The Disclosure of Politics: Struggles Over the Semantics of Secularization

By Maria Pia Lara

María Pía Lara explores the ambiguity of secularization and the theoretical potential of a structural break between politics and religion. For Lara, secularization means the translation of religious semantics into politics; a transformation of religious notions into political ideas; and the reoccupation of a space left void by changing political actors, one that gives rise to new conceptions of political interaction. Conceptual innovation redefines politics as a horizontal relationship between governments and the governed, better enabling societies (and political actors) to articulate meaning through action.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Release date: Sep 17, 2013
• ISBN: 9780231535045

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The Disclosure of Politics

NEW DIRECTIONS IN CRITICAL THEORY

NEW DIRECTIONS IN CRITICAL THEORY

Amy Allen, General Editor

New Directions in Critical Theory presents outstanding classic and contemporary texts in the tradition of critical social theory, broadly construed. The series aims to renew and advance the program of critical social theory, with a particular focus on theorizing contemporary struggles around gender, race, sexuality, class, and globalization and their complex interconnections.

Narrating Evil: A Postmetaphysical Theory of Reflective Judgment, María Pía Lara

The Politics of Our Selves: Power, Autonomy, and Gender in Contemporary Critical Theory, Amy Allen

Democracy and the Political Unconscious, Noëlle McAfee

The Force of the Example: Explorations in the Paradigm of Judgment, Alessandro Ferrara

Horrorism: Naming Contemporary Violence, Adriana Cavarero

Scales of Justice: Reimagining Political Space in a Globalizing World, Nancy Fraser

Pathologies of Reason: On the Legacy of Critical Theory, Axel Honneth

States Without Nations: Citizenship for Mortals, Jacqueline Stevens

The Racial Discourses of Life Philosophy: Négritude, Vitalism, and Modernity, Donna V. Jones

Democracy in What State? Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, Daniel Bensaïd, Wendy Brown, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jacques Rancière, Kristin Ross, Slavoj Žižek

Politics of Culture and the Spirit of Critique: Dialogues, edited by Gabriel Rockhill and Alfredo Gomez-Muller

The Right to Justification: Elements of Constructivist Theory of Justice, Rainer Forst

The Scandal of Reason: A Critical Theory of Political Judgment, Albena Azmanova

The Wrath of Capital: Neoliberalism and Climate Change Politics, Adrian Parr

Social Acceleration: The Transformation of Time in Modernity, Hartmut Rosa

The Disclosure of Politics

Struggles Over the Semantics of Secularization

María Pía Lara

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS NEW YORK

Columbia University Press

Publishers Since 1893

New York Chichester, West Sussex

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Copyright © 2013 Columbia University Press

All rights reserved

E-ISBN 978-0-231-53504-5

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Lara, Maria Pia.

The disclosure of politics: struggles over the semantics of secularization / Maria Pia Lara.

pages cm.—(New directions in critical theory)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-231-16280-7 (cloth: alk. paper) —ISBN 978-0-231-53504-5 (e-book)

1. Religion and politics. 2. Secularization. 3. Political science—Philosophy.

I. Title.

BL65.P7L34 2013

322’.1—dc23

2012050236

Cover design: Milenda Nan Ok Lee

Cover photo: photo by Grant Faint © Getty Images

A Columbia University Press E-book.

CUP would be pleased to hear about your reading experience with this e-book at [e-mail].

References to websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor Columbia University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared.

TO NORA RABOTNIKOF

for sharing with me The Secret of Her Eyes

All concepts in which an entire process is semiotically concentrated elude definition; only that which has no history is definable.

—Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals

(trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale)

For Benjamin, the past is not there to be discovered, nor is it here to be invented.… It requires instead a willingness to intervene destructively as well as constructively, to shatter received wisdom as well as reconfigure the debris in new and arresting ways

—Martin Jay, Force Fields

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction

1.  The Semantics of Conceptual Change: The Emergence of the Concept of Emancipation

2.  The Model of Translation: From Religion to Politics

3.  Hans Blumenberg’s Reoccupational Model: Conceptual Transformation

4.  Blumenberg’s Second Model: The Persistence of Mythical Narratives

5.  Hannah Arendt’s Model of the Autonomy of Politics: Semantic Innovation Through Religious Disclosure

6.  Reinhart Koselleck’s Model of Secularization: The Enlightenment as Problematic

7.  Jürgen Habermas’s Innovation Model: Bringing Justice Into the Domain of Politics

8.  The Disclosure of Politics Revisited

Notes

Bibliography

Index

Acknowledgments

This book is the result of several courses that I taught first in New York: a postgraduate course called, like the book, The Disclosure of Politics, then two more in Mexico on the same issues at my university (Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana-Iztapalapa). I wish to thank those students from the New School whose works and commentaries enriched my course and allowed me to gain some clarity in my project of writing this book. Their names are Shelby Canterbury, Nahed Habiballah, Diana S. Mattison (her help and commentaries were very good and useful), Dean R. O’Hara, Timoth J. Palmer, Grant T. Shafe; to those who were not registered but whose contribution was equally important for me: Celina Bragagnolo, Mark Kelly, and Will (whose last name I do not know).

I also received good feedback from my students in the two courses I taught at my university. I wish to thank Francisco Yedra, Diego Arroyo, Ernesto Cabrera, Arizbet Lira, Octavio Martinez, Erik Soria, Luis Flores, Iyazu Cosío, Andrea Escobar and Liliana Arcos. I also need to thank, most especially, for carefully reading several versions of the manuscript: Martin Saar and Chiara Bottici, whose good insights, sharp criticisms, and helpful suggestions were invaluable in the completion of the final manuscript.

By the same token, I received wonderful commentaries and suggestions at the Prague Conference of Philosophy and Social Sciences where I presented several chapters in the last few years. My special thanks to Maeve Cooke, who gave me very good suggestions and proposed revisions of the first chapter. I also wish to thank, most especially, Bill Scheuerman, Claus Offe, Gary Minda, and Amy Allen. Again, special thanks to Alessandro Ferrara who invited me to give a lecture on the first chapter of this book at his seminar in his university in Rome, where I benefited from many good questions and commentaries as well as sharp critical insights. My gratitude to Massimo Rossatti and the other participants in that seminar.

I am also very grateful to Eduardo Mendieta and Craig Calhoun for inviting me to participate on a seminar on Habermas’s work about religion and the public sphere. All those who participated in it gave me good critical insights. I am especially indebted to Jürgen Habermas, Seyla Benhabib, and, again, Maeve Cooke and Cristina Lafont.

I owe a greal deal to Richard J. Bernstein; he offered the invitation to work for the philosophy department during 2009/2010. The work at his university turned out to be fundamental for my project. Dick Bernstein has always been generous to me and his insights about my work were always helpful and stimulating. His friendship has given me so many things that this recognition should extend to the most personal of levels. In the same way, I need to thank Carol Bernstein for her friendship and her intellectual and emotional support over many, many years.

During a trip I made to Spain to participate in a conference on Hannah Arendt and Agnes Heller, I was able to give another lecture on the chapter on Hannah Arendt. For this opportunity, I must thank Angel Prior, Fina Birulés, and Cristina Sánchez. Their stimulatingquestions and comments gave me a chance to think more deeply through many of the issues in this book.

I also enjoyed very good conversations on the subject of my book with many colleagues and close friends: Nancy Fraser, Eli Zaretsky, Amy Allen (again), Nora Rabotnikof, Remo Bodei, Vanna-Gessa Kurotkschka (who unfortunately died, but her memory remains in my heart), Corina Yturbe, and Elías Palti. In Mexico I owe special thanks to Sergio Pérez, Gustavo Leyva, Jorge Rendón, Jesús Rodríguez, and Tere Santiago because they were the first ones to listen and attended the first lecture I gave on my book.

