Preface
1.This way of phrasing my thought was inspired by Katerina Kolozova, Toward a Radical Metaphysics of Socialism: Marx and Laruelle (Brooklyn: Punctum Books, 2015), 13.
2.Daniel Olukoya, Prayer Passport to Crush Oppression (Lagos: Mountain of Fire and Miracles Ministries Press, 2006).
3.Slavoj Žižek, Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences (New York: Routledge, 2004), 172.
4.About subjectivity, Hegel states in Jenaer Realphilosophie (1805–1806): “The human being is this night, this empty nothing, that contains everything in its simplicity—an unending wealth of many representations, images, of which none belongs to him—or which are not present. This night, the interior of nature, that exists here—pure self—in phantasmagorical representations, is night all around it, in which here shoots a bloody head—there another white ghastly apparition, suddenly here before it, and just so disappears. One catches sight of this night when one looks human beings in the eye—into a night that becomes awful.” Donald Phillip Verene, Hegel’s Recollection: A Study of Images in the Phenomenology of Spirit (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1985), 7–8. On the power of understanding, he writes: “That an accident as such, detached from what circumscribes it, what is bound and is actual only in its context with others, should attain an existence of its own and a separate freedom—this is the tremendous power of the negative.” G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 19.
5.Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 37.
6.The split God is a product of Pentecostal productive imagination, as Kant is wont to put it. The scriptural or orthodox idea of God is their basic, universal category of understanding; everyday practices constitute the particular data of experience or sensation, and imagination operating at the border of these two schematizes them. Here imagination, under the pressure of sensations and sensual desires, reorganizes or refigures an already synthetic knowledge of God and the outcome is a split God, arbitrary figures of productive imagination. God is at once more than and one with Power-God, Hand-God, or Glory-God. In the imagination of Pentecostals, God appears to have been transformed from a centralized communion of three hypostases to a decentralized network of partial organs defined, differentiated, and distributed by deeds. With desire rather than repressive hermeneutic or orthodoxy driving the figuration of the divine, God becomes deed or autonomous images of deeds. God is what God does for me (us). God is defined through his deeds as perceived in the concrete lives of individuals or, in different terms, deed precedes essence. Essence has collapsed into deeds; the signified has collapsed into the signifiers. Deeds are by nature split. A deed is self-divided between the action and its trace, the agent and her act, the action and its limit, antecedent productive will and its exterior form, representation, realization, or the deed and its arbitrary count-as-one. Indeed, the Pentecostal notion of a split God does not oppose the orthodox notion of God; it only exposes a caesura or “night of the world” in it when it collides (colludes) with lived experiences of a certain class of believers.
7.In one sense this statement could be interpreted as the worship of “gods” in God, or the loss of God in God’s ownmost-gods. Is this very peculiar to Pentecostalism? Jean-Luc Nancy once wrote: “Judaism is an atheism with God. Protestantism, on the other hand, is a theism without God. Catholicism is the worship of all gods in God, or the loss of God in all gods. Islam is the pure proclamation of God to the point where it becomes an empty clamor. Buddhism is the worship of God in all gods or the loss of all gods in God.” See Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney, foreword Christopher Fynsk (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 128.
8.G. K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy (San Francisco: Ignatius Press, 1995), 145.
9.This paragraph is inspired by Slavoj Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters (London: Verso, 2007), 57–59, and F. W. J. Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006). Schelling writes:
The principle raised up from the ground of nature whereby man is separated from God is the selfhood in him which, however, through its unity with the ideal principle, becomes spirit. Selfhood as such is spirit; or man is spirit as a selfish [selbstisch], particular being (separated from God)—precisely this connection constitutes personality. Since selfhood is spirit, however, it is at that same time raised from the creaturely into what is above the creaturely; it is will that beholds itself in complete freedom, being no longer an instrument of the productive [schaffenden] universal will in nature, but rather above and outside of all nature. Spirit is above the light as in nature it raises itself above the unity of the light and the dark principle. Since it is spirit, selfhood is therefore free from both principles. (33)
10.On this point see Nimi Wariboko, Nigerian Pentecostalism (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2014).
11.Slavoj Žižek, “The Abyss of Freedom,” in F. W. J. Schelling, Abyss of Freedom/Ages of the World (Second Draft, 1813), trans. Judith Norman (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 58.
12.Birgit Meyer, “Aesthetics of Persuasion: Global Christianity and Pentecostalism’s Sensational Forms,” South Atlantic Quarterly 109, no. 4 (2010): 741–63.
13.The analysis in this paragraph was inspired by Žižek, “Abyss of Freedom,” 62.
14.See Schelling, Philosophical Investigations, and Schelling, Abyss of Freedom/Ages of the World.
15.Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 87.
16.Is the split God not an unexpected or (il)logical fallout of a strong-force God, marked by the logic or metaphysics of omnipotence and divine interventionism, to use the language of John Caputo? Since God is the strongest force of all and every aspect/dimension of God’s self is absolutely the same, then fractals of the Godself can be variously deployed in an extravagant display of divine omnipotence without the loss of Godliness or Godhood. While this view of the split God locates it within strong theology with its fantasy of divine power, we should add that the Pentecostal notion of split also gestures to a certain hermeneutic of the desire for God that refuses to contain or close off the name of God as a totalized entity, but strives to affirm the name as an event. In this latter sense, the notion of split God is the (ambiguous) symbol or poetics of Pentecostals’ passion for power and natality. John Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of Event (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006).
17.Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 2008), 241–44.
18.The adjective ordinary is used here to designate everyday form of practice, lived pentecostal practice, rather than academic theology. What matters here is not superiority/exceptionality versus low class or humbug, but the praxis/theory distinction. Though I bring critical theory as a frame of reference to interpret an everyday form of theology from lived pentecostal practices, this should not be construed to mean ordinary Pentecostals will stop being “ordinary” when they start to think philosophically. The distinction between academic Pentecostals and ordinary Pentecostals is based on a praxis/theory distinction that serves to underwrite my appropriation of critical theory, which easily lends itself to deep appreciation of the truths of pentecostal praxis.
19.Wariboko, Nigerian Pentecostalism.
20.Ebenezer Obadare, “The Spirit of Yoruba Liberalism,” Marginalia, February 16, 2017: http://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/spirit-yoruba-liberalism/, accessed February 17, 2017.
Introduction
1.Slavoj Žižek, The Monstrosity of Christ (Cambridge: MIT Press Verso, 2009), 59.
