Political Theologies – serie

The first English translation of his work, The Withholding Power, offers a fascinating introduction to the thought of Italian philosopher Massimo Cacciari. Cacciari is a notoriously complex thinker but this title offers a starting point for entering into the very heart of his thinking. The Withholding Power provides a comprehensive and synthetic insight into his interpretation of Christian political theology and leftist Italian political theory more generally. The theme of katechon - originally a biblical concept which has been developed into a political concept - has been absolutely central to the work of Italian philosophers such as Agamben and Eposito for nearly twenty years. In The Withholding Power, Cacciari sets forth his startlingly original perspective on the influence the theological-political questions have traditionally exerted upon ideas of power, sovereignty and the relationship between political and religious authority.With an introduction by Howard Caygill contextualizing the work within the history of Italian thought, this title will offer those coming to Cacciari for the first time a searing insight into his political, theological and philosophical milieu.

The first English translation of his work, The Withholding Power, offers a fascinating introduction to the thought of Italian philosopher Massimo Cacciari. Cacciari is a notoriously complex thinker but this title offers a starting point for entering into the very heart of his thinking. The Witholding Power provides a comprehensive and synthetic insight into his interpretation of Christian political theology and leftist Italian political theory more generally. The theme of katechon - originally a biblical concept which has been developed into a political concept - has been absolutely central to the work of Italian philosophers such as Agamben and Eposito for nearly twenty years. In The Withholding Power, Cacciari sets forth his startlingly original perspective on the influence the theological-political questions have traditionally exerted upon ideas of power, sovereignty and the relationship between political and religious authority.With an introduction by Howard Caygill contextualizing the work within the history of Italian thought, this title will offer those coming to Cacciari for the first time a searing insight into his political, theological and philosophical milieu.

The issue of debt and how it affects our lives is becoming more and more urgent. The "Austerity" model has been the prevalent European economic policies of recent years led by the "German model". Elettra Stimilli draws upon contemporary philosophy, psychology and theology to argue that austerity is built on the idea that we somehow deserve to be punished and need to experience guilt in order to take full account of our economic sins. Following thinkers such as Max Weber, Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault, Debt and Guilt provides a startling examination of the relationship between contemporary politics and economics and how we structure our inner lives. The first English translation of Debito e Colpa, this book provokes new ways of thinking about how we experience both debt and guilt in contemporary society.

The issue of debt and how it affects our lives is becoming more and more urgent. The "Austerity" model has been the prevalent European economic policies of recent years led by the "German model". Elettra Stimilli draws upon contemporary philosophy, psychology and theology to argue that austerity is built on the idea that we somehow deserve to be punished and need to experience guilt in order to take full account of our economic sins. Following thinkers such as Max Weber, Walter Benjamin and Michel Foucault, Debt and Guilt provides a startling examination of the relationship between contemporary politics and economics and how we structure our inner lives. The first English translation of Debito e Colpa, this book provokes new ways of thinking about how we experience both debt and guilt in contemporary society.

The failure of secular modernity to deliver on its promise of progress and enlightenment leaves a void that religion is rushing to fill. Yet what kind of religious thinking and doing can be adequate to our posthuman condition? And how can we avoid either embracing religious fundamentalism and fantasy or remaining mired in hopeless atheistic nihilism? In Unnatural Theology Charlie Gere provides ways of thinking about the possibilities of religion and theology in the context of our highly technologized postmodernity. Taking its cue from a wide range of thinkers, from John Ruskin and Alfred North Whitehead, to Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Giorgio Agamben, Simon Critchley, Catherine Keller, Bruno Latour, and Timothy Morton, and artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Richard Hamilton, and films including The Incredible Shrinking Man, the book seeks the remnants of theology and religion in the realms of technology and media, and also art, as the basis of potential new religious thinking. Through an interdisciplinary engagement with these thinkers and artists it develops the notion of an unnatural theology as the basis of a new kind of religious thought that does not insult our intelligence.

