Paul Kahn

ExcerptWhat is the point of theory? Reading these essays on postliberalism, with their heavy orientation toward political theology, one has a sense that the authors believe our current political problems have their origin in a mistaken theory. The villain is liberal theory. It is the source of the anomie, inequality, populism, and authoritarianism with which we struggle. Sometimes, liberalism’s problems arise from a false metaphysics or ontology; other times, from internal contradictions. The range of problems for which liberalism is to be held accountable should make us suspicious that something more than analysis is at stake. Somehow liberalism is responsible for both sides of our polarized political order. It brought us neoliberalism, but also identity politics; Donald Trump, but also DEI.

ExcerptTalk of a tectonic shift in American politics after the last election is at best wishful thinking, and at worst a political intervention. The tectonic shift in American politics will not be a realignment around MAGA but the destruction of a viable Republican Party. A party with no discernible principles will not survive the loss of the charismatic authoritarian at its head. Already, Trump’s “electoral bump” is fading as the nation returns to the same division it has displayed for a decade. The half of the country that opposes Trump is not going anywhere.

In Out of Eden, Paul W. Kahn offers a philosophical meditation on the problem of evil. He uses the Genesis story of the Fall as the starting point for a profound articulation of the human condition. Kahn shows us that evil expresses the rage of a subject who knows both that he is an image of an infinite God and that he must die. Kahn's interpretation of Genesis leads him to inquiries into a variety of modern forms of evil, including slavery, torture, and genocide. Kahn takes issue with Hannah Arendt's theory of the banality of evil, arguing that her view is an instance of the modern world's lost capacity to speak of evil. Psychological, social, and political accounts do not explain evil as much as explain it away. Focusing on the existential roots of evil rather than on the occasions for its appearance, Kahn argues that evil originates in man's flight from death. He urges us to see that the opposite of evil is not good, but love: while evil would master death, love would transcend it. Offering a unique perspective that combines political and cultural theory, law, and philosophy, Kahn here continues his project of advancing a political theology of modernity.

On her seventy-fifth birthday, the author’s mother confessed to an affair more than three decades past. His father’s response was unforgiving. Her need to confess met his limitless rage. She acted out of love; he sought revenge. Their battle consumed everything and everyone around them. In the middle of this struggle, she was diagnosed with cancer. Two years later, she died. Testimony is a son’s memoir of this struggle. Paul Kahn finds here a story of the twentieth century, beginning with poverty in the Depression and immigration from Hitler’s Germany. He follows his father’s experience of the war and his return with PTSD. He traces his parents’ movement through the turbulent 60s. More than a study of twentieth-century culture, Testimony is a philosophical inquiry into the possibility of faith in a secular age. History, philosophy, and theology flow together as Kahn finds in his parents’ lives the resources for a series of essays on the nature of truth, memory, death, and faith. Testimony is most of all a meditation on love in a time in which the very possibility of faith is constantly put to the test.

The COVID-19 pandemic has presented an important case study, on a global scale, of how democracy works - and fails to work - today. From leadership to citizenship, from due process to checks and balances, from globalization to misinformation, from solidarity within and across borders to the role of expertise, key democratic concepts both old and new are now being put to the test. The future of democracy around the world is at issue as today's governments manage their responses to the pandemic. Bringing together some of today's most creative thinkers, these essays offer a variety of inquiries into democracy during the global pandemic with a view to imagining post-crisis political conditions. Representing different regions and disciplines, including law, politics, philosophy, religion, and sociology, eighteen voices offer different outlooks - optimistic and pessimistic - on the future.

_An examination of how two fundamental concepts of order influence our ideas about sovereignty, citizenship, law, and history_ Western accounts of natural and political order have deployed two basic ideas: project and system. In a project, order is produced by the intentional act of a subject; in a system, order is immanent in the world. In the former, order is made; in the latter, discovered. Paul W. Kahn shows how project and system have long been at work in our theological and philosophical tradition. Against this background, Kahn explains the development of the modern legal imagination in the nineteenth century as a movement from project to system. Americans began the century imagining the constitutional order as their common project: a deliberate construction of We the People. They ended the century imagining that order is continuous with the common law: an immanent development of the principles of civilization. This imaginative shift affected ideas of legal text, sovereignty, citizenship, interpretation, history, and science.

