01/07/2026 15:00 - 17:10

HALL: Pola - A104

Contact: Serpytyte R.

Chair: Baceviciute D., Serpytyte R.

Panel description: In the contemporary conceptualization of religious experience, the structure of "secular religiosity" and a number of other definitions of (religious) experience raise questions about the boundaries and limits of religious experience, highlighting the (in)commensurability, identity/difference of other experiential structures, as well as their (in)equality in relation to religious experience. The structure of experience that universally accumulates the ambivalence of the relationship between religious experience and other, different, diverse experiences is, we believe, the structure of repetition. Although this structure appears in discourses that seem quite distant from religious experience, its roots are religious. Giorgio Agamben speaks of repetition as anakephala?ösis/ricapitolazione, appealing to the Greek tradition and the letters of the Apostle Paul. In Jacques Derrida's figure of hantise, at least three phantasmagorical levels can be distinguished: phantasm, phantom, and revenant (repetition). The dimension of spectrality is ontologically "flawed" dimension of "being-other," one of whose levels is namely repetition.
This panel therefore invites us to reflect on the limits of religious experience, based on the structure of repetition. This perspective may include not only a reconsideration of Agamben's messianism as a structure of repetition, Derrida's inquiry into the (non)spirituality of revenant's "being", Kearney's perspective of anatheism, which directly raises the question of secular religiosity, and the thinking of many other contemporary authors on the limits of religious experience.