Euro-American discourse about secular, liberal democracy typically relies on conceptions of time and history as progressive. It predominantly conceives modern democracy as intrinsically tied to a historical process of the “West's” secularization.Footnote 1 The West is understood as a time-space that is secular, modern, and sovereign because it is imagined as having escaped the grip and thus constraints of religion and tradition (Reference DavisDavis 2008). Despite convincing critiques, the secularization thesis and its progressive, linear, and thoroughly Eurocentric understanding of time and history undergirding this view are still alive (Reference AsadAsad 2003: 1–17; Reference Mandair, Dressler, Mandair and DresslerMandair and Dressler 2011: 19; Reference Sullivan, Yelle, Taussig-Rubbo, Fallers Sullivan, Yelle and Taussig-RubboSullivan et al. 2011: 1–8; Reference YelleYelle 2011). This story, told in many variations, asserts that the Christian West has successfully separated religion from politics, has tamed the violent potentials of Christian religion by relegating it to the private sphere, and has, thus, created the conditions for peaceful coexistence among its citizens (Reference MahmoodMahmood 2015: 7–8; Reference Mandair, Dressler, Mandair and DresslerMandair and Dressler 2011: 20). It constitutively links the discourse on modern democracy to secularism. But as critics have pointed out, Western secularism is linked to the powerful institution of the modern nation-state and the violence it legitimizes against what is perceived as religiously motivated (Islamic) terror (Reference AsadAsad 2003: 2–8).
Islamic history and time have long figured as the targets and constitutive Others in the discourse of the secularized West as a political project (Reference AnidjarAnidjar 2003; Reference BashirBashir 2014, Reference Bashir, Hom, McIntosh, McKay and Stockdale2016; Reference MahmoodMahmood 2006; Reference SaidSaid 1995; Reference SajdiSajdi 2021). Islam is considered lacking the historical process of self-transformation of an Enlightenment and a Reformation. Therefore, on this view, it cannot accommodate a progressive temporality and, consequently, neither secular political subjectivity nor democratic politics. The West alone is said to be a reasonable foundation for the political. I understand the latter as the zone of always contested attempts to establish a foundation for a community through a specific way of linking a past, a present, and a future (Reference Rancière and RoseRancière 1999). In Euro-American discourse, Islam typically figures as a ground of the political that produces only a regressive temporality. It is deemed “incapable of opening onto a future,” as a leading theorist of historicity and temporality contends (Reference Hartog and BrownHartog 2015: 3). From this perspective, Islam leads to fundamentalism, illegitimate violence, and apocalyptic futures only (Reference Mas, Mandair and DresslerMas 2011). The continuing invocation of the Islamic Other in liberal, secular discourse reveals how secularism's teleology is construed as both enabling and coercive. What is “not yet” secular, must become so to be fully modern and free because only this transition guarantees the overcoming of uncontrollable violence and religiously motivated strife, according to the liberal democratic ideology. The universalist vision of an allegedly open future horizon that the secular modern is taken to guarantee is in fact bound to a specific, naturalized teleology with coercive dimensions for all those deemed to be “not yet” part of the secular modern, Western liberal consensus, which is constantly reinscribed through such comparisons as a goal of history (Reference ChakrabartyChakrabarty 2008: 8–12; Reference MouffeMouffe 2005: 86).
Jürgen Habermas's use of the category of the secular reproduces such a teleology. He reifies the secular as a civilizational asset, even though he emphasizes the importance of cultivating a critical awareness of limits (2008: 139–140). Critiques have shown that Habermas's alleged greater, postsecular openness toward religion in fact privileges a specific, “Judeo-Christian” conception of religion (Reference Birnbaum and BirnbaumBirnbaum 2015: 190–192; Reference SheedySheedy 2009: 8–18). Building on critiques of secularism's teleology developed by scholars working in the tradition of postcolonial and critical secular studies (Reference AgramaAgrama 2012; Reference Amir-MoazamiAmir-Moazami 2022; Reference AsadAsad 2003), I argue that the way in which Habermas reifies the secular blocks the way for theorizing democracy as a temporal practice beyond secularism's Eurocentric epistemology.
My discussion of the work of the contemporary Moroccan Marxist intellectual Abdallah Laroui (b. 1933) demonstrates that democracy must be construed as self-critical work on epistemic boundaries and its exclusions, which often work through specific ways of linking pasts, presents, and futures to one another. By unpacking the basic tenets of his conception of negative universal history—one that constantly and self-reflexively historicizes conceptual foundations—I show that he construes democracy as a practice of continuously scrutinizing and de-reifying truth claims about its grounding in history.Footnote 2
The first section develops a critique of the secularizing teleology underlying Habermas's conception of translation and the hierarchies and exclusions it produces. In the second section, I demonstrate how Laroui develops a shifted understanding of the secular, the religious, and translation through the prism of his conception of dialectics and negative universal history. Unlike Habermas, Laroui puts the Islamic tradition and the West on a par as historical formations, while also recognizing historical power relations and asymmetries between them. I detail how Laroui treats the secular not as a secured ground opposed to religion as something “profoundly alien,” as Habermas puts it (2008: 143). Instead, Laroui develops a distinction between absolute and relative truth claims, a move that cuts across Habermas’ distinction between the secular and the religious. This discussion provides the backbone of my analysis of Laroui's conception of democracy as a dissensus (Reference Rancière and RoseRancière 1999). The conclusion points to how a negatively dialectical understanding of the secular helps to break up its identitarian framings and prevents its weaponization as a civilizational asset.
