Agency Without Transcendence

Scholars of religion have objected to the dominant liberal model of agency, whereby it is equivalent to autonomy, indeed transcendence. According to its critics this liberal conception of agency limits our ability to understand the lives of religious persons. Hence, these scholars look to Judith Butler's ‘paradox of subjection’ in order to fashion a theory of agency that is compatible with the construction, and thus subordination, of the subject. I argue that Butler's theory fails to reconcile agency with the construction of the subject. Moreover, I show how this failure is attributable to her unwitting reinscription of the theistic residues of liberalism, whereby power is figured as transcendent and antagonistic. I then utilize Elaine Scarry's theory of making in order to disentangle the agency of wounding and the agency of making and to render a materialistic account of ‘relative agency’ that is productive for the cross-cultural study of religions.