Claremont Colleges Scholarship @ Claremont CGU Theses & Dissertations CGU Student Scholarship 2011 Becoming Otherwise: Politics, Metaphysics and Power in Judith Butler and Alfred North Whitehead Alan Van Wyk Claremont Graduate University Recommended Citation Van Wyk, Alan, "Becoming Otherwise: Politics, Metaphysics and Power in Judith Butler and Alfred North Whitehead" (2011). CGU Theses & Dissertations. Paper 12. http://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgu_etd/12 DOI: 10.5642/cguetd/12 This Open Access Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the CGU Student Scholarship at Scholarship @ Claremont. It has been accepted for inclusion in CGU Theses & Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Scholarship @ Claremont. For more information, please contact [email protected]. BECOMING OTHERWISE: POLITICS, METAPHYSICS AND POWER IN JUDITH BUTLER AND ALFRED NORTH WHITEHEAD A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF CLAREMONT GRADUATE UNIVERSITY IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY SCHOOL OF RELIGION BY ALAN R. VAN WYK CLAREMONT GRADUATE UNIVERSITY 2011 © Copyright Alan R. Van Wyk, 2011 All rights reserved. APPROVAL OF THE REVIEW COMMITTEE This dissertation has been duly read, reviewed, and critiqued by the Committee listed below, which hereby approves the manuscript of Alan R. Van Wyk as fulfilling the scope and quality requirements for meriting the degree of Doctor of Philosophy. Dr. Roland Faber, Chair Claremont School of Theology Kilsby Family/John B. Cobb, Jr. Professor of Process Studies Dr. Philip Clayton Claremont School of Theology Vice-President for Academic Affairs and Dean of the Faculty; Ingraham Professor of Theology Dr. John Quiring Center for Process Studies Program Director Dr. Ranu Samantrai Indiana University Associate Professor, English ABSTRACT The post-secular event within which we live is occasioned as the limit of the secular project. The secular project meets its limit in attempting to separate a religious private sphere from a public sphere while at the same time repeating as a demand a religious subjectivation of the public sphere: demanding conformity to a simple subjectivity, producing a world of simple subjects through a theologically determined metaphysics of conversion. In this latter demand secularism enforces a simplicity of its subjects and its world. Yet this simplicity cannot be taken up into or as life. To genuinely live and think the post-secular requires, then, not simply a resistance to the secular but a resistance to simplicity, developing ways of becoming otherwise than simply and of producing a world other than that which conforms to a metaphysics of conversion. This dissertation proposes to meet the requirements of the post-secular event by developing a post-secular political ontology drawn from the work of Judith Butler and Alfred North Whitehead. Read through and out of these two philosophers of becoming is a post-secular political ontology that is embedded within a metaphysics of creativity, a metaphysic that is itself already infected by the political. At the intersection of the work of Butler and Whitehead a metaphysic arises that is a systematic discourse of the political. From this metaphysic a political ontology is developed. This political ontology begins with a suspicion of grammar as a suspicion of a subject-predicate form of thought that grounds ontologies of substance. With this suspicion, being is allowed to unfold as its becoming, particularly as a becoming material, so that actuality is a becoming materiality. This is also a relational becoming of feeling, becoming as a process of intensive feeling that can never be finalized for itself, always suffering its own continual downfall. Finally, but without finality, actuality is a becoming of creativity, opened by a divine violence that ruptures history by the possible, leading to a post-secular political ontology of the future. “These practices of instituting new modes of reality take place in part through the scene of embodiment, where the body is not understood as a static and accomplished fact, but as an aging process, a mode of becoming that, in becoming otherwise, exceeds the norm, reworks the norm, and makes us see how realities to which we thought we were confined are not written in stone.” Judith Butler v TABLE OF CONTENTS INTRODUCTION 1 1. On the need for a post-secular political ontology 1 2. The metaphysics of conversion 9 3. After conversion: a post-secular political ontology 44 1. THE POLITICAL UNDOING OF METAPHYSICS 47 1.1 The remains of metaphysics 49 1.2 Subversive practices 59 1.3 Metaphysical performances 66 1.4 The risk of abstraction 82 1.5 The unbound and the undone: the political and the theological 86 2. UNBOUND METAPHYSICS AND THE POLITICAL 102 2.1 The end of conversion and the beginning of critique 108 2.2 A theological opening 118 2.3 From critique to an ecological metaphysics 127 2.4 Speculating at the limits of language 137 2.5 The secularization