The Difference Enlightenment Satire Makes to Religion: Hudibras to Hebdo

What difference has Enlightenment satire made to religion? And how might this difference both limit and enable our ability to imagine toleration? Juxtaposing the following two quotations opens up some new ways to think about these questions. The first is from Fredric Bogel’s book on satiric form, in which he argues that satire works as “a literary mechanism for the production of differences.”¹ The “first” satiric gesture […] is not to expose the satiric object in all its alien difference but to define it as different, as other. […] Satire, then, is a rhetorical means to the production of difference