Post-secular Theory. Rethinking Religion through Flora Tristán, Paul Gauguin and Vargas Llosa in "El paraíso en la otra esquina"

Abstract

This article postulates that the criticism of religion is the central theme of the novel Paradise in the other corner, providing an alternative to the critical challenge of finding a unifying factor of the two stories of the work, both Flora Tristan and Paul Gauguin. Using the post-secular concept of Jürgen Habermas, the three hypotheses of the secularization of José Casanova, the critique of an essentialist vision of the religion of Talal Asad and the three stages of the secular development of Charles Taylor, this analysis has the objective of questioning the binary opposition between the secular and the religious that permeates the work of Vargas Llosa. Through a revision of the narrative of secularization, Eurocentrist and modern, present in the novel, we try to point out the vagueness of the definition of the religious, the porosity of the immanent picture created by the author, and the resistance of the reader to a transhistorical binary opposition that suggests natural human potentialities, which are realized when liberating from religion.