Postsecularism as colonialism by other means

In the last chapter of The Nation and Its Fragments (1993), Partha Chatterjee begins with a scene from Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay’s humorous sketch of the life of the late eighteenth-century poet Kamalakantra Bhattacharya. Kamalakantra has been called to testify in court concerning a case of petty theft, and the lawyer, simply seeking to get Kamalakantra to state his identity for the record, asks, “What jāti are you?” (Chatterjee, 1993: 220). In response, Kamalakanta, using what Chatterjee refers to as “extreme analytical skills found only among the mad,” engages the lawyer in a brief existential disputation on the nature of what it might mean to be a “jāti,” asking, “Am I a jāti?” (Chatterjee, 1993: 220). After several rounds of such back-and-forth, the lawyer finally loses his temper and expresses regret at calling a witness who cannot seem to simply indicate to which caste he belongs. The judge steps in at this point and lists the various jāti to which a Hindu might belong, and he asks Kamalakantra to pick one. Referring to the “sacred thread around [his] neck” and the fact that he has already given his name as “Chakravarti,” which is a sacred name designating one through whom the “wheel of dharma [or, sacred law] is turning,” Kamalakantra insists that it is not his fault that, given all of this context, the lawyer was not able to identify him as belonging to the priestly caste of Brahman (Chatterjee, 1993: 220).

Chatterjee uses this story to present Kamalakanta as one who would not allow his voice to be colonized by simply accepting the decontextualized identity markers of colonial rule. The familiar logic of this decontextualization involves appropriating indigenous concepts that properly function within a complex network of particular practices and associations, fixing their meaning by way of abstraction, and then returning them to their “original” users as the terms by which they are to understand themselves for the purposes of governance. In this case, the term “jāti,” which can variously refer to one’s socio-economic class of origin, biological species, spiritual status, ethnic or tribal lineage, or nationality depending on the context, is being offered as a taxonomical category for legal purposes to establish the standing of a witness vis-a-vis the court (Chatterjee, 1993: 221f.). Here, civil law becomes the primary discourse within which the various historical and political meanings of “jāti” are synthesized into a single, univocal category, and Kamalakantra’s questioning is meant to reassert the playful ambiguity of this term before those who would seek to erase it. In this way, what may first appear to be a harmless, if annoying, failure to have properly learned the terms by which one is to be understood in court, becomes an act of resistance by refusing to participate in one’s own colonization by rejecting the invitation, extended by the lawyer, to use these terms to understand oneself.

It is confrontations such as these, which broadly speaking seem to involve the negotiation of “religious” identities vis-a-vis the homogenizing discourse of “secular” law, that have led many theorists, particularly in the West, to talk about the emerging “postsecular” character of contemporary society. The rise of politically powerful and potentially violent forms of religious belief and practice, these theorists argue, is motivated by certain deficits of democratic legitimacy within the modern nation-state, which citizens no longer trust to represent them and their interests. In its most radical form, this postsecular diagnosis names a kind of congenital defect in the universalizing Enlightenment project itself, which Alasdair MacIntyre has argued was doomed from the start (MacIntyre, 1984; 1988). More recently, though, Jürgen Habermas has promoted a more pragmatic account of this postsecular problematic, which understands the persistence of politically potent forms of religious belief and practice as a problem to be solved by simply expanding the representative capacities of the democratic process so as to include those who may have been forgotten in the as yet “unfinished project of modernity” (Habermas, 1997; 2010a).

The ability of Western-style procedural democracy to undergo this expansion without betraying its commitment to universalism, however, has been challenged by a number of empirical cases in which religious leaders have been duly elected to political office. One of these from the Indian context, which is most relevant for what follows, is the recent election of the Bhartiya Janta Party (BJP) leader Narendra Modi as the new Prime Minister of India. Modi is a member of a Hindu fundamentalist organization, Rashtriya Swayamsevak Sangh, and has been criticized for neglecting to take the steps necessary to prevent the 2002 riots in the state of Gujarat, where he served as chief minister. These riots resulted in the deaths of over one thousand Muslims and the displacement of nearly two thousand (McGowan, 2014). Because of incidents like these, Indian social theorists have tended to be less hopeful than their Western counterparts that communitarian movements can be brought to serve democratic ends (Borradori, 2003; Bhargava, 1998; Black et al., 2014; Nandy, 1995; Needham and Rajan, 2007).

