The Future Belongs to Ghosts:
An Anatomy of the Apophatic Imagination with Constant Reference to the Spectrality of God
Instructor: John D. Caputo, PhD
Description: In a scene from Ghost Dance (1982) in which Derrida played himself, an actress asks Derrida whether he believes in ghosts. His “appearance” in this film is turning him into a ghost, he replies, an apparition in which, long after he is dead, we will be able to “see” and “hear” him, although he is no longer there. “I think that the future belongs to ghosts,” he adds, “that technology increases greatly the power of ghosts.” In this course, I take belief in ghosts as a deadly serious way to frame the question of God, a very holy ghost indeed, where being is haunted by time and the spectral is the figure of the instability and undecidability of being, never identical with itself, especially today, when information technology has filled the air with ghostly voices and visions. I locate the roots of all this spectrality in what I am calling the apophatic imagination, which is what becomes of thought when it runs up against its limits.
Assigned Texts:
Schedule:
Saturdays: September 3, 10, 24, and October 1 @1pm New York time.
Session I: Methods and Aims [Sat Sep 3 @1pm New York time]
In the first session I establish the methodology of apophatic thinking, which in Husserlian terms lies in suspending both the supernatural and the rationalistic naturalizing attitude, thereby protecting radical apophatic phenomena from both belief and disbelief (as befits a proper fantom), and then I introduce the guiding distinction between classical or edifying apophaticism and a radical or anxious (spooky) apophaticism (aka, radical theology).
Session II. The Ontotheological Imaginary [Sat Sep 10 @1pm New York Time]
Drawing upon Hegel and Schelling, I follow the “reduction” (in the Husserlian sense) of the transcendent Supreme Being of theism (the ontic) to the immanent ontological ground of being, the Spirit (Geist) in the world, the matrix from which beings emerge and to which they return. In his debate with Hegel (Kierkegaard was in the audience), Schelling singles out the nocturnal powers of being – an anxious apophatic – found in its most dramatic form in his “Satanology,” his metaphysics of the mythic figure of Satan.
Session III. The Hauntological Imaginary [Sat Sep 24 @1pm New York Time]
After exploring the post-theistic (panentheistic) courage to be in a dark and ambiguous world (Tillich, who is following the lead of Schelling’s critique of Hegel), I take up Derrida’s trope and undertake a second “reduction” of the ontological to the hauntological, of the Spirit to a specter, of the Geist to a ghost, which might be described as haunting German Idealism, which is framework in which I think the spectrality of God.
Session IV. The Posthuman Imaginary [Sat Oct 1 @1pm New York Time]
Enter the spooks of posthumanism – an eerie angelology (angelos = an instant information system), a quantum hauntology (Barad), a ruinology where the universe may be expanding into oblivion, a virtual reality where it may be that “information” goes all the way down, where being-in-the-world may turn out to be being-in-a-virtual-world (Bostrom, Chalmers), and the + in Humanity+ or Reality+ is Derrida’s “dangerous supplement,” because it could be a minus. In this world of beings not descended from Adam or saved by Jesus, where the future belongs to ghosts, I pose the question of whether there is any possible future for theology, radical or not.
Intended Learning Outcomes: The seminar will introduce the student to the the key concepts and ideas that have given rise to Radical Theology, offering an historical and contextual overview of the various streams in radical theological thought. The seminar will also address the potentials and possibilities Radical Theology offers those who are interested to redefining faith and community life in the 21st century