Beyond the Secular: Jacques Derrida and the Theological-Political Complex investigates the contemporary relationship between religion and politics through a critical reading of Jacques Derrida’s political thought. Its central claim is that Derrida’s thought offers powerful resources to rethink such a relationship beyond the secular paradigm. In dialogue with recent debates on the global resurgence of religion, the book questions the binary logic of modern secular discourse and illuminates its exclusionary character by tracing its roots in racialized understandings about language, epistemology, politics, and religion that travel worldwide through processes of globalization. As a challenge to the alleged neutrality of these processes, this work exposes the political dimension of translation and the assimilatory role it plays in hegemonic forms of secularization and knowledge production relevant to public life. By exposing the discriminatory hierarchies that the Western-Christian, sexualized, and racialized presuppositions of secular discourse keep producing and maintaining, Beyond the Secular ultimately sheds light on the multiple entanglements of secularism with the legacy of colonialism. As such, it unearths and sustains a series of interconnections with non-Western and decolonial responses to Eurocentrism, colonialism, Islamophobia, and white supremacy.
(SUNY Press, forthcoming)