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    Hyman - Radical Orthodoxy, Ethics and Ambivalence - JCRT 3.2

    Radical Orthodoxy, Ethics and Ambivalence

    Gavin Hyman
    University of Lancaster

    One of the many defining characteristics of the postmodern ‘sensibility’ may be said to be that of ambivalence. To some extent, such ambivalence derives from the dominance of a deconstructive disposition which saturates our postmodern condition. The logic of deconstruction is such that one deconstructs not in order to negate, discard or destroy but in order to problematise, question and interrogate. That which is deconstructed is both affirmed and negated, or neither affirmed nor negated. Whichever strategy is employed, the deconstructive disposition is one of ambivalence. Such ambivalence may be regarded as a performative enactment of a refusal of the false opposites and dualisms with which modern metaphysics presents us. To affirm the System, for instance, is to affirm presence and all the hegemonic structures that that brings, whereas to negate the System is to fall into nothingness and therefore to affirm absence and all the nihilistic corollaries that that entails. Problematising both - presence and absence - entails a difficult process of negotiation which postmodernism - in myriad different ways - calls us to pursue.

    Notes

    Gavin Hyman, is Lecturer in Religious Studies at the University of Lancaster, U.K. He is author of The Predicament of Post-modern Theology: Radical Orthodoxy or Nihilist Textualism? (Westminser Press, 2001) and of numerous articles.

    ’ 2002 Gavin Hyman. All rights reserved.
    Updated 07/28/21.
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    1. See, for instance, Gavin Hyman, The Predicament of Postmodern Theology: Radical Orthodoxy or Nihilist Textualism? (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2001), especially chapters 4 and 5. ↩︎

    2. Thomas Frank, One Market under God: Extreme Capitalism, Market Populism and the End of Economic Democracy (London: Vintage, 2002), p. 57. ↩︎

    3. Ibid., pp. 86-7. ↩︎

    4. Andrew O’Hagan, ‘Everything Must Go!’ London Review of Books Vol. 23, No. 24 (2001), p. 3. ↩︎

    5. For some remarkable instances of the contemporary conflation of God and the Market, see Frank, One Market under God, pp. 2-4. ↩︎

    6. John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990), p. 177. ↩︎

    7. John Milbank, ‘The Body by Love Possessed: Christianity and Late Capitalism in Britain’ Modern Theology 3 (1986), p. 55. ↩︎

    8. Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, p. 192. ↩︎

    9. Milbank here refers to Jean-Fran’ois Lyotard, 'conomie Libidinale (Paris: Minuit, 1974), pp. 187-88. ↩︎

    10. Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, pp. 192-93. ↩︎

    11. That Milbank regards Christianity and capitalism as being directly antithetical is evident when he says that ‘If our worst fears are confirmed, and Capitalism transforms itself into a subtle totalitarianism, then the world will shape itself into a more definite (though perhaps more disguised) rejection of Christ.’ ‘The Body by Love Possessed’, p. 61. ↩︎

    12. Milbank says that postmodernists ‘embrace capitalist logic because it is, precisely, a secular logic, which acknowledges no substantive norms, and which can absorb and overcome within its regulative rule every traditional constitutive system of cultural exchange.’ Theology and Social Theory, p. 194. ↩︎

    13. Ibid., p. 314. ↩︎

    14. Ibid. ↩︎

    15. Or better: Christianity is ‘truer’ but only in so far as it is more ethical. Here, the Platonic resonances are obvious: Christianity is ‘truer’ not in any foundational, metaphysical or representative sense, but because it is closer to the ‘Good’. ↩︎

    16. Mark C. Taylor, About Religion: Economies of Faith in Virtual Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), p. 140. ↩︎

    17. Ibid., p. 167. ↩︎

    18. Ibid. ↩︎

    19. Ibid., p. 191. ↩︎

    20. Ibid., p. 201. ↩︎

    21. Most recently, Taylor has suggested that the logic of complexity theory, as applied to our contemporary network culture, may provide a way out of this impasse. See Mark C. Taylor, Hiding (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1997) and The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002). This is to open up a whole new arena of debate that I am unable to address here. Suffice to say, however, that I am unconvinced about the efficacy of this move. There is a debate to be had as to whether the logic of network culture may resist the dissolution and fragmentation of late capitalism or whether, on the contrary, it re-inscribes the very things Taylor is seeking to overcome. ↩︎

    22. This is the argument Mark C. Taylor develops in Hiding, especially pp. 270-72. ↩︎

    23. This is a point that has been made by numerous commentators who have suggested that such uncomfortable facts cannot be so easily elided in the way Milbank tends to do. See, for instance: Wayne John Hankey, ‘Re-Christianizing Augustine Postmodern Style: Readings by Jacques Derrida, Robert Dodaro, Jean-Luc Marion, Rowan Williams, Lewis Ayres and John Milbank’ Animus 2 (1997), an electronic journal at http://www.mun.ca/animus/, Robert Dodaro, ‘Loose Canons: Augustine and Derrida on Themselves’ in John D. Caputo and Michael J. Scanlon (eds.), God, the Gift and Postmodernism (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1999), pp. 79-111, Steven Shakespeare, ‘The New Romantics: A Critique of Radical Orthodoxy’, Theology 103 (2000), pp. 163-77 and Hyman, The Predicament of Postmodern Theology, pp. 73-77. ↩︎

