The Politics of Postsecular Religion: Mourning Secular Futures (Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture)

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Ananda Abeysekara contends that democracy, along with its cherished secular norms, is founded on the idea of a promise deferred to the future. Rooted in democracy's messianic promise is the belief that religious& mdash;political identity-such as Buddhist, Hindu, Sinhalese, Christian, Muslim, or Tamil& mdash;can be critiqued, neutralized, improved, and changed, even while remaining inseparable from the genocide of the past. This facile belief, he argues, is precisely what distracts us from challenging the violence inherent in postcolonial political sovereignty. At the same time, we cannot simply dismiss the democratic concept, since it permeates so deeply through our modernist, capitalist, and humanist selves.

In The Politics of Postsecular Religion, Abeysekara invites us to reconsider our ethical-political legacies, to look at them not as problems, but as aporias, in the Derridean sense-that is, as contradictions or impasses incapable of resolution. Disciplinary theorizing in religion and politics, he argues, is unable to identify the aporias of our postcolonial modernity. The aporetic legacies, which are like specters that cannot be wished away, demand a new kind of thinking. It is this thinking that Abeysekara calls mourning and un-inheriting. Un-inheriting is a way of meditating on history that both avoids the simple binary of remembering and forgetting and provides an original perspective on heritage, memory, and time.

Abeysekara situates aporias in the settings and cultures of the United States, France, England, Sri Lanka, India, and Tibet. In presenting concrete examples of religion in public life, he questions the task of refashioning the aporetic premises of liberalism and secularism. Through close readings of Nietzsche, Heidegger, Arendt, Derrida, Butler, and Agamben, as well as Foucault, Asad, Chakrabarty, Balibar, and Zizek, he offers readers a way to think about the futures of postsecular politics that is both dynamic and creative.

The Politics of Postsecular Religion: Mourning Secular Futures (Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture) Review

A B E Y S E K A R A : this book is part of the Insurrection series from Columbia, which has established a very high standard of excellence. This book shares that excellence. The key to understanding Abeysekara's position is to be aware of the fact that the concepts of "democracy" and "Christianity" have reached an intersection-point of inconsistency; where they cannot proceed forward. This inconsistency is labeled an "Aporia". When we arrive at this critical point of impossible synthesis; we must entertain the possibility of actually un-inheriting, or abandoning the failing concepts; abandoning even the "name". Therefore, for the first time, we find a thinker who views postmodern "reconstruction" as part of the problem; a desperate determination to cling to these inconsistent names. In this way, the author is one of the first postmoderns to actually posit a complete "break" in the self, falling all the way back to the "abyss", not just the explored unconscious. As a example of an internal positing of an aporia in the explored unconscious; he articulates a 7-step process for 9/11 which was informative. Positing employs a triad consisting of "responsibility-community-democracy" and this triad is posited after the birth of the "free-self". When discussing the mediation of conscience, he uses the example of Tibet. This is an interesting approach. Integrating 9/11 and Tibet into the task of postmodern thinking really drove home the issues that are at stake. Globalization is coupled with "obscurantism" in order to emphasize the deception behind the process. The presentation is "intellectual" and does communicate a system of ideas and concepts. But, the recent world-event examples do actually apply the model. His writing style took me a little time to appropriate, but after a couple of chapters I formed my own method of adapting. He is a religion professor at Virginia tech, with specialization in Buddhism and postmodern thinking. It was nice that Columbia included this diverse presentation. I've purchased the entire insurrection series. I'm glad I did not skip this one. No aporia here; just excellent scholarship. 5 huge stars for content and creativity.

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