In the latest issue of Public Culture, Stathis Gourgouris writes:
How one answers the question “Is Critique Secular?” determines substantially how one engages with secularism, how one comes to defend it, repudiate it, or reconceptualize it. My answer to this question is unequivocal: Yes, critique is secular, and, to go even further, if the secular imagination ceases to seek and to enact critique, it ceases to be secular.
Before I elaborate, let me reflect briefly on the two terms involved. The root term of critique, the Greek krisis, carries a rather instructive multivalence. At a primary level of meaning, it pertains to the practice of distinction and the choice involved — in other words, the decision to pronounce difference or even the decision to differ, to dispute. In this very basic sense, krisis is always a political act. In legal or philosophical usage, it is thus linked to judgment and indeed to the fact that judgment cannot be neutral (which we still see nowadays in the commonplace negative meaning of critique as rejection). In this sense, krisis, as judgment, distinguishes and exposes an injustice. As an extension of this meaning, we also find in the ancient usage the notion of outcome, of finality — again in the sense of the finality of decision.
And Saba Mahmood replies:
…it must be clear that we were not looking for a yes or no answer to our question, “Is Critique Secular?” To do so would be to foreclose thought and to fail to engage a rich set of questions, answers to which remain unclear not because of intellectual confusion or incomplete evidence but because these questions require a comparative dialogue across the putative divide between “Western” and “non-Western” traditions of critique and practice. Furthermore, such an engagement requires putting our most closely held assumptions to critical scrutiny, a task best suited, we thought, to a symposium devoted to critique itself. After all, one of the most cherished definitions of critique is the incessant subjection of all norms to unyielding critical examination. Or is it?
This exchange between Gourgouris and Mahmood first developed at The Immanent Frame, as part of an ongoing series of posts initiated in response to a symposium at UC-Berkeley, organized by Judith Butler, Saba Mahmood and Chris Nealon. Read the full exchange here, here, here and here, and in Volume 20, Number 3 of Public Culture. And don’t miss other contributions to this series at The Immanent Frame, including Talal Asad’s “Historical notes on the idea of secular criticism,” and Charles Taylor’s “Secularism and critique.”