 on secularism and cosmopolitanism sponsored by the Critical Theory Institute. I will make my remarks very, very brief, in part because if I did justice to the long career of publication and teaching of our friend and colleague, Professor Etienne Belibar, you would never hear a talk, but I did want to make sure to represent accurately the titles of some upcoming publications. Since 2000, Etienne Belibar has been a distinguished professor of French and Italian and I compare her literature in the School of the Humanity. Stefan, up here in the front. No longer English, I'm sorry. Rick, there's a seat here. Come forward, two more seats here in the front. Etienne Belibar's writings, which are a sample reading ready project that addresses the political issues of our times, are numerous, as I said, and include three new titles that I want to draw your attention to. Violence and Civility, which are the Wellick Library Lectures of 1996 and other essays, forthcoming from Columbia University Press, very soon are told. The Proposition of Echo of Liberty and other political essays, Duke University Press, also forthcoming very soon this year. Not very soon. Not very soon. Let me tell them. As soon as possible. And French philosophy after 1945, and then fall into an essay that includes an introductory essay by Etienne. This is in collaboration with John Reinman and Ann Boyman, and it's forthcoming from the New Press New York. As I said, I want to make my comments very brief today. But the talk we're about to hear has ramifications locally and globally. And locally, I think will help us make more precise our interventions around the recent Irvine 11 issue and issues of civil disobedience and freedom of speech and student activism and student movement in the UCs more broadly. I did want to share with you one quote from some earlier work, an essay that Etienne wrote, an address he delivered in 2000 in Greece. Because I think it speaks to some of the feelings that I've been hearing aired, both by students and faculty, that there's something about our geographic and political situation that makes us, in some way, marginal or peripheral for the centers of action, the hot campuses that will have the very big demonstrations tomorrow. And I wanted to reaffirm that being marginal is a good thing. It can be a powerful thing. It can be a powerful position in which to rethink key terms. Etienne's talk will teach us how to rethink key terms. This is what he said in 2000 in Greece. The term border is extremely rich in significations. One of my hypotheses is that it is undergoing a profound change in meaning. The borders of new socio-political entities in which an attempt is being made to preserve all the functions of the sovereignty of the state are no longer entirely situated at the outer limit of territories. They are dispersed a little everywhere, wherever the movement of information, people and things is happening and is controlled. For example, in cosmopolitan cities. But it is also one of my hypotheses that the zone is called peripheral, where secular and religious cultures confront one another, where differences in economic prosperity become more pronounced and strained, constitute the melting pot for the formation of the people, demos, without which there is no citizenship in the sense that this term has acquired antiquity in the democratic tradition. I'm proud to say that the students lead us to rethinking the demos in which we are apart. And I give you Etienne Balibar. Thank you so much. Yes, this seems better. Okay. There's still a few seats in the front maybe for you. Kerry, for example. I'm not sure, or somebody else. Okay, I want to begin with expressing both gratitude and apologies. Gratitude to Dina first of all for the most generous and friendly introduction. I couldn't dream of a warmer and more appropriated introduction and bridging the distance of the gap between what I'm going to say, things on which I have been working for some time, and a bunch of critical issues that belong to our most immediate environment and present. Second to the critical theory institute for asking me to deliver this public talk while I'm here by chance, because for me this is not a normal year at all, while I'm on sabbatical, but you see I cannot prevent from being pulled somehow to this part of the world and of the academia where I now in fact have my continuous activities of research and teaching. And of course last but not least for all of you for coming, attending the lecture. I have many good friends and colleagues and students in the audience and other new friends as well whom I want to thank. Apologies as well for two reasons. One, the paper that I'm going to read for you is not an original paper that I prepared especially for this occasion. It's in fact essentially the same as a public lecture that I gave in last November in Beirut, in the American University of Beirut, called the Anismat D.C. Memorial Lecture. And well, in fact I'm going to repeat it before you. I don't know if this kind of association is virtual or real. Okay, and second, even more embarrassing for me, some of you will attended already a little conference, I mean a conference that I was going to be organizing with George Marcus from anthropology and other colleagues here in this very place with the general title, Culture and Religion, will easily recognize ideas and formulations, perhaps even old passages into this lecture that derived from the talk I had given on that occasion. This is not only because I'm a very lazy man, but it's because in fact I remained obsessed by the same issues and I tried to seize still another occasion to continue on the same lines and if possible develop or improve some of the formulations. Nevertheless, it's not perfectly satisfactory to repeat the same things for the same audience. Maybe this time the criticism at the end will be harsher. Now let's come to the subject, Secularism and Cosmopolitanism or in the reverse order. Well the conjunction end in my title might suggest is that there is a complementarity of the two notions or that we should try to build or rebuild a discourse combining a definition of secularism, even secularist perspective with a cosmopolitan perspective. I would readily admit that in my view these are both positive notions and values which form part of a civic and democratic understanding of the political. Simultaneously, I have become aware or increasingly aware that their combination is profoundly contradictory and I went as far as becoming convinced that each of these two notions in the contemporary situation that this situation is the result of a long history essentially undermines, distracts or deconstructs the meaning and stability of the other puts its validity into question. This situation makes it probably more difficult, not less, to refer to them as complementary aspects of the democratic project. So in a sense what I want to do is to make it more complicated to associate cosmopolitanism and secularism within a single problematic as many of us might be tempted to do with different intentions in mind. Is this working correctly? I'll turn it down because I think it's too loud. It's a little loud, yes. Sorry. Thank you. Essay. I should not stand too close on the microphone. Is that better? No, it's too loud. Always have the temptation to kiss the microphone. Is this it? Okay, I think that's good. In particular, I'm trying to work against a tendency to which I myself owe a great deal of my civic commitments. A tendency to see cosmopolitanism and secularism as natural components of modernity, which can also become, for some of our contemporaries, a reason to challenge their validity and denounce their belonging to hegemonic discourse. Essentially that of a Eurocentric and European modernization of the world. In other terms, an imposition on the rest of the world of Europe's anthropological and constitutional assumptions during and after the formal colonial era. This kind of occupation leads me to formulating rather convoluted questions. For example, suppose that... Poor Lisa. I should never have said anything that was better. Suppose that in the conditions of contemporary politics, no cosmopolitan project can acquire meaning without involving a, quote, secular, unquote, dimension. So that no such thing as a, quote, religious cosmopolitanism, unquote, is thinkable. Why is it then that initially at least a secular, not to say a secularist understanding of the construction of the cosmopolitanists adds difficulties and contradictions to those already contained in the classical idea of instituting citizenship at a transnational level or granting it with a new transnational dimension? Why is it that the explicit characterization of the public sphere as a non-religious or secular one, which seemed quite clear at the level of the city and the nation, if of course not universally accepted, becomes confusing and possibly self-destructive when we tentatively raise our definition of the political to the apparently unlimited, non-exclusive space of the human world? How could the obstacles contained in such a representation adding utopia to utopia as it were nevertheless figure a path towards discussing the political tasks and the kind of political process involved in the idea of a cosmopolitical horizon for our societies? And conversely, suppose that at least in some regions of the world or perhaps in all of them or by each time in a singular way, there no longer exists any possibility to ground and implement a secular agenda in politics to vindicate secularism in the regulation