From: "Dominic Le Fave" <dominic.lefave-AT-the-spa.com>
Date: Fri, 26 Jul 1996 13:19:29 +0000
Subject: Re: I am God very little of the time . . .


> I'm much more of a mind to agree with the "forget" (or
> better and more to the point, "fuck") theology--and we really do need to
> practice a bit of counter-memory here, I think--posts and with those who
> maintain that god (I can't ever bear to capitalize it, frankly) can't
> function in any way that is not disciplinary.  

Ed: While I have no apology to make for theology--since it does not 
deserve one as you point out--I would like to say that there is a 
certain failure of imagination, both with regard to theology's 
post-modern elaboration and with regard to it historical effects, 
involved in you response.  First, I cannot even think of a 
revolutionary movement, or liberational movement, that did not 
involve--or was inspired by--a theological agenda. The history of 
dissent is, for the most part, a history of heresy and theological 
protest. One might point 
to certain post-Enlightenment revolutionary movements, but I hope I 
do not have to point out that all those movements had quasi-religious 
practices and psudo-theological underpinnings since this has been so 
well hashed out by the scholars (references upon request). Of course 
these were all squelched or undone from the inside by the same or other 
theologies--which is why history does not provide an apologia.  The 
Enlightenment itself is squarely rooted in the Reformation and deals 
with all the same theological issues.  Voltare was a great and 
conservative theologian and Enlightenment discussions of The Supreme 
Being galvanized the 
religious sect that we now call Secularism. This is a localized sect 
like any other, with all of its presupositions about the nature of truth 
discipline and modes of suppression, oppression, and control--and a 
particularly nasty history of persecution. For make no mistake:  Nazism was a religious 
movement and a religious persecution.  It is not just the churches 
that will never be able to figure out how to apologize for that, it 
is your sect as well. Conversely, where would the civil-rights 
movement have been with out Ghandi and various Southern Baptist 
theologians? What you call "counter-memory" is a vocation 
for the Missionary Apostolate For Post-Enlightenment Euro-American 
Culture.  While a respectable religious cult, it will face the same 
problems and challenges as the other churches, though perhaps with 
more resources and fire-power.  Secondly, there is a cynical 
scepticism involved in your response that may be applied to any 
discipline.  Politics has a bad history as well--so fuck political 
philosophy.  People don't treat each other right--fuck ethics. What 
about English literature?--fuck literature and all who read it!  What 
about agriculture?  I would suggest that it is simple religious 
bigotry that makes you so blind or selective in this 
criticism--though, again, the criticism is valid, but valid with 
regard to every discipline.  And if you do not apply it to your own, 
you have taken an amazing blind leap and become a true knight for 
your apostolate.  

>And I really don't think
> that the reduction of god to a blank concept, his removal to an infinite
> distance, or any of the other aporietic strategies that we've seen the past
> few years successfully evade this. 

Indeed they do not! Which is what I have been trying to say to 
ethereal fellow believer.

> In fact, I have two questions for these
> people  (1) Given the history of the concept of god, its linkages to all
> sorts of disciplinary structures that we all want to repudiate at this
> point, why, exactly, is it worth trying to preserve a concept with such a
> history?  What could we possibly gain from this?  (2) As a corrolary:
> doesn't the attempt to formulate a Deluzian (or, and not to imply any
> denigration or preference, a Deleuzo-Guattarian) theology, amount to the
> re-territorialization of this thought much more than the
> deterritorialization of the concept of god, which, more than any concept,
> shows in its history precisely the linkage between deterritorialziation and
> reterritorialization:  in other words, the more deterritorialized and
> amorphous the concept of god gets, the more effective it is as a pure
> mechanism of power, a sort of means to absolute reterritorialization.

Given all this, it seems to me that we are faced with some bad 
histories.  I have heard of some yoga techniques similar to your 
counter-memory which would extract us from this world and allow us to 
function independently of culture, but I do not know those techniques 
and I have the sneaking suspicion that they are some sick projections 
of European Culture onto unwitting eastern theologians.  

Bless you,

--dominic.lefave