Pub Date : 2022-12-23DOI: 10.1080/1462317x.2022.2148430
Méadhbh Mcivor
The following conversation between Kieran Griffiths (director of The White Handkerchief), Chloe Harkin (stage manager of The White Handkerchief), and Méadhbh McIvor (special projects editor, Political Theology) took place at the Derry Playhouse on 8th July 2022. It has been lightly edited for length and clarity. The White Handkerchief tells the story of Bloody Sunday, the 1972 massacre in which British soldiers shot at unarmed civilians during a civil rights march in the Bogside, a predominately Catholic area of Derry, Northern Ireland. Thirteen people died on Bloody Sunday itself, while others sustained life-altering injuries. The play’s title references the most famous photograph of the massacre, in which Catholic priest Fr Edward Daly waves a bloodied handkerchief before him as a group of men carry the fatally wounded body of a 17-year-old boy in search of medical treatment. The White Handkerchief premiered at the Derry Playhouse on 30th January 2022, the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday. It is the first in a trilogy directed by Kieran Griffiths that focuses on the Troubles and the subsequent peace process.
{"title":"“Honouring Their Waking Lives”: Love and Memory After Atrocity","authors":"Méadhbh Mcivor","doi":"10.1080/1462317x.2022.2148430","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.1080/1462317x.2022.2148430","url":null,"abstract":"The following conversation between Kieran Griffiths (director of The White Handkerchief), Chloe Harkin (stage manager of The White Handkerchief), and Méadhbh McIvor (special projects editor, Political Theology) took place at the Derry Playhouse on 8th July 2022. It has been lightly edited for length and clarity. The White Handkerchief tells the story of Bloody Sunday, the 1972 massacre in which British soldiers shot at unarmed civilians during a civil rights march in the Bogside, a predominately Catholic area of Derry, Northern Ireland. Thirteen people died on Bloody Sunday itself, while others sustained life-altering injuries. The play’s title references the most famous photograph of the massacre, in which Catholic priest Fr Edward Daly waves a bloodied handkerchief before him as a group of men carry the fatally wounded body of a 17-year-old boy in search of medical treatment. The White Handkerchief premiered at the Derry Playhouse on 30th January 2022, the 50th anniversary of Bloody Sunday. It is the first in a trilogy directed by Kieran Griffiths that focuses on the Troubles and the subsequent peace process.","PeriodicalId":43759,"journal":{"name":"Political Theology","volume":"24 1","pages":"528 - 536"},"PeriodicalIF":0.3,"publicationDate":"2022-12-23","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"43967387","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Pub Date : 2022-12-16DOI: 10.1080/1462317X.2022.2152612
P. Klassen
Reading Maxwell Kennel’s Postsecular History: Political Theology and the Politics of Time was a fascinating journey across time and texts. From Augustine’s Confessions to Melville’s Moby Dick, and with stops along the way to consider how historians of the “Radical Reformation” have attended to (or ignored) the Dutch Collegiant groups and why Dorothée Sölle espoused a willingness to wait, Kennel makes an argument about the politics of periodization anchored by the concept of the “postsecular.” In his words: “it is time to work against the forward facing implications of its prefix and turn the postsecular towards the past while asking what a postsecular history might entail.” In this brief response, I follow the contours of Kennel’s provocative argument, reflecting on the questions it prompted for me as I read. I take Maxwell Kennel’s argument to be rooted in a wider conversation that seeks to understand the ongoing power of “secularized theological concepts” in contemporary political life in Europe and North America, while insisting that that this is not only a “modern” concern (hence his discussion of the Dutch Collegiant groups). For Kennel, periodization is always political. He writes:
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Pub Date : 2022-12-16DOI: 10.1080/1462317X.2022.2157578
Juan Pablo Aranda
ABSTRACT A structural correspondence is found between the process whereby Catholicism prevents the infallibility of the people of God (sensus fidei) from becoming schismatic by appealing to the final authority of the magisterium, and the way democracy disables the immediate power of the acclaiming people, opposing the People’s direct participation by means of the mediation of a variety of institutions. The exigency of an unmediated, individual access to God’s voice found in both Pentecostalism and the Prosperity Gospel, on the other hand, is structurally analogous to the populist rejection of the symbolic character of the democratic “People” and the rejection of any mediation between the faction-people and the gifts of the Spirit.
