Abstract
A theory of nature that is thought separately from the World must be both non-philosophical and non-theological. It must be both for the theory and must avoid the trap of a Principle of Sufficient Philosophy that would circumscribe nature as a thing captured and examined by its own thought. It must also avoid an all-too-easy reversibility with God. In this way the hypostasized Nature of naturalism is a form of theological thinking. So, the theory must be non-philosophical in order to think nature as in-One, radically autonomous and foreclosed in-the-last-instance to thought, which nevertheless remains relatively autonomous, and must be non-theological to avoid the Principle of Sufficient Theology where the relatively autonomous thought becomes a mere echo of authority, not only of the standard theologies of Worldly religious authorities, but also the unacknowledged theologies at work in those naturalisms that aim to “mirror Nature.” The practice of thinking outside these specular forms of thinking, with their complementary forms of self-sufficiency discussed already in part I, is the unilateralization of this dyad of earth and divinities.
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Notes
Rudite Velde, Aquinas on God: The “Divine Science” of the Summa theologiae (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2006), p. 85.
St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica (literal English translation), trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (Westminster, MD: Christian Classics, 1981), Ia, q. 4, a. 2.
St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Contra Gentiles, trans. A. C. Pegis, James F. Anderson, Vernon J. Bourke, and Charles J. O’Neil, 4 vols. (Notre Dame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press, 1975), 1/30; hereafter SCG.
See Anthony Kenny, Aquinas on Being (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002).
St. Thomas Aquinas, “Commentary on Boethius’ De Trinitate [selection],” in Selected Philosophical Writings, ed. and trans. Timothy McDermott (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 44.
See Bernard Montagnes, The Doctrine of the Analogy of Being According to Thomas Aquinas, translated by E. M. Macierowski (Milwaukee, WI: Marquette University Press, 2004), p. 24.
St. Thomas Aquinas, “On the Principles of Nature,” in Selected Philosophical Writings, ed. and trans. Timothy McDermott (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993), p. 67.
See John Milbank and Catherine Pickstock, “Truth and Correspondence,” in Truth in Aquinas (London: Routledge, 2001).
St. Thomas Aquinas, “On Kingship or The Governance of Rulers (De Regimine Principum, 1265–1267),” in St. Thomas Aquinas on Politics and Ethics, ed. and trans. Paul E. Sigmund (London and New York: W. W. Norton & Company, 1988), pp. 17–18.
François Zourabichvili, Spinoza. Une physique de la pensée (Paris: PUF, 2002), p. 255.
Rocco Gangle, “Theology of the Chimera: Spinoza, Immanence, Practice,” in After the Postsecular and the Postmodern: New Essays in Continental Philosophy of Religion, eds. Anthony Paul Smith and Daniel Whistler (Newcastle-upon-Tyne: Cambridge Scholars’ Press, 2010), p. 27.
For example, Steven Nadler’s biography of Spinoza, Spinoza: A Life (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), which presents a radically atheist Spinoza, as does Stephen B. Smith’s Spinoza’s Book of Life: Freedom and Redemption in the Ethics (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2003). This view is shared to a lesser extent by Jonathan I. Israel in his Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
Nancy K. Levene, Spinoza’s Revelation: Religion, Democracy, and Reason (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), pp. 10–12.
Benedict de Spinoza, “Ethics,” in A Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and Other Works, ed. and trans. Edwin Curley (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1994), IVPref.
This is the argument of Deleuze who places Spinoza among other authors steeped in Neoplatonism and developing various theories of expression and explication. He writes that the goal of these thinkers “was to thoroughly transform such Neoplatonism, to open it up to quite new lines of development, far removed from that of emanation, even where the two themes were both present” (Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughlin [New York: Zone Books, 1990], p. 19).
Blayton Polka, Between Philosophy and Religion: Spinoza, the Bible, and Modernity, Vol. I: Hermeneutics and Ontology (Lexington: Lexington Books, 2007), p. 6.
Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, translated by Michael Silverthorne and Jonathan Israel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), p. 59.
Conor Cunningham, Genealogy of Nihilism: Philosophies of Nothing and the Difference of Theology (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 60, 68.
See Jürgen Mettepennigen, Nouvelle Théologie—New Theology: Inheritor of Modernism, Precursor of Vatican II (London and New York: T&T Clark, 2010);
and John Milbank, The Suspended Middle: Henry de lubac and the Debate Concerning the Supernatural (London: SCM Press, 2005).
