The Politics of Imagination and the Public Role of Religion

Chiara Bottici

The politics of imaginationand the public role of religion

Abstract The aim of this article is to show that, in order to understandthe new public role of religion, we need to rethink the nexus, often neglectedby contemporary philosophy, between politics and imagination. The currentresurrection of religion in the public sphere is linked to a deep transforma-tion of political imagination which has its roots in the double process ofthe reduction of politics to mere administration, on the one hand, and tospectacle, on the other. In an epoch when politics is said to be simply aquestion of ‘good governance’, of good administration within a neo-liberalconsensus, the paradox is that of a lack of political imagination which goeshand in hand with its hypertrophy through the media. This article tacklesthis paradox, by firstly discussing the nexus of politics, imagination andreligion and, secondly, by analysing their contemporary transformations.In conclusion, the thesis is illustrated through the analysis of some contem-porary examples.

Key words Hannah Arendt · Walter Benjamin · Cornelius Castoriadis ·imaginal · imaginary · imagination · politics · religion

In his reflections on the work of art in the age of its technical repro-ducibility, Benjamin provides a stimulating starting point for discussingthe relationship between religion, politics and imagination. Writing inthe 1930s, when the consequences of the industrialization of the pro-duction of images started to manifest themselves, he was in the perfectposition to catch their radical novelty. The possibility to reproduce animage in series, for example, in a photo or even more so on film, destroysthe uniqueness of its being here and now, hic et nunc (Benjamin, 2002:23). By multiplying its reproduction, it substitutes for a single imagean indefinite quantity of images, thereby destroying their authenticitytogether with the possibility of distinguishing between the original and

PSCPHILOSOPHY & SOCIAL CRITICISM • vol 35 no 8 • pp. 985–1005Copyright © The Author(s), 2009.Reprints and permissions: http://www.sagepub.co.uk/journalsPermissions.navhttp://psc.sagepub.com DOI: 10.1177/0191453709340642

the copy. In other words, what Benjamin calls the ‘aura’, defined as ‘astrange tissue of space and time: the unique apparition of a distance,however near it may be’ (Benjamin, 2002: 104–5), disappears. In turn,this destruction would bring with it the liquidation of the traditionalvalue of images, resulting in a large-scale, radical questioning of allforms of traditions.

Benjamin stresses the ambivalent character of this process, linked tothe mass movements of the first half of the 20th century: destruction ofthe aura, but also a potential liberation from the chains of tradition.This, in his view, is particularly clear in film. The social impact of cinema,especially in its most positive form, has a ‘destructive, cathartic side’,namely ‘the liquidation of the value of tradition in the cultural heritage’(Benjamin, 2002: 104). To Abel Gance, who maintained that filmswould contribute to the resurrection of myths, legends and religion,Benjamin responds that they will on the contrary produce their ‘generalliquidation’ (ibid.).

Today, more than 70 years after Benjamin’s prophecy, it seems as ifwhat happened was precisely that resurrection of religion through filmsthat he had emphatically negated. The only difference is that more thana ‘celluloid’ resurrection, concerning only films, what we are witnessingis a ‘virtual’ resurrection embracing all new media. Even more strikingis the fact that this resurrection does not mainly concern the films poten-tially watched only in the private sphere, but the public sphere itself. Inthis latter, religion seems to play a much greater role than foreseen bythe theorists of secularization.

Maybe the expression ‘resurrection of religion’ is misleading on asociological level. According to some analysts, religion is rising on aglobal level, but still declining in advanced industrialized societies whichcan guarantee a certain level of existential security (with the only excep-tion of the United States where the absence of a social security systemand continual immigration have kept religiosity at the same level sincethe Second World War) (Norris and Inglehart, 2004). Whether, and towhat extent, the expression ‘resurrection of religion’ is well groundedin sociological terms is a question to be dealt with through empiricalstudies on the topic.1 What I want to do here is to use this expressionin a phenomenological way to signal the fact that, even in industrializedsocieties, there is a widespread perception of the increased public role ofreligion. Debates such as the one on the reference to Christian origins inthe draft European Constitution, on the threat to excommunicate Kerrysupporters in the last American presidential elections2 or the role ofIslamic fundamentalism in the post-9/11 September world3 are signs thatsomething has changed, if not in the substance of individual religiousbeliefs, at least in the perception of religion’s public role. In developingcountries, the return of religion to the public sphere has been particularly

986Philosophy & Social Criticism 35 (8)

evident: for some this is the result of the forced modernization of the1950s and 1970s, whereas for others it is the consequence of the revivalof local identities in contrast to values perceived as falsely universal.4

The main argument of this article is that in order to understand thistransformation in the public role of religion we need to rethink the nexusbetween politics and imagination. The current resurrection of religion inthe public sphere is linked to a transformation of political imaginationwhich has its roots in the double process of the reduction of politics tomere administration, on the one hand, and to spectacle, on the other.In an epoch when politics is said to be simply a question of ‘good gover-nance’, of good administration within a neo-liberal consensus, the para-dox is that of a lack of political imagination which goes hand in handwith its hypertrophy through the media.

In order to reconstruct this paradox, I will first discuss the interplaybetween politics and imagination (section 1) and then move on toanalyse its contemporary transformations as regards the role of religion(section 2). Finally, I will illustrate this thesis through the analysis ofsome examples (sections 3 and 4).

