Religion and its Other (Philosophy Today), 2018. (original) (raw)
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Derrida and the Danger of Religion (Journal of the American Academy of Religion), 2018.
Journal of the American Academy of Religion, 2018
This paper argues that Jacques Derrida provides a compelling rebuttal to a secularism that seeks to exclude religion from the public sphere. Political theorists such as Mark Lilla claim that religion is a source of violence, and so they conclude that religion and politics should be strictly separated. In my reading, Derrida's work entails that a secularism of this kind is both impossible (because religion remains influential in the wake of secularization) and unnecessary (because religious traditions are diverse and multivalent). Some attempt to contain the disruptive force of religion by excluding it from the public sphere, but Derrida argues that one may endure instability for the sake of something more important than safety. Although Derrida admits that religion is dangerous, he demonstrates that it is nevertheless an indispensable resource for political reflection.
Religion as Response: Derrida's Responsibility to the Question of the Question
2016
fullest treatment of religion comes . In it he states, Of the origins and borders of the question as of the response. In this thesis I explore to and fro of question and response as a means for thinking through what is taking place in the event of religion. nd the way it engages with four thinkers who influence his exploration of religion as response: Heidegger, Kant, Levinas and Kierkegaard. The thesis reveals that, rather than approaching religion as a site to be excavated and examined as if we might get to its interests lie in the event of religion that would exceed thematisation. As such, he attempts a way to speak of religion without ever saying what religion is, for when it comes to religion everything tends to drop out of sight as soon as knowledge is framed in terms of mastery. For Derrida, knowledge is not opposed to faith, but rather something that is infused with faith as it participates in the fiduciary opening that performativity affords. This faith-filled reasoning ope...
The Insistence of Religion in Philosophy
Symposium, 2016
the publication in of the groundbreaking book, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion Without Religion. 4 With this work, Caputo not only wrote one of the best, most original, and most important books on Derrida, he also found his voice, as he puts it in the interview below, cemented his reputation, and generated and legitimated a novel approach to interweaving continental philosophy and religion. Following this intensive engagement with Derrida, Caputo devoted himself in the s to greater consideration of religion from the phenomenologico-deconstructive perspective he had cultivated, publishing three major books, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (), The Insistence of God: A Theology of the Perhaps () and The Folly of God: A Theology of the Unconditional (). 5 While Caputo labels these works theologies, philosophers would do well not to jump to conclusions, for they are, in fact, deconstructions of the tradition Heidegger named onto-theology, counteracting the metaphysical notion of God as the greatest of beings quali ied as omnipotent, omniscient, and omnipresent. For Caputo, God is, instead, a name inherited from a cultural tradition for an always to come sense which can be harnessed for all too human purposes. Consequently, thinking about God-or, rather, the name of God, since God, for him, does not exist-is thinking about the world in which we live. Religion, as he claims in the interview, articulates a Lebenswelt. That's why it would be hasty for philosophers to dismiss these works as theology and non-philosophy. Indeed, while they engage deeply with religious texts like the Bible, Augustine, and medieval, modern, and contemporary theologians, they also engage, beyond Derrida, with philosophers like Hegel, Merleau-Ponty, Deleuze, Agamben, Z izěk, Latour, and Meillassoux. Alongside and complementing all of this writing-not to mention the more than articles and chapters he has published-is a more curatorial side. Around the time of his turn to the thinking of Derrida, Caputo started to convene a series of star-studded conferences on continental philosophy and religion at his home universities, irst at Villanova and then at Syracuse, featuring luminaries such as Derrida himself,
Phenomenology’s Rejects: Religion after Derrida’s Denegations
Open Theology, 2017
Religion, as well as any individuals’ volitionally chosen ‟worldview,” generally get conceived solely in affirmative terms of value. ‟Religion” has been conceptualized almost solely on the terms of axiology: as the experience of ‟the greatest” holiness (Otto), the purely valuable sacred (Eliade); the most ‟ultimate concern” (Tillich); the symbols accepted to order life (Geertz), or the binding of oneself to deep value (Müller). Yet there are limitations of such axiomatic thinking, limitations that can be exemplified through an interpretation of Derrida’s ‟globolatinization,” which he described as a system of thought that promotes a universalism of pseudo or petit-valuations, and punishes those resistant and inflexible to them in the name of toleration. This essay investigates what happens when this ‟axiomatic” register (i.e. a reduction to a set of values) gets displaced in order to conceptualize religion also in terms of the nonvaluable or ‟rejected.” Rejection entails the paradox ...
