Theopoetics to Theopraxis

2020 ◽  
Vol 25 (1) ◽  
pp. 163-182
Author(s):  
Calvin D. Ullrich
Keyword(s):  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
Continental Philosophy ◽  
The Political ◽  
Late Work ◽  
Theological Turn ◽  
Political Writing

The theological turn in continental philosophy has beckoned several new possibilities for theoretical discourse. More recently, the question of the absence of a political theology has been raised: Can an ethics of alterity offer a more substantive politics? In pursuing this question, the article considers the late work of Jacques Derrida and John D. Caputo. It argues that, contrary to caricatures of Caputo’s “theology of event,” his notion of theopoetics evinces a “materialist turn” in his mature thought that can be considered the beginning of a “radical political theology.” This position is not without its challenges, however, raising concerns over deconstruction’s ability to navigate the immanent but necessary dangers of politics. In order to attempt to speak of a form of “radical political theology”—i.e. a movement from theopoetics to theopraxis—the article turns to some of the political writing of Simon Critchley. It is argued that a much desired “political viscerality” for a radical political theology is supplied by Critchley’s anarchic realism. The latter is neither conceived as utopian nor defeatist, but as a sustained program of inventive and creative political interventions, which act as responses to the singularity of the situation.

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.

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.

Broken Tablets

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sarah Hammerschlag
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Emmanuel Levinas ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
Continental Philosophy ◽  
Jewish Question ◽  
Religion And Literature ◽  
Jewish Heritage ◽  
State Of Israel

Over a span of thirty years, twentieth-century French philosophers Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida held a conversation across texts. Sharing a Jewish heritage and a background in phenomenology, both came to situate their work at the margins of philosophy, articulating this placement through religion and literature. Chronicling the interactions between these thinkers, Sarah Hammerschlag argues that the stakes in their respective positions were more than philosophical. They were also political. Levinas’s investments were born out in his writings on Judaism and ultimately in an evolving conviction that the young state of Israel held the best possibility for achieving such an ideal. For Derrida, the Jewish question was literary. The stakes of Jewish survival could only be approached through reflections on modern literature’s religious legacy, a line of thinking that provided him the means to reconceive democracy. Hammerschlag’s reexamination of Derrida and Levinas’s textual exchange not only produces a new account of this friendship but also has significant ramifications for debates within Continental philosophy, the study of religion, and political theology.

scholarly journals Rowan Williams’s Political Theology: Multiculturalism and Interactive Pluralism

2010 ◽  
Vol 9 (1) ◽  
pp. 61-79 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mark D. Chapman
Keyword(s):  
Decision Making ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
Community Formation ◽  
The Political ◽  
Popular Press ◽  
Religious Perspective ◽  
Religious Law ◽  
Political Writing ◽  
Political Speeches

AbstractThis essay discusses the political thought of Rowan Williams in the context of his leading influences and wider theology. It shows the continuity in his political writing from his early days as a radical to his frequent political speeches and lectures as Archbishop of Canterbury. The over-riding theme is that of ‘interactive pluralism’, which seeks to establish a form of politics with a very weak system of sovereignty. This influenced his 2008 lecture on ‘Civil and Religious Law in England: a Religious Perspective’, which suggested a limited role for parallel religious law codes alongside those of the state. Although this lecture was subject to much criticism, particularly in the popular press, it nevertheless displays a consistency with his strongly disestablishmentarian inclinations, which give a large amount of space to ‘first-level’ institutions in both decision-making and community formation. A healthy society is established through dispute and dialogue between such groups rather than strong centralized power.

The Star and the Stripes

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael N. Barnett
Keyword(s):  
Foreign Policy ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
Political Identity ◽  
The Political ◽  
Current Debate ◽  
American Jews ◽  
Peace And Justice ◽  
The World ◽  
Policy Beliefs ◽  
Justice Movements

How do American Jews envision their role in the world? Are they tribal—a people whose obligations extend solely to their own? Or are they prophetic—a light unto nations, working to repair the world? This book is an interpretation of the effects of these worldviews on the foreign policy beliefs of American Jews since the nineteenth century. The book argues that it all begins with the political identity of American Jews. As Jews, they are committed to their people's survival. As Americans, they identify with, and believe their survival depends on, the American principles of liberalism, religious freedom, and pluralism. This identity and search for inclusion form a political theology of prophetic Judaism that emphasizes the historic mission of Jews to help create a world of peace and justice. The political theology of prophetic Judaism accounts for two enduring features of the foreign policy beliefs of American Jews. They exhibit a cosmopolitan sensibility, advocating on behalf of human rights, humanitarianism, and international law and organizations. They also are suspicious of nationalism—including their own. Contrary to the conventional wisdom that American Jews are natural-born Jewish nationalists, the book charts a long history of ambivalence; this ambivalence connects their early rejection of Zionism with the current debate regarding their attachment to Israel. And, the book contends, this growing ambivalence also explains the rising popularity of humanitarian and social justice movements among American Jews.

Dante’s theology and contemporary thought: Recovering transcendence?

2021 ◽  
pp. 001458582110215
Author(s):  
William Franke
Keyword(s):  
Middle Ages ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
Turn On ◽  
Theological Turn ◽  
Theological Turn In Phenomenology ◽  
The Middle Ages ◽  
Realized Eschatology

This article outlines how Dante’s philosophy and theology turn on issues that are being debated in broader philosophical, theological, and theoretical milieus today. It emphasizes, in particular, how the new horizon opened by certain postmodern—and more specifically post-secular—turns in philosophy shifts the light falling on the interface between the concepts of transcendence and immanence. As a result, Dante’s attempt, in the twilight of the Middle Ages, to renegotiate the relations between the two shows up as acutely relevant and potentially groundbreaking for current philosophical and theological inquiry. The areas of inquiry traversed include realized eschatology as theorized by Agamben; Foucault’s archeological model of knowledge; Patristic and medieval hexameral exegesis; the tension between hermeneutics and deconstruction; political theology; the theological turn in phenomenology; secularism and humanities as crypto-theological forms of thought. All are examined as prefigured in embryo by Dante’s comprehensive, poetic approach to knowing.

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.

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