Encountering Religion: Responsibility and Criticism After Secularism 9780231535496

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ENCOUNT ERING RELI GI O N

Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture

INSURRECTIONS: CRITICAL STUDIES IN RELIGION, POLITICS, AND CULTURE

Slavoj Žižek, Clayton Crockett, Creston Davis, Jeffrey W. Robbins, Editors The intersection of religion, politics, and culture is one of the most discussed areas in theory today. It also has the deepest and most wide-ranging impact on the world. Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture will bring the tools of philosophy and critical theory to the political implications of the religious turn. The series will address a range of religious traditions and political viewpoints in the United States, Europe, and other parts of the world. Without advocating any specific religious or theological stance, the series aims nonetheless to be faithful to the radical emancipatory potential of religion. After the Death of God, John D. Caputo and Gianni Vattimo, edited by Jeff rey W. Robbins The Politics of Postsecular Religion: Mourning Secular Futures, Ananda Abeysekara Nietzsche and Levinas: “After the Death of a Certain God,” edited by Jill Stauffer and Bettina Bergo Strange Wonder: The Closure of Metaphysics and the Opening of Awe, Mary-Jane Ru benstein Religion and the Specter of the West: Sikhism, India, Postcoloniality, and the Politics of Translation, Arvind Mandair Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction, Catherine Malabou Anatheism: Returning to God After God, Richard Kearney Rage and Time: A Psychopolitical Investigation, Peter Sloterdijk Radical Political Theology: Religion and Politics After Liberalism, Clayton Crockett Radical Democracy and Political Theology, Jeff rey W. Robbins Hegel and the Infinite: Religion, Politics, and Dialectic, edited by Slavoj Žižek, Clayton Crockett, and Creston Davis What Does a Jew Want? On Binationalism and Other Specters, Udi Aloni A Radical Philosophy of Saint Paul, Stanislas Breton, edited by Ward Blanton, translated by Joseph N. Ballan Hermeneutic Communism: From Heidegger to Marx, Gianni Vattimo and Santiago Zabala Deleuze Beyond Badiou: Ontology, Multiplicity, and Event, Clayton Crockett Self and Emotional Life: Merging Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, and Neuroscience, Adrian Johnston and Catherine Malabou The Incident at Antioch: A Tragedy in Three Acts / L’Incident d’Antioche: Tragédie en trois actes, Alain Badiou, translated by Susan Spitzer Philosophical Temperaments: From Plato to Foucault, Peter Sloterdijk To Carl Schmitt: Letters and Reflections, Jacob Taubes, translated by Keith Tribe

EN COU NTERI NG R E L I GI O N Responsibility and Criticism After Secularism

TYL ER RO BERTS

C OLUM BIA UNIVER SITY PR ESS NEW YORK

Columbia University Press Publishers Since 1893 New York Chichester, West Sussex cup.columbia.edu Copyright © 2013 Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Roberts, Tyler T., 1960Encountering religion : responsibility and criticism after secularism / Tyler Roberts. pages cm. — (Insurrections) Includes bibliographical references (pages) and index. ISBN 978-0-231-14752-1 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-231-53549-6 (electronic) 1. Religion—Philosophy. 2. Social sciences. I. Title. BL51.R576 2013 200.7—dc23 2012039916

Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. This book is printed on paper with recycled content. Printed in the United States of America c 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 cover photo: © Getty Images cover design: Milenda Nan Ok Lee References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

For Madeleine, Will, and Emma

We were to be freed from superstition; instead the frozen hopes and fears which attached themselves to rumored dictates of revelation have now attached themselves to the rumored dictates of experience. . . . Our education is sadly neglected: we have not learned in the moral life, as the scientists have in theirs, how to seek and press to the limits of experience; so we draw our limits well short of anything reason requires. —STANLEY CAVELL, THE SENSES OF WALDEN

CONT ENTS

Acknowledgments xi Introduction 1 PA RT I

1

LOCATI N G R E L IG I O N

Religion and Incongruity 23 2 Placing Religion 49

PA RT I I

E N COU N TE R I N G R ELI G I O N

3 Encountering the Human 85 4 Encountering Theology 119 PA RT III

RE L I GI ON , R E S P ON S I B I L I TY, A ND C RI T I C I SM

5 Religion and Responsibility 147 6 On Psychotheology 173 7 Criticism as Conduct of Gratitude 201 Conclusion 231 Notes 239 Bibliography 271 Index 285

AC KNOWLEDGMENTS

This book has been a long time in the making and it was only with the support of family and friends, colleagues and students, that I was able to see it to the end. I hope these few words of acknowledgment begin to convey the gratitude I feel for their care and generosity. I thank first present and past members of the Department of Religious Studies at Grinnell College, including Tim Dobe, Caleb Elfenbein, Ed Gilday, Harold Kasimow, Henry Reitz, and Kathleen Skerrett. Much of what I write about here had its genesis in conversations with these colleagues about our curriculum and our research. I couldn’t have asked for a more congenial and stimulating setting in which to reflect on the current state of the field. In particular, I want to thank Ed Gilday, my partner in developing our course on method and theory, for the many long conversations we have had about the field, for his enthusiasm for my work, and for the critical acumen he brought to bear on the chapter drafts he read. Speaking of congenial and stimulating settings, I want thank to Chuck Matthewes and Kurtis Schaeffer for organizing and leading a fantastic NEH Summer Seminar at the University of Virginia on “The Study of Religion” in the summer of 2011. Chuck and Kurtis assembled a group of scholars eager to test ideas with one another and gave us the space to go at it. For their contributions to the seminar, I thank Clayton Crockett, Greg Erickson, Jennifer Eply, Jennifer Gurley, Angie Heo, Joseph Laycock, Brenna Moore, Matt Mutter, Keven Schilbrack, Claudia Schippert, Rachel Scott, John Seitz, Kevin Vose, Chad Wellmon, and Liz

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Wilson. I extend special thanks to Matt, Brenna, and John for thoughtful comments on draft chapters; to Clayton, a longtime supporter of the project and an insightful reader of draft chapters; and to Kevin Schilbrack, with whom I have had many conversations on these topics over the years, for reading and commenting on the entire manuscript. And I need to thank Chuck, once more, for his generous support of the project from beginning to end. As editor of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion, Chuck oversaw the publication of early versions of some of the material in the book. His enthusiasm at that point provided a much needed push. He also read the penultimate draft of what follows with the exemplary blend of encouragement and challenge that I know he has shown to many colleagues. I have presented much of this material at conferences, at talks, and in essay form and I thank the colleagues who made these presentations possible. Some of my first published thoughts on secularism appeared in Secularisms, edited by Janet Jakobson and Ann Pelligrini, and I thank Ann for the invitation to contribute to the volume. Antoinette Denapoli organized an enjoyable visit to the University of Wyoming, where I presented material from the first two chapters. Bruce Ellis Benson and Norman Wirzba organized a conference for the Society for Theology and Continental Philosophy on “Love’s Wisdom,” where I first presented material from chapter 6 under the title “Militant Love,” and edited the volume that collected the conference papers, Transforming Philosophy of Religion. I presented the first version of chapter 7 at a panel on Stanley Cavell at a national meeting for the Society of Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. The other panelists, Rick Furtak, Ed Mooney, and Anthony Rudd, made this an exciting and valuable experience. I want to offer special thanks to Ed for our many conversations about Cavell, Kierkegaard, pedagogy, and life. His is the encouraging voice I hear in my head when I wonder whether this stuff really matters. Many other colleagues have made their mark on the book. I thank Elizabeth Pritchard, Bud Ruf, and Alan Schrift for their comments on draft chapters. For good conversation and correspondence, I thank Heath Atchley, Jack Caputo, Hent de Vries, Peter Dula, Sam Gill, Philip Goodchild, Charles Hallisey, Tal Lewis, Lisa McCullough, Russell McCutcheon, Saba Mahmood, Johanna Meehan, Robert Orsi, J. Z. Smith, Jeff Robbins, and Mark Taylor. In one way or another, all helped me to develop and refine my thinking and writing. xii

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

The students at Grinnell College are some of the most engaged and challenging I have encountered and it has been a joy working with them. I’d like to extend special thanks, for their research and their interest, to Cain Elliott, Ben Lebsack, Tiffany Ong, Jacob Rhoades, Eric Ritter, Caitlin Short, Sam Stragand, Ian Warlick, and Adam Wert. Angela Winburn has made Steiner Hall a great place to work. I thank her for that and for taking on the difficult job of organizing the mess of footnotes and bibliographical references I produced over the years. I also thank Wendy Lochner at Columbia University Press for guiding the book through the review process with enthusiasm and expertise. I am grateful for financial and leave support from Grinnell College and the National Endowment for the Humanities. In particular, I want to thank Dean Paula Smith and the Committee for Support of Faculty Scholarship at Grinnell for allowing me some flexibility in my sabbatical schedule so that I could make one more push to get this done. Finally, my deepest gratitude goes to those who make it all worthwhile. Through many conversations—and arguments—about humanism and the humanities, Shuchi Kapila has made this a better book, but her companionship has done so much more. When I started the book, my children, Madeleine, Will, and Emma, were barely walking. How is it that the book has taken so long and they have grown up too fast? I dedicate the book to them. Sections from chapter 1 appeared originally in: “All Work and No Play: Chaos, Incongruity, and Difference in the Study of Religion,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 77, no. 1 (2009): 81–104. Sections from chapter 2 appeared originally in: “Rhetorics of Ideology and Criticism in the Study of Religion,” Journal of Religion, July 2005. Sections from chapter 3 appeared originally in: “Between the Lines: Exceeding Historicism in the Study of Religion,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 72, no. 3 (September 2006): 697–719.

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ENCOUNT ERING RELI GI O N

INTRODUCTION

Religion is about what is always slipping away. —MARK TAYLOR 1

“I have to begin with this”

In the aftermath of September 11, 2001, Rowan Williams, shortly to become Archbishop of Canterbury, published a brief meditation on grief and mourning entitled Writing in the Dust. Williams had experienced the destruction and the dust firsthand, having been near the World Trade Center when the planes hit. He begins his reflections by invoking the “last words” of farewell from those on Flight 93, sent by cell phones to their loved ones. For Williams, these “nonreligious words are testimony to what religious language is supposed to be about—the triumph of pointless, gratuitous love, the affirming of faithfulness even when there is nothing to be done or salvaged.” From these “secular” words of others, Williams moves to grapple with his own words, the “religious” words he will use, as a Christian, to respond to these horrific events. The words do not come easily—they hang, hesitatingly, on the verge of silence and the “void”: Simone Weil said that the danger of imagination was that it filled up the void when what we need is to learn how to live in the presence of the void. The more closely we bind God to our own purposes, use God to help ourselves avoid our own destructiveness, the more we fi ll up the void. It becomes very important to know how to use the language of belief; which is why the terrible simplicity of those last messages matters so intensely. And why also we have to tread so carefully 1

INTRODUCTION

in not making some sort of religious capital out of them. Ultimately, the importance of these “secular” words has to stand as a challenge to anything comfortingly religious we might be tempted to say. Th is is what human beings can find to say in the face of death, religion or no religion. This is what truly makes breathing space for others. Words like “transcendent” hang around uneasily in the background of my mind. Careful again. But that moment of pointless loving communication is the best glimpse many of us will have of what the rather solemn and pompous word means. I have to begin with this. I know I shall be feeling my way towards making some verbal shape out of it all in terms of my Christian faith. But there is nowhere else to start except with that frightening contrast: the murderously spiritual and the compassionately secular.

Williams comes to his “religious” words slowly and only in the shadow of the “murderously spiritual.” And the words he does come to are words “written in the dust,” words that are written in the spirit of those “sand mandalas made by Tibetan monks for festivals, made to be broken up.”  They are words not meant to draw attention and arrest us and accrue capital, but rather to slip away, releasing themselves, and us, into the midst of grief and so into the midst of life. But words never do just what we want them to. Williams’s words are a gift, an offering to those in mourning. As such, they are caught in the bind of all human gifts. The gifts we receive seem always demand something of us. It is difficult, perhaps “impossible,” as Derrida puts it, to treat them as wholly gratuitous. Williams is aware of this, hence his desire to “tread carefully.” But all his care cannot prevent the fact that with his gift, in the form of the judgments and beliefs of a recognized religious authority, he will make “religious capital” out of his words. And by invoking Williams for my own purposes, I, too, will play my role in the circulation and accumulation of such capital. What kind of problem does this pose for Williams? For me? Mark Taylor has written extensively about religion and capital, and his words about religion, quoted in the epigraph above, help us with these questions. Religion, he says, is about that which slips away, about the fact that as we pursue and try to articulate and grasp the things most important to us—whether “meaning,” “value,” “identity,” “love,” “God”—they elude us. I would add that they don’t slip away because we 2

INTRODUCTION

are not going after them correctly, but because it is in some sense in their “nature” to do so. Or to take this line of thought further—further perhaps than Taylor would go—there is a way in which meaning and value take place precisely in this elusiveness, in this slippage, thus existing only as a kind of excess in those things we can and do grasp. We can observe, in Williams’s meditation, numerous kinds of slippage: between one’s own purposes and God’s, between the possibility and impossibility of giving gifts, between self-aggrandizement and selfeffacement, between self and other, between the “religious” and the “secular.” What strikes me is the way his words, in both form and content, acknowledge and accept this slippage. Williams cites his concerns about capitalizing on the words and on the tragedies of others, yet he neither mourns nor defends the purity of his own intentions. Nor does his writing manipulate. Rather, it creates what he calls “breathing space” for the response of the reader, not so much to his words, but to the events of which he writes. Williams practices a kind of self-effacement in his writing that in the counsel to breathe, to take the time to allow the void its “presence,” absolves the reader of an expected, demanded response. To my mind, what makes Writing in the Dust powerful and exemplary of a basic Christian and—if we follow Taylor—religious gesture is that he does not try to halt, explain, or apply too much friction to this slippage. In this, I think, he helps enact Taylor’s claim that, since religion is about that which slips away, it is impossible to grasp what religion is about “unless . . . what we grasp is the impossibility of grasping.” Before going on too long with this line of thinking, though, it is necessary to give voice to an objection. Against the notion of religion as the impossibility of grasping, many will argue that religion is all about grasping, even more, that in its claims to the Divine or the Truth religion is the most grasping of human discourses. Religion, that is, makes claims about the ultimate nature of things and in doing so claims ultimate authority for a particular and ultimately very human vision of life. This, we must admit, is also true: if we consider the wide range of human religious behavior through history, there is little question that religion is never just or even primarily about what slips away; it is also, perhaps much more often, about locating and fi xing, about assigning things to and keeping them in their place, about boundaries and identities, about the power that accrues to people, institutions, and traditions that control this process, and, all too often, about the “murderously 3

INTRODUCTION

spiritual.” We should acknowledge, then, that neither Williams nor Taylor captures the “essence” of Christianity or of religion and we should not assume that Williams is more of a “real” Christian, or “really” religious, than any number of contemporary “fundamentalists.” As Williams himself recognizes in the opening pages of Writing in the Dust, he is responding to terrible religious violence, violence the likes of which, as we know, religious people of all sorts—Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, Sikh—have visited on those they call heretics, apostates, or unbelievers. To my mind, both the attacks of September 11 and the response to these attacks by Christians such as Pat Robertson and Jerry Falwell are as much real religion as Williams’s powerful and admirable words.

This is a book about how scholars study and represent religion; more precisely, it is about how scholars and others use the concept “religion,” a concept with a long, complicated, and still obscure history, to make sense of the world and themselves. I have opened with a step that will court the suspicion of many of these scholars. By invoking Williams, a theologian and, until recently, one of the world’s most powerful and influential religious leaders, I have ceded some authority for thinking academically about religion to a religious thinker. Th is violates a boundary that many of my colleagues consider to be absolutely necessary if the study of religion is to take its place as a legitimate academic enterprise, that is, the boundary separating secular academic thinking about religion from religious thinking about religion. This is, in some contexts, an important distinction to make. For example, it is one that I myself emphasize in my introductory classes. But it also is a distinction that when pushed too far becomes, or so I will argue, extremely elusive. And when we try to chase it down and force our studies of religion to hold to it, especially when we try to define and theorize religion in what I will describe as a “secularist” or “locativist” fashion, we lose sight of important matters and subtle differences. For one, we fall into a tendency to focus on how religious beliefs, practices, discourses, and institutions seek to grasp the world or bind God in ways that create and support forces of domination and violence and we tend not to explore in nuanced ways the possibility that religion has something to teach us about the impossibility of grasping. We become suspicious of religion— and of scholars who are not suspicious enough. 4

INTRODUCTION

Suspicion does have its place, but after the Enlightenment and after the hermeneutics of suspicion we tend to see the grasping and binding aspects of religion everywhere. Has this led to a different type of grasping, a secularist “binding of God”? I think this, along with other factors that I will discuss below, leaves some of us who think and write about religion in a difficult place. I am not a Christian, a Jew, a Buddhist, or an adherent of any other “religion”; for all sorts of reasons, I would never describe myself as “spiritual.” I am, though, compelled by the depths of beauty and insight I see in Writing in the Dust, and I have spent a lot of time wondering and thinking about how I might respond to it and other instances of religion like it. Perhaps I could simply say that I am compelled by Williams’s humanity, but then I want to ask whether, and if so how, religious beliefs and practices are a force for cultivating such humanity. As a scholar and teacher of “Religious Studies,” what can I say about such beauty, insight, and humanity without being an apologist for religion and without trying, again, to grasp it? And then, should I even be thinking about religion in such apparently vague and ideologically loaded terms as “beauty,” “insight,” and “humanity”? My academic expertise is in modern, Western religious thought. I am trained, then, to read “theological” words such as those we find in Williams in terms of their logics, their histories, and their rhetorical strategies. In addition, as a scholar of religion, I also think theoretically about religious thought as an instance of “religion” and inquire into the different disciplinary and inter- or transdisciplinary approaches we can take to religion. What do such lenses allow us to see and what do they prevent us from seeing? Finally, I also am trained to ask questions about this training, or, more generally, to be aware of and reflect on the historical and social contexts, the interests and ideologies, that have shaped the study of religion itself. Why do we even use this concept, “religion”? Where and who did it come from? What does it mean to study religion in an academic setting? It is precisely this self-consciousness about “religion”—and the increasingly prevalent self-consciousness about the “secular”—that leads me to wonder whether it has become too easy for scholars today, at least for those who take pride in their critical and theoretical consciousness, to grasp—that is, to historicize, contextualize, theorize, explain—the kinds of words Williams offers us. 5

INTRODUCTION

Today we are exposed to an avalanche of books and articles, popular and scholarly, on religious ideology and religious violence. And many influential scholars of religion, reflecting on theoretical and methodological approaches to religion, argue, as I demonstrate below, that the defining characteristic of religious discourse is the kind of claim to absolute authority that is so effective in inspiring and rationalizing such violence. In such a context, it becomes easy to dismiss as mystification or cheap sentiment Williams’s “pointless loving communication.” And even if we “feel” the need to acknowledge and honor such words, it can be hard to know what, from an academic perspective (if that means a critical perspective), we can usefully say about it. But I believe that it is imperative that we do find ways to acknowledge, analyze, and evaluate such words, to think carefully and constructively about the way a thinker such as Williams combines compassion, hope, and theological commitment with realism and critical consciousness. This is not to say that we should not also continue to develop tools for analyzing the destructive power of religion. There are good arguments to be made that these tools are essential, today more than ever. But “more than ever” does not mean “exclusively,” for such exclusivity may well lead us to ignore, among other things, powerful religious resources for responding to violence. This would be a double failure, one ethical and one academic. That is, it would be a failure to attend to practices and ideas that may offer alternatives to dominating and destructive ideologies, whether religious or not, and it would be a failure to know religion in all its complexity and power.

Stories Ordinary and Extraordinary

Religion After Religion, Steven Wasserstrom’s fine study of Gershom Scholem, Henry Corbin, and Mircea Eliade, tells a story about modernity and the study of religion. According to Wasserstrom, what brought these great scholars together in the middle of the twentieth century was a desire to “return religion to its original splendor.” This desire was shaped in and by the violence and chaos of their times, which Scholem, Corbin, and Eliade viewed as symptomatic of the dominance of modern rationality and technology. For them, to “return religion” was to recover religion’s essence: those symbols and myths that connect us 6

INTRODUCTION

with the “depths” of the human spirit. This was not simply a matter of identifying and understanding something about religion, to remind us of its splendor, but to reestablish it as a vital cultural force, even if only as a “religion after religion.” As Wasserstrom tells it, these scholars forged a kind of “secular esotericism” conducted outside of traditional religious contexts, “a soteriologically vibrant conversation of likeminded intellects, a transcultural circle of intensively learned but entirely nonpracticing believers, an invisible congregation of the very few.” And, in doing so, they gave birth to the “History of Religions” not simply as a discipline, but as a discourse of resistance to modernity. Wasserstrom expresses deep admiration for the figures at the heart of his story, yet he is critical of their project. Scholem, Corbin, and Eliade, he claims, were brilliant writers of religious history, but in their efforts to be both scholars and adepts, to write history about religion as part of an effort to challenge and change secularism, they pushed the history of religions in problematic directions. By reading religious history in a way that privileged myth and symbol as the key elements of a mystical transcendence of history, these thinkers deemphasized, even lost sight of, historical difference and the multiple ways religion works in history and society, in other words, the rich and disturbing detail and ambiguity of human religiosity that Wasserstrom contends must be at the center of any viable history of religions. In this, I think Wasserstrom is right. It is necessary, though, to specify just how we approach the question of “historical difference.” Here, let me pursue this question by juxtaposing Wasserstrom’s story of the study of religion with two others. There are many versions of the next story, but I will focus on the one that frames the introduction to one of many “guides” and “companions” to our discipline that have emerged in recent years, Guide to the Study of Religion, edited by Willi Braun and Russell McCutcheon, a volume to which I will return in some detail in chapters 1 and 2. In his introduction to the volume, entitled simply “Religion,” Braun appeals to a common narrative about the development of critical, theoretical consciousness as an accomplishment of Western modernity. As the story goes, the establishment of the modern university, and of the human and social sciences, made possible the social-scientific and naturalistic theories of religion developed by Durkheim and others in the late nineteenth century. However, something went wrong in the middle 7

INTRODUCTION

of the twentieth century when Eliade and others (this is where Wasserstrom comes in) developed quasi-theological approaches to religion, for these came to dominate the field just as many of the independent departments of Religious Studies were being established in the United States. Consequently, so Braun and many others argue, the study of religion was established as an independent enterprise in the academy on very weak academic foundations and it is now long past time to rebuild the field from the ground up. Thus, Braun unapologetically dismisses paradigms for the field built on the concepts “sacred” and “holy,” such as Eliade’s, arguing that because they ultimately appeal to unverifiable, private experiences, they in fact only serve to mystify the way religion functions in human life, limiting the “uncensored curiosity” that should be the hallmark of academic study. Scholars of religion can and should protect and foster such curiosity by taking two steps. First, they should give up efforts to defi ne the field in terms of some essential referent for religion—such as the “sacred”—and instead selfconsciously construct the concept in a way that can produce real knowledge about human behavior. The concept of religion, rightly understood, is a scholarly tool “used to allocate the stuff of the real world into a class of objects so as to position these objects for thought that is aimed toward explanation of their causes, functions, attractiveness to individuals and societies, relationships to other concepts, and so on.” As a second step toward academic respectability, scholars should study religion as a social phenomenon, not as a matter of individual religious experience. The mission of the Guide is therefore to offer a variety of perspectives on an explanatory, naturalistic paradigm for the study of religion, one that views religion as one among other means by which human beings organize worlds, societies, and identities for themselves— in other words, as a key element in what Burton Mack, a contributor to the Guide, calls “social formation.” For Braun, this approach makes the scholar of religion a social theorist and makes possible a research strategy that will allow the study of religion to become “a contributing partner in the pursuit of a science of human social life, an exercise that could be credible within the family of human and social sciences in the modern university.” Before commenting on Braun’s story, let me briefly turn to a third story, this from Robert Orsi’s Between Heaven and Earth. Like both Wasserstrom and Braun, Orsi claims that certain problematic “reli8

INTRODUCTION

gious” assumptions and perspectives have had an undue influence on the study of religion. But where our first two stories focused on the resistance to modernity and secularism in Eliade and others, Orsi argues that in the early twentieth century a “domesticated Protestantism” adapted itself to modernity in a way that allowed it to retain a place in university culture, initially as the morally uplift ing element of undergraduate teaching (often identified with the “Humanities”) and then, as the study of religion emerged, as the paradigm of “religion” studied in the academy. For Orsi, this paradigm not only has led to the establishment of a (particular form of) Christianity as the model against which other religions are defi ned and measured, but has impressed upon scholars the idea that religion is basically “good.” Excluded from the discipline, then, or relegated to the margins as “primitive” or “immature” are those religions that don’t measure up to the rationality, tolerance, peace, and “spirituality” of this domesticated Protestantism. Although we are a long way from having fully excavated all the assumptions and presumptions that limit the field, we are at a point where we can at least recognize that a primary challenge for scholars of religion is, as Orsi writes, “not to stop at the border of human practices done in the name of the gods that we scholars find disturbing, dangerous, or even morally repugnant, but rather to enter into the otherness of religious practices in search of an understanding their human ground.” The stories I have summarized here have some obvious affinities. For my purposes, the most important of these is that each sees the academic study of religion as marked by a problematic slippage between religion and the study of religion. As Wasserstrom puts it, “here the subject and object of the study were confused, conflated, confounded.” Where Wasserstrom identifies a more or less conscious effort to recover a generalized form of religiosity in response to historical circumstances, Braun and Orsi, though in different ways, identify a kind of unacknowledged theological remnant that has decisively shaped the field up to the present day. For all three, this confusion needs to be eliminated, for it has prevented scholars from addressing religion in all its complexity and from taking a properly academic perspective on it. The field is thus saddled with a problematic conceptual apparatus, one that deters scholars of religion from studying, for example, the ideological dimensions of religion, as Braun argues, or the dangerous and violent dimensions of religion, as Orsi argues. In a crucial sense, the moral for all 9

INTRODUCTION

three stories is that we need to pay more critical attention to the genealogy of the concept “religion” and to the theological and ideological forces that have exercised such influence on its past and that continue to shape our studies in the present. These stories also are significantly different. Note, first, a further, though ultimately superficial, similarity: working through each of these stories is a distinction between what I will call ordinary and extraordinary religion. Wasserstrom shows how “religion” for Scholem, Corbin, and Eliade was an esoteric discipline that could interrupt the historical. He wants a History of Religion, however, that will direct us to the historical, ordinary, local forms of religion, where the abstracting and generalizing force of concepts such as “myth” and “symbol” will not obscure differences between religious traditions, ideas, and practices. For Braun and his coeditor Russell McCutcheon, the premise of their naturalistic, historical, and social approach to religion is, as McCutcheon puts it, that religion is “utterly ordinary.” Th is means that scholars of religion should focus their attention not on exalted states of mind and experience or on some posited transcendent referent, but on the everyday, ordinary activity of “social formation” (which, of course, often utilizes and appeals to extraordinary experience and transcendent referents for its authority). Further, because religion is utterly ordinary, academics should not accord it special consideration or give it any more respect than they grant any other kind of human activity they study. Finally, Orsi urges us to fi nd ways to think beyond a particular idealized vision of “good” religion so that we can examine it in all its complexity; further, as a historian of “popular” or “lived” religion, Orsi takes as the object of his own research the everyday religious practices and relations of ordinary people, as opposed to the ideas and texts of religious elites. But if each of these scholars directs our attention to everyday lives and everyday religious behavior, they do so with different purposes in mind. McCutcheon’s appeal to the ordinary is a disciplinary move: it allows us to distinguish between the proper object of study for scholars of religion (ordinary activities of social formation) and the improper (extraordinary religious states or experiences). Moreover, it is a reductive move, one in which “ordinary” means “natural”: McCutcheon advocates a naturalistic approach to religion that seeks to explain claims to the extraordinary in terms of the way these claims function socially, 10

INTRODUCTION

politically, or biologically. For Orsi and Wasserstrom, by contrast, the appeal to the ordinary is more limited, simply pointing us to modes of being religious that often, and for various, sometimes “religious,” reasons, are overlooked: ordinary people in their everyday lives. They do not claim that this is the only place to find religion, and they do not exclude the possibility that in and through religious practices extraordinary things can happen to ordinary people. This difference suggests two ways of thinking about “extraordinary” religion. The first sees the proper role of the scholar of religion as reducing the extraordinary to the ordinary in a reduction or “redescription” that renders what is strange and perhaps extraordinary into concepts and processes that are familiar, understood, and worldly. It seeks to explain the extraordinary in ordinary terms. The second is not necessarily reductionist in this sense. Rather, in what seems to me a more expansive and richer fashion than the first way of thinking about the ordinary, it attends to the intersection between the ordinary and extraordinary in peoples’ religious lives and to the play of life, power, and imagination at this intersection. Even though Wasserstrom does not think that the esotericism of the scholars he studies should be the sole focus of the study of religion or should in any way control the development of the concept of religion, he also does not claim that we should reduce extraordinary religion to ordinary culture and social formation. To bring history back into the History of Religions, he writes, is “not to denude [religion] of its mystery.” For his part, Orsi seems to relish stories of the extraordinary. Some of these involve extraordinary things that happen to him in the context of his work as a scholar and observer of religion. For example, in his preface to Thank You, St. Jude, a study of devotion to the patron saint of lost causes, he tells of being on a plane circling LaGuardia airport when the pilot announced they were being diverted to Philadelphia. Orsi spontaneously prayed to St. Jude for intervention. Soon, the pilot informed the passengers that, surprisingly, they were going to be able to land after all. We might wonder whether the prayer worked, but this is not Orsi’s concern. So even as he reports that he does not “believe in” St. Jude, he asks us, “What does belief have to do with it?” Orsi’s obvious purpose here is to raise questions about the way scholars of religion have traditionally privileged belief over practice. But he also seeks to dislocate the reader, to upset his or her assumptions and convictions, and so to push the reader to adopt what he 11

INTRODUCTION

elsewhere describes as “a disciplined suspension of the impulse to locate the other (with all her or his discrepant moralities, ways of knowing, and religious impulses) securely in relation to one’s own cosmos.” Orsi’s histories do locate peoples’ religious practices in rich webs of religious, cultural, and social networks, but he is not interested in the question of whether St. Jude “really” intervenes or not, or in explaining the belief that he does intervene in naturalistic terms. Instead, he adopts a stance that, as he puts it, is “in-between” his own as a person and scholar, on the one hand, and those of his subjects, on the other. From this position, he believes he can reflect usefully on the play between the ordinary and the extraordinary, earth and heaven, and so come to a better understanding of how religious people give shape and texture, meaning and value to their lives.

Religion and Responsibility: A Humanistic Approach

Social formation theory, naturalism, and the turn to the ordinary have a lot to offer the study of religion. Today we can think about “religion” in ways that are no longer exclusively textualist, we study prosaic or popular religion as well as the religious expressions of elites, we have rigorous cognitivist and structuralist theories of religion, and, perhaps most important, we can analyze religious forms of power that are not beholden to the claims of religious actors and ideologies: these are all signs that the field has advanced. But in my view, too many scholars who embrace these advances have failed to pay enough attention to Orsi’s claims about the impulse to “locate the other . . . securely in relation to our own cosmos.” Consequently, in their quest for academic legitimacy, they end up locating both their religious subjects and themselves too securely and are not nuanced enough in their explorations of the power of religion. I make this argument in the first part of the book; in parts 2 and 3, I take steps in the direction of a different approach to the field.

Part 1: Locating Religion

I begin with the concept “religion” itself, which most scholars and historians view as a product of Western modernity. A crucial element of 12

INTRODUCTION

the genealogy of the concept is the deep suspicion about the power of Christian institutions and traditions that marked the thinking of leading Western intellectuals in the Enlightenment and the nineteenth century. This suspicion drove political and social efforts to limit religious power, and helped shape developments in political theory that grounded human power in the natural and social, rather than the divine, as well as philosophical efforts to conceptualize and enact the autonomy of reason against the authority of tradition and revelation. These projects helped to reshape North Atlantic society and culture and, in the context of European colonialism, much of the rest of the world as well. One site where the impact of these projects was particularly profound was the university. The founding of the University of Berlin in 1810 created a model for the modern research university that would be copied throughout Europe and the United States, a secular space that made it possible to ask and study the questions about religion that had been broached in the previous two centuries. Thus the early nineteenth century saw the emergence of historical-critical studies of the Bible in German universities, a development perceived by many to constitute an attack on religion, especially on Christianity. In the second half of the nineteenth century and into the early twentieth, historical and naturalistic investigations into the origin and function of religion in the work of scholars such as Max Müller, Emile Durkheim, and Max Weber were integral to the development of the social sciences. Thus, almost from the point at which it emerged as an object of intellectual consideration, religion became not only the site of a battle between various cultural and social forces, but an object of academic explanation and demystification. However, as Wasserstrom, Braun, and Orsi correctly argue, this academic project met with resistance in the middle of the twentieth century. If the social-scientific study of religion emerging at the end of the nineteenth century can be seen as a sober, academically restrained version of the radical hermeneutics of suspicion being articulated outside the university at the same time in Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud, the work of midcentury thinkers and theorists such as Corbin, Scholem, and Eliade were expressions of a form of countersuspicion directed at modernity’s instrumentalism, rationalism, and historicism. Although social-scientific approaches to religion generally held sway in departments of anthropology and sociology in the middle of the twentieth century, in departments of religion or religious studies, most of which 13

INTRODUCTION

came into being in the 1960s and 1970s, this countersuspicion exerted a powerful influence, particularly in its Eliadan form. It is precisely against this influence that scholars such as Braun and McCutcheon are working as they seek to articulate a more legitimate form of the study of religion by returning to and updating the naturalistic and social-scientific approaches to the study of religion that they see in Durkheim and others. For them, and many other contemporary scholars of religion, Eliade—understood as quasi-theological thinker—became the favorite target. This is where the argument of part 1 of this book begins, specifically with the fascinating, provocative, and essential work of Jonathan Z. Smith. In the early 1970s, Smith was one of the first scholars of religion to take on Eliade directly. In doing so, he raised a series of crucial questions about maps and territories: How do religions deal with chaos and order? How do they locate human beings? How do academics locate religion? In chapter 1, I explore Smith’s contributions by explaining the importance of his work on these issues, particularly as it centers on his criticisms of Eliade’s “locative” approach to religion and his own efforts to explore the ways in which religious myths and rituals allow people to engage what he comes to call “incongruity.” Where Eliade employed a locative map or religion to show how religious people order their worlds and place themselves, Smith argues that such maps think away or refuse to think about the ways life and history disrupt our orders or “maps.” He pushes us to attend more closely to the way religious myths and rituals do, at times at least, acknowledge and work with such disruption or incongruity. Smith’s work on incongruity makes a singular contribution to our field. Although, as I argue, it is limited in certain respects, it deserves much more attention than it has received. In the second half of chapter 1 and in more depth in chapter 2, I show how such attention allows us to think critically about an influential contemporary paradigm for the study of religion. I argue that a range of influential scholars, including Braun and McCutcheon, who embrace many of Smith’s ideas, ignore his work on incongruity and end up employing their own locative map of the field. In their focus on the authoritative and ideologically stabilizing nature of religious discourse and in their insistence on the centrality of social-scientific and historicist methods, these scholars locate religion too securely precisely by insisting that religion is all about securely locating us, that is, 14

INTRODUCTION

about warding off chaos and refusing to acknowledge incongruity. I examine the work of these scholars in some detail to argue that there are good reasons for suspecting that this new locative map of religion is inadequate. I argue further that as “locative” scholars try to establish the study of religion on more “legitimate” academic grounds by drawing clear boundaries between religion and the secular study of religion, they are attempting to securely locate themselves. And they do so in what I describe as a “secularist” fashion. Thus, Tim Jensen and Mikael Rothstein, editors of a volume entitled Secular Theories on Religion, note that they use the term “secular” “simply . . . to designate the academic study of religion as defined in opposition to religious thinking of religion.” But are we so sure that we know what “religious thinking of religion” is that we can define the secular, academic study of religion simply by opposing “it”? Or that we are sure about what “academic” thinking about religion should be? When I read what scholars such as Donald Wiebe and Russell McCutcheon have to say about the academic study of religion, it seems to me that the category “academic” is theoretically underdetermined. They are guided by sophisticated views about the history of the construction of “religion” as a concept, but too often they lose their critical edge when it comes to thinking about the equally constructed and historically variable ideas of a “discipline,” the “academic,” and, as I argue at the end of chapter 1, the “secular.” We all recognize that the academy has been a site (among others) for the construction of the category of religion. We must attend to this history and we should not retain the kind of “Protestant” bias Orsi discusses or an Eliadan notion of the “sacred.” Yet, we also must keep in mind that as they have been constructing religion, academics have contributed to the process of constructing the academy. And, because the question of religion has been formative for the construction of both secular modernity and the secular university, and because, as Orsi puts it, “the political and intellectual history of modernity is also always a religious history,” we need to keep in mind that these constructive processes are linked. How have secularist ideologies, which have had such an impact on modern society, culture, and politics, shaped the university? And, finally, we need not only to examine these links, but also to think carefully about the responsibilities entailed in such constructive work. 15

INTRODUCTION

Part 2: Toward a Humanistic Study of Religion

If it is true that the academy is devoted to critical inquiry, if it is a space for what Braun calls “uncensored curiosity,” shouldn’t we always be ready to question those who define a field by an appeal to what is “properly” academic? For instance, how significant is it that scholars who are most invested in defining and securing the boundaries of the academic study of religion tend to study religion through the lenses of the social and natural sciences, or that some of these scholars, Donald Wiebe, for example, claim that humanistic studies are perhaps too close to religion to be considered properly academic? And how relevant is it that calls for grounding the study of religion in the methodologies of the social sciences have come at a time of ever-increasing technological and scientistic framing of higher education and of a corresponding waning of the significance of the humanities? My view is that scholars need to think in a focused way about what it might look like—after Eliade, locativism, and secularism—to study religion humanistically. Reflecting on what such study might look like is the task of chapters 3 and 4. There, I argue that thinking about the study of religion along humanistic lines addresses the problems with locative approaches to religion I identify in part 1, I defend a version of what Lorenzo Simpson calls “post-metaphysical humanism,” and I treat the humanities as a site of “encounter” and “response.” The humanities, Simpson asserts, reveal, “as no other disciplines can, the full measure of worlds and epochs that are orthogonal to ours.” To “encounter” religion, as I understand it, is to undertake a “disciplined suspension,” to use Robert Orsi’s phrase, of one’s own locative impulses and thus allow the differences between the scholar’s own world and the world of the religious other to emerge in as much detail as possible. But the humanistic study of religion and the humanities more generally, I argue, need to think difference and encounter within the larger framework of response and responsiveness. The humanities, as I understand them, are the site in the academy where we try not only to understand the immense diversity of ways that human beings have in the past and continue in the present to reflect on and represent themselves to themselves and others, but also to respond to these processes of reflection and representation and to the processes of self and social formation, to which they not only are bound but

16

INTRODUCTION

also effect and enable. To respond, in this sense, is to reflect on what the ideas and practices we study might mean for us, in our worlds. In this respect, the humanistic study of religion departs from the modern academic ideal of disinterested inquiry. Instead, it involves disciplines of experimentation in which we reflect on what the lives of others have to teach us about ourselves, testing ourselves in terms of their beliefs and imperatives, practices and hopes. In this sense, humanistic inquiry, as the philosopher Robert Pippen argues, is a kind of moral inquiry. Here, humanistic inquiry becomes humanistic criticism. I make this argument in chapter 3 first by articulating a vision of humanistic study grounded in the idea of responsiveness and then by exploring the ethnographic work of the social historian Robert Orsi and the anthropologists Michael Jackson and Saba Mahmood. I argue that with their focus on what Orsi calls “lived religion” and in their experiments with their relations to those they study, these scholars inflect their work in a humanistic direction and exemplify what I am calling encounter and response. In chapter 4, I examine humanistic encounters with religious texts and theology. Scholars who stress the theoretical rigor of naturalistic explanations of religion frequently describe such resistance as “theology” (or “crypto-theology” or “religionism”), which they consider pretty much the worst thing you can say about another’s scholarship. But I do not think that scholars of religion, especially those who I would describe as locativists, have thought carefully enough about theology. I argue that scholars of religion, and particularly those who study religion humanistically, have much to learn from theology, and religion more generally, about questions of location, criticism, and power. In chapter 4, I explore the way Amy Hollywood and Romand Coles, scholars without obvious allegiance to Christianity or religion, think not in opposition to but with religious thinkers on topics such as fi nitude, power, and self-dispossession as part of their effort to think practically and theoretically about issues such as human loss and radical democracy. These theorists, I argue, contribute to our knowledge of religion by cutting against the grain of traditionally secular scholarship to view traditions of religious thought not just as objects of study but also as sources of analytic categories and ethical orientations that can contribute to the construction of meaningful worlds.

17

INTRODUCTION

Part 3: Responsibility, Philosophy, and Affirmative Criticism

I pursue this line of thinking in more detail in part 3, where I explore the intersection of theological thinking and philosophy of religion. Anyone reading this book is surely aware that in past decades, religion, often in the form of conservative, often “fundamentalist” movements, has become more and more visible on the world stage. This phenomenon has led many scholars to claim that the “secularization thesis”— taken for granted by many scholars and other observers of culture and society in the twentieth century—is false or in need of drastic overhaul. In this context, it is striking that at the same time that religion has been reasserting itself socially and politically around the world, we also find a “turn to religion” in many Continental philosophers. Julian Young defines Continental philosophy as an effort “to respond to the question of what can be said about the meaning of life in the light of the death of God.” But it appears that an increasing number of philosophers are wondering whether accounts of this death have been exaggerated, and that perhaps we need new ways to think about God if we are to find something meaningful to say about human life. This is not to say that links between Continental philosophy and religious thought are anything new, but in the past they usually have been forged by explicitly religious thinkers, such as Rudolf Bultmann or Paul Tillich, who adapted philosophical categories for their theological purposes. However, with figures such as Levinas and Ricoeur as precursors, philosophers who previously addressed religion only rarely and whose intellectual genealogies are dominated by figures such as Marx, Nietzsche, and Freud— Ricoeur’s “masters of suspicion”—now have been not only addressing religion but also reshaping their philosophical discourses in a way that blurs the boundaries between philosophical and religious thought. They are producing hybrid discourses that reflect on and enact an exposure of secular thinking to religious thought and practice. Thus we have Derrida writing of “religion without religion,” Eric Santner writing about “psychotheology,” and new interest in the work of Continental figures who might be said to have anticipated this turn, such as Georges Bataille, Franz Rosenzweig, Walter Benjamin, and Carl Schmitt. We already have some fine studies of these shifts in Continental philosophy, but the question of the significance of these hybrid discourses 18

INTRODUCTION

for the way we study religion—and for academic discourse in general— has yet to be posed with sufficient force or clarity. One way to describe what is taking place in these discourses is that the two forms of suspicion I have discussed in this introduction—the suspicion of religion and the suspicion of secular modernity—are converging in an interesting and perhaps radical way. I want to suggest that, without necessarily canceling one another out, they may lead us to what Rowan Williams describes as the “suspicion of suspicion” and even to what Paul Ricoeur called the “hermeneutics of affi rmation.” That is, we fi nd thinkers working with sophisticated versions of Marxist, Nietzschean, and Freudian modes of analysis—materialists, genealogists, and psychoanalytic theorists—citing religious ideas, practices, and figures not as examples of false consciousness or illusion, but as means to move through or around some of the dead ends of a critical consciousness that has emptied concepts such as “responsibility,” “ethics,” “freedom,” and “subjectivity” of critical and emancipatory force. That we have reached these dead ends is, I think, due in part to an academic framework that makes it difficult for “legitimate” scholarship to take on in a constructive and affirmative way, as opposed to simply an explanatory or historicist way, questions of justice, meaning, and purpose. It is due also to the impact of a certain trajectory of Continental theory dominant in the humanities in the last part of the twentieth century—think of the various structuralist and poststructuralist antihumanisms of this period. In On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche argued that responsibility, and related moral ideas such as guilt, selfsacrifice, and compassion (mitleid ), are at the root of the “slave morality” that he saw in Judaism and Christianity. This morality, made powerful by the idea of “God,” wrested power from the strong and healthy in a culture-transforming and ultimately life-denying “revaluation” that Nietzsche hoped to overcome. At the heart of Nietzsche’s analysis is the paradox of the “ascetic ideal,” his recognition that certain forms of self- and world-denial, particularly those in which a person sacrifices his or her own desires for the sake of others and, in the end, for the sake a transcendent god, are in fact the routes to immense social, cultural, and political power. Nietzsche’s argument resonates deeply in today’s academy. His genealogical uncovering of the power struggles at the roots of our most cherished and valorized ideals and his claims about the power of renunciation fuel contemporary academic suspicion not just 19

INTRODUCTION

of religion but of moral discourse more generally and have helped to elevate the concept of “power” to the central place it holds today in critical thinking in the humanities and the social sciences. In this context, it becomes difficult to think academically about responsibility or the ethical import of religious ideals and practices, or to argue that certain kinds of self-dispossession or the responsible orientation to the other are not primarily self-interested maneuvers. My goal in part 3 is to move beyond this difficulty by showing how Hent de Vries, Eric Santner, and, though he comes from a different philosophical tradition, Stanley Cavell offer new ways to think religion and responsibility together. De Vries and Santner quite explicitly show how certain kinds of theological thinking create disruptions in processes of self-formation and social formation that enable us to turn to others in responsibility and responsiveness. Such thinking is, for them, decisively nonlocative. This is also true of Cavell; but more than de Vries or Santner, Cavell attends to the tension each one of us must negotiate between the need for order and identity, on the one hand, and the need to criticize, transcend, and reimagine order and identity for the sake of new life, on the other. Along these lines, particularly important for me is Cavell’s vision of criticism as a “conduct of gratitude.” Each of these thinkers, in one way or another, blurs the boundaries between religion and theology, on the one hand, and philosophy, theory, and criticism, on the other. As I have noted, many scholars argue that our field has suffered because religion and the academic study of religion have been “confused, conflated, confounded.” In some senses, this is true. But I think that instead of worrying about erecting an impenetrable wall between these discourses, we should consider how attending carefully to crossings between “secular” and “religious” discourses, and rethinking what it means to think humanistically, enables valuable forms of critical thinking about religion and about life in general. We should consider, that is, whether as scholars of religion we might learn something valuable by treating certain religious discourses not only as objects of study but as potential methodological resources for the study of religion and for cultural criticism.

20

PART I LO CAT IN G RE L IG I O N

1

RELIGION AND INCONGRUITY

But when we thus complain that some illicit religiosity—which may be by nature dogmatic and hegemonic—seems to be inhabiting academic discourse with impunity, do we understand our condition adequately? —TOMOKO MASUZAWA 1

Orsi, Braun, and Wasserstrom are only a few of the many scholars who in recent years have explored the history of the study of religion, surveyed the range of theoretical approaches to it, or undertaken genealogical explorations of the idea of “religion” itself. This theoretical and metatheoretical work is wide-ranging and, depending on one’s perspective, demonstrates either that the field is rich, pluralistic, and multi- if not interdisciplinary or that it continues to suffer from a lack of a strong sense of purpose and theoretical grounding. Those who take this second perspective and seek to make the study of religion a legitimate contributor to academic knowledge often argue that the study of religion still has not detached itself sufficiently from theological or, more generally, religious modes of thinking. They believe that the field will only be placed on firm theoretical ground once we identify and put in place clear boundaries between the study of religion as an enterprise of the secular academy, on the one hand, and religion as the object of this study, on the other. Or, to put it in its more polemical version, it is necessary to eliminate theological obscurantism in order to make room for the conceptual clarity of theories and methods that will explain religion. This kind of diagnosis is put forward in the editorial introductions to two of the guides or companions to the study of religion that have been published since 2000, both of which argue for grounding the field in reductive, social-scientific approaches to religion. Willi Braun, as I

23

PA R T I . L O C AT I N G R E L I G I O N

have noted, argues in his introductory essay to the Guide to the Study of Religion that theoretical paradigms for the field organized around concepts such as the “holy” or the “sacred” fail because they appeal, in a quasi-theological manner, to unverifiable, private experiences and serve only to mystify the way religion functions in human life. Such “obscurantist” ideas, Braun argues, protect religion from the “uncensored curiosity” that should be the hallmark of academic study. Robert Segal, in his editorial introduction to the Blackwell Companion to the Study of Religion, argues against what he describes as the “religionist” approach to the study of religion, which he defines as any theory that offers a “religious” rather than a social-scientific explanation of religion. The “siege-like defensiveness” of religionist approaches, he argues, rules out of bounds properly reductive studies of religion. A primary target for both Braun and Segal is Mircea Eliade’s argument that that religion, as sui generis, is irreducible to social or biological factors and so must be explained on its own terms, as a manifestation of the sacred. Eliade’s view exercised considerable influence during a formative period for the field, especially the 1960s and 1970s, when many of the existing departments of religion in the United States were established. It is this legacy that the critics of “theological obscurantism” and “religionism” seek to displace. If Eliade has come to represent much of what is wrong with the contemporary study of religion, this is in significant part due to the efforts of J. Z. Smith, Eliade’s one-time colleague at the University of Chicago. Not only was Smith one of the first scholars to challenge the Eliadan paradigm from within the study of religion, but he also has arguably done more than anyone else over the past forty years to develop resources for an alternative approach to the academic study of religion. It is no surprise, then, that after Durkheim, Freud, and Marx, no scholar is referred to more often in the Guide to the Study of Religion than Smith and that most of the appeals to his work in the volume are in the service of articulating a clear academic purpose for the study of religion. Indeed, Braun attaches the following passage from Smith as the epigraph to the Guide’s introductory essay: “Lacking a clear articulation of purpose, one may derive arresting anecdotal juxtapositions of self-serving differentiations, but the disciplined constructive work of the academy will not have been advanced, nor will the study of religion come of age.” 24

RELIGION AND INCONGRUITY

This chapter takes Smith’s work, specifically some of the essays that Smith collected in his first published book, Map Is Not Territory, as a point of departure. These essays mark a trajectory from Smith’s earliest engagements with what he describes as Eliade’s “locative map” of religion to his efforts to identify and explore alternative ways of mapping religion. For Smith, a “map” is a kind of model, a way of representing reality for the purposes of engaging and coming to a better understanding of it. Religious maps are a means by which religious people “construct and inhabit [space in which to meaningfully dwell] through the use of myths, rituals, and experiences of transformation.” Scholars also construct maps, which is to say, theories and concepts essential to the production of knowledge. But, Smith cautions, scholars must keep in mind that “map is not territory,” that their models and theories are different from that complex array of things that people do, think, or sense that might, under one theory or another, get called “religion.” Maps, as Smith puts it, are “structures of transformation, not structures of reproduction.” Smith argues that in Eliade the difference between map and territory is submerged, if not erased. Scholars such as Segal and Braun agree, arguing that Eliade’s “map” of religion, organized around dualities such as sacred and profane and myth and history, is grounded not in scholarly self-consciousness regarding the human activity of constructing worlds, but in “theological” claims about the human responsiveness to the constructive power of the sacred. For Eliade, sacred power manifests itself in “hierophanies.” Temporally, hierophanies are understood as beginnings, the time of creation; spatially, they designate the center of the world. Religion thus locates people in space and time by establishing boundaries and limits that give everything a clearly defined place. Myth and ritual are dedicated to transmitting and preserving this order. In the early essays of Map Is Not Territory, Smith questions what he describes as this “locative” map of religion and argues that it is only one possibility for mapping religion. He identifies two others. One he calls “utopian”: here the religious impulse is not to preserve but to escape from a given order or designated place. The other mapping strategy goes unnamed but its central focus is the problem of “incongruity.” Where locative maps tend to assimilate all experience to established temporal and spatial patterns, Smith directs our attention to myths and rituals in which people acknowledge and grapple with that which seems out of place. 25

PA R T I . L O C AT I N G R E L I G I O N

Smith’s work in these essays, particularly with respect to the issue of incongruity, makes one of the most important contributions to the study of religion of the past half century. For a variety of reasons, however, central aspects of this contribution have yet to be fully acknowledged and thought through, including by those scholars who claim to be following Smith in making the study of religion more academically legitimate. A major reason for this, I argue, is that some of these scholars employ their own locative maps of religion and hence remain oddly Eliadan. In other words, for all the influence Smith has exerted, I think that the distinction between maps that locate and maps that engage incongruity has yet to be taken seriously enough. This chapter (in fact, this book as a whole) tries to do so in a way that allows us to think more clearly about what it means to study religion critically and about how scholars of religion might think more critically about themselves.

J. Z. Smith: Beyond the Locative? Locative and Utopian

I begin with one of the earliest of the essays collected in Map Is Not Territory, “The Wobbling Pivot,” one of Smith’s most pointed efforts to come to terms with the legacy of Eliade. There, Smith does not so much reject Eliade’s central ideas as show how they tend to obscure some of the details and ambiguities that Eliade himself identifies. Of prime importance for Smith is the concept of chaos. Eliade’s locative map of religion stresses order and the overcoming of chaos: myth retells and ritual reenacts, and thus maintains, the primal victory of order over chaos. But chaos, Smith claims, is “never, in myths, finally overcome” and it is embodied in religious tricksters and reformers such as shamans and prophets. We should therefore think about the sacred as constituted through a dynamic relation between order and chaos, and even about chaos itself as “a sacred power.” By the end of the essay, these and other considerations lead Smith to contrast two distinct “visions of the world” (he is not yet using the term “map”), one in which the threat of chaos is suppressed and one in which it plays a more dynamic, productive role. He describes the first, Eliade’s vision, as “locative”: religion as affi rming and repeating the basic order of the world, firmly locating or placing 26

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people by repressing the creativity of chaos, denying change, and stressing “dwelling within a limited world.” The second vision emphasizes rebellion against and freedom from established orders. Smith calls it a “utopian” vision of the world: where the locative vision focuses on place, the utopian affirms the value of being in no place. Both, he claims, are “coeval existential possibilities.” In another early essay from Map Is Not Territory, Smith develops this perspective on chaos, but then he seems to ultimately pull back from it. “The Influence of Symbols on Social Change” begins by reasserting the contrast between locative and utopian maps of religion. Locative maps secure the borders of the world and represent the boundless as “chaotic, demonic and threatening.” Again, Smith draws our attention to a different religious pattern. In some Hellenistic religions, for instance, the cosmic order is questioned as repressive and tyrannical and “another world of freedom and openness . . . becomes the chief concern.” According to Smith, a similar vision is at work in celebrations of movement, boundlessness, and rootlessness in the American myth of the cowboy and in contemporary valorizations of social mobility. In these cases, the boundedness of order is seen as something to escape and boundlessness is valorized. However, even as Smith develops this contrast, another line of thinking begins to emerge as he considers how human beings take their place in the world through a complex process of “double objectification”: “Man creates his place in the world as he creates his world; man discovers his place as he encounters the world in which he finds himself.” On Smith’s view, symbolic and social change happens when some kind of disjunction interrupts this process, when order is threatened. In the final paragraph of the essay, Smith directs our attention to moments of “ritualized disjunction” that in one way or another take place in each society. These are “moments of ‘descent into chaos,’ of ritual reversal, of liminality” that are part of a process by which such moments of chaos are ritually overcome. There is some indication here of a larger claim, namely, that such symbols and rituals help human beings deal with disjunctions that take place outside of ritual contexts, when a world is thrown into question and chaos threatens, for, as Smith puts it, when faced with such threats, human beings cannot recognize the world or, “even more terrible,” cannot recognize themselves. Something puzzling happens in the course of the essay. Beginning with the celebration of boundlessness, even a certain chaos, Smith 27

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moves by the end of the essay to rituals that employ chaos to overcome disjunction. These rituals proceed from the boundedness of structure, through the boundlessness of liminal reversal, and then back to structure. They involve, Smith writes, “a highly structured scenario in which these moments [of descent into chaos] will be overcome through the creation of a new world, the raising of an individual to a new status, or the strengthening of community.” In other words, we are left, at the end of the essay, with “structure,” “world,” “status”: all terms of place and order. Moreover, this is not necessarily a new place or a new order, for it could just be the old order “strengthen[ed]” by the passage through liminality. Perhaps a hint of this perspective is announced in the essay’s earlier discussion of utopian religion: “Hellenistic man,” he writes, “strives to return to the world-beyond-this-world, which is his true place.” All this raises questions about what, precisely, Smith means by “utopian”: Does the utopian celebrate rootlessness and placelessness, as Smith first suggests, or does it celebrate the move from a false place to a true place? Does the utopian only affirm chaos as a liminal moment in a complex but nonetheless locative vision? In the last lines of the essay, a passage Smith quotes from Suzanne Langer, it seems that a locative vision has indeed reasserted itself, that we are very far removed from the chaos or the “no place” of the vast and boundless: “man can adapt himself somehow to anything his imagination can cope with; but he cannot deal with Chaos.” However, in two other essays from Map Is Not Territory (“Birth Upside Down or Right Side Up?” and “Good News Is No News”), Smith offers a more unsettling disruption of place and order than we see in the last sections of “The Influence of Symbols on Social Change.” “Birth Upside Down” is notable both for the way in which it rewrites “The Influence of Symbols”—passages are repeated word for word—and for a decisive shift in the treatment of liminality. Where “The Influence of Symbols” ends with a highly structured process of liminality and “man’s” inability to deal with chaos, “Birth Upside Down” ends with Smith suggesting that in some instances liminality becomes not just a bounded interval but a goal in itself, “the supreme goal rather than a moment in a rite of passage,” and so points us to an “absolute freedom.” Not exactly what we ordinarily think of as utopian, but closer to a no place than an old, new, or true place. Th is conception of liminality is developed further in “Good News Is No News.” There Smith 28

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reconstructs the genre of “gospel” in a way that allows for comparison between the New Testament and Hellenistic myths, as a genre that “play[s] between various levels of understanding and misunderstanding” by portraying a central figure that “play[s] with our seriousness and is most serious when he appears to be playing.” His examples are Apollonius and Jesus, figures that are simultaneously, paradoxically, and bewilderingly opaque and transparent and that appear to disciples and opponents alike as riddles that upset established categories. They are revelatory, but what they reveal for Smith is “enigma.” Gospel—and by the end of the essay Smith makes this claim about “myth” more generally—stresses the uncertainty of the “riddle” or the “joke,” the “play in-between” two different things as opposed to their resolution in a new order. It neither overthrows the existing order, as in utopian rebellion, nor moves through liminality to a new order. Rather, it plays with “incongruity,” the discrepancy between understanding and misunderstanding, in a manner that produces “delight” and expresses an awareness of the contingency of all order. (Here we see the important term “incongruity” for the first time.) In contrast to the Eliadan sense that chaos is threatening, Smith sees at least the possibility of chaos— of disorder, lack of fit, incongruity—as providing an opportunity for frivolity and delight and, as he puts it, “freedom, transcendence, and play.” Are we still working with a utopian map? Consider the possible responses to the enigma of “gospel” or, more generally, to the ways in which a myth does not “fit” with experience, when, as Smith puts it in “The Influence of Symbols,” some kind of disjunction disrupts the process by which people make and take their place in the world. Such disruption might spur the creation of new myths or symbols and so a reordering of the world. This is the “utopian vision” in the register of “escape” to a “true place.” Or, a group might manage such disruption through a limited or liminal introduction of chaos as a structured passage through liminality that reinforces the old order. Th is seems for Smith to be an alternative view of the utopian. But neither of these visions seems to be what Smith presents at the end of “Good News,” for there he writes about an attitude that neither rejects one order for another nor revises an old order, that is neither locative nor utopian; the  attitude he describes is rather one that relativizes all order. Here, Smith gestures toward a religious disposition in which chaos is neither 29

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overcome nor (only) a spur to a new ordering or reordering, a disposition that in some significant sense bears or inhabits chaos. Accordingly, where in “The Influence of Symbol” Smith ends with Suzanne Langer and our inability to deal with chaos, in “Good News” he approaches his conclusion with Mary Douglas’s reflections on the joke: “The joke affords opportunity for realizing that an accepted pattern has no necessity. Its excitement lies in the suggestion that any particular ordering of experience may be arbitrary and subjective. It is frivolous in that it produces no real alternative, only an exhilarating sense of freedom from form in general.” We might say that where Smith’s discussion of utopia in the end comes down on the positive freedom made possible by finding one’s true place, this initial discussion of incongruity emphasizes a negative freedom from any true place or order, the striving, as Smith puts it, “to be free from being ‘placed,’ ” through a “frivolity [that] is, in fact, transcendence.”

Excess and Application

In “Birth Upside Down” and “Good News,” Smith introduces a radical alternative to the locative map of religion. It is an alternative that scholars of religion even now have not adequately grappled with, perhaps because it was a map that Smith only briefly, and perhaps not completely coherently, sketched and never really developed further. For, in the essay that concludes and gives the name to this collection of early writings, “Map Is Not Territory,” Smith reworks the concept of incongruity in a manner that throws into question his claims about this radical liminality. At the start, the essay continues to treat incongruity in terms of joke and play. About halfway through the essay, Smith illustrates the power of the joke by reflecting on an Arandan initiation ceremony that culminates when it is revealed to the initiates that what they thought was the voice of the god Tuajiraka was in fact only the sound made by swinging a piece of wood. He writes: The normal expectation has been suspended and the unexpected intrudes relativizing all previous modes of thought. The practical joke (and this, after all, is what most initiations are whether they occur in primitive societies or in college fraternities) structurally resembles 30

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that sudden breakthrough which scholars of religion have termed an epiphany or hierophany but it does not, thereby, lose its character as a joke. The tradition has been applied, and the problematics of its application function as a religious experience and as an occasion for thought.

