scholarly journals Marginalizing the Victim and the Political Body of the People

Stasis ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 208-244
Author(s):  
Marina Koretskaya
Keyword(s):  
Public Space ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
The Political ◽  
Catastrophic Events ◽  
Political Body ◽  
The People ◽  
Independent Media

The article examines Judith Butler’s performative approach to the concept of the people, which allows to not only outline the boundaries of a certain model of political theology, so important for conservative political thought, but to also see the significance born by the acts of entry by collective bodies into public space. In this context, the figure of the victim can have a consolidating function, being the potentially affectively condensed point of the collective body’s assembling. The marginalization of the victim’s body is analyzed through the concept of the politics of grief and that of ungrievable lives. The victim’s marginalization is shown to be a multidimensional phenomenon. Not only the victim, but also the criminal can be marginalized, as well as various circumstances of catastrophic events and acts of violence. Examples taken from the Russian news in recent years illustrate how important the independent media audience’s perception of victims are: whether they perceive the victims they are informed about as marginal or as pertinent to their own lives and identities, whether the audience is ready to shift the boundaries toward greater inclusivity and to reinstate

Humans, Jews, and the Other Others

Other Others ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 1-16
Author(s):  
Sergey Dolgopolski
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Human Being ◽  
Paradigm Shifts ◽  
Human Beings ◽  
Political Ontology ◽  
Dynamic Key

The “Introduction” formulates the question of the political, and in particular of the emergence and erasure of the political from the horizon of currently predominant political thought in political theology and political ontology. The “Introduction” further attunes the readers to the dynamic key of “effacement” as both emergence and erasure, thereby defining the main register in which the book is proceeding -- as distinct from the keys of chronological periodisation, linear history, paradigm shifts, or other stabilizing approaches. The “Introduction” further draws a distinction between politics and the political, and advances the question of the political in relation to the Talmud as both a text and a discipline of thinking able to shed a new, contrasting, light on the paradox driven modern political notions of a singularizing and even singling out notion of a “Jew,” and a universalizing notion of the “human being.” The “Introduction” concludes by gesturing towards a much closer connection between the question of the political in the Talmud, the notions of the Jews and of the human beings in modernity, and the question of earth and territory as a part of political equation these concepts spell out.

The Abolition of Slavery

2020 ◽  
pp. 195-203
Author(s):  
Sophia Khadraoui-Fortune
Keyword(s):  
Eighteenth Century ◽  
Public Space ◽  
The Political ◽  
French History ◽  
Political Body ◽  
High Iron ◽  
Official Discourse ◽  
Power Strategies ◽  
Culture Of Silence ◽  
The City

April 24th 1998, a two-meter-high iron statue of a slave, arms raised towards the sky, breaking free from his/her chains, was erected clandestinely in Nantes, the primary French slave port of the eighteenth century. Faced with the local government’s refusal to erect a statue commemorating the 150th anniversary of the abolition of slavery, the Mémoire de l’Outre-Mer association decided, in secret, to commission a sculpture. Following the organization’s initial success of hijacking the inauguration, the statue was vandalized. It soon became a performative monument, a memorial palimpsest, and a centre stage of a symbolic combat where opponents and supporters clashed. This essay reveals the democratic praxis at the heart of this commemoration debate. With both the pressure of citizens on the political body, and the triple practice of diversion, subversion, and taking hostage of (public) space, the association thwarts the writing and power strategies of the city of Nantes and its culture of silence. Mémoire de l’Outre-Mer not only resists official discourse but subsequently imposes its own version of French history on the whitened pages of France’s colonial narrative, thus reclaiming a past, a story, an identity, by bringing to light existences and testimonies, and defining new lieux de parole.

