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This article develops a theoretical & political critique of the contemporary notion of the deconstruction of Christianity primarily in the later work of Jacques Derrida & Jean-Luc Nancy. The deconstruction of Christianity relies upon an understanding of temporality & messianicity derived from Heidegger & Benjamin, & we challenge this privileging of messianism in contemporary philosophy & theology. Messianism is contrasted with plasticity, & plasticity is shown to have resources to overcome the impasses of contemporary thought in a counter-messianic way. To oppose messianism is not to oppose theological thinking, but to open a creative & productive political space for a radical theological & philosophical reflection. Adapted from the source document.

After the Second World War, continental philosophy became increasingly influential on the American literary left. In particular, the philosophy of Martin Heidegger had a profound effect on the Objectivist poet, George Oppen, in the 1950s and 1960s, and less than a decade later Ludwig Wittgenstein's philosophy was crucial to the Language poet, Ron Silliman. Each poet turned to philosophy in response to the crises of post-war America. As a consequence, Heidegger's and Wittgenstein's philosophies have since become dominant frameworks for reading Oppen's and Silliman's poetry, and for reading twentieth-century poetry more generally.Such readings, however, risk reducing a poet's work to the passive reflection of contextual materials. In contrast, this thesis proposes a combination of 'faithful' and 'unfaithful' reading, interpreting a poet's work from both within and without the parameters set by its context. Faithful reading responds to and unfaithful reading questions the hold that context currently wields over interpretation. This thesis argues that, while philosophical influence is important to any understanding of Oppen's and Silliman's poetry, faithful reading alone often neglects the ways in which poetry is meaningful in relation to competing philosophies. Furthermore, the thesis argues that, despite the great differences between Heidegger and Wittgenstein, both Oppen and Silliman use philosophy to create poetry that responds directly to a time of historical and cultural crisis. Heidegger's philosophy helps Oppen to seek a phenomenological experience that is like Heidegger's concept of Ereignis, the event of Being's disclosure. For Oppen, this experience is capable of resisting the ideologies behind his capitalist culture and American war-time atrocity. At the same time, however, the experience resists the language that is used to express it. Wittgenstein's philosophy also helped Silliman respond to the historical crisis of war-time atrocity and capitalism's dominance over his culture. Wittgenstein demonstrates that language's meanings are social and determined within 'forms of life'. This allows Silliman to emphasise, politicize, and trouble at the intersection of language's meanings the forms of life from which they emerge. This contention with what Wittgenstein calls the 'grammatical criteria' of meaning also works to disclose the crisis to which the poems respond.

It has often been noted that Leo Strauss developed his understanding of political philosophy through a critical engagement with Heidegger. Yet most analyses focus on Strauss's American works while neglecting his earlier response during the crisis years of the Weimar Republic. The article seeks to overcome this limitation by 'deconstructing' Strauss's American definitions of political philosophy in light of both his Weimar understanding of politische Wissenschaft and his 1922 discovery of Heidegger's Aristotle. I argue that Strauss's conception of political philosophy originated in Heidegger's subversion of the traditional distinction between theory and praxis. I thus propose a way to read Strauss from the start following his own changing views of that distinction. [Reprinted by permission of Sage Publications Ltd., copyright holder.]

AbstractIn skirmishes over the interpretive turn, the work of Charles Taylor is frequently cited as representing the state of the art. Yet a systematic assessment of Taylor's interpretivism in light of the most salient criticisms made against it has not been conducted. This paper argues that Taylor's interpretivism withstands the strongest criticisms made of it so far, and therefore is an essential resource for revitalizing the interpretive turn. Although it is widely acknowledged in the secondary literature that Taylor's interpretivism rests on ontological claims about human agency, this paper presents a novel justification for this thesis as derived from a Heideggerian phenomenology of moods. It also presents two novel ways in which a defense of Taylor's interpretivism helps to bridge the gap between empirical social science research and normative political and ideological critique. In the latter discussion, it draws on Taylor's most recently published work.