CONF: Re-Describing the Sacred/Secular Divide: The Legal Story II

University of Buffalo Law School, 1-2 May 2009

Conference: "Re-Describing the Sacred/Secular Divide: The Legal Story II"

"For the walls collapse and the spaces which were once distinct intermingle and penetrate each other, as in a labyrinthine architecture of light." (Carl Schmitt, Political Theology II)

This conference brings together scholars of law, humanities and the social sciences for a sustained conversation regarding contemporary relations between law and religion. Public policy in this area is being reconsidered at every level of government in many parts of the world, and the boundaries between the "sacred" and the "secular" seem very much in play in a variety of contexts and traditions. The conference seeks to diagnose and re-describe our current environment and to deepen understanding of the dynamics connecting law and religion.

www.law.buffalo.edu/baldycenter/sacredSecularDivide09.html

Panel II on 1 May, 1-3 pm, is particularly concerned with "Law and Political Theology":

- Paul Kahn (Yale Law School): "Why Political Theology Again"
- Robert Yelle (History, University of Memphis): "Moses' Veil: Secularization as Christian Myth"
- Leonard Kaplan (Law, University of Wisconsin): "The Political as Prior: Arendt, Schmitt and Strauss"
- Bruce Rosenstock (Religious Studies, University of Illinois, Urbana): "Sovereign Impunity: The Theologico-Political Horizon of the International Criminal Court"

Two papers from Panel VI "Sacrifice" on 2 May, 3-5 pm:

- Banu Bargu (Politics, New School for Social Research): "Stasiology: Political Theology and the Figure of the Sacrificial Enemy"
- Thomas Blom Hansen (Sociology and Anthropology, University of Amsterdam): "Cool Passion: The Political Theology of Modern Conviction"

Abstracts of all papers can be found on the conference website.

Registration is open for both Friday and Saturday, 1 and 2 May. Register for the conference by sending your name, address (including institutional affiliation), email address, and telephone number to Anita Mazurek: amazurek@buffalo.edu

Indicate whether you will attend on Friday, Saturday, or both days. There is no registration fee, but registration is required as space is limited.

CFP: The Absent Center: A Graduate Student Conference

University of Texas at Austin, Government Department,
19-20 February 2010

Call for papers: “The Absent Center: A Graduate Student Conference on Contemporary Issues in Political Theology”

Keynote speakers:

- Simon Critchley (New School for Social Research)
- Eric Santner (University of Chicago)

The secular Enlightenment sought to replace religion as a foundation for political legitimacy and personal meaning. It led to a profound disappointment, one not specific to contemporary life. Even Spinoza, the great rationalist and philosopher of immanence, feared for a society lacking any belief in salvation whatsoever.

Precisely because the transition to secular modernity has failed, contemporary society has invested with renewed critical interest and urgency the age-old question: “What might be the best normative center for any society?” Even those who say with Nietzsche that “God is dead” would likely concede that a divine center, even though absent and yet to be replaced, retains for many a powerful force upon political imagination.

The Absent Center Conference will examine these circumstances in terms of the following questions: Is a normative center necessary for political life? Are multiple centers possible? If so, which can or ought to be affirmed, and who should decide, by what criteria? Alternatively, can political community and political action be centerless, as philosophers such as Alain Badiou and Simon Critchley argue? Can secular reason and its contemporary political form – liberal democracy – harness the passions and channel the grievances of a thoroughly secular political life? Can alternative post-secular forms of political life be imagined? Could they ever be realized without a return to the religious?

Graduate students interested in presenting a paper should e-mail an abstract of no more than 300 words, together with a CV, to: absentcenterconference@gmail.com

Submission deadline: 1 August 2009

Authors of accepted proposals will be notified in early September 2009.

CFP: Democracy's Linkage to Capitalism

Please circulate widely! Blog about it! etc.

Call for papers: “Democracy's Linkage to Capitalism”

Fourth Annual International Symposium of the Sussex Centre for the Individual and Society (SCIS), 7-9 September 2009, in Geneva, Switzerland

For decades, scholars have been describing the period we live in as “late capitalism”. Why then have so many people been surprised that capitalism could indeed fall into a global crisis? And how do we explain the silence of the political left in the face of that crisis of the despised capitalist order? Besides the academic self-assertion of a few leftist scholars and publicists that had already given up on the revolution, there appears to be no organized political movement (anywhere) that seeks to overthrow capitalism now that it is weak. Anti- and alter-globalization movements and protests (most recently observed at the Nato and G20 summits) are smaller now than they were ten years ago. New scholarship is scarce on the failure of (neo-)liberal political-economic theories and the “science” of Economics.

