Words: Religious Language Matters

By Ernst van den Hemel and Asja Szafraniec

A wide-ranging anthology of essays that examine the uses, purposes and influence of religious language.

It is said that words are like people: One can encounter them daily yet never come to know their true selves. This volume examines what words are—how they exist—in religious phenomena. Going beyond the common idea that language merely describes states of mind, beliefs, and intentions, the book looks at words in their performative and material specificity.

The contributions in this volume examine and employ a number of linguistic and semiotic ideologies. They develop the insight that our implicit assumptions about language guide the way we understand and experience religious phenomena. They also explore the possibility that insights about the particular status of religious utterances may in turn influence the way we think about words in our language.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jun 15, 2016
• ISBN: 9780823255573

Book preview

Words

This volume has emerged from a collaboration among:

The NWO Research Council for the Humanities (GW),

The NWO Research Council for Social Sciences (MaGW), and

The Netherlands Foundation for the Advancement of Tropical Research (WOTRO).

International Advisory Board

Veena Das, Chair

Christoph Auffarth

Peter Clarke

Galit Hasan-Rokem

Michael Lambek

Regina M. Schwartz

THE FUTURE OF THE RELIGIOUS PAST

Hent de Vries, General Editor

In what sense are the legacies of religion—its powers, words, things, and gestures—disarticulating and reconstellating themselves as the elementary forms of life in the twenty-first century? This sequence of five volumes publishes work drawn from an international research project that seeks to answer this question.

Editorial Board

Meerten ter Borg

Jan Bremmer

Martin van Bruinessen

Jan Willem van Henten

Dick Houtman

Anne-Marie Korte

Birgit Meyer

Words

RELIGIOUS LANGUAGE MATTERS

Editors

ERNST VAN DEN HEMEL

and ASJA SZAFRANIEC

Copyright © 2016 Fordham University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.

Visit us online at www.fordhampress.com.

Library of Congress Control Number: 2015938860

First edition

in memory of

Helen Tartar

Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction: Any More Deathless Questions?

ASJA SZAFRANIEC AND ERNST VAN DEN HEMEL

PART I: WHAT ARE WORDS?

1. Word as Act: Varieties of Semiotic Ideology in the Interpretation of Religion

MICHAEL LAMBEK

2. Medieval Irish Spells: Words of Power as Performance

JACQUELINE BORSJE

3. Inscriptional Violence and the Art of Cursing: A Study of Performative Writing

JAN ASSMANN

4. Words and Word-Bodies: Writing the Religious Body

LORILIAI BIERNACKI

5. Flesh Become Word: Textual Embodiment and Poetic Incarnation

ELLIOT R. WOLFSON

PART II: RELIGIOUS VOCABULARIES

6. Semantic Differences, or Judaism/Christianity

DANIEL BOYARIN

7. The Name God in Blanchot

JEAN-LUC NANCY

8. Humanism’s Cry: On Infinity in Religion and Absence in Atheism—A Conversation with Blanchot and Nancy

LAURENS TEN KATE

9. Intuition, Interpellation, Insight: Elements of a Theory of Conversion

NILS F. SCHOTT

10. Allowed and Forbidden Words: Canon and Censorship in Grundbegriffe, Critical Terms, Encyclopedias: Confessions of a Person Involved

CHRISTOPH AUFFARTH

PART III: TRANSMITTING AND TRANSLATING THE IMPLICIT

11. God Lisped: Divine Accommodation and Cracks in Calvin’s Scriptural Voice

ERNST VAN DEN HEMEL

12. Rethinking the Implicit: Fragments of the Project on Aggada and Halakhah in Walter Benjamin

SERGEY DOLGOPOLSKI

13. What Cannot Be Said: Apophasis and the Discourse of Love

JEAN-LUC MARION

14. Givenness and the Basic Problems of Phenomenology

TAREK R. DIKA

PART IV: SITUATING ONESELF VIA LANGUAGE

15. Prayer: Addressing the Name

KARMEN MACKENDRICK

16. A Quarrel with God: Cavell on Wittgenstein and Hegel

ASJA SZAFRANIEC

17. Thinking about the Secular Body, Pain, and Liberal Politics

TALAL ASAD

18. The Rise of Literal-Mindedness

PETER BURKE

19. From Star Wars to Jediism: The Emergence of Fiction-based Religion

MARKUS ALTENA DAVIDSEN

20. The Words of the Martyr: Media, Martyrdom, and the Construction of a Community

PIETER NANNINGA

PART V: RELIGIOUS LANGUAGE AND NATIONALISM

21. Militant Religiopolitical Rhetoric: How Abraham Kuyper Mobilized His Constituency

ARIE L. MOLENDIJK

22. Thinking through Religious Nationalism

ROGER FRIEDLAND AND KENNETH B. MOSS

Notes

List of Contributors

Acknowledgments

This book is first and foremost indebted and dedicated to the late Helen Tartar. The start of our engagement with this publication, the conference Words in Groningen, unrolled itself against the backdrop of the sound of Helen’s knitting needles. Far from being a deterrent, the thought of engaging relatively junior scholars as editors for this volume excited her. Helen had been a famous and infamous figure in our circle—famous for editing some of the most exciting volumes in our fields and infamous for starting to knit when she was less interested in the lecture that was given. Having the chance to work with her was a thrilling opportunity. During the construction of this book, she was a sagacious and humorous guide whose professionalism and degree of involvement exceeded by far that of the average academic editor. Her suggestions for enriching and broadening the scope of the volume combined with her impressive knowledge and network ensured that our shared wish to make this book more than a selection of conference proceedings was firmly entrenched since the beginning.

The tragic passing of Helen was a shock to us all. As our inbox and the Internet were buzzing with utterances of disbelief and testimonials to Helen’s work, the true impact of Helen on the world of academic publishing became apparent also to those who did not know her.

We were now faced with the task of finishing a book that was two-thirds finished yet fully indebted to Helen. As many of the testimonials mentioned, Helen stated that her books were like her children. We hope to have continued this orphaned book with the energy, enthusiasm, and professionalism that characterized Helen’s personality and approach to academic publishing.

