At the heart of the present uncertainty gripping the world in the wake of what seems to be a still unabated global economic crisis and the unraveling of the political, socio-cultural infrastructures and consensus that supported the dominant world order in the past few decades is a growing recognition of the terrifying presence of an overwhelming force that eludes and refuses to be reined by what we modern men have long held on to as a marker of our capacity to shape our lives and destiny: reason. What is striking, however, about our contemporary condition is how appeals to the restoration of reason and the retrieval of human agency to shape individual and collective ways of living together are invoked with either an implicit or explicit spirit of despair. On the one hand, the triumphalism and messianism of the market reveals not quite a hopeful trust in the originality of the human person to reorganize what existing possibilities for creative self-actualization provide but a submission to the logic and rationalities that enable such possibilities. The resounding call to reason which has been the battle cry of the Enlightenment is by now no more than a reverberating call to identify with the privileged reason of modernity – that of the market.

On the other hand, the blatant condemnation of contemporary reason found in the skepticism of those who lament the potentials of human creativity – its ideological domination and thus lack of originality – under the technological apparatuses of late capitalist modernity has prevented many agents of critical transformation from developing a consensual and universal paradigm around which collective forms of identification may be organized.

This rejection of a universal account of reason and collective identification betrays what many critics of modernity aim for – the retrieval of the particularity and historical uniqueness of human creativity and agency – since in the repudiation of the desirability of a stabilizing foundation for collective self-realization, attempts to build shared political goals may tend to be received and perceived as impositions of uncompromising positions rather than as self-disclosing moments. Once understood this way, it becomes too easy to subject the aims of specific communities competing in the political struggle to the enforcing apparatuses of a rarefied consensus and universalism that is no longer publicly and communally accessible.

For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one

of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably.

-- WALTER BENJAMIN

Moving beyond the fascination that technology exerts, we must reappropriate the

true meaning of freedom, which is not an intoxication with total autonomy, but a

response to the call of being, beginning with our own personal being.

– POPE BENEDICT XVI, “Caritas in veritate”

This course investigates the status, deployments, rationalities and prospects of REASON in the

context of our contemporary CAPITALIST MODERNITY. It does so by revisiting the

categorical opposition within the political vocabulary and imaginary of modernity between

REASON AND RELIGION through a genealogical study of the historico-material and

theoretical terrains that have lent currency to such a discursive oppositionality while paying attention to the concrete strategies of its deployment as well as consequences to the possibility of truly

REVOLUTIONARY and HUMANIST political practices and modes of criticism.

Throughout the semester, the course will show how the diverse pursuits, reflections and theoretical engagements of modern and contemporary political theorists are underpinned by a struggle to define the boundary of the religious and the non-religious with the aim of securing and guarding the freedom promised by the modern conceptualization of reason. The course proceeds from the overarching claim that the framing of these conceptual struggles/oppositions cannot be separated from the critical appraisal of and resistance to the demands of the historically dominant mode of economic organization and production and as such any attempt to reconfigure the frames and terms of these conceptual categorizations by way of discursive representation and theoretical innovation must also pay attention to the possibility of reproducing the very system of economic life and accumulation that allows such a system of representation to attain a meaningful and powerful status in the consciousness of observers and critical interrogators. The central objective of the course then is to strive in the most effective way to resist and displace the possibilities for reproducing these representational and discursive tendencies. The route for reflection offered by the course is directed towards the study of contemporary political subjectivity and the cultivation of possible counter-subjectivities as well as the endorsement of forms of counter- consciousness drawn from the concrete experiences of those at the margins of the authorized rationality of capitalist modernity - laborers, religious mystics, theologians, women, homosexuals and postcolonial subjects – and are the constant targets and instruments, but as such, also possible sources of resisting, the disciplinary apparatuses and forms of violence underlying the present order.

At the heart of the course is a sustained and systematic effort as well as invitation to approach religion – that is, to consciously nurture and performatively cultivate a disciplinary form of subjectivity capable of making such an approach – and then to be possessed by religion – that, is to think about the present, about oneself and one’s relations as a subject of and constituted by religion.

