Introduction: Secularization and Disenchantment

From the Enlightenment to Nietzsche, the critique of religion remained central to European theories of progress. Weber saw the "disenchantment of the world" as both tragic and inevitable. And he believed, without qualification, that any true intellectual must be strong enough to countenance the emptiness of the heavens. Both Nietzsche and Weber saw the intellectual's resistance to religious consolation as a mark of heroism. In their wake, however, we seem today to be confronting a rebirth of theological interest that cannot be dismissed as mere regression. The renewed focus on alterity, for example, most prominent in the writings of Levinas and deconstruction, was originally meant to further what [Martin Heidegger] called a "destruction" of ontotheology: the last remaining "religion" was the metaphysics of linguistic presence or egological self-satisfaction. But in Derrida's last writings, it is argued that alterity was all along the name for a "messianicity," which this school distinguishes from the entrapment of "doctrinal messianism." What was once considered theological regression is now presented as the next stage in overcoming metaphysics. Elsewhere, the theological turn has a more differentiated genealogy. The last decade's burgeoning interest in Franz Rosenzweig and Emmanuel Levinas might be seen as a part of a broader renewal of American and European interest in modern Jewish religious thought. Similarly, from the perspectives of critical theory, the turn to post-metaphysical religion could be considered an attempt to heal the divided reception of Walter Benjamin during the 1970s and 1980s, when Benjamin was seen as torn between irreconcilable "Marxist" (i.e., Brechtian) and "theological" (i.e., Scholemian) influences. And the same might be said of the equally contentious reception of Carl Schmitt that quickly followed. On the left as well as the right, there is now a burgeoning interest in political thought that takes its cue from Schmitt's dictum that all pregnant concepts of political theory are secularized theological concepts. Does Europe define the role of religion in the public sphere differently than America? Jacques Derrida and Jurgen Habermas, despite their many theoretical differences, found common cause in the midst of the Iraq war and issued a vigorous statement of European solidarity that they cosigned in May 2003 and published in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. In contradistinction to the solidaristic faith in a "divine mission"