Introduction: Christo's and Jeanne-Claude's ‘Wrapped Reichstag’

In 1995, Christo and Jeanne-Claude completed wrapping the German parliament building, which they referred to as ‘the symbol of Democracy’.¹ The ‘Wrapped Reichstag’ of Christo and Jeanne-Claude stands in eerily strange contrast to the Bundestag of today, with its enormous glass dome open to the public, arguably representing transparency. There is no need to delve into the artist's intentions – according to interviews, there are scarcely any: ‘All our projects are absolutely irrational with no justification to exist … They are created because Jeanne-Claude and I have this unstoppable urge to create.’Reference Christo² Nor is there any need to analyse the art critics’ interpretations.Reference Panero³ Rather, visually what we find in Christo's and Jeanne-Claude's ‘Wrapped Reichstag’ is, prosaically, the parliament building, the political public institution par excellence, wrapped in a protective barrier, impenetrable to the hue and cry exterior to it, closed off from the wild socio-politico-cultural life external to it. Thus wrapped, it is not too encouraging of democratic participation within, but it is a stable structure; although not pluralist, it looks secure.

Christo and Jeanne-Claude Wrapped Reichstag, Berlin 1971–95. Photo: Wolfgang Volz^© 1995, Christo.

Reflecting off of the image of Christo's and Jeanne-Claude's ‘Wrapped Reichstag’, this paper offers a rather against-the-grain reading of Jürgen Habermas’ so-called post-secular turn.Reference Habermas⁴ Habermas’ post-secular turn harnesses a great number of voices – from both the left and the right – drawing attention to the failure of the secularist paradigm to expel religion from the public realm, and indeed, quite the opposite, perceiving what can be called ‘the new visibility of religion.’Reference Hoelzl and Ward⁵ According to many,Reference Losonczi and Singh⁶ the Gordian knot binding religion and politics was not meticulously unknotted in late modernity, but magisterially sword-sliced in Alexandrine fashion, and thus the resurgence of public religion is the inevitable consequence, possibly even in a polemical stance, against secularizing powers.Reference Ingelhart and Norris⁷ Within this context, Habermas’ post-secular turn appears as an attempt to take up both sides and make amends.Reference Harrington⁸

However, scrutiny of Habermas’ discourse may equally reveal a preoccupation with closing off, with security, with protecting the centre. This other Habermas discloses himself not so much through positive argumentation, but rather through the language, imagery, metaphors, and word-choice deployed during his positive argumentation. This paper thus attempts to expose a palpable tension existing between what Habermas generally argues and maintains and how he often chooses to say it – the interesting result is that the latter seems seriously to belie the former. In the process of exposing this tension, and to recontextualize the ‘conservative’ rendition of Habermas presented herein, some time is also devoted to placing the prefix ‘post’ from the term ‘post-secular’ in juxtaposition with the ‘post’ of post-modern, post-colonial, and some other ‘posties’ that Habermas has directly commented upon in past decades.Reference Rorty⁹

Habermas’ post-secular turn as a conservative revivalism

Habermas’ recent works attempt to find new life, ‘inspiring energy’, in the religious traditions, in order to counterbalance decadent tendencies and aid us in questions of value arising in late modernity (our age), but he does not want the fundamental rationality and freedoms of modernity overturned thereby. Rather, in his account, the secular would assimilate the religious like a blood infusion, becoming more vibrant and stronger, but not losing its hard-won advantage:

In Habermas – and here keep Christo's and Jeanne-Claude's work before your mind's eye – the post-secular problem lies in how best to preserve the secular democratic institutions and keep them from being ‘violated’ through religiously motivated politics:

This rich paragraph is replete with suggestion; let us draw out just three:

1. (a) religious traditions have a ‘special power’;

2. (b) translation from particular (i.e. the language of religion) to general (i.e. secular language) serves the ‘threshold’, which protects institutions like parliament from the public Babel exterior to it;

3. (c) the leader of the house in parliament should be empowered to expunge religious language from the minutes.

