Introduction

ABSTRACT

Studies of affect center the porous non-enclosure of bodies and psyches, and temporality is crucial to our interpretations of violence, loss, rebellion, and change. The authors in this issue collectively demonstrate the inadequacy of colonialist and masculinist notions of static self-sovereign subjects in political theology. While affectability is frequently invoked for racialized and gendered modes of demonization or dismissal, the contributors to this special issue show the key role that it also plays in transforming power relations. The essays differ in the extent to which they foreground religious communities and practice, relations to nation-states, and divine or non-human agency. Together, however, they loosen assumptions about affect that limit visions for living otherwise and point to moments where we might glimpse such possibilities.

KEYWORDS:

• Race
• coloniality
• affect
• temporality
• Orientalism

Studies of affect center the porous non-enclosure of bodies and psyches, the ways that our engagements with politics and religion are not mere expressions of internal opinions and beliefs but are shaped by forces that exceed our cognitive grasp. Temporality is embedded in how we talk about violence, loss, and rebellion, and the change that we perceive in their midst. The call for this issue was written six months into the Covid-19 pandemic and four months after George Floyd’s murder. Its impending publication comes over three months into Israel’s genocidal onslaught against Palestinians following the attacks by Hamas in Israel on 7 October 2023. All of these events arose as sudden devastations; all were conditioned by racial, colonial, and capitalist patterns of harm and vulnerability. The synchronicity of uprising and suppression is not new either, but the uncertainties it generates are not resolved with historicist or presentist preoccupations. While none of the pieces in this collection directly discusses these events, we mark them here to acknowledge that a shared drive to push beyond current conceptual roadblocks to liberatory action bears their traces.

In Toward a Global Idea of Race, Denise Ferreira da Silva points to the submerged significance of spatiality in critical theories that emphasize time. She argues that, “When the racial writes Europeans and the others of Europe as subjects of exteriority, it institutes the body, social configurations, and global regions as signifiers of the mind.”¹ It is “exteriority [as] an (im)possible ontological moment” that configures and haunts European post-Enlightenment epistemologies.² The ostensible transparency of the (again, supposedly) self-determined subject is spatially delimited by attributions of interiority.³ The field of religion has been no stranger to the prioritization of interiority for political reasons. One might recall the experience of the “holy” or numinous which is described by Rudolf Otto as the essence of religion in his Idea of the Holy.⁴ For Otto, the holy is experienced as an overwhelming feeling which is unlike other emotional states and can only be understood once one has had a unique experience of it. His influential theory prizes “inner experience” over and above the social, political, and linguistic context of that experience. Recent work in the fields of affect theory, especially in the fields of decolonial theory, queer theory, and disability studies, have shown the necessity of attending to affect and temporality in ways that move beyond traditional accounts that prioritize inner states over exterior practices. The essays collected in this special issue draw on these fields to open new ways of configuring the relationship(s) between religion, affect, and temporality.

In many Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment works of European philosophy, a march into the future toward reason and away from myth or superstition has often been represented as a march away from affectability, toward self-sovereignty. Carlos Ramírez-Arenas traces an important strand of the philosophical genealogy that aligns transparency and authenticity with a racially and religiously formulated model of consciousness. Heidegger’s critique of temporality is central to this problematic; while he helpfully intervenes in a notion of time as “independent from human existence” and acknowledges its affective conditioning, Heidegger also portrays the authentic being liberated from ontic time as issuing from an ascetic practice that “mirrors the temporal and affective configuration of Protestant eschatology.”⁵ Ramírez-Arenas, with da Silva, argues that this asceticism is differentially available and dependent upon “exterior determinations such as geographical location or kinship.”⁶ Authenticity involves performances and options that are implicitly racialized, and “the failure to embody the ideal” is used to confirm race and culture as natural scientific forms of difference.⁷ Taking inspiration from J. Kameron Carter, Ramírez-Arenas gestures toward a “fugitive sacrality” that would not seek transparency but would affectively dwell in (Glissantian) opacity and untranslatability.⁸

