On Secularity and the Religion-Making Machine
ARVIND MANDAIR
No philosopher of the 19 C or 20th C has had as great an impact on the world as Hegel. The only possible exception to this sweeping statement would be Karl Marx—and Marx himself was heavily influenced by Hegel. Without Hegel neither the intellectual or political developments of the last 150 years would have taken the path they did.
—Peter Singer, Hegel: A Very Short Introduction
Since David Strauss first coined the terms “Right Hegelians” and “Left Hegelians” in the mid-nineteenth century, perceptions about Hegel’s intellectual legacy generally tend to have been split between two opposing interpretations of his work. The so-called Right Hegelians saw Hegel primarily as a religious philosopher whose ideas helped to revive a theistic version of traditional Protestantism. By contrast “Left Hegelians” argued that Hegel had shown how to unravel the structure of human consciousness, in the process demonstrating that religion was a mere by-product of the human mind and could be better understood if we reduced it to more basic processes such as psychology, society, economics, and so on. By laying bare the processes of thinking itself, Left Hegelians, including Marx, developed a form of secular critique that framed the way in which religion was thought about for almost two centuries, culminating in the secularization thesis: the idea that modernity and secularism would combine to eventually displace religion altogether from the public sphere.
Hegel, it seems, has suffered many different fates. Exorcized by thinkers as different in their orientations as Marx and Kierkegaard in the nineteenth century, left for dead by modern theologians such as Karl Barth, supposedly made redundant by analytic philosophers such as George E. Moore in the early twentieth century, and disavowed though surreptitiously deployed by postmodern theorists, it would appear that the death of Hegelianism has become part of conventional wisdom.
Yet such banal optimism about the death of Hegel has been shattered by a recent revival of interest in Hegel’s key philosophical works within the humanities and social sciences. Hegel’s philosophical resurrection seems to revolve around two main themes: (i) a broad shift in scholarly understanding of the relationship between religion and the secular, and related to this (ii) the revalued status of time and temporality (specifically the future) in relation to Hegel’s system of dialectic.
As I argue below, these two themes are strongly interlinked. The first theme has been examined by Catharine Malabou in her recent book The Future of Hegel.1 Arguing against the prevailing Heideggerian interpretation of Hegel, Malabou calls for a revaluation of time and temporality in Hegel’s key works such as the Phenomenology of Spirit, his two Berlin lecture courses on the Philosophy of History and the Philosophy of Religion, and the Science of Logic. The dialectical process, Malabou argues, needs to be read not simply as an exercise in logic, but as a movement or plasticity that forms time itself: “The dialectical composition of such concepts as ‘the future,’ ‘plasticity,’ and temporality form an anticipatory structure operating within subjectivity itself as Hegel conceived it.”2 Malabou names this anticipatory structure “to see what is coming” (le voir venir), an expression that can refer at one and the same time to teleological necessity, to being sure of what is coming, and to the surprise of not knowing what is coming. Far from simply being a philosopher of history (understood as the overcoming and installation of past stages in human development), Hegel needs to be understood as a thinker who anticipated a certain future that seems to be unfolding right now. That future involves the vexed relationship between religion and the secular, or better still, what comes after religion and the secular as it relates to the future of democracy in an era of sharply accelerated globalization. The question that concerns us in this chapter is why in contemporary theory and in the politics of the global right and left, Hegel has become such a resource for understanding the intersections between politics, religion, and culture.
To answer this question I want to situate this reading of Hegel in relation to recent intellectual movements that have analyzed the key transformations in the enigmatic relationship between religion and the secular, as well as its practical implications for postcolonial cultures for whom the categories religion and secular are doubly problematic. This juxtaposition of the theoretical and the practical/political may help to justify Peter Singer’s claim that Hegel has had an unrivaled impact on intellectual and political developments in the modern world.
HISTORICAL CONSCIOUSNESS, SECULAR CRITIQUE, AND THE WESTERN IMAGINARY
Recent years have seen significant alterations in the way that public spheres are perceived, as can be seen in the proliferation of phrases such as the “return of religion” or the “crisis of secularism.” In accordance with this altered perception, scholarship in the study of religions has begun to adopt a less normative stance toward the secularization thesis, in the process redrawing the map of the religion-secular debate. For the sake of argument, it is helpful to identify several of the more important strands of scholarship that have contributed to this transformation. These include (i) the sociopolitical philosophy of secular liberalism championed by Charles Taylor and to some extent shared by thinkers such as John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas, (ii) the discourse of “political theology” revived in part by postmodernist theologians and continental philosophers; (iii) Foucault’s genealogical critique of power, particularly as it has been deployed by theorists of postcoloniality such as the literary critic Edward Said and the anthropologist Talal Asad.
