Lessons in Secular Criticism Paperback / softback

by Stathis Gourgouris

Part of the Thinking Out Loud series

Paperback / softback

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Description

Secular criticism is a term invented by Edward Said to denote not a theory but a practice that counters the tendency of much modern thinking to reach for a transcendentalist comfort zone, the very space philosophy wrested away from religion in the name of modernity.

Using this notion as a compass, this book reconfigures recent secularism debates on an entirely different basis, by showing (1) how the secular imagination is closely linked to societyâ€™s radical poiesis, its capacity to imagine and create unprecedented forms of worldly existence; and (2) how the space of the secular animates the desire for a radical democratic politics that overturns inherited modes of subjugation, whether religious or secularist. Gourgourisâ€™s point is to disrupt the co-dependent relation between the religious and the secularâ€”hence, his rejection of fashionable languages of postsecularismâ€”in order to engage in a double critique of heteronomous politics of all kinds.

For him, secular criticism is a form of political being: critical, antifoundational, disobedient, anarchic, yet not negative for negationâ€™s sake but creative of new forms of collective reflection, interrogation, and action that alter not only the current terrain of dominant politics but also the very self-conceptualization of what it means to be human. Written in a free and combative style and given both to close readings of texts and to gazing off into the broad horizon, these essays cover a range of issuesâ€”historical and philosophical, archaic and contemporary, literary and politicalâ€”that ultimately converge in the significance of contemporary radical politics: the assembly movements we have seen in various parts of the world in recent years.

The secular imagination demands a radical pedagogy and unlearning a great many established thought patterns.

Its most important dimension is not battling religion per se but dismantling theological politics of sovereignty in favor of radical conditions for social autonomy.