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    Crockett - Economies of Studying Religion - JCRT 1.3

    The Journal of Cultural and Religious Theory is committed to advancing critical discourses aiming to (re)define the nature of disciplinary and inter-disciplinary scholarship in religion and culture studies. In a series of feature articles, the editors and members of the editorial board will address a wide range of issues in cultural and religious theory.

    Economies of Studying Religion

    Clayton Crockett
    College of William and Mary

    Religion is about a certain about. What religion is about, however, remains obscure for it is never quite there–nor is it exactly not there. Religion is about what is always slipping away. It is, therefore, impossible to grasp what religion is about–unless, perhaps, what we grasp is the impossibility of grasping… This strange slipping away is no mere disappearance but a withdrawal that allows appearances to appear.

    -- Mark C. Taylor, About Religion

    _One of the significant problems for both understanding and living today involves the unrestrained proliferation of capital. In traditional Christianity, the prohibition against usury means that charging money for time is sinful because humans presume to buy and sell time, which is deemed God’s possession. Of course, we could not conceive of modern society and economy without the practice of charging interest. One possibility for religious studies then, is to use economic concepts to understand religious phenomena, broadly following Marx. Here I am thinking of Mark Taylor’s essay ‘Discrediting God,’ as well as some of Derrida’s philosophical reflections in ‘White Mythology’ and Specters of Marx. The other side of this agenda would involve using religious and theological terms to critique and understand the workings of our economy. Here one could think of the market as God, and grapple with notions of investment, speculation and faith. It is intriguing to explore the multivalent resonance of words such as interest, speculation and credit in both philosophical-religious and economic contexts.

    It is our epoch which has discovered theology. One no longer needs to believe in God. We seek rather the ‘structure,’ that is, the form which may be filled with beliefs, but the structure has no need to be filled in order to be called ‘theological.’ Theology is now the science of nonexisting entities, the manner in which these entities’divine or anti-divine, Christ or Antichrist’animate language and make for it this glorious body which is divided into disjunctions.[1]

    1. the experience of belief, on the one hand (believing or credit, the fiduciary or the trustworthy in the act of faith, fidelity, the appeal to blind confidence, the testimonial that is always beyond proof, demonstrative reason, intuition); and

    2. the experience of the unscathed, of sacredness or holiness, on the other.[2]

    the gap between the opening of this possibility (as a universal structure) and the determinate necessity of this or that religion will always remain irreducible’.Thus one can always criticize, reject or combat, this or that form of sacredness or of belief, even of religious authority, in the name of the most originary possibility.[3]

    Notes

    Clayton Crockett is Visiting Assistant Professor of Religion at the College of William and Mary. He is the author of A Theology of the Sublime and editor of Secular Theology: American Radical Theological Thought, both forthcoming from Routledge, and is the Managing Editor of the JCRT.

    Updated 07/28/21.
    http://jcrt.org/archives/01.3/crockett/

    [2:1]

    1. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, translated by Mark Lester (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), p.281. ↩︎

    2. Jacques Derrida, ‘Faith and Knowledge: the Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,’ in Religion, edited by Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998, p.33. ↩︎ ↩︎

    3. Ibid., pp.58-59. This is similar to Caputo’s formulation of ‘religion without religion.’ However, this formulation must not be understood simplistically, as if one could construct a religion purified of content, dogma and history; this is a facile understanding which fails to do justice to Derrida’s thought as well as Caputo’s representation of it. If Derrida’s religion is purely possible and absolutely indeterminate, then this can only be thought in intrinsic relation to particular and determinate religions, as Derrida emphasizes in ‘Faith and Knowledge.’ ‘Religion’ is always both with and without religion. See John D. Caputo, The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without Religion (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1997), pp.xviii-xix, 194-96. ↩︎

    4. Ibid., p.50. ↩︎

    5. Ibid., p.50. ↩︎

    6. Ibid., p51. ↩︎

    7. Ibid., p.51. ↩︎

    8. Here we could ask, in a Heideggerian/Derridean vein, what is de-onto-theo-logy? ↩︎