Secular Translations: Nation-State, Modern Self, and Calculative Reason by Talal Asad

Those who are familiar with Talal Asad’s works, in particular Genealogies of Religion (1993) and Formations of the Secular (2003), will not be surprised that this book too deals with “the idea of the secular” (1). In his previous works, Asad has dealt with the secular by offering genealogical critiques of the binary between the religious and the secular to show that the category “religion” is in fact a construction of the secular itself and the structures it is part of, i.e., colonialism, nation-state, and modernity at large. However, this time, while keeping and developing this line of thought, Asad approaches the issue “indirectly” in terms of translation and language, and he has a new interlocutor: Ludwig Wittgenstein, an early twentieth-century philosopher, whose writings have influenced a wide variety of thought and are currently enjoying an anthropological renaissance. This new Wittgensteinian turn in anthropology fundamentally draws upon the posthumously published work Philosophical Investigations (1953), rather than earlier Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (1921) where language is mainly discussed from a logico-metaphysical standpoint in terms of its referentiality and verifiability.