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AGAINST TRADITION TO LIBERATETRADITIONAnthony Paul Smitha

a La Salle University, Department of Religion, 1900 W. OlneyAvenue, Philadelphia, PA 19141, USAPublished online: 10 Sep 2014.

To cite this article: Anthony Paul Smith (2014) AGAINST TRADITION TO LIBERATETRADITION, Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities, 19:2, 145-159, DOI:10.1080/0969725X.2014.950870

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2014.950870

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Son point de depart est Dieu, son pointd’arrivee est la sans-limite.

Suhrawardi

the first axiom of non-theology

P hilosophers always feel that they are finallydone with religion. Whether they think

they have neutralized it by placing it withinthe limits of reason alone or they’ve decon-structed it through the principles of laicity andphilosophical universalism, religion alwaysseems to return, if witnessed only by the factthat philosophers seem to constantly be accus-ing one another of being theologians. Itperhaps says something that, though thischarge functions as an allegation in the realmof philosophy, there are others who veryproudly take on this title. There are still thosewho call themselves, in public even, theologians.Of course, religion and theology are not synon-ymous and between them there is a real separ-ation. But theology is at least concerned withthe materials manifest in religion, meaningthat theologians concern themselves with thepractices and beliefs of peoples, who directtheir lives maybe to illusion but also to experi-ences and experiments in what it means to bea human being, to be a creature. It would bemisguided and haughty to deny that, thus far,all of these experiments have failed on thegrand scale. We ought not to hold up any ofthese attempts at living as if immortal, toliving as truly free, instead of just surviving orliving as a slave in this World. They are notthe answer. And all too often the theologiancomes along and idealizes some aspect of reli-gion, some idea within it, and projects it overthe whole phenomenon, trying to veil the

concrete, actually existing form. Perhaps,then, the epithet “theologian!,” shouted byone philosopher with extended forefinger point-ing to the other, is deserved in those momentswhen it means “idealist.”

But then again, if this simply is a particularlybrutal epithet for those thinking through ideal-ist forms, then perhaps philosophers would dowell to put their swords away lest they perishby them. For what François Laruelle hasargued in his critique of philosophy is that phil-osophy, too, projects an idea over the Real. Phil-osophy is all too often almost invariantlyidealistic in its approach. Philosophy – eventhose philosophies of difference of the twentiethcentury – always raises the idea to the positionof the Real, forgetting that prior to the idea is

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ANGELAK Ijournal of the theoretical humanitiesvolume 19 number 2 june 2014

ISSN 0969-725X print/ISSN 1469-2899 online/14/020145-15 © 2014 Taylor & Francishttp://dx.doi.org/10.1080/0969725X.2014.950870

anthony paul smith

AGAINST TRADITIONTO LIBERATETRADITIONweaponized apophaticismand gnostic refusal

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always an underlying Real, an underlying iden-tity, in-person, that will always be a stumblingblock and offence to that idea. Laruelle summar-izes his criticism of philosophy from Plato toDeleuze and Derrida succinctly in his Philos-ophies of Difference, which deserves to bequoted at length here for the reader:

Thus all contemporary philosophy of Differ-ence offers despite everything a strangelyPlatonizing spectacle: the interminable pro-cession of the most communal entities,Being, Nothingness, Desire, Power,Language, Text, raising themselves up fromthe ground of experience each in turn likeshades at once bloodless and laden withchains, trying to lift themselves in infinitefile towards a mirage of the One where theywould believe themselves capable of beingregenerated and saved from empirical hellas if at a wellspring of life. It is truly abizarre and certainly quite “philosophical”merry-go-round, philosophical because it issimultaneously ascending and descendingand playing itself out finally in a circle andin a place. As if these larvae wished, bytheir hesitations, their stumblings, their skid-dings, the allure of their approach continu-ally spoiled, to abandon the weighty formsof being or non-being in order to yield andsink into their limit, to abandon their deter-mined forms of existence, to prove to them-selves that they still exist when in truththey only exist as fleeting larvae on earth.They seek the One precisely because theyhave not found it, and they will never findanything but their own hallucination. Theyneither find nor become anything otherthan what they already are: them-“selves.”They possess no more than tautological life,but they still do not know that tautologicalexistence does not exhaust the real, thatBeing, Nothingness, Desire, Text, Power,etc., all this is absurd and these tautologiesare unnecessary. They have their aims,hatreds and desires, but they continue to beunaware that if they possess meaning relativeto one another and truth relative to them-selves and as a system of them all, all ofthis taken together – and taken together,the system itself included as well, whichcannot now exceed or escape itself and itsdestiny – is as absurd and unnecessary as a

tautology. For the One, the World is aredundancy.1

This seems to me the most succinct and poeticsummary of the deflationary aspect of Laruelle’snon-philosophy. Philosophy always confusesitself with the Real by way of treating its con-cepts as maximal, as all-encompassing ofreality. Philosophy, through its philosophers,fails to see that it is itself part of the Real,that it too is material. But Laruelle’s early defla-tionary project serves a productive purpose: tocreate theory freed of this shortcoming. I havealready written much regarding this projectand its move from criticism to production,especially in relation to religion where I havetaken up explicating and developing Laruelle’sown promise of a non-theology.

