Utopia and Political Theology in the “Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism”

2021 ◽  
pp. 54-72
Author(s):  
S. D. Chrostowska
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
German Idealism ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Future Return ◽  
Modern Era ◽  
State Form ◽  
Systematic Program

This chapter focuses on a figure of historical progression embedded in revolutionary thought in the modern era: the spiral. Most associated with Hegelianism, the spiral stands for the dialectic of history: an eventual future return to the origin. The spiral’s secularized telic schema remains, however, continuous with the theological model of change as the circle of perfection. This continuity is reflected in Romantic messianism and its heirs. My discussion of the spiral is anchored well before their time, in “The Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism,” likely authored in 1796/1797 by Hegel himself. Unpublished until the twentieth century, the text calls for a new, rational mythology to do away with the modern state. In contrast to the later Hegel’s attempt to identify the spiral of history with the development of the state-form, the political theology of this radical early document identifies its utopian telos with the overcoming of the state.

scholarly journals From Kierkegaard to Schmitt: Towards the Political-Theological Relevance of Repetition

2021 ◽  
Vol 20 (1) ◽  
pp. 25-49
Author(s):  
Vladimir Bashkov
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
Soren Kierkegaard ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
The One ◽  
Main Ideas

This article attempts to explore Carl Schmitt’s political theology with reference to the philosophical and literature heritage of Søren Kierkegaard. For most modern scholars, the presence of this ideological connection is no longer something unknown or to be doubted. In the key statements of political theology, the dialectic of exception and of the universal is found, appearing in the same way as it was formulated by Kierkegaard. More often, the exception is the one that attracts the attention of specialists. However, in addition to the exception, Kierkegaard also speculated on repetition; it was the Danish philosopher’s work of the same name that was the source of the quotation with which Schmitt illustrated the significance of the sovereign decision for the systematic doctrine of the state. This paper redefines Schmitt’s main ideas through the notion of repetition, and demonstrates the theoretical novelty and productivity of this approach to the study of the heritage of one of the key political thinkers of the twentieth century.

scholarly journals Light and Power: The Panopticon as a Political Form and its Variations

2020 ◽  
Vol 19 (1) ◽  
pp. 9-34
Author(s):  
Svyatoslav Kaspe
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
Civil Religion ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Political Religion ◽  
The Future ◽  
Political Form ◽  
Modern Era

After Michel Foucault, Bentham’s Panopticon became a widely recognized image of the modern state. The article focuses on some aspects of this strong metaphor that were not taken into account by Foucault or most other researchers. The question of the sources of light in the Panopticon, also understood metaphorically as a sine qua non for the exercise of power and for its legitimacy at the same time, allows to describe such variations of the state’s political form that is based on either a “political religion” (adjacent to a totalitarian phenomenon), or secular (adjacent to liberalism) and based on the “civil religion” (the most complicated of all). A key variable here is the mode to interface the political and the sacred. If in the pre-modern era the openness of political forms for influences emanating from the sacred was presumed, in modern states the political reaches autonomy; the political becomes emancipated from the sacred, and occupies its place in the most radical scenarios. The author argues that in the future, the highest sustainability will be demonstrated by those variations of the state political form in which this autonomy is not completed, or where the connections between the political and the sacred are maintained, albeit at a reduced level, that is, those in which “civil religion” is practiced.

scholarly journals Kongen hersker, men regerer ikke - Guvernementalitet, statificering og statspraksis hos Michel Foucault

2018 ◽  
pp. 89-108
Author(s):  
Nicolai Von Eggers ◽  
Mathias Hein Jessen
Keyword(s):  
Michel Foucault ◽  
The State ◽  
The Political ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Giorgio Agamben ◽  
The West ◽  
Historical Investigation ◽  
History Of ◽  
Way Of Thinking

Michel Foucault developed his now (in)famous neologism governmentality in the first of the two lectures he devoted to ’a history of governmentality, Security, Territory, Population (1977-78) and The Birth of Biopolitics (1978-79). Foucault developed this notion in order to do a historical investigation of ‘the state’ or ‘the political’ which did not assume the entity of the state but treated it as a way of governing, a way of thinking about governing. Recently, the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben has taken up Foucault’s notion of governmentality in his writing of a history of power in the West, most notably in The Kingdom and the Glory. It is with inspiration from Agamben’s recent use of Foucault that Foucault’s approach to writing the history of the state (as a history of governmental practices and the reflection hereof) is revisited. Foucault (and Agamben) thus offer another way of writing the history of the state and of the political, which focuses on different texts and on reading more familiar texts in a new light, thereby offering a new and notably different view on the emergence of the modern state and politics.

The State and Violence

2010 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 293-296 ◽  
Author(s):  
Larry Diamond
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Order ◽  
The Political ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Human History ◽  
The Rule Of Law ◽  
Social Orders

Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (Cambridge 2009) offers a theory of the evolution of the modern state and an even more ambitious framework “for interpreting recorded human history.” The book raises fundamental questions about the political structuring of violence, the functions of the rule of law, and the establishment and maintenance of political order. In doing so, it speaks to a range of political scientists from a variety of methodological and subfield perspectives. We have thus invited four prominent political science scholars of violence and politics to comment on the book: Jack Snyder, Caroline Hartzell, Jean Bethke Elshtain, and Larry Diamond.

