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Abstract
This essay begins by examining the identity of tradition, arguing that traditions as contemporarily conceived cast themselves as an end rather than as a means. This takes place through a consideration of the writing of MacIntyre before turning to a non-philosophical interpretation of tradition as a kind of theological decision centred on the question of a power principle (symbolized by the name of God). This opens up to an explanation of the concept of weaponized apophaticism, which describes the way in which traditions cast themselves as an end through a process of theological claims to authority that are ultimately made all the more powerful through a process of deferral. The essay then concludes with a discussion of gnosis as a kind of non-tradition, a generalized form of tradition which escapes being mistaken or “hallucinated; as an end because of gnosis's being cast as prior to origin. Tradition is revealed in its identity (as means, not end) through gnostic refusal, which ultimately illuminates the consequences and meaning of what we are terming the first axiom for a nontheology to be completed in a future project.
Notes
1 Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference 179. [Translation slightly modified to emphasize elements at play in this essay. Some emphasis mine.]
2 Smith, “What can be Done?”
3 I use the term creatural here to refer to this production not being a simply human production, but one that includes all the non-human elements one finds within ecology. See Smith, Non-Philosophical Theory, esp. 218–20, for a fuller treatment of this concept.
4
We are apt to be misled here by the ideological uses to which the concept of a tradition has been put by conservative political theorists. Characteristically such theorists have followed Burke in contrasting tradition with reason and the stability of tradition with conflict […] Traditions, when vital, embody continuities of conflict. Indeed when a tradition becomes Burkean, it is always dying or dead. (MacIntyre 221–22)
5 Ibid. 203.
6 Ibid. xiii.
7 Asad 273.
8 Laruelle sums up his “collider” model of non-philosophy in a recent interview, saying:
I have always used two philosophies at the same time. Heidegger and Nietzsche, then Derrida and Deleuze. So it is always a matter of how to eventually combine several philosophies […] I had the feeling that in order to completely change the concept of philosophy, two philosophies were always necessary, as if each of the philosophers represented half of philosophy, basically, which I felt to be the non-completeness of a particular philosophy; this problem would have to be resolved each time by the combination of two philosophers. I have followed this way of doing things, a little bit in spite of myself, always combining two philosophies as if each of them was lacking what the other had. You could think that this is a dialectical relation. But in fact that was not that at all, because it was, each time, two philosophies and not one philosophy and the entire history of philosophy in addition. Thus, I am part of a conjugation, I like this term a lot, of philosophies which replaced the missing concept. What was missing was the One, the One-in-One. (Laruelle, “Non-Philosophy” 239)
9 Asad 266.
10 Ibid. 267.
11 Consider, for example, the strangely amorphous Roman Catholic Archdiocese for the Military Services, USA, which, unlike nearly every other archdiocese in the world, has no central seat and no cathedral but serves in an almost Deleuzian rhizomatic way the network of American imperialist bases throughout the world despite the Roman Catholic Church's official line of propagating a whole cloth “culture of life.”
12 There is likely something interesting in the Gnostic rejection of the Eucharist. Here we see a different understanding of the relation to authority and power and the possibility of resistance to them through sacrifice. As Brakke summarizes it:
the Gnostic author of the The Gospel of Judas severely criticizes the Eucharist as a ceremony that offers praise to Ialdabaōth, the god of this world. The sacrificial victim that other Christian leaders offer on their altars is not bread or the body of Christ, but the people that they lead astray into ignorance and death ([The Gospel of Judas] 39:18–40:1). “Stop sacrificing animals!” Jesus commands his wayward disciples, referring to the animals that symbolize their deceived Christian followers (41:1–2). (Brakke 77)
13 Marion 153.
14 Ibid. 158.
15 Gilson 97.
16 Ibid.
17 This is a summary of an argument made at greater length with regard to Thomas in Smith, Non-Philosophical Theory 190–98.
18 MacIntyre 184.
19 Cavanaugh 3.
20 Ibid. 14.
21 Barber 91.
22 Ibid.
23 Asad 292.
24 There is a debate amongst scholars of the history of religions about whether or not something as diffuse as the various groups collected under the term gnosis even exist. Foremost amongst those who argue for the uselessness of the term is Karen King. See her What is Gnosticism? However, as I argue below, I follow the work of other theorists who are more structuralist in their understanding of identity, like Corbin and other more contemporary historical thinkers like Gerd Lüdemann (see Lüdemann) who assert the usefulness of this term in capturing a certain spirit of a myriad of “lost” traditions.
25 Voegelin 165, 166.
26 Norman O. Brown makes a similar claim with regard to the lived experience of time in Islam, marking out Islam as a kind of challenge to the world as a universal prophetic tradition. See Brown; Iqbal. Basit Kareem Iqbal's contribution goes beyond a mere review and deepens these claims by suggesting ways in which Brown's thesis can be seen without the reference to a certain kind of orientalizing of Islam through exclusive focus on Shi'a sources.
27 Corbin 14; translation slightly modified.
28 Laruelle, Théorie 46–47; translation mine.
29 See Brakke 53, 60.
30 Agrama 71.
31 Ibid. 185.
32 Ibid. 187.
33 Ibid. 182.