...- ence, not to be engaged by the demand of the other that only takes us away from what is needed to ally ourselves with being. So for Spanos, the basic activity becomes not serving the interests of heteronomy but foregrounding a “profane” sense of worldliness capable of challenging the smugness...

... of heteronomy. © 2016 by Duke University Press 2016 secular humanism political theology heteronomy secularization Political Philology Michael P. Steinberg A beloved friend of mine, a member of the substantial Greek com- munity of Ithaca...

...-old discourses that have been produced over many centuries over heteronomy and/or autonomy, across the theological, philosophical, juridical, and political spectrum, revolve around the same false paradox of how to form order in the world from a transcendental vantage point, without being able...

... observations in Euro-­American inquiry about the heteronomy of language. This is why one of Lu Xun’s best-­known tropes, the “iron house,” evokes Chinese selfhood as a product of the Chinese language itself.5 The trope conjures up a vivid image of wenyan as a language walled...

... 10.1215/01903659-2072882 © 2013 by Duke University Press 78 boundary 2 / Spring 2013 secular claims were not antireligious—in fact, they were often militantly reli- gious. Secularism emerges out of a demand for greater religious freedom. It represents an interesting combination of heteronomy...

... of the politics of identity. The essential attributes, as I see them, of the incommensurable cul- ture are the following: 1. a logic of ‘‘identity’’ within a group, sometimes called (as by Richard Rorty) ‘‘solidarity and ‘‘difference’’ from all outside the group; 2. ‘‘heteronomy’’ (group...

... of a positive agency or nega- tive structure that operates behind the backs of people. Benjamin, how- ever, enlists this trope for his own purpose by displacing the scene of this heteronomy from speculative thought to a nonhumanist anthropology of the body, which allows for human agency beyond individual...

... of exclusionary sovereignty, of heteronomy pure and simple. Regardless of what these theories claim for themselves—that in various ways they exemplify decisionist power—they are the exact oppo- site: they abrogate the capacity for decision, by displacing decision to an undecidable beyond, to a land...

... in human beings toward heteronomy are utter nonsense. Surely, such theories never seem to wonder about the episte- mological position from which their “investigations” and “explanations” are promulgated. They don’t seek to explain why they conduct and achieve a self-­understanding that comes from...

... (as the start of the dissensus that is objet-­consciousness) against those seeking to restore heteronomy. These might be found not only in the state’s agents and apparatuses but also in the person of “private prosecutors . . . subcon- tracted by the public prosecutor’s office as local organs of state power...

... the form of a retroactive anthropomorphism or mimeticism that paradoxically erases human heteronomy (its finitude) with regard to the contingency of nature’s gift con- ceived contradictorily as ‘‘inhuman techne’’ (Cheah, Spectral Nationality, 110–11). 9. Cheah, Spectral Nationality, 61–113. See Immanuel...

... of remaining within one’s own terms, of escaping the heteronomy of being counted and discounted. I would go so far as to say that this includes the erotic world of men, if it were to be seen as a collec- tive. The illicit homoeroticism in Cavafy’s poems is always singular and itin- erant; it belongs...

..., this refusal to grant to the (collective) self autonomy (from the whims of the beloved) can indeed only appear masochistic. The lyric subject in Faiz’s poetry is located at those borderlands of self and world where autonomy and heteronomy lose their distinctness, where the self is confronted...

.... On the contrary, all theo- onto- logical configurations of nature and time that produce a tran- scendental Being must be dismantled, if human- being as an interrogative, mutable, social- historical condition is to escape the prison of heteronomy. In this case, how this interrogation takes place, as well as what...

... temporally between those performances.35 We believe that the very fact that music studies remained unconcerned with the givenness of its object—music— was no oversight but rather the condition of possibility for its advocacy of the performative as performance. And so, in place of a heteronomy...

... repeat the peculiar heteronomic structure of reason—to be beyond itself away, subordinate to what it cannot yet understand; they repeat the struc- ture, to be sure, outside the sphere of reason—now there will be a historical self, a laboring self, a willing self, an existing self—but heteronomy...