Articles, book & reviews :

Articles :

Plato's Deconstruction of Derrida

   " In Plato's Phaedrus, Socrates recognizes sophism's threat to civic life and warns against the nihilistic consequences of its severing of ontology from transcendence. In so doing, he attacks the earliest foreshadowing of contemporary secular modernity or postmodernity. In defense of the latter, Jacques Derrida has tried to show how Socrates's critique falter over the issues of speech and writing. Socrates' preference for the former, claims Derrida, is a defence of 'metaphysical presence'. Once this preference is dconstructed, his entire case collapses and an even more radical sophistry triumphs. Socrates' preference for speech over writing, however, is not a defense of 'metaphysical presence' but the opposite : an attack  on presence. His critique of writing and rhetoric does not entail a supralinguistic logos, independent of time and place. On the contrary, he associates this with the sophist vision of a purely commercial reality. As heir to this vision, Derrida's insistence on the transcendental written character of language turns out to be a rationalist attempt to suppress embodiment and temporality. "
   ... for Socrates it is only by means of the dialogic art of differentiation (dialectic) that it is possible to transcend the confusion of mere opinions and prejudices, and only the dialectician, who holds steadfastly to the good, is in a position to differentiate the true from the false. "

- in Telos, no. 107, Spring 1996, pp. 9-43.

Necrophilia : The Middle of Modernity . A Study of Death, Signs, and the Eucharist

   " In this article, I trace the deathly lineaments of the unliturgical world whose struggle to quell the agonies of obsolescence and desire involves the provocation of an effort of security against the void which, in a newly unilateral universe, is configured as a mobilizing gesture of spatialization (the eradication of time, difference, and death in favour of a virtual reality without depth). The urgency of this gesture, and the fear which provokes it, are the condition of possibility or a peculiarly contemporary variant of absolutist power. The invisible and unquestioned supremacy of certain totalizing assumptions as to what constitutes the subject, genuine human action, and the nature of the city, are founded upon the disposition of the subject as yearning  for the once-and-for-all termination of desire via the acquisition of the superlative obkect to end all objects. This final act of desire which desires its own termination therefore guarantees a collusion with the subject's own objectification. Nothing more perfectly fulfills the termination of eros than the condition of the inert object which coincides with death itself.
   In the first section of this essay, I argue that the lineaments of secular power are perversely sustained by the provocation of necrophobia, the consolation of which is presented as the desire to cancel the ache of desire, the sinister corollate of which is a dissimulated desire for death, or necrophilia. In the second and third sections, I show how postmodernity preserves and indeed intensifies this arbitrary and culpably metaphysical separation of life and death, as exemplified by Jacques Derrida's theory of the sign in Speech and Phenomena. In the final section, I contrast the immanentist negociation of death with the Eucharistic view of life and death as belonging together. I show that whereas for Derrida every sign rationalistically denotes the perfect object, which is death, for a Eucharistic view, every sign mediates and repeats the resurrection. The Eucharist, I argue, is the crucial site for the manifestation of this power of language. But it is only a construal of the Eucharist in terms of transubtantiation which can fully do justice to a view of language as freed from the limits imposed by the necrophiliac order of immanentism."

- in Modern Theology, 12, 4, October 1996, pp. 405-433.

AAsyndeton (*):  Syntax and Insanity.  A study of the revision of the nicene creed

  " Once we are dead, the nightmare of death can no longer assail us. The unspoken objective of modernity is to relinquish death by means of death, which is to say, to abolish time. The infinite accumulation of simulacra is the stock-piling of dead value, the neutralization of life, and where there is no life, there death can have no dominion. Ever since the Baroque anxiety of mutability, modern existence has sought to mobilize every resource in the hypertrophy of eros and the attenuation of thanatos, and the purpose of my paper is to delineate one important example of the way in which language has been pressed into the service of this secular cause, this process of spatialization which has occured on every level of modern Western culture.
   ...I shall examine three main concerns : first, the representation in the Nicene Creed of the Trinitarian doctrine of three-in-one ; secondly, the representation of a sacral temporal order, and the importance of this with respect to the Creed's position in the service of Holy Communion ; and thirdly, the liturgical collusion with secular modernity, as expressed in the shift from the model of open-ended doxological desire as excess, to desire framed by the capitalist logic of lack, semelfactive acquisition, and consumption. The first section comprises a brief syntactic analysis, and the second two sections extend the results of this analysis to establish modes of syntax as philosophical and theological categories."

* Asyndeton : syntax characterised by the absence of explicit conjunctions.

- in Modern Theology, 10, 4, October 1994, pp. 321-340.

