“Between his Prayers and Tears (1997) and The Weakness of God (2006), Caputo undergoes a conversion of sorts, or what he describes as a coming out as a theologian.”601 As mentioned,
Caputo’s concern with more explicit questions regarding faith and theology can be seen in the series of ‘edifying divertissements’ in Prayers and Tears. In an interview with Keith Putt found in a volume of essays that mediated on the latter, we learn from Caputo that initially he had set out to write a book that would “put deconstruction in service of religion,” titled God and
Anonymity. The latter was put on hold when the chapters on Derrida and religion took on a
life of their own to later become the manuscript for Prayers and Tears.602 The reflections on the
598 Ibid., pg. 338. 599 Ibid., pg. 288-289. 600 Ibid., pg. 289.
601 See Crockett et al. (eds.), The Future of Continental Philosophy of Religion, pg. 5.
602 See James H. Olthuis (ed.) Religion with/out Religion: The Prayers and Tears of John D. Caputo (London: Routledge, 2002), pg. 157. See also Caputo’s interview with Mark Dooley, which traces this transition to theology; Ian Leask
theological topoi found in the divertissements or “so many little sermons,”603 as he called
them, seem to be the product of those early deliberations that culminate in The Weakness of
God604 and later The Insistence of God (2013).605
At this juncture and given the trajectory mapped in the course of this study, we are in a position to formally engage its ‘second axis.’ Such a ‘formal’ engagement, however, is somewhat artificial since we have already been implicitly exploring the event throughout Caputo’s work insofar as it remains deeply influenced by Derrida. Indeed, the thinking of ‘event’ appears early Derrida’s “Signature, Event, Context,” followed by his books dedicated to Francis Ponge, Paul Celan and Maurice Blanchot, as well as his later more political writings.606 While Caputo follows Derrida607 (with the exception of also Lyotard and
Deleuze),608 it should also be noted that there exists a long tradition of twentieth century
continental thought that can be characterized as ‘philosophies of event,’ — stemming at least from Heidegger through Deleuze, Lyotard, Levinas, Blanchot, Badiou, Žižek and others. For Caputo’s part, as will be shown below, the series of dyadic tropes marshalled from Derrida’s
(ed.), “From Radical Hermeneutics to the Weakness of God: John D. Caputo in Dialogue with Mark Dooley” in
Philosophy Today 51.2 (2007), pp. 216-226.
603 Caputo, Prayers and Tears, pg. xxix.
604 Many of the themes in those sermon-like interludes in Prayers and Tears, Caputo would expand upon and publish in the years preceding Weakness of God. Indeed, almost two-thirds of the chapters in Weakness of God are acknowledged as having antecedents in previously published articles throughout the late 90’s and early 2000s. During these interceding years, he would also publish two popular works that serve as evidence of this increasing interest in theology. See John D. Caputo, On Religion (London: Routledge, 2001) and Philosophy and Theology (Nashville: Abingdon, 2006). We mention these biographical points only to point out that at the beginning, Caputo never saw himself as doing ‘theology’ and that indeed it was a term he was ‘allergic’ to. Consequently, this lengthy ‘coming-out’ process to what he now calls ‘radical theology’ attests to a deeply rooted ‘hermeneutics of suspicion,’ and which no-doubt informs what he means by ‘radical theology.’
605 John D. Caputo, The Insistence of God: A Theology of Perhaps (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2013). Caputo has also produced a number of popular books that emphasize his theological position in more undemanding language: see John D. Caputo, What Would Jesus Deconstruct? The Good News of Postmodernism for the Church (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2007); John D. Caputo, Truth (Penguin: 2014); John D. Caputo, The Folly of God: A Theology of the
Unconditional (Salem, OR: Polebridge Press, 2016).
606 See Jacques Derrida, Alan Bass (trans.) “Signature, Event, Context” in Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1984 [1972]), Richard Rand (trans.) Signéponge-Signsponge (New York: Columbia University Press, 1984), “Shibboleth: For Paul Celan” Thomas Dutoit and Outi Pasanen (eds.), Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of
Paul Celan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), Giovanna Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2003) and Jacques Derrida,
“A Certain Impossible Possibility of Saying the Event” in Critical Inquiry 33.2. (Winter 2007), pp. 441-461.
607 This is seen most clearly in his analysis of Derrida’s 1980 essay Psyché: Inventions de l’autre. See Captuo, Prayers
and Tears, pg. 71-76.
608 Acknowledging the influence of Gilles Deleuze’s The Logic of Sense (1969) Caputo writes: “In an important ‘sense,’ The Weakness of God is inspired by Deleuze, and this Theology of the Event in my subtitle is very much a contribution to a ‘(theo)logic of sense.’” See Gilles Deleuze, Mark Lester (trans.), Constantin V. Boundas (ed.) The
Logic of Sense (New York: Columbia University Press, [1969] 1990), and see Caputo, Weakness of God, pg. 301; fn. 5.
