1 Bataille, G., ‘The Sacred Conspiracy’, in Stoekel, A. (ed. and trans.), Visions of Excess (1985), 178Google Scholar, at 179.

2 Altman, G. et al. , ‘La Révolution d'abord et toujours’, (1925) 5 Révolution Surréaliste 31Google Scholar.

3 League of Nations Covenant (First Draft), reprinted in R. Stannard Baker, Woodrow Wilson and World Settlement, Vol. 3 (1923), 81–2.

4 Bataille, supra note 1, at 179.

5 For an overview of some of these movements, see W. Cristaudo and W. Baker (eds.), Messianism, Apocalypse and Redemption in 20th-Century German Thought (2006); Löwy, M., ‘Messianisme Juif et utopies libertaires en Europe Centrale (1905–1923)’, (1981) 51 Archives de sciences sociales des religions 5CrossRefGoogle Scholar; M. Richman, Sacred Revolution and the College of Sociology (2002); R. Whalen, Sacred Spring: God and the Birth of Modernism in Fin de Siècle Vienna (2007).

6 J. Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul (translated by D. Hollander) (2004), at 62.

7 I borrow the descriptor ‘mush’ from Taubes, ibid. Sometimes, these different stances can be found in the works of a single author or movement, as in the case of André Breton and the surrealists, who variously adopted primitivist, ironic, and strategic stances in their deployment of both Orientalist and religious or spiritualist imagery; sometimes a single author's stance may have changed over time, as in the case of Ernst Bloch's stance on the relation between secularity and religion. The best example of a highly self-aware dialectical exposition of the relationship between secularity and religion is, of course, Walter Benjamin.

8 See, generally, T. Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or, How European Universalism Was Preserved in the Language of Pluralism (2005).

9 Ibid., at 42–4.

10 See, e.g., R. Seager, The World's Parliament of Religions: The East/West Encounter (2009), 1893.

11 Masuzawa, supra note 8, at 37–46, 309–23.

12 Ibid., at 37–46, 309–23. While a detailed presentation of Masuzawa's argument goes beyond the scope of this paper, I note that she argues that this superiority took a variety of forms in the period from the late nineteenth century through the 1930s and beyond. At times, it took the form of assertions of Christian superiority, the notion that Christianity was both one among many religions and the only truly universal one: ibid., at 12–13, 81. At other times, it took the form of the assertion that Europe, paradoxically by virtue of the development of its Christianity, was developing beyond religion and that religion was the province of underdeveloped ‘others’: ibid., at 12–13, 19–20. At still other times, it took the form of a more relativist assertion about the unique relationship of particular religions and particular peoples, most eminently that of Europe to Christianity: ibid., at 317–24.

13 See, generally, N. Berman, Passions et ambivalences: Le colonialisme, le nationalisme et le droit international (2008).

14 E. Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (translated by K. E. Fields) (1995), at 412–17; R. Hertz, ‘La prééminence de la main droite’ (1909), in R. Hertz, Sociologie religieuse et folklore (1970); see also Bataille, G., ‘Attraction and Replusion II: Social Structure’ (1938), reprinted in Hollier, D. (ed.), The College of Sociology, 1937–39 (translated by Wing, B.) (1988), at 113Google Scholar, 121–2.

15 R. Caillois, ‘Introduction’ (1937), reprinted in College of Sociology, supra note 14, at 9–11.

16 Pope Pius XI discussed the relationship between religion and nationalism in his first encyclical. See Encyclical from Pope Pius XI, On the Peace of Christ in His Kingdom (1922), available online at www.papalencyclicals.net/Pius11/P11ARCAN.HTM.

17 See, generally, Baume, S., ‘On Political Theology: A Controversy between Hans Kelsen and Carl Schmitt’, (2009) 35 History of European Ideas 369CrossRefGoogle Scholar. The year 1922 saw the publication both of Kelsen's article ‘God and the State’ and Schmitt's book Political Theology.