A Critique of Habermas's Conception of the Secular, the Religious, and Secularizing Translation
In Habermas's Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays, which was originally published in German in 2005 and translated into English in 2008 (Reference HabermasHabermas 2005, Reference Habermas2008), he presents himself as progressive because he has undergone a learning process that turned him into a postmetaphysical, secular subject. Due to this transformation, he states, he now takes a stance “against an overly narrow, secularist definition of the political role of religion within the context of a liberal political order” (Reference HabermasHabermas 2008: 123). For him, what he calls a “secularist” understanding of religion problematically views it as something of the past, not, as he advocates, of the present (Reference HabermasHabermas 2012: 10). The “serenity” of an “agnostic” political subjectivity marked as secular and postmetaphysical has left behind any “resentment,” he adds in his follow-up book (idem: 149). Whereas he characterizes this shift as politically progressive, he in fact reproduces not only the fundamental premises of secularism as a form of governance of the modern nation-state but also deep-seated Eurocentric assumptions about Western superiority.
Reasserting the Supremacy of the Secular West
In both Between Naturalism and Religion: Philosophical Essays and Nachmetaphysisches Denken II: Aufsätze und Repliken (Postmetaphysical Thought II: Essays and Rejoinders, 2012) the category of the secular figures as an epistemological space in which Western societies and its members have arrived through a long process of secularization (Reference HabermasHabermas 2008: 114). This narrative is complemented by one about the, for him and others, “unexpected” return of religion (idem: 114, 115). Addressing what he frames as the “new, hitherto unexpected political importance” of religious traditions and communities of faith” (idem: 114) since the end of the Cold War, he also registers what he views as their illegitimate “politicization across the world” (idem: 1). Based on his notion of the political as limited to the secular domain, he thereby problematically assumes that these traditions and communities were unpolitical before and did not contribute to the symbolic production of the political. From a postfoundationalist perspective, such historical formations have instead always inhabited and shaped the contested zone of the political in which different attempts at inscribing foundations of a community continuously clash with each other. Religion never disappeared. It has been transformed under the conditions of modernity and colonialism. But Habermas does not explore the way secularization has transformed and regulated “religion,” including Christianity (Reference AbeysekaraAbeysekara 2008; Reference AsadAsad 2003).
Habermas continues, using a negatively connotated epidemiological metaphor, by pointing out that “Europe alone seems to be immune” against the “revival of religious energies” (2008: 2). Yet, for him, it seems clear that “for want of alternatives, the scope for political action is henceforth restricted to the universe of scientific-technical and economic infrastructures that developed in the West” (ibid.). His text conveys the idea that this teleology of progress is beyond any doubt. This is also evidenced by his secularist admonition that non-Western cultures must replicate Western secularization and “find functional equivalents for the European innovation of the separation of church and state in responding to similar challenges” (Reference HabermasHabermas 2008: 311). “Religious consciousness” in non-Western cultures should, Habermas explains, modernize itself from within to resist—or rather, inevitably face—violent intervention from outside (ibid.). Inscribing himself into a modernization theory discourse, Habermas wants other cultures to “catch up” with the West and thus centers the latter's future past (Reference ChakrabartyChakrabarty 2008; Reference Koselleck and TribeKoselleck 2004). He contends that in “the West” secularization led to a complete separation between politics and academic knowledge production on one hand and religion on the other. He urges other “cultures” to replicate this model for action to attain the civilizational level of “the West.”
Against this background, Habermas urges both “religious” and “nonreligious” citizens to engage in a process of translation of, in the first case, their own, and, in the second case, others’ religious truths into secular truths to make the content of religion available for a public, secular, and therefore reasonable debate (Reference HabermasHabermas 2008: esp. 5–6, 130–133, 137–138, 141). He presents this as an insight of a matured, more self-reflexive postsecular society, which has become more aware of the limits of secularism and values religious experience as a potential source for public reason. For Habermas, those he identifies as lacking a subjectivity fully shaped by the secular—whom he calls “religious citizens” and “devout” subjects—must follow the teleology of secularizing translation (Reference AsadAsad 2018: 46). They must learn to embrace the narrative and practice of Western secularization to be both able and allowed to contribute to formal public debate (Reference CookeCooke 2007: 232; Reference HabermasHabermas 2008: 102, 111–112). Habermas thus ultimately denies “religious voices a place in the legislature” (Reference SheedySheedy 2009: 4).
In contrast, for Habermas, “nonreligious citizens” have already fully internalized the history of secularization. Thus, they appear as though they seamlessly inhabit the space of the secular. On this account, even if someone called upon them to further increase their self-reflexivity, this would, for Habermas, not require translation because the difference would only be a matter of degrees. Their essential identity is already taken for granted. Secular citizens can thus directly engage in public debate because their embeddedness in the secular guarantees the basic rationality of their proposals (Reference HabermasHabermas 2008: 111). Since they are perfectly embodying secularism's teleology, they can perform the “correct” form of translation of others’ religious experience into what Habermas understands as secular language. He grants only such secularized religious knowledge legitimacy within and potential benefit for the secular body politic. Habermas’ notion of fallibility—the awareness that any plan can go wrong in hindsight—does not counterbalance the foundational imbalance in his conception of the public sphere because it is precisely not meant to “relativize or leave open the truth claim” he advances (idem: 284).
