Postmodernism and the Revolution in Religious Theory: Toward a Semiotics of the Event

Notes

NOTES ■ introduction 1. Olivier Roy, Holy Ignorance: When Religion and Culture Part Ways, trans. Ros Schwartz (New York: Columbia University Press, 2010), 5. 2. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 3. The quotation is from the essay “Force and Signification,” originally published as “Force et signification,” Critique, nos. 193–94 (June–July 1963). 3. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 22. Earlier in his career Deleuze characterizes the virtual as “real without being present.” The virtual is the “principle of localization , rather than of individuation. It appears as local essence.” Deleuze, Proust and Signs, trans. Richard Howard (New York: George Braziller, 1972), 60. 1. religion and the Semiotic revolution 1. Charles S. Peirce, The Essential Peirce: Selected Philosophical Writings, ed. Nathan Houser and Christian Kloesel (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1992), 281. 2. Jonathan Z. Smith, To Take Place: Toward Theory in Ritual (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 101. 3. Jean Baudrillard, The Transparency of Evil: Essays on Extreme Phenomena, trans. James Benedict (New York: New Left Books, 1993), 132. 4. See my article “A-dieu to Derrida,” in Secular Theology: American Radical Theological Thought, ed. Clayton Crockett (London: Routledge, 2001), 37–50. 5. Perry Anderson, The Origins of Postmodernity (New York: Verso, 1998), 62. 6. Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of Enlightenment: Philosophical Fragments, trans. Edmund Jephcott (Stanford: Stanford University Press), 131. 7. Richard Murphy, Theorizing the Avant-Garde: Modernism, Expressionism, and the Problem of Postmodernity (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 272. 214 n o T E S T o Pa G E S 2 8 – 4 3 8. See Gary Genosko, Undisciplined Theory (London: Sage Publications, 1998). 9. For a good discussion of Peirce’s semiotics as analysis of the human “sign” that establishes the sign, see Jorgen Dines Johansen, Dialogic Semiosis: An Essay on Signs and Meaning (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993). 10. See Jack Goody, Representations and Contradictions: Ambivalence towards Images, Theatre, Fictions, Relics, and Sexuality (London: Blackwell, 1997). 11. This insight was actually discovered by Durkheim. In the Elementary Forms of Religious Life, Durkheim notes that the synecdochal relationship between part and whole is the basis of the sense of “sacrality.” “A mere fragment of the flag represents the Motherland just as well as the flag itself. Therefore, it is sacred in the same way and to the same degree.” Émile Durkheim, Durkheim on Religion, ed. W. S. F. Pickering (Atlanta: Scholars Press, 1994), 139. 12. Genosko actually uses the term “representation” instead of “mimesis,” but he employs it in a special sense, which I am avoiding in order not to confuse the reader with “representational” kinds of epistemology that stem from Plato’s epistemology of truth as the original versus its “copy.” 13. Genosko, Undisciplined Theory, 151. 14. See Stephen Gersh, Concord in Discourse: Harmonics and Semiotics in Late Classical and Early Medieval Platonism (Berlin: Mouton de Gruyter, 1996). 15. Derrida works out the beginnings of this argument in Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Rachel Bowlby (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), a transitional work to what is usually considered the “middle” or “later” Derrida. 16. Jacques Derrida, On the Name, trans. David Wood, John P. Leavy, and Ian McLeod (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 121. 17. Ibid., 120. 2. Theory and the Deus Evanescens 1. The word religiones was frequently used by Roman writers to describe the secret ceremonies and guarded mysteries of the Druids. For works that discuss the Roman view of religiones as shadowy activities that go on in impenetrable woods, see Peter B. Ellis, The Druids (Grand Rapids, MI: William B. Eerdmans, 1995), 58–59. See also Nora Chadwick, The Celts (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1966). 2. Victor Taylor, Para/Inquiry (New York: Routledge, 2000), 3. 3. Ibid., 17. 4. Jacques Derrida, “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Newly Adopted in Philosophy,” trans. John P. Leavey Jr., in Derrida and Negative Theology, ed. Harold Coward and Toby Foshay (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 36. 5. Ibid., 53. 6. Jacques Derrida, “Post-Scriptum: Aporias, Ways and Voices,” in Derrida and Negative Theology, 289. 7. Ibid., 299. 8. Mark C. Taylor, “nO nOt nO,” in Derrida and Negative Theology, 175. 215 n o T E S T o Pa G E S 4 4 – 5 8 9. Mark C. Taylor, About Religion (Chicago: University of...