Regarding (a), we see here what we might call a romanticization, not to say fetishization, of religion's relevance – ‘religious traditions have a special power.’Reference Habermas¹¹ It is also interesting to notice the emphasis specifically on ‘traditions’; does this include the Hare Krishnas and Scientologists, neither of which is granted the tax-free status of religious organizations in Germany? However we understand it, the ‘special power’ is part of what constitutes that vitality injected by religion which Habermas hopes to harness. But, of course, to harness on his own terms.

Thus we get (b), the ‘threshold’, and the protection of institutions like parliament from the Babel surrounding it – what peripety: Habermas de-scripturalizes ‘Babel’ here, in relation to insulating and protecting a wholly profane institution such as parliament. The idea of ‘peripety’ is especially important here, because this mention of the exclusionary ‘threshold’ occurs within the wider context of Habermas’ arguably inclusionary notion of the ‘linguistification of the sacred’. There is a vast amount of secondary literature on Habermas’ idea of ‘linguistification’Reference Habermas¹² and its evolution into ‘translation’ in the post-secular writings,Reference Harrington¹³ and a debate rages as to whether Habermas’ basic position on this has changed or not. While we cannot delve into the substantive issues surrounding ‘linguistification’ or ‘translation’ in this paper, we must mention a point that will be of relevance to the line of argumentation pursued below. Many critics of Habermas (and of Rawls, who has a similar framework in this respectReference Maffettone¹⁴) have pointed to an unfair burden on religious persons, who, when they enter the political public sphere, are required to translate their reasons and justifications into a secular discourse. Habermas has made remarks that would seem to show that this burden is not as asymmetrical as it would at first seem. For he does not think that ‘we, as Europeans, can seriously understand concepts like morality and ethical life, persona and individuality, or freedom and emancipation, without appropriating the substance of the Judeo-Christian understanding of history in terms of salvation’.Reference Habermas¹⁵ But does this sober rendition of the kernel of Carl Schmitt's political theology (recall: ‘All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts’)Reference Schmitt¹⁶ really lighten the burden of religious people, or does it rather shift that burden from some religious groups onto others, namely, onto those from a non-Judeo-Christian religious background?

And the problematic nature of Habermas’ ‘We … Europeans’Reference Hahn¹⁷ also refracts through point (c), where Habermas provides the Speaker of parliament with a rather unprecedented power: to expunge religious statements from the minutes, in case that threshold filtration or prophylactic were compromised during parliamentary discourse, with a religious seed planted in the minds of the debaters. Significantly, granting the Speaker power to abort that religious seed necessarily precludes plural legal systems such as those operative in India or Israel, as shall be discussed further below.

Finally, the paragraph cited also evokes Habermas’ ostensibly reconciliatory gesture of situating himself as a mean between two extremes of the wider secularism debate. On the one side, he criticizes John Rawls because he finds that Rawls’ logic excludes too rigorously the religious, not allowing it to be infused into the blood of the body politic. This reading of Rawls of course recapitulates one of the fundamental disagreements articulated in the Habermas–Rawls debate, treating of the dilation/contraction of the political public sphere.¹⁸ Rawls contracts what Habermas hopes to dilate. In this respect, Habermas, despite lapsing occasionally into thoughtless remarks that mimic an ‘us/them’ discourse, aims at inclusion. And indeed, an inclusive aim is widely regarded as consistent with decades of positive work on his part – starting way back in 1962 with The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere Reference Habermas¹⁹ – to formulate principles of inclusionary democratic cooperation in multicultural and plural societies.

At the other extreme, Habermas criticizes Nicholas Wolterstorff, who errs on the side of excess as much as Rawls errs on the side of miserliness. According to Habermas, Wolterstorff would overrun the political by the religious, thus violating vulnerable democratic institutions like the parliament:

Habermas’ ‘institutional filter’ which protects the parliament from its violation allows the state to preserve its earlier legitimacy – and preserve state sovereignty – while opening it to the life-affirming but politically destabilizing domain of religious vitality. Throughout his important recent writings, especially in and after Religion in the Public Sphere (henceforth RPS), Habermas persistently, unwittingly employs Victorian innuendo bestowing masculine ‘inspiring energy’, ‘vitality’,²⁰ and also danger, onto religion, which runs the risk of ‘violating’ effeminate democratic institutions symbolized by the parliament, were it not for some prophylactic device, the oft-mentioned ‘filter’, which serves to protect her virtue. In the event she, the parliament, is violated by some premature ejaculation/expression by a religious parliamentarian, Habermas’ proposed mechanism of expunging religious terms stands by ready to abort the product. Habermas will only countenance a refined or immaculate conception of effete democracy by vitalizing, energetic religion.²¹

