Last week, one of the two activists, Emdadur Choudhury, was found guilty under Section 5 of the Public Order Act of burning the poppies in a way that was likely to cause “harassment, harm or distress” to those who witnessed it, and was fined £50. The symbolic nature of the punishment aside, the Choudhury verdict invites immediate comparison with incidents of offense to Muslim religious sensibilities (from Rushdie to the Danish Cartoons and beyond), which, by and large, have not been suppressed by European legal institutions. While it is very tempting for Muslims, and those sympathetic to the situation of Muslims in Europe, to see a case like this as evidence of double-standards—Muslim speech is suppressed on grounds of injury to non-Muslims, while the reverse is not; speech injurious to secular affect is suppressed, while speech injurious to religious affect is not—this might also be an occasion for some general reflection on the problem of injurious speech in morally pluralist contexts. A case like this invites such reflection both for its similarities with and for its differences from the Jyllands-Posten and Lars Vilks cartoon affairs.

1) Europeans appreciate the concept of “moral injury.”

For some analysts, often writing on this blog, the critical lesson to draw from the Danish cartoon controversy concerns how certain ethical and semiotic norms “fail to translate” across civilizational, ideological, and religious divides. Saba Mahmood, most notably, suggests “several reasons why the idea of moral injury I have analyzed remained mute and silent in the public debate over the Danish cartoons, key among them the inability to translate across different semiotic and ethical norms.” What idea of moral injury was at stake, for Mahmood, in the case of the Danish cartoons? It was about a

violation [that] emanates not from the judgment that the law has been transgressed but that one’s being, grounded as it is in a relationship of dependency with the Prophet, has been shaken. For many Muslims, the offense the cartoons committed was not against a moral interdiction but against a structure of affect, a habitus, that feels wounded. This wound requires moral action, but the language of this wound is neither juridical nor that of street protest because it does not belong to an economy of blame, accountability, and reparations. The action that it requires is internal to the structure of affect, relations, and virtues that predispose one to experience an act as a violation in the first place.

The idea of a satisfactory “translation” of the ethical norms is left conveniently vague. What would be evidence of a successful translation of ethical and semiotic norms? That Muslims are able to have speech they don’t like suppressed by European courts? Or that more people in the media and broader public sympathize with their injury and describe it accurately?

Either way, the “poppy case” casts some serious doubt on this analysis. The witnesses and judge in the Choudhury case employ, in fact, a language almost identical to that employed by Mahmood. Judge Riddle argued that, because the November 11, 1918, ceasefire has “huge significance” for Britons, burning poppies is “is behaviour that is bound to be seen as insulting.” (Read: many Britons have a “structure of affect, relations, and virtues that predispose one to experience an act as a violation in the first place.”) A witness, the grandson of a World War II soldier, reportedly “felt sick inside. It is something that means so much to me and to see what I believed to be a wreath of poppies fall to the ground—it is just despicable.” (Read: for this witness, “the offense the cartoons the burning of poppies committed was not against a moral interdiction but against a structure of affect, a habitus, that feels wounded. . . . His being has been shaken.”)

Thus, it seems that those invested in the idea that conflicts over speech and the sacred reveal some deep and troubling incommensurability—not over whether “blasphemous” speech ought to be prohibited by the law (Mahmood does not argue for this, unlike, say, Peter Danchin), but rather over the background presuppositions about what kinds of speech can injure, how they injure, and why—are not looking broadly or carefully enough at public and legal discourse in Europe. I cannot see much difference at all between how Mahmood characterizes the injury felt by (some) pious Muslims at the defamation of the Prophet and how Judge Riddle and his witness describe the injury felt by “typical, mild-mannered” Britons at the burning of poppies during a commemorative ceremony. Thus, Mahmood seems overhasty when she writes:

Muslims who want to turn this form of injury into a litigable offense must reckon with the performative character of the law. To subject an injury predicated upon distinctly different conceptions of the subject, religiosity, harm, and semiosis to the logic of civil law is to promulgate its demise (rather than to protect it). Mechanisms of the law are not neutral but are encoded with an entire set of cultural and epistemological presuppositions that are not indifferent to how religion is practiced and experienced in different traditions. Muslims committed to preserving an imaginary in which their relation to the Prophet is based on similitude and cohabitation must contend with the transformative power of the law and disciplines of subjectivity on which the law rests.

Let’s grant Mahmood, for the moment, the idea that Muslims are only interested in using the law to prevent or punish scandalous speech about Muhammad because they are “committed to preserving an imaginary in which their relation to the Prophet is based on similitude and cohabitation.” (I find this overly restrictive of the many motivations and moral reasons Muslims have voiced—at least since the Rushdie Affair—and quite artificial in its construction.) It seems that, at least if they were arguing before Judge Riddle, they would have no problem at all articulating their “conceptions of the subject, religiosity, harm, and semiosis,” for the language Mahmood uses is, in this case, the same as that of the secular court.

2) Is it “religious pain,” or merely “Muslim pain,” about which Europeans are insufficiently concerned?

Poppies are not Prophets, though. Is the Choudhury case, perhaps, evidence that, after all, the “secular nomos” of Europe is unfairly and arbitrarily biased against religious habitus, insofar as it protects citizens from the exact same kind of moral injury only when it is performed against secular signs and not religious ones? As Talal Asad has written, because Western societies do impose some restrictions on speech, “it seems probable that the intolerable character of blasphemy accusations in this kind of society derives not so much from their attempt to constrain as from the theological language in which the constraint is articulated.”

Perhaps. This would require some direct apples-to-apples comparison, though. For example, have there been attempts to use Section 5 of the Public Order Act (leaving aside even the “Incitement to Religious Hatred” section) to prosecute acts of desecration of religious symbols combined with “persistently shouting abuse or obscenities at passers-by . . . within the sight or hearing of the suspect who is likely to be caused harassment, alarm or distress by the conduct in question” that have been summarily dismissed by similar courts on the grounds that the desecration of religious symbols cannot cause “harassment, harm or distress,” or that any that is caused is either inconsequential or deserved? Certainly, there is nothing in the language of the ordinance that would exclude religious pain from consideration, and, in fact, the law includes special consideration for “religiously aggravated offence.”

I do not mean to suggest that there is no problem of imbalance or discrimination in Europe. Far from it. Rather, I mean to ask: When does a public or a legal discourse that does not accord Muslims all the protection or consideration they want evince a problem related to the distinctly secular nature of European public norms and discourses? Those interested in exploring whether secularism is part of the problem have not only to give a better account of what a successful translation of norms would be, or what Muslims and other religious subjects are due in a pluralist society, but also, and primarily, to consider how much of what is going on in public debates about offensive speech is evidence of a particular antipathy or anxiety surrounding Muslims. Before insisting that in cases like the Danish cartoons there is a distinct kind of pain that modern secular societies simply can’t wrap their heads (or hearts) around (an explanation made quite unlikely by the language in the Choudhury case), we would do well to remember that Western publics these days often have a hard time taking seriously Muslim pain of any kind.

This phenomenon is widely appreciated, and I do not need to belabor it here. But I do want to suggest that, while Europeans’ anxieties about Muslims are often bound up in their anxieties about religion in the public sphere, and while Europeans often misuse the secular license to insult religion as an alibi for creating a hostile environment for citizens of Muslim cultural backgrounds, not every act of exclusion or hostility towards Muslims in Europe is evidence of a secular failure to provide sufficient space for multiple ethical norms to thrive. To see only secular failures (while refusing to imagine the space that secularism leaves open for the resolution of ethical conflicts) is no less a piece of dogmatism than the insistence of those who regard “secular failure” as a contradiction in terms.

3) The materiality of utterances matters.

But let us concede that in the British court’s willingness to punish a Muslim for injuring patriotic Britons, we have prima facie evidence of secular hypocrisy. Still, we must be careful. At stake was a not a general ban against burning poppies, or a ban against printing cartoons of burned poppies (or of soldiers burning in hell), but a direct physical encounter. As a fairly unimaginative American liberal habituated into a stringent defense of political speech, I would have preferred not to see Choudhury fined for this form of political expression, even if fairness and decency would permit the police to remove him from the scene at the time. However, not only is a £50 fine a relatively symbolic punishment; it is a fine, not for some general transgression against a sacred national symbol, but rather for a public disturbance.

A surprising lacuna in much academic writing, outside of legal studies, about popular incidents such as the controversy around Rushdie’s The Satanic Verses and the Danish cartoon affair is the failure to explore the materiality of speech. It is more common to explore interpretations of the utterances as such—what they mean, why they injure, why they were produced—rather than the ways in which the same utterance, in terms of brute content, can take on quite different ethical and social meanings when uttered in different material forms and in different physical contexts. Obviously, I do not flatter myself by thinking that I am correcting a general mistake on our part. Of course, we know that the “N-word,” when spoken by whites, is not the same as when spoken by blacks, and that the word spoken by a white actor on a stage is not the same as the word spoken by a white schoolteacher to a black student, and so on.

But this obvious category of ethical analysis in the realm of speech acts is too often overlooked by those broadly sympathetic to the idea of religious injury. Speech acts are, of course, always acts. They always do something. But some are more act-like than others; some do what they do more immediately and physically, with much less dependence on the agency of their recipient or target. Most obvious are instances of direct harassment or intimidation. Here, the political concern is first with public space and how it can be transformed into a zone of hostility or menace. Furthermore, it is important here to analyze the different kinds of public space available as sites of speech: schools, walls in ethnic neighborhoods, highway overpasses, bus stops, public squares, etc.

The same act can thus vary wildly, not only in terms of threat and intimidation, but also in terms of political statement, when performed in different spaces. Claiming a common space like a school through hostile speech should be considered a more aggressive act than spray-painting the identical message on a wall. Both are acts of hostility towards a group, but the first goes out of its way to “claim” a space that is not only supposed to be safe and common to all members, but that is also supposed to be dedicated to the mission of advancing inclusion and guaranteeing the acquisition of primary skills and resources. Hate speech towards Jews, Muslims, or African-Americans is vile everywhere, but it is easy to see how it is even worse in schools or Congressional hearing rooms than at lunch counters. Along these lines, for me, the Swiss minaret referendum poster portraying niqabed women and missile-like minarets disrupting the Swiss flag—plastered over walls and bus stops throughout the common public space—was a much more aggressive and hostile form of political speech than, say, the ostensibly more “blasphemous” Satanic Verses or Danish cartoons.

Because of the more physical nature of these kinds of speech, it is probably not as crucial what the subjective content of the utterance is. Whether or not Rushdie’s use of the name “Mahound” in a dream sequence in a postmodern novel is a direct assault on the Prophet Muhammad, spray-painting this over walls in a Muslim neighborhood, or at a school with many Muslim children, is clearly an act of hostility, if not intimidation. Unlike dense novels or obscure right-wing Danish newspapers, this is an act that seeks to force itself into the physical world of a target, giving him or her no choice to ignore it.

Thus, take a blasphemous cartoon in the culture section of a newspaper. It is clear that this kind of physical context could have been less offensive, but also much more so. A cartoon produced by journalists writing for a private paper is clearly much more public than one on an obscure website or in some arcane niche magazine. But in terms of a distinctly public statement, it is clearly less odious than when it was reproduced and worn by an Italian minister on a t-shirt. As a physical act, it is clearly more intrusive and insidious than words which one has to rummage through a novel in a language one understands to find, but far less so than the Swiss minaret poster. Similarly, a threat to burn the Qur’an as a media event on your own private church property is doubtless a less-than-welcome intervention into national and global multi-cultural politics, but it is also slightly less of an affront to public order than would be threatening to do so outside of a mosque after Friday prayers. And so on.

