Part 1: Why I Am Not a Postsecularist

boundary 2 40:1 (2013) DOI 10.1215/01903659-2072873 © 2013 by Duke University Press

Bruce Robbins

I once saw a television interview with a Boy Scout, whose camp had been struck by some natural disaster—I forget whether it was lightning or fire or maybe a flash flood. Several boys had been killed. But this boy had rescued another boy from his tent, or alerted the authorities, or something like that. He told the journalist he had been taught that everything hap-pens for a purpose, and the fact that he had been spared and able to help showed that it was really so. Everything happens for a purpose. According to Jürgen Habermas, the term postsecular applies to soci-eties that were once Christian, then became secular, and now—because of the large- scale immigration of believers from non- Christian nations as well as the rise of religion globally—are obliged to adapt to the religious beliefs around them.1 If this is what postsecular means (its meaning is by

1. Jürgen Habermas, “A Postsecular World Society? On the Philosophical Significance of Postsecular Consciousness and the Multicultural World Society,” an interview by Eduardo Mendieta, trans. Matthias Fritsch, posted on the Social Science Research Council blog The Immanent Frame, http://blogs.ssrc.org/tif/wp- content/uploads/2010/02/A- Postsecular - World- Society- TIF.pdf.

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no means simple or fixed), then much as I may believe in adaptability vis- à- vis the beliefs of others, I need not scratch my head over whether the term applies to me. It doesn’t. As an American, I do not live in a society that is or has ever been secular. The secularization thesis predicted that as people increasingly understood the physical causes of natural phenomena and were increasingly able to control those phenomena, or at least came to enjoy a certain security from the most threatening of them—infant mortality, death in childbirth, death from starvation—there would be a corresponding decline in the belief that supernatural beings intervene in the natural world, hence also a decline in religious observance. Secularization in this sense has happened, roughly speaking, in Europe, but it has not happened in America. (The fact that it has not happened in the rest of the world seems grossly attributable to the fact that most of the world’s population is still extremely vulnerable to injury from material forces that are difficult to grasp, let alone control.) A large percentage of Americans believe their lives are subject to intervention by God or by the designs of guardian angels, saints, Satan, ghosts, witches, or extraterrestrials. The statistics have often been cited, and I will not repeat them here. The Boy Scout should be example enough. His conviction that human matters are decided by the conscious will of nonhuman agents would not count as common sense in a society that had been secularized, but it probably overlaps with the world view of more Americans than those who say they believe in the literal word of the Bible, and that’s already quite a high percentage. In this sense, our society has never been secular. Whether we want to or not, therefore, we don’t have the option of declaring ourselves post-secular. An optimist might say, “It’s too soon.” In any case, we can perhaps agree to take up the matter again on that future day when a candidate for the American presidency no longer feels the obligation to make a heartfelt public display of her or his religious faith.2 Habermas’s stolid, not overenthusiastic commitment to what he understands as the postsecular results directly from his commitment to democracy. It seems unlikely he would approve of the assumption under-lying the Boy Scout’s thinking: if I was spared for a purpose, then the kids who were killed while they slept must also have been killed for a purpose.3

2. With some understatement, David Hollinger remarks, “Believers in the secular pub-lic sphere in the US are now on the defensive.” See “Separation Anxiety,” a review of Mark Lilla’s The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics and the Modern West, London Review of Books 30, no. 2 (January 24, 2008): 15–18.3. James Wood has argued that notoriously extreme versions of this view, like the Rev-

Robbins / Why I Am Not a Postsecularist 57

The postsecularist’s premise must be that the particular content of the belief is irrelevant. If it is held by enough of those with whom he cohabits, then however grotesque it may seem, democratic principles seem to decree that he must readjust his position on the belief or at least be ready to enter into openminded dialogue about it. If this is where democratic principles are leading, then it’s perhaps not too soon to reconsider what those principles are and what precisely they commit us to. The timing is especially good for the cultural disciplines, where for almost half a century the urge to make scholarship more demo-cratically inclusive has been the most distinctive new motive for research and pedagogy. The turn to religion is an entirely predictable result of this innocent- sounding and in fact praiseworthy impulse. The high theory period’s critiques of bourgeois liberalism, secular humanism, and Enlight-enment reason, which now, looking back, appear to have eased religion’s reentry into current debates by chastening those most hostile to it, took much of their energy and constituency from the project of retrieving and respecting neglected and disempowered subjectivities. This was not an unworthy cause. In context, it may have been an inevitable one. When the technocrats who were supposedly society’s best and brightest were offer-ing us the Vietnam/American War as a rational necessity, even the ecstatic New Ageism that Norman Mailer lifts an eyebrow at in The Armies of the Night acquired a certain practical force, even a certain legitimacy. More than a million Vietnamese died in that war. Many of us felt that the sys-tem that chose to perpetrate violence on this scale was clinically insane. We saw (or thought we saw) that it was indeed a system and that many of its victims were on the march. We put our money on the proposition that highlighting their viewpoints, the method that has informed so many kinds of cultural politics since those years, would do as much as scholarship was capable of doing to overturn this system. However, the project involved a lapse in historical memory, or per-haps in moral imagination. We neglected to consider that many of his-tory’s worst atrocities, including America’s war against the Vietnamese, have been popular, and not just among the populations committing them. This is a point that Doug Henwood raises about Naomi Klein’s The Shock

erend Pat Robertson’s announcement that the Haiti earthquake of January 2010 was God’s punishment of the Haitian people for their misdeeds, are unfortunately much closer to the mainstream than they appear. James Wood, “Between God and a Hard Place,” New York Times, January 24, 2010.


