Series:

New Perspectives in Ontology

2 total works

Cover of The Political Theology of Schelling

Saitya Brata Das rigorously examines Schelling's theologico-political works and sets his thought against his more dominant contemporary, Hegel. Das argues that Schelling inaugurates a new thinking outside of Occidental metaphysics, by a paradoxical manner of exit, which prepares for the post-metaphysical philosophy of Martin Heidegger, Franz Rosenzweig and Jacques Derrida.

This new reflection, outside of the Universal world-historical politics of modernity, is achieved by re-thinking religion as eschatology. Intervening in contemporary debates on post-secularism and the return to religion, Das shows that religion, in an essential sense, always opens up infinitude from the heart of finitude, to an irreducible outside of the profane order of worldly hegemonies. Religion here assumes a negative political theology of exception without sovereign power.

Cover of The Political Theology of Kierkegaard
Reconstructs a negative political eschatology through thinking of an exception without sovereignty
  • Intervenes in contemporary debates on post-secularism and the return to religion
  • Constructs a political theology that radically puts into question the logic of sovereign power
  • Re-thinks the place of religion as the radical outside that does not function as the legitimising principle of sovereignty in today's world of mass consumption
  • Sets the agenda for re-thinking the relation of religion and politics for our contemporary historical condition

Saitya Brata Das argues that in Kierkegaard's work we find a radical eschatological critique, not only of the liberal-humanist pathos of modernity but also the political theology of Carl Schmitt, that seeks to legitimise the sovereign power of the state by an appeal to a divine or theological foundation.

Relating Kierkegaard's notion of 'Christianity without Christendom' to the Schellingian eschatological critique of sovereignty, he shows how Schelling's insistence on the eschatological difference between religion and politics is transformed and further intensified in Kierkegaard's critique of historical reason. Such an exception without sovereignty, Das argues, is the very task of our contemporary time.