1 Politics and imagination: the space of religion

In her Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, Arendt sketches out atheory of judgement based on the idea of a close link between politicsand imagination (Arendt, 1982). In her political reading of Kant’s thirdcritique, she underlines the central political role of imagination. As sheopenly states by recovering Kant’s intuition of the Critique of PureReason, imagination is the faculty that mediates between universal andparticular by generating both schemes for knowledge and examples foraction (Arendt, 1982: 72 ff.; 79–85).

Examples are crucial for judgement because they are the particularfrom which the universal can derive. They are ‘the go-cart of judgements’,they are what sustain us when we formulate judgements. ‘The exampleis the particular that contains in itself, or is supposed to contain, aconcept or a general rule’ (Arendt, 1982: 84). Let us make the examplebe the judging of an act as courageous. If she were an ancient Greek,Arendt argues, she would have in the depths of her mind the exampleof Achilles. Imagination is central here because it makes present to ourmind what is not in front of us. If we say of somebody that they aregood, we probably have in the back of our mind examples such as StFrancis or Jesus of Nazareth or some other archetypical example ofgoodness. Imagination sustains what she calls an ‘enlarged mentality’,that is, a mentality which enables us to prescind from the particularconditions we are in and assume the point of view of the others (Arendt,

987Bottici: The politics of imagination and the public role of religion

1982: 73). Thanks to its capacity to represent in our mind what is notimmediately present, imagination is the faculty that enables us to putourselves in the others’ shoes.

As a consequence – as Arendt states at the beginning of ‘Lying inPolitics’ – imagination is central to the possibility of action itself. Whatis typical of human action is that it always begins something new, notin the sense of starting ex nihilo, but in the more limited sense of addingsomething that did not exist before. Such a faculty to begin somethingnew depends on our capacity to make abstraction from our particularcondition and imagine that things could be different from how they arehere and now (Arendt, 1972: 5). However, the same faculty of repre-senting what is absent as present also generates the capacity to negatewhat is given, and therefore to lie. Hence, the ambivalence of imagina-tion; the fact that it enables us to go beyond what is given in order tocreate something new, but also to conceal it, to lie.

Arendt’s remarks on this topic remain crucial for a theory of politi-cal imagination, although we do not know how she would have devel-oped them had her premature death not prevented her completing hertheory of judgement.5 Nevertheless, Arendt remained linked to theKantian concept of imagination as an individual faculty. As a conse-quence, her theory remains within the presuppositions of a philosophyof subject, which can hardly account for the role of social context inthe shaping of the imagination of individuals. Philosophical research hasgone beyond such a presupposition as signalled by the fact that togetherwith the passage from a theory of ‘reason’ to a more context-orientedone of ‘rationality’ there has been an analogous change in perspectivefrom a theory of ‘imagination’ to a theory of the ‘imaginary’.6

The author in whom this passage is at the same time most clearand most problematic is Castoriadis. In his view, the human being, whois initially only a pure ‘representational/affective/unintentional flux’,becomes a proper individual, that is, a social individual, only througha forced process of socialization to the imaginary significations of asociety. This process starts very early, at least with the first contacts withlanguage, in particular the mother’s language (Castoriadis, 1987: 303–4).Nevertheless, Castoriadis uses the expression ‘psyche’ or ‘psychicalmonad’ in order to stress the fact that at the origin it is an asocial andindeterminate being. In his psychoanalytical view, through the firstencounters with language, the psyche is led to abandon its originalobjects in order to invest socially instituted ones, those sustained bythe social imaginary. As he emphatically puts it, it is only through theinternalization of the world and imaginary significations created bysociety that an individual is created out of a ‘little screaming monster’(Castoriadis, 1991: 148).

There are limits to the power of the symbolic order of a society.7 Inthe first place, the work of the social imaginary must start from what


it finds there already, be it the residual of previous social imaginaries, aminimal coherence of the imaginary significations or the imperativesimposed by nature itself (for instance, any society defines in its own waythe meaning of nourishment, but it must start from the need for foodin the first place). Notwithstanding all these limits, the social imaginaryhas a capacity for virtual universal coverage so that any irruption of theraw world can immediately be treated as a sign of something, it can beinterpreted away and thus exorcized. Even that which collides with thisorder can be subject to a symbolic processing: transgression of social rulecan become an ‘illness’, and completely alien societies that are funda-mentally at odds with a given social imaginary can become ‘strangers’,‘savages’ or even ‘impious’ (Castoriadis, 1991).

The major threat for the social imaginary nevertheless remains itsown creativity. The social imaginary is said to be radical precisely becausethere cannot be individuals outside of it, but also because it can always,potentially, question itself. The instituting social imaginary is at the sametime always also instituted by individuals. There are no individualsoutside of it, but, likewise, no social imaginary can exist without theindividuals that create, re-create and sustain it. In such a particular rela-tionship between a society that transcends the individuals that composeit, and those very same individuals, we experience a unique relation-ship that cannot be reduced to a simple one such as between the wholeand its parts, or even less between the universal and the particular(Castoriadis, 1991: 145).

Yet, in my view there is a tension between the idea that there existsa unique relationship of mutual implication between society and indi-viduals and Castoriadis’ view of the psyche as a monad. He goes so faras to speak of an ‘absolute scission’ between the instituting and insti-tuted poles of the social imaginary: the psychical monad on the onehand, and what he calls the social-historical on the other (Castoriadis,1987, 1982). As Habermas underlines, the idea of a monadic isolationof the psyche and that of heterogeneity between the psyche and societycan lead to an untenable metaphysical opposition (Habermas, 1987:327). However, even within a psychoanalytical conception of the indi-vidual there is no need to maintain such heterogeneity. We are notmonadic beings that become dependent on one another only through aviolent socialization, but are rather dependent and independent at thesame time from the very beginning.

