Identity for and against Itself: Religion, Criticism, and Pluralization

Abstract

Confronted as we are with new sorts of postcolonial political orderings, the study of postcolonial religion demands a new practice of criticism. Meeting this demand, among other things, involves a different kind of rethinking of still taken-for-granted assumptions about the liberal distinction between religion and secularism and related concepts like nation, tolerance, and unity. Secularists of varying disciplinary persuasions remain unable to offer an alternative view of the distinction, as they obtain their conceptions of “religion” in advance of the conjunctures in which differing definitions of religion come into being. Through a reading of a particular public dispute among Buddhist parties contending to define Buddhist identity and difference in varying terms in late 1990 Sri Lanka, I offer a refashioned conceptualization of the relation between the secular and the religious that helps us understand how agonistic spaces of dispute can oblige religious identity to be both for and against itself, producing a new postcolonial politics of care for the “Other.” Finally, with some help from Foucault and Heidegger, I argue that conceptualizing these agonistic spaces as public sites that demand such a “care for the Other” can constitute an ethic of intervention and affirmation.