The suppression of the sacred is the root cause of Anti-Blackness, but unproductive expenditure is key to Black Social Life in its wake.

I want to think with and through this statement, for while I suspect I share a number of Rev. Lamar’s sociopolitical leanings, I nevertheless want to rewrite the terms of his critique of what might be termed our current theopolitical, settler-colonial fascism and thereby complexify what he seems to be calling for. Rev. Lamar’s comments suggest that the country’s fortunes or, as the case may be, its misfortunes move in direct relationship to “proper practice” (rather than what he calls malpractice) in the dual spheres of political rationality and theological rationality. The former we often think of as a secular sphere where electoral politics, governance through a system of checks and balances, equality before the law, policies for the good of the citizenry, and so forth, take place or are guaranteed. The latter is often thought of as a private domain that considers religion, salvation, and related personal matters of conscience and of the heart. As Rev. Lamar’s Washington Post comments suggest, these two spheres of the political and the theological offer parallel tracks that contribute to the health and moral well-being of the nation.

While Rev. Lamar indicts both spheres of politics and religion, nevertheless the force of his criticism falls decidedly on the so-called private sphere of religion. On asking why this might be the case, it seems the answer lies in the social imaginary Rev. Lamar works with or the picture of society he paints. It is as if in the picture he paints the last line of defense to keep the state on the moral straight and narrow, even when or perhaps most especially when political institutions are failing us, is proper theological practice. Religion is our (political) salvation. But what do we do when religion does not uphold its societal duty? It is for this reason that Rev. Lamar is keen to call out this particular sphere. Theological malpractice, or a religious imagination that has abdicated its duty to keep the state on the moral straight and narrow by surrendering to “the sweet bye-and-bye,” is as responsible, if not more so, for a country gone off the rails as political malpractice or the failure of our political institutions.

While I celebrate Rev. Lamar for forcing attention on the dual political and theological operations of our current moment, I want to up the ante, to break from what I see as a limiting presumption within the picture he paints of the Charlottesville incident as expressive of today’s general crisis of politicality. This is the presumption of the givenness of the state as telos of society or social order. I want to further separate from the way Rev. Lamar perceives the duties of religion insofar as even that perception is a bit captured by the presumption of the givenness of the state as telos of the social. Here, religion does a kind of upholding work; that is, religion’s task is to uphold the state, perhaps pushing it toward reform. But in any case, right or proper theological practice—orthopraxis rather than malpractice—moves in close relationship to state order. This presumption of the state as teleological principle of the social, I contend, prevents Rev. Lamar’s important critique from going far enough.

It is in the space between the insight Rev. Lamar offers about the twin theopolitical operations of the present and the limiting presumption of the state within his yet important account of “what’s goin’ on” that I want to open up the concerns of this article. More specifically, while in his analysis Rev. Lamar talks about the country’s political and theological failings as if they are independent or parallel and as if all that is needed is better practice in these two spheres working toward a “more perfect union,” what he in fact invites is a consideration of how Charlottesville laid bare not a two-track but a singular failure, indeed, a singular terror and violence. This singular terror I name political theology. This is the animating problem not just of Charlottesville, Virginia, but of Charlottesville as placeholder for the United States of America. It is the animating problem, shall we say, of Charlottesville, USA.

After an initial consideration in the next section of this article to unfold what I mean by the sacred in such a way that begins juxtaposing blackness and the sacred, I then reframe the Charlottesville incident and the general crisis of politicality today as nothing less than a crisis of the sacred that, rather than disavowing malpractice, in fact calls for it. Together these first two sections serve as a springboard from which I rethink in the remainder of the article the inherently ambivalent notion of the sacred, mobilizing it as a tool for black thought—that is, as a tool for thinking blackness precisely as opening up an alternate imaginary of the sacred from which also opens up other worlds. Here blackness indexes sacrality without property and without sovereignty, thus activating other modes of dwelling on and with the earth, other modes of knowing that we might call “abyssal nonknowledge,” other socialities or congregationalities that exceed settler politicality. I call this a poetics of the sacred. Stated differently, if in the immediate sections that follow I consider the myth of politicality or political knowledge in which certain energies of the sacred are harnessed to state projects and incarnated in charismatic political leadership (this is, what the Charlottesville white nationalists rallied to defend) to produce a kind of “pure” or “right-hand sacred” meant to secure homogeneity, then in the rest of this article I consider the sacred in its base, heterogeneous, or immanent modalities—that is, the sacred not as figure but as impure, “left-hand” flight, indeed, as that movement or passage or diaspora of spirit that enlivens or animates blackness in its would-be corpsing. I now turn to the question of the sacred.

