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.

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.

Hans Maier

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Intellectual History ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
Public Intellectual ◽  
The Political ◽  
German History ◽  
Political Scientist ◽  
Highly Sensitive ◽  
History Of ◽  
The Rich ◽  
Academic Teacher

The political scientist and former Bavarian Minister of Culture Hans Maier has created a historically profound, theologically educated, literarily and musically highly sensitive, politically mature body of work, with which he has inscribed himself in the (intellectual) history of the Federal Republic. This book is the first to contain contributions by renowned scholars and politicians on the rich work and impact of the Catholic scholar and politician Hans Maier. It thematises and appreciates in detail his view of German history and the traditions of political thought, his critique of political language, political theology, totalitarianism and political religions, but also his contributions on Catholicism and modernity, his writings on literature and music, and finally his influence as an academic teacher, public intellectual and politician.

“Tough Love”: The Political Theology of Civil Disobedience

2020 ◽  
Vol 18 (3) ◽  
pp. 851-866
Author(s):  
Alexander Livingston
Keyword(s):  
Civil Rights ◽  
Political Theory ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
Civil Disobedience ◽  
The Political ◽  
Nonviolent Resistance ◽  
History Of ◽  
Critical Interpretation ◽  
Civil Rights History ◽  
Martin Luther King

Love is a key concept in the theory and history of civil disobedience yet it has been purposefully neglected in recent debates in political theory. Through an examination of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s paradoxical notion of “aggressive love,” I offer a critical interpretation of love as a key concept in a vernacular black political theology, and the consequences of love’s displacement by law in liberal theories of civil disobedience. The first section locates the origins of aggressive love in an earlier generation of black theologians who looked to India’s anticolonial struggle to reimagine the dignity of the oppressed as “creative survival.” The second contextualizes King’s early sermons on moral injury and self-respect within this tradition to reinterpret Stride toward Freedom’s account of the dignity-enhancing effects of nonviolent resistance as the triumph of love over fear. The third considers the implications of these arguments for conceptualizing the moral psychology of the white citizen and its consequences for contemporary debates over the ideological uses of Civil Rights history. The call to respond to oppression with aggressive love illustrates the paradoxical character of civil disobedience obscured by legal accounts as well as by criticisms of the very idea of “civil” disobedience. This is the paradox of affirming civility while enacting disobedience in order to bind political confrontation with political pedagogy.

Precedent and Perversity in Wordsworth's Sonnets Upon the Punishment of Death

1996 ◽  
Vol 50 (4) ◽  
pp. 427-447 ◽  
Author(s):  
Sharon M. Setzer
Keyword(s):  
French Revolution ◽  
Death Penalty ◽  
Capital Punishment ◽  
The Political ◽  
Poetic Form ◽  
Ancient History ◽  
Biblical History ◽  
History Of ◽  
Uncritical Acceptance ◽  
The Aesthetic

First published in 1840, at the height of the controversy over capital punishment in England, Wordsworth's Sonnets Upon the Punishment of Death counter the movement toward political reform through their massive appeal to ancient history, poetical history, and the history of poetic form. While Wordsworth attempts to ground his authority in the biblical history reconstituted in Milton's Paradise Lost and the classical history of Lucius Junius Brutus recuperated during the French Revolution, his argument for the political imperative of the death penalty is inextricably bound up with the aesthetic imperatives of the sonnet form. The sonnet series as a whole thus betrays a perverse appropiation of literary and historical precedent as well as an uncritical acceptance of Petrarchan conventions.

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.

Introduction

2016 ◽  
Author(s):  
Michael N. Barnett
Keyword(s):  
Political Theology ◽  
Historical Record ◽  
Jewish Question ◽  
The Political ◽  
American Jews ◽  
Social Sciences And Humanities ◽  
American Experience ◽  
The Social ◽  
History Of ◽  
Political Communities

This introductory chapter provides an overview of the book's main themes. This book immerses itself in the history of American Jews and traces how the American experience shaped the identity of American Jews; how this identity is intertwined with the political theology of Prophetic Judaism; how the political theology accounts for an outward orientation that is more cosmopolitan than tribal; and how this foreign policy orientation shaped American Jews' responses to the Jewish Problem and the Jewish Question. As a work of history, this book is deeply informed by the historical record and draws from memoirs, archives, secondary research, and interviews. As a work of interpretation it is informed by what the social sciences and humanities tell us about the relationships between various kinds of political communities and their relations with others.

From Death Penalty to Thanatopolitics

2019 ◽  
Vol 63 (2) ◽  
pp. 293-314
Author(s):  
Sabeen Ahmed ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Death Penalty ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
Carl Schmitt ◽  
Nation State ◽  
Sovereign Power ◽  
Central Question ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
Disciplinary Power ◽  
Starting Point

Drawing from the works of Carl Schmitt, Michel Foucault, Giorgio Agamben, and Jacques Derrida, this article offers a theory of political theology for the contemporary Western liberal nation-state. Taking as its starting point the death penalty, it presents a triune theory of governance—what I call Trinitarian Governmentality—which exposes the thanatopolitical dimension fundamental to the very articulation of sovereign power and, as such, the theologico-political. It is thus only by conceptualizing sovereignty as Trinitarian Governmentality—composed of biopower/oikonomia, disciplinary power/theologia, and pastoral power/eschatologia—that we can begin to address Derrida’s central question: how might we theorize a properly philosophical abolitionism for the present?

Enmity or Friendship?

2019 ◽  
pp. 11-36
Author(s):  
Gerald M. Mara
Keyword(s):  
Political Philosophy ◽  
Political Thought ◽  
Jacques Derrida ◽  
Frame Of Reference ◽  
Carl Schmitt ◽  
The Political ◽  
War And Peace ◽  
History Of

Chapter 1 interprets statements offered by two twentieth-century philosophers, Carl Schmitt, principally in The Concept of the Political, and Jacques Derrida, in his critique of Schmitt in The Politics of Friendship. Both works make the importance of political philosophy’s frame of reference explicit, though they offer opposed characterizations of its content. I argue that the substantive positions taken in the two works share more characteristics than initially apparent. Schmitt’s characterization of enmity as the essence of politics must accommodate a kind of mutuality. And Derrida’s political friendship eventually constructs its own distinctive enemy. Those complicating parallels diminish confidence in either author’s ability to settle the question of how political thought should be framed and prompt a reconsideration of how allegedly overarching imperatives of war and peace have been treated within the history of Western political philosophy.

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.

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