Alex Dubilet

This essay argues for the political-theological significance of Louis Althusser's theory of interpellation by analyzing the import of the "Christian religious ideology" in his argument. It suggests that the subject as a complex dispositif—of (self-)recognition in relation to a transcendent call, which bestows a proper name, a place in the world, and freedom in obedience—anchors both the Christian and the secular domains. In reconstructing the subject's constitutive elements, this essay argues that interpellation does not merely recruit individuals but itself acts as an operation of individuation. Moreover, the interpellative matrix of the subject works as a sorting mechanism that segregates those who cohere as subjects from those who do not. Turning to the fourteenth-century mystical figure Meister Eckhart, the essay theorizes deinterpellation as a delegitimating force against the interplays of transcendence and subjection wherever they are operative. Rather than opening the self to a transcendent call, Eckhartian deinterpellative becoming nothing affirms an anoriginary freedom detached from the entire matrix uniting interpellative transcendence and the subject.

Please contact me to receive the introduction to the book.

https://www.fordhampress.com/9780823279470/the-self-emptying-subject/

https://www.amazon.com/Self-Emptying-Subject-Kenosis-Immanence-Medieval/dp/0823279472

https://muse.jhu.edu/book/57499

This essay proposes to rethink the conceptual associations that bind immanence to the secular and oppose it to (divine) transcendence. It asks: What if immanence is divorced from the conceptual opposition between the world and its openings to (divine) other(s), between enclosure and the trace of a transcendent outside? What might arise if immanence is severed from its link with secularity, if it ceases to be merely another conceptual support in secularism’s metaphysical armature? To pursue these questions, the essay engages a variety of materials, including medieval mysticism, anthropological critiques of the secular, work in Black studies, critiques of the subject, and François Laruelle’s non-philosophical thought. The result links immanence more intimately with dispossession than with the subject’s self-possession—and entwines it with the undercommons, as the atopic lowest place, rather than with the nomos and topos imposed by the (modern) world and its regime of the proper. Immanence is thought of as anti- and antenomian force, a groundless ground coming underneath the conceptual logics of the world, its normative order of things, and life lived according to its distributions. As a result, rather than a weapon in modernity’s endless self-justifying polemics with religion, immanence opens forth trajectories for its destitution and delegitimation.

By reconstructing the conceptual logic underlying the figure of 'the just' found in Meister Eckhart's sermons, this essay transforms the parameters of what counts as political theology for the medieval period. By giving voice to an uncreated freedom of those who are equal to nothing, Eckhart's mystic discourse poses an unmarked challenge to the political theologies of sovereignty and subjection. Against the interlinked ruses of individuation, subjection, and salvation, his mystic speech of de-interpellation asserts that justice is lived only in the now, without deferral or justification. By enacting a reading practice of abandon-abandoning not only rigid distributions of textual genre, but also the primacy accorded to the subject and the proper-this essay makes visible an example of the unbearable truth for the political that may be retrieved from mystical texts-a scandal for the orders of legitimation and interpellative subjection around which the logic of the political ceaselessly revolves.

Dubilet’s contribution turns to Marx’s “On the Jewish Question” in order to diagnose the collusive interplay between mediation and sovereignty as modes of transcendence that, together, prevent real immanence from irrupting. It does so by recovering the logic of “the general secular contradiction”—the division between the state and civil society that materializes and secularizes the structure of diremption originally articulated in theological form, as the opposition between heaven and earth. In this analysis, the logic of Christianity is shown to be imbricated with the political form of secular modernity itself. Moreover, this account reveals that the modern secular state does not inaugurate the political theology of immanence; rather it constitutes a mechanism of transcendent mediation. The exception that mediates across the two realms renders transcendence livable, but it also reproduces the dirempted life, establishing it as the unsurpassable horizon and foreclosing all operations of dissolution or abolition that could collapse the structure of civil society and the state that governs “the order of the world.” Although immediate transcendence (sovereignty) may be positioned, as it is in the Schmittian paradigm, as radically distinct from its mediational counterpart, in relation to real immanence the two operate as a collusive ensemble.

