Until 20th February enjoy free access to Nancy Levene’s full article, ‘The Religion of Confrontation: Concepts, Violence, and Scholarship’, published in Vol. 133 Issue 1, Harvard Theological Review.

One of the challenges of working in the humanities is how best to balance learning from the scholarship of one’s precursors with sensitivity to the contemporary world and the desire for innovation. Arguments and research can fall out of date or call for amendment. Who gets to decide what is current, what no longer so? What are the modes, queries, and issues that should drive research at any given time? Students and scholars respond to these questions in their own ways. Indeed, it can seem at the very center of the work itself to observe which older claims have eerie purchase in the present, what shocking claims no longer shock, which triumphant avenues are now desolate and grown over. It is exhilarating to discover that there is no single rule for thinking. The weight of being responsible to precedent exists alongside the call to change the story—to see changes, to make them.

All of this makes scholarship an adventure, an apt metaphor as long as one considers what has been a righteous obsession of this scholarly present: the recognition that adventures in knowledge are hardly neutral endeavors. Such adventures have not infrequently involved presuppositions and practices that exploit, misconstrue, and wound those “others” who somehow fall outside—where they are not exotically activating—the operating principles of the quest. It is possible to say that this is now an old story. It has been over a hundred years since doubts were voiced by philosophers, philologists, historians, theologians, and social theorists about the ideal at the center of the modern humanities and social sciences: the knowledge of “man,” as it used to be called. The knowledge of human beings. Which human beings? Whose knowledge? Knowledge of what, who, why, to what end? The stories to which these questions gesture may have begun in the past, but they are no less alive in the present.

What draws my interest is the relationship between precedent and innovation when the precedent is itself a moral judgement of its own precursors. It is appropriate to be wary now of depicting scholarship as adventure because of the adventures—whether undertaken or simply written about, authorized—of a class of persons one can refer to as “colonialist.” This term refers not only to political acts of colonization but also to scholarship that expresses ideas legitimating such acts and, itself blind in a way, liable to blind readers and citizens to what is actually going on. The work to get out from under colonialist modes of knowing is doubtless far from over. But there are countless questions, too: about the metaphors involved (getting out from under, surviving, exposing, rectifying), about appeals to reality, about new stories. If one’s precursors have laid down the centrality of ideology to scholarship itself, how does one change the story? This is what my essay is about in considering roads taken by two recent precursors, Jonathan Z. Smith and Edward Said, and one older one, Friedrich Nietzsche. The charge is heavy, the work is not done.