ABSTRACT
This essay discusses modern scholasticism, secular transcendence, and worldly immanence, influenced in part by the corpus of Chakrabarty’s work. It seeks to stay with the tensions and contentions between (modern-day) scholasticism and immanence, between the “is” and the “ought,” and between a formatively singular rationality and constitutively heterogenous reason(s). The essay treats these not simply as conceptual/philosophical oppositions, but also as meanings and practices tied to affect, bound with modes of existence and experience. Unsurprisingly, these matrices are intimately constituted by assertions of power – that are ever epistemic and always hierarchical – not least in the academy. On the one hand, the chapter turns to routine vignettes of enactments of entitlement and performances of privilege in everyday intellectual life. On the other, it thinks through the writings of the philosopher Jürgen Habermas, as these braid together the “ought” and the “is,” the scholastic and the immanent. Unraveling these contentions and retying them as lived and as embodied in dispositions and affects, the essay carefully, strategically insists that there is no option but to stay with the antinomies, abjuring polemical negation or dialectical overcoming. Indeed, recognising that the embeddedness of these tensions in the world might require something different: a “history without warranty.”
