The Unevenness of Political Theology

ABSTRACT

Those who agree that Carl Schmitt was correct to prefer to political theology to liberalism nonetheless need to develop an account of how an authority structure can sustain itself without imposing an ideology on those over whom it rules. This article suggests that one possibility forward is found in the mystical political theology of Jacob Taubes's 1955 essay “On The Symbolic Order of Modern Democracy,” since that essay posits a political body in which sovereignty is distributed, without forcing that distribution in an arbitrary manner.     

Miroslav Volf on Living One’s Faith

Abstract

In this essay the author reflects on Miroslav Volf’s discussion, in A Public Faith, of Christianity as properly a prophetic religion. The author focuses especially on the two main malfunctions that Volf cites as accounting for the fact that the faith of individual Christians is often not prophetic, namely, what he calls “idleness of faith” and what he calls “coerciveness of faith.”     

Political Theology as Liberative Theology

ABSTRACT

Challenging the widespread assumption that “political theology” as a discipline began with Carl Schmitt in the 20th century, this essay explores the biblical theme of God’s preferential option for the poor and oppressed first articulated as a modern political theology by Latin American theologians, but organically and independently manifest in US black liberation theology, and First World feminist theologies. At the heart of this movement is a commitment to speak truth to power at the risk of personal loss and even martyrdom.     

The European miracle. Environment,economies and geopolitics in the history of Europe and Asia

This article analyses the 1936 “Wotan” essay by Swiss psychologist Carl Gustav Jung in light of one of its reigning motifs, Ergriffenheit. First, this term is examined within the works of Protestant theologian Rudolf Otto and Indologist Jakob Wilhelm Hauer, who used it to describe what they claimed to be the original religious experience, a state of being deeply stirred or even seized by the “the holy” or by “the ultimate reality.” The article then examines antecedents in Jung's theory of states of psychic seizure, in which two halves of the psyche come into conflict, the resolution of which leads to an increased capacity to create the arts of culture. The analysis then moves to the “Wotan” essay itself, where Jung brings together his own theory of psychic seizure with the theory of the original religious experience as proposed by the above-named scholars of religion in order to suggest that, under National Socialism, the Germans were in the midst of a collective confrontation with their own inner divinity, which should lead to a national spiritual rebirth. The article then investigates the works of several of the men Jung mentions in the essay, as well as his use of ancient Germanic mythology, to support his claim. Through his portrait of the Germanic archetype Wotan, Jung psychologizes and thereby essentializes the Romantic image of the Germans as “a people of poets and philosophers” as well as that of a Nietzschean “master-race.” In conclusion, the article argues that, at least in 1936, Jung's attitude towards Hitler and National Socialism was much more favorable than has previously been recognized.     

18th‐Century pacific voyages of discovery, “big science”, and the shaping of an European scientific and technological culture

Abstract

The European exploration of the Pacific Ocean in the latter half of the eighteenth century is usually presented as part of the Enlightenment's quest for pure knowledge, knowledge which was shared freely in the “Republic of Letters”. In this essay, however, these expeditions are set against the background of a ferocious struggle between western European states to dominate the world, bringing together national political, commercial, military, and learned institutions, showing them to be more akin to today's “big science” than to an activity of free‐minded, autonomous, gentlemen. The holistic approach developed to apprehend “big science” in today's world is thus used to reexamine scientific cooperation as well as the circulation of men, objects, texts (including maps) and ideas in the politico‐economic context of early modern Britain, France and Holland, the relationship between this “big science” and eighteenth‐century, western European society, and how these shaped European scientific culture and identity. The paper ends with some reflections on the contrast between “big scientific” activity in the two periods.     

Russia,China, and the universalism of modernity: the “Account of the Reforms of Peter the Great” by Kang Youwei

ABSTRACT

This paper analyzes a short essay by Kang Youwei (1858–1927) – one of the intellectual and political protagonists of late imperial and early Republican China. In it, he interpreted the historical experience of Russian modernization under Peter the Great (1672–1725) and used it as a “success story” for the renewal of Chinese monarchical institutions. It was written in 1898 and presented to the Manchu throne under the title “Account of the Reforms of Peter the Great”, and for our purposes will be the departing point for a “global intellectual circuit” through which the following questions will be addressed: Why was seventeenth and eighteenth century Russia considered as a model for China by the author? How did he manage to adapt the historical experience of Russia into a social and political conceptual framework for China? What was Kang’s historiographical method, and what kind of philosophy of history framed his reflections? What does this short essay tell us about Kang’s view on “Westernization”, on the concept of “modernity” itself, and on its use for historiographical purposes?     

Were the Wars of Religion about Religion?

