{"id":5438,"date":"2010-04-06T15:50:46","date_gmt":"2010-04-06T19:50:46","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/?p=5438"},"modified":"2010-04-21T12:42:56","modified_gmt":"2010-04-21T16:42:56","slug":"response-to-asad-and-mahmood-22","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/2010\/04\/06\/response-to-asad-and-mahmood-22\/","title":{"rendered":"response to asad and mahmood 2\/4"},"content":{"rendered":"

Asad, Talal. Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Saba Mahmood. Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech.<\/a> <\/em>California: The Townsend Center for the Humanities University of California Berkeley, 2009.<\/p>\n

Blasphemy is viewed in secular liberal society as a constraint on free speech, but why is it contextualized exclusively in this way? Is it that the normative question of whether or not we will censor drives from the start the way in which we conceptualize the phenomenon? If we were to conceptualize the phenomenon differently, would different kinds of normative issues come to the fore?<\/p>\n

Is there an idea of the human implied by prohibitions and protections related to speech, and if so, how does this idea serve to distinguish between what is called the religious and what is called the secular?<\/p>\n

… free speech <\/strong>is produced precisely through the circumscription of the public domain and its protections and, most importantly, it is presumed to belong to a subject who exercises free speech as a right.<\/span><\/p>\n

This subject owns itself and its free speech, and it exercises speech freely as a \u201cproperty\u201d of its own personhood.\u00a0 As self-owning, the subject possesses its own personhood and exercises that personhood freely; free speech is a paradigmatic example of this self-owning subject.<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In this way, the claims to free speech are embedded in a certain ontology of the subject<\/strong>, and it is this ontology that is challenged by theological claims that assert the subject or self\u2019s dependence on or participation in a transcendent power<\/strong>. The theological claim seems, on the surface, to contest the secular ontology of the subject.<\/span><\/p>\n

And whereas Islam, according to Asad, offers no punishment for disbelief and in no way mandates belief, it opposes any efforts to coerce belief or disbelief. Belief itself is not a cognitive act, not even the \u201cproperty\u201d of a person, but part of an ongoing and embodied relation to God. So any attempt to coerce someone away from his or her belief is an effort to break a relation to a transcendence by which one is sustained. It is not, in these terms, a quarrel between beliefs or an attack on an idea, but an effort to coerce the break of a bond without which life is untenable. <\/strong>As Asad puts it,<\/p>\n

\u201cwhat matters, finally, is belonging to a particular way of life in which the person<\/strong> does not own himself<\/strong>.\u201d The outrage against the cartoons articulates an objection to \u201csomething that disrupts a living relationship.\u201d<\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The legal imaginary of liberal law, which protects free speech against blasphemy, makes the claim that the charge against the cartoons is blasphemy. This immediately makes the issue into one of whether or not free speech should be curtailed. On the other hand, to situate blasphemy \u2014or in this case, is\u0101\u2019ah, insult, injury\u2014in relation to way of life that is not based in self-ownership<\/strong>, but in an abiding and vital dispossession, changes the terms of the debate. It does not provide an immediate answer to how the question of prohibition or censorship should be legally decided, but shifts us into a mode of understanding that is not constrained by that juridical model<\/em>. In other words,<\/p>\n

to understand blasphemy as an injury to a sustaining relation is to understand that we are dealing with a different conception of subjectivity and belonging than the one implied by self-ownership. (I am tempted to say that this mode of subjectivity functions as a critique of self-ownership within secular hegemony.) <\/span><\/p><\/blockquote>\n

The public outcry against the cartoons is also a way of refusing and parochializing<\/strong> the specific property-driven ontology of the subject that has come to support the claim of free speech.<\/p>\n

In this case, to change the framework within which we seek to understand blasphemy makes it possible to see that what is at stake is not so much a question of whether speech should be free or prohibited as a way of conceiving a mode of living outside of selfidentity and self-ownership. The cartoons are injurious not only because they fail to understand this way of life but also because they deploy the iconography of Muhammad to direct the viewer toward a repudiation of that way of life.<\/p>\n

To claim that someone or anyone can \u201cown\u201d the image is to seek recourse to a framework of property that is implicitly criticized by the living relation to the icon.<\/p>\n

So the critical question that emerges is whether ways of life that are based on dispossession in transcendence (and implicit critique of self-ownership) are legible and worthy of respect. It is then less a legal question than a broader question of the conditions of cohabitation for peoples whose fundamental conceptions of subjective life divide between those that accept established secular grounds and those at odds with secular presumptions of self-coincidence and property.<\/span><\/p>\n

It would seem that we are being asked to understand this battle as one between, on the one hand, a presumptively secular framework tied to an ontology of the subject as self-owned and, on the other hand, a nonsecular framework that offers an ontology of the subject as dispossessed in transcendence. This explanation, however, asks us to assume that there is a certain generalized secular ontology of the subject<\/strong>, and that secularization has effectively succeeded in establishing that ontology within the parameters of law and politics. I have questions about whether the secular and secularization are as monolithic as this, but I will defer them in order to follow through with this argument. For if we accept that secularization is the way that religious traditions \u201clive on\u201d within postreligious domains, then we are not really talking about two different frameworks, secularism versus religion<\/strong>, but two forms of religious understanding, intertwined with one another in various modes of avowal and disavowal. Indeed, the binary framework crumbles further when we consider modes of secular criticism that take place in religious contexts (for example, the discourse ofthe current pope) as well as modes of religious reasoning that recur within secularism (for example, Protestant commitments to the distinction between public and private life that have become essential to modern liberalism).<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Asad, Talal. Wendy Brown, Judith Butler, Saba Mahmood. Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech. California: The Townsend Center for the Humanities University of California Berkeley, 2009. Blasphemy is viewed in secular liberal society as a constraint on free speech, but why is it contextualized exclusively in this way? Is it that the normative … Continue reading “response to asad and mahmood 2\/4”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[78,120,15],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5438","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-butler","category-frames","category-subjectivity"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5438","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5438"}],"version-history":[{"count":9,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5438\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5538,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5438\/revisions\/5538"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5438"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5438"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.terada.ca\/discourse\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5438"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}