Hegel and the Infinite: Religion, Politics, and Dialectic

Orthodox Christianity offers a formula for triumph over death but the purchase price is high, the theory of two worlds: one here below, the other up above; the one up front, the other behind the scenes; the one in time, the other in eternity. By “radical theology” I mean among other things a theology that has been bold enough to pull up this venerable root and to treat it as so much alienation or self-estrangement, to take it as a kind of modified gnosticism. The two worlds theory is the basis of supernaturalism and superstition, of magic and thaumaturgy, in which we are called upon to enter into mysterious commerce with an otherworldly being in order to stay in his good graces. Radical theology has other advice to offer, like saying that death is part of the rhythm of things, albeit a divine rhythm. That uprooting of theology and subsequent transplanting onto more worldly soil got its most prestigious and powerful boost from Hegel, whose speculative tour de force left nothing afterward unchanged. But inasmuch as Hegel started something (radical theology) he did not quite finish, my tribute to Hegel will be perverse. I will treat him as a hero of “perversatility,” by which I mean his success in introducing a felicitous and productive perversion—or if you prefer a “paradigm shift”—into the very nature of the absolute (if there is one), one that left Kierkegaard crying out for relief. In so doing, he opened the door for a radical theology and, as I hope to sketch here, for a new vision in political theology. I thus propose, in this very contrarian and perversatile spirit, to seek out the “perverse core” of Hegel and indeed of the absolute itself, to borrow the phrase Slavoj Žižek used of Christianity.¹ This will mean following Hegel where he did not mean to lead, marching to a drum he did not quite beat, taking up a cause he did not quite advocate, and so to pursue Hegelian perversatility to its felicitous end. I propose, as Heidegger would have said, that we “repeat” Hegel, repeat not what Hegel actually said, which has already been said by Hegel, but repeat the possible in Hegel, the possibilities Hegel opened up for us, repeating what is unfinished and still becoming in what Hegel said about becoming, repeating him, to be sure, in what is hopefully a perversely productive way, in the likeness of his own prodigious perversatility.

I treat Hegel as the springboard to radical theology precisely because he proposes a way to continue to think theologically even after laying to rest the metaphysics and metaphorics of the two worlds, which then as today might have been mistaken for the very essence of theology, but is in fact an elemental figure of a pre-Copernican imagination and of mythological thinking. Like Hegel and Heidegger, like Nietzsche and like Levinas, I have lost my patience with the “world behind the scenes” of mythology and classical metaphysics. Hegel thinks theologically by taking the world as a horizon and by thinking God in the world, thereby radicalizing the Christian doctrine of Incarnation. But let me say at the start that the relationship of God to the world defended by Hegel himself—that of being-in-itself externalizing or expressing itself in being-for-itself and returning home in the spirit as being-in-and-for-itself—is for me a no less extravagant flower in the garden of metaphysics. It will be replaced in these remarks by the relationship of the “event” to the “world,” which is a more descriptive way to look at things. Very simply put, the event is not what happens but what is going on in what happens, while the world is everything that happens. The event is what is astir in the world, the root (as in “radical”) of the restlessness and impatience of the world with what happens, with its present configurations. A radical theology is a theology of the root, of the event. In this view the world—what is being called in this volume the “secular” order—arises as a provisional and imperfect solution, a kind of makeshift, to a problem posed to it by the name of God, or rather by the event that is stirring in the name of God, as a temporary configuration patched together under the impact of a kind of divine eventiveness. The world, I hope to show, is everywhere marked by patches of the “sacred” and the “holy,” which are streaks and traces of divine events. That is why it makes no more sense to oppose the “secular” to the “sacred” or to the “holy” than to oppose a question to its answer or a problem to its solution.

My aim is thus to embrace this figure of perversity as a way to reconfigure the relationship of the secular order to the sacred and the holy and to suggest a new constellation, to introduce another figure or framework, a more chiasmic one in which the two intertwine, interact, interbreed so closely that it is misleading to speak of “two.” In this new configuration certain restless forces, certain impatient powers and potentialities, seek expression, and this expression is called the world (the secular order). The world trembles with possibilities, is rocked by immemorial memories, grieves and rejoices in forces still unformed, giving form and expression to such forces only to become in turn undone and to stand in need of further reform, of still new forms, of realizing still more hidden potentialities which give it life in the first place. Such possibilities are the stuff politics and ethics are made of, they being arts of the possible or, more precisely, of the possibility of the impossible. On this view the world is made to tremble by certain divine forces or intensities, certain events harbored in the name of God, which beat like the heart of a heartless world.² Thus it would make no sense to speak of keeping such forces out of politics—for that would be to keep our dreams of peace and justice out of politics—although it will be of the utmost importance to rethink and reconceive the “divine” and the “theological,” not to mention the political. I treat these events or forces as a new post-Hegelian version, or perversion, of the absolute, whose perversity is such that the absolute is not exactly absolute but pure, where what is pure is not exactly being but becoming, where what is becoming, pure and simple, is the world, and the world is not simply what happens but what is inwardly disturbed by the event that is going on in what happens.

