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Arts of Wonder: Enchanting Secularity - Walter De Maria, Diller + Scofidio, James Turrell, Andy Goldsworthy

Jeffrey L. Kosky

The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by “the disenchantment of the world.” Max Weber’s statement remains a dominant interpretation of the ... More

The fate of our times is characterized by rationalization and intellectualization and, above all, by “the disenchantment of the world.” Max Weber’s statement remains a dominant interpretation of the modern condition: the increasing capabilities of knowledge and science have banished mysteries, leaving a world that can be mastered technically and intellectually. And though this idea seems empowering, many people have faced modern disenchantment. Using intimate encounters with works of art to explore disenchantment and the possibilities of re-enchantment, this book addresses questions about the nature of humanity, the world, and God in the wake of Weber’s diagnosis of modernity. It focuses on a handful of artists—Walter De Maria, Diller and Scofidio, James Turrell, and Andy Goldworthy—to show how they introduce spaces hospitable to mystery and wonder, redemption and revelation, and transcendence and creation. What might be thought of as religious longings, the book argues, are crucial aspects of enchanting secularity when developed through encounters with these works of art. Developing a model of religion that might be significant to secular culture, it shows how this model can be employed to deepen interpretation of the art we usually view as representing secular modernity.Less

The Figural Jew: Politics and Identity in Postwar French Thought

Sarah Hammerschlag

The rootless Jew, wandering disconnected from history, homeland, and nature, was often the target of early twentieth-century nationalist rhetoric aimed against modern culture. But following World War ... More

The rootless Jew, wandering disconnected from history, homeland, and nature, was often the target of early twentieth-century nationalist rhetoric aimed against modern culture. But following World War II, a number of prominent French philosophers recast this maligned figure in positive terms, and in so doing transformed postwar conceptions of politics and identity. This book explores this figure of the Jew from its prewar usage to its resuscitation by Jean-Paul Sartre, Emmanuel Levinas, Maurice Blanchot, and Jacques Derrida. Sartre and Levinas idealized the Jews' rootlessness in order to rethink the foundations of political identity. Blanchot and Derrida, in turn, used the figure of the Jew to call into question the very nature of group identification. By chronicling this evolution in thinking, this book ultimately reveals how the figural Jew can function as a critical mechanism that exposes the political dangers of mythic allegiance, whether couched in universalizing or particularizing terms.Less

God Being Nothing: Toward a Theogony

Ray L. Hart

God Being Nothing: Toward a Theogony challenges and contests traditional understandings of God in favor of a God in process: a God determinately unfinished. The author deconstructs and radically ... More

God Being Nothing: Toward a Theogony challenges and contests traditional understandings of God in favor of a God in process: a God determinately unfinished. The author deconstructs and radically re-envisions what monotheistic and trinitarian mean. Letting go of the traditional trinitarian doctrine of divine persons, the author reimagines the Trinity as three loci of relational potency, exploring the creational relations within and between each trinitarian locus as potencies of interrelationality, only some of which are actualized in time. The three loci addressed are theogony, or primordial Godhead vis-à-vis God-aborning; cosmogony, or God-aborning vis-à-vis temporal creation; and anthropogony, or humanity vis-à-vis God-aborning. The book’s ultimate implication is that all of Being and Nonbeing is aborning together in interrelation and interdependence—God, creation, humanity—in an ongoing project of theo-logo-anthropo-gony. To the extent that this divine reality is actual, it is unfinished, imperfect, still in the course of an ongoing living-dying process, one that implicates all things existent and inexistent, temporal and eternal. The Trinity, the Godhead, is not fully formed, not aboriginally perfected, but actively self-generated in concert with processes ongoing in time, in which we participate. Hence, to think the human person, the world, and God is to participate simultaneously in anthropogony, cosmogony, and theogony.Less

Heidegger's Confessions: The Remains of Saint Augustine in "Being and Time" and Beyond

Ryan Coyne

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) is one of the most influential and controversial figures in twentieth century intellectual history. Though it is well known that his brand of ... More

The German philosopher Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) is one of the most influential and controversial figures in twentieth century intellectual history. Though it is well known that his brand of phenomenology was heavily indebted to Christian theology, the specific terms of this debt, its impact on his shifting views of time, subjectivity and selfhood, as well as its role in his rejection of modern metaphysics have not been fully grasped. Drawing upon new evidence, this book argues that Heidegger’s initial confrontations with the apostle Paul and with Augustine of Hippo’s Confessions in the years leading up to Being and Time (1927) generated a series of tensions running throughout his work from start to finish. Though concepts drawn from these sources informed Being and Time, they also worked at cross-purposes with its ultimate philosophical aims. Starting in 1930 Heidegger sought to revise these concepts in part by reconsidering their textual sources. This book argues that in his later writings Heidegger reused concepts originally drawn from his 1921 and 1930 seminars on Augustine to criticize his earlier views while simultaneously deepening his criticism of the metaphysical tradition from the pre-Socratic philosophers to Friedrich Nietzsche. It also contends that Heidegger’s complex use of theological sources, coupled with his repeated attempts to distance his own thinking from Christian theology, is instructive for philosophy and religious studies alike, as it can help us to clarify the primary object of inquiry for what is often called the philosophy of religion.Less

