-
1. Religion and the Semiotic Revolution
- University of Virginia Press
- Chapter
- Additional Information
1 RELIGION AND THE SEMIOTIC REVOLUTION ■ The content of consciousness, the entire manifestation of mind, is a sign resulting from inference. —C. S. Peirce, “Some Consequences of Four Incapacities” After the postmodern turn seems to have come full circle and we find ourselves yearning to know what “comes next,” we continue to be confronted foursquare with the aporia of the religious. Postmodern philosophy has exfoliated in hundreds of different directions, and “postmodern theology” has leveraged this development to pose a variety of questions and a profusion of problemata that both challenge and reaffirm the historical arcs for its trajectories of thinking. But postmodernism as a movement has skirted the question of “religion,” or the “religious,” even while it has constantly called attention to it. This avoidance may stem from the reluctance of Jacques Derrida, who at his death was truly the movement’s grand old man, to confront the religious as religious, even while in his later years he made the religious an operative theme in his writings and infused the vocabulary of postmodernism with various words and phrases that hint at the “mysteries ” of religion—faith, the messianic, the secret, the gift—without actually going there. Religion must be avoided because it is at once “the clearest and most obscure,” as Derrida says, of subject matters. It cannot really be amenable to any “phenomenology” of religion, because it does not “appear” as phenomena are supposed to do along T H E R E V O L U T I O N O F T H E S I G N 14 any surfaces or in any guises. The religious is a curious “alliance” of the “calculable and incalculable.” While the ubiquity of religious faith and praxis is evident worldwide , a burgeoning population of ordinary believers, particularly in third world nations, defies decades-old expectations of triumphal secularity . In addition, as a metastasis of religious violence somewhat tendentiously characterized as “terrorism” spreads fatally and unpredictably , religion as a theoretical challenge becomes ever elusive and murky. At the same time that theological conversation has paled into political and ideological wrangles posing as substantive theory, academic research in the area has shattered into a muddle of sociocultural methodologies with no common thread except a vague interest in res religiosa, or “matters religious.” The Deposition of the Sign Although “religious studies” as a field has sought for several generations to become a Religionswissenschaft, or “science of religion,” the outcome has been something disturbingly to the contrary. The nineteenth-century concept of “religion” in the grand sense flowered from the assumption that wherever the venerable term occurred, a shared situs for speech could be located, and the “phenomenon” itself mapped and assessed. The “classical theories” of religion, elaborated by such intellectual giants as Weber, Levi-Bruhl, Durkheim, Otto, van der Leuw, and Robertson-Smith, were launched from this very proposition. The establishment of the academic field and intellectual pursuit of “religious studies,” deriving historically from the merger of liberal Protestant theology and comparative religions, carried this trend further under a rising regime of the social sciences. Yet in the past generation the search for what might be considered a general consensus concerning the meaning of such words as “God,” “the sacred,” the “divine,” and even the “religious” itself has petered away. “Theological” inquiry, which at one time focused on the meaning of the word “God” (Greek theos), has been undercut by the strident contention that such an undertaking is inherently sectarian and incapable of comprehending the limitless diversity of religious experiences and faith stances. Inquiry into religion as a whole, which a generation ago ignited endless discussion and the writing of monographs, has for the most part given up the ghost. In contrast, academic attention has been concentrated on enlarging the gamut and complexity of what are conventionally called “area studies,” on [54.160.244.62] Project MUSE (2024-03-19 09:54 GMT) R E L I G I O N A N D T H E S E M I O T I C R E V O L U T I O N 15 outlining perspectives on familiar religious or cultural motifs without asking the uncomfortable question of why these topics matter in the first place. It is as if medieval historians were to deliberate constantly on arcane concerns about papal legitimacy, feudal sovereignty, guild practices, and mercantile economies without ever seeking to understand what the phrase “Middle Ages” connotes, or what “history” itself might signify. The theory of theos has...