John Milbank

Theology and the Political: The New Debate, sic v

The essays in Theology and the Political —written by some of the world’s foremost theologians, philosophers, and literary critics—analyze the ethics and consequences of human action. They explore the spiritual dimensions of ontology, considering the relationship between ontology and the political in light of the thought of figures ranging from Plato to Marx, Levinas to Derrida, and Augustine to Lacan. Together, the contributors challenge the belief that meaningful action is simply the successful assertion of will, that politics is ultimately reducible to “might makes right.” From a variety of perspectives, they suggest that grounding human action and politics in materialist critique offers revolutionary possibilities that transcend the nihilism inherent in both contemporary liberal democratic theory and neoconservative ideology. Contributors. Anthony Baker, Daniel M. Bell Jr., Phillip Blond, Simon Critchley, Conor Cunningham, Creston Davis, William Desmond, Hent de Vries, Terry Eagleton, Rocco Gangle, Philip Goodchild, Karl Hefty, Eleanor Kaufman, Tom McCarthy, John Milbank, Antonio Negri, Catherine Pickstock, Patrick Aaron Riches, Mary-Jane Rubenstein, Regina Mara Schwartz, Kenneth Surin, Graham Ward, Rowan Williams, Slavoj Žižek

THE SOUL OF RECIPROCITY PART TWO: RECIPROCITY GRANTED

In “The Soul of Reciprocity Part One: Reciprocity Refused”, the case for reciprocity was established in a negative manner. It was shown that its refusal is a crucial aspect of modernity: the result of the interacting influences of modern capitalist economics and an ontotheological outlook that is explicitly modern, not ancient. A disdain for reciprocity thus lies at modernity’s very heart. The soul, which, I argued, it allied to reciprocity, was rejected in modernity and the subject was rhetorically advocated in its place. This is true for three crucial instances: Deleuzian transhumanism, Levinasian intersubjectivity and neo-Kantian neo-humanism. All three only re-work the Cartesian and Kantian turn to the subject, which was also a turn away from the soul. “The Soul of Reciprocity Part Two: Reciprocity Restored”, establishes a positive case for a postmodern retrieval of the premodern soul of reciprocity.

Can Morality Be Christian

et me tell you the answer straightaway. It is no. Not no there Lcannot be a specifically Christian morality. But no, morality cannot be Christian. All those obscure men of Whitechapel and thereabouts, the Muggletonians and members of other forgotten sects and their heir William Blake,l were no doubt muddled, culturally illfed and heretical, and yet in their central antinomianism they were essentially right. And had they known it were but struggling to say what Catholic tradition itself implies (but has never perhaps adequately articulated), that is, that Christian morality is a thing so strange, that it must be declared immoral or amoral according to all other human norms and codes of morality. Let me try to demonstrate this by taking five marks of morality, and then contrasting them with five notes of Christianity. The five marks are Reaction, Sacrifice, Complicity with Death, Scarcity and Generality. The five notes are Gift, End of sacrifice, Resurrection, Plenitude and Confidence. Let us begin by considering the reactive character of virtue. ’I heard

The Gift and the Given

Luckmann, T. (1967) The Invisible Religion: The Problem of Religion in Modern Society. New York: Macmillan. Marx, K. (1844) ‘The Jewish Question’, in Deutsch Franzosische Jahrbucher. Paris. Roy, O. (1994) The Failure of Political Islam. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Said, E.W. (1978) Orientalism. New York: Vintage. Perkins, F. (2004) Leibniz and China: A Commerce of Light. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Vries, H. de (2002) Religion and Violence: Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to Derrida. Baltimore, MD and London: Johns Hopkins University Press. Watt, W.M. (1999) Islamic Political Thought. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press. Weber, M. (1966) Sociology of Religion. London: Methuen.

Sacred Triads: Augustine and the Indo‐European Soul

In this paper the author endeavours to bring together discussions of Georges Dumezil’s thesis concerning the tripartite structure of Indo-European mythology with discussions of Trinitarian theology. The claim is, first, that the mythology led to an intrinsically aporetic characterization of the soul as a sphere of ‘self-government in space’. Second, that Plato, initially, and then much more emphatically Augustine, dissolved this construction and resolved its aporias by substituting an alternative construction in terms of ‘government by the other through time.’

