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Improper Names for God: Religious Language and the "Spinoza-Effect"

  • Daniel Whistler (author)
Chapter of: Speculations 3(pp. 99–134)

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Metadata
TitleImproper Names for God
SubtitleReligious Language and the "Spinoza-Effect"
ContributorDaniel Whistler (author)
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.21983/P3.0010.1.06
Landing pagehttps://punctumbooks.com/titles/speculations-iii/
Licensehttps://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-sa/3.0/
CopyrightWhistler, Daniel
Publisherpunctum books
Published on2012-09-03
Long abstractThis paper practises a Naturphi-losophie of language. I treat texts as rocks to examine the linguistic forces that constitute them. In other words, this paper is born out of a hyper-realist attitude to sense that asserts: what goes on in texts should be subject to a “linguistic physics.”2 In order to bring out this linguistic physics as fully as possible, what follows is devoted to the logic of sense (or, even better, the physics of sense3) in monist philosophies. As I shall argue, monism forces the philosopher to treat words as one more class of body colliding on a surface. This is because the mo-nist assertion that there is ultimately one thing in existence ultimately leads to the materialisation of language (at the same time as the linguistification of matter). A lacuna from the opening to Badiou’s Logic of Worlds clarifies this point: Today, natural belief [or democratic materialism] is condensed in a single statement: There are only bodies and languages. This statement is the axiom of contemporary conviction...It is then legitimate to counter [it] with a materialist dialectic, if by “materialist dialectic” we understand the following statement...There are only bodies and languages, except that there are truths.4There is of course a third option: “there are only bodies.”5According to such “monist materialism,” the linguistic is reduced to the corporeal; yet, this is a radical materialism that Badiou seems loath to mention. In this paper, however, I explore the implications of such a corporeal reduction of language by focusing on two monisms—Spinoza’s Ethics and Schelling’s Identitätsphilosophie.
Page rangepp. 99–134
Print length36 pages
LanguageEnglish (Original)
Contributors

Daniel Whistler

(author)