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TALAL ASAD

to me uniquely embedded in a political struggle over two idealized models of France’s
future, a division that cuts across left and right parties: a highly centralized and controlling
state versus a decentralized and minimalist one, in both of which the need to exercise
sovereignty seems to be taken for granted. This struggle has somehow come to be linked
to the state’s principled definition of religion and its ‘‘public’’ limits in the interest of
creating ‘‘a community of sentiment.’’
At any rate, in my view it is wrong to see secularism primarily as the modern formula
for toleration (enduring a difference that strikes one as intolerable). There are obviously
rigid secular societies and relaxed religious ones. Besides, the idea of tolerating differ-
ence—itself a complicated idea, ranging as it does from indifference to endurance—
predates the modern political doctrine of toleration. Secularism has to do with particular
structures of freedom and sensibilities within the differentiated modern nation-state. It
has to do with conceptualizing and dealing with sufferings that appear to negate or dis-
courage those freedoms and sensibilities—and therefore it has to do with agency directed
at eliminating sufferings that conflict with them. In that sense secular agency is confronted
with having to changea particular distribution of pain, and while in that capacity it tries
to curb the inhuman excesses of what it identifies as ‘‘religion,’’ it allows other cruelties
that can be justified by a secular calculus of social utility and a secular dream of happiness.
It replaces patterns of premodern pain and punishment with those that are peculiarly its
own.
Here are some familiar examples (I leave aside Stalinist and Nazi atrocities): the
deliberate destruction of civilian populations in the Allied bombing of German and Japa-
nese cities during World War II, the ruthless American prison system, the treatment of
non-European asylum-seekers by EU countries. All of these actions by liberal democracies
are based on calculations of worldly pain and gain, not on religious doctrines and pas-
sions. Anything that can be used to counter attempted subversions of the state—any
cruelty or deception—acquires justification as a political technique. In ‘‘a state of excep-
tion,’’ liberal democracies defend ‘‘the rule of law’’ not only by issuing administrative
orders to eliminate public disorder but also by the extrajudicial means of secret violence
(the inflicting of pain and death), so long as that contradiction doesn’t cause a public
scandal.^39 Deliberately inflicted suffering in modern war and government blends into the
widespread social misery produced by neo-liberal economic policies. Thus apart from the
enhanced scale of suffering due to modern techniques, the quality of human suffering is
often shaped by changed relations and ideas. People are taught that they are free and
equal and find to their anguish that they are not: encouraged to believe that they can
fulfill all their ‘‘normal’’ desires—even be desired by others—they find they cannot and
are not. The modern sufferer’s sense that pain is always worldly, or that it no longer has
any moral significance, perhaps makes it less easy to bear. Certainly, modern poverty is
experienced as more unjust—and so as more intolerable.

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