Derrida om påstridiga amerikaner

Sluta försvara religion!

Margo Ingvardsson, tidigare riksdagsledamot för vänsterpartiet, skrev nyligen en debattartikel i DN där hon argumenterade för att "barn upp till tolv års ålder bör ´fridlysas´ från religiös utövning". Stefan Swärd är en av de som reagerat mot stolligheterna i Ingvardssons förslag och även debatterat mot henne i radio.

Jag menar dock att Swärds sätt att bemöta Ingvarssons förslag ytterst sätt gynnar den sekularism som Ingvarsson företräder. Problemet med Swärds resonemang är nämligen att han oproblematiskt tycks köpa religionsbegreppet, och därmed föreställningen om att "religion" skulle vara ett avgränsat fenomen urskiljbart från andra kulturella yttringar såsom exempelvis politik. Att hävda religionsfrihet som stöd mot Ingvardssons kritik blir problematiskt då det skriver under på distinktionen mellan "religiöst" och "sekulärt". Att denna uppdelning inte håller för en närmare granskning kan väl sägas utgöra kärnan i talet om det postsekulära samhället (för kort into till detta begrepp läs Göran Rosenbergs färska artikel i SvD: Religion och politik lika med sant). 

William Cavanaugh är en av många som pekat på religionsbegreppets problem:

The first conclusion is that there is no transhistorical or transcultural concept of religion. Religion has a history, and what counts as religion and what does not in any given context depends on different configurations of power and authority. The second conclusion is that the attempt to say that there is a transhistorical and transcultural concept of religion that is separable from secular phenomena is itself part of a particular configuration of power, that of the modern, liberal nation-state as it developed in the West. In this context, religion is constructed as transhistorical, transcultural, essentially interior, and essentially distinct from public, secular rationality. To construe Christianity as a religion, therefor, helps to separate loyalty to God from one´s public loyalty to the nation-state. The idea that religion has a tendency to cause violence - and is therefore to be removed from public power - is one type of this essentialist construction of religion." (The Myth of Religious Violence, s.59)

Problemet är alltså inte bara att "religion" är en konstruktion som inte återfinns i verkligheten, utan även att det går att ana en politisk agenda bakom begreppet. Med Stanley Hauerwas ord:

Religion is the designation created to privatize strong convictions in order to render them harmless so that the alleged democracies can continue to have the illusion that they flourish on difference. (The State of the University, s.60)

Min önskan är att de som debatterar med sekularister som angriper religion i allmänhet, istället för att gömma sig bakom talet om religionsfrihet, först skulle be dem definiera vad de menar med religion. Jag tror att en mer fruktbar debatt skulle bli följden av detta; förhoppningsvis ett samtal som visar på att även föreställningen om ett neutralt sekulärt förnuft är en trosföreställning. 

Rowan Williams om samhällets kommersialisering

We are the first civilisation to treat monetary accumulation as an absolute goal, and it has obscured the whole of our discourse about shared well-being, or the "common good." Politics is trapped in discussion about efficiency and the maximising of choice; the west, at least, is dominated by the assumption that the state exists to protect choice and to do so by protecting financial competitiveness in every sphere.

Rowan Williams - Trading in the souls of men: The commodification of life

Rosenberg om det postsekulära samhället

Jag tror att Taylor här rör vid själva kärnan i det som vi kan kalla det postsekulära tillståndet. Här är det inte längre bara religiösa övertygelser och opinioner som kan sägas emanera ur ”irrationella” trosföreställningar. Också det sekulära förnuftet tvingas här rannsaka och begrunda de trosbaserade (utompolitiska) fundamenten för sin egen ”rationalitet”. I det postsekulära samhället är det offentliga förnuftet produkten av en fortlöpande kommunikation mellan såväl ”religiösa” som ”sekulära” trosuppfattningar. 

I varje fall har det blivit allt mera uppenbart att ett samhälles politiska och moraliska grundprinciper inte kan härledas ur politiken själv, än mindre ur vetenskapen eller logiken. Lika lite som de två kanske mest inflytelserika icke-religiösa moralsystemen i västerlandet, kantianismen (pliktmoralen) och utilitarismen (nyttomoralen) nödvändigtvis förmår övertyga också fullt sansade och klartänkande människor om sin inneboende ”rationalitet”. 

