Soziologie
Final Report Abstract
Synthetically formulated, the main conclusion is that the distinctively post-Christian character of European state-society formations lies not in their overcoming of a Christian identity in the name of the principle of religious neutrality, but in the reshaping of this identity in order to activate the symbolic apparatus of state sovereignty and social cohesiveness. This operation is performed by severing the previous nexus between formerly religious symbols and diffuse practices located in the lifeworld of proximity relations. In this context the vulnerable presence of Islam in Europe is not merely yet another problem in the historic dealing with religion in the Old Continent, but plays a strategic role in questioning (and, by contrast, reconstructing) post-Christian tenets of the secular and the related concepts of solidarity and sovereignty. Islam in Europe can expose the inherent contradictions and weaknesses of European secular models issued of early modern traumas and transformations and the parochial limitations of secular arrangements between churches and states going back to the 19th and 20th century. But it can also incite responses that help revive, reshape and re-legitimize those arrangements. The resulting type of protean secular power, which is simultaneously anthropologically rooted and socio-politically effective, is post-Christian in nature. The ‘post’ in post-Christian does not mean the erasure of Christian identity, traditions and symbols. It is more a type of overcoming in the Hegelian sense of Aufhebung (‘sublation’). It is an institutional disabling of the Christian heritage in ways, however, that preserve and magnify its symbolic power—with the only restriction that the Hegelian dialectics of sublation are rather deluded by a process that is, at the end, obsessively circular. The Hegelian negation of negation does not prevent us from sliding back to a pre-Christian quandary in constructing the relation between self and other, a quandary that was already well reflected in the essentialist and violent anthropology of Thomas Hobbes, via the subversion of grace in the relations between self and other. Yet this symbolic power is absorbed in the postures and expressivity that sovereign power (or an impersonal civilizing process) demands from the individual bodies. And this is where the case of the Stasi commission still illustrates the point in the most poignant way. But the consequence is that all other forms of body postures, affects and disciplines have to be aligned with secular standards. This discourse is effectively propagated to the detriment of the social and communicative infrastructure of autonomy which lies in lifeworld-rooted notions of justice and solidarity pinpointed by social rights. The only viable alternative to liquidating the internal other is to immunize the social body from it. The conclusion of the research program has encouraged two new ramifications of present and future research: one about the extent immunity is the ultimate stage of the genealogy of sovereignty and solidarity, the other about the de-parochialization of Elias’ notion of the civilizing process, which complexifies the above discussion of habitus as a way out from the ‘iron cage’ of modern secular orders. The liberal secular episteme-cum-formation, unlike its illiberal versions, constitutes here a pattern of immunization from all sorts of concrete other through the embracement of the generalized Other, and therefore a protection against the connective and exposed character of the Maussian dimension of the social bond based on the exchange and circulation of gifts and signs. Yet as much as secular immunity crystallized for fear of the exposed character of the social bond, so much today the symbolic demarcation from the Muslim Other and the related public staging of secular identity, which works as a symbolic sublimation of secular power, is becoming exposed to critique. The result is the contestation of this specifically post-Christian type of the social bond, a development that might rehabilitate the exposure of connectedness between ego and alter ungoverned by republican sovereignty and uncovered by organic solidarity. So we might observe the beginnings of an anti-immunitary reaction, which the invocation of a post-secular era or the theorization of a post-secular order are not sufficient to capture, to the extent these are based on a hermeneutic fusions of yet identity based, secular or religious horizons. To the extent such a post-secular reflex is part of social reality and public discourse nowadays, it seems to work rather as a ruse for the reproduction of a neo-secular order. On the other hand, the anti-immunitary reaction provides a socio-cultural background to the deparochialization of the civilizing process and of the interaction between symbolization and habitualization in it. As a result, what is and ought to be secular is open to an even more restricted range of interpretations and practices by the predominance of ideas of cohesion, mastery and productivity over notions of commitment, connectedness and meaning. Surely the secular space is conceived as ample enough to allow for the participation of the citizens not only on an individual basis but also via the inclusion of new groups and populations, based on the degree of their assimilation in the both material and symbolic economy of the space, also depending on their cultural-linguistic competencies, which European states have started to measure and selectively integrate via metric parameters that are reflected in the tests and rituals of acquisitions of national citizenship. No doubt, the activation of such parameters of inclusion erodes ever more the margins to reinterpret the secular frame of reference from within its own contestation field and to question its monocivilizational (when not narrowly national) bias. Most significant is the increasing restriction of the range of internal contestation of the meaning of laicité in France. The definition of the subjects and spaces that resist integration by adopting practices which are explicitly dissenting or simply divergent does no longer reflect interpretive contentions of a more traditional kind but causes even more a polarization of spaces and a pressure to normalization via repressive measures, educational tools of an increasingly metric kind, or judicial means. Yet this conclusion cannot confute the idea (stated and supported e.g. by Talal Asad) that the secular is a radically new formation. Further research along the double rail of immunity and the civilizing process should interrogate more deeply the anthropological metamorphosis that has accompanied the process, and look at how the forms of the human changed accordingly—in particular the human capacity of signification linked to practices. In this context, the question of the legitimacy of ‘public religion’ becomes the question of how secular power formations deal with forms of solidarity that do not fit its sovereignty, reflected in the ‘classic’ formula of symbolic sublimation of the power formations subsumed under the idea (and corresponding iconography) of the incorporation of the citizens within the state. As highlighted by Talal Asad, as far as the nature of the European state-society nexus is concerned, Durkheim was and is—thus far—quite right in highlighting the primacy of organic forms of solidarity. But he might start to be wrong, as soon as the exhaustion of the process of symbolic sublimation of sovereignty and solidarity exposes the secular power nexus to a resistance of bodies signalling a resilience and revival of connectedness in giving meaning to practices.
Publications
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Islam and Modernity: Key Issues and Debates, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press
Armando Salvatore with Muhammad Khalid Masud and Martin van Bruinessen
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Rethinking the Public Sphere Through Transnationalizing Processes: Europe and Beyond, Basingstoke: Palgrave
Armando Salvatore with Oliver Schmidtke and Hans-Jörg Trenz
