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John Schad, Queer Fish: Christian Unreason from Darwin to Derrida Brighton: Sussex Academic Press, 2004. pp.x + 177; ISBN: 1-84519-020-3.
John Schad's Queer Fish takes its epigraph from a passage in Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilisation that refers to 'the madness of the Cross'. According to Foucault, this 'great theme', which 'belonged so intimately to the Christian experience of the Renaissance', 'began to disappear in the seventeenth century', at which point it was 'relegated by Christians themselves into the margins'. Only with Dostoyevsky and Nietzsche does Christ begin to 'regain the glory of his madness'. Schad's book offers an extended meditation on this notion of Christian unreason. It is a theme that prompts relat ed musings on work by Darwin, Marx, Freud, Dickens, Wilde, Joyce and Derrida. Yet the book is not concerned simply with Foucault's identification of an increasingly rare strain in the Christian tradition, but with the predicament of Christianity itself. 'As unbelief became the norm', notes Schad, 'so Christianity became, in some senses and in some instances, marginal and othereď (p.2).
What exactly does 'Christian unreason' mean in this context? Schad refers to a 'tradition of holy idiocy' (p.4), which partakes in the 'secret history [...] of Christian involvement in such radical movements and developments as Anarchism, Surrealism, the Absurd, deconstruction and even quantum physics'. He also speaks of a fundamental discontinuity. For Schad, both Foucault and Charles Kingsley err 'in the sense that the Christian turn to madness was not just a re-turn...