Rejoicing: Or the Torments of Religious Speech

by Bruno Latour, Julie Rose (Translator)

Bruno Latour’s long term project is to compare the felicity and infelicity conditions of the different values dearest to the heart of those who have ‘never been modern’. According to him, this is the only way to develop an anthropology of the Moderns. After his work on science, on technology and, more recently, on law, this book explores the truth conditions of religious speech acts. Even though there is no question that religion is one of the values that has been intensely cherished in the course of history, it’s also clear that it has become immensely difficult to tune in to its highly specific mode of enunciation. Every effort to speak in the right key sounds awkward, reactionary, pious or simply empty. Hence the necessity of devising a way of writing that brings to the fore this elusive form of speech to render it audible again. In this highly original book, the author offers a completely different tack on the endless ‘science and religion’ conflict by protecting them both from the confusion with the notion of information. Like The Making of Law, this book is one more attempt at developing this ‘inquiry on modes of existence’ that provides an alternative definition of society.

Genres: Philosophy, Religion, Theology

179 pages, Kindle Edition

First published March 27, 2002

About the author

Bruno Latour, a philosopher and anthropologist, is the author of Reassembling the Social: An Introduction to Actor-Network Theory, Our Modern Cult of the Factish Gods, An Inquiry into Modes of Existence, and many other books. He curated the ZKM exhibits ICONOCLASH and Making Things Public and coedited the accompanying catalogs, both published by the MIT Press.

Reviews

[BlackOxford · Rating 5 out of 5]

Faith Has Lost the World

I do not believe. I do not disbelieve. Nor am I indifferent to religion. Therefore I don’t fit the categories into which I am permitted to place myself. I am not an atheist. I am not a member of the faithful. And I find agnosticism insipid. ‘Seeker’ is a hippie term that implies cultic experimentation which I find puerile and beside the point. ‘Enthusiast’, in the original meaning of infused with the divine, has a vaguely relevant ring but implies far too much emotion. Admirer-at-a-distance, spiritual supplicant, undogmatic disciple, mystical protégé are all somewhat distasteful conditions I would rather avoid. In the world of religion I do not seem to have a conceptual place to lay my head.

Bruno Latour shares my problem. In a sense he solves it by creating a community of the two of us who know the peculiar pangs of religious isolation. Latour doesn’t provide a name for this community, or a new category of religious experience, or a description of the box into he and I might fit, but he does an excellent job of inventorying the contents of this box as well as outlining a programme that might well invite other people to share it. The regime he suggests is one implied by some modern theologians like Jean-Luc Marion but, I think, with more clarity and … well, more respect for non-academics who don’t really care about professional or confessional disputes. So, for me Latour has provided a first-rate thinking person’s guide to religion in the 21st century.

Latour’s basic insight is brilliantly simple and to the point: In religion God is not the issue. More precisely, whether or not God exists is not a question that is in any way relevant to any religion, at any time, among any group of human beings. This is exactly the same point as that made by Marion in his God Without Being (https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). Marion’s thesis is grounded on Christian scriptures. If God is love, he says, then He loves before He exists and therefore exists in a manner we cannot conceive. One might say He loves Himself and everything else into existence and then is present as a sort of dark matter, impossible to detect but necessary to recognise. Both Latour and Marion thereby remove the distracting and impossible issue of ontology from religious discourse.

Put this another way: What you and I, our ancestors, and countless others have seen, felt, observed around us for the last 200,000 years or so has been more or less the same. No, not in terms of landscapes, or technologies, or specific threats to life and limb, but rather in terms of our difference as humans compared with the rest of the world, our mysterious separation from the other animals with whom we share so much, our obviously superior facility with memory, expectation, and reflection which don’t appear to be present anywhere else and which constitute our only competitive advantage in a world that seems dominated by brute strength and thoughtless forces.

Many, perhaps all, of those people to some degree or another, had an insight that what they were experiencing was a reality that they could not quite grasp; and that the reality of their mates, friends, and enemies was not quite the reality which they themselves were experiencing. In a typically human way, they brought these experiences under a kind of control by putting them into words. They could then share these words as if they had just discovered a new species to hunt, or a particularly delicious strain of berry that had been unknown to the clan. If the words sparked positive responses, they might become commonplace in communal discourse as ‘the way things are’. It is even possible to imagine a certain amount of primitive intellectual excitement about the discovery of some new aspect of life. In any case these primitive people frequently appeared to have used the word God to express both the mystery and the reality which they could not quite reach.