Abstract

William Cavanaugh's The Myth of Religious Violence raises important questions about the role of religion in society. It challenges all-too-common misunderstandings about the relationship between religion and politics and, most valuably, warns against any assumption that religion is peculiarly prone to violence. This essay nevertheless takes issue with his attempt to disprove what he calls “the myth of religious violence” with evidence from the Wars of Religion in sixteenth-and seventeenth-century Europe and his claim that “the story of these wars serves as a kind of creation myth for the modern state” (10). The essay emphasizes the importance of understanding the religious dimensions of early modern Europe's wars but also of recognizing that, in both historical and contemporary situations, religious motivations are best understood not as independent variables but rather as catalysts that could exacerbate-or relieve-tensions rooted in other sorts of divisions or quarrels.     

‘The Island Blazed’: A Blinding Light and Tiepolo's Hound

This essay is primarily a study of Derek Walcott's Tiepolo's Hound as an affirmation of Caribbean, tropical, blinding light through an engagement with the life and work of Camille Pissarro. Conceived as such, the poem, I argue, proposes an “adamic” vision and imagination attuned with “Time” rather than “History” (the concepts are Walcott's), as well as an intensification of sensory-perception beyond vision. In order to better appreciate the historical and contextual relevance of Tiepolo's Hound, the essay provides first a general introduction to: (1) a nuanced understanding of light and its “otherness” emerging from modern physics; (2) some of the ways in which western capitalism and Cartesian perspectivism, as a hegemonic aesthetic and philosophical tradition in the West, have attempted to capture and control light and its “otherness;” and (3) the blinding quality of light in the tropical context, which repositions light as a force against any and all exploitative capitalist desires.     

On morel's épilepsie larvee: The first Danish epileptologist Frederik hallager's opposition in 1884 against morel's psychical epileptic Equivalents*

Abstract

In 1860 B.A. Morel published some cases of masked epilepsy, i.e., paroxysmal behaviour disturbances or “epileptic equivalents”;. The majority behaved criminally. Hughlings Jackson opposed and Hallager showed that all the cases related later as épilepsie larvée could be explained as postepileptic attacks, general paralysis, paradoxical normalization, schizophrenia, mania and otherwise. True criminal behaviour was exeptional. The present author agreed. There is no need for épilepsie larvée. It is discussed whether Blumer's recent “Paroxystic neurobehaviour disorder”; will revive “Morel's disorder”;.     

“UNABLE TO RESIST”: ON THE “POSSIBILITY” OF “IMPOSSIBILITY” AND CHRISTOPHE BOUTON'S TIME AND FREEDOM

This essay reflects critically on Martin Heidegger's remarks about authenticity and death with the aid of Christophe Bouton's Temps et liberté (2002), translated by Christopher Macann as Time and Freedom (2014). It first raises general questions concerning the possible thematic relationship between human endeavoring (action) and the experiences of finitude and freedom. Heidegger's Being and Time is particularly useful for exploring this relationship, but certain problems emerge when using this text for accessing the essay's themes. To wit: there are good reasons for mistrusting readings of Being and Time as a “practical” guide for grounding action. Against the practical reading, the essay wishes to reclaim the ontological‐existential significance of Heidegger's text. Although Bouton's treatment of Being and Time excludes its ontological dimensions and is entirely practical, even to the point of disregarding certain theoretical risks inherent in this approach, Bouton's study is indispensable for situating Being and Time in a historical‐intellectual context, whereby the experiences of freedom and time are understood within certain metaphysical presuppositions rendering them difficult to establish together on reliable grounds. Following Bouton's lead, the essay shows that the hermeneutic differences between practical and ontological readings of Being and Time can be explored through reflections on what Heidegger might have meant by the term “Möglichkeit” (“possibility”), from which Bouton infers “freedom.” It is alleged that Bouton does not fully consider all of Heidegger's assertions regarding Möglichkeit, most problematically the claim that the human being's most essential “possibility” is its “impossibility,” that is to say, its death.     

Shelley’s Jingling Food for Oblivion: Hybridizing High and Low Styles and Forms

ABSTRACT

This essay argues that there was a sense in which Shelley actively approved of “jingling verse.” His poetic energy was sustained by a substratum of popular and tuneful versifying, such as impromptus, bouts-rimés, anagrams, enigmas, ballads, Mother Goose rhymes, proverbs, hymns, and drinking songs. He hybridizes the registers and meters of these humble forms with elevated, sublime, and erudite ones. This hybridization is, arguably, connected to the characteristic coexistence of the direct and clear with the knotty and puzzling in his poetry. After a brief account of Shelley’s submerged youthful reading, noting in passing that Shelley’s lyrics proved amenable during the early twentieth century to recycling as Shelleyesque jingles, the essay illustrates its thesis from unfamiliar fragments in Shelley’s notebooks, such as the late lyric fragment “Time is flying,” and from more familiar matter such as “Dirge for the Year,” “Mont Blanc,” “The Cloud,” “On the Medusa of Leonardo da Vinci,” “The Sensitive Plant,” “Song: to the Men of England,” “Ode to the West Wind,” and Peter Bell the Third.     

