My contribution to the Agamben symposium

The Political Theology blog has published my contribution to their symposium on The Kingdom and the Glory, which discusses Agamben’s method in dialogue with Alberto Toscano’s critical review of the book.

Sociopathic subjects

I really enjoyed Why We Love Sociopaths, in part because of the additional perspective it gives on Awkwardness. The “fantasy sociopath” the book studies is introduced as the opposite of  awkwardness: where awkwardness is an anxiety in relation to social norms, sociopaths, at least in TV fantasy, never experience social norms as something that makes them anxious, only as tools they can use to manipulate others. But what unites awkwardness and sociopathy is that these anti-social experiences reveal something fundamental which underlies the possibility of sociality. That is to say, Adam’s project is a kind of dialectical redemption of the anti-social, in which anti-sociality, by revealing the conditions of our sociality denaturalize it and provide ways of thinking about an alternative sociality which we might choose. Awkwardness and Why We Love Sociopaths thus I think have something in common with what Judith Halberstam calls “anti-social” queer theory; the connection is perhaps clearest in the anti-familial theme that surfaces periodically through Why We Love Sociopaths.

One thing that is suggested in the book but I think it would be interesting to think about more is the possibility that the liberal subject as such is sociopathic.

Nietzschean Christology: A Life of Its Own

Back when I was a junior at Saint Vincent College, in Latrobe, PA, thinking about graduate school, vocation, etc., I took a Christology course with one of my favorite professors, Father Tom Hart, O.S.B., a Benedictine priest and then chair of the Religion and Religious Education department.  The course was, as one would expect, fairly Catholic–in a good way–and was a genuine attempt at simultaneously introducing multicultural and spiritual approaches to the subject.  Me being me, I presented as my final paper for the class something neither Catholic nor multicultural, “Nietzschean Christology.” 

Earlier in that semester I actually got locked into the lower level of the library late one Friday night–this was before the library had a major renovation and brought up to fire code.  St. Vincent has a phenomenal library right in the center of campus, and I had my favorite spots on the lower levels that were generally uninhabited.

Another question

Does anyone know if Nietzsche read Anselm’s Cur deus homo? Obviously Anselm’s argument is very well-known and has been repeated, with variations, by many, many subsequent theologians, but I wonder if he literally sat down and read the original text.