Modernity as Exception and Miracle
Modernity as Exception and Miracle

Author: Eduardo Sabrovsky

Publisher: State University of New York Press

Published: 2020-08-01

Total Pages: 220

ISBN-13: 1438479174

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Translated from the Spanish De lo extraordinario: Nominalismo y Modernidad, this book argues that a defining aspect of modernity is an ever-increasing pursuit of, and need for, what Eduardo Sabrovsky calls "the extraordinary," a term that encompasses both the exception and the miraculous. Sabrovsky shows the degree to which Robert Musil's novel The Man without Qualities functions as a paradoxical paradigm of the extraordinary, and he extends the theoretical insights drawn from Musil's magisterial work through a series of inquiries into cardinal elements of modern literature, material culture, historiography, physical science, psychoanalysis, and political theory. Sabrovsky demonstrates how the extraordinary condition of modernity emerges from the debates conducted by the last representatives of medieval scholasticism in which nominalism defeated realism, and he resituates the results of this triumph of nominalism in the writings of Friedrich Nietzsche, Theodor Adorno, Walter Benjamin, and Georges Bataille, among others.

Modernity, the Environment, and the Christian Just War Tradition
Modernity, the Environment, and the Christian Just War Tradition

Author: Mark Douglas

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2022-05-26

Total Pages: 369

ISBN-13: 1009116568

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In this volume, Mark Douglas presents an environmental history of the Christian just war tradition. Focusing on the transition from its late medieval into its early modern form, he explores the role the tradition has played in conditioning modernity and generating modernity's blindness to interactions between 'the natural' and 'the political.' Douglas criticizes problematic myths that have driven conventional narratives about the history of the tradition and suggests a revised approach that better accounts for the evolution of that tradition through time. Along the way, he provides new interpretations of works by Francisco de Vitoria and Hugo Grotius, and, provocatively, the Constitution of the United States of America. Sitting at the intersection of just war thinking, environmental history, and theological ethics, Douglas's book serves as a timely guide for responses to wars in a warming world as they increasingly revolve around the flashpoints of religion, resources, and refugees.

Political Theology & Early Modernity
Political Theology & Early Modernity

Author: Graham Hammill

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2012-08-23

Total Pages: 326

ISBN-13: 0226314995

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

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 Modernity explores 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.

Modernity and Terrorism
Modernity and Terrorism

Author: Milan Zafirovski

Publisher: BRILL

Published: 2013-05-02

Total Pages: 403

ISBN-13: 9004242880

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

In Modernity and Terrorism: From Anti-Modernity to Modern Global Terror Milan Zafirovski and Daniel G. Rodeheaver analyze the nature, types, and causes of contemporary global terrorism. The book redefines modern terrorism in a novel more comprehensive manner compared to the previous literature. It examines counter-state and state terrorism, with an emphasis on the latter in light of its scale, persistence, and intensity as well as its relative neglect in the literature. The book identifies and predicts the general cause of most modern terrorism in anti-modernity as the adverse reaction to and reversal of liberal-democratic, secular, rationalistic, and globalized, modernity. In essence, it discovers and predicts anti-liberalism in the form of conservatism as the main source and force of modern terrorism.

The Crisis of Global Modernity
The Crisis of Global Modernity

Author: Prasenjit Duara

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2015

Total Pages: 339

ISBN-13: 1107082250

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Drawing on historical sociology, transnational histories and Asian traditions, Duara seeks answers to the pressing global issue of environmental sustainability.

Genealogies of Political Modernity
Genealogies of Political Modernity

Author: Antonio Cerella

Publisher: Bloomsbury Publishing

Published: 2020-01-23

Total Pages: 306

ISBN-13: 1350079480

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

What is political modernity? And how much of its concepts and structures has changed or remained the same with the advent of the so-called globalization? What does it mean, from a political perspective, that we live in a postmodern era? This book discusses these issues in light of the key authors and texts of the continental philosophical tradition: from Carl Schmitt to Giorgio Agamben, from Thomas Hobbes to Michel Foucault. Looking at the roots of the current historical crisis that characterizes Western political regimes, this book gazes into the past in order to trace the possible development of our current global era, in which all the classical concepts and our symbolic resources seem to be called into question, leaving a vacuum of meaning for political action as much as for political theory.

