introduction
A subjectivity in lack of total control plays a significant role also in
Ola Sigurdson’s contribution. Through an analysis of prayer, Sigurd-
son wants to examine the potential for a different kind of religious
subjectivity than the one that we normally think of today. In prayer
the human being responds to a primary action in which the subject
receives itself. This way of relating to such a primary action is both
embodied and social, and it is also a decentered act that renounces all
claims of control over the addressee. It shows a transcendence that is
not opposite to immanence, but rather a transcendence within im-
manence that breaks with the tendency to circle around itself. Starting
out from such a subjectivity, religion would not have to be understood
as inherently violent and as something that needs to be expelled from
public life, but could instead contribute to it.
Prayer is also the theme of Hans Ruin’s article that explores how an
analysis of prayer can enrich the phenomenology of religion, drawing
on the comparison between poetic and religious language, partly
through a reading of Nietzsche’s Zarathustra. Ruin shows how prayer
can be understood as a way of calling forth an experience of selfhood
that is not independent and autonomous, but dependent and
belonging. Prayer shows itself as an experience of and with language,
where language is not limited to propositional language. Prayer, as a
poetic saying, cannot be true in the same way as propositional
language, since it does not say “what is.” But this does not simply
place it outside of any truth-discourse. On the contrary, it has its root
in an experience of letting truth happen. In the appraisal the praying
person lets the gift come into being. Prayer shows the world as a gift,
but a gift of meaning, and of language. The analysis of prayer is
therefore important to the understanding of religion, as well as to the
understanding of the finitude of human life.
The organizing of the conference and the preparation of the book
has been made possible through generous support from the Axel and
Margaret Ax:son Johnson Foundation.
Hans Ruin and Jonna Bornemark
Stockholm, April 2010