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HENT DE VRIES

racial), engages in a direct relationship with the state,’’ which ‘‘reciprocates by playing
down the role of such identities in the political process,’’ rejecting ‘‘balkanization’’ and
‘‘identity politics,’’ but also sectarianism and communitarianism, as ‘‘incompatible with
the realization of the common good.’’^153 Jansen examines this perspective by revisiting the
historical context of the concept oflaı ̈cite ́in the conflict between secular republicans and
the Catholic Church in the French Third Republic. She recalls that republicans, in this
struggle, ‘‘required more than just a juridically defined secularity,’’ as would be provided
by the 1905 law ratifying the official separation of church and state—they ‘‘needed a
pedagogy to institutionalize a culture of Republicanism.’’ Rather than a merely formally
defined ‘‘freedom of conscience’’ and the ‘‘disestablishment’’ of religion in its public as-
pect, they sensed they had to provide a ‘‘communitarian concern for civic unity,’’ whose
aim was to ‘‘substitute democratic civil loyalty for religious and traditional allegiances,’’
and whose vehicle would be public education (p. 477).
In particular, Jansen scrutinizes the political and cultural imagery invoked in this
debate by analyzing political cartoons. She draws two important conclusions from her
consideration of this material. First, she notes that a ‘‘revolution-based conception of
history,’’ implied in its schematic antithesis of before and after, blocks our view of the
interweaving of tradition and modernity, belonging and freedom. Second, she spells out
important differences between the nineteenth-century conflict and the state’s present
dealing with a religious minority that, at least in France, ‘‘has no history of political
domination, as Catholicism did’’ (p. 480). In other words, what the older controversy
reveals is that we should not ‘‘transpose the imaginary structure of the struggle between
church and state into an abstract opposition between politics and religion, then translate
it into a concern about the role of ‘political religion’ in contemporary society’’ (p. 480).
That abstract opposition, she suggests, was already overcome theoretically by Durkheim,
but his lessons seem largely forgotten in the recent debate. Taking issue with Roy, Jansen
opts for a richer understanding of ‘‘culture’’ so as to accommodate—philosophically and
politically—the multifarious ways in which all individuals and groups (and not just immi-
grant populations) negotiate agency (or lack thereof ) in the contemporary domain.^154
Asad starts out from an anthropologist’s concern, which, he claims, consists in ‘‘try-
ing to see a particular public event—or series of interlinked events—as the articulation of
a number of organizing categories typical of a particular (in this case political) culture’’
(p. 497). In other words, what Asad presents, in his discussion of the Islamic veil affair,
is less a critical rejoinder to that debate or a juridico-political solution to the ‘‘crisis of
laı ̈cite ́’’ than a description of the implicit ‘‘grammar of concepts’’ that governs the ideolog-
ical positions taken, the affects expressed or suppressed, the pains inflicted or suffered.
This analysis amplifies a line of inquiry begun in such important studies as hisGene-
alogies of ReligionandFormations of the Secular.^155 The latter work sets itself the seemingly
simple but in fact truly daunting task of understanding the concept, the existential forms,
the practical instantiations, and the political formations of the ‘‘secular’’ and ‘‘secularism’’

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