I doubt very much that I am saying anything original or insightful here, and, needless to say, I am not insisting than all pious Muslims adopt the distinctions I am drawing. But the weakness of many arguments, in my opinion, for even voluntary self-restraint in such cases as the Rushdie and Danish cartoon affairs is not that they fail to show why Muslims may have been injured, but that they fail to show why the relationship between the authors of this injury and all persons liable to be injured—all Muslim fellow citizens of a country, all Muslims of Europe, and Muslims anywhere on the globe—commands a generalized ethics of self-restraint.

This is not to say that understanding the ethico-religious imaginaries of our fellow citizens is not a crucial component of responsible citizenship. But it is to say that attaining this understanding does much less work for us than some have suggested. Given the capacity of speech about the Virgin Mary or the Prophet Muhammad to injure, what we need is not an ethos of speaking in public but many such ethoi. Speaking as a novelist, as an artist, as a cartoonist, as a government minister, as a public school teacher, as a candidate for Congress, as a professor at a private university, as a guest in someone’s home or place of worship, as a friend, as a doctor, or as a newspaper editor are all quite different roles, and each will require a different ethics of speech.

What focusing on the possible conflict between secular and religious moral imaginaries fails to advance is this understanding of reasonable ethical obligations arising from how we speak in different contexts of power and moral responsibility. The authors of moral injury are usually not unaware of the capacity of speech to injure. The Danish cartoons were not accidental acts of injury; the protagonists deliberately set out to make a statement about religious attachments (not beliefs) being fair game. Would they have gone after the Prophet Muhammad if they were unaware that this was a soft spot? Exploring the genealogy of some so-called “non-Protestant” religious subject does not actually fill in any gaps in such cases. Thus, what those interested in “fostering greater understanding across lines of religious difference” need to show is not why Muslims are injured by this but not that, but rather why and when not injuring Muslims qua pious religious subjects is a moral desideratum regardless of what other views about the social world we want to express.

4) Muslims, as much as any social group, have a strong interest in robust protections for speech.

Suppose, though, that there is a seriously skewed playing field for European Muslims in the area of offensive speech. Whether anti-Muslim or anti-religious sentiment is to blame for the differential protection of Muslim speech and non-Muslim speech in Europe, instances like the Choudhury case remind us that advocating for more stringent protections for speech (pace Stanley Fish and others who have drunk the oil) is not evidence of some embarrassingly “non-neutral” or civilizationally particularist ideological prejudice, but something in which the religious generally, and Muslim minorities in particular, have a strong interest.

To put it most bluntly: while there is no denying that Muslims and other religious subjects are often injured by speech (whether intentionally and gratuitously or merely as collateral damage from some form of social commentary), there is also no denying that the religious often wish to injure through speech. Two recent cases—the Westboro Baptist Church case in the U.S. and the burning poppy case in the UK—provide timely examples of this. And this, more than any genealogy of the subject (religious or otherwise) or archaic conception of the public/private divide, is what grounds the right to blaspheme or injure the religious: that the religious, too, often wish to injure through speech. We should be consistent and defend their right to do so, limiting ourselves to narrow, restrained, and equitable uses of public order justifications for restrictions on speech (which ought to include harassment, intimidation, and threats).

But beyond the fact that certain fundamental interests shared in equal measure by the religious and the secular generally—what Joshua Cohen has identified as the expressive, deliberative, and informational interests—are secured by stringent protections of expressive liberty, I believe that Muslim minorities in particular have a strong interest in securing a more fundamentalist and formalist culture of defense of free speech. For which community, in present times, is more likely than Muslims to be the victim of courts and legislatures that see political expression as a luxury that can give way to any political or security expediency? It is, above all, Muslim speech that is liable to be labeled dangerous, harmful, and excitable—whether through the widening restrictions on “material support for terrorism” supported by the US Supreme Court in Holder v. Humanitarian Law Project, the shameful manufactured outrage over the Park 51 cultural center, or the Choudhury poppy burning case.

The idea that free speech, even when “abused” to transgress against the sacred (whether secular or religious), is some arbitrary, sectarian value that is unjustified to the religious is a piece of sophistry that masquerades as a defense of an embattled religious minority but, in fact, undermines their long-term interests in Western societies. Of course, we often wish to suppress the speech of others, and, of course, we often believe that some symbols or entities really are sacred and ought not to be violated (unlike those fake idols that others hold sacred). But the fact that people are often unhappy with the protections they get in this or that case proves absolutely nothing. It is a strange exercise in hollow, content-free formalism, which holds up mere disagreement or dissatisfaction as evidence of profound arbitrariness or ideological bias. Of all thriving religious communities in the West, the most pious segments of the Muslim community seem as interested as any and more interested than most in their expressive liberties—to preach Islam (da‘wa), to bear witness to Muslim truths and values, to denounce Western imperialism, to protest against sexual moralities and theories of human origins that they oppose, and to construct new material and virtual moral communities. Some of what issues from these quarters injures me immediately and offends me profoundly. That is exactly as it should be.

Let’s consider this from another angle. At least in the modern world, resistance takes both a passive or ethical form—renunciation, and an active or political form—revolution. Renunciation and revolution are conceptually twinned since neither affirms the current actual social order or seeks to reform it. Indeed, as most other non-political, non-contemplative modes of social disengagement disappear into modernization’s integrative machinery, these become the most easily imaginable modes of resistance.

But sometime after 1917 (1923? 1956? 1968? 1989?) it became clear that no major modernized, capitalist society would, in all probability, undergo a secular revolution. Perhaps rather surprisingly, the French post-1968 Maoists were those who first absorbed the implications of this for the history of religious renunciation. They did so originally in Christian Jambet and Guy Lardreau’s L’ange (1975) and then, more famously, in Alain Badiou’s ongoing work.

By and large the post-Maoists have not been well received in the Anglophone world, and it is not hard to see why. Nonetheless, their’s is not just the most inventive left-wing theo-politics of our time, it’s one of the few bodies of thought that has remained loyal to thorough-going resistance.  (I say this mindful of Leo Strauss’s not wholly dissimilar right-wing irreligious theo-politics, which in the end, however, aloofly concedes to liberal capitalism.)

To simplify greatly, one post-Maoist move is to emphasize the distance between critique and resistance.  The logic runs like this: revolution has become impossible but there are good rational grounds maximally to disengage from, indeed to resist, the democratic state capitalist order. However resistance cannot be grounded just in reason since it requires a leap into another order, into the unknown. So to commit to resistance involves a Pascalian wager. We stake ourselves on a faith that the current situation is temporary and a new order can suddenly and unexpectedly appear.  Resistance demands patience, hope against hope, fidelity: indeed it will be unending since even overturned social existence will gradually become routinized, institutionalized, hierarchized.

What kind of intellectual work can help prepare for the irruption of a new order, an “event” in Badiou’s patois? Mainly not critique in the conventional sense as evidential and situated judgment on what lies to hand: Badiou rejects the “proximity of critique and violence” that Justin Neuman ascribes to Walter Benjamin. Rather, philosophy thought in Platonic (and indeed Straussian) terms as the care for truth and for universals can most help prepare us for the irruption of a future event and help preserve the shards of a past event. For Badiou (and this is a clearly a Maoist move) to live in the true is to live in resistance, while to critique is to tally with and in the system and its untruths. Thus Badiou’s recent polemic, De quoi Sarkozy est-il le nom?, which is indeed addressed to the situation at hand, is not critique in any conventional sense but rather a denunciatory naming of the various forms and instances of untruthfulness and anti-universalism (nation, family) that have been made use of by Sarkozy (for Badiou, a Petainist rat-man stoking the politics of fear). This is combined with encouragement to a particular renunciatory ethical stance in relation to the current democratic market-state, and axioms, some philosophical, that are put forward for debate (“Love ought to be reinvented but also simply to be defended”).

In this project, maybe surprisingly, religion becomes an intellectual resource since (as Bellah reminds us too) it maintains memories of styles of comportment through which it is possible to live in resistance. Religious revelations (i.e., prophetic narrativizations of supernatural agents’ interactions with the world) are not true, but this does not detract from religion’s ethical and political commitment to resistance. Thus in Badiou’s remarkable book on St Paul, Paul is converted blindly to Christianity and, in the face of murderous state persecution bravely dedicates himself to building collectives open to anyone at all outside the legitimating forces that uphold the Roman Empire. Paul’s is an inspiring example of militant practice and virtue committed to waiting for a miraculous event, all the more so because, in truth, his trust in Christ is hypothetical or “fictional.” For that reason, his conversion and commitment are motivated by a faith (not quite a conviction) that reminds us of the distance between thought and resistance.

Where does this leave us in relation to Saba Mahmood’s and Stathis Gourgouris’s instructive disagreement?  My sense is that (leaving aside their implicit dispute about the political status of contemporary Islamic theocracies) their debate can be stripped down to an argument about whether religious or secular institutions are the more mystified in regard to their own historicity and situatedness.

From the position of the post-Maoist theo-politics, this is not a debate worth having since beyond history and critique lie domains that are neither religious nor secular (i.e., do not belong to the order of enlightened rational progress). These include what is axiomatically true (like mathematics) as well as whatever is open to total rupture and innovation—what can break with incremental or mundane temporality (e.g., falling in love, or creating a wholly new kind of artwork, or being converted to a faith).

Let me be clear: I do not write this as a committed post-Maoist myself, far from it. But I do think this body of work makes an important contribution to contemporary theory, partly because, in fidelity to the spirit of resistance and in its dismissal of the (divisive and integrative) politics of difference and identity, it asks us to approach religion subtracted from its institutionality and truth-claims and hence from the schema in which the religion versus secular debate is carried out. In doing so it asks us squarely to examine how critique helps us deal with what remains a (maybe the) crucial question of our time: should we refuse capitalism? And it does so without succumbing to the manifold lures of revelation, revolutionary expectations, transcendence, historical progress, eternal life, tradition, philosophy-as-conversation, communicative rationality, social-capital building…

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.”

Let me take a passage in Habermas’s early essay, “Toward a Reconstruction of Historical Materialism,” as a point of departure. Habermas, while accepting the validity of neoevolutionist approaches in their own terms, argues that in studying social evolution we will inevitably be governed not only by cognitive standards, but by normative ones, though I am sure he would not want to confound the two levels. Even if we can speak of societies with normatively lower and higher levels of social learning capacity, we can never assume that there is anything inevitable about attaining the higher levels. If we are going to talk about levels at all, as I am prepared to do, we must expect to find regress as well as progress and face the possibility that the human project may end in complete failure. In speaking of the transition from tribal societies organized by kinship to the emergence of the early state, Habermas writes:

Social integration accomplished via kinship relations … belongs, from a developmental-logical point of view, to a lower stage than social integration accomplished via relations of domination. … Despite this progress, the exploitation and oppression necessarily practiced in political class societies has to be considered retrogressive in comparison with the less significant social inequalities permitted by the kinship system. Because of this, class societies are structurally unable to satisfy the need for legitimation that they themselves generate.

It is true that the early state and its accompanying class system emerge in what I have called archaic societies well before the axial age and generate a degree of popular unhappiness that can be discerned in the texts we have from such societies, but the legitimation crisis of which Habermas speaks arises with particular acuteness in the axial age, when mechanisms of social domination increase significantly relative to archaic societies and when coherent protest for the first time becomes possible.

In answer to the question of where this criticism originated there has been a tendency to speak of “intellectuals,” though what that term means in the first millennium BCE is not obvious. Scribal and priestly classes come to mind, but we can assume that most of them were too tied in to the existing power systems to be very critical. It is not easy to imagine the social space for criticism in such societies. It is here that we have to consider the role of the renouncer, to take a term most often used for ancient India.

