Jesus replied...

books:


	• The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology (Religion and Postmodernism Series) Slavoj Zizek, Eric L. Santner, ... University Of Chicago Press, 2006 - 240 pages average customer review:based on 1 review view larger image
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Jesus replied...

To the question, "Which part of God's Law is the highest?" Jesus famously replies: "You shall love the Lord your God...and the second, which is like the first, you shall love your neighbor as yourself!" The first part of Jesus's reply is understandable: okay, we should love God, got it. But then he adds this second part: love your neighbor! Neighbor?! Who is that? Why should I love him? And why as myself? This basically summarizes Sigmund Freud's response to the Judeo-Christian ethic of neighborly love.
In this fabulous work three psychoanalytic commentators take as their basic point of departure this response of Freud's to develop the groundwork for a politics of the neighbor. The other point of reference here is Carl Schmitt's friend/enemy politics. The neighbor being a third overlooked category that is neither a friend nor an enemy.
If you are interested in political theology, then, you should pick up this book. But the real gem of this book is Kenneth Reinhard's contribution. I believe you can find Zizek's and Santner's contributions in other works, but Reinhard's is original. But it is original in the sense of novel: I think Reinhard provides the most comprehensive look at what a politics of the neighbor might look like. I get the feeling that Reinhard is providing here a short synopsis of a larger political theology of the neighbor, and if so, I cannot wait for it to come out!

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In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud made abundantly clear what he thought about the biblical injunction, first articulated in Leviticus 19:18 and then elaborated in Christian teachings, to love one's neighbor as oneself. "Let us adopt a naive attitude towards it," he proposed, "as though we were hearing it for the first time; we shall be unable then to suppress a feeling of surprise and bewilderment." After the horrors of World War II, the Holocaust, Stalinism, and Yugoslavia, Leviticus 19:18 seems even less conceivable?but all the more urgent now?than Freud imagined.

In The Neighbor, three of the most significant intellectuals working in psychoanalysis and critical theory collaborate to show how this problem of neighbor-love opens questions that are fundamental to ethical inquiry and that suggest a new theological configuration of political theory. Their three extended essays explore today's central historical problem: the persistence of the theological in the political. In "Towards a Political Theology of the Neighbor," Kenneth Reinhard supplements Carl Schmitt's political theology of the enemy and friend with a political theology of the neighbor based in psychoanalysis. In "Miracles Happen," Eric L. Santner extends the book's exploration of neighbor-love through a bracing reassessment of Benjamin and Rosenzweig. And in an impassioned plea for ethical violence, Slavoj ?i?ek's "Neighbors and Other Monsters" reconsiders the idea of excess to rehabilitate a positive sense of the inhuman and challenge the influence of Levinas on contemporary ethical thought.

A rich and suggestive account of the interplay between love and hate, self and other, personal and political, The Neighbor will prove to be a touchstone across the humanities and a crucial text for understanding the persistence of political theology in secular modernity.

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