Tuesday, October 8, 2013

more on Latour and religion

Terry Blake from Agent Swarm HERE and Chris Watkin HERE.  Some interesting reflections on how Latour sees commonalities between religious discourse and lover's discourse.  The point is that we must remain sensitive to "melody" and "rhythm" (or better perhaps "dissonance" and "consonance") when it comes to religious speech, and do so in a way that does not "literally" oblige one to the content of religious speech.

Watkin takes Latour to task with the "literally" part.  Is Latour "demythologizing" religion, a Derridean "religion without religion," pace Caputo (or even Santayana for that matter)?  Yes, Latour is calling for a "renewing repetition" of the rhythm and melody of religious speech, its transformative power of information, but for him, given the call for sensitivity to rhythm and melody, this information is not specifically Christian in content.  Why?

This leads Latour to an "awkward" position as both Blake and Watkin point out, although for different reasons it seems.

Again, I'll provide some of my initial thoughts - and they are roughly the same today as when I posted them some months back - HERE.