The Case for Christian Atheism

Or: Global Plurality and its Singular Negativity

“The Christian [...] who chooses the orthodox image of Christ is making a wager in which he [...] forfeits all the life and energy of a world [...] totally alien to the Church.”¹

“I think we should retain the notion of belief. [...] Belief is a practical question: can I live as a Christian in Holy Spirit?”²

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The next Philosophy Portal course starts October 20th and focuses on Christian Atheism, see: Christian Atheism.

The Portal is a live event space that hosts four live events every month, see: The Portal.

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PREFACE

(skip to “THE CASE FOR CHRISTIAN ATHEISM” if you don’t need the Preface)

The origin of Philosophy Portal’s function is in a precise lacking form: in and around 2020 I recognised that there was an emerging digital scene with a thirst for learning the foundations of modern philosophy.³  I myself had contact with this lacking form stretching back to the start of my doctoral thesis in 2014, in attempting to think around the problem of technological singularity.  At the time, I had had the great privilege of existing in an open-ended research space developing the concept of singularity as a consequence of receiving a grant to conduct a doctoral project which I could in the end take in whatever direction I chose.  These investigations had been originally provoked by the evolutionary theories and technological projections of speculative technologist Ray Kurzweil;⁴ and my department was dependent on investigating these theories using the scientific paradigm of “evolution, cognition, and complexity”, led by cybernetician Francis Heylighen.⁵  This paradigm had the potential to add greater theoretical depth to the relation of technological singularity and human civilization.⁶

However, the more I investigated the technological singularity from the perspective of evolution, cognition, and complexity, the more I recognised the need for modern philosophy.⁷  More specifically, I recognised the need for the dimensions of phenomenology and the unconscious psyche, which were missing from the paradigm, as well as the research on technological singularity.⁸  If I could pinpoint one principle that separates modern philosophy from the perspective of modern evolutionary theory, it would involve the introduction of the transcendental a priori, which does not so much center thinking about external change and process (like the evolution of the whole cosmic history of the universe), but rather the very structure of appearance: the way evolutionary process appears to itself as historical subjectivity.  Here we do not get caught up in stories about the evolutionary past, and the way this evolutionary past allows us to make more robust predictions about the future (which was the Kurzweilian approach to thinking technological singularity), but rather thinking more about the structure of the way humans experience the appearing of this reality to itself.  Before modern philosophy “appearances” were understood in a pejorative sense, as defective illusions in relation to the “truth” as something “deeper” “behind/beyond” the appearances (like the evolution of the universe); but after modern philosophy, “appearances” themselves, the structures overdetermining the way we come to be thinking beings, are seen as the key to understanding the conditions of possibiltiy for our access to the truth itself.⁹    

Consider that today we are intellectually and scientifically enculturated to think about the universe as a 13.7 billion year process, with different phase changes, like the development of physics, chemistry, biology, culture and technology and so forth, all unfolding before we (contemporary or modern subjectivity) starts to appear to itself.¹⁰  However, when we were intellectually and scientifically enculturated only 250 years ago, we would be hearing a very different story of the past, our history, and the universe.¹¹  This is not to say that the story we are told today is not superior or more informed, or less illusory than the story we would have been told 250 years ago.  Indeed, this is what we all like to believe under a progressivist notion of knowledge, science and reason: certainly we are more informed about the nature of reality today than we were 250 years ago.  My aim here is not so much to undermine or insert a deeper skepticism into that perspective, but it is to say that the story we tell ourselves 250 years from today could be completely transformed in the discovery of some irrational excessive contingency that “rewrites the history books”.  What is important for modern philosophy and the modern philosopher is to keep a reflective distance between the stories that we are intellectually and scientifically encultured into to think about thinking as such.     

Perhaps some famous examples here: we might recall the way Hegel thinks about the experiential structure of sense-certainty in the opening chapters of the Phenomenology, of the way in which every “here” and “now” is dialecticized, ultimately leading to intensifying contradictions of the understanding in the “Here-and-Now” as such.¹²  Consequently, Hegel’s thinking path does not so much lead us to thinking about the cosmic evolution of the whole universe, but rather to thinking about the “Rosy Cross” of our social and political moment that is always-already introducing to us impossible problems for thinking.¹³  For Hegel, the reason of a philosopher should always be (delightfully) brought to bear on the cross of the present, precisely for the purpose of helping thought reconcile itself with the mess of its current reality:¹⁴ 

“To recognize reason as the rose in the cross of the present, and to find delight in it, is a rational insight which implies reconciliation with reality.”

Or we might recall the way Lacan thinks about the starting condition of every historical subjectivity as beginning in a horribly terrifying state of impotence, surrounded by big Others and overdetermined by a language that both precedes and transcends our existence as individuals.¹⁵  However, in this structural condition subjectivity ultimately has to reconcile with the transubjective immortal powers of its “First Cause” as opposed to building for itself an identitarian cave world.¹⁶  For Lacan, the “First Cause” should be rigorously distinguished from pre-modern or ancient philosophy of causation, and also the science of substance, on the level of signifying drive, in order to remain truthful:¹⁷       

“It is only as instinct of the unconscious, the Freudian unconscious, that one grasps (...) the only true first cause (...) the retroaction of the signifier in its efficacy.”

Is there not a tendency for thinking to try to escape both the impossible problems of political reality, as well as the immortal problems of its own unconscious first cause?  As I covered in the last chapter, focusing on the challenges of Nick Land’s philosophy of exit in relation to Hegel’s philosophy of love, ultimately provoked by the work of Michael Downs, when one takes the structural present moment of the evolutionary story too seriously, one can easily start extrapolating all sorts of justifications that may well reflect real futures, but are far more likely to become retroactively understood as the science fiction of the past.  What is much more difficult is to take the meta-position of the present moment as such, recognising that it contains many present-futures which teach us more about the cracks of our present, as well as responds to the subjective positionality of the impotence we may feel in that moment, than it does actually teach us about the actual future in-and-for-itself.  The perspectival accent on the way this has changed the way I think about the technological singularity is hard to articulate, if still quite explicitly and elaborately expanded in my writings on the transcendental philosophy.¹⁸  

Indeed, in Downs' recent conversation with Land on Theory Underground, this issue of the way reality appears to us, through the vicissitudes of premature birth, and the laborious and awkward development of the human body (what he calls “mass”), is actually it turns out the cause of his reasoning about our eventual imminent replacement or transformation into something whose conditions of appearing to itself, are less burdensome, and perhaps more conducive to facilitating spatial expansion qua exit to other planets and solar systems.¹⁹  Here Land is correct in his speculations that models of the human future like Star Trek are not only implausible but downright self-deluded, and that the only reason human beings will ever set foot on Mars would be as a PR stunt; as I mentioned on a recent Voicecraft podcast,²⁰ and as I elaborate in the third part of my doctoral thesis Global Brain Singularity,²¹ such visions are downright anti-scientific and anti-Darwinian in the sense that whatever process from our superorganism adventures into space, will be trans or post-human, and primarily technological.  But the fundamental problem is not one on the level of evolutionary theory, but rather on the level of transcendental philosophy: the problem of the structure of our appearing to ourself in the context of an assumption that expansion into space is the destiny of intelligence.  This at the very least should be recognised for what it is: an assumption and a presupposition that at the very least seems dramatically conditioned by colonial history of expansionism and a neoliberal culture of exit into infinite space.                        

At the same time, this critical reflection on the transcendental philosophy and its relationship to evolutionary theory, is not an exercise in gaslighting: we do really seem to be entering a new world, but the difficult thing is the way our thinking about this new world is always overdetermined ideologically.  Take for example the evolution of the subtitles of Kurzweil’s own writings, where we find that the zeitgeist of the moment about what that new world is, has shifted from a world where we “transcend biology” (machine uploading towards immortality and so forth), to a world where we “merge with AI” (large language models towards technosapien cloud connectivity and so forth).²²  While both visions point towards something non-trivial and potentially concrete, we cannot jump on our own shoulders and see into the future.  Perhaps more importantly, we cannot just uncritically and dogmatically assume (as Kurzweil does as a rule), that this new world is co-extensive with our freedom (i.e. freedom as “machine uploading” or freedom as “connecting our minds to the cloud”).  We must live forwards into this future (abysally), and understand it backwards (retroactively), as Kierkegaard’s “Christian Atheism” suggests.  Or as Hegelian philosopher Katherine Everitt brilliantly reminds us, we cannot hold tight to presuppositions (about this or that evolutionary process, or about this or that potential future), but must confront the basic structure of the appearances themselves as the presuppositions of our world fall into a dizzying vertiginous void and call for new orientation:²³                

“Vertigo is the confrontation with space itself. Empty space is disorienting. It is horrifying. Stripping away everything until there is only space-itself produces anxiety – an anxiety that is not without object. Hegel’s Encyclopedia effectively begins with a free-fall in the void, in an empty space without determination. Thus, this project examines not only how to exit vertigo by orienting amidst a disorientating emptiness, but also, how vertigo is necessary in the immanent developments of logic, nature, and spirit. Hegel throws reason into vertigo, strips all away, and demonstrates that orientation emerges from the void itself.”

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THE CASE FOR CHRISTIAN ATHEISM

In this spirit, for the past few years I have been sensing into the form of a different lack: there has been an emerging thirst for not only learning and intellectualizing, but re-embodying and re-socialising, a relationship to Christianity.  In the past years, I have noticed this emerging thirst take many forms: from an attempted Western reappropriation of Orthodox Eastern Christianity as the “one true church” which can recenter the Trinitarian God with the guidance of the Church Fathers and save the West from its own decadence, superficiality and nihilism opened by false or untrue versions of Christianity produced by the vicissitudes of history (e.g. Catholicism, Protestantism, etc.);²⁴ to post-evangelical/post-deconstructed secular attempts to invent a post-post-modern or (so-called) “Metamodern Christianity” which can embody a sincerely ironic affirmation of Christianity while creating a safe distance from its more radical supernatural claims, incorporating a space for modern evolutionary science, and also making room for a harmonious multiplicity of alternative religious orientations to co-exist as an enlightened plurality (e.g. Metamodern Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, etc.).²⁵ Both, of course, have a real truth to them.   

The religious spirit is in the air, so to speak, and I have been deeply puzzled about how to relate to it.  On the one hand, there is clearly a secular atheist burnout from the pseudo-philosophical positionality of the New Atheist movement, which sees us encounter the hyper-strange and “topsy-turvy” emergence of secular liberals who have all of a sudden started to perform Christian identity as the best possible response to the (so-called) “Meaning Crisis”.²⁶  But perhaps we should move from crisis to contradiction.  While the principle contradiction for American Christianity used to be distinctly Nietzschean, claims made by secular atheists who suggested that American Christians do not act out what they believe in the figure of Christ (i.e. Christ would not have identified with Christians, etc.); today the principle contradiction is shifting to secular atheists themselves who claim that their moral and ethical behaviour requires identification with a deeper foundational structure of Christian belief.  Here consider this reflection from religious educator Justin Brierly about “The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God”:²⁷

“Most significantly, as the influence of New Atheism has waned, a variety of secular thinkers have been stepping forward to ask new questions about the value of religion and where the West is heading in the absence of the Christian story. Many of them have developed large platforms and have a huge influence on a younger generation searching for meaning. Many even seem to harbor a wistful desire for Christianity to be true. As their influence has grown, it has led me to wonder whether, even in the midst of our highly secular culture, we are witnessing a sea change in people’s openness to faith.”

On the other hand, this new secular interest in the Christian foundation of Western civilisation is deeply unreflective of its own performative contradictions, as well as misguided in its belief and interpretation of the meaning of the sacred.  For many of these secular thinkers they presuppose that “liberal society” is empty of meaning because of a predominance of “left brain thinking” that privileges mechanistic and reductive analysis at the expense of “right brain thinking” that privileges the fullness of complexity, ambiguity and paradoxical interconnectedness.²⁸  Thus, what they seek in returning to Christianity or entertaining Christianity for the first time, is the return to some sort of magical positivist re-enchantment of a universe with meaning.  In reality, the central importance of the history of Christianity to human civilisation is that it precisely opened up the conditions of possibility for the meaningless emptiness of secular liberalism through inverting the worst possible fate of the ancient (Roman) mind — crucifixion — into an emancipation from the obscene excesses of the ancient mind and world itself.²⁹  

In this way, it is not a lack of meaning requiring the addition of some metaphysical wonder that our civilization is seeking, but rather it is the excess of meanings that we are seeking to subtract via confrontation with subjective destitution.  In other words, if one truly understands the meaning of the return of interest in Christianity, one should not be looking for a “magical positivist re-enchantment of the meaningless emptiness of secular liberalism”; one should be looking at how the (so-called) “meaningless emptiness of secular liberalism” is reproducing an unbearable positivist excess.  Here following the work of psychoanalytic philosopher Duane Rousselle, this unbearable positivist excess can be understood as the “domain of jouissance” without any censorship, prohibition or containment.³⁰  Rouselle actually diagnoses exactly the confusion of what I am trying to say above about secular liberals perceiving a negativity where they should in fact be perceiving a positivity that they find unconsciously disturbing:³¹

“This book was inspired by [...] confusion. It seemed to us that the concept of negativity [...] was being used too casually within some of the popular online literature. Yet, perhaps it was even worse: what was in fact positive was being referred to as negative, and what was negative was sometimes referred to as positive. [...] Clinical experience necessitates that we interrogate some of these theories: what [...] has been said about the positive, that is, non-negativizable, domain of jouissance?”  

Here I am taking some liberties with this critical observation in the field of psychoanalytic philosophy to suggest that this domain of “non-negativisable jouissance” as positivist excess is precisely what is calling forth the return of the repressed on the level of secular liberal desires to re-identify with Christianity.  What this return of the repressed signifies is a monstrous historical return, that of the Christianization of Rome which centers a surprisingly disturbing and properly negative idea: that the individual’s true locus in history is as on a cross.  This idea was so “subversive and disruptive” in relation to the positivist excess of Rome that it has come to be the unconscious foundation of Western culture and theology.³²  While we cannot claim that modern Western society, the American Empire, and its “Globalized Plurality” is strictly equivalent to Rome, that would be absurd; the parallel is clear in light of the fact that the ethical tensions that undermined Rome, namely the aristocratic-democratic split in the ethical social body, also plagues our society, not only threatening individual rights of persons, but also making the idea of divine-human unity, unbelievable.    

Rouselle’s co-editor for Negativity in Psychoanalysis, psychoanalytic theologian Mark Gerard Murphy, similarly theorizes this contemporary problem of interpretation.  For Murphy, as for Rouselle, the problem we face today is precisely one of a strict identification with positivist experiences, something which significantly undermines our capacity to undergo genuine spiritual transformation or to find genuine spiritual direction.³³  In this way, for Murphy, secular liberal society has destroyed the spiritual path in thinking that spiritual or religious experience must be positive, adding yet more pleasure to their life.  Or in the frame of Justin Brierly’s temptation to secular liberals looking for some more meaning through a pleasurable Christian conversion: “You may even be tempted to dip a toe in [to Christianity] yourself.  Come on in!  The water’s lovely.”³⁴  Here Murphy could not be more opposed: introducing Christianity is to introduce a distinctly negative phenomenon, an arduous struggle beyond the pleasure principle, a subtractive dimension which is “subversive and disruptive” in relation to the non-negativizable domain of jouissance.  Thus, it is no coincidence that Murphy’s work calls forth, not a mythical return to traditionalist Christian abstractions challenging secular liberals to “really believe” in the supernatural, but rather for the mystical figure of “John of the Cross” to combat what he calls “positivist experientialism”:³⁵  

“Today, the very framework used to measure therapeutic effect on the psyche is also utilised to measure one’s relationship with God in the contemporary context of spiritual direction. [...] This perspective suggests that as an individual deepens their relationship with God, signs of ‘happiness’, ‘satisfaction’, ‘wholeness’, ‘spiritual health’, and ‘well-being’ emerge.  However, equating spiritual direction solely with cultivating positive emotions and mindsets would be an oversimplification [...] We see that John of the Cross warns us clearly that the want for satisfaction is something that hinders spiritual direction.”

