Have we ever been religious? It may seem strange to open an essay on Derrida with a Latourean question. Yet, with regard to religion, what Derrida demonstrates is quite unavoidably this: we have long been, and are still being, Christianized. Whatever else we may have been, perhaps still are, constitutes but the space or espacement offered or relinquished, however reluctantly or even grudgingly (though more often than not quite willingly) to Christianization. This is a space that goes beyond whatever is (...) meant by the word or the concept of ‘religion’, under whatever definition. And though Derrida still refers to it, at times, in terms that have themselves become, for the most part, religious markers (Judaism, Islam, etc.), he leaves no doubt that such name calling is part of the Christianization he otherwise documents. This essay attempts to show that the question (let us call it Derrida's ‘Christian question’) is therefore: what is Christianity? (shrink)

This article examines the critique of philosophical Eurocentrism developed over the past two-and-a-half decades by Robert Bernasconi. The restriction of the moniker “philosophy” to the Western tradition, and the exclusion of non-Western traditions from the field, became the standard view only after the late eighteenth century. Bernasconi critically analyzes this restriction and exclusion and makes a compelling case for its philosophical illegitimacy. After showing how Bernasconi convincingly repudiates the identification of philosophy with Europe – asserted most explicitly by Continental philosophers (...) such as Hegel, Husserl, Levinas, and most recently Rodolphe Gasché – the present article critically reflects on both the significance and the limits of Bernasconi’s own predominantly “immanent critique” of philosophical Eurocentrism, and ends by calling on philosophers to engage more thoroughly in studies of and dialogues with non-Western traditions of philosophy. (shrink)

The paper reflects on the experience of reading Levinas’s ‘God and Philosophy’ paying particular attention to the ways in which it would have us read the word ‘God.’ Levinas refuses to let the word become the property of even the most radical treatment of religious faith. The word, the biblical word, must never serve the self-consolation of philosophy. Many of Levinas’s readers regret this aspect of his writing, but the paper argues that ‘God and Philosophy’ offers an exemplary introduction to (...) Levinas’s most developed style of writing and thinking, and it does so while bringing to mind the question of the relation between Levinas’s philosophy and their religion. The second part of the essay considers possible contexts in which this question and ‘God and Philosophy’ itself can perhaps best be understood. (shrink)

This essay describes some of the basic pragmatic tendencies at work in the world of working and then shows how the finite provinces of meaning of theoretical contemplation and literature act against those pragmatic tendencies. This analysis prepares the way to see how the religious province of meaning in a similar but also distinctive way acts back against these pragmatic tendencies. These three finite provinces of meaning make it possible to see the world from another center of orientation than that (...) of the ego agens and its proclivity to bring transcendences within reach, thereby freeing oneself to a degree from the fundamental anxiety and revealing the uniqueness of oneself and others, who are no longer subjected to working’s pragmatic imperatives. (shrink)

In this paper I argue that we need to analyze ‘religious violence’ in the ‘post-secular context’ in a twofold way: rather than simply viewing it in terms of mere irrationality, senselessness, atavism, or monstrosity – terms which, as we witness today on an immense scale, are strongly endorsed by the contemporary theater of cruelty committed in the name of religion – we also need to understand it in terms of an ‘originary supplement’ of ‘disengaged reason’. In order to confront its (...) specificity beyond traditional explanations of violence, I propose an integrated phenomenological account of religion that traces the phenomenality of religion in terms of a correlation between the originary givenness of transcendence and capable man’s creative capacities to respond to it. Following Ricœur, I discuss ‘religious violence’ in terms of a monopolizing appropriation of the originary source of givenness that conflates man’s freedom to poetically respond to the appeal of the foundational with the surreptitiously claimed sovereignty to make it happen in a practical transfiguration of the everyday. (shrink)