040112

In May i listed some forthcoming books. Some of those still aren’t out yet. Some new ones are rumoured to be in press but aren’t yet listed (Agrama’s Secular Paradox). But these do have dates listed:

• Daniel Barber, On Diaspora: Christianity, Religion, and Secularity (Wipf and Stock, 2011)
• Whitney Bodman, The Poetics of Iblis: Narrative Theology in the Qur’an (Harvard UP, 2011)
• Giorgio Agamben, The Church and Its Reign (Seagull, 2012)
• Kevin Newmark, Irony on Occasion: From Schlegel and Kierkegaard to Derrida and de Man (Fordham, February 2012)
• Michael Naas, Miracle and Machine: Jacques Derrida and the Two Sources of Religion, Science, and the Media (Fordham, February 2012)
• Peter Gratton, The State of Sovereignty: Lessons from the Political Fictions of Modernity (SUNY Press, February 2012)
• Sherine Hamdy, Our Bodies Belong to God: Organ Transplants, Islam, and the Struggle for Human Dignity in Egypt (University of California Press, March 2012)
• Nadia Abu El-Haj, The Genealogical Science: The Search for Jewish Origins and the Politics of Epistemology (University of Chicago Press, March 2012)
• Ovamir Anjum, Politics, Law, and Reason in Islamic Thought: The Taymiyyan Moment (Cambridge UP, March 2012)
• Mohammad Hassan Khalil, Islam and the Fate of Others: The Salvation Question (Oxford UP, March 2012)
• Sherman Jackson, Sufism for Non-Sufis?: Ibn ‘Ata’ Allah al-Sakandari’s Taj al-’Arus (Oxford UP, April 2012)
• Ahmad Ahmad, The Fatigue of the Shari’a (Palgrave, April 2012)
• Jean-Luc Nancy, Adoration: The Deconstruction of Christianity II (Fordham, May 2012)
• Anna Korteweg and Jennifer Selby (eds), Debating Sharia: Islam, Gender Politics, and Family Law Arbitration (U of T Press, May 2012)
• Philip Gorski et al (eds), The Post-Secular in Question: Religion in Contemporary Society (NYU Press, May 2012)
• Samera Esmeir, Juridical Humanity: A Colonial History (Stanford UP, June 2012)
• Khaled Furani, Silencing the Sea: Secular Rhythms in Palestinian Poetry (Stanford UP, July 2012)
• Patrick O’Donnell, Advanced Dictionary of Islam: Jurisprudence, Theology, Mysticism and Philosophy (Continuum, August 2012)
• John Bowen, The New Anthropology of Islam (Cambridge UP, October 2012)

231111

prospective MA thesis abstract. obviously subject to revision, &etc. working to complete a draft by mid-december.

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At the end of “What Might an Anthropology of the Secular Look Like?”, the first chapter of his Formations of the Secular, Talal Asad provides a dense discussion of two conceptions of the secular “available to anthropology today.” The first concept is developed through Paul de Man’s discussion of Romantic symbol, and the second through Walter Benjamin’s discussion of baroque allegory. Asad concludes that Benjamin’s approach is more helpful for addressing the “ambiguous connections between the secular and modern politics,” and then moves on in the next chapters to discuss agency, pain, and cruelty in relation to embodiment; no reference to either de Man or Benjamin is made for the rest of the book. But the opposition between symbol and allegory has a long European heritage, with distinct periods, methods, and tropes associated with each. In what follows, I first attempt to situate Asad’s discussion of symbol and allegory both in reference to certain historical polemics against each and in reference to broader scholarship on de Man and Benjamin. Second, by describing Benjamin’s allegory as a way to address the relationship between the secular and modern politics, Asad makes a critical intervention into contemporary debates on political theology. I thus read Asad’s comments on symbol and allegory as continuous with his explicit comments on Carl Schmitt and Jean-Luc Nancy. Finally, Benjamin’s notion of allegory articulates both a distinct experience of temporality and a critique of historical reason. I argue that it is this temporality, the time of allegory, that Asad recommends to the anthropology of the secular. By reading this brief section through these three registers (de Man/Benjamin; political theology; temporality), I hope to correct for the scant attention Asad’s comments on symbol and allegory have received, despite the proliferating scholarship on the secular.

031111

I wrote the following paragraphs for an essay I was working on in spring, but the section never made it into the final version (in part because it relies too much on secondary sources and i didn’t have time to go deeper into it, and in part because the paper itself was far too long already). So the paragraphs resurface here, instead. Some thoughts on Agamben’s treatment of al-Ghazali, after the break.

111011

started reading The Kingdom and the Glory this week. At the end of the preface he says

In opposition to the ingenuous emphasis on productivity and labor that has long prevented modernity from accessing politics as man’s most proper dimension, politics is here returned to its central inoperativity, that is, to that operation that amounts to rendering inoperative all human and divine works. The empty throne, the symbol of Glory, is what we need to profane in order to make room, beyond it, for something that, for now, we can only evoke with the name the zoe aionios, eternal life. It is only when the fourth part of this investigation, dedicated to the form-of-life and use, is completed, that the decisive meaning of inoperativity as a properly human and political praxis will be able to appear in its own light.

The expanding “homo sacer” project now looks like this:

1) Homo Sacer

2.1) State of Exception

2.2) The Kingdom and the Glory

2.3) The Sacrament of Language

3) Remnants of Auschwitz

4) Forthcoming part on “form-of-life and use”

Does that look about right? The internet lists a few more recent publications (La Chiesa e il Regno, Altissima poverta, Opus Dei, etc), but, not knowing Italian, i don’t know if or how they fit in here.

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edit: Lara’s comment: “This makes Agamben the George R R Martin of continental philosophy.”

300911

i often miss the prairies. As i have told some friends while declaiming these lines, i am quite sure this has as much to do with living in the city as it does with living out east, but i sometimes feel like all my pores are clogging up by not ever being able to see the horizon (unless we walk down to the water, and that is a different kind of horizon). It’s not a sour feeling, in itself – we love where we live, the balcony garden with the tomato jungle and pots of potatoes and the fields of mint and basil, the family we live with, the routines we have built and the people who visit, and U of T itself is really great…but i miss leaving the city, leaving the city lights behind. The way northern lights fill the sky, that the midnight bark of a doe cracks the silence, that traffic noise stops.

These days: am reading Cormac Mccarthy, listening to Jeffrey Foucault, doing editing work, writing thesis, and taking a class on religion in liberal law and sitting in on a tafsir class. Fall in Alberta is always a two-week affair, rushing to get the leaves off the trees before the first snowfall, but here it’s long enough that you can settle into it, watch the colours change and the air turn crisp. ketiva ve-chatima tova

070911

In his recent interview with Peter Mansbridge, Stephen Harper says “Islamicism” is the biggest security threat facing Canada. “Islamicist”, of course, is the older term for the subcategory of Orientalists studying Islam (as in the title of Nasr’s “In Commemoration of Louis Massignon: Catholic, Scholar, Islamicist, and Mystic”). There is something perversely hilarious in the idea of cells of radical Islamicists gathering and plotting to attack Canada. Revisionists and grand masters, together! In the difference between Goldziher’s Muslim Studies (1890) and the more recent edited collections Approaches to Islam in Religious Studies (1985) and Rethinking Islamic Studies: From Orientalism to Cosmopolitanism (2010) lies nothing less than the doom of this great country. Allahu akbar.