In this paper, I will argue that the inadequacy of Western postsecular democracy in both its MacIntyrean and Habermasian forms is due to the fact that they both follow the same logic of colonial appropriation, definition, and postcolonial reappropriation that left Kamalakanta with no other option but revolutionary madness. In the first section, drawing on Chatterjee’s analysis of the “derivative discourse” of nationalist historiography in postcolonial India (Chatterjee, 1986; 1993), I will argue that MacIntyre’s claim that the rationality of “classical” traditions ought to replace the supposedly failed universalist rationality of the Enlightenment only transposes an interminable battle of elite wills in the moral and political sphere onto the field of academic historiography. In the next section, I will argue that the celebrated 2004 “debate” over the prepolitical foundations of the democratic state between then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger and Habermas devolves into just such a battle of elite wills over the proper genealogy of modernity that is motivated by a shared desire to rise above the sordid questions of actual politics as it is practiced in what Chatterjee has called “most of the world” (Chatterjee, 2004; Habermas and Ratzinger, 2006).

Finally, in the last part of this paper, I will consider the suggestion made by Ashis Nandy that a truly democratic and postsecular society ought to leave the coercive legal regime of State-sponsored procedural rights behind completely in order to make room for the everyday negotiations of difference that take place at a variety of local levels and make actual democracy work (Nandy, 1995; Needham and Rajan, 2007: 107--117). I will argue, once again following Chatterjee, that such calls for a postlegal society, like Habermas’s dreams of a “postnational” global order (Habermas, 2001), privilege those who have already enjoyed the luxury of legally protected self-determination and deprives developing populations of the only mechanism by which they might also be recognized as world citizens (Chatterjee, 2010: 164–177; 2011: 235–252). In the end, I will conclude that the Western discourse of postsecularism is an attempt to preempt the necessarily uncertain and fragile democratic politics that it claims to protect, and, thus, it merely continues the project of colonialism by other means.

Whose History?

Before the collapse of Soviet communism and the subsequent failure of Western capitalism to make good on its promise to bring history to a peaceful end in its consumptive embrace (Eagleton, 2014: 197f.; Fukuyama, 1992), MacIntyre predicted the inevitable failure of the Enlightenment project of secular, technocratic universalism in both its communist and capitalist forms to fulfill its own vision of a just social order, because it had dismantled those traditional institutions on which its operative concepts depend for their meaning. In his highly influential After Virtue (1984), MacIntyre argued that contemporary philosophy was mired in endless, intramural disputes concerning fundamental moral principles, because it no longer could reference the world of background belief and practice that was once shared by a large majority of the public. In his equally influential sequel, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? (1988), MacIntyre concluded that the religiously motivated Thomistic tradition of moral inquiry could provide such a culturally and historically rooted rational background and that any rival proposals, including those of Enlightenment thinkers like David Hume and Immanuel Kant, would “depend for their vindication upon the adequacy and the explanatory power of the histories which the resources of each of those traditions in conflict enable their adherents to write” (MacIntyre, 1988: 403).

On MacIntyre’s account, the plausibility of a particular conception of justice depends upon a broadly shared understanding of what counts as “rational,” which must be further grounded in the common history of a specific community. The alternative, according to MacIntyre, is endless controversy over fundamental moral principles within the university and the enervation of ethical thought and action in society at large. It is this shared diagnosis of the present state of political apathy, leading to crises of democratic legitimacy in the modern nation-state, which has led a number of recent Catholic intellectuals, in particular, to hold up MacIntyre as the philosophical prophet for our postsecular age (Gregory, 2012; Pfau, 2013). These authors have answered MacIntyre’s call to ground their moral proposals for a just society in historical accounts of the development of modern rationality by writing extensive genealogies tracing the rise and fall and possible resurrection of an integrated Christian worldview—thus transposing the philosophical fight over the fundamentals of morality into the discipline of history. But, for Chatterjee and other postcolonial historians and social theorists, the main question still remains: Whose history are they writing?

For these mostly non-Western thinkers, the problem with this MacIntyrean version of the postsecular recovery of a supposedly seamless integration of reason, morals, and history is that it still assumes the same opposition, characteristic of European modernity, between a disenchanted, modern present and an enchanted, premodern past that is supposed to rescue it from its bureaucratically induced, bourgeois boredom. As Nandy and A. Raghuramaraju have argued, the situation in postcolonial societies, like India, is far more complex (Nandy, 1995; Raghuramaraju, 2011; 2013). In these societies, it is often the case that “premodern” ways of life and modes of production coexist with quite “disenchanted,” pragmatic worldviews, and, as in the case of the very pro-business agenda of Modi and the BJP, there is no reason to assume that a managerial materialism cannot coexist with an “enchanted” communitarianism (Kumar, 2013). For Raghuramaraju, the apparent failure of MacIntyrean “traditional morality” to track the “organic relation between facts and values” that obtains in postcolonial societies suggests that these particularist genealogies are as much a product of “sociological imagination” as those enlightened dreams of a “universal history” that they reject (Raghuramaraju, 2011: 23; cf. Stout, 2004: 118--139; Mignolo and Escobar, 2013).

