Marika Rose

On the Sovereignty of Mothers sets out to “think the political otherwise than as paternal or patriarchal, otherwise than as fraternal”; to “think the political as it has always been: maternal.”[1] Into this project, Anidjar enlists Thomas Hobbes, the only social contract theorist to locate the origin of sovereignty not in the right of the father over the child, nor in the right of the husband over the wife (Pateman, 1989), but in the right of the mother (p. 72). In Elements of Law, Hobbes argues that the mother’s right derives not from her generation of the child but from her preservation of the child (p. 71). In De Cive, he writes that the mother who chooses to raise the child does so on the condition that, “being grown to full age he become not her enemy.” Mothers thus suspend the state of nature as a state of “universal enmity” (p. 72), occupying a double function as both “mother” and “lord.” In Leviathan, Hobbes holds that the mother’s natural dominion derives from the fact that it is she who first decides either to “nourish” or to “expose” the child (pp. 73). The maternal contract, Anidjar suggests, is that which “binds mother and child” but also “two mothers, two maternal functions, two maternal powers”: the power of preservation and the power of destruction (pp. 73), what Walter Benjamin calls founding or instituting power and divine power. It also marks a form of social life that stands between the undifferentiated multiplicity of the state of nature and the undivided unity of the commonwealth: one (the father), two (the mother), many (the state of nature). It is the sovereignty of the mother that mediates between the state of nature and the social contract. It is mothers who make and unmake the collective. It is mothers who “guard the world…preserve it and also guard us from it” (pp. 84-85). It is mothers who force the recognition that nations, unlike Hobbes’ men, are not created equal (pp. 96). [1] This piece was made possible by my Coombe Trust fellowship at the Institute for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the University of Edinburgh. I am very grateful for the time and space given to me by IASH. Conversations with Anthony Paul Smith helped me work through the ideas and arguments here.

Slavoj Žižek’s enthusiastic endorsement of the Christian legacy as the only hope for the future of radical politics has, unsurprisingly, made him popular amongst many Christians and theologians in recent years. This article explores the underlying logic of Žižek’s celebration of the Christian legacy, arguing that his dual celebration of the Christian and European legacies not only reveals the entanglement of his argument with the white supremacist logic of Christian superiority but begins to expose the ways in which Žižek’s focus on Christian Europe is inconsistent with his own fundamental ontological claims.

This article responds to David Newheiser’s contribution, ‘Foucault and the Practice of Patristics’, Rick Elgendy’s ‘Practices of the Self, Reading Across Divides: What Michel Foucault Could Have Said about Gregory of Nyssa’ and Devin Singh’s ‘Disciplining Eusebius: Discursive Power and Representation of the Court Theologian’. It discusses two key distinctions within Foucault’s work: that between genealogy and archaeology, and that between genealogy and pedigree, arguing that while patristics is always an analysis and practice of power, it has a complex relationship to the role of history as a source of authority. It discusses the way that Foucault’s work highlights the complex relationship between past and present within patristics, which uses the past to change the present yet draws on the present to rewrite the past and, suggests that the question of the relationship between power, oppression and justice points towards the limitations of Foucault’s thought as an approach to the study of patristics.

It is always dangerous to assert an essence of anything so sprawling, diverse and multiple as Christianity, which is an institution, or a tradition, or a body that has always been as much at war with itself as with any of the others against which it constitutes itself. But it is perhaps close enough to something like the truth to suggest that, somewhere near the heart of this monstrous body, this (un)holy city, is a problem that can be set out something like this: Jesus Christ died for our sins. Perhaps that sounds less like a problem than a solution; but the devil is, as always, in the details.

Maurizio Lazzarato argues that contemporary capitalism functions through two central apparatuses: Social subjection and machinic enslavement. Social subjection equips individuals with a subjectivity, assigning them identities, sexes, bodies, professions, and other markers of identity, along with a sense of their own individual agency within society. Machinic enslavement arises out of the growing reliance of capitalism on what Lazzarato calls “asignifying semiotics”—processes of production that function increasingly independently of human awareness or intention. Drawing on this analysis of the contemporary functioning of capitalism, this paper will explore the concepts of individuals and society at work in recent Anglican social theology. Focusing on two recent texts which attempt to give an overview of Anglican social thinking—Eve Poole’s The Church on Capitalism: Theology and the Market and Malcolm Brown’s Anglican Social Theology—it will suggest that, within the contemporary Church of England, mainstream attempts to reckon with political questions tend to understand the role of individual agency and ethical behaviour in ways which prop up existing social, political and economic structures rather than disrupting them.

This article explores the role of the body in Thomas Aquinas’ ethical thought, focusing on the Summa Theologiae. Drawing on Thomas’ account of human nature, teleology and ethics, it traces Thomas’ account of human embodiment through his discussion of the relationship between human and angelic nature, the beatific vision, law and virtue, and the active and contemplative lives. Against several recent accounts which have presented versions of Thomas as a thinker who is generally positive in his assessment of the human body, it argues that there is a basic tension in Thomas’ thought between the desire to locate human distinctiveness in the conjunction of body and soul and the sense that after a certain point, embodiment is precisely that which obstructs progress towards God. This tension is inextricably connected to Thomas’ understanding of human calling and discipleship and poses serious challenges to any attempts to draw on Thomas’ work as an ethical resource.

