Konturen: Vol 1 (2008)
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Political Theology: the Border in Question
Konturen opens with a series of essays on the law of the limit between politics and religion. The question of this law today is of a piece with the broader contemporary problem of the border, threshold, or determining framework, because the modern, Enlightenment privatization of religion repeats and reverses itself as the politicization of privatized religion, and as a consequence the modern subject finds itself in the paradoxical situation of a radical limitation (or finitude) doubled by an equally radical limitlessness (or infinite capacity).
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Item Open Access Introduction: Political Theology and the Question of the Border(University of Oregon, 2008) Librett, Jeffrey S.Item Open Access The Gap in the Law and the Border-Breaching Function of the Exception(University of Oregon, 2008) McNulty, TraceyThis paper evaluates the status and function of the border in the two polemics that bookend the long history of political theology: Paul’s polemic against the Jewish law, and Carl Schmitt’s critique of constitutional liberalism. Paul and Schmitt both challenge spatial notions of law that establish a boundary between an “inside” and an “outside” by topologizing “inside” and “outside” as continuous: through the “fulfillment of the law” in Paul, and through the strategy of sovereign exception in Schmitt. Schmitt even describes sovereignty as a “border concept,” a Grenzbegriff: a concept that pertains to borderline cases, but perhaps at the same time a concept of the border, one that proposes a particular interpretation of the border and its logical function. The essay argues that Schmitt’s contribution to the logical problem of law as border is to claim that the border need not be written, and that the sovereign exception is not of the order of a writing, but a “miracle” that is by nature unwritten and unwritable. The Hebraic tradition of law that is the object of Paul’s polemic offers another way of considering the border, as the function of the written law. It conceives of law not as a normative representation of an existing situation, but as the delimination of a space or gap that may not be transgressed. While the fulfillment of the law and the sovereign exception bypass the limit implied in the law, offering a topological interpretation of the border as what integrates “inside” and “outside” into a new whole, the Hebraic law aligns the border with the logical function of negation. The essay approaches these different accounts of the border by way of Lacan’s distinction between the imaginary and symbolic dimensions of law. The imaginary is the “incarnated” dimension of law, while the symbolic corresponds to the function of speech as a barrier or limit, and involves a spacing and negation, the introduction of a gap or emptiness that precludes anything like a “whole.”Item Open Access Political Theology Revisited: Carl Schmitt's Postwar Reassessment(University of Oregon, 2008) Hohendahl, Peter U.The essay examines the pronounced theological turn of the late Carl Schmitt, especially in his Politische Theologie II (1970). He aim is to understand what Schmitt meant by a “Catholic intensification” in the relationship between theology and political theory. The essay gives equal attention to Schmitt’s polemic against the theologian Peterson, who denied the possibility of political theology, and the dialogue with the philosopher Hans Blumenberg, who had severely criticized Schmitt’s conception of secularization. The essay shows that in both instances the opposition merely encouraged Schmitt to sharpen and clarify his own theological position, which includes heretical Gnostic elements.Item Open Access Schmitt, Locke, and the Limits of Liberalism(University of Oregon, 2008) Feldman, Leonard C.This article brings Carl Schmitt's Political Theology into conversation with John Locke's Second Treatise of Government. Two fundamental issues are considered: the relationship between Locke's theory of prerogative power and Schmitt's sovereign/commissarial distinction, and the place of the theological—in particular the “miraculous” nature of the exception. While some have claimed that Locke's theory of prerogative fits the model of “commissarial dictatorship” I argue that Locke actually complicates the sovereign/commissarial distinction by maintaining the tensions between prerogative, law and popular judgment. Schmitt, on the other hand, dissolves the tension by absorbing popular sovereignty into sovereign exceptionalism. Concerning the miraculous nature of the exception, I argue that Schmitt's claim should be understood as part of a broader effort to render politics serious and so I situate his remarks in light of the complex relationship between the political and the moral in his Concept of the Political. Because Locke's politics is “already” serious in the sense of being firmly situated within natural law, exceptional circumstances do not perform the same redemptive function.Item Open Access Princes of Peace and War and their Most Humble, Most Obedient Court Composer(2008) Yearsley, DavidJ. S. Bach took many of his own vocal works conceived as tributes to earthly sovereigns and transformed them into glorifications of the heavenly King. Yet in contrast to the implications of some aspects of Luther's theology, these transformations leave undisturbed an underlying commitment to temporal authority and social obedience. Indeed, many of Bach's sacred works not only rely on rhetorical and musical topics associated with court life and the culture of war, but exploit these images in order to dramatize their message more immediately in the imaginations of contemporary churchgoing listeners.Item Open Access Eruptions of the Ethical Baroque(2008) Shankman, StevenRenaissance perspective constructs objective reality from the viewpoint of a sovereign subject. The border protecting the sovereignty of this subject is sometimes crossed, in the Baroque, by means of the subject's sudden awareness of the humanity of the other person and of our inescapable responsibility for that unique and irreplaceable