Violence of Sacred Regimes

Abstract

The creation of sacred regimes stems in ideology. The sacred as an ideological object legitimates and represents society as a whole in an attempt to crystallize collective consciousness. Here, the attempt is ‘to synthesize the unsynthesizable’ thus forming the imagined totality of the collective, which in turn doomed to fail for the synthesis into a collective union is impossible. The relation of the self to the Other is incongruent vis-à-vis the self fashions the Other as its radical enemy construed in the former’s desire to subjugate the latter under his/her power to the extent of activating violent impulses, energies and sentiments. In so doing, the synthesis turns into manifolds of illusion or fantasy lodged in belief of the sacred expressed institutionally as religion and foments politically as powerful regimes. In this sense, sacred regimes i.e. revolutionary and religious fundamentalist movements are artefacts of this incongruent relation thus a discursive othering that allows an ideological misrecognition between the self and the Other. In this light, the paper argues the complexity of sacred regime and its endeavour to realise a collective enjoyment (jouissance) amidst violence and corruption imposed by religion and ideology.