    24. Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, p. 192. ↩︎

    25. See, for instance, Frank, One Market under God, pp. 15-23. ↩︎

    26. It should be noted that Milbank has explicitly denied the charge of theocracy: ‘Radical Orthodoxy favours no theocracy, because theocracy is predicated on the very dualism it rejects: for the sacred hierophants to be enthroned there must be a drained secular space for them to command. But for Radical Orthodoxy there is no such space. For Radical Orthodoxy, the sacral interpenetrates everywhere, and if it descends from above, this descent is also manifest through its rising up from below.’ ‘The Programme of Radical Orthodoxy’ in Laurence Paul Hemming (ed.), Radical Orthodoxy? - A Catholic Enquiry (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2000), pp. 36-7. While accepting, however, that radical orthodoxy rejects such a dualism between the sacred and the secular, this dualism is overcome by absorbing and gathering up the secular into the sacred. To this extent, the charge of theocracy, whereby the secular is ruled and legitimated by the sacred, still stands even if there is no dualistic separation between them. ↩︎

    27. This is Clive James’ phrase. See his essay ‘The All of Orwell’ in Even as we Speak: New Essays 1993-2001 (London: Picador, 2001), p. 20. This essay on the work of George Orwell is particularly relevant for some of the issues being discussed here. ↩︎

    28. I recall Milbank making comments to that effect during the discussion following the delivery of his paper at the ‘Radical Orthodoxy’ conference held at Heythrop College in the University of London in June 1999. ↩︎

    29. Richard H. Roberts, Religion, Theology and the Human Sciences (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), p. 206. ↩︎

    30. Ibid., p. 260, n. 30. ↩︎

    31. Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, tr. Steven Rendall (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), p. 37. ↩︎

    32. For an analysis of how the values of late capitalism, the enterprise culture or ‘managerialism’ have come to dominate such institutions in Britain, see Roberts, Religion, Theology and the Human Sciences. ↩︎

    33. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p. 40. ↩︎

    34. Ibid., p. 34. ↩︎

    35. Ibid., p. 36. ↩︎

    36. See, for instance, the much quoted opening paragraph of The Word Made Strange (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), p. 1: ‘For all the current talk of a theology that would reflect on practice, the truth is that we remain uncertain as to where today to locate true Christian practice. This would be, as it has always been, a repetition differently, but authentically, of what has always been done. In his or her uncertainty as to where to find this, the theologian feels almost that the entire ecclesial task falls on his won head: in the meagre mode of reflective words he must seek to imagine what a true practical repetition would be like.’ My emphasis. ↩︎

    37. Milbank, ‘The Body by Love Possessed’, p. 60. ↩︎

    38. See Hyman, The Predicament of Postmodern Theology, especially chapter 6 and the conclusion. ↩︎

    39. For a discussion of these ‘reasons’ as to why Christianity is not quite ‘on a level’ with all other narratives and discourses, see John Milbank, ‘“Postmodern Critical Augustinianism”: A Short Summa in Forty-Two Responses to Unasked Questions’ Modern Theology 7 (1991), pp. 227-28. ↩︎

    40. See John D. Caputo, ‘God is Wholly Other ’ Almost: “Diff’rance” and the Hyperbolic Alterity of God’ in Orrin F. Summerell (ed.), The Otherness of God (Charlottesville: University Press of Virginia, 1998), p. 192. ↩︎

    41. See John Milbank, ‘Can a Gift be Given? Prolegomena to a Future Trinitarian Metaphysic’ Modern Theology 11 (1995), pp. 119-61, especially pp. 137f. See also the discussion by Theresa Saunders, ‘The Gift of Prayer’ in Clayton Crockett (ed.), Secular Theology: American Radical Theological Thought (London: Routledge, 2001), pp. 130-40, especially pp. 134-35. ↩︎

    42. Jean-Luc Marion, God Without Being: Hors-Texte, tr. Thomas A. Carlson (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), p. 102. ↩︎

    43. See, for instance, Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable, Vol. I: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, tr. Michael B. Smith (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), p. 15: ‘To locate [the Other] apart, to isolate it from the texts that exhaust themselves trying to express it, would be tantamount to exorcising it by providing it with its own place and name, to identifying it with a remnant not assimilated by constituted rationalities, or to transforming the question that appears in the guise of a limit into a particular religious representation’. ↩︎

    44. See, for instance, Jacques Derrida, ‘How to Avoid Speaking: Denials’ in Harold Coward and Toby Foshay (eds.), Derrida and Negative Theology (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), where he says that ‘“negative theology” seems to reserve, beyond all positive predication, beyond all negation, even beyond Being, some hyperessentiality, a being beyond Being’, p. 77. Again, he speaks of the ‘ontological wager of hyperessentiality that one finds at work both in Dionysius and in Meister Eckhart’, p. 78. ↩︎

    45. de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, p. 35. ↩︎

    46. Ibid., p. 37. ↩︎