The Politics of Postsecular Feminism

Introduction: Feminism and Its ‘Others’

Recent years have experienced a remarkable opening of feminism toward new understandings of the constitution of the feminine self and feminist consciousness through the lens of a particular critical angle: through the critique of secularism as cultural and political ethos. The (im)possibility of a cross-cultural feminist ethics, the accommodation of allegiances at odds with feminist norms, the critique of the unitary subject of western, liberal, Marxist or secular feminism – or, in different words, the status of historical and cultural specificity in feminist accounts of the subject – are themes with a long history within feminist thinking. The new element, though, shared by these more recent approaches is the shift of feminism to the ‘non-rational’, the ‘non-secular’ or the ‘religious’. Advocated as a ‘turn’, an increasing number of feminist and other critical theorists are currently aligning with the critique of secularism as the vehicle for counter-hegemonic, anti-Eurocentric social theorizing and truly subversive politics. In this context, postsecularism emerges, on the one hand, as a moment, or an ‘event’ (Smith and Whistler, 2010), which signals the breakdown between private religion and public politics, and, on the other hand, as an epistemological challenge which questions the divide between reason and faith as a location of knowledge in modernity, whilst the debate about the implications stemming from the logic of postsecularism has intensified over the last decade (Gourgouris, 2008a, 2008b; Robbins, 2013a, 2013b; McLennan, 2007, 2010).

Operating within the broader context of poststructuralist concerns about the ways modernity authorizes particular kinds of subjectivities tied up with analogous social and conceptual exclusions, the postsecular theoretical approaches converge in two main points. The first point is the repudiation of secularism, which is used as a metaphor of western categories of sociological knowledge and political organization. This is done through a particular understanding of the term’s meaning in which secularism becomes – despite the disclaimers, as we shall see below – a substitute for Eurocentrism, racism, nationalism, colonialism, imperialism or state violence. A common line in these recent critiques is the questioning of secularism and religion as antithetical concepts and the reconfiguration of secularism as religion by another name. Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007) famously makes the case of secularism not being simply the absence of belief but itself a historical construction, which creates the conditions for a multiplication of options including belief and unbelief. Asad’s work (1993, 2003), equally a landmark contribution in this debate, locates the very possibility of the emergence of secularism and the constitution of the western nation-state in the exclusion of the non-secular Other. Similarly, secularism has also been denounced as not only a mask for Christianity but also as an ideological embodiment of orientalism and imperialism (Anidjar, 2006; Hart, 2000). Furthermore, and despite its foundation on Edward Said’s secular-orientated scholarship, postcolonialism has been one of the most productive study fields in the critique of secularism and its destructive effect on other ways of being in the world (Chakrabarty, 1995, 2000; Nandy, 2002, 2003; and more recent contributions from the perspective of decolonial thinking, Grosfoguel, 2009; Mignolo, 2000).

The second salient figure of this line of thought is the critique of the ‘secular’ ¹ which operates through the re-examination of the relationship between religion and agency in order to demonstrate how the categorization of religion as a concept shapes the practice of feminist engagement with religion, and how situating religious subjectivity in its own ‘grammar’ makes the secular assumptions of feminist critical social theory manifest. ² Following from this, what is shared by these approaches is the discussion about degrees of agency, autonomy, or self-determination, which are not only political, at least in the sense of progressive politics. In this perspective, the totalizing, and largely thought of as ‘Eurocentric’, narratives of resistance and emancipation are replaced by counter-narratives centred around the non-reflective or embodied constitution of the self.

This contemporary theoretical interest in religion evidences a dissatisfaction with existing feminist approaches to the question of agency, for which the notion of autonomy is crucial, as is resistance to forms of heteronomy, such as religion. Having said this, the critique of the ‘necessary secularism’ (Chakrabarty, 2000: 14) of feminism runs earlier than the rise of postsecular thinking as a concrete movement in social theory: almost three decades ago, emblematic figures of the field, such as Luce Irigaray (1993), had declared the return to the divine as the repository of autonomous feminine subjectivity and real freedom. However, in the more recent postsecular feminist accounts on which this article focuses, the agency of the ‘religious Other’ must not only be recognized as political in its own terms, but in some ways it must be acknowledged as an example of a more flexible model of subjectivity with an openness to spiritual sensibilities, a capacity that the progressive political subject seems not to possess. This ‘religious Other’, whose subjectivity is thought as being suppressed by the dominant secular culture and the kind of subjectivity it enables, is not to be feared or rejected, but in many ways is thought to be much more open to the possibilities of alternative, happier futures in comparison to the outdated and melancholic secular subject.

