Noreen Khawaja
· Associate Professor of Religious StudiesYale University · Department of Religious Studies
Active 2013–2025
About
Noreen Khawaja is an Associate Professor of Religious Studies at Yale University. Her academic specialization encompasses 19th and 20th century European intellectual history, with a particular focus on the evolving status of religious ideas and norms in late modernity. Her research explores the fate of metaphysics, the relationship between critique and reform, the nature of realism, and the philosophical, historical, and aesthetic features of the secular. She authored the book 'The Religion of Existence: Asceticism in Philosophy from Kierkegaard to Sartre,' published by the University of Chicago Press in 2016. Currently, she is working on two major projects: a monograph examining the relation between theory and philosophy in the humanities, especially in the study of religion, and a longer work analyzing the emergence of authenticity as a cultural ideal from the early Surrealists to the present day. At Yale, she teaches courses including Existentialism, Critical Theories of Science and Religion, Authenticity, Problems of Secularization, Possession, Religion and Society, Martin Heidegger, Romance and Romanticism, and The Surreal.
Research topics
- Geology
- Art
- History
- Paleontology
- Philosophy
- Aesthetics
- Epistemology
- Literature
Selected publications
Is This Real? Five writers on the line between fact and fiction
The Yale Review · 2025-03-01
article1st authorCorrespondingCambridge University Press eBooks · 2023-11-16
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingThis essay examines the link between eros and metaphysics in “The Seducer’s Diary.” It argues that Johannes approaches seduction as a performative rather than strategic medium, in which the goal is not conquest but a way of playing with reality. The diary, on this reading, allows us to explore the erotic structure of our most fundamental experiences of mediation and serves as a key to understanding the spiritual dimensions of aesthetic existence.
Interlude I: Wayward Intimacies
2022-04-19
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingThe Sublime Modes of Sheila Heti: The novelist as philosopher
The Yale Review · 2022
1st authorCorresponding- Philosophy
- Epistemology
- Aesthetics
The Sublime Modes of Sheila HetiThe novelist as philosopher Noreen Khawaja (bio) Philosophy is a practice of questioning shaped not only by what we ask but also by the attitudes and experiences that lead us to ask in the first place. Today academic philosophy often brackets the circumstances in which concepts first come to be needed. It commits to examining the “content” of truth claims—the concepts “themselves” as abstracted from fields of lived experience—and leaves to psychoanalysis, religion, or literature reflection on the ample rest. And yet, many of the philosophers who have directly impacted how people live have been those whose work refuses a neat distinction between concepts and experiences. Plato’s dialogues, Descartes’s Meditations, Kant’s theory of the sublime, Kierkegaard’s Fear and Trembling, Fanon’s studies of colonial consciousness, Beauvoir’s Second Sex, Arendt’s theorization of evil—the immediacy with which these works speak to readers, resonating far [End Page 136] beyond their circumstances of origin, stems from the fact that they offer something more than keen arguments. These works develop original treatments of the scene of philosophy. Using narrative techniques such as characterization and mise- en- scène, they reveal that the range of experiences yielding fundamental lessons about the nature of the world and ourselves is much greater than we perhaps imagined. Through such works, I’d suggest, the scope of the philosophical project itself expands. Expanding the philosophical project is often the work of those less known as philosophers. Consider Sheila Heti. Heti’s writing has been famously tough to categorize. The two novels for which she may be best known, How Should a Person Be? and Motherhood, have often been read as autofiction, or an entwining of autobiography and the novel. One can see the appeal in viewing Heti’s work that way. How Should a Person Be? is subtitled “A Novel from Life” and focuses on the relationships between a protagonist named Sheila and her closest friends, whose names are shared with their real- life counterparts. Motherhood concerns a writer’s wrestling with the question of whether to become a mother. While the narrator’s first name remains unmentioned, Heti has been phenomenally open in interviews about the book’s basis in her own struggle. She has also confirmed that the narrator’s central method of deliberation—tossing coins to yield yes- no answers where her own thinking stalls—is a technique she herself regularly uses in writing. The “Further Note” that opens the novel thus reads as both fictive feint and methodological confession: “In this book, all results from the flipping of coins result from the flipping of actual coins.” Currents of nonfiction flow through Heti’s work, to be sure. But to view those elements as autobiographical simply because they reflect the author’s life is to claim an answer before we have figured out the question. There is a porous quality to Heti’s novels, a plasticity in the relation between writing and living, which diverges from autobiography’s usual aim to index a life. Literary critics have for this reason noted a connection between Heti’s novels and more didactic, performative genres such as self- help [End Page 137] books and improvisational comedy. (Heti’s 2011 inventive non-fiction work co- written with Misha Glouberman, The Chairs Are Where the People Go, plays with these genres most directly.) But while Heti’s books draw from life, her life is less the subject of her writing than it is a medium or instrument for reflection. Indeed, the real subject of Heti’s novels is often not a character at all but a moral or metaphysical question. How should a person be? What is a mother? And in her new book, Pure Colour, what is the difference between love and repair in a broken world? In other words, Heti’s work is not interested in the correspondence of the mind of the character to the mind of the author. Rather, what is essential is that the character’s search and the author’s search coincide. They need one another in order to proceed. What if we considered the nonfictional elements of these novels...
Yale University Press eBooks · 2020
1st authorCorresponding- History
- Art
- Geology
Yale University Press eBooks · 2020
1st authorCorresponding- History
- Geology
- Paleontology
2018-01-01 · 2 citations
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingThe Journal of Religion · 2018-03-21
article1st authorCorresponding2017-04-24 · 1 citations
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingKierkegaard has long been known as the "father of existentialism." This essay argues that there are three novel ideas within Kierkegaard's authorship that bear out this reputation. First, by radicalizing nineteenth-century notions of alienation, Kierkegaard sketches existence as fundamentally factical or "thrown." Second, he develops a model of penitential choice that forms the background of existentialist accounts of "decision" as redemptive, a way of "becoming oneself." Third, Kierkegaard's notion of "becoming a Christian" shifts theological ideas of conversion onto the terrain of personal identity, re-imagining Christian devotion as an ontological language in which every "doing" is a way of "being."
2016-01-01
book-chapter1st authorCorrespondingAbstract This chapter offers a theory of sin, grounded in a new approach to existential thinking about time and presence. The chapter argues that, despite the intuitive association of sin with inauthenticity, Pauline and Protestant notions of sin had a profound influence on the idea of authentic temporality among existential thinkers. By adopting ascetic notions of conversion within a normative procedure for the philosophy of everyday life, sin became a model for defining authentic existence on the basis of rupture, dispossession, and difference, a model that had a profound effect on late twentieth-century critiques of essentialism.
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