Keeping the Rhythm
This is the second essay in a two part article. You can find the first essay here.
Parenthood, I’ve realized, is really just one interruption after the next. Any form of stability is a small achievement soon burst apart by something new, and yet all these interruptions roll up into one long event: my singular, private experience of something “common to man.” Of course, well-meaning forerunners have tried to prepare me, to let me know what I’m up against and make it predictable. Occasionally, they prescribe in no uncertain terms what “good parenting” looks like. This is not, Lexi Eikelboom argues in her book Rhythm, far off from the worst impulses of metaphysics when the desire to put a bow on reality cuts short the project of understanding.
This, as Eikelboom explains, is the problem with synchronic philosophies and theologies, which attempt to achieve a holistic perspective from a “God’s eye view.” They accomplish this by arresting the perspectival oscillation between the one and the many—what Eikelboom refers to as the diachronic rhythm of life lived in the world. Instead of seeking such stability, Eikelboom says, Christian theology reveals that this oscillation is the human experience of transcendence, not to be displaced by any pretension to an outside perspective on the shape of things. Diachronicity is the very condition in which humans theologize and the rhythm in which we live.
Having explored rhythm’s place in the history of philosophy and given examples of synchronic and diachronic perspectives within that history, Eikelboom advances her theological argument through the work of Erich Przywara. Discussing Przywara’s interpretation of Augustine in terms of diachronic oscillation allows Eikelboom in Chapter 5 to expand our understanding of what Przywara means by the analogy of being: the relation-in-alterity that, according to the Thomistic tradition, makes possible a union between creature and Creator that is proper to both, without risking either God’s total identification with creation or the absolute hierarchical domination of transcendence over immanence. Within this union, Eikelboom sees the possibility of articulating a theology with a genuinely diachronic rhythm.
Such an analogical perspective as Przywara’s “points to the possibility that the rhythm of the ontological structure in Augustine is capable of recognizing a historical counter-rhythm in which creaturely reality is not subsumed under a larger ontological hierarchy but is confronted and interrupted through an encounter with God-as-other from within the oscillations of intra-creaturely reality.” Eikelboom demonstrates the available potentials of this perspective through an exemplary reading of creation in Genesis 1 (as a synchronic theology) and Genesis 2 (as a diachronic response).
Observing such oscillations in scripture, Eikelboom attempts in the sixth chapter to make sense of the theological concerns animating both Augustine and Catherine Keller in their appraisals of the world, suggesting that creation itself is encountered differently at different historical moments when different rhythms become available or dominate others. As she discusses in Chapter 7, the vocation of the church involves theologizing in a way that accounts for these oscillations and remains open to the fact that, as long as human experience takes place within time, the diachronic interruptions of history and community will always demand we articulate the story of salvation in new ways—though with Christ as the still-point through which these oscillations occur.
Joan Miro Rhythmic Characters
Eikelboom’s study opens multiple opportunities for creative sequels. Genealogists interested in her account of rhythm for precisely its “ghostly” quality will likewise want to follow up on her discussion of how rhythmic periodicity impacted the industrial revolution, or how the lives of enslaved peoples persisted in their own unconquerable rhythms despite the hegemonies of their colonizers. Eikelboom also suggests that contemporary immanentisms like those of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari take for granted the schizophrenic functions and flows of contemporary capitalism without critically acknowledging the idiosyncrasies of the present. The man-made rhythms informing Deleuze’s philosophy, she argues, are observable because of our technological and economic situation, and not because they define reality. Eikelboom thereby suggests that many “postmodern” theopanisms amount to a kind of naturalization of the social, and historians of philosophy will be interested in exploring how far this theory might prove itself out.
On the other hand, genealogically minded scholars may also take umbrage with Eikelboom’s reading of Giorgio Agamben. Those familiar with his work will rightly note that his vision is more “synchronic” than Eikelboom suggests, pointing towards a Spinozist ontology of substance and modes in which “the world . . . is God.” To be sure, Agamben describes a diachronic world throughout his work, but it is a world made by language, and language is the very phenomenon that Agamben wants to question. Language, says Agamben, divides by its own power that which cannot be divided in nature, and this division by language of the linguistic from the non-linguistic forms the foundations of religion and politics. It is therefore structurally endemic to language to introduce divisions into being that are not proper to it.
