Religionless Christianity and the political implications of theological speech

Professare ◽  
2018 ◽  
Vol 7 (1) ◽  
pp. 109
Author(s):  
Claudemir Aparecido Lopes

<p class="resumoabstract">O professor Giorgio Agamben tem elaborado críticas à engenhosa estrutura política ocidental moderna. Avalia os mecanismos de controle estatal, nos quais os denomina ‘dispositivos’, cuja força está na imbricação às normas jurídico-teológicas com seus similares ritos e liturgias. Suas ocorrências e legitimidade preponderam no tecido social cuja organização sistêmica se põe quase como elemento natural e não cultural. O texto tem por objetivo explorar a concepção política de Agamben sobre a política contemporânea, especialmente considerando seu livro: ‘Estado de Exceção’, cuja investigação apresenta a possibilidade de atenuação dos direitos de cidadania e o enfraquecimento da prática da liberdade política e o processo de relação dos indivíduos no meio social através da redução das subjetividades ‘autênticas’. Analisamos ainda a transferência do mundo sacro elaborado pelos teólogos católicos presente na modernidade à política cuja democracia moderna faz do homem (sujeito) tornar-se objeto do poder político. Faz também, reflexão dos conceitos de subjetivação e dessubjetivação relacionando-os às implicações políticas do homem moderno. A pesquisa é bibliográfica com ênfase na análise dos conceitos elaborados por Agamben, especialmente quanto ao ‘dispositivo’. Conclui que o indivíduo ocidental, de modo geral, sofre o processo de dessubjetivação e está ‘nu’, indefeso e alienado politicamente. Ele precisa voltar-se ao processo de ‘profanação’ dos dispositivos para libertar-se das vinculações orientadoras que forçosamente o descaracteriza enquanto ser ativo e livre.</p><p class="resumoabstract"><strong>Palavras-chave</strong>: Política. Liberdade. Subjetivação.</p><h3>ABSTRACT</h3><p class="resumoabstract">Professor Giorgio Agamben has been criticizing the ingenious modern Western political structure. It evaluates the mechanisms of state control, in which it calls them 'devices', whose strength lies in the overlap with legal-theological norms with their similar rites and liturgies. Its occurrences and legitimacy preponderate in the social fabric whose systemic organization is almost as a natural and not a cultural element. The text aims to explore Agamben's political conception of contemporary politics, especially considering his book 'State of Exception', whose research presents the possibility of attenuating citizenship rights and weakening the practice of political freedom and the individuals in the social environment through the reduction of 'authentic' subjectivities. We also analyze the transfer of the sacred world elaborated by the Catholic theologians present in the modernity to the politics whose modern democracy makes of the man - subject - to become object of the political power. It also reflects on the concepts of subjectivation and desubjectivation, relating them to the political implications of modern man. The research is bibliographical with emphasis in the analysis of the concepts elaborated by Agamben, especially with regard to the 'device'. He concludes that the Western individual, in general, suffers the process of desubjectivation and is 'naked', defenseless and politically alienated. He must turn to the process of 'desecration' of devices to free himself from the guiding bindings that forcibly demeanes him while being active and free.</p><p class="resumoabstract"><strong>Keywords</strong>: Politics. Freedom. Subjectivity. </p><p> </p>


Author(s):  
Daniel S. Markey

This book explains how China’s new foreign policies like the vaunted “Belt and Road” Initiative are being shaped by local and regional politics outside China and assesses the political implications of these developments for Eurasia and the United States. It depicts the ways that President Xi Jinping’s China is zealously transforming its national wealth and economic power into tools of global political influence and details these developments in South Asia, Central Asia, and the Middle East. Drawing from extensive interviews, travels, and historical research, it describes how perceptions of China vary widely within states like Pakistan, Kazakhstan, and Iran. Eurasia’s powerful and privileged groups often expect to profit from their connections to China, while others fear commercial and political losses. Similarly, statesmen across Eurasia are scrambling to harness China’s energy purchases, arms sales, and infrastructure investments as a means to outdo their strategic competitors, like India and Saudi Arabia, while negotiating relations with Russia and America. The book finds that, on balance, China’s deepening involvement will play to the advantage of regional strongmen and exacerbate the political tensions within and among Eurasian states. To make the most of America’s limited influence along China’s western horizon (and elsewhere), it argues that US policymakers should pursue a selective and localized strategy to serve America’s aims in Eurasia and to better compete with China over the long run.


