In rejecting the ethical authority of those social institutions that attempt to define and impose norms of belief and behavior, radical environmentalism has many parallels with past antinomian protests. It is characterized by a 'hermeneutics of suspicion' directed towards the establishment in all its forms and extending to all its attempts to 'lay down the law.' Those nomothetic models which represent environmentalists as, (a) seeking to extend current legal/bureaucratic frameworks to 'nature,' or (b) drawing moral conclusions from 'natural laws' are (...) guilty of ignoring radical environmentalism's antinomian ethos. (shrink)

In this introduction to part 3 of the Common Knowledge symposium “Antipolitics,” the journal's editor argues that, apart from sortition, the best guarantees of safety in a democracy are, first, to augment judicial oversight of all political processes and, second, to exclude politicians from the process of selecting judges. “There can never be too much judicial interference,” he writes, “in what politicians regard as their domain.” The author reached this conclusion during attempts by the newly elected Israeli government, in the (...) spring of 2023, to make itself absolute by eliminating checks on its conduct that the Supreme Court had been developing and applying since the 1950s. Traditional Jewry and Judaism being notoriously hypernomian, the resistance to legality on the part of the ruling coalition has conveyed an aura of antinomian heresy. The choice in Israel appears to be between antipolitics and antinomianism, rather than between Left and Right politically—and the antipolitical model in Israel of a superintendent judiciary and an autonomous attorney general is arguably superior to the American prototype, even from the perspective (“all men are created equal..., endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights”) that we have come to regard as quintessentially American. (shrink)

Heidegger's connection with Nazism is well known and has been exhaustively debated. But we need to understand better why Heidegger believed National Socialism to be the best cure for the ills of modern society. In this book Christopher Rickey examines the internal logic of Heidegger's ideas to explain how they led him to become a powerful critic of liberalism and a Nazi supporter. Key to Rickey's interpretation is the radically antinomian conception of religiosity he finds at the core of Heidegger's (...) challenge to modernity. Heidegger responds to the crisis of modernity with a philosophy attuned to the fundamental need for humans to live with the proper stance toward the divine. Inspired by Lutheran and mystical theology, Heidegger outlines an essentially religious conception of authentic human being. Like his radical Lutheran forerunners, Heidegger politicizes the radical strains of Luther's theology to create a potent revolutionary brew: the revolution of the saints. Rickey traces out the ways in which these currents fundamentally shape Heidegger's thought: the Lutheran background to his critique of modern science and the technological rationality it spawns; his transformation of Aristotle's prudential conception of practical wisdom into the total revelation of being that lays the basis for revolutionary political action; and his mystical and sectarian understanding of authentic community. Rickey shows how this political-theological vision forms the basis of Heidegger's concrete political action, and concludes with an analysis of the fundamental problems this vision poses to our political thinking today. (shrink)

Heidegger's connection with Nazism is well known and has been exhaustively debated. But we need to understand better why Heidegger believed National Socialism to be the best cure for the ills of modern society. In this book Christopher Rickey examines the internal logic of Heidegger's ideas to explain how they led him to become a powerful critic of liberalism and a Nazi supporter. Key to Rickey's interpretation is the radically antinomian conception of religiosity he finds at the core of Heidegger's (...) challenge to modernity. Heidegger responds to the crisis of modernity with a philosophy attuned to the fundamental need for humans to live with the proper stance toward the divine. Inspired by Lutheran and mystical theology, Heidegger outlines an essentially religious conception of authentic human being. Like his radical Lutheran forerunners, Heidegger politicizes the radical strains of Luther's theology to create a potent revolutionary brew: the revolution of the saints. Rickey traces out the ways in which these currents fundamentally shape Heidegger's thought: the Lutheran background to his critique of modern science and the technological rationality it spawns; his transformation of Aristotle's prudential conception of practical wisdom into the total revelation of being that lays the basis for revolutionary political action; and his mystical and sectarian understanding of authentic community. Rickey shows how this political-theological vision forms the basis of Heidegger's concrete political action, and concludes with an analysis of the fundamental problems this vision poses to our political thinking today. (shrink)

On October 26–27, 1962, the first meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy took place in Evanston, Illinois. Seven months earlier, on March 19, 1962, Columbia Records released the debut album of a young folk singer from Hibbing, Minnesota. Topics discussed at the SPEP meeting included the "phenomenology of perception, existential aesthetics, value theory, the life-world, the emotions, and expressive meaning."1 Songs on the album included two originals—"Talking New York" and "Song to Woody"—and covers of several gospel and (...) blues songs, including "In My Time of Dyin'," "Fixin' to Die," and "See That My Grave Is Kept Clean." The SPEP archives don't indicate whether anyone at the meeting in... (shrink)

The legacy of an antinomian messianism within a Jewish historical context -- Jacques Derrida and Giorgio Agamben on the processes of messianicity and canonicity -- Conclusions formulated on the basis of part I: recognizing the challenges of a "political theology of immanence" -- The radical hermeneutics of theology -- The "violence" of the canon: a contemporary context for the canonical form -- The necessity of hermeneutics.

