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Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech

Online ISBN:
9780823252862
Print ISBN:
9780823251681
Publisher:
Fordham University Press
Book

Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech

Talal Asad,
Talal Asad

Professor of Anthropology

CUNY Graduate Center
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Wendy Brown,
Wendy Brown

Class of 1936 First Professor of Political Science

University of California, Berkeley
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Judith Butler,
Judith Butler

Maxine Elliot Professor of Rhetoric

University of California, Berkeley
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Saba Mahmood
Saba Mahmood

Associate Professor of Anthropology

University of California, Berkeley
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Published:
9 May 2013
Online ISBN:
9780823252862
Print ISBN:
9780823251681
Publisher:
Fordham University Press

Abstract

This book interrogates settled ways of thinking about the seemingly interminable conflict between religious and secular values in our world today. What are the assumptions and resources internal to secular conceptions of critique that help or hinder our understanding of one of the most pressing conflicts of our times? Taking as its point of departure the question of whether critique belongs exclusively to forms of liberal democracy that define themselves in opposition to religion, the book considers the case of the “Danish cartoon controversy” of 2005. It offers accounts of reading, understanding, and critique for offering a way to rethink conventional oppositions between free speech and religious belief, judgment and violence, reason and prejudice, rationality and embodied life. The book, first published in 2009, has been updated for the present edition with a new Preface by the authors.

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