Disclaimer: This essay is a philosophical and theoretical reflection on the concepts of authority, legitimacy, and the construction of sacredness. All terms — including "desacralization," "presumption of non-sacredness," "InfraHuman," "ideal crime," "counter-blessings," and "systematic profanation" — are used exclusively in an analytical and metaphorical sense. The text contains no calls to action, nor does it advocate, justify, or promote the violation of law, disrespect of legitimate institutions, or disruption of social order. The questioning of automatic sacredness is a philosophical exercise, not an endorsement of lawlessness or nihilism. Its sole purpose is to examine how societies construct and maintain legitimacy, authority, and reverence within the realm of critical philosophical discourse. The methodology of desacralization operates entirely within the bounds of intellectual inquiry and does not constitute legal, political, or practical advice.
Desacralization
Synopsis
Central Thesis
Desacralization is a radical philosophical methodology based on the presumption of non-sacredness: nothing is sacred by default until it proves its right to that status. Unlike the historical understanding of desacralization as the loss of the sacred (Eliade), this is an active philosophical stance systematically challenging any claims to automatic inviolability — whether state, morality, truth, or tradition.
Criteria for Proving Sacredness
A phenomenon can claim recognition only if:
- It is necessary and irreplaceable
- Its origins are publicly verifiable
- It is reversible or time-limited
- Those affected consent to submission without coercion
This isn't nihilism — if sacredness is proven, it will be recognized. But the burden of proof lies on what claims reverence.
Distinction from Other Philosophical Methods
From Derrida's deconstruction: not revealing internal contradictions, but a performative act of immediate removal of sacred status.
From secularization: applies not just to religion, but to all forms of power, knowledge, and authority.
From critical theory: doesn't promise liberation, but creates space for action outside moral coordinates.
Architecture of the Ideal Crime System
Desacralization functions within a broader system:
- InfraHuman — a subject existing not against morality, but outside its coordinates
- Ideal Crime — action making visible the arbitrariness of distinctions between legal and illegal, sacred and profane
This is an ontology of freedom understood not as choice between options within a system, but as freedom from the very necessity to choose within given coordinates.
Practical Methodology
Desacralization is embodied through concrete actions:
- Philosophical trials — institutions of power subjected to symbolic trial without recognizing their right to judge in return
- Anti-blessings — speech acts removing automatic benevolence
- Systematic profanation — demonstrating the arbitrariness of any claims to sacredness
Philosophical Genealogy
Stirner called forms of the sacred "spooks" enslaving the individual. Nietzsche proposed revaluation of values but remained attached to creating new ones. Foucault showed power as productive force. Desacralization synthesizes and radicalizes these approaches.
Provocative Conclusion
In an era of traditional legitimacy crisis and emergence of new forms of control (algorithmic, biopolitical), desacralization offers resistance without creating new idols. The platform desacralization.com will become a space for practical application of the method.
"Sacredness has always been a fiction of power. Desacralization makes this fiction visible".
Question for Contemplation: If everything sacred must prove its right to reverence, what will remain sacred? And isn't the very readiness to ask this question the beginning of genuine freedom?
The concept of desacralization within the philosophical system of Ideal Crime is an ambitious project of rethinking the relationship between subject and power, the sacred and the profane, the observer and the observed. I argue that desacralization can develop into an independent philosophical methodology, comparable in influence to Derrida’s deconstruction.
The core principle of desacralization is the presumption of non-sacredness. Nothing is sacred, and nothing deserves worship, reverence, or automatic recognition — not God, not morality, not truth, not authority, not tradition, not law — until it has proven its right to be called and treated as sacred (that is, as respected). It is a method, but applied to society, to laws, traditions, the state, and power itself. This is not nihilism — if something can be demonstrated and justified, it may then be recognized as “sacred.”
Some criteria of sacredness can already be outlined:
– The phenomenon or principle must be necessary (and irreplaceable)
– The reasons for its existence must be publicly-verifiable
– It must be reversible and/or limited in time
– Those subject to it must consent to obedience without coercion
This essay is an introductory, programmatic text in a cycle of works on desacralization, whose practical platform I intend to develop at the domain desacralization.com.