In some respects, the first two sentences of this passage effectively summarize “Good News”: like gospel and myth, initiation rituals introduce a fundamental relativity into the conception of order. This challenge to order, Smith says, “structurally resembles” hierophany. But this hierophany, unlike Eliade’s, does not place us securely in the cosmos. Rather, it upsets order and, to return to “Good News,” perhaps even allows a certain transcendence of order or placement. At this point, though, Smith makes what I take to be a significant transition, signaled in the third sentence of the passage with the term “application.” In the course of the second half of “Map Is Not Territory,” the vaguely existentialist terminology employed by Smith in earlier essays, echoed here by concepts such as “religious experience” and “hierophany,” disappears—and with it the idea of the liminal relativization of all order. Instead, an intellectualist perspective and vocabulary, indebted to Levi-Strauss, comes to the fore and dominates Smith’s writing on incongruity and application, the major themes of the rest of the essay. Myth, he writes, is not an “exotic category of experience which escapes everyday modes of thought,” but involves “the ordinary, recognizable features of religion as negotiation and application.” It is a “rationalizing enterprise” showing us the truth of Levi-Strauss’s dictum that “man has always been thinking equally well.” From here, Smith counters claims of radical difference between so-called primitives and moderns in anthropologists such as Lévy-Bruhl and, in a different way, in Eliade’s contrast between archaic and modern religions. He baldly and sweepingly asserts that the “primitive” has “historical consciousness” and “critical rationality” and that these attributes are definitive of “being human.” As an example, Smith invokes the story of Hainuwele from the Wemale tribe of Ceram, reading the myth in the context of the encounter between native and European economic systems. The challenge for the Wemale is to understand this new, disruptive historical circumstance by applying their traditional myths to it. According to Smith, this effort fails, but what is important for him is that they 31

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acknowledge the incongruity and test “the adequacy and the applicability of [their] categories to new situations and data.” This, he goes on, is “preeminently a rational and rationalizing enterprise, an instance of an experimental method .  .  . [a] science.” These “primitives,” in other words, do not think away incongruity; they think through it. This is, no doubt, an interesting and provocative move, worthy of careful attention. But this intellectualist approach to myth also domesticates some of Smith’s earlier ideas about chaos and incongruity and draws his reflections on incongruity more closely to the locative map. Let me explain. At the end of “Map Is Not Territory,” Smith defines the locative in terms of religions in which “the disjunctive (identified with the liminal or chaotic) will be overcome through recreation.” That is, locative maps cannot really acknowledge disjunction; they ward it off by focusing on the celebration and re-creation of the original order of the cosmos. Put bluntly, religious people guided by locative maps do not really “think.” Much later in his career, Smith will reiterate this basic point by claiming that the locative emphasis on congruence denies “the significance of efforts at thought and of intellectual criticism.” By contrast, religious maps that acknowledge incongruity don’t “flee from disjunction” but allow incongruous elements to stand, playing in between them. Echoing the passage from the middle of the essay quoted above, Smith states that this play “gives rise to thought.” But how, precisely, do religious people—whether “primitive” or “modern”—experience or think about incongruity? There are, I think, crucial differences between the thinking of radical liminality that Smith points to at the end of “Good News” and the “application” that he focuses on in “Map Is Not Territory.” We find the idea of “play” central to both, but it is not at all clear that the term means the same thing in both. In his discussion of application, Smith compares play with “science” and “rationalization,” casting myth as a kind of hypothesis, an answer to the problem of incongruity that needs to be tested. It is here, I argue, that Smith’s account of incongruity moves from a decisively nonlocative form of religiosity as radical liminality to something much closer to locative religion. In the second half of “Map Is Not Territory,” application of myth is a form of instrumental thinking, directing thought in the direction of explaining incongruity, of solving a specific problem presented by history; it seeks to make puzzling or new phenomena intelligible even if this will involve, in the end, replacing 32

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one intellectual construction, one map, one myth, one set of categories with another or, more often, adjusting or refining the original map. In “Good News,” by contrast, incongruity is not simply a problem to work through but a condition to live, a condition that provokes ontological and existential reflection, more generally, on the bearing of “enigma.” If application in “Map Is Not Territory” is concerned with placement in the world as a mode of science-like thinking, then incongruity in “Good News” provokes what I will call a “thinking of excess.” I will have more to say, especially in the second half of the book, about what it is to think excess. Provisionally, I will say that it has to do with a mode of taking one’s place in the world by engaging, reflecting on, and affirming, rather than repressing or thinking away, boundlessness. Now, though, I want to develop the claim that although Smith’s reflections on application are valuable, they also push his consideration of incongruity closer to the locative paradigm than he acknowledges. In “Map Is Not Territory,” Smith notes that his claim that incongruity gives rise to thought is a play on Paul Ricoeur’s “the symbol gives rise to thought.” However, Ricoeur’s “thought” is much closer to what I am describing as a thinking of excess than Smith’s thinking as application and rationalization. Ricoeur’s theory of myth subordinates myth’s “explicative” function to its symbolic and disclosive functions, producing a cognitive equivocation or excess that reveals to us existential—not simple intellectual or instrumental—possibility. Smith, however, distances himself decisively from Ricoeur’s hermeneutics of the symbol. He does employ the language of symbol in the early essays of Map Is Not Territory, but in “Map Is Not Territory” he writes: “I expect that scholars of religion in the future will shift from the present Romantic hermeneutics of symbol and poetic speech to that of legal-exegetical discourse.” Myth doesn’t disclose; it works as precedent. As he puts it later, “religion is not best understood as a disclosure that gives rise to a particular mode of experience. To the contrary, religion is the relentlessly human activity of thinking through a ‘situation,’ an understanding that requires assenting to Lévi-Strauss’s dictum, ‘man has always been thinking equally well.’ ” In other words, rather than a fundamental existential and linguistic incongruity that has the potential for distancing us from our ordinary common-sense reality and our ordinary efforts to place ourselves, Smith focuses on “situational incongruity,” where experience and history present challenges that religious people 33

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try to explain and represent in and through the religious maps deployed in myth and ritual. This sharp contrast between what Smith views as the passivity of disclosure—being the recipient of a disclosure, whether from a symbol or a god—and “relentlessly human activity” helps reinforce the distinction I am making between excess and application. Quoting Cassirer, Smith defines the human in terms of “work”: “Man’s outstanding characteristic, his distinguishing mark, is not his metaphysical or physical nature, but his work.”  In a revealing footnote to the late essay “When the Chips Are Down,” Smith recollects that early on he adopted the term “application” as an “in your face” move to counter A. E. Jensen’s emphasis on myth’s disclosive power. (Smith also refers to Jensen as the “enemy of enemies.”) According to Smith, all that one can do in the face of such disclosure is to adopt a stance of “silence,” which in his view is “antihuman.”  Smith’s “human” is always constructing, always applying, always adapting. It is always thinking as well, but as I have been stressing, there isn’t just one type of thinking to consider when we study religion. One can think through a situation: recognizing incongruity, one applies myth or some other resource in an effort to explain the incongruity or redraw one’s map. Or, one can think about a situation: arrested by the joke, the epiphany, or the incongruity, one reflects on the fact that all our efforts to place and secure ourselves take place in the midst of enigma and considers the significance of that fact for the way we live our lives. Many scholars of religion, and other critics of ideology, will call out such appeals to enigma as “mystification.” And Smith himself, in both “Map Is Not Territory” and in the later “When the Chips Are Down,” connects such silence with “imperial ideologies” and “ ‘conservative’ approaches to the study of religion.”  But the confident modernist and locative assumption that all questions point to problems to be solved, rather than mysteries, enigmas, or conditions to be borne, has its own ideological dangers. To be sure, we need to think about the ways in which religious people apply their maps as they engage and transform the world and themselves, but what are we excluding when we relegate silence and receptivity to the “antihuman”? Does this exclude practices of prayer or contemplation, disciplined listening, and attentiveness? When is the claim of enigma an ideological strategy for blocking critical inquiry and when is it a rational, critical acknowledgment of the limits of our capacity to know and place ourselves? 34

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Theologians and Pilgrims

Taken together, the essays from Map Is Not Territory I have examined above offer a range of ways to think about religious modes of thinking about and working with chaos, order, and incongruity. In the earlier essays, Smith tries to show that not all religious traditions conform to Eliade’s locative map; in “Good News,” he suggests a radical liminality that, in my view, is the most extreme of the nonlocative options he considers; in “Map Is Not Territory,” Smith narrows his focus to situational incongruity and application and thus to thinking as the social labor of fi nding, or refi nding, a place in the world or cosmos. These essays themselves offer no real evidence that we should read these differences as signaling a progression or development in Smith’s thought and thus as suggesting that he rejected the views of “The Wobbling Pivot” or “Good News.” Moreover, it is important to keep in mind that Smith’s preferred scholarly genre is the essay, that is, an experiment in thought: how might we conceptualize religion when we look at it like this or when we compare it to that? In “Map Is Not Territory,” he acknowledges that his treatment of incongruity, particularly his comparison of the application of myth to “science,” is “an exaggeration in the direction of the truth.”  That said, Smith does claim, in the late, retrospective essay “When the Chips Are Down,” that the essay “Map Is Not Territory,” which I read as offering a more locative treatment of incongruity than “Good News,” set the agenda for his future work. I will not claim that Smith ends up with his own locative map of religion—I do not think that is the case—but I also do not think that he gets as far from the locative map as he suggests. To push this point further, I offer one more observation about “Map Is Not Territory.” The operations of classification and comparison are, for Smith, at the heart of all thought. Accordingly, he opens “Map Is Not Territory” by reflecting on his place in the University of Chicago’s Faculty Directory— where he is classified as a “historian of religions”—and by comparing the historian to two different religious figures. The historian is unlike the “theologian,” whose thinking, according to Smith, proceeds from the absolute standpoint of the “Beginning,” because the historian thinks from within the messiness of history: he or she has no firm or given place to stand; his or her beginnings are always arbitrary. But, Smith goes on, the historian is like the “pilgrim” because he or she is “obliged 35

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to approach his subject obliquely . . . [and] must circumambulate the spot several times before making even the most fleeing contact.”  These comparisons are not incidental or fashioned for the particular occasion of this essay, for throughout the essays that compose Map Is Not Territory, Smith plays continually with comparisons between religion and the study of religion, between religious and scholarly mapping strategies. He does so again later in “Map Is Not Territory.” There, he argues that religious locative mapping strategies appear, historically, to be linked with imperial ideologies and to express a conservative interest in restricting mobility and maintaining the status quo. He goes on to say that he fi nds the same “conservative, ideological element strongly to the fore” in phenomenological, functionalist, and structuralist approaches to the study of religion, all of which, he says, “lay prime emphasis upon congruency and conformity.”  In other words, certain kinds of scholars are like theologians in their locative orientation. This anticipates later criticisms of Eliade (and others) as too “theological” and not sufficiently historical in their approach to religion: Eliade, as a scholar of religion, is like the theologian for whom everything gets its meaning from the “Beginning” in that he assimilates all religious behavior to the locative model. These comparisons reveal as much about Smith, and, I will argue, about the study of religion today, as they do about Eliade. Smith may not want to draw lines between “primitives” and “moderns,” but he does want to draw the line between those who can acknowledge and think incongruity and those who cannot. And this distinction, even as he claims that the historian has no place to stand, makes it possible for Smith to oppose the historian to the cosmically grounded theologian and the conservative phenomenologist. In a gesture I will examine in more detail below, he thus gives the historian if not firm ground to stand on then at least some leverage—something to stand against.

The New Locativists

Smith has had an enormous impact on the study of religion up to the present. His emphasis on religion and scholarship as historical, constructive activities and his unmatched reflections on the comparative process are widely and deservedly lauded. Unfortunately, his thinking 36

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on incongruity has not had a similar impact, though it is, in my view, of an importance equal to or greater than his other contributions. I argue now that it is precisely those scholars who want to follow Smith in constructing a more academically respectable study of religion that most need to take seriously his work on incongruity. I pointed out above that Smith’s essays can be read as “exaggerations in the direction of truth.” His essays in Map Is Not Territory thus invite at least two questions: What does religion look like when we exaggerate in the direction of “Good News” rather than “Map Is Not Territory,” that is, toward radical liminality or a thinking of excess? And, what does religion look like when we take the “pilgrim” rather than the “theologian” as its paradigmatic figure? But, in the work of many today who claim to be taking up Smith’s efforts to establish the study of religion on solid theoretical and academic grounds, such questions do not get a hearing. Instead, in a manner more polemical than experimental, they repeat Eliade’s emphasis on the locative, albeit with a difference, by viewing religion as a “totalizing” discourse inimical to history. I will call them, with apologies for the clumsiness of the term, “locativists.”

A Locativist Manifesto

This is nowhere more evident than in the Guide to the Study of Religion. This volume gathers essays from an impressive array of scholars, including Smith, on key concepts for the study of religion. Far from being a mechanical attempt to survey the field as a whole, it is a focused, programmatic collection that comes with what coeditor Willi Braun describes as “a bit of an ‘attitude.’ ”  This attitude is expressed in an unapologetic dismissal of established paradigms for the study of religion, such as Eliade’s. We need, Braun tells us, to chart new directions, perhaps even a new paradigm, for the study of religion that can “be credible within the family of human and social sciences in the modern university.”  For the editors of the Guide and a number of the contributors to it, religion is a means by which human beings organize worlds, societies, and identities for themselves, a method (to use the term of another contributor to the volume, Burton Mack) of “social formation.” My argument is that these scholars are locativists in two closely related respects. First, they conceive of religion as a kind of social formation 37

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deeply invested in stability and congruence. As such, it is particularly resistant, even opposed, to critical thought, only working as social formation by masking the human reality of its own standpoint and mystifying its sources of authority. Second, these scholars claim academic legitimacy by drawing a sharp contrast between the inherent obscurantism of religion and the self-consciousness, playfulness, and critical awareness of scholars of religion (or at least of those scholars who conceive of the study of religion properly). Locativists, that is, even as they eschew theological and metaphysical strategies of placement, locate themselves securely in the academy and locate the academy securely in the contemporary world by opposing their “thinking” to religion. These two locative tendencies, and their interweaving, are especially evident in the two essays that frame the Guide, Braun’s “Religion” and Sam Gill’s “Play.” Braun’s work depends heavily on the work of another contributor to the Guide, Bruce Lincoln, a major figure in the field who, like Smith, at one time worked closely with Eliade. Lincoln’s “Theses on Method,” fi rst published in 1996, sets up an influential and telling contrast between two discourses—“the history of religions” and “religion”—on the basis of both their voice and content. The historian of religion, he asserts, “speaks of things temporal and terrestrial in a human and fallible voice, while staking his or her claim to authority on rigorous critical practice.” By contrast, religious discourse is “that discourse whose defining characteristic is its desire to speak of things eternal and transcendent with an authority equally transcendent and eternal.” Th is claim to transcendent authority makes religion a particularly, even uniquely, effective stabilizing force, a point crucial for Braun’s introductory essay. Citing Lincoln, Braun characterizes the “rhetorical propensity” of religion as the desire to speak with “transcendent and eternal” authority. He goes on to contrast the “uncensored curiosity” of scholars of religion with the “confessional” and “apologetic” constraints placed upon theologians by the “knowledge frameworks of religious structures.” Braun not only opposes religion and the study of religion in these terms of freedom and constraint, but argues that efforts to study religion in terms of concepts such as the “holy” and the “sacred” do nothing but explain one mystery by another and so undermine scholarly efforts to “enlist the study of religion as a contributing partner in the pursuit of a science of human social life.” With Lincoln, then, Braun renders religious discourse and any discourse 38

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that comes too close to religion—such as Eliadan phenomenology—as the “other” of historical, academic discourse: religion does not just become the object of academic discourse; it also plays an essential role, as that which must be excluded, in constituting academic discourse as the “rigorous critical practice” that it is supposed to be. Such practice, of course, is grounded in the ability to identify, to explain, and indeed to introduce incongruity, to see the difference, for instance, between religious claims to surrender all human interests to a transcendent God and the interests served by that surrender. For Braun and Lincoln, religious discourse obscures this incongruity. Unlike Smith, they do not imagine the possibility of a nonlocative religious engagement with incongruity. Even Sam Gill, who arguably has done more than any other scholar to develop Smith’s ideas on play and incongruity, falls into this pattern in the Guide’s epilogue, an essay entitled “Play.” For Gill, play holds together two or more irreconcilable positions in a “dialogical structure,” moving between positions rather than seeking to overcome differences between them. Play is thus a liminal concept, “a boundary that presents alternatives governed by self-contradiction such that each leads to and negates the other in an apparently endless cycle.” Gill goes on to say, drawing from Smith, that such play is found in both religion and scholarship, for example, in the fit or nonfit between the myth and the mythteller’s historical experience and in the fit or nonfit between the scholar’s “map” and religious “territory”: “Religion and its constituents, as Smith imagines them, involve the oscillatory and iterative negotiation of fit without final resolution. But the academic study of religion, while framing different concerns than do religions, gains its meaning and vitality through the same process.” But play for Gill is even more complex. Embracing Smith’s claim that “map is not territory” and that scholars of religion have no “justifiable place to stand,” Gill notes that scholars nevertheless do try to comprehend and order the world. Th is shows us that play in fact involves two distinct movements of “oscillation.” The fi rst is the oscillation between the two “positions” or “alternatives,” say, “map” and “territory.” The second is the more complex movement between this oscillating refusal to choose a position, and so to defer resolution, and the decision to ultimately rest with one or the other, a second-order oscillation or play between “comic and tragic” views of the world, that is, between the resolutions of knowledge and 39

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the knowledge that such resolutions can never be final. This is a significant development of Smith’s ideas, for it gestures to the radical incongruity of “Good News,” to a thinking of excess, or, as Gill puts it, to reflection on the “absurd.” It is a development I will have more to say about below. But who thinks this excess by playing between the comic and the tragic? Gill begins by claiming that religion and the study of religion both play, but he then introduces a crucial difference: “The academic study of religion has a play structurality in that doing it always also involves the meta-message ‘this is academic not religious’—to be ‘religious’ would be to identify with one of the alternative positions that engage the academic study of religion and would therefore negate any possibility of being engaged by the play structurality—signaling a passage through a boundary of paradox very like that of play.” It appears that religion and the study of religion play differently, even that religion does not really play at all: it “negates any possibility of being engaged by the play structurality.” Here, the religious (unlike those Smith writes about in “Good News”) do not play between the “alternative positions.” In another essay, “No Place to Stand,” Gill puts it this way: “To take a stance, in this complex multi-cultural world, without recognizing its absurdity is either religious, narrow-minded, or naïve. To refuse to take any stance at all is either to indulge in infi nite regress, a favorite of many post-modernists, or silence. The alternative, which is at least more interesting, is the perspective of play: seriously taking a stance while acknowledging its absurdity.” He goes on to compare the humor of the novelist Milan Kundera with the playful storytelling of the scholar. Kundera, he claims, offers a “sharp” contrast between literature and religion, in part because, for Kundera, “religion and humor are incompatible.” Gill embraces Kundera’s claim, apparently forgetting or rejecting Smith’s reflections on religion and the joke. Thus, even as he offers an honest and penetrating account of the “absurdity” of our scholarly efforts to map the world and religion, Gill does so, at least in these essays, only by denying a similar self-consciousness and similar playfulness to religion. It is as if he forgets what he states clearly elsewhere: that Smith develops the idea of play by focusing on the playfulness of religion. And, like Braun and Lincoln, it seems that Gill is taking Smith’s assured theologian, rather than his tentative pilgrim, as the paradigmatic religious figure: religion takes a position, stands firm in 40

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one place, and does not play between positions. Making such claims, he deploys what I will show in the next chapter is a common rhetorical and conceptual strategy for distinguishing between the critical self-consciousness of the scholar and the naïve locativism of religion. This is not to say that distinctions between the self-consciousness of the scholar and the locative “naiveté” of the religious are simply misguided. We see every day that religion does provide some people with a sense of certainty that denies modern and postmodern historical consciousness and perpetuates intolerance and violence. These elements of religion certainly deserve our attention and our analysis. My point has less to do with wanting to ignore the questions that these elements raise about locative religion than with wondering whether their “exaggerations” in certain directions have prevented us from pursuing more fully other questions: Can religious people play religiously? Can they recognize absurdity in and through their religious thought and practice and, if so, how? Do they always, necessarily, “speak” with transcendent and eternal authority when they speak about God or about their religious beliefs? Can they think critically when they think religiously? Finally, if so, where and how, exactly, do we draw the boundaries between religion and the academic study of religion? Read carefully, Smith and Gill do provoke such questions, but scholars such as Braun and Lincoln seem to foreclose them from the start and so foreclose the possibility that religion plays with incongruity. For them, as I argue in more detail in the next chapter, religion exerts an ideological force by naturalizing and divinizing—and so mystifying—contingent, historically constructed human categories and hierarchies. It thereby places human beings securely and authoritatively in the world and cosmos in a way that admits, at least on its own terms, no challenges and only very limited recognition of incongruity. We are back to the Eliadan position that all religion is locative.

Locativism as Secularism

In the “Preface” to the collection of essays they edited under the title Secular Theories on Religion, to which Lease, Lincoln, McCutcheon, and Burton Mack all contribute, Tim Jensen and Mikael Rothstein offer this account of the academic study of religion: “We have to recognize 41

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that [it] . . . is not at all as emancipated from religion, not least Christianity, as one might think.  .  .  . Consequently, scholars of religion frequently have to explain and justify their academic, non-religious or secular approach.” They go on to quote Armin Geertz to summarize the “secular approach” they want to defend: it should, Geertz claims, “confine itself to analytical models grounded in a view of the world based on the insight and achievements of the natural sciences . . . and apply methods, theories and models developed in the human and social sciences.” In some respects, Jensen and Rothstein are right: the religious, particularly Christian influence on the history of the study of religion has been pervasive and demands analysis and critical reflection. They also are right to argue that scholars should not have to defend naturalist and social-scientific approaches to religion. Such approaches have much to teach us and there is no reason why religion should not be studied with the same academic tools with which we study other human phenomena. The question is how to defend such approaches. Even as scholars such as Braun and Lincoln defend the importance and legitimacy of the naturalistic and social-scientific— that is, the “secular”—study of religion, they fail, in their locativism, to think critically enough about religion. Specifically, they fail to consider the possibility that not all religious discourse claims transcendent authority and that by placing scholarly discourse in opposition to religious discourse they redeploy a form of locativism. Jensen and Rothstein repeat this move as they consider the word “secular” in the title of their book: they use this term, they write, “to designate the academic study of religion as defined in opposition to religious thinking about religion.” Must we think about religion through the lens of an opposition between “secular” and “religious”? Addressing this question is the task of much of the rest of the book. To conclude this chapter, I’ll set the stage with some general comments about the opposition and argue that locativists are defending not a secular but a secularist study of religion. The “secular” is one of the conceptual pillars of modernity, but theorizing it has taken an enormous leap forward in the past decade and has become a major focus of inquiry for prominent philosophers, sociologists, historians, and scholars of religion. Whether these figures claim that we are in the midst of a “secular age” (Charles Taylor), a “post-secular” age (Jürgen Habermas), or something else, much of this thinking 42

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converges on three main points. First, the “secularization thesis,” which pointed to the decline or privatization of religion in the modern period and powerfully guided research and prognostication through much of the twentieth century, has been thrown into question, if not falsified, by what to many appears to be a worldwide resurgence of religion in recent decades. Second, it has become necessary to question one of the guiding ideas of modern political and academic discourse, namely, that the “secular” designates a neutral discursive space or a kind of conceptual Esperanto that allows people of many different beliefs and ideologies to share a “public” discourse that in one way or another transcends their particularities. Scholars such as Talal Asad contest this view by arguing that the secular is a positive cultural formation grounded in particular metaphysical, epistemological, and normative claims about the world and human beings. Third, we need to attend to the way conceptions of the secular have been shaped by Western religious ideas and practices and to the way secular discourse has in turn shaped and policed the modern conception of “religion.” The questions I have raised about locativism have nothing to do with scholars who claim to study religion from a secular perspective if all they mean by this is that their work does not presuppose or defend any particular set of religious commitments. But they have everything to do with locativist arguments for an exclusively secularist study of religion. I derive this distinction between “secular” and “secularist” from Jorge Casanova’s and Charles Taylor’s analyses of secularity and from William Connolly’s and Jeffrey Stout’s criticisms of the secularist exclusion of metaphysical and religious discourse from the public sphere. Casanova distinguishes between “secular,” “secularization,” and “secularism”: the first concept is used to distinguish between “secular” and “religious” realms of life; the second refers to patterns of historical and social transformation that led to the emergence of this secular realm and that have been used in support of the “secularization” thesis; the third refers to normative and political projects that seek to further the differentiation of the secular and the religious. Taylor, in A Secular Age, offers what some, including Casanova, argue is the most comprehensive and illuminating treatment of secularity we have, one that overlaps significantly with Casanova’s. What Taylor shows so well is that the secular age creates the conditions for new forms of engagement with the world, including new forms of religious engagement. Received 43

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ideas about secularization are not completely misguided, Taylor argues, for we do see the withdrawal of religion from the public sphere (what he calls “Secularity 1”) and a decline in religious belief and practice (“Secularity 2”). But particularly important for him is “Secularity 3,” that is, a fundamental change in what he calls the “conditions of belief,” whereby religious belief not only becomes more personal than collective, but also comes to be held with the knowledge that such belief is only one among other options: “Modern secularity therefore must be understood as this field of increasingly multiform contestation, in which every position is rendered uneasy and questionable because it can be challenged from many angles.” As William Connolly puts it, in the secular age, all of us, whether “secular” or “religious,” come to “dwell” in the world in a new way. Th is is to say that we are all “secular”— whether we worship in a Temple or proclaim the death of God. Indeed, in spite of his own strong Catholicism, Taylor believes that Secularity 3 is a good thing for human beings because it makes possible richer forms of interaction between people of different religions and between believers and nonbelievers. It makes possible a broad, deep pluralism. Yet he is critical of what Casanova calls “secularists,” who view religion as unalterably tied to premodern exclusivism and authoritarianism. Secularists see themselves as having advanced beyond or grown out of irrational religious worldviews and believe that others should follow. However, for Taylor—and we see this too in Connolly and Stout—secularity makes possible new forms of religious imagination, practice, and belief that are not necessarily authoritarian or enemies of pluralism. Taylor’s point is not to question the validity or respectability of nontheistic views of life—though he certainly engages in different forms of contestation with such views—but rather to combat the idea  that religious belief and practice are necessarily presecular holdovers. Jeffrey Stout offers an illuminating account of the difference between such secularism and what he calls “secularized discourse” (what I have been referring to as the “secular”). Secularized discourse emerges in the modern period as a pragmatic response to religious pluralism, that is, to the recognition that, increasingly, participants in public discourse could no longer take for granted that others shared their own religious (or nonreligious) assumptions. Secularism, by contrast, is an ideology that demands the “expulsion of theological expression from the public 44

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sphere,” an ideology prevalent in liberal philosophers and political theorists. Stout’s is perhaps the best account we have of how religious people can and do participate in the public sphere without leaving their religion at home. In part, the success of this account is due to Stout’s persuasive arguments about how people with different “final vocabularies” can engage one another in public discourse. He points out that even when religious people base their arguments, as they properly do, on the authorities in their tradition, such as God’s will or the Bible, many will rarely appeal only to such authorities in making their arguments. Instead, they will offer a range of premises, many of which are open to debate with others who do not share their view of what ultimately is authoritative. He also stresses the importance of immanent criticism, the ability to participate, for the sake of discourse and argument, in an interlocutor’s worldview in order to test the coherence of his or her arguments and the possibilities implicit in them for reaching different conclusions on their own terms. Would it be useful to imagine a secularized rather than a secularist study of religion? As I have pointed out, much of the recent genealogical work on the concept of “religion” focuses on the way that our theories and approaches to “religion” continue to be compromised by theological and religious, particularly Christian assumptions, conceptions, and histories. Now, however, scholars are bringing the same genealogical scrutiny to the concept of the “secular.” With this, efforts to exorcize the study of religion of the ghosts of religion and theology become more complicated. If modern conceptions of “religion” emerge with, through, and against the modern conception of the “secular,” that is, if these concepts are mutually constitutive, and if we understand “secularism” to be a political and social project, then simply pointing out that in some way religion or theology infects the secular study of religion (or the public and political space) or arguing that the academic sphere should be secular is to invoke a host of presuppositions and categories that themselves need to be interrogated. For one, the stories the locativists tell about religion and modernity tend to be versions of what Charles Taylor calls “subtraction stories,” that is, stories “of modernity, and secularity in particular, which explain them by human beings having lost, or sloughed of, or liberated themselves from certain earlier, confi ning horizons, or illusions, or limitations of knowledge.” Th is kind of narrative, in its classic, 45

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Enlightenment, liberationist version, plays a substantial role in the contributions of Lincoln, Braun, and Donald Wiebe to the Guide to the Study of Religion. Lincoln cites the violence of the “religious wars” and asserts that “the secular nation-state learned to derive legitimacy from the people it governed rather than God.” Braun and Wiebe focus on another strand of the narrative, each emphasizing the progress of reason and its impact on the study of religion. Thus, Braun, as we have seen, contrasts the “uncensored curiosity” of academic discourse to the “confessional and apologetic requirements” of religious discourse and insists that the essays in the Guide represent yet another step forward in the march of reason. Wiebe’s telling is close to Braun’s, though more assertive and prescriptive. His modernity is characterized, as I discuss in the next chapter, by “a uniquely successful . . . culture-transcending science.” But, he argues, this success came under attack in the twentieth century, leaving the field in danger of falling back into a “premodern form of the study of religion.” To prevent this, the fortress of science must be made more secure by ensuring that “the study of religion as a social science provide[s] us with the only acceptable model for the study of religion in the modern public university.” Lincoln levels a similar and even more dramatic warning: “When one rejects the Enlightenment’s values en masse and dispenses with its model of culture, one risks not just a return of the repressed, but novel Wars of Religion.” In each of these cases, the narrative is propelled, first, by the subtraction of religious thinking and violence and, second, by the (progressive) development of a nonreligious sphere, whether of politics or the academy, made possible by this subtraction. Importantly, this progress takes place against the background of a static, monolithic, and violent religion and its intellectual counterpart, theology: as the academic and political spheres are secularized and thus are making progress, religion stays the same or, at most, dons the disguise of modernity or even postmodernity in order to beat back or overturn the cultural changes of the past few centuries. These narratives thus encode the opposition between religion and the study of religion we find in the locativists: there is a story of progress to tell about the development and success of the academic study of religion, but no such story to tell about religion or theology. Like Christian fundamentalists who see themselves as protecting a “tradition” that never was or retrieving an “original” Christi-

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anity that never existed, such scholars define religion and ground their critical perspective in it by pulling it out of history. One reason that the concept of the secular becomes useful in Taylor’s hands is that he eschews such oppositional thinking. For him, it is possible to be secular and religious, at least in the sense of Secularity 3. Locativism, however, gets much of its force from binary thinking; when it comes to the study of religion, the crucial binaries are (in addition to the secular and religious) the metaphysical and the nonmetaphysical, tradition and criticism, public and private, and critic and caretaker. Everything has its place and everything must stay in its place, at least when it comes to religion, or we risk infection or worse. Ironically, theorists of religion since Durkheim have seen such binary thinking as the mark of religion, which is most clearly seen in the distinction between the sacred and the profane. But it is not at all clear that this is a helpful way to think about religion. Perhaps our problem is not that scholars of religion are still too religious, but that they are too secularist and that their secularism depends on a mythological form of “religion.”

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Can I, must I, leave it to, say, literature, or history, or anthropology, to articulate and preserve the richness of my experience for me? Are their authorities in positions to work their impressions that are essentially different from my capacities as a participant of a human culture? To cede the understanding of my experience, trivial and crucial, to them would require, from my point of view, a massive effort of discounting. —STANLEY CAVELL 1

In a review essay published in 1996 entitled “Modernism and Postmodernism in the Study of Religion,” Catherine Bell offered a provocative diagnosis of two chronic methodological debates afflicting the study of religion. Both, she says, are “variations of a fundamental polarization between ‘insider’ claims to experience something in one set of terms and ‘outsider’ claims to explain that experience in very different terms.” The first debate pits “modernists,” those who endorse methods for studying religion that explain religion in naturalistic and social-scientific terms, against phenomenologically oriented scholars who are wary of methods that “explain away” religion and who seek to understand religion in experience-near terms. The second debate is between “modernists” and “postmodernists.” Postmodernists bring to bear historicist criticism of modernist positivism, rejecting the idea that science is a culture-transcending discourse by emphasizing the theory-laden nature of all observation and description. But they too are critical of theological and Eliadan—or “religionist”—approaches to religion and they too argue that scholars of religion should develop scientific theories and methods that confine any discourse even hinting at theology or religionism to “data” that can be explained. Modernists and postmodernists alike, according to Bell, are characterized by a “nearly paranoid degree of anti-theology polemic.”

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Bell’s analysis is a useful starting point for reflecting further on locativist theorizing in today’s study of religion, particularly with respect to strategies of what I will call “detachment” and “closure.” In this chapter, I examine modernist and postmodernist, or, as I prefer to call them, positivist and historicist, forms of locativism and argue that despite important differences in the way each understands the academic enterprise, both go to great lengths to detach the academic study of religion not only from religion but also from various forms of “quasi religion” or “crypto-theology” and even, in some cases, from humanistic scholarship as well. To justify this separation, these scholars argue that religion is an especially powerful discourse of closure and, as such, precludes the transgressive and liberating openness of modern and postmodern forms of critical thought. Such arguments perpetuate the polarization Bell identifies. The problem, as I see it, is not that locativists seek to explain religion in terms very different from those employed by insiders, but that they misunderstand and thus exaggerate such difference, leaving us with a simplistic view not only of religion but of the academic enterprise as well. Locativists certainly are not alone in their sensitivity to the dangers of violating the boundaries between the religious and the academic. But the extremes to which they go in this regard can astonish. As a case in point, consider an exchange in the pages of the Journal of the American Academy of Religion occasioned by the publication in that journal of Ivan Strenski’s article “Religion, Power, and the Final Foucault.”  There, Strenski argues that genealogical self-consciousness regarding the concept of “religion” and its oppressive discursive effects, which has led some scholars to advocate abandoning the concept altogether, has gotten out of hand. Scholars of religion, he claims, have no more power in “creating” the object of their studies than scholars in other fields. He makes a compelling point, but my focus here is on one of Strenski’s corollary arguments in the article, namely, that some scholars violate academic boundaries by going beyond the description and analysis of religion and hence “ ‘make’ religion or ‘do’ religion where, intellectually and constitutionally, it ought not to be done.” Or, as he summarizes, “Theology happens.” He adds that this kind of problem is endemic. Just as scholars of religion sometimes engage in “saving souls,” political scientists sometimes “preach” and economists sometimes defend “market orthodoxy.” Strenski concludes that “the dirty 50

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little secret of today’s politicized university is .  .  . [that] Ideology happens.” Note the rhetorical conflation: “Theology happens. . . . Ideology happens.” This rhetoric reverberates in the published responses to the article, particularly in Gary Lease’s. Lease asserts that Strenski’s criticisms of genealogical investigations of “religion” are expressions of a desire to limit critical examination of the history and effects of the concept and that this amounts to an effort at a kind of “soul-saving.” For Lease, that is, Strenski is engaged in precisely the kind of theology and ideology he criticizes: Strenski has “embarked on a crusade to achieve nothing less than the redemption of contemporary public society [through] our current institutions of higher learning.” This, he goes on, threatens to turn the university into an “evangelistic tent show” when its real focus should be “knowledge, its hard-won presence, its constant need of revision, its demand for never-ending critique.” Not to be outdone, Strenski, in his rejoinder, asserts that Lease “sermonizes,” makes a “god” out of power, and sets his views in the concrete of “neo-religious dogma.” Despite some fundamental disagreements, Strenski and Lease both deploy classic secularist rhetoric as they seek to cleanse the university of “religion.” If religion is not handled carefully, the scholar might be tempted to confuse academic responsibility with hopes and desires for a better society, an academic transgression that here is held with a contempt expressed in what for today’s intellectuals are terms of ridicule and condemnation: “crusade,” “tent show,” and “dogmatism.” What do Lease and Strenski think the university can offer us that a pseudoacademic evangelist or dogmatist might threaten? Lease gives us the basic answer: critical thinking, which religion resists, and thus knowledge. Strenski agrees. In another context, he identifies the process by which knowledge must be arrived at (and in doing so qualifies his condemnation of ideology) by claiming that the only “ideology” that academics should defend is “open inquiry.” We are back, then, to the locativist opposition between open, critical academic discourse and closed, uncritical religious discourse, though now rhetorically energized with stock characters embedded deeply, as objects of ridicule, in the secular imaginary. One might reasonably question whether the only operative ideology here is the ideology of “hard won” knowledge. Given the history of the study of religion in the twentieth century, when many scholars looked at naturalistic explanations of religion with 51

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suspicion, it makes sense that scholars today are thinking carefully about how we construct theories of religion after we have excavated the religious, especially Christian, presuppositions that have had such a powerful influence on the field. Yet, it seems to me that locativists are driven by a secularist overreaction to Eliade and others that has warped the understanding of both religion and the academy. One result of this overreaction is that efforts to construct a “scientific” paradigm for the study of religion collapse into what Barbara Herrnstein Smith describes as a scientistic set of “intellectual confinements,” a perspective on knowledge in which the “aims, methods, and products of the natural sciences [are] taken as models for all knowledge practices.” As a consequence of such confinements, locativists fail to see certain things about their purported object of study. Most important for my purposes, they fail to see how religious traditions and discourses grapple creatively and intelligently with chaos, disorder, and incongruity.

Detachment, Closure, and Social Formation The Positivist: Donald Wiebe

Donald Wiebe is one of the most prolific contemporary defenders of the study of religion as a “science.” In his essay in the Guide, on “Modernism,” Wiebe criticizes Catherine Bell’s own postmodernist views of science and argues that science is a “culture transcending” discourse that is “objective, neutral, and universalistic.” Elsewhere, in a survey of programmatic documents on the study of religion in Canada, Britain, and the United States, Wiebe bemoans the lack of scholarly consensus about the nature of the discipline and the fact that so few view the study of religion as an “objective science.” He is particularly concerned that so many, especially in the United States, link the study of religion “not to the social sciences but rather to the fate of the humanities.” This means, Wiebe contends, that rather than understanding the study of religion primarily as a scientific discipline dedicated solely to the production of knowledge, too many view it as an “element in the student’s search for meaning in life” and, as such, conceive of the study of religion as a “surrogate religion” or, as he puts it elsewhere, “crypto-theology.”

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Wiebe’s distinction between scientific and theological or humanistic approaches to the study of religion depends on the distinction between “cognitive” and “existential” forms of inquiry. The study of religion, as Wiebe sees it, should be a purely cognitive enterprise of theorizing and explaining religion detached from existential considerations: cognition has to do with “knowledge” about the way the world is and about “facts,” and existential discourses have to do with “wisdom, value and meaning.” But many philosophers, and not just the “postmodernists” Wiebe condemns, have criticized this sharp dichotomy between fact and value. Wiebe fails to acknowledge and grapple with Quine’s rejection of the analytic/synthetic distinction or Hilary Putnam’s arguments that facts and values are deeply entangled, even in the scientific sphere, and that values always guide the descriptions in which our facts are embedded. Wiebe thus leaves himself in the position of positivists and emotivists who dismiss moral and literary accounts of human life and value as mere expressions of emotion-driven preferences: he cannot account adequately for the ways in which humanistic and religious thinking are also cognitive and produce forms of knowledge, even if this knowledge is in some sense “existential.” Wiebe does gesture beyond the crudest forms of this binary. In “Modernism,” his contribution to the Guide, Wiebe relates a brief history of the development of science and writes about different cognitive “styles” and about the “transformation” of reason that led to the birth of modern science and its separation from “mythical discourse.” His emphasis is less on the noncognitive status of theological and mythical discourses than on the “disjunctive” nature of scientific discourse, that is, its detachment from existential concerns of happiness or virtue. He defends this position at greater length in The Irony of Theology and the Nature of Religious Thought. There, Wiebe acknowledges that not all forms of “theology” are noncognitive. However, the “irony of theology” is that, starting with scholasticism, theology increasingly divorced itself from its roots in devotional life and became more like science in its quest for knowledge for the sake of knowledge. It thus became a vehicle for disenchantment. On the one hand, this argument usefully complicates our view of the history of theology. On the other hand, it keeps the distinction between the cognitive and the existential at the center of his thinking.

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This is evident in his discussion of the theologian Andrew Louth, apparently a holdover from prescholastic forms of theology, that is, as Wiebe puts it, a “non-scientific” theologian whose theology “is not an intellectual activity but a faith-event, where faith is understood as ‘thinking with assent’ as opposed to ‘critical thinking.’ ” But on what grounds does Wiebe distinguish “faith” from “intellect” or—and this is of central importance to my project—thinking “critically” from thinking with “assent”? The idea of blind or unthinking faith is a modern cliché, but for every thinker who embraces it, there are many others who do not. Louth clearly is one of the latter. Though he does employ the term “thinking with assent,” nowhere can I find him contrasting it with, or arguing that it precludes, “critical thinking.” This is Wiebe’s opposition, not Louth’s. What Louth does argue is that theology’s closest neighbor in the academy is humanistic, not scientific, inquiry. In this, he would agree with Wiebe. The difference, of course, is that Louth argues that such humanistic thinking has a cognitive validity of its own, one grounded in what he describes as “engagement” with tradition and particular forms of life. Humanistic thinking and theology, in other words, are neither “culture transcending” nor value-free. Yet, such engagement is genuinely critical in that it forces us, often painfully, to revise expectations and preconceptions as we open ourselves to new experiences and perspectives. When theologians engage with their religious tradition or when literary critics engage texts from the past, their objective is not simply to understand the past, but also to come to a better understanding of themselves. This may not be “science” in Wiebe’s sense of the word, but that does not mean that it is not “critical,” “rational,” and “cognitive.” Nor does it mean that humanistic and theological thinking have no place in the academic study of religion. Let me return to Wiebe’s examination of the spectrum of frameworks for the study of religion. These range from the study of religion as a religious exercise, to the study of religion as an interdisciplinary enterprise where scientific and nonscientific goals coexist, to the study of religion as “science.” Wiebe offers detailed, perceptive accounts of each of these positions and concludes by asking which position is appropriate for the modern university. This leads him to the obvious but important assertion that the answer to the question “depends upon one’s conception of the nature of the modern university and, concomitantly, of the academic vocation.” 54

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His conclusion? “The fact of the matter, however, is that the modern Western university is generally understood as essentially a research institution dedicated to the advancement of objective knowledge about the world and we can conclude therefore that ‘religious studies’ should be understood to refer to a purely scientific undertaking.” This is locativist detachment and closure at work. Cognition, or critical thinking, requires detaching the scientific study of religion not just from all forms of “religious” thinking but also from all forms of humanistic thinking because these latter forms of thought think with assent and so close themselves off from critical thinking. Yet, in the end, Wiebe’s claims about the study of religion, the sciences, and the humanities depend not on a rigorous examination of the various forms of the cognitive work that people do but rather on the simple dualism of seeking knowledge for the purposes of life and seeking knowledge for its own sake. It also depends on the blunt assertion that it is “generally understood” that the purpose of the modern Western university is to produce “objective knowledge.” Here we move from the realm of intellectual debate and critical thought to political assertion. A critical thinker might want to ask whether this consensus is as clear as Wiebe makes it sound and, further, if there is a “general understanding,” how it came about, whose interests it serves, and what effects it has had.

The Historicists: McCutcheon, Braun, Mack

For Wiebe, the academy is a kind of utopia, a no place that transcends culture and locale. By contrast, historicists such as Russell McCutcheon claim that the academy is just another place, that academic discourse produces just another form of “local knowledge.” This discourse, however, does have its own rules, careful attention to which enables us to distinguish the academic from the religious. Like Braun and Lincoln, and, less categorically, like Smith, McCutcheon distinguishes between the “human and fallible voice” of the historian and the “transcendent and eternal” authority claimed by religious discourse. For McCutcheon, religious discourse is “metaphysical” because it grounds its explanations of natural and human phenomena in nonhistorical causes and claims to know what things “really” are. By contrast, academic discourses, and more specifically the human sciences, are “historicist” in that they 55

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embrace a set of discursive rules based on the premise that “human behaviors always originate from within, and derive their culturally embedded meanings from being constrained by, historical (i.e. social, political, economic, biological, etc.) entanglements.” Here we find a way of detaching religion and the study of religion that differs from Wiebe’s. McCutcheon replaces Wiebe’s cognitive/existential distinction with the distinction between the historicist and metaphysical and thereby positions historicist scholarship as reflexive and critical and religion as a closed, uncritical discourse of “sociohistorical autonomy,” indeed as the paradigm of antihistoricist sensibility. With this historicist “premise” in place, McCutcheon argues that the goal of the study of religion should be to theorize—explain, redescribe, or translate—religion, not merely to describe it. Such critical redescription exposes the mechanisms by which religions construct metaphysical claims so that they appear to be necessary, ahistorical, and divine rather than human. Whatever else religion may be, and whether it is “really” a response to divine revelation manifested in particular texts, intuitions, or experiences or not, McCutcheon argues, it is a potent means by which humans construct “worlds,” form societies, and defend and contest social power and privilege. The mechanisms of such social formation are accessible to historically responsible academic description and theory; divine revelation is not. Thus, historicist work is “public,” and so properly academic, because it brackets metaphysical questions of divine reality and historicizes questions of private experience and value. It does not ask where religious ideas, values, and experiences ultimately come from, questions that cannot be answered in terms that satisfy public criteria for knowledge, but rather inquires into the social work of ideas, values, and experiences, that is, how they function, in particular historical contexts, to shape societies and individuals. McCutcheon also argues that such redescriptive work also brackets normative questions. Like Wiebe, he makes a sharp distinction between fact and value, where “the facts of life (events in the natural world),” he says, are “in themselves are neither bitter nor sweet— they just are.” The scholar as historicist is thus a “critical rhetor” concerned not with the question of which social formations are good or bad but only with the question of how such social formations emerge, are stabilized, and disappear.

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The detachment made possible by McCutcheon’s version of historicism is a complicated, even paradoxical one. McCutcheon commits himself to claiming that the discourse of scholarship on religion is both “local” and “public.” The discourse of scholarship is not privileged in any final way over the discourse of religion. It is just another way that human beings talk and think, another “game,” as McCutcheon sometimes puts it. Yet, even as he sets up a wall of separation between historicist and public academic discourse and metaphysical, normative, and private religious discourse, McCutcheon asserts a proprietary relation to “religion” that should lead us to raise questions about the “public” nature of academic discourse. One of the factors that leads Bell to label scholars such as McCutcheon “postmodernist” is his understanding that all description and redescription is driven by theory, which means that what the scholar identifies as the “data” for religion is always informed by the categories, concepts, and models (or maps) that the scholar brings to the table. Theory is not simply a matter of generalizing, of moving from specific facts to explanation, because theory already shapes the very way we see these phenomena in the first place and the way we consider some phenomena interesting, significant, or worthy of questioning. Theory, in other words, is already operative in the selection of data. Influencing McCutcheon here is J. Z. Smith’s insistence that the fundamental task of the scholar of religion is to “imagine religion.” Religion, Smith says, is “solely the creation of the scholar’s study” and it is “ for the scholar’s analytic purposes.” That is, “religion,” as a scholarly category, is produced by acts of imagination working through cognitive practices such as comparison and generalization. Think again of Bruce Lincoln’s “Theses.” From the perspective I’ve just described, Lincoln’s definitions of “the history of religions” and “religion” are scholarly, theoretical constructions by means of which he establishes an oppositional relation between the scholar and the object of his or her study. What is entailed in this act of theory? Willi Braun puts it bluntly in the opening pages of the Guide: “Researching the world we live in . . . is always a complex exercise of selecting, inventing, and fiddling with categories in order to render—to force—the natural world and the range of human doings as intelligible, differentiated, ours to respond to, to make and remake.” What, exactly, is being “forced” here? In what respect is the world—or “religion”—“ours”?

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Consider McCutcheon’s view of social formation. It is derived in large part from Burton Mack, a contributor to the Guide and perhaps the most articulate defender of social formation theory in the study of religion. A key target for Mack has been what he calls the “individualist anthropology” of scholars of religion and their emphasis on “religious experience”: “Religion thought of as traffic-with-the-divine implicitly works with an anthropology of the autonomous individual, not with a social anthropology. . . . There is no need to deny the significance of religion for an individual, or to overlook the many ways in which individuals within a society experience, interpret, and manipulate a religion, because a radically social theory of religion can account for them as products of a social formation.” Theorists of religion have much to learn from Mack’s arguments, but this passage displays the kind of binary thinking I have already identified as central to locativist theorizing and deploys it in the conviction that all human experience can be accounted for in terms of historical and sociological processes. Mack opposes the anthropology of the autonomous individual to a radically social theory that accounts for the behavior and experiences of individuals as products of social formation. The claim, then, is that appeals to intuition and experience as either justifying or accounting for certain religious behaviors or beliefs fail to take into consideration the historically and socially constructed nature of human experience. In McCutcheon this claim is made in particularly strong, even antihumanist terms. Rejecting what George Lindbeck calls “experiential expressivist” approaches to the study of religion, McCutcheon rightly objects to discursive rules that protect religion from historicist explanations and thus from the fact that religion is an “effect of events in the historical, social world.” However, rather than moving from this observation to a more complicated view of the relation between religion and social and historical context, McCutcheon, like Mack, simply reverses the relationship and establishes a new form of protectionism by contending that “a thoroughly social theory of religion posits individual actors’ intentions, plans, and organizations not as causes of but as artifacts that result from social formation.” In other words, historicist social formation theory entails that concepts such as “religious experience,” “religious identity,” and “religious impulses” are not useful explanatory categories because they obscure the historical and social causes of human behavior. On this view, the human subject is but a 58

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function of his or her social and historical context, an “artifact”: all our thoughts, feelings, and actions—including those we call “religious”— can be explained as always the effect but never the cause of historical change and religious behavior. As Kevin Schilbrack puts it, this renders the individual as “merely the internal echo of social discourse, merely a reflection of ideology.” On what grounds are we justified in investing the “social” and “historical” with such explanatory finality? Even if we agree that the historical and social are causal factors in the religious experience and behavior of individuals, we might also posit feedback loops in which human agents operating with some degree of autonomy or freedom also play a causal role in shaping their religious lives, as Barbara Herrnstein Smith argues with respect to religious ritual. To consider human beings and their experiences and meanings simply as “artifacts” of social formation is to reject the analytic and explanatory usefulness of concepts such as “subjectivity,” “freedom,” and “creativity.” For all the appeals to “public knowledge” made by the proponents of the locative paradigm, this is, as Cho and Squier point out, a “deeply anti-empiricist” move. That is, it precludes from the start, as a matter of theory, that the experience of religious subjects, which includes their own understanding and explanation of their experiences, has any explanatory significance. This kind of approach makes it impossible for subjects to recognize themselves as the free, moral beings many experience themselves to be. Does any given experience mean that we are, in fact , such free, moral beings? No. But as I argue in the next chapter, it means that we should not try to preemptively exclude research programs that offer to give us a more complex and intuitively satisfying account of religious belief, feeling, and behavior—that can engage “lived experience” in a more productive way. Back, then, to Braun’s claim that “the natural world and the range of human doings as intelligible, differentiated [is] ours to respond to, to make and remake,” and to McCutcheon’s nonnormative view of criticism. If the world is “ours”—if it belongs at least in some sense to us scholars—then aren’t “we” also involved in the processes of social and cultural formation that McCutcheon wants us to redescribe and explain? Our imaginative and theoretical work certainly produces knowledge, but it also has effects in the world. This has been made increasingly evident in the historicist, genealogical work of scholars such 59

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as Talal Asad, David Chidester, and others, who have demonstrated that the development and deployment of the concept “religion” in the modern period have had a variety of concrete cultural and political effects in the world, not least of all as a result of its implication with Western colonialism. That is, “religion” is a modern concept that philosophers, historians, anthropologists, and others have had a hand in “imagining,” “inventing,” or “manufacturing” and this “religion” is out there in the world, contributing to social formations. Once we take Smith’s constructivist turn, normative questions and questions of academic responsibility cannot be avoided and so certain kinds of academic “detachment”—those we see in Strenski, Lease, Wiebe, and McCutcheon—cannot be maintained.

Explaining Religion Description and Reduction

“Theology happens.” For locativists and other defenders of explanatory approaches to religion, it is usually as “theology,” or as some kind of “quasi theology” or “crypto-theology,” that religion purportedly infests, infects, or insinuates its way into the field. Thus, when they construct the opposition between religion and the study of religion, theology is often positioned as, to cite McCutcheon, “the very discourse that is most in need of the radically historicist, postmodern critique.” But what do McCutcheon and others mean by “theology”? McCutcheon, I have pointed out, views it as a discourse of sociohistorical autonomy. How do we judge whether this is a good theory? One way is to consider Wayne Proudfoot’s argument that “explanatory” reduction is perfectly valid as long as it is not based on a “descriptive” reductionism, that is, on descriptions that cannot “plausibly be ascribed” to insiders. McCutcheon himself affi rms Proudfoot’s argument because he thinks, rightfully, that it legitimates explanatory approaches to religion. So, to rephrase my question, is the opposition McCutcheon and others set up between academic theorizing and theology based on adequate description? As a metaphysical discourse of “sociohistorical autonomy,” theology, for McCutcheon, “decontextualizes” and “dehistoricizes” particular 60

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socially constructed human ideals, values, meanings, and beliefs by treating them as integral parts of a totalizing vision of the divine. And it claims to be able to do so on the basis of revelation, the “authority of some kind of inspiration from beyond history.”  There are, certainly, theologies that do just this. However, McCutcheon’s efforts to defend this redescription of theology tend to be based only on some brief and clumsy treatments of specific theologians and theological issues. To take just one example, in an essay devoted to the topic of theodicy, McCutcheon’s “description” of theodicy occupies only slightly more than one page and consists only of rudimentary, textbook summaries of the theodicy problem in various religious traditions, failing to discuss or even cite a single theologian or theological text (he does mention the philosopher Leibniz and the sociologist Max Weber). From this, he moves to the assertion that “where we find a theodicy, we thus find an attempt to make an ambiguous, natural world totally intelligible, knowable, and controllable.”  But just a glance at contemporary theologians such as Rowan Williams or Catherine Keller, not to mention the Book of Job, should quickly disabuse anyone of this caricature. McCutcheon’s failure to offer anything like a careful description of theodicy is the rule rather than the exception when it comes to locativist descriptions of theology. What would a more adequate description of theology look like? It seems obvious that it would need to include, at least as a start, a careful account of what theologians say about their own work. Such an account would quickly make clear that theologians do speak about things transcendent and eternal, but do so in many different ways. Some justify their claims to truth and authority based solely on appeals to revelation, whether found in scripture, tradition, or experience. Others, however, proceed in a very different manner. Rowan Williams, whose work I explore in more depth in chapter 4, says that “religious and theological integrity is possible as and when discourse about God declines the attempt to take God ’s point of view (i.e., a ‘total perspective’).”  Furthermore, he writes that “a god whose essential function is to negate the ‘otherness’ and discontinuity of historical experience, and so to provide for us an ideal locus standi, a perspective transcending or reconciling discontinuity into a system, is clearly an idol.”  Williams thereby links a central element of the critical sensibility of Biblical religion and theology— criticism of idolatry—not to the “false” religion of non-Christians or 61

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non-Jews, but to the theological failure to recognize incongruity. For her part, Kathryn Tanner argues that theologians need to take the “anthropological turn” and to view theology as a “material social product that specializes in meaning production.”  Finally, Francis Schüssler Fiorenza argues that previous appeals to “theological sources or texts as ‘absolute’ authorities as if they were ‘absolved’ from historical and social conditions has become increasingly impossible.” He goes on to say that theology in the university should be “comparative, historicist and explanatory” and “open to intersubjective pluralist discourse.” Theology is a form of religious behavior, but it is reflexive and dialogical in ways that, say, prayer or ritual tend not to be. For Charles Winquist, theology differs from other forms of religious behavior in that “at least some of the conditions of its possibility are epistemically isomorphic with the conditions that make the study of religion possible.” Hence, many theologians explicitly engage—borrow from, critique, and interpret—nontheological discourses. This raises the possibility that the boundaries between the theological and the academic, the religious and the secular, divine and human discourse, and data and theory are more fluid than locativist theorists allow. What makes an interpretation or explanation “religious” or “theological” as opposed to “secular” or “academic”? What does this mean for theological accounts of religion? These are questions I pursue in more depth in later chapters. For now, I simply point out that many of the scholars who seem most invested in demarcating clear, impermeable boundaries between religion or theology and the study of religion are descriptively reductive because they generally do not account for the vision of theology we find in Williams, Tanner, Fiorenza, and others. Their explanations are thus based on generalizations that, as Clifford Geertz puts it, fail to “grow out of the delicacy of [their] distinctions.” This is not to say that scholars must take at face value what these theologians say about their work. It is to say, however, that their redescriptions have to carefully describe and account for theological claims to “anthropological” and “historicist” turns. To the extent that they do not do this, they are engaged in the same kind of scholarly overreaching that Smith identifies in his early confrontation with Eliade, overreaching that takes place when scholars blind themselves to data that does not fit as a way of “forc[ing] . . . the range of human doings [to seem] intelligible, differentiated” and making them “ours to respond to and make and remake.” 62

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Redescription as Reduction

Exacting, thick descriptions have a crucial role to play in the study of religion. But all significant knowledge about or understanding of the phenomena that we describe does depend on intellectual processes that are in some general sense reductionistic. Knowledge and understanding, in other words, involve processes of generalization, selection, simplification, and modeling. Locativist scholars of religion, however, tend to use “reductionism” in a more narrow sense to refer to explanations of phenomena in terms of biological or sociological causes or functions. In one of the more recent of the endless discussions of reductionism as it pertains to the study of religion, Edward Slingerland says that reduction allows scholars to “answer the ‘why’ question” of religion by “tracing causation from higher to lower levels or uncovering hidden correlations.” In other words, to explain religion is to look for the most basic causes of religious behavior. But is all interesting and productive knowledge a matter of identifying basic causes? Are there “correlations” that do not have to do with causes or functions and that might illuminate the phenomena in question? To his credit, Slingerland does suggest that there are things worth knowing about religion other than causes and functions. He defends a noneliminative reductionism that “recognizes the reality of complex, emergent human-level structures of meaning.” Such reductionism distinguishes different levels of explanation, not all of which involve precisely identifiable, material causes. In the case of human behavior, as we move “up” to nonphysiological levels of explanation, we find “the emergence of what appear to be new entities, which possess their own novel and unpredictable organizational principles.” Yet it is not clear that in Slingerland’s case noneliminative reductionism really gets us anywhere. What happens, for instance, when we get to the level of human intentionality and meaning? On the one hand, because cognitive scientists are moving steadily in the direction of a fully materialist account of human meaning and mindedness, Slingerland rejects appeals to “ontological dualism,” where the human mind, human “qualia,” or “original intentionality” are said to be irreducible to physical processes. On the other hand, he avers that such a thoroughgoing physicalism violates “fundamental, innate human ideas” about human agency centered on concepts such as “soul, freedom, choice, and responsibility.” 63

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Indeed, such physicalism renders belief in these human attributes, and, more generally, the belief that our lives are “meaningful,” as “illusions.” In what sense, then, does Slingerland think that noneliminative reductionism views meaning as “real”? In the sense that we simply cannot help but “project intentionality onto the world,” that our cognitive make up means that we are the kinds of beings who must live in “moral space.” So, after rejecting ontological dualism in favor of a strictly naturalistic monism, Slingerland opts for a different kind of dualism, distinguishing between “reality” as science tells us it really is and “reality” as it seems “to us” as living, interacting, moral beings. To put it slightly differently, Slingerland identifies a disjunction between a drive for truth and our experience as moral beings. And, like Nietzsche before him, he recognizes that this drive to truth may eventually undermine our belief in morality and meaning. We find ourselves in the position of needing to make meaning yet unable to fully immerse ourselves in it because we know, or fear, that it is not really real. Slingerland’s conclusion, however, is much more optimistic than Nietzsche’s and, ironically, he claims that it is his naturalism that saves him. The fact that we are hardwired to create meaning, he contends, “ensure[s]” that a full-blown naturalism will not lead to nihilism or despair. That is, all we need to do is learn to “pull off the trick of simultaneously” viewing the human as a physical system and a person. This optimism is unconvincing; Cho and Squier describe it as “cavalier.” For one, Slingerland’s slippery use of the word “real” brings him very close to metaphysical reductionism. Yes, he claims, our meanings are “real” in the sense that they proceed necessarily from our cognitive makeup. But he still describes them as “projections” and “illusions,” as though a thin fi lm of meaning were being placed over the meaninglessness of real (really real) physical processes. Still, he at least recognizes that there is a problem here. Locativists such as Wiebe and McCutcheon, in the complacency with which they detach the cognitive from the existential or the critical rhetor from the moralizing critic, do not. This is especially problematic for historicists such as McCutcheon, Braun, and Mack, who eschew Wiebe’s positivist claims about science. Historicism has become indispensible for critical thinking. It enables the genealogical and constructivist turns that have increased our critical capacities, and it makes it clear, even if this point is too often ignored, that scholars of religion, and scholars in general, participate in 64

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processes of social formation. But it is more than a critical tool for most of us: it is also one of the constitutive elements of the “modern” and, possibly even more so, the “postmodern” condition of intellectual life. Most of us fi nd ourselves in historical consciousness, no longer able to appeal in any simplistic way, or in any way at all, to something that stands outside of history, such as the “natural” or the “eternal.” This was something Nietzsche understood—and worried about. He ended up calling it “nihilism.” First in the “The Uses and Abuses of History for Life” and then in the Genealogy, Nietzsche argued that once everything is reduced to physiology and historical relations of power and knowledge, meanings and ideals lose their hold on us, leaving us with no goal, except, perhaps, the truth itself (knowledge for knowledge’s sake). But, this goal, when itself historicized, subject to the genealogist’s demystification, is, Nietzsche claimed, really a “will to nothing,” to something beyond human life and so the “kernel” of the ascetic ideal. This is to say that the cultural critic certainly can deploy historicism to expose the mechanisms of human ideals and meanings, but it is much less clear how he or she can escape or inflect historicism to think positively and constructively about ideals and meanings. This, I think, is why Alain Badiou claims that historical consciousness becomes a “substitute for politics.” Historicism makes it extremely difficult for scholars to take responsibility for their constructive work even when they recognize that they are participants in, not just observers of, social formation.

Redescription as Translation

Both McCutcheon and J. Z. Smith tend to avoid the term “reduction.” McCutcheon prefers “re-description” because he thinks “reduction” suggests the metaphysical or positivist claim to know “what is really going on.” In a similar but ultimately more productive move, J.  Z. Smith usually employs the term “translation” instead of “reduction.” According to Smith, translation produces knowledge by bringing the unknown or less familiar into relation to the known or more familiar. His favorite example is Durkheim, whose method is based on the idea that, as Smith puts it, “the theoretical second-order language appropriate to one domain”—in Durkheim’s case “society”—“may translate the theoretical 65

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second-order language appropriate to another domain”—“religion.” But Smith questions Durkheim’s view that the goal of such translation is “explanatory simplicity”—the goal of many champions of reduction— and aligns himself instead with a formulation of Levi-Strauss: “scientific explanation consists not in a movement from the complex to the simple but in the substitution of a more intelligible complexity for another which is less.” If we were to retain the concept of “reduction” here, which Smith sometimes does, it would be a version of what Slingerland calls “noneliminative reduction.” The point is “intelligibility,” which, as I read it, allows for possibilities of explanation or understanding beyond simply reducing religion to “fundamental” or “real” causes. Smith is after a particular kind of intelligibility, however, and distinguishes between “description” and “paraphrase,” on the one hand, and translation proper, on the other. That is, knowledge is not produced in the repetitions of description or in the slight alterations of paraphrase, but through the encounter with difference and discrepancy, and even distortion, that necessarily comes with translation. Like his maps, Smith’s translations “are structures of transformation, not structures of reproduction.” If we pursue this line of thinking, however, we need to consider the relation between the “familiar” and the “unfamiliar” and the knowledge produced through the process of translation. Take the translation of a literary or philosophical text from French to English. For many who will use the translation, there is a clear line between French as the less familiar language and English as the more familiar: for them, translation substitutes familiar for unfamiliar words and intelligibility is the result. For a good translator, however, the line between the familiar and the unfamiliar is much less clear; he or she has presumably mastered both languages—both are familiar. As a consequence, this translator can engage in a kind of knowledge production beyond the substitution of familiar for unfamiliar words: he or she can reflect on and play with the incongruity between different languages and the conditions of unknowing and responsibility in which we humans find ourselves as we cross between cultures and languages. Such translators, in other words, will understand what Smith is getting at when he says that maps are structures of transformation: translation is not a process of finding one-to-one correspondences between the languages but rather one of carefully and creatively dealing with the incongruity or 66

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lack of fit between them, with the fact that when one translates a text from French to English, one rewrites it. Because translation is itself a comparative enterprise, Smith’s formative work on comparison illuminates the kind of translation as transformation at stake here. For him, comparison involves, first, the detailed description and contextualization of the phenomena to be compared, second, the comparison of “aspects and relations held to be significant,” third, the “redescription” of each of the phenomena in light of the comparison, and, finally, the “rectification of the academic categories in relation to which [the exempla] have been imagined.” “Rectification” is particularly pertinent for thinking about translation. To return to the example, a translator produces more than just the knowledge of what a text written in French might look like in English. He or she also produces knowledge about French and English more generally as well as knowledge about categories such as “language” itself, about, more specifically, the kinds of incongruities that come into play when we compare languages, and about the linguistic conditions of human life. Thus, translating from French to English, we rectify views of both French and English as well as of language and humanity. What does this mean for thinking about the comparison or translation between “theoretical second-order languages”—say, the language of religion and the language of society or the language of religion and the language of the study of religion? Note that when Smith discusses translation in the case of Durkheim, he positions the language of religion as unfamiliar and the language of society as familiar. As Smith relates it there, the translation goes one way, from religion to society. But if we think about this process in terms of the two-way understanding of comparison that Smith articulates, where both terms end up being “rectified,” then we also need to position the language of society as “unfamiliar” and consider how comparing it with religion allows us to learn more about society. Unlike one-way conceptions of reduction that seek explanatory simplicity, Smith’s translation should be understood as a two-way process of comparing intelligible complexities in a way that makes each more intelligible. Such comparison is going on all the time, but I see little evidence that locativists have attended closely enough to the rigorous comparative process that Smith outlines. They define religion and the study of religion in terms of each other, but without thinking enough about how 67

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they do so, that is, about the limits of simplistic contrasts between theologians and historians, open and closed discourses, and critical thinking and thinking with assent. Thus McCutcheon, and in different ways Wiebe and to a lesser extent Slingerland, think translation and comparison only as the opposition between “religion” and “science” or “the religious” and “the academic” and as a one-way translation from the former to the latter. This is a secularist form of translation. Like those political theorists who argue that only a secular language can be “public,” these scholars contend that scientific, theoretical language is the only language appropriate for the “public” university. We might contrast this to the kind of two-way translation that Dipesh Chakrabarty calls a “barter” exchange. For him, scientific translation or reduction is based on the idea of a language of “superior positivity” and “universal middle terms,” that is, terms that purportedly capture most fully the positivity of the world and human life. From this perspective, both “water” and “pani” are captured most fully by “H2O.” By contrast, “barter exchange” refers to a process that takes place between local languages, a two-way process of translation that enables translators to think about fit and nonfit and about which words can be exchanged for one another, without the mediation of a neutral or universal language. The point is not to incorporate one language into the other or to determine which captures “reality” most effectively or truly, but to make possible communication that leads to new and more complex forms of knowledge. In some respects, this second form of translation might seem to be closer to what McCutcheon is arguing with his appeal to the “local” nature of academic language. This appeal is a welcome acknowledgment of the fact that academic discourse, no matter how scientific, is not, as Wiebe argues, culture-transcending. But McCutcheon is not interested in barter, in the back and forth between languages and what this process can tell us about the multitude of differences and similarities that make up the complex web of relations between the languages of religion, on the one hand, and the languages of history and nature, on the other. For him, everything proceeds from the former, the unfamiliar languages of religion, to the latter, the familiar, local language of theory. This is well illustrated in McCutcheon’s criticisms of Benson Saler’s Conceptualizing Religion. Saler’s project is to “tame” ethnocentrism and forge “transcultural understanding” through a dialogical anthro68

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pology by which indigenous folk categories might supplement the critical, anthropological vocabulary of the scholar. But McCutcheon argues that despite appearances Salers’s is an ethnocentric project that assumes “others” are as interested as we scholars in developing crosscultural, explanatory generalizations about religion. Generalization and explanation, he argues, are part of “our” local knowledge practices, not “theirs.” To enlist others to help us with this project is to “appropriate” and “domesticate” their means for our ends and so to perpetuate colonialist dynamics. Since we are inevitably ethnocentric—all knowledge is situated—we should distinguish between more and less problematic kinds of ethnocentrism, instead of striving for greater transcultural understanding. McCutcheon claims that we can do this by distinguishing between theoretical redescription of other cultures and normative judgment about them. There are at least three problems with this argument. First, it is not at all clear that McCutcheon avoids “judging” religious others. Simply consider some of the apparently normative statements that McCutcheon makes about theology: it is the “obscuring [of] discursive relativity”; it is in need of “demystification”; and it threatens to “smuggl[e] a foundationalist perspective back within the academy.” Second, his reification of “us” and “them,” “insider” and “outsider,” abstracts and obscures by failing to acknowledge changes in and conflicts over who counts as “us” and over which questions and tools are “ours.” As Richard King writes, it relies on a misrepresentation of “fluid and dynamic qualities implied by the term ‘culture.’ ” “Cultures” are always plural and always changing and (almost) always interacting with other “cultures.” To ignore this when it comes to drawing the boundaries of the “us”—that is, the academy—is to engage in the kind of sociorhetorical discourse of “autonomy” that McCutcheon criticizes. Finally, McCutcheon misunderstands Salers’s call to dialogue, viewing it simply as a matter of exploiting “their” categories instead of as a practice by which both parties come to ask new questions and to rethink the way they divide up the world. Since such rethinking is an inevitable consequence of contact between peoples of different cultures, whether or not “we” are seeking understanding or explanation, local knowledges are always in flux and are never simply “local.” Despite McCutcheon’s important concerns about repeating colonial relationships, the complex questions at issue here cannot be tidied up through an imaginary cultural 69

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hermeticism that ignores this point and protects academic discourse from certain kinds of questions and criticism by keeping the “data” from talking back. Th is is the kind of ethnography that, as Bernard McGrane puts it, is “epistemologically committed to the sovereignty of observation and its monologue about the Other rather than the democracy of genuine participation and its dialogue with the Other.”

