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.

Charles Taylor's 'secular age' was always also a machine age; the death of God and the mechanisation of the world developed in tandem with one another. Yet magic did not disappear from this new world so much as find itself transposed into new forms, new bodies, and new powers. This paper will explore the implications of this tranposition. On Marx's account, a machine is made up of three components: a motor mechanism, a self-moving power which drives the machine as a whole; a transmitting mechanism, which divides and distributes this power; and the tool or working machine. We might, then, read Dionysius' decidedly un-secular Celestial Hierarchy as the description of a heavenly machine designed, as Agamben suggests, for the government of the world and the generation of surplus value in the form of doxology. The divine eros which generates the Dionysian cosmos originates with God, is passed on by the angelic messengers, who transmit the divine power to the ecclesiastical hierarchy, whose members labour to become fellow workers with God. As Marx well knew, machines can function as instruments either of domination or of liberation. This paper will bring Dionysius' account of angelic labour into conversation with contemporary discussions of the machinic transformation of human labour. First, it will think through the relationship of the divine eros and the role of angels as 'fellow workmen for God' in dialogue with Frédéric Lordon and Maurizio Lazzarato's account of the entanglement of machines and desire in contemporary labour. Second, it will bring the ambiguous role of angels in Dionysius' anthropology to bear on Donna Haraway's exposition of the utopian possibilities of the figure of the cyborg as a figure for the possible futures of human life and labour. How might Dionysius help us to think postsecular labour anew?

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.

In this article I consider the stories of Jesus' women ancestors in the genealogy which opens the Gospel of Matthew. Reading these stories in light of Marxist-feminist analyses of marriage, sex work and reproductive labor, alongside contemporary sex workers' rights discourse, and through Marcella Althaus-Reid's claim that all theology is "a sexual act", I explore their implications for contemporary debates about property and propriety in both Christian systematic theology and contemporary Christian sexual ethics - which cannot, of course, be disentangled from one another. To conclude, I return to the twinned questions of righteousness and purity which centrally define both theological accounts of Christian identity and Christian sexual ethics, suggesting that righteousness relies for its coherence not only on the abjection of those who fall short of its standards, but also on their labor.

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.

There has been a generalised anxiety concerning the future of continental philosophy of religion as a discipline, with a number of books, articles, conferences, and presentations taking up this theme. This anxiety exists because as a discipline continental philosophy of religion lacks a clear claim to an identity. This article analyses the anxiety concerning the future of continental philosophy of religion as an anxiety of reproduction. By locating the philosopher’s anxiety within a wider anxiety of reproduction we begin to understand this anxiety through the queer anti-social critique of Lee Edelman. This anxiety is traced through three processes of reproduction: intellectual reproduction, disciplinary reproduction, and institutional reproduction. The article goes on to sketch out a position against the reproduction of continental philosophy of religion by taking on and celebrating the discipline’s improper nature. Appealing neither to secular reason nor to established traditions, we draw on the Malleus Maleficarum (as read through queer theory and non-philosophy) to craft various models for thought. Here we find abortion prized over the future of the race, miscegenation over blood purity, and impotence and infertility over the sovereign power of the father. These models are explored both in terms of their historical context and as providing a different image of the work that can be carried out in the discipline of continental philosophy of religion. The article concludes by suggesting other perverse lines of relation that may be opened up when one gives up on the reproduction of the discipline.

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.

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.

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. 

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.