The Figure of the Pagan: Varro and Hermes contra Augustine in the Theater of Postmodern A/theology

This paper offers an immanent critique of Klossowski and Lyotard’s work, which shows how their recuperation of a pagan “theatrical” theology of figuration against a Christian “natural” theology of semiotic abstraction, carried out in the name of Varro against Augustine, is a willfully heretical a/theism. Turning to their invocation of late-antique accounts of religion, I contend that their conception of figurality entails something like a materialist anti-Christianity: a Nietzschean polytheism that challenges Augustinian and monotheist idealism. However, this paper also demonstrates that this materialist anti-Christianity still relies upon Augustinian “idol theory” to affirm its radical project of impulsive autonomy and consequently remains beholden to the very Christian theo-logic it claims to resist. I therefore introduce the Surrealist International, which desired the concrete abolition of Christianity, rather than its mere figurative disavowal or parodic transgression, as a “hermetic” and “gothic” alternative to Klossowski and Lyotard’s theater of postmodern a/theology.