Postsecular Encounters in World Politics

In a late interview, published after his death, one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century, looking to the future with an eye to the past, condensed in one sentence the historical and spiritual condition of his age: Nur noch ein Gott kann uns retten [only a God can save us]. ¹ With this seemingly simple phrase, Heidegger cast a counter-image as intense as the one launched by Nietzsche’s philosophical cry a century earlier. For, the ‘death of God’ and his invoked ‘resurrection’ metaphorically drew the philosophical and cultural boundaries of an age suspended between construction and deconstruction, nihilism and search for a nomos, being (Heidegger) and nothingness (Nietzsche). ² It is exactly within this intellectual landscape that the analyses of those who have sought to rethink the thorny relationship between religion and politics in the ‘age of disenchantment’ have found refuge. Once the great myths of the ‘accomplished secularization’ and of the ‘privatization of religion’ had faded, the so-called ‘resurgence of the sacred’ ³ – especially in International Relations ⁴ – revitalised some of the fundamental issues of our time. In particular, the complex debate on the relationship between secularisation and modernity, religion and conflict, democracy and inclusion has been reopened and reconsidered in the light of a new ‘postsecular awareness’. ⁵ This recent theoretical direction has been indicated by Jürgen Habermas who has taken a conceptual step back and spoken of the necessity of ‘postsecular encounters’ between religious and secular understandings of being-in-the-world, of ‘a change of attitude in favour of a dialogical relationship, open to learning, with all religious traditions’. ⁶

It is around these themes and issues that the two works under review have been developed. They offer novel, alternative and illuminating insights on how to rethink the relationship between religion, world politics and global ethics within the new theoretical postsecular horizon. These books somehow represent the two faces of the same coin. Mavelli elaborates a genealogical deconstruction of the problematic relationship between Europe and Islam which, figuratively, opens the way to Barbato’s postsecular construction.

From its outset Mavelli’s work can be considered as a sort of exploration in Orientalism ‘in reverse’. ‘Orientalism’ – Edward Said writes – ‘is a style of thought based upon an ontological and epistemological distinction made between “the Orient” and (most of the time) “the Occident”’. ⁷ To track this ontological prejudice, which spoils the relationships between Europe and Islam, Mavelli – instead of following Said’s path and retracing this ‘distribution of geopolitical awareness into aesthetics, scholarly, economic, sociological, historical, and philosophical texts’ ⁸ – prefers to draw what he calls a genealogy of the ‘secular episteme’. ⁹ Here, secular (in line with Charles Taylor) means a category, system of thought, or ‘a matter of the whole context of understanding in which our moral, spiritual, or religious experience … takes place’. ¹⁰ Mavelli wants to show how – to paraphrase Said – our western conceptions of the Occident, embodied in a secular forma mentis, made us emotionally immune to the ‘Other’ whether the stranger, the religious, the Muslim but also to a deeper form of knowledge, spiritually understood here following Foucault ¹¹ as transcendence of the self, overcoming of one’s own limits. To draw this genealogy of secularity, and to trace the origins of this conceptual and emotional ‘paradigm of immunity’, Mavelli – wisely relying on the works of Talal Asad ¹² and of the late Foucault ¹³ – begins his exploration from the Christian Middle Ages, passing through Descartes’ cogito and Kant’s Critiques, until directing his genealogical gaze towards the works of Durkheim and Weber. This initiatory path is useful to demonstrate how ‘the secular mode of knowledge’ – developed along this intellectual journey – ‘has marked the progressive withdrawal from the transcendent Other/God’ and ‘may have also contributed to a parallel, progressive withdrawal from the empirical other’. ¹⁴ According to the author, this is due to the fact that the conceptual fracture opened by Thomas Aquinas, with his dualistic distinction between body and soul, heaven and earth, the ‘civitas Dei’ and the ‘civitas terrena’, has over time suffered a process of immanentisation, as it were, through which the transcendent dimension was abandoned in favour of withdrawing into the physical/material one. Accordingly, the western conception of the individual, whether conceived as res cogitans or transcendental subject, leaves no room for encounters that do not happen on the ground of sheer conceptual abstraction, instrumental rationality, or pure and simple materiality; that is to say, within that secular space in which ‘it is not reason which supplants faith, but man’s faith in man which replaces man’s faith in God’. ¹⁵ This powerful description should not mislead. Mavelli does not naively sustain that ‘man moves in a secularized world in place of God as the creator of the Being of being’, ¹⁶ but rather that the western understanding of the individual, instead of freeing one’s potential to know and experience, has objectified and reduced one to sentimental and dialogical impotence. In order to understand this position, it is crucial to cite in extenso a fundamental text of Martin Heidegger:

the modern age has, as a consequence of the liberation of humanity, introduced subjectivism and individualism. But it remains just as certain that no age before this one has produced a comparable objectivism, and that in no age before this has the non-individual, in the shape of the collective, been accorded prestige. Of the essence here is the necessary interplay between subjectivism and objectivism. … This objectification of beings is accomplished in a setting-before, a representing, aimed at bringing each being before it in such a way that the man who calculates can be sure – and that means certain – of the being. ¹⁷

The question referred to above, therefore, helps to clarify how the secular episteme has created (following Heidegger) an empty form of man, the individual, stripped of all of its cultural and religious attributes, who as a neuter, but not neutral, entity in its human and intellectual encounters projects this spectral imagine of the self as archetype of knowledge. This is as if to say that the division between ‘us’ and ‘others’, religious and secular, European and Muslim, is the result of such representation of the western secular reason. In other words, even the secular individual/subject should be considered a ‘rationalized’ form of metaphysics.

It goes without saying that Mavelli’s genealogy is not inspired by Heidegger’s Seinsgeschichte but instead sinks its roots in the theoretical corpus of the Christian (Augustine and Aquinas) and post-secular ‘traditions’ (Taylor and Asad). Yet, Mavelli’s and Heidegger’s conceptualisations converge and overlap – at least at this level – creating an interesting vanishing point through which to escape the ‘rigidity’ of the classical approaches to the problem of secularism. For, through this framework, Mavelli offers a very powerful and provocative theoretical device not only to analyse the question of Euro-Islam, but also the problematic relations that link the ‘religious’ and the ‘secular’. L’affaire du foulard in France, ¹⁸ the Danish Cartoons controversy as well as the speech of Pope Benedict XVI at the University of Regensburg, can be seen as expressions of this inability to conceptually accept and interact with what has been ontologically constructed as different in order to ‘to mark a clear distance between “secular Europeans” and “religious Muslim”’. ¹⁹

At this point, it might be worth asking: how can Europe, and the West, bogged down in such a ‘secular swamp’, overcome this deadlock and rethink its identity in a new pluralistic and postsecular public sphere? Mavelli’s proposal – which, as we shall see, shares some points of contact with Barbato’s one – tends towards a positive reactivation of the idea of transcendence. To overcome the ‘secular flattening’ it is necessary to rediscover, especially in Europe, a different spiritual dimension. In this sense Mavelli does not align himself with scholars like William Connolly, Jürgen Habermas, and Jean-Luc Nancy who have rethought the principles and conditions of freedom, universality and becoming, only within a strictly immanent, contingent and dialogic plane. ²⁰ Instead, according to Mavelli, Europe needs to rethink itself as a space open on two sides: towards transcendence through which it might be possible to reconstitute a new immanent European public sphere, inclusive of otherness. ²¹