Habermas's Conceptualization of the Secular as a Secure Ground
Crucially, while acknowledging some inequality by saying that the burden of translation is heavier for the religious citizen than for the nonreligious one (e.g., regarding abortion rights), Habermas yet imagines this exchange to be happening on a level field and an otherwise power-free exercise. What enables this view is his notion of the secular as the secure ground of the modern political that he considers beyond questioning (except for his call for greater self-reflexivity). Habermas construes postmetaphysical thinking as having turned “its back on strong ontological conceptions” (2008: 81) and merely bound by “those ‘unavoidable’ pragmatic presuppositions that participants in argumentation must implicitly accept once they participate in a cooperative search for the truth geared to redeeming controversial validity claims in the form of a competition for better arguments” (idem: 82). But precisely by fixing specific premises as “unavoidable” and claiming that the “secularized citizen” only carries “light metaphysical baggage” (idem: 262) he naturalizes the ground of the secular. He in fact turns the latter into a secular “certainty” beyond the scope of “unreserved discursive examination” that he associates with secular rationality (idem: 129). When he claims that his postmetaphysical stance has only a few premises, he not only conceals the fact that every form of (political) subjectivity is based on metaphysical assumptions (Reference CookeCooke 2006: 205). He also treats the latter as unproblematically universalizable. Thus, he conflates the postmetaphyscial with the secular as such (Reference CookeCooke 2007: 230–231).
He presents secular language as constituting the ground of translation (which enables the reconfiguration of religious traditions for the purpose of reasonable secular political debate) and the goal to be attained (for religious traditions and their adherents). Within the context of this discussion, Habermas never considers the fact that what he terms religious traditions and communities have historically been subjected to secularizing projects of translation within the context of European imperialism and colonialism, a process during which the form and content of and the conditions for these traditions were violently altered (Reference HussinHussin 2016). Moreover, the modern state has not only acquired the power to define the limits of “religious freedoms,” as Reference HabermasHabermas (2008: 254) himself notes and demands. The modern secular state is also in a position to define the boundaries of religion. For instance, it can declare the headscarf a merely cultural accessory or an integral element of the Islamic tradition and, in doing so, to authoritatively identify it as either secular or religious (Reference Amir-MoazamiAmir-Moazami 2022; Reference Asad, de Vries and SullivanAsad 2006).
Unpacking Habermas's Imperative for Secularizing Translation
Processes of translation have always been bound to relations of power (Reference Bachmann-Medick and Bachmann-MedickBachmann-Medick 2014; Reference BhabhaBhabha 1994; Reference Chakrabarty and DorisChakrabarty 2014; Reference Derrida, Wellbery and PlugDerrida 2004; Reference LiuLiu 2014; Reference PernauPernau 2012: 6–8; Reference SakaiSakai 2006). Habermas's imperative to become secular by translating oneself into the language of the secular modern does not offer a neutral conversation among equals either. Instead, it calls upon subjects to (re)constitute and thus translate themselves into the category of the secular modern in response to a project of state power (Reference Amir-MoazamiAmir-Moazami 2022: 11–12; Reference Foucault, Martin, Gutman and HuttonFoucault 1988). Habermas's notions of translation, the secular, and the religious are aligned with the logic of the sovereign nation-state that deploys secularism as a mode of governance (Reference AsadAsad 2018). Being a key asset of “liberal democracy” in Western political discourse, the secular has assumed the function of a civilizational standard others must meet. This narrowing of the form, content, and goals of democracy to Western liberalism authorizes a story of unilinear, exclusively Western progress in relation to which other historical traditions are measured (and outlawed) (Reference ScottScott 2012). Within civilizationalist discourse, democracy becomes the property of the civilized anxiously waiting for the (Muslim) “barbarians” (Reference Mas, Mandair and DresslerMas 2011). Even though this is not what Habermas explicitly says, his view of the West as a tradition undeniably superior to others and his anxiety of the religious Other are the complementary elements of his naturalizing of the secular and the religious as myths, that is, as lying beyond history in Reference Barthes and LaversRoland Barthes’ sense (1973). Westernization as secularizing translation or death are the two options Reference HabermasHabermas (2008: 311) bluntly puts before those “Others,” as Chantal Reference MouffeMouffe (2005: 86) has noted.
For him, these “Others” are located not just elsewhere but also within his “home country.” Discussing the history of democracy in Germany, he frames the democratic state's prerogative to define religious freedoms as an instance of the defense of the constitution against the “enemies of freedom” who do not deserve “tolerance” (Reference HabermasHabermas 2008: 254–255). To make his point, he parallels the potential threat posed by religion with, first, a historical one posed by National Socialism (idem: 254). Typical of nationalist discourse, he posits a transtemporal community of Germans—“we in Germany” (ibid.)—whom he construes has having learned the correct democratic lesson from their past. Second, he points to two sets of enemies of this community in the present: “The ‘enemy of the state,’ originally a concept with religious connotations, resurfaces in the guise of the enemy of the constitution, whether in the secularized form of the political ideologist who combats the liberal state or in the figure of the fundamentalist who violently attacks the modern way of life as such” (Reference HabermasHabermas 2008: 255). Habermas thus simply subsumes all critics of the liberal state and Western liberalism under this rubric of the enemy. Further inscribing this agonistic perspective, he couples critics of the liberal state with the fuzzy figure of the “fundamentalist” that he associates with violent opposition to Western modernity as such. To deal with these enemies, political criminal law must be applied and basic rights may have to be suspended, he argues (ibid.). He does concede that “those who are suspected of being ‘enemies of the state’ may very well turn out to be radical defenders of democracy” (ibid.). The problem with this statement is that this kind of self-reflexivity does not extend, in Habermas's argument, to his conception of the secular, liberal state itself as a secure ground and as a result of the nation's moral progress that legitimizes the suspension of basic laws. His use of the concept of tolerance is a form acknowledging difference while maintaining the supremacy of that discursive framework (Reference ŽižekŽižek 2008).
