I have been very interested in your exchange with Saba Mahmood and I sincerely appreciate your efforts to maintain the inescapable political dimensions of this debate. Near the end of her response to this post, she resurrects the idea of the ‘free’ space of critique that exists only insofar as it “suspends the closure necessary to political action.” In these discussions, we must always resist the urge to return to the reassuring opposition between theory and practice since it is in truth an attempt to evade the responsibility that comes with the fact that our positions and articulations are political acts with real political effects.

With all of this said, I want to press you on the need to retain the word and hence legacy of the secular within a de-transcendentalizing movement that seeks to open “a whole other horizon of thinking about contemporary political problems beyond the bipolar syndrome of ‘secularism’ vs. ‘religion’.” Given the interpenetration of the secular and the religious, it seems dangerous to inscribe in advance this movement of critique within the category of the secular since this could obstruct the very de-transcendalizing operation that you seek to put into play. In recognizing the necessity of inheriting the dialectical movement of the Enlightenment, why must we preserve a term whose very horizon we hope to see effaced? What if this continual effort to construct a materialist epistemology demands that we forsake the epistemological ground of this opposition between the secular and the religious?