The guiding question of Caputo’s book, “What do I love when
I love my God,” is complicated for several reasons, the least of which is not
Caputo’s insistence that religious truth is a kind of “truth without knowledge”
(111); in other words, the entire concept of a final, definite answer based on
a concrete set of propositions and/or suppositions needs to be qualified.
“God,” it turns out, is approachable from many (one might
even say infinite) perspectives
(112), and, from the de-capitalized postmodern perspective, no one method of
approach can be considered “Really Real” (126). Therefore, just as Derrida
argued that “justice” is not deconstructable, Caputo, who himself equates God
with justice (138), argues that what we call “God” or “the love of God” is not
deconstructable (113). To put it differently, Caputo’s question is, at his own
insistence, impossible to answer as it is phrased. Caputo would rather see the
interrogative pronoun shift from “What” to “How” (134), which would allow
“justice” to become a verb rather than a noun, and “God” to become another word
for an enacted responsibility toward others rather than a misunderstood
artifact of religious belief.
As Caputo writes, “We do not know who we are…and that is who we are” (128). Following
this statement, Caputo’s answer to the question that haunts and guides his
entire book seems to be, “We do not know what we love when we love our God, and
that is what we love.”
However, this radical unknowability necessarily places
Caputo and his postmodern faith at odds with fundamentalism. For Caputo, the
various global fundamentalist movements (Protestant, Catholic, Islamic, etc.)
are paradoxical reactions to a radically decentered, technologized world.
Fundamentalist movements utilize the very technologies and apparatuses of
media(tion) that they condemn in order to sustain their ideologies and disseminate
their messages; therefore, Caputo argues, it is inevitable that fundamentalisms
meet some sort of “explosive” end (106). The faith of the postmodern subject,
meanwhile, presents itself vaguely as a “truth without Knowledge” (115) that
takes as its starting point the undecidability of metaphysical questions and
consequently revels in the hyper-reality of not knowing who one is or (in) what
one believes (127).
Through Caputo’s writing style is, as always, engaging, I
find that Caputo’s a/theological analysis confuses the real issue here.
Caputo’s analysis might have been more relevant and clear had he situated both
the various fundamentalisms and postmodernisms as symptoms of the
socio-economic processes of late capitalism, as many Marxist scholars have
done. Though Caputo would likely shrug this suggestion off as resorting uncritically
to a base/superstructure metanarrative, it is clear without reference to any
sort of historical teleology that world capitalism represents the fundamental
problem faced by the contemporary ethical subject.
The way Caputo constructs the two phenomena reveals that, in
a way, fundamentalism and postmodernism are not altogether distinct since they
both respond directly to “the abyss within” (108). It is ironic, then, that
Caputo, for whom all choices conceal a false binary, can sincerely choose postmodern faith and ask his
readers to follow suit. Does not Caputo’s postmodern insistence that objective
truth is impossible have the capacity to become just as dogmatic and harmful to
a possible future as the fundamentalist’s strongly-gripped Bible? Caputo, in
his mocking analysis of fundamentalism and earnest appeal for a postmodern
faith, certainly shows that it can be just as normative and judgmental!
Can Caputo’s postmodern faith lead to an ethical life, that
is (to use Spinoza’s definition of ethics), a happy life? This question seems
the most pertinent. Caputo’s collapse of all motivating utopias or
possibilities of collective action into “undecidability” has the troubling capacity to
pave the way for the unabated continuance of state power and world
capitalism. In the final analysis, neither fundamentalism nor postmodernism can
be a site for mourning or celebration but must instead be understood as
concrete challenges or obstacles on the path to a better world.
