Response: guest post from Vincent Lloyd

Vincent Lloyd, soon to be at Syracuse, has kindly written this post in response to the series of posts on his recent book The Problem with Grace.

1. It’s troubling when nearly everyone thinking about an academic topic is a white male. This is largely the case for discussions of political theology, and to some extent also for discussions of secularism. It should make us suspect that the there’s something wrong with how the topic is being approached. Indeed, we should worry that there is something about the topic that maintains white male privilege, and consequently that scholarship on the topic has the potential to give legitimacy to, and so entrench, this privilege. But there are topics so central to who we are that they cannot be abandoned; rather, they must be re-imagined in ways that challenge the privilege which they have long supported.

Of course there’s a long tradition of considering women, non-whites, and poor people as in some sense naturally religious, preempting questions of secularism. Similarly, religious and political vocabularies are often thought to blend much more easily in such communities (e.g., Martin Luther King, Gandhi, etc.). If secularism is a problem peculiar to elite white men, you would think it would be natural to turn to poor people, people of color, and women for an antidote – but that hasn’t happened. In part there’s a concern that the religiosity of such communities is derivative, or, on the flip side, that it ought not to be fetishized as authentic. In response, we might think of political theology as co-constituted, created in the relationship between the center and the margins (as Jared Hickman has argued).

The Problem with Grace explores the political significance of religious concepts by focusing neither on the center (the political or religious canon) nor on the margins (as authentic or derivate) nor on a constructive dialogue between center and margins. Rather, the book “reconfigures” political theology by exploring figures of failure: two women and two men who were both part of and alien to their communities. As such, Gillian Rose, James Baldwin, Franz Kafka, and Simone Weil were acutely aware of the contingency of community custom, but also of the ruses used by power to conceal itself, to make grave injustice seem perfectly natural.

2. Power is concealed and naturalized through ideology, and religious concepts and practices play a crucial role in ideology. It is religion, not God, that is the opiate of the masses, but too often the richness of religious vocabulary is forgotten. This richness is what makes the hold of ideology (and so the interests of the wealthy and powerful) so strong, but it also provides openings to challenge ideology. This richness involves concepts and practices including love, faith, hope, liturgy, sanctity, and revelation. The project of The Problem with Grace is to explore how those concepts function to support ideology, and to explore how they might be understood differently, so as to challenge ideology.

The opiate metaphor suggests a structure of fantasy. Infinite value is placed on something otherworldly, skewing perception (and so action) in this world. The difficulties and failures of the world are concealed by the blinding light of the object of fantasy – and so the world is enchanted. This structure of fantasy takes many forms. The object of infinite value may be represented as transcendent, or immanent, or a mixture of the two. Such a fantasy is relatively easy to identify when it is labeled God, but when it takes the form of secularized concepts that seem inextricable from our everyday lives (love, faith, hope…) they appear perfectly natural – and so function all the more strongly to secure ideology, to advance the interests of the wealthy and the powerful.

3. Ordinary people naturally do the right thing, ethically and politically, but their actions are always already distorted by ideology. It is trendy to say that the subject is constituted by ideology, but it is only the middle class white male subject who is constituted by ideology, and even in that case only imperfectly. In contrast, for the vast majority of people ideology drips down from elites, infecting the language and perceptions of ordinary people, but still obviously artificial and incomplete. Challenges to power come from two complementary directions: the critique of ideology and mass movements of ordinary people. Academics concern themselves with the former, and they ought not aspire to say anything about the latter (they ought to simply follow). Anything else academics do supports the interests of the wealthy and powerful. Theorists and theologians don’t have anything to teach ordinary people; their job is to critique ideology and idolatry. That’s what The Problem with Grace attempts.

Of course things are a bit more complicated. Through social movements ideology is wiped away, but purity is never reached. Recording best practices of social movements, historically and cross-culturally, is another important task. Moreover, without organization, ideology gains strength. Organization fills in “the middle”, makes “complex space” – the rich texture of neighborhood associations, labor unions, sports clubs, and other groups that is opened once the fantasy of sovereignty is abandoned, and through which the fantasy of sovereignty is abandoned.

The task of academics is to open this space for organization, this space of “the middle,” rather than to fill it in. Too often political theorists, philosophers, and theologians purport to be interested in the ordinary, but for them the ordinary secures rather than undermines ideology: the ordinary as object of fantasy. They fill in the middle with theory instead of practice, and so absorb it in fantasy, and so quash it.

