Phenomenal Violence and the Philosophy of Religion

2013 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hent de Vries
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Philosophy Of Religion ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Phenomenon ◽  
Wars Of Religion ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Religious Wars

This chapter offers the example of a philosophy that began with Jacques Derrida, the genesis and structure of whose overall thinking, writing, and interpretative praxis it reviews. Derrida, who has played an influential role as a groundbreaking thinker, speaks of an unconditional affirmation, an absolute performative, whose contours are not established. The neologism mondialatinisation captures the old-new and new-old taken as a total social phenomenon and one that is “at the same time hegemonic and finite, ultra-powerful and in the process of exhausting itself.” Derrida determines that if religion was ever dead and overcome, in its resurrected form it is much less localizable and predictable than ever before, most manifestly in the “cyberspatialized or cyberspaced wars of religion” or “war of religions.” Religion, the political religions, and religious wars and terrorisms in the contemporary world resist their very own demise or rumors thereof.

The Political Theology of Schelling

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Saitya Brata Das
Keyword(s):  
Martin Heidegger ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
The Political ◽  
Franz Rosenzweig ◽  
Political Works ◽  
The Way

This book rigorously examines the theologico-political works of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling, setting his thought against Hegel's and showing how he prepared the way for the post-metaphysical philosophy of Martin Heidegger, Franz Rosenzweig and Jacques Derrida.

scholarly journals Singapore: Reflections and Implications of Another Smart State

2003 ◽  
Vol 10 (1) ◽  
pp. 53-69 ◽  
Author(s):  
Clive Edwards
Keyword(s):  
Economic Development ◽  
Development Strategy ◽  
Direct Investment ◽  
Political Leadership ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Leaders ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Michael Porter ◽  
State Initiatives ◽  
The Development Strategy

The objective of this paper is to analyse key elements of the development strategy of Singapore since the mid–1960s. The paper describes the economic challenge faced by Singapore in the mid–1960s, overviews contemporary world trends in foreign direct investment, and uses competitiveness constructs developed by Michael Porter (1985) to clarify key stages in the evolution of Singapore's development strategy. The paper argues that the strategy has been successful because of unremitting top priority given to it by Singapore's political leadership and because the political leaders charged a single organisation, the Economic Development Board (EDB), with absolute authority to develop and implement the strategy. The paper concludes with implications for Queensland's Smart State initiatives.

Scatter 2

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Geoffrey Bennington
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
The Other ◽  
Carl Schmitt ◽  
Early Church ◽  
The Political ◽  
Church Fathers ◽  
Jean Bodin ◽  
Marsilius Of Padua ◽  
The One ◽  
Nuremberg Trials

Scatter 2 identifies politics as an object of perennial difficulty for philosophy—as recalcitrant to philosophical mastery as is philosophy’s traditional adversary, poetry. That difficulty makes it an attractive area of attention for any deconstructive approach to the tradition from which we inevitably inherit our language and our concepts. Scatter 2 pursues that deconstruction, often starting, and sometimes departing, from the work of Jacques Derrida, by attending to the concepts of sovereignty on the one hand, and democracy on the other. Part I follows the fate of a line from Book II of Homer’s Iliad, where Odysseus asserts that “the rule of many is no good thing, let there be one ruler, one king,” as it is quoted and misquoted, and progressively Christianized, by authors including Aristotle, Philo Judaeus, Suetonius, the early Church Fathers, Aquinas, Dante, Ockham, Marsilius of Padua, Jean Bodin, Etienne de la Boétie, up to Carl Schmitt and Erik Peterson, and even one of the defendants at the Nuremberg Trials, before being discussed by Derrida himself. Part II begins again, as it were, with Plato and Aristotle, and tracks the concept of democracy as it regularly impacts and tends to undermine that sovereignist tradition, and, more especially in detailed readings of Hobbes and Rousseau, develops a notion of “proto-democracy” as a possible name for the scatter that underlies and drives the political as such, and that will always prevent politics from achieving its aim of bringing itself to an end.

