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The im-possibility of secular critique: The future of religion's memory

2010; Taylor & Francis; Volume: 11; Issue: 3 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14755610.2010.505432

0143-8301

Ananda Abeysekara,

Religious Education and Schools

Abstract The legacy of secular critique, with its Greek, Christian, Kantian, modernist traces, constitutes an aporetic law (or contradiction). That law is this: a critical legacy, if it is critical, can affirm and sustain itself only by trying to separate it from itself (from the very crisis that it is). The legacy or history of ‘religion’ is always a history of such critique. Such a legacy always anticipates critiquing itself, its memory (of whatever kind – racist, sexist, colonialist, nationalist). Such a legacy of critique is always a legacy of crisis. However, the crisis of such a legacy cannot be resolved, because critique, as kairos/krisis (critical/decisive moment), can admit of no resolution. Yet the (secular) history of religion, if it is ever historical, can only be a history of such aporetic critique. Such an aporetic critique will be the heritage of religion's im-possibleFootnote 1 future. It is an im-possible future because it will always be a promise, a promise to separate it from itself, a promise that will remain always deferred, always to come. Today, the promise of this secular critique is (in) democracy with its sovereign ‘decisive’ politics. We can no longer simply critique the (future) legacy of religion, understood this way. To do so is to fulfil that legacy's own messianic wish. This is the aporetic limit of secular critique. To think at the limits of the legacy of the critique of religion is to think the very question of the (secular) history of ‘religion’ and its others, that is, ‘religions’. Keywords: critiquecrisis vs. kairos religionsubstitutionhistorydecisiondivision and separation of heritage; democracyquestion of resolutionaporiapromise and différancedeconstruction of Christianity vs. deconstructionsecularizationfuture of postcolonial religions Acknowledgements I thank Sujala Singh for inviting me to write and present this paper as a keynote address for the Conference on the ‘Sacred and the Secular’ at the University of Southampton in 2008, which I could not attend. I presented a shorter version of this paper at the North American Association for the Study of Religion in Montreal, Canada in 2009 and thank everybody who commented on it, including the respondent Timothy Fitzgerald. My thanks are also due to Arvind-Pal Mandair and Harjeet Singh Grewal for inviting me to share some of these ideas in my keynote address as part of the colloquial series ‘Reconvening Asia: Embodiment, Transformation, Space’ at the University of Michigan in 2010. I thank all those who participated in the symposium for their probing questions. Jacob De Rover referred me to R. Gasché's work and Terry Papillon checked the spelling of Greek words. Brian Brit, Ben Sax and Bryan Rennie kindly commented on early versions of it. Reviewers of the article for the journal noted that this is a challenging piece. I am grateful to the editor of the journal Paul-François Tremlett for his commitment to the thinking in this article and not sparing the journal's readers its challenge. Notes 1. I write the word impossible/impossibility with and without a hyphen. When I hyphenate im-possible, I do so to remain true to Derrida's use of it. The im-possible is irreducible to either possibility or impossibility. Sometimes Derrida also writes the word without hyphenating it, but he still implies such irreducibility. 2. To bring to light is to decode, to translate (something) into a ‘metaphor’. On this troubling relation between metaphor and light, see Derrida (Citation1982). As Derrida says, ‘metaphor, then, always carries its death within itself’’ (ibid., 271). A good example of this would be Descartes, who (one may argue) proves (at the end of the Third meditation) the existence of God by killing Him first. Descartes is able to dispel the ‘doubt’ about God, to ‘contemplate God Himself’, to know that ‘He cannot be a deceiver’ only through the metaphor of ‘natural light’. Natural light, of course, comes from God himself; cited in Derrida (Citation1982, 267). For Descartes, the metaphor of light performs a double function: it kills God and then brings God back to life, by returning God's light to himself. For Kant, of course, light comes from critique. In that sense, Kant's critique kills religion and returns ‘it’ to reason/the light of critique. 