Just started reading a fun new book and I think I'm in love. Mary-Jane Rubenstein works at the intersection of debates about science and religion, gender, theology and history of ideas but that doesn't begin to describe the remarkable synthesis of this book. Its topic is "pantheism," the abject of western tradition, maligned and vilified and yet, she shows, always present. Not that there's any consensus on what pantheism is, perhaps because it's defined as the monstrous and creative refusal to accept the distinctions on which western tradition is built - distinctions she shows are always gendered and racialized, and which have served to deny and repress the mystery and fecundity of an animate and pluralistic world. As variously denigrated communities have done with terms like "queer," "hag," "Obamacare," and "the big bang," the aim here is to reappropriate and mobilize a ridiculed position to disrupt the very order that finds it so revolting. (32)
This means starting with the "panic" (one of a panoply of Pan-related terms invited to the dance) which the idea of identifying God and the world has caused western thinkers over the centuries. This frenzy of rejection conceals a horror of multiplicity, mixture, indeterminacy - life! - and is articulated with dreary consistency in deadening hierarchies, distinguishing divinity - which is theistically encoded as immaterial, strictly active, anthropomorphic, light-soaked, and male - [from] matter, understood as passive, amorphous, dark, and feminine. (47) Yet Rubenstein's purpose isn't to liberate the world from the wielders of God-language but to rescue God, too, from the oppressive imaginations of the past. One past: as she shows the narrowness of the tradition she discovers new possibilities within it.
It's dazzling, the kind of work, I sense, which can change your life.
