The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps

9. As if I were Dead: Radical Theology and the Real

180 cosmopoetics: the insistence of the world n i n e as if i were dead Radical Theology and the Real To perceive the object as such implies that you perceive the object as it is or as it is supposed to be when you are not there . . . So to relate to an object as such means to relate to it as if you were dead. That’s the condition of truth . . . the condition of objectivity. —Jacques Derrida I object to the blackmail, to the bad choice—theism or atheism!— and to the violence of double genitive in the odium theologiae—the total contempt for religion on the part of secularists, the demonization of atheism by the theologians, which leads to outright violence by religious extremists. The whole thing is a perfect recipe for war. The current form this blackmail has taken in recent years is a new wave of “materialism,” “realism,” and “atheism” that has arisen in reaction to the so-called theological turn. These terms are used more or less interchangeably, as if theology is allergic to reality and materiality, which is the point where we radical theologians sigh in despair, as if we had to choose. The (not so) new blackmail is: Reality or fiction! Materiality or spirit-seeing! Science or fideism! These not-so-new materialists seek to rekindle the old science wars and to wage a new version of the old battle over what is really real, pitting toughminded scientists against tender-minded types who lack the heart to face reality and so take flight to the fancies of poetry and the fantasies of religion . The new breed of scientific realists, what I will call warrior realists, are merciless iconoclasts, out to destroy all the graven images of the scientific real in order to let the real itself be itself in all its unvarnished reality. As we more deconstructively minded types could have predicted, this massive assault on theology is massively theological, finding its theological counterpart in the neo-Orthodoxy of Karl Barth: they want to pave the way for absolute transcendence by clearing away every relativity and immanence. To be sure, the difference is that Barth was protecting the as if i were dead 181 transcendence of God, not of gluons. But the analogies between these two apologists of the absolutely absolute and really real and truly transcendent —let us say their common theological assumptions or what Derrida calls their “implicit theologemes”1 —are unmistakable, not the least of which is their common contempt of images and mediations (Vorstellungen ). These friends of the absolute want to relativize every human construction (be it the “church” or “social constructions”), degrade every mediating image of the real, and devalue every man-made mediation (it usually is men!). Of course I do not object to the presence of an implicit theology, which I could have predicted, but to the absolutist nature of the theology. As always, I steer around such gigantomachean debates and number myself among the friends of interpretation, whose counterpart in theology is Paul Tillich and his theology of the cultural mediation and the concretization of transcendence and the divine. For us post-Tillichians, if you want transcendence, you will have to construct it yourself and not sit back and wait for it to fall from the sky, which does not mean there is anything phony about such transcendence. It is real enough, and indeed a more realistic transcendence. All we radical theologians are doing is trying to append to it a more sensible explanation of its provenance. My new species of theologians, the ones who say “perhaps,” are thus not anti-realists, who do not “believe in reality,” as if reality were a matter of personal belief, with opinions to be found on both sides of the issue. As soon as we open our mouths, we affirm a profound faith in reality, wittingly or not, so profound we have never even thought to say it out loud or write it down. Skepticism, Heidegger said, is refuted not by any argument but by the very being of Dasein.2 Reality does not wait for our consent; our relation to reality is the whole momentum of our being. We have a “natural contract” with nature, as Serres said, which was signed in advance for us without our consultation. Our relation to the “other”—please note, this is the way we continental philosophers tend to speak of the “real”—to other persons, to other living things, to anything...