Toward a post-representational theologyBy Petra Carlsson

Abstract:

Drawing on Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze’s critique of representation, this

article introduces the notion of a post-representational theology and finally suggests

a forerunner in the radical theologian Thomas J.J. Altizer.

In the article, two contemporary theologians are used to throw light upon a

theological dilemma to which the post-representational approach offers a possible

solution. The theological dilemma coincides, however, with a problem that Gayatri

Chakravorty Spivak locates in some uses of Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze’s post-

representation, why a certain account of the post-representational perspective is

suggested. This account is derived out of Foucault’s notion of metaphysics from his

famous article “Theatrum Philosophicum”.

It is a post-representational perspective that may serve to open theology to the

ever-changing nature of real life experiences; to the movement of the nihilo. It is a

theological approach of which, the article finally argues, Thomas J.J. Altizer, can be

seen as a precursor and an example.

How can we talk about concrete experience, about our actual

pains and passions and their ever-changing nature without, yet

again, excluding and omitting these actual yet evasive

experiences? How can we talk about real life, if the words we

use never capture concrete reality simply because words are

always an abstraction? So it seems, however we strive to put

different human realities into words, some realities are always

left out. Especially, perhaps, those that need representation

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the most in order to exist politically, philosophically and

theologically.

It was questions like these that made the French thinkers

Michel Foucault and Gilles Deleuze experiment with language and

thought beyond representation. A word can never, they say,

fully capture what it is said to represent why the words are

always creative beyond human control, and why there is always a

gap between words and things.

For this reason, Deleuze introduces a philosophy that

continuously creates concepts and, by doing so, depicts that

repetition is only possible through difference. Words are

creative, they live a life of their own, why they never carry

the same meaning twice. Thus, to Deleuze, philosophy does, and

should, create concepts in accordance with the multiplicity of

life and the impossibility of repetition. His readings of other

thinkers throws light upon the way in which their concepts, no

matter how seemingly constant, are inescapably creative in this

manner. In his own work, he continuously creates new concepts

in order to capture the force of the ideas discussed.

For the same reason, Foucault refuses to pose statements. His

examinations of history does not make him simply replace old

truths with a new ones. Instead, his historic studies throws

light upon the power of representation. He often turns to the

archives, to actual human stories in order to find those

historic events that are buried far below the formal decisions

and treaties on the institutionalized level of power, (what the

historians of his time often regarded the events.) Not, however,

in order to replace one Event with another, but in order to

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show that history could be understood otherwise because

representation is not constant. The answer to the questions

“What is that?” or “What actually happened?” can neither be

exhaustive nor final.

SPIVAK. This aspect of post-representation in Deleuze and

Foucault has inspired the post-colonial thinker Gayatri

Chakravorty Spivak, but it has also caused her to critique

them.1

When Spivak reads a conversation between Deleuze and

Foucault she realizes that the two revolutionary intellectuals,

whom she greatly admires for always siding with the excluded,

reveal a dubious tendency when speaking out.2

In this conversation, Deleuze admires Foucault’s work on the

prison, and his ability to, Deleuze says; “establish conditions

where the prisoners themselves would be able to speak.”

Foucault then adds that “the masses no longer need the

intellectual to gain knowledge: they know perfectly well,

without the illusion; they know far better than the

intellectual and they are certainly capable of expressing

themselves.”3

1 This critique is expressed e.g. in: Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty Marxism and the Interpretation of Culture, 1988, and; Outside in the teaching machine, 1993 and; A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a history of the vanishing present, Harvard University Press, 1999.2 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a history of the vanishing present, Harvard University Press, 1999, p 2493 Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a history of the vanishing present, Harvard University Press, 1999, p 255. “Intellectuals and power” 1972 in language, counter-memory, practice: selectedessays and interviews by Michel Foucault, ed. Michel F. Bouchard, 1980, p206f

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According to Spivak, these statements express two naïve

notions. Firstly, that free subjects are hidden under layers of

oppression. Secondly, that the prisoner’s and the masses’

concrete reality is accessible to these established European

intellectuals.4

In Spivak’s view, when philosophers start speaking of

concrete experience, they may always be used to overshadow, and

ignore, those actual experiences that their philosophy does not

at all capture.5 Some realities, she says, still need

representation. In other words, Spivak suggests that Foucault

and Deleuze’s endeavour to open Western thought, and politics,

to excluded experiences might do the complete opposite.6

4 Spivak quotes them slightly out of context. In the first quote Deleuze refers to Foucault’s work with the prison discussion group, G.I.P. (”Groupe d’information de prisons) where prisoners actually got together and talked. In the second quote, Foucault speaks of theevents of may 68. Baring the recent events in Egypt, Tunisia and Lybia in mind, Foucault’s enthusiasm and faith in the masses abilityto know and speak for themselves four years after may 68, is, perhaps, quite understandable.5 She even suggests that neither “Deleuze nor Foucault seems aware that the intellectual within globalizing capital, brandishing concrete experience, can help consolidate the international divisionof labor by making one model of “concrete experience” the model.” Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a history ofthe vanishing present, Harvard University Press, 1999, p 255f.6 Deleuze and Foucault’s lack of recognition of the different kinds of representation, where some are still needed while others should be left behind, leads, according to Spivak, to an essentialist utopian politics. It prepares the ground for a new essentialist notion of a subject who does not need to be represented; a new notion of a free subject. Thus, their utopic idea of post-representation might, unwillingly, support e.g. the construction of a “general will in the credit-baited rural woman” so that she can be“developed”. The Deleuzian and Foucauldian post-representation mightsupport the creation of a made up will, a made up subject, that overshadows the actual subaltern. In consequence, Spivak writes: “Itis in the shadow of this unfortunate marionette that the history of

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However, Deleuze and Foucault differ, not regarding the

overarching critique of representation, nor regarding the

points of resistance internal to thinking itself, but regarding

the way in which this resistance is most efficiently enacted.

