The God of Abraham and the Spirit of Philosophy

a primer on the engagement of postmodern philosophy with the Abrahamic scriptures

Postmodern continental philosophy is shaped and even in some respects driven by an ongoing agon with texts and concepts drawn from the scriptures of the Abrahamic monotheisms. The books of the Hebrew Bible and the New Testament have not only occasioned centuries of philosophical commentary and reflection by the faithful but also intense engagements by critics and antagonists, challenging, exasperating, and even enraging readers from theists to atheists and beyond. When it comes to the work of philosophers like Derrida, Deleuze, Lacan, Irigaray, Kristeva and Laruelle, this engagement has a special pertinence.  For reasons biographical, cultural and historical, as well as concerns arising from issues internal to their thought, these philosophers share a level of attention to these scriptures that is somewhat exceptional even in the long tradition of western philosophy that has unfolded in their regard.

We will come to the relevant biographical details in a moment, but here I simply want to remark that the most salient of the general reasons for this preoccupation is the shadow cast by the holocaust, that catastrophe that has darkened the ethical, political and intellectual life of Europe for now for several generations. In the face of that debacle, which called into question all that the west held dear in philosophy and religion alike, it became a matter of urgency – for many a matter of life and death – to contest the hegemonic power of these monotheisms and the philosophies they have generated and to find a way to crack these constructs apart or at least to lessen their grip.

This urgency challenged philosophy to a profound revision of the central tenets of many inherited belief systems, including but not limited to theological ones, and of the ways in which they are held and deployed. The challenge has been particularly acute for continental philosophers, who live and work at ground zero for that holocaust, and pursuing it has been for them and for their readers both exhilarating and draining, even though they have the strong heritage of Kierkegaard, Nietzsche and Heidegger to draw on. This heritage is, however, extremely problematic. We cannot over-estimate the terror for thought as well as for life and limb occasioned by the knowledge that all the learned, analytically acute and passionately held deconstructive or proto-deconstructive energy in the world did not prevent at least two of these great predecessors from implication in that catastrophe, whether posthumously or in their own lifetimes. The brilliance of Nietzsche and Heidegger can never be a sufficient resource or consolation for dealing with the legacy of violence and genocide overshadowing their work, less because of lacunae or lapses in their thought, for they are hard to exceed, than because it is darkened by their complicity or supposed complicity in its regard.

Of course, there have been other genocides, other complicities, some of them passed over in a silence that only deepens the darkness– as indeed the holocaust itself might well have been passed over as an unfortunate blip on the Euro-screen of modernity if it were not for the courageous and ongoing witness of many. But the shoah has had a particular impact on postmodern philosophy, in part because it was not just an attack on other people’s lives and property nor even a reaction to population pressure or a purely ethnic genocide, but an attack on Jewish identity per se carried on in the name of Christian identity per se and carried on in terms drawn explicitly from traditions of European thought drawn from these religions. While ferociously anti-intellectual, at least in its appeal to the masses, the ‘principles’-- if I may so egregiously refer to them -- under which the mass murder of thousands was conducted were drawn from a body of ideas on human nature, sovereignty and the state profoundly rooted in the Abrahamic faiths.

Thrust from a provincial and marginal status in thought and politics, the apparently provincial Judaism of the shtetl and synagogue and the old-fashioned Christianity of the pulpit and church suddenly became for continental philosophy no longer quaint artifacts of the past, soon to be superseded, if not already having been so, by secular reason and progressive democracy, but major and often opposed players on the stage of human history. (Similarly after the bombing of the twin towers in 2001 with traditional Islam: it became a source of challenge to understanding that was clearly not going to be taken care of automatically by the ongoing march of time.) As such, the holocaust has been the catalyst for a profound and ongoing struggle to understand the implications of these Abrahamic religions, their vexed and violent relationships with one another, and their curious, even ominous, persistence as agents economic, political and conceptual in modern life. Their scriptures and traditional understandings of these have catalyzed postmodern thought for decades, both by appropriation and by critique.

