Routing my response through a close reading of Bilgrami’s secularism thesis, I aim to achieve a few interrelated goals: first, by examining a few worldly and literary examples, to problematize the concept of religious homogeneity that constitutes the tacit alternative to pluralism in Bilgrami’s essay. Second, I try to suggest both that the world is more plural than we often take it to be and, more controversially, that in terms of religion, all societies manifest deep and significant internal pluralism—a form of diversity at least as important as inter-religious differences. Finally, I try to clarify the shift in Bilgrami’s thesis from individual subjects and objects—the “we” of Bilgrami’s proviso—to corporate and conceptual ones, a slippage symptomatic of the way Bilgrami describes the kinds of things religion and pluralism are.

“The ‘qualifier’ that (S) opens with,” writes Bilgrami, “is there to point out that secularism is a doctrine that may be relevant even in societies where there is no religious plurality” (emphasis added). We can imagine possible worlds (utopian and dystopian) that display the technical characteristics of capitalist global modernity, and might, in a superficial sense, qualify as being religiously homogeneous. The scholarly literature on ethnoreligious monocultures, a term adopted by sociologists from modern agribusiness, disputes their supposed advantages and disadvantages, but generally accepts their existence. Most examples of homogenous societies, however, are located problematically in the distant historical past (thus apt to be tinted by nostalgia, as are many yearnings for the apparent security of naïve belief), or amidst uncontacted, preliterate rainforest tribes—they are not societies in which “we” might be living, let alone ones that have written constitutions and “stated fundamental rights.” As with nostalgic yearnings for the pleasures of an enchanted world, we would do well to regard most claims about religious monocultures as the likely product of projective fantasy. As Bilgrami himself acknowledges, even ostensible religious monocultures will eventually fracture through internal sectarian conflict. History, meanwhile, makes it clear that in nations appearing (or claiming) to be religiously homogeneous, people are very likely living in tyranny or its recent shadow. As with total consensus on any major issue, a great deal of bloodshed or repression is the likely cause and cost of a religious monoculture.

One of the main problems with monocultures is that frequently invoked contemporary examples—like Japan, a nation whose high degree of ethnic and linguistic homogeneity is often remarked upon by Japanese and visitors alike—turn out to be more diverse upon closer inspection. Indigenous groups like the Ainu, whose histories resemble that of some Native American tribes, have long inhabited the islands of the Japanese archipelago. Readers of Haruki Murakami’s recent novel IQ84 may recall the extended account of Ainu village life on Sakhalin and Hokkaido the protagonist reads aloud in an interpolated tale from a Japanese translation of a story by Anton Chekhov, or his descriptions of Ainu villages on the northern Island of Hokkaido in A Wild Sheep Chase. Far more significant in numeric terms, the population of Korean Japanese, often called zai-nichi, constitute an undocumented minority numbering perhaps several million living as an underclass with problematic citizenship status, a reminder that Japanese ethnic homogeneity is part of the machinery of social hierarchy. Large non-citizen laborer populations of industrial and post-industrial nations clearly should be—but most often are not—recognized in data on ethnic, religious, and linguistic diversity.

When James Joyce’s Stephen Dedalus collects his teacher’s wages at the end of book two of Ulysses, he endures a lecture on Anglo-Irish history, fiscal responsibility, and the Jews from his headmaster, who chases after him to offer the following coup de grâce on the question of Irish religious homogeneity:

Ireland, they say, has the honour of being the only country which never persecuted the jews [sic]. Do you know that? No. And do you know why?
He frowned sternly on the bright air.
—Why, sir? Stephen asked, beginning to smile.
—Because she never let them in, Mr Deasy said solemnly.

Even if Deasy is convinced, erroneously of course, that Ireland is a uniformly Christian society, the long history of “the Troubles” should immediately emphasize the important denominational differences occluded by the category of “Christian.” As political scientist James Fearon emphasizes, “it rapidly becomes clear that one must make all manner of borderline-arbitrary decisions” in the process of ethnic categorization; “constructivist or instrumentalist arguments about the contingent, fuzzy, and situational character of ethnicity seem amply supported” by the character of taxonomic decisions. If ethnic and linguistic monocultures are always already problematic, claims about religious homogeneity are further complicated by the nature of religious belonging. Even in a hypothetical society where 100% of the population might name the same group when asked to state their religion—answering “Christian” or “Muslim” to the question marked “religion” in a Pew Research Center survey, for instance—individuals within the society will differ widely in the intensity, sites, and modalities that define their experience of religion.

Before I get deeper into what is at stake in the proviso through which Bilgrami seeks to limit secularism’s problematic claims to universality, I want to summarize a few of the key points along the fast-paced itinerary of his argument. As an effort to nail down the slippery terminology of the secular and its various cognates, Bilgrami’s essay represents an incisive intervention in the critical study of secularity. While Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age dismantles oppositional conceptions of religion and secularity, Bilgrami aims to restore secularism’s oppositionality but limit its applicability. He asserts that there are three “invariant forms” characteristic of secularism as a political stance: first, that secularism is a structural relationship or an attitude toward religion rather than a thing in itself; second, that secularism is a political doctrine about, but not against, religion; and third, that secularism is not a good in and of itself. For Bilgrami, secularism simply isn’t justifiable on rational grounds: “there are no…secure universal grounds on which one can base one’s argument for secularism.” What’s more, he warns, secularism “is only a good in some contexts, and therefore not always to be embraced even in temporal modernity.”

Each of these points is contentious in its own right; by defining secularism in opposition to religion (secularism has for him only “parasitic meaning”) Bilgrami charts a course that departs from recent trends in the field, represented by Talal Asad and Taylor, both of whom conceive of secularism as a complex, historically specific set of ideologies and disciplines rather than in opposition to religion. Asad in particular has aimed to uncover the various ways secularism operates as a set of disciplinary and disciplining practices that produce and police the modern category of religion. Narrowing his focus to legitimating state secularism, Bilgrami’s thesis reads:

Should we be living in a religiously plural society, secularism requires that all religions should have the privilege of free exercise and be evenhandedly treated except when a religion’s practices are inconsistent with the ideals that a polity seeks to achieve (ideals often, though not always, enshrined in stated fundamental rights and other constitutional commitments) in which case there is a lexical ordering in which the political ideals are placed first. (Italics his)

The concept of lexical ordering—a final propositional jab in a series of subordinate clauses—is Bilgrami’s attempt to offer a principle for adjudicating questions of moral priority, here by ranking religious practices lower than those that result from those of a polity’s ideals. Put more simply, lexical ordering is the process by which we weigh competing goods. For Bilgrami, the way to reassert secularism’s ethical mandate, despite its relativism, is not to redefine it, as Taylor and others have suggested, but to assert the importance of respecting a particular group’s vision of its own ideals, which can be, at least according to Bilgrami, articulated without reference to religion.

One of the strengths Bilgrami identifies in his argument is the way it helps him to negotiate several hot-button issues in what he calls “the present cold war being waged against ‘Islam.’” Quoting Taylor’s concern that secularists might misguidedly, to Taylor’s mind, “attack ‘Islam’ for instance for female genital mutilation [FGM], and for honor killings,” Bilgrami defends his version of the thesis (S) on the grounds that “when female genital mutilation or honour killings are identified as practices to be placed second in the lexical ordering, [i.e. to be objected to] Islam, as a generality, is not ‘under attack.’ Rather, the claim is entirely conditional: If there be a claim by those by those who practice them that these practices owe to a religion and if that claim is correct,” and so on. Lexical ordering allows Bilgrami to avoid being charged with attacking religion without adopting a position of neutrality towards its claims. Though neither Taylor nor Bilgrami intend it as such, female genital mutilation offers a good example of the internal diversity and syncretism of all religious traditions and of the difficulties one encounters when attempting to define what constitutes a religious practice. In Egypt, where over 99% of the population identifies as ethnical Egyptian and 94% as Sunni Muslim (a statistic growing higher, I fear, given recent violence against Egypt’s Coptic Christians) the U.S. Department of State reports that female genital mutilation is “nearly universal among women of reproductive age.” This is a sobering and distressing statistic, but FGM, which is practiced extensively across Africa and the Middle East, is not “Islamic” in origin; it seems to have originated in Ancient Egypt long before the rise of Islam. The prevalence of FGM in North Africa and its relative rarity in many Asian Muslim communities underscores the complex processes of local accommodation and syncretistic cultural absorption attendant to Islam’s globalization and indigenization.

