The first and most pressing reason that makes imperative a new secularism brings us back to the preceding idea that the play of culture and religion in the ideological complex exists only as the function of an exterior (or, as the Lacanians would put it, a “real”): capitalist globalization itself, insofar as it is taking forms that are devastating or even catastrophic for the natural and cultural environments and, consequently, for humanity—even if it is also beginning to create planetary solidarities of a new type. From this standpoint, the question of a secularism for the global age does not really differ from that of the development of universalism or the very meaning of the category of universality in the current conjuncture. What language do we have with which to convince ourselves that there exist risks and interests “common to all humankind”? Or again: what are the ideological alternatives to which that proposition gives rise? Even if, following the suggestion of certain eminent contemporary postcolonial critics, such as Paul Gilroy and Gayatri Spivak, we use the term “planetarity” rather than “cosmopolitanism” to designate the set of constraints and imperatives that, in one way or another, must, after being formulated in accessible terms, take their place in the political consciousness of all the planet’s inhabitants, we will still not have eliminated all ambiguity.1
There is nothing in itself absurd in the claim that the idea of a community of interests spanning all human individuals and groups (or, more generally, all living beings) has to carry the day if we are to limit the effects of unrestrained competition and capitalist individualism, avoid the self-destruction of humankind, and move toward a civilization of the postmodern age in which all kinds of communities, dependent on the same environment for their survival, can coexist. But it is quite obvious that this idea must itself be universalized if it is to leave the status of a moral horizon or utilitarian calculation behind, and advance to the rank of a political construction. (This further implies, in all probability, that government and modes of representation will have to be reconstructed on bases other than those invented by the industrial nation-states in the period in which they undertook to “divide up the world among themselves”). Or, to put the same thing in still other, Gramscian terms, the idea of such a planetary community of interests will have to become “common sense,” translatable into a multitude of discourses and languages spoken by a multitude of groups and social conditions.2 One hardly need be a Marxist-Leninist to guess that such planetary universalization will come about only at the price of very violent conflicts in which the immediate interests of the dominant and dominated, old and new, will clash for a very long time, without an a priori prospect of reconciliation or even of reciprocal recognition. Science will not suffice. Nor will law. Nor will humanism. Invoking “commons” or “commonalities” names the problem, but does not yet determine a solution. I postulate, for my part, that the capacity to face up to these conflicts and take part in them in a civilized way with a view to changing the world will not depend on the establishment of a new religion, even if we should not exclude religious components from the idea of planetarity, especially in view of the apocalyptic dimensions of the ecological risk and the fears it generates.3 It will depend, rather, on whether we manage to discover a new “civic” articulation (articulation citoyenne) combining socialism, internationalism, multiculturalism, and, so to speak, a secularism raised to the second power—a “secularization of secularism” itself, that is to say, a critical and self-critical form of what has been historically thought and institutionalized under that rubric.4
In an articulation of that sort, nationally and internationally recognized legal systems, hence “secularized” states and “cosmopolitical” agencies, cannot but play an important role. For there is no citizenship, not even democratic citizenship, without institutions and institutionalization, and these are impossible without law. (This does not mean that there is an invariant legal form, especially not when the territorial framework of the law changes—but that is not my subject here.) But it may fairly be doubted whether states and international agencies will be, in the final instance, the decisive actors of such an articulation. For states and legal systems are, precisely, prisoners of national and, therefore, cultural particularism; they tend to reproduce forms of communitarian hegemony or, at best, to establish their limits. Above all, they are inseparable (however loudly they proclaim their devotion to laïcité) from theologico-political constructions, or present themselves as, in Hegel’s terms, determinate negations and “sublations” of the theological institutionalization of sovereignty and the law.5 That is why there is no reason to be particularly surprised that the idea of secularism—whether as the strict separation of the religious and the political along the same dividing line that separates private and public (this is what the French Republic officially means by laïcité), or as equal protection for all religious affiliations by a state and law that would maintain a rigorous “neutrality” toward all of them—has not been slow to lapse back into forms of a sacralization of power, not just as an absolutization of its authority, but also as an immunization of its discourse, which is thus placed beyond the reach of contestation and the conflict of interpretations. A state that holds a monopoly (within defined borders) on interpretation and enforcement of the law is always on the way to de-secularization even as it generalizes the field of secularization. That is the abiding lesson of Hobbes’s Leviathan and Hobbes’s own political theory: the substitution of the “mortal God” (incarnated, as a general rule, in the form of a national body) for the “immortal God” (assuming, let me add, that the mortal and immortal are separable attributes of the divine). The interstate negotiations from which international law derives occasionally limits the identity-based complex built up around the state and membership in the nation, but it cannot do away with it.