When Eikelboom suggests, then, that the “division of division” proposed by Agamben embraces diachronic oscillation, she understands distinction and diachronicity to be proper to being as such—and she is in good theological company. This is not, however, what Agamben argues. In his philosophy, the diachronic world is a kind of technological after-effect of language. His “division of division” poetically renders language itself inoperative, unable to perform its function of dividing the world from itself and exposing the “otherwise” or the “whatever” that is possible when language is no longer taken for granted as an essential human apparatus. This “otherwise” is nothing less than a new anthropogenesis, its inaugural moment a kind of “pantheist wager” in a Spinozan key.
Eikelboom’s use of Agamben is further complicated by her suggestion that his philosophy remains open to a transcendence-in-immanence, since, if this is true, it is in spite of Agamben’s own intentions. In fact, Agamben’s genealogy suggests that the exclusionary machinery of sovereignty both creates and is upheld by the illusory structure of transcendence. Agamben does not simply prefer an immanent perspective to a transcendent one; Agamben inherits from Deleuze the conviction that transcendence is a problem and pure immanence is its solution. When Eikelboom then defends transcendence using his work without directly engaging those critiques that motivate his and other immanentisms in the first place, her affirmations lose some of their force.
This also forces us to ask what kind of transcendence Eikelboom is working to defend. Is such alterity ascribed absolutely to God, or is “transcendence” one more (contingent) way of describing the relation of the Creator to creatures? At times, Eikelboom’s commitments to interruptive diachronicity (or her suspicions of synchronicity) seem to require that alterity be an absolute predicate of God, in ways more resonant with Jean-Luc Marion than with Przywara. And depending on our understanding of transcendence here, we potentially fall further under Agamben's indictment: overemphasizing diachronicity in God’s relationship to the world risks suggesting arbitrariness in the divine will and action, reifying the “state of exception” that Agamben critiques throughout his corpus. The “interruptions” of such a God may in fact hide a synchronistic sovereignty, a wholism achieved through inclusive exclusion by the exceptional will of God.
While arguing that Agamben's philosophy is not as available to theology as Eikelboom suggests, I do not mean to imply that she has simply misunderstood Agamben or his relevance to her project. She is an excellent interpreter of his more theological concepts, most notably the kairos, or “messianic time” in which new rhythms emerge and human action becomes decisive. Her own notion of diachronicity helps elucidate this difficult idea. This connection is enriched by understanding that Agamben also understands kairos as “the time that it takes for time to end,” or the diachronic experience of “penultimate things” before the synchronic event of the parousia. In these ways, Agamben’s work further supports Eikelboom’s own approach to eschatology.
There is also more to be said about her juxtaposition of Agamben and Przywara. Both thinkers propose a rhythmic understanding of boundaries and limitations that may transform the theological landscape around another of Agamben’s concerns: the place of law in Christian self-understanding, and the possibilities it furnishes for human politics. For Agamben, the law is the ultimate technology of sovereignty; it is the incarnate engine of inclusion and exclusion. Christianity introduces a messianic potential into the law by rendering it inoperative and subordinating it to the form of life inaugurated by Christ. While Agamben can only affirm the “abolition” of the law by Christ and not its fulfillment (Matthew 5:17), Eikelboom’s bridge from Agamben to Przywara via the category of rhythm furnishes theology with new opportunities to describe Christian obedience in non-juridical, non-heteronomous ways that distance God-in-Christ from the logics of sovereignty that still haunt the Christian tradition.
Grant Wood Fall Plowing
Again, these are not blindspots, but avenues for development. I cannot ask these questions without the foundations laid by this excellent and inaugural work. Eikelboom's research has great potential to impact contemporary theology for the better, using rhythm to rediscover (and reclaim) its “messianic” potential for addressing the world.
But let that be secondary. This book teaches, first and foremost, that speaking of God’s rhythm—and of God as rhythm—matters. And it matters most because the “routines and variations” that Eikelboom describes are, at bedrock, the ways in which we seek simple “health, happiness, and productivity.” Her work argues, in a new way, that theology always begins from these most ordinary places, driving us deeper into such moments instead of out and away from them. As I sway my newborn in the dark, where rhythm is all he knows and all I can feel, God is present in bending knees, flailing arms and broken sleep, and I live in the time that it takes for night to end. Eikelboom teaches me to trust that these interruptions, eternal as they seem, are the caesurae and line breaks proper to a poem— a poem we will recognize as such only when it ends, its bounds enclosed, ourselves bound to it, rhythmed and released into ever new forms of life.