Political agency cannot be grasped apart from ethical agency

Evidence

What I want to emphasize here are two interrelated points: first, that it is impossible to understand the political agency of the movement without a proper grasp of its ethical agency; and second, that to read the activities of the mosque movement primarily in terms of the resistance it has posed to the logic of secular..liberal governance and its concomitant modes of sociability ignores an entire dimension of politics that remains poorly understood and undertheorized within the literature on politics and agency. — Saba Mahmood, Politics of Piety, 253

Categorization

• ADDENDUM: Parallel to the ‘Grafting & Growth’ essay’s point that material practices (like ethical self-formation) carry infrastructural consequences beyond their stated purpose.
• XREF: connects to: Moral conscience cannot justify political editorial decisions — Christine Daigle, Jacob Golomb (eds.), Beauvoir and Sartre: The Riddle of…, 490; Political movements fail without unachievable one-on-one ethical encounters — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 2178; Ethical reading must choose between qualified agency and historical excess — Donna Landry and Gerald MacLean, The Spivak Reader: Selected Works of…, 1599 (+1 more)