of social conflicts or the development of such public services as education or health care or urbanism etc. without referring to a cosmopolitan way of defining the political. Suppose in other terms that there is no viable, no consistent, no progressive or democratic secularism that can be less than cosmopolitan so that in particular a secularism defined in purely national terms or subjected to the mere imperatives of national unity and national security would instantly become contradictory and in fact self-destructive. Again, why is it that such a formula does not so much remove obstacles than create them or to be more cautious, reveal them in a manner that precludes of immediate visible solutions? In other terms, what I have in mind in the first place is the fact that secularism and cosmopolitanism now again hotly debated issues remain less and less separable. More than ever, there is a necessity of discussing each of them in terms of its interference with the other. However, the conjunction produces a terrible vacillation in almost each and every of the apparent certainties that we associate with the names secularism and cosmopolitanism. A vacillation that is indeed so violent that it can be doubted whether they will survive this trial in a recognizable form and tempted here also because in a minute I will refer to some of her analysis in the field to simply borrow the marvelous title of Joan Scott's seminal book on the constitution of Republican citizenship in French constitutional history, only paradoxes to offer. I do so because I believe that such a formula aptly indicates what in other places I have suggested is the intrinsic property of the development of citizenship as a historical institution, namely its antinomic character or its capacity to generate internal contradictions and become self-destructive. I try to associate this with the idea that citizenship at the same time as a necessary relation to processes of democratization and nevertheless remains irreducible or not entirely reducible to pure democracy. I admit that this represents an extremely quick shortcut but let me suggest that along those lines, those of a discussion of the antinomies of citizenship, cosmopolitanism and secularism are part of a project of democratizing the accepted forms of democratic citizenship themselves that cannot be brushed aside, at least from my point of view. But at the same time, they indicate limits of the possibility of expanding citizenship in a democratic manner, limits which in a certain conjuncture, whose end is not entirely predictable, could prove insurmountable. And this is even more the case when their conflictual interdependency is perceived. We have no certainties, no guarantees on this point and we will have none in any predictable future. Since these considerations were very abstract, allow me now in a condensed manner to illustrate with a concrete example the kind of situation and debate that led me to rethinking the contradictory articulation of cosmopolitanism and secularism. I will borrow it in a manner this time completely predictable from recent French history and I should perhaps apologize again for that because it could sound terribly perocural and above all it may very well demonstrate in your eyes the extent to which somebody who claims to work in a critical perspective remains in fact acritically subjected to the representations of his own nation and tradition. However, this episode known as the legal and political controversy about the wearing of the so-called Islamic veil or hijab by young Muslim girls in schools and its subsequent interdiction by the state authority in the name of constitutional secularism already a few years ago is now widely known, even debated outside France, perhaps at the coast of some simplifications. And the fact that it produces such echoes even in the form of a widespread critique of the rationality and the effects of the law which banned the veil from French schools, that is in practice placed girls wearing hijabs before the alienating choice of being stripped of the most personal government or being expelled from the public educational system is itself part of the cosmopolitical meaning of the event. Let us note in passing that the quasi-unanimous rejection or criticism of the French law ranging from conservatives to liberals and from intellectuals, activists and clerics in the East and the West is by itself something French exceptionalism may very well be pleased with. Since, in its eyes, it would emphasize the allegedly unique relationship between French republicanism and secularism. Therefore, it flatters our cultural narcissism. I must regretfully leave aside long considerations on the possibility or impossibility of rendering the French official word laïcité into English as secularism, simply indicating that the two terms are not complete equivalents, but also not totally external to one another. The aspect of secularism that laïcité, I guess, let's do it, laïcité in Italian and the Turks also and from what I have been told, the Persian language also reproduces it, literally. So the aspect of secularism that laïcité pushes to the extreme is not the equal right of religious denominations in the public realm, but the separation of church, more generally religions and state or state functions, including in particular education in the French case. This specific emphasis, whose philosophical roots I suggested in other places, could be traced back to a Hobbesian rather than a Lockean conception of the social contract, suddenly does not represent the only possible form of secularism for its mainstream realization far from. But this variation again is part of the problem rather than an extrinsic element. We should not be surprised to discover that why the kind of extremism involved in the discourse and practice of laïcité distorts many of the issues involved in the secularizing process of the Western societies. It also reveals some of the deepest contradictions that are at stake in any discussion of secularism in general. This is my excuse for returning to this case as did many others coming from different countries in the recent past who have very different degrees of sympathy for the French political tradition, not to mention French narcissism. To which I should add that one of my reasons for discussing it again is my dissatisfaction with many discourses both from inside and from outside this tradition. I have strongly disagreed and I continue to strongly disagree with the French law in spite of what became its apparent peaceful implementation greatly helped in fact by the global conjuncture at the moment. The head chef wearing girls and their families or advisors in France did not want to become instrumentalized by or assimilated to the fundamentalist preachers or even al-Qaeda spokesmen who loudly supported their resistance. Not al-Qaeda. Who loudly supported their resistance from the international stage or on the international stage. Independent of other circumstances I deny that an injunction directed at individuals who are supposed to be the victims of religious and or patriarchy oppression to abide by the law or leave the public school which in practice means surrendering them to the absolute power of the family and in some cases the religious community can have the least emancipatory effect or educated function. Since it denies to the subjects themselves every possibility of expression, self-determination and if necessary negotiation or it treats them precisely as subjects in the old sense referring to subjection and not as virtual citizens. In fact this conspicuous constraint was destined to give satisfactions and grant legitimacy to the racist components of the French society as much as to impose secular obedience on Muslim girls but of course to the expense of them the letter. Accordingly this seems to be a very clear case of the situation famously described by Gayatri Speevac as the scenario of I quote the phrase you all know white men liberating brown women from the oppression of brown men which testifies eloquently for the continuation of colonial relations and perceptions in the post-colonial era. The things are less simple because there also exists I believe a counter scenario whose exact practical importance has to be carefully assessed not exaggerated but cannot be entirely denied that of I suggest brown men protecting brown women from being liberated by white men or in fact white women as are many of the school teachers strongly voicing against the acceptation of the veil in their classes. This I believe was clearly illustrated when street demonstrations were staged by some Muslim associations where girls were invades sometimes mockingly colored like the Republican the French Republican flag protested and marched against the ban under close custody of male Islamic militants who prevented any access to or conversation with them. A moment ago I was referring to Joan Scott's formulations about citizenship and as some of you possibly know she has also published possibly read it also published an important book on the French controversy and its historical roots called Politics of the Veil where she mainly describes the continuity in the representation of the indigenous woman especially the Muslim woman which was an integral part of the colonial orientalist imaginary and becomes now protracted in the dominant view of gender relations among migrant populations in post-colonial France. This is hardly disputable but in the same analysis she apparently endorses the discourse of the opposition between traditional