prayer, subjectivity, and politicsirreducibly transcendent, the Christian tradition, as well as other
monotheistic traditions, the human subject confronts not just another
human being but a more radical form of otherness. Prayer could be
seen as a practice that avoids reducing human subjectivity to a search
for a stable and autonomous identity, but instead acknowledges the
need for change in confronting rather than avoiding the other. In this,
it recognizes what the American philosopher Judith Butler has termed
the “precariousness of life” and is a way of dealing with the vulnerability
of one’s own as well as the other’s existence. Our embodiment means
that we are fundamentally social, which means that we are “already
given over, beyond ourselves, implicated in lives that are not our
own,” and to deny this is also to deny the fundamental vulnerability
of human life, which, perhaps, is the reason that we need a politics at
all.^37 Butler sails — intentionally or not? — very close to a Christian
and perhaps also a Jewish doctrine of creation, and in these religious
traditions, prayer is precisely the therapy through which the constant
human temptation to flee from our precarious condition is exposed for
what it is: escapism.
If, then, prayer and also religion could be ways of dealing in a truth-
ful way with embodiment, responsibility, and vulnerability, religion
should not be seen as a threat to the values so often celebrated, at least
in principle, by a secular modernity: freedom, tolerance, and human
rights.^38 It might be that these values have to be renegotiated, and also
sometimes fought for in the face of a secular modernity as well as in
the face of authoritarian religion, when these movements in a violent
way try to secure a sphere, whether political or religious, beyond hu-
man vulnerability. But religion is not only a threat but also a resource
for any future politics of human subjectivity, and so the first lesson for
a secular modernity would be to discord of the kind of resentment of
religion that construes it as its negative other and so not only does not
recognize its plural and dynamic character but also represses the una-
voidably interdependence of all embodied life. What is needed in pub-
lic life is more religion, but of a richer, more-nuanced kind.
- Judith Butler, ibid., 28. Judith Butler, ibid., 28.
- For a more thorough exposition of these claims, see my forthcoming book Det
postsekulära tillståndet: Religion, politik och mänskliga rättigheter.