'La Pensee 38': Metapolitics and the sacred in inter-war France

In "La Pensee 38: Metapolitics and the Sacred in Inter-War France," I examine the sacralization of the political/the politicization of the sacred in 1930s France. I focus on the over-determination of the "sacred" as the site of a "pure" politics to come and a post-Kantian domain of experiential knowledge and practice which, by virtue of its imagined vitality and turbulence, escaped political and epistemological recuperation. I therefore recount two intertwined narratives. Firstly, I trace the fragmentation and mutation of the Durkheimian tradition and its political and philosophical ethos. Secondly, I illuminate the birth of a new post-Durkheimian and post-religious domain of metapolitics which launched a virulent critique of civilization, "State thought," and modernity, vis-a-vis the discursive, performative, and causal category of the sacred. By telescoping the oeuvres and activities of sociologists and historians of religion (Durkheim, Mauss, Dumezil, etc.), reactionary mystics (Guenon, Evola, Eliade, etc.) philosophers and theorists (Kojeve, Benjamin etc.) and a host of neither left, nor right non-conformiste movements, (the College of Sociology, Esprit, etc.), I reconstruct a field where the sacred was posited as the unconscious of modernity. I demonstrate it is precisely within this political-theological nexus where the antinomies of reason and revelation, order and disorder, the "actual" and the "virtual," and temporal power and sacred authority, are forever negotiated. Following from this, I also reveal how the sacred, the mystic, and the mythic, functioned as political ontologies which legitimized and narrativized anti-communist, anti-democratic, and often, proto-fascist, ideologies.