The Rule of the Sacred: Religion, Nationalism and Secularity

Résumé 0

Interrogating the relationship between religion and nationalism ultimately means interrogating the relationship between culture and politics, or rather what is - in the modernist mindset - considered as the separate fields of culture and politics. Interrogating this relationship is also the predicament in the study of nationalism. Nationalism already posits the relation between culture and politics as fundamental - albeit problematic - for its (re)production and its critique. The historical importance of religious institutions (for our purpose, Christianity in the European context), the analogy between the Church and the institutions of secular states (E. Hobsbawm) points a finger to their elemental correlation. The quasi-religious discourse in E. Renan's "What is nation?" (the notion of sacrifice e.g.) already suggests, for instance, how nationalist myths are closely related to and perhaps of the same nature as religious myths. It is in terms of cultural hierarchies (understood as the organisation relative to "the rule of the sacred") that, in this paper, we approach the question of the relation between religion and nationalism. Re-examining the Aristotelian categories of "form" (eidos) and "matter" (hylè), the paper attempts to define the articulation between the two different cultural arrangements (G. Deleuze) represented by the institutions of the Church and of the secular State in Europe, and define their lines of concurrence and their lines of difference.