Author(s):  
Hugh B. Urban ◽  
Greg Johnson

The Afterword includes an interview with Bruce Lincoln, in which he is asked to reflect on the current study of religion, methods of comparison, and the political implications of academic discourse. In addition to responding to specific points in these chapters, Lincoln also fleshes out what he thinks it would mean “to do better” in the critical study of religion amid the ongoing crises of higher education today. Perhaps most importantly, he reflects upon and clarifies what he means by “irreverence” in the study of religion; an irreverent approach, he concludes, entails a rejection of the sacred status that other people attribute to various things, but not of the people themselves.


Author(s):  
Talbot C. Imlay

In examining the efforts of European socialists to forge a common position towards the issue of post-war empires, this chapter highlights some of the political stakes involved in decolonization. As debates between European and Asian socialists suggest, the process of decolonization witnessed a struggle between competing rights: national rights, minority rights, and human (individual) rights. Each set of rights possessed far-reaching political implications, none more so than minority rights, as they were often associated with limits on national sovereignty. These limits could be internal, such as constitutional restraints on the working of majority rule; but they could also take the form of external constraints on sovereignty, including alternatives to the nation state itself. The victory of the nation state, in other words, was inextricably tied to the defeat of minority rights as well as the growing predominance of human rights.


1985 ◽  
Vol 17 (2) ◽  
pp. 341-369 ◽  
Author(s):  
Philip J. Williams

The involvement of Christians in the Nicaraguan Revolution is a clear manifestation of the profound changes taking place within the Nicaraguan Church as a whole. While a clear majority of the clergy took a stand against the injustices of the Somoza regime, a smaller group of priests and religious demonstrated a more profound commitment to radical structural transformation of society. Although their efforts to organize andconcientizar1rural and urban poor had serious political implications – in fact, many joined the guerrilla as a result of the ‘radicalization of their faith’ – to these priests and religious the political solutions available to counter growing social injustices and government abuses were few: either fight or capitulate. The bishops, on the other hand, were cautious about the pace of change and rejected the violent option, choosing instead an intermediate path. Unfortunately, such an option proved futile in the case of Nicaragua, and finally the bishops justified armed revolution as a viable alternative to systematic repression.


2019 ◽  
Vol 36 (7-8) ◽  
pp. 261-271
Author(s):  
Daniel McLoughlin

In this interview, Vicki Kirby discusses her research into the relationship between nature and culture, focusing in particular on her recent edited collection, What If Culture Was Nature All Along? The volume appears in the ‘New Materialisms’ series, and so the interview begins by situating the collection with respect to the recent materialist turn in social theory. Kirby discusses the influence of deconstruction on her thought, and the way that she draws upon Derrida to think through recent research in the life sciences and its implications for understanding the relationship between matter, life, and communication. She also goes into the political implications of her work and the relationship between biopolitics and biodeconstruction.


1962 ◽  
Vol 4 (4) ◽  
pp. 436-453 ◽  
Author(s):  
Joseph R. Levenson

In “The Suggestiveness of Vestiges: Confucianism and Monarchy at the Last”, I wrote of the draining of the monarchical mystique in modern China. Vestigial monarchism, it seemed to me, was related to an equally vestigial Confucianism — really related, that is, not just parallel in some modern course of corrosion. The relation was the thing, a novel one of untroubled association (in a common, new ideology of “national spirit”), unpromising departure from what seemed, more and more, the devious, uncertain, tense partnership of pre-Western days. The loss of this ambivalence, this Confucian-monarchical attraction-repulsion, comprised the Chinese state's attrition. And if in its time that traditional state was a prodigiously hardy perennial, perhaps its vitality, in a truly Nietzschean sense, was the measure of its tolerance of tensions: their release was the bureaucratic monarchy's death.


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