Eric Santner's Books

The Weight of All Flesh

On the Subject-Matter of Political Economy

By: Eric Santner

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The Weight of All Flesh

On the Subject-Matter of Political Economy

By: Eric Santner

Eric Santner offers a radically new interpretation of Marx's labor theory of value as one concerned with the afterlife of political theology in secular modernity. What Marx characterized as the dual character of the labor embodied in the commodity, he argues, is the doctrine of the King's Two Bodies transferred from the political theology of sovereignty to the realm of political economy. This genealogy, leading from the fetishism of the royal body to the fetishism of the commodity, also suggests a new understanding of the irrational core at the center of economic busyness today, its 24/7 pace. The frenetic negotiations of our busy-bodies continue and translate into the doxology of everyday life the liturgical labor that once sustained the sovereign's glory. Maintaining that an effective critique of capitalist political economy must engage this liturgical dimension, Santner proposes a counter-activity, which he calls "paradoxological." With commentaries by Bonnie Honig, Peter Gordon, and Hent de Vries, an introduction by Kevis Goodman, and a response from Santner, this important new book by a leading cultural theorist and scholar of German literature, cinema, and history will interest readers of political theory, literature and literary theory, and religious studies.

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313

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Oxford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0190254106

ISBN 13

9780190254100

Sovereignty, Inc.

Three Inquiries in Politics and Enjoyment

By: William Mazzarella,Eric L. Santner,Aaron Schuster

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Sovereignty, Inc.

Three Inquiries in Politics and Enjoyment

By: William Mazzarella,Eric L. Santner,Aaron Schuster

What does the name Trump stand for? If branding now rules over the production of value, as the coauthors of Sovereignty, Inc. argue, then Trump assumes the status of a master brand whose primary activity is the compulsive work of self-branding—such is the new sovereignty business in which, whether one belongs to his base or not, we are all “incorporated.” Drawing on anthropology, political theory, philosophy, psychoanalysis, and theater, William Mazzarella, Eric L. Santner, and Aaron Schuster show how politics in the age of Trump functions by mobilizing a contradictory and convoluted enjoyment, an explosive mixture of drives and fantasies that eludes existing portraits of our era. The current political moment turns out to be not so much exceptional as exceptionally revealing of the constitutive tension between enjoyment and economy that has always been a key component of the social order. Santner analyzes the collective dream-work that sustains a new sort of authoritarian charisma or mana, a mana-facturing process that keeps us riveted to an excessively carnal incorporation of sovereignty. Mazzarella examines the contemporary merger of consumer brand and political brand and the cross-contamination of politics and economics, warning against all too easy laments about the corruption of politics by marketing. Schuster, focusing on the extreme theatricality and self-satirical comedy of the present, shows how authority reasserts itself at the very moment of distrust and disillusionment in the system, profiting off its supposed decline. A dazzling diagnostic of our present, Sovereignty, Inc., forces us to come to terms with our complicity in Trump’s political presence and will immediately take its place in discussions of contemporary politics.

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257

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University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