A Critical Understanding of the Religious Other
Faithful Interpretations: Islam and Truth in Catholic Theology of Religions.
According to Charles Taylor, "the great challenge of this century, both for politics and social science, is that of understanding the other. The days are long gone when European and other Westerners could consider their experience and culture as the norm toward which the whole of humanity was headed, so that the other could be understood as an earlier stage on the same road that they had trodden."1 As we all know, there is always a temptation to make too quick sense of the other, that is, make sense of her or him in one's own terms. Therefore, we need to understand how we can move from making the best sense of the other in our initial terms, which she or he will usually experience as an alien imposition, to making the best sense of her or him on that person's own terms. According to Taylor, such a move will be impossible "without allowing into our ontology something like alternative horizons or conceptual schemes."2 Yet, especially in the case of religious pluralism, the coexistence of different conceptual schemes confronts us with some fundamental problems, at the heart of which lies the intricate question of religious truth: is it possible to devise a meta-scheme to decide which of those schemes is the right one, or at least the most appropriate one to interpret someone else's religion? And, in a similar vein, which meta-scheme can legitimately function as an objective standard for our critique of the religious other? Obviously, one cannot simply impose one's own conceptual schemes as a universal standard and apply them unreservedly to all other religions. The traditional answer to these questions was that the idea of truth provides people with a crossreligious standard for their critical understanding of the religious other. Yet when the idea of religious truth itself turns out to be part of a religion-specific conceptual scheme, can we still legitimately use it for such a critical understanding? If our conceptual schemes indeed would not reach beyond the horizon of our own religious outlook, criticizing the religious other is nothing more than an expression of our personal disapproval. The above remarks illustrate the predicament in which we often feel stuck. On the one hand, the need to understand the religious other in her or his own right is essential in times of religious pluralism. On the other hand, if this means allowing an unqualified plurality of conceptual and religious schemes in our own mental world, the stability and, more importantly, truth of our intellectual, practical, and even moral reference-points crumbles. From this naturally follows that the legitimacy of our standards to criticize the religious other also evaporates. Therefore, the fundamental question is how we can understand the religious other on her or his own terms and yet criticize that person on fair grounds? Is a critical understanding of the religious other possible in a world that largely has become heterogeneous and centerless due to the multiplication of conceptual and religious schemes, and what role can the idea of religious truth play in this situation? To answer this complex question, we have to first examine what it means when the religious landscape has become heterogeneous and what this implies for a critical understanding of the religious other and for the notion of truth. Thereafter, a hermeneutic approach of how to understand the religious other in her or his own right will be explored with the help of the ideas of Taylor, Alisdair MacIntyre, and Paul Ricoeur on this matter. Yet, this exploration will also
Journal of the British Association for the Study of Religion (JBASR)
The keynote contributes to critical analysis of religion and attendant categories by proposing that religions be understood as vestigial states. According to this hypothesis, religion is a modern discursive product that is not present in the Bible. The category evolves as a management strategy, a technology of statecraft to contain and control conquered, colonized and/or marginalized populations as an alternative to genocide. Examples are drawn from Greek mythology, Jewish and Druid history and recent Buddhist politics. The author uses texts pertaining to international law and political philosophy to argue that viewing religion as synonymous with displaced, uneasy, former government opposes male hegemony by revealing the political structure of mystified nostalgia for male leadership. She also maintains that understanding religions as restive governments promotes clarity in regard to contemporary conflicts between religious freedom and equality rights. Psychoanalytic theories of Si...
Jacques Derrida on the Secular as Theologico-Political
Philosophy & Social Criticism, 2016
The essay articulates Jacques Derrida’s view of the secular as the field of the socio-political. It focuses on his argument as to why religion and politics cannot be strictly separated as in the classical modern paradigm. By engaging Derrida’s later writings, this article shows that the secular domain cannot be purified of all faith and is best thought of as theologico-political, where ‘theologico-political’ indicates the interrelatedness and distinction between the theological and the political. The article’s central claim is that that by opening up to some form of the theological that is not reducible traditional conceptions, and to a faith that is not necessarily religious, Derrida provides significant resources for understanding the secular today in more complex and critical ways than usual approaches offer.