Criticism and Responsibility: Locativism and Ideology Ideology and Closure

Central to locativist efforts to detach the study of religion from religion is the theorization of religion as a discourse of closure. As I have shown, Braun, Lincoln, Mack, and McCutcheon, and even Gill and Smith, contrast the historically self-conscious, critical, and fallible discourse of the study of religion to the eternalizing, authoritarian, and even naïve discourse of religion. This contrast is made particularly evident when they treat religion as a mystifying, ideological discourse of social formation. Understanding religion in these terms goes back at least as far as the Enlightenment but perhaps receives its definitive treatment in Marx, who held that “the criticism of religion is the premise of all criticism.”  For Marx, religion’s “general theory of the world” masks the mundane, historical origins of all things human through an idealist inversion that permeates human social relations and infects “secular” theories of the state as well as “religion.” To change the world, this inversion has to be set right. Few ideas have had a more powerful impact on the study of religion, and few have been as controversial. Many scholars of religion have resisted Marx’s view that religion is based on a fundamental misconception of human life. But for locativists such as Lease, Lincoln, and McCutcheon, this basic approach to religion and ideology has proved extremely useful in explaining religion. For them, religion is what Lease claims that it was for Marx: “ideology per se.” Lease is the author of the Guide’s entry on “Ideology.” There, he highlights a contrast between Marx’s own “legendary position” on ideology and the positions of later Marxists. Though Marx’s definition of ideology is hard to pin down, it is basically an idealism that masks the true, material conditions of human life. From this perspective, the critic of 70

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ideology regards religious, philosophical, or other kinds of discourse that deny or ignore their own material conditions as “illusory.” Religion is especially effective at stabilizing this kind of illusion because it claims that its beliefs and norms, as eternal and holy, are not exposed to any of the contingencies of ordinary, mundane claims and beliefs. Despite the enduring influence of this view of ideology, Lease’s own position owes more to the views of Marx’s later followers, Althusser in particular, who reject stark contrasts between “illusory” and “true” discourses and view ideologies as “system[s] of meaning” through which objects are defi ned and identified in an attempt to account for and stabilize the world of experience. As such, Lease argues, ideology is the “inevitable result of human consciousness.” Raymond Geuss distinguishes between “pejorative” and “descriptive” uses of “ideology.” Understood pejoratively, ideology depends on the distinction between “illusion” and “truth,” and it is the critic’s job to expose the illusion. But a descriptive account of ideology—for example, Lease’s “systems of meaning”—is a more modest affair in which the goal of criticism is to describe and analyze the ways in which meanings are constructed and deconstructed: ideology critique becomes a matter of gaining self-consciousness about human meaning-making. Accordingly, the critical task, for Lease, is to construct “natural histories” of religion. He is adamant that in doing so, he has nothing to say about the “reality” or “validity” of particular religious claims, but only about the historical processes by which such claims emerge and then fade and about how they function in a given social context. A “science” of religion, for Lease, “is not the giving or bearing of a testimony to the truth of a particular religion, or of religion in the abstract: it is not an act of belief.” This definition of ideology allows Lease to position himself as a secular academic, without “belief” in or about religion, searching only for knowledge, much as McCutcheon does as a “critical rhetor” exposing the mechanisms of religion. I return to this below. But is Lease able to maintain this position? Although Geuss’s distinction between the pejorative and descriptive helps account for some of what he is saying, Lease does see a fundamental falsification at work in religion—and in all ideologies or discourses of meaning: “To identify both self and world and have them remain stable and separable, consciousness stamps them as independent and external, rather than seeing them as the products of 71

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cultural and representational imagination.” That is, consciousness fails to fully distinguish between its own projections and reality “out there.” From here, Lease makes four claims (close analogues of which are to be found in Lincoln and McCutcheon) that lead him to the position that religion is a discourse of illusion and closure. First, needing to assure themselves of the stability of their representations and identities, human beings engage in “feverish” attempts to hide their constructive activity from themselves. Second, as a system of meaning, religion makes “absolute claims” for these representations and identities, thus creating “totalizing” catalogs of meaning. Third, religion thereby serves as an ideological “meta-system” that is particularly effective at shoring up other ideological systems. Religion in fact is for Lease the paradigmatic expression of ideological misrecognition, denying all incongruity, warding off the threat of “chaos.” It is, he writes, “always the enemy of revolution.” Fourth, and finally, Lease stabilizes this picture of religion by contrasting it with scholarship: although his arguments preclude the possibility of the scholar taking a stance beyond all ideology, he does distinguish religion, as the discourse most closed to critical questioning or ideology critique, from scholarship, as “never-ending critique.” Even more than Lease’s, Lincoln’s work on ideology is deeply Marxist, though he too looks to later Marxist theorists, especially Gramsci. As Lincoln puts it in the Guide, ideology for Marx was something “invariably mystificatory, but potentially dispensable,” something we could vanquish by means of “science,” but Gramsci teaches us that this opposition is itself ideological, that there is no transcendent position, no “neat antithesis” from which to combat ideological discourses. In other words, thinking through the lens of ideology means understanding that “human speech in general” is always perspectival. Th is goes for scholarship as well: indeed, Lincoln is more explicit than Lease on the respects in which even scholarship has ideological “dimensions.” As he puts it in the last chapter of Theorizing Myth, “scholarship . . . is interested, perspectival, and partial and . . . its ideological dimensions must be acknowledged, ferreted out where necessary, and critically crossexamined.” This admission, however, does not prevent Lincoln from continuing to use the concept of “ideology” to draw a sharp distinction between scholarship and religion. Myth and scholarship, he argues, are not ideological in the same way: myth is “ideology in narrative form” 72

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and scholarship is “ideology with footnotes.” In other words, compared to myth, scholarship is more “critical and self-reflexive” because it acknowledges its perspectival character and so opens itself to criticism. In the Guide, Lincoln returns to his first thesis on the study of religion, adjusting it a bit to claim that the “defining characteristic” of religion is that it “invest[s] specific human preferences with transcendent status by misrepresenting them as revealed truths, primordial traditions, divine commandments and so forth.” Because it thereby protects its claims from “most forms of debate and critique,” it is closed to critical questioning and thus “uniquely stabilizing.” By contrast, academic discourse represents itself as thoroughly human and, despite the inevitable partiality constitutive of all discourse, therefore as open to critical questioning. This distinction takes on even clearer outlines when Lincoln compares religious discourse to the discourses of ethics and aesthetics. Like religious discourse, ethics and aesthetics are means by which groups of human beings “articulate their characteristic and defining preferences or what some are inclined to call ‘values.’ ” But for Lincoln aesthetic and ethical claims are, unlike religious claims, “open to disputation via arguments.” Th is makes religion, again, “uniquely stabilizing” and apparently the most closed of cultural discourses. There does appear, however, to be a significant contrast between Lease and Lincoln on the issue of ideology. For Lease, “religion . . . is always the enemy of revolution” because it is always “working tirelessly against the dismantling of ideological systems, trying to stem any encroaching chaos.” By contrast, Lincoln’s Gramscian perspective acknowledges that religious ideologies can contest one another. Thus Lincoln distinguishes between “religions of the status quo,” “religions of rebellion,” and “religions of revolution.” However, this difference is more a matter of nuance than substance, for even as Lincoln acknowledges that religion is not always the enemy of “revolution” (at least in one meaning of the term), religion for him does appear to be always a matter of stabilizing a particular group’s identity, whether that group uses religion to bolster its hegemony over other groups or to challenge the hegemony of another religious or social ideology. From this perspective, utopian, rebellious, and revolutionary forms of religion are in crucial respects ultimately locative, for they still seek to secure a stable place in the world for believers, even if this means that they or another 73

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group will be dislocated before they can relocate themselves. Religion for Lincoln is all about securing and protecting one’s own identity or one’s group identity. Incongruity is always a problem of the other, and when it must be confronted by rebellion or revolution, the goal is to overcome it. This is also the case for Braun and McCutcheon, both of whom rely heavily on Lincoln. Braun, as I have noted, borrows Lincoln’s distinction between religious and scholarly discourse. For his part, McCutcheon treats “mythmaking” and religion as ideological when he invokes one of Lincoln’s defi nitions of ideology as “a screen that strategically veils, mystifies, or distorts important aspects of real social processes.” In the space of one paragraph, in a discussion of religion as “social formation,” McCutcheon quotes Lincoln’s definition of ideology, appeals to Lease’s description of religions as “totalized systems of meaning,” and invokes J. Z. Smith and Roland Barthes to claim that religions function ideologically to reproduce “certain specific social values as if they were universal.” Like Lease and Lincoln, McCutcheon does not simplistically contrast the mythmaking, ideological role of religion with the neutral or “true” status of scholarly discourse. Instead, in a move we have seen already, he distinguishes “theoretical” discourse that acknowledges its historical and social particularity and fallibility from “ideological” discourse that hides the historical and social processes by which human beings, in both “religious” and “non-religious” ways, construct normative visions of reality.

Vacillations

What we observe, then, is that Lease, Lincoln, and McCutcheon “vacillate” between what Geuss names descriptive and pejorative uses of the term “ideology,” between, that is, employing the term to refer to the beliefs, concepts, attitudes, and disposition held by particular groups, on the one hand, and to illusion or false consciousness, on the other. Th is vacillation destabilizes their locative distinction between the openness of academic discourse and the closures of religious discourse. One might, however, invoke Geuss once more to defend this vacillation. Geuss complicates his distinction between descriptive and pejorative perspectives on ideology with a further distinction between “epistemo74

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logical” and “functional” approaches to ideology. In other words, discourses can be ideologically false by virtue of the epistemic status of particular beliefs or they can be false by virtue of a belief’s function with respect to social formation. Thus, when scholars of religion use the language of “misrepresentation,” they may be confining themselves to an epistemologically pejorative claim, something like “religious people do not know that what they take as divinely revealed ideals or doctrines are really products of human historical activity.” This would not necessarily entail, however, further critical claims about the social effects of practices grounded in the misrecognition of reality. Thus, as we have seen, Lease, Lincoln, and McCutcheon all argue that the proper role of the scholar of religion is to explain religion, not to evaluate it as a social phenomenon. Confi ning their “critical” work to exposing the mechanisms of religion, they leave open the possibility that the beliefs and practices constructed in and through religious discourse— even as those who articulate those beliefs and practices deceive themselves and others about their source—can be “good” or at least “necessary” for human beings. There are ways, I think, to defend at least the heuristic value of such a vision of criticism. But Lease, Lincoln, and McCutcheon don’t take this route, and the route they do take doesn’t get them to where they want to go. First, none of them employs the conceptual resources of the kind I borrow from Geuss to make their use of the term “ideology” more precise and so to explain the apparent vacillation between descriptive and pejorative uses of the term. Second, and this is the main point I will develop in the remainder of this chapter, this vacillation helps them to shape a moral and political rhetoric that trades on the pejorative connotations of “ideology”—its resonance as a “battle cry,” as Lease notes—and that casts religion as that against which criticism must work. In this, I think, they betray their vision of criticism. This rhetoric, which we could roughly characterize as neo-Marxist (especially in Lincoln’s case and to some extent in Lease’s) and leftist “postmodern” (in McCutcheon’s case), frames yet another stark opposition between scholarly and religious discourse, in this case in political terms that suggest, strongly, that religion has adverse effects on social formation and that the critic is working for the social good. McCutcheon consistently casts his work—in ways subtle and not so subtle—as morally and politically preferable to religious discourse, and 75

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even, as in Wiebe, to “humanistic” discourse. For instance, he links Eliade’s approach to religion to the politics of fascism; he criticizes the “liberal” tolerance of certain humanistic, dialogical approaches to anthropological studies of religion in the name of a “less colonizing” approach; and, more generally, and with explicit appeal to Lease, he describes religious discourse in terms of abuse popularized by the postmodern left: “totalizing,” “normalizing,” and “universalizing.” These, of course, are the same terms that he uses to discuss ideology and that he contrasts to his own “transgressive” scholarly discourse. Whereas theologians and some scholars of religion (that is, Eliadans and humanists) “disdain . . . transgressive questions,” historicist scholars are intellectuals who “trade in ideas by transgressing discursive frontiers.” Such transgressors are not only more self-conscious than religious thinkers, but also more “creative” and more “oppositional.” I am not unsympathetic to some of the distinctions McCutcheon draws here, for it seems to me (1) that religious discourse often does serve in the (pejoratively) ideological ways that these scholars suggest, both epistemologically and functionally; (2) that efforts to distinguish different discourses as more or less ideological are useful; and (3) that, in general, transgressing discursive frontiers or pursuing a version of what Braun calls “uncensored curiosity” is a good thing for scholars to be doing. But, to focus on this last point, I do not make this claim simply because I believe that it is a discursive rule of a “game” called “scholarship” that I have agreed to play. Nor do I make it out of some sort of deep sense of the value of knowledge for knowledge’s sake, though I don’t disagree that knowledge has intrinsic value. Instead, I make it because I believe it is good for human beings and human societies to support institutional sites that enable and value transgressive forms of questioning, where, for instance, we can find the kind of patient, illuminating work of critique performed by Lincoln in the first three chapters of the book Holy Terrors. So, I would defend academic questioning and criticism by arguing that human lives and human societies are made better when people are free to pursue knowledge and question received traditions and claims of authority. But this obviously is a normative claim that raises many questions for “social formation.” To note just two: Why should a society pour billions of dollars into institutions of higher education that support, at least to some extent, transgressive questioning? In what ways does such transgression in fact contribute to 76

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the formation (and perhaps even the stabilization) of a certain kind of society? Let me develop these points with reference to Lincoln, whose treatment of ideology and criticism is more complex, though not necessarily more coherent, than McCutcheon’s. Lincoln is explicit about the “ideological” status of his own work, conditioned as it is by his own interests, desires, and social location. As we have seen, he claims that because his work is transparent about its sources, it, unlike religious discourse, opens itself to critical interrogation. In his essay on “Culture” in the Guide, Lincoln employs this distinction to make the historical claim that socially formative modern discourses such as ethics and aesthetics are preferable to, because less ideological than, premodern religious discourses. Western societies are better off, therefore, when they conduct their “most bruising conflicts” through critical, aesthetic, and ethical, rather than religious, discourse. Yet Lincoln’s own critical work does not take advantage of the conceptual resources offered by modern ethics and aesthetics. His employment of the flattening, perhaps even emotivist language of “preference” (instead of “values”) is a symptom of his failure to argue carefully for the ways in which his own critical work is consistently and reflexively—as opposed to simply “ideologically”— grounded in the normative vision that allows him to “prefer” ethics and aesthetics as cultural discourses or the modern to the premodern. Instead, ironically (given his distinction between “ideology in narrative form” and “ideology with footnotes”), he defends these preferences through a narrative: this is a story in which reasoned, critical discourse and secular politics emerge in the early modern period as a response to religious violence. And it ends with a portentous warning: “When one rejects the Enlightenment’s values en masse and dispenses with its model of culture, one risks not just a return of the repressed, but novel Wars of Religion.” Lincoln takes a normative position but supports it not by the kind reasoned argument he champions, but rather by the familiar, one might argue tired, narrative of modernity and Enlightenment that has maintained a comfortable hegemony among Western intellectuals for more than two centuries. The moral of this story? Religion functions to stabilize, but only at the price of intolerance and violence. To summarize, Lease, McCutcheon, and Lincoln use the language of ideology not only to analyze particular religious phenomena, but to 77

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secure their positions as publicly responsible academic critics. They achieve this by means of a complex maneuver. Embracing approaches to ideology that purport to avoid the claims about “illusion” made by the early Marxist tradition, they claim that all human discourse, as perspectival and historically located, is ideological. From this perspective, the critical task is merely a historicist one, that is, to explain religious phenomena in terms of historical and social location instead of making difficult and precarious normative arguments. At the same time, by relying—sometimes explicitly, sometimes not—on the idea that there are different degrees of ideology, that some forms of ideological discourse are more “closed” than others, these critics still give their work moral and critical weight: they claim that their scholarly discourse is “open”— always duly noting their own implication in ideological formations— and then cast the object of their criticism, religion, as the “most” ideological, most closed and stabilizing, of human discourses. But they can maintain this position only through a strategic failure to examine thoroughly the theories of ideology—connected to names such as Althusser and Gramsci—they invoke. With an undertheorized conception of ideology, they leave us with a “religion” that is understood through crude notions of “closure” and “stability” and a “criticism” that, while useful in some respects, is not nearly as “open” or as “self-reflexive” as it claims to be. These critics are in fact not simply exposing the mechanisms of religion as social formation, but defining and placing religion in such a way so as to defend secular social formation. I agree with Lease, Lincoln, and McCutcheon that we should pursue greater self-consciousness in the study of religion, self-consciousness that includes the interrogation of the ideological dimensions of religion and of our own work. But in the way they target the “closure” of religious thought and celebrate the openness of their own scholarly work, these critics in fact perform a closure of their own: failing to explain why some kinds of socially stabilizing activities are preferable to others, they offer instead the all-too-easy language of “transgression” and “critique.” I do not claim that there is some ultimately secure moral ground from which to defend certain visions of social formation, nor do I dismiss the ironic and playful criticism we find, for example, in certain kinds of critical and deconstructive writing. But I do question the efforts of Lease, Lincoln, and McCutcheon to erect institutional or discursive barriers that shield us from messy questions of advocacy and 78

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social formation as well as the locative strategy that they use to identify the ideological aspects of religious discourse and to distinguish, politically as well as conceptually, religious and secular discourses.

Conclusion: Criticism After Secularism

As an epigraph to The Discipline of Religion, Russell McCutcheon appends the following passage from Michel Foucault: Criticism is a matter of flushing out . . . thought and trying to change it: to show that things are not as self-evident as one believed, to see that which is accepted as self-evident will no longer be seen as such. Practicing criticism is a matter of making facile gestures difficult. . . . As soon as one can no longer think things as one formerly thought them, transformation becomes  .  .  . very urgent, very difficult and quite possible.

I find much to admire in this vision of criticism. I am puzzled, though, that McCutcheon would use it, or at least all of it. Clearly, he champions the critical exposure of those ideals and values that people, especially religious people, accept as “self-evident.” But transformation? He, like most of the scholars I have treated in these first two chapters, does want to transform the way scholars think about religion: they should relinquish the “caretaking” role and embrace the “critical” role. If they do so, they will be able to do what academic work is supposed to do: produce knowledge—nothing more and nothing less. Anything more, as the “debate” between Strenski and Lease shows, is “theology.” Yet the claim that the academic critic seeks knowledge only for the sake of knowledge not only is belied by the rhetoric of many of these critics, but, as I have suggested, is ultimately nihilistic. Foucault, the Nietzschean, recognized this, which is why he wanted urgently to change thought not just for the sake of knowledge, but for the sake of life: “I can’t help but dream about a criticism that would try not to judge but to bring an oeuvre, a book, a sentence, an idea to life . . . it would multiply not judgments but signs of life.” It is not surprising, then, that Foucault turned in his later work from genealogy and discourse analysis to ethics and the “arts of existence.” Criticism that simply exposes religious 79

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and normative commitments as “ideology” by following the historicist imperative withholds judgments of worth, possibility, and hope, and so shows few if any signs of life. To be alive, criticism must recognize that it is never simply “transgressive” or “oppositional”; it must recognize that it is also involved in constructive processes of classifying, ordering, and declaring positions. Terry Eagleton, one of our foremost theorists of ideology and critique, is a critic who understands this. Eagleton is suspicious of cavalier invocations of “transgressive questioning” found in historicist critics and in discourse analysis. These are useful tools, he acknowledges, but they tend “to ‘demonize’ the very act of semiotic closure . . . betray[ing] an anarchic suspicion of meaning as such and . . . falsely assume[ing] that ‘closure’ is always counterproductive.” More recently, Eagleton has taken to task cultural critics such as Frederic Jameson for a materialism that too easily collapses morality into ideology, a conflation that has a close analogue in the conflations of religion and ideology I’ve been exploring here. Eagleton writes that “moral” thought as he understands and defends it “means exploring the texture and quality of human behavior as richly and sensitively as you can.” Interestingly— given his Marxist and materialist commitments—Eagleton follows up his observations on moral thought and cultural theory with an extended defense of the concept of agapic love in St. Paul. Eagleton, I think, is an example of a critic who has come to see that criticism needs to have a vision of transformation that goes beyond the exposure of ideology or the valorization of knowledge for its own sake. The locativist scholars and critics of religion I have engaged to this point in the book fail to explore closely enough the “texture” of religious discourse or, for that matter, of their own “preferences” and commitments. In large part, this is the result of what Žižek refers to as “over-rapid historicization,” the unwarranted assumption that religious discourse as such, in its use of concepts such as “eternity” and “transcendence,” seeks to escape history, obscure what Lease calls “chaos,” and close itself off from any real critical scrutiny. They fail to note how concepts such as “transcendence” and “God” can effect an opening in human discourse and experience that serves to question, interrupt, and decenter, rather than secure and authorize, human discourse and human values or that disrupts and deterritorializes religions, politics, and cultures of identity. In one sense, to be sure, such ideas can make 80

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possible the kind flexibility within religious systems that allows them to change in the face of ideological challenges even as they maintain their stabilizing force, a claim central to the perspectives of Lease and Lincoln. But it also enables criticism, change, and even, as Timothy Beal argues, exposure to chaos. If this is true, blanket statements about religion and chaos, stability or closure, tell us very little. We need, instead, to pose some difficult questions: What kind of “chaos” does religion resist? What kinds of criticism and change does it allow? Is it necessarily the case that the form of authority exerted by religious canons is inherently conservative and antirevolutionary (Lease) or that religious interpretation of canonical sources (Lincoln’s “hermeneutics”) is inherently less “radical” than other forms of criticism? Does any discourse—scholarship included—allow the kind of “chaos” that Lease claims religious discourse denies or represses? Are there resources in religious thought and practice that can help us think about how to think critically and even transgressively without assuming that the kinds of closure that enable the affirmations of value and meaning are always “counterproductive”? Locativists have positioned themselves with respect to their subject matter by means of some sweeping assertions about the closures of religious discourse. To challenge these assertions is to reconsider the views of “criticism” and “the academy” that they help make possible. It is ironic that scholars who see themselves as “transgressors” are also among those who argue most vehemently for strict boundaries for the study of religion and the academy more generally, boundaries, moreover, that are based on a rather conservative and narrow view of what should count as “academic” or as “knowledge.” We might ask them: What is so transgressive, in the context of the modern university, about claiming social-scientific status and seeking to marginalize, if not to exclude, humanistic interpretation? And, what is so transgressive, in the context of modernity, about historicizing religion? Pleas for criticism based exclusively on naturalistic, social-scientific approaches appeal to a broad, normalizing consensus in the university, one tied up with broader cultural norms that favor technology, method, and quantification, as well as the “excellence” and “accountability” that Bill Readings discusses so provocatively. For all their insistence on the historical and social specificity or location of discourse, the locativist failure to seriously engage and question the “aca81

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demic” prevents them from thinking seriously and critically enough about “religion.” First, locativists have not thought seriously enough about the humanities, the topic of the next chapter. To do so would be, for instance, to consider Samuel Weber’s vision of a humanities, in which they are not satisfied with “confirm[ing] the existing order by reproducing exploitable knowledge” but strive to “be open to the unknowable as the enabling limit of what can be known.” For Weber, this involves openness to “experimentation.” Criticism of the best sort is always experimental, not simply in the scientific sense of testable hypotheses and carefully circumscribed research programs, but in the philosophical sense articulated so well by Nietzsche and, later, Foucault, both of whom learned much from the ascesis of Greek and early Christian philosophers and theologians. This is an experimentation in which we work on ourselves and that takes place at the interstices of mind and body, knowledge and desire. We should consider how such experimentation might enrich our understanding of the critical study of religion. One such experiment would involve work at the boundaries of the humanities and theology, work that would learn from Charles Winquist’s understanding of theology as an experiment with both desire and truth. Perhaps if we scholars of religion stopped viewing theology and the religious heritage of the study of religion with embarrassment, as the relic of a past we must overcome so that we can start doing what we think our colleagues in other fields are doing, we might in the spirit of such experimentation come to see this heritage as a resource that can help us think differently and creatively about knowledge and criticism. We might in fact learn something, for example, about the way criticism, desire, and deep commitment can be productively related to one another in a critical thinking of assent. This is not to argue for erasing all distinctions between scholarship and religion; it is, though, to ask whether critical self-consciousness is simply a matter of rigorously respecting a certain imperative to “knowledge,” or whether it also includes a certain disciplined ability to allow the boundaries of academic discourse to be disturbed or destabilized and so creatively transformed in the direction of more “open inquiry.”

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3

ENCOUNTERING THE HUMAN

The “we” remains incessantly to be reinvented. —JOÃO BIEHL 1

We must recognize that ethics requires us to risk ourselves precisely at moments of unknowingness, when what forms us diverges from what lies before us, when our willingness to become undone in relation to others constitutes our chance of becoming human. To be undone by another is a primary necessity, an anguish, to be sure, but also a chance—to be addressed, claimed, bound to what is not me, but also to be moved, to be prompted to act, to address myself elsewhere, and so to vacate the self-sufficient “I” as a kind of possession. If we speak and try to give an account from this place, we will not be irresponsible, or, if we are, we will surely be forgiven. —JUDITH BUTLER 2

In Thank You, St. Jude, Robert Orsi explores the world of twentiethcentury Catholic women’s devotion to St. Jude, the patron saint of hopeless causes. Working from Church documents, popular Catholic periodicals, and interviews with the devout, Orsi weaves, in the fi rst six chapters of the book, a rich social history of the cult and tells a story. The basic plot is this: “in desperate circumstances [the devout] prayed to St. Jude and . . . something good happened for them.” Or, to put it in Orsi’s academic terms, when crisis put these women in “desperate circumstances,” their devotion to St. Jude allowed them to renegotiate “meaning, purpose, [and] a sense of the possible” and so to come to a new experience of their lives. In the concluding chapter of the book, however, Orsi asks the reader to reconsider this narrative. It depends, he notes, on accepting the women’s claim that their prayer led to “something good.” But what would things look like from a perspective informed by the critical tools of the social scientist? Did the women’s 85

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devotion make something “good” happen? Did St. Jude really make their lives better? “It is precisely into this space between the social facts of hopelessness and the changes wrought thanks to St. Jude that we must go now . . . with questions the devout themselves might not have asked.” How do we think about this space? For scholars of religion who defend explanatory, social-scientific paradigms, the narrative Orsi attributes to the women devout is data: their claim that their prayers were heard by St. Jude and that something “good” happened is a religious explanation of their lives. The job of the scholar is not to retell a religious story but to explain these lives in nonreligious terms. Writing his social history in the first six chapters of the book, Orsi does offer a redescription of sorts of the particular words and stories offered by the women he studies, but it arguably comes closer to what Smith calls a “paraphrase” than to critical explanation. Implicitly acknowledging this, Orsi opens his final chapter by considering a psychological explanation: because the women refused to address directly the social forces threatening their worlds, they surrendered their autonomy and agency in a superstitious dependence on Jude. They were infantilized, not empowered, by St. Jude; Jude was less a companion and friend to the women than an ideological force of interpellation. Orsi acknowledges that such an explanation helps us to see that devotion to St. Jude is more “ambiguous” than his original narrative allowed. Yet he does not give the psychological explanation the last word because, he claims, it does not acknowledge that the women’s engagement with Jude pushes them to help themselves, to respond actively to their desperate circumstances. He attributes this shortcoming to the dichotomy between autonomy and heteronomy that the psychological explanation deploys. For Orsi, the women’s narratives are evidence of a more complex relationship to St. Jude, one that takes place in between freedom and surrender. Indeed, the idea of “in-betweenness” serves for Orsi as a conceptual key to the ambiguous role St. Jude plays in these women’s lives. Even as the saint contributes to the Catholic Church’s efforts to keep women in a subservient position, the devout do exercise agency in the relationships they form with him and so limit the power of the Church. Jude is not, Orsi writes, “a stable agent of the culture”; rather, he exists between church, society, and culture, on the one hand, and the lives of the women, on the other. The confidence engendered 86

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by their dependence on St. Jude enables these women to actively explore and renegotiate their worlds, to recognize the difference between what they cannot change and what they can, to accept God’s will while still working on their worlds. Jude, then, is not simply a construction of an authoritative religious discourse to which the women are subject, but a key player in a process by which they become “subjects for” themselves who actively and reflectively appropriate and change socially and theologically approved meaning: “But in their prayers to Jude in disorienting times women experienced the ‘reality of the reality-refusing imagination’ . . . they refashioned the world and then directed themselves toward this new horizon become real in the moment of praying.” By arguing for the ability of religious subjects to improvise with these discourses for their own purposes, an agency made possible in and through a certain kind of religious “dependence,” Orsi refuses to treat the devout and their stories simply as “data” and so marks the limits of the kinds of critical social explanation I explored in the first two chapters. He contextualizes and questions the women’s “religious” explanations; but instead of giving the social-scientific explanation the last word, he stages a confrontation between this explanation and the women’s story. This confrontation offers us a more complex and nuanced understanding of the devotion to St. Jude than we get from either simple “description” or “explanation.” As such, it is a model for what, in this chapter and the next, I will explore as the humanistic study of religion. We have to keep in mind, however, that Orsi stages this confrontation between the psychological explanation and the women’s story as told by Orsi: the narrative he constructs in the fi rst six chapters of the book is, in crucial respects, his. The “women’s narrative,” in other words, emerges only through an academic process of selection and interpretation ultimately controlled by Orsi. From this perspective, the “confrontation” at the end of the book is really a confrontation between two kinds of academic translation: a social-scientific explanation of religion and a humanistic encounter with religion. In this chapter, I consider how Orsi and other scholars take the words, meanings, and experiences of religious subjects not simply as data to be explained, but as significant interpretations in their own right to which the scholar responds. Such response depends on processes of translation, but refuses the one-way translations of the locativists. Humanistic scholars 87

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do not simply acknowledge the lack of fit between their own academic language and the languages of their subjects, and then bracket this incongruity with an appeal to academic protocol (for example, with McCutcheon, by saying, “this is simply what we academics do”). Rather, they attend to this incongruity by critically engaging the limits of their disciplinary vocabularies, and even their own normative and political perspectives as human beings. Such encounter takes place not on the firm ground of the academy’s discursive rules but, as Orsi has it, “inbetween” the world of the academy and the world of religious subjects.

Humanistic, Humanism, Humanities

Working from a positivistic distinction between the cognitive and the existential, locativists such as Donald Wiebe conflate humanistic and theological accounts of religion. Other locativists, such as Gary Lease, gesture more positively toward the humanities. Defending the claim that the humanities “provide both the basic core and the cutting-edge of today’s research university,” Lease argues that the humanities are the academic site where we “conduct an intensive conversation with the traditions, present and past, that help make us who we are . . . [that leads to] knowledge about your self and others.” Importantly, Lease adds that “it is precisely in the humanities that the key skills and elements for the formation of culture are intensively studied, inculcated, and perfected.” I stress the words “inculcated” and “perfected,” for with them Lease comes close to the claim I made in the previous chapter that humanistic disciplines do not simply expose the mechanisms of culture, but are integral to processes of culture and social formation. However, Lease seems not to fully grasp this point, or at least does not exemplify it in his own work on religion, which, as I have shown, is focused on ideology critique. It is thus easy for someone like McCutcheon to enlist Lease in his own vision of the field, where the roles of critic and caretaker are put in opposition to each other. What kind of “conversation” with religious and moral traditions ensues from this vision of “criticism”? Is there any room for engagement that attends to what is worth recovering and creatively learning from tradition? The fact that neither Lease nor McCutcheon answers these questions in a satisfactory way suggests that the “humanistic” remains undertheorized in their 88

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work, as it does, I think, in the study of religion, perhaps even in the academy, more generally. The humanistic study of religion, I argue, moves beyond locative theorizing and locative criticisms of the field. To use the term “humanistic” is to invite reflection on two others—and a host of questions and problems. It points us to “humanism,” a concept that for many has been irreparably stained by its universalism, its Christian roots, its Eurocentrism, and its male bias. And it leads us to “the humanities,” a branch or division of academic inquiry that seems to be in perpetual crisis. The causes of this so-called crisis are many, but two are particularly important. The first is that for decades now the criteria for academic rigor, progress, and success in the academy has been defined by the sciences. Thus Wiebe, Segal, and Armin Geertz quite explicitly seek to make the study of religion a science, while McCutcheon and, to a lesser degree, J. Z. Smith write about the study of religion as a discipline of the “human sciences,” not the humanities. The second element of the crisis is the parochialism of the humanities as traditionally conceived and practiced. Since the middle of the twentieth century, it has become more and more difficult to defend one of the early rationales for the humanities, namely, that it serves to defend and propagate “our” (that is, the Western) culture and canon. And this brings us back to the problem of “humanism,” for as questions about the privileged place of this tradition in the academy are raised, it becomes evident to many, especially to those informed by feminist and postcolonial criticism as well as, increasingly, animal studies, that the very notion of the human—insofar as it is articulated and valorized in and through a particular privileged tradition of ideas and texts—must itself be questioned. I take the humanities to be a set of disciplines and fields of study that analyze and interpret human cultural products and activities, such as literature, art, popular culture, philosophy, and religion, in ways that distinguish them from the natural, social, and human sciences in at least two respects. First, humanistic scholarship pursues knowledge about how human beings, in and through producing and employing such cultural products, construct worlds of meaning and purpose. This constructive activity is also studied by social scientists, but in the humanities one studies it in terms of what Geoffrey Harpham describes as the “distinctively human capacity to imagine, to interpret, and to represent human experience,” that is, in terms of reflective human 89

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subjects grappling, intentionally, with what matters. Harpham points us in this direction when he quotes Charles Frankel: “the humanities are that form of knowledge in which the knower is revealed. All knowledge becomes humanistic when we are asked to contemplate not only a proposition but the proposer, when we hear the human voice behind what is being said.” For social formation theorists such as Burton Mack or Russell McCutcheon, human behavior is an “artifact” of social and historical forces. They focus not on the human “subject” but on the social “mechanisms” by which meaning, value, and action are established, authorized, and maintained. By contrast, humanistic study engages such issues in terms of what the philosopher Robert Pippen calls “irreducibly ‘first-personal’ questions.” By this, Pippen means that when we seek to understand human life, third-person explanations only take us so far because they do not offer a full account of social practices of “giving and demanding reasons for what we do.” Human subjects make decisions and act based, at least in part, on such reasons. All the knowledge in the world about my historical context, psychological profile, or genetic makeup cannot make decisions for me. This is not to say that there isn’t a lot to learn about human behavior by studying genes or ideology. But explanations based on such work do not render irrelevant the reasons people use to explain or justify their behavior to themselves or to those with whom they are engaged in social relations. Nor do they answer all questions about how those reasons, and the sensibilities and dispositions that are bound up with them, move people to do what they do. Naturalistic explanations treat such intentions and purposes as epiphenomena to be explained in terms of social processes or deep psychological structures of which human subjects are largely unaware. A humanistic understanding of human behavior, by contrast, puts intentional ideas and actions of human agents at the center of inquiry. In one way or another, all forms of knowledge, humanistic as well as scientific, contribute to the process by which human beings represent themselves to themselves and thus to our knowledge of what it is—or what it might be—to be human. However, and this is a second distinction between the humanities and the sciences, in the humanities we contribute not only to the knowledge of the parameters and mechanisms of human life but, as Volney Gay argues, to the understanding of what it “means” to be human. As such, at least at certain levels or in 90

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certain modes, humanistic inquiry becomes a normative endeavor, as Robert Pippen avers when he claims that at the heart of the humanities are questions about “what ought to be believed and what ought to be done.” This emphasis on the normative is controversial. In one sense, it will require the rest of the book to make and defend it. Let me put it this way for now: properly understood, the humanities are the site in the academy where not only do we try to understand the immense diversity of ways that human beings have in the past and continue in the present to reflect on and represent themselves to themselves and others, but also we take up, inherit, and respond to these processes of reflection and representation and the processes of self-formation and social formation that they are bound to but that they also effect and enable. This is most obvious in disciplines such as ethics, where what I am calling response will take the form of ethical evaluation. But it also is true of humanistic criticism more generally: the humanities are not just a matter of making fine distinctions or exposing mechanisms; they are about responding to texts, ideas, visions of the human, artworks, and values, that is, about encountering and engaging the claims and visions embedded in them to ask what they mean for me or us. From this perspective a literary critic, for example, does not just tell us how a novel or a poem works as an aesthetic object or how it is a product of its time and place, but treats it as a claim about or vision of human life that the critic, in responding, places in relation to his or her own life and culture. Generally, the critic articulates this relation not by blunt forms of evaluation such as “bad” or “good,” but by tracing the relationships, identifying the gaps and connections between the two worlds, and considering how one’s own life looks different, given this relationship and these gaps and connections. Th is might take the form of being unsettled in one’s own convictions or hopes by a text and so working with it to interrogate and revise one’s own view of things. Or it might take the form of offense or horror that leads one to articulate, defend, and reinforce certain commitments one has. In the richest instances of criticism, both of these elements will be present and, to make a further claim, will lead to the effort to reimagine what it means to be human. Th is responsive component of humanistic work does not always have to be front and center, for humanists produce knowledge through the valuable work of translation, commentary, description, and analysis 91

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in which response is muted or perhaps even absent. But humanistic criticism, as a response to these objects and activities, is perhaps the most important of the ways humanistic scholars participate in what Lorenzo Simpson calls the “unfinished project,” in which the question of the human is asked and answered, and by which humanity not so much is explained but “forged.” It is an imaginative and normative endeavor, the ultimate goal of which is to work from the knowledge of the past and the insightful interpretations it produces to reflect on what it means to be human in the present and what it might mean in the future. In other words, humanistic criticism, to follow thinkers such as Richard Rorty and Stanley Cavell, finds its ultimate goal not in the accurate representation of the human but in the edification or education of human beings. This claim gets at the crux of the contemporary suspicion of the “human” and “humanism.” Can we contribute to the forging of the “human” in any useful way without falling into the perennial effort to identify some fundamental, timeless essence of the human, that which is “proper” to being human, or into certain modern, Western-centric versions of this quest that define the human as a “sovereign” subject or as the autonomous center of all value? Haven’t the antihumanist, postmodern, feminist, and postcolonial discourses of the past forty years demonstrated that “humanism” is best left behind as an intellectual project? As a very preliminary response to these questions, I note that at least some of the discourses that criticize traditional humanism for its hegemonic vision gain their purchase from the claim that humanism has marginalized many human beings and human ways of life. In this respect, the visions of difference and alterity that emerge from such critiques remain tied to the emancipatory impulse of modern humanism or at least to some vision of what Saba Mahmood, who herself rejects the term “humanism,” calls “human flourishing.” Such criticisms of humanism remain dependent on the idea that we can—at least in some tentative sense—identify the “human” and on the moral imperative that we need to forge new, more liberating connections between human beings. I put forward, then, a version of what Simpson calls “post-metaphysical humanism” or what Paul Gilroy calls “planetary humanism.” Simpson and Gilroy recognize that criticisms of traditional forms of humanism do hit the mark and that conceptions of the human are his92

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torically and culturally situated and changing. But this recognition itself necessitates some point of commonality or some sharing of concepts or languages between human beings who inhabit very different social, cultural, and historical worlds. If we are to criticize some ways of being human as too narrow or too exclusive and oppressive, we have to have some way of recognizing those others, their visions of flourishing, and their claims on us. And this entails some universalizable conception of the human—however tentative, cautionary, or proleptic. Simpson puts it like this: [T]he idea of common humanity highlights, therefore, not only the ways in which others who are differently situated are the same—as does humanism traditionally conceived—but also, and most distinctively, what we can learn from the differences themselves.  .  .  . The importance of the humanities in our civic culture is due to their revealing, as no other disciplines can, the full measure of worlds and epochs that are orthogonal to ours, worlds that represent differences from which we can learn and that provide a perspective from which our own strangeness can come into view, enabling a more reflective and critical awareness of who we are.

Simpson traces a delicate and difficult dynamic between similarity and difference. An overarching or universalizable idea of “common humanity” enables us to identify any given difference as a human difference. But if such a conception of the human is to contribute to, and not detract from, humanistic knowledge, it must only be articulated in and through a responsive effort, grounded in a disciplined attentiveness to difference, to expand connections between human beings and so contribute to ever-widening circles of solidarity, reflection, and inclusion. The “universality” of guiding conceptions of the human is a practical matter, informed by a commitment to what Paul Gilroy describes as “solidarity” in the face of our “elemental vulnerability to the wrongs we visit upon each other.” Because humanistic scholarship as I am imagining it here finds its end not in explanation but in responsiveness and reimagination, it has to take cognizance of the limits of theory. I can get at what I mean by this by returning to the idea that the human subject is at the heart of humanistic scholarship. In our efforts to inhabit our worlds, we humans 93

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exercise freedom and creativity in at least the minimal sense that our thoughts and actions are never fully determined by historical and social conditions, that however deeply shaped by these conditions, we also transcend them. To invoke freedom in this way is not, however, to recover extreme modern conceptions of “autonomy.” We are biological, intersubjective beings deeply informed by our particular social, historical contexts in ways we can only glimpse. Our subjectivities, that is, are never simply “ours.” And we are fragile creatures: concrete material conditions can and do inhibit or even completely crush not only freedom of action but also freedom of thought, expression, desire, and hope. Still, human beings, sometimes in incredibly adverse circumstances, do exercise freedom and creativity as they grapple to make their lives. What kind of claim is this? In one sense, it is an empirical claim, since many if not all of us, at one time or another, to a greater or lesser degree, experience ourselves as subjects and agents who make decisions and realize our intentions in our actions. At the same time, however, freedom and creativity are not the kinds of things that can be fully theorized or explained: to invoke freedom is not really to explain something—an action or an idea—but to say that explanation has run its course, that something new has happened. Orienting one’s scholarship in this direction involves a certain kind of commitment with respect to the antinomy of necessity and freedom that has haunted Western thought at least since Kant and arguably much earlier. The dissolution of the subject in social theories of religion that I remarked on in part 1 entails the ultimately metaphysical position that human beings are determined by their context, that their lives follow the strict hand of necessity. But there is no reason to privilege such a metaphysic in academic discourse and there are many reasons to make room for the metaphysical and moral commitment to freedom. The point is not that we can prove that people are free or that in any given case this or that explanation has in fact run its course; it is rather that we should resist dogmatic assertions to the contrary and instead commit ourselves to asking what practical difference it makes to study people, and participate in Simpson’s unfinished project, as if they were free. One reason to commit in this way is that only if we can free ourselves from our conditions, in some limited way, can we get outside of ourselves enough to come to genuine knowledge of the other. Simpson 94

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proposes that the humanities reveal to us our strangeness by showing us how to perceive difference. One way to think about the role of theory in the humanities is to consider how psychoanalysis, genealogy, and deconstruction, for instance, work as disciplines of attentiveness, training us to see and grapple with elements of our texts and our lives that we too easily ignore or that our own hopes, desires, and commitments blind us to. Such discipline enables the kind of humanistic ethical practice through which, as Gayatri Spivak puts it, one is trained in the “suspending [of] oneself into the text of the other, for which the fi rst condition and effect is a suspension of the conviction that I am necessarily better, I am necessarily indispensable, I am necessarily the one to right wrongs, I am necessarily the end-product for which history has happened.” In a similar vein, Judith Butler writes about the “inhuman” in terms of those “social forces [that] take up residence within us, making it impossible to define ourselves in terms of free will.” Recognition of this “inhuman” suggests a humanism very different from those that depend on “sovereign” subjects. As Butler puts it in the epigraph to this chapter, it is precisely our “willingness to become undone in relation to others [that] constitutes our chance of becoming human.” So even if we cannot “define ourselves in terms of free will,” it is still a “willingness” that makes us human. To become “undone” or “suspended,” even as we forge relations with others, is not to dissolve our subjectivity or agency—no relation would be possible if that were the case—but to recognize that openness to and a relationship with others is a fundamental condition of human selfhood.

Humanism and Acts of Theory

Russell McCutcheon argues that a major reason the contemporary study of religion is impoverished is that it is dominated by “liberal humanism,” which is based on the assumption that “scholars share a fundamental commonality with their research subjects—call it ‘the human condition,’ if you will—making them all participants in a common dialogue that addresses and, ideally, overcomes the particularities that might otherwise divide them.” The assumption of a common humanity might sound impeccable, McCutcheon argues, but it is in fact the height of imperialism because in the end it is really an effort to erase 95

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difference through a kind of ventriloquism: when scholars claim to represent the religious subject and thus to find common ground with them, they in fact are speaking in words that have been processed by their own acts of theory, that is, in the context of ethnographic or textual situations set up by the researcher on the basis of his or her theoretical questions and commitments. In short, “data” is in crucial respects a construction of the scholar. McCutcheon makes this argument in a response to Robert Orsi’s review of McCutcheon’s book The Discipline of Religion, published in 2003. In the review, Orsi criticizes McCutcheon’s account of the role of theory in the study of religion because McCutcheon does not allow the “data” to speak back to the theorizer. In his response, McCutcheon focuses on the figure of Punkin’ Brown, the snake-handler Orsi writes about in “Snakes Alive,” to argue that scholars delude themselves if they think that they allow their subjects to “speak back.” Because we “fabricate” the reality of the religious subjects that we study and because there is no way to “bridge the gap between Self and Other,” the only honest approach to the religious lives of others is to acknowledge that one is always redescribing, that is, theorizing, one’s subjects, that one is always writing about them in and through one’s own questions, concepts, theories, and interests. Scholars should therefore be open and unapologetic about the fact that the words they use to talk about these others are theirs and no one else’s. It is true that all scholarly representation of religious others, no matter how “descriptive,” involves the selectivity inherent in any coherent representation, narrative, or theory. Anthropologists and historians have long recognized this. Most, though, don’t move as quickly as McCutcheon does from these very real difficulties to the claim that all translations are equally far from the religious lives they purport to represent and that there is no way to “bridge the gap between Self and Other.” To make such claims is to engage in the kind of hyperbole that gives “postmodernism” its bad name and involves its defenders in various conceptual and performative contradictions. Consider the simple fact that McCutcheon claims to be giving us an account of Orsi’s review, an account on the basis of which he argues for his own view of what constitutes proper scholarship. Even if we acknowledge that all data is theory-laden, unless McCutcheon can persuade us that his account of Orsi’s review is in some way adequately grounded in Orsi’s text, there is no reason to take it seriously. And for his criticism of Orsi’s 96

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“ventriloquism” to carry any weight, McCutcheon also must claim either that he can get at Punkin’ Brown in a way that is more descriptively adequate than Orsi’s, which he does not seem to allow for, or that in some other respect his own ventriloquism is preferable to Orsi’s. Indeed, his point seems to have nothing to do with anything specific or concrete about Punkin’ Brown and everything to do with a theoretical framework that leads him to claim that he is being more honest than Orsi, and less imperialistic, by acknowledging that we are all equally far from the subjects we study. But this seems simply to erase important distinctions between description and explanation, to ground our theorizing in any kind of faithfulness to the religious phenomena we encounter. By contrast, Orsi’s writing is marked by close attention to the complex relationships between himself, the people he studies, and the cultures and traditions in which these human subjects are enmeshed. Moreover, Orsi situates himself in a way that makes his relationships with many of these subjects particularly vivid and complex. He negotiates with, reacts to, contests, and is moved by the people and traditions he studies even as he takes some distance from these engagements and encounters to reflect on what they mean for him as a scholar. His ethnographic and theoretical writing, in other words, is modulated by rhythms of nearness and distance that allow the reader to identify and reflect on the multiple levels of difference, as well as on the similarities, between himself as researcher and his subjects as researched. Orsi does not suggest anywhere, as far as I have seen, that the perspective of his subjects trumps his own or that he is simply allowing them to speak for themselves. Instead, his writing conveys the sense that it is the product of intense attention and dialogue, of a rich “relationship”—to use one of Orsi’s key words—between researcher and researched. Thematizing these relationships, Orsi draws attention to the voices of his subjects in a way that constrains and informs, without dictating, his translations and generalizations. To invoke “voice” in this way is not completely to deny McCutcheon’s points about the difficulties involved in interpretations or representations of text or testimony. But there is a crucial difference between arguing that these difficulties point us to the metaphysical impossibility of understanding between people and arguing that they present us with epistemological, practical, and ethical difficulties. The former releases 97

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us from careful attention to the other; the latter imposes responsibility. To think such responsibility is thus a matter not of appealing to abstract ideas about the fictional character of all representation, but of working with social and dialogical approaches to the interpretation of culture found in pragmatists such as Richard Rorty and Wittgensteinians such as Rowan Williams. “Knowledge,” Rorty argues, is “a matter of conversation and of social practice.” McCutcheon acknowledges that scholarship is a social practice, but takes an overly narrow view of this practice by trying to isolate academic discourse as a language of naturalistic reduction. Rowan Williams provides a much richer treatment of the study of human behavior when he argues that our interpretations should be understood as “social proposals.” For Williams, reductionist explanations of behavior can be illuminating but when they claim the status of a final explanatory vocabulary, they stifle the “pluriform vitality of interpretation” and become totalizing. Interpretation is a form of persuasion whose success is determined in conversation about the particulars of a given case, in careful attention to the “endlessness of difference,” not necessarily in the correct application of a given method. Interpretation and explanation, then, “are social proposals for common reading and common, or at least continuous, activity (a gesture or performance that in some sense goes on with or takes up from mine).” In short, interpretations and explanations are forms of “responsive action.” Humanists evaluate such action not by the identification of final, determinate causes that exhaust explanation, but by its ability to generate persuasive, complex accounts that generate further thought, further insights, and further questions that solicit even further response. The explanations of scholars such as Wiebe and McCutcheon avoid such response: the “data” becomes an object to be submitted to a set of given, machine-like procedures, instead of a voice or voices that need to be engaged and responded to in all their strangeness, particularity, and complexity. From a humanistic perspective, to describe or interpret human thought and behavior involves allowing oneself to “come undone,” to echo Judith Butler, by the voice or voices of the human beings one studies and so to question one’s own desires and theoretical commitments. Orsi does not pretend to capture, in any final way, the full reality of the religious other; his desire for knowledge is guided by “an obligation to keep itself alive as desire and not to resolve itself.” We find something 98

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similar in Saba Mahmood when she writes, with reference to her study of the women’s mosque movement in Cairo, “it is through this process of dwelling in the modes of reasoning endemic to a tradition that I once judged abhorrent, by immersing myself within the thick texture of its sensibilities and attachments, that I have been able to dislocate the certitude of my own projections and even begin to comprehend why Islamism, at least in one of its renditions, exerts such a force in peoples’ lives.” Orsi does write about fundamental commonality, about, for instance, “human ground” and “common humanity.”  One of Orsi’s primary concerns in the discussion of Punkin’ Brown is to reflect on how a scholar of religion should engage with religious phenomena that he or she finds morally, aesthetically, or religiously problematic. For Orsi, “common humanity” is a premise that makes possible a space for encounter in which the scholar suspends “moralizing” reactions in the effort to understand how apparently alien or repugnant beliefs and practices “exert such a force in peoples’ lives.” But McCutcheon is mistaken when he says that Orsi’s humanism seeks “to overcome” the particularities that divide us. On the contrary, the assertion of a common humanity makes it possible to identify and come to some understanding of many of the differences that divide us, precisely by understanding them as differences between human beings. In other words, contact across boundaries is the condition for marking and understanding those boundaries in the first place and so for examining the varieties of human experience. We find here an intimate dialectic between difference and commonality. How can we make any claims about difference, save for the most abstract, if we cannot even communicate with those who are different from us? And if we can communicate, don’t we share something, even, perhaps, a great deal?

Lived Religion, Subjectivity, and Encounter

Let me develop these claims by considering in more detail three elements of the humanistic study of religion I find in the work of Orsi, Michael Jackson, Saba Mahmood, and others. First, this work is based on a method of engagement with and representation of the texture of “everyday life” that Orsi and others have referred to as “lived religion.” 99

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Second, its thick descriptions of religious life throw into sharp relief the thoughts and actions of religious subjects. It thus holds an interesting and difficult tension between the particularity of specific lives and the generalizations and closures that go with explanation and theory. Third, it is grounded in a dialogical relationship between researcher and subject that I call “encounter.”

Lived Religion, Explanatory Closure, and Bearing Incongruity

Locativist approaches to religion turn religion into a phenomenon of closure and stasis that demands to be analyzed in terms of power, authority, and legitimation. But such analysis performs closures of its own when, as Talal Asad puts it, it is grounded in a “sociologism according to which religious ideologies are said to get their real meaning from the political or economic structure, and [a] self-confirming methodology according to which this reductive semantic principle is evident to the (authoritative) anthropologist and not to the people being written about.”  In comparison with the social formation theory of the locativists, Orsi’s focus on “lived religion” is, to use his word, significantly more “dialectical.”  The study of lived religion situates all religious creativity within culture and approaches all religion as lived experience. . . . Rethinking religion as a form of cultural work, the study of lived religion directs attention to institutions and persons, texts and rituals, practice and theology, things and ideas—all as media of making and unmaking worlds. The key questions concern what people do with religious idioms, how they use them, what they make of themselves and their worlds with them and how in turn, men, women, and children are fundamentally shaped by the worlds they are making as they make these worlds.

Scholars of lived religion avoid sociological, locativist closure by placing their analyses of social formation and power in dialectical relationship with humanist interpretation of the improvisatory cultural work through which religious agents negotiate the exigencies of life. That is, they attend to what goes on between “the actual experience of religious 100

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persons” and “the prescribed religion of institutionally defined beliefs and practices.”  Michael Jackson argues that because lived experience “is never identical with the concepts we use to grasp and represent it,” scholars must attend to the “ ‘transitive’ as well as the ‘substantive’ elements, conjunctions as well as disjunctions, [to] the immediate, active, ambiguous ‘plenum of existence’ in which all ideas and intellectual constructions are grounded.”  Like Asad, Jackson contends that anthropology has come to be dominated by theories that prioritize the causal force of political economy in human affairs and more generally by a theoretical reason focused on clearly objectifiable causes such as social structure and discourse. Jackson insists, though, that when we explore how human agents engage life and its demands, we must consider the causal force of “existential imperatives” such as love, mutual respect, and wellbeing, those imperatives that, as the medical anthropologist Arthur Kleinman puts it, “really matter.” Jackson admits that such imperatives are more difficult than social structures to identify and theorize, being “transitive, ambiguous, penumbral, elusive, irreducible, intermediate and resistant to what John Dewey . . . called ‘cognitive certification.’ ”  Th is difficulty leads him to propose an anthropology of “events” or “situations” that focuses on vital and intense moments of life, “border situations” where people find themselves caught between their everyday experience of agency and the aleatory experience of being acted upon by forces that they cannot fully grasp. Here, Jackson claims, people are “most alive to what one might call the real or the religious.”  Are people “alive” at such moments because they have a sense of having found the meaning of it all? Because they feel everything, themselves included, has its place? Perhaps in some instances, but the instances Jackson writes about tend not to be of this sort. They are less defi nitive; the people he studies have a sense of how to go on with things but not the clarity and assuredness that comes with epiphany or hierophany. How should scholars write and think about this kind of “aliveness”? Jackson employs what he describes as a “poetics that makes present the character of the world.”  I take this to mean a descriptive writing that is not simply or primarily an initial stage of study on the way to theory and explanation. Rather, as a kind of phenomenology, this poetics carves out a space between description and theory in which 101

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we glimpse the variety of ways—cognitive, emotional, embodied, moral—people engage the unknown, the unexpected, the painful, the traumatic, the hopeful, the joyous. To explore such engagement only on the model of mapping or classification and only when it is explicable sociologically is to abstract from lived experience in a way that sacrifices descriptive richness and blinds us to the complexity of causal forces involved in the everyday, leaving intact only what can easily be named or “cognitively certified.” In an essay in Between Heaven and Earth, Orsi explores his grandmother’s relation to St. Gemma. He argues against certain “safe” ways of interpreting or explaining religion. Catholic saints can serve as a prescriptive force in people’s lives, whether this prescription is understood theologically, as a religious and moral ideal approved by institutional authorities, or from the secular perspective of social formation theory, where the saint mediates social power. But, Orsi argues, it also is necessary to understand the role of saints such as Gemma in the everyday lives of the people he studies. To ignore this role, to focus exclusively on the ideological uses of saints, is to play it safe by conforming to powerful contemporary theological or academic interests that allow theologians and scholars to avoid the messiness of the everyday lives of religious people. Theologians clean up this mess by dismissing such everyday religion as “infantile,” “superstitious,” or “unorthodox”; social scientists clean it up with the historicist dissolution of “subject” and “experience”; and yet other cultural observers clean it up with the concept of “meaning.” These are all locative strategies: in each case, the place of the saint in people’s lives can be clearly articulated, pinned down, placed—and the disjuncture or incongruity between different functions or effects of saints disappears. How do religious persons live and reflect on, inherit, create, and reshape what matters to them? How do they, as Stanley Cavell puts it, “go on” when meanings and identities are thrown into question in contexts of suffering and loss or when they are transformed by visions of hope? What stands out in Orsi’s exploration of Gemma’s role in his grandmother’s life is not so much the resolutions of “meaning” that the saint provides as the more uncertain, ongoing work of “relationship”: “What the saint seems to have offered was companionship on a bitter and confusing journey—bitterness and confusion to which the saint’s own stories had contributed. My grandmother asked no grace of Gemma other 102

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than that of accompaniment, no miracle beyond the recognition of shared lives.” Orsi’s grandmother does not look to Gemma to provide “answers” or a place of rest but only for help in bearing her difficult life. With this conclusion, Orsi resists the closure of explanation and highlights the thin margin of freedom that borders ideologies and meanings, the space of improvisation with a religious idiom by which his grandmother bears fragility and tragedy. To attend in this way to the dynamism and irresolution of religious life is to identify incongruity and reflect on how religious subjects deal with it. As I argued in chapter 1, Smith takes his consideration of incongruity in an intellectualist direction that moves back toward a version of locativism. Orsi certainly considers the way that human beings adapt to their worlds by grasping them cognitively and by constructing meaning, but he is equally attentive to the ways in which the conceptual and emotional resolutions that come with the scholarly identification of “meaning” can obscure the way that incongruity is borne, not resolved.

Subjectivity and/as Agency

“Subjectivity” is a category that has been treated with suspicion by philosophers, anthropologists, and scholars of religion at least since LeviStrauss. Much of what gets described today as poststructuralist or postmodern thought and criticism either rejects the category as too compromised by the modern ideals of autonomy and disembodied consciousness, or, more radically, embraces an antihumanism that declares the death of the subject. Scholars such as Orsi and Jackson resist these theoretical regimes without seeking to recover the isolated, autonomous subject that was a preoccupation of modern philosophy from Descartes to the existentialists. For Orsi and Jackson, human subjects are inherently relational, or intersubjective, and deeply shaped by religious and other social discourses, but they are also agents who improvise with the discourses and meanings available to them. In their introduction to a volume of “ethnographic investigations” into subjectivity, João Biehl, Byron Good, and Arthur Kleinman offer a useful definition of the kind of subjectivity that emerges from the scholarship I am defending here. Subjectivity, they write, is “the agonistic and practical activity of engaging identity and fate, patterned and felt in 103

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historically contingent settings and mediated by institutional and cultural forms.” Note the dialectic: when “mediated,” subjectivity is also a “means of governance,” for we are “subject to” social forces; as “activity,” however, subjectivity entails the feeling, thought, and practice through which persons act on their worlds and make and unmake meaning. Subjectivity is not, in other words, merely an epiphenomenon of mediating social forces. Biehl, Good, and Kleinman, like Asad, are therefore critical of academic explanations that simply redescribe or explain subjective, experienced-based accounts of life by means of technical, theoretical vocabularies that provide cognitively certifiable explanations. They connect such redescriptions to regimes of social control, criticizing the “statist” orientation of contemporary anthropology and arguing that certain forms of explanation not only dismiss what Pippen calls “first-personal” perspectives on experience but contribute to social forces that colonize life-worlds and undermine human agency. For instance, they criticize “the increasing medicalization of depression and suicide not only as the state’s response to a perceived new public-health crisis but potentially also as the spread of a form of diff used governance that substitutes everyday commonsense categories and practices for rational and technical ones so as to vitiate the moral and political meanings of subjective complaints and protests.” From this perspective, the abstractive force of concepts such as social construction and discursive power can lead scholars of religion to dismiss the analytic and explanatory usefulness of experience-near modes of understanding and practice by which human beings negotiate their lives. To make this point is not to dismiss the analytic concepts created by scholars. Rather, it is to ask how scholarly and existential worlds are related in the course of understanding and explaining religious phenomena. For Biehl, Good, and Kleinman, investigation into subjective experience and value—into “what matters”—and into the strategies and projects by which people live what matters to them helps us understand how subjects are not only “subject to” the discursive power of the social but also “subjects for” themselves. What does it mean to be a “subject for” oneself? Saba Mahmood’s study of Islamic women involved in Cairo’s mosque movement provides a fascinating perspective on this question. Her work is much more influenced by the high theory of poststructuralist thought than either Orsi’s or Jackson’s, yet she employs theory in a way that brings her 104

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closer to, rather than distancing her from, the lives of her subjects. Specifically, she engages feminist and postcolonial theory to think through the displacement of her own academic and political certainties that was occasioned by her fieldwork, opening space for an encounter with her subjects by putting into play their experience, their projects, and their own categories of understanding and explanation. Like other thirdwave feminists, Mahmood criticizes essentialist visions of “woman,” “sex,” and “gender” and is indebted to Judith Butler’s work on performative modes of resistance, subversion, and resignification. But she also argues that Butler, as well as many postcolonial theorists, still depends too heavily on a conception of the subject as “the capacity to realize one’s own interest against the weight of custom, tradition, transcendental will, or other obstacles (whether individual or collective).” This conception assumes that we can distinguish someone’s “true” desires from those that are “socially prescribed.” The women of the mosque movement, according to Mahmood, engage and change their worlds not through acts of resistance to traditional Muslim discourses of gender and religious submission, but by “inhabiting” them. They are subjected to authoritative Muslim codes of gender and piety—which is why it is so easy for Western progressives to view them as dominated and unfree—but they also exercise agency precisely in the work they do in constituting themselves as obedient Muslims. Departing from Kantian models of autonomy and turning instead to the positive ethics of Aristotle and Foucault, Mahmood conceives of this cultural and religious work in terms of the cultivation of habits and virtues by means of “techniques of self” made possible in large part by the normative power of the traditions in which they are embedded. This work on the self is directed not at discovering the “true” desires of a humanist subject— “true” because they exist beneath or apart from the historically and socially disciplined or determined self—but at conforming the self to the religious ideal of the Prophet Muhammad. But what is it, in this context, to “conform”? Conformity, clearly, is an ideal from which many of us formed in the contexts of modern liberalism or the postmodern valorization of transgression recoil. But as Mahmood reads it, to conform is not to blindly obey, but to actively reflect, reinterpret, and reshape ideals handed down by tradition and to bring them to life. Like the concept of “resistance,” though for Mahmood without the accompanying idealization of autonomy, “inhabitation” opens up 105

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a gap between socioreligious norms as articulated by the tradition or by religious authorities, on the one hand, and the agency of religious subjects, on the other. Where the resisting subject of Western theory questions or rejects dominant norms from the standpoint of the “autonomous” or the “real” self, the women of the mosque movement, according to Mahmood, exercise their autonomy by focusing on how to practice the norms they inherit. In doing so, they create a distinct form of the Islamic life, transforming Islamic piety as they live it and as they shape their lives more generally in response to the exigencies they encounter. Beyond autonomy and social formation, Mahmood finds the creativity and freedom of human agents. For her, “agency” is the “ability to effect change in the world,” and as such is distinct from “subjectivity” in that it does not depend on the idea that selves can transcend their social contexts and find secure ground from which to evaluate inherited norms and customs. Here, Mahmood echoes Pierre Bourdieu’s distinction between subject and agent, which emphasizes the “practical mastery” and the “feel for the game” of the latter. Agents, for Bourdieu, operate within and on the basis of a background of social norms and practices about which they do not think. But Mahmood also argues that Bourdieu places too much emphasis on the unconscious imbibing of habitus and so fails to consider seriously intentional practices by which agents cultivate traditional virtues. She offers vivid accounts of the practices by which the women of the mosque movement shape their own dispositions and emotions. Their “agency” is directed not only at changing the world around them but also, perhaps primarily, at changing themselves. In this respect, Mahmood’s concept of agency seems rather close to what Biehl, Good, and Kleinman mean when they use the term “subject.” What this suggests to me is that understanding freedom and agency in terms of the dichotomy between autonomy and heteronomy is too simplistic. We need to think, instead, about a complex dynamic of dependence and freedom, a freedom made possible in and through certain practices of inheritance, commitment, and inhabitation.

