"The Sacred Commons: Reconstructing Hegel, Religion, and National Memory" turns to a new interpretation of Hegel in order to understand two "sacred" sites constructed by secular states: the National September 11th Memorial in New York and the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe in Berlin. As "countermemorials"—memorials that work to subvert traditional forms of national identification—these sites aim to express and thematize the complex relationship of national subjects to their nations. The central challenge these sites address is how to render compatible the imperatives of a secular, pluralistic society while also constituting the nation as a moral community. I argue that Hegel's social theory adumbrates this central concern, elaborating a model of "participatory freedom" that both accords individuals deliberative space to reflect on the framework of social life and entails that the social institutions in which they participate are found worthy in their eyes. Hegel's idea was that art and religion provide primary modes through which subjects come to express and thematize their relationship to social institutions. I claim that these national memorials serve a similar function, allowing national subjects to navigate the push and pull of national identity, particularly with respect to the nation's "sacred" spaces. These memorials do so through their "interpretively open," minimalist designs, which encourage individuated viewers to actively engage with national memory. Understood in this light, these "countermemorials" work to conscript visitors as authors of national memory and as authorities with respect to the determination of what the nation holds "sacred." In this way, national religiosity and secular individuality assume complementary, rather than simply antagonistic, form. Yet the national dimension of the memory that these memorials concretize raises the issue of how these nations unjustly commemorate some lives, and not others, and allow some, but not all, to participate in the nation's memory work. Further, as national memorials, they may inhibit forms of trans- and post-national identification that might serve as vital responses to the very events they seek to commemorate. Ultimately, the dissertation asks what a "sacred commons" could look like outside the nation-form.
Le, David Micah,
"The Sacred Commons: Reconstructing Hegel, Religion, and National Memory"
(2017).
Religious Studies Theses and Dissertations.
Brown Digital Repository. Brown University Library.
https://doi.org/10.7301/Z00K270K
