- Title
- Beyond absolutism: conversations with Karl Barth over the reforming of enlightenment subjectivity in judgement
- Creator
- Kirkland, Scott A.
- Relation
- University of Newcastle Research Higher Degree Thesis
- Resource Type
- thesis
- Date
- 2014
- Description
- Research Doctorate - Doctor of Philosophy (PhD)
- Description
- This thesis reads Karl Barth’s work as being concerned with the healing of the Enlightenment ‘absolute’ subject, manifesting itself both in the individual subject, and politically in the formation of the modern nation state. The ‘turn to the subject’ is indicative for Barth of the turn to forms of contractual political relation that inevitably absolutise ideological agendas in their failure to be attentive to their own fragility and particularity by virtue of the structuring of power as possession. The dominant reading of Barth at present is concerned to locate him within a Kantian epistemic frame of reference; this thesis challenges this reading by locating him as respondent, from the outset of his Church Dogmatics, to the problem of German Idealism’s framing of subjectivity. Not only this, it sees locating Barth within this Kantian tradition as deeply problematic in the way it structures consciousness prior to the event of revelation. Consequently, Barth’s dislocation of persona in favour of Seinsweise is seen not as a move toward absolutising the subject, but as a generalised way of unsettling the stability of the Idealist subject. In speaking of a singular subject in three ‘modes’ he reframes the relation between known and knower, subject and object. By the grounding revelation in the doctrine of the Trinity, the subject’s knowing is located in a divine work of dispossessive judgement. Reading Barth’s doctrine of reconciliation we can see his intense interest in themes of judgement and dispossession coming to give shape to an account of the subject refigured in the Christ event. Donald MacKinnon’s interrogative Christological reflections serve to illuminate Barth’s critical project by providing conversation within the kenotic traditions. It is as the grammar of God is moved away from an abstract theism toward the concrete particularity of the incarnation that language of both the subject and God are unsettled by Christ’s death and resurrection. MacKinnon provides a window into a reading of kenosis that need not fall into the problems of revisionist readings of Barth’s doctrine of election and its ontological consequence. We find in Barth a form of dispossessive knowing that radically challenges the individuated ‘I’ of the absolute subject by re-ordering speech about God in attention to concrete historicity. Christ cannot be abstracted from his historical particularity, and yet we must find ways of speaking of the communication of the Gestalt of Christ’s life to us. Fyodor Dostoyevsky’s literary art serves to dramatise the ways narrative and history function as the theatre for the formation of the subject in dialogical action. This forms an implicit theology of divine presence in history that embraces the tensive relation between a particular historical locale as the site of divine self-disclosure and the historical as constituted by this event. It is Barth’s construal of the Spirit that is critical for the healing of the absolute subject, for it is the Spirit who drives us back into attention to ethical performance that is responsive to the object of theological inquiry in creative ways. It is in the Spirit that we are dispossessed of our subjectivity as we return again and again to the judgement of God.
- Subject
- Karl Barth; Donald MacKinnon; Gillian Rose; Fyodor M. Dostoevsky; judgement; theology; subjectivity; enlightened absolutism; conversation
- Identifier
- http://hdl.handle.net/1959.13/1045175
- Identifier
- uon:14425
- Rights
- Copyright 2014 Scott A. Kirkland
- Language
- eng
- Full Text
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