At this point, another objection arises. To talk about the permanence or the return of the religious, about a “religious” or “theological” determination encompassing both creeds and secular critiques of them, is to make use of an imprecise if not deceptive category, one that rules out in advance, as certain philosophers and anthropologists tell us today, any comprehension of the cosmopolitical stakes, because it itself always already contains the principle informing a dogmatic deformation. In France, both Jacques Derrida and Régis Debray have outlined such a critique. Their formulations of it are the more important in that they are prudent, essentially tending to double their intervention in the contemporary “clashes of civilizations” with a deconstructive skepticism toward the basic ideas such clashes mobilize. In the United States, this critique has been developed, notably, by Talal Asad, whose formulations, as erudite as they are radical, have become very influential throughout the English-speaking world, especially after 2001, with the controversies touched off by the invasion of Afghanistan, one of the official justifications for which made constant reference to the “liberation” of Muslim women from Taliban oppression and, more generally, Islamic fundamentalism.1
Derrida, setting out from a critical reading of Emile Benveniste’s etymologies, points out that the word “religion,” whose meaning still depends on its Roman and Christian sources, is, properly speaking, untranslatable into other languages and cultures. Use of this term accordingly imposes a “Romano-Christian” code on everything it is used to designate, even when non-Christian confessions (Judaism or Islam) have recourse to it to demand equal rights and recognition in a “religious” domain whose contours are in fact determined by a knowing or judging agency that claims to except itself from that domain by virtue of its secular nature (although, historically, it springs from it):
[W]e will put to the test the quasi-transcendental privilege we believe ourselves obliged to grant the distinction between, on the one hand, the experience of belief (trust, trustworthiness, confidence, faith, the credit accorded the good faith of the utterly other in the experience of witnessing) and, on the other, the experience of sacredness, even of holiness, of the unscathed that is safe and sound…These comprise two distinct sources or foci. “Religion” figures their ellipse because it both comprehends the two foci but also sometimes shrouds their irreducible duality in silence, in a manner precisely that is secret and reticent. In any case, the history of the word “religion” should in principle forbid every non-Christian from using the name “religion,” in order to recognize in it what “we” would designate, identify and isolate there…. Benveniste also recalls that there is no “common” Indo-European term for what we call “religion.” The Indo-Europeans did not conceive “as a separate institution” what Benveniste, for his part, calls “the omnipresent reality that is religion.”…There has not always been, therefore, nor is there always and everywhere, nor will there always and everywhere (“with humans” or elsewhere) be something, a thing that is one and identifiable, identical with itself, which, whether religious or irreligious, all agree to call “religion.” And yet, one tells oneself, one must still respond.2
That may be why the opposite happens in actual practice. Derrida calls it the “mondialatinization” of religio (it might also be called a Romanization of the world).
Yet this does not prevent Derrida from depicting the violence of the conflict raging around the city of Jerusalem and the national appropriation of its holy places, not merely as a phenomenon of a colonial type (the late development of European hegemony in the Mediterranean region due to dramatic historical circumstances: the persecution of the European Jews and, ultimately, their extermination), but also a “sovereign” intensification—and therefore a self-destructive or, to use the term he proposes for this type of violence, an “autoimmune” intensification—of representations elaborated by the three “Abrahamic” monotheisms over the sites and contents of the religious revelation that unites as it divides them.3
In a brilliant essay, Régis Debray takes a different tack. Debray denounces the modern (and, precisely, “secular”) confusion between religion and belief in God, a confusion that obscures the greater generality of the relationship between religion and membership in a community or social body that assigns itself a collective identity (by fashioning or constructing it) transcending the sum of its members’ individualities. Debray accordingly proposes to short-circuit the Christian legacy in order to return to a Roman definition of religio and, ultimately, replace it with communion, which, he says, is the modern term that better captures the intended meaning:
We do not pretend to believe in some policing of language that would, with one stroke of the wand, do away with a usage two thousand years old. The word “religion” appears to be here to stay; but let us note, for honor’s sake, that there is a candidate fulfilling these various requirements: “communion.” The narrowly liturgical meaning that Christianity has assigned the latter term—the reception of the sacrament of the Eucharist—fails to exhaust its resources…. Even if the Latin etymology of the word is not union (cum et unio), but a burden or mission to be shared (cum and munus), the word meets the purpose of breaking down the barriers between the domains of “belief” and “unbelief,” which are all too piously segregated. “Communion” is charged with more meanings than “religion.” It does not dissociate denomination (“the Anglican, Orthodox, Hindu communions”) and empathy (“I feel a sense of communion with your ideas and sentiments”). It is simultaneously a socially recognized “denomination” and a gut feeling, a relation translated into emotion. Above all, however, the word joins the horizontal: “to be a member of”—and the vertical: “to adhere to.” That, precisely, is the equation informing every assemblage that is destined to endure…. In order to become “brothers,” people have to be “brothers in…”—in some overarching entity, noble abstraction, or sublime personage that precedes and exceeds us.4
This proposition, however, presupposes the primacy (which, Derrida would doubtless say, would have to be deconstructed) of the communitarian dimension (or effect of social integration, even if it continues to be ontologically marked by incompletion) over the individualistic (heretic, mystical, ascetic, or “virtuoso,” in Weber’s sense) dimension. It suggests, at any rate, that the latter is always an anomaly or excess with respect to the former. Ultimately, it conduces to an astonishingly skeptical version of the idea of laïcité:
We have concocted antidotes for overcoming the tragedies of credulity and lowering the mandatory rate of symbolic deductions. The first antidote is intellectual: science…. The second is political, and has been around for a century or two: laïcité. This defensive and extremely precious accomplishment safeguards, in the state, a kernel of indifference to symbols and the imaginary, by neutralizing, as fully as possible, their devastating effects on freedom of conscience and the coexistence of differences…. But let us not be duped: although law has an adequate knowledge of things, including things social and economic, and although the disjunction between citizenship and confession, law and creed, is nonnegotiable, it would be imprudent to expect them to be able to divest our mini-religious, pluricultural societies of the inevitable little touch of madness deposited in their monuments, constitutions, and schoolbooks. What the blinding Weberian formula about “the disenchantment of the world” masks is, ultimately, the fact that every disenchantment of a symbolically invested realm, such as politics and its utopias today, precipitates the enchantment of another—in the case to hand, culture and its identities.5
The consequence of this may well be (and is it not what Debray himself would like to see come about?—I am not sure) a purely political decision in favor of one or another type of “communion” (or its institutional primacy), whether it is the communion oriented toward religious confession or that oriented toward citizenship.
