Crediting God: Sovereignty and Religion in the Age of Global Capitalism PDF
Preview Crediting God: Sovereignty and Religion in the Age of Global Capitalism
Crediting God .................17920$ $$FM 10-26-1010:30:09 PS PAGEi .................17920$ $$FM 10-26-1010:30:09 PS PAGEii Crediting God Sovereignty and Religion in the Age of Global Capitalism Edited by Miguel Vatter fordham university press NewYork 2011 .................17920$ $$FM 10-26-1010:30:10 PS PAGEiii Copyright(cid:2)2011FordhamUniversityPress Allrightsreserved.Nopartofthispublicationmaybe reproduced,storedinaretrievalsystem,ortransmittedin anyformorbyanymeans—electronic,mechanical, photocopy,recording,oranyother—exceptforbrief quotationsinprintedreviews,withoutthepriorpermission ofthepublisher. FordhamUniversityPresshasnoresponsibilityforthe persistenceoraccuracyofURLsforexternalorthird-party Internetwebsitesreferredtointhispublicationanddoesnot guaranteethatanycontentonsuchwebsitesis,orwill remain,accurateorappropriate. FordhamUniversityPressalsopublishesitsbooksina varietyofelectronicformats.Somecontentthatappearsin printmaynotbeavailableinelectronicbooks. LibraryofCongressCataloging-in-PublicationData CreditingGod:sovereigntyandreligionintheageofglobal capitalism/editedbyMiguelVatter.—1sted. p. cm. BasedonaconferenceheldinMay2005 atNorthwesternUniversity. Includesbibliographicalreferences(p. ). ISBN978-0-8232-3319-9(cloth:alk.paper) ISBN978-0-8232-3320-5(pbk.:alk.paper) ISBN978-0-8232-3321-2(ebook) 1.Religionandpolitics—Congresses. 2.Globalization—Religiousaspects—Congresses. 3.Capitalism—Religiousaspects—Congresses. I.Vatter,MiguelE. BL65.P7C73 2011 201(cid:2).7—dc22 2010039505 PrintedintheUnitedStatesofAmerica 13 12 11 5 4 3 2 1 Firstedition .................17920$ $$FM 10-26-1010:30:10 PS PAGEiv contents Acknowledgments vii Introduction:CreditingGodwithSovereignty miguelvatter 1 PartOne religionandpolity-building 1. ReligiousFreedom:PreservingtheSaltoftheEarth freddallmayr 29 2. ANewFormofReligiousConsciousness?Religion andPoliticsinContemporaryMuslimContexts abdoufilali-ansary 43 3. ARepublicWhoseSovereignIstheCreator: ThePoliticsoftheBanofRepresentation shmueltrigano 67 4. Confucianism’sPoliticalImplications fortheContemporaryWorld ranjooseoduherr 83 5. ReligionandthePublicSphereinSenegal: TheEvolutionofaProjectofModernity souleymanebachirdiagne 102 PartTwo theendofthesaeculumandglobalcapitalism 6. ShouldWeBeScared?TheReturnoftheSacred andtheRiseofReligiousNationalisminSouthAsia georgesdreyfus 117 7. AllNightmaresBack:DependencyandIndependency Theories,Religion,Capitalism,andGlobalSociety haukebrunkhorst 142 8. TheEvangelical-CapitalistResonanceMachine williame.connolly 160 v .................17920$ CNTS 10-26-1010:30:12 PS PAGEv vi Contents PartThree questioningsovereignty:lawandjustice 9. ‘‘TheWarHasNotEnded’’:ThomasHobbes,CarlSchmitt, andtheParadoxesofCountersovereignty friedrichbalke 179 10. NaturalRightandStateofExceptioninLeoStrauss miguelvatter 190 11. LawandtheGiftofJustice reginamaraschwartz 207 12. Drawing—theSingleTrait:TowardaPoliticsofSingularity samuelweber 221 PartFour thereligionofdemocracy:tocqueville beyondcivilreligion 13. TheReligiousSituationintheUnitedStates 175YearsAfterTocqueville jose´ casanova 253 14. TheAvatarsofReligioninTocqueville lucienjaume 273 15. Publics,Prosperity,andPolitics:TheChangingFace ofAfricanAmericanChristianityandBlackPoliticalLife eddieglaude 285 16. Conversion thomasl.dumm 305 Notes 317 ListofContributors 373 .................17920$ CNTS 10-26-1010:30:13 PS PAGEvi acknowledgments Theideaforthisvolumecameoutoftheinternationalconference‘‘The- ology, Faith, and Politics’’ held in May 2005 at the Alice Berline Kaplan Center for the Humanities at Northwestern University, which was orga- nizedbyRobertGooding-Williams,atthetimethecenter’sdirector,and myself. I am grateful to Robert Gooding-Williams for his help, friendly advice, and unflagging support of this editorial project in the years since. I would also like to thank all the contributors to this volume, some of whomwerepresentattheoriginalconferenceandotherswhogenerously offered their texts for this project at a later stage. Last, I am greatly indebtedtoHelenTartar,whoencouragedmetopursuethisprojectfrom theverybeginning,andwhomIamveryluckytocountasmyeditor. Chapter 8 is from William E. Connolly, ‘‘The Evangelical-Capitalist Resonance Machine,’’ Political Theory 33, no. 6 (December 2005): 