There were renouncers already in late Vedic India, particularly within the Brahmin class. What the renouncer renounces is the role of the householder and all of the social and political entanglements that go with it. Buddhism provides a radical form of the renouncer, whose initial act is to “leave home” and to be permanently homeless. If the renouncer is “nowhere” he, and sometimes she, can look at established society from the outside, so to speak. It is not hard to see the Hebrew prophets as, in a sense, renouncers, though I have also called them denouncers. They too stood outside the centers of power, attempting to follow the commandments of God, whatever the consequences. Even in opposition, they were more oriented to power than were Buddhist monastics, to be sure, but the Buddhist monks also had a radical critique of worldly power. It is easy to see the early Daoists as renouncers, and they too have a critique of power, though perhaps more satirical than ethical. But there is a sense in which the Confucians were renouncers, criticizing power from the outside—especially the greatest ones who never held office or held only lowly ones briefly, who were in principle opposed to serving an unethical lord. And finally I will argue that Socrates and Plato were, in different ways, also renouncers, who were in, but not of, the city and also criticized it from the outside.

For all the differences among what can, in most cases, only loosely be called renouncers in the several axial cultures, the one thing they shared was that they were teachers, and founders of schools or orders, thus institutionalizing a tradition of criticism. Ultimately their power was exercised through the extent to which they influenced or even controlled elite education, as, to some degree paradoxically, many of them ultimately did. And inevitably their survival depended on what they charged for their services or were freely given. But then how did renouncers garner the support that allowed them to survive in their outsider position? It seems apparent that some degree of unease about the state of the world must have been relatively widespread, even among the elite, to provide the support without which renouncers would simply have faded away into the wilderness.

If Habermas is right about the legitimation crisis of the axial age brought on by the dissonance between the developmental-logical advance and the moral-practical regression—as I think he is—I would like to illustrate the response to this legitimation crisis by referring to the utopian projections of a good society that the various kinds of renouncers offered as criticism of the existing order.

In ancient Israel the prophets sharply criticized the behavior of foreign states, but also conditions within the kingdoms of Israel and Judah. According to Amos, the rich and the rulers “trample the head of the poor into the dust of the earth, and turn aside the way of the afflicted.” In contrast the prophets look forward to the Day of the Lord when judgment will come to the earth and justice will “roll down like the waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.” The prophets admonish rulers and people alike to change their ways but look forward to a divine intervention that will finally put things right.

In ancient China, Mencius, for example, along with many Confucians before and after him, bemoaned the sad state of society, the corruption of the rulers and the oppression of the peasantry, and offered an alternative form of government: rule by moral example, by conformity with the li, the normative order, and not by punishment. The Confucian hope for an ethical ruler who would follow Confucian injunctions did not involve any idea of divine intervention, except a vague notion that Heaven would eventually punish behavior that was too outrageous, but it was in its own way as utopian as was the prophetic hope of ancient Israel.

Plato, in the Gorgias and in the first book of the Republic, is a critic of a politics where the strong could inflict harm on the weak with impunity: for him despotism was always the worst form of government. In the Republic he depicted a good society in contrast to the one he criticized, but which he knew was a “city in words,” or a “city in heaven,” and not one likely to be realized on this earth.

The early Buddhist canon describes an ideal society so different from existing reality as to be perhaps the most radical utopia of all, the most drastic criticism of society as it is.

In each axial case, what I am calling social criticism is combined with religious criticism and the very form and content of the axial symbolization take shape in the process of criticism. The Greek case is exemplary because our very term “theory”—which I, following Merlin Donald, take as diagnostic of the axial transition—first appeared there. It is not surprising that it was Plato who took the traditional term for ritual theoria and transmuted it into philosophical theoria, which is not the same thing as what we mean by theory, but is its lineal predecessor.

Andrea Nightingale in her book, Spectacles of Truth in Classical Greek Philosophy: Theoria in its Cultural Context, describes theoria before Plato as “a venerable cultural practice characterized by a journey abroad for the sake of witnessing an event or spectacle.” It took several forms, but the one which Plato took as the analogy for philosophical theoria was the civic form where the theoros (viewer, spectator) was sent as an official representative of his city to view a religious festival in another city and then return to give a full report to his fellow citizens. Nightingale notes that the traditional theoros was a lover of spectacles, particularly of religious rituals and festivals, while the philosophical theoros “loves the spectacle of truth.” Plato put great emphasis on vision, on seeing the truth more than hearing it; it is also a special kind of seeing, seeing with “the eye of the soul.” It is this kind of seeing that requires a protracted philosophical education to prepare for, but it ends with the “theoria [the 'seeing'] of all time and being.”

I cannot here give an account of the beauty and complexity of the Parable of the Cave in the Republic, which is the locus classicus for the Platonic treatment of theory, but can allude only briefly to those aspects of it that relate to my argument. The parable begins with a person who is “at home” in his own city. Home, however turns out to be a dark cave that is in fact a prison where one is in bonds and is forced to look at shadows on the wall cast by people (ideologists?) behind one’s back projecting images by holding various objects in front of fires. Still, those shadowy images are what one is used to, so that in a situation where one is freed from one’s bonds and, in Plato’s words, “compelled to suddenly stand up and to turn [one's] head and to walk and turn upward toward the light,” (515c) one will be confused, in a state of aporia, that is, profound uncertainty. One will have entered, in Nightingale’s words, “a sort of existential and epistemic no-man’s-land,” being able no longer to recognize the old familiar shadows nor yet to see anything in the blinding light above, so that one would be tempted to flee from the whole journey and return to the old familiar prison.

Yet the would-be philosopher does not flee back, but goes on to actually view and be transformed by the form of the good. In a good city when he returns he will be given civic office and expected to serve, even though he would rather spend his time in contemplation, yet even in office he is still a kind of foreigner in his own city. But if he returns to a bad city, his report of what he has seen will be mocked as foolish and nonsensical: he will be abused, he may even be killed. Nightingale sums up: “When he returns to the human world, then, he is atopos, not fully at home: he has become a stranger to his own kind.”

In the good city the philosophic rulers, or, as they are often called, the “guardians,” are an ascetic lot, and have been compared to a monastic order. Not only are they committed to a life of poverty (they live on what the city gives them, not on anything of their own, and can be considered in a way to be beggars), but their sexual life is so regulated that, though they have children, they have no family life, no personal household: the children are raised in common. They embody the virtue of wisdom, but they preside over a city that is characterized by the virtues of justice and moderation, and, not insignificantly, where there are no slaves.

In the Buddhist case, religious reform and political criticism also went hand in hand. The Buddhist Myth of the Cave is in an important sense the whole elaborate story of the Buddha’s life as the tradition handed it down. Just as the philosopher had to leave his city, the Buddha had to leave his kingdom. Seeing sickness, old age, and death, the Buddha wanted to leave that cave, and spent years of suffering and deprivation trying to do so. In the end, however, he found a middle way between the sensual indulgence of the world and the harsh austerities of the renouncers who preceded him, a way in which serene meditation could lead him to the vision of the truth and the release which he sought. And, giving up the temptation to withdraw completely from a world filled with lust and hate, the Buddha undertook, out of compassion for all sentient beings, forty-five years of itinerant preaching to make sure that the truth he had seen would not be lost to the world.

The great utopias served for the renouncers as stark contrasts to the actual world, and their vision of that other world could be called “theory” in Plato’s sense. But the very distance they felt from the world to which they returned made possible another kind of “theory,” another kind of seeing—that is, a distant, critical view of the actual world in which they lived. The renouncer sees the world with new eyes: as Plato says of the ones who have returned to the cave, they see the shadows for what they are, not naively as do those who have never left. One could say that the ideological illusion is gone.

Once disengaged vision becomes possible then theory can take another turn: it can abandon any moral stance at all and look simply at what will be useful, what can make the powerful and exploitative even more so. One thinks of the Legalists in China, and of Kautilya’s Arthashastra in India. Although the Hebrew prophets saw and condemned the self-serving manipulations of the rich and powerful, we can find in the Bible no example of someone arguing for such behavior in principle. Except possibly some of the Sophists, whose surviving writings are fragmentary, we have nothing quite like Han Fei or Kautilya in Greece. Or do we?

Aristotle was not an amoralist; he was one of the greatest moral theorists who ever lived. Yet in Aristotle we have the beginning of the split between knowledge and ethics that will have enormous consequences in later history. He severs the link between wisdom (sophia) and moral judgment (phronesis). Though he sees contemplation (theoria) as the best life for human beings, it is, in his words, useless. It is a good internal to itself, but it has no consequences for the world. Aristotle’s Politics, furthermore, is no utopia, but an empirical and analytical description of actual Greek society, containing ethical judgments between better and worse to be sure, but distant, in a sense disengaged. He was the founder of sociology, which Durkheim recognized when he assigned the Politics as the basic textbook for his students when he first began to teach at the University of Bordeaux. Aristotle on the whole used the word theoria in Plato’s sense, but he also used it from time to time for “investigation,” or “inquiry,” that is for the study of all things in the world, natural and cultural, to see how they worked and what they are for.

The axial age gave us “theory” in two senses, and neither of them has been unproblematic ever since. The great utopian visions have motivated some of the noblest achievements of mankind; they have also motivated some of the worst actions of human beings. Theory in the sense of disengaged knowing, inquiry for the sake of understanding, with or without moral evaluation, has brought its own kind of astounding achievements but also given humans the power to destroy their environment and themselves. Both kinds of theoria have criticized but also justified the class society that first came into conscious view in the axial age. They have provided the intellectual tools for efforts to reform and efforts to repress. It is a great heritage. I doubt that any of us would rather live in a tribal society than in one whose beginnings lie in the axial age; I know I would not. Yet it is a heritage of explosive potentialities for good and for evil. It has given us the great tool of criticism. How will we use it?

[This post is a condensed version of a keynote speech delivered at a conference on "The Axial Age and its Consequences for Subsequent History and the Present." Held last month at the the Max Weber Center for Advanced Cultural and Social Studies (in Erfurt, Germany), the conference was sponsored by the John Templeton Foundation in cooperation with Robert Bellah and Hans Joas.---ed.]

It could be that heteronomous thinking is bad because it leads to unpleasant things. This would be a kind of consequentialist argument and would therefore live or die on the empirical evidence. This is Christopher Hitchens territory. Rightly recognizing that this is not where he wants to go, Gourgouris opts for the other kind of answer, which is to insist that heteronomous thinking is problematic in itself—a kind of formal argument. But at some point any argument along these lines will beg the question, for it will need to assert that thinking for oneself is a good in itself. And that assertion can’t in turn be justified without appealing—heteronomously, if you will—to some scheme of values outside the mode of thinking in question.

At stake here is a certain kind of intellectual posture. In his debate with Mahmood, Gourgouris bases his argument on two suppositions that Mahmood wants to question. Those suppositions are that enlightened reason (“secular criticism”) can be purged of its own heteronomous tendencies, and that religion is an archetypal example of heteronomous thinking. If this description is right, then the dispute is really over the Enlightenment and its legacies—a point that Charles Taylor alludes to in his post in this thread. Like his enlightened forbears, Gourgouris thinks that the critique of religion is the archetype of critique as such, and he thinks that the critical project, while itself at constant risk of becoming arrogant or disconnected, can correct itself from the inside so long as we exercise sufficient care. Mahmood has a different understanding of what “critique” entails. Her more Foucaultian approach involves asking questions about how particular assumptions (that the veil is a symbol, for example) produce particular kinds of subjects, enable and dis-enable certain kinds of work, and so on.

Must we choose sides? Gourgouris apparently wants sides to be chosen. Mahmood wants to question the drive to choose sides. But I would rather try to inflect these choices differently by reading them through a category that has not received enough attention in the debate about secularism. That category is the literary.

***

If we follow Gourgouris and assume for the sake of argument that heteronomy/autonomy is the best scale we have for thinking about the question of critique (though I’m not sure it is), we can see immediately that a certain picture of the intellectual life follows naturally. In this picture, intellectual activity at its best involves the rigorous guarding against the temptation toward heteronomy. If we relax our guard, it seems, we’re going to find ourselves mired in some appeal to external authority. In this way certain values are brought into rough equivalence: reflexivity, critique, and the secular (in its proper, non-doctrinal, form).