I focus here on the recent contributions by Judith Butler, Rosi Braidotti, and Saba Mahmood in particular, whose stance can be seen as symptomatic of the postsecular moment and whose combined interventions create the conceptual space to re-examine the significance of religious subjectivities in a postsecular world. However, these works should not be understood as overdetermined by the theoretical concerns of immanent critique only, but as produced within a specific geo-political context within which gender politics becomes a central vehicle of western interventionism and a motor of Islamophobic discourses and mobilizations: for Butler, it is the appropriation of the struggles for sexual freedom by racist, xenophobic and anti-immigration political rhetoric and policy; for Braidotti, the reduction of the postsecular condition to the ‘Muslim issue’ in the context of the war on terror and the militarization of the social space; for Mahmood, the difficulty of writing about Muslim women in a political condition in which Muslim women are systematically portrayed as needing saving by the West. However, even though each one of them seeks to respond to particular concerns, the common thread of their endeavours is the effort to problematize normative conceptions of secularism and the way these define what constitutes religion and religious subjectivity in the modern world.

This selection of authors does not, of course, claim to be exhaustive of postsecular feminism as an emerging field, or of the sum of positions and arguments of these individual theorists. Nevertheless, I hope that this article will demonstrate that the conjoint moves and breakthroughs of authors discussed here have important theoretical and political implications, which are left unexamined. Naturally, critically engaging the responses that postsecular feminism offers to hegemonic versions of secularism today and its rethinking of the relationship between religion and agency, freedom and coercion, or subordination and emancipation, does not imply that postsecular feminism takes for granted that religious movements often manifest conservative or patriarchal aspects. The analysis that follows aims to go beyond such facile and largely unfair assertions and has a different objective: it examines how a particular postsecular conceptualization of religion and agency is produced within contemporary feminist theory, whilst it also problematizes the way the critique of secularism is articulated within these accounts and the political functions that such critique inadvertently performs. Whilst acknowledging the importance of the effort of postsecular feminism to think of agency beyond the constraints of our existing intellectual traditions and the limitations of Eurocentric theorizing, as well as the political urgency to interrogate the ideological uses of secularism in the era of western neo-colonialism and demonization of Islamic societies and communities, I question the way secularism is produced as a narrative of exclusion and the reluctance to scrutinize the political implications of such theorizing. I argue that it remains unclear whether this particular conceptualization of agency, in close synergy with religion as a matrix for subject formation, can have genuine subversive, counter-hegemonic, conceptual and political effects. In addition, and perhaps more importantly, I question to what extent postsecular feminist theorizing – the cutting edge of contemporary critical social theory – risks the neutralization of critical social theory itself, because abandoning autonomy as the foundation of political subjectivity does now allow for the interrogation of arbitrary authorities and the social inequalities that they sustain.

Secular Time

One of the most prominent examples of feminist engagement with the critique of secularism is Butler’s 2008 article ‘Sexual Politics, Torture and Secular Time’ (hereafter abbreviated ST), where a number of recent controversies which pertain to the way western democracies deal with forms of otherness are viewed as a result of a specific understanding of time, namely secular time. In this text, Butler brings together the racist immigration laws in the Netherlands, the US military interventions in the Middle and Central East, the laws prohibiting child adoption to homosexual couples in France, the Pope’s anti-Islamic comments and the incidents of torture in Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo and frames them as symptomatic of the domination of secularism as an ideology, as symptomatic of ‘certain secular conceptions of history’ (ST: 3). Butler’s ‘j’accuse’ against secularism – and more precisely against the kind of temporality which carries specific ideas about civilization and barbarity – is partially based on the analysis of a neo-orientalist text, ‘The Arab Mind’. This document, which was assigned by the US Department of Defense in 1973, defined an assumed ‘Arab mind’ with respect to religious beliefs and specific sexual vulnerabilities of people of Arab descent, and came to public attention following the Abu Ghraib scandal when it was revealed that it was used as a source of information. Butler’s interesting reading of this text demonstrates how ideologies of civilization and backwardness authorized the use of torture as an instrument of ‘humanizing’ Muslim detainees deemed as non-human. ³ Butler’s analysis in terms of empirical underpinning is strikingly similar to the material used by another fierce critique of secularism, Saba Mahmood, in her piece ‘Secularism, Hermeneutics, and Empire: The Politics of Islamic Reformation’ (2006). Mahmood’s critique partially relies on the analysis of the Rand Report, Civil Democratic Islam: Partners, Resources and Analysis. This is another neo-orientalist document released by the National Security Research Division of the Rand Corporation, the conservative research foundation in which prominent members of the Bush administration were members, and which claims that the real long-term threat for US strategic interests and ‘democratic values’ comes from traditionalist Islam because of its attitude towards authority and its modes of reasoning which are causally linked with an assumed Muslim backwardness and underdevelopment. Mahmood focuses in this article on the convergence between US foreign policy and those Muslim intellectuals who favour an Islamic reform in the sense of western-style democratization and demonstrates that particular, secular understandings of religion as a concept authorize particular subjectivities and define what an acceptable attitude towards religion is in a secular world.

