The JCRT’s introductory essays over the past two years have focused on the status of religious studies in the context of critical theory. The editors have traced these developments, provided analyses of religious theory, and modeled critical discourse. “Desire and Mourning: Theology and the Literary Imagination” follows the last of these, bringing theology into literature by investing theology with a critical force to open an analysis of literary language. Subsequent introductions will return to these and other issues in our continued effort to reshape the discourse of cultural and religious theory.
Victor E. Taylor
York College of Pennsylvania
For Charlie
[T]heology inhabits the edges and cracks of the dominant culture. It is a nomad discipline wandering, wondering, and erring.
—Charles E. Winquist, Desiring Theology[1]
[I]t is always an Other who speaks, since words have not waited for me, and there is no language other than the foreign; it is always an Other, the "owner" of the objects he possesses by speaking. It is still a question of the possible, but in a new fashion: the Others are possible worlds, on which the voices confer a reality that is always variable, depending on the force they have, and revocable, depending on the silences they create. Sometimes they are strong, sometimes they are weak, until a moment arrives when they fall silent (a silence of tiredness). Sometimes they separate and even oppose each other, sometimes they merge together. The Others--that is, the possible worlds, with their objects, with their voices that bestow on them the only reality to which they can lay claim--constitute "stories." The Others have no other reality than the one given them in their possible world by their voices.
—Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical[2]
Theology belongs to the population of all discursive practices. There is no special privilege to its discursive formations that comes from outside of the text production. The theological exigencies inscribed within its texts are effects of the metonymical placing of extreme formulations throughout the texts. . . . [T]heological texts introduce an incommensurability into discursive practices that is an internal trace of the other.
—Charles E. Winquist, Desiring Theology[3]
How can one imagine a whole that holds everything together [un tout qui fasse compagnie]? How can one make a whole out of the series? . . . . The aporia will be solved if one considers that the limit of the series does not lie at the infinity of the terms but can be anywhere in the flow: between two terms, between two voices or the variations of a single voice--a point that is already reached well before one knows that the series is exhausted, and well before one learns that there is no longer any possibility or any story, and that there has not been one for a long time.
—Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical[4]
esire and mourning are folds[5] in theological and literary discourse, limits to our ability to make present an object or mourn its loss. As surfaces the theology of literature and the literature of theology remain held together through a mutual limit, an interval in which the nomadic quality of each flows across distinct "incommensurabilities." While desire and mourning, exhaustion and erring persist as elements of both "surfaces," the return of the desired object or the restoration of narrative plenitude through mourning escape recovery and reconciliation, performing instead, as Deleuze notes, the "limit of the series" as a condition of possibility: "But the image is more profound because it frees itself from its object in order to become a process itself, that is, an event as a 'possible' that no longer even needs to be realized in a body or an object, somewhat like the smile without a cat in Lewis Carroll."[6] Desire and mourning occur concurrently. One begins as the other begins, yielding a condition of possibility that was, is, or shall be nothing more or less than a “fold,” "movement," or "cut," "passage," or "cloud."[7]
Our Father, without beginning and without end, like heaven!
May Thy being only be holy.
May power be only Thine, so that They will be done, without
Beginning and without end, on earth.
Give me food for life in the present.
Smooth out my former mistakes, and wipe them away; even as I so do with
all the mistakes of my brothers, that I may not fall into temptation,
and may be saved from evil.[24]
1 Charles E. Winquist (1995). Desiring Theology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 133.
2 Gilles Deleuze (1997). Essays Critical and Clinical, Daniel W. Smith and Michael Greco trans., Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 157.
3 Winquist, 124.
4 Deleuze, 157-8.
5 In referring to the Baroque painters Tintoretto and El Greco, Deleuze describes the visual fold, a division of space calling attention to an indefinite separating line: “The severing of the inside from the outside in this way refers to the distinction between two levels, but the latter refers to the Fold that is actualized in the intimate folds that the soul encloses on the upper level, and effected along the creases that matter brings to life always on the outside, on the lower level. Hence the ideal fold is the Zweifalt, a fold that differentiates and is differentiated (Gilles Deleuze (1993) The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 30).
6 Deleuze, 168.
7 Deleuze, 165.
8 See Gregg Lambert (2002) “On the uses (and abuses) of literature for life” in The Non-Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. London: Continuum
9 Leo Tolstoy (1829-1910), excommunicated (1901) Russian novelist who wrote a series of literary texts addressing religious belief. The Gospel in Brief and Confession represent his move to an existential Christianity.
10 Leo Tolstoy (1997) The Gospel in Brief, trans. Isabel Hapgood. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 21.
11 Tolstoy, 23
12 Ray Monk in Ludwig Wittgenstein: The Duty of Genius recounts the significance of Tolstoy's text in existential terms. Wittgenstein's celebration, however, includes an element of philosophical-linguistic admiration insofar as The Gospel in Brief enacts much of the linguistic theory informing the Tractatus.
13 Tolstoy, 21
14 Tolstoy, 23
15 See Victor E. Taylor (2000) Para/Inquiry: Postmodern Religion and Culture. London: Routledge.
16 Tolstoy, 16
17 Tolstoy, 17
- Man is the son of an infinite source: a son of that Father not by the flesh but by the spirit.
- Therefore man should serve that source in spirit.
- The life of all men has a divine origin. It alone is holy.
- Therefore man should serve that source in the life of all men. Such is the will of the Father.
- The service of the will of that Father of life gives life.
- Therefore the gratification of one's own will is not necessary for life.
- Temporal life is food for the true life.
- Therefore the true life is independent of time: it is in the present.
- Time is an illusion of life; life in the past and in the future conceals from men the true life of the present.
- Therefore man should strive to destroy the illusion of the temporal life of the past and future.
- True life is life in the present, common to all men and manifesting itself in love.
- Therefore, he who lives by love in the present, through the common life of all men, unites with the Father, the source and foundation of life.
19 Tolstoy, 19.
20 Tolstoy, 19.
21 Tolstoy, 19.
22 Tolstoy, 19-20.
23 Tolstoy, 23.
24 Tolstoy, 81.
25 Tolstoy, 81.
26 Tolstoy, 81.
27 Gilles Deleuze (1990) The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester. New York: Columbia Unniversity Press, 1.
28 Tolstoy, 215.
29 See Victor E. Taylor, “Theography: Signs of God in a Postmodern Age,” in Secular Theology: American Radical Theological Thought (2001), Clayton Crockett, ed. London: Routledge.
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