This non-theology is the focus of this essayand so builds off a number of other essays ofmine, most directly “What Can Be Done withReligion? Non-Philosophy and the Future ofPhilosophy of Religion.”2 In addition tosuggesting how non-theology can be used toprotect non-philosophy from certain theologicaltemptations inherent in its focus on the Real,non-theology is also used as a name for a non-philosophical unified theory of religion andphilosophy, where religious materials are maderelative to the Real and used to construct newtheories. The practice of non-theology, I claim,operates on two axioms: (1) the Real is fore-closed to authority and tradition, and (2) whatis true(-without-truth) in theology is what ismost generic and thus what is most secular(though this must necessarily modify the usualmeaning of the term “secular”). This essay isconcerned with explaining the first axiom,leaving the second to be developed later. Assuch, it is not an essay directly on Laruelle,and it is not primarily a work of explication,as some of my other essays have been, butrather the development of a nascent theoryusing means taken from Laruelle’s non-philos-ophy. So I will continue to reference Laruelle,as well as some others, but nothing here iswritten under the name of Laruelle or is directlyabout Laruelle. For what Laruelle has done withnon-philosophy is to open up the possibility of

against tradition to liberate tradition

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thinking differently, of thinking as if a strangerin a land that is not one’s own.

The essay begins by examining the identityof tradition, arguing that traditions as contem-porarily conceived cast themselves as an endrather than as a means. This takes placethrough a consideration of the writing ofMacIntyre before turning to a non-philosophi-cal interpretation of tradition as a kind of theo-logical decision centred on the question of apower principle (symbolized by the name ofGod). This opens up to an explanation of theconcept of weaponized apophaticism, whichdescribes the way in which traditions castthemselves as an end through a process of theo-logical claims to authority that are ultimatelymade all the more powerful through a processof deferral. The essay then concludes with adiscussion of gnosis as a kind of non-tradition,a generalized form of tradition which escapesbeing mistaken or “hallucinated” as an endbecause gnosis is cast as prior to origin. Tra-dition is revealed in its identity (as means,not end) through gnostic refusal, which ulti-mately illuminates the meaning and conse-quences of what we are terming the firstaxiom for a non-theology to be completed ina future project.

the identity of tradition as means

Let us return to that notion of thinking as astranger in a land that is not one’s own, thinkinga stranger thought and from that position askthe question “What is a tradition?” From anon-philosophical perspective this seeminglyontological question must be recast, for to dis-cover the identity of what has become a quasi-transcendental we have to bring it back toearth, down to the level of the creature, andask “What does a tradition do?” It is my conten-tion in this essay that a tradition is a product ofcreatural labour which has no intrinsic end ortelos, but is simply put to creatural ends.3

However, a tradition becomes quasi-transcen-dental or an end unto itself, which ends up har-assing the very creatures upon whose existenceit depends. To expand on this claim I will turnto MacIntyre’s conception of tradition and the

way in which tradition has become the sourceof authority in philosophical theology throughan operation I have termed “weaponized apo-phaticism.” Allowing this weaponized apophati-cism to come into vision is a way of uncoveringthe identity of tradition as a simple means, aswell as the way tradition is hallucinated as anend unto itself.

The two most prevalent anti-liberal con-ceptions of tradition are Burkean and whatcould be termed Neo-Aristotelian-Thomist(MacIntyre). While the first, where Burke seestradition as static and unchanging, is clearly areactionary conception of tradition arising outof a Whig ideology that desperately clings toany form of order over the seeming disorderof things, something even MacIntyre himselfrecognizes, the second, that of MacIntyrehimself, is more complicated.4 One might evenrefer to this conception of tradition as pseudo-Marxist both in terms of influence (MacIntyreis quite explicit in his Marxist sympathies,though also explicit that he is not a Marxist assuch) and in its theoretical practice. Thesecond is shown in the appeal to a structuralconception of the self where the self is depen-dent upon social and material relations thatreside outside the individual subject. What isinteresting about this seeming hegemonyamongst anti-liberal theorists is the ambiguityit introduces into any theoretical attempt tobreak out of the reactionary circle. We can seethis by setting Burke’s clearly reactionary char-acter aside and focusing on MacIntyre’s con-ception of tradition and the way he allows foran idealist overcoding of his conceptionthrough an appeal to virtues. I will argue thatvirtues in this sense are as abstract as the tra-ditions which produce them, and so not anend, but still merely a means projected or hallu-cinated as an end. This becomes especially pro-blematic, even nefarious, when this now idealistconception of tradition treats tradition as atranscendental amongst other transcendentals,the principal among them God, to which theother transcendentals – tradition includedthough privileged – are related. For now thetranscendental character of tradition, even asnarrative, takes on a particularly apophatic

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character weaponized to protect not thecreature (humanity included) but the traditionitself.

MacIntyre’s account of tradition is entirelydependent upon virtues, as is well known, andultimately those virtues are directed towardsthe end (telos) of the good. However, it isunclear for rational subjects what the good actu-ally is in itself as the good clearly takes on asupernatural dimension in MacIntyre’s work,meaning its full identity ultimately lies outsideof human experience. The telos thus transcendsthe human, as MacIntyre explains:

I have suggested so far that unless there is atelos which transcends the limited goods ofpractices by constituting the good of awhole human life, the good of a human lifeconceived as a unity, it will both be the casethat a certain subversive arbitrariness willinvade the moral life and that we shall beunable to specify the context of certainvirtues adequately.5

Since a tradition is related to the end proper tohumans that is only achieved in some sensethrough virtue, we find that MacIntyre’sentire definition of a tradition rests upon thissupernatural good that is the only truemeasure of the limited goods. So, in MacIn-tyre’s view, traditions are attempts to resistthe “subversive arbitrariness” of the limitedgoods of individuals that “invade the morallife” while still allowing for conflict over thetrue character of the good (this emphasis onconflict marks out the difference betweenBurke and MacIntyre).