What is noteworthy in these critical accounts is a peculiar simultaneous widening and narrowing of the meaning of secularism, which is endowed with the explanatory ability of a fully-fledged metanarrative: like capital, or patriarchy, secularism becomes a kind of overarching causal framework from which all forms of domination and oppression emanate. On the one hand, as noted above, secularism is held accountable for various forms of state violence, or it becomes a substitute for Eurocentrism and phobic reactions to difference: torture, war, laws regulating sexual freedoms in Butler’s case, and US security and foreign policy concerns and international interventions in Mahmood’s case, are all attributed to an assumed secular ethos, which appears unified and omnipotent, even if these issues belong to categorically different registers and are conditioned by their own specific historicity and politicality. On the other, the empirical material for the construction of such a broad critique, which turns secularism into a metaphor of western violence, is culturally defined either by US militarist rhetoric and interventions, or by the political climate imposed by the weight of this dominant superpower. This way, though, both theorists commit an serious mistake: they take for granted the ideology of ‘secular liberalism’ ⁴ – a construct which conflates liberalism with secularism and reduces the one to the other, or considers the one as a precondition for the other ⁵ – in the form that it was engineered and propagated in recent years, and in this way they fail to acknowledge that not only ‘competing notions of freedom’ (ST: 19) but also competing notions of secularism are at stake in the current historical moment. Despite the disclaimer that ‘secularism has a variety of forms’ (ST: 13), the analysis privileges exclusively the version embraced and mobilized by the two Bush administrations. This becomes even more problematic if one considers that the particular form that the ideology of ‘secular liberalism’ acquired in the Bush years owes as much to secularism as to its repudiation, and that during those years secular ethics found itself under an unprecedented attack in modern US history (Kaplan, 2004; Linker, 2005). Butler (ST: 14) herself observes that the US ‘civilizing mission’, one of the most notable manifestations of the ideology of ‘secular liberalism’ as propagated by the US, is a ‘cross of secular and non-secular perspectives’, whereas Mahmood (2006: 329), commenting on the US modus operandi with regard to the war on terror, notes that ‘the United States has embarked upon an ambitious theological campaign’.

Furthermore, both analyses tend to efface the difference between the Christian and the secular-liberal, which is a distinguishing feature of postsecular thought in general (Anidjar, 2006; Asad, 1993, 2003; Taylor, 2007), by assuming that because Christianity and secularism share the same origins and developed to a certain extent together, they are bound to converge in political meaning and intent today (McLennan, 2010; Robbins, 2013b). Butler, on the one hand, in analysing the argument against gay parenting in France and the Pope’s commentary on women’s issues and indirect denunciations of Islam, concludes that ‘it is the idea of culture in the French instance, a notion of culture that understands itself as “secular”, which clearly works in tandem with the papal argument’ (ST: 13). And although one can clearly see in Butler’s analysis that the defenders of heterosexual ‘symbolic order’ in France share a common ground, what is also significant is that anthropologist Françoise Héritier, whose views are taken as representative of the secular order of things in France, is not arguing on secular but on Catholic grounds (as Butler notes; ST: 9). So when Butler observes that the basis of laïcité and the cultural grounding for the rights of men ‘is not far from the clearly theological view of the current Pope who voices his condemnation of gay parenting and Islamic religious practice on common grounds’ (ST: 10), one needs to interrogate how this convergence between the secular and the Catholic is produced. Mahmood, on the other hand, despite recognizing that the US imperial project of reforming Islam in a way compatible with liberal sensibilities ‘is shot through with the interests, agendas, and aspirations of the Christian Right’ (2006: 329), still insists that this project is secular, provided that ‘we understand secularism to be not the dissolution of religion but its rearrangement so as to make it more congruent with a certain modality of liberal political rule’ (2006: 335). However, by collapsing the divide between the Christian and the secular-liberal, such analyses cannot account for recent phenomena such as the Catholic far right in France, or the Protestant far right in the US – they would be paradoxically compelled to see them as manifestations of secularism – but they also unwittingly sanction the appropriation of secularism by those political forces inimical to manifestations of Otherness.