Doctrine.4 As Henwood notes, Klein’s journalistic conspiracy- of- the- elites model of history treats victim and victimizer as if they could be neatly sepa-rated. In fact, neoliberal economic policies could be instituted in times of disaster not merely because the government lent its ear to the Chicago- style champions of deregulation but because belief in the free market was broadly pervasive. More precisely, free market ideology was embraced by social groups that were not, objectively speaking, beneficiaries of the free market. It’s the tired old story of false consciousness. Unfortunately, with-out that story, history is incomprehensible. If you look closely at the beliefs of the victims, you will find nothing that effectively prevents them from vic-timizing in their turn. Consider the Boers or the Israelis. Not only is there no guarantee that the downtrodden will not go on to tread on others, but there is a well- documented history of them having already done so while they were victimized. Consider the chummy relation between Christian fun-damentalism, widespread among the American poor, and the projects of American militarism, to which the American poor are often too willing to sacrifice themselves. Consider, to return to our immediate subject, any of the religious beliefs that are now being brought to light as “new” and “counterhegemonic.” In a paper presented at a conference at Columbia University in 2006, Sarah Bracke and Maggie Schmitt traced the postsecular to “affirmations of new subjectivities, knowledges, and understandings of the world.”5 The familiar- sounding phrase slips by without setting off any alarms. There are, of course, religious beliefs that are new. But their newness offers no cer-tainty that they will be better than what they succeed, and in any case the new ones seem to represent a small portion of what is being celebrated by Bracke and Schmitt, or by the academy’s religious revival generally. In fact, “new” in the sentence quoted mainly refers to beliefs that are not new but old. Many of these subjectivities, knowledges, and understandings of the world belong to official or well- established religions, religions that have long existed in the world and have often wielded considerable power in it. Indeed, they are arguably responsible for a nonnegligible portion of the world’s suffering and injustice—evidence will not be slow to suggest itself.

4. Doug Henwood, “Awe, Shocks,” Left Business Observer 117 (March 2008), http://www .leftbusinessobserver.com/Shock.html.5. Sarah Bracke and Maggie Schmitt, “A Battle over Transcendence: Confronting Post- secular and Religious Perspectives” (paper presented at the ReStating Religion Confer-ence, Columbia University, New York, March 23–24, 2006). This and subsequent quota-tions are from a typescript the authors provided for participants in the conference.


To think of them as “countersubjectivities” is to pretend they have not yet had a chance to show what they can do and that given such a chance, they would improve considerably on the existing historical record. But they have already had quite a lot of chances, and if you look at the historical record, the results are not good. To think of them as “resistance” seems less plau-sible on the face of it than to think of opposition to them as resistance. For the postsecularist, what these beliefs are to be honored for resisting is presumably secularism. Some credit might be awarded to this notion if it could be established (a) that secularism has had its way in America and (b) that its presence has been a bad thing for America. Neither of these propositions can be simply assumed. The best case that can be made for the second, I think, is William E. Connolly’s pragmatic and somewhat oblique one: that given the force of Christian fundamentalism in American politics, the Left has no choice but to learn to talk to these people if it wants to see Tea Party–style energies pushing back against Tea Party politics. The best case that can be made for the first proposition is that the separation of church and state—secularism in a sense that does not abso-lutely require disbelief in supernatural agency—is indeed a historical reality, though an imperfect one. In this sense, yes, of course, secularism is indeed part of the structure of power in the United States. Whether you think this makes it an abomination will depend on your understanding of power, con-fusion about which seems to underlie much of the fuss over the postsecu-lar.6 For example, the idea that secularism is hegemonic depends on the simple mistake that in any given situation, there exists a single hegemon, a single, quasi- omnipotent, purely malevolent source for everything in the world that needs to be fought and changed, from the credit rating agencies to homophobia. Here is secularized theology with a vengeance. Things are not so simple. As the prefix post suggests, one of postsecular’s selling points is novelty. It lays claim to being the latest thing, and does so in the very act of

6. Both José Casanova and Veena Das suggest (correctly, in my view) that much too much causal power is attributed to secularism in the influential postsecular arguments of Talal Asad. See José Casanova, “Secularization Revisited: A Reply to Talal Asad,” and Veena Das, “Secularism and the Argument from Nature,” in Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors, ed. David Scott and Charles Hirschkind (Stan-ford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 12–30 and 93–112, respectively. For what it’s worth, natural science is not hegemonic secularism, either: consider both the hold that religion has over popular opinion and, on the other hand, the fact that theoretical physics is being defunded.


taking modernity as its prime object of reproach. The slipperiness here is worth attending to. The real problem of the post in postsecular, as with the post in postmodern, is not the misleading implication that the break with the secular or the modern past is a clean one (though it never is), but rather the implication that what existed before was modern or secular—that those adjectives offer the best descriptions of that past, that modernity or secu-larism is triumphantly central, having beaten out all competitors for the right to occupy the ground, and can be taken as the decisive term for how things are. This would have to be shown, and I don’t think it ever could be. The same holds for terms like Enlightenment or rationality. It’s not that these concepts refer to nothing. But how much do they refer to? Do they really deserve the privilege—a necessarily rare privilege—of defining the way we live now? The way we live now is largely defined, for example, by the flows of financial capital. As a means of allocating resources, is the stock market rational? Is the conduct of Standard & Poor’s or the Pentagon enlightened? No, and no, and most of us would probably prefer for there to be more rather than less enlightenment and rationality in these domains. These are among the considerations that are shunted aside when rationality or secu-larism is assumed to represent how we are, or were, and when a break with secularism or rationality is therefore taken as the defining criterion of politi-cal resistance. Even more crucial to the postsecular than the new is what I would call the populist, or respect for the popular as such. Rabbinical authorities in Israel recently ordered a dog to be stoned to death on the grounds that the dog was the reincarnation of a lawyer, deceased, who had once insulted the rabbinical court. (The sentence was disputed by an animal rights group in New York.)7 Those rabbis have a lot of devoted followers. Supposing they had even more, it would still not follow that the rabbis’ sentence should be carried out. Only a very misplaced sense of democracy would lead people to think that because a majority of people believe X, it is a good thing that they believe X. You can’t conclude from the spread of religion that religion is a good thing any more than you can draw this conclusion about the spread of AIDS, or poverty, or capitalism. If a triumphal or providential view of his-tory was a mistake when the secular Left embraced it, it’s just as much of a mistake when the postsecularists congratulate themselves on the most recent demographics. Why is it that the wind of postsecularism that is now a large and

