Being in Uncertainties

Gerhard Richter’s 1973 series of five paintings, each entitled Verkündigung nach Tizian (Annunciation after Titian), and each offering a more or less blurred vision of Titian’s original,¹ nicely illustrates several prominent features of a postsecular posture. In the first place, the paintings advertise a sense of “afterwardsness,” which may be a source of liberation or anxiety but which either way bears witness to a complex mode of cultural and historical relatedness with respect to the tradition they equivocally invoke. This sense of an afterwards haunted by what it seeks to supersede—winkingly acknowledged in the dual sense of “nach” in the paintings’ title—is explored at length in Richter’s 2011 monograph Afterness: Figures of Following in Modern Thought and Aesthetics, in which he calls attention to a mode of “living on and after that both remains attached to what came before, and.. . departs from it in ever-new directions,” and in which he asks, “Can the ‘after’ ever fully emancipate itself from its predecessor, or does it in fact remain in the latter’s ghostly debt?”² Richter’s meditations in print and paint on the act of “wrestling with a ghostly Nach“³ have obvious corollaries in “postsecular” studies, which, as several articles in this collection attest, have to wrestle not only with the multiple and contested conceptions of the “secular” but also with the various divergent meanings of that notoriously slippery prefix “post.”

In the second place, in their opening-up of a shifting distance from their subject (the Annunciation—or, perhaps, an already vertiginously regressive annunciation of the Annunciation), the paintings adopt an in-between stance, at once oriented towards and yet keeping a distance from, which suggests an attitude of ambivalence or reticence in relation to the religious.⁴ (Though we should note that this “in-betweenness” appears to pertain to the manner of the paintings—which hovers between Renaissance figuration and twentieth-century abstraction—as well as the posture they adopt towards their subject.) What’s more, the paintings pass on this unsettled and unsettling sense of in-betweenness to the viewer, as Richter’s trademark technique of blurring involves a showing and a teasing partial withdrawal of what’s shown, which disrupts our automated habits of viewing and functions as a kind of alienation device, presenting us with an image whose haunting modality of half-presence eludes even as it allures us.

A parallel posture of postsecular in-betweenness is conveyed, at least in the eyes of some viewers, by what is probably Richter’s most well-known and most controversial work—namely, the window he designed for the south transept of Cologne Cathedral, which was unveiled in 2007, and consists of approximately 11,500 pixel-like squares of brightly colored glass, arranged in a random pattern, without any figuration, generated by a computer program.⁵ Perhaps not surprisingly, Richter’s eschewal of explicitly Christian symbolism or figuration has been interpreted as an antagonistic gesture and an incongruously “areligious” design within a space of worship. Jackie Wullschlager, for instance, has remarked, “It is hard to think of a more militantly anti-spiritual cathedral decoration anywhere.”⁶ Others, however, prefer to see the window’s meaning less as a matter of its intrinsic forms and more as something determined by its context and affects. An obvious example of the latter would be the “uncontained splendor” of kaleidoscopic light that the window brings flooding into the heart of the cathedral,⁷ which creates a spectacle of heart-stopping beauty that can help to elicit a sense of awe and wonder as one approaches the altar. The window might therefore have a religious significance on account of what it does and not simply in terms of what it is. Equally, as one window amongst many in the cathedral, and in a context that emphasizes the immanence of the divine, the conspicuous avoidance of all figuration may serve a countervailing apophatic purpose, pointing toward a beyond that exceeds finite determination and attempting to free the viewer from the idolatrous accretions of our kataphatic imaginings.

In the third place, the blurring of Richter’s Annunciation...