Postsecular History: Political Theology and the Politics of Time

231 Pages·2021·2.195 MB·English

by  Maxwell Kennel

RADICAL THEOLOGIES AND PHILOSOPHIES
Postsecular History
Political Theology and the Politics of Time
Maxwell Kennel
Radical Theologies and Philosophies
Series Editors
Michael Grimshaw
Department of Sociology
University of Canterbury
Christchurch, New Zealand
Michael Zbaraschuk
Pacific Lutheran University
Tacoma, WA, USA
Joshua Ramey
Grinnell College
Grinnell, IA, USA
Radical Theologies and Philosophies is a call for transformational ideas
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that have entered or seek to enter the public sphere. This engagement
arises from the continued turn to religion and ideology, especially radical
thought in politics, social sciences, philosophy, theory, cultural, and literary
studies. The post-theistic thought both driving and emerging from these
intersections is the focus of this series.
More information about this series at
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Maxwell Kennel
Postsecular History
Political Theology and the Politics of Time
Maxwell Kennel
University of Toronto
Toronto, ON, Canada
ISSN 2634-663X ISSN 2634-6648 (electronic)
Radical Theologies and Philosophies
ISBN 978-3-030-85757-8 ISBN 978-3-030-85758-5 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-85758-5
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A
cknowledgements
While writing this book I benefitted from the support and insights of sev-
eral teachers, the most important of whom is Travis Kroeker. Several sec-
tions of this book were drafted in his seminars and influenced by his
approach to close reading and figural interpretation. Travis’s messianic
political theology—one that builds up the secular from below and is “nei-
ther Catholic nor Protestant, neither Mennonite nor secularist, neither
orthodox nor heterodox”1—continues to inspire me as I develop my own
interdisciplinary and pluralistic approach to the study of religion. Much of
my methodological orientation has been further influenced by the critical
and charitable approaches to texts and traditions that I was taught during
my time as a doctoral student in the Department of Religious Studies at
McMaster University, and I am grateful for the friends and colleagues who
made my time there so enjoyable.
Parts of Postsecular History have been revised and reworked from previ-
ously published material. Earlier versions of Chaps. 3, 5, and 6 appeared
in Studies in Religion/Sciences Religieuses 46 (2017), Telos 188 (2019),
and rhizomes 34 (2018), respectively. I am grateful to the editors of these
journals for granting me permission to reproduce updated and expanded
versions of these texts here.
1 P. Travis Kroeker, “Foreword” in A. James Reimer, Toward an Anabaptist Political
Theology: Law, Order, and Civil Society. Ed. Paul G. Doerksen (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2014),
ix–x. See also P. Travis Kroeker, Messianic Political Theology and Diaspora Ethics: Essays in
Exile (Eugene, OR: Cascade, 2017).
v
vi ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am also grateful to those who have responded to my work over the
past several years. Parts of Chap. 2 were first presented at the November
2019 meetings of the American Academy of Religion in San Diego on a
panel discussing the work of Adam Kotsko, and I am thankful for the com-
ments and questions of the organizers and respondents. For comments on
the manuscript, collegial support, and a kind endorsement, I am grateful
to David Newheiser. I also want to thank Daniel Colucciello Barber—
whose work on the postsecular is foundational for this project—for his
careful and critical questions about the manuscript. For encouraging me as
I developed the argument of the book, I want to thank Steven Shakespeare
and Ward Blanton. But most importantly, for their essential work in bring-
ing this book to publication in the Palgrave Macmillan Radical Theologies
and Philosophies series, I will be forever grateful to Mike Grimshaw and
Phil Getz.
This book was conceived of and written concurrently with my disserta-
tion on ontologies of violence in the works of Jacques Derrida, Mennonite
philosophical theologians, and Grace Jantzen. The critical approach to the
theopolitical periodization of time and history that I develop herein is
connected to my dissertation’s critique of theopolitical configurations of
origins, essences, and ends that justify the use of violent and coercive
means. In some ways, the two texts can be read together as a pair. While
“Ontologies of Violence” analyses how various uses of the term ‘violence’
reflect value-laden metanarratives, Postsecular History develops a critical
approach to the periodizing strategies that underpin such orderings.
However, one open thread at the conclusion of both works is that many
persuasive periodizations and figural fulfilments that connect past, present,
and future in postsecular ways remain open to the anachronistic distor-
tions and epistemological violences of conspiratorial thinking. I will
