Devotion to Critique

I did not know that I was “allowed” to consider critique in terms of its affective elements of “self-cultivation” — “reading, contemplation, engagement, and sociality” (Mahmood 91). Though I realize this is an impossible and problematic admission, I’ve always felt that when I engage in critique, I am/should be striving for my own objectification. I should labour to first identify my identity politics (White, straight, North American, lower-middle class, agnostic), then empty out these subjective prejudices, sensitivities and processes...really I should empty out my identity. I imagine offering myself up to some larger (secular) project, which is more about observing, through a removed posture, the politicized operations of other people's “ethics” rather than the deeply individualized ideations and experiences of “morality.” There is this perception that morality is normatively defined only in relation to religion. As a class, I believe we have already interrogated the resistance to include approaches and topics that seem religious, for fear they are not critical or, borrowing Mahmood’s term, “satirical” enough (90).

As a student, I tell myself, “see, look what you've done to contribute to the advancement of— to use the same descriptors Mahmood troubles— ‘tolerant’, ‘democratic’ and putatively secular critique (90). Really, though, my confession shows a prohibitive, normalizing and moralistic connection to my object of study: academic discourse. Like Mahmood suggests, there must be room to talk about injury and punishment, here (70). And there must be room to seek an address in “intersubjective” (89) relations between secular critique and religious dogma, particularly if both of these bodies rely on “normative” ideas of truth (90). Following from what Mahmood proposes, I think this address cannot reduce either pole to the material (religion as racial, and critique as the objectifying explanation of materials like the Danish cartoons), or the abstract (religion as non-material and non-racial, and critique as entirely intellectual).
But how would this play out? How do we prevent respective systems of belief from collapsing during collision?