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the insistence of the world 167 e i g h t the insistence of the world From Chiasm to Cosmos Where were you when I laid the foundations of the earth? —Job 38:4 Introduction to Part 3 We promised at the start to honor the animals of Jesus, and now we must make good on that promise, this time by honoring the animal that Jesus is, the animal that I am following (je suis),1 whose animal needs were recognized by Martha. Indeed it is time to honor the history of the animals that we all are and are following, which I have emblematically called Martha ’s world, the world to which we all belong in the most deeply material sense. Yet, despite our pledge to follow the animals of Jesus, we have in truth been focused almost exclusively on human beings and God, on the chiasmic intertwining of God’s insistence and the need God has for human existence to fill up what is lacking in the body of God. So the time has come to shed the anthropocentrism and humanism of the first two parts of this study. Now we must ask, what about everything else? Does God need anything else? Does anything else need God? More unnervingly still, does insistence have a wider reach than the name (of) “God”? What about non-human animals and non-living things? What about Nietzsche weeping over that horse? What about the stars and the distant origins of the universe ? Is not the “little town” of Bethany in the story to be found on planet Earth? Does it not have a planetary and ultimately a cosmic setting and is its fate not bound up with the fate of the planet and the solar system? Does not any possible theopoetics have a wider cosmic context? These are not the kinds of question we are used to asking, not in the humanities generally and not in continental philosophy in particular, which today finds itself under fire for having kept nature and the physical sciences at arm’s length. I have been arguing in the present study that I have found it necessary to delimit Kant in order to make room for Hegel, 168 cosmopoetics: the insistence of the world and then to delimit Hegel in order to make room for the event. But now I must take care that what I have been calling theopoetics not succumb to the Kantian move I criticized in the second part of this book, which is to delimit what the scientists are telling us in order to make room for what we are doing back in the “humanities center,” in “philosophy” and “theology” and “literature.” So, in the final part of this book I wish to press the case still harder against the Kantian tilt of postmodernism that I criticized in part 2. In doing so I take the occasion to examine a contemporary critique of the continental tradition from Kant to the present that is particularly frustrated by the so-called theological turn in which this tradition seems to have culminated, a critique that would certainly include the present undertaking. It is a sign of the times that nowadays everyone wants to be a “materialist ,” even the theologians. My idea, on the other hand, has been to treat the name (of) “God” as a response to the deepest promptings of our life and in so doing to undermine the binarities of “theism” and of “atheism,” of the “religious” and the “secular,” and also of “materialism” and “idealism,” on the grounds that these categories block our access to the event. A theopoetics of the events ought to be in principle post-theist and post-atheist, post-materialist and post-idealist, and even post-religious and post-secular , on the grounds that I am feeling about in a more elementary space which gives place to events. But beyond the philosophical inadequacy of these binary schemas, they are a trap, a kind of blackmail, forcing a bad choice on us under pain of incurring the deep “odium” each harbors for the other. The odium theologiae is deep indeed and it cuts both ways: not only the odium of evolutionary biologists for Bible thumpers, but also the no less odious demonization of “atheism” by people who really do believe in demons! With my event-driven theopoetics I am trying to burrow beneath this binarity and to defuse the mutual animosity by meditating upon the event that insists in the...

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