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.
This chapter considers the desire built into science as a vehicle not only of important scientific achievements, but also scientific violence. What Aristotle called the “desire to know” can be linked to a history of extraordinary racialized and gendered forms of violence throughout the history of science. Today, one of the most prominent domains of scientific violence is directed at nonhuman animals, producing a profoundly one-sided multispecies epistemic machine that is aggressively enforced by its defenders.
I begin with a reflection on how the field of secularism studies has pivoted to an interest in the formation of “secular bodies”—disciplined subjects that express the secular priorities of rational sovereignty and emotional neutrality. But this professed neutrality is, I go on to show, a sham, based on an untenable split between thinking and feeling, which is disrupted by attention to the affective dimensions of scientific knowledge-production itself. The secular body, then, is actually an “emotional habitus”—a mode of playing up one set of emotional priorities (the fascination with scientific knowledge-production) at the expense of others (such as compassionate concern for science’s victims).
After briefly reviewing the history of animal testing over the past half-century, I then turn to two perspectives on the disciplinary practices that make animal experimenters as secular subjects: one a view from the outside (Lesley Sharp’s anthropological study of workers in animal laboratories) and one from the inside (John Gluck’s memoir of his own career in animal science). Science, in disavowing the emotional machinery at the heart of its project, ends up producing a multispecies epistemic regime defined by spectacular violence that is largely kept out of sight.
