The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology, with a new Preface

Slavoj Žižek · Eric L. Santner · Kenneth Reinhard

Jul 2013 · University of Chicago Press

About this ebook

In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud made abundantly clear what he thought about the biblical injunction, first articulated in Leviticus 19:18 and then elaborated in Christian teachings, to love one's neighbor as oneself. “Let us adopt a naive attitude towards it,” he proposed, “as though we were hearing it for the first time; we shall be unable then to suppress a feeling of surprise and bewilderment.” After the horrors of World War II, the Holocaust, and Stalinism, Leviticus 19:18 seems even less conceivable—but all the more urgent now—than Freud imagined.

In The Neighbor, three of the most significant intellectuals working in psychoanalysis and critical theory collaborate to show how this problem of neighbor-love opens questions that are fundamental to ethical inquiry and that suggest a new theological configuration of political theory. Their three extended essays explore today's central historical problem: the persistence of the theological in the political. In “Toward a Political Theology of the Neighbor,” Kenneth Reinhard supplements Carl Schmitt’s political theology of the enemy and friend with a political theology of the neighbor based in psychoanalysis. In “Miracles Happen,” Eric L. Santner extends the book's exploration of neighbor-love through a bracing reassessment of Benjamin and Rosenzweig. And in an impassioned plea for ethical violence, Slavoj Žižek’s “Neighbors and Other Monsters” reconsiders the idea of excess to rehabilitate a positive sense of the inhuman and challenge the influence of Levinas on contemporary ethical thought.

A rich and suggestive account of the interplay between love and hate, self and other, personal and political, The Neighbor has proven to be a touchstone across the humanities and a crucial text for understanding the persistence of political theology in secular modernity. This new edition contains a new preface by the authors.

About the author

Slavoj Žižek is professor of philosophy at the University of Ljubljana. His numerous books include Iraq: The Borrowed Kettle and The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity. Eric L. Santner is the Philip and Ida Romberg Professor in Modern Germanic Studies, professor of Germanic studies, and a member of the Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Chicago. He is the author of several books, including On Creaturely Life: Rilke, Benjamin, Sebald and The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty, both published by the University of Chicago Press. Kenneth Reinhard is associate professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he also directed the Center for Jewish Studies. He is coauthor of After Oedipus: Shakespeare in Psychoanalysis.