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In On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life, Eric Santner puts Sigmund Freud in dialogue with his contemporary Franz Rosenzweig in the service of reimagining ethical and political life. By exploring the theological dimensions of Freud's writings and revealing unexpected psychoanalytic implications in the religious philosophy of Rosenzweig's masterwork, The Star of Redemption, Santner makes an original argument for understanding religions of revelation in therapeutic terms, and offers a penetrating look at how this understanding suggests fruitful ways of reconceiving political community. Santner's crucial innovation in this new study is to bring the theological notion of revelation into a broadly psychoanalytic field, where it can be understood as a force that opens the self to everyday life and encourages accountability within the larger world. Revelation itself becomes redefined as an openness toward what is singular, enigmatic, even uncanny about the Other, whether neighbor or stranger, thereby linking a theory of drives and desire to a critical account of sociality. Santner illuminates what it means to be genuinely open to another human being or culture and to share and take responsibility for one's implication in the dilemmas of difference. By bringing Freud and Rosenzweig together, Santner not only clarifies in new and surprising ways the profound connections between psychoanalysis and the Judeo-Christian tradition, he makes the resources of both available to contemporary efforts to rethink concepts of community and cross-cultural communication.
In his Duino Elegies, Rainer Maria Rilke suggests that animals enjoy direct access to a realm of being—the open—concealed from humans by the workings of consciousness and self-consciousness. In his own reading of Rilke, Martin Heidegger reclaims the open as the proper domain of human existence but suggests that human life remains haunted by vestiges of an animal-like relation to its surroundings. Walter Benjamin, in turn, was to show that such vestiges—what Eric Santner calls the creaturely—have a biopolitical aspect: they are linked to the processes that inscribe life in the realm of power and authority. Santner traces this theme of creaturely life from its poetic and philosophical beginnings in the first half of the twentieth century to the writings of the enigmatic German novelist W. G. Sebald. Sebald’s entire oeuvre, Santner argues, can be seen as an archive of creaturely life. For Sebald, the work on such an archive was inseparable from his understanding of what it means to engage ethically with another person’s history and pain, an engagement that transforms us from indifferent individuals into neighbors. An indispensable book for students of Sebald, On Creaturely Life is also a significant contribution to critical theory.
"With brilliance and considerable daring, Peter Gordon's Rosenzweig and Heidegger broaches the possibility of a shared horizon and a promising dialogue between these two seminal figures—these antipodes—of twentieth-century thought. It will be the bench mark for future work in the field."—Thomas Sheehan, author of Heidegger: The Man and the Thinker "In this brilliant book, Peter Gordon sheds light on Rosenzweig's most important philosophical book, The Star of Redemption, by means of an unexpected (and sure to be controversial) comparison—with the philosophy of Heidegger's Being and Time. The result is a "must read" for anyone with a serious interest in either thinker."—Hilary Putnam, author of The Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy and Other Essays "A major work. Gordon persuasively argues that the true originality of Rosenzweig's achievement, heretofore associated with a distinctively "Jewish" break with his German philosophical milieu, only becomes intelligible from within that very milieu. Focusing on resemblances between Rosenzweig's and Heidegger's projects, Gordon discerns the contours of a post-Nietzschean religious sensibility condensed into the paradox of a "redemption-in-the-world." This book will be valued by readers of both Heidegger and Rosenzweig, and by anyone interested in the intersections of philosophy and religion."—Eric L. Santner, author of On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig "A comparative reading of Rosenzweig's Star of Redemption and Heidegger's Being and Time. Peter Eli Gordon has written a work of exemplary erudition, analytical nuance, philosophical acumen and expository grace."—Paul Mendes-Flohr, author of German Jews: A Dual Identity
A masterly analysis of the Book of Leviticus, the newest volume in the award-winning series of commentaries on the Hebrew Bible by “a celebrated biblical scholar, keen on weaving together traditional Jewish exegesis, psychoanalysis, and postmodern criticism” (The New York Times Book Review) The image of the Golden Calf haunts the commentaries that thread through Leviticus. This catastrophic episode, in which the Israelites (freed from Egyptian slavery and forty days after their momentous encounter with God at Mount Sinai) worship a pagan idol while Moses is receiving the Torah from God on the mountaintop, gives the mostly legalistic text a unique depth and resonance. According to midrashic tradition, the post-traumatic effects of the sin of the Golden Calf linger through the generations, the sin to be “paid off” in small increments through time. Post-biblical perspectives view this as the diffusion of punishment, as well as a way of addressing the on-going phenomenon of idolatry itself. These after-effects of the Golden Calf incident are imaginatively explored in Avivah Zornberg’s magnificent textual analysis. She brings the rabbis of the Talmud, medieval commentators, Hasidic scholars, philosophers, psychoanalysts, and literary masters—from Aristotle and Rashi to the Baal Shem Tov, Franz Rosenzweig, Sigmund Freud, and George Eliot—into her pathbreaking discussion of the nature of reward and punishment, good and evil, Eros and Thanatos, and humankind’s intricate and ever-fascinating encounter with the divine.
