Powers of Distinction ─ On Religion and Modernity

In this book, philosopher of religion Nancy Levene probes the elemental character of religion and modernity, and their relation to each other. Her focus is the structuring role of distinction, such as the distinctions between the one and the many, us and them, God and history, but also a neglected or ?missing” distinction that she calls fundamental to modernity. There are, Levene suggests, two concepts of religion. The first always deploys two terms, whether to oppose them or collapse them into identity: one and many, reason and history, soul and body. The second understanding of religion, however, refuses to oppose or collapse such terms, but regards them as standing in mutually supportive relation. Levine is interested in the promise and paradoxes of the second of these concepts of religion. This ?dualism of mutual relation” refuses the logic of identity (the reduction of many to one) as well as opposition. Rather, it forges them into cooperation through the work of interpretation. But Levene argues that this principle of inclusion is also a distinction??that it is paradoxically distinction by which inclusion comes to be possible.” This argument allows Levene to propose a new way of understanding modernity: that the distinction of inclusion is the very principle of modernity, associated with values such as democracy, pluralism, and critique. And yet this principle of modernity confounds our sense of modernity as an epoch, for it is latent, Levene agues, even in biblical antiquity. An ambitious, challenging, and genre-bending book, ?Powers of Distinction” will help readers see fundamental problems of religion, secularity, and modernity in new ways.

Nancy Levene is associate professor of religious studies at Yale University. She is the author of Spinoza’s Revelation: Religion, Democracy, and Reason.