Postmodernism and the Revolution in Religious Theory: Toward a Semiotics of the Event

Conclusion. Toward a Revival of Religious Theory

CONCLUSION ToWarD a rEvivaL of rELiGioUS ThEory ■ She tore a hole in our universe, a gateway to another dimension . A dimension of pure chaos. Pure [ . . . ] evil. When she crossed over, she was just a ship. But when she came back [ . . . ] she was alive! Look at her, Miller. Isn’t she beautiful? —Dr. Weir, in the movie Event Horizon But if in considering the religious we find ourselves in such a strange “place,” seeking to peer over the generative rim of events, we must ask the question: how do we think at, and across, this horizon? How do we theorize the infinite, or illimitable, horizon of the event that Spinoza’s God, Deleuze’s “expressive” semiosis, Levinas’s face, Derrida’s “friendship,” and Žižek’s singular materiality pose to us. The horizon, or “place of religion,” is only the site for this infinite indicativity within our own time-space continuum. Spinoza himself said the infinite continuum of God allowed for an infinity of divine attributes, only two of which we are capable of thinking God. A human being is limited to thinking God through the attributes of mind and matter. There are of course now other means of thinking the infinite. String theory in physics, for example, has supplied a mathematic apparatus for thinking n dimensions beyond what we can conceive, perceive, or measure, even though we can characterize the sense of that generativity of a multidimensional universe and a transdimensional God by certain empirical procedures. Mathematics is one signifying series on which we can rely. But ultimately the infinite, or the transfinite, cannot be thought simply in the manner of Spinoza. If we are conscious (or “sentient,” as Buddhists would say) entities, then our thinking is a response, and a response to an “address” by the transfinite. Religious C O N C L U S I O N 204 theory must take one step beyond Heidegger/Derrida, Deleuze/Badiou, and Lacan/Žižek, all of whom, as energetic, binary stars in the galaxy of modern philosophy, have in their own fashion sought to de-reify Western ontology and respond in different but provocative vernaculars to the question of the sign, or more precisely to the question of the relation between the singularity and the sign. The next step must be to consider the possibility of a transversal of the finite signifier that Levinas bequeaths to us and is entailed in any “incarnational” theory. Mathematics can give us the sign of the incarnate—Isaiah’s sign of Emmanuel—but it cannot address the thetic source of signification, nor be the addressee. The infinite as Signification Kierkegaard’s “paradox” of the infinite singularity of the “God-man” (that is, the infinite singularity that meets us in our finite singularity that requires a response) will continue to haunt us, the last and least exorcizable of specters. Though not all “religions” encompass an explicit language of infinite address, they contain the elements of the vocative and of the invoked. It is the vocative that separates religious language from poetic language and religious theory from aesthetics. A theory of the vocative is barely in its infancy. It can be teased to a certain extent out of Kristeva and Lacan, though all forms of psychoanalysis are in the last synopsis theories of the subject. Religious theory is a theory of the infinite intersubjective, or the infinity of the interpersonal. The infinite intersubjective is what “translocates” the singular location we designate as the religious. The kind of naming that saves the names depends on the open-endedness of the intersubjective relation. The infinite or divine, as Luther said, is always “für uns.” It is neither “in itself” nor “for itself,” but “for us.” This for-us is more than a relationality; it is the relativization of all logical and tangential relations in a singular moment of orthogonality. Yet this orthogonality constitutes a time of the full penetration of Badiou’s multiplicity by the singularity of infinite dwelling as event, as the impossibility of a reduction within the horizon of signification. That event can be called an eschatological event, which means it is not an event at all. It is the event that is exceptional, that pulls toward itself all moments and eventualities, that annihilates and affirms. Eschatology is not an event within some religions; it is the cipher of the religious singularity. If postmodernism has declared the end of all comprehensive histories , grand narratives, and dialectical philosophies, it must declare [18.219.236.199] Project...