Political Myth , livre ebook

Duke University Press - Boer Roland Boer

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268 pages

English

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In this provocative and necessary work, Roland Boer, a leading biblical scholar and cultural theorist, develops a political myth for the Left: a powerful narrative to be harnessed in support of progressive policy. Boer focuses on foundational stories in the Hexateuch, the first six books of the Bible, from Genesis through Joshua. He contends that the "primal story" that runs from Creation, through the Exodus, and to the Promised Land is a complex political myth, one that has been appropriated recently by the Right to advance reactionary political agendas. To reclaim it in support of progressive political ends, Boer maintains, it is necessary to understand the dynamics of political myth.Boer elaborates a theory of political myth in dialogue with Ernst Bloch, Theodor Adorno, Alain Badiou, Jacques Lacan, and Slavoj Zizek. Through close readings of well-known biblical stories he then scrutinizes the nature of political myth in light of feminism, psychoanalysis, and Marxism. Turning to contemporary politics, he examines the statements of prominent American and Australian politicians to show how the stories of Creation, conquest, Paradise, and the Promised Land have been distorted into a fantasy of Israel as a perpetual state in the making and a land in need of protection. Boer explains how this fantasy of Israel shapes U.S. and Australian foreign and domestic policies, and he highlights the links between it and the fantasy of unfettered global capitalism. Contending that political myths have repressed dimensions which if exposed undermine the myths' authority, Boer urges the Left to expose the weakness in the Right's mythos. He suggests that the Left make clear what the world would look like were the dream of unconstrained capitalism to be realized.

Sujets

Philosophie et théologie

Theology

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Publié par	Duke University Press
Date de parution	25 mars 2009
Nombre de lectures	1
EAN13	9780822390053
Langue	English
Poids de l'ouvrage	1 Mo

Informations légales : prix de location à la page 0,1398€. Cette information est donnée uniquement à titre indicatif conformément à la législation en vigueur.

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Political Myth

NEW SLANT

R E L I G I O N , P O L I T I C S , O N T O L O G Y

Edited by Creston Davis, Philip Goodchild,

and Kenneth Surin

Roland Boer

On the Use and Abuse of Biblical Themes

D U K E U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S Durham and London 2009

All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paperb Designed by Amy Ruth Buchanan Typeset in Iowan Oldstyle by Achorn International Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data appear on the last printed page of this book.

Duke University Press gratefully acknowledges the support of the Australian Research Council, which provided funds for the production of this book.

For Ibrahim Abraham

The Sacred Economy 89

The Fantasy of Myth 62

Bibliography 227

Indexes 245

Mythmaking for the Left 168

Appendix 193

Women First? On the Legacy of “Primitive Communism” 36

Foreign Policy and the Fantasy of Israel in Australia 116

Introduction 1

Conclusion 189

Toward a Theory of Political Myth 9

Contents

Preface ix

Christianity, Capitalism, and the Fantasy of Israel in the United States 144

Notes 213

Preface

Almost a century ago, in the midst of revolutionary turmoil, with all its vivid hopes and crushing disappointments, Georges Sorel (1961: 127) wrote in hisReLections on Violence,“We know that the general strike is indeedwhat I have said: themythin which Socialism is wholly comprised,i.e.a body of images capable of evoking instinctively all the sentiments which correspond to the different manifestations of the war undertaken by So-cialism against modern society.” The deep agenda, the political passion of this book is driven by the sense that Sorel’s program remains unînished: awed, piecemeal, running in various directions, it touches nevertheless on the primary need for political myth, for powerful political myths on the Left. It seems to me that an intervention like Sorel’s is sorely needed at the present moment. For Sorel (1961), the revolutionaries at the turn of the twentieth century needed something to keep their hopes alive, to touch their hearts as well as their minds, and that was the myth of the general strike that would bring capitalism to its knees. For all its continued potency, we may not wish to pin our hopes on the general strike at the beginning of the twenty-îrst century, but what I like so much about Sorel’s project is that political myths should be collective, motivational, and irrefutable. Let me spin this out: cast in terms of the fundamental ideas of the group itself, such a myth was primarily a collective project that thrived on various images and metaphors that made the myth irrefutable, providing the deep motivation for continued political action in the face of repeated failures. In short, political myth is “the framing of a future, in some indeterminate time” (124).