My most sincere gratitude goes to Kitty Ross whose help in shaping and styling my English has been invaluable; thanks to her my ideas sound coherent. I hope that this is not the last time we work together. I wish to thank Eric Jimenez for his help on the first draft of my book. I also owe much to Wendy Lochner, who has always supported this project and others on which I have been engaged. One can’t be luckier than I have been, sending her two projects that she has fully supported from their very beginnings.

I want to thank my students and assistants for all their help, most especially Claudio Santander. My younger assistant, Laura Cabrera, has worked hard helping me with my courses to allow me to complete this book.

Last, once again many thanks to my sisters Ana, Magali, and Silvia for being there while this project was evolving, for their support and love. And to Nora Rabotnikof whose friendship has been key for what I have become as a human being.

Introduction

GENEALOGIES

Recently, Charles Taylor, among others, has written about the different meanings that are attached to the concept of secularization.¹ It seems clear from his analysis that we have only just become aware of the difficulties and problems that the term secularization suggests. The apparent separation of church and state and the ways we think about how religion and politics might interact are now open questions. Indeed, it is no longer unusual to see that political theorists from both the left and right are prepared to give up what we once took for granted, namely, the fact that, in modernity, religion was supposed to play only a secondary role in politics. Renewed interest in religion seems to be supplanting a critique of ideology and polemics when it comes to questions of justice and politics. Political theorists are arguing about how many political concepts owe more to religious semantics and structures than they do to another form of conceptual innovation, as we once thought.² They seem to be forgetting the important contributions that politics has made.³ Indeed, politics seems to be losing ground. It is either underestimated altogether or presented as if it were a discourse or a realm that cannot be separated from religion. The so-called Weberian disenchantment has vanished.

The renewed interest in religion has prompted an explosion of works about the different meanings of secularization. Just as modernity has come to be regarded as an assemblage of plural meaning occupying different historical and geographical contexts, the meanings of secularization seem to be undergoing a similar process. Indeed, secularization is a wide and ambiguous concept and, due to particular and contextual uses, it has also become a polemical one. As Reinhart Koselleck has eloquently argued, the term secularization can be called a concept, because, as a result of the historical vehicle of semantic transformation, it has vastly different connotations.

Two things must be clarified here: one is that the term religion has been used in different ways throughout the history of Western thought. For the Greeks and the Romans, it meant something other than what we have come to accept with the Christian appropriation of the term. It was Plato who first coined the term political theology in his Republic to define the science of politics.⁴ For the Romans, on the other hand, the Latin word religare was related to forming a community: to be tied back, obligated, to the enormous, almost superhuman and hence always legendary effort to lay foundations, to build the cornerstone, to found for eternity.⁵ For the Romans, the term religion was almost synonymous with political activity, and it meant, literally, to be tied up with the past, with tradition. The term also connoted ties that articulated its relation to the law, since the Latin word lex was used to define a relationship: These ‘laws’ were more than the means to re-establish peace; they were treaties and agreements with which a new alliance, a new unity, was constituted, the unity of two altogether different entities which the war had thrown together and which now entered into a partnership.⁶

Thus, it was only when the Christian Church took the legacy from antiquity, from the Greeks and Romans, that the older semantic notion of religion became linked to the Augustinian translation of the Platonic world of ideas as truth and to the Roman notion of heritage as the meaning of foundation, which was ultimately reinterpreted as the resurrection of Christ.⁷ This historical step allowed for the institutionalization of the word religion as having an altogether different meaning from the one used by Greeks and Romans: The politicalization of the Church changed [the semantics of] Christian religion.⁸ In a way, the Christian faith became a religion not only in its post-Christian sense but also in the ancient sense, as Hannah Arendt was keenly aware.⁹ This is the reason Talal Asad has not only questioned the post-Christian sense of the universal meaning of religion, but has also warned us about the danger of using it to build up a normative model. There cannot be a universal definition of religion, he writes, "not only because its constituent elements and relationships are historically specific, but because that definition is itself the historical product of discursive processes" (my emphasis).¹⁰