4. The Problem with Grace explores ways of talking about the ordinary that are grounded in practice, and accountable to practice. It suggests that the ordinary is not composed of just what there is, or the commonplace. Rather, the ordinary is composed of what one does and what one ought to do, of practices and norms. Ideology (enchantment) makes it seem as though norms and practices do, or could, fit together well: it’s possible to do what we ought to do. That’s what religious concepts are used to reinforce. The Problem with Grace proposes alternative ways of understanding religious concepts that acknowledge the constant mismatch between norms and practices – and so aspires to shear the ordinary of fantasy.

The self-preservation of the wealthy and the powerful depends on convincing us that norms and practices coincide, that doing what one ought to do will lead to success. It is blatantly obvious to poor people and people of color that norms and practices don’t match, that doing what one is supposed to do, what is socially acceptable to do, doesn’t lead to success. Tragedy is not fully concealed. Ideology trickles down unevenly, incompletely. The Problem with Grace aspires to offer a repertoire for ideology critique, vocabulary and practices that combat regnant enchantment, opening space for political organizing in “the middle” and for political imagining beyond the pragmatic (pragmatism, after all, is the approach that best preserves the interests of the wealthy and powerful – or second best, behind “prophetic pragmatism”).

5. The critique of ideology has two aspects: immersion in tradition and transformation of tradition. Neither is possible without the other; attempts to do one without the other lead to further entrenchment of ideology. Asceticism without revolution is empty; revolution without asceticism is blind. Ideology depends on its control of desire: it depends on fantasy. The asceticism of tradition, doing what is done not because it is desired but because it is what is done, deprograms the desires of ideology and makes possible entirely novel configurations of desire. The asceticism of tradition is oriented towards the eschaton.

Just as the task of academics is to critique ideology and to record best practices of social movements, the task of theologians is to critique idolatry (immersion in tradition and transformation of tradition) and to record best practices of social movements. Religious communities that are not social movements are idolatrous. Idolatry controls desire, conceals the eschaton.

Sin has become taboo. Idolatry cannot stand talk of sin (ideology is antithetical to humility). The Problem with Grace makes sin central: the world is fallen and the world cannot redeem itself. Theologians purporting to represent women, people of color, and poor people shun talk of sin, claiming that sin is part of the vocabulary of oppression. But it is just the opposite: acknowledging sin makes redemption possible. It is the powerful and wealthy who depend on concealing the reality that the world is fallen – and who fear redemption the most.

Lloyd’s Problem with Grace (5)

Lloyd’s conclusion speaks of a politics of the middle. ‘There are two kinds of politics’ that of law and grace and that of the middle. The politics of the middle refuses transcendent authority, whether from beyond the world or inside the person – what matters is reasoning and negotiation. The point is to stay with the everyday instead of going beyond it; explanations just occlude. There is no secret, all-encompassing explanation. ‘But sometimes things do need to be said.’ It is not that there is no normativity and only practices. Against the beautiful soul and against quietism we must commit ourselves, we must act. The alternative to quietism is ‘to represent the ordinary rhetorically.’ To be aware of and speak to one’s audience. This must be done strategically, at certain times. It cannot be done all the time because it is trying to make the audience aware that how they live needs to be changed. This politics will use various strategies to represent the ordinary (the ordinary ‘cannot be accessed directly. It can only be represented.’) This representation is somewhat free of enchantment and so needs protecting. ‘This deliberative, Socratic moment must be separated from the political moment, the moment when politics is packaged in the language of enchantment in order to persuade.’ We shouldn’t neglect this moment altogether, nor try to use it too often. It requires faith and love.

Is this elitist? How does the rhetorical packaging of politics work? If we know it is rhetorical persuasion doesn’t that make us less likely to be persuaded? Who is the audience here? The original socratic philosophers were clear that they were a class above the polloi but I think Lloyd would be uncomfortable with this. I think Lloyd imagines that the moments of critique can only be sporadic because we have to get on with the everyday running of politics, but equally that the institutions generating critique and the political class’ ability to hear critique need to be nurtured.

The appendix on ‘political theology as a rigorous science’ grapples with the problem of how political philosophy can be both thorough and efficacious. It needs to go beyond the ordinary and yet rooted in the ordinary in order to persuade most people. The key move is to refuse any transcendent source of normativity so that norms and practices are open to change. Here’s the difference Lloyd’s approach could make. To advance a political goal people normally think of the actors and their motivations and how they could be persuaded to change their minds or do a deal. But this precludes other options, it precludes surprise. It operates only within the normal logic. Political philosophy as a ‘rigorous science’ is a way of calling forth ‘the invisible unpredictable possibilities. It is political theology.’ So political philosophy is especially important in moments of deadlock or impasse. But political science and political theory don’t really allow for this.

