1/ Eric Voegelin’s short essay of 1960, 'Ersatz Religion: The Gnostic Mass Movements of our Time', remains a crucial text for our understanding of contemporary political ideology and political theology. 2/ As he doe throughout his work, Voegelin deploys what he calls an 'Aristotelian method' to put before our eyes a ‘historical phenomenon’, only then proceeding to analysis and definition (p.61).

1. I'm attempting an (initially non-theological) definition of the idea "non-identical repetition".

Grateful for any immediate responses, including about potential lack of clarity, whether you're familiar with the term or not. Does what follows make some kind of sense? Thanks. 2. Non-identical repetition, in simple terms, might be taken as containing two core propositions, both of which might seem rather obvious and intuitive.

1. Deleuze was a great thinker, but his concept of difference does not quite attain to what I believe to be the proper understanding of metaphysics as "non-identical repetition". 2. For Deleuze avers that all that is repeated is Being itself, taken as univocal, such that for him there is only a single immanent totality (albeit in ceaseless flux).

1. The tenth chapter of Bruno Latour's "After Lockdown" (2022) addresses the human body and its materiality. This is a rare topic for Latour, but was inspired (as he himself says) by his own experience of pancreatic cancer and its difficult treatment towards the end of his life.
2. Latour recounts visits to specialists in hospital. Procedures, tests and analyses were gathered to generate a medicalised database of his personal health history: it felt to him that these were establishing "a map based rather superficially on the territory of a body".

1. One alarming feature of Trump’s rhetoric on Greenland, etc, is the way it presages a bastardisation of the political concept of the “border”. Trump leads us towards a Schmittian notion of a “nomos”, but without being undergirded by a civilisational ethic of “love”. 2. This can be contrasted with the understanding of "borders" advanced in Catholic Social Teaching. In Fratelli Tutti, for example, Francis makes clear that the future is not tied to the nation-state per se, and certainly not to any form of nationalism (which is never Christian).

1. In the Catholic world, there is often misunderstanding of the relationship between the traditional social teaching concept of “the common good”, on the one hand, and the vision of “integral ecology” more recently advanced by Pope Francis, on the other. These are not the same. 2. The "common good", as explored in the Catholic Social Teaching tradition, is closely aligned to a definition of human dignity that leads to arguments for human rights and solidarity with the most vulnerable human communities in our world.

1. A short thread on Joseph Conrad’s wonderful late novella, “The Shadow-Line”, written in 1915, including historical, psychologising and metaphysical readings of this important text.
2. In this story, Conrad draws on his own experience as commander of the Otago in 1888. The genesis for the story itself dates to 1899, when Conrad had in mind a story titled “First Command,” a possible follow-up to “Youth” (1898).
(for background: ) nzgeo.com/stories/joseph…

1. In one interesting, controversial and yet little-known essay, René Girard applies his theory to an understanding of the phenomenon of eating disorders: ‘Anorexia and Mimetic Desire’ (2013, from a 1996 lecture). A thread.
2. Why can Girard speak diagnostically on this topic? On the basis of his theory about human desire. For Girard, desire is never a function of an autonomous subject. Rather, it is generated by a pre-conscious psychological formatting that he calls ‘mimetic’.

1. One of my favourite scholarly books of the last few years has been Gary Dorrien’s "Social Democracy in the Making: Political and Religious Roots of European Socialism". I have learnt a lot from it. A short thread. 2. Dorrien argues for democratic socialism as “the ethical passion for social justice and radical democratic community […] conceiving democracy in terms of character of relationships in a society, not mere voting rights” (p.4).

1. I love the @DisorderShow podcast and have greatly appreciated thinking about contemporary geopolitics through this prism. But, if I may, I have a question about the concept of “order” itself.
@alexhallhall and @JasonPackLibya 2. Is there a risk that the term itself - including all its historical and lexical baggage - risks re-baptising a sense of exceptionalism and hegemony that (I know) at heart you seek to critique and overturn?

1. For those Vance-inspired American nationalists trying to claim an intellectual mandate from René Girard, I would suggest a careful reading of “Achever Clausewitz” (2011) - trans "Battling to the End" - in relation to political theology and the concept of apocalypse. A short 🧵 2. In this text Girard argues that world history is an admixture of progress and regression. And that we must live humbly in the midst of, not as "masters" of this trajectory. The metaxy is key here.

