Postsecular History

What is postsecular history? As Maxwell Kennel powerfully argues in Postsecular History: Political Theology and the Politics of Time, it is a critical form of history-making that works against progressivist narratives of history, whether religious or secular. Kennel asserts that both secular and religious approaches to history are susceptible to different forms of historical triumphalism wherein either secular modernity (for the former) or God’s overcoming of the world (for the latter) are posited as the inevitable culmination of history. Kennel instead enjoins readers to turn to the paradigm of the postsecular; a “confluence of Christianity, religion, and secularity” within which it is possible to “resist both religious and secular assertions of dominance” (9). A varied and eclectic body of literature is marshalled by Kennel in order to imagine what a postsecular canon might be (while simultaneously challenging traditional notions of canonicity). He draws on 4^th-century church father Augustine of Hippo, 17^th-century Dutch Collegiants, 19^th-century literary provocateurs Friedrich Nietzsche and Herman Melville, and 20th-century political theologian Dorothee Sölle, all of whom are upheld as exemplars of how to more subtly narrate the theopolitical complexities of human history.

Kennel’s use of political theology enables him to successfully problematize the old yet persistent conceptual distinction between religion and secularity. As he writes, political theology reveals “how theological and religious concepts are entangled with supposedly secular ideas, but without the underlying ontological and epistemological assumption that secular and religious concepts are necessarily in relationships of antagonistic displacement” (14). Where theological and secular commentators see mutual enmity, Kennel instead finds “normative entanglements” that bind these purportedly warring entities together; this hidden filiation between religion and secularity grounds his interpretive accounts of seemingly divergent theological and philosophical voices from the past.

A good example of this is found in his joint reading of the Christian Augustine and post-theist Nietzsche in chapter 5 (“Periodization and Providence Between Nietzsche and Augustine”). While those assuming a fundamental dualism or antagonism between religious and secular authorship might avoid reading these authors together, Kennel shows how Augustine’s and Nietzsche’s shared image of the pilgrim/wanderer is a common theme that brings aspects of their writings together. Ultimately, Kennel’s postsecular hermeneutic reveals how problems and themes from the history of theological thought have survived into our own (post)secular age in contradictory yet generative ways.

Although Postsecular History’s strength lies in its weaving together of a diverse collection of literature that attends to broad historical themes of periodization and progress, its weakness is that it occasionally leans too heavily on its sources. While Kennel provides illuminating close readings of his chosen texts, his tendency to summarize source material can make the book read like a literature review at times. However, this is not necessarily a completely bad thing; his survey of recent key publications in political theology in chapter 2 (“Political Theology and the Politics of Time”) is a fascinating tour through the cross-disciplinary inquiries that have revolutionized political theology in recent years (led by thinkers such as Marie-José Mondzain, Giorgio Agamben, and Adam Kotsko). Kennel uses these sources to demonstrate that any political theological critique of the current neoliberal order must contend with its periodizing rhetorics—as seen in the prefix “neo” in the term “neoliberal,” which implies a renewal of liberalism’s promise of universal emancipation through competitive market activity (39).

Later chapters, however, such as “The Regulation of the Subject by the Technology of Time” (chapter 6), seem to stray from the main focus of the work, given the boundary-pushing sources Kennel tries to synthesize with the book’s main argument. While Kennel’s analysis of authors who work on the intersection of technology and time is certainly interesting (especially his discussion of Bernard Stiegler), it is hard to see how the concept of technology that Kennel interrogates at this stage of the book integrates with his thesis as a whole. Indeed, Postsecular History could have potentially benefited from being released as a collection of essays instead of as a single-thesis monograph, which would have given Kennel the liberty to perform close readings of his sources without the need to provide an overarching framework to which each chapter need conform. Kennel’s own pluralistic interpretive ethos works self-consciously against intellectual systematization in favor of a more polyvalent hermeneutics. This anti-systematic sensibility is in tension with Kennel’s attempt to unite the diverse chapters of Postsecular History within the purview of a single argument. 

To offer further criticism of Kennel’s book, I would have appreciated clearer elaboration regarding his oft-repeated, threefold schema of “Christianity, religion, and secularity.” In particular, I am uncertain about how Kennel wants to justify the nominal distinction between Christianity and religion he creates in this typology. Kennel ultimately neglects to explain why he has included the generic term “religion” as a remainder for any cultural-religious tradition that is not Christian. This is curious, especially given that he does not engage with any non-Christian religious traditions (Judaism is referenced several times, but always in conjunction with Christianity). Postsecular History appears to be written for those working with and against the Christian theological tradition as it has survived in the contemporary secular academy, so perhaps a clearer identification of the book’s intended audience may have obviated Kennel’s need to uncritically include the freighted term “religion” in his book.

These criticisms are not intended to detract from Kennel’s signal accomplishment in Postsecular History, which is a timely political theological intervention into the present through the development of a postsecular vision of history. Kennel makes a compelling case for how interpreting time and history from a postsecular perspective—in conjunction with his own pluralistic style of political theology—can defend against (to recapitulate a binary Kennel warns us repeatedly against) both religious and secularist essentializations of history.

Jonas Brandt is an independent scholar.

 

 

Jonas Brandt

Date Of Review:

December 6, 2023