modesty of women as a cultural trait of the Muslim world which would allow them to resist the brutal exploitation of the female body and its image in western modernity as illustrated by commercials and advertisements. And she would combine, I hope I'm not distorting her views while summarizing them as well as I can and she combines in a single critical concept of abstract universalism the capitalist mass consumption of which the sex industry and the gender oppression form part with the typical neutralization that is to say denial of anthropological differences be they sexual, cultural or religious in French republicanism. The result in my view is not to allow for a more concrete investigation of the contradictions it is to render this definition of abstract universalism itself completely abstract and ahistorical. In fact what I find more satisfactory than recurring to antithetic notions of resistance to control imperialism or or liberation from culturally oppressive traditions is to describe a double-bind situation. The fact is that in precise episodes of the conflict over the acceptation or rejection of hijab wearing girls in French schools as again today in new conflictual developments which have started around the possibility or impossibility of wearing both cats in the French cities or by the social, legal and political aspects are not exactly the same. These female subjects found themselves caught between the coercive agencies of two rival phallocratic groups which indeed can include many women one speaking the language of religious traditions and religious freedom and the other speaking the language of secular education and the emancipation of women. Each of them in fact targeting their bodies and making it the stake of their will to power, the reproduction of their domination however unequal politically these forces remained and however heterogeneous the social realms in which they were exercising their power. As you can imagine this is where I expect objections to be raised. I know that such a characterization is disputable and I'm eager to have it contested and rectified but I want to derive two preliminary hypothetical conclusions from there which will lead me to my next point namely a more general reflection on the uses of the categories culture and religion that are so insistent in these debates. The first provisional conclusion is that such seemingly local even parochial conflicts are always already cosmopolitical. In this name, cosmopolitical has successively emphasized the two sides of the expression. They are cosmopolitical and they are cosmopolitical in the full sense. They involve the whole world or crystallized elements arising from world history and world geography within a specific national microcosm which by definition is open and unstable. The more you try to enclose it, the more you destabilize it. This is clearly the case with social and institutional tensions taking place in the middle of what we might call global suburbs like Saskia, Sassan coined the expression global cities where migrations and diasporas had increasingly normalized the that is rendered common. The heterogeneity of cultures and religions sometimes of course their clashes always their huge inequalities of power and institutional legitimacy. It is even more the case because generally speaking the encounter of local and diasporic cultures is a post-colonial phenomenon, we agree on that in a double sense. It continues the colony but also it transposes or translates it therefore it transforms it sometimes even it reverses it. More than ever we ought to acknowledge that what shapes the social environment in which we live what makes it a global world in particular is the conflictual legacy of the immediate past, the process of colonization and decolonization. There is clearly no global society combining a global civil society and a global political system of states which is not the result of a process of globalization but the process of globalization which has several centuries behind itself was not simply capitalist in the abstract sense of the term a mere process of commodification and accumulation. It was capitalist in the concrete political form of colonization in particular. This is already to say that what is cosmopolitical must be also cosmopolitical in the sense in which the political is inseparable from historical and social conflict. But our example shows more if we draw the attention to the necessary intervention of religious discourses or discourses labeled religious and the counter discourse of laicite and state secularism which clearly has in the French case perhaps others as well a symmetric tendency to become sacralized that is to appropriate some of the most typical characteristics of the religious admittedly the monotheistic religious or the Christian poliom religious which is not any religious discourse in the West. My tendency formula would be here and I want to insist on this as strongly as possible. There is no such thing as a purely religious conflict but in today's world a conflict that pits religious representations and allegiances against one another or against their secular antithesis is always already entirely political. Perhaps that was always the case but the modalities have changed especially since the relativization of national boundaries and sovereignty. The increasing importance of migrations made it impossible to assign the religious discourses to the place of the particular or particularism whereas the secular discourse of public reason would occupy the place of the universal. In fact we always have to do with conflictual universalities which may explain why it proves increasingly difficult to project a dichotomy of the private and the public realms on the distinction of religious membership and legal or the legal citizenship. A public discourse and institution that derives its legitimacy from a national and inevitably nationalist tradition is not more universal or universalistic than a transnational religious discourse. In any case its greater degree of universality cannot be asserted a priori taken from granted. It has to be proved and experienced especially in terms of its emancipatory power. Whenever the religious differences become conflictual and we must always investigate the practical circumstances which crystallize the conflict that never have purely religious roots. This conflict is virtually a cosmopolitical one. This also explains the paradoxical relationship between the neighboring notions of cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitanism. It is now the case at least in my opinion that the reality and visibility of cosmopolitanism as a highly conflictual contemporary form of politics either directly prepares for a cosmopolitan era or simply destroys its possibility. But it opens the field I believe of a competition between alternative cosmopolitanisms themselves conflictual just as I will try to show that it forces us to consider alternative secularisms. This leads me to a second conclusion still provisional. Among the varieties of cosmopolitanism that seemed likely to be implemented at the institutional level there was something called multiculturalism. It is or was both a very important and a very ambiguous idea. Indeed, and this is crucial in my view, this term was never taken in the same sense on all sides. The differences are huge and obvious between multiculturalism based on the idea of mutually external cultures corresponding to mutually exclusive communities or allegiances. Whose coexistence should be organized in the form of an institutional pluralism whereby the cultural tradition of the community represents the ultimate framework of socialization for the individual. Her point of entry into the public sphere say the multiculturalism of Charles Taylor and a multiculturalism based on the representation of a continuous process of interference or hybridization of cultures whereby the adaptive and translating capacities of individuals or groups in the broad sense form the ultimate agency of historical transformation and subjectivation say the multiculturalism of Omibaba and Stuart Hall or Paul Gilroy. And it should be said that among the modern post-colonial nations, and it should be said that among the modern post-colonial nations, the receptions of one or another of these conceptions of multiculturalism had been extremely diverse themselves depending in particular on the historical imaginary of their nationalism and their exceptionalism. France was certainly one of the least receptive places according to whichever measure. But generally speaking, and this is my point, the one I want to make now, it would seem that the so-called return of the religious or return of the sacred different terminology used for example by Ashish Nandi has produced the dissociation and in fact the crisis of the idea of a multicultural cosmopolitanical agenda or cosmopolitanism as multiculturalism. I'm not thinking here on not only of nationalist or exclusivist xenophobic discourses which contrary to every historical lesson declare the homogeneity of culture within certain sovereign boundaries to be the absolute condition for the survival of any existing political community. I'm rather thinking of discourses which explain to us that the agenda of a multicultural constitution grossly underestimates the violence of potential conflicts between religious allegiances precisely because there are not conflicts among particularisms but conflicts of rival universities. The lesson to be drawn should be, we are told, that the multicultural project