Hegel’s philosophy of religion contains an implicit political theology. When viewed in connection with his wider work on subjectivity, history and politics, this political theology is a resource for apocalyptic thinking. In a world of climate change, inequality, oppressive gender roles and racism, Hegel can be used to theorise the hope found in the end of that world.Histories of apocalyptic thinking draw a line connecting the medieval prophet Joachim of Fiore and Marx. This line passes through Hegel, who transforms the relationship between philosophy and theology by philosophically employing theological concepts to critique the world. Jacob Taubes provides an example of this Hegelian political theology, weaving Christianity, Judaism and philosophy to develop an apocalypticism that is not invested in the world. Taubes awaits the end of the world knowing that apocalyptic destruction is also a form of creation. Catherine Malabou discusses this relationship between destruction and creation in terms of plasticity. Using plasticity to reformulate apocalypticism allows for a form of apocalyptic thinking that is immanent and materialist.Together Hegel, Taubes and Malabou provide the resources for thinking about why the world should end. The resulting apocalyptic pessimism is not passive, but requires an active refusal of the world.

What is political modernity? And how much of its concepts and structures has changed or remained the same with the advent of the so-called globalization? What does it mean, from a political perspective, that we live in a postmodern era? This book discusses these issues in light of the key authors and texts of the continental philosophical tradition: from Carl Schmitt to Giorgio Agamben, from Thomas Hobbes to Michel Foucault. Looking at the roots of the current historical crisis that characterizes Western political regimes, this book gazes into the past in order to trace the possible development of our current global era, in which all the classical concepts and our symbolic resources seem to be called into question, leaving a vacuum of meaning for political action as much as for political theory.

What is political modernity? And how much of its concepts and structures has changed or remained the same with the advent of the so-called globalization? What does it mean, from a political perspective, that we live in a postmodern era? This book discusses these issues in light of the key authors and texts of the continental philosophical tradition: from Carl Schmitt to Giorgio Agamben, from Thomas Hobbes to Michel Foucault. Looking at the roots of the current historical crisis that characterizes Western political regimes, this book gazes into the past in order to trace the possible development of our current global era, in which all the classical concepts and our symbolic resources seem to be called into question, leaving a vacuum of meaning for political action as much as for political theory.

Beginning from the notion of finite life, Another Finitude takes this staple subject from post-Heideggerian philosophy and opposes it to the onto-theological concept of infinity, represented by an eternal absolute. Although critical of Heidegger and his definition of finitude as ‘being-towards-death’, this book does not revert to the ontological idea of infinity secured in the sacred image of immortality. But it also does not want to give up on infinity altogether; the infinite is transposed, so it can become a necessary moment of the finite life. A theological framework for the new elaboration of the concept of finitude is crucial; but instead of following the Lutheran formula, Agata Bielik-Robson turns to the sources of Judaism. Taking inspiration from the Jewish idea of torat hayim, the principle of finite life, which found the best expression in the biblical sentence: love strong as death; love emerges as the alternative marker of finitude, allowing to us redefine it in an affirmative way. By tracing the avatars of love in the group of 20th-century thinkers, or ‘messianic vitalists’–Benjamin, Rosenzweig, Arendt, Derrida, and (deeply revised) Freud–the book attempts to demonstrate the possibility of such affirmation. Love becomes the new ‘infinite-in-the-finite’; love in all its forms, from the original libidinal endowment of the human psyche to the last metamorphoses of agape, the Greco-Christian divine love.

