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The Red Thread of Christianity
Abstract
Mas examines Anidjar's response to Nancy in order to argue against readings that understand Anidjar's treatment of the concept of Christianity as indiscriminately referring to secularism, globalisation, the West, or Westernisation. In Mas's reading, Christianity is simply a conceptual instantiation of the continuity between, of, and from civilisational and imperial power. Mas argues that to understand the discursivity of Christianity as a concept is to examine how its shifts and expansions are organised, deployed, and put into movement by power. Mas then goes on to ask what a concept is, and thereby semantically uncovers the functioning of power at the moment of the “is.” This insistence on the question of power allows Mas to unpack and develop the problematic that lies behind Anidjar's engagement with the nature of the concept as a polemical (and thus dividing, separating, and isolating) exercise within the grammar it has mapped out. This polemical exercise functions as the expansive moment of “Christianity” in its conceptual extension to “religion” (and also to “secularism), an extension that is divisive in function and thus operative of power.
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References
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