At the Limits of the Secular

Postcolonialism’s understanding of religion, broadly conceived, depends on a certain secular relation between critique and history. It is assumed that historicization constitutes a critical secular practice within which true-to-the-Greek and other conventional senses of the word ‘critique’ ultimately cause life to become separated from itself. The chapter suggests that the critical historicization of religion, and of life more generally, which foregrounds itself as a particular secular possibility for our present, has yet to think the question of ‘inheritance-translation’ (Derrida) in which such historicization remains necessarily implicated.

Aesthetics · Epistemology · Inheritance (genetic algorithm) · Postcolonialism (international relations) · Relation (database) · Secularity · Social science · Sociology · History · Philosophy · Religion and Society Interactions · Religious studies