Mad Kids, Good City: Counterterrorism, Mental Health, and the Resilient Muslim Subject

In his magnum opus, A Secular Age (2007), philosopher Charles Taylor argues that the process of secularization in the West has gradually and contingently replaced pre-modern "porous" selves, vulnerable to the cosmic and causal forces of an "enchanted" world, with modern "buffered" selves that assume a clear boundary between "the mind" and the outside "disenchanted" world. Rather than take Taylor's binary at face-value, this article queries which sensibilities, behaviors, and practices constitute buffered and porous selves in the current age of national security. More specifically, it examines the debates surrounding the implementation of the "Countering Violent Extremism" (CVE) program in Los Angeles, California, to probe how domestic policing apparatuses in the War on Terror construct and shape improper or racialized US Muslims as proper religious subjects. To discipline Muslim youth deemed susceptible to extremism, secular rule in the US counterterror state draws on, as well as amends, the discursive grammar of the secular to include the sensibility of resiliency, and its other, risk, from the psychiatric and psychological sciences. However, this secular sensibility has not only shaped the logics of counterterrorism, but has also come to inform pious US Muslim responses to policing interventions in their immigrant communities in LA, authorizing what they identify as the practices and virtues of a resilient Islamic subject. In this way, by exploring the intimacies between counterterrorism and the secular, and how these intimacies enable and disable certain forms of life in the current age of national security, this article argues that the styles of reasoning, values, and/or virtues belonging to distinctive traditions differentially articulate in what ways and for what purposes a proper subject must cultivate buffered and/or porous sensibilities.