This panel stages an inquiry into the possibility of a relation between queer theory and philosophy of religion. Its starting premise is that these discourses mirror one another in surprising, challenging ways. If, on the one hand, philosophy of religion has historically tended toward a universalizing gesture which needs particulars to translate or supersede, even if only to problematize this very supersession, on the other hand queer theory is a relentlessly particularizing discourse which parasitically requires a universalizing norm from which to deviate. Both discourses are constituted by asymmetric power relations they long to overcome and yet cannot do without; bringing the two into relation thus illuminates something essential and problematic about both philosophy of religion and queer theory. What comes next, after this illuminating relation? The three panelists address this question by taking up major topoi of queer theory: temporality, anti(sociality), and reproductive futurism, respectively.
This paper revisits a canonical text of queer theory, Lee Edelman’s No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (2004), and argues that this book has been misunderstood insofar as it has not been received as theorizing the secular. Taking No Future as a work of philosophy of religion in the sense that, like much work in philosophy of religions over the past two decades, it attempts to expose the religious genealogy of Western secular modernity, the paper puts this book into conversation with philosophy of religion and religious studies more broadly. This conversation affords a fresh reading of Edelman’s familiar critique of “reproductive futurism” alert to its intersections with such themes and discourses of philosophy of religion as political theology, aura, the post-secular turn, and messianism/messianicity.
This paper will ask to what extent queer temporalities and critiques of colonial time converge in overlapping or complementary reconfigurations of time and history. Using Elizabeth Freeman’s notion of chronormativity, it will demonstrate how multiple theorists with divergent methods destabilize a unified and universal sense of time as a precondition for critiquing colonial capitalism. It will conclude by asking whether versions of teleological or messianic thinking—however abstract or indeterminate—recur across these critical discourses. It asks, in particular, what Freeman’s queer erotics and Bliss Cua Lim’s notion of “the fantastic” might have to do with conceptions of justice.
In response to the critique that “religion” is a Protestant category, privileging (individual) belief over (collective) practice, philosophers of religion working out of modern Christian sources have rightly sought to nuance this claim by showing that Christian philosophers like Kant or Schleiermacher also care about moral action or social cohesion. By contrast, modern Jewish philosophy, which frames dialogical ethics, sociality, intersubjectivity, and obligation to the other as its foundational contribution, has not had to contend with this same challenge. Yet for all the ways modern Jewish philosophy prizes the ethical import of its “originary” sociality, its ethical import, I suggest, may just be in forms of sociality illegible to philosophy’s so-called “social turn.” I turn to queer sociality to develop this claim and to ask whether sociality can do the kind of ethical and political work in philosophy that it is called upon to do.
| Amaryah Shaye Armstrong | amaryah@vt.edu | View |