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Chapter four, “Unwilling Feeling,” reads John D. Caputo’s material theology and his conception of the insistence of God alongside Sara Ahmed’s work on what she names “affect aliens” and willfulness to offer biblical scenes of affect alien prophets. Jonah and Martha embody such moody prophecy in this scene. The chapter constructs and applies an affect hermeneutic to and with biblical texts in order to read for what might happen when we follow moodiness to unexpected theological conclusions. Jonah’s and Martha’s moodiness in their biblical tales reveal not what’s wrong with them, but rather serve as a lament against problematic theological interpretations and conscriptions of each character. These affect alien prophets exist as blockage; their existence stops up or slows down the normative flow. These biblical characters prophetically persist by remaining moody impediments to the story. To gravely attend to such prophets is to embrace alternate flows or undercurrents within the biblical story. Such an embrace invites us to look for alternate flows within our contemporary stories.

This chapter examines the move made by philosophers Jacques Derrida and John D. Caputo to reconfigure prayer as sans, in which prayer would be to pray without knowing where to direct the prayers. It questions whether such prayer is possible and whether it reinscribes the exclusivist logic that it seeks to avoid. This chapter argues that such a prayer appears to be presented as superior to that of traditions with a determinate messianism, and with this Derrida and Caputo failed to escape religious violence.

This statement takes up John D. Caputo’s seminal work of “weak theology,” The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida (1997). In addition to calling into question a careful reading of Derrida on the subjects of faith and reason, the author also critiques the elision of both skepticism and psychoanalysis as possible epistemologies.

John D. Caputo reminds us that the impossible immobilizes us on the cognitive level, but then we shift to the conative, to the sphere of praxis and the pragmatic order. This is where Saint Thomas Aquinas developed his theology of grace even to the point of a theology of “merit”, wherein our grace-enabled praxis creates our eternal destiny. As Caputo might put it, we experience the impossible by doing it. For Aquinas, merit is not a psychological category of motivation — it is grace realism in the pragmatic order. Aquinas developed his theology of merit within his theology of grace, elaborated in the philosophical categories of Aristotle. He spoke of “human nature”, which is the essence of the human being as source of human activity unto a human end. As part of the modern vocabulary, the term “experience” fell under the suspicion of the Vatican, which delayed the development of any modern Catholic theology. Today, postmodern philosophy and theology question subjectivity together with the objectivity of metaphysical language as appropriate loci for talk about God.

This chapter is a discourse between Edith Wyschogrod and John D. Caputo on postmodernism and the desire for God. In the postmodern culture of images, so-called virtual reality raises the problem to a new level. Nothing is more common in the postmodern world than the replication of the violence of interactive video games and Internet images. In a world of semblances, people die by violence, but their deaths are and are not understood as being real. Violence is envisaged as simultaneously actualizing and de-realizing death. If all is semblance, a game, death's finality is fictive, undecidable. What is more, if transcendence and immanence are inextricable, the atheist could see le désir de Dieu not only as our desire for God but also as God's desire. So the amor dei, le désir de Dieu, in this culture of images, is to be the imago dei, to let the images of God fly up like sparks, and to affirm a certain holy undecidability between the “image” and “God”.