Abstract

Beginning precisely where the great masters of suspicion ended, this book aims for nothing short than a renewal of theological thinking. Not by way of an argument against the death of God or on behalf of the postmodern return of religion, but instead by extending and radicalizing an iconoclastic and existentialist mode of thought. It ventures to put forth a theology whose point of departure assumes and accepts the critiques of religion launched by Nietzsche, Freud, Marx, and Feuerbach, but nevertheless takes theological desire seriously as a rebellious force working within, but against, an anthropomorphic, phallogocentric worldview. As a theology of language, it does not claim any privileged access to some transcendent divine essence or ground of Being. On the contrary, for Noelle Vahanian, theology is a strictly secular discourse, like any other discourse, but aware of its limitations and wary of great promises--its own included. Its faith is that this secular theological desire can be a force against the constitutive indifference of thought, the myopic fundamentalism of any literalism, the rule of nobody, or even the biopower that produces docile subjectivities in an age of global capitalism. Just as Albert Camus would say that the absurd hero lives a meaningless existence out of spite, theological thinking, as a desiring to no end, is a meditative act of rebellion in the face of brute facticity and being-there-in-and-of-language. There is no way out of this world; no way out of the tyranny of being worded; no way out of humanity’s crimes against itself. Even so, the rebellious desire of a wholly secular theological thinking is a way not to forget not to say nothing. Meditative and aphoristic instead of argumentative, this book offers an original and constructive engagement with seminal issues such as indifference, belief, madness, and love.