The American anthropologist Talal Asad has suggested an altogether different formulation in a series of essays on the genealogy of the opposition between the religious and the secular; they are becoming steadily more influential today, especially in debates on Western societies’ attitude toward Islam.6 Asad’s main idea is that “religion” is a purely Eurocentric category that Christianity forged in order to impose the Church’s domination on practices and creeds that had to be either overcome or assimilated, but, always, assigned their subordinate place in one and the same field, although they themselves had nothing “religious” about them per se (for example, asceticism, charity, contrition, or prayer). Every classification and every interpretation of individual and collective non-Western experience based on the proselytizing, self-referential category of “religion” is accordingly certain to denature such experience, even when claiming to recognize and validate it. But “secular” discourse (in whose terms we formulate the program for the history of religions and, in our schools, our classes on “religious phenomena”) has by no means abolished the theological antitheses intrinsic to the Christian tradition, which it both criticizes and preserves; rather, it has contented itself with displacing and amplifying them, superimposing the opposition between the secular and the religious on that between the orthodox and the heretical, or religion and superstition.7 In so doing, it has constructed a code, dominant in certain societies in which it has been both institutionally (legally) established and intellectually elaborated; this code rules out alternate ways of constructing historical experience.
I think that this line of argument is ultimately aporetic, but I also think it should be taken very seriously, because it reminds us of the crucial fact that there can be no recognition without representation, and no representation without a code for representation. A code is dominant or dominated, but never neutral. It organizes what Jacques Rancière calls the “distribution of the sensible” between the representable and the unrepresentable; in other words, it totalizes the world in accordance with a rule of quasi-transcendental inclusion that also, inevitably, entails exclusion. Yet no code for representing differences is established from outside the conflict or the power relations constituting it, from some purely theoretical position: every code is itself party to the conflict and constitutes one way of managing it. This situation cannot but influence the way the problem of the relationship between democracy and representation is posed. Edward Said and, in his wake, others who have taken up or rectified his analyses, have extended to the realm of “culture” as a whole, with its normative, performative, and figurative dimensions, the antithesis, classic in political sociology (beginning, at the latest, with the Marx of The Eighteenth Brumaire), between dominant and dominated positions in the field of representation (in other words, the difference between being represented by imposed powers or theoretical discourses and the act of representing oneself, that is, in fact, of presenting oneself in the form of a political demand for emancipation).8 But the debate on Orientalism is not only not over, it is also shifting to the terrain of the relations between religion and culture—as we saw when the Catholic Church, in the person of its supreme doctrinal authority in Rome or intellectuals close to him, endorsed the idea that European identity (or, more generally, Western civilization) has “Christian roots” and that this establishes a supposedly unique relationship between faith and reason.9 It would be easy to multiply examples; for, of course, certain critiques of imperialist domination in the extra-European world, or on the part of intellectuals attempting to theorize its emancipation from the mind-sets established by colonization (including “modernity,” “rationalism,” and “historicism”), are quick to adopt the same idea in order to apply it in inverted fashion against what they designate with the blanket term “the West.”
However, if we take seriously, as I suggested above, the idea that there exists a multiplicity of cosmopolitanisms, and if we bring it into relation with the internal critique or deconstruction of the secularism historically institutionalized in the framework of the nation-state, as one of the instruments of its sovereignty and cohesion, we are led to a different way of posing the problem of coding and codification, which is also that of the regime of translation through which collective subjects represent themselves for one another (generally speaking, through the mediation of discourses with which certain “organic intellectuals” and institutions of “power knowledge” provide them). Clearly, we cannot simply dismiss the injunction, issued by Asad and others, to question the religious code and, with it, the secular code bequeathed us by the history of Christianity, together with its juridical and theological elaborations and internal conflicts, all of which turn, precisely, on the category of religion. Does it follow that that injunction is itself free of all contradiction, and is by itself sufficient to free us from the dominant code that prescribes and limits the possibilities for the translation and representation of differences? I am not at all sure, for the logical reason, to begin with, that we will not be able to dispense with the category of the religious without mobilizing other anthropological categories, such as that of culture or tradition, defined as “agency is a complex term whose senses emerge within semantic and institutional networks that make possible particular ways of relating to people, things, and oneself.”10 If, however, we pursue the deconstructive project to its term, the category of culture, like the category of society, law, politics, nation, or even the state, must necessarily appear just as Eurocentric or Western in our eyes as the categories of religion and secularism (or laïcité). For the category of culture results, no less than they do, from the functioning of the major ideological state apparatuses that have been put in place by the West and serve as transmission belts for its hegemony: among them is academic research and scholarship, with the various historical and anthropological disciplines that make it up. The problem, therefore, is perhaps less to eliminate one or the other of these disciplines than to rectify them all, as well as the borders between them, by confronting them with what they have historically grasped in a strange relationship of recognition and miscognition.11