“I quite rightly pass for an atheist,” Jacques Derrida announces in Circumfession. Grace Jantzen's suggestion that the poststructuralist critique of modernity can also be trained on atheism helps us make sense of this playfully cryptic statement: although Derrida sympathizes with the “idea” of atheism, he is wary of the modern brand of atheism, with its insistence on rationally arranging—straightening out—religion. In this paper, I will argue that poststructural feminism, with its focus on embodied epistemology, offers a way to re-explain Derrida's (...) “I rightly pass,” and also to carry it forward. Poststructural feminist atheism leads us through Derrida to an embodied disbelief drawing on three dimensions of poststructural feminism: feminist epistemology and material feminism, relationality, and affect theory. (shrink)

Lisa Sideris's Consecrating Science: Wonder, Knowledge, and the Natural World (2017) proposes that the call by some science advocates for a new moral framework based on scientific wonder is flawed. Sideris develops a typology of “wonder” with two separate affective axes: “true wonder” that is the prerogative of a sort of dwelling with the overwhelming mystery of life, and “curiosity” that presses to resolve puzzles and break through into a space of total clarity. The former, Sideris writes, is an ethical (...) resource that, by placing the human self against the backdrop of the unknowable cosmic expanse, prompts humility and genuine admiration for nature. The latter is the theater of “mere science.” This essay follows suit with Sideris's line of questioning, but also pushes back on the correlation of wonder with ethical attentiveness and proposes ways that science in its puzzle‐solving mode can be brought back into the ethical conversation. (shrink)

Affect theory is a subfield that encourages us to think about how we interact with each other and the world along registers that are not reducible to language. This has suggested to some scholars that affect theory can also be used to better understand the experience of animals. This article explores a merger between affect theory, animal studies and the lifeworld tradition of phenomenology. The upshot of this is a way of seeing how animals, like humans, have rich religious worlds (...) that are shaped by pre-linguistic textures of affect. This perspective indicates that animals can be thrown into a state of trauma by being deprived of these lifeworlds. In light of this, the article considers the ethical implications of the modern factory farm system, particularly the practice of mass confinement. (shrink)

Catherine Keller's Cloud of the Impossible knits together process theology and relational ontology with quantum mechanics. In quantum physics, she finds a new resource for undoing the architecture of classical metaphysics and its location of autonomous human subjects as the primary gears of ethical agency. Keller swarms theology with the quantum perspective, focusing in particular on the phenomenon of quantum entanglement, by which quantum particles are found to remain influential over each other long after they have been physically separated—what Albert (...) Einstein and his collaborators recklessly dismissed as “spooky action at a distance.” This spooky action, Keller suggests, reroutes process thought—classically concerned with flux—to a new concern with intransigence—particularly the intransigence of the ethical relationship. Attending to the ethical urgency of the Other, she leaves process theology in a position of susceptibility to the moral imperative posed by the marginalized, the victimized, and the oppressed. This essay argues that although the ontological work of Keller's book productively integrates quantum physics into process theology, the ethical dimension of relationality is left cold in the quantum field. This is because, contra the ethical framework of contemporary deconstruction, which, following Emmanuel Levinas, sees ethical relationships as emerging out of a dynamic of infinite distance, moral connection has nothing to do with the remote reaches of the quantum scale or the macro-scale limits of space—nothing to do with “infinity” at all. Ethics emerges out of a much messier landscape—the evolved dynamic of fleshy, finite, material bodies. Rather than seeing ethical labor as a matter of physics, my contention is that interdisciplinary undertakings like Cloud of the Impossible are ethical disciplinary practices, re-acquainting us with the non-sovereignty of the self in order to open up new habits of relating rather than spotlighting ethical imperatives. (shrink)

This paper explores the ways that Daniel C. Dennett’s bestselling 2006 book Breaking the Spell traffics in a set of distinctly American presumptions about the relationship between religion and science. In this Americanized atheism, religion is presumed to be a set of logically organized propositional beliefs–a misbegotten science in need of correction or elimination. I show that a convergent critique, drawing on both evolutionary theory and deconstruction, highlights the limitations of this approach. This convergence highlights the theme of accident in (...) both pluralist evolutionary biology and continental philosophy of religion. Thematizing accident opens up a new conversational space between a deconstructive approach to religion and postadaptationist evolutionary theory, with implications not only for a philosophical understanding of religion, but for new, postsecular atheisms. (shrink)

James Joyce’s Ulysses can be read through the prism of the New Materialist School of contemporary critical thought to shed light on ongoing questions in the humanities about the relationship between language and embodiment. Specifically, Ulysses resonates with three thematic concerns of New Materialisms: the nature of matter, the correspondence between human and animal, and the role of affect. Contra some calls for the humanities to retrench in a conservative posture that reaffirms the special status of human reason and “consciousness” (...) – corresponding to Catholic readings of Ulysses that find in Joyce a metaphysical philosopher of transcendence – New Materialisms take human continuity with animals and matter seriously. Joyce’s Ulysses, by developing robust accounts of the interactions between matter, language, and thinking bodies, offers a template for exploring this convergence, demonstrating that the human “ghost” must be understood as radically inextricable from its material body and the material formations of its world. (shrink)

Zygon®, Volume 57, Issue 1, Page 200-222, March 2022.

In _Wild Experiment_, Donovan O. Schaefer challenges the conventional wisdom that feeling and thinking are separate. Drawing on science studies, philosophy, affect theory, secularism studies, psychology, and contemporary literary criticism, Schaefer reconceptualizes rationality as defined by affective processes at every level. He introduces the model of “cogency theory” to reconsider the relationship between evolutionary biology and secularism, examining mid-nineteenth-century Darwinian controversies, the 1925 Scopes Trial, and the New Atheist movement of the 2000s. Along the way, Schaefer reappraises a range of (...) related issues, from secular architecture at Oxford to American eugenics to contemporary climate denialism. These case studies locate the intersection of thinking and feeling in the way scientific rationality balances excited discovery with anxious scrutiny, in the fascination of conspiracy theories, and in how racist feelings assume the mantle of rational objectivity. The fact that cognition is felt, Schaefer demonstrates, is both why science succeeds and why it fails. He concludes that science, secularism, atheism, and reason itself are not separate from feeling but comprehensively defined by it. (shrink)