Religion, Critique, and Modernity in Jalal Al-e Ahmad and Walter Benjamin Ajay Singh Chaudhary ...

390 Pages·2013·2.81 MB·English

Religions of Doubt: Religion, Critique, and Modernity in Jalal Al-e Ahmad and Walter Benjamin

Ajay Singh Chaudhary

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the
requirements for the degree of
Doctor of Philosophy
in the Graduate School of the Arts and Sciences

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
2013
© 2013
Ajay Singh Chaudhary
All Rights Reserved
ABSTRACT
Religions of Doubt: Religion, Critique, and Modernity in Jalal Al-e Ahmad and Walter Benjamin
Ajay Singh Chaudhary
Religions of Doubt: Religion, Critique, and Modernity in Jalal Al-e Ahmad and Walter Benjamin
is a work of comparative philosophy addressing selected works of the Iranian novelist and
political thinker Jalal Al-e Ahmad and the German-Jewish critic and philosopher Walter
Benjamin. I demonstrate that the perceived failure of utopian modern projects, particularly
Marxism, led each of these twentieth century thinkers to re-engage with religious questions and
concerns in a simultaneous critique of the corrosive, reductive, and catastrophic nature of the
modern condition and the idea of traditional religion – static, irrational, regressive – that
modernist thought had conjured. Furthermore, both Al-e Ahmad and Benjamin were compelled
to move beyond the worlds of traditional philosophical inquiry or political action, into questions
and practices of art, literature, science, technology, and ritual. I argue that reading these thinkers
together allows a glimpse at ideas and modes in philosophical thought that were largely derailed
by varying discourses of secularism, poststructuralism, naturalism, and fundamentalism. This
reading suggests new synthetic possibilities for philosophy in the twenty-first century.
Note on Transliteration: This dissertation primarily addresses bodies of literature originally
written in Persian and German but it also draws on words and phrases in Hebrew, Arabic,
French, Aramaic, Greek, and Latin. To address this vast array of languages, I have employed a
transliteration method designed to be easily understandable to an English reader. I have
transliterated words and phrases from Persian, Hebrew, Arabic, and Greek into a basic phonetic
English approximation, free of diacritical marks. For words and phrases in German, French, and
Latin, I have preserved accents and diacritical marks that are commonly employed in English
writing. I have occasionally included words and phrases in their original Perso-Arabic, Hebrew,
or Greek scripts where they might prove additionally beneficial to readers of those scripts but
always alongside a clear English translation and explanation.
Table of Contents:
Prologue: An Excursus on Ending before Beginning………………………………………………………….….1

Introduction…………………………………………………………………………………………………………13
Chapter Outline……………………………………………………………………………………………… 17

Chapter 1: Theory, Methods, and, Justification…………………………………………………………………..29
Comparative Philosophy and History………………………………………………………………………...36
Illustrative Excursus: Colonization and Self-Colonization………………………………………………….. 38
Historical and Textual Comparison towards Philosophical Comparison……………………………………. 44
Outside Modernity? …………………………………………………………………………………………. 50
Expanding the "Incomplete Project" of Modernity………………………………………………………….. 54
Expansion I: 'Provincializing Europe' and Beyond………………………………………………………….. 56
Expansion II: the Shifting Uneven Geometry of Modernity……………………………………………….…64
Religion and Religious: The Critique of Secularism and Religion as Polemic……………………………… 70

Chapter 2: How to Read Gharbzadegi? …………………………………………………………………………... 90
The Jünger/Heidegger Approach…………………………………………………………………………….. 92
Nativism……………………………………………………………………………………………………… 97
Mirsepassi's Al-e Ahmad and Jünger………………………………………………………………………..115
Excursus: An Alternative Theory of Nativism………………………………………………………………127
Gharbzadegi: A Question of Self-Knowledge and Consciousness …………………………………………132
Gharzadegi's Ends …………………………………………………………………………………………..144

Chapter 3: Pereat Mundus? Anaesthetics and Epistemology ………………………………………………......152
Enlightenment and Roshanfekri ………………………………………...…………………………………...156
Anaesthetics and Benjamin ……………………………………………………………………...…………..159
Materialism, Religious Practice, and Judaism……………………………………………………...………. 173
Die Versteckte Zwerg……………………………………………………………………………...………..177
A Strange Case of the Productivity of Misunderstanding: Benjamin and the Kabbalah……………..……..195
Adjudicating Yiddishkayt………………………………………………………………………………….... 204
A Strange Case of the Production of Misreading: The Critique of Violence School……………………..... 213
Taubes and the Letter…………………………………………………………………………………..…... 215
Derrida: the Eclipse of Reason…………………………………………………………………………...… 231
Agamben and Beyond: the Reproduction of Mania………………………………………………………... 245

Chapter 4: Religions of Doubt…………………………………………………………………………………… 250
Waiting for the Mahdi…………………………………………………………………………………….... 250
“Khassi dar Miqat”……………………………………………………………………………………….... 267
Vacillation ………………………………………………………………………………………………......270
A Ritual of Doubt ……………………………………………………………………………...……………278
Aggadah and Time ……………………………………………………………………………………...…...302
The Problematic Status of Halachah ……………………………………………………………………......306
Materialism, Time, and Action in Benjamin’s Messianism ……………………………………………...…312
Secularizations …………………………………………………………………………………………...….320
Comparative Philosophy and the Uneven, Shifting Geometry of Modernity ……………………………....325
Familienähnlichkeit ……………………………………………………………………………………...…329

Conclusion: A Generalized Presentation of the Philosophical Conception of a “Religion of Doubt”……….. 331
Hermeneutic Capture and Some Interventions Identified ………………………………………………......338