I cannot dwell on this point here. I just want to signal that thetension mentioned above is the sign of a deep philosophical problem. Ifwe start from the idea that imagination is in primis an individual faculty,the problem emerges of determining the way in which it can be shapedby the social context. If we begin from the concept of social imaginaryunderstood as context, the problem is how to account for the freeimagination of individuals. There are no easy ways out of this problem.


For this reason, I have elsewhere suggested that after a passage from atheory of imagination to a theory of the imaginary, we need to take afurther step towards a theory of the imaginal (Bottici, 2008). ‘Imaginal’,from Latin imaginalis, simply denotes what is made of images (imagines)and as such it can be both the product of an individual faculty and ofa social context, as well as the result of a complex, yet-to-be-determinedinteraction between the two.

Furthermore, in contrast to ‘imaginary’, which means unreal, ficti-tious, the concept of ‘imaginal’ does not make any assumption as to thereality of the images that compose it. This is particularly clear in theEnglish language, where ‘imaginal’, according to the Oxford EnglishDictionary, denotes primarily what pertains to imagination or to mentalimages, whereas ‘imaginary’ primarily means what exists only in fancyand has no real existence, and therefore is opposed to ‘real’, ‘actual’(Simpson and Weiner, 1989: II, 668). The concept of imaginal thereforecomes before the distinction between ‘real’ and ‘fictitious’, because thelatter only makes sense within a specific form of the imaginal. The defin-ition of what is real is not an a priori of human understanding, butsomething that depends on the imaginal itself and that has thereforecontinuously been changing over the centuries.8

Surely, as Castoriadis observes, every social imaginary will attemptto hide this fact, occulting the instituted side of the society through theattribution of the origins of social significations to an extra-social source(Castoriadis, 1991: 153). By ‘extra-social’ he means external to the actualand living society, so that ‘extra-social’ sources can be gods, foundingheroes, or even natural laws when they are presented as immune tohuman influence (Castoriadis, 1982: 464). On the other hand, there isalways, according to Castoriadis, the possibility for a society to recog-nize itself as the result of a process of self-institution. In this, lies itsautonomy.9 I am autonomous if I am at the origins of what will be (archeton esomenon as Aristotle used to say) and I know myself to be so(Castoriadis, 1982: 479). Autonomy means that my discourse has totake the place of what is given as the discourse of the others. This, aswe will see, explains the tension between autonomy and religion, becausethe latter poses the origin of society in an extra-social source and it doesso through a ‘revealed’ discourse, which is, by definition, the discourseof an other.

But before moving on to that point, let me briefly spell out in whatconsists the relationship between the political and the imaginal. Fromwhat we saw before, it follows that the imaginal is central to politicsboth in its more general meaning of what concerns the polis, and there-fore the public,10 and its more restricted meaning of an activity charac-terized by the potential recourse to legitimate physical force. Politics inthe first sense depends on the imaginal because it is only by imagining


it that a public exists. This holds for big political bodies such as states,but also for small communities. The first are clearly ‘imaginal beings’because it is only in the medium of the imaginal that we can perceivecommonalities among citizens who are reciprocally stranger.11 But smallcommunities also depend on it because it is only by imagining a com-munity that the latter can be perceived out of an otherwise mere sumof individuals. Without the imaginal what we perceive in the agorà is amere aggregation of bodies, not yet a polis.

In sum, politics is imaginal because it depends on the possibility toimagine commonalities, but also because, as Arendt emphasized, theimaginal is what enables us to prescind from our particularities and putourselves in the others’ shoes. It is in the double meaning of being freedfrom one’s own particularities and of imagining commonalities that thepolitical in the more general meaning depends on the imaginal. But thepolitical depends on the imaginal also if we take the above-mentioned,more restricted meaning of the political.12 Indeed, in order to be perceivedas legitimate, political power must make sense within the imaginary signi-fications of each society. If such a possibility to imagine it as legitimatevanishes, then it ceases to be political power and becomes mere violence.

To put it in Castoriadis’ words:

beneath the monopoly of legitimate violence lies the monopoly of the validsignification. The throne of the Lord of signification stands above thethrone of the Lord of violence. The voice of the arms can only begin tobe heard amid the crash of the collapsing edifice of institutions. And forviolence to manifest itself effectively, the word – the injunctions of theexisting power – has to keep its magic over the ‘group of armed men’(Engels). The fourth company of the Pavlovsky regiment, guards to HisMajesty the Czar, and the Semenovsky regiment, were the strongest pillarsof the throne, until those days of February 26 and 27, 1917 when theyfraternized with the crowd and turned their guns against their officers. Themightiest army in the world will not protect you if it is not loyal to you –and the ultimate foundation of its loyalty is its imaginary belief in yourimaginary legitimacy. (Castoriadis, 1991: 155–6)

If such is the relationship between the political and the imaginal,what is the position of religion? It is certainly difficult, if not impos-sible, to provide a single definition of religion which reflects the com-plexity of the historically given forms of religiosity. For our purposes itis, however, sufficient to deal with the topic from the point of view ofa theory of the imaginal. In this perspective, it is clear that politicsand religion must be linked to one another because they both dependon the imaginary significations of the society within which they providean answer to the question ‘What is the origin of society?’ As a systemof beliefs aimed at the elimination of contingency, religion plays acrucial role within the social imaginary, allowing Castoriadis, following


Durkheim, to conclude that religion almost coincides with society as awhole for the great majority of known societies (Castoriadis, 1982: 465).

