Event Details

This workshop seeks to explore, in homage to Max Weber's classic Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, what we might call the "spirit" of neoliberalism. Featuring Carl Raschke (University of Denver).

In a famous 1981 interview, Margaret Thatcher declared of her political project: "Economics are the method, the object is to change the soul". This workshop seeks to explore, in homage to Max Weber's classic Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism, what we might call the "spirit" of neoliberalism. What are the spiritual dimensions of the neoliberal project? How far does it emerge out of, and feed back into religious or theological investments like faith, credit, atonement, soteriology, political theology? To what extent has neoliberalism succeeded in "changing the soul"? In this symposium with leading philosopher of religion Carl Raschke (University of Denver), we seek to bring neoliberal theory (Becker, Foucault, Lazzarato et al) into dialogue with contemporary theory of religion (Derrida, Agamben, Esposito.)

Speakers:

Carl Raschke (University of Denver)

Arthur Bradley (Lancaster University)

Antonio Cerella (Nottingham Trent University)

Boštjan Nedoh (ZRC SAZU Ljubljana)

Carl Raschke is Professor of Philosophy of Religion at the University of Denver. He is an internationally known writer and academic whose recent books include Neoliberalism and Political Theology: From Kant to Identity Politics (Edinburgh University Press, 2019), Force of God: Political Theology and the Crisis of Liberal Democracy (Columbia University Press, 2015) and Postmodernism and the Revolution in Religious Theory: Toward a Semiotics of the Event (University of Virginia Press, 2012). In 2023, he is working on a new book provisionally entitled Monopolitics.

Arthur Bradley is Professor of Comparative Literature at Lancaster University. He works at the intersection of literature, political theory, continental philosophy, and theology. He is the author of many books including, most recently, Unbearable Life: A Genealogy of Political Erasure (Columbia University Press, 2019). He has recently published articles in Review of Politics, Telos, Theory, Culture & Society and Political Theology. In 2023, he is working on a new book entitled In the Theatre of Sovereignty: Theory, Theatre, Thaumaturgy.

Antonio Cerella is Senior Lecturer in Social and Political Studies at Nottingham Trent University. His interests revolve around the relationship between politics, religion and violence. He has published numerous essays in several major international journals. He also has edited several volumes, including The Sacred and the Political (Bloomsbury 2016) and Heidegger and the Global Age (Roman & Littlefield, 2017). His most recent book is Genealogies of Political Modernity (Bloomsbury, 2020).

Boštjan Nedoh is research fellow at the Institute of Philosophy in the Research Centre of the Slovenian Academy of Sciences and Arts. He works at the intersection between continental philosophy, psychoanalysis, biopolitics, political theology and economic and social theory. He has published articles in journals such as Law, Culture and the Humanities, Angelaki, Journal for Cultural Research and Paragraph. He is the author of Ontology and Perversion: Deleuze, Agamben, Lacan (Rowman and Littlefield International, 2019). He is also co-editor of Lacan and Deleuze: A Disjunctive Synthesis (Edinburgh University Press, 2017) and Objective Fictions: Philosophy, Psychoanalysis, Marxism (Edinburgh University Press, 2023). In 2023, he is working on a book project provisionally entitled Why Are Women More Anxious than Men? Kierkegaard and Lacan on Anxiety and Sexual Difference (SUNY Press, forthcoming