3. Foucault (Citation1997b, 125) says that to him, unlike Kant, critique is genealogical, and not ‘transcendental’, in that it ‘will not seek to identify the universal structures of all possible moral action’. On the problematic relation between critique and genealogy, see Abeysekara Citation2008a. 4. Heidegger (Citation1990, 2) notes this dual aspect of critique in terms of Kant's claim that critique is a ‘preparation’ (Kant's word) or lays the ground for metaphysics. ‘Laying the groundwork for metaphysics means to lay a foundation [fundament] under this natural metaphysics, or rather to replace one which has already been laid with a new one through a process of substitution’. So critique substitutes. 5. I cannot help but recall here Hegel's brilliant reworking of the relation between ‘subject’ and ‘substance’. As Hegel (Citation1977, 10) says memorably, ‘Substance is, as Subject, pure, simple negativity’. Substance exists, as subject, through its own negation of itself. This is what Hegel calls also the ‘mediation of its self-othering with itself’. This negativity, we know now, is the dynamic of the moment of history. (‘Negativity is the differentiating and positing of existence’, he says [32]). This is why for Hegel God can (and must) never become a subject as such. But God exists – if God exists at all – precisely as a subject, a kind of being, substituted for God. The contradiction is this: When God becomes subject/being, the subject (God) is dissolved. Without the dissolution of God, God cannot become God the subject. As Hegel explains, this is what happens in a proposition like ‘God is being’. In the proposition, when God is rendered as ‘being’ (the predicate), ‘God ceases to be what he is’ (ibid., 38). But for Hegel, God himself ultimately becomes mediated through history, via Christ, reconciling the difference between the absolute and humanity. Nietzsche may say this is the process through which God became ‘so pale, so weak, so decadent…Even the palest of the pale are able to master him’. That is, God of ‘the chosen people’ became the god of ‘the great majority’, ‘a democrat among gods’, who ‘became the “ideal”’, became ‘pure spirit’, became ‘the absolute’, became ‘the-thing-in-itself’…The collapse of a god: he became a “thing-in-itself”’ (2007, 43). Recall also that Heidegger (Citation1996, 87) registers a similar complaint against Descartes's understanding of ‘being’ in terms of substantial ‘attributes’ of beings: ‘Because “being” is not accessible as a being, it is expressed by existing definite qualities of the beings in questions, by attributes.’ 6. The problem of with metaphor, its history of ‘white mythology’ (1982), and how it is always involved in a metaphysical task that seeks to erase memory, is lost on many ‘professional’ scholars of religion. This is why, for example, Thomas Tweed (Citation2005) can claim astoundingly and naively: ‘religions function as clock and compass’. This is why Tweed can also define religion in these terms: ‘Religions are confluences of organic-cultural flows that intensify joy and confront suffering…’ According to such definition, anything (such as sex or drugs) that does ‘intensify joy or confront suffering’ can be religion! Note how this violently does away with memory, indeed the memory of religion itself. That is, one can simply dispense with religion, its whatever memory, if religion can be anything that does ‘intensify joy or…’ 7. This is one of the chapter titles in secular theologian Taylor's work (2008). Taylor claims imperially: ‘I have been consistently guided by leading eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European [Christian] thinkers and writers. Thought it has become fashionable to deny it, the world has been decisively shaped by these seminal figures’ (xiv). Unfortunately, this European guidance did not help Taylor avoid the Euro-Western fallacy of repeating a discredited definition of religion as a ‘network of symbols’ and offering us watered down ‘Ethics without absolutes’, which is ethics without substance. Taylor's work sits squarely within European Christian logic of inheriting religion without religion, that is, inheriting the very thing it denies. Hence, nobody needs to deny the European Christian legacy and its so-called guidance, if there is such a thing. It denies itself. The seminal European Christian thinkers that Taylor likes are part of Christianity's self-denial. 