Abstract:

ETHICS OF THE OBVIOUS is a non-teleological collection of essays. What the Doing Does' elucidates presumptions about meaning and essence shared between 'reductionist' and 'antireductionist' theories of religious practice. One proposes that there is manifest meaning distinct from latent meaning; the other proposes that manifest and latent meanings coincide. It proposes that, instead of seeking an answer to what religious practice MEANS, the student of religious practice seek to determine what it DOES in a particular context and with particular aims in mind. 'What the doing does' does not seek to uncover the deep meaning of religious practice, so the scholar can analyze a religious practice without claiming that its meaning is either illusory or concomitant with its appearance.

R/evolution' argues that 'the system' in the work of Michel Foucault functions analogously to William Paley's intelligent designer. The logic of Foucault's artifacts (the prison, the discourse on sexuality, the subjection of individuals) displays the cunning and calculation of a mastermind. Like natural theology, NATURAL CONSPIRACY can be explained through Charles Darwin's theory: even the most complex specimens emerge through an untidy mechanism of variability, heritability, and incessant struggle. Motivated by deviation rather than direction and chance instead of perfection, Darwin's theory elucidates the abrupt shifts and periods of stasis that Stephen Jay Gould terms 'punctuated equilibrium', providing an explanation of Foucault's episodic changes in the 'face' of society. The same stochastic arrangement that generates tired and trivial results (evolution) can also produce outcomes that are perceived as remarkable (revolution).

Horizons' argues that the disruption of field of understanding must be inherent to that horizon. Using a version of Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel's notion of sublation, the processes by which practices are made familiar, obvious, apparent can be understood as the same processes by which practices are made strange, alien, broken from one's horizon. Through Alain Badiou's 'immanent break', it is possible and necessary to change a situation without resort to transcendence. The work of inciting social change involves bringing obviousnesses into question and performing radical ethical exercises, for there is no existence of ideology' outside of our practices.