18 See, e.g., N. Stinnett, ‘Defining away Religious Freedom in Europe: How Four Democracies Get away with Discriminating against Minority Religions’, (2005) 28 Boston C. ICLR 429.

19 See the decision of the European Court of Human Rights in Leyla Sahin v. Turkey, Decision of 29 June 2004, (2006) 45 ILM 436. The Turkish Constitutional Court's comment about religion's ‘respectable place’ is quoted in ibid, at 442, para. 39.

20 On this phenomenon in the sixteenth century, see A. Anghie, ‘Franscisco de Vittoria and the Colonial Origins of International Law’ (1996) 5 Social and Legal Studies 321.

21 See, generally, J.-C. Monod, La querelle de la sécularisation: Théologie politique et philosophies de l'historie de Hegel à Blumenberg (2002).

22 See, generally, ibid. The quotes in this sentence are from page 22, where Monod summarizes the analysis of Hans Blumenberg, who most sharply distinguished between the two senses of ‘secularization’. I believe that it is less a question of a choice between the two senses than of a variety of discursive relationships between them, including ambiguity, dialectic, and supplementarity.

23 Readers of Agamben will immediately notice that I am about to engage in an elaboration of themes in early twentieth-century thought that serve as the target of vigorous disapprobation in G. Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereignty, Power and Bare Life (1988), 49–51, 67–8. At this point in my exposition, however, the theoretical merits of this negative stance are not necessarily relevant – I am, after all, engaged in a historical analysis of conceptual structures of early twentieth-century thought, rather than a theoretical inquiry into their merits. To this extent, my analysis is quite compatible with Agamben's claim that the tradition of thinking about the sacred – particularly the notion of the ‘ambivalence of the sacred’ – that characterizes the Durkheim school, as adopted from W. Robertson Smith, is a widely shared ‘mythologeme’ of this era, as indeed of our own; ibid., at 49. I hasten to add, however, that I am in broad agreement with some of the insightful recent critiques of Agamben. See, e.g., J. Librett, ‘From the Sacrifice of the Letter to the Voice of Testimony: Giorgio Agamben's Fulfillment of Metaphysics’, (Summer–Fall 2007) Diacritics 11; Fitzpatrick, P., ‘Bare Sovereignty: Homo Sacer and the Insistence of Law’, (2001) 5 Theory & EventGoogle Scholar, available online at http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/theory_and_event/v005/5.2fitzpatrick.html; Chow, R., ‘Sacrifice, Mimesis, and the Theorizing of Victimhood (A Speculative Essay)’, (2006) 94 Representations 131CrossRefGoogle Scholar. While these critiques are not always completely consistent with each other, discrepancies attributable to either misunderstandings of Agamben or tensions and contradictions within his work, or both, I retain two points pertinent to this paper. First, the critics tend to highlight the ways in which Agamben's exposition is caught within a dynamic of ambivalence closely related to that found in the Durkheim tradition. Second, Agamben attributes the appeal of the notion of the ambivalence of the sacred to a ‘psychologization’ of religious experience in the early twentieth century, which he associates with the contemporaneous European ‘disgust’ and ‘horror’ at the ‘religious fact’; Agamben, supra this note, at 50. Aside from the perhaps overly obvious note that this description only includes one side of the ‘ambivalence’, the term ‘psychologization’ accounts neither for the deep structural presence of this ‘mythologeme’ in European thought and practice nor for the quite explicit ways in which it is used by a writer like Bataille in an anti-subjectivist fashion (I leave aside the nuanced distinction between psychological and subjectivist accounts, as well as their complex relationship with various forms of structuralist accounts that seem most suited to the word ‘mythologeme’). Agamben associates his recoil from the notion of the ‘ambivalence of the sacred’ with his contempt for ‘a theology that had lost all experience of the revealed word’ – and, to this extent, his difference with the Durkheim tradition is, precisely, a theological rather than a ‘juridicopolitical’ one. See Librett, supra this note. On a quite different note, he simultaneously associates this recoil with his disdain for ‘a philosophy that had abandoned all sobriety in the face of feeling’; Agamben, supra this note, at 50. The notion that identifying a ‘loss of sobriety’ constitutes a critique suggests that Agamben's difference from a writer like Bataille may covertly begin on the plane of aesthetics, even if it extends more globally to the political–theological planes. Indeed, it is precisely an emphatic valorization of, and a quest for, a ‘loss of sobriety’ in a variety of forms that explicitly animates Bataille's work and his desire for the ‘left sacred’. Finally, I note that one of Agamben's concerns seems to be his view of an inappropriate combination of the religious and the political in the Durkheim tradition's notion of the sacred – the inability of its notion of the sacred to explain a ‘juridicopolitical phenomenon’ and the consequent need for ‘an attentive and unprejudiced delimitation of the respective fields of the political and the religious’; Agamben, supra this note, at 51. Yet, anxiety about the distressing tendency of the encroachment by the religious on the terrain of the political is a central symptom of the very notion of the sacred that animates the Durkheim tradition as well as the broader structures of European thought analysed in this paper. For me, the bottom line of these critiques is the continued pertinence of the Durkheim tradition in the analysis of Western discourse and practice, and, indeed, as I shall suggest in my conclusion, the ways in which it continues to retain a powerful hold on all of us writing and working within their globalized reach.