It is rare point of agreement between Euro-American academics and practicing Muslims that, relative to other religions, Islam is a total way of life; similarly, both groups acknowledge the singular importance of the ummah. Even admitting that mainstream Islamic traditions place more emphasis on ritual observance than their contemporary Christian counterparts, the notion of a homogeneous “Islamic world” is, of course, highly problematic. According to the Pew Research Center’s Forum on Religious and Public Life’s 2009 analysis of global Muslim populations, Afghanistan, Iran, Mauritania, Tunisia, Western Sahara, and Yemen all report that Muslims constitute over 99% of the population, but to assume that the result of even this high degree of apparent religious uniformity is a meaningful religious monoculture would be to fall victim to what Nigerian novelist Chimamanda Adiche calls “the danger of a single story.” In her 2009 TED talk, Adiche critiques the powers that reduce a society’s pluralism to a single story, as European stories forged Africa as “a place of negatives, of difference, of darkness.” For Adiche, the problem is not that stereotypes are untrue but that they “flatten [our] experience and overlook the many other stories that inform” our sense of self and that they blind us to the importance of internal diversity.

One way to clarify the deeper philosophical issue at stake here is by appealing to Hannah Arendt’s theory of action, in which plurality and freedom are ontological conditions on which any meaningful concept of agency must be predicated. For Arendt, the ability to act, to introduce something new and unexpected into the world, can only arise in a condition of pluralism. In a famous passage at the beginning of The Human Condition, Arendt describes the human condition as one of plurality owing “to the fact that men, not Man, live on earth and inhabit the world…this plurality is specifically the condition—not only the conditio sine qua non, but the conditio per quam—of all political life.” By linking action to freedom and freedom to plurality Arendt means to emphasize that the capacity to introduce novelty into the world depends upon a quality of openness antithetical to a monoculture. On a practical level, as we adopt increasingly flexible and, as Amartya Sen calls them, “robustly plural” senses of our own identity based on multiple, overlapping, and shifting modes of belonging, the purely hypothetical nature of a religious monoculture becomes increasingly apparent.

Because modern world religions aggregate individuals often lacking other common bonds in custom, language, or ethnicity, it seems particularly problematic that the grammatical object of Bilgrami’s thesis (S) becomes “religion” itself: “[Secularism] requires that all religions should have the privilege of free exercise and be treated evenhandedly” (emphasis added). Why are “religions” as such, and not “religious individuals,” the agents bearing the “privilege” (not the right?) to free exercise? Returning to the example of Japan provides clarification on what is at stake here. It is important to note that Japan’s high degree of ethnic and linguistic homogeneity does not correlate to religious uniformity. Indeed, in addition to its Shinto, Buddhist, and Christian communities, the modern period has seen the explosive growth of new religious movements in Japan and a rise in multiple religious affiliations (self-reported membership in religious groups totals nearly twice the nation’s population). There are almost two hundred thousand religious organizations registered under Japan’s 1951 Religious Judicial Persons Law, which secures corporate legal personhood and various tax benefits for registered religious movements, but also entangles religious organizations with state power. Murakami’s Underground examines the legacy of the terrorist attacks perpetrated by Aum Shinrikyo, Japan’s most notorious new religious movement, a trope that reemerges in the alter-reality of IQ84 as the cultish Sakigake organization, a messianic new religious movement with a charismatic leader, a heavily armed military compound, and an elaborate network of political and economic influence. IQ84’s dystopian possible world highlights (and sensationalizes) the danger of a system where rights accrue to religions rather than to individuals. Sakigake’s mysterious “Leader” raises the question of who speaks for a religion. When an elected official in a democratic government speaks on behalf of a community, her legitimacy and sovereignty is contingent upon the consent of the governed, at least in liberal political thought. The question of who speaks for a religion, by what right and chosen by whom, is another matter; before granting Bilgrami’s claim that religions should have rights, we need to think more about the processes and systems that legitimate those who speak for a religion.

In a relatively recent essay in Critical Inquiry “Occidentalism, the Very Idea: An Essay on The Enlightenment and Enchantment,” the subject of a heated exchange on the popular blog Three Quarks Daily, Bilgrami makes some very confident claims about what “ordinary Muslim people” think and feel. Bilgrami writes:

Ordinary Muslims on the street are clear and perfectly precise about what they claim and want: that they are fighting back against centuries of colonial subjugation; that they want the military and corporate presence of the West (primarily the United States), which continues that subjugation in new and more subtle forms, out of their lands; that they want a just solution for the colonized, brutalized Palestinian people; that they want an end to the cynical support by the west…of corrupt regimes in their midst…that they will retaliate (or not speak out against those who retaliate) with an endless cycle of violence unless there is an end to…endless state-terrorist actions.

I am in no personal position to dispute the accuracy of this list, but I am struck by the relative confidence with which Bilgrami takes the pulse of the Muslim street. In his working paper on secularism he makes a strikingly similar claim: “The right thing to do is not to ask that secularism be redefined but to demand that one should drop talk of secularism and focus instead on trying to improve matters on what is really at stake [in relationships with the Muslim world]: the effects of a colonial past, a commercially exploitative present, unjust wars and embargoes, racial discrimination against migrants in Europe, and so on.” I see at least two issues at stake here. The first is practical: for Bilgrami, the “right thing to do” centers on addressing violations perpetrated by Euro-Americans in the name of secularism against Muslims. One thing made clear by the slogans and demands of the Arab Spring, however, is that its supporters are motivated by issues like government injustice, economic decline, and restrictions on basic freedoms—a list more in line with the demands and deficits identified by recent UN reports on human development in the Muslim world. The second is more philosophical: I am wary of confident generalization about the Arab street (or even about people down the street, for that matter). The kind of clean distinctions between politics and religion, public and private implicit in the idea of lexical ordering are likely to be available only to those who are already secular.

Mindful of the fact that a course on modal logic was the reason I changed my undergraduate major from philosophy to English, I conclude with an amendment to Bilgrami’s thesis, which incorporates the revisions to (S) that might follow if my critique of modern religious monocultures is convincing, in a thought-experiment I call (SN):

Should we be living in a religiously plural society, s Secularism requires that all religious people religions should have the privilege of free exercise and be evenhandedly treated except when a religion’s religious person’s practices are inconsistent with the ideals that a polity seeks to achieve (ideals, often, though not always, enshrined in stated fundamental rights and other constitutional commitments) in which case there is a lexical ordering in which the political ideals are placed first.

This post sketches out some of the ways the events of 9/11 altered time-consciousness and temporal rhetoric in the public sphere and follows how the attacks continue to frame the subjective experience of temporality. Beginning with the lexicon of the war on terror—with its temporally overdertemined rhetoric of “the homeland,” “preemption,” “fundamentalism,” and, of course, the name-date “9/11” itself—I consider a few cases of what I call 9/11 chronomania—the obsession with time and temporal disruption that characterizes representations of 9/11 across a variety of media forms. In the case of the 9/11 Commission Report, by refashioning disaster as chronology, the narrative aims to replace victims with knowers—first, by establishing an authorial subject in command of its perceptual, technological, and temporal fields, and second, by attempting to shape personal and collective understandings of 9/11 by securing events unfolding in multiple locations and witnessed in myriad ways on a single, immanent timeline. The goals of such a narrative are clear: the chronometric novella that begins the 9/11 Commission Report is in part a hook designed to catch a national audience primed by thrillers like the television series 24, but it is also an attempt to incrementalize and disaggregate horrific events into an easily understood linear plot as part of a self-professed attempt to salve the wounds of collective trauma.

From my perspective in literary studies, I am interested in the ways the seminal speeches and policy documents of the post-9/11 era—among them President George W. Bush’s address on September 20, the Quadrennial Defense Review of 2001 conducted by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, and the National Security Strategy (NSS) of 2002—frame September 11 as a temporal event and cast the problem of understanding or responding to the attacks in terms of the clash between multiple conceptions of time. Many of the early responses to September 11 in the Anglophone media compensated for the collapse of geographic distance that had long separated the United States from its enemies by emphasizing the temporal distance between the “medieval,” “barbarous,” and “fundamentalist” perpetrators of the attacks and the putative modernity of its victims. The dichotomies of the war on terror depend in large part on dualistic notions of cultural conflict between Western modernity and the archaic forces of a fundamentalist Islam, as cultural critics Edward Said, Judith Butler, Bruce Holisnger, and many others have argued. Neomedievalist rhetoric dusts off old Orientalist tactics to police the boundaries between “us” and “them,” in part by denying what anthropologist Johannes Fabian describes as the “coevalness” of the two parties in question. The medievalization of Islam—or, for that matter, of American foreign policy, as with President Bush’s telling use of the term “crusade” as a synonym for the war on terror—is not, however, my subject here. Indeed, the denial of coevalness between “Islam”and “the West” serves in part to obscure the more complex temporal logic of the war on terror. Though a vast quantity of critical ink has been spilt on the laws and policies of the Bush era, much more can be gleaned by examining the temporal logic of the war on terror, in which time is not experienced and narrated as homogeneous, but rather as uneven, saturated, multiple, and neither as secular nor as hegemonic as has previously been maintained.

