Immediately after the previous post, I encountered this as I read on:

Healing desire of the wounds inflicted by capitalist discipline, the gift of forgiveness renews the possibility of a true mutuality and reciprocity of desire through nonpossessive participation in the other. In this way, the gift of forgiveness is the true form of absolute deterritorialization whereby desire is released from every captivity (including the bondage of anarchic self assertion) in order to flow freely as it was created to do, in the sociality of love that is the Trinity. Thus, by refusing the logic and not only by refusing violence as a means of enactment, forgiveness interrupts the cycle of violence in which justice as the guarantor of rights remains trapped.

emphasis mine, from Bell, p.151

This “nonpossessive participation in the other” is a key concept in what I believe I am talking about and experiencing in this “warping” or “distortion” of desire in regards to the effects of capitalism and its accompanying liberal democracy features: the “funding” neccessary for the resistance of Chriastians to this skewing of God-given desire is tucked away in this idea of “nonpossessive participation in the other”. When we treat each other as strangers (this is what we effectively do in negelecting even that intial “discovery of the other” in the persons of those to whom we have supposedly agreed to “bind ourselves”). Of course, this “binding” is severely “loose” in our modernistic church; in our “individualistic” , “therapy-emphasizing” theological reflections. But when we are deficient in even this task, what is to become of the more challenging and confronting mission of reaching out to the “radically other” in our culture (and in OTHER cultures)? What are we to make of our refusal to encounter each other, even those of us withy whom we well may find numerous instances of similar experiences and closely related struggles with our social standing and its accompnmying responsibilities as to what we are to then offer up as our role in the body of Christ? The intentional seeking out of “the least of these” appears as “far off” ; BEYOND the space of separation from those very much like us, in which we complicitly persist. But I do not accept the premise that seeing this inability to “take care of our own”, we should then postpone until “we are ready” the encounter with the radically other; the “least of these”. I’ve heard that rationalization before. We are never ready, or finsihed, or have things sufficiently “resolved”. I suspect that much of what remains to be discovered about church and God’s calling is waiting for us in encounters with the unknown.