24 Durkheim, supra note 14, at 36.

25 Ibid., at 311.

26 Ibid., at 37.

27 Ibid., at 429.

28 Falasca-Zamponi, S., ‘A Left Sacred or a Sacred Left? The Collège de Sociologie, Fascism, and Political Culture in Interwar France’, (2006) 23 South Central Review 40CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

29 Bataille, G., La Sociologie sacrée et les rapports entre ‘société,’ ‘organisme,’ et ‘être’ (1937), reprinted in Hollier, D. (ed.), Le Collège de Sociologie, 1937–1939 (1995), 36Google Scholar, at 53. I have left this phrase in French as it defies translation into English, but will convey its meaning to most readers of this journal.

30 Bataille, supra note 1.

31 Durkheim, supra note 14, at 322, 328.

32 Ibid., at 327–9.

33 Ibid., at 324–5.

34 R. Caillois, ‘Brotherhoods, Orders, Secret Societies, Churches’ (1938), in College of Sociology, supra note 14, at 145, 152 (translation modified).

35 Ibid.

36 R. Caillois, ‘L'ambiguïté du sacré’ (1938), in Le College de Sociologie, supra note 29, 365, at 377.

37 Ibid., at 385.

38 Bataille, supra note 14.

39 G. Bataille, ‘Popular Front in the Street’ (1936), reprinted in Stoekel, supra note 1, at 162, 167.

40 G. Bataille, introduction to Caillois, supra note 34, at 145, 147 (translation modified).

41 Ibid., at 149 (translation modified).

42 G. Bataille, ‘The Use Value of D.A.F. de Sade’ (1930), reprinted in Stoekel, supra note 1, at 90, 97.

43 See, e.g., Bataille, G., ‘Sade et la morale’ (1948), reprinted in (1976) 7 Oeuvres complètes 445, at 448Google Scholar. This view of ‘religion’ conforms to an old theme in the Durkheim school. Thus, Caillois quotes a 1904 dictum of Henri Hubert: ‘[R]eligion is the administration of the sacred’, R. Caillois, L'homme et le sacre (1939), 2.

44 Bataille, supra note 42, at 101.

45 G. Bataille, ‘Sacrifices’, reprinted in Stoekel, supra note 1, at 130, 133–4.

46 G. Bataille, La part maudite (1967), 43.

47 E. Bloch, The Spirit of Utopia (2000), 228.

48 ‘Neutrality Law Termed Immoral: Religion Teaches that One Should Stand Up for the Right, says Prof. Clyde Eagleton’, New York Times, 4 October 1939, A13.

49 See Berman, N., ‘Between Alliance and Localization: Nationalism and the New Oscillationism’, (1994) 26 New York University Journal of International Law and Politics 449Google Scholar.

