Critique of modernity in the philosophy of Nishitani Keiji

This article analyses Nishitani Keiji’s persistent critique of modernity and how it intertwines with other issues—such as nihilism, science and religion—in his philosophy. While Nishitani gained some notoriety for his views on overcoming modernity during WWII, this article will look at his relationship with the issue more in the scope of his whole philosophical career. Pulling together various strands that weave through Nishitani’s treatment of modernity, its relation to nihilism and his views for overcoming both, we find that it motivates his themes of Heideggerian critique of technology and Nietzschean redemption of tradition that combine with a reverse-Hegelian search for an originary ground that is grasped via existential realisation revealed through religious praxis. However, Nishitani’s approach raises some problematic questions on the social level due to the way it conceptualises modernity through a Nietzschean lens that leaves little room for modernity as a social and political phenomenon.     

On Jews and property in provincial Central Europe: Leopold Kompert’s 1848 publications

ABSTRACT

Bohemian-born Jewish author Leopold Kompert (1822–1886) is best known for Aus dem Ghetto (1848), his popular tales of provincial Jewish life featuring pious men and women who eke out a living and try to maintain religious traditions amid the temptations of modernity. However, at the same time he also wrote a number of newspaper articles, among them a biography of Jewish tobacco and wax merchant and financier Israel Hönig von Hönigsberg (1724–1808). Considered together, Kompert’s fiction and non-fiction suggest that owning property played a significant – if at times conflicted – role for Jews in the decades preceding emancipation. Analyzing these texts helps show how property, both literal and symbolic, could be used to clarify and critique Jews’ experiences of acculturation, migration, and secularization in the middle of the nineteenth century.     

Heidegger,Catholicism and the History of Being

ABSTRACT

This paper aims to rebuild the relationship between the Seinsfrage and Catholicism in Heidegger’s meditation and to shed light on his critique to Christianity (in terms of Christentum) as a philosophical necessity rooted in his broader critique of modernity in the context of the Black Notebooks. In order to reach these purposes, this contribution will be articulated in two parts: in the first one, I will rebuild Heidegger’s relationship to Catholicism and in the second one, I will focus on Black Notebooks as important tools in understanding Heidegger’s critique to Catholicism, a critique that is built on three levels: historical, speculative and political. The essay will show how the Schwarze Hefte illuminate Heidegger’s attempts to answer the question of Being in an incessant tension with the coeval seven major treatises on the Seinsgeschichte, in which Christianity, metaphysics and nihilism are inextricably tied together.     

George Eliot and the Authority of Preaching

Abstract

Preaching was for many centuries the domain of men, and the exclusion of women was justified on the grounds of their different nature and lack of authority. Victorian philosophical debates about the nature of women found literary counterparts in Victorian fiction. Eliot's novel Adam Bede presents a female preacher whose authority is demonstrably independent of her biological sex, despite the attitudes of her audiences. Her sermon's echoes of Mark's Gospel show how the literary contexts of both biblical and Victorian fiction may suggest that the authority of preaching in the material world comes from encounter with Christ and is entirely independent of gender.     

National identity and ethno-religious identity: A critical inquiry into Chinese religious policy,with reference to the Uighurs in Xinjiang

Abstract

On the basis of data from the survey of religion and values in Central and Eastern Europe Aufbruch – 2007 this article questions the applicability of the basic theoretical propositions about the relations between religion and modernity, such as theory of secularisation (classically understood) and rational choice theory, and the thesis about the vicarious nature of religion, to the religious situation in the traditionally Orthodox part of Eastern Europe (Romania, Moldova, Serbia, Bulgaria, Belarus' and Ukraine). Following Shmuel Eisenstadt's concept of multiple modernities and Grace Davie's thesis of the secular character of Western European societies, it explores the possibility of viewing the religious modernity/modernities in the postcommunist traditionally Orthodox area of Eastern Europe as an alternative to the (secular) modernity of Western Europe, and the region itself as an ‘other-worldly’ Europe. After an overview of the specific features of Orthodox Christianity enabling this traditional religion to respond successfully to the demands of modern society, the article turns to the survey data covering a range of standard and also less frequently researched aspects of religiosity. The analysis concludes with a summary of the challenges that Orthodox Europe presents to the basic theoretical propositions about religion and modernity and stresses the important role that religion (and traditional churches) play in the social and political life of this region – a role that should not be ignored.     

