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WORKS CITED
Badiou, Alain. Ethics: An Essay on the Understanding ofEvil. Trans. Peter
Hallward. London: Verso, 2001.
_. ''A Finally ObjectlessSubject:' Who Comes After the Subject? Ed. Eduardo
Cadava. London: Routledge, 1991. 24-32.
_ . Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return of Philosophy. Ed. and trans. Oliver
Feltham and Justin Clemens. London: Continuum, 2004.
_ . Theoretical Writings. Ed. and trans. Ray Brassierand Alberto Toscano.
London: Continuum, 2004.
Bailie, Gil. Violence Unveiled: Humanity at the Crossroads. New York: Crossroad,
1995.
Eagleton, Terry. After Theory. New York: BasicBooks, 2003.
Hallward, Peter. Badiou: A Subject to Truth. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 2003.
Zizek, Slavoj. The Fragile Absolute: Or, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting
For? London: Verso, 2000.
_ . The Puppet and the Dwarf The Perverse Core ofChristianity. Cambridge, MA:
MIT Press, 2003.

Postsecularism and a Prophetic Sensibility

Kathryn Ludwig
Recent fiction signals a shift in orientation with regard to the religious.
Many contemporary novels depict the performance of a "turning" in the
lives of characters or the introduction of moments of mystery and religious
possibility, such as those found in the works of Thomas Pynchon and Don
DeLillo. In other novels, characters who already espouse some religious
belief take up secular challenges to religion by reconsidering religious
assumptions, toying with the practice offaith, attempting to rebuild religion
afresh, or placing an existing tradition alongside other faith systems in a
syncretistic articulation of belief. Yann Martel, E. 1. Doctorow, Cynthia
Ozick, Marilynne Robinson, and Toni Morrison are among the authors
engaged in these kinds of activity.
John McClure has dubbed this manifestation of the turn to the religious,
"the postsecular" In a 1995 article in Modern Fiction Studies, McClure
described the period of"resacralization" in contemporary fiction and theory

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as a movement toward religious ways of knowing. McClure complicates

accounts of the postmodern, like Frederic Jameson's and [ean-Francois
Lyotards, contesting their claim that the postmodern is already secular,
and even post-religious.' McClure notes, as Linda Hutcheon's account
of postmodernity suggests, that the secular strand of the postmodern is
rivaled by a different strand, which allows for a different kind of reading
than the one privileged by critics who assume secular constructions of the
postmodern. He points to the "presencing" (using Homi Bhaba's term)
of religious discourses in some postmodern fiction, including Thomas
Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow and Ishmael Reed's Mumbo Jumbo?
The postsecular shift has only intensified in the years since McClure first
published on the subject.' Currently, postsecularism in literature describes
a marked increase in the production of novels involving "journeys of the
soul" (Ford S6-S7). In December of2007, McClure published Partial Faiths:
Postsecular Fiction in the Age ofPynchon and Morrison, the first full-length
book devoted to the subject of contemporary postsecular fiction. In the
preface, he defines postsecularism as "a mode of being and seeing that is at
once critical of secular constructions of reality and of dogmatic religiosity"
(ix). Postsecular narratives, he writes, suggest the need for a "religiously
inflected disruption of secular constructions of the real," yet they refuse,
for the most part, to endorse any single religious discourse (3). Postsecular
thinkers, for McClure, neither reject the religious a priori nor do they accept
existing interpretations of the religious a priori.
I argue that the postsecular can be characterized as a "prophetic" turn,
as the notion is elucidated in Martin Buber's writings. Martin Buber, who
wrote in the first half of the twentieth century, called for a renewal of the
religious to counter the prevalent secularism of his age.' In works such as I
and Thou and On the Bible, Buber urged not a return to existing models of
the religious but a turn toward unmediated relation with the divine. Bubers
renewalism, and in particular his interest in the prophetic, can help us to
think out the shift of orientation through which we seem to be moving, and
especially the literary writing now characterized as postsecular.
In his article, "The Man of Today and the Jewish Bible;' Buber articulates
a definition of prophetic reading. Buber states that man must
read the Jewish Bible as though it were something entirely unfamiliar,
as though it had not been set before him ready-made, as though he
has not been confronted all his life with sham concepts and sham
statements that cited the Bible as their authority. He must face the Book
with a new attitude as something new. (5)