It entails asking first – who is making this approach? How has the one approaching religion been constituted as a subject and how has this subject come to know one’s subjectivity as such via one’s position in relation to religion? The course will argue that the constitution of contemporary political subjectivity along the

discourses of consumerism and (post)coloniality has adversely influenced the ability of

the modern subject to approach religion – that is, to consider the rationality and reasonableness of a religious approach to living in the world and with others. Central to these discourses is the reproduction of the ideology of secularism and its attendant constitution of religion as a moralizing rationality thus legitimizing religion’s occlusion from the world of public life while at the same time politicizing it to serve purposes other than theologically and ecclesiologically authorized ones. The course aims to dismantle these apparatuses by inviting students to cultivate, assemble and nurture a communal, public and militant sense of the religious that is truly the work of peoples –

liturgeia.

Thus, the critical motif of approaching religion via one’s engagement with the world and with others is viewed in this course as a liturgical celebration – a simultaneous affirmation of commonality and difference, a productive agonism that resists solipsism and atomism, a communion with the world that is truly revolutionary. Here, to be possessed by religion does not entail the abandonment of the self but in fact demands a heightened and deliberate awareness of the self’s encounters that allows the self to come into being rather than to declare its finality, that is a rejection of an apocalyptic conception of the self and the world and its place through acts and gestures of receptivity to the eschatological moment of reason, the triumph of an enlightened form of thinking that is able to appreciate the public, stabilizing and grounded positionality of each other rather than the invisible, arbitrary and irrationality of hierarchies brought about by a false sense of rationality – a longing, a desire to long.

The sinner's glimpse of heaven, as he comes to acknowledge his most grievous

fault, is an element in the Church's liturgy, in the Mass as in penance. But it is

also an element of contemplation which (as we shall see) encounters the word

of God, a word which both pronounces sentence and justifies. So a person who

contemplates on a regular basis is already to a large extent prepared for

confession. He is accustomed to looking in the mirror and seeing himself as God

sees him.– HANS URS VON BALTHASAR

Review Essay (10%) Each student will be assigned to review four (4) journal articles relevant to a particular author to

be covered during the semester. The authors and the journal articles will be chosen by the

instructor at the very beginning of the academic term. The review essay – no less than 3,500 but

no more than 5,000 words following the conventions set by the instructor – is due on the first

day of classes after the Christmas break (for authors discussed during said period) or on the

final class session preceding the conference paper presentation writing break.

Midterm Oral Exam (20%) Each student will defend a thesis statement during a 30-minute midterm oral examination to be

conducted during the third week of January. Students should come to the exam prepared to

speak for 20 minutes and to answer relevant questions from the instructor for 10 minutes.

Failure to deliver a 20-minute defense of the statement will automatically merit a failing mark.

Course Paper (25%) An 8,000-word final paper will be required at the end of the semester. The course paper will

explore the thematic concern of the academic term from a grounded critical theory perspective.

A student conference entitled, “Moving from the Critique of Religion towards Religion as

Critique” will be held two weeks before the semester’s scheduled final examinations during

which students will be presenting their work to a public audience.

Comprehensive Final Written Exam (30%) Students will be asked to answer a comprehensive final examination at the end of the semester.

Class Recitation (10%) Students will be given a chance to respond to two sets of recitation questions in the course of

the semester.

Why is the Enlightenment’s concept of reason and appeal to the use of reason self-

defeating and incapable of animating, building and sustaining communal existence?

How did the Enlightenment distort the meaning of reason and how has it shaped our

contemporary political vocabulary?

How did truth become publicly inaccessible in the way the Enlightenment understood

it? To what extent can invocations and appeal to truth still make sense, and in fact,

necessary in order to acknowledge and endorse the reality of human differences?

Why is the use of religious reason not grounded on moral imperatives but guided by

tradition?

Why is violence the result of a form of reason that is no longer bound with tradition?

Immanuel Kant. “What is Enlightenment?” Alasdair Macintyre. “The Predecessor Culture and the Enlightenment Project of Justifying Morality” and “Why the Enlightenment Project of Justifying Morality Had to Fail” in After Virtue Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno. “The Concept of Enlightenment” and “Enlightenment as Mass Deception” in The Dialectic of Enlightenment Pope Benedict XVI. Caritas in veritate.

NOVEMBER 8, 10, 15 and 17

Why did the logic of property and the language of the economy become the prevailing

constructs of Enlightenment rationality? Why can these constructs not fulfill the tasks

of reason and as such only serve to betray reason?