Desacralization as a Unique Philosophical Concept
The concept of the “presumption of non-sacredness” (nothing is sacred by default) strikes me as a radical inversion of the traditional philosophical approach to authority and legitimacy. Unlike Mircea Eliade’s classical understanding of desacralization as the historical loss of the sacred in modernity, I propose it as an active philosophical stance — a methodology of systematically contesting any claim to automatic sacredness or untouchability.
This differs fundamentally from Derrida’s deconstruction, which works by exposing internal contradictions in texts and concepts. Desacralization does not merely reveal the instability of the sacred/profane binary — it actively denies the presumption of sacredness to any object, institution, or idea. If deconstruction is an endless process of deferred meaning (différance), then desacralization is a performative act of immediate removal of the sacred status.
Unlike secularization, understood as the institutional separation of religion and politics, desacralization is total in scope — it applies not only to religious institutions but to all forms of power, knowledge, and authority.
Unlike critical theory, it lacks a utopian horizon — desacralization does not promise liberation or emancipation, but creates a space for action outside moral coordinates.
The crucial distinction of desacralization as an ethical and performative stance lies in the fact that it does not stop at critique, but is realized through action. It is not merely an intellectual exercise, but a way of existing that systematically refuses automatic reverence toward any authority.
The Architecture of the Ideal Crime System
Desacralization functions as the central methodological principle within a broader philosophical system that includes the concepts of the InfraHuman and the ideal crime as an ontology of freedom. The InfraHuman is a subject who acts not against morality but outside its coordinates — not immorality, but extra-morality, an existence in a space where moral categories simply do not apply (a position of “escaping automatism,” not a license to “do anything”).
Unlike Nietzsche’s Übermensch, who creates new values, the InfraHuman neither creates nor destroys values — he exists in a register where value judgments lose their operability. This is a radicalization of Stirner’s egoism, where even one’s own ego does not become a new sacred idol, but remains merely an instrument among other instruments.
Performativity here is not understood in Butler’s sense of repetitive acts that constitute identity, but as a philosophy enacted through action rather than through text. Philosophical courts, counter-blessings (the symbolic withdrawal of legitimacy), acts of systematic profanation (desacralization.com) — these are not illustrations of philosophical ideas, but philosophy itself in action. Within this context, the ideal crime is not a violation of the law, but an act that exposes the arbitrariness of the very distinction between lawful and unlawful, sacred and profane.
This system presents an ontology of freedom understood not as the liberty to choose between options within the system, but as freedom from the very necessity of choosing within given coordinates. It is not anarchism, which still defines itself through negation of the state, but a stance in which the state is simply one construct among many, devoid of intrinsic necessity.
The Philosophical Roots of Desacralization Reach Deeper than Simple Secularization
Although the term desacralization was originally used primarily in religious studies and sociology to describe the historical processes of the loss of the sacred, I see its philosophical potential as profoundly underdeveloped.
Mircea Eliade regarded desacralization as a tragic loss, an “impoverishment” of human experience in modernity. But what if this “loss” were transformed into an active methodology?
Max Stirner already anticipated this possibility in 1844, describing all forms of the sacred as “specters” (Spuke) that enslave the unique individual. His radical thesis — “I have based my affair on nothing” — represents an early formulation of the presumption of non-sacredness. Yet Stirner stopped at an individual revolt, without developing a systematic methodology.
Nietzsche went further with his concept of the revaluation of all values, but his project remained bound to the idea of creating new values.
Georges Bataille came close to radical desacralization through his concept of transgression, but for him the violation of a taboo paradoxically reaffirmed the sacred.
Only Foucault, with his analysis of power as a productive force that creates subjects rather than merely repressing them, opened the path to understanding desacralization as a systematic practice.
Contemporary philosophers such as Giorgio Agamben, with his concept of profanation, approach this idea, yet for Agamben profanation means returning the sacred to common use, not rejecting the very category of the sacred itself.
