Daniel Barber, On Diaspora: Christianity, Religion, and Secularity.

Eugene, OR: Cascade

Books, 2011. 155 pp. $20.00. ISBN 978-1-60899-400-7 (pbk).
A major task of political theology amid the discussion on the relation between secularity
and religion is to interrogate the function and meaning of Christianity as a discursive
tradition, in both historical and contemporaneous terms. However, there are many ways
into this questionand not many ways out. Daniel Barber proposes an original approach to
both in On Diaspora, wherein he retheorizes these three termsChristianity, religion, and
the secularityas concepts to be disassembled and rethought by diaspora. Barber maintains
that the central difculty facing theologies today is the relationship of identity to
differenceor differentiality. Rather than reiterating identitarian competition and dispute,
Barber constructs an ambitious theory of diaspora, so as to energize the problematic
operation within Christianitys properly differential form. Diaspora, contends Barber,
explicates the differential constitution at the theoretical heart of Christianity, which also
composes its relation with religion and secularity. Diaspora, however, is more than a
heuristic; it is a normative articulation of an alternative style of theological thinking. One
might assume this includes political action, but Barber is silent on this.
Immanence is central to Barbers theorization of diaspora. Eager to disqualify the retreat
to a transcendent beyond as the default response to diasporic differentiality and
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inconsistency, Barber turns to Baruch Spinozas naturalization of theology which identies
cause and effect as existing and operating on the same place: The cause is not prior to its
effects, for its essence is affected by what it effects; the cause is constituted by its effects (2).
Diaspora modies immanence insofar as immanence puts into play a reciprocal relay
between namelessness and excessive signication (xi), which likewise characterizes
diaspora. This relay identies an exteriority of surplus as the site of diaspora, the substance
of which is unnamable, but is necessarily given ctive expression. It avoids muteness and
taciturnity by breaking the world from the beyond or below of being itself by the
apocalyptic movement relay of ctive excess and apophatic refusal, which is properly
immanent.
Barber proceeds with diasporic readings of particularity, identity, world, chaos, and
difference, all of which structure his rather original take on the relation of the secular to
religion and to Christianity, specically. Diaspora disarticulates or decomposes the
boundaried modality of consistent identities and creatively shifts Christianity in the novel
recomposition of differential forms so as to pose problems to the world by challenging its
ontology. This foregrounds the differentialities that make Christianity, religion, and
secularity inherently inconsistent. This promotes an interparticularity that deterrorializes
identity and afrms the other without absorbing it. A diasporic Christianity does not resolve
its intrinsic inconsistencies but leverages them to create alternative possibilities for all
thought forms in the contemporary world. Barber investigates the relational sites between
and within Christianity, secularity, and religion by employing diaspora as a kind of critical
theory, whereby they are interpreted as mutually dominative resolutions to the
differentialities that disembed it from identitarian forms.
Holding open the possibility of something altogether novel, a diasporic Christianity
refuses to seek after a forgotten or neglected core, which if marshaled would return
Christianity from its apocryphal history to its original authenticity. Diaspora animates the
problematic form of Christianity that actively antagonizes the world as it is, calling
attention to its mode of domination. In this way, Christianity proceeds in the world as a
problematic horizon, it declares its content, and in doing so problematizes the world as it is
presently given (38). It does this problematic style of work through a transversal process of
decomposition and recomposition of variant identity elements. What Christianity means
can only be determined in-between. It is not its own thing set apart from, say, Judaism or
secularism, but rather is an immanently displaced relation that recongures itself apart
from the borders of its others. Barber expands this differential form of the Christian to
both the concepts of religion and the secular in order to develop a rather full theory of
intrinsic inconsistency, or the differentiality of differentialities, for which diaspora is
indispensable.
There is no question about the strength of Barbers thesis, or of the depth or quality of
scholarship he displays. He moves deftly from Spinoza, to Deleuze, to Boyarin, to Yoder,
and back to Spinoza, exegeting them all with fair nuance and skillful ease. His choice to
base his argument on broadly Jewish voices in this project will be of particular interest to
readers keen to discover the import of his project on Jewish-Christian relations, a matter
that Barber himself takes up in some detail. His novel theorization of the immanent, the
apocalyptic, and the diasporic opens new conceptual spaces for political theologies,
especially post-secular debates about political subjectivity amidst religious pluralism. Yet,
even though Barber does the very important work of theorizing the concept of diaspora and
applying it to understandings of Christianity in relation to both secularity and religion, his
descriptive account of diaspora is, in some ways, incomplete, and so, insufcient. This may
stem from the fact that Barber is thoroughly conceptual, and not explicitly historical or
political. Indeed, the argument seems to be disconnected from and uninformed by actual
experiences of diasporic peoples and their narratives and traditions. His notion of diaspora
seems funded by primarily, if not exclusively, North American and Continental intellectual
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traditions, and is quite untouched by any concrete accounts of being diasporic, such as one
might nd within postcolonial, or even rabbinic, literature. Since Barber is silent about the
particular history of African, Asian, and even Jewish diasporas, he misses, in my opinion,
the rich resources that these diverse experiences bring to understanding what diaspora
means for theology and religious studies today. To be sure, Barber does us all a great favor
in bringing to our collective attention the conceptual signicance of diaspora; perhaps it is
our work to apply his insights more specically to theological issues and political contexts.
SILAS MORGAN
Loyola University Chicago, IL
smorgan2@luc.edu
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