Thus, if the collaboration and cooperation of institutions such as states and international organizations, as well as advances in humanitarian and environmental international law, may well be required to regulate the problem of identity-based passions, communitarian hatreds or, more simply, the barriers to communication threatening to spoil, from the outset, the chances for the development of a new planetarity in the global age, it would seem that the solution to that problem cannot, in the final analysis, proceed from law itself. If so, it remains for us to grasp what can mobilize and articulate processes of cultural communication and the civilizing (in the sense of civility) of religious antagonisms. I have suggested elsewhere that the condition for defending and developing multiculturalism (jeopardized everywhere today by deadly combinations of postcolonial racism, a resurgence of nationalism, and defensive reactions brought on by globalization itself, to the extent that it “profanes” cultural identities and undoes social solidarities) is as radical a dissociation as possible between the traditionally contiguous (albeit not identical) figures of the stranger (étranger) and the enemy.6 The condition for multiculturalism is therefore also a politics of intercultural translation valorizing and fostering the phenomena of alliance and hybridization, of multiple affiliations, that form the material basis for encounters and exchanges between distant cultural universes, even if such phenomena have many obstacles to surmount and often come at the price, for the individual, of a melancholy bred by the experience of exile or, more simply, the existential problems inherent in life in a diaspora.7 I have emphatically not changed my mind on this point. But I have to admit, on the basis of the preceding formulations, that none of all that precedes is sufficient. The pacification of religious conflicts, or, still better, their conversion or sublimation into ideals capable of relativizing communitarian affiliations, cannot function in the mode of multiculturalism because such pacification is not only based on processes of change, transition, and translation, however demanding they may be, but has also to do with what Weber calls “the war of the gods,” that is, the incompatibility of axiomatics and ethical choices that such affiliations force individuals to make when the stake is the unbearable indeterminacy of anthropological differences themselves. What reigns between religious axiomatics is not necessarily war (for, as I recalled earlier, the causes of “wars of religion” are in fact never simply ideological), but what I have called a conflict of universalities; thanks to which difference is reduced to, or represented in accordance with, a certain code, a certain symbolic law. Here it is the regime of translation or “translatability” itself that must change. When it is possible to translate one religious universe into another, the reason is precisely that it is not purely religious. The “religious” as such always marks the point of the untranslatable.8 As has been shown, however, by a major strand in contemporary philosophical thought, from Walter Benjamin to Jacques Derrida, the untranslatable is not just a barrier in this case, an external limit on the possibility of the encounter; it is, rather, the problem that must be confronted in common.