The reason for all this, I propose, is that we are only too aware that any fundamental criticism of capitalism in the current situation would also imply a fundamental critique of democracy. As we all know, it is democratic nation states that keep capitalism alive now. Never before has it been so obvious that democracy is intrinsically linked to capitalism. No one dares to point it out: whoever wants to fight capitalism now must be prepared to fight democracy as well.

I argued this first in 2004 in my paper “Fighting Capitalism and Democracy”:

books.google.com/books?printsec=frontcover&id=KkMdJtaaeOYC#PPA187,M1

A summary of which is to be found here:

www.political-theology-agenda.blogspot.com/2009/04/fighting-capitalism-and-democracy.html

Why don't people dare to criticize democracy? While capitalism has been in crises before (though arguably not of such global dimensions), it is the first time that there exists no obvious alternative to capitalism and democracy. At the time of the last crises, socialism/communism or even fascism seemed viable political options. They are not anymore, and no new alternatives have arisen. China has become capitalist, and so has Russia. All criticisms of democracy available to us hail from a time when democracy had not been consolidated yet, in most countries. All this results in empty gestures of (journalistic) criticism of capitalism, without political content or demands.

On this, see my book “Anti-Democratic Thought”:

books.google.com/books?printsec=frontcover&id=KkMdJtaaeOYC

None of this should stop us from using the moment to further investigate the intrinsic linkage of democracy to capitalism. Papers on this and related themes are invited from affiliated and non-affiliated scholars of any discipline or background. Papers may be theoretical and/or empirical in nature.

Deadline for proposals is 30 June 2009, but later submissions may be accepted. Earlier submission is strongly encouraged and proposals may be accepted as they come in. Please send your proposal to: e.kofmel@scis-calibrate.org

SCIS Symposia are small interdisciplinary workshop-style events with 15-20 participants. Each paper is allocated about an hour for presentation and discussion. Previous SCIS Symposia took place at the University of Sussex and the Institute of Development Studies, Brighton, England (2006); University of Pisa and Hotel Santa Croce in Fossabanda, Pisa, Italy (2007); and Sciences Po/The Institute for Political Studies in Paris, France (2008). Keynote speakers included full professors from the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard; Duke University; King's College London/British House of Lords; etc.

As always, no fees will be charged for participation in this Symposium, and no funding is available for participants' travel and accommodation cost. We will be glad to issue letters of invitation on request though to assist participants with applications to their usual sources of funding. All participants are responsible to make their own travel and accommodation arrangements. The Symposium starts Monday afternoon and ends Wednesday at lunchtime.

Because we expect that particularly doctoral candidates and young researchers may experience problems obtaining funding for travel in the current economic situation, we will also accept tabled papers (i.e. authors do not need to be present personally; their full papers will be circulated among all participants prior to the Symposium). If in such a case you would like to make a video of your presentation, it can be shown to participants during the Symposium. If not stated otherwise, we will assume that proposed papers are to be presented in person in Geneva.

Erich Kofmel
Managing Director
Sussex Centre for the Individual and Society (SCIS)
http://www.scis-calibrate.org

Postal address:
Sussex Centre for the Individual and Society
1200 Geneva
Switzerland

SCIS is an international association under Swiss law.

Fighting capitalism and democracy (summarily)

“What has been, that will be; what has been done, that will be done. Nothing is new under the sun.” – Qoheleth 1:9

The concluding paper in my volume “Anti-Democratic Thought”, entitled “Fighting Capitalism and Democracy”, was written in 2004, long before the global financial crisis set in. Surveying various bodies of theory and research (historical and empirical evidence, liberal and modernization theory, among them), the paper argues that democracy and capitalism are inextricably linked – and goes on to ask what this means for a politics of resistance.

The paper finds that capitalism can exist (for a lengthy period of time) without needing or leading to democracy. (Ultimately, though, every form of capitalism will lead to some form of democracy.) Democracy, on the other hand, cannot exist without capitalism. (The few cases in which democracy survived in not-yet-capitalist circumstances only confirm that rule – the reasons for the survival of democracy lie in circumstances outside the democracy-capitalism nexus.)

I didn't need the global financial crisis to realize this. However, the financial crisis most certainly has confirmed all my findings in that much earlier paper. Democratic governments everywhere have found it necessary to stabilize the capitalist economic system(s) without which these democracies would fail immediately. (Due, for example, to popular uprisings caused by economic distress of the population.)

My paper comes to some conclusions. If the basic assumptions of the paper have been reinforced by the financial crisis, so must have been the conclusions drawn from the linkage between capitalism and democracy: whoever wants to fight capitalism (like Islamist terrorists or the anti- and alter-globalization protesters we observed most recently at the Nato and G20 summits) must be prepared to fight democracy as well.

Here a summary of the argument (of much interest to people engaged in and with political theology, I am sure):

Since the 1950s, political scientists, historians, sociologists, and economists have been attempting to prove scientifically common sense observations about an inherent linkage between capitalism and democracy (“Any causal glance at the world will show that poor countries tend to have authoritarian regimes, and wealthy countries democratic ones”: Przeworski et al.: Democracy and Development).