On this post-Hegelian accounting theology belongs to the world as an ingredient in and constitutive of our cultural imagination, which means of the world’s imagination. Theology dreams the dreams of the gods, dreams hitherto undreamt, hopes against hope for what is coming, even as it remembers the dead who shall not have died in vain. Such dreams are the stuff of the Hegelian triumvirate of “Religion, Art, and Philosophy,” the core of the life of the absolute Spirit. But on my telling, a theological imagination is as much a part of culture as is artistic or conceptual imagination, with which it is inextricably related. So I propose to pervert this Hegelian schema by reproducing it without the hegemony and the hierarchy exercised by the metaphysical Concept (Begriff) or absolute knowledge (by which it itself is perverted). I take religion, art, and philosophy as three forms of a pluriform imaginative life—not so much a Vorstellung as a Darstellung, a presentation or exhibition of inner forces—giving multiple forms and shapes to a restlessness within the world, within ourselves, and within the things themselves. If there is any “concept” at all, it is that of the event, where the concept does not “grasp” anything but points, like a finger pointing to the moon, making for a concept of an inconceivable excess of things that it indicates but does not conceive. I number theology among the several discourses—and there are more than three—that suspect an inner restlessness in things and feel called upon to give it voice.

In borrowing the trope of perversity from the subtitle of Slavoj Žižek’s The Puppet and the Dwarf, I want to draw attention to the provocative ambiguity by which it is beset. Does Žižek mean that the “perverse core of Christianity” lies in the way that Christianity, while supposed to give us the freedom of the children of God, the new being, the life of grace which liberates us from the law, is actually perversely reinscribed within the economy of sacrifice and death, where the infinite debt of sin gets paid off by Christ’s sacrificial death? This perversity of Christianity would then mean, as Žižek says, that God’s “‘free’ gift is aimed at putting you in a position of permanent debt.”³ While that may seem to be its most likely meaning, the “perverse core” really lies in exactly the opposite direction—now that sounds like Žižek!—that the death of Jesus on the cross is the death of God, the last gasp of that transcendent and separate being whom we can count on to keep general watch over mundane affairs here below and to bail us out when the going gets rough. Christianity thus turns out to be like psychoanalysis:

Contrary to all appearances, this is what happens in psychoanalysis: the treatment is over when the patient accepts the nonexistence of the big Other. The ideal addressee of our speech, the ideal listener, is the psychoanalyst, the very opposite of the Master-figure that guarantees meaning … the patient accepts the absence of such a guarantee.⁴

And further, contrary to all appearances, that is also the “very core of Christianity,” a Christianity for which “My God, my God, why have you forsaken me?” (Matthew 27:46) has become the watchword:

The “Holy Spirit” is the community deprived of its support in the big Other. The point of Christianity as the religion of atheism is not the vulgar humanist one that the becoming-man-of-God reveals that man is the secret of God (Feuerbach et al.); rather, it attacks the religious hard core that survives even in humanism, even up to Stalinism, with its belief in History as the “big Other” that decides on the “objective meaning” of our deeds…. That is the ultimate heroic gesture that awaits Christianity: in order to save its treasure, it has to sacrifice itself—like Christ, who had to die so that Christianity could emerge.⁵

If Christianity is the beginning of the end of the big Other, and if this was recognized first by Hegel and the young Hegelians’ critique of religion, psychoanalysis is its consummatum est. I cannot resist pointing out that in Erring: An A/theology Mark C. Taylor made pretty much the same argument on behalf of deconstruction,⁶ when he said that “deconstruction is the ‘hermeneutic’ of the death of God.” For by deconstructing the “transcendental signified,” it has deconstructed not only the old God but any big contenders for the place vacated by the old God—Subject or Object, History or the Book, Structuralism or Humanism, Science or Psychoanalysis (as a strong version of the big all-knowing Listener). The name of God here is the name of anything that pretends to provide abiding and centered presence, which is the “theological gesture” par excellence. In deconstruction, or in psychoanalysis (à la Žižek), “Man” is not the secret of God. The secret is, to paraphrase Derrida, there is no Secret, no big Other who has the Secret.⁷ Deconstruction is the deconstruction of the theological “place,” the very place of the big Other, of the very taking place of theology. On this point, whatever his rhetorical sallies, Žižek is serving up vintage deconstruction.

The perverse core of Christianity is thus to be the perversion of a perversion. But we should resist concluding that this sets things straight—since the “straight,” the orthe in orthodoxy, is tied up with the two worlds theory. It is better to say that this sends this perversity off in a more productive and inventive direction, like a productive misreading, a fertile and seminal heresy. The death of God is the death of death (of the big Other), where a perversion means that the native forces and energies of a thing are turned against itself, are alienated and become destructive, so that what is meant to liberate binds us up, what is meant to empower enervates us. But to pervert a perversity it is not a matter of a simple negation, where the negation of a negation returns us to an affirmation, for dialectics, too, is a distortion of the event, an attempt to repress and rule the event. Perversatility requires that we reinhabit and redescribe and redirect the perversity to reform it from within in order to release its elemental forces, its anarchic energies, its chaosmic tendencies. The perversion of a perversion requires working through it, reinterpreting it, “repeating” it so that what has all been recorded in the register of death and repression may now be replayed, repossessed, reenacted in the register of life, of free play, of the gift, of the grace of the event. I endorse Žižek’s insistence that with “Christianity” nothing is finished, that nothing more than a transition will have been marked, because the future stretches before us as a task to be achieved in which we bear the responsibility to fill up what is lacking in the body of God. That is the basis of a productive theo-politics, in my view. This means that the messianic postures of Judaism and Christianity are different but overlapping. In Judaism, we are called upon to expect and make ready for the Messianic age. In Christianity, the Messiah has already come, but that means that we ourselves are called to carry out the messianic event, to bring it to completion, to occupy the messianic position, and to make ready a second coming, where everything turns on what is coming. That represents a very powerful perversion of the messianic event, which might be compared to the one that has been marked off by Benjamin’s reversal of the messianic age—where we are the ones in the messianic position, the ones the dead have been waiting for to remedy the evil that has been done to them.

