I especially want to thank whoever it was a couple of days back for
suggesting the Marotti and Jackson essay, which I've since read and
found thoroughly illuminating.
It certainly supports any skepticism you (Dan, or others) may have
about religion/culture/politics as categories of analysis, though it
does so by way of the same late Derrida I was advocating recently, and
does it a lot more clearly than I've been able to. The authors are
particularly shrewd in linking the major weakness of new historicist and
cultural studies criticism to the main focus of Derrida's work in the
nineties. That is, they note that the new historicism tends to make a
fetish of the "other" without adequately theorizing alterity, and winds
up "othering" early modern religious language and experience in part as
a consequence of this weakness. Derrida comes back to this question
through a critique of Levinas and his engagement with the problem of the
"other" in phenomenology. Hence the special relevance of Derrida's late
"turn" to ethics and religion for the "religous turn" in Renaissance
studies.
Oh, and the authors do obviously acknowledge that there's been work on
religious figures and discourses all along. What they see changing is
the prominence of such issues in our efforts to define the period and
our relation to it.
David Lee Miller
Professor of English & Comparative Literature
University of South Carolina
Columbia, SC 29208
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