The Future of Illusion: Political Theology and Early Modern Texts - Brossura

Kahn, Victoria

Brossura

ISBN 10: 022637937X ISBN 13: 9780226379371

Casa editrice: University of Chicago Press, 2016

Riassunto

In recent years, the rise of fundamentalism and a related turn to religion in the humanities have led to a powerful resurgence of interest in the problem of political theology. In a critique of this contemporary fascination with the theological underpinnings of modern politics,Victoria Kahn proposes a return to secularism—whose origins she locates in the art, literature, and political theory of the early modern period—and argues in defense of literature and art as a force for secular liberal culture. Kahn draws on theorists such as Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, Walter Benjamin, and Hannah Arendt and their readings of Shakespeare, Hobbes, Machiavelli, and Spinoza to illustrate that the dialogue between these modern and early modern figures can help us rethink the contemporary problem of political theology. Twentieth-century critics, she shows, saw the early modern period as a break from the older form of political theology that entailed the theological legitimization of the state. Rather, the period signaled a new emphasis on a secular notion of human agency and a new preoccupation with the ways art and fiction intersected the terrain of religion. Reclaiming a role for the arts in contemporary debates about liberalism and political theology, The Future of Illusion articulates a new defense of what Hans Blumenberg called “the legitimacy” of our modern secular age.

Su questo libro

L'autore:

Victoria Kahn is the Katharine Bixby Hotchkis Chair in English and professor of comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley, and lives in Berkeley. She is the author ofRhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance; Machiavellian Rhetoric: From the Counter-Reformation to Milton; andWayward Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640–1674.

Su questa edizione

• Editore: University of Chicago Press
• Data di pubblicazione: 2016
• ISBN 10: 022637937X
• ISBN 13: 9780226379371
• Rilegatura: Copertina flessibile
• Numero di pagine: 260