In his September 20 address to a joint session of Congress, the national public, and beyond it a global audience, President Bush set out to reassure a stricken nation, name its antagonists, and outline the parameters and goals of a militarized response. “Without a story,” Naomi Klein observes in The Shock Doctrine, “we are intensely vulnerable to those people who are ready to take advantage of the chaos for their own ends. As soon as we have a narrative that offers a perspective on the shocking events, we become reoriented, and the world begins to make sense.” The narcissistic evasions of the rhetorical question at the heart of President Bush’s September 20 speech (“Why do they hate us? … They hate our freedoms”) and the broader Manichean drama between good and evil that would come to characterize the rhetoric of the war on terror tell a simple, easily weaponized story of precisely the kind Klein had in mind. But despite sustained attempts on September 20 and in other speeches to gloss the events of September 11 within the familiar nationalist topoi of freedom, heroism, and justice, the speeches and policy documents of the Bush-era constitute less of an orienting metafiction than a tangled web of analeptic and proleptic leaps that provoke and maintain a state of crisis rather than prepare the ground for its resolution. While this and other speeches attempt to channel the affective response of a wounded nation, they do so precisely by maximalizing and marshalling traumatic rupture to shatter any preexisting historical order, particularly one based on linear temporality.

Beginning with his brief statement on September 11, Bush-era speeches and policy documents enmeshed the terrorist attacks in a discourse of temporal rupture. As the President intoned on September 20, “All of this was brought upon us in a single day, and night fell on a different world.” The binary metaphor of day and night, established here with a keen emphasis on the “fall” that defines their separation, pervades Bush’s lexicon in the aftermath of the attacks. The elegant and formally complex September 20 speech, arguably the most important rhetorical moment in what would become the war on terror, deploys a series of catachrestic claims that underscore the way the attacks both constitute and trigger temporal dislocations: “tonight we are a country awakened to danger and called to defend freedom” because, he argues, “we face new and sudden national challenges” presaged by unprecedented acts of terrorism (my italics). Lending rhetorical force to these claims with a chiasmus that echoes the earlier crossing of day and night, the speech reaches its climax in the moment when Bush declares, “whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done.”

For its victims and for the billions around the world who watched, paralyzed, as disaster unfolded on television, the coordinated strikes of September 11 came as a cataclysmic shock. Within hours on a beautiful but otherwise ordinary Tuesday morning, four commercial jetliners had been hijacked and the World Trade Center’s signature towers and a large section of the Pentagon, symbols of America’s economic and military might, had been reduced to smoking rubble. It is difficult to think critically about the rhetoric of surprise without seeming to lend support to the ranks of September 11 conspiracy theorists, but for national security experts and administration officials, the idioms of surprise must be weighed against the repeated warnings and public pronouncements of impending terrorist attacks in order to understand its ideological value. Beyond their obvious utility in denying culpability for failing to disrupt terrorist networks prior to the attacks of 2001, claims regarding the epochal nature of September 11, particularly those emphasizing suddenness and rupture, begin to translate the experience of surprise and shock into a politically mobile idea of the attacks as an atemporal event whose force severs the causal and epistemological relationship between the past that came before and the future yet to come. In a carefully argued analysis of the President’s September 20 address, literary critic Donald Pease argues that the speech was “designed to lessen the events’ traumatizing power through the provision of an imaginary response to a disaster that could not otherwise be assimilated to the preexisting order of things.”  It seems to me, however, that something of the opposite is the case; while this and other speeches attempt to channel the affective response of a wounded nation, they do so precisely by maximalizing and marshalling traumatic rupture to shatter any preexisting historical order. A better trope than assimilation would be peripeteia: the sudden reversal from mourning to violence enacted in Bush’s September 20 address (“our grief has turned to anger, our anger to resolution”), which embodies the temporal instabilities of the war on terror.

The Quadrennial Defense Review, the primary public document that outlines national military strategy, published on September 30, 2001, is unsurprisingly devoted to the “new era” of national security inducted on September 11, and it is here that the emergent Bush Doctrine fully articulates the ontology of temporal rupture. By tradition a highly narrative genre, the QDR of 2001 attempts to tell the story of 9/11 and its implications for national security in such a way as to forge consensus, if not actually to blunt the edge of defense policy. One of the most striking aspects of the 2001 QDR conducted by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld is the way the surprise attacks precipitate uncertainty: “A fundamental condition of our circumstances,” Rumsfeld maintains, is that “the United States cannot predict with a high degree of confidence the identity of the countries or the actors that may threaten its interests and security.” If the past can no longer be used to predict the future, the military must “establish a new strategy for America’s defense that would embrace uncertainty and contend with surprise.” In other words, the disappearance of history at the heart of chronomania denies the narratives that would consider the role played by American policies in creating the material conditions out of which 9/11 arose and substitutes for them dystopian imaginings of greater violence yet to come.

As Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld argued in prepared testimony for the 9/11 Commission, “on September 11th, our world changed … we cannot go back. The world of September 10th is past … we cannot go back to thinking as we did on September 10th. For if we do—if we look at the problems of the 21st century through a 20th century prism—we will come to wrong conclusions and fail the American people.” For Rumsfeld, pre-9/11 epistemologies—forensic evidentiary paradigms based on retrospective analysis—have little place in the altered world of the twenty-first century, a world in which analyzing the past to predict the future will generate, as he opined, the “wrong conclusions.” If the Cold War policies of deterrence and containment operate with a fundamentally reactive logic, the war on terror claims the necessity of preemption. The National Security Strategy (NSS) of 2002, the first such document prepared by the White House after September 11 and a radical departure from its predecessors, aggressively consolidates the imperatives of preventative war. The seminal characteristic of the “new thinking” advocated by the White House and Department of Defense in the National Security Strategy and elsewhere is the proleptic temporality that emerges to govern the War on Terror. Because the goal of anticipatory action is to prevent the very terrorist strikes whose execution would have substantiated the need to strike in the first place, the proleptic futurity of the war on terror depends, paradoxically, on the public’s ability to maintain the violence of September 11 in the continuous present. “The hour is coming when America will act,” President Bush avowed messianically on September 20, confident in America’s redemptive agency.

At the same time as the logic of preemption and the temporality of trauma were deployed to sever the continuity of cause and effect, the rhetoric of temporal rupture within halts calendrical flow, and in the resultant temporal rift opens new connections between the nation’s mythic past and its present. In his major post-September 11 speeches, the President forged a series of opportunistic contiguities between America’s two great twentieth-century foes, communism and fascism, and its new enemies in the twenty-first century. Bush described al Qaeda on September 20 as “the heirs of all the murderous ideologies of the 20th century,” insisting that “they follow in the path of fascism, Nazism, and totalitarianism.” In his prayer service remarks at the National Cathedral on September 14, a day consecrated to prayer and remembrance, crisis connects the present with a cyclical pattern of heroism: “In every generation, the world has produced enemies of human freedom. They have attacked America because we are freedom’s home and defender, and the commitment of our fathers is now the calling of our time.” In the Bush administration’s telling of “history,” one strikingly similar to Francis Fukuyama’s, “the great struggles of the twentieth century ended with a decisive victory for the forces of freedom—and a single sustainable model for national success: freedom, democracy, and free enterprise.” With time itself torn asunder by the attacks, temporal instability facilitates analeptic leaps into the nation’s mythic past that conjoin 9/11 with an unlikely array of historical moments in public and political discourse.

By examining narratives of state power, we can begin to see how the war on terror, far from being disabled by chronomania, integrates nonlinear time into the very fabric of the national imaginary and the seminal legislation of the post-9/11 period. In the dominant academic account, modernity conceives of history as unfolding in what Walter Benjamin influentially called homogeneous empty time. Indeed, the idea of modernity is constitutively rooted, as literary critic Matei Călinescu argues, “within the framework of a specific time awareness, namely, that of historical time, linear and irreversible, flowing irresistibly onwards.” In Benedict Anderson’s influential account, “the idea of a sociological organism moving calendrically through homogeneous, empty time is a precise analogue of the idea of the nation, which is also conceived as a solid community moving steadily down (or up) history.” In this way, modern states can be understood as fundamentally chronopolitical entities. But, as I have been arguing here, after 9/11 we no longer live in this time, if “we” ever did.

I began this essay with a series of observations about how the 9/11 Report asserts temporal mastery over unpredicted events by constructing a timeline, a chronometric form that attempts to move readers away from affective responses surrounding victimhood toward those of agency. At a very basic level, such a process deactivates the kairotic rupture triggered by the war on terror by drawing readers through the time of catastrophe and, figuratively, out the other side. While such a narrative form might seem inherently aligned with state power and the homogeneous empty time of modernity—and thus easily summoned to the service of militarized patriotism—in the context of kairotic governmentality, the stopwatch-driven narrative of the Report can be seen in a different light. When I asked Philip Zelikow, the Executive Director of the 9/11 Commission and the person most responsible for the Report’s form and tone, about this chronometric approach to history, he described how the cultivation of what he called the Report’s “House Style,” a voice free of polemic and, to the extent possible, of interpretation, was one of the primary goals for the final document he established during his first meeting with Commission chairman Thomas Kean and vice-chair Lee Hamilton. With a “dry, unadorned style designed around a rigorous substructure of time and narrative,” Zelikow aimed to focalize what people knew at particular moments in history and clarify how individuals understood their choices in the moment, rather than succumb to what he termed “the blinding force of hindsight.” The precise temporal measurements characteristic of the Report find their analogue in the operational complexity of al Qaeda’s attacks, which depended on similar, distinctly “modern” temporal logics. In other words, the Report’s chronometric narrative restores the coevalness of terrorism’s victims and perpetrators.

