Enlightenment as Religion

William Rasch

“Jesus is the Christ.” With this every Christian can agree; thus, in his Levia-
than, Thomas Hobbes insists that this be the single article of dogma all citi-
zens are called on to profess. All other tenets—transubstantiation, for instance,
or the particularities of baptism or predestination, or whether salvation is the
result of faith or good works—are to become a matter of private conviction and
not public dispute. In this way a communal identity is thought to be preserved
and, more important, civil peace secured. Hobbes’s attempt to overcome the
potentially explosive effects of doctrinal differences by finding a common
ground of agreement becomes the model for the function of the modern Euro-
pean state after the religious wars of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
With the Reformation, and with the many internal fissures within Protestant-
ism itself, Truth clothes itself in many guises and takes up residence in many
locales from which it launches its various crusades. Since doctrinal warfare
threatens the very existence of the polity, internal pacification can be achieved
only by neutralizing these causes of bloody conflict. “Jesus is the Christ” is
both the affirmation of a specifically Christian commonwealth and a formally
declared and legally enforceable truce.
But the story does not end there. As is commonly noted, Hobbes’s is
but the first step in the eventual secularization and liberalization of modern
Europe by privatizing religious conviction about the nature of righteousness
and the pious good life on earth. The tale is most often told in a triumphant
mode or, less often, as decline and decadence, because, for better or worse,

New German Critique 108, Vol. 36, No. 3, Fall 2009

DOI 10.1215/0094033X-2009-013 © 2009 by New German Critique, Inc.

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110 Enlightenment as Religion

secularization is thought to be what has made modern Europe modern. Carl

Schmitt also relates a version of this historical trajectory, though his is nei-
ther a triumphalist narrative nor a fable of entropic degeneration. It is, rather,
simply the particular story of modern Europe, not a teleological tale told by a
genius, not the unfolding of a world-historical development, and not a neces-
sary descent into nihilism. Nevertheless, his is a cautionary tale, for with every
redefinition of identity a loss of order remains a real possibility, as does the
ever-present threat of civil war and chaos. Neutralization, the ability to disarm
difference, requires a common ground or “central sphere,” as Schmitt calls it,
on which warring parties can stand, yet that ground or central sphere cannot
be neutral itself, cannot be pure neutrality. For the Europe of Hobbes, Jesus,
not Yaweh, not Allah, not Buddha, is the Christ, and there is a Christ, a divine,
transcendent lord and master, no matter how remote and unknowable that God
may be. In seventeenth-century Europe Christians are still privileged, non-
Christians at best tolerated. Thus neutralization always also brings with it dis-
criminations. Distinctions must be made between “us” and “them” to bring us
together. They need not be enemies, but they do not partake fully in our world,
just as we do not partake fully in theirs.
The history of modern Europe since Hobbes’s attempt to neutralize
Christian difference is the history of the shifting of central spheres and thus
central identities as new conflicts and new differences arose. To accommodate
non-Christians—Jews, for instance, beginning in the eighteenth and nineteenth
centuries, and of course freethinkers and atheists, too—there could no longer
be a personified deity on the throne of Europe, and his name would certainly
not be Jesus. Schmitt therefore traces the trajectory of post-Christian shifting
spheres from metaphysics to morality (by which he means the Enlightenment)
and finally to economics and technology. The most elegantly rational expres-
sion of European civilization’s identity, Schmitt feels, is represented by the
very first attempts to accommodate difference after the religious wars, namely,
in the metaphysical systems and balance-of-power ordering of the European
states in the late seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries. But neither the
accuracy of his account nor his particular judgment is of interest here. His fear,
however, is pertinent, for in economics and especially in the rise of a sanguine
belief in the universal good of technology, Schmitt finds that neutrality itself
stakes a claim to be the central ground on which all differences can be neutral-
ized. With technology, neutrality becomes the Christ, as it were, and infused
with the holy spirit of indifference, difference is said to be banished from the
civilized, worldly realm.
 William Rasch 111

Schmitt offers two separate accounts of the dangers of neutrality, though

they are often confusingly intertwined and, ironically, indistinct. On the one
hand, neutrality is a real possibility and is represented by the claims of the
nineteenth-century liberal, agnostic state. The danger he sees for Europe in
such neutrality is its consequent inability to define and thus defend itself. One
might liken Schmitt’s position to those who fear something they call the moral
relativism that accompanies pure, irresponsible tolerance. That is, absolute
neutrality would seem incapable of making any distinctions at all and would
therefore be unable to recognize and combat potential enemies. Neutrality, he
fears, is incapable of self-defense. On the other hand, however, neutrality itself
is not thought of as the threat; rather, the disingenuous claim to neutrality or,
more strongly, the ideology of neutrality represents the danger we face. Here
terms like humanity, peace, human rights, and a host of other general and flex-
ible terms are used to disarm sensible European resistance. Whereas neutral-
ity itself, were it to exist, would be impotent, the duplicitous and deceptively
aggressive language of neutrality surreptitiously introduces distinctions and
exclusions that gain in potency by remaining unacknowledged and unnoticed.
Those familiar with Schmitt’s writings will recognize this gesture in his invec-
tives against the emerging, post–World War I discourse of monolithic, global
liberalism, invectives largely aimed at the threat coming from the United States.
Let me cite here the following explosion of passion from his 1929 essay “The
Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations,” the text on which I have pri-
marily relied for the above account of Schmitt’s Europe. “Great masses of
industrialized peoples today,” Schmitt writes at the end of that essay,

still cling to a torpid religion of technicity because they, like all masses, seek
radical results and believe subconsciously that the absolute depoliticization
sought after four centuries can be found here and that universal peace begins
here. Yet technology can do nothing more than intensify peace or war; it is
equally available to both. In this respect, nothing changes by speaking in the
name of and employing the magic formula of peace. Today we see through
the fog of names and words with which the psycho-technical machinery of
mass suggestion works.
Today we even recognize the secret law of this vocabulary and know
that the most terrible war is pursued only in the name of peace, the most ter-
rible oppression only in the name of freedom, the most terrible inhumanity
only in the name of humanity.1

1. Carl Schmitt, “The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations,” in The Concept of the
Political, trans. George Schwab, exp. ed. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 95.
112 Enlightenment as Religion