What must be stated explicitly here at the outset is that this negative phenomenon vis-a-vis non-negativizable jouissance does not eliminate, and cannot eliminate, non-negativizable jouissance, but rather contains or channels it — like through the “eye of a needle” — towards its mystical (and again, not mythical) expression.  Thus, the task for modern secular liberals is not to “really believe” in the myths of Christianity (that is basically irrelevant).  The task for modern secular liberals is to entertain the possibility that they must, or are already, starting to assume the metaphorical position of the cross, the “worst imaginable” fate to the positivist excesses of the Roman Empire’s intellectual aristocratic class.³⁶  It is only in this situation that a “magical inversion” of secular liberal excess could be “positively” transmuted.  In other words, the “positivity” that should be reflected in our current moment of an unconscious revival of interest in Christianity, should be deeply inscribed into the most tragic possible negativity, so tragic and so negative, that it is quite possible that we will not live to see the benefits, or the fruits, of this transmutation.  

To be sure, there will be benefits and fruits and transmutations, but we should not be so naive as to think that it is our historical fate to be ushered into a new “Kingdom of God”, or even more devastating, that “God’s Kingdom” should be a reality that we would even be capable of recognising as positive: it could be that we recognise it as our worst nightmare.  The point here is that we may be a “sacrificial generation” in relation to the future, the future may be for our “Sons” or “Children” and not for us, as the generation before leaves us drowning in positivist non-negativisable jouissance.  But this is not the way that most secular liberals are consciously thinking about their return to Christianity: they think that they are simply doing the only thing they know how to do: add another positive experience to their spurious infinity of experiences.  That is why my engagement with a few of my closest collaborators, Daniel L. Garner of O.G. Rose and David McKerracher of Theory Underground, emphasizes the importance of the negativity in the positivity: for Garner, I try to emphasize the “hard road” in “belonging”;³⁷ and for McKerracher, I try to emphasize the “lack” in “timenergy”.³⁸  In moving non-negativisable jouissance through the negativity of the cross (“eye of a needle”), perhaps our “children” may live in a world with belonging and timenergy, but without the cross it will anyway be destroyed by its own excess.  The trick is to want the cross: to want what the Roman mind finds to be the “worst imaginable” fate.  Or maybe Land is right and nothing human will get out no matter what we do.³⁹             

Whatever will happen in this situation, in this article I will try to articulate why I think the concept of “Christian Atheism” is the most appropriate civilisational response to the moment, at least from a Western philosophical perspective, and what that might mean for the future of Christianity, as well as the future of Atheism.  I want to be clear that this will not involve a reduction of our global moment to the moment of the Christianization of Rome (although there may be important historical parallels), and I also want to be clear that this is my attempt to articulate the proper philosophical link to theology, and not to develop a theology in-and-for-itself.  The founder of the P2P movement and theorist of the commons, Michel Bauwens, has also made this connection between our moment and the Christianization of Rome, insofar as what he sees in the P2P movement and in the space of the commons, requires “communities of faith” to endure the vicissitudes of a logic that escapes reduction to capital accumulation within the political-economic centers of the “Globalized Plurality” of neoliberal capital (a domain where, it must be said, Land seems to dramatically lack faith).⁴⁰  Moreover, my working model for moving into P2P/commons oriented spaces is that philosophy, theology, and art, need to work together, which does not mean collapsing the three forms into each other, but rather to conceive of the three as a (trinitarian) “three-in-one” that must engage the hard work of learning how to work together.          

In these contexts, the concept of Christian Atheism allows us to affirm the history of Christianity, the way it provided the “seedbed” for secular liberalism and scientific humanism — a radical disenchantment and desacralization, or said positively and in the words of Christian Atheist theologian Thomas Altizer: opening towards profanation — and potentially formulate a genuine theory of Christianity independent of the denominational tendency to think that it holds the “one truth”, following the radical theological work of figures like Peter Rollins⁴¹ and Barry Taylor.⁴²  Towards the end of this article I will try to articulate why I think the work of Peter Rollins opens the conditions of possibility for what he calls “Drive Denomination”, which is precisely an inversion of the “institutional” forms of Christianity that have perhaps failed to properly engage the radical theology necessary after the Death of God.⁴³  Here we start with Žižek, when he articulates this move of disenchantment and desacralization, or profanation after the “Death of God”, is not what founds institutional forms but rather grounds “Holy Spirit”:⁴⁴  

““Christian atheism”: the space for the experience of the “divine” is the gap [...] [and] refers to the experience of radical negativity (what mystics and Hegel called “night of the world”) which precludes any theology focused on a positive figure of god[...] In Christianity, this gap registers the absence of god (its “death”) which grounds the Holy Ghost.”

Here by definition we are dealing with a phenomenon whose location cannot be precisely pinpointed under a transcendental schematism of space and time, characteristic of institutional subjectivity, but rather must be embodied in the mystical forms of subjectivity that we will come to see are required for Holy Spirit, as well as perhaps commons organizations.  Thus, the forms of subjectivity, the very positionality of subjectivity that we are looking for, involve those forms of subjectivity that have undergone subjective destitution after the Death of God, can endure the mystical negativity or “night of the world” (which is why psychoanalysis is so important), and whose relationality is itself the movement of Holy Spirit.       

This concept and approach of Christian Atheism also allows us to avoid a thin “meta-form” of Christianity that too much accommodates itself to both the secular liberal and scientific humanist zeitgeist that do not recognise their own ground, as well as a general globalized plurality of religious and cultural dispositions which are understood to be neutral towards each other and harmoniously tolerant of each other.  In other words, this concept and approach of Christian Atheism presupposes that both Christianity and its Atheist result introduce a real difference to Globalized Plurality.  What we find in thin forms of Christianity is the leveling and relativisation of Christianity, its history and symbolism, while unconsciously raising bureaucratic technocratic specialization, Eastern spiritual traditions, and indigenous knowledge forms, into a weird and confused hegemonic form “keeping the appearances” of institutional subjectivity.  In contrast, for Christian Atheism, we seek to both affirm the Western tradition proper, avoiding its implosive “self-destruction” because it cannot process the monstrosity of its own history (e.g. colonialism, genocide, slavery, etc.), while also maintaining its “self-critical edge” (e.g. the capacity of it to critique itself by its own universal standards).⁴⁵  The problem with the thin “meta-form” of Christianity, which we have arguably seen emerge since the “counter-culture” after World War 2 driven by “New Age spirituality”, is that it seeks to positivise an interfaith center of a “vague general spirituality” as opposed to centring the fact that what unites us all is a negativity, Atheism proper:⁴⁶

“What Christian atheism renders possible here is not the overcoming of the existing religions – on the contrary, it opens up the space for a spiritual bond which enables each of them to flourish freely. Here atheism plays a key role: the common space in which different religions can thrive is not some vague general spirituality but atheism which renders meaningless the struggle between particular religions.”

What we find in this Atheist common space is different than what New Age spirituality would like in the common space, again: a vague general spirituality leading to interfaith harmony and tolerance of differences. What we find in this Atheist common space is rather a form of subjectivity beyond figures of the big Other via subjective destitution, and capable of networking in the void as an ontological commitment driven by an autonomous belief (more on this later). For Žižek, Christian Atheism uniquely opens this possibility because it combines the idea that: (1) the truth of belief requires an immanent movement through religion (transcendental identity), and (2) the existential error of this true belief which changes ones subjective positionality (speculative transgression).⁴⁷ For Žižek enacting this passage to engaged Atheism through modification of belief on the level of your subjective existence is difficult to reduplicate in religious forms that either (1) uphold an undialectical big Other (God/Absolute), or (2) rid spirituality of any figure of the big Other (God/Absolute) for pure processuality. Here he finds in the former mode a type of vulgar fundamentalism, and on the latter mode a type of existentially disengaged form of subjectivity.

However, what we may find in this modification of subjective existence is both a strange power and a power of the strange, in a Lacanian sense, and following both the work of Lacanian philosopher Lorenzo Chiesa on logic and God,⁴⁸ and philosopher Richard Boothby on a psychoanalytic theory of religion.⁴⁹  This strange power is in the aforementioned recognition of the absolute historical break that is contained in Christianity’s inversion of the ancient mind — turning its absolute negativity into a positivity — which precisely emptied the universe of positivist imaginaries of sacred fullness and dreams of ideological closure for the emergence of a mystical, and not mythical, cognition (something missed by a general New Age spirituality).  This power of the strange is in that it opens us towards a disorienting and fracturing release from a “divine innocence” (traditional mythical sacred) while simultaneously forcing onto us a crushing “reflexive responsibility” (“God is unconscious (as Holy Spirit)”).  Liberal secularity confines and contains itself in institutional bureaucratic consciousness that basically reproduces a sanitised mythical sacred which ultimately infantilizes its members in a (using secular language) “Patriarchy”, and a (using Christian language) “patristic order”.  However, the power of the strange requires that we navigate what Chiesa calls the “Not-Two” (1/0): our unconscious oscillation in the symbolic order as such between the libidinal desire for masculine totalising oneness (1) (qua patriarchy/patristic order), and the inexistence of the feminine or other enjoyment (0) (qua mother-child), where we find the strange faces of a God who both exists and does not exist at the same time.⁵⁰  While the libidinal desire for the totalising oneness is constitutive of institutional subjectivity (patriarchy/patristical order), the inexistence of the other enjoyment often haunts it from within and without (mother-child).  

In Christian Atheist terms we can call the totalising oneness “God” and we can call the inexistence of the other enjoyment pointing towards “Christ” with the dizzying link between the “Not-Two” as the stakes for movement in the Holy Spirit.  Here we find what Richard Boothby calls the love which is superior to absolute knowledge (or ancient pseudo-Hegelian “gnosis”), and which persists in and as a painfully enjoyable imperfection which cannot but appear to us as both a gift and a curse of the nature of our being God’s children (as opposed to being a perfect being without children).⁵¹  Thus, the full extent of the “power of the strange” is both the play with our own inexistence (Death) where we find an “other enjoyment” in the lack of the Other (who would be the complete One if it were to exist), as well as the gifts that can appear when we learn to love imperfection beyond the pleasure principle as opposed to suture a pseudo-perfection with our knowledge.  Here, if we are going to be brutally reductive, we can say that women who give birth to children (and submit to this experience) are naturally and dramatically closer to this Death and their own inexistence where we find an “other enjoyment” in the lack in the Other; while men (in the most generalised sense of the term), seem to need to more actively engage in processes that could undermine their (masturbatory) tendencies to libidinal fusion (in and as some kind of reified position of patriarchal/patristic order) and towards this “other enjoyment” or lack in the the Other.  In Christian Atheist terms, perhaps all subjectivity needs to reify some form of patriarchy/patristic order or Father, in order to transgress it, as we will think more in what is to come.

Consequently, we do not find in Christian Atheism a neutral “meta” position capable of balancing the existing zeitgeist in a new higher order ideological comfort allowing us to neatly blend “ancient wisdoms” with “modern secular technology”, what we find is a deepening on the surface of history of the truth that was revealed in Christ (the absolutely negative as positive), and the painful challenge that we find in the excess of love (which escapes all positive knowledge or “understanding”).  Why this emergence is distinctly “Atheist” is because we should be attempting to dialectically empty any figures of the “big Other” — fully, substantial, complete, coherent “Gods” or “Systems” — especially those which claim to know the direction to “Paradise” in a positive sense.  We should be recognising the inestimable treasure and value in the singularity of weakness, sickness, failure, and fragility without guarantee of strength, health, success and robust systematic containment.  Here we should remember that Christ could not walk with Christ to support the Truth in his subjective destitution (and thus even or especially Orthodox mythical images of Christ are a sure way to avoid the mystical Truth).  And we should see in our networks and relations the potential of a magical loving power to, not grant us new positive orientation, but to surprise us in the most disorienting of ways.  In this we should not make enemies of the institutions but create strategic links on the terms of our network dynamics, i.e. without making the institutions figures of the big Other as if they are somehow transcendent in relation to our “lowly” positionality.  

What could perhaps serve as a helpful guide is the combination of the radical theology of Barry Taylor, with his emphasis on particular fragments,⁵² the psychoanalysis of Samuel McCormick, with its emphasis on weakness and castration,⁵³ and the philosophy of Alenka Zupančič, with its emphasis on a constitutive disorientation.⁵⁴  These three ideas and thinkers can be linked into a weird philosophical-trinitarian unity.  Note that in this proposed unity we find Taylor in the position of the “unknowing Father” (the lack in the big Other, fragmented into particulars):⁵⁵

“Life unfolds in fragments. We spend too much time trying to piece things together to create the illusion of some overarching scheme to our existence. Life is made up of bits and pieces, routines and rituals, catastrophes and epiphanies. These mundane, everyday experiences are the relationships that form you, and the unexpected moments when the whole axis of your life shifts. We tend to think these unexpected, life-changing events will arrive with more grandeur, warning, or significance, but it can be throwaway comments, casual encounters, or unplanned, inconvenient situations that become points of departure and arrival. These are the moments when life comes into focus.”

We find McCormick in the negative and mystical position of the “reflexive Son” where truth reaches its own limits in language revealing the strange power of “impotentialities” (the knowing of subjective destitution, loving weakness):⁵⁶

“I am the part of truth that can be said, but there is this other side of the story that cannot be spoken, I am powerless to say anything about this other side beyond this statement, the other side’s impossible, I can speak no further.”

And finally we find in Zupančič the inexistent non-position, or even more dramatically, the inhuman dimension where all partial object fixations of libidinal fusion sustain the human in the (feminine) “Other enjoyment” of the “Holy Spirit” (the disorienting magic of the life itself of network subjectivity without a One to suture or totalise it):⁵⁷ 

“The sexual as a factor of radical disorientation [...] it is the operator of the inhuman, the operator of dehumanization.”

The reason why it is important to keep the Father in fragments, the Son at the limits of language, the Holy Spirit as an inhuman operator of dehumanization is because ultimately the totalizing Father is a dead order, the Son who identifies too strongly with his language becomes stuck on his own wall, and the Holy Spirit stripped of its sexual life energy gets once again trapped in institutional structures.  We need a Father that is fragmented capable of being with and as fragments; we need a Son that is tarrying with the limits of his/her language, and we need a Holy Spirit that is nothing but the disorienting matrix of life energy that is not supported by Being, but continues to circulate in the political crack of the Real itself:⁵⁸

“If there is an ontology [...] this can only be an ontology as “disoriented” by [...] object a. [...] It introduces a conceptual model of thinking the non-relation as dictating the conditions of different kinds of ties, including social ties (or discourses). [...] A true emancipatory politics can be thought only on the ground of an “object-disoriented ontology” [...]—that is, an ontology that pursues not simply being qua being, but the crack (the Real, the antagonism) that haunts being from within, informs it.” 