Before championing some kind of return to the secular, however, one must acknowledge the empty formalism of the 9/11 Commission Report’s approach: after all, one gains little useful knowledge in the confidence that the first plane struck at 8:46:40. On a pragmatic level, identifying the kairotic power of September 11 reflects an astute recognition within the Bush administration that the terrorist attacks afforded a unique opportunity for political action—not only in its immediate aftermath but in any of its citational presents. In the new, multidimensional temporality of the war on terror it is not, as Benjamin feared, time deployed as chronos that presages oppression, nor does time’s messianic cessation necessarily constitute the hallmark of revolutionary praxis; instead, in the proleptic and analeptic constellations of September 11, technocapital and state power have subsumed what Charles Taylor—following the apostle Paul, who used the term to denote messianic time—calls the kairotic time of the religious imaginary.

Ten years after the attacks, the multiple temporalities of the war on terror pose something of a conundrum, particularly for thinkers on the left who believe that to effectively contend with state power and its dominant ideologies, one must begin with a critique of its chronopolitical underpinnings: namely its hegemonic secular temporality. When “destabilization” has long served the critical community as a synonym for subversion, what happens when rupture becomes the status quo?

The series, a historical fiction set during the Second World War and filmed in Paris, Budapest, and Tehran, casts Habib and Sarah as star-crossed lovers in a world at war, during the course of which Habib saves Sarah and her family from the Nazi concentration camps by facilitating their escape from France and Nazi persecution with Iranian passports. At the same time as Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad was making international news with his Holocaust denial and vitriolic anti-Semitism—rhetoric that has become central to Iran’s foreign policy and saturated its domestic media since his presidential election in 2005—Zero Degree Turn’s frank engagement with the Holocaust as a historical reality, its depiction of secular culture, and its egalitarian, interfaith romance stunned Iran-watchers in the West. During the Ramadan fast, millions of Iranians gathered to watch the series finale, filmed amidst the ruins of Persepolis, in which Habib and Sarah reunite after years of hardship and persecution. “If Ahmadinejad perpetuates the Islamic Republic’s traditional attempts to undermine Israel’s right to exist by denying and/or trivializing the Holocaust,” asked the Jerusalem Post, “then why has Iranian state television produced Zero Degree Turn?”

Why indeed? While editorials rushed to put forward consequentialist readings, a more patient approach would instead be to step back and investigate instead what watching Zero Degree Turn can teach Western audiences about the way Iranians might imagine themselves, their histories, and their futures, beyond their rulers’ genocidal rhetoric. Especially now, several years after the series aired, in light of the disputed Iranian presidential elections of 2009, the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli conflict, and the developments of the Arab Spring, Zero Degree Turn offers a unique invitation to call attention to the relationship between popular media and affective engagement, and to cultivate new knowledge where political grandstanding too often trumps substantive engagement.

Without a doubt, the series merits broader attention; it should be seen, discussed, and engaged as a potential vehicle for positive cosmopolitan exchange and as a basis for a more productive future among contentious parties in a complex global system. More than anything else, I intend this post as an invitation to begin such a project; almost no one has watched Zero Degree Turn in the Anglophone world—coverage was limited to a few two-minute video clips and trailers linked to online editorials. Sources from BBC News to The Christian Science Monitor mapped similar political, historical, and ideological coordinates—citing the show’s uncharacteristically high production costs, its high viewership numbers, and the historical figures on whom Fathi based his hero. All then turn to rehash the well-documented anti-Semitism and Holocaust denial with which Ahmadinejad attempts to undermine the legitimacy of the Israeli state and bolster his domestic popularity.

As it turns out, one consequence of Iranian restrictions of press freedoms is an enforced monolingualism: despite its 2007 distribution in Europe on satellite television and a DVD release by a company in California, no complete subtitled version of Zero Degree Turn is available. Non-Farsi speakers like myself must watch online videos of varying quality, hosted by YouTube and other sites. Official links to the series on the Iran Broadcasting website are dead, but by cobbling together subtitled fragments posted by various YouTube users, a diligent Anglophone audience can gain access to episodes one, eight, and nine through the links provided here, and it is to these episodes that I turn my attention in this post.

The climax of the ninth episode occurs in a classroom that, in the melodrama’s exaggerated visual style, evokes a theater. The simple staging places Habib and Sarah side by side on the dais of a lecture hall facing a few dozen students, their contemporaries, who take notes and exchange conversation in the stadium seating; alongside them, but away from the lectern, stands a respected professor. The presentation, delivered by a complementarily attired Habib and Sarah, concerns their research on the philosophical views of, and possible connections between, seventeenth-century Shia theologian Mulla Sadra and his Dutch contemporary Baruch Spinoza. In speeches of equal length, Habib and Sarah present the fruits of a collaborative intellectual project, trading insights on Spinoza’s monism and Sadra’s rationalist conceptions of beauty, truth, and goodness. The episode stages analysis not as cultural contest but as an exchange in the Socratic, or Habermasean, public sphere.

The majority of the shots are taken either from in front of the lecturing pair or from Sarah’s side, where the camera angle and composition emphasize Sarah and Habib’s equal stature and confidence in oral argumentation. This composition is all the more striking when compared to other scenes in the series, particularly domestic interiors and thresholds, where Sarah appears inches shorter than Habib and looks up at him in moments thick with erotic tension. The message conveyed by the staging and content could hardly be clearer: two representatives of their respective cultures analyze leading liberal figures of seventeenth-century thought as equals under the secular codes of academic knowledge-production. Islam and Judaism are formally equivalent as objects of rational inquiry, independent of Habib and Sarah’s private affective commitments to their religions. One of the most striking aspects of Zero Degree Turn is the way the series depicts and celebrates secular social norms and practices distinctly at odds with the Islamic Republic’s constitutional regulation of dress, social comportment, and public morality. Not only does the series depict uncovered women, it revels in elaborate period costumes evocative of Paris in the 1940s and, more importantly, accurately portrays the secular norms of Iranian intellectual culture under Pahlavi rule. The first episode prominently features a damning critique of censorship and casts Habib as a staunch defender of a free press. In the ninth episode, the secular space of the classroom, governed by norms of free intellectual inquiry and expression, upholds both a democratic polity and an egalitarian romance under threat from an external totalitarian force.

Habib and Sarah’s presentation is interrupted by the entrance of a German Waffen SS officer and his contingent. In keeping with the careful attention to historical costume characteristic of Zero Degree Turn, the scene emphasizes the black formal uniform of the commanding officer, a haughty Sturmbannfuhrer wearing the SS runes, braids, stars, and cap attendant to his rank. Behind him stands a young officer named Schmit Mayer, a former classmate of Habib and Sarah’s during his pre-war days as a German student in Paris. In an inspection of a university regarded as a hotbed of potential resistance, the senior officer confronts first the professor and then Habib and Sarah about the content of their presentation. Discovering that their subject is Spinoza, the officer attacks Sarah with a question: “I think Spinoza was a Jew thinker of the bad and renegade type. Is this not so?” As Sarah stutters in fear, Habib interjects with a raised hand and deflects the conversation to his own identity as an Iranian. Drawing the officer skillfully into a discussion of Hölderlin, Habib springs a rhetorical trap, quoting the poet to the effect of cryptic adage and veiled critique: “As you have commenced, you shall always be likewise.” The officer refuses the bait, continuing his interrogation: “So your research is on the Jew Spinoza,” he continues. “Is there a Jew in this class?” Seconds of tense silence tick by with the camera panning the students, who keep their eyes averted until Habib again interjects to assert that “here we are more familiar with each other’s nationality rather than the religion or race we belong to,” a claim corroborated by the informant, Schmit Mayer.

Not only do the French and Iranian students conceal and protect Sarah’s Jewish identity, a German officer actively conspires with the students in a treasonous act against his own commanding officer. Later in the episode, Schmit takes Habib aside to pass on the warning that “They’re [the Gestapo] going to start identifying and arresting Jew (sic) nationals…separating the Jews and transferring them to concentration camps.” In numerous moments such as this Zero Degree Turn takes pains to emphasize the complex entanglements that motivate diverse people, most of ‘good’ hearts, to do what they do in times of emergency. As Schmit puts it to Habib during a rainy street scene in episode nine: “When a war breaks out, unfortunately, we ordinary people have this only (sic) chance to choose between the bad and worse.” An equivocation, clearly, and the series’ portrayal of the historical reality of the Holocaust does not imply its support for a Jewish state in the Middle East; instead, while sympathizing with the Holocaust’s Jewish victims, Zero Degree Turn casts the main villain as Sarah’s Zionist uncle Theodor (clearly named in reference to Theodor Herzl), a Mephistophelean figure who opposes Sarah and Habib’s love while colluding with the Nazis to facilitate the creation of a Jewish state in Palestine. In this way, the series attempts to disaggregate anti-Semitism and anti-Zionism, and thus to disconnect recognition of the Holocaust from recognition of Israel.