Habermas draws an antagonistic picture of the relationship between the secular modern and the German liberal state, on the one hand, and their enemies, on the other. This account reveals a problematically arrested understanding of historical difference. He represents these elements as separate from one another. This conception of difference reveals the problematic premises of Habermas's notion of translation. Naoki Reference SakaiSakai (2006) has convincingly argued that the modern Western nation-state institutionalizes a notion of communication as happening between two languages, namely a national language and a foreign language, construed as spatial figures “as if the two unities were already present in actuality” (Reference SakaiSakai 2006: 74). The national politics of difference allows for mapping unto each other the hierarchized oppositions between inside and outside, the West and “the rest” (Reference HallHall 2019; Reference SakaiSakai 2006: 76), and the secular and the religious as deployed by Habermas's identity politics. Habermas construes the figure of the translator as a homogenous one fully embodying the secular modern reaching out to a religious language outside (and not constitutively related to the inside). In this way, the translator represents the insular identity of the West, the secular nation-state, and its sovereignty. Sakai points out that it is only the representation of translation that allows for construing such a notion of a self-identical “We.” For Sakai, the actual operation of translation involves discontinuity that disrupts the notion of a self-identical “We.” Habermas's notion of translation reproduces what Sakai terms the representation of translation and, thus, produces a notion of “homolingual citizenship” that “oscillates between the extreme of war and a benevolent ‘integration’ within an already constituted and bordered assemblage in dealing with the ‘other’” (Reference Mezzadra and SakaiMezzadra and Sakai 2014: 20). Habermas's model of the translator pits religious and secular citizens as well as religious and secular languages against one another. He thereby reproduces what Sakai calls homolingual address (idem: 11–15), thus fueling an imagination of cultures and languages as homogenous, countable units.
The very idea of the countability of languages corresponds to what Jacques Reference Rancière and RoseRancière (1999: 29) calls the “police regime.” As a practice of representation it is, in the French philosopher's words, a “distribution of the sensible (partage du sensible) whose principle is the absence of a void and of a supplement,” (Reference Rancière and CorcoranRancière 2010: 36) and thus the “fittingness of functions, places, and ways of being” (Reference RancièreRancière 2001). Habermas discursively frames the secular precisely in this manner. In his argument, it functions as a secure foundation of a community (“the West”). He not only treats the latter's foundation—the secular—as unproblematically available for all those he locates within it but also construes the Western secular as neatly separate from other “cultures” and “religion.” In this police regime, every part seems to have its orderly place and internal unity. The act of translation, then, never calls into question these foundational differences.
Habermas installs a depoliticizing and dehistoricizing moment in the heart of democratic practice because he naturalizes the categories and frames that ground his account of the political. It is secularism's teleology that keeps his form of “counting” intact because it treats time as empty and homogenous. This form of representing history represents its units such as the secular, the religious, and the nation as stable, discrete units traveling unchanged through time within an uninterrupted flow of history (Reference Benjamin, Eiland, Jennings and JephcottBenjamin 2003).
Habermas's opposition to what he views as a dangerous Schmittian emphasis on conflict (Reference HabermasHabermas 2012: 238–256) mirrors this tendency in his position to narrow down the legitimate realm of politics. For him, democratic politics is something that takes place only within the confines of the secular as he construes it. His conception of the secular as a sphere of an established consensus “counts” the elements of the community “as the sum of its parts (that is, of its groups and of the qualifications that each of them bear)” (Reference Rancière and CorcoranRancière 2010: 70). In contrast, democratic politics disrupts such a police regime by introducing a new way of “counting the parts of the community,” Rancière points out (2010: 36). He explains this point by contrasting the police way of counting with that of democratic politics: “there is the political way of counting” the community “as the supplement added to the sum (as the part of those who have no part, and that acts to separate the community from its parts, places, functions and qualifications)” (Reference Rancière and CorcoranRancière 2010: 70). Whereas the “police count” inscribes the notion of “distinct spheres,” politics, according to him, brings those into view as elements of a political and historical process (ibid.).
Beyond Secularizing Translation: Refiguring the Islamic Tradition as an Archive of the Political
Laroui's account of the epistemology of history, memory, and politics develops precisely such a new “counting” of the parts of the community and separates the concept of politics from the naturalized teleology Habermas ties it to. I read Laroui as showing that positing the secular as a naturalized foundation of the political is already itself part of a history of conflicts and a move within the ongoing struggles over institutionalizing a specific account of the political. Laroui helps to deconstruct Habermas's notion of a homogenous, reified space of the secular and its connection to a Eurocentric teleology (the secular as a Western, civilizational achievement to be emulated). Laroui conceptualizes political, democratic subjectivity not as a stable location within a seemingly given, homogenous time-space but as a constant recounting of the parts of the totality of history. He develops a conception of democratic subjectivity as constitutively shaped translation embedded within a negatively dialectical conception of history. By this I mean a notion of history as materially determined but open-ended and constituted through the dialectic of discontinuity and the production of continuity, universalization and particularization, as well as unification and differentiation. Accordingly, Laroui treats concepts as historically situated abstractions within a continuing tension between foundational discontinuity and the production of continuity through, for instance, the abstraction of concepts, the production of memory, and the creation of institutions (Adorno and Ziermann 2017; Reference Derrida and KamufDerrida 2012; Reference Khurana, Quadflieg, Raimondi, Rebentisch and SettonKhurana 2018; Reference LandwehrLandwehr 2016: 46–55; Reference Scott, Jenkins, Morgan and MunslowScott 2007: 25; Reference Vázquez-ArroyoVázquez-Arroyo 2008). This approach allows for a more comprehensive and critical historicization of concepts, truth claims, and ontological foundations. It renders these legible as provisional moments within this dialectical movement (Reference Laroui and CammellLaroui 1976, Reference Laroui1999, Reference Al-ʿArwīAl-ʿArwī 1997b; Reference RieckenRiecken 2016, Reference Riecken2019; Reference Roussillon and El-KurdiRoussillon 2000) and not a ground secured once and for all.