Nothing Absolute

2021 ◽  
Keyword(s):  
Political Theology ◽  
German Idealism ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Enlightenment ◽  
The Earth ◽  
The World ◽  
Theological Perspective ◽  
Traditional Approaches ◽  
First Time ◽  
Point Of Reference

Staging for the first time in extant scholarship a rigorous encounter between German thought from Kant to Marx and new forms of political theology, this ground-breaking volume puts forward a distinct and powerful framework for understanding the continuing relevance of political theology today as well as the conceptual and genealogical importance of German Idealism for its present and future. Against traditional approaches that view German Idealism as essentially a secularizing movement, this volume approaches it as the first speculative articulation of the political-theological problematic in the aftermath of the Enlightenment and the advent of secularity. Via a set of innovative readings and critiques, the volume investigates anew such concepts as immanence, utopia, sovereignty, mediation, indifference, the earth, the absolute, or the world, bringing German Idealism and Romanticism into dialogue with contemporary investigations of the (Christian-)modern forms of transcendence, domination, exclusion, and world-justification. Over the course of the volume, post-Kantian German thought emerges as a crucial phase in the genealogy of political theology and an important point of reference for the ongoing reassessment of modernity and secularity. As a result, this volume not only rethinks the philosophical trajectory of German Idealism and its aftermath from a political-theological perspective, but also demonstrates what can be done with (or against) German Idealism using the conceptual resources of political theology today.

Unstated: Narrating War in Lebanon

PMLA ◽  
2008 ◽  
Vol 123 (5) ◽  
pp. 1621-1629 ◽  
Author(s):  
Salah D. Hassan
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Civil War ◽  
North American ◽  
Political Authority ◽  
The State ◽  
American Fiction ◽  
Colonial Rule ◽  
American Writer ◽  
French Colonial ◽  
State Form

This essay consists of three beginnings, then a deferred reading of a novel. One beginning, a theoretical beginning, reflects on the question implicit in my title: What is unstated in the state of Lebanon? Another beginning, a literary critical beginning, returns to the work of Kahlil Gibran, the most famous early-twentieth-century Arab North American writer. Gibran links modernist and postmodernist Arab North American writing and, in a historical parallel, connects the foundations of the Lebanese state under French colonial rule to its disintegration in the context of the civil war. A third beginning, a contextual beginning, evokes more recent events in Lebanon through a discussion of the July War of 2006, during which Israel bombed the country for over a month. These three points of departure, I suggest, are crucial to readings of contemporary Arab North American fiction, which is always conditioned by theories of the state, a post-Gibran literary sensibility, and the politics of the present. More specifically, I argue that Rawi Hage's representation of the civil war in Lebanon in DeNiro's Game negotiates the destruction of the Lebanese state through figures of the unstated, whose very existence questions more generally the state form as the preeminent site of political authority and contributes to unstating the state.

The State and the Jews: Reflections on Difficult Freedom

2006 ◽  
Vol 14 (1-2) ◽  
pp. 109-130
Author(s):  
Annette Aronowicz
Keyword(s):  
Jewish People ◽  
Second World War ◽  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
The Political ◽  
Modern State ◽  
World War ◽  
Political Dimension ◽  
Second World ◽  
Do So

AbstractThis essay examines the contrast between two conceptions of the universal, one represented by the modern State and the other by the Jewish people. In order to do so, it returns to the collection of essays on Judaism Levinas wrote in the approximately two decades after the Second World War, Difficult Freedom. Its aim is to focus specifically on the political dimension within this collection and then to step back and reflect on how his way of speaking of the political appears to us a full generation later. As is well known, Levinas's approach to the political has a way of escaping that realm, while nonetheless remaining relevant to it. This is what we shall try to capture and to evaluate.

The State and Violence

2010 ◽  
Vol 8 (1) ◽  
pp. 287-289 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jack Snyder
Keyword(s):  
Conceptual Framework ◽  
Political Science ◽  
Rule Of Law ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Order ◽  
The Political ◽  
Modern State ◽  
Human History ◽  
The Rule Of Law ◽  
Social Orders

Violence and Social Orders: A Conceptual Framework for Interpreting Recorded Human History (Cambridge 2009) offers a theory of the evolution of the modern state and an even more ambitious framework “for interpreting recorded human history.” The book raises fundamental questions about the political structuring of violence, the functions of the rule of law, and the establishment and maintenance of political order. In doing so, it speaks to a range of political scientists from a variety of methodological and subfield perspectives. We have thus invited four prominent political science scholars of violence and politics to comment on the book: Jack Snyder, Caroline Hartzell, Jean Bethke Elshtain, and Larry Diamond.

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