Abstract
To begin, a story concerning devils, shadows, and geographical knowledge. The story I have in mind is entitled “The Wonderful History of Peter Schlemihl,” a novella published in 1814 by a poet, botanist, and sometime-Romantic named Adelbert von Chamisso.1 As the story opens, the eponymous narrator has just arrived in a nameless port town. Schlemihl seeks out a wealthy contact, hoping to ingratiate himself to the man, and soon finds himself joining a company of lively companions on an afternoon stroll. They wind up on a hilltop overlooking the ocean. As the group grows increasingly festive and celebratory, Schlemihl notices a mysterious thin man lingering at the edge of the group, unacknowledged by the other members of the party. The man wears a long gray coat, and Schlemihl marvels as he pulls from his pocket an enormous telescope after someone expresses a desire to view the expanse of the ocean more closely. No one remarks upon the strangeness of the occurrence. But the wonders continue, for shortly thereafter the man pulls from his pocket a Turkish rug woven with gold filaments, that the party might have a picnic upon it. When the weather takes a threatening turn, the man pulls an entire canopy tent from his pocket to shelter the party. Finally, at the end of the episode the strange man pulls three black horses from his pocket, evidently to transport the party to a different location.
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Notes
I am grateful to Karsten Harries for drawing my attention to Chamisso’s tale.
Adelbert von Chamisso, Peter Schlemihl, trans. Wulf Koepke (Columbia, SC: Camden House, 1993), p. 122.
Ibid., 116–117.
Friedrich Schleiermacher, On Religion: Speeches to Its Cultured Despisers (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988), pp. 10–11.
A felicitous turn of phrase that I learned from Mark D. Jordan.
Ibid., p. 11.
Ibid., p. 23. Italics mine.
See Karl Barth, The Theology of Schleiermacher: Lectures at Göttingen, Winter Semester of 1923/24 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans Publishing Company, 1982), especially the final chapter, “Concluding Unscientific Postscript on Schleiermacher.”
See H. Richard Niebuhr, Christ and Culture (New York: Harper Perennial, 2003).
See George Lindbeck, The Nature of Doctrine (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox Press, 1984), p. 21.
See Frederick Herzog, Justice Church (New York: Orbis Press, 1980).
I am drawing on Peter Hodgson’s very helpful summary of the characteristics of liberal theology here, found in his book Liberal Theology: A Radical Vision (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2007), pp. 13–22.
See Kwok Pui-lan, Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster/John Knox, 2005), especially chapter 8, “Beyond Pluralism.”
See Joerg Rieger, Christ and Empire (Minneapolis, MN: Fortress Press, 2007), especially chapter 5, “Resisting and Reframing Prophet, Priest and King.”
Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism, Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press), pp. 38–45.
Paul Gilroy, Postcolonial Melancholia (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), p. 67. See also Eduardo Mendieta, Global Fragments: Globalizations, Latinamericanisms, and Critical Theory (Albany, NY: SUNY Press, 2007), pp. 7–13.
Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000), p. 207.
Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972–1977 (New York: Pantheon, 1980), p. 149.
Henri Lefebvre, The Production of Space (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 1991, first published 1974), p. 2
Ibid., p. 5. Derrida of course wrote for many years after Lefebvre published The Production of Space and did eventually address those concerns in collaborations with architects such as Peter Eisenmann and Bernard Tschumi. See Mark Wigley’s The Architecture of Deconstruction: Derrida’s Haunt (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995).
Lefebvre, The Production of Space, p. 33.
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984), chapter 7.
Augustine, Confessions (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1991), pp. 186–187. Karsten Harries writes about the spatial imagination of this passage in Infinity and Perspective (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2001), p. 155–159.
Speeches, p. 23.
Lefebvre, p. 45.
Ibid., pp. 257–259.
Margery Kempe, The Book of Margery Kempe (New York: Penguin Classics, 1986).
Stories captured in David Harvey’s interview at the beginning of Spaces of Capital (New York: Routledge Press, 2001), pp. 5–8.
As quoted in David Harvey, Spaces of Hope (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2000), pp. 25–26.
See Naomi Klein, “China’s All-Seeing Eye,” Rolling Stone, Issue 1053, May 29, 2008, pp. 58–66.
Harvey, Spaces of Hope, p. 59.
Ibid., p. 155.
Ibid., p. 159.
Ibid., see pp. 233–255.
Ibid., p. 234.
Karl Barth, The Theology of Schleiermacher: Lectures at Göttingen, Winter Semester of 1923/24 (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdman’s Publishing Company, 1982), p. 264.
Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans (London: Oxford University Press, 1933), pp. 29–41.
Ibid., p. 41.
Ibid., p. 23.
Ibid., p. 16.
Kwok Pui-lan, Postcolonial Imagination and Feminist Theology (Louisville, KY: Westminster John Knox Press, 2005), p. 196.
Manuel Castells, The Rise of the Network Society, 2nd Ed. (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2000), p. 501.
Mark C. Taylor, The Moment of Complexity: Emerging Network Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001), pp. 154–155.
Speeches, p. 25.
Ibid., p. 27.
Ibid., p. 41.
Friedrich Schleiermacher, The Christian Faith (London: T & T Clark, 1999), p. 35.
David Blackbourn, History of Germany, 1780–1918: The Long Nineteenth Century (Malden, MA: Blackwell Publishing, 2003), p. xvi.
Ibid., p. 11.
Ibid., p. 58.
Ibid., all statistics found on p. 8.
Ibid., p. 26.
Ibid., p. 24.
Susanne Zantop, Colonial Fantasies: Conquest, Family, and Nation in Precolonial Germany, 1770–1870 (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1997), p. 8.
Ibid., pp. 102–103.
Ibid., pp. 126–127.
Blackbourn, p. 9.
An interpretation first suggested to me by Karsten Harries, one that has had a significant impact on my reading of the period, including my reading of Schleiermacher.
Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, Faust (New York: Norton, 2001), p. 22, lines 775–778.
Ibid., p. 30, lines 1074–1079.
Ibid., p. 31, lines 1122–1125.
It is important to note that Act V of Faust II, in which Faust becomes an urban planner, was sketched by Goethe around the year 1800, some 30 years before its publication. So Goethe conceived Faust’s trajectory in the years immediately following the French Revolution, just before the Napoleonic invasion. See Cyrus Hamlin’s helpful interpretive notes in Goethe’s Faust (New York: Norton, 2001), p. 468.
Ibid., p. 318, lines 11244–11250.
Friedrich Hölderlin, Hymns and Fragments (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1984), p. 61.
Ibid., p. 89.
Ibid., p. 93.
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© 2012 Steven R. Jungkeit
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Jungkeit, S.R. (2012). Theological Space. In: Spaces of Modern Theology. New Approaches to Religion and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137269027_1
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