While all three schools have responded to the challenges posed by the resurgence of religion within the dominant frameworks of modern liberal social democracy, what distinguishes the first two schools from the third is a specifically philosophical investment in the constitution of the modern Western imaginary. This philosophical investment hinges on the belief that there is an essentially historical difference between the West and the Rest. The term “historical difference,” which I borrow from Dipesh Chakrabarty, signifies a cluster of related ideas that account for the coemergence and codependence of religion and secularity in the West, and by implication, why these processes and the forms of cultural and political organization that it spawned (global capitalism, democracy, and so on) could not have emerged in the non-West.
Religion and secularity thus haunt each other such that religion, as it evolved in the West, has always been present in all secular phenomena, even when it appears to be absent, and secularity, in turn, has covertly continued a religious agenda. However, these oscillations between religion and secularity did not take place in a vacuum, but are tied to a series of theoretical developments that helped to create the current map of religion and the secular. These developments were instigated, at least in part, by a logic of reform that was embedded in the Protestant revolution. It was this logic of reform that not only helped to rupture the connections between society and religious life, but also created the rupture in consciousness that generated the individuated religion of devotion (Protestant interiority) that is so integral to our understanding of the secular age.3
The key theoretical developments include the following.4 First, Luther’s discovery of the divided self, that is to say, the form of consciousness that separates itself from itself. Second, Kant’s discovery of the transcendental faculty of mind whose operative mechanism he termed “the schematization of the categories.” This schema unified human experience through three interrelated ideas of reason—God, self, and world—and in so doing Kant laid the groundwork for the disclosure by his successors (such as Hegel) of the self-reflexive structure of self-consciousness. According to Mark C. Taylor, a self-conscious subject is one that “turns back on itself by becoming an object to itself. As a result self-as-subject and self-as-object are reciprocally related in such a way that each becomes itself through the other and neither can be itself apart from the other.5 The self-conscious subject is therefore noncoincident with itself—it separates itself from itself. This paradoxical structure of self-relation (to be itself the self must separate itself from itself) is what we call self-representation. As Kant sees it, an important consequence of this representational mode of thinking associated with this self-conscious subject is that any object of thought must already be separated from itself. Thus when religion becomes an object of thought, the imperative to separate itself from itself constitutes its secularization. Through this mode of secularization the sanctity of religion is replaced by the sanctity of critique, which then becomes inviolable.6
The third development is Hegel’s incorporation and reworking of this mode of self-relation into a comprehensive schema for organizing the ever-growing knowledge about other cultures in terms of the historical transition between religion(s), secularity, and the postsecular. It was with Hegel that the notion of historical difference became integral to the determination of the other. Hegel’s genius was to integrate the possibility and definition of critical thinking (or critique) with the notion of historical difference. That is to say, religion/tradition can be defined as critical if from its very beginnings it is able to contest its own origins. The ability to separate oneself from one’s origins, hence separation from religion or tradition, can be seen as a measure of secularity. In Hegel’s reworking of this principle (see the following) the degree to which a culture or religion can carry out this self-separation at its origins not only defines history (and secularity), but also determines the degree to which it is different from other traditions and cultures.7
But how exactly did Hegel make the move from the structure of rational self-consciousness (the self-representing subject) to the nature of thinking (critique as a mode of secularization) and finally to a world-historical organization of human society? The key to this move is the complex interplay between, on the one hand, the universalization of the category of religion and, on the other hand, the deployment of a particular religion (Christianity) as the glue that holds together the movement between self-consciousness and secular thought and world-historical society. This move was continually reformulated in his key works, but its most familiar version is found in the Phenomenology of Spirit, published in 1806, in which the representational model of self-conscious subjectivity not only explains the relationship between Kant’s ideas of reason (God, self, world), but equally accounts for the relationship between religion and secularity (qua history).