In a Shade of Blue: Pragmatism and the Politics of Black America

Eddie S. Glaude

This book makes a plea for black America to address its social problems by recourse to experience and with an eye set on the promise and potential of the future, rather than the fixed ideas and ... More

This book makes a plea for black America to address its social problems by recourse to experience and with an eye set on the promise and potential of the future, rather than the fixed ideas and categories of the past. Central to its mission is a rehabilitation of philosopher John Dewey, whose ideas, it argues, can be fruitfully applied to a renewal of African American politics. The book suggests that Dewey's pragmatism, when attentive to the darker dimensions of life—or what we often speak of as the blues—can address many of the conceptual problems that plague contemporary African American discourse. How blacks think about themselves, how they imagine their own history, and how they conceive of their own actions can be rendered in ways that escape bad ways of thinking which assume a tendentious political unity among African Americans simply because they are black. Drawing deeply on black religious thought and literature, the book seeks to dislodge such crude and simplistic thinking and replace it with a deeper understanding of and appreciation for black life in all its variety and intricacy. It argues that only when black political leaders acknowledge such complexity can the real-life sufferings of many African Americans be remedied, an argument echoed in the recent rhetoric and optimism of Barack Obama's presidential campaign.Less

The Indiscrete Image: Infinitude and Creation of the Human

Thomas A. Carlson

Humanity's creative capacity has never been more unsettling than it is at our current moment, when it has ushered us into new technological worlds that challenge the very definition of “the human.” ... More

Humanity's creative capacity has never been more unsettling than it is at our current moment, when it has ushered us into new technological worlds that challenge the very definition of “the human.” Those anxious to safeguard the human against techno-scientific threats often appeal to religious traditions to protect the place and dignity of the human. But how well do we understand both theological tradition and today's technological culture? This book challenges our common ideas about both, arguing instead that it may be humanity's final lack of definition that first enables, and calls for, human creativity and its correlates—including technology, tradition, and their inextricable interplay within religious existence. Framed in response to Martin Heidegger's influential account of the relation between technological modernity and theological tradition, this book builds an understanding of creativity as conditioned by insurmountable unknowing and incalculable possibility through alternative readings of Christian theological tradition and technological culture—and the surprising resonance between these two. The book concludes that the always ongoing work of world creation, tied essentially to human self-creation, implies neither an idol's closure nor an icon's transcendence, but the “indiscrete image” whose love makes possible—by keeping open—both the human and its world.Less

The Mystic Fable, Volume Two: The Sixteenth And Seventeenth Centuries

Michel de Certeau

Luce Giard (ed.)

This second and final volume of Michel de Certeau’s Mystic Fable, brought to fruition despite the author’s death in 1986 (see “Presentation” below) is a close analysis of the prose and poetry of John ... More

This second and final volume of Michel de Certeau’s Mystic Fable, brought to fruition despite the author’s death in 1986 (see “Presentation” below) is a close analysis of the prose and poetry of John of the Cross and Nicholas of Cusa, a letter from Pascal, and a wealth of aspects of the mystic “fable” (fari: to speak). Going beyond the texts themselves, Certeau probes the uses to which books are put by such mystics as Teresa of Ávila, and the importance of the orientation of biblical translations during this period toward Scripture, as faith in religious institutions wanes. Our understanding of the “experimental science of mystics” grows through adjacent studies, such as the language of angels, the role of the body as the space of suffering and passions, and the phenomenon of glossolalia, a saying pursued despite the absence of a said. All of these approaches contribute to a historiography that does not substitute the writing of history for history itself, but tends toward historical truth as toward (the calculus of) a limit. The specific nature of the subject of this historical investigation is elusive in another sense as well: it is, to borrow the title of one Certeau’s works (1973), the historiography of “The Absent from History.” If all goes well, the reader may experience a point where a crowding fullness of information and reflection defines a space so clearly circumscribed as to suggest the “not this, not that” of the mystic aspiration.Less

Powers of Distinction: On Religion and Modernity

Nancy Levene

Powers of Distinction is an account of the elemental character of religion and modernity, a conceptual history that aims to clarify the commitments involved in these terms. Deep in their operating ... More

