The counter-modern Eliade. "Wiederverzauberung der Welt" in the life and work of Mircea Eliade
The counter-modern Eliade. "Wiederverzauberung der Welt" in the life and work of Mircea Eliade

Summary/Abstract: The present article aims at proving that Mircea Eliade was decisively a counter-modern in everything he wrote, including literary, scholarly, and political works. It re-reads Eliade’s oeuvre using the concept of counter-modern as an ideological filter, in order to demonstrate how the apparent proteism and entropy of Eliade’s oeuvre thus becomes homogenous and consistent. Eliade’s counter-modern work can teach us how to recognize remnants of the sacred; he conceived his work as a vade mecum in this regard. This is why he appealed, in his early work, to those cultures where the mystical structures were still present, still central, still recognizable; namely, the Oriental cultures. And this is also why, towards the end of his activity, which coincided with the end of modernity, he felt that he could at last openly speak, as we have seen, about the necessity of reintroducing the sacred into a desacralized society. Eliade’s work in the literary, scholarly, and political realms is nothing less than a vade mecum for the re-enchantment of the world. And this is also why it so fascinates readers situated beyond historical modernity: this counter-modern thinker can teach those of us who have survived a disenchanted modernity, how to re-enchant our world.

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