The Concept of Asia: From Geography to Ideology

2006 ◽  
Vol 35 ◽  
pp. 21-35
Author(s):  
Hiroshi Mitani
Keyword(s):  
Nineteenth Century ◽  
Early Modern ◽  
East Asia ◽  
Regional Integration ◽  
The Political ◽  
Late Nineteenth Century ◽  
Historical Process ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Late Nineteenth ◽  
Asian People

In the contemporary world the word “Asia” invokes a sense of regional integration or solidarity among Asian peoples. This sense of the word is rather recent and can only be traced back to the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In that period, Japan called on Asian people to unify against the Western threat under its leadership. But until the late nineteenth century, “Asia” was a purely geographical term; merely the name of one of the five continents-a concept that had been modeled by early modern Europeans.In this essay I will discuss how and why the political usage of the word “Asia,” stressing Asian solidarity, was invented by the Japanese around the 1880s. I also investigate the ways in which this sense of the word spread to the rest of the geographical region of Asia. In order to understand the unfolding of this historical process, we should first examine the traditional concepts of world geography in Japan and how the European concept of Asia was introduced into East Asia.

Hegel on the Political Significance of Collective Self-Deceit

2018 ◽  
pp. 171-184
Author(s):  
Robert Pippin
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
Collective Agency ◽  
The Political ◽  
Collective Intentionality ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
Political World ◽  
Collective Self ◽  
Philosophy Of Right ◽  
Group Agents

In a famous passage in his Elements of the Philosophy of Right, Hegel claimed that ‘philosophy is its own time comprehended in thought’. But our time is very different from Hegel’s, so two approaches have developed to understanding the relevance of his work for the contemporary world. One looks to remaining points of contact, such as his criticism of a contractualist view of the state. Another tries to apply his general approach to contemporary issues. Both are valuable, but in this article, the latter is taken up, and one issue is the focus. The question is, assuming there can be collective intentionality and collective agency (what Hegel calls Geist (spirit)), how should we understand Hegel’s claim that such group agents can be collectively self-deceived? And how would that claim bear on the contemporary political world?

Cruelty and Its Vicissitudes

2019 ◽  
pp. 120-138
Author(s):  
Elizabeth Rottenberg
Keyword(s):  
Death Penalty ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
The Political ◽  
History Of

This chapter tracks the history of cruelty in the administration of the death penalty. It moves from the history of blood (cruor) and bloody cruelty (e.g., the guillotine) to a history that involves the disappearance of blood and the non-bloody process of interiorization. It argues that psychical cruelty makes cruelty not only difficult to determine but also, as Jacques Derrida insists, one of the horizons most proper to psychoanalysis. This chapter begins by following the signs of the mutation of the death-dealing discourse in the Christian, European West; it ends by reading the Jewish joke as the sign of a psychoanalytico-philosophical alliance that is explosively out of tune with the political theology of the death penalty.

Derrida, Agamben, Wynter

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Vincent W. Lloyd
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Philosophy Of Religion ◽  
Black Theology ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
Black Feminist ◽  
Religion And Theology ◽  
Homo Sacer ◽  
Religion And Race ◽  
Race And Religion ◽  
The Way

This chapter explores the way race and religion are articulated together in the work of leading critical theorists Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben. It probes how these theorists stand on the border between philosophy of religion and theology, and it argues that it is only because of secularist assumptions that this divide between outsider’s philosophy of religion and insider’s theology can be maintained. For Derrida, both religion and race function as loose threads that can be pulled in order to unravel a system of thought. For Agamben, the protagonist of modernity, homo sacer, is both racialized and sanctified. Yet Derrida and Agamben’s accounts are skewed by a Eurocentrism and a failure to take religious ideas sufficiently seriously. The black feminist Sylvia Wynter offers an antidote, similarly linking race and religion but doing so in a way that attends to how racialization is produced theologically and goes hand in hand with patriarchy. Wynter’s work implies that philosophy of religion that refuses secularism is always black theology and that black theology must engage seriously with questions in philosophy of religion.

