying to run it off the grounds. I called a matter of ‘ultimate concern’; it am just trying to stop it from taking over touches upon the passion of our lives. I and driving everything non-objective off think of ‘God’ in terms of the event, and I the grounds. I am trying to prevent it think of the ‘event’ in terms of God, from preventing the event. So the event because I think each is in a certain way means how things lay claim to us while a helpful paradigm for the other. ‘God’ we are still alive, how they call upon or signifies the claiming power of the event, are visited upon the living, who are of its power to address us, but the event course living mortals. Things happen in signifies that God is a weak force, that our lives by the event. By the impossible, God’s power is a weak force because it is Derrida says, things begin, in whatever the power of a claim, a call, an invitation, order – art, science, ethics, politics, a solicitation, an ‘insistence’, but without religion, no matter what, inside or an army to enforce it. Calls can always outside the university, inside or outside be ignored. The event signifies what is what we call in Christian Latin ‘religion’. going on, what insists, in the name of There is always the event and the God; it means that the name of God is university is the assembly, the collegium, not the name of a being that does things of those who have been overtaken by the but the name of a claiming event. So event. Everything really important in our ‘God’ and ‘event’ are each in their own lives happens by the event and in that way paradigmatic of something that is sense, to come back to your first going on not only in ‘theology’ but question, there can be no purely secular everywhere, in the other ‘disciplines’, and university. We have never been secular. outside academic life, which is why the Secularity will set in only about fifteen event that overtakes us when we use the minutes or so after we are dead.

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References

Caputo, J. D. (1987), Radical Hermeneutics: Repetition, Deconstruction, and the Hermeneutic Project, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Caputo, J. D. (1993), Against Ethics: Contributions to a Poetics of Obligation with Constant Reference to Deconstruction, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Caputo, J. D. (2006), The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Foucault, M. (1995), Disciplines and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, New York: Vintage Books.

Heidegger, M. (1996), The Principle of Reason, Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

Heidegger, M. (2002), ‘The Age of World Picture’, in Off the Beaten Track, New York: Cambridge University Press.

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