Political Theologies Public Religions in a Post-Secular World

by de Vries, Hent; Sullivan, Lawrence E.

• ISBN13: 9780823226450
• ISBN10: 082322645X
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-11-15
• Publisher: Fordham University Press

Summary

What has happened to religion in its present manifestations? In recent years, Enlightenment secularization, as it appeared in the global spread of political structures that relegate the sacred to a private sphere, seems suddenly to have foundered. Unexpectedly, it has discovered its own parochialism--has discovered, indeed, that secularization may never have taken place at all.With the "return of the religious," in all aspects of contemporary social, political, and religious life, the question of political theology--of the relation between "political" and "religious" domains--takes on new meaning and new urgency. In this groundbreaking book, distinguished scholars from many disciplines--philosophy, political theory, anthropology, classics, and religious studies--seek to take the full measure of this question in today's world. This book begins with the place of the gods in the Greek polis, then moves through Augustine's two cities and early modern religious debates, to classic statements about political theology by such thinkers as Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt. Essays also consider the centrality of tolerance to liberal democracy, the recent French controversy over wearing the Muslim headscarf, and "Bush's God talk." The volume includes a historic discussion between Jürgen Habermas and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, concerningthe prepolitical moral foundations of a republic, and it concludes with explorations of new, more open ways of conceptualizing society.

Author Biography

Hent de Vries is Professor of Humanities and Philosophy at The Johns Hopkins University and Professor of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. He is the author of Philosophy and the Turn to Religion; Religion and Violence: Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to Derrida; and Minimal Theologies: Critiques of Secular Reason in Adorno and Levinas. Among the volumes he has edited are, with Samuel Weber, Violence, Identity, and Self-Determination and Religion and Media. Lawrence E. Sullivan is Professor of World Religions at the University of Notre Dame. The author of Icanchu's Drum: An Orientation to Meaning in South American Religions, he was director of Harvard University's Center for the Study of World Religions, and served as President of the American Academy of Religions (AAR).

Table of Contents

Preface	ix
Hent de Vries
Lawrence E. Sullivan
Introduction: Before, Around, and Beyond the Theologico-Political	1	(90)
Hent De Vries
PART I. WHAT ARE POLITICAL THEOLOGIES?
The Gods of Politics in Early Greek Cities	91	(11)
Marcel Detienne
Church, State, Resistance	102	(11)
Jean-Luc Nancy
Politics and Finitude: The Temporal Status of Augustine's Civitas Permixta	113	(9)
M. B. Pranger
The Scandal of Religion: Luther and Public Speech in the Reformation	122	(15)
Antonia Szabari
On the Names of God	137	(11)
Ernesto Laclau
The Permanence of the Theologico-Political?	148	(40)
Claude Lefort
Violence in the State of Exception: Reflections on Theologico-Political Motifs in Benjamin and Schmitt	188	(13)
Marc De Wilde
Critique, Coercion, and Sacred Life in Benjamin's ``Critique of Violence''	201	(19)
Judith Butler
From Rosenzweig to Levinas: Philosophy of War	220	(12)
Stephane Moses
Levinas, Spinoza, and the Theologico-Political Meaning of Scripture	232	(19)
Hent De Vries
PART II. BEYOND TOLERANCE: PLURALISM AND AGONISTIC REASON
On the Relations Between the Secular Liberal State and Religion	251	(10)
Jurgen Habermas
Prepolitical Moral Foundations of a Free Republic	261	(8)
Pope Benedict XVI
Bush's God Talk	269	(9)
Bruce Lincoln
Pluralism and Faith	278	(20)
William E. Connolly
Subjects of Tolerance: Why We Are Civilized and They Are the Barbarians	298	(20)
Wendy Brown
Religion, Liberal Democracy, and Citizenship	318	(9)
Chantal Mouffe
Toleration Without Tolerance: Enlightenment and the Image of Reason	327	(14)
Lars Tønder
Saint John: The Miracle of Secular Reason	341	(24)
Matthew Scherer
PART III. DEMOCRATIC REPUBLICANISM, SECULARISM, AND BEYOND
Reinhabiting Civil Disobedience	365	(17)
Bhrigupati Singh
Rogue Democracy and the Hidden God	382	(19)
Samuel Weber
Intimate Publicities: Retreating the Theologico-Political in the Chavez Regime?	401	(26)
Rafael Sanchez
The Figure of the Abducted Woman: The Citizen as Sexed	427	(17)
Veena Das
How to Recognize a Moslem When You See One: Western Secularism and the Politics of Conversion	444	(31)
Markha G. Valenta
Laicite, or the Politics of Republican Secularism	475	(19)
Yolande Jansen
Trying to Understand French Secularism	494	(33)
Talal Asad
Pim Fortuyn, Theo van Gogh, and the Politics of Tolerance in the Netherlands	527	(12)
Peter Van Der Veer
Can a Minority Retain Its Identity in Law? The 2005 Multatuli Lecture	539	(18)
Job Cohen
Prophetic Justice in a Home Haunted by Strangers: Transgressive Solidarity and Trauma in the Work of an Israeli Rabbis' Group	557	(34)
Bettina Prato
PART IV. OPENING SOCIETIES AND THE RIGHTS OF THE HUMAN
Mysticism and the Foundation of the Open Society: Bergsonian Politics	591	(11)
Paola Marrati
The Agency of Assemblages and the North American Blackout	602	(15)
Jane Bennett
Automatic Theologies: Surrealism and the Politics of Equality	617	(16)
Kate Khatib
Theoscopy: Transparency, Omnipotence, and Modernity	633	(19)
Stefanos Geroulanos
Come On, Humans, One More Effort if You Want to Be Post-Christians!	652	(19)
Thierry De Duve
The Right Not to Use Rights: Human Rights and the Structure of Judgments	671	(20)
Werner Hamacher
Contributors	691	(6)
Notes	697