Oikonomia Leaves Home: Theology, Politics, and Governance in the History of the West

1. The Political Fourfold Political rule involves four factors: sovereignty, force, persuasion, and administration. Up until modern times, in the history of the West, the first two factors were the most in evidence. Political rule claimed an uneasy monopolization of power in the name of its own legitimacy. This legitimacy could be variously established and justified, but its reality was in the end proved by the exercise of might. At the same time, mystery hovered over the question of what the ruling power was in itself, if it is defined, unlike everything else, solely by its rule over others. This…

Culture and Justice

Invoking Zygmunt Bauman’s acute exposition of a left-critical hesitation between intellectuals as saviours and intellectuals as oppressors, this essay argues that while Bauman reveals this hesitation as crucial and symptomatic, nevertheless he leaves it unresolved. The essay shows how the human nature/ culture distinction (which is also a continuity) is, in fact, constitutive of human culture as such; moreover, the essay argues that this constitutive distinction reproduces itself within culture in terms of reciprocal hierarchies of social division — intellectual/non-intellectual, shamanistic/folk, aristocratic/popular. This pattern of vertical reciprocity is precisely what the purely horizontal axis of capitalist-bureaucratic liberalism excludes, collapsing the hierarchical axis of political culture into the horizontal false-binary of ‘left’ versus ‘right’. In this way the essay argues that the crux of an authentic resistance to capitalist-bureaucratic liberalism will involve not a triumph of the ‘left’ over the ‘right’ , but the retrieval of the dynamic paradox of the vertical axis of the hierarchical communion of guiding excellence fused with popular spontaneity. The hierarchical yet dynamically educative interplay between innovators and those being constantly innovated is the organic root of human culture and the means of the authentic practice of human justice.

Without Heaven There is Only Hell on Earth: 15 Verdicts on Žižek's Response

Abstract This is a response to Slavoj Žižek, which carries the debate between us forward. This debate is published as The Monstrosity of Christ edited by Creston Davis and published by MIT Press, 2009.

History of the One God

The article discusses the history of monotheism from the earliest times to the present. It begins with arguments against the notion of monotheists as an evolutionarily early stage in religion and then proceeds to characterize monotheism in the Old testament. The view that there was every a pre-monotheistic phase of one ‘national God’ is called into question, along with the priority of the ‘God of history’ over the creator God. Association of the divine with social justice is shown to be common to the ancient Near East as a whole; however, Israelite monotheism, it is argued, was associated with a kind of conservatism which preserved more features of an oral and gift-exchange culture, while calling into question the more fetishistic aspects of such culture. Monotheism, it is claimed, is what refutes both myth and rationalism, while the superiority of one God to many gods is defended in connection with the theme of peace. The final section deals with the three monotheistic faiths, and argues that Christianity, with its doctrines of incarnation and the Trinity, is not qualifying monotheism and its distinctive features as just adumbrated, but on the contrary developing it in the purest and most consistent form.

The Midwinter Sacrifice: a Sequel To 'Can Morality Be Christian?

In the course of this argument, I shall try to show that these received ideas of the ethical, which may or may not permit some play to ’moral luck’, all ascribe to a ’sacrificial economy’. And that they do so in two different variants: either in terms of the giving up of the lesser for the greater, or else of a more radical notion of absolute sacrifice of self for the other, without any ’return’ for, or of the self, in any guise whatsoever. The second variant, which would usually see itself as escaping the sacrificial economy of do ut des, but which I will argue is but this same economy taken to its logical extreme, has been recently espoused in different but profoundly analogous ways by Jan Patocka, Emmanuel Levinas and Jacques Derrida.2 Against this view, which now enjoys a wide consensus, I shall argue that a self-sacrificial view of morality is first, immoral, second, impossible, and third, a deformation, not the fulfilment, as Patocka echoed by Derrida claims, of the Christian gospel. The article has two parts: first, a consideration of ’moral luck’ accompanied by an intermittent analysis of Shakespeare’s late play