I had lunch with James Burton at the conference and talked Exegesis, and enjoyed his talk. His work looks very promising. I couldn't agree more about the emphasis on Bergson and Paul, the political dimension of Dick's religious thought, and the central important of fictionalizing. Look forward to his book on SF and Salvation!
Machines Making Gods
Philip K. Dick, Henri Bergson and Saint Paul
Abstract
This article addresses shared themes in
the writing of Saint Paul and the work of the science fiction writer
Philip K. Dick.
Much recent philosophical interest in Saint Paul
focuses on his contemporary significance as a radical political thinker,
following Jacob Taubes' influential late work, The Political Theology of Paul.
Assessments of Paul's writing in this context (e.g. by Agamben, Badiou,
Milbank) highlight the various ways in which he
uses fictionalizing, for example in setting up the
tension between the present world and a messianic future, in the role he
assigns to faith, and in the importance he assigns
to the counter-factuality of resurrection. Yet the common thread of
fictionalizing
running through these themes has not been
explicitly discussed. Meanwhile, the supposed `religious turn' in Dick's
late writing
has often been taken to have less political
significance than his earlier science fiction. Considering Paul
alongside Philip
K. Dick, this article will attempt to bring out
this central role of fictionalizing in the religious experiences of
both.
Like Paul, Dick experienced a visionary encounter
with a God-like entity that shaped his interests and writing for the
remainder
of his life, and developed his own soteriology in
response to what he perceived as the continued existence of (the Roman)
Empire in modernity. Bringing out the mutual
complementarity of Dick and Paul is facilitated by a framework derived
from Henri
Bergson's Two Sources of Religion, which
theorizes the relation between mechanization as a human tendency
characterizing both imperialism and industrialization,
and fabulation as a human faculty for using fiction
for the jointly immanent-transcendent purposes of survival/salvation.
In this context, the diverse modes of
fictionalizing employed by both Dick and Paul, including their
unconsciously produced
visions, may be understood as part of an ongoing,
continually renewed strategy of revolutionary transformation of both
self
and world.
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