an uncanny way to the trafficking with money that prevails at the most
rarefied—and profitable—levels of the financial markets. Just as successful
dealing with hedge funds produces money and nothing else, so does trading
in theory tend to produce yet more theory and, at most, fleeting academic
prestige: like hedge funds, theories are a volatile business, as shown by the
once-fashionable terms that now litter publications just a few years old. In
theory, as in stocks, timing is everything, as it is crucial to start employing
fashionable terms when they are not yet common property, and even more
crucial to drop them just before they lose their market value—that is to say,
before non-theorists and, even worse, theologians start using them.
The concern with the exploration and display of one’s subjectivity that
characterizes contemporary American culture makes its presence felt in
academic and quasi-academic works by demanding that those works assume
a confessional character. It is not surprising, therefore, that in this age of the
memoir, one finds authors becoming protagonists of their studies, a state of
affairs that would have been unthinkable at the time when authors refused,
at least consciously, to become characters in their texts. This blurring of the
academic and the personal can be seen in works as different as Karen Brown’s
Mama Lola(1991/2001) and Elaine Pagels’ book on the Gospel of Thomas,
Beyond Belief(2003); the former being devoted as much to a narrative of the
author’s travails as to a vodoo priestess in Brooklyn, the latter dealing with
Pagel’s personal losses as well as a late first-century text. The cult of celebrities,
another way in which popular culture makes itself present in the academic
world, is related to the concern with individual agency—or, indeed, with
superhuman agency, one of the key components of religion—as it is the display
of the academic celebrity’s supreme theoretical agency that the academic rank
and file wishes to celebrate. An extreme, but not unique, example of this cult
took place at the 2002 meeting of the American Academy of Religion and the
Society of Biblical Literature, during which three sessions, under the general
heading ‘Reading a Page of Scripture (with a Little Help from Derrida)’, were
devoted to the embodiment of so-called postmodernism. Anyone who has
witnessed the serial infatuations of theologians and theorists with existentialism,
Marxism, phenomenology, and hermeneutics, to mention but a few intellectual
trends, cannot be surprised by the current infatuation with deconstruction/
postmodernism, nor can that hypothetical observer be faulted for wondering
about the identity of the—preferably French, but if need be German or Italian—
European intellectual or quasi-intellectual figures who will lend theologians
and theorists a helping hand in the not too distant future.
Far less amusing, but not unrelated to the current vogue of cultural
relativism, nor to the embrace of turgid ‘postmodern’ speculations about pure
difference, contingency, undecidability, and the like, on the part of some
theologians, is the resurgence of confessional influence on the study of religion.
Such resurgence is made intellectually, or at least academically, respectable246
GUSTAVO BENAVIDES