By Casey Spinks · Wednesday, January 31, 2024 For Gabriel Noah Brahm’s preface to this essay, click here.
 In the first panel of TPPI’s Israel Initiative webinar series devoted to discussing the atrocities of October 7, one of the chief points of debate was whether critical theory—or any other theory—was up to the task of reckoning with Hamas’s massacre of Jews and its ensuing embrace from certain parts of academia.
Abe Silberstein cautioned that it is not helpful to emphasize the disruptive character of these attacks or the notion that something new has happened. Instead, violence like this is, unfortunately, what human beings have been doing to each other for a long time. And Silberstein, thus, seems committed to the tough work of theorizing about these events and distinguishing carefully where their academic boosters have erred in their theorizing about them.
Cary Nelson, Gabriel Noah Brahm, and Manuela Consonni, however, held that there is not much theory going on. Nelson even admitted that “no theory that I’ve been working with for the past sixty years” is up to the job of understanding or explaining this event. Consonni also cautioned that it’s not a matter of “whether or not Franz Fanon is being followed.” They agree that there is something more sinister at work than bad theory.
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By Steven Knepper · Tuesday, May 2, 2017 At the beginning of his 1961 study The Death of Tragedy, George Steiner claimed that Christian “optimism” contributed to the demise of tragic drama in modernity. The ensuing chapters of The Death of Tragedy actually offer a more nuanced account, though, in which Steiner finds tragic potential in the doctrine of original sin. In subsequent essays, Steiner has doubled down on his claim that tragedy must be bleak. Indeed, he now holds up an ideal of hopeless “absolute tragedy.” In these later writings, Steiner has also continued to show interest in original sin, even claiming in a 2004 essay that original sin is the core of tragic art.
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By Brian J. Fox · Tuesday, March 28, 2017 Carl Schmitt is frequently assumed to have primarily been a Catholic intellectual, or Christian political theologian, at least until becoming alienated from the Church in the mid-1920’s. The jurist’s book Political Theology is quite logically a main source of evidence for this standard interpretation of Schmitt’s intellectual biography. However, an assumption of Schmitt’s Catholic, or even simply Christian, bona fides serves more as a distraction in understanding the origins and contours of his early thought. This mistaken narrative hides the degree to which Schmitt’s brand of secular and proto-Hobbesian decisionism is contrary to the thought of his claimed forebears among nineteenth-century counter-revolutionary Catholic theorists.
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By John Milbank · Friday, March 24, 2017 Is there any genealogical connection between Christian oikonomia and modern political economy? Originally the turning of polity into household and interpersonal “pastoral” rule was not sinister but an advance. Likewise the Christian doctrines of Trinity and Incarnation resolved rather than sustained aporias of the reserved versus the economizing deity. However, later developments with the Franciscans, Palamites, and Jansenists effectively undid this resolution, producing a new “gnostic” duality. Economic rule was now sundered from ethics in a fallen world seen as utterly depraved. The heterodox discourse and practice of political economy resulted.
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Telos 178 (Spring 2017) is now available for purchase in our store.
 “If men were angels, no government would be necessary,” James Madison famously writes in Federalist No. 51. The defectiveness of the human will and the human intellect make government necessary, whether in John Calvin’s Sermon on the Galatians, which Madison echoes, in the locus classicus of this argument, Augustine’s City of God, or in book 9 of Plato’s Laws, which already describes humans’ innate capacity for evil as “a result of crimes long ago.” In modernity, Christian tropes like the Fall and original sin are used not only to justify political power, but also to temper utopian political goals. Reinhold Niebuhr emphasized the latter, for example, when he described the preference of the United States’ purportedly “Calvinist fathers” for relying upon checks and balances rather than the intelligence and goodwill of future American statesmen. Even the most familiar political analyses of original sin and the anthropology of Western Christianity contain this tension between justifying and limiting political power.
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