Nonetheless, the series marks a potential for substantive intercultural understanding, so often thwarted by censorship, corrosive politics, and the systematic preaching of hate. It reminds us of alternate histories to the one we now inhabit, where, as Benjamin Netanyahu argued in his May 24, 2011, address to a joint session of Congress, Israel regards Iran as the gravest threat to its security. During the reign of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, and particularly during Muhammad Mossadeq’s administration, Israel and Iran enjoyed mutually beneficial ties: Iranian oil flowed to European markets through the Elat-Ashkelon pipeline, and Iran, like Turkey, and Ethopia, formed part of Ben Gurion’s “Alliance of the Periphery.” For those in the West, the popularity of Zero Degree Turn suggests at the very least that Iranians are willing to imagine far more nuanced engagements with the Holocaust than president Ahmadinejad’s denialist rhetoric would suggest.

Ubuntu, the Zulu term for an ethic of interdependence, which informs social structures and ethical practices throughout southern Africa, has been called the motivating principle, or zeitgeist, of communitarian village life for Bantu-speaking peoples, for whom muntu, or mutu, is a common word for person. The connotations of ubuntu are commonly expressed by invoking a Zulu maxim in which its cognates predominate: “umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu,” or, to use the proverb of Tutu’s Xhosa heritage, “ubuntu ungamntu ngabanye abantu,” (“a person is a person through other persons”). Ubuntu’s untranslatability is central to both theoretical and popular articulations: nearly all writing on the subject takes this claim as axiomatic, and nearly all such texts (my own included) cite the transliterated Zulu maxim. Untranslatability asserts cultural difference; the lack of an equivalent concept in European languages and cultures, where the concepts of individuality are more deeply sedimented, is thus marshaled as evidence of otherness. In the 1960s and ‘70s, ubuntu was claimed by négritude thinkers, like Senegalese president Léopold Senghor and anti-apartheid activist Steve Biko, as the unique cultural inheritance of Black Africa. The term anchored both the norms of an idealized precolonial condition and rehabilitated cultural forms that had been marginalized by colonial domination. If for Senghor, Biko, and others fighting against colonialism and apartheid, ubuntu symbolized opposition to Western practices of domination and served as their dialectical antithesis, its status as a guiding principle of the new South Africa and its strategic use by Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu catapulted ubuntu into national and global circulation as a rival normative framework to Western ideas about sovereignty, utility, and individual autonomy. At the same time, ubuntu was called upon to translate these very norms—and the attendant discourses of human rights and civil society—into African vernaculars. Ubuntu can thus be seen as a threshold, or site of intensity, in global networks of cultural exchange.

The clearest example of the way ubuntu served as a site of mediation can be found in the “National Unity and Reconciliation” chapter of South Africa’s 1994 Interim Constitution (the section cited as the mandate for the Truth and Reconciliation Commission, which dominated media and politics in South Africa from 1996 to 1998). Proleptically affirming the possibility of reconciliation on the basis of a community yet to come, the constitution asserts that apartheid’s “gross violations of human rights . . . can now be addressed on the basis that there is a need for understanding but not for vengeance, a need for reparation but not for retaliation, a need for ubuntu but not for victimization.”  In its very enunciation, the term ubuntu begins the process of reparation that it both embodies and desires, in this case by making the argument, both pragmatically and philosophically, for moral and linguistic reeducation. By asserting the importance of an untranslated Zulu word, the interim constitution makes good on a principle that would be formalized in Article 6.2 of South Africa’s 1996 Constitution: “Recognising the historically diminished use and status of the indigenous languages of our people, the state must take practical and positive measures to elevate the status and advance the use of these languages.”

Part of my point, however, is that ubuntu can be meaningfully described as “indigenous” to southern Africa only in a historical sense relating to its origins. Indeed, YouTube videos featuring Nelson Mandela and Desmond Tutu pitch ubuntu as a platform for public claim-making that rejects subject-centered models of citizenship and agency. While Jimmy Klausen, in his recent post on the subject of indigenous religions, uses the category of indigeneity to shed light on Taylor’s “politics of recognition,” the assumptions about cultural purity that freight indigeneity reflect neither the global iterations of ubuntu as a product in the global marketplace of ideas nor its history of mediating colonial and missionary encounters.  Instead, various claims to ubuntu’s indigenousness—its status as an “indigenous African philosophy,” as it has been described both by members of the Black Consciousness movement and by academic anthropologists—is an obvious part of its cultural currency. It would be more accurate to read the discourse of ubuntu as a part of the phenomenon of religious pluralization that Taylor calls the “nova effect,” in which the “malaise of modernity” and a deep history of religious improvisation combine to power our “spiritual super-nova, a kind of galloping pluralism on the spiritual plane.” This image helps to make sense of the rampant commercialization of ubuntu showcased by phenomena as diverse as the Ubuntu computer programming language, the 2009 “Ubuntu Diplomacy” initiative of the U.S. Department of State, and the Cape Town “Ubuntu Festival.” Much of this is merely multiculturalist kitsch, and indeed it is on the very basis of ubuntu’s status as “an African product” that it is marketed as a valuable cultural resource and has become a buzzword in corporate management discourse. There, ubuntu management symbolizes leveraging less hierarchical business models to attain greater employee satisfaction and corporate profit in an explicit bid to bridge global capitalism and local folkways.

In No Future Without Forgiveness, Desmond Tutu, the most systematic and cogent advocate of ubuntu in recent decades, puts it this way:

[Ubuntu] speaks to the very essence of being human [. . .] it is to say, ‘My humanity is caught up, is inextricably bound up, in yours.’  We belong to a bundle of life. We say, ‘A person is a person through other persons.’ It is not, ‘I think therefore I am.’  It says rather: ‘I am human because I belong. I participate, I share [. . .] Harmony, friendliness, community are great goods. Social harmony is for us the summum bonum—the greatest good. Anything that subverts, that undermines this sought-after good, is to be avoided like the plague.

If for Taylor, Christianity is all about reconciliation, for Tutu, Christianity is all about ubuntu. As Michael Battle, a scholar of what he calls Tutu’s “ubuntu theology,” argues, ubuntu inflects Tutu’s deepest sense of Christianity, affecting his understanding of agape, the imago dei, and the church as a community. Several caveats are in order: I am bracketing questions about whether descriptions of ubuntu should be taken as empirical claims about actually existing social norms or are, rather, better seen as utopian longings. Furthermore, the heterogeneity of sub-Saharan Africa—not to mention the differences between precolonial village life and, for instance, life in the slums of Soweto—renders suspect any claims about a singular African culture. I am also not, for the purposes of this discussion, concerned with whether ubuntu’s communalism underwrites the suppression of dissent, though Tutu’s claim that anything detrimental to social harmony should be “avoided like the plague” has a chilling tone.

Instead, I want to linger on the ways that ubuntu, in all of its guises, challenges the basic assumptions about selfhood that subtend Taylor’s work, from Sources of the Self through A Secular Age, while its contemporary mediation and global circulation—as well as its status as a translation zone between Christian missionaries and African converts—confound attempts to see ubuntu as wholly other to Latin Christianity. The evidence of European influences are particularly conspicuous: from the centrality of Christianity to the echo of Kant’s categorical imperative, Tutu’s rhetoric seamlessly integrates the Christian imagery of brotherhood and the dignity shared by all those made in God’s image with ubuntu’s communalism. Indeed, at least since Christian missionaries from Anglican denominations began evangelical work among Zulu and Xhosa communities in the early nineteenth century, both missionaries and converts have come to see ubuntu as the particular language through which the Gospel would most successfully reach its target audience.

For Taylor, the modern self begins with the inward gaze of Cartesian reason; it is no accident that Tutu stages ubuntu as an explicit critique of the Enlightenment in his deft juxtaposition of ubuntu with Cartesian subjectivity, Humean utility, and Smith’s market economics. Developed as an ideology that locates human flourishing in the enrichment of connections between people, ubuntu offers an ontological antidote to apartheid’s logic of separation. As a political theology, ubuntu radicalizes familiar Christian injunctions toward forgiveness, hospitality, reconciliation, and social justice with the aim of drastically reconfiguring the political and cultural landscape of South Africa and, ultimately, the world. In Taylor’s terms, ubuntu insists that we are not buffered selves; the remediation of ubuntu in South African jurisprudence and in its global circulation suggests a normative indictment of firm boundaries between self and other.

