Lessons in Secular Criticism - (Thinking Out Loud) by Stathis Gourgouris (Hardcover)

About the Book

Disrupting recent fashionable debates on secularism, this book raises the stakes on how we understand the space of the secular, independent of its battle with the religious, as a space of radical democratic politics that refuse to be theologized.

Book Synopsis

Secular criticism is a term invented by Edward Said to denote not a theory but a practice that counters the tendency of much modern thinking to reach for a transcendentalist comfort zone, the very space philosophy wrested away from religion in the name of modernity. Using this notion as a compass, this book reconfigures recent secularism debates on an entirely different basis, by showing (1) how the secular imagination is closely linked to society's radical poiesis, its capacity to imagine and create unprecedented forms of worldly existence; and (2) how the space of the secular animates the desire for a radical democratic politics that overturns inherited modes of subjugation, whether religious or secularist.

Gourgouris's point is to disrupt the co-dependent relation between the religious and the secular hence, his rejection of fashionable languages of postsecularism in order to engage in a double critique of heteronomous politics of all kinds. For him, secular criticism is a form of political being: critical, antifoundational, disobedient, anarchic, yet not negative for negation's sake but creative of new forms of collective reflection, interrogation, and action that alter not only the current terrain of dominant politics but also the very self-conceptualization of what it means to be human.

Written in a free and combative style and given both to close readings of texts and to gazing off into the broad horizon, these essays cover a range of issues historical and philosophical, archaic and contemporary, literary and political that ultimately converge in the significance of contemporary radical politics: the assembly movements we have seen in various parts of the world in recent years. The secular imagination demands a radical pedagogy and unlearning a great many established thought patterns. Its most important dimension is not battling religion per se but dismantling theological politics of sovereignty in favor of radical conditions for social autonomy.

Review Quotes

"Lessons in Secular Criticism is a timely and polemical manifestation of parrhesia. It offers compelling evidence that 'post-secularism' comes neither 'after' the secular nor does it understand the 'secular'. Moving effortlessly between literary theory, philosophy, and politics, Gourgouris offers a profoundly democratic defense of criticism without transcendent principles and a critical defense of democracy without neoliberal capitalism. Lessons in Secular Criticism brilliantly diagnoses the key antagonism of our times as that between various heteronomies (theology, capital, transcendence) and autonomy, the power (kratos) of the demos to become otherwise. Read it."-Costas Douzinas, Birkbeck College, University of London

"This book defines the secular: 'to encounter one's life as a worldly affair and responsibility that rests on no foundation.' This definition drives Gourgouris' intervention in the critical debate around secularism and his reading of global popular revolts as lived forms of secular criticism. Erudite, thrilling, and provocative, this is, simply, urgent reading."-Martin Harries, New York University

"Gourgouris presents an incredibly intelligent means by which the secular can address [the challenge to the secular] without ultimately disturbing its own enabling habits."--Daniel Colucciello Barber, Los Angeles Review of Books

". . .Gourgouris not only challenges the metaphysical commitments he sees in traditional formations of secularism and religion, but he also significantly expands the potential meaning of the term 'secular criticism' . . ." -College Literature, Vol. 41.3

"Written in a free and combative and given both to close readings of texts and to gazing off into the broad horizon, these essays cover a range of issues historical and philosophical, archaic and contemporary, literary and political..." Theological Book Review Issue 26.2

About the Author

Stathis Gourgouris is Professor of Classics, English, and Comparative Literature and Director of the Institute for Comparative Literature and Society at Columbia University He is the author of Dream Nation: Enlightenment, Colonization and the Institution of Modern Greece and Does Literature Think? Literature as Theory for an Antimythical Era and editor of Freud and Fundamentalism (Fordham).