Материал: The Routledge Companion to the Study of Religion by John Hinnells

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inevitably constituted by processes of exclusion, which render them unavoidably incomplete.’ Derrida, for example, questions the logocentrism of Saussure’s idea of the sign – that is, the assumption that the world presents itself to consciousness in a clear and transparent manner, that it is immediately present. Derrida’s approach is to provide close readings of parts of texts to reveal their incoherence and hidden tensions. He applies his deconstructive reading to the key texts of structuralism (Saussure and Lévi-Strauss), discovering the paradox and limits of their logic and their metaphysic of presence (Derrida [1967] 1976; 1972). In wishing to show how metaphysics holds a ‘defense against the threat of writing’, Derrida ([1967] 1976: 101–102) questions, for example, the phonologism of Lévi-Strauss. Derrida is questioning the priority of speech over writing, because speech gives the illusion of immediacy and presence (from the reality of the spoken word). By showing that speech is a form of writing he questions the opposition of the terms and creates a new set of concepts to explore the implications of this insight. Post-structuralism thus extends structuralism by both pushing and questioning its logic and revealing the inherent construction of structure. Post-structuralist thinking questions the authority of our intellectual assumptions. It extends what Derrida (1963: 3) calls ‘an anxiety of language, within language’ to its philosophical, historical and political formation.

This critical engagement with structure is the mark of post-structuralism. The historical moment of structuralism disappears when the critique of structuralism is located in a wider epistemological critique. The ‘post’ of post-structuralism is an intellectual transformation of the language of structuralism, increased, not least, by the student riots in Paris in May 1968 (historic protests against the traditional education system and employment in France that led to a political rethinking of knowledge). As Lacan famously declared: ‘If the events of May demonstrated anything at all, they showed that it was precisely that structures had taken to the streets!’ (Dosse 1997: 122). The political mutation was already apparent before, in so far as structuralism was always concerned with a hidden logic and relation, but the poststructuralists carry the language of structuralism into wider domains of knowledge. Barthes takes Saussure’s linguistic ideas into ideology and semiotics; Foucault returns structuralism to history and the politics of knowledge; Lacan joins structuralism and psychoanalysis and rethinks the unconscious as language, and Kristeva radicalises structuralism by revealing the semiotics of gender. The post-structuralist literature, as Leonard Jackson (1991: 242) has argued, slowly increased the ‘magnitude’ of the philosophical claims from Saussure’s more limited science.

We can find a way to understand the problem of structuralism and post-structuralism and make sense of post-structuralism in the field of religious studies by framing the discussion in terms of Roland Barthes’ 1963 essay ‘The Structuralist Activity’. Like Derrida, Barthes sees the ‘overworked’ nature of the idea of ‘structure’ and seeks rather to see the idea as an ‘activity’, originated by Saussure, rather than a specific ‘structuralist work’. The structuralist seeks to ‘reconstruct’ the object. For Barthes, the structuralist ‘makes something appear which remained invisible or, if one prefers, unintelligible in the natural object’ (Barthes 1963: 215). Post-structuralism develops this critical ‘activity’ using the structuralist lexicon but embellishes it within other forms of critical awareness of what Foucault called ‘a positive unconscious of knowledge’ (Foucault 1966: xi; 1969: 60). The post-structuralist is therefore engaging language, history and ideology in ways Saussure’s model restricted critique. It reveals the hidden within the normative.

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Post-structuralism and the study of religion

The post-structuralist radicalisation of structuralism provides religious studies with strategies of critique: ways of reading texts (Derrida and Kristeva), ways of exposing ideological structures (Barthes and Foucault), ways of uncovering the historical formation of ideas (Foucault) and ways of revealing hidden desires and the construction of subjectivity (Lacan and Kristeva). The scholars of religion who utilise these strategies – not methods because they are more fragmented – are doing a number of things. First, they are supporting and appealing to the authority of the associated French authors and their ideas, diverse as they may be within the intellectual space of French thought. Second, they are deploying the critical lexicon of these writers to question the assumptions operating in the field. Finally, they are using the ideas to expose the excluded issues within religious studies, not least in the ways we see postcolonial theory appeal to post-structuralism (King 1999a). There are various ways of mapping the critical literature of post-structuralism and the way it pervades scholarship in religious studies but I will map three key domains of this new lexicon for the field of religion: first, language and text; second, history, power and knowledge; and, third, subject and the body.