For Chatterjee, the problem is not so much that these histories are imagined. After all, what account of the past is not (at least partially) a product of someone’s imagination? The real question is: Who is doing the imagining? This is the critical question that Chatterjee puts to Benedict Anderson’s seminal study predominantly focused on Western nationalism, Imagined Communities (1983), at the beginning of The Nation and Its Fragments. Chatterjee goes on to argue that it is not simply acknowledging the fact of such imaginings that will free postcolonial people to shape themselves into national communities; it is the form of this imagining that threatens to leave them “forever colonized” (Chatterjee, 1993: 5) by the kinds of stories that European and American elites have told of themselves.

Chatterjee offers an example of this postcolonial appropriation of an essentially Western form of storytelling in the nineteenth-century writings of Bankimchandra Chattopadhyay. For Bankim, the writing of history was the means by which the literati of a people formed itself and those it claims to represent into a nation and, in exercising this power to represent itself, achieved, as Chatterjee puts it, “nothing other than political power itself” (Chatterjee, 1993: 76). While, for this reason, Bankim understood history writing to be yet another act of resistance, Chatterjee argues that it is this view of history that belongs to the self-colonizing impulses of the formerly colonized.

What is most important about the writings of Bankim for the relationship between procedural democracy and religion, with which I am concerned, is the way that Chatterjee uses them to dramatize the shifting conceptions of law, power, and subjectivity under colonialism. In precolonial histories, dynasties were not established by the contestation of rival juridical powers, but they were “founded by the grace of the divine power,” which was granted “as long as the ruler is true to dharma” (Chatterjee, 1993: 81). This meant that there was an “inner law” governing the plot of history that could not be disambiguated from the political negotiations by which various rulers gained, maintained, and lost power. This also meant that one did not have the extrinsic means by which to choose the winners and losers of history. Thus, the historian did not have the power to give the definitive history of the nation, by which present progress or decay could be judged.

It was only when this ambiguous “inner law” was expropriated by the realm of positive civil law and secured within the jurisdiction of the governing elites of the modern nation-state that one had the tools to instrumentalize history-making in such a way that certain actors could be embraced as clearly contributing to the proper ends of the nation. Civil law also served as the external measure that allowed the historian to recommend himself [sic!] as a civic leader by contributing to the solidarity necessary to legitimate the nation insofar as the logic of civil law served as his primary guide for adjudicating the “subjects” of history. ¹ These judgments are no longer hidden in the “ineffable […] greatness of the divine will” (Chatterjee, 1993: 88--89), which invites the difficult negotiations of moral praise and blame that belonged to the everyday politics of dharma as practiced by the uneducated masses, but they can now be prosecuted in the court of the nation established through the politics of juridical power. What emerges in nationalist history is nothing more or less than a new kind of juridically constituted subject, who is no longer free to discern his or her place within the indeterminate, but prosaic, plot of providence. Rather, this subject is confined to those determinate identities given by the genealogy of the nation as authorized by the expert discourse of academic historiography, and it is this identity that makes it possible for one to be properly governed as a recognized citizen by the forensic technologies of civil law (cf. Kayaoğlu, 2010).

On this account, even as Bankim understood himself to be telling the story of his own Bengali nation and not that of colonial India, Chatterjee notes that he was united with his colonial counterparts in believing that “the old society had to be reformed in order to make it adequate for coping with the modern world” (Chatterjee, 1993: 93). This is to say that the history that Bengalis tell themselves has to be competitive with the history that is given to them by their colonizers, but in rising to greet this competition “they”—that is, the elite representatives of the people—seek to simultaneously defeat and win the recognition of their competitors. This ambivalence is born of the fact that it is the colonizer who taught “them” how to write a proper national history, following a standard genealogy that begins in a “classical” past, undergoes a period of “medieval” dormancy, and reaches maturity by way of a “renaissance” leading to the full flowering of the modern state where the crass and backward politics of dharma is replaced by the enlightened discourse of juridical rights (Chatterjee, 1993: 95f.).

For Chatterjee, what is most important about the transformation and construction of nationalist history in resistance to colonial rule is the way in which the story that the emerging postcolonial community tells of itself is one that requires, as the means of its legitimation, the techniques of modern historiography taught by the colonizers themselves to the educated elite of the colony. In the precolonial model, historians would recount the political negotiations by which actors entered and exited the world stage before a general public, all of whom (at least in theory) might be equally qualified to discern the activity of a “hidden” law working within the plot of mundane human action. In the postcolonial model, the historian, as the genealogist of the nation, always has its emerging positive law in mind as the expert discourse governing the criteria by which the villains and heroes of the story will be identified as either proleptically contributing to or undermining the stability of the present order, which means that the messy business of political discernment can be left behind.