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Pub Date : 2022-12-05DOI: 10.1080/1462317X.2022.2110580
Diego Rossello
There is something almost mean about the forensic, which seeks to wrest without charity meaning from every letter, citation, and gesture (...) It is counterbalanced by the fabulative which is the more generous in spirit. But this describes not just feminist criticism but also practices of rabbinical interpretation. Indeed, I think of the combination of the two as a Jewish combination, in a way a method of political theology... Bonnie Honig, “Forensics and Fabulation: Anti-Shock Politics and its Judaic Inspirations”
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Pub Date : 2022-12-05DOI: 10.1080/1462317X.2022.2152180
Robert A. Yelle
ABSTRACT The Political Imaginarium, which is the topic of this special issue, is not static. Older modes of representing the body politic, as illustrated by Ernst Kantorowicz’s account of the King’s Two Bodies, were focused on the figure of the monarch. With the transition to democratic republics based on popular sovereignty, was this older aesthetic of sovereignty abandoned, extended, or transformed? I argue that the shift to focus on the People represented only a partial break with older modes of representation, due to the difficulty of figuring the masses as such in their unformed condition. Case studies from England and France suggest that the problem of representation remains without a final solution.
摘要本期特刊的主题《政治幻想馆》并非一成不变。恩斯特·坎托罗维奇（Ernst Kantorowicz）对《国王的两个身体》（King’s Two Bodies）的描述表明，代表政治体的旧模式集中在君主的形象上。随着向以人民主权为基础的民主共和国的过渡，这种古老的主权美学是被抛弃、扩展还是转变了？我认为，关注人民的转变只是与旧的代表模式的部分决裂，因为很难将群众想象成处于未成形状态的人。来自英格兰和法国的案例研究表明，代表权问题仍然没有最终解决办法。
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Pub Date : 2022-12-05DOI: 10.1080/1462317X.2022.2152610
Jennifer Otto
In Postsecular History, Maxwell Kennel asks us to consider how the concept of the “postsecular” may help us to make sense not only of our present condition, but of our past and our future as well. To do this, he draws our attention to the variety of possible meanings contained in the prefix “post.” To say that we live in a postsecular age is not simply to say that we live after a time period defined by something called “the secular.” Kennel resists usages of the prefix “post” that would suggest that “the secular” has now definitively been overcome, surpassed, or superseded. “Instead,” he writes, “I want to use the term ‘postsecular’ as a flexible name for how the secular, secularism, and secularization are being mediated, contested, and entangled in the present” (27). That “the secular” continues to be “entangled” with “religion” is a claim that recurs throughout the wide-ranging chapters that comprise this ambitious study. The ongoing entanglement of the “religious” and the “secular” is particularly visible and meaningful, Kennel contends, in the ways in which we conceptualize time and come to understand our relationship to the past, the present, and to our anticipated future. This is the through line that connects Kennel’s readings of influential texts ranging from The Confessions to Moby Dick, and thinkers including Friedrich Nietzsche, Carl Schmitt, Eric Auerbach, and Dorothee Sölle. The individual chapters that comprise the book aim to show.
