... thus far unrecognized, namely, how the problem of heresy figures at its core; they help us recall the interwar origins of the contemporary fascination with the term, the historical “horizon” in which it was born; they make plain what was at stake for Jewish thinkers in particular; and they help us ask...

..., it is a structural force in the history of Western thought that returns in Jewish, Christian, and even secular phenomena. Nonetheless, for both scholars, messianism was a paradoxical, anarchic, apocalyptic, and revolutionary phenomenon best understood from the perspective of heresy. Focusing on the role of heresy...

... the notion of a modern cae- sura. Geréby concludes that “few critics of Schmitt are in a position to call political theology a heresy, as Peterson did.” Christiane Frey examines Agamben’s recent reading of Paul’s Letter to the Romans. Frey shows how Agamben, drawing on and critiquing Martin...

... that the divine and the natural are never confused. (Without acknowledging it, Horkheimer and Adorno 32  Beyond Gnosticism and Magic recognize that pantheism is one of Judaism’s greatest heresies.) The Bilder­ verbot maintains these distinctions by prohibiting illusion and preserves the mimetic core...

... it, forms like “science,” “art,” and “philosophy,” all of which the essay violates, betrays, and corrupts. Consequently, the essay’s form consists of having no form at all or, more specifically, of having no form of its own: its “innermost formal law is heresy” (EF, 47). Adorno’s own text, “The Essay...

... had appeared in Hebrew in Israel. The work built on Scholem’s earlier studies of Sabbatianism, such as the chapter “Sabbatianism and Mystical Heresy” in Major Trends in Jewish Mysticism and his aforementioned article “Redemp- tion through Sin.” Scholem sought to recount the history...

... curse, and nature’s lament, three fundamental enunciatory modes of interjections.43 A good decade after this theolinguistic treatise, written, as he insisted in a letter to Gershom Scholem, “in immanent relation to Judaism,”44 Benjamin has added the heresy himself. His praise of the comforts...

... Christianity and modernity that renders the latter a deplorable “Christian heresy.” 15 In Legitimacy of the Modern Age , Blumenberg notes that these theories assume that the authentic, religious “substance” remains hidden but is nonetheless present in its secular derivations, “implied” or “wrapped up...

.... Not to know reliably about the details of Jesus’s life because the gospels were mythic constructions was one kind of heresy; to claim that Jesus can be best understood in the context of rabbinic literature, the Mishnah, Tosefta, Targumim, and Talmud, as Geiger claimed, was an outrage to Protestant...

..., but in fact Maimon belongs to a school of German Jewish schol- ars who were students—in the strict sense—of both Kantian philosophy and 21. See Abraham P. Socher, The Radical Enlightenment of Solomon Maimon: Judaism, Heresy, and Philosophy (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006), 50–51...

... would find a counter model in Goethe’s political demonology of one god against another god. The heresy of the separation of powers through the polytheistic intervention stands against the orthodoxy of legitimizing absolute sovereignty through the analogy of a monotheistic god. In a final salute...

..., they are previously sup- pressed heresies). For Arendt, the current theories of “political religion,” rang- ing their objects among historical faiths as if they were simple additions, have failed to develop a theory of their signifi cance as the outcome of a dynamic she identifi es. Their secularism may seem like...

... Interrupted: Heresy and the European Imagination between the World Wars (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).   6. Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt and Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995). Cf. John P. McCormick, Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism...

... counterarguments were never acknowl- edged on the level that Schmitt’s formulas were, not even by the anti-Schmitt polemicists. There is a straightforward sociological explanation for that. Few critics of Schmitt are in a position to call political theology a heresy, as Peter- 76. Peterson, “Kaiser...

... . Lazier Benjamin . God Interrupted: Heresy and the European Imagination between the World Wars . Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press , 2012 . Lazier Benjamin . “ Overcoming Gnosticism: Hans Jonas, Hans Blumenberg, and the Legitimacy of the Natural World .” Journal of the History...

... life in exile (the Tree of Knowledge) is destroyed, revealing the face of creation as it appeared to God on the seventh day (the Tree of Life). Benjamin’s embrace of the antinomianism and antitradi- tionalism of this heresy, especially in the figure of Sabbatai Zvi in the seven- teenth century...

... controversy about Western civilization. Questioning the Western canon is seen as heresy, and those who do this as undesirable radicals. In the writings of Roger Kim- ball and Allan Bloom, this polemic is much more outspoken. Both attack the changes that took place during the 1970s as dangerous...