Political Theology of the Earth by Catherine Keller

Author:Catherine Keller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Perseus Books, LLC

QUEER ARTS

Would some God cloaked in amorous darkness now succeed where the traditional deity brightly fails? Or might theology withdraw from the competition? In other words, we might take a cue from what Jack Halberstam famously calls “the queer art of failure”:

There is something powerful in being wrong, in losing, in failing, and … all our failures combined might just be enough, if we practice them well, to bring down the winner. Let’s leave success and its achievement to the Republicans, to the corporate managers of the world, to the winners of reality TV shows, to married couples, to SUV drivers.

Halberstam is not bothering with God (they have enough on their plate). They are talking back to the politico-capitalist scheme of success, which blames the inequities of its systems on the failure of its victims. We should not be shocked that Halberstam draws here upon Benjamin, with his revolutionary but antiteleological refusal of progress-temporality. “The concept of practicing failure perhaps prompts us to discover our inner dweeb, to be underachievers, to fall short, to get distracted, to take a detour, to find a limit, to lose our way, to forget, to avoid mastery, and, with Walter Benjamin, to recognize that “empathy with the victor” invariably benefits the rulers.”24

Success seals the privilege of the winners, the victors—the exceptions. And it is a seal imprinted on its few, including, of course, select “classy” exceptions of color and sex, with the white force of heteronormativity. Capital haunts our every “climb across” to critical difference. But losing, wandering, and falling short take us off the straight and narrow path of success. Then we may fester with resentment. Or stay with the trouble of the uncertain alternative.

Similarly, in a theodicy in which the victims carry the blame for their suffering, shame due to private “sin” conveniently occludes suffering due to social oppression. It teaches identification upward, with those apparently more favored by God. So then protest against the structural injustices of race, sex, and class will intensify the resentment of those trying to stay on the straight path of success. Spirited alternatives will be repeatedly doomed to failure. Failure, however, may provoke more creative, generative, and surprising ways of inhabiting our world: “Rather than resisting endings and limits, let us instead revel in and cleave to all of our own inevitable fantastic failures.”25 What might such reveling reveal not only about theologically shaped lives, but about the theological shape of “God”?

Rather than just transcending God and succeeding at secularism, or, to the contrary, judging the secular to have failed and winning God back through the postsecular, what if theology keeps faith with its own failures? This does not require that we repeat them. We would become alert to our own ploys of power and certitude, our own sovereign subjectivities. We would practice mindfulness of the complex affects of failure. We would watch for possibilities buried in the ruins. We would have the benefit of a half-century of experimentation in a queerer art of theology, in

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