8. Liberal postcolonial scholars of religion continue to emphasise the importance of ‘moderate’ religious identities as an alternative to ‘religious violence’ or supposedly politicised religion in non-Western places. For instance, in his review of Martha Nussbaum (Citation2007), Gerald Larson (Citation2009) finds Nussbaum's livid diatribe on the Hindu right's violence against Muslims to lack ‘balance, nuance, and civility’. Larson finds Nussbaum's account problematic largely because of its focus on the Hindu right and not on Hindu ‘moderate spokespersons’. For Larson, the moderate spokespersons become the corrective to religious violence. This view of course hardly thinks the question of religion and violence. It simply wants to find a way to accommodate religion's place in modern, secular society. And that place can only be accommodated through those who are its ‘moderate spokespersons’. This is how religion, which supposedly always carries the possibility of extremity, then becomes humanised. Note also the fundamental secular division at work in this view, between something called religion and its moderate spokespersons, who can make religion moderate. Ultimately, we will never be able to really tell who these moderate spokespersons and their identities are! 9. This is not quite the same way that the British colonialism gendered Indian religions in its discourses about them (especially Hindus) as naturally effeminate subjects. Kant (Citation1996b, 201), too, charged that ‘the Hindu faith gives its adherents the character of pusillanimity’. This ‘character of pusillanimity’ is hardly what the Kantian sensibility of critique desires. Even though Kant claims that a ‘similar charge’ can be made against the ‘Christian faith’, he obviously thinks Christianity (unlike Judaism, Islam and Hinduism, which are not quite ‘religions’) has the potential to be a ‘moral religion’. Or, as he says (quoting II Timothy 3:16), its (Christian) scripture has the potential for ‘for reproof, for correction’ (143). 10. To say that this way of thinking about legacy/inheritance is profoundly Derridian is only to understate it. For a sample, and only a tiny sample, of Derrida's vast oeuvre on the question of legacy, see Derrida Citation1995a. 11. If I were interested in a historical genealogy of critique vis-à-vis secularisation, I would of course name other names such as Adorno and even Habermas. For something of such a genealogy, see Pecora Citation2006. Pecora is not concerned with the kind of questions I am asking about the aporia of critique here. His is largely a historical account. 12. I have attempted to think the question of resolution in relation to the question of religion and heritage elsewhere; see Abeysekara (Citation2008b). Also, it would be interesting to think about the secular idea of resolution to the Christian notion of ‘reconciliation’, which, as Talal Asad (Citation1993) discusses it in relation to the medieval sacrament of penance and reconciliation, is never something ever really done away with but one that is ‘endless’. 13. On some of these questions, see Derrida (Citation1993). This in part is a deconstruction of Heidegger's labor to think the perennial problem of the separation between life and death. 14. Foucault's reading of the text is indebted to the commentary by the Italian scholar Marcello Gigante. 15. Curiously, Foucault (Citation2001, 112) says that the reference to ‘piloting or navigation is primarily of metaphorical significance’. 16. On various uses of the verb krino, see http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc = Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Aentry%3D%2360004 17. Here, then, decision cannot simply be a choice in the sense that Aristotle speaks of choice: ‘Choice seems to be concerned with things within our own control’ (III. ii. 5–11). 18. On the difference between Bodin's and Schmitt's notions of decision vis-à-vis sovereignty and the state of exception, see Balibar (Citation2004). Schmitt says mistakenly that such decision is already found in Bodin's idea of sovereignty. 19. This relation among separation, decision and critique receives Derrida's (Citation2002) scrutiny (in his “Force of Law: Mystical Foundations of Authority”). Here Derrida in part demonstrates the difference between deconstruction and critique, by way of reading Walter Benjamin's classic essay, ‘Critique of Violence’. Derrida argues that Benjamin's idea of critique runs into all sorts of trouble as Benjamin separates (krinein) different kinds of violence: law-preserving violence and law-sustaining violence, mythic violence and divine violence. Benjamin does not avoid the problem of the repetition of the problem of foundational violence by separating one kind of violence from another. Ultimately, Benjamin's critique does not escape the law of violence but merely retains violence without violence, without its status. I cannot do justice to Derrida's argument here, but for a reading of this part of Derrida's essay, see Gasché Citation2007. Judith Butler (see note 21 below) misses this aspect of Derrida's reading of Benjamin's essay. 