Since Laroui cannot rely on such a notion of stable ground, he construes the act of translation between historical traditions such as Western modernity and Islam not as a transfer of meaning between two separate traditions but as a more complex renegotiation of their commonalities and differences. Translation, then, cannot be a mere transfer of meaning from a religious realm of intelligibility into a secular one. The “translator is internally split and multiple, devoid of a stable position. At best, they are subject in transit,” as Reference SakaiSakai (2006: 75) usefully puts it. Understanding translation in this way is to conceive of it as a “heterolingual address,” which is a situation in which one addresses oneself as a foreigner to another foreigner” (ibid.). From this perspective, the translator cannot stand in for a story of (national) homogenization.
Situating the Islamic Tradition and the Secular within the Antinomy of History
Laroui directly challenges the notion of the secular as a secure foundation of the political and modern democracy by advancing his own negatively dialectical conception of the secular and the religious (Reference LarouiLaroui 1999, Reference Laroui and Filali-Ansary2008, Reference Laroui2009). He has worked out this account by engaging with the historiography of the Islamic tradition (Reference Al-ʿArwīAl-ʿArwī 1997a, idem: 1997b , 1999). He reconceptualizes the unity of Islamic history on new terms by reconsidering what is universal and what is particular about it and re-situates it within a non-Eurocentric conception of universal history (Reference LarouiLaroui 1999: 17, 23, 28–37). This approach leads him to fundamentally question the identity of the term “Islamic historiography” (Reference RobinsonRobinson 2003) and its epistemological and political status as an “Other” of Western history and historiography.
One of Laroui's main aims is to refute the notion that the secular is simply absent in Islamic history. Such an idea has often been used to deny that Muslims can be genuine democratic subjects. However, his argument is not about excavating an equivalent to the Western modern form of the secular in Islam. Such a move would again epistemologically recenter the West. Instead, Laroui conceptualizes the secular as bound to a specific temporal dynamic that he traces to an “antinomy” (Reference LarouiLaroui 1999: quote 134, 154n9) within the concept of history itself. His point is that it is, because it is itself a product of history, governed by the never ceasing tension between the production of continuity through the creation of memory, traditions, practices, concepts on one hand, and its challenges through discontinuity, on the other (Reference Al-ʿArwīAl-ʿArwī 1997b: 387–390). For Laroui, discontinuity refers to the material history of human activity. It signals the re-occurrence of the material event (Reference LarouiLaroui 1999: 103, 118) and thus change and the ongoing existence of politics as conflict. He calls this the “worldly,” “profane,” and “secular” dimension (Reference LarouiLaroui 1999: 51).Footnote 3 In contrast, what he construes as the absolute (Reference Al-ʿArwīAl-ʿArwī 1997b: 347) and “theological” (idem: 91–110) in modes of representing history looks away and occludes these challenges to such an organic understanding of history and time. He distinguishes these modes of representing truth as either “absolute” (Reference LarouiLaroui 1999: 67) or “relative” (Reference LarouiLaroui 1999: 106):
On one hand, there is absolute truth, at one point revealed for all to man in history itself. Opposing this view there is relative truth, progressively discovered by humans for humans; facing the history of Islam as such, servant of theology, there is the opposing view of the history of Muslims, if not of all the subjects of the caliph, that opens itself toward anthropology. (Reference LarouiLaroui 1999: 125)
Laroui distinguishes between both epistemic stances as two different forms of “counting” the community—either as Muslims within the theological history of Islam or as Muslims within a conception universal history broader than the former.
But Laroui's understanding of “relative truth” is not aligned with Western secularism's teleology and its narrative of progress. Within his negative dialectics, “relative truth” refers to an always unfinished state of things in which no truth is understood as definitive. His conception of both modes of representing history resists any attempt to imagine them as homogenous languages according to the “regime of translation” (Reference SakaiSakai 2006: 71–72, 74–76). Instead, he demonstrates that these two conflicting but dialectically intertwined epistemic “stances” (Reference Al-ʿArwīAl-ʿArwī 1997a: 205–222; 1999: 21, 132–133) structure the field of Islamic history and Muslim historiography. The theological stance creates representations of continuity and coherence, the worldly one recognizes continuity and coherence but, simultaneously, foregrounds discontinuity and incoherence.
