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This chapter discusses the different ways contemporary artists re-use religious motifs and the effects of such citations. In the majority of cases their artworks function as a context to turn that religion into a topic, and an object of discussion. The critical potential of contemporary artworks that deal with religious themes lies somewhere apart from art’s rejection or mocking of religion, as blasphemy retains its proximity to the specifically religious power of images. When contemporary artists reuse religious motifs they become counter-motifs. The interest in religion, in its various traditions and guises, indicates a desire for self-understanding by re-staging the past. The multifaceted relationship between contemporary art and religion is examined through a detailed discussion of twelve exhibitions organised between 1999 and 2010, which approach religion and religious art from a variety of perspectives. Many of the curators claim that they are emphatically not religious, nor trying to send a religious message. Including religion in the infrastructure of display associated with contemporary art creates a different visibility in the public space and asks questions concerning such visual practices as iconoclasm; the relationship between commercialism, mass media and religion, and the afterlife of religious art, among many others.

Historically, music as an affective technology and as a source of social cohesion has played a significant role in religious ritual. However, its power to manipulate emotion makes it not only peculiarly conducive to the cultivation of a sense of the otherworldly in religious contexts, but also peculiarly suspect as a force of profanation. Drawing on theological typologies of Christianity’s relationship to culture, this chapter examines a number of issues relating to popular music’s relationship with religion, including the opposition of religion to popular music and the deification of celebrity. The aim, as in the previous chapters, is to examine the significance of constructions of the sacred and the profane.

This chapter focuses the relationship between Agamben’s methodology and that of Michel Foucault, which was one of the most hotly contested issues in the initial reception of the Homo Sacer project. It argues that Agamben’s work involves a critical engagement with Foucault that, through a confrontation with its limits, displaces its method and problems. Clemens argues that this method involves a practice of profanation: it is not a substitute for ‘real action’, but a way of enacting, in the reading of texts, the in distinction between theory and praxis that is central to Agamben’s vision of the ‘coming politics’.

This chapter focuses on the ways in which Niddy Impekoven’s Bach dances and Franz Kafka’s “Conversation with the Supplicant” reenact the embodied tradition of liturgy. It singles out postures of inclination as poses of quiet ecstasy and devout submission to the divine, working closely with Dora Kallmus’s photographs of Impekoven. Impekoven’s posture is read alongside Benjamin’s observations on inclination (Neigung) in the Bible illustrations of medieval miniature painting, which he rediscovers in expressionist art, and which he links to historical instances of collective guilt. It is also read alongside an extravagant reenactment of prostration in Kafka, which constitutes an instance of Agambian profanation. Kafka shows how modified reenactments of a given gestural vocabulary undermine this vocabulary’s conditions of meaning; Impekoven in turn demonstrates how such conditions of meaning can be enhanced.