2.Nimi Wariboko, Nigerian Pentecostalism (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2014).
3.Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 125–26.
4.Giorgio Agamben, Nudities, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 102.
5.Agon Hamza, “A Plea for Žižekian Politics,” in Repeating Žižek, ed. Agon Hamza (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 235.
6.Here I have played around with Alfred Sohn-Rethel’s words in his Intellectual and Manual Labor: A Critique of Epistemology, trans. Martin Sohn-Rethel (London: Macmillan, 1978), 20.
7.The two quotes are from Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 17.
8.Adrian Johnson, Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2008), 166.
9.Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney, foreword Christopher Fynsk (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 19.
10.Nancy, Inoperative Community, xxxvii.
11.I have adapted Jean-Luc Nancy’s words for my purposes here. See Nancy, Inoperative Community, 30.
12.I have adapted the words of Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso, 2012), 267.
13.The quotes are from Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 267.
14.My thinking and some of my words here draw from Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 267, 280–81.
15.Slavoj Žižek, Organs without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences (New York: Routledge, 2012), 12.
16.Adrian Johnson, “ ‘Freedom or System? Yes, Please’: How to Read Slavoj Žižek’s Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism,” in Hamza, Repeating Žižek, 18.
17.Gavin Walker, “Žižek and Marx: Outside in the Critique of Political Economy,” in Hamza, Repeating Žižek, 197, inspired this train of thought.
18.Adam Kotsko, “The Problem of Christianity and Žižek’s ‘Middle Period,’ ” in Hamza, Repeating Žižek, 245–48, and Sead Zimeri, “Islam: How Could It Have Emerged after Christianity?,” in Hamza, Repeating Žižek, 257–58, inspired this thought.
19.Frank Ruda, “How to Repeat Plato: For a Platonism of the Non-All,” in Hamza, Repeating Žižek, 47.
20.See Johnson, “ ‘Freedom or System?,’ ” in Hamza, Repeating Žižek, 19.
21.Virginia Burrus, “The Heretical Woman as Symbol in Athanasius, Epiphanius and Jerome,” Harvard Theological Review 84, no. 3 (1991): 232, quoted in Harvey Cox, Fire from Heaven: The Rise of Pentecostal Spirituality and the Reshaping of Religion in the Twenty-First Century (Reading: Addison-Wesley, 1995), 328.
22.Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 71.
23.Gerhard Richter, Thought Images: Frankfurt School Writers’ Reflections from Damaged Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 1.
24.Paul Tillich, The Protestant Era (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1948), 75.
25.Richard McNemar, “The Mole’s Little Pathways,” in Nathan Hatch, The Democratization of American Christianity (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1989), 81.
26.For a discussion of the expressionists and impressionist pictures of Jesus Christ in a different context, see Terry Cross, “Tillich’s Picture of Jesus as the Christ: Toward a Theology of the Spirit’s Saving Presence,” in Nimi Wariboko and Amos Yong, Paul Tillich and Pentecostal Theology: Spiritual Presence and Spiritual Power (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015), 71–83.
27.Lee Smolin, The Trouble with Physics: The Rise of String Theory, the Fall of a Science, and What Comes Next (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2006), 15–16.
28.Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 166.
29.Ruth Marshall, Political Spiritualities: The Pentecostal Revolution in Nigeria (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 213.
30.Nimi Wariboko, The Pentecostal Principle: Ethical Methodology in New Spirit (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012), 151–54.
31.Carl Raschke, “The Monstrosity of Žižek’s Christ,” Journal of Cultural and Religious Theory 11, no. 2 (2011): 11–20, 16.
32.Hatch, Democratization of American Christianity, 65.
1.Mark C. Taylor, Altarity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 101, inspired this series of thought.
2.Taylor, Altarity, 168.
3.Taylor, Altarity, 54–55.
4.Anne Norton, “Pentecost: Democratic Sovereignty in Carl Schmitt,” Constellations 18, no. 3 (2011): 393–94.
5.Norton, “Pentecost,” 397.
6.Martin Heidegger, Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 202, quoted in Taylor, Altarity, 43–44.
7.Mark C. Taylor, About Religion: Economics of Faith in Virtual Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 40–42, inspired this section.
8.Taylor, About Religion, 42–43.
9.The traditional pentecostal interpretation is that the languages the disciples spoke in Acts 2 were foreign, strange to them. A disciple spoke a language he or she did not previously know how to speak before the pouring out of the gifts of the Spirit. The belief is that the Spirit supernaturally endowed the disciples with a new capability to speak new languages they had not learned in the past. This perspective implies three things: the disciples did not cognitively understand their own utterances; if they did, then they also had the spiritual capability to understand what was coming out of their animated mouths; and they spoke a kind of unintelligible language, but each member of the audience experienced the miracle of hearing the disciples in his or her native/particular language. There are a few Pentecostals who champion the third option, but a majority of them tend to lean toward the first option given their experiences with glossolalia. With the gift of glossolalia persons speaking in tongues do not often understand what they are saying, except in cases where they also receive the gift of translation or another person is spiritually endowed to understand their utterances and interpret the words pouring out of their mouths. In all options, the starting point for analysis of Pentecostals is that the disciples, at least initially, did not know or understand what they were saying. See Frank D. Macchia, “Glossolalia,” in Encyclopedia of Pentecostal and Charismatic Christianity, ed. Stanley M. Burgess, 223–35 (New York: Routledge, 2006).
10.Jacques Lacan, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis 1959–1960, bk. 7, of The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Dennis Potter (New York: Norton, 1992); see also Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2009), 89.
11.Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Norton, 1977); see also Clayton Crockett, Interstices of the Sublime: Theology and Psychoanalytic Theory (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007).
12.Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 112.
13.Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 95, 137.
14.Agamben, Time That Remains, 23.
15.Agamben, Time That Remains, 23.
16.Agamben, Time That Remains, 26.
17.Agamben, Time That Remains, 124.
18.Slavoj Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters (London: Verso, 2007), 169.
19.Robin Horton, Patterns of Thought in Africa and the West: Essays on Magic, Religion and Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993), 25.
20.Horton, Patterns of Thought, 25–26.
21.F. W. J. Schelling, Abyss of Freedom/Ages of the World (Second Draft, 1813), trans. Judith Norman (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997). In this section of the chapter, I am going to combine my reading of the second and third drafts of Schelling’s Ages of the World and Žižek’s interpretation of the second draft to provide a succinct summary of its main ideas as they bear on our purpose here.
