Theological Reproduction: Figurality and the Sexual Life of Christian Sense

This paper reads Henri de Lubac’s writings on Christian spiritual understanding and Eugene Rogers’ writings on the Spirit’s gendering of Gentiles to show that figurality is how sexuality and social reproduction are figured in Christian thought. Reading the two authors together shows how Christian poiesis and semiosis depend on racialization to incarnate the desirability of Christianity. The Jewish other becomes the occasion for the enfleshed verification of the truth of Christianity as the Christian’s vitalized sense of spiritual understanding (in de Lubac’s argument) supersedes the Jew’s “sterile” interpretation and the Spirit’s excessive incorporation of the Gentile’s (in Rogers’ argument) ingrafts them into the people of God. In both instances, the figure and flesh of the Jew gives living sense to the efficacy and supernatural power of God’s grace, either as an enfleshed witness to Christ’s fulfillment of Jewish promise or as the Spirit’s rearranging force which parses out the people of God in a Christian sense. By analyzing how each author frames Jewishness in their expositions of Christian sense and sexuality, I show how Christian anxieties over being a “living” tradition reveal the relationship between the production of a sense capacity and the securitization Christianity’s significance in the flesh. This relationship between figurality and sexuality in Christian thought defines theological reproduction. 

The fundamentally reproductive work of theology is the socially necessary labor that makes the continuity of Christian order and Christian community possible. Read in this way, figurality might be understood as the social reproduction of the living images which make Christian sense and  desirability. The erotics of Christian sense are crucial to its reproduction and the figural anxieties and romances circulating around questions of Christian continuity and faithfulness make this clear. Figurality’s socially reproductive procedure of sense-making can thus be understood as a crucial element in unraveling the West’s resolution of its crises of legitimacy, meaning, and value through the sexual management of sense. I close by arguing that we can read this convergence of race, sex, and governance in terms of Christian order’s social reproduction. The figural is an effect of the economic guile and deceit that Christian thought and life depends. To recognize what Marie Jose Mondzain calls the “living fertility” which defines Christian economy is to become capable of reading the conversion of anxieties regarding Christianity’s survival and continuity into the necessary creative labor that can sustain it.The relationship between figurality and sexuality in theological explanations of the labor of Christian continuity. Figurality enables the social reproduction of the living images which make Christian sense. Taking flesh in the world as the proper sense of material shapes, Christianity’s erotics of sense is what animates the sexuality of the Christian body. As one name for Christianity’s principle of vitality, figurality expresses how the labor of Christian spiritual sense is made, not only necessary, but desirable and so reproducible.