The End of Oppositional Consciousness and the Rise of the Postsecular Affirmative Subject

Equally important is to consider another influential text, which signalled the end of oppositional consciousness and the advent of the affirmative postsecular feminist subject. Braidotti’s 2008 article, ‘In Spite of the Times: The Postsecular Turn in Feminism’ (hereafter abbreviated PTF), is both a cartography of the nascent postsecular movement and a manifesto of its theoretical interventions. Here the emphasis is not on the ethos of secularism per se but on the suggestion to broaden existing understandings of agency as oppositional and to open up critical theory to spirituality in the form of affirmation rather than negativity. For Braidotti, the postsecular trend challenges European feminism because it makes manifest that agency, or political subjectivity, is not antithetical to religious piety or spirituality and that it can be unproblematically conveyed by it. The theoretical argument contests any necessary link between political subjectivity and oppositional consciousness, or critique in the negative sense. Therefore, postsecular feminism stands for a ‘vision of consciousness that links critique to affirmation instead of negativity’ (PTF: 2); it ‘bears a close link to residual forms of spirituality’ (PTF: 15) and it ‘casts a new light on the role of spirituality in social and critical theory’ (PTF: 15).

Two aspects are significant theoretically as well as politically in Braidotti’s manifesto for the analysis attempted here: firstly, the disjunction of political subjectivity and oppositional consciousness and the coupling of political subjectivity with spirituality instead, in order to enable the process of engendering empowering modes of becoming. This is envisioned as a shift of paradigm which essentially means less emphasis on the dialects of consciousness and more attention on issues of empowerment, positivity and the critique of the negative (PTF: 12). Secondly, a new methodology and role for critical social theory as a series of ‘strategies of affirmation’, which practically means ‘multiple micro-political practices of daily activism or interventions in and on the world we inhabit’ (PTF: 16). Braidotti concludes with a definition of postsecular subjectivity ‘as the ethics of becoming: the quest for new creative alternatives and sustainable futures’ (PTF: 19).

To be sure, Braidotti’s intervention is not a defence of all and any religion. As she observes, ‘religious extremism and the politically conservative return of God is a feature of all monotheistic religions today’ (PTF: 4) and ‘the postsecular defined as a revival of the debate on the relationship between religion and the public sphere both supports and is enhanced by a turn towards political conservatism. This is clearly evidenced by the comeback of Christian and religious militantism all over the world, in the public arena, beyond the boundaries of the private spiritual domain’ (PTF: 5). Having recognized this, however, two questions arise from Braidotti’s intervention for the creative and critical potential of alternative, affirmative spiritualties. The first problem pertains to the fact that religious subjectivities have nothing new as such and their historical record tends to weigh more on the side of repression and social control rather than creativity and openness. As Robbins (2013b: 58) points out, ‘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 non-negligible portion of the world’s suffering and injustice’. Additionally, and perhaps more importantly, what we witness at the current political conjuncture – at least in terms of popularity and persuasive power – does not suggest a substantial turn towards alternative spiritualities but, on the contrary, towards powerful forms of hegemonic religious conservatism. From the massive mobilizations against gay marriage in France (and, to a lesser extent, in the UK), to the recent attempts to control women’s sexuality via abortion legislation on both sides of the Atlantic, to the homophobic outbursts of the Greek Orthodox Christian Church, whose discourse is more often than not indistinguishable from the openly racist, xenophobic far-right, to the fate of Pussy Riot’s alternative feminism in Russia, the postsecular historical moment has not been favouring open, flexible and nomadic forms of subjectivation, but mostly conservative, patriarchal and homophobic ones, which demonstrate a professed desire not for playful creativity but for re-assertion of the terms of their own ‘discursive traditions’, to use Asad’s renowned term. In that sense, it remains to be seen to what extent the new forms of religious subjectivities, such as the ones discussed by Braidotti, can become the kind of postsecular power which would efficiently challenge forms of closure and aggressive conservatism and engender a real possibility of progressive social change.

The second problem with Braidotti’s contribution relates to the very idea of dissociation of agency, or political subjectivity, from oppositional consciousness. As Braidotti observes herself, contemporary critics of religious politicality run into considerable difficulty in accounting for the paradox ‘that some of the most pertinent critiques of advanced capitalism today, and of the structural injustices of globalization, are voiced by religiously driven social movements’ (PTF: 9). If we consider – as we should – the subversive, counter-hegemonic potential of such movements, then we would not fail to notice that their mode of articulation is clearly one of opposition, resistance and negative critique, rather than affirmation and positivity. Following this, it would not be unreasonable to maintain that the location of religious subjectivities in affirmation and the rejection of the negative would remove much of the radical, politically subversive potential of such moves.