However, traditions can never meet on equalfooting. Indeed, this is often held up as one ofthe strengths of MacIntyre’s theory since itargues, against liberalism, that there is noneutral sphere where the claims of rival tra-ditions may be adjudicated. MacIntyre presentsa rather Pollyannaish vision of the meeting ofrival traditions where

it is possible for one such tradition to defeatanother in respect of the adequacy of itsclaims to truth and to rational justification,even though there are no neutral standardsavailable by appeal to which any rational

agent whatsoever could determine which tra-dition is superior to which.6

This is a fantasy precisely because it ignores thequestion of power in the construction of suchtruth claims. Of course, MacIntyre purposelypitches his own virtue ethic vision of traditionsagainst the idea that “might makes right,”chalking this up to an undesirable Nietzscheanview of politics and society. But this is to misun-derstand Nietzsche and the ways in which hisphilosophy of the will to power have been devel-oped in the twentieth century, mostly by Frenchpost-’68 philosophers. For what figures like Fou-cault and those who have come after him haveshown is that a hegemonic tradition willalways make demands on the manifestation ofthe minority or weaker tradition. While, fromFoucault’s perspective as well, there is noneutral perspective from which to adjudicateclaims, that does not mean that the victor ofthe rivalry is in possession of the truth; it doesnot mean that they “deserve” their station insome way that appeals to a transcendentmeasure of value. Take an evolutionaryexample, for just as the success of one speciesover another in the biosphere says nothingabout the value of the extinct species(a modern form of theodicy, a “biodicy”) soneither does the success of one tradition overanother in the social biosphere say anythingabout the value of the extinct tradition. TalalAsad sums up this reality succinctly when hetakes up the specific case of European liberalismas it played out in the British demands on itsminority cultures that came to the fore in the“Rushdie Affair”:

The core values of nonwhite immigrants arenot – so the hegemonic discourse goes –

part of British culture, and therefore to livepermanently in Britain they must – as politi-cal minorities – assimilate into that culture.However, minorities have not always had tomake this kind of adjustment. When Eur-opeans went to Asia, Africa, and the Ameri-cas, as settlers, administrators, missionaries,they did not need to adopt the core valuesof the majority populations among whomthey lived. On the contrary, they soughtwith great success to change them. But that

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immigrations from those populations shouldnow presume to act as though they had aright to something that power did notaccord them – that is quite another story.In that story it is their presumptuous behav-ior that needs explaining and correcting, notthe postures adopted by the British.7

Here, the philosophically inflected anthropol-ogy of Asad can be seen as having tempered andcorrected MacIntyre’s philosophy, by perform-ing a kind of non-philosophical completing ofMacIntyre in thinking elements of his workwith Nietzsche/Foucault: a kind of unifiedtheory of Tradition and Power.8 For liberalismis also a tradition and so in practice it isalways in conflict with the other traditions ithas in the past claimed to provide a neutralspace for. Asad, following MacIntyre in part,shows the ways in which liberalism’s abstractclaims to neutrality are exposed as a falsehood.He sums up his argument this way:

I am not arguing against multiculturalism orsyncretism in the abstract. Instead, I havetried to indicate that the specific way inwhich they have been practiced in contem-porary Britain has meant the reinforcementof centralized state power and the aesthetici-zation of moral identities, that thereforeneither has been seen as a potential threatto British identity.9

However, it would be a mistake to simply stophere, at the exposing of the falsehood as if nowthe Truth-with-a-capital-T will simply shineforth. Asad moves beyond those Christian thin-kers, like MacIntyre, who hold up this gapbetween what liberalism proclaims (the protec-tion of difference) and what it practises (theestablishment of homogeneity) as the end ofthe critique. For what Asad claims matters isnot this gap itself but rather the way in whichthe hegemonic discourse (in this case Europeanliberalism) plays both sides of the gap as anothermeans at its disposal in order to decide the verycoordinates by which abstraction and practiceunfold: “In that context what is crucial for gov-ernment is not homogeneity verses difference assuch but its authority to define crucial homoge-neities and differences.”10

Government for Asad refers, of course, to theactual British government that is the focus of hisanthropological inquiry. But we could take it insome sense to mean any bureaucratic structureof a tradition, which must also include its intel-lectuals. Those Christian intellectuals who havecome after MacIntyre are no less part of thebureaucratic structure of their traditions thanthe bureaucrats of the ultimately hegemonicliberal regime of capitalist nation-states. ButChristianity, even as a tradition or set of tra-ditions with elements that attempt to resistthis hegemonic liberalism, is intimatelyweaved into the very fabric of this hegemonysuch that a kind of background of Christianculture is inoffensive. This inoffensivenessallows for those in the majority culture toignore the ways in which this Christian cultureis often held aloft as a moralizing sceptre inthe hands of the liberal sovereign.11 Exploringthe ways in which its intellectual-bureaucratshave engaged in what I call weaponized apopha-ticism will reveal the ways in which traditionsare hallucinated or turned into golems.

weaponized apophaticism

In his influential text of philosophical theologyGod without Being, Jean-Luc Marion bothputs forth a critique of God as conceptualizedin the tradition of ontotheology and discussesthe way a tradition explicates a culture of theWord. The Word is that hybrid Christianconcept of the Messiah and the Scriptures thatare repeatedly re-read in order to bind the com-munity together (“re-read” and “binding” beingtwo of the possible meanings of the Latinreligio). There the discourse of theology is ahermeneutic of words on the Word that is, forthe Roman Catholic tradition, ultimatelyenacted in the Eucharist (the ritual of sharingof bread and blood amongst the congregants).12

Marion’s critique of ontotheology would seem tobe a secular project, following as it does fromHeidegger’s own destruktion. But what we seein Marion’s challenging of the tradition ofontotheology is far from Heidegger’s secular-ism, for Marion claims that only the authorities

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of the Roman Catholic Church can speak forGod as theologians. He writes:

if finally only the celebrant receives authorityto go beyond the words up to the Word,because he alone finds himself invested bythe persona Christi, then one must concludethat only the bishop merits, in the full sense,the title of theologian.13

But Marion is clear that all of this goes beyondmere theological fan fiction and actually makesa political claim, rare in his work:

