Recasting Past Concepts in New Contexts

This paper offers a theological engagement with psychoanalytic communist Xandra Metcalfe’s concept of ‘primordial transsexuality’, in conversation with Gregory of Nyssa. It explores Metcalfe’s picture of an original non-binary state of all humans prior to the violence of heterosexuality and cisnormativity, a narrative she compares to the Fall. I compare this with Gregory’s belief in humanity’s primordial creation in a gender-transcendent divine image, prior to the ‘male and female’ divisions given in anticipation of the Fall. Within this, I consider on Metcalfe’s employment of the Lacanian Real—as that which resists symbolisation—alongside Gregory’s view of the Divine Essence as unnameable and unspeakable, suggesting that both Metcalfe’s primordial transsexuality and Gregory’s imago dei evade gendered subjectivity by their proximity to an extradiscursive origin. This paper thus also contributes to ongoing dialogue between theology and Lacanian thought, suggesting Gregory as a promising interlocuter for Lacan.

Although Thomas Berry proclaimed the universe to be “a communion of subjects rather than a collection of objects,” a robust case for pan-animal communion has yet to be made. While we can recognize a natural basis for communion in animals’ subjective interactivity, a merely transactional logic governs the temporal milieu. We can incorporate the existential freedom which underlies communion, however, by reference to the medieval theological voluntarism of John Duns Scotus. Scotus’s Triune God is a self-organizing—and so free—circulation of love. Correspondingly, God founds each creature on its own existential freedom. In this way, God accords it the possibility of gifting its own self in a friendship relation which cultivates some other’s own agency. In light of Scotus, then, a pan-animal subjective interactivity does indeed hold the potential to progress toward communion: A community of unique individuals pursuing, in freedom, an emancipatory love for self and other.

This paper examines The Epic of Arya, a work by Aryan supremacist, Sorbonne-trained philosopher, and esoteric Nietzschean ideologue Abir Taha, as a case study in the fascist appropriation of continental philosophy’s critique of logic and metaphysics. Drawing on her idiosyncratic reading of Nietzsche, Taha advances a mythic vision of eternal sacred Truth underpinning Aryan identity, paradoxically invoking Nietzschean themes of becoming while reinstating the very metaphysical fixity Nietzsche resists. Situating The Epic of Arya alongside scholarly accounts of Nietzsche’s rejection of logic and metaphysics, and broader concerns about the co-option of post-structuralist thought by reactionary movements, this paper argues that Taha’s work exemplifies how anti-rationalist philosophical currents can be weaponized to support discourses of hierarchy, discrimination, and exclusion. By extension, it contributes to ongoing academic dialogue about whether continental philosophy’s critique of logic inadvertently creates conceptual space for the resurgence of authoritarian political theologies under the guise of postmodern flux.