Publics, Politics and Participation

(Wang) #1

84 Philosophical Frames


a defective source of “agency,” for Foucault this source is potentially exces-
sive and expressive—a combination of passions or aesthetics that Bataille
and Deleuze have also pointed to as being one of the crucial, albeit prob-
lematic means by which those excluded from or opposed to modernity
and its spheres of influence can attempt to escape its strictures.
iven his position in the political struggles of the 1930s and not-G
withstanding the obvious fact that from prison he could produce neither
ethnographies nor journalistic accounts (but at best rely on those of oth-
ers), Gramsci’s influence upon authors of the second half of the twentieth
century—such as the Neapolitan anthropologist Ernesto De Martino—
remains seminal. Located between Gramsci and more contemporary
“subaltern studies,” De Martino saw religion as intrinsically disjunctured
yet vital, inherently—though unpredictably—dislocating the power rela-
tionships between dominant and dominated classes, between colonizers
and colonized.^64
earning from this trajectory of critique, if we unwind the abso-L
lutist categories of post-Reformation and post-Enlightenment discourse,
we are reminded of the necessity of moving beyond a focus on “religion”
as a separate category, and thus on “Muslim” public spheres. On a more
basic level, we need to develop the critical view that the Western observer
(whether philosopher, social scientist, or journalist) fails to see the extent
to which socioreligious movements, before they can create an alterna-
tive subjectivity or “political spirituality,” have to reforge social solidarity
via piety and welfare deeds, in turn based on notions, and passions, for
justice—facing the evidence that nation-states, especially in postcolonial
sociopolitical contexts, cannot provide social justice to the majority of
their populations. Distrust and Nietzschean resentment are certainly part
of the genesis of such movements, but they function more as the trigger
rather than the formula of social reconstruction.
Finally, we should recall Foucault’s belief that


European thought finds itself at a turning point. The turning
point is none other than the end of imperialism. The crisis of
Western thought is identical to the end of imperialism ... If
a philosophy of the future exists, it must be born outside of
Europe or equally born in consequence of meetings and
impacts between Europe and non-Europe.^65
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