20. Also see Blanchot and Derrida Citation1998. 21. Some critics fail to note this about decision. In a recent essay, Judith Butler (Citation2006) claims that Benjamin's ‘divine violence’, exemplified by the commandment ‘Thou Shall Not Kill’, is opposed to mythical or legal violence. Unlike mythical violence (as in the myth of Niobe), the divine violence of the commandment is not ‘despotic’ or ‘coercive’ (ibid., 204). The commandment does not dictate a ‘duty’ but involves a response. (The commandment commands without commanding?) To respond to the commandment is to wrestle with it. ‘If there is wrestling, there is some semblance of freedom’ (ibid., 213). This wrestling, Butler thinks, produces ‘a result, a decision, an act that refuses or revises the commandment, and, in this sense, the decision is an effect of an interpretation’ (ibid.). However, decision cannot ever be such an ‘effect’. 22. Saba Mahmood Citation2008a; also see Asad et al. Citation2009. 23. Elsewhere in an important work, Mahmood (Citation2006, 36–37) also rightly doubts the logic of secular critique but seeks an ‘expansion’ of the normative understanding of critique. While I share her doubt, the word ‘expansion’, I think, runs the risk of carrying a metaphysical sense, as it seeks to expand, beyond itself. The metaphysical expansion is always already at work in critique. This is what Kant himself assigns to the task of critique, as we noted above. 24. For a longer discussion of this, see Asad Citation2008b. 25. Elsewhere, in a fascinating chapter on the Islamic practice of religious criticism (nasiha) in the Middle East, Asad (Citation1993) recognises the ‘limits’ of critique. The duty of nasiha as a moral-political criticism stands opposed to the Kantian notion of critique as a right. (For Kant, the exercising that right is optional and does not impede the duty to obey the ruler). However, nasiha ‘is limiting in that there are certain choices that it will not allow; it is limited that there are certain things it will not criticize… Limitations are part of the way of a discursive tradition’ (ibid., 232). What Asad leaves us to do is to think these limits, I suppose. 26. Again, various contexts for the use of the word krino can be found at http://www.perseus.tufts.edu/cgi-bin/ptext?doc = Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.04.0057%3Aentry%3D%2360004 27. Aristotle sometimes speaks of the ‘competent critic’ (agathos krites). He says: ‘Each man judges [krinei] correctly those matters with which he is acquainted. It is of these that he is a competent critic. To criticise a particular subject, therefore man must have been trained in that subject: to be a good critic, he must have had an all-round education’ (Nicomachean Ethics, I. iii. 4–8). 28. On the Greek question of memory, particularly in relation to the question of beginning, see Sallis Citation1999. In Timaeus, Plato seems to insinuate that remembering, which is a way of repeating a beginning (which is another beginning), is ‘severe, difficult, troublesome, even dangerous’ (kalepon) (ibid., 12). Also see Sallis 2008. 29. This other is what Hegel (Citation1977, 21) also calls ‘the negative’. ‘This negative is the self’. See also note 5. 30. Much of Derrida's deconstructive thinking can be read as a confrontation with this Hegelianism in one way or another, particularly in terms of aporia, the im-possible, the irresolvable, and the undeconstructible. 31. I use this word ‘gives’ in sense of Heidegger (Citation1977, 238; cf. Citation1996, 377–78) of ‘it gives’ (or ‘there is’) (es gibt), as in ‘being gives’. Heidegger's thinking of history or being in terms of es gibt refuses to reduce being to the objective sense of ‘is’. Recall that Hegel (1977, 175) too tries not to reduce his idea of negative dialectic to an objective sense of ‘is’. This is why to him the ‘inorganic inner…as a property… is’ but the ‘organic’ is a ‘movement’. I need not of course remind that Hegel's idea of ‘mediation’ of being both retains and battles against the sense of ‘is’. Heidegger's understanding of history in terms of es gibt refuses to buy into any sense of Hegel's dialectic. But es gibt is not entirely unproblematic either. More on this question of es gibt and its relation to the question of what history ‘gives’, see Derrida Citation1991. 