1. I’ve been meaning for a while to comment on an important article published in @NewLeftReview earlier this year by @docteur_en_rien entitled “Reactionary Ecology”. Let’s see if I can gather some thoughts now, even if this is somewhat inchoate.
newleftreview.org/sidecar/posts/… 2. To begin with, I’m glad this sort of discussion can be held. With feisty polemic, it correctly identifies how the recent book - "On the Emergence of an Ecological Class" by Bruno Latour & Nikolaj Schultz - enacts an orthogonal redirection of Marxist political economy tropes.

1. Throughout his work Bruno Latour offers a critique not just of “modernity”, but also of “secular modernity” - in particular the claim of the secular to provide a structure within which all human ideologies are able to flourish equally.



2. Fundamental to secularism is its claim to provide a neutral or non-aligned space within which human existence can be creatively and independently pursued. Latour challenges this claim, proposing that secularism must be understood as itself having the form of an ideology.

1. What is agro-ecology? Its techniques may seem niche to those of us who are not "farmers", but the idea of applying ecological systems principles to food production is relevant to us all. Moreover, it has important connections to culture, social movements and even religion. 2. With this in mind, it was a delight to host a conversation earlier this week on "agro-ecology" as part of the new 'Integral Ecology Dialogues' series at @LSRIOxford @CampionOxf. With scholars and practitioners Norman Wirzba, Jenny Howell, Matthew Whelan and Austen Ivereigh.

1. Although we can approach it via history, politics, IR, theology or social science, at the heart of Eric Voegelin’s intellectual project is his Philosophy of Consciousness. This is abstract, abstruse and difficult. But essential if we are to understand what he is saying. 2. Voegelin’s philosophy of consciousness enables him to analyse "symbolizations", that is, how humans have depicted their encounters with “the ground of being” over time. These symbols change and evolve of course, and may be more of less faithful to the original experience.

1. On Christmas Eve 1968, the Apollo 8 mission was in orbit around the moon. The crew comprised three American astronauts: Frank Borman, James Lovell and Bill Anders. 2. Over the course of three orbits, these men gazed down at the lunar surface through their capsule’s tiny windows as they carried out the observations prescribed for almost every minute of this tightly-planned and tightly-controlled mission.

1. Jospeh Conrad's "Nostromo" (1904) grew from a projected short-story into his longest novel. The composition was, even by Conrad’s standards, a ghastly ordeal: “I see nothing, I read nothing. It is like a kind of tomb which is also hell where one must write, write, write.”

2. Nevertheless, the narratival machinery is extraordinary, the plot beginning 'in medias res' and subsequently revealing itself through a series of flashbacks and metadiegetic retellings.

1. A brief thread on a possible literary influence on Kierkegaard’s understanding of Sin: 2. Kierkegaard often spoke of leaving his home and immersing himself in a ‘people bath’ in the streets of Copenhagen.

1. The late work of French philosopher Michel Serres was attuned in important ways to contemporary philosophy of religion/ theological metaphysics, esp its understanding of what constitutes a responsible religious "retrieval": tradition, renovation, non-identical repetition, etc.



2. In his very late work, "Religion: Re-reading what is Bound Together", for example, Serres seeks to go beyond historicist approaches that seek to undermine religion by appeal to "the mere facts" of history and by noting the problem of transmission of these into the present.

1. In his final book “Religion: Rereading what is bound together” Michel Serres offers his understanding of religion as a “hot spot”. For him, religion experience is a point of eruption out of the vertical matrix that goes from the heavenly to the chthonic/ earthly. 2. For Serres the power of religion is thus to be a connector. Religion indexes at the same time to “the universal and the singular, the global and the local". It is "an infinite immensity and a finite pinpoint, between the virtual and the real, the absent and the present” (p.41)

1/ I think this short article by Bruno Latour is an excellent precis of why his entire system of thought should be called “Gaian” and how this can even be considered as having the status of a new metaphysics.
lareviewofbooks.org/article/bruno-…
2/ What is the value of the Gaia concept for Latour?
His answer: “with the Gaia theory one can grasp the “power to act” of all the jumbled-up organisms without immediately integrating them into a unity that is superior to them and which they obey”.