Powers of Distinction

Nancy Levene

Published by University of Chicago Press 2017

Powers of Distinction

On Religion and Modernity

Nancy Levene

https://doi.org/10.7208/9780226507675

Overview
Contents

About this book

In this major new work, philosopher of religion Nancy Levene examines the elemental character of religion and modernity. Deep in their operating systems, she argues, are dualisms of opposition and identity that cannot be reconciled with the forms of life they ostensibly support. These dualisms are dead ends, but they conceal a richer position—another kind of dualism constitutive of mutual relation. This dualism is difficult to distinguish and its concept of relation difficult to commit to. It risks contention and even violence. But it is also the indispensable support for modernity’s most innovative ideals: democracy, criticism, and interpretation.

In readings from Abraham to the present, Levene recovers this richer dualism in its difference from the alternatives—other dualisms, nondualism, multiplication. From Abraham we get the biblical call to give up tribal belonging for a promised land of covenantal relation. Yet modernity, inclusive of this call, is also the principle that critiques the promise when it divides self from other, us from them.

Drawing on a long tradition of thinkers and scholars even as she breaks new ground, Levene offers here nothing less than a new way of understanding modernity as an ethical claim about our world, a philosophy of the powers of distinction to include rather than to divide.

Author information

Nancy Levene is associate professor of religious studies at Yale University. She is the author of Spinoza’s Revelation: Religion, Democracy, and Reason.

Reviews

“Abraham is modern, Plato is not: this is the seemingly paradoxical position carefully argued for in Levene’s fine book, where she transforms received ideas about religion and modernity, with the help of erudite and elegant readings. Key to her demonstration is a new understanding of history: not the realization of a promise, but the injunction to leave for the other’s land. This is immensely helpful when postsecular ideologies struggle with their own confusion, calling for a new beginning of critique.”

— Etienne Balibar

“Powers of Distinction can be understood as a major contribution to what has been called post-secularism, a field often taken as the study of the afterlife of religion in fundamentally secular western modernity. But for Levene, the religious and the secular in modernity are not self-sufficient and opposed propositions; in fact, the belief in the opposition of those ideas, whether in favor of the religious or the secular, is what modernity, in Levene’s sense, refuses. This book will be of greatest interest to scholars and students of religion, but by no means will it be limited to people working in ‘religious studies,’ a category that is indeed fundamentally redefined here.”

— Kenneth Reinhard, University of California, Los Angeles

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	ii
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	vii
1. The Principle of Modernity Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	1
2. A History of Religion Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	33
3. Artificial Populations Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	56
4. The Collective Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	99
5. Images of Truth from Anselm to Badiou Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	141
6. The Radical Enlightenment of Spinoza and Kant Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	168
7. Modernity as Ground Zero Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	211
8. Of Gods, Laws, Rabbis, and Ends Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	243
Acknowledgments Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	267
Notes Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	269
Index Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	293

Language: English
Publisher: University of Chicago Press
Audience: Professional and scholarly;
Pages
- Main content: 304
Keywords: modernity; religion; democracy; Abraham; dualism; distinction

eBook

Published: December 6, 2017
ISBN: 9780226507675