If it is true that religion identifies with society, the further questionconsists in asking with what kind of society. Castoriadis’ answer is veryclear: religion and society coincide in the case of heteronymous soci-eties. To put it in Castoriadis’ words:

the heteronymous institution of society and religion are identical in theiressence. They aim at the same thing and with the same means. They arenot just both about the organisation of society, but they both also aim toprovide one and the same meaning to the world. Both must indeed hidethe chaos, and in particular the chaos that is society itself. (Castoriadis,1982: 466)

In other words, both heteronymous societies and religion aim at theelimination of contingency, which is on the contrary ineradicable in anautonomous society which recognizes itself as a self-creation and, there-fore, as always open to the possibility of chaos. The price to be paid forautonomy is very high – accepting that one faces the possibility of chaos.There are, therefore, good reasons to be sceptical vis-à-vis the possi-bility to fully realize such a society. Every society aims at its own self-preservation and therefore tries to occult its own contingency in oneway or another.

To conclude on this point, for Castoriadis the deep and systematiclink between religion and heteronomy goes in both directions: all reli-gions include the origin of institution in their system of beliefs, and the(heteronymous) institution of society always situates its own origins inan extra-social source. By occulting the possibility of total chaos throughits system of beliefs, religion operates a sort of closure of the socialimaginary. This holds particularly for the religions of the book whichtransmit their revealed message through a written text. Saying ‘So it iswritten’ amounts to saying ‘You cannot imagine it otherwise’. Surelythe message of the book can be interpreted differently, but the interpre-tation must stay within the boundaries of what is defined precisely forthis reason as the ‘sacred’ history. An interpretation of the New Testa-ment which denies the resurrection of Jesus Christ would immediatelybe stigmatized as heresy, and could only at best generate another faith.Interpretations and commentaries, therefore, are more the means topreserve the revealed truth than radically to change it.

Hence the tension between democracy and religion. While the formercoincides with an autonomous society, which acts as self-instituted andopenly recognizes this fact, the latter situates its origins in a truth whichhas been revealed by an other from the society itself – and this is thereason why the revealed truth must be preserved if the society is not toface the potential abyss of chaos. One of the major consequences is the


different evolutionary pace of religion and democracy.13 While democ-racy follows the rhythm of the society itself, responding to the needsgradually emerging within the society, religious consciousness followsthe evolutionary pace of a revealed religion which must be respectedand preserved in the first place. Hence also the discrepancy betweenthe religious and juridical consciousness of many Western countries.An illuminating example is the different role of women, who remain inan inferior position in many ecclesiastical communities although theyhave been recognized in full juridical (if not yet social) equality with theother sex.

2 In search of meaning between governance and spectacle

How does the interplay of religion and political imagination change inthe contemporary conditions of a mediatic and potentially global village?Contemporary political imagination is characterized by a paradox. Onthe one hand, the reduction of politics to governance, to mere administra-tion within a general neo-liberal consensus, has brought about a declinein political imagination understood, following Arendt, as the capacityto begin something new, to question the status quo by imagining thatthings may also be radically different from what they are.

The concept of governance was introduced to political jargon by theWorld Bank in the 1980s to denote its own policies in a juridical contextthat negates its right to exercise political functions.14 It was, therefore,originally coined to denote a form of authority which is not fully politi-cal: governance instead of a government. Since then, the term has beenextended to denote a particular network-like form of authority whichsituates itself above that of nation-states.15 As such, the concept has beenassociated with the crisis of nation-states and of the traditional sites ofdemocracy, in favour of transnational and supranational bodies whichescape the traditional mechanisms of representative democracy.16

In a context where the sites of decision-making increasingly breakaway from democratic constraints, political imagination seems to havedried up. If the power to make decisions effectively binding is – orappears to be – located so far away, there seems to be no reason to putimagination to work to imagine alternative political scenarios. Theslogan ‘Another world is possible’, which was coined in Seattle in 1999by new-global social movements, now appears as an isolated attempt torekindle political imagination.

Yet, governance does not only mean a multi-layered system ofauthority. It also implies an increased role for expertise and knowledge.Together with physical force, new modes of exercising political powerappear: first, the threat of exclusion from the benefits of governance


itself, and, second, the central role of experts. One only has to think ofthe huge amount of ‘grey literature’ produced by institutions such as theWorld Bank, the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and all the expertcommittees to realize the extent to which governance relies on knowl-edge and expertise. This, in its turn, goes hand in hand with the expan-sion of the scope of political power, which increasingly includes issuessuch as health, well-being and even sex changes. While an 18th-centurycommentator was still able to point to the sex of individuals as a subjectthat could not be ruled by political power, this is no longer possible. Inan epoch where biotechnologies are now able to penetrate the deepestmechanisms of life, nature seems to have become unable to set limits onpolitical power.17 To sum up, the concept of governance points to deepchanges in the nature of politics, which include, on the one hand, itsreduction to mere technique within highly specialized fields, and, on theother, the widening scope of competence of political power. The latternow increasingly includes issues of good life and even death. And it iswithin such issues that religion finds a fertile soil to proliferate.

