At the heart of the present uncertainty gripping the world in the wake of what seems to be a still unabated global

economic crisis and the unraveling of the political, socio-cultural infrastructures and consensus that supported the dominant world order in the past few decades is a growing recognition of the terrifying presence of an overwhelming force that eludes and refuses to be reined by what we modern men have long held on to as a marker of our capacity to shape our lives and destiny: reason.

On the other hand, the blatant condemnation of contemporary reason found in the skepticism of those who lament the potentials of human creativity its ideological domination and thus lack of originality under the technological apparatuses of late capitalist modernity has prevented many agents of critical transformation from developing a consensual and universal paradigm around which collective forms of identification may be organized.

For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably. -- WALTER BENJAMIN

What is striking, however, about our contemporary condition is how appeals to the restoration of reason and the retrieval of human agency to shape individual and collective ways of living together are invoked with either an implicit or explicit spirit of despair. On the one hand, the triumphalism and messianism of the market reveals not quite a hopeful trust in the originality of the human person to reorganize what existing possibilities for creative self-actualization provide but a submission to the logic and rationalities that enable such possibilities. The resounding call to reason which has been the battle cry of the Enlightenment is by now no more than a reverberating call to identify with the privileged reason of modernity that of the market.

This rejection of a universal account of reason and collective identification betrays what many critics of modernity aim for the retrieval of the particularity and historical uniqueness of human creativity and agency since in the repudiation of the desirability of a stabilizing foundation for collective self-realization, attempts to build shared political goals may tend to be received and perceived as impositions of uncompromising positions rather than as selfdisclosing moments. Once understood this way, it becomes too easy to subject the aims of specific communities competing in the political struggle to the enforcing apparatuses of a rarefied consensus and universalism that is no longer publicly and communally accessible.

This course investigates the status, deployments, rationalities and prospects of REASON in the context of our contemporary CAPITALIST

MODERNITY. It does so by revisiting the

categorical opposition within the political vocabulary and imaginary of modernity between

REASON AND RELIGION through a genealogical study of the historico-material and

theoretical terrains that have lent currency to such a discursive oppositionality while paying attention to the concrete strategies of its deployment as well as consequences to the possibility of truly

REVOLUTIONARY and HUMANIST political practices and modes of criticism.

Throughout the semester, the course will show how the diverse pursuits, reflections and theoretical engagements of modern and contemporary political theorists are underpinned by a struggle to define the boundary of the religious and the non-religious with the aim of securing and guarding the freedom promised by the modern conceptualization of reason. The course proceeds from the overarching claim that the framing of these conceptual struggles/oppositions cannot be separated from the critical appraisal of and resistance to the demands of the historically dominant mode of economic organization and production and as such any attempt to reconfigure the frames and terms of these conceptual categorizations by way of discursive representation and theoretical innovation must also pay attention to the possibility of reproducing the very system of economic life and accumulation that allows such a system of representation to attain a meaningful and powerful status in the consciousness of observers and critical interrogators. The central objective of the course then is to strive in the most effective way to resist and displace the possibilities for reproducing these representational and discursive tendencies. The route for reflection offered by the course is directed towards the study of contemporary political subjectivity and the cultivation of possible counter-subjectivities as well as the endorsement of forms of counterconsciousness drawn from the concrete experiences of those at the margins of the authorized rationality of capitalist modernity - laborers, religious mystics, theologians, women, homosexuals and postcolonial subjects and are the constant targets and instruments, but as such, also possible sources of resisting, the disciplinary apparatuses and forms of violence underlying the present order.

Moving beyond the fascination that technology exerts, we must reappropriate the true meaning of freedom, which is not an intoxication with total autonomy, but a response to the call of being, beginning with our own personal being. POPE BENEDICT XVI, Caritas in veritate

