Sovereignty and the Sacred

To the yelping chorus of social scientists informing us of the health benefits of religious life—from length-of-life to greater happiness to lower blood pressure—Robert A. Yelle offers a devastating demurral. Religion, he argues, is not best seen as something rational, but rather as something wild, a set of “exit signs” from the rational economies that appear to structure much of human life. Religions posits laws but, more importantly, offer an escape from them via the antinomian. “Religion” from this perspective is best conceived of as a series of states of exception, of bombs laid in the path of economism, calculability, and rational-actor theories of agency. The historical record makes this clear, Yelle argues, though scholars mostly misrecognize it in order to make it fit within Enlightenment programs of progress and explanation. Against such distortions, Yelle invites readers to see religion in relation to a range of performances that suspend the usual values of transactional economies: in play, asceticism, rituals of return to primal chaos, sacrifice, carnival, the Feast of Fools, communitas, Jubilee, charisma, wastage, wilderness; in short, to a wide comparative range of anti-economistic acts that offer no obvious advantage or benefit other than the attraction to the act itself. No lowered blood pressure, no competitive marketplace advantage, no longer life, no happier marriage. To the contrary, “religion” is an exit, a refusal, even a negation of all such calculations.

Asceticism · Enlightenment · Environmental ethics · Negation · Political science · Politics · Sacrifice · Sociology · Sovereignty · Theology · Law · Philosophy · Religion and Society Interactions