50 Ibid.

51 The key works of Schmitt for this argument are The Concept of the Political (1927); The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy (1923); Political Theology (1920); see also Wolin, R., ‘Carl Schmitt: The Conservative Revolutionary Habitus and the Aesthetics of Horror’, (1992) 20 Political Theory 424CrossRefGoogle Scholar. It would, of course, take me too far from my central arguments in this paper to engage in an extended demonstration of this point.

52 Altman, supra note 2.

53 See Keck, F., ‘Le primitif et le mystique chez Lévy-Bruhl, Bergson et Bataille’, (2003) 3 MethodosGoogle Scholar, available online at http://methodos.revues.org/document111.html.

54 Aragon, L., ‘Réponse de M. Louis Aragon’ (1925) 76 Clarté 24Google Scholar. This rejection of nationalism, especially as defined by legal terms, did not prevent passionate support on the part of many surrealists for the 1925 anti-colonial revolt in Morocco. See my discussion in Berman, N., ‘“The Appeals of the Orient”: Colonized Desire and the War of the Riff’, in Knop, K. (ed.), Gender and Human Rights (2004), 195CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

55 Bataille, G., ‘The Surrealist Religion’ (1948), in Richardson, M. (trans.), The Absence of Myth (2006), 71Google Scholar.

56 Ibid., at 73.

57 Ibid., at 76.

58 Monod, supra note 21, at 47–63, 176–9.

59 P. Fussel, The Great War and Modern Memory (1975).

60 League of Nations Covenant (First Draft), supra note 3 (emphasis added).

61 See I. Kant, Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View (1784). To be sure, given Kant's critique of teleology in his critical philosophy, one must be cautious in interpreting its seeming evocation in his less technical writings.

62 Ibid., at 81–2.

63 Ibid.

64 N. Bentwich, The Religious Foundations of Internationalism (1933), 246.

65 Ibid., at 279.

66 Ibid., at 267.

67 Ibid., at 256.

68 Ibid., at 255.

69 Ibid., at 256.

70 As in his statement that the ‘tendency to world unity in the political and economic spheres is accompanied by the tendency to union in the cultural and political spheres’; ibid., at 262. Written in 1932, published in 1933, this frame seems something of an overcompensation in the face of the ominous signs of Europe's immediate future, as well as standing in sharp contrast to many of Bentwich's actual historical analyses.

71 See, e.g., M. Horkheimer and T. Adorno, The Dialectic of Englightenment (1972), xvii: ‘[M]yth is already enlightenment; and enlightenment reverts to mythology.’ My use of the term ‘dialectic of secularization’, which stays close to the Frankfurt School meaning of dialetic, is very different from its use as a designation of a complementary relationship between the secular and the religious in the book of the same name co-authored by Jürgen Habermas and then-Cardinal Ratzinger. See J. Ratzinger and J. Habermas, The Dialectics of Secularization: On Reason and Religion (2007).

72 Bentwich, supra note 64, at 282.

73 Durkheim, supra note 14, at 1.

74 Masuzawa, supra note 8, at 315–17.

75 Bentwich, supra note 64, at 279.

76 Ibid., at 274.

77 Even if, to be sure, he did not seek two of the other key elements: religion's privatization and its diminished significance. See J. Casanova, ‘Secularization Revisited: A Reply to Talal Asad’, in D. Scott and C. Hirschkind (eds.), Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors (2006), 12.

78 See, e.g., T. Asad, Genealogies of Religion (1993), 27–54.

79 C. Hayes, Essays on Nationalism (1926), 93–125.

80 Ibid., at 95.

81 Ibid., at 118.

82 Ibid., at 93–4.

83 See a related usage by Bentwich, discussing Soviet Communism: ‘[A] new universal dogma which, while it disclaims the character of a religion, is in essence religious, inculcated in all citizens by the secular power’; Bentwich, supra note 64, at 281.

