The Romance of the Indo-European Family: Globalatinization, Philology, and the Space of Christian Semantics

Abstract

This dissertation explores the idea of “history” as a general theory of meaning in its rapport to Christian political theology and its liquidation into the secular idea of a world divided into “familial,” “civilizational,” “national,” “racial,” and “religious” entities and collectivities. The author attempts to demonstrate that the relevance of historical meaning expands globally with Christian colonialism and imperialism, and that historicization ultimately amounts to racialization. Acquisition of historical meaning is the rite of entry into the world of nations, and history ultimately figures the political collectivities that it founds and bestows meaning upon as “communities of blood,” or communities in possession of a sacred shared substance that persists over time, is often constituted by means of purging from it what is produced as “foreign,” and has to be protected and immunized against exterior contamination. The process of acquisition of modern racial-historical meaning and formation into a national situation is particularly explored with reference to Iran.A variety of scholarly and literary texts are recited, alongside an exploration of postmodern war and democratic politics in an attempt to demonstrate the theological underpinnings of historical meaning. Interrelations of “religion” and “race” are particularly explored and the idea of “secularism” is questioned specially in its rapport to Christian imperialism, Orientalism, and the philological history of “Semitism” and anti-Semitism. The text is largely sui generis, self-referential and poetic in method: it explores the resonances and dissonances of various texts and strives to express the semantic noise of these juxtapositions all the while that it seeks to explore the obscene undersides of contemporary political ideas and ideals.