In Caputo’s earlier discussion of his theory of subjectivity in Against Ethics, he gives an account of ‘events’ (pp. 93- 98), and distinguishes them by their singularity, idiosyncratic and irreducible nature. “The subject is never an ‘agent’ through and through. For one thing, the subject is just as often something acted upon, subjected to events.” Pg. 95. There, Caputo also footnotes (pg. 270, fn. 1) his indebtedness to thinking the singular and irruptive force of events to Deleuze as well as Lyotard, especially the latter’s last chapter of The Differend.
writings are ‘organized’ and recast by his own theory of ‘Name’ and ‘event,’ and subsequently deployed in a poetic discourse that constitutes ‘weak’ or ‘radical’ theology.609 The artificial
formality of the second axis, then, lies in the specific iteration of the event that takes place in this radical theological discourse.
Caputo’s critical and novel move is to develop his notion of ‘event’ in a theological account of deconstruction (or a deconstructive account of theology).610 For him the event functions
analogously to the different sites or dyadic tropes of the il/logic of différance (the impossible, the ‘to come,’ gift, messianic, apocalyptic). It names an excess relative to contingent horizons of meaning. Religion and theology are but historical constructs (names) which bear witness to a disturbance that exceeds them. This disturbance is the event which is experienced as a call in the ‘name’ of God. A ‘weak’ or ‘radical theology’ is configured as a specific description, hermeneutics, narration, or poetics, that responds to the experience of the call of this event — where much depends upon the ‘how’ of the response.611 For example, as Caputo writes, “any
theology, weak or strong, is the explication of the event that is implicit in the name of God.”612
Accordingly, the appropriate response for a ‘theology without theology’613 is to approach the
event with a hermeneutic of ‘weakness.’ This means understanding that the call of the event ‘harbored’ in the name is indifferent to whether or not the ‘caller’ can be identified. Such is the mistake of ‘strong’ theology. The excess of the ‘event’ or the event of excess does not come from the ‘outside,’ from another ontological or ontic ‘source,’ or as Caputo later puts it; God is not what ‘exists’ but rather ‘insists.’614 The event ‘in’ the name of God (God’s insistence) is
located on the ‘plane of immanence’ (Deleuze), which describes not an ‘infinite finitude’ but rather a ‘finite infinity.’ That is, the possibility of infinition in what is actually happening.615
609 Caputo’s use of ‘weakness’ is informed by Gianni Vattimo’s ‘Weak thought,’ see John D. Caputo and Gianni Vattimo, Jeffrey W. Robbins (ed.) After the Death of God (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). It also follows Derrida’s use of the phrase ‘weak force,’ after Walter Benjamin’s ‘weak messianic force’ in the famed Rogues essay. See Jacques Derrida, Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (trans.) Rogues: Two Essays on Reason (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), pp. xiv, 36.
610 It is at this point that we may speak of a ‘postmodern theology’ according to Caputo: “On my accounting, things take a theological turn in postmodernism when what we mean by the event shifts to God. Or, alternately, things take a postmodern turn in theology when the meditation upon theos or theios, God or the divine, is shifted to events.” See Caputo, “Spectral Hermeneutics: On the Weakness of God and the Theology of the Event” in John D. Caputo and Gianni Vattimo, Jeffrey W. Robbins (ed.) After the Death of God (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), pp. 47-88; pg. 49.
611 “The old ‘logos’ of theology is replaced with ‘events,’ which are addressed by a poetics, not a logic. To put it in Paul Ricoeur’s terms, it is not a logos but an event that the mythos gives us to think.” See Caputo, The Insistence of
God, pp. 63-64.
612 John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2006), pg. 113. 613 Caputo borrows this phrase form Charles E. Winquist’s Surface of the Deep (Aurora, Colo: Davies Publishing Group, 2003), pg. 206.
614 Caputo, The Insistence of God, pg. 14-19.
615 “The à venir is a structure of experience and responsibility. It is not time but something going on in time. It is not a bad infinity but a finitely constituted but open-ended call – and in that sense not an infinite finitude but rather
The conclusion of this chapter will be dedicated to further exposing what Caputo means by his ‘theology of the event,’ as well as pointing toward the ramifications of this thinking about God for theology and sovereignty.
