Voracious secularism: emotional habitus and the desire for knowledge in animal experimentation

Abstract

ABSTRACT The conventional formula for dividing religious and secular connects religion to emotion and secularity to rationality. However, recent work in what has been called critical secularism studies has challenged this orientation. This scholarship has proposed that the line between secular and religious is blurry, and that we should expect the secular to be determined by embodied emotion just as much as religion. Postcolonial theorist Saba Mahmood calls these ‘secular affects,’ which include the affects of science. This dovetails with recent research in science and technology studies, which has suggested that science itself is driven by feelings, like excitement in the exploration of concepts and information.