http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9048-6558
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ABSTRACT
To contend with the racist scaling of bodies seems to tend toward the ontological and metaphysical. Counter-strategies entail engagement with the predominant framework – i.e., with its categories of being and its grounds of analysis – however, much subjected to critique and deconstruction. Shawn Copeland and Mayra Rivera both identify and accept this “risk” in their theological projects. I argue that, although each does it with differing relative emphases, their political theologies trade upon an alternation between practical and poetical modes of critical reflection – the one is more negative and formal, the other is more positive and material; and this unitary alternation is what staves off failure in ideology and foundationalism. I furthermore suggest that the practical-poetical alternation I describe represents a contemporary politicization of the aesthetical.
KEYWORDS:
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes on contributor
Bruno M. Shah is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Theology at the University of Notre Dame, writing a dissertation on Xavier Zubiri. Some of his works have appeared in Logos, Modern Theology, New Blackfriars, Nova et Vetera [English], and Scottish Journal of Theology.
ORCID
Bruno M. Shah http://orcid.org/0000-0001-9048-6558
Notes
1 Crace, Quarantine, 103.
2 Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom.
3 Rivera, Poetics of the Flesh.
4 In the digital columns of Syndicate, there is a brief exchange between Copeland and Rivera regarding the latter’s work. I return to it in conclusion. See https://syndicate.network/symposia/theology/poetics-of-the-flesh/, curated by Erickson, “Poetics of the Flesh”, accessed April 25, 2018.
5 Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom, 86.
6 Owing to the limits of the paper, I cannot provide discussion of the modern and ideological roots of “aesthetics” as a discipline. But the political enfleshment of the aesthetical that I describe in this article is oriented to that conversation.
7 See Pinn, Embodiment and the New Shape, 3–4. Pinn does not level the charge of being “materially empty” directly against Copeland; but it is clear from the context that he finds her more or less guilty in this regard.
8 I consider Copeland’s reflections on #BlackLivesMatter indicative:
[The] principles and the critical interruptive performances they inspire have engaged the moral imagination and courage of women and men across the country, especially young people of all races, of differing economic classes, cultural-ethnic backgrounds, sexual orientations, physical-ableness, religious beliefs, education and work experience.
9 Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom, 20; for the distinction between “postmodernism” as cultural phenomenon and “postmodern theory” as philosophical critique, see 143–4, n. 67; for her sketch of what is useful in “postmodern theory,” see 20–1. Cf. ibid., “Difference as a Category in Critical Theologies”.
10 In this paper, I use “habitude” in lieu of “habitus,” as Bourdieu intends it. I take his well-known and broad metaphor to refer to the praxial and performative dynamics of concrete, everyday social arrangement. Cf. Bourdieu, Chapter 2 in Outline of a Theory of Practice.
11 Copeland explicitly allies her project with the practical fundamental theology of Metz.
The memoria passionis interrupts our banal resignation to a vague past, our smug democratic dispensation, our not so benign neglect. From the perspective of a contextual theology of social transformation, the full meaning of human freedom (religious, existential, social, eschatological) can be clarified only in grappling strenuously with the “dangerous memory” of slavery.
12 Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom, 94.
13 Copeland quotes from Lonergan, “Metaphysics as Horizon”: “By horizon, I mean ‘a maximum field of vision from a determinate standpoint.’ What and who is outside the range of that field is eliminated from my knowledge and interest, care and concern.” See Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom, 13; cf. 140–1, n. 31.
14 Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom, 15.
15 Ibid., 12.
16 See Craig, Ain’t I a Beauty Queen?, 164. Craig identifies four shifting contexts for the phrase’s rearticulation in the 1960s and 1970s – assertion of beauty against white racism, anxiety about social uplift, sociological theories about “black self-hatred,” and scaling of blacknesses within the community.
