The Bible After Deleuze Affects, Assemblages, Bodies Without Organs

The impact of Gilles Deleuze on critical thought in the opening decades of the twenty-first century rivals that of Jacques Derrida or Michel Foucault on critical thought in the closing decades of the twentieth. The "Deleuze and..." industry is in overdrive in the humanities, the social sciences, and beyond, busily connecting Deleuzian philosophy to everything from literature to architecture, metaphysics to mathematics, ethics to physics, sexuality to technology, and ecology to theology. What of Deleuze and the Bible? What does the Bible become when it is plugged into the Deleuzian corpus? An immense affective assemblage, among other things. And what does biblical criticism become in the process? A practice of close reading that is other than interpretation and renounces the concept of representation.

Not just for those already familiar with the work of Deleuze, the book begins with an extended introduction to Deleuzian thought. It then proceeds to unexegetical explorations of five successive themes: Text (how to make yourself a Bible without Organs, and why); Body (why there are no bodies in the Bible, and how to read them anyway); Sex (a thousand tiny sexes, a trillion tiny Jesuses); Race (Jesus and the white faciality machine); and Politics (democracy, despots, pandemics, ancient prophets). Cumulatively, these explorations limn the fluid contours of a Bible after Deleuze.

Stephen D. Moore is Edmund S. Janes Professor of New Testament Studies Theological School, Drew University. He is author or editor, co-author or co-editor, of around thirty books, including the monographs Untold Tales from the Book of Revelation: Sex and Gender, Empire and Ecology (2014) and Gospel
Jesuses and Other Nonhumans: Biblical Criticism Post-poststructuralism (2017), and the collection (co-edited with Karen Bray) Religion, Emotion, Sensation: Affect Theories and Theologies (2019).

Acknowledgments
Abbreviations

INTRODELEUZE (who and why?)
Deleuze in Theory
The Box and the Machine
The Deleuze Affect
ELand the Bible?

1. TEXT (the Bible without organs)
Part I: At the Bible Study with Foucault and Deleuze
What Is a Biblical Author?
Knowledge, Power, Desire

Part II: At the Bible Study with Deleuze and Guattari
In Flux, in Assemblage
The Book of Order-Words
A Bible That Expresses Everything While Communicating Nothing
How Do You Make Yourself a Bible without Organs?

2. BODY (why there are no bodies in the Bible, and how to read them anyway)
Part I: The Eclipse of the Ancient Body
Bodies Discoursed and Performed
Bodies in a Noumenal Night

Part II: The Ponderous Weight of the Incorporeal Synoptic Body
Nonrepresenting the Synoptic Body
What Is a Body When It Is Incorporeal?
The Mundane Miracle of Reading (Everywhere Enacted Daily)

3. SEX (a thousand tiny sexes, a trillion tiny Jesuses)
Part I: The Deleuzian Queer
Desiring and Naming
The Proletariat of Eros (Producing the Product Society Cannot Want)

Part II: Queer Mark
The Coming, and Becoming, of Christ
The Crucified Body without Organs
The Risen Body without Organs

4. RACE (Jesus and the white faciality machine)
Part I: The Matter of Race
White Light
Dark Matter, I
Jesus in Jackboots
Dark Matter, II
Is Race Structured Like a Language?

Part II: Race and Face
Assembling Race
Facing Race
Defacing Race

5. POLITICS (beastly boasts, apocalyptic affects)
Unmethodological Prelude
Tweets from the Bottomless Abyss
Larval Fascisms, Insect Apocalypses
Horrible Hope
Post-Beast Postscript

Index