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Rejoicing: Or the Torments of Religious Speech, by Bruno Latour
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Bruno Latour’s long term project is to compare the felicity and infelicity conditions of the different values dearest to the heart of those who have ‘never been modern’. According to him, this is the only way to develop an anthropology of the Moderns. After his work on science, on technology and, more recently, on law, this book explores the truth conditions of religious speech acts.
Even though there is no question that religion is one of the values that has been intensely cherished in the course of history, it’s also clear that it has become immensely difficult to tune in to its highly specific mode of enunciation. Every effort to speak in the right key sounds awkward, reactionary, pious or simply empty. Hence the necessity of devising a way of writing that brings to the fore this elusive form of speech to render it audible again. In this highly original book, the author offers a completely different tack on the endless ‘science and religion’ conflict by protecting them both from the confusion with the notion of information. Like The Making of Law, this book is one more attempt at developing this ‘inquiry on modes of existence’ that provides an alternative definition of society.
- Sales Rank: #972704 in eBooks
- Published on: 2013-07-11
- Released on: 2013-07-11
- Format: Kindle eBook
Review
"In a book both informative and transformative, Latour may well have succeeded in his aim to ‘reboot the teeniest hint of a beginning of a religious sentiment’"
Southern Semiotic Review
"Rejoicing is a kind of meditation: Latour has composed, in Yeats’ phrase, a dialogue of self and soul.”
Chicago Tribune
"In this honest , profound yet accessible book, a distinguished French scholar and public intellectual carries on an agonized dialog with himself as he faces the obstacles to religious faith today - and then points toward a resolution. As I read, I felt he had climbed into my soul."
John O’Malley, Georgetown University
"Rejoicing constitutes a creative, thought-provoking and impressive blend of, and reflection upon, learning and traditions."
Rebecca Catto, Coventry University
About the Author
Bruno Latour is one of the world’s leading sociologists and anthropologists. He taught at the École des Mines in Paris from 1982 to 2006 and he is now Professor and Vice-President for Research at Institut d'études politiques (Sciences Po). His many books include Laboratory Life, We Have Never Been Modern, Reassembling the Social and The Making of Law.
Most helpful customer reviews
8 of 8 people found the following review helpful.
Religious Language
By Robin Friedman
Religion remains a troubling, divisive matter for many people. By considering the nature of religious language, Bruno Latour offers insights into religion in his book "Rejoicing: or the Torments of Religious Speech". Latour (b. 1947) is a renowned French sociologist and anthropologist whose books show a distinctly philosophical bent. "Rejoicing" is the first of his books I have read. Published in French in 2002, the book has been translated into English by Julie Rose.
The format of the book is unusual and confusing. It is a lengthy essay of 175 pages written without chapter divisions or other clear breaks. Brief subject-matter descriptions appear at the top of some pages. The essay is meditative, introspective, rambling and frequently repetitive. It is also difficult and not a little obscure. It begins with the author referring to the subject of the book and, in the third person, to himself. The opening passage offers a good example of the writing style and themes of the book.
" Rejoicing -- or the torments of religions speech: that is what he wants to talk about,, that is what he can't actually seem to talk about: it's as though the cat had got his tongue as though he was spoilt for choice when it comes to words; as though it was impossible to articulate; he can't actually seem to share what, for so long, he has held so dear to his heart; before his nearest and dearest, he is forced to cover up; he can only stutter; how can he own up to his friends, to his colleagues, his nephews, his students?"
The book has throughout the painful tone of one who has struggle with religious questions.
Latour's focus is on language. The single most important claim of the book is that religious language is separate from questions of religious belief. That is to say, Latour wants to challenge the standard view that questions of religion divide at the outset over a question of belief -- a question whether or not God exists. Latour argues that religious language and its import is separate from questions of belief. This position is in itself not new. Latour develops it well.
Latour also distinguishes religious speech from scientific speech or, as he describes it in one of the many catchy phrases in his book, "double-click" speech. Scientific speech, he argues, may be viewed as mapping. When a person asks "do you believe in the big bang theory" or "are you convinced that global warming is occurring" one is relying on a description of a state of affairs -- is there such a thing as the big bang, global warming, or, say, a unicorn or a zebra. Religious speech, Latour argues, differs from scientific speech in that it does not "map". Latour wants to show by this argument the falsity of the dichotomy frequently set up between science and religion.
