Underpinned by the assertion that religion remains key to ‘reorient[ing] the understanding of modern life’ (3), Nancy Levene's book swiftly and effectively refutes the challenge of scientism, a position which ‘holds the opponent in place as a ghost in the system’ (256), and the oppositional logic of ‘new atheism’. ‘If one does the close reading of scholarship,’ Levene coolly notes, ‘judgmental questions will simply not arise’ (40). Evaluating religion, she implies, is one of the least interesting ways to approach it. Exchanging evaluation for understanding, as she does, results in no less ambitious a project. Rather, this is an audacious and impressive book, whose bold readings of canonical figures – Anselm, Spinoza, Vico, Kant, and others – are located in an intellectual framework where central terms – religion, history, truth, God – are themselves subject to review. That this book is engaging and illuminating, despite divesting with stable terrain, is testament to Levene's intellectual agility and insight.
The book pivots on the question of modernity. Of the numerous definitions that Levene offers, perhaps the most useful is the simplest: modernity, she maintains, is ‘the critique of divisive borders in support of inclusive ones’ (65). Unexpectedly, yet reflective of the often counter-intuitive reasoning the book advances, it is Abraham, called to think beyond the limitations of kinship to a more inclusive community, who represents the logic of modernity. If we accept Levene's definition, it follows that ‘the unfinished business with religion’ (249) continues to have political stakes. Connecting the book's varied chapters is the belief that modernity, both an epoch and a concept (219), is worth pursuing. Unsurprisingly, given Levene's thesis that ‘modernity is the primacy of labor’ (229), the reader is invited to participate in the shared labour of thinking. Levene draws her sources from literature as well as philosophy and theology, and is methodologically unyielding; ‘there is no effort to write continuous prose’ (24), she warns. The setting out of terms in the opening chapter demonstrates the scope and complexity of the project; there is, of course, no single definition of modernity, or of the ‘composite term’ (105) religion. Under ‘conceptual scrutiny’ (3), both terms split: religion, first, into the opposition between natural and supernatural, and second, into a practice of inclusion and interpretation, the ‘realm of the modern’ (195), which supersedes the opposition within the former. It is Levene's justified contention that the latter remains largely unthought. In turn, modernity is doubly divided: both externally, in relation to non-modernity, and internally, in relation to its own temptation, the betrayal of inclusivity. In combination, these definitions disturb any simplistic identification of modernity with a critique of religion (4).
In the following chapters, Levene tracks these complex figures of religion and modernity. Committed to a regeneration of modernity as the drive towards inclusive community, she looks to thinkers who read religion aside from its Latin etymology, contesting the stranglehold of ‘social and intellectual power’ held by Christianity ‘in the West’ (40). Accordingly, Durkheim enables a sustained focus on the relationship between social structures and religion, and Said's critique of Orientalism facilitates an examination of the nature of history. Levene's uptake of Said is, however, partial. In employing a problematic binary between religion and the secular (dependent on the first definition of religion that Levene articulated), Said overlooks the critical heritage of religion and its relationship with modernity. ‘In setting aside religion,’ Levene argues, ‘Said unwittingly sets aside criticism’ (98).
Thinker by thinker, Levene questions our assumptions about who or what has ongoing operative value for modernity, generating expansive, thoughtful readings which run counter to a ‘twentieth-century critique of “metaphysics” [which] needs reformation’ (173). Accordingly, in his sustained pairing of ‘criticism and orthodoxy’ (37), Descartes is framed as paradigmatic of modernity, Kant is ‘a critic of the Kant he became’ (172), rendering the work of Nietzsche interpretative rather than corrective (173). Twinned provocatively with Badiou through the figure of truth, Anselm, Levene contends, pre-empts modernity by demonstrating, through the ontological argument's focus on the limits of the human, that ‘[t]he realm of God is also the realm of the secular’ (145). Already lauded for its radicalism, Spinoza's legacy nonetheless needs rethinking, disentangling both from the ‘secular radicalism that was foisted on him’ (172) and from a materialism which ‘overcorrects towards the body’ (185). More recent thinkers are exhibited to distinguish Levene's project. The ‘blind spot’ (142) of Foucault's work on epochal specificity is that it cannot, or rather does not attempt, to think ‘the history of history’ (143). Social theorist Niklas Luhmann faces a similar charge, the mistaken assumption that modernity marks a chronological break after which humans cease transcendental aspiration. Not only does Levene expose this glorification of disillusionment as another illusion, she follows the practice of disillusionment, of critique, to its religious roots. Biblical scripture, she reminds us, is sharply ‘mindful of its own corruption’ (99), delivering ‘not human perfection but the struggle to keep faith with human nature and its critique’ (99).
Even in such a rich volume, some conversations inevitably remain unfinished; had there been space, the hermeneutics of Gadamer and Ricoeur, the work of Levinas on alterity, and Kierkegaard on subjectivity, might have enriched these discussions. Given its thematic and methodological similarities to that of Levene, Derrida's work is a curious omission, particularly as Derrida retains the lesson of Kant (and others), ‘[t]hat nothing important is possible. That everything important is impossible’ (219), a lesson forgotten, as Levene shows, by many of Derrida's twentieth-century contemporaries. Indeed, deconstruction – a double task combining ‘criticism’ with ‘orthodoxy’ – finds an ally in Levene's portrayal of modernity. Levene's book is striking and persuasive; its greatest strength is to render freshly compelling the renewal of modernity, a project which is necessary, impossible, and ‘never complete’ (30).
