Political Theology and its Discontents

With Political Theology and Its Discontents, K. Daniel Cho and Boštjan Nedoh present a series of powerful challenges to Carl Schmitt’s still-influential notion of political theology. Schmitt sometimes is simply dismissed for his Nazism. At other times, leftist critical engagements with him tend merely to appropriate his conceptions of sovereignty and the friend-enemy distinction as useful for radical leftism too. What distinguishes Political Theology and Its Discontents is that it convincingly demonstrates how bringing Freudian and Lacanian psychoanalysis to bear on Schmittian political theology utterly transforms the latter. The psychoanalytic reinterpretations of Schmitt’s ideas and texts offered by the essays in this volume reveal that neither politics nor theology can be limited to what Schmitt took them to be. Cho and Nedoh’s Political Theology and Its Discontents is a timely, invaluable, and highly original reconsideration of the contemporary interrelationships between politics and religion in Schmitt’s wake. Nobody concerned with our current geo-political circumstances can afford to ignore this path-breaking collection. * Adrian Johnston, Distinguished Professor of Philosophy, University of New Mexico, Albuquerque, USA *
Political Theology and Its Discontents refuses to let political theology rest—it wrestles with it until it confesses something new. Re-examining political theory through the prism of psychoanalysis, these essays turn it into a laboratory of critical invention. Here, the sacred meets the symptomatic, sovereignty meets the unconscious, and the Schmittian legacy is turned inside out. In this encounter, the only true sovereignty left is thought itself. * Alenka Zupancic, Professor at the European Graduate School and the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts *