Political Theology and Its Discontents - (Political Theologies) by K Daniel Cho & Bostjan Nedoh (Hardcover)

About the Book

Book Synopsis

The essays in this collection revitalise political theology through the lens of psychoanalysis, unlocking its emancipatory potential and providing new ways to think about the political.

They are united by a conviction that there is something in political theology worth fighting for. Banishing the misconception of political theology as reactionary or paradoxical, they push the discipline forward by drawing on the insights of psychoanalysis and a re-engagement with theology.

While Sigmund Freud was at times dismissive of religion, he also used his inquiry into it to completely re-theorize the political in a way that this book's team of leading scholars bring to the fore. Each chapter uses psychoanalysis as a point of departure for serious engagement with political theology, eliciting the radical potential at the nexus of the political and the theological. This powerfully productive approach unearths new strands of political theology and refreshing perspectives on established concepts like universality, ideology, law, authority, the neighbor. Covering ideas from libidinal politics to the political economy of laziness, Political Theology and its Discontents demonstrates that a deep and sincere engagement with theology can give us a new view of the political.

Review Quotes

"With Political Theology and Its Discontents, K. Daniel Cho and Bostjan Nedoh present a series of powerful challenges to Carl Schmitt's still-influential notion of political theology. Schmitt sometimes is simply dismissed for his Nazism. At other times, leftist critical engagements with him tend merely to appropriate his conceptions of sovereignty and the friend-enemy distinction as useful for radical leftism too. What distinguishes Political Theology and Its Discontents is that it convincingly demonstrates how bringing Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis to bear on Schmittian political theology utterly transforms the latter. The psychoanalytic reinterpretations of Schmitt's ideas and texts offered by the essays in this volume reveal that neither politics nor theology can be limited to what Schmitt took them to be. Cho and Nedoh's Political Theology and Its Discontents is a timely, invaluable, and highly original reconsideration of the contemporary interrelationships between politics and religion in Schmitt's wake. Nobody concerned with our current geo-political circumstances can afford to ignore this path-breaking collection." --Adrian Johnston, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, USA

"Political Theology and Its Discontents refuses to let political theology rest-it wrestles with it until it confesses something new. Re-examining political theory through the prism of psychoanalysis, these essays turn it into a laboratory of critical invention. Here, the sacred meets the symptomatic, sovereignty meets the unconscious, and the Schmittian legacy is turned inside out. In this encounter, the only true sovereignty left is thought itself." --Alenka Zupancic, Professor at the European Graduate School and the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts

About the Author

K. Daniel Cho is a professor of education at Otterbein University, USA.

Bostjan Nedoh is a research fellow at the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts, Institute of Philosophy, Ljubljana.