This revivalist endeavour seems, moreover, a rather conservative endeavour for at least three reasons: first, as Ungureanu has pointed out, Habermas fails to negotiate and draw out the consequences of his ostensible openness to religious traditions, and ‘not infrequently, there is an empirical correlation between right-wing and conservative politics and religious affiliation’.Reference Ungureanu²² Moreover, Habermas has also insufficiently addressed his prioritization of religious ‘traditions’ over religious movements, sects of various sorts, hybrids, and the panoply of other new religious expressions in public spaces. Finally, in a not unrelated set of issues, about which more below, since 2003, in respect to the debates on the EU – the European Constitution, the need for a common identity, foreign policy, etc – Habermas has seemingly reversed his earlier position for critically self-reflective identities and tends toward a glorification of the European model,Reference Lacroix²³ conceived in terms of superiority to the American hegemonic model. In so doing, he has slipped into the populist talk of ‘values’ as opposed to principles, in direct defiance of substantive distinctions drawn throughout his definitive work of political philosophy Between Facts and Norms,Reference Habermas²⁴ where questions of right need to be severed from questions of the good in order to bring about the neutral conditions required for an inclusive pluralist polity. Ignoring this important distinction, Article I-2 of the European Constitution had read that ‘The Union is founded on the values of respect for human dignity, freedom…’ – obviously, these basic components could have been termed ‘principles’ or ‘norms’ rather than ‘values’, a term associated with ‘comprehensive doctrines’ rather than politics in the Rawlsian terminology, and one that is generally agreed to belong to classical conservative discourse.Reference Lacroix²⁵ Habermas’ postmetaphysical thought,Reference Habermas¹⁵ if it had a vocabulary, ought certainly to have preferred ‘principle’ rather than ‘value’ in this regard, all the more so given its indebtedness to Rawls’ liberal conception of ‘political’ against ‘metaphysical’.

In, therefore, this conservative-leaning revivalist endeavour of Habermas’ post-secular turn, it seems that everything would hang upon the effectiveness of the prophylactic, the ‘institutional filter.’ In short, how to let religious values into the political public sphere without impregnating democracy with the bastard child that goes by the name ‘political theology’. Habermas’ implicit preoccupation with political theology became explicit in late 2009, when he gave a talk in New York entitled, ‘The Political: The Rational Sense of a Questionable Inheritance of Political Theology.’Reference Habermas²⁶

Political theology is dubious; religion is powerful – New York's Twin Towers stand, or do not stand, as a painful reminder of these facts. This is why Habermas requires the post-secular to be realized wholly upon the terms set by the secular. We open ourselves to the religious in good faith and wish not to be violated. Europe, as it is, is already suffering under pains of contraction and miscarriage, and thus is vulnerable, according to Habermas. For, as he describes in the closing paragraph of his ‘A Plea for a Common Foreign Policy, Beginning in the Core of Europe’, to which Derrida inscrutably appended his signature:

The ‘posties’: Post-secular, post-sovereign, post-modern, post-colonial

The ‘violence of a forcible and uprooting process of modernization’ about which Habermas speaks in relation to imperial power and colonization, was a far more masculine era in European political history. Europe's position in a post-colonial world is as unsettling as the prospects of a post-secular one. Modernization with its avatars as secularization (internally) and colonization (externally), although violent and ‘uprooting’, was contemporaneous with the era of the consolidation of the sovereign nation-state.