A similar distaste for “ordinary” politics can be detected in the work of contemporary postsecular apologists for the political relevance of the “classical” religious past, which most often involves picking out certain precocious elites of history who stood apart from their unenlightened contemporaries. For instance, in their most recent work, both Brad Gregory and MacIntyre point to highly selective and disciplined medieval institutions of higher learning as the prelapsarian counterpart to the fallen modern secular research university (Gregory, 2012: 298--364; MacIntyre, 2009). Similarly, Chatterjee criticizes the “master” of Subaltern Studies, Rajit Guha, for indulging in the same kind of academic chauvinism by privileging the wondrous, disembodied voices contained in the books of university archives over the significantly less eloquent, enfleshed cries of those who live in the streets (Chatterjee, 2010: 153--160; Guha, 2002). And Raghuramaraju argues that Indian social theorists undermine their stated mission to bring their own people out of the margins when they seem more concerned with “provincializing” European histories than with clearing a space for the least among them to tell their own stories (Raghuramaraju, 2011; cf. Chakrabarty, 2000). Finally, one could also level the same charge against the current vogue for genealogical critiques of the academic discipline of religion, which is a kind of postreligious counterpart to the postsecular, in the name of those who probably have never even heard of the World’s Parliament of Religions or the American Academy of Religion (Asad, 1993; Fitzgerald, 2000; McCutcheon, 2001; Masuzawa, 2005).

In this section, I have been arguing that what Chatterjee allows us to see is that all of these attempts to present the postsecular and postcolonial as alternatives to Western modes of knowledge production merely perpetuate the same old colonial clash of educated elites in the rarified and cloistered realm of juridically disciplined academic discourse. It completely avoids any reference to the daily lives and political struggles of those poor populations to whom these professorial protagonists might give voice. As Simon During has asked, with reference to Charles Taylor’s A Secular Age (2007), “[W]hat about those who neither feel the spiritual emptiness of modernity nor embrace secular reformism’s promise?” (Warner et al., 2010: 113; cf. Taylor, 2007). I would now like to offer the Ratzinger–Habermas “debate” as a particularly striking instance of another elitist exchange that merely continues the secularist, colonial project, even while purporting to symbolize a new openness to popular religious belief and practice.

Which Politics?

On a symbolic level, the conversation between Ratzinger, who became Pope Benedict XVI, and Habermas is significant for MacIntyrean postsecularists. On one side, we have a representative of the Enlightenment who has self-consciously sought to package the “philosophical discourse of modernity” into a coherent tradition that pays its respects to an historical legacy of Jewish and Christian moral and political thought for which he sees “no alternative” (Habermas, 1990; 2002: 149; cf. 1998: 3--46). On the other, we have the future leader of the institutional incarnation of MacIntyre’s Catholicism. Thus, the Habermas–Ratzinger “debate” would seem to be precisely what MacIntyre called for at the end of Whose Justice? Which Rationality?: a contest between two traditions that have a deep historical self-awareness of the conditions of their emergence, development, and continued practice.

The philosophical point of departure for this discussion between Habermas and Ratzinger is the legitimacy of the modern state, primarily understood as a legal institution. The emergence of global economic markets, the proliferation of transnational technological systems, and advances in medical sciences all seem to be outstripping the juridical power of nations to govern the relationships between peoples. As a result, citizens are beginning to suspect that the states that are supposed to protect their rights as members of a legal community no longer have the power to do so, because individuals and corporations now have the ability to circumvent the normal procedures by which this power is constituted in order to claim it for themselves. This leads both Habermas and Ratzinger to search for supplemental resources that can buttress the legitimacy of civil law. Thus, as Habermas writes, both he and Ratzinger remain committed to the premise that “a ‘constituted’ (not merely a constitutionally tamed) state authority is governed in its innermost core by the rule of law, so that political power is totally permeated by the law” (Habermas and Ratzinger, 2006: 26, emphasis mine).

