Abstract
Catherine Keller is a highly original and multi-ocular theologian who blends together process theology, deconstructionist philosophy, feminism, postcolonial and decolonial thought in challenging theopoetic writing. This chapter introduces Keller to the novice reader, concentrating on her emphases on creation and apocalypse.
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Notes
- 1.
Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death/Literature in Secret, trans. by David Willis (Chicago: University Chicago Press, 2008).
- 2.
Keller (2017) elaborates: “What appears instead suggests a chaotic decomposition, the return to the Body of the earth, the dissolution of the One into the all, the all too many…. And yet composition is also underway: improvisational self-compositions of the multitudes themselves, compost piles amid loss. Rotting and gestating, dissolving and resolving, these entangled manifolds of the earth may respond quite differently to us if we respond to their bodies and ours with less fear. And more canniness. We could become better artists of the possible. Unexpected alliances might arise, not awaiting salvation but actively, amorously salvaging. They would intensify planetary resistance to the global corporations that now threaten the corporeal ground and climate of our shared life” (7–8).
- 3.
Process thought is perhaps an interloper in the primary discourses of radical theology, which developed during the last century in the United States largely out of an exchange with continental philosophy—an elaboration of its ongoing critiques of classical ontotheology and the modern metaphysics of substance. Whitehead articulated in the early twentieth century, in the wake of the quantum discoveries in theoretical physics, an alternative cosmology in which the world is understood in terms of dynamic becoming rather than of static being. Process thought thus challenges in its own, affirmatively metaphysical, way precisely the fixed, atomistic notions of substance, matter, and individual identity that have been the object of deconstructive critique. In Whitehead’s cosmology the divine is not an Absolute Being, hovering outside of the universe, and dropping in on occasion to supernaturally intervene; instead God names for Whitehead a “divine lure,” immanent in processes of worldly becoming and soliciting all creatures toward the actualization of novel possibilities. Keller’s writing is unique in its continued and creative engagement with this alternative Whiteheadian metaphysics, especially insofar as she has sought continually, against the anti-metaphysical thrust of continental thought, to elaborate certain convergences between process cosmology and poststructuralist theory (a convergence she facilitates largely in connection to the work of Gilles Deleuze).
- 4.
Further: “Fear of merger and self-dispersion motivates all insistence on separate selfhood. But let me suggest that in such fear of self-loss lurks a profound fear of women. Because of this basic gynophobia, any articulation of a feminist perspective, especially one unfurling a sense of radical interconnection, will be suspected of advocating female dominance and the defeat of the differentiated individual. To relax the severity of masculine ego boundaries threatens to unleash a tidal wave of matriarchal collectivism…. As I shall argue, only as women and men outgrow this covert and culturally ramified matriphobia can any new consciousness begin to fashion itself in and among us” (Keller 1987, p. 3).
- 5.
Drew University arguably has an intriguing place within the history of radical theology for a variety of reasons, including a faculty schism directly related to the death of God controversy. As it relates to Keller’s theological projects in particular, because of the fact that the term “theopoetics” was itself coined there by Amos Wilder in the 1970s. Keller reconstructs this lineage in “The Becoming of Theopoetics: A Brief, Incongruent History” in Intercarnations (2017).
- 6.
Other volumes from the TTC series that have been edited by Keller and are of particular relevance to radical theological thinking include Ecospirit, ed. with L. Kearns (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007); Apophatic Bodies, ed. with C. Boesel (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009); Common Goods, ed. with M. Johnson-Debaufre and E. Ortega-Aponte (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015); and ed. with L. Schneider, Polydoxy (New York: Routledge, 2010).
- 7.
Jeffery Robbins , Radical Democracy and Political Theology (New York: Columbia, 2011), 9.
- 8.
Both Apocalypse Now and Then and Face of the Deep carry through a thread of feminist engagement. In Apocalypse Now and Then, the current conversation about feminist theory, which imagined itself tottering on the edge of destruction in the wake of poststructuralism’s challenge to the agency of the individual woman, is framed as yet another apocalyptic habit. Keller unpacks a whole chapter on the role of gender in apocalypticism. Women in modernity benefited from the overflow of the apocalyptic script of progress, which took the form of the antislavery movement and movement for women’s rights. Of course an apocalyptically tinged backlash against these movements warned (still warns) about Jezebel’s desire to destroy White-Christian America. Refusing the binary of feminist-immanence versus patriarchal-transcendence, Keller (1996, p. 300) looks closely at the ontology of the spirit, where she finds “relation of relations.” Feminism need not lose itself (herself) in binaries, but rather can open up into a feminist counter-apocalypse, into “some imago of female self-visualization that might link us at once to the wider universe and to each other” (304).
In Face of the Deep, Keller builds upon the multiplying relational self that drives the feminist counter-apocalypse. Keller (2003, p. xvii) explains that “the aggressive nihilation of the chaoid otherness took the form of the exacerbated, even divinized masculinities.” Lurking in the tehom is Tiamat— the female goddess of the Enuma Elish, itself so influential to the authors of the biblical creations—who is killed. Keller seeks to not simply pull out a woman from the deep, but to unfold the complex movements of women through “race, economics, decolonization, class, or ecology” (xviii).
In other words, the feminism of Face of the Deep rejects the apocalyptic habit that would place one oppression at the top of a hierarchy and instead attempts to facilitate the flourishing of difference, because tehomophoia always corresponds to gynophobia. “A tehomic theology, writing its theos in undisguised mimicry of the masculine imaginary, involves the feminism not of a supersessionist progress-optimism, but of a ‘wild patience’” (223). Rather than rushing to rewrite God in some new female final form, Keller exhorts feminists to sit with the partial, imperfect, but perhaps fruitful instantiations of God.
- 9.
John Caputo, “If There is Such a Thing,” in Journal of Cultural and Religious Theory 17.1 (2018), online.
- 10.
Interestingly, Heidegger himself had agreed to attend one of these conferences. However, when he discovered that his former Jewish student, Hans Jonas, would be in attendance, he backed out.
- 11.
See, for example, the authors’ introduction in W. Blanton et al., An Insurrectionist Manifesto (New York: Columbia University Press, 2016), 6, and the same book’s “Afterword” by Catherine Keller, 177.
- 12.
Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. W. Kaufmann (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 101.
Works Cited
Keller, Catherine. 1986. From a Broken Web. Boston: Beacon.
———. 1996. Apocalypse Now and Then. Minneapolis: Fortress.
———. 2002a. Introduction. In Process and Difference, ed. C. Keller and A. Daniell, 1–30. Albany: SUNY Press.
———. 2002b. Process and Chaosmos. In Process and Difference, ed. C. Keller and A. Daniell, 55–72. Albany: SUNY Press.
———. 2003. Face of the Deep. New York: Routledge.
———. 2013. Theopoiesis and the Pluriverse. In Theopoetic Folds, ed. R. Faber and J. Fakenthal, 179–194. New York: Fordham University Press.
———. 2015. Cloud of the Impossible. New York: Columbia University Press.
———. 2017. Intercarnations. Bronx, NY: Fordham University Press.
———. 2018. A Political Theology of the Earth. New York: Columbia University Press.
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Gasson-Gardner, L., Goodwin, W., Prewitt-Davis, E., Roberts, A. (2018). Catherine Keller. In: Rodkey, C., Miller, J. (eds) The Palgrave Handbook of Radical Theology. Radical Theologies and Philosophies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-96595-6_16
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