For Hegel, the structure of self-consciousness—the field on which the self represents itself to itself—mirrors the conceptual structure of the Incarnation and the Trinity. Taylor explains, “the triadic structure of Father-Son-Spirit is isomorphic with the triadic structure of self-consciousness: self-as-subject [= Father]. Self-as-object [= Son] and the inter-relation of the two [= Spirit].”8 Since the figure of the Father, which symbolizes transcendence and separation as attributes of religion, is transfigured into that of the Son, it is possible to see how the oscillation between religion and secularity is mediated through the activity of the spirit. And because Spirit is described as that substance which is able to separate itself from itself in the moment of its origin (or what Hegel calls pure elevation, pure movement), the work of Spirit consists in nothing less than a pure relation, an infinitely transparent (or “generalized”) translation that is able to move between self and other, subject and object, religion and secularity, infinitely and at will.
What is often forgotten about Hegel’s reconstruction of the Kantian imaginary is that even though it universalized its self-referential mode of subjectivity on the basis of a particular religious culture (Christianity), it was not formed in a cultural vacuum. Its backdrop was the growing encounter between European and non-European cultures, an encounter that Hegel was not only aware of, but took an active part in reformulating, especially in his later works, which were written at a time of maximal colonial expansion.9 Insofar as it represented the self-consciousness of the West, this imaginary was, from the outset, a comparative imaginary “that functioned according to a structured-structuring process.”10 At the very moment that the comparative imaginary was inscribed in and structured the “signifying practices that described, classified, annotated, analyzed, represented, prescribed and ordered the cultural and material world of its colonial subjects, in ways that have too often become naturalized,”11 in that very moment and through the work of comparison, the very same imaginary was actively fleshing out the identity of European culture. The contours of the West and the non-West were thus codependent and coemergent. They were mutually fleshed out (translated) within and through this model of self-representation. It is possible to suggest that the comparative relation between West and non-West was, and continues to be, isomorphic with the relation between self-as-subject and self-as-object.12 It was in fact a universalized or “generalized” translation in which the other was reduced to the same (self-as-object) or cast out of the purview of human consciousness altogether.13 Through this generalized translation that constitutes the comparative relation between self and other (say, Europe and Africa/Asia), “the difference of the other no longer appear[ed] as a threat; a hindrance maybe, and a source of resistance to be quelled, certainly a source of evidence and experiences for reflection on the human condition and for forging the policies and the measures for the transformation of the world.”14
To briefly restate the above point, the historical coemergence and codependence of religion and secularity, leading up to the contemporary map of these two categories, are inextricably bound to the development of the modern Western imaginary with its constitution of a particular structure of human consciousness. This in turn privileges a particular type of critical thinking as universal (one that grounds itself in self-separation) and a particular religion, Christianity, which acts as the pivotal “axis on which the history of the world turns.”15 Hegel’s reference to the turning of the world seems to imply two things.16 First, the potential for a culture to move from the lowest to the highest stages of religious evolution—typically from paganism to Christianity but also from religion, through secularity, to the postsecular. Second, the potential for changing the world (“world turning”) is also an indirect reference to the logic of reform that was embedded within the Protestant revolution. For it is this logic of reform that enabled Christianity to overcome itself, to shift from corporeal practices toward states of interiority and, in the event, give rise to the disenchantment that led to secularism. It was precisely this logic that forced the rupture in consciousness that gave Luther his project. Thus the key to understanding the role of Christianity is the historical—specifically the notion of time central to the task of inheriting (that is, reforming) Christianity that is built into the perceived codependency of religion and the secular.
If the secular and the reform that gave rise to it represent the dynamics of religion’s self-overcoming, its ability to turn the axis of the world, then (i) turning implies the movement of history, that is, temporality, (ii) the secular is incipient in religion from the moment that human consciousness emerges as a divided subjectivity. In other words, the relationship between religion and secularity is maintained by a particular notion of history. This notion of history is nothing other than the moment of emergence of a particular form of self-consciousness as the so-called critical attitude that not only came to define the very nature of modern Western man as the relational center of the world, but also constitutes itself as universal insofar as the twinned categories of religion and the secular, time and consciousness, are then inscribed onto every other culture through the work of imperialism.
