Formations of the Trans-Secular

In this chapter I am going to suggest three levels of ontological reformulation that might help us to break the attitude of what Taylor calls “excarnation” or the systematic exclusion of the body from the social imaginary that leads to the peculiar hegemony of reason: (a) Revelatory (such as the corporeal acts of the Christ), (b) Regulatory (such as the bodily emancipatory acts of Gandhi), and (c) Refractory (such as the corporeal acts of chthonic groups that emerge from the geo-ecology of a terrain). In the reverse effort to reach back into the corpus sensorium, I shall draw on one or two scenarios from originary moments in antiquity in order to extract from them lessons for trans-secular formations.