Abstract: This essay follows the recent criticism in Melville studies along the lines of religion, secularization, and the questioning of a Melvillean aesthetic sense of democracy. It suggests recognizing the idea of radical democracy in Melville’s oeuvre—and more specifically in Clarel —as the accidental supplement of his spiritual search, without locating the seeds of democracy in theology, or vice versa. In Clarel , Melville explores the hermeneutical and existential significance of religion in the process of a political genealogy of religion itself. At the end of this process, Melville formulates the sheer incommensurability of both theology and politics. However, the discovery of such an incommensurability stems from an embodied exploration of theology in Clarel that gives its shape to politics and to an idea of democracy in the form of radical egalitarianism. The aim of this essay is not to read a theological origin of democracy in his thinking, but to recognize the possible analogies between these two realms, without confounding their ontologies—that is to say that they entertain a relationship of irony , which gives rise to a specifically Melvillean philosophy of secularization. Taking into account the recent reappraisal of radical democracy and of skepticism in Melville’s texts, this essay suggests an existential understanding of skepticism through the lens of twentieth-century German hermeneutical theology and existential philosophy as defined in the works of Rudolf Bultmann, relying on his concept of “demythologization.” This approach will be complemented by the political philosophy of Hannah Arendt—a key thinker of radical democracy, and also Bultmann’s student in theology—with the aim of delineating a religious, existential, and political phenomenology specific to Melville’s Clarel .
Caroline Hildebrandt (Sun,) studied this question.