Full Description
For more than three decades, Talal Asad has been engaged in a distinctive critical exploration of the conceptual assumptions that govern the West's knowledges—especially its disciplinary and disciplining knowledges—of the non-Western world. The essays that make up this volume treat diverse aspects of this remarkable body of work. Among them: the relationship between colonial power and academic knowledge; the historical shifts giving shape to the complexly interrelated categories of the secular and the religious, and the significance of these shifts in the emergence of modern Europe; and aspects of human embodiment, including some of the various ways that pain, emotion, embodied aptitude, and the senses connect with and structure cultural practices. While the specific themes and arguments addressed by the individual contributors range widely, the essays cohere in a shared orientation of both critical engagement and productive extension. Note that this is not a festschrift, nor a celebratory farewell, but a series of engagements with a thinker whose work is in full spate and deserves to be far better known and understood.
Contents
@fmct:Contents @toc2:1 Introduction: The Anthropological Skepticism of Talal Asad @tocca:David Scott and Charles Hirschkind 000 @toc2:2 Secularization Revisited: A Reply to Talal Asad @tocca:Jose Casanova 000 @toc2:3 What is an "Authorizing Discourse"? @tocca:Steven C. Caton 000 @toc2:4 Fasting for Laden: The Politics of Secularization in Contemporary India @tocca:Partha Chatterjee 000 @toc2:5 Europe: A Minor Tradition @tocca:William E. Connolly 000 @toc2:6 Secularism and the Argument from Nature @tocca:Veena Das 000 @toc2:7 On General and Divine Economy: Talal Asad's Genealogy of the Secular and Emmanuel Levinas's Critique of Capitalism, Colonialism, and Money @tocca:Hent de Vries 000 @toc2:8 The Tragic Sensibility of Talal Asad @tocca:David Scott 000 @toc2:9 The Grammar of Redemption @tocca:George Shulman 000 @toc2:10 Subjects and Agents in the history of Imperialism and Resistance @tocca:Jon E. Wilson 000 @toc2:11 Responses @tocca:Talal Asad 000 @toc4:Appendix: The Trouble of Thinking: An Interview with Talal Asad @tocca:David Scott 000 @toc4:Talal Asad: A Bibliography @tocca:Zainab Saleh 000 @toc4:Notes 000 Contributors 000 Index 000
