Judith Butler and Theology

Judith Butler and Theology
Author: Anna Maria Riedl
Publisher: Brill Schoningh
Total Pages: 166
Release: 2021-05-07
Genre:
ISBN: 9783506715081

Judith Butler is regarded as one of the most popular philosophers of the present. Famous for her theory of gender her wide-ranging work explored such themes as language, power, recognition, vulnerability, mourning, and grievability, revolutions, democratic movements, and resistance. This book provides an overview of Butler's rich scholarship and utilizes selected examples to present opportunities for a theological approach to her work. Of particular interest in this regard are the clear parallels between Butler's thought and progressive theologies, such as Liberation Theology or the New Political Theology founded by Johann Baptist Metz. With attention to Butlers Jewish background, this unique interdisciplinary investigation bridges Butler's thought, political philosophy, and Christian theology. Judith Butler and Theology considers how the reflections and insights of this critical intellectual can help set a constructive theology for the challenges of our century.

The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere

The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere
Author: Judith Butler
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 149
Release: 2011-03-02
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 023152725X

The Power of Religion in the Public Sphere represents a rare opportunity to experience a diverse group of preeminent philosophers confronting one pervasive contemporary concern: what role does or should religion play in our public lives? Reflecting on her recent work concerning state violence in Israel-Palestine, Judith Butler explores the potential of religious perspectives for renewing cultural and political criticism, while Jürgen Habermas, best known for his seminal conception of the public sphere, thinks through the ambiguous legacy of the concept of "the political" in contemporary theory. Charles Taylor argues for a radical redefinition of secularism, and Cornel West defends civil disobedience and emancipatory theology. Eduardo Mendieta and Jonathan VanAntwerpen detail the immense contribution of these philosophers to contemporary social and political theory, and an afterword by Craig Calhoun places these attempts to reconceive the significance of both religion and the secular in the context of contemporary national and international politics.

Human Being and Vulnerability

Human Being and Vulnerability
Author: Joseph Sverker
Publisher: BoD – Books on Demand
Total Pages: 295
Release: 2020-11-24
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 3838213416

Joseph Sverker explores the division between social constructivism and a biologist essentialism by means of Christian theology. For this, Sverker uses a fascinating approach: He lets critical theorist Judith Butler, psycholinguist Steven Pinker, and systematic theologian Colin Gunton interact. While theology plays a central part to make the interaction possible, the context is also that of the school and the effect of institutions on the pupil as a human being and learner. In order to understand what underlies the division between nature and nurture, or biology and the social in school, Sverker develops new central concepts such as a kenotic personalism, a weak ontology of relationality, and a relational and performative reading of evolution. He argues that most fundamental for what it is to be human is the person, vulnerability, bodiliness, openness to the other, and dependence. Sverker concludes that the division between constructivism and essentialism discloses a deeper divide, namely that between fundamentally vulnerable persons on the one hand and constructed independent individuals on the other.

Unbecoming Subjects

Unbecoming Subjects
Author: Annika Thiem
Publisher:
Total Pages: 152
Release: 2006
Genre: Crimes against humanity
ISBN: 9780823248582

Using the horrors of the war in Bosnia to develop meaningfully adequate accounts of evil within the context of war crimes and crimes against humanity, this book states that since the foundations of the social are found in human action, evil's assault on these foundations results in the demise of the social.

Parting Ways

Parting Ways
Author: Judith Butler
Publisher: Columbia University Press
Total Pages: 403
Release: 2012-07-24
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 0231517955

