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The Return of Political Theology

Peter Uwe Hohendahl

in Perilous Futures: On Carl Schmitt's Late Writings

The fifth chapter goes back to Schmitt’s 1922 Political Theology to frame the author’s late return to this theme. The chapter argues that this return underscores the centrality of political theology ... More

The fifth chapter goes back to Schmitt’s 1922 Political Theology to frame the author’s late return to this theme. The chapter argues that this return underscores the centrality of political theology for Schmitt’s late work in general. It means to show that Schmitt in his debate with the theologian Erik Peterson and the philosopher Hans Blumenberg in Political Theology II emphasizes the need for theological foundations. They can be found in the New Testament. As a consequence, he stresses the continued relevance of political theology.Less

Public Theology: A Feminist View of Political Subjectivity and Praxis

Rosemary P. Carbine

in Questioning the Human: Toward a Theological Anthropology for the Twenty-First Century

This chapter takes up the challenge of non-Western voices for theology’s political relevance, more specifically for elaborating a constructive feminist public theology. Rosemary P. Carbine critically ... More

This chapter takes up the challenge of non-Western voices for theology’s political relevance, more specifically for elaborating a constructive feminist public theology. Rosemary P. Carbine critically analyzes public theology’s prevailing anthropology, which often aligns itself with Euro-American modernity’s rationalist notion of humanity and its associated modes of political participation. This modern anthropology falsely naturalizes elite gendered, racial, nativist, and corporatist constructs of the human person. To offer a theo-political alternative view of public engagement and personhood, Carbine reconfigures public theology as the praxis of imagining, creating, and sustaining a community, and does so by revisiting Catholic social teaching on the Church’s public role in an eschatological and anthropological light. Feminist, womanist, and mujerista theological anthropologies propose a relational notion of the person, which Carbine weaves with Catholic social teaching into a religio-political reconceptualization of the imago Dei, beckoning us to live our full humanity in an ever more just community. Carbine argues that effective public theology should subsist in rhetorical, symbolical and prophetic practices that perform this community-creating work as exemplified by movements for social and economic justice as well as for the civil rights of immigrants.Less

“Honest Indignation Is The Voice Of God”: Blake And Political Theology

Kir Kuiken

in Imagined Sovereignties: Toward a New Political Romanticism

This chapter explores how William Blake, through his revaluation of the imagination as a form of “poetic genius,” creates an alternative political theology to the one that produced traditional ... More

This chapter explores how William Blake, through his revaluation of the imagination as a form of “poetic genius,” creates an alternative political theology to the one that produced traditional conceptions of “divine right.” Rather than make the imagination equivalent to the divine, however, Blake attempts to show how basic categories of political theology- God, Man and especially “the infinite”- rely on a notion of identity and transcendence that forgets prior more radical conceptions of the divine. Focusing on Blake's notion of an infinite that cannot be opposed to the finite, the chapter goes on to lay out the political consequences that Blake thinks will follow from a reconceived understanding of the relation between his quasi-theological conception of the infinite and a finite politics.Less

Premises and Arguments

Marinos Diamantides and Anton Schütz

in Political Theology: Demystifying the Universal

The big news on the global horizon at the end of the second decade of the 21st century concerns the promise of politics. At stake is no political promise in particular; that would barely be news — ... More

The big news on the global horizon at the end of the second decade of the 21st century concerns the promise of politics. At stake is no political promise in particular; that would barely be news — the presence of some such promise has been Western humankind's invariable self-endowment throughout modernity. The news is that the emancipatory promise proposed by political discourse sounds hollow to most. The equality of human lives appears to be at an all-time low just at the moment in which politics, the site at which such a state of things encounters objections and oppositions, has fallen into silence, but for the noise of populist fake news and regardless of the continuing enjoyment of its theatrical side. Declared king only a few centuries ago, politics, in the age of "function systems" has fallen far below the rank of others, including the economy and the media, which appear today perfectly able to outdo politics in energies, powers, deeds. Take the vast academic success of Political Theology during the past fifty years: what is at stake here, if not the disaster inflicted, first, upon religious devotion by the triumph of ‘glorious’ secular politics and secondly, by the self-inflicted disaster of the latter?Less

The Question of the Political: Back to Where You Once Belonged?