The perversity introduced by Christianity is, as Žižek says, that God has entered into his own creation so as to expose himself to all its contingencies and vagaries. But if that is so, then in what sense is this absolute still an absolute? In what sense is God still God? In one sense, in more than one sense, it is not, which is why Spinoza was attacked as an atheist. That is the “radical” in radical theology, the perversity of it all, and what I am calling here the perversity of the absolute. The absolute is not the absolutely transcendent and sovereign being of classical theology, nor is it the deeper law of nature (Spinoza), nor the ground of being in Tillich’s theology of culture, which steers all things wisely and mightily, albeit immanently and mediately, into a good dialectical outcome. The absolute is neither Absolute Transcendence nor Absolute Transcendence-in-Immanence, neither a supreme being nor Being In and For Itself, nor Being as the ground of beings. Nor is it “beyond” or “without” being in the sense of mystical theology, for the hyper in hyperousios is another more resourceful attempt to preserve the transcendence of the absolute, although its felicitous tropes and gestures elicit widespread admiration and awaken another possibility that I am not exploring here.

The difficulty with all these versions of the metaphysics of the absolute is that they take the absolute to be a strong force not a weak one. That perversion of strength into weakness, the perversatility of the weakness of God which is greater than the strength of the world, is a crucial motif for me, the motif of the cross itself, the very perversity of the cross. On my accounting—and I would like to see this as a long-range effect or by-product of Hegel—the great perversity of classical theology is to treat God as an effective force, either an actual and entitative power, as in the deus omnipotens of classical creation theology, or as an ontologically effective force, as in Spinoza’s natura naturans and in Hegel and Tillich, which exercises its power mediately in the world. In classical theism, God is the supremely powerful and transcendent creator of heaven and earth, where the main thing that baffles us about a being so powerful, wise, and beneficent is how the world God made could have turned out so badly for so many. Hegel took the revolutionary step of divesting this supreme entity of its separate transcendence and harnessed all this power to driving the forces of history and culture. God is not a supreme and separate actuality, not actually absolute, but an absolute becoming or becoming absolute, a process unfolding not only in history, a figure that still preserves the transcendence implied by the figure of “incarnation,” but more important as history, in and as history itself. God is the becoming absolute of the absolute, the actualization of the absolute, through the laws of its dialectical unfolding. But the proximity of Hegel to classical theism shows up in the way that Hegel is exposed to exactly the same objection as classical theism, for how could history as the becoming absolute of the absolute have run such a bloody course? What sort of perversity is it, what sort of blasphemy or obscenity against life is it, to say that the absolute mounts its progress on the bodies of the dead, that many an innocent flower is trampled along the way of the absolute’s itinerary? As Lyotard has shown, there is no excuse today for even asking what divine wisdom was served by such merciless slaughters.⁸ It was to Tillich’s credit that he saw this as a problem and for that reason had recourse to Schelling’s Ungrund, which at least allows him to inscribe a certain undecidability in the absolute in virtue of which it can occasionally go over to the dark side, not to another place, but to its own dark side, the underside of its own nature.

In any version of this metaphysics of the absolute, the assumption is that God is an effective force which influences the flow of things on earth—either a direct, supernatural, or magical force, as in classical theism, or an indirect and mediated one immersed in nature and history, over whose actualization God exercises effective force, as in Hegel and Tillich. But suppose this assumption is questioned, suppose this perverse power of metaphysical theology is perverted? Suppose there is a flow of time and expanse of space over which God exerts no effective force or power, whether as a supreme being or being itself? Suppose God is not an actual power but a “weak” force? Suppose the only power of God is the power of powerlessness, because God, or the event that transpires in this name, belongs to another order than the order of actual or effective power? Suppose God does not belong to the order of effective power at all, neither transcendent nor immanent, but to another order, that of the event, as a kind of teeming of the event, or boiling of the virtual? Suppose perversely that God is a certain play of virtualities, whose actual effects, outcomes, instantiations, or actualizations form a complex of time, chance, and circumstance, for better and for worse, issuing in irregular and unpredictable combinations of human malice and benignity, natural abundance and scarcity, in times and places good and bad, in ecstasies both joyous and horrifying, in circumstances that constrict and strangle no less than in ones that liberate and open up? Suppose that God makes both his rain and his sun to shine on both the righteous and the unrighteous? Suppose that God is a kind of infinite reservoir of virtualities seeking actualization?

