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The Politics of Postsecular Religion: Mourning Secular Futures (Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture) by Ananda Abeysekara is a book available to read on EtoBox.

What is The Politics of Postsecular Religion: Mourning Secular Futures (Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture) about?

Ananda Abeysekara contends that democracy, along with its cherished secular norms, is founded on the idea of a promise deferred to the future. Rooted in democracy's messianic promise is the belief that religious--political identity-such as Buddhist, Hindu, Sinhalese, Christian, Muslim, or Tamil--can be critiqued, neutralized, improved, and changed, even while remaining inseparable from the genocide of the past. This facile belief, he argues, is precisely what distracts us from challenging the violence inherent in postcolonial political sovereignty. At the same time, we cannot simply dismiss the democratic concept, since it permeates so deeply through our modernist, capitalist, and humanist selves. In The Politics of Postsecular Religion, Abeysekara invites us to reconsider our ethical-political legacies, to look at them not as problems, but as aporias, in the Derridean sense-that is, as contradictions or impasses incapable of resolution. Disciplinary theorizing in religion and politics, he argues, is unable to identify the aporias of our postcolonial modernity. The aporetic legacies, which are like specters that cannot be wished away, demand a new kind of thinking. It is this think

Author

Ananda Abeysekara

Publisher

Columbia University Press

Published

2008

Language

EN

ISBN

9780231142908

Subjects

Philosophy, History, Religion