22.Andrew Bowie, Schelling and Modern European Philosophy (New York: Routledge, 1993), 105, quoted in Žižek, Indivisible Remainder, 37.
23.Slavoj Žižek, “Abyss of Freedom,” in Schelling, Abyss of Freedom/Ages of the World, 17.
24.Žižek, “Abyss of Freedom,” 30.
25.Žižek, Indivisible Remainder, 71.
26.Schelling, Abyss of Freedom/Ages of the World, 181–82.
27.Žižek, Indivisible Remainder, 72.
28.F. W. J. Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 31–34; see also 36–37.
29.This is how Žižek explains this Schellingian point: “The Good always involves a harmonious unity of sensual and spiritual—it is a Spirit which penetrates and illuminates nature from within and without forcing itself upon it, renders it ethereal, deprives it of its impenetrable inertia; whereas true ‘diabolical’ Evil is a pale, bloodless, fanatical spiritualism which despises sensuality and is bent on violently dominating and exploiting it. The diabolical spiritualism, a perversion of the true spirituality, is the obscure Ground which has ‘attained itself,’ its selfhood—that is to say, has reached the Light and posited itself as such.” Indivisible Remainder, 69.
30.For Schelling, evil is attributable to the split itself in the Absolute between ground and existence. But the fact that creation exists attests that good (expansion) prevails over evil (contraction). Since God has his power of the center in himself and his nature is perfect, God always uses his freedom to choose the good. See his Philosophical Investigations; also see Žižek, Indivisible Remainder, 66–67.
31.Žižek, “Abyss of Freedom,” 15.
32.Žižek, “Abyss of Freedom,” 15.
33.Immanuel Kant, Critique of Practical Reason (New York: Macmillan, 1956), 152–53.
34.Adrian Johnson, Žižek’s Ontology: A Transcendental Materialist Theory of Subjectivity (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2008), 208.
35.Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume 1: Reason and Revelation, Being and God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951), 16–17, 221–30; Paul Tillich, Systematic Theology, Volume 3: Life and the Spirit, History and the Kingdom of God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965), 283–94.
36.Tillich, Systematic Theology, 1:221, 228.
37.Tillich, Systematic Theology, 1:16–17, 221–30; Systematic Theology, 3:283–94.
38.Crockett, Interstices of the Sublime, 92.
39.Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government, trans. Lorenzo Chiesa with Matteo Mandarini (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011).
40.Agamben, Kingdom and the Glory, 207–11, 221, 230.
41.Agamben, Kingdom and the Glory, 242–43, 230.
42.Agamben, Kingdom and the Glory, 230.
43.Agamben, Kingdom and the Glory, 198–202.
44.Agamben, Kingdom and the Glory, 208.
45.Moses Maimonides, Guide to the Perplexed (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), bk. 1, chap. 64, 156–57; see also Agamben, Kingdom and the Glory, 198–99.
46.Agamben, Kingdom and the Glory, 211.
47.For inoperativity that comes at the eschaton, that is, postjudicial inoperativity, see Agamben, Kingdom and the Glory, 239–42, 245.
48.Giorgio Agamben, Nudities, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 98; see also William Robert, “Nude, Glorious, Living,” Political Theology 14, no. 1 (2013): 123.
49.Agamben, Nudities, 111.
50.Robert, “Nude, Glorious, Living,” 123.
51.Eric L. Mascall, “Primauté de la louange,” in Dieu vivant 19 (1951), quoted in Agamben, Kingdom and the Glory, 220. I am relying on Agamben’s interpretation here.
52.Mascall, “Primauté,” 112, quoted in Agamben, Kingdom and the Glory, 220.
53.Mascall, “Primauté,” 114, quoted in Agamben, Kingdom and the Glory, 220.
54.Agamben, Kingdom and the Glory, 220–21.
55.Agamben, Kingdom and the Glory, 248–49.
56.Agamben, Kingdom and the Glory, 248–49.
57.This sentence should not be interpreted as suggesting that there are only two options available theologically, namely, a strict classical theism or a split-God model that contains contradictions. A wide variety of options exists between these two extremes, for example, open theism and even some versions of process theology. Once we take seriously the pentecostal notions of God at the grassroots level, we will discover that these notions are contesting the boundaries of classical theism that official pentecostal theologians or preachers argue embeds the pentecostal doctrine of God. Or at least they will be forced to look for other models of God outside classical theology that best fit what Pentecostals are doing on the ground. Thus, to reiterate, I am not writing as if these are the only available theologies. Rather, I have only analyzed and described everyday pentecostal practices in ways that will show how ordinary Pentecostals (knowingly or unknowingly) do not limit themselves to classical theism and that in some respects their views of God make common cause with open theism and process theology.
58.Slavoj Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 2008), 42–43.
Chapter 2
1.Jean-Pierre Vernant, Mortals and Immortals: Collected Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1991), 141.
2.Nimi Wariboko, God and Money: A Theology of Money in a Globalizing World (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2008), 99–105.
3.Robin Horton, Patterns of Thought in Africa and the West: Essays on Magic, Religion and Science (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993).
4.Horton, Patterns of Thought, 207–10.
5.Here I am going to adapt Richard Fenn’s theory of religion as elucidated in his “Sociology and Religion: Searching for the Sacred,” in The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science, ed. Philip Clayton and Zachary Simpson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 253–70.
6.Fenn, “Sociology and Religion,” 258.
7.Fenn, “Sociology and Religion,” 259.
8.G. W. F. Hegel, Jenenser Philosophie des Geistes in Sämtliche Werke, ed. Johannes Hoffmeister (Leipzig: Felix Meiner, 1931), 20:180–81, quoted in Georges Bataille, The Bataille Reader, ed. Fred Botting and Scott Wilson (Oxford: Blackwell, 1997), 279.
9.See Nimi Wariboko, Ethics and Time: Ethos of Temporal Orientation in Politics and Religion of the Niger Delta (Lanham: Lexington Books, 2010), 47–48; Nimi Wariboko, The Depth and Destiny of Work: An African Theological Interpretation (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2008), 38–39.
10.It is important for me to state at this juncture that my move to link African Pentecostals’ view of or approach to discernment by starting from local ATR practices should not be construed to mean that these features are peculiar to ATR or African Pentecostalism rather than as broadly shared features of Pentecostalism in other parts of the world. Second, Pentecostals’ appropriation of the ATR is both a continuity of the past and a rupture.
