Desecularizing Santner’s Psychotheology

Abstract

In this paper, Eric Santner’s theory of political flesh is appreciated in its relation to philosophy of religion and Christian theology. In the first part of the paper, Santner’s speculative concept is brought into conversation with the debate on embodiment, incarnation, and a hermeneutics of the flesh. Santner’s conception of the flesh is shown to follow a logic of excarnation, or rather disincorporation, and thus to be at odds with contemporary harmonistic theories of embodiment that attempt to think body and spirit together without rupture. In contrast, the relevance of Santner’s theory lies precisely in its antagonistic reading of the dynamics that constitute human embodied being – a dimension overlooked by most recent theories of embodiment. The second part of the article develops a reading of Protestantism as a “religion of the flesh” in line with Santner’s argument. In doing so, it is shown that the Protestant narrative of self-modernization and progress (Hegel’s “religion of freedom”) can be subverted by the conception of the flesh brought into play by Santner, revealing a much more ambivalent history of Protestantism. In a re-reading of the theologies of Karl Barth, Friedrich Schleiermacher, and John Calvin, it is shown that the Protestant understanding of the church can be made transparent to a figure of the undead that is virulent in it, namely the undead flesh of Jesus Christ. In the end, the question is raised whether this figure of an “undead” Christ might not be interpreted as a paradoxological intervention in the sense of Eric Santner.