address these problems in a third book project called Critique of
Conspiracism. In the project I aim to show how violent epistemologies
and instrumental uses of history combine in conspiratorial thinking, while
also exploring the confluences of secularity and religiosity that motivate
and structure conspiracism. For the opportunity to pursue this project as
a SSHRC Postdoctoral Fellow in the Department for the Study of Religion
at the University of Toronto I am deeply grateful to Pamela Klassen,
whose timing and support have made an immeasurable difference in my
work and life.
In the spirit of the postsecular entanglement of secularity and religion,
I want to acknowledge my profound debt to several friends who are
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS vii
uncapturable by such distinctions. For supporting me throughout my
graduate studies I am grateful for Charlie Roth and the exceptional envi-
ronment of the Rainham Mennonite Church. I am also very thankful for
the home and work provided for me by the Steinmann Mennonite Church
at the conclusion of my degree. For showing me less dissociative and more
connective ways of living, I want to thank my friends Seija Grant, Liz Foo,
Carlyn Hopkins, Jorian van den Helm, Jenn Neufeld, Rachael Lake, Jess
del Rosso, Traci Dow, Jeremy Cohen, Anna Phipps-Burton, and Kyle and
Rob Jones. I am also deeply indebted to the professional work of SB.
For support from afar and so many memorable visits I am thankful for
the abiding friendships of Tyler and Chalsi Campbell (and Cy and K!). My
family has worked tirelessly to support me during my graduate education,
and for their love and care I will always be deeply grateful. Without the
years of formative conversations with my parents Shirley and Steve, and
my brother Reid, I would never have found my love for this work or
stayed with it.
Edmond Jabès writes that “Little by little the book will finish me,”2 and
for saving me from being finished off by this book, I am grateful for the
familial accompaniments of Luna and Atlas—animal companions who
teach me so much about what it means to be both human and posthuman.
Lastly—because promising and fulfilling movements between beginnings,
interims, and ends underpin the postsecular history that these chapters
develop—I want to thank Amy, most especially for our conversations and
the shared history and future we are always renarrating, rewriting, unwork-
ing, and processing together. uxori omnia mea.
2 Quoted in Jacques Derrida, “Edmond Jabès and the Question of the Book” in Writing
and Difference. Trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 65.
n c A
ote on the over rt
The choice of cover art—George Frederic Watts’s painting “The All-
Pervading” (1887–c.1893)—reflects the orientation of this book in ten-
sions between religiosity, Christianity, and secularity. The catalogue
description for its exhibition at the New Gallery in 1896 describes “The
All-Pervading” as a “Spirit of the universe represented as a winged figure,
seated, holding in her lap the ‘Globe of Systems.’”1 Watts associated the
figure of the All-Pervading with Michelangelo’s Sibyls who look onward
into the future, while at the same time its crystal ball reflects Watts’s inter-
ests in the science and spiritualism of his day. Barbara Bryant writes that
“Watts was far too much of a doubter to have fallen completely with any
one religion” and she highlights his consistent interest in “mystical and
other-worldly matters.”2 Watts himself, using symbolist language and con-
sidering the painting of ideas, writes of “the density of the veil that covers
the mystery of our being, at all times impenetrable, and to be
impenetrable, in spite of which conviction we ever passionately yearn to
pierce it.”3 Although these words challenge the rage for order that imposes
categories and divisions upon mysterious and complex realities—also
1 Quoted in The Age of Rossetti, Burne-Jones & Watts: Symbolism in Britain 1860–1910. Ed.
Andrew Wilton and Robert Upstone (Paris: Flammarion/Tate Gallery, 1997), 268.
2 Barbara Bryant, “G.F. Watts and the Symbolist Vision” in The Age of Rossetti, Burne-Jones
& Watts, 72.
3 George Frederic Watts “The Present Conditions of Art,” quoted in Bryant, “G.F. Watts
and the Symbolist Vision,” 73.
ix
x NOTE ON THE COVER ART
manifested in certain possessive acts of periodization that I will explore
below—Watts’s legacy and the tensions between his deconstructive and
imperialist inclinations are far more complex than I can account for here.4
Part of Watts’s ‘history of the cosmos,’ “The All-Pervading” further reso-
nates with the mysteries of creation and light in his painting “The Sower
of the Systems” (c. 1902), and is close to his work “The Recording Angel”
(c. 1890) which features a scroll laid out over the globe that rests in the
hands of a golden incarnation of the All-Pervading.
4 See David Stewart, “Deconstruction or Reconstruction? The Victorian Paintings of
George Frederic Watts” SECAC Review 12.3 (December 1993): 181–186.