They built upon arguments presented in the literature that emerged in the wake of the Second World War and the independence of former colonies on the economic development of so-called underdeveloped or developing countries. Soon this body of literature led to the academic discipline of development studies and a scientific theory of development, usually called “modernization theory”, which was of major influence in the 1950s and 60s and again, along with neo-liberalism, in the 1980s and 90s.

While many of the early authors of modernization theory were only concerned with the economic side of capitalist development, others such as Seymour Martin Lipset (1959 in his article Some Social Requisites of Democracy) assumed that economic development – capitalism –, would lead to political development – democracy.

One year earlier than Lipset, in an often cited non-empirical study (The Passing of Traditional Society), Daniel Lerner had already proposed a causal sequence of urbanization leading to literacy and media growth, which in turn would lead to the development of institutions of participatory politics. Karl de Schweinitz (Industrialization and Democracy) went on to claim that the process of causation runs from industrialization to political democracy and he linked this to people being “disciplined to the requirements of the industrial order” and therefore more willing to resolve conflicts, arising for example from the distribution of national income, peacefully.

De Schweinitz affirmed that this form of rationality would only develop “in a high-income economy”, but not in a mere “subsistence economy”. Samuel P. Huntington, an influential author of the second wave of modernization theory, argued that democratization will usually happen “at the middle levels of economic development. In poor countries democratization is unlikely; in rich countries it has already occurred” (The Third Wave).

Processes associated with industrialization make it, in Huntington's eyes, more difficult for authoritarian regimes to control the population, not least because they promote the growth of an urban middle class.

With their writings authors of modernization theory prepared the theoretical foundations for numerous comparative and cross-cultural studies trying to establish correlations and the causal relationship between capitalism and democracy. The task is made more difficult by the fact that there is no agreement as to what constitutes either “capitalism” or “democracy” and the proper measures of both remain contested.

This as well as the application of a wide array of research designs did however not change the fundamental finding of such studies that democracy, at the national level, stands little chance of survival if not coupled to a capitalist economic system.

In my paper, I suggest that the few deviant cases in which a democratic constitution that predated capitalism did not fail were sustained by variables external to both capitalism and democracy.

While there is disagreement as to whether democratization is a linear or near-linear positive function of economic growth or a threshold phenomenon associated with a country (or its citizens) reaching a particular level of income, either accounts for the fact that capitalism can, and does, exist in countries without democracy.

Still others have argued that only in countries above a certain economic threshold democracy will not be overthrown once it has been introduced. Steady economic growth appears to mitigate the danger of failure of democracy even in circumstances in which such a threshold has not yet been reached. Democracy, in its turn, has been shown to stimulate further economic growth.

Before Francis Fukuyama proclaimed The End of History and that liberal democracy and capitalism might constitute the “end point of mankind’s ideological evolution”, only once in twenty years a major liberal author had bothered to write about the linkage of democracy to capitalism at all, and then, as Milton Friedman put it, “to keep options open until circumstances make change necessary [...], to keep them alive and available until the politically impossible becomes politically inevitable” (Capitalism and Freedom).

Jeremy Bentham and James Mill had been the first though to become convinced, in the early nineteenth century, that far from destroying “property” the poor would let themselves be guided by the property-owning classes. Vladimir Lenin thus called democracy “the best possible political shell for capitalism”. Capitalism, he concluded, could not be overcome by democratic means (The State and Revolution).

Oswald Spengler put it succinctly: “In the form of democracy, money has won”. It becomes effective, he said (often repeated since), by manufacturing public opinion and enslaving free will through the media and campaigning and the systemic corruption of all the people (The Decline of the West).

Henry C. Simons, the first of many professors to turn the University of Chicago into a centre of so-called neo-liberal thought, took the “preservation of democratic institutions” to be one of the “objectives of economic policy” in the US in the face of communism and fascism (A Positive Program for Laissez Faire).

Decades of economic growth under democracy as well as the welfare state, much despised by the Chicago school, further consolidated the capitalist economic system in the West by bestowing property and entitlements upon almost every citizen and thus muting fundamental opposition.

The notion that democracy is intrinsically linked to money, and democratic power is linked to material wealth, is as old as democracy itself. Athenian democracy excluded men who did not own property and Caesar, who brought the Roman Republic to its end, was the richest man of his time.

Wherever a form of democracy arose, be it the Italian city republics or the Swiss ur-cantons, preceding economic development and the introduction of “capitalist” modes of production can be detected. The American Revolution only took place, it appears, once there was a “capitalist” cause to fight for – the spoils of the New World. All Americans were united in their ardent desire for what Alexis de Tocqueville called “material well-being” (Democracy in America).

