A Politics of the Sacred for a Secular Age – Giorgio Agamben and Dionysius the Areopagite

Dr David A. Newheiser

The sacred remains a powerful force in secular politics. Modern democracies are sustained by ritualized reverence for individuals, texts, and institutions that form the focal point of national identity. The sacred can energize political movements and inspire sacrifice for the sake of a greater good, but it sometimes forecloses positive change. For this reason, it is dangerous to assume that the sacred is simply a relic of the past—insofar as it persists, we should take seriously its power (for good and for evil).

Giorgio Agamben argues that the sacred functions to neutralize resistance, and so he attempts to undo its influence in order to preserve a politics premised upon freedom. In response, I will draw upon the sixth century theologian Dionysius the Areopagite in order to argue that the sacred can intensify (rather than suppress) critique. Agamben claims that the true function of Dionysian mysticism is to reinforce ecclesiastical bureaucracy, but I will argue that Dionysius’s account of divine transcendence entails that Christian commitment is provisional and therefore subject to revision.

In my view, neither the uncritical assertion of a particular vision of the sacred nor the rejection of all sacrality takes seriously the ambivalence of our secular age. Dionysius offers an alternative: he shows that it is possible to affirm some things as sacred while holding them open to development. In this way, although it is dangerous, a politics of the sacred may expand the limits of imagination through intensified critique.

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David Newheiser is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the Institute for Religion & Critical Inquiry at the Australian Catholic University. He has a PhD from the University of Chicago and an MPhil from Oxford. His research focuses on the topics of power and biopolitics, secularization, and the history of sexuality. He has published articles on interpretation, apocalypticism, neoliberalism, love, secularity, and sexuality, and he is currently completing a book on the relation between temporal transcendence and discursive negativity in Dionysius the Areopagite and Jacques Derrida.

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