A Genealogical Critique of the Turn to the Sacred

Conservative claims to sacrality ground a social/political order by appealing to external sources (e.g., Carl Schmitt’s exceptional sovereign and Mircea Eliade’s axis mundi). Progressive claims to sacrality, meanwhile, often treat the sacred as an externality that cannot be subsumed within the existing order and thus offer a resource by which to challenge it (e.g., more recent work by Barbara Sostaita and An Yountae). Despite their differences, both of these discourses suppress the Christian genealogy of the sacred that shapes its use in the academy. The result of this obfuscation is to reinstate the sacred/profane binary rather than challenge it, thus also rescripting its binaries and the modes of domination they secure. This presentation returns to the sacred/profane binary as constructed by Rudolf Otto to address the limits of the turn to the sacred and to suggest that new vocabularies are needed in the postsecular turn.