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    Taylor - Desire and Mourning: Theology and the Literary Imagination - JCRT 3.2

    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.

    Desire and Mourning: Theology and the Literary Imagination

    Victor 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]

    Desire 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]

    1. Our Father/ Man is the son of the Father.
    2. Which art in heaven/God is the infinite spiritual source of life.
    3. Hallowed be Thy name/May the Source of Life be held holy.
    4. Thy kingdom come/May His powers be established over all men.
    5. They will be done, as in heaven/ May His will be fulfilled, as it is in Himself.
    6. So also on earth/So also in the bodily life.
    7. Give us our daily bread/The temporal life is the food of the true life.
    8. This day/The true life is in the present.
    9. And forgive us our debts as forgive our debtors/May the faults and errors of the past not hide this true life from us.
    10. And lead us not into temptation/And may they not lead us into delusion.
    11. But deliver us from evil/So that no evil may come to us.
    12. For thine is the kingdom, the power and the glory/And there shall be order, and strength, and reason.[^19]

    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]

    Notes

    Victor Taylor, teaches in the department of English and Humanities at York College of Pennsylvania. He is the author of Para/Inquiry: Postmodern Religion and Culture (London: Routledge, 2000), Editor (with Charles E. Winquist) of The Routledge Encyclopedia of Postmodnerism (London: Routledge, 2000), and Editor of the Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory. His book The Religious Pray, The Profane Swear will be published this spring.

    ’ 2002 Victor Taylor. All rights reserved.
    Updated 07/28/21.
    http://jcrt.org/archives/03.2/taylor/

    [^_ftnref1] Charles E. Winquist (1995). Desiring Theology. Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 133.

    [^_ftnref2] Gilles Deleuze (1997). Essays Critical and Clinical, Daniel W. Smith and Michael Greco trans., Minneapolis: The University of Minnesota Press, 157.

    [^_ftnref3] Winquist, 124.

    [^_ftnref4] Deleuze, 157-8.

    [^_ftnref5] 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).

    [^_ftnref6] Deleuze, 168.

    [^_ftnref7] Deleuze, 165.

    [^_ftnref8] See Gregg Lambert (2002) ‘On the uses (and abuses) of literature for life’ in The Non-Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze. London: Continuum

    [^_ftnref9] 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.

    [^_ftnref10] Leo Tolstoy (1997) The Gospel in Brief, trans. Isabel Hapgood. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 21.

    [^_ftnref11] Tolstoy, 23

    [^_ftnref12] 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.

    [^_ftnref13] Tolstoy, 21

    [^_ftnref14] Tolstoy, 23

    [^_ftnref15] See Victor Taylor (2000) Para/Inquiry: Postmodern Religion and Culture. London: Routledge.

    [^_ftnref16] Tolstoy, 16

    [^_ftnref17] Tolstoy, 17

    [^_ftnref18]

    [^_ftnref19] Tolstoy, 19.

    [^_ftnref20] Tolstoy, 19.

    [^_ftnref21] Tolstoy, 19.

    [^_ftnref22] Tolstoy, 19-20.

    [^_ftnref23] Tolstoy, 23.

    [^_ftnref24] Tolstoy, 81.

    [^_ftnref25] Tolstoy, 81.

    [^_ftnref26] Tolstoy, 81.

    [^_ftnref27] Gilles Deleuze (1990) The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester. New York: Columbia Unniversity Press, 1.

    [^_ftnref28] Tolstoy, 215.

    [^_ftnref29] See Victor Taylor, ‘Theography: Signs of God in a Postmodern Age,’ in Secular Theology: American Radical Theological Thought (2001), Clayton Crockett, ed. London: Routledge.

    1. Man is the son of an infinite source: a son of that Father not by the flesh but by the spirit. ↩︎

    2. Therefore man should serve that source in spirit. ↩︎

    3. The life of all men has a divine origin. It alone is holy. ↩︎

    4. Therefore man should serve that source in the life of all men. Such is the will of the Father. ↩︎

    5. The service of the will of that Father of life gives life. ↩︎

    6. Therefore the gratification of one’s own will is not necessary for life. ↩︎

    7. Temporal life is food for the true life. ↩︎

    8. Therefore the true life is independent of time: it is in the present. ↩︎

    9. Time is an illusion of life; life in the past and in the future conceals from men the true life of the present. ↩︎

    10. Therefore man should strive to destroy the illusion of the temporal life of the past and future. ↩︎

    11. True life is life in the present, common to all men and manifesting itself in love. ↩︎

    12. 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. ↩︎

    13. Tolstoy’s Gospel in Brief, through condensed and object language, permits Christianity (proper) to end with the death of Jesus. The objective language or language not contaminated with “slime” reaches its limit as it approaches this death, which also becomes language’s death since objective discourse remains silent once Jesus lets his head fall and gives up “the ghost.”[^28] The silence, however, is not simply the inaccessibility of a supernatural reality, a reality dismissed by Tolstoy, but the folding of language. Tolstoy 's objective language must recognize its desire, purity of message, and, through mourning, open a surface for thinking that begins with a possibility of the impossibility of either bringing the desired object to presence or mourning its loss. The ‘Jesus event’ creates an aporia in condensed language, with the ghost that is ‘given’ up functioning as a figure of speech. It is, however, the figure in the figure of speech that points to an incommensurability between the word of objective reality and the Word of the supernatural. The word of objective reality, just as the Word of the supernatural, is a referential sign, a mark that points to something beyond itself. The death of objective language occurs when the sign has nothing more to point to, other than death and, in pointing, folds into death. Theological or theographical[^29] inquiry addresses the limit of the ‘Jesus event’ and similar limits presenting a collision of incommensurable surfaces. ↩︎

    14. The question to ask is not what is this theological or theographical inquiry, but WHERE is it? For Gilles Deleuze, the collision or folding of surfaces means that language is not limited to referral or deferral of meaning, but about what event gives rise to meaning, even a non-meaning: ‘It is still a question of the possible,’ Deleuze writes, ‘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.’ The silence created by objective language in the Gospel in Brief is death; however, in silence something is created, an incommensurability directing us to exist in relation to a new world, a new surface in which possibilities for thinking are present. As one turns from the presence of God (metaphysics) or word (objectivity), one finds a silence of possibility, structures to be created, in search of ‘foreign’ languages to follow the ‘internal trace of the other.’ Desire and mourning are preparation for thinking, moveable limits that allow the recontouring of ultimacy not in reference to or in light of something else, but as a becoming something other. Literature moves across theology and theology moves across literature, colliding at times to form aporias, events, folds, as calls to thinking. If we begin with theology as nomadic, erring, then theology places us under an obligation to seek other worlds and other languages for writing, thinking, and forming ourselves along a series of possibility. ↩︎