Following the statements above about Murphy, Chiesa, and Boothy’s movement to mystical subjectivity and an other jouissance, this is perceived by subjects of knowledge, by Fathers and Sons alike, to be dissatisfying as opposed to satisfying; what it dissatisfies is the libidinal fusion of masculine jouissance as it empties itself into an other jouissance where new signifiers can be born:⁵⁹

“The new signifier is the algorithm that disorients the drive by cutting off the well-established routes of its satisfaction.  It is what inserts itself at the very core of the double face of the drive and of its “satisfaction”.”

The key paradox here for Christian Atheism is that it is this mystical subjectivity emptied of its dissatisfied masculine jouissance that at the same time opens the conditions of possibility for real bonds between “Father and Son”: the Father that can offer its fragmented discourse/body to the Son (without totalising the Son in his own models of reality or ontology); the Son that can tarry with the mystical limits of its language with the Father (without using his/her language to kill the Father qua historical ontologies), both held in the “emancipation” of a non-orientable surface .  

Before moving too far or fast in this attempt to articulate the philosophical meaning of Christian Atheism, I should emphasize that I am most definitely not speaking from nowhere.  As alluded to above, my position is principally speaking not Christian or religious, but a philosophical stance that recognises while not identifying or deconstructing the Christian ground of Western philosophy and science.  In other words, I am not speaking “from inside” Christianity or religion, and I am not trying to, as I think that would be disingenuous.  However, I am increasingly realizing that I am not exactly speaking “from outside” Christianity or religion, either.  Of course, the trap of speaking from inside Christianity is that you cannot really think its Atheist dimension; and the trap of speaking from outside Christianity in Atheism, is that you cannot really think Atheism’s Christian dimension.  As I realized while speaking at Peter Rollins’ Wake festival this past year, I am speaking from the position of an extimate relation to Christianity and religion, which I think is the only proper way to think Christian Atheism philosophically.  The term extimacy is a fancy psychoanalytic concept that is meant to combine the terms “external” and “intimate”, or in Lacan’s own words:⁶⁰

“The central place, as the intimate exteriority or “extimacy”, that is the Thing.”  

What we find in the “extimate” dimension is not something impersonally strange (exterior), nor something personally familiar (interior), but rather something that is both “strange to me” and “at the heart of me” (simultaneously).⁶¹  There is perhaps no better way for me to describe my philosophical relationship to Christianity, and there is perhaps no better way to think about what I have said previously about the “strange power” and the “power of the strange” as I understand it operating in Christian Atheism.    

To elaborate a bit on how I seek to situate this extimate relation, when a typical “New Atheist” speaks of Christianity and religion, they are speaking external (not extimate) to it, in the sense that they do not have an “intimate” sense of the “strange interiority” of Christianity and religion.  What they tend to have is an intimate interior experience of some form of scientific naturalism (e.g. Richard Dawkins, Sam Harris) or discursive historicism (e.g. Christopher Hitchens, Daniel Dennett), where Christianity can but only appear as a form of “delusion” or as Dawkins first suggested: “relusion”.⁶²  This has catastrophic consequences for the nature of the discourse between religious theists and secular atheists which always results in horribly unproductive events of speaking past each other.  Here note that even Freud, famous for his atheistic deconstruction of religion and Christianity (as we will explore in greater detail below), admitted that we cannot understand religion as a “delusion” but rather as an “illusion”.⁶³  The key difference here is that a “delusion” is a “false belief” contradicting reality, but an “illusion” is not necessarily erroneous (although it often is empirically), but rather represents the truth of an unconscious wish or a desire.⁶⁴  Here consider the way Dawkins speaks on delusions/relusions:⁶⁵   

“Delusion [is] ‘a false belief or impression’ [or] ‘a persistent false belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence’ [which] captures religious faith perfectly. [...] I am inclined to follow Robert M. Pirsig, author of Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, when he said, ‘When one person suffers from a delusion, it is called insanity.  When many people suffer from a delusion it is called Religion.’” 

And the way Freud speaks on illusions:⁶⁶

“When I say that these [religious ideas] are illusions, I must define the meaning of the word.  An illusion is not the same thing as an error; nor is it necessarily an error. [...] In the case of delusions, we emphasize as essential their being in contradiction with reality.  Illusions need not necessarily be false – that is to say, unrealizable or in contradiction to reality. [...] An illusion [is] a wish-fulfillment [playing] a prominent factor in [...] motivation, and in doing so we disregard its relations to reality, just as the illusion itself sets no store by verification.”   

This difference is key because what New Atheists miss in classifying religion as a delusion is precisely the passage that takes us from an external understanding of religion to an internal understanding of religion, a passage that allows us to analyze from the position of extimacy.  When we reduce religion to a “persistent false belief held in the face of strong contradictory evidence” we miss this subtle move (missed also by Zen Buddhism) to the unconscious psyche where “a wish-fulfillment playing a prominent factor in motivation” and investigating both the transcendental horizon of such unconscious wishes, as well as their orientation and transgression to mysticism proper.  This move is in fact missing in both Dawkins and Freud, and is key for the Christian Atheist project (where we see Dawkins is being pulled back into the religious culture wars, and where we will see Freud needs to be supplemented with Lacan).     

Thus, when I speak of Christianity and religion, while I am technically on the “outside” of it, I would still like to recognise the truth, however incomplete, of the interiority that religion has to offer human subjectivity, as well as the absolute necessity of religion and theology, as essential features of the historical civilisational process.  As alluded to above, this necessity is philosophically speaking on the level of inherent transgression: that Christianity is necessary not as a permanent transcendental identity, but as a metaphysical structure that helps historical subjectivity transgress the identity towards a historical positionality that was not possible to embody without this process.  We see this clearly if we pay attention to the way the history of the West recapitulates itself in individuality, and we also see this clearly in contemporary post-evangelical deconstructed subjectivity.⁶⁷  When we treat Christianity as a permanent identity we become “Fathers without Sons” in the sense that we do not recognise nor understand secular liberalism and scientific humanism; and when we treat Atheism as a stand-alone position that does not fundamentally depend on Christianity, we become “Sons without Fathers”, exploring the new but without a ground that would connect us to our history and each other.  

Hegel writes on this relation indirectly in the Preface of the Phenomenology when he speaks of science as rushing to Absolute Knowing proper (not ancient “gnosis”), like a “shot out of a pistol”, without offering historical subjectivity a ladder to the standpoint of science.⁶⁸  We can certainly discard with the ladder as individuals once we have reached this standpoint, but also must recognise that this ladder must be in place for future subjectivity, so that they may reach the same standpoint.  This is not so much a teleology but the way the truth of teleology undermines itself for a permanent revisionism in the absence of a perfect knowledge which correlates to the nature of the truth.⁶⁹  As will be elaborated throughout the rest of the article, what we should perhaps think of is not a ladder that we climb and then leave in place for the next generation, but perhaps the structure of a Klein bottle, where climbing the ladder and helping the next generation climb are but one and the same non-orientable process.        

Moreover, I think that my extimate relation to religion can have an important influence or impact for those with a deeper philosophical inclination.  I should re-articulate that the case for Christian Atheism is two-fold:

1. On the one hand, I want to demonstrate why Christianity is unique to Western culture and history, and cannot just be relativised towards a multiplicity of different religious orientations that can co-exist in a flat multicultural matrix that does not recognise the difference that Christianity has introduced into Western culture and history; 

2. And on the other hand, I want to demonstrate that “real Christianity” cannot be dehistoricized towards its original moment, but rather its truth has to be understood in the power of its very historicity which does not ultimately open to rigid dogmatic institutional identifications, but rather opens towards secular atheism.  

Thus, if we could frame this case in two sentences, we could come up with the following double axiom:

1. Christianity is the truth of religion

2. Atheism is the truth of Christianity

This double axiom should itself be read as a non-orientable surface and not a linear teleology.  It represents “Christian Atheism” as concept in the logic of a double negation, or negation of negation: “Christian is the truth of religion” negates the multicultural matrix of religion (it does not need to eliminate or actively negate these religions, it is just that the inherent truth of Christianity, its mythological innovation, does this for us); and “Atheism is the truth of Christianity” represents the negation of this negation (where the negative principle of Christianity itself stands as its own positive moment against its reification).  Here crucially, both of these principles are extimate to me: while I do not identify as on the inside of religion, it is something that I have been oscillating with for most of my adult life (as an ant on a möbius strip, or even better, and as suggested above, a Klein bottle).  Thus, I am coming to see this oscillation more and more as revealing the geometric structure of a non-orientable surface (which is itself the double negation of “disorientation”), that could even be used to philosophically model the concept of “Christian Atheism” as a useful and insightful civilisational project.⁷⁰  

Here I should state that my personal background gives us a unique insight, not only into Christian Atheism (that is for Christians ready to transgress their own identities towards a new standpoint); but also Atheist Christianity (that is secular liberals ready to reconcile themselves with the ground of their historical identity), which can allow us to even think the contours of a “Christianity Beyond Itself” which avoids the very real problems of traditional Christian reactionary culture, or in Christian Atheist terms, “pseudo-Christianity” (or a Christianity that is mostly unconscious to itself).⁷¹  The first standpoint can be represented as A/B while the second standpoint can be represented as B/A, giving us in total a logical historical quadruplicity.⁷²  For our purposes this logical historical quadruplicity can be can read as follows:

• A/B (Christian / Atheist)

• B/A (Atheist / Christian)  

The historical content of this historical quadruplicity for our moment can perhaps best be represented using the following cultural terms:⁷³

• A = American Christianity / B = New Age Multiculturalism

• B = Globalized Pluralism / A = Orthodox Christian Reactionism

The first cultural term here represents the dominant mid-20th century cultural zeitgeist of the most powerful “World Empire” of the 20th century (A = American Christianity), whereas the second term here represents the counter-cultural reaction to this hegemony which sought to invert the central signifying terms of American Christianity into their opposite (B = New Age Multiculturalism).  Here New Age Multiculturalism sought to make central the marginal and peripheral, the non-Christian (Buddhist, Hindu, Indigenous spiritualisms), the non-White (“Black and Brown”), and the non-Male (Feminisms, LGBT+ etc.), forms of subjectivity, in the end transforming what was at first a “counter-culture” into the “new culture”.  This “New Culture” is what then represents the third logical term in the matrix: B = Globalized Pluralism.  However, as “New Age Multiculturalism” was not so much a “Culture” as it was, what Alenka Zupančič calls a “Libidinal Anti-Culture”.⁷⁴  What we get as a dominant hegemony in this turning of B from a secondary to a primary category in the logical matrix, is a radical disorientation which most historical subjectivity were/are not prepared to embody as a civilisational project, and which is delayed by the advent of a type of anti/non-political liberal subjectivity (currently plaguing general spirituality, critical race theory, and feminism and queer studies).  Thus, “Globalized Pluralism” (B) produces a reactionary opposite as a fourth term in the logical matrix, which is not so much a foundational Christian culture, but a type of ressentiment driven patristic identitarianism that is more of a symptom of cultural identitarian struggle than it is a genuine response to the conditions of Global Pluralism (A = Orthodox Christian Reactionism).  

What we need to understand in this logical matrix as such is that the first two terms here represent the emergence onto the modern globalized stage of an Americanised form of Christianity unable to integrate with a Globalized Pluralism, as well as a Globalized Pluralism that too quickly identifies with excess itself as emancipatory, as opposed to recognising the “Atheist Truth” of Christianity (subjective destitution).⁷⁵  Furthermore, what we need to understand in this logical matrix as such is that the second two terms here represent the immanent negativities of the Globalized Pluralism as hegemonic category, introducing to us not the conditions of possibility to return/react to identitarian institutional forms of Christianity, but rather to bring into Globalized Pluralism (as its truth), subjective destitution.  What is essential to understand here in the terms of the quadruplicity, is that it is precisely the locus of subjective destitution, which transforms the “unbound-wandering excess” (terms developed by Zupančič) into the site of a potential transmutation for “Holy Spirit” (what was/is ultimately missing in “New Age Multiculturalism/Globalized Pluralism”).  In precisely psychoanalytic terms, unbound-wandering excessive enjoyment emerges at the place of a fundamental negativity in need of signification (the magic of signifiers that work, or even a new master signifier/quilting point).⁷⁶  While historically speaking the aforementioned Christianisation of Roman excess occurred with Christ as the negative master signifier/quilting point, and our moment points in a similar direction, it could be that this signifier needs to itself be liberated towards its own otherness (or “beyond of itself”).                       

As this relates to my personal background: I was raised in a secular atheist household open to “Globalized Pluralism” (B), and while I occasionally thought about God, even recognising the Christian foundations of our civilisation (A), it did not have a major impact on my early childhood existence (B=A).  I should also state that I am exceptionally grateful that I had this luxury for intellectual development, as I feel like I have been far more capable of choosing the direction of my thought path as a result.  In other words, the turning of the logical historical quadruplicity from A=B to B=A is not something which produces a null result in need of a pure reactionary movement against it, but rather represents a more subtle need for new philosophical cognition.  Moreover, I was so thoroughly immersed in this turn to B=A that I did not even have any real personal contact with religion as a child or even as a teenager, and I do not feel like I was missing it.  However, it must be said that I was certainly missing other things essential for full childhood development, like a stable familial household, which of course reactionaries can attribute to the loss of explicit and direct containment by a traditional patristic Christianity, and so forth.  In order to combat this missing element, or lacking form, I tended to graft my intellectual process creatively in relation to dead and living “Fathers” whom I both respected and saw as necessary to the future of thought.      

My first real “contact” with religion proper (and it was kind of like an alien encounter with the logical term A as “American Christianity” preserved in its relation to logical term B as “New Age Multiculturalism”) was with an American Christian family at a family cottage as a late teen in the first decade of the 21st century.  I could tell that they were different: they did things differently, they spoke differently, they even seemed to laugh and commune differently.  There was a “wholesome family vibe” that I found both beautifully endearing and terrifyingly creepy.  At the same time, I became good friends with the father of the family, and our dialogues about evolution and religion proved to be both intellectually stimulating and formative for me.⁷⁷  In my late teens and early 20s, these conversations were quite polarizing and antagonistic, revolving around deadlocks of Chrisitian fundamentalism and Darwinian evolutionism; but as I have aged, I have come to appreciate, not necessarily his intellectual view and religious orientation in terms of presuppositional truth value, but the way they helped him to embody the role of a husband and a father, even if I still find myself in a different intellectual position.  What seems devastatingly clear to me now, as opposed to my early 20s, was that Christianity as a metaphysics possesses a remarkable potential for helping humans build stable familial and communal dynamics capable of enduring subjective destitution with grace.  The question remains very open to me about how to think about the future of family building a genuinely globalized plurality and the role of explicit Christian identification, as will be explored below.  

The truth, and the symptom of this truth, is perhaps best expressed currently in the work of Simone and Malcolm Collins, as they attempt to lead a religious movement capable of creating open-ended “Cultivars” — new cultural religious vehicles — that both recognise the truth of Christianity (on the one hand), as an evolutionary fit culture for reproducing the human population; while adapting strategically to the atheist truth of “Globalized Pluralism” (on the other hand), which they read as being parasitically captured by an anti-reproductive mind-virus (e.g. “Woke moralism”).⁷⁸  Here I find the strange concretion of a project that combines religious traditionalism with scientific evolutionism that was missed by most 20th century subjectivity, in that we find the absurd paradox that secular evolutionary culture seems to be itself unfit (on its own Darwinian terms) when compared with traditional religious culture.  Here we get the strange irony that certain (not all) traditional religions are better at reproducing the species than are secular cultures seemingly reconciled with the reality of evolution.  Consequently, there is indeed an emerging intellectual trend to view religions as evolutionary phenomena necessary for the survival of the species, or to put it in the terms of the transcendental philosophy: to continue the process of subjectivity appearing to itself the way that we have (it has) traditionally appeared.  But for the Collins even this dimension is radicalized, as they seek to even support cultivars that experiment with transhuman modes of reproduction (everything from in vitro fertilization to artificial wombs and nannies).                 