Desacralization goes further — it does not return the sacred to the people, it demonstrates that sacredness was always a fiction of power.
The Methodology of Philosophical Action through Systematic Profanation
The practical application of desacralization opens new horizons for philosophy as a performative practice. Unlike academic philosophy, which analyzes and critiques, desacralization acts. Philosophical courts are not a metaphor but a real practice in which institutions of power are subjected to symbolic judgment without granting them the legitimacy to judge in return. Counter-blessings function as speech acts that do not curse but withdraw blessing, annulling automatic favor and the presumed right to sacredness.
Applied to institutions of power, the method begins with rejecting their self-legitimation.
The state appears not as a necessary form of social organization, but as a historically contingent construct whose power rests on the monopoly of violence, not on inner sacredness.
Law is desacralized by exposing its origin in force rather than in justice — “justice” itself proving to be a post hoc rationalization of power relations.
Science, which claims objectivity, is desacralized by uncovering its institutional and political foundations. This is not anti-scientific obscurantism, but the recognition of science as a human practice among other practices, stripped of privileged access to truth.
Media are desacralized by refusing their claim to represent reality — they produce reality rather than reflect it.
This methodology can be applied systematically to any institution or concept that claims automatic authority. Education, family, art, even philosophy itself — nothing is immune to the desacralizing gaze. But this is not nihilistic destruction — it is the creation of space for action without preordained constraints.
The Potential to Become a Global Philosophical Movement
The study of contemporary philosophical movements shows that concepts become “brands” through a combination of theoretical articulation, institutional support, and performative demonstration. Derrida’s deconstruction became a global phenomenon through the publication explosion of 1967, the creation of journals, conferences, and academic programs. Speculative realism grew from a single conference at Goldsmiths in 2007 into a major philosophical movement in less than two decades.
I am deeply convinced that desacralization has unique advantages for establishing itself as an independent philosophical current.
First, it fills the conceptual gap between deconstruction, which remains a textual practice, and political activism, which often lacks philosophical depth.
Second, it resonates with the contemporary crisis of legitimacy faced by traditional institutions of power.
Third, its performative character makes it accessible beyond the boundaries of academic philosophy.
The academic niche for desacralization lies at the intersection of continental philosophy, performance studies, political theology, and critical theory.
Desacralization Responds to the Challenges of the Present
In an era when traditional forms of legitimacy are in crisis while new forms of control grow ever more sophisticated, desacralization offers a path of resistance that avoids the trap of creating new sacred idols. The critique of automatic legitimacy of power becomes not merely an intellectual exercise but an existential necessity in a world where algorithms decide human destinies and corporations wield greater power than states.
The philosophy of equality between observer and observed that I propose through desacralization resonates with contemporary movements for epistemic justice. Yet unlike these movements, which often demand recognition of marginalized knowledges as equally sacred, desacralization insists on recognizing all knowledges as equally profane. This is not relativism but radical realism, which treats every claim to truth as a human construction.
The restoration of subjectivity without reverence is perhaps the most important contribution of desacralization to contemporary philosophy. In a world where the subject is continually constituted through submission to various forms of power — biopolitical, algorithmic, spectacular — desacralization offers the possibility of subjectivity not grounded in recognition by external authority. It is neither solipsism nor narcissism, but a mode of existence that acknowledges the contingency of all power relations without collapsing into paralysis or despair.
Desacralization as a philosophical system still has a long path of formation ahead, and its success will depend not on academic recognition but on its ability to transform ways of thinking and acting beyond the borders of philosophical institutions. In this sense, desacralization is already enacting itself — by refusing the sacredness of academic philosophy, it opens a space for philosophy as a form of life.
desacralization.com
Desacralization is not only a philosophical methodology but also a performative system. It does not merely critique the sacred by overturning the very logic of legitimation — where now the sacred must prove its right, rather than the profane justify itself — but also provides real cases for applying this method in lived reality.
With this aim, I created the platform desacralization.com. It will contain not only the philosophical and theoretical foundation for the development of the concept of desacralization, but also concrete cases demonstrating the application of the principle of non-sacredness.