On conversion. Affecting secular bodies (original) (raw)
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4 The Emancipatory Continuity of Religious Emotion
In this paper, I engage three different sets of phenomenological concepts in order to explore continuous transformation (" transmutation ") of religious emotion from unwholesome (anger, alienation, grief) to wholesome (love, sense of connectedness, bliss). Analysis shows that in Neo-Buddhist practice, emotion transitions from complex and axiologically directed at intentional objects (claims based on Husserl's theory of intentionality), to nonrepresentational (as suggested by Levinas). Husserl's theory of passive synthesis appears insufficient to account for the continuity of emotion's " transmutation, " which can be understood by means of Henry's nonintentional phenomenology and philosophy of affectivity. In meditative practice, emotion is reduced to being a counterphenomenon, continuously undergoing modifications and the inhibition of rising intentionalities. The modes of noesis also change to include reversibility between the self-affective character of emotion and the " clear-seeing " aspect of noesis. I further elaborate on the conditions of possibility for the continuous teleological transformation of emotion, found not only in the horizon of time-consciousness and clear seeing but, more important, in noematic horizons of the reversal of self-affection and the rudimentary intentionalities related to the quality of emotion, and the foundational horizon of phenomenological materiality (not hyletics). Finally, I argue that a religious quality of this experience depends on the teleology of emotion's continuous transformation.
The Emancipatory Continuity of Religious Emotion
The Problem of Religious Experience: Case Studies in Phenomenology, ch.5, 2019
In this paper, I engage three different sets of phenomenological concepts in order to explore the continuous transformation ("transmutation") of religious emotion from unwholesome (anger, alienation, grief) to wholesome (love, sense of connectedness, bliss). Analysis shows that in Neo-Buddhist practice (NBP), emotion transitions from complex and axiologically directed at intentional objects (claims based on Husserl's theory of intentionality), to nonrepresentational (as suggested by Levinas). The way emotions are given in NBP, as a continuity in which one emotion is not replaced by another but transforms into it, is very different from the discrete, incremental character of emotion in the everyday. Husserl's theory of passive synthesis and intentional continuity appears insufficient to account for the continuity of emotion's "transmutation," which can be understood by means of Henry's nonintentional phenomenology and philosophy of affectivity as non-intentional continuity. In meditative practice, emotion is reduced to being a counterphenomenon, continuously undergoing modifications and the inhibition of rising intentionalities. The modes of noesis also change to include reversibility between the self-affective character of emotion and the "clear-seeing" aspect of noesis. I further elaborate on the conditions of possibility for the continuous teleological transformation of emotion, found not only in the horizon of time-consciousness and clear seeing but, more importantly, in noematic horizons of the reversal of self-affection and the rudimentary intentionalities related to the quality of emotion, and the foundational horizon of phenomenological materiality (not hyletics). Finally, I argue that a religious quality of this experience depends on the teleology of emotion's continuous transformation.
Women & Performance: a journal of feminist theory , 2009
In the past decade, ‘‘affect’’ has emerged as a keyword for queer and feminist studies – and beyond. The turn to affect is also a re-turn, with contemporary studies of affect drawing across rich earlier studies of emotion, feelings and sentiment. This article is less interested in offering a long history of affect studies than it is in asking: Why affect? Why now? As a provisional response this article situates the so-called ‘‘affective turn’’ (to use sociologist Patricia Clough’s term) in relation to the anxiety that secularists, including and especially secular intellectuals in the US academy, have had at the resurgence of religion post-1979. This anxiety, I suggest, formed in response not just to any religion, but to religion understood as ‘‘fundamentalist’’: 1979 is the date of the Iranian revolution, and also marks the emergence or re-emergence of a certain kind of US Christian fundamentalism. Jerry Falwell names his ‘‘Moral Majority’’ as such in 1979. These twinned emergences have shaken the epistemological foundations of large segments of the US academy for whom secularism has been and remains a kind of guiding sentiment. This article goes on to consider the political and epistemological stakes of the secular academy’s disidentification not just with religion, but feelings coded as ‘‘religious.’’ Rather than reject the allegedly contaminating affects of religious feelings, this article argues, scholars of gender and sexuality studies might profit from considering the places where religious and secular feelings ‘‘touch.’’ The case study for this analysis is Hell Houses, Evangelical theatrical performances that seek to scare young people to Jesus.
Drawing on fieldwork conducted in an African evangelical congregation in Montreal, I examine the conversion narrative of a new member. I show that experience of ritual performance is a key element in her trajectory. Various techniques of ritual are used to create an emotional atmosphere that shifts the frame of perception, preparing the would-be member to accept a new system of meaning and a new sense of belonging. In this setting, the "somatic mode of attention" gives rise to a new process of subjectivation which involves the recoding, transformation and purification of the body, the spirit and the self.
