Santner, Eric (, The Philip and Ida Romberg Distinguished Service Professor in Modern Germanic Studies, University of Chicago)

The Weight of All Flesh: On the Subject-Matter of Political Economy - The Berkeley Tanner Lectures Santner, Eric (, The Philip and Ida Romberg Distinguished Service Professor in Modern Germanic Studies, University of Chicago)

Marc Notes: Includes bibliographical references and index. Table of Contents: Acknowledgements Contributors IntroductionKevis Goodman The Weight Of All Flesh: On the Subject-Matter of Political EconomyEric L. Santner Preface Lecture 1: The Weight of All Flesh Lecture 2: Paradoxologies Commentaries Charged: Debt, Power, and the Politics of the Flesh in Shakespeare's Merchant, Melville's Moby Dick, and Eric Santner's The Weight of All FleshBonnie Honig Secularization, Dialectics, and CritiquePeter E. Gordon The Exercise of Paradoxological ThinkingHent De Vries Reply to the Commentators In Response: Idle WorshipEric L. Santner IndexBiographical Note: Eric L. Santner is The Philip and Ida Romberg Distinguished Service Professor in Modern Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago. Kevis Goodman is is Associate Professor of English at the University of California, Berkeley. Publisher Marketing: Eric Santner offers a radically new interpretation of Marx's labor theory of value as one concerned with the afterlife of political theology in secular modernity. What Marx characterized as the dual character of the labor embodied in the commodity, he argues, is the doctrine of the King's Two Bodies transferred from the political theology of sovereignty to the realm of political economy. This genealogy, leading from the fetishism of the royal body to the fetishism of the commodity, also suggests a new understanding of the irrational core at the center of economic busyness today, its 24/7 pace. The frenetic negotiations of our busy-bodies continue and translate into the doxology of everyday life the liturgical labor that once sustained the sovereign's glory. Maintaining that an effective critique of capitalist political economy must engage this liturgical dimension, Santner proposes a counter-activity, which he calls "paradoxological." With commentaries by Bonnie Honig, Peter Gordon, and Hent de Vries, an introduction by Kevis Goodman, and a response from Santner, this important new book by a leading cultural theorist and scholar of German literature, cinema, and history will interest readers of political theory, literature and literary theory, and religious studies.

Contributor Bio:  Honig, Bonnie Bonnie Honig is Nancy Duke Lewis Professor of Modern Culture and Media and Political Science at Brown University. She was formerly Sarah Rebecca Roland Professor in Political Science at Northwestern University and Research Professor at the American Bar Foundation, Chicago. She is an award-winning author whose work has been translated into numerous languages and is read by a wide interdisciplinary audience composed of scholars and researchers in political theory, philosophy, classics, gender studies, cultural studies, American studies, comparative literature, critical theory, media studies, law and international relations. Contributor Bio:  Gordon, Peter Eli Peter Eli Gordon has published widely on topics in both modern European intellectual history and modern Jewish thought. He is presently Professor of History at Harvard University and faculty affiliate at the Center for European Studies. His book, Rosenzweig and Heidegger, Between Judaism and German Philosophy (2003), received several distinguished awards. Contributor Bio:  Vries, Hent De Hent de Vries is professor of Modern European Thought in the Humanities Center and the Department of Philosophy at the Johns Hopkins University and professor of Philosophy at the University of Amsterdam. Among his books are Philosophy and the Turn to Religion and Religion and Violence: Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to Derrida, both available from Johns Hopkins. He is the co-editor, with Samuel Weber, of Violence, Identity, and Self-Determination and Religion and Media, and, with Mieke Bal, of the book series Cultural Memory in the Present. Contributor Bio:  Santner, Eric L Eric L. Santner is the Philip and Ida Romberg Professor in Modern Germanic Studies and chair of the Department of Germanic Studies at the University of Chicago. He is the author of "On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life" and coauthor of "The Neighbor," both published by the University of Chicago Press. Contributor Bio:  Goodman, Kevis Kevis Goodman is Associate Professor of English Literature at the University of California, Berkeley. She has published articles in Studies in Romanticism, ELH and South Atlantic Quarterly.