For an analogy to religious speech, Latour relies throughout in the situation between two lovers. One asks the other "do you still love me?" An appropriate answer would not be "of course I do" or "I have told you so many times" or "we discussed this last year".
So too, this question in its intimacy and immediacy captures for Latour the nature of religious speech.
The book goes through many long by-ways but returns to this figure of the lovers. Some of Latour's further examples also are illuminating: his discussion of the Old Testament story of Noah, his treatment of the Gospel of Mark, and, especially, his discussion of the impact Fra Angelico's painting of the Empty Tomb had upon him during a visit to Florence. Latour also considers and finds wanting various allegorical or symbolic approaches to religious language, finding the such approaches mask the immediate, transformative demands of religious speech.
There is a strong sense of individual solitude and of connectivity in Latour's understanding of religious language. In a passage closer than anything in the book to a definition, Latour writes:
"By reducing religion to its simplest expression, you could just say that, without it, there would be nobody anymore. Everything would remain in place: nations, societies, persons, worlds, assemblies, collectives, regulations, economies, cosmologies, divinities; the only thing missing would be the making of persons made close because they've been gripped by a form of temporality that no longer goes from the past to the present, but the other way round, from the present to the whole of the past and the future. In this limited, terribly limited sense, demanding to live without religion would come down, in the eyes of that tradition, to living with no presence and with nobody, like the living dead."
Latour finds religion in the human present rather than in a transcendental future. Religious language, like the language of lovers, is transformative in understanding the world rather than descriptive. Latour concludes:
"Why did we lose the use of religious speech? Because we believe religion to be tortuous, as if we needed it to accede to dark and distant mysteries all the way along a narrow path sewn with pitfalls. It does indeed sow obstacles that cause us to stumble, but that's because its ordeals have another spring mechanism; it really is hard, in fact, to find the right words, accurate and precise, to make speech salutary, to speak well of the present." Then, Latour insists, "I haven't taken anything away from the treasure of faith, not one comma, not one iota."
The book includes some highly insightful writing and figures, but the presentation sometimes tends to obscure the message. Readers with their own struggles with religious questions will benefit from this book.
Robin Friedman
4 of 4 people found the following review helpful.
Whither Meaningful Speech?
By K. N.
This book elaborates on a fundamental premise in Latour's work, notably set forth in We Have Never Been Modern (1991; English translation 1993): that the veneration of Science (singular) "has taken the place of the sciences [in the plural]...thereby concealing their prodigious transformations" (p. 22). In particular, Latour is interested in examining how a world defined by Science loses something meaningful in its discourse. Science, he says, is the province of "double-click communication," or a form of mediated speech that grants "immediate and costless access," one that "demand[s] no transformation" on the part of the subject (p. 22). Latour's reference to the double-click of a mouse suggests that communication today, despite its apparent proliferation, in fact has been stultified (and rendered meaningless) by Science's regime of digital technology (to say nothing of social media).
With that premise, Latour's book -- really an extended essay, as there are no chapter breaks -- experiments in recovering a kind of speech (even a "religious speech") that would contest the relative meaninglessness of Science talk. He is after "words that change, alter, shake up" (p. 21), and Latour's wager is that such language can only be found in speech that proceeds from a certain kind of faith. He theorizes religious speech as an expressive mode that resists double-click communication insofar as it exerts a transformative power on the speaker. "There is no religious speech that isn't hesitant, stuttering, embarrassed," he claims (p. 83) -- and such self-reflexivity is precisely why it's valuable in today's world.
I'm sympathetic to Latour's theoretical project, though I can't say I found this to be a wholly satisfying book. The (post)theological insights were thin, and the conflation of religion with faith seemed to me a glaring error. T. M. Luhrmann's When God Talks Back (2012) struck me as a more precise and compelling study of contemporary "religious speech." Latour's book appeared in the original French well before that (in 2002) -- but I suppose that's part of my issue with this edition: it doesn't feel wholly relevant to the present conversation.
3 of 3 people found the following review helpful.
