Becoming Otherwise: Politics, Metaphysics and Power in Judith Butler and Alfred North Whitehead

<p>The post-secular event within which we live is occasioned as the limit of the secular project. The secular project meets its limit in attempting to separate a religious private sphere from a public sphere while at the same time repeating as a demand a religious subjectivation of the public sphere: demanding conformity to a simple subjectivity, producing a world of simple subjects through a theologically determined metaphysics of conversion. In this latter demand secularism enforces a simplicity of its subjects and its world. Yet this simplicity cannot be taken up into or as life. To genuinely live and think the post-secular requires, then, not simply a resistance to the secular but a resistance to simplicity, developing ways of becoming otherwise than simply and of producing a world other than that which conforms to a metaphysics of conversion.</p> <p>This dissertation proposes to meet the requirements of the post-secular event by developing a post-secular political ontology drawn from the work of Judith Butler and Alfred North Whitehead. Read through and out of these two philosophers of becoming is a post-secular political ontology that is embedded within a metaphysics of creativity, a metaphysic that is itself already infected by the political. At the intersection of the work of Butler and Whitehead a metaphysic arises that is a systematic discourse of the political.</p> <p>From this metaphysic a political ontology is developed. This political ontology begins with a suspicion of grammar as a suspicion of a subject-predicate form of thought that grounds ontologies of substance. With this suspicion, being is allowed to unfold as its becoming, particularly as a becoming material, so that actuality is a becoming materiality. This is also a relational becoming of feeling, becoming as a process of intensive feeling that can never be finalized for itself, always suffering its own continual downfall. Finally, but without finality, actuality is a becoming of creativity, opened by a divine violence that ruptures history by the possible, leading to a post-secular political ontology of the future.</p>

Name thesis:degree_name

Philosophy, PhD

Level thesis:degree_level

Open Access Dissertation

Year dc:date.available

2011

Author dc:creator

• Van Wyk, Alan

Contributors dc:contributor

• Philip Clayton
• John Quiring
• Ranu Samantrai

• Judith Butler
• Metaphysics
• Politics
• Power
• Subjectivity
• Alfred North Whitehead
• Religion
• Religious Thought, Theology and Philosophy of Religion

Repository record dc:identifier

https://scholarship.claremont.edu/cgu_etd/12

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:scholarship.claremont.edu:cgu_etd-1013