After the Death of God

One way to put what postmodernism means is to say that it is a philosophy of the event, and one way to put what a radical or postmodern theology means is to say it is a theology of the event. Obviously, then, on such an accounting, everything depends upon what we mean by an event, which, for the sake of simplicity, I describe as follows. 1. An event is not precisely what happens, which is what the word suggests in English, but something going on in what happens, something that is being expressed or realized or given shape in what happens; it is not something present, but something seeking to make itself felt in what is present. 2. Accordingly, I would distinguish between a name and the event that is astir or that transpires in a name. The name is a kind of provisional formulation of an event, a relatively stable if evolving structure, while the event is ever restless, on the move, seeking new forms to assume, seeking to get expressed in still unexpressed ways. Names are historical, contingent, provisional expressions in natural languages, while events are what names are trying to form or formulate, nominate or denominate. 3. An event is not a thing but something astir in a thing. Events get realized in things, take on actuality and presence there, but always in a way that is provisional and revisable, while the restlessness and flux of things is explained by the events they harbor. 4. What happens, be it a thing or a word, is always deconstructible just in virtue of events, which are not deconstructible. That does not mean that events are eternally true like a Platonic eidos; far from being eternally true or present, events are never present, never finished or formed, realized or constructed, whereas only what is constructed is deconstructible. Words and things are deconstructible, but events, if there are any such things (s’il y en a), are not deconstructible. 5. In terms of their temporality, events, never being present, solicit us from afar, draw us on, draw us out into the future, calling us hither. Events are provocations and promises, and they have the structure of what Derrida calls the unforeseeable “to come” (à venir). Or else they call us back, recall us to all that has flowed by into the irremissible past, which is why they form the basis of what Johann Baptist Metz calls “dangerous memories” of the injustice suffered by those long dead, or not so long, a revocation that constitutes another provocation. Events call and recall.¹

Events are what Žižek calls the “fragile absolute”—when Žižek leaves off abusing postmodern theories he often serves up excellent postmodern goods—fragile because they are delicate and absolute because they are precious.² Events are tender shoots and saplings, the most vulnerable growths, a nascent and incipient stirring, which postmodern thinking must exert every effort to cultivate and keep safe. Postmodernism is the gardening of the event, the thinking of the event, offering events shelter and safe harbor. Events are menaced by great monsters who feed on their tender pulp, by large and overarching theories that would catch them in their sweep, organize them, make them march in step to some metaphysical tune or other, right or left, theistic or atheistic, idealist or materialist, realist or antirealist. Events, on the other hand, travel close to the surface of what happens, lying low on the plane of immanence, far beneath the radar of big theories like the history of the Absolute Spirit or the Destiny of Being (Seinsgeschick). Events are little gifts, and postmodern thinking seeks to keep them free of big deals, which would sell them out.

On my accounting, things take a theological turn in postmodernism when what we mean by the event shifts to God. Or, alternately, things take a postmodern turn in theology when the meditation upon theos or theios, God or the divine, is shifted to events, when the location of God or what is divine about God is shifted from what happens, from constituted words and things, to the plane of events. When events take on the specific look or sound or feel of the sacred, when the sparks we experience in words and things are sacred sparks, divine promptings, or holy intensities, then we have stepped upon the terrain of postmodern theology.³ Think of the event as a fire, a flame, even as what Deleuze does not hesitate to call its “eternal truth”! Fire, flames, and sparks have from time out of mind been figures of the divine. To cite but one very famous example, Meister Eckhart said there is a little spark in the soul (ein Seelenfünklein), which is the point where God and the soul touch. In postmodern theology the event lends things, we might say, a kind of divine glow, what Deleuze calls a brightness and splendor, “the splendor of Being.” Theology keeps its ear close to the heart of the pulses or pulsations of the divine in things.

However postmodern, a theology of the event has an ancient pedigree, going back to a famous narrative about a very seminal event indeed, whose punch line was that life glows with the “good” that Elohim pronounced upon creation—six times, the final time emphasizing the point in case we missed it: very good. For if we look closely at just what Elohim did in the first creation story in Genesis, we will quickly notice that it did not consist in drawing being out of nothing, as the metaphysical theologians would have us think, but in putting the glow of life and light upon what was dark and lifeless, charging it, sparking it, lighting it up, we might say with the splendor and brightness of life. It was as if the great elements—the womblike deep (tehom), the formless void (tohu wa bohu), and the wind (ruach) were sleeping, and Elohim’s word was a call to them to awaken and glow with life. On this alternate account of creation, what Elohim did was to release the events that stirred within these great sleeping elements.

We might even say, to put all this in a bold and simple stroke, that in postmodern theology what happens to us is God, which is why we call it postmodern theology. Or, to couch it in a slightly more cautious terms, in postmodern theology what happens to us is the event that is harbored in the name of God, which is why we want to cultivate the resources in this name, to nurture and shelter them, and to let us ourselves be nourished by their force, made warm by their glow, charged by their intensities.⁴ The crucial move lies in treating the event as something that is going on in words and things, as a potency that stirs within them and makes them restless with the event. Deleuze says that to will the event means more precisely to will “not exactly what occurs but something in that which occurs, something yet to come which would be consistent with what occurs.” “The event is not what occurs (an accident), it is rather inside what occurs, the purely expressed. It signals and awaits us.”⁵ That is to head in a more Derridean direction where willing the event means to “affirm” the event, to say “oui, oui” (Amen!) not to what is present but to what is coming, to what stirs within things, within words and things, to what is promised by them.

Then events assume a more messianic or even a ghostly look, for in postmodern theology we believe in ghosts, very holy if slightly pale ghosts called events, which are the stuff of what I am calling here a spectral hermeneutics. Then one has turned one’s face to the future and one is haunted by the possibilities harbored in events—by the fragile “perhaps” in things—which promise a new life, a new being, a new creation. We replace amor fati, which is one of those big stories that threatens to quash the fragile absolute of the event, with an amor venturi, a love or affirmation of what is to come, which makes more sense.⁶ For all of us, everyone from Deleuze to evangelical Bible-thumpers, want to be born again.⁷ For Deleuze, the event is a kind of anonymous impulse, a prepersonal transcendental field, a nomad that moves freely across the border that separates words and things, essence and existence, or else it is the very “surface” that joins and separates them. The event constitutes a transcendental archi-sense (which Deleuze somewhat misleadingly calls non-sense) that makes garden variety sense and non-sense both possible and impossible. If so, then what is distinctive about postmodern theology is that this prepersonal, prehuman field is taken to be a domain of the divine, a sacred surface that is lined with divine strings of force or sparked by divine impulses or charged with divine intensities.⁸

In thinking of radical theology as a theology of the event, the stress is on the event as an irreducible possibility, a potentiality that can assume various forms of expression and instantiation. The event is not reducible to the actual, but stirs as a simmering potentiality within the name or the state of affairs, incessantly seeking an outlet, constantly pressing for expression in words and things. The event is irreducible; indeed, I am inclined to say that it is the very form of irreducibility itself. For what is irreducible is what resists contraction into some finite form or other, what seeks to twist free from the finite containers in which it finds itself deposited, what cannot be contained—which is what we mean by the event. Whenever we encounter an occurrence like a word or a thing, a proposition or a state of affairs, a belief or a practice, a discourse or an institution that cannot contain what it contains, that is because of the event it contains, because it is astir with the event, because it has been shocked, shaken, and disturbed by the event, which is seeking to twist free from its present confinement. Indeed, that is also how I would put deconstruction in a nutshell. For what else is deconstruction but the work of analyzing phenomena that contain what they cannot contain in order to release the event they (cannot) contain?