Powers of Distinction is an account of the elemental character of religion and modernity, a conceptual history that aims to clarify the commitments involved in these terms. Deep in their operating systems, it argues, are dualisms of opposition and identity that cannot be reconciled with the forms of life they ostensibly support. There is a missing position, neither non-dualism nor multiplication but a second dualism constitutive of mutual relation--relation that risks contestation and even violence but also supports modernity’s most innovative ideals: democracy, criticism, and interpretation. In readings from Abraham to the present, Powers of Distinction recovers this dualism in its difference from its shadow partners. From Abraham we get the biblical call to give up tribal belonging for a promised land of covenantal relation. But modernity, inclusive of this call, is also the principle that critiques the promise as what divides self from other, us from them. Drawing on a long tradition of thinkers and scholars even as it breaks new ground, this book offers a new way of understanding modernity as an ethical claim about our world, a philosophy of the powers of distinction to include rather than to divide.Less

The Religion of Existence: Asceticism in Philosophy from Kierkegaard to Sartre

Noreen Khawaja

This book offers a broad new vision of the history and substance of existential philosophy. It shows how an ascetic tradition with roots in European piety movements focused on personal conversion ... More

This book offers a broad new vision of the history and substance of existential philosophy. It shows how an ascetic tradition with roots in European piety movements focused on personal conversion formed the basis for the chief ideal of existentialism, personal authenticity. The book examines new connections between Kierkegaard’s religious theory of the self, Heidegger’s phenomenology of everyday life, and Sartre’s global mission of atheistic humanism. It reopens fundamental questions about the nature of secular thought, and asks us to consider how ascetic norms have shaped one of the twentieth century’s most powerful and most popular ways of thinking about identity and difference—the idea that the “true” self is not simply given but something that each of us is responsible for producing.Less

Socrates & the Fat Rabbis

Daniel Boyarin

What kind of literature is the Talmud? To answer this question, the book looks to an unlikely source: the dialogues of Plato. In these ancient texts it finds similarities, both in their combination ... More

What kind of literature is the Talmud? To answer this question, the book looks to an unlikely source: the dialogues of Plato. In these ancient texts it finds similarities, both in their combination of various genres and topics and in their dialogic structure. But the book goes beyond these structural similarities, arguing also for a cultural relationship. It suggests that both the Platonic and the talmudic dialogues are not dialogic at all. Using Michael Bakhtin's notion of represented dialogue and real dialogism, the book demonstrates, through multiple close readings, that the give-and-take in these texts is actually much closer to a monologue in spirit. At the same time, it shows that there is a dialogism in both texts on a deeper structural level between a voice of philosophical or religious dead seriousness and a voice from within that mocks that very high solemnity at the same time. The book ultimately singles out Menippean satire as the most important genre through which to understand both the Talmud and Plato, emphasizing their seriocomic peculiarity.Less

Socrates and the Jews: Hellenism and Hebraism from Moses Mendelssohn to Sigmund Freud

Miriam Leonard

“What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” Asked by the early Christian Tertullian, this question was vigorously debated in the nineteenth century. While classics dominated the intellectual life of ... More

“What has Athens to do with Jerusalem?” Asked by the early Christian Tertullian, this question was vigorously debated in the nineteenth century. While classics dominated the intellectual life of Europe, Christianity still prevailed and conflicts raged between the religious and the secular. Taking on the question of how the glories of the classical world could be reconciled with the Bible, this book explains how Judaism played a vital role in defining modern philhellenism. Exploring the tension between Hebraism and Hellenism, it looks at the philosophical tradition behind the development of classical philology and considers how the conflict became a preoccupation for the leading thinkers of modernity, including Matthew Arnold, Moses Mendelssohn, Immanuel Kant, Karl Marx, Friedrich Nietzsche, and Sigmund Freud. For each, the book shows how the contrast between classical and biblical traditions is central to writings about rationalism, political subjectivity, and progress.Less

With the World at Heart: Studies in the Secular Today

Thomas A. Carlson

This book explores the roles played by love in opening and sustaining the temporal worlds we inhabit and builds on previous studies of mystical theology, mortal experience, and human creativity in ... More

This book explores the roles played by love in opening and sustaining the temporal worlds we inhabit and builds on previous studies of mystical theology, mortal experience, and human creativity in Indiscretion (1999) and The Indiscrete Image (2008). Revising Augustine's insight that when we love a place, we dwell there in the heart, the book also resists influential lines of Christian thought that seek to transcend loss and its grief by loving all things within the eternal. The fragility and sorrow of mortal existence, the book argues, do not contradict but condition both love and its joy, even as they empower love to create a world. Through this understanding of love, the book advances a new way of thinking about the secular today: not as the rational self-assertion of humanity within effectively idolatrous closed-world-systems, but as the affirmative orientation of human affection with respect to the time of our passing days. The book opens with a reading of Cormac McCarthy's The Road; turns to the inheritance and revision of Augustinian thinking about love within the philosophical tradition of Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida, Jean-Luc Marion, and Jean-Luc Nancy; and closes by calling forth an essential but overlooked background of this tradition: that of Ralph Waldo Emerson and Friedrich Nietzsche, for both of whom the heart of education is our awakening to the day through an education of the heart.Less