022666841X

ISBN 13

9780226668413

The Neighbor

Three Inquiries in Political Theology, with a new Preface

By: Slavoj Žižek,Eric L. Santner,Kenneth Reinhard

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The Neighbor

Three Inquiries in Political Theology, with a new Preface

By: Slavoj Žižek,Eric L. Santner,Kenneth Reinhard

In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud made abundantly clear what he thought about the biblical injunction, first articulated in Leviticus 19:18 and then elaborated in Christian teachings, to love one's neighbor as oneself. “Let us adopt a naive attitude towards it,” he proposed, “as though we were hearing it for the first time; we shall be unable then to suppress a feeling of surprise and bewilderment.” After the horrors of World War II, the Holocaust, and Stalinism, Leviticus 19:18 seems even less conceivable—but all the more urgent now—than Freud imagined. In The Neighbor, three of the most significant intellectuals working in psychoanalysis and critical theory collaborate to show how this problem of neighbor-love opens questions that are fundamental to ethical inquiry and that suggest a new theological configuration of political theory. Their three extended essays explore today's central historical problem: the persistence of the theological in the political. In “Toward a Political Theology of the Neighbor,” Kenneth Reinhard supplements Carl Schmitt’s political theology of the enemy and friend with a political theology of the neighbor based in psychoanalysis. In “Miracles Happen,” Eric L. Santner extends the book's exploration of neighbor-love through a bracing reassessment of Benjamin and Rosenzweig. And in an impassioned plea for ethical violence, Slavoj Žižek’s “Neighbors and Other Monsters” reconsiders the idea of excess to rehabilitate a positive sense of the inhuman and challenge the influence of Levinas on contemporary ethical thought. A rich and suggestive account of the interplay between love and hate, self and other, personal and political, The Neighbor has proven to be a touchstone across the humanities and a crucial text for understanding the persistence of political theology in secular modernity. This new edition contains a new preface by the authors.

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201

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University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

022606851X

ISBN 13

9780226068510

On Creaturely Life

Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald

By: Eric L. Santer

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On Creaturely Life

Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald

By: Eric L. Santer

In his Duino Elegies, Rainer Maria Rilke suggests that animals enjoy direct access to a realm of being—the open—concealed from humans by the workings of consciousness and self-consciousness. In his own reading of Rilke, Martin Heidegger reclaims the open as the proper domain of human existence but suggests that human life remains haunted by vestiges of an animal-like relation to its surroundings. Walter Benjamin, in turn, was to show that such vestiges—what Eric Santner calls the creaturely—have a biopolitical aspect: they are linked to the processes that inscribe life in the realm of power and authority. Santner traces this theme of creaturely life from its poetic and philosophical beginnings in the first half of the twentieth century to the writings of the enigmatic German novelist W. G. Sebald. Sebald’s entire oeuvre, Santner argues, can be seen as an archive of creaturely life. For Sebald, the work on such an archive was inseparable from his understanding of what it means to engage ethically with another person’s history and pain, an engagement that transforms us from indifferent individuals into neighbors. An indispensable book for students of Sebald, On Creaturely Life is also a significant contribution to critical theory.

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243

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University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0226735052

ISBN 13

9780226735054

Judaism, Liberalism, & Political Theology

By: Jerome E. Copulsky,Dana Hollander,Eric Jacobson,Gregory Kaplan,Daniel Weidner,Daniel Brandes,Sarah Hammerschlag,Zachary Braiterman,Robert Erlewine,Oona Eisenstadt,Brian Britt,Bruce Rosenstock

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Judaism, Liberalism, & Political Theology

By: Jerome E. Copulsky,Dana Hollander,Eric Jacobson,Gregory Kaplan,Daniel Weidner,Daniel Brandes,Sarah Hammerschlag,Zachary Braiterman,Robert Erlewine,Oona Eisenstadt,Brian Britt,Bruce Rosenstock

These essays propose “a new and richly detailed engagement between Judaism and the political” (Jewish Book World). Judaism, Liberalism, and Political Theology provides the first broad encounter between modern Jewish thought and recent developments in political theology, arguing in opposition to impetuous associations of Judaism and liberalism and charges that Judaism cannot engender a universal political order. The vexed status of liberalism in Jewish thought and Judaism in political theology is interrogated with recourse to thinking from across the Continental tradition. “This collection of essays, which examines political theology from the distinct perspective of Jewish philosophy, could not be timelier or more useful for scholars and students navigating what is often viewed as very dense and difficult material.”—Claire Elise Katz, Texas A&M University