The Right- and Left-Hand Sacred

Building from Émile Durkheim and especially Durkheim’s student Robert Hertz, Georges Bataille, and Roger Callois give us an important initial handle on the sacred in its ambivalent double-sidedness and as a tool for grappling with the modern social text. In “The Psychological Structure of Fascism,” published in 1933, Bataille mobilized a discourse of the sacred to examine what was happening at the time and, crucially, to begin thinking toward modes of social life that exceed the political as we know it. For this, he expanded the basic profane/sacred duality that Durkheim bequeathed to French social theory into a distinction between the homogeneous and the heterogeneous. This became for him an analytic framework through which to make sense of fascism. Identified with production, the sphere of the profane or what Bataille called the homogeneous is an exclusively utilitarian realm or a restricted economy of exchange. Conversely, the elements of the sphere of the heterogeneous or what Bataille called the sacred indicate a general economy of an unrestricted expenditure of energy that, though to a point employable and thus valuable because useful and useable within a social system to help render the system coherent, even if fragilely so, remains fundamentally excessive, ecstatic, or rapturous.

To borrow a formulation from Roger Callois, a colleague of Bataille’s in a dissident study group that met in the back of a Paris bookstore and that they called the “College of Sociology,” we might think of left-hand experiences of the sacred as those in which the sacred is nothing less than the experience of sociality through and as infraction given in “interaffective” excess, given in and as “collective ecstasy.” The sacred here manifests as the experience of innovation and improvisation, what Callois calls an “improvisation of the sacred,” that connects with a “mysterious world” (152). For Callois, such improvisational ecstasy bespeaks a fundamental “metamorphosis of . . . being.” I will revisit this term again when I consider Sylvia Wynter’s Black Metamorphosis. Staying for now with Callois, improvisational ecstasy as the metamorphosis of being indicates an anguished yet joyous dwelling in a kind of blurred communion apart from and in critique of the presumptions of individuation (282). Akin to Callois’s description of the sacred as a kind of ecstatic and anoriginal metamorphosis, thinking with Angela of Foligno, a thirteenth-century Italian female mystic, Bataille figures the sacred as a sort of fecund, negative space, an “abyss of possibilities . . . where the possible is the impossible itself” and in which “ecstatic, breathless, experience . . . destroys the depths . . . of being by unveiling” a nonpossessable, a nonsubjective zone irreducible to property and thus irreducible to propertied subjectivity. While Bataille eventually devotes an entire book-length study to such “inner experience,” where “inner” here is not to be understood as the interiority of a supposedly coherent, individuated self but a kind of collective aliveness, Callois advances his thinking in this vein in an essay called “Festival.” Presented as a talk to the dissident College of Sociology study group, “Festival” considers the sacred in terms of a collective effervescence and eruption that characterized ancient festivals and feasts and whose vestiges one finds, Callois argues, in contemporary carnivals and such. Such festive events of “yesteryear and today,” he says, are “always defined by dancing, singing, excitement, excessive eating and drinking. It is necessary to go all out to the point of exhaustion, to the point of sickness. That is the very law of the festival” (281). Here profane or chronological temporality or the time of Man and his others is disrupted in the name of dwelling in some other experience of time beyond the logic of separability. To dwell in the spacetime of “difference without separability,” and thus in ecstatic temporality, is to dwell in the experience of carnival time, which is the experience of being out of time, of dwelling in time-out, in out-time. It indicates a dwelling unhistorically in history, which is to say, in history’s exhaustion. In short, it is to be off beat. Such is Callois’s description of “inner experience,” where experience here indicates a condition of ek-stasis—a dwelling in and witnessing to out-ness as such. This is a condition of being dispossessed of a self, which is a condition of (non)possession that is anterior to property, anterior to propertied self-possession, indeed anterior to a possessive and possessing self altogether. A condition perhaps of spirit possession, this socioecstasy given in the ferment of the festival manifests the sacred as a sociality of infraction against “taboos” and “rules” meant to ensure propriety and comportment (282). Such a tabooed sociality in festivaled rapture is nonboundaried and thus nontabooed in the first place.

