...Philip Balboni Abstract This essay works to clarify Edward Said’s writings on religion, criticism, and the secular, arguing that this clarification has serious implications not only for Said’s project of “secular criticism” but also for understanding the workings of what he called the “critical...

...Mohamad Amer Meziane Abstract This essay examines the effects of the critique of religion on the critique of capital and how the former confines the latter. It asks: What remains of the concepts of alienation or fetishism if they all stem from an anthropology of religion that seems to be criticized...

...Ananda Abeysekara Abstract Critiques of the concept of “Protestant Buddhism” claim to tell a different story about the relation between religion and modernity (“Protestantism”) in South Asia. They seek to reconstruct the temporal relation between the past and the present, contesting postcolonial...

... distributions. As a result, rather than a weapon in modernity’s endless self-justifying polemics with religion, immanence opens forth trajectories for its destitution and delegitimation. 45. Edelman, No Future , 6 . 46. Maurice Blanchot, quoted in Foucault, “The Thought from the Outside,” 152...

...Wendy Brown Copyright © 2014 Qui Parle 2014 Is Marx (Capital) Secular? wendy brown Money is the alienated ability of mankind. —Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844 Religion is only the illusory sun about which man revolves so long as he does...

...Rachel Haejin Lim A review of Beliso–De Jesús Aisha M. , Electric Santería: Racial and Sexual Assemblages of Transnational Religion ( New York : Columbia University Press , 2015 ). Cited in the text as es . Copyright © 2017 Editorial Board, Qui Parle 2017 In the United...

...,” for with it “we must refer to what does not yet exist” as well as to what no longer exists (PL, 4). Between these two vec- tors—that which is no more, and that which is not yet—conversion relates language to religion and religion to language. It is revealed as a work of translation...

...Talal Asad Copyright © 2009 Qui Parle 2009 The Idea of an Anthropology of Islam Talal Asad For three decades, Talal Asad’s work on the question of religion, and on the entanglements of this question with the sensibilities of modern life, has steadily overturned dominant...

... in The Elementary Forms of Reli- gious Life (1915), emphasizing that sacred things were set apart in such a way that they became the center of the social whole.1 For Durkheim, religion began when social groups performed rituals as a way of binding together a community; these actions produced a sense...

..., anthropology, religion and secularism studies, philosophy, and critical race theory via the figure of the network and the ever-contentious frame of belief in order to ask not only what it means to live in a networked world but also, perhaps more important, what it means to believe that we live in one...

... of Religion, the Un-translatability of Life: Thinking Talal Asad’s Thought Unthought in the Study of Religion .” Method and Theory in the Study of Religion 23 , nos. 3–4 ( 2011 ): 257 – 82 . Agamben Giorgio . The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life , translated by Kotsko Adam...

... offers Asad’s Genealogies of Religion as an example of interrogating different forms of life, countenancing historicity without resorting to historicism. 21 Importantly, it is Asad’s attentiveness to form of life (rather than a view of religion as an external form adhered to pure life...

..., to a spatial periphery, and to a nar- rative of underdevelopment. Max Weber describes “the elimina- tion of magic from the world” as the “great historic process in the development of religion” that “repudiated all magical means to salvation as superstition and sin” and culminated in the “worldly...

...- scientifi c rationality succeed in expanding our knowledge of the physical and biological world and in bringing material comfort to everyday life, moderns will remain reluctant to trade religion for science if it means giving up hope of eternal life. The Nietzschean, Freudian, and Heideggerian...

...- temporary social and cultural theory— Spinoza represents a well- spring. Even if many seventeenth- century authors refl ected on the imaginary and image- mediated nature of political relationships, particularly in the connection between politics and religion, few did so as thoroughly...

... (New York: Routledge, 2000). Thomas A. Howard, Religion and the Rise of Historicism: W M. L. de Wette, Jacob Burckhardt, and the Theological Origins of Nineteenth-Century Historical Consciousness (Cambridge: Cambridge University...

... of translation and is therefore inadequate. It is our desire for coherent and singular stories about concepts and a better future that forces us to reify such terms. Reorienting this desire, Asad contends that the crucial project is to consider how words such as modernity , religion , politics...

..., Bergson rose above his wartime jingoism in his last work, The Two Sources of Religion and Morality (1935), in which he proposed an intriguing contrast between closed societies that practice closed morality with a static religion and an open society that would practice open morality with a dynamic...

... Contributors gil anidjar is associate professor in the Department of Middle East and Asian Languages and Cultures and in the Department of Religion at Co- lumbia University. His most recent book is Semites: Race, Religion, Lit- erature (Stanford, 2008). jennifer doyle is associate...

..., and secularism and religion. His articles on these topics have appeared in many venues, including MLQ, Public Culture, Studies in Romanticism, and ELH. He is co- leader of the “Objects and Environments” seminar at the Center for Cultural Analysis, and he is the author of The Book...