I. The Quasi-Structure of ‘Name-Event’
The point of departure for Caputo’s radical theology begins with a distinction between two necessarily related terms that follow the parlance of deconstruction; ‘name’ and ‘event.’616 As
already discussed in chapter three, Derridian deconstruction begins from the critique of logocentrism, which, through the spatialization of the inside/outside binary, extends to all closed systems that attempt to exclude the outside as other. When Derrida says ‘il n’y a pas de
hors-texte,’617 he means not to eliminate the binarity of the inside/outside but rather to suggest
that this opposition is already inscribed in the writing outside at the margins, and thus is subverted from the beginning. The fault of logocentrism and the ‘metaphysics of presence’ is to assume that binary distinctions remain fixed in their distinctiveness, whereas what Derrida shows is that binaries are always mutually constituting and their distinctiveness always unstable. The Name-Event structure follows this schema. While Caputo sees his theology of the event as an emphasis on the ‘event side’ of the binary (the outside, absence, impossibility,
sans, without),618 for which he has received no small criticism,619 his intention is not to
a finite infinite.” See John D. Caputo, “The Return of Anti-Religion: From Radical Atheism to Radical Theology” in
Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 11.2 (2011), pp. 32-124; pg. 58.
616 There are a number of superb introductions to Caputo’s theology of the event. From Caputo himself, see “Spectral Hermeneutics: On the Weakness of God and the Theology of the Event” in John D. Caputo and Gianni Vattimo, Jeffrey W. Robbins (ed.) After the Death of God (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), pp. 47-88, also Robbins’ useful introduction to this volume, pp. 1-26; “The Sense of God: A Theology of the Event with Special Reference to Christianity” in Lieven Boeve and Christophe Brabant (eds.) Between Philosophy and Theology:
Contemporary Interpretations of Christianity (Surrey: Ashgate, 2010), pp. 27-41. For other introductions, which are
generally optimistic toward Caputo’s project, see Katherine Sarah Moody, Radical Theology and Emerging
Christianity: Deconstruction, Materialism and Religious Practices (Farnham: Ashgate, 2015), pp. 61-76, and Steven
Shakespeare, Derrida and Theology (London: T&T Clark, 2009), pp. 196-200. For a more critical approach see Christopher Ben Simpson, Religion, Metaphysics, and the Postmodern: William Desmond and John D. Caputo (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009), pp. 7-22. After introducing Caputo’s thought in the opening chapter, Simpson embarks in each subsequent chapter to explicate and then defend the work of William Desmond as an alternative to Caputo.
617 Jacques Derrida, Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (trans.), Of Grammatology, corrected edition (Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, [1967] 1997), pg.158.
618 For example, with respect to democracy (Name), Caputo says “In the ‘democracy to come,’ the ‘to come’ [Event] is more important than the ‘democracy.’” See Weakness of God, pg. 3.
619 This criticism can be designated as the problem of the ‘with’ in Caputo’s ‘religion without religion,’ that is, whether or not a religion without religion does not seem to favor the ‘event’ of religion over its historical instantiations. For recent critics like Joeri Schrijvers — Between Faith and Belief: Toward a contemporary phenomenology
of religious life (New York: SUNY Press, 2016) — Caputo’s effort to avoid a certain empiricism leads to a neglect of
factical being-in-the-world (pg. 162). This issue has also been raised variously in another volume of essays, see Aaron Simmons and Stephan Minister (eds.) Reexamining Deconstruction and Determinate Religion: Toward a Religion
With Religion (Pittsburg: Duquesne University Press, 2012). It also goes to the heart of the titanic debate between
Caputo and Martin Hägglund. Hägglund’s Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008) argued against Caputo by asserting that he creates too great a gap between the conditional
denigrate the ‘name’ but to expose it to the event which it contains or cannot see coming. Certain names concerning theology, indeed, theology itself — which presume to grasp the Truth ‘inside’ or at least to have obtained privileged access to it — are inevitably subjected to a ‘quasi-hermeneutical’ reduction of being (Name, God, theology) to the event going on ‘in’ or coming over being.620
Caputo wastes no time in the opening pages of Weakness of God to set out the itinerary of this reduction. He argues that names as nominal unities having accumulated meaning are always already compromised by an indefatigable paradox, in that they simultaneously contain events which are in principle uncontainable. The ‘uncontainability’ of events means that names like ‘God,’ ‘Christianity,’ or ‘democracy’ are opened up onto something that exceeds them, and which forces them to re-nominate themselves in an endless “nameability by other names equally eventful.”621 Since events ceaselessly escape nomination, names are endlessly caught
up in ‘translating’ the event to which they are a response and, thus, are themselves not ‘literal’ in the sense of grasping (greifen) a concept (Begriff). Caputo calls the process of ‘deliteralization’ of the name which tries to articulate the event it harbors ‘poetics.’ This will be an immensely important part of his radical theology which we will pursue further below. Keeping in mind Derrida’s critique of Levinas in “Writings and Difference” (1967), Caputo also notes that the excess of events is posited against a horizon of expectation or pre-given horizon of perception (Husserl) that it shocks and shatters. Opposing Levinas’ tout autre, which is impossible, simpliciter, Caputo follows Derrida in arguing that events refer to the
