Polygraph Issue 19

Issue Editor: Russ Leo

TENTATIVE TITLE: Augustine, our Contemporary

The Polygraph Editorial Collective invites papers on any aspect of St. Augustine of Hippo's
work - on Augustinian concepts; interventions in the history of Augustinian exegesis (or in
the exegesis of Augustine's considerable body of work); non-modern, pre-modern, and
modern determinations of his thought which inform our own contemporary preoccupations
or occlusions; or the assessment of his importance to current theologico-political
controversies. Augustine's import to intellectual history has yet to enter the emergent
conversation on "political theology" or the phenomenology of religion in any substantial way
- a particularly striking absence given the scope of writing by and on Augustine shaping
numerous philosophical and theological archives as well as the recent interest in religion
(and Paul in particular) across a number of disciplines. Important works on Augustine are
integral to numerous contemporary debates on grace, law, the Word, the messiah/
messianism, sovereignty, belief, and secularism.

Encounters with Augustine enable new or renewed meditations on love, translation and
historicity; projects of autobiography and subjectivity in the afterlives of the Confessions;
epistemologies of memory and origin, where Augustinian determinations of conversion or
original sin complicate our readings of events and iteration; theories of temporality; or
diagrams and negotiations of religion and the secular state after Hegel's Phenomenology of
Spirit or Marx's Capital, in their confrontations with the City of God. Given the rich history of
Augustinian reading, our task remains one of retrieval as well as reappropriation. What are
the resources of love in and after Augustine? What are the demands of grace? Who are
Augustine's interlocutors and what are their terms, from the Pelagians, the Donatists, and the
Manicheans to Heidegger, Derrida, Arendt, Vattimo, Lyotard, Wittgenstein, and Agamben?
What has been done with Augustine, in or against his name? What does it mark? What is the
import of a theology of grace to philosophy? To ethics? To feminism? To race? To political
economy? Moreover, what is the status of the City of God, given attendant religious
controversies and our contemporary "secular" occasion?

 
Deadline for submissions: December 31, 2006.
Please email submissions to: russell.leo_at_duke.edu
See the Polygraph website (http://www.duke.edu/web/polygraph/submissions.html) for
submission guidelines.

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Received on Thu Oct 12 2006 - 11:20:03 EDT