In an aim to reverse Carl Schmitt's political theology, American radical theologian Jeff Robbins lets the notion of democracy pave the way for a renewed account of theology. ![]() In the course of time, however, Foucault’s critique was to find its way back into theology and today his critique of transcendence is influencing a wide range of theologians. He found a basis not only for developing his groundbreaking method for the study of history, but also for developing his critique of Christian thinking and the Christian idea of a transcendently situated truth. In Kandinskij and the wider non-representational art scene, Foucault found what he had been striving for philosophically. After 1920, Kandinskij’s art approached a geometrization of forms, and with Kandinskij, this trajectory of Russian painting was to become important to French thinker Michel Foucault. If art no longer strove to capture a higher, transcendent truth-would it not finally encourage people to search for the truths of life in this world rather than in heaven? While not affiliated with the movement, Russian painter Wasilij Kandinskij was influenced by Malevitj’s Suprematism. ![]() To that extent, Malevitj’s approach was also highly provocative to the dominating theology of his time. This revolutionary art form turned away from the long-established ideal of art as representing a transcendently situated truth and, instead, elevated the flat canvas and its immanent reality of forms. Leaving behind the representational ideal of painting, Malevitj introduced instead a ”supremacy of forms”, a painting that would let form be form: non-objective and non-representational, related to nothing but its intrinsic geometric shapes and colours. In Moscow in 1913, Kazimir Malevitj (1878-1935) turned the art world around by founding the Suprematist art movement. Moreover, the chapter shows, it is an account of the apophatic that finds a counterpart in Vladimir Lossky's notion of the orthodox way of life as "a tendency towards an ever-greater plentitude, in which knowledge is transformed into ignorance." Hence, it is an approach that involves playful and nonsensical artistic as well as spiritual techniques, aiming beyond the illusory singularity of reason and even beyond the notions of meaning and meaningfulness as such. ![]() It is an account of the apophatic that does not aim to protect the eminent oneness of the transcendent God, but rather to throw light upon the cracks in human knowledge and thus lead to an embrace of the multiplicity of life. It endeavours to show how a certain account of the apophatic appears in Foucault, Kandinsky, Malevich, the OBERIU (Объединение реального искусства the Association for Real Art) and Magritte alike an account that relates closely to the Pussy Riot's notion of the tradition of critique through faith of the Christian Orthodox tradition. By way of Foucault, this chapter suggests a way to understand the common denominator between these two sources of inspiration. When the Pussy Riot prayed their "Punk Prayer" in the Cathedral of Christ the Saviour in 2012, they themselves claimed that they were standing in a Christian Orthodox tradition as well as in a Russian artistic tradition.
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