#postsecular

Between the no-longer and the not-yet

The lack and negativity that are built into the world keep it open to a religious dimension that, although seemingly marginalized in the advanced stages of secular culture, turns out actually to be constitutive for the whole postmodern outlook. Postmodernity, by discovering the undecidable, the infinite or open-ended planted everywhere in its midst, in effect turns into a turn back to religion. This is not a religion of stable dogmas but one of belief in what can never be defined. Such belief is all that ties society together and loosely brings any- thing back round to itself, and this religio performs then in the role that was formerly filled by the unifying, cementing paradigms of religion. This religion offers nothing positive; it is a negative theology. It is critique of all pretended accounts and their closures that opens culture to what it cannot comprehend, in effect to an unknowable God.