Since discovering this paradox I have found it comically interesting as opposed to tragically disappointing, perhaps as a result of my aforementioned disposition to seeing my own oscillating relation to Christianity as revealing a non-orientable geometry.  What is so fascinating in reflecting on this specific history, is that while I rejected my aforementioned Christian “father friends’” arguments against both evolutionary thinking and communistic thinking — or Darwinian and Marxist paradigms — respectively; in the nature of my own evolution and in my own communing as a secular atheist, I (to my absolute surprise) still came to experience the meaning of Christian symbolism as important and integral for my own becoming, and specifically the power of “trinitarian thinking” as a dialectical process opening to speculative cognition.  And this is my bias produced by my historical positionality (B=A), but I think it is best if the power of religion in general is something that one learns through internal experience, as opposed to external logical argumentation.  In short, the power of religion should come first through one’s intuition of sense-certainty in the process of coming-to-be an adult consciousness, and only secondarily through rational logical reflection which forms the ground of a certain and explicit metaphysical positionality.  

I think that the truth of this “right relation” is one of the reasons why it is impossible to convince someone like Richard Dawkins about the truth of Christianity or religion in general.  Dawkins has had no reflexive contact with the truth of the experience, so its logic is going to feel empty and reduced to a decorative cultural aesthetic (which has been his consistent position for decades now), as opposed to a necessary ontological commitment (and that is ok).⁷⁹  But this “right relation” is also why a famous 20th century Christian thinker like C.S. Lewis strategically threw himself into a rationalistic atheism as a young man before not so much learning the truth of Christianity logically, but being “surprised by joy” experientially, before then re-converting to Christianity logically.⁸⁰  Here when we think of Lewis writing to  “answer to requests that I would tell how I passed from Atheism to Christianity”⁸¹ we cannot forget that this oscillating process as a whole is what is called “Christian Atheism”, and when he tells us of “arrows of Joy”⁸² we should not forget that they are coupled to pure “terror”.⁸³  These types of dialectical non-orientable inversions between sense-certainty and logic, are the mark of the truth of “Christian Atheism”, and we should not expect them to be properly oriented, but rather continuing to oscillate as a non-orientable quadruplicity (A/B = B/A).      

In other words, the truth of a religion should stand on the nature of its joyful-terrifying experience, as opposed to being externally imposed from without.  The great 20th century mythologist, Joseph Campbell, in fact opens the Preface of his classic text A Hero With A Thousand Faces, by quoting Freud at length in his suggestion that telling children symbolic myths before they are ready to understand what they mean, as opposed to letting children figure out the truths of myth on their own and in their own time and experience in their coming-to-be logical adults, is a great disservice to both the truth of individual experience as well as the truth of religious mythology:⁸⁴  

"THE TRUTHS contained in religious doctrines are after all so distorted and systematically disguised," writes Sigmund Freud, "that the mass of humanity cannot recognize them as truth. The case is similar to what happens when we tell a child that newborn babies are brought by the stork. Here, too, we are telling the truth in symbolic clothing, for we know what the large bird signifies. But the child does not know it. He hears only the distorted part of what we say, and feels that he has been deceived; and we know how often his distrust of the grown-ups and his refractoriness actually take their start from this impression. We have become convinced that it is better to avoid such symbolic disguisings of the truth in what we tell children and not to with-hold from them a knowledge of the true state of affairs commensurate with their intellectual level."

It is the purpose of the present book to uncover some of the truths disguised for us under the figures of religion and mythology by bringing together a multitude of not-too-difficult examples and letting the ancient meaning become apparent of itself. The old teachers knew what they were saying. Once we have learned to read again their symbolic language, it requires no more than the talent of an anthologist to let their teaching be heard.”

Here we see clearly that too quickly projecting onto children symbolic meanings that they could not possibly understand (e.g. storks bringing newborn babies, or Jesus Christ dying for our sins), is perhaps a perfect way to guarantee that children become distrustful of adults and their mythological ramblings.  I have previously articulated the way I think this relationship should be corrected in the relationship of truth as “drive before myth” as opposed to “myth before drive”, as Lacan notes well that “drives mythify the real” autonomously, without our conscious intervention, in any case.⁸⁵     

In fact, I would even say that if someone is attempting to externally impose religion from without by logical argumentation, it is a symptom of an insecurity in the religious belief itself, i.e. the religious belief is not “self-standing” but dependent on a figure of the big Other (some “Fatherly” external standard).  In my experience, true religious belief is self-standing, a type of “autonomous belief” that does not need to be verified by the belief of an other human being.  Here consider this reflection on the nature of belief and Holy Spirit from Slavoj Žižek:⁸⁶

“The dimension of Holy Spirit is a purely self-relating autonomous belief.  You do not have belief in something “out there”.”   

Here a dramatic and seemingly crucial paradox is revealed in the nature of religion and perhaps specifically Christian trinitarian dialectical process: oftentimes religious metaphysics function as a rationalistic mechanism, chemism, and teleology for the social bond, but it is only the undermining of these metaphysical functions that first bring us to the “divine-transcendent” gap of the “Death of God”, followed by the immersion in a speculative self-relating autonomous belief in Holy Spirit capable of sustaining the non-relation, which has recently been generalized towards an “Atheist” sociology by psychoanalytic philosopher Duane Rouselle:⁸⁷

“The oft-quoted Lacanian aphorism “there is no such thing as a sexual relationship” (hereafter referred to as the paradigm of the “non-rapport”) may be generalized for psychoanalytic sociology: “there is no such thing as a social relationship”. [...] This [...] reading [supports] psychoanalytic counter-pragmatics—[...]which promotes a passage beyond the primordial fantasy of consistency/coherency onto the other side of the fantasy, the side of the satisfaction of drives which resonate without social incorporation.”     

This foregrounding of the social non-relation is essential because it introduces us to the paradox that the people who most need community are the people least suited to build it, and the people who least need community are the most suited to build it, a paradox that perhaps should be thought again on the non-orientable surface of the Klein bottle in relationship to the aforementioned ladder and our relationship to it before and after climbing it; as well as the relationship or position of subjectivity before and after the experience of the Death of God (in the mode of the transcendental illusion and its transgression through subjective destitution and Holy Spirit).  In this way, the truly religious subject embodies within his or her positionality, an enormous responsibility for actions demonstrating the real of the belief (what I would call “the hard road”), over direct and explicit discursive identity representing belief (what I would call the “pseudo-religious temptation” in need of an inherent transgression).       

Moreover, and perhaps more importantly, this idea about the difference between self-standing autonomous belief and belief dependent on the other, came to me in experience.  To be specific, before I had had contact with an experience that I would label “God-like”, I would always find it extremely distasteful when I ever encountered someone trying to tell me what religion I should join, or what God to believe in (external determination of a transcendental illusion).  However, after I had an experience that I would label “God-like” (something like the structural appearance of a “big Other” which was simultaneously beautiful and terrifying, as well as ending in self-vanishing/disappearing or “Death”), I did not really need to tell anyone, I did not need someone else to believe what I had experienced in order to verify my belief, to give it its transcendental guarantee.  In other words, the belief was self-standing in the social non-relation as such, and its meaning did not produce certainty, but rather opened something more mysterious.  This something more mysterious is what Richard Boothby suggests requires “richer and more transformative arts of unknowing” in relation to the impenetrable, enduring, and excessive nature of the “Other’s desire”.⁸⁸ 

I believe that I experienced it, it moved me, it had an impact on how I think, and how my mind has developed, and its truth (or “fruits”) will be known in my body and my works.  This experience does not need to be explicitly referenced or obsessed or revolved around in-and-for-itself as a “divine experience”, but rather, it is an experience which lets itself go to its own unfolding.  This here points towards the importance of philosopher Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes work in the relationship between “mysticism and metaphysics”, with mystical experience representing not the end and the final truth of a process, but rather the first and the opening of truth to the unfolding of a logical process that requires the difficult work of a metaphysical tarrying.⁸⁹  In this challenge, not only do we need to avoid imposing a logical qua metaphysical map into children or impressionable others in general (as it obfuscates the subject’s first cause with final cause); but we also need to avoid converting the immediacy of our mystical experiences into absolute metaphysical maps (as what obfuscates the subject’s final cause with its first cause).  The problem is perhaps something that can again be represented with our aforementioned historical logical quadruplicity of A/B = B/A:

• A = Final Cause (Metaphysical Map) / B = First Cause (Mystical Experience)

• B = First Cause (Mystical Experience) / A = Final Cause (Metaphysical Map)       

As it relates to the non-orientable surface of the Klein bottle of Christian Atheism: if a parent (or teacher/leader) obfuscates the child’s (student/follower) first cause with a premature final cause, the child in search of truth will have to negate the metaphysical map to discover its first cause (something which perhaps overly concerns contemporary Atheist subjectivity); and if a subject confuses their metaphysical experience as final cause as opposed to an open-ended first cause, the subject will likely delay the process of subjective destitution in walking or working the hard road (something which perhaps overly problematizes modern religious subjectivity).  In this way, while the Klein bottle of Christian Atheism is indeed non-orientable, there are worse and better choices, and there are choices that can be and are best avoided.  The whole point of the concept of Christian Atheism is to open the coordinates for new thinking and new discussion about precisely these weird inversions and reversals on a non-orientable surface.

Now we can perhaps outline how this non-orientable surface has been traversed by modern philosophy (and eventually psychoanalysis).  Indeed, we find the problem of the transformation of a first cause into a final cause as something that seems to be one of the central problems that emerge in the initial tensions of German Idealism.  Thus German Idealism finds within the logic of its own process the problems of distinctly modern religious subjectivity.  When Kant introduced the transcendental philosophy, what we lose here is a notion of an external big Other independent of our experience (the level of the Death of God);⁹⁰ but what we also gain here, recognised by Friedrich Schelling, is the problem of religious experience (the level of the abyssal nature of Christ).⁹¹  What to do with religious experience, which very well may give us a legitimate access to God within the historical process, but which can also be transformed into a poisonous dogma by the fallen human beings who attempt to obsessively formulate this experience into a system of ideation?⁹²  This is not an obscure or peripheral issue: humans do have God-like experiences, and humans do tend to obsessively formulate the meaning of this experience into an illusory system of ideation that can then become an imposition on others.  In fact, the origin of the dogmatic religious belief in my aforementioned “father-friend”, had its root in a psychedelic experience without proper “set and setting”, opening up a terrifying vertigo-inducing abyss (to again reference the recent work of Hegelian scholar Katherine Everitt), and as a defense, required the formulation of a strict Christian identity for reactionary re-orientation.

What we actually find in this problem may be one of the zero-level dimensions of the importance of the philosophy of Christian Atheism.  While there is a temptation in the history of Christianity to reify the “Father” as a transcendental signifier which correlates to a transcendental experience, what this correlation presupposes is a form of human cognition which is not susceptible to self-illusions (a problem that, as mentioned, gets foregrounded also in psychoanalysis).  In other words, the human psyche is not totalised by its conscious experience but is rather constituted by the unconscious as a gap internal to consciousness.⁹³  As a result, the system of ideas that are built out of transcendental experience and sutured with a transcendental signifier (“God”) — a specific “structure of knowledge” carrying an unconscious historical project — can easily become the ultimate source of a positivist self-deception correlated with a false “true belief”.⁹⁴  However, the obfuscation of this gap in the strong conscious identification with a structure of knowledge upheld by the “Name-of-the-Father” is, in fact, childish (as we will also explore when discussing Freud again).⁹⁵  The result is unfortunately the cause of the situation where adults operating with a childish metaphysical system of knowledge strictly correlated to true belief raising children (or organizing students/followers) that will suffer under the illusions of their parents (or teachers/leaders), and are robbed of the truth of making sense of their own experience on their own time and in their own way.

This issue of the Father as a transcendental signifier correlated to transcendental experience requires the delicate art which was in fact opened by the transcendental philosophy of Kant, but only (arguably) perfected in the philosophy of Hegel which can be properly nominated as, not primarily metaphysical or transcendental, but speculative.  In Christian Atheist terms, Kant opens up the issue of the Father as a transcendental signifier correlated to transcendental experience in the transcendental philosophy which recognises that previous philosophers and philosophies’ too quickly externalized the signifier into the logical schema of experience as being, from Parmenides to Plato to Aristotle to Spinoza.  In its most ridiculous caricature, this is where we get the imagery of “God the Father” as a “Man in the Clouds” overlooking all of Being with an “omniscient gaze”.  While all of these philosophers and philosophies represent real pre-modern “philosophical Fathers’” historically stabilizing the transcendent being, they do so, from a Kantian/post-Kantian perspective, with a horrifyingly insufficient self-reflection, ultimately resulting in the idea of a Father who “fully enjoys himself”.⁹⁶  In this way, we never get to the Son, or in Christian Atheist terms, we never get to Christ and Holy Spirit.      

Thus, while Kant institutes the transcendental turn, helping philosophy recognise the gap between signifier and signified, as well as the nature of the transcendental constitution of reality, he ultimately failed to understand his own project in presupposing the eternal nature of transcendental categories, forcing the question of “meta-cognition” and “meta-critique”.⁹⁷  This is why both Schopenhauer and Žižek critique the blind-spot of Kant’s project on the level of a man at a ball attempting to conquer a masked beauty, but finds at the end of the night that the masked beauty is his wife.⁹⁸  In other words, Kant kills God as an external transcendental guarantee only to transpose this transcendental guarantee into an internal system of categories (which is how much of liberal secular culture maintains its pseudo-faith in institutional subjectivity).  However, while Schopenhauer’s critique of Kant results in a philosophy that suggests a more Buddhist turn away from Christianity, towards a life and will de-emphasising thought and its categories as mere transcendental illusions; Žižek, following Hegel, recognises that what Kant opens actually needs to be followed internal to the resources of Christianity itself, inclusive of liberal secularity.⁹⁹  In other words, what Kant opens is the condition of possibility internal to philosophy itself, to think for the first time the “Death of God”.  But what Kantian and neo-Kantian philosophy cannot do, is think of its consequences, instead ending up in pseudo-religious institutional forms governed by transcendental categories of the understanding, which it seems like it is our task to transgress. 

The idea of the “Death of God” is typically attributed to Nietzsche, and we do have to discuss Nietzsche’s important interpretation of this concept.  However, the lineage and roots of the “Death of God” run through the theology of Martin Luther in the opening of interpretation for historical spirit,¹⁰⁰ and through the philosophy of Hegel, who anticipates Nietzsche’s philosophy by 75 years.¹⁰¹  Here is a direct quote from Luther on the matter:¹⁰²

“[God] could not sit on the scale unless he had become a man like us, so that it could be called God’s dying, God’s martyrdom, God’s blood, and God’s death. For God in his own nature cannot die; but now that God and man are united in one person, it is called God’s death when the man dies who is one substance or one person with God.”  

And here is one of Hegel’s reflections on the Death of God in the Phenomenology:¹⁰³

“The death of this picture-thought contains, therefore, at the same time the death of the abstraction of the divine Being which is not posited as Self.  That death is the painful feeling of the Unhappy Consciousness that God Himself is dead.”  