17 By “recapitulating,” I mean what Robert Sokolowski (per Thomas Prufer) means in referring to the repatterning of systematic meaning, the repurposing of analytic and descriptive materials, arguably without connoting “epistemological freight.” According to Sokolowski, “recapitulation” involves the life of public activity and syntactical reformulation. See Sokolowski, Phenomenology of the Human Person, 78, n. 10.
18 Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom, 16.
19 See ibid., 90 ff.
20 Copeland explains,
The phrase turn to the subject signals the shift in Christian theology that adverts to the challenges of modern philosophy initiated by René Descartes, John Locke, David Hume, and Immanuel Kant. These philosophers shifted discourse toward speech about human subjectivity and its role within human knowledge and religious belief. (Enfleshing Freedom, 159, n. 3)
21 Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom, 93.
22 See ibid., 18 (italicization added for emphasis).
23 The humanum is something of a phenomenological-hermeneutical replacement/supplement for the metaphysics of “human nature.” The notion is derived from Edward Schillebeeckx, who noted at least seven “anthropological constants” – worldly traits, situations, and orientations, where we can identify the constitutive tasks of humanity. Copeland says Schillebeeckx “employs the term humanum to speak of the vision of a full humanity that, while not antecedently given by God, presents itself as a goal to be achieved through justice.” See Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom, 164, n. 25.
24 See, e.g., Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, 378–82 [A282–290/B238–246], 384 ff. [A293/B249 ff.], 673–84 [A798–820/B826–48]. Owing to the limits of this article, I cannot discuss the significance of Kant’s Critique of Judgment, whose reception apropos modern aesthetics is directly relevant to my aims. See also the disclaimer in n. 6, above.
25 Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom, 108–9 (italicization added for emphasis).
26 Ibid., 18.
27 See Carter, Race, 167.
28 See Copeland Enfleshing Freedom, 3. Cf. Anderson, “Black Scholarly Aesthetics and the Religious Critic”. Anthony Pinn might argue that Anderson’s critique of “scholarly aesthetics” discerns the problem but remains trapped in ontologizing blackness. The phenomenological conceit still functions as metaphysical ersatz.
29 See Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom, 8. Pinn believes his work deals not only with the “metaphorical” resources of interpretation but also the “material” sources of experience. See Pinn, Embodiment.
30 See Pinn, Terror and Triumph.
31 See West, “Black Theology and Human Identity”.
32 Rivera, Poetics of the Flesh, 134.
33 See Rivera, Poetics of the Flesh, 79–83. Alejandro García-Rivera's methodology of “interlacing” as a cross-disciplinary technique of “artful weaving,” which reshapes canons of probity and yields “aesthetic insight”; see García-Rivera, The Garden of God, ix–xi.
34 Rivera, Poetics of the Flesh, 101.
35 Ibid., 70.
36 Ibid., 80, 85.
37 Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom, 17.
38 Ibid., 99.
39 Rivera, Poetics of the Flesh, 120.
40 Ibid., 127.
41 See ibid., 72.
42 Ibid., 144.
43 Ibid., 141.
44 Ibid., 144; cf. 79.
45 Copeland speaks of solidarity in terms of empathy: “solidarity has become a category in Christian theology and, as such, denotes the empathetic incarnation of Christian love.” I find it well to distinguish the “praxial task” of solidarity from the broader range of empathetic intuition. Cf. Copeland, Enfleshing Freedom, 92 ff. Cf. “intimacy” in Jennings.
46 Rivera, Poetics of the Flesh, 71; cf. 146.
47 See ibid., 76.
48 Cf. n. 3, above.
49 See Chopp, “Reimagining Public Discourse.”
50 Rivera, Poetics of the Flesh, 58.
51 Ibid., 148.
52 “Negative contrast experience” owes to Edward Schillebeeckx’s critical hermeneutics of praxis: it describes the way an irrepressible “no!” to evil suffered experientially grounds the counter-creative “yes.” See, e.g., Mosely, Salvation Despite the Death of Jesus?