In the way of things linguistic (as well as religious) the words used to describe these experiences expand, collect connotations, become more sophisticated, morph into many variations, and take on diverse evocative meanings, often widely different for different individuals and groups. Although this process is unstoppable, there is an apparently irresistible impulse in some people, usually leaders in a religious community, to insist that the evolution of the language used to describe religious experience cease. The result is the identification of official sacred texts, creeds, doctrines, and a concern about orthodoxy, that is, the allegiance to particular texts. God is no longer then what Latour calls “the obvious framework for ordinary everyday things” but an abstraction, a symbol to which we pledge our allegiance… or not. As the symbol is attacked or compromised by facts or the horrid actions of one’s fellow believers, we are left with the mere belief in belief, a virtual world of spiritual Knownothingness equivalent to obdurate ignorance.

The consequences for religious individuals of such a ‘linguistic turn’ are, of course, severe. Those for whom orthodoxy does not express their own experiences are likely to be condemned as heretics and apostates. They will be duly victimised. However the implications for the religious community itself are even more devastating. Quite apart from the likelihood of schism, the insistence on linguistic orthodoxy shifts the focus of the entire community from religious experience to religious language. Quite literally what is considered divine in practice are the words that have been fixed. Gradually the community loses the ability to communicate within itself about their individual experiences at all. At this point religion has lost all meaning except that of tribal membership attested by affirmation of texts, creeds, etc.

Perhaps thinking since the Enlightenment has degraded our ability to talk about God. But not because of a denial of the validity of religious discourse by scientists. Rather it is religionists who have adopted the language of science - particularly the positivistic presumption that words can be reliably correlated with things that are not-words - that destroys our religious discourse. Latour puts the matter clearly: “There’s no point trying to get around this rule: the connection between a religious text and the thing it talks about is not the same as the connection between a map and its territory.” The attempts to break this rule are more down to the theologians than the scientists. Any referent in religious language is beyond our comprehension. Poetry respects this but is taken seriously by neither science or theology.

Surprisingly, perhaps, the recognition by Latour and Marion of the dangers of language to religion were anticipated by Karl Barth, arguably the most important theologian of the 20th century (and also a conservative evangelical pastor). Barth’s lifelong crusade was to convey the distinction between the Word of God, and the word of Man (see: https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...). For Barth even the sacred scriptures of Judaism and Christianity are necessarily human constructions which could not be trusted to do more than inspire a response to the divine presence in the world. Scripture for Barth is not definitive but provocative. When it is considered as more than mere language, it hides the reality it is meant to reveal, and it prevents the communication about reality among us. Barth knew that belief could be poison in religion.

And this is Latour’s point as well. Religious revelation is not constituted by angelic messages from some other world. Revelation is the transformation of individuals who have been provoked to appreciate things differently in this one. The language of religion in modern society has ceased to be provocative. It has not only lost its meaning; it is no longer even audible; its poison has deadened our sense of a shared reality. Contemporary religious language pretends to express something that has no meaning among even many of those who affirm the formulae of faith and belief. This goes some way to explain the apparently contradictory behaviour of many Christians, for example, who take the phrase ‘God is love’ as a mantra to legitimise violence, racism, oppressive and discriminatory legislation, and so on, as an expression of ‘Christian values.’ They seem to realise (and to fear), that their religion has become vacuous, that all they have left is meaningless words which they repeat endlessly in the hopeful arrogance that they might become reality. Latour summarises his view of the situation elegantly: “The world has ‘lost faith’, as they say? No, ‘Faith’ has lost the world.”

[robin friedman · Rating 4 out of 5]

Religious Language

Religion remains a troubling, divisive matter for many people. By considering the nature of religious language, Bruno Latour offers insights into religion in his book "Rejoicing: or the Torments of Religious Speech". Latour (b. 1947) is a renowned French sociologist and anthropologist whose books show a distinctly philosophical bent. "Rejoicing" is the first of his books I have read. Published in French in 2002, the book has been translated into English by Julie Rose.

