Beyond the Secular

<p><b>Investigates through a critical exploration of Derrida's political thought the foundations of modern secular discourse in relation to issues of race and colonialism.</b></p><p>Through an in-depth critical analysis of Jacques Derrida's later writings <i>Beyond the Secular</i> examines the contemporary nexus between religion and politics. Reconnecting these writings to his early works Andrea Cassatella explores distinctive topics that are thematically linked by the theological-political problematic and theoretically informed by Derrida's relational approach to language time religion and politics. The result is a critical investigation into under-examined assumptions of modern secular discourse that questions its binary logics and illuminates such discourse's exclusionary character by tracing its roots in racialized understandings about language epistemology politics and religion that travel worldwide through global processes of assimilatory translation. By exposing the discriminatory hierarchies that the Western-Christian sexualized and racialized presuppositions of secular discourse keep producing and maintaining Cassatella ultimately sheds light on the deep entanglements of secularism with the legacy of race and colonialism.</p>