Imperial somatics and genealogies of religion: How we never became secular

The narrative of Modernity is a fabulous retelling of colonialism and the cultural and ethnic devastation that came along with European imperialism. With the aid of Foucault's genealogical method, the author re-reads the story of alleged social, political, and epistemological advances that propel the West to world-historical pre-eminence as the formation of a complex " autotheodicy" aimed at justifying the depredations of the West on the rest. In particular, the author considers the case of the Inquisition in Spain, and its exportation to the "New World." In the course of this process, religion turned into the form of (Western) "science", but the operation remained much the same under either description: an education in self-regard and other-loathing. The supposed secularization of the West is, then, a fable. Religion is the mirror in which modern society must look at itself to discover its own otherness. But it is also in this mirror where its "others" look back.