Browsing by Subject "Politics"

The theologies of St. Augustine and John Howard Yoder are, if at all treated together, typically contrasted. This negative juxtaposition is in so small part due to the very different reputations of each theologian on the question of violence. This dissertation demonstrates that the standard contrast between the theopolitical visions of Yoder and Augustine is mistaken. An introduction portrays the cumulative work of the chapters as the unfolding of a question about the contemporary reception of Augustine and Yoder: Might John Howard Yoder's "pacifism of the messianic community" be received as a radical form of Augustinianism? The dissertation consists of four chapters, each dealing with some aspect of Yoder's or Augustine's thought which, under closer examination, reveals an interesting line of convergence with the thought of the other. The politics of historical interpretation, the challenge of interiority, the aims of historicism, and the nature of "the political" are taken up in succession. An affirmative answer to the overarching question is suggested, but the more important task is to render the question salient for contemporary theologians and ethicists.

Israel's establishment in 1948 in former British-Mandate Palestine as a Jewish country and as a liberal democracy is commonly understood as a form of response to the Holocaust of WWII. Zionist narratives frame Israel's establishment not only as a response to the Holocaust, but also as a return to the Jewish people's original homeland after centuries of wandering in exile. Debates over Israel's policies, particularly with regard to Palestinians and to the country's non-Jewish population, often center on whether Israel's claims to Jewish singularity are at the expense of principles of liberal democracy, international law and universal human rights. In this dissertation, I argue that Israel's emphasis on Jewish singularity can be understood not as a violation of humanism's universalist frameworks, but as a symptom of the violence inherent to these frameworks and to the modern liberal rights-bearing subject on which they are based. Through an analysis of my fieldwork in Israel (2005-2008), I trace the relation between the figures of "Jew" and "Israeli" in terms of their historical genealogies and in contemporary Israeli contexts. Doing so makes legible how European modernity and its concepts of sovereignty, liberalism, the human, and subjectivity are based on a metaphysics of presence that defines the human through a displacement of difference. This displaced difference is manifest in affective expression. This dissertation shows how the figure of the Jew in relation to Israel reveals sexual difference as under erasure by the suppression of alterity in humanism's configuration of man, woman, and animal, and suggests a political subject unable to be sovereign or fully represented in language.

Thousands of public records survive from democratic Athens. Nearly all of them are inscribed on stone (or more rarely metal). A century and more of study has revealed that these inscriptions were the tip of the iceberg. Beyond them was an apparatus of public records, kept on perishable media, that were central to the administration of the city. Call it the paperwork of democracy. What remains to be reconstructed are the processes by which this paperwork was created and the significance of those processes for our understanding of democracy. This dissertation examines the paperwork of making decrees, the basic legislative document in Athens, using literature, court speeches, and inscribed decrees to reconstruct the process by which decrees were written and reused in city politics. It argues that paperwork was done in the central institution of democracy, the assembly; that the orators better known in their capacity as masters of speech were also masters of the rules and discourses of decree-making; that in foreign policy these orators and their audience, the masses, brought the same rigor to documentary texts that they brought to giving and hearing speeches. In sum, where earlier researchers have assumed that paperwork had nothing to do with democracy, this dissertation shows that Athenians were as clever with paperwork as they were with oratory.

Literary modernism followed a century during which philosophical speculations about the mechanistic basis of human life found experimental validation in the work of physiologists, who stressed the power of environment to shape and delimit thought and action. By the late 19th century, the hypothesis that humans were "automata," as Descartes had conjectured, began to seem much more than philosophical speculation, as statesmen and industrialists appropriated blueprints of the human machine originally mapped by the sciences. So dominant was the conjunction of politics and habit that, writing in 1890s, the American psychologist William James would call the automatic operations of body and mind the very engine of political life: "Habit," he declared, "is the enormous fly-wheel of society, its most precious conservative agent. It alone is what keeps us all within the bounds of ordinance, and saves the children of fortune from the envious uprisings of the poor." But James was only anticipating the wide range of thinkers who would associate physiological automatism with politics in the coming years. By century's end, the belief that habit determined social action and circumscribed individual volition was to find wide currency in a variety of cultural fields, including literary modernism.

Situating literary modernism in relation to this emergent sense of political modernity, Automatic Modernism argues that modernists reconfigured the discourse of automatism for political and aesthetic ends. Wary of the new political environment in which government, political parties and industry exploited the science of conditioned reflex to ensure automatic responses from docile subjects, writers of this period turned to the resources of literature in order to both disrupt the clichés of thought and action enforced by environmental stimuli and to imagine forms of politics adapted to the physiologically automatic body. Looking in particular at the fiction and non-fiction work of D. H. Lawrence, Wyndham Lewis, Rebecca West, and Samuel Beckett, this dissertation attempts to understand the recurrent equation of automatic behavior and twentieth-century modernity. Even as modernists vigorously rejected habitual behavior as the very element of twentieth century life that imperiled authentic art and social belonging, they forged alternative notions of bodily being, investing in the potentialities of human automatism as the basis of aesthetic possibility and social coherence. The formal experiments of these modernists emerge, then, as efforts to foreground, manipulate, rupture, and mimic the political habits of readers.

