I was invited to publish this paper on Baudrillard and rather took the opportunity to dismantle postmodern Continental philosophy in the process. Nevertheless there have always been strong possibilities for the green shoots of the spiritual life in postmodern thought, and here they relate to the everyday, as pointed to in Baudrillard's photos of urban scenes.
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This paper explores an approach to the question of Baudrillard and religion via the Ricoeurian hermeneutics of suspicion. It elaborates on the deliberately ambiguous term ‘hermeneutics of suspicion denied’, parsed as either as a ‘(hermeneutics of suspicion) denied’ or a ‘hermeneutics of (suspicion denied)’. The former is considered as the naive religionist’s position, i.e. a rejection of Continental philosophy, while the latter uses that tradition against itself in a knowing denial of suspicion. When performing this move on the Baudrillardian canon – including his photographs – it leaves a space for religion inflected by the rejection of totalising structures. Other possibilities also open up, the most promising of which is perhaps a religious practice of the quotidian relating to Baudrillard’s ‘singularities’ as contextualised through the Buddhist concept of ‘tathata’ and Mauss’s ‘gift’.
Keywords: Baudrillard, hermeneutics of suspicion, Ricoeur, Continental philosophy, singularity, negative theology, tathata, gift, Marx, Freud, Nietzsche, Foucault.
First published: International Journal of Baudrillard Studies, Vol. 16, No. 1,
Year: 2020, no of words: 8088
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