This of course is a bitter claim born of the resentment aroused by a lost

war and a self-righteously vindictive peace. Nearly a century later we have lost
our faith in technology to neutralize our differences and solve our problems,
and Europe no longer seems to burn with the same sectarian resentments of
old. In truth, Europe has emerged from its twentieth-century version of the
Thirty Years’ War as robust as ever. No longer the world’s hegemon, it never-
theless serves as that sovereign power’s junior partner and receives the full
economic benefits of empire without appreciable cost. But what exactly do we
mean now when we say Europe? What central sphere neutralizes Europe’s dif-
ferences today? Put another way, if Jesus is no longer the Christ, who or what
is? On the level of Europe’s self-reflection or self-description the answer, I
believe, is pretty clear: the Enlightenment, under which we subsume Europe’s
secular society and liberal politics and economy. What, however, is the Enlight-
enment, or rather, what value does it ascribe to itself? Does it, like Jesus once
did, serve as a way to distinguish itself from the world to extinguish its internal
differences? Or does it view itself as neutrality itself, a global medium in which
all differences will eventually melt away into the private sphere and become
harmless artifacts of the past? The questions I raise are meant to direct our
attention to the function that claims of enlightened, secular, and liberal neu-
trality serve. Are they philosophically sophisticated expressions of the belief
in the power of mutual tolerance and peaceful coexistence, and thus, as Schmitt
sometimes feared, do they pose a danger to Europe’s ability to defend itself in
times of crisis? Or in truth do they contain within their self-justifications an
evangelical call to arms that can be perceived only as a threat by those who do
not wish to convert? If the latter, is the threat justified? Are those who resist us
truly evil, condemned not, as of old, to eternal damnation but nevertheless to
secular excommunication? I do not hope to answer these questions fully. Rais-
ing them in such a passionately sober manner will, I hope, allow a space for
self-reflection and discussion. As I show, self-reflection and discussion are
bruited to be enlightened virtues, so they ought to be brought into play in any
self-examination of the Enlightenment, even a self-critical one.
But before I begin, this note of explanation. Though in what follows,
my primary examples come from German-speaking, continental Europe, I do
not write as an American who isolates the United States from “old” Europe.
Despite important differences, differences attributable to America’s millennial
sensibilities and the necessarily subordinate role Europe has played in its part-
nership with the New World for over a half century, commonalities of history
and mission prevail. To say “Europe” necessarily entails the inclusion, how-
ever problematically, of its upstart, Anglo-Saxon, imperial offshoot.
 William Rasch 113

Universality . . .
Let me begin with the recent Danish caricatures of the Prophet Muhammad,
not because I wish to say anything about them directly, but because of what
Günter Grass had to say when interviewed in early 2006 by the Spanish news-
paper El país. I use his comments to open a broader discussion about Europe’s
relationship to the non-European world, including to what is thought of as non-
European in Europe itself. I cite three of his responses to the Spanish inter-
viewer and note basic distinctions that, I think, will be recognizable to all and
comfortable to most.
To the question of whether he was surprised by the acts of violence that
followed the publication of the caricatures, Grass answered: “We live in an
age in which one act of violence follows another. The first originated in the
West, the invasion of Iraq. Today we know that thereby international law was
violated; the war was waged solely on the basis of Bush’s fundamentalist argu-
ments, namely, that there is a battle between good and evil. What we see now
is the fundamentalist answer to a fundamentalist act.”2 Many Americans
would be incensed by the idea that the United States was in any way respon-
sible for the Islamic reaction to Danish cartoons, but I am not one of them,
and that claim does not interest me here (if for no other reason than the fact
that the chain of causality imputed is far too simple). Others may be amused
by the idea that the United States broke international law, as if what we call
international law actually held for those with sufficient power to ignore it with
impunity, and may therefore wonder whether European—this time, “old”
European—protestations about putative laws and their violators are nothing
more than signs of European, even “core” European, impotence. Again, this is
not my concern. What does interest me is the complication of the basic dis-
tinction between the West and the non-West, for the target of Grass’s wrath is
something called fundamentalism, and it seems that fundamentalists exist in
both global spheres, though I suspect that the West’s fundamentalists, in Grass’s
mind, are predominantly if not exclusively to be found on this side of the
Atlantic and associated with the now former president George W. Bush. What,
then, distinguishes the nonfundamentalist West from its fundamentalist other,
wherever located?
An answer comes in Grass’s response to a redundant follow-up question
evoking Samuel Huntington’s notion of a clash of civilizations. Having already
stated that a conflict between fundamentalists is by no means a conflict between

2. Günter Grass, “Kein Kampf der Kulturen, sondern zweier Un-Kulturen,” www.welt.de/print-
welt/article196879/Kein_Kampf_der_Kulturen_sondern_zweier_Un_Kulturen.html (accessed
February 10, 2006). Hereafter cited as “Kein Kampf.” My translations.
114 Enlightenment as Religion

cultures but between the uncultured (“By no means do we find here a clash of
cultures—rather, we have a conflict between two noncultures”), Grass responds
to a question asking whether this cycle of action and reaction should be taken
as evidence of a “clash of cultures”:

That is precisely what fundamentalists on both sides want. We should

begin, however, to differentiate. We have the luck to have had the Renais-
sance and the Enlightenment and therefore have undergone a painful pro-
cess that has brought us a series of freedoms that are still threatened. The
Islamic world has not undergone this process; they find themselves at a dif-
ferent stage of development. And this must be respected. (“Kein Kampf”)

“We”—meaning nonfundamentalist Europeans; indeed, one is tempted to say:

European Europeans—“we” have undergone the process of Enlightenment
and thus find ourselves at a different, presumably higher or more advanced,
level of development. Whereas the difference between Europe and fundamen-
talists (both Islamic and their counterparts in the West) is a simple difference
between the civilized and the uncivilized, what distinguishes Europe from the
Islamic world in general is the higher level of culture we have so painfully
achieved. And that must be respected.
We respect this difference between us and our civilized but somewhat
backward cousins by tolerating them. “Two years ago Western and Arabic
authors met in Yemen,” Grass tells his interviewer, “to discuss literary themes,
including erotic themes. This was unusual for Arabs, but in the end we had
a successful discussion. One can talk about everything, even controversial
themes, if everyone brings the same tolerance he expects from others—even if
one has a different idea of culture that is determined by its own set of taboos”
(“Kein Kampf”). One wonders how that discussion went. If one can speak about
everything, as long as one brings tolerance to the table, does that mean that
tolerance is a way to get others, who for religious or cultural reasons are disin-
clined to talk about sex, to talk about sex? And if one’s beliefs about culture
are determined by taboos, what taboos did Grass break at this meeting? For
Grass, who knows a thing or two about taboos and their consequences in post-
war Germany, tolerance may come easy when one occupies the role of the
civilizer, and the taboos broken are not one’s own.
Nevertheless, as I said, most of us, I suspect, recognize and feel comfort-
able with the views represented here. Whether explicitly or only implicitly, we
cannot help but identify with what Grass calls the Enlightenment and the free-
doms it bestowed on us—among them, the freedom of speech that protects
cartoonists in Denmark and me in the United States. I also suspect that most of
 William Rasch 115