Following a very different path, Barbato’s work reaches a similar conclusion. His starting point is global mobilisation: that is, the process of collective loss of meaning and community fragmentation created by the dynamics of globalisation. Aware of the fact that one cannot respond to these challenging processes with a Leviathanic vision of politics (the so-called top-down approach), in his book, Barbato aims to provide – as Hobbes did for Modernity – a new metaphor adapted for our times of mobility. This new mythopoeic figure is identified with the pilgrim. For this concept offers ‘a new root metaphor’ appropriate to our condition of being-on-the-way and to rethink the ‘self, community and agency beyond liberal individualism, the Leviathan, contract and state’. ²² The pilgrim, in fact, is not the liberal nomad in search of profits in the age of global finance and, even less, the simple migrant ‘tossed around’ by the economic impact of mondialisation. ²³ It is not simply a homo faber on the road to materiality, but rather a homo viator who exploits these processes of globalisation ‘as a chance for new departures toward fullness’. ²⁴ In this sense, Barbato’s theoretical proposal may seem close to that literature that has attempted to rethink citizenship, the self, and ethics as mobility and nomadism. ²⁵ Yet, in reality it distances itself from them precisely because its aim, which is clearly explicit from the outset of the work and in its subtitle, is to give a theoretical contribution to international relations using a religious semantics. ²⁶ Against the vision of the liberal homo oeconomicus and of Habermas’s homo dialogicus, Barbato’s pilgrim is part of a global community which reinvents itself through the experience of travel, spiritual movement, and internal and collective meditation. Individual and community, particular and universal, time and history are reunited – yet at the same time remain distinct – in the experience of pilgrimage in which the ‘notion of universal is … not what is accessible to all in principle but that which allows all to come together in a specific situation and which creates the capacity for further action’. ²⁷ For these reasons, he is closer to Cosmopolitan and English School approaches that stress ‘the concomitance of pluralistic, solidaristic and global governance approaches rather fragmented than unified as a picture of our liquid age of transformation’. ²⁸ And it is therein that its originality lies. In an attempt to combine, in a creative and original way, political pragmatism and Christian ethics, Barbato breaks (partially) with the Christian realist tradition of Reinhold Niebuhr ²⁹ to propose what may be called a new ‘Cosmopolitan Catholicism’ suitable for the twenty-first century.

The fascination of this book lies above all in the narrative style and the method used: Barbato leads us on a tour de force around the world, the sacred sites and key figures of Christianity. From Manila to Loreto, Mexico City to Lourdes, Jerusalem to Rome; international relations are reinterpreted in the light of a potential spiritual community, which he calls the ‘Pilgrim City’, that might arise – in harmony with the work of Mavelli – ‘from the in-between of heaven and earth’. ³⁰

Yet, it is precisely on this last statement that the instantia crucis of the postsecular discourses of the two authors lies. In fact, both Mavelli’s and Barbato’s theoretical approaches call for a positive re-discovery (revitalisation) of transcendence. In Mavelli’s book, which on this point follows the work of Martin Buber, ³¹ this dimension is described as ‘non-religious religiosity’, in the sense that the new concept of solidarity – based on the I-Thou relationship – must be understood ‘as encounter between self and other mediated by a transcendent Other and centred on an idea of knowledge as a critical ontology of the self’. ³² Barbato offers a very similar idea: the rediscovery of the City of God as a source of transcendence in order to break the apathy created by the secular habitus. For, the strength of the pilgrim is to be inspired, and on-the-way, because she tends towards a heavenly utopia, a sacred transcendent dimension. ³³ From these theoretical proposals some crucial issues arise that are worth mentioning in conclusion.

For instance, if it is true, as Mavelli argues, that the secular episteme has flattened the source of our Euro-western knowledge on a limited rationality so as to make us a sort of one-dimensional secular men, how is it then possible to bring forth, from within such an immanent conception, a new opening to transcendence? Is this not a rational tentative to recover (reinvent) the sacred as a solution for the emotional desert created by instrumental rationality? What I am trying to say is that transcendence cannot be invented, or rather, cannot be instrumentally reintroduced in a world where science and technology are the new ontologies. This is precisely what Nietzsche means when, in a locus classicus, discussing the notions of free will and causality, he writes:

The longing for ‘freedom of the will’ in the superlative metaphysical sense …, the longing to bear the entire and ultimate responsibility for your actions yourself and to relieve God, world, ancestors, chance, and society of the burden – all this means nothing less than being that very causa sui and, with a courage greater than Münchhausen’s, pulling yourself by the hair from the swamp of nothingness up into existence. ³⁴

Once man ‘has killed God’ and discovered of being the ‘cause of himself’, it becomes impossible to rethink transcendence, if not from a human, private and immanent perspective. Transcendence, in fact, following Heidegger, cannot be understood only as the ‘highest being itself’. ³⁵ Historically, it refers to another dual meaning: transcendence as a relationship between human being and Being, and as a relationship leading from the ‘changeable being to a being in repose’ ³⁶ (which is the meaning resumed by Foucault to form his idea of   knowledge). The fact that transcendence nowadays is conceived only as ‘other/high dimension’ is indicative of how our gaze is directed from the bottom upwards; that is, from human being (immanence) towards God (transcendence).

