I would now like to introduce a final hypothesis (which I will doubtless be able to do little more than state): the determinations of culture and religion bear, not on distinct materialities, but on one and the same “object.” That object, however, is so malleable that it lends itself to heterogeneous and even incompatible constructions or representations. The concept for it accordingly derives from a disjunction (a system of differences) rather than a conjunction (a synthesis based on a single criterion). Since it is clearly a question of general (or philosophical) anthropology here, we might be tempted to say simply that what is at issue is the human and its characteristic variability. Taking a step beyond this tautology (one step at best), I prefer to say that what is involved is anthropological difference and the way it is constructed, which never ceases to vary historically (this also means that “man” is never the same throughout history—except perhaps as biological species, at the level of genetic determinations, and even that is an open question). Several years ago, in the context of a discussion of the bourgeois ideology of citizenship, I tentatively proposed the category of anthropological difference in opposition to that of “ontological difference” to designate differences that are intractable (but, for the same reason, crucial) in that we can neither avoid them (or deny their existence) nor specify them in stable, univocal, incontestable fashion. Among them are sexual difference—as it structures the attribution of “masculine” and “feminine” roles on the basis of a more or less heavily marked conjunction or disjunction of reproduction and pleasure, affect and utility, love and genealogical institutionalization—but also the differences between the normal and pathological, mental (“intellectual”) and physical (“manual”), and so on. The locus or the exact delineation of these differences as modes of classifying human beings and individual behavior thus remains, by definition, problematic, both socially and psychically, and even physiologically. We will never have a stable, indisputable answer to “essential,” “existential” questions such as: What is specifically masculine and feminine (or appropriate to men and to women)? What is abnormal or “monstrous” from the standpoint of norms of thought or behavior? What puts the human in the animal realm or, on the contrary, distinguishes it from it? I presume that it is a question here of both an anchorage wholly immanent to the human condition and a radical indeterminacy (a “principle of insufficiency” in Georges Bataille’s terms, or a “principle of incompletion” in Debray’s) that rules out any common notion of the human, given once and for all and accessible to merely observing reason.1
Since such differences constitute, contradictorily, objects of fixation and displacement, normalization and perturbation, it is plainly tempting to postulate, if only as a working hypothesis, that culture does the work of normalization, or, in Weber’s terms, of routinization, or, in Freud’s and Norbert Elias’s, of the civilizing of manners, whereas religion brings about the upheavals or sublimations, in revolutionary or mystic modes (which are not, of course, mutually exclusive).2 The historical institutionalization of the human, whatever the material conditions of its “production” and “reproduction,” can be thought only at the price of this tension.
One may object that this division of labor has something very mechanistic about it. That is true, and I have accordingly proposed it only as an allegory indicative of the fact that the opposed functions called into being by the uncertainty of anthropological difference do not fall under the same systems or the same actions in ideology. Pace the indications provided by anthropologists and historians intent on reconciling the religious and the cultural or reducing one to the other, I am taking the risk of pushing the idea of their polarity toward the dialectical figure of an antagonism: I put norms and customs, the “inventions of tradition,” and the processes of “acculturation” at one pole of the opposition, and “conversions,” “reformations” (or “counterreformations”), and “religious revolutions” at the other. The point is, obviously, to draw attention to the effectiveness of symbolic systems that are both thought and institutionalized, not only in the organization and sacralization of cultural structures of power and hegemony, but also in the investment of anthropological differences (such as the difference between the sexes), which accentuates and radicalizes the distribution of roles and practices that it is culture’s basic function to render uniform and inscribe in the obviousness of the everyday.3 What, however, does “radicalize” mean? It can mean, depending on the circumstances, intensifying, sacralizing, absolutizing, idealizing, and sublimating, or, on the contrary, deconstructing, indetermining, or opening lines of escape by introducing, via religious adoration or mysticism, an element of “additional significance” with respect to the everyday.4 That is why this way of reconstructing the tensions within the ideological ultimately leads to limit-questions such as that of religious revolutions or revolutionary transformations of religious tradition (often called “reformations” [réformes] in the West, on the Lutheran or Calvinist model, or classified on the basis of an opposition between reformism and fundamentalism). It also leads to the question of the political effects they can bring in their wake.
