The Postsecular and Rethinking the Political

Abstract

The notion of postsecularity has come to the fore in recognizing the neglected significance of religion and belief in terms of their normative, social and political contributions to the individual and collective lives of contemporary times. The literature of postsecularism, essentially, takes issue with the normative-political problematique of coexistence of diverse beliefs in the political community. In this respect, Jürgen Habermas joins the term of postsecular consciousness to be able to deal with the persistence of religiousity and faith in modernized societies and seeks ways to include religious reasoning and moral intuitions into the public sphere and will-formation of the political community. However, he ends up restricting religious moral and political contribution strictly to the general public sphere and ultimately civil society. This article argues that the inadequacy of his postsecular orientation has to do with his idea of the political, which ignores contestation and pluralization in relation to the very foundations of the political. The article also claims that the postsecular turn in political theory fulfills its promises, if it opens the relationship between the secular/immanence and the religious/transcendence to diverse/plural interpretations, and simultaneously contest the political as ontology among subjects of diverse beliefs in the political community.

Keywords

• The postsecular
• habermas
• public sphere
• religion
• ontology
• the political

Supporting Institution

Istanbul University BAP unit provided financial support for the presentation of the text on which the article is based, as a communiqué at APSA’s 2017 annual congress

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