What is urgently needed in the many different domains of interest and engagement— the academy; politics; the arts; religious and other types of communities across different societies and cultures—is a commitment to a turning toward the other with a different critical orientation.

What we must together work on is the development of an anthropology, psychology, sociology, aesthetics, performative-expressive and material culture criticism and critical politics of “scriptures.”

The Institute for Signifying Scriptures supports the advancement of this critical orientation, one that is radically different in its con-fusion of practices and its con-founding aims and agenda (signifying).