Postsecular History: Political Theology and the Politics of Time (Radical Theologies and Philosophies)

This book explores how contemporary approaches to the meaning of time and history follow patterns that are simultaneously political and theological. Even after postsecular critiques of Christianity, religion, and secularity, many influential ways of dividing time and history continue to be formed by providential narratives that mediate between experience and expectation in movements from promise to fulfilment. In response to persistent theological influences within ostensibly secular ways of understanding time and history, __Postsecular History__ revisits and revises the concept of periodization by tracing powerful efforts to divide time into past, present, and future, and by critiquing historical partitions between the Reformation and Enlightenment. Developing a postsecular critique of theopolitical periodization in six chapters, __Postsecular History__ questions how relations of possession, novelty, freedom, and instrumentality implied in the prefix ‘post’ are reproduced in postsecular discourses and the field of political theology. Acknowledgements 6 Note on the Cover Art 9 Praise for Postsecular History 11 Contents 12 About the Author 13 Chapter 1: Introduction 14 What Is the Postsecular? 18 Political Theology 26 The Politics of Periodization 28 Temporal Crises 31 Plan of the Work 33 Chapter 2: Political Theology and the Politics of Time 38 Economic Political Theology 40 Periodization as Theopolitical Economization 56 Contain, Defer, Withhold 61 Conclusion 66 Chapter 3: Postsecular History and the Seventeenth-Century Dutch Collegiants 68 The Radical Enlightenment 70 The Collegiant Movement 75 The Postsecular Epistemology of Daniel Colucciello Barber 85 Collegiant Postsecularity? 91 Conclusion 94 Chapter 4: Fanaticism, Anachronism, and Melville’s Intervals 97 The Radical Reformation 98 Fanaticism and Anachronism 103 Fanaticism: Against Time 103 Fanaticism: Against Representation 110 Caged Interpretations: Figuring Anachronism and Representation 116 Melville’s Intervals 120 Conclusion 129 Chapter 5: Periodization and Providence Between Nietzsche and Augustine 132 Transformations and Metamorphoses 136 Zarathustra’s Parable 140 Augustine on Time and Memory 145 Distentio Animi and the Augenblick 149 Theopolitical Periodization in Zarathustra and the Confessions 151 Conclusion 156 Chapter 6: The Regulation of the Subject by the Technology of Time 159 Technology and Time 161 Stiegler’s Technics 167 Prometheus’s Fire 169 Augustine Returns 172 Cosmotechnics and Settler Time 176 Conclusion 180 Chapter 7: Dorothee Sölle’s Postsecular Political Theology of Waiting 181 Waiting, Experience, and Expectation 192 Conclusion 196 Chapter 8: Conclusion 200 Figural History 201 Dissociation 204 Recapitulation 207 Bibliography 212 Index 226 "This book explores how contemporary approaches to the meaning of time and history follow patterns that are simultaneously political and theological. Even after postsecular critiques of Christianity, religion, and secularity, many influential ways of dividing time and history continue to be formed by providential narratives that mediate between experience and expectation in movements from promise to fulfilment. In response to persistent theological influences within ostensibly secular ways of understanding time and history, Postsecular History revisits and revises the concept of periodization by tracing powerful efforts to divide time into past, present, and future, and by critiquing historical partitions between the Reformation and Enlightenment. Developing a postsecular critique of theopolitical periodization in six chapters, Postsecular History questions how relations of possession, novelty, freedom, and instrumentality implied in the prefix 'post' are reproduced in postsecular discourses and the field of political theology." --Provided by publisher