I am in part drawing upon the framework proposed by Deleuze’s philosophy of the event to imagine God, but not uncritically. The limitation of Deleuze is the limits of his imagination when it comes to God, whose escape from classical theology he rarely plots. For the most part the name of God for Deleuze represents the rule of identity over difference, of hierarchy over freedom, of necessity over chance, of what he calls the “analogy of being,” where all things are proportioned and distributed according to the standards and measure set by God. So when Deleuze marks off a “fixed” distribution, where each thing has a predefined place to which it is assigned, once and for all, where individuals are monitored so that Being is distributed across them according to the rule of “categories” and “sedentary proportionality,”⁹ he decides to call that an orderly and a “divine” distribution. This is distinguished from nomadic distribution which happens across borders, in open space, in an errant or delirious distribution, which he calls “demonic” because it operates in the intervals between the fields marked off by the gods, upsetting their sedentary structures, producing a “crowned anarchy.”¹⁰

While I support and understand the strategic value of these designations vis-à-vis the old onto-theologic, it is long overdue to ask whether there is not another view of the divine. Is not Deleuze criticizing a very literal reproduction of the old theology rather than its genuine theological repetition? For example, is this not a very shortsighted view of the distribution of bodies in the New Testament, which is marked precisely by upsetting such sedentary structures, overthrowing its temple tables, violating its rules of ritual purity and separation, trafficking among the lame and lepers, the prostitutes and the poor, and by feasts where the outsiders are in and the insiders are out? Is this not a very shortsighted view to take of the prophets of the Jewish Scriptures, dressed in sackcloth, railing against the powers that be, who end up losing their life for their troubles? Is there no way to think the name of God as associated precisely with the unequal, different, impure, the disturbing and anarchical? Might not the royalty of God be a crowned anarchy? Might there not be a divine disturbance, a precious perversity, let us say a “sacred anarchy” that is a counterpart to this crowned anarchy?¹¹ What is more perverse than the reversals and paradoxes that the figure of Jesus puts into effect in the order of temple authority? The same point may be made in reference to the early use of the word “theology” in Derrida, for whom the “book” exercises the “encyclopedic protection of theology and logocentrism against the disruption of writing, against its aphoristic energy, and, as I shall specify later, against difference in general.”¹² But what if everything about the name of God were to suggest that this name belongs precisely on the side of aphoristic energies and difference, of what disrupts encyclopedic projects? Then theology would go on, this time reinscribed within difference.

To be sure, there are times when Deleuze himself recognizes this—as does Derrida later on—moments when he says that what is actual is like the solution to a problem whereas problems are of the order of the event, which function “like the dreams of the gods,” singular points of virtuality distributed throughout real things. Events are the dreams of the gods that the world wants to make come true. The world is a game of divine dice,¹³ of the chance of grace, of the grace of a chance. That is to associate God not with the actual but the virtual, not with order but with chance, not with what is finished or finalized but what is still to come, not with what is but with what is coming or becoming, which is why Deleuze thinks that even the “dissolved”—or fragmented—“self still sings the glory of God.”¹⁴ At these moments, it has to be said, Deleuze is thinking with Nietzsche of the Greek gods, the “pagan” gods, of what we can call the “sacred,” but without Levinas’s sneer. We in turn are duty bound to recover what Levinas obscures, that the Jewish and Christian Scriptures are packed with praise for the glory of the world that God has created—the imagery of Jesus in speaking of the kingdom of God is drawn almost completely from the natural world—even as they do indeed highlight what Levinas, breathing easier now, calls the “holy,” the face of the neighbor and the stranger. But there is no need to choose among the multiple play of divine effects, to choose between the sacred and the holy, for both the lilies of the field and the widow and the orphan bear the glory of the Lord, both instantiate, actualize, embody the events that stir in the name of God. Deleuze’s logic of sense is thus implicitly a theo-logic of the event without being an onto-theology. It is a logic of divine events, of the “sense” of God, but not of some supreme and powerful entity or underlying being. The world is a set of provisional solutions to the question put to it by the name of God, by the singularities that circulate, combine, and recombine in unforeseeable ways in the name of God. Such divine events are the salt that gives taste to the food of the world, the yeast that leavens the bread of the world, the “absolute” that is astir in the multiple forms of “Spirit.” That is why there ought to be no war, no contest, between the “sacred” and the “secular,” between the events that stir within the name of God and the multiform and plurivocal world that rises up in response to a divine provocation. That is why, as I will point out below, it is not a question of keeping theology out of politics but of rethinking the radical theology that drives a more radical politics.

In this theology more radically conceived, the name of God harbors an infinite reservoir of virtualities, like a great divine gathering place or khora. It proceeds on the assumption that the name of God is a signal of a vast depository of every actuality gone by, of the potentiality to which they return, of an infinite sea or endless ensemble of potentialities from which things arise and in return to which all things actual come and go in a great cosmic inhalation and exhalation, like the rising and sinking of a huge divine breast. The name of God is a marker of the uncontainable, irrepressible excess things contain, or cannot quite contain, like a buoy on the surface of the water alerting us to a dangerous swirl below.

The perversity of Hegel’s rereading of Christian theology as the death of God, and as the death of this death, and hence his radical perversion of the figure of Incarnation—which sent Kierkegaard into spasms—opens the door to radical theology today.¹⁵ The grievances Kierkegaard brought against Hegel opens the divide between the Neo-Orthodoxy of Barth and the correlational theology of Tillich, who is the grandfather of radical theology. Hegel launched the task of thinking God without God. He perverted the vertical and separate transcendence of a being presiding over this world from his station in another, higher one behind the scenes. Hegel launched the project of the radicalization of the Incarnation and of the theme of “God with us,” proposing to take it all the way to the end, which means to bring it back into this world. He proposed thinking God reconciled with the worlding of the world, with the pain and death that is woven into the world, reconciling God with time and history and culture. When he said that the absolute is both subject and substance,¹⁶ he was acknowledging his antecedents in this risky business—Spinoza, on the one hand, whose famous deus sive natura had boldly charted a part of the path Hegel was following, and Fichte, on the other hand. He was saying that the world is the body of the absolute, its embodiment and palpability, even as the absolute is the inner subjective and spiritual life of the world. Hegel’s limitation was to do all this while remaining in the thralls of metaphysics—the metaphysics of substance and subject, as well as a metaphysics of history over which the absolute presided as its immanent teleological force. The perverse core of Hegel lay in being a liminal figure, the lining surface that on one side is the absolute consummation of metaphysics, where metaphysics tries to contain the uncontainable force of the event, while on the other side simultaneously showing the way out of such perversity.

