#post-secular

Integrating Technology and Religion in a Post-Secular World

Contrary to Foucault, whom we have called a post-Nietzschean, Meillassoux is by all means an anti-Nietzschean. For whereas Nietzsche, at the close of the nineteenth century claimed that the Age of Reason (introduced to us by Kant among others) has caused us to murder God, Meillassoux claims exactly the opposite. He states that Kantian thinking, in which the absolute has been closed off from thought for good, expelled from the metaphysical, has caused the remarkable return of religious fundamentalism today as it allowed for the absolute to be removed from knowing and thus to be revived in the form of believing.

...it would take an entire lifetime to recall the "real" history of another's life, and a thousand lifetimes to tell the complete story of a village. Memory is premised upon forgetting, and history no less, is premised upon illuminating omission- upon abstraction, distillations, metonymy, and other tools for navigating thorough the dense foliage of lived details.

In the heart of Manhattan, in the Metropolitan Museum of Art, hangs one of El Greco's remarkable creations, The Vision of St. John. Completed around 1614, it is one of his paintings that looks like it could have been painted in Paris in the early twentieth century. Its feel is not only modern but also somehow imperceptibly contemporary. Evoking the opening of the Fifth Seal in Revelation 6:9-11, the martyrs who bore faithful witness are given white robes while John (it seems) looks heavenward toward the epiphany of the Lamb. The colours of the painting are themselves a startling revelation of another reality. But the painting as we view it today is a fragment. The canvas that hangs in the Met doesn't tell the whole story. In the course of a "restoration" around 1880, the unfinished canvas was trimmed by at least 175 cm. In the name of "improvement," the scene is truncated by almost half. And so, in what seems a fitting parable of modernity, the exultant arms of John the Revelator reach upward to—nothing: to the top of the frame, to the edge of the canvas. The martyrs seem to receive gifts from nowhere, and John seems to praise the nonexistent. All of them seem to look for something no longer there. What if our modernist, secularist projects of "improvement" have unwisely severed us from what makes for a flourishing society? While some might rail against myths of what lies beyond the frame, many others might be asking: What's up there? Our calling in a secular age might be less a matter of securing our status and more a matter of bearing witness to what's missing, especially to those who are feeling the claustrophobia of that frame. We might be surprised at the response.

In suggesting that many modernist texts are shot through with and even shaped by spiritual concerns, I mean several things: that they make room in the worlds they project for magic, miracle, metaphysical systems of retribution and restoration; that they explore fundamental issues of conduct in ways that honor, interrogate, and revise religious categories and prescriptions; that their political analyses and prescriptions are intermittently but powerfully framed in terms of magical or religious conceptions of power. But I means as well, that their assaults on realism, their ontological playfulness, and their experiments in the sublime represent a complex and variously inflected reaffirmation of premodern ontologies-contructions of reality that portray the quotidian world as but one dimension of a multidimensional cosmos, or as a hosting world of spirits. I am arguing, then, that some of the very features of fiction which secular theorists have singled out as definitively postmodern must at least in some cases be understood in terms of a post-secular project of resacralization. But at the same time, I will argue, this process of resacralization can only be understood, in its historical specificity, with the help of secular theorists who have ignored it.