Jeffrey Wheatley notes that so-called religious fanatics in the US leading up to the Civil War were defined by what da Silva calls affectability. Part of the analytics of raciality, designations of affectability mark those without self-determined will who are not subjects of reason.⁹ Wheatley argues that affectability was an image Nat Turner cultivated (“affected”) to demonstrate that his political actions aligned with divine intentions. This placed his seemingly failed rebellion in a wider existential frame and temporality.¹⁰ For those looking to discount Turner’s actions and prevent their replication, affectability provided a mode of psychic and political containment: it was fanatical religious delusion, not enslavement and oppression, that drove Turner to violence and made his message compelling to others. Incommensurable narratives of the relationship between religion, politics, and temporality generated and expressed a complex, discordant “affective economy.”¹¹

In writing about Nur students in Turkey, Maria Tedesco is conscious of how Orientalist notions of Muslim excitability too often preclude attentive understanding of convergences between “affect, thought, and action in the religious field.”¹² In sohbets dedicated to reading and discussing Nursi’s Risale-I Nur (Epistles of Light), students develop habits of engagement that intuitively align “collective personality” in a religious context with attitudes toward the state. Through what Tedesco, following Silvan Tomkins, calls “ideo-affective resonance,” the state comes to be regarded as a living entity growing toward “full development.”¹³ Nur participation in an officially secular political realm tends to strive for “positive action” that is neither “passive acceptance of injustice” nor “forceful, disruptive political action.”¹⁴ While Tedesco intentionally withholds reflections on the extended political effects of these alignments, the analysis shows its subjects’ keen awareness of the impossibility of “autonomous self-containment” in religious or political praxis.¹⁵

The nation as “collective body” is also significant in the British government’s 1933 censorship of Angarey in India. Sumera Saleem attends to the contradictions the volume both elicited and expressed: Much like the colonial state, the fiction anthology Angarey largely portrayed Muslims as excitable and irrational, “the opposite of secular modernity.”¹⁶ Saleem notes that its authors had westernized educations that influenced their critiques of religion but were also grappling with Muslim political minoritization and colonial injustice. The text, which incited large-scale protests and condemnations from the Muslim community in India, was banned by the colonial government “in an attempt to maintain the order of the colonial public sphere.”¹⁷ While state actions might accord with religious objections to Angarey as blasphemous, censorship functioned politically to contrast “what it means to act rational” with “what it means to feel religious.” An emphasis on affect, Saleem suggests, can helpfully attend to embodied performances of both injury and rationality so that neither is assumed to be a fully transparent phenomenon.¹⁸

Ebrahim Moosa challenges the universality of the self-sovereign subject of Christian European philosophy. His starting point is “A Common Word Between Us and You,” a letter written by several Muslim theologians in response to a lecture by Pope Benedict that cast Islamic accounts of God as irrational. Moosa critiques what he sees as the desire of Muslim theologians to find common ground with Christian conceptions of love at the expense of a robust Islamic theological account. By attempting to bring Christian and Islamic notions of love closer together, they relinquish the importance of "obedience and surrender" as a precondition for love between God and humans in the classical Islamic tradition.¹⁹ Drawing especially on the twelfth-century Islamic theologian and philosopher Al-Ghazali, Moosa makes the case for an account of “love of God” that is just as detailed and dynamic as the Christian one, without sacrificing its uniqueness and distinctiveness from the Christian account. Further, by acknowledging the "centrality of the ontotheology of mercy" as a precondition for love, Moosa challenges the notion that love begins in the interior of the individual and only then extends outward toward God.²⁰

Fannie Bialek likewise challenges philosophical narratives that center mastery over vulnerability that often have their roots in Christian European philosophy. If Moosa and Tedesco turn to different Islamic conceptions of selfhood in order to challenge notions of self-sovereignty, however, Bialek does so by offering an immanent critique of Christian notions of selfhood. Bialek puts victims of sexual assault’s incredulity about their own suffering into conversation with Caravaggio’s 1602 painting The Incredulity of Thomas. She shows how what she calls “emotional incredulity” – that is, "a feeling about something I know to be true that makes me relate to that knowledge with denial or doubt, though I might have no trouble stating my belief in it plainly if asked for the fact" – is a step in the process toward realizing one’s state, and all our states, as a vulnerable creature.²¹ Bialek argues that we might see incredulity not as a denial that something terrible happened, but as a wish, or hope, that something so vile could not happen, that we are not indeed the vulnerable creatures such harm reveals us to be. A lesson we might take from Bialek is that incredulity can open space for realizing our own vulnerability through and with others, and in doing so, open up new potential forms of solidarity.

