Milton and the Post-Secular Present: Ethics, Politics, Terrorism

Abstract

Feisal G. Mohamed. Milton and the Post-Secular Present: Ethics, Politics, Terrorism. Stanford: Stanford UP, 2011. 162 + xii pages. $21.95.Reviewed by Ryan NetzleyFeisal G. Mohamed's Milton and the Post-Secular Present: Ethics, Politics, Terrorism argues that Milton's poetry and prose not only exhibit a pre- or proto-secular account of reason's value but also reveal a decidedly non-secular commitment to transcendent truth (19). As a result, Milton's work is especially useful for any attempt to understand our own transition into a post-secular age, succinctly defined here as a turn away from the empty proceduralisms of the liberal state. Mohamed shows how Milton's concern for the of belief provides a substantive, and not merely formal, mechanism for judgment (41), and, in so doing, escapes the tendency to cheerlead, for either ineffable passion or hard-nosed reason, that characterizes many discussions of post-secularity. Even the most committed foe of the Enlightenment will find in this book a compelling brief for the continued value of skepticism in a post-secular age.In Mohamed's account, Milton is decidedly wary of fallen humanity's ability to evaluate its own motive passions. Samson Agonistes and its famously ambiguous rousing motions show that there is certainly reason to be skeptical of one's own inner promptings, but such doubts do not translate simply into an obverse transcendent reserve. Instead, the dramatic poem is useful because it allows us none of the reassuring dialectical oppositions on which both belief and skepticism play:If Milton prompts us to look beyond an axis of good and evil, it is because of, not despite, the unsettling parallels between Samson Agonistes and modern terrorism; in these parallels we see that even a subtle-minded poet energetic in his defense of liberty can promulgate an exceptionalist discourse privileging the rights of the elect. (126)Yet despite these moments that endorse skeptical responses to passionate promptings, Milton's work also shows us that rationalist skepticism does not show itself skeptical enough and frequently veers toward a self-satisfied triumphalism. In fact, Mohamed's book begins with the acknowledgment that skepticism often runs the risk of devolving into a reactionary acceptance of contingency and injustice and disavowing the obligation to make choices in the world:Skepticism on its own, the worry seems increasingly to run, can devolve into a nihilist acceptance of the given eschewing strong ethical and political engagement . . . current skepticism can take as axiomatic the ambiguity of phenomena and see its own rationalism and self-conscious discursiveness as the end of a telos where grand narratives are meant to be outgrown. (2)Like Milton's Samson, we are still required to make choices in this world of passionate promptings. But those choices cannot simply stem from blind hope or faith: such reactions are not so much an overcoming of skepticism's potential inertia as they are an attempt to ignore it.Milton and the Post-Secular Present never condescendingly assures us that there is a rationalist structure that could guarantee our adjudication of faith claims and, in so doing, continues the tradition of Areopagitica's denigration of a simple outsourcing of belief and judgment. Mohamed's suspicion of liberal proceduralism leads him to make common cause, to a certain extent, with Alain Badiou's work (4). Yet he also notes that Badiou's notion of the event is just as formally empty as any juridical proceduralism: Rather than the deliberative procedures of capitalist-parliamentarianism we are leftwith a procedural activism contingent upon a posture of belief more than on its content (41). Milton insists, of course, in Areopagitica and elsewhere, that the of belief matters. Yet his challenge to a hollow democratic procedure does not merely reduce to an argument for the liberty of a fit few or the triumph of an elect and elite ruling class (52-56). …