Desecularizing Secularism

Abstract

Animated by a profound sense of complacency about history, rights and law, secularism has reached a dead end of political despair today. Thinking about this dead end will demand giving up certain cherished historicist claims to law and justice. The task of desecularizing secularism is one of dehistoricizing history. To relieve secularism of its appeal to the innocence of history, we need a conceptualization of time that folds the Nietzschean idea of active forgetfulness of history into the Derridian notion of the spectral present that is ‘out of joint with itself’. Such a notion of time/history may help us do the im-possible1 work of thinking of inheriting the futures of democracy and justice irreducible to law and rights. The futures of the irreducible political, where we can neither forget our pasts nor remain bound to them, haunted by their ghosts, cannot be dictated by the apparatuses of the state or the politics of some non-state community. The futures are made possible by the very the non-contemporaneity of our living present, where historical disconnections defy ‘explanation’, opening up new political spaces of becoming.

Keywords:

• history
• secularism
• active forgetfulness
• law
• im-possibility of justice
• non-juridical futures
• postsecular politics

Notes

 1. Throughout this paper I will use the words possibility and im-possibility interchangeably. Thus, when I say the possibility of non-juridical justice or active forgetting of history I also mean its im-possibility, because such a practice is not simply present out there, as an example or a case, under a sign. I am simply trying to imagine such an im-possibility. As will be clear, for Derrida the word im-possibility, as he wrote it, is irreducible to possibility or impossibility.

 2. For samples of the continuing academic interest in questions about the ‘Death of God’ see Pippin (1999), Harr (1998), Roberts (1998, 196–198), Ruprecht (1997), Vattimo (2002) and Caputo (2001).

 3. Literature on this is abundant. My own take on Kant and Rorty is found in Abeysekara (2004).

 4. See also Foucault (1984).

 5. Foucault is probably thinking of this category of enmity in relation to Nietzsche. For a masterly reading of Nietzsche's defamiliarizing and indeed dechristianizing the figure of the enemy see Derrida (1997, 2001).

 6. The text of Bush's speech can be found at http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2001/09/20010917-11.html.

 7. ‘“In God We Trust”—stamping out religion on national currency’ (http://www.atheists.org/flash.line/igwt1.htm).

 8. ‘In God We Trust’.

 9. Legal scholars have pointed to the implausibility of trying to figure out the ‘original intent’ of documents like the Constitution. In many instances the interpretations of legislative acts may become legislative acts themselves. See Waldron (1999, 119–146).

10. ‘In God We Trust’.

11. ‘In God We Trust’.

12. On how publicity works as a secret and what is public is not necessarily helpful to democratic politics see Dean (2001).

13. ‘In God We trust’.

14. Here, suffice it to say that the Bush administration's financial assistance to countries like Pakistan to help combat terrorism is precisely guided by the former's commitment to secularism, and not necessarily democracy. One has yet to conceptualize how this secularism might be different from that which failed in Iraq.

15. In so many different and critical ways, for sometime now, Chakrabarty has been reminding us of the non-western partnership in the architecture of modernity. More than a decade ago Chakrabarty argued that ‘modernity is not the work of Europeans alone; the third-world nationalisms, as modernizing ideologies par excellence, have been equal partners in the process’ (2000, 43). This argument is found in ‘Postcoloniality and the artifice of history’, first published in Representations in 1992.

16. I use the word postsecular not to mean the end of the secular but to note something of the political present animated by the crisis of secularism, to which I allude in the paper. In this regard I disagree with Phillip Blond that rescuing religion from the hands of ‘fascists’ as a corrective to the ‘liberal erasure of God’ can be seen as ‘the end of the secular’ (see his introduction in Blond, 1998, 54). Following Derrida, we cannot speak of a postsecular in terms of an easy separation of the ‘post’ from the ‘secular.’ The possible dangers of ‘new traditionalist’ criticisms of secularism to democracy are the subject of Jeff Stout (2004).

17. It first appeared in Unmaking the nation (edited by Jeganathan and Ismail; Scott 1995), then in Scott (1999). All references to the article are from Scott (1999).

18. For an interesting take on the idea of the future in relation to Heidegger's ‘not yet’ see Chakrabarty (2000, 249–253).

19. Also cited in Soderholm (1993). Soderholm is primarily concerned with Nietzsche's interest in Lord Byron's hero Manfred.

20. It is important to point out that Derrida considers himself hardly a Marxist. But he is against the European alliances (as he calls them) to exorcise and chase away the ghost of Marx too quickly. As he puts it, literally and metaphorically, Marx:

belongs to a time of disjunction, to that ‘time out of joint’ in which is inaugurated, laboriously, painfully, tragically, a new thinking of borders, a new experience of the house, the home, and the economy. He is not part of the family, but one should not send him back, once again, him too, to the border. (Derrida 1995, 174)

21. Derrida's take on the South African Truth and Reconciliation Commission is found in Derrida (2001).

22. Here Derrida is alluding to something of the problem of the relation among necessity, law and political sovereignty. Derrida discussed the problem of this relation elsewhere (2002). Agamben (2005) has alluded to the connection between necessity and sovereignty in a very interesting way.

23. For Derrida (1979) ‘living on’ is not reducible to living or dying.

24. I can only note here that there are, of course, profound differences between Heidegger and Derrida. For a sustained critique of Heidegger's notion of possibility in terms of the notion of ‘not yet’ see Derrida (1993). For Heidegger (1996) the present and future, the no-longer and not-yet, are (already available), though they remain uncatualized. For Derrida the present-future remains deferred, as a promise. That which is deferred has to be seen in terms of the ‘to come’ (Derrida 2002; see also note 22).

25. Derrida's idea of ‘to come’ is not a simple religious notion with messianic connotations. The idea is already inscribed within the problem of law/justice itself. He has demonstrated this in numerous writings. For example, Derrida wrote:

the foundation of law remains suspended in the void or over the abyss, suspended by a pure performative act, that would not have to answer to or before any one. The supposed subject of this pure performative would no longer be before the law, or rather he would be before a law still undetermined, before the law as before a law is nonexisting, a law still ahead, still having to and yet to come… the law is transcendent, violent and nonviolent, because it depends only on who is before it (so prior to it), on who produces it, founds it, authorises it in an absolute performative whose presence always escapes him. Law is transcendent and theological, and so always to come, and always promised because it is immanent, finite, and thus already past. Every ‘subject’ is caught up in the aporetic structure in advance… The only ‘to come’ will produce the intelligibility or interpretability of this law. (Derrida 2002, 270)

26. I have spelled out these details in Abeysekara (2002).

27. Pradeep Jeganathan (1997) has cast doubt on these sorts of explanation of violence.

28. I have in mind an assortment of articles one can easily find on the web by typing the words ‘LTTE attack on the Katunayaka Airport in Sri Lanka’ into a search engine like Google.

29. Writing about majority directed violence against minorities in Sri Lanka, Sankaran Krishna argued: ‘We have to explain why, even as they help neighbors to escape or provide succor to victims, significant sections of the majority community feel the violence against the minority community is, at a certain level, both understandable and necessary’ (1999, 55, emphasis added). Though there is some merit to this statement, the pursuit of the question of ‘why…?’, it seems to me, is no longer a worthwhile theoretical strategy.