11.See Nimi Wariboko, Nigerian Pentecostalism (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2014).
12.Kevin Madigan and Jon D. Levenson, Resurrection: The Power of God for Christians and Jews (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2008), 22.
13.Nimi Wariboko, The Pentecostal Principle: Ethical Methodology in New Spirit (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012), 19–35.
14.Jean-Luc Nancy and Federico Ferrari, Being Nude: The Skin of Images, trans. Anne O’Byrne and Carlie Anglemire (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 33.
15.See Giorgio Agamben, Nudities, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 1–2; Amos Yong, “Spiritual Discernment: A Biblical-Theological Reconsideration,” in The Spirit and Spirituality: Essays in Honor of Russell P. Spittler, ed. Wonsuk Ma and Robert P. Menzies (London: T. and T. Clark, 2004), 84–101.
16.Here I have adapted Martha Nussbaum’s description of the pupils for my purposes. See her The Fragility of Goodness: Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 412.
17.Agamben, Nudities, 57–90.
18.Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press, 1961), 61, 170.
19.Erik Peterson, “Theology of Clothes,” in Selection, ed. C. Hasting and D. Nichol (London: Sheed and Ward, 1954), 2:56–57, quoted in Agamben, Nudities, 64.
20.Agamben, Nudities, 102.
Chapter 3
1.Nimi Wariboko, The Depth and Destiny of Work: An African Theological Interpretation (Trenton: Africa World, 2008), 4–14, 233–38.
2.I have reworked Albino Barrera’s phrasing for my purpose here. See his God and the Evil of Scarcity: Moral Foundations of Economic Agency (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 2005), 219.
3.Annalisa Butticci, African Pentecostals in Catholic Europe: The Politics of Presence in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016).
4.Mark C. Taylor and Carl Raschke, “About About Religion: A Conversation with Mark C. Taylor,” accessed June 14, 2015, http://www.jcrt.org/archives/02.2/taylor_raschke.shtml, 3.
5.Slavoj Žižek, Event: A Philosophical Journey Through a Concept (London: Penguin Books, 2014), 133–34.
6.Slavoj Žižek, The Most Sublime Hysteric: Hegel with Lacan, trans. Thomas Scott-Railton (Malden: Polity Press, 2014), 43.
7.Slavoj Žižek, Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso, 2014), 20.
8.F. W. J. Schelling, Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Jeff Love and Johannes Schmidt (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2006), 51–52.
9.Hegel’s words as quoted in Žižek, Event, 128.
10.Žižek, Absolute Recoil, 168.
11.G. W. F., Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 89.
12.Adrian Johnson, “ ‘Freedom or System? Yes, Please’: How to Read Slavoj Žižek’s Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism,” in Repeating Žižek, ed. Agon Hamza (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 24.
13.Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso, 2012), 37.
14.Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 144.
15.Ruth Marshall, Political Spiritualities: The Pentecostal Revolution in Nigeria (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), 190–93, 212–14.
16.Afe Adogame, The African Christian Diaspora: New Currents and Emerging Trends in World Christianity (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013).
17.Adogame, African Christian Diaspora, 22.
18.Chinua Achebe, Things Fall Apart (New York: Anchor Books, 1994), 22.
19.According to Italian sociologist Annalisa Butticci, “Na God,” a common pidgin English expression in West Africa, captures the sense of awe.
Na God is an expression in West African Pidgin English that means “It is God.” When people unexpectedly hear good news, experience a miracle, receive a gift, or when something right or remarkable happens, that is when we might hear Nigerians and Ghanaians say “Na God.” This expression is much more than a mere exclamation; it is part of a way of experiencing the world, acknowledging the presence of the supernatural powers, and communicating and mediating experiences of daily life. Na God is part of the aesthetics with which African Pentecostals reiterate their link with God and with their community.
Annalisa Butticci, introduction to Na God: Aesthetics of African Charismatic Power, ed. Annalisa Butticci (Rubano: Grafiche Turato Edizioni, 2013), 6.
1.Richard Fenn, Key Thinkers in the Sociology of Religion (London: Continuum, 2009), 1–4. This rendition of what I think Pentecostals mean by miracle benefited from my understanding of Fenn’s concept of the sacred.
2.Richard Fenn, “Sociology and Religion: Searching for the Sacred,” in The Oxford Handbook of Religion and Science, ed. Philip Clayton and Zachary Simpson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006), 259; italics in the original.
3.Nimi Wariboko, The Depth and Destiny of Work: An African Theological Interpretation (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2008), 37–39.
4.Agu-nsi is an Igbo word that has been adopted in Kalabari. The Kalabari word for carved or sculptured idol is ẹkẹkẹ-tamụnọ, and ẹkẹkẹ means stone, piece of stone, or rock.
5.Robin Horton, Kalabari Sculpture (Lagos: Department of Antiquities, Federal Republic of Nigeria, 1965), 8–9; see also Robin Horton, “The Kalabari Worldview: An Outline and Interpretation,” Africa 32, no. 3 (July 1962): 204. Horton relates the story of how a spirit who misbehaved was summoned before an assembly of its worshipers, found guilty, and fined. Robin Horton, “A Hundred Years of Change in Kalabari Religion,” in Black Africa: Its People and Their Cultures Today, ed. John Middleton (New York: Macmillan, 1971), 194–98.
6.Horton, “Kalabari Worldview,” 204. I have heard of at least two cases of gods that have been disrobed of their powers. One is the Owu Akpana (shark) cult and the other is Ogboloma (called Kun-ma in Okrika, also a Niger Delta community) cult.
7.Richard Fenn, The Return of the Primitive: A New Sociological Theory of Religion (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2001), 59.
8.Fenn, Return of the Primitive, 60.
9.Fenn, Return of the Primitive, 60.
10.Portions of this section bear repeating from chapter 2.
11.From hereon I am going to adapt Richard Fenn’s theory of religion as elucidated in his “Sociology and Religion,” 253–70.
12.Fenn, “Sociology and Religion,” 258.
13.Fenn, “Sociology and Religion,” 259.
14.Fenn, “Sociology and Religion,” 257–58.
15.If a person does not like the course of her life on earth, she goes to a diviner to change her so or fiyeteboye. The process of changing destiny is called bibibari (altering or nullifying the spoken word, recanting). The person visits a diviner to let Teme-órú (the supreme goddess) know that the person would like to change how he or she wants to live his or her life course on earth. Once the change of destiny is effected, the new so (which becomes a new point of fixity) determines the whole course of the person.
