Academic Privilege and Modern Scholasticism: Secular Transcendence and Wordly Immanence

Abstract

This essay explores issues of worldly immanence and secular transcendence by focusing on modern scholasticism. Such scholasticisms intimate pervasive procedures that turn their particular case into the general story while forgetting the conditions that make this possible. It is exactly such spectacular conjuring that the essay refers to as secular transcendence: implicit assumptions of immaculate knowledge that occlude and ignore the traces and tracks of its maculate birth in the world. Against this is contrasted the presence of worldly immanence, which militates against routine assumptions of the disenchantment of – and detachment toward – the world. Seizing upon such worldly immanence, the essay critically explores how modern scholasticism and secular transcendence formidably beget and betoken the cultural privilege of academic arenas, embodied at once in the latter’s conceptual conventions as well as their everyday life-worlds.