For Laroui, neither stance refers to the writers’ mental states, because that would be a positivist notion he rejects, but to a discursive logic that produces specific conceptions of time, space, truth, the subject, action, the political, and, ultimately, Islam:
Let us remember the constant antipathy between two types of formation, between two logics; and because we give that last word a larger meaning, the opposition applies as well to authors of books of history. Those who think according to ethical vision of the hadīth [i.e., the reports about the Prophet Muhammad's actions and sayings, NR] would certainly not have the same conception of continuity, time, the event, finality, etc. as those who employ the rules of reasoning of the fiqh [Arabic for jurisprudence within the Islamic tradition, literally “understanding”, NR], even if they are not jurists by profession. Each group would have its own definition of the qiyās, of analogy, of exemplarity (ʿibra), and of experience (tajriba). (Reference LarouiLaroui 1999: 38)
Laroui shows that while each epistemology can be tracked to a particular social field of origin (the science of the hadith and jurisprudence) and particular social roles (scholars of the hadith, scholars of law), neither is limited exclusively to its original field of emergence. Instead, it can be found beyond this realm, as in the works of historians and historical representation more generally. Laroui thus analyzes both epistemic stances as individual but related modes of historical totalization (Reference LarouiLaroui 1999: 67, 118), which is to say that he construes them as two forms of establishing what historian Achim Landwehr calls “chronoferences” (Reference LandwehrLandwehr 2016: 28–30, 149–165).
Neither form of establishing chronoferences can be understood in isolation from one another and confined to separate and discrete realms within the Islamic tradition or any other tradition; rather, they exist in a relationship that is antinomic—they are both true and contradict each other—and negatively dialectical (Reference Al-ʿArwīAl-ʿArwī 1997b: 399–407; 1999: esp. 12–13, 75–76, 117, 125, 134). Instead of theorizing the relationship between both stances—the privileging continuity and certainty on one hand, and the emphasis on discontinuity and relativity while acknowledging the never ceasing human production of continuity on the other—as a linear succession in which one historically supersedes or is superior to the other, Laroui foregrounds how their coexistence is determined by an unceasing tension of the aforementioned antinomy of history.
Critiquing Habermas's Secular as a Form of Memory
By revealing the existence of the secular as he construes it inside Islamic historiography and the Islamic tradition it represents, Laroui demonstrates that the Islamic tradition is not just the theological Other of the secular modern. It does not have to learn to be political in the secular modern sense by being subjected to secularizing translation. However, this is only the first half of my argument. Through the prism of Laroui's analysis, Habermas's conception of the secular as a definitive asset of the West can be interpreted as enacting the theological, absolute understanding of history, time, and truth.
Habermas's conception of the secular can be read as an attempt to interrupt the dialectic of history by placing it within the empty, homogenous time of a national community that has undergone a successful learning process. Read with Laroui, Habermas's representation of the secular is legible as a genuine historical event (Reference LarouiLaroui 1999: 108) that the German philosopher, however, renders invisible by claiming that the secular is an already, transparently given entity. I am not making the point here that Habermas is actually a theologian. Rather, his deployment of the secular follows the specific temporal form that Laroui understands as theological and that gives the epistemology of memory an absolute status.
For Laroui, the epistemology underlying a theological stance is that of human memory taken as absolute (Reference LarouiLaroui 1999: 100). Pushing his argument beyond the realm of the Islamic tradition, he points out that neither this form of totalization nor this subject position is unique to the Islamic tradition and can be taken up by any historian and any person at any point in time (idem: 13): “Searching for the absolute devalues what is transitory and temporal, that is, historical. When one places oneself within this perspective, whether being a historian or not, one adopts ipso facto the presuppositions of the theologian or the theosopher” (idem: 112). He thus reads the portrayal of the Islamic tradition of itself and the world as selfsame as an instance of collective memory and its form of temporality (idem: 100). Significantly, for Laroui, the ensuing notion of a passive representation of the (Islamic) past as in Islamic theological conceptions of the Islamic tradition and the understanding of truth as absolute in this or any other context, such as political debates, are not simply wrong but instances of memory building (Reference Laroui and CammellLaroui 1976: 73, 91, 156–159, 176). He rather locates such claims—extending the notion of “constituting” and “constituted” power often reserved for Western history (Reference Kalyvas, Bernstein, Ophir and StolerKalyvas 2018)—within the antinomic movement inside the Islamic tradition. The latter is both “constituting” and “constituted” (Reference LarouiLaroui 1999: 76). Construing this form of representing the Islamic tradition as the result of human activity, Laroui conceptualizes the Islamic tradition as an active, recursive process in time, again and again folding back upon itself and becoming its own point of reference in the discourse of those who seek to continue it. He makes clear that this folding back, or loop, must itself be understood as a historical and therefore materially situated event in its own right.
Laroui's Conception of Democracy as a Dissensus
Laroui places this continuing, open-ended, negative dialectic at the heart of democratic practice. Against the epistemological closure embodied in Habermas's account of secularizing translation Laroui provides a form of translation that resists the hierarchies and exclusions of Habermas's model. Laroui's analytic grid allows for the translation of historical constellations and claims by actors into the dialectic of relative and absolute, profane and theological understandings of history, time, and truth.
Crucially, Laroui's critique of memory and the absolute is not tied to a teleology of their redemptive overcoming. For him, their limitedness is not normative in the sense that its recognition leads to the erasure of the other epistemology. It merely signals the discontinuity of material history within which humans forever create continuity anew. To attend to the observation that the material event is the elusive foundation of any form of continuity (such as a tradition) is not to discount the latter. Whereas the theological epistemic stance, focused on continuity and coherence (as in Habermas), denies this limitedness, the worldly stance insists on the existence of incoherence within coherence and discontinuity within continuity. This latter stance thus involves acknowledging the existence of conflict and, therefore, politics. Within Laroui's negative dialectics of history, this epistemology therefore represents the logic of situated critique as an operation of analyzing and acknowledging epistemological limits. The corresponding subject position is that of a “human being that is only interested in practical truth, relative by definition, discovered by and for human beings” (Reference LarouiLaroui 1999: 117).
