Nothing Absolute: German Idealism and the Question of Political Theology

by Alex Dubilet (Editor), Kirill Chepurin (Editor), Joseph Albernaz (Contribution by), Daniel C. Barber (Contribution by), Agata Bielik-Robson (Contribution by)

Overview

Featuring scholars at the forefront of contemporary political theology and the study of German Idealism, Nothing Absolute explores the intersection of these two flourishing fields. Against traditional approaches that view German Idealism as a secularizing movement, this volume revisits it as the first fundamentally philosophical articulation of the political-theological problematic in the aftermath of the Enlightenment and the advent of secularity.

Nothing Absolute reclaims German Idealism as a political-theological trajectory. Across the volume’s contributions, German thought from Kant to Marx emerges as crucial for the genealogy of political theology and for the ongoing reassessment of modernity and the secular. By investigating anew such concepts as immanence, utopia, sovereignty, theodicy, the Earth, and the world, as well as the concept of political theology itself, this volume not only rethinks German Idealism and its aftermath from a political-theological perspective but also demonstrates what can be done with (or against) German Idealism using the conceptual resources of political theology today.

Contributors: Joseph Albernaz, Daniel Colucciello Barber, Agata Bielik-Robson, Kirill Chepurin, S. D. Chrostowska, Saitya Brata Das, Alex Dubilet, Vincent Lloyd, Thomas Lynch, James Martel, Steven Shakespeare, Oxana Timofeeva, Daniel Whistler

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780823290185
Publisher:	Fordham University Press
Publication date:	02/09/2021
Series:	Perspectives in Continental Philosophy
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	256
File size:	3 MB

About the Author

Alex Dubilet (Edited By)
Alex Dubilet is Assistant Professor of English at Vanderbilt University.

Kirill Chepurin (Edited By)
Kirill Chepurin is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at HSE University, Moscow.


Joseph Albernaz is assistant professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University. He is currently working on a book about conceptions of community in Romanticism, tentatively entitled All Things Common.
Daniel C. Barber is assistant professor of philosophy and religious studies at Pace University. He is the author of On Diaspora: Christianity, Religion, and Secularity (Cascade, 2011) and Deleuze and the Naming of God: Post-Secularism and the Future of Immanence (Edinburgh University Press, 2014).
Agata Bielik-Robson is professor of Jewish studies in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at the University of Nottingham. She is the author of The Saving Lie: Harold Bloom and Deconstruction (Northwestern University Press, 2011), Jewish Cryptotheologies of Late Modernity: Philosophical Marranos (Routledge, 2014), and Another Finitude: Messianic Vitalism and Philosophy (Bloomsbury, 2019).
S. D. Chrostowska is professor of humanities at York University, Toronto. She is the author of Literature on Trial: The Emergence of Critical Discourse in Germany, Poland, and Russia, 1700-1800 (University of Toronto Press, 2012) and Matches: A Light Book (Punctum, 2015, 2nd enl. ed. 2019), and coeditor of Political Uses of Utopia: New Marxist, Anarchist, and Radical Democratic Perspectives (Columbia University Press, 2017).
Saitya Brata Das is associate professor in the School of Language, Literature, and Culture Studies at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He is the author of The Political Theology of Schelling (Edinburgh University Press, 2016) and coeditor of The Weight of Violence: Religion, Language, Politics (Oxford University Press, 2015).
Vincent Lloyd is associate professor of theology and religious studies at Villanova University. He is the author of The Problem with Grace: Reconfiguring Political Theology (Stanford University Press, 2011), Black Natural Law (Oxford University Press, 2016), Religion of the Field Negro: On Black Secularism and Black Theology (Fordham fUniversity Press, 2017), and In Defense of Charisma (Columbia University Press, 2018).
Thomas Lynch is senior lecturer in philosophy of religion at the University of Chichester. He is the author of Apocalyptic Political Theology: Hegel, Taubes and Malabou (Bloomsbury, 2019).
James Martel is professor of political science at San Francisco State University. He is the author of Divine Violence: Walter Benjamin and the Eschatology of Sovereignty (Routledge, 2011), The One and Only Law: Walter Benjamin and the Second Commandment (University of Michigan Press, 2014), and The Misinterpellated Subject (Duke University Press, 2017).
Steven Shakespeare is associate professor of philosophy at Liverpool Hope University. He is the author of Kierkegaard, Language and the Reality of God (Ashgate, 2001), Derrida and Theology (T&T Clark, 2009), and Kierkegaard and the Refusal of Transcendence (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015).
Oxana Timofeeva is professor of philosophy at the European University at St. Petersburg. She is the author of History of Animals: An Essay on Negativity, Immanence and Freedom (Bloomsbury, 2018).
Daniel Whistler is reader in modern European philosophy at Royal Holloway, University of London. He is coauthor of The Schelling-Eschenmayer Controversy, 1801: Nature and Identity (Edinburgh University Press, 2020) and the author of Schelling’s Theory of Symbolic Language: Forming the System of Identity (Oxford University Press, 2013), as well as coeditor of The Schelling Reader (Bloomsbury, 2020).

