Religious Studies and the Return of the Religious

Abstract

In the context of contemporary literary and cultural theory, the return of the religious (which also goes under the name of the religious or theological turn) has manifested itself in a number of different ways. First, and most visibly, a significant number of leading contemporary philosophers commonly identified as atheist or, at least, secularist in orientation (Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Jean‐François Lyotard, Julia Kristeva, Luce Irigaray, Jean‐Luc Nancy, Gianni Vattimo, Alain Badiou, Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj Žižek, Charles Taylor) began to explore religious texts, themes or problems in their work over the course of the past 20 years. Second, the return of the religious has also taken the form of a revisionist reading of the religious dimensions of continental philosophy itself which both offers reinterpretations of canonical thinkers such as Walter Benjamin, Franz Rosenzweig, Carl Schmitt, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau‐Ponty, Jacques Lacan, and Emmanuel Levinas and reappraises hitherto marginalized or more secondary figures like Eric Petersen, Henri de Lubac, Jacob Taubes, and Michel de Certeau. Finally, the religious turn has also prompted a thoroughgoing re‐evaluation of a Judeo‐Christian tradition that had too easily been written off as metaphysical or ontotheological together with a contemporary reassessment of theological concepts such as messianic time, justice, givenness, confession, forgiveness, the universal, apophatic or negative theology, and, most recently, political theology. If the return of the religious in contemporary theory takes many different forms, though, a common theme running through all work in the field is a self‐conscious reflection on its own inherent assumptions. What exactly is “the religious”? How does its “return” manifest itself? Why has it come back now – if, indeed, it ever went away in the first place?