Speculative Grace: Bruno Latour and Object-Oriented Theology

37. The Two Faces of Grace

37 The Two Faces of Grace Religion corrects for our farsightedness. It addresses the invisibility of objects that are commonly too familiar, too available, too immanent to be seen. To this end, it intentionally cultivates nearsightedness. Religion practices myopia in order to bring both work and suffering into focus as grace. Redemption turns on this revelation. The principle of irreduction guarantees resistant availability and bans any slick metaphysics. Absent the singular transcendence of a traditional God, grace isn’t dissolved but distributed. An object-oriented grace is fomented by a restless multitude of cross-fertilizing transcendences, resistances , and availabilities. Here, grace is the double-bind of resistant availability that both gives objects to themselves and gives them away to others. Or, better, grace is what gives objects to themselves by giving them away to others. There is no grace if the resistant is not also available and there is no grace if the available is not also resistant. 143 Double-bound, grace has two faces. On the one hand, grace presents as the ceaseless work required by the multitude’s resistance. On the other hand, grace presents as the unavoidable suffering imposed by our passibility. Work is grace seen from the perspective of resistance. Suffering is grace seen from the perspective of availability. Hell is when the grace of either slips from view. Work and suffering are the two faces of grace. On this account, sin is a refusal of grace. It is a refusal of this double-bind. It is a desire to go away, to be done once and for all with the necessity of negotiation, to be finally free from the imposing demands of others. Sin denies both the graciousness of resistance and the graciousness of availability . It can see neither work nor suffering as the gifts that jointly constitute the object that it is. Sin does not want to be dependent on a grace it cannot control and it does not want to be impinged on by a grace it did not request. Sin wants the given to be something other than given. The business of religion is ‘‘to disappoint, first, to disappoint ’’ (TF 32). Religion aims to intentionally, relentlessly, and systematically disappoint this desire to go away by bringing our attention back to the most obvious features of the most ordinary objects. Its work is to bring us up short by revealing our desire to be done with the double-bind of grace. To disappoint this drive, ‘‘to divert it, break it, subvert it, to render it impossible, is just what religious talk is after’’ (TF 32). Habitually, we smooth over the rough edges, downplay the incompatible lines, and fantasize that the relative availability of a black box depends on something other than the unruly mobs packed-away inside. Sin is the dream of an empty black box, of a black box that is absolute rather than relative, permanent rather than provisional . Sin repurposes the obscurity imposed by a black box for the sake of obscuring grace. In this way, sin is as natural 144 The Two Faces of Grace as the habits upon which substances rely. But in religious practices, ‘‘incredible pain has been taken to break the habitual gaze of the viewer’’ (TF 39). Great effort is expended to show work and suffering as something other than regrettable . ‘‘Religion, in this tradition, does everything to constantly redirect attention by systematically breaking the will to go away, to ignore, to be indifferent, blasé, bored’’ (TF 36). Mark this definition: religion is what breaks our will to go away. The trick, as Latour puts it, is ‘‘to paint the disappointment of the visible without simply painting another world of the invisible’’ (TF 40). Something obscure does need to be revealed, but the obscurity in question is not the kind proper to what is distant, resistant, or transcendent. Rather, religion aims for a revelation of the obvious as otherwise than we’d assumed. In religion, ‘‘what is hidden is not a message beneath the first one, an esoteric message, but a tone, an injunction for you, the viewer, to redirect your attention and to turn it away from the dead and back to the living’’ (TF 42). Life and redemption depend on this revelation of a novel tone. However the world’s furniture might be arranged, its objects will not cease to ferment and the double-bind of work and suffering will remain...