Monday, November 13, 2006
(10:31 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
CFP: Augustine, Our Contemporary
Polygraph is having a special issue devoted to Augustine. Here is the description:The Polygraph Editorial Collective invites papers on any aspect of St. Augustine of Hippo's work—on Augustinian concepts; interventions in the history of Augustinian exegesis (or in the exegesis of Augustine's considerable body of work); non-modern, pre-modern, and modern determinations of his thought which inform our own contemporary preoccupations or occlusions; or the assessment of his importance to current theologico-political controversies. Augustine's import to intellectual history has yet to enter the emergent conversation on "political theology" or the phenomenology of religion in any substantial way—a particularly striking absence given the scope of writing by and on Augustine shaping numerous philosophical and theological archives as well as the recent interest in religion (and Paul in particular) across a number of disciplines. Important works on Augustine are integral to numerous contemporary debates on grace, law, the Word, the messiah/messianism, sovereignty, belief, and secularism.Submissions are due December 31; see the link above for details. I may try to put something together for this on the De Trinitate, though I'm not making any promises.
Encounters with Augustine enable new or renewed meditations on love, translation and historicity; projects of autobiography and subjectivity in the afterlives of the Confessions; epistemologies of memory and origin, where Augustinian determinations of conversion or original sin complicate our readings of events and iteration; theories of temporality; or diagrams and negotiations of religion and the secular state after Hegel's Phenomenology of Spirit or Marx's Capital, in their confrontations with the City of God. Given the rich history of Augustinian reading, our task remains one of retrieval as well as reappropriation. What are the resources of love in and after Augustine? What are the demands of grace? Who are Augustine's interlocutors and what are their terms, from the Pelagians, the Donatists, and the Manicheans to Heidegger, Derrida, Arendt, Vattimo, Lyotard, Wittgenstein, and Agamben? What has been done with Augustine, in or against his name? What does it mark? What is the import of a theology of grace to philosophy? To ethics? To feminism? To race? To political economy? Moreover, what is the status of the City of God, given attendant religious controversies and our contemporary "secular" occasion?
