© Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, 2011 DOI: 10.1163/157006811X567751 Method and heory in the Study of Religion 23 (2011) 160-176 brill.nl/mtsr METHOD THEORY in the STUDY OF RELIGION & Is there a (M)other in the Text? Post-theistic Sikh Ontology and the Question of the Phallus Sîan Hawthorne Department of the Study of Religions, School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, London, England sh79@soas.ac.uk Abstract In this paper I examine Arvind Mandair’s retrieval of the posttheistic ontologization of language in early Sikh thought, an aspect which is fundamental for his argument for Sikh postcolonial secularity. However, he frames his argument by drawing—implicitly and explicitly—on a paral- lel modelling of the ontological function of language found in Lacanian psychoanalysis. Whilst finding much to affirm in Mandair’s argument, I query the extent to which its subterranean reli- ance on psychoanalysis runs the risk of replicating the Lacanian marginalisation and ultimate exclusion of female subjectivity (paradigmatically the mother) as a figure of alterity and of lack. I argue that a model that promotes the ontology of language as a liberatory and inclusive politi- cal tool must also account for the gendered and thus potentially exclusory nature of language. Keywords Lacanian Phallus, ontology of language, gendered subjectivity, alterity, Sikh ontology Arvind Mandair’s Religion and the Specter of the West (hereafter, Specter) invites us to rethink the uneasy relationship between religion and secularity. He reminds us of the continuities of ontotheology, even as it simultaneously divides religion and the secular—producing both as universals fundamental to the clarity of modernity—revealing the ethnocentrism and imperialist dynamics of the division. His call to recognise the correspondence between the representations (and productions) of “religious” violence by state, media, and religious studies holds to account the intertwined knowledge constella- tions that continue to domesticate the “religious” other to debilitating effect. His retrieval of elements of the Sikh tradition that produce a discourse of the secular which is not reducible to the bifurcating impulse of western ontothe- ology outlines a shared task for the fields of continental philosophy, the study of religions, and postcolonial theory—namely, the creation of a “global humanities.” Finally, his retrieval of a foundational element of Sikh tradition