7. Ma’an News Agency, Jerusalem, June 18, 2011.


unsettling fact of our intellectual weather has been blowing with such strength and regularity from the cultural disciplines, and in particular from departments of anthropology? The answer, I have been suggesting, is the implicit populism that underlies the anthropological concept of culture and that has now extended itself, even in that concept’s apparent absence, from the equation “everything is culture” to something like “everything is reli-gion.” You can see the continuity in the work of anthropologist Saba Mah-mood. Mahmood has become a major spokesperson for postsecularism, largely because she yanks the pilings out from under secular liberalism’s favorite global rhetorical weapon: look how they treat their women. Her 2005 book, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject, tries to win respect for Egyptian women who participate in the “piety move-ment” by showing that there is self- conscious agency in their submission to the divine will, their willing embrace of an extremely patriarchal theology.8 In a global perspective, she suggests, freedom is overrated, a sort of fetish of Western modernity. Mahmood may be a severe critic of Western modernity, but meth-odologically speaking, she is also very modern. She is much too mod-ern to invest in such creaky, embarrassingly outdated technology as the culture concept. The conceptual apparatus to which she refers is that of Michel Foucault, where the proper name Foucault signifies both “up- to- date” and “not cultural.” Thus Mahmood describes her subject as “differ-ent configurations of personhood . . . with each configuration the prod-uct of a specific discursive formation rather than of the culture at large” (PP, 120–21; my emphasis). But how far does a terminology like “specific discursive formation” actually take her from the distinctive emphases and limitations of culture, including its impulse to end up in a self- annihilating abdication to religion? When Mahmood talks of ethics, calling on Foucault by name, she defines ethics as “founded upon particular forms of discur-sive practice, instantiated through specific sets of procedures, techniques, and exercises, through which highly specific ethical- moral subjects come to be formed” (PP, 120; my emphasis). Forms of discursive practice are not, like culture, reified essences, frozen in time. Nor do they preclude self- consciousness, though there are other postsecularists, like Colin Jager, who seem to embrace the term practice precisely because it does make

8. Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (Prince-ton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005). Hereafter, this work is cited parenthetically as PP.


unselfconsciousness into a virtue, or rather a right that can be demanded. Yet all this repetition of “specific” and “particular” could certainly be read, symptomatically, as a compulsive reinscription of another of culture’s char-acteristics. Here, as elsewhere, Mahmood repeats the founding gesture of anthropology as a discipline based on the concept of culture: the local and the particular are asserted against the universal and the general. In the same way, the autonomy of the subjective is asserted against material explanation or ethical evaluation. “An inquiry into ethics from this perspec-tive requires that one examine not simply the values enshrined in moral codes, but the different ways in which people live these codes— something anthropologists are uniquely situated to observe” (PP, 120). To put it crudely: what is decisive is how things look to the participants themselves, without regard to how things might look to anyone else. Aligning herself with Talal Asad, Mahmood translates tradition as “discursive formation.” She takes the discursiveness seriously, trying as hard as possible to credit the vocabulary of religion deployed by the subjects themselves as the privileged means of access to their self- understanding and to identify that self- understanding as the true meaning of their actions. In this sense, too, one might say that her use of Foucault’s terminology, though it seems to go behind the backs of her subjects, does the work of the culture concept. And more of that work is done by the equally Fou-cauldian term practice. To say religion should be considered as a practice is to say that it is best not considered as, say, a set of statements about the world. This means that it cannot be judged by its theology or the truth value of its beliefs. Like culture, it enters into the domain of incorrigibility. No practice can claim the authority to correct or admonish any other practice. If they were uncomfortable with this conclusion, Mahmood and her allies might ask what is excluded by the formula “everything is practice.” Mah-mood says explicitly that “practice” excludes political questions that are separate from ethics (PP, 119). That is, it excludes any exterior judgment on these practices in terms of their comparative meaning or political ends. I apologize in advance for the rhetorical overkill here, but it gets us right to the point: the kind of case made by Mahmood for her pious women could be made as easily for, say, a fascist youth movement. From the perspective of the participants, a fascist youth movement, too, might have to be posi-tively valued for what it gives them: for example, a sense of self- discipline, belonging, purposefulness, and collective agency. When and where does one get to ask about the larger political meaning of these locally meaningful practices? Larger political meanings don’t seem to have any place on Mah-


mood’s agenda. The strategy of the postsecularists can sometimes appear to involve maneuvering their fellow scholars into a situation in which such issues need not and cannot be raised. That takes something off the to- do list of the specialists, but to anyone who cares what the humanities looks like to a larger public, it seems a bit irresponsible. The postsecularists are antiauthoritarians. But their anti- authoritarianism is disingenuous, since its effect is to make room for appeals to divine authority, which outranks all others. Still, they challenge their secular opponents to concede their own dependence on authori-ties of some sort, and I would like to accept that challenge. Let us con-sider the actual procedures by which intellectual authority is exercised in the academy (which it is). In my experience, these procedures are rarely acknowledged, perhaps because they are embarrassingly out of sync with our democratic self- image. We know, though we are not eager to say so, that the academy is not, in fact, a perfectly open, perfectly democratic space where all opinions can always be expressed and/or are offered equal time. Far from it. There exists a slow, mysterious, but more or less effica-cious process whereby certain opinions are little by little dismissed as inde-fensible and unworthy of any time at all on our overcrowded syllabi and conference programs. This involves neither the brutal extermination of the dissenters nor tolerant, helplessly uncritical cohabitation with them. What happens is that certain beliefs are sidelined and then silenced. Verbs like sideline and silence are usually assumed to be academic misdemeanors or worse, but they stand for operations that I think most scholars would even-tually be ready to endorse. Those who believe that the world is flat have not been rounded up and done away with; they have merely lost the pre- argument about which arguments are worth spilling ink over, and thus they are no longer heard from. The same for believers in the inherent superiority of men to women, or the coming corruption of the white race by immigrants from Asia, or the idea that the Palestinians exiled in 1948 left their homes voluntarily. These propositions have had their glory days; many scholars have held to them fiercely; a few still do. But now these ideas are non-starters, and who can regret it? Is it a scandal that neither their proponents nor their critics can win funding from foundations? Is it a scandal that there is no “balance” where they are concerned? “We” are a functional consen-sus, at least in the minimal sense that no one insists too loudly that we should waste our precious waking hours on these ideas anymore. It is to be hoped that divine intervention in the affairs of men will similarly subside as an active hypothesis both inside the academy and, above all, beyond it. If