More or less recent and still topical examples abound. The “secular religions” (or “political religions”) that Nazism and especially Communism (whose messianic dimension runs much deeper) are supposed to have been may or may not qualify, but liberation theology clearly does.5 “Islamic feminism” might well be counted as another example, if, in defining it, we privilege the symbolic and, equally, political objective of challenging structures of familial domination which, from the earliest stages of the Koranic revelation on (before or after the Prophet’s death), must have been closely associated with monotheistic principles so as to inscribe the regulation of sexuality at the very point of articulation of the cosmic and social orders, between “revelation” and “community.”6 It may be that Islamic feminists, reenacting, in their fashion, a gesture made by other reformers, intend to isolate an element of “purely religious” revelation from everything that falls in the domain of culture or the traditional mores dominated by the patriarchate. It is more likely, however, that they will have to engage in interpretation of the revelation itself, which cannot be divorced from its founding history and, consequently, from that which symbolically institutes the tradition in Islam. At the intersection of tradition and revelation, the crucial stakes will be, obviously, Islamic law, derived from the revelation and the rules of conduct exemplified by the Prophet (shari’a), as well as the ways of understanding it (fikh).7
This last example—which would call for a long discussion—clearly shows that the domains of “the cultural” and “the religious” are never absolutely separate, not even when the logics informing them clash at a given moment in history and produce, as a result, a cascade of political consequences. The same lesson may be drawn from Saba Mahmood’s work on the “mosque movement,” with its radically different orientation. This movement, which Mahmood defines as a form of “piety” (in line with one possible meaning of the word da’wa, which may also be translated as “conversion”), has urban Egyptian women meeting under the guidance of a holy woman (dā’iya) in order to develop, together, the performance of traditional rites (particularly those involving prayer and modesty) and infuse their everyday existence with their spirit—in opposition to tendencies to laxity fostered by the modernization and Westernization of culture.8 In the case of both Islamic feminism and the “mosque movement,” it can readily be seen that only individual and collective subjects, constituted in and through this very experience, effect the overlap between the cultural and the religious in the conditions of a particular conjuncture. This is what lends the history of ideological formations its unpredictable and, simultaneously, never-ending character. Ideology, Althusser said, interpellates individuals as subjects; but subjects, Judith Butler points out, “counter-interpellate” ideology.
It is therefore just as crucially important to observe the emergence and development of new, more or less syncretic religions. They will confer a different meaning on the very notion of the religious by reversing, in some sort, the trend that—from the West’s standpoint—shifted “polytheism” toward “monotheism” (albeit with all sorts of internal contradictions in the interpretation of the latter notion), thereby providing the history of religion in the Romantic period with a prototype for the subsequent shift from the theological age to the age of secularization. In what concrete context will these new religions emerge, if not, precisely, in the field of the mass “culture” fostered by capitalist globalization and the extreme tensions it is breeding—and thus also, as the need arises, against mass culture? I am thinking in particular of the “deep” ecological consciousness that manifestly has messianic and apocalyptic dimensions (with its quest for a katekhon or force capable of “warding off catastrophe”), but that may or perhaps even must also take the form of a revival of the “religions of nature” once known as pantheism or polytheism. They will quite possibly associate a personification of the Earth (Gaia, Pachamama), a “concern for life,” a feeling of emotional community binding “human” and “nonhuman animals” together, as well as the imaginary panoply surrounding manmade life and the proliferation of constructs that are part human, part machine, while also prescribing new modes of life respectful of the environment and the corresponding dietary and health regimes.9 I am not, of course, postulating that the environmental concerns spawned by the growing urgency of the global ecological problem can be expressed and disseminated in the culture of contemporary societies only by way of a religious (or neo-religious) revolution. But a revolution of that kind does seem to me to be well within the realm of possibility. It would be all the more likely if an essentially secular civic universalism were to remain the prisoner of productivism and its own “cult of progress.”
Setting out from the hypothesis of new religions, we might further hypothesize a new secularism. But if the first hypothesis remains, to some extent, a matter of conjecture (even if it is based on numerous “signs of the times”), the second bears all the marks of a political and philosophical imperative, and it is urgent that we get to work on the ways and means of realizing it. In concluding, let me try briefly to say why.