Monograph in Progress
Interpreting Early Christianity with Deleuze and Guattari:
A Short History of Desiring-production and the Lobster God
Interpreting Early Christianity with Deleuze and Guattari:
A Short History of Desiring-production and the Lobster God
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Premise:
Immanuel Kant once observed that reason requires concepts to make sense of human experience. To avoid getting lost in the illusions created by such concepts, he employed reason to critique reason itself, and thereby to grasp itself in its deepest condition. Scholars of early Christianity likewise depend upon identity-based concepts and, by so doing, risk fixating on their own illusions, fantasies and nostalgic constructions of the past. We cannot achieve a more direct relation to life without escaping from the prison house of representational concepts. Deleuze employs nonrepresentational concepts as tools for experimental engagement with the world. He develops these concepts in contact with psychoanalysis, science, literature, and the arts. If we were to replace the representational concepts presently used by scholars of early Christianity with Deleuzian nonrepresentational concepts, what difference would it make to our understanding Christian origins?
To explore this question, this book identifies a variety of representational concepts and explores alternative nonrepresentational ways of mapping early Christianity. My purpose is to establish a new paradigm of thought that will allow scholars to accomplish tasks that are presently beyond the reach of thinking-as-representation. Deleuze’s construction of new concepts respond to real problems, a property which endows them with a revolutionary force.
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Desiring-production. . .
and the Lobster God
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