To counteract the antinomian tendencies of nineteenth-century secular Protestantism, Søren Kierkegaard turns to Johannes Tauler's sermons, which vividly express a dialectics of works and grace, attacking an inflated asceticism as much as idleness. For reasons of reception history and because of the similarity of the images Kierkegaard and Tauler use, particularly servitude as expressed in Luke 17:10, this article proposes to understand Kierkegaard's account of grace as ‘Taulerian’ rather than ‘Arminian’. To show the intertwined agency of the human and the (...) divine, the article offers a comparative reading of Tauler's two sermons on Cantate Sunday, Kierkegaard's Upbuilding Discourse ‘The Expectancy of an Eternal Salvation’ and the second part of Judge for Yourself. Both Kierkegaard and Tauler design definitory ambiguities for a performative purpose: to help their readers and, respectively, listeners to become receptive to grace by humbling themselves and refraining from fathoming ‘what is not given to be understood’. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:From the Sacrifice of the Letter to the Voice of TestimonyGiorgio Agamben’s Fulfillment of MetaphysicsJeffrey S. Librett (bio)By denying us the limit of the Limitless, the death of God leads to an experience in which nothing may again announce the exteriority of being, and consequently to an experience which is interior and sovereign. But such an experience, for which the death of God is an explosive reality, discloses as (...) its own secret and clarification, its intrinsic finitude, the limitless reign of the Limit, and the emptiness of those excesses in which it spends itself and where it is found wanting.—Michel Foucault, “Preface to Transgression”Can there be a discourse that, without being a metalanguage or sinking into the unsayable, says language itself and exposes its limits?—Giorgio Agamben, “The Idea of Language”I shall not rest until every German sees that it is a shameful thing to be a lawyer.—Adolf Hitler, speech before theReichstag, April 26, 1942From his early works on, Giorgio Agamben has opposed the thought of no contemporary philosopher more consistently and programmatically than that of Jacques Derrida, whose questioning of phonocentric metaphysics Agamben has tried to replace by a characterization of metaphysics as (what I am calling here) graphocentric. To go back behind the replacement of the voice by the letter is for Agamben to recover the event of language itself, the taking-place of language as Being.1 In his conceptualization of the project for such a recovery, as we shall see, Agamben’s commitment to Heidegger’s fundamental ontology is overdetermined by his investment in the Christian God as logos.This philosophical program in Agamben’s early essays guides his later work on the homo sacer-sovereign relation but also distorts and disturbs the later work in three principal ways. First, it prompts him to propose an exclusively juridicopolitical understanding of the sacredness of the homo sacer, effectively scapegoating the juridical sphere for a more broadly theopolitical problem, while placing the specifically Christian background [End Page 11] of his antinomianism in a misleadingly secular, rational, and universalist light. Symptomatically, in order to accomplish this juridicopolitical reduction Agamben must reject Bataille’s analysis of sacrifice—along with the entire modern anthropological reading of the sacred—out of hand. For this rejection protects his discourse against any sustained confrontation with the importance of the sacrificial dimension for both what he calls the homo sacer and his own approach to law in his theorization of the homo sacer..Second, Agamben’s philosophical program impoverishes the account he provides of the Nazi death camps as an extreme example of the sovereign-homo sacer relation by making it impossible for him to appreciate the importance of Christian antinomianism in the formation of National Socialist ideology. For Agamben’s philosophical orientation requires or presupposes that he ignore or underestimate, first of all, the sacrificially anti-Semitic dimension of Christian antinomianism—the tendency of such antinomianism to make Judaism responsible for the ontological desert into which representation exiles us all. Further, as a consequence of his continuing commitment to this tradition, Agamben cannot see how important the tradition remains, even if in a displaced form, for Nazi anti-Semitism. I argue that Agamben’s animus against the letter blinds him to the Christian and sacrificial dimensions of the Holocaust—he ignores the former and explicitly, emphatically denies the latter dimension—because this animus represents his own commitment to the Christian antinomianism that, in its racialized National Socialist form, attempts to rid itself of the letter by sacrificing not only Judaism but the (biologically, racially construed) Jews. Because his radically antinomian program would become unsettled by his recognition of its important overlap with the ideological bases of National Socialism, Agamben cannot ultimately acknowledge the Christian and sacrificial aspects of the Holocaust.Finally, in Remnants of Auschwitz—his main reading (outside of Homo Sacer) of the significance of the Nazi death camps—Agamben positions “testimony” as the exemplary instance of the speaking of speech, the taking-place of language. The result of the destruction of European Jewry becomes here the revelation of poetic speech as a manifestation of the absolute. Unwittingly, Agamben ends up participating in... (shrink)

Definitions of death are often referred to as legal fictions since brain death was conceived in the mid-twentieth century. Reference to legal fiction is generally paired with bioethicists’ concern that it facilitates post-mortem tissue donation and the health system generally, by determining death earlier on the continuum of dying and availing more viable tissue and therapeutic resources for others. The author argues that spatio-legal theory, drawing from legal geography, can account for the heterogeneity of effects that the fiction has in (...) spatially managing bodies (e.g., physicians, patient, family) at the bedside. The legal fiction is produced in physicians’ socio-legal practices, coordinating decision-making according to geographies of scarcity and severable, self-contained live- and dead-bodies. The determination liminally exists between private and public, enacting a sterile, affectless ordering of bodies but administered in the spectacle of sovereign death-making, conveying authority whilst managing patient’s and family’s consents. Spatialising traces of anatamo-politics and biopolitics thereby congeal and are enacted heterogeneously in and through the legal form of the fiction, securing preferred constructions of the body in the management of mortality. These spatio-legal features of the legal fiction are described from their collision with case law and literature that document competing nomoi produced from or secreted by antinomian bodies. (shrink)

_Making Sense of Tantric Buddhism_ fundamentally rethinks the nature of the transgressive theories and practices of the Buddhist Tantric traditions, challenging the notion that the Tantras were "marginal" or primitive and situating them instead--both ideologically and institutionally--within larger trends in mainstream Buddhist and Indian culture. Critically surveying prior scholarship, Wedemeyer exposes the fallacies of attributing Tantric transgression to either the passions of lusty monks, primitive tribal rites, or slavish imitation of Saiva traditions. Through comparative analysis of modern historical narratives--that depict (...) Tantrism as a degenerate form of Buddhism, a primal religious undercurrent, or medieval ritualism--he likewise demonstrates these to be stock patterns in the European historical imagination. Through close analysis of primary sources, Wedemeyer reveals the lived world of Tantric Buddhism as largely continuous with the Indian religious mainstream and deploys contemporary methods of semiotic and structural analysis to make sense of its seemingly repellent and immoral injunctions. Innovative, semiological readings of the influential _Guhyasamaja Tantra_ underscore the text's overriding concern with purity, pollution, and transcendent insight--issues shared by all Indic religions--and a large-scale, quantitative study of Tantric literature shows its radical antinomianism to be a highly managed ritual observance restricted to a sacerdotal elite. These insights into Tantric scripture and ritual clarify the continuities between South Asian Tantrism and broader currents in Indian religion, illustrating how thoroughly these "radical" communities were integrated into the intellectual, institutional, and social structures of South Asian Buddhism. (shrink)

