INTRODUCTIONby no longer reducing them to an offshoot or by-product of the Western concept of
‘‘religion,’’ while nonetheless stressing the intrinsic relationship between these phenom-
ena. Asad’s ‘‘anthropology of the secular’’—in the present essay called the ‘‘political theol-
ogy of laı ̈cisme’’—is informed by a host of historical, philosophical, empirical, and
political analyses. It studies the often-ignored complexity of the concept of the secular by
viewing it as something other than the mere successor to religion, with whose concept
and doctrinal elaborations it entertains an indirect and paradoxical relationship. Like
Detienne and Nancy, Asad asserts: ‘‘Contrary to what is popularly believed, it was not the
modern world that introduced a separation between the religious and the political. A
separation was recognized in medieval Christendom, although of course it meant some-
thing very different from what it means today’’ (p. 498). Its ‘‘complementary organizing
principles,’’ Asad continues, were those of ‘‘temporal power’’ versus ‘‘spiritual power,’’
the ‘‘body natural’’ and the ‘‘body politic,’’ which together covered—and personalized—
the whole spectrum of social and juridical relations in partly physical, partly metaphysical
terms. The modern state ‘‘transfigured’’ these pairs of principles by depersonalizing and
de-Christianizing them: ‘‘political status (a new abstraction) could be separated from
religious belonging, although that doesn’t mean it was totally unconnected with religion.
The dominance of ‘the political’ meant that ‘religion’ could be excluded from its domain
or absorbed by it.... The reading of uncontrolled religion as dangerous passion, dissident
identity, or foreign power became part of the nation-state’s performance of sovereignty’’
(p. 498). The headscarf affair dramatized this fairly recent transition: ‘‘The state’s inviola-
ble personality was expressed in and through particular images, including those signifying
the abstract individuals whom it represented and to which they in turn owed uncondi-
tional obedience. The headscarf worn by Muslim women was held to be a religious sign
conflicting with the secular personality of the French Republic’’ (p. 500).
Neither merely religious nor simply on the side of the rational and the profane, the
secular is treated as a category with a multilayered history and internal logic of its own,
one that sheds an indirect—and surprising—light on the major premises of modernity,
democracy, minority representation, and the concept of human rights, hence also on
agency, cruelty, and the like. But, here as elsewhere, Asad’s interest and method is less
hermeneutic than that of the anthropologist-grammarian. He follows Wittgenstein’s rec-
ommendation to look for ‘‘use,’’ not for ‘‘meaning,’’ steering clear of all attempts to
essentialize either ‘‘religion’’ or its supposed counterpart, ‘‘the secular,’’ and insisting in-
stead on seeing both as something ‘‘processual’’ rather than, say, a ‘‘fixed ideology’’ (even
less that of a ‘‘particular class’’).^156 In so doing, in rethinking the powers of a certain
‘‘authoritative discourse’’ that does not simply come from ‘‘outside’’ but stems at least
equally from an ‘‘inner binding,’’ as the ‘‘internal shaping of the self by the self,’’ he
circumvents the simple opposition created by ‘‘lingualism’’ and ‘‘sociologism.’’^157
In his recent writing, Asad thus propels the concepts of the secular, secularism, and
laı ̈cite ́into a privileged subject of study over and against the constructs that have formed
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