Here, of course, the idea of the Death of God will get further radicalized, but it is important to note that both Luther and Hegel are explicitly building into their theology and philosophy a crucial dialectical moment that increasingly recognises the importance of the experience of subjective destitution (with Hegel explicitly linking this moment to the death of picture-thinking and abstractions about the divine).  In this way, it was Hegel who recognised both the truth of the feeling of Luther’s theology towards the centrality of “self-will” (breaking from both the “Church Fathers” and “Central Institutions” alike),¹⁰⁴ and the reason of Kant’s philosophy towards the nature of transcendental apperception (introducing a gap/cut into being).¹⁰⁵  Hegel, in combining these two principles, offers us the first comprehensive attempt to develop Christian Atheism proper, in the nature of a “fearless fall” (from the “Father” in “the Sky”).  What is at stake here is the movement situated in the dialectic between the “Death of God” and the “crucifixion of Christ” (again: subjective destitution).  While God as an eternal absolute reality appears to history in the form of his Son, a contingent particular human being, this Son does not even know his truth but comes to know his truth, not in finding himself unified with his Father, but in finding himself abandoned by his Father.  Here we find that the centrality of self-will and spirit’s historical interpretation comes with a cross, and the nature of transcendental apperception shatters all categories of the understanding opening to speculative cognition proper. 

To put things simply: while conservative reactionary theologians during Kant’s day saw in Kantianism a threat to theological order opening to liberal secularity,¹⁰⁶ Hegel saw this too but mobilized resources in his philosophy of religion that allow us to think both Christ and Holy Spirit in their spiritual historicity as opposed to their historical actuality.¹⁰⁷  Here is a crucial footnote to the Religion chapter of the Phenomenology of Spirit which clearly captures his idea that there is a dialectic in Christianity from a metaphysical Father God to an abyssal community of autonomous belief:¹⁰⁸

“Instead of seeing the redemption of the alienated world as inherently necessary the religious consciousness sees it as due to a special event, God’s incarnation and death.  But it also realizes that death to be a resurrection, the universal life of Spirit among the individuals in a religious community.”  

Here the careful wording in Hegel’s note also points towards the more Atheistic dimension of Christian Atheism, clearly radicalized in Marx and Nietzsche, as we will see, in the sense that this process can also unfold in the secular experience of alienation.  In other words, Christianity after Hegel is not so much caught up in the historical reality of Christ and the reification of the original Christian communities organised by Paul, but rather caught up in the historical movement of spirit where the truth of Christ’s inversion of life and death can in principle be experienced as the “negative unity” of the divine and the human.¹⁰⁹  This negative energy, for Hegel, was necessary for the foundation of communities capable of enduring and justifying the secular political institutions that would stabilize as a dialectical layer above them.¹¹⁰  In Hegel’s fully philosophical account, all of the trinitarian mythology of religion is rationalized as opposed to left in obscure mystery, so that the truth of the mystical experience of the process was less constrained to pre-modern thinking.  But here we get a really deep problem: this process of rationalization is by its nature split between a minority interested in and capable of reflexively cognising the concept, and a majority directly enacting the myths of Chrisitan religion so as to be capable of identifying with a social order based on the principle of freedom.¹¹¹         

In this way Hegel’s “Christian Atheist” solution certainly contributed in delaying a direct and widespread manifestation of a non-dialectical Atheism, but it can also be understood as a tremendous failure in many ways.¹¹²  This tremendous failure repeats itself in the initial splits between “Right” and “Left” wing Hegelians that continue to this day, with of course “Right” wing Hegelians tending towards more traditionalist theological and monarchal interpretations of Hegel, and “Left” wing Hegelians tending towards more progressivist atheist and secular communist interpretations of Hegel.  As what we should consider standard to the dialectical coordinates of Christian Atheism, the ring-wing is a force of conservation and a repetition of the old-in-the-new (however not always exclusively Christian, theocratic or monarchist), whereas the left-wing is a force of novelty and an attempt to introduce the new-in-the-old (however not always atheist, progressivist or communist).  The properly “Christian Atheist” disposition as such holds the non-orientable split-gap between the two.  However, the excess of the new-in-the-old is what has historically made its deepest and most long-lasting marks on the historical process as such, first in a figure like Marx, and second in a figure like Nietzsche, both of whom find themselves on the atheist end of the spectrum, but Nietzsche certainly not easily categorizable in terms of Left-Right.  In fact, the whole oscillation and polarization between Left-Right is way more complex than can be discussed in this article, with the split seeming to be eternally recurrent after the French Revolution, even appearing internal to schisms of actually existing communism (i.e. internal to Leninism and Stalinism and Maoism);¹¹³ as well as the emergence of purely Atheist Right wing political figures, like Nick Land, and Christian Left wing political figures, like Slavoj Žižek.¹¹⁴   

The Marxist wing of Hegel’s project in many ways undermines the entire relation between Hegel’s ideas of a split between a philosophical religion that rationalizes the mythological concepts of the trinity, while leaving the masses to directly identify with Christian myth in order to reconcile itself with a social order based on freedom.  For Marx, this split itself is radicalized by seeing in the split a source of the major civil war of the modern world between proletariat (working class peoples) and bourgeoisie (owners of the means of production).¹¹⁵  For Marx, leaving religious myth intact risks creating a situation of drug-induced infantilization, obfuscating the true sources of the social hierarchy which alienate the human being from its creative powers here on earth, and offers a false promise in being reunited with our creator in the afterlife, as opposed to fighting for a radical emancipation now.¹¹⁶  Thus, while Marx’s views on religion were actually ambiguous — leaving room for a genuine religion as the “heart in a heartless world” as opposed to simply a drug to numb the masses from social reality — he still had no sympathies for the conservative tendencies in religion which, for Marx, use myth to entrap the masses into identification with their oppression.¹¹⁷  In this way the religion of Marxism is the religion of proletarian struggle where, if we wanted to put this in Christian Atheist language, we could say that this struggle is the struggle of crucified workers for the resurrection of a body in the Holy Spirit of the workers commune.          

The Nietzschean wing of Hegel’s project recognises the Death of God but attempts to mobilize the philosophical resources necessary to resolve it outside or external to Christianity as opposed to internal to it.  Nietzsche, like Hegel, recognises Luther as not only the originator of the Death of God theology, but also as the grandfather of all modern German philosophy;¹¹⁸ but for Nietzsche, the situation is so tragic that the figure of Christ representing divine-human unity, as well as the Holy Spirit as the abyssal community of belief, itself needs to be radicalized.¹¹⁹  This radicalization is required for two principle reasons: the first is that Christ, although the total embodiment of agapic love and relationality, should not be followed on the basis that this path drains the subject of the truth of life and desire, as well as the inner combat that is required to stay with life and desire;¹²⁰ and the second is that the Holy Spirit as a community is not capable of holding the truth of the creative-destruction of communities as such, which is necessary to make room for the true principle of subjective valuation in the aftermath of the Death of God.¹²¹  Nietzsche’s solution is well known, if still poorly understood: the eternal return as the will to will only what you can will to return eternally, a power capable of converting every “thus it was” into a “thus I have willed it”.¹²²  Such a power for Nietzsche was for the strong (the completion of Roman valuation), as opposed to the weak (the Christianization of Rome).¹²³  In this way, and to boil it down to its simplest axiomatic ground: while Hegel still sees Christ as the agapic model of love to follow and the Holy Spirit as the community of belief necessary to justifying secular political order, Marx sees this as too conservative in the face of capitalist production which is the true site of war and struggle in the modern world, and Nietzsche sees this as delaying the emergence of the overcoming of man, and the introduction of figures of the Overman capable of identifying with creative-destruction itself.      

These two most famous and most influential post-Hegelian paths pushing the Christian Atheist turn towards its most Atheist interpretations have left an enormous mark on our culture.  However, perhaps both projects have suffered in not only not being situated as part of a Christian Atheist project (Marxists and Nietzscheans tend to be totally dismissive of the historical roles of religion and theology), but also, and as a result, have suffered in being totally stripped of their conditions of possibility internal to their Christian foundations (with a “Lutheran and Hegelian Father”).  In other words, both the Marxist and Nietzschean projects could in principle be framed as “Sons” of Luther and Hegel, that failed to produce anything like a living spirit on the level of contemporary 21st century network dynamics, perhaps because these Fathers have been totally repressed or foreclosed.  Thus, and with again reference to the non-orientable Klein bottle model of Christian Atheism, perhaps if the 20th century saw Marx and Nietzsche as an Atheist undermining of Christianity, the 21st century can see the Christianization of Marx and Nietzsche which establish the emancipatory possibilities of Christian community on the Marxist end, as well as the importance of agapic love on the Nietzschean end.  While Marx is right to emphasize the infantilizing dimensions of Christian myth left to obscurantist mystery in order to reconcile the masses with unjust social conditions, there is no need to discard of religion completely in capitalist conditions; and while Nietzsche is right to emphasize that following Christ can leave many without contact with life and desire necessary for self-overcoming and immanent antagonism, there is no need to discard of agapic love completely as the foundation for familial and community life.

However, while these reflections have given us the opportunity to think about the dialectical link between philosophical “Father-Sons” with deep potential relevance to the future of a Christian Atheist project, we must also think about the most important opposite of philosophy for Christian Atheism: psychoanalysis.  In psychoanalysis we not only find a Father-Son duo with relevance to this theopolitical project (Freud and Lacan), but also the capacity to think about the nature of the “Father-Son” as such and the way in which religion must be understood internal to human psychology and anthropology.  In these double dimensions, it must be emphasized that we find a remarkable reversal of the Father-Son relationship that marks Hegel and Marx as well as Hegel and Nietzsche; in the sense that the Father in this relationship is more on the atheist dimension of Christian Atheism (Freud), whereas the Son in this relationship is more on the Christian dimension of Christian Atheism (Lacan).  This is an inversion that perhaps points us towards the aforementioned inversions that our society is currently undergoing in relation between a Globalized Plurality (B) and an Orthodox Christian reactionism (A), where a dominant culture lacking subjective destitution regresses towards a rigid eternalised patristic order.  

The key to Freud’s entire understanding of religion revolves around the position of the Father, and not only the dead Father, but the murdered Father.  For Freud, all unreflective religion proper has to do with the unconscious position of the Father for the Child: at base, religion is a coping mechanism for the fact that we are helpless in relationship to our natural starting conditions and that we are looking for consolation.¹²⁴  In this consolation what religious structures reveal is that in our helplessness we seek to sublimate a surrogate father or the copy of a father.¹²⁵  In Freud’s view the blatant childishness of this situation was bound to give way, and indeed did give way, to a “mature stance” which he explicitly associated with non-belief, the reconciliation with reality the way that it is, or more simply: Atheism.¹²⁶  As Nietzsche recognised before Freud, we were responsible for murdering God; the blood was on our hands, and that we had not thought adequately about a real way beyond or outside of the Death of God (as mentioned above vis-a-vis Hegel and Nietzsche’s different responses to Death of God theology).  What Freud adds to this drama is the recognition that the murder of the Father was not actually a modern individual or psychological act, but the primal anthropological act of a mob or a “band of brothers”, who seek to take down the “all-enjoying father of the primal horde” (the man who possesses all the women, the man who has a monopoly on the violence, and the man who controls the distribution of resources).¹²⁷  But crucially, this band of brothers does not have a response or a solution to the distribution of what amounts to violent aggression and sexual enjoyment, and Freud’s tendency to pragmatic realism does not seem adequate to this reality.  

Thus, after Freud, we conceive of the history of human civilization as the history of this dynamic repeating over and over again, reaching a type of metaphysical speculative climax in the Death of God theology and its atheistic secular liberal aftermath.  The problem for atheistic secular liberal culture is identical with the problem of the primal band of brothers: what to do with the distribution of what amounts to violent aggression and sexual enjoyment?  Even for anthropological theorists who come to similar conclusions about the origin of social order as located at the dimension of patristic murder or scapegoating, like Rene Girard, his actual solution to the problem is always one formulated within a traditional theistic frame of reference that he needed to discard after recognising it as a non-solution revealing rather the intractable deadlocks of human desire.  Here from Girard himself:¹²⁸

“We cannot escape mimetism; we always participate in it in some way, and those who acknowledge it interest me more than those who try to dissimulate it.

I became aware of this obvious point only gradually.  I long tried to think of Christianity as in a higher position, but I have had to give up on that.  I am now persuaded that we have to think from inside mimetism.”                

This line of thinking and argumentation reveals again the honesty in the non-orientable oscillation between Christianity and Atheism.  This Girardian oscillation is itself something that has been radicalized in creative ways by Thomas Hamelryck at Philosophy Portal in situating Girard’s thought next to Nietzsche’s thought: if anyone was willing to think a mad solution “within mimetism”, it was Nietzsche.¹²⁹  In a recent conversation with Hamelryck about these problems, he seems to come to the crucial point about the impotence of Christianity as a solution to violent aggression and sexual enjoyment in the sense that it crucially depends, not on the self-conscious identity of the subjects of religion, but rather their unconscious subjective positionality, the very actuality of their modes of violent aggression and sexual enjoyment as such (which often have very little to do with self-conscious identity).¹³⁰        

In the end, these problems force us into the work of Freud’s rightful heir and Son: Jacques Lacan.  For Lacan, Freud’s ideas about religion may well point in the right direction, towards the Death of God, but are so fundamentally revolving around the figure of the dead/murdered Father that they do not go deep enough.  In other words, Freud’s ideas do not or are not capable of really getting to the core of the Son, arguably vis-a-vis the relationship between the Mother and Child, a dynamic which gets systematically overlooked in the early years of psychoanalysis.¹³¹  Thus, if Freud’s explanation can be boiled down to the unconscious wish for a Father as well as an identification with a Fatherly superego,¹³² Lacan’s interest in religion begins and ends with the terrifying and strangely joyful abyss of desire that is left vacant by the dissolution of this structure, which presents to us an unsettling and indestructible enigma.¹³³  What Freud identifies as religion, for Lacan, is but the violent unconscious libidinal defense against this deeper enigma of a form of jouissance that functions as an ecstatic locus that cannot be thought of, but rather thinks of us.¹³⁴  Thus, while the Death of God theology reveals the protective dogmatic structures that are the result of the childish fantasy of a father to rescue us from nature and ourselves, as well as a morality to help guide us in the terrifying natural and social world, even after this deconstruction we do not find ourselves existing in a rational pragmatic reality.  For Lacan, we rather find ourselves even closer to the mysterious jouissance that threatens to drive us into madness or psychosis.¹³⁵  In a way, for Lacan, we have thought of God's laws and moral codes, but we have not thought of God’s enjoyment (or jouissance).  In fact, Lacan traces this problem back to the philosophical break to Christian Atheism in the form of Kantian morality:¹³⁶

“Christianity has assuredly taught men to pay little attention to God’s jouissance, and this is how Kant makes palatable his voluntarism of Law-for-Law’s-sake.”