Carlos A. Manrique finally takes us to Colombia and the 2017 Civic Strikes in Buenaventura. During these strikes, protestors took to the streets in solidarity against state-sanctioned racial and economic inequality. Taking on the secular political paradigm which would place strict boundaries on the institutional separation of religion from the state, Manrique shows how for protestors, separating religion from politics, as the "frames of intelligibility of social and political life implied in the normative ideal of liberal democracy" do, would have neglected the concrete social, political, and historical realities that shaped civic space in Colombia.²² Protestors hoped that the marginalized in partnership with the Church would penetrate the institutions of the state in order to transform them from the bottom up. This is a model that challenges European and US colonial paradigms which separate religion from the state in hopes of containing its potentially status-quo challenging power. On Manrique's model, we find the “ineradicable entanglement between the religious and the social, the religious and the political”.²³ This secular schema of course also privileges the autonomous rational individual da Silva critiques. And as Manrique shows, religious affects move in ways that push the boundaries not only of the institutions of the secular state, but also the notion of self-master that underpins it. We are likewise far from the inner experience model of religious affect that Otto put forward and that has played such a crucial role in forming the modern study of religion and political life in Europe and the US.

Taken together, these essays provide a roadmap for reimagining the study of religion, affect, and temporality beyond the universalizing tendencies that have been dominant in all three areas of study. For example, even a field as focused on power, history, and social inequality as affect theory often treats its subject matter as an abstract quality of human beings that can be applied without attention to the particularities of a given context. By centering stories from the margins, the essays collected here, in political theological fashion, contribute to projects of imagining otherwise.²⁴

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Correction Statement

This article has been corrected with minor changes. These changes do not impact the academic content of the article.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Eleanor Craig

Eleanor Craig is Administrative and Program Director and Lecturer in the Committee on Ethnicity, Migration, Rights at Harvard University. They research critical theories of race, gender, and religion with literary and philosophical methods. Their writing and teaching is rooted in critical ethnic studies and gender and sexuality studies. Craig coedited Beyond Man: Race, Coloniality, and Philosophy of Religion (Duke 2021) with An Yountae and the “Practices of Devotion” special issue of Representations (Winter 2021) with Amy Hollywood, Niklaus Largier, and Kris Trujillo.

Joshua Lupo

Joshua Lupo is the Assistant Director of the Contending Modernities research initiative. In this role, he serves as the editor and writer for the Contending Modernities Blog and the classroom coordinator for the Madrasa Discourses program. He has published articles and reviews in Sophia, Soundings, Critical Muslim, Reading Religion, and Religious Studies Review. With CM Co-Director Atalia Omer, he is the co-editor of Broken Solidarities: Feminism, Race, and Transnationalism (Notre Dame Press, 2022) and Religion, Populism, and Modernity: Confronting White Christian Nationalism and Racism (Notre Dame Press, 2023). His current book project is titled After Essentialism: A Critical Phenomenology for the Study of Religion.

Notes

1 Ferreira da Silva, Toward a Global Idea of Race, 29.

2 Ibid., 31.

3 Ibid., 35.

4 Otto, The Idea of the Holy.

5 Carlos Ramírez-Arenas, "The Asceticism of Transparency," 3, 8–9, 13–14.

6 Ibid., 15–16.

7 Ibid., 21.

8 Ibid., 25.

9 Wheatley, “Nat Turner and the Affective Power of Religious Fanaticism,” 2.

10 Ibid., 4, 6.

11 Ibid., 13.

12 Tedesco, “Affect, the State, and Political Subjectivity," 3, 16.

13 Ibid., 5–12.

14 Ibid., 14–15.

15 Ibid., 11.

16 Saleem, “Colonial Sense and Religious Sensibility," 2–3, 9.

17 Ibid., 11–12.

18 Ibid., 15.

19 Ebrahim Moosa, “Decolonizing the Politics of Love,” 4.

20 Ibid., 5.

21 Fannie Bialek, “Incredulity and the Realization of Vulnerability, or, How it Feels to Learn from Wounds,” 11.

22 Carlos A. Manrique, “Spiritual Memory, Spatial Affects and Churchstateness in a Popular Uprising in Afro Colombia's Pacific Littoral,” 4.

23 Ibid., 16.

24 The phrase “imagining otherwise” has resonance across multiple fields, from the anti-Cartesian philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas to abolitionist discourses to queer theorists pushing beyond heteronormative and cisgendered frameworks. The essays collected here might be framed as additional layers of these sometimes aligned, sometimes divergent efforts.