They share a notion of non-representation, but the difference

regarding the ways forward posits them differently to Spivak’s

critique. Actually, Foucault suggests the same risk in some

accounts of Deleuzian thought as does Spivak, and when doing

so, Foucault points towards a certain kind of post-

representation.

We shall soon have a closer look at Foucault’s suggestion,

but let us first turn to theology in order to shed theological

light upon this dilemma, and on the risk that Foucault sees in

some accounts of Deleuzian non-representation.

THEOLOGY AND REPRESENTATION. The problem of giving room for the

concrete, the body and the contingent present rather than the

ideal and the sublime is obviously a philosophical problem, but

every theologian knows that it is definitely a theological one.

As a matter of fact, I believe theology is incomparably

illuminating when it comes to the power of representation.

Due to its living relation to its own history of ideas,

theology hardly gives room for ideas about leaving

representation behind. Christian thinkers are brought up to

believe that the general represents the particular, and vice

versa, just as God represents man. They are also made to

the unheeded subaltern must unfold.” Spivak, Gayatri Chakravorty, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason: Toward a history of the vanishing present, Harvard University Press, 1999, p 259

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believe that those certain wishes and desires, struggles and

miseries, that are represented in the Bible and taken into

regard in the grand history of redemption, actually mirror life

on earth, our actual pains and passions. Additionally, since

God himself has actually become body, there is no reason to

distrust this overarching pattern, nor God’s insight into any

bodily experience.

However, if this is how the Christian tradition constitutes

representation, it is also how it continuously throws light

upon the predicament of representation, causing e.g.

postcolonial and feminist theologians to wonder; was God ever

in labor, was he ever raped? How is women need for redemption

mirrored in the grand history of redemption, how is the female

particularity represented by the male God generality?, and so

forth.

In other words, the dilemma is well known in theology.

Numerous contemporary theologians who try to open Christian

thought to the complexity of experience and to the ever-

changing nature of life, must recurrently face the fact that

the representation of the transcendent and eternally absolute

God has managed to sneak back in. In consequence, so has the

One that overshadows diversity and singular experience.7

7 For instance, I believe this is what makes the British theologian Graham Ward, in the introduction to his second edition of his accomplished book on Barth and Derrida, explicitly underline; ‘But, and this is the important but, God is not différance for Derrida (…)’? (And also what makes him cry out “Christ has genitals!” at the ISRLCconference in Oxford 2010.) Obviously, in the reception of his book,the old God has managed to sneak in, and now Ward must push this Godback out. Ward has (believe it or not) attempted to speak of the complexity life that he finds so well depicted by the Derridean différance, but his readers have understood him as speaking of the

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Now, what are the mechanisms behind this? Is it as simple as

pious expectations, or habitual thinking? Is it even

theological incompetence when it comes to thinking outside the

box, or what? Let us have a closer look at the predicament of

the power of representation in theology through two

applications of Deleuzian concepts in theology, concepts that

definitely strive beyond representation.

WARD AND KELLER. Catherine Keller and Graham Ward both make use

of Deleuzian thought in order to open the theological doctrines

to the complexity and contingency of human reality.

In Anti-Oedipus, Deleuze and Guattari introduce the concept of

”the schizophrenic” as a radical, revolutionary nomad who

resists all forms of oppressive power (also religious.)8 The

schizophrenic is a direct affront to Freud's psychoanalytic

system since s/he has not developed an ego, or gone through

the Oedipal process of individuation. A schizo politics, they

write, would thus ”escape coding, scramble the codes, and flee

in all directions”.9 Schizos are not obsessed with analysing

their parent-relations, nor restricted by religious Christian

sublime, of a transcendent and eternal reality above bodily life. Ward, Graham, Barth, Derrida and the Language of theology, Cambridge University Press, 2004, p xviii. A similar statement is made by JohnD. Caputo in ’Atheism, A/theology and the Postmodern Condition’, in the Cambridge Companion to Atheism, ed Michael Martin, Cambridge University Press, 2007, p. 274.8 Thus, radical political movements should ”learn from the psychotichow to shake off the Oedipal yoke and the effects of power, in orderto initiate a radical politics of desire freed from all beliefs”, Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Felix, Anti-Oedipus, 1972, Continuum, 2004, p xxiii.9 Deleuze, Gilles & Guattari, Felix, Anti-Oedipus, 1972, Continuum, 2004, p xxiii

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or political power directed at the self. Thus, they are free,

and depict an escape from modern Western thought and politics.

Now, in his Christ and Culture, Graham Ward introduces a

“schizoid Christology”, inspired by this “schizo” in Deleuze

and Guattari. Through the schizo, Ward understands the Christ

based on Christic operation rather than on dogmatic Christology.

Ward aims to radically relocate the characteristics of Christ

from that of the eternal and stable to a Christ founded in, and

only in, an economy of response. Ward presents the Christ as

one who, citing Deleuze and Guattari, is; “continually

wandering about, migrating here; there, and everywhere as best

he can, he plunges further into the realm of

deterritorialisation, reaching the furthest limits of the

decomposition of the socius on the surface of his own body

without organs.”10

This is, surely, an image of Christ that causes a reversal of

ideals, a twist of Christological signification and

representation. However, is it a distortion of representation

as such? It seems to me, that the theological setting somehow

does not allow the making of a schizo out of Christ. Instead,

the schizo becomes the Christ. Suddenly, the schizo as

described in the quotation above becomes an image of Jesus

wandering about Israel, and the Christ plunging into our lives

today. Rather than breaking with representation, it becomes

itself a representation of the Christ (thus excluding anyone

who/ any experience that does not feel represented in this new

10 Ward, Graham, Christ and Culture, Blackwell Publishing, 2005, p 61.

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image of the son of man.) Now, why is that? Why is it so hard

to rupture the Christian representation?

