"Underlying all the very varied essays in this volume is a set of issues about how we understand human action. And what the essays have in common, I believe, is a conviction that the fundamental requirement of a politics worth the name is that we have an account of human action that decisively marks its distance from assumptions about action as the successful assertion of will. If there is no hinterland to human acting except the contest of private and momentary desire, meaningful action is successful action, an event in which a particular will has imprinted its agenda on the 'external' world. Or, in plainer terms, meaning is power . . . and any discourse of justice is illusory."--Rowan Williams, Archbishop of Canterbury, from the introduction

Creston Davis is a doctoral candidate in philosophical theology at the University of Virginia.

John Milbank is a professor of religion, politics, and ethics at the University of Nottingham. His books include Being Reconciled: Ontology and Pardon and Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason.

Slavoj Žižek is a senior researcher at the Institute for Social Studies in Ljubljana, Slovenia. He is the author of Tarrying with the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology, editor of Cogito and the Unconscious: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology, and coeditor of Perversion and the Social Relation and Gaze and Voice as Love Objects, all also published by Duke University Press.

Acknowledgments xi
Introduction / Rowan Williams 1
Part I. Revolution and Theological Difference
Tragedy and Revolution / Terry Eagleton 7
Metanoia: The Theological Praxis of Revolution / Creston Davis and Patrick Aaron Riches 22
The “Thrilling Romance of Orthodoxy” / Slavoj Zizek 52
Nothing is Something Must Be: Lacan and Creation from No One / Conor Cunningham 72
Revelation and Revolution / Regina Mara Schwartz 102
Part 2. Ontology, Capital, and Kingdom
Capital and Kingdom: An Eschatological Ontology / Philip Goodchild 127
Neither Servility nor Sovereignty: Between Metaphysics and Politics / William Desmond 153
Of Chrematology: Joyce and Money / Simon Chritchley and Tom McCarthy 183
Only Jesus Saves: Toward a Theopolitical Ontology of Judgment / Daniel M. Bell Jr. 200
Part 3. Infinite Desire and the Political Subject
The Political Subject and Absolute Immanence / Antonio Negri 231
Rewriting the Ontological Script of Liberation: On the Question of Finding a New Kind of Political Subject / Kenneth Surin 240
Ecclesia: The Art of the Virtual / Anthony Baker and Rocco Gangle 267
The Univocalist Mode of Production / Catherine Pickstock 281
Part 4. Reenchanting the Political beyond Ontotheology
The Unbearable Withness of Being: On the Essentialist Blind Spot of Anit-ontotheology / Mary-Jane Rubenstein 340
“To Cut Too Deeply and Not Enough”: Violence and the Incorporeal / Elanor Kaufman 350
The Two Sources of the “Theological Machine:: Jacques Derrida and Henri Bergson on Religion, Technicity, War, and Terror / Hent de Vries 366
Part 5. Theological Materialism
Materialism and Transcendence / John Milbank 393
Truth and Peace: Theology and the Body Politic in Augustine and Hobbes / Karl Hefty 427
The Politics of the Eye: Toward a Theological Materialism / Phillip Blond 439
Notes on Contributors 463
Index 467