At the heart of the course is a sustained and systematic effort as well as invitation to approach religion that is, to consciously nurture and performatively cultivate a disciplinary form of subjectivity capable of making such an approach and then to be possessed by religion that, is to think about the present, about oneself and ones relations as a subject of and constituted by religion. It entails asking first who is making this approach? How has the one approaching religion been constituted as a subject and how has this subject come to know ones subjectivity as such via ones position in relation to religion? The course will argue that the constitution of contemporary political subjectivity along the discourses of consumerism and (post)coloniality has adversely influenced the ability of the modern subject to approach religion that is, to consider the rationality and reasonableness of a religious approach to living in the world and with others. Central to these discourses is the reproduction of the ideology of secularism and its attendant constitution of religion as a moralizing rationality thus legitimizing religions occlusion from the world of public life while at the same time politicizing it to serve purposes other than theologically and ecclesiologically authorized ones. The course aims to dismantle these apparatuses by inviting students to cultivate, assemble and nurture a communal, public and militant sense of the religious that is truly the work of peoples

liturgeia.

Thus, the critical motif of approaching religion via ones engagement with the world and with others is viewed in this course as a liturgical celebration a simultaneous affirmation of commonality and difference, a productive agonism that resists solipsism and atomism, a communion with the world that is truly revolutionary. Here, to be possessed by religion does not entail the abandonment of the self but in fact demands a heightened and deliberate awareness of the selfs encounters that allows the self to come into being rather than to declare its finality, that is a rejection of an apocalyptic conception of the self and the world and its place through acts and gestures of receptivity to the eschatological moment of reason, the triumph of an enlightened form of thinking that is able to appreciate the public, stabilizing and grounded positionality of each other rather than the invisible, arbitrary and irrationality of hierarchies brought about by a false sense of rationality a longing, a desire to long.

The sinner's glimpse of heaven, as he comes to acknowledge his most grievous fault, is an element in the Church's liturgy, in the Mass as in penance. But it is also an element of contemplation which (as we shall see) encounters the word of God, a word which both pronounces sentence and justifies. So a person who contemplates on a regular basis is already to a large extent prepared for confession. He is accustomed to looking in the mirror and seeing himself as God sees him. HANS URS VON BALTHASAR

Review Essay (10%)

Each student will be assigned to review four (4) journal articles relevant to a particular author to be covered during the semester. The authors and the journal articles will be chosen by the instructor at the very beginning of the academic term. The review essay no less than 3,500 but no more than 5,000 words following the conventions set by the instructor is due on the first day of classes after the Christmas break (for authors discussed during said period) or on the final class session preceding the conference paper presentation writing break.

Midterm Oral Exam (20%)

Each student will defend a thesis statement during a 30-minute midterm oral examination to be conducted during the third week of January. Students should come to the exam prepared to speak for 20 minutes and to answer relevant questions from the instructor for 10 minutes. Failure to deliver a 20-minute defense of the statement will automatically merit a failing mark.

Course Paper (25%)

An 8,000-word final paper will be required at the end of the semester. The course paper will explore the thematic concern of the academic term from a grounded critical theory perspective. A student conference entitled, Moving from the Critique of Religion towards Religion as Critique will be held two weeks before the semesters scheduled final examinations during which students will be presenting their work to a public audience.

Comprehensive Final Written Exam (30%)

Students will be asked to answer a comprehensive final examination at the end of the semester.

Class Recitation (10%)

Students will be given a chance to respond to two sets of recitation questions in the course of the semester.

Immanuel Kant. What is Enlightenment? Alasdair Macintyre. The Predecessor Culture and the Enlightenment Project of Justifying Morality and Why the Enlightenment Project of Justifying Morality Had to Fail in After Virtue Max Horkheimer and Theodore Adorno. The Concept of Enlightenment and Enlightenment as Mass Deception in

The Dialectic of Enlightenment

Pope Benedict XVI. Caritas in veritate.

NOVEMBER 8, 10, 15 and 17

Why is the Enlightenments concept of reason and appeal to the use of reason selfdefeating and incapable of animating, building and sustaining communal existence? How did the Enlightenment distort the meaning of reason and how has it shaped our contemporary political vocabulary? How did truth become publicly inaccessible in the way the Enlightenment understood it? To what extent can invocations and appeal to truth still make sense, and in fact, necessary in order to acknowledge and endorse the reality of human differences? Why is the use of religious reason not grounded on moral imperatives but guided by tradition? Why is violence the result of a form of reason that is no longer bound with tradition?

