Politics and the SacredCambridge University Press, 30 kwi 2015 This path-breaking book argues that practices of the sacred are constitutive of modern secular politics. Following a tradition of enquiry in anthropology and political theory, it examines how limit situations shape the political imagination and collective identity. As an experiential and cultural fact, the sacred emerges within, and simultaneously transcends, transgressive dynamics such as revolutions, wars or globalisation. Rather than conceive the sacred as a religious doctrine or a metaphysical belief, Wydra examines its adaptive functions as origins, truths and order which are historically contingent across time and transformative of political aspirations. He suggests that the brokenness of political reality is a permanent condition of humanity, which will continue to produce quests for the sacred, and transcendental political frames. Working in the spirit of the genealogical mode of enquiry, this book examines the secular sources of political theologies, the democratic sacred, the communist imagination, European political identity, the sources of human rights and the relationship of victimhood to new wars. |
Spis treści
The extraordinary and the political imagination | 19 |
The politics of transcendence | 43 |
Secular sources of political theologies | 69 |
Democracy and the sacred | 97 |
communism and beyond | 125 |
Generations of European imaginations | 150 |
The spell of humanity | 178 |
Victims and new wars | 202 |
rationalities of the sacred | 225 |
256 | |
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Kluczowe wyrazy i wyrażenia
action Agamben argued Asad aspirations Auschwitz authority become Bolshevik boundaries century Christian citizens civil claims Claude Lefort Cold War collective identity concept conflict constitutive crucial cultural democracy democratic discourse emerge enemy ethical ethnic cleansing Europe European evil existential existential pluralism experience extraordinary faith Fassin forms frames French French Revolution fundamental genocide German Giorgio Agamben Girard global globalisation historical Holocaust homo sacer human rights humanitarian idea immanent individual instance internal Islam Koselleck laïcité Lefort liberal liminal limit situations meaning memory mimetic modern moral narratives nation nature needs Nietzsche Nietzsche 1997 norms one’s paradoxical people’s Plato political imagination political theology practices profane reality reciprocity recognition redemption regime religion religious revolution revolutionary ritual ritualised rule sacred sacrifice salvation secular secularisation sense social society sovereignty Soviet communism spiritual structures symbolic temporal theory tion transcend transformed trauma truth ultimate ends victimhood victims violence West Germany Western Wolin Wydra