Tragic agency is constituted by the past rather than liberated from it

Evidence

It is precisely the retrospective telling of this pre-scription that serves to define his present status as a moral agent—not because it liberates him from his past but because it traces his agency to his habitus, the ability to act sanely—albeit tragically— in accordance with his experience and situation. The authority of the past is not necessarily a sign of psychopathology, as Freud the modernist taught. — Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular, 477

Categorization

• XREF: Directly complicates the modern/secular liberal premise of autonomous self-making that Cooper and the vault argue Christianity smuggles into ‘secular modernity’.
• DEEPTHINKING: Reworks Oedipus from a story about destiny vs. free will into a theory of agency as retrospective moral habituation — deserves sitting with.