Rejoicing: Or the Torments of Religious Speech by Latour Bruno

Author:Latour, Bruno [Latour, Bruno]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Wiley
Published: 2013-07-11T00:00:00+00:00

We will say, for instance, that ‘Jesus is risen’. If already we can no longer understand those words, it is very tempting to ask ourselves the common sense, yes common sense, question: ‘So then, the tomb must have been empty?’ Before we know it we’re adding an episode to a story that has accordingly become both more reasonable – since a connecting passage has been added – and more unreasonable – since the initial lack of understanding over the sense of the word ‘risen’ is now capped by a second lack of understanding over the empty tomb episode. And since we then find ourselves saddled with a double lack of understanding, the demon of rationalization whispers to us that the way to get out of this is by a third eminently commensical suggestion, a reflex reaction any good housekeeper would have: ‘The proof is that the shroud is lying on the floor of the tomb.’ Other stories will follow, other embroideries, other inventions, pious lies, but lies all the same, in which the blood-stained cloth will be stage-managed a thousand different ways. Then, like children who start telling fibs and then try to get out of it by inventing more and more improbable ones, we force ourselves to ‘prove’ the preceding inventions by other inventions. Until, suddenly, in mid-course, faced with the scepticism provoked by all these whoppers in reasoners whose inclinations we’ve played to, we change our tune once more and admit that we’re dealing here with mysteries too deep for human understanding. With admirable liberality, wherever we no longer understand the mechanism for producing meaning, we indulge in handing out miracles. Then, still hesitating, annoyed at having embroidered so much, and stricken with remorse at having strewn miracles around so rashly, in a new twist we start sending relics off to the laboratory, taking DNA samples, slipping electrodes into the skulls of clairvoyants – bits of scientific procedures that we then give up on as suddenly as the rest as soon as we decide that they’ve led us too far down the paths of information. When the demon of logic interferes, the particular regime of religious speech becomes indecipherable, and rationalization, the true madwoman in the attic, leaves behind her everywhere a trail of chaos, as incapable of doing the serious work of the sciences as of getting on with the job of religion. The devil has triumphed: we will never be able to talk about these things again.

Thanks to rationalization, inspired texts have been made apocryphal. Instead of the cracks in the narrative gathering meaning, they’ve been covered up or encrypted: they distract, they whip up, they mislead. The Apocrypha anaesthetize like opium. We no longer hear in them the transversal history that alone allows us to grasp what these venerable writings were talking about. The reader’s attention flies off to ancient times: death will triumph, since the direction of time has once more been reversed. Because of the varnish of logic that has been laid over

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