This dissertation examines those scenes in Acts where members of the church are banished, exiled, or displaced from the city, such as Acts 8:1, 13:50, and 16:35-39. It argues that Luke-Acts presents the church as a community of political exiles who have been exiled or banished from the cities of the Roman Empire. This narrative displacement prompts a response or solution, which in Luke-Acts is found in the community itself. Unlike other early Christian texts, which spoke of the church in exile from heaven or awaiting a city to come, Luke-Acts portrays the church itself as this “new city” that becomes a refuge for the displaced believers. Furthermore, exile or homelessness in Luke-Acts is not a problem requiring an otherworldly solution, but a part of the new way of life engendered by the proclamation of the gospel—it is a core part of following the way of Jesus, who himself is exiled from Nazareth in the gospel of Luke.The primary methodology I employ is literary criticism, by which I mean a careful, contextualized reading of Luke-Acts that attends to the form and content of the entire narrative. My reading of Acts is also a contextualized reading, by which I mean a reading that seeks to understand Acts in its late first-century context. This is especially important when talking about exile, since the study of exile in the New Testament has primarily focused on Israel’s exile without an adequate understanding of the socio-historical and literary reality of exile in the first century. To remedy this, I primarily read Luke-Acts alongside the consolatory literature of Plutarch, Musonius Rufus, and Favorinus. These texts address the problem of exile from different perspectives, but they all address the common themes of the loss of one’s homeland, the loss of possessions, and the loss of free speech or παρρησία. By reading Acts alongside these texts, which provide their own alternative visions of political belonging in the face of exile, I show how Luke-Acts envisions a new form of political belonging in local communities centered around the gospel.

This dissertation examines the relationship between architecture and democratic politics in late-modernity. It identifies the refusal of architects to consider the political dimensions of their work following the failures of 20th century High Modernism and the scant attention that the intersection between architecture and politics has received from political theorists as a problem. In order to address these deficiencies, the dissertation argues for the continued impact of architecture and urban planning on modern subject formation, ethics, and politics under the conditions of de-centralized sovereignty that characterize late-modernity. Following an opening chapter which establishes the mutual relation architectural design and political culture in the founding text of political science, Aristotle's Politics, the dissertation offers a genealogical critique of modern architectural design and urban planning practices. It concludes that modern architecture shapes individual and collective political possibilities and a recursive relationship exists between the spaces "we" inhabit and the people that "we" are. In particular, it finds that there is a strong link between practices of external circulation and the interior circulation of thoughts about the self and others. The dissertation concludes by proposing a new understanding of architecture that dynamically relates the design of material structures and the forms of political practices that those designs facilitate. This new definition of architecture combines political theorist Hannah Arendt's concept of "world-building action" with the concept of the "threshold" developed and refined by Dutch architects Aldo van Eyck and Herman Hertzberger.

This thesis examines how the recent discovery of massive oil reserves off the coast of Cuba has driven a resurgence of Cuban-Russian relations in the 21st century. The first chapter demonstrates how the Russian government came to conceptualize the export of hydrocarbons as integral to the nation's development. It also examines the internal situation in Cuba after the fall of the Soviet Union to explain what initiated shifts in domestic policy that allowed for greater external investment. The second chapter discusses the effect of the discovery of these oil reserves, and how the Russians and the Cubans have come together over this issue against the backdrop of larger anti-American tendencies in Latin America. The first chapter relies more on secondary analyses of trends in both nations to help familiarize the reader with key concepts, such as the idea of Russia's energy weapon and Cuba's impetus for change. The second chapter heavily uses newspaper articles and speeches to demonstrate the visible shift in Russian attitude towards Cuba.

This thesis shows that the oil reserves have stimulated both countries to work closely together, though each has their respective reasons.