How can we learn to love this excess that remains after the Death of God?  In Christian terms: how can we learn to love crucifixion and resurrection into the Holy Spirit?  In Atheist terms: how can we learn to love the abyssal nature of our enjoyment as such?  Perhaps we find a clue if we return again to those late Lacanians who often find themselves confronting the mystical feminine “other enjoyment” or “non-All of the phallic function” itself, from Chiesa’s “Not-Two”,¹³⁷ to Boothby’s “Embracing the Void”,¹³⁸ to Murphy’s “Direction of Desire”.¹³⁹  For Chiesa, as already suggested in this article, the mystical “other jouissance” is not mythical (the realm of ancient stories about angels and demons, good and evil) but rather mystical, and it is only man’s fantasmatic desire for fusion which leads us to obfuscate the motives of our own drive for mythical fantasies which have no knowledge of the mystical non-knowledge.¹⁴⁰  For Boothby, we find here the affirmation of an excessive dimension irreducible to knowledge and in need of loving imperfect embrace with a feminine logic that escapes any totalising reduction to a One-All, and that in Christian Atheist terms, this can be precisely understood as a Christ that is “in me more than me”.¹⁴¹  And finally, for Murphy, the mystic operating by the feminine logic of the non-All surrenders and in learning to surrender to what is “in me more than me” becomes “no-one-anymore”.¹⁴²  In this surrender one let’s go of fusional attachment to experience as such, in the process abandoning notions of the heavenly Father in the afterlife, in favor of the love of God that can only be described as the chaos of Holy Spirit in this world.¹⁴³  

This is a full circle moment for this article.  If you recall the problem of the reactionary revival of Orthodox Christian thinking, or the secular turn to a Christian foundation, is precisely to be located on the level of the problem of excessive jouissance.  As mentioned, it is a misconception to think that atheistic secular liberal society is struggling with a negativity, it is struggling with the unbound wandering excess of a disturbing and unthinkable positivity: we have all become ecstatic loci of jouissance that cannot be thought, not because of the complexity and sophistication of the thought, but because of its brutal and embarrassing real of its idiotic enjoyment.  Chiesa is brilliant in pointing out that this enjoyment is precisely idiotic in the roots of the meaning of the term: “private” and “one’s own”.¹⁴⁴  In other words, when the structures of the father have collapsed, there is a terror at the indestructible excessive jouissance that appears in that void, there is an inability to bear the weight that the further limits of our nature, the “thou art that” of our ecstatic imaginary, terrifies us: we do not want what we desire, we perceive in it a nightmare.  We would rather react back into some figure or form of the father that would give containment, protection, from both nature and ourselves.  This is why the appearance of “father figures” from Jordan B. Peterson to Andrew Tate to Church Fathers, populate the digital landscape and wasteland, offering some semblance of an escape from the abyssal nature of the Son, and the impossibility of the organization of jouissance, in a “patristic order”.         

So to put things very simply: what is the real direction here?  Or more properly: how to “orient” when the true Christian Atheist situation exists as a non-orientable surface?  Here we have to turn to an unlikely source for a gospel designed in relation to the “Death of God”, that is the “Gospel of Christian Atheism” offered by the great 20th century radical theologian Thomas Altizer.  Altizer was in fact discovered by Žižek after early criticisms of Žižek’s theological work suggested that he was just a repetition of Altizer, to which Žižek responded (quoting Deleuze): “everything really new appears in the form of repetition”.¹⁴⁵  Altizer starts his gospel with the following message:¹⁴⁶

“The honest Christian must admit that the God he worships exists only in the past — or he must bet upon the gospel, or “good news”, of the God who willed his own death to enter more completely into the world of his creation.  And the honest atheist, who lives forlornly bereft of faith, will want to understand this revolutionary and definitive statement about a Christ who is totally present and alive in our midst today, embodied now in every human face.”

As I discussed in the Christian Atheism dialogue series with Mark Gerard Murphy, this means embracing the psychotic madness of the “subtle body”, Christ’s body, on fire and in the void, stripped of any figure of the big Other.¹⁴⁷  This figure is left to face the non-Other which is populated only by others, or in the words of Altizer: “embodied in every human face”.  Or as I discussed in the Christian Atheism dialogue series with former megachurch pastor and now author of Deconstructionology, Jim Palmer, the task before us is simply the shift from the big Other to others as such, in their fragmented particularity, in their weakness and fragility, at the limits of our capacity to symbolize, and in the potentially magical powers of network dynamics embodied by mystics who have internalized both the non-sexual and non-social relation at the core of being.¹⁴⁸  Altizer’s gospel here can help us as it outlines a convincingly radical form of theology well suited to our time.  Here are the main aspects of this gospel:¹⁴⁹

1. We are entering a period of the most radical challenge for Christianity since its beginning and must be conceived as in need of the reformation of American Christian Protestantism itself in light of the Death of God

2. The radical Christian is given to the total transformation of Christianity for the rebirth of the living word in both a new and a final form that does not regress to the primordial-original but to the divisions of history itself

3. The greatest Christian visionaries that lead this radical challenge for Christianity can be found in the works of William Blake, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Georg Hegel, who allow for the return of a vibrant erotic living Christ

4. The proper place of God in the movement to Christ is as a dramatic “Self-Annihilation” and “Negation of Negation”, and the passage through Christianity teaches one in experience of this apocalypse

5. The life and energy of our world is totally alien to the life and energy of the Church, the Orthodox images must be forfeited for the life and energy that is still to come, still to be revealed to us in “every human face”  

Here in the beautiful conclusion of the gospel:¹⁵⁰

“Every nostalgic yearning for innocence, all dependence upon a sovereign other, and every attachment to a transcendent beyond, stand here revealed as flights from the world, as assaults upon life and energy, and as reversals of the full embodiment of love. The Christian who chooses the ancient image of Christ as the Son of God, or who is bound to an epiphany of Christ in a long-distant past, must refuse the Christ who is actually present in our flesh. He wagers upon a purely religious image of Christ even at the price of forfeiting the actuality of our time and history. But the radical Christian wagers upon the Christ who is totally profane. He bets upon the Christ who is the totality of the moment before us, the Christ who draws us into the fullness of life and the world. Finally, radical faith calls us to give ourselves totally to the world, to affirm the fullness and the immediacy of the present moment as the life and the energy of Christ. Thus, ultimately the wager of the radical Christian is simply a wager upon the full and actual presence of the Christ who is a totally incarnate love.”

While at times Altizer’s thought is like a painstaking crucible requiring all of your attention to make sense of his radical theological speculations, this paragraph is absolutely clear: no more Christian nostalgia for the past, no more dreams of a Christianity of innocence, we must affirm a fearless fall into the divisions and vicissitudes of history; no more Christianity of flight and exit from the world and the real of the body’s real life and energy, no more ancient imaginaries designed to distract us from the actual present moment of our flesh and our speech, we must learn to speak here and now in the bodies that are pulsating with an impossible-to-contain fire.  

This seems like an impossible challenge, and perhaps it is precisely because it is an impossible challenge, that we have not taken it up, but have rather moved from a traditional Christian world to a Globalized Plurality that has conveniently decided to remove the central singularity and pivot point of that transformation: the negativity of Christ in the Self-Annihilation or Negation of Negation of God.  We have instead used something like a “vague general spirituality” or a “multicultural matrix” of New Age spiritualities to construct a world of unbound excessive positivity, which in its actualisation, is actually a nightmare.  Instead of doing the hard work and walking the hard road opened by the Protestant tradition, and continued in modern philosophy and psychoanalysis, we find ourselves drowning in the ecstatic jouissance that is the excessive left-over of our own violence and aggression against the father, and which we now unconsciously wish to return in shock and recoil.  We think that we can either affirm an original Christianity that eliminates thinking the real vicissitudes of history and the cracks of the present, or we think we can re-identify with a thin form of Christianity that reaffirms a flat multicultural matrix of equal differences neutralizing the field as a whole.  The Christian Atheist Gospel maintains that neither option is up to the task of our moment.

The challenge before us is an enormous one and it is not clear that a Christianity without contact with the real of modern philosophy is up to the challenge.  That is why the most concrete project that gives body to this challenge, even in its seed form, is in the work of Peter Rollins.¹⁵¹  Peter Rollins has studied deeply the history of modern philosophy and thought through its connection and relevance to the challenges of theology today.  In Rollins’ work we do not get either a regressive return to an original father, nor do we get a flat multicultural thin version of Christianity.  What we get in Rollins’ work is a further turning of the process that is active and alive between Freud and Lacan, a turning that sees the emergence of thought that seems properly situated as an Atheistic form of Christianity.  In short, in Rollins’ work we see an insanely innovative variant of Christian Atheism that seems to revolve on three pillars:

1. Pyrotheology

2. Church of Contradiction

3. Drive Denomination

Pyrotheology is in short the term Rollins’ uses to describe the burning body of Christ, the feeling of the body abandoned by any figure of the big Other.  To bring the experience of pyrotheology to life, one does not need a conventional set up with a pastor telling everyone what the Bible says, but rather spaces of art, music and dialogue that makes room for division, lack, and unknowing, that weaves division, lack, and unknowing into the very performativity of the art, music, and dialogue itself.  In its ideality, these spaces can be set up and brought to life anywhere, they do not need to be housed within a traditional church, and to exterior perception, no one even needs to recognise that the processes unfolding are Christian Atheist in nature.  

These practices could be the ritual ground of a familial organization, as well as its link to community, where art, music and dialogue investigate the nature of division, lack, and unknowing, and form the basis for reflecting on the nature of spirit and world.  In fact, I think the seed forms of such activities are already starting to happen in our various liminal web/underground theory communities and networks.  Here subjectivity could become more deeply enculturated to learn about loss and embrace the nature of spirit as that which can survive any loss in the loving embrace of a type of divine emptiness as the condition of possibility for our historical appearance to ourselves and becoming with others.  Perhaps “pyrotheological spaces” could actually offer alternative grounds to a culture that is constantly trying to sell us images of wholeness, fullness, and knowing, which often produce symptoms in an addicted society constantly striving to reconcile with these impossible demands.  Indeed, people in our society can constantly feel like we need to unify our divisions, fill our lacks, and feel ashamed of our unknowing.  From these ideas, perhaps the “future of the father” can be understood in this dimension: division, lack, unknowing.  The father who is open to his children about his self-divided nature, his own lacks in being, as well as the dimensions where he is confronted with his own unknowing.  Perhaps following Boothby’s hypothesis about the future of Christianity, it is only this father that we could call a “loving father”?  The loving father as a father who does not know the way, but still shows up as a loving presence in that unknowing itself, which precisely opens the capacity of the father to love the son’s jouissance. 

Now the two other important terms, the Church of Contradiction and Drive Denomination, are essentially concepts derived from Rollins’ engagement with Žižekian philosophy, but neither term should be reduced to or collapsed back into Žižekian philosophy.  When we think of these concepts we should think of them as genuine theological concepts that need to be developed on their own terms and in their own purpose and function as serving a theological dimension of Christian Atheism.  Like Christ, these concepts are of course designed to be “subversive and disruptive” to traditional forms of Christianity which seek unified institutional identity as opposed to embracing the contradiction of identity, and which seek to fulfill and completely satisfy desire as opposed to entering the mode of the drive where the pain of loss is converted to the excessive enjoyment of lack.  For Rollins’ the Church of Contradiction is not so much a community — which again depends on not only a shared identity, but also a shared enemy — but a communion with the lacks in our identity, where our identity does not quite live up to its own ideal standards.  It is this “shared castration”, this sharing in our weakness and fragility, that the Church of Contradiction seeks to serve (where importantly: God also lacks).  In Rollins Church of Contradiction, there would not be so much a permanent location, as there would be theatrical events that artfully stage the Death of God in a derelict building, just a whole that people will have to walk on, confronting them directly with the gaze into the abyss, where the abyss will gaze back.  After this shared experience which is literally grounding a shared castration, as well as the castration of God, we have a communion around this void.   

Moreover, the Drive Denomination is not so much a new Protestant split, introducing new demands and desires, but rather the nature of the split as such, something which opens to a “religionless Christianity”, a Christianity that has subtracted or contracted itself to the nature of the drive.¹⁵²  While the nature of demand is childish (and linked to the impotence of our primal needs), and desire is tragic (the failure of every positive object), the nature of the drive is almost magically comical, the inversion of failure into its own triumph as the excessive compulsion to repeat itself.¹⁵³  Thus, if our modern secular liberal society is struggling under the positive weight of its own excessive jouissance, this struggle is only a struggle because it interfaces with this reality under the mode of a positive desire, of the desire to add one more and finally find the object that would complete and fill it up.  Perhaps where our society now finds itself is in that terrifyingly tragic perspectival shift where we recognise that there is no final object that will bring satisfaction and completion, but rather we must reconcile ourselves with the nothing that we can enjoy to repeat endlessly as it weaves an excessively disorienting and confusing masterpiece that nonetheless works as not-working.  It is this reality that Rollins thinks the function of the “Drive Denomination” as introducing the perspective that “Nothing” is actually what helps us “live”, helps us “bind together”, and even “saves us” from our illusions of desire.¹⁵⁴  This is why I consider Rollins’ to be a real “scientist of logic” in the Hegelian sense: his theology recognises the unity of Being-Nothing as the condition for a real Becoming.               

While Rollins’ work continues the tradition of Christian Atheism, and I think that it points the way for many today who may be wrestling with these constitutively confusing and disorienting dimensions of modern society, I have no illusions here of success or triumph of this project as somehow functioning as a main theological layer or level of a civilisational Christian Atheist project.  Perhaps Christian Atheism is doomed to be a peripheral theological-philosophical project that points towards the complexity of a truth that most individuals and communities will find off-putting, weird, or totally misguided.  Perhaps the allure and the non-contradiction of a re-identification with an original Christianity under an eternalised patristic order, or the multicultural positivity of a thin Metamodern Christianity that takes a sincerely ironic distance from its own metaphysics, will take the central cultural stage as Western civilisation continues to wrestle with its own legacy while maintaining its secular modern advances?  Perhaps the history of modern philosophy, whether it actually contains the seeds of a Christian Atheist project or not, is too dense and impenetrable for its treasures to be shared widely and accessibly?  Perhaps most people search for a Christian identity so they can simply stop questioning, and find a home where they can align with a Church Father, Priest, or Pastor who can tell them the way, and interpret the texts, and reduce any tensions that appear as a result of the real of life and history and time and death?  Perhaps a Pyrotheology that opens space to explore the real of division, lack, and unknowing, a Church of Contradiction that confronts us with a universal castration, and a Drive Denomination which celebrates the process of division itself is too radical.  

At the same time, I do see a real energy around Christian Atheism, a small and obscure, but at the same time, a real and deep energy that could have tremendous influence indirectly.  I think the conversations that are possible at the intersection of this contradiction go straight to the core of the problems of our life, our history, our temporality, and our death.  How to think about the future of sexuality and the family given the positivist excesses of jouissance unleashed by the destruction of old prohibitions and institutions within the contours of a global technological infrastructure that is the foundation for our brave new complex world of networks?  How to think about the history of Christianity and its role in establishing the opening for a liberal secular society and a scientific humanist epistemology that is fundamentally antagonistic with its own religious and theological conditions of possibility?  How to love eternally in the face of a never-ending temporality and historicity that goes on and on breaking our most cherished relations and revealing the core of all relationality to be a deep and impossibly painful fragility that brings us to our knees in the breaking of our hearts without compensation or justice?  All such questions find new expression, new meaning, and new intellectual coordinations within the structures of a Christian Atheist project.  

