Free Politics of Piety: The Islamic Revival and the Feminist Subject by Saba Mahmood

of the group such that the ideologies the members inhabit
    come to be congealed in their social or class ha (see, for example, Bour.. dieu 1977, 1 990). One may argue, however, that the signifi of an em.. bodied practice is not exhausted by its ability to function as an index of social and class status or a group's ideological habitus.45 The specifi y of a bodily

    law), in virtue of which a human being, through gradual reformation of conduct and consolida� tion of his maxims, passes from a propensity to vice to its opposite. But not the slightest change of heart is necessary for this; only a change of mores. . . . However, that a human being should be� come not merely legally good, but morally good (pleasing to God) i.e. virtuous according to the in�
    telligible character [of virtue] ( virtus noumenon) and thus in need of no other incentive to recog� nize a duty except the representation of duty itself-that, so long as the foundation of the maxims of the human being remains impure, cannot be effected through gradual reform but must rather be effected through a revolution in the disposition of the human being. . . . And so a 'new man' can come about only through a kind of rebirth, as it were a new creation . . . and a change of heart"
    (Kant 1 998, 67-68 ).
    44 This does not mean that for Kant morality was purely an individual matter, guided by per. sonal preference; rather, an act was moral only insofar as it was made in accord with a univer� sally valid form of rationality. As Charles Taylor points out, Kant's moral law combines two fea. tures: everyone is obligated to act in accord with reason, and "it is an essential feature of reason that it be valid for everyone, for all rational creatures alike. That is the basis of the first form of Kant's categorical imperative: that I should act only according to a maxim which I could at the same time will as a universal law. For if I am right to will something, then everyone is right to
    will it, and it must thus be something that could be willed for everybody" (Taylor 1985b, 323 ) . 45 In Excitable Speech (1 997a), Butler praises Bourdieu's work on habitus for its sensitivity to how an individual's social and cultural location comes to be embodied in her disposition. She
    criticizes him, however, for failing to attend to the potential of the body to resist this system of
    practice is also interesting for the kind of relationship it presupposes to the act it constitutes wherein an analysis of the particular form that the body takes might transform our conceptual understanding of the act itself. Furthermore, bodily behavior does not simply stand in a relationship of meaning to self and society, but it also endows the self with certain kinds of capacities that provide the substance from which the world is acted upon.

    positive ethics
    There is another tradition of ethics, Aristotelian in inspiration, that provides a means of redressing some of the problems discussed above. Michel Foucault's later work draws upon this tradition to formulate what Claire Colebrook aptly calls a "positive conception of ethics" that extends the domain of ethics "be.. yond notions of norms, justifi tion, legitimation, and meaning to include the consideration of the practices, selves, bodies, and desires that determine ( and are codetermined by) ethics" (Colebrook 1998, 50) . Foucault's conception of positive ethics is Aristotelian in that it conceives of ethics not as an Idea, or as a set of regulatory norms, but as a set of practical activities that are germane to a certain way of life. 46 Ethics in this conception is embedded in a set of spe.. cifi practices ( what Aristotle called "practices of virtue"). It is only from the standpoint of the dispositions formed through these practices that the Kant.. ian question of moral deliberation can be posed. In this view, you ask not what a particular ethical theory means, but what it does. 47 In contrast to other con.. temporary writings on "virtue