From Dialogue to Encounter

When locativists move from description to explanation, they move from what “they” say and do to the explanation of it in “our” terms. 106

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Richard King argues that modern secular theories of religion work largely by “managing” religion, theorizing it in a way that emphasizes those aspects of it that most easily admit of explanation. The consequence, what King calls the “iatrogenic effect of religious studies,” is that the subject has been “pared,” stripped of those elements that don’t admit of certain modes of cognitive certification. One way to avoid this iatrogenic effect is not only to place lived experience and subjectivity at the center of the study of religion work but to place the scholar there as well. Th is is the heart of what I call encounter. Mahmood’s example is instructive: through her encounter with the women of the mosque movement, she comes to question her own theoretical commitments, placing the work her subjects perform on their religious worlds in dialectical relation to her own politics and sense of self by identifying and grappling with the lack of fit between the two worlds. Mahmood, in other words, disrupts the dichotomy between us and them of the locativists by reflecting on how the subjects of her studies, in what they say and do, challenge her to rethink and reimagine herself. From this perspective, “we” too are our subjects: humanistic encounter, as it emerges in ethnographic and archival work, takes place when the researcher exposes his or her world, and therefore his or her questions, expectations, ideals, and analytical maps and models, to the world of the religious subject, with the idea that this encounter might transform the perspective of the researcher. I borrow the term “encounter” from both Mahmood and Orsi. It is a term I prefer to “dialogue” because I think it helps us keep in mind that it is the scholar who represents, and who writes the book or article about, the meeting between scholar and subject and because it suggests something of the unexpected, of the differences emerging in what Mahmood refers to as their “unseemliness.” Still, I begin with “dialogue.” Gavin Flood makes dialogue, as theorized by Mikhail Bakhtin, central to his effort to “rethink” the study of religion. Like Smith and McCutcheon, Flood argues that all scholars and theorists are “situated observers” producing knowledge from a “social base.” But, where McCutcheon deploys the academic rules that define this base so as to preclude the scholar from thinking beyond “our” questions, Flood distinguishes between the “ ‘double-voiced’ depth of the humanities” and the “ ‘single-voiced’ precision of the sciences” and contends that the latter, when applied to the study of social 107

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and cultural human behavior, is “unnuanced in not allowing the subject of the inquiry a voice or response.” For him, dialogue makes it possible for scholars to study religion in a self-reflexive mode unavailable to the locativists. Though McCutcheon certainly recognizes the need for critical reflexivity, his is a monological rather than a dialogical kind of reflexivity, one in which the scholar exposes his or her work to the critical and historicizing work of other scholars. This is not insignificant and McCutcheon knows that his work, like all scholarly work, must remain open to historicizing critique. But it is a much more formal kind of critical exposure than the kind recommended by Flood and other defenders of dialogue. The scholarship of Flood, Orsi, Jackson, King, and Mahmood actually emerges out of encounters in which “emic” perspectives are not just data but interpretations of the phenomena under consideration that must be given critical weight. Encounter is only possible if the scholar acknowledges that he or she shares something with his or her subjects. In Orsi’s case, for example, his “thick descriptions” of religious practices, his frequent use of quotations from the writings of and conversations with his subjects, and his reflections on his own experiences of the strangeness of some of their ideas and practices all convey a rich sense of difference between his world and that of his subjects. At the same time, he is constantly exploring his connections to those he studies, such as his own Catholic background or his own experiences of vulnerability and confusion. His contention is that scholars can only get at the fine grain or texture of religious life to the extent that they are willing and able to put their own experience on the line, to make their own experience of the people they are studying part of the study. As Jackson puts it (in a passage Orsi quotes): the study of the other is also always a “testing and exploring [of] the ways in which our experiences conjoin or connect us with others.” As an example of such “testing and exploring”—humanistic experimentation—Orsi relates how, in the midst of his study of St. Jude, he spent a night “praying” after being told by one of his informants that he would never understand her relation to St. Jude unless he asked Jude for something he really wanted. Although Orsi felt that he could not actually “pray” to St. Jude, when he did find himself in a moment of need, he engaged in a form of self-reflection that he came to characterize as an analogue, in his own experience, to the “vulnerability, risk and acceptance” that, he claims, serve “as the ground” of the devotion to St. 108

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Jude. By creating a new point of contact with his informant (and questioner), Orsi came to a new understanding of prayer and devotion to St. Jude. In this, I think, he gives support to Lorenzo Simpson’s claim that understanding others, while not demanding that “people differently situated actually be similar,” does demand that “we find analogical relations of similarity” with them. Th rough such experimentation, and through other means of close engagement with the subjects of his research, Orsi argues that it is precisely on the shared ground of “human conditions” such as vulnerability and risk that he can understand their prayers to St. Jude. He describes this sharing as a “second solidarity: the recognition after the necessary discipline of distanciation of a shared human fate.” What are we to make of this claim? When Orsi argues that the study of religion is a “moral discipline,” he is, among other things, criticizing the (locativist) tendency of scholars to construct figures of “otherness” that help them to secure our own intellectual and moral worlds, to define and so protect their own place by assigning others their own place, even if that place is morally problematic. But this dramatically limits our knowledge of them; indeed, one might say that we only “know” our own figments of them, for in such cases we constitute “others” by projecting our own fears and fantasies onto them. This means that in creating aliens, we alienate, and so fail to know, ourselves. For Orsi, then, in order to come to knowledge of others less distorted by our efforts to secure our own cosmos of meaning, we need to consider how all religion, even religious ideas and practices we consider morally problematic, arises from “human ground.”  Th is is only possible through a disciplined encounter with the other in an “in-between” space “at the boundary between one’s own moral universe and the moral world of the other.” Orsi describes this as a “suspensive” method. Th is discipline and this dynamic of encounter are evident also in Mahmood’s work, even as she disowns a “universal humanism that claims the power to break through the thicket of prejudices and fi nd a common human essence.”  But her rejection of humanism is tied to her critique of liberal notions of “autonomy,” or, more precisely, of what she calls the “sovereign subject,” the subject who is somehow able to detach itself from historical and social conditions and thereby find a “true self.” She thus also rejects humanistic efforts on the part of historians and ethnographers to “recuperate” others either as resisting 109

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subjects (for example, “subaltern feminists”) or as victims of oppression (for example “fundamentalist Others”). Even so, she, like Orsi and Paul Gilroy, claims “solidarity” with the subjects of her research and grounds this solidarity in “encounter”: “I came to reckon that if the old feminist practice of ‘solidarity’ had any valence whatsoever, it could not be grounded in the ur-languages of feminism, progressivism, liberalism or Islamism, but could only ensue within the uncertain, at times opaque, conditions of intimate and uncomfortable encounters in all their eventuality.” Here, in the last paragraph of the book, she wants to show the “reason” at work in the women of the mosque movement and asserts that by dwelling in these modes of reasoning she is able to question her own “certitudes.” Thus, as she goes on, sounding almost Rortyian, her work becomes a mode of “conversation” that “can yield a vision of coexistence.” In her use of Aristotle and Foucault to theorize a positive ethics, in her efforts to employ Western theoretical terms and theories (even as she reworks these using the resources of “folk categories”), in her reworking of the concept of “agency,” and in her claim that she fi nds in the women of the mosque movement a form of “human flourishing,” she reinscribes humanist themes and points toward fundamental commonalities between human beings. There is no talk about a “common essence” here, but, like Orsi, Mahmood depends on the idea that there is enough in common between herself and her subjects for her to throw up some bridges between them and for her to recognize, even if only dimly, their freedom and their flourishing. The tentative, partial, contextually specific encounters we fi nd in Mahmood and Orsi center on points of similarity that make a degree of understanding possible. This is a modest form of what Gadamer calls a “fusion of horizons,” an idea that has come in for much abuse in recent decades from antihumanists, critical theorists, and defenders of various forms of “radical alterity.” One may, with Levinas, want to preserve the radical difference of the other in the face of the assimilation to the same. But there is nothing in Orsi or Mahmood to indicate that they believe that the many differences between people can ever be reduced to a common essence, that all differences can be overcome, or that scholars can ever completely understand their subjects. As Lorenzo Simpson interprets Gadamer, a “fusion of horizons” does not entail any wholesale convergence between “us” and “them” but rather the forging of a “situated metalanguage” that is the condition of possibility 110

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for identifying any similarities or differences between us and them. Again, it is only if we can communicate with the other—that is, only if we already share something with the other—that we can identify concrete difference.

Questions

Richard King warns that a danger of dialogism in the postcolonial context is that it can elide the power relationships between Western scholars and their non-Western subjects. But he also warns that to read ethnographic or historical encounter only through such power dynamics can elide the agency of colonial or postcolonial subjects. King’s answer is not to reject dialogue, but to recognize that it must take into account the disparity in power between the participants. What would this look like, say, in the case of Orsi and Punkin’ Brown? As McCutcheon warns, many religious actors such as Brown are not interested in reflecting critically on their religious practices. So what kind of power or what kind of cultural imposition is taking place when a journalist or an ethnographer arrives on the scene wanting to understand, interpret, or explain these practices? Is it false consciousness on the part of the researcher to imagine that any kind of genuine dialogue can emerge out of this imposition or interruption of everyday life? Even if the subject is willing and interested in such a process, isn’t it the case that the scholar is ultimately responsible for representing this subject and their dialogue? Aren’t the other and the dialogue ultimately constructed and staged by the researcher? Such questions have been at the core of methodological reflection in anthropology for decades. The first point to make is that in practically any ethnographic situation at least some form of intersubjective relation of give and take does happen. But it happens because the ethnographer is there and has created a new situation for the religious subject. Inevitably, then, what the ethnographer studies is not what might have happened had he or she not been there, but religious behavior in the context of a situation that in some significant sense has been created by the ethnographer’s intervention and is marked by the ethnographer’s presence. But the ethnographer is not the only one scripting the ethnographic situation. As James Clifford puts it: “It becomes necessary to 111

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conceive of ethnography not as the experience and interpretation of a circumscribed ‘other’ reality, but rather as a constructive negotiation involving . . . politically significant subjects.” In other words, what the ethnographic study produces and what the scholar represents is an encounter. Further questions along these lines are put to Orsi and others in a particularly effective way by Elizabeth Pritchard. Pritchard does not display much sympathy for the kind of strong separation between the researcher and researched that we fi nd in McCutcheon, and she applauds efforts to engage with the particularities and differences of religious subjects. She agrees with Orsi that to do so one must move beyond the idea that in deep ways others are “not like us.” At the same time, though, she is suspicious of Orsi’s suspensive method, asking whether Orsi’s emphasis on the discipline and transformation of the scholar, as she or he moves into this in-between space, makes the scholar, rather than the religious subject, the center of the research. Moreover, and more important, she argues that Orsi’s method involves an “insidious reinscription” of the liberal, secular assumption that a nonconflictual, liminal space free of power can be created. A real encounter, she argues, must identify and address the “historical, material, bodily consequences” of religion and it must recognize and learn from conflicting views about these consequences, just as much as it might learn from relations of compassion. When confl ict is ignored and judgments about the material and discursive consequences of religious belief and behavior are suspended, when, in other words, “radical openness” becomes the imperative and all closures on the part of the scholar are seen to betray his or her “moral discipline” (to use Orsi’s term), relationships between scholar and religious devotee are muted and falsified. Pritchard thus is critical of the way that Orsi rushes to defend Punkin’ Brown in the face of the reporter Dennis Covington’s criticisms because, she argues, in doing so he softens the edges of Brown’s own acts of othering—his condemnation of Covington (“It’s a lie, Dennis! . . . It’s a sin!”)—and ignores Brown’s subordination of women. Orsi thus plays out a liberal fantasy of tolerance by shifting focus from “the impersonal judgment of actions to a personal judgment of actors” and so focusing on Brown’s underlying humanity rather than the effects of his behavior. On this reading of Orsi, it appears that no matter how 112

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repugnant or damaging the other’s behavior is, the scholar is able to focus on what really matters: the other’s humanity. Pritchard’s questions and criticisms make a crucial point. I have argued that the explanatory closure I find in locativist theorists prevents us from arriving at adequate descriptions of religious phenomena and is based on a stunted vision of academic responsibility. Pritchard’s criticisms of Orsi push me to a more nuanced view of these closures. As she puts it, “the problem with Orsi’s account is that being critical of any and all othering, boundaries, conflict or closure, he bestows on the scholar the power to domesticate difference and forestall conflict.” Her primary concern here is not to defend locativist closure, but to insist that the scholar face conflict by identifying and grappling with problematic— from the scholar’s point of view—religious and moral discourses and behaviors. In other words, scholars must be willing to perform the kinds of moral and critical closures that Orsi seems to reject when he distinguishes between the study of religion as a “moral discipline” and the “moralizing” entailed in making judgments about the religion of others. Along similar lines, Stephen Prothero argues that Orsi’s suspensive method is necessary but that a more complete engagement with religious lives demands that at some point we move from “bracketing to moral inquiry.” He thus applauds Covington’s “principled assertion of women’s rights.” For both Pritchard and Prothero, taking such stands and working through—though not necessarily claiming to resolve— the confl icts they entail can produce useful insights into the relationship between scholar and religious devotee and thus into the religious phenomena in question. Pritchard and Prothero articulate a central element of what I, in the opening paragraphs of this chapter, called “response.” Orsi certainly communicates a strong sense of responsibility to the religious individuals he studies. Pritchard acknowledges this, but it is fair to ask whether the very power of Orsi’s loving and illuminating portrayals of religious individuals—Clara, who is one of St. Jude’s devout, Orsi’s Uncle Sal, and his grandmother Giulia—may well overwhelm other aspects of his work and keep the reader suspended in the pleasures of compassion and commonality. Pritchard alerts us to the dangers of a humanism that remains in this suspension and so fails to fully identify and assess the effects of human beliefs and actions. Like Prothero, however, I don’t think that these criticisms should lead us to abandon Orsi’s “suspensive” 113

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method. Instead, they push us to grapple more than I think Orsi does with how precisely we respond to religious ideas and behaviors we find dangerous and oppressive. Whenever we acknowledge that our scholarly work is informed by our place in the world and that the encounter with religion—whether in the form of living people or ancient texts—is something that we in some significant sense stage, we are going to become part of the story we tell. This is even more true when, like Orsi and Jackson and Mahmood, one believes that scholarship should transform the scholar by challenging his or her sense of human possibility. This transformation is more than a matter of accumulating knowledge; it entails that one’s own world is, to some degree, defamiliarized. This is bound to make one’s standpoint less secure and more vulnerable, hence one’s judgments more qualified. But to simply suspend all judgment at this point would be, as Pritchard argues, to underemphasize particular differences between the worlds and people at stake in the encounter. Here is where response and certain kinds of closure come into play, where defamiliarization becomes transformation or reimagination.

Conclusion: Response and Critique

The approach to religion for which I have been arguing here counters the historicist reduction of religion to social formation and ideology by exploring how religious subjects live or, to use Mahmood’s term, “inhabit” their religious traditions. It thus requires that we reinvigorate the analytic force of the concepts “subject” and “agent” and of an approach centered on encounter, that is, on suspension and response. By way of a conclusion to this chapter, let me reflect further on the question of response as central to humanistic study. I am not interested here in drawing hard and fast boundaries between the humanities and the social sciences. It would be senseless, for example, to try to pin Orsi, a social historian, or Mahmood, an anthropologist, to either of these academic divisions. Rather than worrying too much about institutional “divisions,” “departments,” or “disciplines”— categories constructed as much for institutional as for intellectual purposes—it is more fruitful to think in terms of a range or spectrum of categories and questions that can help us articulate with some clarity different goals of scholarship and different forms of criticism. One way 114

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to think about the place on the spectrum I identify with humanistic scholarship is to consider Henry Sussman’s understanding of criticism as “marshal[ing] specificity against the law of genre.” Where scientific or social-scientific theory seeks to explain human phenomena in terms of general laws or patterns, humanistic study, while by no means simplistically rejecting generalization (which would be to give up on thought and knowledge altogether), insists on studying human behavior through the concepts of freedom and creativity. Another way to put this, a way that anticipates the second half of the book, is to note the deconstructive force of Sussman’s formulation: he wants us to focus on the specific, yet he recognizes that it is not possible to focus on specificity and particularity in simple opposition to genre, the general, or the theoretical. If we are to think at all, we cannot avoid subsuming the specific under the general. So the specific is “marshaled” as a remainder that always exceeds the closures of theory. As Derrida puts it: “I do not oppose thereby the translatable to the untranslatable. I always search, in the ‘sacred’ respect for the idiom, for a universal political chance, a universality that is not the crushing of the idiom.” In other words, “knowledge” in the humanities is always disturbed by the reverberations of the particular, which can never be fully subsumed by the concept or the explanation. Humanistic scholarship on religion thus maintains critical playfulness—to look back to the fi rst chapter—by attending to this complex relationship between the specific and the generic, “data” and theory, territory and map. To maintain playfulness here is not simply to acknowledge that map is not territory, but to allow the reverberations of the particular to work their way into and through the description and analysis of religious phenomena and so to keep theory open to the life of the particular. Orsi’s and Mahmood’s accounts of particular religious lives, their interviews with religious subjects, and their reflections and narratives on their engagements with these subjects all feed into their generalizations about their subjects and about religion. But even as they generalize and theorize, these particulars retain a life of their own in their writing. This makes palpable the contingency of these generalizations. One way Orsi keeps the specific alive is by narrating his religious subjects and juxtaposing the narratives of his subjects not only with academic explanations of these narratives but with narratives from his own life. We see something similar in the way 115

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Mahmood frames Politics of Piety with a story about her shifting political commitments. Narrative, of course, is also a form of generalization, but, as Geoffrey Harpham argues, “narrative engages with theory in a process of reciprocal probing and stressing that tests the capacity of theory to comprehend and regulate practice, and the power of ‘actual life’ . . . to elude or deform theory.” Harpham calls this point of contact between theory and narrative “ethics.” Where Bruce Lincoln contrasts scholarship with narrative, suggesting that the latter is less critical than the former, and in so doing correctly pointing to the ideological uses that narrative can serve, Harpham points us to the critical role of narrative in opening us to the life-world of others in staging the encounter between particularity and generality. These scholars also attend to the life of the particular in their refusal to dissolve the individual into the social. Religious subjects come to life in the kinds of ethnographic work we find in Orsi and Mahmood, but this turn to the subject, and particularly to the subject’s agency in reworking culture, serves to mark the limits of explanation. To appeal to “intention” or “decision” is not to give up on explanation altogether, for we can know a lot about how human beings live their freedom and creativity and about what we might call the necessary conditions of particular acts of human agency. However, as Terry Eagleton puts it, freedom “is elusive, quicksilver stuff which slips through our fingers and refuses to be imaged.” Like religion for Mark Taylor, freedom is what “slips away,” thus introducing a gap in our explanations. For the social theorists I have been engaging to this point, this slipperiness of freedom is irrelevant, for there is nothing to “know” and so nothing “academic” or “scientific” or “cognitively certifiable” to say about it. But what kind of knowledge are we after here when we make this claim? Let me suggest that rather than limiting knowledge to the kinds of causes scholars look for when they move to history (for example, historical context) or nature (for example, genes or cognitive mechanisms), we should include the knowledge that results when the humanist moves from freedom to what I have called “response,” knowledge that is existential as well as cognitive, that is articulated and enacted in critical engagement with the behavior in question. Such response must be part of an effort to get as complete a picture of religious behavior as possible, but it goes further in that it involves the examination and articulation of that which is invoked in or provoked for us, as scholars, by the be116

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havior in question and, as such, it becomes a moment in the creation of culture itself: the encounter of ethnographer and subject, an encounter of human beings communicating, contending, negotiating, is the stuff out of which culture is made. Scholarship conducted on the ground of the in-between does not simply represent; it transforms self, other, and culture. Locativist claims that as scholars our only responsibility is to the academy, that we fulfi ll this responsibility simply by pursuing an “uncensored curiosity,” are misguided. Our work is part of the process of inheritance and creativity by which cultures are made; we are actors in, not just observers of, the process of social and cultural formation. So how do we scholars think about our freedom and thus our responsibility? We might start with Mahmood: “Critique, I believe, is most powerful when it leaves open the possibility that we might also be remade in the process of engaging another’s worldview, that we might come to learn things that we did not already know before we undertook the engagement. Th is requires that we occasionally turn the critical gaze upon ourselves, to leave open the possibility that we may be remade through an encounter with the other.” Here, the critic is responsible not only for remaking him- or herself, but also, since this takes place in and through “encounter” with others, for the remaking of human relationships and so culture more generally. It is important to note that Mahmood does distinguish theory from politics, insisting that the theoretical moment grants one time and space to reflect and question without acceding to the immediate demands of the political. This is one way of defending—to a point—the idea of uncensored curiosity, of the pursuit of knowledge unfettered by defi nite ends. But Mahmood’s way of putting it makes it clear that the political always awaits. And Pritchard reminds us that even in the midst of our academic work, the political cannot and should not be avoided. When we study the cultural expressions of others, we engage in analytic and theoretical tasks, utilizing disciplinary tools, concepts, and categories that help us understand how people act and how they use language to represent themselves, others, the world, and everything that matters to them. In this latter regard, the study of religion is particularly pertinent. Whatever else they are, religions have and continue to provide a context in which human beings experiment with their subjectivity and intersubjectivity, engaging in forms of reflection and 117

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practice about what does and what should matter to them. To follow the paths of the scholars I have studied in this chapter is to agree that we do this in and through the effort to connect with those we study as human beings. As Biehl puts it, “the ‘we’ remains incessantly to be reinvented.” This effort to find common human ground with the other requires that “we” too imagine new possibilities of human communication and human culture. To do this requires that we know how to engage with one another, learn from one another, and go on from our encounters. Th is is the kind of knowledge that is produced through humanistic inquiry, the knowledge of how, for example, to receive a philosophical text, a novel, a claim, or a vision articulated by another in a way that one’s life and one’s connection with others is expanded and vivified.

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Beneath and behind the continuing theoretical refusals and reductions of authorial subjectivity lies a model of textual simplicity which seeks to keep “life” at bay. —SEAN BURKE 1

At the end of chapter 2, I suggested that attention to theology as a critical discourse might help us think more generally about humanistic criticism. Having explained what I mean by humanistic criticism in chapter 3, I begin, in this chapter, to explore the boundaries between humanistic inquiry and theology. I extend my reflections on the humanistic study of religion to consider the encounter with religious texts and then examine concrete examples of such encounters in the work of two “secular” thinkers: the historian and theorist Amy Hollywood and the political theorist Romand Coles. Both show the critical work that thinking with theology, between the secular and the religious, can do. This will be a first step—further steps come in chapters 5, 6, and 7— in showing that theology is not, at least not always, the locative enterprise it has been made out to be by some scholars of religion. It also will entail consideration of how the study of religion might view theology or other forms of religious thought and practice not just as objects of study but as the source of categories, concepts, and practices that might contribute to the study of religion, a consideration, that is, of what it could mean for scholars to think with, and not just about, theology and religion.

Encountering Texts: The Death and Life of the Author

Texts do not talk back to the scholar of religion the way ethnographic informants do. Many humanists, however, consider the study of texts, 119

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broadly construed, to be the primary object of humanistic inquiry. And even if we want to call the kind of ethnographic work I explored in the previous chapter “humanistic,” we still need to ask what it means to “encounter” a written text. Some philosophers, such as Richard Rorty and Jeff rey Stout, view philosophical discourse as “conversation.” This suggests that when we engage written texts we enter into dialogue with the author. To some extent, I think this is right. But many theorists, particularly those influenced by structuralism and poststructuralism, draw clear distinctions between conversation or dialogue, on the one hand, and textual study, on the other. For Paul Ricoeur, conversation and dialogue are matters of “speech,” in which there is an immediate relation between speaker and listener, a relation made impossible by the mediations of writing, the historical and textual swirl of relations, arguments, presuppositions, and forms. Thus Ricoeur focuses not on what the author “says” or “means,” but on the text and on the way the reader appropriates meaning by engaging with the “matter of the text.” This view does not preclude at least some ways of thinking about encounter: when I immerse myself in a text, I am often challenged, surprised, forced to rethink; I am drawn out of myself and exposed to other worlds. I can even be “read” by the text. But is this an encounter with an “other”? With, since we are talking about the humanities, another human being? This kind of question takes on added relevance when one considers how Ricoeur’s phenomenological and hermeneutic efforts to think beyond the “philosophy of consciousness” are radicalized in the structuralist and poststructuralist work of thinkers such as Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida. Where Ricoeur insists on the referential function of the text—even though the “matter of the text” is not equated with the “intention” of the author—Barthes, Foucault, and Derrida are, for many, prophets of the “death of the author.” Far from offering us any notion of encounter, these theorists—at least as far as the “antihumanist” readings of them go—argue that the text sweeps us up in a play of language wherein we lose not only the other but ourselves and any clear sense of textual reference. From this perspective, Geoffrey Harpham’s account of the humanities, which helped guide my reflections in the previous chapter, may seem naïve and retrograde. Let me repeat one of his central claims: “All knowledge becomes humanistic when we are asked to contemplate not 120

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only a proposition but the proposer, when we hear the human voice behind what is being said.” He goes on to say that “the text represents intention and agency,” though he is clear that there is always more to the text than the author’s conscious intention. The terms “proposition” and “proposer” allow him to distinguish between the text and the creative act of the human proposer and to claim that humanistic inquiry is a matter of looking “behind” the text in order to encounter the “human voice” and that the meaning of the texts we study are in significant part a function of human efforts to communicate intentions and ideas through the use of written signs. Why does a critic like Harpham, who is aware of and agrees with many of the reasons for distinguishing between author and text, think that it is important to consider the “proposer”? Is this an idea that, after the theoretical wave of the last decades of the twentieth century, can command our assent? I think it is. To defend this claim, I take a brief detour through Sean Burke’s revisionist study of Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault, in which he argues that the influence of the “death of the author” idea owes more to the overhasty reception of these seminal thinkers than to careful attention to the full range of their writing. Burke acknowledges that Barthes, Derrida, and Foucault each did, in one way or another, announce the death of the author. But he argues that each also came to see that what he really was doing was “resituating” the author. For instance, Burke argues that Derrida’s early commentators ignored the phenomenological context of his work, in particular his criticism of Husserl’s concept of intention, and so failed to see that instead of dismissing the concept of subjectivity or author, he was questioning the “punctual simplicity of the classical subject” and “unsettling” the authorial center to effect “the redistribution of authorial subjectivity within a textual mise en scéne which it does not command entirely.” Thus, even as Derrida pushes us to rethink notions of authorial autonomy and intention, he remains attentive to the author’s struggle for expression in and through writing, with and against language, with and against him- or herself. This struggle is manifest, Burke says, in a biographical, intellectual, and stylistic “specificity” that unsettles the contextualist, historicist, and textualist methods of reading that dominated interpretive practice during the heady days of theory. Indeed, this specificity marks the limits of theory itself, whether historicist theories that reduce the subject to social flows of energy, new and old formalisms for which texts are worlds unto 121

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themselves, or, importantly, even recent efforts, in Walter Benn Michaels, for instance, to reduce the meaning of texts to authorial intention. Each of these “theoretical refusals and reductions of authorial subjectivity,” Burke argues, blinds us to “existential” forces at work in the text by means of “a model of textual simplicity which seeks to keep ‘life’ at bay.” What does Burke mean by “life”? One example he offers is Nietzsche’s autobiographical performance in Ecce Homo, where Nietzsche addresses his own writing, connects it to his life, and reflects on the ways in which his writing does, or does not, communicate with his readers. More generally, Burke means all the “modes of inscription by which a subject appears in her text,” textual signs of “that ever-singular place of desire, will, and history” from which the author writes. When theorists focus on the death of the author as a way to emphasize the power of language, structure, and history, they tend to underemphasize or exclude from consideration the energy of this singular life and the way it disrupts every theoretical attempt to grasp the text without remainder: “The processes of intention, influence and revision, the interfertility of life and work, autobiography and the autobiographical, author-functions, signature effects, the proper name in general, the author-ity and creativity of the critic, all these are points at which the question of the author exerts its pressure on the textual enclosure.” In this sense, “life” is a sign of incongruity marking the inevitable lack of fit between the author and his or her text, between the felt dynamism of life and thought, on the one hand, and the apparent or relative stability of proposition, representation, and theory, on the other. From this perspective, a key element of reading humanistically is to identify and reflect on this “unquiet presence” by reading for signs of life. There are at least two modes of such reading. First, by bringing to bear various critical or deconstructive methodologies, one attends to contradictions, frayed edges, tensions, and blindnesses that indicate an unconscious or unacknowledged disjunction between what the author wants or claims to say and what the text actually says. Second, and of more interest to me here, one attends to the struggles and uncertainties, explicit or not, by which the author, even as he or she makes arguments and takes positions, tries to find the words and forms that are “right” and that will enable him or her to communicate with others. In other words, one attends to textual dynamics that make writing never simply 122

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an expression but an enactment of life, the means by which the author becomes something other than what he or she was in and through the act of writing. As I understand him, such reading for life is what Harpham is after when he writes of the “drama of other minds”: To read is to understand a mind that struggled to express itself, and this shared struggle is one of the bases for communication between author and reader. To enter into silent dialogue with an author, we must suspend our distinct identities and presume that his or her mind is like ours in this and perhaps other respects. . . . [R]eading words in search of the human presence behind them strengthens our imaginative capacity, forcing us to reenact in our own minds the drama of other minds and even to feel their thoughts and sensations as if they were our own.

This is a compelling vision of textual “encounter.” It is easy to point to the controversial ideas embedded in this passage, which are all central to my notion of encounter: “suspend,” “mind,” “dialogue,” “presence,” “feel.” But it is clear that Harpham recognizes (as does Burke) that the “mind” is not simply “consciousness” and that authors are not in full control of their texts: “Interpretable texts are, we necessarily presume, produced by a mind (immured in a body, with emotions, affects, drives; and embedded in history, the moment, the family, the class, etc.) whose fullness exceeds its conscious intentions or field of immediate awareness.” Because the mind is “immured” in this way, the explanatory resources of the historical, sociological, and psychological methodologies of the human sciences have a central role to play in interpretation. In this respect, Harpham appeals to a process of reading that traces something like Ricoeur’s “hermeneutic arc,” a dialectical relation of explanation and interpretation. Texts are overdetermined and so require “multiple explanations.” Still, in the process of identifying, sorting through, emphasizing, and deemphasizing one or more possible explanations of a text, it is necessary to maintain disciplined attention to the “mind” of the author. This is precisely what humanizes our reading and so allows the reader not only to enter into the world that emerges in and through the text but also to understand this world as a world imagined, challenged, or proclaimed by another human being struggling, 123

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with and against the multiple vectors of his or her own life, to express him- or herself and to inhabit his or her world. I do think that it is necessary to push Burke and Harpham a bit further than their explicit claims about such reading might suggest. Burke usefully focuses on the challenges the “return of the author” poses for theory. Harpham goes further than Burke in the direction of what I am calling encounter. At one point, he asserts that “humanistic understanding is inescapably dual—on the one hand, a liberation from the confi nes of the mundane self through an immersion in the lives and thoughts of others, a loss of bearings; and, on the other, a vicarious or secondary participation in the author’s act of creation that enhances and strengthens our imaginative powers.” Yes, but what do we do with these powers? In a brief discussion of the characters of Léon and Rodolphe in Flaubert’s Madame Bovary, Harpham claims that both are “antihumanistic types,” unable to achieve the kind of “empathetic identification” with others that Flaubert achieves in his writing. Léon, Harpham argues, fails to understand that true engagements with literature “yield an augmented self-knowledge.” But Harpham takes the reading of this text no further and it is only elsewhere in the essay that we get a sense of what this “augmented self-knowledge” might look like in practice: “In humanistic study, we confront not just our ancestors [in texts from the near and recent past] but also our own capacity for determining who our ancestors were, and thus for determining who we are or might become.” In other words, to read is not only to immerse oneself in the lives and thoughts of others and so to come to a better sense of who we are; it also is to reflect on what we might become in the future. To return to a theme from the previous chapter: on this model of reading, one not only suspends oneself in the thought and words of the other, looking for signs of the other’s life; one also puts these signs of life into conversation with one’s own life, reflecting on what the text means for one’s own life. What kind of demand does this text and this author place on me? What am I, or we, to become in the face of this work?

Mysticism Between Theology and Theory

In this and the following section of the chapter, I explore encounters with religious writing and thinking in the work of the feminist theorist 124

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and medieval historian Amy Hollywood and the political theorist Romand Coles. Both exemplify, though in rather different ways, the kind of textual encounter I’ve been sketching. Both also offer provocative and creative “secular” efforts to think with nonlocative religious discourses.

Fetishism, Interpretive Control, and Psychoanalysis

Hollywood’s Sensible Ecstasy is a theoretically and methodologically ambitious study of the twentieth-century fascination with medieval women’s mysticism, a history of a modern recovery of a religious past. French philosophers and theorists such as Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, and Luce Irigaray are “secular” thinkers who appeal to women’s mysticism as a resource for imagining forms of subjectivity open to the ethical call of the other and free from the modern dualisms of emotion and reason and body and soul. Engaging their work, Hollywood reflects in a sophisticated manner on the problem of finding life in the texts of the past. As a historian committed more to a feminist politics and ethics of embodied subjectivity than to any clearly identifiable religious, dogmatic, or confessional religiosity, she nonetheless demonstrates an acute theological sensibility in her effort to think with these women about affirming the bodily and affective life of human beings in the face of the unavoidable reality of loss and death. She agrees with Bataille and the others that these medieval religious figures have something important to say to us, but argues that these modern readers too often exert a form of interpretive control over the texts that prevent them from fully understanding the radical nature of the mystics’ writing. She considers how theory, particularly psychoanalysis, both enables and limits the historian’s ability to encounter the life enacted in the texts she studies. We need, she argues, to read these texts better: “any feminist assessment of the contemporary turn to the mystical must take seriously the words of those women whose writings purportedly, if often only elliptically, give rise to this turn.” She does this not by dismissing her theoretical frame or orientation, but through an encounter between theory and “the messiness, multiplicity and pain—as well as to the pleasure, beauty and joy—of embodied subjectivity.” Hollywood employs the psychoanalytic categories of hysteria and fetishism to analyze the mystics and their interpreters. Modern theorists 125

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often view mysticism, particularly the affective mysticism usually associated with medieval women, through the lens of “hysteria.” As Freud defined it, the hysteric is “one who suffers bodily symptoms she (or he) does not know how to interpret.” These bodily symptoms signify repressed traumas or desires that the theorist or the analyst must interpret. This very definition throws into sharp relief the issue of interpretive control, for it bestows on the modern theorist a form of interpretive authority that renders the mystic’s own views of her bodily, affective, and intellectual states as symptoms of the condition under question. But Hollywood asks whether mystics themselves offer viable interpretations of their condition. Answering this question in the affirmative is one step Hollywood takes in arguing that the interpretive control exerted over these mystical texts is a symptom of fetishism and that we fi nd such fetishistic readings not only in modern theorists but also in medieval accounts of mystics’ lives. Thus, she compares Beatrice of Nazareth’s “Seven Manners of Loving” with the “Life” written by her hagiographer. Not only does Beatrice write insightfully and coherently about her condition, but she focuses on the interior struggle of her soul. By contrast, when her hagiographer writes the theologically authoritative account of her travails, he externalizes this struggle, focusing on bodily states, about which Beatrice herself has little to say. According to Hollywood, this shift is an act of “ventriloquism” that misses what is most provocative and interesting about Beatrice’s treatise. The hagiographer, Hollywood argues, speaks for Beatrice as a way of coping with “his culture’s spiritual dilemmas and its conflicts over materiality and religious authority.” At a time when the Church was being challenged by powerful heretical movements, women’s mystical bodies, not just Beatrice’s, became a physical sign of divine presence that served to bolster orthodoxy. Perhaps, Hollywood suggests, it is the hagiographer, not Beatrice, who is the hysteric: by turning Beatrice’s body into a site of imagined affective or cognitive plentitude, it becomes for him a fetish, that is, an object that comes to cover over a fundamental lack or divide in the subject and his culture. The modern interpreters also fetishize the mystics even though, according to Hollywood, Bataille and Lacan inflect hysteria in a more positive direction than Freud. Both view the hysteric as one who is open in a radical way to the bodies and affects of other, which enables forms of embodied subjectivity that avoid fantasies of totality and autonomy 126

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upon which modern ideals of subjectivity have been built. In Angela of Foligno, Bataille finds an encounter with the crucified Christ that produces, in ecstatic anguish, the realization that one is “radically contingent, partial, and incomplete.” Like Bataille, Lacan views certain mystics as having encountered the truth of the “not all,” a “feminine” subject position that refuses to repress the “lack” underlying all subject formation. As Hollywood puts it, the mystics’ “unstinting quest for the absolute exposes the subject’s own lack and the always absent and unattainable other through which it is brought into existence.” But even as she finds aspects of the work of Bataille and Lacan compelling and seeks to extend a concept of subjectivity as embodied openness to others, Hollywood argues that they, like Beatrice’s hagiographer, ultimately fetishize mysticism. This is particularly true in Lacan’s case. Although he seeks to dismantle the fantasy of male totality, his insistence on viewing the human subject in terms of castration or lack, that is, in terms of subjectivity that is grounded in the repression of the “castrated” mother in favor of God, the phallus, or the Father, perpetuates a male-centered symbolic. By associating women with the truth of this lack, Lacan fetishizes women’s bodies as a paradoxical site of plenitude and promise. Hollywood’s history of modern readings of mysticism culminates in a lengthy and complex engagement with the work of the feminist philosopher Luce Irigaray, whose influential contributions to psychoanalysis and feminist philosophy chart routes beyond Lacanian readings of women’s mysticism, feminism, and subjectivity. Specifically, Irigaray seeks to construct a new feminist imaginary that will exceed the vestiges of patriarchy in Lacan’s vision of subjectivity as lack. As in Lacan, subjectivity for Irigaray is fundamentally bodily and grounded in identificatory structures. To the extent that patriarchal cultures have made such structures available to women at all, they have tied them to nature, community, and family. For Irigaray, however, feminist subjectivity is possible only if such identifications can be transcended and only if this transcendence is “continuous” with nature and embodiment; it will be, Irigaray claims, a “sensible transcendental.” As Hollywood puts it, this enables “recognition that the body is the site both of limitations and of the transcendence of some of those limitations.” “Mysticism,” as a disruption of dualities, is the name for the most important manifestation of sensible transcendence, “a shared outpouring . . . [a] loss of 127

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boundaries of the one and the other by the passage of skin into the mucous membrane of the body, from the circle of my solitude to a shared space, a shared breath.” Such transcendence differs from Christian, fetishistic transcendence, because it will not be supported by “belief” in something beyond the human that promises wholeness and “depends on the concealment of its [real] object.” Instead of believing in divine figures, Irigaray embraces the “risk” symbolized by them, the risk of a relation, an openness to the other that is not the covering over of a lack or a desire to be “all.” Hollywood, however, is not persuaded that this move overcomes fetishism, for ultimately Irigaray’s risk is directed toward a reified conception, even divinization, of the heterosexual woman. She notes Irigaray’s debt to Feuerbach’s concept of belief to argue that “sexual difference,” like Feuerbach’s “species being,” is an abstracting, essentializing concept that denies the ambiguities and differences that make up human life. Irigaray does stress “the risk of opening ourselves to the other” in “a transcendence that is horizontal and nonhierarchical, a movement out toward the other rather than of mastery over her.” But her claims about sexual difference fail to acknowledge and affirm the ambiguity of the body and the multiple possibilities of passionate and sexual attachments. Instead, Irigaray naturalizes sexual difference, appeals to an “empirically unavailable site of plenitude,” and thus disavows the fundamental reality of loss. As deeply indebted to Lacan and Irigaray as she is, Hollywood argues that their psychoanalytic perspective leads them to conclude that the fetishism they discuss is the consequence of phallocentrism. But Hollywood proposes the converse, that phallocentrism is the consequence of a fetishistic logic of subjectivity grounded in the disavowal of loss. With this argument, she directs psychoanalysis against itself, theorizing it as “the modern West’s preoccupation—even fetishization—of sexual difference.” For Hollywood, fetishization as a psychic dynamic is in place before sexuation, as a consequence of the development of the bodily ego itself, which, as Hollywood puts it, is “both the first psychic recognition and the first attempt to create a safeguard against mortality.” In light of Irigaray’s disavowal of loss, the question thus remains for Hollywood: How do we incorporate a genuine recognition of loss, contingency, and mortality, intellectually and affectively, into our sense of self and our relations with others? Is it even possible? Here, she 128

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argues, the mystics can help us if we are willing to relinquish the interpretive control over their writing made possible by the fetishism of contemporary theory or, to put it more positively, if we are willing to engage in the kind of two-way translation and humanistic encounter I described in chapter 2, to argue that even as psychoanalysis and other theories can help to illuminate mystical writing, mystics such as Beatrice and Angela can help us come to a better understanding of ourselves as historians, theorists, and subjects.

What Can the Mystics Tell Us?

Hollywood takes great care to show how these mystical texts resist contemporary and modern appropriations, but she, too, at least in some sense of the word, appropriates them. That is, she enlists them in her own efforts to imagine an embodied subjectivity that affirms the practically infinite reaches of human desire—perhaps best expressed in religious, especially mystical discourse—even as it acknowledges the ambiguities, limits, and losses of human life. In the last paragraph of the book, she writes: Poised between the desire to transcend the body’s limitations and the recognition that transcendence occurs only through the body, women like Beatrice of Nazareth, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Hadewijch and Angela of Foligno hold out the possibility that endless, ceaseless, illimitable desire might be thought and lived outside of a phallic law of impotence. . . . Read critically, then, these exorbitant mystical writings and others like them may help us devise new ways to negotiate the often fraught relationship between the political, the religious and the mystical. At the very least, feminist philosophy should follow these women in opening itself to the messiness, multiplicity and pain—as well as to the pleasure, beauty and joy—of embodied subjectivity.

Is Hollywood performing her own acts of ventriloquism? Does she fetishize Beatrice, Angela, and others? How, in other words, should we put these texts in conversation with present-day concerns and questions? If Bataille, Lacan, and Irigaray do not take the writings of medieval women 129

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“seriously” enough, how does Hollywood, who also employs a sophisticated theoretical apparatus, avoid doing the same? To address these questions, it is necessary to understand what Hollywood means when she claims to read the mystics “critically” and to “follow” them. How does she do both and how does doing both avoid interpretive control and fetishism? Two aspects of her critical reading address the issue of interpretive control directly. First, Hollywood employs historical and textual analysis to argue that the mystics’ “religious” writing cannot be understood in isolation from its political and social context. Women such as Beatrice contested the religious roles prescribed for them by contemporary religious authorities, which means that we should read their texts as expressions of a “desire for freedom” and so also as proleptic forms of resistance to twentieth-century readings of their mysticism. Second, she criticizes the tendency, evident in many modern studies of mysticism, to assume that mystical texts generally consist of direct reports on experience. Although some mystical texts do appear to describe particular experiences, many utilize a range of formal genres that complicate our understanding of how the mystical text connects to the mystic’s life. In other words, we have to read these texts as written. So, for instance, Hollywood argues that the texts of Mechthild and Angela are probably best interpreted as “confessions” in the Augustinian sense. Th is means that they are texts written both to a human audience, as spiritual guides, and to God. In the latter sense, they expose the writer to God’s judgment in a way that undercuts their own authority even as it establishes the divine authority of the text (a textual strategy especially important for women in the medieval period). Some of these texts, however, push such negation even further, even to the point where the women seem to deny their own salvation or negate divine being. That is, the texts both enact and deconstruct desire and subjectivity in a way that disrupts clear boundaries between male and female, body and soul, life and death, self and God. In Angela, for instance, meditation that imaginatively relives the sufferings of Christ exposes her to the fragility of the human body and soul in a way that “displays her desire to dissolve the self, to approach death, and to open herself to the lacerating wounds required for communication.”  In this opening to the other, Angela sees herself as sharing in Christ’s salvific work. 130

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A third, particularly important element of her critical reading of mystical texts is Hollywood’s argument that even as the mystics help us think in new ways about desire and subjectivity, they also employ their own spiritual and writerly strategies for evading loss. Beatrice’s writing, for example, resists the bodily forms of mysticism that her hagiographer and her culture assign to her, but her emphasis on interior suffering ends up performing a melancholic refusal of mortality. Angela is more complex and it is with her that we see Hollywood’s most important contribution. “Angela,” Hollywood writes, “encountered the real, in ecstasy and anguish, in ways that Irigaray approaches only at her most mystical—hence most audacious, desirous, and least programmatic—moments.”  Angela’s is a mysticism focused on a divinized “Love” that “occupies the site both of the transcendental signifier, which fi xes meaning and insures wholeness and stability, and of signifiance, in which meaning is always unmoored and put in motion.”  This deconstructive movement keeps belief open to excess, enigma, and incongruity. Following the call of this Love toward the other requires belief that seeks God not in a static plentitude that one clings to or that one tries to make one’s own, but in the practice of making oneself the site of God’s “boundless and ceaseless desire” that disrupts the closures of self, gender identity, and religious meaning. God, from this perspective, is always doubled, a doubling most succinctly expressed in Meister Eckhart’s saying, “So therefore let us pray to god that we may be free of god.”  But Eckhart is praying for, not accomplishing, this freedom. And when Angela, according to Hollywood, employs medieval meditative techniques to reenact Christ’s suffering on the cross, she resembles the melancholic who introjects the lost loved one as a strategy for evading loss and threatens to “overwhelm the redemptive story that frames her meditative practice.”  In other words, she comes close to “eschew[ing] the soteriological in response to the real.”  It is precisely here, I think, that Hollywood finds her way between explanation and fetishism. Mystics such as Angela and Eckhart—and, I would add, many theologians as well—recognize that religious belief is often, even usually, driven by the projection of human needs, anxieties, and wants. What makes these mystics so remarkable, and so important, is their relentless acknowledgment that such “idolatry”—the “god” Eckhart prays to be rid of—is both present in and resisted by the disciplined and intense ways that they inscribe themselves into 131

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the Christian narrative. They rely on this narrative, believe in its God, and, in the practice of this belief, resist its closures. It is only in holding this tension that the God beyond “God,” what Hollywood calls the “real,” might be glimpsed. But it is not simply that the mystics succeed in this and Irigaray fails, for there is no simple success here. With respect to almost all of the texts she reads in Sensible Ecstasy, medieval and modern, religious, historical, and philosophical, Hollywood identifies multiple trajectories, arguments, and tensions and correlates them with the conflict and ambiguities of human subjectivity. These texts, the mystical texts included, all display some form of fetishism, but she focuses on Irigaray and the mystics because she finds that their writings also, in different ways and to different degrees, work against fetishism. In other words, she refuses a monological explanation of Irigaray and medieval women’s mysticism in order to thematize and perform an intellectual, even an existential, encounter with them. Making her own uncertainties about the possibility of acknowledging loss clear, Hollywood works with, not just on, these texts, returning to them again and again, implicitly asking us to question her own interests, and explicitly accepting the voices of medieval mystics as contributors to contemporary efforts to grapple with life and loss. For Hollywood, the losses all human beings face in life—of loved ones, of hopes and dreams, of oneself in death, and, perhaps, first of all, of the intimate relation with the mother’s body—do not point to a fundamental structural lack in human beings, but they are painful, even traumatic, events that shape us deeply. Hollywood seeks a reconceptualization of subjectivity, an affirmation of embodiment and desire, a belief that can acknowledge this loss on both the cognitive and affective levels. This is not to say, though, that shifting from subjectivity built on the repression of lack to a subjectivity formed by inevitable loss avoids the problem of fetishization, for, as Hollywood puts it, “mortality and fetishization come together.”  However, the mystical writings Hollywood analyzes and thinks with offer resources, in their deconstruction of fetishistic belief, for conceiving new forms of belief and risk beyond fetishistic denials of ambiguity and loss. Even if it is not possible ever to overcome fetishism, Hollywood thinks that the mystics point us to a way of inhabiting the ambiguities and losses of existence that exposes and resists fetishism instead of simply succumbing to it. 132

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It is fetishistic, in short, to think we can escape fetishism. To take “seriously” or to “follow” these mystical texts is to read them critically as they work for and against themselves. “Feminist philosophy,” she writes, “can learn from the doubleness of mystical discourse and practice, which reflects and speaks to the deep ambiguities within bodily existence.” Hollywood’s mystics do not promise any final fulfillment or any mode of belief that forecloses the possibility that the believer will fall into a fetishizing attachment to God or Christ. Hollywood shows us their drama and their struggles, but avoids turning these women into fetishes themselves and indicates that they should not become so for her readers. The point, then, is not that her own interpretation somehow completes these texts, that it offers a diagnosis that these women could not articulate, or that it realizes the mystical project in a way that the mystics themselves failed to do. It is, instead, to engage the writers as insightful, provocative human subjects who can help us think through our condition despite their own limitations and failures, and ours. In this way, and in contrast to the medieval hagiographers and the mystics’ modern interpreters, Hollywood refuses to fetishize the women mystics, to attribute to them a fullness of vision, an embodied manifestation of the divine, or a solution to an intellectual problem. She allows the lives of these women and the force and ambiguity of their writing to resist her own theorization of them and to help her understand in a deeper way the insights made possible by psychoanalysis. In doing so, she “follows” these women in bearing an element of incongruity between theory and the passionate life and desire at work in their writing.

Theology and the World: Coles, Yoder, and Williams

Does religious belief inevitably fall into fetishistic closure or can it be a sign of and a way to more life? Hollywood offers no simple answer, but she does show us religious thinking, writing, and practice, as well as writing as practice, on the edge of presence and absence, body and soul, order and incongruity. To further develop this question, I move now from the writings of medieval mystics to contemporary theological writing as encountered in the work of the political theorist Romand Coles, who, perhaps more than any non-Christian political thinker I 133

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know, “follows” theology in a way that puts it into productive conversation with other kinds of theoretical and critical discourse.

Democracy on the Edge

As a theorist of radical democracy, Coles is committed not simply to “democracy” but to “democratization,” which entails that democracy is never fully realized but always “to come” through processes of critique and cultivation. Radical democrats criticize “the arbitrary exclusions, subjugations, and dangers that accompany every democratic ‘we’ and their ‘knowing.’ ” They cultivate dispositions of receptivity, generosity, and epistemological and ethical modesty by which political actors and theorists remain open to the unexpected and “unwonted,” to conversations and conflicts with those who challenge their sense of what democracy is or should be. To be a radical democrat is to live one’s political identity on “the dialogical edge between order and unanticipatable emergence.” Coles derives this conception of “edge” from Bakhtin, for whom “every cultural act lives essentially on the boundaries.” Coles takes this claim as a political and existential imperative to give life: “where there is life-giving, there is vulnerable exposure to the difficult edges of life.” “Vulnerable exposure” is, for Coles, a matter of “receptivity,” an ideal he exemplifies and develops in his engagement with a broad range of political thinkers, philosophers, and activists, some of the most pointed of which are his encounters with the theologians John Howard Yoder and Rowan Williams. Unlike Yoder and Williams, of course, Coles pledges his allegiance not to Christ, but to democracy. Yet unlike liberal theorists who think that a single, secular “public sphere” is the proper site for political engagement and deliberation, Coles argues that democracy only lives in and through engagement with multiple publics, including those that political liberalism generally marginalizes, such as religious groups and institutions. Coles follows Alasdair MacIntyre, one of our most cogent defenders and theorists of tradition-based reasoning and ethics, to argue that liberal politics as generally theorized depends on the illusion of a neutral reason that distances us from the narratives and practices by which we are politically and ethically formed. Both

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argue that tradition-based forms of reasoning can be critical and can constructively engage with dissent and difference. For Coles, forms of reasoning and engagement based on vulnerable receptivity complicate the sense in which one “belongs” to a particular tradition of thought and practice. In this, he is more attentive than MacIntyre to the limits of claiming that there is deep incommensurability between traditions. If democratization is to be lived on the edge, our sense of it, and of our traditions, changes through the encounter with difference. Coles develops this claim in his encounters with Yoder and Williams. For Yoder, the impetus for establishing relations with others is grounded in an understanding of the “lordship of Christ” and of the role of the Church as a community that resists certain forms of worldly ethics and politics. For many, of course, such commitments are evidence that Christians see themselves as exclusive bearers of the truth who dwell apart from the world. But for Yoder, to say that Christ is lord is to say that he is an exemplar of “vulnerable relations with outsiders” and thus that the difference between the Church and the world is to be found precisely in the Church’s practices of vulnerable receptivity to the world as a practice of caritas. The Church is set off from the world precisely by its particular way of being open to it. To form a Christian identity in allegiance to Christ entails the continual reformation of this identity in receptivity to the outside of Christianity. Rowan Williams comes at the issue of vulnerable receptivity from a different angle than Yoder. What Coles finds particularly important are Williams’s “unsettling accounts of what it might mean to cultivate traditions of association that repeatedly strive toward a vulnerable and generous edge, eschewing interior territory as a locus of transcendent monological control over time and space.” Williams’s Christ does not come to establish a “Christian” territory that will compete for worldly space with other cultures or associations, for it is precisely this competition that is the “untruth” of the world and that for Coles is at the core of the Church’s “skewed and destructive account of itself.” Coles is particularly impressed by what he calls Williams’s “pregnant reticence.” In the introduction, I reflected on Williams’s reluctance to voice or write “religious” words in the face of the “secular” words of the hijacking victims of September 11, 2001. The theme of reticence, more precisely silence, is at the center of Williams’s treatment of the passion

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narrative in the Gospel of Mark. Jesus refuses to identify himself and his mission, breaking his silence on these matters only when his betrayal, arrest, and trial render him powerless in the eyes of the world. This, for Williams, is the center of the Gospel: only when he has been stripped of all worldly power and so can speak the truth without fear of being misunderstood as grabbing for such power, when it will be clear that the “kingdom” he promises opposes worldly, even religious, territoriality, can Jesus reveals his identity. To follow this Jesus is first of all to acknowledge, in penance, that one participates in this territoriality, that one is part of the world that betrayed and murdered Jesus. Faith and “spiritual life” begins in the space hollowed out by the silence of Christ, in an encounter with oppression and death, with our victimization of others. “Real life in Christ,” writes Coles (and, he adds, “real life in radical democracy), “requires us to look death in the face” and to keep in mind that resurrection is represented in a risen body “disordered in crucifi xion.” As in Hollywood, though with more confidence in the Christian narrative, both Williams and Coles insist on the necessity of the encounter with limit, necessity, death, and the tragic. Let me digress briefly from Coles to develop this aspect of Williams’s thinking in a way that I think strengthens Coles’s reading. The “religion,” if we can use this term, that Williams finds in the Gospels looks nothing like the kind of ideological discourse that locativists define as “religious.” On the contrary, Williams views these stories as a powerful tool for critics of ideology, for they push Christians—and those like Coles—to become receptive to the pain of the world, to structures of oppression and marginalization. Religion here becomes a practice of dispossession by which we interrogate our hopes and identities as well as the strategies we use to bolster and protect them. This is a practice of living at the edges where “us” and “them” become intertwined in complex but life-giving ways. One of Williams’s most pointed discussions of this topic focuses on John of the Cross, for whom the illumination found on the mystical path is not a matter of “mystical trances, visions or ecstasies, but the sense of being drawn into a central magnetic area of obscurity” where language and thought “run out” and we encounter a reality ungraspable by our conceptual capacities. This invocation of mystery is neither triumphalist nor apologetic, nor is it part of a mystificatory effort to negate explanation. Rather, for Williams, it is meant 136

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to keep Christians attuned to the “questioning at the heart of faith.” John’s dark night of the soul is achieved only in ever-deepening confrontation with pain and suffering and with our propensity, as Hollywood traces in such fi ne detail, to disavow this pain—ours and others’—in ideological mystification. John’s is not a mystical experience that is a confirmation or fetishistic avowal of God’s reality and favor, nor is it the foundation for positive knowledge of God: “No experience that can be held on to, possessed or comprehended can have to do with God.” It is, again, a discipline of dispossession, in which “the last enemy to be overcome is religion.” One form of this practice, particularly important for St. John of the Cross, is contemplation. For theology to have integrity, Williams claims, it must root itself in the silence and listening of contemplation and prayer: “Contemplation . . . is a deeper appropriation of the vulnerability of the self in the midst of the language and transactions of the world; it identifies the real damaging pathologies of human life, our violent obsessions with privilege, control and achievement as arising from the refusal to know and love oneself as a creature, a body.” Positioning the contemplative as a critic of our fears and obsessions and their sources, Williams offers a marked contrast to J. Z. Smith’s claims about silence as “antihuman,” as does his perspective on prayer with respect to Smith’s (and, more generally, the locativist) treatment of theology: “Prayer is precisely what resists the urge of religious language to claim a total perspective; by articulating its own incompleteness before God, it turns away from any claim to human completeness.” Indeed, for Williams, the primary goal of theological doctrine is not to pin down God or Christ in propositional form or to justify or defend the Church or the faith, but rather to hold “us still before Jesus” so that we can learn who we are in light of the questions he puts to us. Williams argues that theological integrity is only possible when it speaks about things divine and about the “moral universe” in a way that invites question and contention, that makes possible, as he puts it, genuine “response.” And, if theological integrity is a matter of speaking in a way that creates openings for genuine encounter and response and if the Church is to exemplify the Christlike “giving away of power,” then it must open itself to the judgment of the world and make such judgment an integral part of the process by which it fi nds its identity. Williams thus can write about the Church being “evangelized” by a 137

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poem written by “the agnostic” Wilfred Owen, and Yoder can focus on the influence of Gandhi on Martin Luther King. Most important, the Church must retain an acute sense that it does not possess Christ. Here, I return to Coles, who glosses Williams this way: “those who struggle to remain with Jesus depart from him exactly to the extent that they forget the ways he is an exile and refugee from their communities and efforts.” Of course, this is not simply a one-way process, for the Church also judges the world of territoriality and oppression. For Coles, this puts the Church in a difficult position, for how is judging the world different from competing against it and thus falling right back into the quest for territory? What, exactly, is the distinction between “competing against and struggling for something that is beyond the logic of competition”? Coles thinks that there are no easy answers to this question, but also that it is a question any political community embracing radical democracy must face—How do political actors genuinely engage difference and work for radical change without competing for territory? Coles reads Williams, rightly in my estimation, as claiming that the rejection of competition does not entail the rejection of confl ict. The question is whether “generative confl ict and tension” and “generous receptivity among differences,” as Coles puts it, can be distinguished from confl ict spurred on by “competitive yearning.” The “generative” and the “generous”: these are terms that perhaps above all unite Coles and Williams in the idea that generosity is, in large part, a matter of being open to the generative. In conflict, generosity can end a stalemate to produce something new, can produce the “new life” that is at the heart of the Christian promise. For Williams, God is “the loving and nurturing advent of newness in human life,” and God’s revelation “is essentially to do with what is generative in our experience—events or transactions in our language that break existing frames of reference and initiate new possibilities of life.” The “new”— the different, the other, the incongruous—is always both promising and painful. It requires Yoder’s “wild patience” and Williams’s “silence,” a disciplined attention to the generative force of God in the world. And it requires painful processes of learning and confl ict, for God’s love disrupts our lives more often than not: “If we believe we can experience our healing without deepening our hurt, we have understood nothing of the roots of our faith.” 138

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Translations

One might argue that my reading of Coles and his of Yoder and Williams “describes” or perhaps “paraphrases” but does not take the critical turn of “translation” (in Smith’s sense), redescription (in McCutcheon’s), or explanation. Coles refers to his readings as “translations,” yet unlike Smith, he does not render one vocabulary into a more familiar one—in this case, the theological into the political. Rather, Coles’s translations take the form of what I described in chapter 2 as “two-way translation.” Coles’s reading of Yoder and Williams is a receptive and responsive effort to follow their thinking to find points of contact and instruction, to test and reimagine his own standpoint. It is sprinkled with praise and at times stops short in disagreement and puzzlement. Practicing generous reception in his writing on Yoder and Williams, Coles is able to bring their writings and projects to life in a way that makes the life of his own thinking and feeling present to the reader. Perhaps the best account of this reading practice comes from Yoder and what he calls “transcultural witness.” Th is, Yoder writes (and Coles quotes), is a process of entering “concretely into the other community . . . long enough, deeply enough, vulnerably enough, to be able to articulate our Word in their words.” This is a process of translation, no doubt, but before we assume that Yoder sets up a pernicious hierarchy between the two vocabularies— marked by “Word”—it is important to note that Yoder also writes that such translation requires the risk and vulnerability that come with immersing oneself in the world of the other to the point where “I begin to feel at home in it, [feel that] its tug at me questions my own prior (Christian) allegiance anew.” Yoder places himself on the edge, risks his own allegiance. When you translate your own words into the words of another, they return to you changed. Th is process can involve real movement between different worlds and the construction of ad hoc “interworldly grammars” (what Simpson would call a “situated meta-language”). Importantly, these passages Coles quotes from Yoder are drawn from Yoder’s reflections on mission. The attempt to bring together mission and vulnerable receptivity may seem jarring; certainly the history of Christianity suggests that Yoder is idealizing, at best, and falling victim to false consciousness, at worst. But for him, mission is witnessing to one’s faith by sharing belief in Jesus Christ as the exemplar of vulnerable receptivity; 139

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such witness recognizes that proclaiming Christian belief and identity to the world always entails the difficult practice of having that identity reshaped in the encounter with the other. This would have to include receiving the history of Christian mission from those who have been or continue to be victimized by it. Without such vulnerability, Christian dialogue and mission and Coles’s own “radical dialogue” become efforts to assimilate the other into one’s own tradition and rationality. This makes it impossible to really be open to the “unanticipatable,” to the genuinely new or generative. It is no coincidence that in Beyond Gated Politics, Coles follows up his discussion of Yoder with a chapter on Derrida, nor is it accidental that Derrida has figured his own treatment of the “to come” in terms of “messianicity.” In both, we find what Coles, borrowing from Yoder, calls an “ethic of excess.” Recall that in chapter 1, I argued that Smith’s early work on incongruity points to a “thinking of excess.” Coles and Yoder return us to this thinking of incongruity as a condition of human life, of the inevitable gap between our maps and myths, on the one hand, and our territory and experience, on the other. This requires disciplines and dispositions by which one lives in excess of the identities and territories that provide us with a “place” to live. Ideas such as vulnerable receptivity and responsiveness, the edges of culture, dispossession, and generosity and generativity are excessive in this sense. They are, as Coles puts it, “beyond the logic of identity.” This is not to say that we can transcend the logic of identity but rather that we must learn to live our identities in a way that bears this excess. So, even as Yoder acknowledges that some aspects of his Christian faith are nonnegotiable, Coles notes his “patience,” what, borrowing from Williams, Coles describes as “slackening the will to retain identity.” For Coles, this means that one lives one’s identity on the “dialogical edge between order [read identity] and unanticipatable emergence,” that is, with the awareness not only that identity is in process and never settled but also that this process, for the radical democrat or the Christian, is lived in and through the reception of otherness. It is a matter of finding the right balance between a “teleological” effort to work with, out of, and for identity-forming traditions and practices and the “ateleological receptive responsibility to be radically open to and by others and events beyond that tradition.” For Coles, the political theorist, this is one way to describe “democratization.” 140

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This brings me back to J. Z. Smith and to an interesting tension in his thinking, which is announced in the title his essay “Good News Is No News.” On the one hand, Smith’s anthropology is relentlessly active and constructive. This is particularly evident, as I have pointed out, in an essay such as “Map Is Not Territory.” On the other hand, there is also in Smith an element of the “ateleological,” that is, of “no news.” Recall that Smith reads gospel as riddle or joke: the god who appears in gospel stories, Smith tells us, is a “riddle inviting misunderstanding.” This is something very close to what Coles fi nds so compelling about Rowan Williams, for whom the Gospels do not confirm us in but lead us to question our identities. But this contrasts, or is in tension with, the teleological or instrumental thrust of Smith’s “application,” which at times almost effaces the ateleological and excessive. As with humor, so with faith, at least as faith is understood by Yoder and Williams, which is not a “blind” faith that holds on for dear life to propositions and practices which it refuses to interrogate critically or that is unable to see incongruity, but a faith that makes it possible to venture into the unknown and unexpected with the patience, the risk, and the receptivity that is necessary for discernment and growth. We see this, too, in Hollywood’s mystics, particularly in the case of Mechthild, Angela, and others who turn to God in their suffering by pushing up against the limits of the narrative that gives such suffering meaning. Coles confesses to being “haunted” by Yoder and Williams. By this he means that he senses challenges and problems produced by his encounters with them that he has not been able to fully process. But “haunting,” as he deploys it, also refers to an attitude or disposition, a willingness to be disturbed and unsettled in one’s identity with respect to a particular vision of the world or way of life that is different yet somehow compelling. To be haunted is to bear with excess, with something between life and death. However, and perhaps paradoxically, it is at this point of haunting that we find some of the most vivid signs of life in Coles’s text. At the points in his texts where he goes beyond commentary and translation and acknowledges a point of real difference with a Yoder or a Williams (or a Derrida or a MacIntyre), Coles seems to be enlivened by the “uncertainty” and by the way these thinkers “mightily [call] into question my perception, sense-making, reach, direction, ethical and political faiths.” It is here, it seems, that “Yoder” and “Williams” are no longer simply signs referring to discrete, disembodied 141

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texts, but signs of life. They disturb not just Coles’s ideas and arguments, but his very perception, to the point of remaining with him even when he looks up from the words on the page.

Conclusion

All this is to say that Coles doesn’t really explain or theorize Yoder or Williams; he encounters and engages them. He generalizes at certain points and identifies similarities and differences between his vision of radical democracy and the Christianity of Yoder or Williams, but he makes no systematic or comprehensive attempt to translate their ideas into the language of political theory. Hollywood, by contrast, makes much more use of theory to help us understand, and, in some respects, even to explain, medieval women’s mysticism. As I’ve argued, though, her use of theory does not replace theology as an important source for understanding and explaining these women’s lives and their writing. Instead, she holds to both discourses, articulating an argument in and through their interaction and mutual critique and supplementation. Here, I think, Coles and Hollywood are more similar than different. Both exemplify the kind of humanistic reading I have identified in the pages above. That is, both bring to their engagements with texts and writers a practice of reading that is less interested in placing them than in working with and responding to them. Too often, we take the process of describing religious phenomena for granted, not recognizing what we lose when we place and simplify such phenomena so as to render them more suitable for theorizing. Hollywood and Coles attend carefully to tensions within texts, draw them out, and refuse to domesticate them, and they expose themselves, as readers, to the force and affect, not just the concepts, of the writers. Both are “haunted” by the texts they encounter. The conclusions they draw about these texts, and the arguments and explanations they offer in support of these conclusions, are in this respect finely attentive to the fundamental difficulty of the descriptive endeavor and alert us to the importance of a critical sensibility generated by recognizing the limits of our theoretical and explanatory tools. This humanistic responsiveness plays a crucial role in Hollywood’s and Coles’s identification of and reflection on the way that religious discourse makes possible acknowledgment of and forms of 142

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concerted attention to the flux and excess of “life.” This acknowledgment counters the locativist vision of religion and theology. Hollywood and Coles read and write in a way that allows new words and new questions to emerge. They are successful because they think with and not just about religion and theology and because they expose themselves, as readers and writers, to the strangeness of the texts with which they engage, seeking the signs of life written into these texts. Like the religious figures they study, they practice a kind of dispossession in their writing that disrupts and reshapes their own maps, not only of religion but, more importantly, of fundamental human conditions—loss in Hollywood, violence in Coles. And both argue that this exposure to theology and dispossession “gives life,” that is, opens our imaginations and expands our connections with others. This is criticism not simply as the production of knowledge, though it is that as well, but as work we perform on ourselves. It is criticism as spiritual exercise.

