Books by Hent de Vries
Religion and Violence: Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to Derrida
Chosen as an Outstanding Academic Title for 2003 by Choice Magazine
Originally published in 2002. Does violence inevitably shadow our ethico-political engagements and decisions, including our understandings of identity, whether collective or individual? Questions that touch upon ethics and politics can greatly benefit from being rephrased in terms borrowed from the arsenal of religious and theological figures, because the association of such figures with a certain violence keeps moralism, whether in the form of fideism or humanism, at bay. Religion and Violence: Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to Derrida's careful posing of such questions and rearticulations pioneers new modalities for systematic engagement with religion and philosophy alike.
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Love and Forgiveness for a More Just World (Religion, Culture, and Public Life, 24)
One can love and not forgive or out of love decide not to forgive. Or one can forgive but not love, or choose to forgive but not love the ones forgiven. Love and forgiveness follow parallel and largely independent paths, a truth we fail to acknowledge when we pressure others to both love and forgive. Individuals in conflict, sparring social and ethnic groups, warring religious communities, and insecure nations often do not need to pursue love and forgiveness to achieve peace of mind and heart. They need to remain attentive to the needs of others, an alertness that prompts either love or forgiveness to respond.
By reorienting our perception of these enduring phenomena, the contributors to this volume inspire new applications for love and forgiveness in an increasingly globalized and no longer quite secular world. With contributions by the renowned French philosophers Jacques Derrida and Jean-Luc Marion, the poet Haleh Liza Gafori, and scholars of religion (Leora Batnitzky, Nils F. Schott, Hent de Vries), psychoanalysis (Albert Mason, Orna Ophir), Islamic and political philosophy (Sari Nusseibeh), and the Bible and literature (Regina Schwartz), this anthology reconstructs the historical and conceptual lineage of love and forgiveness and their fraught relationship over time. By examining how we have used―and misused―these concepts, the authors advance a better understanding of their ability to unite different individuals and emerging groups around a shared engagement for freedom and equality, peace and solidarity.
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Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World
by Hent de Vries, Lawrence E. Sullivan
What has happened to religion in its present manifestations? In recent years, Enlightenment secularization, as it appeared in the global spread of political structures that relegate the sacred to a private sphere, seems suddenly to have foundered. Unexpectedly, it has discovered its own parochialism―has discovered, indeed, that secularization may never have taken place at all.
With the “return of the religious,” in all aspects of contemporary social, political, and religious life, the question of political theology―of the relation between “political” and “religious” domains―takes on new meaning and new urgency. In this groundbreaking book, distinguished scholars from many disciplines―philosophy, political theory, anthropology, classics, and religious studies―seek to take the full measure of this question in today’s world.
This book begins with the place of the gods in the Greek polis, then moves through Augustine’s two cities and early modern religious debates, to classic statements about political theology by such thinkers as Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt. Essays also consider the centrality of tolerance to liberal democracy, the recent French controversy over wearing the Muslim headscarf, and “Bush’s God talk.” The volume includes a historic discussion between Jürgen Habermas and Joseph Cardinal Ratzinger, now Pope Benedict XVI, concerning
the prepolitical moral foundations of a republic, and it concludes with explorations of new, more open ways of conceptualizing society.
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Violence, Identity, and Self-Determination
by Hent de Vries, Samuel Weber
With the collapse of the bipolar system of global rivalry that dominated world politics after the Second World War, and in an age that is seeing the return of "ethnic cleansing" and "identity politics," the question of violence, in all of its multiple ramifications, imposes itself with renewed urgency. Rather than concentrating on the socioeconomic or political backgrounds of these historical changes, the contributors to this volume rethink the concept of violence, both in itself and in relation to the formation and transformation of identities, whether individual or collective, political or cultural, religious or secular. In particular, they subject the notion of self-determination to stringent scrutiny: is it to be understood as a value that excludes violence, in principle if not always in practice? Or is its relation to violence more complex and, perhaps, more sinister?
