This essay is part of the Discourses in Spirituality Round Robin.
This essay is part of the Discourses in Spirituality Round Robin.
An interview with William Stell regarding his new book, Born Again Queer: A History of Evangelical Gay Activism and the Making of Antigay Christianity.
This essay is part of the Discourses in Spirituality Round Robin.
By revisiting the myth of Joan of Arc, Daniel Bensaïd endows his political militancy with a potential theological scope: that of a de-phallicized thinking of the divine.
Inspiration comes from previously off-limits traditions, just as emotions once dismissed as despairing gain untold potentials: this is the turn from leftist melancholy to melancholy politics.
Daniel Bensaïd reinterprets Marxism as a Jewish messianism of “patient impatience,” in which political defeat, exile, and even anti-Semitism become the paradoxical sites from which a non-statist, heretical, and universalist revolutionary agency can re-emerge.
Bensaïd critiques political theology while defending Derridean sovereignty—itself theological—and the distance between the two theologies is short.
“Neither of us would be allowed to do our jobs had we adhered to our practice of wearing a veil.”
“Balthaser’s history is a helpful necessity. Without it the obligation has no shape, no lineage, no proof of its own non-marginality. But memory cannot be the ground of the obligation, only its occasion.”