From their decisive emergence in the late eighteenth century, modernity and modern politics were long haunted by irony and paradox. Ours, however, is the age of the implosion of modernity. Modernity has degenerated into self-parody. The polarities that an ironic grasp of it could potentially always hold in tension are finally collapsing into each other.In Modernity and the Political Fix, Andrew Gibson tells the relevant story and asks what aspects of modern politics we might want to salvage and preserve and within what structure we might continue thinking about them. His answer is that these questions call for the isolation of a particular set of concepts; that, rightly positioned in relation to one another, the concepts amount to a political theology; that the very formulation of political temporality is therefore at stake; and that the thinking in question has been and is best represented in modern philosophy and art, above all, modern literature. Ranging through early modern and modern thought from Hobbes, Pascal and Leibniz to Rousseau, Kant, Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard to Foucault, Lacan, Badiou, Jambet and Rancière, and in modern literature and art from Wordsworth and Byron to Goya and Wagner, Huysmans and Wilde, Joyce and Woolf, Joseph Roth, Vicki Baum, Gabriele Tergit and the Weimar novel, Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell to R.S. Thomas and Norman Nicholson, Gibson seeks to compile a modern political aide-memoire, a treasury for a politics to come.

This book presents the first in-depth survey of Austrian-Jewish sociologist and philosopher Jacob Taubes (1923-87). Born in Vienna, Taubes and his family fled to Switzerland in the 1930s to escape Nazism, and the philosopher later took up positions at schools in the US and in Berlin. Paradoxically, however, Taubes shared correspondence with Carl Schmitt, the infamous "crown jurist" and legal theorist of the Nazi regime. This book unpacks these paradoxes through deep analytical observation of Schmitt and Taubes' dialogues, and shows how Taubes deconstructed St. Paul’s writings to reveal their more subversive and heterodox implications. These readings, which gave rise to the school of thought we now call political theology, have also proven foundational to the thought of contemporary thinkers such as Giogio Agamben, Slavoj Zizek and Alain Badiou.Stimilli’s incisive treatment of Taubes finally brings him to the attention of an even wider audience. This is essential reading for anyone researching political theology, 20th-century Jewish thought and the relationship between theology and philosophy today.

Jacob Taubes (1923-87) was one of the most important Jewish thinkers of the 20th-century, but until recently there has been little academic writing about him. Elettra Stimilli presents the first English translation of Taubes' work, which has proved so essential to philosophical and theological studies. Stimilli’s work will hold considerable interest for students and scholars specialising in Saint Paul’s writings; Taubes brilliantly deconstructed these texts to reveal their more subversive and heterodox implications and through his interlocutions with Carl Schmitt, identified the apostle as a heretical Jew, who decided to follow Jesus. Such original thought ushered in a new realm of political theology that has been crucial to thinkers who work with Pauline thought today, such as Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou. Stimilli’s work has grown increasingly significant and her incisive treatment of Taubes’ writings will bring him to the attention of an even wider audience.

In The Phenomenology of Religious Belief, the renowned philosopher Michael J. Shapiro investigates how art – and in particular literature and film – can impact upon both traditional interpretations and critical studies of religious beliefs and experiences. In doing so, he examines the work of prolific and award-winning writers such as Toni Morrison, Philip K. Dick and Robert Coover. By placing their work in conjunction with critical analyses of media by the likes of Ingmar Bergman and Pier Paolo Pasolini and combining it with the work of groundbreaking thinkers such as George Canguilhem, Giorgio Agamben and Slavoj Žižek, Shapiro takes a truly interdisciplinary approach to the question of how life should be lived. His assessment of phenomenological subjectivity also leads him to question the nature of political theology and extend the criticism of Pauline theology.

The failure of secular modernity to deliver on its promise of progress and enlightenment leaves a void that religion is rushing to fill. Yet what kind of religious thinking and doing can be adequate to our posthuman condition? And how can we avoid either embracing religious fundamentalism and fantasy or remaining mired in hopeless atheistic nihilism? In Unnatural Theology Charlie Gere provides ways of thinking about the possibilities of religion and theology in the context of our highly technologized postmodernity. Taking its cue from a wide range of thinkers, from John Ruskin and Alfred North Whitehead, to Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, Giorgio Agamben, Simon Critchley, Catherine Keller, Bruno Latour, and Timothy Morton, and artists such as Marcel Duchamp and Richard Hamilton, and films including The Incredible Shrinking Man, the book seeks the remnants of theology and religion in the realms of technology and media, and also art, as the basis of potential new religious thinking. Through an interdisciplinary engagement with these thinkers and artists it develops the notion of an unnatural theology as the basis of a new kind of religious thought that does not insult our intelligence.