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PART III RE LI GI ON, RE SP O N SIB IL IT Y, A ND C R I T I C I S M

5

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Even where the “religious” can no longer be identified as an integral and compelling system of belief—or, more indirectly, as a narratively constructed way of life—it provides us with the critical terms, argumentative resources, and bold imaginary that is necessary for a successful analysis of contemporary culture. In other words, the study of religion must not only base itself on the latest fi ndings of the empirical social sciences or on the most advanced conceptual tools provided by philosophical, literary, and cultural analysis. The critical terms of these disciplines must also be recast in light of the tradition they seek to comprehend. —HENT DE VRIES 1

Philosophy claims to wake us up from the sleep of common sense, sometimes treating religion as but another sleep, but what if philosophy falls into a new sleep, from which only a different sense of religious sleeplessness can wake us? —WILLIAM DESMOND 2

Philosophy’s Vigilance

To develop my ideas about the humanistic study of religion, I have drawn from a range of disciplines and methods, from the historical work of Orsi and Hollywood, the anthropology of Jackson and Mahmood, and the political theory of Coles. I turn now to philosophy, the discipline with which I most often identify my own research and scholarship. I am tempted to write “philosophy of religion” and so name a familiar location on the map of the academic study of religion. But I resist the temptation because this map is inadequate, in part because “philosophy of religion” traditionally has been dominated by analytic philosophers, and so by a rather narrowly conceived subset of philosophical questions and methods, but more importantly because philosophers 147

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of religion generally have conceived of their work as bringing philosophy as a method to bear on religion as an object of study. This coheres with a general locative conception of the study of religion: “religion is the phenomenon; philosophy, psychology, sociology, phenomenology, history, textual analysis, etc., are the methods.” In my view, however, the relationship between philosophy and religion is more interesting and complex than this. Particularly important for my work are philosophers who come out of the Continental philosophical tradition from Kierkegaard and Nietzsche, Irigaray and Derrida, up to Marion and Meillassoux and who, in different contexts and in different ways, not only think about but also with religion, to echo my argument in the previous chapter. Here, religious concepts and categories become not simply objects of philosophical analysis or evaluation, but contributors to the constitution of philosophical concepts and arguments and to the analysis and evaluation of philosophy itself. In this hybrid discourse, we find what William Desmond describes as a “two-way intermediation or communication between religion and philosophy, not just a singular direction from religion to reason.” More specifically, my goal in this chapter is to consider philosophy as a practice of responsibility that finds in religion resources for articulating and illuminating this responsibility. David Wood, building on the work of Heidegger and Derrida, offers a starting point for considering this practice: “Philosophy is at war with the complacency of the concept. . . . The concept functions both to disclose and to conceal: its practical benefits obscure its selective operation. Where chaos threatens, philosophy may temporarily side with the concept, but when systematic conceptualization becomes the order of the day, eternal vigilance requires a liminal interrogation—probing, challenging, poking at the lines we have drawn on the map.” This vision of philosophy’s critical vigilance is a version of J. Z. Smith’s approach to maps and territories, for it reminds us that even as our concepts allow us to grasp and work in the world, they do so only at the expense of also hiding it from us. But philosophy, according to Wood, does not rest with the simple recognition of this fact. Rather, its responsibility consists in turning back, when conceptual stability becomes the “order of the day,” to approach that which the concept conceals. But this raises some of the difficult questions I have been grappling with throughout the book. When and to what extent does chaos “threaten”? When is conceptual 148

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stability a problem? As a deconstructive thinker, Wood likely has more tolerance for chaos—or at least for deferral and lack of closure—than most thinkers. But how do we negotiate between chaos, disorder, and deferral, on the one hand, and closure, order, and stability, on the other? What are we looking for in our vigilance? I open these questions of philosophical responsibility in this chapter and develop them further in chapters 6 and 7. A central argument of these chapters is that it is illuminating to think about this responsibility and vigilance as, in some sense, “religious.” To the extent that this is right, we need to think beyond the limits of locative approaches to religion. Such approaches, I have argued, cast religion as a uniquely stabilizing, ideological discourse of social formation and ground the academic study of religion in a secularist opposition to religious discourse. Recall J. Z. Smith’s comparisons of the historian to the theologian and the pilgrim. Locativists take the theologian as the paradigmatic religious figure. But thinking philosophy’s vigilance through religion demands thinking religion and the study of religion in terms of the pilgrim, who, as Smith has it, only obliquely and hesitantly approaches his object of concern and in the end is able only to make “fleeting contact.” With the help of the creative work of Hent de Vries, Eric Santner, and Stanley Cavell at the boundaries of secular philosophy and theory, on the one hand, and religion and theology, on the other, I try to show what such fleeting contact might look like and how it helps us rethink the critical enterprise. There are important differences between these thinkers that I address, but at this point I stress two affi nities. First, like Wood, each understands philosophy not as a handmaiden to science or a discourse that simply grounds and stabilizes our concepts, but as a deconstructive mode of thought, “a liminal interrogation.” Second, each pushes philosophy in an existential direction, practicing it as a spiritual exercise that can be illuminated, even enabled, by certain forms of religious thought and practice. Here, “fleeting contact” takes the form of reflection on and enactment of finitude, the limits of knowledge, and the intensification and responsiveness of and to “life.” I analyze de Vries’s argument that deconstructive responsibility is always minimally theological, always a matter of a double movement toward and away from the “absolute,” and that in the practice of such responsibility existence “comes into its own.” Here, I argue, we find a framework, contra many 149

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critics of deconstruction, for thinking about how philosophy moves between “liminal interrogation” and siding “with the concept.” But I also argue that de Vries only takes us so far in thinking about how to live this tension and negotiation. This leads me, in chapter 6, to turn to Santner’s “psychotheology,” for he uses the tools of psychoanalysis and theology to offer a richer existential account of responsibility than de Vries. This, for Santner, is responsibility as answerability, a practice of neighbor-love that furthers the work of redemption by creating the opening for divine love’s interruption of the rigidity and defensiveness of our attachments to social formations and authorities. This unplugging allows us to receive the “blessings of more life” and so to engage life with more attentiveness and creativity. In the final chapter, I engage the work of Stanley Cavell to argue that the conception of responsibility worked out in the previous chapters helps us conceive of an affirmative cultural criticism grounded in the practices of praise and gratitude.

Deconstructive Vigilance and the Turn to Religion

No philosophical discourse does more to help us think about these issues, and the problems I have been addressing in the book so far, than deconstruction, and no thinker has done more to shape my approach to the connection between deconstruction and religion than de Vries. His groundbreaking work on figures such as Kant, Heidegger, Levinas, and especially Derrida turns to religion to explore the incongruities we experience every day in the context of more general incongruities at the heart of human thought and existence. Among these, the most important is the aporia between rules, conventions, and laws, on the one hand, and responsibility and justice, on the other. For de Vries, thinking and bearing this aporia requires a new kind of engagement with the religious traditions that have shaped Western culture; it demands, that is, an “exposure of the philosophical to the religious,” which he identifies as “minimal theology.” By this, de Vries means a mode of thinking about decision and action that takes place not in resolving incongruity but in responding to it, that is, by thinking respectfully and responsibly. In decisive contrast to secularist theorists of religion, de Vries, following Derrida, understands such responsibility for and to incongruity 150

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and the respect that grounds it as the mark of the “religious”: “The indecisiveness or undecidability with regard to these last and most pernicious of all binary oppositions [the theological and the philosophical, more generally the religious and the secular] may very well be the ultimate gesture of respect . . . that marks the essence of religion, whatever form it takes.” The point of departure for de Vries’s sustained and voluminous engagement with the question of religion is the claim that at this point in time, in our increasingly globalized (but, importantly, still significantly Western) historical context, and despite the powerful secularizing forces of modernity that have led critics and observers of religion since the Enlightenment to predict and call for the end of religion, old and new religions continue to exert powerful intellectual and social influences. Moreover, Western religious traditions brought to bear on questions of existence and ethics—especially questions of responsibility and finitude—continue to shape even the most secular of discourses in complex ways. We cannot begin to understand this complexity if we conceive of religion simply as a historical leftover that should be thought or legislated away or, at most, tolerated. Instead, critical thought on ethics, politics, and philosophy depends on a careful working through of, or even what de Vries describes as a “breaking back through” to, the West’s religious heritage. This is not necessarily to privilege the Christian (or the Jewish or the Islamic) way of naming and relating to the fundamental incongruities or the aporetics of human life—the deconstructive turn to religion is not, in any simple sense, a turn to a particular religion—but to acknowledge that these traditions have structured Western thought, including Derrida’s and de Vries’s own conceptions of the universal, the ontological, the ethical, and so on. This is a past that must in some ways be affirmed and inherited, even as it may also be questioned and betrayed. Breaking back through to religion helps de Vries to think a deconstructive inheritance of the past. From this perspective, deconstruction is not a modern critical discourse that in some way helps to initiate a new historical period after “metaphysics” or “ontotheology,” but rather a mode of working out of and with the past so as to invite new openings to the future. As de Vries inherits and inflects it, deconstruction traces “a series of linkages that allows no single concept or figure of speech to be privileged ontologically, axiologically, aesthetically, theologically, or 151

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ethically and religiously.” Th is includes those terms that feature prominently in Derrida’s early work and that continue to inform his reception, such as “trace” and différance. De Vries reminds us that these are not philosophical master concepts but rather links in a chain of “nonsynonymous substitutions.” In other words, they enable fleeting contact with the conditions of language and life, especially with the fundamental aporia at the heart of all experience and language, meaning and signification. Retracing and recasting the work of Derrida, and deconstruction more generally, de Vries notes that although forty years ago Derrida understood his work in terms of the deconstruction of the binary of writing and speaking and of a “generalized writing,” conditions today call for new terms and concepts. Specifically, we need to think about a “generalized religion” that is neither a historical relic of “obscurantist” thinking nor a covert confessionalism but rather a “minimal theology” that deconstructs the binary of the religious and the secular. “Enlightenment and its philosophical concept of critique,” de Vries writes, “can no longer be defined as being merely opposed to, rather than being traversed or haunted by faith and trustworthiness that borders on heteronomy.” Developed most succinctly in his accounts of “respect” and “responsibility,” de Vries argues that this “faith” both makes possible and is expressed in the critical procedures that mark secular thought and ethics. Hence, if various forms of critical thought today, including the many demystifications pursued with respect to “religion,” are to avoid becoming themselves forms of mystification or obscurantism, they must acknowledge—respect and respond to—this heteronomy and thus give up the founding myth of modernity that opposed critical reason to the blind faith of religion and tradition. This would be to recognize a complicated connection between critical reason’s vigilance and the “trust” that comes with faith.

Formal Indication: An Invitation to Life?

As de Vries reads it, the deconstructive turn to religion “might well reveal a central figure of thought and action in general.” The figure that de Vries refers to here is the aporetic adieu: the turn to religion, as a turn to God (a dieu), is also, always, a turn away from God (adieu): 152

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Necessarily idolatrous, the adieu signals not only that all religious and a fortiori all theological speech—in short all “Godtalk”—is irrevocably tainted by what Kant . . . calls an “admixture of paganism”: a slippage into the empirical or into anthropomorphism. Conversely, the formula adieu accentuates the fact that every discourse, even the most secular, profane, negative, or nihilistic of utterances, directs and redirects itself unintentionally and unwittingly toward the alterity for which—historically, systematically, conceptually, and figuratively speaking—“god” is, perhaps and so far, the most proper name. This orientation of all discourse toward the religious and everything that comes to take its place, is by definition inflected, contorted, or even false. . . . Wherever and whenever “God” is named and conceptualized, or been invoked or addressed, the gesture of this speech act is immediately broken.

The adieu signals that God must be approached obliquely, that any effort to grasp God misses God, that there are resources within religious traditions of the past for conceptualizing “God” also as “the most proper name for this trace itself.” From this perspective, theology resists its own ontotheological impulses and can be seen as a “broken speech act,” contradictory at its very core not because it is somehow misguided or self-deceptive, but because of the way it tries to speak finitely about the infinite and acknowledges that this effort necessarily fails. Perhaps the most important of these is the biblical prohibition against idolatry, which marks for de Vries the simultaneous necessity and impossibility of conceptualizing God (a dieu/adieu). Thus, in contrast to those who claim that religion’s ideological function is definitive, to those fundamentalists to whom God reveals positive knowledge, or to those for whom God is the ontotheological “dream of an absolute erasure of the [Derridean] trace,” de Vries argues that religion is never just an authorizing “fable” but always also, even in some sense primarily, a questioning or even a negation of all such fables. To think philosophy and theology in terms of the adieu “preserve[s] theology in its critique.” It is one thing to note this critical element of theological discourse, often treated in terms of “negative theology,” but it is another to claim, as de Vries does, that it is a structural element of all thinking, even the most critical and secular. De Vries argues that the very “abstracting and 153

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formalizing” procedures by which religion, or anything else, is theorized, explained, and demystified already partake of or are constituted by the critical imperative prefigured by the prohibition against idolatry. To understand philosophy as a critical discourse thus means rethinking the relationship of philosophy and religion in terms of “mutual contamination and undecidability.” But this relation has been denied by most modern philosophers who seek to explain religion by uncovering its “pre-religious” conditions of possibility. This secularizing move was at the heart of Kant’s transcendental project: the effort to identify the universal, ahistorical conditions of possibility of experience and hence of all empirical, historical phenomena, such as religion. De Vries rethinks Kantian transcendentalism and its revisions and revolutions in Husserl and Heidegger by exploring “philosophical idealization and the ways in which any conceptualization is triggered, carried forward, and interrupted by the experience of factical life.” Both “triggered” and “interrupted”: in other words, the ideal conditions of possibility for empirical phenomena are themselves conditioned by those phenomena, or, as de Vries puts it in a paradoxical formula, “the conditioned conditions the condition.” To think this paradoxical relationship between the transcendental and the empirical is to explore the limits of philosophical idealism and transcendentalism, generalization and structuralization “beyond a concept.” De Vries makes this argument most clearly in his analysis of Heidegger’s method of “formal indication,” which Heidegger developed in his early lectures on the phenomenology of religion and employed to both continue and correct Husserlian phenomenology. From Heidegger’s perspective, Husserl was only the latest in a long line of Western philosophers who saw it as their task to fi x the order of objects in the world, rendering them stable for purposes of mapping or classification. But for Heidegger, such fi xation, characteristic of the “ontotheological” tradition, is inadequate for thinking the flux of factical life. Seeking to push phenomenology in an existential direction in order to address this problem, Heidegger moved from phenomenological generalization to phenomenological formalization. Proper to the ontic sciences, generalization abstracts from particular domains of objects and in this process constrains or “prejudges” the naming and understanding of empirical specificities by conflating them, under the concept, with other, similar objects or events: phenomena are specified as par154

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ticular instances of the general. Formalization, Heidegger argues, is proper to philosophy as ontology and is fundamentally “free” from the distorting influence of a given object domain. It “steers free of every preconceived theoretical order” and so opens the way to a hermeneutics of facticity. Here, according to John Caputo, Heidegger thinks philosophy as “handmaiden to life” rather than to science: “formal indication tries to bring the factical life embedded in excessively rich texts . . . to a certain pale formal structure which remains beholden to life, which remains but a handmaiden to life, which at most, at best, issues an invitation to live life and to keep thinking in its place.” Formal indication, in other words, points toward factical life without claiming to grasp or objectify it and so is more open than Husserl’s phenomenology to the singular givenness, the “thisness” of phenomena. As an “anticipatory sketch,” it works through a certain cautionary negativity or philosophical vigilance: formally indicative concepts function as specifications that are always under erasure, as “warning signs” pointing to the fact that “no single concept—or for that matter the totality of all possible concepts—conveys the true, full, or genuine meaning of the phenomenon and the flux or unrest of factical life.” It is particularly significant for de Vries that Heidegger first developed his thinking about formal indication in the context of his early lectures on the phenomenology of religion. Heidegger argues that attention to religion, specifically to the letters of Paul, gives the least indirect access to the facticity, and particularly to the unrest, of human life. In Paul’s notions of kairos and parousia, he discerns a form of faith that is a “restless vigilance” and a “wakefulness” ever ready to turn from (this) life to (a new) life, again and again. The philosophical task is thus to show that this Pauline, religious mode of faithful anticipation gives access to “factical life experience as such” by formalizing religious faith in terms of the nontheological, ontological category of “resoluteness.” Heidegger understood himself to be stepping back from the ontic rootedness of a particular form of existence—Paul’s letters (or “religion”)—in order to articulate its ontological conditions. And he presumes that in this process he is also stepping back from the ontic science of theology to philosophical ontology, thus “correcting” theology. De Vries, however, argues that Heidegger’s text reveals something quite different than this modernist, secularizing, philosophical trajectory: an undecidability as to whether resoluteness is the formal condition 155

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of possibility of Christian wakefulness or whether “early Christian theology prefigures the ontology of Dasein and the analytic of existence.” Even though Heidegger understands that formal indication is only an “approximation of the phenomenon of factical life experience” and so is always both “a stumbling block no less than a stepping stone,” it still, according to de Vries, falls short of his claims for the method, for it introduces a number of presuppositions and makes a number of puzzling leaps. So, for example, Heidegger never justifies his decision to cast the Pauline experience of time as the best way to get at the human experience of temporality or to cast Paul as the paradigm of religion. More generally, de Vries argues, Heidegger does not fully acknowledge what appears to work itself out in his text: the mutual dependence of the transcendental and ontological, on the one hand, and empirical, historical phenomena, on the other. The text offers no philosophically compelling reason to believe “Heidegger’s pious assurance that philosophy and theology, phenomenology and religion proper, have no common measure,” to believe, in other words, that Heidegger is rewriting Paul rather than accounting for or explaining him. In short, de Vries deconstructs Heidegger’s transcendental, secularizing claim. At the same time, he does not attempt to explain Heidegger with a historicist reading that would trace Western conceptions of religion from Paul to the Catholicism of Heidegger’s youth. Things are more complicated. It’s not simply that resoluteness is the condition of possibility for Pauline faith or that Pauline faith is the historical root of resoluteness. Rather, de Vries writes, “The two extreme poles of our experience and our language—the ideal and, say, the real—are .  .  . abstractions from a more complex process of constant resignification (since no signification was ever first). They are described as being in permanent need of negotiation, as having in fact and for structural reasons been negotiated from the very outset, and hence as never having been given as such, in all purity.” To explain Heidegger’s philosophical categories by appealing simply to the historical effects of Paul’s Christian vision would be to obscure or deny the aporia at issue here, the fact that “since no signification was ever first,” any such historicist reduction is always philosophical, interpretive, and evaluative and as such is never simply a matter of empirical fact or historical context. Explanatory appeals to context or causes, in other words, are never fully determinate because they are conditioned by those concepts, categories, and 156

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universals through which we come to grasp the historical and live time. The history of these concepts and categories is a history of the “quasitranscendental,” for such categories, again, are themselves conditioned by empirical history. We are faced here with a mutual dependence of “formal structures and their historical announcements or reverberations.” This dependence, according to de Vries, undermines all philosophical foundationalisms and naturalistic or historicist reductionisms through a process of “reverse implication” whereby transcendental structures and formal indications are “folded back into—once again implicated in—the history of the tropes, topoi, and even commonplaces that [they] had been thought merely to open up, so as to provide it with a dimension, a horizon, and the condition of its possibility.”

Responsibility to the Absolute: Piety Beyond a Concept

Employing the method of formal indication, Heidegger undertook a phenomenological investigation into factical life free of the inevitable distortions and concealments that result from processes of generalization and abstraction. But formal indication, de Vries argues, even when it is understood negatively as employing concepts under erasure, still brings with it presuppositions that serve to draw us away from the flux of life. In this sense, de Vries argues, even Heidegger furthers the “inevitable deficit of western philosophy,” that is, the “lapse” or “interval” that “opens between the singular and the general or universal. Nonetheless, de Vries believes that Heidegger’s insights into religion, facticity, and conceptualization remain valuable. Paul’s vigilance does point us toward a way of thinking at the boundaries of the concept, always ready, that is, to turn from one way of seeing things to another. The point, however, is not that Heidegger succeeds in formalizing Paul, but that he repeats or rewrites Paul’s logic of the “again of the already,” in what de Vries describes as a performance of “singularism”: “a writing again of the epistles, as it were, of the very same gospel, with and beyond Paul, in a repetition whose modality is apparently more important than their purported content.” De Vries sees Heidegger as one in a line of thinkers, from Augustine, to Luther, to Kierkegaard, to Barth, who rewrite Paul, as though by turning back to a certain origin they are able to break through the petrifications of tradition to recover the restlessness 157

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and responsibility at the heart of existence. This “modality” of interpretation, de Vries argues, a singular engagement with a text and tradition, is itself a form of the restless wakefulness alone before God, the “drama of religion, the horror religiosus.” Why “God”? What is the connection between “God” and restless wakefulness? The deconstructive turn to religion, as de Vries understands it, begins with the necessity of holding in abeyance the claim to priority for either the “ideal” or the “real” and with the further claim that this “hesitation” or “respect,” a radical ascesis at the very heart of all conceptualization, is itself a mark of the “religious.” He quotes Derrida: Every time I say: X is neither this nor that, neither the contrary of this nor of that, neither the simple neutralization of this nor of that with which it has nothing in common, being absolutely heterogeneous to or incommensurable with them, I would start to speak of God, under this name or another. God’s name would then be the hyperbolic effect of that negativity or all negativity that is consistent in its discourse. God’s name would suit everything that may not be broached, approached, or designated, except in an indirect and negative manner.

Minimal theology, which makes use of the resources of religious traditions (resources ignored, “demystified,” and underutilized in the modern period), thinks the “at once minimally different and infinitely multiple ‘beyond’ of a concept.” Neither a “science” of God nor a science of “God,” minimal theology is a discourse of “the ab-solution of the infi nite under the successive onslaughts” of reason. If reason, as philosophy or science, seeks to determine, that is, to classify, categorize, objectify, represent, then minimal theology attends to the ab-solute by absolving or setting free “that which incessantly breaks away from any solid or definite context of meaning and actions, judgment and explanation.”  This would be the absolute neither as a particular object nor as the end of a dialectical process by which we come to a conceptual grasp of a totality, but rather as “that” which is always in excess of our concepts. Minimal theology engages the remainder or excess of life concealed by forms of attention directed exclusively to conceptualization and objectification. Rather than explaining God naturalistically or 158

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systematizing positive statements about God, this excessive thinking brings us into fleeting contact with “an aporia that marks the limit of thought and necessitates and demands a certain suspension or epoche of philosophical or, more narrowly, phenomenological reflection. In the self-restraint or self-critique that this limit imposes (or enables—and nothing else does), philosophy, responsibility, indeed existence, the experience of factical life experience . . . come into their ‘own.’ ” 

Wakefulness, Experience, and Critical Piety

David Wood calls this fleeting contact “the experience of experience,” a form of attention to the boundaries of thought and experience or responsiveness to the infi nite context in which all experience takes place. Philip Goodchild, in closely related fashion, argues that such attention is at the heart of what he calls “singular experience”: The most urgent and fundamental political problem is to restore to people an insight into the power and freedom of their attention. For in a world of excessive mediation, attention is captured by image, spectacle and glamour; it is demanded by economic necessity; it is seduced by flattery of greed, lust and ambition; it is compelled by fear. Mediation substitutes for singular experience. . . . In such a condition, nothing is more needful than the redemption of attention: the discovery of the possibility of turning towards that which matters.

What is “singular experience”? How is it connected to critical thinking and to “what matters”? Goodchild calls on us to shift our attention from the mediations that determine the specificity or content of experience to the “chaotic interval” between mediated and singular experience. He describes this attention as “critical piety,” a form of attention in which one engages in critical examination of the mediations that make possible any given experience. Take, for example, experiences of suffering. Critical piety refuses anticipations or hopes established in contexts of meaning, say, theodicy that would “cash out” suffering in terms of redemption or cosmic consummation. Rather, it dwells with the experience, treating it as a kind of end in itself. It is what Romand Coles would call an “ateleological” form of piety. Of course, to determine 159

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something as an experience of suffering or meaninglessness, as an “itself,” or simply as something, even without inserting it into a narrative or teleology, is already to enter into the mediations of language. We thus cannot not simplistically oppose “singular experience” to mediation. This is what Wood has in mind when he writes about deconstruction as the “experience of experience” and as “experienced regained.”  That is, deconstruction is the insistent effort to bring thought and attention back to that which escapes thought and attention, reminding us of the limits of our concepts, reopening experience to that which it is constantly closing off even as it in some sense continues to hold on to the particular experience. Deconstruction opens up an “abyss” that is “derivative from the experience that it undermines.”  Wood’s point is not that we should or even can avoid such closure—it is absolutely necessary for life. But he and Goodchild have in common a view of being “in” experience in such a way that it is not immediately cashed out, where, for example, the loss of pain and suffering is not immediately recuperated, or where a gift is given without expectation of repayment, or where the wonder that anything is is not lost as we turn toward that which is, or, finally, where the imperative of infinite responsibility is not muted as we seek to discharge our responsibilities according to our dominant moral codes. Critical piety, from this perspective, brings us to the edge of thought and experience, to the point at which we acknowledge the beyond of our concepts or the way that each of our experiences is overdetermined not only by our hopes, fears, and neuroses, but also by the very concepts that make experience possible in the fi rst place. Mediation is “excessive” when it directs attention away from this edge of feeling and thought, avoids the chaotic interval, and fosters complacency with our concepts. Even as it is parasitic on conceptualization, critical piety disturbs and departs from it in response to the infinite or absolute.

Existence and Economy Give Economy Its Chance

To respond to the call of the infinite is to be responsible. Responsibility acknowledges the limits of our concepts in a vigilance that keeps us in 160

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mind of the concealing and excluding work of our concepts. But is this vigilance all there is to responsibility? Is fleeting contact with God or the infinite simply a matter of a responsibility to live beyond a concept? What would that mean for our ability to be responsive to finite others, to act in concrete situations? These questions reveal conceptual and ethical tensions in the deconstructive framework that have led many over the years to dismiss it as a recipe for paralysis or, as in the case of John Milbank, to characterize the deconstructive turn to religion in Derrida as “too moralistic” in its demands for an “impossible” selfsacrifice and as too secularizing in its “deformation . . . of the Christian gospel.”  Milbank is not completely off the mark. Infinite responsibility is sacrificial and impossible. But the question is how, exactly, Derrida and de Vries deploy terms such as “sacrifice,” “responsibility,” and “impossible.” For Milbank, the infi nitization of responsibility erases the Christian promise of resurrection, thus “secularizing” the Christian message. Without the promise of resurrection, we are left only with crucifi xion, that is, with pure sacrifice and secularity: when “modern secularity gets rid of [all intimations of the afterlife] it perfects pagan logic, a logic of sacrificial obliteration of self either for an ideal, or for the city, or for both.” Indeed, whether in Kantian autonomy or in the secular study of religion, modern, secular visions of ethics, criticism, and knowledge often depend on a kind of ethical or methodological asceticism that seeks to purify thought of desire, body, and tradition. Milbank is right to question this. Yet, there are good reasons to think that it is a mistake to view Derrida and de Vries in this secularist light. Take Derrida’s reading of the Gospel of Matthew. Milbank claims that Derrida “deforms” the Gospel. This should not be surprising for a Jewish philosopher who claims to “rightly pass for an atheist.” But Derrida’s reading of Matthew is more complex, and less “pure,” than Milbank acknowledges. He does identify an economy of divine reward in Matthew and suggests that the text thus betrays its own imperative to pure altruistic giving. Yet, Derrida also claims that the text “ integrates the renunciation of a calculable remuneration, renunciation of merchandise or bargaining, of economy in the sense of a retribution that can be measured or made symmetrical.” The Christian gospel, as Derrida reads it, both promises and rejects reward and retribution, thus staging two incommensurable readings that repeat, without resolving, the aporia of 161

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responsibility, by subjecting itself to a kind of hyperbolic, never-ending, internal critique: God does promise reward, but God also demands constant suspicion with respect to one’s desire for reward. This leads Derrida to argue that any attempt to “demystify” the Christian hypocrisy by pointing to the promise of divine reward—he cites Baudelaire and Nietzsche as examples—is already anticipated by Christianity’s own critique of the desire for reward. Where, Derrida is asking us, does demystification come from? Is it secular? And, further, what does it mean to have faith in a God whose gaze can penetrate our inmost secrets? Does it mean believing that if I truly am able to give without expecting or hoping for a reward, even if this is a secret I myself am not able to know, God will reward me? Or is it to believe that even if I do secretly expect or hope for a reward, even if I do give economically, God will forgive me? Derrida offers no final verdict on Christianity with respect to these questions. He does, however, argue elsewhere that responsibility can never be pure, that sacrifice can never be the last word, that it always also is a matter of the sacrifice of sacrifice. In other words, the selfless purity that, according to Milbank, Derrida seems to criticize Matthew for betraying not only is impossible, but also is, in the end, irresponsible. Responsibility, in other words, is aporetic. It is, writes Derrida, “one of those strange concepts that give food for thought without giving themselves over to thematization . . . it gives itself without giving itself to be seen, without presenting itself in some . . . phenomenological intuition.” Epistemologically and ethically, infinite responsibility is, indeed, “impossible”—like the giving or sacrifice of the self, like forgiveness, or, more generally, like the “gift.” In Given Time, after explaining why the gift can never be present as such, why the effort to transcend the economy of exchange always fails, Derrida points us toward a “thinking” (in contrast to a “knowing”) of the “impossible.” He even ventures that the impossible is the “proper element of thinking.” We can, and we must, think the gift in its purity even if we cannot know it or ever experience it as such: “One can desire, name, think in the proper sense of [the gift], if there is one, only to the immeasuring extent that one desires, names, thinks still or already, that one still lets announce itself what nevertheless cannot present itself as such to experience, to knowing: in short, here a gift that cannot make itself (a) present.” We can and must think it in the mo-

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dality of its impossibility. One gives or one exercises responsibility—insufficiently, even immorally, and in some sense selfishly—in a kind of faithful or committed thinking of the gift or responsibility in their impossibility. This would not be a fideism simply asserting and clinging to that which it cannot know or experience, but attention and commitment to an excess, to Goodchild’s chaotic interval. Impossibility, in other words, is an ordeal through which the giver or responder must pass again and again, not a barrier to passage. The movement from the demand for infinite sacrifice (as the condition of pure gift) to the sacrifice of this sacrifice is the ordeal of the undecidable, a movement that holds to the orders of both thought and knowledge. It is, writes Derrida, a matter of responding faithfully but also as rigorously as possible both to the injunction or the order of the gift (“give”) as well as to the injunction or the order of meaning (presence, science, knowledge): Know still what giving wants to say, know how to give, know what you want and want to say when you give, know what you intend to give, know how the gift annuls itself, commit yourself even if the commitment is the destruction of the gift by the gift, give economy its chance.

Even as one lets the gift, sacrifice, responsibility “announce” themselves in all their infi nite purity—calling for gift without return or calculation, for the sacrifice of self and economy, a call to infinite responsibility—the response to this call must be an act or decision that gives economy its chance. The purity one seeks with the sacrifice of self that would give or respond freely and infinitely, the face-to-face, unmediated relationship with the absolute, must be sacrificed out of responsibility. Responsibility demands that one (not) sacrifice oneself. Indeed, according to de Vries: “a certain egoism is good for the other, is necessary for being good to the other, indeed for being separate from and other than the other.” Because responsibility demands the betrayal of the infinite demand, it also requires a sacrifice of this sacrifice, a sacrifice of the purity of one’s own egolessness. The excessive responsibility that responds to the call of the infinite is countered by the betrayal of God— the a dieu, the inevitable, necessary “forgetfulness of God”—in the name of responsibility:

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If [infinite responsibility] were not betrayed, if some economy did not come to restrict its measureless demand, if, fi nally, mitigation and limitation did not haunt emphatic responsibility and “resist” its “gentle but intractable imperative,” responsibility would, for all its dynamism, stiffen into the complacency of a good conscience. Only in being interrupted, restricted, and censored by what it is not—that is to say, comparison and distribution—can absolute responsibility be prevented from turning into its virtual opposite.

One acts responsibly, as de Vries argues, only in and through particular acts of responsibility, which, precisely in their particularity, betray the demand for infinite responsibility. The ideal—infinite responsibility and the sacrifice of self through which one realizes this demand—only takes shape as an ideal in paradoxical entwinement with the real, with finite, economic, calculating, and idolatrous acts of commitment and responsibility. This is why, in the end, forgiveness is so important for Derrida; and it is why both Derrida and de Vries argue that good conscience is the enemy of responsibility.

Testimony

If Milbank overstates the secular nature of the deconstructive turn to religion, many scholars of religion, and particularly those who have devoted considerable energy to thinking and writing about theory and method in the field, either ignore it or treat it simplistically. For Russell McCutcheon, deconstruction is a paradigmatic discourse of secular criticism opposed to religion and theology. Theology, he writes, is “one of, if not the, primary instance of what Jacques Derrida early-on labeled as ‘logocentrism’ ” and, as such, is “the very discourse that is most in need of the radically historicist, postmodern critique.” Such critique, he goes on, “dismisses” logocentrism. But McCutcheon’s conflations of deconstruction with “historicist, postmodern critique” and theology with logocentrism are simplistic and misleading. Neither Derrida nor de Vries ever “dismisses” logocentrism: deconstruction writes the closure, not the end of logocentrism and metaphysics. In other words, it destabilizes logocentrism by always returning to and putting into play the margins created by logo-centering and thus exposing the radical 164

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incompletion of any logocentric formation. It is for this reason that de Vries complicates any appeal to the kind of historicism that plays such an important role in locativist and other explanatory theorizations of religion. That is, he appeals not to the positive knowledge produced by historicist methods—or, more exactly, not only to such knowledge— but to the decisions, commitments, and aporiae that escape historicist reductions and to the passage through the horror religiosus that responsibility entails. This is not to deny that theology, in at least certain respects, is logocentric, but rather to claim that we can find in theological traditions and in the deconstructive turn to religion highly refi ned ways of thinking about how it both relies on and subverts its own logocentrism. In another instance of an attempt to employ Derridean ideas for reflection on the state of the field, Willi Braun invokes Derrida’s “hauntology” to write about the “obscurantist” effects of theology and of the academic use of the concept of the “sacred.” For Braun, these discourses have inhibited progress in the study of religion by permeating it with a religious aura that discourages scholars from treating religion simply as one more human discourse. In good secularist fashion, Braun imagines a future for the study of religion that would be rid of religious and theological ghosts, in which religion is only “data.” But what if such ghosts and hauntings, rather than being feared, were welcomed, in the manner, say, of Romand Coles? Or Ananda Abeysekere, who argues that Derrida’s hauntology has to do not with designating this or that discourse as obscurantist but with reimagining the critical relationship with the past? For Coles and Abeysekere, Derrida’s hauntology imagines a temporality that cuts across or interrupts modernist views of intellectual and social progress by invoking a “non-contemporaneous present” in which the past is neither abandoned nor determinative. This is a version of what de Vries’s calls “breaking back through” to religion. We ought not to exclude that “religion,” in its present vocabularies, imaginaries, sensibilities, practices, and institutions, signals many material traces, residues, and sedimentations of an immensely extended, diversified, and deep-seated archive of the past—which is, in principle, an actualizable and thus potential future as well—whose resources we have barely begun to fathom and to realize, let alone to exhaust. If there was any need for breaking away from “religion” 165

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in modernity, in the wake of the Enlightenment critiques of its epistemic bases, moral significance, and political and cultural merit, there may be just as many reasons to break back through to it at a historical juncture whose violent encounters, predicaments, promises, and threats require that we explore all available sources of the inspirational moods, imaginative motifs, intellectual modalities, and practical motivations that past generations have bequeathed to us.

De Vries’s analysis of the distinction between theological and secular discourses is at once more and less historical than McCutcheon’s historicism and Braun’s narrative of academic progress toward a “science of human social life.” It is more historical because it historicizes and questions modern secularism’s own historical and oppositional narrative in which philosophical and naturalistic discourses are supposed to displace and explain religious discourses. That is, it historicizes historicism. It is less historical, or, more exactly, less historicist, in that it not only relates to the past in terms of the positive knowledge produced by historicist contextualization and causal explanation, but also seeks to “actualize” the future. In what ways might we “actualize” the practices, ideas, figures of thought that have informed our religious past in ways that open us to a new future? What new possibilities open up when we think and imagine these resources outside of the binary between the religious and the secular that has dominated our historical perspective on religion in the modern period? Trying to account for Paul, Heidegger inserts himself into a history of interpretation and conceptualization that proceeds in a series of underdetermined decisions, or acts of what de Vries calls “testimony,” by which an archive of the past is reread and redeployed. Heidegger’s philosophical effort to formalize Paul, to tell us something ontological about religion and factical life, is also a singular, existential repetition of religion and factical life. Here, de Vries appeals to Husserl’s insight that history is “from the start nothing other than the vital movement of the coexistence and the interweaving of original formations and sedimentations of meaning.” This means that sedimentations of meaning— the historically ideal and material influences that come to bear in a given moment—are only visible, expressed, or manifested in an iteration that is at once both a repetition and an “original formation,” that is, testimony. 166

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Th is turn to testimony plays a key role in de Vries’s argument for a deconstructive alternative to the “logic of presupposition.” This logic, he argues, is operative in the idea of the hermeneutic circle and all genealogical and historicist as well as transcendental and phenomenological philosophies. De Vries’s alternative, which he finds at work in Derrida, is a “logic of substitution” in which the history of any discursive tradition is constituted by a series of nonsynonymous substitutions, an endless series of testimonies, through which ideals, universals, truths both inform and are formed by empirical, historical claims and behaviors. A “hospitable” or “responsible” logic, the logic of substitution offers a formal account of the freedom of testimony, those acts of responsibility that testify to the infinite even as they inevitably betray it, that gesture toward God (à dieu) even as they turn away from God (adieu). In this moment of decision, one commits oneself to the past, links oneself with a series of nonsynonymous testimonies, only by giving testimony of one’s own, giving economy its chance, and thereby breaking from the past. This paradoxical “forgetting without forgetting” is a function both of the particular, unique context in which it takes place (which is thus dependent on historical chains of ideas and circumstances) and of a response, by this speaker or this actor here and now, to the singularizing imperative of the absolute. It is a kind of crossing or pivot between absolute origin and history, autonomy and heteronomy. Timothy Clark, in a critical literary study of the “poetics of singularity” in which Heidegger and Derrida figure prominently, treats this interpretive, testimonial stance in terms of “existential engagement.” Like Sean Burke, he thus highlights the often-ignored existential significance of deconstruction: “At issue in reading a literary text, however gently, is the force of a possible discontinuity, that the understanding achieved by the minute discipline of following its terms is not a kind of continuous progression of insight, but—somewhere—a jump.” As de Vries puts it, existence comes into its own in an enactment of singularity at the limits of thought and ethics. It is necessary to keep in mind, however, that “coming into one’s own” and “singularity” are not features of a modernist subject unified in itself or unifying itself through acts of responsibility and justice. To heed the demands of infi nite responsibility is, in a sense, to lose oneself, to respond to, even give oneself up to the other or the other within the self, to become other in en167

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acting one’s “own” singularity, though this is always in some real sense impossible. In contrast to Kantian conceptions of rationality and ethics that view heteronomy as that which we must eliminate from the moral life, de Vries thinks the possibility of a heteronomy characterized by “faith and trustworthiness”—if also by “bad conscience.” The self is most fully itself not in acts of mastery over the self or in acts that guarantee some kind of secure and secured authenticity, but in acts in and through which one comes to oneself—into one’s own—by opening oneself to the infinite and to the other. As Derrida puts it, “responsibility is something that responds only to the other within us, and can therefore never be reappropriated, resubjectivized or reconstituted autonomously.” The religious exceeds the historical precisely at this point: one responds to the past, as tradition or heritage, in a repetition that, if it is to be responsible, is faithful to the past even as it exceeds and betrays it in a performance of singularity, an “event” of “irreducible prescriptivity.” Such testimony involves a complex performative, or a “perveraformative,” speech act that is both a following of or adhering to and a perversion of this past, a faithful interpretation and a singular invention. To take responsibility, in concrete, particular instances, is to be irresponsible. Clark’s “jump,” like Kierkegaard’s leap of faith, necessarily betrays the codes of the past and the call of the infi nite even as it attends with all vigilance to them. This makes it impossible, or rather irresponsible, to act or decide in good conscience. To do so, de Vries argues, would be to fall into complacency, to give up religious or philosophical vigilance, and to fail to understand that even as one exerts such vigilance, to act or decide is to risk the worst even as one tries to do the best. In short, as de Vries summarizes Adorno, and his own conclusions, “idolatrous blasphemy is inevitable, and bad conscience is the sole figure of its hope.”

Conclusion

At stake in the idea of breaking back through to religion, among other issues, are the questions of criticism and critique. To think and live after secularism involves reconceiving the relation between religion and modern critical thought by acknowledging the intertwining of faith 168

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and responsibility at the heart of all our critical projects. It is thus to be open to the possibility that we might learn something about critical thinking by breaking back through to religion rather than insisting, in a modernist vein, that we can break cleanly from religion by establishing new, secularist foundations for critical thinking, whether metaphysical, transcendental, empirical, or historicist. Whether one appeals to the pragmatism of Jeffrey Stout, the historical work of Amy Hollywood, the political theory of William Connolly and Romand Coles, or to Charles Taylor’s interrogation of the secular, secularist visions of critical thinking and public discourse are increasingly being questioned in a way that gives weight to Ward Blanton’s claim that “there will be no serious mapping of the space of the political or the ‘critical’ in our time without a negotiation or contestation, precisely, of received and yet perhaps still malleable borders between ‘religion’ and its outside.” In chapter 3, I suggested that both Orsi and Mahmood help us think about how certain forms of religious dependence enable empowering and critical engagement with one’s world. Robert Orsi argues that in their dependence on St. Jude, devotees fi nd “the ground of action, choice, autonomy and healing.” Saba Mahmood questions liberal conceptions of autonomy that, she argues, exert a powerful influence even on the most thoughtful of Western feminists, and she argues that the Muslim women she studies enact effective and creative agency without such autonomy. One might argue that by not questioning the reality of St. Jude or the imperative to emulate the Prophet, these women are unable to resist the patriarchal cultural and social networks in which they are enmeshed. Such criticism has to be taken seriously, as both Orsi and Mahmood acknowledge. Yet, if they are persuasive in arguing that it is precisely in a certain “dependence” (to use Orsi’s word) that these women find the power to take a significant amount of charge over their own lives and even to flourish, then such criticism must also be leveled with great care. To what degree do certain kinds of dependence or even heteronomy make it possible for people, at least in certain circumstances, to lead lives of creativity and freedom? Are there significant forms of freedom outside of the ideals of autonomy that have shaped the modern Western imaginary? In the cases studied by Orsi and Mahmood, a certain kind of surrender to God’s will takes place that entails an acceptance of certain historical realities. It appears that rather than 169

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serving to disempower religious subjects, such acceptance allows them to actively confront, reimagine, and rework their situations and, especially in the case of Mahmood, their traditions by faithfully employing the resources of their religious traditions. This is also a critical, that is, an attentive, discerning form of empowerment. Orsi, writing about the material culture of the devotion to St. Jude, describes the blessed oil and water used at the shrine as “the solvents of the givenness of experience.” The importance of this figure becomes evident when we think carefully about what it means for an experience to be given—and thus about what it means to “accept” a situation. In one sense, the devotees of St. Jude accept as given the situations of suffering, despair, and hopelessness that led them to appeal to the saint—they could not change what had happened. But they could appeal to St. Jude to help them. The saint did so, according to the devout, by leading them to accept the situation in its singularity and so to loosen it, to free or absolve it, as with the solvents of blessed oil and water, from the web of meanings and expectations with which they had wrapped it up and which had in turn snared them. Jude helped them to free themselves from being defeated by claims about what “must” follow from the situation and to see things in a new light. In this freedom, from this new perspective, they were able create and find new possibilities in the situation. Rowan Williams’s concept of “revelation” also is relevant here. “Revelation,” Williams writes, “is essentially to do with what is generative in our experience—events or transactions in our language that break existing frames of reference and initiate new possibilities of life.” The idea of revelation certainly suggests a kind of heteronomy, for it ordinarily is understood as some kind of truth given to human beings by God and, as such, is taken as transcendentally authoritative. Williams, though, describes the dependence put in play with revelation as “nonheteronomous dependence.” Revelation, on this view, is not a matter of the dictation of propositional truths or divine laws that instruct us how to act in particular situations. Rather, it is a matter of invitation and challenge, an invitation to a relationship with God that demands a radical openness to the future. One the one hand, the relationship takes concrete form in the doctrines and practices of a particular historical tradition. One who belongs to this tradition must accept that in some

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sense this tradition has its origins in God. On the other hand, God is never fully captured by these traditions, doctrines, and practices and so their meaning is always in question—they guide but don’t determine, and to believe otherwise is to fall into idolatry. This places demands on thought, imagination, and practice that can open us to new possibility even as this possibility demands certain kinds of acceptance, adherence, and self-dispossession. Revelation, Williams writes, is “addressed not so much to a will called upon to submit as to an imagination called on to ‘open itself.’ ” It is, in other words, an invitation to what de Vries describes as a “singular repetition or testimony,” which will both repeat and transform the tradition. Here, dependence and self-dispossession become the conditions for creative freedom and new possibility. In both of these cases of dependence, Orsi’s and Williams’s, we find a double movement that follows the trajectory of de Vries’s adieu: a movement toward God or the absolute in which concrete ideas or situations are in some sense dissolved or transcended, which is followed by a movement of return to the concrete and the particular in which one forecloses this transcending, infinitizing movement of responsibility in a testimonial reengagement with finite life. This first step does not entail losing sight of what is before us, where we are in the world, or the suffering face of the other, rather it allows us see them in light of a singularizing attention and with the recognition that the infinite difference or chaotic interval demands a decision that will not be determined in any strict way by the fact of the matter or a code of ethics. As a form of vigilance, this singularizing attention is a spiritual exercise, or what David Wood calls an “ethical bearing”: “The ethical bearing of experience . . . is a way of comporting ourselves in our necessarily finite engagements, one in which the boundaries we necessarily set up are, as Heidegger put it, ‘examined constantly.’ ” Yet, even though Williams’s view of revelation entails the demanding vigilance that goes with radical openness to the future, the experience of reading him on revelation is markedly different from reading de Vries on responsibility, even when we read Williams in the context of his sobering work on the responsibility each of us bears for the suffering in the world. Williams, of course, is a professing Christian and de Vries is not. De Vries’s vigilance, an extreme ascesis of negativity inherited from Adorno and in a different way from Levinas, finds its only hope in bad

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conscience and, for him, a theologian such as Williams is too complacent, not negative enough. But are “complacency,” “negativity,” and “bad conscience” the best criteria for examining and evaluating the way we bear our responsibility? What about, alternatively, “passion,” “love,” and “forgiveness”? Something in their interaction with St. Jude energized and enlivened the women Orsi encountered; something, according to Williams, invites us into the future. What kind of critical attention is needed to embrace this energy or accept this invitation?

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ON PSYCHOT HEOLO GY

What Freud and Rosenzweig have done, then, is to elaborate the ethical relation introduced into the world by Judeo-Christian monothesism—love of God as love of neighbor—as the basis of a distinctly modern ethical conception: my obligation to endure the proximity of the Other in the “their moment of jouissance,” the demonic and undying singularity of their metaethical selfhood. —ERIC SANTNER 1

Who Is Really Alive Today?

Eric Santner’s On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life does its work at an intersection of the thought of Sigmund Freud and Franz Rosenzweig. Early in the book, Santner quotes Rosenzweig: “The concept of the order of this world is thus not the universal, neither the arche nor the telos, neither the natural nor the historical unity, but rather the singular, the event, not beginning or end, but center of the world.” This event, Santner points out, is for Rosenzweig an event of divine revelation. Scholars of religion thus may fi nd it tempting to see in Rosenzweig, writing in the second decade of the twentieth century, an anticipation of Mircea Eliade’s locative theory of religion, in which divine hierophanies establish centers—axes mundi—around which and by means of which spatial and social orders are established. Santner quotes further: “From the beginning as well as from the end the world is ‘infinite,’ from the beginning infi nite in space, toward the end infinite in time. Only from the center does there arise a bounded home in the unbounded world, a patch of ground between four tent pegs, that can be posted further and further out.” This passage, too, might be read as vaguely Eliadan, but in fact it, and specifically the word “infinite,” indicates that Rosenzweig’s theological enterprise was quite different from Eliade’s. For Eliade, religious systems are based on the idea of a definite beginning 173

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to time and history: origin, for him, is as important as center, arguably more so; both serve as a point from which all order proceeds. But this correlation is absent in Rosenzweig, which helps us see that his “center” is not Eliade’s. Indeed, on Santner’s reading, Rosenzweig theorizes religion as a disruption that extracts us from the ordering or economy of the world and makes it possible for us to turn to one another in love. All of this is brilliantly worked out and elaborated by Santner in a way that speaks directly not only to issues of order and incongruity, but also to questions of singularity, responsibility, and secularism. Santner’s work represents a particularly provocative and illuminating example of what de Vries means when he writes of “breaking back through” to religion. As the designation “psychotheology” suggests, Santner explores a region where conceptual maps clearly opposing the secular to the religious and the scientific to the theological, not to mention the political to the personal, are rendered inadequate and demand some version of what Rosenzweig, placing his own work explicitly between philosophy and theology, describes as “new thinking.”  For my immediate purposes, it is enough to say that Rosenzweig’s new thinking is a mode of attentiveness that orients us to the “midst of life.” I argue in this chapter that this attentiveness, as Santner reads and develops it as an “ethics of singularity” that opens us to the “blessings of more life,” allows us to think critically about and further develop the existential thematics of responsibility we find in de Vries. By way of introduction to this argument, I reflect briefly on what Santner means by “more life.” To put it in terms of the previous chapter, to have more life is, first, to live with a certain kind of wakefulness grounded in the acknowledgment of the contingency and limitations of our maps and categories and, second, to nonetheless be able to commit or, to use Santner’s term, “answer” to the concrete, particular demands of life. A major reason for wanting to push de Vries’s thinking about responsibility in a slightly different direction than he does is that although both these elements are present in his work, what remains unclear is how we move from heeding the call of the infi nite to answering to our finite obligations. My argument is that the extreme negativity of de Vries’s vigilance needs to be balanced, if only slightly, by attention to the affirmative, specifically to passion, love, belief, and “more life.” Moreover, to pick up on a theme I addressed in the fi rst part of the book, the affirmative is not just a problem for deconstructive 174

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thinking—a point that has been made by critics of deconstruction for decades—but for the academy and, more generally, for our increasingly globalized world. Slavoj Žižek—whose work is in some ways quite close to Santner’s—puts the issue of more life in the form of a question: “Who is really alive today?” For him, the question arises as he reflects, with much pessimism, on the possibility of committed political struggle in a world dominated by globalized capitalism. Such struggle is usually associated, of course, with the politics of the left, but Žižek argues that these politics have failed, in part because leftists increasingly eschew class consciousness and “proper political hatred” in favor of an accommodating politics of difference and multiculturalism. They, Žižek claims, along with most of the rest of us, have lost the ability to “believe,” or, to put it psychoanalytically, the ability to sublimate, to be passionately attached to a vision and way of life: “The very fundamental matrix of sublimation,” Žižek writes, “seems to be increasingly under threat.” From this perspective, the commitment to difference is not real commitment because it is grounded more in the suspicion of belief and passion than in passionate belief. One might argue in response to Žižek that there is too much belief in the world today, that from religious intolerance and strife around the globe to various forms of transparently ideological politics, strident belief and the failure to reason and respect difference are the main sources of violence, oppression, and the denial or policing of difference. Žižek counters that fundamentalists and ideologues believe in the register of fantasy, paranoia, and obsession rather than sublimation and that we cannot contest the power of such fantasy without the commitment and political “hatred” that sublimation makes possible. Thus the question for Žižek becomes whether there is a way to think and theorize critically that does not simply expose “belief” as dangerous and naïve, but that thinks critically and believes passionately. Belief, I have suggested, is also a problem for an academy dominated by various forms of the hermeneutics of suspicion and by historicist and naturalist theories and methodologies that make it extremely difficult to think belief as anything but a sacrifice of the intellect, a surrender of individuality and autonomy, or a form of heteronomy that must be critically unraveled and disarmed. To the extent that we do not simply dismiss belief, many of us—and I include myself in this diagnosis— seek rational mastery over our beliefs and commitments and have a 175

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very difficult time imagining any other way to be. But is such mastery really possible? Is it desirable? Can one master one’s beliefs and still believe? Isn’t this—to echo Žižek—like deciding to fall in love? This is not to say that academics are or necessarily try to live without belief. But many, as I have discussed, also argue that our beliefs, save for the belief in the value of knowledge, should stay out of academics and that we should guard vigilantly against its sneaking in, as it all too often does: “Theology happens.” But is belief in the value of knowledge enough to sustain the kind of critical thought that will make a difference for how we live? For those who would answer “yes” to this question, practical, existential, and evaluative approaches to questions about particular beliefs and meanings are off limits to the academic because they are not properly “cognitive” (Wiebe) or “critical” (McCutcheon) or “scientific” (Slingerland). But accepting such claims prevents us from inquiring seriously into forms of rationality—and here theology would be one example—that are grounded in and are devoted to the critical and affirmative exploration of particular beliefs. Can we believe and reason passionately? For de Vries, specific acts of belief, commitment, or responsibility are always also betrayals of infinite responsibility. Thus we only decide or act responsibly in “bad conscience.” Žižek, by contrast, aligning himself with Alain Badiou, wants to think about belief and life more affirmatively, without bad conscience. The key to this thinking is the concept of event (in Badiou) or act (in Žižek), a kind of conversion moment that grasps and reorients one’s life. This reorientation is lived as fidelity to the event through which one becomes a “subject.” In many respects, Santner’s work is informed by Badiou and Žižek on the event and act. But I find Žižek’s and Badiou’s attacks on deconstruction and the ethics of alterity unpersuasive and argue that Santner helps us to articulate theoretical space between de Vries and Žižek. Religious concepts play a significant role here. Where de Vries’s “turn to religion” focuses on concepts such as apophasis, testimony, horror religiosus, and bad conscience, and where Žižek secularizes Paul, Santner works in a “postsecular” mode with concepts such as “redemption,” “miracle,” “grace,” and, above all, “love of neighbor.” Two further points about the similarities and differences between de Vries and Santner lay the groundwork for my argument in this chapter. First, Santner’s use of psychoanalysis brings an existential thickness to 176

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questions of religion and responsibility absent in de Vries. De Vries, by means of the quasi-transcendental mode of thinking developed by Derrida, traces the contours of an aporia fundamental to human thought and experience. This brings thought to its limits, where it opens up on existence, allowing existence to “come into its own.” Maintaining the strictest commitment to thought and deliberation, to the point where philosophical reflection drives itself to the aporetic limits of conceptuality, deconstruction shows us that one’s decisions ultimately will be made without the assurance of calculating reason. To decide responsibly is to take on the insecurity of life and time, the repeated risk of naming and enacting life in a testimonial gesture that simultaneously indicates and betrays the call of the absolute and so takes the risk of the “worst” even as it strives for the “best.” I agree with de Vries that the aporia of responsibility is essential for understanding our ethical lives, not to mention for thinking between philosophy and religion. But psychoanalytic theory, and even more Santner’s “psychotheology,” orients us to this uncertainty in a way that engages our thinking and our bodies and passions. It thereby makes “belief” or “commitment” a matter not just of right thinking, but of a certain way of experiencing and inhabiting our existence with others in soul and body, thought, desire, and practice. If de Vries shows us through conceptual analysis the paradoxical intertwining of the transcendental and the empirical, an undecidability that brings existence into its own, Santner’s psychotheology illuminates the way in which the imperative to responsibility registers, at the edge of the semantic and the physical, in our experience. Second, this imperative to responsibility is deeply entwined with the question of how we live out of the past, or, more accurately, how the past continues to live on in and around us. For de Vries, to give testimony is to perform an act of faith by taking a stand and making a decision with but also beyond a rigorous respect for past and heritage. In testimony, we hold on to the past as we let go of and betray it. This, de Vries tells us, takes place in the modality of mourning. Psychotheology, as Santner understands it, also is a mode of reflecting on the ways in which we are always haunted by “nameless loss,” yet he analyzes this haunting in terms of melancholy, as distinct from mourning. This melancholy can take one of two forms. The past can live on in each of us, in forms both physical and psychological, in a way that produces a kind of “nihilistic vitality” or “undeadness” that drives us to identify ourselves 177

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with dominant social formations. Or melancholy can attach itself to loss as a mode of attention or critical piety that opens us to a “revelation” by which we discover how to “deanimate” this undeadness and make the turn to more life. Santner thus helps us address the following kinds of questions: How are we responsible to the past? How do we take up the past, in the present, in a way that both acknowledges loss and helps us move freely into the future? And to bring us back to Žižek’s question, the topic of the next section, can we expose ourselves to the past in a manner other than historicist determination, a determination that evacuates our acts and our subjectivities and so turns them into artifacts of social formation? And can we think “belief ” or “commitment” as elements of a critical attitude toward the various social formations of which we are a part?

Sublimation and Revelation From Desire to Love: Žižek on Sublimation

Sublimation, psychoanalytically understood, is “the process by which the energy of the drives is taken up and directed toward ‘higher,’ more creative aims.” Žižek’s (and Santner’s) approach to sublimation is rooted in revisions to traditional Freudian theory worked out by Jacques Lacan and, especially, Jean Laplanche. Both locate the origins of desire not in the trauma of separation from the mother, as in Freud, but in a prior trauma of proximity: the “traumatic encounter with the dense, enigmatic presence of the Other’s desire.” In their relationships with parents and other significant adults, children are initiated into language and meaning, develop an identity, and attach themselves to the social world. But this process is driven not just by the encounter with shared meanings, but with the unconscious, meaningless erotic energy operating on the boundaries of physiology and culture that is part of each of us. Registering the fleeting transmissions of this energy, the child seeks to decode and process or, to use Santner’s term, “metabolize” that which, as meaningless, cannot be processed. This failure is traumatic, producing knots of psychic energy that constitute the uncanny excitement of pleasure and pain, the insistent, driven mindlessness or “excessive intensity” that Žižek, after Lacan, identifies as jouissance. As 178

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unmetabolizable psychic energy, jouissance is a “void” in the “symbolic,” a material stain, or what Žižek calls the “ex-timate” remainder: it is “in” us at the very depths of our selves, but at the same time always “external” to conscious life, not a discrete desire that happens to be unconscious, but simply force, insistence, pressure. This revision to traditional psychoanalysis brings with it a striking reversal. For Freud, fundamental trauma comes with the intervention society in the form of the father, that is, the imposition on the child of the individuating structures of society and meaning (what Lacan calls the “symbolic”). For Žižek and Santner, by contrast, the symbolic provides the promise of relief from trauma: we submit to the Law in an effort to escape from the overwhelming nature of the enigmatic, psychosexual energy of parental jouissance. The symbolic, in other words, seduces with the promise of an answer to the enigmatic traces that so excite, that drive desire, understood here as the search for an answer to the question, “What do they want from me?” On this view, desire and law are not opposed forces but go hand in hand, both serving to protect the self from jouissance and both serving to propel the child on a quest for social legitimation. We come to believe that establishing our identities, fi nding our place in the social, will relieve the pressure this unconscious desire exerts on us. In reality, though, the objects of our “desire” are only compromise solutions to the fundamental trauma. To sublimate, in both Žižek and Santner, is to turn from this ideological, legitimizing trajectory of desire in recognition of the meaninglessness of jouissance. To put it in Žižek’s terms, fidelity to the event must not only have as its condition the “act” of radical negativity that “momentarily suspends the Order of Being,” but also allow this traumatic negativity to “resonate” in the creation and attachment to a new symbolic. With this, Žižek distinguishes, or, more precisely, as I explain below, comes close to distinguishing, between the sublimation of desire and the sublimation of love. Each path of sublimation follows from distinct “events” of interpellation, that is, from those processes by which one is called out in a psychically compelling way to assume the status of subject: the interpellation of the law, which creates desire, and “an uncanny ‘interpellation’ beyond ideological interpellation.” The sublimation of love thus breaks from the repressive economy of social legitimation without destroying the possibility of a new symbolic order. Or, to put it differently, it requires a form of attachment to the symbolic 179

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that recognizes that social legitimation cannot give us the final answers that we crave. Žižek’s answer to this problem, though I will argue that he does not embrace the answer decisively enough, relies on a conception of love that he derives from St. Paul and a new conception of the subject. Paul’s great insight, he argues, is that Jewish law provokes the desire to transgress the law: it sets up a vicious cycle in which it “generates and solicits” sin and where sin, in turn, provokes the guilt that binds us ever more tightly to the law. Judaism, in other words, is bound by its own “obscene underside” to the economy of desire, which is centered on a Law sustained by libidinal attachment to fantasies of transgression. What is required, therefore, is breaking from the law, not by rejecting it, but rather by breaking from the psychic force exerted in the attraction of its obscene underside. This is a break from desire to love, to a “jouissance outside the Law.” One continues to obey the Law, but only “as if” one were not obeying it. We can think about this in terms of love for another person. What is it, exactly, that one loves when one loves another? For Žižek, Lacan’s conception of “not all,” which I touched on in the discussion of Hollywood, is relevant here. Famously, Lacan asserted that “not all of woman is submitted to the phallic function.” This generally has been interpreted to mean that part of woman is external to the symbolic, making possible a feminine jouissance akin to ineffable mystical rapture. But Žižek and Santner, as we will see, read this formula of feminine sexuality differently, holding that the “not all” is neither fully internal nor fully external to the symbolic, that is, that the “Real,” the extimate remainder, is both inside and outside of the symbolic. Another term for this “Real” is “subject.” Defined in terms of the logic of “not all,” the subject is the gap in or inherent failure of the symbolic; in relation to the symbolic order, one is “not all,” an “excess.” From this position, it is possible to reject the fantasy of completion that phantasmagorically constructs the other or the social whole as holding the answer to desire. With this rejection, we are able to face, rather than repress, “the traumatic encounter with the opacity of the Other’s desire.” For Žižek, sublimation as love is a matter of a person becoming passionately attached to another (or to a cause) not because the person possesses a particular desired quality or because he or she meets some particular need. Rather one affi rms the other precisely in his or her 180

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enigmatic jouissance. The sublimation of love (as distinct from the sublimation of desire) allows one to love the other “the way he or she is,” that is, in the “unnameable X,” the extimate remainder at the heart of his or her subjectivity. At the same time, Žižek argues, such love takes place only in and through engagement with the other in his or her symbolic identity, his or her concrete being in the world. In “true love,” the “absolute” dimension of the other—the singularity of his or her jouissance, what Žižek calls the “fragile absolute”—becomes visible in and through their ordinary, everyday life. This engagement with the other requires the “arduous work of love” by which one traverses one’s fantasies and encounters the void at the heart of oneself and others. In this way, the “nothingness” of this jouissance, our own and the other’s, “resonates” in one’s everyday engagement with the object of one’s love.

Creaturely Life

What is this uncanny interpellation? What draws us to the “fragile absolute”? Santner, I think, answers these questions more clearly and consistently than Žižek, beginning with a compelling treatment of the Lacanian “not all” and the purpose of psychoanalysis. Ordinarily, according to Santner, we view each individual in terms of his or her “personality,” that is, in terms an identity that is socially intelligible by virtue of being located in “an established set of social relations of production and exchange.” But, like Žižek, Santner finds at the heart of the human psyche a “constitutive too-muchness,” an “internal alterity,” an “enigmatic density of desire,” which he refers to variously as “self,” “subject,” and, most technically, “metaethical subject.” As a personality, one is integrated into a social whole, forming his or her identity in a web of the accepted meanings that constitute identities and social formations. As a metaethical subject, however, one is “not all,” a “nonrelational excess that is out of joint with respect to the generality of any classification or identification.” These two conceptions of the person, and the relationship or nonrelationship with the social that they entail, are for Santner the respective foci of two conflicting versions of psychoanalysis. The first is psychoanalysis as a therapeutic process aimed at reducing the power of neurosis and so enabling “healthier” social relations, that is, relations well integrated into regnant social formations. 181

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This is psychoanalysis as a “science of symbolic identity.” But Santner views this version of psychoanalysis as an ideological discourse of adjustment, or “relational surrender,” and seeks instead to articulate a vision of psychoanalysis as an “ethics of singularity.” The goal of this version of psychoanalysis is not to discover the meaning of neurotic or otherwise pathological symptoms but to encounter them in their meaninglessness and so to encounter oneself as a singular excess that cannot be incorporated into the social without remainder. Or, to put it differently, the point is to encounter ourselves as remainder; psychoanalysis is less a form of therapy than a spiritual discipline in which one faces up to, learns to bear, the fundamental enigma and excess at the heart of oneself and others. What does it mean to encounter our symptoms in their “meaninglessness”? Psychoanalysis theorizes the intersections of the physical and the psychological, the material and the semantic, the meaningless and meaningful in part by showing that these distinctions, pushed far enough, ultimately obscure our thinking about subjectivity, desire, love, and politics. It is more productive, Santner argues, to think in terms of what he calls the “psycho-physical” or the “bio-political,” both liminal designations for the permeability between the natural and cultural. He calls the dimension of human existence that takes place at this site of permeability “creaturely life.” What makes us “creatures” for Santner, somewhat counterintuitively, is not our possession of biological instincts, but rather the way that these instincts, in processes of capture or interpellation that start very early on in our lives, are channeled in highly idiosyncratic, even “demonic” directions—becoming “drives”—in response to our disorienting encounters with the enigma of others’ desire. In this encounter, our instincts are charged, amplified, and twisted, leaving us with a “surplus animation” or form of “undeadness” closed off from “more life” in the rigid and repetitive search for legitimation. As I have indicated, this encounter is not simply a function of the “family romance” at the heart of traditional forms of psychoanalysis; it is also integral to all social relations and crucial for understanding the power of social institutions. Santner borrows from Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben to argue that any social and political formation is grounded in a form of sovereignty maintained by the “state of exception,” that is, that state in which the law is—or always potentially can 182

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be—suspended by the sovereign in the name of its preservation. This capacity reflects the fact that the Law that calls us out with the promise of an answer to the enigmatic signifiers ultimately is ungrounded, a construction covering its own enigmatic, meaningless force. We are immersed in social and cultural formations that are themselves “permeated by inconsistency and incompleteness . . . punctuated by a lack by which we are, in some peculiar way, addressed, ‘ex-cited.’ ” This excitement produces knots of psychic energy, a “symptomal torsion.” For Santner, Kafka is perhaps the master of the literary portrayal of such excitement (think of Joseph K. driven to find the reasons for his indictment) and of the “creaturely” aspects of our response to it (think of his menagerie of figures, such as the hunchback, the prisoner in the penal colony, and Gregor Samsa). They not only are confused, neurotic, and riven by psychological disturbance, but their bodies are bent, burdened, tortured, and transformed by anonymous, indecipherable social and bureaucratic forces, by exposure to the violence of the state of exception. They adopt, Santner says, the posture of “cringe,” the posture of creaturely life: “Man is, in short, the creature whose creatureliness has been amplified by a death-driven singularity that makes him more than creature or, rather, more creaturely than any other part of creation.”

