Editors:
- First collection of articles to center around the work of Simon Critchley
- Opens up a productive rather than a reductive interaction between politics and religion, appealing to readers who want to hear something new and positive about religion and politics
- Contributions are from a Continental Philosophy perspective, attractive to readers familiar with this tradition?
- Includes supplementary material: sn.pub/extras
Part of the book series: Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures (SCPT, volume 8)
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Table of contents (11 chapters)
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Front Matter
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Back Matter
About this book
The liberal enlightenment as well as the more radical left have both traditionally opposed religion as a reactionary force in politics, a view culminating in an identification of the politics of religion as fundamentalist theocracy. But recently a number of thinkers—Agamben, Badiou, Tabues and in particular Simon Critchley—have begun to explore a more productive engagement of the religious and the political in which religion features as a possible or even necessary form of human emancipation. The papers in this collection, deriving from a workshop held on and with Simon Critchley at the University of Texas at San Antonio in February 2010, take up the ways in which religion’s encounter with politics transforms not only politics but also religion itself, molding it into various religions of politics, including not just heretical religious metaphysics, but also what Critchley describes as non-metaphysical religion, the faith of the faithless. Starting from Critchley’s own genealogy ofPauline faith, the articles in this collection explore and defend some of the religions of politics and their implications. Costica Bradatan teases out the implications of Critchley’s substitution of humor for tragedy as the vehicle for the minimal self-distancing required for any politics. Jill Stauffer compares Critchley’s non-metaphysical religiosity with Charles Taylor’s account of Christianity. Alistair Welchman unpacks the political theology of the border in terms of god’s timeless act of creation. Anne O’Byrne explores the subtle dialectic between mores and morality in Rousseau’s political ethics. Roland Champagne sees a kind non-metaphysical religion in Arendt’s category of the political pariah. Davide Panagia presents Critchley’s ethics of exposure as the basis for a non-metaphysical political bond. Philip Quadrio wonders about the political ramifications of Critchley’s own ‘mystical anarchism’ and Tina Chanter re-reads the primal site in the Western tradition at which the political and the religious intersect, the Antigone story, side-stepping philosophical interpretations of the story (dominated by Hegel’s reading) by means of a series of post-colonial re-imaginings of the play. The collection concludes with an interview with Simon Critchley taking up the themes of the workshop in the light of more recent political events: the Arab Spring and the rise and fall of the Occupy movement.
Editors and Affiliations
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Department of Philosophy and Classics, University of Texas at San Antonio, San Antonio, USA
Alistair Welchman
About the editor
Bibliographic Information
Book Title: Politics of Religion/Religions of Politics
Editors: Alistair Welchman
Series Title: Sophia Studies in Cross-cultural Philosophy of Traditions and Cultures
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-94-017-9448-0
Publisher: Springer Dordrecht
eBook Packages: Humanities, Social Sciences and Law, Philosophy and Religion (R0)
Copyright Information: Springer Science+Business Media Dordrecht 2015
Hardcover ISBN: 978-94-017-9447-3Published: 03 November 2014
Softcover ISBN: 978-94-024-0810-2Published: 10 September 2016
eBook ISBN: 978-94-017-9448-0Published: 20 October 2014
Series ISSN: 2211-1107
Series E-ISSN: 2211-1115
Edition Number: 1
Number of Pages: XIII, 191