All is given to the Church (space: the nations;time: the days) so that the Church may returnit (keep the commandments) to the Word,because he already received all (exousia [auth-ority]) from the Father; in theology it is not aquestion, anymore than elsewhere, of workingto a completion yet to come: completion, forthe Church, is accomplished definitively atEaster, hence at the origin (tetelestai [it is fin-ished], John 19:28 = 13:1).14

The two Greek words have purchase within thepolitical economy of the Roman Empire andthus purchase for the political theology of theearly Christian sects. While the second, theword of Christ before he dies upon the instru-ment of capital punishment, was an economicterm written on the bottom of receipts indicat-ing that a debt had been paid in full, dischargingthe two parties from their legal responsibilities.Obviously the giving of authority to a man mur-dered by the authority of the state is a radicalpolitical act and that is carried in the recastingof language present here. But Marion repur-poses these terms and mystifies the way theyworked as a rebellion against worldly powersin the first and second centuries. He simply ahis-torically accomplishes the transfer of transcen-dent authority from one power to another, andthe paying of debt stands in for the always-already character of the accomplishment of theChristian tradition. That is, as Marion says,this mystified end (“completion”) is carriedalready in the origin, which is supernaturaland so beyond human cognition.

Here, the theological method of apophaticismis on display. Apophaticism, as many students

of theology and religion may already know,comes from the Greek apophasis which literallymeans “unsaying” and is developed by medievalLatin Christianity in the via negativa. In termsof theological claims about God, apophaticism issummed up by the French neo-Thomist EtienneGilson this way: “To make God known by wayof negation is to show not how He is, but howHe is not.”15 But as Gilson goes on to explain,this form of reasoning concerning God’s iden-tity is not a simple denial of knowledge, asaying, for example, that “God is not knowable”tout court. This apophaticism is actually reveal-ing of God’s identity, since the negations flowout of certain theological decisions in favour ofmonotheistic simplicity implied by God’stranscendence:

Moreover, this is what we have already begunto do in establishing His perfect simplicity.To say that God is absolutely simple, sinceHe is pure act of existing is not to have aconcept of such an act, but to deny Him, aswe have seen, any composition whatsoever.16

But there is something subtle going on here interms of the claim to possess knowledge,which is also the claim to posses power, asMarion himself demonstrates by locating auth-ority in the Word that always escapes ontotheol-ogy and in those who speak and represent dejure that Word. For talk about God is neversimply talk about some divine personhood;rather, the Name of God stands in for the prin-ciple of authority and sovereignty itself withinmonotheistic theology. This becomes evenclearer in the ways in which apophaticism pro-ceeds in St Thomas Aquinas’ theology.Thomas apophaticism, and theology ingeneral, operates through a certain unilateralduality of the natural and the supernatural.The natural is always the base on whichhuman beings begin to reason about God(again taken as the principle of principles, auth-ority itself), but natural reason is always takento be ultimately grounded upon the superna-tural it attempts to think. The consequence ofthis is that nature provides the vocabulary forbeginning to think about God, but the syntaxis provided by the decision of faith, the decision

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that ungrounds any substance being foundwithin nature itself. Nature always pointstowards the supernatural, yet this pointing isonly possible because it is given the power todo so by the supernatural. Thus, from the per-spective of the supernatural, everything issupernatural in terms of cause. Only from theperspective of the effect, the natural, is thereany duality.17

What does this mean from a political per-spective then? MacIntyre signals his belongingto this school of thought when he writes ofthe good to which every tradition is devoted,that “The good for man is of course a superna-tural and not only a natural good, but superna-ture redeems and completes nature.”18

MacIntyre here is following the CatholicJesuit theologian Henri de Lubac, whose nou-velle theologie was heavily influential forEmeritus Pope Benedict XVI, and so eventhis seemingly universal discourse on traditionas such is entirely dependent upon a Christian– specifically Roman Catholic – conception ofthe good arising out of this unilateral dualityof the natural and the supernatural. But ulti-mately this good is beyond knowledge,because the good is only another apophaticname for God. Even the way the good func-tions in MacIntyre mimics the same unilateralduality, where the good is the telos uponwhich all means are grounded. Though the ulti-mate truth of that grounding is always tem-porally deferred, metaphysically these meansare always subjected to the end for their verysubstance. This can be called a weaponized apo-phaticism in so far as the form of reasoninghere has the effect, if one follows this visionof tradition, of setting up the very terms ofany conflict and form of life. By collapsingthe natural under a deferred supernaturalMacIntyre and those who follow him are ableto cover over the questions of power that lieat the heart of thinking through the conflictsof rival traditions and in so doing obscure thepotential of those traditions as means beneaththe duality of secularism and post-secularismset up in contemporary liberalism.

To illustrate this further, and before movingon to our alternative, I want to look at a recent

attempt by another Christian theorist to chal-lenge the hegemonic power of liberalism bydebunking its “creation myth,” while ultimatelydeferring the question of power sought after byChristian theology itself. This is found in TheMyth of Religious Violence: Secular Ideologyand the Roots of Modern Conflict by WilliamT. Cavanaugh, whose work unfolds in wayslargely dependent upon MacIntyre. There heattempts to challenge secular liberalism’sclaim to neutrality by showing its underlyingnarrative to be false. That narrative claimsthat liberalism arose in response to the irrationaland endless violence waged in the name of reli-gion. As he states in Myth:

What I call the “myth of religious violence”is the idea that religion is a transhistoricaland transcultural feature of human life,essentially distinct from ‘secular’ featuressuch as politics and economics, which has apeculiarly dangerous inclination to promoteviolence.19

Cavanaugh’s book can be placed alongside anumber of recent post-secular works of theory(he makes use of the work of post-secularcritics of Christianity, like Asad and andTomoko Masuzawa); but unlike their work, hisis an unrelentingly negative work: negative ina double sense, subordinating both “thesecular” and “religion” under a supernaturalgood beyond these two traditions. In eachchapter the goal is not to provide some bettertheory of religion and violence, or even a newtheoretical framework for thinking about ques-tions generally treated under that academicpursuit, but simply to negate through reason-able doubt the power of the prevailing “myth”and in so doing to “unsay” that myth andopen up space for another. This opening up ofspace for another myth, that of Christianity, isgiven in the negative deployment of the ideaof religion, in so far as he allows this term tostill function in a liberal way, not with regardto Christianity, but with regard to Islam.

