The Great Global Covid-19 Pandemic has functioned in recent weeks as a gigantic, media-tinged Rorschacht ink blot upon which anyone and everyone is invited to project both their deepest political fears and their most cherished fantasies. That the effects of the pandemic are totally unprecedented, at least for modern times,…
The Dialectic Of Enlightenment From A Postsecular Lens, Part 8 (Roger Green)
In my previous post, I discussed some of the parodic qualities by which the notion of madness occurred in the generation following Horkheimer and Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment. Many readers will easily see the fluid connection with Michel Foucault’s work, and it has been part of my intention in this…
The Dialectic Of Enlightenment From A Postsecular Lens, Part 6 (Roger Green)
As I ended my previous post in this series, the postsecular moment has brought with it a broadening of application of the anti-Semitism the Horkheimer and Adorno describe with respect to the literary figure of “the Jew.” It is especially important to note this transposition with respect to current U.S.…
The Dialectic Of Enlightenment From A Postsecular Lens, Part 5
In this series of posts, I have been reviewing Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno’s Dialectic of Enlightenment from a ‘post secular’ lens. In my last post, I was tracing the authors’ descriptions of anti-Semitic behavior as “blindness,” and I quipped that this blindness is repositioned by neoliberalism, that it speaks “in no…
The Dialectic Of Enlightenment From A Postsecular Lens, Part 4 (Roger Green)
I have been working through a reading of Max Horkheimer and Thedor Adorno’s classic work of Critical Theory, Dialectic of Enlightenment. I am particularly interested in the use of literary concepts in their critique. As we have seen in earlier posts, their first few chapters moved historically, seeing the core…
Neoliberalism And The Cultural Politics Of Shame (Samantha Pinson Wrisley)
Shame as an affect, an emotion, or a feeling serves a critical purpose in the construction and maintenance of hegemonic power relations. Sara Ahmed defines it in her book The Cultural Politics of Emotion as an “intense and painful sensation that is bound up in how the self feels about…
The Dialectic Of Enlightenment From A Postsecular Lens, Part 3 (Roger Green)
In my previous post, I took a turn from direct analysis of Dialectic of Enlightenment to engage with David Scott’s writing on tragic disposition in Conscripts of Modernity. I then focused on Emmanuel Levinas’s early essay, “Reality and Its Shadow.” I merged Levinas’s pessimism concerning art and his call for a…
The Dialectic Of Enlightenment From A Postsecular Lens – Part 1 (Roger Green)
I am often perplexed, sometimes disturbed, and generally intrigued by the use of Literature in philosophical arguments. While there is a robust tradition of Marxian-influenced material critique within Cultural Studies, the conception of “the Literary” within literary studies also went through its own kind of “secularization” during the latter half…
Amorous Agonism And The Allergy To Difference – Part 3 (Roger Green)
I ended my previous post pointing to a critique of Spirit in its eurochristian derivation. This series of posts has been based on a broader critique of Catherine Keller’s Political Theology of the Earth wherein she relies on a concept of amorous agonism to develop a processually-based (or constructivist) theology on a tweaked…
Nor On The Soles of Her Shoes? The King Of Infinite Space (Roger Green)
The tendency toward universalizing concepts has its legacy within the foundation of Religious Studies as a discipline, which, though little known outside the field, has recently interrogated its underwritten Protestant biases. This work continues, despite the fact that many religiously sentimental scholars merely take discussions of “postsecularism” to be an…