The event is not so much something present as something coming, something stirring, something signaling us from afar, something waiting for us to catch up, something inviting, promising, provoking, and, let us say, for this is a word that packs a special punch in theology, something promised. When Derrida speaks of the “democracy to come,” that phrase refers to the event of something coming that is presently astir in the word democracy, something that invites and calls us in this word, which is the least bad word we have at present for something given to us now only by an anticipated grace, that is, in our prayers and tears. This is how the event is capable of taking a religious form and just why it provides the stuff of a theology of the event. For the event constitutes a kind of covenant that has been cut with us, which makes us the people of the promise, of the covenant, of the cut. Religion is the covenant that has been made—by whom we cannot quite say—between the event and us. So beyond—or perhaps within—the Jewish and the Christian Covenants, let us dream of a postmodern covenant, where we are the people of the event, the ones called together by the event.

Still, by speaking of the “religious” form taken by the event, have I not endangered this tender sapling by exposing it to the Monster or Master Narrative of Religion, whose history in the West is one of violence and bloodshed? Have I not baldly betrayed the irreducible event by reducing it to the religions of the Book, the ones constituted by the Covenant that has been cut between God and his chosen people, which are famous for their monotheistic exclusivism and jealousy? I will be your God and you will be my people, and we will not allow any foreign gods or infidels to disturb this intimacy of this private relation. It is for this reason that I insist that the event is not what occurs but something in what occurs, something stirring, something still to come. The idea behind a postmodern theology is to release the event that stirs in the famous covenantal scenes and not allow it to be contracted to any present form or constricted by its local conditions.⁹ The event is the unconditional that is astir in these local conditions, what is undeconstructible in any historical construction or discursive practice. If I take “religion” in its most radical sense as a covenant cut between the event and its people, my intention is to avail the event of the most flexible form available to safeguard its irreducibility. To say that the event has a religious sense is to underline something crucial in it, which is the unconditional passion or the passion for the unconditional that the event engenders. In the Scriptures the covenant is a promise or a covenant cut by God—that is why I speak unabashedly of theology—where the name of God is the name of an event, of something that stirs within that name, something I know not what, some sacred spark or fire. The name of God shelters an event, and the task of thinking about or meditating upon this name is to safeguard that event and release what is stirring there. The name of God is very simply the most famous and richest name we have to signify both an open-ended excess and an inacccessible mystery. That is why I insist I do not “reduce” the event to religion when I speak of a theology of the event but on the contrary find a place to safeguard its irreducibility and unconditionality. The name of God is the name of one of humanity’s most famous fires, one that has inflamed humankind from time immemorial—which explains why, like every fire, it is also so dangerous. Affirming the eternal flame of the event that burns within the name of God is also a way to flag the consuming violence that is stored up in this name.

The name of God is one of the names that Derrida has in mind when he meditates upon the phrase sauf le nom, “safe the name,” an expression that for Derrida means both: let us keep this name safe, let us save it, but also: God is everything save (sauf/except) the name, save or except what the name names explicitly, everything except the excess that exceeds what is explicitly named. The name of God names everything save the event that is sheltered by this name, which is an event that solicits and invites, calls and signals us, but is never finally named.¹⁰

The affirmation of the event is less an agency than a responsiveness, less a subjectivistic decisionism than accepting the terms of a covenant. For what else can the affirmation of the event be but the response of a subject to a visitation by something that overtakes it? What else can such an affirmation be but the responsibility by which the subject is organized or galvanized into a subject of the event? What else is the event than the fire that inflames the movement of the subject or what Derrida calls the decision of the other in me? To affirm the name of God is to say yes to the forces that work their way through that name and traverse our hearts and bodies. For the event is what calls us and we are the people of the call, the people of the event who want to make themselves worthy of the call.

Religion begins and ends with prayer; where there is prayer, there is religion; where there is religion, there is prayer. Now the event is the stuff of which prayers and tears are made, that by which we are always already solicited, invited, called. The event is always already ahead of us, always provoking and soliciting us, eternally luring us on with its promise. The truth of the event is its promise to come true. Events make promises that are never kept by any actual occasion. That is also what I have been calling the irreducibility of the event. The event can never be held captive by any particular instance of the event, never reduced to any present form or instantiation. It would be the height of injustice, not to say of arrogance, to say that justice is finally realized in some existing form, in some present person or state. The unconditional event is only conditionally realized in any time or place, in any word or proposition or discursive formation, in any ontic realization or actualization. The irreducible event is what reduces us to tears, to prayers and tears, for its coming. The event is what destabilizes all such relatively stable structures as attempt to house it, making them restless with the future, teeming with hope and promise, even as it is in virtue of the event that things are haunted by the past, made an occasion of dangerous memories, which are no less unnerving and destabilizing. The eternal truth of the event is its nomadism, its restless journey across barren deserts, or perhaps its venturing upon uncharted seas, in any case, its discontent with more sedimented, sedentary formations, even as the ancient charge that is laid upon us by the nomad is hospitality, to throw wide the door of welcome to its coming. Not only to welcome its coming but to pray and weep over its arrival.

Theology is a place where the energies of the event may be nurtured and released, its intensities cultivated and affirmed, built up and discharged—free from all the constraints of what exists. Alice in Wonderland and the stories of Borges suffer very little disadvantage from having to do with nonexistent entities, a point that Deleuze makes throughout The Logic of Sense, which on my reading is also a bit of a cryptotheologic of sense.¹¹ Nor does prayer, as we do not pray for what already exists, unless we are praying for it to go away and exist no more. Indeed, such inexistence is the condition of the range and power of literature and prayer, of sense itself. Literature and theology are places where we dream of what is coming, where we pray and weep for something that eye has not yet beheld nor ear heard, where we venture upon the plane of what does not exist and wonder indeed why not. I think that on the whole such inexistence constitutes a very upbeat and affirmative definition of theology; every genuine affirmation of God must pass through a dark night and mandatory atheism. Whenever Derrida speaks of the event, which turns on what is undeconstructible, he adds the precaution s’il y en a, “if there is any”! For if whatever exists is deconstructible, then the event, which is undeconstructible, lies just beyond the reach and across the borders of what exists, which is the special province of a postmodern theology.

