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Acknowledgments
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xxiii This book is composed chiefly on the basis of Thinking Out Loud: The Sydney Lectures in Philosophy and Society, which I presented on May 21–25, 2012, at the State Library of New South Wales. The lectures were sponsored by the University of Western Sydney in collaboration with the State Library of New South Wales, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation (which broadcast the lectures on Radio National), and Fordham University Press, which is the publisher of the Sydney Lectures series. My profound gratitude goes to Dimitris Vardoulakis, who is the ingenious composer and orchestrator of this extraordinary yearly event and whose friendship and intellectual companionship I treasure in ways I cannot express in words. The privilege of presenting my work in Sydney in this context was enhanced by an unforgettable intellectual experience of practically nonstop encounters in the course of two weeks. A great part of these discussions and arguments found its way into the written material, and a lot more is certain to be included in future writings . For this good fortune, I am especially grateful to Melinda Acknowledgments xxiv Acknowledgments Cooper, Farid Y. Farid, Joel Graham, John Hadley, Gail Jones, Nicholas Kompridis, Alex Ling, Chris Peterson, Amanda Third, Anthony Uhlmann, Jess Whyte, and above all the late Alan Saunders, on whose legendary radio show The Philosopher’s Zone I had the sad honor of being the last guest. The work that led to the Sydney Lectures has been conceived and conducted over a number of years, and earlier stages of it have been presented in various contexts of publication and performance. For their generosity in supporting and hosting the part of my work that specifically found its way into this publication, I wish to thank Jonathan Van Antwerpen for including me in the discussions of The Immanent Frame from the outset; Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar for inviting me to publish the earliest instance of “Detranscendentalizing the Secular” and my subsequent exchange with Saba Mahmood in the pages of Public Culture; Ali Behdad and Dominick Thomas for soliciting my contribution to their Companion to Comparative Literature ; Nasir Yousafzai Khan for his unwavering hospitality in Al Jazeera; Paul Bové and the boundary 2 Editorial Collective for underwriting the collaborative engagement of the question “Why I am not a post-secularist” and for a great deal more; Vicky Unruh and Simon Gikandi for asking me to share my views on the deregulation of the political in the pages of PMLA; Andrew Arato and Constellations for including me in the memorial colloquium on Claude Lefort at the New School of Social Research; Sophie Klimis and Philippe Caumières for inviting me to participate in the Journées Castoriadis in Brussels in May 2011. No thinking worthy of its name ever happens in the echo chamber of one’s own mind. Although I bear sole responsibility for any errors and excesses of this writing, I cannot claim proprietory knowledge of its innovations. My learning has been informed by numerous friends and adversaries on countless occasions , but specifically regarding this material, I wish to express gratitude to Aamir Mufti, who was the first to break through the problem of secularism, more than a decade ago, by disman- [3.235.130.73] Project MUSE (2024-03-28 17:03 GMT) Acknowledgments xxv tling facile or fashionable alternatives and by raising the stakes of what is immanently critical in the secular—to the pleasure of our ongoing thinking together I owe more than I can ever acknowledge ; Gil Anidjar, whose tireless argument has saved me from many pitfalls and continues to elucidate the tacitly unexamined corners of my thought; Andreas Kalyvas, whose agonistic companionship is a never-ending source of radical discovery and wondrous invention; and Martin Harries, in whose wry wisdom and refined sense of reading my mind finds welcome and playful rest. I must also express deserved gratitude to friends who, sometimes explicitly and precisely, other times inadvertently and unwittingly, have opened up new avenues in my thinking, or enabled me to evade the perils of my hardheadedness, or, even more, liberated my spirit from the treadmill of inertia that tends to take over such decade-long research projects. In this respect, I am indebted to Sadia Abbas, Emily Apter, Athena Athanasiou, Etienne Balibar, Aristides Baltas, Dušan Bjelić, Jean Cohen, Arne de Boever, Victoria de Grazia, Mehmet Dosemeci, Costas Douzinas, Simon During, Bernard Flynn, Carlos Forment, Eleanor Kaufman, Virginia Jackson, Ronald Judy, Vassilis Lambropoulos, Thomas B. Lemann, Antonis Liakos , Michael...