Political Theology and Early Modernity

by Hammill, Graham; Lupton, Julia Reinhard; Balibar, Etienne (AFT)

• ISBN13: 9780226314983
• ISBN10: 0226314987
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2012-10-01
• Publisher: Univ of Chicago Pr

Summary

Political theology is a distinctly modern problem, one that takes shape in some of the most important theoretical writings of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries. But its origins stem from the early modern period, in medieval iconographies of sacred kinship and the critique of traditional sovereignty mounted by Hobbes and Spinoza. In this book, Graham Hammill and Julia Reinhard Lupton assemble established and emerging scholars in early modern studies to examine the role played by sixteenth- and seventeenth-century literature and thought in modern conceptions of political theology. Political Theology and Early Modernityexplores texts by Shakespeare, Machiavelli, Milton, and others that have served as points of departure for such thinkers as Schmitt, Strauss, Benjamin, and Arendt. Written from a spectrum of positions ranging from renewed defenses of secularism to attempts to reconceive the religious character of collective life and literary experience, these essays probe moments of productive conflict, disavowal, and entanglement in politics and religion as they pass between early modern and modern scenes of thought. This stimulating collection is the first to answer not only how Renaissance and baroque literature help explain the persistence of political theology in modernity and postmodernity, but also how the reemergence of political theology as an intellectual and political problem deepens our understanding of the early modern period.

Author Biography

Graham Hammill is professor of English at the University at Buffalo. He is the author of Sexuality and Form and The Mosaic Constitution: Political Theology and Imagination from Machiavelli to Milton. Julia Reinhard Lupton is professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author or coauthor of four books on Shakespeare, most recently of Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life.

Table of Contents

List of Illustrations	p. vii
Acknowledgments	p. ix
Introduction	p. 1
Modern Destinations
Political Theology and Liberal Culture: Strauss, Schmitt, Spinoza, and Arendt	p. 23
The Tragicity of the Political: A Note on Carlo Galli's Reading of Carl Schmitt's Hamlet or Hecuba	p. 48
Hamlet: Representation and the Concrete	p. 60
Blumenberg and Schmitt on the Rhetoric of Political Theology	p. 84
Political Theologies of the Corpus Mysticum: Schmitt, Kantorowicz, and de Lubac	p. 102
Dead Neighbor Archives: Jews, Muslims, and the Enemy's Two Bodies	p. 124
Novus Ordo Saeclorum: Hannah Arendt on Revolutionary Spirit	p. 143
Force and Justice: Auerbach's Pascal	p. 159
Scenes of Early Modernity
The Instance of the Sovereign in the Unconscious: The Primal Scenes of Political Theology	p. 183
Pauline Edifications: Staging the Sovereign Softscape in Renaissance England	p. 212
Striking the French Match: Jean Bodin, Queen Elizabeth, and the Occultation of Sovereign Marriage	p. 240
The Death of Christ in and as Secular Law	p. 264
Samson Uncircumcised	p. 282
Postscript: The Idea of "New Enlightenment" [Nouvelles Lumières] and the Contradictions of Universalism	p. 299
List of Contributors 307
Index	p. 309
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