The fact that a finished project lies in front of you now is thanks to a number of people who helped complete it. Next to Helen Tartar, this book is indebted to Hent de Vries, who conceptualized and made happen the very idea of having a series of volumes addressing the future of the religious past, each focusing on particular type of expression: Concepts, Things, Words, Gestures. Hent kept watch over the progress of the futures project from the very beginning, and when in the wake of Helen’s passing away the publication process seemed to be threatened, he was the first to make sure that Helen’s and our work would not be lost.

Many people at Fordham University Press contributed to finish this project. We thank especially Tom Lay, Eric Newman, and Teresa Jesionowski for doing all in their power to pick up the project, with contributions at various stages of editing, searching for the most recent versions saved on Helen’s computer. Bud Bynack, Helen’s widower, was so generous to continue Helen’s editing work, insisting on staying faithful to Helen’s spirit. With his help, the final remaining parts of the book were also edited. But the contributors to this volume, whose patience was already tested by such a large multiauthor project, also showed their patience and understanding in the long process of publishing this book. We also acknowledge the staff at the Press for the professional manner with which they continued work after having lost such an important cornerstone of their publishing house.

A large number of people were instrumental in earlier phases of this book. First of all Jan Bremmer, organizer and original architect of the conference Words, for his help at the initial stages of this publication. Michael Lambek, whose role was not limited to providing the opening essay of this book; his programmatic lecture at the Groningen conference also provided important inspiration for the book in general. We would like to acknowledge Birgit Meyer, whose wonderful predecessor of this volume, Things, raised the bar for our volume, for her insightful and productive comments on an early draft of the introduction. Burcht Pranger, director of the subproject The Pastness of the Religious Past, for his sagacious support for us during the Future of the Religious Past project. We also thank the team of Religion, Secularism, and Political Belonging at the Centre for the Humanities of Utrecht University for their support during the final stages of this project. The funding of Netherlands Organisation for Scientific Research (NWO) was of course essential for the entire Future of the Religious Past project.

To conclude with Helen’s own words, in a 2004 interview with Fordham Magazine, she described her attitude toward academic publishing, which formulates clearly the open spirit with which she worked with us on this volume: [In academic publishing] you’re a perpetual student. . . . You’re constantly learning, even if [the authors] are much younger than you are. We hope to take this as a guide for our own future projects.

Words

Introduction

Any More Deathless Questions?

Asja Szafraniec and Ernst van den Hemel

So, any other deathless questions?

—Robert Creeley

It is something miraculous that words can mean at all, that such things can be said, that there are words.

—Stanley Cavell

It is sometimes said that words are like people in that one can encounter them daily and yet not come to know their true selves. In any case, the meaning of words tends to involve more than can be grasped by resorting to a dictionary. This definitely seems to be the case for the word religion, as well as for the many words that it draws to itself. Despite its ubiquity today, merely encountering the word in everyday discourse does not necessarily lead to a better understanding of it. Sometimes the familiarity of a word actually occludes its sense or its multiple senses, which will be revealed only after the word is examined in contrasting contexts and under competing angles of approach. And debates since at least the 1970s have shown that the understanding of the word religion is continuously shifting. Just as the boundaries between religion and other spaces in society, such as politics, law, or science, are not as clear cut and as stable as they were once perceived to be, there is no stable definition of the word religion itself. For a long time, since the Reformation and certainly since the Enlightenment, the assumption prevailed that secularization produced a growing dichotomy between the public sphere and an increasingly private religious sphere, implying a sort of stability in the meaning of both terms, even as their relations shifted. However, the impression of the progressive triumph of secularization over religion has been countered by more nuanced scholarly appraisals of secularism, as well as by contemporary political events.

At the beginning of the twenty-first century, global debates about fundamentalisms and about the way in which religion intersects with the problematic fields of secularism, power, violence, modernity, political liberalism, democracy, and individual freedom and debates about the nature and the future of religion itself have given rise to a new scholarly challenge: how to address religion without embracing unwarranted grand histories that tend to be invoked by certain connotations of the word. At the same time, it became clear that the very notion of religion itself and the desire to grasp it conceptually can themselves be part and parcel of a grand history, placing religion squarely in opposition to its classical counterparts, politics, law, or science.¹

What is in question here is how we can speak of religion. This question is not just limited to the status of language in religious practices but also involves the implicit and explicit conceptualizations of language that is used to make sense of religion, both inside academic practice and in societies. This volume does not seek to supply the last word about the word religion or about the many words that are associated with it. Instead, it restages the question, gauging not only in what ways religion has been spoken about in the past, but also how it is possible to speak about religion anew. Instead of trying to establish once and for all the notoriously unstable boundaries of the notion of religion, it embraces the ongoing evolution of the term as a necessary part of speaking about religion, recognizing that, as Hent de Vries has put it, ‘religion’ is nothing outside or independent of the series of its metamorphoses, its metastases.² Its manifestations are not the instantiation of a common concept, but phenomena exhibiting at most a set of family resemblances at different historical moments and in different geographical locations. It is thus impossible to do justice to the phenomena of religion without conceding that the analytic coherence, discreteness, and universality of the category of religion are problematic.³ The series to which the present volume is a contribution consequently approaches religion via the study of the singular or the particular—things, gestures, powers,⁴ or, in this case, words—rather than starting out from some purported universal, such as the concept of religion.⁵ Following upon earlier volumes, the contributions presented here assess the present and the future of religion by examining the status of words, expressions, and vocabularies associated either with religious contexts (ritual speech, prophecy, divination, magic, myth, and more) or with discourse(s) about religion.

And the focus here is indeed on words, not on the putatively universal category of language. It is true that our views of religion are influenced by how we understand the nature and origins of language, and beginning with the so-called linguistic turn in the 1970s, the way in which language is understood has dominated many approaches to the several domains of the humanities and the human sciences for the past several decades. But conceptions of the nature and origins of language have themselves been so various and varied that the coherence, discreteness, and universality of that category is problematic and in flux, as well. While the category of language may be advanced as universal, how it is conceptualized dissolves into a variety of particular preconceptions about the nature of language—as simply referring to things, as a system of signs and associated concepts, or as performative of actions in the world, among others.