Alex  Dubilet’s  essay  “The  Catastrophic  Joy  of  Abandoning  Salvation:  Thinking  the  Postsecular  with  Georges Bataille” explores  the  way  Bataille  belies  the  established  divisions  between  theological  and  philosophical  modes  of  thought  in  order  to  develop  a  critique  of  subjection  as  being  enacted  by  theologico
- religious  concepts,  operations,  and  structures  no  less
than  philosophico-secular  ones.  Building  on  Bataille,  Dubilet proposes rethinking the status of immanence and transcendence,  by  decoupling  them  from  their  usual  semantic  associations  that  align  immanence  with  secularity  and  transcendence  with  the  religious.  Dubilet  finds  an  important  element  for  a  novel  theory
of the postsecular in Bataille’s elaboration of catastrophic joy as a critique of investments in futurity and salvation found across the secular-religious divide.

In recent years, in the field of philosophy of religion, François Laruelle’s “non-philosophy” has opened up a path out of the battles between secularist philosophies and resurging Christian theologies. It has done so by theorizing the radical immanence of the Human (or, as he writes, Man-in-person) separated from and foreclosed to simultaneously the (philosophical) enclosure of the World and the (theological) transcendence of God. This paper explores the way Laruelle’s 2007 work Mystique non-philosophique à l’usage des contemporains further articulates radical immanence by engaging with materials from the traditions of mysticism and mystical theology. Mystique non-philosophique diagnoses the ways traditional mysticism remains complicit with philoso- phical operations by enchaining the radical immanence of Man-in-person or the One, making it desire, need and work for divine transcendence. In contrast, it proposes the practice of “future mysticism”, which seeks to subvert all conceptual mechanisms that subjugate the Human and render it servile to operations such as dialectical synthesis, conversion or desire for the Other. This approach underwrites Laruelle’s critique of Meister Eckhart’s thought for its enclosure of the Human within the Neo-platonic grammar of procession, conversion and return, and for the way it retains an emphasis on transcendent super-essentiality in its discourse of the God(head) beyond God. The paper suggests, however, that Eckhart’s sermons, despite deploying such inherited philosophical vocabularies, already articulate radical immanence that undermines the necessity of mediation and work, through mystical topoi such as poverty, humility and “without a why”. In so doing, the paper not only proposes the necessity of a more generous hermeneutic framework for non-philosophy, but also offers the possibility of de- emphasizing the name of “Man” in the theorization of radical immanence. As the paper shows, Eckhart’s conceptuality of poverty, humility and “without a why” points not only to the capacity to subvert transcendence, but additionally to articulate radical immanence decoupled from any Human figure. The radical immanence of the One, however, is not just foreclosed to the World, but, as Mystique non-philosophique makes clear, also entails a messianic dimension: the text repeatedly proposes cloning “Christ-subjects” or “Future Christs” who are not of the World but “for the World”. The final part of this paper argues that it is necessary to read such messianic concepts or “first names” without reverting to economic thinking, without, that is, re-introducing the mechanism of transcendence and specular enclosure. The real subversion of the World lies not in the affirmation of divine transcendence, nor in the nihilism of the desert, but in an immanent One, which is foreclosed to the World but nevertheless messianically displays its insufficiency. Finally, the paper suggests interpreting the radical immanence of the One as an undercommons of the World and (eschatological or divine) transcendence taken together, an undercommons that indexes the mobile lives, generic uncountable forms of living and anonymous forces that pose a perpetual danger to the order enforced by the World and its Gods. This paper is published as part of a thematic collection dedicated to radical theologies.

Published as part of the special issue "New Life of German Idealism" edited by Kirill Chepurin.

The Russian version of the article appeared in: http://www.logosjournal.ru/cgi-bin/arch.pl?action=show&id=86&lang=en

The paper turns to the thought of G.W. F. Hegel and its convergence with Meister Eckhart's thought in order to explore the possibility of a speculative and affirmative relationship between philosophy and religion. It argues that these thinkers, taken together, offer a possible way of rejecting one of the binary structures prevalent in recent continental philosophy, namely the division between an atheistic defense of philosophy and its (secular) egological subjects on one hand, and the affirmation of the primacy of transcendence and alterity (in a quasitheological vein) on the other hand. Hegel's and Eckhart's works suggest that such binaries foreclose a third possibility of annihilating the subject as a way to affirm a speculative and infinite immanence. Utilizing different discursive spaces and theoretical vocabularies , Hegel and Eckhart propose to annihilate the subject as the site from which transcendence could be affirmed in the first place. Moreover, here, God no longer functions as a name against which to struggle in the name of atheism, or one to uphold for a theological critique of the secular. Rather, it becomes the name for the possibility of absolute desubjectivation, of self-emptying and annihilating the subject— processes that are no longer open to transcendence, but reveal the ungrounded immanence of life. In tracing these logics, this paper questions the dominant distribution of concepts structuring the recent turn to religion in continental philosophy, and suggests one possibility for the democratization of thought that would dislocate the imperialism of secular and atheistic discourses without elevating theology to a renewed position of power.

