Age Of Enlightenment
The resounding call to reason which has been the battle cry of the Enlightenment is by now no more than a reverberating call to identify with the privileged reason of modernity – that of the market. REASON AND RELIGION through a genealogical study of the historico-material and theoretical terrains that have lent currency to such a discursive oppositionality while paying attention to the concrete strategies of its deployment as well as consequences to the possibility of truly. Throughout the semester, the course will show how the diverse pursuits, reflections and theoretical engagements of modern and contemporary political theorists are underpinned by a struggle to define the boundary of the religious and the non-religious with the aim of securing and guarding the freedom promised by the modern conceptualization of reason. At the heart of the course is a sustained and systematic effort as well as invitation to approach religion – that is, to consciously nurture and performatively cultivate a disciplinary form of subjectivity capable of making such an approach – and then to be possessed by religion – that, is to think about the present, about oneself and one’s relations as a subject of and constituted by religion. It entails asking first – who is making this approach? How has the one approaching religion been constituted as a subject and how has this subject come to know one’s subjectivity as such via one’s position in relation to religion? The course will argue that the constitution of contemporary political subjectivity along the discourses of consumerism andcoloniality has adversely influenced the ability of the modern subject to approach religion – that is, to consider the rationality and reasonableness of a religious approach to living in the world and with others. Central to these discourses is the reproduction of the ideology of secularism and its attendant constitution of religion as a moralizing rationality thus legitimizing religion’s occlusion from the world of public life while at the same time politicizing it to serve purposes other than theologically and ecclesiologically authorized ones. Thus, the critical motif of approaching religion via one’s engagement with the world and with others is viewed in this course as a liturgical celebration – a simultaneous affirmation of commonality and difference, a productive agonism that resists solipsism and atomism, a communion with the world that is truly revolutionary. Here, to be possessed by religion does not entail the abandonment of the self but in fact demands a heightened and deliberate awareness of the self’s encounters that allows the self to come into being rather than to declare its finality, that is a rejection of an apocalyptic conception of the self and the world and its place through acts and gestures of receptivity to the eschatological moment of reason, the triumph of an enlightened form of thinking that is able to appreciate the public, stabilizing and grounded positionality of each other rather than the invisible, arbitrary and irrationality of hierarchies brought about by a false sense of rationality – a longing, a desire to long. A student conference entitled, “Moving from the Critique of Religion towards Religion as Critique” will be held two weeks before the semester’s scheduled final examinations during which students will be presenting their work to a public audience. NOVEMBER 8, 10, 15 and 17 Why is the Enlightenment’s concept of reason and appeal to the use of reason selfdefeating and incapable of animating, building and sustaining communal existence? How did the Enlightenment distort the meaning of reason and how has it shaped our contemporary political vocabulary? How did truth become publicly inaccessible in the way the Enlightenment understood it? To what extent can invocations and appeal to truth still make sense, and in fact, necessary in order to acknowledge and endorse the reality of human differences? Why is the use of religious reason not grounded on moral imperatives but guided by tradition? Why is violence the result of a form of reason that is no longer bound with tradition? Why did the logic of property and the language of the economy become the prevailing constructs of Enlightenment rationality? Why can these constructs not fulfill the tasks of reason and as such only serve to betray reason? Why are the human capacities to desire and to reason not incompatible? What ways of understanding each would render them in opposition or contradiction? How did the historical-material conditions of the industrial capitalist age pervert the human capacity to desire? Why did capitalism emerge, how does it operate and how did it change the way religion was understood? Why is capitalism inherently exploitative? How does it conceal its exploitative tendencies? Why and how can religion not become complicit in the concealment, reproduction and legitimation of the exploitative nature of capitalism? How is capitalism involved in preventing critics of the consequences of capitalist accumulation from realizing the capacity of religion to pose a serious challenge to the capitalist system? Why is a class approach to the study of society compatible with a religious form of subjectivity? Ellen Meiksins-Wood. “Hunger,”Something in a Dream,” “God of Hope,” Thing-ForUs” in The Frankfurt School on Religion ed. Why would the delegitimization and suppression of the authority of religion over its subjects lead to the rise of totalitarianism? Why is religion’s insistence on the uniqueness of the human person a powerful antidote against totalitarian terror and ideology? How does religion provide a guard against escaping the pluralistic and deeply conflictual realm of worldly existence? Why do appeals to and invocations of the law today share in the logic of totalitarianism? Why is a formal account of state power inadequate in understanding the manner through which the interests of capitalism are reproduced and legitimized? Why should revolutionaries pay attention to the production of knowledge and why is the production as well as deployment of knowledge linked with the historico-material constitution of the dominant social order? Why and how can the disciplinary regimes and technologies of religion be conceptualized and utilized in the critique of capitalist modernity? Why and how can the body become a political strategy for resisting the normalizing gaze of capitalist modernity?