Paradoxically, Benedict Anderson’s notion of the nation as an imagined community occupying a territory at once bounded and sovereign became commonplace around the same time that prominent global novelists were beginning to reject the obligation to reproduce that fantasy. I consider two generations of novelists who do so in the late twentieth century. J.M. Coetzee articulates the failure of sovereign boundaries in the postcolony and the changing nature of the relationship between the citizen-subject and the state, while Sebald considers the possibility that a new form of non-hierarchical community might come into being amid the European ruins of the Second World War. For both authors, such projects rely on an acknowledgment of the limitations, disappearance, or outright absence of the nation-state, despite its purported centrality in modern life. More recent Anglophone novelists, by contrast, feel obliged to think with and within the infrastructure of global capitalism, paying particular attention to individuals who have been either empowered or dispossessed by global flows of resources, people, and information. Teju Cole, Indra Sinha, and Colson Whitehead are among these writers who can indeed sketch and animate the community to come, and they do so in forms predicated on the extinction of anything like the individual citizen-subject in favor of new heterogeneous and often radically antisocial forms of community. These novels offer their variously damaged (former) individuals as protagonists who militantly oppose the partitioning of society into friends and enemies, since such distinctions ultimately encourage the classification of groups according to metaphysical categories of good and evil. The common purpose of these protagonists is instead to negate the negativity of that very opposition in the hope that anything else—some intelligent form of life—might grow.

The core claims of this study are that dramatic and political practice mutually depend on rich concepts of mimesis––of exemplary images and formative imitation––for their coherence; that the seventeenth century bears witness to a gradual and intricate impoverishment of these concepts; and that this degeneration transpires reciprocally across dramatic and political theory. Accordingly, this project tracks early modern ideas of what it means to be an actor––on the stage or in the world––and of how actors’ claims to represent (a) people can make claims on (a) people’s action. It reveals in these ideas a growing inarticulacy regarding the ends of actors’ representative claims. Through close readings of Shakespeare, Hobbes, and Dryden, a story emerges: a shift from defending mimetic art as a tradition of moral and civic (trans)formation, toward exempting or abstracting mimetic art from any framework of ethical and political thought whatsoever.

Lost in this shift are the interconnectedly aesthetic and normative criteria of representation. Lost with these criteria are visions of mimetic action as a dynamic that can call a people into existence. Figuring an image of the people, in this richer sense, does not mean simulating or replicating a preexisting entity (reducing its being to a model proportional to our present understanding). It means actualizing the being of that entity (opening a path beyond our present understanding). It means revealing a horizon in which people(s) may glimpse who they are called to become. After Shakespeare, this figural concept of representation becomes circumscribed by pictures of artificial reproduction and assimilation. In the realm of politics, what results is an inability to conceive of how representative persons condition a people’s rational and participatory agency in civic life. In the realm of the theatre, what results is an inability to conceive of how dramatis personae can appear not just as static types of manners or roles, but as narrative-bearing agents––capable of accounting for their character(s) and calling audiences to account. Neither domain can articulate how images infuse and educe communal transformation.

Collectively, then, this study’s close readings attest to a collapse of authority and power in early modernity––a confusion of how auctoritas summons and binds our agency, with how potestas coerces and canalizes our behavior. Behind the waning of dramatic poetry’s authority lies a waning vision of moral and civic traditions as living and shaping matrices. For the authority of a tradition does not inhere in persons’ positions within institutional hierarchies. It flows from images of action, which reveal who persons aspire to be and why. Strictly speaking, authority is an attribute not of persons, but of the images persons bear. Persons hold authority through disclosing the source(s) and end(s) of their traditions––through making themselves exemplary. Authority thus names a normative claim on us––a call for our participation in joint undertakings that precede and surpass us. Our poetic and legal fictions can issue these calls only insofar as they figure what is at once before and beyond us, informing our mutual, conscientious commitments.

This dissertation is a theoretical and art/archival practice-based exploration of aesthetic-affective resistance to neoliberal recuperation of urban space that not only constitutes a physical manifestation of capitalist accumulation by dispossession, but also serves to aesthetically valorize affluent middle-class normativity. Through archival research, I discuss the rise of aesthetic-political dissidence against the rent-seeking displacement of the minoritized in Istanbul, and follow its trajectory from the mid-1990s to the mid-2000s. Using visual analyses, I theorize the aesthetic strategies of cultural-political dis-identification from the presiding logics and affectations of neoliberalism. These aesthetic strategies include satire, valorization of the obsolete, discarded, devalued and superfluous, and the fragmental provocation of memory to keep the lived history of Istanbul active against neoliberal erasure without monumentalizing a particular historical narrative. The art practice component of this dissertation provides self-reflection on my art works that draws upon aesthetic-political developments in Istanbul. In my discussion, I also put my art practice in conversation with queer temporality, utopian realism, and a queer-feminist ethic-erotic that orient us to social practices of production, reproduction, and subjectivization based on relational principles driven from sensuous reciprocity that go beyond the familial and the naturalized, and that the dominant political-economic order renders unfeasible.

The moral and ethical choices made during the Nazi Occupation of France would echo for generations: they served as a source of pain and pride when the French sought to rebuild their national identity after the ignominy of the defeat, and acted as the foundation for the intellectual legacy on which post-war life stands.

