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Faisal Devji
Faisal Devji
University of Oxford faisal.devji@sant.ox.ac.uk
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Jane Garnett
Jane Garnett
University of Oxford jane.garnett@history.ox.ac.uk
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Ghassan Hage
Ghassan Hage
University of Melbourne ghage@unimelb.edu.au
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Sondra L. Hausner
Sondra L. Hausner
University of Oxford sondra.hausner@theology.ox.ac.uk
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There is a close relation between satire and secularism as the latter came to emerge in Europe. Secularism, as is well-known, gained strength historically as a reaction to an era of European interreligious violence and massacres. It was not only a desire for the separation of church and state, as the classical formula has it. It was also an attempt to keep religious affect out of politics. This was in the belief that religion, because it is faith rather than reasoned thinking, produces too much of a narcissistic affect—that the faithful are unable to ‘keep their distance’ from what they believe in. It was thought that this narcissism was behind the murderous intensity of religiously driven conflicts. Being able to laugh at yourself literally means being able to not take yourself overly seriously. This, in turn, is crucial for the deintensification of the affects generated by the defense of what one believes in and for the relativization of one’s personal beliefs. Such relativization, as Claude Lévi- Strauss argued, is crucial for thinking oneself comparatively and in relation to others (the opposite of narcissism).