this happens, it will not have been as a result of the worst tyranny ever exer-cised by human beings over their fellows. In the academy, disinterested-ness remains a working rule, and despite much ideological discord, there is considerable agreement concerning standards of argument and evidence. The same cannot be said everywhere. The most attractive account I can think of for the Boy Scout’s convic-tion that things happen for a purpose is that things might well have turned out a lot worse, and we should be grateful they didn’t. This is hard to argue with, except perhaps for the gratitude. I have no problem with gratitude in the loose, negative sense of not taking too much credit for oneself, as when ballplayers cross themselves after getting a hit. If one happens to be fortunate, it’s important not to conclude that one owes one’s good for-tune to one’s personal merits. (This is especially true in baseball.) But to what or whom is one supposed to be grateful? As it happens, “gratitude for existence” is the key to the understanding of the postsecular offered up in Connolly’s influential book Why I Am Not a Secularist (1999).9 As his title suggests, Connolly is responding to Bertrand Russell’s Why I Am Not a Christian (1957), which stressed the absurdity of the idea that everything happens for a purpose: “Apart from logical cogency, there is to me some-thing a little odd about the ethical valuations of those who think that an omnipotent, omniscient, and benevolent Deity, after preparing the ground for many millions of years of lifeless nebulae, would consider Himself adequately rewarded by the final emergence of Hitler and Stalin and the H- bomb.”10 Connolly does not engage directly with Russell’s contempt for theodicy, but perhaps his underlining of the Nietzschean formula “gratitude for existence” is a kind of oblique engagement. If so, questions follow. How much gratitude ought we to feel for an existence that for so many humans was rendered nasty and brutish and was shortened considerably by Hitler, Stalin, and the H- bomb? An updating of Russell’s list would include, say, the high proportion of Indian children who, in this period of enormous eco-nomic growth for India, are even more seriously malnourished than they were before. How much gratitude should they or we feel for that? Should a

9. William E. Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 15.10. Bertrand Russell, Why I Am Not a Christian and Other Essays on Religion and Related Subjects (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1957), vi. People believe in God, Russell says, because they “wish for safety, a sort of feeling that there is a big brother who will look after you” (14).


dalit be grateful for the centuries of humiliating treatment to which his or her people have been exposed by every stage and form of Hinduism? In Why I Am Not a Hindu and Why I Do Not Want Ramrajya, Ramendra, an admirer of Russell, summarizes what is prescribed for the behavior of the Sudras in the Hindu text Manusmriti: “If a Shudra dares to give moral lessons to a Brahmin, the king is to get him punished by pouring hot oil in his ear and mouth. Similarly, if a Shudra occupies the same seat as a Brahmin, he is to be punished by branding his waist (with a hot rod) or getting his buttocks cut.”11 Once you start looking into scenes of existence like these, gratitude doesn’t seem like the most precisely calibrated response. Even attaching gratitude to an appropriate human addressee is no simple matter. For better or worse (mainly better), I owe my existence directly to my parents, just as they owe theirs (again, for better or worse) to their parents. Beyond the line of genetic kinship and parental nurturance, and (to paraphrase Philip Larkin) the fucking up associated with both, I can understand gratitude to those, most of them not known to me but real nonetheless, who fought the struggles and made the sacrifices from which I and my loved ones have benefited—struggles for democratic representa-tion, for unions, for the weekend, for racial and gender and sexual equality, and so on. But my existence is not a morally spotless thing. Causally speak-ing, I also owe my existence to agents toward whom it really would not be suitable to feel grateful. I will not express gratitude that the land I live on was taken over from the Native Americans, though my present residence depends on that event, and I don’t imagine the Native Americans would express gratitude to them either. Existences, like works of art, are both documents of civilization and documents of barbarism. In one sense, the postsecular call for gratitude is deeply incon-sistent. As a historical narrative, postsecularism is inclined to nostalgia. Thus it tends to be notably ungrateful for the achievements of modernity, achievements by which it is nonetheless constituted. (Postsecularists also try to be as impartial as possible at tenure meetings, refusing, for example, to be swayed by personal gratitude to one or another colleague.) In All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secu-lar Age, a book that is symptomatic of the postsecular moment, Hubert

11. Ramendra, Why I Am Not a Hindu and Why I Do Not Want Ramrajya (Patna: Bihar Rationalist Society, 1993), 15. See also the title by the dalit activist Kancha Ilaiah, Why I Am Not a Hindu: A Sudra Critique of Hindutva Philosophy, Culture and Political Economy (Calcutta: Samya, 1996).


Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly comment on a typed note, found among the papers of David Foster Wallace after his suicide, which speaks of “grati-tude at the gift of being alive” as the other side of an immense, crushing, and characteristic boredom.12 It seems likely that the gratitude is generated by the boredom. You imagine an ideal, blissful gratitude as the proper way to exist only if you are suffering from a failure to find anything meaningful at all in the life around you. Like many postsecularists, a considerable num-ber of whom have spent some time as medievalists, Dreyfus and Kelly write out this vision of ecstasy and emptiness as a linear fable, a history with a before and an after. Hugely nostalgic for the plenitude of relatively unprob-lematic meaning they see (bizarrely, though they have much company) in premodern Europe and in its classics, they are predictably inattentive to the daily horrors and uncertainties of life during that period for a majority of those who lived in it, and they are disinclined to see the ways in which modernity has added to rather than detracted from the opportunities for meaningful existence available in the present. Much the same reflex anti-modernity characterizes the argument by Bracke and Schmitt. They sug-gest that “the realm of religion and religious subjectivities is a constitutive other of the formation of modernity as we used to know it.” And again: “the secular rules of the game relegating religion to the space of the private as a ‘constitutive outside’ of Western modernity.” What they are doing is set-ting up something they call modernity as their own constitutive other. It is a useful construct for certain polemic purposes, no doubt. The problem is that, historically speaking, neither the modern nor the secular is what they say it is. The secular does not define itself by excluding the religious. It has no choice but to include religion, though not on the terms that religion itself might prefer. By definition, secularized concepts are impure, concepts that retain and preserve as well as transform their religious antecedents. And modernity too is full of contradictions: it includes things that need changing, and it also includes the conceptual tools that are needed to change those things. Democracy and science would count as both. So would secularism. In “After the Postsecular,” Scott McLemee asks Anthony Paul Smith and Daniel Whistler, editors of the collection After the Postsecular and the Postmodern, what the term postsecular means.13 Their answer is that the

12. Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly, All Things Shining: Reading the Western Classics to Find Meaning in a Secular Age (New York: Free Press, 2011), 31.13. Scott McLemee, “After the Postsecular,” Inside Higher Education (blog), August 4, 2010, accessed July 12, 2012, http://www.insidehighered.com/views/mclemee/mclemee301. His subject is Anthony Paul Smith and Daniel Whistler, eds., After the Postsecular and


postsecular is an event: the breakdown of the relationship between politics and religion “determined by the notion that there is a split between pub-lic politics and private religion.” This formulation gives a slightly different emphasis to the question of what the postsecular is opposing. Secular-ism here is not a constitutive other but a way of dividing the territory that constrains and overrides religion’s absolute, ultimate claims. According to Smith and Whistler, secularism’s divide between public and private is not just not neutral, as it claims to be—as they note, it has been visibly biased toward Christianity. That could be corrected, one might say, by trying harder to de- Christianize it. More important, secularism presents itself as “an over-arching master narrative” that can judge religious traditions, or put them in their (private) place, when in fact it is just one particular tradition among others.14 The objection, then, is to the standpoint of critique: the premise that he who factors in all the different believers and unbelievers wins the right to speak in the name of the social whole, which is to say the right to speak with more critical authority than anyone who does not. The significance of this rejection of critique is laid out with great clarity in the contributions of Mahmood and Asad to the joint volume (with Wendy Brown and Judith Butler) Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech (2009).15 The book’s occasion is the infamous Danish cartoon affair of 2005. Both Asad and Mahmood seek to change the terms of that debate, which, as they very properly argue, had gotten locked into an unproductive binary between “free speech” on the one side and “blas-phemy” on the other. Their first target is the “free speech” side, which could not understand the deep sense of injury the cartoons caused to Mus-lims. Asad convincingly demonstrates the existence of a double standard in Europe, which pretends to be secular and neutral but conveniently for-gets how scandalized it can still be by affronts to Christianity. Mahmood shows that the liberal category of free choice distorts the kind of belonging

the Postmodern: New Essays in Continental Philosophy of Religion (Cambridge: Cam-bridge Scholars Publishing, 2010).14. A reminder of the initial and continuing rationale for secularism in this sense was avail-able when Florida pastor Terry Jones burned a Koran in March 2011, touching off murder-ous violence in Afghanistan. Roger Cohen, “Religion Does Its Worst,” New York Times, April 5, 2011.15. Talal Asad, Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, and Saba Mahmood, Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech (Berkeley: Doreen B. Townsend Center for the Humanities and University of California Press, 2009). Hereafter, this work is cited par-enthetically as ICS.


embodied in Muslim faith. For many Muslims, she argues, it is their survival itself that is at stake when their religion is attacked.16 Survival trumps all normative principles, as Carl Schmitt argued. All this is valuable. But as the book’s title suggests, Mahmood and Asad are really playing for much larger stakes. They seem less concerned, finally, about the Muslims of Europe (whose social position they neglect to discuss) than about the categories of secularism and critique, which they identify with “the West” and join forces in trying to discredit. For Asad, these categories seem to be crystallized in the “secular criticism” proposed by Edward Said. Rather than taking on Said directly, Asad opens his discus-sion of secular criticism by coyly asking “three questions.” The first question is about the notion of the secular, the second is about skepticism, and the third—this is where a defense attorney might sense an objectionable “lead-ing” question—is about whether secular criticism “aspires to be heroic” (ICS, 47; Asad’s emphasis). Like any questions (including the one that gives this book its title), Asad’s are based on certain presuppositions. Indeed, this is just the objec-tion that Asad makes against the fetishizing of free speech. Free speech, he argues, may look as innocent as the asking of questions, but the asking of questions always happens in a power- laden landscape of concrete situa-tions and institutions. The truth behind the asking of questions in universi-ties, he says, is “the reproduction of intellectual disciplines and the culture of belief that goes with them” (ICS, 53). Fair enough. But note the term belief here. It’s not merely that discourse is ordered, as Foucault would say. Asad pushes a stronger position: that the order of discourse is the same kind of order as the order of religion. What underlies the asking of questions is not merely presuppositions, but belief. Behind Asad’s questions about Said’s secularism is the belief that everything is religion. And if everything is religion, which is to say an irreducible particular, then of course there is no such thing as secularism because there is no such thing as valid generalization.

