The Un-translatability 1 of Religion, The Un-translatability of Life: Thinking Talal Asad’s Thought Unthought in the Study of Religion

Abstract

Every scholarly attempt to define-and, by extension, theorize, interpret, and conceptualizereligion is based on the sovereign "force of decision." Such theory-decision translates religion into a symbol or category, accounting for it, separating and releasing it from what Talal Asad calls the "not so easily varied" disciplinary practices that constitute life. In this separation of "religion," life becomes a spectator (theoros) to itself. Asad's argument about the impossibility of defining religion, connected to his contention that "life is essentially itself," helps us think about the un-translatability of life. Closely paralleling Nietzsche and Heidegger's reflections on existence and memory-but largely unthought by contemporary theorists of religion-Asad's thinking about religion is a refusal to historicize life.Life is essentially itself.-Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion I will return . . . not to a new life, or a better life, or a similar life: I will return to this same, selfsame life.-Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra One ultimately inherits [experiences] only oneself.-Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra 1 I hyphenate the word "un-translatability" here to note that it is not merely separate from or opposed to translation and grants the (whatever) possibility of translation. For ease of reading, I will not hyphenate the word in the rest of the text. Similarly I do also not hyphenate the word impossibility or unavailability.

Asad and Benjamin: Chronopolitics of tragedy in the anthropology of secularism

“…Time between medieval monastics and modern Muslims is not broken into separate frontiers (of past and present), needing some difficult and qualified transition into or crossing over, authorized by some historicist sense of distance and difference between two worlds, as if such a sense were an authorized power granting prior official permission to cross such geographical-temporal barriers. (Abeysekara, 2011: 279)Opposed to this historicist procedure, disabling its disenchantment politics and its tragic poetics, Asad presumes that we live in the same time, in the same world, with all the difficulties this bears, without falling under the ’spell’ of the ‘mendacious fiction … that interpersonal, intergroup, indeed, international time is “public Time” — there to be occupied, measured, and allotted by the powers that be’ (Fabian, 2002: 144).…”

“…Time between medieval monastics and modern Muslims is not broken into separate frontiers (of past and present), needing some difficult and qualified transition into or crossing over, authorized by some historicist sense of distance and difference between two worlds, as if such a sense were an authorized power granting prior official permission to cross such geographical-temporal barriers. (Abeysekara, 2011: 279)…”