In this book, I have collected three groups of texts, to illustrate what I believe to be the importance of a new “critique of religion” in the contemporary world, to indicate some of its objects, highlight some of the reasons for its practical urgency, and contribute to its development.
The first part consists of the retranslation into English of my essay Saeculum: Culture, Religion, Idéologie, published as a book in France by Editions Galilée in 2012, itself an expanded and adapted version of the lecture on “Cosmopolitanism and Secularism” that I gave in November 2009 as the Anis Makdisi Memorial Lecture in Beirut. In this essay I argued, on two correlative planes, that current disputes concerning the uses and misuses of the concept of religion and the religious (clearly Eurocentric, but also deeply rooted in the legacy of rival Western monotheisms, which include Islam)1 would greatly benefit from the theoretical distinction between “religious” and “cultural” dimensions of social practice that a renewed concept of “ideology” in the post-Marxist sense makes possible; and, second, that confrontations between “religious” traditions and “secular” discourses and institutions must now become reframed from a cosmopolitan point of view that fully takes into account the relativization of borders, the hybridization of cultures, and the migrations of populations which have restructured our postcolonial world. I proposed that these phenomena intensify and redefine the perception of “anthropological differences” which are permanently at stake in symbolic differends, particularly among religions and between religions and secular discourses. These issues are intrinsically philosophical (if we understand philosophy as a discipline that continuously exchanges questions and notions with anthropology and other social sciences), but they are also immediately political, with highly conflictual or violent dimensions that verge on a state of endemic war of all against all, leaving us no intellectual or moral security. Because I wanted to overcome past shortcomings, introducing what I hoped was a better sense of the complexity and ambivalence of our historical, juridical, and hermeneutic categories, while not avoiding taking sides in the controversies about the universal in which some major intellectuals of our time have been involved—which also matter to every citizen—I tried to define a strategy through the somewhat utopian notion of the secularized secularism (or desacralized secularism). Borrowing Fredric Jameson’s famous category and using it in my own way, I proposed that it could serve as a “vanishing mediator” in the multifaceted conflict of rival universalities. However elusive it may appear, this notion remains the guiding thread of all the subsequent parts of the volume, not as a “solution” or a “fixed” concept, but as an instrument to criticize existing rules, construct genealogies, and make room for political imagination.
As a complement to this principal essay, I have collected two groups of independent essays or texts. In the first group, titled “Essays,” I put together three articles, all written before Saeculum (in 2005 and 2006), one of which had already appeared in English, which can be said to highlight the continuity and pervasiveness of the “theologico-political complex” from a hermeneutic and institutional point of view. “Note on the Origin and Uses of the Word ‘Monotheism’ ” explains in detail my discovery and personal interpretation (rather isolated at the time) of the fact that “monotheism,” a category and a name without which there would have been no “history of religion” or understanding of the triangular relationship between the “revelations” of Judaism, Christianity, and Islam in our culture, is a recent European invention linked to the ideological struggles involving reason and faith between the seventeenth and the nineteenth centuries, on the background of Europe’s oriental expansion. It absorbed retrospectively the understanding of “idolatry” and “polytheism,” and never acquired a perfectly stable meaning. It is not just the Greek name of Moses’s revelation or its subsequent codification in the Biblical tradition, and it could be applied only retrospectively to the “Abrahamic legacy” in the course of modern interreligious dialogues. In my view, this does not lead to abandoning the category. On the contrary, I am convinced that it signals a fundamental reason why the three Western theologies and theocracies, with their internal divisions, are caught in a symbolic nexus of identity and difference,2 but this certainly imposes a cautious attitude with respect to the possibility of “translations.” The other two essays—“ ‘God Will Not Remain Silent’: Zionism, Messianism, and Nationalism,” a review article about recent critical works on Israeli official ideology and its internal tensions; and “What Future for Laïcité?”, a contribution previously unpublished, written for a conference held in the United States on the centenary of the French legislation establishing secularism as a constitutional principle that remains so enigmatic for most of the “external” world,3 although in Republican ideology it is supposed to be supremely universalistic —are both concerned with singular figures of the articulation of religion and nationalism, in which many of us find ourselves caught directly or indirectly. This is the core of the modern theologico-political complex, or better said: it was its core, before the cosmopolitical dimension discussed in Saeculum passed from margin to center. But, of course, it is an unfinished, perhaps interminable transition, in which the issues of the “past” spectrally haunt the “present.” Taken together, the three essays will hopefully help clarify a situation in which, as I explain in Saeculum and elsewhere, the crisis of modern civic, national, therefore secular universality has irreversibly begun while the crisis of traditional “monotheistic” religious universality is still in progress, without predictable end, creating something like a double bind for our ethical and political orientations.
