Theory, History, and the Study of Religion in Late Antiquity
Speculative Worlds

The Element addresses the fundamental questions at the intersection of various disciplines through the needle's eye of theory in the study of religion in late antiquity.

Maia Kotrosits (Author)

9781009012003, Cambridge University Press

Paperback / softback, published 9 February 2023

75 pages
22.9 x 15.2 x 0.4 cm, 0.119 kg

Theory is not a set of texts, it is a style of approach. It is to engage in the act of speculation: gestures of abstraction that re-imagine and dramatize the crises of living. This Element is a both a primer for understanding some of the more predominant strands of critical theory in the study of religion in late antiquity, and a history of speculative leaps in the field. It is a history of dilemmas that the field has tried to work out again and again - questions about subjectivity, the body, agency, violence, and power. This Element additionally presses us on the ethical stakes of our uses of theory, and asks how the field's interests in theory help us understand what's going on, half-spoken, in the disciplinary unconscious.

Introduction
1. Gender, Difference, Thereness, and Representation
2. Foucault and Defamiliarization, or 'Keeping Late Antiquity Weird'
3. Colonial Histories and the Vexations of the Global
Conclusion: Theory and Its Uses
References.

Subject Areas: Religion: general [HRA]