Sergey Dolgopolski

in Other Others: The Political after the Talmud

The chapter analyses how the question of the political in two currently predominant and competing schools of political thought, political theology, exemplified by Carl Schmitt, and political ... More

The chapter analyses how the question of the political in two currently predominant and competing schools of political thought, political theology, exemplified by Carl Schmitt, and political ontology, exemplified by Jacques Rancière. The notion of the other others comes front and centre in this analysis. In political ontology, the concept of the political is predicated on an ability of a politician, a lawyer, or an artist to employ the philosophical, and in modern terms, “ontological” distinction between what is the case in each case and what seems to be the case in each case. In political theology, it is no longer “being” as opposed to “seeming”, but rather an ability to represent as radically distinct from any particular content conveyed. The chapter further traces foundations of both political theology and political ontology in Kant’s transcendentalism -- in particular in the necessity by which transcendentalism denies “positive law,” which Christianity traditionally ascribed to the Jews. The balance of the chapter shows how, however mutually exclusive, both political theology and political ontology remain intersubjective in their scope and thereby both efface and help notice what, in the following chapters will emerge on the pages of the Talmud as interpersonal rather than intersubjective dimension of the political.Less

The Gap in the Written Law and the Unwritable Act of Decision: Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology

Tracy McNulty

in Wrestling with the Angel: Experiments in Symbolic Life

This chapter examines Carl Schmitt's claim, articulated in his 1922 book Political Theology, that there is a “gap” in the law corresponding to the place of the exception and that the concept “legal ... More

This chapter examines Carl Schmitt's claim, articulated in his 1922 book Political Theology, that there is a “gap” in the law corresponding to the place of the exception and that the concept “legal order” is made out of two independent and autonomous elements, norm and decision, which together constitute the juristic sphere. Paul and Schmitt challenge spatial notions of law that establish a boundary between an “inside” and an “outside” by topologizing “inside” and “outside” as continuous: through the “fulfillment of the law” in Paul, and through the strategy of sovereign exception in Schmitt. Schmitt even describes sovereignty as a “border concept,” a concept that pertains to borderline cases. This chapter also considers Jacques Lacan's proposal that offers a different understanding of the law as representation, whose function is symbolic rather than imaginary, and concludes by discussing the question of the border within the context of political theology.Less

“Heidegger” and the Jews

Michael Fagenblat

in Reading Heidegger's Black Notebooks 1931-1941

The first part of this chapter discusses Heidegger’s metapolitical critique of Judaism and world-Jewry. I argue for a placeholder interpretation of this critique. To hold that Judaism is a ... More

The first part of this chapter discusses Heidegger’s metapolitical critique of Judaism and world-Jewry. I argue for a placeholder interpretation of this critique. To hold that Judaism is a placeholder in Heidegger’s metapolitical thought implies that the “history of being” is not essentially anti-Semitic. This is not to apologize for Heidegger’s anti-Semitic ravings but to clear a path toward understanding its source. I locate this source in Heidegger’s neglect of the phenomenological-conceptual and ultimately ontological relation between being and evil. In the second part I analyse the conceptual relation between Heidegger’s philosophy and characteristic features of Jewish thought. Building on MàrleneZarader’s work, I elucidate numerous, crucial points of convergence between the two ways of thinking. This motivates an explanation of why it is that leading Jewish philosophers drew on Heidegger’s philosophy in order to articulate their views. Thinkers briefly discussed include F. Rosenzweig, G. Scholem, A. Altmann, E. Fackenheim, J. B. Soloveitchik, L. Strauss, E. Levinas and M. Wyschogrod. I then argue for a conceptual fault-line concerning the theme of Place. I conclude by suggesting that contemporary theologies of Zion extend this trajectory by adopting topological modes of thinking akin to Heidegger’s but rejected by their European predecessors.Less

The Void Occupied Unconcealed

Stathis Gourgouris

in Lessons in Secular Criticism

Examines political philosopher Claude Lefort’s notion of the “empty space of power” in the midst of democratic politics and his critique of the relation between the political and the theological.