Vad både Habermas och Taylor i sista hand söker svaret på är hur de moraliska grundvalarna för demokratin och politiken ska kunna skapas och upprätthållas i ett samhälle präglat av såväl religiös som sekulär mångfald. Vad som skiljer de två filosoferna åt är gränsdragningen mellan Religion och Politik. Vad som förenar dem är övertygelsen om den potentiella fruktbarheten i mötet mellan de båda.

Göran Rosenberg ger i dagens SvD en liten grundkurs i begreppet "det postsekulära samhället". För en fortsättningskurs rekommenderas oblygt denna uppsats.

Zizek vs. Horowitz

Zizek och David Horowitz debatterar civilisationens framtid under Julian Assanges ledning. Det som slår mig är hur både Zizek och Horowitz tycks dela föreställningen om att tillvarons grundtillstånd utgörs av våld; ett sorts Hobbeskt ursprungstillstånd där våld är nödvändigt för att tvinga fram ett önskvärt samhälle. Med denna världsbild blir det svårt att skilja makt från rätt.

För ett mer konstruktivt samtal om hur vi skapar ett gott samhälle, lyssna på denna debatt mellan John Milbank, Phillip Blond, Adrian Pabst (tipstack till @sebasti_an). De är alla tänkare som menar att det goda samhället inte kan byggas utan en transcendent föreställning om det goda.

Cavanaugh om tortyr och modernitet

Both attitudes toward torture - that we don't and that we must - stem from what is commonly called "American Exceptionalism" - the idea that the United States has a messianic role to play in assuring that history moves forward against the enemies of progress, liberty and reason.
In important ways, the United States has not really secularized at all. What has happened instead, to borrow a phrase from historian John Bossy, is that in the modern era the holy has migrated from the church to the state. By this I do not mean that Christian evangelicals had an inordinate influence on the Bush Administration. I mean that faith in the United States and in "secular" Western values can take on the status of a religious conviction, for the propagation of which the United States has assembled the largest military in history.

William Cavanaugh - Torture then and now: How should the Catholic Church do penance for the Inquisition?

Tro i praktiken

The idea that “belief” is at the center of those institutions and cultural practices we typically identify as “religious” is highly problematic. It’s an ongoing struggle to disrupt this common (Protestant) assumption in the classroom.

ur Craig Martins senaste bloggpost på Religion Bulletin om religion förstådd som praktik.

John Gray om vetenskapstro

The belief that the political conflicts of the day can be resolved by applying evolutionary psychology is no more wellfounded than the claims of earlier versions of scientism that invoked phrenology or dialectical materialism. No doubt human knowledge has increased since the days when those pseudo-sciences were in the ascendant. Certainly we know a good deal more about human origins, and about the workings of the human brain, than we did then. But we are no better equipped to deal with moral and political conflict. Intellectually, we may be less well prepared than previous generations, if only because we know less of our own history.

John Gray recenserar The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion
av Jonathan Haidt i The New Republic.

Cunningham om nihilismens logik

For example, because thought and being are not the same, accidents happen, tragedy arises. But the danger is that if one simply renames life as tragic, tragedy disappears, for its now ‘metaphysical’ status – its reality – leaves it without the requisite space for tragedy to occur. To put it another way, to say that the world is full of suffering and so is meaningless, is to dilute the very suffering that initially motivated the negative judgement: there is suffering in life, therefore life is meaningless, therefore there is no suffering. Absurdity and nihilism operate in a similar fashion, for they are names that settle into the gap between being and thought, reforging a novel chain. This is the ‘Devil of the Gaps’, who is a bridge to the void, after which it lusts.

Conor Cunningham, A Genealogy of Nihilism: Philosophies of Nothing and the Difference of Theology (Routledge, 2002), 258.

Rasmusson om vetenskap som ersatz religion

Christian theology may thus contribute to the desacralisation of Science, critiquing the myth of Science for the sake of both society and of the sciences themselves. As Conor Cunningham remarks, “Scientism is a massive intellectual pathology” that is destructive for a society’s moral and political thinking and practice as well as for the immensely important work of ordinary science. It is not only a matter of Lakoff and Pinker failing to deliver what they promise; for theologians, the problematic nature of their work demonstrates the need for theological critique of the uses of science and for more fruitful, albeit humble, uses of scientific work in moral and political discourse.

