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The Row Boat"Had we but world enough, and time..." *
The Exhilaration of Critique4/01/2008 11:55:09This is a comment I put to a post on The Immanent Frame by Saba Mahmood, one of the most important anthropologists of religion going now. It won't be much to read without taking a look at her excellent post first. For years (since reading “Rehearsed Spontaneity and the Conventionality of Ritual” as a freshman in college) I have been grateful for your efforts to push past fictional categories, tempting as they may be for making bold assertions like Gourgouris’s. I think you are right with the direction you point to at the end, the “feeling good” of secularism, the experience of the people involved in it. This kind of attention is also what makes Asad’s Formations of the Secular so powerful: its willingness to see the phenomenon beyond social-structural conditions to a more precise cultural anthropology: How does secular culture feel? Secularists rejoice in the experience of liberation in secularism, and it is true, this liberation comes from a critique. It can be emotionally exhilarating, filled with the thrill of unsettling old dogmas and seeing the world with fresh eyes. I give it that. But this is not lost on so-called religion either. Much the same exhilaration, built also on a kind of critique, is part of the experience of cradle-secularists who “find religion.” I myself was one; when I was 18 years old, I converted to Catholicism from my secular upbringing. It was a thrilling experience, a liberating one, built on a critique of how secularism had fallen short. Since, I have undergone a number of pendulum-swings back and forth between secular and religious thinking. Each move has been infused with its own form of critique and its own sense of exhilarated liberation. As you say, it is not the category of “critique” that identifies secularity. Rather, the differences are more specific. Critique, with its attendant emotional drives and payoffs, are possessed by neither imaginary civitate, that of the religious or the secular. If anything, it depends on the possibility of moving among them, of mobility among cultures. |
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