This seems to suggest that political philosophy needs practitioners who practice the philosophical virtues and strategies Lloyd has named so that they can be ready with imagination and discernment when moments of impasse happen. If this suggests more dialogue between politicians and political philosophers that’s probably a good thing. But are political philosophers the best people for moving past an impasse? Perhaps NGO workers or the equivalent are better at coming up with practical solutions.

Political philosophy is the root of political theology. Done rightly political philosophy makes visible the invisible, and it does so through rhetoric. A particularly efficacious rhetorical technique is to use the language of religion, a language that has wide cultural resonance in the contemporary context. It is, after all, the quintessential language of enchantment. The language of theology can be used sophistically or philosophically; almost always it is used sophistically.

But political philosophy can use theological language as its own rhetoric to achieve its own ends. This is not an attempt to fool people but speaking to them with reasons that anyone can assess in order to persuade them to change. It is representing the ordinary to side-step the enchantment of the obvious. In other words, it is representing the everyday in a way that puts it under question whilst suggesting another possibility. This is partly a please for political theologians and philosophers to use religious concepts more flexibly and widely. Is this also a call for politicians to use religious rhetoric to mobilise sections of the population? The former seems wise, the latter dangerous.

Throughout the book there’s a focus on the political actor. This is partly due to the focus on political virtues and partly the importance given to the Roseian phenomenological method, which is existential as well as intellectual. Lloyd is not writing about political strategies in the sense of policy mechanisms or electioneering. He is writing about forming political agents through the virtues and practices, e.g., forgiveness, attention, dispossession, etc. but this is also about a type of political discourse, one that remains in the middle rather than speaking with a supersessionist accent. Is this sort of discourse only able to find a home in civil society or could governments work this way too? Lloyd seems to suggest that only at certain Socratic moments could governments enact a Roseian phenomenology; otherwise they must depend more on their usual logic and rhetoric. This is not a critique so much as a fact.

This is a fascinating book that deserves wide debate. Tune in next month for one more post: a response from Lloyd himself.

Lloyd’s Problem with grace (4)

Section II of The Problem with Grace is about theopolitical strategies, the main aim of which is to thin out our enchantment, which means to make us aware of the necessary gap between practices and norms. Tradition is used as a strategy when the mismatch between norms and practices is taken as a chance to interpret and develop the tradition, perhaps in surprising directions, or even ‘a direction inexplicable by analysis of practices alone.’ Here the person (rhetorician, novelist, politician) plays with norms to reconfigure them, they don’t just refer them to/from practices.  There is no one account that will explain everything and make sense of all our practices. When we accept this, i.e. that norms are only fictions to live by, then both norms and practices lose a sense of mystifying authority and we become free to change them.

Liturgy should be distinguished from ritual. Ritual must follow precisely the set norms; liturgy (as understood by Vatican II thinkers) is primary and it is the job of theological norms to catch up. Lloyd argues that liturgy is, in one sense, self-authorizing, if its practices are taken as primary and the norms of theology have to catch up with it. This means that it can be treated, at least for a while, as practices free from norms. This leaves space for play and experimentation, even if only in putting the norms and practices back together again. The result may be something unexpected. Liturgy can function this way without the ‘rhetorical flourish’ of calling it a foretaste of the world to come. More recent enthusiasts for liturgy who suggest it opens the way to ontological peace are hiding the violence we always enact because of the intrinsic gap between norms and practices. Simone Weil’s concept of attention offers ways of becoming aware of our own violence and our institutions’ violences.

Lloyd also turns to Weil in discussing sanctity. He understands sanctity as another strategy for loosening our normal understanding of the obvious. Sanctity acts ‘as if there are no norms’ so that ‘new practices can be born that are unpredictable from the perspective of norms.’  How can we gain the leverage on ourselves to create this new perspective? Through some of Weil’s disciplines: attention, dispossession, affliction, forgiveness, abandonment of reward. These are not things we do all the time (that would be to instate a new norm). They are strategies employed from time to time in order to question the link between practices and norms and develop practical wisdom in the light of that. This helps when we encounter practices without norms and have to develop them.

