ABSTRACT
If the Christian imperial dream of eternity, which it has equated with God, is really the suppression of life (as Nietzsche and Daly suspected) and of divinity, then what becomes of the Christian story of God? Hell’s weight of horror turns out to be merely the story of bodies, ‘‘testimonies’’ as AlthausReid suggests, ‘‘of real lives in rebellions made of love, pleasure and suffering.’’3 The imperial Christian dream of eternity, which is actually a story of Hell turned upside down, tries to condemn bodies that have failed to stop being bodies; that have failed to stop changing, feeling, longing, and indulging in gravitational contact. This makes ‘‘Hell,’’ as I have argued, the makeshift closet of the imperial God, stuffed with the improper, bodily reality that is the cosmos itself. All of which suggests that the divinity that Christians occasionally glimpse in the Incarnation is not to be in any way throned in the eternal, bodiless death of Heaven but-so loving the world-fleshed in the space/time of shifty becoming. It takes courage to see this, against the wisdom of logic of the One, and it takes a certain courage to sin, in looking to Hell for the divine. The God which is not One is, as Irigaray suggests, unintelligible within a phallic frame of oneness.4 Even to talk of an ‘‘outside’’ of the One is to stay within its frame. There are other logics, however (at least that is the suspicion and hope upon which this whole project is based), other logics that do not deny the One, but are not bound by it, either. Divinity imagined within and through frames that are otherwise to the phallogocentrism of the One requires thought that is also somehow Other wise. This brings us directly to the challenge of thought. To think a non-static
basis for reality en route to a thawed and living sense of incarnate divinity
is no small task given the power and duration of the logic of the One in the religious and scientific stories of Christian imperial expansion thus far. How to begin even approaching a logic of multiplicity without slipping always back into the logic of the One? As Gilles Deleuze and Fe´lix Guattari point out,
to attain the multiple, one must have a method that effectively constructs it: no typographical cleverness, no lexical agility, no blending or creation of words, no syntactical boldness, can substitute for it.5