The philosophers to be discussed here have registered that struggle in various ways, and we will soon have to  differentiate between and among them, but for the moment I simply want to make the point that each of them in his or her own way takes a vital interest in the scriptures from which these faiths spring, and their work cannot be understood apart from this interest, whether tacit or explicit. Actually, it is often quite explicit, to a degree that their largely secular expositors have often overlooked, though it is signaled on virtually every page. To take only a few examples, Derrida has commented extensively on the sacrifice of Isaac in Genesis and on the book of Revelation, as has Lacan on the understanding of the law in the Pauline letters, while Kristeva has made the Song of Songs (not to mention her deployment of the thought of Thomas Aquinas) the subject of extended reflection. Irigaray gives frequent attention to the figure of the Virgin Mary as understood in the gospels, and perhaps most notably of all, Laruelle, in his effort to duck the complicities of philosophy proper, has written several volumes engaging with figure of Christ and its theologies both mainstream and heterodox. Even Deleuze, who is often less text-based than the others, partly for reasons having to do with his relativized understanding of language, is deeply engaged with concepts arising from these religions, including the relationship between spirit and matter and the issues raised by the esoteric traditions of Christianity and Judaism.

Even just a glance then at the work of these philosophers shows not only a number of direct citations from the Biblical corpus but extended arguments emerging from the lineages and lines of theological thought that arose in ancient Israel, were recast in the fire of Christianity, and challenged again by Islam. Sometimes, it is true, the initial provocation for these arguments in a Biblical passage or a particular theologumenon is present only indirectly, though as already noted there is much more explicit allusion here than is often recognized by secular commentators.   As my colleague OG Rose has written:

When postmoderns sought their own ‘line of flight,’ they ended up in a horizon of non-theism which has proven isomorphic in its categories to theism, suggesting that perhaps those classical theists had more wisdom to their thinking than we today may tend to think. There is something about humans that seems to ‘need’ those theological categories, and the fact that postmoderns trying to leave them behind ended up back in those categories only functions as evidence that this is the case.

In the work of all of these figures and more (including Adorno, Jean-Luc Nancy, Marion, Badiou, and Agamben) such terms as prophecy, logos, incarnation, prayer, ascension, and revelation, which carry meanings in European culture to a great extent peculiar to the Abrahamic faiths, give ample testimony to the scriptural concerns of these philosophers as do such specifically religious concepts as sacrifice, messianicity, creation ex nihilo, holy law, incarnation, eschaton, and apocalypse. Critics often seem to regard the issues raised in Abrahamic religious discourse as either resolved -- and resolved to their discredit -- or as not worth the time and attention of inquiring minds. This a foreclosure that has its costs, both in terms of basic comprehension of postmodern philosophy and of its potential for creative appropriation and re-appropriation.

This project has a relatively modest aim, at least for the start, which is to identify and present for readers some of the Biblical texts and passages that have most directly influenced the thought of a number of the postmodern continental philosophers mentioned above and to indicate some of the problems these raise for their thought and work. The method here will be first to present first a scriptural reference and the challenges it presents to the reflective reader and then to consider how it functions in the work of one or more of the philosophers in question. Thus we will look at, for instance, the opening of Genesis, where “in the beginning, God said ‘let there be light,’ together with its New Testament echo, the gospel announcement that “in the beginning was the logos,” and their implications both for Derrida’s attempt to shake out the reifications of language and thought and also for Deleuze’s struggle to articulate the conditions for the self-emergence the new.

There are a few framing concepts and schemes that will govern these considerations, though not always foregrounded.  First and foremost, there is the tension throughout the Biblical traditions between what Matthew Arnold with such perspicuity called Hebraism on the one hand and Hellenism on the other.  The binary opened up here is not absolute, and it has been challenged, but it is a useful heuristic, and it originates in our texts themselves, in the different genres of wisdom and apocalypse and the competing claims of reason and revelation that determine canon of the Hebrew Bible. It lies behind Paul’s insistence that the gospel is “a scandal to the Greeks and a stumbling block to the Jews,” and in the early Christian theologian Tertullian’s famous rhetorical question “what has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” It surfaces again and again in the tradition, especially in the work and witness of Martin Luther, together with Aquinas among the most influential theologians for postmodern philosophy. There are dangers to this dichotomous framing, ones of which our authors are aware, dangers among others of assigning rational speculative thought to philosophy proper and the claims of revelation to theology alone. Nonetheless, this opposition operates within the traditions themselves as a kind of energizing problematic or shuttle, and it will inform much of the argument here. It is this problematic opposition that informs my title here: the God of Abraham and the Spirit of Philosophy.)