This article considers the effects of secularization on the American constitutional law of religion. It argues that, in a secular age, religious belief becomes a matter of subjective opinion to be treated in much the same way as other opinions. Claims that religious beliefs occupy a privileged legal position become problematic, once those opinions are understood to be merely subjective. Free exercise jurisprudence tends to collapse into the jurisprudence of free speech: We protect religious speech because it is speech, not because it is religious. In establishment clause jurisprudence, endorsement becomes the focus of attention. If religious belief can never be more than a subjective opinion, then it is measured like other opinions: we want to know who supports it, not whether it is true. Thus, the endorsement test asks whether the state is asserting a religious belief as its own. Once religious belief is understood as subjective opinion, its natural place will appear to be within, not outside of, politics, for interest groups are defined by the opinions they pursue. Perhaps ironically, the increasingly visible role of religious groups in American politics is an expression not of how seriously we take religion, but of how much less serious it has become. No longer about the truth of the human condition, it is merely another opinion.

The torture prohibition is not just one rule among many. Its status as an absolute prohibition in both domestic and international law suggests that it lies at the very foundation of the rule of law. Yet, the prohibition is oddly discontinuous with other practices of state sanctioned violence. I argue here that the prohibition functions as much as symbol as norm. To explain what it symbolizes, I deploy some of the interpretive methodology Freud used to interpret dreams. The torture prohibition is a kind of waking dream. As with other dreams, we must pierce the manifest content to reveal the unconscious meaning. The prohibition, I argue, comes less from a concern about victims than about torturers, for the right to torture was a claim of the sacral monarch. The affective weight of the prohibition emerges from the relationship of law to sovereignty, and to the violent, sacrificial demand of even a popular sovereign.

Les juristes ont tendance à s’attacher à la doctrine et les philosophes à l’abstraction. En réalité, nous vivons dans une complexité interprétative. On vit et on meurt grâce à l’imagination qui fonctionne par le particulier et y voit tout un monde de significations. En en appelant à l’esthétique pour interpréter le politique, cet article soutient que nous vivons une période d’anxiété où l’imagination ne parvient plus à concilier droit – système de représentation – et souveraineté – expression de l’identité. La confusion entre les catégories de criminel et d’ennemi témoigne de cette déstabilisa-tion du lien moderne entre identité et représentation. Plusieurs films à succès offrent un accès privilégié au statut trouble de cette solution politique moderne. On y voit la triple expression de l’anxiété à propos du rapport entre criminels et ennemis : le désir de recouvrer l’unité de l’amour exprimé dans un acte de violence original, la crainte que la violence politique ne puisse être stabilisée par le droit et la peur qu’un code trop figé n’exclue une libre politique d’identité

Paul Kahn vraagt zich in zijn essay af hoe het komt dat de onderwerpen, recht en liefde, telkens weer naast elkaar worden geplaatst. Waarom reageren wij zo direct op dit contrast? En in welke zin is deze tegenstelling voor ons noodzakelijk? De uitdaging waar we op dit moment voor staan, stelt Kahn, is om een seculiere inhoud te geven aan het religieuze thema dat de wet het domein van de gevallen mens is, en dat we via de liefde iets van het goddelijke terugwinnen. Het religieuze is op de achtergrond gedrongen door het denken over de politieke orde, waarin de wet orde aanbrengt in de chaos en zorgt dat de rede het verlangen beteugelt. Aan de hand van begrippen als publiek versus privé, algemeen versus individu, heilig versus wereldlijk, universeel versus specifiek bespreekt Kahn het onderscheid tussen recht en liefde.