Paradoxically, then, the crisis of imagination goes hand in hand withits hypertrophy. If we look at the issue from the point of view of a theoryof the imaginal which looks in the first place at the change in the natureof images rather than at those of the faculty that produces them, wecannot but perceive both a quantitative and a qualitative change in thenature of political images. Let us start from the first one. If we think ofwhat politics meant before the large-scale diffusion of the media, we canclearly perceive the exponential increase in the number of images thatenter contemporary politics. It is very hard to imagine politics outside thecontinual flux of images that enter the homes of millions of spectatorsaround the globe every day. The quantitative increase is such as toproduce a qualitative change as well. Competition among images is sohigh that a selection must be made and the criterion for choosing is quiteclear: only those images able to capture people’s imagination are news-worthy events. The mass media tend to transform images into ‘mediaevents’. The latter is the expression coined by Katz and Dayan to meana social, political or religious event which can be transformed into aTV event thanks to its spectacular and exceptional potential (Katz andDayan, 1992). The result of such a transformation is that images are nolonger what mediate our being in the world, but have become an endso that the spectacle of politics prevails over its content. The millionsof images that enter our homes day in day out are no longer the simplemedium of doing politics, but what risk doing politics in our stead.

Let us think of elections, for instance. Scholars have long sinceemphasized that their ritual function is as important as their content inthat it generates a sense of allegiance to the political system.18 But todaywe have gone beyond this. Political images are no exception to the golden


rule according to which we talk only of what attracts an audience, thatis, of what stimulates curiosity and fascinates spectators. But the spec-tacle that accompanies electoral campaigns occults the fact that it is notthere that the real battle takes place. In the first place, candidates witha chance of succeeding quite often have very similar programmes. In thesecond place, the crucial decisions are made elsewhere, in sites thatescape the traditional mechanisms of democracy.19 In the end, the realpolitical battle is between those who have a role in the spectacle andthose who are left out, that is, between those political options that areacceptable within the political imaginary and those that have to remainoutside.20

Along with a quantitative change, we are also witnessing a qualita-tive one, which directly affects the nature of images. As we have seen,Benjamin already registered a qualitative change in the nature of imageswhen he observed that as a consequence of their technical reproducibil-ity images had lost their aura. He looked mainly at the transformationsinduced by photography and cinema, but today we have reached afurther stage. While both photography and cinema still maintained a linkwith the hic et nunc (here and now), so that one could still distinguishbetween original and fake, between an authentic image and a photo-montage, all this is lost with virtual images. Images are not only repro-ducible in series, but also modifiable up to a point where it no longermakes sense to distinguish between original and fake. There is nooriginal ‘here and now’, and therefore no authenticity to be preserved.Virtual images are not objects created once and for all, but processes.There is no act of original creation, but only processes of perpetualmaintenance.

It is perhaps too early to determine the ultimate consequences of thisprocess. We can nevertheless already observe that there is a democraticpotential in all this, insofar as all those who have access to a computercan modify a virtual image. Where once a film required complex andexpensive equipment to be made, today a mobile phone suffices. Togetherwith such a democratic potential, there are, however, more alarmingconsequences. If virtual images are never-ending processes, then there isnothing that can orient us with regard to their reality. Virtual imageshave by definition an uncertain status of reality. They remain, so to speak,suspended. Hence the need to look at them from the point of view of atheory of the imaginal that does not make any assumption as to theirreality or unreality. Many of the pathologies of political imaginationin our epoch are due to this fact: images present themselves as real,although we have no criteria with which to establish their reality.

The impact of such a transformation on the link between religionand politics is twofold. Put in a nutshell, we can speak of a politiciza-tion of religion which goes hand in hand with its mediatization. Caught


in the double vice-like grip of spectacle, on the one hand, and reductionto governance, mere technique, on the other, politics is increasingly un-able to provide resources of meaning. Hence the request for a greaterrole of religion in the public sphere: the latter, with its vocation to theelimination of contingency through its system of beliefs, is an endlessreservoir of meaning, potentially able to cover over any appearance ofchaos. This generates a crisis of the secular model according to whichpolitics and religion must be separated: this model works only if politicsand religion can rely on resources of meaning that are comparable atleast. If politics drains away, it is unavoidable that we look for meaningelsewhere.

The problem is that once we have opened the doors to the publicrole of religion, it is very difficult to set an effective limit on it. Solutionssuch as Habermas’ one, which distinguish between an informal part ofthe public sphere, where religious arguments are admitted, and a formaldecision-oriented one, where they have to be ‘translated’ into seculararguments (Habermas, 2006), work at best from the point of view of‘the reasonable’, but not of that of the ‘imaginal’. Once religious contentsmake a considerable entry into the collective and potentially globalsocial imaginary, it is very hard to circumscribe them by law: in the firstplace, because the law, and in particular democratic law, is still to alarge extent anchored to state boundaries, while the public sphere isnow, if not global, at least transnational in scope; in the second place,and foremost, because once religious content is given political signifi-cance and inserted in the public sphere, it risks exploding beyond anydistinction between formal and informal parts of the public sphere. Theimaginal does not respect the subtle distinctions made by reason aboutwhat is more or less formal and therefore triggers a mechanism in whichpublic reason is powerless.