other. With examples from music, painting, and literature, I discuss what I call "eruptions of the ethical Baroque." These eruptions trouble the serenity of the arts and haunt us: one such eruption reveals, to the Christian warrior-crusader Tancredi, the face of the apparently Muslim female warrior Clorinda, in Monteverdi's "Combattimento di Tancredi e Clorinda"(1624); another reveals, to Abraham—in Rembrandt's 1635 painting of "The Sacrifice of Isaac"— the face of his son Isaac and then suddenly interrupts what appeared to have been an imminent murder; another forces us to encounter, in Shakespeare's disruptively sober prose, Shylock's Jewish eyes; yet another, in Paul Celan's arguably modern Baroque poem "Tenebrae", interrupts—but too late, tragically—the profoundly enchanting pathos of François Couperin's high Baroque choral masterpiece, "Leçons de ténèbres", which inspired Celan's poem.Item Open Access Beyond Secularism: Orhan Pamuk's Snow, and the Contestation of 'Turkish Identity' in the Borderland(2008) Gokberk, UlkerThis paper explores the multifaceted discourse on Islam in present-day Turkish society, as reflected upon in Orhan Pamuk’s 2002 novel Snow. The revival of Islam in Turkish politics and its manifestation as a lifestyle that increasingly permeates urban environments, thus challenging the secular establishment, has occasioned a crisis of ‘Turkish identity’. At the core of this vehemently contested issue stands women’s veiling, represented by its more moderate version of the headscarf. The headscarf has not only become a cultural marker of the new Islamist trend, it has also altered the meanings previously attached to socio-cultural signifiers. Thus, the old binaries of ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity,’ ‘backwardness’ and ‘progress,’ applied to Islamic versus Western modes of living and employed primarily by the secularist elites and by theorists of modernization, prove insufficient to explain the novel phenomenon of Islamist identity politics. New directions in social and cultural theory on Turkey have launched a critique of modernization theory and its vocabulary based on binary oppositions. I argue that Pamuk participates, albeit from the angle of poetic imagination, in such a critique. In Snow the author explores the complexities pertaining to the cultural symbolism circulating in Turkey. The ambiguity surrounding the headscarf as a new cultural marker constitutes a major theme in the novel. I demonstrate that Snow employs multiple perspectives pertaining to the meaning of cultural symbols, thus complicating any easy assessment of the rise of Islam in Turkey. By withholding from the reader a clear guide to unequivocal judgment of right and wrong, the author transcends the parameters of Turkish modernist ideology. Pamuk situates his story in Kars, a border city in North-Eastern Turkey. This location at the geographical and cultural margins of Turkey emerges in the novel as a complex site of contested ideological, political, and metaphysical positions pertaining to the question of Turkish identity. It represents a space where Islamic faith in its esoteric and exoteric forms is carried out over against state-imposed laicism. I argue that it is the other-worldliness of the locale that instigates such a reflection. The protagonist Ka, a Turkish poet who has briefly returned to his hometown, Istanbul, after twelve years of exile in Germany, embarks on a journey to Kars. A member of the secular Istanbul bourgeoisie, Ka seems to be afflicted by an ailment common to his social stratum, a vacuum of spiritual values. Even though Ka travels to Kars with a journalistic mission, he soon becomes entrapped in this alien world of Sheiks, head-scarved girls, and former communists turned political Islamists. The novel oscillates between the Ka’s perspective as a detached observer and his personal quest to find transcendence. By employing multiple perspectives, Pamuk complicates any easy assessment of the rise of Islam in today’s Turkish society. I complement this reading of Snow with a brief excursus to Pamuk’s recent memoir, Istanbul: Memories and the City, permeated by the author’s critique of the modernist ideology of the Republican era. This critique sheds light on Pamuk’s opaque discourse on faith in Snow. These two books by the Nobel-prize winner have been his most disputed ones among the Turkish secular intelligentsia. I conclude with a reference to these critical commentaries.Item Open Access Religious Turns: Immigration, Islam, and Christianity in Twenty-First Century German Cultural Politics(2008) Breger, ClaudiaThe paper analyzes recent German headscarf legislation in the context of early twenty-first-century religious turns, that is, on the one hand constructions of “Islam/ism” as the newly dominant figure of cultural difference on the political stage, and on the other hand the renewed prominence of Christianity in public discourse. Against the background of current academic work on and in political theology, I analyze the “post-secular” concepts of collective identity developed under the sign of the headscarf by associating them with two different theoretical models. Berlin’s headscarf legislation can be compared to the French “Law on Laicity,” which has been criticized as a vehicle of hidden political theologies in Carl Schmitt’s sense: the Republic performs its sovereignty through the ways it manages religious exceptions. The openly asymmetrical headscarf bans passed in a number of other German states, however, do not just make “exceptions” for Christianity; rather, they privilege “Christian tradition” as the foundation of the “secular” German state. Critically relating this rhetoric to the ways in which Jean-Luc Nancy and Slavoj Zizek conceptualize the (presumably inescapable) destabilization of secular democracy through the forces of heteronomy and tradition, the paper pleas for replacing such uses of political theology in both politics and theory.Item Open Access Review Essay: Hannah Arendt. The Jewish Writings. Ed. Jerome Kohn and Ron H. Feldman. NY: Schocken Books, 2007. 559+lxxvi pp.(2008) Lupton, JuliaThe Jewish Writings by Hannah Arendt, reviewed by Julia Reinhard Lupton.