Though Cavanaugh often provides Islam amodicum of defence against the explicit racismof the New Atheists, he also takes pains toemphasize that he is not saying “religion is off

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limits” or that he is out to just defend religion(sometimes he says “Christianity” and some-times just “religion,” despite doubting the exist-ence of religion or at least showing reasonabledoubt regarding its existence as a genus; rarelydoes he refer to any of the other traditions wewould normally refer to as “religious”). Yet inthe first instance of this hedging it is in factIslam that is used as the example of a religionthat can be interrogated: “I think that the separ-ation of church and state is generally a goodthing. On the other side, there is no questionthat certain forms of Muslim beliefs and prac-tices do promote violence.”20 Now, Cavanaughis clear that Christianity is up for debate too(namely the relationship between violence andthe sacrificial atonement of Christ), but considerthe difference in his presentation of Islamiccountries in relation to America. He acceptsthat countries like Iran and movements likePalestinian liberation are a theopoliticalmixture that can be identified as Islamic. Yethis description of America as a largely secularcountry that has felt the need to separate outChristian religious commitments from civiccommitments is an intellectual bait andswitch. While, yes, America seems to have acivic religion that goes into full swing whenAmerica goes to war, it does so with a wholearmy of clergy who belong mainly to sects ofChristianity. What is it that allows Cavanaughto label the theopolitics of the Islamic worldIslamic as such and to claim that the Americansystem of civil religion is not Christian, but asecular and liberal counter-tradition? Thiscovers over the way in which the Christianform of post-secular politics lobbies on behalfof Christian institutions’ inclusion in the stateapparatus in some way, even if that inclusionis just as a founding and privileged member ofthe Big Society. This post-secular form of Chris-tianity does so by presenting itself as an “inte-gral part” in the development of Westernculture and an integral part in a way that othertraditions are not allowed to claim.

The question of the identity of Christianityis, of course, deferred by Cavanaugh, and thatis not just an accident of academic writing, butgoes to the heart of a conception of tradition

within the Christian vision of the post-secular.As Daniel Colucciello Barber has argued, build-ing on Richard King and Daniel Boyarin, “theinvention of Christianity amounts to the inven-tion of religion, and vice versa.”21 Prior to theinvention of Christianity/religion, or whatBarber also refers to as Pauline universalism,traditions were not a matter of truth or falsity;only after the development of Pauline universal-ism is religion “worship of the true.” Thus,

Pauline universalism cannot accommodate aplurality of religious traditions, at least notinsofar as these are ultimately determinativeof identity. Similarly, the new people ofChrist cannot be yet another religion [or tra-dition], insofar as religion refers to particularcultural practices. The only way forward is toremake religion in the image of Christianity.22

That is, Christianity requires that in any conflictthe terms are unilaterally produced and con-trolled by Christianity (even as it absorbsJudaism and Greek pagan philosophy), whileultimately deferring the question of the truesource of such principles, grounding themupon a supernature beyond the tradition butpointed to it most faithfully by the tradition ofChristianity above every other one.

gnostic refusal as pre-origin

Speaking about liberalism, though he could betalking about any authority hallucinated astranscendent, Asad writes: “Like any imperializ-ing orthodoxy, this doctrine demands of us auniversal way of ‘being human’ – which isreally a singular way of articulating desire, dis-course, and gesture in the body’s economy.”23

Asad’s statement here connects up to our non-theological exploration of tradition because heshows that imperializing orthodoxies are con-cerned ultimately with the identity of thehuman. What the axiom of non-theology ulti-mately means, and has as a consequence, isthat there is no universal definition for beinghuman and that the concept of identity for thehuman, qua creatural, is radically differentfrom the transcendental or standard philosophi-cal concept of identity. Gnostic refusal, as

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outlined by Laruelle in Future Christ andStruggle and Utopia at the End Times of Phil-osophy, is the breaking from tradition as an end,revealing it merely as a means suspended fromorigin and end. For gnosis reveals, in its ques-tioning of the simple “what is” and its questionof what it means to be a human creature, theways in which all traditions are ultimately uni-laterally dependent upon the creatures whomake them manifest, who are ultimately fore-closed to reified tradition. But why is Gnosti-cism, or what we will also refer to as simplygnosis, privileged? Is this simply a puerileanti-Christian move? Does it tarry dangerouslyclose to a more threatening anti-Judaism,which appears to many ignorant of the studyof religion as simply anti-Semitism?24 In thestory that Orthodox Christianity tells aboutitself, the heretical gnostic traditions cameafter the origin of “true Christianity” thatMarion spoke about. In reality, as has beenlong established by scholars, many of thevarious sects called gnostic (the majority ofwhich no longer exist, often having been phys-ically wiped from the face of the earth byother human beings) came before the establish-ment of what we would recognize as Christianityand its institutions today. As any institution ofthe practices of gnosis have passed from thisworld, theses gnoses take on a strange identityas having no origin, or coming from a pre-origin, utterly useless for the ends imposed onthe human by the traditional institutions oftoday.