84 Ibid., at 123.

85 Ibid., at 123.

86 Ibid., at 124–5.

87 I have elaborated on this in detail in my studies on interwar attitudes on nationalism; see Berman, supra note 13.

88 P. Marshall Brown, International Society (1923), 3.

89 Ibid., at 151.

90 Ibid., at 3.

91 Ibid., at 166.

92 Ibid., at 166.

93 Ibid., at 167.

94 Ibid., at 167.

95 My review of the New York Times of the period, for example, finds the term ‘religious fanaticism’ commonly applied to phenomena outside the United States and Western Europe, with the term ‘religion’ applied, in ironic tones, to communism and fascism. See, e.g., E. Lengyel, ‘Four World Ideas Vie for Domination’, New York Times, 24 June 1934, A4.

96 See, e.g., Asad, supra note 78; Monod, supra note 21; D. Boyarin, Border Lines: The Partition of Judaeo-Christianity (2006).

97 This principle was probably more apt as a characterization of the mid-sixteenth-century Peace of Augusburg, with the ‘Westphalian’ Treaty of Osnabrück something of a retreat in this regard. See, e.g., Osiander, A., ‘Sovereignty, International Relations, and the Westphalian Myth’, (2001) 55 International Organization 251, at 272CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

98 ‘General Questions Relating to the Rights of Minorities’, (1922) 3 League of Nations Official Journal 705.

99 ‘Minorities in Romania’, (1932) 13 League of Nations Official Journal 1490, at 1491; see the thorough discussion of disputes of these kinds in M. Evans, Religious Liberty and International Law in Europe (1997), 157–71.

100 See Berman, N., ‘Modernism, Nationalism, and the Rhetoric of Reconstruction’, (1995) 13 Current Legal Theory 3Google Scholar.

101 ‘Protection of Minorities in Greece’, (1934) 15 League of Nations Official Journal 1674, at 1675.

102 Ibid.

103 ‘Ruanda-Urundi: Examination of the Annual Report for 1933’, Permanent Mandates Commission, (1934) 26th Session, 34, at 149 (C.489.M.214.1934.VI).

104 Fournié, P., ‘Le Mandat à l'épreuve des passions françaises: L'affaire Sarrail’ (1925), in Méouchy, N. (ed.), France, Syrie et Liban, 1918–1946 (2002), 125CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

105 Ibid., at 125–33.

106 Deguilhem, R., ‘Impérialisme, colonisation intellectuelle et politique culturelle de la Mission Laïque française en Syrie sous Mandat’, in Méouchy, N. (ed.), British and French Mandates in Comparative Perspective (2004), 321Google Scholar.

107 ‘Cameroun: Examination of the Annual Report of 1932, Permanent Mandates Commission’, (1933) 22nd Session, 32, at 38 (C.619.M.292.1933.VI).

108 A. Anghie, Imperialism, Sovereignty and the Making of International Law (2007), 22.

109 ‘Annex 10. Iraq’, Permanent Mandates Commission, (1932) 22nd Session, 327, at 328 (C.772.M.364.1932.VI). I note that the parenthetical translation of ‘millet’ as ‘nation’ is in the original text itself.

110 Ibid.

111 See the discussion of this dispute in Cahnman, W., ‘Religion and Nationality’, (1944) 49 American Journal of Sociology 524CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

112 ‘Conclusions of the Rapporteur, Appendix to the Opinion of the Commission’, Permanent Mandates Commission, 22nd session, 374, at 375.

113 Ibid.

114 See my discussion in Berman, N., ‘“But the Alternative Is Despair”: European Nationalism and the Modernist Renewal of International Law’, (1993) 106 Harvard Law Review 1792CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

115 Nationality Decrees Issued in Tunis and Morocco (French Zone), French Mémoire, PCIJ Rep., (1923) Series C No. 2, Additional Volume, at 3 (hereafter, ‘French Mémoire’).

116 Ibid. (emphasis added).

117 Ibid.

118 Caillois, supra note 36, at 396.

119 Nationality Decrees Issued in Tunis and Morocco (French Zone), Speech by M. A. de Lapradelle, PCIJ Rep., (1923) Series C No. 2, at 69. Where available, I have used the English translations of French material provided in the Court's documents. I have, however, occasionally modified the translation to conform to the strict sense of the French.