The Sacred Polis : Language as Synactic Event

  " The cosmos is poised on the edge of the abyss. In order that there be an enclave at a remove from the vast and undefined space of the chaotic quotidian where events are caught up in the cataract of paratactic time, an enclave where words are continuous with their referents and where the violence of time is suspended, the sacred polis must perpetually reaffirm creation. There are various linguistic and semiotic devices which liturgical language employs to keep chaos at bay. Of these, I shall consider stylisation, performativity, and repetition. These three have implications for the eventfulness of language, the initiation of a sacral temporal order, and the creation of a cohesive community where there is a synaxis, or 'coming together' of the disparate into a single unit.
   All rituals are a declaration against indeterminacy. The chaos which the formalised and recursive nature of the liturgy eschews is by implication its central concern. Every invocation betrays an absence, but it also embodies reparation, since to call is to anticipate an answer, and to name is to bring into being. Ritual is paradoxical in that it constitutes one of the most contrived forms of social contact, drawing attention to its own artifice, yet at the same time, deflecting challenge. Its message is established as unverifiable, since it is synaesthetically performed, and once engaged, it offers its own immutable cosmos. The sacred polis remains unperturbed by the atonal clamour of the chaotic quotidian which seeks always to render the performative infelicitous and the repetition lexically diminished.  The sacred polis sets as its task not only to hold in rapture the cosmos, but also chaos itself."

- in Literature & Theology, vol. 8, no. 4, December 1994, p. 367-383.

Thomas Aquinas and the Quest for the Eucharist

   "... that Aquinas's logic of imitation both anticipates and surpasses in advance a postmodern treatment of mimesis."

and : a critique of the derridian sign :

   "In the first place, by cleaving to absence, Derrida leaves the metaphysical correlation of meaning and presence in place, even as he claims that presence is that which is perpetually postponed. For the vehicle of Derridean différance, namely the sign, must perforce remain the same in its repeatedly pointing to something which enver arrives. This renders both signification and repetition transcendenntally univocal, precisely because they point to the nothing of postponed presence - and it should perhaps be noted that nothing is more identical that nothing is to nothing. In this way the very unmediability of an absolute radical difference, immune to any likeness, must collapse into its opposite, into identity, sameness and indifference. It resolves, as a transcendental category, into absolute equivalence which comprehends or measures each difference after all... " (161)

- in Modern Theology, vol. 15, no 2, April 1999, p. 159-180.

Liturgy and Modernity

   "Efforts to find alternatives to liberal individualism and, in particular, problems relating to social fragmentation and the construction of the self have generated interest in a liturgicalcritique of modernity. The deployment of liturgy as a political category, however, needs to be examined carefully. First, liturgy is a special case of ritual behavior. In addition to designating the commitment of individuals or communities to particular traditions, liturgy occupies a unique mediating position between art and politics, which ensures that the political can transcend its own immediate ends and, at the same time, prevent the artistic from lapsing into a "magic circle" of compensatory realities and merely negative or utopian critiques of politics. Second, modernity has produced a parody of the liturgical, a sort of anti-liturgical-liturgy that confirms the dominance of politics and art without liturgy. Third, there are serious proble,s with any purely secular concepts of liturgy and, in order to develop a political critique of modenity, liturgy needs to be seen as a theological as much as a political category."

- in Telos, 113, 1998, p. 19.

Liturgy, Art and Politics

   "In this essay, I am going to discuss three things ; first of all, the nature of liturgy in its most general aspect, and not specifically Christian liturgy. I will try to show how it occupies a unique mediating position between art and politics which ensures, on the one hand, that the political can transcend its own immediate ends, while, on the other hand, preventing the artistic realm from lapsing into a magic circle of compensatory realities and merely negative or Utopian critiques of politics. Secondly, I will suggest certain ways in which secular modernity has produced a kind of parody of the liturgical, a sort of anti-liturgy liturgy which nonetheless confirms the dominance of politics and art without liturgy. Finally, I will try to indicate certain characteristic ways in which specifically Christian liturgy performs the liturgical mediation."

- in Modern Theology, 16, 2, April 2000, p. 159-180.

The Problem of Reported Speech : Friendship and Philosophy in Plato's Lysis and Symposium

  " Plato's discussions of love and Friendship in Lysis and Symposium, unlike those of Aristotle, reputedly allow little place for love or affection toward individuals. This conclusion is reached through several routes ; for some, it is the aporetic inconclusiveness of the discussion concernig the nature of frienship in Lysis ; for others, it is the suggestion that love inspires one to see in the beloved something which betokens higher realities and is merely occasioned by the beloved, i.e., the lover's gaze ultimately passes beyond the specificities of human beauty. In Symposium, Diotima allegedly suggests that eros is infiinitely substituable and impersonal. It is said that Aristotle more genuinely appreciates the specificity of human affections and friendships : for the Stagirite friends are considered " the greatest of external goods" ; those who have regulated their passions to such a degree that they are unmoved by particular instances of beauty are "simply not human"...