Originally appeared as part of "New Life of German Idealism" of Logos
http://www.logosjournal.ru/cgi-bin/arch.pl?action=show&id=86&lang=en
http://www.logosjournal.ru/arch/86/111_4.pdf

English version
"Speculation and Infinite Life: Hegel and Meister Eckhart on the Critique of Finitude" available at: https://www.academia.edu/33405786/Speculation_and_Infinite_Life_Hegel_and_Meister_Eckhart_on_the_Critique_of_Finitude

The Invisible Committee may be productively, albeit counterintuitively, understood as Gnostic, a perspective that will put into question some of the assumptions behind the way the political and the theological are demarcated from and related to each other in contemporary debates.

Jonathan Sheehan and Dror Wahrman’s Invisible Hands: Self-Organization and the Eighteenth Century presents a fascinating exploration of the proliferating logics of self-organization across various Enlightenment discourses, ranging from metaphysics and political economy to botany, mathematics, and epistemology. The book reinterprets a wide array of well-known figures and recovers a set of forgotten minor characters who, in different ways, attempt “to rediscover a meaningful world beyond the random motions of an Epicurus or Lucretius, beyond the older pieties of Christianity, and beyond the cold world of Descartes.” The complex language of self-organization that permeated the emerging sciences offered a malleable vehicle that was able to grapple with problems of accident and causality, the mysteries of aggregation, the nature of organic life, and the complexity of modern existence.

English Language Original Draft of “Имманентность и Жизнь” published in Логос: Философско-Литературный Журнал (“Immanence and Life: A Review Essay on Roberto Esposito’s Living Thought: The Origins and Actuality of Italian Philosophy” in Logos:  Philosophical and Literary Journal)

A Biography of Ordinary Man
On Authorities and Minorities
François Laruelle
Translated by Jessie Hock and Alex Dubilet

This book is a foundational text for our understanding of François Laruelle, one of France’s leading thinkers, whose ideas have emerged as an important touchstone for contemporary theoretical discussions across multiple disciplines.

One of Laruelle’s first systematic elaborations of his ethical and “non-philosophical” thought, this critical dialogue with some of the dominant voices of continental philosophy offers a rigorous science of individuals as minorities or as separated from the World, History, and Philosophy. Through novel theorizations of finitude and determination in the last instance, Laruelle develops a thought “of the One” as a “minoritarian” paradigm that resists those paradigms that foreground difference as the conceptual matrix for understanding the status of the minority. The critique of the “unitary illusion” of philosophy developed here stands at the foundation of Laruelle’s approach to “uni-lateralizing” the power of philosophy and the universals with which it has always thought, and thereby acts as a basis for his subsequent investigations of victims, mysticism, and Gnosticism.

This book will appeal to students and scholars of continental philosophy, philosophy of religion, ethics, aesthetics, and cultural theory.

http://politybooks.com/bookdetail/?isbn=9781509509959

Response to the book event on The Self-Emptying Subject at An und für sich blog:
https://itself.blog/2019/01/08/introduction-the-self-emptying-subject-book-event/

Originally published at:
https://itself.blog/2019/02/04/the-self-emptying-subject-book-event-becoming-unrecognizable/

This essay turns to Marx’s “On the Jewish Question” in order to diagnose the collusive interplay between mediation and sovereignty as modes of transcendence that, together, prevent real immanence from irrupting. It does so by recovering the logic of “the general secular contradiction”—the division between the state and civil society that materializes and secularizes the structure of diremption originally articulated in theological form, as the opposition between heaven and earth. In this analysis, the logic of Christianity is shown to be imbricated with the political form of secular modernity itself. Moreover, this account reveals that the modern secular state does not inaugurate the political theology of immanence, but constitutes, rather, a mechanism of transcendent mediation. The exception that mediates across the two realms renders transcendence livable, but also reproduces the dirempted life, establishing it as the unsurpassable horizon and foreclosing all operations of dissolu...