Insulting Religion

Penal Secularism and the Government of Feeling

Bibliographic Data

ID8203786
AuthorsJ Barton Scott (corresponding author)
Year2023
Volume91
Issue1
Pages35-50
Publication date2023-12-11
Peer ReviewedYes
Open AccessYes
TypeARTICLE
VenueJournal of the American Academy of Religion (JOURNAL)
Journal identifiersISSN: 0002-7189 • E-ISSN: 1477-4585
PublisherOxford University Press (PUBLISHER • GB)
DOI10.1093/jaarel/lfad036
OpenAlexW4388603626
LanguageEN
References cited40

This article revisits the Indian Penal Code’s restrictions on religious offense, especially Section 295A, with particular attention to nineteenth-century debates about secularizing the English common law of blasphemy. Building on scholarship that takes the histories of British and Indian secularisms as constitutively intertwined, I suggest that these entangled legal secularisms are best studied within a single analytic frame. I further suggest that this colonial secularism was, among other things, an affective apparatus. It linked the modern state to questions of sentiment or feeling, implicitly defining “religious feeling” as a species of affect with an intrinsic link to populational violence. Although colonial law ostensibly sought to reduce such violence, it instead had a more complex and perverse set of effects. Section 295A and its cousins turned law into a relay point for the circulation of affect, a mechanism for the transmission of populational pain

Affect (linguistics) · Colonialism · Epistemology · Feeling · Government (linguistics) · Political science · Politics · Scholarship · Secularism · Sociology · State (computer science) · Subjectivity · American Constitutional Law and Politics · Colonialism, slavery, and trade · History · Law · Philosophy · Vietnamese History and Culture Studies

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