Having affirmed this as a starting premise that he shares with Ratzinger, Habermas sets out in search of those “political virtues” that citizens possess insofar as they are “embedded in a civil society” and are “nourished by springs that well forth spontaneously—springs that one may term prepolitical” (Habermas and Ratzinger, 2006: 30--31). Here, Habermas seems to be invoking his earlier Theory of Communicative Action (1987), which suggested that religious communities in particular offered paradigms for the lifeworld of autonomous and dynamic discursive practices that animates coercive democratic political institutions. However, in his more recent work on both the nature of democratic legitimacy and public religion, Habermas has expressed concerns that a lifeworld that has not already been disciplined by the norms of these modern institutions might devolve into a dangerous cacophony of local perspectives (Habermas, 1985: 9; 1987: 43–112; 1990). For this reason, he has claimed that the “Hegelian learning processes” that made the modern nation-state possible give us confidence that the appropriate lifeworld can be “reproduced even without subjects” (Habermas and Ratzinger, 2006: 44; Habermas, 1990: 149). And, in the case of religion, he has gone so far as to say that “at best, philosophy circumscribes the opaque core of religious experience,” which remains “profoundly alien to discursive thought” (Habermas, 2008: 143). Thus, it remains difficult to see how any personal virtues that Habermas’s religious interlocutors might put forward could be granted any “spontaneity,” given the fact that their communicative potential—and, thus their real power—must first pass through the disciplinary procedures of modern secular political discourse.

Nevertheless, the place where Habermas locates the proper exercise of this virtuous agency is in the practice of “a self-critical ‘politics of memory.’ ” This is the kind of postcolonial politics practiced by Chatterjee’s Bankim, and thus, he would no doubt have been gratified to hear Habermas say that it is “no longer something exceptional, but is found in many other countries, too” (Habermas and Ratzinger, 2006: 33). Habermas calls for much the same genealogical history in service to national law that Chatterjee described as the means by which the emergent nationalist elite is able to assert itself over its colonizers. Now, however, what was once seen as a potential competitor to the enlightened discourse of Western history is being hailed by Habermas, one of the Enlightenment’s “cultured defenders,” as the means by which “shared patriotism linked to the constitution can be formed and can renew itself […] in the political sphere” (Habermas and Ratzinger, 2006: 33; Habermas, 2010b). Thus, the unfinished project to produce what Kant once called a “universal history with a cosmopolitan aim” finds itself in the ironic position of having to construct the kind of parochial genealogy that enlightenment was supposed to have overcome in order to compete with those that the Enlightenment has spawned (Kant, 2007: 107--120).

It is the Enlightenment itself that needs a kind of legitimating history, and it is this history that Habermas calls “postsecular.” Just as the genealogical nationalisms that Chatterjee describes begin by positing a golden age in which the seeds of the present legal order lay in potentia, Habermas, following Jaspers, posits an “axial age” in which “the mutual compenetration of Christianity and Greek metaphysics not only produced the intellectual form of theological dogmatics and a Hellenization of Christianity,” but “it also promoted the assimilation by philosophy of genuinely Christian ideas” (Habermas and Ratzinger, 2006: 44; Jaspers, 2014). This is the period of original harmony, during which the authentic consciousness of modern enlightenment grew out of the soil of popular myth. Then there was the narrative break during which the myth of Christian dogma went to war against the emergence of its true rational essence, and in turn, this rationalism went to war with its religious ancestors. On this account, medieval Christianity and early modern secularism belong to the same dark period of conflict during which modern postsecular consciousness had yet to fulfill the promise of immanent transcendence through civil law (Habermas 2002: 147--167; 2003a: 101--115). Now, under the jurisdiction of this law, Habermas claims that we have constructed the measure by which to judge the contributions of both “religious” and “secular” citizens (Habermas 2008: 114–148). This is to say that we are united in “the complementary learning process” that has contributed to the philosophical evolution of the present order of which “we” are a product (Habermas and Ratzinger, 2006: 47; cf. 1998: 3–46; 2003b: 175–212).

At this point, it should be clear that even before Ratzinger comes on the scene, the “religious” has already been appropriated as part of the logic of a postcolonial history, which in this case finds the colonial discourse of enlightenment turning back upon itself. In Chatterjee, we see an insufficiently determined colonized people engage in the project of positivist historiography in order to give themselves the kind of genetic identity that can compete with and ultimately beat the “enlightened” colonizer at his own game. In Habermas, an increasingly insecure and under-determined “enlightened” people trade one genealogy that has become increasingly difficult to substantiate, that is, secularism, for another that can incorporate the return of certain ancestral “worldviews” seeking to take advantage of its present “crises” of identity. Thus, the valences of the postcolonial dialectic repeat within the genealogy of the postsecular, and the colonizer is forced to colonize himself.