Judith Butler follows Edward Said's late suggestion that through a consideration of Palestinian dispossession in relation to Jewish diasporic traditions a new ethos can be forged for a one-state solution. Butler engages Jewish philosophical positions to articulate a critique of political Zionism and its practices of illegitimate state violence, nationalism, and state-sponsored racism. At the same time, she moves beyond communitarian frameworks, including Jewish ones, that fail to arrive at a radical democratic notion of political cohabitation. Butler engages thinkers such as Edward Said, Emmanuel Levinas, Hannah Arendt, Primo Levi, Martin Buber, Walter Benjamin, and Mahmoud Darwish as she articulates a new political ethic. In her view, it is as important to dispute Israel's claim to represent the Jewish people as it is to show that a narrowly Jewish framework cannot suffice as a basis for an ultimate critique of Zionism. She promotes an ethical position in which the obligations of cohabitation do not derive from cultural sameness but from the unchosen character of social plurality. Recovering the arguments of Jewish thinkers who offered criticisms of Zionism or whose work could be used for such a purpose, Butler disputes the specific charge of anti-Semitic self-hatred often leveled against Jewish critiques of Israel. Her political ethic relies on a vision of cohabitation that thinks anew about binationalism and exposes the limits of a communitarian framework to overcome the colonial legacy of Zionism. Her own engagements with Edward Said and Mahmoud Darwish form an important point of departure and conclusion for her engagement with some key forms of thought derived in part from Jewish resources, but always in relation to the non-Jew. Butler considers the rights of the dispossessed, the necessity of plural cohabitation, and the dangers of arbitrary state violence, showing how they can be extended to a critique of Zionism, even when that is not their explicit aim. She revisits and affirms Edward Said's late proposals for a one-state solution within the ethos of binationalism. Butler's startling suggestion: Jewish ethics not only demand a critique of Zionism, but must transcend its exclusive Jewishness in order to realize the ethical and political ideals of living together in radical democracy.

Butler on Whitehead

Butler on Whitehead
Author: Roland Faber
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
Total Pages: 334
Release: 2012
Genre: Biography & Autobiography
ISBN: 073917276X

Considered together, Butler and Whitehead draw from a wide palette of disciplines to develop distinctive theories of becoming, of syntactical violence, and creative opportunities of limitation. The contributors of this volume offer a unique contribution to and for the humanities in the struggles of politics, economy, ecology, and the arts

Walter Benjamin and Theology

Walter Benjamin and Theology
Author: Colby Dickinson
Publisher: Fordham Univ Press
Total Pages: 341
Release: 2016-05-19
Genre: Religion
ISBN: 082327019X

In the Arcades Project, Walter Benjamin writes that his work is “related to theology as blotting pad is related to ink. It is saturated with it.” For a thinker so decisive to critical literary, cultural, political, and aesthetic writings over the past half-century, Benjamin’s relationship to theological matters has been less observed than it should, even despite a variety of attempts over the last four decades to illuminate the theological elements latent within his eclectic and occasional writings. Such attempts, though undeniably crucial to comprehending his thought, remain in need of deepened systematic analysis. In bringing together some of the most renowned experts from both sides of the Atlantic, Walter Benjamin and Theology seeks to establish a new site from which to address both the issue of Benjamin’s relationship with theology and all the crucial aspects that Benjamin himself grappled with when addressing the field and operations of theological inquiry.

The Force of Nonviolence

The Force of Nonviolence
Author: Judith Butler
Publisher: Verso Books
Total Pages: 194
Release: 2020-02-04
Genre: Political Science
ISBN: 1788732782

Judith Butler’s new book shows how an ethic of nonviolence must be connected to a broader political struggle for social equality. Further, it argues that nonviolence is often misunderstood as a passive practice that emanates from a calm region of the soul, or as an individualist ethical relation to existing forms of power. But, in fact, nonviolence is an ethical position found in the midst of the political field. An aggressive form of nonviolence accepts that hostility is part of our psychic constitution, but values ambivalence as a way of checking the conversion of aggression into violence. One contemporary challenge to a politics of nonviolence points out that there is a difference of opinion on what counts as violence and nonviolence. The distinction between them can be mobilised in the service of ratifying the state’s monopoly on violence. Considering nonviolence as an ethical problem within a political philosophy requires a critique of individualism as well as an understanding of the psychosocial dimensions of violence. Butler draws upon Foucault, Fanon, Freud, and Benjamin to consider how the interdiction against violence fails to include lives regarded as ungrievable. By considering how ‘racial phantasms’ inform justifications of state and administrative violence, Butler tracks how violence is often attributed to those who are most severely exposed to its lethal effects. The struggle for nonviolence is found in movements for social transformation that reframe the grievability of lives in light of social equality and whose ethical claims follow from an insight into the interdependency of life as the basis of social and political equality.

Bodies that Matter

Bodies that Matter
Author: Judith Butler
Publisher: Psychology Press
Total Pages: 308
Release: 1993
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 9780415903660

The author of "Gender Trouble" further develops her distinctive theory of gender by examining the workings of power at the most material dimensions of sex and sexuality. Butler examines how the power of heterosexual hegemony forms the matter of bodies, sex, and gender.