The law must endlessly re-demarcate religion’s boundaries because secular life keeps shifting them.

Evidence

The space that religion may properly occupy in society has to be continually redefined by the law because the reproduction of secular life within and beyond the nation-state continually affects the discursive clarity of that space. The unceasing pursuit of the new in productive effort, aesthetic experience, and claims to knowledge, as well as the unending struggle to extend individual self-creation, undermines the stability of established boundaries. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 975

Categorization

• QUESTION: Asad says the pursuit of novelty and self-creation undermines boundaries — worth chasing how this squares with his other claims about tradition and repetition.