Camil Ungureanu

Derrida’s Tense Bow

Abstract This essay explores both the appeal and the difficulties of Derrida’s “democratic Romanticism.” Derrida’s broader philosophical project seeks to make explicit the paradoxes or aporias that are embedded in practical experience. In unveiling these aporias, Derrida pleads, particularly in his later writings, for a transformation of democracy and religion so as to make them hospitable to difference. However, I will argue that Derrida’s reduction of the great variety of moral-political and religious situations to one aporetic logic runs into conceptual problems and risks undoing the moral tissue that makes hospitality possible in the first place.

The Post-secular Debate: Introductory Remarks

Some scholars have recently expressed their doubts about the popular use of the term “post-secularism” and suggested that it is merely a short-lived fashion in social theory and philosophy, all too often used to gain access to research grants. Veit Bader may be perfectly right about the term itself, for in time it may indeed fall into disregard and disappear from use. Skepticism about its inflationary use is, we think, warranted. However, we also submit that, if severed from the temptation of proposing a new grand narrative, “post-secularism” can be useful for designating a socio-cultural phenomenon that will not wither away any time soon. Let us first consider the inflationary reading according to which the “return” of religion is interpreted as the shift to a new age or to a new type of society coming after the secular one. According to this influential reading, advanced by philosophers as different as Jürgen Habermas, John D. Caputo, and Gianni Vattimo, in this new age a transformed religion may play a fundamental role in the socio-political sphere and enable individuals to overcome unhelpful divisions between faith and reason. Habermas, for one, speaks of a new “post-secular society” in which religious and nonreligious citizens engage, predominantly in the social-public sphere, in a process of mutual learning and reconciliation through dialogue and the exchange of reasons. For Habermas, religious and non-religious citizens can attain agreements and enrich public discourse by means of a rational dialogue, understood, in large part, as leading to the translation of sacred language into secular language. In turn, by developing Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive reading of religion, Caputo interprets the end of the secular age as the abandonment of the belief in the death of God and of the death of religion as proclaimed by, among others, Feuerbach and Marx. For Caputo, we have entered a new post-secular age characterized by “the death of the death of God,” namely by a shift in focus away from God as Reality and Truth to God as Love. He argues that the deconstruction of the question of the existence of God, that is, the onto-theological critique of religion, has a liberating political-religious impact. Bracketing the question of the reality of God opens up the possibility of experiencing God as passionate, impossible love beyond the absolute certainties and rigid institutional hierarchies of the Church. Finally, Vattimo welcomes the “Age of Interpretation” in which democratic citizens abandon absolutist claims about religious or non-religious nature, accept the

Habermas on Religion and Democracy: Critical Perspectives

The recent rise of populism and nationalist majoritarianism in various countries from the United States and India to Turkey, Hungary, and Israel poses a challenge to constitutional democracy and human rights around the globe. Events such as Brexit and Donald Trump’s electoral success are a reminder of the fragility of democracy in “times out of joint.” The full significance of these changes is difficult to fathom, and will become clearer only in the years or decades to come. It seems safe to argue, nonetheless, that we are moving into a more polarized and unstable world.1 These changes have not come out of the blue: for decades political theorists, sociologists, and historians have been identifying and analyzing the signs of a malaise and growing disaffection in Western and non-Western democracies, the increased tensions between corporate capitalism and democracy, and the divisions between North and South.2 Jürgen Habermas, for long at the forefront of these debates, has repeatedly addressed the tectonic shifts and tensions in modern capitalist democracies and has passionately advocated the democratic re-engagement of citizenry. Over the past two decades, Habermas has focused on two specific sociopolitical phenomena: the crisis of the European Union and the renewed influence of religion in the public sphere. To address this dual challenge, he introduced two new concepts: first, the notion of a European postnational constellation to counter the technocratic rule of bureaucratic experts and financial markets as well as the exclusive focus on the nation-state;3 and, second, the notion of the postsecular society where the discourse of religious communities is reflexively integrated into public discourse and democratic practice. Habermas thus proposes an intermediate stance between two opposed and extreme views of the place of religion in contemporary democracies: the “revenge of God,” on the one hand, and the inevitable divorce of democracy from religion, on the other.4 His vision of a postsecular society attempts instead to reconcile the tradition of the Enlightenment and modern religion, democracy and reflexive faith.5 In recent debates on postsecularism, critics of different ideological outlooks from various disciplines have often turned Habermas’s vision into a punching bag. While it has become fashionable to debunk Habermas by reducing his view to a caricature or a series of clichés, his view has also been carefully scrutinized.6 His left-wing critics see his growing interest in postsecularism as a retreat into conservatism, thus abandoning his earlier post-Marxist critique of religion as articulated in his Theory of Communicative Action (1981). Some see

