Milton and the Post-Secular Present Ethics, Politics, Terrorism [Hardcover]

Our post-secular present, argues Feisal Mohamed, has much to learn from our pre-secular past. Through a consideration of poet and polemicist John Milton, this book explores current post-secularity, an emerging category that it seeks to clarify and critique. It examines ethical and political engagement grounded in belief, with particular reference to the thought of Alain Badiou, Jacques Derrida, J?rgen Habermas, and Gayatri C. Spivak. Taken to an extreme, such engagement produces the cult of the suicide bomber. But the suicide bomber has also served as a convenient bogey for those wishing to distract us from the violence in Western and Christian traditions and for those who would dismiss too easily the vigorous iconoclasm that belief can produce. More than any other poet, Milton alerts us to both anti-humane and liberationist aspects of belief and shows us relevant dynamics of language by which such commitment finds expression. Faisal G. Mohamed has written about this question before, and he expands on his views here. . . [T]he book moves steadily towards the discussion of 'Samson Agonistes', and these are the clearest and most convincing chapters. . . Mohamed's analysis here is subtle and strong. Mohamed (Univ. of Illinois) attempts to establish a dialogue between the presecular thought of Milton and current post secular thought in which the two cultural perspectives mutually critique each other. The writing style is dense, and the book assumes a reader familiar both with Milton and with modern intellectual movements in literary and cultural theory. . . Recommended. Milton and the Post-Secular Presentdefines and critiques the term 'post-secular' as it appears in current thought, bringing its implications into sharp relief by comparison to the pre-secular works of John Milton.Feisal G. Mohamed is Associate Professor in the Department of English and in the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory at the University of Illinois. He is the author ofIn the Anlƒ)