Qoheleth and Postmodernism

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:03 am By Peter Leithart

Doug Ingram suggests in his 2004 Grove Book study of Ecclesiastes that the book has a peculiarly postmodern emphasis on the ambiguity of the world and human life. Pointing to the proliferation of studies of Ecclesiastes over the past decade and a half, he writes that while modern readers find Ecclesiastes’ apparent lack of structure and clarity frustrating, postmoderns revel in those same qualities. I don’t think Ecclesiastes is quite as ambiguous as Ingram suggests, and also think (as Ingram... Read more

Courtly love

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 10:51 pm By Peter Leithart

A former student, Matt Dau, commented on reading David Bentley Hart’s description of postmodernism and the sublime that it seemed very similar to the courtly love tradition – the dominating attraction of one’s life is the inaccessible beauty of the beloved. Judging from Holsinger’s work, that analogy is no accident. Lacan did a psychoanalysis of the courtly love tradition, Bataille edited a poem of chivalry, and de Rougement’s work on the courtly love tradition in the West was studied by... Read more

Bataille and Danielou

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 10:47 pm By Peter Leithart

Holsinger argues ( Premodern Condition ) that Bataille, despite writing a somme atheologique was not so much attacking or parodying Thomism as critiquing Thomas with resources taken from inside the medieval Catholic tradition. As an illustration of his “intellectual open-mindedness vis-a-vis the tradition of Catholic theology,” Holsinger cites the exchange between Bataille and Jean Danielou, leader of nouvelle theologie and later cardinal, that took place in Vichy Paris in 1944. Danielous was among a group that included Sartre and Merleau-Ponty... Read more

Old and new Thomists

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:05 am By Peter Leithart

Bruce Holsinger gives this summary of the conflict between “traditional” Thomists and the advocates of nouvelle theologie during the early decades of the 20th century: “What infuriated . . . the [traditionalist] neo-Thomists about the nouvelle theologie was what they perceived as its historical relativism, which in turn derived from its guiding spirit of ressourcement , the more general movement withhin the Church to recover lost of little-known patristic and medieval theological traditions and make them newly vital to religious... Read more

Jesus and Covenant of works

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:45 pm By Peter Leithart

In what sense did Jesus fulfill the covenant of works? He is clearly the last Adam (Rom 6), and reverses the work of the first Adam. But unless we assume that Torah is a straightforward republication of the covenant of works, then any claims about Jesus fulfilling the covenant of works has to be qualified by the fact that he comes into an Israel under Torah. And if the Torah is a dispensation of the covenant of grace, then Jesus... Read more

Foucault the conservative

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 11:42 pm By Peter Leithart

Foucault is normally classified as a radical postmodern, but there is a strong “conservative” thrust to his work on the prison and other “disciplinary” mechanisms of the early modern period. His attention is mainly on the social, architectural, and political mechanisms that break down traditional solidarities and thereby isolate individuals in order to dominate them, leaving them directly accountable to the state. This line of argument, which respects traditional forms of community and laments their breakdown, is a common theme... Read more

Architecture of control

Last updated on: September 6, 2017 at 10:46 pm By Peter Leithart

One of the key themes of Foucault’s work is an effort to uncover the social conditions of modern individualism. He suggests that the idea that “the model of a society that has individuals as its constituent elements is borrowed from the abstract juridical forms of contract and exchange” is only half the story: “it should not be forgotten that there existed at the same period [seventeenth and eighteenth centuries] a technique for constituting individuals as correlative elements of power and... Read more

Politics and visibility

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:04 am By Peter Leithart

Discussing Bentham’s vision of the panopticon, Foucault notes that Bentham’s vision inverts the relationship of visibility and power. Traditional power was made visible in various sorts of symbols – crowns, robes, rituals; the powerful displayed their power in public, and this public display was the basis of their power. In the panopticon, the subjects living in the surrounding are permanently visible to the rulers who occupy the central tower of the structure, while the rulers remain anonymous and invisible to... Read more

Plague v. Leprosy

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:04 am By Peter Leithart

Foucault draws an intriguing political contrast between the “rituals of exclusion” that arise with lepers and the “disciplinary confinement” that constituted the response to the plague. Leprosy and its rules of “rejection, of exile-exclusion” produces a “massive, binary division between one set of people and another”; by contrast, the plague“called for multiple separations, individualizing distributions, an organization in depth of surveillance and control, an intensification and a ramification of power.” Thus, “those sick of the plague were caught up in... Read more

Priesthood of Believers

Last updated on: September 7, 2017 at 12:04 am By Peter Leithart

At various points in Discipline and Punish , Foucault notes how monastic discipline provided a model for early modern society forms. Factories were compared to monasteries not only in their organization but also in the spiritual dimension of factory management. Time-tables and rigorous time-keeping, as David Landes and others have pointed out, originated in monastic communities in order to keep track of liturgical hours. And this effort to “establish rhythms, impose particular occupations, regulate the cycle of repetition” (Foucault) was... Read more