Annual Meeting 2023 Program Book

In response to the question “Who are you?”, directed at Carl Schmitt during his 1945-47 incarceration, he returned to his jurisprudential foundation and used his friend-enemy axiom to exculpate his self from any criminal guilt and moral responsibility. The theorem of this “theorist beyond theology” cannot be reduced to a ‘pseudo-theological myth of the enemy’ (Groh) or a discourse on *Political Theology* (Meier). Rather it permits him to remain a Pharisees and enclosed in his idealist self (Bonhoeffer). To safeguard his *Gestalt*, Schmitt abstracted the objective from the subjective within juristic guilt and his official roles, and revised the beginning of conflict from Original Sin to Cain and Abel. This reinforced his concept of history as perpetual inter-human fight of dichotomist ideas and accepted a new domain in which the enemy becomes the new elite and friend, thereby betrays, and reinforces, his “sovereign” and devises a mechanism for ideological manipulations.

Why does the Dutch far-right Party for Freedom’s plan for the “De-Islamization” of the Netherlands include defunding wind energy? Why did Viktor Orban lump “demography, migration, and gender” into a single “great historic battle”? The global far right increasingly refuses to distinguish between its targets—queer and trans people, Muslims, immigrants, decarbonization, etc—instead seeing them as different faces of a single, kaleidoscopic enemy. This paper draws on Schmitt’s concept of the enemy, Freud’s theory of displacement, and Vamik Volkan’s large-group psychoanalysis to argue the far right’s collapsing of its various enmeties can best be understood as a displacement of death anxiety through secularized salvation theology. The very real threat of communal death posed by climate change or nuclear proliferation is repressed and returns in the various guises of a single fantasmatic enemy, whose vanquishing by sovereign violence is imagined to guarantee the eternal preservation of the nation. 

Carl Shmitt’s assertion that the friend/enemy distinction is the foundation fo the political might be interpreted backwards, suggesting that where there is the political, there is enmity. The political, however, is not the only mode of relation produced by enmity. Emile Benveniste’s philological examination of the origin of the term hostis suggests that the Other is not only understood politically, but economically as well. As such, economy might equally suggest the presence of an enemy. The question that this paper will pose and seek to answer is whether enmity within the self might be helpfully understood as expressed economically, and if so, whether “the economic” remains the appropriate term or whether, as this paper will argue works by Georges Bataille suggest, an internal economy of friend/enemy can best be understood as constitutive of the erotic; thus suggesting that the erotic is indicative of an internal enemy. 

In assessing the genealogical trajectories of modern political theological discourse leading up to Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben, this paper will explore how both traditional and burgeoning approaches to thinking the katechon (i.e., the 'force that withholds’ the ‘mystery of lawlessness’ in 2 Thessalonians 2:6–7) might inform ways of theorising the proximity or coincidence between the anarchic and the messianic vis-a-vis the state and its administration. I therein ask of the eschatological significance of the concept of civil war and what a political theology of the latter might mean for the relationship between two terms which have fuelled the western machine of history: eschatology and economy. Today, the latter has become aimlessly totalised in the absence of its other, and so a new engagement between the two offers the potential to reveal and thus throw the archic fixations of contemporary economic life into relief.

On 28 May 2022, ten thousand people gathered in Bedworth in central England to watch the ceremonial burning of the Sanctuary memorial devoted to victims of COVID-19. Filled with photographs, mementos, and messages associated with the dead, these materials rendered Sanctuary a sacred site amidst a country struggling to religiously locate its response to the pandemic. The sharp decline in Christian affiliation in the UK has led to a situation of religious-secular flux in memorialization of COVID-19, and through the Sanctuary project’s use – and ritual destruction – of materials of grief, the initiative offered a provocative new form of public mourning. Mixing inspiration from American counter-culture, conscious references to ritual spaces of British war memory, and a deliberate refusal to define its meaning for audiences, Sanctuary speaks to a national context of uncertainty regarding how to remember the pandemic and what constitute socially acceptable uses of bereavement materials.

Everyday Hinduism in India and in the diaspora is practiced, especially by women, through a calendar of religious fasts, called vratas. The concomitant food recipes have elaborately defined rules that are required to be followed by the worshippers. With the gradual dissolution of multigenerational families, many Hindu women now live in nuclear families in cities and countries away from their natal homes. Their childhood memories of religious fasting and feasting need to be documented, shared and buttressed by other accessible resources for memory-creation. One such resource is the proliferating Hindu religious recipes (which are conduits of material memories) on food websites and food blogs. This paper will investigate some food blogs and food-based websites—selected through purposive sampling method—and will attempt to explore how their recipes of vrata food function either as sites for the obedient replication and/or the more unruly refashioning of everyday religion and religious identities.

