I had gone to teach but stayed to learn: Geraldine MacKenzie at Aurukun Mission, 1925-1965

This article examines the missionary career of Geraldine MacKenzie who, with her husband Bill MacKenzie, served on the Presbyterian mission at Aurukun on the Cape York Peninsula between 1925 and 1965. It focuses primarily on MacKenzie’s own interpretation of and reflection on her experiences, as described in her memoir, Aurukun Diary. While the memoir elides some of the more controversial features of the MacKenzies’ tenure at Aurukun, it provides insights into the changing nature of missionary theology and practice on Aboriginal missions in the early twentieth century, particularly as they relate to the role of women—both missionaries and mission residents.

A Jamesonian theory of theological practice: a critical response to the work of Roland Boer

In a conjuncture marked by the “resurgence of religion,” the problem of historical materialism’s relation to religious ideologies has acquired a new urgency. The work of Roland Boer, recently awarded the Deutscher Prize for his magnum opus on Marxism and Theology poses this question from a surprising perspective. While his main claim is that religious influences in Marxist theory represent a sort of theological unconscious in historical materialism, at the same time Boer also advances an original Marxist interpretation of the Abrahamic religions, especially Christianity. This line of research, which extends from his dissertation on Jameson and Jeroboam through to his most recent work on The Sacred Economy, proposes that theology is a reflective representation of the social totality. In this article, I criticise Boer’s valorisation of theology as a practical discourse that is post-ideological but non-theoretical, and conclude by indicating an alternative.

On a neglected argument in French philosophy: Sceptical humanism in Montaigne, Voltaire and Camus

This paper wants to draw out a common argument in three great philosophers and littérateurs in modern French thought: Michel de Montaigne, Voltaire, and Albert Camus. The argument makes metaphysical and theological scepticism the first premise for a universalistic political ethics, as per Voltaire's: "it is clearer still that we ought to be tolerant of one another, because we are all weak, inconsistent, liable to fickleness and error." The argument, it seems to me, presents an interestingly overlooked, deeply important and powerful contribution to the philosophical discourse of modernity. On one hand, theological and post-structuralist critics of "humanism" usually take the latter to depend either on an essentialist philosophical anthropology, or a progressive philosophy of history. The former, it is argued, is philosophically contestable and ethically contentious (since however we define the human "essence," we are bound to exclude some "others"). The latter, for better or worse, is a continuation of theological eschatology by another name. So both, if not "modernity" per se, should somehow be rejected. But an ethical universalism - like that we find in Montaigne, Bayle, Voltaire, or Camus - which does not claim familiarity with metaphysical or eschatological truths, but humbly confesses our epistemic finitude, seeing in this the basis for ethical solidarity, eludes these charges. On the other hand, philosophical scepticism plays a large role in the post-structuralist criticisms of modern institutions and ideas in ways which have been widely taken to license forms of ethics which problematically identify responsibility, with taking a stand unjustifiable by recourse to universalizable reasons. But, in Montaigne, Voltaire and Camus, our ignorance concerning the highest or final truths does not close off, but rather opens up, a new descriptive sensitivity to the foibles and complexities of human experience: a sensitivity reflected amply, and often hilariously, in their literary productions. As such, a critical agnosticism concerning claims about things "in the heavens and beneath the earth" does not, for such a "sceptical humanism," necessitate decisionism or nihilism. Instead, it demands a redoubled ethical sensitivity to the complexities and plurality of political life which sees the dignity of "really-existing" others, whatever their metaphysical creeds, as an inalienable first datum of ethical conduct and reflection. After tracking these arguments in Montaigne, Voltaire, and Camus, the essay closes by reflecting on, and contesting, one more powerful theological argument against modern agnosticism's allegedly deleterious effects on ethical culture: that acknowledging ignorance concerning the highest things robs us of the basis for awe or wonder, the wellspring of human beings' highest ethical, aesthetic, and spiritual achievements.

Legal systemology and the geopolitics of Roman law: a response to Stuart Elden’s critique of Carl Schmitt’s spatial ontology

This paper explores the production, destruction, and reproduction of the geopolitical spaces of Roman law in order to offer an analysis of Schmitt’s (selective) notion of Jus Publicum Europaeum and its relevance to the current “depoliticization” and “dejuridification” of the world. By adopting a historical and geopolitical approach that reaches the boundaries of legal systemology and political theology, the present contribution investigates the manipulative and instrumentalist use of the material object of Rome’s (universalist) competence, namely the “territory” as dominium of its political intervention, which was ultimately (and idealistically) aimed at avoiding the natural destiny of any living being: birth, maturity, and death. Attention is therefore paid to the Roman strategy of (ontological?) contamination of its mythical identity through the legal and sociopolitical administration and regulation of its geographical spaces in terms of (non-)cultural signification. Through the analysis of such concepts as “nomos,” “Großraum,” “Ortung,” and “Ordnung,” it is claimed that Schmitt voluntarily chose to identify the Jus Publicum Europaeum with the geopolitical order produced during the Age of Discovery and not with the “comprehensive” Roman spatial order. The reason for this choice may be identified in the distortive use of Rome’s social relations and political allegiances that lay at the core of its genealogical expansionism (and subsequent inevitable dissolution) since the conquest of Veius in 396 BC and the historical compromise between patrician nobility and plebeians in 367 BC.

Camus, philosophe: to return to our beginnings

Camus, Philosophe: To Return to our Beginnings is the first book on Camus to read Camus in light of, and critical dialogue with, subsequent French and European philosophy. It argues that, while not an academic philosopher, Albert Camus was a philosophe in more profound senses looking back to classical precedents, and the engaged French lumières of the 18th century. Aiming his essays and literary writings at the wider reading public, Camus’ criticism of the forms of ‘political theology’ enshrined in fascist and Stalinist regimes singles him out markedly from more recent theological and messianic turns in French thought. His defense of classical thought, turning around the notions of natural beauty, a limit, and mesure makes him a singularly relevant figure given today’s continuing debates about climate change, as well as the way forward for the post-Marxian Left.

The age of ‘depoliticisation’ and ‘dejuridification’ and its ‘logic of assembling’: an essay against the instrumentalist use of comparative law’s geopolitics

While comparative law has become a key discipline, its instrumentalist use has turned out to be a powerful weapon: it is the ‘pen’ by which the identity of and differences in law’s geopolitics are continually written and rewritten. Given its attractive functionalist essence, comparative law is gaining increasing international credit as a way of developing newer theories of sovereignty and governance in a framework in which law is conceived of less as a set of rules and more as a symbolic vestimentum of global soft power. The present contribution critically investigates the relationship between distortive views of comparative law’s geopolitics and the intimate essence of the doctrine aimed at creating the ‘aspatial’, unbounded, illimitable (and hence intangible) liberal global order whose governance appears to transcend the idea and form(s) of law through which the ‘politicization’ and ‘juridification’ of modernity have been achieved in the last century. In doing so, it also addresses why such an alliance has made it easier to ‘discover’ and ‘sell’ the smooth and rectilinear land of the figuratively unspoken and unwritten as the terra incognita that lies over what is created by the constructivist political intervention(s) of the modern nation-state