NOTES TO PAGES 293–99and those that cannot.... To illustrate: from within a political conception of justice let us suppose
we can account... for equal liberty of conscience, which takes the truths of religion off the
agenda.... But by avoiding comprehensive doctrines we try to bypass religion and philosophy’s
profoundest controversies so as to have some hope of uncovering a stable consensus’’ (John Rawls,
Political Liberalism[Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1993], 151–52).
- I first emphasized the signal importance of multidimensional pluralism to the health of a
polity inIdentity/Difference, first published in 1991 and republished with a new preface in 2002
(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press). I did not see then the effect such a process could
have on amplifying the experience of difference within faith practices. Etienne Balibar, inPolitics
and the Other Scene(London: Verso, 2002), has very insightful things to say about the political
effect of multiplying the types of minorities. - Multidimensional pluralism must be discussed in conjunction with the need to reduce the
stratification of income, education, job security, and retirement prospects. I argue elsewhere that
pluralism and the reduction of inequality set mutual conditions of possibility for each other. See
The Ethos of Pluralization(Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), chap. 3, and ‘‘Assem-
bling the Democratic Left,’’boundary 2(February 1999). - Asad comes to terms with this issue in Islam inGenealogies of Religion: Discipline and
Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam(Baltimore: The Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993).
In a very thoughtful book edited by Fabio Petito and Pavlos Hatzpoulos,Religion in International
Relations: The Return from Exile(New York: Palgrave Press, 2003), several essays explore the effects
of the Westphalian accord in privatizing religion and address this ‘‘site’’ as a potential source of
connection across faiths. It is where they both resist secularism and transcend the quest for forma-
tion of an ecumenical creed that the essays make their most promising innovations. In that respect,
the pieces by Scott Thomas, Cecelia Lynch, Carsten Bagge and Ole Waever, and Richard Falk and
Fred Dallmayr are very thoughtful. The one limit is that few, if any, of these supporters of multiple
orientations to transcendence concedes the nobility that can reside in philosophy/faiths of radical
immanence. A corrective to that omission, in a book that also explores the time in Spain when
Christianity, Judaism, and Islam coexisted uneasily, is John Docker,1492: The Poetics of Diaspora
(London: Continuum Books, 1999). - I in fact support a ‘‘double-entry orientation’’ to the universal. SeePluralism(Durham,
N.C.: Duke University Press, 2005), chap. 4. - When secularists do focus on such practices, the tendency is to define them as modes of
manipulation to be transcended by intellectual effort. My argument, however, is that practices of
rationality themselves involve disciplines and enactments that become embodied in the soft tissues
of life, so that it now becomes a more complex matter to sort out manipulation from self-
enactment.
Wendy Brown, Subjects of Tolerance: Why We Are Civilized and They Are the
Barbarians
- Mahmood Mamdani,Good Muslim / Bad Muslim: America, The Cold War, and the Roots of
Terror(New York: Pantheon, 2004), 18. - Bernard Lewis, ‘‘The Roots of Muslim Rage,’’The Atlantic(September 1990); Samuel Hun-
tington, ‘‘The Clash of Civilizations?,’’Foreign Affairs72, no. 3 (Summer 1993): 31; both cited in
Mamdani,Good Muslim / Bad Muslim, 20–21. - Liberalism is used here in the classic sense: it is the distinctly Western body of modern
political theory and practices built on the assumption of the ontologically a priori nature of the
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