The Relevance of Julia Kristeva's Theory of 'Signifiance' for Theology
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University of Denver Digital Commons @ DU Electronic Theses and Dissertations Graduate Studies 1-1-2017 "Revolution in Religious Language": The Relevance of Julia Kristeva's Theory of 'Signifiance' for Theology Timothy O. Inman University of Denver Follow this and additional works at: https://digitalcommons.du.edu/etd Part of the Linguistics Commons, and the Religious Thought, Theology and Philosophy of Religion Commons Recommended Citation Inman, Timothy O., ""Revolution in Religious Language": The Relevance of Julia Kristeva's Theory of 'Signifiance' for Theology" (2017). Electronic Theses and Dissertations. 1270. https://digitalcommons.du.edu/etd/1270 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Graduate Studies at Digital Commons @ DU. It has been accepted for inclusion in Electronic Theses and Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Digital Commons @ DU. For more information, please contact [email protected],[email protected]. “Revolution in Religious Language”: The Relevance of Julia Kristeva’s Theory of Signifiance for Theology __________ A Dissertation Presented to the Faculty of the University of Denver and the Iliff School of Theology Joint PhD Program University of Denver __________ In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree Doctor of Philosophy __________ by Timothy O. Inman June 2017 Advisor: Jere Surber Author: Timothy O. Inman Title: “Revolution in Religious Language”: The Relevance of Julia Kristeva’s Theory of Signifiance for Theology Advisor: Jere Surber Degree Date: June 2017 ABSTRACT This dissertation applies Julia Kristeva’ theory of revolution in the practice of signifiance to religious discourse. In particular, it argues that the salient features of signifiance are present and active in religious speech acts as well as poetic language, the subject of Kristeva’s doctoral thesis Revolution in Poetic Language. Signifiance describes the process in which meaning is produced in linguistic utterance, and its intentional practice is subversive not only in terms of language but culture in general. ii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS Thanks, first of all, for the patient support of the members of my doctoral committee, especially Jere Surber. Special thanks to Lindsay Colahan for introducing me to Kristeva’s work and to Kyle Allbright, my friend and colleague in the Joint PhD Program, for suggesting the topic of this dissertation. Finally, I would not have been able to finish this journey without the support of my husband, the Rev. Josh Shipman. iii TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction ................................................................................................................1 Chapter One: Kristeva’s Revolution ..........................................................................14 The Question of Agency ................................................................................14 Kristeva’s Project ...........................................................................................17 The Mirror Stage ............................................................................................20 The Oedipal Drama ........................................................................................28 The Semiotic and the Symbolic .....................................................................36 The Semiotic Chora and Negativity ..............................................................42 Signifiance and the Subject-in-process/on-trial .............................................47 Chapter Two: Revolution in Religious Language .....................................................53 Kristeva on Religious Language ....................................................................53 Religion, Revolt, Modernity ..........................................................................60 Between Poetic and Religious Language .......................................................71 Chapter Three: Proof-texts .........................................................................................88 Anselm’s Proslogion and the Semiotic-Symbolic Dialectic .........................88 Revolution in Homiletics: The Case of Martin Luther King .........................102 Chapter Four: Conclusion and Implications ..............................................................117 Theology, Language, Culture ........................................................................117 The “Ambiguous Heritage” of Liberal Theology ..........................................126 Radical Orthodoxy, or the “Word Made Strange” .........................................140 Postscript ....................................................................................................................148 Bibliography ..............................................................................................................153 iv INTRODUCTION My dissertation will explore the intersection of theology, language, and culture. I am interested in the nature of the speaking being, particularly the believer qua speaking being. I define “believer” as a religious body, a subject engaged in language and culture endowed, for whatever reason, with a sense of “calling” to something greater than culture can currently offer. I am interested, then, in the believer with a revolutionary purpose, and I am concerned with the theoretical apparatus by which that purpose can be enacted in the modern secular world, because the believer is “always already” a subject of the symbolic order. The believer holds a special place in the modern discourse of revolution. Her speech acts are particularly dangerous because they reside in the gray area between sense and nonsense, unless, of course, they are adopted by the culture at large, in which case they are formative of “sense” in the first place. In the chapters that follow, I will claim that the salient features of revolutionary discourse, as understood in the sense of the Bulgarian-born French philosopher Julia Kristeva, are present and active in religious speech acts. I will argue that theology benefits from Kristeva’s idiosyncratic notion of revolution because the former currently lacks a theory of language as a dynamic interplay of body and culture. The religious body, in fact, participates in culture at the moment of enunciated speech acts, giving it the capacity to “inscript” religious ideas and feelings into the broader cultural order in which believers participate. Adopting Kristeva’s notion of revolution in the process of 1 signifiance allows for analytical readings of religious texts and speech acts that have, as yet, to be explored. Modern and contemporary theological reflection on the proper standpoint of believers toward modern society falls, broadly, into at least two camps. On the one hand, theologians such as John Milbank, Catherine Pickstock, and Graham Ward have espoused a reactionary stance against what they perceive as a distancing of modern developments in thought and cultural practices from traditional, doctrinal tenets of the church. In contrast, “liberal” or progressive theologians—including Walter Rauschenbusch and Henry Wieman, among others—seek a more “cooperative” approach vis-à-vis these modern trends. For the doctrinal-orthodox camp, religious language stands as an alternative to what Milbank understands as the inherently “violent” discourse associated with modern secularism. For progressive theologians, religious language works with and informs modern secular cultural and linguistic practices on matters involving morality, ethics, social justice, etc. Reading Kristeva theologically, however, opens up a new frontier with regard to believers’ role in relation to modernity—namely that religious bodies always already interact with and transform linguistic and cultural practices at the moment of enunciated speech acts. My argument will unfold in four parts. First, I will describe Kristeva’s theory of signifiance. Second, I will claim that the salient features of her theory are present and active in religious language as well as the “poetic language” that Kristeva privileges. Third, I will argue that theology benefits from accounting for Kristeva’s insights into revolutionary discourse, understood as an interaction between biological bodies and the 2 cultural forces that such bodies create and maintain, because theologians have yet to entertain the ways in which religious bodies, via the medium of language, interact with culture at the point of enunciation. Finally, I will place my observations in conversation with modern and contemporary theologians concerned with the intersection of language, theology, and cultural studies. In her doctoral thesis, Revolution in Poetic Language, Kristeva develops a notion of revolution as the effect of linguistic acts at the point of enunciation, acts that call into question the fixity of the speaker’s status as a subject of language and culture. For Kristeva, then, the subject should not ultimately be viewed as a unified totality across time and space but rather as coming into being only at the point of enunciation within the context of a given speech act. Certain kinds of utterance, especially poetry, “point up” the subject—to adopt Kelly Oliver’s phrasing—as the provisional result of cultural and linguistic processes. Language is revolutionary, finally, when the subject comes into being in what Kristeva terms the “thetic break,” at which point she re-enters the realm of the symbolic order of language and culture after delving into the inner-depths of “the semiotic.” Kristeva