Paul Kahn

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.

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.

In this strikingly original work, Paul W. Kahn rethinks the meaning of political theology. In a text innovative in both form and substance, he describes an American political theology as a secular inquiry into ultimate meanings sustaining our faith in the popular sovereign. Kahn works out his view through an engagement with Carl Schmitt's 1922 classic, _Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty_. He forces an engagement with Schmitt's four chapters, offering a new version of each that is responsive to the American political imaginary. The result is a contemporary political theology. As in Schmitt's work, sovereignty remains central, yet Kahn shows how popular sovereignty creates an ethos of sacrifice in the modern state. Turning to law, Kahn demonstrates how the line between exception and judicial decision is not as sharp as Schmitt led us to believe. He reminds readers that American political life begins with the revolutionary willingness to sacrifice and that both sacrifice and law continue to ground the American political imagination. Kahn offers a political theology that has at its center the practice of freedom realized in political decisions, legal judgments, and finally in philosophical inquiry itself.

Belief in the rule of law characterizes our society, our political order, and even our identity as citizens. The Cultural Study of Law is the first full examination of what it means to conduct a modern intellectual inquiry into the culture of law. Paul Kahn outlines the tools necessary for such an inquiry by analyzing the concepts of time, space, citizen, judge, sovereignty, and theory within the culture of law's rule. Charting the way for the development of a new intellectual discipline, Paul Kahn advocates an approach that stands outside law's normative framework and looks at law as a way of life rather than as a set of rules. "Professor Kahn's perspective is neat and alluring: We need a form of legal scholarship released from the project of reform so that we can better understand who and what we are. The new discipline should study 'not legal rules, but the imagination as it constructs a world of legal meaning.'... [C]oncise, good reading, and recommended." —New York Law Journal.

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.