16.Slavoj Žižek, Event: A Philosophical Journey through a Concept (London: Penguin Books, 2014), 128.
17.Slavoj Žižek, The Most Sublime Hysteric: Hegel with Lacan, trans. Thomas Scott-Railton (Malden: Polity Press, 2014), 157.
18.I have borrowed the term mindful ignorance (docta ignorantia) from Catherine Keller. See her Cloud of the Impossible: Negative Theology and Planetary Entanglement (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 165. By the term, Keller, relying on Nicholas Cusa, refers to “not only the maximum mystery but the misty unknowns of all relations.” See Catherine Keller, “The Entangled Cosmos: An Experiment in Physical Theopoetics,” Journal of Cosmology (September 2012): 2.
19.Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why Is the Christianity Legacy Worth Fighting For? (London: Verso, 2008), 89.
20.Jacques Lacan, The Ego in Freud’s Theory and in the Technique of Psychoanalysis 1954–1955, bk. 2, of The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Sylvana Tomaselli (New York: W. W. Norton, 1991), 229, quoted in Žižek, Most Sublime Hysteric, 64.
21.Slavoj Žižek, “Christianity Against the Sacred,” in Slavoj Žižek and Boris Gunjević, God in Pain: Inversions of Apocalypse (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2012), 58.
22.This sentence was inspired by Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 67.
23.G. W. F. Hegel, Elements of the Philosophy of Right (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1991), 204–5, quoted in Žižek, Parallax View, 66.
24.Jeffrey Kripal, Authors of the Impossible: The Paranormal and the Sacred (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010), 9.
25.Kripal, Authors of the Impossible, 9.
26.Mark C. Taylor and Carl Raschke, “About About Religion: A Conversation with Mark C. Taylor,” accessed June 14, 2015, http://www.jcrt.org/archives/02.2/taylor_raschke.shtml, 2.
27.Taylor and Raschke, “About About Religion,” 3.
28.Keller, Cloud of the Impossible.
29.I need to clarify this interpretation of her thinking. As a follower of Whitehead, she will agree that in abstract form possibilities do function as “external objects,” but as real possibilities/potentialities, they carry the relational density of the past.
30.Keller, Cloud of the Impossible, 188–92, quote on 188; see also 131–32, 145, 152–53, 164–65.
31.Keller, Cloud of the Impossible, 145.
32.Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (London: Routledge, 2003).
33.Catherine Keller’s preferred term is Resolute, not the Hegelian Absolute. It is a third place between Absolute and “Dissolute.” See her, On the Mystery: Discerning God in Process (Minneapolis: Fortress, 2008), 173–76.
34.Keller, Cloud of the Impossible, 146. She is citing Charles Hartshorne here.
35.Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2009), 140.
36.Slavoj Žižek, Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso, 2014), 33. Žižek adds, “What characterizes a really great thinker is that they misrecognize the basic dimension of their own breakthrough” (34).
37.Keller, Cloud of the Impossible, 17.
38.Here I am applying the distinctions of Jacques-Alain Miller, “Le nom-du-père, s’en passer, s’en servir,” www.lacan.com, quoted in Žižek, Defense of Lost Causes, 327.
39.Žižek, Defense of Lost Causes, 327; see also Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso, 2012), 496.
40.Keller, Cloud of the Impossible, 148–50.
41.Keller, Cloud of the Impossible, 157.
42.The latter—no underlying oneness—more precisely represents the overall focus of her theological and philosophical thought over the years. Creativity would not be for her the One.
43.For the meaning of en, see Keller, Cloud of the Impossible, 177, 191. See also her Face of the Deep.
44.In (en)? As we have shown earlier, the realm of the sacred exceeds what is religiously, doctrinally, and institutionally referred to as theistic God.
45.Nimi Wariboko, The Pentecostal Principle: Ethical Methodology in New Spirit (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012), x, 131, 151, 186, 203.
46.See also Žižek, “Christianity Against the Sacred,” 50, where he relies on Giorgio Agamben to make the same point, that the profane is inherent to the sacred.
47.Giorgio Agamben, Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 75.
48.Quentin Meillassoux, “Potentiality and Virtuality,” Collapse: Philosophic Research and Development 2 (2007): 71–72.
49.Meillassoux, “Potentiality and Virtuality,” 74.
50.Meillassoux, “Potentiality and Virtuality,” 72.
51.Meillassoux, “Potentiality and Virtuality,” 73n7.
52.Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 230.
53.Keller, Cloud of the Impossible, 138–42, 150–51. She certainly understands relationalism to be largely—but never entirely—subject to regulation. This is why she argues against intervention ex nihilo in her work.
54.For an excellent discussion of real presence, see Annalisa Butticci, African Pentecostals in Catholic Europe: The Politics of Presence in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016).
55.Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990).
56.Deleuze, Logic of Sense, 7.
57.Butticci, African Pentecostals.
58.Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 608.
59.In a different interpretation of her work, one could say that she overrides the distinction between the phenomenal and the noumenal through her focus on materiality of human relationality. The inaccessibility of Ding an sich is not the apophatic for her, but the depth and margin of entanglement between things may be. But yes, she does not trust anyone’s claim to know the thing in itself, to master pure presence epistemically. She only respects conjectures, and vivid, transformative glimpses, breakthroughs and breakouts. But she does not respect epistemic mastery of the mystery.
60.Žižek, Less Than Nothing, 609.
61.Alain Badiou, Theoretical Writings (London: Continuum, 2004), 43.
62.Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Oliver Feltham (London: Continuum, 2005).
63.In the language or manner of Keller’s thought, we should suspect any prophet or prophetess who claims to have perceived the “full ply of possibilities” as in all of the Sacred.
64.Fenn, “Sociology and Religion,” 259.
65.Meillassoux, “Potentiality and Virtuality,” 67.
66.Meillassoux, “Potentiality and Virtuality,” 73.
67.Meillassoux, “Potentiality and Virtuality,” 69.
68.Meillassoux, “Potentiality and Virtuality,” 73n7: “The virtualizing power of time, its insubordination to any superior order, lets itself be known, or is phenomenalized, when there emerges a novelty that defeats all continuity between the past and the present. Every “miracle” thus becomes the manifestation of the inexistence of God, insofar as every radical rupture of the present in relation to the past becomes the manifestation of the absence of any order capable of overseeing the chaotic power of becoming.”
