Asset Details
Do you wish to reserve the book?
Post-Linguistic Acts and the Worshiped Invisible
Hey, we have placed the reservation for you!
By the way, why not check out events that you can attend while you pick your title.
Oops! Something went wrong.
Looks like we were not able to place the reservation. Kindly try again later.
Are you sure you want to remove the book from the shelf?
Post-Linguistic Acts and the Worshiped Invisible
Do you wish to request the book?
Post-Linguistic Acts and the Worshiped Invisible
Please be aware that the book you have requested cannot be checked out. If you would like to checkout this book, you can reserve another copy
We have requested the book for you!
Your request is successful and it will be processed during the Library working hours. Please check the status of your request in My Requests.
Oops! Something went wrong.
Looks like we were not able to place your request. Kindly try again later.
Journal Article
Post-Linguistic Acts and the Worshiped Invisible
2026
Overview
For communities on the margins of hostile or indifferent power structures, the political order can be experienced as a force whose acts are not motivated by reasons in accord with recognizable norms. Power, then, as a social phenomenon, is naturalized in the sense that it is dehumanized. Derrida explored some of this territory in his final seminar, the Beast and the Sovereign. Power becomes a latent animality, structuring social life as it removes itself from mechanisms of accountability. At the same time, the Black church ritual, in the United States and elsewhere, provides an experience of a self-sustaining power, whose invisibility is taken as coextensive with its omnipresence. The act of worship becomes a project of counter-habituation whereby power can be constituted as just and life-affirming. Simone Weil’s spiritual writings on the necessity of God’s love can be of some assistance here, but her concern with “decreation” is on its face a self-erasing theological enterprise, the sociopolitical implications of which would seem to put it at odds with a movement, among marginalized people, toward increased recognition. A look at the relation between Weil’s writing method—which I analyze as a kind of endophrasis—and Edmund Husserl’s transcendental understanding of the self provides a way to reorganize our understanding of the sociocultural project supported by the ritual. To grasp the counter-habituating project of the ritual, we must see it as founded in non-linguistic thinking and post-linguistic acts. These acts are, in part, improvisational, which is a key to habituating the recognition of higher-order necessity through free activity. They bring the worshiper “through” culturally determined linguistic acts to another kind of experience, in which the freedom to worship an invisible God is manifest.
