Thacker, Eugene. After Life.

Weigel, Peter

THACKER, Eugene. After Life. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010. xvi + 295 pp. Paper, $29.00--Can one offer a coherent ontology of life, in all its variegated phenomena? "Life," Thacker believes, emerges as a "troubling and contradictory concept" and "yet is everywhere at stake." After Life investigates and tries to deconstruct certain philosophical and theological accounts of life. The author suggests a tripartite division of historical approaches: (1) life conceived in relation to time, as what becomes, changes, and passes; (2) life as form, in what causes and organizes life, including the divine Life itself; and (3) life as pantheistic spirit in its immanent, omnipresent guises.

Chapter 1 probes Aristotle's search for a common principle of life in living things, namely, the soul (psukhe). First, however, the author canvasses twentieth-century horror stories (for example, H.P. Lovecraft's) for monstrous life forms, which suggest an "unhuman" world, and life being too multivalent for easy conception. Aristotle is seen as caught in "several different contradictions." He must paradoxically explain life through what is nonliving, or if the life principle is itself living, then that principle needs an inner principle of life, and so on to regress. Psukhe is "common across every instance of life," but its notion as a principle of life is left "empty and unexamined" and as an abstraction. Stratification of life in the Great Chain of Being, the author suggests, collapses under such aporia.

This negative outcome parallels, in Chapter 2, a "negative theology" of God as "Superlative Life" running through Plotinus, Pseudo-Dionysius, John Scotus Eriugena, and Scholasticism. Plotinus's One is superlative "life-beyond-life" and beyond thought. Pseudo-Dionysius and Eriugena similarly divide created life from divine, and characterize God's superabundant Life as beyond thought, inviting contrary negations and affirmations. God as superlative Life thus "is ontologized via the logical framework of negative theology." A God "beyond Life" or "after life" can only be thought negatively as "that which is nothing (nihil) precisely because it is superlative," again ending in contradiction. There is then a discussion of Graham Priest's searches for a "paraconsistent" logic beyond worries about contradiction. Aristotle's laws of noncontradiction and excluded middle receive only a sentence each--odd given the work's nose for purported inconsistency and contradiction.

Chapter 3 on "Univocal Creatures" continues exploring God's Life and created life in Aquinas and John Duns Scotus on analogical versus univocal divine predication. Aquinas allows that a term can be analogically predicated "in two qualitatively different kinds of relations." In doing so, the author claims, Aquinas has to consider "relations between relations" which opens onto a regress. How this regress happens is explained in only a few lines. Aquinas' complex theory of divine predication receives three short pages. For Scotus, univocal predication between God and creatures still recognizes their fundamental inequality and difference. Gilles Deleuze, in a closing section, appropriates Scholastic conundrums to "flatten" distinctions among the divine, human, and other living things, segueing to "Dark Pantheism" (Chapter 4).

Life as spirit, the author's third historical division, seeks a continuum running through Life [God] and all living things. Continuity, for the author, yields pantheism, "in effect equating the divine with the earthy," traces of which are already in the "dispersional nature" of life in Eriugena's Periphyseon, in Scotus's penchant for univocal divine predication, and in Nicholas of Cusa's On Learned Ignorance. Spinoza's pantheism and Deleuze's postmodern abolition of "stratifications of human, animal, and divine" complete the reduction of all to raw nature. This is no joyous, affective "hippie pantheism," but only a misanthropic "dark pantheism" leaving a cold, de-anthropomorphized nature.

Chapter 5 briefly charts Kant's struggle articulating a concept of life tied to "the question of order ... as it is related to teleological purpose in nature." There is no well-grounded inference to a supernatural "final end" of living creation, nor can non-teleological mechanism account for nature's laws and organization. This, the author thinks, prefigures sterile modern controversies between bio-materialism and theological mysticism in approaching life.

The work arguably shows difficulties conceiving life in all its rich, multivalent forms. Whether one accepts the stronger, parting conclusion that "a furtive, miasmic unintelligibility ... inhabits any ontology of life," the reader can ponder. Readers should prepare for the studied, iterative density of postmodern academic prose. Experienced scholars of the historical figures involved could find some of the interpretations a bit quick, and similarly with a pre-decided tendency to sweep initial problems or issues into the basket of contradiction and final impasse. Yet, many readers will find the subject matter and approach thought-provoking, and occasioning meditation on difficulties of conceiving an ontology of life, and that in relation to the divine Life.--Peter Weigel, Washington College, Md.