Vox Populi, Vox Dei

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michelle Sizemore
Keyword(s):  
Political Theology ◽  
Democratic Society ◽  
Religious Culture ◽  
Great Awakening ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Subjectivity ◽  
Second Great Awakening ◽  
The People ◽  
Early Exploration ◽  
The Voice

This chapter presents enchanted subjectivity as a model of political subjectivity in which individuals claim to speak for God, not for themselves, as commonly assumed for a democratic society. This phenomenon occurred in both the political and religious realms, as demonstrated in the popular republican expression “Vox populi, vox dei” (The voice of the people is the voice of God) and in the prophecies of the Second Great Awakening. Charles Brockden Brown’s Wieland (1798) brings together the political and religious culture of prophecy in his novel about ventriloquism, an early exploration of political theology, that is, a study of the ways in which theological principles infuse republican political arrangements.

Is “the Political” a Romantic Concept?

2014 ◽  
Author(s):  
Rüdiger Campe
Keyword(s):  
Political Theory ◽  
French Revolution ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
Vantage Point ◽  
The Political ◽  
German Romanticism ◽  
Radical Constructivism ◽  
The French Revolution

This chapter analyzes Carl Schmitt’s concept of the political from the vantage point of German Romanticism. For Schmitt, Romanticism wasan intellectual attitude that precluded the concept and practice of “the political.” Through an in-depth reading of a preeminent document of political thought in German Romanticism, Novalis’s Love and Faith, this chapter considers and qualifies this view, arguing that “political theology” can be understood as a reaction to the French Revolution rather than as a tradition reaching back to medieval or baroque times. This chapter also argues that Novalis’s famous essay must be seen as a precursor to Schmitt’s own political theory. Overlap exists both in the blend of conservatism and radical constructivism in Novalis and Schmitt and in the interventionist character of both men’s statements on politics. Read as a precursor to Schmitt, Novalis’s philosophy of politics also offers a meaningful critique of Schmitt’s later theories.

scholarly journals Trinitarian political theology and radical democracy

2020 ◽  
Vol 5 (1) ◽  
pp. 71-91
Author(s):  
David Haddorff
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
Detailed Comparison ◽  
Radical Democracy ◽  
Karl Barth ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Situation ◽  
Political Analysis ◽  
Political Philosopher ◽  
Contemporary Context

This article brings into dialogue Karl Barth and the political philosopher Chantal Mouffe. The purpose here is not to provide a detailed comparison, but to explore why Mouffe’s thought is relevant to the current political situation, which providesthe contemporary context for engaging Barth’s political theology. This argument involves: 1) a political analysis of the current political situation offered by Mouffe; 2) a particular interpretation of Barth’s political theology emerging from a trinitarian theological framework; 3) a comparison between the political thought of Mouffe and Barth emerging from Barth’s trinitarian political theology. This engagement is less concerned with critiquing Mouffe from a theological viewpoint, than positively demonstrating how Mouffe’s thought can be seen as a “secular parable” for a political theology in which trinitarian theology provides a framework. Central to this political theology are the ideas of equality, freedom, participation, and promise, which provide a theo-political framework for a radical democracy.

scholarly journals Interrogating the Constitutional Requisites for Legislative Oversight in the Promotion of Accountability and Good Governance in South Africa and Nigeria

2018 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
pp. 38-59
Author(s):  
Omololu Fagbadebo
Keyword(s):  
South Africa ◽  
Public Space ◽  
Good Governance ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Elites ◽  
Dominant Party ◽  
The People ◽  
Legislative Oversight ◽  
The Face ◽  
Legislative Activities

This article interrogates the effectiveness of the requisites for constitutional provisions in respect of the promotion of accountability and good governance in South Africa and Nigeria. The article notes that the drafters of the Constitutions of the two countries made sufficient provisions for the regulation and control of the executive and legislative activities in a manner that could guarantee effective service delivery. These constitutional provisions, in line with the practices of their respective governing systems of the two countries, empower the legislature to hold the executive accountable. The article discovers that the lawmakers in the two countries lacked the capacity to harness the provisions for intended purposes. Using the elite theory for its analysis, the article argues that legislative oversight in South Africa and Nigeria is not as effective as envisaged in the constitutional provisions envisaged. This weakness has given rise to the worsening governance crises in the two countries in spite of their abundant economic and human resources. The article opines that the institutional structures of the political systems of the two countries, especially the dominant party phenomenon, coupled with the personal disposition of the political elites incapacitate the effective exercise of the oversight powers of legislatures in the two countries. The article, therefore, submits that the people of the two countries have to devise another means of holding their leaders accountable in the face of collaboration between the executive and the legislature to perpetuate impunity in the public space. Independent agencies should be more active in the exposure of unethical behaviours of the political elites, while the judiciary should be more independent in the dispensation of justice.

