I am interested in addressing the question of the possibility of secular critique (with the use of the visual m eans; through images) of the politics of memory which project the sacred status of the victims/witnesses/survivors and/or of the historical events. I wish to point to the shift in artistic practices from the commemoration of the past (i.e. the celebration of memory) to the critique of the very fra m ework in which memory operates and the individual and collective identities are being shaped vis-à-vis the historical event, the Holocaust, and its aftermath. I am interested in the crisis of sorts caused by the shift in question and numerous accusations of violence practiced by the artists on the one hand, and by the authorities undertaking the acts of censorship of theartefacts (works, exhibitions, etc.) in the name of the protection of the “sacred” status of the victi m within a certain community.
I would like to take a closer look at a couple of examples, among others, Zbigniew Libera's Lego. Concentration Camp (1995), Santiago Sierra's 245 cubic metres (2006), and Artur Zmijewski's Game of Tag (1999). In the light of René Girard's Violence and the Sacred, I would like to discuss the conditions of possibility of secular (or postsecular) critique of m e m ory practices which tend to be framed very much in secular-like context. Based on the acts of iconoclas m can one talk about the treat m ent of the Holocaust as a paradoxical, secular sacred? How does that work in the light of the abuses of identification, e m pathy and speaking on behalf or even in the place of the “victim .”
I am interested in the notion of the violent image or the i m age-wound which “hurts” the collective identity and disturbs the consensus as to the vision of the past and the affective division of subjective positions. How is this wound operating and what could be its relationship to the practices of critical thinking and i m agining? How should such an i m age be treated by the “hurt” collective and what are the good and the bad solutions? Finally, where in this context can the notion of respect of feelings be located and what role does it play.

Piotr Filipkowski
(Warsaw University)
Testimonies of Violence and Postsecular Memory Studies

In the last two decades or so tens of thousands oral and video testimonies with “survivors” of different atrocities have been conducted, collected and made accessible for research all over the (so far mostly ‘western') world. What kind of sources are these stories? How can (or maybe should) we interpret them? What are the limits of these interpretations – if there are any? Or maybe yet another, more naive question: should we believe them? These questions are very simple but – if taken seriously – do not lead to easy answers.
There is a serious ‘irrational” uneasiness embedded in survivors' testimonies. They are not, or not only, historical but first of all m oral testimonies (refer to Avishai Margalit and Aleida Assmann distinction). This moral and “sacral” dimension seems to make these testimonies problematic for rational, critical and secular academic thinking. Deconstruction is suddenly replaced by silent and attentive confirmation. A critical approach is replaced by an ethical one. In the paper I will examine whether the interpretative framework offered by “postsecular memory studies” might help to answer questions asked above from a different perspective.

Jiang Peng, Chen Qineng
(Chinese Academy of Social Sciences)
Humanist Thought in Indian Buddhism

Religion is sacred. Buddhis m as one of three great religions in the world (Buddhism, Christianity, Islam ) is sacred too. If we could find the humanist thought in Indian Buddhism its sacred character should be more obvious. There existed two ideological transformations in the process from the period of Gautama to Secreted Buddhism. One was the theory of Madhyama, another was idea of “atman hiding in the lotus flower”. The first emphasized Samutpada and Sunyata, so the Buddhism dharma could be developed. It meant the World was Nirvana. The fundamental purpose of Gautama could be to have been the popularization of Buddhism.
The second told us that both the world and Buddha lived in the lotus flower, and Tathagata was still hiding in the flower, just as the seed of the lotus was still hiding in the flower, as being pregnant. When petals fell the lotus seeds revealed themselves. So the idea of “atman (self)” appeared. It means everybody are part of the Buddha. But on the lotus throne except for Tathataga there was also world. It means the objective world and Buddha in the heart of person were the same thing. It was the idea of “identification of Brahma with atman”. The appearance of this idea helped Indian Buddhism to give up nihilism and merged with Hinduism . The famous Indian philosopher S. Radhakrishnan said that an understood Buddha is not a Buddha but an artificial thing in people's heart. In a certain sense this thing existed in Universe. The fact that people can detect the truth means that people have the ability to do it. The conclusion is that in the late Indian Buddhism there was humanist thought. The difference between it and Western humanism is as follows. The first m eans everybody could become Buddha but the second means everybody could be free.

Masayuki Sato
(University of Yamanashi, Japan)
The secular turn and the post secular turn in our cognitive frames of counting years: Is the current Christian chronology a theological chronology?