If the new-global movements were an attempt to rekindle politicalimagination, 9/11 made it explode. All of a sudden, the attack on theTwin Towers not only brought onto the scene new political scenarios,but also triggered reactive mechanisms of identification with one’s ownreligion, thus fuelling the idea of there being a clash between Islam andthe West. The result is that the latter has become one of the mostpowerful political myths of our time. I have dealt elsewhere with thereasons why an increasing number of people around the globe startedto believe that a clash between Islam and the West was taking place(Bottici and Challand, 2006). I would here like only to briefly point outthat nobody in the face of the bombs blown up by Christian Identity inOklahoma City in 1995 or in Atlanta in 1996 spoke of a clash betweenChristianity and the federal state, while a significant percentage of jour-nalists and the global media did not hesitate to interpret 9/11 as a clashbetween Islam and the West. The result of the working of this myth is


that people no longer perceive the actions of single individual humanbeings, acting out of a more or less complex series of motivations, butentire civilizations clashing with each other. And insofar as it is an entireIslamic civilisation that is perceived as a threat, it is unavoidable forWestern citizens to perceive the need to go out in search of their allegedChristian identity.21

3 Jihad via the media

What are the reasons for the success of Islamic fundamentalism – pro-viding that this is an appropriate label for the actions of groups such asAl-Qaeda?22 Surely fundamentalism is an extreme example, but preciselybecause of its extreme character it is best suited to illustrate the inter-twining of religion and the politics of imagination. As I will now illus-trate, the communion of politics and religion is enabled here by thatvery transformation of the imaginal I described above.

Whoever starts to investigate the nature of Al-Qaeda by exploringits internal logic and grammar cannot fail to register a first strikingcharacteristic. The most tangible proof of the existence of this group isa body of writings and images that circulate on the web and the tele-vision. Al-Qaeda has first and foremost a mediatic existence, so muchso that journalists investigating its nature and specificity have coined theexpression ‘Jihad via the media’.23 According to Gilles Kepel the reasonsfor the success of Al-Qaeda – which translates literally as ‘the base’ (alsoin the sense of electronic database) and ‘the norm’ – is a very loose andrambling ideology devoted wholly to the media from which it draws itsforce. It is indeed in the virtual space of the television and the Internetthat Al-Qaeda fights its battle and quite often wins the competition withmore moderate and coherent ideologies.24

Both in the propaganda and the actions of Al-Qaeda we find thetransformations of the imaginal I described above: the prevalence of thespectacle over the content and the virtuality of images together withtheir loss of authenticity. Let us start with the propaganda. Al-Qaeda’spropaganda consists in a more or less coherent set of writings andimages circulating through the Internet, satellite channels or digitalmedia such as videotapes and DVD. All this material – brief and simpledoctrinal messages, most of the time read by turban-clad ideologists,spiritual testaments of young martyrs filmed just a few seconds beforetheir suicide attacks – largely plays on the register of emotions, like inany good spectacle. The ideological content remains relatively simple:the faith in Allah, the duty to respect the five pillars of Islam, to whichthey add the duty of jihad. The latter is portrayed in the mythical termsof the original fight of Islam against a protean enemy, now depicted as


the atheist, infidel (kafir), apostate (murtadd), etc. The many referencesto the medieval epoch, the use of the hegira calendar and ancient placenames are aimed at reviving the founding myth of an original battle.History thus becomes the eternal return of the identical, the endlessrepetition of the sacred history: the coming of Islam, the fights againstthe infidel.

It is, therefore, a very simple and loose religious ideology, which evencontains striking contradictions. For instance, the fight in the name ofGod is presented at times as an individual duty that must be fulfilled byeach and every Muslim (fard’ayn) and at times as a broad collectiveduty (fard kifaya) performed by a minority only in the name of the entirecommunity. It is thanks to such a movable ideology that Al-Qaeda hasmanaged to attract the consent of a wide range of followers.25

Together with the prevalence of the register of spectacle over thecontent of propaganda, we also note the clearly virtual nature of theimages. One of the first characteristics that strikes whoever starts toinvestigate the multifaceted body of Al-Qaeda propaganda is the factthat it is quite often impossible to establish the author of the material.Not even written text can be univocally attributed to a single author.The only guarantee of the authenticity of images and texts is most ofthe time the anonymous webmaster, who attributes the texts to one oranother ideologist. This holds even more for images: whether it is thereal testament of martyrs just about to blow themselves up or not isoften almost impossible to determine. Precisely for this reason, becauseit remains suspended between reality and spectacle, Al-Qaeda’s propa-ganda did not fail to attract proselytes and meet with general acceptanceamong non-militants. Playing on continual references to the tragediesof Iraq and Palestine, true catalysers of consent, Al-Qaeda’s discoursemanaged to appear as a moment of redemption after years and years ofpolitical deadlock.26

But let us now look at the actions done by or at least attributed toAl-Qaeda. Here too we register the prevalence of the register of spec-tacle over content. The attacks almost never have an intrinsic value, butmainly focus on their symbolic one. The targets do not have a valuein themselves, but rather for what they represent. The actions, and inparticular simultaneous ones, which follow the virtual logic of endlessreproducibility, have the same mass-media logic: they take place at highlysymbolic places and times, they use metonyms (a synagogue to meanIsrael), synecdoche (claims are always in the name of the whole of Islam)and symbols (burning its flag to declare war on the USA). All this is notsimply well suited to the media, but lives off them, because it simplycould not exist without them.

Far from being a mere residual of atavism, a regression vis-à-vis anaccelerated modernization, Al-Qaeda is a product of modernity.27 It is


thanks to the media and the unification of the global mediatic space thatthe concept of ummah has left the book of theologians to become areality for millions of Muslims around the globe (Challand, 2008). Thenew satellite channels are a sort of soundbox for the spectacular actionsof Al-Qaeda. Think of the new channels in Arabic such as Al-Jazeera.There is a sort of objective alliance between a movement that has noother consistency than the one provided by the images themselves anda few peripheral media, which aim at increasing the audience at anycost. Bin Laden, like Al-Zarqawi, another media star, has learnt the rulesof the new channels’ aggressive and hypermodern journalistic style:short films or advertisements, with brief speeches, easy to place in primetime, carefully thought-out staging, lacking in sophistication in order toincrease the reality effect.