It would be easy—and profoundly misleading—to argue that people who inhabit communities governed by a sense of the self as porous, interconnected, and vulnerable to the world are “outside” Taylor’s immanent frame and the history he expertly tells. Ubuntu articulates a strong sense of immanence that manifests itself in its very lexicon: there is a profound horizontality—and a striking absence of vertical appeals to transcendence and the higher power of divinity—in the repetition of cognates for “person” in the proverbs umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu and ubuntu ungamntu ngabanye abantu. In his discussion of the mundane, Simon During questions Taylor’s assertion that spiritual hunger is integral to human nature; in a different way, the notions of fullness implicit in ubuntu allow us to see the verticality of Taylor’s argument as distinctly contingent; from another angle, ubuntu’s concept of personhood suggests that the buffered self is neither a necessary nor sufficient condition of immanence. At the same time, ubuntu is not immanent in a materialist sense: the network of personhood implicit in ubuntu includes ancestors and spiritual energies, for which ancestors serve as mediators. Ubuntu operates in an enchanted world—one sees this vividly in the phantasmagoric realism of Nigerian-British novelist Ben Okri’s Famished Road trilogy, in which the spirit world is coterminous with the megacity of Lagos—but not necessarily in one governed by a transcendent/immanent dialectic.

What does Taylor mean when he claims, apropos of Christianity, “It’s all about reconciliation”?  While rhetorically straightforward, Taylor’s choice of terms invokes, only to complicate, common theological contexts in which the term implies a specific predicate: reconciliation is transacted between individuals and God (or the Church). The term bears witness to this history etymologically: “reconciliation, from reconsiliaciun, the Anglo-Norman term for reunion with the Church” (OED). In Taylor’s hands, reconciliation is overdetermined by its counterintuitive roles as at once a properly Christian concept internal to Christian self-fashioning and the threshold upon which Christianity opens toward difference as such. There is something similar going on with ubuntu, which is at once uniquely African and universally human. Taylor’s closing turns of phrase are either arrestingly direct or oddly multilayered, particularly given the divergence between his normative embrace of reconciliation as a project and the descriptive account of the reformist energies within Christianity that he elaborates in A Secular Age. As Taylor tells it there, reform and reconciliation are by no means parallel trajectories.

Taylor’s sympathies with Tutu’s vision of Christianity are especially apparent in his references to South African theology and politics at two important moments in A Secular Age. Taylor cites the dismantling of apartheid as an example of the kind of conflicts and ethical dilemmas facing the world today, and of their possible transcendence. For Taylor, apartheid is not an ethical dilemma; rather, the dilemma inheres in the enacting of solutions to apartheid’s obvious injustice in which the difficulty of adjudicating victimhood, communicative justice, reparation, and a plurality of competing goods exposes the inadequacy of modern ethical theory’s fetish for norm and rule. On the one hand, the spectacular failure of neoliberal globalization to translate economic growth into worldwide peace and harmony suggests that “we need a stronger ethic, a firmer identification with the common good,” and on the other, Taylor is convinced that legal and ethical codes can never provide for the ethical energy necessary to sustain flourishing societies. Instead, Taylor looks to recent cases of transitional justice, like South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission, as examples of the way reconciliatory frameworks can shatter the zero-sum nature of award and judgment by enabling a “vertical” shift to ethical planes that permit “a win-win move.” Taylor writes:

The basic idea behind this kind of procedure was to get the ex-victims to accept that they could have a maximum of one kind of closure (the truth about what happened) at the cost of renouncing a lot that they could quite legitimately claim of another kind: punishment of the perpetrators, an eye for an eye. The aim was to find an ‘award’ which allowed also for a reconciliation, and therefore living together on a new footing.

While very different sets of practical and discursive demands come to bear on the term reconciliation when it is uttered by Desmond Tutu and Charles Taylor, it is no surprise that one can hear echoes of Mandela and Tutu in Taylor’s “It’s all about reconciliation.” Tracking the relationship between ubuntu and Christian concepts of reconciliation and forgiveness is a potent reminder of how intertwined Christianity is with geographies, histories, and cultures distant from Taylor’s focal point, and it is with this goal in mind that I take inspiration from the essays in Varieties of Secularism in a Secular Age by Nilüfer Göle, José Casanova, and Saba Mahmood, who each seek to pluralize and decenter Taylor’s account of Latin Christianity in the North Atlantic world. It is a testament to the strength of Taylor’s work that his project fosters a framework for comparative analysis despite his focus on the internal history of Latin Christianity. By examining the way that ubuntu has altered—through theology, corporate management culture, ethical theory, and state politics—what Taylor might call the “South African social imaginary,” we begin to see intimations that the self is not as buffered as Taylor might take it to be.

In this post I begin my discussion of Justice: Rights and Wrongs by elucidating the main trajectory of Wolterstorff’s argument, paying specific attention to its final phase, where his argument transitions from delineating genealogies and evaluating the strength of various philosophical systems to his own attempt to articulate a vital theory of inherent rights. With a studied account of various conceptions of the good life as his axis, Wolterstorff turns his argument to the conclusion that the problem of rights comes down to questions of worth.  In his account, rights are the correlative to the worth conferred upon all human beings by God’s love, a love bestowed equally on all beings bearing the imago dei.  With this love and the imago dei as the backstop for the foundationalist project toward which the book aspires, much of the argument’s strength or weakness depends upon how satisfying his readers find his account of God’s love, the nature of God’s image, and their effects.

Wolterstorff’s archaeology of the idea of natural rights in medieval cannon law and in the Old and New Testaments explicitly refutes the argument popularized by Alasdair Macintyre that a vocabulary for what is meant by rights—and thus the very idea of inherent rights—does not exist prior to the fifteenth century.  In this way, Wolterstorff seeks to undermine a common refrain in Anglophone philosophy that the myth of personhood underlying human rights is specific to the post-Enlightenment West: the individual as separate, atomistic, and free.  To question this concept of the individual is to question human rights, and vice versa.  Contrary to dominant readings of justice in the Old Testament as being primarily a matter of law and judgment (and thus focusing on the “right order” of a society rather than on the inherent rights of its individuals) and to those who see the Christian tradition as replacing law and justice with love and forgiveness, Wolterstorff argues that the Old Testament implies a rigorous and consistent idea of inherent rights.

Because such inherent rights are never overtly theorized in the Old Testament, Wolterstorff infers their existence from extensive accounts of being wronged.  If maintaining a properly ordered society constituted the horizon of the scriptural conception of justice, there would be no need to dwell so persistently on the society’s peripheries.  Instead, biblical discussions of justice focus disproportionately on those Wolterstorff calls “the quartet of the vulnerable”: “widows, orphans, resident aliens, and the poor.”  Only with a sense of the inherent worth of those individuals and an underlying conviction that all are worthy of basic life goods like physical security, sustenance, and shelter do the prevalence of such accounts cohere.

In his discussion of the Gospels, Wolterstorff’s attempt to dispel the sensibility that renders justice irreconcilable with forgiveness follows a similar logical and exegetical trajectory.  Forgiveness, Wolterstorff argues, is not justice-blind; rather, “[t]he concept of forgiveness incorporates the concept of being wronged,” and “can occur only in the objective context of the agent having a right that has been violated and acquiring retributive rights on that account…justice-blind love cannot forgive.”  The implication of this line of reasoning is clear: Wolterstorff’s long history of inherent rights severs the link between the political liberalism developed by Hobbes and Locke and the birth of human rights, demonstrating conclusively that rights culture is innocent on at least one count for which it is indicted.  As Wolterstorff puts it, “[a]ssuming that present-day Western society is indeed afflicted by attitudes of possessive individualism, the cause cannot be the use of rights language.”  Beyond critiques of justice and rights foundationalism from those, like Rorty, who suggest that we abandon such endeavors in order to devote our resources to the task of expanding the normative compass of rights cultures, many critique the persistent Eurocentric bias at the heart of the human rights project, a bias generative of continuing relationships of dominance of the West over the rest.  While Wolterstorff’s argument absolves rights discourse of the individualist charge, it reinforces and even heightens its historical particularism.

If the first trajectory of Wolterstorff’s argument recuperates a theological history of inherent rights, the second avenue of argumentation, one more familiar to the tradition of analytic philosophy, considers why a project of rights foundationalism unmoored from theism fails to offer an adequate account of natural rights.  Since the eudaimonist thinkers of antiquity offer the most expansive and influential alternative to the biblical account of social structure in the European tradition, Wolterstorff begins there.  Eudaimonists, from Aristotle and the Stoics to MacIntyre and Martha Nussbaum, articulate a vision of ethics in which an individual evaluates actions by virtue of whether that action contributes to their happiness, where happiness is not understood in terms of pleasure but as the well-lived life.  As Wolterstorff argues, such an approach cannot support a theory of rights because it conceives of the good life primarily in terms of an individual’s actions rather than in the way that individual is treated.  Whereas the Bible valorizes the emotive state of being wronged as a spur to justice, eudaimonists regard such anger as an undesirable emotional disturbance.  The insufficiency of eudaimonism as a foundation for rights is even more transparent when considering our actions toward others; as Wolterstorff argues, “[a] theory of rights needs the idea of a person’s worth requiring that she be treated in certain ways.  The eudaimonist speaks only of the worth of life-goods…the worth of persons and human beings has no place in his scheme.”

