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Figurality and the Christian Question

Submitted to Program Units
1: Theology and Continental Philosophy Unit

Samantha Kang, University of California, Santa Barbara, Presiding

Abstract for Online Program Book (maximum 150 words)

This panel interrogates 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), etc. We are also interested in the way that figurality plays a pivotal role in movements in the Christian tradition that seek to avail themselves of biblical narratives and figures to ground a particular political or ethical project, and in the extent to which 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 the Christian tradition wields its figures—be they swords or plowshares.

Papers

  • Amaryah Shaye Armstrong, Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

    Theological Reproduction: Figurality and the Sexual Life of Christian Sense

    Abstract

    This 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, I show 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.

  • Samuel Baudinette, University of Chicago Divinity School

    The Figure of the Pagan: Varro and Hermes contra Augustine in the Theater of Postmodern A/theology

    Abstract

    This paper offers an immanent critique of Klossowski and 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. Turning to their invocation of late-antique accounts of religion, I contend 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. I therefore introduce 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.

  • Timothy Snediker, University of California, Santa Barbara

    Figura and the Critique of Supersession

    Abstract

    This 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 text from 1997, “The Gospel’s Uniqueness.” I argue 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.

Responding
Sarah Hammerschlag, University of Chicago

Full Papers Available

No
Program Unit Options

Session Length

90 Minutes
Schedule Info

Monday, 3:00 PM - 4:30 PM

Tags

figurality
Christianity
figura
Auerbach
Lindbeck
supersession
Klossowski
Lyotard
a/theology
figuration
Surrealism
Henri de Lubac
Eugene Rogers
sexuality
social reproduction
theology

Session Identifier

A25-332