tries in vain to relocate on the cultural terrain what should be treated primarily if not in theological terms at least in terms of a civic different among religious discourses. Therefore, not so much in the anthropological language of cultures than in the moral and political language of tolerance or interface dialogue. All the more because on the global level there is no pre-established last instance or supreme court that regulates this kind of difference. So the mediation should come from the participants themselves as they see and identify themselves that is, we are told as religious communities. I'm aware of the fact that it is here also that in a very powerful way some contemporary anthropological discourses will want to reverse the pattern and invoke the return of the religious as an argument against the very use of the category religion. There are different versions of this argument. One was proposed in a cautious manner almost entirely negative or deconstructive by Jacques Derrida when he submitted that the term religion with its Roman and Christian background is strictly speaking untranslatable. Therefore, it imposes a Christian stamp on the very claims of recognition that are raised by non-Christian faiths such as Judaism and Islam when they ask for example in a European background or within a European constituency to become recognized as equals in the religious realm whose boundaries are in turn drawn by a secular agency which accepts itself from the confrontation. That did not prevent the same Derrida to picture the violence of the conflict around the national appropriation of the city of Jerusalem and its sacred places not only which is obvious to him and to me as well and I'm sure to many others here as a colonial phenomenon but above all as an intensification of the rival representations concerning the sites and contents of revelation offered by the three great Mediterranean monotheisms. Another formulation which has quite different sources and intentions was put forward by Talal Assad when he argued in famous essays on the genealogies of religion and the secular including some very harsh critiques of French secularism that religion is a purely Christian category used to impose the domination of the church over practices and creeds which by themselves are not religious to which he added that the dominant notions of secularism have inherited should we say totalogically secularized this theological notion of the religious. I think that this argument ought to be taken very seriously if only because it stresses the fact that there is no process of recognition without an institutional pattern of representation and there is no representation without a code of representation which is either dominant or dominated. The secular or the antithesis of the secular and the religious and essential component of secularism is precisely one such code, a dominant code in certain societies where it is both institutionally organized and intellectually elaborated in particular through the discipline called history of religions. This is also the question of what my friend Jacques Ancière calls le partage du sensible or the distribution of the perceptible which necessarily excludes something as it includes something else or as it totalizes the world in a comprehensive representation. The problem as we know comes from the fact that the code for the representation of the differences is not, is never really enunciated from outside from some absolutely universal or objective theoretical place. It is enunciated from within the conflict itself. This problem should be related of course with more general democratic issues concerning representation. In the wake of Edward Said we have discussed for quite some time now the antithesis being between, excuse me, between being represented in a theoretical discourse in the case of subalterns or simply the people and representing oneself, therefore presenting oneself in a claim of emancipation that is not only juridical but also discursive and figurative. This was the whole issue of the controversy over Orientalism that is clearly not finished. It has even received new developments in Europe since the highest authorities of the Catholic Church and some prominent intellectuals around them have embarked on demonstrating once again the Christian roots of European identity and the uniqueness of its, the alleged uniqueness of its relationship to reason. An idea that is of course enthusiastically endorsed by some critiques of western domination in the non-European world or rather among intellectuals who claim to speak in its name. But if we take seriously the idea of alternative conceptions of cosmopolitanism based on the deconstruction or internal critique of what has been institutionalized as secularism in the national framework and as an element of its sovereignty, we will have to consider another problem which is the problem of the code therefore the regime of translation in which the connected historical subjects present or represent themselves to one another and for one another, usually through the mediation of some discourses and some organic intellectuals. The critique of the religious secular code inherited from Christianity and also I think that Assad underestimates that aspect. Let's not forget this, from pre-Christian Rome suggested by Assad and others is certainly useful here but is it sufficient? Is it consistent? In fact I cannot prevent from wondering if it is not aporetic as well because it almost inevitably ends with a recourse to the alternative anthropological category of culture even in the case of Tal al-Assad's discourse well aware of the traps hidden in dominant uses of culture the translation of cultures etc. and a protagonist of their critique but who must name the stage on which historical transformations and conflicts take place as a realm of culturally diversified practices and representations. In fact the category of culture as that of society or that of politics is no less Eurocentric and western if you want to go that way than the categories of religion and secularism. It is the true product of a discourse arising from this great prototype of power and knowledge apparatus the academia of which we are part. So are we in a complete circle which can produce only skepticism? I see all by very hesitantly I must say and once again I call for criticism and suggestions an alternative possibility which is not based on a choice between the language of culture and the language of religion or a reduction of one term to the other but a critical use of the conceptual duality itself in order to identify certain differences that are elusive but crucial at stake in the political conflicts with either cultural or religious content. This I must admit is also on my side a way to reintroduce or rehabilitate an old fashioned category that of ideology this is where I return to some of the problems I already discussed two years ago. I make an attempt at reintroduces the quote Marxist and quote category of ideology as a formal and heuristic instrument not to reduce everything to ideology and disqualify it but to complicate the semantic demarcation of culture and religion and also to displace it if possible. In fact this is a circular movement. I want to see whether the category of ideology can benefit from this use as a mediating concept articulating a cultural dimension which I tend to refer as you will see to the pragmatic but also the imaginary realms of society and a religious dimension which I tend to consider essentially symbolic or attached to the collective unconscious as much as I want to see which clarification of debates involving religion and culture could arise from there being considered opposite poles of the ideological processes. Formally speaking I would suggest that such a duality is not only a logical construction but also a dynamic pattern. Cultural processes of generalization, routinization and hybridization alter and even destroy over the long run religious models of life, of subjectivity and of community just as religious symbols associated with rituals, beliefs, imperatives, revelations, myth and dogmas crystallize cultural differences. They limit the flexibility of cultures or in some cases ignite their internal tensions and transform them into political oppositions. Cultural habits and imaginaries travel only with people whereas religious rituals and symbolisms can become adopted out of their place of origin. You can convert to belief, not to a culture, only adopted more or less completely or adopted. But there is another reason why I believe that it could be fruitful to revive here a non-dogmatic version of the category of ideology namely that it keeps a constitutive relationship with a representation of its own outside. You cannot speak of ideology if you believe that ideology is everything. In this sense culture and religion or better said the religious dimension and the cultural aspect of ideology are not exhausting the range of causes that account for their own combination. The equation so to speak which we may have in mind would not be something like culture plus religion equal ideology but rather culture plus religion plus X equal ideology. Now what is this X? A Marxist would say that its economy is stupid. A Durkheimian sociologist would say that it is society in as much as it includes processes and factors irreducible to either religion or culture like the division of labour. A Foucaultian would say that it is power or power relations. A Viberian would say that it is domination and so on. This is a consideration