us almost instinctually shrink from what Grass calls fundamentalism, espe-

cially religious fundamentalism, for most of us, I suspect, presuppose, whether
explicitly or implicitly—though more likely only implicitly—the Enlighten-
ment’s cultural and political superiority, or, as we prefer to say, its universality,
and most of us pit that inclusive universality against the exclusive particularity
we associate with fundamentalism. It is this conviction that our beliefs are
universally valid, applicable, as the saying goes, to all people at all times, that
allows us the ability magnanimously to exercise tolerance toward those who
have yet to ascend to the stage of Enlightenment. Indeed, it is this belief in the
Enlightenment—again, I suspect—that allows Europeans of all stripes to use
the pronoun we as unreflectively as Grass does and, only slightly more reflec-
tively, as I have just done.
If Grass and countless others are right about Europe’s commitment to
something called the Enlightenment, then the following question arises: What
distinguishes Europe’s fundamental beliefs from a fundamentalist’s funda-
mental beliefs? Why, in other words, are Europe’s fundamental commitments
not fundamentalist in nature? The common answer generally invokes a his-
torical narrative that marks the stages of Europe’s increased religious plural-
ism and the consequentially necessary emergence of secularism and the liberal
neutral state, precisely the narrative that Schmitt tweaks in his analysis of nec-
essary neutralizations. Because of Europe’s historical experience with reli-
gious schism and civil war, the modern nation-state develops into an institu-
tion indifferent to an increasing number of competing and divisive worldviews
and thus serves as the neutral ground on which people espousing a plurality
of incommensurable beliefs about the good life can gather and live in relative
social harmony. It is the configuration of this ostensive neutrality that has
become an object of intense interest over the past few decades.
In a number of essays written since the end of the Cold War, Jürgen
Haber mas has elaborated on this progressive Enlightenment narrative with
enviable clarity. Working in an explicitly Kantian framework, Habermas points
to basic philosophical presuppositions and the political institutions that arise
from them in modern, pluralist Europe, presuppositions about the morally and
politically autonomous, self-legislating individual and the public use of a uni-
versally valid and normatively binding reason that, he maintains, should be
viewed as paradigmatic for all others who inhabit our now globally intercon-
nected planet. Only in this way, he believes, can the type of difference that
fundamentalism rejects be simultaneously preserved and politically neutral-
ized. For instance, in an essay on the legitimacy and legitimating function of
human rights Habermas maintains the following:
116 Enlightenment as Religion

Kant conceived autonomy as the capacity to bind one’s own will by nor-
mative insights that result from the public use of reason. This idea of self-
legislation also inspires the procedure of democratic will-formation that
makes it possible to base political authority on a mode of legitimation that
is neutral toward worldviews. As a result, a religious or metaphysical jus-
tification of human rights becomes superfluous. To this extent, the secu-
larization of politics is simply the flip-side of the political autonomy of
citizens.3

The crucial distinction here is between religion and metaphysics, on the

one hand, and secularism, on the other. Secularism itself, with all its explicit
assumptions about the political autonomy of citizens, rational nature of the
human being, and the disenchantment of politics to which autonomy is nec-
essarily linked, remains the other of all worldviews. Religious or metaphysi-
cal justifications for political, moral, or legal positions (like human rights)
become not only superfluous, as Habermas says (we no longer need theories
of divine or natural law), but also illegitimate, because religious belief and
metaphysical reasoning reflect worldviews that, due to their fiercely defended
partiality, cannot be universally valid. The neutrality toward worldviews that
Habermas celebrates here is precisely the European achievement brought
about by the Protestant Reformation and its Enlightenment aftermath. In the
face of religiously or metaphysically justified worldviews, which by definition
are partial and encompass only true believers, Europe created a “political
authority,” the modern state with its political and legal institutions, that remains
agnostic to competing truth claims because it is putatively founded on a “mode
of legitimation that is neutral toward worldviews.” Therefore this mode of legit-
imation and the philosophical principles it both presupposes and enables must
themselves not comprise a worldview. What founds modern European plu-
ralism, in other words, is said to be qualitatively different from what founded
societies in the past and what founds contemporary non-European societies.
The Enlightenment is not thought of as just another, not even a superior, view
of how the world should be ordered, but as the Aufhebung of all such particu-
lar views and their contentious rivalries. Europe has worldviews contained in
it, so to speak, but Europe itself is the pure medium that allows for their peace-
ful coexistence.
This neat, pleasing picture of pacific neutrality is quickly troubled, how-
ever, by another distinction Habermas makes. There are, it turns out, two clas-

3. Jürgen Habermas, The Postnational Constellation: Political Essays, ed. and trans. Max
Pensky (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), 127. Hereafter cited as PC.
 William Rasch 117

sifications of worldviews, and only one of them is to be tolerated or, rather,

accepted into the fold of global civilization. What Habermas and therefore
Europe requires of worldviews is reflexivity, a “reflexive attitude” that allows
for “a civilized debate between convictions” facilitated by a “relativization of
one’s own position.”4 This the European religions have achieved, and this the
rest are called on to emulate. There is today an increased awareness, Haber-
mas contends,

that one’s own religious truths must be brought into conformity with pub-
licly recognized secular knowledge and defended before other religious
truth claims in the same universe of discourse. Like Christianity since the
Reformation, traditional worldviews are thus being transformed into “rea-
sonable comprehensive doctrines” [a phrase and concept Habermas bor-
rows from John Rawls] under the reflexive pressure generated by modern
life circumstances. (PC, 128)

We see that acceptable worldviews are ones that have accommodated them-
selves to and have “been brought into conformity” with secular society. Only
those worldviews that have adapted to European specifications are to be
acknowledged as legitimate, for worldviews that have not been transformed
into “reasonable comprehensive doctrines” are ostracized. Fundamentalism
Habermas defines as “a peculiar mindset, a stubborn attitude that insists on
the political imposition of its own convictions and reasons, even when they
are far from being rationally acceptable,” and fundamentalists are those who
“ignore the epistemic situation of a pluralistic society and insist—even to the
point of violence—on the universally binding character and political accep-
tance of their doctrine” (PTT, 31). Therefore, in Europe at least, “political
integration does not extend to fundamentalist immigrant cultures” (IO, 229).
And since, as Habermas writes, “autarkic isolation against external influences
is no longer an option in today’s world” and thus “the conflict of cultures takes
place today in the framework of a world society in which the collective actors
must, regardless of their different cultural traditions, agree for better or worse
on norms of coexistence” (PC, 128), political integration does not extend to
fundamentalist cultures anywhere else, either. The Enlightenment, it seems, is
only for the enlightened.