Encountering a practice without a norm is an ‘event’, a way of understanding revelation. Not revelation as a conversation stopper because of its authority and transparency, nor a Badiouian event requiring a total Gestalt switch, but a more hermeneutic event that requires re-thinking norms and creating new ones. Excellent writing can also help here because it works through tensions instead of giving answers; it is ‘equivocal all the way down.’ James Baldwin serves as the example for this, and for prophecy. Prophecy is rhetoric that attempts to name and highlight the meeting of the ordinary and the invisible: it tries to make us aware of what we do and how that doesn’t quite fit our normative schemes, so that we may change them. The prophet is interested in the ‘systematic violence of norms’. Another of Lloyd’s exemplars here is Foucault who both questions anchorage points (e.g. ‘sex’) and underlines the tensions between norms and practices (through genealogical critique). The prophet does not speak from some otherworldly realm but is persuasive because she gives reasons and arguments; hers is public speech. The prophet wants to change things, she calls for faith, a ‘total commitment never fully justified.’

Lloyd takes a series of religious practices and loosens them from their traditional, theological context without reducing them to secular terms. Some of them could be re-described in secular terms, I think, but some of them not (say, revelation and sanctity respectively). The point for Lloyd is to avoid equating religion with transcendence and the secular with immanence, so that a range of (suitably defined) religious concepts and practices can be used to shed light on politics.

Lloyd’s Problem with Grace (3)

The first section of the book is called ‘theopolitical virtues’ and covers love, faith and hope. Love and faith are interpreted as virtues (always beneficial) and hope as a rhetorical strategy (ambiguous). Love is interpreted as an embodiment of the Hegelian speculative identity, a learning to live in and by negotiation. This is most obvious between two lovers but it helps us understand love as a political virtue (it says something about the state of the agent). Loving political actors are willing to stake themselves in their political negotiations; they accept the constant pulling and pushing required by common life, that we cannot always get what we want, that we must make room for others. This has parallels with William Connolly’s work. Faith is the virtue of carrying on in engaging the ordinary world after the realisation that all normative worlds fail. (For more on this see the introduction to Secular Faith edited by Lloyd and Elliot Ratzman).

In the first two chapters, Lloyd takes an understanding of a religious concept and, by freeing it from being overburdened by thick traditional description, enables it to cast light on politics. First, the whole idea of virtues in politics is marginal in current discourse. Second, the virtues chosen come from the Jewish and Christian traditions rather than secular political analysis, and it speaks both ways through its use in this new context. This is how Lloyd fleshes out the middle way he refers to in his introduction (see part (2)). We can also see this in his use of hope as a strategic, rhetorical tool, used to generate political momentum. Hope is certainly important in politics and probably deserves more discussion that it receives, but it shouldn’t be handled in a naive fashion, and this is what Lloyd avoids.

Lloyd’s Problem with Grace (2)

I can finally start to blog about Lloyd’s new book The Problem with Grace. It helps to outline an important part of Lloyd’s thinking first. Lloyd thinks there are only practices and norms (‘Law’ is the symbol for this). What else could there be? Norms are related to practices but are always mismatched. We can’t help but give reasons, arguments and justifications for our norms – in other words, get involved in metaphysics and ethics. Norms have no ontological ground in an ultimate sense, but they are they are real and have social force: they are fictions we live. There is no principle or scheme that would make everything make perfect sense, that could ground all morality and from which everything could be derived (‘Grace’ is something like this). If we assume this then we distract from our own violence and prevent ourselves from changing it [e.g. assuming the church or America is the paradigmatic society]. When we attempt to redeem the world as a whole through some scheme, we refuse to accept its tragic and messy nature. We need to accept and mourn this, not get fixated on it in melancholia. We need to focus on what we actually do, not some ideal scheme of ‘if only everyone would…’ Supersessionism is replacing one thing with another: dismissing the actual world for some hoped-for melancholic object. Lloyd is against utopian thinking, in favour of dialectical thinking that starts in the middle of the messiness and works to improve it. (For more on norms and practices see his Law and Transcendence).

The subtitle of the book is Reconfiguring Political Theology and this is about removing a supersessionist logic from political theology and philosophy, by which Lloyd means that the ‘world is amiss, fallen; some redemptive force, with its origins both inside and outside the world, is needed to make it right.’ One way Lloyd will go about this is broadening the number and scope of theological ideas used to understand politics and political philosophy. Rather than simply relating political structures to transcendence and immanence he draws on the theological virtues and some practices such as tradition, liturgy and sanctity. A major claim is worth quoting in full.