Laroui's negative dialectics and his critique of the absolute sustain a conception of democracy that I characterize with Rancière as dissensus, that is, as “politics” as opposed to the “police” (Reference Rancière and RoseRancière 1999, Reference Rancière and Corcoran2010). Dissensus as the mode of politics denotes a situation of conflict and a moment of “declassification” rather than a logic of overcoming understood as substitution (Reference Rancière and CorcoranRancière 2010: 205). The operation of dissensus interrupts a naturalized distribution of “functions, places, and ways of being.” (Reference RancièreRancière 2001). For Laroui, the absolute—understood as that which is decontextualized from material history—is but a moment within the open-ended dialectic of discontinuity, as the singularity of the event, and the creation of continuity, for instance, through memory, narrative, or institutions. Laroui's practice of criticism resists discursive mechanisms that remove concepts and the foundations of a community from history by representing them as stable. In this way, he places democracy as a process of historical-epistemological critique (Reference Scott, Jenkins, Morgan and MunslowScott 2007) within a negative ontology of becoming. Foundations (the secular, a constitution, the modern way of life) are only provisional articulations within a series of attempts to (re-)establish a ground of the political (Reference Bonacker, Moebius and ReckwitzBonacker 2008). The critical unpacking of foundations and their articulation does not mean, however, that they are to be construed as less real or simply fabricated. Instead, Laroui's analysis locates views that rely on such notions of foundations as stable (as the theological view of Islam or the theological view of the secular) within the dialectical movement of history. He never loses sight of the fact that they are posited within a dialectics in which the semblance of a concept's or an identity's continuity and stability is only the result of human labor invested in a representation of history and time.
For Laroui, the critique of the absolute through a negative ontology of becoming is the unstable “foundation” of democracy. The following passage in The Crisis of the Arab Intellectual, first published in English in 1976, spells it out:
In order that history may become the domain of well-defined, serious thought, it is necessary to regard becoming as the absolute. When you describe a given fact and wish to give it its true weight, you must not be at all certain of its value or that it possesses an absolute meaning or that it must be forever deprived of such a meaning; rather, you should believe that its meaning will slowly take shape, day after day, event after event, without ever attaining complete realization. All historical action is always in suspense, every sentence is under consideration. The democratic principle means that no one in society possesses political truth, that this truth will only gradually take shape through the procedures of discussion and successive elections—a process that should ideally cause truth to emerge, a truth that the body politic will be able to momentarily agree upon. This principle is at once the foundation of historicism, democracy, and modern science. Similarly, in order that there may be scientific activity, nature must be neither altogether unknowable nor susceptible to immediate knowledge by mystical illumination. This is the foundation of modern historical practice, and it is evident that no one can easily demonstrate—on the level of philosophical presuppositions—the superiority of one vision over the other. (Reference Laroui and CammellLaroui 1976: 28)
The temporality of democracy, historicism, and modern science as construed within Laroui's negative dialectics is askew to the one embodied in naturalized truths and Western secularism's teleology. His conception of democracy acknowledges the continued movement of the dialectic reversal in any conceptual form. It takes becoming as the absolute but does not tie it to a fixed teleology. Rather, as Jacques Derrida put it, democracy becomes “a future-to-come” (Reference Derrida and KamufDerrida 2012: 19, 81, 88, 212). The totality of history is not understood to be definitively captured through a particular account of it, which would lead to an abstract and formalist understanding of reality. Therefore, no conception about the relationship between past, present, and future can be detached from the dynamic of the dialectic reversal—the continuing tension between discontinuity and the human production of continuity— and therefore be taken as simply given (Reference Al-ʿArwīAl-ʿArwī 1997b: 387–88). If the democratic process must always relate pasts, presents, and futures to one another in order to construe political action, Laroui's epistemic stance consistently resists the reduction of political action to the application of a pre-established, naturalized historicity, which would negate the political subject because it simply repeats a given order of things, or, in Rancière's words, the police regime (Reference Rancière and RoseRancière 1999). For instance, the claim that a country such as Germany has drawn the correct lessons from history and thus possesses superior moral knowledge represents, just as Habermas does, establishes, in Laroui's terminology, a theological representation of history, time, and truth because it naturalizes a specific way of linking a past, a present, and a future to one another.
For this reason, Laroui also rejects the reduction of democracy to a technical proceduralism, which supposedly circumvents questions of ideals and normativity and naturalizes one way of linking past, present, and future in the imagined mere application of set rules. He identifies the realm of political action with interests as opposed to values but does not establish a technocratic understanding of political action (Reference LarouiLaroui 2005: 139–142). Equally, he does not reduce the temporal process of democracy to the formal time of scientism, which reduces the time of politics to the time of nature. Moreover, the temporality underlying his conception of democracy and historicism counters the “progressive historicism” (Reference FadelFadel 2011: 135) of the liberal Western view of history as progress in the nineteenth century, such as Hegel's conception of history, and contemporary advocates of Western empire such as Francis Reference FukuyamaFukuyama (1989). Moreover, Laroui historicizes dialectical historicism, in Giorgio Agamben's (1993: 120) words, as a “magic wand” to fathom “the secret of any possible transformation.” Where progressive historicism naturalizes the historicity of progress tied to the West and Western liberalism, the magic wand-reading of dialectical historicism asserts that the temporality of the entire analytic framework is turned absolute and made into a panacea (Reference ChoueiriChoueiri 1989); both forms of historicism represent truth as being already present, as something to be implemented. In contrast, for Laroui, the truth of democracy is marked as always deferred, not as a presence that can be grasped and presented to others to follow. However, his historicist relativization of democracy's truth is not an expression of relativism but rather an intervention into the closure of time, history, and politics.
