Speculative Grace: Bruno Latour and Object-Oriented Theology

38. Spirit

38 Spirit Even ported onto an object-oriented platform, it remains apt to say that religion reveals what is, at once, both in us and more than us. Religion presses us to open the black box that we are. It presses us to render commonplace objects less transparently available and, thus, sheds light on those constitutive operations, alignments, and concatenations so ordinary as to typically avoid visibility. This sea of welling, intimate, translucent objects is what the tradition calls Spirit. You must be born again to see it. We possess ‘‘hundreds of myths,’’ Latour says, about how subjects construct objects, ‘‘yet we have nothing that recounts the other aspect of the story: how objects construct subjects’’ (WM 82). Explicitly assembling these new myths is the work of an object-oriented theology and—on the ground, in the first person—it is the enduring practice of everyday religion. Showing grace, revealing Spirit, depends on foregrounding this material that, previously, was only 147 packed-away. Or, as Latour puts it, ‘‘with religion, it is always: ‘back to the flesh’’’ (TS 232). Spirit traverses the intimate detour of the flesh. To trace it, the religious practitioner persistently and prayerfully asks: what composes my flesh? What affects, sensations, emotions, thoughts, and circulations congest it? What breath, what blood, what bile, what nerves animate it? In response, Spirit shows you a subject overflowing with objects. ‘‘What I am going to argue,’’ Latour says, ‘‘is that religion—again in the tradition that is mine—does not speak of things, but from things’’ (TF 29). Religion induces this change of tone. Subjectivity is a black box. Its output of agency is real, but borrowed. In fact, its agency is real because it is borrowed . In order to get anywhere, subjects need an enabling push from the objects that compose them. This enabling push fuels but also displaces subjectivity. Unavoidably, the grace of this push decenters the self. Subjects are given to themselves only when they are prevented by the objects that compose them from coinciding with themselves. Fishing after their own nature, subjects find themselves only by losing themselves. Trained in disappointment, religion, then, is the practice of losing. Religion is not so much about obediently coinciding with the demands of a super-ego as it is about the work of patiently and compassionately unpacking a subject’s under-ego. ‘‘To the super-ego of the tradition,’’ Latour suggests , ‘‘we may well add the under-ego’’ (MT 253–254). Spirit manifests in the under-ego, in the material packedaway behind the navel, inside the diaphragm, between the shoulder blades, like a fire shut up in the bones. Religion probes: which is the least of these? And then attends to it. It asks: what schools of objects, what elaborate machinations , what only partially compatible agencies are, right now, traversing and composing the shape of this subject? 148 Spirit Don’t begin, Latour advises, with the notion of ‘‘a subject endowed with some primeval interiority;’’ rather ‘‘observe empirically how an anonymous and generic body is made to be a person’’ (RS 208). To make progress in revealing Spirit, ‘‘you don’t have to imagine a ‘wholesale’ human having intentionality, making rational calculations, feeling responsible for his sins, or agonizing over his mortal soul. Rather, you realize that to obtain ‘complete’ human actors, you have to compose them out of many successive layers’’ (RS 207). Subjects are layered, tiered, stacked, and aligned like every other object. Their restless but interlocking tiers are framed together from a welter of objects and agencies. In addition to flesh, subjects are ‘‘obviously made of so many layers of law, politics, narratives of self, authorship, the unconscious, identity cards, physiological knowledge, that no form of life can create it from scratch’’ (TS 233). Subjects, to the extent that they occur, are a grace. In particular, the grace of the subject, of the human, ‘‘is in the delegation itself, in the pass, the sending , in the continuous exchange of forms. Of course it is not a thing, but things are not things either’’ (WM 138). In this sense, ‘‘subjectivity is not a property of human souls but of the gathering itself’’ (RS 218). Though it is true that ‘‘nothing pertains to a subject that has not been given to it,’’ subjects are not entirely reducible to the objects that compose them (RS 213). The pass, the sending, the exchange that subjects are resists...