ON LOVE AND MELANCHOLIA IN MARGUERITE DURAS'S AUTOFICTION

In the Durassian melancholic atmosphere, past and present, fantasy and reality come together as one. This paper addresses the themes of love and destruction in Marguerite Duras's life that pervade her oeuvre, allowing us to discern a melancholic structure within her autofiction. Writing down her melancholia—the impossible mourning of a loved object—Duras captures nothingness and loss—in order not to die of love. In a constant exchange with her readers, she searches for herself and delivers herself to her readers. This renewable creative process of writing enables her to engage in an ongoing experience of identity reconstruction, in a way similar to the patient in psychoanalysis re‐creating his/her life's fiction.     

The im-possibility of secular critique: The future of religion's memory

The legacy of secular critique, with its Greek, Christian, Kantian, modernist traces, constitutes an aporetic law (or contradiction). That law is this: a critical legacy, if it is critical, can affirm and sustain itself only by trying to separate it from itself (from the very crisis that it is). The legacy or history of ‘religion’ is always a history of such critique. Such a legacy always anticipates critiquing itself, its memory (of whatever kind – racist, sexist, colonialist, nationalist). Such a legacy of critique is always a legacy of crisis. However, the crisis of such a legacy cannot be resolved, because critique, as kairos/krisis (critical/decisive moment), can admit of no resolution. Yet the (secular) history of religion, if it is ever historical, can only be a history of such aporetic critique. Such an aporetic critique will be the heritage of religion's im-possible ¹ ?1. I write the word impossible/impossibility with and without a hyphen. When I hyphenate im-possible, I do so to remain true to Derrida's use of it. The im-possible is irreducible to either possibility or impossibility. Sometimes Derrida also writes the word without hyphenating it, but he still implies such irreducibility. future. It is an im-possible future because it will always be a promise, a promise to separate it from itself, a promise that will remain always deferred, always to come. Today, the promise of this secular critique is (in) democracy with its sovereign ‘decisive’ politics. We can no longer simply critique the (future) legacy of religion, understood this way. To do so is to fulfil that legacy's own messianic wish. This is the aporetic limit of secular critique. To think at the limits of the legacy of the critique of religion is to think the very question of the (secular) history of ‘religion’ and its others, that is, ‘religions’.     

Feminist Phenomenology and the Film World of Agnès Varda

Through a discussion of Agnès Varda's career from 1954 to 2008 that focuses particularly on La Pointe Courte (1954), L'Opéra‐Mouffe (1958), The Gleaners and I (2000), and The Beaches of Agnes (2008), this article considers the connections between Varda's filmmaking and her femaleness. It proposes that two aspects of Varda's cinema—her particularly perceptive portrayal of a set of geographical locations, and her visual and verbal emphasis on female embodiment—make a feminist existential‐phenomenological approach to her films particularly fruitful. Drawing both directly on the work of Maurice Merleau‐Ponty and on some recent film‐ and feminist‐theoretical texts that have employed his insights, it explores haptic imagery and feminist strategy in The Gleaners and I, the materialization of space characterizing Varda's blurring of fiction and documentary, and the dialectical relationship of people with their environment often observed in her cinema. It concludes that both Varda's female protagonists and the director herself may be said to perform feminist phenomenology in her films, in their actions, movement, and relationship to space, and in the carnality of voice and vision with which Varda's own subjectivity is registered within her film‐texts.     

REPUBLICS AND THEIR LOVES: REREADING CITY OF GOD 191

In City of God 19.24, Augustine rejects Cicero's definition of res publica as a society founded on justice for a new definition focused on common objects of love. Robert Markus, Oliver O'Donovan, and a host of Augustinian political theologians have depicted this move as a positive gesture toward secular society. Yet this reading fails to account for why Augustine waited so long to address Cicero's definition, first discussed in Book 2, and for the radical dualism Augustine sets forth between the two cities throughout his text. I argue, in line with Rowan Williams and John Milbank, for a minority reading of Book 19 that draws upon the narrative structure of City of God. In Books 3–5, Augustine recounts the history of the earthly city according to Rome's penchant for violence and idolatry, both a function of love for temporal goods. In Book 18, Augustine traces the history of the earthly city before Rome according to the same themes, completing a narrative argument that humanity has always been divided according to differing loves. Book 19 advances the idea that such idolatry is injustice—a failure to grant God the worship he is due. With the new definition of 19.24, Augustine retains Cicero's emphasis on the importance of virtue in civic society while characteristically shifting the terms of discussion from justice to love. While such a definition means that Rome can be called a res publica, it also prompts a negative judgment upon her history according to her objects of love. Given her violence and idolatry, Rome is no better than Assyria, Babylon, Egypt, and Greece—all subject to withering critique in Book 18. Thus, Augustine's new definition does not retract but extends the polemic of City of God.     

