Derrida, Agamben, Wynter
This chapter explores the way race and religion are articulated together in the work of leading critical theorists Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben. It probes how these theorists stand on the border between philosophy of religion and theology, and it argues that it is only because of secularist assumptions that this divide between outsider’s philosophy of religion and insider’s theology can be maintained. For Derrida, both religion and race function as loose threads that can be pulled in order to unravel a system of thought. For Agamben, the protagonist of modernity, homo sacer, is both racialized and sanctified. Yet Derrida and Agamben’s accounts are skewed by a Eurocentrism and a failure to take religious ideas sufficiently seriously. The black feminist Sylvia Wynter offers an antidote, similarly linking race and religion but doing so in a way that attends to how racialization is produced theologically and goes hand in hand with patriarchy. Wynter’s work implies that philosophy of religion that refuses secularism is always black theology and that black theology must engage seriously with questions in philosophy of religion.