_Making Sense of Tantric Buddhism_ fundamentally rethinks the nature of the transgressive theories and practices of the Buddhist Tantric traditions, challenging the notion that the Tantras were "marginal" or primitive and situating them instead -- both ideologically and institutionally -- within larger trends in mainstream Buddhist and Indian culture. Critically surveying prior scholarship, Wedemeyer exposes the fallacies of attributing Tantric transgression to either the passions of lusty monks, primitive tribal rites, or slavish imitation of Saiva traditions. Through comparative analysis of (...) modern historical narratives -- that depict Tantrism as a degenerate form of Buddhism, a primal religious undercurrent, or medieval ritualism -- he likewise demonstrates these to be stock patterns in the European historical imagination. Through close analysis of primary sources, Wedemeyer reveals the lived world of Tantric Buddhism as largely continuous with the Indian religious mainstream and deploys contemporary methods of semiotic and structural analysis to make sense of its seemingly repellent and immoral injunctions. Innovative, semiological readings of the influential _Guhyasamaja Tantra_ underscore the text's overriding concern with purity, pollution, and transcendent insight -- issues shared by all Indic religions -- and a large-scale, quantitative study of Tantric literature shows its radical antinomianism to be a highly managed ritual observance restricted to a sacerdotal elite. These insights into Tantric scripture and ritual clarify the continuities between South Asian Tantrism and broader currents in Indian religion, illustrating how thoroughly these "radical" communities were integrated into the intellectual, institutional, and social structures of South Asian Buddhism. (shrink)

When in October 2016 I started working on my book Jorge Mario Bergoglio. An intellectual biography I did not have the slightest idea of ​​the importance played by the figure and work of Gaston Fessard in the formation of Bergoglio’s thought. There was nothing to suggest that Gaston Fessard could be a relevant author for the intellectual formation of the future Pope. I was struck by the polar and dialectical model of thought that animated him, the possibility of harmonizing opposites, (...) of inviting concepts to a common table that apparently could not be approached, because it places them in a higher plane in which they find their synthesis. This paradigm, of the Church and of the Society of Jesus as complexio oppositorum, finds its verification, according to Bergoglio, in the way in which the Jesuits have achieved the inculturation of the faith in the indigenous peoples of Latin America. Bergoglio rereads Ignatius in the light of a dialectical model. As he will say in one of the interviews he gave me on the occasion of the writing of my book: “In Ignatian spirituality there is always this bipolar tension”. It is certainly an original, uncommon reading of Ignatius’s thought. It is the ideal factor that allows us to explain why Bergoglio, when in 1986 he went to Frankfurt to write his doctoral thesis, chose the Guardinian essay dedicated to the polar opposition. When I concluded my volume on the intellectual biography of the future Pontiff in February 2017, one element, however, remained obscure. Where, from which author had Bergoglio drawn his polar model? Where did your antinomic reading of Ignatian spirituality come from? Not by Guardini discovered philosophically in 1986. Francis indicated the starting point of his intellectual formation. The reading of Fessard’s La dialectique des Exercices spirituels de saint Ignace de Loyola, published in 1956, is the work that “ had a great influence “ on him. It is the work that clarifies Bergoglio’s antinomian thought, his subsequent ideal encounter with Guardini’s philosophy. (shrink)