4. Jürgen Habermas, The Inclusion of the Other: Studies in Political Theory, ed. Ciaran Cronin
and Pablo de Greiff, trans. Ciaran Cronin et al. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1998), 224; Giovanna
Borradori, Philosophy in a Time of Terror: Dialogues with Jürgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida
(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 31. Hereafter cited as IO and PTT, respectively.
118 Enlightenment as Religion

At this point, one might ask the following: once a normative distinction
has been made between civilizations that are advanced and those that are not,
between acceptable-because-reasonable and unacceptable-because-unreasonable
worldviews, can the Enlightenment with its liberal and secular institutions still
maintain its neutrality? The answer, I think, is no. To return to Schmitt’s typol-
ogies, we can say that neutrality is not Europe’s fundamental disposition. Were
it so, were tolerance universal, European identity would dissolve. Rather, what
we call the Enlightenment is the ground on which differences in Europe are
thought to be neutralized, though, of course, one can argue about the relative
success of the effort. Thus “neutrality” takes effect only after specific require-
ments are met. The medium or “mode of legitimation” that can serve as the
so-called neutral ground on which incommensurable but reflexively “rea-
sonable comprehensive doctrines” coexist cannot in turn serve as the neutral
ground mediating the differences between so-called reasonable and unreason-
able worldviews. For a worldview to be recognized and tolerated by enlight-
ened, secular Europe, it must adapt to European ways. In short, it must convert,
because the distinction drawn between the reasonable and the fundamentalist
is an asymmetrical distinction made, not surprisingly, by those who identify
themselves as reasonable. Precisely because it stands in an antagonistic rela-
tionship to what it identifies as its enemy—fundamentalism—Enlightenment
thought mimics what it chastises, namely, the fundamentalists’ condemnation
and exclusion of those “infidels” who do not believe. The distinction between
two incompatible forms of worldviews is the distinction between enlightened,
liberal, European secularism and those who cannot or do not wish to conform
to European standards. Enlightenment, too, distinguishes between believers
and nonbelievers. As “fundamentalists,” the latter are banished from the civi-
lized world, both domestically and internationally, and thus, as outlaws, are
subject to civilizing violence. What Grass calls the Renaissance and the Enlight-
enment and Habermas a neutral mode of legitimation is in fact the core identity
of core Europe, for one is hard-pressed to refer to the Enlightenment and all
that is associated with it as anything other than Europe’s Weltanschauung.
And why should Europe not have an identity? And why should that
identity not center on Enlightenment values like secularism and reasoned
discourse among politically autonomous individuals? There is no convinc-
ing reason why it should not. I take what I have described above—Europe as
a rough unity of politically, economically, and culturally allied entities that ide-
ally but imperfectly define themselves as enlightened, liberal, and secular—
to be both painfully obvious and perfectly appropriate. That this identity is
neither natural nor immutable seems equally clear, though there will always
 William Rasch 119

be some who wish to see in European history the unfolding of a teleology.

And finally, that Europe’s boundaries, both physical and intellectual, are also
mutable serves precisely as the motivation for these reflections. As a steady
barrage of heavy theoretical artillery continuously reminds us, identity is not
essential but constructed, not fixed but flexible, not inhabited but performed.
So when I speak of identity, I speak of the effects of political, cultural, and
philosophical self-descriptions on the order of Grass’s and Habermas’s men-
tioned above. Distinctions are important because they are unavoidable and
because they simultaneously uncover and cover up possibilities. In its simplest
and perhaps most effective form, European identity is constructed by the dis-
tinctions it makes and enforces.
But if the claim to neutrality is itself not neutral, if it is in truth the decep-
tive marker of core commitments, then Schmitt’s second fear comes into
play, namely, that the claim may serve an imperial function. In its glide from
a particular historical development to a universal mode of legitimation, the
Enlightenment presents itself in a confusing and deeply disturbing way. This
troubling slide from the particular to claims of universal validity is visible in
Habermas’s interview with Giovanna Borradori, conducted shortly after Sep-
tember 11, 2001. Reflecting on the paternalistic, asymmetrical implications of
tolerance, in which one side determines both the norm and the limits of accept-
able deviation from the norm that can be tolerated, Habermas notes that “within
a democratic community whose citizens reciprocally grant one another equal
rights, no room is left for an authority allowed to one-sidedly determine the
boundaries of what is to be tolerated.” Instead of patronizing tolerance one
has “reciprocal respect,” and reciprocity “requires a common standard” (PTT,
41). Habermas identifies two candidates for such a common standard. First,
and most directly, one has the constitution. All agreement and disagreement
must be articulated in the procedural and legal language of a founding instan-
tiation of a political community. Such a constitution could, for instance, declare
Jesus the Christ and could thus be but another name for a particular “central
sphere” of neutralization that sets limits to discourse, but of course Haber-
mas equates the notion of a constitution with its modern form, a written con-
stitution that even allows for “civil disobedience” and the possibility of demo-
cratic alteration of what is and is not recognized as constitutional (PTT, 41–42).
This emphasis on the liberal constitution leads quickly to the articulation of
a second, all-encompassing, and putatively universal “common standard”—
namely, “the universalistic nature of the legal and moral foundation of a liberal
order.” Universalism, Habermas contends, “amounts to the egalitarian indi-
vidualism of a morality that demands mutual recognition. . . . Membership
120 Enlightenment as Religion

in this inclusive moral community . . . promises not only solidarity and a

nondiscriminating inclusion, but at the same time equal rights for the protec-
tion of everybody’s individuality and otherness” (PTT, 42). Thus tolerance
is no longer called for, because in universalism asymmetrical distinctions
disappear.
Yet, as I have already argued, universalism itself is not universal. Not
everybody’s individuality and otherness is protected, because membership
in universality is restricted. There is an outside to the universe of universal-
ity, and this outside is made to resemble the very other of heaven. To avoid
that alternative, one must agree to accept the common standard, the language
to be spoken and heard, if one wishes to secure entrance into the community
of mutual recognition. Those whom we “one-sidedly” identify as fundamen-
talist are not invited to the party. In fact, their voice is not even heard, because
when they speak they are made to say what we want them to say. Habermas
acknowledges the point made by both Marx and Schmitt, namely, that “uni-
versalistic discourses” may hide “particular interests” and thus serve an “ideo-
logical function” (PTT, 42). However, Habermas deftly evades the problem
by declaring that the critique of universalistic discourses is rendered impos-
sible because any critique automatically validates the universalism it attempts
to deconstruct.

