Articles & Book Chapters by Beatrice Marovich
Relegere, 2018
This essay argues that the biblical image of the peaceable kingdom offers a useful filter through... more This essay argues that the biblical image of the peaceable kingdom offers a useful filter through which to examine and contemplate the passion and fervor for interspecies friendship in the digital era. I argue that the digital medium of the animal video (more specifically, animal videos that document and record interspecies friendships) can be read as an alternate spacetime: one alleged to be outside of predation. But I also argue that, when we look closer at both the biblical context of this passage as well as visions of interspecies kinship that derive from, or resonate with, the biblical text, the dystopian underside of this almost utopian image can be rendered with more clarity. Perhaps, however, this biblical image—with its messianic undertones—can also help us to set in sharper relief the non-predational, creaturely, potentialities that might still emerge from these digital peaceable kingdoms.
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Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory, 2017
This article examines how both religious and secular regimes of meaning seek to transcend, or ove... more This article examines how both religious and secular regimes of meaning seek to transcend, or overcome, death. I argue against the claim that religion provides a superior method for quelling our mortal dread (thus leaving secular people with no option but to return to religious regimes of meaning, when coping with death). Instead I argue that both religion and the secular have failed to take our mortality seriously, often collapsing misogyny and mortal dread together in a double rejection of both our dying bodies and death itself. In other words; they both do violence to death, and this violence often has gendered dimensions. I examine feminist attempts to "transfigure mortality" that work both with and against religious and secular thought and I ultimately query whether these transfigurations might be deemed "postsecular."
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Editors' Introduction (Beatrice Marovich and Alex Dubilet) to Journal of Cultural and Religious T... more Editors' Introduction (Beatrice Marovich and Alex Dubilet) to Journal of Cultural and Religious Theory 16.2 (2017): "Negotiating Terrain: Gender and the Postsecular"
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Glossator: Practice & Theory of the Commentary, 2013
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Dialog, Dec 2015
This article develops the concept of the “theological relic”: a facet of secular life and culture... more This article develops the concept of the “theological relic”: a facet of secular life and culture that maintains traces of (and so remains bound in some way to) its genealogy in the theological. The theological relic, then, is something that fails to be either robustly religious or properly secular. It is, instead, a product of the relations between these social spaces. The article illustrates this concept by examining a cultural history of the whale, highlighting this creature's complex bonds with the theological. The whale, in other words, is figured as a theological relic: a creature of the secular that remains shrouded enough by traces of the theological that these vestiges of divinity are implicated in the whale's powerful late-twentieth-century cultural reconfiguration.
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In Rilke's poetry, God often appears closer to the animals than he does to the humans. Rather tha... more In Rilke's poetry, God often appears closer to the animals than he does to the humans. Rather than infusing the animal with the potency of divine power, this seems instead to have the effect of making God vulnerable. This essay explores the nature and shape of Rilke's vulnerable, almost animalistic, God and also brings this figure into conversation with work on sovereignty and animality in Derrida and Agamben. A chapter from the volume Divinanimality: Animal Theory, Creaturely Theology.
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Speculations, Sep 2012
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Anglican theological review, Jan 1, 2010
Examining Walt Whitman’s poem “Song of Myself” (from his 1855 collection Leaves of Grass), this a... more Examining Walt Whitman’s poem “Song of Myself” (from his 1855 collection Leaves of Grass), this article expounds upon the subject formation contained within it: the self. This self, developed through a variant of creation myth, is inflected with both political and theological agendas. The complex democratic negotiation of these poles places Whitman’s poem in the realm of political theology. The first half of the essay traces the theological inflections in the poem: the impact, in other words, of the name of God on the formation, development, or thriving of the self. It also sketches the contours of Whitman’s political context and lays bare some of his political agendas. The latter half of the essay speculates on some potential consequences of the development of this self and raises the question: How deeply is it already embedded in American democratic subjectivity?
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Other Essays by Beatrice Marovich
This is speculative fiction. The scene is a postapocalyptic (or, perhaps better said, counterapoc... more This is speculative fiction. The scene is a postapocalyptic (or, perhaps better said, counterapocalyptic) future earthscape. The border between the biological and the digital is now so permeable, and manipulable, that the planet becomes overpopulated with hybrid species–creatures who’ve “recreated” themselves by fusing with animal parts and machine bodies. The “pure humans” who remain make what they call an “evolutionary move”. They abandon The Open and sequester themselves in a planet of their own making: Terra Pura.
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An essay on the beckoning cat, and other talismans, for the Object Lessons series at The Atlantic.
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Papers by Beatrice Marovich
Fordham University Press eBooks, Dec 31, 2020
<p>This chapter examines the multispecies kinship sentiments that congeal around the theolo... more <p>This chapter examines the multispecies kinship sentiments that congeal around the theological figure of creaturely life. Analyzing confessions of creaturely kinship from both theologians and evolutionary science, the chapter argues against a reading of creaturely kinship that sees this bond as merely a form of commonality, or sameness. Working with contemporary figures such as Jacques Derrida and Karen Barad, as well as the early modern philosopher Anne Conway, the essay argues for a reading of creaturely kinship as a diffractive relational bond—one that highlights the differences and plurality in creaturely life and sees, in creatureliness, a "connective distinction" or a difference that also binds.</p>
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Society & Animals, Jun 1, 2017
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Worldviews, May 30, 2018
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Punctum Books, Sep 3, 2012
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Edinburgh University Press eBooks, Sep 3, 2017
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Columbia University Press eBooks, Jan 30, 2023
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Agamben and the Existentialists, Aug 29, 2021
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Edinburgh University Press
Few of Giorgio Agamben’s works are as mysterious as his unpublished dissertation, reportedly on t... more Few of Giorgio Agamben’s works are as mysterious as his unpublished dissertation, reportedly on the political thought of the French philosopher Simone Weil. If Weil was an early subject of Agamben’s intellectual curiosity, it would appear – judging from his published works – that her influence upon him has been neither central nor lasting.1 Leland de la Durantaye argues that Weil’s work has left a mark on Agamben’s philosophy of potentiality, largely in his discussion of the concept of decreation; but de la Durantaye does not make much of Weil’s influence here, determining that her theory of decreation is ‘essentially dialectical’ and still too bound up with creation theology. 2 Alessia Ricciardi, however, argues that de la Durantaye’s dismissal of Weil’s influence is hasty.3 Ricciardi analyses deeper resonances between Weil’s and Agamben’s philosophies, ultimately claiming that Agamben ‘seems to extend many of the implications and claims of Weil’s idea of force’,4 arguably spreadin...
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Agamben's Philosophical Lineage, 2017
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Articles & Book Chapters by Beatrice Marovich
Other Essays by Beatrice Marovich
Papers by Beatrice Marovich