Unquestioning obedience - in politics, religion, and gender roles - leads to disaster. But how are we to overcome these pernicious traditions without hurtling toward anarchy and antinomianism? In this updated edition of a classic text, theologian Dorothee Solle examines historical patterns of obedience and oppression and suggests a model of timeless "creative disobedience" that leads to liberation for all. Appealing to the figure of Jesus, whose earthly ministry was marked by submission to the will of God, not to (...) oppressive institutions. Solle reminds us that this kind of revolutionary response is required of all of us. She also offers a revealing account of her own evolution as a female scholar searching for the meaning of God - a search that led not to a rejection of her faith, but to the theological justification of faithful and creative disobedience. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Journal of the History of Ideas 64.4 (2003) 619-637 [Access article in PDF] Overcoming Gnosticism:Hans Jonas, Hans Blumenberg, and the Legitimacy of the Natural World Benjamin Lazier University of Chicago In 1984, about a decade before his own murder, the Romanian scholar of religion Ioan Culianu complained of a more widespread, if decidedly less grisly form of assault. 1 The gnostics, he declared in a moment of high jocularity, (...) had "taken hold of the whole world, and we were not aware of it. It is a mixed feeling of anxiety and admiration, since I cannot refrain myself from thinking that these alien body-snatchers have done a remarkable job indeed." 2Though offered in jest, Culianu's designation "alien body-snatchers" quite accurately sums up what has remained since 1934 the leading view of gnosticism as a delimited, identifiable phenomenon. In that year appeared the first monumental volume of Gnosis und spätantiker Geist (Gnosis and the Spirit of Late Antiquity) composed by the young Jewish philosopher Hans Jonas as a dissertation under Martin Heidegger and the theologian Rudolf Bultmann. Over the next sixty years Jonas returned again and again to the movement as he defined it. Above all, gnosticism had as its guiding principle the notion of das Fremde. The term includes in its linguistic domain not only "the alien," by which it is most usually translated, but its cognates as well: the strange, the foreign, the other, the unknown, the uncanny, and the like. This sense of alienation is wildly overdetermined in gnostic theology: man is alienated from himself, from a fully transcendent God, and most powerfully from the material, [End Page 619] sensuous universe in which he lives, created as it was by an evil, malicious demiurge. Such anti-cosmism could license both ascetic retreat from the world as well as an antinomian descent into the worldly abyss, with the intent to defeat it from within. The locution "body-snatcher" now acquires relevance, for gnostic theology made impossible any positive appraisal of the physical body, or of the physical world at all for that matter. As the political philosopher Leo Strauss put it in a letter to Jonas, gnosticism may well have been the most radical rebellion in Western history against the Greek notion of physis.In stylized terms Jonas's philosophical career represents what I would like to call gnosticism's "third overcoming." Such terms signal an allegiance to the work of the German philosopher Hans Blumenberg. But they signal a departure as well. In Legitimität der Neuzeit (Legitimacy of the Modern Age, 1966), Blumenberg undertook what must count among the most ambitious revisions of Western intellectual history ever ventured. Against a rash of attacks on the modern age as an ill-concealed, secularized derivative of an earlier Christian era, he stepped up in its defense. He linked the emergence of the modern age—defined preeminently by man's need for self-assertion, to act in the world—to a "second overcoming" of gnosticism at the end of the Middle Ages. The gnostic spirit he found revived by the nominalism and theological voluntarism of late-medieval scholastic theology, a loose confluence of thought centripetally bound by the black hole of the deus absconditus or hidden god. Whereas gnosticism's first overcoming was Augustine's work and but a partial success, its second, and for Blumenberg "final" overcoming was the work of an ethos of human self-assertion best instantiated by the scientific program of Francis Bacon.To argue for its third overcoming in the late 1920s and '30s is therefore to take leave of Blumenberg's account, if also to extend it. The condition for the possibility of this argument, of course, is that gnosticism had in fact returned. Gnosticism, or at the very least a host of phenomena going by the name and generally understood as such, did indeed return, and with a vengeance—on the occult scene, in philosophy, in theology of all persuasions, even in natural-scientific discourse. This period also witnessed the return of the... (shrink)

ABSTRACT My aim in this paper is not to try to formulate the meaning the word ‘terrorism’has in ordinary use; the word is used in so many different, even incompatible ways, that such an enterprise would quickly prove futile. My aim is rather to try for a definition that captures the trait, or traits, of terrorism which cause most of us to view it with moral repugnance. I discuss the following questions: Is the historical connection of terrorism with terror to (...) be preserved on the conceptual level, or relegated to the psychology and sociology of terrorism? Does mere infliction of terror qualify as terrorism, so that we can speak of non‐violent terrorism? If terrorism is a type of violence, does it have to be against persons, or should violence against property also count? In what sense can terrorism be described as indiscriminate violence? Should we use the word only in a political context? In such a context, can we speak of ‘state terrorism’, or should the word be restricted to actions not sanctioned by law? Is the terrorist necessarily oblivious to moral considerations, as those who define terrorism in terms of antinomianism imply? My answers to these questions lead up to the following definition: terrorism is the deliberate use of violence, or threat of its use, against innocent people, with the aim of intimidating them, or other people, into a course of action they otherwise would not take. (shrink)

In this chapter, we examine a few potential problems when inquiring into the ethics of medieval Christian and Islamic mystical traditions: First, there are terminological and methodological worries about defining mysticism and doing comparative philosophy in general. Second, assuming that the Divine represents the highest Good in such traditions, and given the apophaticism on the part of many mystics in both religions, there is a question of whether or not such traditions can provide a coherent theory of value. Finally, the (...) antinomian tendencies and emphasis on passivity of some mystics might lead one to wonder whether their prescriptive exhortations can constitute a coherent theory of right action. We tackle each of these concerns in turn and discuss how they might be addressed, in an attempt to show how medieval mysticism, as a fundamentally practical enterprise, deserves more attention from practical and moral philosophy than it has thus far received. (shrink)

David Hume’s position on religion is, broadly speaking, “politic”: instrumental and consequentialist. Religions should be tolerated or not according to their effects on political peace and order. Such theories of toleration are often rejected as immoral or unstable. The reading provided here responds by reading Hume’s position as one of radically indirect consequentialism. While religious policy should serve consequentialist ends, making direct reference to those ends merely gives free reign to religious-political bigotry and faction. Toleration, like Hume’s other “artificial virtues” (...) (justice, fidelity to promises, allegiance to government), is a universally useful response to our universal partiality—as established uniformity, however tempting, is not. This implies that toleration can progress through political learning, becoming broader and more constitutionally established over time. A sophisticated Humean approach thus shares the stability and normative attractiveness of respect- or rights-based arguments while responding more acutely and flexibly to problems the former often slights: antinomian religious extremism; underdefined political agency; and internationalized, politicized religious movements. (shrink)

Khoryev regards Petersburg, a collection of essays by Jarosław Iwaszkiewicz, published in 1976, as a windup of the writer’s complex ties with Russian culture and literature, which he was widely known to have loved and known in depth. It is a book where, through the legendary city on the river Neva, Iwaszkiewicz takes a look at a number of essential issues of Russian history and its ties with the history of Poland and the Polish people. Iwaszkiewicz avoids unequivocal judgments, noticing (...) the antinomian nature of St. Petersburg, seen as a being full of contrast but at the same time the center of revolutions and despotism, a manifestation of imperial power and the highest achievements of sophisticated art. These contrasts reveal, in Khoryev’s opinion, the multi-faceted and fullest picture of St. Petersburg and its individuality: so mysterious, overpowering and unique. (shrink)

