An Insurrectionist Manifesto contains four insurrectionary gospels based on Martin Heidegger's philosophical model of the fourfold: earth and sky, gods and mortals. Challenging religious dogma and dominant philosophical theories, they offer a cooperative, world-affirming political theology that promotes new life through not resurrection but insurrection. The insurrection in these gospels unfolds as a series of miraculous yet worldly practices of vital affirmation. Since these routines do not rely on fantasies of escape, they engender intimate transformations of the self along the very coordinates from which they emerge. Enacting a comparative and contagious postsecular sensibility, these gospels draw on the work of Slavoj i ek, Giorgio Agamben, Catherine Malabou, François Laruelle, Peter Sloterdijk, and Gilles Deleuze yet rejuvenate scholarship in continental philosophy, critical race theory, the new materialisms, speculative realism, and nonphilosophy. They think beyond the sovereign force of the one to initiate a radical politics "after" God.
Exploring novels by Virginia Woolf, D. H. Lawrence, Evelyn Waugh, and Sylvia Townsend Warner as political theology – works that imagine a resistance to the fusion of Christianity and patriotism which fuelled and supported the First World War – this book shows how we can gain valuable insights from their works for anti-militarist, anti-statist, and anti-nationalist efforts today. While none of the four novelists in this study were committed Christians during the 1920s, Andrews explores how their fiction written in the wake of the First World War operates theologically when it challenges English civil religion – the rituals of the nation that elevate the state to a form of divinity. Bringing these novels into a dialogue with recent political theologies by theorists and theologians including Giorgio Agamben, William Cavanaugh, Simon Critchley, Michel Foucault, Stanley Hauerwas and Jürgen Moltmann, this book shows the myriad ways that we can learn from the authors' theopolitical imaginations. Andrews demonstrates the many ways that these novelists issue a challenge to the problems with civil religion and the sacralized nation state and, in so doing, offer alternative visions to coordinate our inner lives with our public and collective actions.
In "The Pathway Towards Peace: U.S. Human Rights Manifesto," Jánelle Marina Méndez Viera exposes the American billionaire patriarchy's strategic takeover of democracy and delves into the intersection of two social scientific theories regarding racism thought to be conflicting and synthesizes both concepts into her theory of psychosocial racism and sexism. Through her own experiences as a child-sex slave in the U.S. Marine Corps and through her work leading the Military Sexual Trauma Movement, Méndez Viera as a human rights executive and movement leader, she shines a light on the dark side of the tourism industry and American exports, by relocating to the Dominican Republic to investigate the experiences of enslaved Haitians. She connects modern slavery in the Caribbean to the radicalization of boys and men in the U.S. military and the role mass communication plays in their indoctrination. This powerful manifesto is a compelling account of one woman's resistance and fight for the abolition of modern slavery in the Western Hemisphere. Jánelle Marina Méndez Viera not only exposes the threat to democracy and the junction of racism and sexism in American society, but she also predicts the January 6th Insurrection six weeks before it occurs. On November 11th, 2020, in a speech in Washington D.C. at a press conference she organized called, "Fight for our Freedom", she warns of a looming national security issue involving veterans and Marines. Through her development of the radicalization pipeline model, Méndez Viera is able to accurately predict and assess risks in order protect herself from violent attacks on her life. Méndez Viera uses her extensive knowledge and expertise to guide and educate Americans on how to defend democracy and create lasting peace. Her theory of psychosocial racism, sexism and misogyny posits that these systemic issues are psychological delusions that evolve into social constructs when mass media creates propaganda on behalf of billionaire patriarchy. Loyal audiences usually made up of male involuntary celibates are intentionally recruited on to the radicalization pipeline through google queries that respond to self-help questions such as “how do I get girls to like me or how do I attract women?” The manosphere then places bids on google searches and returns dating gurus like Andrew Tate who indoctrinate men and teen boys through mid-level radicalization by showing them misogynistic content that externalizes their insecurities to make these men and boys hate women and minorities. They become defenders of patriarchy and fight against feminism, civil rights and social justice through coordinated online harassment, threats, physical violence and domestic terrorism. Méndez Viera lays out how to spot the red flags early on and discusses what society can do to create peace and minimize the recruitment into the radicalization pipeline. Méndez Viera analyses the illicit sex markets in the Western Hemisphere compared to legalized and regulated markets around the world. She investigates sexual violence, slavery and prostitution in the Caribbean and its ties to chattel slavery while discussing legalized and regulated markets in Nevada and the Netherlands that have higher levels of protection, safety and workers' rights. These areas have been able to reduce child sexual slavery through the regulated sex markets. Méndez Viera discusses the combining regulation, legalization and psychological therapy for involuntary celibate males can be a powerful tool for preventing recruitment into the radicalization pipeline and thus preventing gender violence, mass violence, modern slavery and domestic terrorism in the United States of America.