69.There is, perhaps, what we may call a Pentecostal unconscious that has deep relations to the scared as the full plenum of possibilities along with its chaotic depths. The unconscious itself has been symbolized as an ocean, an oceanic plenum.
Chapter 5
1.Slavoj Žižek, The Most Sublime Hysteric: Hegel with Lacan, trans. Thomas Scott-Railton (Malden: Polity Press, 2014), 23.
2.Nimi Wariboko, Nigerian Pentecostalism (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2014).
3.Žižek, Most Sublime Hysteric, 23.
4.For a discussion on Pentecostalism as a religion of play, see Nimi Wariboko, The Pentecostal Principle: Ethical Methodology in New Spirit (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012), 161–95.
5.Slavoj Žižek, Absolute Recoil: Towards a New Foundation of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso, 2014), 372–73.
6.Quoted in Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso, 2012), 19.
7.Antifragility goes beyond resilience or robustness. A fragile system breaks under stress, disorders, or volatility. An antifragile system not only withstands shocks, stress, disorder, uncertainty, and volatility; it also benefits from them. Late capitalism, and more precisely finance capital, renders most persons’ and institutions’ lives fragile to undermine their freedom.
8.William E. Connolly, The Fragility of Things: Self-Organizing Processes, Neoliberal Fantasies, and Democratic Activism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 31.
9.Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2009), 61.
10.Potentiality, as Aristotle taught us, consists of the potential to-do and the potential to not-do, which is called impotentiality. There is more discussion on forms of potentiality in the pages ahead.
11.Žižek, Parallax View, 202.
12.Giorgio Agamben, Nudities, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 44–45.
13.Žižek, Parallax View, 181, 318–20.
14.William E. Connolly, Capitalism and Christianity: American Style (Durham: Duke University Press, 2008).
15.Nimi Wariboko, Economics in Spirit and Truth: A Moral Philosophy of Finance (New York: Palgrave Macmillan 2014), 19–32.
16.“Here one encounters the Lacanian difference between reality and the Real: ‘reality’ is the social reality of the actual people involved in interaction and in the productive processes, while the Real is the inexorable ‘abstract,’ spectral logic of capital that determines what goes on in social reality.” Slavoj Žižek, Violence: Six Sideways Reflections (New York: Picador, 2008), 13.
17.Maurizio Lazzarato, The Making of the Indebted Man (Los Angeles: Semiotext(e), 2012), 8–9.
18.Žižek, Parallax View, 334.
19.Lazzarato, Making of the Indebted Man, 31.
20.Slavoj Žižek, In Defense of Lost Causes (London: Verso, 2009), 29.
21.Žižek, Violence, 149–50.
22.Žižek, Violence, 142–57, inspired this paragraph. I am indebted to his insights on capitalism.
23.Žižek, Violence, 7.
24.Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, ed. and trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).
25.Agamben, Nudities, 44.
26.Agamben, Nudities, 43–44; Agamben, Potentialities, 182.
27.Agamben, Potentialities, 182–83.
28.Žižek, Parallax View, 383.
29.Žižek, Most Sublime Hysteric, 137.
30.Agamben, Nudities, 44–45.
31.Dorothee Sölle, Beyond Mere Obedience, trans. Lawrence W. Denef (New York: Pilgrim Press, 1982).
32.Sölle, Beyond Mere Obedience, 51.
33.Connolly, Capitalism and Christianity.
34.Rey Chow, The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 2002), viii.
35.Chow, Protestant Ethnic, 111.
36.The word is used in the sense made popular by Julia Kristeva. Chow defined it as “the often culturally tabooed condition of an excessive, rejected being that nonetheless remains a challenge to the body that expels it.” Chow, Protestant Ethnic, 147–48. According to Kristeva, “The jettisoned object, is radically excluded and draws me toward the place where meaning collapses. … It is something rejected from which one does not part, from which one does not protect oneself as from an object. Imaginary uncanniness and real threat, it beckons to us and ends up engulfing us. It is thus not lack of cleanliness or health that causes abjection but what disturbs identity, system, order. What does not respect borders, positions, rules. The in-between, the ambiguous, the composite.” Julia Kristeva, Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection, trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1982), 2, 4, quoted in Chow, Protestant Ethnic, 148.
37.I have adapted Chow’s phraseology to my limited purpose here. See Chow, Protestant Ethnic, 152.
38.Colin Campbell, The Romantic Ethic and the Spirit of Modern Consumerism (London: Blackwell, 1987).
39.This will be further discussed in the next chapter.
40.This way of putting the matter is informed by Slavoj Žižek, “Christianity Against the Sacred,” in Slavoj Žižek and Boris Gunjević, God in Pain: Inversions of Apocalypse (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2012), 43–71, quote on 57–58.
Chapter 6
1.Henry Vaughan, “The World,” accessed June 24, 2015, http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174701.
2.Tennessee Williams, “The Timeless World of a Play,” in The Rose Tattoo (New York: New Directions, 1951), 5.
3.Nimi Wariboko, The Pentecostal Principle: Ethical Methodology in New Spirit (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2012).
4.Slavoj Žižek, Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism (London: Verso, 2012), 229–31.
5.I am indebted to Slavoj Žižek, “The Necessity of a Dead Bird: Paul Communism,” in Paul and the Philosophers, ed. Ward Blanton and Hent De Vries (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 180–81.
6.Stathis Gourgouris, “Paul’s Greek,” in Paul and the Philosophers, ed. Ward Blanton and Hent de Vries (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 375.
7.Gourgouris, “Paul’s Greek,” 375.
8.Giorgio Agamben, Profanations, trans. Jeff Fort (New York: Zone Books, 2007), 77.
9.Agamben, Profanations, 86.
10.It is important at this juncture to clarify what I mean by worship as a pure means. Some might argue that bringing about the space in which something or anything might happen, namely, that the Holy Spirit can work and move, is precisely the goal of pentecostal worship and thus constitutes a very particular means-end relationship. This does not defeat my argument that worship is a pure means; pure means by definition a medium/mediality through which things can happen and is not “purity” in an absolute sense. To be in church and enter into a worship that is only the context of the Holy Spirit, a context that is not tied to specific or instrumental ends or economic logic of reciprocity is to reach the point of worship as pure means. Pure means names a medium that is not predetermined for an end, but it does not mean that at the end of their experience participants would say absolutely there is no end at all to their involvement. Indeed, the concept of pure means names or conceptualizes the ultimate goal of pentecostal worship when not adulterated.
