ABSTRACT
A distinctive feature of William Connolly’s political philosophy is its disclosure of flows of life and possibilities of becoming in the seemingly inert spaces between identity and difference, private and public, secular and religious, hidden and manifest. For Connolly, life overflows and invests these attempts to organise our existence. The task of the philosopher, he suggests, is not that of regulating and constraining life, but rather striving to grasp its protean character, its endless dynamics of transformation and reproduction, aware that ‘being exceeds every interpretation’ (Connolly, 2002a: xi). Connolly’s philosophy thus unravels alternatives to contemporary forms of being, dissects the inner conceits of identity and, most of all, unveils the anti-pluralist character of seemingly natural political dispositions that marginalise minority subjectivities and force them to adapt to hegemonic/authoritative forms. This chapter explores Connolly’s critique of one such authoritative form:
secularism. The distinctiveness of Connolly’s approach to secularism does not rest on a sweeping condemnation of the hegemony of the secular outlook, nor does it simplify it into a multicultural appeal for peaceful coexistence between secular and religious perspectives. More radically, Connolly maintains the necessity of rethinking secularism in its limits, conceits and ontological assumptions (particularly the very possibility of a clear-cut distinction between religious and secular) in a broader context of identity formation and ethical engagement with deep-seated sensitivities. Connolly’s call for a ‘refashioning of secularism’ (Connolly, 1999b: 19) is thus an integral part of his overall political philosophy of immanent pluralism. Accordingly, this chapter strives to illuminate the main tenets of Connolly’s narrative (beyond an exclusive focus on Why I Am Not a Secularist) within which the role and relevance of his critique of secularism may better be appreciated. In order to reconstruct this narrative, two main arguments are put forward.
First, Connolly’s philosophy can be read as an attempt to address some of the tensions of modern thought highlighted by Michel Foucault in his analysis of the transformation of the modern episteme into an ‘analytic of finitude’ – and in particular, of how the relocation of authority from the transcendence of
God to the immanence of Man that characterises the emergence of the modern subject, is paralleled by the ascendancy of an understanding of ethics as an authoritative mechanism of transcendental regulation that disparages uncertainty, cultivation and spiritual self-transformation as moral resources. Second, taking the relocation of authority from God to Man as a crucial dimension of secularism, I suggest that Foucault’s account of the ‘analytic of finitude’ can be read as a philosophical description of the modern process of secularisation. The chapter then explores Connolly’s challenge to the constraining and
anti-pluralist aspects of secularism by looking at how his philosophy strives to overcome the tensions of the ‘analytic of finitude’. The main thesis advanced is that these tensions are prompted by an unfinished process of secularisation, with authority still partially located in a realm beyond the subject, namely the Kantian transcendental. Connolly’s project can therefore be described as the attempt to locate all sources of authority and morality within the subject by pushing the process of secularisation to a stage where life, ethics and becoming may be experienced on a pure plane of immanence. Connolly, in sum, strives to pursue pluralism by ‘rewriting’ the transcendent(al) into the immanent. The argument begins with a reading of Foucault’s ‘analytic of finitude’ as a
philosophical account of the modern process of secularisation, and is followed by a discussion of how the main tenets of Connolly’s philosophy can be interpreted as a response to some of Foucault’s concerns. Connolly’s critique of secularism, it will be shown, targets a wider set of dispositions than those encompassed by secularism and eventually emerges as a critique of those philosophies – secular-humanistic, theistic, or a combination of both – which claim authority on the ground of transcendence, be it the expression of a theological order or of an abstract reason capable of mediating between (hence to transcend) conflicting world-views. The chapter then assesses Connolly’s success in breaking with (some of) the
tensions of the modern episteme by placing Connolly in conversation with Jürgen Habermas. The entanglement of the German philosopher in the ‘analytic of finitude’ negatively affects his capacity to foster a genuine pluralism and offers a clearer sense of the strength of Connolly’s argument. However, a more detailed examination of the unintended and unsolicited dimensions of the process of secularisation shows how some of the weaknesses that may be attributed to Habermas can actually be attributed to Connolly. The latter, in particular, fails to justify and accommodate the advocacy of seemingly transcendent(al) ‘civilisational limits’ in his philosophy of immanence. This argument raises doubts over the very possibility that the transcendent(al) may be rewritten into the immanent and asks whether it must be an essential component of political imagination and, as such, also central to Connolly’s view immanent pluralism. The chapter concludes with a modest subversion of Connolly’s approach which places the possibility of pluralism not in an unattainable translation of the transcendent(al) into the immanent but in the recognition of its very centrality to seemingly conflicting religious and secular perspectives.