Theological thought has long been focused on the meaning to be found in our existence, but it has tended to neglect what it might offer to those seeking how to prolong and improve our physical existence in this world. In conversation with twentieth-century materialist art and thought, this book presents a radical theology that engages directly with the political and ecological issues of our time. The book introduces a new thinker to the theological sphere, Russian avantgarde artist Liubov Popova (1889–1924). She was a woman acknowledged for her artistic and intellectual talent and yet is never discussed in relation to the twentieth-century thinkers with whom her ideas have obvious connections. Popova’s art and thought are discussed together with thinkers like Walter Benjamin, Donna Haraway, Gilles Deleuze and Paul Tillich, along with ecotheological and theopolitical perspectives. Inspired by the activist creativity of avantgarde art, the book’s final chapter, playfully yet with deadly seriousness, presents a manifesto for radical theology today. This is a work of theological activism that demonstrates the benefit of allowing new voices into the conversations around art, spirituality and our planet. As such, it will be of keen interest to academics in Theology, Religion and the Arts and the Philosophy of Religion.
This book aims to provide fresh perspectives on Vattimo and Zabala’s groundbreaking foundational text, Hermeneutic Communism, from 2011. The contributors to this collection of essays explore various facets of Vattimo and Zabala’s “anarchic hermeneutics” and “weak communism” in order to investigate the concepts resulting from them, such as “framed democracies,” “armed capitalism” and “conservative impositions.” Vattimo and Zabala’s text is one of the most innovative contributions to the current debate on Communism, in which authors such as Badiou, Negri, and Rancière have been the protagonists so far. The unique and original contribution of Vattimo and Zabala’s position consists in letting politics evolve from one of the anarchic origins of hermeneutics: the end of truth. This triggers the essential question of how far politics is possible without truth. One of the essential, methodologically innovative characteristics of this collection is its dialogical, hermeneutical form, which is achieved by inserting Vattimo and Zabala’s personal reactions to each essay in the book. By responding to each chapter in turn, Vattimo and Zabala establish a hermeneutic dialogue with the contributors. Thus hermeneutics will not only be a central topic, but also an epistemological, concrete application of Vattimo and Zabala’s theories. An indispensable critical tool for students, researchers, professors, activists and general readers interested in the philosophical and political debate on Communism, which encompasses a wide variety of disciplines such as philosophy, political science, sociology, postcolonial studies, critical theory and Latin American studies. Offering an innovative first analysis of the new concepts of Hermeneutic Communism, this book represents a vital contribution to the understanding of the intriguing interrelation between philosophical hermeneutics and political communism. “A very much needed and refreshing perspective for all those interested in rethinking radical politics beyond both political Eurocentrism and philosophical imperialism." (Chiara Bottici, New School of Social Research, and author of Imaginal Politics) “The book offers much food for thought both for those who have given up hope and for those who have been fighting for a better world for some time...The contributions to Making Communism Hermeneutical may be seen as step in the direction of a much-needed change in thinking.” (David Block, ICREA Research Professor in Sociolinguistics, Universitat de Lleida)
This book is a work of theological resistance. It is not so much about the presidency of Donald Trump as it is about what his popularity and rise to power reveal about the state of Christianity and the moral character of the evangelical Right in the United States today. More specifically, it is about the threat of white Christian nationalism, which is the particular form that the nationalist populist movement of Trumpism has adopted for itself. The contributors are all fellows from the Westar Institute’s academic seminar on God and the Human Future, and include many of the leading figures in theology and Continental philosophy of religion. This volume provides a form of theopolitical resistance based on intersectionality. The authors recognize how the various forms of oppression interrelate to contribute to a vast, dynamic, and seeming impenetrable network of systemic injustice and marginalization. These essays demonstrate that politics need not be played as a zero-sum game with a winner-take-all mentality, and that a critical theology is as urgently needed and as relevant now as ever.
