Nothing Absolute
German Idealism and the Question of Political Theology
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Featuring scholars at the forefront of contemporary political theology and the study of German Idealism, Nothing Absolute explores the intersection of these two flourishing fields. Against traditional approaches that view German Idealism as a secularizing movement, this volume revisits it as the first fundamentally philosophical articulation of the political-theological problematic in the aftermath of the Enlightenment and the advent of secularity.
Nothing Absolute reclaims German Idealism as a political-theological trajectory. Across the volume’s contributions, German thought from Kant to Marx emerges as crucial for the genealogy of political theology and for the ongoing reassessment of modernity and the secular. By investigating anew such concepts as immanence, utopia, sovereignty, theodicy, the Earth, and the world, as well as the concept of political theology itself, this volume not only rethinks German Idealism and its aftermath from a political-theological perspective but also demonstrates what can be done with (or against) German Idealism using the conceptual resources of political theology today.
Contributors: Joseph Albernaz, Daniel Colucciello Barber, Agata Bielik-Robson, Kirill Chepurin, S. D. Chrostowska, Saitya Brata Das, Alex Dubilet, Vincent Lloyd, Thomas Lynch, James Martel, Steven Shakespeare, Oxana Timofeeva, Daniel Whistler
Did German Idealism introduce the death of God and disclose the space-time of radical immanence, or is it rather the pivotal moment for the development of political theology in late modernity? This exciting collection of essays offers new insights into this perplexing question for both philosophy and theology.---Miguel Vatter, Flinders University
This volume, full of precise, incisive, and deeply researched scholarship, situates the problematic of political theology within a series of questions that emerge within German Idealist philosophy, from Kant to Marx. This is an original and necessary contribution to the growing field of political theology. As evinced in this volume, German Idealism and its intellectual heirs in critical theory, Marxism, and cultural theory are an important, perhaps even necessary place to ground the contemporary critiques of the global capitalist order of racial, gendered, and biopolitical oppression.---Joshua Ramey, Haverford College
Nothing Absolute offers a clear, critical, dynamic, and living alternative to thinking about theology and politics outside of its problematic, historical forms of modern self-legitimization.---Reading Religion
Alex Dubilet is Assistant Professor of English at Vanderbilt University.
Kirill Chepurin (Edited By)
Kirill Chepurin is Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at HSE University, Moscow.
Introduction: Immanence, Genealogy, Delegitimation | 1
Kirill Chepurin and Alex Dubilet
1 Knot of the World: German Idealism between Annihilation and Construction | 35
Kirill Chepurin
2 Utopia and Political Theology in the “Oldest Systematic Program of German Idealism” | 54
S. D. Chrostowska
3 Relational Division | 73
Daniel Colucciello Barber
4 Otherwise Than Terror: Ten Theses on the Modernist Secular | 87
Daniel Whistler
5 Kant’s Unexpected Materialism: How the Object Saves Kant (and Us) from the Moral Law | 104
James Martel
6 Earth Unbounded: Division and Inseparability in Hölderlin and Günderrode | 124
Joseph Albernaz
7 Kant with Sade with Hegel: The Death of God and the Joy of Reason | 144
Oxana Timofeeva
8 A Political Theology of Tolerance: Universalism and the Tragic Position of the Religious Minority | 160
Thomas Lynch
9 Hegel, Blackness, Sovereignty | 174
Vincent Lloyd
10 Political Theology of the Death of God: Hegel and Derrida | 188
Agata Bielik-Robson
11 Exception without Sovereignty: The Kenotic Eschatology of Schelling | 207
Saitya Brata Das
12 Once More, from Below: The Concept of Reduplication and the Immanence of Political Theology | 223
Steven Shakespeare
13 On the General Secular Contradiction: Secularization, Christianity, and Political Theology | 240
Alex Dubilet
List of Contributors | 257
Index | 261