I take religious language seriously, and I do so in a way that retains the rich legacy of Jewish and Christian reflection on and refinement of religious concepts without subordinating those concepts to an overarching theological narrative. We gain something of value when concepts like tradition, liturgy, and sanctity are made available for political theorizing, but we lose something of value when such concepts are stripped of their religious heritage. We also lose something of value when every mention of concepts like tradition, liturgy, and sanctity brings with it unwarranted commitments that are specifically theological. Some middle path must be possible: it is precisely the task of this book to identify and traverse that path.

On key question, then, will be how well these concepts function outside of their larger theological context and how much of their ‘rich legacy’ can be maintained without it. This is what the following chapters must display. This is intended to be a ‘postsectarian, postsecular political theology’. Each chapter focuses on a religious practice but tries to understand it in relation to social norms and practices, ‘detaching it from an overarching theological narrative’, in order to help us understand the political and social norms and practices, rather than to mobilize the affect of these concepts for apologetic purposes.

Lloyd’s ‘The Problem with Grace’ (1)

I’m up against some tight deadlines at the moment so I won’t be able to post much for the next couple of weeks but I’ve just had an exhilarating day and a half reading The Problem with Grace by Vincent Lloyd. I hope to post in more detail about it towards the end of May but here’s a quote to whet your appetite.

I take religious language seriously, and I do so in a way that retains the rich legacy of Jewish and Christian reflection on and refinement of religious concepts without subordinating those concepts to an overarching theological narrative. We gain something of value when concepts like tradition, liturgy, and sanctity are made available for political theorizing, but we lose something of value when such concepts are stripped of their religious heritage. We also lose something of value when every mention of concepts like tradition, liturgy, and sanctity brings with it unwanted commitments that are specifically theological. Some middle path must be possible: it is precisely the task of this book to identify and traverse that path.

Lloyd’s Law and Transcendence

Near the beginning of his impressive book Law and Transcendence. On the unfinished project of Gillian Rose, Vincent Lloyd says

One of Gillian Rose’ insights was that philosophy, since Kant (and before Kant), has most often conducted its investigation by placing certain privileged concepts in a transcendental register. These concepts determine the conditions of possibility for the empirical world. The content of the transcendental register is immune from criticism; nothing in the empirical world can affect it. But where does the content of the transcendental register come from? What is the source of its authority? Perhaps it seems self-evident, perhaps it seems god-given, or perhaps it seems the result of exhaustive reflection.

In fact, any content of the transcendental register is merely an elevated, sanctified aspect of the ordinary world. Any content of the transcendental register is rhetoric usurping the place of philosophy.

These philosophies are motivated by the realization that there is something wrong with the world, to which we can respond by melancholy or mourning (Freud). Melancholy is when grieving never stops, the whole world is viewed in the light of the lost object. Mourning is temporary, it allows one to return to the normal world and get on with things, even though we are changed. Philosophy then must be about critical reflection on the ordinary, on ethics, on ‘what one is to do’. The way to do this is to see philosophy as ‘the study of law, of individuated social norms.’

The way to do this is by developing a speculative identity (following Hegel). ‘A speculative identity of the form A is B simultaneously and equally affirms and rejects the identity that it states. It says, at the same moment, ‘A is B’ and ‘A is not B.’ Rather than making the relation in question vacuous, a speculative identity ‘must be understood as a result to be achieved’’.  The two terms are ‘empty names’ to be filled in by examining ‘the social and historical conditions which give rise to the speculative identity’, their tensions and contradictions.

I’m not sure if this is just an absolutely thoroughgoing phenomenological method, or at least one version of it (following Hegel’s own), or if something more is being claimed. Certainly the book as a whole is an impressive argument, confidently handling a large number of thinkers (HLA Hart, Marion, Butler, Lacoste, Milbank, Stout, McDowell and others), and what Lloyd works towards is the claim that we must do away with transcendence. Or at least, it seems that way, but then he seems to equivocate slightly (which perhaps Rose would applaud), by granting legitimacy to moments of experience of transcendence (here he discusses Bataille and Houllebecq). He says

Transcendence is a fantasy. Like any genuine fantasy, it must always be kept at a distance…But a fantasy still does worldly work. A fantasy of transcendence involves a strategic lever – the founding moment, the will of God, the American dream. What flattens transcendence into strategic rhetoric for Houellebecq – rather than an actually achievable or knowable possibility, as it is for Bataille – is the unbridgeable distance between the fantasy of transcendence and the ordinary. In Lacanian parlance, Houellebecq has traversed the fantasy.

