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Saeculum: religion, culture, ideologie

This is an expanded version of material first presented as the Anis Makdisi Memorial lecture, ‘Cosmopolitism and Secularism: Controversial Legacies and Prospective Interrogations’, delivered at the American University of Beirut in 2009, and published in English in the journal Grey Room 44, Summer 2011, pp. 6–25. An English translation is forthcoming from Columbia University Press.

Provided as hard copy of the French book.

This book continues Balibar’s project of thinking through aporias in the concept of democracy, with the aim of furthering ‘the democratization of democracy’: in this case, aporias in the apparent dependence of cosmopolitanism on secularism. For secularism also thwarts the attempt to achieve cosmopolitanism by virtue of its implicit imposition of one religious and cultural tradition, the European, over all others. In response, the book calls for a ‘secularization of secularism’ by stripping that ideal of its implicit and contradictory elements of sacralization.