The Sacred Secular
Postcolonial and decolonial paradigms are often seen as purely academic enterprises. But these paradigms in fact address concrete questions about how we can conceive of (and ultimately achieve) liberation from the throes of colonial modernity. Such projects are philosophically demanding: they require a critical self-examination of the ability of our narratives to adequately critique colonial modernity in the first place. One of the ways in which narratives of postcolonialism and decoloniality tend to fall short in this regard is in their failure to sufficiently engage questions of secularity or “the secular.” If postcolonial narratives are to succeed in critiquing colonial modernity and enacting the kinds of liberation they envision, they must interrogate the secular regimes of knowledge that legitimize their own theoretic projects. Such a critique necessitates reclaiming the place of the divine and transcendent in postcolonial and decolonial paradigms.
For Reinhart Koselleck, “the secular” is not a modern abstraction, but the chief “hermeneutic category of modernity.” In other words, the secular is the dominant interpretative lens through which modernity is understood and realized. The chief characteristic of the secular is its epistemic self-referentiality. The secular acknowledges no transcendent point of reference exterior to itself; it represents the totality of possibilities. The secular proclaims that it is the world – not God – that is sovereign. This negation of “exteriority” renders liberation through divine or transcendent means impossible. Liberation, in this context, is reduced to a purely secular project. There is no self-transcendence, or what Paul Tillich calls a “driving towards the sublime.”
Koselleck’s secular hermeneutic recognizes the world as a space of pure power and domination. This decentering of God is not necessarily carried out through a rise of radical atheism but through the (re-)creation of God in the image of the secular: a nominalist God who, according to Hans Blumenberg, is “pragmatically as good as dead.” What emerges in the place of God is a reign of what Sherman Jackson calls “second-creators,” powerful figures who recreate the world in their own image. The secular inaugurates a new metaphysical order that is legitimized by secular regimes of knowledges, or epistemologies.
The key challenge for most critics of colonial modernity is to identify some other, non-divine kind of “exteriority” within the enclosure of the secular world. The argument put forth by most postcolonial and decolonial narratives is that the exteriority which grounds the subaltern project exists on the margins of colonial order—that is, in the subaltern peoples themselves. But the problem with limiting exteriority to the oppressed is (as Ángela Iranzo Dosdad rightly cautions) that their exteriority comes to be determined only by “their negative imprint, caused by their subordination to colonial power.” Anne McClintock poses a similar thesis, arguing that the postcolonial is “haunted by the very figure of linear development that it sets out to dismantle.” McClintock warns that the prefix “post-” in “postcolonial” runs the risk of construing time as a linear temporality whose beginning is the European colonial campaign. The term itself perpetuates the very post-Enlightenment binaries it purports to deconstruct: it “re-orients the globe once more around a single, binary opposition: colonial/post-colonial.” The danger, in other words, is that the subaltern is only described negatively in terms of its relationship to colonial modernity. This problem is compounded by the fact that the subaltern is not a tabula rasa, but a dynamic concept with contending histories and epistemologies of its own. Marco Vieira writes:
So powerful is the legacy of colonial rule that the subject of the postcolonial condition is always already somehow predetermined, somehow stamped, indeed inscribed by the colonial experience. Viewing the international from the vantage point of the non-West is hence to do so through a lens that is already prescribed and shaped by coloniality and the desire to resist its continued economic, social, political and epistemological domination.
This epistemological domination has resulted in the absence of a critical engagement with the secular, which is itself a regime of colonial modernity. This tacit perpetuation of the secular closes off the possibility of an alternative metaphysical order that takes the idea of God seriously.
To illustrate, let us consider two key concepts that inform most decolonial narratives. The first is the idea of “delinking” indigenous knowledge from hegemonic Western knowledge. The second, as a strategy for delinking, is Walter Mignolo’s idea of “epistemic disobedience.” Epistemic disobedience becomes a “liberatory” move only by virtue of its self-referentiality—that is, its indigenous origins. This is problematic for two reasons. First, this self-referentiality, as we have already noted, is characteristic of a secular world in which we have no recourse to Absolute Exteriority, or God. Second, it leaves us with an unanswerable question: if the exteriority of the subaltern is the grounds for the decolonial project, then what kinds of exteriority guide the subaltern peoples themselves?
In the absence of a guiding exteriority for the subaltern, we must ask: to what extent does “epistemic disobedience” challenge the secular proclamation of the sovereignty of the world, and its reduction of the world to a space of pure power? The sovereignty of the world is not a philosophical appendage to colonial modernity; it is its chief metaphysical commitment. Secularity furnishes colonial modernity with the very logic of domination that legitimates its arbitrary power. Thus, we cannot “delink” indigenous epistemologies from colonial power without first critiquing the very idea – the sovereignty of the world – that legitimates colonial power.
Most narratives of postcolonialism and decoloniality fail to articulate a positive and alternative metaphysical order to that of colonial modernity and its secular insistence on the sovereignty of the world. One response to my own critique might be to argue that the conception of God and the study of metaphysics are themselves totalizing and ideological. The problem with this contention, however, is that it ignores the fact that any epistemology is inevitably grounded in a latent set of metaphysical assumptions. The idea of an epistemology that is self-referential and free from metaphysics is a secular myth. Furthermore, the neglect of the metaphysical only engenders further problems. The first problem, as we have already noted, is the inability of postcolonial and decolonial narratives to critically engage with the unseen metaphysical order of colonial modernity. The second problem is the turning of a blind eye to one’s own latent metaphysical commitments. This act of concealment, be it intentional or naïve, is characteristic of a colonial modernity which masquerades its metaphysical commitments as the “natural order of things.” Third, if we reduce exteriority to the subaltern per se, there is nothing to prevent powers within the subaltern from fabricating their own fetishized and iron-clad regimes of knowledge. Enrique Dussel summarizes this problem aptly: “Pure atheism, without the affirmation of the infinite Other, is not sufficiently critical; it permits the fetishization of a future system.”
We finally are left with two challenges: one practical, one philosophical. First, how are we to escape the throes of the “second-creators” of colonial modernity, their unseen metaphysical order, and secular regimes of knowledge? Second, if the exteriority of the subaltern is the grounds for the decolonial project, then what kinds of exteriority guide the subaltern peoples themselves? Our answers to these questions must finally point us to a God who is uniquely and absolutely exterior to the secular enclosure of colonial modernity.
If we are serious about critiquing colonial modernity, we must reclaim notions of the divine and transcendent. Dussel argues it is only through affirming that "the divine is other than all possible systems,” that God is “outside of any system and formation,” that we can hope to enact a “liberating revolution.” The ultimate point of reference for the subaltern must not be the “altern,” but the absolute Exteriority of God: what Dussel call the “affirmative and definitive precondition for liberation.” Epistemic disobedience is not sufficient: what is required for a truly liberatory project is metaphysical disobedience against the second-creators of colonial modernity.
Ali S. Harfouch is a writer and researcher focusing on secularity, contemporary Islamic thought, and political theology. He obtained his Master of Arts in Political Science from the American University of Beirut. Twitter: @asharfouch