Indeed, there is even something of a classical ring, a paradoxically Anselmian tonality in this formula. The name of God is the name of an event that is greater than anything that exists.¹² If anything does exist, that is not what is named by the name of God, or, rather, it is not the event that is harbored or contained within the name of God. For the very meaning of the event is to prevent the name or the thing from blocking or containing the intensity of the event within. When something happens that contains an event, it contains precisely what it cannot contain. To exist would mean to exhaust the event, which means the event that is named in or under the name of God can never take final form, can never exist and exhaust itself on the ontical or ontological plane, neither in some highest being up above nor even in Being itself, even as it can never be conceived in some logically adequate expression or concept. The event that stirs within the name of God is always soliciting us and inviting us, calling and signaling us. We do not properly say of this event that it exists but that it solicits and calls to us from within what exists, which is why events are a matter of prayers and tears. Prayer is not a transaction or interaction with some hyperbeing in the sky, a communication with some ultrareality behind the scenes, the invocation or appeasement of a magical power of supernatural intervention from on high. Prayer has to do with hearing, heeding, and hearkening to a provocation that draws us out of ourselves.¹³

To speak of our prayers and tears is but another way to speak of our desire, and to speak of our desire is to enter a never-never land more outlandish than anything Alice ever ran into down that rabbit hole, for desire is situated in the space between, or perhaps it is the very spacing between, what exists and what does not exist. Desire is nourished and fed by what does not exist, by the power of what does not exist to solicit and disturb us, which is why desire has ultimately to do with events. To speak of desire is to address all that we are and are not, all that we know and do not know, which means an enigma wrapped in a secret so deep that it can never be known by us or by anyone else, which is why Derrida calls it the absolute secret. Because desire has to do with the event, we do not know what we desire, but this nonknowing is what keeps desire alive. If the event would be exhausted by existence, by existing in full, it would be exterminated by the white light of knowledge.

We should never give up on our desire, as Lacan says, upon which Badiou comments, “For desire is constitutive of the subject of the unconscious; it is thus the non-known par excellence, such that ‘do not give up on your desire’ rightly means: ‘do not give up on that part of yourself that you do not know.’”¹⁴ I would put the same idea by saying that our desire is for the Messiah who never shows up, which is what keeps desire going. Unless in a futile attempt to get some peace and quiet we give up. But if we give up on desire, that will succeed only in making us miserable. For then one part of us, the part of us that we know, gives up while the other part, the part of us that we do not know, has not given up. That will not bring us inner peace but the inner illness of the sickness unto death.

From time immemorial the name of God has been the name of what we desire, with a desire beyond desire, so one way to try to give up altogether is to give up on God—or to try. The name of God is not precisely the name of what we desire but the name of the event that occurs in what we desire that keeps desire alive. Whenever we desire this or that determinate thing, it is true that that indeed is what we desire. But that is not the whole truth; it is not the final form in which our desire can take shape. For were the thing that we desire delivered, that would only feed desire all the more, and were, God forbid, that thing or person dashed, that would not, or need not, dash our desire, for desire can never be reduced to that determinate occasion. Our desire is irreducible because the event, which is what we desire, is irreducible. To speak of making ourselves worthy of the event means that we spend our lives, or so we should, trying to make ourselves worthy of what we desire. We spend our lives, or so we should, hoping, dreaming, sighing for the event, praying and weeping over the event, praying for the coming of the event. For the event does not quite, never does exactly—exist. If theology is the science of nonexistent entities, it is because theology is born in the space between what exists and the event, which means that theology is born in prayer. That is its great dignity, its glorious body, which pulses through and animates the language of Saint Augustine’s Confessions. The name of God is as old and venerable and hoary a name as we have for desire, for our desire beyond desire. “Inquietum est cor nostrum,” our heart is made restless with this desire, “donec requiescat in te,” and our heart will not rest until it rests in you, in the event that this “you” embodies.

What do I desire? Who or what is desiring within me? That, by the very terms of what we mean by desire and event, cannot finally be formulated. Of course, this is only the half of it. For the issue of our inability to give our desire any final formulation is a steady flow of provisional formulations.¹⁵ We are all along in the dark about what we desire, about what is desiring us, about what is desiring in us. But this darkness keeps desire safe from the withering sun of knowledge. “Quid ergo amo, cum deum meum amo?” Derrida asks with Augustine (Conf. 10:6–7). What do I love when I love my God? What do I desire when I desire God? What is the event of desire that takes place in me, that makes its place in me, here in this place where I say “I.” What is the event of desire, which is always the desire for the event, that occurs in theology?

The event jolts the world, disturbs, disrupts, and skews the sedimented course of things, exposing the alternate possibilities that course their nomadic way through the normalized quotidian paths that things routinely follow. That is one reason we read literature, and that is why Deleuze takes so much joy in the works of Lewis Carroll, and well he should. I am only puzzled—well, not really puzzled, but disappointed—that he did not notice another literature—and here he differs from Derrida—no less anarchical and chaosmic, an anarchy no less crowned, but this time with a sacred crown, the sacred anarchy of the “Kingdom of God.” I am disappointed that he did not pursue the fountain of events that issues in the mad, paradoxical, parabolical, upside down, topsy-turvy world that is to be found in the Scriptures. For if postmodern thinking is intent on following the movements of the events by which words and things are inwardly disturbed, by which they are even driven slightly mad, we theologians of the event are here to insist that madness is of many kinds. To the bright and witty giddiness of Alice of Wonderland and the dark pain of schizophrenia mapped by Deleuze we add a third: the divine madness of the Kingdom of God described in the New Testament, where the event provokes the most sublime effects, a veritable “sacred anarchy,” whose parables and paradoxes are easily the match of any of the tales told by Lewis Carroll. It is precisely this impossible circulation of such divine events that gives rise to a story like the wedding feast that is every bit as odd as a party thrown by a Mad Hatter.

Deleuze should have suspected an event there. He should have wondered whether the zany reversals and astonishing paradoxes in the New Testament were any less the offspring of an event than is the tale of a tardy rabbit darting down a hole. What marvelous stream of events has left its traces on this surface and marked this surface with such vivid and unforgettable figures? But, for the most part, the New Testament remained for him a missed opportunity, and he allowed himself to be waylaid by the received institutional reading of the text and discouraged by the high wall of ecclesiastical power by which it is surrounded. So one way for a postmodern theology to proceed—and there are several; I make no claim to have a corner on the market—is to feel about for the event that has so disturbed the surface of these stories. What intensities, what nomadic bit of nonsense or archi-sense there throws everything into reverse? What flow of forces issues in such unforgettable madness, in such sacred foolishness, where people make themselves fools for the Kingdom of God?

My thesis is twofold. 1. In the Scriptures the odd phenomena constituting the “Kingdom of God” are the offspring of the shock that is delivered by the name of God to what is there called the “world,” resulting in what I call a “sacred anarchy.” Consider but a sampling of its more saliant features. In the Kingdom, the last are first and first are last, a strategically perverted system of privileging, so that the advantage is given not to beautiful Athenian bodies that house a love of wisdom, but to lepers, deaf mutes, the blind, epileptics, and the paralyzed. The favor of the Kingdom falls not on men of practical wisdom, of arete, of experts in phronesis, but on tax collectors and prostitutes, who enjoy preferential treatment over the upright and well behaved. In addition, in the Kingdom the way to be arrayed with all the glory of God is to neither sow nor reap but to behave like the lilies of the field. If you try to save your life you will lose it, but if you lose it you will be saved. In the Kingdom one should hate one’s father and mother but love one’s enemies, and if a man strikes you you should offer him the other cheek. There, if you are rich, you have a very fine needle indeed to thread to get into the Kingdom. If you would want to become rich with the treasures offered by this Kingdom, you should sell all that you have and give it to the poor. Moreover, you should give to the poor not only what you can afford but even what you need for yourself. If one of your sheep is lost, then you should not worry about endangering the other ninety-nine but go out and search for the lost one, which is an unaccountably odd way to count. If you host a party—even a wedding for one of your children—you should go out into the streets and welcome in the passers by. There bodies pass easily through solid walls, rise from the dead, traverse the surface of water without sinking, glow with a blinding whiteness, and pass instantly from one state, like water, into another, like wine. Cripples are made straight, lepers are cured, and the dead rise from their grave. All these bodily metamorphoses are in turn figures of a personal transformation best described as metanoia, which might be retranslated from “repentance” to “being of a new mind and heart,” being tuned and attuned to the new being that comes of belonging to the Kingdom.

