Figurality and the Christian Question

The semantic range of the word ‘figure’ is notoriously difficult to chart—let alone use—consistently and comprehensively. One speaks of numbers as figures, of bodies as figures, of abstract shapes as figures, of tables included in scholarly essays as figures, of historical persons as figures, of rhetorical devices as figures—the list could go on. A similar difficulty obtains with the related word, ‘figurative,’ which can refer, variously, to parts of speech, to a method or style of painting or photography, to intellectual or ideological representations, or even to the domain of representation in general. A figure can function as a symbol (e.g., as Sarah Hammerschlag shows, the shifting significations of the “figure of the Jew” in modern French society; or, as Lee Edelman shows, the heteronormative “figure of the Child” in late capitalist modernity), but it can also describe a concrete, bodily shape (e.g., when one speaks of a person’s “figure”). One can even speak figuratively of a figure, as when Hegel described Napoleon’s triumphant entry into Jena in 1806 as “the World Spirit on horseback.” 

This panel proposes to take up the question of figurality (denoting the whole range of senses and significations summarized above) in relation to the theological, political, and social dimensions of the Western Christian tradition. We are particularly interested in the way that figures and figurative language are strategically deployed in the history of Christianity to secure a claim, or claims, to religious and political hegemony; that is, to describe its own central doctrines (the figure of the Crucified), or to argue its case against Jews, heretics, and pagans (figural or typological hermeneutics). We are also interested in the way that figures—and figurality generally—play a pivotal role in movements within the Christian tradition that seek to avail themselves of biblical narratives and figures to ground a particular political or ethical project. From historic black invocations of the Exodus and other exilic narratives in Hebrew scripture to more recent associations, in certain American evangelical circles, of the presidency of Donald Trump with the apocalyptic role played by the Persian king Cyrus, figurality is an essential feature of human life, language, and thought. Figures and figurative language are, so to speak, up for grabs. What this panel proposes is an analysis of how Christian tradition wields its figures—be they swords or plowshares. 

To that end, we propose a panel consisting of three papers, to be followed by a critical response from Prof. Sarah Hammerschlag. The panel will proceed as follows.

The first paper reads Henri de Lubac’s writings on Christian spiritual understanding and Eugene Rogers’ writings on the sexuality of the Christian body to show that figurality is how sexuality and social reproduction are said in Christian thought. Christian figurality incarnates the sexual sense of Christianity through the figure of the Jew who, in the Christian imagination, becomes the occasion for the enfleshed verification of Christianity’s truth. By analyzing how each author frames Jewishness in their expositions of Christian sense and sexuality, the paper’s author shows how anxieties circulate around resolving the crises that would call Christianity’s status as a “living” tradition into question. Staving off this perpetual crisis of continuity reveals the relationship between the social reproduction of a distinctively Christian sense capacity and the sexual securitization of (in this case, Christianity’s) significance through the proper stewardship and management of Christianity’s textual and perceptual life—its erotics of sense.

The second paper offers an immanent critique of Pierre Klossowski and Jean-François Lyotard’s work, which shows how their recuperation of a pagan “theatrical” theology of figuration against a Christian “natural” theology of semiotic abstraction, carried out in the name of Varro against Augustine, is a willfully heretical a/theism. By turning to their invocation of late-antique accounts of religion, the author contends that their conception of figurality entails something like a materialist anti-Christianity: a Nietzschean polytheism that challenges Augustinian and monotheist idealism. However, this paper also demonstrates that this materialist anti-Christianity still relies upon Augustinian “idol theory” to affirm its radical project of impulsive autonomy and consequently remains beholden to the very Christian theo-logic it claims to resist. The author therefore introduces the Surrealist International, which desired the concrete abolition of Christianity, rather than its mere figurative disavowal or parodic transgression, as a “hermetic” and “gothic” alternative to Klossowski and Lyotard’s theater of postmodern a/theology.

The third paper considers the reception of Erich Auerbach’s concept of figura in the works of Hans Frei and George Lindbeck, especially the way that ‘figural interpretation’ and ‘figuration’ are deployed by Frei and Lindbeck as a means of recovering a ‘classic model’ of reading scripture that—allegedly—avoids the theological and political pitfalls of the logic of supersession. The paper briefly summarizes Auerbach’s theory as it is presented in his 1939 “Figura,” then traces the vicissitudes of figura in post-liberal theological circles. The paper focuses especially on Lindbeck’s 1997 “The Gospel’s Uniqueness.” The author argues that, far from avoiding, much less dissolving, the problem of supersession, Lindbeck’s hermeneutics effaces the distinctively Christian genesis and structure of figural interpretation as the concrete, historical practice of the logic of supersession, and ultimately repeats the supersessionist gesture at the very moment he claims to repudiate it.