William Blake and Zadie Smith reached strikingly similar critical positions towards philosophical trends current in their respective eras. Both excoriate those who, for selfish ends, disparage beauty and in so doing sabotage justice, love, joy and genuine freedom. Smith’s On Beauty, like Blake’s America: A Prophecy and Visions of the Daughters of Albion, indicts the reprehensible intellectual discourses of the day that undermine human happiness and corrupt the social order. Whereas Blake critiqued the rights revolutions set in motion by Thomas (...) Paine, William Godwin, Mary Wollstonecraft and others from a more broadly moral and future-oriented angle than has generally been recognized (as Saree Makdisi has shown), Smith wittily dramatizes that same vision through a huge range of up-to-date ideological discourses and antagonisms–many of them descended from Paine et al.–to refurbish Blake’s particular brand of radical antinomianism and to celebrate much the same optimistic spirit that Blake invested in America and Visions. Indeed, Smith’s novel anticipates and critiques ab ovo the sweepingenthusiasms that are animating current uprisings worldwide. (shrink)

A pós-modernidade sublinha o papel produtivo da diferença, em oposição à predilecção "moderna" ou do Iluminismo pela universalidade, comunalidade, consenso, bem como por aquilo que os modernos chamam "racionalidade". Segundo o autor do artigo, existem duas variedades distintas desta filosofia da diferença, dependendo de qual predecessor do século XIX – Nietzsche ou Kierkegaard – se prefere, de modo que o artigo distingue entre um pós-modernismo "dionisíaco" e outro de carácter mais "profético". A maioria das objecções que se fazem contra o (...) pós-modernismo têm em conta a versão dionisíaca do mesmo, falhando em larga medida a sua visão, ou dimensão, profética. A linha de objecções levantada contra os pós-modernistas - relativismo, subjectivismo, cepticismo, anarquismo, antinomianismo, anti-institucionalismo, niilismo e desespero - deriva fundamentalmente da versão do pós-modernismo de inspiração nietzschiana. Segundo o autor, se todas ou a maioria destas objecções fossem válidas, o pós-modernismo deveria ser denunciado como inimigo de Deus e da religião. Assim, muito embora estas queixas possam ser pertinentes no que se refere à versão dionisíaca do pós-modernismo, no que se refere à sua versão profética, elas são falsas e ignoram a sua proveniência religiosa e até bíblica. /// Postmodernism emphasizes the productive role of difference, as opposed to the "modern" or Enlightenment predilection for universality, commonality, consensus, and what modernists call "rationality" There are two different varieties of this philosophy of difference, depending on which of its two nineteenth century predecessors – Nietzsche or Kierkegaard – one favors, which I call "Dionysian" and "prophetic" postmodernism. Most of the objections that are made against postmodernism have in mind the Dionysian version, but they fall wide of the mark of the prophetic version. The line of objections raised against postmodernists – relativism, subjectivism, scepticism, anarchism, antinomianism, anti-institutionalism, nihilism, and despair – takes its lead from the Nietzscheanized version of postmodernism. Clearly, were all or most of these objections valid it would be as rightly denounced as inimical to God and religion. These complaints may hold of its Dionysian version; they are, as regards the second or prophetic version, false and ignore its religious and even biblical provenance. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Confessions of an American PsychoJames Hogg’s and Bret Easton Ellis’s Anti-Heroes’ Journey from Vulnerability to ViolenceDaniel Cojocaru (bio)My vitals have all been torn, and every faculty and feeling of my soul racked, and tormented into callous insensibility.... I could perceive no bottom, and then—not till then, did I repeat the tremendous prayer!—I was instantly at liberty; and what I now am, the Almighty knows! Amen.—James Hogg, The Private Memoirs (...) and Confessions of a Justified Sinner1My conscience, my pity, my hopes disappeared a long time ago (probably at Harvard) if they ever did exist.... My pain is constant and sharp.... But even after admitting this... and coming face-to-face with these truths, there is no catharsis. I gain no deeper knowledge about myself.... This confession has meant nothing.—Bret Easton Ellis, American Psycho2A hundred and sixty-seven years lie between the publication of James Hogg’s The Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner (1824) (henceforth referred to as Confessions) and Bret Easton Ellis’s American Psycho (1991). Yet one cannot but be amazed at the striking similarities of the main [End Page 185] protagonists’s insights at the end of these two novels. Although connections between works of Gothic Romanticism and postmodern narratives have been duly noted, the possible reasons for the analogies remain largely unexplored.3It will be argued here that both novels are representations of worlds immersed in what René Girard, in Deceit, Desire, and the Novel (henceforth referred to as Deceit), has termed “deviated transcendency,” resulting in similar stages of narrative progression, which in turn can be analyzed in terms of Girard’s mimetic cycle of violence.At a first glance, the two pieces seem to be concerned with themes that to a secularized age must appear most disparate. But as Girard has noted: “The very idea of mediation encourages literary comparisons at a level which is no longer that of genre criticism or thematic criticism.... It may illuminate the works through each other.”4 Hogg’s narrative deals with the problem of antinomianism and the resulting spiritual pride. The anti-hero of the narrative, Robert Wringhim, relies on his belief that he is one of the elect and cannot fall from grace and consequently is convinced by his elusive friend Gil-Martin to become a murderer without having to fear punishment. American Psycho on the other hand is concerned with the consequences of the crass materialism of the U.S. yuppie generation, culminating at the end of the 1980s, as experienced by the serial-killing first-person narrator Patrick Bateman. However, one could argue that in its very first pages, American Psycho presents the reader with a secularized version of antinomianism. Michael Steig has fleetingly noted that the egocentric doctrines of antinomianism psychologically resemble the “I’m alright tenets” of yuppie pseudo-psychology.5 Timothy Price, one of Bateman’s colleagues on Wall Street, expresses this in the following words: “In essence what I’m saying is that society cannot afford to lose me. I’m an asset.”6 Translated into antinomian terms, one could say that he is one of the elect, one of the privileged enjoying a capitalist heaven on earth; and by saying that society cannot afford to lose him, he, like Robert Wringhim, is showing that he believes he cannot fall from grace—or at least he tries to believe it.“I was well aware that the devilish powers of his mother would finally prevail; and either the dread of this, or the inward consciousness of having wronged him, certainly unnerved my arm.”7 If, in this reference to a quarrel with a fellow pupil at school, Robert gives away the fact that he doubts his own words, through the rhetorical device of correctio, so does Timothy Price by his choice of words. In fact, it is exactly because he is an asset that society can afford to lose him. As he is literally transformed into a commodity, society can discard him and in the novel indeed does so. It is one of the many ironies of the narrative that Price disappears soon after the above... (shrink)

