The tricky thing about global imaginaries unlike other social imaginaries is the issue of totality. Whereas other kinds of social imaginaries (e.g. nations, publics, counterpublics, commons, etc.) can shore up identity by posing an external or excluded other, there are few possibilities of exclusion in the global. That does not mean, however, that we are doomed to some global apolitical homogeneity. Affect, when understood as a mode of investment through which social meaning is organized, opens a field of difference without succumbing to the closure of totality or the sedimentation of oppositional identity.
Posts Tagged ‘social imaginary’
August 16th, 2011
Is sovereignty necessarily theological?
posted by Jason Stevens
Paul Kahn’s task, he says, is to describe and interpret, rather than demystify, America’s political theology. That political theology, he argues, has contributed to making America an irresponsible, at times bellicose and dangerous, superpower. Yet, in Kahn’s opinion, religious faith and “secularized” deposits of religion are so deeply interwoven with nationalism, law, and foreign policy in the American social imaginary that the only alternative, he indicates, is to manipulate the existing political theology, as he defines it, to achieve more desirable goals.
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