which it might be worth remembering when we discuss political issues which tend to become reduced either to cultural transformations or to consequences of the action of religious forces or to distorted synthesis of both such as the infamous clash of civilisations. Indeed not only culture and religion do not automatically converge but their combined effects are always over determined by economic social processes and power relations which are neither cultural nor religious. This is from their point of view the absent cause which acts on another seed and without which they would perform nothing or nothing specific. If we remain with a simple or absolute self-sufficient articulation of the cultural and the religious it will ultimately become torn between the classical discourses of the unilateral reduction either to the religious of the religious excuse me to the cultural or the reverse. They both correspond to grand narratives of our theoretical tradition from which we keep learning and which I am sure encapsulates part of the problem. A strong version of a reduction of the religious to the cultural can be looked for in the work of Clifford Geertz and his continuators with his definition of religion as a cultural system which in a performative manner confers the aura of reality and conceptions of the general order of existence from which motivations derive in man. On this point of view it is clearly culture that is universal and religion that is particular not only because religion as a system of symbols is considered one aspect of culture among others but perhaps more decisively in the current conjuncture because it is at the level of culture and specific cultures that a comparative study of the differences among societies or human communities can be envisaged and carried on in a meaningful manner. And it is not religions or religious systems but cultures who meet and influence attract or repel each other through the intermediary of their individual and collective bearers or subjects. In this sense for Geertz and his followers culture is concrete, religion is abstract. An example of a symmetric reduction of the cultural to the religious can be drawn from Max Weber's program of a comparative study of religions. As we know Weber does not only insist on the fact or the idea that religious ethics are attached to the existence of economic differences and antithetical cultural roles, he strongly suggests that religious singularities are ultimately rooted in irreducible what I would call this is my terminology interpreting Weber. Irreducible axioms which represent so many incompatible ways of dealing with the symbolic relationships between the worldly and the other worldly are the issues of purity and impurity and redemption and evil or sin. In fact this time it is religion or the religious question that becomes universalized and cultures are historical effects of the adaptation of religious axioms to historical circumstances. Following a quasi-hegelian pattern of dialectical reasoning I will argue that each of these antagonistic points of view is true or rather that it is true in its negative relationship to the other. From this I would like to derive a methodological consequence. We're not certain of the exact meaning of the categories culture and religion but paradoxically even if the terms of the opposition are not really clear and possibly refer to practices and processes which materially are the same we need ever more a formal differential polarity of two terms say the religious and the cultural. It should work as a critical instrument to problematize irreducible notions of community of the incorporation of individuals or subjects into communities established reciprocities frame collective destinies in situations which are always singular. The distinction of the religious and the cultural dimensions of ideology plus X in this sense is in my view an instrument against the indiscriminate use of the category community which plagues debates about communitarianism and universalism. The community as such if it exists is probably neither religious nor cultural. It takes shapes against others in a historical process other communities and others other groups in a historical process that is essentially political even cosmopolitical through a combination of cultural and religious determinations plus X the material processes of economy and power relations. This leads me to a final hypothesis on this point perhaps the most important in my eyes but one that I can hardly do more than indicate in this lecture. Cultural or religious determinations undoubtedly have a common object or rule upon a common materiality which however is so elusive that they take it or construct it in opposite manners. What is this common disjunctive object? We could say simply that it is the human. I try to avoid the tautology looming behind this indeterminate reference by saying that it is the anthropological difference as such of a difference among humans. A category that I coined some years ago to indicate differences that are at the same time unavoidable impossible to deny and impossible to locate in a univocal or final manner. Therefore always remain problematic for each and every of us. Differences whose exact location and content remain for that reason problematic. The sexual difference, the masculine and the feminine as pure opposition preceding the attribution of gender roles and functions in the family whatever its social content which is always we know very arbitrary is an obvious example of such a difference. It is of course also primordial in all these debates but there are also such differences as the normal and the pathological or the mental and the organic etc. It is tempting to suggest that as such differences require at the same time fixation or related fixation and displacement normalization and perturbation. It is culture in quotes which normalizes or rootinizes them as Weber would say and religion which destabilizes or sublimates them in a revolutionary or mystical way. However this is still a rather mechanistic division of labor therefore only an allegoric indication that the opposite tasks cannot be performed by the same ideological systems. Thus while trying to keep something from the idea of an essential polarity of the religious and the cultural and using for this purpose the alternative attempts of anthropologists and historians at reducing one to the other my tendency is to push the opposition towards a complete ideal antithesis or antagonism in this respect with cultural evolutions, transformations, so-called inventions of traditions on one side and religious processes or moments of reform and revolution on the other side. This is suggested for political reasons of course in particular because I want to emphasize the role of religious symbols. However the size of the clearly are in building and sacralizing cultural hegemony structures and models of power in radicalizing or pushing to the extremes the anthropological differences and the corresponding distributions of roles and practices whose normalization is the essential function of culture. Pushing to the extreme that is either sacralizing, absolutizing, idealizing, sublimating or on the contrary in defining or deconstructing through mythical representations or mystical notions of transcendence. But this is also because I want to suggest that it is crucial and will be crucial for us in the future to observe the coming of religious revolutions in the sense of revolutionary transformations of the religious traditions, the existing religious traditions themselves which indeed cannot remain without political effects. The liberation theology has been an example. Islamic feminism could be another one equally important if it concentrates on its core objective of challenging from the inside the cultural structures of domination which since the original revelation or shortly after were fused with the theological premises of Quranic monotheism and it will be crucial to observe the emergence and the development of new religions which indeed will be religious in a new sense of the term. They might emerge precisely out of the new culture created by capitalist globalization and extremities that it reveals or reactivates and thinking particularly of ecological consciousness that can also and perhaps must take the form of a renewed religion of nature whether we call it Pantheism or Polytheism linked with the care for life and the community feeling between humans and non-human animals but also exploring the enigmas of the hybrid life of organic bodies and artificial machines. I don't have to give names here. They are already recognized. The hypothesis of new religions quite naturally leads me to my last hypothesis that of a new secularism. However, whereas the first hypothesis remains a conjecture the second is also in my eyes the political and philosophical imperative whose forms and means of realization call for urgent discussions and elaborations. This arises out of several reasons certainly not completely independent. The first and most massive reason takes us back to the previous idea of an outside of the ideological interplay of culture and religion. It is globalization itself or rather it is the combination of globalization with an emerging awareness of risks and interests associated with its impact on the society of all humans. In this sense, the question of secularism in the global age is not very different from the question of universalism and universality in the current conjecture. Can we say that these planetary risks and interests