RAGHURAMARAJU*
Secularism and Time
[Rux Martin] Q: The classical age is pivotal in all your writings. Do you feel nostalgia for the clarity of that age or for the "visibility" of the Renaissance when everything was unified and displayed?
[Michel Foucault] A: All of this beauty of old times is an effect of and not a reason for nostalgia. I know very well that it is our own invention. But it's quite good to have this kind of nostalgia, just as it's good to have a good relationship with your own childhood if you have children. It's good thing to have nostalgia toward some periods on the condition that it's a way to have a thoughtful and positive relation to your own present. But if nostalgia is a reason to be aggressive and uncomprehending toward the present, it has to be excluded. ("Truth, Power, Self: An Interview with Michel Foucault," in Technologies of the Self: A Seminar with Michel Foucault^ eds. Luther H. Martin, et. al. The University of Massachusetts Press, Amherst, 1988. P.12)
In time, culture comes to be associated often aggressively, with the nation or the state; this differentiates 'us' from 'them', almost always with some degree of xenophobia. Culture in this sense is a source of identity, and a rather combative one at that, as we see in recent 'returns' to culture and tradition. These 'returns' accompany rigorous codes of intellectual and moral behaviour that are opposed to the permissiveness associated with such relatively liberal philosophies as multiculturalism and hybridity. In the formerly colonized world, these 'returns' have produced varieties of religious and nationalist fundamentalism. (Said, Edward, Culture & Imperialism, Vintage, London, 1993. pp.xiii-xiv)
Secularism is not only a matter concerning space, particularly the social space, but also time. It is not sufficient to treat the problem of secularism as a problem of space as it is equally a problem concerning
* Department of Philosophy, University of Hyderabad, Hyderabad.
Social Scientist, Vol. 29, Nos. 11-12, Nov.-Dec. 2000