This insight about context furnishes us an incompletable passage by which an impossible truth might appear or be conceived. The philosophical concept of worship as pure means (WPM) is not simply meant to capture the idea of a context in which the Holy Spirit freely compears, but an ex-position of what is true in the context, and on the basis of this knowledge to conceive what in the worship appears as a withdrawal or subtraction of something, as a pure event. (G. W. F. Hegel, Hegel’s Science of Logic, trans. A. V Miller [Atlantic Highlands: Humanities Press International, 1989], 588, inspired the construction of the second sentence). What appears as an event is neither a human possession, nor a project; what is given is only a formal relation to it. This amounts to the “unworking,” the inoperativity of end. The context is “neither ground, nor an essence, nor a substance. But it appears, it presents itself, it exposes itself, and thus it exists as communication” (Jean-Luc Nancy, Inoperative, 28). Context is worship communicating itself to worshipers, “both immediately—because it communicates itself—and in a mediated way—because it communicates” (49). Context “being immediate and mediated, is itself the rendition of the [worship] that it mediates, it is the emergence of its own [mediality]” (49).
11.This paragraph is inspired by Brian Blount, Then the Whispers Put on Flesh: New Testament Ethics in an African American Context (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 2001), 72–73. For the conceptualization of participation, potentiality, and participation, see my The Charismatic City and the Public Resurgence of Religion: A Pentecostal Social Ethics of Cosmopolitan Urban Life (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 104–8, 152.
12.This way of styling my thought owes much to James Buchanan, What Should Economists Do? (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1979), 31–32.
13.Jean-Luc Nancy, Being Singular Plural, trans. Robert D. Richardson and Anne E. O’Byrne (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 5–6.
14.Jean-Luc Nancy and Federico Ferrari, Being Nude: The Skin of Images, trans. Anne O’Byrne and Carlie Anglemire (New York: Fordham University Press, 2014), 17.
15.John Fiske, Reading the Popular, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2011), 170.
16.Slavoj Žižek, The Most Sublime Hysteric: Hegel with Lacan, trans. Thomas Scott-Railton (Malden: Polity Press, 2014), 32–33.
17.Žižek, Most Sublime Hysteric, 157–62.
18.Mark C. Taylor, About Religion: Economics of Faith in Virtual Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 205.
19.Taylor, About Religion, 205.
20.Martin Heidegger, “The Thing,” in Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. Albert Hofstadter (New York: Harper and Row, 1971), 168–69.
21.Taylor, About Religion, 206; see also Mark C. Taylor, Altarity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987), 83–85.
22.Taylor, About Religion, 246.
23.F. W. J. Schelling, The Ages of the World: Third Draft (c. 1815), trans. Jason M. Wirth (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 24–25.
24.Schelling, Ages of the World, 25.
25.Schelling, Ages of the World, 25.
26.Schelling, Ages of the World, 24.
27.Slavoj Žižek, The Plague of Fantasies (London: Verso, 2008), 250.
28.Žižek, Plague of Fantasies, 35.
29.Žižek, Plague of Fantasies, 41.
30.It is conceivable that in some rare cases the repeated failures in “securing” object petit a might lead to a crisis of faith, a spiritual conversion away from Pentecostalism or what Lacan calls “subjective destitution.” This is “an abrupt awareness of the utter meaningless [sic] of our social [religious] links, the dissolution of our attachment to reality [God] itself—all of a sudden, other people are de-realized, reality itself is experienced as a confused whirlpool of shapes and sounds, so that we are no longer able to formulate the desire.” Slavoj Žižek, “Only a Suffering God Can Save Us,” in Slavoj Žižek and Boris Gunjević, God in Pain: Inversions of Apocalypse (New York: Seven Stories Press, 2012), 167.
31.Žižek, Plague of Fantasies, 226–27, inspired the discussion of these four types of response.
32.Immanuel Kant, Critique of Judgment, trans. James Meredith (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 24, 21.
33.Slavoj Žižek, “The Most Sublime of Hysterics: Hegel with Lacan,” trans. Rex Butler and Scott Stephens, accessed July 10, 2015, http://www.lacan.com/zizlacan2.htm; see also Žižek, Most Sublime Hysteric, 118.
34.Agamben, Profanations, 86.
35.G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), 210.
36.See also Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2003), 81–85.
37.Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government, trans. Lorenzo Chiesa with Matteo Mandarini (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 246.
38.Agamben, Kingdom and the Glory, 221.
39.Agamben, Kingdom and the Glory, 226.
40.Agamben, Kingdom and the Glory, 245.
41.Agamben, Kingdom and the Glory, 200–1, 211.
42.Agamben, Kingdom and the Glory, 245.
43.Giorgio Agamben, Nudities, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 98.
44.I am deploying the term apparatus in its Agambenian sense. See Giorgio Agamben, “What Is an Apparatus?” and Other Essays, trans. David Kishik and Stefan Pedatella (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009). It is not in the Foucauldian sense of “a set of strategies of the relations of forces supporting, and supported by, certain types of knowledge.” Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings, 1972–1977, ed. Colin Gordon (New York: Pantheon, 1980), 196, quoted in Agamben, “What Is an Apparatus?,” 2.
45.Agamben, “What Is an Apparatus?,” 14.
46.Nimi Wariboko, Nigerian Pentecostalism (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2014).
47.Slavoj Žižek, “Only a Suffering God,” 171.
Chapter 7
1.Jacques Derrida, Positions, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 71.
2.Gerhard Richter, Thought Images: Frankfurt School Writers’ Reflections from Damaged Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 1.
3.This chapter is a revised version of “West African Pentecostalism: A Survey of Everyday Theology,” in Global Renewal Christianity: Spirit-Empowered Movements, Past, Present and Future, Vol. III: Africa and Diaspora, ed. Vinson Synan, Amos Yong, and Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu (Lake Mary: Charisma House, 2016), 1–18.
4.See Nimi Wariboko and Amos Yong, Paul Tillich and Pentecostal Theology: Spiritual Presence and Spiritual Power (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2015).
5.John Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2011), 22.
6.John Fiske, Reading the Popular, 2nd ed. (London: Routledge, 2011), 1.
7.Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture, 56.
8.Birgit Meyer, “Aesthetics of Persuasion: Global Christianity and Pentecostalism’s Sensational Forms,” South Atlantic Quarterly 109, no. 4 (2010): 742; italics in the original.