One could argue that Ward knows his Derrida better than his

Deleuze, or even that he does not want to take the full

consequences the Deleuzian critique of representation.11 Still,

could there not be a more profound reason for the mechanisms at

work when Deleuze’s post-representation meets theology?

Because, a similar phenomenon can be noticed in the

theology of Catherine Keller, who is explicitly critical of the

Radical Orthodoxy with which Ward is associated.

Keller’s Face of the Deep questions the traditional idea of the

Christian “origin” on basis of the “beginning”, the “bereshit”

of the Hebrew myth of creation.12 Christianity, Keller states,

early established as an unquestionable truth that God created

the world out of nothing, ex nihilo, despite the opening verses

of the Bible, where God created the world out of chaos. Instead

of keeping the chaotic fond – what Keller calls the beginning –

the Christian tradition made sure to cut free from the abysms

of the past and invent the idea of a pure, blank origin, Keller

states.13 Thus, Keller aims to reintroduce a chaotic complexity

into the theological discourse, and suggests (beyond a simple

substitution of “origin” for “beginning”) a “tehomic theology”

or a “theology of becoming”. In other words, she searches a

11 See eg. Ward, Graham, Barth, Derrida and the Language of Theology, Cambridge University Press, 1999.12 Keller makes this distinction partly on basis of statements by Edward Said and Wolfhart Pannenberg. Keller, Catherine, Face of the Deep:a Theology of Becoming, Routledge, 2003, p 159.13 Keller, Face of the Deep: a Theology of Becoming, p xvi.

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theological language where the chaotic reality of our concrete

lives foregoes ideas of organisation and being.

Rather than simply borrowing a Deleuzian term, and apply it

on theology, as does Ward, Keller actually follows Deleuze’s

example. She does not recycle already invented concepts, but

starts creating concepts herself. Thus, her endavour is a lot

more likely to succeed than is Ward’s.

Nevertheless, just like the schizoid Christ in Ward, her

re-conceptualizations affirms diversity when contrasted to that

which they oppose, but once her tehomic theology is established

it is just as defining and imperative as the notion it intended

to disturb. Only now, the traditional notion of origin, and the

entire ex nihilo, is excluded.

I refer only one of her books, which, of course, does not do

her justice – the totality of her work better mirrors the flux

of Deleuzian concept creation. Still, and interestingly, it is

not her endeavour that causes this effect, but the setting

within theology. When the argumentation takes its outset in the

creation myth – the Christian narrative itself – the God figure

and even the notion of theology as such, unavoidably precedes

“the tehom”, which then becomes merely an attribute.

Now, the point here is not to ask whether or not the

theologians referred manage to properly implement Deleuzian

thought, if they are not brave or talented enough, because,

naturally they are. The question is rather; what are the

mechanisms at work when Deleuzian post-representation is placed

in theology? Especially since theology is one of the discourses

Deleuze explicitly aim to rupture?

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Let us say it is all in the eye of the beholder, still, why

is it that a theologically oriented reader of a “tehomic

theology” or a “schizoid Christ” detects a chaotic yet

redemptive and still safely Christian God in the tehom, and a

twisted yet still fully recognizable Christ in Anti-Oedipus? Why

does one not, instead, detect the schizo in the Christ figure?

Why is it that these radical images in the end do not create a

more profound change? Because, the hierarchic and

representational structure remains, does it not? Only now “the

chaotic”, “the schizoid” or “the indeterminate” is the higher

truth while traditional dogmatics are pushed down and out.14

Or, to speak with Spivak, the actual experience is, yet again,

overshadowed by a new truth, one even harder to break down,

since it gives itself out to articulate the complexity of life.

The complexity and contingency of life, the painful and

passionate bodily reality that both Ward and Keller whish to

articulate, is overshadowed by new conceptual exteriorities,

placed safely beyond the present. Now, let us see what Foucault

has to say about this shared theological and philosophical

problem.

THE ENTRY OF THE UNEXPECTED. After having read Deleuze’s

Difference and Repetition and his Logic of Sense, Foucault writes an

article. Foucault is inspired and impressed, he agrees fully

with the Deleuzian conclusion that leaving representation

behind – by “thinking a plane of immanence” or “the univocity

of being” – is what finally truly allows for diversity.

14 Deleuze, Gilles, Guattari, Felix, What is Philosophy?, p 45.

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However, Foucault highlights the risk in such thinking, and

especially in the Deleuzian imperative of creating concepts.

There is a risk embedded in naming and conceptualizing that

which differs, that which does not yet fit in, he says, since

as soon as difference is conceptualized it turns identical.15

Thus, his critique parallels that of Spivak and it also

anticipates what happens, as shown, when Deleuzian concepts are

brought into the kind of representational context they are

meant to rupture.

Now, Foucault, provides us with a somewhat surprising

suggestion to this seemingly unsolvable dilemma. Reading

Deleuze, Foucault has encountered Deleuze’s use of the univocity of

being as introduced by Johannes Duns Scotus. Through the idea

of a univocal being of infinite expression, Deleuze offers a

new understanding of being itself. It is being as becoming, or

as eternal return – being determined by difference, and the

impossibility of repetition (rather than a being that

determines difference as exception.)

In Deleuze’s account, the world is a plane of immanence that

continuously expresses itself differently. Repetition is

impossible since saying the same thing twice always entails, at

least, two different understandings. Now, this understanding of

being (being as difference) enables a return to the concept

being, and even to metaphysics, understood in a completely

different manner; as multiple and non-representational.16

15 Foucault, “Theatrum philosophicum”, p 192.16 ’Being is said in a single and same sense of everything of which it is said, but that of which it is said differs: it is said of difference itself.’ Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p 45.

