Secular Assemblages

Affect, Orientalism and Power in the French Enlightenment

Marek Sullivan

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English

Bloomsbury Academic
09 January 2020

Western philosophy: Enlightenment; Religion & politics; Humanist & secular alternatives to religion; Nationalism

Series: Bloomsbury Advances in Religious Studies

In this book, Marek Sullivan challenges a widespread consensus linking secularization to rationalization, and argues for a more sensual genealogy of secularity connected to affect, race and power. While existing works of secular intellectual history, especially Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007), tend to rely on rationalistic conceptions of Enlightenment thought, Sullivan offers an alternative perspective on key thinkers such as Descartes, Montesquieu and Diderot, asserting that these figures sought to reinstate emotion against the rationalistic tendencies of the past. From Descartes’s last work Les Passions de l’Âme (1649) to Baron d’Holbach’s System of Nature (1770), the French Enlightenment demonstrated an acute understanding of the limits of reason, with crucial implications for our current ‘postsecular’ and ‘postliberal’ moment.

Sullivan also emphasizes the importance of Western constructions of Oriental religions for the history of the secular, identifying a distinctively secular—yet impassioned—form of Orientalism that emerged in the 18th century. Mahomet’s racial profile in Voltaire’s Le Fanatisme, ou Mahomet (1741), for example, functioned as a polemic device calibrated for emotional impact, in line with Enlightenment efforts to generate an affective body of anti-Catholic propaganda that simultaneously shored up people’s sense of national belonging. By exposing the Enlightenment as a nationalistic and affective movement that resorted to racist, Orientalist and emotional tropes from the outset, Sullivan ultimately undermines modern nationalist appeals to the Enlightenment as a mark of European distinction.

By: Marek Sullivan
Imprint: Bloomsbury Academic
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 234mm, Width: 156mm,
Weight: 506g
ISBN: 9781350123670
ISBN 10: 1350123676
Series: Bloomsbury Advances in Religious Studies
Pages: 264
Publication Date: 09 January 2020
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate , Undergraduate
Format: Hardback
Publisher's Status: Active

Preface Acknowledgements Note on translations Introduction 1. Cartesian Secularity: ‘Disengaged Reason’, the Passions and the Public Sphere Beyond Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007) 2. Enlightened Bodies I: Secular Passions, Empiricism and Civic Virtue in the ‘Radical Enlightenment’ 3. Enlightened Bodies II: The Crafting of a Secular-National Subject 4. The Ritual Mask of Oriental Despotism: Wonder and Superimposition in Montesquieu’s Lettres Persanes (1721) and De l’Esprit des Lois (1748) 5. ‘A Morbid Impression’: Race, Religion and Metaphor in Le Fanatisme, ou Mahomet (1741) Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index

Marek Sullivan is a Research Assistant at the University of Oxford, UK. He is also a Managing Editor of the Journal of Secularism and Nonreligion and a former Editor-in-Chief of The Oxonian Review.