Marika Rose, ‘A Political Theology of Disenchantment’

Wednesday, 21 April 2021 , 4pm

In this paper I will suggest that the invention of the secular and the modern takes place as and alongside the invention of sovereignty, private property, and a political, theological, and disciplinary concern for propriety. Rather than escaping the binary poles of the Christian and secular, then, in this paper I will explore the theme of magic, which is improper to both; and narratives of enchantment and disenchantment which have been important to the struggle between the Christian and the secular, as the secular has sought to escape the clutches of the Christian and the religious, and the Christian has sought to re-establish its sovereign power. If, on the one hand, disenchantment marks the break between medieval Christendom and secular modernity, then magic exists at the border of both, not so much lost in the transition as transposed from being Christendom’s rejected other to being modernity’s rejected other. It is this transposition which, I want to suggest, make both magic and enchantment proper - or, rather, improper - subjects for political theological enquiry, taking us not quite beyond but rather to the borders of and between the Christian and the secular

Marika Rose is Senior Lecturer in Philosophical Theology at the University of Winchester. She works at the intersection of continental philosophy and theology; her current project focuses on angels, cyborgs, and the political theology of disenchantment. Her first book, A Theology of Failure: Žižek Against Christian Innocence was published by Fordham University Press in 2019.

Part of the Association for Continental Philosophy of Religion seminars

To attend, please email Steven Shakespeare on shakess@hope.ac.uk for a link.

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