Our views of religion are most directly manifest in our attachments to particular words—our penchant to privilege certain senses or aspects of certain words above others. But our views of religion are also concerned with an understanding of what words in general are. The famous biblical phrase from John 1:1 In the beginning was the Word, taken up in a collection of books known as the Word of God, a word whose meaning is to be deciphered, is just one example around which a particular conceptualization of and interaction with words takes central stage. But of course, there are many more. This volume discusses religious words in practices ranging from tantric repetitions of words void of meaning (Karmen MacKendrick) to ritual repetition of the word God in Sufi prayers (Michael Lambek), from Irish magic spells (Jacqueline Borsje) to the transformation of flesh into word in medieval Kabbalah (Elliot Wolfson). But this volume not only offers analyses of words in religious practice. The sheer variety of practices into which religious words are taken up calls for a revisiting of the various dominant semiotic ideologies that determine our relationship with words. Originally coined by Webb Keane and discussed by Michael Lambek in the introductory essay in this volume, the concept of semiotic ideology functions as a way to discuss basic assumptions about what signs are and how they function in the world. It is semiotic ideology that determines what people will consider the role that intentions play in signification to be, what kinds of possible agent (humans only? Animals? Spirits?) exist to which acts of signification might be imputed, whether signs are arbitrary or necessarily linked to their objects, and so forth.⁶

Semiotic ideology determines different approaches to religious words, for instance. Whereas in some contexts correct repetition is seen as a central element of religious practice, in others, sincerity and authenticity are seen as more important. Between many of these instances, what a word means or does differs radically. Faith, materiality, sincerity, agency—all these terms are dependent on semiotic ideology. Keane highlights how certain dominant modes of thinking about how words and things interrelate can be traced back to Protestant Christian origins. The prevalence of the spiritual over the material is an example of a mode of thinking that resonates with a Protestant sensitivity, to the detriment of other practices. The emphasis on spirituality over materiality and of inwardness over exteriority has also influenced the scientific approach to religious words. This influence can bee seen in the obviously pejorative characterizations of nonrational fetish religions that characterized scientific approaches to religion well into the twentieth century, but it can also be seen to steer more recent approaches to religious words. In a reading of the theory of Ferdinand de Saussure, which was highly influential during the linguistic turn, Keane emphasizes how deeply engrained the dematerialization of signifying practices has become. By highlighting how the separation of signifier and signified is part of a distinction between signs and the world, "what Saussure called semiology concerned only virtual types, never concrete tokens."⁷ This, according to Keane (and others), has been part of a dematerialization and a skewed and biased outlook on religious practices.

Keane’s critical stance toward this dematerialization of signifying practices, his criticism of the approach to religion during the linguistic turn, and his emphasis on the problematic boundaries between word and thing, meaning and form, has been highly influential in the reevaluation of materiality. One of the things that has been less extensively discussed, however, is what this critical reevaluation means when we return to that vestige of internal, spiritual meaning, the word. What is the effect of trying to do away with unwarranted Protestant forms of approaching language for the analysis of words in religion?

We would like to highlight two principal productive perspectives on the relationship between religion and words. The first is informed by the turn to materiality, the second by the performative dimensions of language. Both developments help in thinking beyond the opposition between the spiritual and the material, between any inner and outer dimensions of language. These debates have generated a lot of new work concerning the material aspects of religion and the material effects of language. Yet they also generate new questions. What about inwardness? Sincerity? Discursivity? Informed by these approaches, how can we revisit the topic of words?

As this volume will argue, these debates are much helped by a discussion of the turn to the ordinary as described in the work of J. L. Austin and Stanley Cavell. This perspective, without renouncing the idea of materiality or performativity, acknowledges the fundamental discursivity of words, calling for interpretation and explanations: "Every sign by itself seems dead."⁸ But let us begin with one of the principal critical responses to Protestant-inspired modes of conceptualizing language and the linguistic turn: the turn to materiality.⁹ For it is the material turn that has given an impetus to the study of religion, taking its distance from the semiotic ideology that has guided approaches to religion, meaning, and words.

Materiality, Performativity, and the Material Turn in Religion

According to Dick Houtman and Birgit Meyer in another volume in this series, Things: Religion and the Question of Materiality, words need to be rematerialized, that is, we should revaluate them as forms of outward behavior.¹⁰ This call for the rematerialization of words follows a more general shift in religious studies away from approaches that understand religion in terms of personal experience, immediate encounters with the divine, inward belief, and, more generally, in terms of meaning and content, a shift toward interest in media, form and outward behavior,¹¹ part of a broader call for a revaluation of the magical, orgiastic, ecstatic, and ritual elements of religiosity.¹² Thus, for example, in this volume, Jacqueline Borsje describes the context of magic spells in medieval Ireland, where tracing words with a finger on an object or bringing a sacred manuscript in contact with it was taken to have healing or protective effects.

What are the consequences of this turn to the materiality for words? One possible reaction would be to focus on the flesh of words, whether vocal or graphic, as opposed to their psychological status as signs of concepts—to treat them as that from which the mental is subtracted. In Words and Word-Bodies: Writing the Religious Body in this volume, Loriliai Biernacki thus proposes a notion of language that is divorced from its semantic function, emphasizing free-floating meaningless syllables, rather than meaning-bearing components, and claiming that the purely material language of the mantra points to a quality of language that is mostly neglected in the West.

While this way of looking at language is possible from within some traditions, as Biernacki demonstrates, she always warns against turning the mental or the spiritual into a mere epiphenomenon of the material practices. This would amount to reproducing the much-criticized binary logic according to which the material is excluded from the spiritual, simply reversing the hierarchy. In this context, it is also important to remember that one of the most powerful critics of the view according to which we use words merely to represent meaning, Maurice Merleau-Ponty, was also just as critical of what he called the mechanistic understanding of language, where all that is at stake is the reproduction of the word or a syllable and where uttering a word becomes primarily a physiological phenomenon.¹³ When the meaning of a word is disregarded, Locke’s old charge that this is like talking like a parrot, without understanding, still needs to be refuted.¹⁴ Are such utterances even words? Jean-Luc Nancy, who identifies words with concepts, argues in "The Name God in Blanchot in this volume that terms such as being or neutral are words (concepts), whereas God is a name (without concept), so even names (such as the name of God) cannot, strictly speaking, be called words.¹⁵ The challenge is analogous to what Webb Keane saw as the main challenge in thinking about things: The goal is to open up social analysis to the historicity and social power of material things without reducing them either to being only vehicles of meaning, on the one hand, or ultimate determinants, on the other"¹⁶

