Capitalism and Mysticism

3 Credits · Level: Graduate, Undergraduate

The aim of the course is to examine – across a truly wide range of disciplines (religious studies, theology, philosophy, history, literature, cultural studies, political science, cinema) two central points: the political possibilities of resistance within certain forms of the mystical, with specific reference to insurgencies/revolutions/uprisings which comprised some form of mystical language, as well as the way the language of certain mystics (Rumi, Eckhart, Hildegaard von Bingen, and others) spoke about material questions of power, capital and the wealthy; secondly, the extent to which contemporary capitalism has been able to appropriate mystical notions of incommensurability, resistance to conceptualization, invocations of the sublime in order to lubricate the structure of late capitalism. Medieval German mystics (along with Marxist commentators on them), Turkish communist poetry, mysticism within anti-colonial movements, twentieth century American fiction will all feature amongst our sustained analysis of the relationship between the mystical and the political. Figures from theory – Zizek, Jean Luc Marion, Derrida, and others – will also feature as a supplementary framework within which to analyse notions of exchange and the radically incommensurable.