This post is a cataloguing of contemporary fascism which is bolstered by religious ideology. I seek to define it, trace its roots, and remove it from the shadows while inspiring Christian ethical response to counter this plague.
He was on a lifelong pursuit to understand the deepest structures and meaning of existence, along with the place, purpose and destiny of the human being in it. He was troubled by existence. He found it difficult and challenging to understand, liable to so much delusion and perversion.
Jesus’ message was not only spiritually transformative but also politically charged, as it reimagined who held power and how that power should be used—not to marginalize, but to uplift and include.
Is the new materialist language of agential realism really an instance of what Niklaus Largier calls figuration? How did we transition from a use of the term “agent,” meaning conduit or receptive tool, an actor moved by an other, to the term “agential,” meaning immanent to itself, meaning matter that has its own imagination, even its own desire? Largier’s brief investigation of new materialist language in chapter six of Figures of Possibility ultimately serves as a provocative digression, a counterexample underscoring the overall thrust of his book.
The text of 1 Kings 8 is a conversation, not a monologue. For those of us who look to Scripture to guide our understanding and action in our own context, this text invites us to wrestle, conversationally, with the embedded ideologies of our own political leaders’ projects. Names matter in politics. But humble leadership, for the good of all, ought to matter more.
What futures are possible if Largier’s imaginative vision of transformative practice is embraced? Against the stagnating rehearsal of sedimented forms of knowledge production and the force of familiar affective patterns, Largier’s figures offer possibilities as infinite as the bodies they represent.
You discuss a God that both invites us to love our enemies, already incredibly challenging, and a God that also seems to allow, endorse, or sometimes invite violence against the oppressor in certain scriptural texts. Both are hard theological pills to swallow.
Just because leaders appear tough and strong, formidable and forceful, does not mean they have the qualities needed to govern well. Hubris should not trump humility.
This intervention invites readers to consider Largier’s interdisciplinary approach on figuration and theistic immanence, particularly in the light of Foucault’s reflection on Subject and Power and his large influence on Anthropological and Social Sciences studies of power and the willful subject. Napolitano examines mystics and negative theology’s thread of “the ground” in Largier’s work, likening its affective intensity and dynamic of figuration to an otherwise imagination of the political, and its forms of violence.
We consider our friends those who can keep a secret and help us stop feeding our inner monsters.
Any effort to secure special status in the eyes of God is a rejection of manna. God’s grace and provision cannot be manipulated by humans for their own ends. It might appear successful. It might even help win an election. But hoarded manna will always become “wormy and rotten” (Exodus 16:20).
Resisting the temptation to romanticize the prelapsarian state of affective and sensory innocence before the fall into conceptualization, Largier attends to contemplative practices that open the discursive mind to be interrupted by figuration.