Once again the prevalence of the register of spectacle goes hand inhand with the uncertain status of reality of images. The virtuality andspectacularity of images imply a loss of the link with the ‘here and now’that guarantees the possibility of establishing the images’ authenticity.Suspended between reality and spectacle, the actions of Al-Qaeda,which often follow the virtual logic of simultaneous multiplication, aredifficult to attribute to a definite author. It is not by chance that at firstsight, in the face of the images of the collapsing Twin Towers, manyspectators around the globe wondered whether it was actually real orsimply another special effect. It comes as no surprise to learn that imme-diately after 9/11 videotapes representing the towers in flames accom-panied by scenes from Hollywood films went on sale on the Chinesemarket: it was as if the real event, the huge towers collapsing on thou-sands of people, was not enough and only Hollywood imagination couldrender the proportions of the catastrophe.28

4 The Video-Christian Civilization

Fundamentalism is not the prerogative of Islam. The most widely knowncase of the mediatization and politicization of religion is that of evan-gelical preachers who became famous precisely through their massive useof the modern mass media (Pace, 2007: 166). The phenomenon of theso-called ‘electronic church’ started in the USA at the end of the 1970s,in the aftermath of the Vietnam War, when the country was in searchof its new identity. By reaching people directly by phone or through thetelevision, evangelical preachers base their discourses on the infallibilityof the Bible and the mutual dependency of politics and religion (DeKerckhove, 1990).

It is through the media that evangelical fundamentalists wage theirwars against abortion, for the exclusion of Darwinism from school


curricula, for the introduction of systematic preaching in schools, etc.The means for collective mobilization is the religious performance oftelevision anchormen who transmit moving messages, by making use ofthe register of spectacle – people crying, live miracles, etc. The result isthat in 1989, spectators already amounted to 60 million Americans eachmonth (Pace, 2007: 166).

Once again here we are finding the signs of the transformation ofthe imaginal analysed above; in the first place, in the use of spectacularand virtual images. Evangelical fundamentalists also make use of spec-tacular images and very often images that possess an uncertain statusof reality (think of live miracles).29 It is true that fundamentalists remaina minority and an extreme one at that. They cannot be taken as repre-sentative of the variegated forms of politicization of religion today. Still,precisely because they are extreme cases, the two examples analyseddemonstrate in a conspicuous form the transformations I am talkingabout. If we afterwards move on to analysing less extremist forms ofreligiosity, it will not be difficult to find similar processes taking place.

The reason for this is easy to see. On the one hand, religious move-ments and associations that do not want to abandon the possibility ofmobilization offered by the new media can but come to terms with thelogic of the mass media. The latter rely on the spectacularizationimposed by the golden rule according to which we can speak only ofwhat can capture the audience’s imagination. The mass media tend tovalue and give visibility to forms of religiosity which potentially producemedia events, that is, events that contain a potential for spectacle andexceptionality.

Take as an example the travels of Pope John Paul II. The televisiontreated them as a series of performances by a telegenic star, insistingmore on the image of the exceptional character of the pope, always ableto overcome difficulties and attract huge crowds, than on the religiousmessage itself (Pace, 2007:165). As Guizzardi observed in his analysisof the media coverage of these travels, the charisma of John Paul II wasspecifically mediatic, because it could not have existed without themedia. The latter were the first and real followers of Wojtyla becausehis charisma was constructed through them and vis-à-vis them. Wojtylawas such a pope precisely owing to his capacity to produce images ableto move even a medium by nature as cynical as television with its strictgolden rule of the audience (Guizzardi, 1986). Every gesture of Wojtyla– his travels in difficult conditions, the appearances at St Peter’s with histrembling hands, kissing the ground – was a media event. The last onewas his exit from the stage: the gospel opened on his coffin, the pagesfluttering in the wind, the same wind that had been one of the crucialscenic elements of his television performances. A few days afterwards,the media were reporting the dead pope’s first miracles.30


There seems to be something intrinsic to religion which makes iteasily subsumable to the mass-media logic. The latter relies on the twofundamental ingredients of personality cult and spectacle, and religioncan easily provide both of them. The register of religion has alwaysincluded both ingredients: charismatic characters and extraordinaryevents. It is such homogeneity between the language of the media andthat of religion that creates a sort of virtuous circle, which explains thenature of many forms of the politicization of religion today. Religionsare given a crucial choice: they can come to an agreement with the massmedia and become thus a mass-media commodity in their turn, or remainbelow the line of visibility that only the media can guarantee and try tosurvive in the cleavages of society (Pace, 2007: 164). In the latter case,they must face the possibility of a complete oblivion.

Conclusions

Certainly there are no univocal or easy recipes to break with the circlecreated by the mediatization and politicization of religion. For the reasonsI have tried to illustrate above, they cannot but reinforce each other. Inan epoch where politics oscillates between being simple administrationand the empty spectacle of itself, religions are deemed to be acquiringan increasingly greater role in the public sphere.

This creates a crucial philosophical-political dilemma: how can wereconcile such an increased role of religion with the principle of auton-omy? As I have suggested above, reconciling the project of autonomywith the new role of religion in the public sphere is easier from the pointof view of the reasonable than of the imaginal. The reason for this iseasy to see: the imaginal is much more insidious and pervasive than thereasonable and can, therefore, be dealt with less easily through the law.Once religious contents have been massively inserted in the imaginal,they cannot easily be limited to the sole ‘informal’ part of the publicsphere, as in Habermas’ solution. Religious contents risks explodingwithin it, invading both its informal and formal parts.