2. The event that shocks the world is not a strong but a weak force. Underlying, or arching over, all these famous paradoxes, there is, on my hypothesis, a thesis about God, or about the event that is harbored in the name of God, one that is contrary to the powers that be in theology and the church, a startling thesis found in what Paul calls “the weakness of God.”¹⁶ Saint Paul puts this thesis about weakness very powerfully, even paradigmatically, in a veritably Deleuzian discourse on the “logos of the cross (logos tou staurou),” the mark of which Paul identifies as “foolishness.” Here, in a virtuoso performance of the interweaving of sense and non-sense, of a logos that is the offspring of moria, Paul spells out the way this weakness jolts the world: God chose the foolish ones in the world to shame the wise, and what is weak to shame the strong, and what is the low down in the world, the ones who “are not” (ta me onta), to shame the men of ousia, men of substance, the powers that be. The “weakness of God,” Paul says, is stronger than human strength (I Cor. 1:25).¹⁷

A good deal of what is going on in these texts comes back to a certain event, to a disturbing experience of God as a “weak force,” and it is this crucial paradox that incites such a riot of reversals and paradoxes in its narratives. This crucial event is paradigmatically expressed in the Cross, where Jesus is subjected to an excruciating and humiliating execution as a common criminal, defeated by Roman power, deserted by the disciples and even forsaken by God.¹⁸ Jesus was crucified, not freely, but against his will, against the will of everything that is good and just, human or divine. Jesus was the spokesman of a message about the coming of the Kingdom, which delivered the shock of the event to the world, for which the world made him pay with his blood. Blood is the coin of the realm in the world, not in the Kingdom. Blood is how things are done in the world, for the ways of the world are the ways of power. When Peter raises his sword to prevent Jesus from being taken by the Roman guards in the Garden, Jesus tells him to put it down, for that is not how things happen in the Kingdom. If we take from this that Jesus could, with a wave of his hand or a wink of his eye, demolish these Roman soldiers but freely chose not to exert his omnipotence because he was on a divine mission, then we would concede that he merely seems, docet, to be a helpless and innocent victim of this power. But that is what he was in truth. The radical uprooting of the heresy of Docetism demands that we locate the divinity of this scene of misery and defeat, the sacredness of its memory, not in some hidden divine power play or long-term investment in a divine economy of salvation. The sacredness lies in the cries of protest that rise up from the scene. The event to be willed here is the depth of outrage at the injustice of imperial power, of the crushing of the Kingdom by worldly forces. The divinity lies in the identification of the name of God, for Jesus was the eikon of God, not with Roman power but with an innocent victim of that power, not with retribution but with the act of forgiveness that is attributed to Jesus by the evangelists. The ways of a father in the Kingdom are illustrated by the story of another father, the one who was prodigal with his love of his prodigal son. Those are the ways of the Kingdom. In the world, violence is met with counterviolence; in the Kingdom it is met with forgiveness. In the world, betrayal is concealed with a kiss; in the Kingdom, betrayal is healed by a kiss.

The event harbored by the name of God in this scene, the eventful paradox or paradoxical event whose tremors can be felt throughout the New Testament, is that of the power of powerlessness or of something “unconditional without sovereignty,” of a “weak force,” to take up a discussion that Derrida was developing in his final writings.¹⁹ The majesty or glory of the name of God does not lie in the power of a strong force but in something “unconditional,” undeconstructible, but without an army, without actual force, real or physical power. It is the name more of a potency than a power, a restive possibility that makes the world restless with hope for justice and impatient with injustice, while the actuality or the realization is assigned to us, as Bonhoeffer claimed. The transcendence or majesty of God lies in the unconditionality of the claim that is made upon us by God, by the name of God, in the name of God. And when it comes to claims, realization depends upon the response, even as events require actualization and we are required to make ourselves worthy of events. Claims, which are events, depend upon us to respond, to realize or actualize them, to make them happen, which here means to make God happen, to give God body and embodiment, force and actuality. Deleuze puts the event that (we are saying) takes place in the name of God very nicely when he says “To the extent that events are actualized in us, they wait for us and invite us in.… It is a question of attaining this will that the event creates in us; of becoming the quasi-cause of what is produced in us.”²⁰ Of becoming worthy of the events that happen to us.

Religion is what is happening to us in the name of God. Religion means to make God happen in the world and make ourselves worthy of what happens to us. We are functionaries of this event, sent into the world to serve it, to respond to it, to realize it and make it happen, missionaries of its emissions. But this event, like any event, is not reducible to someone or something with the power to makes things right. Rather it takes the form of a call, an address, or solicitation, of a force that lays claim to us, addressing us unconditionally, but without the benefit of either a terrestrial army or arsenal of weapons or of some celestial metaphysical power base in the heavens. It would be magic, supernaturalism, fetishism, reification, idolatry to confine this event within a name, to constrict it to a being, even the Being of beings, to try to contain the event within the confines of some sort of superentity that can outthink, outwill, outpower, and generally outdo anything we mortals here below can come up with. God is not a cosmic force, a worldly power, a physical or metaphysical energy or power source that supplies energy to the world, who designs it, starts it up and keeps it going, and who occasionally intervenes here and there with strategic course corrections, a tsunami averted here, a cancerous tumor there, a bloody war quieted over there.²¹

The very idea of this event, to come back to what Anselm saw within the confines of a medieval metaphysical imagination, was that whoever or whatever bears the name that contains this event cannot contain what it contains. Anything that bears this name, anything that so presents itself, is deconstructible, while the event itself, s’il y en a, is not deconstructible. The name of God is the name not of a res but of a realissimum. The name of a God is not the name of an abstract logical possibility but of a dynamis that pulses through things (rei), urging them, soliciting them, to be what they can be, and it is in that sense what is most real about them. The name of God is not the name of the most real thing but of what is most real in things. The name of God is not the name of something that happens or occurs, but of something in what happens or occurs, which solicits what is best in them. In my slightly postmodern version of Anselm, God is the ens realissimum not exactly as such, but as the realissimum in any res or ens that urges that being beyond itself, like a kind of hyperreal inching it beyond its present reality.

I am proposing a postmodern theology of the Cross in which I ask, what is happening on the Cross? What is happening to us? What events pulsate through that unforgettable scene? Of what are we to make ourselves worthy? It is a mystification to think that there is some celestial transaction going on here, some settling of accounts between the divinity and humanity, as if this death is the amortization of a debt of long standing and staggering dimensions. If anything, no debt is lifted from us in this scene but a responsibility imposed upon us. For we are laid claim to by this spectacle, by the cry against unjust persecution that issues from the dangerous memory of this scene, by the astonishing spectacle of greeting hatred with love, of answering persecution not with retribution but with forgiveness. The crucified body of Jesus is a site—one among many—of divine eventiveness, through which there courses a stream of events that traverse our bodies and shock the world under the name of the weakness of God, and we are to make ourselves worthy of this event.

