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Secular moral/legal commitments revisited: an interlude by way of afterword

( 2019-04-03) Hegde, Sasheej

The effort here is to problematize the conceptual and analytical resources developed in the study of both ‘secularity’ as a normative object and the associated question of the interface of religion and law in the context of modern secularism. Working off a division and/or antinomy central to the essays that comprise this special number, I attempt to complicate the terrain of debate by setting in course a complex series of questions about the very nature and scope of a revitalized analytics of secularism. In doing so, for the most part, our reflection juxtaposes the claims of an anthropology and history of secularism with the demands of a normative order of construal given over to instituting ‘secularism’ as a foundational socio-political norm. The main contention is that this juxtaposing can change the way in which we approach the very question of secular moral/legal commitments. Built into the structure of this appraisal overall is a framework seeking to redeem the idea of normative secularity from the genealogical and diagnostic constrictions that define and frame the order of its commitments. The afterword also implicates a thought about normativity as performative, one that could re-orient our reflections about contentious socio-political norms and ideals such as secularism.