Gourgouris's point is to disrupt the co-dependent relation between the religious and the secular-hence, his rejection of fashionable languages of postsecularism-in order to engage in a double critique of heteronomous politics of all kinds. For him, secular criticism is a form of political being: critical, antifoundational, disobedient, anarchic, yet not negative for negation's sake but creative of new forms of collective reflection, interrogation, and action that alter not only the current terrain of dominant politics but also the very self-conceptualization of what it means to be human.
Written in a free and combative style and given both to close readings of texts and to gazing off into the broad horizon, these essays cover a range of issues-historical and philosophical, archaic and contemporary, literary and political-that ultimately converge in the significance of contemporary radical politics: the assembly movements we have seen in various parts of the world in recent years. The secular imagination demands a radical pedagogy and unlearning a great many established thought patterns. Its most important dimension is not battling religion per se but dismantling theological politics of sovereignty in favor of radical conditions for social autonomy.
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