Academic philosophy may have lost its audience, but the traditional subjects of philosophy--love, death, justice, knowledge, and faith--remain as compelling as ever. To reach a new generation, Paul W. Kahn argues that philosophy must take up these fundamental concerns as we find them in contemporary culture. He demonstrates how this can be achieved through a turn to popular film. Discussing such well-known movies as _Forrest Gump_ (1994), _The American President_ (1995), _The Matrix_ (1999), _Memento_ (2000), _The History of Violence_ (2005), _Gran Torino_ (2008), _The Dark Knight_ (2008), _The Road_ (2009), and _Avata_r (2009), Kahn explores powerful archetypes and their hold on us. His inquiry proceeds in two parts. First, he uses film to explore the nature of action and interpretation, arguing that narrative is the critical concept for understanding both. Second, he explores the narratives of politics, family, and faith as they appear in popular films. Engaging with genres as diverse as romantic comedy, slasher film, and pornography, Kahn explores the social imaginary through which we create and maintain a meaningful world. He finds in popular films a new setting for a philosophical inquiry into the timeless themes of sacrifice, innocence, rebirth, law, and love.

Abstract. To understand the problem of torture in a democratic society, we have to take up a political-theological perspective. We must ask how violence creates political meaning. Torture is no more destructive and no more illiberal than other forms of political violence. The turn away from torture was not a turn away from violence, but a change in the locus of sacrifice: from scaffold to battlefield. Torture had been a ritual of mediation between sovereign and subject. Once sovereignty is located in the people, it no longer makes sense to speak of being sacrificed for the sovereign. Instead, sovereign presence is now realized in an act of self-sacrifice. The wars of modern nation-states have been acts of reciprocal self-sacrifice. Terror invokes torture in response because both speak a primitive language of political sacrifice, denying the enemy the privilege of self-sacrifice.

In this wide-ranging interdisciplinary work, Paul W. Kahn argues that political order is founded not on contract but on sacrifice. Because liberalism is blind to sacrifice, it is unable to explain how the modern state has brought us to both the rule of law and the edge of nuclear annihilation. We can understand this modern condition only by recognizing that any political community, even a liberal one, is bound together by faith, love, and identity.Putting Liberalism in Its Place draws on philosophy, cultural theory, American constitutional law, religious and literary studies, and political psychology to advance political theory. It makes original contributions in all these fields. Not since Charles Taylor's The Sources of the Self has there been such an ambitious and sweeping examination of the deep structure of the modern conception of the self.Kahn shows that only when we move beyond liberalism's categories of reason and interest to a Judeo-Christian concept of love can we comprehend the modern self. Love is the foundation of a world of objective meaning, one form of which is the political community. Arguing from these insights, Kahn offers a new reading of the liberalism/communitarian debate, a genealogy of American liberalism, an exploration of the romantic and the pornographic, a new theory of the will, and a refoundation of political theory on the possibility of sacrifice.Approaching politics from the perspective of sacrifice allows us to understand the character of twentieth-century politics, which combined progress in the rule of law with massive slaughter for the state. Equally important, this work speaks to the most important political conflicts in the world today. It explains why American response to September 11 has taken the form of war, and why, for the most part, Europeans have been reluctant to follow the Americans in their pursuit of a violent, sacrificial politics. Kahn shows us that the United States has maintained a vibrant politics of modernity, while Europe is moving into a postmodern form of the political that has turned away from the idea of sacrifice. Together with its companion volume, Out of Eden, Putting Liberalism in Its Place finally answers Clifford Geertz's call for a political theology of modernity

‘De uitdrukking ‘Europees humanisme’ is op zich al een uiting van de tweeslachtige aard van ons bestaan: tegelijkertijd eindig - omgrensd - en oneindig - altijd buiten die grenzen. Op het kruispunt van het eindige en het oneindige - van Eros en stof - stuiten we op de oorsprong van het kwaad. Dat zou geen verrassing hoeven te zijn, als we bedenken met welke andere gemeenschap we allemaal sterk verbonden zijn: het gezin. Ook daarin zie je dat de liefde en het kwaad met elkaar verstrengeld zijn. Terwijl we op zoek zijn naar liefde, merken we maar al te vaak dat we zelf kwaad berokkenen.’