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However, having introduced this account of the univocal

being, Deleuze then creates new concepts in accordance with the

infinite expressions of this one being. Foucault does not

understand why: “Thought is no longer committed to the

construction of concepts once it escapes good will and the

administration of common sense, concerned as it is with

division and administration. Rather, it produces a meaning-

event by repeating a phantasm.”17

Deleuze has already opened up a new account of “being”; a new

set of eyes for understanding the entire Western tradition of

metaphysics, of transcendence and eternal being. Foucault is

impressed and inspired by this Trojan horse, this new form of

intellectual resistance (possibly also since it well captures

his own academic endeavour thus far) and he does not understand

why Deleuze does not take the full consequences of this idea.

Foucault writes, if “being always presents itself in the same

way, it is not because being is one, but because the totality

of chance is affirmed in the single dice throw of the

present.”18

By way of Deleuze’s univocal being, Foucault detects a

subversive repetition that will make room for, as he says; the

“totality of chance”, and the “entry of the unexpected”. It is

a playful form of resistance, yet profoundly effective. It is a

resistance through a repetition that retains the absolutes as17 Foucault, Michel, ”Theatrum Philosophicum” in language, counter-memory, practice: selected essays and interviews by Michel Foucault, ed. Michel F. Bouchard, 1980, p 206f18 Foucault, Michel, ‘Theatrum Philosophicum’ p 195. Note the allusion to Scotist and Spinozist thought of the infinite expressivity of the univocity of being. This account of being is developed by Deleuze in, e.g Difference and Repetition, p 42 ff.

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absolutes yet acknowledge their diversity and contingency. 19

Foucault writes;

“it is useless to attempt the reversal of Platonism by

reinstating the rights of appearances, ascribing to them

solidity and meaning, and bringing them closer to essential

forms by lending them a conceptual backbone: these timid

creatures should not be encouraged to stand upright. Neither

should we attempt to rediscover the supreme and solemn

gesture which established (…) the inaccessible Idea.20

Rather, we should welcome the cunning assembly21 that

simulates and clamors at the door. And what will enter (…)

will be the event (…); the actual semblance of the

19Now, Deleuze writes, ‘the essential in unicovity is not that Being is said in a single and same sense, but that it is said, in a singleand same sense, of all its individuating differences or intrinsic modalities. Being is the same for all these modalities, but these modalities are not the same’. But as we shall see, there is reason to adhere to Foucualt’s advocation of the term of being as such in order not to resuscitate traditional Christian transcendence. This since the reconceptualizations appear to underpin tradition through analogy. Quote from Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p 4520 Could this be directed at Deleuze’s rereading of Plato, where Deleuze enhances the creative moment in the establishment of the Platonic ideas. To Deleuze, the Platonic ideas, or forms, thus become an imperative for creating concepts? 21 Might one relate these “timid creatures” and “the cunning assembly” in Foucault’s text on Deleuze to the ’murmur’ recurrently adressed by Foucault as the ‘anonymous murmur’ of the ‘one speaks’, the murmur that make up the discourse and therefore simultaneously is the discursive limit and its transgressive potential? (E.g. Deleuze, Gilles, Foucault, 1986, trans. Séan Hand, Continuum, 1999, p18.) Foucault originally encountered the murmur in the poetry of René Char, the following might elucidate this connection, as well asthe connection to the entry of the event as described above: ’S'assurer de ses propres murmures et mener l'action jusqu'à son verbe en fleur. Ne pas tenir ce bref feu de joie pour mémorable.’ InTill frid i kramp, Édition bilingue, Ordström, 1991.

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simulacrum will support the falseness of false

appearances.”22

This passage with an anonymous “cunning assembly” and a

mysterious entry of “the event” may be elucidated by a short

introduction to Foucault’s event concept.23 Foucault’s account

of the event relates to the way in which the dissident

historian handled the controversy in France in the 1960’s and

1970’s between the more traditional academic history known as

the “history of events” and the arising “non-event-oriented

history”.

Instead of leaving the historical concept of “the event”

behind, declaring history’s task other than that of dismantling

and disclosing “the facts” of historical events as the non-

event-oriented historicists, he used the concept in a fashion

that distinguished him from both traditions and that enabled

him to reintroduce the notion of chance into historical

discourse.24 There is, he says, not an event to which one can

add cognitive meaning, but an event in language is always a

change of meaning, of signification and truth, i.e. a “meaning-

event”.25

22 Foucault, Michel, ‘Theatrum Philosophicum’, p 168.23 Deleuze’s event concept is similar and, naturally, they are blurred in ”Theatrum Philosophicum”, but we shall leave the distinctions and connections between them for now. 24 Flynn, Thomas, ‘Foucault’s Mapping of History’, in the Cambridge Companion to Foucault, second edition, ed. Gary Gutting, Cambridge University Press, 2006, p 41.25 A meaning-event enters into our social and linguistic reality as chance and randomness, it simultaneously displaces the present and eternally repeats the infinitive. Foucault, ‘Theatrum Philosophicum’, p 174f.

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FOUCAULDIAN METAPHYSICS. In what sense does the meaning-event

open for diversity and for the unexpected, and more

interestingly, how does it relate to theology? Well, when

describing his notion of the meaning-event, Foucault also

speaks of “metaphysics” as the discourse dealing with

“phantasms”. Phantasms, then, as the ideas and conceptions that

come to the fore as being, and thus often become subject of

discussions of being versus non-being and of truth versus

falsehood. However, in this account, metaphysics is the

discourse dealing with the materiality of these incorporeal

things – of their actuality, their function, their power and

their effects beyond distinctions of being versus non-being.26

These phantasms, that come to the fore as eternal and true, he

says, are indispensable for the possibility of the event, for

the possibility of the unexpected and the previously

impossible. They have a subversive function in our language, as

well as in our belief-systems.