32. Freud especially opposed the psyche's extension to Kant's idea of space. ‘Instead of Kant's apriori determinations of our psychical apparatus. Psyche is extended, and knows nothing about it’ (ibid.). Derrida poses a number of questions to Nancy's reading of Freud's idea of extension, in relation to Descartes's extensio and to Kant's idea of space. One of Derrida's central questions concerns how Nancy's reading of Freud's idea of the extended psyche, which is non-spatial, and which no sense can touch, nonetheless is the ‘sense’ of the world that is ‘self-touching without touching’ (Derrida Citation2005b, 38). (Nancy is also the thinker of ‘touch’ who touches without touching, touching those limits of the untouchable. This is part of Derrida's concern in the book). Derrida questions how far this idea of the psyche extended… goes beyond (or is still caught up in) a Cartesian idea of extension, that is to say, the idea of a distinction between mind and body. Recall that Descartes says that mind and body are distinct yet ‘substantially’ united. For Descartes, ‘I am a thinking thing’ (me esse rem cogitantem) insofar as I am ‘not an extended thing’ (non extensam). Descartes, Meditation III; cited in Skirry (Citation2006, 106). But mind and body both have substance, though of two different kinds. Mind and body are distinct, but substantially united. It is this substantial union between the two that Descartes calls a unum quid (‘one something’) (that is to say, Descartes of course does not call the union ‘one thing’) (ibid.). ‘The proper of unum quid,’ as Derrida calls it, is what is in question for Nancy in ‘Unum Quid’. Nancy locates in the Sixth Meditation the famous passage where Descartes says, ‘I am quasi-intermixed with my body so that along with it I make up a certain unity – something like a “unum quid”’. (CitationNancy, “Unum Quid,” in 1979; cited in Derrida Citation2005b, 25). The word ‘quasi’ is sometimes effaced by translators. Others argue (Skirry Citation2006) that even though Descartes sees this union between mind and body to form a unum quid, that union produces something more that the sum of its parts. Nancy wagers that the quasi-mixture of the union lends to a thinking that is incommensurable, a thinking that is ‘extended’, which undermines Descartes's own distinction between extension and thinking. More on how the extension of the body becomes an ‘attribute’ for Descrates, see Hediegger Citation1996 (89–101). 33. This is part of Nancy new book (2008), which was unavailable to me at the time of writing this article. Since reading the book, I see no need to say anything additional here. 34. Here one thinks of the example of ‘negative theology’. On this, see Derrida Citation2008. 35. Derrida states that this specific tradition of ‘deconstruction’ of Christianity is found in Luther's destructio and the Lutheran memory of Heidegger's deconstruction (Destruktion), and a similar thread of deconstruction of Christianity runs in Pascal and Hegel as well as in Kierkegaard and Marx. On these connections between Luther and Heidegger, see Crowe Citation2006. Specifically on Heidegger's ‘legacy of questioning’ vis-à-vis his thinking about God and the erasure of Being, see Derrida (Citation2008, 185–95). Also, on Derrida's take on how Heidegger still privileges questioning even as Heidegger says (later) that thinking comes before questioning, see Sallis (2008, 53–109). More on the history of the relation between Christianity and questioning, whether that history begins prior to Luther's destructio, see also Nancy (Citation2008, 189, n8). 36. It should be obvious that I engage only this particular chapter, which was published separately in Critical Inquiry in 2006. 37. Sometime ago, David Scott (Citation1999) also asked an important question about what critique demands of itself, in relation to postcolonial literature's deployment of the idea of critique. However, Scott in the end looks for a more refined kind of critique. 38. Cf. Masuzawa Citation2005. I take up the question of genealogical historicisation creating a postcolonial aporia of secular responsibility in Abeysekara Citation2008a. 39. This is what many historians of religion have yet to think about. For example, when historians of Theravada Buddhism make untenable divisions between the ‘practical’ canon vs. the ‘formal’ canon in Sri Lanka (Blackburn Citation2002) or ‘systematic thought’ vs. ‘narrative thought’ or ‘repetitive time’ and ‘non-repetitive time’ in the Pali Buddhist texts (Collins Citation1988), they inevitably write a modern, Christian (Hegelian) sense of secular history into what we know as Buddhism. Such divisions, which, Collins claims, ultimately blend, of course already separate Buddhist life from itself.