Representing Religion: History, Theory, Crisis

Since Saussure argued that there is an arbitrary, not a natural, relationship between a signifier and what it signifies, the human sciences have been in a crisis of representation. This volume consists of essays which explore the critical and constructive dimensions of that crisis. The critical dimension focuses on the history of Religious Studies, especially phenomenology, showing how it has been predicated on a transcendental, non-empirical concept of subjectivity (Geist). This led to a universalized concept of consciousness and a dehistoricized concept of experience as central to the understanding of religion. Nietzsche's critique of precisely these concepts, as refined and extended by poststructuralist theorists, is applied to this segment of the history of the study of religion. The constructive dimension of this work combines the methodological insights of Nietzsche, Saussure, Foucault, Barthes, and Bakhtin to form a Nietzschean semiotics (and the adjectival form is meant seriously), which serves as the basis for a new theory of religion. This theory sees religion as the agonistic deployment of semiotic materials both to structure difference and to form trans-generational identities.

Tim Murphy is Assistant Professor of the History of Religions at the University of Alabama.