Turning now to Ratzinger’s response, he begins by affirming Habermas’s starting premise that the task for the “religious” and the “secular” alike is to “build up a common structure that tames power and imposes a legally responsible order on the exercise of power” (Habermas and Ratzinger, 2006: 55). He then goes on to strengthen this claim by saying that the very task of politics is to “apply the criterion of law to power,” recognizing that “freedom without law is anarchy and, hence, the destruction of freedom” (Habermas and Ratzinger, 2006: 58). Here, one might be tempted to assume that by “law” Ratzinger has in mind the theological tradition of “natural law,” which, like dharma, determines human action intrinsically, such that its positive content can only be discerned within immanent processes of rational disputation and practical negotiation, not as an extrinsic measure given to discipline and judge these processes (for such an account, see McCabe, 2003). This is to say that “natural law,” at least from the perspective of finite human understanding, remains, like dharma, hidden in the “ineffability […] of the divine will” (Chatterjee, 1993: 88--89) For his part, however, Ratzinger clearly takes “law” to mean procedural civil law, agreeing that the problem for “our” postsecular modernity is to find ways to supplement “the instruments whereby a democratic will is formed in society, since all collaborate in the genesis of the law” (Habermas and Ratzinger, 2006: 59). Thus, the “law” is not to be discerned as the telos “hidden” within the messy practice of political deliberation toward which it is ordered, but it is to be affirmed as that which has already been democratically constituted.

By engaging in a politics merely aimed at the legitimation of and participation in this-worldly juridical structures, Ratzinger explicitly places himself on the side of Habermas’s enlightenment against his “fundamentalist” religious counterparts. He suggests that they have failed to fully recognize the need to convert their internal convictions into explicit procedures of legitimation, and he reiterated this position once he became pope in his controversial “Regensburg Address,” in which he seemed to claim that “Muslim teaching” concerning the divine was insufficiently available to rational critique and inherently prone to violence (Benedict, 2006). In a similar vein, MacIntyre’s defense of the rationality of traditions against what he considers the false universalism of liberal individualism is confined to those traditions that have reached a certain “point of development,” which is understood on the model of modern scientific paradigms to be judged based on the “adequacy or inadequacy in their responses to epistemological crises” (MacIntyre, 1988: 358, 366). For all their apparent antipathy toward the present order, then, both Ratzinger and MacIntyre still take advantage of its basic forensic criteria in separating their “rational tradition” from those others that fail this test.

This is why, even though Ratzinger explicitly names the concept of “dharma” as akin to the Catholic notion of “natural law,” he is not able to recognize it as belonging to the same logic of history (Habermas and Ratzinger, 2006: 72). Given the juridical frame that he and Habermas agree belongs to the “exceptional development” of secularization, it is no longer possible (if indeed it ever was) to seek the “rational or ethical or religious formula that would embrace the whole world and unite all persons” (Habermas and Ratzinger, 2006: 76). The Western notion of politics as power tamed by law cannot be allowed to devolve back into the informal and unpredictable political negotiations that took place prior to the establishment of modern juridical institutions. The only hope is to recover those Christian discourses that contributed to the formation of the procedurally defined state in order to reinvigorate important legal concepts like “human rights” (Habermas and Ratzinger, 2006: 71; cf. Habermas, 2003a). Outside of this genealogy, however, the common telos that could serve as the intrinsic basis for the rational hope that cross-cultural politics could resolve into a kind of “world ethos,” Ratzinger says, “does not exist” (Habermas and Ratzinger, 2006: 76; cf. Habermas, 1996: 222--237). ²

This constitutes a radical renunciation of the precolonial belief in an ineffable teleology within history that is given to human persons qua human, which belongs to both the “natural law” and the dharma traditions. This renunciation makes it possible for Habermas and Ratzinger, as members of a certain representative elite, to claim proprietary access to the determinate will, whether “secular” or “sacred,” that governs history. Instead of standing back and taking stock of the narrative of history as the dramatic unfolding of political negotiations that give some witness to an intrinsic hidden order, Ratzinger takes his place alongside Habermas as presiding over this history and constructing a genealogy of the present legal order for which he sees no viable alternative. Thus, the postsecular relevance of Christianity belongs to the logic of self-colonization, whereby the indeterminate law within political history is made explicit in the historical genealogy that recreates it as the civil law separating the crass political negotiations of the common people from the refined and righteous political actions of their proper representatives.

After Law?

Ashis Nandy has suggested one way out of the dilemma of self-colonization involved in articulating the continued relevance of religious belief and practice in a political situation, like the postsecular, that seems always already to have appropriated these utterances as identities to be further integrated into the representative procedures of the status quo legal regime. He has argued that the supposedly democratic legislative procedures of modern politics are actually grounded in the exercise of violence over which the state claims a monopoly (Nandy, 1995; cf. Schmitt, 2006; Benjamin, 1978; Derrida, 2002). This is to say that laws are not legitimated by the common will of the many who vote to ratify them, but by the sovereign will of the few who act to enforce them. As an alternative to this, he espouses the renewal of a “religious tolerance that is encoded in the everyday life associated with the different faiths” (Bhargava, 1998: 337). This prelegal tradition of popular toleration, Nandy argues, has been obscured by the pressures of modernity, forcing “religion-as-faith” to be reconfigured as “religion-as-ideology” for the purposes of advancing a set of well-defined political interests as opposed to preserving a “way of life” that is “definitionally non-monolithic and operationally plural” (Bhargava, 1998: 322).