We are on the threshold, the limen of the thought of the heterogenous or the otherwise. In raptured ecstasy, the element of the heterogeneous betokens ontopoliticality’s, indeed, the human’s collapse in the face of what the violent homogeneity of ontopoliticality cannot hold. The unholdable, the unhavable—notwithstanding that juridical-economic order seeks to seize and thus reduce the unhavable to ownership or property—is in fact uncapturable; it will not fully “get in formation.” Indexing another horizon of existence (where “ex-istence” is necessarily “ek-static” and as such neither is nor is not but “is-not”), the energies of heterogeneity are for this reason ultimately, Bataille says, an unemployable, invaluable, or useless surplus that indicates a kind of energy-in-flux, a charged or “base matter” that allows the elements of heterogeneity, as Michèle H. Rich- man puts in elaborating Bataille on this point, “to break the conventional barriers upon which homogeneity relies.” Bataille associates this break and, importantly, the noncommodifiable knowledge or the nonknowledge from the break that surges through it with what is irreducible to production or monetary and identitarian exchange. This is what makes the heterogeneous powerful and dangerous to systems of politicality or order, why, in other words, it is dangerously sacred. Decentralized and acephalous, the heterogeneous, which bespeaks the sacred of “the left-hand,” indexes “a force that disrupts the regular course of things” (143), though those very disruptive energies can be recruited for “right-hand” purposes, aggregated to an anointed leader, a political “pastor” who uses a kind of “pastoral power” to seal the breach of heterogeneity and violently return a polity to homogeneity. In “The Psychological Structure of Fascism,” Bataille interprets the rise of Hitler and 1930s German fascism along with the resulting effects on and uptake into French politics within this framework and as a manifestation of the right-hand sacred—a recruitment of the wild energies of the sacred to seal the breach of heterogeneity as that political breach of purity at the time came to be figured in the Jews and in other undesirables. I read the summer 2017 white nationalist rally in Charlottesville, Virginia, and the general rise of Donald Trump to the US presidency in related, right-hand terms.

But to stay with Bataille, in that same essay he keeps his eye trained on the left side of things where there is always heterogeneity or base energies exceeding the terms of order. He finds examples in this regard in the untouchables of India, on the one hand, and among the destitute in the economically and socially “less ritualistic” or “advanced civilizations” of the West, as he puts it, on the other. In the latter, “being destitute is all it takes . . . to create between the self and others—who consider themselves the expression of normal man—a nearly insurmountable gap” (144). Whether it be the hereditarily untouchables or the destitute in advanced countries, it is the “lowest strata of society,” Bataille contends, “[that] can . . . be described as heterogeneous . . . those who generally provoke repulsion and can in no case be assimilated to the whole of mankind” (144). In their untouchability or destitution, such groups are a heterogeneous element associated with useless expenditure, with “violence, excess, delirium, madness . . . [that] to varying degrees” has the capacity because occluded within but not fully subsumed by the juridical-economic order to unsettle the terms of order (142). Interpreted as mobs, they are outlaw or “[breakers] of the laws of social homogeneity.” As such, “these impoverished classes,” Bataille says, “are characterized by the prohibition of contact analogous to that applied to sacred things” (144), particularly those tabooed things, those things, as Richman explains again elaborating Bataille, placed under “restricted contact” and whose collective effervescence indicates a “transgression” or a “negation [that] surpasses itself” in exceeding every closed order “without returning to the original condition or state it had negated.” Here we find the sacred in its excessive, left- hand mode of ceaseless rupture and rapture, as harbinger of a sociality without limit or completion.

This brings us to an absolutely vital point around which much of what I want to say in this article and, indeed, much of my effort to mobilize a discourse of the sacred for black studies, turns: the ambiguity within the very notion of the sacred itself as both pure and the impure. Alexander Riley succinctly clarifies the issues here: “The sacred is not only the holy or consecrated but can also be the accursed.” That is to say, “in addition to being opposed in a binary relationship to the profane [this is Bataille’s sphere of homogeneity], [the sacred] is itself comprised of two opposing binary poles: the forces that maintain physical and moral purity and order, life, and health [the holy that upholds the holy], and those that contribute to impurity, evil, sacrilege, disease, and death [the accursed].” The former sphere of pure divinity depends on an accursed share, an excremental element, to constitute and secure itself, within the terms of a restricted economy of sacrificial exchange, as pure. As Giorgio Agamben under- stood and as Riley reiterates, this doubled, contradictory or ambiguous sense of the sacred is connected to the Latin word from which it derives: sacer. Riley goes on to explain how the idea of the sacred can trip us up: hewing close to the Latin sense of sacer, “the French sacré . . . can mean both, and is frequently used in both senses (la musique sacrée, holy or sacred music, and un sacré menteur, a damned or accursed liar), whereas the English ‘sacred’ has in practice lost the second meaning.”