Construing democracy as an enactment of negative dialectics and its form of temporality, Laroui systematically deconstructs epistemologies that naturalize such closures. The latter do figure in his dialectical conception of political action, but as provisional moments: The political act itself (be it a revolution or a reform) requires following a course of action previously decided upon, otherwise no planned action would be possible (Reference Laroui and Filali-AnsaryLaroui 2008: 92, 94). Democracy as critique resists reified time, which produces accounts of what is timely and untimely by authorizing a specific chronology that functions as a yardstick for all others. In this sense, democracy can be “untimely”: it is capable of “contestation and self-contestation” because it can deconstruct the very time(-line) that legitimizes specific notions of the real and the possible and invalidates others (Reference Cheah, Cheah and GuerlacCheah 2009: 80). If democracy in a postfoundationalist sense lacks, as Reference Derrida, Brault and NaasDerrida (2005: 31) puts it, “proper meaning, the very meaning of the selfsame,” Laroui's historical epistemology creates a space for such a democratic practice beyond its confinement to a proper meaning and the selfsame. For Laroui, democracy is therefore politics.
In an interview, he distinguishes between democracy and another type of action, command and administration, which sometimes passes as politics but authorizes a different understanding of time, and thus politics and political subjectivation, by fixing them within a particular historicity:
Democracy is one side, one aspect, one consequence of politics. Democracy is politics. There is no politics, in a meaningful manner, if there is no democracy, at least as a project. If there is “amr” [Arabic for instruction, dictate, imperative, NR], there is order, command, management, the administration of things and persons as things, one is far from politics. One can no longer say: order is the general concept and democracy is one of its specifications. Without democracy, there is no real order, freely consented to. (Reference Laroui, Ksikes and MoussLaroui et al. 2008: 123)
Laroui's opposition between democracy as politics, on one hand, and “management,” “command,” and “the administration of things and persons as things,” on the other, parallels and complements the distinction between politics and police developed by Reference Rancière and RoseRancière (1999; Reference Rancière and Corcoran2010). Laroui's dissensus unsettles the epistemology produced by the police regime. He frees the epistemic objects that secularism’ teleology assembles from their Eurocentric identification and reinterprets them by placing them within his conception of negative universal history. Based on his negative dialectics of the historical, he proceeds to develop a new optic, a new classification, through which those historically produced artifacts—such as concepts and traditions—can be re-described and deployed within a new historical series. Their content and form are now determined not by their place within an established historicity (such as a Eurocentric narrative of Western modernity) but within a newly articulated relationship between past, present, and a future that is open, albeit materially determined by the possibilities for action in the present. In Laroui's analysis, the Islamic tradition is no longer the religious, theological other, but rather an archive of the political and democratic practice. Therefore, Laroui's move is not only one of “declassification” but also of reclassification. For him, to practice democracy is to take up the ethical and political imperative to translate across different archives of the political constituted by specific discursive traditions. This translation involves a recounting of the elements of the community by relativizing the absolute status of naturalized truths and teleologies that constantly re-emerge in contestations over the foundations of a “We.” Laroui thus articulates a powerful critique of ethnonationalist visions of democracy (and history) that seek to install, in Rancière's words, a police regime based on a racialized counting of the community.
Conclusion
Reading Habermas with Laroui, I have argued that the German philosopher, representing a wider Western discourse on liberal, secular democracy, treats the secular as an absolute, as a homogenous, selfsame time-space that all secular citizens unproblematically inhabit and that is inherently liberating and progressive. Whereas secularism's teleology represents secular citizens as fully sovereign, “religious citizens” are, ultimately, lesser citizens, “not yet” fully capable of truly speaking the language of the secular. They and their languages even appear as potential enemies of the democratic state. Habermas's imperative for secularizing translation and his identification with the states’ prerogative to define and delimit religion are constitutively related to the discourse and the practice of Western secularism. The latter in turn has been historically tied to racializing representations of religious (Muslim, Jewish, Catholic, etc.) Others, the modern nation-state's attempts at managing difference and life-forms, and state violence in the name of security (Reference MosesMoses 2021). Habermas disregards these aspects of the history of Western secularism by reproducing its heroic and redemptive teleology of progress.
My point in critiquing secularism has not been to entirely reject or substitute it, but to make us aware of its limitations, its contradictions, and its violent effects. Laroui's theorization of the entwinement of the secular and the religious as moments within the negatively dialectical movement between the relative and the absolute helps to conceptualize the tensions inherent in debates on liberal, secular democracy. By allowing us to read Habermas's notion of the secular as embodying a theological view of time, history, and truth, Laroui's analysis gives us a language to re-assert the secular within a chronoference beyond Western secularism's teleology and a renewed form of universal history. Translation as critique is, then, not construed as a one-way import of meanings from an allegedly homogenous religious language into a secular one. Any claim, secular or religious, must be placed inside the dialectic of history. Any critique can turn into a form of memory. Laroui enables us to look beyond the memory of secularism that its teleology installs. He shows us how negative dialectics can resist the weaponization of the secular by deconstructing its representation as a civilizational asset and its use as a mechanism of exclusion.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful to the editors of this special issue, Mareike Gebhardt and Marlon Barbehön, the participants of the workshop “When is Democracy? Towards a Political Theory of Time”, and the two anonymous reviewers for their critical comments. I also want to thank Florian Zemmin, Schirin Amir-Moazami, and Natalie Rose for their feedback.
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