Christianity has been ‘returning’ to continental philosophy for some time now. At first it was the question of mystical theology which returned to haunt the continental philosophers’ attempts to articulate the unbridgeable gap between words and things, the individual and the world. More recently it is St Paul who has returned to the centre of th…[Read more]

This article explores the role of the body in Thomas Aquinas’ ethical thought, focusing on the Summa Theologiae. Drawing on Thomas’ account of human nature, teleology and ethics, it traces Thomas’ account of human embodiment through his discussion of the rela- tionship between human and angelic nature, the beatific vision, law and virtue, and t…[Read more]

This paper will argue that the work of Slavoj Žižek can be fruitfully understood as a response to mystical theology as it has been received in two strands of 20th century French thought—psychoanalysis and phenomenology—and that Žižek’s work in turn offers intriguing possibilities for the re-figuring of mystical theology by feminist philoso…[Read more]

Maurizio Lazzarato argues that contemporary capitalism functions through two central apparatuses: Social subjection and machinic enslavement. Social subjection equips individuals with a subjectivity, assigning them identities, sexes, bodies, professions, and other markers of identity, along with a sense of their own individual agency within…[Read more]

Charles Taylor’s ‘secular age’ was always also a machine age; the death of God and the mechanisation of the world developed in tandem with one another. Yet magic did not disappear from this new world so much as find itself transposed into new forms, new bodies, and new powers. This paper will explore the implications of this tranp…[Read more]

In this chapter I will, first, discuss the marriage of Christian theology and Neoplatonism which takes place in the mystical theology of Dionysius the Areopagite, and some of the problems which arise from this remarkably fruitful liaison. Then, second, I will trace the line of descent which leads from Dionysius to Žižek, who takes this i…[Read more]