This picture of the intellectual life as a rigorous guarding against the temptation toward heteronomy is what Chris Nealon in the initial post on this thread called “a left-secular structure of feeling.” And its dynamics should be pretty familiar. It is striking, for instance, that this picture is formally very much like the Christian life as it is imagined by St. Paul (“I do not understand what I do. For what I want to do I do not do, but what I hate I do”) and by Augustine. Both of these thinkers call their flocks to vigilance against patterns of worldly thought and behavior understood to be always just around the bend. Worldly criticism reverses the poles (where before the picture was of people pulled away from divinity and toward the world, now the picture is of people pulled away from the world and toward divinity) but it doesn’t alter the basic pattern. To note this similarity is not to say that secularity is “like” religion. It’s just to remark on our widely shared picture of what the intellectual life looks like: we’re on a hair-trigger, concerned above all never to relax our guard.

But we do relax our guard, or take a nap, or just get distracted for a while. Reflexivity is exhausting, after all. And so things sneak in: unexamined presuppositions, various essentialisms, historical blindspots, moments of “heteronomy.” We trust in authorities when we shouldn’t; take things on faith because we’re too tired or busy to run all the background checks that we might. And then we startle awake, and realize what’s happened. This may, in turn, inspire us to build better defenses and bigger data-bases. But we might also be led to reflect on the inevitability of such moments, and to confront the fact that despite our best intentions we will always betray the rigorous demands of our calling. This is the melancholy of criticism—let me say, melodramatically, of criticism in the aftermath of Enlightenment.

No one practiced this critical melancholy with more effect than Paul de Man. Consider two brief examples from his 1969 essay “The Rhetoric of Temporality,” which was for a time perhaps the single most influential essay in literary studies. Discussing the romantic symbol as an attempt to resolve the split between subject and object introduced by Enlightenment reason, de Man dissents from the humanist critics who came before him. Following some hints in Coleridge and elsewhere, those critics had proposed that the symbol repairs the breach between subject and object. De Man, on the other hand, says that subject/object is the wrong problem; the real problem is that we can never escape from time, but by focusing on the pseudo-problem of subject and object the romantic symbol simply encourages us to deny our “authentically temporal destiny” (ie., death) and flee into timeless universals. The symbol, he says, is thus “a temptation that has to be overcome.” Then, later in the essay, having produced an impressive comparison between allegory and irony, de Man writes that “this conclusion is dangerously satisfying….Things cannot be left to rest at the point we have reached.” These are two examples of the kinds of critical restlessness for which de Man is famous. The act of reading itself is the purest form of that restlessness; throughout his critical oeuvre reading appears as dreadful, as painful, as adding up to nothing. The only thing worse than reading, for de Man, is not reading, for that would mean giving in to temptations like that of the symbol, whose “dangerously satisfying conclusions” encourage us to forget about our temporal predicament.

Note that this is not criticism undertaken in the name of liberation. As de Man pictures it, all that reading can do is tie us ever more intimately to the object of our critique. Having seen through the “dangerous satisfactions” that emerge when we stop reading, the critic cannot then take refuge in those satisfactions without bad faith. But having also recognized that the pull of such satisfactions is so great that no amount of criticism will ever fully emancipate him, the critic finds himself plunged ever more deeply into a condition both intolerable and necessary. The only way to resist the temptation to stop reading is to keep reading, but the reading simply reconfirms the power of the temptation to stop. Loving what you hate; hating what you love: this melancholy predicament becomes the critic’s professional identity.

***

De Man was not especially interested in religion or in the secular, though he did assume that modernization meant secularization, and he wrote of religion as a typical example of the “dangerously satisfying” conclusions against which he set his critical project. So in that way he was a secular thinker, though I think he understood pretty well that criticizing something is not the same thing as leaving it behind. Indeed, one might read most of his writing as a continual rediscovery of the stubborn fact that the thing you most want to leave behind is also the thing you can’t leave behind—like St. Paul, who cannot do what he wants to do, but instead does the thing he hates to do.

For de Man–and for many of the literary critics writing in his wake—this kind of vexed melancholia simply was the literary experience. It is a secular experience, but of a tragic kind. It bears more than a passing resemblance to the picture painted by Edward Said, in his “Secular Criticism” essay, of the heroic worldly intellectual, resolutely suspicious of anything that might entice him to rest. Said’s metaphors in that essay, as throughout much of his work, contrast the “the quasi-religious authority of being comfortably at home” with the exile and homelessness that is for him the mark of the critic. Because he is not at home, the critic is able to take the measure of modernity and its loss of filiation: “because of that perspective, which introduces circumstance and distinction where there had only been conformity and belonging, there is distance, or what we might also call criticism,” Said writes. The critic is permanently homeless in this conception—and once again there’s an interesting inversion of the Christian imaginary here, something of which Said was very much aware.

Said’s more programmatic statements may lack the melancholy quality often found in de Man, but Said’s own body of work attests in manifold ways to his deep attachment to the very objects whose siren call he must nevertheless resist. And in this way Said’s secular criticism, like de Man’s version of deconstruction, foregrounds the relationship between secularism and the literary without ever quite saying so. To be sure, Said makes it clear that by “criticism” he means more than simply “literary criticism.” Yet it is also evident that he is modeling habits of critical attention upon the forms of attentiveness solicited by literary writing. “Obviously I’m not suggesting that everybody has to become a literary critic,” he once noted in an interview. “[T]hat’s a silly idea. But one does have to give a certain attention to the rather dense fabric of secular life….” Note the elective affinity among secularism, criticism and literary “attention.” And of course, the importance of literature to Said’s image of criticism has been further reinforced by the fact that many of those currently writing under Said’s influence are located in departments of literature.

***

Gil Anidjar’s recent book, Semites, pushes this line of thinking as far as I’ve seen anyone take it. One project of the book is to mediate between the positions of Talal Asad and Edward Said. (This is one of the things at stake in the Mahmood-Gourgouris debate. In the background, meanwhile, stands the legacy of Foucault and Said’s own critical use of Foucault.) So we get an interpretation of Orientalism in which it emerges that Said’s real target in that book was secularism. I don’t have room here to go into the complexities of Anidjar’s counter-intuitive argument, and in any case what’s relevant to my discussion here is the shape of the book rather than its local engagements. What is that shape? The first half of the book traces, in genealogical fashion, the complicated histories of the categories of Jew and Arab, Semite and Aryan. Having established how fraught and entangled those histories are, Anidjar turns in the second half of the book to “Literature.” The publisher’s description on the back of the book, in fact, says that the book “turns to the literary imagination as the site of a fragile and tenuous alternative, the promise of something like a ‘Semitic perspective’.”

As I understand it, the political resonance of that last phrase is found in the book’s historical argument that “Jew” and “Arab” where once jointly “Semitic,” so that a “Semitic perspective” would be an important alternative to prevailing contemporary narratives of “Jew vs. Arab.” The stakes, then, could not be higher: the “literary imagination” holds out something like the promise of reconciliation, in the sense of which Said spoke of it (see the essays collected in The End of the Peace Process). As Anidjar writes, “I attend to the way in which the texts of Arabic and Jewish literatures undo the narrow limits to which they are confined by the topological imagination and by the disciplines.” And later: “throughout and against history, literature resists.”

What the book largely offers, however, are discussions of that confinement—by the discipline of comparative literature, for example—rather than of literary resistance to it. I confess that I’m still trying to follow Anidjar’s argument, so maybe I’ve got this wrong, but it seems to me that in the places where we might expect discussion of literary texts, we are given instead a resonant picture of the kind of critical brooding I have been discussing. That is, it is the critic’s relation to his object—anguished, anxious, treasonous—that interests Anidjar. The idea is that any such relationship will betray the most important thing about literature, indeed the only thing that matters about it, namely its resistance to history. The critic, who is institutionally located and bound by networks of affiliation she can never quite escape, can only ever be a representative of history, and of the disciplines, can therefore even at her generous best—again with the largest stakes in mind—only imagine a “two-state” (that is, institutionally and historically determined) solution to such intractable questions as that of Palestine. The one-state solution for which Said advocated and which he turned sometimes to literature in order to imagine—that is destined to remain out of reach, though not out of mind for the critic aware enough of her own failings.

It is Paul de Man who becomes the guiding figure in Anidjar’s account. Riffing on de Man, Anidjar writes of “The [critic's] treason, which is also an active joining (a treacherous obedience), a belonging without allegiance, perhaps.” This, he concludes enigmatically, “is the promise, no more than a promise and, equally, the threat of another future, if not of another modernity.” What I take this to mean is that the critic’s treason is the promise of another future because it holds out the possibility of breaking definitively with the past. But this promise is also a threat, because any true break will throw all cherished categories out of the window. And this will be true not only for our illiberal/facist/fundamentalist opponents but for us too, no matter how progressive, generous, and reflexive we imagine ourselves to be.

But this is for the future. What does critique looks like now, in the aftermath of enlightenment? For de Man and Anidjar (and possibly Said) it seems to be a reflexivity so crosscut with humility and tragedy that it keeps generating, as if in compensation, a concept of literariness that is always just around the bend. I think it is not accidental that de Man’s own critical career continued to circle around those texts loosely termed “romantic”—the works of the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century that were striving to come to terms with the secular horizons opened up by the Enlightenment, and striving to find a voice for ways of being that those secular horizons were unable or unwilling to recognize. What I think de Man sensed in those texts and writers is what Anidjar senses in de Man. If we had to label it, we could call it “non-heteronomous critique.” Or, we could just call it “literature.”

First, a few remarks on Gourgouris’s repeated use of the term “anti-secular” to describe and dismiss my arguments. This gesture of course invites a simple counter-response: “No I am not anti-secular” or “Yes, I am.” Such a framing fails to address the complicated set of questions that the symposium “Is Critique Secular?” opened up to reflection and to which I alluded in my earlier post. Notably, calls for the embrace (or for that matter rejection) of secularism are premised on a putative opposition between secular and religious worldviews wherein each is defined as a necessary and stable essence that is superior to the other. It is argued that there is an essential kernel to secularism that must be preserved and defended from religious extremism and backwardness. For some this is secularism’s scientific rationality, for others it is secularism’s incipient objectivity, and for yet others it is secularism’s strict separation between state and religion. The idea that the “good” elements in secularism can be distinguished from its “bad” sides, the latter discarded and the former refined, only serves to further reinforce the blackmail that one is either for or against secularism. (It reminds me of a similar dilemma thrust upon critics of modernity at an earlier moment to which Michel Foucault responded astutely in his essay “What is Enlightenment?“)

Apart from the fact that the “good” and the “bad” cannot so easily be distinguished much less purified, the crucial problem with this kind of thinking is its assumption that a secular worldview is the opposite of a religious one, each indebted to a distinct epistemology irreconcilable with the other. (Charles Taylor’s recent post to this thread provides an intellectual genealogy of this position.) As must be obvious to readers of my work, I do not agree with this understanding of secularism. As a number of scholars have shown recently, the emergence of the modern category of the secular (to be distinguished from the pre-modern use of the Latin term saeculum) is constitutively related to the rise of the modern concept of religion wherein it is impossible to track the history of one without simultaneously tracking the history of the other. Furthermore, secularism, as a principle of liberal state governance, has entailed not so much the abandonment of religion but its ongoing regulation through a variety of state and civic institutions. Through this process has emerged a modular conception of religiosity and a concomitant religious subject that animates various kinds of secular discourses—including juridical, cultural, ethical, and political.

