The conference was about “Calvinism for the 21st Century,” and — naturally, I think — most of the keynote addresses, and the most well-attended concurrent sessions, dealt with political life and what calvinism/neo-calvinism could mean for it. Some hard questions were asked (for instance, by Bacote about the racism of Kuyper, by Howard Schaap about the anthropocentrism of neo-calvinist “progress” and “development” rhetoric from an ecological perspective, by Smith about un-antithetical acceptance by such thinkers as Wolterstorff of liberal democratic assumptions about anthropology and ethics). The range of attendees was splendidly diverse (along that artificial liberal-conservative line, I mean), and the papers spoke to each other and contributed to the over-all question in a way better than what could have been planned.

But I was disappointed that none of the presenters challenged the premise of the conference in their paper — that one of our big goals should be to salvage something we can call calvinism for the purposes of the 21st century. I happen to think we can — though the project is fraught with the necessity of careful discrimination within the corpus of “Calvinist thought,” and the importance of maintaining the word calvinism is unclear to me for any but tribal or sentimental reasons — but I think the case can (and should have been) made that we cannot. To me this failure spoke of the enduring “lawyer” mentality of those who consider themselves reformed: like lawyers, they are above all interested in finnegling  a crafty path through existing structures to their own goals (which have an origin outside the structures, and are frequently contradicted by the structures) rather than approaching the question of structural change. I was gratified, however, by Smith’s presentation, in which he layed down the gauntlet to “reformed thinkers” who seem to accept liberal democratic notions of human rights and human freedom without dealing with the supporting theoretical structures of such ideas. There was a very Levinasian strain within the conference — particularly in the papers of Smith and Haan, and explicitly in the paper of Mark Tazelaar (and, I guess, implicitly in Schaap’s paper on anthropocentrism). I appreciated and was consoled by this.

Those are my over-all thoughts. Do other contributors have opinions they would like to air?

If you’re interested in reading the book for yourself, it’s available on AAAARG [which all TVA readers should be involved in, of course].

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Summary: Bataille begins his theory of religion, surprisingly enough, with the question of how we humans can conceive of the “immanence” of the animal. These are the distinctions Bataille makes between this immanence and the perceiving of a human: the animal does not subordinate its objects to itself, the animal does not experience the duration of its object, and the animal cannot regard itself as an object. All of these restrictions have to do with the animal’s inability to transcend its object — hence, immanence. Bataille equates transcendence with self-consciousness; so another way to describe the immanence of animals is to say that they perceive without consciousness.

The consequence of this immanence, he imagines, is something half-way between our human consciousness and a world without consciousness. The latter can be glimpsed in the “meaningless” layers of nature uncovered by the hard sciences, in the bounding of atoms and gurgling of chemical processes; but animal immanence dazzles and eludes the eye of the mind. The mystery of it prompts what Bataille calls The Poetic Fallacy of Animality — because we simply cannot imagine perception without consciousness, so “the correct way to speak of it can overtly only be poetic, in that poetry describes nothing that does not slip toward the unknowable.” But because such poetry does not penetrate what it addresses but simply puts a vague “fulguration” of words, a halo around the emptiness of incomprehension, Bataille finally insists that the only clear (ie., non-poetic) description he can offer of animal immanence is that animals are like “water in water.” This is an important and recurring phrase.

(Incidentally, he does offer us, by way of disavowing its use, the following poetic description of animal perception: “There was no vision, there was nothing — nothing but an empty intoxication limited by terror, suffering, and death, which gave it a kind of thickness…”)

Commentary: There isn’t much here, yet, that seems to point toward religion or a theory of religion, except the poetic intensity of Bataille’s language. On that note, I admire his characterization of poetry as that which slips “toward the unknowable.” It is this aspect of his style — that it slipped toward the unknowable — that repelled his contemporaries like Sartre, who avoided him because of his “mysticism,” and it is also (I’ll bet) what attracted posterity, like Lacan, Foucault, Derrida.

Regarding his description of animal immanence, an obvious question is this: why does he distinguish the animal from the human? Aren’t humans in fact animals?

I think this question — though it is in some ways a wrong one — gets at the path that will eventually lead Bataille from animal immanence to religion: humans are animals, yet the definition of animality must be a definition in contrast to human consciousness. In some ways, the performance of this definition is a kind objectifying and sacrificing of the animality in humans — though for the purpose, as will become clear in later posts, of regaining intimacy — which ceremonially displays the anguish of the tension in us which he will argue leads us to religion. He concludes the introduction to the book with these words: “The basic paradox of this ‘theory of religion,’ [...] brings a powerlessness to light, no doubt, but the cry of this powerlessness is a prelude to deepest silence.”

At any rate, I think it is important to the argument of the rest of the book for the reader to perform his thought experiment with him, to attempt to conceive of perception without consciousness, to fail but feel the “sticky” temptation of poetry.

I love the way TVA is working out — the balance between things like Kenny’s post about the politics of the RC-Anglican thing, Joel’s musing about apocalyptic movies, and Matt’s investigations of desire. But I do find that I’m holding myself back in order not to swamp the awesomeness of my fellow contributors with my usual prolix stream of consciousness. Consequently, I am going to to remove the more diverse, personal, and frequent parts of my posting to a NEW BLOG. I will of course continue to participate here, but more as one of the group than as the babbling leader.

In short, keep lovin’ on TVA, but if you’re a longtime reader you will want to add The Anti-moderate now as well, where I will continue to let loose with my usual velocity and frequency, reserving TVA for lengthier/meatier disquisitions.

I cannot alter the fact that I see the whole affair [the whole book] with a certain amount of head-shaking. I have looked at the book again recently and am more than ever convinced that the whole is indeed a fragment — but, as a fragment, nevertheless a unity, in which the two chief parts (Background and History) form unities. The reasons which have moved you to present this united fragment in still more fragments, you will have to explain to the English reader yourself: I cannot, because I just do not understand it.

The Dordt version of the book did not include this letter.

At any rate, in the prefatory essay “The Task of a History of Modern Protestant Theology” Barth lays out his own ideas of the proper method for history of theology.

At Dordt, there is one professor who likes to say “theologians should not be left in charge of writing their own history.” Barth addresses the concern that fuels this quip head-on:

We hear the voices of the ancients in order to give an answer by our own attitude and decision. But we do that for or against ourselves, not for or against them. With our own personal decisions we cannot associate judgments upon our forefathers, whether it is a case of pronouncing canonizations or settling accounts and carrying out funerals. . . . An explicit judgment, the feeling that for better or for worse we can be ‘finished’ with this or that, always means the closing of a door that ought to remain open, the silencing of a voice that ought to continue to speak, and that is not only to our detriment, but also to the detriment of the Church.

A bit later he continues this theme:

History writing cannot be a proclamation of judgment. In that case, it would seem that prophetic inspiration warranted us to presuppose not only that our age could be right, but that it was right. We shall do well not to claim this possibility too hastily or too often. It is appropriate for us to leave on one side what the Son of Man will do in his future, namely, to divide the good from the evil. . . . The condition for a legitimate concern with the theology of the past is rather that we should escape again from the unavoidable intoxication of the moment of our own theological recognition as quickly as possible and with the utmost speed meet up again with our fathers, with those whose voices we think that we have heard often enough before.

It remains to be seen how well Barth carried this project out himself.