The question before us now is that of the future of continental philosophy of religion, but before such a question can be answered we have to analyse what is really being asked. To speak of the future is to speak speculatively, so to speak of the future is to do philosophy. This concern with the future is not only a matter of love and romance, but structures all our endeavours, including our intellectual attempts to make sense of the world we have been thrown into. The embrace of a lover is given over to the reproduction of the species, to the continued world-building and world-sustaining project of a forever deferred future that requires the undermining and the deferral of pleasure now. That rush of panic and fear, lying in bed, holding another in your arms, no longer in the moment, but thinking, 'How are we going to afford this?' The moment of impropriety gives itself over to propriety and the concern for property. 'Plan for the future', comes the demand, 'Plan for me'. Everything is a program 'for the future', a time that is said to be on the way, to be coming, and that dominates and harasses us now. To hear people talk, no one much cares for the present. The article concludes by suggesting other perverse lines of relation that may be opened up when one gives up on the reproduction of the discipline. These models are explored both in terms of their historical context and as providing a different image of the work that can be carried out in the discipline of continental philosophy of religion.
Here we find abortion prized over the future of the race, miscegenation over blood purity, and impotence and infertility over the sovereign power of the father. Appealing neither to secular reason nor to established traditions, we draw on the Malleus Maleficarum (as read through queer theory and non-philosophy) to craft various models for thought. The article goes on to sketch out a position against the reproduction of continental philosophy of religion by taking on and celebrating the discipline’s improper nature. This anxiety is traced through three processes of reproduction: intellectual reproduction, disciplinary reproduction, and institutional reproduction. By locating the philosopher’s anxiety within a wider anxiety of reproduction we begin to understand this anxiety through the queer anti-social critique of Lee Edelman. This article analyses the anxiety concerning the future of continental philosophy of religion as an anxiety of reproduction. This anxiety exists because as a discipline continental philosophy of religion lacks a clear claim to an identity. There has been a generalised anxiety concerning the future of continental philosophy of religion as a discipline, with a number of books, articles, conferences, and presentations taking up this theme.