Abstract
This chapter sets out to demonstrate that phenomenology offers us a viable framework to productively think through the vexed relation between religion and violence. I hypothesize that this correlation needs to be reconsidered in a threefold perspective (religio triplex) in order to avoid reductionist conceptions of “religious violence” as merely atavistic, irrational, and merely destructive of meaning. I argue for distinguishing between (a) the originary violence implied in the experience of revelation, “absolute affection,” transcendence (mysterium tremendum et fascinans), and so on; (b) the violent implications of concrete socio-topologies of the sacred and the profane; and (c) the potentials for actual violence transmitted in the narrative semantics of religious traditions and the systems of knowledge they entail. In order to properly distinguish these three layers and to shed light on their complex interplay and possible dynamics in the context of the so-called “return of religion,” I propose an integrated phenomenological perspective. Concretely viewed, I will draw upon Schutz’s theory of “multiple realities,” Merleau-Ponty’s “phenomenology of embodiment,” and Ricoeur’s insight into the “poietic imperative” of human existence. In conclusion, this trajectory will lead me to conceptualize religion in terms of “making transcendence together”—a conceptualization that explicitly avows an intrinsic correlation of religion and violence but also stresses the perfect contingency of “religious violence.”
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Notes
- 1.
- 2.
In the following, I will use the Greek term poiesis in order to clearly emphasize a “broad sense of ‘inventive’ making and creating,” esp. the (unconscious) “creation of everyday existence” (Kearney 2016, p. 366, 179), which is operative in Ricœur’s so-called poetics of the will (see also Wall 2005).
- 3.
This argument is developed in detail by Kippenberg (2011) who attempts to decipher the logics of religious violence from the viewpoint of action theory and, most basically, the so-called Thomas-theorem.
- 4.
The both basic and irreducible ambivalence that I am referring to here is stated most clearly in Wall’s (2005, p. 53) succinct assessment of Ricœur’s understanding of religion which, in the last analysis, cannot avoid this “tantalizing religious possibility” concerning its reserves of violence, even if he hardly ever reflects on it.
- 5.
This insight, namely, that order is dependent upon the production of disorder, which it needs as its material and upon which it is hence parasitic, has been outlined forcefully by Bauman in his account of modernity and the violence that its very project entails (Bauman 1989).
- 6.
That this hypostatization is frequently embellished in a semantics of universality is demonstrated by the author (Staudigl 2014) in a case study on the violent universalism of the Western concept of “world cultural heritage” and the way it was instrumentalized in the case concerning the destruction of the Buddhas of Bamiyan.
- 7.
As a “paradigm,” this concept has been developed in a systematic manner most recently by James Mensch in his book, The Intertwining (Mensch 2018).
- 8.
On this overall dilemma that seems to be constitutive for phenomenology of religion since its very inception, see also Waldenfels (2012, p. 353ff).
- 9.
This reproach finds evidence in the major proponents of both a radicalized and a hermeneutic phenomenology of religion, that is, Marion and Ricœur, who both focus such phenomena at the expense of “lived religion.”
- 10.
In Bloch’s terms, one could also describe this in terms of a “rebounding violence” that is part and parcel of the “conquering return” of the subject to this world from its “journey to the beyond” (Bloch 1992, p. 5): that is, to use Schutz’s expressions, from its journey from the “religious finite province of meaning” that has enabled one to “see through” the all too pragmatic limitations of everydayness.
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Acknowledgments
This chapter was developed with the generous support of two research grants from the Austrian Science Fund (FWF): “The return of religion as challenge for thought” (FWF I 2785) & “Secularism and its Discontents. Toward a Phenomenology of Religious Violence” (P 29599). An earlier, much shorter version appeared in Bogoslovni vestnik 77 (2017) 3/4,517—531 under the title “Transcendence, Self-Transcendence, Making Transcendence Together: Toward a New Paradigm for Phenomenology of Religion.”
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Staudigl, M. (2019). Reflections on the Meanings of Religious Violence: A Phenomenological Exploration. In: Lauwaert, L., Smith, L., Sternad, C. (eds) Violence and Meaning. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-27173-2_4
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