To propose a postmodern theology of the Cross, to meditate the event that transpires in the death of Jesus, is to try to think a certain death of God, the death of the ens supremum et deus omnipotens, the death of the God of power, in order to release the event of the unconditional claim lacking worldly sovereignty that issues from the Cross. I am not satisfied by the death of God announced by Nietzsche, who was too unguardedly in love in with power and hierarchy and struggle, nor even with the beautiful mystical death of God in apophatic theology, which is trying to affirm the still higher being of a hypereminent hyperousios. I would press further to a more pressing and important death, the death of the deus omnipotens of classical theology, and this in order to nourish the life of the event that stirs within the name of God, which is the stuff of our rebirth. The death of the God of power gives birth to what Sallie McFague calls the “body of God,” to God’s suffering body, which rises up in unconditional protest against needless and unjust suffering. Insofar as there is any philosophical life left in this increasingly dated expression, the death of God, it refers to an ongoing and never finished project of deconstructing the God of ontotheologic, which is for me above all the God of sovereign power. I am always interested in loosening up the events that stir within beliefs and practices that have gained too much grip on us, whose prestige threatens to intimidate us, which have grown into big theories and big stories, big deals and big pains, which bring along with themselves a history of intimidation, oppression, and violence. And, God help us, that is certainly true of the name of God. The more some people use the word God the more I find myself praying to God for the death of God, asking God to rid us of God, to cite a very famous mystic. There is surely something to be gained from undertaking a deconstruction of the name of God precisely under the auspices of a “death” of God. To this campaign I make modest annual contributions, just so long as this is understood to be a way of affirming the event that lives within the name of God. For with Deleuze and Saint Paul—and the Bible-thumpers—I too want to be born again, at least once before I die. The work of burning off the old metaphysics of omnipotence, which can never cease, must always be a way to fan the flame or build the fire of the event that transpires in the name of God. Mark Taylor’s famously downbeat description of deconstruction as “a hermeneutic of the death of God” is but a moment in a more upbeat description of the theology of the event as a “hermeneutics of the desire for God.”²²

Indeed, I am happy to countersign the striking improvement Mark Taylor has made over the earlier versions of the death of God to be found years ago in the group that formed around T. J. J. Altizer in the 1960s. Although articulated in Nietzschean terms, Altizer rejected the central sense that the death of God had for Nietzsche, which is to announce the end or withering away of the “ascetic ideal,” of some absolute center or metaphysical foundation. In Altizer the death of God primarily meant that the absolute center had shifted its residence from transcendence to immanence by means of a metaphysics of kenosis, by which the full presence of a transcendent God was transported to the plane of immanence. Altizer merrily danced in the street over the metaphysics of immanent presence, nay, over “total presence,” brought about as the dialectical offspring of “total absence” or negation. Taylor incisively plied apart this and any metaphysical theology, classical or Hegelian, with the stylus tip of deconstruction. At that interment I will certainly be in attendance dressed in my best black. But Taylor’s own “deconstructive a/theology” is for me less an affirmation of the event that stirs within the name of a God than a dissipation of the force of this name under the guise of a dissemination. Taylor’s Erring leads to an affirmation of the world—oui, oui—but in such a way as to leave one wondering if we are not left unclaimed by anything, unresponsible to anything, unsolicited and unprovoked, as if nothing has happened to us, as if there were no events. If it is certainly true that Taylor is not dancing in the streets over the metaphysics of presence, one sometimes wonders if he is not just dancing in the streets, simpliciter. He hardly observes the “/” in his a/theology, the undecidable fluctuation of the event that stirs within the name of God, but allows the theos to dissipate into thin air; it is atheology, not a/theology, decisive death, not undecidability.

My lingering worry is that the death of God theologies are themselves thinly disguised grands récits. They are theologies of history that tell the big story of how we go from the religion of the Father in Judaism, to the religion of the Son in the New Testament, to the religion of the Spirit in modernity (Altizer) or in postmodernity (Taylor), which is the Final Story. Despite the fact that Taylor is telling us deconstruction spells the end of the Book and of History, he does not resist this schema. Indeed he completes or perfects it. When he describes deconstruction as “the hermeneutics of the death of God,” he means that it is the final version of the death of God, the postmetaphysical completion of the story, the decisive way to uproot the metaphysical residue that clings to Altizer’s patently metaphysical version of the death of God. This is quite a Tall Tale to be telling in the name of deconstruction, a story of how consciousness or history traverses from transcendence to immanence, from alienation to homecoming, in which Judaism, as the religion of the Father or of alienation, plays the bad guy. Death of God theologies tend to be Christian theologies—I do not object to that; so is my own “postmodern theology of the Cross”—but ones that present kenosis as a zero-sum game in which the transfer of being is made at the expense of the “religion of the Father” and to the advantage of his local incarnation. God overcomes his alienated condition (= Judaism) in order to pitch his tent right here in Christian Prussia, or Christian Europe, or, let us say, more generally and more generously, the Christian West. Deconstruction, which is much more distrustful of these periodizing and incarnational schemata, has been sent into the world (if I may be so ironic) to break up such illusions²³ and to dispel gospels of economic exchange in the name of the gift.

Nonetheless, I will always want to preserve the work of thinking the death of the God of power, which belongs to the infinite task of the critique of idols. Indeed, by distinguishing between the name and the event, between the name of God and the event that transpires there, I have laid myself open to the possibility that this event, or stream of events, can twist free from this name and that we might then find ourselves out in the desert, in a khoral place of namelessness and the desire for new names. If we release the event that is harbored by the name of God, we might end up having to release that name itself, in the sense of letting it go, letting go of it. The event of solicitation that is issued in the name of God stands on its own, calls and solicits us on its own, whether or not someone named God is the author of that solicitation, in which case the death of the author, which would be here the death of God, is the condition of hearing this solicitation. In the desire for God, it is not God but the event that stirs within that name that is undeconstructible, and it would always be possible for that desire to take other forms, to find other formulations, now or in times to come. So my theology of the event is prepared to concede, if not exactly the death of God,²⁴ at least the mortality or historical contingency of the name of God, the separability in principle of the event from the name, like a spirit leaving a lifeless body behind. For, however precious and prestigious it may be, the name of God remains a historical name and, as such, a contingent formation or unity of meaning. I myself have no inside information to pass along about how well this name will flourish in the future, whether it will live or die, which means how well it will shelter the event with which it is entrusted and by which it is inwardly disturbed.

I have an inner sympathy with Vattimo’s work on more than one count.

