Simon Critchley, Atheist Religious Thinker on Utopia & the Fiction of Faith
The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology
by Simon Critchley
Verso , 2012
August 15, 2012
By Beatrice Marovich
What can an atheist do with theology? Quite a lot, as it turns out. The philosopher Simon Critchley is clear about the fact that, while he doesn’t believe in any gods, neither does he find it necessary to give up on theology. His new book, Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology opens with an invocation of Oscar Wilde—a rather doleful lamentation from a letter, published in 1905, that Wilde wrote (perhaps during his last months of imprisonment) to his lover Lord Alfred Douglas:
When I think of religion at all, I feel as if I would like to found an order for those who cannot believe: the Confraternity of the Faithless, one might call it, where on an altar, on which no taper burned, a priest, in whose heart peace had no dwelling, might celebrate with unblessed bread and a chalice of empty wine. Everything to be true must become a religion. And agnosticism should have its ritual no less than faith.
Wilde points to a kind of phantasm; a collective, a confraternity, that doesn’t actually exist. Where Wilde saw nothing, however, Critchley sees something: political association. He sees, in other words, the ritual life of the faithless playing out on its own territories, in its own registers.
The confraternity of the faithless has a complex, underground life of its own, as Critchley presents it; which seems to be both a problem and an opportunity. The Faith of the Faithless wades uneasily into topics like Rousseau’s theory of civil religion, mystical anarchism in 13th and 14th century movements of the Free Spirit, debates about religious violence.
http://www.religiondispatches.org/books/atheologies/6246/simon_critchley,_atheist_religious_thinker_on_utopia_%26_the_fiction_of_faith/
