On the General Secular Contradiction

This essay turns to Marx’s “On the Jewish Question” in order to diagnose the collusive interplay between mediation and sovereignty as modes of transcendence that, together, prevent real immanence from irrupting. It does so by recovering the logic of “the general secular contradiction”—the division between the state and civil society that materializes and secularizes the structure of diremption originally articulated in theological form, as the opposition between heaven and earth. In this analysis, the logic of Christianity is shown to be imbricated with the political form of secular modernity itself. Moreover, this account reveals that the modern secular state does not inaugurate the political theology of immanence, but constitutes, rather, a mechanism of transcendent mediation. The exception that mediates across the two realms renders transcendence livable, but also reproduces the dirempted life, establishing it as the unsurpassable horizon and foreclosing all operations of dissolution that could collapse the structure of civil society and the state that governs “the order of the world.” Although immediate transcendence (sovereignty) may be positioned, as it is in the Schmittian paradigm, as radically distinct from its mediational counterpart, in relation to real immanence the two operate as a collusive ensemble.

‘Too late for antique vows’

This chapter reads John Keats in the context of the influence of Leigh Hunt and the wider radical Enlightenment. One problem posed by a secular modernity is whether prayer—and forms of religious practice more generally—can be maintained as part of an increasingly abstracted philosophical religion that exits the form of Christianity. Circles of elegy, nostalgia, and scepticism pose this problem of a ‘post-Christian’ prayer. In ‘Ode to Psyche’, Keats tries to imagine a prayer detached from Christianity’s mournful theology; in the Catholic and Gothic tones of ‘The Eve of St. Agnes’, he is repeatedly drawn by the seductive lure of superstition and the rich concrete forms of devotion. The chapter concludes by reading ‘The Fall of Hyperion’ as stylizing a scene of prayer to Moneta, a goddess embodying the uncertain transitions between religious epochs, thus dramatizing his most pressing spiritual dilemma.

Introduction: Secularization and the Resurrection of the Flesh

The introduction traces the intellectual history of resurrection from the Hellenistic era through the Reformation and up to the advent of the scientific revolution in the seventeenth century. To make the idea of resurrection more compatible with an emerging secular modernity it is gradually modified in the direction of dualism by positing a detachable soul that lives on after death. But the ancient hope for the resurrection of the body and its flesh lives on as an oppositional discourse that challenges key institutions of an emerging secular modernity including the models of selfhood, subjectivity, and agency it assumes and privileges. The critical potential of the residual idea of the resurrection of the body and its flesh is most evident in the most experimental poetry of the century, which I argue anticipates the avant-garde poetry of the early twentieth century theorized by Renato Poggioli and Peter Bürger. The formally experimental poetry of Donne, Herbert, Vaughan, and Jonson is a tool for bringing to light a deranging experience of being vibrant matter at the heart of the socialized self.

Beyond secularism and religion: Jean-Luc Nancy on global monotheism

Known for its recent treatment of theological themes, contemporary European philosophy has been at the forefront of critical inquiry into the interface between religion and secular discourse. One of the most original philosophers within this movement is Jean-Luc Nancy, whose deconstruction of Christianity project frames an intertwining of religion and secular modernity beyond the binary opposition between theism and atheism. In this article, I tease out the hitherto under-acknowledged references to Judaism and Islam within Nancy’s project in order to lay out more clearly his philosophical vision of the contemporary landscape of secular modernity and the place of the three main monotheistic faiths within it. In doing so, I elucidate the original contribution Nancy’s philosophy can make to a rethinking of the debate between secularism and religion more broadly.

The Politics of Community Drama in Interwar England

There was a wave of reform-oriented drama across England in the 1920s and 1930s, which extended from urban, socialist theatre to the ‘late modernist’ enthusiasm for rural pageantry and from adult education to Church revival. Most scholarship looks at drama in these various milieus separately, but this study of three plays that were put on in a corner of South West England—a nativity play, an innovative ‘dance-mime’, and a Workers’ Educational Association narrative piece—brings them together. These plays shared a connection to Dartington Hall, a social and cultural experiment set on a large estate in Devon in 1925 by an American heiress, Dorothy Elmhirst, and her Yorkshire-born husband, Leonard, which became a nexus for the various strands of community-seeking theatre evident in interwar England—as well as for social reform more generally. This article shows how dramatic performances formed part of the quest for communal unity that was a dominant strand in social thinking between the wars: driven by fears about class strife, the effects of democratization, the recurrence of war, and the fragmenting effects of secular modernity, elites, artists, and activists of diverse hues tried to reform the very idea of Englishness by putting on plays—fostering values of community and communality, while often taking inspiration from an idealized vision of the rural community of England’s pre-industrial past.

Whittaker Chambers and the Confessions of Ex-Communists

Chapter 5 places Whittaker Chambers’s 1952 Witness within the American panic over communism during the second Red Scare. In the late 1940s, Chambers took the stand before the House Un-American Activities Committee to confess that he and Alger Hiss, among others, had conspired against the United States from a Soviet underground cell. Though Hiss’s prison sentence was a legal victory, the autobiography claimed authority back from the trials and the state’s capacity to make meaning of Chambers’s life. Chambers argued for a return to the authority of God and fathers outmoded in a secular modernity exemplified by communism and New Deal liberalism. Although the trial of Hiss had publicized these accusations, Chambers turned to autobiography to achieve where he thought he had failed: to convert Americans to a Christian anticommunism and to compel present and former communists to confess, though he would ultimately fail to convert Hiss himself.

Agents of Secularisation—Ibsen and the Narrative of Secular Modernity

In sociology, modernisation is often identified with secularisation. How can secularisation in the texts of modernism around 1900 be analysed? Literary history books tell us that the modernist authors were lucid analysts of their time who portrayed the process of secularisation going on around them in their dramas, novels or short stories. The article tries out a different approach: By conceptualizing secularisation as a cultural narrative, the perspective on the literary material changes fundamentally. The modernist authors were involved in shaping the idea of secularisation in the first place, in propagating it and in working on its implementation. They did not react to the process of secularisation with their texts. Instead, they were involved in the creation and shaping of the interpretative category ‘secularisation’. The article exemplifies this change in approach using a pivotal text of Nordic literary modernism, Ibsen’s Rosmersholm.