869– 886.ReprintedbypermissionofSAGEPublications. vii .................17920$ $ACK 10-26-1010:30:14 PS PAGEvii .................17920$ $ACK 10-26-1010:30:15 PS PAGEviii introduction Crediting God with Sovereignty Miguel Vatter Theriseofreligiousfundamentalismintheclosingdecadesofthetwenti- eth century continues to have enormous repercussions not only for poli- tics, but also for the disciplines of the human sciences, philosophy, and theology. The sociology of religion, perhaps the paradigmatic achieve- ment of the discipline of sociology, has been dealing with the effects of thecrisisofitstheoriesofsecularization.Theso-calleddeprivatizationof religion has forced on the table the old-age question of the relation between God and society, or faith and the constitution of community, with the added complication that the community at stake nowadays is a globalone.1Politicaleconomy,whetheronetakesaMarxistorSimmelian approach,is structurallydependent ontheideaofcredit,which inturnis also ultimately rooted in an understanding of trust and faith, which are difficulttodisentanglefromtheology.2Philosophy,foritspart,iscoming to terms with an intuition already prefigured by Hermann Cohen, and nowvoicedbysuchdiversethinkersasJacquesDerrida,Ju¨rgenHabermas, andHilaryPutnam, among others,thatnophilosophical (‘‘scientific’’) foundationofethicscanhopetocapturethefullgrammarofjustice(which thus seems to call upon resources that are to be found only in religious experience).3Furthermore,thedeconstructionofmetaphysicsinitiatedby HeideggerandWittgenstein,andtheshadowithassincecastonthestatus 1 .................17920$ INTR 10-26-1010:30:17 PS PAGE1 2 MiguelVatter of scientific knowledge, has brought to the fore the continued resilience of webs of belief, pre-predicative linguistic structures and practices, that mustbetakenoncreditbyourpropositionsiftheyaretomakesense,with the result that many no longer see any point in accepting the Cartesian exchange of truthfor certainty, and with the discontentwith the modern projectofepistemology,thepathisonceagainbeingopenedforareturn to classical and medieval ontology, to Platonism and Aristotelianism in theirmanifoldversions,andwiththattoavisionoftheworldthatismore compatiblewithrevealedtruths.4 Given thiscontext,where oldmodernist certaintieshavebeenrecalled into doubt, it appears that no master narrative and no one disciplinary perspectivearenowcapableofdoingjusticetothecomplexitiesofthenew relationbetweenreligionandpoliticsinthecontextofglobalcapitalism.5 Whyhasreligion,moresothanpoliticsorlaw,beenabletocapitalizeon theprocessesofglobalization?Thequestionitselfinvitestoapproachthe search for answers through a comparative perspective and a pluralistic methodology, which in any case has been the norm in the study of reli- giousphenomenasinceatleastMirceaEliade’spath-breakingworksafter WorldWarII.Tounderstandthe‘‘return’’ofreligioninthepublicsphere onecanhardlyignoretherealityofwhathasrecentlybeencalled‘‘alterna- tivemodernities,’’6and itscorollary:thepluralityofEnlightenmentproj- ects.Last,butnotleast,thephenomenonthathasrecentlybeentermeda ‘‘clash of fundamentalisms’’7 has opened up history in a way that the fall of the Berlin Wall had seemed to preclude. Derrida’s well-known refuta- tionofFrancisFukuyama’s‘‘EndofHistory’’thesisbywayofrevivingthe category of the messianic contains a fundamental paradox for our times, namely: history has reopened in and through the various religious ways of rethinking the ‘‘end’’ of the saeculum and the renewal of the temporal categoriesofeschatologyandapocalypse.8 All of the essays in this collection demonstrate their affinity to one or moreoftheabovemethodologicalcommitments:theyevidencecompara- tivistandpluralistapproachestothephenomenaofthetheologico-politi- cal,andtheyindicateaconsciousnessofthepeculiarparadoxthatthenew historicalopen-endednessisachievedinandthroughanexperienceofthe ‘‘end’’ ofsecular temporality. The collection owesits genesis toan inter- national conference held at the Center for Humanities of Northwestern University in May 2005 entitled ‘‘Theology, Faith, and Politics,’’ orga- nizedbyRobertGooding-Williamsandmyself.Manyofthepapersgiven at the conference are presented here in revised versions, and some new papers have been solicited in order to provide coherence to the volume’s .................17920$ INTR 10-26-1010:30:18 PS PAGE2
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