From Pussy Riot’s ‘punk prayer’ to Matilda: Orthodox believers,critique, and religious freedom in Russia

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the configurations of belief, critique, and religious freedom in Russia since the performance of the Russian group Pussy Riot in 2012. The ‘punk prayer’ and its legal and political aftermath are interpreted as an incidence of the contestation of the boundary between the secular and the religious in the Russian legal and social sphere. The authors show that the outcome of this contestation has had a decisive impact on the way in which religion, critique, and the human right of religious freedom have been defined in the present Russian context. In response to Pussy Riot, the Russian legislator turned offending religious feelings into a crime. The article investigates two more recent cases where offended feelings of believers were involved, the opera “Tannhäuser” in Ekaterinburg in 2015 and the movie Matilda in 2017, and analyses how the initial power-conforming configuration that emerged as a reply to the ‘punk prayer’ has revealed a ‘power-disturbing’ potential as conservative Orthodox groups have started to challenge the authority of the State and the Church leadership. The article is based on primary sources from Russian debates surrounding Pussy Riot, Matilda, and “Tannhäuser” and on theoretical literature on the religious–secular boundary and human rights.     

Habermas,Religion, and Public Life

Abstract

Although many scholars view Jürgen Habermas as the most important philosopher and social theorist since Weber, his account of religion has been relatively neglected. This may be a reflection of the fact that he appears to offer quite distinct views of religion, but it may also reflect the strong secularist assumptions of his early work. In this paper, Habermas’s early and later views of religion are outlined and the change in his understanding of religion is mapped—from being one of the sources of modernity’s inner problems to being a principal source of the passions and motivations underpinning cultural life today. I argue that the relative neglect of Habermas’s work on religion is unfortunate, as it offers a creative and important attempt to move beyond the secular assumptions that have characterised much modern study of religion, providing it with a central role in the mediation of the costs and benefits of modernity.     

"Wholly Aflame": Erotic Asceticism in the Work of Sara Maitland

Abstract

The writing of the Christian feminist novelist Sara Maitland has explored the interplay of eroticism, masochism and asceticism in women's spirituality. Maitland's 1984 novel Virgin Territory and 1987 essay "Passionate Prayer: Masochistic Images in Women's Experience" condemns how, in patriarchal Christianity, a model of romantic relationship with God, when compounded by the symbolism of women's sinfulness, results in spiritual masochism for women. In her later work, Maitland's writing takes a more ambivalent attitude, wanting to preserve the "otherness" of historical women mystics and martyrs, also admiring the "purity" of the extremity of their devotion. This reflects Maitland's advocating of an excessive and "unsafe" spirituality, given representation in her fiction and in her pursuit of a solitary lifestyle, as explained in 2008's A Book of Silence.     

Between fiction and reflection: Foucault and the experience-book

Foucault notoriously suggests that his historical analyses are fictions. Commentators typically interpret this claim in a negative light to mean that Foucault's works are not, strictly speaking, true. In this paper, I present a positive interpretation of Foucault's claim, basing my argument on a hitherto marginalized aspect of his work: the experience-book. An experience-book is defined as a use of fiction in the practice of critique with desubjectifying effects. My argument for this interpretation proceeds in three steps. First, to prepare a preliminary account of Foucault's concept of fiction and its effects, I look at Blanchot's ontological interpretation of the work of literature in The Space of Literature. Blanchot, I suggest, provides a template for understanding Foucault's concept of the experience-book. Second, I identify traces of Blanchot's concept of fiction in Foucault's study of Jules Verne, Behind the Fable. I argue that Foucault's critique of fiction, in this paper, anticipates and prefigures his later use of fiction in the practice of critique. Third, pursuing this intuition, I develop an interpretation of Discipline and Punish understood as a use of fiction and experience-book. This interpretation provides a new, immanent perspective on Foucault's critique, and mitigates the epistemological skepticism of the claim that his works are fictions.     