The article explores the interface between literature and ideas by highlighting a core »literary« idea, the notion of the text itself. All »text-immanent« interpretation reposes, after all, on the work of editors. Recent debates in textual editing are reviewed to demonstrate how difficult – or for some, how undesirable – it is to fix the identity of the text. Both orthodox and antinomian positions on textual identity are themselves fueled by »ideas.«.

The author contextualizes the Problem of Evil in Open Theism system, listing its main theses, primarily the logic-of- love-defense (and free-will-defense) connected to Trinitarian speculation. After evaluating the discussion in Analytic Philosophy of Religion, the focus is on the personal mystery of evil, claiming that, because of mystery and vagueness, the Problem of Evil is undecidable. Recalling other schools of thought (Pareyson: ontology of freedom; Moltmann: Dialectical theology; Kenotic theology; Original Sin hermeneutics), the author tries to grasp their common insights. (...) One of them is the evident explanatory failure of theodicies, expressed in the antinomian statements ‘God is not innocent’. The author follows these insights, developing the concept of Eternal Immolation (Bulgakov), arguing that, without a proper understanding of its mystery (what is, and what is not), theistic theodicy could remain compromised. ‘Eternal Immolation’ is considered consequent – or already present – in recent speculations, it stands or falls when we accept that these reveal some unresolved points in Christian doctrine. Hence, ‘Eternal Immolation’ becomes a coordinating-concept, able to bring together their assumptions: several kinds of kenosis, the ontology of freedom with a logic-of-love defense, strongly linked to a libertarian human freedom, and the acknowledgement of the unresolved mystery of evil. (shrink)

This paper interrogates some prominent post-Marxist engagements with St Paul’s messianism by reading them in the theological context of the anti-historicist revival of Pauline eschatology in the twentieth century. In both readings, the means through which the critique of historicism is delivered is the revival of the eschatological core of Paul’s proclamation. Paul is read as inaugurating a “new world” of freedom, love and redemptive hope as opposed to the “old world” of oppression, sorrow, death and despair. And yet, it (...) is exactly in such an apocalyptic reading of Pauline eschatology that both philosophical and theological critiques of historicism, despite protestations to the contrary, remain prisoners to the aporias of a historicist temporality. The symptom of the philosophers’ residual parasitism on historicism is expressed as antinomian negativism, while in the case of the theologians it can take the form of a self-assured Church triumphalism. (shrink)

This chapter explores the interrelations between Theodor W. Adorno and Gershom Scholem's thought. It argues that despite the overt differences between Adorno's materialist social philosophy and Scholem's scholarship of Jewish mysticism, both intellectuals were motivated by similar concerns and interests. Following a brief historical contextualization of the intellectual exchange between Adorno and Scholem, the chapter focuses on three main thematic intersections between their thought and writings: The concept of myth and the dialectical entanglement of myth and reason; the heretical element (...) in its relation to natural and social life, and to the critique of normativity; and the theological dimension in their work, and the role of negativity, metaphysics, and materialism within it. (shrink)

This book challenges received notions of ontology in political theory and international relations by offering a psychoanalytically informed critique of depoliticisation in prominent liberal, post-liberal, dialogic and agonistic approaches to pluralism in world politics. Paipais locates the temptation of depoliticisation in their labouring under the fundamental fantasy of various guises of foundationalism (in the form of either political anthropology or ontology as ‘in the last instance’ ground) or, conversely, anti-foundationalism (the denial of all grounds, yet still operating within a foundationalist (...) imaginary). He argues, instead, for a formal political ontology of the void (against historicism) shot through an ‘incarnate’ messianic nihilism (against ethicism and teleological forms of politics). In so doing, the author offers critical readings of the messianic nihilism of Benjamin, Agamben, Taubes and Žižek by problematising the antinomian tendencies in their respective political theologies. The book argues for a version of Žižek’s Badiouian politics of militancy supplemented by a proper participatory understanding of St Paul’s messianic meontology and incarnational Christology as a means to reconceptualise the nexus between subjectivity, universality and political action in world politics. It will be of interest to students and scholars of International Relations theory, political theory, critical social theory and political theology. (shrink)

