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This chapter discusses Eric Santner's On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life, which contains a reading of Franz Rosenzweig's theology that characterizes religion as a disruption that withdraws mankind from the ordering of the world. Santner elaborates this idea in a way that speaks directly not only to questions of order and incongruity, but also to issues of responsibility, singularity, and secularism. As the term “psychotheology” suggests, Santner examines a region where conceptual maps clearly opposing the secular to the religious are considered insufficient and demand some form of what Rosenzweig describes as “new thinking.” This new thinking is a manner of attentiveness that guides mankind to the “midst of life.” The chapter argues that this attentiveness—which Santner develops into an “ethics of singularity” that leads to the “blessings of more life”—allows for a critical thinking about the existential thematics of responsibility found in Hent de Vries' work.

This chapter explores recent work by Agamben and Santner, key figures in the translation of Schmitt's ideas into more left-leaning articulations of political theology. It shows how the figure of the undead Muslim recurs in the various philosophers and theologians whose arguments support the claims of Agamben and Santner. It examines how contemporary messianic thinkers have unconsciously lamented as “dead neighbors” the traumatic irritants productive of the messianic pearl. It argues that in order for a messianic pearl to glow miraculously (as Agamben and Santner would wish it to), the new thinking of today needs to engage in an act of neighbor-love, whereby it embraces the untimely, undead excarnations of a history of typological damage. Otherwise, these traumatic dead neighbors remain undead and driven in the drive of critical theories of sovereignty.

In analysing ‘Sanies I’ and ‘Serena II’ meticulously, with special attention to the animal imagery, Conor Carville in this chapter links Otto Rank’s theory of the trauma of birth with Eric Santner’s recent idea of ‘creaturely life’ – the life that is exposed to biopolitical power at moments of trauma. Trauma is here considered as constitutive of the subject, not an exceptional phenomenon, and also as providing the raw material for biopolitical power. In the process of Carville’s analyses emerge hitherto uncharted networks concerning Beckett’s fixation on the trauma of birth and the contemporary biopolitical concerns with birth, reproduction and population in Ireland and Britain. Carville’s article not only provides original close readings of those difficult poems in the light of Rank but also illustrates how a highly personal unease about sexual identity caused by birth trauma can be connected to the biopolitical discourses by the use of Santner’s idea of ‘creaturely life’ that itself draws on the ideas of Benjamin, Foucault, Lacan, Agamben and other theorists.

This chapter demonstrates Stanley Cavell's claim that cultural criticism carries a new responsibility for the regeneration of the world. Placing Cavell in conversation with Eric Santner and Hent de Vries, the chapter turns to Cavell's treatment of the dynamics of human responsiveness and the relationship between the self and economies of social formation. De Vries and Santner both emphasize the necessity of understanding the self as a “singularity;” however, Cavell asserts that that one cannot be fully responsive to the other without paying attention to the concrete individualities of oneself and the other. The chapter also explores Cavell's conception of the “ordinary.” He theorizes that humans possess the resources, in their everyday interactions with others and ordinary language, to come to a new reception of experience. Cavell's commitment to the ordinary allows him to enact humanistic encounter in a way that is effective for reflecting on experience, responsibility, and responsiveness.

This chapter discusses the difficulty of fulfilling Paul's command to love the neighbor stated in Romans 13. It examines Jacob Taubes's exposition of Paul's political theology: Paul's designation of neighbor-love as the fulfillment of the law represents a radical reduction within the primordial core of the Jesus tradition. It then details the struggle of Kenneth Reinhard, Eric Santner, and Slavoj Žižek to discover resources for rethinking the biblical injunction to love the neighbor in a world where the divine throne is vacant. The chapter then sets out the book's main purpose, which is to provide an interpretation of Romans 13:8–14.

The Epilogue rethinks the theoretical, political, and ethical relevance of choreographic gesture through Eric Santner’s work on political theology and economy. Departing from Agamben’s theory of gesture, it derives gesture’s ontological status not from its pure mediality, but from its gag-like function, as physical performance that cannot be detached from its impact of impediment, of Benjaminian intermittency. The Epilogue argues that a dance studies approach is able to trace the singular appearances of gestural performance in more detailed fashion than a philosophical approach. It holds that gestural performance turns into concrete practice what Santner calls “flesh,” the diffuse symbolic substance that survives monarchic structures of power even after their actual disappearance. It suggests that the gestural imaginary participates in the modern managment of the dimension of work, which has taken over the value attached to practices of glory that used to sustain the king.

This concluding chapter explains how there is a tighter link between humanistic encounters with religion and theology: each considers that theologically altered thinking identifies and promotes what Eric Santner calls pious attention, or responsiveness, “the midst of life.” This idea is essential for two of the book's primary arguments. First, the locative approach to religion fails to give a complete explanation of religion and theology because it dismisses the possibility that religious discourse not only orients and places but also disorients and displaces. The second point asserts that certain religious discourses and practices acknowledge and form concerted attention to the flux and excess of “life.” The chapter cites Santner, Stanley Cavell, and Hent de Vries for their way of thinking with religion as they reflect on how to enrich culture and life, opening up space for new encounters with the religious worlds of others.

A traumatic theory of photography is developed in this chapter. It is established that Freud’s model of memory and trauma lie behind Walter Benjamin’s influential description of early photography as ‘seared by reality.’ A brief discussion of Roland Barthes’s Camera Lucida is followed by an account of Eric L. Santner’s On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald (2006) which is an important source for the key concept of ‘exposure’ in both its photographic and psychic senses. Felix Gonzalez-Torres and Chantal Akerman are offered as examples of artists attuned to this double sense of exposure.

This chapter aims to present philosophy as a practice of responsibility that takes from religion resources for expressing and clarifying such responsibility. Building on the works of Heidegger and Derrida, Christian apologist David Wood puts forward a version of J. Z. Smith's approach to maps and territories, stating that even as our concepts allow us to understand the world, they do so at the expense of also hiding it from us. Philosophy's responsibility consists in dealing with that which the concepts conceal. However, theorizing philosophy through religion demands thinking the study of religion in terms of the pilgrim, which is problematic since a pilgrim hesitantly approaches his object of concern and is able only to make “fleeting contact.” Citing the works of Hent de Vries, Eric Santner, and Stanley Cavell, along with religion and theology, the chapter shows what such fleeting contact might look like and how it helps in rethinking the critical enterprise.

The chapter discusses Butrus al-Bustani’s Nafır Surriya (The Clarion of Syria) pamphlets and his translation of DeFoe’s Robinson Crusoe. Throughout these pamphlets, and using Crusoe’s story as an allegory for civil society in a post-war temporality, Bustani formulated a form of liberal nationalism in defence of  the ‘true religion’ (diyana haqiqiya), Protestant in spirit and corresponding with a political economic logic that ties it to the history of capitalism. This wedding of religion and political economy is most strikingly evident in the way the concepts of guilt and debt were used to separate out a universalistic conception of religion from sectarian political identities. The political theology that underlies Bustani’s liberal logic, and which is the focus of the analysis throughout this chapter, raises the question of the nature of the rule of law in relation to violence; in other words, it exposes the fine line between law-making violence and law-preserving violence. Furthermore, Bustani’s worldview provides us with an understanding of the kinds of symbolic investiture that iterate the performative nature of rites of initiation into community in fin de siècle Beirut, ones that restrict the potentialities of politics from within a ‘psycho-theological’ framework.