There is, Foucault says, an asymmetry in our language, and in

our way of understanding the world. There is a gap due to this

asymmetry – a gap in our knowledge and in our control of

meaning and in of the course of events.

The infinite tense is asymmetrically related to the present

tense. The infinite of, for instance, “to dance”, or “Dance”,

is asymmetrically related to the experience of dancing, the

present tense of “I dance”, or “she dances”. The infinite is a

phantasm, yet its function is that of the constant: “to dance”

26 Foucault, ‘Theatrum Philosophicum’, p 170.

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is always “to dance”. There are certain criteria that must be

fulfilled in order for an action to qualify as a dance. When “I

dance”, “he dances” or “they dance” this multifaceted bodily

experience is not at all, or at least only in an extremely

limited sense, represented by the word, the infinite; “to

dance”, yet, naturally, the action in the present is understood

in relation to the infinite – “Aha, so this is to dance!”

The event of an actual dance breaks into the present,

incarnates the present, yet repeats the infinite of “to dance”

in the momentous, momentary eternal present – an eternal

present that constitutes the meaning-event.27 The gap between

the infinite and the present, the gap where representation

always fails, also enables the entry of the unexpected; “Oh,

but that was not dancing, or, if it was, then dancing is not

what I thought it was…” It is an asymmetry that has the ability

to open the infinite beyond imagination and to make the vanity

of final representation stand forth.

Meaning is created out of this asymmetry, and meaning-events

– where a new and unexpected meaning replaces the old – are

enabled through this asymmetry. Every meaning-event, Foucault

says, is asymmetrical.28

Leaving the innocent example of “dancing” aside, every

experience of, say, a revolution – “I revolt” – is

asymmetrically related to a general (phantasmic) notion of “to

27 Foucault, ‘Theatrum Philosophicum’, p 174.28 The revolution example is illuminating yet simplifying. In Foucault’s account in this article: ”The present as the recurrence of difference, affirms at once the totality of chance” i.e. every present entails a multiplicity of meaning-events. Foucault, ‘Theatrum Philosophicum’, p 194, p 173ff.

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revolt” or “the revolution”. This enables the concrete

experience to break with the idea of a general experience and

subsequently, to open for an entirely new account of “the

revolution” on an individual as well as a collective level.

Lately in Egypt and Lybia, for instance, the disastrous

concrete experiences on individual levels is profoundly

asymmetrically related to any glorified notion of “to revolt”

or of “the revolution”, thus instant meaning-events are

created. To the individuals experiencing personal loss, “the

revolution” will never be the same again. It has lost its

innocence as well as its singular definition, it is multiple

from now on.

The existence of the phantasms – the ideas and conceptions

that come to the fore as being – and its asymmetrical relation

to the particular enables the negotiation or emasculation of

phantasm as well as of the particular. This asymmetry is the

presupposition of the event and it is, according to Foucault,

the condition that enables the entry of the unexpected. To

acknowledge the materiality of phantasms in this way, is to do

metaphysics. “Deleuze’s metaphysics”, Foucault writes,

“initiates the necessary critique for the disillusioning of

phantasms.” It is a joyous metaphysics, free from the One good

and the supreme being, in the threshold of a dead God.29

POST-REPRESENTATIONAL THEOLOGY. In consequence, a theology that

aspires to open theological language to the diversity and

complexity of real life experience, should not be an attempt to

29 “the metaphysics of the phantasm revolves around atheism and transgression.” Foucault, Michel, ‘Theatrum Philosophicum’, p 171.

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conceptualize diversity. It would not entail “lending

appearances a conceptual back-bone” by finding new words to

place that which has been ignored in the centre of

conversation. Rather, it would be a theology that enables “the

event” through dissident repetitions of the established

Christian representations; the Christian phantasms. It would be

a theology that “produces a meaning-event by repeating a

phantasm” – a repetitious theology that negatively opens up for

the entry of the unexpected, instead of re-mythologizing the

Christian tradition.30

Along this line of thought, theology should not leave

metaphysics behind but understand its task differently. In this

account, the inherited Christian truths are considered actual,

and in reality effecting our world – our account of meaning as

well as our actions – yet, they are actual and real “only”

since repeated as such, and used as such. This account of

language, of concepts and dogma, has even been called

“neomaterialist”, since it returns to the materialism of

inherited truths, beyond the idea of representation.31 However,

we shall speak of it as “post-representational”. This since the

latter term carries the memory of the power of representation

in itself. It does not let go of the insight that while reality

is not what is handed to us by language, this is exactly what

language keeps making us believe. A notion that would leave

behind the power of representation (neomaterialism) might

30 Foucault, Michel, ‘Theatrum Philosophicum’, p 182.31 By Deleuze scholar and architect Manuel De Landa and, which corresponds better to the present analysis, by the neomaterialist movement in contemporary poetry.

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indicate a new outset from which statements can keep on being

consolidated into truths.

A post-representational account, then, serves to open

theology to the power of repetition, i.e. to the subversive

rather than the consolidating power of repetition. It enables a

different account of theological doctrines and theological

language, beyond the simplifying ideas of

conservative/exclusive versus liberal/inclusive theology (as

well as, beyond discussions of existent/non-existent.)

It offers a different set of eyes, a new way of understanding

theological language and theological texts. Furthermore, it

illumines how, at times, the rigorous repetition of Christian

truths might enable the entry of that which is beyond

imagination while, conversely, the explicitly open and

flexible, at times is what creates a new exclusive order and

thus preserves the structure it aimed to rupture. Metaphysics,

then, as dealing with what comes to the fore as eternal, and

that, through repetitious encounters with the present, enables

meaning-events in language. No more, nor less, mystique than

that.

