Court on Crowley Redux

I've sort of said most of this already, but I'll reiterate and make it more to the points brought up in other posts:

I must have missed something--which isn't hard since 1) Crowley digresses more than I do; and 2) I digress quite a bit, both in speaking/writing and reading. But I didn't see where Crowley either positioned herself above the fray or even hinted that she intended to be objective. On the contrary, she states quite plainly in the Preface that she's doing a hatchet job of sorts, because she feels that Christian fundamentalism is a threat to democracy: "...the more I study apocalypticism, the more intense becomes my desire not only to dissent from it but to warn others of the ideological dangers it poses to democracy" (ix). Crowley doesn't, in my opinion (though that opinion is admittedly not as invested as others), make broad claims against all Christians, but rather is concerned with those who have sought to reconstitute the role of faith in politics--to merge the private with the public (separation of church and state being a fundamental precept of the Constitution, along with the religious tolerance and inclusion that follow).

Crowley's project, as best as I can see so far (and as best as I can summarize it), is to demonstrate why she believes that fundamentalist (and/or apocalyptic) Christianity has become a dominant hegemony in the U.S. and a challenge to the competing "default" hegemony of liberalism; and that the values inherent to liberalism--"freedom, tolerance, privacy, reason, and the rule of law" (5)--"double" as values inherent to democracy, she feels the challenge must be engaged. Crowley feels that liberal rhetoric is ill-suited to engage fundamentalist Christianity, however--or rather, stasis between liberalism and Christian fundamentalism can not be met, or rather that a reformulated rhetorical theory, one that marries a postmodern orientation with rhetorical strategies--both modern and ancient--is better-suited for engaging the new hegemony.

Rather than being "above the fray," I think Crowley's trying to reconstitute the fray--to bring it into stasis--through her own articulation of the fundamental (and fundamentalist) positions--on both sides. She wants to break down the binary, but she also feels that *fundamentalist* Christianity is a real threat to democracy--because it challenges representative deliberation, privileges the collective over the individual, operates through coercion, and does not allow for tolerance or pluralism (again, this is fundamentalist Christianity--and I would posit one can say the same about fundamentalist Islam, etc.). So she's invested in critiquing fundamentalist Christianity, whereas liberalism is merely "exhausted" (my word--or rather, Lyotard's--but not Crowley's).

To maybe bridge the divide that has seemingly crept in even here, I'd like to make an aside. Kevin mentions how Crowley easily could have turned to the poststructuralists she later uses (Derrida, Foucault, Said) instead of Mouffe in her discussion of identity and "the Other"--I had a similar reaction, only the name that came to mind for me was Emmanuel Levinas (his name is absent in Crowley, as far as I can tell--quite a surprise considering how many other names appear). Just to historically orient those who aren't familiar, in the long line of philosophical "begetting" (Nietzshe and Marx beget Althusser and Heidegger; Althusser and Heidegger beget Foucault and Derrida; Foucault and Derrida beget Said and Butler), Levinas fits snuggly between the generation of Althusser/Heidegger and that of Foucault/Derrida. Levinas was fairly influential, himself, in formulating "L'Autre," the modern concept of the radical Other in constituting the Self. Levinas felt that the Other's presence is what articulates one's own ethical role in the world. In "Totality and Infinity" he posits that "L'Autre precisely reveals himself in his alterity, not in a shock negating the Same [the Self], but as the primordial phenomenon of *gentillesse* ["tranquility" or "gentleness"]." This encounter with the Other in alterity (otherness encountered in a binary) articulates for the Same, the Self--even before one can formulate a response--a demand by the Other for engagement, for affirmation or denial. One has a sense of immediate ethical obligation to the Other. It might be interesting--in terms of bridging the divide between theology and postmodernism--tp make a connection between Levinas' ethical position and Crowley's position on rhetoric, that "minimally it requires an advocate to recognize that an opponent has a position on the issue at hand..." (29). (It might be interesting to note, too, that Levinas articulated God as "the inifinite Other").