Since this argument is quite well known, I do not want to rehearse it here other than to say that this way of thinking challenges the simplistic assumption that secularism is empty of any theological arguments; that if any trace of theology is found in secular discourse, then it is clearly a “bad” development that sullies the true essence of secularism (hence the mission to “detranscendentalize the secular“). For Gourgouris, the fact that I read the theological agenda of the U.S. (in my “Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire” piece) within the terms of the secular is a gross error insomuch as the two are supposedly mutually exclusive. Not only is this understanding of secularism historically inaccurate, I am suggesting, but it remains blind to the enormous impetus to religious reform that is internal to different varieties of secularism (benign or otherwise).

My article “Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire” is an inquiry into how some of the constitutive assumptions of secularism—particularly those that enable the distinction between enlightened religiosity and its more backward/dangerous forms—underwrite the current U.S. government’s attempts to intervene politically and strategically in the Muslim world. (Apart from the Rand Corporation report, my article focuses on the notorious “Muslim World Outreach” program established by the White House National Security Council with a funding of $1.3 billion dollars.) I treat these attempts as historically contingent, enabled by specific events and geo-political developments, and not in any way evidence of a necessary or essential relationship between imperialism and secularism. Obviously, as any student of colonialism and imperialism knows, the history of these two projects is diverse and the role of religious missions within them highly variegated. This variegated history, however, cannot simply be told in terms of a clash between “religious” and “secular” interests for reasons that I have already stated.

It seems that I have upset some people by showing that many of the heroes of the progressive left—self-identified liberal Muslim reformers such as Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd and Abdel Karim Soroush—share secular assumptions about enlightened religiosity with the U.S. State Department. The charge is that in doing so, I have construed them as pawns of an imperial master, reducing their voices to an “echo of the enemy think tank” when presumably they are far more sincere and original in their engagements with Islam. I am not so sure about the originality of their arguments, but, as I noted in my article, these reformers are indeed opposed to U.S. geopolitical interests in the region and do not see themselves as serving this agenda. My object of analysis, however, is not their motivations and intentions but the discursive assumptions (about knowledge, history, language) that underpin their methods and programs of reform. Do we have to prescribe to a full fledged theory of shared interests and motivations to be able to see the common set of discursive presuppositions that cut across political projects? Could one be politically opposed and still share a set of epistemological and conceptual truths? Could one analyze this convergence critically without being accused of “belittling” the heroes of our stories?

Now the question of how liberalism and secularism are related, not just conceptually but practically through mechanisms of governance, is one that needs far more scholarly attention than has been given so far. In my article, I tried to lay out the unique character of liberal secularism in terms of its forceful commitment to the principle of religious freedom/freedom of conscience (this seems to have clearly escaped Gourgouris’s attention). As I pointed out, while totalitarian states (such as China, Syria, the former Soviet Union) abide by the separation of religion and state, they also regularly abrogate religious freedoms. Liberal secular states, while they regulate religious life, must constantly counterbalance this regulation with an individual’s right to practice his/her religion freely without coercion and state intervention. Insomuch as liberal political philosophy consists in setting limits to and enabling the exercise of freedoms, often conceptualized in individualist terms, the calculus of freedom and coercion also informs the practice of liberal secularism.

Individual freedom (as enshrined in the principle of religious freedom) is as central to liberal secularism as it is to political liberalism; in fact, one cannot imagine the latter without the former. But this character of liberal secularism cannot, in my view, be analyzed simply in terms of its merits and failures or its moral necessity. It needs to be analyzed, on one hand, as an exercise of the state’s sovereign power to regulate religious subjectivities, practices, and forms of life, and on the other, as a means by which religious minorities and majorities appeal to institutions of juridical and state power to curtail and/or extend their ability to practice their religion freely. Insomuch as the principle of religious freedom marks the ground upon which the proper limits of state jurisdiction over religious life are argued, contested, and settled in secular liberal societies, then it is crucial that we interrogate the shifting and contested operations of state and juridical power. Such a task would require not simply holding up the morality of the principle of religious freedom but to track when and how it emerges as a strategy of political rule and claims to citizenship.

Finally, and yet again, some brief remarks about the veil. Gourgouris excoriates me for taking seriously the claim, made by a large number of Muslim women, that the veil is a doctrinal command, and for failing to recognize the real significance of the veil as a symbolic element within identity formation. Let me clarify. While interpretations of the veil abound, two main views prevail among its practitioners and critics: one understands the veil to be a divine command and the second regards it to be a symbolic marker, no different than a variety of other practices (religious and non-religious) that represents a Muslim woman’s identity. In my work I do not endorse one of these interpretations over the other since it is not the veracity of these claims that interests me. Instead, as readers of my work know, my attempt has been to analyze both these understandings of the veil as speech acts that perform very different kinds of work in the making of the religious subject.

As I have argued, to understand a bodily practice (such as veiling) as a symbolic act presumes a very different relationship between the subject’s exteriority and interiority than an understanding in which a bodily act is both an expression of, and a means to, the realization of the subject. In other words, my point is not to dismiss semiotic processes (as Gourgouris mistakenly suggests), but to inquire into practices whose assumptions about semiosis do not map onto the model of signs standing for meaning or identity. To say this is to simply note that many dimensions of practice, both linguistic and non-linguistic, cannot be grasped in terms of a theory of representation. Here one only needs to recall the work of philosophers such as Wittgenstein, C. S. Peirce, and J. L. Austin who, in their different ways, have made us think of semiotic practices in registers other than those of meaning, communication, and symbolic signification. (For similar reasons, I treat the claim that the Quran is a historical text as a performative speech act that enables very different relations of power and truth than one that regards the Quran as a divine text.)

Finally, let me close by reminding readers of the questions that prompted the symposium “Is Critique Secular?” at UC Berkeley. These questions, as I suggested earlier, require 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. The academy, I continue to believe, remains perhaps one of the few places where such tensions can be explored.

What are we to think of the idea, entertained by Rawls for a time, that one can legitimately ask of a religiously and philosophically diverse democracy that everyone deliberate in a language of reason alone, leaving their religious views in the vestibule of the public sphere? The tyrannical nature of this demand was rapidly appreciated by Rawls, to his credit. But we ought to ask why the proposition arose in the first place. Rawls’ point in suggesting this restriction was that everyone should use a language with which they could reasonably expect their fellow citizens to agree. The idea seems to be something like this. Secular reason is a language that everyone speaks, and can argue and be convinced in. Religious languages operate outside of this discourse, by introducing extraneous premises which only believers can accept. So let’s all talk the common language.

What underpins this notion is something like an epistemic distinction. There is secular reason, which everyone can use and reach conclusions by—conclusions that is, with which everyone can agree. Then there are special languages, which introduce extra assumptions, which might even contradict those of ordinary secular reason. These are much more epistemically fragile; in fact, you won’t be convinced by them unless you already hold them. So religious reason either comes to the same conclusions as secular reason, but then it is superfluous; or it comes to contrary conclusions, and then it is dangerous and disruptive. This is why it needs to be sidelined.

As for Habermas, he has always marked an epistemic break between secular reason and religious thought, with the advantage on the side of the first. Secular reason suffices to arrive at the normative conclusions we need, such as establishing the legitimacy of the democratic state, and defining our political ethic. Recently, his position on religious discourse has considerably evolved; to the point of recognizing that its “Potential macht die religiöse Rede bei entsprechenden politischen Fragen zu einem ernsthaften Kandidaten für mögliche Wahrheitsgehalte.” But the basic epistemic distinction still holds for him. Thus when it comes to the official language of the state, religious references have to be expunged. “Im Parlament muss beispielsweise die Geschäftsordnung den Presidenten ermächtigen, religiöse Stellungnahmen und Rechtfertigungen aus dem Protokoll zu streichen.”

I think that these positions of Rawls and Habermas show that they have not yet understood the normative basis for the contemporary secular state. I believe that they are on to something, in that there are zones of a secular state in which the language used has to be neutral. But these do not include citizen deliberation, as Rawls at first thought, or even deliberation in the legislature, as Habermas seems to think from the above quote. This zone can be described as the official language of the state: the language in which legislation, administrative decrees and court judgments must be couched. It is self-evident that a law before Parliament couldn’t contain a justifying clause of the type: “Whereas the Bible tells us that p.” And the same goes mutatis mutandis for the justification of a judicial decision in the court’s verdict. But this has nothing to do with the specific nature of religious language. It would be equally improper to have a legislative clause: “Whereas Marx has shown that religion is the opium of the people,” or “Whereas Kant has shown that the only thing good without qualification is a good will.” The grounds for both these kinds of exclusions is the neutrality of the state.

The state can be neither Christian nor Muslim nor Jewish; but by the same token it should also be neither Marxist, nor Kantian, nor Utilitarian. Of course, the democratic state will end up voting laws which (in the best case) reflect the actual convictions of its citizens, which will be either Christian, or Muslim, etc, through the whole gamut of views held in a modern society. But the decisions can’t be framed in a way which gives special recognition to one of these views. This is not easy to do; the lines are hard to draw; and they must always be drawn anew. But such is the nature of the enterprise which is the modern secular state. And what better alternative is there for diverse democracies?

Now the notion that state neutrality is basically a response to diversity has trouble making headway among “secular” people in the West, who remain oddly fixated on religion, as something strange and perhaps even threatening. This stance is fed by all the conflicts of liberal states with religion, past and present, but also by a specifically epistemic distinction: religiously informed thought is somehow less rational than purely “secular” reasoning. The attitude has a political ground (religion as threat), but also an epistemological one (religion as a faulty mode of reason).

I believe we can see these two motifs in a popular contemporary book, Mark Lilla’s The Stillborn God. On one hand, Lilla wants to claim that there is a great gulf between thinking informed by political theology and “thinking and talking about politics exclusively in human terms.” Moderns have effected “the liberation, isolation, and clarification of distinctively political questions, apart from speculations about the divine nexus. Politics became, intellectually speaking, its own realm deserving independent investigation and serving the limited aim of providing the peace and plenty necessary for human dignity. That was the Great Separation.” Such metaphors of radical separation imply that human-centered political thought is a more reliable guide to answer the questions in its domain than theories informed by political theology.

So much for the epistemological ranking. But then towards the end of the view, Lilla calls on us not to lose our nerve, and allow the Great Separation to be reversed; which seems to imply that there are dangers in doing so. The return of religion in this sense would be full of menace.

This phenomenon deserves fuller examination. Ideally, we should look carefully at the double grounds for this stance of distrust, comment on these, and then say something about the possible negative political consequences of maintaining this stance. But in this contribution, I shall only really have space to look at some roots of the epistemological ground.

I think this has its source in what one might call a myth of the Enlightenment. There certainly is a common view which sees the Enlightenment (Aufklärung, Lumières) as a passage from darkness to light, that is, as an absolute, unmitigated move from a realm of thought full of error and illusion to one where the truth is at last available. To this one must immediately add that a counterview defines “reactionary” thought: the Enlightenment would be an unqualified move into error, a massive forgetting of salutary and necessary truths about the human condition.

In the polemics around modernity, more nuanced understandings tend to get driven to the wall, and these two slug it out. Arnold’s phrase about “ignorant armies clashing by night” comes irresistibly to mind. What underlies the understanding of Enlightenment as an absolute, unmitigated step forward?

This is worth asking, I believe, because the myth is more widespread than one might think. Even sophisticated thinkers, who might repudiate it when it is presented as a general proposition, seem to be leaning on it in other contexts.

Thus there is a version of what Enlightenment represents, which sees it as our stepping out of a realm in which Revelation, or religion in general, counted as a source of insight about human affairs, into a realm in which these are now understood in purely this-worldly or human terms. Of course, that some people have made this passage is not what is in dispute. What is questionable is the idea that this move involves the self-evident epistemic gain of our setting aside consideration of dubious truth and relevance and concentrating on matters which we can settle and which are obviously relevant. This is often represented as a move from Revelation to reason alone (Kant’s “blosse Vernunft”).