It is clear that the perversion launched by Hegel is incomplete and that it needs to be pushed beyond itself, that the perversatility of Hegel has not yet been fully tapped. We are in search of another Hegel, a perverse core in Hegel, beyond the Hegel who thinks the Absolute makes its cunning way by subtly steering the passions of human beings who are but bearers of its absolute force. Žižek has recently offered another way to look at Hegel, elaborating the proposals made in The Puppet and the Dwarf, which deserves our attention. Žižek wants us to treat the orthodox Hegel as a cliché about Hegel and proposes a more productive perversion of Hegel’s “Spirit.” Žižek follows the standard reading of Hegel that the Incarnation is the death of God as Father, as a separate and transcendent being, and that the Crucifixion is the death of the Son, the break up of the empirical being of Jesus in order to make way for the coming of the Spirit. But the new twist he introduces is to revise our understanding of the Spirit. The last words on the Cross, “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?” represent the expiration not only of the orthodox version of Spirit in Nicene Christianity but of the standard reading of Hegel, where the Spirit is the transcendence-in-immanence of the Absolute that makes use of individuals and their passions:

The point this reading misses is the ultimate lesson to be learned from the divine Incarnation: the finite existence of mortal humans is the only site of the Spirit, the site where Spirit achieves its actuality…. Spirit is a virtual entity in the sense that its status is that of a subjective presupposition: it exists only insofar as subjects act as if it exists. Its status is similar to that of an ideological cause like Communism or Nation: it is the substance of the individuals who recognize themselves in it, the ground of their entire existence, the point of reference which provides the ultimate horizon of meaning to their lives, something for which these individuals are ready to give their lives, yet the only thing that really exists are these individuals and their activity, so this substance is actual only insofar as individuals believe in it and act accordingly. The crucial mistake to be avoided is therefore to grasp the Hegelian Spirit as a kind of meta-Subject, a Mind, much larger than an individual human mind, aware of itself: once we do this, Hegel has to appear as a ridiculous spiritualist obscurantist, claiming that there is a kind of mega-Spirit controlling our history…. This holds especially for the Holy Spirit: our awareness, the (self)consciousness of finite humans, is its only actual site … although God is the substance of our (human) entire being, he is impotent without us, he acts only in and through us, he is posited through our activity as its presupposition.¹⁷

By claiming that the Spirit is a virtual entity, and by recognizing the impotence of God as an actual entity, Žižek comes very close to the view I am here advancing and have advanced in The Weakness of God, but with one important difference. Žižek’s view of “virtuality” is too much turned to the subject and its belief systems and not enough turned to the event itself. The virtuality of the event is expressed in subjective beliefs even as it is actualized in things, but it is not reducible to subjective beliefs. Subjective beliefs arise in response to events, give words to events, and are translated into deeds and institutions by believing subjects. They are responses to the events that precede them, not simply sustained in the thin air of subjectivity itself by the subject’s ability to suspend its disbelief in a fictive “as if.”

To put my concern in Hegelian terms, we might say that Žižek fails to do justice to the claims of the virtualities of “substance,” for the event is no less instantiated in things (substance) than it is expressed by the names that galvanize the beliefs of the subject. From Hegel’s point of view, Žižek’s view of virtuality is one-sided. The name of God, or of the Spirit of God, arises as a response to events; it gives words to powers that overtake the subject, that lay claim to it. If the “Spirit” is the name of a “subjective presupposition,” that is only because it is first of all the name of something that prepossesses the subject and calls it forth, something by which the subject is constituted in the first place. The virtuality of the event is felt in both the beliefs of subjects and the energies of things, and it shows up in both names and things. The virtual includes not only what is named by our names but what is worlding in the world, the thinging-of-the-thing in Heidegger’s play on Be-ding-ung. The virtual is both substance and subject, realized in things and named by subjects.

But to be more precise, or more perverse, the perverse core of Hegel is to conceive a world in which the absolute would be neither substance nor subject, or in which “substance” and “subject” would only be provisional nominal effects, standins for more nameless and boundless virtualities, for virtualities still unnamed. By the same token, history would be a radically immanent movement without the steadying hand of teleology at its wheel. That is what it means to say there is no big Other. Hegel relocated the absolute, but he himself left its classical attributes in place. But what if—and this is the perversatility of Hegel—history is really history, really has the teeth and eventiveness of history, only as a radically a-telic and contingent process, where its outcome or Resultat is radically unforeseeable, where there is no one identifiable and overarching result but only so many fortuitous effects? What if instead of a teleological movement history is marked by the vagaries of change, the fortuitousness of little graces, and fortunes variously good or bad? What if events are not contained by a telos guaranteeing their direction and good outcome? What if the event is but a promise that provokes us and stirs our heart, or a memory of the dead that haunts us? What if instead of teleology there is only or at most the promise still unkept lodged in events still unsaid? What if substance and subject are nothing more than a certain shorthand we have devised for the play of events? What if, instead of the absolute steering all, we are thrown back on ourselves, made radically responsible for responding to the address that comes to us from events? If it is events that call, it is we who are made responsible. Hegel argued that nothing in the realm of ideas, of the concept, or meaning, nothing even about God himself, can be a real and effective actuality unless it becomes what it is in space and time. But the becoming effective of the absolute is our responsibility, just as Paul said that it is we who are expected to fill up what is lacking in the body of Christ (Colossians 1:24).

