Paranoid Repair: Literature, Religion, and the Post-Secular Mood

This paper returns to an old question—“Is critique secular?”—in order to ask a new one: “Is the post-critical turn post-secular?” The famous 2007 symposium on the question of secular critique imagined a shared affective posture between secularism and critique itself: relentless skepticism towards perceived reality, and an equally relentless hunger to unveil the worldly constructions masquerading as metaphysical Absolutes. Almost 20 years later, “post” critical and “post” secular both gesture vaguely towards a revisionist mood that hungers for more hopeful, more horizontal, more constructive, and more ethically responsible paradigms of interpretation. By reading Sedgwick’s description of reparative reading alongside Anna Kornbluh’s Immediacy, I take stock of the post-secular’s strange critical posture, one as uninvested in distinguishing between representation and the real as it is invested in affect as an interpretative apparatus.