Ananda Abeysekara
Title |
Address |
Phone |
E-mail |
Associate Professor |
209 Major Williams |
231-5788 |
Ph.D. in Religious Studies at Northwestern University, 1999.
Ananda Abeysekara is Associate Professor in the Religious Studies Program at Virginia Tech. He is also a member of the editorial board of the journal Culture and Religion (Routledge). His research and teaching interests lie at the intersection of religion, postcolonial studies, Buddhism, philosophical theory, and political philosophy. His approach to the study of religion engages broad questions of memory, history, inheritance, legacy, allegation, loss, catastrophe, un-witnessing, secularism, law, political sovereignty, responsibility, and justice. Currently, especially in conversation with Martin Heidegger and Jacques Derrida (as well as with such thinkers as Friedrich Nietzsche, Hannah Arendt, Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, Etienne Balibar, Slavoj Zizek, Dipesh Chakrabarty, William Connolly, Giorgio Agamben, Gayatri Spivak, Richard Rorty, and Talal Asad), Abeysekara is concerned with what he calls "thinking the question of religion." This task demands more than the conventional modes of analysis, interpretation, critique--and more than even theoria in the Greek and other senses of the word--that guide the epistemological and empiricist protocols of area studies. He considers thinking religion to be inseparable from thinking the question of our (still?) secular-political futures; that is, it involves thinking the question of the im-possibility of inheriting and re-inheriting the democratic legacies of religion. To respond to--not just to answer but to answer to--this question responsibly, we cannot continue to treat such legacies as problems, to be historicized, criticized, neutralized, and resolved. They should be understood as aporias--irreducible contradictions, without passage. Such legacies (which are always legacies of allegation) do not remain relegated (and delegated) to the past but come from the future, whose promised (secular) arrival always remains deferred. Thus, the challenge for us (those of us who are in one way or another preoccupied with "history" and its supposed redemptive democratic virtue) is to clear a pathway of mourning and "un-inheriting" the memories of a legacy that cannot be inherited or abandoned. Abeysekara’s latest book, The Politics of Postsecular Religion: Mourning Secular Futures (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), in part speaks to this challenge. His new book project explores how imagining a way of living that will be survived by the very secular/religious futures that can only be un-inherited may face up to our contemporary habitations of juridical sovereignty.
Representative Publications:
The Politics of Postsecular Religion: Mourning Secular Futures (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). Published as part of the series: “Insurrections: Critical Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture.”
"Thinking the 'Question' of Religion: Aporia of Buddhism and its Democratic Heritage in Sri Lanka,” Religion 38 (2008)174-180.
"Desecularizing Secularism: Postsecular History, Non-Juridical Justice, and Active Forgetting,” Culture and Religion 7:3(2006):205-243.
Colors of the Robe: Religion, Identity, and Difference (Columbia: University of South Carolina Press, 2002). Winner of the 2003 American Academy of Religion Award for the “Best First Book in the History of Religions.”