“I’ll say nothing against him. At one time the whites in the United States called him a racialist, and extremist, and a Communist. Then the Black Muslims came along and the whites thanked the Lord for Martin Luther King.”. “The goal has always been the same, with the approaches to it as different as mine and Dr. Martin Luther King’s non-violent marching, that dramatizes the brutality and the evil of the white man against defenseless blacks. And in the racial climate of this country today, it is anybody’s guess which of the”extremes” in approach to the black man’s problems might personally meet a fatal catastrophe first – “non-violent” Dr. King, or so-called “violent” me. “If violence is wrong in America, violence is wrong abroad. If it is wrong to be violent defending black women and black children and black babies and black men, then it is wrong for America to draft us, and make us violent abroad in defense of her. And if it is right for America to draft us, and teach us how to be violent in defense of her, then it is right for you and me to do whatever is necessary to defend our own people right here in this country.” “I’ve never seen a sincere white man, not when it comes to helping black people. Usually things like this are done by white people to benefit themselves. The white man’s primary interest is not to elevate the thinking of black people, or to waken black people, or white people either. The white man is interested in the black man only to the extent that the black man is of use to him. The white man’s interest is to make money, to exploit.” “I can’t turn around without hearing about some ‘civil rights advance’! White people seem to think the black man ought to be shouting ‘hallelujah’! Four hundred years the white man has had his foot-long knife in the black man’s back – and now the white man starts to wiggle the knife out, maybe six inches! The black man’s supposed to be grateful? Why, if the white man jerked the knife out, it’s still going to leave a scar!”. “When you go to a church and you see the pastor of that church with a philosophy and a program that’s designed to bring black people together and elevate black people, join that church! If you see where the NAACP is preaching and practising that which is designed to make black nationalism materialize, join the NAACP. Join any kind of organization-civic, religious, fraternal, political or otherwise-that’s based on lifting… the black man up and making him master of his own community.” “There can be no black-white unity until there is first some black unity…. We cannot think of uniting with others, until after we have first united among ourselves. We cannot think of being acceptable to others until we have first proven acceptable to ourselves.” “The white man knows what a revolution is. He knows that the Black Revolution is worldwide in scope and in nature. The Black Revolution is sweeping Asia, is sweeping Africa, is rearing its head in Latin America. The Cuban Revolution – that’s a revolution. They overturned the system. Revolution is in Asia, revolution is in Africa, and the white man is screaming because he sees revolution in Latin America. How do you think he’ll react to you when you learn what a real revolution is?”. “I’m not going to sit at your table and watch you eat, with nothing on my plate, and call myself a diner. Sitting at the table doesn’t make you a diner, unless you eat some of what’s on that plate. Being here in America doesn’t make you an American…. No I’m not an American, I’m one of the 22 million black people who are the victims of Americanism. One of the 22 million black people who are the victims of democracy, nothing but disguised hypocrisy…. I’m speaking as a victim of this American system. And I see America through the eyes of a victim. I don’t see any American dream; I see an American nightmare.” “One of the things that made the Black Muslim movement grow was its emphasis upon things African. This was the secret to the growth of the Black Muslim movement. African blood, African origin, African culture, African ties. And you’d be surprised – we discovered that deep within the subconscious of the black man in this country, he is still more African than he is American.” “We, the Black masses, don’t want these leaders who seek our support coming to us representing a certain political party. They must come to us today as Black Leaders representing the welfare of Black people. We won’t follow any leader today who comes on the basis of political party. Both parties are controlled by the same people who have abused our rights, and who have deceived us with false promises every time an election rolls around.” “I may say that I don’t think it should ever be put upon a black man, I don’t think the burden to defend any position should ever be put upon the black man, because it is the white man collectively who has shown that he is hostile toward integration and toward intermarriage and toward those other strides toward oneness. So as a black man, and especially as a black American, any stand that I formerly took, I don’t think that I have to defend it because it’s still a reaction to the society, and it’s a reaction that was produced by the society; and I think that it is the society that produced this that should be attacked, not the reaction that develops among the people who are the victims of that negative society.” “Before the Black Muslim movement came along, the NAACP was looked upon as radical; they were getting ready to investigate it. And then along came the Muslim movement and frightened the white man so hard that he began to say, ‘Thank God for old Uncle Roy, and Uncle Whitney, and Uncle A. Philip….'”. “In my recent travels into African countries and others, I was impressed by the importance of having a working unity among all peoples, black as well as white.” “For the freedom of my 22 million black brothers and sisters here in America, I do believe that I have fought the best that I know how, and the best that I could, with the shortcomings that I have had…I know that societies often have killed people who have helped to change those societies. And if I can die having brought any light, having exposed any meaningful truth that will help destroy the racist cancer that is malignant in the body of America then, all of the credit is due to Allah. Only the mistakes have been mine.”