Modernists Despite Themselves: The Phenomenology of the Secular and the Limits of Critique as an Instrument of Change

Abstract

Probing the discourse of religious freedoms exposes the complex and multidimensional relations between religion and social change. The critics of this discourse, especially as it is integrated into the articulation of American foreign policy, fittingly historicize and locate it in continuity with the broader discourses of orientalism, colonialism, and neo-imperialism/neoliberalism as well as with the domestic antagonisms between religious and political institutional spheres. This kind of interrogation is born out of, or shares affinity with, what I term “the phenomenology of the secular,” which is theoretically grounded, for the most part, in the work of anthropologist Talal Asad and his historicist and genealogical critique of “religion.” I argue that the phenomenologists of the secular are implicated in power reductionism and thus risk an antirealist and reactionary position. This debilitates their capacity to theorize an alternative to the hegemonic discourse they critique.