Profanations: religious vs secular in the Temple of Western modernity

Any translatio necessarily starts from one side of the bridge, the language­source with the encyclopaedia of meanings that belongs to the translator; and it is this encyclopaedia that tells us a lot about the interpreter, prior to what- is-interpreted in the language-target.

More radically, to carry our daemons out from the Temple of Western modernity, a ‘profanation’ of its boundaries must be provoked. It is, in fact, ‘in praise of profanation’ (to quote the title of a famous essay by Giorgio Agam­ben, 2007) that we can find interpretive hints for our translatio of the essential categories of the ‘sacred’ and the ‘profane’ in different cultures.

The sacred conceptually exists in a dialectic with the profane, and when we place these words in the Western world, a visual space dominates their interpretation; a visual rationality that is grounded on division and separation as described by McLuhan (see section 1.3.3), and confirmed in El Greco’s representation of Christ Cleansing the Temple (Figure 1.1). More specifically, in this visual rationality, the profane does not deny, but rather, re-affirms the sacred by denoting a direction, a position: pro-fanus stands for pro-, ‘before,’ hence, ‘in front of’ + fanum, ‘the temple,’ ‘the sacred place.’ We are precisely ‘in the vicinity of,’ ‘beside’ (hence related to, while separated from) the sacred. A separation between the sacred and the profane defines, for example, what was ‘religious’ in ancient Rome.

The Roman jurists knew perfectly well what it meant to “profane.” Sacred or religious were the things that in some ways belonged to the gods. As such, they were removed from the free use and commerce of men; they could be neither sold nor held in lien, neither given for usu­fruct nor burdened by servitude.... And if “to consecrate” (sacrare) was the term that indicated the removal of things from the sphere of human law, “to profane” meant, conversely, to return them to the free use of men.

(Agamben, 2007, p. 73)

Hence, the religio of the Romans defined ‘not what unites men and gods but what ensures they remain distinct’ (ibidem, p. 75; on the point see also later section 2.3). There is here a conceptual distinction between the religious and the secular that the West grounds on a world of visual separation and that was later perpetuated by Christianity, as we have seen in the scene of Christ Cleansing the Temple. ‘Religion can be defined as that which removes things, places, animals, or people from common use and transfers them to a separate sphere. Not only is there no religion without separation, but every separation also contains or preserves within itself a genuinely religious core’ (Agamben, 2007, p. 74). In the end, the very roots of the Western thinking of religion, and hence, of ‘religious law,’ in opposition to ‘secular law,’ but also of the notion of law as a corpus, as well as of the construction of its social, political, and economic culture, stem from this paradigm.⁹

In the attempt to unveil the Western paradigm of religion, a critical school has recently emerged, with seminal works by Talal Asad (specifically on Christi­anity and Islam, 1993, 2003)¹⁰ and Timothy Fitzgerald (2000, 2007). Accord­ing to this critical approach, just as the category of religion represents an image of Western modernity that cannot be conceived independently from its secu­lar counterpart, so the concept of non-Western religions (deprived of their own secularities) has been invented in various colonial contexts (in this sense Fitzgerald, 2007) as a tool of Western colonial domination. In her well-known contribution to the subject, Tomoko Masuzawa (2005) claims that, by inventing the category of ‘world religions,’ the West has been able to preserve its universality in a fictitious language of pluralism.

However, this radical critique may lead the interpreter, I believe, to sur­render in front of Babel. Cutting off one side of the bridge by removing the language-source may make it impossible to deal with religion and law by ‘mov­ing the concepts from a place to another’ - i.e. by means of translation. Nev­ertheless, Fitzgerald is right when he argues that religion should be studied as ‘an ideological category, an aspect of modern western ideology, with a specific location in history, including the nineteenth-century period of European colo­nization’ (ibidem). In fact, what is ideological is not religion itself (whatever its meaning may be) but the Western representation of religion as ‘the basis of a modern form of theology’ (a ‘liberal ecumenical theology,’ according to Fitzgerald, 2000, p. 5), developed in a world of meaning where ‘[r]eligion was one pole of the religion-secular dichotomy’ (ibidem).

Thus, to proceed further via the bridge of translation, we need to depart from religion as a monovalent category and recognise how, paraphrasing the opening quotation of this chapter, ‘religion’ exists only in the form of specific ‘religions.’ In this regard, to move towards the other side of the bridge, a relevant hint can be found, I think, in the previously quoted passage by Eco, by recognising that ‘[o]ften, when faced with an unknown phenomenon, we react by approximation’ (Eco, 1999, p.

To come closer to Islam, the Temple of Western modernity must be aban­doned as the place for a valuable comparative investigation; within its con­ceptual boundaries, in fact, non-Western cultures are reduced to sub-places attached to the West and its hegemonic power. As we have seen in the Intro­duction, Edward Said specifically highlights how the imaginative geography of the West has represented the East as if it were ‘enclosed’ beyond some sacred borders, so as to keep it external from the Temple of modernity. ‘The Orient then seems to be, not an unlimited extension beyond the familiar European world, but rather a closed field, a theatrical stage affixed to Europe’ (Said, 1978, p. 63). To desecrate the conceptual boundaries of this fictitious lan­guage of pluralism (Masuzawa, 2005, previously quoted), the Orientalistic ‘discourse of othering’ must be abandoned and replaced with a ‘discourse of non-identity.’

2.3.