Anti-Event: A Case for Inconspicuousness in Religious Experience

Abstract

It generally goes assumed that philosophical movements provide the fundamental inspiration and content for new theological reflection. Yet it also is the case that some philosophical concepts are secularized Christian theological concepts. Contemporary »postmodern« philosophy, for example, holds to the idea of »the event« as essential to its parting ways with the Modern philosophical tradition; an idea that is strikingly similar to how individual experiences of »revelation« have been understood in the Christian tradition, both as a personal and political phenomenon/phenomenality. Further, remaining unreflectively and theoretically beholden to the idea of the event may actually entail falling into its more negative form, the »spectacle«. By calling into question some of the negative potentials that clinging to such a notion could pose, this paper proposes a developed notion of »inconspicuous« as a means of countering such negative potentials. It engages the work of Heidegger, Debord, Janicaud and others in order to provide another angle by which it is possible to interpret the by now well-known »Theological Turn in French Phenomenology«. If over-reliance upon the concept of »the event« may fall prey to overemphasizing the outsourcing of imagination to a third party so that an agent might benefit from the novelty of surprise, difference, and newness, then both theological and philosophical engagements with »the event« run the risk also of becoming a »spectacle«.