This chapter engages the work of two prominent theorists of agonistic democracy, William Connolly and Chantal Mouffe. It analyzes their critiques of liberal theory and Western political thought, both of which, they argue, divest politics of its essential vitality by prizing consensus, unity, and agreement. Commending agonism for its recovery of the ineliminable place of contestation in democratic politics, as well as its appreciation of the generative and emancipatory possibilities of conflict, the chapter then raises the question of political community. Must agonism’s safeguarding of difference and its preservation of perpetual contestation entail the abandonment of the concept of community? I argue agonists are right to worry about the ways appeals to community threaten difference, but contend nevertheless that a vision of collectivity is necessary for agonistic politics to survive the pressures of neoliberalism. The chapter concludes by considering a movement of radical theology that has adopted some of agonism’s central insights but which, I argue, remains captive to a form of analogical thinking that insufficiently attends to the nature of creaturehood.

Chapter 2 critiques two prominent approaches to the question of difference and disagreement. Engaging with John Rawls and Jürgen Habermas’s accounts of “deliberative democracy,” the chapter first argues that discursive approaches to democracy “aim too high.” They overestimate the degree to which a basic “liberal public culture” is secure, and do not provide convincing accounts of how citizens can become (and continue to be) steadfast liberal democrats who will do what it takes to sustain liberal democracy. The chapter then probes “realist” approaches to democracy. Focusing on William Connolly and Chantal Mouffe’s accounts of “democratic agonism,” the chapter argues that realist approaches “aim too low.” They overestimate the ability of sound institutions to channel difference and disagreement, and do not adequately acknowledge the need for a sense of unity to prevent difference and disagreement from spiralling out of control. This chapter concludes that liberal democracy must be supported by a sense of unity that is oriented toward the preservation of liberal democracy and that does not unduly suppress difference and disagreement.

Chapter 1 lays out two common ways of thinking about the relationship between the religious and the secular. The first assumes that secular and religious approaches to the world are mutually exclusive; where one is ascendant the other must be in decline. The second considers the secular and religious to be paradoxically dependent on each other; one is always a curious inversion of the other. I suggest a better, third way inspired by Talal Asad’s Formations of the Secular, Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age, and William Connolly’s A World of Becoming. A scene from Defoe’s The Farther Adventures of Robinson Crusoe (1719), the sequel to Robinson Crusoe (1719), shows how letting go of certain assumptions about the secular and religious can help us notice more of what is happening in the novel. The chapter ends with a brief discussion of what is at stake for literary studies in rethinking the secular, what we stand to lose if we do not and what we stand to gain if we do.