TALAL ASADbasis of which the autonomous self can make a ‘‘truly free choice’’ (moral, political, or
economic). In the real world of capitalism in which the market imposes conditions of
work and profitability and in which advertising manipulates zones of ignorance and desire
among individual consumers, the idea of ‘‘free choice’’ means a happy immersion in a
consumer culture. How far can the offspring of North African immigrants, unemployed
and stigmatized, secure inthatworld an identity ‘‘freely chosen’’ in school? French posi-
tivism seems to conceive of ‘‘free choice’’ on the basis of two quite distinct forms of the
liberal individual: the subjective version, which chooses in response to an ‘‘authentic,
distinctive core,’’ and the forensic version, according to which the citizen can choose as a
matter of ‘‘universal right.’’
Butlaı ̈cite ́has great ambitions. Like American Christianity, it aims to redeem the
world.^75 A lyrical passage entitled ‘‘Secularism: A Hope for the Twenty-first Century’’
concludes the declaration of principles by the CLR:
Secularism faces not the past but the future of mankind. Carrier of reason’s future,
it is open to the progress of thought. It wishes to be the liberator of intelligence.
Secular humanism, living force of History, addresses itself to all women and all men,
to all peoples. Rejecting all ethnocentrism and bearing emancipation for all, it attests
more than ever—in a world becoming increasingly smaller—to the permanence and
universal mission of the values of Liberty, Equality, and Fraternity. Today, secular
humanism alone can nourish and guide the march of all peoples toward knowledge,
toward a better existence and justice, toward peace and freedom.^76The philosophy of secular humanism invoked here presupposes the existence of subjects
who can find (or make?) an inner core that can be claimed to be authentic, an authentic
self that needs to be both freed and regulated by an abstract, transcendent (state) power
and by the impersonal power of the market, because each individual acquires his or her
properfreedoms only through those powers. The maintenance of ‘‘universality’’ is a func-
tion of the state, which at the same time represents and speaks to aparticularessence. But
the limits to the state’s transcendence, as well as the excess generated by its passions, both
continually undermine the clarity of its theology of signs.
Conclusion
Defenders and critics of the Islamic veil law represent it in different ways, but secularists,
whether pro or con, employ the same political language, in which they assert something
about the proper place of religion.^77 I think that in doing so most of them miss just
how certain discourses can become part of the powerful practices that cultivate particular
sensibilities essential to a particular kind of contradictory individual—one who is morally
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