The Future of Illusion: Political Theology and Early Modern Texts

Abstract

In recent years, rise of fundamentalism and a related turn to religion in humanities have led to a powerful resurgence of interest in problem of political theology. In a critique of this contemporary fascination with theological underpinnings of modern politics, Victoria Kahn proposes a return to secularism - whose origins she locates in art, literature, and political theory of early modern period-and argues in defense of literature and art as a force for secular liberal culture. Kahn draws on theorists such as Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, Walter Benjamin, and Hannah Arendt and their readings of Shakespeare, Hobbes, Machiavelli, and Spinoza to illustrate that dialogue between these modern and early modern figures can help us rethink contemporary problem of political theology. Twentieth-century critics, she shows, saw early modern period as a break from older form of political theology that entailed theological legitimization of state. Rather, period signaled a new emphasis on a secular notion of human agency and a new preoccupation with ways art and fiction intersected terrain of religion. Reclaiming a role for arts in contemporary debates about liberalism and political theology, The Future of Illusion articulates a new defense of what Hans Blumberg called the legitimacy of our modern secular age.