The papers on this panel explore the theme of transmission from past to present, tradition to tradition, theology to politics. Transmission is constituted by both continuity and discontinuity, by what is reproduced and by what is not passed on. The first paper locates an early image of Christian supersession in the doubled figures of Jesus and Barabbas, tracking a line of descent from this moment of Christian origins through to contemporary political theological questions of sovereignty and civil war. The second paper reveals a line of continuity from the biblical Eve through to contemporary phenomenology via a discussion of futurity and fall. Another paper asks what specifically Christian problems are transmitted to Islam when Muslim thinkers take up political theology and its European sources. The last paper considers the classic philosophical problem of the communicability of divine revelation, specifically its transmission from past to future generations.
This paper takes up the question of the doubling of the body of Jesus in Barabbas and Jesus in the Mark's gospel narrative, and situates this doubling in the context of the destruction of Jerusalem in the wake of which the text is written. It shows how the destruction of Jerusalem serves for the Flavians as the vindication of their rule and, for Mark, the vindication of Christainity. Reading this site with Barabbas' return in Marlowe's The Jew of Malta, I suggest we might see this primal scene of supersession as necessarily predicated upon the staging of a civil war out of which a sovereign body emerges. Showing the way Schmitt reads these two sites, I suggest that ingredient to the production of "new-Schmittianisms" is the production of civil war superseded.
Few stories in the Book of Genesis have generated as much theological and philosophical reflection on the human condition as the story of Eve. Interpretations of the narrative have traditionally emphasized disobedience and the theological problem of the Fall, while feminist scholarship has highlighted Eve’s association with knowledge and moral awareness. Less attention has been given to the way the narrative depicts the emergence of a future-oriented structure of human existence. Drawing on phenomenological accounts of temporality developed by Edmund Husserl and Martin Heidegger, this paper argues that Eve’s act marks the moment when human life becomes oriented toward possibilities that do not yet exist. By acting on an imagined future, Eve inaugurates a form of existence structured by projection, uncertainty, and responsibility for what has not yet occurred. Read in this way, the Genesis narrative reflects how human existence becomes historical and ethically responsible for the future.
In recent years, there has been increasing interest in expanding political theology beyond its roots in the Christian tradition. This paper investigates two case studies from the Islamic tradition, corresponding to the two main strains of the field. On the side of politically-engaged theology, it focuses on Hamid Dabashi’s Islamic Liberation Theology: Resisting the Empire (Routledge, 2008), and on the side of genealogical inquiry into transformations of religion in a secular world, it takes up Faisal Devji’s Waning Crescent: The Rise and Fall of Global Islam (Yale, 2025). Both explicitly engage with their Christian forebears—Gustavo Gutiérrez and Carl Schmitt, respectively—making them particularly fruitful interlocutors. Though they come from very different perspectives and take very different approaches, both ultimately show that the problems that Christianity has bequeathed to modernity remain problems for an Islamic political theology as well.
This paper rehabilitates a central problem for philosophy of revelation brought into relief by the responsibility for transmitting religious beliefs and practices to future generations. Transmission is a communicative endeavor essential to the task of religion. However, the concept of "revelation," philosophically considered, resists the possibility of communication in the first place by exceeding the conditions of communicability. As such, revealed religion cannot expect to transmit the revelation that constitutes it to future generations by legitimate means. Thus, under what immanent conditions might divine transcendence appear as communicable without violating divine transcendence? I argue that epistemological and phenomenological approaches to revelation have not adequately answered this question. I argue that philosophical hermeneutics in a Gadamerian vein offers conceptual tools for conceiving of language as the medium required for a robust notion of revelation as communicable. Gadamer's philosophy of transmission (Überlieferung) trades on concepts of transcendence that can countenance religious revelation.