As we consider the complexity of the task of defining the transformation of the term secular, we do well to remember that we must frame any discussion about the history and changes undergone by this term according to its uses in different geographical places and contexts. Secular is derived from the word saeculum, which comes from the roots secus and sexus. It was connected linguistically to sex, generation, age, time to govern, the lasting of life, and a period of one hundred years. The modern transformation into the worldly concept of saeculum or secular (Weltbegriff) came to be related to the category of century (Jahrhundert), even though it had a pre-Christian origin. But this fusion of meanings only became common in the sixteenth and the seventeenth centuries. It was meant to express the passage from a religious to a secular state. Thus, the regular church became secular. The religious right has continued to use the word in this semantic sense up until the present. Though, the term was meant to describe a semantic opposition between the spiritual versus the secular (geistlich/weltlich), the large-scale transformation of the concept is tied up with notions about the future and with the changing horizons of expectations and experiences of social actors, as Koselleck has clearly demonstrated in his work.

This double structure of history and language allows for an interrelationship, a connection between our conception of time and the relation between past and future as well as between diagnosis and prognosis, which are articulated within the concept itself. This is the reason we need to use Reinhart Koselleck’s method of conceptual history (Begriffsgeschichte), which allows us to detect [the] persistence, change, and novelty [which] are thus conceived diachronically along the dimension of meanings and through the spoken form of one and the same word.¹¹ By tracing back the continued use of the concept, its overlapping with different meanings and the thematization of the discarded ones as well as the new ones attached to it, we can find the indicators that allow us to relate the concept to the experiences and aspirations of social and political actors and their historical and contextual problems.

My main argument for using Koselleck’s conceptual history is to claim that concepts not only have the capacity to translate and transform themselves from their original usage but can also become innovative if they end up disclosing new areas of political action. This is the reason Koselleck described these new goals as redefining the horizons of expectations of political actors.¹² However, if we also acknowledge that history is involved in the transformation of the concepts, then we must agree that what Koselleck calls the other category—spaces of experiences—must be taken into account. These experiences are also significant because the actors undergo a transformation with respect to their projects, their struggles, and the political tensions involved in their efforts to change themselves and their own societies.

DEBATING THE CONCEPT

The recent debate about how to understand the current meaning of secularization seems to be avoiding the lesson that a group of German theorists—Carl Schmitt, Reinhart Koselleck, Hans Blumenberg, Hannah Arendt, and Jürgen Habermas—thematized some decades ago. Before we can adequately explain why we use the term as we do today, we must trace its genealogy. For example, in A Secular Age Charles Taylor broadly conceives of three aspects of secularity, mostly from a phenomenological perspective: 1. The retreat of religion from public life, 2. the decline in belief and practice, and 3. the change in the conditions of belief.¹³ Taylor assumes that his criteria represents the standardized and commonly accepted account of how and what occurred with the different processes of secularization. But I claim that, before we can agree with Taylor, we need to know who the relevant political actors were in the development of secularism, when they began to use the term as they did, and why their expectations were related to their experiences through new and different ways of understanding the concept.

In his attempt to describe the processes of secularization by differentiating between political and social notions, Alessandro Ferrara has taken an alternative approach.¹⁴ His account consists of, first, the political dimension embodied in the terms laïcité (its French version) or religious neutrality, meaning that the narrative of its rise is coextensive with the narrative of the modern separation of church and state at the end of the religious wars.¹⁵ Second, rather than seeing the phenomenon only through its political expression, Ferrara suggests that secularism has a social meaning, inasmuch as it reflects a process by which religious communities cease to influence the law, politics, education, and public life. According to him, today people are less concerned with following rituals and symbols that mark the significant moments of their lives and do not regard religion as one of their main concerns. As an example of the marginality of religion, he notes that art as an expression of religious feelings or inspiration has virtually disappeared.