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367

Publisher

Indiana University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

025301039X

ISBN 13

9780253010391

The Royal Remains

The People's Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty

By: Eric L. Santner

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The Royal Remains

The People's Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty

By: Eric L. Santner

The king is dead. Long live the king!" In early modern Europe, the king's body was literally sovereign—and the right to rule was immediately transferrable to the next monarch in line upon the king's death. In The Royal Remains, Eric L. Santner argues that the "carnal" dimension of the structures and dynamics of sovereignty hasn't disappeared from politics. Instead, it migrated to a new location—the life of the people—where something royal continues to linger in the way we obsessively track and measure the vicissitudes of our flesh. Santner demonstrates the ways in which democratic societies have continued many of the rituals and practices associated with kingship in displaced, distorted, and usually, unrecognizable forms. He proposes that those strange mental activities Freud first lumped under the category of the unconscious—which often manifest themselves in peculiar physical ways—are really the uncanny second life of these "royal remains," now animated in the body politic of modern neurotic subjects. Pairing Freud with Kafka, Carl Schmitt with Hugo von Hofmannsthal,and Ernst Kantorowicz with Rainer Maria Rilke, Santner generates brilliant readings of multiple texts and traditions of thought en route to reconsidering the sovereign imaginary. Ultimately, The Royal Remains locates much of modernity—from biopolitical controversies to modernist literary experiments—in this transition from subjecthood to secular citizenship. This major new work will make a bold and original contribution to discussions of politics, psychoanalysis, and modern art and literature.

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286

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University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0226735346

ISBN 13

9780226735344

Sites of the Uncanny

Paul Celan, Specularity and the Visual Arts

By: Eric Kligerman

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Sites of the Uncanny

Paul Celan, Specularity and the Visual Arts

By: Eric Kligerman

Sites of the Uncanny: Paul Celan, Specularity and the Visual Arts is the first book-length study that examines Celan’s impact on visual culture. Exploring poetry’s relation to film, painting and architecture, this study tracks the transformation of Celan in postwar German culture and shows the extent to which his poetics accompany the country’s memory politics after the Holocaust. The book posits a new theoretical model of the Holocaustal uncanny – evolving out of a crossing between Celan, Freud, Heidegger and Levinas – that provides a map for entering other modes of Holocaust representations. After probing Celan’s critique of the uncanny in Heidegger, this study shifts to the translation of Celan’s uncanny poetics in Resnais’ film Night and Fog, Kiefer’s art and Libeskind’s architecture.

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345

Publisher

Walter de Gruyter

Published Date

ISBN 10

3110913933

ISBN 13

9783110913934

On Creaturely Life

Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald

By: Eric L. Santer

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On Creaturely Life

Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald

By: Eric L. Santer

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243

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University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0226735052

ISBN 13

9780226735054

Hamlet and the Rethinking of Man

By: Eric P. Levy

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Hamlet and the Rethinking of Man

By: Eric P. Levy

Isolating the conceptual apparatus dominant in the world of the play, this book traces the play's origins, including those pertaining to Christian Humanism and the Aristotelian-Thomist synthesis with its assumption of 'the sovereignty of reason'.

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262

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Associated University Presse

Published Date

ISBN 10

0838641393

ISBN 13

9780838641392

Keywords for Southern Studies

By: Thomas F. Haddox,Eric G. Anderson,Sylvia Shin-Huey Chong,Houston A. Baker

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Keywords for Southern Studies

By: Thomas F. Haddox,Eric G. Anderson,Sylvia Shin-Huey Chong,Houston A. Baker

In Keywords for Southern Studies, the editors have compiled an eclectic collection of essays which address the fluidity and ever-changing nature of southern studies by adopting a transnational, interdisciplinary focus. This book is termed 'critical' because the essays in it are pertinent to modern life beyond the world of 'southern studies.' The non-binary, non-traditional approach of Keywords unmasks and refuses the binary thinking -- First World/Third World, self/other -- that postcolonial studies has taught us is the worst rhetorical structure of empire. Keywords promotes a holistic way of thinking that starts with southern studies but extends even further"--

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423

Publisher

University of Georgia Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0820349615