As far as I can tell, he allow for moments of transcendence (presumably including religious and aesthetic experience), but refuses to allow them to be used as a trump card. The meaning of such experiences is always contestable so they cannot make their way into politics simpliciter. What Rose and Lloyd want to avoid is using transcendence as a conversation stopper. A very interesting book on an extremely difficult thinker.

A conversation with Vincent Lloyd

Dr. Lloyd is Assistant Professor in the department of religious studies at Georgia State University with interests in religion and politics, philosophy of religion, religion and literature, continental philosophy, and race theory. He has many papers some of which can be viewed and downloaded here. He is the author of Law and Transcendence: On the unfinished project of Gillian Rose and the forthcoming The Problem with Grace: Reconfiguring Political Theology, the editor of Race and Political Theology (forthcoming) and the co-editor of Secular Faith (with Elliot Ratzman).

Our conversation begins with some question about his recent article ‘Complex Space or Broken Middle? Milbank, Rose, and the Sharia Controversy’ (in Political Theology, 10.2, 2009), which develops the idea of the politics of the middle. He suggests that we need to keep philosophy and rhetoric separate. Politics proceeds by rhetoric – trying to convince others that your interests are theirs, even if they are not. Philosophy is there to humble the rhetoric when it begins to be taken too seriously. Political claims are necessary but incomplete. The job of philosophy is to stop any political-theological mythos taking hold, but such mythoi should be used by associations to out-narrate one another in gaining allegiances. ‘But commitment in the middle is hypothetical, not categorical. Authorities hold sway provisionally, not absolutely.’

Rowan Williams’ speech on Sharia law was an attempt to work this out. Williams was ‘proposing a framework to institutionalize this humility [of a politics of the middle], a framework that would tame the over-reaching claims of both religious communities and the ostensibly secular state.’ In the end you can always leave an association if you decide you don’t believe it any more (Lloyd recognizes this is difficult). This upholds the hypothetical rather than categorical nature of their beliefs. Multiple legal jurisdictions keep them humble and working for the best of people, working to secure their allegiance.

Beyond Unknowing: Can we prevent mythoi from taking hold? Don’t we have to have a mythos in order to act?

Vincent Lloyd: I wasn’t trying to say people shouldn’t let mythoi take hold, but rather that it’s important to maintain space for critique (what I think I was calling space for philosophy). I don’t think this claim is so unique — isn’t this what Lacanians, Derrideans, Foucaultians, and pragmatists all try to do in different ways? They at once embrace the symbolic/text/episteme, but also grapple for (and perform) critique of that which they embrace; they come up with novel critical maneuvers.

More recently I’ve been arguing that there is a particular stance towards mythoi encouraged by a certain class configuration – the hegemony of the bourgeoisie. It’s a bourgeois attitude that takes things (everything) too seriously. While academics are busy worrying about inconsistent beliefs and figuring out some method of knowing the right thing to do or the right way to understand the world, the university’s janitors, maintenance workers, cooks, and repair people have a sense of the tragic and the comic, they understand (through knowledge how, not knowledge that) the world is broken and irreparable and that’s no reason to despair. In other words, the philosophical moment, the critical moment, comes about from accessing the perspective of the poor, of the proletariat — and holding it in critical tension with the analysis of the mythos possible from an academic vantage point, from within the professor’s office.

BU: Can we really act on a mythos if we don’t really believe in it? Isn’t that lack of belief part of political apathy at the moment (in the UK at least)? Can we really prevent ourselves from elevating our own rhetoric into philosophy?

VL: I think the point I wanted to make was that the philosophical moment is an exceptional moment. As soon as it becomes the norm it loses its potency (all too evident in the “radical” humanities). In The Problem with Grace I have a chapter on liturgy (in the everyday sense and the expansive sense, including Critical Mass bicycle rides) as a way of creating exceptional, potentially critical moments.

So, yes, I think in national electoral politics it’s inevitable that rhetoric is taken very seriously. In a sense, local electoral politics seems much more interesting, and like the place where people should be getting engaged. But on the other hand, there are theo-political virtues built by commitment to something which is obviously deeply flawed but

the best of bad options (in a sense, isn’t this what Christianity is all about?).