In this way, prior to their actual colonization, all other cultures of the world (indeed the very possibility of pluralism) were mapped within a framework of historical development in such a way that Christianity provided the essential blueprint for the map and the historical evolution of world cultures inscribed within it. As Jonathon Sheehan suggests, it is through this emerging narrative arrangement of cultures on a world grid, that Christianity came to occupy all of the available sites of intellectual responsibility—“to possess the past.… as the originary author of the secular age and yet to disavow responsibility for it.”17 The crucial aspect in this is performed by the narrative itself. For it is the narrative that, on the one hand, recognizes other cultures as religion(s), and in that very moment of recognition sets them apart in a proper place, and on the other hand, inasmuch as it coincides with the transparent movement that is time (or history), ensures the Christian claim to the present (the secular age that we all live in), to its past (the history of the world’s religion(s), or the religious history of the world), but also, and perhaps more importantly, to its postsecular future, which would entail a renewal of the secular by returning to its religious sources.18
HEGEL’S TRANSCENDENTAL APPARATUS: REMAKING RELIGIOUS PLURALITY
One of the keys factors that enabled the narrative movement from religion to the secular, and through to the postsecular, thereby connecting the world spatially and temporally, is the concept of religion as a universal. That philosophical interpretations of the religion-secular-postsecular relationship depended on the ability to conceptualize religion as a universal should not surprise us. Its antecedents can be found in the work of major thinkers of the Enlightenment such as David Hume in the mid-eighteenth century and, even more so, G. W. F. Hegel in the early nineteenth century.
One of the key problems for both Hume and Hegel was to find a reliable intellectual solution to the problem of pluralism and cultural difference as it was manifesting itself in the reports of explorers, missionaries, and orientalists. Although they both worked in different contexts, in different time periods, and with different materials at their disposal, for both Hume and Hegel the only proper solution to the problem presented by the increasing variety of non-Christian cultural beliefs and practices was to assimilate them to a category of religion modeled on a Protestant understanding of religion with “belief and practice at its conceptual center.”19 The closest that Hume comes to entertaining the idea of religion as a universal category can be seen in his Natural History of Religion, in which he traces the origin of religion to peculiarly human experiences of hope and fear, arguing that the “first obscure traces of divinity” grow out of “ordinary affections in human life.”20 But even in this influential treatise Hume is very clear to point out that while religion is common (all men potentially have religion) it is not necessarily universal.
While arguments for or against a universally applicable model of religion remain implicit in Hume’s accounts, they are far more rigorously theorized by Hegel. In his Berlin courses, published as the Lectures on the Philosophy of History and Lectures on the Philosophy of Religion, Hegel effectively constructed just such a model in the form of a comparative schema that could frame all empirical and explanatory knowledge of other cultures within a historicist vector much the same as the one recounted above. Hegel’s main concern in the Berlin lecture courses was to counter the philosophical influences of Deism and the debates about natural religion. As Hegel saw it, discourses such as these, especially when deployed by the early orientalists, provided a potentially safe haven for oriental cultures, a means whereby they could adversely influence the European intellectual mindset, and in so doing could possibly displace or undermine the dominant vantage point of Christian European cultural identity. The problem for Hegel was how to differentiate between Christian religion as properly historical (and therefore capable of self-critique and secularization) and other, especially Asian, religions as lacking history. Hegel’s answer was to establish a firm theoretical standpoint, the concept of religion-in-general, that could be used as a means for comparing oriental cultures (particular religions) by means of an ontotheological framework.21 The term “ontotheology” refers to an essential continuity of different moments in the Western philosophical and theological traditions (specifically the Greek [-onto], the medieval-scholastic [theo-], and the humanist [logo- or logic]), a continuity that challenges the dominant secular Enlightenment story in which modernity and humanism constitute a radical break with prior religious tradition.22
Hegel’s genius was to incorporate both religion (by reformulating the existing ontological proofs for God’s existence) and secularity (through the vector of historicism) into the work of comparing different cultures.23 According to the rules of his schema, the degree to which any culture can think coherently and clearly about “the transcendent” corresponds to its ability to emerge into history, that is, to elevate itself from a purely natural existence. This in turn is a measure of that culture’s ability to think critically, as measured by its ability to separate itself from itself—and it also measures its degree of secularity. What becomes clear in any close reading of the Hegelian narrative is that the concept of religion-in-general is being fleshed out with the simultaneous inclusion and exclusion of oriental cultures within history (that is, inclusion within the domain of religions, which is simultaneously exclusion from the domain of history/secularity).24 Furthermore, the concept of religion as universal is fleshed out in a process that is paralleled by the refinement of a specific mode of thinking, the so-called critical attitude that is characteristic of the modern West, in which the operation of thought becomes indistinguishable from generalized translation as the ability to translate infinitely and at will between the universal and the particular.
