Secular Assemblages: Affect, Orientalism and Power in the French Enlightenment

Description

In this book, Marek Sullivan challenges the widespread consensus that links secularization to rationalization, and argues for a more sensual genealogy of secularity. Sullivan examines how theorists of the secular tend to rely on excessively rationalistic conceptions of Enlightenment thought, derived from key enlightenment thinkers such as Descartes, Montesquieu and Diderot. Sullivan offers an alternative perspective, asserting that these figures actually sought to reinstate emotion against the rationalistic tendencies of their past, using Descartes’s last work Les Passions de l’Âme (1649) as one example of this. Sullivan also addresses existing critiques that focus on the importance of religious constructions of Oriental religions for the genealogy of secularity. Sullivan instead identifies a distinctively secular—yet impassioned—form of Orientalism that emerged in the 18th century, one of anti-religion, racism and nationalism. To illustrate this, Sullivan presents the racial profiling of ‘Mahomet’ in Voltaire2019s Le Fanatisme ou Mahomet as a polemic device calibrated for emotional impact, used for purposes of statecraft to generate an affective system of anti-Catholic propaganda. By exposing the Enlightenment as a nationalistic and affective movement that resorted to racist, Orientalist and emotional tropes, Sullivan ultimately undermines modern nationalist appeals to the Enlightenment as a mark of European distinction. Cover Half title Series Title Copyright Dedication Contents 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