Just as every objection raised against the selective or one-eyed application

of universalistic standards must already presuppose these same standards,
in the same manner, any deconstructive unmasking of the ideologically
concealing use of universalistic discourses actually presupposes the criti-
cal viewpoints advanced by these same discourses. Moral and legal univer-
salism is, thus, self-reflexively closed in the sense that its imperfect prac-
tices can only be criticized on the basis of their own standards. (PTT, 42)

Readers of Habermas will recognize in this passage his favorite rhetorical

weapon, the accusation of performative paradox. Hypocrisy, cynicism, and
ideology all involuntarily endorse the values they simulate, and, more impor-
tant, the critique of hypocrisy, cynicism, and ideology can be based only on the
values that the critiqued ideologies embody. Habermas would view my criti-
cism of his universalism, in other words, as necessarily based on the univer-
sal principles I vainly attempt to dispute. Since universalism is universal, there
can be no legitimate outside, no alternative basis for critique, and internal
or immanent critique is declared self-contradictory, or at best universalism’s
immune system, the involuntary self-correction of universal liberalism.
 William Rasch 121

It may be ungenerous to say so, but the qualities Habermas uses to

describe the essence of fundamentalism, phrases like “the political imposition
of its own convictions and reasons” and the “insist[ence]—even to the point of
violence—on the universally binding character and political acceptance of
their doctrine,” might plausibly be identified as attributes of Europe as well.
What we call the Enlightenment—what we call democracy, liberty, liberalism,
secularism, human rights, and human dignity—may not only represent our
fundamental commitments but may also be deployed in the same manner we
attribute to our fundamentalist enemies. Our open and liberal values, in other
words, may have their critics and opponents, whom we in turn exclude in the
name of an all-encompassing inclusion of “the other.” Thus my brief investiga-
tion of our fundamental liberal assumptions may very well be liberal in spirit,
as Habermas suggests. I am, after all, European, in the expanded definition I
articulated above. Nevertheless, my observations attempt to recognize the lim-
its of liberal universalism and point to the consequences of violating those
limits. Habermas may also be correct to insist that in today’s world autarchy
is no longer possible. Thanks to five hundred years of European expansion (to
use a gentle word for the process), mutual ignorance, even mutual indifference,
has become seemingly impossible. One need not celebrate this fact, however.
Today we feel compelled to think and act globally, but does that necessarily
entail thinking and acting universally, as if everything Europeans do others
should do too? Is this urge to know and to appropriate the known as one of our
own not without an element of tragedy, especially when seen from the perspec-
tive of those who reject or are rejected by the one possible universe we have to
offer? Is the communicative double bind that Habermas wields so deftly really
the last word? If it is the last word, if lines can no longer be drawn, difference
no longer displayed, and resistance no longer articulated, then should it come
as such a surprise to us that there are those who use other, more physical and
more pointed media with which to communicate their frustration?

. . . and Particularity
Allow me to answer that question as well: no, it should come as no surprise.
Let me be explicit: it is not in the least bit surprising that attacks have been
carried out indiscriminately against European and American civilians. Does
this claim make me an apologist for “terrorism”? As the scare quotes around
the word terrorism should make clear, I understand the question to be a trap, a
Fangfrage, to use the appropriate German word, to which any answer already
concedes too much. Raising the use of terror to an ism conveniently allows one
to distance (the history of) one’s own employment of shock and awe from that
122 Enlightenment as Religion

of one’s opponent. When contemplating Europe’s long-standing relationship to

the non-European world, making fine distinctions between (“our”) legitimate
and (“their”) illegitimate uses of violence becomes problematic, since Europe
has always resorted to physical force of all shapes and sizes, from the initial
coercion of conquest, reprisal, and “punitive” military expeditions to the abso-
lute annihilation of genocide. But the issue here is not the long history of phys-
ical “terror,” in which we are still entangled and which, because of the weap-
ons that Western technology has introduced into the world, threatens us all;
rather, the issue revolves around covert, “linguistic violence,” that is, the silence
that discourse can impose on interlocutors which in turn tempts some to use
overt violence as an ersatz form of communication.
In this regard, it is fascinating to watch two of Germany’s best and bright-
est operate so confidently with their hard-won postwar orthodoxy, an ortho-
doxy that, as Schmitt already saw in the 1920s, preaches peace and equality
but promotes an age-old civilizing mission. Grass unabashedly, if rather clum-
sily, repeats this mission’s traditional tripartite historical structure and the tele-
ology that supports it. In a quick overview he introduces us to the savages devoid
of culture, the semicivilized, and the pinnacle of human development, on which,
of course, he plants his own flag. Whereas the Islamic world has the chance to
redeem its potential and become fully human (note the ability of Arab poets to
overcome their puritanical inhibitions), fundamentalists are incorrigible and
slated, it is hoped, for eventual extinction. Ideally, none of this is to happen on
the physical level; rather, perhaps the proper pedagogical process (albeit backed,
if necessary, by force) will lead to the desired result. Thus we have those who
stand outside history altogether and are not part of human culture or human
development. One way or another, they are fated to disappear. And then there
are the rest of us who represent different stages of human development. Those,
like the inhabitants of the Islamic world, who are still childlike but neverthe-
less progressing toward full untutored maturity can experience the benevolent
tolerance and encouragement of those, like Grass, who have already achieved
confident adulthood.
Whereas Grass explicitly manipulates the category of difference, both
the difference between the cultured and uncultured (which easily translates
into human and nonhuman) and the difference of stages of cultural develop-
ment (leading toward the end stage of full or completed humanity), Haber-
mas, the far more thoughtful and subtle thinker, eschews explicit difference
and embraces the category of inclusion. We are all reasonable creatures and
thus all have the potential to use our reason correctly in consort with other
reasonable creatures. The devil is in the details, however, which therefore
 William Rasch 123