are common and in which language are we going to say it? This is the great ideological question. I agree with the idea proposed by some, Gilroy in particular, to name planetarity instead of cosmopolitanism the material constraint which one way or another has to become formulated in a political language reaching each and every inhabitant of the planet. The idea of a community of interests of human groups and individuals and perhaps beyond them living individuals which should prevail over ruthless competition in order to avoid mutual destruction and to create a civilization of the post-modern age in which communities are overlapping everywhere sharing and exploiting the same environment is not, of course, an absurd idea but it has to become universalized itself and to pass from a moral ideal horizon to a reconstruction of the political. It has to become common sense to put it in Gramscian terms. We suspect and there is no need to call oneself a Marxist to suggest it that this will become possible only through very harsh conflicts in which the immediate interests of the dominance and the dominated will sharply diverge potentially leading to extreme violence. In my opinion the capacity to address these conflicts and so to speak fight them in a civilized manner does not depend on the emergence of a new religion even if religious components of planetarism are not to be excluded especially because of the apocalyptic dimension of ecological threats. It rather depends on a new political articulation of socialism internationalism, multiculturalism and secularism which I call after my friend Bruce Robbins in a recently published paper the secularization of secularism itself therefore a reflective and self-critical form of what had been called an institutionalized in different ways under that name in certain countries. In that articulation states, legal systems nationally and internationally must play an important role but they cannot remain the decisive ultimate agents. States and legal systems are culturally determined. They are bound to reproduce cultural hegemony or simply to limit them and even more profoundly they are built on the transformation of theological discourses of sovereignty and authority. The idea of secularism either as a strict separation of the religious and the political along the same lines as the division of the private and public spheres if this is at all possible or as equal protection of religious affiliations and practices by the state and the law who from that point of view would represent a neutral arbitrator becomes progressively reintegrated in a religious framework and become desecularized as they take the form of a state monopoly of legitimate interpretation of the law perfectly illustrated by the French case. Again, this is pure Habesian political theology. It is the substitution of the mortal God for the immortal one and it is not even sure that mortal and immortal are completely separated symbols at least in a Christian environment. But if the problem of a regulation of identity conflicts communitarian hatreds are simply incommunicability which threatens the necessary planetarism of the age of globalization with internal collapse can be resolved with the help and active collaboration of states, supranational agencies and new transnational forms of legal rules but not as a purely legal initiative. It remains to understand along which lines the processes of cultural communication and neutralization of religious antagonisms or if you like secularization will work. As I have argued elsewhere what seems to form the condition of effective multiculturalism the one that is right now everywhere in danger because of a murderous combination of postcolonial race discriminations intense nationalism, renewed intense nationalism and defensive reactions against the profanation of communitarian traditions is a relativization and a civilization of the figure of a stranger which would take her away from the assimilation with an enemy. Therefore it is also closely associated with cross-cultural processes of hybridation and multiple affiliations which make life uneasy for diasporic individuals and groups because they are linked with the melancholy of exile but form the material condition for the development of translation processes among distant cultural universes. This is indeed crucial. The neutralization of religious conflicts however does not work in this manner since it is predicated not on social change transition and communication however difficult they can be but on incompatibility and choice what Weber called a war of the gods or by not every religion has gods and the war is not necessarily violent it becomes such only when over-determined by other causes. Among religious axioms or creeds there exists inevitably a conflict of universalities there can be translation processes among religious universes but these translations involve precisely the fact that such universes are not purely religious the religious as such I would suggest is a point of untranslatability. I tend therefore to believe that the religious conflict which cannot be solved by legal or statist means or institutionally displaced in the form of a conflict between what is particularized as religion and what forms actually a civil religion but bears a different name for example secularism or laïcité and can also not become reduced to mere cultural differences must be treated precisely as a different which I take basically in the sense offered by Jean-François Lyotard encounter of heterogeneous phrases or discourses that is it must be formulated as such in the first place as irreconcilable juxtaposition of choices about the human and the inhuman the intrinsic divisions of the human what I call the anthropological differences etc and then it must be mediated by the introduction of an additional element of this course which cannot be counted as another choice of the same kind that is a new religion but would appear heretic from the point of view of any of them we get this to the idea that in order for the various religious discourses to become mutually compatible in the same public space or enter into a free conversation the introduction or intervention of an additional a religious element is needed without it there would be no possibility of mediating between the opposite religious axiomatics or have their interpretations agreeing on certain practical rules or moral and social principles more profoundly there would be no discursive space where their differences are presented as such in a comparative manner and presented to one another so to speak in a non hegemonic manner but this additional element both bringing together the religions and assessing their conflict which I am tempted, the symbolic conflict which I am tempted once again after Frederick Jameson to call the vanishing mediator of the conversation between antagonistic religious discourses must indeed have very paradoxical characters in fact it must embody a series of contradictions or tensions it is always already there but perhaps unnamed or called with the wrong names therefore to some extent unrecognizable or subject to prominent misrecognitions it is not universal morality or scientific knowledge or human rights or toleration or cosmopolitanism or planetarism or naturalism although it shares with them some practical objectives it is not atheism or agnosticism or skepticism perhaps my preferred term although it certainly involves the same negative dimension but all these terms relate the negation exclusively to a particular form of religious attitude for example, atheism relates to religions with a God but not to religions without a God it can be called secularism for historical reasons but only on the condition of a radical critique of existing institutions and conceptions of the secular both culturally and politically determined and remain mutually exclusive this element which I call the vanishing mediator of religious difference this is the last page can exist only if it comes from inside the religious discourses revealing the contradictions within their axiomatics therefore I spoke of heresies but it must also expropriate them of their own singularity and disturb their certainty of being uniquely true and just or pure when not preventing them from seeking truth or justice along their own path perhaps we should say that in this sense it is essentially heretic or it forms the impossible common heresy of all the religious discourses in a relation to be determined with their own specific historical heretic movements finally this element is certainly public or it performs an essentially public function however all by public and if I may say so publicizing the religious issue the vanishing mediator cannot become identified with any legal instance and more generally any institution that performs a legal regulation of conducts more generally it is not a normative element it does not express an imperative in Cansion language all the less so because the normative or imperative elements of culture bear themselves the irreducible trace of specific religious constructions of the human and their inscription in the soul or the self or in the sacred rituals of prohibition and prescription but it is not essentially a purely cognitive either however important it is for any secularism to stress the importance of knowledge and understanding it is rather performative and first of all it performs its own parisia as Foucault would say or truth enunciation against all theologies and mythologies which exercise power it is therefore fairly possible that