Ferrara argues that the distinction between political secularism and social secularism is useful because it allows us to draw nuances in the asymmetries and imbalances between historical traditions. To demonstrate the complexity of the processes of so-called secularization, he claims that we should reflect on the different ways that non-Western countries and traditions manage to cope with their own local and historical contexts. He maintains that this process is useful because it allows us to understand the ideological uses of secularization as it has dominated the Western political and social thought of the last three centuries.

While Taylor is interested in the modern phenomenological experience of the different meanings of secularism, Ferrara helps us grasp how theories of democratic citizenship and the institutional separation of religion from politics need to be theorized further. Because juridical norms and forms of consciousness have developed at a more rapid pace than the religious ones, our notions of equality and toleration have been transformed. In his description of the ways in which religion and political neutrality have actually worked in democratic societies, Ferrara describes the compelling challenges that societies must face in the process of secularization.

After thoroughly considering both Taylor’s and Ferrara’s accounts of secularization, I maintain that only Ferrara’s provides us with a perspective on how the different processes of secularization evolved and offers specific examples related to contemporary practices. Taylor presupposes that we have some common ground concerning those different experiences of secularization, but this position is difficult to accept because he sees the process of secularization as being universal. Thus we must acknowledge that Koselleck is right to point out that "the phenomenon of Säkularisation cannot be investigated solely on the basis of the expression itself. For the historical treatment of words, parallel expressions like Veweltlichung (secularization) and Verzeitlichung (temporalization) must be introduced; the domain of church and constitutional law must be taken on account historically; and, in terms of intellectual history, the ideological currents which crystallized around the expression must be examined—all before the concept of Säkularisation is sufficiently worked up as a factor in and indicator of the history to which it relates."¹⁶ In order to understand the different meanings of secularization, I will begin by acknowledging that the German theorists on whom my book focuses had already identified secularization as an ambiguous concept because of its articulation of temporality.

The subject of time has been the primary concern of philosophers of history since Hegel conceived of history as the locus of time. It is also time that completely transformed the social and political vocabularies of modernity. As Koselleck argues, since then [when time was introduced], there has hardly been a central concept of political theory or social programs which does not contain a coefficient of temporal change, in the absence of which nothing can be recognized, nothing thought or argued, without the loss of conceptual force. Without a temporal perspective, specific concepts of legitimation would no longer be possible.¹⁷ Thus this book is not a work on the genealogy of the concept of secularization, but, rather, on how the specific German theorists constructed different models of secularization in their debate about the conceptual change of politics and religion.

The German debate about secularization shows how the historical development of certain concepts became constitutive of the spaces of the experiences and expectations of modern political actors and how those experiences and expectations ended up transforming the political landscape of Europe.

TRANSLATION, TRANSFORMATION, AND INNOVATION IN CONCEPTUAL HISTORY

Here is another point about the present debates on secularism that I intend to address: The religious roots of political concepts have an ideological core that must be thematized differently. Even if religion and the persistence of religious beliefs is the predictable response to globalization, I am doubtful about the current shape of the debate and about its outcome. Indeed the sense of defeat that characterizes recent efforts by political theorists is rather perplexing. For that reason I felt the need to retrieve a specific historical discussion about secularization—one that takes into account the spirit of our times but avoids the lack of clarity of the present debate.

The authors who once discussed secularization—Karl Löwith, Reinhart Koselleck, Hans Blumenberg, Hannah Arendt, and Jürgen Habermas—also focused on the kind of political models they wanted to suggest. Through their debate, the question of the autonomy of politics became associated with the transformation of our conception of history and with the ways in which modernity altered our notion of time, specifically of time in relation to politics. The relationship between history and politics that was articulated in the German debate demonstrates the kinds of semantic relationships that can be established between religious and political concepts. By understanding this, we may gain some much-needed analytical clarity on the complicated relationship between religion and politics that still persists—and why it is still both a matter of dispute and a product of conceptual and historical change, transformations, and innovations.

