and Benjamin, is not solipsistic, in the sense that it recognizes the mutuality
and necessary intersubjectivity required for subjectivity to develop and flourish.
The trend toward the sovereignty of the individual and the socializing ten-
dency of various cultural communities toward a postmodern notion of the
“good death” leaves the individual, in many instances, facing death, and per-
haps controlling death, on their own terms, without the guidance of tradi-
tional religious or professional authorities. This is one of the weaknesses that
Walter identifies with the postmodern revival of death. With the individual
cast as a kind of sovereign, coupled with the encouragement of the use of
religious language, the language of dying threatens to become singularized
through its spiritualization – perhaps to the point of self-alienation. The indi-
vidualist emphasis on the internalization of the sacred is something that
Charles Taylor has theorized in detail. His analysis in Sources of the Selfcare-
fully outlines the way in which the intensification of a sense of inwardness
forces one to adopt a stance of disengagement from one’s own feelings, ren-
dering inward reflection impossible (Taylor 1989:390).
In this sense, the postmodern move toward the ‘forced’ articulation of a
death narrative or a personal mythology, the self-invention and guiding
authority of a “good death,” may have the inadvertent effect of isolating indi-
viduals from those around them or bringing about exaggerated forms of
aggression. While I certainly agree that autonomy must be encouraged, it is
necessary to grasp what this means with adequate sociological and philo-
sophical concepts. Habermas’s contention that religious language is not orig-
inal is helpful here since it establishes a sociological basis for the conceptual
ban on the sovereignty of the individual and takes up a skeptical position
with regard to the sacred. Habermas argues that individuality is always social-
ized, the individual is itself a self-descriptive concept derived from processes
of social recognition, affirmation, and contradiction. Under the premises of
postmetaphysical thinking, religious language cannot be viewed as original,
in the sense of an authentic manifestation of some form of ultimate reality, a
sacredness that ought to be respected. While the philosophical and scientific
discourses have disenchanted the social world, postmodern trends have
renewed the power of the sacred in singular form, a form I argue is para-
doxically encouraged by the reality of pluralism conceptualized in abstrac-
tion. What makes this renewal of religion postmodern is its optional and
arbitrary nature coupled with expressive individualism. This transition might
be understood along the lines of a shift from sacred ritual praxis within the
Intersubjectivity and Religious Language • 197