Politics and the Sacred, Cambridge University Press 2015 (original) (raw)
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The model of secularism as the overarching framework for managing the relationship between religion and politics has come under increasing scrutiny in recent International Relations (IR) scholarship, particularly in the wake of the so-called “postsecular turn”. Where once religion was thought to be an entity that was easily identifiable, definable and largely irrelevant to politics and public life, these assumptions are being increasingly brought into question. This special issue makes a specific contribution to this recent questioning of secularism within IR by noting and interrogating the multiple ways in which the boundaries between the religious and the political blur in contemporary politics. Our contributors explore the multifarious dimensions of this critical issue by asking whether the relationship between religion and politics has taken on significant new forms and dimensions in our contemporary globalised age or if we are simply beginning to recog- nise a pattern that has always been present. In this introduction we canvass some of the par- ameters of current debates on the religious and the political. We note that there are multiple and (at times) competing understandings of such key terms as religion, secularism, secularisation and the post-secular that shape and are shaped by ongoing discussions of the relationship between religion and public life. Our goal is not to close down these important points of difference through the imposition of singular understandings. We simply wish to highlight the points of contestation that continue to be significant for how we understand (or obscure) the boundaries between the religious and the political.
Politicized religion: symbolism and the instrumentalization of the sacred
In the following pages, I support the view of various authors who argue that modern secularization has not produced a definitive separation between religion and politics (Beaman, 2003, 2016; Bellah, 2005; Cristi, 2001; Gentile, 1990, 2003; Mosse, 1991). In doing this, I argue that this separation is ‘blurry’ and ambiguous as both spheres share a common element: the symbolic. To demonstrate this, I outline two processes often characterized as ‘inverse’. I begin by outlining the so-called ‘sacralization of the secular’, primarily relying on the works of Cristi (2001), Gentile (1990, 2003), and Mosse (1991). Secondly, I expand on Beaman's (2003, 2016) analyses on the ‘secularization of the sacred’. To illustrate this, I draw upon the recent case of Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil. The case in question allows us to see how the sacred and the secular are the result of socio-political processes of meaning; that being, instances of conflict and negotiation about what ‘secular’ and ‘sacred’ mean. Ultimately, this unmasks the inherent politicization of the sacred in secular modernity.
THE MYTH AND THE SACRED IN THE CONTEMPORARY POLITICAL STRUCTURES
Metabasis - Filosofia e comunicazione, 2019
Inside the process of mythification, the sacred plays a fundamental role: it is that element able to transform representations lying at the core of the collective imaginary up to the rank of authentic myths, in particular social myths. It is important to notice and to remember that nowadays, a myth takes advantage of the sacred as its principal element even if it doesn't possess religious aspects.This paper will focus on these aspects to show how even inside the most secularized society - e.g. the western world - the sacred plays a fundamental role and determines the coming into being, the consolidation, the trans- formation and the decline of all the social myths capable of displacing human communities towards previously unthought directions. The paper will also examine the decisive role of power in its definition/redefinition of worldwide political assets, as well as it becomes interwoven with the dimension of the sacred.
Sacred and secular: Religion and politics worldwide
2011
Seminal nineteenth-century thinkers predicted that religion would gradually fade in importance with the emergence of industrial society. The belief that religion was dying became the conventional wisdom in the social sciences during most of the twentieth century. The traditional secularization thesis needs updating, however, religion has not disappeared and is unlikely to do so. Nevertheless, the concept of secularization captures an important part of what is going on. This book develops a theory of existential security.
Spells of the Sacred in a Global Age
This article argues that quests for sacrality are creative forces in the formation of collective identities in the global age. Shifting the vantage point towards extraordinary politics of liminal globality, the first part captures borderline experiences where political reality is broken and markers of certainty dissolve. Taking the lead from mimetic theory, the second part looks at the ambivalent sources of the sacred. Symbols of peace, reconciliation and order originate in violence. The third part illustrates varieties of the global sacred by looking at the democratic imagination and the politics of humanitarian reason. Finally, the constitutive role of the sacred is examined for the background of cultural frames and with a view to the unconscious and non-agentive drivers of global processes. Rather than a fundamentalist remainder in a secular world or a foundational principle, the sacred is a transitional and processual reality that performs a hinge function that balances the fragility of political reality. Keywords Background, democratic imagination, extraordinary politics, humanitarian reason, liminality, political theology, sacrifice, victimhood
The political sacred and the holiness of life itself
This article reflects on Agamben's formulation of the sacred within the political order of the West, contrasting this with the Durkheim/Bellah view of the sacred/profane opposition, and then presenting two arguments that reduction of the sacred to the political is insufficient, one a form of biological reductionism that seeks to locate the sacred within the common, biological nature of human life itself, the other an abductive argument for human transformation in terms of what Sloterdjik has called 'vertical tension.' This argument turns out to be one for locating holiness in the very notion of life itself that I wish to ground in the idea of social cognition.
On Theopolitics - Introduction: Incarnate Politics beyond the Cross and the Sword [Special Issue]
Social Analysis The International Journal of Cultural and Social Practice, 2020
This introduction outlines an anthropological concept of ‘theopolitics’ emergent from ethnographic engagements with the oldest site of European colonialism—the (Latin) Americas. Defined as a query into the sensorial regimes enabling incarnate forms of power, theopolitics focuses on the sovereignties from below that are immanent in struggles between the universalisms of Christian imperialisms and the autochthonous forces they seek to police and unmake. The articles comprising this special issue advance this query by exploring processes of attunement to the prophetic voices of the dead and the living, the elasticity of incarnate forms of political charisma and crowds, and the potencies of precious matter and touch as domains for rethinking relationships among political anthropology, political economy, and political theology beyond a focus on the state.