Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Andrew Cole is Associate Professor of English at Princeton University. He is the author of Literature and Heresy in the Age of Chaucer.

D. Vance Smith is Professor of English at Princeton University. He is the author of Arts of Possession: The Middle English Household Imaginary and The Book of the Incipit: Beginnings in the Fourteenth Century.

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"An uncompromising riposte to the notion, in Medieval Studies as elsewhere, that critique is dead and that we should quietly return to tasks of description. A potent demonstration that without critical theory, modernity and the medieval are unintelligible."--David Wallace, author of "Premodern Places: Calais to Surinam, Chaucer to Aphra Behn"

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The Legitimacy of the Middle Ages

Duke University Press

Contents

Acknowledgments........................................................................................................ixIntroduction Outside Modernity ANDREW COLE AND D. VANCE SMITH..........................................................1The Sense of an Epoch Periodization, Sovereignty, and the Limits of Secularization KATHLEEN DAVIS.....................39The Sacrament of the Fetish, the Miracle of the Commodity Hegel and Marx ANDREW COLE..................................70Empire, Apocalypse, and the 9/11 Premodern BRUCE HOLSINGER............................................................94Response More Than We Bargained For MICHAEL HARDT.....................................................................119We Have Never Been Schreber Paranoia, Medieval and Modern ERIN LABBIE AND MICHAEL UEBEL...............................127Medieval Studies, Historicity, and Heidegger's Early Phenomenology ETHAN KNAPP........................................159Medieval Currencies Nominalism and Art C. D. BLANTON..................................................................194Response Medusa's Gaze JED RASULA.....................................................................................233Afterword On the Medieval FREDRIC JAMESON.............................................................................243Bibliography...........................................................................................................247Contributors...........................................................................................................269Index..................................................................................................................271

Chapter One

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Periodization, Sovereignty, and the Limits of Secularization KATHLEEN DAVIS

This moment of suspense, this pokh this founding or revolutionary moment of law is, in law, an instance of non-law. But it is also the whole history of law.-Jacques Derrida

"Where is the now?" The challenge of this question lies less in its riddle than in its suggestion that we must not answer. Were we to supply a location for "the now," for a present already made strangely singular yet ubiquitous by the definite article, we would privilege a specific position-whether cultural, geographic, economic, political, or technological-as the perspective from which a "present" is made apprehensible. We would thus be proposing a particular content, and by extension a set of potential meanings, for the apparently global time of "the now." In short, we would periodize. Through its trick of catachresis, this question redirects us to the "where" of our own speaking position as the premise that makes it possible to say "now," and to the periodizing structure shared by this subject position and any conception of a global moment or politics. At its most extreme, this question references the global violence we witness today and reminds us that every faction engaged in this economic, religious, or ethnic strife must attach not only to a legitimating history but to a theory of history, not only to a particular claim upon "the now" but to a conception of how "the now" can be thought.

I take the question "Where is the now?" from Dipesh Chakrabarty, who raises it as a challenge to scholarship that presupposes a "certain figure of the now" in its approach to current political dilemmas, insisting that "how we periodize our present is connected to the question of how we imagine the political," and that the insufficiently examined historicity of fundamental concepts-such as religion, secularism, democracy, and politics-renders the logic of many events across the world unrecognizable to dominant strains of critical theory. The history of these fundamental concepts is also the history of medieval/modern periodization, consideration of which is essential to any rethinking of critical theory and its limits.

This essay focuses upon the problem of "secularization," which as a term suggests the transference or transformation of something from a "nonsecular" to a "secular" status, whether that something is a plot of land, a priest, a government, or an attitude. As an ecclesiastical term since early Christianity, it has referred to the movement from monastic life to that of secular clergy, and as a legal term in European history after the Reformation it refers to the expropriation of ecclesiastical rights and property. In a less concise and far more controversial sense, secularization has been understood as a periodizing term that attempts to narrate the modernization of Europe as it gradually overcame a hierarchized and metaphysically shackled past through a series of political struggles, religious wars, and philosophical upheavals. This is the familiar Enlightenment "triumphalist" narrative of secularization-for which the privatization of religion, along with the freeing of the European imagination from the stranglehold of Providence, came to mark the conditions of possibility of the emergence of the political qualities designated "modern," particularly the nation-state and its self-conscious citizen. The temporality of secularization in this sense is qualitative, and its underside is the history of colonialism, empire, and slavery. This triumphalist narrative is fast losing credibility as current controversies over secularization, coincident with the "resurgence of religion" in many parts of the world, including the United States, have exposed the historicity of its qualitative story.

My interest here is in the role of medieval/modern periodization in the constitution of the fundamental categories in question, and how taking this periodization into account can make a difference in understanding the contours and implications of the debate. The belief in a break between a medieval and a modern (or an early modern) period ever more intensively assumes world-historical implications for categories such as the sovereign state and secular politics-that is, categories with both ideological and territorial stakes. For exactly this reason, the "Middle Ages," like "modernity" before it, has been vaulted from a European category to a global category of time. This globalized Middle Ages operates in two conflicting ways. On the one hand, literary and political history-whether of Europe, Asia, India, or Africa-is increasingly organized along a conventional medieval/early) modern divide. According to this scenario, the world moves in unison, in tempo with a once European story written at the height of, and in tandem with, colonialism, nationalism, imperialism, and Orientalism. On the other hand, the "Middle Ages" is a mobile category, applicable at any time to any society that has not "yet" achieved modernity or, worse, has become retrograde. In this mode, it provides a template for what Johannes Fabian has aptly termed the "denial of coevalness."

Our coming to terms with medieval/modern periodization, to put this more forcefully, is prerequisite to addressing the disavowal by "secular" politics of its founding paradox-a disavowal that, despite all good faith efforts (toward justice or freedom, for example) has enabled and continues to enable the sanctification of particular vested interests. The theory of...