A note from the East

My first participation in the Prague meetings in 2006 (during the doctoral years) was unlikely, but it was part of a decisive shift in my stance and thinking about politics. Its unlikeliness resulted from my background and initial trajectory: I spent a good part of my childhood in the 1980s, the worst years of Romanian communism under Ceausescu – a period of deep injustices and deprivations. I was coming from a family that had suffered from the harassment of the Romanian Secret Service [Securitate]; I vividly remember my mother’s tormented and helpless crying every time a woman from Securitate with rotten teeth and excessive make-up was paying visits to our place. The visceral hostility to communism or anything that had to do with Marx was part of my most elemental moral reflexes. After the Romanian revolution in 1989, my education at the University of Bucharest and the shape of post-communist politics strengthened this stance. Marxism and critical theory were non-existent at the university. The actual thought of Benjamin, Adorno and Habermas was unknown to us; even Hegel was under suspicion for having influenced Marx. Our reference points were Karl Popper’s The Open Society and its Enemies, Friedrich Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom, Ludwig von Mises’ Socialism and Human Action and Hannah Arendt’s The Origins of Totalitarianism. The little we knew about the more recent left thinking was filtered through Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind. It is a biased and intolerant book; but I still remember how enthralled I was by its condemnation of the so-called neo-Nietzschean and postmodern left. In addition, after the fall of communism, Ceausescu’s second guard confiscated the discourse of the left: up to nowadays the leftist ideology in Romania has been a cover of the most corrupt and conservative political party. Thus, the new post-communist Romanian intelligentsia seemed condemned to neo-liberalism; with a notable exception – the small but active ‘Critic Attack’ group. This intelligentsia still regards politics in a Manichean way: the good (capitalism, neo-liberalism, neo-conservatism) and the bad (socialism, multiculturalism, feminism and – most recently – Islam and the refugees).

Michel Houellebecq’s shifting representation of Islam: From the death of God to counter-Enlightenment

Michel Houellebecq has, I argue, changed significantly his portrayal of Islam: in earlier novels, he advances a hostile view of it premised on the secularist belief in the death of God and the inexorable decline of monotheism (Platform, 1998; The Elementary Particles, 1998; The Possibility of an Island, 2003). Houellebecq sets capitalism against Islam, and advances a vision of a godless ‘religion positive’ (Auguste Comte) better suited for capitalist modernity. In contrast, in his last novel (Submission, 2015) and interventions, Houellebecq makes a post-secular turn largely driven by the radicalization of positivist ideas relying on evolutionary biology. This turn is opposed to modernity and favourable to a reconsideration of Islam as the religion of submission and a remedy to personal crisis and Europe’s decline. I show that, evaluative differences notwithstanding, Houellebecq’s stereotyping of Islam has remained constant in his literary work.

Aestheticization of politics and ambivalence of self-sacrifice in Charlie Brooker’s The National Anthem

This paper is focused on the meaning of the artist’s ‘theatre of violence’ and self-sacrifice in Charlie Brooker’s The National Anthem (2011), a parable of power and resistance in the age of technology. To interpret ‘the first great artwork of the 21th century’ (as this resistance is called in the film), I critically draw on Jean Baudrillard’s post-Maussian theory of spectacular terror and on Walter Benjamin’s reflection on technology and the aestheticization of violence. Technology and mass media carve out a ‘domain of the sensible’ where hegemonic power and reactive violence are, as in The National Anthem, theatrically staged with contrasting effects, carnivalesque and dramatic, funny and abject. In Brooker’s film, the aestheticization of dominant power and subversive violence obliterate, and at the same time unveil, a moral problematic. By manoeuvring the logic of the spectacle of hegemonic power, the artist short-circuits it, and clings to the aspiration to an alternative or a political ‘heteroglossia’ (Bakhtin) the staging of a global carnival is a moral protest meant to free people from the delusions of political and mass media power.