Monism and individuation in Anne Conway as a critique of Spinoza

ABSTRACT

In chapter IX of the Principles, Anne Conway claims that her metaphysics is diametrically opposed to those of Descartes and Spinoza. Scholars have analyzed her rejection of Cartesianism, but not her critique of Spinoza. This paper proposes that two central points of Conway’s metaphysics can be understood as direct responses to Spinoza: (1) the relation between God, Christ, and the creatures in the tripartite division of being, and (2) the individuation of beings in the lowest species. I will argue that Conway, in criticizing Spinoza’s identification between God and nature, defends a paradoxical monism, and that her concept of individuation is a reductio ad absurdum of Spinoza’s criterion of identity in the individuation of finite modes.     

Embodied Disbelief: Poststructural Feminist Atheism

“I quite rightly pass for an atheist,” Jacques Derrida announces in Circumfession. Grace Jantzen's suggestion that the poststructuralist critique of modernity can also be trained on atheism helps us make sense of this playfully cryptic statement: although Derrida sympathizes with the “idea” of atheism, he is wary of the modern brand of atheism, with its insistence on rationally arranging—straightening out—religion. In this paper, I will argue that poststructural feminism, with its focus on embodied epistemology, offers a way to re‐explain Derrida's “I rightly pass,” and also to carry it forward. Poststructural feminist atheism leads us through Derrida to an embodied disbelief drawing on three dimensions of poststructural feminism: feminist epistemology and material feminism, relationality, and affect theory.     

THE DEEP CONDITIONS OF SECULARITY

In modern societies and cultures today, religion is widely perceived as basically even if not merely trivially “optional.” This is a contention strongly advocated by Charles Taylor, most notably in his monumental A Secular Age. Throughout his career, Taylor has made the question of religion in modernity the core of his interests. In his most recent work, A Secular Age, Taylor addresses challenging issues of what he calls the “contemporary spiritual experience” and speaks to “the spiritual hungers and tensions of secular modernity.” I critically consider three aspects of this immensely suggestive if not uncontroversial work: (1) I examine whether there is in fact a possible reversibility or revisability to the so‐called ‘optional’ nature of belief that Taylor thinks is characteristic of the secular age; (2) I scrutinize Taylor's notion of “immediacy” of belief in the same milieu; (3) I interrogate his use of the term “fullness” in delineating the temper of the secular age.     

Thoughts on the inner conflict within Islamic culture: Their existential anxieties and ours

Abstract

This paper focuses on how Islamic terrorism is primarily part of a larger internal conflict within Islamic culture. Western, liberal (largely Christian) democracies evolved over centuries of their own bloody philosophical and political struggles between religious authority and what came to be defined as a modern, civil society built on individual freedom of belief, secular authority, and law. Now, Western liberal modernity represents a deep existential threat to traditional Islamic societies around gender, family relations, and individual beliefs. A ferocious internal struggle exists between those Muslims who believe Islam can absorb those tensions – creating its own version of an open, tolerant, cultural modernity – versus political Islamists, jihadists, for whom the annihilation anxiety elicited by the threatened social change is directed both internally and in violent rage at the West.     

Satir's Formula for Therapeutic Endurance

SUMMARY

Of the many factors thai accounted for Virginia Satir's ability to create change in intransigent couples and families, the sine qua nan may have been her therapeutic endurance (ability to “hang in there” with tough clients). Satir's formula for therapeutic endurance was her constant belief in the intrinsic worth of each individual—the wonderful human being myth—and its corollary thai all people arc capable of changing     

Reformed and Radically Orthodox?: Participatory Metaphysics,Reformed Scholasticism and Radical Orthodoxy's Critique of Modernity

Radical Orthodoxy locates the intellectual roots of secular modernity in the attenuation of Thomistic participatory metaphysics in the late medieval period. John Milbank implicates Reformational theologies in this unintentionally secularizing movement. I examine seventeenth‐century Reformed scholastic Stephen Charnock, contending that he articulates an account of participatory metaphysics similar to Thomas Aquinas, and even further, fails to exhibit the negative trends which Milbank and Catherine Pickstock associate with Scotus and the via moderna. This analysis of Charnock calls into question the location of Reformed theology in Radical Orthodoxy's genealogy of secular modernity, and opens up possibilities for rapprochement between Reformed theology and Radical Orthodoxy.