The Political Saturation of Social Space

2019 ◽  
pp. 71-94
Author(s):  
Robert B. Talisse
Keyword(s):  
Social Space ◽  
Social Identities ◽  
Democratic Citizenship ◽  
The Political ◽  
Social Phenomenon ◽  
Social Spaces ◽  
Tyranny Of The Majority

This chapter begins to develop the book’s diagnostic argument. Overdoing democracy is partly the result of a widespread social phenomenon identified as the political saturation of social space. Politics has permeated our lives enough to guide where we shop, what we wear, even what we drink (Starbucks latte versus Dunkin’ Donuts coffee). Our social spaces are increasingly sorted and segregated according to our political allegiances, while our political allegiances are increasingly constitutive of our broader social identities. The result is that we are more than ever enacting democratic citizenship, but almost always under conditions that are themselves politically homogeneous. Until citizens are open to each other’s arguments, we cannot plausibly see democratic political rule as consistent with each citizens’ status as an equal, and thus more than merely the tyranny of the majority.

Political Theory and Political Economy

2009 ◽  
Author(s):  
Stephen L. Elkin
Keyword(s):  
Economic Growth ◽  
Political Economy ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Life ◽  
The Political ◽  
Distribution Of Wealth ◽  
Contemporary World ◽  
The Core ◽  
Democratic Societies

This article describes the connection between political theory and political economy. It argues that political theorists need to take account of political economy in theorizing about the contemporary world because capitalism is the most powerful force at work in shaping the modern sociopolitical world. It also explains that economic questions concerning economic growth, the distribution of wealth and income, and role of markets are at the core of the political life in democratic societies.

The Reformation and Wars of Religion in France

2010 ◽  
Author(s):  
Barbara B. Diefendorf
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
Catholic Church ◽  
16Th Century ◽  
Wars Of Religion ◽  
Religious Wars ◽  
The Right ◽  
King Henry Ii ◽  
Catherine De Medici ◽  
Religious Nature ◽  
The Impact

The 16th century began in France as a time of relative peace, prosperity, and optimism, but horizons soon darkened under the clouds of religious schism, heresy persecutions, and civil war. French theologians condemned Martin Luther’s ideas as early as 1521, but his views continued to spread underground. The movement remained small and clandestine until the 1550s, when the penetration of John Calvin’s ideas from nearby Geneva resulted in the formation of Reformed churches, whose growing membership demanded the right to worship openly. The accidental death of King Henry II in 1559 left France with a religiously divided court and a series of young, inexperienced kings. Henry’s widow, Catherine de Medici, attempted a policy of compromise that backfired. Militancy increased on both sides of the religious divide, and civil war broke out in 1562. Neither side could secure a decisive win on the battlefield, and neither was satisfied with the compromise peace that ended the war. Indeed, war broke out seven more times before a more lasting peace was secured by the first Bourbon king, Henry IV, with the Edict of Nantes in 1598. The edict set the terms for religious coexistence, allowing French Protestants limited rights to worship and certain protections under the law. It also fostered the spread of a movement already underway for the renewal of Catholic spirituality and reform of Catholic church institutions in France. Until the 1970s, the civil and religious wars that afflicted France through the second half of the 16th century were viewed largely as the consequence of political rivalries that spun out of control following the death of King Henry II. More recently, historians have shifted their attention to the social and cultural contexts in which the wars took place, particularly to the fundamentally religious nature of the quarrels. This has led to a profusion of new scholarship on the impact of the Protestant and Catholic Reformations in France, the tensions—and ultimately the violence—generated by competing claims to religious truth, and the difficulty of resolving the quarrels or putting an end to the wars that resulted from them.

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