Philosophy and Religion

This essay is part of a larger project that aims to trace the return of the old in "new" critical theory. It attempts to demonstrate how, after the failure of the second generation of the Frankfurt School to situate the ongoing antagonisms of neo-liberal social relations, several of the concepts of the first generation weigh on the comportment of "new" critical theory. More specifically, by examining the figures of the gambler and the prostitute in relationship to Walter Benjamin and T.W. Adorno's conception of the dialectical image, we observe just how much the critique of commodity fetishism, the use of rhetoric in historicophilosophical presentation, as well as the analysis of political economy and class-relations, continue to assert themselves as pressing needs for social theory. In beginning to perform this "new" critical theory that heeds the dialectical tension between the past and present, an image of the unfulfilled desires at work in both the idea of communism and neoliberalism ultimately comes to the fore. Instead of undialectically discarding these figures as morally bankrupt or expressions of mere illusion and falsehood, we are called to capture the truth of their appearance, i.e., the ambivalent desire that promises submission to domination at the same time that it highlights an indispensable moment in the real possibility of emancipation.

This essay attempts to grasp the contemporary relevance of Walter Benjamin's claim that the technically most advanced artwork is necessarily the politically most advanced artwork. More specifically, it attempts to link Walter Benjamin's " The Author as Producer " to the theory and practice of John Cage and Pierre Schaeffer, two of the most important experimental composers of the Twentieth Century. After highlighting an affinity between Cage and Schaeffer's attempt to disburden music of subjective intentions and Edmund Husserl's attempt to get " back to the matter at hand, " we discover that Benjamin's position, in fact, pushes Cage and Schaeffer beyond their political limitations. By supplementing their innovations with Benjamin's politics of production, instead of continuing to search for the truth of music in a " pure, " a priori realm, we not only engage in a critique of the relativist ethics or depoliticized stance of post-modernity, we also begin to see a pathway leading towards new modes of collectivized (musical) improvisation. The challenge to the rigidity of musical specialization ultimately points to how the " audience " could become the producer of music in the shared space that I call the " public studio. "

Critical Theory demands that its forms of critique express resistance to the socially necessary illusions of a given historical period. Yet theorists have seldom discussed just how much it is the case that, for Walter Benjamin and Theodor W. Adorno, the concepts and language it employs, as well as the aesthetic comportment it would champion for the sake of generating a critical distance from these illusions, require an understanding of the mimetic faculty. The point of departure for this work is thus an attempt to delineate both the essential and the historical features of this faculty, in the hope of understanding the conditions under which the force of critique can truly find language today. With this is in view, I illustrate the manner in which these features of mimesis, namely its semblance (Schein) and play (Spiel) character, are initially at work in our experiential relation to nature, but are ultimately subject to a violent taboo that wrenches us from nature and thereby wages a desperate battle against the attempt to give voice or call a halt to the unnecessary suffering of an antagonistic historical circumstance. This shows that there is a dialectic of enlightenment built into the comportment of mimesis itself, that latent within it is the simultaneous potential for progress and regression. More specifically, it shows that mimesis is, as it were, banished from an immediate absorption with nature, and, therefore, needs to migrate into the neutralized and sorrowful (traurig) sphere of art-the sole refuge within which the outermost consequences of mimetic development are granted full expression. Parallel to the Kantian category of philosophical-ideas,‖ I, accordingly, argue that the recognition of this immanent struggle to end myth is synonymous with a mimesis awakened to a regulative striving after the idea of peace or reconciliation, i.e., a striving that, if realized, would at last assuage the hostility between rationality and mimesis, concept and intuition. Mimesis is thus, on the one hand, capable of sensing the material trace or hearing the musical echo stored up in the unreconciled state of language. But if, on the other hand, it becomes dislodged from the sensitivity that-reads‖ with and against the tempo of its material circumstance, it could just as well disavow precisely the possibility of this peace and thus regress to a catastrophic form of instrumental rationality. By virtue of immersing itself in the most minute details of the present historical constellation, exposing the falsehoods involved in, for instance, the harmony of traditional beauty, or the triumphalism and sovereignty of the traditional sublime, I argue that mimesis not only marks an indispensable moment in the dynamic movement of critique, it also brings to the fore the pressing need for a materialist conception of aesthetics.

Following the work of Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, this essay argues that there is an implicit conception of mimesis operative in Heidegger's conception of Dasein's being-in-the-world. More speciϔically, it argues that an examination of Heidegger's theory of repetition (Wiederholung) and play (Spiel) in relation to Dasein's uncanniness (Unheimlichkeit) illustrates Dasein's tendency to turn away from mimesis and, instead, opt for the comfort of "mimetology," the comfort of submitting to a levelled down identiϔication with the ready-to-hand and the they-self. Ultimately this analysis, which itself performs a mimetic re-reading of Being and Time, brings to the fore a counter-force within Heidegger's thought that arguably resists what Lacoue-Labarthe calls Heidegger's inadvertent reproduction of the metaphysics of presence and the worrisome political implications that attend it. Moreover, this re-reading suggests that, precisely when the implicit role of mimesis is emphasized, the temporal possibilities built into Dasein's way of Being might also be understood in a new light.

In this paper, I seek to show the fruitfulness of connecting the study of ritual activities to the ritualists's metaphysics, which is to say, to their understanding of the necessary conditions of life. I suggest that some rituals may be seen as inscribing bodies with messages that are, properly speaking, metaphysical in this sense, and that some rituals may be seen as embodied inquiries into the metaphysical nature of things. By so doing, I hope to provide conceptual tools for those who see rituals as having a cosmic dimension, and thereby to improve the generally weak relationship between the study of rituals and philosophy.

Though others have surveyed the different methods in comparative religious ethics, relatively little attention has been given to different approaches to pedagogy (exceptions include Lovin and Reynolds; Juergensmeyer; Twiss). The field of comparative religious ethics has now reached a level of maturity so that there are a variety of ways such courses can be taught. In this review I consider the approaches to comparative religious ethics found in four recent texts by . In the essay I note the strengths and weaknesses of each text, with special attention given to how the texts might work in the classroom. I then argue that the different texts reflect different understandings of the goal of teaching comparative religious ethics, and I make these goals explicit in order to help teachers decide how they might approach the teaching in this growing field.

Several theorists argue that the concept of "religion" is not a cultural universal but rather emerged under particular historical and political conditions in the modern post-Reformation west. "Religion," they say, is a social construction. What are the implications of this view of the ontology of religion? My aim in this paper is to critically engage the arguments of Timothy Fitzgerald-a social constructionist about religion who combines, in my judgment, insight and confusion on the issue-in order to trace out the values and the limits of this approach.

Some scholars of religion have turned their attention from religion to "religion" and have then deconstructed the conceptual category, arguing that the concept of religion is an invention of the scholar that corresponds to nothing. In Schilbrack (2012), I used the work of Tim Fitzgerald to identify what such arguments get right and what they get wrong. In the present reply to Fitzgerald, I make a case for critical realism as a methodological stance for the study of religion that can learn from deconstructive approaches without abandoning the concept.

Richard Rorty's antifoundationalist or 'neo'-pragmatism has significant implications for the practice and the study of religion. By developing James's dictum that truth is 'the name of whatever that proves itself to be good in the way of belief' into a repudiation of the correspondence ...

This trilogy represents a high-water mark for comparative philosophy of religion. The basic premise of the project is simple: it brings tradition specialists in Judaism, Christianity, Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and Chinese Religions together with generalists interested in ...