Powers of Distinction: On Religion and Modernity - Softcover

Levene, Nancy

Softcover

ISBN 10: 022650753X ISBN 13: 9780226507538

Publisher: University of Chicago Press, 2017

Synopsis

In this major new work, philosopher of religion Nancy Levene examines the elemental character of religion and modernity. Deep in their operating systems, she argues, are dualisms of opposition and identity that cannot be reconciled with the forms of life they ostensibly support. These dualisms are dead ends, but they conceal a richer position—another kind of dualism constitutive of mutual relation. This dualism is difficult to distinguish and its concept of relation difficult to commit to. It risks contention and even violence. But it is also the indispensable support for modernity’s most innovative ideals: democracy, criticism, and interpretation.
 
In readings from Abraham to the present, Levene recovers this richer dualism in its difference from the alternatives—other dualisms, nondualism, multiplication. From Abraham we get the biblical call to give up tribal belonging for a promised land of covenantal relation. Yet modernity, inclusive of this call, is also the principle that critiques the promise when it divides self from other, us from them.

Drawing on a long tradition of thinkers and scholars even as she breaks new ground, Levene offers here nothing less than a new way of understanding modernity as an ethical claim about our world, a philosophy of the powers of distinction to include rather than to divide.
 

About this title

About the Author

Nancy Levene is associate professor of religious studies at Yale University. She is the author of Spinoza’s Revelation: Religion, Democracy, and Reason.
 

Edition details

• Publisher: University of Chicago Press
• Publication date: 2017
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 022650753X
• ISBN 13: 9780226507538
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 304