“Where has God gone?” [the Madman] cried. “I shall tell you. We have killed him – you and I. . .There has never been a greater deed; and whosoever shall be born after us – for the sake of this deed they shall be part of a higher history than all history hitherto.”
Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science
“Open the so-called body and spread out all its surfaces:. . .Work as the sun does when you’re sunbathing or taking grass.”
Jean-Francois Lyotard, Libidinal Economy
“By applying the knife vivisectionally to the chest of the very virtues of their time, [philosophers] betrayed what was their own secret: to know of the greatness of [God], of a new untrodden way to [its] enhancement. Every time they tried to expose how much hypocrisy, comfortableness, letting oneself go and letting oneself drop, how many lies lay hidden under the best honored type of their contemporary morality, how much virtue was outlived. Every time they said, “We must got there, that way, where you today are least at home.”
Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil
“This is our blessing, this is our curse: to be responsible for the corpse of God. But more than anything we must ask this: Which God has died? What is to be done with its corpse? And, finally, do we want answers to these questions?”
In Good Faith (Original Draft)
In this post discussing the opening section of In Good Faith, I would like to examine Part I’s two titular concepts: necrophobia (fear of death/dead bodies) and the “Throne of Desire”, which I have in earlier drafts referred to as the infernal divine libido.
Necrophobia is in reference to not only personal death, but to the death of God, the body of the God who was abandoned, left for dead, and yet still persists. Nietzsche is famous for elaborating on this concept and transmitting it into popular understanding as a core aspect of his philosophy. It is deeply related to the concept of nihilism, which can be defined as 1. “the rejection of all religious and moral principles, in the belief that life is meaningless” and 2. “extreme skepticism maintaining that nothing in the world has a real existence.” Both of these angles are evident in Nietzsche’s philosophy of value creation, in which he argues that nihilism is a troubling, difficult, even dangerous, but altogether necessary path forward into a future in which new values (ones devoted to this life rather than to some great beyond) can come into the world. In this way, nihilism is not an end goal, but instead an essential passage in humanity’s continued evolution. Importantly, I will argue throughout this book that the death of God via nihilism is the result of the anthropocentric-patriarchal-colonial-imperial dimensions of European Christianity and philosophy. As Nietzsche suggests, it is precisely life-denying values (of which I will argue these are pivotal examples) that have planted the seeds of nihilism in the Modern West. As I will convey throughout this book, a life-affirming, posthumanist, heretical, radical, non-dual, and cosmic Christianity may serve as an antidote to the secularized Christianity of Modernity/Coloniality.
If we are to make it through this period of time (both the death of God and what Foucault and posthumanists refer to as the death of ‘Man’), we must come to terms with this death and navigate it, explore what it means to have had a God who could die (and a humanism that could die with it), and become responsible for the world left in its wake. In this section I am specifically referring to the God of Western Christianity, which, despite still being a popular part of spiritual discourse and religious practice, has too often been distorted and made into a tool of the state, a disciplining apparatus, and a genocidal mode of domination. To face this death means that we must not only face our own mortality, but it also leaves us with a task: the creation of new gods, or perhaps, the revelation of forgotten ones.
Following this, he throne of desire represents the libidinous energy that allowed for the “creation” of gods in the first place. It is our holiest spiritual power, our ability to craft the world, to destroy and enchant. Without it, the death of God is merely a sad song about the end of a bygone era, one in which spirituality filled the air and our destinies were set in stone; instead, however, the throne of desire, our root chakra, the origin of our spirit, is still able to pulse in rhythm with the heart of the world. It is the creative urge to reconstruct divinity, to dream of utopia, to fight, bleed, and die for something larger than ourselves: the liberation of all beings.
Very key to this concept is the theme of desire elaborated by Deleuze and Guattari in Anti-Oedipus, a work that explored the connections between Marx and Nietzsche, amongst so many others. In this work, desire is seen as that which creates values, constructs reality, bodies, and visions, and as the key to social transformation. Desire comes in many forms: it may desire repression as much as it desires liberation, a fascist desire or a revolutionary desire. In order to process this moment of multiple ‘deaths’, we must confront the repressed cisheteropatriarchal God who is not really dead, still growing his fascist seeds. He lives in us, in our dreams, in our fears, in our values. As argued by both Nietzsche and Sylvia Wynter, this dying God — who as yet has not finished dying — has simply passed the torch to ‘Man’, which is a provincial, particular being (Western, male, white, capital-owning, etc.) being passed off as the universal model of the human. As ‘Man’ has taken the throne, he has made the world in his image — a world that decolonial thinkers such as Walter Mignolo have labeled Modernity/Coloniality. Here, the legacy of the cisheteropatriarchal God still lives, if only as the shadow of ‘Man’.