The rematerialization that is called for, in short, does not involve a simple repudiation of all meaning, but rather only a repudiation of meaning that pretends to emancipate itself from its material basis, presenting itself as independent and radically distinct from the material medium that carries it. The material quality of words, which is frequently mistaken as merely the medium of an independent mental message, its cloak or garb, and hence as something that potentially could efface itself or become wholly transparent, must instead be understood as what is simultaneously, to borrow Marshall McLuhan’s phrase, the medium and the message.¹⁷ To rematerialize words is to acknowledge this inseparability, so that the word’s incarnate form does not alienate what it allows to be thought. Adapting the call for the revaluation of the role of media in religion to the problem field of words, we might say with Birgit Meyer that to rematerialize words is to "vest the mediation in which [they] take part with some sense of immediacy.’¹⁸

This focus on the materiality of words is part of a movement that aims to offer an antidote to the Western-centered, post-Enlightenment Protestant perspective in which meaning has a central place and religion becomes a matter of (unfathomable) individual belief. For example, the tendency attributed to post-Enlightenment liberal Protestantism to seek a sense of immediacy (say, of God) beyond the medium of words, an immediacy merely transmitted by words, rather than in them (the claim, for example, that it is not the form of the prayer that is important, but its sincerity), should be countered by acknowledging the immediacy of the media itself—that what counts is the ritual of pronouncing certain particular words and phrases.¹⁹ But to the extent that this antidote involves a focus on the flesh of words—the desire to see words in the flesh again, the flesh invested with spiritual power—it is good to remember that this antidote is in itself hardly religiously and culturally neutral, brought up as it is from a tradition in which the materialization of the religious has a particular heritage and pedigree—in which the word indeed supposedly has become flesh.²⁰ Emphasizing materiality, focusing on the surface of the ritual, generates questions concerning the inward experience of it. The distinction between surface and inwardness, while considered questionable by some advocates of the material turn, cannot be abandoned, if only in view of the problems that skepticism raises about the impossibility of fathoming individual belief—of knowing other minds.

A similar challenge is offered by the second materialist perspective that we want to highlight, which is the performative aspect of words.²¹ If words say something meaningful to us, it is because the words themselves, as material objects, often come to us infused with significance, spiritualized or otherwise credited with an emphatic sense of presentness, force, or monumentality. They have effects. The use of and response to words in religious contexts might thus be conceived of as primarily a matter of seeking performative felicity, which suggests that words are like gestures. Our use of language, as Merleau-Ponty puts it, is a form of verbal ‘gesticulation.’²² Beyond the familiar use of words as symbols, words are extensions of our bodies: means of intervention, of poking or prodding at the world, occasionally with the power to heal and to produce injury. Religious words are treated as things autonomously incarnating meaning and exuding this meaning. But if they do have this causal link to reality, it is not on their own account (as things, or even as signifiers), but on account of us, the gesticulating bodies who use, hear, or read them. Whether they are spoken or written, they are invested with a feature of holiness, with a supernatural power of seduction (as Karmen MacKendrick argues in Prayer: Addressing the Name in this volume) or with the sensual presence of the greatest imaginable intensity.²³ Such words are then conceived not as merely mediating vehicles for some mental content but as the source of the mental content.

Thinking about words as performative, as in prayer or in rituals, generates questions concerning the status and importance of inwardness of meaning, shifting the burden of performative felicity from the speaker’s true intention or commitment to the cause to the presence of a certain context, audience, and in case the latter is conceived very broadly, eventually to nature or divine powers. (If the rain ritual does not work, it is nature that is at fault.) Performative felicity remains an important topic, if only because not all our word uses are felicitous. Every religion faces the possibility that the prayer may not be answered or the magic spell may not work, which in turn might lead to skepticism regarding the question whether the conditions of the performance have been fulfilled.²⁴ Has the inner attitude been right? Have the holy words been pronounced with appropriate dignity? Has the prayer been sufficiently engaging? As Jan Assmann notes in his contribution to this volume, Inscriptional Violence and the Art of Cursing: A Study of Performative Writing, fundamental uncertainty about the felicity of performatives is a problem of every . . . writing that makes claims to eternity.²⁵ Using words (in prayer and otherwise) thus is not a matter of mechanistic causality, but indeed a form verbal ‘gesticulation.’ In short, an approach that de-emphasizes or seeks to sublate inwardness in the name of the focus on performativity generates questions concerning the status of lived experience that safeguards the ritual.

We cannot but conclude that while words are not merely the garb of meaning, they are not merely material objects, either (such as calligraphic ornaments or articulate sounds), nor are they merely forms of outward behavior. An experience of words that does not include conveying a meaning, whether intended or not, or signifying, and of doing so always in context, is no longer an experience of words, but an acoustic or visual experience—which does not preclude its being spiritual, as in case of glossolalia or ritual calligraphy.

The performativity of religious words (their having efficacy) can be seen in a vitalist context. The words are vibrant with life and produce their effects on their own account or ascribe their results to the working of ideology, self-induced or not: Move your lips in prayer and you will believe, to speak with Pascal. But in this volume, we argue that something more is needed. Phenomena such as the absentheist versions of the discourse on God (see Nancy’s reading of Blanchot in this volume) or the discourses of negative or mystical theology (as discussed below by Jean-Luc Marion), or such elusive ways of speaking of religion as Cavell’s, point to another vantage point. In religion, the words said or written also need to be seen as part of a discourse involving questioning the significance of what is said, as involving persuasion—a discourse requiring interpretation, or, in Austin’s language, involving questions concerning the inherent discursivity of perlocutionary utterances.

