Toombs and Merleau-Pontus on Phantom-Limb Syndrome and Intentionality

“Merleau-Ponty would argue that my inability to recall or re-imagine ‘walking’ can be understood in terms of bodily intentionality. For instance, he notes that the phenomenon of ‘phantom limb’ is best explained in terms of the body’s involvement with the environment. The person who feels the phantom limb does so for as long as the body remains open to the types of actions for which the limb would be the center of it were still operative (Merleau-Ponty, 1962: 76). Thus, my inability to re-imagine ‘walking’ might be understood in terms of a permanent change in bodily intentionality. My limbs are no longer open to the possibility of moving in a certain manner (i.e., in the mode of ‘walking’).

Sociality and the Gospel

"Whoever uncouples the religious and the social life has not understood Jesus. Whoever sets any bounds for the reconstructive power of the religious life over social relations and institutions of men, to that extent denies the faith of the Master."

Walter Rauschenbusch, Christianity and the Social Crisis (New York: Macmillan, 1907), pp. 48-49.

The Faces of Religion

"Religion is an amazing phenomenon that plays contradictory roles in peoples lives. It can destroy or revitalize, put to sleep or awaken, enslave or emancipate, teach docility or teach revolt." ~Ali Sharyati

Cited from Leslie Hazelton, After the Prophet (New York: Doubleday, 2009)

Cornel West on the Permanance of Religion and Idolatry

"So we have to hold onto the liberal political, moral breakthrough and try to make the breakthrough on the economic level in terms of democratizing, but also acknowledge that Durkheim was actually more right than Weber, in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life. Think about page 431. He says there's something eternal about worship and faith. And if you shift from God-talk, you could end up worshipping the market or its accomplishments and accoutrements. You can end up with idolatrous worship of a lot of profane things. It reminds one of Joseph Conrad's Heart of Darkness. You are going to worship something. What is it? Is it Kurtz and the ivory? That's Conrad, 1899, the critique of idolatry. Christians like myself say you must forever be vigilant in critiques of idolatry. Why? Because idolatry is shot through all of us. But you're going to treasure something. If you treasure something that pulls you out of yourself and makes you love more and sacrifice for justice, that's going to be better than the next Lexus that you get. There's no escape from the fiduciary dimension of being human."

Cornel West, "Dialog: Judith Butler and Cornel West" in The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, ed. Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan Vanantwerpen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 105-106.

Cornel West on Prophetic Religion

"I'm going to close with the notion of 'utopian interruptions.' What I'm talking about is always tied to failure. It's no accident that the figures that I invoke - Beckett has an aesthetic for failure, doesn't he? So does Chekhov. So does Kafka. That wonderful letter that Benjamin writes to Gershom Scholem, July 1938: 'You'll never understand the purity and the beauty of Kafka if you don't view him as a failure.' […] Prophetic religion is an individual and collective performative praxis of maladjustment to greed, fear, and bigotry. For prophetic religion the condition of truth is to allow suffering to speak. Yet it is always tied to some failure - always. [...] because the powers-that-be are not just mighty, but they're very clever and they dilute and incorporate in very seductive ways - or sometimes they just kill you!"

Cornel West, "Prophetic Religion and the Future of Capitalist Civilization" in The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, ed. Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan Vanantwerpen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 99.

Judaism as Redemption from Teleology

"Arendt was clearly closer to Benjamin's counter-Messianic view. In that view, it was the suffering of the oppressed that flashed up during moments of emergency and that interrupted both homogeneous and teleological time. [...] Redemption itself is to be rethought as the exilic, without return, a disruption of teleological history and an opening to a convergent and interruptive set of temporalities. This is a messianism, perhaps secularized, that affirms the scattering of light, the exilic condition, as the nonteleological form that redemption now takes. This is a redemption, then, from teleological history."

Judith Butler, "Is Judaism Zionism?" in The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, ed. Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan VanAntwerpen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 81.

Judith Butler on Religion

"It makes a different kind of sense to refer to a secular Jew than to a secular Catholic; while both may be presumed to have departed from religious belief, there may be other forms of belonging that do not presume or require belief; secularization may well be one way that Jewish life continues as Jewish. We also make a mistake if religion becomes equated with belief, and belief is then tied to certain kinds of speculative claims about God […] That effort to distinguish the cognitive status of religious and nonreligious belief misses the fact that very often religion functions as a matrix of subject formation, an embedded framework for valuations, and a mode of belonging and embodied social practice."

Judith Butler, "Is Judaism Zionism?" in The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere, ed. Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan VanAntwerpen (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 72.