Panel: TALES OF POSTSECULAR PERFORMANCE



761.1 - POSTSECULARITY AS TRANS-IMMANENCE OF THE BODY?

AUTHORS:
Kern C. (Faculty of Theology (cath.), Muenster ~ Muenster ~ Germany)
Text:
In a dominant mainstream discourse, postsecularity is understood as a practice of translation. Following Jürgen Habermas, theorists define the postsecular as a back-and-forth between religious and secular languages. In a joint cooperation process, both linguistic worlds are to be brought into contact with each other. In this process, the particularities of religious conviction are translated into generally understandable reasons, thus gaining political plausibility. A second main discourse understands post-secularity as a practice of questioning and contestation. Following in the footsteps of scholars like Talal Asad and Saba Mahmood, the post-secular consists in questioning dominant epistemic frameworks that developed primarily in Western contexts and distinguished the religious from its other, the secular. In critical genealogies, the conditions of origin and inconsistencies of such dichotomic theoretical frameworks are deconstructed and problematized. The postsecular then consists of a move into the open, "post" or "beyond" these organizing dichotomies. This paper takes up this second approach and deepens it. It elaborates that in the "post" of these critical approaches, a new sensitivity to bodies and affectivity in public space emerges. Far from being a simple material return to immanence, a different way of understanding and living the body as social reality appears: as a presence that is simultaneously permeated by an infinite absence and depth in which possible other forms of life—heteromorphies—announce themselves, without being conclusively definable. In this third perspective, the post-secular becomes the name for a vitalizing trans*immanence of the body in the struggle for political livability. The paper outlines this understanding of post-secularity and substantiates it with empirical findings from the work process of the Postsecular Performance Network.