The Neighbor: Three inquiries in political theology

In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud made abundantly clear what he thouht about the biblical injunction, firts 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 thought we were hearing it for the firts time; we shall be unable then to suppress a feeling of surprise and bewilderment". After the horrors of World War II, the Holocaust, Stalinism, and Yugoslavia, Leviticus 19:18 seems even less conceivable -but all the more urgent now- than Freud imagined. In this book, three of the most significant intellectuals working in psychoanalysis and critical theory collaborate to show how this problem of neighbor-love opnes questions that are fundamental to ethical inquiry and that suggest a new theological configuration of political theory. Their three extended essays exlore today´s central historical problem: the persistence of the theological in the political.In "Towards a Political Theology of the Neighbor", Reinhard supplements Carl Schmitt´s political theology of the enemy and friend with a political theology of the neigbor based in psychoanalysis. In "Miracles Happen", Santner extends the book´s exploration of neighbor-love throught a bracing reassessment of Benjamin and Rosenzweig. And in an impassioned plea for ethical violence, Zizek´s "Neighbors and Others Monsters" reconsiders the idea of excess to rehabilitate a positive sense of the inhuman and challenge the influence of Levinas on contemporany etical thought.