In short, Hegel’s ontotheological schema identifies reason with Christianity and thus closes the circular relationship between (i) historical consciousness, (ii) the assumed secularity of critique, and (iii) Western civilizational identity more securely than at any point in the history of philosophy. But more importantly, he can implement this circularity between history, critique, and secularity by identifying tangible others (Asia, Africa, and the like) as “religious,” followed by their inclusion-exclusion within the order of knowledge and existence. In other words, by means of the law of history/critique/secularity Hegel is able to constitute a relation between European Christianity and its others. But it is a relation in which the other is excluded through its inclusion within the orders of knowledge and existence. This simultaneous exclusion-inclusion becomes a means for rendering the encounter with non-Western cultures politically harmless. This was achieved by installing these cultures at the lower end of a horizontal axis that charts the development (self-elevation) of cultures of the world from religion through secularity and eventually into the postsecular.25 The dual purpose of this installation was to give them a comparable and recognizable identity, while through that very gesture subverting their potential for contributing in any way to modernity.26
In one sense Hegel’s comparative schema (underpinned by the movement from religion to secular to postsecular) can be seen as part of a broader anxiety felt by European intellectuals about an originary diremption, a crisis of identity, at the heart of the intrinsically linked concepts of Europe, Modernity, and Christianity. In other words, Hegel’s response to this anxiety was not just epistemological but deeply political, a point that is echoed by Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri in their influential work Empire.27 According to Hardt and Negri, modernity was never a unitary concept, but rather appeared in two ways. The first mode was a radical revolutionary process that broke with the past and declared the immanence of world and life, positing human desire at the center of history. For Hardt and Negri, the philosophy of Spinoza provides a good example of this tendency toward immanence. But it could also be discerned in the supposedly “pantheistic” philosophies of oriental cultures, particularly those of India and China. Opposed to this, however, was a second mode of modernity, which deployed a transcendental apparatus to suppress the potential for liberating the multitude. In the struggle for hegemony between these two modes, victory went to the second and hence to the forces of order that sought to neutralize the revolutionary effects of modernity. This internal conflict at the heart of European modernity was simultaneously reflected on a global scale in the form of external conflict. The same counterrevolutionary power that sought to control the potentially subversive forces within Europe also began to realize the possibility and necessity of subordinating other cultures to European domination. Eurocentrism was born as a reaction to the potentiality of a newfound human equality.28
In many ways Hegel’s reworking of the comparative imaginary of the West epitomizes this second mode of modernity. As Hardt and Negri point out, intellectual projects such as Hegel’s “could not but take place against the backdrop of European expansion … and the very real violence of European conquest and colonialism.” However, the real threat for Hegel was not physical but intellectual—a threat to the very design of the concept. Hence the ontotheological schema can be considered a diagram of power that at the same time provided a mechanism of power for controlling the constituent and subversive forces within Europe that championed a revolutionary plane of immanence, as well as a “negation of non-European desire.” During Hegel’s tenure, the thought of his rivals, such as Schelling and later Schopenhauer, must be considered good examples of “non-European desire.”
The results of this transcendental apparatus—the new comparative schema—were far reaching. Deploying for the first time the terms “pantheism,” “monotheism,” and “polytheism” as “world-historical” or comparative categories, the schema provided an intuitive comprehension of the “meaning-value” of each culture that happened to be plotted on the axis.29 The insidious aspect of this schema is not simply the representation of diversity, plurality, difference, time, and other(s) through a configuration of the “world,” but more accurately the fleshing out and preservation of the particular constellations “Europe,” the “West,” “Christianity,” and “the Secular” through the category of universal religion.30 It is this move that allowed Hegel, and after Hegel a host of orientalists, missionaries, philosophers, anthropologists, historians, economists, and religionists, to apply models that recognized the diversity of world cultures in terms of similarity and difference. Non-Western cultures could be recognized as religions (and therefore similar to “our own,” that is, Christianity, and as part of a broad human unity) but at the same time served to differentiate between humans and cultures precisely on the basis of their different religious elevation, their incompatibility with secular cultures of Europe. This ambivalent schema, which simultaneously produces religions of the world as a measure of their historical difference from the West, even as they are denied the ability to overcome or reform themselves except through a developmental process based on Western patterns, was put to use intellectually and practically during the colonial and postcolonial era.
