A New Reading of Jacques Ellul. Jacob Marques Rollison
I move finally from irony and incredulity to alarm—about the violence of this book. Žižek has not the slightest compunction about invoking violence . . . Milbank . . . batters our ears with a barrage of rhetorical violence, with the vintage violence of theological imperialism . . . a disturbing and dogmatic theological dismissiveness of anyone who disagrees with him . . . Milbank and the authors who swim around him in the “school” of “Radical Orthodoxy” flatter themselves with the insufferable conceit that the entire world may be divided into either medieval Thomistic metaphysicians—or nihilists! They remind us, in case we might have forgotten, why no one trusts theology.
While perhaps Caputo’s polemic unhelpfully represents other Radical Orthodoxy writers, he seems to read Žižek in line with the above citations. Caputo’s commentary nicely encapsulates my question: is this, or can this really be, a dialogue at all? And if theological speech is violent, has there not been a wrong turn somewhere?
Žižek seems to think it was not a dialogue, or that it stopped being one. God in Pain, written with theologian Boris Gunjević, starts with Gunjević citing an e-mail exchange between Milbank and Žižek:
Time to conclude. When, at the beginning of his reply to my reply, Milbank claims that, in my previous reply, I merely reiterated my main points, without properly engaging with his specific arguments, my reaction is that this, exactly, is what he is doing in his second reply—a clear sign that our exchange exhausted its potentials. So, since we are both reduced to reiterating our positions, the only appropriate way for me is to conclude the exchange.[19]
As in the US impeachment trial, the dialogue seems to have failed. Far from suggesting that there is no fruit to glean from theological engagement with Žižek or post-structuralism—on the contrary, I think that I have generously reaped benefits of such engagement—I am questioning if, at the moment, dialogue with structuralism might be precisely what theology should not desire.
In this inquiry, I seek a response to structuralism that upsets a binary laid out by James K.A. Smith. In a popular work, Smith provocatively analyzes what theology must be after taking postmodernism seriously (perhaps justifying Caputo’s wider critique above): “a ‘radical orthodoxy’ is the only proper outcome of the postmodern critique . . . ”[20] In a more academic register, he allows two options: “there are two ways to be postfundamentalist: emergent or catholic.”[21] On the following page, he recounts beginning with the “emergent,” “anti-institutional trajectory,” then gravitating towards the “catholic” side. He cites “a criticism often levelled at my work by a certain stream of theologians, often emerging from Scotland . . . from the Barthian tradition that does not entertain the possibility of a Christian philosophy . . . ”[22] Without commenting on the possibility of Christian philosophy, this book (in tandem with structuralist thought) interrogates the role philosophy plays in ethics, language and community. In other words, Smith might be right, but only if one accepts the terms laid out in the “postmodern critique”; the binary emergent/catholic response already assumes that speech operates within a philosophical framework.
In some ways, this book is prefigured by Smith’s comment: it emerges from research undertaken in Scotland, from a more or less Barthian tradition, and if decidedly not anti-institutional, does stem from a specific approach to institutions that will come out in due course. However, I believe my treatment is original—it is expressed in a register more Kierkegaardian than Barthian, and my entire interest is in how these seemingly philosophical questions bear on our time. In this book, I describe elements of what I see as a distinctly protestant response. It is protestant in the true sense of protest. To borrow from Žižek as cited above, it will refuse to allow the enemy to define the terrain of the struggle. Or more precisely, leaving the fight metaphor, it refuses to fight, but perhaps also to speak. I propose to accomplish this through an original reading of Jacques Ellul.
What Does Bordeaux Have to Do with Paris?
Why choose Jacques Ellul to examine the theological and communicative issues surrounding structuralism? Ellul, who is better known for his critical sociology of technique than for any philosophical dialogue, might seem a surprising interlocutor for this inquiry. He admittedly lacked the interest and vocabulary for profound engagement with philosophical thought.[23] Moreover, he often expressly refused using philosophical works—he refused employing Heidegger’s thought, as he was already aware in 1934 of the German philosopher’s National Socialist affiliations.[24] He polemically speaks of “ . . . the very great Heidegger, where everything is so profound, seductive, innovative, but who lacked the minimal lucidity to discern what national socialism was at its foundation. The several months of his adhesion to Nazism suffice for me to consider the rest of his work as nothing.”[25]
In fact, Ellul is an excellent choice for several reasons. First, his anti-philosophical approach in no way implies ignorance of philosophy. On the contrary, Ellul’s works are full of criticisms of Sartre, references to Bergson, dialogue with Ricœur, readings of and references to Nietzsche, Jürgen Habermas, Jean Baudrillard, Adorno, Lacan, Deleuze, Simone de Beauvoir, and Foucault—not to mention his having read all of Kierkegaard’s and Marx’s works.
Second, there are important similarities between Ellul and structuralism. Both sharply criticized early and mid-twentieth-century European humanism. Many structuralist thinkers directed themselves against reigning intellectual institutions, to which they were often outsiders—like Ellul, a Bordeaux professor who often targeted Parisian intellectuals en bloc.[26] Both Ellul and many structuralists viewed their projects as anti-philosophical, attacking metaphysical or ontological approaches, preferring to think within the confines of temporality, finitude, and limitation.
Among secondary examinations of Ellul’s work, it is fitting to mention several authors who have compared Ellul to structuralist thought. Frédéric Rognon has masterfully drawn out Ellul’s dialogue with Nietzsche, Ricœur, Freud, and Heidegger, all of whom play important roles for structuralist thinkers.[27] Patrick Chastenet has suggested that Ellul prefigured Deleuze, Foucault, Negri, Bourdieu, and Michel Serres.[28] Wagenfuhr has highlighted Ellul’s use of Claude Lévi-Strauss.[29] The late Ellul scholar Darrel Fasching, Wagenfuhr, George Ritzer, Jacob Van Vleet and I have all juxtaposed Ellul and Lyotard.[30] Ritzer only briefly suggests a comparison; Wagenfuhr treats Ellul together with Lyotard’s The Postmodern Condition, coming close to a theme which I develop at length below (without the language of myth or narrative) in suggesting that “Lyotard’s narrative creates a myth of postmodernity that enables a self-justification that Ellul’s metanarrative finds both naive and dangerous.”[31] Van Vleet writes: “Ellul agrees with thinkers like Lyotard and Foucault for the most part. However, unlike these postmodern thinkers, Ellul is convinced that the solution to our technological predicament lies in the spiritual realm rather than strictly in the political sphere.”[32] He sees a rapprochement between Ellul and Foucault (on propaganda), Heidegger, Habermas, and Lyotard, and—unique among introductory treatments—puts Ellul alongside Herbert Marcuse and Paul Virilio, helpfully bringing Ellul into wider continental dialogue.[33] I will return to Fasching below.
In a tribute after Ellul’s death, Stanley Hauerwas suggested Ellul’s similarity to Foucault:
The only figure I can think of comparable to Ellul’s courageous imagination is that of his fellow Frenchman, Michel Foucault. They each looked on the world with a courageous imagination that allowed them to see the world as it is without flinching. The power of Foucault’s work is undeniable, but . . . many of us had been well prepared to face the realities of which Foucault’s work directed us by the courage of Ellul . . . what Ellul offers that Foucault cannot, is hope. Such hope is not based on false utopianism, but rather resides in the very intervention by Ellul’s work through which we know God matters.[34]
David Lovekin, treating Ellul’s theology as philosophy, joins Hauerwas to make a pair who recognize something interesting in Ellul’s use of language. Lovekin writes:
For Ellul, it is the poet using