The same critical approach can be used for Barbato. If the pilgrim is understood not as a secular tourist but as a homo viator; that is, as the one who needs a transcendent tension (precisely to transcend the physical, cultural and political boundaries) to stay on the road, this appears extremely difficult in the ‘age of disenchantment’. Pilgrimage in medieval times was significant because it took place within a shared ethos, a Christian aeon, an all-encompassing cosmos. Today is the common centre which is lacking. Religious semantics may remain without pragmatics, as it were, if deprived of the sacred background upon which to unfold itself. For every historical epoch rests, to put it again with Heidegger, ³⁷ on an ontological background which today is well represented by the immanence of technology, and upon which it is difficult to re-engage a religious ontology as a type of collective fulcrum. In the age of neutralisations and depoliticisations, ³⁸ the centre has been occupied by technology, unleashed on a global scale, which rejects any idea of form and spirit: and this is precisely what alarmed Carl Schmitt, from whom Barbato explicitly dissociates himself. ³⁹ The German jurist was obsessed with the question of unity and political form, not only because from the Greek polis to the wane of the Jus Publicum Europaeum, politics was conceivable and viable only within a physical space, but also because such a community needs a form and place in the world even when it takes the form of a ‘spiritual community’, or ethos. In fact, even a sacred site loses its order (Ordnung) and orientation (Ortung) if that spiritual and conceptual space is not shared. The Buddhas in the Bamiyan Valley certainly represented a spiritual and meditative place to a community. Yet, their physical destruction at the hands of the Taliban is testimony that a space – be it physical or spiritual – will always be at the mercy of the ‘political’ if it is not founded on a nomos, a shared moral and political guiding centre. It has been authoritatively stated that ‘without a concrete politico-spatial determination, there is only formless virtuality and dominated inauthenticity. There is not even plurality – only dispersal.’ ⁴⁰ I personally share this fear of the ‘political vacuum’, of the horror vacui activated by the processes of global mobilisation.

These are reflections that detract nothing from Mavelli’s and Barbato’s elegant theoretical elaborations, but rather wish to emphasise the thematic and theoretical complexity of the matter. Faced with such a critical perspective, it seems fair to recall the positions of those who, like Heidegger, preferred a ‘productive silence’, and the expectation created by it, precisely in the knowledge that – from this humana conditio – ‘only a God can save us’. That is to say – paraphrasing Nietzsche – only a transcendence that entered the world and, pulling us by the hair, saved us from our nihilistic condition, could revive the dialogue between human being and Being, immanent and transcendent grounds. It is also for this reason that scholars such as Rosi Braidotti ⁴¹ and William Connolly ⁴² – but especially Gilles Deleuze – revisiting Spinoza, have beaten alternative paths, looking for new intellectual spaces within ‘absolute contingency’, in an attempt to reinvent an ethics of alterity understood as ‘voyage in immanence’ ⁴³ ‘which is no longer an individuation but a singularization: a life of pure immanence, neutral, beyond good and evil’. ⁴⁴ An ethics that rediscovers the totality of living, in an inner recollection, similar to the natural music sung by the great American poet Robinson Jeffers:

I believe if we were strong enough to listen without

Divisions of desire and terror

To the storm of the sick nations, the rage of the hunger smitten cities,

Those voices also would be found

Clean as a child’s; or like some girl’s breathing who dances alone

By the ocean-shore, dreaming of lovers. ⁴⁵

Yet, although ‘the poetry that thinks’, as Heidegger argues, can help us to open novel horizons of meaning and conceptual spaces to rethink these enormous problems, the solutions – in this writer’s opinion – still seem stuck in the web of the ‘political’. Thomas Hobbes’ questions – Quis judicabit? Quis intepretabitur? [Who will judge? Who will interpret?] – still echo unanswered. Who will decide in concreto ⁴⁶ what is morally right or wrong in the age of global finance and of the crisis of the state? What political forms will the communities take in the era of virtual liquidity? Who will decide when to use – and how to measure – (legitimate) violence in order to stop (illegitimate) violence? The works of Mavelli and Barbato certainly offer two exciting alternative paths within the new postsecular horizon to rethink the relationship between religion, world politics and the sacred – inspired as they are towards a new communitarian and ‘errant ethics’ – but even they have, along the way, to deal with the brutality of the ‘political’ and the force of nihilistic attraction of the secular.