Secular Thinking

Secularism is a question regarding assessing the modern world but also one more specifically for the originary hypothesis which, you could say, brings secularization to its conclusion and thereby cancels it. But, if so, cancels it in the name of what? The originary hypothesis finds the origin of the human, of language, and of the sacred in a single gesture. If the sacred is thus bound up with language from the beginning, how can secularization even be imagined? Wouldn’t secularization have to conceal other modes of sacrality, or perhaps negations of existing modes of sacrality—and therefore be nothing but nihilism? But at the same time, if the originary hypothesis locates the origin of the sacred, from where and how is it doing so? Any manifestation of the sacred by definition excludes any other manifestation—even if one accepts that there are various names of god(s) constituting various communities how does one get from there to the concept of “the sacred”? We seem to be caught in an oscillation between “everything is sacred” and “nothing is sacred.” And out of these questions must issue implications for our current social order, which certainly claims to be secular and to make firm distinctions between secular and sacred, relegating the latter to the “private” realm.

I think we can locate the origin of the secular in philosophy, or metaphysics, or the hypostatization of the declarative sentence. If our conversation starts with the question of what is true (or what is good) then we must resort to protocols governing that conversation and those protocols will involve certain rules or processes of logical induction and deduction, dialogue, agreement, assessment of evidence, and so on. We have to agree on what it would mean to agree. Something is or is not the case: we would all be able to agree on one or the other, or on some way to keep the question relevant as a topic of conversation. In that case, the question of sacrality is suspended, because determining something to be sacred and hence the source of the good, the true, etc., would then invalidate the conversation. We don’t begin by pointing to the same thing and then asking what we are doing; rather, we begin by asking what is something we might all point to together. The failure of philosophy is that we must already be on a scene to engage in this conversation—something that is made obvious by the origin of Western philosophy in the Platonic dialogue (people walking around and talking) and concealed by the disciplining of philosophy over the centuries. If philosophy was to start by asking how the interlocutors have found themselves to be upon that scene, and how those topics (the good, the true, the beautiful) came to stand in its center, it would become a different kind of conversation.

The conversation would then have to focus on the break-up of the ritual world that is the real concern of philosophy and the break-up of that ritual world results from the invention of writing, the spread of money and, I will say, the phenomenon that includes both of those, the establishment of “tyranny.” The real topic of philosophy is “tyranny,” which is to say rule that is not ritually established, which is therefore usurped and has no justification and therefore rules through money, which destroys old affiliations and creates new, much more unstable, ones. The rules about what a ruler can do to not be a tyrant are mere backstops, because then you have to start arguing about constitutes a violation of the rules, the severity of that violation, which other bodies (of what “legitimacy”) get to decide, etc. You can bravely oppose a tyrant but only in the name of something that wouldn’t be tyranny, and what would that be? You can try to educate or persuade the tyrant to no longer govern arbitrarily, in which case you need a model of the good, the true and beautiful to present to him and guide him. You could say that philosophy is always complicit with power because all it can do is come up with better ways for power to justify and, at best, reform, itself. And if philosophy is always complicit with power, then the same is true for all “secular” thought, which is to say all the “social sciences” spawned by philosophy: political science, economics, sociology, anthropology, etc. They are all trying to solve the problem of tyranny, which is to say the destruction of sacral kingship, but can only do so by concealment and disguise. And, even more: the destruction of sacral kingship is not, I would suggest, primarily an internal, organic development but one imposed by some external sovereignty, which is to say by imperial conditions that either explicitly interfered with the community governed under sacral kingship or demanded some organized response that only a usurper could provide. The problem of the many and the one is the problem of empire.

I am challenging “secular” thought here and so I used the formulation of “complicity” with power, which sneaks in the presupposition that one could somehow be either “genuinely” opposed to or free of all debts to power—which, of course, I by no means contend. The accusation of “complicity” is ultimately one philosophy makes to itself, as it chases its own tail. I think we can more straightforwardly address the reality of the imperial, which is to say the human usurpation of the sacred center, with its line taking us from the Big Man, through the chiefs, the sacred kings (who can be sacrificed by the people) and the divine kings (who can demand sacrifices from the people). Treating the imperial as a “problem” to be “addressed” and “solved” is of course a kind of secularization, insofar as I am not starting from the presupposition of the divinity of power, something which current manifestations of power in fact prohibit (or with good reason accuse of arbitrariness). So, the originary hypothesis initiates another mode of secularization, first of all in thinking but ultimately in human ordering as well. This mode of secularization involves holding the thread of the center, which is the thread of succession and, ultimately, of social continuity itself. Do we live in the “same” order today as we did yesterday and as we will tomorrow? This question resolves itself into others: are promises made yesterday obliging today? Is debt enforceable—or forgivable? Is my credit good? Concepts like the true, the good and the beautiful take on their meaning in the context of these other questions. And I am asking such questions both inside and outside of their frame: I am keeping a promise, fulfilling an obligation, paying a debt in trying to clarify these questions, even if part of the clarification involves figuring out exactly what and to whom are the promises, obligations and indebtedness.