Braidotti’s suggestion to dissociate agency from oppositional consciousness is a step further from Butler’s idea of the nonvoluntaristic, resisting subject (‘Politics, Power and Ethics’; Butler and Connolly, 2000), as she argues that ‘political subjectivity or agency need not be aimed solely at the production of radical counter-subjectivities’ (PTF: 19). But what are the consequences of such disjuncture which essentially breaks the link between resistance and self-determination and even oppositional consciousness and political subjectivity? What are the potential theoretical and political risks of ‘the double challenge of linking subjectivity to religious agency, and disengaging both from oppositional consciousness and critique defined as negativity’ (PTF: 2)? I propose to explore those in the section below. Looking closely at arguably the most prominent example which practically contests any necessary link between opposition – and even autonomy – and agency will demonstrate the problematic ramifications of such a move.

The Politics of Piety: From Resistance to Docility

The year 2005 saw the publication of an important book by Saba Mahmood, The Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject (hereafter abbreviated PP), which represents perhaps the most challenging and theoretically sophisticated argument to liberal and to postmodern feminism, as it further radicalizes the debate about the nature of agency or political subjectivity. ⁶ Politics of Piety is an analysis of Islamic revivalism through the ethnography of a women’s piety movement in the mosques of Cairo. The mosque movement had emerged in Egypt in response to what Mahmood’s informants described as ‘secularization’ or ‘westernization’, meant in this context as the marginalization of religious knowledge as a means of organizing daily conduct and its reduction to an abstract system of beliefs (PP: 4). Mahmood’s argument departs from an established thesis within the postcolonial literature, i.e. that secular or politically progressive forms of life do not exhaust ways of living meaningfully and richly in the world (PP: xi).

The crux of Mahmood’s theoretical enterprise is essentially a polemic against the widely-shared feminist assumption that there is something intrinsic to women that should predispose them to resist practices and values such as those conveyed by nonliberal movements like the Islamist ones (PP: 2). Mahmood’s thesis sets off to challenge the normative liberal assumption that all human beings have an innate desire for freedom, that they all seek autonomy, and that agency is the capacity to realize one’s own interests against the constraints of tradition or custom or transcendental will (PP: 8). In a way, she meets Braidotti’s ‘non-oppositional’ agency when she contests the liberal-feminist assumption that agency consists primarily of acts of resisting or subverting social norms and not those that uphold them (PP: 8). Mahmood seeks to ‘parochialize those assumptions – about the constitutive relationship between action and embodiment, about resistance and agency, self and authority – that inform our judgements about nonliberal movements such as the women’s mosque movement’ (PP: 38).

To do so, Mahmood problematizes the notion of resistance which is coalescent to the liberal-secular feminist conceptualization of agency. Resistance to and subversion of norms has been, and still is to a great extent, the prime trope of a feminist analytics of power. She persuasively argues that the feminist literature reproduces resistance as an unproblematic, cross-cultural and in a way ‘natural’ predisposition, and in doing so the feminist analysis fails to capture the agency of those women ‘who may be socially, ethically, or politically indifferent to the goal of opposing hegemonic norms’ (PP: 9). Based on this observation, Mahmood asks a question with important implications for the conceptualization of agency: is it at all possible to recognize the existence of a universal category of acts – such as those of resistance – outside of the ethical and political contexts within which such acts obtain their particular meaning and within which their connotations are experienced by the agents (PP: 9)? For Mahmood, ‘the category of resistance imposes a teleology of progressive politics on the analytics of power’, and this teleology excludes forms of being in the world that ‘are not necessarily encapsulated by the narrative of subversion and reinscription of norms’ (PP: 9). Hence, she questions the binary of subverting-confirming the norms as the site where subjectivity is produced, and she proposes to detach the notion of self-realization from that of autonomous will (PP: 9).

In fact, Mahmood’s theoretical move is a radicalization of Butler’s poststructuralist critique of the transcendental subject and the repressive models of power. ⁷ She questions Butler’s tendency to conceptualize agency in terms of subversion and resignification of social norms and to locate agency within these operations that resist the dominating and subjectivating modes of power. As Mahmood observes, Butler locates the possibility of agency within the structures of power and suggests that the reiterative structure of norms serves not only to consolidate a particular regime of discourse but also provides the means for its destabilization. Therefore, there is no possibility of ‘undoing’ social norms that is independent of the ‘doing’ of norms, and agency resides within this productive reiterability. Although Mahmood recognizes that Butler keeps a clear distance from the teleology of emancipatory politics of liberal feminism, by insisting on the contingent and fragile character of the process of resignification/subversion of norms (PP: 20–22), and acknowledges her own debt to the poststructuralist analytics of power, she still thinks that the analysis operates within a dualistic framework: that norms are either resisted and subverted or consolidated. In different words, Mahmood reproaches the normative subject of poststructuralist feminism for being still an emancipatory one, whose agency is conceptualized on the binary model of subordination and subversion. For in doing so, she argues, this approach ignores dimensions of human action whose ethical and political status ‘does not map onto the logic of repression and resistance’ (PP: 14) and leaves little room for the appreciation of the ways these norms ‘are lived and inhabited’ by the subjects (PP: 23).