9.Annalisa Butticci, “Crazy World, Crazy Faith! Prayer, Power and Transformation in a Nigerian Prayer City,” Annual Review of Sociology of Religion 4 (2013): 254.
10.Butticci, “Crazy World,” 256.
11.J. Kwabena Asamoah-Gyadu, Contemporary Pentecostal Christianity: Interpretation from an African Context (Eugene: Wipf and Stock, 2013), 33.
12.Fiske, Reading the Popular, 116.
13.Fiske, Understanding Popular Culture, 86, 88.
14.Jacques Rancière, Dissensus: On Politics and Aesthetics, ed. and trans. Steven Corcoran (London: Continuum, 2010).
15.Fiske, Reading the Popular, 13–16, 27, inspired this paragraph.
16.Matthews Ojo, The End-Time Army: Charismatic Movements in Modern Nigeria (Trenton: Africa World Press, 2006), 89.
17.I have adapted the four modes of exchange as described by Kojin Karatani for my purposes here. See his The Structure of World History: From Modes of Production to Modes of Exchange (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 1–28.
18.Annalisa Butticci, African Pentecostals in Catholic Europe: The Politics of Presence in the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2016).
19.Birgit Meyer, “Aesthetics of Persuasion,” 741–63, quote on 754.
20.See Afe Adogame, The African Christian Diaspora: New Currents and Emerging Trends in World Christianity (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2013), 118, 137.
21.Adogame, African Christian Diaspora, 118; italics mine.
22.Adogame, African Christian Diaspora, 98–99.
23.Adogame, African Christian Diaspora, 84–85.
24.By “academic theology” I mean systematic or constructive theology that functions around classical doctrines and their receptions and interpretations over time. Logos here means a theology that functions in this way and does not involve the daily meanings people draw from practices of their faith or the philosophical/religious significance of the mundane narratives of their everyday lives. But our discourse does not reject logos, and as stated later; microtheology brings together both the signs of logos and meaning. For it is obvious that to make sense of the everyday form of theology we have used critical theory as a frame to interpret practices of ordinary Pentecostals. Note that in the preceding paragraph I stated that there are two issues in the statement: methodology of extracting everyday form of theology (microtheology) and the philosophical grounding of theoretical constructs of ordinary folks (some philosophy of existence). The problem with “academic theology,” as I see it, is that its starting points for theological construction are doctrines and their past interpretations instead of practices of folks on the ground.
25.This way of putting the matter is informed by Enrique Dussel, Ethics of Liberation in the Age of Globalization and Exclusion, trans. Eduardo Mendieta, Camilo Peréz Bustillo, Yolanda Angulo, and Nelson Maldonado-Torres (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013).
26.Margery Perham, The Colonial Reckoning (London: Collins, 1962), 87, quoted in Karen E. Fields, Revival and Rebellion in Colonial Central Africa (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1985), 31–32.
27.Adogame, African Christian Diaspora, 86.
28.Adogame, African Christian Diaspora, 87–92.
29.See Adogame, African Christian Diaspora, 94–99, for a view of the world as a battlefield.
30.Adogame, African Christian Diaspora, 18.
31.Adogame, African Christian Diaspora, 85.
32.Erving Goffman, “On Face Work: An Analysis of Ritual Elements in Social Interaction,” Psychiatry 18 (1955): 213–31; Erving Goffman, The Presentation of the Self in Everyday Life (New York: Doubleday, 1959).
Conclusion
1.I am indebted to Eric L. Santner, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), for inspiring this thought.
2.Santner, Psychotheology of Everyday Life, 5.
3.Santner, Psychotheology of Everyday Life, 5.
4.Nimi Wariboko, Nigerian Pentecostalism (Rochester: University of Rochester Press, 2014), 268–73.
5.Slavoj Žižek, “The Abyss of Freedom,” in F. W. J. Schelling, Abyss of Freedom/Ages of the World (Second Draft, 1813), trans. Judith Norman (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1997), 49–50.
6.Žižek, “Abyss of Freedom,” 50.
7.Santner, Psychotheology of Everyday Life, 6–7.
8.Santner, Psychotheology of Everyday Life, 7.
9.Santner, Psychotheology of Everyday Life, 60–66.
10.Santner, Psychotheology of Everyday Life, 66.
11.Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. William W. Hallo (Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame, 1985), 332.
12.Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, 332.
13.Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, 333–34.
14.Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, 334.
15.Santner, Psychotheology of Everyday Life, 66.
16.Santner, Psychotheology of Everyday Life, 97.
17.Santner, Psychotheology of Everyday Life, 105.
18.Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, 1097b 25–30. The translation is from Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Martin Oswald (Indianapolis: Liberal Arts Press, 1962).
19.Jean-Luc Nancy, The Inoperative Community, trans. Peter Connor, Lisa Garbus, Michael Holland, and Simona Sawhney, foreword Christopher Fynsk (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).
20.Giorgio Agamben, Means without End: Notes on Politics, trans. Vincenzo Binetti and Cesare Casarino (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 115–16.
21.See Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, 65–70; Santner, Psychotheology of Everyday Life, 72–73.
22.Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, 69.
23.Santner, Psychotheology of Everyday Life, 73.
24.Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, 65, 72, 79.
25.Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, 71.
26.Santner, Psychotheology of Everyday Life, 75.
27.Slavoj Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder: On Schelling and Related Matters (London: Verso, 2007), 59.
28.Slavoj Žižek, How to Read Lacan (New York: W. W. Norton, 2006), 43.
29.Richard Wagner, Jesus of Nazareth and Other Writings (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1995), 303.
30.Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, 300–1, 404–5.
31.Rosenzweig, Star of Redemption, 409.
32.Jürgen Moltmann, The Spirit of Life: A Universal Affirmation, trans. Margaret Kohl (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2001), 51.
33.Franz Kafka, The Trial, trans. Willa Muir and Edwin Muir (New York: Schocken, 1984), 220.
34.Santner, Psychotheology of Everyday Life, 102.
35.For ex-citation as calling forth, see Eric L. Santner, “Miracles Happen: Benjamin, Rosenzweig, Freud, and the Matter of the Neighbor,” in Slavoj Žižek, Eric L. Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard, The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 86–92.
36.May we suggest that one of the functions of Paul’s “as-if-not” is aimed at suspending this obscene underside of the incorporation of glossolalia into the symbolic network?
37.This paragraph was inspired by Santner, “Miracles Happen,” 104–5.
38.Santner, Psychotheology of Everyday Life, 102.
39.Santner, Psychotheology of Everyday Life, 102.