Why are the human capacities to desire and to reason not incompatible? What ways of

understanding each would render them in opposition or contradiction? How did the

historical-material conditions of the industrial capitalist age pervert the human

capacity to desire?

John Locke. Second Treatise on Civil Government

Hannah Arendt. “The Social Question” in On

Revolution

Alexander Kojeve. “In Place of an Introduction” in

Introduction to the Reading of Hegel

Pope Paul VI. Populorum Progressio

NOVEMBER 22 - 29 & DECEMBER 1

Why did capitalism emerge, how does it operate and how did it change the way

religion was understood?

Why is capitalism inherently exploitative? How does it conceal its exploitative

tendencies? Why and how can religion not become complicit in the concealment,

reproduction and legitimation of the exploitative nature of capitalism? How is

capitalism involved in preventing critics of the consequences of capitalist

accumulation from realizing the capacity of religion to pose a serious challenge to

the capitalist system?

Why is a class approach to the study of society compatible with a religious form of

subjectivity?

Ellen Meiksins-Wood. “The Agrarian Origins of Capitalism” in Capitalism: A Longer View Karl Marx. “The Jewish Question”; “Theses on Feuerbach”; “Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts” and “Commodities” in The Marx-Engels Reader ed. Robert Tucker Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. “The Manifesto of the Communist Party” Ernst Bloch. “Hunger, “Something in a Dream,” “God of Hope,” Thing-For-Us” in The Frankfurt School on Religion ed. Edward Mendieta Pope John Paul II. Laborem exercens

DECEMBER 6, 8, 13 and 16

Why are the modern institutions and

apparatuses of the liberal state

subservient to the interests of the

ruling capitalist class?

Why is the “freedom” of civil society

under the liberal-democratic

consensus of the modern state

complicit to the reproduction of

capitalism? What are the mechanisms

that reproduce capitalist logic, control

and rationality under the authority and

dynamics of state-society

engagement?

How should revolutionaries

understand and engage the

institutions and apparatuses of the

modern state?

Vladimir Lenin. “What is to be Done?” Antonio Gramsci. “State and Civil Society” in Selections from the Prison Notebooks George Lukacs. “Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat” in History and Class Consciousness Rosa Luxemburg. “Reform or Revolution” in The Essential Rosa Luxemburg

Why would the delegitimization and suppression of the

authority of religion over its subjects lead to the rise of

totalitarianism?

Why is religion’s insistence on the uniqueness of the human

person a powerful antidote against totalitarian terror and

ideology?

How does religion

provide a guard

against escaping

the pluralistic and

deeply conflictual

realm of worldly

existence?

Why do appeals to

and invocations of

the law today share

in the logic of

totalitarianism?

Hannah Arendt. “Totalitarianism” in Origins of

Totalitarianism Herbert Marcuse. “New Forms of Control” and “The Closing of the Political Universe” in The One Dimensional Man

Why is a formal account of state power inadequate in understanding the manner

through which the interests of capitalism are reproduced and legitimized?

Why should revolutionaries pay attention to the production of knowledge and why is

the production as well as deployment of knowledge linked with the historico-material

constitution of the dominant social order?

Why and how can the disciplinary regimes and technologies of religion be

conceptualized and utilized in the critique of capitalist modernity?

Why and how can the body become a political strategy for resisting the normalizing

gaze of capitalist modernity?

Michel Foucault. Discipline and Punish _____________. “Method” in History of Sexuality Vol. 1 _____________. “Governmentality” and “The Subject and Power” in Power: Essential Writings and Interviews

Talal Asad. “What might an Anthropology of Secularism Look Like?” and “Secularism, Nation-State, Religion” in Formations of the Secular

Hent de Vries. “On General and Divine Economy: Talal Asad’s Genealogy of the Secular and Emmanuel Levinas’ Critique of Capitalism, Colonialism, and Money” in Powers of the Secular Modern

Saba Mahmood. Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Chapter 5 and Epilogue) Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, and Judith Butler. Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech (whole book)

Jacques Derrida. “Force of Law: The Mystical Foundations of Authority” John Milbank, Slavoj Zizek and Creston Davis. Paul’s New Moment (whole book) Simon Weil. Waiting for God (whole book) Hans Urs Von Balthassar. Prayer (selections) Pope Benedict XVI. Deus caritas est