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Buber posits a practice of reading scripture in the context of one's "historical

hour" and undertakes to move biblical reading from a tripartite relation
(which is arbitrated by convention) to a bipartite relation (which involves
unmediated contact with the divine) ("Prophecy"). Buber articulates this
idea of relation as a "dialogue between heaven and earth" and points to the
many dialogues between God and man in the Hebrew Bible as examples of
I-Thou relations between humans and the divine ("Dialogue").
Buber called for a return to "betweenness;' a notion drawn, in part,
from the teachings of German sociologist Georg Simmel.' For Buber, the
space between two people is of more consequence than the subjectivity of
the people themselves, which could be understood as its end terms. He is
less interested in dialogue in the Aristotelian sense of a discussion between
two distinct parties than people engaged in connectedness. Betweenness,
according to Buber, is the site of openness to the otherness of the other
and to the signs of God's address or summons coming through the other
(Between Man and Man). He writes that it is only in relation to another that
one's own being is realized.
Buber laments the loss of community in his age and will later turn to
dialogue to remedy this loss. His dialogical vision derives from the model
of the Biblical prophet." In Buber's understanding, the prophet's work is
founded in his attentiveness to God's revelation. He faces God and says,
"Here I am:'? He awaits God's wisdom, and the prophecy given to him
results in a moment of decision for those who hear it, a call to "turning:'
The prophet does not give predictions; he is not a soothsayer or a fortuneteller. Rather, the prophet awakens people to the eventualities of their
present course and calls people to action in the face of God's admonition
("Dialogue" 219).8 In a similar way, the prophetic reader awaits God's
communication. He dispenses with ready-made interpretations so that he
can read sacred texts and the world as text anew and receive revelation in
the here and now," Buber writes that man was created to be "a center of
surprise in creation" ("Prophecy" 178). For Buber, the "if... then" structure
of the prophetic reveals the partnership between God and man in creation.
For the prophetic reader, reading sacred texts is an encounter with the
Divine-a moment of betweenness-and a call to turning.
Buber's writings are valuable to a discussion of a present-day turn to the
religious because ofthe stylistic and thematic parallels between the two. The
similarities in approach between Buberian renewalism and contemporary
postsecular literature include an emphasis on (1) reading the sacred for

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one's historical hour," (2) the acting out of what Buber calls a "turning"
and what McClure describes as conversion experiences and (3) the shift
in emphasis away from systematized religion toward relational enactments
of the divine-human connection. While McClure helps us to describe the
postsecular, Buber helps us to theorize it.
The postsecular exemplifies what Buber describes in his writings
on the prophetic, in which the prophetic is a casting off of assumptions
regarding the religious. Postsecular literature shows people trying to
get beyond mediated relations, beyond what Jean Baudrillard called a
"simulacrum:' Baudrillard argued that the "real" in our age is that which
has already been represented-that which has always already been mapped.
For Baudrillard, the thing we think of as real is only a manifestation of
the experience modeled in the simulacrum. In the postsecular, as in the
prophetic, the reader endeavors to move beyond this simulacrum toward a
fresh reading and toward revelation. II A character in Doctorow's City ofGod
(2001) argues the necessity of reading sacred texts for one's age when she
challenges the assumption "that the ancients were in closer communication
with the Creator than we ourselves" (252). The entirety of her speech echoes
Buber's assertion that "what happened once happens now and always;' that
the dialogue between heaven and earth is a recurrent happening (Buber,
"Dialogue" 215).
The result of this kind of reading is that the turn toward the religious
in writing of recent years does not necessarily involve a return to any
established religious system with which we are familiar. In fact, much
postsecular writing challenges existing constructions of the religious as
vehemently as it challenges the secular, as is the case in City ofGod. In other
cases,prominent religious traditions are "weakened;' to use Gianni Vattimo's
term." Consider Yann Martel's Life of Pi, in which the syncretism of the
main character serves as a decentering technique in a novel that claims to
relate "a story that will make you believe in God" (x).
Yet, the examples of the religious set forth in much fiction that I consider
postsecular also attempt construction following an age of deconstruction.
They respond to the fragmentation that has dominated in the postmodern
period byemphasizing connectedness-between man and man, and between
the human and the divine. Postmodernism, in opposition to the totalizing
tendencies of high modernism, called attention to the chaos of modern
life. Michel Foucault developed theories of "discourses" and Jean-Francois
Lyotard wrote about "language games:' Efforts to recognize a multiplicity