Pyschotheology: Love Happens

I have suggested that both Žižek and Santner distinguish between an interpellation by which social formations capture us—Žižek’s interpellation of desire and Santner’s interpellation of law and identity—and an interpellation of love that singles us out from social formations. And both employ theological concepts, particularly those of St. Paul, to elaborate their ideas. However, Žižek’s, unlike Santner’s, is a secularizing reading of Paul. That is, Žižek reads St. Paul through Hegel’s progressive history of religion, philosophy, and politics: Christianity supersedes Judaism and then is itself superseded in a secularizing, death-ofGod aufhebung by philosophy and radical politics. Santner, by contrast, offers what he describes as a “post-secular” reading of Judaism and of Paul that is more nuanced than Žižek’s and that locates psychotheology between traditional, metaphysical, or otherworldly theologies and 183

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secular psychoanalysis, theory, or philosophy. Psychotheology is rooted in and analyzes this-worldly psychic, social, and political practices and discourses. Yet—and here there are strong parallels to de Vries’s turn to religion—Santner argues that this analysis brings us, in a nondialectical manner, to the “immanent impasses of secular thought.” Secular critical thought in the modern period has gained much of its power by contrasting itself with the metaphysics and other-worldliness of religion and theology, but in the end, according to Santner, it is secular thought that is most heavily invested in modern fantasies of legitimation: moral autonomy, self-grounding political and legal structures, continual growth and progress. Thus, secular thought finds it increasingly difficult to chart a way to live less defensively and rigidly with the ultimate groundlessness of society and politics, which is, perhaps, one reason why the idea of “political theology” has become so important recently to critics such as Santner and to many philosophers and political theorists. For Santner, psychotheology is a discourse of neighborlove that intervenes into the space of sovereignty to open up “the possibility of new possibilities foreclosed within the agitated immobility of that fateful entwinement” between sovereign and creature. Put differently, psychotheology intervenes to deanimate our “undeadness.” Santner refers to this deanimation as “unplugging,” a process in which one finds oneself recognized and affirmed as a metaethical self and so comes to understand oneself in excess of one’s socially mediated identity. This “understanding” does not entail the discovery of a real identity or true self beneath the social façade of personality, but instead the recognition of a psychomaterial excess or singularity that, as in Rosenzweig, bears nothing but a proper name. Unplugging is a productive disorientation of the unified, socially grounded self, a disruption of the symptomatic configuration of our attachments to meaning. The possibility is that this disruption will release us from our undeadness, from the fantasy of and desire for the “meaning of it all,” by opening us in a new way to the world and to others, to the “midst of life.” To become unplugged is to be singled out from all social formations. As Santner puts it, unplugging is “not so much the positing of an alternative and competing standard of value as an intervention into the very syntax by which values are determined and to which we are bound in our life with our values.”

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Santner turns to theological concepts such as “revelation,” “grace,” “miracle,” and “redemption” to develop this idea. The discourse and practice of psychotheology thus takes place in between discourses such as philosophy and other forms of cultural studies that seek to know the positivity of our social lives, on the one hand, and theology as a discourse of revelation, on the other: “One cannot give to oneself the possibility of new possibilities. Something must happen, something beyond one’s own control, calculations and labor, something that comes from the locus of the Other.” This “Other”—God—is “above all the name for the pressure to be alive to the world, to open to the too much of pressure” generated by our lives as social beings. God’s love transforms the way we bear our identities in the world by relaxing—absolving us from—our need for legitimation and thus the desperation and defensiveness with which we try to secure our identities. It clears “away the fantasies that confine our energies within an ultimately defensive protocosmic existence . . . [and] that keep us at a distance from our answerability within everyday life,” that is, it keeps us at a distance from one another by focusing our own attention on social legitmation. Unplugging us from rigid attachments to ideology, God’s love enables us to respond to life with new attention and creativity. Santner agrees with Harold Bloom’s assessment that Freud (and we can extend this to Žižek and Badiou) misunderstood Judaism and so failed to recognize that “Jewish monotheism in some fashion removes itself—unplugs—from the enigmatic seductions of sovereign power and authority.” And Santner finds the clearest articulation of Jewish unplugging in Rosenzweig. It begins, Rosenzweig claims, in a divine imperative: “Love me.” God’s commandment seizes me in my singularity, calls it out, producing an existential realization that God’s commandment and God’s love for me are one and the same and that both are directed not to my identity, but to my anxious, gnarled metaethical self. This verifies me in my singularity, allows me to acknowledge this aspect of myself as “I.”  God’s love, in other words, interrupts our social identities. From here, it is possible to read Paul’s thinking on law and love in a way that does not relegate Judaism to a religion of the “law” (as this traditionally has been understood by many Christians and by others such as Žižek). Rather, for Santner what is at stake in Paul is the distinction between two forms of responsibility, or, more precisely,

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between responsibility and “answerability.” Here, “responsibility” is a matter of experiencing oneself as addressed, in the third person, by social dictates, articulated, for instance, by the superego, and so as a part of a larger, social whole. Such responsibility involves surrendering oneself to the dictates of social relations and formations. By contrast, God’s commandment is addressed not to the third but to the first person, producing the “here I am” of Abraham, which is an expression of answerability. As Santner puts it, in response to law, one “holds oneself ” responsible, whereas in response to God’s commandment to love, one “accepts” responsibility and thus transforms responsibility into answerability to God and to the other. The result is a new relationship to the law, not a rejection or transcendence of it, but a release from our compulsive attachment to its “obscene underside.” This psychotheological transformation entails a liberating conversion in the way we bear our identities. It frees us from the ideological pressure to legitimate and defend our identity and it also frees us for our fellow human beings: God’s commandment to love him and God’s commandment to love the neighbor are for Santner two sides of the same coin: My opening to the Other in his or her metaethical selfhood, my urgent sense of answerability to this “nothing” of death-driven singularity in all its insistent and idiosyncratic expressivity, is, for Rosenzweig, coterminous with the call of divine love. When we experience this urgency—when we are, as it were, seized by our “NeighborThing,” we are at that moment in the midst of something that both subtends and exceeds the twoness of the encounter. Put somewhat differently: the shift within a twoness from the part-whole logic of socio-symbolic relations to the part-part logic of ethical encounter . . . this very shift is, for Rosenzweig, where and how human beings register the impact of divine love.

Ordinarily, we engage others in the third person, as “he” or “she,” as bearers of particular identities and particular social roles. But divine interpellation makes it possible for us to relate to others differently, in an “ethical encounter” with another “I,” that is, with the other as a fellow bearer of psychic excess. God’s love, working through us, enables us to acknowledge our own trauma and that of others. And such love 186

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grounds a kind of universal ethic of singularity that consists in a “shared opening to the agitation and the turbulence immanent to any construction of identity, the Unheimlichkeit or uncanniness internal to any and every space we call home.”  We might call this an ethic of incongruity, of bearing and caring for incongruity in ourselves and others. For Santner, this ethic grounds a political theology of love opposed to a political theology of sovereignty: love of the other is not just giving charity to the other or, in Levinasian fashion, surrendering to or becoming hostage to your neighbor, but, in love, moving out into the world to work for its redemption.

Love and Existence: Žižek, De Vries, Santner

This brings me back to the differences between Žižek and Santner on sublimation, distinctions that make it possible, in turn, to consider how Santner’s psychotheology both compliments and critically extends de Vries’s turn to religion. Although Žižek recognizes the importance of thinking sublimation in terms of the interpellation of love, he does so only inconsistently. On the one hand, he is critical of the standard Lacanian view of sublimation—what I’ve called the sublimation of desire—by which one elevates a particular object to the status of the Real. This, for Žižek, confuses the object of desire, a given person or political cause, for the cause of desire, a fundamental lack in the self. On the other hand, and at his most insightful, Žižek points toward a sublimation of love by which the Real is not an object to grasp, but a “void” that must always resonate in love’s attachment to its objects. Why this inconsistency? A major reason, I think, is Žižek’s politics, more specifically his claim that being “alive” is a matter of identifying with a “cause”: “What makes life ‘worth living’ is the very excess of life: the awareness that there is something for which we are ready to risk our life (we may call this excess “freedom,” “honor,” “dignity,” “autonomy,” etc.).” Where Santner, and Žižek on occasion, allows us to understand that this “excess” is, in a real sense, “nothing,” Žižek’s effort to connect it with particular political causes turns it into a “something,” moreover, a something difficult to distinguish from the ideologies and closed social formations he wants to combat. This means, as I have argued elsewhere, that Žižek is caught between two versions of revolutionary or redemptive community. To the extent 187

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that he views sublimation and love in terms of the passionate, even violent defense of a “new order” and its institutional manifestations, he takes a view of sublimation distinct from Santner’s. When he keeps in mind, however, his own claims about love and the “fragile absolute,” he is more inclined to think in terms of the kind of community Santner finds in Rosenzweig, that is, one organized on “the basis of a shared orientation with respect to a nonrelational remainder/excess, to the signifying stress that every ‘normal’ community attempts to gentrify by way of some sort of simulated holism.”  This ambiguity also helps us understand Žižek’s (and Badiou’s) criticisms of deconstruction and “postsecular” ethics: “Derrida reduces Otherness to the ‘to-come’ of pure potentiality, thoroughly deontologizing it, bracketing its positive content, so that all that remains is the specter of a promise.” On Žižek’s reading, deconstruction, with its themes of “messianism to come” and “undecidability,” is a symptom of the contemporary threat to sublimation and commitment, a form of symbolic death without the resurrection of a new sublimation. We can read him as trying to avoid this symbolic death by thinking a form of sublimation that can commit to “positive content.” He takes this to be a secularized form of Christian messianism in which the Messiah has arrived already and opened up a new space for us. It is now our duty to act, to “help God” by “drawing the consequences of the Act” by creating and defending, violently if necessary, a new form of community. From de Vries’s perspective, however, this criticism of deconstructive messianism is misguided. For him, messianism is never simply a matter of the “specter of a promise” or a future “to come.” Like infi nite responsibility, of which it is a modality, messianism as absolute openness to the future must always be betrayed in acts of testimony. In his treatment of friendship and hospitality as modes of deconstructive responsibility, de Vries writes that “friendship in its perfection or ‘to come’ . . . cannot stand on its own but demands its own interruption and, as it were, instantiation.” Friendship—and we can say the same about deconstructive justice or democracy—demands that “pure” friendship be “corrupted” by making it concrete in particular times and places. We cannot simply live in the purity of the “to come”; its promise does not allow us to float above commitment and decision, but rather insists that we act, even if such action must be always undertaken in bad conscience. We might even say that Žižek’s insistence that the Void 188

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must resonate in our work of sublimation has its correlate in deconstruction’s bad conscience. But this only takes us so far. Even if Žižek is wrong to describe deconstruction as a form of symbolic death, it remains difficult to see in de Vries just how one moves beyond infinite responsibility to testimony, decision, or act. How does one hold together or negotiate these incompatible demands? In one sense, of course, the point is that we cannot offer instructions or rules that will determine our decisions and actions. But what can we say about how we “give economy its chance”? Santner helps us take a step in this direction with his observation that because Levinas only has one concept of interpellation, the encounter with the face, his “characterization of the ethical summons with regard to the Other often sounds like descriptions of a punishing superego.” This is one place, I think, that the strong Levinasian influence on the concept of responsibility in Derrida and de Vries plays out: in their writing, the call to responsibility takes the form, to use Rosenzweig’s distinction, of a command rather than a commandment. That is, it commands us to hold ourselves responsible, but does not release us, in and through love, to be answerable to the other. It is significant, precisely at this point, that the concept of love plays little role in de Vries’s turn to religion. For Santner, by contrast, love absolves: it is directed not to bolstering and defending particular social identities or ideologies, but to releasing self and others from the fantastic, neurotic labor of defending identity and ideology. (This is not to say from all labor: recall that Santner’s unplugging does not release us from law and ethics absolutely, but only from the rigid and compulsive attachment to it.) Absolution plays a crucial role for de Vries, as we have seen, but he places emphasis on the absolution of the infinite, on the way we open ourselves to the “beyond” of every concept. In Santner, we find something slightly different, an absolution, even a forgiveness, that enlivens us, that causes life to matter not by giving us specific beliefs about the world or, as Žižek would have it, an identifiable cause, but in the way that falling in love enlivens us and propels us into the midst of life with a new sense of hope and possibility. There is something anarchic about this vision. Santner, with Rosenzweig, does affirm the kind of Jewish communities formed in adherence to halakah, but he also argues that such communities are not bounded and holistic in the way many other religious and political 189

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communities are, for halakah is a practice that directs one, in love, to the other as he or she stands out from the whole, and so to the other as “neither Greek nor Jew.” Such divine love for the neighbor in his or her singularity must be distinguished from forms of self-surrendering love expressed in devotion to “higher unity, cause, ideal, or totality”: “What makes Judaism different is that it elaborates a form of life around the disruptive, even traumatic, pressures induced in us by the “neighborThing” rather than, under the auspices of the superego, transferring those pressures into this or that national project, this or that construction of home.” And, to return to the quotation from Rosenzweig with which I began the chapter, this singular other is the “center of the world.” This is one of the key points at which Santner departs from the readings of Paul offered by Badiou and Žižek. Badiou claims that with his “neither Greek nor Jew,” Paul advocates a “universalism of sameness.” But for Santner, this is to miss the “thinglike” singularity of the other and the “entirely new logic of being-with” of Paul’s universalism. “Paul,” Santner writes, “divides both sides of the identitarian division [between, say, Greek and Jew] such that neither side can any longer enjoy stable self-coincidence.” The divisions become nonexhaustive and “not all”; they leave a remainder. In other words, none of our natural, cultural, or political principles of identity or allegiance—biological, ethnic, racial, national, religious, and so on—ever fully accounts for who we are or binds us together in a whole. Each of us is always not all, a remainder, a site of incongruity—as a “metaethical self,” we stand out, are in excess of, all principles of social organization. But it is precisely in this sense that we can share an “opening to the agitation and turbulence immanent to any construction of identity,” which provides for Santner a new kind of universalism. This treatment of divine love, as an interpellation or a “grace-event,” allows us to think responsibility and sublimation between Žižek’s militancy and de Vries’s bad conscience. Moreover, it helps us consider further de Vries’s claim that “existence comes into its own” between the philosophical, ethical, and secular, on the one hand, and the religious, on the other. Neither de Vries nor Santner offers us principles for calculating how to act responsibly in a given situation—they offer neither utilitarian formulae nor categorical imperatives. Both do, however, write about practices of attention through which we discover the singularity of our experience and recognize the aporetics of responsibility. 190

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In other words, both are distinctly nonlocative thinkers, not only in their disruption of established academic boundaries between the cognitive and the existential and the secular and the religious, but, more generally, in their insistence that life comes into its own only to the extent that it is able to put its maps into question and so enact an excessive openness to the other. And both argue that responsibility also demands a return from attention to the “untameable strangeness” of the other to “economy” and “identity,” that is, to an encounter with self and other not in terms of an infinitizing singularity but of particular, concrete difference. This is to respond to the other not as absolute, ever differing other, but as a particular human self here and now. If responsibility to the call of the absolute requires a suspension of one’s own and the other’s sense of identity and social embeddedness, responding to the other, to the particular other, requires a sense of oneself, a recognition of particularity and location, one’s own and the other’s. For such particular difference to be visible at all, to be communicated and understood, some kinds of fundamental commonality must be presupposed—languages that can be translated, modes of life that can be recognized or affirmed as human. In both de Vries and Santner, then, we find a kind of dual consciousness of difference, two perspectives on the other existing in an uneasy, unresolvable tension. On the one hand, the other is absolutely other, indeed, I am even other to myself. On the other hand, in order to relate to the other, one must venture concepts, definitions, or decisions that identify other and self and so close off or retreat from the demand for absolute responsibility. It is here that Santner’s theology takes us further than de Vries’s: with a concept of revelation that makes possible answerability and love, Santner thinks a divine interpellation by which we are not simply exposed to the absolute but called by God to the redemptive work by which neighbor-love is brought into circulation in the world. Love may sound vague as an ethical and political guide—it is, as I have said, in certain respects anarchic—but I think that this is part of Santner’s point, as well as the point at which de Vries’s view of “existence” resonates in Santner’s thinking. Existence comes into its own only at a site that is not determined by law, strict ethical guidelines, or social expectation and legitimation. This does not save us the hard work of determining what to do in any given situation, the assessment, calculation, and negotiation in which law and ethics are valuable resources. But, for 191

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Santner, existence comes into its own as love and in love, directed to the hard work of decision by a conversion in the very sense of what is needed and possible. Responsibility becomes answerability when one is released from the compulsion to legitimate oneself and from the fantasy that the other is the answer to my desire. With this, it becomes possible to see the other as “neighbor” and so to immerse oneself in the concrete reality of life.

Psychotheology, Redemption, and the Demands of History

At the beginning of the chapter, I noted the following passage from Rosenzweig, quoted by Santner: “The concept of the order of this world is thus not the universal, neither the arche nor the telos, neither the natural nor the historical unity, but rather the singular, the event, not beginning or end, but center of the world.” It is now possible to explain the difference between Rosenzweig’s “center” and Eliade’s: on Santner’s reading, the former is neither a point of orientation that organizes social space nor a principle or anchor of social formation. But what, then, does Rosenzweig mean by “order of this world”? The basic answer is that neighbor-love orients us in a new way to worldly order or economy by attending to and affirming that which is in excess of such order, attending to the way we are always both in and dislocated from one or another social formation. Psychotheological unplugging is not a radical transcendence or break from law, convention, institution, and identity, but rather a release from certain kinds of compulsive and defensive attachments to such formations. It does, then, involve a certain decentering of social formation, one that exposes a “remainder,” a metaethical self that never completely fits into the social formations from which we get our identities. This remainder is the “center of the world.” Where a locative vision of the world views the center as that point of reference by which everything gets its meaning and its place as part of a unified whole, Rosenzweig has in mind a different “concept of order,” or, perhaps more precisely, a different way of thinking about our relation not only to space but also to time and community. In The Myth of the Eternal Return, Eliade contrasts conceptions of time in archaic religions with time as conceptualized and imagined in the historical religions of Judaism and Christianity. In the former, the 192

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present finds its meaning in terms of a past origin recalled by religious myth and repeated in religious ritual. The ritual repetition of cosmogony keeps the present connected with the origin and so legitimates the present as a manifestation of divine order. For “historical” religions, such as Judaism and Christianity, and for many secular moderns, by contrast, the present finds its meaning in the future, in the eschaton, or in some notion of progress or growth. These conceptions of time are both examples of what Santner calls “sovereign temporalization,” that is, the organization of time by dominant social formations. As such, they are counterparts to locative visions of space. Sovereign temporalization organizes and stabilizes meaning in the midst of the infinitude of time by identifying arche or telos. By contrast, modern historicism treats time as meaningless sequence, what Benjamin refers to as “empty and homogenous chronology.” This is not to say, of course, that historicists do not understand that meaning happens in history. Indeed, one of the main jobs of the historicist is to identify the factors and the mechanisms by which human beings construct meaning in and through history. However, this critical task, at least on a formal level, separates itself from the processes of meaning-making and certain practices of meaning-discerning. Santner reads Benjamin and Rosenzweig as theorizing a third way of understanding time. He quotes the following from a letter Benjamin wrote to Horkheimer: “History is not simply a science but also and not least a form of remembrance. What science has ‘determined’ remembrance can modify. Such mindfulness can make the incomplete (happiness) into something complete, and the complete (suffering) into something incomplete. . . . That is theology [and] in remembrance we have an experience that forbids us to conceive of history as fundamentally atheological.” Why does Benjamin describe the kind of mindfulness and remembrance at stake in this passage as “theology”? And what does he mean by completeness and incompleteness? After all, the past has happened, it is complete, as Horkheimer had pointed out to Benjamin in the letter that provoked this passage as a response. To answer this question, it is necessary to refer back to “creaturely life” and the “cringe.” For Santner, the cringe is a form of witness to the sovereign violence that underlies social formations and institutions and is carried in the myths, rituals, and memories of cultural traditions. This trauma registers as a kind of disturbance taking place under the surface of 193

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history. Psychotheology, as a kind of historical symptomology, as a form of attention that Santner compares to Kafka’s “natural prayer of the soul,” seeks to remember this trauma as “a past that in some sense has not been.”  He means something like this. Historicism as a “science” focuses on the positive, discrete, empirically verifiable events and contexts that make up what we ordinarily refer to as history. Historical events have effects—are themselves the constituents of historical contexts—and so are causally connected to the future, but, for the purposes of the historian, they can be treated as complete, as the end of a specific chain of historical causes. Psychotheology and Benjamin’s remembrance look at history differently, by looking at the trauma of sovereign violence as still happening, as incomplete because as yet not acknowledged or responded to. Thus, Santner writes that psychotheology begins in a rethinking “of that which in [historical] experience, in its dense, ‘creaturely’ materiality, calls out toward the future, constitutes— ‘temporalizes’—the dimension of futurity as a mode of response to a peculiar sort of ex-citation transmitted by the past.” The “remembrance” of which Benjamin writes, Santner’s psychotheological “mindfulness,” interrupts sovereign temporalization by attending to this incompletion as part of the work of redemption, listening for the suffering that “calls out toward the future.” On this view, the present is shot through with messianic time. Peter Gordon makes a useful contribution to understanding this conception of time by stressing the importance of “eternity” in Rosenzweig’s thought. He notes Rosenzweig’s claim that each moment is a “ ‘temporal dwelling’ into which ‘eternity is invited.’ ” For Gordon, this appeal to eternity is not part of an effort to transcend time or to deny human fi nitude but to experience past, present, and future as “mutually informative indices within a given moment.” But just how do these temporal modes inform one another? Here, Gordon is less helpful because he relegates the past to a subordinate role as “inherited structure.” Santner, with the help of Benjamin, gives a more nuanced, satisfactory, and ultimately comprehensible way of developing Rosenzweig’s view of the interrelation of past, present, and future: the past informs the present and future not just in terms of framing possibilities but, as we have seen, by calling to the present and future in traces of creaturely agitation. One responds to this call by acknowledging it and thereby releasing or absolving this agitation. This is not to redeem the 194

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past by giving it meaning but to respond to it with a love that releases self and other from repetition and allows the “completion” of (certain kinds) of happiness. This completeness cannot be fully understood apart from an anticipatory orientation to the future, for two reasons. First, as a release from the compulsions of the past, a physical and psychical unfolding of mind and body (we no longer cringe), the moment of redemption is an opening to new possibilities—to “the possibility of new possibilities”—and so to the future. Second, as divine interpellation, a call to love one’s neighbor, redemption in the present orients one to the futural aspect of redemption. The work of redemption is never finished: we must constantly be “moving out into the world on behalf of revelatory love.” To live “in the midst of life,” if such life is characterized by neighbor-love, is to invite eternity into time, to live in anticipation or hope, in a state of wakefulness, attentive to those moments of grace in which time is fulfilled. Or, as Rosenzweig puts it, it is to “coerce the kingdom of God into being.” This orientation to the future, Santner argues, is manifested in Jewish liturgical time, especially in the chant, which expresses an anticipatory resoluteness directed toward the “becoming-neighbor of the other.” This brings us to the question of community and to another difference between Santner’s and Gordon’s readings of Judaism. Gordon sees Rosenzweig as defending the community of Jews as a “unified and organic structure.” But Santner argues that Judaism, as a community of redemption, always stands out from communities of blood, nation, ethnicity, or any other positive characteristic that creates an “organic” bond or a “whole.” What the community shares, as I have noted, is an orientation to the metaethical, to that which exceeds and disturbs every social formation, which other forms of community repress. In other words, communities of redemption keep alive the “negativity” that Žižek argues must inhabit every nonideological form of sublimation, that is, the recognition that any social formation (Lacan’s “symbolic”) is predicated on the repression of the Real by which any human social order organizes itself to keep at bay. But what is particularly interesting about Santner’s effort to grapple with this issue is that the work of redemption transforms this negativity into something positive by making it the basis of neighbor-love. Some of Santner’s most interesting and evocative contributions to this line of thought take place in the context of his reflections on 195

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creaturely life, “natural history,” and “melancholy.” For Benjamin, “natural history” refers to the way in which artifacts from the human past— objects, ideas, and narratives, for example—come to lose their meaning, their place in a form of life, through the violence and disruption of historical change. Think of the ruins of human habitations shading into the brute materiality of nature. But such artifacts, expelled from the midst of life by the violent succession of social formations, can, Santner argues, still speak to us: they can still testify to the “fantasmatic holism” upon which social formations rest, and they can give form and voice to the void of sovereignty itself. As one example, Santner cites Rilke’s The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge and the exiled narrator’s encounter with modern Paris. On Santner’s reading, the book explores a form of “exposure” to the world under the “dual impact of historical violence and the structural dislocations generated by capitalist modernity.” As the narrator wanders the city, he finds himself transfi xed, in body, mind, and imagination, by “houses which had been demolished,” leaving as their only remnants pieces of floor or ceiling or strips of wallpaper on the exterior walls of connecting houses. These remnants speak to the narrator of the “stubborn life” of the people who had lived in those rooms, of the “air of these lives” that “no wind had yet scattered.” Malte’s “traumatic epiphany” registers the life of the past, especially suffering life, as though it had been absorbed in the physical spaces left behind by history. Santner’s analysis resonates with Žižek’s claim that historical violence and the consequent sense of the meaninglessness has become particularly acute in the modern period as various forms of dislocation—world war, globalization, and, particularly, capitalism—seem to have accelerated. But his psychotheological perspective is both more acute and more promising than what we find in most analyses of modern disenchantment or nihilism, Žižek’s included. It is more acute because, for Santner, meaninglessness, the loss of the ability to sublimate, is in some sense a symptom of a more fundamental problem: the manic vitality of our undeadness, by which we frantically try to cover up the void. It is more promising because, Santner argues, the trauma that leads to undeadness is precisely the site where new meaning, or, better, a new kind of enlivening, can emerge. Santner finds the “promise” of such trauma expressed as a “poetics of exposure,” which he finds in writers such as Rilke, Benjamin, and W. G. Sebald. This poetics takes the form of an 196

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exquisite attentiveness to the melancholy of creaturely life, an attunement to the way things matter to us in the mode of loss. Freud, of course, distinguished melancholy from mourning: the former is stuck in the past, unable to let go of loss and so unable to engage the present and the future; the latter acknowledges loss and so is able to move on and form new attachments. Santner questions this distinction, asking whether mourning is insufficiently attentive to the losses and devastations of the past. He invokes Benjamin’s criticisms of certain versions of Christianity in which the desperation and grieving of Good Friday is converted all too easily into the glad tidings of Sunday’s resurrection. For Benjamin and Santner, melancholy holds on to the “saturnine” gaze, “tarr[ies] with the negative,” not in the mode of withdrawing from the world or of dialectically overcoming the negative, but rather as a condition for engagement with it. Melancholy, as a mode of attentiveness, focuses on and grasps the “agitations” of creaturely life, remembering past loss by keeping it alive, thus “incompleting” the past. Benjamin’s thinking, Santner argues, “demands that any ethicopolitical act be oriented by, be performed on behalf of, creaturely life, the isolation and elaboration of which takes place under the saturnine gaze of melancholia.” But melancholic attentiveness alone cannot produce the “ethico-political act” that “completes” the present. What is needed is a miracle, specifically what Rosenzweig called a “providential” miracle, that is, a “sign-event” or event of meaning in which signs of sovereign violence carried in cultural traditions and artifacts from the past become legible and meaningful, are remembered and so released in the present. This, for Benjamin and Santner, is the fulfillment of the present, the completion of happiness, the messianic intervention into the fixations of creaturely life. Melancholic attentiveness to life and history prepares the ground on which miracles occur for acts of neighbor-love that acknowledge and respond to the pain of undeadness in the present. Thinking Žižek’s questions about life and sublimation through Santner, we can say that the miracle is that one is grasped by a particular form of meaningfulness, not responsibility in an ethical or legal sense (an ought or an obligation) and not a “cause” by which one surrenders oneself to a social or political whole, but the existential conviction that one is answerable to this particular event coming from the past or from this particular person in front of one. 197

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Conclusion

In chapter 4, I identified “life”—what Burke refers to as “that ever-singular place of desire, will, and history”—as a key principle of the humanistic encounter with texts. Amy Hollywood’s study of medieval women’s mysticism and Romand Coles’s encounter with the theologies of John Howard Yoder and Rowan Williams each explore ideas about and practices of Christian dispossession as they also enact dispossession in the way they read these texts. In doing so, they disrupt boundaries between religion and other discourses and forms of life in a way that allows them to think expansively about fundamental human conditions such as loss and violence. Both argue that this exposure to theology and the practice of dispossession “gives life” by opening up and expanding their connections with other lives and ways of being. De Vries and Santner explore this intersection of the secular and the religious in comprehensive theoretical terms. De Vries highlights the deconstructive dynamic at work in the idea of humanistic responsiveness. Life, or what de Vries calls “existence,” “comes into its own” as responsibility. Deconstructive responsibility is always minimally theological, always a matter of a double movement toward and away from the “absolute.” Santner, for his part, appeals to theology in developing a conception of responsibility as answerability, a practice of neighbor-love made possible when divine love interrupts the rigidity and defensiveness of our attachments to social formations and authorities and so makes possible more creative and impassioned attention to the concrete demands of life. I have argued, however, that de Vries’s ultimately Levinasian view of infinite responsibility and bad conscience does not have enough to say about how we meet such “demands,” and that we find a richer sense of this in Santner. Th is is, in large part, because Santner’s conception of divine interpellation, the interpellation and sublimation of love, entails a fundamental affi rmation and freedom of the self as a condition of responsiveness. Psychotheology theorizes and cultivates attention to what Rosenzweig calls the “singularity” found at the heart of the self and in the testimony of the past. Another way of naming this singularity is incongruity: that which stands out from and cannot be incorporated into or subsumed under any kind of unified self, historical tradition, or social formation. As an ethics of singularity or answerability, psycho198

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theology neither thinks away nor explains this incongruity, but responds to it. Santner, in other words, has identified a particular mode of passionate commitment to others, a commitment that makes the singularity of the other the center of or the “order” of this world. Th is commitment is made possible in events of grace or miracle and sustained by practices of thought and attentiveness by which responsibility to the other or faithfulness to the past demands not acts of integration, conformity, or explanation, but rather the difficult, critical work of response.

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Philosophy’s virtue is its responsiveness. —STANLEY CAVELL 1

Introduction: Cultural Criticism and the Work of Redemption

Kenneth Reinhard, commenting on Benjamin’s view of history, writes that “redemption is the not the final cause of history, but the interruption of the false totality of historical causality and contextualization by acts of critical creation and constellation.” Such “acts” are at the heart of a conception of humanistic cultural criticism that I find opened up by de Vries, Santner, and, as I will argue in this chapter, Stanley Cavell. Such criticism depends on a distinction between historicist views of causality and context that, in locativist fashion, put the events of the past in their place, and “remembrance” as a form of responsiveness to the past that dislodges events and texts from cause and context to bring them to life in the present. As Santner writes, this involves “a new conceptualization of the nature of that which registers itself in historical experience, a rethinking of that which in such experience . . . calls out toward the future.” Historicist criticism does usefully expose the contingency and historicity of our identities and the historical narratives that support them. As such, it can recover forgotten or ignored aspects of the past and so exert its own kind of resistance to “false totality.” But to the extent that it does so by reducing the scope of its explanations to “nature” or to “power” and “conflict,” it forecloses alternative modes of engaging with or responding to the past. We need a more responsive, capacious, and affirmative criticism.

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How, we might ask, do we remember the past in the mode of inheriting it? What are the different ways in which the past “speaks” to us? What disciplines of attention can we bring to bear on it? Frederic Jameson, in remarks on Peter Weiss’s The Aesthetics of Resistance, offers a particularly vivid response to these kinds of questions. Jameson reads Weiss’s book, a historical novel about left ist anti-Nazi politics in the Germany of the 1930s, as simultaneously witness to and intervention in history. It is, first, an “unflinching contemplation of the past,” or what Jameson, invoking Cavell, calls an “acknowledgment” of the past. This acknowledgment, in the form of a rich literary account of resistance to the Nazis, does not simply locate these past events in their context or demand that we learn from and make amends to the past. Rather, Jameson argues, Weiss is making an intervention into the past; his writing destabilizes the empirical contours of the past and transforms it into an “unfinished project.” For Jameson, this means that “what seemed over and done with is opened up for a new beginning, a new continuation.” Like Santner, Jameson stresses a melancholic attentiveness to the past, noting that only recently have critics moved beyond the idea that melancholy represents a kind of “paralysis” in the face of loss and defeat to embrace the idea that “it can also constitute an energizing precondition of action.” More generally, and although his politics are in some ways closer to Žižek’s than to Santner’s, Jameson—who famously urged us to “always historicize”—shares with Santner a sense of the incompleteness of history and the need for not only “unflinching contemplation” of the past but also critical creativity in taking it up. On Jameson’s reading, Weiss’s work is not a “pious” preservation of the past but, along the lines of de Vries’s “testimony,” a performative response to the past that remains faithful and responsible to it, not in the mode of preservation, but by inflecting it in new directions. Witnessing to the past is not, on this view, simply explaining what happened, but treating the past as still happening and in need of a response from us. Importantly, Jameson argues that in this mode of remembrance Weiss blurs established lines between creative artist and critic. So too does Santner in his account of aesthetic criticism. As we saw in the previous chapter, Santner’s “ethics of singularity” is based on a form of responsiveness to that in the other or in the past that stands out from the totalities of identity or social formation. Aesthetic criticism, too, he claims, is rooted in response to the singular. The beautiful “moves us,” 202

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he argues, “because its own formal composition and procedures produce more reality than it can contain.” That is, beautiful objects are “self-interrupting”; they produce more reality than they contain. Like the events of history, they are always to be completed. The task of the critic is not to “fi nish” the work in the sense of identifying and placing this “more” as if to make explicit what the work only hints at. Rather, the critic’s job is to provide a (provisional) completion, a “strong-misreading”—a version of de Vries’s “betrayal” of the past— that is in fact faithfulness to it. With Santner, we might say that it is not so much a betrayal of the past or of the aesthetic object as a singular response to the excess of the past or object. In this encounter, the vitality or life of both object and critic emerge; both enter into the midst of life. The critic, in a sense, repeats the work in a way that brings him or her and, it is hoped, the reader to an encounter with this excess. Finding him- or herself called out by the work or object, much in the way one finds him- or herself called out by the commandment to love God, the critic is called to the work of redemption. This will sound grandiose unless it is kept in mind that Santner, working from Rosenzweig’s new thinking and Benjamin’s view of the messianic, views “redemption” as a matter of creating openings in everyday life for the new possibilities. It is a turn to a new perspective on ordinary life and a new or expanded way of thinking about what it is to think “critically.” Santner’s “redemption” echoes in Stanley Cavell’s claim that cultural criticism “bears a new responsibility for the resuscitation of the world, of our aliveness to it.” In this final chapter, I work out this assertion by placing Cavell in conversation with de Vries and Santner. I turn first to Cavell’s treatment of the dynamics of human responsiveness and the relation between the self and economies of social formation. De Vries and Santner stress the necessity of understanding the self as a “singularity.” Singularity, as I have developed it to this point, is an infinitizing and absolving concept—it keeps us attentive to the fact that we are always in excess of our identities and that it is not enough to relate and respond to others as bearers of particular identities. Yet Cavell shows us that one cannot be fully responsive to the other without attending to identity, to the concrete particularities of oneself and the other. This is not to say that singularity does not play a crucial role in Cavell’s thinking. We are, he argues, fundamentally separate from one another and “I” am never 203

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“exhausted by all the definitions or descriptions the world gives of me to me.” At the same time, “I” can come to myself only in and through responsive relations to others, relations in which, to a significant extent, I receive myself from the other and vice versa. Such reception depends on my being able to declare myself, to take positions and test them with and against the other. The trick is to hold a difficult balance between dispossession and receptiveness, on the one hand, and self-assertion, on the other, or, as I will put it, to be attentive to oneself and others in terms of both singularity (the way each of us exceeds all descriptions) and particularity (the way we identify one another in responsive relation). The links between responsibility and responsiveness, singularity and particularity, and reception and declaration of self will be major themes in what follows. A second, closely related, organizing theme for this chapter is Cavell’s conception of the “ordinary.” De Vries and Santner both owe their main ideas and the style, or what Cavell would call the “mood,” of their thinking to Continental philosophy and critical theory. Th is is a tradition of thought characterized, especially in thinkers such as Heidegger and Derrida, by a rarified conceptual vocabulary developed in an effort to expose and explain various forms of false consciousness and to radically rethink, reimagine, and redirect human life. By contrast, Cavell was trained in the analytic tradition of philosophy, often perceived as more sober and plain-spoken, or at least less literary, than Continental philosophy. But he never has fit comfortably within this tradition and at times pays explicit attention to points of intersection between analytic and Continental philosophy. Moreover, his thinking has been shaped decisively by Wittgenstein and Austin, philosophers critical of many of the fundamental preoccupations of analytic philosophers. At the heart of their criticisms is what Cavell, following and elaborating on Austin, calls the “ordinary.” To put it as simply and concisely as possible (for now), Cavell thinks that we possess the resources, in our ordinary, practical, everyday interactions with others, and particularly within our ordinary language, to come to “a new reception of [our] own experience.” Cavell brings to the questions and issues I have been grappling with to this point in this book a philosophical style that draws us in and back to our own experience in a way that neither de Vries nor Santner does. It is not that either opposes Cavell’s views on the ordinary, on the contrary; nor is it that Cavell is more direct and 204

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accessible than either de Vries or Santner, for he has his own elusiveness and complexity; nor, fi nally, is Cavell less critical than they are with respect to the ways we fail to understand ourselves. Rather, Cavell’s commitment to the ordinary allows him to enact humanistic encounter more fully than de Vries or Santner and in a way that is particularly effective for reflecting on experience, responsibility, and responsiveness. This difference becomes particularly visible when we consider the autobiographical pitch of Cavell’s philosophy, that is, the way he inserts himself in his philosophizing, or, as he puts it, returns “voice” to philosophy, by constantly looking to his own experience, his own words, his own feelings. De Vries and Santner offer conceptual resources for thinking about philosophy and cultural criticism as forms of spiritual exercise; Cavell shows us this exercise in action. He claims that “philosophy’s virtue is its responsiveness,” but also that this virtue cannot be understood apart from “what may appear as [philosophy’s] esotericism,” that is, “its power to divide one from himself or herself, or one from others, in the name of healing or of bringing peace.” With phenomenological exactness and existential pathos, Cavell casts his own ordinary experience as a site of philosophical experimentation and reflection, inquiring into what he is willing to count as his experience. He tests his experience with others, but also resists forces of mediation that would separate him from his own experience: “To cede the understanding of my experience, trivial and crucial [to disciplines such as history or anthropology,] would require, from my point of view, a massive effort at discounting.” To resist the temptation to such discounting and to declare his own understanding of his experience is, for Cavell, to practice a form of responsiveness to himself, to others, and to history and culture that he calls “perfectionism.” Integral to perfectionism is a practice of cultural criticism grounded in questions such as, “What am I willing to consent to?” and “What do I find worthy of praise?” Such criticism cultivates “aliveness” and is, as Cavell puts it, a “conduct of gratitude.”

Cavell and Religion

De Vries and Santner are explicit that the encounter with religion is  central to their work. By contrast, a glance through The Claim of 205

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Reason or some of Cavell’s other major works will suggest that religion is, at most, a minor concern for him. His comments on religion, though sometimes provocative and insightful, often serve as occasions for him to distinguish religion from philosophy and to assert himself as a secular philosopher. But there is often an insistence about these claims that suggests that matters are more complicated. Although he has never engaged in a sustained and explicit discussion of religion, Cavell does seem, if not haunted by it, more intrigued or provoked by it than he generally acknowledges. It is not surprising, then, that recently an increasing number of commentators have been exploring the place of religion in Cavell’s work and what Peter Dula describes as the “curious space Cavell inhabits between or beyond the conventional hostilities between philosophy and theology.” Dula (and Stephen Mulhall, one of the earliest commentators to examine this space) quotes Cavell: “Christianity is something that in its very presence is to be expected, that exists only in expectation, say faith. Then the absence or refusal of Christianity is a constant offer of its possibility or presence.” Although Cavell sometimes asserts that theology no longer is a live option for modern thinkers, claims like this have to be balanced with the demand for openness to the other and to the future that is integral to his views on responsiveness and moral perfectionism. In other words, his challenges to and even dismissals of theology, and religion more generally, are an opening to encounter with it. In my view, however, even the most sympathetic and theologically attuned commentators have been too selective in considering the importance of religion in Cavell’s work. It is surprising, for instance, that Mulhall and Dula, both of whom are exquisitely attuned to Cavell’s thinking, rarely mention The Senses of Walden or A Pitch of Philosophy in their discussions of Cavell and religion, even though Cavell engages religion more explicitly in these books than in most, if not all, of his others. In the former, Cavell reads Thoreau’s Walden as “scripture,” as a new “Testament”: “This writer is writing a sacred text. This commits him, from a religious point of view, to the claim that its words are revealed, received, and not merely mused.” Among the themes Cavell reflects on in the book are sin, rebirth, faith, wakefulness, prophecy, mysticism, and ecstasy. Of course, Cavell is writing about Thoreau’s views on these matters, not, at least first of all, expressing his own views on, say, sin and rebirth. Or, more precisely, he is engaging the views of 206

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the author of Walden, for he constantly refers not to “Thoreau” but to the “writer” of Walden. This clues us in to the fact that Cavell’s book is first of all a book about writing and, crucially, a text in which he explores and articulates his own aspirations as a writer and so a text in which the line between Cavell and the “writer” he is writing about is difficult to discern. This difficulty is essential to Cavell’s efforts, found throughout his writing, to experiment with modes of philosophy and put into play the lines we ordinarily draw between philosophy, religion, and literature. Given Cavell’s own reflections on what it means for him to be a philosopher, and given his decades-long effort to get Thoreau and Emerson recognized as the first figures in American philosophy, it is remarkable that he would read Walden, a text that many others have treated as unproblematically secular, with such fine and thoughtful attention to its religious themes and figures. A Pitch of Philosophy is not saturated with religious themes and theological reflection in the way that The Senses of Walden is. But it is framed by religion, more specifically by Judaism and Cavell’s relation to it. In the preface, Cavell discusses essays by Gershom Scholem, the twentieth century’s foremost scholar of Jewish mysticism, and takes this as an opportunity to reflect, as he rarely does in his earlier work, on his own Jewishness. And to each of the chapters of this book on the autobiographical pitch of philosophy Cavell appends passages from Scholem’s essay “Walter Benjamin and His Angel,” each of which has to do with Jewish rituals and conceptions of naming and selfhood, specifically with secret names and personal angels. The first of these relates how the young Jewish man, at his bar mitzvah, is called by his secret name to read Torah. This is an act of singling out, conferring on the young man, with a new name that will be used only in God’s presence, the obligation to keep the commandments of the Torah. “Philosophy,” Cavell has written, “can’t say sin.” Yet, in this book on autobiography, voice, and responsibility, it seems that sin and its link to selfhood are on his mind. Cavell reflects on his decision, at age sixteen, to change his name: I began to know or know that I knew that the deed of declaring a name, or making a name, or any questioning of your identity, was being linked with criminality, forged together with it. Quite as if the reason for being singled out with a name were not just to be traceable 207

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in the case of wrongdoing, but before that, as its ground, to serve notice that identifiable actions, deeds, the works of human beings, are the source of identity, and consequently constitute identity through accusation—all doing known as wrongdoing. The first guilt is being the one you are. So we are originally sinners.

If philosophy is autobiography, and we are originally sinners, does that make philosophy, for Cavell, a form of confession? How is Cavell’s “original sin” related to de Vries’s “bad conscience”? At this point, I invoke these texts merely to say that Cavell has been more preoccupied with questions of religion than many acknowledge, but not to make any determinate claims about the significance of this preoccupation. I am not drawing from these observations the conclusion that Cavell is a religious thinker or that, despite his rather clear protestations, he believes in, or has (much) need of the concept of, God. Rather, I will say only that at specific points, often at those points when he is considering the existential depths of skepticism and questions of identity and autobiography, or, more recently, when he is considering cultural criticism as a “conduct of gratitude,” he seems to need theological thinking, or at least to have recourse to religious thematics. At times, as I have noted, he invokes religion to mark his distance from it. At other times, however, he seems to find in “religious” language (say, in Thoreau’s “testament”), if not the most precise, then at least the most vivid, affecting, and even autobiographical way of saying what he wants to say. Or perhaps the most affi rmative way of saying it. The writer of Walden, Cavell tells us, comes to us from a sense of loss. Whether this is the “writer’s” loss or that of his neighbors—whom he wants to wake up to and from their “quiet desperation,” even “perdition”—is not always clear. What is clear is that the writer wants to share with them, and us, his own efforts to recover himself and his experience: The experiment is the present—to make himself present to each circumstance, at every eventuality; since he is writing, in each significant mark. The very awareness of time compromises presentness; the succession of words is itself a rebuke. There never is but one opportunity of a kind. That is the threat, but also the promise. To go on, untransformed, unchaste so far as you know, means that you have not been divided by the fact and concluded your mortal career. But to 208

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learn to await, in the way you write, and therewith in every action, is to learn not to despair of opportunity unforeseen. That was always the knack of faith.

This recovery begins with what Cavell calls acknowledgment, which should be understood as his response to the problem of skepticism as a form of “despair.” Many commentators interested in the question of religion in Cavell have, for good reason, focused on his response to sin, despair, desperation, and skepticism. Below, I do so as well, but my main interest is to push further to what Cavell calls in this passage “faith.” I take a cue from the theologian Graham Ward’s comment on Cavell’s acknowledgment, which he describes as “the entré to the practice and discipline of appreciation, not the passive letting things be as they are, but the (difficult) praising of what is.” Cavell, I argue, may come closest to the theological, and to a certain faith, when he shows us how to (re)introduce terms such as “praise,” “trust,” and “gratitude” into our critical lexicon.

Acknowledgment Skepticism, the Ordinary, and Perfectionism

The task of Walden, Cavell writes, is “to discover how to earn and spend our most wakeful hours—whatever we are doing.” Too often, though, what we are doing is avoiding or disowning our experience. Cavell’s well-known, career-long engagement with the problem of skepticism shows how philosophical skepticism emerges from an existential avoidance, from a kind of psychic rigidity or defensiveness—a “melancholy,” he sometimes claims—that leads us to separate ourselves from, by becoming suspicious of, our own experience. Even more fundamentally, it is a denial of the deep agreements and attunements between people that Cavell argues, following Wittgenstein, are the very conditions of human language, selfhood, and experience, the conditions that “alone provide the coherence of our expression.” Skepticism’s denial of these conditions fantasizes, in a metaphysical mode, an epistemological foundation “that goes beyond human sense and certainty.” In other words, it denies, or seeks to go beyond, “the ordinary.” 209

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The conception of the ordinary emerges from Cavell’s readings of Wittgenstein and Austin. Wittgenstein, he argues, extends the Kantian project by arguing for the necessity of a transcendental deduction, or what Wittgenstein calls the “grammatical investigation,” of each word of our language. This process identifies the “criteria” for each word, that is, the agreements that make it possible for words or concepts to do their work. For Wittgenstein (as for Heidegger), these agreements emerge from the complex, multifarious practical relationships that constitute forms of life. Ordinary language philosophy, as Cavell has it, understands our words as the site of these agreements and relationships: they are “knots of agreement,” the medium of our “attunement” with one another. By articulating the conditions for our knowledge in this way, ordinary language philosophy alerts us to our tendency to ask more of knowledge than it can give and so to fall into skepticism, into ordinary language’s own repudiation of “its power to word the world, to apply to the things we have in common.” Ordinary language philosophy thus takes a Kantian approach to skepticism by setting limits to our knowledge and placing skeptical questions beyond those bounds. But for Cavell, and, he argues, for Wittgenstein, skepticism casts a much more uncanny spell than it does for Kant, for language itself continually “bewitches” us by leading us to feel disappointment or dissatisfaction with the power of our words and with our ordinary relationships with things and with others. Skepticism thus tempts us away from our intimate connections with the world. At the same time, Cavell argues that to respond to this temptation by trying to refute skepticism philosophically or ignore it existentially is a mistake. Skepticism is something we have to bear, for there is “truth” in it. It is, in other words, a “natural” expression of the fact that “we are endlessly separate” from one another. Skepticism, Cavell argues, is a sign of the existential ambivalence about the limits of our condition that are marked by that separateness—and this ambivalence is also a part of our condition. The desire to remove ourselves from our ordinary connections to the world and to others by wondering whether one can “know” anything at all or whether other people actually exist is as human, as ordinary, as those connections themselves. To seek to refute skepticism denies our condition as much as skepticism itself does. Another truth of skepticism is this: that we do not know with certainty that the world or others exist is not a “ failure of knowledge” but 210

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rather an indication that our primary relation to others and the world is not one of knowing. Reading Emerson and Thoreau through Wittgenstein and Austin, Cavell argues that careful attention to the ordinary meanings of words suggests that we don’t really “know” or “believe” that the world and others exist. Both the philosophical skeptic, despairing of knowledge of the world and of others, and the philosophical critic of skepticism, asserting such knowledge, try to get words such as “knowledge” to work beyond the criteria that make them meaningful in the first place. They both ignore or fail to see the more primary relation to the world and others that Cavell calls “acknowledgment”: “[The world’s] presentness to us cannot be a function of knowing. The world is to be accepted; as the presentness of other minds is not to be known, but acknowledged.” The Kantian solution to skepticism is to view knowledge as active, the work of the categories of understanding on sensuous intuition. But Cavell argues that knowledge is based on the passivity or the receptiveness of acknowledgment. The more we actively try to “grasp” the world or the other, the more we find them slipping out of our hands—we are, to cite Emerson, in an “unhandsome” condition. We must learn to think receptively, not just representationally; we must learn, in other words, “to let objects become impressive to us, matter to us.” Peter Dula notes that the ordinary is not for Cavell simply a given state of language or life but rather a form of “attentiveness.” It is the attentiveness peculiar to Cavell’s moral perfectionism, a way of life based on the testing and experimenting with our conditions so that we are able to constantly recover the ordinary that we are constantly losing. The skeptical refusal of our conditions, the quest for intellectual or existential certainty, can lead to a demonic and destructive drive to the inhuman. At the same time, if we are too complacent in accepting the necessity of our experience and everyday life, if we try once and for all to deny or repress our ordinary tendency or desire to exceed our conditions, we become confined by habit and false necessity, captive to the “repetitious inertia of social construction” that Thoreau describes as “quiet desperation.” In this state, we refuse the truth of skepticism as a way of refusing our separateness. So we avoid the task of finding ourselves in relation to ourselves and to the world and the society of which we are a part. For Cavell, this is not some lone, individualist quest for authenticity, for we are fundamentally social beings, attuned to one 211

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another, inextricably linked through our words and meanings. Yet in the context of the “habitual” or “actual everyday,” we fail to see the full expanse of these words and meanings—we narrow our vision under pressures of conformity and with illusions of false necessity to the point where the ordinary meaning of our words, in all their depth, nuance, connotation, and history, is lost: “Our faithlessness to our language repeats our faithlessness to all our shared commitments.” This is the key to Cavell’s reading of Walden and to his own challenging style of writing. The writer of Walden, Cavell argues, seeks “to demonstrate the fearful esotericism of his culture’s parlance as it stood, to preserve its words against its demented wish to damage and deny them.” Such efforts of preservation sometimes necessitate styles of writing that force us to listen, as if for the first time, to what our words are saying. Thoreau’s sojourn in the woods is not a form of flight or withdrawal from his neighbors. (Cavell mocks those who think they criticize Thoreau by noting that his house at Walden Pond was only a mile from society’s settlement.) Nor is Cavell’s writing only for those with ears to hear. Each is engaged in “a confrontation, a return, a constant turning upon his neighbor”—and also, and just as much, in a confrontation or turning upon himself. Perfectionism, as the turn from the “actual everyday” to the “ordinary” or “eventual” everyday, is the work of attentiveness that one performs on self and culture, a struggle with words and with others by which, living beyond habit and false necessity, one remains committed to and expands our ordinary agreements. The ordinary is an achievement. Philosophy, as a perfectionist practice, is both spiritual exercise and cultural critique. It investigates the “grammar” of our words, examining their conditions, hearing them from all sides, listening to their resonances; it “recounts” them, making them count again, testing and contesting our inheritance of language and word. In philosophy, as Cavell puts it, I “confront the culture with itself, along the lines which it meets in me.” 

Presentness

One way Cavell distinguishes acknowledgment from knowledge is by distinguishing our “nearness” to the world and to one another from our “knowledge” of them. Cavell does describe acknowledgment as “an in212

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terpretation of knowing.”  Although we can know certain things about objects and people without acknowledging them—say, scientifically— certain things are only knowable on the basis of acknowledgment, only, as Emerson puts it, when “we love and aspire,” when we are engaged with and respond to things and people by letting them matter to us. To acknowledge something is to recognize it as making an impression on us; in this sense it is receptive. But it also entails recognition of our habitual efforts to deny such impressions, especially in our relations with others. So to acknowledge someone is to take responsibility for oneself in relation to him or her, to let oneself be impressed by the words—and the gestures and the expressions—that come from the other. It is a “spiritual task” of recognizing and relating to the other between commonality and separateness. Perceiving your wince, I recognize our commonality, that is, I recognize the wince as a criterion for pain. Perhaps I acknowledge your pain, though I might instead deny you by questioning whether you really are in pain. But to acknowledge you in your pain is not simply to mark or register your pain—to know that you are in it—but to respond to it. You feel the pain. Acknowledging this, letting your expression impress me, I respond to it. This is what it means, for Cavell, to be “near” or “present” to the other even as we each are “absolutely separate” from one another. In his book on Thoreau, Cavell takes on the task that Thoreau assigned himself in Walden: “the present was my next experiment of this kind.”  “This,” of course, refers to Thoreau’s sojourn at the pond in the woods, his experiment in dwelling. But, to come back to the passage I quoted above, the writing of Walden is itself also an experiment—an experiment with being “near” or “present.” Both the dwelling and the writing are “ways of arriving at the present.” The writer arrives there by making every word count, making every word and then every sentence bring itself to a point that both finishes something and opens up a path forward. This “location”—the word, the sentence, the book—is always also a moment in a process: it is always slipping away, carrying us from that present, “compromising presentness,” since the character of this dwelling will, in some respects, only be determined retroactively, in the way that Thoreau’s time at Walden only became what it is in the writing of Walden. This succession is a rebuke and a loss. It requires continuous mourning: “The world must be regained every day, in repetition, regained as gone.” But it can be regained, so succession is also a promise—if we 213

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can dwell or write in a way that is open to the future, that occupies the present as a condition of being able to go on, of knowing how to take one’s leave. Thoreau’s experiment requires a constant rebirth into the present and what he calls the “infinite expectation of the dawn.” To be in the present is also to mark one’s separation from it. It is, in “faith,” to refuse the “despair” of loss. Cavell has long recognized that his ideas about presentness have certain affinities with, but also place him at a distance from, Derrida’s critique of the metaphysics of presence. He is in general agreement with Derrida’s effort to think beyond the “metaphysics of presence” and metaphysics more generally, which, Cavell asserts, “suffocates” the ordinary voice of philosophy. But he also marks a difference between Derrida’s “presence,” a metaphysical concept having to do with “Being,” and his “presentness,” which is about one’s stance in the world. Cavell works out this distinction by questioning Derrida’s claims about the metaphysics of voice, contesting the claim that philosophers without exception have treated writing as merely an “extension” of speech that tears language away from the “unity of thought and voice in knowing.”  For Thoreau, Cavell argues, presentness is a function of writing, not of speech, which is not a reversal of the hierarchy of speech and writing (where writing would be understood to be prior to or the condition of possibility for speech), but a more fundamental rethinking of the relationship between these terms. For Thoreau, writing is not an “extension” of speech, but an “experience” of it, or, more precisely, a reexperiencing or “recounting” of it: [Writing’s] alteration of speech is not accidental but essential; it is not different in means or in medium if this means that you can tell the difference between writing and speaking by the senses as they stand, for reading with understanding requires reborn sensation, and first in hearing; and writing differs from speaking not by its more powerful technical mediation over greater distance but by a “memorable interval” which is to say, in Thoreau’s lingo, by a discontinuous reconstitution of what has been said, a recounting of the past, autobiographizing, deriving words from yourself.

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oneself. As in Derrida, writing here is a matter of iterability, for one comes to oneself only in a “discontinuous reconstitution,” a recounting, of what one has said and done. Cavell thus is not appealing to a stable, unified, transparent self, from which speech proceeds, but claiming that writing’s interval is a discipline by which one examines one’s speech and life and becomes a self. This emphasis on recounting counters metaphysical conceptions of speech with an appeal to the ordinary: in writing, one tests one’s words against their criteria, asking whether what one has said or done fits with our criteria and whether one can accept such criteria as they stand. It also counters metaphysical conceptions of writing. For Cavell, Derrida’s claim that the ordinary is an “effect . . . of a general writing” is itself metaphysical and privileges “system over individual intervention . . . sign over word.”  This brings me back to my claim about the limits of de Vries’s account of responsibility and responsiveness. Deconstructive responsibility emphasizes the singularity of the other. This is evident in deconstructive practices of reading and writing, in which the reader remains infinitely open to the singularity or “untameable strangeness” of the text, refusing closure, teasing out the strategies and figures by which we exclude and assimilate. But is the deconstructive mode of receiving a text or an other, an opening to the singularity and strangeness of the other, or even of oneself, in fact a mode of responsiveness? Even though de Vries argues for the necessity of betraying my infinite responsibility (and the openness of hospitality) in particular acts of responsibility, he does not attend enough, I think, to the particularity, as opposed to the singularity, of the other. Responsiveness, that is, is a matter of responding simultaneously to the other as both singular and particular, both the unknowable, unassimilable “other” and the human being who, to a greater or lesser extent, shares with me a form of life and with whom I can speak. Deconstructive attention to the singular, to the other as radically other, is necessary for responsiveness, but to the extent that we pay exclusive attention to the singular, we repeat the skeptic’s response to human limit and human condition and construct an esoteric philosophical idiom of never-ending deferral that dissolves the ordinary voice in the play of signifiers. Michael Fisher, reflecting on Cavell and Derrida, remarks on the “pathos of separation” evident in Derrida’s statement that “no one is there for anyone, not even for himself.” Cavell’s appeal to “voice” and “presentness,” by contrast, opens up 215

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philosophy for the exploration and testing of the conditions of nearness, of ordinary intimacy.

Response: Experience and Experiment

Let me go back to the end of a passage I quoted above: “But to learn to await, in the way you write, and therewith in every action, is to learn not to despair of opportunity unforeseen. That was always the knack of faith.” To learn to “await” in one’s writing is to take the words of a text or an other, truly read or heard, as an “opportunity” for response. Like Derrida and de Vries, Cavell’s understanding of reading and responsiveness demands a certain passivity before or radical receptiveness to the text or the other. It is a matter, as Mulhall puts it, of “philosophical thinking as essentially receptive—as a matter of reading by being read.” In The Senses of Walden, Cavell tells us that he has “come to trust Walden,” which means, among other things, that when encountering points in the text where there is a temptation to doubt or disagree with the book, “I am not quick to determine whether it is failing me, or I it. My subject is nothing apart from sensing the specific weight of these words as they sink.” Cavell as reader receives the words of the text and allows them to question him as they “sink”; he has the patience to listen to them sound the depths. At the same time, such reception is only possible if I allow the words to question me: “Who am I that I should be called upon in these ways?” Cavell’s responsiveness involves a complex dynamic of receptivity and activity—in other words, writing. Responding to the text (or to another) requires that I bring myself before it, which means not only that I must let it matter to me, but also that I must have a sense of where I stand, even if that stance is being questioned, and a sense of what it moves me to say. What, here and now, before this text, before this other person, am I experiencing? If I simply dissolve myself before the text or the other, if I remain infi nitely open, response is impossible. Instead, it is necessary to attend closely not only to the words (and gestures and expressions) of the text (or the other), but also to the ways in which those words move one to speech and, then, to the deliberation involved writing. This deliberation is central to what Cavell understands as the “dec-

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laration” of self. Expression (speech) happens: I am provoked, astonished, impressed, disturbed and so I speak or gesture. In writing, I recount and reconstitute my expression and my experience, or my experience of expression. This is writing as “autobiography,” that is, as a critical exploration and reiteration of one’s words and one’s experience. Saying something, if it is not to be a step astray, is not simply a matter of what one happens to be “moved” to say, but rather the result of deliberation, testing, or experimenting with what one is moved to say in order to see whether it is in fact derived from oneself, whether I was speaking or simply echoing the words of others and, in the process, becoming lost to my own experience. “Finding and accepting and confidence and trust require our interest in our experiment, in our experiences, in what happens to us.” To write is to take interest in one’s experiences and expressions and to experiment with them. What kind of interest do we have in our experience? How is experience a matter of experiment? Emerson distinguishes between a “grand” empiricism, “a science of the real,” and a “paltry empiricism” that despairs of the world. For Cavell, the role of “experience” in analytic philosophers such as Quine, where it serves mainly as a “checkpoint in sensory prediction,” is paltry. Grand empiricism, by contrast, is a matter of finding one’s experience and so one’s world, of “demanding from whatever I am moved to say, its capacity to resist the temptation to become lost to the world of my own experience.” That both Emerson and Cavell are primarily writers of essays is not accidental. An essay is an experiment that puts an idea or a feeling or an experience on trial, testing it, refining or disowning it. This demands a delicate balance of self-assertion and reception, which is what I mean by responsiveness. Thus the declaration of the self is not an assertion that closes the self in a confrontation with others. Rather, it opens or exposes the self to others. Stephen Mulhall puts it like this: “My existence as a human individual is not just a fact about me or about the world, and it is not something that I can simply be thought to grasp entirely independently of the reactions and responses of others.”  One finds one’s experience, keeps oneself from losing it, through a self-revelation that acknowledges the other and makes it possible for one to receive oneself back from the other. I “declare” myself by responding to the other out of my own experience, out of my effort to find myself, at this place

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and this time, needing to respond to this particular call. Acknowledging your pain requires my expression, my response, and attention to our connection and separation. By denying our separateness, Cavell argues, the skeptic also denies the possibility for ordinary intimacy with others. Unless our practices of writing and reading not only welcome the other in his or her singularity, but also draw near to his or her particularity using the words that we share, we are alone and in despair. But what makes any of this philosophy? Cavell proposes that in speaking out of his own experience he can find the words to speak for all of humanity. He knows that this sounds bad—arrogant, universalistic. Indeed, he describes it as the “arrogation” of voice: “The autobiographical dimension of philosophy is internal to the claim that philosophy speaks for the human, for all; that is its necessary arrogance. The philosophical dimension of autobiography is that the human is representative, say, imitative, that each life is exemplary of all, a parable of each; that is humanity’s commonness, which is internal to its endless denials of commonness.” This is a very particular sort of universalistic claim and perhaps is better conceived as an assertion of, or claim to, nearness. It is a claim, in other words, that makes space for answer and response in an effort to discover wherein “the human” consists—a call to the other for edifying conversation about the conditions of human life. This arrogation of philosophical voice, or any voice that speaks for the human in this sense, asserts the human in a practice of sounding connection and separation. It is based on a claim to test and defi ne, not to transcend, particularity. My speaking is “exemplary of the human condition as such” in the sense that I, like all human beings, must submit myself to ordinary language, can make myself intelligible to myself and others in my particularity only by obeying the ordinary language that we share (or I may find that we don’t share a particular form of language, that “we” are not a we). Both standing apart from and connecting with others, in conversation, we place ourselves in relation to our common language. I find myself, come to my expression, in relation to others as together we plumb our language, thus our conditions. To “press to the limits of experience,” I must both acknowledge others, letting them impress me and challenge my words, and declare myself, arrogate my voice.