Hegel’s philosophy of religion contains an implicit political theology. When viewed in connection with his wider work on subjectivity, history and politics, this political theology is a resource for apocalyptic thinking. In a world of climate change, inequality, oppressive gender roles and racism, Hegel can be used to theorise the hope found in the end of that world.Histories of apocalyptic thinking draw a line connecting the medieval prophet Joachim of Fiore and Marx. This line passes through Hegel, who transforms the relationship between philosophy and theology by philosophically employing theological concepts to critique the world. Jacob Taubes provides an example of this Hegelian political theology, weaving Christianity, Judaism and philosophy to develop an apocalypticism that is not invested in the world. Taubes awaits the end of the world knowing that apocalyptic destruction is also a form of creation. Catherine Malabou discusses this relationship between destruction and creation in terms of plasticity. Using plasticity to reformulate apocalypticism allows for a form of apocalyptic thinking that is immanent and materialist.Together Hegel, Taubes and Malabou provide the resources for thinking about why the world should end. The resulting apocalyptic pessimism is not passive, but requires an active refusal of the world.

Colby Dickinson proposes a new political theology rooted in the intersections between continental philosophy, heterodox theology, and orthodox theology. Moving beyond the idea that there is an irresolvable tension at the heart of theological discourse, the conflict between the two poles of theology is made intelligible. Dickinson discusses the opposing poles simply as manifestations of reform and revolution, characteristics intrinsic to the nature of theological discourse itself. Outlining the illuminating space of theology, Theological Poverty in Continental Philosophy breaks new ground for critical theology and continental philosophy.Within the theology of poverty, the believer renounces the worldly for the divine. Through this focus on the poverty intrinsic to religious calling, the potential for cross-pollination between the theological and the secular is highlighted. Ultimately situating the virtue of theological poverty within a poststructuralist, postmodern world, Dickinson is not content to position Christian philosophy as the superior theological position, moving away from the absolute values of one tradition over another. This universalising of theological poverty through core and uniting concepts like grace, negation, violence and paradox reveal the theory’s transmutable strength. By joining up critical theology and the philosophy of religion in this way, the book broadens the possibility of a critical dialogue both between and within disciplines.

From their decisive emergence in the late eighteenth century, modernity and modern politics were long haunted by irony and paradox. Ours, however, is the age of the implosion of modernity. Modernity has degenerated into self-parody. The polarities that an ironic grasp of it could potentially always hold in tension are finally collapsing into each other.In Modernity and the Political Fix, Andrew Gibson tells the relevant story and asks what aspects of modern politics we might want to salvage and preserve and within what structure we might continue thinking about them. His answer is that these questions call for the isolation of a particular set of concepts; that, rightly positioned in relation to one another, the concepts amount to a political theology; that the very formulation of political temporality is therefore at stake; and that the thinking in question has been and is best represented in modern philosophy and art, above all, modern literature. Ranging through early modern and modern thought from Hobbes, Pascal and Leibniz to Rousseau, Kant, Schopenhauer and Kierkegaard to Foucault, Lacan, Badiou, Jambet and Rancière, and in modern literature and art from Wordsworth and Byron to Goya and Wagner, Huysmans and Wilde, Joyce and Woolf, Joseph Roth, Vicki Baum, Gabriele Tergit and the Weimar novel, Evelyn Waugh and George Orwell to R.S. Thomas and Norman Nicholson, Gibson seeks to compile a modern political aide-memoire, a treasury for a politics to come.