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Pub Date : 2022-12-05DOI: 10.1080/1462317X.2022.2152611
Travis Kroeker
Anyone who reads Postsecular History: Political Theology and the Politics of Time will know that Maxwell Kennel is an exciting scholar to think with! I’m grateful to have been able to spend five years with him at McMaster University. The intellectual liveliness, curiosity, careful close reading, and collegial affection that he brought was a delight, and this book puts all of these gifts on display. There’s obviously far too much to respond to, and given that he first drafted a couple of his chapters as essays in graduate seminars (on Nietzsche and Augustine, and on Melville), I’m going to continue the conversation here by returning to what he rightly identifies as a primary interest of mine: namely,messianic political theology from an apocalyptic, figural perspective. I think Kennel and I agree that a messianic political theology and a postsecular one differ significantly, though both of us aim to trouble periodization when it comes to religion, secularity, and politics. As he suggests in Postsecular History, the prefix “‘post’ better serves to name mediations, entanglements, and figural reconfigurations of the tensions and terms it purports to move beyond.” These latter terms consistently frame his narration of the historiographical project between conflicting normative orders, especially those rooted in narrow identitarian agendas that seek to “possess, instrumentalize and manage’ these terms. Such agendas include the enforcement of binaries between religion and the secular in exclusivist and increasingly violent directions. I worry, however, that these framing considerations—despite all the engaged close readings of a remarkable range of sources—remain overly abstract. “Postsecular,” like “posthistorical,” in the literal Augustinian sense, would suggest that we’d be “out of time,” just as “posthuman” or even worse “transhuman” might suggest that we’re “out of nature” too! Perhaps this is also found in the figurative sense intended in Francis Fukuyama’s provocative The End of History, paired nicely in his title with Nietzsche’s nightmare of the Last Man. This might help prove just how prophetic Fredric Jameson was when he said that “someone said” it’s easier for us now to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. We should rightly be nervous about all this “post” language! It seems we
任何读过《后世俗史：政治神学与时间政治》的人都会知道，马克斯韦尔·肯尼尔是一位令人兴奋的学者！我很感激能够在麦克马斯特大学与他共度五年时光。他所带来的知识活力、好奇心、仔细的细读和学院式的感情是一种乐趣，这本书展示了所有这些天赋。显然有太多的东西需要回应，鉴于他最初在研究生研讨会上起草了几章作为论文（关于尼采和奥古斯丁，以及梅尔维尔），我将继续这里的对话，回到他正确地认定的我的主要兴趣：即从启示录的、形象的角度来看的弥赛亚政治神学。我认为肯尼尔和我都同意弥赛亚政治神学和后基督教政治神学有很大不同，尽管在宗教、世俗和政治方面，我们都想麻烦分期。正如他在《后世俗史》中所建议的那样，前缀“post”更好地用来命名调解、纠缠和对其声称要超越的紧张关系和术语的形象重构。”后一个术语一致地构成了他对冲突的规范秩序之间的史学项目的叙述，尤其是那些植根于狭隘的同一主义议程的人“拥有、工具化和管理”这些术语。这些议程包括在排他性和日益暴力的方向上强制执行宗教和世俗之间的二元对立。然而，我担心，尽管对大量来源进行了仔细解读，但这些框架考虑仍然过于抽象字面意义上的奥古斯丁意义，会暗示我们“不合时宜”，就像“后人类”或更糟的“超人类”可能暗示我们也“脱离自然”一样！也许这也体现在弗朗西斯·福山（Francis Fukuyama）挑衅性的《历史的终结》（the End of History。我们应该对所有这些“后”语言感到紧张！看来我们
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Pub Date : 2022-11-25DOI: 10.1080/1462317X.2022.2148431
Milinda Banerjee
This is a condensed and annotated version of a conversation that took place between Bratya Basu (1969 – ), playwright and director, and Minister of Education of the Indian state of West Bengal
这是剧作家兼导演布拉蒂亚·巴苏(1969 -)与印度西孟加拉邦教育部长之间的一次对话的浓缩和注释版
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Pub Date : 2022-11-24DOI: 10.1080/1462317X.2022.2148429
Milinda Banerjee, Méadhbh Mcivor
2021–2022 marked two major (post)colonial anniversaries: the centenary of the Partition of Ireland in May 1921 and the 75th anniversary of the Partition of India/Pakistan in August 1947. As Britain’s first and largest colonies, respectively, both Ireland and India have been home to longstanding anticolonial movements. On the island of Ireland, Partition turned out to be a step towards the Republic of Ireland’s eventual achievement of independence (Northern Ireland, by contrast, remains a part of the United Kingdom). In the case of India and Pakistan, it was coterminous with independence itself. In both cases, Partition’s specter continues to haunt the political landscape. In the Irish context, divisions persist between those who seek a united Ireland and those who are loyal to the British Crown. Almost twenty-five years since the signing of the Good Friday/Belfast