The evidence that Mahmood provides from her ethnographic fieldwork suggests that, for the female subjects of the mosque movement in Egypt, acts of subordination have particular meaning. These subjects are found to cultivate docility, piety and the submission to an external authority – that is, Islamic precepts – as a form of practice of ‘positive ethics’ ⁸ in order to achieve the self’s potentiality. ⁹ For Mahmood, the fundamental distinction between the subject’s real desires and the social conventions in progressive political thought is deeply problematic as far as Islam is concerned, because in the case of the piety movement these socially prescribed norms constitute the conditions for the emergence of the self (as a pious subject) and are essential to its realization (PP: 149). In short, the distinction between desire and social norms is blurred, if not nonexistent, in nonliberal cultures, like the Islamic ones. The question for Mahmood then is how is it possible ‘to conceive of individual freedom in a context where the distinction between the subject’s own desires and socially prescribed performances cannot be easily presumed, and where submission to certain forms of (external) authority is a condition for achieving the subject’s potentiality’ (PP: 31)? To do so, Mahmood moves away from questions formed by the framework of gender to favour questions regarding the embodiment of ethical norms and suggests a three-fold theoretical movement in this direction: first, the detachment of agency from progressive politics because the desire of freedom from or subversion of norms is not an innate desire that motivates human beings cross-culturally and independently of their discursive traditions. Second, the reformulation of agency in relation to embodied capacities and means of subject formation. Third, the understanding of self-formation beyond the attempt of conceiving emancipatory politics outside the narrative of secular history. ¹⁰ Mahmood goes again a step further from the long-standing feminist line of ‘politics of everyday life’ to suggest that the transformative project of ethical embodiment is a political practice per se since particular conceptions of the self presuppose different kinds of political commitments.

What Mahmood accuses liberal and poststructuralist feminism alike of is the failure to think historically about the applicability of its norms on the ‘Other’ in order to understand forms of agency that are not created by the desire of autonomy (PP: 14); for Mahmood, autonomy is not ‘an innate desire that animates all human beings at all times’ (PP: 14). She thinks of autonomy as Eurocentric – and determined by its Kantian conception of the transcendental ego (PP: 25–7) and, hence, cross-culturally untranslatable, and redefines agency as the way in which one inhabits and practices a culture’s norms. This is indeed a bold and truly subverting theoretical move given that all radical political projects presume to a greater or lesser degree the moral autonomy of the subject. But what are the unstated implications of Mahmood’s disarticulation of agency from autonomy?

First, the disarticulation of agency from autonomy as argued in Mahmood’s work forces postsecular feminism to face a puzzling observation: that once the link between oppositional consciousness and agency breaks down, what seems to happen is not the emergence of a new positive and activist political subject or the multiplicity of futures, as Braidotti suggests, but the reduction of subjectivity to the unreflective, embodied experience of the norms of one’s religious culture. Mahmood takes the poststructuralist critique of western feminism as the site of authentic feminist agency and the concern about culturally specific configurations of subjectivity to the denial of autonomy as fundamental for subject formation, and the untranslatability of ethical and cultural norms. In that sense, as Waggoner (2005: 247) observes, she risks the introduction of ‘a certain kind of cultural and ethical absolutism’. What stems from Mahmood’s argument is not only that subjectivities are cultural or discursive products, or that agency is more diverse than acknowledged in theories of resistance, but that there are (pre)determined, fixed subjectivities specific to particular cultures, which is a typically essentialist understanding of culture: ¹¹ on the one side of the fence, the western female subject is constituted around the questioning and subversion of prescribed norms, whilst on the other the Muslim female subject is fulfilled by docile embodiment of religious norms. Butler’s critique of the mentality behind texts like The Arab Mind, as ‘that form of cultural anthropology that treated cultures as self-sufficient and distinctive, which refused the global mixing of cultural and social formations’ (ST: 15), mentioned above, could be addressed precisely to the view of culture that Mahmood seems to endorse. ¹²

In a way, Mahmood’s scepticism towards autonomy as the foundation of agency departs from the counter-hegemonic position of deconstructing dominant ideologies like secularism or liberalism, to the opposite anti-critical stance, namely to the acceptance of social positions and hierarchies of power within a culture. Despite Mahmood’s cautionary note asserting that she is not arguing that ‘we should abandon our critical stance towards what we consider to be unjust practices in the situated context of our own lives, or that we uncritically embrace and promote the pious lifestyles of the women I worked with’ (PP: 39), the numerous gender inequalities and hierarchical social positions that such pious practices entail are left unaddressed. As a consequence of this view, the historicity of practices such as piety and the kind of submission it presupposes are left unexamined, for instance, the modern – rather than traditional – character of Salafist pietism as well as the particular social and political location of pietist women (Bangstad, 2010). Or the emergence of the pietist movement within the broader political context of privatization and neoliberalization of Egypt in the 1970s, as well as the rise of a multi-million-dollar Islamic media industry in the 1990s (Selim, 2010). And as an effect of this sociological disengagement important political questions are precluded, for instance, questions about the executive power by which divine law is imposed and the role of the female piousness movement in upholding and policing moral law (Cooper, 2008: 39).