- in Telos, 123, 2002, p. 35-64.

Postmodern Scholasticism : Critique of Postmodern Univocity

   "Is there a 'postmodern' phase of history ? If so, is it to be celebrated or regretted ? If the modern is progressive, is the postmodern reactionary ? The myth that there are irreversible cultural breaks through time has long since been refuted. In tracing developments from the late Middle Ages to the early modern period, parts of late mediaeval theological thought can be seen as underpinning later 'modern' ideas, while much of the Enlightenment may also be seen as a qualified reaction against these changes. The origins of modernity are often explained in terms of 'the Enlightenment,' and modernity in terms of the rise of the secular state needed to quell the religious wars -- along with the rise of medical, educational and penal institutions. Since secular attempts to improve society by means of the state and the market have failed, a revised genealogy stressing the legacy of distorted religious devlopments could pave the way for more serious alternatives than those prefigured by liberal and postmodern critiques.
   One can go further. Postmodernists have protested against one-dimensional notions of progress without a genuine novum, in the name of the diverse, the more than human, the incommensurable. In so doing, some of them ( especially Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou and Jacques Derrida ) have gone back to Duns Scotus for inspiration : to his levelling of the finite and the infinite to a univocal being, whose unleashing of the virtual and the discontinuous prefigures a radical break with a totalizing rationalism. It has also been claimed thate these Scotist innovations paved the way for modernity. Il so, how can they also contribute to a break with modernity ? This calls for a re-examination of the origins of modernity. "

- in Telos, 126, 2003, p. 3-24.

Eros and Emergence
 
 

   " Ever since Plato, philosophy has seen a profound link between knowledge and desire. Why does one desire at all, when it involves so much labor? Is motivation of learning a clue to the nature of knowledge? This link is particularly apparent in Plato's Meno, one of the most important loci for the Platonic doctrine of recollection. Socrates' interlocutor, Meno, poses a problem known as the "aporia of learning": "Why, on what lines will you look, Socrates, for a thing of whose nature you know nothing at all? Pray, what sort of thing, amongst those that you know not, will you treat us to as the object of your search? Or even supposing, at the best, that you hit upon it, how will know it is the thing you did not know?"(Meno, 80d)
   This presents a double problematic : how can one seek to discover something about which one is ignorant? How does one recognize a truth when one finds it, if previously one had been ignorant of this truth? As e veryone knows, Socrates' solution to both sides of the aporia is to argue that, before birth, one's soul possessed perfertc understanding, and that the procvess of human learning in time is less a matter of discovery than of remembering. He dramatically argues for this solution by putting a slave-boy through his geometric paces, and shows that, untaught, he can derive new conclusions from a few given postulates.
   Very often, this argument has been seen as fallacious. Equally often, it has been regarded as a mythical presentation of a doctrine of a priori understanding. It makes sense, it is contended, for Socrates to argue that geometric knowledge is "in" the boy's soul already, in the sense that the mind implies logical principles which in some sense are pre-inscribed within the mind - whether transceddentally, or psychologically, or in terms of the mind's access to some sort of logical universe - rather than being discovered empirically. But the myth of pre-existence is entirely apart from the truth of this argument : the myth reprsents either Plato's merely tentative grasp of the notion of an a priori or just a colorful and rhetorical presentation of the latter. "

- in Telos, 127, Spring 2004, p. 97-118.

Book :

After Writing : On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy

   ( Preface :) " This essay completes and surpasses philosophy in the direction, not of nihilism, but of doxology. It shows how philosophy itself, in its Platonic guise, did not assume, as has been thought, a primacy of metaphysical presence, but rather, a primacy of liturgical theory and practice. This same primacy, it claims, was developed, and more consistently realized, in mediaeval Christendom. However, it will also be described how it was during this period that the destruction from within of a liturgical city and a doxologic, took place, culminating eventually in the restoration, during the early modern period and beyond, of these very Greek sophistic positions which the Platonic liturgical philosophy had initially refused. Through a detailed reading of Plato's Phaedrus, the mediaeval Roman rite, and a discussion of the theology of the Eucharist, this essay points out the directions for the restoration of the liturgical order.
   The essay falls within the new theological imperative of "radical orthodoxy." This imperative coincides with an increased presence of theology in the domain of public debate. The reason for this is that, on the one hand, postmodernism appears to have foreclosed the possibility of a benogn, universal, rationalist humanism, while, on the other hand, it does not seem able to refute the suggestion that it is itself irredeemably nihilistic. Radical orthodoxy, however, has offered a third alternative : while conceding, with postmodernism, the indeterminacy of all our knowledge and experience of selfhood, it construes this shifting flux as a sign of our dependency on a transcendent source which "gives" all reality aas a mystery, rather than as adducing our suspension over the void."

