WHAT IF postmodernism is true & Christianity false - doomed to nihilistic Fascism ?

David Bentley Hart surveys the various strains of postmodernism, where the unity of being is severed from goodness and beauty, either as brute difference and flux which one can joyously embrace or dismally retreat from, or the world as some deformed ideal as a veil for some more true and real sublime, and this is what he says we can expect if we affirm a postmodern narrative, in Beauty of the Infinite he writes :


"Nietzschean" moralism is a sad absurdity. True, Nietzsche himself would have found the Nazis vulgar, and he denounced fashionable anti-Semitism in his day, but there is no way within the Nietzschean narrative to prevent a renarration of the Reich's mass-murders as merely careless acts of Aryan exuberance, not resentful but affirmative, natural gestures, a bit of playful aquiline depredation; and similarly, while Deleuze and Foucault may resist collective expressions of power, it is difficult to see why they should, as only a Kantian transcendental subject (that is, one that has not been serialized) needs to be saved from flowing into greater expressions of force. The longing for an impossible freedom - the dream of a flight to the exteriority of nomadic migrations or to the interiority of self-creation - remains as a governing pathos, although it is obviously nothing but a metaphysical nostalgia.

.....it is questionable whether a pure affirmation can ever fail to culminate in one or another of the more robust and pitiless nihilisms unless its inner premises are in fact theological: because only the affirmation that actually creates transcendently is capable of setting difference free without burden, without negation, without reaction; only God's "It is very good" can give difference in the pure positivity of its being: because here affirmation and creation are one. 

This permits something like eschatological or metaphysical irony to govern the enthusiasm of affirmation: affirmation made in accord with an infinite transcendence, bound by no necessity to the world's mechanisms, can be made of the entirety of being without ever becoming a justification for whatever is simply ply the case; it is a pure affirmation that nonetheless can judge violence and cruelty not by negation, reaction, or mere moral sensibility, but by the same absolute solute creativity that gives the world freely. From the Christian point of view, infinite perspectives of affirmation open up: not merely perspectives from which catechetically to mimic the divine approbation, but vantages from which different appropriations of it may proceed analogously, through a sharing in God's infinite embrace of creation and through a repetition in thought, word, and deed of the original divine gesture of love.

For only if being is freed from its subordination to the violence of the sacred and the "natural," and received as a gift of the transcendent (and so impossible to contain within any circle of the Same); and only if the other is also received as a gift, seen within the light of being as one who must be, and one with whom I wish to share yet more being; then is morality possible, not only as injunction, but as a desire that wakens me to something more than subjectivity."

Probably the greatest example of someone trying to wrest an ethical stance from postmodernism is Levinas, Hart writes on his "ethical sublime" :

"The ethical sublime, or the discourse of the unrepresentable when a more genuinely Kantian vein has been struck. For Levinas the place of the unrepresentable is occupied not by "being," "chaos," or "differance,"but by the "Other." That which defies presence and representation, that which stands over against what we can grasp within the horizons of our habitual universe of thought and action, that which is sublimely true is the otherness of the other, the alterity that always precedes and escapes the intentionality by which we compose a world according to our own capacities."

However Hart notes,

“….if presence and beauty cannot coincide, if the possibility of joy in the other is not also the possibility of ethics, if hunger for the visible cannot also become a hunger for the good, then blindness and alien sublimity must be the (irrational) context of the ethical. In fine, if ethics is pure disinterest, then the good cannot appear as being or phenomenon, or anywhere where within the realm of the "theoretical"; but this simply means that disinterest is the wrong formula for the ethical. What, after all, is really more disruptive of simple self-possession, persecution or joy? Joy feeds on what it receives, but rarely on what it establishes; it is a true wakefulness to what I do not ever already ready possess, and it requires a continuity between what evokes and what is evoked, an analogy that places itself in me."

Finally Hart concludes,

"Moreover, from the theological vantage, postmodern discourse compounds the issue with its own violences: its tale of being as a cosmic agon, principally, and all the strange ways it recapitulates the evils it denounces: the way in which Deleuze and Guattari, attempting to describe the living of a nonfascist life, reinvent the nihilistic aesthetics of Marinetti or Jiinger, or in which Lyotard and Derrida unreflectively revert to a classical liberal narrative of difference whose only real embodiment must be an imposition of certain Western prejudices regarding the limits of meaningful discourse upon all other narratives, or in which Foucault succumbs to his own narrative of power so thoroughly that the only political hope he can enunciate is the rescue of autonomous arbitrary will from collective arbitrary will (which, by his own account, is really impossible), or in which all of them repeat without fail a narrative of being wherein the ethical occurs as an inexplicable nostalgia, and whereby either fascism, unrestrained capitalism, or Stalinism might be just as plausibly advanced.

Nor does the postmodern escape the tendency to fashion its own analogy of cosmos, city, and soul: the image of being as force makes political arrangements first and foremost a confluence of powers, not really a possible grammar of accords, and the freedom of the self power unleashed; the univocity of being is an image that portrays difference formally, through the inanition of differential content, and so - by refusing to allow any analogical disruptions of the plane of immanence - inevitably arranges being homogenously, as formally uniform instances of punctiliar difference which must be governed as equally inviolable and equally dangerous quanta of force (that is, as conceived as a coincidence of individual forces of will is always one or another kind of homogenizing police state, in ways it would require a Foucaultian acuity to enumerate).

Theology can take nothing from either approach to "ethics": it cannot relinquish its faith in the goodness of being, or embrace the magical thinking that supposes that there is such a thing as a singular event that obliges apart from the thematizations of creeds and traditions; as it cannot accept the division between being and the good.

The desire to limit violence by surrendering being univocally to the testimony of history, without analogical or eschatological tension, is one that has conceded violence an ontological primacy (and the ethical, as a purely voluntarist response to this violence, is contingent on cultural and political forces it would be quixotic to imagine any discourse of reason or restraint could control)."