In a context in which religion has such an increasingly public role,it is much easier to answer the question ‘How can I be autonomous?’in the sense of the reasonable (to give oneself one’s own law) than toanswer the more complex ‘How can I be at the origin of what will beand know myself to be so?’ in the sense of the imaginal. In dealing withsuch a question, we cannot neglect the danger that threatens contem-porary politics: if the latter, taken between the Scylla of the reductionto mere technique, on the one hand, and the Charybdis of empty spec-tacle, on the other, decides to unconditionally open the doors to reli-gious resources, it risks being phagocytized. In the contemporary political


condition, the risk is therefore not so much that religion is becoming a‘conversation-stopper’,31 but rather that it is turning into an ‘inflamer ofpolitical imagination’, something that can rekindle the political imagin-ation but may also burn it out.

Università di Firenze, Italy

Notes

1 For instance, according to the critics of the concept of secularization,religion has never completely disappeared from the public sphere (Asad,2002). Peter Berger, a former supporter of the secularization thesis, nowradically concludes: ‘The world today, with some exceptions to which I willcome presently, is as furiously religious as it ever was, and in some placesmore so than ever. This means that a whole body of literature by historiansand social theorists loosely labelled “secularisation theory” is essentiallymistaken’ (Berger, 1999: 2).

2 According to Dworkin, America’s religiosity is not new. What is differentis the political militancy, aggressiveness and apparent success of fundamen-talist religion. The fact that Roman Catholic and evangelical priests openlycalled for John Kerry’s defeat or that a group of bishops said that anyCatholic voting for him should be excommunicated is an example of suchan aggressiveness (Dworkin, 2006: 53).

3 It is still debated as to when this process began. According to Gilles Kepelthe ‘revanche de dieu’ starts in the 1970s (Kepel, 1991).

4 On the Middle East see, for instance, Halliday (2005: 193–228) and An-Na’im (1999).

5 Arendt’s The Life of the Mind remained uncompleted as a consequence ofher death. On judgement as a model of validity, see Beiner and Nedelski(2001) and Ferrara (2008).

6 For a more detailed analysis, see Bottici (2008).7 On this point, see Castoriadis (1987: 125).8 See, for instance, the way in which the definition of the real has changed

from antiquity to the Middle Ages and the modern epoch (Bottici, 2007:ch. II).

9 On the definition of autonomy, see Castoriadis (1987: 101 and 1982: 479).Translations are mine unless otherwise indicated in the bibliography.

10 On this definition of politics, which derives from the original Greek adjectivepolitikos, see Bobbio (1990: 800). Note that for Bobbio such a definitionof politics includes the social, while in Arendt’s terms it excludes it.

11 The reference is to Anderson’s ‘imagined communities’ (Anderson, 1991).12 On this definition, see Weber (1978: I, §.17; IV §.1, 2).13 On this, see Ferrara (2008: ch. 9).14 For this genealogy of the concept of governance, see Bottici (2006) and

Cochrane, Duffy and Selby (2003).


PSC

15 On the contemporary use, see the classic Rosenau and Czempiel (1992),Bottici (2001).

16 David Held has been insisting on this aspect since the 1990s, underliningthe structural reasons for the much debated crisis of democracy (Held,1995).

17 A celebrated aphorism on the limits that nature sets on political power,which Dicey borrowed from an 18th-century writer and made famous,reads as follows: ‘It is a fundamental principle with English lawyers, thata Parliament can do everything but make a woman a man, and a man awoman’ (Dicey, 1959: 43).

18 On this point see, for instance, Eder (2003).19 See note 16.20 Empirical studies on the influence of the media, such as the classic Berelson,

Lazarfeld and McPhee (1954), mainly focus on the competition amongofficial candidates. But the real power of the media starts before, in thevery selection of those political options that are acceptable and those thatare not. On the way in which the media deprive political elections of theirsubstance, see Newman (1999).

21 Think, for instance, of the huge mass of films, books and exhibitions onJesus Christ or the crusades. For an analysis see Bottici and Challand(2006).

22 For instance, Kepel observes that the category of fundamentalism wascoined within the Christian world and cannot easily be applied elsewhere(Kepel, 2006).

23 This is the title of a documentary produced by the Japanese National Tele-vision NHK (NHK, 2004).

24 In this and what follows, see in particular Kepel (2006) and Kepel andMilelli (2008).

25 On the composite nature of Islamist movements, which find their followersamong the middle class and the urban poor, see Kepel (2006).

26 The fossilization of the political regimes in most of the Arab world reachedits peak at the beginning of the new millennium, when, in the face of rapidchanges taking place elsewhere, they kept inventing new strategies to justifyan anachronistic authoritarianism (Owen, 2004: 1–22, 131–53, 219–40).

27 On the modernity of Al-Qaeda, see Gray (2003).28 The anecdote is reconstructed in Buruma and Margalit (2004: 13).29 See, for instance, the website: http://www.liveprayer.com/index.cfm which

provides a ‘Live prayer miracle center’.30 A woman suffering from Quincke’s Syndrome told the media that exactly

at the moment of the pope’s death at 9.30 p.m. on 2 April 2005, she sawthe pope blessing her and since then she has been able to breathe normallyagain (Guizzardi, 2005: 13).

31 This is Rorty’s famous expression (Rorty, 1999).


PSC

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The Politics of Imagination and the Public Role of Religion

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