Everyone agrees that theology has failed; but the question of how to
understand and respond to this failure is complex and contested.
Against both the radical orthodox attempt to return to a time before
the theology’s failure and the deconstructive theological attempt
to open theology up to the hope of a future beyond failure, Rose
proposes an account of Christian identity as constituted by, not
despite, failure. Understanding failure as central to theology opens
up new possibilities for confronting Christianity’s violent and
kyriarchal history and abandoning the attempt to discover a pure
Christ outside of the grotesque materiality of the church.
The Christian
mystical tradition begins with Dionysius the Areopagite’s
uncomfortable but productive conjunction of Christian theology and
Neoplatonism. The tensions generated by this are central to
Dionysius’s legacy, visible not only in subsequent theological
thought but also in much twentieth century continental philosophy as
it seeks to disentangle itself from its Christian ancestry. A
Theology of Failure shows how the work of Slavoj Žižek
represents an attempt to repeat the original move of Christian
mystical theology, bringing together the themes of language, desire,
and transcendence not with Neoplatonism but with a materialist
account of the world. Tracing these themes through the work of
Dionysius and Derrida and through contemporary debates about the
gift, violence, and revolution, this book offers a critical
theological engagement with Žižek's account of social and political
transformation, showing how Žižek's work makes possible a
materialist reading of apophatic theology and Christian identity.