Space does not extend terrestrial violence and – unlike the alt – it provides pragmatic way of overcoming their K.

(Graeme Wend-Walker is an assistant professor at Texas State University-San Marcos. His research interests include postsecular theory. “The Inexplicable Moon and the Postsecular Moment: The Apollo Program in Two Picturebooks” Children's Literature, Volume 39, 2011, pp. 169-194 (Article) – via Project Muse

DOI: 10.1353/chl.2011.0008)

Certainly, this was an event in which the world found itself reflecting, literally looking back at itself, in a way that had never been possible before—seeing itself through the eyes of Apollo, as it were. Views of Earth as a single entity on which no political border is visible produced a heightened sense of humanity’s shared condition; and simultaneously, a hope that, in a world capable of such an accomplishment, we as a single people might actually be able to address those problems on Earth which some had seen this project as evading. From Apollo 8’s image of an Earthrise appearing over the desolate lunar horizon—an image which “revolutionized public perception of our fragile planet”—to Apollo 17’s equally iconic image of a fully illumined blue marble hanging in the vasty deeps of space—a “photographic manifesto for global justice,” it has been called—Apollo altered our sense of what it is to be human (NASA, NSSDC; Poole, Earthrise plate 18). For all the pride that has been expressed in Apollo, the public response was, and to some extent continues to be, defined thus also by the humility it evoked in recognition of how tiny an accomplishment it really was—“a rebuke to the vanity of humankind,” as historian Robert Poole put it (Earthrise 13, 10). In taking us out away from the Earth, Apollo engendered a new way of gauging proportion—in respect not only to the universe but also to the challenges which faced humanity at home. Neil Armstrong noted that, from the surface of the Moon, he could blot out the entire Earth with his thumb; when asked if that made him feel like a giant, he replied, “No; it made me feel really, really small” (qtd. in Mackie). Though Apollo was not in any conventional sense a divine event, the images it produced of the planet’s collective humanity seem nonetheless to have produced in many what Freud called “the oceanic feeling”— the “feeling of an indissoluble bond [. . .] with the external world as a whole” (36, 37). Numerous religions refer explicitly to union with God, the all, or the infinite, but “one may,” Freud was prepared to believe, “rightly call oneself religious on the ground of this [oceanic] feeling alone, even if one rejects every belief and every illusion” (36).9 Freud here somewhat anticipates Derrida, who in the Gift of Death came to speak also of a kind of religiosity that is “without reference to religion as institutional dogma”—what he called “the possibility of religion without religion” (49). It is the hesitation implicit in such formulations that marks the postsecular as a moment of what McClure calls “partial faith”—a moment, that is, both of “dramatically ‘weakened’ religiosity” and of a “religiously inflected disruption of secular constructions of the real.” And it is here, in this condition of mutualized ontological interference—within a “strategy of perhaps”—that postsecular rhetoric can be seen renegotiating access to the oceanic (Partial Faiths ix, 3, 14). This renegotiation can be seen, for instance, in the “almost” in Poole’s symbolic legitimacy of) an image drawn from religion, while partially displacing it with a nonsymbolic, technologically derived (and hence, seemingly more real) secular counterpart (Interview). As is seen also in No One Walks, where the boy’s experience of the oceanic—“his body [. . .] drifted through the dazzling crescents’ glow”—coincides with the discovery of truth as “the many in one,” the spiritual can be seen to emerge not so much from the discourse of the religious as from the destabilization of the discursive and ontological boundaries that might otherwise have repeated its partitioning.