Spiritual Politics After Deleuze: Introduction

Religious discourse now permeates the theoretical humanities. At least since Jacques Derrida’s insistence upon complex connections between deconstruction and negative theology, there has been an onslaught of writing connecting the demise of traditional metaphysics to the apotheosis of modernity, and a general despair over the possibility of any purely “secular” form of critical reason. A new postmodernism in philosophy now seeks to move beyond merely immanent critique, toward the construction of alternative and experimental syntheses of knowledge and belief. Thus figures such as Agamben, Badiou, Caputo, De Vries, Eagleton, Taylor, Vattimo, and Zizek, among others, have put religious concepts at the center of both analysis and methodology in contemporary critical theory. Conversely, contemporary theology (especially the so-called radical orthodoxy movement) has found an engagement with theory to be crucial to its own ends in a post-metaphysical era.