Much of what has been written against an inherent linkage between capitalism and democracy appears, after the fall of communism, outdated. Socialists may still argue that the two are separable and that one can fight capitalism without harming democracy. However, while capitalist democracy continues, all attempts at socialist democracy collapsed at an early stage.

One cannot fight capitalism, it seems, and replace it with some non-liberal democracy because every form of democracy, if sustained long enough, will in turn give rise to some form of capitalism.

Factors associated with a capitalist economic system are among the necessary preconditions for a stable democracy.

This is the deeper meaning of the inextricable linkage of democracy to capitalism: whoever wants to fight capitalism must be prepared to fight democracy as well.

Being anti-capitalist one must be anti-democratic too.

Islamist terrorists have understood this.

The one who really means to fight the system must stand entirely outside of it.

> Read the full paper here:
books.google.com/books?printsec=frontcover&id=KkMdJtaaeOYC#PPA187,M1

CFP: Special issue of “Telos” on Carl Schmitt's “Hamlet or Hecuba”

David Pan and Julia Reinhard Lupton are the editors of a special issue of the journal “Telos”.

In 1956, Carl Schmitt published a short volume entitled “Hamlet oder Hekuba: Der Einbruch der Zeit in das Spiel”, based on a series of lectures he held on the topic in Düsseldorf the year before. A core section of the essay was translated into English and published in a special issue of “Telos” devoted to Schmitt’s writing in 1987. Twenty-two years later, Telos Press is now publishing a complete English edition of “Hamlet or Hecuba”, translated by David Pan and Jennifer Rust and with introductions by David Pan, Jennifer Rust, and Julia Reinhard Lupton.

The planned special issue of “Telos” invites responses to Schmitt’s Hamlet interpretation from a broad range of perspectives in order to promote a lively discussion. Topics might include: the motivations, symptomology, and insights of Schmitt’s reading of Hamlet; the relation of Hamlet or Hecuba to Schmitt’s other postwar writings; Schmitt’s essay in the framework of the German Shakespeare and/or the German postwar political context; Schmitt’s encounters with Benjamin and Freud through the medium of Hamlet; Schmitt’s cultural and literary theory, including his understanding of myth and tragedy; Schmitt and historicism; Schmitt’s dramaturgy; Schmitt’s ideas on political representation; Schmitt, Shakespeare, and political theology.

We seek submissions of approximately 6,000 words. Deadline: 1 March 2010.

Please direct inquiries to David Pan, Department of German, University of California at Irvine: dtpan@uci.edu
and Julia Reinhard Lupton, Department of English, University of California at Irvine: jrlupton@uci.edu

Book: “The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?”

Those of us who still seek to understand what Slavoj Žižek and political theology could possibly have to do with each other may be interested in the most recent publication from the prolific Creston Davis editorial stables: “The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?”, a dialogue between Žižek and Radical Orthodox theologian John Milbank (MIT Press 2009).

mitpress.mit.edu/catalog/item/default.asp?ttype=2&tid=11672

From the book ad:

“What matters is not so much that Žižek is endorsing a demythologized, disenchanted Christianity without transcendence, as that he is offering in the end (despite what he sometimes claims) a heterodox version of Christian belief.” – John Milbank

“To put it even more bluntly, my claim is that it is Milbank who is effectively guilty of heterodoxy, ultimately of a regression to paganism: in my atheism, I am more Christian than Milbank.” – Slavoj Žižek

In this corner, philosopher Slavoj Žižek, who represents the critical-materialist stance against religion's illusions; in the other corner, “radical orthodox” theologian John Milbank, an influential and provocative thinker who argues that theology is the only foundation upon which knowledge, politics, and ethics can stand. In “The Monstrosity of Christ”, Žižek and Milbank go head to head for three rounds, employing an impressive arsenal of moves to advance their positions and press their respective advantages. By the closing bell, they have proven themselves worthy adversaries – and have also shown that faith and reason are not simply and intractably opposed.

Žižek has long been interested in the emancipatory potential offered by Christian theology. And Milbank, seeing global capitalism as the new century's greatest ethical challenge, has pushed his own ontology in more political and materialist directions. Their debate in “The Monstrosity of Christ” concerns nothing less than the future of religion, secularity, and political hope in light of a monsterful event – God becoming human. For the first time since Žižek's turn toward theology, we have a true debate between an atheist and a theologian about the very meaning of theology, Christ, the Church, the Holy Ghost, universality, and the foundations of logic. The result goes far beyond the popularized atheist/theist point/counterpoint of recent books by Christopher Hitchens, Richard Dawkins, and others.

Žižek begins, and Milbank answers, countering dialectics with "paradox." The debate centers on the nature of and relation between paradox and parallax, between analogy and dialectics, between transcendent glory and liberation.