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Critical Piety in the Midst of Life: Writing Gratitude and Praise When my reasons come to an end and I am thrown back upon myself, upon my nature as it has so far shown itself, I can, supposing I cannot shift the ground of discussion, either put the pupil out of my sight . . . or I can use the occasion to go over the ground I had hitherto thought foregone. If the topic is that of continuing a series, it may be learning enough to find that I just do; to rest upon myself as my foundation. But if the child, little or big, asks me: Why do we eat animals? Or Why are some people poor and others rich? Or What is God? Or Why do I have to go to school? Or Do you love black people as much as white people? Or Who owns the land? Or Why is there anything at all? Or How did God get here?, I may find my answers thin, I may feel run out of reasons without being willing to say “this is what I do” (what I say, what I sense, what I know), and honor that. Then I may feel that my foregone conclusions were never conclusions I had arrived at, but were merely imbibed by me, merely conventional. I may blunt that realization through hypocrisy or cynicism or bullying. But I may take the occasion to throw myself back upon my culture, and ask why we do what we do, judge as we judge, how we have arrived at these crossroads. —STANLEY CAVELL 64

The call to one’s own experience is at the heart of Cavell’s practice of cultural criticism, which, he says, “cuts and separates, in order to edify.” To edify is to educate, and philosophy, as an “education for grownups,” edifies by drawing others and oneself to the call of experience and from there to engaging questions about the “we” and the “I.” “Who are we?” “Where have we been and where are we going?” “Am I a part of your we?” “What, if anything, do ‘we’ share?” Coming to judgment about culture, the philosophical critic educates others only as he or she also educates him- or herself in and through exposure to others and to culture. This is the “crossroads” to which Cavell refers in the long passage quoted above, a site of confrontation. “What I require,” Cavell writes, “is a convening of my culture’s criteria, in order to confront them with my words and life as I pursue them and as I may imagine them; and at the same time to confront my words and life as I pursue them with the life my culture’s words may imagine for me: to confront

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the culture with itself, along the lines in which it meets in me.” Philosophy as cultural criticism and spiritual exercise: this is Cavell’s perfectionism. To count something as my experience is a matter of experimenting with the words I receive from my culture. The “return to the ordinary” throws one back on oneself, on one’s expressions, assuming not that they automatically reflect agreements and attunements with others but that they must be tested with others, as though one gropes with one’s words, one’s voice, in order to find the precise sites of agreement and disagreement: “There is no case in which the reference of a word or our sharing of it may not be contested.” We are bound by the agreements and attunements that constitute our language and experience. But not completely, for we are separate and no one shares exactly my experience. At any moment, with every word with which I find and declare my experience, I may strain and even break these agreements. I may find myself on the edge of my community, grappling with the question of whether I can consent to current political arrangements or with the fact that I am moved to praise or reject something that is ignored or valued by my neighbors. Am I living aslant from them by violating the agreements that bind us, ignoring the criteria of our common words? Or are my neighbors doing so, narrowing their understanding of what it means to consent, refusing to sound the culture around them and so impoverishing their, our, lives? Or perhaps our divisions are simply the result of fundamental disconnection due either to my own particularity in relation to my community or communities, what Cavell describes as “the small differences and intimacies my existence projects,” or to our participation in different forms of life, or perhaps to something new in my experience. After all, human communities are never unitary or fully coherent; they are constituted out of multiple histories and forms of life and they change. Philosophy as cultural criticism takes different forms in Cavell. Two distinctions are key for my purposes in the rest of the chapter. One is the distinction between what I will call recovery and expansion. Recovery is a mode of criticism that appeals to our criteria to show that a current political arrangement, work of art, moral action, or religious practice or idea does or does not deserve our affi rmation. What we imagine to be fundamental agreement may in fact only be a result of unthinking conformity. Expansion, by contrast, has to do with the 220

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claim that an aesthetic, political, moral, or religious position, decision, or work that seems to violate our criteria in fact creatively expands or pushes them in a new direction, like a fresh metaphor that allows us to see things in a new way: “What makes metaphor unnatural is its occasion to transcend our criteria; not as if to repudiate them, as if they are arbitrary; but to expand them, as though they are contracted.” Or like the way a work of art or a philosophical or theological text comes to bear new meaning as new readers bring new experiences to them. Such expansion of criteria is fundamental to the way language works. It is also fundamental to acknowledgment as a form of attention that has the power to reconfigure relationships: “In the realm of the figurative, our words are not felt as confining but as releasing, or not as binding but as bonding.” Of course, it may be that what I felt, and came to determine as my experience, and thus as true to our criteria or a necessary expansion of them, may not be acknowledged or taken up by others. This may lead me to question myself, or it may lead me to mark my distance from the common life of my neighbors. “My words and my life as I pursue them” may distance me from our agreements. Or, in and through criticism and argument, it might lead us to expand our agreements, and so reshape our common life. Cavell also distinguishes between criticism as disapproval, denunciation, or demystification and criticism as praise and gratitude. Criticism may be an expression of my withdrawal of consent from a political arrangement or the denial of an aspect of “the life my culture’s words may imagine for me.” Alternatively, it may take the form of praise for an aspect of my culture, affirming its words (or art, or ideals, and so on) because they fit or expand our sense of beauty or justice or illuminate deep questions and truths. Cavell certainly thinks that criticism as denial, refusal, or suspicion has its place, but he echoes Walter Benjamin’s complaint that criticism is too often merely a “negative court of judgment.” To think beyond the joyless, knowing that conformity characterizes much contemporary critical practice, especially in its claims to demystification, is to think about criticism in a more affi rmative register. Cavell thus seeks, under the influence of Emerson’s “tropism toward joy” and Nietzsche’s “sacred yes,” to think criticism as a “conduct of gratitude . . . a specification and test of tribute.” Colin Davis goes so far as to call Cavell’s criticism a “secular form of adoration.” “True praise” declares, tests, and, when received by the other, confi rms the 221

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objects, ideas, and practices under consideration—a process through which we learn to be impressed by, even to love them. Gratitude is an expression of dependence or obligation, a mode of receiving that which is being praised as a gift, in this case a gift that allows one to see oneself and one’s relations to others and the world more clearly, that makes one more alive. As praise and gratitude, criticism educates us with respect to what attracts us and matters to us, teaching us to identify and attend to it. “Sacred yes,” “gratitude,” “adoration,” “rebirth,” “trust,” “the knack of faith”: there is much to consider as one explores the religious and theological resonance in these words, all of which, in one way or another, are connected, in Cavell’s work, to praise and gratitude as critical practices. And this raises the question: How might philosophy as a critical and affirmative practice be deepened and illuminated through engagement with forms of attention worked out in various religious traditions, such as spiritual discipline, worship, veneration, and adoration? An early provocation, one that finds echoes in Cavell’s most recent work on philosophy as cultural criticism in Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow, provides me with a first step in this direction. Cavell ends the early essay “Knowing and Acknowledging” with an expression of “gratitude” toward poetry as the means by which human beings turn to the “unknown”: “This sense of unknownness,” he goes on to say, “is a competitor of the sense of childish fear as an explanation for our idea, and need, of God.” Cavell is giving voice to what was perhaps no more than an intuition—as far as I have been able to determine, he never pursues the issue further, at least explicitly. But it is an idea that continues to resonate in his thinking or, I should say, that opens up a range of questions that his work continues to pose for us, especially with respect to what it is to confront and reflect on the unknown, not as a source of fear, but as a realm to explore, the site of the expansion of the words and worlds we do, or might, share. For Santner, this “unknownness” is the site of the opening to “more life.” I take this “more life”—and the “pressure” to open up to it (Santner’s definition of God)—to be a useful way to think about Cavell’s perfectionist imperative to identify and reflect on the limits of our experience. Santner views the failure to press to these limits in the habitual avoidance of “the uncanny presence” of our neighbors. What is required to overcome this avoidance is a miracle or grace, in the form of 222

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divine pressure to “acknowledge” them (Santner borrows this term from Cavell). This way of thinking about the divine decisively shifts the problematic of transcendence from a concern with something or someplace beyond or higher than life and reality to a concern with the concrete details of ordinary life. “What is more than life,” Santner writes, is “immanent to and constitutive of life itself.” I invoke Santner here in order to make two points. The first I will only consider in  the form of some questions. Where, for Cavell, does the ability or willingness to acknowledge the other come from? One reason I find Santner so illuminating on the topics of love and more life is his psychotheological account of grace. I don’t find this in Cavell, nor do I find an equally compelling account of the source of acknowledgment. Is there a place for grace in Cavell’s thinking? To what extent is a conception of grace necessary for a rich conception of gratitude? The second point has to do with the affinities between cultural criticism in Santner and Cavell. Santner finds the divine pressure to be alive expressed in cultural artifacts and the demands they make on us. They “call” out to us to be open not just to our neighbors here and now, but to the past. That is to say, Santner finds a crucial role for the aesthetic, and particularly for poetry, in opening us to this “more,” claiming that the “sparks or blessings of ‘more life’ within [our social relations] . . . can be liberated from their undeadness by the intervention of the right word.” Cavell also traces lines between aesthetics, theory, criticism, and life, lines that extend, at times, even to theology. Cavell theorizes and exemplifies this relationship most explicitly in Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow, a book that perhaps more than any other finds Cavell preoccupied with questions of criticism and experience, with criticism as a practice of finding, reflecting on, and experimenting with experience. There, Cavell writes that aesthetic criticism “reveal[s] its object as having yet to achieve its due effect.” He means by this that aesthetic criticism builds on and continues the work of art; it makes possible certain effects that the work alone does not produce. In the background here is Kant’s view that aesthetic judgment is reflective, not simply an assertion of taste. Aesthetic judgment begins in the subjective experience of being moved by something, in desire or passion. But in and through reflection, this feeling takes shape as judgment and so makes “comprehensibly universal claim[s]” on the taste and sensibility of others. Such reflection articulates and tests the grounds, the criteria, upon which 223

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“the fact of pleasure” is based. It is, therefore, not just a matter of “me” and my taste but of “us” and our life together. From this perspective, emotivist theories that would regard such judgments as “simply” propositional statements with a dash of feeling—say, of approval or disapproval—are empty, for, as Cavell argues, in the context of recounting one’s experience, such approval or disapproval is moral or aesthetic judgment and subject to rational debate as to the appropriateness or felicity of invoking certain criteria in particular contexts, that is, given certain states of the world. Articulating these connections, these states, and our position with respect to them, and subjecting them to questioning, and eliciting agreement or rebuke may bring to light or expand bonds between us. Cavell expresses close affinity with Santner’s view of aesthetic criticism and redemption when he claims that such criticism “bears a new responsibility for the resuscitation of the world, of our aliveness to it.” Cavell further develops his conception of judgment by working out and extending Austin’s theory of speech acts and particularly his distinctions between locutionary, illocutionary, and perlocutionary forms of speech. Austin focused primarily on the illocutionary, speech acts that in appropriate circumstances accomplish something in the saying of certain words, such as “I do” or “I promise.” They derive their effectiveness from relatively stable, often institutionalized rituals or conventions. Cavell focuses on perlocutionary acts, which, like illocutionary acts, are performative. They differ, however, in that they work not in but by saying something, as in acts of persuasion or intimidation. Further, they depend not on routine or ritualized performances in stable context but on specific performances in singular contexts, on the skill and improvisation that make “demands on the singular body.” Cavell is most interested to theorize a type of perlocutionary act that he calls “passionate utterance,” an act in which one expresses what he or she is “moved” to say as both a declaration of self and an invitation to encounter, that is, as the exploration and questioning of this declaration in the context of a shared life and hence as the bringing of it to concept and judgment: “One person, risking exposure to rebuff, singles out another, through the expression of an emotion and a claim of value, to respond in kind, that is, with appropriate emotion and action (if mainly of speech), here and now.” To bring this “claim of value” to concept and judgment involves evoking one’s subjective sense of pleasure, right224

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ness or wrongness, devotion, gratitude, or worthiness in the other by making vivid the shared context in which the experience is comprehensible. In doing so, one must expose oneself, open oneself to rebuke, and so make one’s experience a trial or ordeal, testing and so expanding or deepening, or perhaps rejecting, as in disowning, the experience itself. Success in this endeavor depends not on an appeal to convention, nor on an appeal to the structure of human rationality, but rather on the skill and responsiveness of the interlocutors in a given situation. In the essay “Something out of the Ordinary,” Cavell analyzes and praises a dance routine, performed by Fred Astaire, from the American film Band Wagon. The choice is significant, not just because the dance as aesthetic object is taken from “low,” that is, “ordinary,” culture—a film, and a popular American film at that—but also because the dance routine provokes vexed questions of race in American culture. The routine has been taken by some critics to pay homage to African American culture only by affirming, even excusing, its domination by white culture. Cavell acknowledges this reading, but asserts a counterclaim, arguing that Astaire’s “dance of praise” to African American dance both ironizes and contests white domination. My purpose here is not to take sides in this debate, but rather to praise the way Cavell takes his position in it: Is this art of song and of dance, which I make part of my experience, a part I wish to demand that others recognize as part of theirs, to be something from which we stand to derive the pleasure of what is beautiful, hence, according to Socrates, something to be loved—is this rightly ours to declare? In claiming, however anxiously, that it is, and in claiming agreement from you on the matter, I am not asking for permission to enter the claim. Who is in a position to grant or to deny me permission? The logic of my claim is that the claim is open to rebuke, perhaps from myself.

With this demand—and this is what is “arrogant” about Cavell’s “arrogation of voice”—Cavell puts other readings of the dance, and so the culture more generally, on trial, demanding attention and reasons from them, even as he does the same with his own. The tone is important here. Cavell puts forth the claim that he can rightly declare his experience to us, but does so “anxiously.” He knows this declaration, as an 225

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offer to share his experience, may be rebuked, that he even may end up rebuking himself. Cavell exposes himself, his pleasure, his praise, and his judgment to the judgment of those with whom he shares his culture. In this context, he highlights the passivity of passion—“Here I am, this is what moves me”—and the demand to submit one’s passion and one’s sense of value to the critical ordeal. From this perspective, the arrogation of voice, far from being an expression of the drive for power, is a gesture of vulnerability and dependence. I will return to this shortly. Cavell’s primary example of passionate utterance is aesthetic judgment, but he extends the idea to moral and religious judgments as well. Moreover, his focus on the aesthetic should not blind us to the deep moral significance he attributes to all forms of passionate utterance. That is to say, aesthetic judgment, just as in the more obvious cases of moral and religious judgment, is always “ethical encounter,” an element of moral perfectionism, for it solicits and remakes self and community. What are our words? What do we praise? The point of asking this question, with this inflection, is “not to provide an increase in learning but . . . a transformation in existence.” In taking up and testing a cultural work and finding it beautiful, true, or morally or religiously worthy, the critic places a demand on the experience of self and other, thus making the object under consideration a point of relationship and connection or, of course, disagreement and conflict. Emotivism fails to recognize how our experiences of pleasure and emotion are themselves conceptually and socially informed, like all experiences, and thus subject to reflection and criticism. The fact that I am moved in a certain way says something about us, something we can argue about. By the same token, conceptions of criticism grounded in social constructionism fail to understand how one can appeal to experience without making it foundational and, more importantly, fail to recognize how criticism, as social engagement, can change the social and cultural networks in which experience takes shape. This is particularly true of criticism that involves praise and gratitude as I see it working in Cavell, as a form of what Goodchild calls “critical piety.” “Piety” is often seen as the enemy of critical thinking, a kind of unthinking, romantic, or nostalgic submission that gets in the way of clear-eyed analysis and unmasking. To be pious, from this perspective, is to sacrifice reason and be easily duped. But why does such resolute, courageous, critical thinking matter? What commitments, 226

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what visions of life underlie such a vision of critical thinking? Yes, some forms of criticism do valuable work by exposing the mechanisms by which cultural work constructs identities and values as well as the contingencies and perhaps violence of our standpoints and commitments. But without passionate commitment to a form or forms of life, such criticism is lifeless. It leaves us adrift, unable to go on except in the direction of more criticism and more demystification. As Cavell puts it, when we fail to acknowledge and praise, we “draw our limits well short of anything reason requires.” To draw our limits more fully requires the kind of critical engagement with self and others made possible by praise and gratitude. Such criticism does the hard and necessary work on attention, thought, and commitment that enables one to move toward a mature and discerning sense of oneself and one’s community. For Santner, cultural criticism works toward “redemption”: for Cavell, it is a practice of “resuscitation.” Criticism enlivens: it identifies and cultivates passionate commitment and it opens us to sharing “more life” or to the more life that is sharing. Criticism as praise and gratitude asks us to take a stance, to actively embrace our pleasures, our values, our visions for the future as ours, not just as something we have been historically conditioned to embrace. To praise or give thanks is not simply to assert that something matters to us, but to initiate a process by which we explore that which matters to us. This involves learning how to let things matter and to explore what it is to be someone for whom things matter. It also, and this is particularly true of gratitude, is to reflect on how the assent that comes with praise places demands on us and on our lives together, on how we might reshape ourselves and our life together in accordance with what (really) matters to us. It is, in other words, responsible and responsive. When one makes an affirmative claim on or about one’s culture, one engages with others in an appeal to criteria, which entails a careful account of the place from which one speaks, an exposure of self to others and oneself. Remember that Nietzsche’s infamous attack on Christian “pity” has as its goal not so much the unmasking of Christianity or religion, but rather a critical opening toward shared joy: “I want to teach [those who feel pity] what is understood by so few today, least of all by these preachers of pity: to share not suffering but joy.” Critical piety seeks to recover the depths of our sharing, to think critically about how and what we share, and to expand the conditions for future sharing. My words of praise commit 227

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me to exploring the range and nuances of their meaning, which amounts to a process of discovery of beauty, justice, God, or love and what it is to affirm them. To praise or give thanks is to set out on a path of finding out what it is to praise and what is worthy of praise. We may find this together, but even in those cases where I determine that I have to find it on my own, I only find my separateness against the background of, and depending on, a multitude of other acknowledgments and agreements. Finally, to reflect on criticism as a conduct of gratitude is to return to a central argument of the book: theological thinking can help us imagine how to live between autonomy and heteronomy after secularism. Is there any discourse in Western culture that has done more to reflect on and develop the languages of praise and gratitude, particularly in the face of that on which we depend for our lives? For Rowan Williams, praise “is nothing if not the struggle to voice how the directedness of my regard depends on, is moulded by, something irreducibly other than itself.” Like contemplative silence (and closely related to it), praise is a practice of dispossession—Williams speaks of the “sacrifice of praise”— in which one learns to direct one’s attention to that which is other than oneself and to give oneself to it. The discipline, of course, is to learn to praise without self-aggrandizement or “object-cathexis,” that is, without the eternalizing or justifying by which we enclose ourselves protectively in our own identities. To praise, in this sense, is to come to know ourselves and those around us better, but only through taking the risk of displacement or dislocation that is involved with opening oneself to, depending on, something other. Williams praises and gives thanks to God. Cavell praises and gives thanks not to God but, for example, to Astaire’s dance, or to the bonds between us that we discover and work on in language (which seems to him a “miracle”), or to Thoreau’s Walden (which he argues is a “scripture”). He says that he has come to “trust” Walden. To understand praise and gratitude as critical practices, we should think about them as practices of trust, practices by which one comes closer to and deepens one’s understanding of trust and that which one trusts in. I say, “this is beautiful,” or “this is just,” or “you are my God,” or “I love you.” Such a declaration may be an initial expression of a response to something I have encountered. As such, it must be tested with myself and others as I move from expression to judgment. But it may also be a reflective, ma228

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ture judgment, an expression and enactment of trust, in which case it is both a statement reflecting an emotional and intellectual stance I have taken and a kind of promise that when I am confronted with doubts about my commitment, that when I am genuinely tested, I will not fall into despair but persevere in the disciplines of patience and hope that open new opportunities and possibilities. This is the “knack of faith.”

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In Democracy and Tradition, the philosopher of religion Jeffrey Stout argues against liberal theorists such as John Rawls and Richard Rorty that religious discourse has a rightful place in the democratic public square. He also argues that “new traditionalist” theologians such as Stanley Hauerwas and John Milbank exaggerate the separation between the church and the secular public discourse of modern Western democracies. These two claims play a major role in Stout’s effort, as I described it in the first chapter, to distinguish between secularism and his own vision of a secular, pluralist framework for public discourse. I  agree with Stout that religious discourse in the public sphere is not necessarily a “conversation stopper” and that blunt refusals of the “secular” on the part of religious thinkers prevent them from being adequately responsive to the world and even to their own religious traditions. In the past four chapters, however, I have sought to identify a third intersection between the “religious” (that is, those who embrace a more or less orthodox form of religious belief) and the “secular” (that is, those who do not), namely, the ways that secular philosophers and theorists have engaged religious discourse in order to think responsibility and responsiveness. At this intersection, history in Hollywood, political theory in Coles, philosophy in de Vries and Cavell, and psychoanalysis, literary criticism, and political thought in Santner become sites for exploring, in a “secular,” humanistic context and without presuming the authority of any specific religious texts or revelations, the way that religious forms of knowledge and practice can help us to 231

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responsively reimagine the lives of those who live both inside and outside of identifiable religious communities. There is a further, tighter link between these humanistic encounters with religion and theology: each, in one way or another, considers how theologically inflected thinking identifies and cultivates what Santner describes as pious attention, what I have called responsiveness, in “the midst of life.” Th is claim is central for two of the primary arguments I have been making. The first of these is that the locative approach to religion fails to give a full accounting of religion and theology because it rules out from the start the possibility that religious discourse not only orients and places but also disorients and displaces. The second argument is that certain religious discourses and practices, as understood by the thinkers I have engaged in the last four chapters, make possible acknowledgment of and forms of concerted attention to the flux and excess of “life.” Both arguments are elaborations of my effort in chapter 1 to complicate J. Z. Smith’s typology of religious mapping strategies. My claim has been that encounters with incongruity lead us not only to adjust or redraw our maps, but to forms of reflection and practice oriented to this excess that change the way we draw our maps in the fi rst place. From the locative perspective, the sacred or the divine is understood to be a power that fi xes this world, gives everything an assigned place. From what Smith describes as the utopian perspective, such power beckons us to escape worldly places in order to fi nd the “true” place. But thinking incongruity and religion in terms of excess demands attention to the way sacred or divine power relativizes all human, including theological, classifications and categories and to the ways we might live in, rather than trying to escape from, this condition. I began, in the introduction, with Rowan Williams and his claim that “what we need to learn is how to live in the presence of the void.” Theorizing this void in terms of the “absolute,” the “metaethical subject,” “separation,” and “excess,” de Vries, Santner, and Cavell argue that living in the presence of the void makes possible an enlivening responsibility. Each of them, though in very different ways, articulates this responsibility by means of an encounter with religion grounded in humanistic responsiveness. This responsiveness is, first, a matter of responding to difference. Recall Lorenzo Simpson’s claim about the humanities: “The importance of the humanities in our civic culture is due 232

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to their revealing, as no other disciplines can, the full measure of worlds and epochs that are orthogonal to ours, worlds that represent differences from which we can learn and that provide a perspective from which our own strangeness can come into view, enabling a more reflective and critical awareness of who we are.” What kind of differences are at stake here and what can it mean to reveal the “full measure” of these differences? I have argued that both de Vries and Santner, though in significantly different ways, identify and relate two types of difference. The first I have treated in terms of “singularity,” a radical difference that exceeds all determinate forms of difference, that is, a matter of an excessive openness to the other as other. Thus, de Vries focuses on the call of and response to the absolute and Santner on the acknowledgment of metaethical selfhood and of the void underlying all social formations. They find the possibility of such openness articulated in religious thought and practice attending to a God that singles us out and calls us to responsibility. But in addition to this willingness to bear radical difference and incongruity, de Vries and Santner argue that responsibility demands a return from attention to the “untameable strangeness” of the ever differing other to the other standing there, now, with particular needs and desires, making particular demands and eliciting particular obligations. From this perspective, to complicate Simpson’s “difference,” encountering the “full measure” of worlds orthogonal to our own thus demands a dual consciousness, a recognition of an uneasy tension or ultimate disjunction at the heart of responsibility, that holds to both the radical difference of singularity and the particular differences grounded in history and culture. There are elements of both these perspectives in Cavell’s work, which are visible especially in the way he develops the themes of separateness and acknowledgment. But, more than de Vries or Santner, Cavell argues that responsiveness to the particular, concrete other demands a certain affirmation of the self, and so a difficult dynamic of dispossession and self-assertion. For Cavell, responsiveness to the concrete other requires the persistent testing of my sense of who and where I am. On one level, we can say that when I acknowledge the other as other, he or she could be any other, simply a human other whom I, simply as another human being, should acknowledge. But such encounters only take place in particular circumstances, which means that when it comes to deciding 233

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how I am to respond to this other I have acknowledged, I must decide what this situation, with this other, demands of me. And this requires that I have a sense of who I am, that I take responsibility not just for the other, but also for myself. It requires, as Cavell puts it, that I make myself intelligible to myself and the other, which entails exposing myself to the other in a way that may raise all sorts of questions about how well I know myself and about how much responsibility I have taken for myself—there is, as I have said, a moment of dispossession here. Yet this testing of myself is possible only if I have taken a stance, declared myself, and find, in relation to the other, that the self I have declared is wanting or, alternatively, that my spade is turned. Ultimately, if I am to respond, and not just be responsible, I must take and affirm my place. Near the end of chapter 3, I addressed Elizabeth Pritchard’s and Stephen Prothero’s criticisms of Robert Orsi’s suspensive method. Both Pritchard and Prothero argue that it is not enough to suspend or “bracket” one’s own worldview in studying the religious ideas and practices of others. In the end, they argue, the scholar needs to take a stand because to “respond” to the religious subjects one studies is not only to open oneself to the radical difference of the other, or to allow the particular differences of the other to emerge as fully as possible and report on what one finds, but to engage in what Prothero describes as “moral inquiry.” For Pritchard, such inquiry, even if it exposes deep conflict between the scholar and the religious subjects one studies, is the mark of a concrete relationship, unlike the pernicious tolerance that she argues infects liberal humanism. Let me reiterate that I do not think that Prothero’s term “bracketing” does full justice to what we see going on in the work of scholars such as Orsi, Mahmood, Hollywood, and Coles, or, more generally, in the kind of response to radical or relative diff erence that I discussed above. These scholars do not simply set aside or bracket their worldviews and then, having explored the lives, beliefs, and practices of others from this place of suspension, return, unchanged, to their own worldviews. Rather, they fi nd that in the effort to understand the lives and visions of others, they must open their own lives and their own visions to change: in and through his study of St. Jude, Orsi not only produces knowledge about the women devout, but arrives at a new sense of prayer and the possibilities of freedom in dependence; Mahmood emerges from her study of the mosque movement having experienced shifts in her own sense of political and moral pos234

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sibility; Hollywood and Coles find in the encounter with theology lines of thinking that relate to and inflect their own moral, political, and existential projects. We might say that their encounters with the religious lives of others are an occasion for thought, through which they “return” to their lives having been changed. This is what Simpson refers to as “enabling a more reflective and critical awareness of who we are.” This means being open to change in and through the encounter with the other. From this perspective, although there is much about Orsi’s “suspension” that I have affirmed, I do not think that it, or Prothero’s “bracketing,” captures the full range of humanistic responsiveness. We need something more dynamic that reflects the full range of stances of response that I have tried to articulate above. Perhaps Thomas Tweed’s notion of “crossing” is more appropriate. Tweed uses this idea to capture the fact that religious subjects are not simply involved in locative projects of “dwelling” but also in the boundary-questioning and exploring projects of “crossing.” For him, to study and theorize religion is to embark on an itinerary, that is, to cross boundaries and thus to stand in and move between numerous places. He therefore helps us see the limits of locative visions of scholarship that stress culture transcendence or the local language of scholarship, or claim that the academic has “no place to stand.” From this perspective, what characterizes academic work on religion is not that it emerges from a specific location or takes place in a “no place” but that it is a matter of movement, process, or journey. If, then, we are to agree that what Prothero calls moral inquiry, or what I would call responsive cultural criticism, has a place in the academic study of religion, it would have to be inquiry that is openended and provisional—a taking stock not just of where the scholar stands at a particular point in time, but also of where he or she has been and might be going. Many thoughtful and morally sensitive scholars would argue that when we respond to religious phenomena in this way, we lose sight of what it means to be an academic. For them, criticism is not a matter of moral or existential response or inquiry, but rather an articulation and exploration of “conditions,” that is, of “critique.” Thus, we have Kantian forms of critique that identify epistemological and ontological conditions of possibility for human experience and we have versions of scientific reductionism and historicist and genealogical contextualization 235

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that focus on the causal processes and mechanisms that explain how natural and social phenomena come about. By contrast, responsive, humanistic criticism, as I have argued for it here, pushes further, even as it finds much that is valuable in the examination of conditions, to engage rather than simply to place the human phenomena to which it attends. That is, the humanistic critic does not simply “critique”—identify the conditions under which ideas, beliefs, and practices become possible and are constructed—but engages in cultural criticism by responding to these ideas, beliefs, and practices in ways that address their significance for their own lives and for the lives they share with others. This is not to pass “judgment” on the lives of others with sweeping claims such as “this way of life is good or bad” or “this way of life is or is not worthy of emulation” or “these people are or are not paradigms of human flourishing,” nor is it to simply to return to ourselves as we were when we started our journey into unfamiliar territory. Human life is always rather more complex than these kinds of judgments allow. Such responsiveness and such transformation require that our cultural criticism be affirmative. In Ecce Homo, Nietzsche looked back on his life as a philosopher and declared that Thus Spoke Zarathustra had completed “the Yes-saying part” of his task. His later writing, he went on to note, had accomplished something different—“no-saying, no-doing.” It is perhaps nowhere more evident than in today’s study of religion that we academics have failed to take seriously enough Nietzsche’s “yes-saying.” We know how to say no, to decode and demystify, even if, not knowing how to affi rm, we are not always able to explain why we should demystify. As genealogists and historicists, we know how to reduce religion to social context and how to explain religious practices and ideas in terms of power, conflict, and identity. There no doubt is much to unmask in religion, as in other human activities. When the hermeneutics of suspicion emerged in nineteenth century, our sense of who we are and of the possibilities for understanding human motivation, action, and society was expanded in valuable ways. But that affirmation has lost its force, withered into method weakly supported by an ideology of knowledge for knowledge’s sake. As a result, critical suspicion increasingly fails to “press to the limits of experience”: human life becomes reduced to power and interest and for many it is no longer clear how we can remain intellectually honest while making moral or religious claims upon one another or how we can affi rm the traditions and 236

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forms of life that make us, in large part, what we are. When demystification comes to define the study of religion, and the academic enterprise more generally, we lose sight of what it means to find and affirm our place in relation to others. De Vries, Santner, and Cavell theorize religion and responsiveness in ways that help us think about what affirmation and affirmative criticism entail. Their engagements with modes of theological thinking and spiritual discipline point to trajectories of thought and life constituted in and through a tension between forms of radical distanciation and dispossession (de Vries’s “absolute,” Santner’s “creaturely life,” and Cavell’s “skepticism”) and affirmation and reengagement with life (with economy, the midst of life, the ordinary). Analytic thinking about religion is not absent from their work, but more important for my purposes is the way they think with religion as they reflect on how to expand and enrich culture and life. In the process, they do, to some degree, wrench religious thought and practice out of the religious traditions, particularly Christianity and Judaism, in which they were developed. But because they also eschew simple distinctions between the religious and the secular—they are not “for” or “against” religion or “for” or “against” the secular—their displacements or redescriptions of religion are not secularist, reductive, or theological. They have dispensed with some of the maps that have done so much to guide modern thinkers on their journeys through the religious worlds of others. Doing so, they have opened space for new encounters with these worlds. Thinking humanistically, scholars of religion can move into this space able to attend in new ways to forms of pious thought and practice, to the languages of belief and commitment, their own and others’, that expand experience, that make people more attentive to and discerning about the reality around them and enable them to imagine and enact liberating transformation for themselves and others. After all, what forms of knowledge could be more important to develop and teach than those that make it possible for us to count, engage, and practice forms of life that are realistic and responsive? After secularism, this is the task: knowledge and criticism for life.

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Introduction 1. Mark C. Taylor, About Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 1. 2. Rowan Williams, Writing in the Dust (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2002), 3. 3. Ibid., 11–12. 4. Ibid., 77. 5. Jacques Derrida, Given Time, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 29. 6. Taylor, About Religion, 1. 7. In the aftermath of the attacks of September 11, Jerry Falwell, in an interview on Pat Robertson’s 700 Club telecast, had the following to say about the attacks: “The ACLU has got to take a lot of blame for this. And I know I’ll hear from them for this, but throwing God . . . successfully with the help of the federal court system . . . throwing God out of the public square, out of the schools, the abortionists have got to bear some burden for this because God will not be mocked and when we destroy 40 million little innocent babies, we make God mad . . . I really believe that the pagans and the abortionists and the feminists and the gays and the lesbians who are actively trying to make that an alternative lifestyle, the ACLU, People for the American Way, all of them who try to secularize America . . . I point the finger in their face and say you helped this happen.” Robertson “totally” concurred. Falwell later apologized for his comments. “Falwell and Robertson on the 700 Club After 9/11,” www.youtube.com/watch?v=H-CAcdta_8I. 8. Steven Wasserstrom, Religion After Religion (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999), 239. 9. Ibid., 248.

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10. Willi Braun, “Religion,” in Guide to the Study of Religion, ed. Willi Braun and Russell McCutcheon (London: Cassell, 2000), 9. 11. Ibid., 12. 12. Ibid., 5. 13. Robert Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 186. 14. Ibid., 180, 192. 15. Wasserstrom, Religion After Religion, 239. 16. Ibid., 243. 17. Robert Orsi, Thank You, St. Jude (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), xxi. 18. Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth, 198. 19. See, for example, Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1993); Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); and Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982). 20. Tim Jensen and Mikael Rothstein, Secular Theories on Religion: Current Perspectives (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2000), 7. 21. Orsi, Betweeen Heaven and Earth, 178. 22. Donald Wiebe, “Religious Studies,” in The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion, ed. John R. Hinnells (New York: Routledge, 2005), 101. 23. Robert Pippen, “Natural and Normative,” Daedalus, Summer 2009, 38. 24. Julien Young, The Death of God and the Meaning of Life (New York: Routledge, 2003), 4. 25. See John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997); Thomas Carlson, Indiscretion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999); Hent de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999); Kevin Hart, The Trespass of the Sign (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1989); Dominique Janicaud, Phenomenology and the Theological Turn (New York: Fordham University Press, 2001); Calvin Schrag, God as Otherwise than Being (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 2002).

1. Religion and Incongruity 1. Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 328. 2. In addition to Orsi, and Wasserstrom, see also Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1993); Walter Capps, Religious Studies (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1995); Daniel Dubuisson, The Western Construction of Religion, trans.

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William Sayers (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2003); Timothy Fitzgerald, The Ideology of Religious Studies (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003); Gavin Flood, Beyond Phenomenology: Rethinking the Study of Religion (New York: Continuum, 1999); Daniel Gold, Aesthetics and Analysis in Writing on Religion (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003); Sam Gill, Storytracking (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998); Hans Kippenberg, Discovering Religious History in the Modern Age (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2002); Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions; and Guy G. Stroumsa, A New Science: The Discovery of Religion in the Age of Reason (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010). In addition to these monographs, a number of volumes collecting essays on various aspects of the study of religion have been published during this period. See William E. Deal and Timothy K. Beal, ed., Theory for Religious Studies (New York: Routledge, 2004); Willi Braun and Russell McCutcheon, eds., Guide to the Study of Religion (London: Cassell, 2000); Hent de Vries, ed., Religion: Beyond a Concept (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008); Nancy Frankenberry, ed., Radical Interpretation in Religion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002); John Hinnells, ed., The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion (London: Routledge, 2005); Tim Jensen and Mikael Rothstein, ed., Secular Theories on Religion: Current Perspectives (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2000); Ivan Strenski, Thinking About Religion (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2006); Mark C. Taylor, ed., Critical Terms for Religious Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1998); Robert A. Segal, ed., Blackwell Companion to the Study of Religion (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2006). 3. In addition to Braun and McCutcheon, Masuzawa, Orsi, and Wasserstrom, see Bruce Lincoln, “Theses on Method,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 8 (1996); and Donald Wiebe, The Politics of Religious Studies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000). 4. For discussions of explanation in the study of religion, see Catherine Bell, “Modernism and Postmodernism in the Study of Religion,” Religious Studies Review 22, no. 3 (July 1996): 179–90; Sam Preus, Explaining Religion (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1987); and Tyler Roberts, “Exposure and Explanation: On the New Protectionism in the Study of Religion,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 72, no.1 (2004). 5. Willie Braun, “Religion,” in Braun and McCutcheon, Guide to the Study of Religion, 10–11. 6. Robert Segal, ed., Blackwell Companion to the Study of Religion (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2006), xvii. 7. See especially Russell McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997). 8. Willie Braun, “Religion,” 1. 9. Jonathan Z. Smith, Map Is Not Territory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).

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10. Jonathan Z. Smith, Relating Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 47, 59. 11. Smith, Map Is Not Territory, 291. 12. Smith, Relating Religion, 59. 13. Smith, Map Is Not Territory, 97. For other treatments of the persistence of chaos in myth and religion, see Timothy Beal, Religion and Its Monsters (New York: Routledge, 2002); Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep (New York: Routledge, 2003); Jon Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988); Frederick J. Ruf, Bewildered Travel (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2007). 14. Smith, Map Is Not Territory, 100. 15. Ibid., 101. 16. Ibid., 134. 17. Ibid., 140. 18. Ibid., 141. 19. Ibid., 145. 20. Ibid. 21. Ibid., 146. 22. Ibid., 145. 23. Ibid., 140; emphasis mine. 24. Ibid., 146. 25. Ibid., 170. 26. Ibid., 194. 27. Ibid., 205. 28. Ibid., 206–7; emphasis mine. 29. Ibid., 207. 30. Ibid., 301–2. 31. Ibid., 308. 32. Ibid., 297. 33. Ibid., 307–8. 34. Ibid., 309. 35. On the aesthetics of Smith’s invocation of the “primitive,” see Daniel Gold, Aesthetics and Analysis in Writing on Religion, 90. 36. Paul Ricoeur, The Symbolism of Evil (Evanston, Ill.: Northwestern University Press, 1967), 347. 37. After the essays of Map Is Not Territory, the closest Smith ever gets to the perspective of “Good News” and what I am calling a thinking of excess is in the essay “The Bare Facts of Ritual.” Exploring hunting rituals as a step to theorizing ritual, Smith argues that ritual is “a means of performing the way things ought to be in conscious tension to the way things are.” Th is difference provides an occasion for thought, for “reflection on and rationalization of the fact that what ought to have been done was not.” There is no real “application” here, only the “recollection” of

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what should be and the “rationalization” of why things did not turn out this way. Jonathan Z. Smith, “The Bare Facts of Ritual,” History of Religions 20, no. 1/2 (1980): 63, 109. 38. Smith, Map Is Not Territory, 300. 39. Smith, Relating Religion, 32. 40. Ibid., 19. 41. Smith, Map Is Not Territory, 144. 42. Smith, Relating Religion, 47. 43. Ibid., 53. 44. Smith, Map Is Not Territory, 308. 45. Smith, Relating Religion, 17–19. 46. In a further comparison, Smith compares the historian’s oblique “manner of speech” with “erotic tentativeness.” Smith, Map Is Not Territory, 290. 47. Ibid., 293. 48. Braun, “Religion,” 12. 49. Ibid., 5. 50. Lincoln, “Theses on Method,” 225. 51. Ibid. 52. Braun, “Religion,” 10. 53. Ibid., 7. 54. Ibid., 5. 55. Sam Gill, “Play,” in Braun and McCutcheon, Guide to the Study of Religion, 455. 56. Ibid., 459; emphasis mine. 57. Ibid., 458. 58. Sam Gill, “No Place to Stand,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 66, no. 2 (1998): 306; emphasis mine. 59. Ibid., 308. 60. Jensen and Rothstein, Secular Theories on Religion, 7. 61. Ibid., 8. 62. Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2003); Rajeev Bhargava, Secularism and Its Critics (New York: Oxford University Press, 2005); Jose Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994); William Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Jürgen Habermas, An Awareness of What Is Missing (Malden, Mass.: Polity, 2010); Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005); Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007). 63. For a defense of what he calls the “secularization paradigm,” see Steve Bruce, God Is Dead: Secularization in the West (Malden, Mass.: Blackwell, 2002). 64. I need to acknowledge that my very questioning of secularism in this context risks reinscribing the historical links between Christianity, secularism, and

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the “West,” which interrogated by Asad, Anidjar, and others. See Asad Genealogies of Religion; Asad, Formations of the Secular ; and Anidjar, Semites (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008). 65. Jose Casanova, “A Secular Age: Dawn or Twilight?,” in Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, ed. Craig Calhoun, Michael Warner, and Jonathan VanAntwerpen (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010). 66. Taylor, A Secular Age, 306. 67. William Connolly, “Belief, Spirituality, and Time,” in Calhoun, Warner, and VanAntwerpen, Varieties of Secularism, 306. 68. Jeff rey Stout, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 97. 69. Ibid., 93. 70. Linell Cady has argued that Stout’s account of secularization underestimates the power of secularist ideology in shaping late-nineteenth- and earlytwentieth-century attitudes toward the “separation of Church and state.” Cady cites Philip Hamburger’s examination of this issue, but we could also point to scholars such as Noah Feldman, who charts the rise of a secularist Supreme Court in the twentieth century, and Julie Reuben, who describes the emergence of a secularist vision of the academy in the late nineteenth century in the United States. Noah Feldman, Divided by God: America’s Church-State Problem—and What We Should Do About It (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2006); Julie Reuben, The Making of the Modern University: Intellectual Transformation and the Marginalization of Morality (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 71. Taylor, A Secular Age, 22. 72. Lincoln, “Culture,” in Braun and McCutcheon, Guide to the Study of Religion, 418. For William Cavanaugh, the kind of story told by Lincoln simplifies the complex reality of this period of violence. See Cavanaugh, “The City: Beyond Secular Parodies,” in Radical Orthodoxy, ed. J. Milbank, G. Ward, and C. Pickstock (New York: Routledge, 1999), 196. 73. Braun, “Religion,” 10. 74. Wiebe, “Modernity,” in Braun and McCutcheon, Guide to the Study of Religion, 362–63. 75. Lincoln, “Culture,” 421.

2. Placing Religion 1. Stanley Cavell, Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 116. 2. Catherine Bell, “Modernism and Postmodernism in the Study of Religions,” Religious Studies Review 22, no. 3 (July 1996): 179–90, quotation at 179. As I will argue in more detail below, it is not clear to me that the term “postmodernism” is

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particularly useful in this context. Many of the scholars Bell would label as postmodernist are, I think, simply historicists. 3. Ibid., 187. 4. Ivan Strenski, “Religion, Power, and Final Foucault,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 66, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 345–68. 5. Ibid., 359; italics in the original. 6. Ibid. 7. Gary Lease, “Response: Public Redemption: Strenski’s Mission for Religious Studies,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 66, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 377. 8. Ibid., 377–78. 9. Ivan Strenski, “Respecting Power, Worshiping Power, and Knowing the Difference: Rejoinder to David Chidester and Gary Lease,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 66, no. 2 (Summer 1998): 383. 10. See Ivan Strenski, “Why ‘Theology’ Won’t Work,” in Religious Studies, Theology, and the University, ed. Linell Cady and Delwin Brown (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002), 40. 11. Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Natural Reflections (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), 32. 12. Donald Wiebe, “Modernism,” in Guide to the Study of Religion, ed. Willi Braun and Russell McCutcheon (London: Cassell, 2000), 362, 359. 13. Donald Wiebe, “Religious Studies,” in The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion, ed. John R. Hinnells (New York: Routledge, 2005), 101. 14. Ibid. Donald Wiebe, “On Theology and Religious Studies: A Response to Francis Schüssler Fiorenza,” Bulletin of the Council of Societies for the Study of Religion 23, no. 1 (February 1994): 5. 15. Wiebe, “Religious Studies,” 105–6. 16. Wiebe, “Modernism,” 358. 17. Donald Wiebe, The Irony of Theology and the Nature of Religious Thought (Montreal: McGill-Queens University Press, 1991), 21. 18. Andrew Louth, Discerning the Mystery (New York: Oxford University Press, 1990), 45. 19. Ibid., 33. 20. Ibid., 37. 21. Wiebe, “Religious Studies,” 121. 22. Ibid. 23. Wiebe acknowledges as much in The Politics of Religion Studies (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2000), xi. 24. Russell McCutcheon, Critics Not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001), 6–7. 25. Ibid. 26. Ibid., 134.

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27. McCutcheon, “The Study of Religion as an Anthropology of Credibility,” in Brown and Cady, Religious Studies, Theology, and the University, 25. 28. McCutcheon, Critics Not Caretakers, 107–9. For a response to McCutcheon’s use of “game,” see William Arnal, “What If I Don’t Want to Play Tennis? A Rejoinder to Russell McCutcheon on Postmodernism and Theory of Religion,” Studies in Religion 27, no. 1 (1998): 61–68. 29. Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), xi; emphases mine. 30. Braun, “Religion,” in Braun and McCutcheon, Guide to the Study of Religion, 3; emphasis mine. 31. Burton Mack, “A Radically Social Theory of Religion,” in Secular Theories on Religion: Current Perspectives, ed. Tim Jensen and Mikael Rothstein (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum Press, 2000), 129. See also Burton Mack, “Social Formation,” in Braun and McCutcheon, Guide to the Study of Religion. 32. McCutcheon, Critics Not Caretakers, 5. 33. Ibid., 27. 34. Ibid., 137. 35. Kevin Schilbrack, “Bruce Lincoln’s Philosophy,” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 17, no. 1 (January 2005): 6. See Joan Copjec, who defines historicism as “the reduction of society to its indwelling network of relations of power and knowledge.” Joan Çopjec, Read My Desire (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1994), 6. 36. Herrnstein Smith, Natural Reflections, 55. 37. Francisca Cho and Richard K. Squier, “ ‘He Blinded Me with Science’: Science Chauvinism in the Study of Religion,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 76, no. 2 (June 2008): 435. 38. Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2003); and David Chidester, Savage Systems: Colonialism and Comparative Religion in Southern Africa (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 1996). One also would want to study the effects, beyond the academy, of the academic ideology of knowledge for knowledge’s sake. For a view opposed to the claims I am making here, see Stanley Fish, Save the World on Your Own Time (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008). 39. McCutcheon, Critics Not Caretakers, 107. 40. Wayne Proudfoot, Religious Experience (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985), 181. 41. Russell McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), 212. 42. McCutcheon, “Study of Religion as an Anthropology,” 27. 43. McCutcheon, Critics Not Caretakers, 107. 44. McCutcheon, “Study of Religion as an Anthropology,” 22.

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45. See the readings of Job in Rowan Williams, “Poetic and Religious Imagination,” Theology 80 (May 1997): 179; and in Catherine Keller, Face of the Deep (New York: Routledge, 2003). 46. In this context, I also note Strenski’s treatment of Karl Barth, whose theological position Strenski calls “offensive” and whom he characterizes in terms of “parochialism” and “abject ignorance.” Strenski, “Why ‘Theology’ Won’t Work,” 27. I don’t think such harsh judgments are inherently out of bounds in academic writing, but I also don’t think that Strenski’s brief treatment of Barth is nearly complex enough to warrant them in this case. Francis Schüssler Fiorenza also criticizes McCutcheon’s descriptions of theology. See Schüssler Fiorenza, “Religion: A Contested Site in Theology and the Study of Religion,” Harvard Theological Review 93, no. 1 (2000): 24–26. 47. Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 6; emphasis in original. 48. Ibid., 155–56. 49. Kathryn Tanner, Theories of Culture (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1997), 72. 50. Francis Schüssler Fiorenza, “Theology in the University,” Bulletin of the Council of Societies for the Study of Religion 22, no. 2 (April 1993): 34–39. 51. Francis Schüssler Fiorenza, “A Response to Donald Wiebe,” Bulletin of the Council of Societies for the Study of Religion 23, no. 1 (February 1994): 6. 52. Charles Winquist, Desiring Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 305. 53. Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Culture: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 25. 54. Braun, “Religion,” 3. 55. Edward Slingerland, “Who’s Afraid of Reductionism? The Study of Religion in the Age of Cognitive Science,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 76, no. 2 (June 2008): 384. 56. For thoughtful reflection on these kinds of questions, see Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Scandalous Knowledge (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). 57. Slingerland, “Who’s Afraid of Reductionism?,” 375. 58. Ibid., 388. 59. Ibid., 394. 60. Ibid., 399. 61. Francisca Cho and Richard K. Squier, “Reductionism: Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 76, no. 2 (June 2008): 414. 62. Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundations of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Palo Alto: Stanford University Press, 2003), 44. 63. McCutcheon, Critics Not Caretakers, 10–11. 64. Jonathan Z. Smith, Relating Religion (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 30.

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65. Ibid., 59. 66. Ibid., 29. 67. Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000), 82–85. 68. Benson Saler, Conceptualizing Religion (New York: Berghahn, 1999). 69. McCutcheon, Critics Not Caretakers, 80. 70. Ibid., 108, 109, 120. 71. Richard King, Orientalism and Religion (New York: Routledge, 1999), 79. 72. McCutcheon, Critics Not Caretakers, 79. 73. Bernard McGrane, Beyond Anthropology (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989), 124. 74. Karl Marx, “Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right: Introduction,” in The Marx-Engels Reader, 2nd ed., ed. Robert C. Tucker (New York: W. W. Norton, 1978), 53. 75. See Marx, “On the Jewish Question,” in Tucker, Marx-Engels Reader. 76. For important treatments of the concept of ideology, see John Thompson, Ideology and Modern Culture (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990); and Terry Eagleton, Ideology (London: Verso, 1991). 77. Gary Lease, “Ideology,” in Braun and McCutcheon, Guide to the Study of Religion, 443–44. 78. Raymond Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981), 5–12. See also John Thompson on “neutral” and “critical” uses of the term: Thompson, Ideology and Modern Culture, 52ff. 79. Lease, “Ideology,” 446. 80. Ibid., 443. 81. Ibid., 445; emphasis mine. 82. Bruce Lincoln, “Culture,” in Braun and McCutcheon, Guide to the Study of Religion, 413. 83. Bruce Lincoln, Theorizing Myth (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 208. 84. Ibid., 209. 85. Braun and McCutcheon, Guide to the Study of Religion, 416. In claiming that a discourse is closed to “critical scrutiny,” it is of course important to distinguish carefully between types of criticism. To some degree, Lincoln does this, though he is unfortunately vague at the crucial point. In Holy Terrors, he discusses “hermeneutics” and “casuistry” as providing religious thinkers “space to maneuver” in lieu of more direct forms of critique. Here, criticism becomes part of an essentially conservative strategy to maintain religious hegemony by merely interpreting and reinterpreting, rather directly criticizing, particular truths. Bruce Lincoln, Holy Terrors (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 6, 55. It is for this reason that Lincoln sees religion as more closed than other discourses. He then goes on to claim that “space for more radical forms of contestation can also be found within

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the religious,” but he fails to integrate this claim into his theoretical approach by thinking about how attention to these forms of contestation might lead one to challenge his claims about closure. For a different view of religious hermeneutics, see Daniel Boyarin, “Shattering the Logos: Hermeneutics Between a Hammer and a Hard Place,” in The Blackwell Companion in Postmodern Theology, ed. Graham Ward (London: Blackwell, 2001). See also J. Z. Smith, “Canons, Catalogues, and Classics,” in Canonization and Decanonization, ed. A. Van der Kooij and K. Van der Toorn (Leiden: Brill, 1998). 86. Lincoln, “Culture,” 415. 87. Lincoln, Holy Terrors, 55–56. 88. Lease, “Ideology,” 444. 89. Lincoln, Holy Terrors, 77–78. 90. Braun, “Religion,” 10–11. 91. Russell McCutcheon, “Myth,” in Braun and McCutcheon, Guide to the Study of Religion, 204. McCutcheon quotes this passage from Bruce Lincoln, Myth, Cosmos, and Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1986). 92. McCutcheon, Critics Not Caretakers, 32–33. 93. I borrow this claim of vacillation from Étienne Balibar, “The Vacillation of Ideology in Marxism” and “Politics and Truth: The Vacillation of Ideology, II,” in Masses, Classes, Ideas, trans. James Swenson (New York: Routledge, 1994). 94. Geuss, The Idea of a Critical Theory, 13. 95. McCutcheon, Manufacturing Religion, 74–100; McCutcheon, “The Imperial Dynamic in the Study of Religion,” in Postcolonial America, ed. R. C. King (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2000), 275–302; McCutcheon, Critics Not Caretakers, 31. 96. McCutcheon, Critics Not Caretakers, 132–33. 97. Lincoln, “Culture,” 420. 98. Ibid., 421. 99. For alternative stories, at least with respect to religious violence, see Cavanaugh, “The City: Beyond Secular Parodies,” in Radical Orthodoxy, ed. J. Milbank, G. Ward, and C. Pickstock (New York: Routledge, 1999); and Peter M. Wilson, The Thirty Years War (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2011). 100. Russell McCutcheon, The Discipline of Religion (New York: Routledge, 2003), vi. 101. Michel Foucault, “The Masked Philosopher,” in Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. Paul Rabinow (New York: New Press, 1997), 323. 102. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 2, The Uses of Pleasure, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1985), 10. Where I’d depart from Foucault on the question of criticism is that judgments, or at least certain kinds of judgments, are signs of life. 103. Eagleton, Ideology, 197.

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104. Terry Eagleton, After Theory (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 143. 105. Slavoj Žižek, Mapping Ideology (New York: Verso, 1994), 327. 106. Timothy Beal, Religion and Its Monsters (New York: Routledge, 2002), 195. See also Jon Levenson, Creation and the Persistence of Evil (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988). 107. Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996). 108. Samuel Weber, Institution and Interpretation, expanded ed. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001). 109. Jeff Robbins has cited this passage in a context closely related to my efforts here. Robbins, “Weak Theology,” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 5, no. 2 (2004): 2.

3. Encountering the Human 1. João Biehl, Byron Good, and Arthur Kleinman, ed., Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007), 449. 2. Judith Butler, Giving an Account of Oneself (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 136. 3. Robert Orsi, Thank You, St. Jude (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 185. 4. Ibid., 186–87. 5. Ibid., 185. 6. Ibid., 210. 7. Ibid., 203–9. 8. Ibid., 211. 9. Gary Lease, “What Are the Humanities and Why Do They Matter? The Case of Religion and Public Life,” Bulletin of the Council of Societies for the Study of Religion 27, no. 4 (1998): 91–95. 10. Ibid., 92. 11. The “crisis” of the humanities is the subject of an immense literature. Two useful treatments are Geoff rey Galt Harpham, The Humanities and the Dream of America (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2011); and Louis Menand, The Marketplace of Ideas (New York: W. W. Norton, 2010). 12. For a related definition, see William Schweiker, “Humanizing Religion,” Journal of Religion 89, no. 2 (April 2009): 222–23. 13. Geoff rey Galt Harpham, “Beneath and Beyond the Crisis in the Humanities,” New Literary History 36, no. 1 (2005): 29. 14. Ibid., 7. 15. Robert Pippen, “Natural and Normative,” Daedalus (Summer 2009): 38. See also Christian Smith, Moral, Believing Animals (New York: Oxford University Press, 2003).

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16. See Webb Keane, “Minds, Surfaces, and Reasons,” in Ordinary Ethics, ed. Michael Lambek (New York: Fordham University Press, 2010), 67. 17. Volney Gay, Progress and Values in the Humanities: Comparing Culture and Science (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 108. See also Anthony Kronman, Education’s End (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2007), 239. 18. Pippen, “Natural and Normative,” 36. 19. Lorenzo C. Simpson, The Unfinished Project: Toward a Postmetaphysical Humanism (New York: Routledge, 2001), 11. 20. Richard Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979), 360; Cavell, The Claim of Reason (New York: Oxford University Press, 1979), 125. 21. Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 155. 22. To my mind, the limits of humanism are to be found not with the question of difference but with the question of what is beyond the human. Does humanism limit human responsibility to nonhuman animals? Does it necessarily locate the source of value solely in the human realm and thus preclude a theological humanism? For this last point, see William Schweiker’s criticism of “monocentrism.” Schweiker, “Humanizing Religion,” 230. 23. Simpson, The Unfinished Project, 197–98; Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 4. 24. For a contemporary discussion of the possibilities, indeed the necessity, of universalism, see Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau, and Slavoj Žižek, Contingency, Hegemony, and Universality (Brooklyn: Verso, 2000). Terry Eagleton argues that we are “universal animals because of the kind of bodies we are born with.” Eagleton, After Theory (New York: Basic Books, 2003), 157; emphasis mine. 25. Simpson, The Unfinished Project, 139. 26. Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia, 4. 27. Michael Allen Gillespie, The Theological Origins of Modernity (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). 28. Cited in Feisal G. Mohamed, Milton and the Post-Secular Present (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), 83. 29. Butler, Giving an Account, 106. 30. Ibid., 136. 31. Russell McCutcheon, “ ‘It’s a Lie. There’s No Truth in It! It’s a Sin!’ On the Limits of the Humanistic Study of Religion and the Costs of Saving Others from Themselves,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 74, no. 3 (September 2006): 726. 32. Robert Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2005), 177–204. 33. Ibid., 743, 727. 34. I thank Chuck Matthewes for helping me frame the issue in these terms. 35. Rorty, Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature, 171.

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36. Rowan Williams, “The Suspicion of Suspicion,” in The Grammar of the Heart, ed. Richard H. Bell (San Francisco: Harper and Row, 1988), 40. 37. Ibid., 39–40. We see a similar approach to psychoanalysis, and to the humanities more generally, in Volney Gay’s Progress and Values in the Humanities. Criticizing Freud’s own understanding of psychoanalysis as a process of “magnification” or “plumbing the depths,” Gay argues that it is in fact a “process of exploration between persons and between persons and their environments, aligned along a horizontal axis.” Gay, Progress and Values in the Humanities, 112. 38. Butler, Giving an Account, 43. 39. Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 199. 40. Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth, 191–92. 41. Quoted in Richard King, Orientalism and Religion (New York: Routledge, 1999), 49. See also Rosalind Hackett’s claim that we can see in contemporary anthropology of religion “a shift in focus from structure to agency.” Hackett, “Anthropology of Religion,” in The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion, ed. John Hinnells (London: Routledge, 2005), 147. 42. On “lived religion,” in addition to Orsi, see David D. Hall, ed., Lived Religion in America: Toward a History of Practice (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); and Meredith McGuire, Lived Religion: Faith and Practice in Everyday Life (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008). 43. Robert Orsi, “Is the Study of Religion Irrelevant to the World We Live In?,” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 42, no. 3 (June 2003): 172. 44. McGuire, Lived Religion, 12. 45. Michael Jackson, Paths Toward a Clearing: Radical Empiricism and Ethnographic Inquiry (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989), 2–3. 46. Michael Jackson, Methodology and History in Anthropology, vol. 11, Existential Anthropology, ed. David Parkin (New York: Berghahn, 2005), xxix. 47. Ibid., xii. 48. Michael Jackson, The Palm at the End of the Mind: Relations, Religiosity, and the Real, (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), xii, 37. 49. Ibid., 203. 50. For a good account of the openings made possible by human poiesis, see Richard Eldridge, “Introduction: From Representation to Poiesis,” in Beyond Representation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). 51. Stanley Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America (Albuquerque: Living Batch Press, 1989), 23. 52. Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth, 145. 53. Biehl, Good, and Kleinman, Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations, 5. 54. Ibid. 55. Ibid., 3. 56. Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 8. 57. Ibid., 149.

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58. And in this respect, as Mahmood acknowledges, the women of the mosque movement do end up resisting various religious and secular authorities in Egypt. Her main point, however, is that such resistance is an effect of, not a motive for, their religious behavior. Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 175. 59. Ibid., 14–15. 60. Ibid., 138–40. 61. Biehl, Good, and Kleinman, Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations, 5. 62. King, Orientalism and Religion, 47. 63. Such encounters can take place face to face, as we see in most ethnographic work, or it can take the form of what Richard Wightman Fox describes as “attentive listening in the archives.” Quoted in Robert Orsi, “Fair Game,” Bulletin of the Council of Societies for the Study of Religion 33, no. 3/4 (2004): 89. 64. Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 198. 65. Gavin D. Flood, Beyond Phenomenology: Rethinking the Study of Religion (New York: Continuum, 1999), 72. 66. Ibid., 77. 67. Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth, 173. 68. Ibid. 69. Simpson, The Unfinished Project, 107. 70. Orsi, Between Heaven and Earth, 173. 71. Ibid., 192. 72. Ibid., 198. 73. Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 199. 74. Ibid., 154. 75. Ibid., 199. 76. Ibid. 77. Simpson, The Unfinished Project, 68. 78. King, Orientalism and Religion, 207. 79. See James Clifford and George E. Marcus, ed., Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1986); and Delwin Brown, Sheila Greeve Davaney, and Kathryn Tanner, Converging on Culture: Theologians in Dialogue with Cultural Analysis and Criticism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001). 80. Quoted in Brown, Davaney, Tanner, Converging on Culture, 47. 81. Elizabeth Pritchard, “Seriously, What Does Taking Religion Seriously Mean?,” Journal of the American Academy of Religion 78, no. 4 (December 2010): 1089. 82. Ibid., 1108. 83. Ibid., 1102. 84. Ibid., 1101. 85. Stephen Prothero, “Belief Unbracketed: A Case for the Religion Scholar to Reveal More of Where He or She Is Coming From,” Harvard Divinity Bulletin 32, no. 2 (Winter/Spring 2004): 3.

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86. To some degree, Orsi is more attentive to these effects than Pritchard allows. Like McCutcheon, both Pritchard and Prothero focus almost exclusively on the essay “Snakes Alive” to craft their arguments. This is perhaps Orsi’s most focused methodological statement, but it in some ways is also atypical of Orsi’s work because it is based on secondhand observations, not on Orsi’s own fieldwork. Attention to his other writings shows that Orsi does address the material costs of certain religious practices and is willing to criticize them. See, for example, the essays “Mildred, Is It Fun to Be a Cripple?’ and “Material Children,” in Beyond Heaven and Earth. On a related issue, Pritchard worries about Orsi’s fascination with the person of the scholar and the heroic pose he strikes in claiming to be able to discover the reality of his subjects. But when she contrasts Orsi’s compassionate scholar with the resolute critic willing to put it all on the line—“criticize and be damned!”—she also appeals to a heroic vision of scholarship: the modern, secularist iconoclast. She also appeals to a different kind of claim about common humanity: “Is it not possible to reach the conclusion that other peoples’ practices are sexist or racist or contradictory precisely because they are all so familiar to us, because we recognize these limitations in our own practices and institutions?” Pritchard, “Seriously,” 1104. 87. Henry Sussman, The Task of the Critic (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 5–6. 88. Quoted in Hent de Vries, Religion and Violence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 319. 89. Geoff rey Galt Harpham, Shadows of Ethics: Criticisms and the Just Society (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 35. 90. Eagleton, After Theory, 195. 91. Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 37. 92. Biehl, Good, and Kleinman, Subjectivity: Ethnographic Investigations, 449.

4. Encountering Theology 1. Sean Burke, The Death and Return of the Author (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 180. 2. Paul Ricoeur, “What Is a Text?,” in Hermeneutics and the Human Sciences, ed. John B. Thompson (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1981). See also Richard Kearney, On Paul Ricoeur (New York: Ashgate, 2004), 3. 3. Geoff rey Galt Harpham, “Beneath and Beyond the Crisis in the Humanities,” New Literary History 36, no. 1 (2005): 7. 4. Ibid., 13. 5. Burke, Death and Return of the Author, 177. 6. Ibid., 194. 7. Ibid., 180.

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8. Ibid., 181, 198. 9. Ibid., 183. 10. This is not to say, however, that there are not texts in which the author, for historical and textual reasons, is so occluded that such readings are extremely difficult, if not impossible. See, for example, the discussion of Talmudic texts in Daniel Boyarin, Carnal Israel (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 10–23. 11. Harpham, “Beneath and Beyond,” 13–14. Harpham goes on in this passage to note that some find this focus on identification with the author “primitive and precritical.” Burke too notes that his calls for looping back from postmodernism to a new existentialism and a new humanism will be perceived by some as “retrograde.” Burke, Death and Return of the Author, 197–98. 12. Geoff rey Galt Harpham, Shadow of Ethics: Criticism and the Just Society (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 154. 13. Ricoeur, “What Is a Text?,” 161. 14. Harpham, “Beneath and Beyond,” 11. 15. Ibid., 16. 16. Ibid., 15. 17. Ibid., 13; emphasis mine. 18. Amy Hollywood, Sensible Ecstas y (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2002), 6. 19. Ibid., 278. 20. Ibid., 243. 21. Ibid., 246. 22. Ibid., 247. 23. Ibid., 252–55. 24. Ibid., 148. 25. Ibid., 164. 26. Ibid., 167–68. 27. Ibid., 212–13. 28. Ibid., 190. 29. Ibid., 188. 30. Ibid., 222. 31. Ibid., 237. 32. Ibid., 227. 33. Ibid., 237–38. 34. Ibid., 270–71. 35. Ibid., 272. 36. Ibid., 278. 37. Ibid., 263, 6. 38. For a sustained treatment of this issue, see Denys Turner, The Darkness of God (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998). 39. Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy, 101–3.

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40. Ibid., 72. 41. Ibid., 264. 42. Ibid., 273. 43. Ibid., 208. 44. Ibid., 211, 234. 45. Ibid., 78. 46. Ibid., 272. 47. See, for example, Sarah Coakley, Powers and Submissions (London: Blackwell, 2002). 48. Hollywood, Sensible Ecstasy, 268. 49. Ibid., 271. 50. Ibid., 278. 51. Romand Coles, Beyond Gated Politics (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2005), xi. 52. Ibid., 119. 53. Romand Coles, “The Pregnant Reticence of Rowan Williams: Letter of February 27, 2006, and May 2007,” in Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary, ed. Stanley Hauerwas and Romand Coles (Eugene, Oreg.: Cascade Books, 2008), 176. 54. See also the extended encounter with Stanley Hauerwas that constitutes Christianity, Democracy, and the Radical Ordinary. 55. Coles, Beyond Gated Politics, 83. 56. And in this respect, Coles may be closer to Jeffery Stout than to MacIntyre. 57. Coles, Beyond Gated Politics, 112. 58. Coles, “Pregnant Reticence,” 177. 59. Ibid., 181. 60. Ibid., 193, 181. 61. Coles, Beyond Gated Politics, 42. 62. Rowan Williams, The Wound of Knowledge, 2nd ed. (Cambridge: Cowley, 1990), 172. 63. Ibid., 11. 64. Ibid., 173. 65. Ibid., 176. 66. Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 13. 67. Ibid., 8, 85–86. 68. Ibid., 31. 69. Coles, “Pregnant Reticence,” 186. 70. Ibid., 185; emphasis mine. 71. Williams, On Christian Theology, 145, 134. 72. Williams, Wound of Knowledge, 11. 73. Coles, Beyond Gated Politics, 125.

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74. Ibid., 133. 75. Ibid. 76. Coles, “Pregnant Reticence,” 72. 77. Ibid., 119. 78. Coles, Beyond Gated Politics, xv. 79. Jonathan Z. Smith, Map Is Not Territory (Chicago: University of Chicago, 1978), 204. 80. Coles, Beyond Gated Politics, 137.

5. Religion and Responsibility 1. Hent de Vries, Religion and Violence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 326. 2. William Desmond, Is There a Sabbath for Thought? (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005), 25. 3. Bruce Alton quoted in Christopher Chesnick, “Our Subject ‘Over There?,’ ” in Religious Studies, Theology, and the University, ed. Delwin Brown and Linell Cady (Albany: SUNY Press, 2002), 61. 4. One might point to the earlier work of Paul Ricoeur and Emmanuel Levinas, though both professed to keep their philosophical and religious writings distinct. Contemporary thinkers who in one way or another are paying increased attention to religion include Agamben, Badiou, Desmond, Marion, and Žižek 5. William Desmond, Is There a Sabbath for Thought?, 106. 6. David Wood, Thinking After Heidegger (Malden, Mass.: Polity, 2002), 1. 7. Jonathan Z. Smith, Map Is Not Territory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 290. 8. Hent de Vries, Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason in Adorno and Levinas (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2005), 32, 623; and de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 10. 9. de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, 242. 10. I note here de Vries’s, and my, focus on Western religious traditions, particularly on Judaism and Christianity. This, no doubt, is a limitation of this study. And it is one that, it might be argued, is particularly problematic when it comes to thinking about concepts such as “religion” and the “secular.” However, it is necessary to keep in mind two points. First, as should be clearer below in the discussion of the vision of “nonsynonymous substitution,” de Vries is not arguing from biblical religious traditions to an “essence” of religion. Second, and more important, my own argument also does not depend on generalizing from particular religious traditions to “religion,” but rather makes the point that we can find in traditions

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such as Christianity and Judaism, and in different modes of “secular” engagement with these traditions, examples of nonlocative religion. This is, of course, not to argue that we can’t fi nd locative examples in these traditions or that we can’t find examples of nonlocative religion in other traditions. 11. Hent de Vries, Religion: Beyond a Concept (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 68. 12. de Vries, Religion and Violence, 303. 13. de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, 14. 14. de Vries, Religion and Violence, 101. 15. de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, 26–28. 16. Ibid., 355. 17. de Vries, Minimal Theologies, 56. 18. de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, 3. 19. de Vries, Minimal Theologies, 25. 20. de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, 183. 21. Ibid., 141. 22. de Vries, Religion: Beyond a Concept, 11. 23. de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, 207–9, 216–17. 24. Ibid., 213. 25. John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), 141. 26. de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, 213. 27. Ibid., 189–95. 28. Ibid., 196. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid., 91. 31. Ibid., 219. 32. de Vries, Religion and Violence, 295. 33. de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, 250. 34. Ibid., 147. 35. de Vries, Minimal Theologies, 42. 36. de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, 205. 37. de Vries, Religion and Violence, 161. 38. de Vries, Minimal Theologies, 615. 39. de Vries, Religion: Beyond a Concept, 93. 40. de Vries, Minimal Theologies, 51–52. 41. Ibid., 5–6. 42. de Vries, Religion and Violence, 317. 43. Wood, Thinking After Heidegger, 26. 44. Philip Goodchild, Capitalism and Religion (New York: Routledge, 2002), 242. For a related take on the political relevance of what, after Goodchild, we might

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call “critical piety,” see Jeff rey Stout, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004). There, Stout distinguishes between piety as deference to authority and a “democratic” piety that is the virtue of “just and fitting acknowledgment of the sources of our existence and progress through life” (p. 30). 45. Goodchild, Capitalism and Religion, 212, 242. 46. For a fascinating treatment of such ateleological piety in the Christian tradition, particularly with respect to “Holy Saturday” (the interval between Good Friday and Easter Sunday), see Shelly Rambo, Spirit and Trauma (Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2010). 47. Wood, Thinking After Heidegger, 26. 48. Ibid., 30. 49. John Milbank, “The Midwinter Sacrifice,” in The Blackwell Companion to Postmodern Theology, ed. Graham Ward (Oxford: Blackwell: 2002), 108. 50. For a fuller treatment of my claims about Milbank and Derrida, see Tyler Roberts, “Sacrifice and Secularization: Derrida, de Vries, and The Future of Mourning,” in Derrida and Religion, ed. Yvonne Sherwood and Kevin Hart (New York: Routledge, 2005). 51. Milbank, “The Midwinter Sacrifice,” 125–26. 52. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 106; emphasis mine. 53. John Caputo and Mark Dooley have responded persuasively to Milbank’s criticisms of Derrida on forgiveness. My response here, though taking a different tack, is indebted to their work. See Dooley, “The Catastrophe of Memory,” and Caputo, “What Do I Love When I Love My God? Deconstruction and Radical Orthodoxy,” in Questioning God (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2001). 54. de Vries, Religion and Violence, 189. 55. Jacques Derrida, Given Time, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 29. 56. Ibid. 57. Ibid., 30. 58. de Vries, Religion and Violence, 316. 59. Ibid., 116–17. 60. Russell McCutcheon, Critics Not Caretakers: Redescribing the Public Study of Religion (Albany: SUNY Press, 2001), 107. 61. As Derrida puts it, “one does not leave the epoch whose closure one can outline” (quoted in de Vries, Minimal Theologies, 583). Gayatri Spivak puts it this way: “Deconstruction, whatever it may be, is not most valuably an exposure of error, certainly not other people’s error, other people’s essentialism. The most serious critique in deconstruction is the critique of things that are extremely useful, things without which we cannot live on, take chances.” Spivak, “An Interview with Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak,” Boundary 2 20, no. 2 (1993).

