The one and only, living legend, and Homebrewed frequenter John Caputo is back! Think of this as a pump primer for the HBC-3d with Caputo at Soularize. Both his first and second visit rocked the podcast. Even more exciting are these class lectures Caputo is sharing here at HBC. These lectures, as we say in the intro, are theological cat nip for theology nerds. Enjoy.
Caputo Writes lots of books. He mentions Some Philosophers…Ray Brassier’s Nihil Unbound: Enlightenment and Extinction and Quentin Meillassoux’s After Finitude.
* We are excited about Doug Pagitt coming to Soularize!
* ‘Like’ John Caputo on facebook
Where’s the Caputo?!? *sniff sniff*
Thanks for the Caputo fix guys
Thanks for posting this lecture. I’ve listened to many of the Caputo’s lectures that you are hosting, and this lecture was a great summary of some highlights. I only wish I’d been assigned less Rorty as an undergraduate philosophy major (although I’ve benefited immensely from reading Rorty) and more Caputo.
On an unrelated matter, is there a way to add a function to your comment section such that you can subscribe to receive an e-mail when follow-up comments are posted?
Thanks so much for posting this historic lecture! I’ve also been chuggalugging the Caputo material on the website and immediately realized when he started giving the lowdown on Meillassoux and Brassier in particular that I needed to sit up and take note of what I was hearing. JDC is a great communicator who can be witty, profound and at times highly moving, as well as a fantastic pedagogue and peerless resource into the latest and wildest Continental philosophical developments.
At the same time I do have the persistent feeling that there is something somewhat schizophrenic in his theological position. When he gets going in other contexts about the ethics of the Gospel, he does so with a zeal that is ‘evangelical’ in the truest, not the tribal sense of the word, and it’s clear that he is in considerable synergy with the thinking represented by Homebrewed, Brian McLaren et al. Here there is evidently a great deal of common ground between his brand of philosophical theology and progressive Christianity. And yet within philosophical circles he is at pains to point out, almost as a point of honour, that to construe what he is saying theistically really would be a serious mistake. This I think is what both Merold Westphal and Kevin Corcoran find perplexing about Caputo, who I feel is trying to be a ‘Christian without God’, if that makes any sense.
I’m still trying to fathom why exactly he takes this stance, but my impression (correct me if I’m mis-reading this) is that his theology is dictated by an a priori objection to the notion of any Big Other (to use Zizek’s term, which Caputo appropriates). The concept of any kind of ‘hyper-being’ is anathema for Caputo, for at least two reasons, I guess.
The first is ethical: the abuses the idea of God has so frequently engendered have made it unusable for him, which is a form of ‘protest atheism’ which one can easily understand and with which it is not hard to sympathize. The second reason seems more structural – following Derrida, Caputo seems to stake his theo-poetics on the idea of that what gives life its passion is a desire for the impossible. This must by definition be infinitely deferred, otherwise this all-important desire (which sounds like Caputo’s élan vital) would be ruined. Even fulfillment in the eschaton must be denied here on principle as a relapse into belief in a deus ex machina. I have no idea what Caputo thinks of Moltmann, whose Crucified God as (following Whitehead) the ‘fellow-sufferer who understands’ surely is close to his vision of the Gospels, but he certainly doesn’t buy his eschatological hope. The Messiah can never arrive in JDC’s scheme, as that would nullify what for Caputo gives life its meaning and preciousness, namely the longing for the impossible arrival.
On the poetic level, it is not difficult to sense the stoic nobility and tragic grandeur of this idea, but Corcoran’s point that it is hardly ‘good news’ has a certain force to it. What struck me about Caputo’s take on Meillassoux and Brassier (of whom I’ve only read reviews and snippets, I have to admit) is that although he raises various cogent objections to both, he is basically defenceless in the face of the nihilistic argument in Brassier’s ‘Nihil Unbound’ that the ultimate reality of the universe is extinction. Caputo’s response – against his nemesis John Milbank as the arch-representative of Christian orthodoxy – is once more essentially a poetic one, namely to argue that death should not be seen as futility but rather as what makes life in all its transience something so priceless. Faced with the implacability of the cosmic end-game, his refusal to countenance the possibility of a ‘hyper-being’ ultimately sovereign over physical laws gives him nowhere else to go.
This is why Caputo as theologian rather than ethicist is frustrating for many who find his poetics a paltry consolation. Aren’t there other possibilities here? Isn’t a social Trinitarian vision based on God’s embrace of the truly human in the Incarnation and rooted in the notion of the Divine Being as kenotic all the way down (as in Urs von Balthasar) enough to show that God does not inevitably have to be perceived as a Big Other? Aren’t there options available – e.g. God as assuming and thereby redeeming the Godforsakenness of the Cross – that Caputo could explore without losing the admirable poetry of his concept, perhaps even enhancing it?
I only wish I could come to Soularize to ask him all this myself!
Have a great time in San Diego,
Peter
@peter great question Peter. how about you write it in just a couple sentences and i ask him while the tape is running!
@carl yeah we will work on the comment stuff. we are not web-studs. when i get rich ill hire one!!
Do you have a time and place for this lecture (for citational purposes?) Thanks.
Thanks so much for offering, Tripp. I’m struggling to condense here … I suppose what I’m trying to ask is:
1. Does belief in God NECESSARILY have to end up in the kind of ‘Big Other’ to which Caputo is understandably allergic, or can the Gospel be read in such a way as to retain the core of orthodox Christianity but in which the naked, thirsty, hungry Christ of Matthew 25 is a genuine revelation of the self-emptying nature of the Divine?
2. While I understand JDC’s eloquently-made point about the link between the preciousness of life and its transience, doesn’t a stoic acceptance of death abandon the quest for JUSTICE that is at the heart of the Judeo-Christian tradition; if there is no ultimate restorative hope for the countless millions throughout history who have suffered terribly, innocently and with apparent finality, then surely life truly IS meaningless.
OK, that was a long sentence, but I had to say it, and perhaps you can find a way to put it more succintly when you have the tape on! Re-listening to the wrap-up to Caputo’s wonderful course on the Future of Continental Philosophy of Religion, 2) strikes me as a crucial issue; I can see why Caputo objects to Milbank’s and Brassier’s shared assumption that only what is permanent has meaning, but surely the vision of Isaiah 61 and Revelation’s ‘healing of the nations’ isn’t primarily about survival in an abstract sense but ultimate redemption. ‘Post-humanism’ might get future generations to the former by downloading consciousness onto robotic bodies as Caputo fascinatingly suggests, but surely only God can bring about the latter. Particularly when it comes to redeeming what for us is irrevocably past. Think of all history’s nameless, forgotten victims; if hope is lost for them, then we’ve lost everything, whatever our poetic gloss on the situation.
There’s no two ways round it – as James Cone says, ‘justice sleeps, but it never dies’.
Peter