Why did the logic of property and the language of the economy become the prevailing constructs of Enlightenment rationality? Why can these constructs not fulfill the tasks of reason and as such only serve to betray reason? Why are the human capacities to desire and to reason not incompatible? What ways of understanding each would render them in opposition or contradiction? How did the historical-material conditions of the industrial capitalist age pervert the human capacity to desire?

John Locke. Second Treatise on Civil Government

Hannah Arendt. The Social Question in On Revolution Alexander Kojeve. In Place of an Introduction in Introduction to the Reading of Hegel Pope Paul VI. Populorum Progressio NOVEMBER 22 - 29 & DECEMBER 1

DECEMBER 6, 8, 13 and 16

Why did capitalism emerge, how does it operate and how did it change the way religion was understood? Why is capitalism inherently exploitative? How does it conceal its exploitative tendencies? Why and how can religion not become complicit in the concealment, reproduction and legitimation of the exploitative nature of capitalism? How is capitalism involved in preventing critics of the consequences of capitalist accumulation from realizing the capacity of religion to pose a serious challenge to the capitalist system? Why is a class approach to the study of society compatible with a religious form of subjectivity? Ellen Meiksins-Wood. The Agrarian Origins of Capitalism in Capitalism: A Longer View Karl Marx. The Jewish Question; Theses on Feuerbach; Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts and Commodities in The Marx-Engels Reader ed. Robert Tucker Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. The Manifesto of the Communist Party Ernst Bloch. Hunger, Something in a Dream, God of Hope, Thing-ForUs in The Frankfurt School on Religion ed. Edward Mendieta Pope John Paul II. Laborem exercens

Why are the modern institutions and apparatuses of the liberal state subservient to the interests of the ruling capitalist class? Why is the freedom of civil society under the liberal-democratic consensus of the modern state complicit to the reproduction of capitalism? What are the mechanisms that reproduce capitalist logic, control and rationality under the authority and dynamics of state-society engagement? How should revolutionaries understand and engage the institutions and apparatuses of the modern state? Vladimir Lenin. What is to be Done? Antonio Gramsci. State and Civil Society in Selections from the Prison Notebooks George Lukacs. Reification and the Consciousness of the Proletariat in History and Class Consciousness Rosa Luxemburg. Reform or Revolution in The Essential Rosa Luxemburg

Why would the delegitimization and suppression of the authority of religion over its subjects lead to the rise of totalitarianism? Why is religions insistence on the uniqueness of the human person a powerful antidote against totalitarian terror and ideology? How does religion provide a guard against escaping the pluralistic and deeply conflictual realm of worldly existence? Why do appeals to and invocations of the law today share in the logic of totalitarianism?

Hannah Arendt. Totalitarianism in Origins of Totalitarianism Herbert Marcuse. New Forms of Control and The Closing of the Political Universe in The One Dimensional Man

Michel Foucault. Discipline

and Punish
_____________. Method in

History of Sexuality Vol. 1

_____________. Governmentality and The Subject and Power in

Power: Essential Writings and Interviews

Why is a formal account of state power inadequate in understanding the manner through which the interests of capitalism are reproduced and legitimized? Why should revolutionaries pay attention to the production of knowledge and why is the production as well as deployment of knowledge linked with the historico-material constitution of the dominant social order? Why and how can the disciplinary regimes and technologies of religion be conceptualized and utilized in the critique of capitalist modernity? Why and how can the body become a political strategy for resisting the normalizing gaze of capitalist modernity?

Talal Asad. What might an Anthropology of Secularism Look Like? and Secularism, Nation-State, Religion in

Formations of the Secular

Saba Mahmood. Politics of Piety: Hent de Vries. On General and Divine Economy: Talal Asads Genealogy of the Secular and Emmanuel Levinas Critique of Capitalism, Colonialism, and Money in Powers of the

The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Chapter 5 and

Epilogue) Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, and Judith Butler. Is Critique Secular?

Secular Modern

Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech (whole book)

Jacques Derrida. Force of Law: The Mystical Foundations of Authority John Milbank, Slavoj Zizek and Creston Davis. Pauls New Moment (whole book) Simon Weil. Waiting for God (whole book) Hans Urs Von Balthassar. Prayer (selections) Pope Benedict XVI. Deus caritas est