Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World » (1st Edition)

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). "

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, concerning the prepolitical moral foundations of a republic, and it concludes with explorations of new, more open ways of conceptualizing society.

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