Speaker: Prof. Mark Cauchi (York University, Toronto)
Date: Tuesday 15 October 2024
Time: 17:30
Location: CHBO-418
Abstract
This seminar shall explore the intersections between secularity and coloniality in the modern age through the thought of Bruno Latour, Charles Taylor, and Sylvia Wynter. Coloniality has been defined by contemporary theorists like Anibal Quijano, Walter Mignolo, and Sylvia Wynter as a structure of thought larger than the merely historical processes of colonialism, and which involves the denigration of indigenous forms of knowledge and life practices, the racialisation of human difference, and the vaunting of European instrumental reason and individualism. Coloniality, Prof. Cauchi will argue, is made possible by secularity. Through Taylor and Latour, he will try to show that secularity is the regulation of religiosity, and, through Wynter, that this capacity to control religion becomes one of the markers of colonial difference: European elites in modernity regard themselves as capable of differentiating religion, while they define colonial subjects as incapable of making that secular move, rendering colonial subjects as indelibly religious, thereby racialising religion.
Bionote
Mark Cauchi is a Maltese-Canadian philosopher and cultural theorist in the Department of Humanities and the Graduate Program of Social and Political Thought at York University in Toronto, Canada. His research and teaching are focused on the relationships between secularism and religion in philosophy, politics, and aesthetics. He is the editor of Cinema and Secularism (Bloomsbury 2024), the co-editor with John Caruana of Immanent Frames: Postsecular Cinema between Malick and von Trier (SUNY 2018), and the author of several articles and chapters in publications such as Journal of Continental Philosophy of Religion, Political Theology, Idealist Studies, The Immanent Frame, Levinas Studies, Angelaki, Journal of Film-Philosophy, and The Phenomenology of Prayer (Fordham 2015), among others.
For further information please contact the Department’s Research Seminars series convenor, Prof. Jean-Paul De Lucca.