This electronic version has been made available under a Creative Commons (BY-NC-ND) open access license. How do we transform the world when we are ourselves inescapably part of it? If we cannot know what makes the world the way it is, or what impact our actions will have, where do we begin? Renowned politics scholar Jenny Edkins explores the imperative for change in a world filled with inequality, violence, persecution, and injustice - and the difficulties faced in bringing it about. Over the course of ten chapters Change and the politics of certainty examines our varied responses to questions such as aid in times of famine; opposition to the Iraq War; humanitarian intervention; the memorialisation of 9/11; enforced disappearance; and calls for justice after the Grenfell Tower fire. Drawing on insights from the author’s life and on the work of playwrights and filmmakers, the book interrogates the ideas of thinkers including Lauren Berlant, Judith Butler, Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, Stuart Hall, Eric Santner, Elaine Scarry, Carolyn Steedman and Slavoj Žižek. Tackling themes such as the fantasy of security, contemporary notions of time and space, and ideas of humanity and sentience, this accessible book is essential reading for all who strive for a better world.
Eric Santner offers a radically new interpretation of Marx's labor theory of value as one concerned with the afterlife of political theology in secular modernity. What Marx characterized as the dual character of the labor embodied in the commodity, he argues, is the doctrine of the King's Two Bodies transferred from the political theology of sovereignty to the realm of political economy. This genealogy, leading from the fetishism of the royal body to the fetishism of the commodity, also suggests a new understanding of the irrational core at the center of economic busyness today, its 24/7 pace. The frenetic negotiations of our busy-bodies continue and translate into the doxology of everyday life the liturgical labor that once sustained the sovereign's glory. Maintaining that an effective critique of capitalist political economy must engage this liturgical dimension, Santner proposes a counter-activity, which he calls "paradoxological." With commentaries by Bonnie Honig, Peter Gordon, and Hent de Vries, an introduction by Kevis Goodman, and a response from Santner, this important new book by a leading cultural theorist and scholar of German literature, cinema, and history will interest readers of political theory, literature and literary theory, and religious studies.
The volume collects a series of groundbreaking new studies which delve into the work of Franz Rosenzweig and assess its enduring yet still unacknowledged value for Epistemology, Aesthetics, Moral and Political Philosophy, going far beyond Theology and Philosophy of Religion.
In November 1893, Daniel Paul Schreber, recently named presiding judge of the Saxon Supreme Court, was on the verge of a psychotic breakdown and entered a Leipzig psychiatric clinic. He would spend the rest of the nineteenth century in mental institutions. Once released, he published his Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903), a harrowing account of real and delusional persecution, political intrigue, and states of sexual ecstasy as God's private concubine. Freud's famous case study of Schreber elevated the Memoirs into the most important psychiatric textbook of paranoia. In light of Eric Santner's analysis, Schreber's text becomes legible as a sort of "nerve bible" of fin-de-siècle preoccupations and obsessions, an archive of the very phantasms that would, after the traumas of war, revolution, and the end of empire, coalesce into the core elements of National Socialist ideology. The crucial theoretical notion that allows Santner to pass from the "private" domain of psychotic disturbances to the "public" domain of the ideological and political genesis of Nazism is the "crisis of investiture." Schreber's breakdown was precipitated by a malfunction in the rites and procedures through which an individual is endowed with a new social status: his condition became acute just as he was named to a position of ultimate symbolic authority. The Memoirs suggest that we cross the threshold of modernity into a pervasive atmosphere of crisis and uncertainty when acts of symbolic investiture no longer usefully transform the subject's self understanding. At such a juncture, the performative force of these rites of institution may assume the shape of a demonic persecutor, some "other" who threatens our borders and our treasures. Challenging other political readings of Schreber, Santner denies that Schreber's delusional system--his own private Germany--actually prefigured the totalitarian solution to this defining structural crisis of modernity. Instead, Santner shows how this tragic figure succeeded in avoiding the totalitarian temptation by way of his own series of perverse identifications, above all with women and Jews.
"The king is dead. Long live the king!" In early modern Europe, the king's body was literally sovereign—and the right to rule was immediately transferrable to the next monarch in line upon the king's death. In The Royal Remains, Eric L. Santner argues that the "carnal" dimension of the structures and dynamics of sovereignty hasn't disappeared from politics. Instead, it migrated to a new location—the life of the people—where something royal continues to linger in the way we obsessively track and measure the vicissitudes of our flesh. Santner demonstrates the ways in which democratic societies have continued many of the rituals and practices associated with kingship in displaced, distorted, and usually, unrecognizable forms. He proposes that those strange mental activities Freud first lumped under the category of the unconscious—which often manifest themselves in peculiar physical ways—are really the uncanny second life of these "royal remains," now animated in the body politic of modern neurotic subjects. Pairing Freud with Kafka, Carl Schmitt with Hugo von Hofmannsthal,and Ernst Kantorowicz with Rainer Maria Rilke, Santner generates brilliant readings of multiple texts and traditions of thought en route to reconsidering the sovereign imaginary. Ultimately, The Royal Remains locates much of modernity—from biopolitical controversies to modernist literary experiments—in this transition from subjecthood to secular citizenship. This major new work will make a bold and original contribution to discussions of politics, psychoanalysis, and modern art and literature.
*Explores the larger significance of disability in cultural, political, and religious venues * Novel aspects of Christian theological tradition emerge in this light * Highly original and thought-provoking