“Religious Violence as Modern Myth”

Abstract

In this essay the author summarizes the argument of his book entitled The Myth of Religious Violence, whose main contention is that there is no reason to suppose that people are more likely to kill for a god than for a whole other host of “secular” ideologies and practices that behave in the way that “religions” do. The author then goes on to respond to various critiques that have been made of the book since its appearance in 2009.     

The Life and Poetry of Yun Sŏn-Do 尹善道, the Greatest Poet in the Sijo Form

Abstract

This essay, beginning with the proposition of Confucius being born with knowledge, aims to illustrate the sacred imagination Zhu Xi has on Confucius, as well as how the former utilizes specific hermeneutical strategies to maintain the image of the latter. The essay first places in order theories from scholars in the past, regarding “sages being born with knowledge,” then goes on to examine the exegesis Zhu had on the fact that Confucius has “Inborn Knowledge”; followed by a revelation on how Zhu has made use of the concept of “Expression of Modesty” to resolve textual conflicts caused by the affirmation of such knowledge. Finally, limitations of Zhu's hermeneutical strategies are critically examined, so as to exhibit the correlation between commentators of the Classics and the time they live in. The investigation can deepen our understanding on the hermeneutical tradition of Confucianism, hence producing a complementary effect on recent studies.     

God’s Sovereign Word

Abstract

Much political theory is funded by a purportedly “theological” notion of sovereignty. This essay re-reads and thereby deconstructs such a view. The argument presented herein is that certain political theorists—notably Schmitt, Bodin, and Hobbes—uncritically appropriate a “theological” notion of sovereignty as an analogy for political sovereignty. Engaging the work of Karl Barth, this essay undercuts such analogizing tendencies, contending that the “theological” superstructure on which so-called political theology is constructed is not theological but anthropological. Barth’s reconfiguration of theology, grounded not on natural law or reason, but on God’s self-revelation of Godself in Jesus Christ, offers a very different terminus a quem for political theology.     

What Is Religion?

Abstract

This essay considers the question: “What is religion and is it essentially violent?” Rather than answer the question directly, Martin suggests that it is a loaded question and reflects on what might motivate it. Through a comparison of the concepts of “religion” and “child abuse”–as analyzed in Ian Hacking’s work on social constructionism–Martin points to the social or political stakes of defining terms tied to normative discourses and which could be designed to pathologize certain behaviors.     

KARL POLANYI AND THE REALITY OF SOCIETY

This essay reconsiders Karl Polanyi's famous thesis about the “embeddedness” of the economy through an examination of two recent books: For a New West, a collection of previously unavailable essays by Polanyi, and Fred Block and Margaret R. Somers's The Power of Market Fundamentalism: Karl Polanyi's Critique. The guiding thread of this analysis is the claim that a constant in Polanyi's thought was his belief in what he called “the reality of society,” that is, that society exists as a social fact over and above the individuals that constitute it. The essay begins by tracing Polanyi's intellectual development, drawing primarily on the essays found in For a New West. Polanyi's quest to reconcile individual freedom with social solidarity led him first, in the years between the First and Second World Wars, to embrace liberal socialism, before his readings in anthropology persuaded him that traditional economies “embed” the economy in social relations and that the nineteenth‐century liberal project of a “disembedded” economy (through the so‐called free market) is a departure from this anthropological norm. The essay then examines and questions Block and Somers's claim that Polanyi maintained that the economy is always “already embedded,” arguing notably that Polanyi believed that the advent of market society entailed an economy that was actually disembedded from social relations, not merely one that was re‐embedded in an alternative set of institutions.     

Nietzsche's Political Critique of Modern Science

Abstract

Contrary to the claims that The Brothers Karamazov is a polyphonic novel, in which the author's own views are irrelevant to its interpretation, and that Dostoevsky himself was unable to furnish an adequate defense of Christianity after Book V, the author shows how Zossima's doctrines of active love and responsibility for all are the interpretive keys to the novel. This so-called “unity in diversity” in Bakhtin's literary criticism thereby provide a compelling alternative vision of community from the Grand Inquisitor's.     

THE COMMONPLACES OF “REVISION” AND THEIR IMPLICATIONS FOR HISTORIOGRAPHICAL UNDERSTANDING

Recognizing the contingent entanglement between historiography's social and political roles and the conception of the discipline as purely factual, this essay provides a detailed analysis of “revision” and its connection to “revisionism.” This analysis uses a philosophical approach that begins with the commonplaces of our understanding as expressed in dictionaries, which are compared and contrasted to display relevant confusions. The essay then turns to examining the questions posed by History and Theory's Call for Papers announcing its Theme Issue on Revision in History, and, where philosophically relevant, answers them. The issue of paradigm change proved to be quite significant and required particular attention. A “paradigm” is analyzed in terms of Quine's “web of belief,” and that web is itself explained as an ongoing process of revision, in analogy with Rawls's concept of pure procedural justice. Adopting this approach helps clarify the entanglement between politics and historiographical revision.