Get Rhythm
I
In his Ethics, Baruch Spinoza argues that “[t]he man who is guided by reason is more free in a state, where he lives under a general system of law, than in solitude, where he is independent.” I am certainly not guided by reason at three in the morning, as I sway my newborn son through a dark house. At three weeks old, his life is still a lawless form of solitude: anxiously unaware of his own contingency and dependence, he is too mystified by his own body and appetites to be “governed” by them. Alone as we are together, “freedom,” by Spinoza's definition, does not appear to be in the cards for either of us.
I close my eyes and try to breathe my way through Wendell Berry’s poem “Sabbath, IX” (1979):
Enclosing the field within bounds
sets it apart from the boundless
of which it was, and is, a part,
and places it within care.
The bounds of the field bind
the mind to it.
My son and I long for boundedness in these wee hours. He lacks the knowledge and control to keep himself together, so I bind him up in my embrace and carry him to his mother from hunger to hunger. Somewhere in this rhythm, I am told, is a freedom that is proper to us both. This back-and-forth will grow and stretch and change and, somehow, we will recognize that we have been caught up together in another, greater boundedness all along.
Lexi Eikelboom has a name for this oscillation. She refers to it as the diachronic: the interruptive, interpersonal rhythm that conditions our experience as finite creatures who depend on an infinite God. For Eikelboom, this musical, poetic notion of rhythm is a theological category. Studying it as such, she makes her own contribution to a field of philosophical theology that tries to understand how limitation conditions the human experience and forms our notions of freedom and possibility. She also participates in an ongoing conversation about whether transcendence or immanence offers the best options for political and religious life in the present and the future.
As a literature scholar, I am delighted that Eikelboom defines human experience and the work of theology through such an aesthetic category. I am also surprised that it isn’t a more common way of talking about theology. While her own method is not genealogical, this core part of her argument—that “rhythm” plays a significant but unacknowledged or “ghostly” role in the Western philosophical tradition—will interest genealogists wishing to follow up on her claims and explore their implications. Eikelboom herself, however, is less interested in rhythm’s subterranean history than in exploring the category’s latent potentials for constructive theology in the present.
In the first chapter, Eikelboom reads in recent philosophical histories of rhythm two competing accounts: one pre-Socratic tradition, often traced back to Heraclitus, describes rhythm as a provisional cosmic form imparting its fluctuating shape to the whole of reality, while the Platonic tradition offers a more familiar notion of meter or numeric periodicity, as experienced in music or poetry. These rhythms are imbricated with one another; formal poetic rhythms like iambic pentameter owe themselves to the Platonic tradition, while the idea of the sonnet form more broadly, with all its potentials and variations, better exhibits a pre-Socratic understanding.
While Eikelboom demonstrates these differences through readings of poetry, she also argues that the pre-Socratic and Platonic traditions are by themselves inadequate for deploying rhythm in phenomenological contexts useful to theology. Using Maurice Merleau-Ponty as a bridge into such contexts, Eikelboom proposes that the pre-Socratic/Platonic distinction be distilled further into the synchronic and the diachronic.
Synchronicity here refers to the experience of rhythm as constituting a whole. Poems are, for instance, experienced as poems when we recognize them as self-contained. Metrically and hermeneutically, then, poetry is often studied in terms of the internal self-relations that form individual poems. An analogous philosophical or theological perspective produces what we recognize as a metaphysical “system”: a self-referential view of being that assumes not only wholeness but also a kind of extra-systemic perspective that can take in the whole from outside. Eikelboom acknowledges postmodern critiques that such “God’s eye” perspectives lend themselves to hegemony and pre-interpretation, but she goes further and says there is little phenomenological precedent for synchronic perspectives; the whole in knowledge is never experienced as the whole of knowledge. Therefore, even if there is a synchronic wholeness proper to being, it is never experienced by humanity. Instead, we experience being not as though we were analyzing a poem but as though we were reading it in time with fits, starts, and interruptions. Eikelboom calls this the diachronic rhythm proper to finite creatures, their experiences and relationships. For this reason, she says the diachronic oscillation between harmonious and interruptive perspectives on God best characterizes our experience of the world.
Eikelboom demonstrates that these categories matter by showing how synchronic philosophical perspectives tend to deform human experience. In the second chapter, she briefly analyzes the projects of Gilles Deleuze, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Martin Heidegger, each of whom attempts to forswear transcendence by doubling down on pure immanence. Eikelboom argues that these thinkers inevitably express themselves through a synchronic, transcendental appraisal of the whole, “describ[ing] rhythm in terms of a fluid form that comes to stand for the whole of reality,” as either an esoteric, chaotic harmony or a primordial oscillation of conflict. There is, in these immanent perspectives, yet a “religious expression corresponding to a deification of the whole.”