The format of the book is unusual and confusing. It is a lengthy essay of 175 pages written without chapter divisions or other clear breaks. Brief subject-matter descriptions appear at the top of some pages. The essay is meditative, introspective, rambling and frequently repetitive. It is also difficult and not a little obscure. It begins with the author referring to the subject of the book and, in the third person, to himself. The opening passage offers a good example of the writing style and themes of the book.

" Rejoicing -- or the torments of religions speech: that is what he wants to talk about,, that is what he can't actually seem to talk about: it's as though the cat had got his tongue as though he was spoilt for choice when it comes to words; as though it was impossible to articulate; he can't actually seem to share what, for so long, he has held so dear to his heart; before his nearest and dearest, he is forced to cover up; he can only stutter; how can he own up to his friends, to his colleagues, his nephews, his students?"

The book has throughout the painful tone of one who has struggled with religious questions.

Latour's focus is on language. The single most important claim of the book is that religious language is separate from questions of religious belief. That is to say, Latour wants to challenge the standard view that questions of religion divide at the outset over a question of belief -- a question whether or not God exists. Latour argues that religious language and its import is separate from questions of belief. This position is in itself not new. Latour develops it well.

Latour also distinguishes religious speech from scientific speech or, as he describes it in one of the many catchy phrases in his book, "double-click" speech. Scientific speech, he argues, may be viewed as mapping. When a person asks "do you believe in the big bang theory" or "are you convinced that global warming is occurring" one is relying on a description of a state of affairs -- is there such a thing as the big bang, global warming, or, say, a unicorn or a zebra. Religious speech, Latour argues, differs from scientific speech in that it does not "map". Latour wants to show by this argument the falsity of the dichotomy frequently set up between science and religion.

For an analogy to religious speech, Latour relies throughout in the situation between two lovers. One asks the other "do you still love me?" An appropriate answer would not be "of course I do" or "I have told you so many times" or "we discussed this last year".
So too, this question in its intimacy and immediacy captures for Latour the nature of religious speech.

The book goes through many long by-ways but returns to this figure of the lovers. Some of Latour's further examples also are illuminating: his discussion of the Old Testament story of Noah, his treatment of the Gospel of Mark, and, especially, his discussion of the impact Fra Angelico's painting of the Empty Tomb had upon him during a visit to Florence. Latour also considers and finds wanting various allegorical or symbolic approaches to religious language, finding the such approaches mask the immediate, transformative demands of religious speech.

There is a strong sense of individual solitude and of connectivity in Latour's understanding of religious language. In a passage closer than anything in the book to a definition, Latour writes:

"By reducing religion to its simplest expression, you could just say that, without it, there would be nobody anymore. Everything would remain in place: nations, societies, persons, worlds, assemblies, collectives, regulations, economies, cosmologies, divinities; the only thing missing would be the making of persons made close because they've been gripped by a form of temporality that no longer goes from the past to the present, but the other way round, from the present to the whole of the past and the future. In this limited, terribly limited sense, demanding to live without religion would come down, in the eyes of that tradition, to living with no presence and with nobody, like the living dead."

Latour finds religion in the human present rather than in a transcendental future. Religious language, like the language of lovers, is transformative in understanding the world rather than descriptive. Latour concludes:

"Why did we lose the use of religious speech? Because we believe religion to be tortuous, as if we needed it to accede to dark and distant mysteries all the way along a narrow path sewn with pitfalls. It does indeed sow obstacles that cause us to stumble, but that's because its ordeals have another spring mechanism; it really is hard, in fact, to find the right words, accurate and precise, to make speech salutary, to speak well of the present." Then, Latour insists, "I haven't taken anything away from the treasure of faith, not one comma, not one iota."

The book includes some highly insightful writing and figures, but the presentation sometimes tends to obscure the message. Readers with their own struggles with religious questions will benefit from this book.