Like Vattimo, I am a Catholic and an Italian—well, a weak Italian, a quasi-Italian, a simulacrum of an Italian, an Italian American who does not speak Italian, two generations removed from the ancestral city of Napoli, and no doubt an even weaker Catholic. As such, I share with him a common intellectual culture and a common education in the great medieval metaphysical theologies. Like Vattimo, Jacques Maritain was an early hero for me, and I was from the start suspicious of modernist dogmas. When I first read Being and Time, I thought, here is what I am looking form, a way to critique modernity which is not a narrow-minded antimodern Catholicism but the very latest thing in European phenomenology! Like Vattimo, I feel a common outrage at the pontifical authoritarianism and “fundamentalism”²⁵ of John Paul II and I would be astonished if anything different emerged from Benedict XVI. If the late pope was a lovely man who lent a hand in bringing down the reign of terror in Communist east Europe, he was also an administrator who installed his own form of terror within the Roman Catholic Church. John Paul II virtually extinguished every trace of the notion of the “people of God” that was the hallmark of the Second Vatican Council and thoroughly betrayed the spirit of that great council. He set back the legitimate aspirations of women in the Church a generation, intimidated Catholic scholars and free speech with inquisitorial violence, and left behind a Church in which it is impossible to imagine that its dangerous and reactionary teachings on birth control and homosexuality will be corrected in the foreseeable future. He suppressed open discussion in the Church of the legitimate civil rights of men and women in secular society to decide these and other matters, like abortion rights, without ecclesiastical intimidation. He contradicted the spirit of Jesus, who risked his own life by defying the very authoritarianism practiced in his name by the Vatican. This pope helped align the Church with right-wing and reactionary political causes in Europe and the United States that have shrunk the Christian message to opposition to abortion rights and homosexuality. Jesus took his stand with the poor who are oppressed by the political forces with which the Catholic Church is today aligned.

Like Vattimo, I too first made my way beyond a conventional Catholicism into postmodernism by way of Heidegger, Nietzsche, and Gadamer, although later on Derrida would become my principal ghostwriter. Like him, I have not given up on the word hermeneutics but have tried instead to save or rehabilitate this word in a more postmodern modality, to save the event harbored within this word, which I have practiced by way of a campaign of long standing to defend what I called radical hermeneutics.²⁶ By this I mean a view that takes interpretation to be radically inescapable, which is something all of us have learned from Gadamer, but with the special twist of trying to help hermeneutics itself escape from metaphysics, especially from a version of Hegelian metaphysics by which it seems particularly menaced. If I had convened a conference on the Isle of Capri to talk about religion, I too would have wanted to see both Derrida and Gadamer at the same table. I have long dreamt of setting such a table, for my idea has been for some time now to hold the feet of hermeneutics to the fire of deconstruction. I affirm the inescapability of interpretation less because of Heidegger and more because of the play of différance, a misspelling that spells the end of overarching, ahistorical uninterpreted facts of the matter.

Like Vattimo, I have found a way to reinscribe, or reinvent, or reaffirm, my Christian beginnings within a framework that I do not know how to describe except as a certain Christianity, a Christianity of a certain sort, focused on the image of weakness in the New Testament and the death of Jesus on the Cross. Like his, my Christianity has laid aside the trappings of modernist certitudes and, as Vattimo puts its so perfectly, at best I believe that I believe. Like Vattimo, I am interested in a certain postmodern version of religion and have found it necessary to “weaken” metaphysical objectivism in order to make room for faith. For the effect of the various revolutions that shook twentieth-century philosophy, which we might too hastily summarize under the names of the linguistic turn and the hermeneutic turn, in fact showed the door to reductionism and made it possible for religious discourse and religious faith to be seen once again in public.

Like Vattimo, I too have tried to sing a postmodern theological and slightly Italian love song to the God of love, to the hermeneutics of charity. Above all, I am inclined today to organize everything I think about postmodern thought and about postmodern theology in particular around the figure of weakness, a figure forever associated with Vattimo’s brilliant articulation of what he calls weak thinking (pensiero debole). On an analogy with Vattimo’s weak thought, I speak of a weak theology. Such an expression, which is also to be found in Jeffrey Robbins and the Dominican theologian Ulrich Engel,²⁷ does not refer to intellectual spinelessness but, in the first place, to a weakening of the militant dogmatic tendencies of the confessional theologies, which in modernity fused in a lethal way with the Cartesian paradigm of certitude. As Engel points out, were the great religions of the Book to look to their own teachings about humility and to their traditions of mystical theology, which stressed that the truly divine God is the Godhead that eludes our comprehension, it would give them pause to so militantly pursue their purposes. As with Engel, my hope too is that “a rediscovery of this moment of ‘weak,’ ambiguous theology” could perhaps curb their tendencies to violence.²⁸ But, beyond that, my interest in a weak theology presses past the weakness of thought to the very weakness of God, which I discussed above.

Vattimo undertakes a two-pronged process of weakening. The first process is the weakening of Being, from an objective metaphysical structure into interpretation (“event” in the Heideggerian sense) or, as he sometimes says, into the “world as picture” (Heidegger’s Weltbild). This is described in the Nietzschean language of “nihilism,” which means the historical process in which the objectivistic pretensions of metaphysics, of locating an absolute foundation, have withered or become incredible (or “nothing”), that is, have emptied or weakened and been replaced by “perspectives” or interpretive schemata. The second process is the weakening of God into the world, which is described in the Pauline language of emptying (kenosis), which is paradigmatically expressed in the Christian doctrine of the Incarnation, the birth but also the death of Jesus. Kenosis is not a one-time-only event occurring in the life and death and Jesus but the ongoing history or tradition inaugurated by this event. This process Vattimo calls “secularization,” which means not the abandonment or dissolution of God but the “transcription” of God into time and history (the saeculum),²⁹ thus a successor form of death of God theology.³⁰ The two processes, nihilism and kenosis, are strictly parallel. Nihilism is the emptying of Being into interpretive structure; kenosis is the becoming nothing of God as a transcendent deity. The two processes of weakening, of Being and of God, are the correlates of what Vattimo calls weak thought (pensiero debole). Kenosis, as the transcription, translation, or transmission of God into the world, means establishing the kingdom of God on earth. This is an idea whose political correlate is a nonauthoritarian democracy and whose epistemic correlate is a Gadamerian vision of dialogue and horizon-fusion, where, as Gadamer says, “Being that is understood is language”—and conversation. Weakening then is Vattimo’s more radical version of hermeneutics.

The Christian church should accordingly reconsider its critique of an increasingly secular culture, and, instead of lamenting defeat at the hands of secularization, it should declare victory and march home in triumph. For what else is Western culture than the translation of otherworldly Christianity into terrestrial structures, the conversion of its celestial currency into the coin of the more benign ethical, social, political, and even economic institutions of the Western world? The weakening of Being (Heidegger) has made “Christianity” once again a legible, credible story, one that we can take seriously, and secularization has transcribed that story from unreadable myth into legible history. In secular culture the old religious narratives are published in a new edition, translated into the secular vernacular in an affordable paperback. There they are no longer tales told about transcendent transactions in eternity but stories about the saeculum, the historical time in which real people live. There is thus a “family resemblance” between the weakening of Being and the rebirth of religion, an essential correlation.³¹ With the withering away of metaphysics, which was given ample opportunity to prove its worth and whose only result was an arid and reifying rationality that turned the world and human life into objects for instrumental reason, we are free to return for nourishment to the old religious narratives.