Unlike in an illocutionary act that does what it says (for example, I do in marriage) and that is designed to fit neatly in the ready-made context of its ritual, a perlocutionary act does something else by what it says (it can move me, scare me off, influence me) and is improvised (there is no conventional procedure, which is to be executed correctly and completely by people having certain thoughts and feelings who must in the future so behave). Cavell called Austin’s privileging of the illocutionary act (and the consequent privileging of it in scholarly work on performativity) a catastrophe in his theory.²⁶ What Cavell wants by emphasizing the perlocutionary type of utterances is to take Austin’s picture beyond performance as ritual. To do so, he not only needs to go beyond the illocutionary acts, but also needs to focus on a certain group of perlocutionary acts that Cavell calls passionate utterances that is, judgments directed by one person to another, such as I am bored or I love you. It is typical of passionate utterances that they require interpretation.²⁷ To say that interpretation is characteristic part of those utterances—that they hence frequently need explanation—is to say that they are fundamentally discursive, involving questioning of their significance, explanation, and persuasion, and hence inferential in the sense that they participate in our activity of giving and asking for reasons. (This is true for Cavell, if not for negative theology.)

In one of his lectures, Robert Brandom observed that some of Wittgenstein’s language games are not, properly speaking, language games, because they are not inferential, that is, they do not involve giving and asking for reasons. Would Brandom consider religion such a game? Or perhaps only some manifestations of it? Do we need to choose between religion as a form of inferential discourse or religion as extralinguistic? Cavell’s work in any case offers a possibility of—no, calls for—including religion in discourse. Cavell considers doing so necessary because while a performative utterance is an offer of participation in the order of law, a passionate utterance is an invitation to improvisation in the disorders of desire.²⁸ In other words, the illocutionary utterance (the ritual) symbolizes the degree to which we are determined, but the perlocutionary utterance signifies the degree to which we are free. To give up the discursive dimension of religious words is to give up freedom. It is because of this that, instead of distancing itself from belief, Cavell’s thought remains critically open to it, on the assumption that religion is not a set of unchangeable dogmas, but a body of thought with which one can quarrel.

The change in thinking about language—emphasizing the ongoing use of words and often addressed as a critique of the referential character of language—influences the very core of the debate about religion, bearing its imprint on our thinking about religion as a unified phenomenon. Emphasizing the ongoing use of words in religion puts in question the purported specificity of its language or the assumptions about the common ground or source of its phenomena. (Sometimes it is held that religion has its common ground in subjective experience, sometimes, on the contrary, in participation in a set of practices.) While what religion is consequently becomes problematic—whether there is a religious language, whether there is a universal source of religion—other questions become more prominent. These are questions not so much about the essence of a phenomenon arrested in time and captured by concepts, but about the continuation of (to use Wittgenstein’s formulation) the understanding of a game as we go on. Emphasizing the ongoing use of words in religion involves understanding its in-depth entwinements with other games, its hidden sources of life. The central problematic is then changed: from questions about religion and secularism as if these were stable domains to a questioning of what it means to inherit religion as a ongoing possibility, or at least to inherit a culture that is infused with religion, and what ways there are of responding to it.

The words of the everyday are in a lot of respects unlike philosophical or scientific concepts. Their use does not presuppose the clear-cut application of a definition, or an exhaustive set of rules for their application, or a metaphysical reality. When their use is felicitous, they convey to their addressee only as much as is needed for that instant and for that particular use. Moreover, their conceptual boundaries may change from one language game to another and are never established once and for all, since, as Veena Das points out, this language is never a totality and is mastered only in fragments.

This is also visible in Talal Asad’s interest in the movement of concepts in history. (Asad has repeatedly acknowledged his debt to Wittgenstein.) In his account, the development of a new doctrine, leads to the coming into being of a new concept and presupposes an often implicit change in other concepts—for example, secularism presupposes a new concept of religion. In this sense, much of Asad’s work is essentially a study of the constant movement and evolution of concepts with respect to one another—of the changing distribution of meaning between them, as well as of the evolution of the hidden dividing lines within what looks like a single conceptual category (secular and secularism, for example).²⁹

If constitutive insecurity in language is indeed part and parcel of the life of religious words, the approach to religious words should perhaps likewise take this sense of indeterminacy and insecurity into account. A core characteristic of Keane’s notion of semiotic ideology is openness. It is this openness that perpetually threatens to destabilize semiotic ideologies.³⁰ Instead of contributing once more to the heap of definitions, it might be more productive to see the religious words as perpetually challenging academic frameworks. In a blog named after Charles Taylor’s concept of the immanent frame—the context that frames our reality to such a degree that we do not even notice its implications—there is a section titled Deathless Questions.³¹ This section is named after the question that American poet Robert Creeley used to ask his students during a lull in class discussions: So, any other deathless questions? Speaking of religion may amount to asking deathless questions within immanent frames.

Perspectives

The present volume offers a spectrum of perspectives on these matters. It pays attention to how linguists, philosophers, and anthropologists conceive what words are and what they do; it considers the implications of the focus on the material appearance of words and on words as they are chanted, recited, calligraphed, or chiseled in stone; finally, it addresses the preconceptions connected to the everyday dimension of language. The volume also focuses on the effect that the prevalence of these perspectives may have had on the academic study of religion and on the understanding of the meaning of religious practices by religious subjects themselves. In doing so, it seeks to offer a vantage point that might take into account the problems posed by speaking about religion without falling into entrenched disciplinary positions or simply repeating unquestioned presuppositions, whether these involve the focus on the exclusively material qualities of words or on their intended meaning. The volume thus seeks to provide a specific point of focus for rethinking how to speak about religion by addressing our conceptions of the nature of speaking itself—the act, its objectives, its material ingredients, and more.

Part I, What Are Words? opens with two papers directly exploring the common ground of the majority of approaches to the relation between religion and language—that is, the various dimensions of performativity. The three papers that follow examine other traditions. In Word as Act: Varieties of Semiotic Ideology in the Interpretation of Religion, Michael Lambek, drawing on the work of Roy A. Rappaport, provides background for the ensuing discussions by examining three widely held presuppositions about the nature of language, showing in what way each of them determines our understanding of religious phenomena. In particular, Lambek shows how investment in the performative force of words (whether illocutionary or perlocutionary) influences our understanding of religion. In the chapter that follows, Jacqueline Borsje similarly addresses the field of performativity. In Medieval Irish Spells: ‘Words of Power’ as Performance, she focuses on examples of magic spells recorded in medieval Irish manuscripts so as to reconstruct the working of a performative mode of language use specifically requiring (or mobilizing) belief in its (magic) power (whether in the intrinsic power of words themselves or in the power conferred on them by intervention of a divine being), making it a form of speech act characteristic of religion and ritual. The subsequent two chapters offer different perspectives on the role of words in religious discourse, emphasizing their material aspects or their relation to matter. In Inscriptional Violence and the Art of Cursing: A Study of Performative Writing, Jan Assmann emphasizes not only the performative dimension of curses, but also its ties to the inherent insecurity of words as expressed in any practice of writing that claims a connection to eternity. Loriliai Biernacki, in Words and Word-Bodies: Writing the Religious Body, focuses on tantric practice to analyze the intense bond between words and the bodies that can be said to be construed in them. Finally, in Flesh Become Word: Textual Embodiment and Poetic Incarnation, Elliot Wolfson addresses the textual nature of bodiliness: Taking inspiration from Merleau-Ponty’s ontology of the flesh of things, understood as a dimension shared by subject and object, he juxtaposes the Christian idea of the incarnation of word (in the person of Jesus) with the transfiguration of flesh into word in medieval Kabbalah, where the body of words of the Torah is the poetic incarnation of what exists in the world, the hypertext revealing the semantic character of nature.