Not only in the work of Carl SchmittReference Schmitt¹⁶ but even in that of his inspiration Thomas Hobbes,²⁸ is secularity a question of sovereignty. In one reading of Schmitt, consistent with Habermas’ position in his relatively early work Legitimation Crisis [LC], since political theology asserts a direct and inevitable connection between religion and politics, the secularization process inevitably entailed a decline in political authority no longer divinely sanctioned and, consequently, it eroded sovereigntyReference Espejo²⁹ (although various other techniques – which Foucault gathers under the idea of ‘governmentality’Reference Foucault³⁰ – served to recuperate that sovereignty by other means). In the opposing reading, modern political authority, precisely because it was not sanctioned and legitimated by divinity, fosters what Habermas refers to as the polemical ‘secularist’ (as opposed to indifferent ‘secular’Reference Habermas and Ratzinger³¹) attitude, that has ensured that religious orientations did not prevent citizens from ‘rendering unto Caesar what is Caesar's’. This is Habermas’ orientation in the recent work ‘Dialektik der Säkularisierung’. Whether we subscribe to Habermas’ more radical position from LC or his more conservative position of today – that is, whether we give credence to the story that secular modernity has eroded the sovereignty of the nation-state, or the opposing story that it has enhanced that sovereignty – the correlation between sovereignty and secularism remains established either way.

It is therefore tempting, as Hent de Vries has intimated, to correlate the secularity-sovereignty nexus with a post-secularity-post-sovereignty one.³² At the very least, given the current and continued erosion of the nineteenth-century paradigm of univocal nation-state sovereignty (in spite of the success of governmentality) by means of regionalization and various currents of globalization, further research on the problematic of post-secular sovereignty would be urgently required if indeed we were being ushered into a post-secular environment. Hints of this have already arisen, with expected controversy, in the debate surrounding Rowan Williams, the Archbishop of Canterbury's remarks challenging the absolute authority of secular law:

By ‘modern societies’ Williams implies highly and multiform pluralistic³⁴ societies, and it thus seems somewhat to overlap with what Habermas calls ‘post-secular societies’. Both capture the current resurgence of interest in legal pluralism, which of course takes many forms.³⁵ One such is the widespread attention focusing on the dual-codes of countries such as India (with one set of laws for Muslims and another for Hindus, and so on), and Pakistan.³⁶ Most of the furore around Williams’ challenge centres on the point of dual codes, especially his remarks that the adoption of certain aspects of Sharia law in the UK ‘seems unavoidable’: ‘There's a place for finding what would be a constructive accommodation with some aspects of Muslim law, as we already do with some other aspects of religious law.’³⁷

Habermas’ watershed essay RPS was also partly inspired by the fact that, to quote from his opening pages, ‘In several Muslim countries, and in Israel as well, religious family law is either an alternative or a substitute for secular civil law’ (Ref. 10, p. 2). It is of course intriguing to try to reason out how Habermas envisioned parliamentary and legislative debate surrounding the framing and adopting of such laws, considering that religious statements and justifications should be expunged from the minutes. As adumbrated above, how could the Israeli Knesset, the Indian Lok Sabha or the Pakistani Majlis-e-Shoora – just to take a few examples of countries with plural legal systems – possibly function under the constant erasure of religious statements?

Of course, for Habermas, India and Pakistan fall outside the scope of his (post)secular dialectics; because not ‘affluent’, they are not entitled to the designation ‘post-secular’:

This exclusion of South Asia does not prevent Habermas from speaking of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Islam over a dozen times in this same essay, nor does it dissuade him from opening his recent talk on Political Theology in New York with pithy remarks on China.Reference Habermas³⁸ But why even speak of the phenomena in these non-affluent areas if by definition they do not bear on the theme under consideration: affluent post-secular societies? It is a vexing question as to why so much of the evidence of the resurgence of religion, which characterizes the post-secular condition Habermas apprehends, is drawn from regions lying outside the ‘affluent societies of Europe’ – it cannot be that Europe may develop into a post-secular society because Israel, India, Pakistan, Afghanistan, China, Russia, and other outliers fail to fit the framework of the secular paradigm; that is a non-sequitur. The affluent societies were at one time secular, and they dialectically proceed to post-secular. India, for example, on the other hand, was never perfectly secularized, but remains static in its a-secular condition. Do we hear an echo of Hegel's Philosophy of World History and Philosophy of Religion in Habermas’ dialectical account?Reference Dallmayr³⁹