Decoration Day is a lesser-known tradition of the Upland and Appalachian South, in which members of the community gather to clean up and adorn the graves of departed family and friends. Liberty Hill Baptist Church Cemetery in Spruce Pine, North Carolina, holds its Decoration Day on the third Sunday in June, Father’s Day—though decoration refers to the whole weekend during which community members gather in the cemetery to do the work of clearing, cleaning, and decorating the graves of their departed loved ones. This paper examines how the para-ecclesial practice of decoration uses material practices of memory (particularly through the maintenance and decoration of graves) as a way of cultivating ongoing bodily relationship with the spirits of the dead. Decoration provides a different religious imaginary than either contemporary death-avoidance or unironic communitas, but material and spiritual communion with the dead which nevertheless holds space for alienation, brokenness, and repair.

In this proposal I intend to examine the everyday feelings and obstacles that arise from the realities of exhaustion. I will expand on what I think are the most “unspoken” traits of exhaustion that we seem to want to hide from family, friends, and co-workers. These include feelings of guilt and shame, failure and self-hatred, anger and rage. There are also particularly debilitating emotions, such as hopelessness and despair. Exhaustion steals your creativity and your desire to express yourself in any way more significant than a tweet.  Work suffers (actually, you start to resent work but feel guilty for doing so since you are so lucky to have a tenured job.) Relationships suffer. You suffer. And sleep doesn’t help. In my paper I will use a variety of vignettes to demonstrate how exhaustion feels, focusing on some of these characteristics such as anger, guilt, loneliness, shame and the like.

What it is about the turtle’s conditions of existence, its particular mode of production, its “nature,” that makes it so fitting a metaphor, in Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath, for those who trudge along, navigating obstacles, benefitting from those who would do no harm, and surviving in spite of others who intend it? The turtle survives, after all, by instinctual persistence and dumb luck. This paper reflects on what it is to be drawn, with a creative impulse, toward that which is lifeless and void, from the perspective of someone writing and working within a toxic workplace environment. This leads to ruminations regarding the relationship between paid and creative labor, what creative labor as resistance resists, and ambivalence vis-à-vis the paradoxical amateurism of writing that is driven by salvage and survival, and characterized by rearrangement, redaction, and negation, much like works of found art and blackout poetry.

Reflecting on the Asian immigrant experience of the third otherness, and witnessing increased anti-Asian violence and its embedded racism toward Asian immigrants in U.S. Asian immigrant history and culture, this paper will raise and analyze the complications of Asian immigrant issues and their "third otherness." The first part of this paper will reinterpret U.S. racial relations by dismantling black/white and native/alien binary concepts from an Asian immigrant perspective and explore the deeper understandings of postcolonial relationships that Asian immigrants experience and challenge. Deconstructing black/white, native/alien, and host/guest binary divides, this paper will address the current structures of sociohistorical binary paradigms, investigate the unique challenges of Asian immigrant positions, analyze the reality of their third otherness, and explores the possibilities of transforming binary relationships into postcolonial relationships based on ethical and theological religious traditions and practices in Asian immigrant contexts. The second part of this paper will show how this third otherness, especially invisibility between white/black and native/alien paradigm, plays in my academic life and challenge my scholarship.

Waking up with dread, excitement, or indifference. The dull monotony of responding to email after email. The joy of seeing a student’s face when they finally understand. Our academic lives are deeply affective. In this presentation, I will discuss the affective dimensions of academic labor through the lens of a day in my life as a tenure-track faculty member at non-elite, rural, small liberal arts college. Feelings of disconnection from my scholarly field pair with daily work to craft something of meaning in my classroom and campus to create a complex of affective experiences. I will think through the possibilities of scholars’ communal labor and the potential for celebrating that we matter in our day-to-day lives. Perhaps by discussing our individual experiences of despair and joy within academia, we can craft an affective space of healing and rejuvenation. Or burn it all to the ground.

My presentation is a sensually-rich, affectively charged engagement with the scholarly conversations on discursive traditions, media and mediation, and gendered authenticity from the perspective of figures who have remained peripheral to scholarship on "Tradition." In addition to ethnographic informants from my research on reproductive loss, my interlocutors are two unlikely figures: Talal Asad’s and Joseph Soloveitchik’s moms. My reading of Talal Asad’s 2020 “Portrait” in Religion and Society during the Covid-19 pandemic while wrangling two young children inspired me to reflect—or more accurately, express rage, empathy, and languishment—on the exhausting labor of maintaining Tradition. In addition to critiquing the gendered temporal and spatial imaginaries on which predominant theories of tradition have been built, my talk kneads together insights on a how to live tradition otherwise from queer companions, from the Rabbis of the Mishna to Fiddler’s Tevye to the great Tim Gunn.

This paper explores William James’s experience of “stage fright” and W.E.B. DuBois’s “strange feeling” of racialization as windows into the stresses we often endure in a variety of academic environments, including conferences.  Highlighting what both men referred to as “new religious ideals” taking shape through their negative emotional experiences, I contend that religious revelations are not beyond the anxieties and sufferings we feel but forming within them, urging us to transcend the limits of our presence predicament in order to build genuine, just, and happier social connections.  I also emphasize that how we interact with each other at conferences has consequences for the kind of society we want to build.  Will we to commit to forms of social life premised on conditional recognition and performative assimilation?  Or, will we listen to our bodies, letting their fears and strange feelings push us toward more liberating social experiences?