How could a human invention hold such sway over us as a people? Garry Wills argues that the gun is, for most Americans, a sacred object.
Posts Tagged ‘political theology’
March 6th, 2012
Hosanna-Tabor in the religious freedom Panopticon
posted by Peter Danchin
Michel Foucault famously describes Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon as a “cruel, ingenious cage” to be understood not as a “dream building … [but as] the diagram of a mechanism of power reduced to its ideal form … a figure of political technology.” For Foucault, panopticism is “the general principle of a new ‘political anatomy’ whose object and end are not relations of sovereignty but the relations of discipline: [t]he celebrated, transparent circular cage, with its high towers powerful and knowing.” In reading the Supreme Court’s decision in Hosanna-Tabor v. EEOC recognizing a “ministerial exception” to antidiscrimination law—a case hailed almost immediately as a victory for religious freedom—it is for me the specter of the Panopticon that haunts every page.
February 8th, 2012
After the secular age
posted by John D. BoyJust out from Verso Press, Simon Critchley’s The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology investigates the role of religion in the postsecular twenty-first century.
November 28th, 2011
There is Power in the Blog: Paul W. Kahn
posted by Wei ZhuThere is Power in the Blog is hosting an eight-part discussion on Paul W. Kahn’s recent book Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Columbia University Press, 2011). Featuring posts by Susanna J. Snyder, Jerome Copulsky, Michael Hollerich, Vincent Lloyd, William T. Cavanaugh, Chris Baker, as well as a response from Kahn, the discussion reflects the wide range of reactions to Kahn’s complex work. For even more on Political Theology, please browse through The Immanent Frame’s extensive series.
November 7th, 2011
A response to critics
posted by Paul W. Kahn
I knew that my new book, Political Theology, would be controversial. It covers a lot of ground; it produces odd conjunctions; and its rhetoric can sound extreme. It pays little attention to academic conventions and often cuts against popular, political expectations. Some might think presumptuous its design and method of “rewriting” Schmitt’s classic. Many readers are startled to find that out of an engagement with Schmitt can come an exploration of freedom in its political, legal, and discursive dimensions. Others are surprised to find that a book about sovereignty and law—let alone a theological inquiry—puts the imagination at its center.
November 2nd, 2011
Jürgen Habermas on myth and ritual
posted by Wei ZhuThis video is an excerpt of a lecture by Jürgen Habermas, delievered at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs on October 19th.
September 28th, 2011
CFP: Sovereignty, Representation and Authority
posted by Jessica PolebaumPléyade, a biannual journal of Political Science published by the Centro de Análisis e Investigación Política, has issued a call for papers and book reviews for an upcoming issue, “Sovereignty, Representation and Authority: Current Interpretations of Political Theology.”
September 23rd, 2011
Not for the squeamish
posted by Sanford LevinsonPaul Kahn has written a remarkable meditation on Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology. A truly adequate response would undoubtedly require a book at least as long as Kahn’s own. Instead, I want to offer some comments playing off of some of Kahn’s own observations. Indeed, as Kahn makes clear, his own book is meant to be, not a genuine exegesis of Schmitt’s (in)famous book, but rather his own reflections that have been stimulated by taking the concept of “political theology” seriously. I find Kahn convincing that the concept draws not only on the notion of “sovereignty,” insofar as it is transferred from God to those who claim “leadership” of the state, particularly when it is faced with existential threats, but also on the important reality of “sacrifice.”
September 21st, 2011
For a new migration of Abraham
posted by Ward BlantonAt a moment when some of the theoretical gestures being inspired by old, new, or futuristic political theologies have become ineffective, Paul Kahn’s Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty is a book of extraordinary significance. Or, perhaps I should say that I think it might be a book of extraordinary significance, inasmuch as it bears a potential to do something which has remained impossible, not only for Carl Schmitt, but also for some important contemporary critics of neo-liberal political economy. I want to reflect specifically about the way this impossibility might become possible, strangely, by way of a new migration of Abraham into the territory of philosophies of freedom and difference.
August 29th, 2011
Democracy under exception
posted by Jean-Claude MonodI agree with Kahn (and with Schmitt) about the fact that political theory should leave room for decision and exception. But to me, the main question is: to what extent? Are there no principles that admit no exception? When I read Kahn, as when I read Schmitt, I don’t seem to encounter any such principles—anything like what Habermas thematized in Law and Morality as “indisponibility,” that is, rights that are not at the disposal of the sovereign. Can the sovereign decide that torture is a legitimate practice? The answer, to me, should be no without exception.
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