Secular responsibility presupposes reversible guilt that tragic fate lacks

Evidence

The nature of this pain (punishment, repentance, discipline) is different from the one endured by Oedipus because it is rooted in the idea of responsibility, the idea that someone can be held accountable and blamable for a particular outcome. It implies that the acceptance of guilt and painful expiation opens the way back to a kind of just restoration. For Oedipus such a return does not exist. The accumulation of events is not reversible. The future is not made, but encountered and suffered. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 482

Categorization

• DEFINE: Sharpens the contrast between secular-legal ‘responsibility’ (reversible, expiatable) and tragic ‘agency’ (accumulated, irreversible), which undergirds his whole secularism critique.
• XREF: The West’s punitive restoration logic correlates with the legal-administrative culpability structures in Cooper’s account of neoliberal governance.