How ironic it would be, since Habermas explicitly defends and develops his conception of ‘postmetaphysical’ in contrast to Hegel's philosophy of history, the swansong of metaphysics.Reference Habermas¹⁵ The notion of the post-metaphysical is of course interconnected with that of the post-secular. Habermas’ sixth section of RPS is devoted to unravelling how ‘the secular awareness that one is living in a post-secular society takes the shape of postmetaphysical thought at the philosophical level’ (Ref. 13, p. 16). By ‘postmetaphysical’, Habermas evokes the contemporary constellation of scientific and epistemic paradigms that are, ostensibly, neutral toward the metaphysical. Roughly defining the latter term, he states:

In this exposition of the passage from the metaphysical to the post-metaphysical, just as in the passage from the secular to post-secular, there is no room for the extra-European – and strangely the Arabic and Islamic falsafa are also missing – beyond of course the related affluent ‘countries such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand.’ In the case of the post-metaphysical, unlike the post-secular, there are not even any sensational media events from outliers such as China, India or Iran – to select countries with long traditions of metaphysical speculation – for Habermas to draw attention to in illustration of his argument.

In his book devoted to the subject, Postmetaphysical Thinking (PT), Habermas enumerates ‘four themes’ or ‘four movements of thought’ which characterize the break with the tradition of enlightenment modernity/metaphysics: ‘postmetaphysical thinking, the linguistic turn, situating reason, and reversing the primacy of theory over practice – or the overcoming of logocentrism’ (Ref. 15, p. 6). Just as he envisions his position on the post-secular scene as a mean between two extremes, he situates himself as a post-metaphysical thinker at the mean between the extreme of idealistic, rationalist, ego-centric metaphysics, on the one hand, and the radical form of post-modernism embodying the above-mentioned four movements of thought, such as deconstructionism, on the other.⁴⁰

As Habermas is well aware, the post-modern turn to religion has been coeval with the post-secular turn, and not merely coincidentally. To take some examples, Rodney Stark's ‘Secularization, R.I.P.’ appeared in the same year as Hent de Vries’ Philosophy and the Turn to Religion. Peter Berger's ‘Secularism in Retreat’ appeared the same year as Graham Ward's book The Postmodern God and John D. Caputo's book The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida.Reference Stark⁴¹ Not to mention what is sometimes called the anti-post-modern writings on religion from Zizek, Badiou, Agamben, and Terry Eagleton.Reference Zizek and Milbank⁴² In the early 1980s, Habermas spoke collectively of ‘postenlightenment, post-modernity, even of posthistory’,Reference Habermas⁴³ and in the early 1990s he made reference to ‘posties’ while postulating the inevitability of post-metaphysical thought (Ref. 15, p. 6). A decade later, Habermas begins attempting to balance the post-metaphysical with the post-secular, a precarious move seeking to appropriate both the critical energy of post-modernity and the ‘special power’ of religion simultaneously, without succumbing to the combined explosive defects he finds in post-modern religion, about which he writes with palpable contempt:

Remember, ‘postmetaphysical thought is prepared to learn from religion, but remains agnostic in the process.’Reference Habermas¹⁰

In The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, the prequel to PT, Habermas speaks explicitly of ‘the destruction or overcoming of metaphysics by Nietzsche and Heidegger [which] meant something other than the sublation (Aufhebung) of metaphysics…’. He continues, ‘and yet these attitudes point back to the break with tradition…’.Reference Habermas⁴⁵ Habermas identifies the break with tradition, what he calls ‘the entry into Post-modernity’ as beginning with Nietzsche, and its project of ‘the undermining of Western rationalism through the critique of metaphysics’ as beginning with Heidegger, and then sees Derridian post-modernism as something of an inevitable offspring of the two, considering the Sonderweg of this subject-centred conception of reason which is basically begging to be deconstructed (Ref. 45, p. 161). This sketch from the earlier book matches the later one, but with one noteworthy point: notice that in the phrase Habermas appends the adjective ‘Western’ to ‘rationalism’ but not to ‘metaphysics’. Why? Is this not a far cry from the liberal multicultural, and now current, gesture of prefixing ‘metaphysics’ or ‘philosophy’ by ‘Western’ to exhibit awareness of the presence or vibrancy of philosophy elsewhere in the world? While it may seem over-sensitive, I tend to read this more in line with a latent counter-reformative manoeuvre staking exclusive claim to rationalism by the Western world. While that rationalism is problematic even for Habermas in its logocentric avatar, it is precisely ‘Western’ reason (reconceived intersubjectively) that he seeks explicitly to rescue and preserve from the excesses of post-modern critique. Habermas’ account, then, if we held him responsible for his choice of words, would serve to function as a new chapter sewn into the Eurocentric paradigm of Hegel's Philosophy of World History and Philosophy of Religion. It may be revised and updated, but it fails daringly to introduce a new paradigm; that is, it clings to the centre-periphery epistemic bias that characterized colonialist modernity. Although Habermas would seek strongly to deny it, the transition from the metaphysical to the post-metaphysical in his own account is indeed a sublation (Aufhebung), which, as Hegel explained, picks up and preserves even as it cancels.Reference Singh and Mohapatra⁴⁶

