A commentary on Saba Mahmood’s Religious Difference in a Secular Age, Modern’s essay delves into Mahmood’s attention to the life ways of the secular state, the decisions it makes in order to survive, and the different opinions and debates that it generates. Mahmood’s is a posthuman political critique of a self-organizing system. For rather than focus on the creativity of individuals within the secular age, Mahmood’s interest lies in the creative qualities of secularism, that is, secularism as a discursive formation that performs an amazing trick of making individuals meaningful to themselves.

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