Reanimation: The Logic of Transfer in Measure for Measure

Philip Lorenz

in The Tears of Sovereignty: Perspectives of Power in Renaissance Drama

The chapter considers a first paradigm of sovereignty, focusing on the metaphor-logic of substitution that reanimates the body-of-power in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure. Shakespeare's only play ... More

The chapter considers a first paradigm of sovereignty, focusing on the metaphor-logic of substitution that reanimates the body-of-power in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure. Shakespeare's only play with a religious title, Measure for Measure (1604), a foundational text for scholars working on political theology, asks us to think about the status, structure and above all staging of the law at an acute moment of national and international crisis. Viewing Measure in relation to the Act and writ of habeas corpus, the chapter shows how the “organ transplant” logic of representation staged in Measure for Measure effectively restores the law and satisfies sovereignty's desire to have the body.Less

Return: The “Wrinkles” of Mystery in The Winter's Tale

Philip Lorenz

in The Tears of Sovereignty: Perspectives of Power in Renaissance Drama

The chapter reads Shakespeare's late play, The Winter's Tale, along with Francisco Suárez's Mariological writings as anatomies of the media conditions required for a sovereign event. Shakespeare's ... More

The chapter reads Shakespeare's late play, The Winter's Tale, along with Francisco Suárez's Mariological writings as anatomies of the media conditions required for a sovereign event. Shakespeare's play of “wonder” stages a series of recapitulations, as the political and theological pathways of sovereignty viewed in the previous chapters converge in a complex set of returns. Shakespeare's play of “wonder” draws on what Hent de Vries calls the technicity of a theological construction, the art (or techné) in which a mediated and mediating body is fabricated out of a collage of textual authorities, Ovid, Petrarch, and the book of Revelation, in the course of performing a ‘miracle.’ Like Suárez's Mysteries, The Winter's Tale is a discourse of special effects, of a performance that binds and links the spectator to a tradition that is at least as theatrical as theological, and in which what is at stake is less the body of the absolute object of desire (in this case the body of a long lost mother and queen) than the believer's relation to that object. In different ways, Shakespeare and Suárez show that sovereignty bonds are also always media-bonds, as political theology give way to what might be termed psycho-political theology.Less

The Blind Spot of Power: Sovereignty and Unconditionality in Coleridge's Biographia Literaria and The Friend

Kir Kuiken

in Imagined Sovereignties: Toward a New Political Romanticism

This chapter explores how Samuel Coleridge, in the period between writing the Biographia Literaria and his political treatise The Friend, develops a conception of the imagination that involves an ... More

This chapter explores how Samuel Coleridge, in the period between writing the Biographia Literaria and his political treatise The Friend, develops a conception of the imagination that involves an unconditional act of positing that must be immediately exposed to its own finitude. Closely reading specific passages from both the Biographia and The Friend, the chapter focuses on Coleridge's understanding of the necessity of a political “expedient,” and its connection to his theory of the symbol. The chapter then goes on to argue that Coleridge develops a notion of political sovereignty that, because it is exposed to its own finitude, disarticulates his politics of the symbol, and breaks with traditional conceptions of political theology.Less

African Catholic Theology

Paul Gifford

in Christianity, Development and Modernity In Africa

African Catholic theology has tended to focus on inculturation, or the expression of Catholicism in African cultural forms, a project that this chapter argues is not without considerable internal ... More

African Catholic theology has tended to focus on inculturation, or the expression of Catholicism in African cultural forms, a project that this chapter argues is not without considerable internal incoherence. The Catholic Church (although sometimes co-opted by governments) has been sometimes known for political involvement to challenge governmental abuses, but this political thinking has tended to come less from theologians than from episcopal conferences; this chapter gives a brief overview of Catholic political involvement in Africa since Independence. The chapter argues that since the fall of communism and the demise of apartheid, there is need for a new agenda: Catholic theology needs to address contemporary needs of Africa like poverty eradication, education, ecology, food and water security, conflict management, creation of jobs and above all Africa’s marginalization in the face of globalization. This new theological agenda is only now taking shape.Less

Animality and Identity: Human Nature and the Image of God

Eric Daryl Meyer

in Inner Animalities: Theology and the End of the Human

This chapter works to refigure humanity’s place in creation, shifting from accounts centered in the imago dei that inculcate a sovereign anthropological exceptionalism and toward an account in which ... More

This chapter works to refigure humanity’s place in creation, shifting from accounts centered in the imago dei that inculcate a sovereign anthropological exceptionalism and toward an account in which human beings find themselves personally and spiritually constituted by relations with nonhuman creatures. To that end, the chapter balances conventional emphasis on Genesis 1 with a reading of Nebuchadnezzar’s character arc in the book of Daniel, which configures sovereignty and human uniqueness in a very different way. Moving to the New Testament Gospels, the chapter suggests that one’s identity in the Realm of God is always determined from the perspective of the oppressed. Following this insight through, the chapter imagines who human beings might be in the eyes of various nonhuman neighbors, from pets to animals confined in factory farms.Less