Excerpt from a forthcoming review in Mennonite Quarterly Review.
Daniel Colucciello Barber. Deleuze and the Naming of God: Post-Secularism and the Future of Immanence. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014.
The question of God is not one that can be answered with a yes or no. What is evoked in these questions “is the task of imaging a world, the task of world-making.” With God – or at least the name of God – “the stakes of world-making are pushed to the highest degree” (3). With this orientation Daniel Barber furthers his project of exploring the implications of Deleuzian immanence in the context of religion and secularism. Barber challenges the notion that the critical question is between religion and secularity by claiming that religion (as Christianity or defined by Christianity) and secularism work under the same supercessionist logic that is able to name and position all non-adherents; as Christianity re-positioned Judaism and eventually non-Christian or heretical others so to secularism re-positioned Christianity and religion in general.
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Chapter 6 takes up the challenge of what it means to give attention to the present without escape to another world (whether religious or secular). One example is the life of Malcom X, born Malcom Little. Little did not change his name but marked the site of a name with an X. This X demanded attention to the present because of its constant reminder of a now inaccessible genealogy of his past, his marking under the Christian colonial naming in the present, and his refusal of effacing the present by taking on some eschatological future name. The X remained and resisted the present, opening new possibilities. Barber concludes the chapter with a section called The Fabulation of Icons. This section returns us to the opening comments regarding imagination, politics, and the naming of God. At some point all these elements converge on particular types of story-telling. We are told a story that the question of God can be answered with a yes or no but this and other stories keep us from asking the question of yes or no with regards to capitalism, nationalism, and other ideologies. In the face of these competing imaginations Barber proposes the act of fabulation which “names the capacity to tell a story that outstrips the criteria that would decide on its truth or falsity.” (200) A fable takes the materials of the present and creates an account that refuses the present criteria of truth or falsity and so opens a space for the new. These accounts come most clearly from a place of suffering because suffering demands attention to the present but is itself already outside the discourses of truth (inasmuch as suffering remains senseless).