Yikes! It almost makes you feel as though the Enlightenment bypassed America, and Americans moved from premodern to late-modern & "post-secular" culture directly! While I agree with Maureen that capitalism and its attendant changes in the mode of reproduction are the material basis of many oddities, we can't ignore the thriving religious nonsense to which Americans seem more prone than others. Is there something about living in the belly of the beast that makes people more religious & moralistic than otherwise? Or can it be that Americans gained religious liberties too easily, so they don't treasure them now? Anyway, the dominance of retrofitted religion in public culture has had tremendous anti-feminist implications here.
BTW, are you aware that among the posties there exists a "post-secular" philosophy? Check out the e-mail exchange "Postmodernism and the Desire for God," available at <http://www.crosscurrents.org/caputo.htm>.
***** POSTMODERNISM AND THE DESIRE FOR GOD: AN E-MAIL EXCHANGE by Edith Wyschogrod and John D. Caputo
Augustine's question returns, unanswered:
"What then do I love when I love my God?"
EDITH WYSCHOGROD, J. Newton Rayzor Professor of Philosophy and Religious Thought at Rice University, is the author of Saints and Postmodernism, Spirit in Ashes, and, most recently, An Ethics of Remembering (all published by the University of Chicago Press). Her essay "Works That 'Faith': The Grammar of Ethics in Judaism" appeared in Cross Currents, Summer 1990.
JOHN D. CAPUTO, Cook Professor of Philosophy at Villanova University, is the author of Against Ethics (Indiana, 1993), Deconstruction in a Nutshell: A Conversation with Jacques Derrida (Fordham, 1997), and The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Indiana, 1997).
At the invitation of the editors, philosophers John D. Caputo and Edith Wyschogrod engaged in a lengthy e-mail correspondence that produced the following dialog, itself a phenomenon of the postmodern.
John D. Caputo. In just the past year we have seen two books edited by English theologians -- one entitled The Postmodern God, the other Post-Secular Philosophy -- that have pressed the claim that "postmodern" must be understood to mean or at least to include "postsecular," that the delimitation of the claims of Enlightenment rationalism must also involve the delimitation of Enlightenment secularism. A critical stance toward modernism goes hand in hand with a critical stance toward secularism. In France, Jacques Derrida's most recent work has taken a turn toward what he calls "religion without religion," that is, to a thinking that involves a certain repetition of basic religious structures, most notably the "messianic." Derrida now analyzes in detail notions like the gift, hospitality, testimony -- and most recently, forgiveness -- that have always belonged to classical religious discourse. As you well know, on the continent this renewal is very much the effect of the impact Levinas's work has had.(1) This is especially true of Derrida himself and also of Jean-Luc Marion, who speaks of a God "without being," without the "idols" of what Heidegger calls "onto-theo-logic." As these thinkers have been arguing, it seems that God is making a comeback.
This is a fascinating development, and one that sends shock waves through certain American "postmodernist" writers who, however avant-garde they might be in their own work on the question of God and religion remain deeply and intractably modernist in protecting the rear guard of modernist critiques of religion. Religion is one "other" that these thinkers, who are otherwise deeply persuaded about the power of the "other," do not want to hear about. I have many friends who love to talk about exposing philosophy to the "other," still better to the "unconditionally" or "wholly" other, but when I mention religion, they turn pale. It turns out that by "other" they mean literature. So their unconditional, wholly other is constrained by several conditions, and religion is just too, too other for them, too "tout autre," if I may say so.
This development raises many questions. What does "God" mean if one speaks of a "postmodern God"? What does reason and philosophy mean? What can we say today of the most ancient religious motif of all, the desire for God?
What do you make of these developments?
Edith Wyschogrod. Much of the process of rediscovery hangs, I think, on the way in which immanence and transcendence are now being construed in the postsecular conversation. The problem in the present context has been at least in part framed by the way in which Levinas has been drawn into the God-question. For Levinas, the Other is the other person whose very existence places a demand of noninjury upon me, an ethical demand that I read in the face-to-face relation with the Other. But it has not gone unnoticed that the Other is in the track or trace of transcendence which, for Levinas, is construed in terms of a God who has always already passed by, who cannot be made present. This allows for a transcendence that for him is seen in conformity with rabbinic tradition. Ethics is first philosophy and the Old One, the Ancient of Days is, as it were, cordoned off. But the imago dei (to be construed an-iconically, in conformity with Jewish tradition) is not a representation of God but an invisible writing that more than hints at an immanentist theology. Our postsecular friends, like Philip Blond, maintain that Levinas's thought is deeply dualistic in that the otherness of the Other and the otherness of God -- or to use Levinas's term, of illeity (the He) -- cannot be maintained. Levinas's Otherness, it is argued, has sustained an interest in ethics as a means to eradicate a world that is debased.(2) Now Blond (and John Milbank) want to save the appearances by an appeal to God, not by rereading the appearances as redeemed, but as a therapeutic gesture in the direction of philosophy, making the world safe for philosophy by showing that God's infinite distance does not destroy but proves to be the ground for the realization of human possibility. It is I think a misreading of Levinas to see him as world-denying or at least world-castigating in almost Buddhist fashion. But what has been correctly perceived is that Levinas has opened the need for thinking through the paradox of the Other as being in the track of transcendence, but of transcendence also being (somehow) in the track or trace of the Other.
Caputo. I quite agree with you about the line Blond takes on Levinas. Blond says in effect that for Levinas the Good is otherwise than being because being is evil. It is a shocking misrepresentation, almost a denunciation of a thinker who is no doubt the single most important figure in putting the question of God back on the table for philosophical discussion, who has opened the eyes of a highly secular philosophical world to the question of God. It is furthermore an ironic denunciation, inasmuch as for Levinas the whole force of the name of God, of the Ancient of Days, of the past which was never present, is spent in the name of earthly peace and social justice -- spent, I am tempted to say, "without remainder." That is why I would like to hear more about what you mean when you say, as I understand it, that today we experience the need to think not only the Other person as a trace of God but also to think God as the trace of the Other. Is that what you mean by an "immanentist theology"? Is that the direction a "postmodern" theology or religion would take for you? Or even a "religion without religion," to use Derrida's expression.... *****
I hope you get disturbed by this "post-secular" turn! If not, I'll send you a "post-development" discourse, too, for good measure.
Yoshie