Secular Assemblages: Affect, Orientalism and Power in the French Enlightenment

In this book, Marek Sullivan challenges the widespread consensus that links secularization to rationalization, and argues for a more sensual genealogy of secularity. Sullivan examines how theorists of the secular tend to rely on excessively rationalistic conceptions of Enlightenment thought, derived from key enlightenment thinkers such as Descartes, Montesquieu and Diderot. Sullivan offers an alternative perspective, asserting that these figures actually sought to reinstate emotion against the rationalistic tendencies of their past, using Descartes’s last work Les Passions de l’Âme (1649) as one example of this.
Sullivan also addresses existing critiques that focus on the importance of religious constructions of Oriental religions for the genealogy of secularity. Sullivan instead identifies a distinctively secular—yet impassioned—form of Orientalism that emerged in the 18th century, one of anti-religion, racism and nationalism. To illustrate this, Sullivan presents the racial profiling of ‘Mahomet’ in Voltaire2019s Le Fanatisme ou Mahomet as a polemic device calibrated for emotional impact, used for purposes of statecraft to generate an affective system of anti-Catholic propaganda.
By exposing the Enlightenment as a nationalistic and affective movement that resorted to racist, Orientalist and emotional tropes, Sullivan ultimately undermines modern nationalist appeals to the Enlightenment as a mark of European distinction.