If eudaimonism cannot sustain a theory of rights because it lacks an account of human worth, attempts to ground such worth—and therefore human rights—in the capacities and dignity of the human person prove inadequate because they depend upon too narrow a conception of the human person.  Just as the “circumstance of justice” employed by Rawls and Hume presupposes a concept of the human person as a rational, physically capable adult, arguments for human rights based on capacities and dignity require as their subject a properly formed, properly functioning human person.  For Rawls as for Wolterstorff, Kant is the central figure in this tradition and thus can stand metonymically for capacities approaches as a whole.  Kant argues that our worth as human beings inheres in our capacity for rational action; Wolterstorff, like many of Kant’s critics, rightly observes that not only do people vary significantly in their rational capacities, some people—infants, those born with mental disabilities, those suffering from severe Alzheimer’s, those in vegetative states—lack this capacity entirely; most of us are unwilling to accept that the worth of such persons is insufficient to merit rights or that torturing them for our pleasure would not constitute a serious breach of justice.

Attempting to redeem flaws of this kind leads to mediated, qualified articulations.  The best argument Wolterstorff can muster to rescue Kant would be that rights inhere in beings “belonging to a species such that maturation of its properly formed members includes possessing the capacity for rational agency” (Original italics).  Wolterstorff concludes—and rightly so—that this attenuated property is unimpressive indeed and certainly inadequate to the task of rights foundationalism.  Kantian ethics, like those of the eudaimonists, simply cannot offer an account of human worth of sufficient strength to build upon it the edifice of inalienable, universal human rights.

In the wake of a compelling archaeology of inherent rights in the Gospels and an impressive account of the insufficiencies facing secular rights foundationalism, we come to the core of the argument.  For Wolterstorff, justice is grounded in natural or inherent rights.  Rights, in turn, are not the possession of an individual isolated subject, but rather “normative social relationships” with a necessarily interpersonal structure.  And here Wolterstorff’s argument turns an important corner: we have rights to certain goods (namely to the goods of a flourishing life) because of the worth conferred upon us by virtue of the unique relationship between God and human beings, who are made in the image of God; rights express the worth imparted to us by the love of God for those made in God’s image.  Wolterstorff formulates the crux of the argument as follows:

From these reflections, I conclude that if God loves a human being with the love of attachment, that love bestows great worth on that human being…and I conclude that if God loves, in the mode of attachment, each and every human being equally and permanently, then natural human rights inhere in the worth bestowed on human beings by that love.  Natural rights are what respect for that worth requires.

But why should we conclude that God’s love for human beings takes the form of attachment love as opposed, for instance, to the agape love dominant in the Christian tradition?  Why should we conclude that God loves us at all?  And if God and God’s love exist, why should we conclude that God loves every human being equally?  Whereas Wolterstorff offers careful exegesis of Biblical texts supported by thorough etymological analysis in his argument for the presence of a concept of inherent rights earlier in the book, he marshals no such evidence here to suggest that alternate conceptions of God’s love are untenable.  How would one prove that God’s love takes the form of equally distributed attachment?  While such evidence would not compel agnostics, atheists, or those who do not profess an Abrahamic faith, one avenue open to an argument of this kind would be to extend the scriptural and historical analyses to these subjects as well, a task we can reasonably expect Wolterstorff to pursue in his project on love and justice.

I am particularly unsettled by Wolterstorff’s recognition that only if God’s love is imparted to us equally can theistically grounded human rights overcome the objections that plague capacity and dignity approaches to human rights.  Just as human beings differ radically in their exercise of reason and these differences have unintended consequences to their worth in a Kantian system, must not human beings differ in lovability, with similar implications for theistically grounded human rights?  If God’s love is not distributed on the basis of merit, is it not therefore love as caritas or agape and precisely not the kind of love, in Wolterstorff’s account, on which inherent rights can be based?  Wolterstorff’s poignant example of attachment-love as the unjustifiable affection a child has for her particular blanket or stuffed animal addresses only the unmerited nature of God’s love, not its even and universal distribution.  A way out of this conundrum could be found in arguments from relative asymmetry.  To someone traveling at the speed of light, the difference in speed between Lance Armstrong on his road bike (to borrow one of Wolterstorff’s favorite examples) and my daughter on her tricycle would be absolutely insignificant.  From the perspective of the speed of light, Armstrong’s talent and strength would not add to his worth.  Perhaps from the perspective of an omniscient, omnipotent God, the difference between a person of the keenest intellect and the most severe Alzheimer’s patient would be equally negligible, thus supporting the claim that God loves all humanity equally.

God’s love alone does not singlehandedly sustain Wolterstorff’s argument; instead, it is God’s love coupled with a particular conception of what it means to bear the image of God that forms the basis for inherent human rights.  Wolterstorff’s approach to the question of what it means to be made in the image of God (a question, he observes, that “has provoked more indecisive speculation and fruitless controversy” than any other theological conundrum) follows a now-familiar path: exegesis of relevant Biblical passages, considered analysis of critical and philosophical debate, articulation and refinement of concise and rigorous argument.  For Wolterstorff, to bear the image of God is to possess a “human nature,” and “that nature,” he continues, “is such that the mature and properly formed possessors of that nature resemble God with respect to their capacities for exercising dominion.

Wolterstorff’s argument is logically and textually coherent; I do not dispute its validity, nor is it necessary to do so.  More to the point, the argument is neither satisfying in affective terms nor is it ultimately persuasive in the context of rights foundationalism.  Even if we withhold judgment on Wolterstorff’s premises about God and do not interrogate the questionable status of Biblical testimony introduced as evidence within the framework of a deductive argument, two aspects of his imago dei argument remain profoundly unsettling.  First, the argument’s structure (which Wolterstorff calls a “nature-resemblance” approach) is functionally equivalent to the Kantian “capacities-resemblance” approach dismissed earlier as insufficient.  Indeed, Wolterstorff’s critique of a similarly watered-down capacities approach to human worth is equally applicable to the nature-resemblance argument advanced here.

Second, and more pressingly, I have grave reservations about the seminal characteristic through which Wolterstorff reads the imago dei, namely that of “dominion.”  At times, Wolterstorff’s argument assumes a recognizably Levinasian attentiveness to the rights of others, most notably in the preface: “the presence of the other before us places a claim on us, issues to us a call to do justice.”  A dominion-based approach to human nature and the imago dei would seem to render ancillary the worth of any other person to individual practices of domination.  To predicate rights and justice on control and sovereignty is to inscribe hierarchy and power in advance of any social relationship and thus to weaken the rights that arise on such a ground.  To be sure, the dominion bestowed upon humanity in Genesis is limited to rule over the non-human world; but dominion establishes relationships in which the idea of others (any kind of other) as the bearer of worth comes a distant second to the pragmatics of domination, control, and violence.  God’s dominion over creation is replicated in and reflected by human rule over a natural world subjected to our power.  Since in the Abrahamic monotheisms God lacks others who come before God with inherent worth (human worth is conferred by the creator), the model of divine dominion provides no model for inherent worth other than God’s own.  Models of mutuality do appear in Genesis—particularly in God’s recognition that it is not good for Adam to lack an equal partner and subsequently in the erotic bond between Adam and Eve—but dominion is not the structuring force behind relationships of this kind.

Wolterstorff’s attempt to ground the worth of human persons in God’s love is explicitly conditional: “My argument has been hypothetical…I have not argued that God does in fact so love every creature who bears the imago dei.  I have argued that a grounding of natural human rights is available to the person who holds the theistic convictions indicated.”  Consequentialist arguments of this kind seem unlikely to convert or convince many people (they strike an affective register dissonant to the intensities of faith) but they do imply that a greater public role for specific religions—those that conceive of humans as made in the image of God and where that God loves every human being with equal attachment-love—could be a force for greater justice in the world.  The greatest achievements of Wolterstorff’s book—those that ensure its centrality to the flourishing debates surrounding human rights, religion, and secularism in the public sphere—lie in its compelling histories of faith cultures and philosophical traditions.  The move from hypothesis to thesis regarding the imago dei, God’s love, and human rights awaits further analysis.