That is why I am inclined to think that if conflict, insofar as it is religious, cannot be resolved by purely legal or statist means (but can only be repressed or institutionally displaced in the form of a conflict between religion, relegated to the private sphere or particularity, and a secularism that sometimes tends to reestablish a “civic religion”), and if it also cannot be reduced to a system of cultural differences, then we have to agree to treat it as a differend.9 That is, we have first of all to state it as such: to state it not as a juxtaposition of arbitrary constructs, but as a (forced) choice, for the subjects involved, between irreconcilable representations and prescriptions of the subdivisions of the human, of what separates the human from the inhuman, or of what separates the various modalities of the human from one another. It thereby allows us to bring these representations and prescriptions into relation. If there exists a symbolic element or a type of discourse that can here play the role of a mediation (or mediator), it cannot present itself as simply one more choice of the same kind; in other words, it cannot simply take its place in the system of religions, not even as a “new religion”—except, perhaps, as a sort of generalized heresy. Whence the idea, which has already appeared episodically in the history of ideas (in Spinoza, for example), that what obliquely makes the encounter of different religions possible, or allows them jointly to cultivate a “free conversation” in the public realm, is the introduction or intervention there of a supplementary element that is, as such, a-religious (although not necessarily anti-religious). Without this paradoxical element, which might be called atopical, internal/external, and be said to form something like an edge of the ideological universe, we would have no way of measuring the distance between the axiomatics of the difference, and no way of bringing their interpretations to converge on certain ethical or social rules, since there would be no discursive space in which these differences could be presented (présenté) as such, in comparative fashion, and thus “introduced (présenté) to each other” outside the framework of a codified domination or an imaginary reconciliation. It is this additional element, charged both with bringing religions together and recognizing the irreducibility of their conflict, that I am once again tempted to call, after Fredric Jameson, the “vanishing mediator” of communication between incompatible religious discourses. It must, accordingly, exhibit sharply paradoxical features, and we cannot be sure that they will not remain irreducibly contradictory.10
This vanishing mediator must always already have existed, even if it was not identified or was identified under assumed names, so that misidentification of it, its invisibility, is in some sort the rule. It is neither the discourse of universal morality nor that of the ethics of discussion, neither the discourse of scientific knowledge nor that of the rights of man; nor is it the discourse of tolerance, cosmopolitanism, or planetarity, although it has certain practical objectives in common with all of them.11 Nor can it be identified with atheism, agnosticism, or skepticism, although it doubtless includes, as they do, a dimension of negation. It is easy to see, however, that each of these terms suggests negation in opposition to just one religious form or attitude. “Atheism,” for example, is meaningful only in the case of religions organized around the representation of one or more gods; there are, however, religions without gods. As for “skepticism,” which I have occasionally privileged, in the lineage of Montaigne and Bayle, it is meaningful only when the essence of religion is creed or dogma; the religious can, however, reside primarily in ritual.12 For historical reasons, we can, for a particular place, call the vanishing mediator “secularism,” on condition that our use of this term goes hand in hand with a critique of the institutions and reigning conceptions of secularization—heavily determined, culturally and politically, by the theological heritage and ecclesiastical institutions that secularization combated. Such secularism resembles a skepticism to the second power.
The vanishing mediator between politico-religious differends is effective only if it resonates within religious discourses, if it reveals cracks in their creeds, impossibilities in their prescriptions, or inconsistencies in their ethics. It has to divest them of their singularity and undermine their certainty that they hold the monopoly on truth and justice, without, however, thwarting their search for truth and justice (“salvation”) on their own paths. Here we may, perhaps, once again invoke the category of heresy or try to imagine the vanishing mediator as the unlikely heresy common to all religious discourses, while leaving open the question of its relation to the heretical movements that have historically affected each particular religion. Not all heresies, of course, have been tolerant; far from it. Spinoza, for his part, preferred the term wisdom (manifestly inspired by a Greek and Latin tradition of “worldly wisdom” or “profane wisdom,” Weltweisheit); yet the way he conceived wisdom was itself profoundly heretical, combining Lucretius’ teaching with the Ecclesiast’s.13
Be it added that this element is certainly a public discourse—in any case, the function it performs is not “private”—or always raises the private to the level of the political. However, as we have seen, precisely by functioning in such a way as to make the religious differend public, the vanishing mediator that we are identifying with (self-) critical secularism is necessarily at antipodes from the state institutions whose task is to regulate behavior in a legally enforceable way, while conferring an unquestionable obviousness on the distinction between public and private (which, in the order of discourse, is often redoubled by that between the expressed and repressed). More generally, it cannot be normative; it does not express an imperative in the Kantian sense—the less so in that, in our culture, the normative or imperative bears the indelible traces of certain religious constructions of the human, inscribed both in the inwardness of the soul and ethical consciousness, and in the externality of rules of prescription and prohibition (especially where sexuality is concerned). Yet it is also not purely cognitive or “theoretical,” however important knowledge and an understanding of natural and social phenomena are for all secular thought. It might be called, rather, declarative or performative, in the sense, to begin with, that it effects its own free statement of truth (something the Greeks called parrhèsia, as Foucault reminds us) in the face of discourses of power based on myth, revelation, or the force of habit, but also in the face of the authority of science and law. Let us therefore forthrightly admit the fact: it is quite possible that this vanishing mediator is nothing more than a philosophical fiction. It is up to all of us to endow it with existence—or to invent it.