What if the absolute were not a matter of a logos at all, of a wisdom and a power that steers things wisely and well to their appointed telos, but a kind of a-logical “sense” that we can call the “intensity” of existence? What if the force that is harbored by the word “divine” is not “providence” or “omniscience” but excitation, exaltation, exultation, rejoicing in the moments when the flow is intensified, concentrated, when it shines bright with the splendor of becoming, when it resonates with the clamor of becoming? What if existence were a matter of awakening to the flow within, sensitizing ourselves to its impulses, rejoicing in its joys, suffering with its sorrows? What if the “absolute” is found not in treating all suffering as for the better, as belonging to a deeper divine calculation and foreknowledge that sees it all to a happy conclusion? What if, instead, suffering were a sigh from the depths of becoming, the intensity of a divine sigh, a divine lamentation, that asks everything of us, that demands our response, our redress? What if it is the divine becoming itself that suffers and that asks not to be abandoned? The perversatile result would be not that it is God who brings relief but that it is we who are asked to relieve the suffering of God, to answer the divine lamentation, to hold out a hand to those who are laid low by the shifting tides of becoming.

What if the name of God is not the name of the telos, logos, and nomos that hover protectively over becoming, but of events astir within becoming itself that leave their trace in the absolute intensities of becoming? Life is not justified because there is some divine watchman overseeing it from afar in a distant heaven, nor even, as in Hegel himself, when this watchman or logos is restationed within becoming itself. Life is justified by life itself. If you ask life, why do you live, Meister Eckhart said, it would answer, “I live because I live.”¹⁸ Life is justified by the intensities of life, by movements of intense joy or compassion, by movements of authentic intensity, by the intensity of the most quotidian events, by events both sacred and holy, by the event of intensity, which is life itself. Then everything is redeemed—which is not to say that it was ever fallen or lost—by being made into an affirmation, even though we suffer daily from a sea of troubles and outrageous fortune. The world is not fallen, but the world is a challenge, a task; the world is not lost, but it is risky business.

Events are not philosophical objects that suffer from the lack of a philosophical logos that works like a rule to stabilize them or a key to unlock their secret, even as life is not a game in which we are asked to guess the secret word. Life is an incomparable and unencompassable flow in which we are swept up that offers us the occasional chance of intermittent grace, the passing opening of momentary glory, moments that give life its passion, its intensity. It is not a matter of the rationalization or the justification of events but of their intensification, not of finding the logos of becoming but of undergoing its pathos, its passion, the passion of existence. Life is a flow by which we are carried and the passion of life is the passion of the flow. Our passion is to awaken to and feel life’s pulse, our task is to let life pass through our bodies so that we tremble with joy, even as it is no less our task to reach out to those whom life has laid low. We are called upon to let the sparks of becoming fly up in all their unpredictable and immeasurable chance, to let the dance of becoming, the grace of life flow freely. Without turning life into a preexistent and autonomous force of which individuals are merely bearers—that is exactly why Levinas thought that Bergson is a “pantheist”¹⁹—it is still true that life passes through our bodies and minds, our hearts and souls, with all the force of a wind-swept beach, with all the lightness and grace of a gentle breeze.

Hegel labored under the classical metaphysical assumption that becoming is a process to be interpreted, not a process to be intensified, magnified, and made more elastic and electric. By reinscribing God in the world, Hegel sent theology down a radical path. But the perverse core of Hegel is that, by saying that the absolute is the substance and the subject of the world, Hegel opened the door to seeing God as the body and the soul of the world. To say the world is made in the image of God means the world is God’s body or flesh. From the standpoint of religion—the terms are different in art or philosophy—the world beats with the heart of God, pulsates under a divine impulse, breathes with God’s breath. What Marx said of religion, that it is the heart of a heartless world, he might better have said of God. The ecstasies of joy and sorrow are the sighing and heaving of God. The lamentation of the wretched, the shouts of exaltation, what the Catholic rosary calls the “joyful, sorrowful, and glorious mysteries,” are the groaning of the Spirit, exclamations of the divine impulse with which things tremble.

