Political Theory, Political Theology
Telos 175 presents a series of articles that examine the relationship of politics to religion, or theory to theology, intersections that have grown increasingly relevant to our contemporary political environment. Critical theory inherited the mission of philosophy to know the world and to pursue the good life, yet that aspiration encountered the limits of intelligibility, beyond which reason could not proceed. The efforts to remake the world in the spirit of reason elicited processes of rationalization, as deleterious to the world around us, the natural environment, as to the world within us, the ongoing cultural crisis of modernity and its social corollaries. With this critical framework in mind, the current issue explores the end of the secularization thesis, the ways in which religion has extensively underpinned and informed structures of modernity, the targeting of religion by the world of theory, as well as a host of related political theoretical and political theological questions.
Introduction
Russell A. Berman
Insufficient Secularization
Diego Bermejo
Badiou, Paul, and Anti-Judaism: Post-Identity and the Abuse of Ethics
Shira Wolosky
The Ontology of Power, the Failure of Modernity: Insights from a 1954 Gespräch by Carl Schmitt
David Ragazzoni
Beyond Hamlet and Hecuba: Irruption and Play in Carl Schmitt’s Thought
Andrea Mossa
The Political Totalization of Carl Schmitt: Deciding on “the Absolutely Unpolitical”
Inna Viriasova
Redefining the Friend-Enemy Distinction in the War on Terror
Marcus Schulzke
Stirner and the Critique of Political Theology
Saul Newman
Gentlemen and Revolutionaries: Politics and Pedagogy in Strauss and Rancière
Jade Schiff
Power and Representation in Governance “Politics”: An Analysis on the Basis of Claude Lefort’s Work
Femmy Thewissen
Notes and Commentary
Mourning, Solidarity, and “Transversal Grief”: How Judith Butler Misreads Paris
Russell A. Berman
Reviews
Populism or National-Populism? A Critical Approach to Cas Mudde’s Perspective on SYRIZA’s Populism
Andreas Pantazopoulos
A Jewish Critique of Levinas
Wayne Hudson