Obviously, variations of this Eurocentric schema were located within the broader imperialist politics of modernization, understood as a civilizing mission when referring to the “Rest.” Intellectually, aspects of it were incorporated into hermeneutic explanations about the essential nature of non-Western cultures that would eventually become seamlessly incorporated into the system of the emerging human sciences. Within an emerging world-religion discourse, the schema provided an intuitive comprehension of the “meaning-value” of cultures through a principle of “generalized translation”—a mechanism for bringing different cultures into a taxonomic system of equivalence, in which the relative meaning-values could be assigned to each culture in order for them to be exchanged or compared. By bringing the meaning-value of different cultures into a system of exchange-comparison, this approach effectively replaced the tangible problem of translation (and hence the anxiety of real encounter) with the work of representation proper to the political economy of the sign. Within the context of cultural exchange and comparison that begins to parallel commodity exchange in the political economy of empire, the system of exchange-comparison that is intrinsic to the comparative cultural imaginary of the West can be seen as a precursor of the system of global monetary exchange, which, as Karl Marx pointed out, developed at roughly the same time.31
In practice, the principle of “generalized translation” (which combined the twin assumptions that critique is secular32 and that religion is a universal category) was transferred almost invisibly from philosophical texts into the work of orientalists and missionaries as the privileged interpreters and translators of key indigenous texts and cultural practices. From there it passed, again seamlessly, into the policy-making decisions of administrators, lawmakers, and educators during the colonial period, and then crucially into the reformist-cum-nationalist (religionizing and secularizing) projects of native elites in various parts of the colonial world.33 Of course, as we know only too well today, the work of the schema of generalized translation did not stop with the colonial era but can be seen in the centrality of historicism and secular critique that continues to underpin the contemporary human sciences in such a way that it continues to theoretically exclude non-Western cultures, to “ban them from entering signification (the realm of human intellectual and physical contact and interaction)” and yet at the same time to “retain, rename and elevate them in a benevolent second-order gesture as signification’s spectral other.”34
Because it is born out of a particular religion (Christianity), and in order to justify its claim to be a universal discourse that can maintain its promise of peace, the secular-historicist regime has to be able to produce religion in other cultural sites. Yet this could be done only by the assumption of religion as a universal. That is, religion has to have a logic that requires the translation of itself, which means that it performs an invisible violence toward every culture it encounters. Only then can it be desired by all and accepted without the imposition of direct colonial violence. Consequently the normative and dominant diagnosis of a West that is secular (and/or postsecular) versus a non-West that is nonsecular (and/or religious) remains persuasive. Indeed, as Dingwaney and Rajan argue, this occurs “even when recast in tones of politically correct self-reproach and postmodern interrogation among intellectuals in the Western academy, as, for example, in the following statement issued at a recent major Euro-American conference on “political theologies”:
Imagined to be universal in both relevance and application, the rigid boundaries by which secular social structures divide the public sphere of political processes from private commitments to the values inculcated by religious and spiritual traditions have proved, instead, a source of mounting resistance on the part of cultures in which the superiority of such structures is not self-evident.
The statement continues to insist on the urgency of understanding the “religiously informed resistance to pressures of secularization and cultural-political assimilation implicit in the continuing sources of tension between the ‘secular’ West and the developing societies imagined in the West as the ‘beneficiaries of globalization.’ ”35
What Dingwaney and Rajan usefully draw attention to is the phenomenon of religion-making—the fact that “religion is still called on to serve as the distinguishing mark of such minority identity struggles. Even though the globalizing West may be blamed for such a development, it implicitly remains the secular [or postsecular (author’s insertion)] party in this narrative.”36 As I have argued above, the mechanisms by which religion-making continues to do its work (historical difference, secular critique and its concomitant, the belief in religion as a cultural universal) can be attributed more to Hegel than to any other modern thinker.
NOTES
1. Catharine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic, trans. Lisabeth During (New York: Routledge, 2005).
2. Ibid., 13.
3. See Charles Taylor’s extended discussion of this in A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2007).
4. See Mark C. Taylor, After God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), chap. 2.
5. Ibid., 111.
6. A useful source here is Ananda Abeysekara, “The Impossibility of Secular Critique,” Culture and Religion 11, no. 3 (2010).
7. For a detailed discussion of this, see Arvind Mandair, Religion and the Specter of the West (New York: Columbia University Press), chap. 2.