To summarize what our foray into the ‘posties’ has thrown up so far, Habermas believes he can bring the straying post-modern flock back into the fold of (the as yet incomplete project of) modernityReference Habermas⁴⁷ by inter alia proposing an alternative way out of the philosophy of the subject – communicative reason as opposed to subject-centred. Notice that there is, therefore, an analogous if not identical dialectical process in Habermas’ attempt to dictate terms, secular and modernist, to both the post-secularists and the post-modernists. Both scenarios are attempts to find a middle-ground, and above all a stable ground. What goes sadly unrecognized in the secondary literature⁴⁸ is that his solution is more in the guise of inclusion rather than truly pluralist: cracks and leaks in his word-choice, metaphors and occasionally also in his positive argumentation subtly reveal that his is, on the contrary, the classical attempt to brace up the centre all over again. This is also revealed in Habermas’ remarks on the post-colonial.

Except in the thoughts of Peter BergerReference Berger⁴⁹ and a few others,Reference Habermas⁵⁰ most scholars agree that to speak of modernity is to speak of secularization, just as clearly as it is to speak of colonization. That modernity – whose requiem is being sung by post-colonial theorists such as Ashis NandyReference Nandy⁵¹ – secular, rationalist, progressive-historical, the project which for Habermas remains incomplete,Reference Habermas⁵² seems now to complete itself only through its own sublation: post-secularity smacks of the violation of modernity by post-modernity, at least an attempt, however reluctantly, to accommodate the cacophony of post-modern complaints that occur in what Habermas calls ‘the ‘wild life’ of the political public sphere (Ref. 10, p. 10). The marriage of post-secularity and post-modernity's religious orientation is of course a reluctant and suspicious one. But as we begin to see, it is telling that they both immediately succeed a decade awash in the violation of Western academia by post-colonial theory, again typified by Nandy's requiem or funeral for modernity. As Hamlet explained to Horatio, ‘The funeral baked meats/Did coldly furnish forth the marriage tables’.⁵³

To speak of modernity is to speak of colonization, just as clearly as it is to speak of secularization. Are we justified in correlating the post-secular with the post-colonial, a direction Habermas himself seems to indicate in the passage cited from ‘A Plea for a Common Foreign Policy’ above? (‘Each of the great European nations has experienced the bloom of its imperial power. And … each has had to work through the experience of the loss of its empire … with the loss of colonialterritories.’Reference Habermas and Derrida²⁷) More recently (in an interview from 2009), Habermas speaks of colonization in terms of an interruption of the ‘linear development’ of egalitarian universalism, which constitutes the basis of the ‘normative self-understanding’ of European peoples. It appears that Habermas’ earlier attempt to apply the Metzean framework of sufferingReference Metz⁵⁴ in his quest for European identity-construction was short-lived, and he atavisticly reverted to the enlightenment notion of an (exclusively) European development toward universal freedom as the basis of self-understanding (i.e. identity):

Nevertheless, Habermas admits to the relationship between the post-colonial and the post-secular a few paragraphs later in the same interview:

But so much for these diverse declensions, from post-secular to post-sovereign to post-modern to post-colonial, and back again. What we seek to uncover through this focus on ‘posties’ is that, in each case, Habermas’ strategy is parallel, and indeed visibly reactionary: the danger is identified, and the centre is then fortified against it. No wonder Habermas is desperate to strengthen that ‘institutional filter’, that protective barrier separating the sanctity of the interior of parliament from the exterior wild and unruly din of a post-sovereign, post-modern, post-colonial clamour. He is protecting effete democracy from both the right and the left, from within and without. Against all these abhorrent threats our fundamental democratic institutions such as parliament seem far too vulnerable; perhaps we should let Christo and Jeanne-Claude re-wrap the Reichstag!

