Abstract
This paper puts Agamben in conversation with the topic of secularization. The fit between thinker and topic is quite natural, given that Agamben frequently approaches modernity through a theological archive, takes secularization narratives as the contrast space for his own account of intellectual history, and regularly discusses secularization through the lens of signatures. The result is that his work ends up revising secularization narratives by relocating the source of modernity in a deeper metaphysical regime rather than a past historical moment. The paper begins first by outlining Agamben’s engagement with secularization theorists and concepts throughout the Homo Sacer series. Next, I sketch Agamben’s ontological picture, exploring the “arché” as the backdrop for his analysis of secularization as a signature. I conclude with three ways Agamben’s work might reconfigure our conversations about the secular and allow engagement with new theoretical partners. By turning our attention away from the binaries of religious/secular to the third option represented by the messianic, Agamben revises traditional narratives about the decline of metaphysics, broadens our alternatives beyond the overly-narrow constraints represented by someone like Charles Taylor, and opens the beginnings of a possible rapprochement with postcolonial accounts of modernity.
Highlights
Accounts of the secular often narrate its emergence as a question of continuity versus rupture relative to a past “religious” age of “transcendence.” On these accounts, modernity is taken to derive from what preceded it chronologically, prompting scholars to theorize modernity’s stance relative to that temporal deposit
This includes classic secularization thinkers such as Carl Schmitt or Max Weber, and twentieth and twenty-first century standbys in the form of Hans Blumenberg or Charles Taylor. How might such conversations look, if the contrast space for modernity were situated differently? What if we asked about our continuity with what was ontologically originary rather than chronologically prior? How would secularization narratives shift if we looked to a metaphysical regime that was “deeper” rather than a historical regime that was “older”?
Agamben’s ontology substantially reconfigures stereotypical secularization accounts by refusing any idea of a transcendent ‘before” that declines into an immanent “after,” instead preferring an alwayspresent ultra-historical potency that is routinized through the several apparatuses operating in history – apparatuses that are juridical, political, secular, theological, medical, educational, ontological, ethical, and so on
Summary
Accounts of the secular often narrate its emergence as a question of continuity versus rupture relative to a past “religious” age of “transcendence.” On these accounts, modernity is taken to derive from what preceded it chronologically, prompting scholars to theorize modernity’s stance relative to that temporal deposit This includes classic secularization thinkers such as Carl Schmitt or Max Weber, and twentieth and twenty-first century standbys in the form of Hans Blumenberg or Charles Taylor. This paper takes up that wager in conversation with Italian philosopher and political theorist Giorgio Agamben, according to whom intellectual history offers insufficient explanations of modernity’s rise because it fails to attend to the “ultra-historical” register that runs alongside any given configuration of history In part, this register names the contingency of historical narratives by pointing to the way no narrative is ever total or absolute. By turning our attention away from the binaries of religious/secular and continuity/rupture to the third option represented by the messianic or ultra-historical register, Agamben revises traditional narratives about the decline of metaphysics, broadens our alternatives beyond the overly-narrow constraints represented by someone like Charles Taylor, and opens the beginnings of a possible rapprochement with postcolonial accounts of modernity
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