Robin Friedman

[Blair Hodges · Rating 4 out of 5]

As far as I can tell, Latour is trying to revive the language of religion in a way that makes faith immediately relevant as opposed to mere recitation of ancient propositional beliefs. He fears his project will annoy religious believers, atheists, and critics of religion alike, as this excerpt summarizing his desire suggests:

"There's no way I can talk about these things if I can't recover the capacity to make the truth, to express reality. I have to be able to talk about religious elaboration without threatening voices—coming from inside as much as outside—immediately asking me to choose: 'Is it real or is it made up?' I have to be able to answer once more: 'Both'" (144).

It will take me several more attempts before I can get a better grasp on his project, but I appreciated his comparison of religious language to the language employed between loved ones—expressing love for each other with all of the entanglements, risks, fissures, disruptions, and ecstasies that such an exchange includes.

[Robert Irish · Rating 5 out of 5]

Latour writes this almost as stream-of-consciousness; it contains no chapter breaks ... you're not supposed to put it down. It is elegant and beautiful. He is attempting to capture a language of religious experience, without the trappings of religious speech. He "speaks" (for it truly feels like he's talking) from the perspective of an agnostic, but one who is steeped in and sympathetic toward (maybe even wishful of) religious faith. For example, he asks:

Alas, what should we call this anti-Pentecost that today forces all the peoples scattered over the earth not to understand, each in his own tongue, the same message, now indecipherable?"

As he steps into this discourse, he takes us along. We encounter his explorations and share them. Whatever our own religious beliefs, we are challenged to experience and express afresh the intangible and elusive, the inexpressible and unreachable. In so doing, we acknowledge that the speech is a "torment", yet one in which we experience our deepest and truest delight.

[Werner · Rating 5 out of 5]

„Man versteht gar nicht mehr, warum man sich nicht versteht“: Latour erinnert mich immer ein bißchen an die Comicfigur Gaston, ein sympathischer trouble maker. Jubilieren: was hat es mit der religiösen Rede auf sich, was sagen eigentlich die Engel? Wie in den Wissenschaften muss man immer erst um ein paar Ecken denken, bevor die Argumentation beginnt („Auch der sichere Weg der Wissenschaften schreibt gerade nur auf krummen Wegen“).Überhaupt die Wissenschaften: während er NICHT über Glaube, Gott, Religion oder Atheisten schreibt, weil das nur ablenken und auf die falsche Fährte führen würde, zeigt er ganz nebenbei, warum er der König der Wissenschaftstheorie ist - immer wieder Szenenbeifall von mir. Und das Hauptargument? Es ist die Liebe, baby. Lustiges, verqueres, überkandideltes, manchmal auch eitles und sperriges Spinnertum. (Spoiler alert: was die Engel sagen? Gar nichts, kein Anschluss unter dieser Nummer. Aber sie verleihen Erneuerung).

[Lucas Pöpel · Rating 3 out of 5]

„Die Welt hat ‚den Glauben verloren‘, heißt es? Nein, der ‚Glaube‘ hat die Welt verloren“ (22)

Ich habe nicht wirklich einen Zugang zu seiner Art zu schreiben gefunden, aber ich teile sein Grundanliegen. Religiöse Rede muss verständlich sein, sie muss in die Gegenwart und ihre Situationen hineinsprechen, ihre Worte müssen lebendig sein und Wirkung entfalten. Er grenzt die religiöse Rede von der Informationsvermittlung ab und weigert sich, die alte, aus der Zeit gefallene Frömmigkeitssprache zu verwenden. Stattdessen verwendet er das Bild von zwei Menschen, die sich lieben. So sollte seiner Meinung nach religiöse Rede sein. Intensiv, berührend und in einer Sprache, die immer wieder versucht, die gegenwärtige Liebe auszudrücken.

Auf die Frage: Liebst du mich? antwortet niemand: Das habe ich dir schon letztes Jahr gesagt oder das sage ich dir immer wieder, sondern die Liebe wird in diesem Moment neu bekräftigt und zur Sprache gebracht. Diese Situation versucht er als Beispiel für eine zeitgemäße religiöse Rede zu verwenden.

Eine ganz nette Anregung, die aber jetzt nicht so vom Hocker reißt.

