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4. Radical Religion in the “Desert of the Real ”
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4 RADICAL RELIGION IN THE “DESERT OF THE REAL” ■ The desert has its holiness of silence. —Walter Elliott Since that fateful day in September 2001, a vast and tenebrous mist has suddenly spread out over the horizon of Western thinking in general , and the theory of the religious in particular. The sentiment was summarized in the title of Žižek’s well-known set of essays published in 2002 as a critique of the terms of the debate after 9/11—“welcome to the desert of the real.”1 The reality of what had undeniably to be denominated as the “religious” brutally and abruptly burst upon the world scene with this “event.” The event gave the lie both to the secularist myth of a deftly micromanaged, prosperous, multicultural liberal democracy and to the Baudrillardian version of postmodern culture as a game of substanceless, media-fabricated significations and simulacra, as the sublimation of the real into the “hyperreal” (even though ironically Žižek’s choice of the title was inspired from a line in The Matrix, the most Baudrillardian of movies from that period). The real not only returned with a vengeance, it was a vast and smoldering wasteland, evident in the rubble of the demolished twin towers. There is an odd thread that connects the destruction of New York’s twin towers, the nightmarish rondo of suicide bombings and military counterstrike that identify the Israeli and Palestinian conflict, the July 7, 2005, bombings in London, other events in Europe, in Iran, and R A D I C A L R E L I G I O N I N T H E “ D E S E R T O F T H E R E A L ” 71 of course the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan with their ongoing bloodshed and routine political shocks and aftershocks—not to mention the more recent mass killings in Norway by a self-proclaimed “Christian .” To date, an equally vast “hermeneutics” designed to construe summarily this specter has gained a head of steam among the Western intelligentsia, more often than not as a routine rhetorical occasion for championing the sundry ideological causes of the last half century. The word “fundamentalist” has become the catchall for naming such a phenomenon, although the meaning of the term has drifted far afield from what it has historically connoted, namely, someone who takes religious texts literally, not someone who acts impulsively, often violently, and with a self-absorbed grandiosity. Before September 11 “fundamentalists” were considered ignorant, but relatively harmless, by the liberal secular elites, unless of course they were able to mobilize effectively to attain certain political objectives. After September 11 such literalism was automatically taken as a signal of a lowering fanaticism that could explode at any moment into random and devastating violence. The outcome was a Manichaean politics, mirroring the duality of the Western mind not just “in itself” but also “for itself,” as a good Hegelian might say. The duality has defined all our responses. It is a duality that, furthermore, happens to be predicated on the West’s own “schizoanalysis” of the religious problem, a problem that even the most advanced “postmodern” mind is incapable of compassing. We are all familiar with the well-established academic interest in “fundamentalism” as a conceptual issue, which might be compared to the old-style European colonialist’s curiosity about body piercing, or female circumcision. Gianni Vattimo’s and Derrida’s analogizing the “return of the religious”—an expression introduced somewhat ironically by Derrida and Vattimo in their Capri colloquy—to Freud’s recovery of the instinctual is a case in point. Is the religious really “returning,” or has the dismantling of the monolith of post-Comtean sociologism in cultural theory pried open a serious space where the obvious can at last be named and successfully theorized? Deconstruction is not theory, as we have seen, and it should never purport to be theory. But it can begin to make fissures through which can manifest a signifying of what is otherwise too treacherous to speak. The return of the religious is ultimately the exodus of signification from a historicist Egypt. But like the archetypal exodus it is both a fulfillment and a frustration of an earlier promise. The fulfillment lies in siting the exodus itself, an escape from an endless bondage that is ironically the deference of “promise.” The deference is the [18.234.165.107] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 14:56 GMT) T H E R E...