In my dissertation I examine the diverse trajectory of two writers, Jean-Paul Sartre and Jean Giraudoux, during the Occupation by focusing on their dramatic works. During this period, no writer could legally exercise his vocation and receive compensation without submitting to certain legalities designed to monitor the content of artistic output. Therefore, any author who published did, at least in some small way, collaborate. This particular line in the sand has become blurred with time and usage. Critics and intellectuals, not to mention the legal system, have initially categorized artists' politics, then, when the boundaries (or public opinion) have shifted, they have chosen to reclassify. Collaborationist, resistant, or neutral - these three convenient labels cannot do justice to the vast array of colors in the Occupation-era landscape.

Writers, like the public at large, responded to the Occupation by becoming extreme collaborators, opportunists, simply earning their daily bread, or becoming fierce resistants, with an infinite number of various roles in between. Although critics have historically attempted to evaluate Jean-Paul Sartre's and Jean Giraudoux's actions in order to classify them as "resistant" or "collabo," this is a reductive act. Both men, like so many Frenchmen of this period, made an infinite number of small and large decisions that refracted their post-war image according to which critic held the prism. The historiography with regards to this era has dramatically changed. Must the manner in which we "categorize" these two authors not change accordingly?

With this question in mind, I have carefully studied the authors' primary texts (plays, essays, critiques, memoirs, and letters). In particular, I focus on their theatrical offerings: Les mouches, Huis clos, and La folle de Chaillot, as these are their best-known works of the era. Next, I examined biographies of the Sartre and Giraudoux (as well as other major historical, political, and literary figures) in order to gain as much background information as possible, and moreover, to identify both tendencies and discrepancies with regards to the authors. After this I sifted through the contemporary press related to these two authors, including theatrical reviews of their plays, their own publications in order re-evaluate the Occupation-era theatrical offerings of Sartre and Giraudoux. I have chosen to focus mainly on their plays from the era, as it those are their best-known works, and the those which had the most influence, in creating their political legacy and reputation during the Occupation. Finally, I applied the theories from contemporary historians - Robert Paxton, Henry Rousso, Philippe Burrin, and Gisèle Sapiro among others - in order to develop my own analysis of the theater of Sartre and Giraudoux and their post-war legacy.

Themes centering on guilt and condemnation abound during the war, especially in these three works. Fueled by De Gaulle's myths of an almost unilaterally resistant French population, the immediate post-war period focused on deliverance from an exterior enemy. However, contrary to popular interpretation, the plays in my corpus condemn the enemy within, the French betrayal of the French.

Pastors, especially senior pastors of churches with larger congregations and staff

teams, have to provide leadership, not only in the typical pastoral sense of

preaching/teaching and counseling/caring, but also in terms of direction and management.

Yet pastors tend to receive inadequate equipping in this third area, and sometimes

flounder when faced with the complexities of their role.

Lee Kuan Yew was an extraordinary political leader and manager, leading the

severely disadvantaged fledgling nation of Singapore from Third World status to First

World in a few decades. Underlying the question of what pastors can learn from Lee,

given that he never professed Christian faith himself, is the principle of discernment

anchored in humility and healthy skepticism: humility to realize non-Christians may be

wiser than Christians in the way they manage their institutional affairs, and skepticism to

know that not everything that “works” in the world is going to likewise succeed in God’s

church.

The first step in discerning what aspects of Lee’s leadership have relevance for

pastors was to construct a biblical/ theological grid by which to evaluate Lee’s leadership.

Shaped by the data available on Lee, this grid had four components - formation,

shepherding, excellence and power – and a broad theological understanding of each of

these themes was outlined so as to serve as a set of criteria in evaluating the applicability

of key aspects of Lee’s leadership.

Lee’s life was examined both in terms of his pre-leadership years and his time in

leadership. The formative experiences of Lee’s life from childhood through to early

adulthood evoke reflections on how one’s own personal history has a shaping influence

on one’s leadership, and where there might be strengths yet to be harnessed, or shadows

yet to be confronted. Lee’s positive leadership traits - as described by himself and others

– are worthy of thoughtful appropriation insofar as they are deemed compatible with

Christian values as identified in the biblical grid. Some features of Lee’s leadership,

which were heavily critiqued by many and are at odds with the principles in the biblical

grid are also identified for reflection.

To deepen and personalize the above leadership reflections, several interviews

with Christians who held significant leadership roles and knew Lee first-hand were cited.

A fictional narrative of an interview with Lee was also incorporated in the final chapter,

which offered the space for imaginatively extending Lee’s leadership in a more

theological vein. In summary, Lee’s complex legacy provides rich material for leadership

reflections by pastors, and the overlap zone between Christian and secular leadership

merits further study and exploration.