ISBN 13

9780820349619

Love against Substitution

Seventeenth-Century English Literature and the Meaning of Marriage

By: Eric B. Song

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Love against Substitution

Seventeenth-Century English Literature and the Meaning of Marriage

By: Eric B. Song

Are we unique as individuals, or are we replaceable? Seventeenth-century English literature pursues these questions through depictions of marriage. The writings studied in this book elevate a love between two individuals who deem each other to be unique to the point of being irreplaceable, and this vocabulary allows writers to put affective pressure on the meaning of marriage as Pauline theology defines it. Stubbornly individual, love threatens to short-circuit marriage's function in directing intimate feelings toward a communal experience of Christ's love. The literary project of testing the meaning of marriage proved to be urgent work throughout the seventeenth century. Monarchy itself was put on trial in this century, and so was the usefulness of marriage in linking Christian belief with the legitimacy of hereditary succession. Starting at the end of the sixteenth century with Edmund Spenser, and then exploring works by William Shakespeare, William Davenant, John Milton, Lucy Hutchinson, and Aphra Behn, Eric Song offers a new account of how notions of unique personhood became embedded in a literary way of thinking and feeling about marriage.

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431

Publisher

Stanford University Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1503631419

ISBN 13

9781503631410

On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life

Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig

By: Eric L. Santner

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On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life

Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig

By: Eric L. Santner

In On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life, Eric Santner puts Sigmund Freud in dialogue with his contemporary Franz Rosenzweig in the service of reimagining ethical and political life. By exploring the theological dimensions of Freud's writings and revealing unexpected psychoanalytic implications in the religious philosophy of Rosenzweig's masterwork, The Star of Redemption, Santner makes an original argument for understanding religions of revelation in therapeutic terms, and offers a penetrating look at how this understanding suggests fruitful ways of reconceiving political community. Santner's crucial innovation in this new study is to bring the theological notion of revelation into a broadly psychoanalytic field, where it can be understood as a force that opens the self to everyday life and encourages accountability within the larger world. Revelation itself becomes redefined as an openness toward what is singular, enigmatic, even uncanny about the Other, whether neighbor or stranger, thereby linking a theory of drives and desire to a critical account of sociality. Santner illuminates what it means to be genuinely open to another human being or culture and to share and take responsibility for one's implication in the dilemmas of difference. By bringing Freud and Rosenzweig together, Santner not only clarifies in new and surprising ways the profound connections between psychoanalysis and the Judeo-Christian tradition, he makes the resources of both available to contemporary efforts to rethink concepts of community and cross-cultural communication.

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165

Publisher

University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0226734897

ISBN 13

9780226734897

Politics and the Order of Love

An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship

By: Eric Gregory

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Politics and the Order of Love

An Augustinian Ethic of Democratic Citizenship

By: Eric Gregory

Augustine—for all of his influence on Western culture and politics—was hardly a liberal. Drawing from theology, feminist theory, and political philosophy, Eric Gregory offers here a liberal ethics of citizenship, one less susceptible to anti-liberal critics because it is informed by the Augustinian tradition. The result is a book that expands Augustinian imaginations for liberalism and liberal imaginations for Augustinianism. Gregory examines a broad range of Augustine’s texts and their reception in different disciplines and identifies two classical themes which have analogues in secular political theory: love—and related notions of care, solidarity, and sympathy—and sin—as well as related notions of cruelty, evil, and narrow self-interest. From an Augustinian point of view, Gregory argues, love and sin constrain each other in ways that yield a distinctive vision of the limits and possibilities of politics. In providing a constructive argument for Christian participation in liberal democratic societies, Gregory advances efforts to revive a political theology in which love’s relation to justice is prominent. Politics and the Order of Love will provoke new conversations for those interested in Christian ethics, moral psychology, and the role of religion in a liberal society.

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434

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University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0226307514

ISBN 13

9780226307510

The Theory of Measures and Integration

By: Eric M. Vestrup

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The Theory of Measures and Integration

