Messiah, Muselmann and the Return of Paul's Real: Evidence for a Trauma of Secularism

Simple item page
dc.contributor.advisorBalfour, Ian G.
dc.creatorPrincipe, Concetta Valentina
dc.date.accessioned2014-07-11T17:56:19Z
dc.date.available2014-07-11T17:56:19Z
dc.date.copyright2013-09-30
dc.date.issued2014-07-09
dc.date.updated2014-07-09T16:20:28Z
dc.degree.disciplineHumanities
dc.degree.levelDoctoral
dc.degree.namePhD - Doctor of Philosophy
dc.description.abstractThis project addresses the anomaly evident in the use of religious terms for secular projects. If secularism was a system that intended to free the state from religion and the subject from religious superstition, then why would religious terminology be used in twentieth-century intellectual and cultural secular projects? For example, why would noted Marxist philosopher Walter Benjamin draw on the messianic figure in his “Theses on the Philosophy of History”? Moreover, what could be meant by the identification of the most abject inmate in Auschwitz, a Nazi death camp predominantly populated by European Jews, as the Muselmann? This project argues that the return of the religious terms, messiah and the Muselmann in twentieth-century secular texts is symptomatic of what psychoanalysts define as a trauma. Freud identifies trauma as evident only in its symptom of compulsive repetition, which motivates a working-through of what was missed. Lacan identifies trauma as the subject’s encounter with the real, where the real is inexplicable and missed, and what returns of the trauma is a remainder of the encounter: Lacan calls this remainder the objet a. The messiah and the Muselmann in secular texts are objets a and therefore, stand as a return of a trauma. Since these two religious terms seem to have no relation to each other apart from being of the religious within secularism, which is a system that has excluded religious presence in the operations of the state, then the objets a would suggest that the trauma is located within secularism itself. What is this trauma and where does it come from? Taking into account the limitations of psychoanalytic hermeneutics, which stresses that the original trauma is forever lost to us, this project traces a connection between contemporary secular messianism and the largest group of earliest-extant texts citing the messiah, St. Paul’s letters. On establishing the connection between Pauline messianism and the twentieth-century terms, messiah and Muselmann, I provide an analysis of four ‘case studies’ of the trauma of secularism expressed in twentieth-century philosophical texts and contemporary cultural works.en_US
dc.identifier.urihttp://hdl.handle.net/10315/27598
dc.language.isoenen_US
dc.rightsAuthor owns copyright, except where explicitly noted. Please contact the author directly with licensing requests.
dc.subjectComparative literatureen_US
dc.subjectPhilosophyen_US
dc.subjectReligious historyen_US
dc.subject.keywordsEqualityen_US
dc.subject.keywordsPsychoanalysisen_US
dc.subject.keywordsLacanen_US
dc.subject.keywordsFreuden_US
dc.subject.keywordsTraumaen_US
dc.subject.keywordsSecularismen_US
dc.subject.keywordsMessiahen_US
dc.subject.keywordsMuselmannen_US
dc.subject.keywordsPaul of Tarsusen_US
dc.subject.keywordsPaul's lettersen_US
dc.subject.keywordsTheologyen_US
dc.subject.keywordsIdeologyen_US
dc.subject.keywordsPolitical theologyen_US
dc.subject.keywordsExceptionen_US
dc.subject.keywordsSchmitten_US
dc.subject.keywordsAgambenen_US
dc.subject.keywordsBadiouen_US
dc.subject.keywordsZizeken_US
dc.subject.keywordsTaubesen_US
dc.subject.keywordsDerridaen_US
dc.subject.keywordsRosenzweigen_US
dc.subject.keywordsSarah Kofmanen_US
dc.subject.keywordsHolocaust Studiesen_US
dc.subject.keywordsBiblical Studiesen_US
dc.subject.keywordsTrauma Studiesen_US
dc.subject.keywordsEarly Christianityen_US
dc.subject.keywordsRabbinic Judaismen_US
dc.subject.keywordsSecond Temple Judaismen_US
dc.subject.keywordsJudean cultureen_US
dc.subject.keywordsJudean faithen_US
dc.subject.keywordsFirst-century Judean cultureen_US
dc.subject.keywordsConversionen_US
dc.subject.keywordsLaw of Christen_US
dc.subject.keywordsAutismen_US
dc.subject.keywordsAnne Carsonen_US
dc.subject.keywordsAutobiography of Reden_US
dc.subject.keywordsStanley Kubricken_US
dc.subject.keywordsSpace raceen_US
dc.subject.keywordsHiroshima and Nagasakien_US
dc.titleMessiah, Muselmann and the Return of Paul's Real: Evidence for a Trauma of Secularismen_US
dc.typeElectronic Thesis or Dissertation

Files

Original bundle
Now showing 1 - 1 of 1
Thumbnail Image
Name:
Principe_Concetta_V_2013_PhD.pdf
Size:
1.43 MB
Format:
Adobe Portable Document Format
Download
License bundle
Now showing 1 - 2 of 2
No Thumbnail Available
Name:
license.txt
Size:
1.83 KB
Format:
Item-specific license agreed upon to submission
Description:
Download
No Thumbnail Available
Name:
YorkU_ETDlicense.txt
Size:
3.38 KB
Format:
Plain Text
Description:
Download

Collections

Humanities

All items in the YorkSpace institutional repository are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved except where explicitly noted.