The neo-conservative philosophy of Eric Voe-gelin was made famous when WilliamF. Buckley popularized his criticism of contem-porary politics with the phrase “Don’t imma-nentize the eschaton!” Voegelin’s ownconception of Gnosticism is known to berather unscholarly, but though eliding any his-torical depth it does touch on what we maycall the gnostic impulse. He wrote:

The truth of gnosticism is vitiated, as youwill remember, by the fallacious immanenti-zation of the Christian eschaton. The fallacyis not simply a theoretical mistake concern-ing the meaning of the eschaton [… but] in

so far as they apply their fallacious construc-tion to concrete social problems, they misre-present the structure of immanent reality[…] Specifically, the Gnostic fallacy destroysthe oldest wisdom of mankind concerning therhythm of growth and decay which is the fateof all things under the sun […] Gnosticism,thus, has produced something like thecounterprinciples to the principles ofexistence.25

To this we can only say, simply, yes. While his-torically it is fallacious to suggest that historicalGnosticism comes after Christianity (and Voe-gelin’s characterization is especially suspect bythe standards of historical scholarship on themyriad of traditions collected under thegeneral term “Gnosticism”) there is somethingto the here-and-now demands of gnostics thatgoes counter to the kind of Christianity whicheventually settled throughout the world.Against a Christianity reconciled with theWorld, with the state, where any hope of over-turning the Powers of this World is alwaysdeferred until the end of time, the Gnosticsects and heretics that historically are foundthroughout history were demanding an immi-nent change in the here-and-now.26 And soalso yes to the notion that Gnosticism “misre-presents the structure of immanent reality.”Here the issue is one of a kind of sterile, essen-tialist naturalism common to conservative phil-osophy. By immanent reality Voegelin meanssomething akin to the modern use of the word“natural” or even “what simply is.” This is thepivot point of conservative ideology, turning“immanent reality” into a normative transcen-dence before which all creatures must bow intheir own radical immanence. And so, yes, thekey here is to misrepresent that hallucinated“immanent reality,” to turn the representationof an oppressive transcendence on its head.And so, finally, a yes to the production of thecounter-principles of existence. It is preciselyagainst the principles of existence given in thistranscendent presentation of immanent realitythat gnosis provides the counter-principles to.Specifically, there is a rejection of a survivalunder the laws of tradition taken as ends.Instead, gnosis requires something like a

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living in truth, something like a lived experienceas truth.

Thus gnosis, as it is more correctly called,refers to a transhistorical or metahistoricalform of practice and thought that one can seerun throughout religions. As Henry Corbin,the forgotten and maligned philosopher of reli-gion, has put it:

Gnosis is not a phenomenon particular to onereligion: it is a Welt-Religion. There was agnosis in Islam, just as there was a gnosis inChristianity, and these gnoses certainlyhave more affinities with one another thanthe official religious forms into which theysecretly made their spirit penetrate.27

The issue here does not concern origins;whether or not gnosis comes prior to Christian-ity, or prior to Islam, or prior to both but afterJudaism, is not of interest here. Gnosis insteadis the name for a form that can be seen runningparallel to these established religions. A kind offorce that remains undetermined by theirconstituted power. A practice and thought, aweapon, fashioned out of the materialspresent in that religion, but changed in theform of gnosis. In many ways this fits withina generally dualistic theory of religion and pol-itical-social life that we can see in thinkers asdivergent as Bergson, Negri, and Bloch.Where Bergson posits a difference betweenopen and closed religion, and Negri posits adifference between constituting power and con-stitutive power, the non-theological theory ofreligion posits a difference between gnosticrevolt or even “cultural revolution” and consti-tuted, compromised piety. In its stranger statusas passed from this world and without origin,gnosis names a refusal. A refusal of authorityand tradition as transcendent, and an insistencethat they are instead merely means that can betaken in hand or that must be disempowered byany means necessary.

The problem is not with a simple rejection ofall authority – that would be adolescent andpuerile – but rather the rejection of the beliefthat authority is good. It is a rejection of believ-ing in any form of theodicy, or any anthropodicyafter the death of God. It is a rejection of belief

in any authority that will come and save us,rather than enslave us. Laruelle sums this upbeautifully in his comparison of what he calls“the two atheisms,” writing:

We already know through the victim’s com-plaint and the courage of certain heretics,perhaps without knowing it because of acertain blessed philosophy, that in Godhides the Great Persecutor. The trueatheism is not nearly as simple as philosophyimagines it, it goes through two stages, thebanal refusal to believe in a God is self-con-tradictory and satisfies small-thinking, butthe refusal to believe in a good God is thetrue rebellion. There is always a good Godin ambush, who prepares his return in anynegation, like a negation of his existence,even if it is a materialist negation, but it isimportant that this is a malicious God, athesis that only an “ultra”-religious heresycan confront. Indifferent atheism is weakand surrenders in calling on philosophy; thesecond is a strong heresy, the “non-”theologi-cal radicalisation of the malicious God, theextension of this malicious God to every divi-nity that presents itself as One or Multiple, asUnique and Great as much as natural andpagan.28

It is gnosis that provides, again just as simplemeans and models, a prior form of thoughtwhich undoes this belief in a good God, a goodAuthority. Gnostic refusal is found in theimpossibility of tradition as a real end by wayof a more radical weaponized apophaticism,this time turned upon the idea of principleitself. The gnostic text “The Apocryphon ofJohn” undoes any form of knowledge by declar-ing that one cannot even speak of the “trueGod” (which for gnostics was beyond the godwho created this world) as Divine. This prin-ciple does not rule this world at all and so isnot at all related to this world. There is aradical, complete, utterly irreversible and untra-versable break between what is actually highestwithin thought and this world. Or, in lessarchaic terms, there is a radical break betweenthe Human-in-person (the radical identity ofthe human stripped of all transcendent attri-butes) and the structures and authorities that

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determine the human as subject (the human as ablended identity of immanence and attributesseparate from that lived identity). Thus thegnostic naming of “God” always rejects theclaim that the authority of God is a good name(think of names like Lord or even the nameGod) and goes so far as to speak of an“Unknown Silent One” and an “Existent aloneby itself” without any attributes.29

Clearly this completely foreclosed identitybeyond authority, beyond that who gives auth-orization to speak, to theorize, to practise, istaken up in some way by Laruelle in his thinkingof the human. To close I want to suggest thatthis gnostic refusal allows us to approach tra-ditions in a new way, enabling us to thinkthrough politics in a seemingly post/secularage (the slash speaking to the fundamentalamphibology of the secular and post-seculartoday). One that looks to traditions, not withinthe coordinates set by Christian, secular liberal-ism, but as means for the construction of humanidentities.

