The Hombrewed Christianity podcast just released an interview with Dr. Clatyon Crockett, and you should listen to it! Crockett is a professor at my alma mater with whom I’ve been in contact ever since a group of us at Fuller began reading his book Interstices of the Sublime, an exploration of psychoanalytic theory and theology. I blogged on one of its themes here. Since then, he has become a friend and valued advisor in my doctoral application process. I may be a bit biased, but I think he is among the best of political and psychoanalytic theorists dialoguing with theology in the U.S.
This interview discusses Crockett’s most recent book, Radical Political Theology. Highly readable for a text engaging academic political theory, this book expresses the avant-garde of a Continental political appropriation of theology. It is also very similar to the type of theory I want to explore in my next graduate program. I’ve been meaning to blurb this book since reading it a few months ago, and soon I hope to explore some of its themes further.
From Columbia University Press:
In the 1960s, the strict opposition between the religious and the secular began to break down, blurring the distinction between political philosophy and political theology. This collapse contributed to the decline of modern liberalism, which supported a neutral, value-free space for capitalism. It also deeply unsettled political, religious, and philosophical realms, forced to confront the conceptual stakes of a return to religion.
Gamely intervening in a contest that defies simple resolutions, Clayton Crockett conceives of the postmodern convergence of the secular and the religious as a basis for emancipatory political thought. Engaging themes of sovereignty, democracy, potentiality, law, and event from a religious and political point of view, Crockett articulates a theological vision that responds to our contemporary world and its theo-political realities. Specifically, he claims we should think about God and the state in terms of potentiality rather than sovereign power. Deploying new concepts, such as Slavoj Žižek’s idea of parallax and Catherine Malabou’s notion of plasticity, his argument engages with debates over the nature and status of religion, ideology, and messianism. Tangling with the work of Derrida, Deleuze, Spinoza, Antonio Negri, Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, John D. Caputo, and Catherine Keller, Crockett concludes with a reconsideration of democracy as a form of political thought and religious practice, underscoring its ties to modern liberal capitalism while also envisioning a more authentic democracy unconstrained by those ties.
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[...] I recently read through Carl Schmitt’s 1922 book Political Theology and wanted to return to Clayton Crockett’s work, Radical Political Theology, which heavily interacts with [...]