Language and text: the rethinking of categories

The lexicon of post-structuralism within religious studies is first and foremost an extension of the ‘anxiety about language’ in a post-Saussurean world. It is the concern about signification and representation and the way the text has become destabilised. In the study of religion in the last twenty years there has been increased critical concern with deployment of basic categories such as ‘religion’, ‘Hinduism’ and ‘mysticism’ as essential unchanging referents, which hold some fixed, natural, stable or essential meaning. Post-structuralists, and Derrida in particular, have supported this critical exercise, although the issues related to the philosophy of language are wider than the post-structuralist turn, as can be seen in Timothy Fitzgerald’s The Ideology of Religious Studies (2000), which uses a range of analytical categories to make similar critical claims. This underlines how post-structuralism returns us to wider questions of epistemology.

Derrida provides a way of questioning the normative concepts within religious studies by showing how meaning is not present in the text but rather differed in a chain of signification (différance) and held by assumptions of power. Différance is created from the words ‘differential’ and ‘deferred’; it implies meaning is never fully present in the text. Derrida’s thinking therefore allows a disturbance of certainty. As he states in his 1967 study Of Grammatology, his intention in the book is to ‘make enigmatic what one thinks one understands by the terms “proximity”, “immediacy” and “presence”’ (Derrida [1967] 1976: 70). Ideas are no longer clear or immediate in use and do not present themselves in a metaphysics of presence. Irritating as this may be to those following the dominant systems of knowledge, it has allowed the study of religion to question the hierarchy of meanings and the exclusion of the Other, not least in relation to issues of race, gender and colonialism. In the text we have only what Derrida calls the ‘trace’: no point of origin, an absence, tensions and the elusive nature of the sign. It is important to realise – to the annoyance of those wanting ‘deconstruction’ to be a method – that Derrida’s readings of texts are not fixed procedures but a way of entering into each text on its own terms and finding within the text the points where it unravels itself. To many this is just a form of relativistic

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‘play’ (a word in which Derrida delights), but it presents profound questions to how we assert various claims and the limits of representation. Derrida’s deconstructive reading, as Barbara Johnson (1981: xv) notes, connects what a writer sees to what a writer does not see in their writing. As Johnson continues: ‘The critique reads backwards from what seems natural, obvious, self-evident, or universal, in order to show that these things have their history, their reasons for being the way they are, their effects on what follows from them, and that the starting point is not a (natural) given but a (cultural) construct, usually blind to itself’ (Johnson 1981: xv–xvi).

The appeal to Derrida has allowed the field of religion to suspend critically many of the accepted terms of the phenomenological tradition and the methods of structuralism, but it also raises important questions about translation. This anxiety about translation can be seen within postcolonial studies. As Mandair (2003: 91) recognises from his context of Sikh studies: ‘To invoke the untranslatable is to invoke what Derrida calls the pharmakonomy of deconstruction as a simultaneously destructive/constructive movement.’ The idea of the pharmakon emerges in Derrida’s close reading of Plato’s Phaedrus, or rather the translators of Plato, because it explores the problem of how the Greek word pharmakon can be translated as both ‘remedy’ and ‘poison’. It reflects the fundamental undecidability of the text and in this sense the pharmakon is writing. ‘[T]he pharmakon, or if you will, writing, can only go around in circles: writing is only apparently good for memory, seemingly able to help it from within, through its own motion, to know what is true’ (Derrida [1972] 2008: 105).

