Contagion: Journal of Violence, Mimesis, and Culture

ERADICATING THE FALSE SACRED, TRYING TO LOCATE ANOTHER SACRALITY

To try to recover something of the religious framework that is inextricably connected to the history of apophatic thought amid the emancipatory claims of various modern nihilisms, I find it helpful to consider how contemporary philosophical views have worked steadily toward an eradication of the false sacred in our world in order to produce nothing more than an empty space that might nonetheless yield the possibility for something like a source of sacrality to appear—though being careful to refrain from making such suggestions for the most part. Though such possibilities flirt with the utopian, they may also highlight a religious sense of grace that is also a necessity in our world though seemingly coming from beyond it.

For example, Giorgio Agamben has suggested that the main task facing humanity today is one of "absolute profanation," a restoration to common use of what had once been deemed sacred.¹ In response to this call for an "absolute profanation," the philosopher Slavoj Žižek has wondered, at what point does an [End Page 111] absolute profanation become ground zero for what is considered sacred in the first place?² As a decidedly Hegelian proposition and adding to this Žižekian line of inquiry, what if the removal of all that was once considered part of the dynamism of the sacred became the only way to access something like the sacred once again, but this time, for real? What if an act of absolute profanation revealed the true stakes of what the sacred actually was, beyond our ability to inscribe it into human traditions and institutions (and as opposed to the mere suppression and concealment of the sacred, or what becomes the secular in the modern age)? Even if what was experienced "for real" were merely an empty space, as Žižek contends, the insight gained would be inestimable, even if practically speaking nearly impossible to sustain as a legitimate principle of social and political order.

Comprehending an absolute profanation as the only possibility for the sacred to enter our world—as is, I might suggest, an intimacy without established or defined relations, as Agamben defines love—becomes something like a "second naïveté," in Paul Ricoeur's sense. It is a chance to see the world anew after the previous conceptions have been deconstructed. This "second naïveté" lies before us as a genuine possibility in the wake of apophatic methods that have been utilized throughout centuries of Christian discourse, as well as in contemporary philosophical terms, without reference to actually existing political or institutional configurations. The key for Agamben to overcoming the violence of the (false) sacred, as he states explicitly, the task of overcoming the varied apparatuses of this world that construct the human being into particular norms based on given theological signatures, is precisely this: ending the mechanisms of sacrifice that ceaselessly construct and divide the human being.³ Though Girard himself has been more embracing of sacrificial themes after his initial critique of them,⁴ Agamben's overlap with the thought of René Girard on this issue is significant, if understated, and it is for this reason that I want to turn directly to Girard's thought as the backdrop behind everything else that follows in this essay.

Though Girard has been more nuanced than his continental-philosophical interlocutors through his defense of established religious structures, there has lingered the sense that his theories open a Pandora's box of nihilistic sentiments. It is precisely in this manner that I find it helpful to recall the theologian John Milbank's critique of the work of Girard. In brief, Milbank had wagered that Girard's thought was an entirely negative enterprise focused on eradicating the false sacred from our world by rendering the single victim mechanism inoperative without putting something else in its place.⁵ Girard's project, by this count, is not just apophatic, but nihilistic, providing the possible end of most [End Page 112] institutions and traditions in our world, without conceiving of what a truly just order might actually be. Every...