Clear examples are found in contemporary political thinkers, for instance Rawls and Habermas. For all their differences, they seem to reserve a special status for non-religiously informed Reason (let’s call this “reason alone”), as though a) this latter were able to resolve certain moral-political issues in a way which can legitimately satisfy any honest, unconfused thinker, and b) where religiously-based conclusions will always be dubious, and in the end only convincing to people who have already accepted the dogmas in question.

This surely is what lies behind the idea I mentioned at the outset, entertained for a time in different form by both thinkers, that one can restrict the use of religious language in the sphere of public reason. We must mention again that this proposition has been largely dropped by both; but we can see that the proposition itself makes no sense, unless something like (a) + (b) above is true. Rawls’ point in suggesting this restriction was that public reason must be couched in terms which could in principle be universally agreed upon. The notion was that the only terms meeting this standard were those of reason alone (a), while religious language by its very nature would fail to do so (b).

Before proceeding farther, I should just say that this distinction in rational credibility between religious and non-religious discourse, supposed by (a) + (b), seems to me utterly without foundation. It may turn out at the end of the day that religion is founded on an illusion, and hence that what is derived from it less credible. But until we actually reach that place, there is no a priori reason for greater suspicion being directed at it. The credibility of this distinction depends on the view that some quite “this-worldly” argument suffices to establish certain moral-political conclusions. I mean “satisfy” in the sense of (a): it should legitimately be convincing to any honest, unconfused thinker. There are propositions of this kind, ranging from “2+2=4″ all the way to some of the better-founded deliverances of modern natural science. But the key beliefs we need, for instance, to establish our basic political morality are not among them. The two most widespread this-worldly philosophies in our contemporary world, utilitarian and Kantianism, in their different versions, all have points at which they fail to convince honest and unconfused people. If we take key statements of our contemporary political morality, such as those attributing rights to human beings as such, say the right to life, I cannot see how the fact that we are desiring/enjoying/suffering beings, or the perception that we are rational agents, should be any surer basis for this right than the fact that we are made in the image of God. Of course, our being capable of suffering is one of those basic unchallengeable propositions, in the sense of (a), as our being creatures of God is not, but what is less sure is what follows normatively from the first claim.

To propound the distinction is much easier if you think you already have a “secular” argument for rights which is watertight, as Habermas does for his “discourse ethic” (which I unfortunately find quite unconvincing).

In fact, modern diverse democracies operate on the basis of what Rawls called an “overlapping consensus.” We agree on affirming a right to life, but we justify it in our own diverse ways. One proposition that such a democracy cannot enshrine is the view that one of these justifications is canonical and correct, and the others faulty and invalid. The Enlightenment myth can’t be part of the overlapping consensus.

The (a) + (b) distinction, applied to the moral-political domain, is one of the fruits of the Enlightenment myth; or perhaps one should say it is one of the forms which this myth takes. What underlies this? I think there are three important sources, which I only have space to identify briefly here.

The first two can be traced back to Cartesian foundationalism. This combines a supposedly indubitable starting point (the particulate ideas in the mind) with an infallible method (that of clear and distinct ideas) and thus should yield conclusions which would live up to claim (a). But this comes unstuck, and in two places. The indubitable starting points can be challenged by a determined skepticism, such as we find in Hume; and the method relies much too much on a priori argument, and not enough on empirical input.

But even though his foundationalism and his a priori physics were rejected, Descartes left behind (α) a belief in the importance of finding the correct method, and (β) a rationalist temper of mind, which applied to ethics has led to the widespread modern view (which I find both startling and erroneous) that we can derive all right actions from a single highly abstract principle; a premise shared by both Utilitarians and those who write in the wake of Kant.

The third source (γ) is embedded in the modern social imaginary; it is the modern notion of moral order: society, made up of individuals, finds its legitimacy in its defense of rights and its fostering of mutual benefit. The way in which these three work together to sustain the illusion of an epistemic superiority of “reason alone” needs to be worked out in detail. It would be a fascinating and instructive story.

Saba Mahmood’s riposte is exemplary of this baffled disavowal. Certainly, the focus of “De-transcendentalizing the secular” was not on Mahmood’s work, and my critical comments pertaining to her, like comments made about others (Anidjar, Asad, Brown, Connolly, During), were signposts on the way to a much broader argument. This does not mean that Mahmood does not have the impetus to defend herself, and opposing my argument may be one way to conduct such a defense, except that this opposition is built on some conspicuous misreadings. I will begin by briefly pointing these out. More important, and in order to rectify her charge that my criticism of her is unfounded, I will look more closely at the argument in her Public Culture article “Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire“—always in the spirit of elaborating on the broader argument I have initiated and not under the imperative of tête-à-tête polemics.

I responded unequivocally to the question “Is critique secular?” in order precisely to raise the stakes of the question. Anything else, I’m afraid, compromises the secular from the start, and, with the pretext of sustaining ambiguity, renders it a mere concept among many, as if in a streamlined and neutralized array of equivalent objects. (One wonders what epistemology authorizes ambiguity outside the realm of critique, but that’s another matter.) My response does not leave any room for the secular to cruise, as it were, on its own epistemological assumptions. Insofar as critique can never be anything less than self-critique, the certainty of weighing the secular with the critical is precisely to plunge the domain of the secular to the uncertainty of its own interrogation. Whether we like it or not, this, itself, is the domain of the dialectic of Enlightenment.

For this reason, I made it repeatedly explicit that the secular was a non-substantive, conditional, and differential domain, therefore—speaking precisely—worldly. By contradistinction, I identified secularism as an institutional term that represents a historical range of projects, and thereby often tends to certain a priori and dogmatic assumptions, which I identified as secularist metaphysics. Though I advocate the emancipatory potentialities of the secular—indeed, with the aspiration of reconceptualizing and enriching the emancipatory domain of the secular—I explicitly criticize the metaphysics of secularism, in fact from within the domain and as work of the secular, as an act of secular criticism. (This is why it is crucial that the metaphysics of secularism not be equated with theological metaphysics, and secularism not be considered another sort of religion; this latter claim is one of the most politically reactionary positions of anti-secularist thinking.)

Mahmood either does not see or does not want to see this explicit and repeated distinction. In her words, I offer “moral platitudes about the goods secularism offers to humanity”; I opt “for the moral superiority of secularism through recourse to the familiar Enlightenment rhetoric of freedom, human creativity, and autonomy as well as an impoverished materialist conception of history”; my “rhetorical defense of secularism devolves upon a kind of liberal romantic imaginary…[of] commitment to autonomy, creativity, imagination, and freedom”, etc.

Never mind here that a proper and rigorous response would require that Mahmood produce a framework of thought that would advocate a politics against autonomy, imagination, freedom, and human creativity, since apparently these are just reprehensible objects of desire. Never mind her derisory insinuations that I am ignorant of “all the recent work on the modern emergence of the categories of secularism and religion.” Never mind that I’m an impoverished materialist thinker, or in turn, a liberal romantic who spouts moral platitudes—although I must say, for the record, that I don’t mind being called a romantic, but everyone knows (insofar as my work stands for it in public view) that liberalism makes me angry and morality makes me cringe. Never mind all that. What remains puzzling is how an entire argument against the transcendentalist metaphysics of secularism can be rehashed and served as a secularist love fest.

Puzzled though I am, I will wager an answer. My understanding of the task of secular criticism is to oppose any sort of heteronomous politics; because theological politics is heteronomous by definition, Mahmood finds it easiest to declare me an avid defender of secularism. Even if I also identify secularism’s transcendentalist politics as heteronomous politics—its technological rationalism, the cultural Ego Ideal, the imperialist mission civilisatrice, the instrumentalist appropriation of the other, etc.—she, nonetheless, bristles at my “visceral attachment” to secularism. She goes so far as to spin my critique of secularism’s rationalist metaphysics against me, leveling the charge of infusing my argument with a certain “structure of affect.” This latter charge, of course, I would hardly disavow, since it’s precisely the rationalist impartiality of secularist thinking (which is, of course, neither rational nor impartial) that I put into question. One wonders how she might account for her own structure of affect, if this, like autonomy, imagination, freedom, etc., is such a reprehensible thing. Does she mean to suggest that anti-secularism is “rational” and “impartial”—even if (or especially when) it is conducted by (presumably) secular academics?

Mahmood’s misreading becomes comprehensible if one looks closely at her own assumptions in the article that served as focus for our initial discussions at SSRC and to which I had referred in passing. I hereby isolate four points.

1. Mahmood predicates her entire argument on an uninterrogated identification of secularism with liberalism. Never mind that secularism does just as well with non-liberal ideologies and institutions, whether the colonialist apparatus of the British Empire, twentieth-century’s fascist or communist states, or non-liberal postcolonial regimes of all kinds. One is puzzled as to why her political critique is not addressed to liberalism as such. Or, more precisely, why, in her political critique, is the ideology of liberalism reduced to a problem of the secular vs. the non-secular? Let us say that, although her target seems to be (by virtue of the argument) the normativity of liberal institutions, her desired enemy is not liberalism but secularism. However, because she doesn’t even raise the question of their equivalence as a preliminary self-critical step in her argument, she confounds the terrain, possibly hoping she can hit both targets at once. But this way she misses the fact that you cannot conduct an anti-secularist argument simply by attacking liberalism without falling into the same path of argumentation that behooves the anti-liberal agendas of US Christian Republicanism. This is one of the ways in which Mahmood’s argument is conservative, whether she intends it or not.

Needless to say, I hardly care to defend liberalism. On the contrary, my attempt to reconfigure the domain of the secular against secularism’s own statist metaphysics is also a critique of the metaphysics of liberalism as such—both its statist and its market metaphysics. But it is so by implication. My impetus is not to critique liberalism—not here, anyway—but to critique heteronomous politics in whatever form this takes, liberal or non-liberal, secularist or religious. The imaginary investment of certain Western (largely Christian) societies in secular institutions—usually (but uncritically) associated with liberal institutions—cannot be the exclusive ground of defining and debating the secular. I understand how it is convenient, because this way the anti-secularist argument draws strength from the condemnation of the US imperialist machinery. But, again, this raises the question as to why a critique of ‘Western’ imperialism, generally speaking, has to be conducted as critique of secularism. Why does it have to be? I raised this question in my initial piece, and I raise it again, since Mahmood does not seem to consider it worth addressing.

2. Mahmood’s central thesis is that secularism “proffers remaking certain kinds of religious subjectivities (even if this requires the use of violence)” according to a “normative impetus internal” to it. “Normativity” is indeed her favorite word, and here it flags the American imperialist agenda of forcefully shaping subjectivities in the Islamic world. About the latter, there can be no argument. But whether this is the outcome of a “secularist” agenda is a matter of debate. I suppose that to the degree that we are talking about practices of the US institutional apparatus, this could be called secularist (among various other names). But I don’t think these practices can be so easily considered “secular” as Mahmood’s own phrasing—“the United States has embarked upon an ambitious theological campaign”—explicitly admits. This conceptual difference is not so fine as to be imperceptible, whether by Mahmood or anybody else. The difference between institutional secularism and the secular as a conditional domain of interrogation is marked by an epistemological chasm.

Then there is the issue of secularism’s shaping of subjectivities as such, its “attendant anthropology of the subject.” Taking as basis the enormous critique of theories of the subject in the last 40some years—which is, let us not forget, a matter of self-critique to the degree that it has all been conducted (including the postcolonial perspective) within the terms of a dialectic of Enlightenment—there is not much here to contend regarding the enforced subjectification that colonialist/imperialist states have perpetrated on conquered peoples all over the globe (but also—and it is equally important—on their own societies). The problem lies in the argument’s framing.

