In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

INTRODUCTION ■ The Question of the “religious” The question of the “religious” today continues concomitantly to haunt, fascinate, and discomfit us. Ever since Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo announced the “return of religion” as an “autoimmune ” reaction to secularism in the early 1990s, scholars have wallowed in their own confusion, not only about whether it is really happening, but also about whether it is a good thing. In the immediate wake of September 11, 2001, much of the Western academic world for a short period tended to give Derrida and Vattimo the benefit of the doubt. During the same period we witnessed, as a result of various culturally complex factors (but largely due to the interests of leading Continental thinkers), the so-called religious turn or theological turn in philosophy. Lately, the wheel has turned once more, and the “auto-immunity” of the secular, academic mind has become just as pronounced. The meteoric and broad popularity of the writings of the so-called new atheists has been shadowed in the academic context by the trendiness of the so-called new materialists and speculative realists , all of whom have a not-so-subtle antireligious, or antitheological, agenda. The problem is, however, that few of those who constantly chatter about religion and its putative revival have much of an idea of what in general they are really talking about. Multiculturalism, anthropological relativism, ethnographic descriptivism, and a colorful selection of socioreligious identitarianisms have all combined with a certain political correctness to choke off the rise of what the current interest in religion desperately requires—a more encompassing, theoretical architecture in accordance with which the varieties of the world’s prevalent and more exotic species can be accounted for. At the same time, the would-be “religious” or “theological turn” in philosophy I N T R O D U C T I O N 2 has not offered much help for understanding the question of religion in general. What amounts to relatively arcane questions of standard Christian theology, framed solely within the argot of contemporary Continental philosophy, have dominated the discourse. The explosive growth of the field of religious studies, virtually nonexistent only half a century ago, has mirrored these trends, which really run as far back as the late 1960s. The academic study of religion has succeeded in naming, profiling, explicating, and often functioning as an apologetics for hundreds, if not thousands, of forms of belief, ritual, and cultic practice that a hundred years ago were dismissed as archaisms or superstitions. It has been responsible in many ways for fostering attitudes of acceptance and tolerance while enlarging considerably the spectrum of recognized “religious diversity,” sometimes even to the point of absurdity. At the same time, the rise of religious studies as a field would have been impossible were it not for two major, perduring factors: (1) the great, richly seasoned “stewpot” of American spiritual experimentation and innovation, as opposed to the old homogenizing “melting pot” metaphor, and (2) the even more powerful agency of cultural comingling and interpenetration that goes by the somewhat murky designation of “globalization.” Without globalization, religious studies would be unimaginable. But the blessing has been mixed, to say the least. As the prominent social philosopher and theorist Olivier Roy, whose work on the contemporary interactions between Islam and the West has been acclaimed in recent years, points out, the “return of religion” in the minds of the Western intelligentsia has not been an organic, historical process. It consists essentially in a trick of the eye when viewing the phantasmagoria we see in the world today of religious incidents, expressions , and symbolic actions. We have been “bewitched” (if we may use Wittgenstein’s famous term for the confusion of words with concepts ) by a culturalist fallacy. The culturalist fallacy (not exactly Roy’s term, but mine) consists in the misidentification of semiotic tokens, or effervescent sign-functions, as underlying cultural realities—or, to put it in shopworn Marxist terms, mistaking the “substructure” for the “superstructure.” As Roy observes laconically in his latest book, Holy Ignorance, “In this sense, religious ‘comeback’ is merely an optical illusion; it would be more appropriate to speak of transformation . Religion is both more visible and at the same time frequently in decline. We are witnessing a reformulation of religion rather than a return to ancestral practices abandoned during the secularist hiatus.”1 This reformulation—or “reformatting,” as he prefers to call it—has more to do with the market-driven and milieu-conditioned perfor- [3.128...

Share