Adi M. Ophir

In the Beginning Was the State (eBook, PDF)

• Format: PDF

Produktbeschreibung

This book explores God's use of violence as depicted in the Hebrew Bible. Focusing on the Pentateuch, it reads biblical narratives and codes of law as documenting formations of theopolitical imagination. Ophir deciphers the logic of divine rule that these documents betray, with a special attention to the place of violence within it. The book draws from contemporary biblical scholarship, while also engaging critically with contemporary political theory and political theology, including the work of Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, Jan Assmann, Regina Schwartz, and Michael Walzer.Ophir focuses on three distinct theocratic formations: the rule of disaster, where catastrophes are used as means of governance; the biopolitical rule of the holy, where divine violence is spatially demarcated and personally targeted; and the rule of law where divine violence is vividly remembered and its return is projected, anticipated, and yet postponed, creating a prolonged lull for the text's present.Different as these formations are, Ophir shows how they share an urform that anticipates the main outlines of the modern European state, which has monopolized the entire globe. A critique of the modern state, the book argues, must begin in revisiting the deification of the state, unpacking its mostly repressed theological dimension.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Fordham University Press
• Erscheinungstermin: 6. Dezember 2022
• Englisch
• ISBN-13: 9781531501433
• Artikelnr.: 68955102

Autorenporträt

Adi M. Ophir is a Visiting Professor at the Cogut Institute for the Humanities at Brown University and Professor Emeritus at Tel Aviv University. Among his works are Goy: Israel's Multiple Others and the Birth of the Gentile, cöauthored with Ishay Rosen-Zvi (Oxford University Press, 2018); Divine Violence: Two Essays on God and Disaster (The Van Leer Institute, 2013); The One-State Condition, cöauthored with Ariella Azoulay (Stanford University Press, 2012); and The Order of Evils: Toward an Ontology of Morals (Zone, 2005).

Inhaltsangabe

Acknowledgments vii Introduction 1 1. Staying with the Violence 13 Divine Violence-A Trailer, 13
A Brief Note on Counting and Explaining Away, 21
Violence, as It Is Unfolding: A Phenomenological Sketch, 24
Literal Reading and the Biblical Language of Violence, 36 2. Theocracy: The Persistence of an Ancient Lacuna 45 Theocracy, with and beyond Flavius Josephus, 45
The Blind Spot: Three Contemporary Readings of Biblical Violence, 53
On the Attribution of Power and Authority, 74
Kingship, Anarchy, Theocracy, 79
Hypothesis, Method, and Stakes, 86 3. The Rule of Disaster: Extinction, Genocides, and Other Calamities 96 Becoming Political, 96
From Extinction to Genocide, 99
Beyond Destruction, 105
Separation and Disaster, 113
Violence and Law, 124
The Sovereign's Moment, 130
Scouts in the Land of the Giants: Three Theocratic Formations, 139 4. Holy Power: States of Exception, Targeted Killings, and the Logic of Substitution 145 Holiness, 145
Rebellions in the Wilderness, 160
Substitution and Containment, 178 5. The Time of the Covenant and the Temporalization of Violence 193 The Experimental Setting: Recalling Violence and Regulating It, 196
The Covenant and the Curses, 204
The Weight of the Present, 214
The Subjects' Trap, or the People's Irony, 222
A Midianite Utopia, 230 Afterword: The Pentateuchal State, and Ours 241 Notes 257 Works Cited 317 Index 335