Derrida draws attention to the assumptions within the text and reveals the values behind the meaning of terms, concepts and ideas in the history of philosophy. As Grace Jantzen’s (1999: 66) post-structuralist feminist philosophy of religion always makes clear, it requires the critical question of ‘whose interests are being served’ in the ways we stabilise our knowledge, concepts and terms. Such critique reveals the excluded Other – not least the gendered and culturally excluded. Not surprisingly, Derrida’s techniques and his deconstructive approach have also been linked to the limits of knowledge in Buddhist philosophy, negative theology and mysticism (Magliola 1984; Silverman 1989). Since Magliola’s (1984) linking of Nagarjuna’s philosophy with Derridean deconstruction there has been much debate about the kind of correspondence of Derrida’s thinking with Buddhist philosophy. As Coward and Foshay (1992: 227) argue:

What Derrida says about philosophy, that it ‘always re-appropriates for itself the discourse that delimits it’, is equally true of Buddhism. Like all religions, Buddhism includes a strong onto-theological element [a theological philosophy about the nature of being], yet it also contains the resources that have repeatedly deconstructed this tendency.

Foucault’s thinking has also been linked to non-western philosophical traditions, and wider elements of French post-structuralist thinking remain engaged with negative theology (Bradley 2004). Post-structuralism, therefore, offers not only a critical question of categories and method but a philosophical opportunity for cross-cultural philosophy of religion (King 1999b: 230–244).

History, power and knowledge: the will to authority

If Derrida explores the concealed elements of metaphysics through textual analysis, it is Foucault who exposes the hidden elements of ideas in their ‘field of use’ (Foucault 1969:

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100); that is, in the ‘network of institutions’ and social structures where they take on their operational power (Foucault 1970: 217). The use of Foucault within the study of religion has been evident since David Chidester’s (1986) mapping of his key concepts for the subject. Like Derrida, Foucault maintains the structuralist features within his work, even when he is not bound by its governing rules (Carrette 2000: 88). Foucault’s reading of the institutions of madness, medicine and the prison provide various strategies for showing how ‘discourses’ are instruments of social engineering. Discourses are the practices of institutions. They are ‘a body of anonymous historical rules, always determined in the time and space that have defined a given period’ (Foucault 1969: 117). Foucault, following in part Heidegger, explores the historical conditions for the ideas governing our lives. He explores how at different moments of history, problems and issues arise as reflections of the orders of power, although power for Foucault is always mobile and non-hierarchical, because it shifts and always involves forms of resistance (Foucault 1976: 92ff).

Echoing structuralism, Foucault called his approach ‘archaeological’ in the 1960s, to show the layers of historical discourse and the hidden epistemic structures, not unlike Kuhn’s paradigms in scientific knowledge. However, under the renewed influence of Nietzsche, in the 1970s he renamed his approach ‘genealogical’, because he recognised the importance of the ‘non-discursive’, that is how discourse always takes place within institutions and involved a relation of power mapped onto the body (Foucault 1971). Foucault has enabled scholars of religion to show how concepts are deployed in different historical contexts and how they are related to power and the body. For example, he showed how ‘sexuality’ was created through the ‘deployment’ or ‘apparatus’ (dispositifâ) of a ‘subtle network of discourses, special knowledges, pleasures and powers’, including the Christian confessional and psychiatric knowledge (Foucault 1976: 71). The complex emergence of ideas of sexuality has led scholars of religion to show how concepts like religion and Hinduism are shaped through what Foucault called a ‘complex political technology’ (Foucault 1976: 71). Foucault thus breaks the ‘positivity’ of knowledge; that is, the assumption that knowledge has an essential givenness. In this sense, where Derrida finds logocentrism in the text, Foucault finds it in social order. Here we see how the post-structuralist move is to reveal the hidden order of knowledge.

Foucault also allowed scholars of religion to raise suspicion over the construction of its own disciplinary knowledge. He showed how knowledge is bound by rules of utterance and that there is a sense of permitting and restricting ideas within different domains of thought. As he stated in his augural lecture at the Collège de France in 1970: ‘Disciplines constitute a system of control in the production of discourse, fixing its limits through the action of an identity taking the form of a permanent reactivation of the rules.’ The field of religious studies thus becomes a system of regulated statements around the object of ‘religion’. The institutional domains of the study of religion interact to establish a disciplinary history, a nomenclature, a canon of texts, an agreement of interlocking methods and the codes of textbooks around the idea of religion as an object of study. These disciplinary practices, as Foucault continued in his 1970 lecture, ‘exercise a sort of pressure, a power of constraint upon other forms of discourse’ (Foucault 1970: 219).