The notion of repeating a phantasm until it enables the

entry of the unexpected, takes the risk highlighted by Spivak

into regard. A simple leaving behind of representation, might

overlook those experiences that still need to be represented in

order to exist politically – or theologically. In this post-

representational notion of metaphysics, the repetition of the

habitual truths are used to throw light upon their contingency,

20

and finally, to give room for the experiences and realities not

yet taken into account.

The repetition of the phantasm also differs from Ward’s and

Keller’s approaches since it does not aim to put the evasive

and complex reality into words. Rather, it aims to make room,

negatively, for the unsaid and the unspoken, through a

disobedient repetition of what is regarded the truths of

reality.

Claire Colebrook writes on this subversive repetition in

Foucault: “We cannot escape the systems of identity, or the

illusion that there is a subject who speaks. But we can perform,

repeat or parody all those gestures that create this

subject.”32 To repeat and parody what ever comes to the fore as

eternal or as the truth of concrete experience – both when

reading and when doing theology – in order to make room for

that silent movement of the nihilo that no language could ever

capture.

Now, how is this done? What would constitute a post-

representational theology? Well, there is actually one

contemporary theologian who has performed a dissident

repetition of the Christian phantasms for decades. Let me

suggest his radical theology as one possible way forward for

theology that aims beyond representation.

THOMAS ALTIZER. According to the early Thomas J J Altizer, a

world without the transcendent God – a world of immanence – is

a world of fulfilled incarnation. Yet, such a world is in

32 Colebrook, Claire, Irony: the New Critical Idiom, 2004, Routledge, 2004, p 129.

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constant need for the kenosis of transcendence into immanence.

Because, if this kenotic act is not repeated, then

transcendence - the source of oppression - is protected and

might be secretively revived. In a world that leaves room for

the account of a pure immanence – a world where God has died -

there is constant need to relentlessly enact the death of God,

enact the coincidentia oppositorum of the sacred and the profane, or

else a veil of immanence might secretly nourish of the source

of oppression. The incarnational event is thus even in itself a

source of oppression since it efficiently hides the Christian

God under a veil of immanence.

Consequently, according to this dissident theologian, the

death of God reveals the true identity of Christian

transcendence as the God of oppression, i.e. as Satan himself,

and this revelation of the transcendent God as Satan is the

very purpose of the incarnation. To Altizer, God’s death with

the entry of modernity, as well as the ideas such as those

embedded in the Deleuzian notion of a pure immanence33, are

nothing but the fulfilment of the Christian incarnation.

Because, the God that dies and reveals its true identity as

Satan, is the Logos, the repressivity of Christian

transcendence and so;

33 Altizer never explicitply adress the Deleuzian immanence. (The cambridge companion to atheism, caputo, om att taylor kritiserar altizer för att inte vara dekonstruerande nog på samma sätt som en deleuzian skulle kunna kritisera robinson för att vara för teologisk, skriver caputo, o jag menar ju att jämförelsen mellan deleuze och robinson är för skev för att vara intressant öht o att taylor missar poängen m altizer gm att läsa honom gm derrida.)

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‘the radical Christian must finally recognize that the

Christ of traditional faith is merely a disguise of the

almighty and wholly other Creator, and therefore he must

defy the orthodox Christ as the ultimate author of

repression and the Lord of a fallen humanity.’34

Only when understood through the death of God is the

incarnation truly redemptive. As long as it still implies a

divine reality underneath, within or above the present world it

is nothing but a source of oppression.35

Altizer’s critique of the traditional Christian notion of

transcendence, then, relates closely to that of Deleuze and

Foucault’s critique of Christian thinking as a tradition of

obedience and of always being subjugated under a higher and

truer representation. His theology is a repetition of what he

calls the gospel of the death of God. This in order to

continuously reveal the true identity of the Christian God and

in order never to establish a new foundation on which the

oppressive God can be revived.

In order not to resuscitate the dead divinity, Altizer

repeats this one gospel over and over again from the 60’s and

up until today. And each time he comes to an end and pompously34 Altizer, Thomas J. J., The New Apocalypse – The Radcial Vision of William Blake, the Davies Group, Publishers, 2000, p 122.35 ‘Once God has died in Christ to his transcendent epiphany, that epiphany must inevitably recede into an abstract and alien form, eventually becoming the full embodiment of every alien other, and thence appearing to consciousness as the ultimate source of all repression. Already we have seen that faith can name this movement as the metamorphosis of God into Satan, as God empties himself of his original power and glory and progressively becomes manifest as an alien but oppressive nothingness.’ Altizer, Thomas J J, The Gospel of Christian Atheism, The Westminster Press, 1954, p 113.

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declares his finale, the end turns out to be the beginning of a

new repetition.

However, according to the theologian Mark C. Taylor, the fact

that ‘Altizer repeats his conclusive claim again and again and

again’ indicates it is time for Altizer to take the

consequences of his own gospel and actually leave God and

theology behind.36

Is Taylor right? Well, there is reason not to consent to

his critique. As a matter of fact, the logic behind the

repetitiousness of Altizer’s theology as well as of his

repetitious style of writing might be clarified by Altizer’s

own notion of repetition. And as we shall se, his account of

repetition also connects him to the Foucauldian post-

representational repetition as presented above.

