Historicizing Secular Subjectivities: Conceptual Erasures and Subjective Multi-Hybridizations

The “multiple secularities” framework may be regarded as a recent ambitious contribution to the comparative analysis of secularisms across Western and non-Western societies. While I argue in this article for the “historicization” of secularities as proposed by the framework, I also point out the latter’s lack of empirical attention to the subjective dimension of historical secularities. More specifically, the article attempts to show the theoretical relevance of analyzing historical secularities in post-colonial societies from the perspective of the subjects and their complex selves. Through a genealogical analysis of the subjectivities of three influential positivist intellectuals in 19th-century Mexico, I argue that the analytical axes of the multiple secularities framework may be refined and broadened. I discuss how the framework’s search for local forms of “conceptual distinctions” should be complemented by the search for conceptual erasures and how the analysis of “semantic hybridity” should be broadened and include the analysis of experiential and emotional forms of hybridizations. I also argue that the analyses of historical secularities should account for “sacred-secular” hybrids, as well as more specific hybridizations, such as ecclesiological–secular and theological–secular transpositions.