Secularization and Cultural Criticism
Religion, Nation, and Modernity
Religion is an undiscovered country for much of the secular academy, which remains deeply ambivalent about it as an object of study. On the one hand, secular scholars agree that it is time to take religion seriously. On the other, these same scholars persist in assuming that religion rests not on belief but on power and ideology. According to Vincent Pecora, the idea of the secular itself is the source of much of the contradiction and confusion in contemporary thought about religion. Pecora aims here to work through the paradoxes of secularization, which emerges in this book as an intractable problem for cultural criticism in the nation-states of the post-Enlightenment West.
Secularization and Cultural Criticism examines the responses of a wide range of thinkers—Edward Said, Talal Asad, Jürgen Habermas, Walter Benjamin, Emile Durkheim, Carl Schmitt, Matthew Arnold, and Virginia Woolf, among others—to illustrate exactly why the problem of secularization in the study of society and culture should matter once again. Exploring the endemic difficulty posed by religion for the modern academy, Pecora makes sense of the value and potential impasses of secular cultural criticism in a global age.
“Vincent Pecora’s important new book offers a powerful meditation on the complexities of secularization in modernity. His wide-ranging analysis reconstructs the rich intellectual history surrounding secularism and provides a compelling framework for understanding the ambiguous persistence of religious concepts and forms in modern thought, literature, and institutions. This is a superb study, one whose capacious insights move beyond some of the more entrenched divides in the debates over the project of modernity and the ongoing task of the humanities.”—Amanda Anderson, author of The Way We Argue Now: A Study in the Cultures of Theory
“At a moment of frightening emergency for Edward Said’s secular ideal, Vincent Pecora offers an ingenious and innovative defense: he concedes the ideal’s ambiguities, fills in its compromising history of continuing engagement with religious tradition, and sets up a subtle and judicious negotiation with its detractors in which they too are asked to concede their deep complicity with the secularism they oppose. This work of high and generous intelligence shows us interdisciplinarity in the most visibly valuable sense.”—Bruce Robbins, author of Feeling Global: Internationalism in Distress
Introduction
1. Secular Criticism and Secularization
2. Benjamin, Kracauer, and Redemptive History
3. Durkheim's Modernity
From the Theory of Religion into Political Theology
4. Arnoldian Ethnology
Nation Between Religion and Race
5. The Modernist Moment
Virginia Woolf Voyages Out
Conclusion
Humanism and Globalization
Bibliography
Index
Literature and Literary Criticism: General Criticism and Critical Theory
Religion: Religion and Society
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