For example, for Vattimo, the commonplace complaint that the secular world has taken the Christ out of Christmas and transcribed it into “Happy Holidays” is to be viewed as still another success on Christianity’s part. For now the Incarnation, a theological doctrine accepted in a strong or robust form only within confessional limits, has been translated into a popular secular holiday in the West, in which the spirit of generosity and goodwill among all people prevails. During the “holidays” this attenuated if wispy “spirit” of love becomes general among humankind, which is what in fact this doctrine actually “means,” its application in the concrete reality of lived experience. The tolerant, nonauthoritarian and pluralistic democratic societies in the West are the translation into real political structures of the Christian doctrine of neighbor love. When the transcendent God is “weakened”—or emptied—into the world, it assumes the living form of Western cultural life. Vattimo shows that this schema, which modernity first learned from Hegel and Schelling, and was deployed by Altizer and the 1960s movement, is found in its earliest form in Joachim of Fiora’s millennialist doctrine of the “three ages,” that of the Father (Judaism), the Son (the New Testament), and the Spirit, which is the unfolding of the Kingdom of God on earth from the year 1000 on. Western history for Vattimo is the Wirkungsgeschichte of a “classic” in the Gadamerian sense, of the New Testament, its unfolding life and application, its developing revelation and realization, translation and transcription.³² But in Vattimo the age of the Spirit is not a version of metaphysics, not the biography of the Absolute in time, as it is in Joachim, Hegel, and Altizer, which is strong thinking, but an interpretive schema, a way to put the realization that we have always to do with conflicting interpretations whose only measure is love without measure.

The task of intellectuals today is therefore twofold. On the hand, they must move beyond the old reductionism and objectivisms of the nineteenth century and take the hermeneutic turn. In such a world the old religious narratives have once again to be taken seriously as irreducible language games or forms of life that uniquely instruct us about the meaning of our lives. On the other, the task of the intellectual is firefighting, that is, to see that while the flame of such religious narratives is kept alive it does not burn out of control. While the stories are to be taken seriously, they are not to be taken literally, which would issue in the worst sort of fundamentalism, the worst hardening of theology into authoritarianism and dogma, as opposed to its weakening into pluralism and hospitality.³³

While I am full of admiration for Vattimo’s bracing and embracing hermeneutics, I have certain reservations that turn on the privilege “Christianity” enjoys in his work, as when he boldly uses the “provocative” expression “the West or Christianity,” which he takes as an inclusive not an exclusive disjunction,³⁴ as if to thwart the way Heidegger tended to see the “West” as “the Greeks” and to treat “Christianity” as a fall from the authentically Greek. It is a generalization of Weber’s thesis that capitalism grows out of the spirit of Protestantism; capitalism and democracy, science and technology are the applied or secularized truth of “Christianity,”³⁵ ways of “achieving our religion,” to adapt the title of a book by Richard Rorty, Vattimo’s recent dialogue companion. What Vattimo and Rorty mean by achieving our country or achieving our religion (Christianity), is realizing the universal ideals that each emblematize. Christianity is to be superseded as a particular sect and taken as a (privileged) stand-in for universal hospitality to the stranger; the United States is to be taken not as a unilateral player in the power games of world politics but as standing for the ideals affirmed in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution. Up to now, Vattimo says, Christianity has been part of the problem, but if it would understand itself correctly it would become the basis of the solution,³⁶ because Christianity means love, and if love, then hospitality and pluralism. My concern is that there is an unguardedness in talk like this, considering that each time different people use these expressions, like “our” country or religion, they mean different countries and different religions. While it is productive to frame things that way in an in-house debate among Americans or among Christians, in order to make sure that the doors of hospitality are held open, it is riskier business to talk this way on a global stage, in the international community, where many countries and religions are in play.

But, beyond the rhetorical limitations, there is a substantive problem: Judaism gets aufgehoben in this expression, absorbed and assimilated into “Christianity,” which is asked to do service for Judaism, asked to remember all the specific contributions of the Jewish in “Christianity,” or in the “Judaeo-Christian,” deploying the famous “hypen” that was the subject of Lyotard’s book. I do not think that Jews will be reassured by this strategy any more than feminists would be reassured by a male philosopher who would assure them that every time he said the “rights of man” he was also including women. Why not either make one’s discourse more complicated or even, in a gesture of strategic reversal, let women or Jews serve as the universal emblem—as in “Athens and Jerusalem”—something that Vattimo could do if he is invoking a broadly biblical tradition, if what he ultimately means is the translation of God into neighbor love. But the problem is substantive, not rhetorical. It lies in Vattimo’s implication that this schema cannot be worked out in a Jewish context, which I think is a mistake. He is a critic of the transcendence of God in Levinas, but he does not observe that in Levinas, every time we attempt to direct our glance to God on high it is “deflected” by God to the face of the neighbor here below. The pragmatic meaning of the transcendence of the tout autre in Levinas is service to the neighbor. Levinas’s Jewish deflection does the work of Vattimo’s Christian kenosis. The very transcendence of God as tout autre of which Vattimo complains is transcribed into neighborly love: it is precisely because the face of God is transcendent that the only form in which you will ever find the face of God is in the face of the neighbor, which is where you should direct all your attention. Indeed, given that Jesus was a Jew attempting to renew Judaism and with no intention of starting a new religion, that is almost certainly what was behind Jesus’s own sayings about neighbor love. But if Vattimo’s privileging of Christianity poses a problems for Jews, it does so a fortiori for Islam, where the question of a simmering religious war is even more acute. For the Arab nations the hyphen in Judeo-Christian is the name of an ominous political alliance between the state of Israel and the United States. At that point, Vattimo’s talk of “Christianity” as the bearer of world hospitality becomes still more questionable—even as it takes a great deal of crust and nose holding to use the words United States as the emblem of international hospitality, when it is in fact the emblem of the wasteful overconsumption of the world’s resources and the hegemonic exercise of national sovereignty.

This bring us back to the problem that I pointed out above with the death of God theologies—and there is a deep family resemblance between Vattimo’s secularization thesis and the death of God theologies. For, however radical they may be, these are theologies with a Christian pedigree that turn on the doctrines of the Trinity and the Incarnation. They tend toward a schema that inevitably casts Judaism in a bad light and hence restages what Derrida calls the “duel between Christian and Jew.”³⁷ From Joachim of Fiora through Hegel, Schelling, and Feuerbach up to the contemporary death of God thinkers, these theologies always plot the transition from transcendence to immanence, from alienation and estrangement to homecoming, from God as a distant and severe Father to God first as Son and sibling and then as the spirit of love. Somebody has to play the bad guy (“the religion of the Father”) in this story, and that is inevitably Judaism.³⁸ The death of God is a grand récit all its own that is complicitous with Hegel’s story about the Jews and a certain quick reading of Saint Paul on the Jews. That is a supersessionist story of the transition from the alienated Old Law of the Pharisees to the benign New Law of love and the gift, from the dead letter of literalism to the living Spirit, from the legalism of slaves to the religion of the children and friends of God, from an eye-for-an-eye economy to the gift, etc. The hint of Marcion is never far from this story, however much it is resisted and revised.

To be reminded of the violence implicit in this schema one need only read Hegel’s Spirit of Christianity, which manages to say the most hateful things about Jews in the course of defining Christianity as the religion of love. Hegel’s metaphysics of the alienated Jews is as much a metaphysics of hate as a metaphysics of love, and it is upon this metaphysics of love/hate that Derrida descends in Glas. That is why, rather than serving as its “hermeneutics,” deconstruction does well to keep a safe distance from the death of God theologies. Deconstruction is something more of a Jewish science, that is, a deconstruction of idols that, while affirming flesh and the body—the Jewish Scriptures are all about land and children—is constantly worried about divine incarnations, because incarnations are always local occurrences. Deconstruction would always worry about a divine kenosis that resulted in filling up someone’s pocket with the transferred goods of divinity. Because the death of God takes place in a particular time and place, in a particular people and language, it raises the problem of privileged theological access and pits those among whom God has pitched his tent against their Jewish predecessors. Jewish alienation is overcome by a kenotic process conceived as a zero-sum economy that empties out the Jewish account and transfers its funds to Christian holdings. So difficult is it for this schema to stay clear of this implication of supersessionism that it even shows up in completely secular, atheistic neo-Marxists like Žižek and Badiou when they start singing the praises of love and grace in Saint Paul over the Law, which is death.