For Chatterjee, however, this view of “religion-as-faith” betrays a naïve belief in a pure space that is immune from the historical facts of modern governmentality, which requires that one resist the excesses of statist intolerance with an equally political notion of religious tolerance. This is to recognize that the self-consciousness of individuals has evolved such that those within religious traditions have, for better or worse, come to expect to have their interests represented as citizens who also have a standing within “modern state institutions as they now exist” (Chatterjee, 2010: 231 n. 34, 206 n. 2; cf. Needham and Rajan, 2007: 182--187; Black et al., 2014: 149--170). Such are what Chatterjee has called the “contradictions of secularism” (Chatterjee, 2004: 113--130). While, on the one hand, it is clear that the state imposition of secularism at the legal level is counterproductive insofar as it forces citizens to strip themselves of communal identities that they see as essential to who they are; on the other hand, Nandy’s rejection of secularism in favor of the recognition of various communitarian orthodoxies would also seem to undermine the creation of a truly democratic order by subordinating individuals to the local hierarchies that claim to represent them (Needham and Rajan, 2007: 107--117).

For example, Chatterjee points to debates among Muslims in West Bengal concerning the modernization of madrasahs, quoting Mainul Hasan, who summarizes the positions as follows:

No Muslim could claim that modern education was not necessary. On the other hand, everyone was agreed that private madrasahs did not provide modern education. Why then should not the government come forward to start modern madrasahs that were not ‘factories for producing mullahs’? The Muslim community should not only support this policy but also actively contribute, even financially, to the setting up of madrasahs that offer modern education (Chatterjee, 2004: 125; Hasan 2002).

Here we can see that the concerns of persons within a particular religious community are not separable from their political interest in participating and thriving as members of modern institutions, but they still seek to interact with this regime on their own terms, inviting the state to partner with them in the negotiated implementation of necessary reforms.

The problem with the kind of position taken by Nandy is that this analysis only considers “civil society,” which is the realm governed by homogenizing legal procedures that do, indeed, often fail to protect the interests of the individuals that they claim to represent. The alternative to this, however, is not some imaginary prepolitical sphere that is immune from the exigencies of civil law. Rather, Chatterjee argues that there is a realm of “political society” that extends across the formal divide between the structures of governmental imposition and the internal dynamics of communitarian belief and practice. This shared political society, Chatterjee claims, is the realm in which populations pursue with no small amount of fear and trembling the promise of modern democracy that all persons can prosper as global citizens without renouncing the local relationships, like family, that give this prosperity its substance and telos (Chatterjee, 2010: 164--177; cf. the feminist critiques of Habermas collected in Meehan, 1995).

From a “secular” perspective, this means that the state’s relationship to the public cannot be, as Habermas would have it, “one of pedagogy rather than free association” (Chatterjee, 2010: 171; cf. Habermas, 2008: 114--148). Rather, it must assume that individuals form themselves into groups on the basis of a genuine rational deliberation concerning the corporate ends that they seek to accomplish vis-a-vis governmental agencies, and that they are not simply conglomerations of people who have willingly surrendered their critical capacities to a clerical elite, as Habermas’s back-handed reverence to the “opaque core” of religion would suggest. And, cutting against Nandy’s desire for a pure faith, “religious” communities must be aware of the rational political negotiations that are ongoing between and among their members and leaders, and the latter, especially, must resist the temptation to assume that their interests are coextensive with those of the least among them, always interrogating the degree to which they are working for the material and spiritual emancipation of those they represent and not, pace Ratzinger, simply using their representative status to win them a seat alongside the governing elite of civil society.

When it comes to “the problem of secularism” and “a redefinition of the concept of toleration,” Chatterjee concludes, “all I can hope for is that, faced with a potentially disastrous political impasse, some at least will prefer to err on the side of democracy” (Chatterjee, 2010: 235). Moreover, he locates the substance of this hope in the exercise of those forms of politics that might appear “deviant and distorted” under the Eurocentric gaze, but nevertheless “carry in them the potential for new democratic practices” (Chatterjee, 2011: 52). Whether considering squatters’ entitlements to live in shanties along the railway tracks in south-eastern Calcutta or the claims of the followers of the Santan Dal religious sect to sit vigil beside the dead body of their leader awaiting his immanent resurrection, Chatterjee argues that cases like these show the ways in which populations negotiate for and assert rights that can be considered legitimately “paralegal” (Chatterjee, 2004: 54f., 41f.). Furthermore, these episodes show that “the paralegal […] is not some pathological condition of retarded modernity, but rather part of the very process of the historical constitution of modernity in most of the world” (Chatterjee, 2004: 75).

