Doomed Discourse: Debating Monotheisms Pre- and Post-Modern

One has only to recognize that something has happened, that dialogues are not possible, given that there's no way to conjure up the dead.

Jacob Taubes

Preface

Western Cultures appear to be caught in a paradoxical split between unbridled secularism and an unparalleled outpouring of books, articles, Op-Ed pieces, blogs, and talk shows dealing with religious issues. Were the phenomenon confined to the public in general, it would occasion little surprise, since there is ample testimony—in America, at least—that religion is no longer "the opiate of the masses," as Marx claimed, but something more akin to "a political action lobby." Nothing new there, perhaps. What is news is the prominence attained by "religion" in critical studies during the last decade when it has even become a frequent topic of course offerings in humanities departments.

But as recently as 1994, it was still a novelty for mainstream theory. We sense this clearly in Jacques Derrida's bemused irony at finding himself addressing the question of "religion" in his opening remarks for a conference on the subject held that year on Capri:

Why is this phenomenon called "the return of religions," so difficult to think? Why is it so surprising? Why does it particularly astonish those who believed naively that an alternative opposed Religion, on the one side, and on the other, Reason, Enlightenment, Science, Criticism . . . as though the one could not but put an end to the other?¹

Derrida goes on in this essay to ask repeatedly how one should speak of religion: "Religion in the singular? Perhaps, may-be (this should always be possible)." "Religion? Here and now, this very day, if one were still supposed to speak of it, of religion . . . " "Religion in the singular?" "To think religion?" As always with Derrida, repetition has the rhetorical effect of making one inflect the repeated phrases differently, and then to see them differently.

While I was contemplating Derrida's challenge to think about religion in different ways, I chanced to open my copy of Carl Schmitt's Political Theology II at the chapter where he is discussing monotheism as a political problem. This in turn led me back to Derrida's question, "Religion in the singular? Perhaps, may-be (this should always be possible)." That set me to thinking that "religion in the singular" was a way of forcing us to think about the meaning of monotheism in a manner that suggests just why and how the concept would inevitably pose a political problem. That forced me to ask, what is the relationship between monotheism and religion?

As a medievalist who has invested a good deal of my life in talking about the role of religious—that is, Christian, that is, monotheistic—symbolism in art and literature, it struck me that I had never thought about the issues posed by Derrida in Foi et Savoir, or by Carl Schmitt in Political Theology II, or at least I hadn't thought about them as critical problems in their own right. It seemed high time that I did.

Monotheism: Religion in the Singular?

By its very nature and definition, monotheism is exclusive, absolute, and universal only in the sense that for the faithful the entire world conforms to the image portrayed in its foundational accounts. This formula has far-reaching socio-political consequences. For monotheism is by its very nature political and politicizing for at least two reasons. First, as Carl Schmitt points out in Political Theology II, because its "formula of one God as a public acclamation can be an affirmation or demonstration both for a particular god and for a particular king or emperor."² And, secondly, monotheism injects what we may call a political anthropology into its historical context by partitioning people along lines of race, class, and category, such as "elect-non-elect," "master-servant," "friend-enemy," and so on. The category of "friend-enemy" politicizes whole groups whose sole error consists in espousing a different faith, particularly when that faith is a rival monotheism.

It's important to recognize that designating a non-believer as...