Arne Rasmusson, nytillträdd professor i Tro- och livsåskådningsvetenskap vid Göteborgs Universitet (dessförinnan Umeå),  skriver i senaste numret av Modern Theology om bland andra Steven Pinkers vetenskapstro och vikten av en teologisk kritik av en naiv vetenskapssyn.

Caputo on the "theological turn"

"When Nietzsche says “God is dead,” he’s saying that there is no center, no single, overarching principle that explains things. There’s just a multiplicity of fictions or interpretations. Well, if there’s no single overarching principle, that means science is also one more interpretation, and it doesn’t have an exclusive right to absolute truth. But, if that’s true, then non-scientific ways of thinking about the world, including religious ways, resurface."

- Caputo and Vattimo, After the Death of God, p. 133.

Zizek om The Master-Signifier

"Suffice it to recall how a community functions: the Master-Signifier which guarantees the community's consistency is a signifier whose signified is an enigma for the members themselves - nobody really knows what it means, but each of them somehow presupposes that others know, that it has to mean 'the real thing', so they use it all the time.... This logic is at work not only in politico-ideological links (with different terms for the cosa nostra: our nation, revolution ...), but even in some Lacanian communities where the group recognizes itself through common use of some jargonized expressions whose meaning is not clear to anyone, be it 'symbolic castration' or 'divided subject' - everyone refers to them, and what binds the group together is ultimately their very shared ignorance." 

Slavoj Zizek. The Fragile Absolute. Verso, 2000. s. 114

Milbank om den västerländska teologins dragning åt öst

"By nature we are orientated to the beatific vision, to the receiving of grace even though we can´t demand something that has to be a gift, so you reach the paradox that we can only reach our natural end if we receive something beyond our nature as gift. We can only be ourselves if we receive something that doesn't belong to us. It seems to me that is the paradox that lies at the very heart of Christianity and goes along with the fact that first of all nature is a gift, it´s creation. It goes along with the fact the the only fully human being who ever lived was a divine person in two natures. It  goes along with a strongly seraline, and in no way Nestorian, Christology." - John Milbank

Stanley Fish upptäcker Anselm

... if evidence is never independent and is only evidence within the precincts of a particular theory, “adherents of rival theories,” Kelly explains, “will irremediably differ as to the appropriate description of the data itself,” and agreement between them cannot be brought about by simply pointing to the data. 

Indeed, the phrase “data itself” — data independent of any theory currently in place — will be without a sense. Nor can any sense be given to the claim that because scientific conclusions must “stand up to scrutiny” (Jan), they enjoy a superior status. Scrutiny, like evidence, is something that occurs within a theory and will have a theory-specific shape. Scrutiny is not a practice that escapes or corrects the boundaries of perspective; it is a feature of a perspective it cannot transcend. 

- Ur Stanley Fish krönika Evidence in Science and Religion, Part Two

Fides quaerens intellectum.

Kurt Wallander och Hegel

Upptäckte just att Zizek, i sitt kommande mastodontverk om Hegel, använder sig av Kurt Wallanders målande far för att illustrera skilnaden mellan Hegels och Deleuzes syn på "difference":

In Henning Mankel´s police procedural series, Inspector Kurt Wallander has a father whose means of survival is painting - he paints all the time, making hundreds of copies of the same painting, a forest landscape over which the sun never sets (therein resides the "message" of the painting: it is possible to hold the sun captive, to prevent it from setting, to freeze a magical moment, extracting its pure appearance from nature´s eternal circular movement of generation and degeneration). There is, however, a "minimal difference" in these otherwise identical paintings: in some, there is a small grouse in the landscape, while others are without the grouse, as if eternity itself, frozen time, has to be sustained by a minimal variation, a kind of stand-in for what really distinguishes each painting, it´s unique, purely virtual intensity.

Deleuze´s most radical anti-Hgelian argument concerns this pure difference: Hegel is unable to think pure difference which is outside the horizon of identity or contradiction; Hegel conceives a radicalized difference as contradiction which is then, through its dialectical resolution, again subsumed under identity. 