BU: Is it the case that one is existentially committed to one’s mythos, but formally accepts it may be mistaken because of the existence of other mythoi?

VL: I suppose my tendency is to go in the other direction, so to speak. Instead of thinking of two different sorts of commitments (existential and formal), to see practice as coming before belief, and to see the apparent problem arising only when beliefs are taken too seriously. In short, it’s what people do that matters, not what they say or what they think (what they think they think). Mythos is a way of approximating practice (or clusters of practice, imagined), but it always misrepresents practice. Critique calls out these

misrepresentations. (Incidentally, perhaps this is a way to think about the epistemological privilege of the poor: that the poor don’t suffer from the bourgeois tendency to take beliefs/rules/language so seriously).

BU: Am I understanding you correctly if I say that you think we should operate with the best mythos we can, until we feel it requires critique in a certain area or at a certain time? Is this what you intend by referring to the political as a ‘moment’?

VL: Yes, and I take this to be Badiou’s position (or at least the interesting part of his position), except that agency is a bit more ambiguous than the question suggests. We don’t choose an event, or when an event appears, or what it might look like; the most we can do is note how the current mythos is stretched, note its points of incompleteness, and be willing to commit to a possibly emerging new mythos (but Badiou, rightly I think, talks on a smaller scale than “global” mythos, that art or science or politics or love each are dominated by different mythoi, can each give rise to events). There’s a nice article by H. Richard Niebuhr advocating pacifism in (the early stages of) the Second World War called “The Grace of Doing Nothing” — basically suggesting that there are times when painfully committing oneself to the status quo, and waiting, is the best one can do.

BU: I gather that reason (in some form) is important to Rose; does this mean there will be some claim to universality in a philosophical critique?

VL: I’m not sure the following is exactly what Rose would say, but I would tend to frame the universality of critique in terms of structure rather than content. It’s important everywhere, always to have spaces for critique, but the content of such spaces is entirely parasitic on a regnant mythos. Reason (that is not echoes of conventional wisdom

going by the name of reason) is necessarily critical, and is only sovereign in critical spaces/moments.

BU: To return to you comments about the state, surely the state is still going to be somehow controlling. The idea that the state would only interfere to sort out disagreements that cannot be resolved locally doesn’t seem plausible. And governmentality studies would suggest that the state controls or exercises power through

various independent and quasi-independent organizations. A politics of the middle seems very attractive but how would it work in practice?

VL: To say that the state exercises authority through quasi-independent organizations is already to buy into the state mythos, isn’t it? Certainly they work in coordination, and that coordination secures the state mythos. But it seems misleading to frame the state as an agent, directing other organizations. I’m not sure that I’d frame a “politics of the middle” as a political system, more as a political spirit, one that doesn’t take itself too seriously and that makes space for critical institutions (universities at their best, the press at its best, the arts at their best, etc.) — and so one that is open to dramatic structural change (but doesn’t

predict or over-plan such change). This summer I’m working on a paper called “How Democracy Hurts,” for a collection on secularism and pluralism, that is basically arguing that people want political participation to feel good — or else they enjoy how ‘broken’ the

‘system’ is. But the best kind of politics happens when people are uncomfortable, when they acknowledge that their values are necessarily being compromised. And it argues that we should think more about cultivating political asceticism.

BU: Could you say a bit more about the ‘radical’ humanities?

VL: Institutionalization of exceptional/critical moments strengthens the status quo, and it seems like this has happened with cultural studies, ethnic studies, Marxist theory, etc. Which is not to say they aren’t worthy of commitment (like other parts of the prevailing mythos/status quo), but the rhetoric of radicalism that accompanies them is irksome because it prevents openness to other, novel critical moments.

BU: Turning specifically to Rose, do you think she errs on the side of being too tragic? I think her description of the need for constant work, constant compromise, never

getting things quite right, does characterize a lot of the world, but there are moments of communal life in which things go well for both parties, win-win situations, times when living virtuously turns out well.

VL: Yes, I agree, and I think this is something Rowan Williams doesn’t quite “get” — the fantasy of all-pervasive redemptive suffering is too strong. In The Problem with Grace, I argue that the most useful way to understand Rose on love is as an exercise for living, but that Rose herself mistakenly wants to see love everywhere, all the time, and she wants friendship, romantic love, and ordinary life all to blend into each other. In doing so she is actually refusing judgment and distinction; for these a dialectic between critical moment and mythos, each distinct, is necessary.