[Sharad Pandian · Rating 5 out of 5]

Latour here offers a new approach to religion, one foolish to try and summarize (and yet, here goes): Unlike Science which attempts to inform about distant things through unbroken networks, religion does not offer a person any information as much as seek to transform the listener. He makes this case through an analogy with love, arguing that both romantic love and the religious life is about conjuring closeness, and maintaining that fragile relationship constantly. For religion, when this is done right, you don't move from some historic event in the past to the present, but instead move from present to the past, creating/reviving the religious community anew constantly: "diverse peoples finally realize that they are linked by the same history, that in reality they form the same people, because they once more hear the same message in formulae that are all completely different."

This this is a difficult task does not evade him. He lists near the end what it would take to find his view plausible:

Clearly, the list of ills that make it impossible to talk about religion again is growing. No wonder I held my tongue for so long.

We’d need firstly not to believe in belief; well, just about everybody approaches ‘the issue of religion’ by firmly asserting that it’s a good idea to believe or not to believe.

We’d need then to give back some strength to the notion of construction, of fabrication; now just about all religious people and their enemies find themselves agreeing to pit what is real, objective, authentic, historic against what is artificial, invented, fabricated: you’d think the truth, for all of them, consisted in worshipping some image ‘not made by human hand’.

Thirdly, we’d have to make the institution synonymous with innovation, whereas almost all our contemporaries assert that the weight of the institution and creative freedom are as opposed as fi re and water.

We’d need, fourthly, to abandon anti-idolatry, even though the battle against fetishes forms the stock in trade of all critical thinking, that is to say, the only thing left when you’ve abandoned all thought.

We’d need, fifthly, to rehabilitate relativism to turn it into a spiritual virtue par excellence, but only the battle against relativism mobilizes believers and unbelievers, rationalists and irrationalists, progressives and reactionaries alike. You’d think they all preferred the absolute.

We should never have been modern – that way, we’d no longer link religion either with the archaic or with the modernization front; but, alas, we only ever talk about a religion ‘torn between modernity and tradition’.

Lastly, we’d have to renew the holy words individually, whereas, by definition, there is no individual religion, and it’s the whole people of the redeemed who must follow. So, that’s it, at least I’ve done my job, I’ve drawn up the estimate without hiding anything: that is the price we’d have to pay if we really wanted to rebuild the monuments of faith.

It's a fascinating, even plausible account, but I have reservations. It was never made entirely clear how the diverse people are supposed to "realize" they're part of the "same" community through time and space or what "realize" even means here (surely "realise" is a success term?). Also, I had a constant suspicion that comparing what was said vs. its effect is not a symmetric treatment - if nothing else, this allows him to be a little too unconcerned with what specific form religious expressions should take. Finally, I've always found the forcefulness of commandments to be a particularly valuable part of religious life - you're obligated to help the widow, orphan, and stranger under the usual understanding. Under Latour's new approach, the lack of concern with the specificity of expression makes it seem as if anything goes, and not in a good way. However, whether these are criticism as much as my personal reservations, I cannot say.

Latour himself agonies over his proposal enough that it comes off as strikingly raw, even tormented:

I don’t in any way claim that the minuscule layer of meaning I’m clinging to has any kind of privilege, that it might serve as a metalanguage for translating the immense corpus of religious sentiment in its entirety. There is no good metalanguage, as we well know, no standard, no yardstick: the most mawkish phrases or the most elaborate, the most venerable or the newest, the most moving or the coldest become equally right or untruthful according to their sole capacity to make what they are talking about, in the instant, for whoever hears them. The felicity conditions, the tone, the tonality and the rhythm are almost completely independent of the form employed, since what matters is something else entirely which points to itself obliquely, through the discrepancies, the implausible details, the cracks in the message. In religion, as in tone, anything goes. But if there is no right metalanguage, there is no bad or inappropriate metalanguage, either. The only question is one of knowing how we can discern the quality of the utterance and then, thanks to this critical discernment – yes, critical, logical and even rational in its way – link up with all the other layers of meaning thanks to which other persons, who’ve become members of the same people, have tried, in other times and places, to express the same thing in different rituals.

[Taylor · Rating 2 out of 5]

The only thing I got from this was the idea of how, when you love someone, you are "blind" so to speak. We also say we're "Too close to see" when we are overflowing with affection. Latour took that idea and wanted me to apply it to religion.... I thought it was an interesting sort of copy-paste literary device, but unfortunately I couldn't succeed in understanding what he was talking about even still.