Rene Girard’s contribution to this mode of secularizing thought that becomes something other than secularization lies in his radicalization of imitation to the point where there is nothing any of us could say, feel, think, believe, that wouldn’t be “touched” by our imitation of others—a radicalization furthered by the introduction of Marcel Jousse’s mimologics and Derrida’s citationality which, if pursued consistently, would have us doing nothing other than iterating one another’s gestures back to one another with the minimal difference any iteration entails. Exhausting, extending, and overturning the other’s gesture in your own implies an ethics yet to be explored. But we need the originary hypothesis for a sign to result from this process, and we get this sign by radicalizing the antagonistic logic certain modes of imitation directed toward possession of a single object lends itself to because here we have the minimal conversion of one kind of imitation into another, only slightly different but completely opposite in its effects. This “miraculous” event is part of what makes the originary hypothesis so hard to accept, for the “secular” (who want causes that can’t be provided here because we have a singular event) and the “religious” (who need a deity to ‘legitimate” their miracles). What would it take for the hand grasping at an object, trying to get there before the others, realizing that singular possession is becoming decreasingly likely, to become a hand pointing to the object, indicating the cessation of that frenzied advance—and for that converted gesture of aborted appropriation to “take,” and in turn be imitated by others in the group. This is a radically secular question because it vigorously displaces an entire field so far covered by “theology” into a hypothesis about a bunch of not necessarily impressive “protohumans” who manage to get something “right” that they’ve probably gotten “wrong” many times already. But the gesture is conferring a new and “ineffable” power upon the central desired object and this first word is the Name-of-God and if the first word names God than what happens to secularism? We’re always just naming God, in that case—“atheism” would just be another, desperate but maybe in some case appropriate, way of doing that, ultimately by naming the “victims” (martyrs) of various religious. “persecutions.”

The equivalent but also the “supersession” of secularism for center study (I won’t make such a claim for Generative Anthropology, leaving that up to its practitioners) is what Eric Gans in The Origin of Language calls the “lowering of the threshold of signification” which makes the development of language possible and allows for the establishment of scenes outside of the formally ritual one. Not every gesture and reference is an immediately life and death situation—which means we provide ourselves with spaces to anticipate and mitigate in advance the life and death situations which will surely continue to arise. But then these other scenes are more in the penumbra of the sacred than outside of it—and the existence of a center implies the possibility of being at a greater or lesser distance from it. Even more, the existence of different locations on a scene, and different “times” on a scene (preparing the scene, exiting the scene, recalling the scene) implies the possibility of scenes within the scene which in turn take on a certain independence. And what the imperial involves in the creation of a meta-scene which includes a series of scenes constrained but not explicitly scripted by that meta-scene. It is within the imperial that we first find a “stack” of scenes, making it simultaneously the origin of the technological, which in turn has its own secularizing and resacralizing effects. We really see the demolition of both sacral and divine kingship in the trial and execution of Charles I of England, even if the results play out over the succeeding centuries—this is where a secular “society” rather than simply local and marginal atheist spaces of thought emerges—while finding its formal theory in a kind of generalization and forgetting of its origin in the radical Puritan sects that deritualized faith. For center study, what is happening here is the multiplication of scenes, macro and micro, upon which the assembled can say “this is the same” in unlimited ways. Finding and creating new scenes upon which we can say “this is same” and thereby say the same thing so as not to do the same thing becomes a self-directed practice, an “end in itself.” This is how the space left by the evacuation of sacral and divine kingship is filled, and center study unconditionally endorses this process and finds itself at home here. Scenes continually generate new scenes which, among other things, single out elements of an already constituted scene as the object of attention around which the new scene is ordered. This process involves something like a radical decentering but, like all decenterings, it creates the material for a new centering, this time one directed at curating and circulating the results of all these proliferating scenes, “standardizing” and “accrediting” them in real time.

But it is the possibility of singling out as a site of inquiry some crucial element of another scene that leaves open the possibility of center study being seen as “secular” in the sense of “anti-religious” because demystifying, debunking, and therefore demoralizing what must be left uninspected or taken on faith for other scenes to “work.” Something as simple as examining the material and political processes that led to a particular change in ritual can easily take away the “aura” required for the effectivity of the ritual—it becomes a problem if some gesture you believed grants you salvation was really a result of some compromise between local clergy, central religious authorities and a sovereign concerned with suppressing a rebellion. But congregations can learn to be unscandalized by such inquiries (while those making them can learn to be less enthused by scandalizing) insofar as any scene must be constructed out of the available materials, which can always be consecrated, regardless of their origins. Even more, “religions” can scale up, growing to fill the space opened by a world governed by a kind of scenicity-in-itself (beyond sacrality and secularity), converting other scenes into the conditions of possibility of receptivity to its own. Christians and Muslims, to take the two most universalizing religions, can no longer expect to govern in the name of their respective revelations without considerable and probably insuperable resistance but they can “prep” other scenes to accommodate and, perhaps on some longer timeline, come to accept that revelation. Your own scene can be designed so as to read the other scenes back to themselves, creating scenes within them that scrutinize their design and workings and find in them elements for constructing meta-scenes of your own. This would turn all “religions,” or all disciplines, into a kind of center study which, of course, is working on infiltrating other scenes in the same way. And may the best mode of deferral prevail.