Let’s look at an example taken from a studentof Asad, Hussein Ali Agrama, in his recentQuestioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty,and the Rule of Law in Modern Egypt. WhileI am not trying to collapse Agrama or Asadunder a general non-theological schema, theiranthropological work shares much in commonwith what Laruelle calls the “defence of thehuman” in their refusal of any straightforwardlyuniversalist schema for human flourishing orways of being, as well as in their focus upon“ordinary human life.” Agrama’s ethnographyfocuses on the fatwa courts in Egypt and thepeople who come there seeking help. As heexplains, the reason why Egypt is such a fruitfulcountry in which to examine secularism isbecause, as a secular state, it has written a fun-damental ambiguity into its very modern consti-tution: its legal structure is modelled on thesecular legal system of France while simul-taneously claiming the Islamic tradition ofShari’a. This mixed constitution is notaltogether different from the United Kingdomand the United States, though the presence ofIslam may often cause a hasty observer toassume a kind of exotic confusion while

ignoring the parallel confusions of the West.As Agrama writes:

secularism itself incessantly blurs togetherreligion and politics in Egypt, and […] it isa form of power that works through andrelies upon the precariousness of the cat-egories it establishes. This, however, is notpeculiar to Egypt; it is also a characteristicof many states considered to be paradigmsof modern secularity, such as France,Germany, and Britain.30

Like these European countries, Egypt simul-taneously draws power from its majority reli-gious tradition and attempts to control andcircumscribe the claims to authority withinthat tradition. This is most clearly seen in theway the fatwa courts exist technically outsidethe civil law and yet Shari’a, technically the offi-cial basis for that civil law, is also practised hereby muftis whom people respect although theyhave no actual police powers. Shari’a is thuspractised in such a way that it is no longer“entangled in the question of religion and poli-tics” that exists at the level of civil law and soexists in a place that Agrama intriguinglyrefers to as one of “asecularity.”

Why might we need such a concept? Becausethe dialectic of the secular and post-secular isestablished firmly upon a monism of “the politi-cal” where everything is taken as needing tosubmit to this all-too-concrete abstraction: poli-tics as a master attribute which is mixed withanything and everything else. Agrama’s explora-tion of Egypt’s secularity points to somethingabout secular power that has not been con-sidered by many other thinkers:

Usually it is thought that secular powerrenders religious traditions irrelevant by rele-gating them outside the domain of politics.Where religion remains or becomes political,then this is where secular power is seen tohave failed, remains incomplete, where itsnormative impetus has broken down, orwhere its impossibility stands revealed. Butthe discussion here points to another possibleway that secular power renders religion irre-levant, not by rendering it outside of politics,but precisely by politicizing it. In politicizing

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religion in broadly similar ways acrossvarious polities, by attaching it to broadlysimilar sets of conceptual and affectiveassociations, secular power renders the speci-ficities of religious traditions irrelevant.This, I submit, is a more profound form ofirrelevance than depoliticization.31

This monism of the political, upon which the dia-lectic of the secular and post-secular plays out,cuts off other forms of life, other stranger formsof subjectivity from being developed. Agramaexplains that he chooses the term asecularitybecause ofwhatwe could term its generic element:

The term nonsecular is too easily confusedwith the notion of the religious. And unlikepostsecularity, asecularity is not a temporalmarker. It allows for the possibility thatasecularity has, in different forms, alwaysbeen with us, even from within the traditionson which state secularity is based.32

In our terms, derived from Laruelle’s non-phil-osophy, asecularity may refer to the way inwhich a creature’s radical identity is ultimatelyforeclosed to the individuals who may destroyher subjectivity (which is not to downplay thereal harassment and oppression indicated insuch destruction).

In thinking tradition from an asecular lens wemay see the ways in which traditions are used asmeans in the construction of those contingentsubjectivities, for greater or lesser forms ofliberty. Consider this beautiful passage fromAgrama detailing the ways in which the fatwaintersects with the subjectivity or self-formationof those who seek a law outside of the massiveobjects of religion and politics:

This image of the fatwa as facilitating ajourney takes us far from the conventionalview of it as primarily a doctrinal pronounce-ment and an instrument of doctrinal reform.It also helps us to see beyond the idea ofIslamic tradition (and its authority) as stuckbetween its past and a future of incessantnovelty. This is because it shows us how thetradition moves towards a future, in theway that it puts a self on a path toward afinal destination. One’s place on that path,however, is always rendered uncertain, but

this is not because endlessly, irreducibly“new” circumstances bring on unforeseeablechange. Rather, it is because the familiar fric-tion that arises from the heterogeneity oflife’s affairs, of being young and growingold and sick, of dying along the way, never-theless renders obscure whether one hasfully arrived at a given place on the path, orwhether one is even still on it. Here it isnot the creativity of the fatwa that matters,but rather its capacity to enable a self tostay and advance upon an already definedpath toward an ideal Muslim self. And thatcapacity is found not in the pronouncementof doctrinal principles and rules for how toact, not in reforming them to fit moderntimes, but in the skill of using them discer-ningly to say “the right words at the righttime” for the person who seeks guidance.33