This exposition will also be informed by the long-established theological concept of salvation history, the governing metaphor of the Abrahamic monotheisms with regard to the destiny of human collectives over time. The Greeks have the polis, which has no telos other than its own perpetuation and resides within nature and cyclical time; the Hebrews have the nation, made up of the chosen people, of which the mission to lead all of humanity on a linear trajectory into a new regime at the end of history. The story of this latter operation is inaugurated, and its terms set down in a scriptural schema which begins in the Hebrew Bible, is refashioned and reset after a serious break in the New Testament and critiqued and re-established on more universal ground in the Qur’an. The first and founding moment of this scheme is the call of Abraham to found a chosen nation, or better a gens in the latin sense, an amalgam of people and land bound into a single complex by extended filiations and with a collective identity and destiny based on law and covenant. (Whether the terms nation or gens here imply a nation-state is a contested question both within and without Judaism.) The telos of this collective is a fully realized realm or ‘kingdom’ that subsumes this complex and gives weight, presence and purpose to its unfolding. Here various earthly regimes are blown open and evacuated through messianic sacrifice and leadership, issuing in a realm of ultimate justice, mercy and love.

This sense of collective historical destiny unfolding through time and seen as inherently sacred is unique to the Abrahamic faiths, though it is held more lightly and universally in Islam than in the other two.  Its three vehicles are, taken severally, 1) the people of Israel, defined primarily by bio-cultural lineage and acceptance of the terms of the covenant; 2) the Church, defined primarily by lineages based on connection with Christ, the founder; and 3) the umma, the governing body of Islam, defined primarily by moral exemplarity and respect for its scripture, the Qur’an. Each of these collectives claims to be the true heir of the patrimony of Abraham: the Jewish tradition by right of primogeniture; the Christian one through adoption into that lineage; and the Islamic one through absolute unmediated contact with the divine beautifully defined in one line of Islamic theology as ‘friendship.’

These three ‘salvation history’ understandings of collective destiny and historical mission are fundamentally at odds in the monotheisms , primarily because all three are based on the axiom that there can be only one true heir, one firstborn son or chosen disciple, who is empowered to represent and transmit the divine patrimony. This is among the underlying assumptions of the Abrahamic monotheisms so deeply foundational to their constitution and so persistently in play as a running program for their operations as to have passed almost without remark by those who study them. (The great exception here is the work of Nancy Jay, who’s Throughout Your Generations Forever: Sacrifice, Religion and Patriarchy has informed much of this project. See the extensive discussion of her work below.) It is an assumption with compelling anthropological roots; almost every society we know, though with different degrees of intensity, faces this problem of cultural transmission, and most solve it by the designation of a single male heir, though the protocol for such a designation varies.  Jewish, Christian and Islamic religions are no exception here, and they are unintelligible without the assumption of a salvation history at work transmitted by a single son or ‘son.’

The third and related framing concept here is that of sexuation. The Abrahamic scriptures draw heavily on the concepts and tropes of biological reproduction, and secondarily yet vitally on that of binary eros to figure the divine.  Gender and its associated desires are present here from creation, which is figured in Genesis as a kind of insemination through the paternal word, as well as of transmission, which comes initially at least through ‘father’ Abraham, and it is carried into the redemptive economy of father-son relations in the Christian trinity. The gender binary is built into the account of creation in Genesis, though in an aporetic way, as we shall see, and it recurs again and again in the torah and in the conception of the messiah in the gospels. For the tradition, however, it is important to note again that this binary registers first and foremost as a matter of reproduction: male and female are defined by their differing roles in conception and childbirth, not in terms of their eros. 

Eros is not absent from these scriptures by any means, present across a double difference in a number of hymns and narratives. It surfaces dramatically in the Song of Songs, which is essentially an erotic poem, and it is not absent from the New Testament, where Jesus himself has an important feminine consort in Mary Magdalen, whether or not this relationship entails actual sex (whatever ‘actual sex’ may be). Both Jewish and Christian mystical traditions often figure the relationship of divine and human as that between lover and loved, with the lover a fathering God and the beloved not simply the soul but a the collective, Israel and the Church respectively seen at times as whore, at times as sacred bride.