Moreover, that is why I have decided to take on the challenge at Philosophy Portal, an organization originally designed to teach the foundations of modern philosophical discourse, towards the challenge of articulating the stakes of a Christian Atheist project.  The working thesis is that modern philosophy itself, perhaps quite unbeknownst to itself, represents a Christian Atheist project which has opened a unique cognitive and social challenge which it is only scarcely aware of.  Perhaps many of the problems of interpretation that plague the history of Marxism, Nietzscheanism, Freudianism and so forth, are problems that lack thought that can traverse the non-orientable surfaces of Christianity and Atheism at the intersections of family and community, individuation and creation, as well as the unconscious mind on the level of instinctual pulsions and socialized morality?  Perhaps also many of the problems of Americanised Christianity reflect the paradoxes that emerge when class antagonism is repressed, when sexual life force energy is foreclosed, and when the unconscious mind is simply treated as an anachronistic pseudo-scientific particularity.  Thus, in combining two forces that have typically only been thought separately throughout the 20th century, perhaps we can revive both and think a Christianity on the level of class and real social change, on the level of the real unity between life and death, and on the level of unconscious social forces and an Atheism that is alive to the foundations of its own conditions of possibility, and the real challenges of being human in this new globalized world.             

---

AFTERWORD

As a closing thought, I also want to articulate that there are so many important threads, people, organizations, and work that is going on, which I think overlaps and connects to this project and this concept in interesting ways, even if those ways are not direct and explicit.  There is the work of figures like Adrian Johnston, whose book on Infinite Greed: The Inhuman Selfishness of Capital,¹⁵⁵ as well as his forth-coming book co-written with Lorenzo Chiesa, God Is Undead,¹⁵⁶ offer tremendous contributions to Christian Atheism and its intersections with the history of Marxism and Lacanian psychoanalysis; as well as Todd McGowan, whose works like the Emancipation After Hegel,¹⁵⁷ and his most recent work, Embracing Alienation,¹⁵⁸ function as absolutely paradigmatic texts for a politicos of contradiction as well as a spirituality of alienation, that should not go overlooked in their contribution to the Christian Atheist project.  There are also the works of figures like Nina Power, whose book What Do Men Want? opens us to problems of contemporary gender dynamics and unforgiveness in a post-Christian age,¹⁵⁹ and whose personal performativity opens us to the strange oscillations of religiosity and secularity that define our age; as well as Julie Reshe, whose immensely influential work Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead, introduces the idea of negative practice to counter a theology of salvation.¹⁶⁰  I also think the beautiful work of the philosophical couple Alfie Bown and Helen Rollins get to the core of social organizing in projects like “Everyday Analysis” which bring psychoanalysis to life outside of the clinic, and spread the good word about how to think culture and society after psychoanalysis.  Bown’s most recent book, Post-Comedy, emphasizes the importance of comedy for building a new society and culture;¹⁶¹ and Rollins most recent book, Psychocinema, introduces the devastatingly subversive idea that film and media can function like an analyst.¹⁶²         

Outside of classical academic work, there is O.G. Rose, composed of the couple Daniel L. Garner and Michelle Garner, whose books and life project point us towards the importance of holding the tension between religion and Christianity specifically, with the direct immersion in global pluralism, embracing difference and otherness internal to Christianity as a way to revive and refresh Christianity in a way that is better equipped to actually live out the teachings of Christ in Holy Spirit today (and not in some imaginary identification with historical belongings).¹⁶³  Beyond academia we also find the online education platform Theory Underground, led by David McKerracher, who is helping educate a new generation in the post-class fractured mass who would otherwise be without educational outlet, and unable to learn the foundations of philosophy,¹⁶⁴ as well as Theory Underground’s Michael Downs, who is leading ground-breaking theoretical developments at the intersection of the philosophy of Slavoj Žižek and Nick Land, helping us to think the dizzying complexities of artificial intelligence and digital capitalism, which seem to be defining the contours of the future of world society.¹⁶⁵  I should also mention Tim Adalin of Voicecraft whose work is establishing a discursive foundation for free discourse that is ideologically open to the real problems for the spiritual present, and while this work does not directly identify with “Christian Atheism”, the work embodies the contradictions between these terms in ways that produce the type of community and the type of spiritual ethos, that is very much in line with what I hope would result from such work.  There are also countless others in this ecology, from the work of Tony Chamas of 1Dime who is really rethinking the stakes for Marxism and religion today,¹⁶⁶ to Bram E. Gieben of Strange Exiles whose books and podcast really expose the Atheistic edge of emancipatory political work,¹⁶⁷ to Matthew Stanley of Samsara Diagnostics whose work blends theology, philosophy, and psychoanalysis in an inspiringly creative mix.¹⁶⁸             

More directly, at Philosophy Portal there is an intensely solid foundation of thinking that intersects between modern philosophy and problems of a theological nature.  Jason Bernstein has written on what it means to stay true to the Earth,¹⁶⁹ as well as what it takes to become graceful in our leap over an abyssal ground;¹⁷⁰ Owen Cox has written on what the stakes are for a form of Nietzscheanism that does not recoil against the hell of its own message, calling us to new life, new vision and new dreaming;¹⁷¹ Dimitri Crooijmans has written at the challenging intersection between libidinal energy/sexuality/tantra and philosophy and intellectual cognition,¹⁷² the weird synergies between Christ’s message and Nietzsche’s Spirit Child,¹⁷³ as well as the stakes for a real work of love;¹⁷⁴ Thomas Hamelryck (as mentioned above) has written creatively on the difficulty but also the necessity of unifying Nietzsche’s intense and ecstatic visions from hell with Rene Girard’s Christian anthropology of renunciation and prohibition;¹⁷⁵ Quinn Whelehan has written on the weird asymmetries between Eastern spirituality and Western philosophy that lead one to new thinking about the becoming of spirit¹⁷⁶ and living life as a contradiction;¹⁷⁷ and James Wisdom has written about Western philosophy in a way that changes our perspective on the nature of modern art,¹⁷⁸ as well as the relationship between nothing and meaning.¹⁷⁹  The names mentioned here represent but the tip of the iceberg of an emerging community mind and writing history that I hope will provide an outlet for deep and rich philosophical interpretation that can live up to the legacy and the potential that was opened by the Protestant reformation and the emergence of the printing press and its capacities, but for the online age.   

Finally, there is The Portal: a live event space that is something like a “theory church”, and something like a “philosophical monastery”.  In the age of “Globalized Plurality” and the tyranny of positivist jouissance without containment or singularized negativity, and with everywhere the temptation to reactionary thinking, The Portal functions as an oasis of long-term conceptual mediation, patience and work of the concept, that introduces one to singular negativity in a liberating form.  The Portal is a space for real thinking, a space to meet and interact with people who are doing real work and want to share it with a thinking community where there is actually the possibility of networking that endures long-term and leads to real physical interactions, events and retreats, that are the ritual ground for a new culture and potentially even more.  The people who make The Portal are everything, and so I will give special shout out to the people who have been its life blood this year: Eliot¹⁸⁰ and Kirsty Rosenstock, Joris de Kelver, Daniel L. and Michelle Garner,¹⁸¹ Davide Pasti, James Wisdom, Alex Ebert,¹⁸² Rebecca Prentice,¹⁸³ Carl Hayden Smith,¹⁸⁴ Cleo Kearns,¹⁸⁵ Chris Eyre, Jason Bernstein, Dimitri Crooijmans, Daniel Coughlan,¹⁸⁶ and many many more.  I hope that all of the little seeds growing here can become the types of minds that help us to become more interconnected on the non-orientable surface of the Christian Atheist Klein Bottle.  This is why, for the first time, the end of this next Philosophy Portal course on Christian Atheism, will be connected to a real embodied event with Peter Rollins’ at the Wake festival, nominated “The Portal at Wake”,¹⁸⁷ where we will try to further investigate what this concept could mean for the future of our bodies, creative communities and network society as a whole. 

1. Altizer, T. 1966. The Gospel of Christian Atheism. Westminster Press.

2. CHRISTIAN ATHEISM (w/ Slavoj Zizek). Philosophy Portal. https://youtu.be/2ZCqQQP2t4Q?si=zi2Ih7p46tXE78Jg (accessed: October 15 2024). (follow:

Slavoj Žižek

)

3. To learn the history of Philosophy Portal and its theoretical development in-between 2022-2024, see: Last, C. 2024. Real Speculations: Thought Foundations, Drive Myths, Social Analysis. Philosophy Portal Books (forth-coming).

4. Kurzweil, R. 2005. The Singularity Is Near: When Humans Transcend Biology. Viking.

5. Heylighen, F. 2007. Accelerating socio-technological evolution: from ephemeralization and stigmergy to the global brain. Globalization as evolutionary process. Routledge. p. 304-329.

6. Heylighen, F., & Lenartowicz, M. 2017. The Global Brain as a model of the future information society: An introduction to the special issue. Technological Forecasting and Social Change 114: 1-6.

7. I outline the contours and necessity of some of this shift between complexity/simplicity, evolution/absolute, cognition/God, here: Last, C. 2022. Necessity of Absolute Knowing: Simplicity in Complexity, Philosophical Science, and the Nature of God. In: Enter the Alien: Thinking as 21st Century Hegel. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 275-292.

8. This gap is starting to be addressed, most notably in the work of psychoanalytic philosopher, Isabel Millar, see: Millar, I. 2021. The Psychoanalysis of Artificial Intelligence. Palgrave Macmillan; as well as Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, see: Žižek, S. 2020. Hegel in a Wired Brain. Bloomsbury Publishing.

9. Žižek, S. 2011. Introduction: Eppur Si Muove. In: Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso. p. 9.

10. Chaisson, E. 2022. Cosmic Evolution: The rise of complexity in nature. Harvard University Press.

11. Harrison, E. 2003. Masks of the Universe: Changing Ideas on the Nature of the Cosmos. Cambridge University Press.

12. Hegel, G.W.F. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford University Press. p. 58.

13. Philosophy Portal has been trying to think about these impossible problems, see: “Rosy Cross Conference” https://philosophyportal.online/rosy-cross (accessed: October 13 2024).

14. Hegel, G.W.F. 2001. Philosophy of Right. Batoche Books. p. 20.

15. Lacan, J. 2005. The Mirror Stage as Formative of the I Function. In: Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. W.W. Norton & Company. p. 76.

16. Philosophy Portal has been trying to think about these immortal powers, see: “Writing For (a) First Cause” https://philosophyportal.online/writing-for-a-first-cause (accessed: October 13 2024).

17. Lacan, J. 2005. Science and Truth. In: Écrits: The FIRST Complete Edition in English. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. p. 734.

18. Last, C. 2020. Part IV: Field of Twenty-First Century Knowledge. In: Global Brain Singularity: Universal History, Future Evolution, and Humanity’s Dialectical Horizon. Springer. p. 214-312.

19. Nick Land at Theory Underground. Theory Underground. https://youtu.be/W1qEhkr9k8c?si=pDaX7ZMCnZLLp-nq (access: October 14 2024). (follow:

Theory Underground

)

20. Is The Earth Enough? l Layman Pascal, Cadell Last, Sean Kelly & Simon van der Els. Voicecraft. https://youtu.be/4AIg_7hRQR4?si=FFfERggGfUBXRA1S (accessed: October 15 2024). (follow:

Layman Pascal

,

Voicecraft

)

21. Last, C. 2020. Part III: Signs of a New Evolution. In: Global Brain Singularity: Universal History, Future Evolution & Humanity’s Dialectical Horizon. Springer. p. 150-211.

22. Kurzweil, R. 2024. The Singularity Is Nearer: When We Merge With AI. Penguin Books.

23. Everitt, K. 2024. Hegel in Vertigo: An Ontology of Space. European Graduate School. p. 7.

24. Many following this direction are inspired by the work of David Bentley Hart, see: Hart, D.B. 2024. All Things Are Full of Gods. Yale University Press.

25. An example of a new attempt at formulating a foundation for “Metamodern Christianity” which includes some of the features mentioned above, can be found in the work of Brendan Graham Dempsey, see: Dempsey, B.G. 2022. Emergentism: A Religion of Complexity for the Metamodern World. Independently Published.

26. Brierly, J. 2023. The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God: Why New Atheism Grew Old and Secular Thinkers are Considering Christianity Again. Tyndale Elevate.

27. Ibid. p. 3.

28. McGilchrist, I. 2021. The Matter With Things: Our Brains, Our Delusions, and the Unmaking of the World. Perspectiva. 

29. Holland, T. 2019. Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. Basic Books.

30. Rousselle, D. 2024. Introduction. In: Negativity in Psychoanalysis: Theory and Clinic.  Rouselle, D. & Murphy, M.G. (Eds.).  Routledge. p. xiv.

31. Ibid.

32. Holland, T. 2019. Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. Basic Books.

33. Murphy, M.G. 2023. The Direction of Desire: John of the Cross, Jacques Lacan and the Contemporary Understanding of Spiritual Direction. Springer. p. 21.

34. Brierly, J. 2023. The Surprising Rebirth of Belief in God: Why New Atheism Grew Old and Secular Thinkers are Considering Christianity Again. Tyndale Elevate. p. 5.

35. Murphy, M.G. 2023. The Direction of Desire: John of the Cross, Jacques Lacan and the Contemporary Understanding of Spiritual Direction. Springer. p. 17-8.

36. Holland, T. 2019. Preface. In: Dominion: How the Christian Revolution Remade the World. Basic Books.

37. Rose, O.G. 2024. Belonging Again: An Address. O.G. Rose. p. 7. (follow:

O.G. Rose

)

38. McKerracher, D. 2023. Timenergy: Why You Have No Time or Energy. Theory Underground Publishing. p. 12.

39. Shout out to Nance at Theory Underground! What do you think? (follow:

Nance

)

40. Bauwens, M. 2024. Personal communication. (follow:

Michel Bauwens

)

41. Rollins, P. 2016. The Orthodox Heretic: And Other Impossible Tales. Paraclete Press.

42. Taylor, B. 2020. Sex, God, and Rock 'n' Roll: Catastrophes, Epiphanies, and Sacred Anarchies. Fortress Press. (note: Taylor’s desired title for this book was “Fucking Comfort”).

43. DRIVE DENOMINATION (NOTHING LIVES, BINDS, SAVES) (w/ Peter Rollins). Philosophy Portal. https://youtu.be/jkpdDpwuy18?si=iTMT5SfgLMo4HfQZ (accessed: October 15 2024).

44. Žižek, S. 2024. Christian Atheism: How to be a Real Materialist. Bloomsbury. p. 5.

45. Ibid. p. 11.

46. Ibid. p. 14.

47. CHRISTIAN ATHEISM (w/ Slavoj Žižek). Philosophy Portal. https://youtu.be/2ZCqQQP2t4Q?si=zi2Ih7p46tXE78Jg (accessed: October 16 2024).

48. Chiesa, L. 2016. The Not-Two: Logic and God in Lacan. MIT Press.

49. Boothby, R. 2022. Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred. Northwestern University Press.

50. Chiesa, L. 2016. The Not-Two: Logic and God in Lacan. MIT Press. p. 4.

51. Boothby, R. 2022. Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred. Northwestern University Press. p. 613-4.

52. Taylor, B. 2020. Sex, God, and Rock 'n' Roll: Catastrophes, Epiphanies, and Sacred Anarchies. Fortress Press.

53. McCormick, S. 2024. Love of Truth in Lacan’s Later Thought. Writing For (a) First Cause. https://philosophyportal.online/writing-for-a-first-cause (accessed: October 12 2024). (follow:

Prof. Dr. Samuel McCormick

)

54. Zupančič, A. 2017. What Is Sex? MIT Press.

55. Taylor, B. 2020. Sex, God, and Rock 'n' Roll: Catastrophes, Epiphanies, and Sacred Anarchies. Fortress Press. p. 12.

56. McCormick, S. 2024. Love of Truth in Lacan’s Later Thought. Writing For (a) First Cause. https://philosophyportal.online/writing-for-a-first-cause (accessed: October 15 2024).