By: Eric M. Vestrup

An accessible, clearly organized survey of the basic topics of measure theory for students and researchers in mathematics, statistics, and physics In order to fully understand and appreciate advanced probability, analysis, and advanced mathematical statistics, a rudimentary knowledge of measure theory and like subjects must first be obtained. The Theory of Measures and Integration illuminates the fundamental ideas of the subject-fascinating in their own right-for both students and researchers, providing a useful theoretical background as well as a solid foundation for further inquiry. Eric Vestrup's patient and measured text presents the major results of classical measure and integration theory in a clear and rigorous fashion. Besides offering the mainstream fare, the author also offers detailed discussions of extensions, the structure of Borel and Lebesgue sets, set-theoretic considerations, the Riesz representation theorem, and the Hardy-Littlewood theorem, among other topics, employing a clear presentation style that is both evenly paced and user-friendly. Chapters include: * Measurable Functions * The Lp Spaces * The Radon-Nikodym Theorem * Products of Two Measure Spaces * Arbitrary Products of Measure Spaces Sections conclude with exercises that range in difficulty between easy "finger exercises"and substantial and independent points of interest. These more difficult exercises are accompanied by detailed hints and outlines. They demonstrate optional side paths in the subject as well as alternative ways of presenting the mainstream topics. In writing his proofs and notation, Vestrup targets the person who wants all of the details shown up front. Ideal for graduate students in mathematics, statistics, and physics, as well as strong undergraduates in these disciplines and practicing researchers, The Theory of Measures and Integration proves both an able primary text for a real analysis sequence with a focus on measure theory and a helpful background text for advanced courses in probability and statistics.

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Page Count

622

Publisher

John Wiley & Sons

Published Date

ISBN 10

0470317957

ISBN 13

9780470317952

Levinas, Adorno, and the Ethics of the Material Other

By: Eric S. Nelson

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Levinas, Adorno, and the Ethics of the Material Other

By: Eric S. Nelson

This book sets up a dialogue between Emmanuel Levinas and Theodor W. Adorno, using their thought to address contemporary environmental and social-political situations. Eric S. Nelson explores the "non-identity thinking" of Adorno and the "ethics of the Other" of Levinas with regard to three areas of concern: the ethical position of nature and "inhuman" material others such as environments and animals; the bonds and tensions between ethics and religion and the formation of the self through the dynamic of violence and liberation expressed in religious discourses; and the problematic uses and limitations of liberal and republican discourses of equality, liberty, tolerance, and their presupposition of the private individual self and autonomous subject. Thinking with and beyond Levinas and Adorno, this work examines the possibility of an anarchic hospitality and solidarity between material others and sensuous embodied life.

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565

Publisher

State University of New York Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

1438480253

ISBN 13

9781438480251

Nothing

Three Inquiries in Buddhism

By: Marcus Boon,Eric Cazdyn,Timothy Morton

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Nothing

Three Inquiries in Buddhism

By: Marcus Boon,Eric Cazdyn,Timothy Morton

The three extended essays in this book provide a set of much-needed inquiries into the connections between Buddhism and critical theory. Both Buddhism and critical theory struggle with the same contemporary forces, from ecological peril to psycho-social violence, and they both offer radically negative critiques of the present as well as utopian postures toward the future. Like other books in the innovative TRIOS series, this one offers readers ambitious essays produced through long-standing conversation among three challenging thinkers. The first essay, by Marcus Boon, explores the politics of sunyata or emptiness as they emerged from 1936 to 1976 in the wake moments of political crisis for both Buddhism and Marxism. Boon illuminates the role of Buddhism in the work of the French philosopher Georges Bataille, the Buddhist politics of the Tibetan writer Gendun Chopel, and the Buddhist anarchism of Gary Snyder. Eric Cazdyn s essay reveals a shared function between the Buddhist category of enlightenment, the Marxist category of revolution, and the psychoanalytic category of cure. The third essay in this trio, by Timothy Morton, explores a phenomenon he calls Buddhaphobia, a fear of Buddhism he attributes to modernity s anxieties about nothingness. Morton argues that critical theory can speak to our dark ecological future only if it attends to current forms of economic and social nihilismand challenge in which Buddhism can serve critical theory as an ally.

