Talal Asad - Secular Translations: Nation-State, Modern Self, and Calculative Reason

SECULAR TRANSLATIONS

RUTH BENEDICT BOOK SERIES

RUTH BENEDICT BOOK SERIES

Edited by David Scott and Elizabeth A. Povinelli

Named after one of the founders of American anthropology and the Columbia Department of Anthropology, the Ruth Benedict Book Series is inspired by Benedicts passionate engagement with the critical political, aesthetic, and theoretical problems of the twentieth century but places them in the global conditions of the twenty-first. Contributions to the series explore contemporary critical thought in politics and aesthetics through a deep knowledge of the global condition in specific localities and regions. The scope of the series is capaciously theoretical and determinately international with special emphasis on settler colonial, postcolonial, and capitalist regimes. The books present crisp interventions in a multiplicity of disciplines, but are also statements whose reckoning cuts across the critical humanistic and social sciences.

SECULAR TRANSLATIONS

NATION-STATE, MODERN SELF, AND CALCULATIVE REASON

TALAL ASAD

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS New York

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

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E-ISBN 978-0-231-54859-5

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Names: Asad, Talal, author.

Title: Secular translations : nation state, modern self, and calculative reason / Talal Asad.

Description: New York : Columbia University Press, 2018. | Series: Ruth Benedict book series | Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: LCCN 2018010138 | ISBN 9780231189866 (cloth : alk. paper) | ISBN 9780231189873 (pbk. : alk. paper)

Subjects: LCSH: Secularism. | Language and languages. | Reasoning. | Secularization. | Religion and culture. | State, The.

Classification: LCC BL2747.8 .A755 2018 | DDC 306.6dc23

LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2018010138

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CONTENTS

I thank Columbia Universitys Department of Anthropology for inviting me to deliver the first Ruth Benedict lectures in April 2017. I am particularly grateful to the following friends who read and commented on part of or the whole manuscript: Hussein Agrama, Gil Anidjar, Partha Chatterjee, Abou Farman, Charles Hirschkind, Mahmood Mamdani, David Scott, John Wallach.

T his book is a slightly expanded version of the Ruth Benedict lectures I delivered to the Department of Anthropology at Columbia University in April 2017. It is an exploration, in the form of three interconnected essays, of a topic I have tried to think about for a number of years: the idea of the secular.

For me, the exploration of what language does with the subject (and not merely what the subject does with language), the attempt to discover how sentiments/concepts/attitudes articulate discourses in and about the secular and the religious in our contemporary life, has been best pursued through writing: through confronting the words one writes down, listening to them, being surprisedembarrassed or pleased. Anthropologists who encounter a very different form of life are familiar with this predicament, with trying to follow through and connect a welter of sometimes puzzling, sometimes familiar, experiences. Like ordinary life, exploration is partly a collective endeavor and its fruitfulness depends not only on interaction with the terrain but also on the knowledge of and cooperation with others. As patterns of ideas and arguments take shape (or change their shape), something that was unreachable becomes available. As with any exploration, thinking through writing means that one cannot know what lies ahead: One discovers thoughts, one doesnt create them. One isnt free in ones thinking. As an anthropologist, one can never separate oneself completely from the way of life one tries to understandeven although one pretends that this attachment is merely temporary, that as an objective scholar one can (and should) return from experience in the field as near as possible to an uninvolved point of view. But when one returns, one is often reminded of that time and place, of the possibility of another way of living and the necessity of writing about it.

Using a language, so Ludwig Wittgenstein proposed, is like playing a game, not like using a calculus. Understanding a language game is understanding a form of life. No appeal to rules guarantees that a statement has been uttered correctly, if only because it is possible to interpret and apply a rule incorrectly. To understand a way of life presupposes that one understands how its language is embedded in and articulates practices, that one can recognize a correct statement in a particular context, and that one can sometimes recognize different interpretations of that statement as obvious in a given situation. You must bear in mind, Wittgenstein wrote, that the language game is, so to speak, something unpredictable. I mean it is not based on grounds. It is not reasonable (or unreasonable). It is therelike our life.

Understanding secularism, like understanding any dominant concept of modern life, is, I think, perhaps best approached indirectly. A straight line isnt always the most useful way to explore things because it assumes not only that the endpoint is known but also that the shortest way to it from the starting point is always the best. In this book I have therefore tried to move forward in an open, speculative way, recognizing that secularism is not only an abstract principle of equality and freedom that liberal democratic states are supposed to be committed to but also a range of sensibilitiesways of feeling, thinking, talkingthat make opposites only by excluding affinities and overlaps. Perhaps the single most important sensibility is the conviction that one has a direct access to the truth. Thus, when humanists conduct funeral rituals, they do so with the notable omission of any reference to God or to life after death, but the feeling that some pre-given formality is necessary appears to them to be a truth that is not in conflict with freedom. Taking an indirect approach is being aware that the object to be reached is not fully known.

So in the first chapter I think about some of the ambiguities in what is translated as equality in liberal state and society, a term crucial to secularism as a political ideology, and I address the claim that liberal equality is an inheritance from an earlier period of Christianity by considering some ideas about translation from religion to nonreligion. In the second chapter, I take up the question of untranslatability, and I analyze some aspects of translation into what some anthropologists have called the mindful body (but which I prefer to call the sensible body), by way of tradition and ritual that actuate the thoughts, behavior, and feelings of individuals. I insist that this translation does not hinge on the distinction between a real private self and a socially evident self, and I contrast this kind of translation with translation into numbers. In the third chapter, I explore ways in which the moral/political concept of a unique, self-governing agent (the so-called essential self) generates uncertainties in reading the intentions of the real self in relation to its public presentation, and the way statistical calculation comes to be regarded as an objective translation of social reality and a rational instrument for resolving future problems and eliminating obstacles inherited from the past.