Ars Botanica: Art, Science, and Comparison in Religious Studies

In this response to Schaefer’s Wild Experiment , we pick up Schaefer’s affective account of science and rationalism in order to follow the decidedly modernist tensions of knowledge production in the field of religious studies. We do so through the contemporary intellectual genealogy of comparison as method, especially as it is configured through the work of Jonathan Z. Smith, in which the analogy of botany figures prominently. We surface within religious studies contradictory aspirations to be both art and science, and we argue that any affective account of scientific knowledge and its others should also make recourse to fantasy and unconscious psychic processes.