The heterogeneity of life’s affairs, those thingsthat these reified forms of tradition foolishlyclaim to either give some control over orbestow meaning upon, always ultimatelyhappen to a creature, they are lived by that crea-ture. And though Agrama here speaks of acertain telos it is spoken of in such a way that itcould be conceived as ultimately anothermeans. A means upon an uncertain path, actingas a compass, a guide, but still material, stillabstract means. Traditions ought to be savedfrom themselves, from the ways in which theycrush creatures beneath them in the verymoment that they seek to free them. Traditionsmay be asecularly reduced to simple meanswhich start creatures on a path seemingly witha power principle driving them, some enddriving from behind, reduced to means insteadof as an end to arrive at somekind of liberty that remains tobe thought in itself. It may helpus move towards some kind ofthought and practice without-limits.

notes

1 Laruelle, Philosophies of Difference 179. [Trans-

lation slightly modified to emphasize elements at

play in this essay. Some emphasis mine.]

2 Smith, “What can be Done?”

against tradition to liberate tradition

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3 I use the term creatural here to refer to this pro-

duction not being a simply human production, but

one that includes all the non-human elements one

finds within ecology. See Smith, Non-Philosophical

Theory, esp. 218–20, for a fuller treatment of this

concept.

4

We are apt to be misled here by the ideologi-

cal uses to which the concept of a tradition

has been put by conservative political theor-

ists. Characteristically such theorists have fol-

lowed Burke in contrasting tradition with

reason and the stability of tradition with con-

flict […] Traditions, when vital, embody con-

tinuities of conflict. Indeed when a tradition

becomes Burkean, it is always dying or

dead. (MacIntyre 221–22)

5 Ibid. 203.

6 Ibid. xiii.

7 Asad 273.

8 Laruelle sums up his “collider” model of non-

philosophy in a recent interview, saying:

I have always used two philosophies at the

same time. Heidegger and Nietzsche, then

Derrida and Deleuze. So it is always a

matter of how to eventually combine

several philosophies […] I had the feeling

that in order to completely change the

concept of philosophy, two philosophies

were always necessary, as if each of the philo-

sophers represented half of philosophy, basi-

cally, which I felt to be the non-completeness

of a particular philosophy; this problem

would have to be resolved each time by the

combination of two philosophers. I have fol-

lowed this way of doing things, a little bit in

spite of myself, always combining two philos-

ophies as if each of them was lacking what the

other had. You could think that this is a dia-

lectical relation. But in fact that was not

that at all, because it was, each time, two phil-

osophies and not one philosophy and the

entire history of philosophy in addition.

Thus, I am part of a conjugation, I like this

term a lot, of philosophies which replaced

the missing concept. What was missing was

the One, the One-in-One. (Laruelle, “Non-

Philosophy” 239)

9 Asad 266.

10 Ibid. 267.

11 Consider, for example, the strangely amor-

phous Roman Catholic Archdiocese for the Mili-

tary Services, USA, which, unlike nearly every

other archdiocese in the world, has no central

seat and no cathedral but serves in an almost

Deleuzian rhizomatic way the network of Ameri-

can imperialist bases throughout the world

despite the Roman Catholic Church’s official line

of propagating a whole cloth “culture of life.”

12 There is likely something interesting in the

Gnostic rejection of the Eucharist. Here we see a

different understanding of the relation to authority

and power and the possibility of resistance to them

through sacrifice. As Brakke summarizes it:

the Gnostic author of the The Gospel of Judas

severely criticizes the Eucharist as a cer-

emony that offers praise to Ialdabaoth, the

god of this world. The sacrificial victim that

other Christian leaders offer on their altars

is not bread or the body of Christ, but the

people that they lead astray into ignorance

and death ([The Gospel of Judas] 39:18–

40:1). “Stop sacrificing animals!” Jesus com-

mands his wayward disciples, referring to

the animals that symbolize their deceived

Christian followers (41:1–2). (Brakke 77)

13 Marion 153.

14 Ibid. 158.

15 Gilson 97.

16 Ibid.

17 This is a summary of an argument made at

greater length with regard to Thomas in Smith,

Non-Philosophical Theory 190–98.

18 MacIntyre 184.

19 Cavanaugh 3.

20 Ibid. 14.

21 Barber 91.

22 Ibid.

23 Asad 292.

24 There is a debate amongst scholars of the

history of religions about whether or not

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something as diffuse as the various groups col-

lected under the term gnosis even exist. Foremost

amongst those who argue for the uselessness of the

term is Karen King. See her What is Gnosticism?

However, as I argue below, I follow the work of

other theorists who are more structuralist in

their understanding of identity, like Corbin and

other more contemporary historical thinkers like

Gerd Lüdemann (see Lüdemann) who assert the

usefulness of this term in capturing a certain

spirit of a myriad of “lost” traditions.

25 Voegelin 165, 166.

26 Norman O. Brown makes a similar claim with

regard to the lived experience of time in Islam,

marking out Islam as a kind of challenge to the

world as a universal prophetic tradition. See

Brown; Iqbal. Basit Kareem Iqbal’s contribution

goes beyond a mere review and deepens these

claims by suggesting ways in which Brown’s thesis

can be seen without the reference to a certain

kind of orientalizing of Islam through exclusive

focus on Shi’a sources.

27 Corbin 14; translation slightly modified.

28 Laruelle, Théorie 46–47; translation mine.

29 See Brakke 53, 60.

30 Agrama 71.

31 Ibid. 185.

32 Ibid. 187.

33 Ibid. 182.

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Anthony Paul SmithLa Salle UniversityDepartment of Religion1900 W. Olney AvenuePhiladelphia, PA 19141USAE-mail: smithanthony@lasalle.edu

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