HENT DE VRIESthe preferred object of historical and theoretical anthropology (such as myth, magic,
witchcraft, and shamanism). What results is a succinct analysis of the ‘‘epistemological
assumptions’’ and (to cite Foucault’s term) the veryepistemeof the secular (‘‘the secular
as a social ontology’’ or, more precisely, ‘‘the shifting web of concepts making up the
secular’’) in relation to ‘‘secularism as a political doctrine.’’ The emergence of the secular
in nineteenth-century liberal society is, Asad acknowledges, somewhat less elusive than
its predecessor concept, the religious. But neither religion nor the secular was ever histori-
cally, let alone ‘‘essentially,’’ a ‘‘fixed category.’’ In consequence, it will not do to ‘‘see
Christianity as being at the root either of capitalism or of the modern drive for world
domination. Nor at the root of modern intolerance, something now being attributed not
merely to Christianity but to all monotheism.’’^158 Rather, a Wittgensteinian attention to
the ‘‘grammar of concepts’’ enables one to perceive in what ways ‘‘Christian discourse is
not being played out as it was earlier.’’^159
And yet, in accordance with another Wittgensteinian insight, Asad also asks what the
forces and needs behind essentializing definitions and simple dichotomies have been and
continue to be. In his recent work, he aims at ‘‘something seemingly paradoxical—to
problematize ‘the religious’ and ‘the secular’ as clear-cut categories but also to search for
the conditions in whichthey wereclear-cut and were sustained as such. In other words,...
‘how can people make these distinctions when they aren’t sustainable?’ but also ‘what
are the conditions in which these dichotomies, these binaries,doseem to make some
sense?’ ’’^160
In Asad’s suggestive reading of the secular and of secularism, it will not do to correct
naı ̈ve views of modernization in terms of Enlightenment rationality, differentiation, and
secularization by appealing to the ‘‘myth of the state’’ in order to locate its foundation in
attachment to belief in the supernatural force of, say, sovereignty. In that respect, his
perspective differs from the projects of the older political theology (from, say, Schmitt to
Kantorowicz, as well from Benjamin to Agamben), but also from attempts to revise—and
save—at least some elements of the secularization thesis at the heart of modern sociology
(as in the work of Habermas and Casanova).
The originality of Asad’s anthropology of the secular, of his ‘‘political theology of
laı ̈cisme,’’ is that it establishes the indissoluble link between the secular and religion along
radically different lines, insisting, for example, inFormations of the Secular, on the fact
that ‘‘the word ‘myth’ that moderns have inherited from antiquity feeds into a number
of familiar oppositions—beliefandknowledge,reasonandimagination,historyandfiction,
symbolandallegory,naturalandsupranatural, sacredandprofane—binaries that pervade
modern secular discourse, especially in its polemical mode.’’^161 Yet unlike some radical
anthropologists (such as Michael Taussig), who have sought to denounce such binaries,
or unlike most critical theorists (notably the representatives of the first and second gener-
ation of the Frankfurt School), who tend to insist on their functional equivalents and
supposedly formal pragmatic transformation, Asad’s questioning is first of all genealogi-
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