Abstract
For Eliade, linear time constitutes the metaphysical substrate of modernity. Consequently, the modern subject experiences time as an irreversible series of events occurring within an absolutised history. It is this subject that ‘makes’ that history. By extension, this time, and the history it valorises, cannot be transcended. This sets up the modern view against a premodern one where temporality is seen in multiple ways, allowing history to be transcended by archetypes. Eliade mourns the alternative ways of being and meaning cultivated by the premodern self that have been lost to hegemonic modernity and its associated, often precarious, subjectivity. He believes that these archetypal modes need to be recovered to counter the damage caused by modernity’s desire to ‘make history’. I reflect on this Eliadean thesis in the light of the coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) crisis, drawing on an example from the Islamic tradition to show what an archetypal, rather than event-centred, approach to the crisis might look like. Specifically, I examine the thoughts of British Muslim theologian, Abdal Hakim Murad, on COVID-19, who reflects on the phenomenon both in the light of the archetypal Islamic concept of the divine names and the event-centred capitalism of late modernity.Contribution: Through an examination of Eliade’s important text, the article continues the decolonial interrogation of modernity’s foundations and its implications for being and acting in the world as distinct from premodern approaches. By highlighting time in both approaches, Eliade shows modernity’s foundations to be just as ‘theological’ as those of religion.
Highlights
Mircea Eliade’s Cosmos and History (Eliade 1974), in particular its chapter on the ‘terror of history’, can be read as an attack on the notion of event
I analyse a lecture by Cambridge academic and British Muslim theologian Abdul Hakim Murad, who does precisely that
The article suggests that a subjectivity cultivated on transhistorical archetypes offers an alternative to a modern self that seeks to make itself in history, together with the unpredictable consequences that may follow from the latter
Summary
Mircea Eliade’s Cosmos and History (Eliade 1974), in particular its chapter on the ‘terror of history’, can be read as an attack on the notion of event. There is a profound continuity between, on the one hand, the archaic perspective which refuses ‘history’ (events that are irreversible, unforeseeable and possessed of autonomous value) to focus on the ‘now’, and, on the other, the more generally premodern one, encapsulated by the world religions, which whilst acknowledging and tolerating history have in place their own mechanisms for transcending it.
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