120 Ibid.

121 Ibid., at 127 (emphasis added).

122 ‘French Mémoire’, supra note 115, at 3.

123 Thus, Hertz describes how the left sacred is often perceived as both ‘weak and incapable’, as well as ‘maleficent and dreaded’; Hertz, supra note 14, at 95.

124 See, e.g., ‘French Mémoire’, supra note 115, at 4.

125 See, e.g., T. Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (2003).

126 See A. Toscano, ‘Fanaticism: A Brief History of the Concept’, Eurozine, 7 December 2006, available online at www.eurozine.com/articles/2006-12-07-toscano-en.html#.

127 Luther, M., ‘Against the Robbing and Murdering Hordes of Peasants’ (1525), in Rupp, E. G. and Drewery, B. (eds.), Martin Luther, Documents of Modern History (1970), 121Google Scholar.

128 On the history of this term, see Vopa, A. La, ‘The Philosopher and the “Schwärmer”: On the Career of a German Epithet from Luther to Kant’, (1997) 60 Huntington Library Quarterly 85CrossRefGoogle Scholar.

129 E. Bloch, Thomas Münzer als Theologe der Revolution (1921).

130 See I. Kant, Observations on the Feeling of the Beautiful and Sublime (2003), 108–9; I. Kant, Religion within the Limits of Reason Alone (1960), 162–3.

131 E. Colby, ‘How to Fight Savage Tribes’, (1927) 21 AJIL 279, at 283, 287 (emphasis added).

132 See Q. Wright, ‘The Bombardment of Damascus’, (1926) 20 AJIL 263.

133 See La Vopa, supra note 128; Toscano, supra note 126.

134 G. Bataille, ‘The Psychological Structure of Fascism’ (1933), reprinted in Stoekel, supra note 1.

135 Greco-Bulgarian ‘Communities’ Case, Discours Prononcé par M. le Professeur Verzijl (Bulg.), PCIJ Rep., (1930) Series C, at 69, 81 (hereafter, ‘Verzijl’).

136 Ibid.

137 Ibid. (emphasis added).

138 See Greco-Bulgarian ‘Communities’ Case, Exposé du Gouvernment Bulgare, PCIJ Rep., (1930) Series C, at 430 (hereafter, ‘Exposé du Gouvernment Bulgare’).

139 ‘Verzijl’, supra note 135, at 81.

140 ‘Exposé du Gouvernment Bulgare’, supra note 138, at 429.

141 Greco-Bulgarian ‘Communities’ Case, Discours Prononcé par S. Exc. M. Politis (Greece), PCIJ Rep., (1930) Series C, at 146.

142 Ibid., at 176.

143 See, e.g., Berman, N., ‘Modernism, Nationalism, and the Rhetoric of Reconstruction’, in Lunch, C. and Loriaux, M. (eds.), Law and Moral Action (1999)Google Scholar; see, generally, Berman, supra note 13.

144 R. Redslob, Le principe des nationalités (1930).

145 Padelletti, G., ‘L'Alsace et la Lorraine, et le droit des gens’, (1871) 3 Revue de Droit International & de Législation Comparée 464, at 491Google Scholar.

146 Caillois, supra note 36, at 398.

147 Ibid., at 396.

148 Ibid., at 397.

149 Bataille, supra note 134, at 137, 148.

150 R. Hertz, The Pre-Eminence of the Right Hand: A Study in Religious Polarity (1960), 89, at 95.

151 Ibid., at 99.

152 C. Macartney, Nation States and National Minorities (1934), 278.

153 Hertz, supra note 150.

154 G. Bataille, ‘Attraction and Repulsion II’, supra note 14, at 164.

155 See T. Byrnes, ‘Transnational Religion and Europeanization’, in T. Byrnes and P. Katzenstein, Religion in an Expanding Europe (2006), 283–305.