From the field of words conceptualized as immanent events, Part II, Religious Vocabularies, addresses significant words associated with the context of religion, either vocabularies drawn from religious texts and rituals or vocabularies mobilized on the account of examining religious phenomena, linking them to their historical, social, and cultural contexts.

In Semantic Differences, or ‘Judaism’/‘Christianity,’ Daniel Boyarin discusses the evolution of some of the most potent terms in the history of religious vocabularies—Judaism and Christianity. His inquiry into how language produces social ‘facts’ and how social facts produce language, deals with Christianity and Judaism as the names for a difference that we call ‘religions.’ In the short piece that follows, "The Name God in Blanchot," Jean-Luc Nancy derives from Blanchot’s work a seminal insight that will prove an important factor in Nancy’s subsequent thought on Christianity: In the work of the atheist Blanchot, the name God (which, according to Nancy, is not a word, but a name whose role is to address the infinite absenting of sense), although it does not signify, retains its function as a nonsignifier: It never stops not making sense. The relevance retained by the name God for Blanchot, despite his overt investment in atheism, with which Blanchot explicitly connects the practice of writing, opens up a new way of thinking about religion for Nancy, absentheism, a mode of religion beyond all positing of an object of belief or disbelief, which informs much of his thought about Christianity. This short text by Nancy is framed and situated by a more extensive contribution titled Humanism’s Cry: On Infinity in Religion and Absence in Atheism—A Conversation with Blanchot and Nancy by Laurens ten Kate in which he explores the Blanchotian roots of Nancy’s project (and the Hegelian roots of Blanchot’s own), devoting particular attention to Nancy’s conceptualization of infinity as inseparable from finitude. Ten Kate subsequently applies the consequences of this line of thinking to the old binary opposition between humanism and religion while questioning whether the two are really that far apart in this theoretical framework. In the fourth contribution to this part, Intuition, Interpellation, Insight: Elements of a Theory of Conversion, Nils Schott argues for a renewed philosophical approach to and conceptualization of conversion. Schott points to the similarities between the philosopher’s task in giving duration to intuition, according to Bergson, and the task of the convert to give duration to his conversion, and he suggests seeing Louis Althusser’s notion of interpellation as way of conceptualizing conversion. In a reading of Augustine’s Confessions, Schott provides a way of conceptualizing the conversion narrative, in which nothing has really changed, nothing will ever be the same, without giving up the philosophical importance of conversion.

So far, Part II has addressed specific words, names, or concepts, but Christoph Auffarth offers a more general vantage point from which to consider the very idea of concept or conceptualization. In "Allowed and Forbidden Words: Canon and Censorship in Grundbegriffe, Critical Terms, Encyclopedias, he discusses the recent transition from an age of lexicons to an age of companions." He argues that the Grundbegriffe of religion, the terms used in lexicons and encyclopedias to define and limit the field of study, have shown themselves to be inescapably fluid and dynamic. By tracing interactions between practices of religion and their lexical definitions, Auffarth, influenced by Wittgenstein, argues for a study of religion that departs from using normative terms and that is geared toward a dynamic notion of religion as a belonging to a constellation of family resemblances. The study of religion, a phenomenon whose terms are in constant flux, he argues, should focus on the history of its problems, instead of on definitions.

Part III of this volume, Transmitting and Translating the Implicit, moves the focus from vocabularies to the space between performative felicity and the ungraspable dimensions of religious language: the transmission and translation of the implicit dimension in religious traditions. In God Lisped: Divine Accommodation and Cracks in Calvin’s Scriptural Voice, Ernst van den Hemel proposes a new interpretation of the notion of accommodation in the work of John Calvin. Following the work of James Simpson and Brian Cummings, van den Hemel focuses on the notion of divine accommodation, described by John Calvin as God lisping to humanity. The continuously expanding scope of accommodation problematizes both interior meaning and performative felicity and sheds new light on the tension between doubt and affirmation that lies at the heart of Protestant textuality. Focusing on the Jewish tradition, Sergey Dolgopolski, in Rethinking the Implicit: Fragments of the Project on Aggada and Halakhah in Walter Benjamin, addresses the question of how we should understand the notion of the implicit as a topos for the transmission of Talmudic tradition: The function of the machinery of mistake in the interpretation of the Talmud is to keep implicit what always was implicit and cannot be articulated—what articulation cannot articulate. In a response to speech-act theory, Jean-Luc Marion, in What Cannot Be Said: Apophasis and the Discourse of Love, revisits the debate around negative theology in order to assess its problematics with the conceptual apparatus of ordinary-language philosophy. By discussing the language game connected to the utterance I love you, he identifies a new field (not limited to the religious experience alone) in the form of a language game that can dispense with affirmation and negation, truth and falsity, and still remain meaningful to those who engage in it. Tarek Dika’s Givenness and the Basic Problems of Phenomenology then closes this part, addressing the transmission of the theological into philosophy. Focusing on Jean-Luc Marion’s philosophical project, Dika employs revelation as a way to test the possibility of phenomenology as a philosophy capable of accounting for the theological. Dika raises the question whether Marion’s phenomenology can account for revelation, which Marion says is the theological phenomenon par excellence.

