Recovering the Vertical. Confronting Religious Violence in a Phenomenological Key

In this paper, I will examine the intricate relationship between religion and violence with a view to its spectacular articulation in contemporary society. In order to do so, I propose to turn to Anthony Steinbock’s work and will draw especially on his conception of verticality. To bring this concept to bear on the problematic at hand, I will evaluate its capacity to consider the specific verticality of “religious experience” and “religious violence” respectively. As to my understanding, “verticality” is not a monolithic concept that can be tracked down easily by way of a classic eidetic-phenomenological description; perhaps it cannot be tracked down at all. I contend that in order to grasp it and assess its vast descriptive scope and analytic power, we need to analyze “verticality” in a generative key. Put differently, we need to pay attention not only to its meaningful articulation on the subjective level but especially to its transformative power on the social and cultural level. It is only in this key that we may get a better understanding of the “dynamic vectors” of “vertical givenness,” its existential structure, as well as its eruptive and disruptive potentials.