How shall peoples in the developed and developing world consider problems of religious and colonialist legacies as they impact present and future political culture? In The Politics of Postsecular Religion, Ananda Abeysekara argues that the modern academy's existing critiques are insufficient and will result in no advance in understanding, nor do they bring us any closer to practical resolution and improvement in political institutions.

To do what needs to be done, he argues, one must take risks, and he proposes in the present rather sweeping work to take them. Abeysekara is self-consciously working in the tradition of Jacques Derrida and deconstructionism, and in the process interacts with philosophers ancient, modern and post-modern, from Aristotle to Locke, Kant, Nietzsche, Dewey, Schmitt, Heidegger, Arendt, Foucault, and many others. The product of his efforts is an intensely challenging work, requiring close familiarity with philosophic literature, but worthy of attention — even for those who may doubt the effort — as a clear and engaging statement of deconstructionism applied to political thought.

From the outset, Abeysekara wishes well to those hoping to repair or reclaim Christianity and democracy toward newly tolerant and non-racist incarnations. But, he asks, what are we to do if neither is ultimately capable of reconstruction? We are, he argues, destined to live haunted by “legacies of ethnic cleansings, segregations, genocides, pogroms, and other separatist horrors …” (32). What if all one can do, finally, is “mourn” that which cannot be wholly kept nor left behind?

Abeysekara argues that the past demands of us a new vocabulary. Accordingly, he introduces his readers to “un-inheriting,” defined as “a pathway of reflecting upon the postcolonial conceptions of heritage, history, and identity” (2) that moves beyond the usual options of remembering or forgetting, and embracing or abandoning them. One must un-inherit “one's political-moral-epistemological identity, one's name, whatever it may be — Sinhalese, Tamil, Christian, Muslim” (30). Because neither democracy, modernity, nor secularism allow for us to even begin doing this, a new understanding of the political is necessary for us to conceive.

The classical Greek aporia — a term meaning a contradiction incapable of clean resolution, and utilized extensively by Derrida — he revives here especially in reference to the evils associated with colonialism. Their extent, scope and impact make it impossible for us to simply comprehend, accept, and dismiss them. Aporia, he writes, is neither dead nor alive, “It is that which has survived. It is the ‘trace.’ It is the figure of the ghostly specter” (31). Similarly, his term “im-possibility,” references a point between the possible and the not possible, allowing for a future political life where “one neither forgets nor remembers, receives nor renounces, history/legacy. Rather, one is always haunted by specters of it” (281). Understanding his meaning and use of these terms is an investment of time, but essential to the task.

Abeysekara illustrates his thesis in the body of the text by way of interaction not only with philosophic greats, but with language/cultural experts, regional affairs scholars, and modern political theorists. While some may complain that these come at too rapid a pace, each makes for interesting reading, and together allow the author to explain himself well. For example, in considering the work of Tibet scholar Donald S. Lopez, Abeysekara sees an author recognizing the insufficiencies of Western romanticization about the land and its people, but unable to “think about responsibility to Tibet — responsibility for supporting its cause of independence without recourse to manufactured idealizations and juridical notions about human rights” (93). Lopez is unable to act on this problem because his work is informed by no “concept of the political,” resulting in his and the academy's predominant multiculturalism demystifying but ultimately doing nothing to “un-inherit the distinction between the West and the non-West, us and them” (98).

Most approachable are Abeysekara's several discussions of Sri Lankan ethnicity and postcolonial conflict. He launches his final chapter, a consideration of the politics of “postsecular” ethnics, with a discourse on the Sri Lankan greeting “Ayubowan!” meaning “May You Live Long!”. In this expression of the island's Sinhalese majority, formerly enforced in various ways by the government on Tamil and Muslim minorities, and required still as a matter of policy by employees of Sri Lankan Airlines, Abeysekara sees another “example of a postcolonial nation's betrayal of its secular promise of ‘equal’ citizenship to all its citizens …” (247). Appreciating this seemingly insignificant phrase and the circumstances of its use is “to conceive of an ethical-political domain that demands thinking about the questions of difference and community in a new way that seeks to un-inherit the very distinction of minority/majority” (229).

Of Abeysekara's argument, one might fairly ask whether he has sufficiently examined the varieties of modern democratic forms, and whether he uses the term “democracy” too freely. And students of American political thought will rightly ask whether he has mined the writings of the American Founding, Lincoln and the Civil Rights movement, for recognition of how a nation might address and protect minority rights. Finally, like other critics of the nation-state, one wonders if Abeysekara has fully considered the political character of what replaces it? His attempt to re-imagine the political is understandable, for modernity's disasters for humanity are, of course, massive in scale. And yet, one is perhaps obliged to imagine as well in detail the consequences of a future without the nation-state–not only what could be gained by its disappearance, but what would be risked or lost outright.