Abstract
This article critically engages with the work of Eric Voegelin, a thinker who, for the most part, has remained neglected. Against this neglect the claim is advanced that Voegelin’s thought should be taken heed of, not least from thinkers who register themselves in the radical tradition of political theory. At the same time, however, it is argued that any positive appropriation of Voegelin from a radical perspective has to put under critical scrutiny basic assumptions informing his thought, and above all his conception of the body. In particular, the argument put forward is that Voegelin’s impoverished conceptualization of the body constitutes a real problem for his thought, and specifically one that underscores his dismissive attitude toward political radicalism. Subsequently, through a presentation of recent theoretical discussions of the body, a more positive conception of embodied being is sought for, which can lay open the radical dynamic of Voegelin’s participatory ontology.
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Notes
For comprehensive commentaries on Voegelin’s philosophy, cf. Hughes (1999) and McKnight et al. (2001). For a comparative analysis with recent trends in political theory and philosophy, see Petrakis and Eubanks (2004).
Such a hierarchy between thought and action is not peculiar to Voegelin. Not only does it characterize classic works of social anthropology (cf. Bell, 1992, pp. 19–66) but – as I will argue – it can be found even in materialist theories of social being, notably Marxism.
Voegelin’s diagnosis of modernity as a version of Gnosticism, which earned him the relative fame he acquired in the intellectual world, was publicly pronounced in his Guilford Lectures, published as The New Science of Politics, and elaborated in works such as Politics and Gnosticism (see Voegelin, 2000a). Later Voegelin would modify his thesis but never fully abandon it.
For a similar phenomenological approach, cf. Marcoulatos (2007).
In these terms, there is also a clear resonance with the thought of Badiou (2005). A lengthier comparative analysis would be potentially very fertile. Along with the many important differences, it could explore the depth of this or other apparent resonances in the thought of these two thinkers.
Whether this shift amounts to an ‘epistemological break’, as Louis Althusser has famously argued, is a different issue that cannot be discussed here. For an analysis that shows how the Marxian critique of political economy can be enriched with themes that preoccupy recent works on the body, cf. Federici (2004).
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Sotiropoulos, G. Bodies of truth: Eric Voegelin’s ontology of participation and the potentialities of embodied being. Contemp Polit Theory 14, 120–136 (2015). https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2014.24
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/cpt.2014.24