The ‘Violence of a Forcible and Uprooting Process of Modernization’

We have begun to unearth an underlying context of threats, fear, uncertainty (‘the outcome is entirely open-ended’⁴⁰). In this vein, Habermas speaks frequently of September 11 whenever he lectures on religion in the public sphere, post-secularism, and/or political theology.Reference Habermas^10, Reference Habermas^11, Reference Habermas^{26, 40} It seems that Habermas believes that September 11 did a great deal to bring concrete challenges of a post-secular dispensation into the daylight. (I would add that it also served to transform numerous philosophers into political theorists and numerous political theorists into pseudo-theologians.)

And indeed, Habermas’ recurrently articulated fear, that religion will violate parliament, was violently realized in New Delhi, India, only two months after September 11: on 13 December 2001, the Indian parliament building was stormed by a group of five heavily-armed Islamic terrorists of the Jaish-e-Mohammed outfit, one of which was wearing the now-fashionable explosive suicide vest.⁵⁵

But Habermas himself acknowledged in his European Foreign Policy article, speaking of the ‘violence of a forcible and uprooting process of modernization’, as well as in his more recent interview, that the decolonization processes have uncovered that the threat had long been present in the opposite direction: from the centre to the periphery, and from the top down. From the so-called secular democratic institutions, such as the parliament, the secularized sanctum sanctorum of the liberal democracy, down against those who were violated within the state under its leviathanic sovereignty.⁴⁰ These include cults labelled criminal, aborigines and tribes labelled inassimilable or unmodernizable, and swathes of post-colonial peoples, subject peoples at one moment, and free-and-equal citizens of a liberal-democratic nation-state at the next moment.⁵⁶

In India, where the hyper-plurality of religious traditions, cults, castes, languages, classes, colonies, cultures, tribes, and so on lends itself to an impossibly complex ‘society’, a nation of heterogeneous rather than homogeneous temporality (following Partha ChatterjeeReference Chatterjee⁵⁷), ‘impossible to discipline’ (i.e. homogenize, at the level of ‘civil’ society),Reference Arnold⁵⁸ the assumption is that discipline, the triumph of governance over anomie, calculative rationalism (in its highest social expression as enlightened self-interest), would descend upon the land as it finally, grudgingly entered fully into modernity. On the contrary, it is now beginning to seem as though that modernity will be finished before India finishes its entry into it.

This is precisely what Habermas intends by his reference to a Gestalt-switch in RPS, again packing his post-secular writing with a Hegelian punch:

Is this intuition of a Nandy or a Chatterjee, that modernity shall forever remain unfinished⁵⁹ – in Habermas framed explicitly in terms of the ‘fact of pluralism’ – implicitly reflected in Habermas’ post-secular turn?

But it must be repeated that Habermas rejects the validity of the Gestalt-switch – he says that it ‘does not quite bear up to sociological scrutiny’ (Ref. 10, p. 2) – and, I suppose, this means that the Occident continues, in his words, as ‘the normal model for the future of all other cultures’ (Ref. 10, p. 2). Bypassing even Hegel, Habermasian post-secularism in this respect reeks of Fukuyamian posthistoricity: the ‘men without chests’Reference Fukuyama⁶⁰ at the end of history, the triumph of liberalism globally, gets a new vitality and inspiring energy (thumos) from religion in the public sphere – thus gets configured the ‘political role of religion.’ So what, then, of the ‘immeasurable relevance’ of the fact of pluralism? It may be ‘immeasurable’ but the supposedly immeasurable, in Habermas as ever in Hegelian thought, can still be subjected to dialectical self-mediation.Reference Desmond⁶¹

It seems that Habermas would have the wolverine wilderness of plurality tamed into a faithful domestic dog – although inspiring, and energetic, nevertheless standing by outside the threshold of the parliament door, in eager expectation of its master's return. The master has entered the building of the parliament: the sign hanging outside reads, ‘No Dogs Allowed!’