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62. Ananda Abeysekara, The Politics of Postsecular Religion (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 24, 200. 63. de Vries, Religion: Beyond a Concept, 68. 64. For a provocative historical account of the emergence of deconstruction in the context of French academics in the mid-twentieth century, one that casts Derrida’s work as a kind of philosophical resistance to the “technobureaucratization” of academic work under the influence of structuralism, see Tilottama Rajan, Deconstruction and the Remainders of Phenomenology (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002). 65. de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, 147. 66. Ibid., 163. 67. Ibid., 92. 68. Ibid., 311. 69. Timothy Clark, The Poetics of Singularity (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2005), 3–4. 70. de Vries, Religion and Violence, 116. 71. de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, 287; de Vries, Religion and Violence, 177. 72. de Vries, Religion and Violence, 386, 398. 73. de Vries, Minimal Theologies, 620. 74. Such “secular criticism,” Talal Asad writes, “is now a sign of the modern, of the modern subject’s relentless pursuit of truth and freedom, of his or her political agency.” Asad, “Free Speech, Blasphemy, and Secular Criticism,” in Is Critique Secular?, ed. Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood, The Townsend Papers in the Humanities 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009), 54. 75. Ward Blanton, “Introduction,” in Paul and the Philosophers: Return to a New Archive (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 9. 76. Robert Orsi, Thank You, St. Jude (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1996), 201. 77. For example, de Vries writes that religion “provides us with the cultural resources—the semantic, figural, and argumentative archives—from which different concepts of hospitality, of understanding and welcoming the other as other— and thereby of friendship, cosmopolitanism, and democracy—can still be distilled, criticized, or imagined.” de Vries, “In Media Res,” in Religion and Media, ed. Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 9. It is in this sense that religion can “deterritorialize” the political (p. 22). For illuminating discussions of radical forms of criticism made possible in and through religious discourse, see Peter Scott on theology and ideology critique in Theology, Ideology, and Liberation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994); and Katherine Tanner on “self-critical cultures and divine transcendence” in The Politics of God (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1992).

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78. Orsi, Thank You, St. Jude, 211. 79. Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 34. 80. Ibid., 147. 81. de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion, 231. 82. Wood, Thinking After Heidegger, 36. 83. See Rowan Williams, Christ on Trial (Grand Rapids, Mich.: William B. Eerdmans, 2000); and Williams, Resurrection, rev. ed. (Cleveland: Pilgrim Press, 2002).

6. On Psychotheology 1. Eric Santner, On The Psychotheology of Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 82. 2. Ibid., 14–15. 3. Ibid., 15. 4. Franz Rosenzweig, The New Thinking, ed. and trans. Alan Udoff and Barbara E. Galli (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1999). 5. Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2003), 94. 6. Slavoj Žižek, The Fragile Absolute (New York: Verso, 2000), 26. 7. See Badiou, Ethics, trans. Peter Hallward (New York: Verso, 2001), 18–23. I will address Žižek on this issue in more detail below. 8. Hent de Vries, Philosophy and the Turn to Religion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press), 9. 9. Eric Santner, Creaturely Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006), 81. 10. Jonathan Lear, Love and Its Place in Nature (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 1990), 179. 11. Santner, Psychotheology of Everyday Life, 33. 12. In The Ticklish Subject (London: Verso, 1999), Žižek appeals to Kierkegaard’s view of a “pure internality which the believer is unable to symbolize/socialize, to share with others.” Such interiority is not private, at least in the sense of a secret that potentially could be shared, that is, it does not express the believer’s “inner nature” but is a radical intrusion from the outside (p. 212). 13. Slavoj Žižek, Did Someone Say Totalitarianism? (London: Verso, 2001), 56–58. 14. Slavoj Žižek, On Belief (London: Routledge, 2001), 76–77. 15. Žižek, The Ticklish Subject, 162–63. 16. Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, 113. 17. Ibid. 18. Hollywood is particularly important for thinking about a feminist response to Lacan’s understanding of “the feminine” and for Žižek’s reading of Lacan’s logic of “not all” in terms of the difference between masculine (Jewish) and feminine (Christian) logics of subjectivity.

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19. Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, 68. 20. Ibid., 129. 21. Slavoj Žižek, “From Purification to Subtraction: Badiou and the Real,” in Think Again, ed. Peter Hallward (New York: Continuum, 2004), 255. 22. Santner, Psychotheology of Everyday Life, 87. 23. Ibid., 9. 24. Ibid., 72–73. Or, as Rosenzweig put it, each of us is “a tautological point of self-reference opening a breach in the chain of being.” Ibid., 80. 25. Ibid., 90. 26. Ibid., 27–28. 27. Ibid., 28, 43. 28. Eric Santner, “Miracles Happen,” in On the Neighbor, ed. Slavoj Žižek, Eric L. Santner, Kenneth Reinhard (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 107. 29. Ibid., 126. 30. Ibid., 112. 31. Žižek does not make this distinction as clear as Santner, but as I argue in “Militant Love,” it best explains Žižek’s treatment of sublimation. Roberts, “Militant Love,” in Transforming Philosophy and Religion, ed. Bruce Ellis Benson and Norman Wirzba (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008). Santner argues that a crucial distinction between Rosenzweig and Levinas is that the latter only has one concept of interpellation and, as a result, his “characterizations of the ethical summons with regard to the other often sound like descriptions of a punishing superego.” Santner, Psychotheology of Everyday Life, 65, note 32. 32. Santner, “Miracles Happen,” 133. 33. See, for example, Creston Davis, John Milbank, and Slavoj Žižek, eds., Theology and the Political (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005). 34. Santner, Creaturely Life, 206. 35. Santner, Psychotheology of Everyday Life, 97; emphasis mine. 36. Santner, “Miracles Happen,” 123. 37. Santner, Psychotheology of Everyday Life, 9. 38. Ibid., 101. 39. Ibid., 27. 40. Ibid., 70. 41. Ibid., 124. 42. Ibid., 90. 43. Ibid. 44. De Vries is after something similar in his account of Derrida’s work on “hospitality” and “friendship.” Each of these terms contains an imperative to create a particular kind of relationship, a “relation without relation,” that is, a relation in which the surplus of the other is not assimilated to the known or the familiar, but is rather “let be” in its strangeness.

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45. Santner, Psychotheology of Everyday Life, 8. 46. Ibid., 124. 47. Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, 94–95. 48. Roberts, “Militant Love.” 49. Santner, “Miracles Happen,” 107. 50. Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, 140. 51. Ibid., 136–37. 52. Hent de Vries, Religion and Violence (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002), 381. 53. Santner, Psychotheology of Everyday Life, 65. 54. Ibid., 124, 117. 55. Santner, “Miracles Happen,” 129. 56. Ibid. 57. Santner, Psychotheology of Everyday Life, 22. 58. Derrida writes, “The singularity of the ‘who’ is not the individuality of a thing that would be identical to itself, it is not an atom. It is a singularity that dislocates or divides itself in gathering itself to answer to the other, whose call somehow precedes its own identification with itself.” Jacques Derrida, “ ‘Eating Well,’ or the Calculation of the Subject,” in Who Comes After the Subject, ed. Eduardo Cadava (London: Routledge, 1991), 100. 59. Santner, Psychotheology of Everyday Life, 14–15. 60. Mircea Eliade, The Myth of the Eternal Return, trans. Willard Trask (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1954), 49ff. 61. Santner, Psychotheology of Everyday Life, 63; Santner, Creaturely Life, 76. 62. Santner, “Miracles Happen,” 127. 63. Ibid. 64. Santner, Creaturely Life, 131, 138. 65. Santner, “Miracles Happen,” 86. 66. Ibid. 67. Peter Gordon, Rosenzweig and Heidegger: Between Judaism and German Philosophy (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003), 189. 68. Ibid., 196. 69. Santner, Psychotheology of Everyday Life, 98–99. 70. Ibid., 130. 71. Ibid., 63. 72. Santner, “Miracles Happen,” 109. 73. Santner, Creaturely Life, 108. 74. Ibid., 49. 75. Ibid., 50–51. For a compelling, related take on Malte, see Robert Pogue Harrison, The Dominion of Death (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 47. 76. Santner, Creaturely Life, 81.

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77. Ibid., 49. 78. Ibid., 90. 79. Ibid., 89. 80. Santner, “Miracles Happen,” 84. 81. Ibid., 128. 82. Sean Burke, The Death and Return of the Author (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010), 198.

7. Criticism as Conduct of Gratitude 1. Stanley Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America (Albuquerque: Living Batch Press, 1989), 74. 2. Kenneth Reinhard, “Toward a Political Theology of the Neighbor,” in On the Neighbor, ed. Slavoj Žižek, Eric L. Santner, and Kenneth Reinhard (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 21; emphasis mine. 3. Eric Santner, “Miracles Happen,” in Žižek, Santner, and Reinhard, On the Neighbor, 86. 4. Frederic Jameson, foreword to The Aesthetics of Resistance, by Peter Weiss, trans. Joachim Neugroschel (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005), viii. 5. Ibid., xlvii. 6. Ibid., xlvi. 7. Ibid., xlvii. 8. Eric Santner, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), 140. 9. Ibid., 136. 10. Stanley Cavell, Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2005), 252. 11. Stanley Cavell, The Claim of Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1979), 390. 12. Stanley Cavell, Pursuits of Happiness (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1984), 240. 13. Cavell’s work plays a small but significant role in Santner’s work and an increasingly prominent role in de Vries’s. 14. Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America, 74; Stanley Cavell, A Pitch of Philosophy (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1994), 5. 15. Cavell, Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow, 3. 16. Stephen Mulhall, Stanley Cavell : Philosophy’s Recounting of the Ordinary (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1994), 285; Peter Dula, Cavell, Companionship, and Christian Theology (New York: Oxford University Press, 2010), 156; Epsen Dahl, Graham Ward, and William Desmond, “Finitude and Original Sin: Cavell’s Contribution to Theology,” Modern Theology 27, no. 3 (2011): 497–516; William Desmond,

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“A Second Primavera: Cavell, German Philosophy, and Romanticism,” in Stanley Cavell, ed. R. Eldridge (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 161. 17. Cited in Mulhall, Stanley Cavell, 312. 18. Stanley Cavell, The Senses of Walden, expanded ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 15. 19. Ibid., 47. 20. Stanley Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 26. 21. Cavell, A Pitch of Philosophy, 26. 22. Henry David Thoreau, Walden and Resistance to Civil Government (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 52. 23. Cavell, Senses of Walden, 61. 24. Graham Ward, “Philosophy as Tragedy, or What Words Won’t Give,” Modern Theology 27, no. 3 (2011): 481. 25. Cavell, Senses of Walden, 89. 26. Stanley Cavell, “The Availability of Wittgenstein’s Later Philosophy,” in Must We Mean What We Say? (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1969), 61. 27. Stanley Cavell, Cities of Words (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2004), 4. 28. Cavell often notes that the fact that this attunement is “based on nothing more than our sharing of (and our capacity for imagining)” a wide range of human activities and states of mind makes the fact of language “seem like a miracle.” Ibid., 139. 29. Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary, 154. 30. Cavell, Claim of Reason, 369. 31. Cavell, Senses of Walden, 106–7. 32. Stanley Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say? The difference in Cavell’s work between “accepting” the world and “acknowledging” other persons is a complicated one that emerges from his distinct treatments of “external world” and “other minds” skepticisms. His most sustained treatment of the difference is to be found in part 4 of The Claim of Reason. Stephen Mulhall gives a good account of the difference. It is not clear to me, however, that Cavell holds to this distinction consistently. Here, I will use “acknowledgment” to refer to this primary connection with both the world and others. 33. Cavell, This New Yet Unapproachable America, 86. 34. Cavell, Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow, 51; emphasis mine. 35. Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary, 68. 36. Cavell, Senses of Walden, 66. 37. Ibid., xv. Cavell’s deeply literary style has long been an issue for his readers. For some it is a distraction or a self-indulgent flaw, leading them to question Cavell’s seriousness as a philosopher; for others—I include myself—Cavell’s style attracts and impresses as a performance of pious attention, putting each word on

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trial, testing language in a way that shakes the reader from habitual forms of inattention, opening new possibilities for thinking and understanding. It is writing that, as James Edwards puts it with respect to Heidegger, “remind[s] us, not only of [its] own conditionality, but the conditionality of everything else as well.” James C. Edwards, The Plain Sense of Things (University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1997). 38. Cavell, Senses of Walden, xv. 39. Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary, 38. 40. Cavell, Claim of Reason, 125. 41. Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary, 51. 42. Ibid., 24. 43. Thoreau, Walden, 57. 44. Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary, 172. 45. Cavell has been aware of Derrida’s work since the late 1960s and over the years has noted various affi nities it. These include the penchant for turning philosophy against philosophy in order to question it—particularly with respect to the boundaries between philosophy and literature; close attention to language and the “endlessness of language’s responsiveness to (even origin in) language, a responsiveness pervading bits and pieces of words”; and the suspicion of logocentrism and metaphysics. See Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary, 130. It should be pointed out, however, that Cavell’s criticisms of Derrida focus on the early work. His most detailed piece on Derrida is a reading of a lecture—“Signature, Event, Context”—that Derrida delivered in 1971. With respect to this early work, I think Cavell’s criticisms are apt. But Derrida’s later work, with its emphasis on responsibility, testimony, and friendship, may bring him closer to Cavell’s position. Th is remains a question for future work. 46. Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary, 174. 47. Cavell, A Pitch of Philosophy, 79. 48. Ibid., 41. 49. Ibid., 83. 50. Colin Davis, Critical Excess (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2010), 28. 51. Michael Fischer, Stanley Cavell and Literary Skepticism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1989), 56. 52. Cavell, Senses of Walden, 61. 53. Mulhall, Stanley Cavell, 293. 54. Cavell, Senses of Walden, 12. 55. Ibid. 56. Ibid., 99. 57. Ralph Waldo Emerson, Selected Essays, ed. L. Ziff (New York: Penguin, 1982), 265, 310. 58. Cavell, Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow, 13.

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59. Ibid., 212. 60. Mulhall, Stanley Cavell, 139. 61. Cavell, A Pitch of Philosophy, 11. 62. Ibid., 8. 63. Cavell, Senses of Walden, 73–74. 64. Cavell, Claim of Reason, 124–25. 65. Cavell, Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow, 44. 66. Cavell, Claim of Reason, 93. 67. Ibid., 125. 68. Cavell, Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow, 71. 69. Cavell, A Pitch of Philosophy, viii. 70. Cavell, In Quest of the Ordinary, 147. 71. Ibid., 148. 72. Cavell, Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow, 94. 73. Ibid., 67. 74. Davis, Critical Excess, 186. 75. Cavell, Must We Mean What We Say?, 266. 76. Santner, Psychotheology of Everyday Life, 23. In discussing this “uncanny presence,” Santner remarks that for Franz Rosenzweig, both God and world “have their own uncanny insistence to which we can be open or against which we can erect defenses.” He notes that this way of putting the matter is indebted to Cavell’s concept of acknowledgment. Ibid., 24. 77. Ibid., 10. 78. Ibid., 142. 79. Cavell, Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow, 11. 80. Ibid., 262. 81. Ibid., 160. 82. Ibid., 252. 83. Ibid., 185. 84. Ibid., 26. 85. Cavell refers to some of these readings in the essay, but see especially Robert Gooding Williams’s rejection of Cavell’s praise of Astaire’s dance in Bandwagon. See Robert Gooding Williams, “Aesthetics and Receptivity: Kant, Nietzsche, Cavell, and Astaire,” in The Claim to Community, ed. Andrew Norris (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2006). 86. Cavell, Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow, 82. 87. Ibid., 155–56. 88. Ibid., 122. 89. Cavell, Senses of Walden, 173–74. 90. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1974), 271.

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91. Rowan Williams, On Christian Theology (Oxford: Blackwell, 2000), 9. 92. Ibid.

Conclusion 1. Jeff rey Stout, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 111. 2. Rowan Williams, Writing in the Dust (Grand Rapids: William B. Eerdmans, 2002), 3. 3. Lorenzo C. Simpson, The Unfinished Project: Toward a Postmetaphysical Humanism (New York: Routledge, 2001), 139. 4. Thomas Tweed, Crossing and Dwelling : A Theory of Religion (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2006). 5. Of course, “critique” is not a neutral technology. Wendy Brown, in the context of an exploration of the question “Is Critique Secular?,” argues that the concept of “critique” gained its footing in the modern West as part of an effort, in Kant, for example, to install reason and science, and displace religion, as the primary intellectual and moral authorities. She argues that his move becomes even more decisive in Marx, for whom religion is not simply illusory but a symptom of unfree and miserable human existence. By means of critique, then, Marx and critical theorists up to the present turn to “the rational, material, real, scientific, and human [in order to] explain and supplant the religious, the ideal, the unreal, the speculative and the divine.” And even though it has been clear since Kant that reason must also submit itself to critique (that is, to itself), Brown wonders whether we have failed to do the same to the concept of “secularism.” Wendy Brown, “Introduction,” in Is Critique Secular?, ed. Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood, The Townsend Papers in the Humanities No. 2 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009). Stathis Gourgouris agrees with Brown about the critique of secularism, but rather than taking her exploratory and questioning approach, he celebrates the inherent secularity of critique, arguing that it “disdains [and] uncompromisingly subverts, battles, and outdoes” the transcendent claims and mystifications of religion. Stathis Gourgouris, “Detranscendentalizing the Secular,” Public Culture 20, no. 3 (2008): 445. But Gourgouris continues, like McCutcheon and others, to rely on a blunt, self-serving opposition between the religious and the secular: the secular, as Gourgouris would have it, is historical, self-critical, and emancipatory, while religion, and the “theological politics” it makes possible, is based on “religious command [which] denies the last instance of a society’s self-interrogation as to who authorizes its self-determination.” Gourgouris, “Detranscendentalizing the Secular,” 458. In other words, religion is “heteronomous by definition.” Gourgouris, “Detranscendentalizing the Secular,” 454. Saba Mahmood describes this opposition as “vacuous,” writing that Gourgouris’s

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initial call for historical specificity in thinking about critique and the secular “devolves into moves common to other triumphalist accounts of secularism wherein religion is ascribed an essence: it is ‘otherworldly,’ ‘transcendental,’ ‘totalizing,’ and ultimately an immature way of dealing with death and mortality.” Saba Mahmood, “Is Critique Secular? A Symposium at UC Berkeley,” Public Culture 20, no. 3 (2008): 450. 6. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals and Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1989), 310.

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284

INDEX

Abeysekere, Ananda, 165 absolute, 149, 157–59, 232; fragile, 181, 188 absolution, 189 academic legitimacy, 17, 37–38 academic thinking: as local knowledge, 55–56; religious thinking separate from, 4, 15, 42, 46–47, 51, 70, 74, 151–52, 166, 231. See also study of religion acknowledgment, 202, 209, 211, 221–23, 233–34; as interpretation of knowing, 212–13 adieu, 152–54, 163, 167, 171 aesthetic criticism, 202–3, 223–26 The Aesthetics of Resistance (Weiss), 202 affirmative criticism, 17–20, 174–76, 220–21, 223–24, 227–28, 236–37 agency, 86, 94, 111, 116; subjectivity and/as, 103–6 Althusser, Louis, 71, 78 analytic tradition, 147, 204, 217, 237 Angela of Foligno, 127, 130, 131, 141 answerability, 150, 174, 185–86, 191–92, 198–99 antihumanism, 19, 58, 92, 120, 124 Apollonius, 29

aporia, 150, 152, 159, 177 application, 31–34, 35, 141, 242n37 Arandan initiation ceremony, 30–31 Asad, Talal, 42, 100, 260n74 ascetic ideal, 19, 65, 161 Astaire, Fred, 225, 228 attention, 155–56, 158–59, 170, 174, 195; to difference, 93–94, 99; melancholic, 196–97, 202 Austin, J. L., 204, 210, 211, 224 author, death of, 119–24 authority, religious claims to, 6, 38, 41 autonomy, 58, 69, 86, 94, 103–5 avoidance: of response, 98–99; skepticism as, 209 bad conscience, 168, 171–72, 176, 188–90 Badiou, Alain, 65, 176, 188 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 107, 134 Band Wagon (fi lm), 225 barter exchange, 68 Barthes, Roland, 74, 120, 121 Bataille, Georges, 125, 126–27 Beal, Timothy, 81

285

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Beatrice of Nazareth, 126, 130, 131 belief, 1–2, 11–12, 41, 44, 61, 64, 71, 236–37; mysticism and, 128, 131–33; vacillation of ideology, 74–77 Bell, Catherine, 49–50, 52, 57 Benjamin, Walter, 193, 194, 197, 201, 221 Between Heaven and Earth (Orsi), 8–9, 102–3 Beyond Gated Politics (Coles), 140 Biehl, João, 85, 103–4, 106, 118 binary thinking, 4, 15, 42, 46–47, 58 Blackwell Companion to the Study of Religion (Segal), 24 Blanton, Ward, 169 Bloom, Harold, 185 border situations, 101 boundaries, 62, 69, 81–82, 266n45; contact across, 99, 109, 128, 235; edge, concept of, 134–35, 139–40; of philosophy, 149; of physiology and culture, 178 boundedness/boundlessness, 27–28, 33 Bourdieu, Pierre, 106 bracketing, 56, 88, 113, 188, 234–35 Braun, Willi, 13, 23; as historicist, 55, 59; Lincoln, view of, 38–39, 74; locative approach, view of, 14–15, 25; uncensored curiosity, concept of, 8, 16, 24, 38, 46, 76; Works: Guide to the Study of Religion, 7, 10, 23–24, 37–41, 45; “Religion,” 38 Brown, Wendy, 268n5 Burke, Sean, 119, 121–24, 167, 255n11 Butler, Judith, 85, 95, 105 Caputo, John, 155 caritas, 135 Casanova, Jorge, 43 Cassirer, Ernst, 34 categories, 17–18, 32–33, 57–58, 148; folk, 69, 110

Catholic saints: Gemma, 102–3; Jude, 11–12, 85–86, 108–9, 169–70, 172, 234. See also Christianity causality, 63, 201 Cavell, Stanley, 20, 49, 92, 102, 149, 232; aesthetic criticism, 223–27; autobiographical elements in, 205, 207–8, 214, 217–18; cultural criticism, 219–29, 236; Derrida, view of, 214–15, 266n45; literary style of, 265–66n37; ordinary, concept of, 204–5, 210–12, 218; ordinary philosophy of language, 210–12, 218, 265n28; passion, view of, 223–24, 226–27; perfectionism, 205, 206, 211–12, 220, 226; redemption and, 201; religion and, 205–9; skepticism, view of, 208–11; Works: The Claim of Reason, 205–6; Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow, 222; A Pitch of Philosophy, 206, 207; The Senses of Walden, 206–9, 213, 216; “Something out of the Ordinary,” 225–26 center, 173–74, 192 certainty, quest for, 41, 209, 210–11 Chakrabarty, Dipesh, 68 chaos, 26–30, 80–81, 148–49 Cho, Francisca, 59 Christianity, 3–4, 46–47; as community, 135; Gospels, 29, 135–36, 141, 161; lordship of Christ, 135; as model for other religions, 9; resurrection, promise of, 161; time, concept of, 192–93; vulnerable receptivity, 135. See also Catholic saints The Claim of Reason (Cavell), 205–6 Clark, Timothy, 167–68 Clifford, James, 111–12 closure: explanatory, lived religion and, 100–103, 112–13; locativist views, 54–55, 80–81; religion as

286

INDEX

discourse of, 50, 70, 72–73, 80–81; in scholarship, 78–79 cognitive inquiry, 53–55, 56, 88 Coles, Romand, 17, 119, 125, 165, 197; ateleological in, 140, 141, 159; political thinking, 133–36, 139, 142, 231, 235; radical democracy, 134–36; translations, concept of, 139–42; Works: Beyond Gated Politics, 140 colonialism, scholarship and, 68–69 commandment and command, 185–86, 189, 203, 207 common humanity, 93, 95–96, 99, 117 comparison, 57, 67–68 concealment, 148, 157–58, 160–61 concept, 148–50, 154–55; “beyond” of, 157–59, 189; concealment and, 148, 157–58, 160–61; under erasure, 153, 155, 157 confession, 130, 208 conflict, 138–39; avoidance of, 112–13 conformity, 105–6, 220–21 connectedness between people, 209–10 Connolly, William, 43, 44, 169 consciousness: critical, development of, 7–8; false, 19, 74, 111, 139, 204; historical, 31, 41, 65; ideology and, 70–71; philosophy of, 120 Continental philosophy, 18–19, 148, 204 Corbin, Henry, 6–8, 10 Covington, Daniel, 112, 113 creaturely life, 181–83, 193, 197 cringe, posture of, 183, 193–94, 195 criticism, 70–74, 248–49n85; affirmative, 17–20, 174–76, 220–21, 227–28, 236–37. See also cultural criticism; humanistic criticism critique, 152, 235–36, 268n5; of ideology, 71–72, 79–80, 88; piety and, 159–60; response and, 114–18; theology as, 153–54 crypto-theology, 52, 60

cultural criticism, 150; as conduct of gratitude, 20, 205, 208, 221–29, 236; perfectionism, 205, 211–12, 220, 226. See also criticism “Culture” (Lincoln), 77 curiosity, uncensored, 8, 16, 24, 38, 46, 76, 117 data, 49, 57, 62, 70, 86, 98; constructed by scholar, 96, 165 Davis, Colin, 221–22 de Vries, Hent, 20, 147, 197, 201, 231, 232, 260n77; adieu, 152–54, 163, 167, 171; bad conscience, concept of, 168, 171–72, 176, 188–90; betrayal concept of, 163, 176, 203, 215; breaking back through to religion, 151–52, 165, 168–69, 174; coming into one’s own, 149, 167–68, 177; Derrida’s influence on, 148, 152, 177; formal indication, view of, 153–57; infinite responsibility, 160–64, 167–68; negative theology, 153, 155, 158, 171, 174; nonsynonymous substitutions, 152, 167, 257n10; Paul’s letters, view of, 155–58; respect and responsibility, view of, 150–52, 215. See also vigilance death of the author, 119–24 deconstruction, 260n64; breaking back through to religion, 151–52, 165, 168–69, 174; as historicist, postmodern critique, 60, 164; linkages, 151–52; messianism, 140, 188; minimal theology, 150, 152, 158–59; mode of working out past, 151, 165–67; philosophy as mode of, 149–50; responsibility and, 149–50, 188, 198, 215; as symbolic death, 188–89; turn to religion, 150–60; vigilance and, 148–52 defamiliarization, 114

287

INDEX

democracy, radical, 134–36 Democracy and Tradition (Stout), 231 democratization, 134–35, 140 demystification, 13, 65, 69, 137, 152, 158, 162; criticism as conduct of gratitude, 221, 227 departments of Religious Studies, 8, 13–14, 24 dependence, 86–87; autonomy, questioning of, 94, 103, 105, 106; heteronomy/autonomy divide, 86, 106, 152, 167–68, 169; mutual, 156, 157 Derrida, Jacques, 2, 18, 115, 120–21, 259n61, 263n58; Cavell’s view of, 266n45; de Vries, influence on, 148, 152, 177; gift, view of, 162–63; Gospel of Matthew, reading of, 161; hauntology, 165; logocentrism, 164–65; messianism, 140, 188; thinking vs. knowing, 162–63; writing, view of, 215; Works: Given Time, 162 description, 60–62 desire, 82, 129–30; creaturely life and, 182–83; enigma and, 178–83; pressure, 179, 185–86, 190, 212, 222–23; for reward, 161–62; sublimation of, 179–80, 187 Desmond, William, 147, 148 detachment, 50, 53–57, 64, 70; historicist, 56–57, 60; positivist, 53–55 dialogical edge, concept of, 134–35, 139–40 dialogue, 120; encounter and, 106–11 difference, 175, 233, 251n22; attention to, 93, 94, 99, 191; encounter and, 108–11; erasure of, 95–96 disavowal of loss, mysticism and, 128–29, 131, 136–37 The Discipline of Religion (McCutcheon), 79, 96

disclosure, 33–34 disjunction, 53, 64, 101; incongruity and, 27–28, 29, 32 dispossession, 19–20; religion as practice of, 136–37, 143 double objectification, 27 Douglas, Mary, 30 Dula, Peter, 206, 211 Durkheim, Emile, 14, 65–66 Eagleton, Terry, 80, 116 Ecce Homo (Nietzsche), 122, 236 Eckhart, Meister, 131 economy, 160–64, 174, 189; divine reward and, 161–62; neighbor-love and, 192 Eliade, Mircea, 6–8, 10; criticisms of, 24–26, 35–36, 52, 62, 76; locative approach, 14, 25, 173–74; Works: The Myth of the Eternal Return, 192–93 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 207, 211, 213, 217, 221 empiricism, 154, 217 encounter, 97; conflict, avoidance of, 112–13; with death, 136; dialogue and, 106–11; difference and, 108–11; with excess, 203; fusion of horizons, 110–11; humanities as site of, 16; relations vs., 185; response and, 113–14; scripting ethnographic situation, 111–12; sharing between researcher and informant, 108–9; suspensive method, 16, 109, 112, 113–14, 234; with text, 17, 119–24, 141–42; tolerance, liberal fantasy of, 112–13; transformative for researcher, 107, 114, 117; vulnerable receptivity, 134–35, 139–40 enigma, 29, 33, 34, 131; desire and, 178–83 Enlightenment, 13, 46, 77, 152 esotericism, 10, 11

288

INDEX

essay form, 217 eternity, 194–95 ethical bearing, 171 ethics: aesthetics and, 73, 77, 85, 91, 116; of singularity, 174, 182, 187, 198–99, 202–3 ethnocentrism, 68–69 excess, 180–82, 186–88, 190–92, 232–33; encounter with, 203; ethic of, 140–41; of metaethical subject, 181, 184; thinking of, 33–34, 37, 40, 140, 158–60, 232, 242n37 existence, 148–50; coming into one’s own, 149, 167–68, 177, 188, 191–92; economy and, 160–64; love and, 187–92. See also life existential engagement, 167 existential imperatives, 101 existential inquiry, 53–55, 56, 88 experience, 58; of experience, 159–60; experiment and, 217–18, 220, 223; writing as, 216–17 experiential expressivist approaches, 58 experiment, 17, 82, 216–18, 220, 223 explanation, 23, 32–34; closure and lived religion, 100–103, 112–13; description and reduction, 60–62; fetishism and, 131–32; first-personal questions, 90, 104; historically conditioned, 156–57; individualist anthropology and, 58–59; levels of, 63; as responsive action, 98 extraordinary religion, 10–12 factical life, 154–57, 159, 166 fact/value distinction, 53, 56 faith, 54, 141, 152, 155, 162 false totality, 201 Falwell, Jerry, 4, 239n7 feminist theory, 89, 92, 105, 110, 169; mysticism, analysis of, 124–25, 127, 129, 133

fetishism, 125–27; explanation and, 131–32; loss, disavowal of, 128–29, 131; resistance to, 132–33 Feuerbach, Ludwig, 128 finitude, 149, 151, 153, 154, 193–94 Fiorenza, Francis Schüssler, 62 Fisher, Michael, 215 Flaubert, Gustave, 124 Flood, Gavin, 107–8 folk categories, 69, 110 forgiveness, 162, 164, 172, 189 formal indication, 153–57 Foucault, Michel, 50–51, 82, 120, 121 Frankel, Charles, 90 free will, 95 freedom, 94, 116, 169–70 Freud, Sigmund, 126, 173, 252n37; trauma, view of, 178, 179, 197 friendship, 188, 262n44 future, 165–66 Gadamer, Hans Georg, 110 Gay, Volney, 90, 252n37 Geertz, Armin, 42, 89 Geertz, Clifford, 62 Gemma, St., 102–3 generalization, 57, 62–63, 69, 152; in Heidegger, 154–55, 157; particularity and, 115–16; phenomenological, 154–55 generous, 138 genre, 115, 135; confession, 130; gospel, 29–30 Geuss, Raymond, 71, 74–75 gifts, 2, 160, 222; impossibility of, 162–63 Gill, Sam, 38, 39–41 Gilroy, Paul, 92, 93, 110 Given Time (Derrida), 162 God, 18, 61–62; adieu and, 152–54, 163, 167, 171; commandment to love, 185–86; confession as written to,

289

INDEX

God (continued) 130; doubling of, 131; impossibility of capturing, 170–71; male-centered symbolic, 127; as Other, 185; turn to religion as turn away from, 152–53 Good, Byron, 103–4, 106 good, religion as, 9, 10, 75 Goodchild, Philip, 159, 160, 163, 226 Gordon, Peter, 194 gospel genre, 29–30, 141 Gospels, Christian, 29, 135–36, 141; reward and retribution in, 161–62 Gourgouris, Stathis, 268–69n5 grace, 190, 195, 222–23 Gramsci, Antonio, 72, 78 gratitude, conduct of, 20, 205, 208, 221–29, 236 Guide to the Study of Religion (Braun and McCutcheon), 7, 10, 37–41, 44–45; “Culture” (Lincoln), 77; “Ideology” (Lease), 70–74; “Modernism” (Wiebe), 52–55; “Play” (Gill), 38, 39–41; “Religion” (Braun), 38–39; “Thesis on Method” (Lincoln), 38–39, 57 hagiography, 126 Hainuwele, story of, 31 Harpham, Geoff rey, 89–90, 116, 120–21, 123–24, 255n11 hauntology, 165 Heidegger, Martin, 148, 152–58; formal indication, 154–57 Hellenistic religions, 27, 28, 29 hermeneutics of suspicion, 4–5, 13 175, 236 heteronomy/autonomy divide, 86, 106, 152, 167–68, 169 hierophanies, 25, 31, 101, 173 historian, figure of, 35–37, 40–41, 149 historical consciousness, 31, 41, 65

historicism, 14–15, 49–50, 55–60, 65, 80; as critical rhetors, 56, 64, 71; detachment, 56–57; theory, views of, 56–57, 62, 68. See also postmodernists history, incompleteness of, 193–94, 202–3 history of religions, 7, 11, 38–39, 57; secular approach, 41–42 Hollywood, Amy, 17, 119, 141–43, 169, 180, 197, 231, 235, 261n18; loss, encounter with, 128–29, 131–32, 136; Works: Sensible Ecstasy, 125–29 Holy Terrors (Lincoln), 76, 248–49n85 Horkheimer, Max, 193 human flourishing, 92, 93, 110, 169, 236 humanism: acts of theory and, 95–99; criticisms of, 92–93; first-personal questions, 90, 104; liberal, 95; as normative endeavor, 90–91; post-metaphysical, 16, 92; as problematic concept, 89; as unfinished project, 92, 94, 202 humanistic criticism, 16–17; common humanity, 93, 95–96, 99; edification as goal, 92; imperialism of, 95–96, 97; meaning and, 90–91; as response, 91–92, 114–18; willingness to come undone, 85, 95, 98 humanistic thinking, 54–55; criticism of, 75–76 humanities, 16, 82, 232–33; crisis in, 89, 250n11; as double-voiced, 107–8; processes of, 89–90; reader and 102, 123–24, 129, 215. See also study of religion Husserl, Edmund, 121, 154–55, 166 hybrid discourses, 18–19, 148 hysteria, 125–27 idealism, 70–71 identity, 6–8, 20, 73–74, 134–35; desire and, 179, 185; dispossession and,

290

INDEX

203–4; establishing, 178–79; gender, 131; group, 72–74, 80; naming, 207–8; as process, 140; psychoanalysis of, 181–82; reception, 203–4. See also subject ideology: academic/religious binary, 72–73; in academic setting, 50–51; critique, 71–72, 79–80, 88; degrees of, 78; descriptive accounts, 71, 74–75, 76, 96–97; epistemological/functional approaches, 74–76; locativism and, 70–74; pejorative accounts, 71, 74–76; secularist, 4–5, 15, 42–47, 51–52; used to secure position, 77–78, 109; vacillations of, 74–77 idolatry, 61–62, 131, 153–54, 164, 168, 171 immanent criticism, 45 imperial ideologies, 34, 36, 95–97 impossibility, 3–4, 162–64, 170–71 incompleteness, 127, 137, 183; of history, 193–94, 202–3 incongruity, 25; deconstructive vigilance and, 150–51; disjunction and, 27–28, 29, 32; ethic of, 187; life as sign of, 122–24; as liminality, 27–32; myth and, 29–33; as problem of the other, 74; refusal to acknowledge, 14–15; religious discourse obscures, 38–39; singularity as, 197–98; situational, 33–34, 35; in terms of joke and play, 29–32, 34, 40, 141; theological failure to recognize, 61–62; translation and, 66–67 individualist anthropology, 58–59 initiation rituals, 30–31 insiders/outsiders, 49, 50, 60, 69 intellectualist perspective, 31–32, 54 intelligibility and explanation, 32–33, 57, 59, 61–62, 66–67 intentionality, 63–64, 90; death of author and, 120–22

interpellation, 262n31; divine, 190–91, 195, 198; face-to-face encounter, 189; of law, 179–80, 183; of love, 183, 186, 187; uncanny presence, 178, 181–83, 267n76 interpretative control, 125–26, 129–30 inversion, idealist, 70–71 Irigaray, Luce, 125, 127–28, 131–32 The Irony of Theology and the Nature of Religious Thought (Wiebe), 53 Islam. See women’s mosque movement iterability, 215 Jackson, Michael, 17, 99, 101, 108 Jameson, Frederic, 80, 202 Jensen, A. E., 34 Jensen, Tim, 15, 41–42 Jesus, 29; silence of, 135–36 Jewish community, 180, 195 John of the Cross, 136–37 joke, incongruity and, 29–32, 34, 40, 141 jouissance, 173, 180–81; Law and, 180; meaninglessness of, 179; parental, 178–79 Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 50 Judaism, 180, 183, 185–86, 195; Cavell’s relation to, 207–8; halakah, 189–90; naming and selfhood, 207; time, concept of, 192–93 Jude, St., cult of, 11–12, 85–86, 108–9, 169–70, 172, 234 judgment, 79, 112–14, 137–38, 236; aesthetic criticism, 223–25 Kafk a, Franz, 183, 194 Kant, Immanuel, 154, 210, 268n5 Keller, Catherine, 61 King, Richard, 69, 107, 111 Kleinman, Arthur, 103–4, 106

291

INDEX

knowledge: acknowledgment and, 212–13; cognitive vs. existential inquiry, 53–55, 56, 88; limitations on, 49, 51–52, 79, 81, 98, 210–12; local, 55, 69; response and, 116–17; theology and, 53–54, 79; thought vs., 162–63 Kundera, Milan, 40 Lacan, Jacques, 125, 126–27, 178, 179, 197; “not all,” concept of, 127, 180–81, 261n18 Langer, Suzanne, 28, 30 language: local, 68–69, 235; mediation of, 159–60; ordinary philosophy of, 210–12, 218, 265n28; religious and secular words, 1–3; second-order, 65–66; situated meta-language, 110, 139 Laplanche, Jean, 178 Law, 180 Lease, Gary, 51; ideology, view of, 70–75, 88; vacillation of ideology in, 74–75; Works: “Ideology,” 70–74 Levinas, Emmanuel, 189 Lévi-Strauss, Claude, 31, 33 liberal politics, 134–35 life, 143, 149–50; author and, 122–23; creaturely, 181–83, 193, 197; embodied subjectivity, 125–29; factical, 154–57, 159, 166; incongruity and, 122–24; “more life,” 133, 150, 174–75, 178, 182, 222–23, 227; responsiveness to, 149–50. See also existence “Life” of Beatrice of Nazareth, 126, 127 liminality, 28–30; incongruity as, 27–32; philosophy as liminal interrogation, 148–50 Lincoln, Bruce, 38, 40–42, 45, 55; vacillation of ideology in, 74–75; Works: “Culture,” 77; Holy Terrors,

76, 248–49n85; Theorizing Myth, 72–73; “Theses on Method,” 38–39, 57 Lindbeck, George, 58 lived religion, 10, 17, 59, 99–111; dialectical relationship with interpretation, 100–101; explanatory closure and, 100–103; poetics as response to, 101–2; saints, role in, 102–3 local languages, 68–69, 235 locating religion, 12–15 locativism, 4, 14–16, 20, 32, 37–41, 50; binary thinking, 4, 15, 42, 46–47, 58; chaos and order, 26–30; closure and detachment, 54–55; freedom from, 29–30; ideology and, 70–74; new locativists, 36–47; response to lived religion, 102–3; as secularism, 41–47; secularist rhetoric, 49–52; theologian, view of, 35–36, 40–41, 149. See also maps, locative; modernists; postmodernists logocentrism, 164–65 loss: avoidance of, 128–29, 131, 136–37; encounter with, 128–29, 131–32, 136; fetishistic disavowal of, 128–29, 131, 132; mystic resistance to, 132–33; psychotheological approach, 177; writer and, 208–9 Louth, Andrew, 54 love: commandment vs. command, 185–86, 189, 203, 207; divine, 150, 186, 190, 198; psychotheological view, 183–87; sublimation and, 179–81, 198 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 134–35 Mack, Burton, 8, 37, 58 Madame Bovary (Flaubert), 124 Mahmood, Saba, 17, 99, 234–35, 268–69n5; autonomy, questioning of, 94, 103, 105–6, 109–10, 169–70; on

292

INDEX

critique, 117; encounter, use of, 107–8; human flourishing, 92, 110, 169, 236; narrative, use of, 115–16; Works: Politics of Piety, 115–16 Map Is Not Territory (Smith), 25–37; “Birth Upside Down or Right Side Up?”, 28, 30; “Good News Is No News,” 28–29, 30, 31, 32, 33, 35, 141; “The Influence of Symbols on Social Change,” 27–28; “Map Is Not Territory,” 30–32, 35–36, 141; “The Wobbling Pivot,” 26–27. See also Smith, Jonathan Z. maps, locative, 14–15, 25–27, 32, 35–36, 115, 148, 232. See also locativism Marx, Karl, 70, 72, 268n5 Masuzawa, Tomoko, 23 McCutcheon, Russell, 7, 10–11, 107, 164, 176; acts of theory, view of, 95–99; description and, 60–61; detachment and, 56–57; as historicist, 55–60; Lincoln, view of, 74; locative approach, 14–15; political slant, 75–76; social formation, view of, 58–59; transgressive discourse, 76–77, 78; vacillation of ideology in, 74–75; Works: The Discipline of Religion, 79, 96; Guide to the Study of Religion, 7, 10, 37–41 McGrane, Bernard, 70 meaning: Continental thought, 18; in humanistic work, 90–91; in lived religion, 102; materialist accounts, 62–64, 80; reader’s appropriation of, 120; signification and, 152; suffering and, 159–60; systems of, 71; time and, 193 meaninglessness, 64, 160, 178–79, 182–83, 193, 196 Mechthild of Magdeburg, 129, 130, 141 mediation, 159–60 medieval religious figures, 125–33

293

melancholy, 177–78, 196–97, 202, 209 messianism, 140, 188, 194, 203 metaethical subject, 173, 181, 184–86, 190, 192, 195, 232, 233 metaphor, 221 metaphysical discourse, 55–57 metaphysical reductionism, 64 Michaels, Walter Benn, 121 Milbank, John, 161–62 minimal theology, 150, 152, 158–59 miracle, 185, 197, 199, 222–23, 228 “Modernism” (Wiebe), 52–55 “Modernism and Postmodernism in the Study of Religion” (Bell), 49–50 modernists, 34, 49–50, 155–56, 165, 167, 169. See also positivists modernity, 46; discourse of resistance to, 6–7; domesticated Protestantism and, 9, 15; religion as product of, 12–13; suspicion of secular, 5, 13–14, 19, 51–52 moral inquiry, 17, 113, 234, 235 morality, 64, 80, 109, 113 mourning, 177, 197 Mulhall, Stephen, 206, 216, 217 mysticism, 123–33, 141, 142; deconstructive, 131; dispossession, 136–37; divinized “Love” and, 131; fetishization of, 126–27; as hysteria, 125–26; loss, avoidance of, 128–29, 131, 136–37; modern readings, 126–27; texts of, 129–33 mystification, 6, 34, 152 myth and symbol, 6–7; application of, 32–33; incongruity and, 29–33; preserve hierophanies, 25; privileging of, 7, 10; scholarship compared with, 72–73; symbolic function, 33 The Myth of the Eternal Return (Eliade), 192–93

INDEX

narrative, 72–73, 77, 115–16 naturalistic paradigm, 7–12, 49, 51–52, 90, 98, 157–58; nineteenth-century studies, 13–14 negative theology, 154, 171–72 negativity, traumatic, 179, 195 neighbor-love, 173, 186, 189, 191–92, 197–98; answerability, 150, 191; anticipatory orientation, 195; psychotheology as discourse of, 184 neutrality, 42, 134 New Testament, 29 new thinking, 174, 203 newness, 138, 140 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 18, 64, 82, 221, 227; Works: Ecce Homo, 122, 236; On the Genealogy of Morals, 19, 65; Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 236; “The Uses and Abuses of History for Life,” 65 nihilism, 64, 65, 79, 196 “No Place to Stand” (Gill), 40–41 nonsynonymous substitutions, 152, 167, 257n10 “not all,” concept of, 127, 180–81, 190, 261n18 The Notebooks of Malte Laurids Brigge (Rilke), 196 obscurantism, 23, 24, 38, 152, 165 On the Genealogy of Morals (Nietzsche), 19, 65 On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life (Santner), 173 ontological dualism, 63–64 ontology, 155–56, 166 ontotheological tradition, 151, 153–54 open inquiry, claims to, 76–78 openness, 130, 135, 140, 171 order, 26–30, 173–74 ordinary, 204–5; philosophy of language, 210–12, 218, 265n28; skepticism and, 209–10; thinking

and, 32–33; turn to, 10–12; writing and, 214–15 ordinary religion, 10–12, 31–33 Orsi, Robert, 13, 15, 23, 96–100, 169–70, 254n86; dependence, view of, 86–87; review of The Discipline of Religion, 96–97; suspensive method, 16, 109, 112, 113–14, 234; Works: Between Heaven and Earth, 8–9, 102–3; “Snakes Alive,” 96–97, 99, 112–13, 254n86; Thank You, St. Jude, 11–12, 85–88 other, 9, 12, 233–34; call to dialogue with, 69–70; drama of other minds, 123–24; ethical call of, 125; God as, 185; liberal tolerance of, 112–13; opening to, 130, 135, 186–87, 191, 215, 222; revelation and, 185, 191; sexual difference and, 128; sublimation of love and, 180–81; suspensive method and, 16, 109, 112, 113–14, 234 paraphrase and translation, 66, 86, 139 particularity: generalization and, 115–16; responsibility and, 163–64, 215 passion, 175–77, 180, 223–24, 226–27 past, 194; deconstructive working out, 151, 165–67; intervention into, 202; religion as archive of, 165; undeadness, 177–78 patriarchy, 127 Paul, St.: de Vries’s reading, 155–58; Žižek’s reading, 176, 180, 183 perfectionism, 205, 206, 211–12, 220, 226 perlocutionary act, 224 phallocentrism, 127–29 phenomenology, 39, 49, 101, 120–21, 154–57, 159

294

INDEX

philosophy: as autobiography, 205, 207–8, 214, 217–18; Continental, 18–19, 148, 204; as critical discourse, 153–54; as a deconstructive mode of thought, 149–50; fleeting contact, 149, 152, 159, 161; as liminal interrogation, 148–50; as ontology, 155; ordinary philosophy of language, 210–12, 218, 265n28; as practice of responsibility, 148–49; vigilance of, 147–50 philosophy of religion, 18, 147 Philosophy the Day After Tomorrow (Cavell), 222 physicalism, 63–64 piety: beyond concept, 157–60; critical, 157–59, 178, 226–27, 232, 258–59n44; Islamic, 105, 106 pilgrim, figure of, 35–36, 37, 40, 149 Pippen, Robert, 17, 90–91, 104 A Pitch of Philosophy (Cavell), 206 pity, 227 planetary humanism, 92 “Play” (Gill), 38, 39–41 pluralism, 44–45 poetics of exposure, 196–97 poetics of singularity, 167–68 political assertions, 55, 75–76 political hatred, 175 political struggle, 175, 188 political theology, 184 political thinking, 117, 133–34; mystical texts and, 129, 130; radical democracy, 134–36; translation of theory, 139, 142 politics of difference, 175 Politics of Piety (Mahmood), 115–16 positivists, 49–52; detachment, 53–55. See also modernists possibility, 184–85, 195 postcolonial theory, 105 post-metaphysical humanism, 16, 92

postmodernists, 41, 49–50, 57, 244–45n2. See also historicism poststucturalism, 120 power: Nietzsche’s analysis, 19–20; relations between scholars and subjects, 111; study of religion and, 50–51 praise, 150, 220–22, 225–28 prayer, 11, 85–87, 108–9, 137 present, 208–9; melancholy in, 197; past, meaning in, 192–93, 195, 201; remembrance, 201; responsibility in, 162–63, 165, 178; Thoreau’s view, 213–14 presentness, 212–16 primitive religions, 31–32 Pritchard, Elizabeth, 112–13, 114, 234, 254n86 Protestantism, domesticated, 9, 15 Prothero, Stephen, 113, 234, 254n86 Proudfoot, Wayne, 60 psychoanalysis, 125, 127; confl icting versions, 181–82 psychotheology, 18, 223; answerability, 150, 174, 185–86, 191–92, 198–99; as discourse of neighbor-love, 184; ethics of singularity, 174, 182, 187, 198–99, 202–3; love, view of, 183–87; mindfulness, 193–94; mourning and, 177; unplugging, 150, 184–85, 189, 192. See also Santner, Eric; theology public sphere, 231; democracy and, 134–35; as historicist purview, 56–57; secularization of, 43–45 Putnam, Hilary, 53 quasi-theological approaches to religion, 8, 14, 24 Quine, Willard Van Orman, 53, 217 rationalizing enterprise, 31–32 Readings, Bill, 81

295

INDEX

Real, 64, 180, 187, 195 reception, 203–4, 215, 216 recounting, 214–15, 216, 224 recovery, 6–7, 220–21 rectification, 67 redemption, 150, 195, 203, 224, 227 redescription, 56, 82; as reduction, 63–65, 104; as translation, 65–70, 96 reduction, 60–62; noneliminative, 63–64, 66; redescription as, 63–65, 104 reflection, 16–17; as fleeting contact, 149, 152, 159, 161 Reinhard, Kenneth, 201 religion: breaking back through to, 151–52, 165, 168–69, 174; central figure of, 152–53; congruence, investment in, 32, 37–38; as disclosure, 50, 70, 72–73, 80–81, 100; dispossession, practice of, 136–37, 143; as enemy of revolution, 72, 73, 81; forms of, 73–74; generalized, 152; as “good,” 9, 10, 75; historical, 192–93; as ideology, 70–74; impossibility of grasping, 3–4; materialist accounts of, 62–64, 80; metaphysical discourse, 55–57; myth and symbol as essence of, 6–7, 10; ordinary, 10–12, 31–33; organizing function of, 8, 37; political effects of, 59–60; as product of Western modernity, 12–13; resurgence of, 41–42; as scholarly tool, 4, 8, 20; as security-seeking, 2–4, 14–15, 72, 77; sociohistorical autonomy, discourse of, 56, 60; as totalizing discourse, 37, 61, 72, 74, 137; thinking with, 17, 119, 125, 132, 148; toward humanistic study of, 16–17; turn to, 18, 150 “Religion” (Braun), 38–39 “Religion, Power, and the Final Foucault” (Strenski), 50–51

Religion After Religion (Wasserstrom), 6–8, 10 religious discourse, 6, 38–39; as private, 56–57 religious thinking of religion, 15 religious/secular division, 4, 15, 42, 46–47, 151–52, 166, 184 remainder, 115, 122, 158, 179–82, 188, 190, 192 remembrance, 193–94, 201 representation, 16, 96 resoluteness, 155–56 respect, 150–52 response, 16–17; avoidance of, 98–99; experience and experiment, 216–18; in humanistic criticism, 91–92, 114–18; to incongruity, 150–51; theological integrity and, 137–38; translation and, 87–88 responsibility, 15, 19–20, 70–74, 233–34; to the absolute, 157–59; as answerability, 150, 185–86, 191–92, 198–99; deconstructive, 149–50, 188, 198, 215; existence and economy, 160–64; historicism and, 65; impossibility of, 162–63; infi nite, 160–64, 167–68, 176, 188–89, 198, 215; Nietzsche’s view, 19–20; overstepping academic boundaries, 50–51, 62; particularity and, 163–64, 215; vigilance and, 148–49; voice and, 98 responsiveness, 16–17, 20, 25, 93, 215–16, 231–33, 266n45; humanistic, 140, 142–43, 201, 204–6; to life, 149–50 resurrection, 161 resuscitation, 203, 224, 227 revelation, 56, 61, 138, 170–71, 173, 185, 217, 231; other, response to, 185, 191 reverse implication, 157 Ricoeur, Paul, 18, 33, 120, 123 Rilke, Rainer Maria, 196

296

INDEX

Robertson, Pat, 4, 239n7 Rorty, Richard, 92, 98, 120 Rosenzweig, Franz, 184–86, 188; center, view of, 173–74, 190, 192–93; providential miracle, 197; singularity, 173, 184, 186, 190, 198–99; time, view of, 192–95 Rothstein, Mikael, 15, 41–42 sacred, 15, 232; as unverifiable, 8, 24 sacrifice, 161–64, 228 Saler, Benson, 68–69 Santner, Eric, 18, 20, 149, 201, 231, 232; creaturely life, 181–83, 193, 197; ethics of singularity, 174, 182, 187, 198–99, 202–3; mindfulness, 193–94; “more life,” 150, 174–75, 178, 182, 222–23, 227; natural history, concept of, 195–96; post-secular view, 183, 188; redemption, view of, 195, 203; sublimation, approach to, 178–81; uncanny presence, 178, 181–83, 267n76; Works: On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life, 173. See also psychotheology Schilbrack, Kevin, 59 Scholem, Gershom, 6–8, 10; “Walter Benjamin and His Angel,” 207 science: as culture-transcending, 46, 49, 52, 54, 68; as only acceptable model, 32, 33, 35, 46, 52–56, 64, 66, 68, 71–72, 81 second-order language, 65–66 secular: as concept, 43, 45; as constructed, 15; neutrality disputed, 42 A Secular Age (Taylor), 43 secular esotericism, 7 Secular Theories on Religion (Jensen and Rothstein), 15, 41–42 secularism: as concept, 43, 45; locativism as, 41–47

secularist ideologies, 4–5, 15, 42–47, 51–52 secularist rhetoric, 50–51 secularists, 44–45; subtraction stories of, 45–46 Secularity 1, 2, and 3, 44, 47 secularization, 43–45 secularization thesis, 18, 42–43 secularized discourse, 44–45 secular/religious division, 4, 15, 42, 46–47, 151–52, 166, 184 Segal, Robert, 24, 25 self formation, 16, 20 self-consciousness, 71; in study of religion, 5, 8, 40–41, 50, 78 The Senses of Walden (Cavell), 206–9, 213, 216 Sensible Ecstasy (Hollywood), 125–33 separation, 178, 209–10, 215, 218, 232 September 11, 2001, 1–2, 4, 135 “Seven Manners of Loving” (Beatrice of Nazareth), 126 signifiance, 131 signification, 152, 156, 215 silence, 34, 135–37 Simpson, Lorenzo, 16, 92–95, 232–33, 235; situated meta-language, 110, 139; unfinished project, 92, 94, 202 singularity, 157–60, 233; ethics of, 174, 182, 187, 198–99, 202–3; of event, 173, 192; as incongruity, 197–98; poetics of, 167–68 situated meta-language, 110, 139 skepticism, 208–11, 208–12, 237 Slingerland, Edward, 63–64, 66, 176 Smith, Barbara Herrnstein, 52, 59 Smith, Jonathan Z., 14, 24–26, 55, 103, 232; application, 31–34, 35, 141, 242–43n37; chaos, concept of, 26–30; comparison, 67–68; impact

297

INDEX

Smith, Jonathan Z. (continued) on study of religion, 36–37, 57; joke and incongruity, 29–32, 34, 40, 141; pilgrim, figure of, 35–36, 37, 40, 149; religion as scholar’s creation, 57, 59; silence as antihuman, 34, 137; theologian, figure of, 35–36, 40–41; translation, concept of, 65–68, 139; Works: “When the Chips Are Down,” 34. See also Map Is Not Territory (Smith) “Snakes Alive” (Orsi), 96–97, 99, 254n86 social formation, 8, 16–17; disruptions in processes of, 20; historicist view, 56; in humanistic criticism, 91; lived religion and, 100; McCutcheon’s view, 58–59; melancholy and, 177–78; metaethical subject and, 181; religion as, 10, 37–38, 58, 60, 70, 74–75, 78, 149; scholars engage in, 64–65; secular, 78–79; sovereignty and, 182–83; sublimation and, 179–80; time organized by, 193 social formation theory, 12, 58–59, 90–91, 100 social-scientific approaches, 7–8, 13, 42 sociohistorical autonomy, 56, 60 solidarity, 93, 109–10 sovereign temporalization, 193–94 sovereign violence, 193–94, 197 sovereignty, 182–85, 187, 196–97; social formation and, 182–83; of subject, 92, 95, 109 speech acts, 153, 214–15, 224 Spivak, Gayatri, 95, 259n61 Squier, Richard K., 59 Stout, Jeff rey, 43, 44–45, 120, 169, 231, 244n70, 258–59n44 Strenski, Ivan, 50–51, 79, 247n46 study of religion: academic ideals, 17, 37; academic thinking vs. religious

thinking, 4, 15, 42, 46–47, 51, 70, 74, 151–52, 166, 231; academic weaknesses, 8–9; Christianity’s influence on, 13, 42, 52; countersuspicion, 13–14; domesticated Protestantism in, 9; guides and companions to, 7, 23–24; hybrid discourses, 18–19; iatrogenic effect, 107; ideology in, 49–50, 72; open inquiry, claims to, 50–51, 62, 68, 73, 76–78, 82, 112; perspectival nature, 72–73; protectionism in, 58; redescriptive work, 56; researcher/ subject relationship, 97–99; science as only acceptable model, 32, 33, 35, 46, 52–56, 64, 66, 68, 71–72, 81; secularist approach, 41–47; self-consciousness in, 5, 8, 40–41, 50, 78; spectrum of frameworks, 54; theological claims in, 25; transgressive discourse, 76–78, 80–81; vacillations of ideology in, 74–77; violation of academic boundaries, 50–51. See also historicism; humanities; locativism; positivists style, philosophical, 204 subject: agency of, 86, 94, 116; dissolution of, 94, 102; intersubjectivity, 93–94, 103; metaethical, 173, 181, 184–86, 190, 192, 195, 232, 233; as product of social forces, 58–59, 90, 94; recuperation of, 109–10; researcher’s relationship with, 97–98; resisting, 106; sovereignty, 92, 95, 109; sublimation and, 179–80. See also identity subjectivity: and/as agency, 103–6; embodied, 125–29; feminist, 127–28; as lack, 127; mediated, 103–4; techniques of self, 105 sublimation, 175, 195; of desire, 179–80, 187; identifying with a cause,

298

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187–88; interpellation and, 179–80; as love, 180–81; of love, 179–80, 198; meaninglessness and, 178–79, 182–83, 193, 196 suffering, 159–60 superego, 186, 189 suspensive method, 16, 109, 112, 113–14, 234 suspicion: hermeneutics of, 4–5, 13 175, 236; of humanism, 92; of religion, 4–5, 12–13, 19; of secular modernity, 5, 13–14, 19, 51–52 Sussman, Henry, 115 symbolic order, 179–80, 197 Tanner, Kathryn, 62 Taylor, Charles, 42, 43, 45, 47 Taylor, Mark, 1, 2–3, 116 teleology, 140–41, 159–60, 259n46 testimony, 166–68, 171, 177, 188–89, 198, 202 text: death of the author and, 119–24; divine authority of, 130; encounter with, 17, 123–24, 141–42; mystical, 129–33; referential function, 120 Thank You, St. Jude (Orsi), 11–12, 85–88 theodicy, 61, 159 theologian: description and, 61–62; figure of, 35–36, 40–41, 149 theological approaches, 49–50 theology, 17; as broken speech act, 153; as critique, 153–54; description and, 60–63; as experiment, 82; knowledge production and, 53–54, 79; logocentrism and, 164–65; minimal, 150, 152, 158–59; prayer necessary, 134; as remembrance, 193–94. See also psychotheology “theology happens,” 50–51, 60, 176 Theorizing Myth (Lincoln), 72–73 theory, 49, 100–102, 104–5, 115–17, 121–22; acts of, 57, 95–99; historicists

and, 56–57, 62, 68; limits of, 93; mysticism and, 124–25; political language, translation to, 139, 142. See also feminist theory “Thesis on Method” (Lincoln), 38–39, 57 thick descriptions, 63, 100, 108 thinking, 17; with assent, 54, 55, 68, 82; attention, 155, 156, 158, 159, 170, 174, 195; binary, 4, 15, 42, 46–47, 58; classification and comparison, 35; excessive, 155, 158–60; humanistic, 54; impossibility and, 162–63; incongruity and, 33–34 Thoreau, Henry David, 206–7, 208, 211; present, view of, 213–14; Works: Walden, 206–9, 212, 213, 216 time, 156, 165, 192–93; eternity, 194–95; present, 208–9; sovereign temporalization, 193–94. See also future; past; present tradition, inhabitating, 105–6 tradition-based reasoning, 134–35 transcendence, 223; bodily, 129; frivolity as, 30, 31; mysticism and, 127–29 transcendentalism, 154, 157 transcultural understanding, 68–69 transcultural witness, 139 transformation, 25, 66–67, 79–80; of scholar, 107, 114, 117 transgression, 51, 105, 180 transgressive discourse, 76–78, 80–81 translation, 65–70, 96, 139–42; incongruity and, 66–67; kinds of, 87; redescription as, 65–70; response and, 87–88; as transformation, 66–67; two-way, 67–68, 129, 139, 148 trauma, psychological, 178–79, 185–86; “cringe,” posture of, 183, 193–94, 195; of sovereign violence, 193–94, 197 trust, 152, 168, 216, 228–29

299

INDEX

truth, 82, 232; Christian views, 135; reductionism and, 65; in skepticism, 210; techniques of self and, 105 Tuajiraka (Arandan god), 30–31 Tweed, Thomas, 235 uncanny presence, 178, 181–83, 267n76 uncertainty, 29, 141, 177 undeadness, 177–78, 182, 184, 196–97, 223 undecidability, 151, 154–56, 163, 177, 188 universalism, 52, 74, 76, 89, 109, 156–57, 218; common humanity, 93, 95–96, 99 university, 13–14, 55. See also academic thinking; departments of Religious Studies; study of religion University of Berlin, 13 unplugging, 150, 184–85, 189, 192 “The Uses and Abuses of History for Life” (Nietzsche), 65 utopian map, 25, 27–30, 55, 232 vacillations of ideology, 74–77 values, 53–54, 56, 77, 104, 184 ventriloquism, 96–97, 126, 129 vigilance: attention, 155, 156, 158, 159, 170; critical piety, 159–60; deconstructive, 148–52; infinite responsibility, 160–64, 167–68; Pauline, 155–58; of philosophy, 147–50; wakefulness, 155, 156, 158, 159–60, 174, 195 violence, religious, 1–4, 6, 41, 77; murderously spiritual, 2, 3–4 voice, 96–98, 107–8, 214–16; arrogation of, 218, 225–26; autobiographical, 205, 207–8, 214, 217–18 void, 1–2, 187, 188–89 vulnerable receptivity, 134–35, 139–40

wakefulness, 155, 156, 158, 159–60, 174, 195 Walden (Thoreau), 206–9, 212, 213, 216 “Walter Benjamin and His Angel” (Scholem), 207 Ward, Graham, 209 Wasserstrom, Steven, 6–11, 13, 23 Weber, Samuel, 82 Weil, Simone, 1 Weiss, Peter, 202 Wemale tribe, 31 Western religious traditions, influence of, 151 Wiebe, Donald, 15, 16, 45, 88, 176; Works: The Irony of Theology and the Nature of Religious Thought, 53; “Modernism,” 52–55 Williams, Rowan, 1–4, 5, 6, 61–62, 98, 134–38, 197, 232; praise, view of, 228; religion of dispossession, 136–37; revelation, concept of, 170–71; silence, view of, 135–37 Winquist, Charles, 62, 82 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 204, 209, 210 women: fetishization of, 126–27; medieval religious figures, 125–33 women’s mosque movement, 99, 104–7, 253n58 Wood, David, 148–49, 160 writing: as declaration of self, 216–17; recounting, 214–15, 216 Writing in the Dust (Williams), 1–4, 5, 6 Yoder, John Howard, 134, 135, 138–39, 140, 141, 142, 197 Young, Julian, 18 Žižek, Slavoj, 80, 175–76, 261n12, 262n31; fragile absolute, 181, 188; “not all,” concept of, 180–81; on sublimation, 175, 178–81, 195

300