The Problem with Grace: Reconfiguring Political Theology - Softcover

Lloyd, Vincent W.

Softcover

ISBN 10: 0804768846 ISBN 13: 9780804768849

Verlag: Stanford University Press, 2011

Inhaltsangabe

This book develops a post-secular, post-sectarian political theology, taking that burgeoning field in a new direction. With his bold suggestion that political philosophy must begin with political theology, Vincent Lloyd investigates a series of religious concepts such as love, faith, liturgy, and revelation and explores their political relevance by extracting them from their Christian theological context while refusing to reduce them to secular terms. He assembles an unusual canon of thinkers "too Jewish to be Christian and too Christian to be Jewish"—Simone Weil, James Baldwin, Franz Kafka, and Gillian Rose—to aid him in his explorations.Unique in its serious attention to both theological writing about politics and the work of academic philosophers and theorists, The Problem with Grace deepens our understanding of political theological vocabulary as a way back to the everyday world. Politics is not about redemption, but about grappling with the ever-present difficulties, tragedies, and comedies of ordinary life.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Vincent Lloyd is Assistant Professor of Religious Studies and Faculty Associate of African American Studies at Georgia State University. He is the author of Law and Transcendence: On the Unfinished Project of Gillian Rose (2009) and editor of Race and Political Theology (Stanford, forthcoming).

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THE PROBLEM WITH GRACE

Reconfiguring Political TheologyBy Vincent W. Lloyd

STANFORD UNIVERSITY PRESS

Copyright © 2011 the Board of Trustees of the Leland Stanford Junior University
All right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-8047-6884-9

Contents

Introduction: Beyond Supersessionism...................................11. Love................................................................292. Faith...............................................................503. Hope................................................................704. Tradition...........................................................915. Liturgy.............................................................1086. Sanctity............................................................1287. Revelation..........................................................1468. Prophecy............................................................165Conclusion: Politics of the Middle.....................................187Appendix: Political Theology as a Rigorous Science.....................205Notes..................................................................221Bibliography...........................................................229Index..................................................................237

Chapter One

LOVE

LOVE OPPOSED TO LAW: THAT IS THE QUINT ESSENTIAL IMAGE OF supersessionism. Where we were once shackled by senseless rules, we are now embraced by that sensuous blend of the affective and the ethical which goes by the name of Love. In the regime of Law, we must be made to do good; in the regime of Love, we do good because we want to do good. Citizens of the City of Man live in a regime of Law; citizens of the City of God live in a regime of Love.

This is the image that grips and enchants us. Yet as soon as it is thought, rather than regurgitated, it becomes almost impossibly perplexing. It is, after all, a metaphor, and a strained one at that. What if all our life was really like love? What if all we did was like that one human practice which seems to have so much appeal, which seems to bring with it affective, ethical, and religious dimensions, to intermingle these dimensions into a fuzzy, spiritual experience? There seems to be no better tool to combat the rational, material, secular character of the modern world than a certain image of love—love as we imagine it in the modern world.

To live in a regime of love: this is a perplexing metaphor because love seems supremely personal, unique to one individual and directed at another for highly contingent, possibly mysterious reasons. To reconcile the specificity of the modern experience of love with the universalities to which the metaphor is applied—the social, the political, the religious: must this require some third, supernatural term that reconciles the universal and the particular, some third, peculiarly Christian term? Or is there a way for the universal to supersede its particular counterparts through its own power? The supersessionist imagination cannot just oppose law and love; it must derive love from law, derive the universal from the particular. Love does not offer an alternative to law, love completes law.

Perhaps it is not in this image of love, this enchanting love, but in the phenomenology of love, in the lived experience of lover and beloved, in the tension and teasing, in the fulfillment and frustration, perhaps in the sorrow and in the confrontation with another being, distinct yet demanding—perhaps this is where the political potential of love resides. This is where Gillian Rose turns in Love's Work, her philosophical memoir, at once a work of autobiography and an ethical-political polemic. The culmination of two decades of investigation of Hegel, Marx, the Frankfurt School, poststructuralism, Christian theology, and the Jewish tradition, as well as four decades of living life as sensually suffused as it was intellectually robust, Love's Work offers a (Hegelian, not Husserlian) phenomenology of love. It not only lays the groundwork for understanding love as a virtue but also exposes the supersessionist deviations that enchant love, deviations that lead to frightening political conclusions.

The question of the relationship between love and politics is posed allegorically through Rose's narration of the story of Camelot. The question is posed but not resolved. The resolution, or rather the work of resolution, is the project of Love's Work as a whole. The story Rose retells is this: In a time of endless feuding and bloodshed, King Arthur had a vision. He wanted to create a kingdom based on justice and equality. There would not be favoritism, the rule of law would be respected, and knights would sit at a Round Table to participate in the governance of the regime, each with an equal voice in the kingdom's affairs. A regime founded on justice and equality, King Arthur believed, would be an island of peace and prosperity in a sea of chaos and violence.

King Arthur recruited knights to Camelot who shared his aspirations. The French knight Launcelot, passionate and idealistic, befriended King Arthur and joined the Round Table. King Arthur, too, was idealistic. His ideal was to create a transparent law that would best suit those who lived in Camelot, would best match their customs. Launcelot's ideal, in contrast, was not to take the people as they were, but to transform them, to perfect Camelot. He was idealistic and passionate: when he slew a knight while jousting, he publicly wept.

Launcelot's passion was without restraint, and it brought about his downfall. He fell in love with King Arthur's wife, Guinevere. According to the laws of Camelot, Launcelot had to be banished and Guinevere had to die. But King Arthur deeply loved both his wife and his friend. The king faced a choice. If he followed Camelot's laws, he would stay true to his ideal of governing a kingdom based on the rule of law; however, he would lose those individuals who are dearest to him, Launcelot and Guinevere. If King Arthur made an exception to Camelot's laws, he would be able to save his wife and friend but Camelot would be tainted. The people would know that the laws are not always applied fairly, that exceptions are made for those whom the king favors.

The choice that King Arthur had to make was a choice between his two loves, between his love for the ideal of Camelot and his love for his wife and friend. It was a conflict of ideals, a conflict of loves for ideals, that gave rise to this choice. King Arthur's ideal of transparent and equitable law arising from the customs of the community was incompatible with Launcelot's ideal, the passionate drive for perfection. It is the tension between these pairs of loves which opens a phenomenology of love. Framed by passionate conflict, this is the experience of love: the working of love's apparent conflicts. What proclaims itself most loudly as love gives way to a practice of love. King Arthur and Launcelot began enchanted by the rhetoric of love; through the experience of conflict, King Arthur learned the practice of love. He became skilled in the virtue of love.

King Arthur decided to follow the law, but Launcelot managed to rescue Guinevere before she was executed. The banished Launcelot and King Arthur fight a war which King Arthur won. But Camelot was no longer a peaceful kingdom, and King Arthur had lost his wife and his friend. Rose concludes that, regardless of what choice King Arthur would have made, "the King must now be sad." This is the heart of the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: Stanford University Press
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2011
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0804768846
• ISBN 13: 9780804768849
• Einband: Taschenbuch
• Anzahl der Seiten: 256
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: Nicht verfügbar
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