A Move

I've shifted spots. I'm now over here.

Hauerwas on Suffering (Again)

I've posted this quote before, but have since started reading the book it's drawn from. Republished as “Naming the Silences,” here's the quote again:

There is no hope for us if our only hope in the face of suffering is that ‘we can learn from it,’ or that we can use what we learn from the treatment of that suffering to overcome eventually what has caused it (e.g., many children in the future will be helped by what we have learned by using experimental drugs on children like Carol), or that we can use suffering to organize our energies to mount effective protests against oppression. Rather, our only hope lies in whether we can place alongside the story of the pointless suffering of a child like Carol a story of suffering that helps us know we are not thereby abandoned. This, I think, is to get the question of ‘theodicy’ right. (34)

Hauerwas, I think too, gets this question exactly right.

Romans 11:33-12:8: Sneak Peek

Since I'm speaking at youth on Friday, I thought I'd put my two years of Greek to work and translate the text I'm speaking from. Here it is:

[11:33] Oh what rich depth and wisdom and knowledge are God’s, that his decisions are so beyond examining and his paths are untraceable! [34] For who knew the mind of the Lord, or who was his advisor? [35] Who first gave him something so that they would be repaid? [36] Because everything is from him and through him and to him—let the glory be his into eternity. Amen.

[12:1] Therefore, I challenge you, brothers and sisters, through God’s compassion, to offer up your bodies as a living, holy sacrifice pleasing to God—your thoughtful worship. [2] And don’t be patterned just like this age, but be transformed by a change of mind, in order to test what the will of God is: good, pleasing, complete.

[3] For through the grace given me, I say to each one of you: do not think better of yourself than you should, but think sanely, since God has given a piece of faith to each of you. [4] Because just as we have many parts in one body, and every part does not function the same, [5] so many of us are one body in Christ, and each person is a part of the others. [6] But we have different gifts based on the grace given to us, whether that’s prophetic—based on one’s piece of faith— [7] or for service in the church’s ministry; or as a teacher in education; [8] or as someone who challenges people, encouraging them; someone who shares with others in generosity; someone who leads others by working hard; or someone who happily extends mercy.

This section marks the end of a long three chapters on how God has spread Israel's promises and gifts into all the world (Romans 9-11). Paul then enters into a longer section on how we should respond to all these gifts by offering up everything we are as “a living, holy sacrifice pleasing to God” (12:1-15:13). So in a way, this passage is a sneak peek on the last part of the letter to the Romans too.

Interview with Meillassoux

There's an interesting new movement in French philosophy termed “speculative realism” which attempts to recover a chastened confidence in reason. There's an interview with one of its leading proponents, Quentin Meillassoux, over at Idée@Jour. Since, however, it's in French, here's a translation:

Q. Can metaphysics speak to these times of crisis?

A. The very fact of getting back in touch with metaphysical questioning is itself a call to a refound confidence in the capacities of thought. This confidence certainly assumes an increased vigilance, bound by the critical heritage of the last decades, toward the dogmatic illusions which speculative philosophy was able to haul through the centuries. But we see today that the abandonment of metaphysical reflection, far from causing the intolerance of thought to decline, did nothing but exacerbate the desire for a blind faith—as though an overreaching skepticism towards reason turned into a fanaticism wishing to be inaccessible to discussion. Resetting ourselves in a metaphysical perspective permits us to confer anew on the concept—rather than on faith alone or the sole opportunism of interest—the duty of helping us to construct our existence, to “vectorise” the concept in its relation to a world both rich and opaque. A metaphysics instructed by the work of its great adversaries—instructed by its reversals (Nietzsche), by its destruction (Heidegger), therapeutic dissolution (Wittgenstein), or deconstruction (Derrida)—sets out both an extraordinary heritage, a treasure of unique thought towards which we are yet able to return—and at the same time imposes on us a totally new and exciting task: that is, how to produce a contemporary metaphysics, able to give a meaning, even a fragile one, to our lives by the sole force of thought, and one which may be likely to “pass across” [passer au travers] those tremendous undertakings of “demolition” which together ran through [traversé] the 20th century.

Q. What are the paths for metaphysics in 2010?

A. They are numerous, and the foremost among them bears a relation to the renewed questioning of its singular: is it still necessary to speak, like Heidegger or above all Derrida, of metaphysics [“la” métaphysique], or is it better rather to speak of metaphysics-plural [“des” métaphysiques-pluriel] which echoes the title of our [new book] series? In effect, this plurality is manifested to us in at least three ways, which make up three important modalities of contemporary research:

• First of all, returning to the surface of those metaphysics either forgotten or neglected for a long time in France, when, that is, they represent alternatives to the grand classical systems of Aristotle, Descartes or Hegel: a metaphysics no longer of substance, of the subject, or of the closed system, but of the Open (Bergson), of the event (Whitehead), of singularity-in-becoming (Simondon), of possession (Tarde), of the work to be created [l'oeuvre à faire] (Souriau). Many more undertakings which demonstrate that metaphysics [“la” métaphysique] is not reducible to a determined collection of concepts which, once disqualified, take with them the whole of speculative thought.
  
  
• This power of the difference [l'altérité] of metaphysics permits us to be comforted in our hope for its renewal, and that from the heart itself of those currents which contested it the most radically: Alain Badiou, thinking totally within the heritage of Lacan's anti-philosophy, takes up in depth the most radical requirements of Platonism in order to elaborate a system of the undecidable event and its weak multiplicities; Graham Harman, an American philosopher whose first work in French we are about to publish, successfully extracts from Heidegger himself a completely rethought metaphysics of the object.
  
  
• Finally, this rediscovery of an “other metaphysics” [autre métaphysique] (according to the expression of Pierre Montebello) is accompanied by the discovery of a metaphysics of the other [métaphysique de l'autre]—that is to say, of “non-Western” peoples. In Métaphysique cannibales, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro establishes that the Amerindians developed a metaphysics of original predation, a “multinaturalist perspectivism” that philosophy—in particular that of Deleuze and Guattari—can help us to tackle and understand. Viveiros can then cite, to support his point, a postface of Lévi-Strauss to a volume of L'Homme, dating from 2000, which treats of this “metaphysics of original predation” and reveals to us the gripping evolution of the author of Mythologiques vis-à-vis philosophy: “...whether one rejoices or worries, philosophy once again occupies center stage. No longer our philosophy, of which my generation had asked foreign [exotiques] peoples for help to dismantle [défaire]; but rather, by a striking turn, theirs.”
  

One could not better describe the movement underway: this benefit (bien) from a thirst for otherness [altérité] and the decentering which metaphysics begins again in the plural, requiring us to think this profusion in preserving it, as much as we can, from ancient wanderings.