RELIGION AS THE CARNIVAL OF THE SECULAR: HISTORICIZING THE HISTORY OF RELIGIONS

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Abstract

Robert A. Yelle’s Sovereignty and the Sacred: Secularism and the Political Economy of Religion explores the apparent convergence between “the central categories of politics and religion respectively, based on their shared qualities of rupture, singularity, and antinomianism” (18). Contemporary secular political economy rests, he argues, on something like religion. But to make good on this claim, Yelle must confront a challenge: modern polity and economy seek to legitimate themselves through the disavowal and erasure of precisely those antinomian impulses on which, according to Yelle, they in fact depend. Sovereignty and the Sacred is thus also a polemic against false consciousness and ideological mystication, a sustained critique of the impoverished historiography of what might be called methodological secularism. However, it does not fully escape the frame of reference Yelle explicitly rejects, for the history of religions inherits a secular understanding of its subject matter. Like Max Weber’s account of charisma,1 which Yelle analyzes as a secular mytheme (see chapter 2), the category of religion has functioned historically as part of a supersessionistic strategy to displace and contain the antinomian. My aim in this essay is not to reject Yelle’s argument, but to push it further, toward a reexive consideration of its vantage point. Early in the book, Yelle remarks that the sacred may constitute a “mode of sovereignty” and that his “interest is in exploring the analogy between the two categories” (13). He develops this analogy partly through a comparison of Rudolf Otto’s account of the sacred2 and Carl Schmitt’s account of sovereignty.3 Both, Yelle notes, involve states of exception, moments of rupture in which the prevailing order is suspended. These states of exception can be found, on Yelle’s account, in moments of Sabbath, Carnival, and Jubilee and in paroxysms of founding or revolutionary violence. The point, for Yelle, is not to valorize the Dionysian at the expense of the Apollonian, but to insist that every polity, every social order, requires both. These irruptions are something not so much to be celebrated—they can be dreadful—as to be acknowledged and responsibly managed. “If every economy appears bound to contain its moments of antinomianism, of return to primal chaos, then the ethical question becomes one of how to direct such moments” (185). The brunt of Yelle’s critique is thus directed not against structure per se, but against accounts of that structure, such as those provided by social contract and rational-choice theories, that fail to acknowledge or