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Genealogies of Political Modernity

Publisher:
, 2020
ISBN: 9781350079489
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What is political modernity? And how much of its concepts and structures has changed or remained the same with the advent of the so-called globalization? What does it mean, from a political perspective, that we live in a postmodern era? This book discusses these issues in light of the key authors and texts of the continental philosophical tradition: from Carl Schmitt to Giorgio Agamben, from Thomas Hobbes to Michel Foucault. Looking at the roots of the current historical crisis that characterizes Western political regimes, this book gazes into the past in order to trace the possible development of our current global era, in which all the classical concepts and our symbolic resources seem to be called into question, leaving a vacuum of meaning for political action as much as for political theory.

Drawing on the work of Agamben, Foucault, Habermas, and Heidegger, amongst others, this book provides a critical assessment of the political formation of modernity in the advent of globalization.

Includes diagrams for clarity and five artwork illustrations
A fresh intervention into the topical debate on the conceptual transition from modernity to post-modernity or globality
A contribution to timely, cutting edge issues (spatiality, political sacrifice, postsecularity, etc.) whose relevance is on the rise, but whose investigation is still underdeveloped

List of Illustrations
Acknowledgments
Introduction: The Walking Tree

Part I: On Sovereignty:
1. Rex sacrorum: On the Origins and Evolution of Sovereign Power
2. Space and Sovereignty: A Reverse Perspective

Part II: Political Theologies
3. Encounters at the End of a World: Max Weber, Carl Schmitt, and the Tyranny of Values
4. Until the End of the World: René Girard, Carl Schmitt, and the Origins of Violence
5. Religion and Political Form: Schmitt contra Habermas

Part III: History and Archaeology:
6. The Myth of Origin: Archaeology and History in the Work of Giorgio Agamben and René Girard
7. Imago mortis, imago Dei: An Archaeology of Political Sacrifice

Bibliography
Index

Genealogies of Political Modernity is an excellent book, examining an important aspect of political modernity, its immanentisation and secularisation of theological ways of thinking. The book offers an important and necessary genealogy of political modernity, particularly in the light of our current political crises.

Despite a key supposition of modernity that it has broken with tradition and started history from a clean slate, its political, social, economic, and other realities are firmly anchored in the past it despises. Antonio Cerella has done a marvellous job of exposing modernity's largely disavowed spatiotemporal roots along with a plethora of contingencies that surprise the thrust of their predetermined movement. The result is a book that is a 'must-read' for anyone interested in the history of the present.

Antonio Cerella is Senior Lecturer in Political Theory and International Studies at Kingston University London, UK.

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    $38.65