Henri de Lubac, The Mystery of the Supernatural, trans. Rosemary Sheed (New York: Herder and Herder, 1998) p. 63.
Etienne Balibar, Spinoza and Politics, trans. Peter Snowdon (London and New York: Verso, 2008), pp. 7–8.
See Alexandre Matheron, Le Christ et le salut des ignorants chez Spinoza (Paris: Aubier-Montaigne, 1971), for an extensive study of this aspect of Spinoza’s thought.
François Lamelle, “The Decline of Materialism in the Name of Matter,” trans. Ray Brassier, Pli 12 (2001): 37.
This is a translation of a section from François Lamelle, Le Principe de minoritié (Paris: Aubier, 1981).
Ya’qûb al-Sijistânî, Le Dévoilement des choses cachées (Kashf al-Mahjûb), trans. Henry Corbin (Lagrasse: Verdier, 1988), pp. 33–35.
Christian Jambet, La grande résurrection d’Alamût. Les formes de la liberté dans le shî’isme ismaélien (Lagresse: Verdier, 1990), p. 210.
Christian Jambet and Guy Lardreau, LAnge. Pour une cynégétique du semblant, Ontologie de la révolution 1 (Paris: Grasset, 1976), p. 36.
Of course, it may also give birth to the barbaric Angel. See Christian Jambet and Guy Lardreau, Le Monde. Reponse à la question: Qu’est-ce que les droits de l’homme? (Paris: Grasset, 1978), p. 187. Lardreau is more direct about this in his own work of negative philosophy entitled La véracité, where he argues for a Kantian sublime within politics defined as “a politics that makes a finality sensible to us that is completely independent from nature”
(Guy Lardreau, La véractié. Essai d’une philosophie négative [Lagrasse: Verdier, 1993], p. 237). Lardreau again invokes the Angel in his development of the concept of the political sublime, this time as the “political name for the desire for death” (p. 241). Within a negative philosophy this desire for death is limited, it is a desire for the self-referential play of the correlative images of the self and the other. In the terms laid out in my “The Judgement of God and the Immeasurable” it is the desire for the death of the play between friend and enemy. For Lardreau, within a negative philosophy, this desire is checked by way of a negative presentation of the Real (ibid). Death is always a form of transcendence as limit for philosophers and Lardreau is no different (Lardreau, La véractié, p. 243.
Cf. Philip Goodchild, Capitalism and Religion: The Price of Piety (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), pp. 148–155). The barbarous Angel, for Lardreau, comes when there is a positive presentation of the Real, a presentation that threatens to topple the sublime over (Lardreau, La véractié, p. 241).
See Anthony Paul Smith, “Nature Deserves to Be Side by Side with the Angels: Nature and Messianism by way of Non-Islam,” in Angelaki (Forthcoming, 2014) for a longer discussion of this angelology.
Francois Laruelle, Future Christ: A Lesson in Heresy, trans. Anthony Paul Smith (London and New York: Continuum, 2010), p. 17; Le Christ futur. Une leçon d’hérèsie (Paris: Exils Éditeur, 2002), p. 33.
François Laruelle, “A Science in (en) Christ,” trans. Aaron Riches, in The Grandeur of Reason: Religion, Tradition and Universalism, eds. Peter M. Candler, Jr. and Conor Cunningham (London: SCM Press, 2010), p. 318.
Gilles Grelet, Déclarer la gnose. D’une guerre qui revient à la culture (Paris: L’Harmattan, 2002), pp. 119f50, 119f49.
Interestingly al-Sijistânî develops an Islamic Christology by way of a kind of fourfold, since he uses the image of the cross as a hermeneutic for understanding Christ. See Abu Ya’qûb al-Sijistânî, “The Book of Wellsprings,” in The Wellsprings of Wisdom, ed. and trans. Paul E. Walker (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1994), pp. 37–111. In the editors’ introduction to After the Postsecular and the Postmodern, Daniel Whistler and I differentiated between a postsecular event and the appropriation of that event in the name of a theologization of philosophy or what we called “imperial secularism.” The event marked a break with Western imperialism, which used Christian forms of thought to develop a post-Christian secularism in an attempt to separate the oppressed colonial subjects internally—a separation of the political and their religious identity, whereas the appropriation of the event is often an attempt to reinstate (at best) a war at the ideational level and (at worst) a new form of imperial war in the name of the clash of traditions.
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Smith, A.P. (2013). Materials for a Theory of Nature. In: A Non-Philosophical Theory of Nature. Radical Theologies. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137331977_13
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