Saba MahmoodThinkers

Agency is a capacity for action that historically specific relations of subordination enable and create.

Agency is the capacity to realize one's own interests against the weight of tradition.

Agentival capacity is concerned not just with resisting norms, but also with the multiple ways in which one inhabits norms such that what appears to be docility may actually be a form of agency.

Docile agency is on our radar. Try again later or consider contributing!

Ethics is practices, techniques, and discourses through which a subject transforms herself in order to achieve a particular state of being, happiness or truth.

Moral injury is an offense against one's affect and habitus. It is not just metaphorical or psychological... it is a social fact. In secular idiom, however, this moral injury is rendered unintelligible making for an incommensurable divide.

Negative freedom is 'the absence of restraints of various kinds on one's ability to act' (defined against positive freedom which is 'the capacity for self-mastery and self-government').

Negative freedom is the absence of restraints of various kinds on one's ability to act as one wants.

Positive freedom is the capacity for self-mastery and self-government.

Religion is a protestant invention.

A Social formation is always vulnerable to fail because it is reproduced through the uncertainty inherent in the reenactment of norms.

The Subject is formed not as a private space of self-cultivation but as an effect of power set to work through sets of moral codes.