JCRT 11.3 Fall 2011

I. First Body: Fundamental Concepts

An engagement with the
work of Eric Santner

Introduction
Julia R. Lupton and CJ Gordon, The University of Califormia, Irvine

In The Royal Remains: The People's Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty, published by the University of Chicago Press in 2011, Eric Santner continues the project he launched in his ground-breaking books...

Political Theology: Sacred Flesh and Social Form
Jennifer R. Rust, Saint Louis University

Eric Santner's exploration of the vicissitudes of the "flesh" in modernity in The Royal Remains: The People's Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty insists at every point on the continued uncanny...

Pauline Biopolitics
Nichole E. Miller, Temple University

In his most recent book, Eric Santner adds a brilliant chapter to his ongoing series of works tracing connections between political theology and psychoanalysis...

Enjoying Law: Psychoanalysis and Sovereign Bodies
Anna Kornbluh, University of Illinois, Chicago Circle

Michel Foucault's influential historicization of psychoanalysis charges that the latter is a technology of biopolitics: that "talking about sex" became not only...

Sorting Out Biopolitics
Alexander Schulman, Duke University

In political studies, the term "biopolitics" has of late had a prosperous but somewhat confusing career. The confusion is that it has been used, plausibly...

II. Second Body: Creative Conjunctions

Shame Without Shame: What Remains of Modernist Aesthetics
Mia L. McIver, Loyola Marymount University and the Univeristy of California, Irvine

Among the many rich motifs that wind through The Royal Remains, we find the theme of the doctor as the paradigmatic figure of modernity. From Freud, to Kafka's "The Country Doctor," to Hofmannsthal's...

Odradek's Laughter
Erica Weitzman, New York University

Comedy - a particular kind of comedy - is the leitmotif of Eric Santner's The Royal Remains. Needless to say, this comedy is hardly that of common conception as a madcap sequence of errors...

The Flesh Might Look Funny - If You Look At It
Jennifer Nelson, Yale University

Where can we see the flesh in pictures? If the bodied, creaturely congealment of popular sovereignty in modernity were to be represented in a painting, where would it...

Response
Eric L. Santner, The University of Chicago

I would first like to thank Julia Lupton and CJ Gordon for organizing this forum and for so generously introducing the argument of The Royal Remains. It's a chastening experience to read a...

Articles

Kinkade, Koons, Kitsch
Paul Maltby, West Chester University

A matter that complicates any discussion of kitsch is the mutability of its status. In his famous 1939 essay, "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," Clement Greenberg warned against...

Graffitti Theology: Criteria and an Agenda
Thomas M. Dicken, Rocky Mountain College

The term "graffiti" has been used in several recent books and articles to suggest a different, maverick way of doing theology. It is my purpose in this article to introduce more specific...

The "Sacredness" of Secular Literature: A Case Study in Walter Benjamin
Samuel Joseph Kessler, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill

In the early pages of his study of religion The Sacred and the Profane, Mircea Eliade asserts that "Man becomes aware of the sacred because it manifests itself, shows itself....

Review Essays

From Human Being to Being Human: An Impossible Short-Cut.
A Review Essay on Elisabeth Roudinesco, Retour Sur La Question Juive
Gabriel Vahanian, Universite de Strasbourg

If Auschwitz, then no God. Except that, were it as plausible as it is lapidary, the hypothesis thus spelt out rests on the assumption that faith is conditioned by some socio-historical process....