Peter Herbst Seminars 2012: Political Theology "Vicissitudes of Abandonment: Nancy, Malabou, and the potential for plasticity in the deconstruction of Christianity"
POLITICAL THEOLOGY
PETER HERBST SEMINARS • 2012
Vicissitudes of Abandonment: Nancy, Malabou, and the potential for plasticity in the deconstruction of Christianity
Alexander C. Karolis, PhD candidate, School of Philosophy, ANU
The notion of abandonment appears in Jean-Luc Nancy’s 1981 essay Abandoned Being, where it is described as the very possibility of thinking being in the world. Martin Heidegger argues that the “lived-experience” of existence must be understood as the “abandonment of beings by be-ing”. In this paper my focus lies with Nancy’s deconstruction of Christianity, which traces the manner in which Christianity has shown itself to be the religion that enabled the surpassing of religion. This reinforces Heidegger’s notion that Christian dogma worked to hide the abandonment of being, while simultaneously undoing Christianity itself by grounding being in a creator that had itself been abandoned. Catherine Malabou, however, also describes the affirmative role abandonment plays in Hegel’s notion of Aufhebung and the “plastic materiality of being”. Through the work of Nancy and Malabou I will explore the manner in which plasticity reveals a way of thinking what Nancy describes as the trans-immanence of existence.
Seminar flyer [414 KB PDF]
A light lunch will be provided.
Please RSVP no later than 2 April 2012 to desmond.manderson@anu.edu.au or Fiona.jenkins@anu.edu.au
Under the auspices of the Peter Herbst Fund in Continental Philosophy, faculty and graduate students are invited to participate in work-in-progress seminars related to this year’s theme. Seminars will be held monthly and will serve as an occasion to discuss recent work, and to build inter-disciplinary networks and new dialogues in the humanities across the University.