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

Other Others ◽  
2018 ◽  
pp. 19-35
Author(s):  
Sergey Dolgopolski
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
The Other ◽  
Carl Schmitt ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Ontology ◽  
Jacques Ranciere ◽  
Positive Law ◽  
Jacques Rancière

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.

Hermann Cohen and Socialist Democracy

Living Law ◽  
2021 ◽  
pp. 35-80
Author(s):  
Miguel Vatter
Keyword(s):  
Human Rights ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
Jewish People ◽  
State Sovereignty ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Problem ◽  
Minority Nationality ◽  
Hermann Cohen

This chapter is dedicated to Hermann Cohen’s renewal of Jewish theologico-political thought. Cohen is the first to establish an internal, systematic connection between the Jewish messianic idea and a universalistic conception of democracy. He articulates a political theology of socialist democracy, not based on the analogy between One God and One King, but on that between One God and One Humanity. Cohen rejected Zionism as a solution to the political problem caused by the condition of minority nationality in which the Jewish people lived in European states. But he did not believe in assimilation either. He maintained that its messianic religion assigned the Jewish people the task of pointing the way to an international order based not on state sovereignty but on the supremacy of international law founded on human rights that recognized the plurality and right to self-determination of nationalities.

From Suarez to Filmer: A Reappraisal

1982 ◽  
Vol 25 (3) ◽  
pp. 525-540 ◽  
Author(s):  
J. P. Sommerville
Keyword(s):  
Seventeenth Century ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
The Political ◽  
Political Thinking ◽  
James I ◽  
The People ◽  
Counter Reformation ◽  
Ancient Constitution

English political thought in the early seventeenth century is often regarded in terms of the disagreements between the king and his parliaments, and of debates amongst lawyers on the nature and contents of the ancient constitution. But a large proportion of the political writings of early seventeenth-century English theorists was directed against the views of Catholic authors. Sir Robert Filmer devoted much of his Patriarcha to refuting the theories of those two great pillars of counter-reformation Catholicism, Bellarmine and Suarez. Suarez's Defensio fidei was burned at Paul's Cross on 21 November 1613. James I believed that by ‘setting up the People above their naturall King’ the political thinking of the Jesuits laid ‘ an excellent ground in Divinitie for all rebels and rebellious people’. One aim of this paper is to suggest that many of the most characteristic ideas on politics of English writers in the early seventeenth century can best be understood in the context of their polemical aim: the refutation of the seditious doctrines of the Papists. This is particularly true of patriarchalism, a subject on which Filmer was no innovator.

scholarly journals Political theology; revising the relation of theology and the political issue with the emphasis on the narratives of Karl Schmidt

2019 ◽  
pp. 123-146
Keyword(s):  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
The Political ◽  
Modern State ◽  
The West ◽  
Political Issue ◽  
Modern Times ◽  
Secular Theology ◽  
History Of ◽  
Theological Concept

In this paper, three commonly used concepts of political theology in different periods of the history of Western thoughts are briefly reviewd. The golden age of political thought in the west called most of the politics functions for theology as political theology. The political issue is considered as an autonomous and independent subject, which reserves the ability for itself to change theology. With the advent of Christianity and its influence on the political and governance pillars, this equation was reversed for centuries, and politics,as the theology servant,was identified as an ancestral affair. It is only in the modern times that Weber, by stating that science should be away from value, created a bedrock for political theology, in which it was not necessary to be a theologist to reach theology. In this context, Schmidt serves the concept of political theology in a sociological sense to serving to depict that the modern state, alongside with its preceding times, is a theological concept that has survived by omitting secular theology.

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