Postsecular Entanglement

In Postsecular History, Maxwell Kennel asks us to consider how the concept of the “postsecular” may help us to make sense not only of our present condition, but of our past and our future as well. To do this, he draws our attention to the variety of possible meanings contained in the prefix “post.” To say that we live in a postsecular age is not simply to say that we live after a time period defined by something called “the secular.” Kennel resists usages of the prefix “post” that would suggest that “the secular” has now definitively been overcome, surpassed, or superseded. “Instead,” he writes, “I want to use the term ‘postsecular’ as a flexible name for how the secular, secularism, and secularization are being mediated, contested, and entangled in the present” (27). That “the secular” continues to be “entangled” with “religion” is a claim that recurs throughout the wide-ranging chapters that comprise this ambitious study. The ongoing entanglement of the “religious” and the “secular” is particularly visible and meaningful, Kennel contends, in the ways in which we conceptualize time and come to understand our relationship to the past, the present, and to our anticipated future. This is the through line that connects Kennel’s readings of influential texts ranging from The Confessions to Moby Dick, and thinkers including Friedrich Nietzsche, Carl Schmitt, Eric Auerbach, and Dorothee Sölle. The individual chapters that comprise the book aim to show.