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Laura Levitt,
"Shedding Liberalism, All Over Again"
(page 5 of 6)
Part 3: Postsecular, Postcolonial, Postliberal: Making Connections
The remainder of this essay extends some of these more recent efforts
to consider how paying attention to the secular can help make more
visible mechanisms of exclusion, again with the hope of imagining other
forms of social connection. In considering alliances between Jews and
Muslims, I draw on the work of anthropologist Saba Mahmood on Muslims
and secularization. From a different angle, Mahmood helps open up these
seemingly otherwise invisible mechanisms of exclusion and what is at
stake in articulating a postsecular criticism.
Writing about the modern phenomenon of secularism and the idea of
religious tolerance in her essay "Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire:
The Politics of Islamic Reformation," Mahmood explains:
In this account, modern secularism emerges in the
seventeenth century as a political solution intended to end the European
Wars of Religion by establishing a lowest common denominator among the
doctrines of conflicting Christian sects and by defining a political
ethic altogether independent of religious doctrines. The realization of
these goals was dependent, of course, upon the centralization of state
authority and a concomitant demarcation of society into political,
economic, religious, and familial domains whose contours could then be
mapped and subjected to the calculus of state rule. In this narrative,
both the ethics of religious tolerance and freedom of conscience are
considered to be goods internal to the doctrinal separation that
secularism institutes between operations of the state and church,
between politics and religion. The assumption is that the state, by
virtue of its declared neutrality towards specific religious truth
claims, makes religious goals indifferent to the exercise of politics,
and, in so doing, ensures that religion is practiced without coercion,
out of individual choice and personal assent. In so much as liberalism
is about the regulation of individual and collective liberties, it is
the principle of freedom of conscience that makes secularism central to
liberal political philosophy in this
account.[18]
This is Mahmood's starting point. It is a succinct encapsulation of
the broader contours of liberalism's historical relationship to religion
and its efforts to both separate from religion and to tolerate religious
difference. It also prefigures many of the problems I have already
discussed. Before challenging the deeply troubling implications of U.S.
attempts to reform Islam in the name of religious tolerance, Mahmood
goes on to argue:
Recent scholarship offers some interesting challenges to the
idea that liberal secularism primarily consists in securing a form of
governance orchestrated around these two principles of freedom and
restraint. Some scholars suggest that the so-called firewall separation
between church and state does not adequately describe how religion and
modern governance are constitutively
intertwined ....[19]
Challenging further this claim of separation, Mahmood goes on to show
how this imbrication continues to pose problems. American efforts to
promote religious pluralism remain fraught. What I find most compelling
in Mahmood's analysis is the ways she argues that liberal discourse
itself produces acceptable forms of religious subjectivity in the name
of tolerance. As she explains:
The political solution secularism proffers, I am arguing,
lies not so much in tolerating difference and diversity but in remaking
certain kinds of religious subjectivities (even if this requires the use
of violence) so as to render them compliant with liberal political
rules. Critics who want to make secularism's claim to tolerance more
robust must deal with this normative impetus internal to secularism, an
impetus that reorganizes subjectivities in accord with a modality of
political rule that is itself retrospectively called "a religiously
neutral political
ethic."[20]
This dynamic reorganization of subjectivity echoes political theorist
Wendy Brown's account of the legacy of Jewish emancipation in Western
Europe. As Brown explains:
To be brought into the nation, Jews had to be made to fit,
and for that they needed to be transformed, cleaned-up and normalized,
even as they were still marked as Jews. These triple forces of
recognition, remaking, and marking—of emancipation, assimilation, and
identification as different—are what characterize the relation of the
state to Jews in nineteenth-century Europe and constitute the tacit
regime of tolerance governing Jewish
emancipation.[21]
As I have argued elsewhere, these efforts to reform Jews to remake
them into acceptable others within liberal nation-states, challenges the
very terms of Jewish difference and who gets to define what it means to
claim a Jewish position. In fact, I used this passage from Brown to
frame my account of the demise of secular Yiddish forms of Jewish
expression in twentieth century
America.[22] As I noted then, the
problems Brown raises are very much the concerns that the last
generation of Jewish secularists confronted as they tried to imagine a
future for their communities. Returning to these issues in light of
Mahmood's essay, I am struck by the connections. These critiques
resonate with the account of Hebert Parzen, one of the last of the
secular Yiddishists I wrote about. As Parzen explained:
The Jewish communities, during the stormy struggle for
emancipation and enlightenment in the nineteenth century, achieved
adjustment to the general social order on the primary basis of religious
tolerance. [...] The Synagogue was, accordingly, the primary instrument
of adjustment to modern life, and acknowledged as the center of Jewish
loyalty and identification.[23]
For Parzen, such adjustment required that his Jewishness be remade in
order for him to fit in as a recognizable and acceptable Jew in the
United States. There was no room for a Jewish subjectivity that was not
already figured in religious terms, even in the secular American state.
For me these accounts make clear how in the name of inclusion and an
appreciation of difference, others—in this case Jews and Muslims—are
strangely forced to contort themselves into an acceptable and contained
form of their Jewish or Muslim identities. This contortion makes
explicit how much pressure is placed on others to reform themselves
within a liberal pluralist vision of inclusion. This is the shared price
of acceptance that perhaps we might begin to draw on together in order
to imagine a different future.
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