Epilogue: Is this Religion? ………………………………………………………………………………………...340
The Intentional Stance and the Astrological Stance……………………………………………………...… 348
Naturalism and “Religions of Doubt” ……………………………………………………………………....359
Bibliography ……………………………………………………………………………………………………….362
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Acknowledgements
I would like to identify the assistance, support, inspiration, and encouragement of many people
without whom this dissertation would never have been possible. Firstly, I must thank my advisor
Hamid Dabashi who not only allowed but encouraged me to pursue such an idiosyncratic
dissertation that brushes more than one field against the grain. This dissertation is built not only
upon some of the groundbreaking work he did in Iranian intellectual history, Shiism, and
aesthetics, but also upon his continual support for the project as a whole. I would also like to
acknowledge the support of my dissertation committee. Sudipta Kaviraj gave me indispensable
feedback that allowed me to see the key function of intellectual history within my broader
philosophic framework and without which this project could never have taken full form. Wayne
Proudfoot graciously chaired my committee and provided me with challenging and thought-
provoking analysis in terms of debates in contemporary philosophy and questions of religious
experience and practice. Andreas Huyssen’s thorough and detailed reading helped me understand
my own work within the contours of modernity, the important role of literature within it, and
kept my German grammar at least remotely passable. Timothy Mitchell offered valuable and
crucial critiques about the role of economic realities and reactions that will continually inform
my thinking about this project moving forward. In addition to my committee members, I would
like to acknowledge Marc Nichanian, whose brilliant, tiny, and, seemingly forbidding seminars
on philology, history, humanism, and anti-humanism were a critical component of my education
and whose support for my work has continued unabated over the years. I would also like to thank
Gil Anidjar, whose incisive criticisms inform so many areas of this dissertation and whose
teaching methods have been invaluable to me as an example of the radically different ways a
classroom can work.
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There is also a series of professors at Cornell and the London School of Economics who
have shaped the line of thinking which has culminated in this project. In particular, I would like
to highlight Susan Buck-Morss, whose classes on visual culture, the Frankfurt School, and
Islamism planted many of the original seeds of this project in my mind. Also at Cornell, Diane
Rubenstein introduced me (then a young political science student) to the world of ideology
critique, and philosophy more broadly, and I never looked back. Jane Marie-Law was not only an
invaluable teacher of methods in the study of religion, but a constant source of support when I
was an undergraduate. Shawkat Toorawa and Deborah Starr helped me produce my first
remotely defensible academic writing. And Nigel Dodd not only guided a cohort of young social
science students at the LSE through a year of close reading of the giants of social theory, but also
provided the rather fruitful suggestion that perhaps the Arcades Project is best understood
through a glass of wine.
I would also like to acknowledge the support of Columbia’s Middle East Institute, the
Institute for Comparative Literature and Society, and the MESAAS department. That includes
not only my colleagues Kamal Soleimani, Soraya Batmanghelichi, Susanne Schneider-Reich,
Elizabeth Marcus, Yuval Kremnitzer, and Elizabeth Johnston, who helped me with everything
from thorny issues of translation to general encouragement about the dissertation, but also the
administrators, Jessica Rechtschaffer, Mirlyne Pauljajoute, and Catherine LaSota, who helped
me navigate murky bureaucratic waters and who arranged the actual logistics and meetings from
my orals through workshops to my defense itself. I was also supported through two years of this
project by the Columbia Core Curriculum. This support came not only in financial form but also
through the opportunity to read and reread texts that are pivotal for me and for the thinkers I
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work on with my extraordinary students and fellow preceptors, everyone involved challenging
and being challenged by each other every step of the way.
Outside of the academy, I have had the support of a wide network of friends. I would like
to thank in particular my friend and on-and-off housemate of the past 15 years, Graziella Matty,
who has been not only a fantastic friend and trusted confidant but has also served as an unwitting
sounding board for some of my stranger ideas and as one of my most productive critics. Robin
Varghese simultaneously embodies the noblest traditions of philosophical conversation and of
nurturing comfort and support for a friend in need. Other friends who have been with me every
step of the way are Greg Yagoda, Dean Kolnick, Cali Gorewitz, Dave Riley, Marlon Williams,
Phil Zigoris, Vanessa Fogel, Ajay Patel, Florence Villimenot, John and Zerna Karian, Ahmad
and Abdullah Saeed, John Cyr, Forrest Paquin, John Adler, Sally Jenkins-Stevens, and Christa
Sanchez. Soup dumplings all around. Gabriel “Bird” Bird was my constant companion before I
finished my undergraduate thesis and nearly made it to the end of my dissertation. Surely, birds
have a portion in the world to come.
Since 2011, I have had the great fortune to work with my colleagues and students at the
Brooklyn Institute for Social Research. Both individually and collectively, they have helped me
think, talk, and teach my way through many sections of this dissertation. Christine Smallwood
reminded me of the extraordinary difficulties and equally extraordinary rewards of truly
interdisciplinary conversation. Michael Brent has helped me – both in this dissertation and
beyond – better understand the intersections of ‘analytic’ philosophy with many of my broader
interests. In turn, I feel I may inflicted upon him a chronic case of critical theory. Hopefully it
will not prove terminal. Maeve Adams was a constant reader, constant conversant, and near-
constant dinner companion throughout the composition of this dissertation, whose insight,
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encouragement, and, last but certainly not least, editing helped me to actually finish the project.
Finally, Abby Kluchin read, revised, and thought every word of this dissertation with me. Her
model as a scholar, writer, and teacher has been a constant guide for me. Her work, so different
and yet so often complementary to my own, has taught me the true range of responsible
philosophical speculation. It has also challenged and transformed so many of my most basic
assumptions. She is my first and last reader, best interlocutor, and intellectual partner. I look
forward to our next project, the next, and the next.

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Dedicated to Millie Poris (םולשה הילע)

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