ABSTRACT
Can there be a non-possessive desire? Are all claims to knowledge intrinsically violent? These sorts of question, disguising their contingent origins and formal presuppositions, present themselves to our age with utmost urgency, as if inevitably and transcendentally inscribed into the very nature of things. And it is in response to these questions that much of (post?)modern theology, in the long wake of Christendom’s collapse, now seems eager to constitute itself. But of course these questions take as transcendentally normative the consequences of that collapse, the parceling up of an ancient theological consensus into various abstract mathematical and atheistic oppositions distributed among analytical and continental preoccupations, whose metaphysically inevitable excesses modern liberal politics is meant to tame. Among them: the ratios of finitude to infinitude and immanence to transcendence; the abstract relation governing the opposition of a self-asserting subject to its objects and the subjects it converts into objects; the despair for the subject of having to buck up in the face of its own self-negation in the limiting face of the ‘other’; and the subsequent relations between intellect and will and descriptive and evaluative language, to name a few.