According to the fox koan, the second case in the Wu-men kuan koan collection, Zen master Pai-chang encounters a fox who claims to be a former abbot punished through endless reincarnations for denying the efficacy of karmic causality. In the end he is liberated by Pai-chang's turning word, which asserts the inexorability of cause-and-effect. Most traditional interpretations of the koan focus on the philosophical issue of causality in relation to earlier Buddhist doctrines, such as dependent origination and emptiness. Dogen, the (...) founder of the Japanese Soto school, devoted two fascicles of the Shobogenzo exclusively to the fox koan. One fascicle supports a paradoxical view of causality and non-causality, the two being "two sides of the same coin"; the second strongly attacks this interpretation and defends a literal reading that asserts causality and denies non-causality. Dogen's apparent change of heart on this topic has inspired scholars of the recent Critical Buddhist methodology to evaluate the merits and weaknesses in Zen's attitude toward ethical issues and social affairs. Shifting Shape, Shaping Text examines the fox koan in relation to philosophical and institutional issues facing the Ch'an/Zen tradition in both Sung China and medieval and contemporary Japan. Steven Heine integrates his own philological analysis of the koan, textual analysis of koan collections and related literary genres in T'ang and Sung China, folklore studies, recent discourse theory, Dogen studies, and research on monastic codes and institutional history to craft an original and compelling work. More specifically, he illuminates a fascinating dimension of the entire Ch'an/Zen tradition as he carefully lays out the philosophical issues in the koan concerning causality/karma and enlightenment, the ethical issues contained therein, the bearing that certain interpretations of causality had on the creation of monastic codes and institutional security in China, the relation between Zen and folk religion as revealed by the koan, and the issue of possible antinomianism in Zen, especially as grappled with by later thinkers such as Dogen and contemporary representatives of Critical Buddhism. Finally he applies theories of "high" and "low" religion and contemporary discourse and in the process rethinks the theories and their applicability across cultures. Far-reaching yet rigorous, Shifting Shape, Shaping Text will not only attract the interest of Ch'an/Zen specialists, but also those studying folklore, popular religion, and issues concerning the nature of discourse and the relation between "high" and "low" religions. (shrink)

By naturalized epistemology, I mean those views expressed by Nozick and Margolis among others who favor an evolutionary account of human rationality as an adaptive mechanism which is unlikely to provide the means for its own legitimation and therefore unlikely to produce a single set of rules or norms which are certifiably rational. Analyzing the likely relativism that stems from such a view, namely that there could be divergent standards of rationality under different historical or environmental conditions, I conclude that (...) evolutionary epistemologies are unable to account for rationality as an experienced capacity on the part of human beings. After giving a few examples of what seem to me to be cases where we do experience a form of reason that appears antinomian, I challenge a naturalized view of mind to embrace and provide some sort of explanatory account of this kind of mental elasticity that it both seems to make room for and is certainly not unfamiliar to other philosophical perspectives such as that of Zen Buddhism. (shrink)

Habermas explained the attraction of German Idealism to twentieth century Jewish philosophers by appealing to the impact of kabbalah on the German Idealists. Schelling was his principal example. In this article, I trace two lines of Jewish reception of Schelling in the nineteenth century. Among German-Jewish thinkers, Schelling was attractive because of his philosophy of mythology, not because of his relation to kabbalah. Among Galician-Jewish thinkers, Schelling was attractive because of what they took to be his non-mythological version of kabbalah. (...) In both cases, Schelling offered a middle road between, on the one hand, traditionalist rejection of modernity and non-Jewish philosophy and, on the other, varieties of antinomianism. (shrink)

In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:Dharma Bums: The Beat Generation and the Making of Countercultural PilgrimageP. J. JohnstonI believe in the sweetness of Jesus And Buddha— I believe, In St. Francis, Avaloki Tesvara, the Saints Of First Century India A D And Scholars Santidevan And Otherwise Santayanan Everywhere.(Kerouac 1959: 15)Preliminary Polemics“PILGRIM, n. A traveler that is taken seriously.”—Ambrose Bierce, The Devil’s Dictionary 2007: 133As Beat commentator Stephen Prothero describes in his article “On the (...) Holy Road: The Beat Movement as Spiritual Protest” (1991), the Beats and their pilgrimages have most emphatically not been taken seriously. Both critics and scholars have been unkind to members of the Beat generation, and this unkindness has manifested itself in relative neglect of the Beats in all possible aspects of scholarly investigation. But nowhere does this appear more pronounced than in the area of Beat religion. Though some recent scholarship has been picking up from this earlier neglect and it is now [End Page 165] possible to find serious biographies of most of the major Beat writers and some belated attention to the movement as a literary phenomenon, the only book-length treatment of Beat Buddhism I was able to locate (Tonkinson 1995) hardly qualifies as a scholarly work and was published not by an academic press but as a special feature of the Buddhist magazine Tricycle. Prothero hypothesizes that this is because of the movement’s reputation as rebellious and antinomian—in its heyday the movement was characterized in identical unsavory terms by publications representing interests as diverse as Life and Playboy, with the latter describing the Beats as “nihilists” and the former claiming that the Beats were at war with “Mom, Dad, Politics, Marriage, the Savings Bank, Organized Religion, Literary Elegance, Law, the Ivy League Suit and Higher Education, to say nothing of the Automatic Dishwasher, the Cellophane-wrapped Soda Cracker, the Split-Level House and the clean, or peace-provoking H-bomb” (Prothero 1991: 206). Norman Podhoretz of Partisan Review went further still, claiming that the Beats were “hostile to civilization” and that the movement as a whole amounted to “a revolt of the spiritually underprivileged and crippled of soul” and “an affirmation of death” (ibid., 206). One couldn’t ask for a more passionate disavowal of the Beats or a more thorough polemic that the movement was profoundly antireligious.This could not contrast more with the Beats’ representation of their movement and its aims, with Jack Kerouac going so far as to reinterpret the crucial term “Beat” (a term for someone down and out originally borrowed from criminal street jive) as a noun derived from the adjective “beatific,” a specifically religious term familiar from such phrases as “the beatific vision” (ibid., 206–207). Several of the representative Beat writers were practicing Buddhists, influencing the entire movement to such an extent that Buddhist ideas and imagery suffused Beat literature as a whole. Ginsberg and Kerouac especially emphasized the positive and constructive elements of their spiritual vision, arguing that literature such as On the Road and Howl should be understood as religious affirmations of what is good and holy rather than as purely critical undertakings: “For the crucifix I speak out, for the Star of Israel I speak out, for the divinest man who ever lived who was German (Bach) I speak out, for sweet Mohammed I speak out, for Buddha I speak out, for Lao-tse and Chuang-tse I speak out” (ibid., 206–207). Or, as Allen Ginsberg put it less lyrically (and rather more bluntly): “Howl is an ‘Affirmation’ by individual experience of God, sex, drugs, and absurdity... the poems are religious and I meant them to be” (ibid., 207).But for the most part, Beat asseverations in no way diminished scholarly wariness about the Beat movement and its spirituality—as Prothero concludes, “the tendency among literary scholars is to see these [religious] concerns as tangential rather than constitutive” while “historians of American religion who have explored beat spirituality have tended to focus almost exclusively on the beats’ engagement with Zen and then to dismiss that engagement as haphazard” (ibid., 207).It is my contention that the mainstream scholarly neglect of Beat spirituality is in some part... (shrink)