Christianity has always been characterised by disagreement, conflict, and inconsistency; so much so that it is tempting to define Christianity precisely as an ongoing disagreement about what it means to be a Christian. Theology has, for the most part, evaded this messy and embarrassing reality in favour of fantasies of wholeness, maintained by a range of strategies from sleights of hand, outright denial, or projection. Contestation cannot become a point of departure for theology so long as theologians are invested in denying its existence. To understand this desire for coherence, which grounds so much theological evasion, this paper draws on the work of Slavoj Žižek, whose materialist reading of Lacanian psychoanalysis offers resources for considering theology’s desire for unity, and suggests a number of possibilities for understanding, unsettling, and reworking our theological investments in fantasies of identity. As continental philosophy in the wake of Hegel has consistently held, however, we cannot understand self-relation and identity without also understanding the relationship between the self and the other. To consider contestation within Christianity, then, we must also pay attention to the fundamental antagonism which makes possible these internal conflicts: the distinction between Christian and non-Christian. This distinction is homologous with Carl Schmitt’s definition of the political as the dimension of human relations that concerns the distinction between friend and enemy. This paper, then, explores what it means to take seriously the centrality of the distinction between friend and enemy to the construction of Christian identity, and will consider what it would mean to undertake to love our enemies, our selves. 

It feels like the world is ending. In the midst of apocalyptic times it’s tempting to cling on tightly to what we still have. But what if our desire to save the world is part of the problem? Theology for the End of the World suggests that in responding to the deeply entwined systems of capitalism, racism and patriarchy we should stop trying to unearth a ‘good version’ of Christianity which stands opposed to these forms of violence and seek instead to reckon with the role that Christianity has played in making the world we now inhabit. How has Christianity shaped the histories of marriage and the family? How did Christianity invent race and give birth to capitalism? Grappling with the ambivalent inheritance of Christianity, a tradition passed down by enslaved people and enslavers; by violent husbands, resourceful wives and courageous sex workers; by rich people and the dispossessed, the book suggests Christians should give up on trying to redeem the world – a social order founded on violence and exploitation – and seek instead to end it.

This paper will argue that the work of Slavoj Žižek can be fruitfully understood as a response to mystical theology as it has been received in two strands of 20th century French thought—psychoanalysis and phenomenology—and that Žižek's work in turn offers intriguing possibilities for the re-figuring of mystical theology by feminist philosophy of religion. Twentieth century French psychoanalysis is dominated by the work of Jacques Lacan and by his students Julia Kristeva and Luce Irigaray. All three of these figures engage in significant ways with mystical theology—particularly with the works and figures of female mystics—as a crucial resource for theorising gender and subjectivity. A second strand of the 20th century French reception of mystical theology is the phenomenological tradition, specifically the work of Jacques Derrida. This paper will argue that, drawing on and challenging both of these elements of recent French engagement with mystical theology, Žižek's work offers a materialist ontology which seeks to locate transcendence within immanence and materiality, offering to feminist philosophy of religion the resources for re-thinking the relationship of the mystical to the material

In diesem Kapitel werden der englische Theologe John Milbank und die von ihm mitbegründete Bewegung der „Radikalen Orthodoxie“ vorgestellt. Letztere steht für ein konservatives Projekt, das sowohl die Autorität der Theologie innerhalb der akademischen Welt als auch die Autorität der Kirche innerhalb des Westens wiederherstellen möchte. Die mit ihr verbundenen Denker prägten Anfang der 2000er Jahre die theologische Auseinandersetzung mit der kontinentalen Philosophie im Allgemeinen und mit Žižek im Besonderen. Das Kapitel führt in Milbanks Denken und seine Rolle innerhalb der Radikalen Orthodoxie ein und präsentiert die kontroversen und Grundfragen des Politischen tangierenden Debatten um das Erbe des Christentums zwischen ihm und Žižek.

Perhaps the most-read philosopher in the world at the time of this publication, Slavoj Žižek has written voluminously on an extraordinary number of topics—and has, along the way, engaged many different fields of inquiry and earned many critics. At bottom, however, is a post-structural philosophy which is provided as an alternative to the proposals of Jacques Derrida, with an emphatic deployment of the psychoanalytic theory of Jacques Lacan. This critical chapter parses his work as it is relevant to radical theology.

Slavoj Žižek’s enthusiastic endorsement of the Christian legacy as the only hope for the future of radical politics has, unsurprisingly, made him popular amongst many Christians and theologians in recent years. This article explores the underlying logic of Žižek’s celebration of the Christian legacy, arguing that his dual celebration of the Christian and European legacies not only reveals the entanglement of his argument with the white supremacist logic of Christian superiority but begins to expose the ways in which Žižek’s focus on Christian Europe is inconsistent with his own fundamental ontological claims.