This essay proposes that the work of Sylvia Wynter, a canonical figure in Afro-Caribbean philosophy, demonstrates other ways of doing philosophy, a comparative philosophy carried out as a cross-cultural exercise. Sylvia Wynter has argued for a “New Science of the Word” by drawing from the contributions of Frantz Fanon (sociogeny), Aimé Césaire (poetic knowledge), and the field of cybernetics, among other sources. This essay aims to explain the framework and methodology of the New Science and the original transdisciplinary engagement that (...) such a framework facilitates. It argues that, by appropriating the concept of “autopoiesis” beyond the natural sciences, Wynter refashions autopoiesis as autopoetics to answer the age-old question of what it means to be human. Comparative philosophy, the essay concludes, can be fertile ground for Wynter’s project and epistemic decolonization. (shrink)

Dubilet’s contribution turns to Marx’s “On the Jewish Question” in order to diagnose the collusive interplay between mediation and sovereignty as modes of transcendence that, together, prevent real immanence from irrupting. It does so by recovering the logic of “the general secular contradiction”—the division between the state and civil society that materializes and secularizes the structure of diremption originally articulated in theological form, as the opposition between heaven and earth. In this analysis, the logic of Christianity is shown to be (...) imbricated with the political form of secular modernity itself. Moreover, this account reveals that the modern secular state does not inaugurate the political theology of immanence; rather it constitutes a mechanism of transcendent mediation. The exception that mediates across the two realms renders transcendence livable, but it also reproduces the dirempted life, establishing it as the unsurpassable horizon and foreclosing all operations of dissolution or abolition that could collapse the structure of civil society and the state that governs “the order of the world.” Although immediate transcendence (sovereignty) may be positioned, as it is in the Schmittian paradigm, as radically distinct from its mediational counterpart, in relation to real immanence the two operate as a collusive ensemble. (shrink)

This article investigates the politics of translation at work in contemporary theories of secularism. It turns to the thought of Jacques Derrida in order to challenge liberal and more critical perspectives. Without a complex analysis of translation and its ethico-political effects, the revisitation of secularism remains deficient, leaving the liberal politics of translation exclusionary and that of their critics ineffective. Pointing to the resources Derrida offers for a deeper understanding of the nature, political stakes, and implications of translation, this article (...) illuminates an understudied and yet crucial dimension of the relationship between religion and politics, and more generally of public life. (shrink)

This article critically engages the postsecular turn in feminism by focusing on recent contributions by Judith Butler, Rosi Braidotti, and Saba Mahmood, whose stance can be seen as symptomatic of the postsecular moment. The article demonstrates that their conjoint theoretical moves have unintended yet important implications, which are left unexamined. Whilst recognizing the importance of the effort of postsecular feminism to think of agency beyond the limitations of Eurocentric theorizing, the article argues that it remains unclear whether the particular conceptualization (...) of agency, as detached from autonomy, can have counter-hegemonic effects. The article is concerned with the politics that the postsecular turn in feminism authorizes, and for this purpose it questions to what extent postsecular feminist theorizing risks the neutralization of critical social theory itself, because abandoning autonomy as the foundation of political subjectivity does not allow for the interrogation of arbitrary authorities and the social inequalities that they sustain. (shrink)

This paper discusses the diverse forms of contemporary Islam practised by the Kists, inhabitants of Georgia's Pankisi Gorge related to the Chechens. The newest wave of Salafi-inspired Islam among the young generation of Chechens, mostly men who have fought in the Chechen-Russian war, is aesthetically marked by a distinctive style of minaret and by a more public adhān than Pankisi has hitherto known. The reactions of local Kists to the aesthetics and morality of the new Islam, and the distinctions between (...) Salafi, Wahhabi, and Pankisi Islam are explored. It is argued that the new Islam is not as foreign to the Caucasus as scholarship tends to suggest. Ethnographies of minarets and headstones are followed by an exploration of reactions to Soviet secularism in the historiography of Chechen Islam. Positioning itself within recent scholarship aiming to overcome the constraints imposed by secular forms of knowledge in the study of Islamic societies, the paper seeks to locate the unique modes of Kist belief within the framework of a comparative, post-secular anthropology of Islam. (shrink)

Almost none of the critical theory concerned with the secular addresses it in relation to sub-Saharan Africa. This is notable not least given the extent to which other post-colonial regions, such as North Africa and South Asia, are central to such discussions. It is not, however, that the critical theorists are ignoring Africanists' work; indeed, looking at the Africanist literature in any depth makes it clear that there is not, and has never been, a field of “secular studies.” Taking this (...) observation as a point of departure, and considering it in relation to a range of classic and contemporary ethnographic cases, this paper aims to shed light on some of the key terms in current debates about the secular—terms such as immanence, the mundane, critique, and doubt. In doing so, it calls for further considerations of how to figure the Africanist canon in relation to the terms of critical theory. (shrink)

If, following Masuzawa, Fitzgerald and others we assume that “the religious” is a category produced by Western colonial regimes in tandem with that of “the secular,” then consequently the post-secular would need to be post-religious, as well. Here I demonstrate how in one metropolitan case, Germany, the religious and secular divide is evoked to produce a particular exclusivist narrative of national identity. A substantial part of German civil society, media, and legal establishment mobilize an imagined culturally Christian vision of Germany (...) in order to exclude from public visibility and political participation German born Muslims of Turkish descent. The colonial twin categories of secular-religious still operate in the shaping of the German polity. Decolonizing it would thus require not only to enter a post-secular dialogue with religious presentations in the public sphere, as Habermas contends; rather a post-secular polity would require the post-religious. (shrink)

This article discusses recent critical works within the frame of what is considered a paramount concern in feminist scholarship today: How do we name and publicize acts of violence against women without providing ideological fuel for orientalism and Islamophobia? By privileging a critique of western imperialism in discussions of violence against women in Muslim contexts, I argue this work: 1) obscures a complete understanding of violence against women in Muslim contexts, 2) is unjustifiably dismissive and belittling to activists working in (...) the Muslim world, and 3) is an expression of a Euro/American experience of Islamophobia post 9/11 that is projected in an ahistorical and politically counterproductive way onto local Muslim and Arab communities. The cumulative result is a teleology of an anti-imperialism that naturalizes the double bind between Islamophobia and gender injustice by presenting women’s rights activism not just as complicit in imperialism and Islamophobia but as inescapably imperialist and Islamophobic. (shrink)