Reconsideration of the concepts, the practice, and even the critique of violence requires an exploration of the implications and limitations of the more familiar interpretations of the terms that have dominated in the history of Western thought. To this end, the nineteen contributors address the concept of violence from a variety of perspectives in relation to different forms of cultural representation, and not in Western culture alone; in literature and the arts, as well as in society and politics; in philosophical discourse, psychoanalytic theory, and so-called juridical ideology, as well as in colonial and post-colonial practices and power relations.
The contributors are Giorgio Agamben, Ali Behdad, Cathy Caruth, Jacques Derrida, Michael Dillon, Peter Fenves, Stathis Gourgouris, Werner Hamacher, Beatrice Hanssen, Anselm Haverkamp, Marian Hobson, Peggy Kamuf, M. B. Pranger, Susan M. Shell, Peter van der Veer, Hent de Vries, Cornelia Vismann, and Samuel Weber.
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Paul and the Philosophers
by Hent de Vries, Ward Blanton
The apostle Paul has reemerged as a force on the contemporary philosophical scene. Some of the most powerful recent affirmations of nonrepresentational, materialist, and event-oriented philosophies repeat topics and tropes of the ancient apostle. Other thinkers find in Paul and his numerous cultural "afterlives" the ideal figure to
contest both identity politics and the postmodern political fetish of endless openness and the deferral of presence. Paul is appropriated both for and against Kantian cosmopolitanism, psychoanalytic models of subjectivity and power, Schmittian political theologies, Derridean messianism, political universalism, and an ongoing refashioning of identity politics within postsecular contexts.
This book provides the most comprehensive constellation to date of current thinking about Paul and his cultural or philosophical "afterlives" in ancient, modern, and contemporary contexts. It is a groundbreaking international and multidisciplinary exploration of the vexed political history of Paulinisms in philosophy and of philosophies in Paulinism.
From his very first utterances, Paul's pronouncements as the self-proclaimed apostle of Jesus were curiously intertwined with philosophical discourse, with Paul presenting himself as both philosopher and anti-philosopher. Early Christian receptions of Paul then carefully managed his legacy in relation to the philosophical
schools, presenting him alternately as an exemplary Platonist, a purveyor of Stoic spiritual exercises, and someone whose authority outstrips philosophy altogether. In the modern period, various types of Paulinism were imagined serially as possible escapes of philosophical thought from the domination of inherited metaphysics or
ontotheology.
The contributors to this volume bring unprecedented multidisciplinary expertise to both the historical reception and the contemporary relevance of a thinker who may come to be seen as the defining figure of our political and intellectual moment.
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Philosophy and the Turn to Religion
Originally published in 1999. If religion once seemed to have played out its role in the intellectual and political history of Western secular modernity, it has now returned with a vengeance. In this engaging study, Hent de Vries argues that a turn to religion discernible in recent philosophy anticipates and accompanies this development in the contemporary world. Though the book reaches back to Immanuel Kant, Martin Heidegger, and earlier, it takes its inspiration from the tradition of French phenomenology, notably Emmanuel Levinas, Jean-Luc Marion, and, especially, Jacques Derrida. Tracing how Derrida probes the discourse on religion, its metaphysical presuppositions, and its transformations, de Vries shows how this author consistently foregrounds the unexpected alliances between a radical interrogation of the history of Western philosophy and the religious inheritance from which that philosophy has increasingly sought to set itself apart.
De Vries goes beyond formal analogies between the textual practices of deconstruction and so-called negative theology to address the necessity for a philosophical thinking that situates itself at once close to and at the farthest remove from traditional manifestations of the religious and the theological. This paradox is captured in the phrase adieu (à dieu), borrowed from Levinas, which signals at once a turn toward and a leave-taking from God―and which also gestures toward and departs from the other of this divine other, the possibility of radical evil. Only by confronting such uncanny and difficult figures, de Vries claims, can one begin to think and act upon the ethical and political imperatives of our day.
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