If Bataille associates this second sense of the sacred, whose relationship to the first is not dialectical but excessive or abyssal, with the untouchables and the destitute, then here I stretch the generally Durkheimian formulation of the right- and left-hand sacred, bending along with it even Bataille’s more renegade formulation of sacred excess to that blackened or black sacral (non)position that aroused the Charlottesville white nationalist rally in the first place as a violent secondary, “right- hand” reaction. This opens up a consideration of the sacred’s proximity to blackness wherein, following Hortense J. Spillers, we might think of blackness as “symptom of the sacred,” as terrifying monstrance of that beautiful monstrosity, that inner scar voluntarily claimed in having been called. The monstrosity to be claimed here, this “unbounded sociality,” concerns “blackness as matter [that] signals [infinity], another world . . . that which exists without time and out of space, in the plenum”—the sacred otherwise. Here the sacred is obscure and formless, even “oceanic,” to stay with Spillers’s Freudian-inflected formulation. More akin to that “raw prime matter” of which Denise Ferreira da Silva has recently spoken as part and parcel of the virtuality of a “black feminist poethics,” the sacred here is of the wild, of the wilderness. To continue to think under the force of Spillers’s thought, the sacred, in its adjacency to blackness or as itself symptomatically black, points to those hermetic energies or those forces of enchantment, to metamorphosis bound to devotional practices of un/knowing. Black sacrality indexes a certain liveliness and aliveness occasioned by, moving in relationship to, and yet irreducible to the “spiritual ordeal” of death that is settler modernity. For this reason, black radical sacrality, which we might just as well think of as the sorcery of (black social) life itself, unsettles, is ever poised to incite volatility within regimes of politicality. That is to say, the sacred, as I am given to thinking about it here as figuring a poetics of malpracticed black (religious) study, is neither transcendental, pure, nor beneficent but, rather, is base, stank, impure, low to the ground, underground, of and with the earth. All this is to say, I approach the sacred as a kind of pathological and ek-static threshold before which other, differential and unrepresentable presences, genres or forms of life, unplottable gatherings in representation’s colonializing ruins, alternative ways of being with the earth, come into view.

From the vantage point of regimes of politicality, black ek-static life, which is to say black social life, cannot help but be understood as indexing deviance, deviation, and aberration. Moving “in the break” of the terror of politicality, black radical deviance is a practice of the social not reducible to politicality—a studied “consent,” it has been said, “not to be a single being.” This is a malpracticed spirituality, a non/theological or, better put, an atheological and thus a “godlessmysticism” that points to frenzied ex-istence that is so much more than resistance because such indeterminate non/existence is on the far side of the concept, on the far side of a god-concept, on the far side of a god that stalls out as a static concept and that thus installs the concept—on the far side, I mean, of “God as a Failed Figuration,” to echo poet Phillip B. Williams, that which grounds “the American aesthetic.” That malpracticed, atheological godlessness bespeaks an interior, collective aliveness constantly ready, expectantly poised for the unexpectant, the experience of the ek-static—to be moved, to be terrified, to love, to hate, to live magically, drunkenly, wanderously, wonderously, erotically, joyously, childishly, prayerfully, in the radicality of a certain moving stillness, a certain quarreling, in/sovereign quiet. This black (w)holiness that (in)sovereignly exceeds the concept, we might call black rapture. It is along this path that I want to begin to unfold or explicate black malpractice as the nonperformance of modernity’s god terms, as nonperformative breach of the religious contract that subtends the racial contract insofar as the social contract (of racism) is necessarily a religion contract whose terms are secular. Stated differently, it is along this path that I want to engage in sacred poiesis, a poethics of the fugitive sacred. But first, I address the problem of political theology as a species, we might say, of antiblackness.