After the Secular: The Subject of Romanticism

Colin Jager

Secularism has garnered little sustained attention from students of romanticism. In large part, this is because scholars of the period have treated religion as something that influenced romanticism or as something that romanticism secularized or humanized. In treating religion as a self-evident category, such accounts naturalize the opposition of the secular and the religious and thereby obscure secularism as an object of study. However, the idea that the opposition between the secular and the religious is self-evident has come under increasing scrutiny in recent years, and romanticism can serve as a site for that scrutiny once it is uncoupled from secularization narratives. Though such language is rather unfashionable now, romanticism has long been interpreted as offering a concept of literary representation capacious enough to negotiate among competing philosophical, metaphysical, and spiritual claims. Tied to a secularization narrative, romanticism thus becomes an alternative to religion. Disentangled from the plot of secularization, however, that very same conceptualization of literary representation can appear as an alternative not to religion but to the increasingly stressed secular spaces that have sought to displace religion. Romanticism’s potential contribution toward an analysis of secularism resides in the outsized claims that it makes for literary representation (or, more generally, aesthetic representation). This essay asks how such claims may help to analyze and amend secularism’s similarly outsized claims to have solved the seemingly irresolvable conflicts of religion.

Answering such questions will require attention to competing tendencies within romanticism itself. On the one hand, romanticism appears to comport well with the sequestering of religious discourse that characterizes secularism.

Because romanticism’s self-consciousness is often construed as positing for literature an autotelic or autonomous domain, religion under the influence of romanticism seems to become a private and unique phenomenon. On the other hand, construing romanticism along the lines of literary autonomy highlights the diversity of experiences imagined through aesthetic representation, thereby producing alternatives to the sui generis interpretation of religion that figures so prominently in secular accounts. Thus the wealth of potential conversations that romanticism envisions through its elevation of the literary offers a model for how to think beyond what one critic has called “the conceits of secularism”1 — conceits increasingly recognized as theoretically and politically disabling.

Romanticism and Secularism

I begin by considering two recent books. The first is William Connolly’s Why I Am Not a Secularist; the second is Paul Hamilton’s Metaromanticism.2 On the face of it, these books have little to do with each other. Connolly’s is a work of political theory dedicated to thinking beyond secularism, while Hamilton’s is an exercise in theoretical and literary analysis devoted to aligning romanticism with a Habermasian theory of communicative action. Yet these books complement each other in crucial ways on just the issue under discussion here: the relationship between secularism and literary language. If we isolate the ways in which these two books can be mutually informing, we can then work back from that conversation to its origins — Kierkegaard, in the case of Connolly, and early German romanticism, in the case of Hamilton.

Why I Am Not a Secularist devotes most of its energy to finding a language for thinking beyond secularism. Connolly seeks to replace the mutual dogmatisms of secularism and religion with a public life in which, he writes, “no constituency’s claim to embody the authoritative sources of reason is sanctified.” The goal is to “rewrite secularism to pursue an ethos of engagement in public life among a plurality of metaphysical perspectives. . . . Such an ethos between interdependent partisans provides an existential basis for democratic politics if and when many partisans affirm without deep resentment the contestable character of the faith they honor most.”3 Much depends on what Connolly means by “contestable character” here; it might sound like a secular notion of tolerance. Connolly, however, proposes something more in tune with the poststructuralist era: that the same conditions of modernity that intensify faith also drive the faithful toward an implicit acknowledgment that they live in a pluralist world. Such pluralism, importantly, is achieved not through liberal practices of forbearance and tolerance but rather through the recognition of difference within oneself. This is one of the ironies of inwardness and thus where Kierkegaard becomes useful for Connolly’s analysis.

Influenced here by Gilles Deleuze’s reading of Kierkegaard in Difference and Repetition,4 Connolly describes the paradoxical relation of the Kierkegaardian apostle to himself in terms of a contrast between faith and faithlessness: “Kierkegaardian faith . . . repeatedly bumps into gaps or feelings of estrangement between repetitions, when traces of faithlessness intervene inadvertently and unintentionally. . . . Deleuze, the a-theist, pounces upon this trace of faithlessness between repetitions. I would do so too, not to purge faith from the faithful or disenfranchise expressions of faith from public life, but to open a window within theistic representations for an appreciation of recurrent moments of difference in faith from itself.”5 This internal difference, writes Connolly, has the potential to connect various religious and nonreligious adherents, for, “if the true believer is a simulacrum of himself, in what relation does the nonbeliever stand to herself?” Do not nontheists “harbor truant moments of forgetful faith that belie the steadfastness we present to Christians and other monotheists whenever they press hard upon us?” And thus the connection: “Is it possible, then, for believers and nonbelievers from a variety of faiths to double over in laughter together on occasion across the space of difference? On principle? Doing so partly because each harbors in itself an ineliminable element of difference from itself?”6

This is a challenging formulation, for it demands from all partisans an honesty typically in short supply. One implication of Connolly’s deconstructive reading of identity, though, is that this process of mutual recognition is in fact always happening; the political task, accordingly, is finding a language with which to bring that process to full consciousness. Putting the matter like this reveals the centrality of representation within Connolly’s account: he wishes to “open a window within theistic [and atheistic] representations,” suggesting that he thinks that secularism can be renegotiated by complicating the way we represent ourselves to ourselves. The question thus becomes: how does Connolly theorize this reflexivity? Will more flexible self-representations lead necessarily to the drama of mutual recognition between partisans that he imagines? If that is to happen, Connolly needs a theory elastic enough to accommodate differences of the most intimate kind and robust enough to keep those differences within range of each other.