57. Zupančič, A. 2017. What Is Sex? MIT Press. p. 7.

58. Ibid. p. 24.

59. Ibid. p. 27.

60. Lacan, J. 1992. The Seminar. Book VII. The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959-60. Porter, D. (Trans.). London: Routledge, 1992. p. 139.

61. Ibid. p. 71.

62. Dawkins, R. 2006. The God Delusion. Bantam Press. p. 5.

63. Freud, S. 1927. The Future of an Illusion. In: Freud – Complete Works. p. 4415-4461.

64. Palmer, M. 2003. Freud and Jung on Religion. Routledge. p. 33-4.

65. Dawkins, R. 2006. The God Delusion. Bantam Press. p. 5.

66. Freud, S. 1927. The Future of an Illusion. In: Freud – Complete Works. p. 4441.

67. Here I would point to the work of theologian Jim Palmer, see: Deconstructionology with Jim Palmer. https://jimpalmerauthor.substack.com/ (accessed: October 15 2024). (follow:

Jim Palmer

)

68. Hegel, G.W.F. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford University Press. p. 16.

69. Lacan, J. 2005. The Subversion of the Subject in the Dialectic of Desire. In: Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. W.W. Norton & Company. p. 675.

70. For more on the importance of non-orientable surfaces, see: Žižek, S. 2020. Sex and the Failed Absolute. Bloomsbury.

71. As Jacob Kishere has been trying to think through SenseSpace.  For a good first video in his exploration, see: Christianity Beyond Itself w/ Matt Segall. SenseSpace. https://youtu.be/GjoUyjyHAB0?si=_dtCAsuN2la5zuCQ (accessed: October 15 2024). (follow:

Jacob Kishere

,

Matthew David Segall

)

72. This logic is based on the final formulations Hegel leaves us in his Science of Logic, see: Hegel, G.W.F. 2010. Science of Logic. Cambridge University Press. p. 746.

73. I elaborate this historical quadruplicity in a video, here: Episode #190. Cadell Last on a New Philosophy Portal Course (October 24th, 2024): Christian Atheism. O.G. Rose. https://youtu.be/FMajhK-L2VM?si=-B8q5R3Ej4e7gQKK (accessed: October 15 2024).

74. Zupančič, A. 2023. Is Sex Passé? In: Underground Theory. Snelgrove, A., McKerracher, D., Lawrence, M. (Eds.). Theory Underground Publishing. p. 219-20.

75. The philosopher who here stands for this identification with excess itself as emancipatory, is perhaps Gilles Deleuze, see: Zupančič, A. 2017. What Is Sex? MIT Press. p. 118.

76. Zupančič, A. 2017. What Is Sex? MIT Press. p. 118.

77. I use these conversations as the starting point of my intellectual journey culminating in my doctoral thesis Global Brain Singularity, see: Last, C. 2020. Preface. In: Global Brain Singularity: Universal History, Future Evolution, and Humanity’s Dialectical Horizon. Springer. p. ix-xiv.

78. Collins, S. & Collins, M. 2023. The Pragmatist's Guide to Crafting Religion: A Playbook for Sculpting Cultures That Overcome Demographic Collapse & Facilitate Long-Term Human Flourishing. Omniscion Press. (follow:

Based Camp | Simone & Malcolm

)

79. Dawkins, R. 2013. An Appetite for Wonder: The Making of a Scientist. Ecco Press.

80. See: Lewis, C.S. 1955. Surprised by Joy: The Shape of My Early Life. Harcourt Brace.

81. Ibid. p. 8.

82. Ibid. p. 217.

83. Ibid.

84. Campbell, J. 2004. Preface to the 1949 Edition. In: Hero With A Thousand Faces. Princeton University Press.

85. Lacan, J. 2005. On Freud’s “Trieb” and the Psychoanalyst’s Desire. In: Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English. W.W. Norton & Company. p. 724.

86. CHRISTIAN ATHEISM (w/ Slavoj Zizek). Philosophy Portal. https://youtu.be/2ZCqQQP2t4Q?si=zi2Ih7p46tXE78Jg (accessed: October 15 2024).

87. Rouselle, D. 2024. Psychoanalytic Sociology: A New Theory of the Social Bond. Bloomsbury Academic. p. 2.

88. Boothby, R. 2023. Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred. Northwestern University Press. p. 627.

89. Sjöstedt-Hughes, P. 2023. On the need for metaphysics in psychedelic therapy and research. Frontiers in Psychology, 14: 1128589. (follow:

Peter Sjöstedt-Hughes

)

90. Allison, H.E. 2004. Kant’s Transcendental Idealism: An Interpretation and Defence. Yale University Press. p. 330.

91. Fackenheim, E.L. 1996. The God Within: Kant, Schelling, and Historicity. University of Toronto Press. p. 95.

92. Ibid. p. 99.

93. Zupančič, A. 2017. What Is Sex? MIT Press. p. 17.

94. The nature of Schelling’s unconscious proper is in fact not the wild reservoir of drives but rather the transformation of this wild reservoir of drives into a self-conscious project whose original reflexive choice/positing must remain unconscious in order to remain operative, see: Žižek, S. 2011. Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso. p. p. 274-5.

95. Which, of course, Freud knew well, see: Palmer, M. 2003. Freud and Jung on Religion. Routledge. p. 41.

96. Chiesa, L. 2016. The Not-Two: Logic and God in Lacan. MIT Press. p. 16.

97. Allison, H.E. 2004. Kant’s Transcendental Idealism. Yale University Press. p. 331.

98. Žižek, S. 2011. Introduction: Eppur Si Muove. In: Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso. p. 11.

99. Ibid.

100. Luther, M. 1541. Luther’s Works: Church and Ministry III (Liturgy and Hymns). Concordia Publishing House. 41: 103-4.

101. Williams, R. 2012. Tragedy, Recognition, and the Death of God: Studies in Hegel and Nietzsche. OUP Oxford. p. 263.

102. Luther, M. 1541. Luther’s Works: Church and Ministry III (Liturgy and Hymns). Concordia Publishing House. 41: 103-4.

103. Hegel, G.W.F. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford University Press. p. 476.

104. Hegel, G.W.F. 2001. Philosophy of Right. Batoche Books. p. 20.

105. Hegel, G.W.F.  2010. Science of Logic. Cambridge University Press. p. 515.

106. Žižek, S. 2011. Introduction: Eppur Si Muove. In: Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso. p. 11.

107. Lewis, T.A. 2011. Religion, Modernity, and Politics in Hegel. OUP Oxford.

108. Hegel, G.W.F. 1977. Phenomenology of Spirit. Oxford University Press. p. 588.

109. Lewis, T.A. 2011. Religion, Modernity, and Politics in Hegel. OUP Oxford. p. 204.

110. Ibid. p. 203-4.

111. Ibid.

112. Williams, R. 2012. Tragedy, Recognition, and the Death of God: Studies in Hegel and Nietzsche. OUP Oxford. p. 264.

113. A point made well and often by Marxist theorist (or the “Last Marxist) Chris Cutrone, see: Neither Left Nor Right? Chris Cutrone and Nina Power. Theory Underground. https://youtu.be/Gtd6qvyvX40?si=NkuIbI0d2ESh6Ohv (accessed: October 16 2024).

114. Žižek, S. 2024. Christian Atheism: How to be a Real Materialist. Bloomsbury.

115. Tucker, R.C. 2017. Philosophy and Myth in Karl Marx. Routledge. p. 166.

116. Ibid. p. 234.

117. Raines, J. 2011. Marx on Religion. Temple University Press.

118. Franck, D. 2012. Nietzsche and the Shadow of God. Northwestern University Press. p. 35-6.

119. Williams, R. 2012. Tragedy, Recognition, and the Death of God. Oxford University Press. p. 26.

120. Welson, R. 2014. The Philosophy of Nietzsche. Routledge. p. 42.

121. Williams, R. 2012. Tragedy, Recognition, and the Death of God. Oxford University Press. p. 285.

122. Ibid.

123. Franck, D. 2012. Nietzsche and the Shadow of God. Northwestern University Press. p. 34-5.

124. Rizzuto, A.M. 1998. Why did Freud Reject God?: A Psychodynamic Interpretation. Yale University Press. p. 160.

125. Ibid. p. 162.

126. Ibid. p. 169.

127. Palmer, M. 2003. Freud and Jung on Religion. Routledge. p. 40.

128. Girard, R. 2010. Battling to the End: Conversations with Benoît Chantre. Michigan State University Press. p. 82.

129. Hamelryck, T. 2023. Nietzsche’s Tantra and Girard’s Sutra. In: Abyssal Arrows: Spiritual Leadership Inspired by Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 171-205.

130. See: GIRARD’S ANTHROPOLOGY OF RELIGION (I SEE SATAN) (w/ Thomas Hamelryck). Philosophy Portal. https://youtu.be/ZKqMCOKqypM?si=Lx3JeyI7UwCyqlKi (accessed: October 15 2024).

131. Lacan himself attributes a shift internal to psychoanalysis from Father to Mother in the work of Melanie Klein, see: Lacan, J. 2005. Aggressiveness in Psychoanalysis. In: Écrits: The FIRST Complete Edition in English. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. p. 93-4.  

132. Palmer, M. 2003. Freud and Jung on Religion. Routledge. p. 45.

133. Boothby, R. 2022. Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred. Northwestern University Press. p. 617-8.

134. Ibid. p. 618-9.

135. Ibid. p. 619-20.

136. Lacan, J. 2005. Kant with Sade. In: Écrits: The FIRST Complete Edition in English. New York: W.W. Norton & Company. p. 651.

137. Chiesa, L. 2016. The Not-Two: Logic and God in Lacan. MIT Press. p. 19.

138. Boothby, R. 2022. Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred. Northwestern University Press. p. 612.

139. Murphy, M.G. 2023. The Direction of Desire: John of the Cross, Jacques Lacan and the Contemporary Understanding of Spiritual Direction. Springer. p. 4.

140. Chiesa, L. 2016. The Not-Two: Logic and God in Lacan. MIT Press. p. 16-7.

141. Boothby, R. 2022. Embracing the Void: Rethinking the Origin of the Sacred. Northwestern University Press. p. 612.

142. Murphy, M.G. 2023. The Direction of Desire: John of the Cross, Jacques Lacan and the Contemporary Understanding of Spiritual Direction. Springer. p. 4.

143. Ibid.

144. Chiesa, L. 2016. The Not-Two: Logic and God in Lacan. MIT Press. p. 18.

145. Slavoj Žižek - Whither the "Death of God": A Continuing Currency? Chomsky’s World. https://youtu.be/YalQEnlsiac?si=uLuQZdlVZAXSXns8 (accessed: October 14 2024).

146. Altizer, T. 1966. The Gospel of Christian Atheism. Westminster Press.

147. Murphy, M.G. 2024. CHRIST’S BODY (AND AN OTHER JOUISSANCE). Philosophy Portal. https://youtu.be/IZEL-n-AB10?si=OMj45hOauRBlkdNd (accessed: October 14 2024).

148. Palmer, J. 2024. DECONSTRUCTIONOLOGY (OR: CHRIST AS ATHEIST). Philosophy Portal. https://youtu.be/AE_cLIkscGA?si=yDHBIshBFr0fMckS (accessed: October 14 2024).

149. Altizer, T. 1966. The Gospel of Christian Atheism. Westminster Press.

150. Altizer, T. 1966. Chapter 5: A Wager. In: The Gospel of Christian Atheism. Westminster Press.

151. Rollins, P. 2024. The Profane Temple. Everyday Analysis.

152. Rollins, P. 2024. DEATH DRIVE DENOMINATION (NOTHING LIVES, BINDS, SAVES). Philosophy Portal. https://youtu.be/jkpdDpwuy18?si=1CM_kqnmDW0JJUn9 (accessed: October 14 2024).

153. Žižek, S. 2011. Chapter 7: The Limits of Hegel. In: Less Than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism. London: Verso.p. 493.

154. Rollins, P. 2024. The Profane Temple. Everyday Analysis.

155. Johnston, A. 2024. Infinite Greed: The Inhuman Selfishness of Capital. Columbia University Press.

156. Johnston, A. 2024. Personal communication.

157. McGowan, T. 2019. Emancipation After Hegel: Achieving a Contradictory Revolution. Columbia University Press.

158. McGowan, T. 2024. Embracing Alienation: Why We Shouldn’t Try To Find Ourselves. Repeater.

159. Power, N. 2022. What Do Men Want? Allen Lane. (follow:

Nina Power

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160. Reshe, J. 2023. Negative Psychoanalysis for the Living Dead: Philosophical Pessimism and the Death Drive. palgrave macmillan.

161. Bown, A. 2024. Post-Comedy. Wiley.

162. Rollins, H. 2024. Psychocinema. Wiley. (follow:

Helen Rollins

)

163. Rose, O.G. 2024. Belonging Again: An Address. O.G. Rose.

164. See: Theory Underground. https://theoryunderground.com/ (accessed: October 14 2024).

165. Downs, M. 2025 (forth-coming). Capital vs. Timenergy: A Žižekian Critique of Nick Land. Theory Underground Publishing.

166. His forth-coming book: Chamas, T. 2024. Freedom to Change Nothing: The Spectrul of Managed Democracy and What Makes the US Different. Revol Press.

167. Gieben, B. 2024. The Darkest Timeline: Living in a World With No Future. Revol Press. (follow:

Strange Exiles

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168. His latest book: Stanley, M. 2024. Ideology and Christian Freedom. Samsara Diagnostics. (follow:

Matthew Stanley

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169. Bernstein, J. 2023. Remaining True to the Earth. In: Abyssal Arrows: Spiritual Leadership Inspired by Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 447-456. (follow:

is subject

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170. Bernstein, J. 2024. Forgetting the Forgetting. In: Logic for the Global Brain: Singular Universality as Perfect Opposition. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 415-448.

171. Cox, O. 2023. A Message From Hell. In: Abyssal Arrows: Spiritual Leadership Inspired by Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 207-230. (follow:

Dark Renaissance

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172. Crooijmans, D. 2022. Hegelian Tantra: Edging the Absolute. In: Enter the Alien: Thinking as 21st Century Hegel. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 107-132. (follow:

Dimitri

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173. Crooijmans, D. 2023. The Birth of the Spiritual Child. In: Abyssal Arrows: Spiritual Leadership Inspired by Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 251-272.

174. Crooijmans, D. 2024. The Work of Love. In: Logic for the Global Brain: Singular Universality as Perfect Opposition. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 293-346.

175. Hamelryck, T. 2023. Nietzsche’s Tantra and Girard’s Sutra. In: Abyssal Arrows: Spiritual Leadership Inspired by Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 171-205.

176. Whelehan, Q. 2022. Hegel, Mahayana Buddhism, and the Becoming of Spirit. In: Enter the Alien: Thinking as 21st Century Hegel. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 79-105.

177. Whelehan, Q. 2024. The Living Contradiction. In: Logic for the Global Brain: Singular Universality as Perfect Opposition. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 347-413.

178. Wisdom, J. 2022. A Black Square: Reading the End of Art Through Hegel and the Negation of the Negation. In: Enter the Alien: Thinking as 21st Century Hegel. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 197-208. (follow:

jameswilliamwisdom

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179. Wisdom, J. 2024. Nothing Matters. In: Logic for the Global Brain: Singular Universality as Perfect Opposition. Philosophy Portal Books. p. 449-457.

180. Follow:

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