Political Theology of the Death of God

2021 ◽  
pp. 188-206
Author(s):  
Agata Bielik-Robson

This essay attempts to complicate Carl Schmitt’s claim that most of modern political concepts demonstrate a “continuing vitality” of God, by evoking another theological figure which, already for Hegel, constituted the gist of modern religiosity: “the sentiment of the death of God,” as he calls it in his Faith and Knowledge. Reading Hegel through Derrida’s lenses, most of all his Glas, the essay shows the inherent subversion of the political theology, which focuses not on God’s vitality but, to the contrary, on God’s demise. Yet, the death of God appears here not as the Nietzschean metaphor of radical atheisation, but as the antinomian moment within the modern political theology: the moment of the paradoxical a/theologisation which occurs in the theological realm itself. Modern political theology would thus be the paradoxical political a/theology of the death of God: not of the Schmittian forever vital, undying, powerfully decisionistic God, but the God who himself agrees to die and cedes his legacy to the finite world.

Stasis ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 10 (2) ◽  
pp. 156-180
Author(s):  
John Ryan Feldmann

Jordan Peterson has risen to prominence as a genuine public intellectual on the New Right within a North American context that (unlike Europe) generally eschews the elitism of educated intellectuals. He has tried to construct a coherent ontological system in order to rejuvenate previously dead cultural forms without recourse to unenlightened fundamentalisms. Critiquing Enlightenment rationality from a post-metaphysical perspective, Peterson seeks to ground a Darwinian materialism in an affective-drive theory of subjectivity. It is only the religious imaginary that holds the key for the renewal of the West, and which can combat the dark-black shadow of nihilism that hangs over Western civilization. Synthesizing psychoanalysis with evolutionary biology, neuroscience, religious anthropology, and existentialism, Peterson forges an ontological structure that endeavors to invert the death of God and re-establish a conservative political project upon a resurrected religious metanarrative.


Author(s):  
Saitya Brata Das

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.


Author(s):  
Michael N. Barnett

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.


1966 ◽  
Vol 60 (4) ◽  
pp. 943-951 ◽  
Author(s):  
Matthew Holden

If an important part of the political scientist's mission is to anticipate and explain “the critical problems that generate turbulence” in that part of the world which attracts his attention, then, in the study of administration, bureaucratic “imperialism” must be of compelling interest. If systematic data directly assembled for the purpose are lacking, and if there are some signal problems of theory which have been little investigated, there is still enough evidence from studies of other political problems that it seems worthwhile to set out some trial-run ideas in the hope that they will elicit further discussion.Bureaucractic imperialism seems pre-eminently a matter of inter-agency conflict in which two or more agencies try to assert permanent control over the same jurisdiction, or in which one agency actually seeks to take over another agency as well as the jurisdiction of that agency. We are thus primarily concerned with the politics of allocation and shall, except incidentally, bypass some other interesting aspects of inter-agency politics such as cooperation between agencies sharing missions, competition for favorable “one-time-only” decisions which do not involve jurisdictional reallocation, or the critical problems of the “holding company” administrative organization and its internal politics. For the moment, our concern with the politics of allocation leads to a focus on what would appear to be the likely behaviors of those decisionmakers who have both inclination and opportunity to look after the institutional well-being of agencies.


2021 ◽  
pp. 601-618
Author(s):  
Elizabeth R. Varon

Americans experienced the last months of the Civil War as uncertain and full of dramatic events that together finally spelled the Confederacy’s doom. The Union capitalized on its advantages in manpower and materiel, on the command harmony of Lt. Gen. Ulysses S. Grant and his team, and on the political momentum of President Abraham Lincoln’s emancipation policy to seize the prizes of Richmond and Petersburg and send the Confederate government and Gen. Robert E. Lee’s Army of Northern Virginia into flight. Confederates, confronting shortages of manpower and materiel, debated how to prolong the fight and clung to the hope that Lee’s army would win victories that breathed new life into the Confederate project. President Lincoln framed this last season of war as a moral reckoning with slavery and the moment to advance the work of reunion. The final campaigns were a watershed in the process of emancipation, as Lee’s surrender brought many slaves their de facto freedom.


2013 ◽  
Vol 6 (2) ◽  
pp. 85-93
Author(s):  
Anna Ceglarska ◽  

History of the rise of the Roman Republic as described by Polybius The aim of this article is to refer Polybius’s political theory, included in Book VI of The Histories, to the history of the rise of the Roman Republic. This theme must have been particularly significant for Polybius. For him, Rome was the most perfect example of a mixed government system, and the aim of describing its history was to show the development of this perfect system. The article presents the mutual relation of theory and history, starting with the period of kingship, up to the emergence of the democratic element, i.e. the moment when Rome acquired the mixed system of government. Both the political and social contexts of the changes are outlined. The analysis suggests that Polybius related his political theory to the history of the state he admired, thus providing the theory with actual foundations. Reconstructing his analysis makes it possible to see the history of Rome in a different light, and to ponder the system itself and its decline, even though the main objective of both Polybius and this article is to present its development.


2021 ◽  
Vol 9 (2) ◽  
pp. 201-219
Author(s):  
Martin Grassi

Although Political Theology examined mainly the political dimension of the relationship between God-Father and God-Son, it is paramount to consider the political performance of the Holy Spirit in the Economy of Redemption. The Holy Spirit has been characterized as the binding cause and the principle of relationality both referring to God’s inner life and to God’s relationship with His creatures. As the personalization of relationality, the Holy Spirit performs a unique task: to bring together what is apart by means of organisation. This power of the Spirit to turn a plurality into a unity is manifested in the Latin translation of oikonomía as disposition, that is, giving a special order to the multiple elements within a certain totality. Within this activity of the Spirit, Theodicy can be regarded as the way to depict God’s arrangement of the world and of history, bringing everything together towards the eschatological Kingdom of God. The paper aims at showing this fundamental activity of the Holy Spirit in Christian Theology, and intends to pose the question on how to think on a theology beyond theodicy, that is, how to think on a Trinitarian God beyond the categories of sovereignty and totalization.


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