this element does not really exist except as a philosophical fiction thank you as usual it was much to know oh we still have a little time reactions questions do we? yes it's not george excuse me rada who was first? oh sorry you were I thought you wanted to no ok so rada actually wants to say thank you for that amazing talk I was wondering if they invite you around the same alliance to say more about the way you perceive the relationship between ways of being and ways of knowing if somebody says I'm a secularist or I'm a cosmopolitan or I am whatever are both of them implicated in some kind of a simultaneity so for example excuse me repeat the end of the phrase somebody says I am a cosmopolitan I'm simultaneously a way of describing a way of being or of knowing are the complications thereof which do you infer from which so when I disagree with another way of doing something what exactly is happening what am I objecting to and the extent to which ways of being are open to scrutiny but ways of knowing both within each culture and between cultures if that question makes sense do you think that the issue of being and knowing are can be separated or are this disjoint issues if we try and work with such analytical instruments as representations codes of representation and within the element of representation what I tried following Hans Tiaveld also others to bring in in order to emphasize the importance of being emphasize the permanent would not necessarily say antagonistic but antithetic antithetic processes of presenting one self and presenting the other as an essential component ok this is verbal but I do think that that what we actually work with as critical theories in all these fields not granting culture the category culture an overarching function a dominant function of the reasons I tried to explain not because I am against culture but because I think that we need a tension between what we commonly call culture and something irreducible to it or its other which can be a religion in particular so but we work generally speaking in the field of representation and we work in the field of representation as a field where precisely it is both a question of knowing and a question of being I would say of being there being there in the field of representation because the field of representation is anything but purely abstract its institutional its historical and its made of precisely visibilities and invisibilities dominant and dominated places this symmetries and symmetries between the ways in which the dominant see the dominated the way the dominated see themselves and the way they see the dominant you know what is of course fascinating from a historical point of view and certain current debates about the clash of civilization or the return of the religious are I think in this respect is that basically of course we should say that the representations are never symmetric as soon as there is a phenomenon of domination that has been inherited from history the western but then inside this basic this symmetry the logic of conflicts which are I repeat political even if they are full of and religious and other elements produces produces mimetic replication so the and as a consequence of course cosmopolitanism and secularism are essentially divided notions so therefore I would return to your initial question when somebody says I am a cosmopolitan or I am a secularist in the in today's world you can't be absolutely sure in advance that this would be incompatible with the way in which others would assert the same seemingly identical initiation thank you George I knew you wanted to say something thank you for that wonderful adventure what I'm what I'm reading here I just want to test it on you is you're calling it's an anticipatory call for new language almost for some new kind of revelation which will break us through which will break us through these interminable conflicts not that you're John the Baptist not through John the Baptist not at all a strong feeling in this for me of a call for a revelation of some kind which will transcend these interminable conflicts is that just my own it's part of what I trying to say I tried in a sense reading is a terrible experience it's not exactly an ordeal but you become aware of the fact that this is all extremely obscure and doesn't lead to clear conclusion or problematic but if I may reply to your question comment on what I have been doing is I would say this is the first moment that I tried to add another one that is of course I would not rule out rule out the possibility and perhaps the necessity and perhaps even the desirability of new revelations provided of course we enter into a complicated discussion about the universality and in fact the limits of the category revelation would be back to Assad's critique this belongs to a specific religious tradition I like the comparison with John the Baptist not only because of private reasons but because it introduces a distance the guy who says I'm a kind of John the Baptist is not exactly the guy who says I'm a new Christ or I'm a new one will come one will come one will come okay so so in a sense yes I this is a known idea not to say obsession of mine that we and I'm not the only one and others have been much more serious more informed that the history history of the religions of humankind I mean are is not finished so if it's not finished I'm sorry it's bound to produce to continue informs that we can only observe after the event but my guess is that some of them are already there then this was not only this was not my and again I I so I'm trading here an extremely dangerous terrain or soil and I'm sure that I become not killed but immediately targeted by critiques if I if I become concrete but liberation theology is extremely interesting to me as a political phenomenon whose importance does not only belong to second third of the 20th century and and is not only meaningful for the Christianized but then of course what the equivalence would be is both crucial and medic this is why I dare to say why not Islamic feminism as a revolutionary movement inside a certain religious tradition which is bound to shake it or to be repressed in the most violent manner in the end or with the help of other circumstances shake it to the roots because in fact what some Islamic feminism feminists want no less daring than what Luther performed in the history of Christianity they want to re-arrived the canon and expect from the Quran itself those verses which the subject they suggest has been injected into the Quran after Mohammed's revelation as an expression of the interest in fact of a male dominated culture and society and therefore do not belong to the canon of the revelation and this is not this is a spiritual atomic bomb clearly from now but I'm not sure what I say and perhaps I speak about that in much too superficial manner in any case and I perfectly understand why from inside societies belonging to the Islamic world in general there are different forms of feminism which cannot become easily reconciled at least at the theoretical level and I would certainly not dare choosing myself or declaring what is right and what is wrong we are here in the realm of what you called possible new revelations new developments in the religious field and my conclusion was not with that it was the vanishing mediator and that is of course it was a way to open a little place for myself people of my kind who perhaps in a self-deceptive manner this is always possible do not think of themselves as a as as a dearest or bearer of any new religious discourse not even the the naturalistic another example of the discourses of the growing religion of nature but are yes I say dreaming of thinking are trying to work on the agenda of secularizing secularism itself that is first of all of course criticized to the root the sacred cows of secularism that is the state, science in the positivistic mode therefore yes among the various terms that I have been invoking tend to be skeptics with sympathies sympathizing with various heredic currents but not adhering to them in fact what I believe maybe this is only a philosophical fiction in fact what I believe is what we are doing here permanently the best as well as we can is precisely that we are not which has to do of course with certain form of critical knowledge we are not preparing for the coming we are not preparing for the coming of anybody or any any revelation and I try to gain of course this is narcissism here is obviously there but I I will not derive from the fact that we are institutionally threatened fragile in these days an easy conclusion that we are after all useful but I do believe that we have a role and this is not the does that charory speak loud charory you know the old professor has very bad ideas there seems to be something in this notion of the new secularism the vanishing mediator that was not being articulated thinking to me and it could be based on a misreading but it seems that what was not being articulated is this notion of a new secularism as an unknown as sort of a space of radical uncertainty and I was sort of led to this reading oh can you hear me should I come closer? yeah microphone here I was only read to did you hear the first part of what I said I was led to think this because you talked about how the religious as the site of untranslatability and this notion of secularism as this vanishing mediator and as maybe a site of translatability but it also seemed that this notion of the religious as a given as a universal as the dominant the known the both ontologically