BU: You used to live in a vegetarian co-op and have been involved in local/grass roots politics. How has that informed your work?

VL: I certainly value the complications, and pleasures, of cooperative living, and I think it helps to humble the medieval fantasies of Milbank & Co. And in general it seems like a really good thing to put oneself in situations, occasionally, where one’s normal social status don’t matter. There’s a nice discussion in the recent Hauerwas/Coles book about foot washing at L’Arche, where the most significant activity is not washing the feet of the developmentally disabled but rather having one’s own feet washed by the developmentally disabled.

BU: I have a lot of sympathy with what you say about practice being more important than belief, but then immediately want to qualify this by saying that a) sometimes belief enables or frames action (for instance, if one is a pacifist then certain actions are just not ‘live’ options), so in at least some cases action is mediated through belief and belief comes first. b) theory, or the critical moment, are important precisely in allowing us to change our actions, and to know what we’re doing. So sometimes a lack of education, frequently associated with poverty, is a real hindrance to good action (hence the emphasis on consciencizatoin in Freire or Marxisms). From a slightly different angle, a lack of phronesis in the Aristotelian/MacIntyrean sense is a problem, a flaw, and depends on some amount of reflection. c) Are there not times when only belief and/or intention can discriminate between the same acts? For instance, purchasing fair trade goods may be an attempt to pursue economic justice or it may be a marker or bourgeois distinction.

VL: a) Right, but what is it to be a pacifist? It is to act in certain ways, to do certain things (one of which is proclaiming oneself a pacifist). “Practice” could be understood to encompass more than just “action” (which suggests intention) — “what is done” or “what one does”… Certainly the practices that “beliefs” abbreviate can influence other

practices, but so can, say, promises, or statements, or other practices…

b) Maybe this can be divided into two issues. There’s acculturation, growing into a tradition, which enables practical wisdom/phronesis/etc., but a “critical moment” involves the suspension of tradition, seeing the world and acting as if tradition has no hold. The second is enabled by the first; one has to have a deep understanding of (a domain of) tradition to know when and how to set it aside. I don’t think phronesis requires the “critical moment”, though — Obama seems like an excellent example of someone with great phronesis, who can negotiate tradition wonderfully, but who is incapable of suspending tradition. And there are issues where that just is necessary, for example Israel/Palestine (deeply questioning U.S. support of Israel seems like a prerequisite to getting anywhere

on that issue). Indeed, it seems like the “critical moment” might only be justifiable in terms of the theological, in some sense.

c) Sure, but I think a sufficiently broad understanding of practice can deal with cases like this (e.g., thinking about how practices are linked with each other, how they cluster, and so on). And, the focus on practice also suggests that there are times when people might profess a distinction (of belief) but it might be less clear-cut. The distinction between the motive of economic justice and a marker of bourgeoisie might be partially illusory.

BU: Why do you say that the critical moment may only be justifiable in terms of the theological?

VL: The terms of justification are the terms of tradition, or mythos. Moments of pseudo-critique involve the thickening of tradition, recovering resources and explicating practices from tradition to address pressing problems. In a secular vocabulary, even in a secularized theological vocabulary of so-called prophetic pragmatists, that sort of pseudo-critique is the most we can hope for (Rowan Williams thinks Blair should have read more Dostoyevsky; Cornel West thinks Obama should read Moby Dick). While I think Badiou and Quentin Meillassoux are definitely pointing in a genuinely critical direction when they urge that we commit ourselves to the absolute, this is too easily read in terms of belief instead of practice. I think the theological virtues offer a very fruitful vocabulary for making possible, without attempting to control, critical moments. The practices of faith, hope, and love allow both for the defense of (generic) orthodoxy and for the welcoming of critical moments, even revolutionary moments.

BU: Professor Lloyd, thank you for talking to us.

The coalition and a politics of the middle?

Vincent Lloyd has pointed out that people either want political participation to feel good or they want to complain that the system is broken, but they don’t want to get on with the difficult work of trying to reform the imperfect institutions we have. The latter he terms ‘political asceticism’, a certain discomfort and frustration with what we’ve got, but a commitment to it nevertheless. It strikes me that this is exactly what the Con-Dems will need if they are to survive.

Vincent Lloyd

Vincent Lloyd’s webpage is an excellent resource of papers and syllabi. He’s done a lot of work on political theology and Gillian Rose. It’s very generous for a scholar to make their work available like that. Check it out.