   (Contents :)
Part I The Polity of Death
1. Socrates Goes Outside the city : Writing and Exteriority
    1. Introduction
    2. The Plot of the Phaedrus
   3. The Trade of the Sophists
    4. Writing as Capital
    5. The Contagion of the Good
    6. Platonic versus Derridean Supplementation
    7. Plato's return to Myth
    8. Eros and Exteriority
    9. The Socratic Gaze
   10. The Mediations of Egypt
   11. Intimations of Doxology

2. Spatialization : The Middle of Modernity
    1. The New Sophistry
    2. Peter Ramus
    3. The Cartesian City
    4. Reality Without Depth
    5. The Written Subject
    6. The City of Virtuosi
    7. The Theatrical City
    8. The Language of Modernity
    Nouns : a hardness as of cut stone
          Syntax : the contour against the void
          The warp of language
 3. Signs of Death
    1. The Necrophilia of Modernity
    2. The Abyssal Gesture
    3. Indications of Nothing
    4. Postmodern Parsimony
    5. A Dismal Sign

Transition

'Can My Eating Slake Your Hunger ?! On The Evacuation Of Liturgy

1. Duns Scotus and the priority of the Possible
    Univocity of Being
    The formal distinction
    The actual-possible
    The thinkable
    The eucharist and other possible miracles
    The haunted middle

2. The Decline of Liturgical Order
    Excursus on Scotist politics
    Kinship
    The economic realm
    The civic realm
    The juridical realm
    The political
    Eternal bonds
    The rupture of power and love

3. The Theological Body

PART II : THE SACRED POLIS

4. I Will Go Unto The Altar of God : The Impossible Liturgy

    1. Introduction
    2. Spatialization and the Liturgy
    3. The Impossibility of Liturgy
    A summary of the mediaeval Roman Rite
        The journey's name
        The problematic altar
        The time of purification
        The other offering
   4. The Apostrophic Voice
    5. The Permutability of Identity
    Divine identifications
        Borrowed names
   6. Liturgical Satire
    7. Liturgy as both Text and Voice

5. Seraphic Voices : The Space of Doxology

    1. introduction
    2. 'Vesper in Ambiguo Est' : The Time of Liturgy
    3. Christic Asyndeton
    4. Kiturgical Space
    5. 'Dona Nobis Pacem' : The Liturgical Chronotope
    6. The Gift of Citizenship
    The character of gift
        Giving the impossible gift
        The impossible return
        The gift of being

6. The Resurrection Of The Sign

    1. Transubtantiation : Beyond Presence and Absence
      2. Eucharistic Scepticism
    3. Transubstantiation in Aquinas : a Defence
    4. Transubstantiation

as the Condition of Possibility for all Meaning
    5. The Eucharistic Logos

- After Writing, page VII- XII, Blackwell, 1998.

Reviews :

Capitalism or Secularism ?

review of : Patrick Murray, Reflections on Commercial Life :: An Anthology of Classic Texts from Plato to the Present, Routledge, 1997.

   "This anthology will be very useful for students interested in the intersection of economic and political theory. The selections have been chosen judiciously and cover the whole Western tradition from Plato to Baudrillard. Excellent bibliographies for each extract are provided and the book is stylishy produced..."
- in Telos,no. 108, 1996, p. 165-168.

Postmodern Theology ?

review of : John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida : Religion without Religion, Indiana University Press, 1997.

   " This book is long and heavy with the loyal trudge of Caputo's feet trailin after the now unremarkable heels of Jacques Derrida. ..Caputo's book traces in considerable detail Derrida's most recent works, in which a certain 'religiosity' seem to be surfacing, and, in spite of its purpleness, the text offers good summaries of Derrida's main arguments in relation to negative theology, the 'secret', 'hauntology', the  Other, the khôra and justice, as well as accounts of deconstruction, différance, sacrifice and the gift..."
- in Telos, no 110, 1998, p. 167-179.

Unitary Self ?

review of : Christopher Gill, Personality in Greek Epic : Tragedy and Philosophy : The Self in Dialogue, Clarendon Press, 1996.

   " Recent developments in philosophy have reacted strongly against the Enlightenment idea of the self, originating with Descartes, as a unitary "I" defined as wholly self-legislating and self-identical. It has become commonplace to stress the dialogic disposition of the self and affirm not only the social dimension of selfhood, but also its its ineradicable embodiedness..."

(critique of the Derridean sign...)

- in The Cambridge Review, November 1998, p. 75-85.