Vattimo criticizes what he variously calls existential, tragic, or apocalyptic Christianity. In this version of Christianity, he says, secular history is devalued as senseless and violent and is seen to require an in-breaking revelation from God as tout autre to redeem it. Such a view of Christianity is inspired by the “Old Testament faith” or a “theology of the first age”³⁹ and “undervalues” Christ’s incarnation; it goes hand in hand with a “Judaic religiosity” that is “affirmed at the expense of any recognition of novelty in the Christian event.”⁴⁰ The very idea of God as “wholly other,” which has played a leading role in the renewed philosophical interest in religion that has come about because of Levinas and Derrida, he says, is an alienated one, estranged from the genuine sense of kenosis according to which God, instead of maintaining his holiness or separation from the world, empties himself into the world. I do agree with Vattimo’s aim of disarming the metaphysics of apocalypticism, the dualism of two worlds, one immanent, lost, and secular, the other in-breaking, salvific, holy, and wholly other. Like him, like all death of God theology generally, I do affirm the one and only world we know, the one that Elohim declared good five times, then adding, for good measure, “very good.” But I want to preserve the salvific effects of distance, of the shock or trauma of an “unconditional claim” that disrupts the human-all-too-human course of the “world.” I want to preserve not the metaphysics of apocalypticism but the ethicoreligious sense or schema of the event. For the event is not what happens but what is going on in what happens that makes it restless with the future. Thus instead of opposing two worlds, or of opposing God and the world as if these were two realms of being, I distinguish between the world and the event by which the world is disturbed, the unconditional claim that solicits the world from within, that interrupts and summons it, which is what I think deconstruction is (if it is). I do not distinguish two different worlds but two different logics, the logic of the mundane constituted economies and the logic of the event that disturbs them, and I see in Jesus of Nazareth an exemplary embodiment of the logic or paralogic of the gift, who told paradoxical parables about and who was himself a parable of the kingdom of God, which he opposed to the economy of the “world.” The event that transpired in Jesus knocked Paul from his horse and delivered a shock to the world. And if I do not pit a supersensible world against a sensible one, neither do I pit Jesus against Judaism. On the contrary, on this point Jesus could not be more Jewish; he does everything he does in the name not of Judaism’s supersession but a renewal of the living doctrine (Torah) of neighbor love, which is also found in Levinas’s notion of deflection and still more inclusively in Derrida’s tout autre est tout autre.

That is why I cast the theology of the event in terms of a structural analysis of the distinction between the name and the event, or the thing and the event, or between the pure messianic and the concrete messianisms. I do not cast my views in terms of the death of God, or even in terms of the secularization thesis, and I keep a safe distance from the historical periodization in which these theologies are caught up. I object to them on two grounds. First of all, I do not see how it is possible to decontaminate these schemata from supersessionist theories that cast Judaism as a religion of the father and hence as theater of alienation and cruelty, even if one’s personal intentions are certainly not antisemitic.⁴¹ Second, they tend to become grand narratives, overarching a priori histories that are selling us another metaphysical bill of goods under the name of demythologization. That is why they suffer embarrassment and consternation under the hand of the empirical facts, of the course that history actually takes. The suggestion that traditional orthodox faith in God is somehow on the wane in the United States, which hit the streets in the 1960s as both a sociological and theological thesis, could only be made today by someone who has been in deep coma for the last quarter of a century. I dare say that faith in the supernatural, angels, a six-thousand-year-old world fashioned in six days, and a human race descended from two parentless and naked people in a garden somewhere in ancient Mesopotamia who were tricked by a snake into eating a piece of forbidden fruit has never been as lively as it is today.

My own version of weak theology is the offspring of a spectral hermeneutics, of what I have been calling for some time now radical hermeneutics, as distinct from Vattimo’s, in whom I do find, I repeat, a kindred spirit. If in my weak theology everything turns on the distinction between the name and event, the hesitations I feel about Vattimo center around how “strong” the names of Christianity and the Incarnation remain in his thought, where such strength comes at the cost of the event, whose most important effect is to weaken any such names. Accordingly, I wonder if Vattimo’s weak thinking is too strong and if his version of radical hermeneutics, because it has not truly eradicated this strength, is not sufficiently hauntological—and radical.

When all is said and done, my hesitation about Vattimo is that there is no counterpart in his work to what Derrida calls khora. This is the figure that Derrida borrows from Plato’s Timaeus, although it is also linked by Derrida to the figure of a desert, of an archi-desert within the biblical desert, to emblematize the elemental spacing in which all our natural languages and historical institutions are inscribed. The effect of this figure in Derrida is to underline the sense of the contingency and deconstructibility—the weakness—of the names that are inscribed in this desert space and hence the deep and intractable secret in which our lives are inscribed. But khora is also used by Derrida affirmatively, as the quasi condition of the im/possibility of prayer, as a way to describe a scene of messianic hope in the coming of someone, of a Messiah whose figure I cannot describe and hence a scene of desert prayers and tears and of desert hospitality. Since Vattimo has no counterpart to khora, the figures of the Christian Incarnation and more generally of incarnation itself go unchecked. Christianity is made the privileged figure of love and hospitality, which are made out to be distinctively Christian notions, a gesture that corresponds quite directly to the idea of a final revelation in Tillich. For all of Tillich’s talk of the symbolic character of our language about God, his theory—like Gadamer’s and Vattimo’s—is situated within a Hegelian view of history as the transcription, transmission, and translation of a more robust and holy Spirit. But, for me, events are inscribed in the weaker, more ghostly play of différance. Events are haunted by a paler ghost in a more hauntological hermeneutics.

In a similar way, Vattimo’s hermeneutics is less a weak hermeneutics of prayers and tears for some coming figure whose lines I cannot make out and more a robust hermeneutics of the application, realization, and translation into the secular world of the already given and authoritative figure of the Christian Incarnation. In my notion of a weak theology such an authoritative figure is far too strong. In the end, Vattimo offers us a hermeneutics of “application” in the Gadamerian mode, where the hermeneutic task is a matter of the application of an authoritative figure or “classic.” I am concerned that Vattimo’s hermeneutics is another example of something I have worried about in the past: when hermeneutics is too closely aligned with Gadamer, it comes under the spell of Hegel and of some version of the metaphysical siren song that history is the way the absolute works itself out.⁴² Does that not here take the form of the thesis that Christianity is a classic truth that needs an updated application in the postmodern or secularized order?

But should it not be the work of weak thinking to weaken the force of such metaphysical tendencies, including the metaphysical distinction between an inexhaustible classic and its current application? When weak thinking works its way into its own story, when it finds a big story in which to tell a tall tale about the passage from strong metaphysical thinking to weak, from an alienated God to an incarnate God here on earth, and from orthodox Christian dogma to the contemporary secularized truth of Christianity in the postmodern world, then weak thinking has grown a little too strong. It is guided by a too authoritative and particular figure of truth and it proceeds on the basis of too strong an idea of truth as a classic that must find its contemporary realization.