I think that the present debate has seriously exaggerated the interdependence of religion and politics because many of the studies that focus on politics now misinterpret or minimize the importance of modern political innovation. The issue of conceptual innovation offers us a perspective on how such concepts as public opinion, publicity, critique, and emancipation have played key roles in the development of political concepts throughout modernity—up to and including the present. In returning to the question of politics’ dependence on religion, it seems to me, there is a danger of forgetting that the privileged relationship between how actors and concepts related to each other is better expressed through Koselleck’s linking the categories of the spaces of experiences with the horizon of political expectations.

While my goal is to illuminate some of the conceptual innovations that have occurred in politics in modernity, I do not argue for a return to the historical moment when theorists took for granted that the term secularization was, more than a description of contemporary events, a universal, normative model. Rather, I seek to show how conceptual history can help us grasp the difficulties and problems of conceptual transformations.

Thus The Disclosure of Politics also focuses on how the question of secularization is related to the history of political concepts. Indeed, political theorists who designed a role for religion had explicit reasons for doing so, and their reasons were political through and through.¹⁸ Each chapter of this book focuses on the model for secularism proposed by a particular theorist—Karl Löwith, Reinhart Koselleck, Hans Blumenberg, Hannah Arendt, and Jürgen Habermas. Resounding through all these different approaches is the idea that secularization is really an argument about what kind of politics the theorist wants to preserve or to create anew and the categories she has developed to achieve this goal.

It was not by accident that Carl Schmitt initiated the debate over secularization, for he was the first to offer the polemical definition of secularization as the translation of the religious semantic field into politics. Schmitt defined political theology as the name given to a specific evaluation of secularization as a model of semantic translations. According to his views on secularization—which are deeply informed by a cultural pessimism prevalent among the intellectuals of his generation—modernity is a process of decay. He writes on political theology as an effort to articulate and to develop a deep connection between a confessional Christian theology and a strong notion of state sovereignty (1922).¹⁹ By now it is clear that he wanted to develop crucial connections between a hierarchical conception of God as the omnipotent lawgiver and his ontological views of an authoritarian state.²⁰

Although Schmitt described his views of political theology with the help of religious semantic contents, he nevertheless considered politics to be autonomous. Later he acknowledged that his earlier views on the concept of the political had changed—from 1927 and 1932–33—leading him to express the opinion that everything is potentially political and that politics can emerge in every domain of human existence. Thus it seems that even Schmitt derived more from his philosophical-metaphysical anthropology than from a strictly religious ground.²¹ Accordingly, he used religion as a vehicle to convey his political goals and outlook insofar as religious semantics offered him the best articulation of his own understandings of power as domination and of his characteristic conception of sovereignty as the decisionism of a ruler. And it was Schmitt who influenced thinkers such as Reinhart Koselleck and those who followed.

Reinhart Koselleck (Görlitz, 1923), a student of Schmitt and heavily influenced by him (Schmitt could not be his formal adviser, since he had been separated from his duties as a professor due to his collaboration with the Nazi regime), became the leader of the field that we know now as conceptual history.²² Koselleck’s notion of conceptual history was inspired by Dilthey’s project as it was reinterpreted—after the linguistic turn—by the hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer. Gadamer’s hermeneutics is a method that allows us to establish dialogues with past traditions, authors, and their works. The use of this method in political theory has been the subject of criticism due to the asymmetrical results from the point of view of the interpreters.²³ Nevertheless, we might consider Gadamerian hermeneutics and conceptual history to be two methods relating language to history, as though they bore family resemblances, to use the Wittgensteinian expression. Because conceptual history specifically concentrates on political and historical concepts through a genealogical account of their emergence and their possible disclosure of new political dimensions, this will be the method that we will be focusing on.

Koselleck’s notion of conceptual history illuminates for us how the debate about secularization was also a