grants the qualifications of “potentiality” and “correctness” their normative

power, because for Habermas, too, humanity is something that needs to be
achieved. One is born with the right to inclusion, but one can far too easily
forfeit that right through wrong thinking. Thus he also reproduces the same
three-part distribution of human characteristics. For Habermas, the primary
task is to distinguish between those who belong in the modern world and those
who do not. As with Grass, fundamentalists, the modern pirates and barbar-
ians, occupy the position of those who have placed themselves outside the law
of reason and thus outside civilization. Within the realm of acceptable human
behavior are those who represent the universal standpoint of the Enlighten-
ment and those who have not fully achieved complete emancipation from
their self-incurred immaturity but who, by relativizing their own fundamen-
tal beliefs, nonetheless recognize the superior authority of those who are fully
enlightened. Reason as defined by the reasonable (for there is no universal
mode of legitimation that could adjudicate the dispute between reason and
what the reasonable define as nonreason) becomes the litmus test for “uni-
versal” inclusion.
The legal scholar Martti Koskenniemi has labeled this way of thinking
“rational imperialism.”5 Ironically, in the name of “a purely formal system of
reasoning” (GCN, 489), universal norms are established that allow for the
deformalization of international law. That is, by way of formally derived norms,
one is now able to discriminate between regimes that conform to universal
standards—namely, liberal regimes—and those that do not. The formalism of
reason, in other words, leads to nonformal, substantial distinctions that under-
mine the formality of the rule of law. Only those regimes are equal before the
law who conform to norms established by ostensibly formal rationality, namely,
regimes with liberal political and economic institutions, whose intellectuals
are precisely the ones who have access to the “peculiar universality of norms”
in the first place (GCN, 489). These norms, then, allow liberal states to con-
strain nonliberal states. “It follows,” Koskenniemi notes, that

a person, group, or State that does not share them is not only of another opin-
ion (or preference) but has made a mistake about something that that per-
son, group, or State should think rational for itself, too. Universalizability in
theory leads automatically to expansion as practice. If my principle is valid
because it is universal, then I not only may but perhaps must try to make
others accept it as well. In any case, I can rest confident that I know what

5. Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International
Law, 1870–1960 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 491. Hereafter cited as GCN.
124 Enlightenment as Religion

principles apply not only to me and my group but to any person or any
group. If I engage in contacts with them, I need not face them as equals. I
need not be open to their preferences because I already know that mine are
universally valid, for me as well as for them, too. I may (or perhaps must)
be kind towards and patient with them [I must, as Grass admonishes us,
respect them with paternalistic tolerance—WR], but the object of my encoun-
ter can only be the transformation of the way they see the world, having them
accept my principles, too (because they are not really “mine” but universally
good). (GCN, 490)

To reject or resist such benevolent intervention can only be seen then as a sign
of irrational error or willful evil. In either case, the miscreants may legiti-
mately be subject to a just because corrective war.
Now, both rationalism’s faith in universality and the diagnosis of this
faith’s imperialist consequences stubbornly coexist in contemporary debates.
In its starkest form, the debate between the two seems to be a clash between
universalism and particularism. Yet even those who fiercely oppose the uni-
versal monarchy of imperialist reason are loath to give up entirely on the notion
of universality or else find it impossible to do so. For many, it’s not about the
value of particularism per se but whether the particular can resist being con-
sumed by the seemingly inevitable totalizing consequences of any theoretical
position, or, if it cannot, whether it then is fated to return in the “deformed” fig-
ure of the vengeful repressed. For Koskenniemi, who, as an almost counterfac-
tual believer in the possibility of international law, wishes to navigate between
the “Scylla of Empire and the Charybdis of fragmentation” (GCN, 504), the
“particular and the universal are related through paradox: the articulation of
the particular can be carried out only by reaching towards the universal,” to
which he quickly adds that “no automatic application to others—imperialism—
is implied” (GCN, 505). This of course is not so much a description of a fact
as the outline of a challenge, namely, the ability to articulate a particular inter-
est, grievance, or right in a universally compelling language without explic-
itly or implicitly demanding that the particular interest, grievance, or right be
recognized as being universally binding on all. It is the challenge of observ-
ing the performative paradox that Habermas identifies to learn from it about
both the particular and the universal and not to use the paradox as a weapon
to silence one’s opponent. Koskenniemi wishes to address this challenge with
what he calls a legal culture of formalism that neither destroys the particularity
of interest and experience nor reduces law to “just an idiosyncratic ‘decision’
of the occasional Weberian jurist” (GCN, 516). He thus posits that a culture of
formalism might
 William Rasch 125

account for the dependence of every particularity on a universality that

defines it, and constitutes the ground from which it may experience itself as
unfulfilled, devoid of some aspect without which it cannot fully realize itself.
Through attention to that “lack,” that absence of what a particular feels it
should possess in order to be fully itself, focus is directed to its universal
aspect. . . . By directing attention to that universality, the particular is opened
up, and its communal lien, its shared property or value with other particu-
larities, is revealed. But unlike in imperialism, it is not opened by a positive
principle but a negative one: what is it that we lack? . . . Universalism here is
neither a fixed principle nor a process but a horizon of possibility that opens
up the particular identities in the very process where they make their claims
of identity. (GCN, 505–6)

All of this may be nothing but the pious hope of one who is committed to the
legal profession in a last-ditch effort to save the law from being nothing more
than politics conducted by other means. Since at least the time of Georges
Sorel, disillusionment with the projects of utopia has triggered attempts to
renew utopian hope (“the ideal of universal emancipation, peace, and social
progress” is also affirmed by Koskenniemi [GCN, 516]) by positing the pro-
ductive power of absence as a form of resistance. Given that this forlorn and
undefined hope (Emancipation from what? What kind of peace? Perpetual?
Or the kind of truce Kant despised? Progress of what? Toward what?) comes in
the last paragraph of a 517-page demolition of a century-long international law
tradition (or rather, traditions), one could simply dismiss Koskenniemi’s clos-
ing gambit as the result of narrative pressure to end on a positive note, to end,
speaking classically, with comedy and not tragedy. But where Koskenniemi
piques one’s interest is in the following declaration. “The Rule of Law hopes
to fix the universal in a particular, positive space (a law, a moral or procedural
principle, an institution). A culture of formalism resists such fixation. For any
such connection will make the formal appear merely a surface for something
substantive or procedural, and thus destroys it. In this sense universality (and
universal community) is written into the culture of formalism as an idea (or
horizon), unattainable but still necessary.” As a “culture of resistance,” a “cul-
ture of formalism is recognizable, or indeed has identity, only in terms of its
opposition to something that it is not” (GCN, 507). The culture of legal for-
malism that Koskenniemi endorses is not simply the repetition of the desire
for the rule of law; rather, the rule of law as currently formulated is precisely
what the culture of formalism opposes.
This sounds of course comfortably “postmodern” and intellectually
enticing. We feel inexorably drawn by the allure of “resistance,” even if we
126 Enlightenment as Religion