Chan Buddhism as we know it today can perhaps be traceable to what is known as the Hongzhou school, founded by Mazu Daoyi. Although it was Huineng who represented an important turn in the development of Chan with his iconoclastic approach to enlightenment as sudden rather than gradual, it was in Huineng’s successor, Mazu, where we saw its complete radicalization. Specifically, Mazu introduced a radicalized approach of collapsing substance and function, as well as principle and phenomena, into a complete overlap. (...) As a result of this radicalization, the Hongzhou lineage received some strong criticisms, the most important of which was possibly by Guifeng Zongmi, of the Heze lineage. Zongmi criticized Mazu for his supposed antinomianism, claiming that Mazu’s approach completely stunts moral and religious cultivation. Due to their commitment to “suchness” rather than deliberate theory, however, Hongzhou never bothered to answer Zongmi’s critique. As such, it is the goal of this article to utilize Guo Xiang’s philosophy as a tool to understand the implicit Hongzhou response to Zongmi. As I shall demonstrate, his philosophical enterprise shares the same ontology of absolute oblivion which Hongzhou was also predicated upon and is, therefore, a possible alternative to understanding what could have been the Hongzhou response to the alleged antinomianism. (shrink)

According to the fox koan, the second case in the Wu-men kuan koan collection, Zen master Pai-chang encounters a fox who claims to be a former abbot punished through endless reincarnations for denying the efficacy of karmic causality. In the end he is liberated by Pai-chang's turning word, which asserts the inexorability of cause-and-effect. Most traditional interpretations of the koan focus on the philosophical issue of causality in relation to earlier Buddhist doctrines, such as dependent origination and emptiness. Dogen, the (...) founder of the Japanese Soto school, devoted two fascicles of the Shobogenzo exclusively to the fox koan. One fascicle supports a paradoxical view of causality and non-causality, the two being "two sides of the same coin"; the second strongly attacks this interpretation and defends a literal reading that asserts causality and denies non-causality. Dogen's apparent change of heart on this topic has inspired scholars of the recent Critical Buddhist methodology to evaluate the merits and weaknesses in Zen's attitude toward ethical issues and social affairs. Shifting Shape, Shaping Text examines the fox koan in relation to philosophical and institutional issues facing the Ch'an/Zen tradition in both Sung China and medieval and contemporary Japan. Steven Heine integrates his own philological analysis of the koan, textual analysis of koan collections and related literary genres in T'ang and Sung China, folklore studies, recent discourse theory, Dogen studies, and research on monastic codes and institutional history to craft an original and compelling work. More specifically, he illuminates a fascinating dimension of the entire Ch'an/Zen tradition as he carefully lays out the philosophical issues in the koan concerning causality/karma and enlightenment, the ethical issues contained therein, the bearing that certain interpretations of causality had on the creation of monastic codes and institutional security in China, the relation between Zen and folk religion as revealed by the koan, and the issue of possible antinomianism in Zen, especially as grappled with by later thinkers such as Dogen and contemporary representatives of Critical Buddhism. Finally he applies theories of "high" and "low" religion and contemporary discourse and in the process rethinks the theories and their applicability across cultures. Far-reaching yet rigorous, Shifting Shape, Shaping Text will not only attract the interest of Ch'an/Zen specialists, but also those studying folklore, popular religion, and issues concerning the nature of discourse and the relation between "high" and "low" religions. (shrink)

This essay returns to Jacob Taubes’s messianism in order to short-circuit a contemporary political and conceptual impasse between left- and right-wing Schmittianisms. It first seeks to expose the limits of both Schmitt’s originary political theology and post-war Italian Marxist rehabilitations of Schmitt, which, it is argued, remain caught in the same political-ontological matrix. To answer the question of what (if anything) might come after political theology, the essay turns to Jacob Taubes’s “counter-political theology” in order to find an alternative genealogy (...) for modern democracy, not in Schmitt’s Christian conservative hierarchy, but in the antinomian and heretical elements within the Judaeo-Christian tradition. In conclusion, the essay argues that Taubes transforms the political theological impasse and makes possible a new reading of the contemporary political false choice we face between democracy and authoritarianism, liberal pluralism and populism. (shrink)

In this article, I propose a new theory of “Buddhist para-charisma” by analyzing the case of an iconoclastic monk in Vietnam. My argument draws from 20 months of ethnographic research conducted in Ho Chi Minh City between 2015 and 2019. During fieldwork, I was introduced to a highly respected monk with the extraordinary capacity to read minds and perceive karmic obstacles in the lives of his lay and monastic followers. This monk was unique for openly consuming meat and alcohol, wearing (...) lay clothing, and using insults while preaching. These behaviors had the deliberate effect of creating an uncomfortable, tense environment among his visitors. Later, the nun who introduced us explained that his harsh language and adversarial demeanor were a rare form of compassion that urged immediate awakening to Buddhist teachings. I compare this case with previously developed theories of Buddhist charisma and moral aesthetics. While past studies analyze Buddhist charisma through the moral aesthetics of physical beauty or affective responses of tranquility, gratitude, and awe, the theory of para-charisma shows how some monks can deliberately use repulsive behavior and negative affects to attract followers and advance spiritual goals. (shrink)