At a March 2010 conference, “Gendering the Divide: Conflicts at the Border of Religion and the Secular” (sponsored by Arizona State University’s Center for the Study of Religion and Conflict), I had the great fortune to speak on a panel with groundbreaking cultural historian and gender theorist Joan Wallach Scott, the Harold F. Linder Professor in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, NJ. The conference was the fourth and final meeting of ASU’s Ford Foundation-funded project on “Public Religion, the Secular, and Democracy.” In 2010-2011, Scott will lead the year-long seminar “Secularism” at the Institute for Advanced Study’s School of Social Science. Scott is the author of numerous influential essays and books, including, most recently, the timely and highly praised The Politics of the Veil. At the conclusion of the ASU conference, Scott and I met for the following wide-ranging conversation . . .
Posts Tagged ‘France’
Secularism . . . a really interesting problematic: A conversation with Joan Wallach Scott
posted by David Kyuman KimFrance wrestles with upcoming vote to ban burqa
posted by Aaron WeinsteinThe popular push to ban the burqa in France lacks clear legality, reports The Associated Press.
Not just a bill to support women’s rights or secular values
posted by Amanda KaplanOn July 13, French parliament will vote on a bill to ban burqa-style veils in the name of gender equality and secular values. More than advocating for women’s rights and a “state-sanctioned Islam that respects the secular state,” this particular version of the bill also implicates “husbands and fathers who impose such veils on female family members.”
Impure thoughts
posted by Sarah Shortall
What fascinates me about [the] language of purity and contamination is the extent to which it is mobilized in the service of both religious and secularist narratives. This is particularly true in the case of France’s republican culture of laïcité, as the recent controversy over the Islamic headscarf—repeatedly figured as a scandalous threat to the purity of the secular public sphere—amply attests. . . . What is interesting is that both the religious and the laïque appeal to a discourse on purity and contamination and rely upon a similar narrative structure, invoking the rhetoric of purity to describe both an originary moment that has since been lost, and an eschatological ideal to be fulfilled at some point in the future.
The poverty of atheism
posted by Gil Anidjar
Famously posing a peculiar problem of translation, names are a necessary feature of our academic craft. We like to call things, but we may also need to, obviously, in order to give figure to that which we think and study. Remarkably true to that necessity, Stefanos Geroulanos tells us in the first pages of his impressive book that the “conceptual reorganization” he will describe and analyze became “an almost official face of French thought.” It was only later (with structuralism and everything, everyone, associated with and past it) that it “acquired the name ‘antihumanism’.” Geroulanos further proposes to expand the reach of the name “antihumanism” by meticulously documenting lesser known antecedents, earlier phases of what the term might otherwise designate, seeking thereby to bring together a fuller, and detailed, account of numerous and diverse actors, elements and factors, and trends too, which in fact jointly define the greater part of the last century.
Sex, scandal, and the secular
posted by Sarah ShortallWhen it comes to the Catholic Church these days, news headlines offer few opportunities for levity. I’m referring, of course, to the thorny problem of sex abuse in the Church. As a student of Catholicism, I’m evidently disturbed by the Church’s handling of the scandal, but I’m also deeply troubled by the tendency among those outside the Church to treat this as a specifically “Catholic problem,” as if it were the logical conclusion of clerical celibacy or some element of Catholic dogma.
Secularism, atheism, antihumanism
posted by Stefanos GeroulanosIn a 1956 text on ethics and literature, Emmanuel Levinas offered the following diagnosis of the philosophical trends of his time: “Contemporary thought holds the surprise for us of an atheism that is not humanist. The gods are dead or withdrawn from the world; concrete, even rational man does not contain the universe.” This atheism that is not humanist, the sense that certain strands of contemporary philosophy had abandoned secularism’s central ethical and political investment in humanism, poses the motivating question behind the book I am presenting for discussion here, An Atheism that Is Not Humanist Emerges in French Thought. In twentieth-century French thought, particularly in the period from the end of World War I through the late 1950s, a new form of atheism, and with it, a new conception of man, emerged and crystallized. What historians and critics of French thought, literature, and intellectual culture have, since the 1960s, called “antihumanism,” I argue, can be best understood in terms of this development, which is at once theological, epistemological, and political.
The scope and uses of secularity
posted by John R. Bowen
Early in Charles Taylor’s study, he remarks that the secular condition, in which belief is an option and religion a distinct domain, is not the case everywhere: in Muslim societies generally, and for people in religious moments in the West: pilgrims at Czestochowa or Guadalupe, for example. We could add: and for people growing up in believing Baptist communities in Nebraska or Mennonite ones in Manitoba or Hindu ones in Gujarat or Bali. [...]
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