Look, a human being! Anthropomorphic solipsism in postsecular thought

Abstract

Adding a woman’s voice to an edited volume, or a person of color on an academic panel, or an ecumenical, universalist message of welcome under a church flag—these may be well intentioned gestures of inclusion, but, even as an unintended result, minority discourses either stand on the margins, as the ‘other,’ or they morph and disappear into the dominant discourse. What is needed instead is a change of ‘being.’ Whatever we call the philosophy of religion, it owes its conception to the European Enlightenment, and the latter, its understanding of the modern subject to Christian imperialism and the colonial enterprise. How can it ever become an inclusive field? This paper reflects on the promise of inclusion of postsecular theological discourses within the Continental philosophy of religion. Can such discourses, coming on the heels of the death of God and the postmodern death of universals, overcome their patriarchal, colonial, and racist cultural archive? Such a possibility glimpses a future worth pursuing. To answer the question, this paper plays on the intersectionality of the human being as such—an imagined abstract condition of possibility of our existence—and human facticity, the embodied lived experience that is historically conditioned, culturally determined, gendered and racialized as we know it today—identities expressing or underwriting white privilege, the economic exploitation of the global south, or hegemonic Western institutions of knowledge and power. The paper analyzes key aspects of well-known postsecular theological discourses (Caputo, Vattimo, Taylor, Levinas) through the intersectional lens of feminist, race, postcolonial, and decolonial critiques (Schutte, Du Bois, Carter, Dussel, Mignolo). Error is human, but today’s sexism, racism, or economic oppression suggest it isn’t human errors we ought to correct so much as our erroneous understanding of what we call a human being. A materialist conception of being (Malabou) and a theology whose God is in and of language open the way to engage the complicity of the philosophy of religion with the dominant and hegemonic ideologies that underwrite, besides the field, today’s world order.