There is, at best, something naïve in setting the foundations of one’s argument about the ills of the secular imagination on the inarguable fact of colonialist/ imperialist politics, especially when one dares not even pose the question of what is normative in non-secular modes of rule. On what basis is there no ground for critique of non-secular modalities of political rule seeking to transform religious subjectivities (not to mention non-religious subjectivities) so they conform to a certain politics? Shall we not speak of the “attendant anthropology of the subject” that Mahmood’s own ethnographic argument proposes? What agenda authorizes us to remain uncritical of it?

3. Mahmood chronicles the ‘findings’ of the Rand Corporation regarding the inner workings of Islamic societies as exemplary of American imperialist practices in the Islamic world. Exemplary, indeed, they are—although to give such scholarly credence to Rand’s account of the social imagination is really to give them too much credit. They are not scholars but ideologues, ideological bureaucrats. It is especially alarming, however, to equate the Rand rhetoric with the view of certain prominent Muslim reformist thinkers—Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, Hasan Hanafi, and Abdul Karim Soroush. Even more so when the argument is constructed with such phrasing as: “Echoing the Rand report’s contention that the Quran is a human rather than a divine text, Abu Zayd argues that the Quran… entered history… [etc.].” This is startling. Do we really need the Rand Corporation to tell us that the Quran is a human rather than a divine text? What is a divine text, but what certain humans, in certain conditions (which are always historical, even when expressed in the most profound spiritual terms), convene, name, and occasionally worship, as divine?

It’s one thing if Mahmood were to argue that the Quran is divine, pure and simple—to argue from the standpoint of a believer. (But there is no pure and simple: are we to assume that communities of believers are so consistently uniform that the precise nature of the divinity they worship—and all its objects—is beyond discussion?) Yet, if she argues that for some people the Quran is divine (as, for others, are the Vedas, the Torah, the Gospel, or the Book of Mormon), she engages in a historical argument about a historical process that institutes a text as divine and, insofar as we are speaking of social-imaginary institution, continuously reinstitutes a text as divine, as long as required by a certain society or societies, a certain community or communities, in order to safeguard and reanimate their identity. In this latter case, what the Rand Corporation has to say is of little importance—except as analysis of how the enemy thinks—but what certain intellectuals, within this social imaginary, say about the varied permutations of this imaginary is of enormous importance, and to belittle it by dubbing it an echo of the enemy think tank is an act of extraordinary arrogance.

This is not the place to conduct the full argument about what sort of textuality—and consequently what sort of social and political imaginary—characterizes a sacred text. Walter Benjamin’s insights to this regard would be essential. I do want to clarify, however, that I would never discount the enormous political power—whether subjugating or (more interesting from my perspective) insurgent power—of a sacred text. That this power derives from its being sacred does not mean that it is sacred. Or, that a text derives its political power from being claimed as sacred by a certain society does not mean that it is sacred by divine decree. In other words, the point is not to dispute the sacredness of the text, but to raise questions about how this sacredness is authorized.

This is also the case with politics based on transcendental religious commands. I am talking specifically of how such commands pertain nominally to emancipatory politics. I would never doubt, for instance, the great revolutionary inspiration that liberation theology once held for certain oppressed societies in Central America or, for that matter, the inarguable power that Islam holds for certain of the insurgent communities in Iraq today. But as I have said several times, this does not mean that, come post-insurgency time, the time of self-determination, a politics based on religious command can produce an autonomous society—at least, history has never shown any such cases. There is a foundational reason why this has not happened: a politics based on religious command bars, by definition, the last instance of any given society’s self-interrogation as to who authorizes its self-determination. Not only does it take for granted an external, ahistorical, heteronomous authorization; it forbids the very question.

4. Mahmood’s dismissal of any argumentative basis for the Quran as a historical text belies her dismissal that neither Quranic scripture nor Islamic ritual can be treated as semiotic or symbolic significations. What is operative in both dismissals is contempt toward the literary domain as a proper epistemological framework, or indeed, contempt toward the poetic as such: “The fact that this understanding of religion and scripture as a system of signs and symbols, ready for a cultured individual to interpret according to her poetic resources, enjoys such broad appeal is in part what the term normative secularity captures” (her italics). How the poetic becomes normative is one of the most mysterious epistemological steps in her entire argument. Not to mention—again keeping Benjamin in mind—that dismissing the poetic in such thoughtless fashion dismisses the opportunity to radically theorize the political power of a sacred text.

Mahmood continues in this vein to reiterate her argument from Politics of Piety that “Muslim women’s consensual adoption of the veil” is belittled when subjected to analyses that determine it according to its symbolic indications, its semiotic meaning, its significations of identity, or even its social instrumentality in regard to sexuality and gender roles. Instead, she argues that the veil claims “a religious obligation,” as “part of a religious doctrine, a divine edict, or a form of ethical practice, and that it therefore has nothing to do with ‘identity’.” I understand (and I agree) in what terms she objects to secularist assessments of wearing a veil – whether oppositional (feminist or otherwise) or supportive (as indicative of the woman’s right to choose how to identify herself) – as imposing on the gesture of the veil a framework of meaning derived from external reasoning and thus disregarding the gesture’s own self-determination of meaning.

But I am amazed at the inability or unwillingness to press the critical question in both directions. Is the veil not a sign for the devout Muslim? What is it? An empty signifier? And as sign, how can it not be activated but in an identity-formation—which, incidentally, by virtue of the elementary dialectics of institution in any society, can never be conducted entirely within an internal signifying framework? That is, one’s identity—even under conditions of perfect self-determination (which, of course, never exist in history, but for the sake of argument)—can never be formed without, simultaneously, forming the identity of the other against whom (or in contradistinction from whom, in difference from whom) one defines oneself.

To argue further: Why is utter and unquestionable obedience to divine/doctrinal edict not an identitary mechanism? This question is never answered by Saba Mahmood because it is not even asked, as if obedience to divine doctrine is different substantially from obedience to non-divine doctrine. (I am not speaking here of negotiation with authority, whether secular or non-secular, but of strict obedience to doctrine—because these are the terms of Mahmood’s argument about the significance of the gesture of the veil.) If one were to seriously argue that religious obedience is radically different from any other kind of doctrinal obedience, so that it lies beyond the world of symbols, signs, social and communal mechanisms, or principles of identity-formation, then there are only two options: 1) the religious experience is totally unworldly, therefore asocial and ahistorical, and in this respect, one can never claim that it bear a politics—of piety, or any other politics for that matter; 2) the religious experience is utterly irrelevant to any discourse or meditation on society, and can only be conducted in terms of the self-enclosed hermeneutic universe of mystical thinking, and for this we have, say, the extraordinary texts of Rumi, the Kabbalah, or St. Teresa de Avila—texts that do not require the authorization of the sacred to yield their poetic splendor.

In other words, if non-secular gestures are to bear a certain politics, they cannot be determined as idiosyncratic or idiomatic gestures; they pertain to an imagined community of some kind and are therefore implicated in an identity-formation of some kind. It is precisely Mahmood’s inability or unwillingness to even entertain the notion that these gestures are themselves identitary gestures—no doubt, in their own way, and here the difference between identitary frameworks would be indeed a worthy theoretical pursuit—that anchors her anti-secularist politics to the stealth dogmatism of nativist identity politics. One yearns here for a little intellectual daring, perhaps the kind that Frantz Fanon showed in the midst of a real revolutionary situation, when he warned us of the pitfalls of national consciousness, equally unafraid to dismantle colonialist and postcolonial—and we might add, ‘Western’ and ‘non-Western’, secular and non-secular—essentialisms alike.

The symposium “Is Critique Secular?” was the inaugural event for a new teaching and research unit in critical theory at UC Berkeley, plans for which had been in gestation for over a year. While the motivations for the establishment of this program were diverse, there is a group of us who are interested in opening up traditional ways of thinking about critique to recent problematizations of notions of the secular, secularity, and secularism. While it is clear that the genealogy of critique is complicated, the thread we wanted to pull involved rethinking some of the underlying assumptions about history, temporality, causality, and ethics as they have become enshrined in regnant conceptions of critique. Insomuch as the tradition of critical theory is infused with a suspicion, if not dismissal, of religion’s metaphysical and epistemological commitments, we wanted to think “critically” about this dismissal: how are epistemology and critique related within this tradition? Do distinct traditions of critique require a particular epistemology and ontological presuppositions of the subject? How might we rethink the dominant conception of time—as empty, homogenous and unbounded, one so germane to our conception of history—in light of other ways of relating to and experiencing time that also suffuse modern life? How do these other ways of inhabiting time complicate the rigid opposition between secular and sacred time so common to everyday practices of modern life? A final set of questions revolve around various disciplines of subjectivity through which a particular subject of critique is secured. What are some of the practices of self-cultivation—including practices of reading, contemplation, engagement, and sociality—internal to secular conceptions of critique? What is the morphology of these practices and how do these sit with (or differ from) other practices of ethical self-cultivation that might uphold contrastive notions of critique and criticism?

Given the nature of these questions, it must be clear that we were not looking for a “yes” or a “no” answer to our question “Is Critique Secular?” To do so would be to foreclose thought and to fail to engage a rich set of questions, answers to which remain unclear, not because of some intellectual confusion or incomplete evidence, but because these questions require a comparative dialogue across the putative divide between “Western” and “non-Western” traditions of critique and practice. Furthermore, such an engagement requires putting our most closely held assumptions to critical scrutiny, a task most suited, we thought, to a symposium devoted to critique itself. After all, one of the most cherished definitions of critique is the incessant subjection of all norms to unyielding critique. Or is it?

The conversation that has unfolded on this blog and other places following our symposium suggests that the task is more difficult. It has to do with the shrill polemic that attends current discussions about religion, and by implication secularism, today. The events of the past decade (including 9/11, the subsequent war on terror, the rise of religious politics globally) have intensified what was at one point only a latent schism between religious and secular world views. It is quite common to hear voices from all sides of the political spectrum posit an incommensurable divide between strong religious belief and a secular worldview. Despite this intense polarization, more reflective participants in this debate have tried to direct our attention to how the religious and the secular are not so much immutable essences or opposed ideologies as they are concepts that gain a particular salience with the emergence of the modern state and attendant politics-concepts that are, furthermore, interdependent and necessarily linked in their mutual transformation and historical emergence. Viewed from this perspective, as a secular rationality has come to define law, state craft, knowledge production, and economic relations in the modern world, it has also simultaneously transformed the conceptions, ideals, practices and institutions of religious life. Secularism in this scholarship is understood not simply as the doctrinal separation of church from state, but the rearticulation of religion in a manner that is commensurate with modern sensibilities and modes of governance. To rethink the religious is to also rethink the secular and its truth claims, its promise of internal and external goods.

While these analytical reflections have complicated an otherwise shrill debate about the religious and the secular, they are often challenged by those who fear that this manner of thinking forestalls effective action against the threat of “religious extremism” that haunts our world today. By historicizing the truth of secular reason and questioning its normative claims, one paves the way for religious fanaticism to take hold of our institutions and society. One enters a slippery slope of the ever present dangers of “relativism.” Our temporal frame of action requires certainty and judgment rather than critical rethinking of secular goods. This line of thought urges you to choose: either one is against secular values or one is for them. If “we” do not defend secular values and lifestyles, it is argued, “they” (often Islamic extremists) will take over our liberal freedoms and institutions. What we need is a robust defense of secularism and its goods.

