Allegory and Accusation: The Rhetoric of Islamo-gauchisme

Abstract While historical and anthropological critiques of secularism have illuminated its contradictory claims, they have been less attentive to secularism’s rhetorical force, i.e., its performative effect. Before theorizing the rhetoric of “Islamo-Gauchisme” and contemporary secularism more broadly, then, this article first traces this inattention to an influential line of argument grounded in anthropologist Talal Asad’s critiques of religion and secularism (1993, 2003, 2018), which opposes secularism’s (putatively) transparent and referential language and autonomous subject, derived from Protestantism, to the performative, pedagogical discourse and subject of authoritative traditions of pious discipline, medieval Christianity and contemporary Islam, in particular. Next, the article lays the ground for theorization by foregrounding the performative and citational, or “theatro-graphic” (Weber 2001), qualities of secular rhetoric in Walter Benjamin’s (2019) and Paul de Man’s (1983) treatments of Baroque and pre-romantic allegory. It closes by reading the performative force of accusation and allegory in the avowedly secular (laïc) rhetoric of contemporary French politics.