...R. Radhakrishnan This essay is a genealogical appreciation of the theoretical legacy of the work of William Spanos as it has evolved from an early and ongoing commitment to the “de-structive hermeneutics” of Martin Heidegger toward Edward Said’s exilic politics of a contrapuntal secular humanism...

... as a frontal critique of political theology and partner to the secular humanism proposed by Edward Said. The political and aesthetic activation of secular criticism involves a practical poetics as well as a critique of the conceits of the postsecular, of the notion of a political theology, and the claims...

... is professionally and economically productive but imaginatively and humanely weak and undesirable. The various papers that made up this conference at UCLA illustrated the best results of a secular humanistic scholarship produced by poetically sensitive readers. © 2012 by Duke University Press 2012 Aamir...

... but people to be kept out, nonexperts and nonspecialists (139), with the idea of a secular inter- pretive community creating truth through rhetorical struggle, for whom the opponent is someone to be persuaded, Said goes on to ask a question that has a powerful claim upon us at a moment when the humanities...

...Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott From the beginning, the work of William V. Spanos has been characterized by a secular vocation, the confrontation with historical relations of power and subordination. His writings on American literature, contemporary humanities, and the Harvard Red Book, along with his...

..., including “Chris- tianity, National Identity and the Problematic Character of Human Rights in the United States,” “Democracy Won’t Help,” “Sacrificial Nation,” and “Evil and European Humanism.”15 These works raised several questions: 1. What theory of secularization underpins Kahn’s concept...

..., by definition, to unfold it in the world. Determined to separate the false paradox (the “world” according to the One) from the true paradox (the cosmological abyss) within which it unfolds, humanity is thought to be destined to an inevitable state of war as if by nature. Secular criticism (in the manner...

... will and the (imperfectly defined) human capacity for open and transcendent radiance of consciousness beyond metonymic identities. His example of joyful creativity offers a propaedeutic advantage for the incommensurable secularity of emerging humanistic work intersecting with increasingly technologically mediated...

... modernity” renounce the most fundamental assumptions of modernity as we have known it—from universalism, democracy, human rights, secularism, equal rights for all regardless of race, class, gender, religious affinity, and so on, all the way to its temporalities and spatialities—as Eurocentric impositions...

... not in any explicit way—that human- ism provides a crucial way of dealing with the ‘‘God problem allowing him to negotiate his way around the categorical imperatives of Christian and Islamic tradition. And this, of course, has significant bearing on definitions of secular criticism indebted to Said’s work...

... to are the intel- lectual traditions of modernity, particularly those of secular humanism—is among those populations that are constituted in disposal. In this context, the production, or facilitation, of the emergence of humans can no longer be seriously conceived of as the inevitable consequences...

... antihumanist impulses in French poststructuralism: “appeals to the extra- human, the vague abstraction, the divine, the esoteric and secret,” a fash- ion for “unthinkability, undecidability, and paradox.”12 In such formulations, Said seemed to take for granted that secular knowledge is straightforward...

... inclusive has been the most distinctive new motive for research and pedagogy. The turn to religion is an entirely predictable result of this innocent-­sounding and in fact praiseworthy impulse. The high theory period’s critiques of bourgeois liberalism, secular humanism, and Enlight- enment reason...

... with virulent hatred (al-karāhīya al-ʿudwānīya). Hating the English, of course, is a type of self-defense. Nonetheless, nationalism is localized humanity (insānīya maḥallīya10 Clearly Kamāl’s militantly secular thinking is not overly burdened with either a sense of inferiority...

... for how many people think whatever happens is God's will, and for how many people think they have guardian angels. You know, if you just ask them, you're not going to get a response that will necessarily be sympathetic to what many would call secular humanism in the university. In a way, I'm defending my...

...—counseling disengage- ment, retreat, and self-cultivation. They undermine not only the convictions, practices, and morale of the progressive Left, but a core assumption of secular modernity itself, its belief in humans’ capacity to discern the truth of things and to make large-scale...

... exist, in its secular, humane, and progressive modes, it does so, as it has always done, in a few selective cases, for a few moments at a time, in highly selective circumstances, with no predictable or consistent in- fluence on anyone’s praxis, not even on those few rational beings. Reason...

.... Mufti / Critical Secularism 7 the core of Said’s critical practice ‘‘an exfoliation of the repressed politics of transcendence A critical secularism means, first of all, an insistence on the this- worldly nature of all human experience and a critical practice of unbelief— threads...

... in the Arab Nahda David Fieni Introduction Edward Said’s unrelenting and unapologetic effort to rethink and transform the interrelated critical fields of philology, humanism, and the secular continues to give pause...

... of the passing of secularity into obsolescence extends its hold over the humanities, the reorganization of social imagi- naries worldwide around various notions and practices of calculability— a hallmark of the secularization thesis in many of its forms, above all the Weberian, but we may also recall...