The link between discourse and power is not far from the work of Roland Barthes and his more overt ideological analysis of semiotics (the science of signs) and his critique of the normative concepts of literary criticism. In his 1966 essay Criticism and Truth, Barthes marked out the constraints on thought in bourgeois criticism. As he declared: ‘What does good taste forbid us to speak of?’ (Barthes 1966: 7). According to Barthes, his form of ‘new’

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criticism ‘produced’ new meanings with a new set of value judgments (Barthes 1966: 32). Barthes’s critique provokes questions of method in the study of religion, but his ideological analysis of signs has also had an influence on thinking about myth, not least because of his influential structuralist text Mythologies published in 1957 (McCutcheon 2000). Even more than Foucault and Derrida, Barthes bridges both structuralism and post-structuralism. For example, in Mythologies we see the same critical lexicon of language, politics and power that Foucault would exploit, but in Barthes there is a distinct Marxist tone.

In Mythologies Barthes examined various cultural phenomena in terms of the ideological codes they carried. One such essay, for example, examined the marketing of the new Citroën D.S. 19 car, the Déesse (the goddess), introduced at the Paris Motor Show in 1955. The car is transformed from matter, from ‘a primitive to a classical’ form, in what Barthes calls a ‘spiritualisation’ of pressed-metal and the ‘exaltation’ of glass. As Barthes explains: ‘We must not forget that an object is the best messenger of a world above that of nature: one can easily see in an object at once a perfection and an absence of origin, a closure and a brilliance, a transformation of life into matter (matter is much more magical than life), and in a word a silence which belongs to the realm of fairy-tales’ (Barthes [1957] 1973: 88).

Barthes’s conclusion to this brief essay indicates the way the goddess is ‘mediatised’ from the heavens in exhibition halls, but what is ‘actualised’, for Barthes, is the ‘essence of petit-bourgeois advancement’ (Barthes [1957] 1973: 90). The bridging of spiritualisation, mediatisation and actualisation are key ideological processes in the advertising of an object. Barthes’s association of ideology and spirit in his essay on the Citroën D.S. can be seen as an early critique of marketing and spirituality, which Carrette and King (2005) unfolded in the later context of neo-liberal capitalism. This is another example of how post-structuralism provides a critique of the hidden politic of knowledge in the study of religion.

Subject and the body: the return of the other

Post-structuralist theory in the study of religion has been used to deconstruct texts and expose the alliance of power-knowledge inside institutions, but wrapped inside these critical perceptions is how post-structuralism brings increased awareness to the dynamics that shape subjectivity and the body. These ideas have been explored most powerfully in the post-structuralist feminist theory of Judith Butler (1990) who reveals the important relation between power, subjectivity and agency. Following Butler, Saba Mahmood (2005) uses Foucault’s ‘paradox of subjectification’ – that is, the capacity of power to subject one to authority and create skills of ethical response – to read the ethical-political nature of Muslim women of Egypt. While Foucault’s thinking has had a significant impact on studies of the body and religion (Turner 1991; Boyarin 1997), scholars of religion, in line with feminist writers, have turned to the psychoanalytically informed post-structuralist writings of Jacques Lacan and Julia Kristeva to make sense of the complexity of religious practices.

Jacques Lacan linked Saussure with Freud and inverted Saussure’s signifier and signified to reinvigorate psychoanalytical ideas in France with his claim that ‘what the psychoanalytical experience discovers in the unconscious is the whole structure of language’ (Lacan [1966] 1977: 147). While, according to Nobus (2003: 53ffâ), Lacan’s ‘erroneous’ reading of Saussure had more to do with Lévi-Strauss than Saussure, it enabled Lacan to react against egopsychology and unfold a divided subject. Lacanian theory also reshaped psychoanalysis with the concepts ‘Symbolic’ (the order of language, social and cultural symbolism), ‘Imaginary’ (the order of phantasies and images) and the ‘Real’ (the impossible to represent, that which