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of silenced voices has often had the drawback of a kind of schizophrenia,

in which the voices are juxtaposed or layered upon one another, but not
brought into communication." In the postsecular, we can see attempts to
bring such voices together. Toni Morrison's Paradise (1997), for example,
depicts a group of outcast women engaging in "loud dreaming:' an ecstatic
ritual in which each woman participates in the private traumas of the
others, facilitating "betweenness" among the women and access to a state of
transcendence, even (seemingly) over death.
Relation is the vehicle for the religious in much postsecular fiction.
In Sue Monk Kidds Secret Life of Bees (2002), a motherless girl finds faith
through a sisterhood of women, who introduce her to a spiritual mother
in the Black Madonna, and whose care and love provide for her an earthly
reflection of that mother. In Myla Goldberg's Bee Season (2000), a girl is
introduced to a world of Jewish mysticism when she attracts, for the first
time in her life, the attention of her father. Connecting with others in what
Buber calls l-Thou relations ushers these characters into the presence of the
divine.
So while postsecular fiction is often infused with the same suspicion
of totalizing narratives that is expressed in postmodernism, the emphasis
on dialogue and reciprocal understanding (which seems to act as a check
against totality and the power structures it can enable) allows postsecular
thinkers to move forward in creating new religious narratives. And while the
postsecular is often continuous with postmodernism in that it favors "play"
and open-ended readings over the affirmation of any existing discourse or
the formulation of any new master discourses, tradition is not altogether
dismissed in postsecular fiction. Religious traditions at times receive fresh
attention in the postsecular, as in Marilynne Robinson's Gilead, and at
other times they assert an influence on even the most reluctantly religious
narratives, as can be said of Don DeLillo's Underworld:" In other works,
ambivalence prevails, as in Jonathan Rosen's Talmud and the Internet, which
is about "learning to embrace contradictory forces: ancient tradition and
contemporary chaos, doubt and faith, the living and the dead, tragedy and
hope" (Preface).
Perhaps the most concrete statement that can be made about the
postsecular project is that it opens up a space in literary studies in which it is
possible to talk about God. Is this sufficient? For those who lament that the
religious has too often been excluded from contemporary literary studies,
the postsecular may seem a positive step. Others may feel that the emphasis

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on newness in this prophetic / postsecular turn unduly dismisses the long

and fruitful history of religious discourse. It is my sense that the greatest
value of Buber's work on the prophetic is that it attempts to make the Bible
strange again, not so that tradition may be overturned, but so that God's
voice in the dialogue between heaven and earth will not be drowned out by
any other voice. Likewise, postsecular writers offer a valuable perspective
as they face age-old questions about the human and divine as if for the first
time, and are thus brought into a new articulation of "the between:'
Whether or not we embrace the postsecular turn as a favorable shift,
however, I argue that an acquaintance with the prophetic as it shows up in
postsecular fiction provides literary scholars with a reference for thinking
about the turn to religion in recent academic discourse. An examination of
the postsecular lends insight to the project, as Susan Felch articulates it, of
"balancing the delicate registers of belief and unbelief;' because the work of
postsecular writers provides a site in which sacred and secular perspectives
may meet.
Purdue University

NOTES
'In Postmodernism, or, the Cultural Logic ofLate Capitalism, Frederic Jameson
describes the postmodern as "effortlessly secular" and as "a situation in which
spirituality virtually by definition no longer exists" (387). Jean Baudrillard also
notes a diminishing possibility of faith in the postmodern age in his book Simulacra
and Simulations (170-71).
2For more by McClure on this countersecular strain, see his article, "PostSecular Culture: The Return of Religion in Contemporary Theory and Literature:'
"Post-secular" is a widely used term today. See, for example, Martin Matustik,
Radical Evil and the Scarcity of Hope: Postsecular Meditations and Phillip Blond,
Post-Secular Philosophy: Between Philosophy and Theology. For my sense of the
term, see text of article.
"Buber first gained his reputation as a Jewish renewalist and only subsequently
as a registrant of Jewish mysticism and especially Hassidism. Buber's long-term
interest in the religious has recently brought him renewed prominence, as noted
by Harold Bloom in his introduction to Buber's collection of Biblical writings, On
the Bible. For more on Buber's cultural milieu, see Carl Schorske, Pin-de-Siecle
Vienna.
"For Simmel's work on religion, see Georg Simmel, Die Religion.

