Sammendrag
A central feature of the work of Hannah Arendt is her distinction between the political and the pragmatic, between how we relate to one another in a democratic field, and how we relate as members of a household. The first is at least potentially democratic, and allows for listening and responding, for actions that persuade and propose. The second is essentially despotic, appealing to obedience and organisation. The first is public, the second, private.
This paper will do three things:
1) Defend Arendt’s division against posthumous criticism (for example, from Benhabib) by applying Agamben’s “patch” and establishing what kind of a distinction it is (i.e. not nominalist but of apparatus);
2) Interpret anti-essentialist approaches to religion such as “lived religion” as pragmatic/household rather than political/public (leaning heavily on postcolonial interpretations at this point);
3) Problematise the interpretation of essentialising approaches to religion that claim identities in the public sphere (of the genre “As a member of religious community X, I am telling you…”) as public statements. On the one hand, identity politics is at least political rather than despotic; on the other, political engagements based on demographic group rather than political principle is the way democracies die.
All this leads us to a double bind for religious education: either study through anti-essentialist attempts to govern religion or accept essentialising identity politics. There may be an Arendtian solution: to treat religion as literature rather than social behaviour.
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