Part IV, titled Situating Oneself via Language, leaves the problems of transmission and examines the way in which certain unacknowledged historical modalities of language have influenced the formation of religious traditions. In Prayer: Addressing the Name, Karmen MacKendrick discusses the possibility of situating oneself in a particular modality of language use that brings its subject into a singular relation with the divine (even if it is a relation with a certain absence): prayer. She offers an analysis of this modality and of the nature of the relation it makes possible, emphasizing its desirous, even erotic or seductive quality. Drawing on the work of Jean-Luc Nancy and Maurice Blanchot, among others, MacKendrick directs particular attention to such aspects of prayer as the nonreferentiality of the name to which the prayer addresses itself (which also dislocates the position of the speaker), to prayerful genres (praise, repetition, lamentation), and to the corporeality of prayer (the prayer is a prayer of a body, and it is incorporated in a particular use of language, attentive for example, to sound). In A Quarrel with God: Cavell on Wittgenstein and Hegel, Asja Szafraniec argues that the sense of religion or of whatever may come to take its place spells itself out in the ordinary language, the environment of our fight for recognition or ‘quarrel’ with God. Szafraniec examines the nature of the project that Cavell calls the rescue of language by superposing Wittgenstein’s reflection on seeing aspects (we cannot see both the rabbit and the duck in Joseph Jastrow’s famous drawing) on the traditional reading of Hegelian fight for recognition. In her reading, Hegelian enslavement is understood in terms of a failure of an aspect (of meaning) to dawn. In Thinking about the Secular Body, Pain, and Liberal Politics, Talal Asad offers a different vantage point on the relation between language and our conceptions of religion, inquiring what the language of the body, in particular, the experience of pain, tells us about the distinction between the religious and the secular. Asad suggests that the distinction between the secular roots of representative democracy and the religious roots of the democratic ethos can be elucidated in terms of the knowledge we gain from understanding human attitudes toward pain (sadism, hypochondria, masochism). In The Rise of Literal-Mindedness, Peter Burke then examines the complex ways in which human investment in the metaphorical or literal aspects of language can influence the development of religions. Burke proposes a new master narrative in which the rise of literal-mindedness is seen as less linear than it is represented in many current master narratives and in which multiplying the connections between microhistory and macrohistory becomes a part of writing the history of literal-mindedness. In "From Star Wars to Jediism: The Emergence of Fiction-based Religion, Markus Altena Davidsen presents an analysis of a form of religion, Jediism," that has its roots in the fictional universe of the Star Wars movies. Focusing on the boundaries between fiction and reality in literature, Davidsen shows how words can conjure up a space in which the lines between the two are blurred. Part IV ends with The Words of the Martyr: Media, Martyrdom, and the Construction of a Community, in which Pieter Nanninga analyzes suicide attacks as messages. In tuning his ear to what these performances have to say and in what ways they are staged, Nanninga aims to expand traditional views of communication to include the use of violence as a way to communicate. Seen in this light, suicide attacks are shown to be intimately tied to issues surrounding the grounding of communities. Furthermore, close readings of the highly mediatized messages surrounding these attacks shed light on the complex interweavings of identity, religion, and violence in an increasingly mediatized world.

The volume closes with Part V, Religious Language and Nationalism, examining ways in which religious language use founds national communities. Part V examines the ways words shape interpretative communities and provides a new vantage point on the way in which communities revolve around the use of language. In Militant Religiopolitical Rhetoric: How Abraham Kuyper Mobilized His Constituency, Arie Molendijk analyzes the rhetorical strategies of what has been called the Netherlands’ first mass politician, Abraham Kuyper. Kuyper was well known for his militant and invective rhetoric. Molendijk charts the strategic use of Kuyper’s lectures. (His rhetoric was not only ‘rhetoric,’ but determined his politics to a great extent.) Words continually shape Kuyper’s adversaries, as well as his allies, and Molendijk uncovers a tendency in Kuyper to refer to the effects of his own words as telltale signs of his own capacities as an absolute leader of his movement. Finally, in Thinking through Religious Nationalism, Roger Friedland and Kenneth Moss argue, against Talal Asad (who has claimed that nationalism requires the concept of the secular to make sense), that at least in certain historical contexts, such as Polish Catholicism or Zionism, it is instead the concept of religion that has proven to be indispensable for the concept of nationalism. According to Friedland and Moss, the problem of nationalism should not be conceived in isolation from the problem of religion. Thus, the volume ends with a polemical discussion of the associations between words, religion, and nation, and the final last words of Friedland and Moss’s contribution underline the concerns of this book in multiple ways. Resisting any idea of purification, they promote the understanding that religion and nation-state can be co-implicated in a multiplicity of ways. Any attempt to purify this into abstract oppositions is risky: Purification protects our political imaginations; it does not promote our understanding of the world that has been shaking beneath our feet.

PART I

What Are Words?

CHAPTER 1

Word as Act

Varieties of Semiotic Ideology in the Interpretation of Religion

Michael Lambek

It is a privilege but also a risk and challenge to write about words to readers who make their living using words to study words. We are all textual scholars and text makers, professional interpreters of varying kinds. Yet it is an occupational hazard or dispensation of the scholar to see words as discrete and abstract phenomena. They sit, resonating on the page, and we struggle to translate or interpret them in and for themselves. In fact, though, words are uttered. An utterance is an act, not an abstraction, and acts take place in specific social contexts and have entailments and consequences. Every utterance invites response; hence I am confident mine will not be the last word.¹

Semiotic Ideologies

Consider the following questions:

Why and how do words matter to religion?

Is religious language different from ordinary language, and in what ways?

Is the specificity of its language a criterion of religion, a way of distinguishing it from other phenomena?

Do these questions and their answers apply universally or only to some specific set of historical formations?

These questions have provoked the present essay but will not be fully answered in it. Thinking about them in my capacity as an anthropologist led inevitably to consideration of some of the things anthropologists who study religion have already had to say about words, the observation that their approaches have been diverse, and eventually the conclusion that the answers to the initial questions cannot be absolute. I draw on the concept of semiotic ideology to clarify the picture. How one sees the place of word or words in religion depends not only on which semiotic ideologies we discern at play within religion or among religious practitioners but also on those that inform the anthropologist’s (or other scholar’s) own thought.