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290

Publisher

University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

022623326X

ISBN 13

9780226233260

The Royal Remains

The People's Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty

By: Eric L. Santner

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The Royal Remains

The People's Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty

By: Eric L. Santner

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286

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University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0226735346

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9780226735344

The Neighbor

Three Inquiries in Political Theology, with a new Preface

By: Slavoj Žižek,Eric L. Santner,Kenneth Reinhard

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The Neighbor

Three Inquiries in Political Theology, with a new Preface

By: Slavoj Žižek,Eric L. Santner,Kenneth Reinhard

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201

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University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

022606851X

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9780226068510

The Neighbor

Three Inquiries in Political Theology

By: Slavoj Žižek,Eric L. Santner,Kenneth Reinhard

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The Neighbor

Three Inquiries in Political Theology

By: Slavoj Žižek,Eric L. Santner,Kenneth Reinhard

In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud made abundantly clear what he thought about the biblical injunction, first articulated in Leviticus 19:18 and then elaborated in Christian teachings, to love one's neighbor as oneself. "Let us adopt a naive attitude towards it," he proposed, "as though we were hearing it for the first time; we shall be unable then to suppress a feeling of surprise and bewilderment." After the horrors of World War II, the Holocaust, Stalinism, and Yugoslavia, Leviticus 19:18 seems even less conceivable—but all the more urgent now—than Freud imagined. In The Neighbor, three of the most significant intellectuals working in psychoanalysis and critical theory collaborate to show how this problem of neighbor-love opens questions that are fundamental to ethical inquiry and that suggest a new theological configuration of political theory. Their three extended essays explore today's central historical problem: the persistence of the theological in the political. In "Towards a Political Theology of the Neighbor," Kenneth Reinhard supplements Carl Schmitt's political theology of the enemy and friend with a political theology of the neighbor based in psychoanalysis. In "Miracles Happen," Eric L. Santner extends the book's exploration of neighbor-love through a bracing reassessment of Benjamin and Rosenzweig. And in an impassioned plea for ethical violence, Slavoj Žižek's "Neighbors and Other Monsters" reconsiders the idea of excess to rehabilitate a positive sense of the inhuman and challenge the influence of Levinas on contemporary ethical thought. A rich and suggestive account of the interplay between love and hate, self and other, personal and political, The Neighbor will prove to be a touchstone across the humanities and a crucial text for understanding the persistence of political theology in secular modernity.

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196

Publisher

University of Chicago Press

Published Date

ISBN 10

0226707393

ISBN 13

9780226707396

My Own Private Germany

Daniel Paul Schreber's Secret History of Modernity

By: Eric L. Santner

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My Own Private Germany

Daniel Paul Schreber's Secret History of Modernity

By: Eric L. Santner

In November 1893, Daniel Paul Schreber, recently named presiding judge of the Saxon Supreme Court, was on the verge of a psychotic breakdown and entered a Leipzig psychiatric clinic. He would spend the rest of the nineteenth century in mental institutions. Once released, he published his Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903), a harrowing account of real and delusional persecution, political intrigue, and states of sexual ecstasy as God's private concubine. Freud's famous case study of Schreber elevated the Memoirs into the most important psychiatric textbook of paranoia. In light of Eric Santner's analysis, Schreber's text becomes legible as a sort of "nerve bible" of fin-de-siècle preoccupations and obsessions, an archive of the very phantasms that would, after the traumas of war, revolution, and the end of empire, coalesce into the core elements of National Socialist ideology. The crucial theoretical notion that allows Santner to pass from the "private" domain of psychotic disturbances to the "public" domain of the ideological and political genesis of Nazism is the "crisis of investiture." Schreber's breakdown was precipitated by a malfunction in the rites and procedures through which an individual is endowed with a new social status: his condition became acute just as he was named to a position of ultimate symbolic authority. The Memoirs suggest that we cross the threshold of modernity into a pervasive atmosphere of crisis and uncertainty when acts of symbolic investiture no longer usefully transform the subject's self understanding. At such a juncture, the performative force of these rites of institution may assume the shape of a demonic persecutor, some "other" who threatens our borders and our treasures. Challenging other political readings of Schreber, Santner denies that Schreber's delusional system--his own private Germany--actually prefigured the totalitarian solution to this defining structural crisis of modernity. Instead, Santner shows how this tragic figure succeeded in avoiding the totalitarian temptation by way of his own series of perverse identifications, above all with women and Jews.

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