For historians the way of counting years is crucial in historiographical discourse. This presentation will discuss the current use of the Christian chronology from the perspective of the secular turn and the post-secular turn. The Christian chronology now dominates the world. It prevails in the world of historiography and even the virtual realm of the Internet. Moreover, it even occupies the role of a common chronology in non-Christendm: China officially introduced the Christian chronology as the common era (kung yuan) in 1949, replacing the two-thousand year old system of era names (nianhao). The new systm was taken from Soviet Russia, which used the Christian chronology as “our era” (nasha era) since the Russian revolution. Japan and Korea introduced the Christian chronology for their secular chronologies in the 1870s. They called it the "Western chronology" (Jap. seiyokigen; Kor. seoyanggiwon)
The current Christian chronology is not, however, historically correct and has little basis in Christian theology. First of all, the year assigned to Jesus's birth is erroneous, for he was in fact born a few years before the year 1, Anno Domini. Moreover, the Christian chronology starts from the 1st Anno Domini, not the year zero. The concept of zero was not yet known in the West when the Christian chronology was created in the sixth century. Zero came to Europe around the tenth century, from India, via the Islamic countries. Not even the first day of January as New Year's Day also has any relation with Christianity.
Joseph Needham has proposed the idea of chronological expression avoiding the writing of dates as ‘BC' and ‘AD' by the use of ‘-‘ and ‘+' respectively in his Science and Civilization in China. He argued that "such a convention seems also more suitable for civilizations which were never part of Christendom ." In recent years, Jews and some historians have begun to use the notations ‘CE' (common era) and ‘ BCE ' (before the common era). Yet however imperfect the Christian chronology turns out to be, it has become so dominant and international that it cannot possibly be replaced with a new or revised method. All such challenges have so far failed.

Edoardo Tortarolo
(University of Turin, Italy)
Enlightenment > Disenchantment?/ Religion > Violence?

The international discussion of the Enlightenment has been recently rekindled, among the others, by the three-volume, 3000 pages long investigation of J. Israel. This paper will briefly present some of the issues raised by Israel's contentions and will place them in the framework provided by the present discussion on religion, secularization, and disenchantment of the world culminating in the claim that we are living in a post-secular age. Special attention will be devoted by René Girard's contributions to this set of questions, especially in his Violence and the Sacred.

Hayden White
(Professor Emeritus, University of California at Santa Cruz, USA)
Reconsidering "Violence and the Sacred"

Violence and the Sacred provides the basis for a full-blown philosophy of history. Thus, it can be criticized from the perspective of philosophy of history, as well as from that of art and ethnology. It is a good example of a “grand narrative” if the kind which, according to Lyotard is utterly alien to Postmodernist thought and art. Or is the “sacred” of Girard a Postmodern sacred?

Hayden White's review of Violence and the Sacred: "Ethnological "Lie" and Mythical 'Truth'." Diacritics, vol. 8, no. 1, Spring 1978:2-9 (special issue on the Work of Rene Girard).

Malgorzata Wosinska
(Adam Mickiewicz University, Poznan)
Violence and the Sacred in Rwanda:
Re-traumatisation vs. Possession in Local Church Practice

The present paper offers an anthropological perspective on the lived embodied experience of the victims of genocide in Rwanda and how they create their own rituals in the sacred space of church to creatively re-think their traumatic experience and their own vision of history and collective identity. During the 1994-19YY conflict churches were often first viewed as safe shelters for the refugees and then they quickly turned into sites of violent m assacres. Today – when looked at fro m a Eurocentric perspective, the role of the Catholic Church in Rwanda, and in Africa in general, is undergoing criticism for their dogmatisms and their inflexibility on issues such as HIV protection. However, a local perspective shows a very different church, a church, which is involved in rebuilding individual subjectivity and a sense of a collectivity with the violence-marred people. As my ethnographic observation shows the church is the only place were both the perpetrators and the victims meet. This is a sacred space offered by the local African priests for communal use. The space, in which they can undergo ritual possession, which is a local form of effective psychotherapy, an emergent, locally developed ritualistic purification. Through re-traumatisation, it offers a catharsis, which facilitates the psychological healing process at both the level of an individual and of the co m m unity. Interestingly, the European missionaries, who do not share the traumatic past with the local community, seem to be unable to interpret the possession ritual as psychotherapy, but read it literally as a demonic possession and deny the trauma victims the only therapy they have access to.