16. In March 2011, a Pakistani minister who supported reform of Pakistan’s 1970s blas-phemy law, which calls for the death penalty for anyone judged to be speaking against the Prophet Muhammad, was assassinated. He was a Christian, and could be called a secu-larist in the limited sense of (1) favoring the peaceful coexistence of different religions, and (2) setting limits to any religion’s sway over public policy. It would be interesting to know whether, in Mahmood’s opinion, the issue here is the minister’s failure to understand the feelings of the Islamic militants who killed him. Salman Masood and Jane Perlez, “Gun-men Kill Pakistani Cabinet Minister,” New York Times, March 2, 2011.


Question by question, Asad’s never- quite- formulated case against Said goes as follows: 1. Secularism is merely Christianity by another name, and it abuses the authority gained by claiming not to be Christianity in various ways, among them by determining what is and isn’t a religion. 2. Since “everything confidently accepted on the grounds of reason could be undone by critical reasoning,” skepticism “collapses under its own weight” (ICS, 49). 3. Therefore, the heroic demand “that reasons be given for almost everything” (ICS, 55) is not a desirable form of heroism or a reliable guide to the good life. On the contrary, secular criticism is a form of coercion and violence. The deep truth of critique is that it leads to “material interventions” on the part of the global North “by which local appearances are dismantled and universal truth is encouraged, in which the South is taught, often coercively, the true meaning of maturity ” (ICS, 144). The upshot of this line of thinking is that Said, as a proponent of secular criticism, was really an Orientalist and a defender of Western mili-tary intervention, including the bombing of civilians. This is a bit of a stretch, to put it mildly. One can understand why Asad’s scrupulously careful sen-tences, which ask more questions than they deign to answer and never stoop to spell out the norms on which they rest—this is a theme of the response from Butler—seem to delay endlessly the absurd conclusion to which they nevertheless inexorably lead. The charge that Said was an imperialist is hardly worth refuting. More generally, this argument instantly collapses in the face of the fact that the term secular describes many of the people in Tahrir Square in January 2011 and can apply, as well, to tenden-cies within Islam that make respectful room for people who do not share the same beliefs. The idea of secularism as nothing but Christianity- in- disguise is a piece of tendentious mythmaking. Asad’s scholarship has been and remains of real political importance. We need his warnings against the tradition in European ethical thought that presents intervention outside Europe as self- evidently virtuous. His book on suicide bombing showed that Western liberals cannot trust their gut feelings about terrorism without falling into utter inconsistency. But cri-tiques of liberalism and the West (if critique is indeed what Asad is doing, something he denies) are not sufficient to provide anyone with political bearings. If anti- Western, antiliberal feeling is the only guide you rely on, it will lead into inconsistencies of its own. In identifying secularism with Chris-


tianity, Asad gives every sign of agreeing with Samuel Huntington about the so- called clash of civilizations: for him, too, civilizational identities fol-low religious allegiance and remain essentially unchanged through history. Essentialism is no more attractive when it dresses itself up in anti- Western or anti- imperialist garb. Asad rails against those who find democracy and free speech “intrinsic to ‘European civilization’” (ICS, 24), and he’s right to do so. But each of his own arguments insists on what is “intrinsic” to Euro-pean civilization. Like Huntington, he cannot break himself of the habit of “intrinsic” thinking. The name Asad most frequently repeats by way of explaining as much as he cares to explain of his procedures is again that of Foucault. But Asad’s procedures are almost exactly the opposite of Foucault’s. Asad protests, for example, against “the universal dignity of man” by saying, “In Medieval Latin, however, dignitas was used to refer to the privilege of high office, not to the equality of all human beings” (ICS, 22). Well, yes, that’s what dignitas meant back then. But we no longer live in the Middle Ages. Over the centuries, the word’s meaning has changed. Little by little, with some good consequences and some questionable ones, dignity has been democratized. The Foucauldian genealogist is supposedly someone who realizes that meanings are not “intrinsic,” not determined by origins, and who therefore pays special attention to discontinuities. Asad says he is practicing genealogy, but he is not. When he looks at the present, all he finds is origins. He is not a genealogist but a mythmaker.17 Asad and Mahmood appear to agree that the real villain of the Danish cartoon story is the modern secular state, which claims falsely to be religiously neutral. It presents itself as “the ultimate adjudicator of religious difference” (ICS, 67), thereby redefining and constraining religion while also consolidating its own power. Among its other problems (what ontology of the state does it presume?), this version of the postsecular, which is much more vehement than Habermas’s or Connolly’s, marks the limits of their

17. In an essay on Asad, David Scott suggests (correctly, in my view) that there is a sig-nificant and unresolved tension in Asad’s work between the genealogical impulse, asso-ciated with Foucault—the impulse behind Asad’s account, for example, of how the cate-gory of religion emerged as a European construct—and a very different but less visible impulse to speak in the name of tradition, an impulse that Scott associates with the conservative Catholic philosopher Alasdair McIntyre. Tradition seems a gentler word for essentialist mythology. David Scott, “The Tragic Sensibility of Talal Asad,” in Powers of the Secular Modern: Talal Asad and His Interlocutors, ed. David Scott and Charles Hirsch-kind (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 134–53.