and epistemologically the claims to its own transparency that the notion of secularism that you're talking about would have to invoke a certain radical uncertainty which uncertainty which makes it difficult to refer to it as what I assume is what you mean by a philosophical fiction in the sense that it's like the space of ultimate desire and that the it can't be articulated and it seemed appropriate that you weren't articulating it but I'm only to assume that that space of radical impossibility and uncertainty must be preserved in this concept because otherwise it's nothing but itself another mode of ideology and other religious your cruel because you pick up the last phrase and ask me to say more where in fact I was reaching the limit of what I could say so you'll see excuse me this is a joke perhaps a bad one but I have to prepare many public talks like this the problem is to find at the end what in French we call a pirouette I don't know what the English equivalent for that would be you know a salto I mean a sort of dancing a move that resonates to the ears of the possible the audience and hides the fact that you don't know the how to continue so this being said allow me to add one quick thing about the point of untranslatability I think it's related to the very much to the issue because to put it for one time in in Badiouan terms the new secularism would logically appear as in excess I would say over the untranslatability or the point of intranslatability I use the reference to or a forcing to speak of the untranslatability now the untranslatability forcing the untranslatability reestablishing or establishing a common ground for heterogeneous discourses or space of encounter for heterogeneous discourses which in a sense are and must remain incompatible that doesn't mean that they are fixed that they were always or you added the words of other determinations to what I had said which from my point of view are not absolutely necessary there's no necessity to to speak this language of incompatible axioms or axiomatics or languages doesn't necessarily imply that you see religions or religious revelations or as as a stable a historical etc. but the idea was that in order to create what seems to be ruled out by the heterogeneity of this is let's put it another way this is completely against any ecumenical representation or analogous even wider modems the idea which is which can be nice idea can be also used of course in power logics because it in fact imposes representation that after all or religions say the same only they say in different languages so if people are people of good will recognize this kind of language let's put them together each of them speaking his or her language and we soon discover that in fact they aim at the same good results so you can set up a meeting and then you can do that preferentially in some highly symbolic religious place say Assisi or Varanasi or perhaps some day in the we set us of New Mexico because the pagans will become increasingly significant and then go beyond the signifier and reach the common ecumenical so to speak or perhaps better transcendent content so I absolutely it's not that they reject it is that I absolutely don't believe in that I don't think all religions have the same positions on basic issues of what I called anthropological differences and therefore not by chance become fixed on such issues as the meaning of death the function of sexual differences in the organization of human communities the problems of responsibility and irresponsibility and so on so I don't believe in that so I try to elaborate a different framework or problematic in which the incompatibility of the heterogeneity is not taken for is taken for granted although not considered of course stable become displaced can become displaced so what makes of course history of religion a fascinating domain and not only a boring lesson of humanism so and then of course you have to force from my point of view the possibility of the impossible that is create a space in which heterogeneous languages conflictual for that reason but not necessarily at war in the form of clashes of civilization crusades g-heads or whatever because as I said before and I want this to be very strongly maintained as well wars are which present themselves or presented as religious wars always have other causes it's not to say that religious differences do not intensify the conflict they do clearly but they never are the only causes except in representations so the space that has to be created at the very least is the space of the different space of the presentation of the heterogeneity itself but this is a performative gesture which in fact does never come out of the blue it has a history behind it and part of that history part of that history on the condition of a very critical reconsideration and of of the past under that name the colonial past the stateist past the academic past etc nevertheless we have inherited I would say in the name of secularism hence the idea of new secularism with of course always always the same ambiguity that you have when you say new and during that spoke of the new light new enlightenment what does that mean that what existed will continue in a renewed form or that what will emerge will have nothing to do in fact with what had been called like that before can be neither in an absolute manner otherwise the word would be meaningless but if you don't like that word give me another one and I'm ready no no this is not a feminine interpolation so in the space that you're talking about where the space of negotiation that's happening it seems to me that again you translate I didn't say negotiation could you say if there was used I said presentation presentation the performative space you know negotiation amounts I'm sorry I don't want to make it vulgar means that you trade something you see if you negotiate okay I'll withdraw on this provided you agree to do the same on your side I'm not asking for that I'm not even sure it has an interest from a religious point of view this performative space can it have any claim to truth whatsoever in so far doesn't it negate any notion of the truth being posited in so far as it's already dealing with universals with these sort of claims to universality doesn't there need to be some radical indeterminacy for that space to be able to do what that sort of to be the vanishing mediator is an interesting point because it is and then it isn't it knows but it doesn't know a very good philosopher you have a very solid background this is so these are the these are the dilemmas if you're a Hegelian there is of course something like a truth project or a T-lass which is latent in the display of the contradictions and therefore also of course the critique of any claim of a specific religious language to be or to embody the absolute truth if you're a Wittgensteinian you don't need or perhaps this idea of an overcoming an absolute that proceeds from the relativization of institutional or historical historically given a truth but you simply view it as another way in fact of sacralizing the philosophical the secular discourse of philosophy if I knew the way out of that dilemma I would I know it sounds like I'm offering a critique but I really don't think I am because I guess what I'm always writing here I welcome this critique but what I'm sort of railing against is the way in which secularism becomes its own religion becomes its own religion that's already done in the secularization of secularism it seems like this new secularism is making some attempt to do that and then what needs to be articulated is the fact that this secularism is itself sort of explicitly disavows or certainty in some form and that seemed to me the missing sort of element in this this is because you're uncomfortable with my skepticism and I'm uncomfortable myself no these phrases are these questions are inevitable the phrases we use are that I know and that I try to use I'm also deeply aware not only performative blah blah blah but they are context bound you see allow me to simply I mean put provisional end conversation with referring to an experience an experience I had some time ago but it's not exceptional I was in India for the second time in my life 26 years later as I and in the meantime the states of the public debate among the people I was meeting there had brutally shifted from the issue of economic and development domination center versus periphery relations to the issue of secularism and and the once admired and publicized model of Indian secularism which of course has closed affinities with the model of Indian democracy the only great nation in the third world which had become central and so some of my friends because of the debates on the French schools et cetera and so on and they knew or thought I had positions on that wanted a local good monthly journal I believe to make an interview with me on this situation and so this what is extremely dangerous in interviews keep that in mind for the future not only the way in which your words are transcribed but it's the one phrase that would be picked out of the conversation and transformed into a title of the whole thing and in that case the phrase they picked out which I had pronounced undoubtedly was the following and was published in the Indian journal secularism is another religion you will stop ok this is part of what I had been saying that we're the only aspect of the debate on secularism and the reasons why well I would in that case I would agree with Stalana-san which is not the case thank you very much