have all more or less packed our berets away in the mothballs of nostalgic
memory and find it harder to clench our arthritic fists. But what, concretely,
might all this mean? Frankly, I am not sure. Nevertheless, to close these rumi-
nations I will try to imagine what emptiness might look like by returning to
the scene of what many believe to be the source of modern Europe’s interna-
tional imperialist thinking: the conquest of America in the sixteenth century.
In so doing, I also return to the Enlightenment’s true, if ironic, origins, namely,
Christianity.
In his remarkable study of Europe’s sixteenth-century confrontation
with the New World, The Conquest of America, Tzvetan Todorov scrutinizes
the various ways the Spaniards thought about identity and distance. By exam-
ining the writings of Christopher Columbus, Hernán Cortés, Francisco de
Vitoria, Bartolomé de Las Casas, and others, Todorov reveals that neither
knowledge of nor sympathy with the Amerindians necessarily led to respect
for their difference. From the very beginning, Todorov notes, either percep-
tions of difference (e.g., in the inhabitants’ modes of social organization, reli-
gious rituals, etc.) degenerate into declarations of the other’s inferiority or
proclamations of the other’s equality were contingent on recognizing their
identity and denying their difference. That is, the experience of difference
provoked the evocation of inequality, and the recognition of equality brought
with it the almost compulsive extinction of difference. The oblique axis of
difference-equality seemed impossible to imagine or maintain. Of the two
available options, the articulation of inequality strikes us as the most egregious
sin, while the drive to assimilate is perhaps the most insidious because the
least visible.
For most of his life, the very sympathetic figure of Las Casas loved and
wished to protect the Amerindians because like all humans, they were equal
before the Lord and should be treated so. With this equality, however, comes
an obligation, namely, belief, for “this very declaration of the equality of men
is made in the name of a specific religion, Christianity, though without this
specificity being acknowledged. Hence there is a potential danger of seeing not
only the Indians’ human nature asserted but also their Christian ‘nature.’ . . .
Since Christianity is universalist, it implies an essential non-difference on
the part of all men.”6 Thus Christianity’s universal claim—all humans all over
the world may be saved, as Jesus explicitly proclaims in the Gospels—slides
into a universal imperative—they must accept the truth of the Gospels or be

6. Tzvetan Todorov, The Conquest of America, trans. Richard Howard (New York: Harper,
1984), 162. Hereafter cited as CA.
 William Rasch 127

forever damned. Todorov observes this glide from possibility to necessity in

Las Casas’s writings:

In a first phase, then, Las Casas observes that from the doctrinal point of
view, the Christian religion can be adopted by all. “Our Christian religion is
suited to all the nations of the world, and it is open to all in the same fashion;
and taking from none its freedom nor sovereignty, it puts none in a state
of servitude, on the excuse of a distinction between free men and serfs by
nature” (discourse presented before the king in 1520; Historia, III, p. 149).
But immediately after he declares that all nations are fated to the Christian
religion, thereby taking the step separating potentiality from action: “There
was never created a generation nor lineage nor people nor language among
human beings . . . and still less since the Incarnation and the Passion of the
Redeemer . . . that cannot be counted among the predestined, which is to
say among the members of the mystic body of Jesus Christ, which, as says
Saint Paul, is the Church” (Historia, I, “Prologue”). “The Christian religion
is granted to different peoples as the universal way to salvation, so that they
may leave behind their various sects” (ibid. I, 1). (CA, 162–63)7

I have cited Todorov’s readings of Las Casas at length because I wish to show
rather than merely assert the commonality of the pattern between the well-
intentioned Las Casas and his well-intentioned descendants like Habermas.
Christianity is a particular religion with a particular history, yet it claims uni-
versal relevance. Its universalism allows for inclusiveness. All may become
Christian. But precisely because Christianity also proclaims that it is uniquely
in possession of a universal truth—salvation—the all-who-may become the
all-who-must. To affirm one’s “sect” and deny Christianity is stubbornly to
maintain a perverse particularity and thus deny one’s very humanity.
Todorov, however, notes a change of position late in Las Casas’s life,
indeed, a kind of “perspectivism” that relativizes Christian universality. To
defend the Amerindians, Las Casas must confront what struck the Spaniards
as their most horrific attributes, the Aztec practice of human sacrifice. Todo-
rov points out that Las Casas offers a de facto comparison with the Christian
tradition, noting God’s command to Abraham to sacrifice his only son, Isaac,
and, indeed, God’s sacrifice of his son for our sins (CA, 188). But more inter-
esting, according to Todorov, is the de jure justification, which involves a
comparative perspective on all religions from the viewpoint of “natural rea-
son,” which dictates that the

7. Bartolomé de Las Casas, Historia de las Indias, 3 vols. (Mexico City: Fondo de Cultura
Economica, 1951).
128 Enlightenment as Religion

greatest proof one can give of one’s love for God consists of offering Him
what is most precious to oneself, human life itself. . . .
Hence, sacrifice exists by the force of natural law. (CA, 188–89)

Now, Las Casas quickly adds that the Aztec god is not the true God, yet the
Aztecs believe him to be so, about which Todorov remarks: “But to acknowl-
edge that their god is true for them—is that not to take a fi rst step toward
another acknowledgment, i.e., that our God is true for us—and only for us?”
Where does this acknowledgment lead? Let me stitch together Todorov’s rea-
soning at this point, again, in his own language:

What then remains common and universal is no longer the God of the
Christian religion, to whom all should accede, but the very idea of divinity,
of what is above us; the religious rather than religion. . . . Religious feeling
is not defined by a universal and absolute content but by its orientation, and
is measured by its intensity. . . . Hence, it is by confronting the most trou-
blesome argument that Las Casas is led to modify his position and to illus-
trate thereby a new variant of the love for one’s neighbor, for the Other—a
love that is no longer assimilationist but, so to speak, distributive. . . .
Equality is no longer bought at the price of identity. . . . Las Casas has sur-
reptitiously abandoned theology and practices here a kind of religious
anthropology which, in his context, is indeed a reversal, for it certainly
seems that the man who assumes a discourse on religion takes the first step
toward the abandonment of religious discourse itself. (CA, 189–90)