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KATHRYN LUDWIG

60 n prophecy in the Jewish tradition, see Yehezkel Kaufmann, The Religion of

Israel,from its Beginnings to the BabylonianExile and also Abraham J. Heschel, The
Prophets.
7See, for example, Bubers seminal essay, "Abraham the Seer" in On the Bible.
"See also Sandor Goodhart, Sacrificing Commentary.
9In Buber's understanding and in much postsecular fiction, revelation includes,
but is not confined to written scripture. All of creation is revelation, much as, for
Barthes, the world itself is a text.
lOIn both Buber's work and postsecular literature, the emphasis on reading is
accompanied by debates about the practice of reading religious "texts" and a sense
of the limitations of language/the unutterablity of the divine.
"The issue of "textual reading" is central to many novels that I take to be
postsecular, including Morrison's Paradise, Doctorow's City of God and Cynthia

Ozicks Heir to the Glimmering World (2004).

12McClure examines the postsecular with reference to Vattimo in Partial Faiths
12-16. See also Gianni Vattimo, Belief
13Foucault describes this as a heterotopia.
14In her article "Don DeLillo's Latin Mass;' Amy Hungerford writes that
Underworld shows the influence of the author's Catholic upbringing. According to
Hungerford, it is through the translation of Catholic structures into literary ones
that DeLillo articulates "an understanding of language that itself mediates between
belief and pluralism" (346).

WORKS CITED
Baudrillard, Jean. Simulacra and Simulations. New York: Semiotexte-McNally
Robinson, 1983.
Blond, Phillip. Post-Secular Philosophy: Between Philosophy and Theology. London,
New York: Routledge, 1998.
Buber, Martin. Between Man and Man. New York: Collier, 1965.
_ . "The Dialogue Between Heaven and Earth:' On Judaism. Ed. Nahum Glatzer.
New York: Schocken, 1967.214-25.
_ . I and Thou. Trans. W Kaufmann. New York: Scribner, 1970.
_ . "Prophecy, Apocalyptic and the Historical Hour:' On the Bible. Ed. Nahum
Glatzer. Syracuse: Syracuse UP, 2000. 172-87.
Doctorow, E. 1. City of God. New York: Plume, 2001.
Ford, Marcia, "Beyond Evangelical Fiction;' Publishers Weekly (Sept. 15,2003): S6S7.
Goodhart, Sandor. Sacrificing Commentary. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1996.
Heschel, Abraham J. TheProphets. New York: Harper & Row, 1969.
Hungerford, Amy. "Don Del.illos Latin Mass:' Contemporary Literature 47.3
(Fall 2006): 346-48.

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Hutcheon Linda. The Politics of Postmodernism. London, New York: Routledge,

1989.
Jameson, Frederic. Postmodernism, or, the CulturalLogic ofLate Capitalism.
Durham: Duke UP, 1991.
Kaufmann, Yehezkel. The Religion of Israel, from its Beginnings to the Babylonian
Exile. Trans. M. Greenburg. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1960.
Martel, Yann. LifeofPi. Orlando: Harcourt, 2001.
Matustik, Martin. RadicalEvil and the Scarcity of Hope: Postsecular Meditations.
Bloomington: Indiana UP, 2008.
McClure, John, PartialFaiths: Postsecular Fiction in the Age of Pynchon and
Morrison. Athens: U of Georgia P, 2007.
_ . "Postmodern/Post-Secular: Contemporary Fiction and Spirituality:' Modern
Fiction Studies 41.1 (1995): 141-63.
_ . "Post-Secular Culture: The Return of Religion in Contemporary Theory and
Literature:' Cross Currents 47.3 (Fall 1997):332-47.
Rosen, Jonathan. Talmud and the Internet. New York: Picador, 2000.
Schorske, Carl. Pin-de-Siecle Vienna. New York: Knopf, Random House, 1980.
Simmel, Georg. Die Religion. Frankfurt am Main: Rutten & Loening, 1906.
Vattimo,Gianni. Belief Trans. Luca D'Isanto and David Webb. Stanford: Stanford
UP, 1999.

African American Literature as Spiritual Witness:

The Poetic Example of Margaret Alexander Walker
Yolanda Pierce

Birthed during the watery baptism of the Middle Passage between

Africa and the New World, African American literature is the product of
hybrid cultures, hybrid worlds, and hybrid religions. The experiences and
memories of traditional African religions, along with a brutal introduction
to Western Christianity, created the cauldron in which African American
literature was born. From the poetry of Ann Plato and Phillis Wheatley, to
the novels of Toni Morrison and John Edgar Wideman, African American
literature has been "haunted" by its religious birth-pangs, which produced
both acceptance and contestation of its African and Christian origins.
Using the poetry of Margaret Alexander Walker, this brief article simply
argues that while there does appear to be a "return to religion" in the larger