Slavoj Zizek - Less Than Nothing

Få saker skulle just nu roa (eller oroa) mig mer än en redogörelse för vad Zizek konsumerar i form av text och film under en genomsnittlig vecka.
...
Uppdatering: Tydligen är det inte första gången Zizek refererar till Henning Mankells skrivande. Om detta har @Ludviger bloggat här!

Zizek om hipsters

"It’s impossible to obtain objective distance from hipsterism; if you are concerned enough about the phenomenon to analyze it and discuss it, you are already somewhere on the continuum of hipsterism and are in the process of trying to rid yourself of its “taint”—as n+1‘s announcement of the event noted. We all had a stake in defining “hipster” as “not me.” I thought that would be the core of the discussion, the paradoxes of that apparent truth." 

It should by now be obvious that the utterance “hipster” finds its analogue in the sobbing flight of the debutante who arrives at the dance only to discover that another girl is wearing an identical dress. The debutante’s double calls into question her own sense of self. In order to avoid Girardian annihilation and rejoin her self she must flee from the sight of her double. But what would it mean if the debutante had planned the entire social disaster, including the existence of her own double and her ridiculous exit, in advance? The utterance “hipster” presents us with just such a scenario. 

The hipster, then, as the not me, the objet petit a, is a sort of double who “enters through the out door” and allows the hipster to maintain the image of his own individuality, but only as the dislocated site of imagined and imaginary resistance. The taint of hipster is the vehicle of this resistance that, through the magic of surplus value, contains within itself the voiceless ejecta of the Lumpenproletariat, as seen through the gaze of the bourgeoisie. Insofar as this gaze is capable of forgetting history, it transmutes antagonism into agonism. That is, liberation is presented, or rather presents itself, as both the head and the tail (but not the body!) of ouroboros, who must now be shackled, but not “to” itself or its own body. 

- Slavoj Zizek - L’etat d’hipster (översatt) via Generation Bubble

Kristus är uppstånden!

”Christ's resurrection has direct implications for contemporary politics. Today, western societies have witnessed the emergence of a new tribalism, fueled by the logic of capitalism with its proliferation of niche identities and by the politics of multiculturalism with its advocacy of mere "difference," while lacking the language to articulate any vision of a common good. Such multicultural pluralism is a mirror image of the postmodern ethics of difference, where each person is assumed to be absolutely "other."
[...]
"This amounts to a crisis in our social imagination: we find ourselves unable to imagine what it might really mean to live together. Margaret Thatcher's prophecy has come true: there is no such thing (anymore) as society."
--
Benjamin Myers - ”Rowan Williams and the Politics of the Empty Tomb”

The greater the gods, the freer the humans

"One could almost devise a law to apply to this situation, a law of human emancipation through divine affirmation. It could be summed up as follows: the greater the gods, the freer the humans are. The degree of human obligation towards the law given to them from outside is, contrary to appearances, inversely related to the degree of concentration of,  and separation from, the divine. And if we assume that such a law exists, the sudden appearance of transcendence supplies the unique occasion for its application. The entire signification of religious history may be condensed into this moment. There is a strong temptation to see this in this unifying removal of the divine a rise in the external determination of the human order, as compared with the immediate and abundant presence of the previous polytheistic Supernatural. Nothing could be further from the truth. Immanence presupposes severance from the foundation, while transcendence brings it nearer and makes it accessible."

Marcel Gauchet. The Disenchantment of the World. New French Thought, 1999. s. 51

Hokus pokus i nattvarden

Philip Goodchild on theology and money

Zizek on art and sex

"Take today’s deadlock of sexuality or art: is there anything more dull, opportunistic, and sterile than to succumb to the superego injunction of incessantly inventing new artistic transgressions and provocations (the performance artist masturbating on stage, or masochistically cutting himself; the sculptor displaying decaying animal corpses or human excrement), or to the parallel injunction to engage in more and more “daring” forms of sexuality?
[...]
And what if, in our postmodern world of ordained transgression, in which the marital commitment is perceived as ridiculously out of date, those who cling to it are the true subversives? What if, today, straight marriage is “the most dark and daring of all transgressions”?

Slavoj Zizek. The Puppet and the Dwarf. MIT Press, 2003. p. 35-36