From: "Eric" <ericandmary-AT-earthlink.net>
Subject: RE: Postmodern Religion
Date: Sat, 4 Jan 2003 10:41:43 -0600


Steve,

And, of course, before Being there is religion and ethics; as Levinas
and others have said.

What I want to suggest is this difference we are having over religion is
not a unique topic, but one that spill over as well into previous
differences over such topics as cyborgs, postmodernism, libertarian
socialism, and anarchy. Certainly, there is a pattern of difference
emerging here which is not merely disagreement. It is something
isomorphic, perhaps.

I certainly agree with you about the limitations of identity politics
and the whole multicultural liberal consensus based upon tolerance that
ends up affirming the status quo and the inherent violence and
oppression of everyday business as usual.  

I recognize you are advocating a certain militancy in your politics and
I can admire that, but my concern is that this very stance is
reductionist and what it leaves out may also be political.  I certainly
don't agree with everything Lyotard has to say either, but in my reading
of him, his politic philosophy is not in any way subsumed by identity
politics, but rather is based upon a critique of the very viewpoint you
seem to advocate.

In section 192 of the Differend, Lyotard writes: "Everything is
political if politics is the possibility of the differend on the
occasion of the slightest linkage. Politics is not everything, though,
if by that one believes it to be the genre that contains all the genres.
It is not a genre."

What is interesting about this section is that it opens with a brief
discussion of Cezanne, Schonberg, and Joyce in relation to what they
each attempted to accomplish in their art. (to failure better, as
Beckett would put it) 

I am arguing here for a more open, complex understanding of religion
that would allow us to view it, not merely as mythical or
fundamentalist, but more concerned with what I have been calling a
technology of self and to acknowledge that it thereby raises questions
of goodness and happiness in the same way, perhaps, that Cézanne raised
questions about painting and vision.  

This is not to legitimize such activities, to make them neutral or
autonomous, or immune to political criticism. It is rather to recognize
that religion originates from conditions of society that are implicated
in the lack of closure and the limits of language.  There is always an
outside.

Just as we must be political, so we also must in a certain sense be
religious, if we define religion in a more open way and do not limit it
to theism or the supernatural. Even an atheist has ultimate concerns
about his or her life. 

This is the intended irony of my final paragraph in the last posting. I
was raising the question whether by your very animosity and your own
totalization of the political, you were actually advocating a form of
religion yourself? The religion of the political as the highest good?

If you don't think this is true, then you need to develop a definition
of religion in a way that sufficiently limits it to exclude such things
as atheistic Buddhism, philosophical Epicureanism, pagan Wicca,
Messianic politics and the like.  

How do you intend to do this?

eric