Petra Brown

During the COVID-19 pandemic, many daughters, sisters, aunts, wives, and mothers found themselves with additional caretaking duties, and many were also vulnerable and unsafe in different constellations of relationships. Lockdown exacerbated this vulnerability. It also heightened stress, as vulnerable women were required to be constantly alert and risk aware in their reconfigured worlds. This not only included women in unsafe intimate relationships but also digital vulnerability for women as life moved online, economic risk for casually employed women unable to work from home, and even increased exposure to misogyny for female political leaders navigating polarizing and volatile political communities. Whilst...

Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Knud Ejler Løgstrup were WWII contemporaries: Lutheran theologians and religious figures in their respective German and Danish communities; both active in the anti-Nazi resistance. Being involved in the resistance, Bonhoeffer and Løgstrup were required to rethink what it meant to be ethical, in particular in relation to disclosure and the telling of truth, in a situation of war. In this paper, we consider the grounds on which both Løgstrup and Bonhoeffer acted, their belief in a duty or requirement to resist, in light of the more general problem presented by resistance as action undertaken in a state of exception. We investigate the distinction between the normativity of ordinary or stable time, and action required in a state of exception, using the specific example of truth-telling as a normative demand and its conflict with the exceptional imperative to lie. The example of truth-telling raises important questions about the role of agency and phronetic judgment in a state of exception. In order to determine a foundation for such judgment, we turn to the framework adapted by both Bonhoeffer and Løgstrup to ground their requirement to lie: Luther’s concept of three estates. We consider how their respective concepts of mandates and laws of life/sovereign expressions of life both illuminate and highlight the more general problem of the relation between norm and exceptional action.

Theologian. Conspirator. Martyr. Saint. Dietrich Bonhoeffer was killed in the waning days of World War II, having been implicated in the July 20th assassination attempt on Hitler. Since his death, Bonhoeffer’s life and writings have inspired contradictory responses. He is often seen as a model for Christian pacifist resistance, and more recently for violent direct political action. Bonhoeffer’s name has been invoked by violent anti-abortion protestors as well as political leaders calling for support on a ‘war on terror’ in the aftermath of 9/11. Petra Brown critically analyses Bonhoeffer’s writing preceding and during his conspiracy involvement, particularly his recurring concept of the ‘extraordinary.’ Brown examines this idea in light of ‘the state of exception,’ a concept coined by the one-time Nazi jurist and political theorist, Carl Schmitt. She also draws on the existentialist philosopher Sören Kierkegaard to consider what happens when discipleship is understood as obedience to a divine command. This book aims to complicate an unreflective admiration of Bonhoeffer’s decision for conspiracy, and draws attention to the potentially dangerous implications of his emerging political theology.

The Enlightenment is often equated with Kant’s Answer to the Question: What is Enlightenment and the charge that humanity must ‘dare to know’ and ‘have the courage’ to understand in order to be liberated from ‘self-imposed immaturity’. The new authority of critical reason as the basis of knowledge and the hope that this could lead to freedom and equality amongst people separated this period from earlier ways of thinking. Kant can be seen as emblematic of this hope for the emancipatory project of the Enlightenment. Yet, while the Enlightenment led to increased political and social emancipation in France, England, and the United States – the German Aufklärung did not follow the same trajectory; its population remaining ‘naively unpolitical’, advocating instead for an educational revolution, spread through dedicated private individuals and benevolent rulers. This was expressed in the uniquely German idea of education as Bildung in which the Enlightenment ideal of progressive self-liberation was framed first and foremost as the internal development of the individual, rather than as requiring social expression and change: self-cultivation rather than political emancipation.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Knud Ejler Løgstrup were WWII contemporaries: Lutheran theologians and religious figures in their respective German and Danish communities; both active in the anti-Nazi resistance. Being involved in the resistance, Bonhoeffer and Løgstrup were required to rethink what it meant to be ethical, in particular in relation to disclosure and the telling of truth, in a situation of war. In this paper, we consider the grounds on which both Løgstrup and Bonhoeffer acted, their belief in a duty or requirement to resist, in light of the more general problem presented by resistance as action undertaken in a state of exception. We investigate the distinction between the normativity of ordinary or stable time, and action required in a state of exception, using the specific example of truth-telling as a normative demand and its conflict with the exceptional imperative to lie. The example of truth-telling raises important questions about the role of agency and phronetic judgment in a state of exception. In order to determine a foundation for such judgment, we turn to the framework adapted by both Bonhoeffer and Løgstrup to ground their requirement to lie: Luther’s concept of three estates. We consider how their respective concepts of mandates and laws of life/sovereign expressions of life both illuminate and highlight the more general problem of the relation between norm and exceptional action.