In The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, Giorgio Agamben reads Paul’s letter as an extended commentary on messianic time and the grace that attends early onset postmortality. The model for what Agamben calls messianic time is that peculiar time—that remnant of time that remains—following the messianic event but preceding […]
The good news, Paul announces, is that it’s possible to die while you’re still alive. It’s possible to survive your own death and, remarkably, to be all the more alive for it. I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live; yet not I, but Christ liveth in me: and the life which I now live […]
Carl Sachs and I shared a session at last week’s North Texas Philosophical Association meeting. Sachs gave an interesting paper about what Kant calls “the affinity of the manifold.” I’d just been gathering my notes for a post on Levi Bryant’s chapter in The Democracy of Objects on the “virtual proper being” of objects (I’ll finish […]
In The Democracy of Objects, Bryant looks to avoid the epistemological trap of “correlationism” by borrowing a novel kind of transcendental argument from Roy Bhasker. Rather than asking what our minds would have to be like in order to experience the world as we do, Bryant asks what the world would have to be like […]
Like the rapture, creation ex nihilo is an extra-biblical doctrine that a slew of people for a long time have enjoyed writing a lot of books about. I don’t have any objection per se to extra-biblical doctrines (Book of Mormon anyone?) but over the past couple hundred years this particular idea has come to seem like […]
It turns out that life is not a competition. It’s not a test. Or, if life is a test, treating it like a test is one surefire way to fail it. Philosophy is no contest either. You are welcome to try, but philosophy is a piss-poor way to slay the primal father. When it comes […]
More or less, I started reading Derrida because of dinosaurs. I was twenty-three. I’d spent two years as the Mormon equivalent of an itinerant monk, celibate, media-less, begging bowl in hand, white shirt yellowing, bike peddles peddling, 24/7. I was pretty serious and I had a lot of questions. Christianity and postmodernity look like an […]
Mythologies (macro-scale meaning-maps) are a byproduct of religion in the same way that stories are a byproduct of life. This is fine. But our stories are not alive and our maps are not the way. It’s a mistake, I think, to think that religions are in the business of making meaning. Religions make meaning the way […]
It is tough to still think, a hundred years into the linguistic turn, that philosophy is much in charge of anything: growing the food, overseeing the menu, preparing the meal, or even serving it up. But philosophy can still help us chew on things. It can be a second stomach that helps digest the kinds of […]