This week the group attempted to answer the question: why does critique still pursue the promise of democracy? Abeysekara argues that a genealogical approach, such as that forwarded by Michel Foucault and adopted as academic method by scholars such as Talal Asad and Tomoko Masuzawa, although insightful and necessary, is not the political project that it claims to be. This is because history and the production of history continue to be haunted by certain spectres, namely the spectre of democracy.
Our discussion then led into an attempt to understand how Abeysekara had adopted Derridian conceptions of the spectre, and the relationship of the spectre with aporia, history, and the political 'present.' For this we delved into Derrida's Spectres of Marx and Force of Law in order to first come to an understanding of how Derrida developed these terms. The spectre, as that which is unnamable, as that which returns, stands in contradiction to the arrivant, for the spectre is that past which constantly returns and the arrivant is the appearance of the unexpected guest. Abeysekara's claim is that in order to un-inherit our pasts, we must inhabit the modern with fear and anxiety. If historicity binds us to the spectre then the maintenance of fear and anxiety as we live within our aporatic limits challenges those limits and the spectres that haunt us by remaining increasingly suspicious and unexpectedly present.
We left our meeting still a bit confused to the connection of aporia with the spectre and history. Does the spectre protect or mask the aporatic limits? Are spectres causal manifestations from the persistence of an aporia? Is the spectre itself the sign of the aporia? Can we imagine the spectre to be something that also haunts an aporia? These are questions that we will seek to explore as we delve into the last few chapters of the book.
This year for the 2010-11 Lester Lectureship the Religious Studies Department of the University of Colorado, Boulder has the privilege to host Dr. Ananda Abeysekara. The lectureship has been organized by Dr. Ruth Mas, professor of Contemporary Islam in the Religious Studies Department and Affiliated Professor of Comparative Literature at the University of Colorado, and consists of a graduate panel of student fellows. Preceding Dr. Abeysekara’s visit this panel will be involved in weekly seminars designed to critically and creatively engage his most recent publication, The Politics of Postsecular Religion: Mourning Secular Futures. During each weekly seminar discussion group leaders will elucidate significant concepts from this work and examine the voices of Abeysekara’s interlocutors.
The question of political and religious identity as it is constructed in monastic institutions and set in opposition to society at large is one important example of how Abeysekara has framed the issues of power, self-definition, and violence in Buddhist culture. His work runs parallel to such contemporary theorists and philosophers as Talal Asad, Alasdair McIntyre, and David Scott. And similar to these scholars his theoretical models are strongly influenced by the writings of Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, as well as other notable post-modernists. Further, Abeysekara is in discourse with such leaders in the field of Buddhist identity, political discourse, and ritual expression as S.J. Tambiah and Gananath Obeyesekere. For all these reasons, we engage his work as a highly relevant contribution to the study of past and present articulations of power and identity in post-colonial South and Southeast Asian Buddhist traditions. In the broader context of Religious Studies, Abeysekara has raised pertinent questions concerning the tools of analytical inquiry, how scholars employ theories of analysis, interpretation, and critique. With all this in mind, the aims of this lectureship are simple: To engage the discourse of a scholar who is helping to shape the future of our field, to contend with the same concepts by which he is occupied, and, to not defer our debates and conversations to any other time than now.