Introduction: Emotional Entanglements of Sacrality and Secularity—Engaging the Paradox
The Secular Sacred Emotions of Belonging and the Perils of Nation and Religion, 2020
How, in various places across the world, do religious emotions and national sentiment become entangled? In exploring this theme, this book focuses on such diverse topics as the dynamic roles of Carnival in Brazil, the public contestation of ritual in Northern Nigeria and the culturalization of secular tolerance in the Netherlands. What binds the chapters in this volume is the focus on the ways in which sacrality and secularity mutually inform, enforce and spill over into each other. The case studies offer a bottom-up, practice-oriented approach in which the authors are wary to use categories of religion and secular as neutral descriptive terms. At this moment in time, it has become somewhat of a stale repetition to criticize the secular-religious divide. We are very much part and parcel of a world in which these boundaries overlap, are claimed, contested, reclaimed and re-contested in new and dynamic ways. If the debate on the postsecular has taught us anything, it is that the tools with which we work are implicated in these contestations. The notions ‘secular’, ‘sacred’ and ‘religion’ are as much part of our conceptual toolbox as objects of investigation. In order to illustrate how we are always in the middle of things, and in order to see how we should, if we are to understand the entanglements of sacrality, religion and secularity, think our way up from praxis, we opt for a start in medias res. We therefore open this introduction in Bangkok, Thailand, 26 October 2017 to be precise, when the mourning rituals for the recently deceased king are about to reach their apex.
Feeling religious – Feeling secular? Emotional style as a diacritical category
South Asian History and Culture
This article compares the different styles in which an Atheist movement in the South Indian states of Andhra Pradesh and Telangana and a community of Twelver-Shia Muslims in Hyderabad, the capital city of Telangana, engage with emotions of heroism and grief respectively. Heroism and grief are not approached as clearly defined or 'felt' mental entities but as complex compounds of diverse feelings and affective dynamics, which are inseparably entangled with the intellectual, social, material, and historical dimensions of specific practical projects: a quest for a fundamental and holistic transformation of society in the case of Atheist activists and the cultivation of a morally upright and pious life in accordance with the way of Islam in the case of Twelver-Shias. By mobilizing the concept of emotional style as a diacritical and comparative category, the aim is not to compare grief and heroism as either mutually exclusive or commensurable in any direct or essentialist sense; instead, my aim is to juxtapose two condensed ethnographic accounts in order to rethink the role of emotions for describing the historical and contingent production of differences between the secular and the religious within concrete practical and political contexts. The article focuses in particular on how controversial debates among Atheists and Twelver-Shias around the nature and appropriate expression of emotions-as well as the varying understandings and practices of critique implied in these debates-function as a means for the two communities to both construct and contest their boundaries as minorities within a shared discursive environment of religious nationalism.
International Journal of Philosophy and Theology, 2018
This paper seeks to problematise and complexify scholarly accounts of contemporary emotional repression in Western contexts by presenting counterevidence in the form of two examples of post-secular collective affectivity and their ritual expressions. It argues that both narratives of emotional repression and expression fail to capture the non-linear complexity of processes of cultural transformation, which have resulted in the simultaneous expression and repression of ritualistic affects that are products of our evolutionary embodied history. Drawing on insights from affect theory, this paper seeks to illustrate how contingent yet nonetheless residual ritualistic affects have become repressed in the nominally secular public sphere in modernity. This has presented certain obstacles to the open communal display of religious ritual, and, as a corollary, the expression of certain religious affects, which have subsequently re-emerged in post-secular ritual spaces that are both publically private and privately public, carved by contemporary renewal movements. Two of these ‘formations of the post-secular’ are explored here: the Sunday Assembly, a secular church, and Mountain of Fire and Miracles Ministries, an international Pentecostal Deliverance church.
Transformative Religious Experience A Phenomenological Understanding of Religious Conversion
Pickwick Publication, 2015
Joshua Iyadurai analyzes psychologically the mystical turning point in the conversion process and finds that the divine-human encounter entails a cognitive restructuring: a new set of beliefs, values, and desires replaces previously held religious beliefs, values, and desires. By drawing insights from the fields of psychology, sociology, anthropology, and theology, Iyadurai develops an interdisciplinary step model from a phenomenological perspective to explain the conversion process that incorporates the religious practices and social-psychological factors while giving a central place to religious experience.
Religious Emotion as a Form of Religious Experience
Journal of Speculative Philosophy, 2019
This article argues that religious emotions are variations of general emotions that we already know from our everyday life, which nevertheless exhibit specific features that enable us to think of them as forming a coherent subclass. The article claims that there is an experience of joy, sorrow, regret, fear, and so on that is specifically religious. The aim is to develop an account that specifies what makes them "religious." The argument is developed in three stages. The first section develops a phenomenologi-cally inspired account of the emotions by focusing on three of their moments: phenomenal quality, cognitive dependency, and intentionality. Drawing on this theory, section 2 distinguishes the class of religious emotions from similar phenomena. The third and final section examines the main features of religious emotions. keywords: religious emotion, phenomenology of the emotions, emotional depth, religious values, value sensitiviity