Makt, apofatisk materia och entanglement : En maktkritisk läsning av den nymaterialistiska teologins epistemologi

Sammanfattning: This study aims to examin how the production of knowledge is intrinsic to the production of power in the New Materialist Process theology of Catherine Keller. The object of critical examination is the theology of Keller and her essay; ”Tingles of Matter, Tangles of Theology: Bodies of the New(ish) Materialism,” from her book Intercarnations: Exercises in Theological Posibility (2017). Keller’s essay will be analyzed through Linda Alcoffs, Alison Baileys and Sara Ahmeds epistemological critical theory of how power produces knowledge and vice versa.  Keller’s theology will be examined based on the study points of analysis on texts of Alcoff, Bailey and Ahmed: subjectivity, making of knowledge, epistemology, making of ignorance, power and authenticity/purity. The study shows that Keller’s notion of apophatic matter has the effect of producing knowledge practices about the object. When the object is obscured from the subject in Keller’s theology, a theological analysis of power and the subject’s position in producing knowledge through theology, is prohibited. By analyzing Keller's notion of entanglement through Ahmed’s thinking, it is shown that the subject is presupposed as free, white and independent. Entanglement among human beings exists as bodily physicality for Keller. Social and economic factors are, thus, made irrelevant for the existence of knowledge and relations between humans. Life situations that are, for example, violent or in position of dependence are incompatible with the reality constituted in entanglement. The subject’s knowledge as socially situated and possibly part of structural power, is also made irrelevant in entanglement-thinking. Thus, the study shows that through the reading of Alcoff, Bailey and Ahmed, theology has the ability to constitute knowledge making practices, that forms the subject’s production of knowledge and ignorance.