emergence or re-emergence of new kinds of religious narratives based on the
social expectation that the individual ought to articulate their own personal
mythology, their own personal notion of the “good death.” This narrative
emphasizes the uniqueness of the individual but also is often taken to regu-
late their own private authority to determine, to whatever degree possible,
their own death. It is the nature of this private authority that needs to be
further explained and examined. It is argued here that the emergence of
religious discourses must be uncoupled from the authoritative basis of an
ill-conceived understanding of autonomy.
Under the rubric of the authority of the self, Walter (1994) notes that post-
modernism encourages autonomy. The nature of autonomy and its relation
to authority and religious language is what needs to be clarified. What I am
interested in here is the way in which disenchantment is perceived of as being
so threatening that the only remaining hope is to develop and encourage a
renewal of mytho-poetic forms of expression. This renewal is mediated in a
contradictory way within the postmodern paradigm. The result, for the post-
modern response to death, is a kind of synthetic privileging of the sacred
interiority of the individual. The postmodern revival of the sacred in terms
of the individual should be distinguished from traditional religious forms,
which situate the sacred as normative for the community. The rise of the
rhetoric of re-enchantment can best be seen as the emergence of new forms
of expression that entwine private feelings and perceptions and professional
caregiving. The entwinement of private experience and public epistemology
cannot be expected to find an easy balance when dying individuals are often
encouraged to take on for themselves the creation of a personal mythology
or a spiritual narrative, one which establishes the individual as a sacred sov-
ereign. As I have argued, this can be highly disruptive and may lead to com-
municative breakdowns. The therapeutic aim of encouraging the articulation
of individual sovereignty toward death, in the name of autonomy, may have
the unintended consequence of making communication between those who
are dying, family and friends, and those who are caregivers, more difficult.
It is worth pointing out that Habermas’s conception of modernity is dis-
tinct from that of Walter. Walter understands modernism to operate along
strategic lines, wherein late modernism continues this trend in a reflexive
way. Habermas’s conception is thoroughly intersubjective. The terminologi-
cal issues should not prevent us from seeing that Habermas’ conception of
modernism is akin to Walter ’s theorization of postmodernism but does so
Intersubjectivity and Religious Language • 195