The Faith of the Faithless

Public Lecture October 14, 2010

by Professor Simon Critchley, The New School for Social Research (New York).

The faith of the faithless

The return to religion has become perhaps the dominant cliché of contemporary theory. Of course, theory often offers nothing more than an exaggerated echo of what is happening in reality, a political reality dominated by the fact of religious war. Somehow we seem to have passed from a secular age, which we were ceaselessly told was post-metaphysical, to a new situation where political action seems to flow directly from metaphysical conflict.

This situation can be triangulated around the often fatal entanglement of politics and religion, where the third vertex of the triangle is violence. Politics, religion and violence appear to define the present through which we are all too precipitously moving, where religiously justified violence is the means to a political end. How to respond to such a situation? Must one either defend a version of secularism or quietly accept the slide into some form of theism? Shouldn’t we refuse such an either/or option?

Through a historical and philosophical investigation of the deep interdependence between politics and religion from the middle ages, through early modernity to the present, I will propose a faith of the faithless, a belief for non-believers that insists that the utopian impulse in political thinking is not dead.

Arranged by:

Filosofisk Forum; Doctoral School of Organization and Management Studies, CBS; Centre for School Leadership, CBS. In the celebration of Filosofisk Forum’s 30th anniversary 14 Oct 2010.

Programme:

16.15-16.25

Introduction by Centre Director, Associate Professor, Camilla Sløk, CBS. Discussion by Associate Professor, Bent Meier Sørensen, CBS

16.25-18.00

Public lecture by professor Simon Critchley

18.00-18.30

Reception – hosted by Centre for School Leadership, CBS