This book puts radical theology and political theology into an interdisciplinary conversation with sustained and serious readings of resistance. Using an anthropology of ritual as a common thread, Jordan E. Miller explores the reality of the relationship between political theology, radical theology, and political theory, action, and power without cynicism in a creative, forward-moving way. The first half of the book develops a radical political theology and the second half applies that theory to a series of social movements, including The AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP), Occupy Wall Street, and #BlackLivesMatter, and includes reflections on the events at Standing Rock, ND.
A call to arms by a group of French intellectuals that rejects leftist reform and aligns itself with younger, wilder forms of resistance. Thirty years of “crisis,” mass unemployment, and flagging growth, and they still want us to believe in the economy... We have to see that the economy is itself the crisis. It's not that there's not enough work, it's that there is too much of it. The Coming Insurrection is an eloquent call to arms arising from the recent waves of social contestation in France and Europe. Written by the anonymous Invisible Committee in the vein of Guy Debord—and with comparable elegance—it has been proclaimed a manual for terrorism by the French government (who recently arrested its alleged authors). One of its members more adequately described the group as “the name given to a collective voice bent on denouncing contemporary cynicism and reality.” The Coming Insurrection is a strategic prescription for an emergent war-machine capable of “spreading anarchy and live communism.” Written in the wake of the riots that erupted throughout the Paris suburbs in the fall of 2005 and presaging more recent riots and general strikes in France and Greece, The Coming Insurrection articulates a rejection of the official Left and its reformist agenda, aligning itself instead with the younger, wilder forms of resistance that have emerged in Europe around recent struggles against immigration control and the “war on terror.” Hot-wired to the movement of '77 in Italy, its preferred historical reference point, The Coming Insurrection formulates an ethics that takes as its starting point theft, sabotage, the refusal to work, and the elaboration of collective, self-organized life forms. It is a philosophical statement that addresses the growing number of those—in France, in the United States, and elsewhere—who refuse the idea that theory, politics, and life are separate realms.
In ancient Rome, any citizen who had brought disgrace upon the state could be subject to a judgment believed to be worse than death: damnatio memoriae, condemnation of memory. The Senate would decree that every trace of the citizen’s existence be removed from the city as if they had never existed in the first place. Once reserved for individuals, damnatio memoriae in different forms now extends to social classes, racial and ethnic groups, and even entire peoples. In modern times, the condemned go by different names—“enemies of the people;” the “missing,” the “disappeared,” “ghost” detainees in “black sites”—but they are subject to the same fate of political erasure. Arthur Bradley explores the power to render life unlived from ancient Rome through the War on Terror. He argues that sovereignty is the power to decide what counts as being alive and what does not: to make life “unbearable,” unrecognized as having lived or died. In readings of Augustine, Shakespeare, Hobbes, Robespierre, Schmitt, and Benjamin, Bradley asks: What is the “life” of this unbearable life? How does it change and endure across sovereign time and space, from empires to republics, from kings to presidents? To what extent can it be resisted or lived otherwise? A profoundly interdisciplinary and ambitious work, Unbearable Life rethinks sovereignty, biopolitics, and political theology to find the radical potential of a life that neither lives or dies.
How are we to conceive of acts that suddenly expose the injustice of the prevailing order? These acts challenge long-standing hidden or silently tolerated injustices, but as they are unsupported by existing ethical rules they pose a drastic challenge to dominant norms. In Excessive Subjectivity, Dominik Finkelde rereads the tradition of German idealism and finds in it the potential for transformative acts that are capable of revolutionizing the social order. Finkelde's discussion of the meaning and structure of the ethical act meticulously engages thinkers typically treated as opposed—Kant, Hegel, and Lacan—to develop the concept of excessive subjectivity, which is characterized by nonconformist acts that reshape the contours of ethical life. For Kant, the subject is defined by the ethical acts she performs. Hegel interprets Kant's categorical imperative as the ability of an individual's conscience to exceed the existing state of affairs. Lacan emphasizes the transgressive force of unconscious desire on the ethical agent. Through these thinkers Finkelde develops a radical ethics for contemporary times. Integrating perspectives from both analytical and continental philosophy, Excessive Subjectivity is a distinctive contribution to our understanding of the ethical subject.
