Fra det religiøse og sekulære til det hellige og profane: «Det religiøse», «det sekulære» og «det hellige» som romlige kategorier sett i lys av begrepshistorie og filosofisk arkeologi

Abstract

The aim of this article is twofold. In the first part, I aim to show how the categories ‘religion’ and ‘secularity’ are separated by being connected to different spheres or spaces. The separation of a ‘religious sphere’, a ‘secular sphere’, a ‘political sphere’, etc. is the ideological outcome of a period in the history of thought we call modernity. Through the tradition of ‘conceptual history’ this separation can, however, be deconstructed. The modern break with the premodern past was less radical than its ideological representation. As I try to show, the works of Reinhart Koselleck and others have demonstrated that the concepts and logics of modernity were partly inherited from what modernity rejected. Thus the modern separation of politics as a specific ‘secular sphere’ (secularism) was just a reversal of Christian political theology. The question is, however, whether beneath the level of conceptual history there is another historical strata that conceptual history cannot deal with. In the second part of the article, I discuss through the work of Giorgio Agamben and his ‘philosophical archaeology’ how ‘any’ logics of separation stems from archaic religion. The distinction between ‘the religious’ and ‘the secular’ sphere thus seems to be a less fundamental one than the archaic distinction between ‘the sacred’ and ‘the profane’. My claim is then not ony that the separation of spheres in modern thinking is conceptually connected to and dependent on Christian theology, but that it also reproduces archaic thought.