Nothing Absolute

This collection of essays is devoted to the diversity of the conceptual and terminological definitions of the notion of the “absolute”. Absolute comprises both the concepts of the Western world related to God and the verbal constructions flowing from these ideas in the spheres of law, philosophy, linguistics, politics, medicine, literature, and arts. Over time, absolute and its neologisms have undergone various modifications, assuming the associated characteristics of syntactic ambiguity and inflation. Absolute can imply an increase in the degree of a quality attached to some object or phenomenon and can be used as either an adverbial modifier or a proper noun. In its appearances as a procedural term, absolute mostly conveys a negative connotation when evaluating some action. The question posed in this book is not what absolute is, but what possibilities exist with regard to perceiving and conceptualizing it in human terms, both historically and in the present.

Featuring scholars at the forefront of contemporary political theology and the study of German Idealism, Nothing Absolute explores the intersection of these two flourishing fields. Against traditional approaches that view German Idealism as a secularizing movement, this volume revisits it as the first fundamentally philosophical articulation of the political-theological problematic in the aftermath of the Enlightenment and the advent of secularity. Nothing Absolute reclaims German Idealism as a political-theological trajectory. Across the volume’s contributions, German thought from Kant to Marx emerges as crucial for the genealogy of political theology and for the ongoing reassessment of modernity and the secular. By investigating anew such concepts as immanence, utopia, sovereignty, theodicy, the Earth, and the world, as well as the concept of political theology itself, this volume not only rethinks German Idealism and its aftermath from a political-theological perspective but also demonstrates what can be done with (or against) German Idealism using the conceptual resources of political theology today. Contributors: Joseph Albernaz, Daniel Colucciello Barber, Agata Bielik-Robson, Kirill Chepurin, S. D. Chrostowska, Saitya Brata Das, Alex Dubilet, Vincent Lloyd, Thomas Lynch, James Martel, Steven Shakespeare, Oxana Timofeeva, Daniel Whistler

Zero, zip, nada, zilch. It's all too easy to ignore the fascinating possibilities of emptiness and non-existence, and we may well wonder what there is to say about nothing. But scientists have known for centuries that nothing is the key to understanding absolutely everything, from why particles have mass to the expansion of the universe; without nothing we'd be precisely nowhere. With chapters by 22 science writers, including top names such as Ian Stewart, Marcus Chown, Helen Pilcher, Nigel Henbest, Michael Brooks, Linda Geddes, Paul Davies, Jo Marchant and David Fisher, this fascinating and intriguing book revels in a subject that has tantalised the finest minds for centuries, and shows there's more to nothing than meets the eye.