I grew up religious and I was once blind with passion for it, so I can sympathize with faith even while I don't believe anymore... but I couldn't for the life of me figure out what Latour was trying to say.

1.8

[Grason Poling · Rating 5 out of 5]

“Hesitation is the thing itself, always to be revived and reformulated.”

Incredible. Latour is the Whitehead/Bolaño lovechild we don’t deserve.

[J. Tim Willis · Rating 5 out of 5]

Excellent

excellent...but difficult content. the style in which it's written is sometimes hard to follow...as are the concepts he's trying to explain.

[Andrew · Rating 5 out of 5]

Bruno Latour believes in the power of love.

Most of this book is a kind of personal journal addressed to an unnamed reader, a journal which systematically dismantles all sorts of attempted religious-epistemic systems, without being so clumsy or graceless (for the most part) as to name them or tag them with -isms. Bruno Latour is sick of normie French Catholicism. He has no time for the ridiculous postures that Trad Caths twist themselves into, and a kind of baffled scorn for Anglo-American Fundamentalist approaches, which are essentially modern. As he reminds us, and he has told us at length, we have never been modern.

The running proof of final resort is an imagined dialogue between two lovers. She asks him, “do you love me?” The reader is asked to pay attention to the ways in which everything hinges on his response. It’s possible for him to destroy the relationship with an affirmative answer delivered the wrong way: “of course I do, didn’t I tell you already? I told you last month.” To not damage the relationship, to affirm and continue it—to create love—requires something else than a simple reference to information that has already been established, or that one might think had already been established if one were foolish enough to think that love is the kind of thing that exists in the same way that information exists.

“Beware of purity; it is the vitriol of the soul.”

All of this, of course, is intended to support an investigation of the ways in which the way God exists is analogous to the way that love exists. What it means to say that something exists is complicated, and there's no way around this. The reader is asked to face up to this through 174 pages of tortured self-examination designed to offend “both those on the inside and those on the outside” of institutional forms of faith. It’s always much too easy to say things that have no truth value, that don’t even rise to the level of being true or false—and yet, it is only by means of speaking that we can take up (again) the journey of love—and yet, as we all know, apologetics is a self-serving project of weak rationalizations that has never managed to convince a single person. We are trying to access not a “pure meaning” that exists spiritually behind a text in a relationship of hidden essence to material representation, but a person that exists behind a stuttering and imperfect utterance in a relationship of person to word. “There is no right way to speak religiously…There is no religious speech that is direct…there is no good metalanguage…the adjective ‘direct’ makes no sense in these matters”—and the retreat to religiously-directed art does not solve this problem either, because what we’re looking for is not aesthetic experience.

Also: notes on the foolishness of anti-fetishist and anti-"idolatry" crusades in the contemporary situation; notes on the relation of all of the above to institutions and politics. Five stars but I would recommend the new reader begin with We Have Never Been Modern. Bruno Latour may be a great Catholic philosopher, but has hidden it well.

[Jack L. Sammons · Rating 5 out of 5]

Latour of Hippo's Confessions

Not for the religious faint of heart, Latour seeks to find a way to speak religiously in our times and, in the process offends, as he says, those within religion and those outside of it. Written in a terribly personal style, more like a very thoughtful (and painful) journal (and journey) than a book, Latour ping pongs his way through the problem, at times brilliantly, at others not so much, but even in the worst of his moves he is fascinating as he slowly finds his way towards an answer (of sorts). So rare it is to find a work of theology that draws the reader in to its puzzle as powerfully. Latour died about a year ago now and with his death we lost something truly unique. If you are curious at all about how it is possible to be religious in our times, if you are a cleric wondering about your role, if you are a parishioner but troubled by the words you utter at church, if you are someone for whom the divide between transcendence and imminence is troubling, read this now.

[Greg Parker · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book would be great if it had a little more structure to it. No chapter divisions, headings, etc. just one long form ramble. Plenty to chew on, especially if you like thinking about language.

[Kingsborough Library · Rating 5 out of 5]

I was not at all expecting a theological book from Bruno Latour, but this is a corker of a work of theology.