MEDIATION, RELIGION, AND NON-CONSISTENCY IN-ONE

Abstract

This paper addresses the capacity of François Laruelle's non-philosophy to evade the difficulties produced by the mediation of religion. Specifically, it looks at how religion is mediated through philosophy under the heading of “philosophy of religion.; While such a heading indicates a gesture seeking to unify what is divided ; namely philosophy and religion ; it actually depends upon and thus maintains this division. The philosophical mediation of religion amounts to the division produced by the thought of religion. Conjoining this claim to a brief genealogy of the concept of religion, I argue that the modern, secular gesture of philosophizing about religion continues a much longer tradition of religion's divisive mediation. What Laruelle's non-philosophy offers, I contend, is a means of escape from the conceptual architecture on which the mediation of religion depends. This is the case specifically insofar as he enables us to conceive a One that would be outside any divisive or mediatic relation to the many. Furthermore, the fact the Laruelle's thought makes use of (what gets named as) religious material enacts a refusal of the division between religion and philosophy. In this regard, however, I argue that his use of religious material still remains imbricated in the division between Christianity and Judaism. Hence, even as Laruelle escapes the conceptual divisions that enable the mediation of religion, his peculiar use of religious material leads him to redeploy divisions central to religion's genealogy.

Keywords:

• Christianity
• genealogy of religion
• gnosticism
• heresy
• Judaism
• Laruelle
• mediation
• non-philosophy

Notes

I would like to express my thanks to the ICI Berlin Institute for Cultural Inquiry for its support of my work.

1 Zito.

2 Ibid.

3 Ibid.

4 Ibid.

5 Ibid.

6 Ibid.

7 Those who have been most influential on my own attempts to do simultaneously philosophical and genealogical work on religion include: Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab; idem, Semites; Asad, Formations; idem, Geneaologies; Boyarin; King; Masuzawa.

8 I have provided a much fuller account of this genealogy in Barber.

9 King 35.

10 The way in which Christianity has thusly obscured itself, under cover of the secular, is most forcefully explained in Anidjar, Semites.

11 Laruelle, Future Christ 13.

12 Idem, “A Summary of Non-Philosophy” 138.

13 Idem, Future Christ 43.

14 Ibid.

15 Brown 277.

16 For instance, Laruelle compares the victimization of the heretic and the victimization of the Jew in order to show that the former is more radical than the latter:

The heretic is more elusive than the unconscious accessible to anamnesis, or than the Jew accessible of the Law. The World itself symbolizes by fire its act of foreclosure. Fire consumes (consommé) or indeed engulfs (consume) itself without remaining, it is the performed par excellence which can only “be done” with the heretic. One will object that the fire set upon the Jewish people does not allow heretics to be distinguished, if it is only the Jewish people who have been burnt-out by a transcendent and technological fire while the heretics are burned up in an immanent fire without author. In one case our living memory of being dead remains in ashes, of traces that bind us to the dead in our unbinding them. In the other there is a radical consummation, without trace in order “to light” our memory. (Future Christ 107)

He continues by claiming: “Burning out the Jews has been a true culture […] But more simply we burn up the heretics, who are of immanence” – that is, “we burn them in the name of their knowledge rather than in the name of their ‘race,’ because of their spirituality rather than their ‘biology,’ ‘history,’ or ‘economy’” (ibid. 108). Laruelle observes that the burning of the Jews is “appalling” (ibid.); however, one cannot avoid detecting here the claim that somehow the burning of the heretics is more essential, since it is a burning based on the “spiritual” rather than on any more material categories. This seems to be a continuation of Christian dualism, in which the spiritual is divided from the material and imagined as superior to it. And the effect of this continuation is to reemploy the long tradition by which Jews are interpellated as “carnal,” i.e., as stubbornly and wrongly wedded to notions of materiality and otherness. It also seems ethically mistaken – to put it mildly – to place the Shoah in comparison to the killing of the heretics, as if the atrocity of which we have an historical record could be relativized in relation to a “radical” killing that we can think about without having to think about the still determinative division between the European and the Semite (who now appears more often in the form of “the Muslim”). This appears to be a means of evading the force of one division of religion by subordinating it to another division of religion. It seems necessary, on the contrary, to see them, in an egalitarian manner, as non-consistently in-One.

17 Laruelle, “Theorems on the Good News.”

18 Ibid.