To Carl Schmitt
To Carl Schmitt

Author: Jacob Taubes

Publisher: Columbia University Press

Published: 2013-05-14

Total Pages: 122

ISBN-13: 0231154127

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

A philosopher, rabbi, religious historian, and Gnostic, Jacob Taubes was for many years a correspondent and interlocutor of Carl Schmitt (1888-1985), a German jurist, philosopher, political theorist, law professor--and self-professed Nazi. Despite their unlikely association, Taubes and Schmitt shared an abiding interest in the fundamental problems of political theology, believing the great challenges of modern political theory were ancient in pedigree and, in many cases, anticipated the works of Judeo-Christian eschatologists. In this collection of Taubes's writings on Schmitt, the two intellectuals work through ideas of the apocalypse and other central concepts of political theology. Taubes acknowledges Schmitt's reservations about the weakness of liberal democracy yet distances himself from his prescription to rectify it, arguing the apocalyptic worldview requires less of a rigid hierarchical social ordering than a community committed to the importance of decision making. In these writings, a sharper and more nuanced portrait of Schmitt's thought emerges, as well as a more complicated understanding of Taubes, who has shaped the work of Giorgio Agamben, Peter Sloterdijk, and other major twentieth-century theorists.

Jewish Cryptotheologies of Late Modernity
Jewish Cryptotheologies of Late Modernity

Author: Agata Bielik-Robson

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2014-08-13

Total Pages: 353

ISBN-13: 1317684508

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

This book aims to interpret ‘Jewish Philosophy’ in terms of the Marrano phenomenon: as a conscious clinamen of philosophical forms used in order to convey a ‘secret message’ which cannot find an open articulation. The Marrano phenomenon is employed here, in the domain of modern philosophical thought, where an analogous tendency can be seen: the clash of an open idiom and a secret meaning, which transforms both the medium and the message. Focussing on key figures of late modern, twentieth century Jewish thought; Hermann Cohen, Gershom Scholem, Walter Benjamin, Franz Rosenzweig, Theodor Adorno, Ernst Bloch, Jacob Taubes, Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida, this book demonstrates how their respective manners of conceptualization swerve from the philosophical mainstream along the Marrano ‘secret curve.’ Analysing their unique contribution to the ‘unfinished project of modernity,’ including issues of the future of the Enlightenment, modern nihilism and post-secular negotiation with religious heritage, this book will be essential reading for students and researchers with an interest in Jewish Studies and Philosophy.

Sovereignty and the Sacred
Sovereignty and the Sacred

Author: Robert A. Yelle

Publisher: University of Chicago Press

Published: 2018-11-26

Total Pages: 281

ISBN-13: 022658559X

DOWNLOAD EBOOK

Sovereignty and the Sacred challenges contemporary models of polity and economy through a two-step engagement with the history of religions. Beginning with the recognition of the convergence in the history of European political theology between the sacred and the sovereign as creating “states of exception”—that is, moments of rupture in the normative order that, by transcending this order, are capable of re-founding or remaking it—Robert A. Yelle identifies our secular, capitalist system as an attempt to exclude such moments by subordinating them to the calculability of laws and markets. The second step marshals evidence from history and anthropology that helps us to recognize the contribution of such states of exception to ethical life, as a means of release from the legal or economic order. Yelle draws on evidence from the Hebrew Bible to English deism, and from the Aztecs to ancient India, to develop a theory of polity that finds a place and a purpose for those aspects of religion that are often marginalized and dismissed as irrational by Enlightenment liberalism and utilitarianism. Developing this close analogy between two elemental domains of society, Sovereignty and the Sacred offers a new theory of religion while suggesting alternative ways of organizing our political and economic life. By rethinking the transcendent foundations and liberating potential of both religion and politics, Yelle points to more hopeful and ethical modes of collective life based on egalitarianism and popular sovereignty. Deliberately countering the narrowness of currently dominant economic, political, and legal theories, he demonstrates the potential of a revived history of religions to contribute to a rethinking of the foundations of our political and social order.