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One has only to recognize that something has happened, that dialogues are not possible, given that there's no way to conjure up the dead.
Jacob Taubes
Preface
Western Cultures appear to be caught in a paradoxical split between unbridled secularism and an unparalleled outpouring of books, articles, Op-Ed pieces, blogs, and talk shows dealing with religious issues. Were the phenomenon confined to the public in general, it would occasion little surprise, since there is ample testimony-in America, at least-that religion is no longer "the opiate of the masses," as Marx claimed, but something more akin to "a political action lobby." Nothing new there, perhaps. What is news is the prominence attained by "religion" in critical studies during the last decade when it has even become a frequent topic of course offerings in humanities departments.
But as recently as 1994, it was still a novelty for mainstream theory. We sense this clearly in Jacques Derrida's bemused irony at finding himself addressing the question of "religion" in his opening remarks for a conference on the subject held that year on Capri:
Why is this phenomenon called "the return of religions," so difficult to think? Why is it so surprising? Why does it particularly astonish those who believed naively that an alternative opposed Religion, on the one side, and on the other, Reason, Enlightenment, Science, Criticism . . . as though the one could not but put an end to the other?1
Derrida goes on in this essay to ask repeatedly how one should speak of religion: "Religion in the singular? Perhaps, may-be (this should always be possible)." "Religion? Here and now, this very day, if one were still supposed to speak of it, of religion . . . " "Religion in the singular?" "To think religion?" As always with Derrida, repetition has the rhetorical effect of making one inflect the repeated phrases differently, and then to see them differently.
While I was contemplating Derrida's challenge to think about religion in different ways, I chanced to open my copy of Carl Schmitt's Political Theology II at the chapter where he is discussing monotheism as a political problem. This in turn led me back to Derrida's question, "Religion in the singular? Perhaps, may-be (this should always be possible)." That...