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

286â Key topics in the study of religions

goes through you, throws you out of yourselfâ). It provided a new meta-theory for reading the orders of domination and suppression in religious subjectivity, not least seen in later feminist deployments (see Joy et al. 2003).

Rejecting ego-psychology, Lacan showed how identity was divided as other, through the ‘mirror stage’, between six and eighteen months, where recognition is given through the other person (the mother) and our construction through the Symbolic order of language. There is a double edge to language. Speech, as Lacan noted, ‘is founded in the existence of the Other, the true one, language is so made as to return us to the objectified other …’ (Lacan [1978] 1991: 244). The divided subject of Lacan is extended by Kristeva to recover a gendered and embodied political order. For Kristeva, the self is linguistic (the Symbolic) but also pre-lingustic (embodied), which she maps out in her idea of the semiotic. In her critical project the semiotic is linked with Plato’s idea of the chora (the receptacle, a space where forms materialise) in the Timaeus; it is the pre-linguistic and pre-Oedipal which disrupts but is inseparable from the Symbolic order of Lacan (Kristeva 1974: 94; 1980: 133). The semiotic carries something prior to the Symbolic order and brings back a maternal and embodied dimension (Kristeva 1974: 94). This uncovering of an underlying container led Kristeva to define her approach of semanalysis as trying ‘to describe the signifying phenomenon, or signifying phenomena, while analysing, criticising, and dissolving ‘phenomenon’, ‘meaning’ and ‘signifier’’ (Kristeva 1980: vii). This dissolving was also at the heart of the individual subject. According to Kristeva, we are subjects in ‘process, ceaselessly losing our identity, destabilised by fluctuations in our relation to the other, to whom we nevertheless remain bound by a kind of homeostasis [a balanced regulation]’ (Kristeva 1987: 9).

After her initial works on semiotics, Kristeva addressed more directly questions of religious history and thought. For example, in her 1982 work Powers of Horror she argued that her notion of abjection (the somatic and symbolic feeling of revulsion) ‘accompanies all religious structurings and appears to be worked out in a new guise at the time of their collapse’ (1982: 17). The fascination with religious thinking can be seen in much post-structuralist literature (see, for example, Foucault 1999 and Derrida 2002) and it creates not only a double analysis (the use of theoretical ideas to read religion and the use of religion by post-structuralists), but a double critique of post-structuralism. Hollywood (2002) and Jantzen (1999), for example, are critical of the gendered analysis within Lacan’s Seminar XX (1974), where he explores female ‘jouissance’ (the ecstatic beyond enjoyment/pleasure) and St Teresa of Avila. The very conceptual space of post-structuralism facilitates a critique of the categories of religion and gender deployed by post-structuralists. As Kristeva ([1969] 1986: 77–78) argued in an early essay on semiotics: ‘Semiotic research remains a form of enquiry that ultimately uncovers its own ideological gesture, only in order to record and deny it before starting all over again.’ The self-reflexive critique remains the hallmark of post-structuralism and opens knowledge to its temporary and provisional nature.

The future challenge to religious studies

We have seen that scholars of religion employ a range of ideas and theories from the key thinkers associated with French post-structuralism and it is therefore important to recognise the distinctive contribution to the field and understand what is at stake in engaging with this set of ideas. As I have already highlighted, it is my argument in this essay that what underlies all these theories is a central question of epistemology. This confirms that while these questions emerge in 1960s France under a renewed political and intellectual context,

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they are evident in a longer tradition of critical thinking from the Enlightenment and indeed could be seen to reflect longer philosophical concerns with knowledge.

The shift from, or rather extension of, structuralism to post-structuralism is not just something that occurs in the texts of Derrida and Foucault on the Left Bank of Paris; it is not just the decentring of Saussure’s sign or the deconstructing of Lévi-Strauss’s phonologism. The shift from structuralism to post-structuralism is the constant activity of critique. It is to suspend the structures we construct to critique the structures we despise as constructions. Critique demands that we unravel what we do not see in our activity of seeing. It demands we constantly enact the ritual of disappearance. But this is not disappearance into the quagmire of relativism; it is the constant critique of change within life itself, which seeks the justice of greater understanding. It demands that we root out the tendency within us to build intellectual empires which blind to us to what we conceal in the assertion of our authority. Post-structuralism is a particular historical moment of critique but its critical strategies become waves of the impulse to yet more unravelling of the unseen in every new age of thought. Foucault and Derrida moved beyond the sign of post-structuralism as they found greater refinements of their thinking, but what remains is critique, endowed to us from the Enlightenment. As Foucault (1984: 42) underlined: ‘I have been seeking to stress that the thread that may connect us with the Enlightenment is not faithfulness to doctrinal elements, but rather the permanent reactivation of an attitude – that is, of a philosophical ethos that could be described as a permanent critique of our historical era.’

Post-structuralism gives renewed energy to the critique of knowledge and practice in the study of religion. In the end what post-structuralism marks out in the history of ideas is the end of innocence. After this point the study of religion can no longer hide its own value judgements, investments and interests. It can no longer disguise its neutrality in terms of gender, culture, power, and ideology. Post-structuralism is the critical consciousness of our time, disturbing forever what we do not see in the knowledge claims of the study of religion.

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Suggested reading

Derrida, J. 1963 ‘Force and signification’ in Derrida 1963, pp 3–30.

This text provides a useful point of access to the strategies Derrida employs to question structuralist thinking, in this case the work of Lévi-Strauss.

Foucault, M. 1970 ‘The Discourse on Language’ in The Archaeology of Knowledge (New York: Pantheon) pp.215–237.

Foucault’s inaugural lecture at the Collège de France in 1970 is a useful introduction to the rules behind disciplinary thinking. It shows the restrictions and limits of a discourse.

Kristeva, J. 1969 ‘Semiotics: A Critical Science and/or a Critique of Science’ in The Kristeva Reader ed. Toril Moi 1986 (Oxford: Blackwell) pp.74–88.

This essay by Kristeva shows the way knowledge questions its own structures and illustrates clearly how Saussure’s method is extended and developed by post-structuralists.

Sturrock, J. ed. 1979 Structuralism and Since: From Lévi-Strauss to Derrida (Oxford: Oxford University Press).

This introduction to the key post-structuralist thinkers is one of the most accessible secondary commentaries, providing outlines of Barthes, Foucault, Lacan and Derrida.