Table of Contents

Introduction: Immanence, Genealogy, Delegitimation | 1
Kirill Chepurin and Alex Dubilet

1 Knot of the World: German Idealism between Annihilation and Construction | 35
Kirill Chepurin

2 Utopia and Political Theology in the “Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism” | 54
S. D. Chrostowska

3 Relational Division | 73
Daniel Colucciello Barber

4 Otherwise Than Terror: Ten Theses on the Modernist Secular | 87
Daniel Whistler

5 Kant’s Unexpected Materialism: How the Object Saves Kant (and Us) from the Moral Law | 104
James Martel

6 Earth Unbounded: Division and Inseparability in Hölderlin and Günderrode | 124
Joseph Albernaz

7 Kant with Sade with Hegel: The Death of God and the Joy of Reason | 144
Oxana Timofeeva

8 A Political Theology of Tolerance: Universalism and the Tragic Position of the Religious Minority | 160
Thomas Lynch

9 Hegel, Blackness, Sovereignty | 174
Vincent Lloyd

10 Political Theology of the Death of God: Hegel and Derrida | 188
Agata Bielik-Robson

11 Exception without Sovereignty: The Kenotic Eschatology of Schelling | 207
Saitya Brata Das

12 Once More, from Below: The Concept of Reduplication and the Immanence of Political Theology | 223
Steven Shakespeare

13 On the General Secular Contradiction: Secularization, Christianity, and Political Theology | 240
Alex Dubilet

List of Contributors | 257

Index | 261

Editorial Reviews

Did German Idealism introduce the death of God and disclose the space-time of radical immanence, or is it rather the pivotal moment for the development of political theology in late modernity? This exciting collection of essays offers new insights into this perplexing question for both philosophy and theology.

Miguel Vatter

This volume, full of precise, incisive, and deeply researched scholarship, situates the problematic of political theology within a series of questions that emerge within German Idealist philosophy, from Kant to Marx. This is an original and necessary contribution to the growing field of political theology. As evinced in this volume, German Idealism and its intellectual heirs in critical theory, Marxism, and cultural theory are an important, perhaps even necessary place to ground the contemporary critiques of the global capitalist order of racial, gendered, and biopolitical oppression.

Joshua Ramey

"Did German Idealism introduce the death of God and disclose the space-time of radical immanence, or is it rather the pivotal moment for the development of political theology in late modernity? This exciting collection of essays offers new insights into this perplexing question for both philosophy and theology."---Miguel Vatter, Flinders University

This volume, full of precise, incisive, and deeply researched scholarship, situates the problematic of political theology within a series of questions that emerge within German Idealist philosophy, from Kant to Marx. This is an original and necessary contribution to the growing field of political theology. As evinced in this volume, German Idealism and its intellectual heirs in critical theory, Marxism, and cultural theory are an important, perhaps even necessary place to ground the contemporary critiques of the global capitalist order of racial, gendered, and biopolitical oppression.---Joshua Ramey, Haverford College

From the Publisher