Beginning from the notion of finite life, Another Finitude takes this staple subject from post-Heideggerian philosophy and opposes it to the onto-theological concept of infinity, represented by an eternal absolute. Although critical of Heidegger and his definition of finitude as ‘being-towards-death’, this book does not revert to the ontological idea of infinity secured in the sacred image of immortality. But it also does not want to give up on infinity altogether; the infinite is transposed, so it can become a necessary moment of the finite life. A theological framework for the new elaboration of the concept of finitude is crucial; but instead of following the Lutheran formula, Agata Bielik-Robson turns to the sources of Judaism. Taking inspiration from the Jewish idea of torat hayim, the principle of finite life, which found the best expression in the biblical sentence: love strong as death; love emerges as the alternative marker of finitude, allowing to us redefine it in an affirmative way. By tracing the avatars of love in the group of 20th-century thinkers, or ‘messianic vitalists’–Benjamin, Rosenzweig, Arendt, Derrida, and (deeply revised) Freud–the book attempts to demonstrate the possibility of such affirmation. Love becomes the new ‘infinite-in-the-finite’; love in all its forms, from the original libidinal endowment of the human psyche to the last metamorphoses of agape, the Greco-Christian divine love.

Colby Dickinson proposes a new political theology rooted in the intersections between continental philosophy, heterodox theology, and orthodox theology. Moving beyond the idea that there is an irresolvable tension at the heart of theological discourse, the conflict between the two poles of theology is made intelligible. Dickinson discusses the opposing poles simply as manifestations of reform and revolution, characteristics intrinsic to the nature of theological discourse itself. Outlining the illuminating space of theology, Theological Poverty in Continental Philosophy breaks new ground for critical theology and continental philosophy.Within the theology of poverty, the believer renounces the worldly for the divine. Through this focus on the poverty intrinsic to religious calling, the potential for cross-pollination between the theological and the secular is highlighted. Ultimately situating the virtue of theological poverty within a poststructuralist, postmodern world, Dickinson is not content to position Christian philosophy as the superior theological position, moving away from the absolute values of one tradition over another. This universalising of theological poverty through core and uniting concepts like grace, negation, violence and paradox reveal the theory’s transmutable strength. By joining up critical theology and the philosophy of religion in this way, the book broadens the possibility of a critical dialogue both between and within disciplines.

In The Phenomenology of Religious Belief, the renowned philosopher Michael J. Shapiro investigates how art – and in particular literature and film – can impact upon both traditional interpretations and critical studies of religious beliefs and experiences. In doing so, he examines the work of prolific and award-winning writers such as Toni Morrison, Philip K. Dick and Robert Coover. By placing their work in conjunction with critical analyses of media by the likes of Ingmar Bergman and Pier Paolo Pasolini and combining it with the work of groundbreaking thinkers such as George Canguilhem, Giorgio Agamben and Slavoj Žižek, Shapiro takes a truly interdisciplinary approach to the question of how life should be lived. His assessment of phenomenological subjectivity also leads him to question the nature of political theology and extend the criticism of Pauline theology.

When God is “dead” and governments themselves are increasingly subject to the power of global corporations, massive movements of peoples, transnational political upheavals, and ecological disasters, what does sovereignty mean for the 21st century? Sovereignty in the 21st Century is Carl Raschke’s deep theoretical dive into the meaning of sovereignty in both its historical and contemporary settings, showing how the idea can be expanded beyond politics and offer emancipatory strategies for previously marginalized peoples.Picking up Carl Schmitt’s idea of sovereignty’s ‘divine’ associations making it an implicitly theological concern, Raschke explains how political and religious thought have always been intertwined. These intertwined strands find their relevance today in debates around class, race and domination, making the question of sovereignty not just a political but a social and economic one. Bringing to light the ways in which great transnational conflicts today are not between authoritarianism and democracy but between neoliberalism and populism, this book brings us closer to a profound understanding of what we truly mean by democracy, or ‘popular’ sovereignty in the 21st-century.