Does Todorov make of Las Casas an Enlightenment figure, indeed, the

first Enlightenment figure? Perhaps, and perhaps correctly so, if we under-
stand Enlightenment in a different and more difficult way than the one cur-
rently articulated as our project and our destiny. The key to comprehending
what is so appealing in Las Casas’s attempt to jump out of his own skin, so
to speak, is to grasp and emphasize the “first step.”
Las Casas takes the “first step toward the abandonment of religious dis-
course” by relativizing his own religion to find points of commonality with
the religions of the Amerindians. Yet Las Casas does not abandon Christi-
anity outright. Rather, he affirms the truth of Christianity while also embed-
ding it in an umbrella category called religious feeling or religiousness. Reli-
giousness is a seemingly universal category; it defines what is common to all
religions—sacrifice. Thus we have competing universalities, namely, the truth
of Christianity and also the truth of a universal medium, namely, a category
of religiousness that serves as a ground for comparing the sacrifice of God’s
“only begotten Son” and the human sacrifices conducted by Aztec priests.
 William Rasch 129

Religiousness on this account becomes the placeholder of an “empty tran-

scendence,” a fictional perspective, so to speak, from which religions can be
viewed as if objectively. Yet one does not necessarily (or not yet) abandon reli-
gion by so doing. One “returns” to the truth of one’s own religion while still
recognizing the parallel action of one who is different from oneself. One par-
adoxically and difficultly, and, no doubt, imperfectly acknowledges the other’s
conviction—Las Casas speaks of intensity and indeed admires the Aztecs’
intensity as being superior to the Christians’—without giving up the belief
in the truth of one’s own convictions. The perspective of “religiousness” rec-
ognizes the truth of “intensity,” while the perspective of one’s own religion
embraces the truth of dogma.
Difference of course is not preserved as pure difference. The “differend”
that separates the Aztec from the Spanish Christian is bridged by the category
of religiousness, thus assimilation occurs, but only to a limited extent. The
Aztec is the “same” as the Spanish observer not because of his or her potential
for being “saved” (and thus becoming fully “human”); he or she is the same
because of a related yet different mode of worship. At this point, to avoid a
“second step” from being taken, the first step would have to be repeated. “Reli-
giousness,” “religious feeling,” “mode of worship” threaten to become the new
universal category of religious anthropology with the same assimilating force
of Christianity. For the newly self-reflexive Las Casas, would, for instance, a
society without religion, without a form of sacrifice, count as fully human? To
avoid a new assimilationist dogma, religious anthropology itself would have to
be relativized. And whatever category would be used to achieve that goal would
itself have to be reflected and limited. The process is potentially infinite.
What I am describing seems to be a radicalization of the self-reflexivity
that Rawls and Habermas require of reasonable comprehensive doctrines. It
recognizes the need for a horizon of transcendence, a space that can be filled,
but must also be emptied for self-reflexivity to recur. This same empty tran-
scendence could accommodate other categories to perform analogous func-
tions for other spheres of social organization—the form of legality, for instance,
to reflect not the universality of a rationally derived natural law but the com-
monality and diversity of positive legal systems. And each time such service is
performed, the category used would eventually have to be put in question as
well. This, I believe, is something like what Koskenniemi has in mind when he
speaks, citing Ernesto Laclau, of universality as a negative not positive princi-
ple, as a lack, an openness, and horizon of possibility (GCN, 505–7).
In the long run, keeping transcendence empty appears to be an impos-
sibility. The “first step” is always eventually followed by a second one. The
130 Enlightenment as Religion

breakthrough that, according to Todorov, Las Casas achieves is enlightened,

but soon becomes reified (to use a quaint term from a bygone era) as the Enlight-
enment. Transcendence is fixed, as it were, by a new God. The truths of oth-
ers are relativized by the one Truth, one’s own truth that is no longer reflected
on. Ideology, like nature, abhors a vacuum, and transcendence becomes filled
with a positive doctrine of universality that now demands, say, of Christianity
or Islam that they become reasonable comprehensive doctrines while the ratio-
nal universality itself remains oddly unreasonable. There is no empty transcen-
dence that stands above the Enlightenment. It is, as Habermas claims, “self-
reflexively closed.” Filled with a new universalism, it seeks to assimilate all
difference, to consume and contain all diversity.
Perhaps this is one reason that Schmitt was so fond of Hobbes and of the
seventeenth century’s solutions to Europe’s problems. Jesus could be both the
Christ and not the Christ, for above him stood the empty space of relativization
that allowed the many faces of Jesus to commune with each other without dis-
turbing the social order. As a model, one can imagine a similar empty space,
now no longer imprinted with Jesus’s face but with other mythical and imagi-
nary ciphers that allow for other forms of diversity. The danger comes when
that imaginary and enabling space becomes filled with a new truth, with only
one face. The danger comes when the utopian longing for emancipation (secu-
lar salvation) becomes a positive dogma.
The difficulty arises in part from the dual function Enlightenment thought
performs: the dogmatic function that serves as Europe’s (the “West’s”) neces-
sary identity and strength, and the function provided by an empty, formal form
that would allow Europe’s engagement with the non-European world to be non-
imperialist. In the contemporary world, that empty form appears to be impos-
sible. Not only have the fundamentalists resorted to violence against which it
is always legitimate to defend oneself, but current global structures, from the
United Nations to the various nongovernmental financial and political agen-
cies (like the International Monetary Fund and the World Bank)—which, like
the Catholic Church of old, dictate the forms modern “worship” is to take—
militate against the flexibility of the latter, formal mode of Enlightenment
thought. That is, political and economic imperatives remain both eminently
“imperial” and “terrorist.” This intricate saber dance of implicit and explicit
violence works against any kind of philosophical reflexivity. Koskenniemi’s
attempt to rethink international law from the basis of reflexivity is admirable.
Now he just needs to explain how formal reflexivity could at all be possible in
the current global institutional framework.
 William Rasch 131

Coda
This has been an Enlightenment tale about the Enlightenment, told, however,
in a tragic, not comic mode. Happy endings resolve conflicts, usually in fantas-
tically unreal ways, as do most progressive narratives about possible futures.
Tragic ones display the lack of such resolutions, the impossibility of happy-
ever-after reconciliations. Happy endings allow the observer to die in peace.
Tragic ones, ironically, force one to live on and cope with serial impossibilities.
Tragedy, therefore, is the perfect mode for political reflection.