This panel offers a series of approaches that critically rethink the entanglements of religion with law, politics, and culture beyond the inherited secularist logics of past scholarship. Across legal theory, political economy, ethnography, and contemporary art, the papers trace how the religious persists within ostensibly secular domains. One paper reconsiders legal positivism as an “uneasy godlessness” structured by implicit theological commitments, while another reframes capitalism as itself a post-secular formation with profound effects on modern life. A third ethnographically demonstrates how secular governance in India is sustained through “vernacular theodicies” that render bureaucratic uncertainty bearable, and the final paper examines an artistic intervention at a Brazilian museum event to elucidate how secular institutions can absorb ritual critique. Together, these papers underscore how religious formations may continue to operate within putatively ‘secular’ institutions, systems of thought, and bureaucratic apparatuses as well as the political and lived consequences of those residues.
Adopting the post-secular as a critical posture for engaging the humanistic study of law, this paper seeks to render explicit legal positivism’s “religious memory” and its persistence within a “religious archive.” By analyzing the account of legal obligation that distinguishes HLA Hart’s brand of positivism from earlier command theories of law, I attempt to show that this view of legal obligation presupposes an individual’s knowledge of some set of social facts whose recognition is deemed necessary for a community’s survival and, by extension, the ability to discern them. This capacity for discernment, I contend, recovers and modifies a form of observational rationality, disused by command theorists, but inherited from the natural law tradition. Such rapprochements with the intellectual reserves of law’s religious archive, I conclude, are particularly important in the present political moment, in which the line between law and sovereign command is increasingly blurred.
This paper introduces the necessity of a postsecular conception of capitalism as religion as an intervention into the discourse of postsecularity and its tendency to reduce the significance of capitalism and its concrete material and social processes in its analysis of religion, culture, and politics. Taking William E. Connolly's project in Capitalism and Christianity as a postsecular framework that tackles this question, I point to the limitations of Connolly's analysis in his reformist conclusions and the relative autonomy he gives to cultural theological formations. Instead, I argue that a synthesis of Benjamin's and Marx's conceptions of capitalism as religion is necessary to an adequate postsecular analysis of capitalist assemblages. I then address the three political options of re-enchantment, disenchantment, and what I term counter-enchantment in the context of this analysis of capitalism as religion.
When bureaucratic processes stall for days—servers are down, requirements seem constantly shifting, and no one is able (or willing) to say why—what keeps citizens from abandoning the process altogether? Dependency may explain why citizens cannot easily exit stalled bureaucratic processes, but it does not explain how encounters repeatedly close without resolution yet avoid rupture—i.e., the interpretive and moral work that makes continued participation bearable and even livable at times. Based on fieldwork in Ahmedabad’s citizen service centres, I illustrate how everyday welfare governance in Gujarat depends on vernacular theodicies that make delay and non-resolution bearable. In these moments, secularity is not the absence of religion (i.e., transcendental power) but the redistribution of transcendence into procedural abstractions, promissory timelines, and moral horizons that exceed the office. I argue that vernacular theodicies are how secularity is practically sustained within one of India’s prevalent forms of secularism: managerial secularism.
In November 2018, indigenous Brazilian artist Denilson Baniwa staged a ritual intervention at the 33rd São Paulo Biennial, one of the largest stages in Brazilian contemporary art. Critiquing the exhibition’s representation of indigenous people, Denilson marched through the galleries wearing a yellow jaguar mask and a leopard cape, inhabiting the “jaguar-shaman”—a Baniwa intermediary between human, animal, plant and more-than-human worlds. “Hacking” the biennial, he performed a ritual critique, contesting ideas about modernity and indigenous art while confronting the exhibition’s complicity in settler colonialism. This paper analyzes this performance and its afterlife. Using the framework of “secular aesthetics,” I argue Denilson’s ritual critique was a constitutive part of his attachment to the museum as an institution with redemptive potential for civic life. I analyze his work to demonstrate the “absorptive quality” of secular aesthetics, showing how art museums have absorbed and performed ritual critiques, exhibitionary alternatives, and decolonial imaginaries.