• Nov 14, 2016 from 1:15pm to 3:15pm
  • Location: Columbia Law School
  • Latest Activity: Aug 21, 2019
Beyond the Secular State: Secularism, Empire, Hegemony
A roundtable conversation with Talal Asad, Etienne Balibar, and Mohamed Amer-Meziane
According to critiques, secularism is more exclusionary than emancipative. French secularism
(laïcité) and its current relation to Muslims is widely considered as the paradigmatic example.
But secularists often claim that such exclusions are not "really secular" and distort the truth of
secularism. Their claim is given credit by the attacks against the idea of secularization emanating
from “fundamentalist” religious discourses, some of which are violent indeed. However, seen
from outside the Eurocentric West, this defense of secularism would be more convincing if
secularists displayed a greater capacity to criticize their own tradition. This roundtable discussion will examine these questions from a genealogical, philosophical, and political
perspective.
Talal Asad is a Distinguished Professor of Anthropology at CUNY; Etienne Balibar is currently a Visiting Professor at Columbia University; and Mohamed Amer-Meziane is a Research and Teaching Fellow at Paris 1 Panthéon-Sorbonne University.
Event co-sponsored by the Columbia Maison Française, Institute for Comparative Literature and
Society, and Center for Contemporary Critical Thought at Columbia Law School.
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