A01=Victoria Kahn
aesthetics
agency
art
Author_Victoria Kahn
authority
carl schmitt
Category=DSB
Category=QRAM2
eq_bestseller
eq_biography-true-stories
eq_isMigrated=1
eq_isMigrated=2
eq_nobargain
eq_non-fiction
freud
fundamentalism
hamlet
hannah arendt
hecuba
history
hobbes
imagination
kingship
legitimacy
leo strauss
liberation
literature
machiavelli
monarchy
nonfiction
oppression
philosophy
political theology
politics
power
rebellion
religion
renaissance
resistance
revolution
royalty
secularism
shakespeare
spinoza
state
walter benjamin
Product details
- ISBN 9780226083872
- Weight: 510g
- Dimensions: 16 x 23mm
- Publication Date: 13 Jan 2014
- Publisher: The University of Chicago Press
- Publication City/Country: US
- Product Form: Hardback
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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 Blumberg called "the legitimacy" of our modern secular age.
Victoria Kahn is the Katharine Bixby Hotchkis Chair in English and professor of comparative literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She is the author of Rhetoric, Prudence, and Skepticism in the Renaissance; Machiavellian Rhetoric: From the Counter-Reformation to Milton; and Wayward Contracts: The Crisis of Political Obligation in England, 1640-1674.