and unconditional, which allows him [Caputo] to circumscribe the inescapable ‘infinite finitude’ of the present – Derrida’s ‘radical atheism’ according to Hägglund. Accordingly, Caputo can insist on the ‘passage’ through the conditional to the unconditional, thus leaving ‘the with’ of a religion without religion behind. One could perhaps make this argument for the present work, Weakness of God, where indeed there seems to be an emphasis on ‘the Event’ in spite of ‘the Name.’ But Hägglund’s reading of Prayers and Tears (the object of his critique) misses the mark. Derrida’s repeated religious references indicate surely something more than the mere notion of ‘radical survival’ as Hägglund argues. Caputo has written an almost 100-page response to Hägglund’s characterization of deconstruction, see John D. Caputo, “The Return of Anti-Religion: From Radical Atheism to Radical Theology” in
Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 11.2 (2011), pp. 32-124, to which Hägglund replied, “The Radical Evil of
Deconstruction: A Reply to John D. Caputo,” in Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 11.2 (Spring, 2011), pp. 126- 150. The debate has been recently revisited by Neal DeRoo in a three-part essay series in the Journal for Cultural and
Religious Theory online supplement, see Neal DeRoo, “The Dangers of Dealing With Derrida – Revisiting the
Caputo-Hägglund Debate On The ‘Religious’ Reading of Deconstruction, Part 1.” Journal for Cultural and Religious
Theory. http://jcrt.org/religioustheory/2018/06/26/the-dangers-of-dealing-with-derrida-revisiting-the-caputo- hagglund-debate-on-the-religious-reading-of-deconstruction-part-1-neal-deroo/ (accessed June 28, 2018). See also Clayton Crockett’s critique and defense of Caputo in Crockett, Derrida after the End of Writing, pp. 33-36.
620 Only ‘quasi-hermeneutical’ because hermeneutics wants to retrieve the more originary relation between Being and ‘man’ that has been alienated by modern Techniks (Heidegger), or that wants to communicate the essential Truth of the tradition however contingently it may be expressed (Gadamer). See chapter four of Radical
Hermeneutics, pp. 95-119.
impossible, making them surprising because their incoming is relative to what we were expecting.622
The event has both a surprising and irruptive quality. The emphasis on irruption is to acknowledge the sense of the event given by Deleuze. However, Caputo stresses that he does want to stage a battle between Deleuze and Derrida but wants ‘to run together the two senses’ of the event. On the Deleuzian side, the event irrupts and breaks-out (e-venire) as a virtuality within names. On the Derridian side, events are what we cannot see coming, interrupting the horizon of the name and break-in (in-venire) with surprise.623 However, whether irruptive or
interruptive, events harbor an irreducible unforeseeability and therefore one could not say that what is breaking-out or breaking-in will be something ‘good.’ The event has no telos and does not involve an ‘essential’ unfolding but is rather constrained by the limitations of historical circumstance i.e. language itself or the name itself. This refers back to how Derrida understands the very structure of language as both promise and threat. The other of language is promised to us in language even before the intentional speech act. Thus, in the unavoidability of speech the other that language promises us takes on a ‘messianic look’ which keeps the future open. But if language, Caputo tells us, “is a promise to speak to one another of the things themselves, to give one another meaning and truth, that is a promise that cannot be kept.”624 The structure of language, therefore, is both promise and threat and
the event which is this promise is never a guarantee. On this account, we begin to see the religious ‘form’ of the event, in that the promise is also experienced as a kind of covenant, a covenant “that has been cut with us, which makes us the people of the promise, of the covenant, of the cut.”625
Caputo maps this ‘Name-Event’ structure onto the dynamics of Christianity. He asserts that internal to Christianity is a ‘bipolarity’ which is “a function of the distinction between name and event.”626 However, where the account of ‘weak theology’ differs is that unlike classical
theology which is always “vacillating wildly between the heights of power and depths of weakness” — as in the kenotic movement that ultimately is an exhibition of divine strength — Caputo’s aim is to allow the event to be thought all the way down. This is the possibility of
622 On Caputo’s reading of Derrida’s relationship to Levinas see, Radical Hermeneutics, pp. 20-24.
623 Caputo, The Insistence of God, pp. 49-50. There are limits to this Derridian-Deleuzian partnership, however. Caputo writes, “the collaboration collapses at that point when the event is nothing more than the actualization of a potency, a part of its program. The crucial point is that the ‘virtuality’ here means a purely open-ended promise but not a programmable predictable process of potentiality passing into actuality.” See pg. 271, fn. 14.
624 Ibid., pg. 30.
625 Caputo, “Spectral Hermeneutics,” pg. 52. 626 Caputo, Weakness of God, pg. 8.
God, the “master word par excellence,” as the experience no longer of an esse subsistens,