8. Taylor, After God, 159.
9. There are many scholarly works that highlight the importance of the colonial encounter with Hegel’s philosophical work. Relevant works include: Wilhem Halbfass, India and Europe: An Essay in Understanding (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988); J. L. Mehta, India and the West: The Problem of Understanding (Chico, Calif.: Scholar’s Press, 1985); Jacques Derrida, Glas, trans. Richard Rand and John P. Leavey (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1986); Gayatri Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000); Susan Buck-Morss, Hegel, Haiti and Universal History (Pittsburgh: Pittsburgh University Press, 2009); Arvind Mandair, Religion and the Specter of the West: Sikhism, India, Postcoloniality, and the Politics of Translation (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).
10. Couze Venn, Occidentalism (London: Sage, 1997), 147.
11. Ibid.
12. See Naoki Sakai, “The Dislocation of the West,” Traces: A Multilingual Journal of Cultural Theory and Practice 1 (2001): 71–94.
13. The term “generalized translation” is borrowed from Jacques Derrida. However, the sense in which I use it is somewhat wider than Derrida’s. See also chapter 17 in this volume, “Translation.” Jacques Derrida, “Theology of Translation,” in Eyes of the University: The Right to Philosophy II, trans. Jan Plug (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 65.
14. Venn, Occidentalism, 147.
15. G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on the Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree (New York: Dover, 1956), 319.
16. See also the helpful discussion in, Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 115–17.
17. Jonathan Sheehan, “When Was Disenchantment? History and the Secular Age,” in Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age, ed. Michael Warner, Jonathan van Antwerpen, and Craig Calhoun (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2010), 240.
18. For similar arguments, see Gil Anidjar, “Secularism,” in Semites: Race, Religion, Literature, Cultural Memory in the Present (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), chap. 3.
19. Robert Baird, “Late Secularism,” in Secularisms, ed. Janet R. Jakobsen and Ann Pellengrini (Durham: Duke University Press, 2009), 165–66.
20. David Hume, Natural History of Religion, ed. A. Wayne Clover (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976), 33.
21. See G. W. F. Hegel, Lectures on Philosophy of Religion, trans. and ed. Robert Brown (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2009).
22. See Mandair, Religion and the Specter of the West.
23. Again, a particularly good example of this can be found in the LPR texts; see Mandair, Religion and the Specter of the West.
24. See discussion on this in Spivak, A Critique of Postcolonial Reason.
25. This axis is, of course, entirely virtual, an imagined function of the narrative itself.
26. Antonio Negri and Michael D. Hardt, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000), 74–77.
27. Ibid.
28. Ibid., chap. 2.1.
29. I borrow the term “meaning-value” from Lydia Liu, “The Question of Meaning-Value in the Political Economy of the Sign,” in Tokens of Exchange: The Problem of Translation in Global Circulations, ed. Lydia H. Liu (Durham: Duke University Press, 1999), 13–44.
30. See Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions; Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). A detailed explanation of Hegel’s epistemo-political schema can be found in Mandair, Religion and the Specter of the West, 147–60.
31. A related discussion can be found in my chapter “Translation,” chapter 17 in this volume.
32. For a particularly helpful probing of the relationship between secularity and critique, see Asad’s essays in Talal Asad et al., Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury and Free Speech (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2009).
33. I am by no means suggesting that Hegel’s schema (or Hegelian ideology) was uncontested during the last two centuries. Far from it. All I am suggesting is that when one looks for a convergence of the key ciphers that constitute Western civilizational identity—as rooted in a convergence of Christianity, the “critical attitude,” historicism, secularism, liberalism, democracy, freedom, and so on—it is Hegel more than any other thinker who brings them all together in a way that others were not able to do. And despite the fact that Hegelian thought was contested so vigorously, his basic schema, far from disappearing, seems to have morphed into what might call the global/Western “social imaginary,” partly through the more palatable and sophisticated renderings of his comparative schema, for example, by Karl Marx, Max Weber, Ernest Troeltsch, and any number of religionists during the twentieth century. Even today, if one looks closely at many of the postmodern and postsecular defenses of Western civilizational identity (for example, Slavoj Žižek, Mark C. Taylor, and Charles Taylor, among others), Hegel is still a primary point of reference.
34. Rey Chow, The Age of the World Target: Self-Referentiality in War, Theory and Comparative Work (Durham: Duke University Press, 2006). For a fuller discussion on this see also Mandair, Religion and the Specter of the West.
35. Anuradha Dingwaney and Rajeshwari Sundar Rajan, The Crisis of Secularism in India (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 3.
36. Ibid., 3–4.