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Barth's formulation of the problem of ethics contrasts an ethic in which God summons human beings to active participation in the good God has established and accomplished with an ethic in which it is left to human beings to identify the good and accomplish it. Does this contrast between ethics as human confirmation of divine grace and ethics as human self‐assertion indicate that Barth's moral theology is embedded in a distinctively modern set of problems, concerns, and assumptions about ethics? This chapter explores Barth's complex relationship to modernity, showing how he treats modernity as the visible culmination of tendencies that were latent in Western society for centuries and are in fact perennial features of fallen humanity and how his own moral theology addresses modernity neither by opposing or accepting its human self‐assertion but by finding in the latter distorted traces of God's profound affirmation of humanity.

This chapter examines the status of military science in the playhouse, especially the ways in which the invocation of arithmetical discourses, processional marches, and battle formations displace cultural fantasies of individual distinction. The chapter focuses on Marlowe's two‐part Tamburlaine, one of the most popular and most explicitly militaristic plays in the Elizabethan repertory and a play that has long been a touchstone for critical discussions of the emergence of the modern subject. This chapter argues that Tamburlaine's preoccupation with military calculation and the organization of bodies in space produces a spectacle not just of overreaching singularity but also of uniform personhood and mathematically rationalized violence. Ultimately, by pointing to the play's sustained attention to visions of men in the aggregate, this chapter revises the usual reading of Marlowe's text so as to tease out its renderings of modern “massifying” practices, which presage a new world of social abstraction.

Chapter 5 examines why and how the new Meiji government made a much more concerted effort to regulate the popular culture as a focal point of its program of remaking the county into a capitalist nation-state. It focuses on the early Meiji policy called “Reform of Popular Culture and Customs” implemented in the 1870s and 80s through a series of decrees and educational reforms. This policy was devised in conjunction with the government’s swift decision to dismantle the Tokugawa social order and erect a new one based on the liberal ideological principle of individual rights to equality and freedom. The new political leaders believed that a competitive ethos of self-motivated individuals was the key to Western nations’ dominance in wealth, military strength, and technology, and that Japan’s successful transformation into a modern nation-state worthy of the respect of Western counterparts depended on the creation of such an ethos at home. Accordingly, Edo-style popular culture, which seemed devoid of the ethos, was reconfigured as the markers of negative traces of the past— backwardness and ignorance— and a serious impediment to the nation’s drive for modernization. This chapter examines the implications of this reconfiguration, reflecting on Meiji power’s effects on subject-formation.

Given the diagnosis that the theological anthropology of Gaudium et Spes is intrinsically modern in approach, Robyn Horner investigates the fate of the modern subject in the wake of poststructuralist critiques such as that of Jacques Derrida. According to Derrida, our relation to the world and to each other is not based in a subject identical to itself; rather, the subject is characterized by “différance,” splitting forever “the self from itself.” Horner then asks whether a (post-) phenomenological anthropology such as that of Jean-Luc Marion might be helpful in renewing theological anthropology. Marion’s work allows us to think the lost or dissipated self by means of the logic of the gift. Unable ever to be present to itself, the subject can be defined only as radical openness to the givenness of the world and of phenomena in general. In that very openness, Marion argues, the subject appears as radically given to itself, a givenness it realizes only in its responding to, and thus being given to, others. This new, Christologically grounded approach to the subject and its relation to the world enables a new theological definition of the human being as given and created by God.

This introductory chapter illustrates the anxiety of the deaf subject caught “in between,” noting that between space is one of longing, yet also one of belonging, and one, too, of limits. Another source of anxiety is their audience—deaf, hard-of-hearing, and hearing alike—since it is hard to shape one's subject and self without some sense of one's audience. Yet, because their subject—that of deaf identity, anxiety, and place—is also a subject of language, community, “reason,” voice, experience, resistance, otherness, power, and more, the deaf subject also understands that they will invariably invoke other audiences. Thus, this chapter opens up a narrative of the “commonplace” for the modern deaf subject since the turn of the nineteenth century.

The subject here is system’s shaping of the subject of culture, literature, and liberalism—the modern self. Narrow-but-deep selves emerged from system’s role in mediating the formation of narrow-but-deep disciplines. With Mary Hays supplying a primary example, the chapter shows that when systems are extended through disciplinary travel so that they can no longer do what isolated systems do—they talk to themselves, the parts making a whole—another kind of self must be formally interpolated to do the talking. Embedded systems yield a newly expressive “I”—that is why in blaming The System we are also somehow blaming ourselves. This chapter bookends the tale of system and self by juxtaposing An Account of the Fair Intellectual-Club” from 1720 to Douglas Englebart’s report on Augmenting Human Intellect from 1962. In the former, young women try to improve themselves through system—both by forming a “club” as a social incarnation of system and by writing systems. In the latter, Englebart describes a “system” in which humans improve themselves by interfacing with technology. The presentation of this report announced the invention of the computer mouse. The chapter concludes by showing how issues of gender and privilege, secrecy and privacy, individual and national development, mix with new kinds of order and method generated by system.

This final and concluding statement addresses the role error in determining the different “regimes of truth” in the history of philosophy, proposing that much of contemporary philosophy is reacting to the same species of error identified with a previous tradition of post-Cartesianism and a Kantian subject of Critique.

Kafka’s Der Proceß exposes the irrationality generated in and through the (bureaucratic) rationalization of the law. But the text operates as a modernist spectacle, inscribing the reader into the process it describes, by which the self-creation of the social converges with the negation of the subject. It thus presents the seductive possibility of absolutizing K.’s experience—as existentialist paradigm, as apophatic revelation, and as allegory for modernity. But such modes of reading elide the distinctions between judge and victim, witness and bystander, and thereby reify and reinforce the very operations of the law that Kafka dissects. In the author’s own terms, they “belong to the court.” Walter Benjamin’s unfinished encounter with Kafka suggests a strategy of reading that better resists the insidious temptation of submission to the modernist spectacle, which construes a process at once absolute and arbitrary as the modern (subject’s) fate.

This chapter describes how Hogarth extended the stage, which was considered the place in which to learn morals, to his “modern moral subjects” with engravings that were frozen scenes from plays such as The Beggar's Opera, Nicholas Rowe's Jane Shore, and George Lillo's London Merchant. In these venues conventional ideas of sin were modified, complicated, and, above all, rematerialized in the new genre that emerged in the 1720s–40s, the novel. A primary source for Fielding's, as for Hogarth's, model of sin-evil was The Beggar's Opera, in which the criminals are bad and punished but the respectable folk are worse and go unpunished. Fielding argues that doing right makes you feel good, doing evil makes you feel bad—unless you are a fiend or a demon.