New Enlightenment

Abstract

The Charlie Hebdo attack in Paris raised the issue of a need for a new Enlightenment and/or its retrieval. Contrast recent writings of Pinker and Sacks on the role of religion in violence. Three central issues of autonomy; reason and progress. RCR offers contributions of distributive agency, plastic autonomy and the need to carry out detailed mapping. Examine Malabou on plasticity and links back to Derrida and Girard, but then draw on Watkin’s critique of Malabou, notably that she uses a ‘host substance’ of identity and personhood. Damasio’s example of Phineas Gage (brain damage), then Jairus Grove talking about protocols in human formation and how the US military use oxytocin to program its forces. Do we just replace one ‘Big Other’ by another one when we abandon religion? Watkin uses Ricoeur’s notion of narrative selfhood and memory to supplement Malabou.

Is Enlightenment deferred, distorted or discredited? Kant on the issue of reason and faith as then played out by Reader examining the relationship between Habermas and Derrida – blurred encounters, but with criteria. Bernard Stiegler on reason and unreason, aims to retrieve the Enlightenment using Deleuze, Simondon, Winnicott as an updated Critical Theory. Reason becomes rationalization and instrumental as individuation is distorted by consumer and commercial forces.

Meillassoux’s Speculative Realism examined on reason and ideas of correlationism: allows religion as belief back into the picture but at the cost of abandoning reason therefore without a basis for political critique – too extreme therefore.

Latour’s notion of multiple rationalities instead from his ‘Modes of Existence’ as more consistent with RCR and its use of NM.

Enlightenment on progress and violence: the future is contingent and open so what is the role of religion(s)? Sacks provides evidence of violence against religions but blames this on a failed Enlightenment in which secular nationalism and individualism has stepped into the gap. Using instead sociology of religion and recent work of Juergensmeyer and colleagues, suggest instead that religion is pharmakon (both remedy and poison) responding to questions of globalization, security, accountability and identity. Religion both exacerbates and calms but which and under what conditions? Need for proper empirical examination and reassembling. He concludes with the notion of a nameless deity for global civil religion – how does this relate to RCR?