This manner of conceptualizing the conflict between secular necessity and religious threat is not only intellectually problematic, I want to suggest, but poses a grave impediment to coming to terms with the religious turn in politics in a range of societies. Intellectually speaking, this dichotomous characterization depends upon a certain definition of religious extremism, often amassing together a series of practices and images that are said to threaten the secular liberal worldview: from suicide bombers, to veiled women, to angry mobs burning books, to preachers pushing “intelligent design” in schools. Needless to say, these diverse set of images and practices neither emanate from a singular religious logic nor belong sociologically to a unified political formation. Far more importantly, the point I want to stress here is that these supposed descriptions of “religious extremism” enfold a set of judgments and evaluations such that to abide by a certain description is also to uphold these judgments. Descriptions of events deemed “extremist” or “politically dangerous” are often not only reductive of the conditions they purport to describe, but more importantly, they are premised on normative conceptions of the subject, law, and language that that need to be urgently rethought if one is to get beyond the current secular-religious impasse. Any serious intellectual and political discussion today must therefore cleave apart description from judgment so as to lay bare the epistemological and ontological assumptions whose status is far more fraught in the academy than meets the eye in these polemical accounts. Such a task of course has bearing upon how one thinks about the project of critique and its various forms of practice.

But for some academics, to inquire into normative assumptions about history, temporality, or regnant language ideologies endemic to secular discourse is to commit a grave intellectual and political error, one easily dismissed as “conservative.” Consider for example Stathis Gourgouris’s post to the The Immanent Frame as part of the thread on “Is critique secular?” He answers the question categorically and unequivocally: “Yes, critique is secular,” he writes. And he goes on to declare, “If the secular imagination ceases to seek and to enact critique, it ceases to be secular.” Note how distinct this emphatic certainty is from the spirit of the symposium I described earlier and how it forestalls the set of inquiries and questions I allude to above. The substantive and rhetorical thrust of Gourgouris’s circular argument turns, not surprisingly, upon: (a) a dichotomous representation of religion and secularism (religion bad, secularism good); and (b) moral platitudes about the goods secularism offers to humanity that religion clearly does not. What I think should be noted is the way an argument about critique’s ability to overcome its own context of iteration draws its rhetorical force from the invocation of a most conventional (and problematic) conceptual repertoire. He states, for example, secularization “makes possible the emancipatory realization of the tragic finitude of every one life (mortality) against the redemptive total finitude of all (rapture). Or, if you will, it underscores the infinite possibility of the human imagination to create out of chaos against the restricted condition of creation by the totality of the All-Signifying-God. This is what makes the difference between a worldly and an otherworldly reality of life, a different whose significance, again, is not critical or philosophical, but political.” The trenchant dichotomies operative here are reminiscent of the likes of Mircea Eliade who, ironically, sought to defend religion’s (rather than secularism’s) ultimate value and truth.

An argument that starts with calls for historical specificity devolves into moves common to other triumphalist accounts of secularism wherein religion is ascribed an essence: it is “other worldly,” “transcendental,” “totalizing,” and ultimately an immature way of dealing with death and mortality. The secular, on the other hand, is essential in its own way because it is “worldly,” “emancipatory,” and reflective of the “human imagination to create” a space of complete freedom. The claim to an historical understanding of secularism is quickly abandoned for the moral superiority of secularism through recourse to the familiar Enlightenment rhetoric of freedom, human creativity, and autonomy as well as an impoverished materialist conception of history. Not only has the universalism of these notions been challenged, of course, their singularity and eminence put to scrutiny within the academy, but the vacuous notion of religion offered here (for Gourgouris, religion is a product of history that misrecongizes its own historicity) hardly captures the complexity of secular modernity itself. While these sorts of valuations might make one feel good about the superiority of “a secular worldview,” they hardly constitute a tenable analysis in light of all the recent work on the modern emergence of the categories of secularism and religion.

But I think the “feeling good” part of the secular story cannot be belittled. It should in fact be studied in all seriousness so as to apprehend the visceral force secular discourses and practices command in our world today. While it is common to ascribe passion to religion, it would behoove us to pay attention to the thick texture of affinities, prejudices, and attachments that tie us (cosmopolitan intellectuals and critics) to what is loosely described as a secular worldview. This visceral attachment is evident in Gourgouris’s argument in several places. Most emphatically, we see this attachment in the way his rhetorical defense of secularism devolves upon a kind of liberal romantic imaginary through which we are routinely asked to recognize our most profound commitments (to autonomy, creativity, imagination, and freedom). This attachment is also evident in his reactive dismissal of the arguments I put forward—in an article initially published in Public Culture and later discussed at an SSRC colloquium on secularism—as “anti-secular,” “conservative,” and guilty of “facile identity politics.” Insomuch as these are charges rather than arguments they depend on a structure of affect in which the mere suggestion that there might be a “normative impetus internal to secularism” is to be blindly “pro-religion” and “anti-secular.” No other position is imaginable in this structure of affect, and arguments that are rather common in a variety of fields (about subject, language, law, and politics) elicit ominous warnings about their dangers when it comes to the study of religion. Moreover, the conceptual acrobatics by which Gourgouris comes to gloss my argument as facile identity politics are stunning in so much as my article builds on a body of work that has challenged the notion of identity as adequate to the analysis of a wide array of Islamic politics. The great analytical cost of Gourgouris’s “pro” versus “against” approach is apparent to anyone interested in interrogating the pious truths of secularism (and not religion alone).

This manner of thinking, I believe, has less to do with individual failures, however, and is more symptomatic of an understanding of critical reason that abjures its ethical and substantive commitments for its procedural merits. Insomuch as critique is often imagined as a constant subjection of all norms to further criticism, it is viewed as what Michael Warner calls a “negative potential,” incapable of recognizing itself as a peculiar (and parochial?) cultural form. The full force of this ideal of critical reason comes to the fore when it is juxtaposed against religious critique, imagined to be saturated with ethical and moral prejudices, and therefore not critique at all. What such a notion of critical reason remains blind to is its own disciplinary formation, its moral and structural unconsciousness. For critique, so understood, if it were to recognize this, would by its own definition have to relinquish its claims on truth and reason. But perhaps a time has come when this circularity of reason can turn the tables on itself and start by acknowledging its normative commitments and ethical presuppositions, as well as the analytical risks entailed in its rhetorical and theoretical gestures. This would certainly constitute a starting point for a dialogue with what critical reason declares to be its ultimate enemy, namely religion and religious criticism. As cosmopolitan secular academics never tire of pointing out, religionists are incapable of such self-critique. What prevents us from engaging in it? The answers may not be so pious after all.

“Unyielding antagonism and stinging rebuke have a more abysmal source than the measured negation of thought. Galling failure and merciless prohibition require some deeper answer.”

It is not clear whether Heidegger provided the deeper answer to the question of criticism (“unyielding antagonism and stinging rebuke”) such as he describes it in this striking moment of “What is Metaphysics?” What he does provide is a name and a structure for these and related “possibilities of nihilative comportment.” For in all of them, Heidegger says, in all criticism, that is, there is a “surpassing of beings as a whole.” This surpassing Heidegger calls “die Transzendenz.” To be sure, Heidegger insists that the kind of transcendence he is thinking about itself surpasses Christianity (as well as science, in fact, which “becomes laughable when it does not take the nothing seriously”). Transcendence – unyielding antagonism and stinging rebuke directed at beings as a whole – may seem like a hyperbolic word for “critique” but it reveals, I think, a deep truth about critique as a structure, a transcendental structure. It also reveals (with no more than the appearance of paradox), the way in which “critique” (beautifully traced by Talal Asad in his post) has come to share a certain secularism with Heidegger’s transcendence.

Consider Edward Said’s reference to Hugo of St. Victor, by way of Auerbach, in his well-known appeal for “secular criticism.” Said proposes both authors as a joint model for criticism, for “philological work,” that “deals with humanity at large and transcends national boundaries.” The secular critic must be separated from his heritage “and then transcend it” in order to become effective. Like Auerbach, Hugo – a twelfth century mystic; not the most immediate illustration of worldly labor – seems to have embraced the fact that “our philological home is the earth.” As Said quotes him: “he to whom every soil is as his native one is already strong; but he is perfect to whom the entire world is as a foreign land [perfectus vero cui mundus totus exilium est].” This deportment toward a negated totality cannot fail to recall Heidegger’s comportment toward “beings as a whole.” Which would be why Said himself deploys the very lexicon of height and transcendence he will proceed to criticize in “theological criticism,” ultimately to invert it for the benefit of the secular critic. Is this “nihilative comportment” however? It is not, at least not enough, not for Said, who outbids Auerbach in quoting a few more of Hugo’s words, thus clarifying what love’s got to do with it: “The tender soul has fixed his love on one spot in the world; the strong man has extended his love to all places; the perfect man has extinguished his.”

In Displacing Christian Origins, Ward Blanton has attended to Heidegger’s surpassing gesture of separation, his own partaking in processes of extinction, his “nihilative comportment,” as it were, in relation to (Christian) theology and faith. “Faith is so absolutely the mortal enemy that philosophy does not even begin to want to do battle with it.” The secular critic knows that indifference is often the outbidding of antagonism. Blanton argues persuasively that there is in this “secular critique” something like an outbidding (Derrida’s word), a “movement by which philosophy has continually attempted to abstract itself from ‘positive’ religion in order to transcend its limitations toward a pure thinking of religion as such.” With Derrida, Blanton recognizes here at once a larger and a narrower phenomenon. This movement – Hannah Arendt called it “Sputnik” – would be far from universal. It would only be common to the “secularizing critiques of Christianity” (double genitive). Ultimately, it would be a kind of “Christian-secularizing ‘machine.’”

This is (not) a critique

Heidegger did not need to point out (but he did) that God occupies a hegemonic place as the figure of transcendence that characterizes the Christian and post-Christian tradition (let us not rush too quickly to operate our own secularizing machines, global experts on world-religions that we are, to claim that other “traditions” equally partake of this particular character). But – and here is some more outbidding – God is not transcendent enough. In order to be a critical secularist, one would have to demonstrate a more unyielding antagonism, take a more radical stance (or agonizing distance), and install oneself in a more transcendent position vis-à-vis the object of one’s critique. What object? More often than not “religion” and better yet “religions.” But not only religion, of course. Still, I do not think it is fortuitous that Heidegger speaks of antagonism, indeed, of mortal enemies. For much like the criminal to the king (as Foucault demonstrated), the enemy was always structurally related to God. I have tried to argue that it was, in fact, Christianity’s peculiar and long-lasting contribution to the history of transcendence (and thus to the history of criticism, secular or not) that it comported itself with particular efficiency toward the enemy as a figure of transcendence. It identified the enemy as a privileged site of transcendental practice. Incidentally, it took some time before these enemies were granted the status of “religions” but valiant efforts ensured that they finally were. What a boon. The practice of “nihilative comportment,” secular criticism, if you will, practiced its own multifarious scales not only on God, but also on the enemy. And not just any enemy. Or enemies. Have you read Orientalism lately?

And before we rev up our outbidding machines again to claim that all cultures and all religions everywhere have practiced one form or other of secular criticism, deployed unyielding antagonism by offering various technological and administrative improvements on genocide, all the while elaborating every possible form of theological, political, legal, scientific, economic and indeed, critical justification (so as to be thereby justified by works, or faith, or both), let us engage in some more critical, comparative studies, review a few history books, and give credit where credit is due all the way to the history of the present. So is critique secular? You’re damn right it is. That’s because secular criticism – what we do for a living, we scholars – advocates equal opportunity criticism. Which means that the very same historical enemies upon which Christianity (aka Western Christendom, aka the West) showered its critical, universalist largesse continue to be the target of unyielding antagonism, to say the least, as they have in turn for centuries. And out of the best global universities in the world, no less (“this is America at its best,” as Columbia President Lee Bollinger put it). True to the principle of accommodation, Christianity was never about essence, of course. True to metaphysics, it was always more efficient in targeting others with the protean and more devastating weapon of critical essentialism. Secular, secularism, secularity (what’s next? Secularicity?) Christianity is no essence indeed. It must be understood rather as that which endures through history as the shape-shifting scourge of its enemies (all of whom remained conveniently located in the “darker” places of the world – unless some cheap labor was needed). Can it be otherwise? Sure it can. Has it become so? Seeing is believing. Or is it the other way around?

This is (not) a critique.