What then of human responsibility? By his redescription of God, Hegel prepared the way for the insight that just as God is not a being that steers things from above, neither is God some immanent guiding force situated here below. Rather God is the name of events that call upon us to complete what is missing in the body of God, to rush to the aid of God’s suffering flesh, to rejoice in the joy that surges through God’s limbs, to sanctify what is holy and what is sacred, to remedy the divine travail, to bring relief wherever his lamentations can be heard. The upshot of Hegel’s revolutionary paradigm shift is not that we become instruments of the cunning of Reason but that we become responsible. Extending Benjamin’s perversatile interpretation of the Messiah, we are prepared to say that we are the ones whom God has been waiting for. We are not waiting for God or Godot, but God has been waiting for us. The weakness of God goes hand in hand with the responsibility of humankind. The name of God is the name of the beating of the world’s heart, of the event that simmers in what happens, and we are asked to respond to it, to preserve the sacredness of earth and sky, to honor the holiness of the face. For the absolute is both the sacredness of the substance and the sanctity of the subject, both the face of the mountain and the flesh of the face. The heart of the absolute—by which I mean the events that stir restlessly with things—beats in both, chiasmically, for the mountain is both flesh and face, and the face is both invisible and visible incarnation, vulnerability, materiality. All things are chiasmically substance and subject, both sacred and holy, and we are asked to be both poets of the sacred and prophets of the holy no less than prophets of the sacred and poets of the holy. The perverse core of what religion calls salvation lies here, for it is not God who saves us but we who are asked to save God, to save the name of God, to save the event that stirs in the name of God. We are asked to make ourselves worthy of what happens to us,²⁰ where God is what happens to us. The Incarnation means that we are asked to assist at his birth in the world, to let the event happen and thereby to save God, to save the event that stirs in the name of God. We are called upon to let the event happen in us, with us, through us, to let the flow of events, the absolute becoming of the flow, pass through our bodies and pass into the world. By virtue of the virtuality of the event, we are called to assist in the realization of God, of the event that is harbored in the name of God, to make ourselves worthy of events, both sacred and holy.

The politics of perversatility is the politics of responsibility, which is why this radical theology is also a radical politics. This shift from the powerless power of the event that stirs in the name of God to the responsibility we bear to respond to the event is at the same time a shift to the ethical and political order, which is the order of making ourselves worthy of the event. For the political order has for too long been organized around a theology of power which Deleuze describes as the “fixed distribution” of the “analogy of being,” the top-down hierarchical order in which all power flows from above, around a “theological” order of God over the world, man over woman, animal, and earth. That is what we have described as the perversity of trying to forcibly contain the forces that things contain, to forcibly contain the uncontainable. The politics of sovereign power turns on what Derrida calls the “unavowed theologism” of the sovereignty of God.²¹ Just so, the interest we have in perverting this political order by what Deleuze calls the “nomadic distribution” of a “crowned anarchy,” and by what Derrida calls a radical “democracy to come,” are not best served by repudiating theology but by rethinking theology from within, by thinking theology through to a more radical theology, of the sort that we have been describing under the trope of perversatility, of the perversion of an already perverted order.

We will never be done with theology and just when we think we are, theology will be more profoundly at work on us than ever before as the blind spot that is working on us from behind, as the part of our text that we do not command, bleeding into our assumptions with all the force of the “unavowed.” That is why it is necessary not to jettison theology and exclude it from politics, but to rethink theology and allow it have a voice in rethinking politics. Apart from and opposed to the fixed distribution of power exercised by what Kierkegaard liked to mock as “Christendom,” which is a power of this world, the Hebrew prophets and the New Testament propose to us a power of an entirely different sort. There we find the paradoxical “rule” (arche) of the an-archic, of the one lost sheep, not the ninety-nine; of children, not adults; of those who were not invited to the feast; of sinners, not the righteous; of the prodigal son, not the loyal one; of the lepers and ritually impure, not the pure; of the weak, not the strong; of everyone who is summed in Paul’s ringing articulation of the perversatility of God:

God chose what is foolish in the world to shame the wise; God what is weak in the world to shame the strong; God chose what is low and despised in the world, things that are not [ta me onta], to reduce to nothing things that are. (1 Corinthians 1:27–28)

I propose a sacred anarchy that is in every case the counterpart to the crowned anarchy of Deleuze, which places the crown of divine preference upon the brow of the nomadic and the immigrant, of the outsider, the marginalized, the disempowered, of the least among us, which is sharply put by Paul when he says that “the weakness of God is stronger than human strength” (1 Corinthians 1:25). The name of God is the name of weakness, or of a weak force, not the name of a physical or metaphysical force that can magically intervene and supervene upon the forces of nature or of history. The name of God is not well served by a powerful institution that enforces its own will under the cover of the name of God, as when the Church authorizes itself by placing the words “thou are Peter and upon this rock I will build my church” on the lips of Jesus. That is autocrowning of the strong with real power and goes hand in hand with its secular counterpart, the sovereignty of the nation, to whom power is transferred in modernity. That does not reflect the sacred anarchy of Jesus, who exercised only the power of powerlessness, who embodied the weakness of God, who practiced not the sword, but the power of forgiveness and of loving his enemies, even unto death.

What would a nation look like that renounced sovereignty, that flexed the muscles not of military strength but of forgiveness, that organized a foreign policy around hospitality to the dispossessed and impoverished, that opened its borders to the widow, the orphan, and the stranger, that took the food out of its own mouth and shared its wealth, that placed the crown of privilege upon what Paul called ta me onta, “the nothings and the nobodies of this world”? That is the politics of perversatility called for by the event harbored in the name of God, the most perverse possible politics and the interruption of the business as usual of brutal power.

To be sure, these images from the New Testament and the prophets of the Jewish Scriptures are fantastic, imaginative leaps. But that is ever the function of literature, to give sensible and imaginative form to the event, to let the event come into word, image, and sound, all so many ways to respond to the address issued by the event. They are indeed dreams, the dreams of the gods, God’s dreams, dreaming of the messianic age, of messianic justice, and of such dreams is politics made, lest it become something less than itself. Unless there is an excess in politics, something more than politics in politics—and the name of God is the name of excess—then politics will fail to be itself. Unless it dreams of the impossible, it will be content with a compromised and brutal realpolitik of the possible. It is theology’s function, the function of a radical theology, to dream, to pray, and to weep over the excess of the event that keep political orders open-ended and dreaming of what is coming.