Does commitment inexorably deteriorate to dogma, forestall debate, and shackle our intellectual capacities in the bonds of reductivism and facile binaries?  Alternately, is the methodological agnosticism implied by a descriptive and genealogical project the best possible guarantor of productive scholarly engagement—indeed, of critique as such?  I believe there is a case to be made for committed criticism—secular, religious, and otherwise, in all their subtle vernaculars—though making that case is not my purpose here.  Instead, by interrogating the relationship between critique and conviction emergent in this discussion and, more broadly, reevaluating the role and effect of conviction in scholarly discourse, I hope to unsettle sedimented assumptions about scale and movement bound up in the concept of critique.

The constellation of terms I deploy throughout this post—conviction, commitment, belief, and faith—are not, strictly speaking, synonyms.  Instead, their diverse connotations and etymologies maps a range of overlapping affective registers.  More than describing a relation to content in a transparent manner, recent scholarship on the religious/secular nexus clarifies how these modes produce, demarcate, and perpetuate their own social structures and forms of knowledge.  Conviction and its ilk are thus “attitudes” in the sense of that term Foucault articulates in his essay “What is Critique”: they are, “in the end, a way of thinking and feeling; a way, too, of acting and behaving that at one and the same time marks a relation of belonging and presents itself as a task. A bit, no doubt, like what the Greeks called an ethos.”  Of the four terms, “conviction” bears most significantly upon discussions of critique.  In two senses, conviction is the telos of criticism: in the juridical sense, critique (as krisis or judgment) works toward, and also defers, conviction (as sentence or declaration); as it relates to suasion, conviction as settled belief based on evidence is likewise both the goal and the process of deferral—or the figurative space in which that goal is indefinitely deferred.  In both senses of conviction, a metaphorics of stasis vies with one of movement.

The crisis of stasis vs. movement was of particular importance to Walter Benjamin, who, along with the secularized Jewish intellectuals of the Frankfurt school, introduced continental thought to the legacy of Jewish mysticism and is thus central to any discussion of “secular” criticism.  For Benjamin, the double-valence of critique and conviction as both deferral and process—with an abyss or rift between the two—yields, in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” and elsewhere, a sense that critique is necessarily a messianic practice.  In his late work on ethics and justice, Derrida recuperates a similar approach to temporality, movement, and action under the aegis of a critical messianism.  For Benjamin, the task of the critic is messianic in a very precise way, marking its paradoxical structure in terms of scale and movement: critique, in the cloak of historical materialism, must be simultaneously an individual act and an act of global scale, a process and a cessation of process, an act of violence and the deliverance from violence, an event endlessly deferred and a view of time in which “every second…[is] the straight gate through which the messiah might enter.”  Benjamin’s “secular” messianic criticism rejects the spatio-temporal sensibilities that underwrite both historicism and genealogy; it is also committed to the core.  As he puts it in his eighteenth thesis on the philosophy of history, the task of the critic is to seize hold of a transformative moment in which “he grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one.  Thus he establishes a conception of the present as the ‘time of the now’ which is shot through with chips of Messianic time.”

While for Benjamin the issue of commitment or belief appears to be a fait accompli, as Colin Jager cogently observes in his recent post, Mahmood and Gourgouris reach strikingly different conclusions on whether critique and conviction are compatible as concepts or as modes of thought.  For Gourgouris, with his emphatic “yes” to the question, “is critique secular?”, the act of critique requires taking a stand, an understanding of the term compatible with what we might call the aggressive/juridical tenor of the term’s etymology as discussed by Talal Asad.  Gourgouris stresses the active, decisionist, prescriptive, and discriminating aspects of critique; for him, taking a stand—itself a juridical metaphor—is the paradigmatic critical act.  What differentiates a critical stand from rhetorical posturing on the one hand and mere bigotry on the other thus becomes a question of the process by which convictions are reached, the degree to which one is cognizant of the limits of any judgment, and the location from which judgment is rendered.  Conviction of the type espoused by Gourgouris is, of necessity, situated (a key term in Edward Said’s description of critique as a located practice), albeit located precisely in the exilic homelessness productive of the distance and dissonance Said identifies as the paradigmatic critical condition.

The stylistic and ontological implications of this performative understanding of critique are obvious enough.   Critique conceived and enacted as differential judgment presupposes and maintains subject-object and self-other distinctions while enabling, even encouraging, tête-à- tête confrontational encounters.  While it may be true that Gourgouris’ posts are made “in the spirit of elaborating on [a] broader argument” about secularist metaphysics and not, as Mahmood alleges, “to undercut critical exchange and make… it impossible to offer anything but a defensive response,” the tendency toward the back-and-forth of accusation and rebuttal, for or against—and thus an imbedded concept of physical and social movement—inheres in the concept of critique.  While this emphasis on the juridical sources of criticism risks fetishizing the substantive “results” of critique—which in this case become judgments (convictions), nominalizing the term’s more procedural or interrogatory valences—it does not necessarily follow that conviction yields binary thinking or stifles “critical” inquiry.

Individual arguments and positions—especially committed ones—clarify the scalar and dynamic dimensions of critique: the very back-and-forth of these exchanges and the public nature of the online forum in which they take place suggest that the locus of criticism lies not within the narrow compass of an individual’s scholarship, but within a broader intersubjective public sphere and with the ability to “move” this audience.  To be sure, we often view ourselves in light of the former, individualizing mode; the atomizing practices of self-cultivation characteristic of “secular” modernity are particularly prevalent among academics in our solitary pursuits.  Benjamin’s historical materialist who “remains in control of his powers, man enough to blast open the continuum of history” is but a particularly bald instance of the trope of the critic as existential hero traced to Sartrean existentialism by Chris Nealon and, in Benjamin’s case, a potent reminder of the proximity between critique and violence.  By displacing the locus of critique away from the individual and toward a broader community, we achieve a vision of critique as public action that emerges not in an individual act, but in aggregate.  Without necessarily following this trail (pace Rawls and Habermas) toward discourse ethics, it seems to me that Gourgouris’ style implies that polemic and critique are closer kin than is commonly assumed.

Mahmood’s case against conviction is by and large an implicit one elicited by her rancor at Gourgouris’ rebarbitave style and by the way a declarative answer to the question “Is critique secular?” throws a shoe into the academic works: “It must be clear that we were not looking for a “yes” or a “no” answer to our question ‘Is Critique Secular?’” Mahmood writes, because “to do so would be to foreclose thought and to fail to engage a rich set of questions, [the] answers to which remain unclear.”  In consequentialist terms, I fear that equating conviction-here symbolized by the declarative “yes” or “no”—with narrow-mindedness stacks the deck against people of faith (if there is a difference between professing a conviction and professing a faith). More broadly (and this is certainly not the intent of Mahmood’s compelling scholarship), the case against conviction reinscribes the division between religious and secular affects. Mahmood essentially argues that we must separate critique (understood as the asking of probing questions and achieved in the genealogical description of complex phenomena) from judgment, accusation, and verdicts.  As she eloquently puts it, critique “require[s] a commitment to put some of our most cherished assumptions to scrutiny. This in turn depends upon making a distinction between the labor entailed in the analysis of a phenomenon and defending our own political commitments and preferences. The tension between the two is a productive one for the exercise of critique insomuch as it suspends the closure necessary to political action so as to allow thinking to proceed in unaccustomed ways.”

It is worth noting that the distinction between analysis and conviction upon which Mahmood insists is based on an assumed equivalence between conviction and closure or stasis.  Maintaining this correspondence employs the term “critique” against its etymological grain and sets up an oppositional either/or distinction between spheres of politics and academics, action and thought.  In the interest of openness and the suspension of closure, setting critique against conviction risks eulogizing the vita contemplativa Hannah Arendt memorably traces to both Aristotelian and Christian attempts to devalue active engagement in worldly affairs and assert the primacy of theory as passive contemplation of a divine cosmos.  On the other hand, in taking up this banner for the academy, Mahmood echoes a similar argument made by Theodor Adorno in his essay “Resignation,” written shortly before his death, in which he defends critical theory from the charge of quietism.  Contra Arendt, who only a decade earlier saw the weight of scholarly consensus settled firmly against action, Adorno advocates on behalf of a beleaguered minority: that of the “uncompromising critical thinker” who suspends programmatic action—kindred to the vision Mahmood offers of the academy as a domain of open-ended inquiry.  For my purposes here, what is striking about Adorno’s compelling final paragraph in the “Resignation” essay (and Mahmood’s desire for “thinking to proceed in unaccustomed ways”) is that the adjective “critical” drops out entirely, to be replaced with “thinking” as such.  “Open thinking points beyond itself,” Adorno writes, adding that “prior to all particular content, thinking is actually the force of resistance”; and in a final enigma, he posits that “thought is happiness.”  Without attempting to gloss Adorno, these shifting formulations suggest that the fact that the question, “Is critique secular?” seems answerable—even invites a declarative answer—stems from something of a category mistake inclining us to debate the relevance of a property (“critique”) to a token or object (“the secular”) when what the forum ultimately strives for is something closer to Adorno’s “open thinking” conducted in a spirit very close to “happiness.”