The ghost of totalitarianism: deconstructing the pneumatological nature of christian political theology

• Autores: Grassi, Martín
• Año de publicación: 2024
• Idioma: inglés
• Tipo de recurso: libro
• Fuente: Tübingen : Mohr Siebeck, 2024
• Materia: TEOLOGIA POLITICA; TOTALITARISMO; ESPIRITU SANTO; FILOSOFIA DE LA RELIGION
• Institución: Pontificia Universidad Católica Argentina

Fil: Grassi, Martín. Investigador independiente; Argentina
This book was written during my research stay at the Insitüt für Hermeneutik as an Alexander von Humboldt fellow. I worked under Prof Dr Cornelia Richter’s guidance over almost three years, bringing together philosophy of religion, systematic theology, and political theology, combining the hermeneutical method with that of deconstruction. Those years (2018–2020) were really exciting, and building my argument on the origins of political Totalitarianism by attending to one of the most important and elusive concepts of western culture, that of spirit (spiritus, pneuma), was one of the best philosophical adventures I have ever lived. At first this task seemed to be impossible to handle, for there were so many centuries to cover, so many disciplines to attend to, so many theological theories, and so many concepts that were connected to that of the spirit that I was about to quit. Nevertheless, the argument was built with patience, mainly by attending to the semantical displacements that were made possible by linguistic connections. Concepts as economy, monarchy, organism, deification, perichoresis, apokatástasis, oikeiosis, and many others, suddenly related to each other thanks to the semantic field that the ambivalent word stasis opened. My argument, thus, was built on the idea that the idea of life and of living beings was characterized in western culture by the use of the prefix autos, and by the need to overcome the inner division (stasis) inherent to this reflexive nature of the living, in order to achieve unity and stability (stasis). Therefore, this book is a continuation of my book on the bio-theo-political paradigm of autarchy, in which I aim at deconstructing the western idea of life1. However, if the aim of that book was to dismantle this paradigm of autarchy to allow a more relational metaphysics of life, in this book my main goal is to show how western culture has been unable to think on plurality without making of it an organized totality. Both books aim, therefore, at thinking on community from a different and new perspective. Both of them, however, are works of deconstruction, that is, of showing how these paradigms of autarchy and of totalitarianism were somehow built over the centuries. I am not confident enough to think that I will ever be able to write a more constructive work, where new metaphors, figures, and concepts are used to set the foundations for a relational and pluralistic metaphysics. But I am confident that these efforts will allow those in the future to find these ways that are today still in the shadow...