156 Bataille, supra note 39.

157 M. Mamdani, Good Muslim, Bad Muslim: America, the Cold War, and the Roots of Terror (2005).

158 Falk, R., ‘Religion and Global Governance: Harmony or Clash’, (2002) 19 International Journal of World Peace 3Google Scholar.

159 Ibid., at 12.

160 Ibid., at 27.

161 Ibid., at 8.

162 Ibid., at 27.

163 Ibid., at 27.

164 Ibid., at 28.

165 See, generally, M. Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations (2004).

166 Falk, supra note 158, at 29–31. It goes without saying that, for this paper, Falk's particular ethnic or religious background is irrelevant. This is not an ad hominem analysis, but an explication of broader discursive structures.

167 Ibid., at 7.

168 Ibid.

169 Ibid., at 31.

170 Ibid., at 31.

171 A different variation on these themes has recently been offered by Habermas. See E. Mendieta, A Postsecular World Society? On the Philosophical Significance of Postsecular Consciousness and the Multicultural World Society: An Interview with Jürgen Habermas, 3 February 2010, available online at www.ssrc.org/blogs/immanent_frame/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/A-Postsecular-World-Society-TIF.pdf. In marked contrast to Falk, Habermas wishes to preserve primacy of the non-religious legitimations of state power: ‘[T]he decisions of the legislator, the executive branch, and the courts are not only formulated in a universally accessible language, but are also justified on the basis of universally acceptable reasons. This excludes religious reasons from decisions about all state-sanctioned – that is, legally binding – norms’, Mendieta, at 9 (emphasis in original). Nonetheless, he insists on the need to maintain dialogue in the public sphere between religious and non-religious viewpoints. This dialogue, however, is only reserved for good religious tendencies, which, like Falk and other writers I have discussed, he defines through a formalistic, even if more sophisticated, dichotomy between ‘two specifically modern forms of religious consciousness’, coupled with a classically ‘world religions’ attitude towards religious phenomena that need not be taken seriously: ‘[O]n the one hand, a fundamentalism that either withdraws from the modern world or turns aggressively toward it; on the other, a reflective faith that relates itself to other religions and respects the fallible insights of the institutionalized sciences as well as human rights. This faith is still anchored in the life of a congregation and should not be confused with the new, deinstitutionalized forms of a fickle religiosity that has withdrawn entirely into the subjective’, Mendieta, at 3. Moreover, Habermas's discussion of the possibilities of ‘the motivational powers of religion against the neoliberal desolidarization of society’ (Mendieta, at 9) links up to similar themes in Falk as well as Bataille. Habermas declares that only religious communities have the ability to create a ‘world’, through a ‘self-referential communal practice’. He also affirms that ritual is ‘a source of societal solidarity for which the enlightened morality of equal respect for all does not provide a real, motivational equivalent’, Mendieta, at 5. However, again relying on the good/bad religion dichotomy, he reminds us that the political significance of religiously motivated action is ‘highly ambivalent’, Mendieta, at 9. Most strikingly, and with reference to Peter Weiss, he harks back to the historical avant-garde, specifically, the ‘surrealist-inspired’ notion that a radical ‘aesthetics of resistance’ can replace religion as a basis for a new progressive solidarity; he comments, perhaps sadly, that that ‘hope’ has ‘faded in the meantime’. Thus, Habermas, though arriving at a rather different set of conclusions than Falk, let alone Bataille, presents us with a variant configuration of the same elements discussed throughout this paper.

172 Translation of Osama bin Laden's speech, Al Jazeera broadcast, 3 November 2001, available online at http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/world/monitoring/media_reports/1636782.stm.

173 Caillois, supra note 15, at 9–11.

174 B. D'Astorg, ‘Au Collége de Sociologie’ (1938), reprinted in Le Collège de Sociologie, supra note 29, at 455, 457.

175 M. Weingrad, ‘The College of Sociology and the Institute of Social Research’, (Autumn 2001) New German Critique 129, at 139.