common vision as a politics. In her substantial, generous, and (to me) very telling response, Butler raises this key issue with regard to Mahmood. To give up on the state is also to give up on political action. In aiming at a change in sensibilities rather than at political change, Mahmood seems to believe, Butler says, “that the law is so pervasively secular that any effort to seek redress for injury through the law would strengthen the very instru-ment through which secularism asserts its hegemony” (ICS, 123). Butler rejects this assumption, bringing forward the example of civil rights law, a direct goal of political change that in turn changed sensibilities (ICS, 123). Why should anthropologists believe that culture exists in a domain that is separable from the law or the state? “When Mahmood makes the decision to turn away from law and politics” (ICS, 124), as Butler argues, she is giving up on too many options that are pertinent to what she implies she wants to accomplish. Butler comes close to suggesting that perhaps what Mah-mood really wants is not political change but material for her research. “Is this finally an apologia for anthropology itself?” (ICS, 124). “Note,” Mahmood writes with asperity in her response to Butler’s response, “that the term culture is alien to my analytical vocabulary” (ICS, 147). Yes, it is. But as I’ve already suggested, a Foucauldian vocabulary does not save her from culturalism any more than the term genealogy saves Asad from a Huntington- like civilizational essentialism. Foucault could never quite reject critique. Asad and Mahmood can never quite affirm it. Instead of admitting that her complaints amount to a critique (as mine certainly do), Mahmood contents herself with calling for more scholarly “labor” (ICS, 91). Calling for more scholarly labor is apparently what you do when you’re not willing to engage with law or the state, to get involved with political action, or even to admit that you are being critical in the name of norms or values that can be articulated to other collectivities.18 Having given up on political action, Mahmood evades the responsi-bility to look at the relevant political actors. She talks at length about secu-larism without considering the importance of the issue in the United States, where she lives and works. She mentions the phrase “intelligent design”

18. In her review of Mahmood’s The Politics of Piety for the online journal Jadaliyya in October 2010, Samah Selim noted with surprise Mahmood’s eagerness to sever women’s agency from “resistance to relations of domination,” which is to say from “the goals of progressive politics.” What Mahmood offers, Selim concludes, is an “argument for schol-arly neutrality in the name of a postmodern cultural relativism.” That seems an accu-rate description of a position that the unprecedented, exhilarating, and sometimes heart-breaking political events in the Middle East have shown to be parochial and irresponsible.


but does so only to mock the fears it inspires. She never suggests that the religiosity of Americans might also be a worthy object of scholarly labor, and indeed causally connected to American militarism against the Islamic world. She does not glance over her shoulder to worry about whether her antistatism might sound like that of the Tea Party. After all, in the United States, hatred of the state and its supposed intrusions has been a cover for racism since the days when white crowds jeered at the federal marshals protecting black children. Mahmood also calls for a perspective that would “recognize and parochialize its own affective commitments” (ICS, 91). That is, Western modernity should criticize itself. Yes, it should. But to say this is to pre-sume that the West possesses the capacity for self- critique, which Mah-mood often seems extremely reluctant to concede. In a sense, her impera-tive grants the main point at issue: whether critique, including self- critique, is possible or desirable. If she demands self- critique, she must think it is both possible and desirable. It’s an all- important concession, but she draws no general conclusion from it. At the same time, one can’t help but notice that no task of self- examination is assigned to any non- Westerner. This is astoundingly condescending toward the rest of the world, where intellectu-als have reason to know that Western self- examination, welcome as it might be, is neither the beginning nor the end of their struggles for emancipation. Asked “what moral or political end” his efforts aim at, Asad does not mention emancipation or any comparable term. He says that there can be no answer to this question. Why not? Because, he says, “it is precisely the implications of things said and done in different circumstances that one tries to understand” (ICS, 138). In other words, all “one” is doing is trying to understand, and trying to understand is not an action in the world that itself has worldly implications and consequences. Claiming to be above the fray, merely describing or analyzing but not judging, outside of history and outside of politics, is one of the oldest tricks in liberalism’s playbook. Butler takes Asad and Mahmood to task for it here. How can they pretend, she asks, that there is such a thing as description that is not also evaluation? It sometimes seems that Asad and Mahmood are so furious at Western liber-alism because they see themselves darkly reflected in liberalism’s mirror. Like religion, the Left runs the double risk of being incarcerated, or worse, if it doesn’t choose to play by liberalism’s rules, and of being identi-fied with liberalism if it does. Of the two risks, the second seems more worth running, at least if what you want is not just to interpret the rules of liberal


democracy but to change them by changing common sense. I’m not a post-secularist because I don’t like postsecularism’s version of common sense. Some of those who turn their back on secularism embrace good old- fashioned religion. Starting with feminism’s putative need for some rock on which to found autonomous female subjectivity, Luce Irigaray gets all the way to God. “If we are to escape slavery,” she argues, “it is not enough to destroy the master. Only the divine offers us freedom—enjoins it upon us. Only God constitutes a rallying point for us that can let us be free—nothing else.”19 Theologian John Milbank offers a devastating critique of the fash-ionable ethics of self- sacrifice but does so in the name of Christian resur-rection, which, as he very properly says, is not based on the assumption that a properly ethical act should expect nothing in return.20 Religious belief that announces itself as such can have a bracing effect on secular common sense; Milbank certainly does. More insidious are those departures from secularism, like Asad’s or Mahmood’s, that pretend they don’t stand for anything, thus pushing the scholarly premise of objectivity into absurdity. The postsecular has put much pressure on normal scholarly premises, and sometimes the results have been both absurd and interesting at the same time. A recent scholarly conference chose for its title “We Have Never Been Secular: Rethinking the Sacred.”21 Both the assertion about secularism and the imperative to rethink the sacred that follows from it are typical of the postsecular turn. “The aim of this conference,” according to the call for papers, “is to contribute to this ongoing academic discussion by illuminat-ing the persistence, permanence, and centrality of the sacred and chal-lenge the construction of the sacred as a deviation from modern, rational, and secular life.” These two clauses contradict each other. The second clause challenges how the sacred has been constructed—constructed “as a deviation from modern, rational, secular life.” It speaks the language of constructionism, which is also assumed by the titular play on We Have Never Been Modern, by the social constructionist Bruno Latour. But the first clause says that the sacred is not constructed at all. On the contrary, it is persistent, permanent, and central. That is, it is a real, universal cate-