Second, this turn towards cultural specificity, if not cultural determinism, raises questions as to what kind of philosophy of history undergirds this particular view of agency. ¹³ In introducing her argument based on an analysis of two ethnographic examples from the women’s mosque movement in Egypt, in an article predating The Politics of Piety, Mahmood submits that:

what may appear to be a case of deplorable passivity and docility from a progressivist point of view, may very well be a form of agency – one that must be understood in the context of the discourses and structures of subordination that create the conditions of its enactment. In this sense, agentival capacity is entailed not only in those acts that result in (progressive) change but also those that aim toward continuity, stasis and stability. (2001: 212)

In this conceptualization of agency Mahmood echoes Asad, who thinks of the making of history not as necessarily oriented to the creation of the future but ‘as seeking to maintain the “local” status quo, or to follow local models of social life’ (Asad, 1993: 19), a reasoning which embodies ‘the disavowal of history itself’, to use Dirlik’s (1999) well-known phrase. The idea that history is conditioned by the ‘discursive tradition’ of Islam, which by Asad’s (2003: 91) own admission fuses too close together ‘eschatology’ and ‘sociology’, is of a much darker shade compared with the open-endness of the contingent, non-predictable futures imagined by Braidotti’s postsecular feminism. Here, Asad’s scepticism towards progressive forms of social change borders on straight-forward political conservatism. It points to a philosophy of history with its gaze fixed to the past, and in an important sense it reduces culture qua tradition to a space filled by a perpetual preservation of the same. In this perspective, the teleology of progress is dismissed in favour of the teleology of cultural incommensurability, where Islam – or perhaps any other religious difference – is perceived as essentially elusive to any secular – and for that matter, any non-Islamic – epistemology. Asad’s view of Islam as a tradition to be preserved, and his view of history as stasis rather than change, and entirely specific to one location only, is paradoxically strikingly similar to the stereotypical, Eurocentric, orientalist view of Islam: static, inimical to change and oriented to the past.

Third, in epistemological terms, collapsing the distinction between the social and the individual, between desires and norms, may be illuminating for explaining, for instance, how this particular pious subject is produced. However, this move is more questionable than assumed given Mahmood’s declared anti-humanism and ‘double disavowal of the humanist subject’, either as recovering the silent voices of those who are absent from ‘hegemonic feminist narratives’, or as the recuperation of the members of the mosque movement as ‘subaltern feminists’ or as the ‘fundamentalist Others’ of feminism’s progressive agenda (PP: 154–5). Mahmood defines her kind of agency not as belonging to the women themselves, but as ‘a product of the historically contingent discursive tradition in which they are located’ (PP: 32). Following this rationale, ‘the individual is contingently made possible by the discursive logic of the ethical traditions she enacts’ and therefore her activities are ‘products of authoritative discursive traditions whose logic and power far exceeds the consciousness of the subjects they enable’ (PP: 32). But in this way Mahmood is ironically led from poststructuralism to the most hardcore version of structuralism, almost mirroring Althusser, the difference being that ideology is re-introduced under the positive light of ‘discursive tradition’.

Four, in philosophical terms, the representation of the Other’s agency as the incarnation of the normalcy of a given culture is not conducive to poststructuralist ethics and its radical openness to otherness – ‘in fact, it entirely excludes consideration of the other’ (Waggoner, 2005: 259). This ethical exclusion of the Other is the effect of the logic of cultural singularity ¹⁴ undergirding approaches like Mahmood’s. The way cultural singularity operates – on the basis of insularity, and as a consequence of exclusion rather than inclusion of the Other – cannot but leave outside its scope questions of ethics, reflexivity and ultimately critique. Approaches which seek to account for the Other in his/her own terms only operate in singularizing rather than relational terms, and therefore they define the non-secular Other in terms of absolute alterity. This profound postsecular scepticism undermines the ability of social science to produce any substantive explanation without committing an act of violence against the object of research, and it reduces every attempt to narrate the Other in terms of a shared language – the language of social theory, for instance – into an act of cultural or epistemic imperialism. ¹⁵

Conclusion: Postsecular Critical Social Theory?