In this sense, the creation/recovery of (re)new(ed) gods (and aspects of the Godhead) is a key part of my project. The apocalyptic struggles we face — the death of God, what posthumanist Rosi Braidotti calls ‘the posthuman convergence’ (the alignment of the death of ‘Man’ and the critique of anthropocentrism), the planetary crisis in the Anthropocene, and the lasting legacy of kyriarchy and Coloniality — is one which I believe requires a deep spiritual dimension. It is my belief that it is not spirituality which is the issue we have with Western Christianity, but instead its world-and-life-denying character, its anthropocentric-patriarchal-colonial-imperial dimensions, and its reactionary political tendencies. It is also my argument that the specific neoliberal secularism of ‘Man’ is in fact nothing more than a reactionary political spiritualization of Western humanism. The category of the human — which, in the control of ‘Man’, has always been understood in asymmetric relation to those cast as less-than-human, in-human, and non-human — is an ideal that has deep spiritual ties to the colonial and imperial projects of Western Christendom. It is my argument that the secularization of mass society is no less than a mask for the spiritual project of ‘Man’, which is colonizing disenchantment of the spiritual capacities of its Others and the simultaneous neoliberal enchantment of commodities. So, rather than abandon spirituality to the reactionaries, we must instead desire (and thus create) revolutionary spiritualities for our present and conjoining crises. The fullness of posthuman spirituality is a gateway into the spiritualities of both the deep past and the (un)imaginable future. To dream of (re)new(ed) gods/goddesses and an enchanted, decolonial, and infinitely-magical universe is to (re)imagine spiritualities that do not taste so bitter, feel so evil, or seem so naive.
To navigate these waters, I will often throughout the book turn to the work of Death of God theologian Thomas J.J. Altizer, various writers on liberation theology, and decolonial thinkers such as Wynter, Mignolo, Maria Lugones, Anibal Quijano, Ramón Grosfoguel, and Nelson Maldonado-Torres, amongst others. I will also turn to both heretical and mystical Christian thinkers; revolutionary groups and individuals; esotericists; religious, yet non-Christian writers; indigenous authors; Afrofuturists; and posthumanists. The goal is to help plant some hopeful seeds for the religions and spiritualities of a post-humanist, post-capitalist, revolutionary, and decolonial world.
In conclusion, I’d like to go over the sections “Part I” will cover: they include “Chapter 1: The Apocalyptic Moment”, with subsections titled “The End of Days: Capitalist Realism, Coloniality, and the Anthropocene”, “The Posthuman Convergence and Critical Posthumanism”, and “The Aion: Ancestral and Futural Communities”; “Chapter 2: The Dead God”, with subsections titled “Nietzsche, Nihilism, and the Death of God”, “Degodding and the Secularization of the West”, and “‘Enthroned over a world of terrors’: The Gifts God Bestowed to ‘Man’”; and “Chapter 3: State Philosophy”, with subsections titled “Political Theology and ‘Man1’”, “City Dis: The Philosophers and Modernity/Coloniality”, and “The Evil Outside: On Pagans, Heretics, and Others”.
As a methodology for the blog, I will make posts for each category — in other words, one for each “Part”, each “Chapter”, and each “Subsection”. If you wish to explore them in linear form, you can check out the first blogpost (LINK HERE) which is an outline that will have updated links to each section as they’re written. Lastly, I just want to say that this project is devoted to many spiritual, philosophical, and political paths and it is in no way meant as an end-all-be-all. While I wholeheartedly believe a spiritual dimension to revolutionary action is needed, I do not find anything wrong with being an atheist or an agnostic — I was an agnostic for many years myself. The suffering that has been done in the name of God, along with the endless proselytizing of its followers, is perhaps too hard to bear, too annoying, and too sickening to ever make the spiritual (no less the religious) a worthy project for some. I understand that sentiment deeply. I once wrote this line in a song: “how the holiest spirits reside in the average atheist’s chest”. I still feel that way, and I hope to convey that atheism is in many ways a radical spirituality of its own, one that may be more revolutionary than the average believer’s.
I would like to finish with a statement on what IGF is: an attempt to radicalize spiritual discourse, including Christianity, in order to participate in the many revolutionary and liberatory paradigm shifts that are occurring in our time. In doing so, I hope to help combat the reactionary nature of ‘Man’ on behalf of the Earth and Her peoples, spiritual or not, in order to foster a future worth living in, where each and every being can thrive and find meaning in what can often feel like a meaningless existence. I dream endlessly of finding those who wish to collaborate in this project and take it down their own paths. With that, I thank you for reading and I look forward to hearing what you think!
In Good Faith: a blog 