19. Luce Irigaray, “Divine Women, Venice- Mestre, June 8, 1984,” in Sexes and Genealo-gies (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 68.20. John Milbank, “The Ethics of Self- Sacrifice,” First Things, March 1999, accessed July 12, 2012, http://www.firstthings.com/article/2009/02/004- the- ethics- of- self- sacrifice- 20.21. “We Have Never Been Secular: Re- thinking the Sacred,” graduate student confer-ence, Department of Sociology, New School for Social Research, April 9, 2010.


gory that is always there, in all times and places, in all cultures, whether we recognize it or not. Now, it is possible to construe these two statements so that they are not absolutely incompatible. The authors of the call for papers could be the constructionists they seem to be, while also asserting that there are better ways of constructing the sacred than as a deviation from modern secu-lar rationality. But in that case, why do they present the sacred as a per-manent, universal category? And if they are not constructionists—if their Latourian title is ironic—then what exactly do they have against modern secular rationality? It is often complained that the values of modern secular rationality have been falsely universalized in time and space—that is what constructionism is forever pointing out in its critical genealogies of sup-posed universals. But this can’t be their complaint, since they themselves are shamelessly universalizing when they present the sacred as a perma-nent and central feature of all human existence. One impulse behind the postsecular may be impatience with con-structionism as common sense and a desire to make less hesitant, more universal assertions about the world.22 I can understand the impatience. But those postsecularists who take this position thereby surrender their case against the natural sciences, which have, of course, always been happy to describe the world in universal terms and, not incidentally, have often mar-shaled their descriptions against those of religion. Once you enter into a duel of universals, the postsecular world where the sacred is a permanent pres-ence and where disasters are the result of divine intention will have to stand up to the competing universals of a world that is explicable (to the extent that it is) solely in terms of natural causes. For literary critics, at any rate, these alternatives are not likely to be satisfactory. We are more comfortable, I think, with the emphasis on modesty, contingency, and uncertainty that Connolly brings to his vision of the postsecular. “The key is to acknowledge the comparative contestability of the fundamental perspectives you bring into public engagements while working hard not to convert that acknowledg-ment into a stolid or angry stance of existential resentment.”23 This seems like constructionism with an intriguing emotional surplus.

22. There is a political point here. It may be that the status quo wins if it gets you think-ing of everything ironically. It may be that an ironic hesitation, which acknowledges in advance the possible disagreement of others and thus the contingency of one’s beliefs, is more conducive to formal democracy than to social or substantive or revolutionary democracy.23. Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist, 8.


Connolly’s term for the emotional surplus is “the visceral register.”24 The viscera, for Connolly, thicken the object of political thought by adding something that seems extraneous to politics, injecting into the citizen more of the person. Symmetrically, literary criticism, which already lays claim to more than its fair share of uncertainty and contingency, thickens itself by appealing to the massive necessity of politics. Connolly accuses Bertrand Russell and other rationalists of neglecting the gut level of things, thus sug-gesting that he may want out of the viscera what other postsecularists want out of “practice,” namely, invulnerability to normative analysis and critique. But the term brings him back into conversation with natural science. Body parts like the amygdala are mentioned by name and function. The case for spirituality rests finally on the flesh, and with the flesh Connolly exposes himself again—willfully, I think—to the slings and arrows of modern analy-sis that he seemed to want to avoid. There is no entry for “modernity” in his index, but nostalgia or systematic hostility to the modern is his argu-ment. Though Connolly wants religion to be better represented in public, the terms on which he imagines religious and secular viewpoints meeting in a renewed public sphere are genuinely neutral, which is to say char-acteristic of an improved, secularized secularism: “No constituency gets everything it wants in such a world, particularly if it imagines itself—in its purity, neutrality, simplicity, faith, rationality, sanctity, or civilizational neces-sity—to be the one party to the case that must also be its final judge.”25 This sounds like the “everything is religion,” world- of- irreducible- particulars case, but notice that the supernatural is not allowed to trump the natural. No higher authority is admitted. When the postsecularists complain that secularism confines religion within the private sphere, they are perhaps too diplomatic to add that once released from their supposed confinement, they will commence invoking God’s will in debates about the pros and cons of earthly legislation. (Doesn’t this happen to some extent already?) In any case, Connolly seems to discourage such appeals. His version of the post-secular actually comes closer to modern secularism as we already know it. In January 1934, a huge earthquake struck the northern Indian region of Bihar, killing many thousands. Gandhi immediately declared that the earthquake represented God’s vengeance on the people of Bihar for tolerating untouchability, which he was in the midst of a campaign to eradi-cate. Admonished by Tagore for thus encouraging an already excessive

24. Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist, 9.25. Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist, 8.


Indian superstitiousness, Gandhi stuck to his guns. This physical catastro-phe was not the result of mere blind forces, he said. It was a moral judg-ment.26 There is a double point here. On the one hand, Gandhi’s antisecular antimodernity ought to be judged as Tagore judged it. Like the Boy Scout with whom I began, Gandhi insisted that everything happens for a purpose, and in so doing he was misrepresenting the world. Political leaders will do what they have to do, but it cannot be a good thing for teachers, humanists, or cultural workers, who have more choice, to encourage misrepresenta-tions of the world. On the other hand, Gandhi was also contradicting him-self in an instructive and productive way. He wielded superstition in order to eliminate untouchability, and the cause of eliminating untouchability was (and is) a modern and secular cause. Modernity was not something Gandhi could be simply against, tempted as he was. Those who try to create a common sense that is simply against modernity are forgetting the dalits, along with many other things. The prospect that one might find oneself mired in such a common sense offers the best possible motive for declaring that one is not a postsecularist.

26. See, for example, Bidyut Chakrabarty, Social and Political Thought of Mahatma Gandhi (London: Routledge, 2006), 101–2. For further nuance, see Makarand R. Paran-jape, “‘Natural Supernaturalism?’ The Tagore- Gandhi Debate on the Bihar Earthquake,” Journal of Hindu Studies 4, no. 2 (July 2011): 176–204.

Documents

Part 1: Why I Am Not a Postsecularist