ALTIZERIAN REPETITION. In an article titled ‘Ritual and

Contemporary Repetition’ from 1980 Altizer discusses the

notions of ritual and myth in modern literature via the

Kierkegaardian notion of repetition. Opposing the idea that in

modern secular literature ‘myth’ has left its religious

companion ‘ritual’ behind and thus made literature secular or

a-religious, Altizer claims that modern literature is itself

ritualistic.37 It is not a mysterious cultic repetition with a

36 ‘Far from a celebration of an apocalyptic faith that now is possible “for the first time”, Altizer’s obsessive writing and rewriting enact an endless work of mourning for the impossibility offaith as well as theology.’ Taylor, Mark C, ’Betraying Altizer’, in Thinking through the Death of God, ed Lissa McCullough and Brian Schroeder,Suny Press, 2004, p 26-27. 37 Altizer, Thomas J.J., ’Ritual and Contemporary Repetition’, Dialog 19 (1980): pp 274–80, p. 275

24

blurred account of meaning that has been replaced by

explanatory narration and a clarified sense of meaning, quite

the contrary. He detects a ritualistic repetition in writers

like Proust, Rilke and Bloom. Furthermore, it is a repetition

that, according to Altizer, inverts cultic repetition.

If the cultic repetition ‘conjoins the profane moment

with a sacred time or event by way of annulling or suspending

the contingency of time itself’, and if thereby ‘the renewal or

repetition of a primordial time or event is identical with the

abolition of actuality and contingency’ then, according to

Altizer, a reversed movement is at work in the ritualistic

repetition of modern literature. (note)

Altizer regards the repetition of the past as memory in

Marcel Proust an illuminating example. When the past enters in

Proust’s Recherché del temps perdu it enters as a sudden grace, a

character stumbles into the grace of a memory, a past suddenly

being present and thus transforms the present and makes it new,

just because it is a repetition of what was before.38

Repetition is the repetition of what was before, but precisely

therefore the new in the here and now, therefore the entry of

the unexpected. The past enters as an unexpected event, an

arrival of the past that transforms the present, that is new

because it has been before. It enters the present in a

profoundly asymmetrical relation to itself as past, as well as

to the present as present and thus transforms what is.

38 As in Kiergegaard “det, der gjentages, har vaeret, ellers kunde det ikke gjentages, men netop det, at det har vaeret, gjör Gjentagelsen till det Nye.” 1962-64: Samlade Vaerker Köbenhavn, p 131

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Altizer presents an account of repetition that is not the

traditionally Christian ‘once and for all’ as the faith in an

original act of salvation. It is not a one past that will break

into the present and transform every present into the same past

event, but to Altizer repetition as such is always a ‘once and

no more’.39 It is, he says, an imageless act behind and beyond

all ‘mythical’ meaning, i.e. beyond everything we know as

‘meaning’.40 It is a repetition that strives toward a notion of

time that is not a cultic time of kairos/chronos but a totality

of here and now, and as such ‘the very opposite of a primordial

Beginning or One.’41

And this ‘once and no more’ Altizer finds in the poetry of

another modern writer; Rainer Maria Rilke who celebrates the

‘Einmal’, the once, in his Ninth Elegy.42 ‘The once’ - the once

and no more - in Rilke is presented in the repetitious mode of

the ‘once’ of the ‘here and now’.

39 Altizer’s account of Kierkegaardian repetition differs from that of Deleuze in a manner that draws Altizer’s repetition closer to Deleuze’s, see Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p 111.40 Thomas J.J. Altizer, ’Ritual and Contemporary Repetition’, Dialog 19 (1980): pp 274–80, p 279. 41 Altizer, ’Ritual and Contemporary Repetition’, p 280. The references to, and elevation of, modern European literature in this article illustrates well what Taylor reacts against in 2004 on Altizer’s neglect of postmodern American art.42 ‘Once,

for each thing, only once. Once, and no more. And we too,

once. Never again. But this

once, to have been, though only once,

to have been an earthly thing – seems irrevocable.’ Rilke, RainerMaria, Duino Elegies, ‘The Ninth Elegy’ trans. C. F. MacIntyre.

26

In its contingency the once becomes the eternal, becomes

that which can never be cancelled just because it is once and

no more, as an imageless act behind every notion of meaning,

behind every account of ‘myth.’ Beneath ‘myth’ as the level of

explanation and conceptualization, of telling the story in

order to make meaningful the event, beneath the traditional

Christian repetition of ‘the “once and for all” rumbles another

repetition, namely that of the eternal return – a repetition

not aiming at a “once and for all” but at the parody of such a

notion of repetition as well as of such a misunderstanding of

the incarnation’.43

According to Altizer, the very notion of meaning - ‘the myth

of meaning’ – is preceded by the imageless act, the empty

motion of repetition that makes every ‘here and now’ a ‘once

and never again’: ‘Just once, everything only for once, once

and no more.’44

Thus Altizer shows how the ritualistic repetition in modern

literature manages to invert the eternal as well as the

mythical (as meaning) and give room for the contingency of

repetition and for a disclosure of ‘myth as lie’. The function

of the ritual of modern literature is not to repeat the eternal

in order to transform the present contingency into a moment of

kairos, but a profound repetitious contingency on which the

notion of the eternal is dependent. He ends his article by

quoting Franz Kafka’s The Trial, where the priest tells K the

story of the doorkeeper and the Law, and in Altizer’s reading

43 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p 118. Sitter citationstecknen rätt…?44 Altizer, ’Ritual and Contemporary Repetition’, pp 274–80, p. 280

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the story ‘might be understood as releasing a total human

freedom, for the mythical world-order now becomes manifest as a

lie: ‘Die Lüge wird zur Weltordnung gemacht.’45

Towards this background of Altizer’s own notion of

repetition his repetitious mode of writing, his stubborn

repetition of his inverted gospel, his repetition of the finale

and of the origin, suddenly makes sense in an unexpected

manner.