There is no doubt that Mahmood pushes boundaries like no one else, but the question is towards which direction? Mahmood perceives her scholarly endeavour as a pure intellectual exercise since she is convinced that the analytical and the political are two modalities of engagement that should not be collapsed into each other (PP: 39, 196). Hence, she does not relate her theoretical insights – that is, the location of agency in specific embodied practices that seek to enhance docility and submission – to their political implications. This is also in line with Asad’s (2006: 207) view, for whom ‘anthropological inquiry and political commitment should not be confused’ because ‘there is always a tension between the need for decisiveness in political commitment and the need for openness in anthropological inquiry’. This political disengagement, though, seems to bypass the problem by re-instituting the barrier between the two fields of engagement, the scholarly and the political. The claim to some kind of intellectual or theoretical purity cannot be sustained without dismissing a crucial feature of Mahmood or Asad’s field of work, i.e. the political nature of anti-Eurocentric scholarship, which in its countless versions and variations aims to expose and disrupt power relations, as well as the making of cultural and intellectual hegemonies of the political present. What is the difference, then, between the positivist, value-free, Eurocentric scholarship which refuses to acknowledge its own political nature from the disavowal of political extensions of one’s own intellectual work, as reclaimed by Mahmood and Asad?

But even if the relationship between the analytical and the political is not Mahmood’s concern, it should be ours, if we wish to maintain a meaningful relationship between critical social theory, feminist or otherwise, and the social world we investigate. Issues such as the political consequences of the (re)turn to cultural incommensurability – a discourse favoured, for instance, by those who propagate a certain view of Islam as fundamentally different and, hence, threatening – or the practical consequences for the lives of those who are judged ‘discursively’ indifferent to freedom, autonomy or equality – and, hence, entitled to fewer civil rights, social rights, gender rights – are of prime importance for anyone who claims to subscribe to a critical perspective. By this I mean that critical social theory assumes an acknowledged political stance. In this I follow Fraser (1985: 97) who, referencing Marx’s 1843 initial definition of critical theory as ‘the self-clarification of the struggles and wishes of the age’, points out that the appeal of this phrase lies in its straightforward political character: ‘It makes no claim to any special epistemological status but, rather, supposes that with respect to justification there is no philosophically interesting difference between a critical theory of society and an uncritical one. But there is, according to this definition, an important political difference’. Naturally, one can question the extent to which the philosophical and the political can be separated as starkly as Fraser seems to assume. Nonetheless, this definition makes obvious the inherent and unambiguous politicality of critical social theory. It goes without saying that for critical theory to be ‘critical’ it must be ‘for’ something and ‘against’ something else, hence critical social theory is not and cannot be neutral. It is associated with a broader project and the normative assumptions it entails. Following Arnason (1989), we can perhaps identify this project as creating an autonomous democratic society. Arnason points to capitalism as a major source of heteronomy, but one could add here patriarchy, racism, and other ideologies of inequality and exclusion, including the ambiguous case of religion, examined here. In that sense, critical social theory must task itself with the radical questioning of all forms of heteronomy. If critical social theory needs to be self-critical toward its own assumptions and modes of appreciation, it also needs to be critical in relation to the social world it studies and to the relations of power that underpin its truths.

More precisely in relation to the discussion attempted here, social critical theorists cannot fail to notice the many ways that religious practice and subjectivity manifest themselves not as counter-hegemonic and enabling, but as a central mechanism of social reproduction: no matter how much docility and submission can be meaningful from the perspective of ethical embodiment, they still produce real exclusions and inequalities, especially towards women and especially in those societies where religion rather than secularism dominates the social and political field. Naturally, it should be recognized that some omissions and generalizations are inevitable in the development of new theoretical trajectories, and that if the theorists examined here have neglected the problematic aspects I have sought to emphasize in the article, they have rightfully drawn our attention towards others: most importantly, towards the ways secular analytics fail to account for the ways religion has been a force of social change and resistance, but also how particular, instrumentalized uses of aggressive, ideological secularism become vehicles of exclusionary politics, in particular towards the most vulnerable. Having said that, what is overlooked in this particular narrative of the way subjectivities are constituted is also instructive: the reluctance to account for the political ramifications of the separation between autonomy and agency, or to examine the consequences of the demise of oppositional consciousness as the motor for social change, and as such the risk of dismissing the critical potential of social theory. In that sense, and without disregarding the important issues which postsecular theorists seek to raise, the postsecular move – as ‘positive critique’ or as the abandonment of counter-subjectivities in favour of ethical embodiment – seems both disengaged and disarmed vis-à-vis questions of inequalities and the ideologies that sustain their alleged natural status.