Unfortunately, this is the least satisfactory aspect of Why I Am Not a Secularist. Connolly hits from time to time upon phrases that have a vaguely aesthetic feel: “It might be wise, then, to cultivate little spaces of enchantment, both individually and collectively.” Other moments suggest a debt to Foucauldian care of the self, such as when he describes “working on yourself in relation to the cultural differences through which you have acquired definition.”7 But there is something haphazard about these formulations and consequently about the nonsecular space of representation that Connolly envisions.

Representation, both personal and political, is central to Paul Hamilton’s reading of Friedrich Schlegel in Metaromanticism. The largest claim of the book, and one in which Schlegel figures centrally, is that romanticism’s philosophical habits of self-consciousness are relevant today because they suggest what a genuinely multicultural politics might look like. Following Walter Benjamin’s reading of Schlegel, Hamilton fastens on a romantic theorization of literature (and artistic practice more generally) as something that is not opposed to critical reflection but in fact solicitous of it; criticism is simply another way for literature to be what it already is.8 The literary is in this sense nonidentical with itself; one of its salient characteristics is to be constantly “fashioning critical alternatives to and historical departures from its original generic performance — that is what is creative about it, its inherent plurality.”9 Literature makes possible a reflective activity that offers practice at negotiating among differing conceptions of the good. This is the famous Schlegelian irony, a capacity to acknowledge as contingent and time-bound the truth to which we are nevertheless committed. Such irony is to be distinguished from liberal tolerance, Hamilton emphasizes, because it must be actively and continuously sustained: “An ironist like Schlegel is more interested in the exercise of imagination by which we can represent . . . different goods as goods belonging to the same human being. Or, another way of putting it, he is interested in the different kinds of human being we could have been, the mixture that one potentially is.”10 Hamilton’s reading of Schlegel, then, offers a robust concept of representation as an exercise, modeled by literature, through which we imagine human beings as recipients of a variety of goods.

Hamilton and Connolly have much in common. In Hamilton’s Schlegelian reading of identity and in Connolly’s Kierkegaardian reading of identity, internal difference becomes a register of potentiality and hence the basis upon which to construct meaningful dialogue among cultures and ways of life. Specifically, Connolly’s reading of Kierkegaard asks us to imagine a theist inside every atheist and an atheist inside every theist; Hamilton’s reading of Schlegel, meanwhile, asks us to imagine “the different kinds of human being we could have been,” a request that might be extended to Connolly’s theists and atheists.11 Understanding the human subject as a site of possibility thus helps us to reflect upon the challenge of negotiating among multiple religious and areligious identities. Furthermore, Connolly and Hamilton both imagine a refashioned public sphere that demands much of its subjects. Hamilton envisions “a new progressiveness, multifarious rather than linear,” that demands of other partisans “comparable efforts to imagine a workable commonality.”12 Connolly envisions a new modus vivendi “grounded in an ethos of engagement between multiple constituencies honoring a variety of moral sources and metaphysical orientations” and likewise demands that others “affirm without deep resentment the contestable character of the faith they honor most.”13 These parallel recommendations come about because both writers refuse to celebrate diversity for its own sake. In spite of the abstract language, moreover, both imagine a public sphere that exists not in theory but in actual practice, in individual efforts aimed at fostering and sustaining it. An analogy emerges, then, between a public sphere imagined as partial or open to revision and the subjects who make up that sphere, likewise imagined as open, incomplete, or — to revert to a Schlegelian idiom — in the process of becoming. The postsecular or multicultural public sphere will need to be assembled again and again by subjects who are themselves undergoing perpetual revision.

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Notes

For reading drafts of this essay, I thank William Galperin, Paul Hamilton, Simon Jarvis, Saba Mahmood, John McClure, and Michael Warner.

1. William E. Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 19.
2. Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist; Paul Hamilton, Metaromanticism: Aesthetics, Literature, Theory (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).
3. Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist, 7, 39.
4. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), especially 95.
5. Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist, 44. For a similar argument, implicitly indebted to Kierkegaard, see John D. Caputo, On Religion (New York: Routledge, 2001), especially 17 – 36.
6. Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist, 45.
7. Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist, 17, 146.
8. Walter Benjamin, “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism,” in Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, 1913 – 1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996), 1:116 – 200.
9. Hamilton, Metaromanticism, 11.
10. Hamilton, Metaromanticism, 262 – 63; emphasis added.
11. Hamilton, Metaromanticism, 263.
12. Hamilton, Metaromanticism, 21.
13. Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist, 39.