This foundational priority of the gender binary in sacred scripture is subverted and contested at many points, in the Genesis creation story, as we shall see, in the conception of Jesus, and most explicitly in the Qur’an, but it remains dominant across the Abrahamic faiths, if only in the prayers and practices of their adherents. Certainly the theologies springing from these are until recently masculinist in the extreme. To ignore this ubiquitous trope is not only to collude with the silencing of half the human race but to seriously misunderstand even the explicit content of the texts in hand. Among other things it threatens to issue only in an anodyne, neutered and defanged reading and response, denuded of desire, eros and purchase on the soul. The issues at stake here, and the revolution in thought, indeed in the nature of thought, catalyzed by the feminist movement at its best exceed this revisionist response and must be allowed to shake the foundations of some basic and long-established paradigms in western culture.

The last framing concept here, or rather family of concepts, are the literary and linguistic concepts of word, text and genre. All three Abrahamic monotheisms reflect an axiomatic grounding in the nature of the divine as essentially expressed in and accessed through signs, above all verbal signs. In all three this axiom can cut many ways. It can go in the direction of a deep reliance on the univocal and codifiable connection between word and thing, or it can open the way to a polysemic proliferation of interpretations and readings without boundary or purchase. The former leads to dogma and at its most extreme to fundamentalism; the latter can lead to relativism and at its mosts extreme to a reduction of sacred scripture to mere literature, in the pejorative sense. (It is the sense given by Valery’s aphoristic dismissal of the aesthetic: “De la musique avant toute chose; tout le rest est litterature.”) It becomes a way to hold the existential claims of the Abrahamic scriptures at bay.  Islam is especially sensitive to this reduction, and its reading practices are designed against such attempts to defang scripture in this way.\

These two modes of reading, the fundamentalist mode and the relativist mode, may be found in all three monotheisms, and there are extensive and interesting debates about whether one formation is more prone than the others to either of its distortions and extremes. (See the recent work of Richard Boothby in his Embracing the Void.) One is often deployed as a prophylactic against the other: relativism against a too strong a fundamentalism, fundamentalism against a too weak a relativism. This opposition, so highly weaponized at this time in history, can, however, obscure a feature common to all oof the Abrahamic scriptures — one quite alien to postmodern philosophy: an absolute demand for surrender of the intellect and will to a sense and sensibility that exceeds the reach of both ordinary reason and ordinary assimilation into the human  It is a call, to use the technical theological term, so central to these texts themselves and so profoundly dramatized both within them and in their reception that to ignore it is to fail to ‘touch the question,’ as they say in law. 

Our philosophers are not always oblivious to this call for surrender, but all of them, Deleuze, Derrida, Nancy, Lacan, Laruelle, Irigaray, Kristeva and more, are serious about the scriptures, and if they do not hold the word of God in the way the children of Abraham do, they do ssem to understanda d register, if only intuitively, that there are imperatives at work in these texts that exceed the parameters even of the high vocation of philosophy. To engage with them is not simply a matter of rational deduction from empirical evidence, but a a matter of ordeal, of submission to modes of expression and communication that their readers do not control and of which the outcome is not predetermined. Even a brief exposure to the texts of the Abrahamic traditions make the need for engagement with forces beyond ordinary understanding palpable, whether by rejection or embrace.

That said, let me further say -- and say as strongly as possible -- that I do not intend in any way to adjudicate the ‘correctness’ of the philosophical readings of scripture under consideration here, to their degree of faithfulness either to the letter or the spirit of the text, or to the depth, quality and and adequacy of the response in terms of any individual spiritual or religious practice — or not. I assume, with a deep bow to my mentor Harold Bloom, that all such readings are driven by their own anxieties and carry their own misprisons, and that, far from vitiating the results, these very errors and swerves, if such there be, have a prima facie claim on our attention independent of any perceived fidelities or infidelities to either text or tradition. But I do hope to show that the scriptural texts that provoke these thinkers are vital to their work and vital as well to its reception, and that these texts have the capacity to continue to generate new energies and visions both by resistance and by embrace.