In the second group, with the title “Statements,” I collected three shorter writings, more recent and more directly interrelated (dated 2015 and 2016, revised in 2017), which are ordered in sequence. They follow the dramatic events that took place in France and some of their consequences on French society and politics, between the attack on the journal Charlie Hebdo and the mass killing on the Nice Riviera in the following year, each time perpetrated by organized or individual “Islamic terrorists.” As a citizen and an intellectual, I reacted with a mixture of immediate sensitivity and ex post factum reflections. What I thought I could say, trying to influence the public debate in a modest way, was directly linked to my general problematic on religion, culture, and ideology—otherwise, what good could it be?—but it was not exactly an application of theoretical notions to a “concrete” situation in which we are caught ourselves. On the contrary, illustrating a concept of theory (and critique) as a conjectural and conjunctural science, I tried to use the situation, however tragic, to rectify my hypotheses (particularly on the issue of conflicting universalities on the global market, and the political ambivalence of “secular” discourses). There is no pretention here of offering a complete interpretation of “Islamic terrorism” as a geopolitical, social, and subjective phenomenon. Nevertheless, I make intellectual efforts to stand the middle ground between reductionist discourses of opposite tendencies. I reject the idea that terrorism is a product of Islam qua “violent religion” (or perhaps qua religion tout court, since religion for some intrinsically means violence, it is the “impolitical” factor par excellence): there are other determining causes, which must be accounted for in the first place. But I also reject the idea that such collective and individual causes could crystallize in the same murderous and suicidal complex without the spiritual resources of Islam, or perhaps the rising to extremes of the “religious” (again, theologico-political) confrontation between Islamic fundamentalism and global islamophobia, in which secularism was never neutral. Everything said here, from my own point of view, is provisional, and offered for critique and objections, including the more elaborated central piece, a set of theses “On ‘Freedom of Expression’ and the Question of ‘Blasphemy,’ ” revised in 2017 for inclusion in this book, where I struggle against the veil of ignorance protecting antithetic “expressions” about the essence and specificity of Islam on the global stage, and I return to the hypothesis of “secularized secularism,” this time to examine its conceptual and ethical affinity with a notion of fearless speech that would enhance the civic dimension of freedom itself, as a cornerstone of democracy. I try to formulate the political and material conditions of reciprocity under which this fundamental “right” proclaimed by our constitutions could actually become unconditionally respected, because it would be treated as a public good on a transnational scale, and not a privilege of some “citizens of the world” only.
If the theologico-political is our past, well encrusted in the present, the secular-political in a radically transformed fashion could be our future, already at work, painfully, in the contradictions and tragedies (or comedies) of the same present. How to ground in a general problematic the idea of this aleatory transition (very different from the classical myth of the “disenchantment of the world” that has governed so much of the sociology and history of “religion” since the nineteenth century)? This should be the object of a “conclusion” which, normally, such a book must contain. I didn’t want to offer that, because it would have meant that I believed I had come full circle, whereas on the contrary I want to create a space sufficiently indeterminate for others to “colonize” its ideas and reshape them. I dream of becoming the observer of reactions and refutations generated by what I wrote, if I am lucky enough to catch the reader’s attention. Instead of a conclusion, I thought I should provide a more general introduction, where my hypothesis of a “new critique of the religious” would be formulated. For this purpose, I seized the occasion of a workshop organized by the French-German research program on “critique” in contemporary philosophy and sociology, based in Paris and Frankfurt under the joint leadership of Gérard Raulet and Axel Honneth.4 In my essay on “Critique in the Twenty-First Century: Political Economy Still, Religion Again,” I explained—once again in conversation with my own Marxist background—that criticism in the proper critical sense (an understanding of the origins, transformations, and contradictions of an institution or a social relation) should at the same time reestablish the question of the “society effect” (Althusser) produced by religious representations and practices in the center of the “ontology of ourselves” (Foucault). This is in a sense the reverse side of what I had argued in Saeculum in the vocabulary of “ideology.” It was directed against the idea that the critique of political economy has superseded the critique of religion, just as capitalism has buried the traditional forms of theology (which certainly was Marx’s conviction). It was also a break with the “positivist” legacy of the Enlightenment, for which we can install ourselves, intellectually and politically, outside the realm of religious interpellations. We are no more outside the religious modes of thought than we are outside the range of economic forms of subjectivation. Homines economici, homines religiosi (which should be written also in the feminine, a symptomatic “grammatical” difficulty indeed), even if it leaves room for dissent, heresy, resistance, and rebellions. This is what makes critique necessary and possible. There is more in my introduction, but why say it in advance? I will take the liberty of redirecting now the reader who is willing to examine my reasons to the text itself.
I want to express generic gratitude to all the institutions, friends, and colleagues who sponsored, commissioned, and commented on the following essays and interventions, as well as the journals and publishers in French and English where some of them appeared, and last not least to the translators (or first translators) of my French into English, particularly Michael Goshgarian, who translated or revised the greatest part. They are all referred to by name in the volume.
Russilly (France), August 25, 2017