Abstract

Ackermann argues that recent changes in French laïcité, such as the law that prohibits wearing conspicuous religious symbols, although introduced to preserve national unity, actually destroy such unity and split in two the lives of those who wear the symbols. Visible religious expression, he argues, can indicate a desire to connect while the privatization of religion is characteristic of fundamentalism. He uses examples from Jewish sacred writings, the lives of important figures, and his family to direct his arguments to Jewish religious fundamentalists. To critical theorists of secularism, he argues that laic France does not separate state and religion but produces a type of religion, one that can only flourish in private; for example, a type of Judaism more like Christianity in its separation of inside and outside, subjectivity and world. He draws on Emmanuel Levinas’s view that subjectivity is not private but fundamentally in relation to others, joining scholars Catherine Chalier, Delphine Horvilleur, and Rachid Benzine, who have used the thought of Derrida, Levinas, and other theorists to argue against fundamentalism, and whose Levinasian–Derridian understanding of subjectivity can be seen to overcome Talal Asad’s concern that secularism is tied to neo-Stoic distancing from religious beliefs and passions.