Postsecular Conflicts non-religious people could lead to better mutual understanding and thus to a better quality of the democratic process. Against Habermas, one could argue that there already exists a sociological model that conceptualizes the moral and religious diversity of modern societies, only in less consensual terms: the model of culture wars described by James D. Hunter. 10 In the United States this concept denotes the conflict between representatives of a culture holding on to traditional teachings, values, and life plans on the one hand, and the representatives of a culture of change and individual freedom on the other. Where Habermas's idea of postsecular society highlights consensus, the culture wars model highlights conflict. Both operate under the assumption that pluralism is the default condition of modern societies, but they come to different conclusions. Habermas's conclusion is optimistic, Hunter's is pessimistic. Culture wars, Hunter writes, precede shooting wars. 11 This introduction is not the place to settle the question whether conflicts over values in modern pluralistic societies always take the form of a postsecular consensus or a culture war. Instead, what this introduction, this edited volume, and in general the whole Postsecular Conflicts research project 12 tries to do, is to define in greater detail the conditions of these conflicts. By "conditions" we mean what actors, what political dynamics, and what ideas and intellectual genealogies are at play in today's postsecular conflicts? 13 James Davison Hunter, Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America
This article examines the legacy of Pitirim A. Sorokin (1889-1968), a Harvard sociologist from the Russian emigration. The authors scrutinise Sorokin as one of the nodal points for today's moral conservatism. As a scholar, Sorokin has been relegated to the margins of his discipline, but his legacy as a public intellectual has persisted in the United States and has soared in Russia over the last three decades. This article examines Sorokin's reception in these two nations, some of whose citizens have facilitated the burgeoning transnational phenomenon of twentyfirst-century moral conservatism. Four aspects of Sorokin's legacy are especially relevant in this context: his emphasis on values, his notion of the 'sensate culture', his ideas about the family, and his vision for moral revival. The authors conclude that Sorokin functions as a nodal point that binds together individual actors and ideas across national, cultural and linguistic barriers. The article is based on a firsthand analysis of moral conservative discourse and documents, on qualitative interviews and on scholarly literature.
The article is devoted to the analysis of the “Pussy riot” case and the peculiarities of Russian postsecularism. Special emphasis is placed on the phenomenon of post-secular hybrids, i.e. the overcoming of the situation of social differentiation between religion and other social subsystems (one of the main distinctive features of secularization). It is claimed that the materials of the trial against “Pussy riot” make evident the appearance in Russia of at least three post-secular hybrids: 1) the blending of religion and politics; 2) installation of religious norms into the public order of the secular state; 3) significance of confessional legal experts as part of the new “ideological state apparatus”
This essay investigates the phenomenon of the selfie. The author is interested in what this phenomenon is able to say about the human subject and its constitution. Jacques Lacan's theory of the subject is used as a fulcrum to investigate, in particular, his reflections on the gaze and the role it plays in the process of constituting human subjectivity. The author takes one specific “mirror selfie” and consistently examines various aspects of the gaze in relation to it: the gaze as it constitutes the identity of the subject; the ideological dimension of the gaze and “ideological visual interpellation”; the gaze as the object‐cause of desire; the unbearable inevitability of the gaze; and the monstrous Real dimension of the gaze. The author concludes that new technology, in particular, the new possibilities for self‐representation they provide, do not distort the nature of man, but on the contrary only more clearly reveal it.
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