When God is “dead” and governments themselves are increasingly subject to the power of global corporations, massive movements of peoples, transnational political upheavals, and ecological disasters, what does sovereignty mean for the 21st century? Sovereignty in the 21st Century is Carl Raschke’s deep theoretical dive into the meaning of sovereignty in both its historical and contemporary settings, showing how the idea can be expanded beyond politics and offer emancipatory strategies for previously marginalized peoples.Picking up Carl Schmitt’s idea of sovereignty’s ‘divine’ associations making it an implicitly theological concern, Raschke explains how political and religious thought have always been intertwined. These intertwined strands find their relevance today in debates around class, race and domination, making the question of sovereignty not just a political but a social and economic one. Bringing to light the ways in which great transnational conflicts today are not between authoritarianism and democracy but between neoliberalism and populism, this book brings us closer to a profound understanding of what we truly mean by democracy, or ‘popular’ sovereignty in the 21st-century.

For the first time, this volume brings together the writings, lectures, and correspondence of two of the most distinctive voices in twentieth-century French thought: Alexandre Kojève (1902–1968) and Gaston Fessard (1897–1978). Kojève is widely regarded as one of the most influential philosophers in France. His Hegel seminars of the 1930s shaped an entire generation of intellectuals, including Georges Bataille, Jacques Lacan, and Raymond Aron. Among his closest interlocutors was Gaston Fessard, a leading Jesuit theologian and himself a member of the seminar.Authority, History, and Political Theology charts Kojève and Fessard’s friendship through their reviews of each other’s work, lectures, letters, and unpublished essays. These texts, many translated into English for the very first time, show how each thinker grappled with urgent political-theological issues, such as the rise of totalitarianism, secularism, and Marxism.Including a historical introduction, the volume situates their exchange at the intersection of Hegelian philosophy, Catholic theology, and global politics. It shows how two readers of Hegel– one an atheist philosopher, the other a Jesuit theologian – challenge how we think about political life, the role of religion in the public sphere, and the meaning of the end of history. Part of Bloomsbury’s Political Theologies series, this book is essential for readers interested in political theology, continental philosophy, and intellectual history.

30 essential concepts. 30 distinguished scholars. 1 landmark volume.This collection is the first critical lexicon dedicated to the central concepts of political theology. Bringing together thirty specially commissioned essays – from 'Acclamation' to 'War' – it maps the conceptual terrain that has shaped, and continues to shape, political-theological inquiry. Featuring contributions from an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars across philosophy, theology and religious studies, political theory, law, history, and comparative literature, this volume offers an authoritative guide to the field and a vital point of reference for future research.In each of the book’s thirty essays readers will find a history of the relevant concept, a summary of key debates and a reflection on that concept’s current and future significance within the field. Chapters are also accompanied by a short bibliography of further reading to enable the reader to pursue a concept in more depth. International and interdisciplinary in its scope, this keystone volume in Bloomsbury’s Political Theologies series is an unparalleled survey of one of the most dynamic fields within contemporary political theory, philosophy and religious studies.

30 essential concepts. 30 distinguished scholars. 1 landmark volume.This collection is the first critical lexicon dedicated to the central concepts of political theology. Bringing together thirty specially commissioned essays – from 'Acclamation' to 'War' – it maps the conceptual terrain that has shaped, and continues to shape, political-theological inquiry. Featuring contributions from an international and interdisciplinary group of scholars across philosophy, theology and religious studies, political theory, law, history, and comparative literature, this volume offers an authoritative guide to the field and a vital point of reference for future research.In each of the book’s thirty essays readers will find a history of the relevant concept, a summary of key debates and a reflection on that concept’s current and future significance within the field. Chapters are also accompanied by a short bibliography of further reading to enable the reader to pursue a concept in more depth. International and interdisciplinary in its scope, this keystone volume in Bloomsbury’s Political Theologies series is an unparalleled survey of one of the most dynamic fields within contemporary political theory, philosophy and religious studies.