Secularization as Kenosis

secularization as kenosis | 211
secularization in history, that is said to reflect a genuine appreciation of historical contingency.
The focus on secularization as a phase in the history of Being makes Vattimo
vulnerable to yet another teleological account of Being. I understand his suspicion of
the Jewish tradition to be a consequence of this teleological bias of Vattimo’s theory, in
which the specific Judeo-Christian understanding of history dissolves.
The implications of Vattimo’s philosophy of secularization for the way man relates
to the world are unsatisfactory in one more way. Vattimo reproaches the theologians of
alterity and negative theology for failing to conceptualize a meaningful relation of God
and world. This may be so, but Vattimo’s model of kenosis in the end gives up on the
world as well, as it is identified with a free play of simulacra and interpretations and
Vattimo proposes giving up the very principle of reality. It seems as if Vattimo, in trying
to avoid a theological objectivism, ends up in a radical subjectivism and that both are
unable to give a satisfactory account of man and world.
5.4 heterotopian politics.
From his thesis of the weakening of Being, Vattimo draws far-reaching conclusions for
the design of a postmodern culture. A weakening of truth leads to a culture in which the
traditional hierarchies give way to a more horizontal structuring of society. A society
of generalized communication is in this sense a sign of the times, that Being is now
becoming more and more immanent. Value is no longer thought of as hierarchically
ordered, but the values that are expressed in culture are endlessly translatable into other
idioms there is only exchange value. 178 Vattimo interprets the philosophical systems
of existentialism and humanistic Marxism as attempts to resist the accomplishment of
nihilism as the reduction of Being to exchange value. In a similar vein he criticizes
forms of Geisteswissenschaften and Wittgensteinian philosophy as marked by a ‘pathos
of authenticity’, that try to save some domains from exchange value: to mark out a
domain in which we meet something of Being itself. Vattimo interprets this as resistance
of nihilism and pleads in favour of an experience beyond these dualities.
Like no other philosopher today, Gianni Vattimo is aware of the political and social
context in which philosophical ideas echo. His ideas were formed initially by his
confrontation with the revolutionary left in Italy in the Nineteen-Sixties. His initial
political concerns show a resistance against the metaphysical nature of leftist ideology
(socialism and communism). Vattimo welcomed postmodernism as the liberation of
the metaphysical preoccupation of leftist thought. Subsequently, however, he realized
that the downfall of communism and socialism after 1989 created a standoff with regard
to the identity of Western democracies. The resurgence of religion in contemporary
culture is – at least partly – a consequence of this ideological vacuum. Religion in postmodern
society can once again be a possible guide for the future. 179 Notes from his
period as a member of the European Parliament – published in Wie werde ich Kommunist
– make clear that Gianni Vattimo a ‘renewed communism’ as the best answer to the
178 “In a world of generalized exchange value all is given . . . as narration or récit. Essentially this narration
is articulated by the mass media, which are inextricably intertwined with the tradition of messages
that language brings to us from the past and from other cultures: the mass media thus represent not just an
ideological perversion, but rather a vertiginous form of this same tradition.” Vattimo, End of Modernity, 27.
179 Gianni Vattimo, ‘After onto-theology: philosophy between science and religion’, in: Mark Wrathall,
editor, Religion after Metaphysics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 29–30.