Postmodernism and the Revolution in Religious Theory: Toward a Semiotics of the Event

While the academic study of religion has increased almost exponentially in the past fifty years, general theories of religion have been in significant decline. In his new book, Carl Raschke offers the first systematic exploration of how the postmodern philosophical theories of Jacques Derrida, Gilles Deleuze, Alain Badiou, and Slavoj Žižek have contributed significantly to the development of a theory of religion as a whole. The bold paradigm he uses to articulate the framework for a revolution in religious theory comes from semiotics—namely, the problem of the sign and the "singularity" or "event horizon" from which a sign is generated.