I’m working on an article that has an ontological immanent critique of the Christian foundations position. Should appear in the IJZS soon if it makes it through the peer review process.

Many thanks to Ash for raising such important questions.

What concerned me at the conference was how a particular reading of Christianity was unproblematically tied to a critique of contemporary democracy by continual reference to the ‘rule of the few’. It did not appear to me Milbank was advocating a ground-up model. It was also asserted in a total reaction to the ills of today – my position here is that the anti-colonial, anti-racist and feminist struggles over the last century have led to many positive developments in spite of the present state of democracy and the world.

I think my more general critique of Milbank and other theorists who advocate a Christian politics is not that they remain within discourses of capital, but within the logics of (Western) modernity. Liberation theology possibly offers an interesting example of a different understanding of modern politics.

As for being reactionary – maybe, sometimes..when the situation politically demands.

As for liberation theology, I fail also to see why you think its position is more progressive than Milbank’s. With regard to capitalism, Milbank (variously) suggests for an absolution of a completely economic sphere, the creation of intercommunity relations based upon the gift rather than upon capitalist contract and a ground-up model that is paninternationalally based not on the nation state, but in interlocking small communities. He has also suggested rethinking the very concept of money itself, and the concept of richness and labour. I see this, while perhaps not practical, as being far more progressive than a Marxist and liberation theology critique, which still is bound up in the discourses and structures offered by capital (the contract, money, riches, the nation state).

I cannot fail to think that your response to what Milbank says is profoundly reactionary – anyone can throw the slur fascist around, and it is neither constructive nor accurate to do so in his case.

At the conference two speakers, John Milbank and Creston Davies, presented the theological Christian view (and not a model) as the political solution to the failures of liberal democracy itself. These were very strange presentations – Milbank, especially with his disconcerting assertive mode, critiqued democracy from what could be rightly called Christian authoritarianism. The unapologetic, near fascism of this undemocratic position raised explicitly the potential problems of the logical construction of a militant politics inside the prescriptive contours of a reworked Marxism through Christianity.

The fact that Milbank is absolutely not in any sense a fascist is by the by. Yet the most weird element of this statement is that Milbank is attempting to create a re-worked Marxism via Christianity. This could not be further from the case. Should you read either the chapter ‘For and Against Marx’ in Theology and Social Theory (and indeed the entire volume) or the chapter ‘Socialism by Grace’ from Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon (and elsewhere), you will note that he is attempting to go beyond any Marxist problematic, indeed he thinks it is fundamentally flawed, hence his trenchant critique of liberation theology, not because of its impulse (eg defending the poor), but because it is too close to the position of Marxism.

hi there,
Visiting via Sinthome’s blog. I have been interested in Zizek’s interpretation of Foucault’s writings on Iran as developing an implicit post-kantian conception of revolutionary enthusiasm (spiritual politics). I have written about it briefly here:

http://eventmechanics.net.au/?p=853

Foucault is rather good I thought on explicating alternative modernities of Islam (capitalism and corruption, etc).

However, my interest is less with the enthusiasm of this historical-scale revolutionary event (which would resonate with other Kantian engagements with Kant’s notion of enthusiasm, namely Lyotard’s), then with Kant’s other explication of enthusiasm in terms of ’something being superadded to the Good’ as a durable relationship (cf. Critique of Judgement). The inversion of this second Kantian enthusiasm along a similar evental axis (similar to Foucault’s inversion) is congruent with Deleuze’s more general post-Kantian argument regarding the role of the intensive ‘difference in itself’.