Critical Theory and Early Christianity - Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, and Judith Butler - Matthew G. Whitlock

Critical Theory and Early Christianity - Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, and Judith Butler - Matthew G. Whitlock

Dialectical Images and Critical Theory

Critical Theory and Early Christianity - Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, and Judith Butler - Matthew G. Whitlock

Matthew G. Whitlock [+-]
Seattle University
Matthew G. Whitlock (PhD, The Catholic University of America, 2008) is Associate Professor of New Testament at Seattle University. His research focuses on Acts of the Apostles, the Apostle Paul, New Testament Poetry, Critical Theory, and Science Fiction. His publications have focused on topics ranging from New Testament poetry in the Catholic Biblical Quarterly to the Body Without Organs and Christianity in Deleuze and Guattari Studies. He is currently working on a book of dialectical images from the science fiction of Philip K. Dick and from the letters of the Apostle Paul.

Description

The chapters in the volume do not aim to resolve, through seamless syntheses, the tensions in dialectical images of the past and present. That is not theory’s chief purpose—at least in the minds of our four theorists. Theory here mediates between images, between the past and the present. What is more, the analyses in this volume are not organized under categories of biblical theology and synthesized by them. Rather, we try to discuss early Christian texts without recourse to biblical and traditional theological categories, even in their secular remains. We offer images not typically associated with early Christian texts: malls, arcades, and libraries; automaton chess players, and chess boards; bodies without organs, machines, rhizomes, national anthems, and call centers; political revolutions, Lenin, Stalin, and mathematical sets; performativity, drag, and mattering bodies, both human and non-human, earthly and celestial. And we offer mediating theories, concepts, and categories not traditionally associated with interpreting early Christian texts: gentrification; body-of-Christ-without-organs, deterritorialization and reterritorialization, simulacra and simulation, facialization; evental sites, mathematics, set theory, and queer theory. These images and theories challenge unspoken premises of our scholarship, and they produce new montages of thought.

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Citation

Whitlock, Matthew. Dialectical Images and Critical Theory. Critical Theory and Early Christianity - Walter Benjamin, Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, and Judith Butler. Equinox eBooks Publishing, United Kingdom. p. vii-ix Oct 2022. ISBN 9781781794135. https://www.equinoxpub.com/home/view-chapter/?id=42263. Date accessed: 11 Dec 2024 doi: 10.1558/equinox.42263. Oct 2022

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