As Chatterjee understands it, the deployment of the “politics of dharma” in these cases does not serve to cynically legitimate and advance the cause of a select elite seeking recognition as contributing to the expansion of formal state policy, or “nīti.” Rather, Chatterjee claims that, as “paralegal” in both their means and ends, these actors are able to inhabit a different kind of political subjectivity based on the categorical distinction between dharma and nīti, or the “rules of right conduct” and “statecraft,” which understands the organic contingency of the former to belong to a different epistemic plane than the enforced necessity of the latter (Chatterjee, 2011: 54f.). It is by maintaining such rigorous, traditional distinctions between, for example, political and civil society, dharma and nīti, natural and forensic law, and not by collapsing them into the univocity of postsecular and postcolonial juridical genealogy, that Chatterjee says we will be able to shift “from an engagement with sovereignty to a concern for the daily nitty-gritty of governmentality” (Chatterjee, 2011: 65).

This is our only hope if we are to save the practice of democracy from the pathologies of its legal colonization. By turning our attention away from the “aura of love” that must be fostered in the people for their juridical sovereign and toward an analysis of “the grey zone between legality and illegality” inhabited by most citizens, Chatterjee argues, we will once again be able to tell the histories of subjects in all of their ambiguity, seeing the once colonized for the autonomous agents that they are and always have been (Chatterjee, 2011: 49, 68). In this way, we might avoid the “deepening suspicion” that there are some who might be on the losing end of history, which motivates those self-colonizing autoimmune responses that lead to the strategic mobilization of religious fundamentalism as a positive competitor to the creeping hegemony of secularist civil law (Chatterjee, 2011: 73).

The point of political society, then, is to avoid the totalization of law, which seeks “to extend civil society to include all collective forms of social life, including tribal-communal forms” (Chatterjee, 2011: 91). “The point,” as Nivedita Menon writes, “is that any project of radical democratic transformation would have to engage and collide with the ideas, beliefs, and practices” in this “political society” that “is inhabited by many new kinds of loci of power and new elites” (Needham and Rajan, 2007: 127). Despite the claims of some MacIntyrean postsecularists to the contrary, there is nothing “radical” in seeking special exemptions from the legal structures of the state on behalf of certain self-proclaimed privileged groups who have been able to construct their own recognizably “modern” genealogy (e.g. Milbank, 1993; Milbank et al., 1999). For this self-exclusion is merely the flipside of a colonial civil society that seeks to assimilate indigenous “forms of life,” including those that it deems exceptional, as contributing to the legitimation of its own juridically constituted power. Both postures fail to open the space for a politically relevant pluralism, which is predicated on the democratic hope that the natural reason and agency of ordinary citizens is always exercised in the service of ends that may be unknown at present, while never being completely unknowable.

Conclusion

In this paper, I have sought to demonstrate that the postsecular and the postcolonial deployment of history as civil genealogy trade the ambiguous democratic potential belonging to persons as political subjects for their determinate identity as citizens within a juridically defined nation. In both its MacIntyrean “traditionalist” and Habermasian “assimilationist” formulations, the “postsecular” attempt to understand the continued relevance of politically potent forms of religious belief and practice fails to remain faithful to the ideals of the democratic project that it claims to be defending. This leaves populations vulnerable to the naïve desire for a pure society that is devoid of this sordid practice of politics, and this manifests itself in the production of genealogies promising to show precisely where things went wrong. This quest for an “archaically prelegal” prepolitical realm goes hand-in-glove with the rise of an elite class of postsecular priests, who maintain a proprietary claim over the means of distinguishing between authentic and inauthentic expressions of this noble indigenous identity. In the end, following Chatterjee, I have argued that all this only serves to distance social theorists from their original concern for those voices that have been left behind by the twin processes of secularization and modernization. If, as Habermas suggests, the “postsecular” is supposed to name a certain “awareness of what is missing” from the self-reflexive “philosophical discourse of modernity” (Habermas, 2010a; 1990), it will not do to simply rehash the same forms of historical thought. Rather, we must tell this story otherwise by starting from the perspective of those who claim to have been excluded, regardless of their status as “religious” or “secular.” Only then will we be able to say that we have given democracy a try. Only then will we have allowed the least among us to speak.