When we say that God is not above being but within, neither as a first being nor the being of beings, we stand in Hegel’s debt. When we say that the name of God is the name of an event that pulsates throughout being, an inner beating that rises to excess from time to time and from place to place, we enter a space cleared by Hegel. God is everywhere as the excess that things contain, the promise that they hold, the deep deposit of the memory of the dead. The lamentations of the wretched of the earth, the cries of pain and injustice, are God’s pain. This is not because God associates Godself with them in a movement of divine empathy, as happens in the various world religions, which is not to be taken lightly, as it remains one of religion’s most powerful figures. Rather, and more radically, it is because bodies in pain embody the pain that expresses God’s life, the excess that rises up and breaks through the tranquil surface of existence and elicits the name of “God” as a cry for justice, peace, joy. As the excess of the event, God is expressed in both exultation and abjection, joy and sorrow, glory and misery. “God” is the name we give to events that have increased their velocity to infinity, that glow white hot in intensity, to the flow of events that exceed the speed limits of a mediocre life and break through the surface in times and places of excess—of excessive joy or sorrow, beauty or horror. God is not the source of beauty or horror, like some first being or uncaused cause, but horror is a wound in the body of God that requires our redress, even as beauty is a jewel adorning the body of God that calls for our celebration.

When we says that God belongs to another order, to the ordering order of events that call for a response, that call and recall, that have a certain power which is not that of effective forces, we pursue a path Hegel made possible, which hears the name of God as an event occurring in matter, space, and time. What Hegel called “Idealism” we have redescribed as the power of an event that calls, which is the power of powerlessness. The Idea is not an effective force, but a call. Calls can go unanswered or unheeded, calls can be declined or rejected, calls can be refused or ignored. Calls lay claim to us but we can always resist their claim. Calls solicit, but we can turn away the solicitor. Calls enjoin, but we can always refuse or disobey. The responsibility of the response is ours—that is what we can call “Materialism,” which means turning the virtual event into material actuality. Idealism solicits, materialism answers. Materialism means that we are the hearers of the call, the one laid claim to, solicited, visited, invited, enjoined to materialize events, to make them happen materially, which is why Levinas says that faced with the hunger of the other “there is no bad materialism other than our own.”²²

On such a view, one might even say that in a theology of the event, there is a remarkable transmutation and perverse reversal that has so far gone unremarked—namely, a perversatility of prayer. For materialism is the answer to God’s prayers. By this I mean that if it is God who calls and we are the ones called upon, then it is God who solicits us, who thus prays to us and seeks our aid and succor. But insofar as we also pray, for we are woven of prayers and tears, we in turn pray for the heart to respond, to make ourselves worthy of the event. We pray for peace, long for justice, dream of the messianic age, call for the democracy to come, pray and weep over what is missing in the body of God. These are God’s dreams, God’s prayers, and ours, with the result that we and God together form a common bond and are both praying for the messianic age, for the coming of the Messiah. Here is another parallax for Žižek: our prayers to God are but God’s prayers to us, from another point of view. But of course the messianic age will never come, for its being is its becoming, its to-come. Its being is the various intensities of becoming, the becoming of events, the events of becoming. The figure of messianic peace and joy floats like a cloud—which Plato called “Ideas” and Kant called “Ideals” and Hegel called the Absolute—giving suggestive form to our imaginative life, sparking the flow of philosophical questioning, giving heart and mind to the great religious traditions, taking shape in the work of the work of art in all its variations. The powerless power of events is the power of appeal, and the name of God harbors events of the most excessive and provocative appeal, eliciting the most powerful invitations, summoning up what is best in us, appealing to the better angels of our nature to make ourselves worthy of what happens to us, to make ourselves worthy of the event.

1. Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), p. 130.

6. Mark C. Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984), p. 6.

7. Jacques Derrida, On the Name, ed. Thomas Dutoit (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1995), pp. 29–30.

8. Jean-François Lyotard, “Result,” in The Differend: Phrases in Dispute, trans. Georges Van Den Abbeele (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988).

9. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), p. 284.

11. I have elaborated the notion of a sacred anarchy in greater detail in The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006).

12. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, corrected ed., trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), p. 18.

15. See Hegel’s presentation of the three elements of “consummate religion”—the religion of the Father; the religion of the Son, who had to perish in his empirical reality; and the religion of the Spirit, of the historical community that bears and is borne by the Spirit—in G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion: The Lectures of 1827, ed. Peter C. Hodgson, trans. R. F. Brown, P. C. Hodgson, and J. M. Stewart (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2006), pp. 389–489.

16. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1977), pp. 9–10.

17. Slavoj Žižek, “From Job to Christ: A Paulinian Reading of Chesterton,” in St. Paul Among the Philosophers, ed. John D. Caputo and Linda Martín Alcoff (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009).

18. Raymond Blakney, Meister Eckhart: A Modern Translation (New York: Harper & Row, 1941), p. 127.

19. Emmanuel Levinas, Time and the Other, trans. Richard Cohen (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1987), pp. 91–92.

20. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale, ed. Constantin V. Boundas (New York: Columbia University Press, 1969), p. 149.

21. Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2005), p. 110.

22. Emmanuel Levinas, Difficult Freedom, trans. Sean Hand (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1990), p. xiv.