of God 147 2.6 A politics of adventure and peace 154 3. A SECULAR POLITICAL ONTOLOGY 165 3.1 Politics and the suspicion of grammar 168 3.2 Becoming material 177 3.3 Melancholy feelings 198 3.4 Death and satisfaction; or the order of law 216 vi 3.5 Divine possibilities 234 3.6 A body politic to come 249 Bibliography 256 vii INTRODUCTION 1. On the need for a Post-secular political ontology More than a century before its recognition, Karl Marx diagnosed the failure of the secular project. When he begins his analysis of Capital, a doubled conversion appears, a series of metaphysical operations marked by ―theological niceties,‖1 through which the commodity becomes: individual labor is represented as general labor, while use value is transformed and transferred into relative (exchange) value. We should resist, here, any temptation to an economic reductionism of this analysis: in addition to Marx‘s own observation that the commodity is produced through theological as well as metaphysical powers, we should not forget that this is also, famously, presented as an analysis of the fetishism of economics, and so is already presented as an analysis tainted by the religious discourse of his day. It is, in other words, an analysis of the effect of the religious in the production of being. Within this already religious analysis, Marx argues that the value of the commodity is created by a series of conversions, which is also a certain transformation and movement. The commodity is the representation of a transformation and movement, a logic of production that produces equality of kind out of difference. Following through on an analysis that takes as its central commodities linen and coats, Marx argues that ―the linen acquires a value-form different from its physical form. The fact that it is value is made manifest by its equality with the coat, just as the sheep‘s nature of a Christian is shown in his resemblance to the Lamb of God.‖2 As Marx points out, it is common to see in linens and coats a difference, and just as common for this difference to be erased by way of the representation of exchangeability. It is the accomplishment of the first volume of Capital to rupture this movement – from difference to exchangeability – 1Karl Marx, Capital, vol. 1, trans. Ben Fowkes (New York: Vintage, 1977), 163. 2 Ibid. 143. 1 and to display this movement precisely as a movement whereby difference is converted into exchangeable value. Analyzed in the first section of Capital is the peculiar mechanism of capitalism – the logic of capitalism – whereby value is created. On one reading, this logic is simply the operation whereby human labor is converted into abstract general labor, such that ―labor time, the substance and measure of commodities, inscribes time as the matter and measure of equivalences.‖3 But things are not so simple. Through the series of conversions whereby value as the measure of exchangeability is created, the object of exchange is moved away from itself, to become represented under the sign of value. As Marx argues: ―The existence of things qua commodities, and the value-relation between the products of labour which stamps them as commodities, have absolutely no connexion with their physical properties and with the material relations arising therefrom. There it is a definite social relation between men, that assumes, in their eyes, the fantastic form of a relation between things.‖4 Within and as a social relation, value is always represented outside of the object itself – outside its materiality – in another, which determines its equivalence. This externalization whereby value is attributed to an object is made by moving through the social in a serious of abstractions. In a circular movement, this abstraction is productive of both social relations that are productive of value which function themselves through the abstractive production of value, such that the capitalist machine that creates valued commodities out of objects is also the production of social relations, of relations between laborers. Here, at the base of capitalism, in its baseness, works labor, being worked over into abstract labor, represented as value as timed. Just as an object is converted into a commodity, so 3Éric Alliez, Capital Times: Tales from the Conquest of Time, trans. by Georges Van Den Abbeele, Theory Out of Bounds, vol. 6 (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), xvi. 4 Marx, Capital, 165. 2 too labor is converted into wage labor, the measure of abstract labor. Hidden within capitalism, a series of conversions – the production of an abstract labor, of a measuring time, of an equalizing value; each leading to a series of representations. As Eric Alliez argues, within Marx‘s analysis, among these representations a certain ―metaphysical figure of capitalism‖ begins to appear.5 On Alliez‘s reading of Marx, this figure is itself a figure of time: a time unhinged from itself, free to be capitalized on, which runs throughout the history of Western metaphysics.