ABSTRACT
Religion' and the 'secular' have a common origin, and the concept of 'religion' is essentially secular. The identification of the 'religious' with the 'sacred' or 'transcendent' with what is set apart from the secular sphere, is deployed by secular modernity to distance itself from 'religion' as its fantastic other. A critical history of the investments placed on the term 'religion' can easily constructed. Only with the more recent cultural turn has the secular space of subjectivity been replaced by that of 'culture', where it assumes the mantle politics and an epistemology. Eagleton, in an incisive critique of the idea of culture, has described culturalism as 'one of the great contemporary reductionisms'. The process of the construction of knowledge as 'capitalization' is dependent on a faith, and even an eschatology. The study of religion has had a crucial role in this process of capitalization.
