Capitalism and Religion: The Price of Piety

by Goodchild,Philip

• ISBN13: 9780415282239
• ISBN10: 0415282233
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-08-02
• Publisher: Routledge

Summary

Our global ecological crisis demands that we question the rationality of the culture that has caused it: Western modernity's global free market capitalism. Goodchild develops arguments from Nietzsche, Adorno and Horkheimer to suggests that our love of Western modernity is an expression of a piety and that it has become a global religion in practice, if not always in belief. He condemns modernity, presenting a philosophical alternative that demands attention from philosophers, critical theorists, philosophers of religion, theologians and those in ecological politics.

Author Biography

Philip Goodchild lectures in Religious Studies at the University of Nottingham.

Table of Contents

Preface	x
Acknowledgements	xvii
Introduction: questioning piety	1	(2)
Piety	3	(2)
Ethics	5	(2)
Reason	7	(3)
Summary of the argument	10	(5)
PART I The problem of reason	15	(86)
The murder of God	17	(26)
Nietzsche's critique of reason: life, nature and history	17	(4)
Nietzsche's critique o f religion: imaginary causes	21	(5)
Locke and the market: who murdered God?	26	(17)
Truth	43	(27)
Critical theory and structuralism: repetition and exchange	43	(8)
Gospel truth: truth and repetition	51	(6)
Ancient Athens and trade: truth and exchange	57	(13)
Price	70	(31)
Cynical materialism: signs	70	(3)
Spinoza's materialism: immanent critique	73	(7)
Marx's materialism: the commodity form	80	(7)
Bataille and Bourdieu: expenditure and strategy	87	(14)
PART II The problem of ethics	101	(74)
Freedom	103	(24)
Bergson's ethics: time and association	105	(4)
Schelling's dialectic: time and freedom	109	(4)
Derrida and Kierkegaard: society and freedom	113	(14)
Value	127	(21)
Capital: the en framing of modern life	127	(3)
Time: the interior of subjectivity	130	(3)
Virulent simulacra	133	(2)
Market value	135	(13)
Potency	148	(27)
Ethics of transcendence: death	148	(8)
Ethics of immanence: Deleuze	156	(7)
Ethics of potency: the situation of the flesh	163	(6)
Conclusion	169	(6)
PART III The problem of piety	175	(79)
Piety	177	(23)
Religion and violence	177	(4)
Ritual piety: repetition	181	(5)
Historical piety: difference	186	(5)
Apocalyptic piety: singularity	191	(9)
Experience	200	(22)
Universal psychosis	200	(3)
Kant's critical philosophy	203	(2)
Scotus and pure ontology	205	(3)
Singularity and disjunction	208	(3)
The matter of suffering	211	(3)
Politics	214	(8)
Awakening	222	(25)
The unthinkable: the potency of thought	222	(1)
Awareness as potency	223	(5)
Dialectic	228	(2)
Unconditioned within experience I: eternal return	230	(7)
Unconditioned within experience II: absolute faith	237	(2)
Unconditioned within experience III: awareness of potency	239	(3)
Conclusion	242	(5)
Conclusion	247	(7)
How we are still pious	248	(2)
An ethics of thinking	250	(1)
Critical piety	251	(3)
Index	254