Man Talking To God Talking To Man
By Kevin L. Nenstiel
Try this thought experiment: can you believe and not believe simultaneously? Now notice your speech, your morphology, your interior monologue. How do your faithful and rational sides communicate? French sociologist Bruno Latour attempts exactly this, unpacking human religious motivation and linguistic intent, arriving at some unexpected conclusions. Though not everyone will embrace his dense, theoretical discursus, his conclusions are remarkably timely and revealing.
The Apostles commenced their missions when, on Pentecost, they spoke to everyone in their own language. Latour loves Pentecostal imagery, because it demonstrates an outward orientation: we speak to others, we don't force them to conform to us. Supposedly. Too often, though, adherents and agnostics alike would freeze language in amber, compelling everyone to speak our language, never speaking theirs. We kill language by separating it from its audience. Then we act offended when others walk away.
Latour attempts to bestride the debate, seeking not any facile resolution, but to define the terms. He perceives the struggle between religious and secularized language as essentially contested: that is, the sides take definition from the debate, and therefore cannot win, since resolution robs them of meaning. To communicate with others, we must sacrifice certainty for context. All truth becomes a lie, Latour says, when we try to fix meanings decisively.
This approach requires all readers, believers and unbelievers alike, to sacrifice sacred cows. Latour uses important philosophical concepts in unconventional ways: his definition of "God" will make most theists squirm, and his definition of "belief" runs almost diametrically counter to Bentham and Locke's usage. He thus implicitly rejects both anti-modernist beliefs in linguistic continuity, and Enlightenment belief in temporal triumphalism. Latour doesn't let us consider any concept unquestionable or sacrosanct.
By prodding religious language from both ends, Latour uncovers a profound gap between how devout and secularized people use seemingly interchangeable language. Specifically, he contends, religious language doesn't have what secularized ontology would call "meaning." That is, we don't use liturgy to transfer literally knowable information; we use liturgy to transform ourselves. Arguers straddling today's religious divide get frustrated, because they don't realize the same vocabulary serves incompatible purposes.
Apparently, Latour considers this conclusion subversive, to believers and skeptics alike. Maybe it is, to readers unfamiliar with contemporary philosophy. Latour conflates ideas familiar from authors like Foucault and Bonhoeffer, in a way that more highlights previously unrecognized concurrence than really adds anything new. Basically, he spotlights what seasoned readers didn't realize they already knew. (Lacking either bibliography or index, it's hard to say how deliberate Latour's coevality is.)
Yet it explains contemporary American religious trends. While many Protestant and Evangelical churches embrace Enlightenment rationality, or some derivative thereof, several centuries late, many rank-and-file believers defect to Catholic and Orthodox worship, citing specifically the experiences' antiquity. And though Latour's approach treats "religion" and "Christianity" synonymously, it explains the Pagan resurgence, purporting as it does to restore humanity's oldest, most undiluted worship practices.
Latour attempts to analyze religious discourse from a complete outside perspective, neither believer nor smug academic atheist. He pursues complete agnosticism, meaning he tries to avoid allying himself with any existing religious (or irreligious) doctrine. Thus, he describes attending Mass and following the liturgy without investing any belief in it. He purposes to discuss religion without recourse to God. He thinks this "shocking," but I've read Émile Durkheim.
He achieves this putative agnosticism sometimes better than others. He treats religious credulity more fairly than, say, Freud. His approach invites comparison to Durkheim and Giambattista Vico, and more recent thinkers like John Polkinghorne and Stephen Jay Gould. But his mask periodically slips, permitting glimpses of a limp demi-Marxist undercarriage, laced with open distaste for anti-modernism. He avoids that annoying postgraduate password, lumpenproletariat, but only just.
This book sets new benchmarks for the expression "not meant for everyone." Latour eschews such conventions as chapter breaks, and organizes his ideas in free-association panorama, meaning he runs 174 pages without letting readers pause to collect their thoughts. His dense "école normal" prose requires extreme dedication. Take copious notes; you'll consult them often. Only truly resolute readers should undertake this book, and only with great forethought and caution.
Yet for Latour's intended readers, this intriguing thought experiment will undoubtedly encourage spirited debate and much-needed introspection. It will force marked re-evaluations of dogmas and golden calfs, of both sacred and secular belief. Nobody will embrace Latour's conclusions altogether, but most honest readers will recognize themselves in his polemics. Once we own our limitations, and only then, we become able to speak across the divide.
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