Agreement, which formally brought to an end the Troubles (the thirty year violent conflict between Northern Ireland’s [predominately Catholic] Irish nationalist and [predominantly Protestant] British unionist communities), the implementation of Brexit has brought renewed focus—and renewed tension—to the relationship between the Republic, Northern Ireland, and the UK. In the case of South Asia, the Partition resulted in mass killings, sexual violence, and plunder, accompanied by waves of forced migrations: between 11 and 18 million refugees are estimated to have moved between India and Pakistan in its aftermath. British colonial policies fostered sectarian divides in both Ireland and India. In British-controlled India, for example, the Empire actively fomented polarization between religious communities in order to project itself as a transcendental umpire. The legacies of colonial divide et impera still shape the region today, fueling right-wing sectarian nationalisms. Comparable to early modern European confessional state-building and civil wars, these twentieth-century Partitions can be seen to demonstrate the links between modern centralized state sovereignty and what is often framed as “religious violence.” Human sovereign violence draws legitimacy from divine violence, as the human state moulds itself in the image of the divine lawgiver. We argue that Partition embodies, par excellence, the violence of colonial political theology.
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Pub Date : 2022-11-18DOI: 10.1080/1462317X.2022.2143138
V. Napolitano
Short books can be powerful – for what they explicitly say and for what they allude in potentia. This is the case of Debt and Guilt: A Political Philosophy by Elettra Stimilli (2018), a lucid and masterly reading of generative connections between theology, politics and economics from the inception of Christianity to present. This book’s central idea is that there is a profound twofold link running through market capitalist economy and Christian political theology: at the center of this link there is, on the one hand, God’s gift of life to humans (as unrepayable debt) and, on the other, the guilt associated with the impossibility of redemption of this debt, if not only through sacrifice. Aimed for an interdisciplinary audience, the book structures the argument in a concise yet wideranging fashion through a review of political, theological and anthropological arguments. It also brings the discussion up to current themes such as the 2008 austerity experienced by southern EU countries and critiques a neoliberalist push toward a feminization of labor. The book relies on a methodological and political apparatus that spans from studies of German and Roman legal systems to anthropological theories of the gift and sacrifice, to critical theory and feminist takes on the psychic life of power. I want to dedicate the rest of this short response to highlighting, from an anthropological perspective, some features of these book’s approach that makes it remarkable for the breath, depth and conciseness of the argument, and then gesture toward some open-ended questions the book as a whole helps us to raise. Let me make here three short points to highlight Stimilli’s reflections on indebtedness, guilt and Capital. Stimilli’s analysis is primarily rooted in economics (oikonomia), theological and political formations anchored in a history of early Christianity, medieval theology, protestant spirit and Catholic affects. Hence first, Stimilli rightly points out the Pauline connection between saving and grace, where the bond of the flesh to sin can only be released by a christic act of sacrifice – the ultimate release of the flesh as a state of liberation (119). The debitum religionis that connects God and human beings is incarnated in the form of a liturgical office. Agamben sees this power of the Opus Dei seated in the figure of the priest and minister, through whose power “law and religion necessary coincides.” Stimilli then extends this argument to the figure of the “entrepreneur of oneself,” who in a capitalist economy does not “admit delegates” and continuously builds on himself as “human capital” (115). In Stimilli’s view, the ontological status of the entrepreneur of oneself – echoing a power of the liturgical office that cannot be affected by the performance of those who are holding it – has ethical
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