Semiotic ideology is a concept developed by Webb Keane, who drew in turn on Michael Silverstein’s concept of language ideology and cultural beliefs about language structure and its use in contexts of social difference.² The concept of language ideology helps address such questions as the formation of national language policies and debates about what makes good English. By semiotic ideology Keane means basic assumptions about what signs are and how they function in the world.³ In a brilliant and wide-ranging discussion to which I cannot possibly do justice, Keane describes semiotic ideologies as offering reflexive accounts of the relations of signs and language to what is outside them, hence to materiality, to intentionality, and to agency. He contrasts religious contexts in which it is correct to repeat ritual formulas with those, especially in certain forms of Protestantism, in which one should speak sincerely, individually, and from the heart. The role and function of words and speaking are conceptualized very differently in the two cases. To answer Stanley Cavell’s famous question Must We Mean What We Say?, the ritual formalist would claim, in effect, that we can mean only what we have said (and what others have said before us), whereas the Protestant semiotic ideology would urge that we must say only what we mean (and what is uniquely ours).⁴ In other words, the respective semiotic ideologies differ on whether saying or meaning is prior and critical. This implies further that the meaning of meaning something itself differs in the two cases. My tentative conclusion, and answer to the big questions posed above, is that what we or our interlocutors distinguish as specifically religious language marks the salience and consequentiality of the particular semiotic ideology in play, such that saying something and meaning it are brought together as closely as they can be under the semiotic ideology in question. This is a fancy way of saying that religious utterances are ones whose truth value and ethical force are marked relative to ordinary utterances. Specific words and actions are often brought into play to enhance such marking and force, as when we begin, but not under every semiotic ideology, In the name of God or place our hands on a Bible.

If the concept of semiotic ideology can differentiate among alternative kinds of speech communities or religious congregations, formations, and practices, surely we can distinguish among both philosophical and anthropological arguments according to their respective semiotic ideologies as well. To take a well-known illustration from philosophy, consider the positions of Austin and Wittgenstein. To summarize so severely that I risk caricature, where Austin sees answers in the ways in which we ordinarily use words, Wittgenstein sees problems in the way we use words, as though language lets us down. Not only are words to be purged of metaphysical excess, but as Simon Blackburn, quoting Fritz Mauthner (interpreting a famous Wittgenstein aphorism), puts it, as soon as we really have something to say, we are forced to be silent.⁵ Both Wittgenstein and Austin are concerned less with the definitions of specific words than with what they perceive to be an incorrect understanding of their functions and especially with a misplaced emphasis on the function of reference itself. However, whereas Austin shows the incredible precision and fineness of distinction in ordinary language, its ability unselfconsciously to get things right, Cavell, after Wittgenstein, attends to the danger of getting them wrong. Cavell points to the huge risks that ordinary speaking entails, the enormous consequentiality of being taken to mean what we say and of acknowledging having said it. It is precisely to the difficulty and consequentiality of meaning what one says that anthropologist Roy Rappaport suggests that ritual, and hence religion, offers some assistance.⁶

Conceptualizing Religion and Words

In this essay I explore how anthropology has explicitly addressed my original questions or implicitly assumed answers to them by means of its own diverse semiotic ideologies. One thing that anthropologists have certainly not agreed upon is a definition of the word religion itself, or even whether religion is the sort of thing of or for which a definition is possible. This is not the place to rehearse those debates, although we ought to be clear about one matter: Namely, that in both most nonmodern and non-Western societies, once the staple of anthropological investigation, religion is not disembedded as a discrete institution in the way we have taken it, rightly or wrongly, to be the case in contemporary (secular) Western societies. As such, religion may not always be conceptually distinguished by members of such societies as a discrete domain or phenomenon—that is to say, in such societies there is generally neither a single, homogeneous phenomenon to be labeled religion, nor are there distinctions made between different, discrete, or mutually exclusive religions—ours versus theirs, for example. That does not imply, however, that analytic concepts of religion are completely inadequate for framing, discerning, and investigating a series of roughly comparable dimensions of human thought, cultural constructions, and social practices across a range of times and places or that they cannot be made sharper or fuzzier.⁷ My point is that any general definition of religion, including the very possibility of such definition, is going to be shaped, in part, by the underlying semiotic ideology of the particular theorist.⁸

I do not think it useful or possible to make an absolute distinction between religious words or utterances and nonreligious ones, but there may be certain things about language uttered in ritual contexts or with religious intention or consequence that render them relatively distinct from other usages that one could by comparison call ordinary, unmarked, or belonging to other language games. I take it that such distinctions will be relative and that there are no stable or firm boundaries between the domain of religion and what is outside it in any sense other than that marked by legal decree on the part of the state. Certainly, the functions of anthropology do not include drawing or policing the borders.

By comparison to religion, anthropologists and linguists have had a somewhat easier time agreeing about the concept of words. Although the issues here cannot be resolved either and remain the subjects of lively debate, I will mention some features of words about which we do, more or less, agree. Words never appear alone but are located within fields of other words. We may speak here of syntactic and paradigmatic axes or chains. Syntactically, words are grammatically linked in phrases, sentences, conversations, and texts of various kinds—speeches, prayers, poems, and so on. Paradigmatically, each word substitutes for a chain of possible other words: its dictionary definition in the first instance, but also green instead of red or blue; God instead of man, woman, humankind, power, spirits, ancestors, prophets, and so on. Each word exists within a specific language, although languages are neither stable nor discrete; their boundaries are always open, and words are easily borrowed between languages. The point is, however, that each word is, or was, reasonably comprehensible to, or usable by, a collectivity of speakers or readers in a universe of other words syntactically and paradigmatically related to one another.⁹ As Geertz notes, the universal human facility and need for language nevertheless implies and requires that we speak in one particular language at a time.¹⁰ Neither polyphony nor code switching refutes this point.¹¹ Indeed, language is inherently social, not only spoken, but spoken to and with other speakers and perhaps auditors, and is thereby always context-sensitive. If we do not generally speak with the parsimony and unambiguousness advocated by logical positivists, we nevertheless usually speak in order to communicate, to make ourselves understood, to make our words available for interpretation and response by certain others who share sufficient features of our code and practice to be able to do so. We may also speak in such a manner as to be deliberately ambiguous or incomprehensible to those who stand outside our immediate speech community.