Taylor critiques not only Altizer’s repetitious mania, but

also his obsession with modern literature as well as his lack

of interest in the popart of Andy Warhol. While claiming to be

contemporary American Altizer keeps referring to the European

modernist writers and completely ignores for instance Warhol’s

radically kenotic pop-art, Taylor writes. Altizer does not,

Taylor claims, even seem to take notice of the similarity

between his own kenotic account of the relation between the

sacred and the profane and Warhol’s idea of the relation

between art and world. He does not see the resemblance of his

own project to the Warholian suggestion that ‘art dies when

everyone becomes an artist and the world is finally transformed

into a work of art.’46

Now, if we regard, instead, Foucault’s Deleuzian account of

Warhol’s popart, we shall witness how Taylor’s critique misses

its target yet again.

In the most famous works of Andy Warhol, Foucault states in

“Theatrum Philosophicum”, repetition is used to even out the45 Altizer, ’Ritual and Contemporary Repetition’ p 280 not m hänvisning t Casey o matt det inte är mänsklighet som subject) Kierkegaard…))46 Taylor, Thinking through the Death of God, p 22.

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particularity of a can, a face, a smile, a Marilyn Monroe, an

electric chair, an Elvis Presley. It is a repetition that

discloses not only the monotony of capitalism, of life, or of

things, not only discloses the fact that ‘it is all the same’

or ‘everything sells’ but rather, in the nailing down of

monotony, one can after another, suddenly there is the

illumination of that which is not a repetitious monotony but a

multiplicity.47 The repetition of ‘a can’ illumines the

multiplicity of cans, as the repetition of an electric chair

suddenly illumines the multiplicity of electric chairs. Every

return of the electric chair is a singularity. The repetition

of the notion of the electric chair might suddenly illumine the

asymmetry that displays every electric chair as a meaning-

event, as the relentless entry of ‘the other’, the entry of

that after which the world is never the same again.

The obsessive repetition of the death of God in Altizer

appears to function in a similar manner as do the Warholian

mass productions in Foucault. Altizer’s reading of the ritual

aspect of the modernist writers is closer to Foucault’s account

of the Warholian cans than is Taylor’s. While there is no

reason to regard Foucault a better art critic than Taylor,

nevertheless, Taylor’s account of the connection of Warhol’s

kenotic art to Altizer’s understanding of ritual and myth -

that ritual as the former sacred has entered myth in a kenotic

act – does not seem to capture the depth of the Altizerian

repetition. In Altizer’s account, the ritual aspect of modern

literature consists of its ability to enable the event and the

47 Foucault, Michel, ‘Theatrum Philosophicum’, p 189. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p 366.

29

entry of the unexpected by inverting the very meaning of cultic

ritual. Altizer’s ritualistic repetition of the ‘here and now’

is an imageless act where the very repetition creates the ‘here

and now’ as a ‘once and never again’.

Rather than searching a language that can make the

Christian transcendence meaningful in a new guise, and rather

than conceptualizing the monstrosity of Christian theology,

Altizer has developed a language ever more impenetrable and

repetitive in order to force the reader beyond the limits of

logic and thus beyond the Christian structure for thought. His

theology seems to aim at enacting the event as such. Not

finding words for explaining its force, but taking part in this

very movement, in the imageless act itself - the movement of

the nihilo. Or, perhaps he too has reached the Deleuzian

insight: ‘All cure is a voyage to the bottom of repetition.’48

Even though his theology certainly could be said to present

a mythical explanation of the salvation history, what stands

forth in his life long production is not simply an inverted

myth of Christianity but, just as Taylor notices, an obsessive

repetition of Christian phantasms, of Christian metaphysics.

Through repetition of the absolutes - of God and Satan, life

and death - he subversively empties their representivity and

re-creates them as phantasms, as ‘extra-beings’ - just like a

can, a Marilyn or an electric chair of the Warhol production.49

48 Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p 21.49 ‘Repetition betrays the weakness of similarity at the moment when it can no longer negate itself in the other, when it can no longer recapture itself in the other. Repetition, at one time exteriority and a pure figure of the origin, has been transformed into an internal weakness, a deficiency of finitude, a sort of stuttering ofthe negative: the neurosis of dialectics.’ Foucault, ‘Theatrum

30

This since Altizer seems constantly aware of the risk of

reviving transcendence, not only in theology but especially in

theology.

After the hype of the mid 1960’s the debate around

Altizer’s theology has kept to the realm of his true admirers.

The marginalization of his theology might however demonstrate

rather than question the efficiency of his critique of the

traditional Christian notion of God. His theology is an

apocalyptic spasm without possible continuation, it is a

destruction of dialectics and thus an end of theological

thought, but an end demanding mass production.

Through repetitiously elevating the absolutes rather than the

contingencies, being rather than becoming, as in Foucault’s

suggestion above, Altizer somehow manages to stay close to the

core of the Deleuzian critique of Christian transcendence. His

theological approach, though radical still immanent to

theological tradition, proves more efficient when it comes to

emasculating the Christian notion of a transcendent

representation than do Ward’s and Keller’s applications of

Deleuzian thought in theology. Possibly due to the fact that

theology especially soaked in an analogical and

representational thinking, and because: ‘Difference is not and

cannot be thought in itself, so long as it is subjected to the

requirements of representation.’50

However, within this Christian economy, so it seems, an

obsessive repetitious mania that repeats the Christian

phantasms just might discover an, in Deleuze’s words;

Philosophicum’, p 184.50 Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p 330.

31

‘authentic repetition in a thought without Image, even at the

cost of the greatest destructions and the greatest

demoralisations, and a theological obstinacy with no ally but

paradox, one which would have to renounce both the form of

representation and the element of common sense.’51

A post-representational theology, then, is one that aims for a

renunciation of common sense, in order to negatively make room

for those concrete experiences, the bodily pains and passions,

and the ever-changing nature of life that no language could

ever capture. It is a deadly serious yet nonsensical repetition

of the Christian absolutes in order never to let the world

forget their oppressive potential.

51 Naturally, the original speaks of philosophy and not theology. Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p 168

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