You are here

Home

Violent Ground: Theorizing Religion between Continental Philosophy and the Colonial Americas

Submitted to Program Units
1: Critical Theory and Discourses on Religion Unit

Kristin Scheible, Reed College, Presiding

Abstract for Online Program Book (maximum 150 words)

This omnibus session invites discussion after each pair of papers. Paper one argues for a reading of “Force of Law” that positions it as both a continued engagement with Levinas’s conceptions of violence – in ways both affirming and critical – and as a corrective to some of Derrida’s own earlier thinking on violence. Paper two takes up Jacques Derrida’s worry that Walter Benjamin’s notion of divine violence too closely mirrors the forms of mythic violence that it is supposed to undo. Paper three asks: What is the relationship between modern finance, the violence of chattel slavery, and the formation of American religious identity? Focusing in on Iiyiyiu histories of land-based activism, paper four suggests that Indigenous appeals to religion that enunciate sustained resistance to the colonial project are acts of resignification and theories of religion in their own right born from a methodology of sustained relationships to place.

Papers

  • Bevin Blaber,
    Bevin Blaber,

    Derrida, Levinas, and Economic Violence

    Abstract

    In this paper, I argue for a reading of “Force of Law” that positions it as both a continued engagement with Levinas’s conceptions of violence – in ways both affirming and critical – and as a corrective to some of Derrida’s own earlier thinking on violence. To make this case, I first trace Levinas’s views on non-violence as he sketches them in Totality and Infinity and Difficult Freedom and discuss Derrida’s critical response to these formulations and their role in Levinas’s broader ethical scheme. I will then explicate Levinas’ treatment of violence and non-violence in Otherwise Than Being as a response to Derrida’s critique and argue that his justification of the concept of non-violence is ultimately insufficient in the context of his ethical system. In light of this, I argue that it is all the more significant that in “Force of Law”, Derrida will forcefully trouble the notion of a justified violence.  

  • Michael Mango, Harvard University

    "Affinities with the Worst": Divine Violence, Nature's Teleology, and Benjamin's Relationship to Radical Conservatism

    Abstract

    This paper takes up Jacques Derrida’s worry that Walter Benjamin’s notion of divine violence too closely mirrors the forms of mythic violence that it is supposed to undo. It places Derrida’s concerns in the wider context of Benjamin’s relationship of “intimate enmity” with radical conservative thinkers. The “Critique of Violence” was intended by Benjamin as one part of a larger political project, in which he sought to respond to the variety of forms of vitalist politics popular among both left- and right-wing figures in the early twentieth century. By setting “Critique of Violence” within this wider perspective, the paper underscore two important features of Benjamin’s politics: first, his assumption that emancipatory practices stand in an uncomfortable proximity to that which they seek to overcome and, second, his insistence that the realms of politics and of divine justice are not coextensive, with the result that their relation always remains troubled.

  • Matthew Tintera, Duke University

    Liquid Goods, Sacred Objects: Slavery, Finance, and the Violence of American Religion

    Abstract

    What is the relationship between modern finance, the violence of chattel slavery, and the formation of American religious identity? In this paper, I argue that the process of fashioning African captives into financial assets relied upon an apparatus of cultural and material violence that was fundamentally religious in nature and, in turn, that their status as liquid goods in the U.S. monetary economy positioned slaves as sacred objects in the nation’s religious economy. I thus approach the question of American religion not in terms of a particular tradition but by examining the religious logics structuring American social and political life. I draw on the work of Orlando Patterson and René Girard to read antebellum U.S. banking practices as operations of a broader sacrificial system serving to shore up American religio-political identity by positioning the enslaved as its quintessential victims, a renewable resource nourishing both its religious and financial life.

  • Meaghan Weatherdon, University of Toronto

    Land as Method: Grounding the Study of Religion

    Abstract

    This paper asks how scholars of religion might approach Land as method. It considers what new insights and questions emerge when community situated theories of religion informed by long standing relationships to particular land bases are permitted entry into the critical study of religion? It attempts to participate in an Indigenous epistemology that labors to listen to the Land on the question of religion and considers what religious studies scholars might learn from the field of Indigenous studies that has long insisted Land and nonhuman beings also generate knowledge. Focusing in on Iiyiyiu histories of land-based activism it suggests that Indigenous appeals to religion that enunciate sustained resistance to the colonial project are acts of resignification and theories of religion in their own right born from a methodology of sustained relationships to place and histories of survivance.

Business Meeting
Katja Rakow, Utrecht University, Presiding
Kristin Scheible, Reed College, Presiding
Audiovisual Requirements

Resources

LCD Projector and Screen
Play Audio from Laptop Computer
Podium microphone

Full Papers Available

No
Program Unit Options

Session Length

2 Hours
Schedule Info

Sunday, 9:00 AM - 11:00 AM

Tags

# Violence
#Vitalism
#Walter Benjamin
#Jacques Derrida

Session Identifier

A24-115