Queer (anti)sociality and the promises of the “social turn”

In response to the critique that “religion” is a Protestant category, privileging (individual) belief over (collective) practice, philosophers of religion working out of modern Christian sources have rightly sought to nuance this claim by showing that Christian philosophers like Kant or Schleiermacher also care about moral action or social cohesion. By contrast, modern Jewish philosophy, which frames dialogical ethics, sociality, intersubjectivity, and obligation to the other as its foundational contribution, has not had to contend with this same challenge. Yet for all the ways modern Jewish philosophy prizes the ethical import of its “originary” sociality, its ethical import, I suggest, may just be in forms of sociality illegible to philosophy’s so-called “social turn.” I turn to queer sociality to develop this claim and to ask whether sociality can do the kind of ethical and political work in philosophy that it is called upon to do.