Robert Delaunay Endless Rhythm
By noting this religious expression, Eikelboom moves the conversation back to her own theological concerns and further clarifies what is at stake in synchronic immanentism, namely a de-emphasis on history and materiality that a more traditional Christian perspective of incarnation provides. In Catherine Keller’s process theology, for example, God is so intimately identified with the world that incarnation is relativized, producing “an account of a unified whole in which gaps or ruptures are . . . swallowed up in the grand movement of becoming.” Historical and interpersonal encounters recede entirely.
Eikelboom develops her own critique of absolute immanence through the Catholic theologian Erich Przywara, who accuses modern philosophy and theology of theopanism—the tendency for God to collapse into and become identified with (anti-)metaphysical systems through either a “pure logic” or a “pure dialectic” aimed at repressing contradictions. In Deleuze, for example, everything reduces to becoming; nothing solidifies into an identity that might introduce a contradiction into the system. Under this “pure logic,” being and nonbeing, truth and falsity, are interchangeable. The other form of absolute thinking, exhibited by Nietzsche and Heidegger, is an “absolute dialectic” that can only seek truth inside antithesis, which—as contradiction and therefore as no-thing—becomes the substance of the resulting system. This amounts to the same univocal statement on reality: “Insofar as rhythm as fluid form lends itself to descriptions of reality as an immanent whole,” Eikelboom says, “it suggests a relationship to a God who is not other than the system but is the inner form of the system—the absolutization of the system.” Christianity, meanwhile, insists on a God who, as other, cannot be identified univocally with the whole and so remains capable of a diachronic relationship with the world.
Parsing diachronicity for a new articulation of transcendence, Eikelboom finds an unlikely ally in Giorgio Agamben, who becomes her philosophical touchstone in Chapter 3. Given her interest in rhythm, Eikelboom pays greater attention to Agamben’s work on poetry and language than to his archaeology of human politics in Homo Sacer, for which he is best known. Still, Eikelboom recognizes that politics and poetry are not separate concerns for Agamben: his obsession with the caesura—the mid-line interruptions that occur in poetry—becomes paradigmatic for his understanding of human experience as a whole. Arguing that religion, politics, and ontology are all founded on linguistic operations of division and exclusion, Agamben instead proposes the proliferation of caesurae, a “division of division” that intensifies the experience of difference and diachronicity until that experience is all there is, resisting calcification into an ontological or political system. Agamben proposes such resistance as an eschatological possibility for humanity gleaned through his reading of the Christian tradition. For Agamben, the Gospel “does not establish something new but interrupts and frustrates the established.” Insofar as this “division of division” opens ever-proliferating spaces for rethinking our most basic relations, Eikelboom sees in Agamben an openness to transcendence-in-immanence that she compares both to Przywara and to Jean-Luc Marion.
But upon establishing that a diachronic approach to rhythm and phenomenology both dignifies creaturely experience and remains open to transcendence, Eikelboom then turns in the fourth chapter to critique forms of Christian transcendence that also achieve their visions through synchronic privilege. Discussing Augustine’s De Musica, Eikelboom expresses concern that, when taken up into a theological register, the synchronic mode of rhythm implies a hegemonic and heteronomous relation of intra-creaturely and created rhythms to the superior rhythms of divine being. Creation is offered “participation” in the divine emanation, but it is also judged according to its degree of acceptance—a threshold that the theologian watches as an adjudicator. From this “participatory” perspective, theology quietly becomes a juridical enterprise.
Henri Matisse Dancers
More problematic still, when participatory metaphysics collapses into this kind of policing of the chain of being, we see that even theologically “orthodox” positions remain vulnerable to theopanism. In this case, we experience “an ontological totality that does not deal in any significant way with historical, pre-eschatological realities and thereby eschews alternative forms of relations and movements which such a history might make necessary.”
The stakes are significant, as we here encounter types of Christianity that motivate critiques of radical immanentism in the first place. Eikelboom notes, for example, that the “peaceful” ontologies of many Radical Orthodox thinkers can only express themselves by dismissing as non-real anything that cannot coexist inside the systems they explicate, falling into the very pattern of sacramental exclusion that Agamben critiques:
“While [such theologies] assert equality and democracy within creation . . . [they] never describe the way in which things relate to one another on this plane of equality. The result is that the privileging of relationality over substance is actually the privileging of a single kind of relationality, namely that of vertical participation. No intra-creaturely movement or relationality is identified. Oscillation [between the one and the many] is overcome, but with what is it replaced?”
What, indeed. From here, Eikelboom will undertake the daring and difficult task of describing the work of theology—which certainly seems to necessitate a synchronic approach—from a diachronic perspective.