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Insecurities: Beyond Religious (Non)Violence

Submitted to Program Units
1: Political Theology Unit

Inese Radzins, California State University, Stanislaus, Presiding

Abstract for Online Program Book (maximum 150 words)

This panel explores ways in which the intricate ties between law and violence play out in the sovereign figure of the state, particularly as questions of (in)security emerge at the center of modern political life. Panelists will analyze the underlying religious foundation that sanctions law/violence within the various domains of the state such as the secular civil disobedience movements, the U.S. elections, the counterinsurgent warfar against the Islamic communities in the U.S. and climate politics.

Papers

  • Adam Kotsko, North Central College

    The Katechōn, the Man of Lawlessness, and the Most Important Election of Our Lifetimes

    Abstract

    This paper proposes to look in a perhaps unexpected place for insight into the 2024 election: the Second Epistle to the Thessalonians, which introduces a strange apocalyptic narrative in which the katechōn or “restrainer” holds back the depredations of the “man of lawlessness.” Applying this framework to the two-party system in the US, this paper shows that each party casts itself in the role of katechōn and its opponent in the role of “man of lawlessness,” turning every election into an apocalyptic showdown in which the forces of evil may triumph once and for all. Drawing on Giorgio Agamben’s attempted secularization of Second Thessalonians’ apocalyptic myth in The Mystery of Evil, the paper argues that the very urgency of always staving off “the worst” is in fact the true force of chaos and destruction, actively preventing us from constructing a livable political and economic order.

  • Kyong-Jin Lee, Fuller Theological Seminary

    The Violence of the State of Exception and Macrosecuritization in Climate Politics

    Abstract

    The intersection of insecurity and exception applied in climate politics is examined through an engagement of Giorgio Agamben’s theory on the limit—more specifically, violence—of law in modern politics. Agamben maintains that the sovereign law, or more precisely the sovereign ban, is applied to disasters, catastrophes, and emergencies which are increasingly becoming ubiquitous conditions of modern life. This constant declaration of the state of exception reveals that the law is in force but without concrete significance. The essential problem with the normalization of the state of exception might be summarized as the sovereign power’s separation between law and life, while replacing it with indistinction between law and violence. This discussion seeks to understand the conceptual mechanisms and processes that enable familiar apocalyptic ideas such as risk and crisis that activate the state of exception, and consequently legitimize and authorize the unleashing of violence in full complicity with law.

  • Mohamad Marwan Jarada, University of California, Santa Barbara

    Counterinsurgent Force: Islam and Speculative Violence

    Abstract

    This paper engages with the intractable fact that Islamic communities in the United States have become sites that express the force of counterinsurgent warfare. As the War on Terror persists, both abroad and domestically, it has developed its weapons and technologies by virtue of taking Islamic forms of life and their spaces as its experimental means. This has intimately reverberated across local Islamic communities in the US, who have felt the pressures of surveillance, capture, and racial violence most intimately inside mosques and within their souls. This paper depicts an experience of counterinsurgent warfare with particular attention to the practices of securitization that are wielded for and against Islamic communities who are deemed prone to domestic terrorism. Fundamentally, the aim of the paper is to conceptualize the mode of violence that is animated by securitization and the counterinsurgent force that perpetuates the use of security technologies within Islamic life.

Responding
Christopher C. Brittain, Trinity College, Toronto

Business Meeting
An Yountae, California State University, Northridge, Presiding
Michelle Sanchez, Harvard University, Presiding
Audiovisual Requirements

Resources

LCD Projector and Screen
Play Audio from Laptop Computer
Podium microphone

Full Papers Available

No
Program Unit Options

Session Length

90 Minutes

Schedule Preference

Saturday, 3:00 PM - 4:30 PM
Schedule Info

Saturday, 3:00 PM - 4:30 PM

Tags

#democracy
# Violence
Giorgio Agamben
biopolitics
global climate change
violence of law
state of exception
security
risk management
climate crisis
Islam in the US
Spiritual Warfare
violence

Session Identifier

A23-326