Date of Award

1-1-2016

Document Type

Masters Thesis

Degree Name

M.A.

Organizational Unit

College of Arts Humanities and Social Sciences, Religious Studies

First Advisor

Carl Raschke, Ph.D.

Second Advisor

Thomas Nail

Third Advisor

Gregory Robbins

Fourth Advisor

Sarah Pessin

Keywords

Capitalism, Christianity, Forgiveness, God, Immanence, Money

Abstract

This essay seeks to formulate a critical account of the genealogical link between capitalism and Christianity by interrogating the ontology and the processes of subjectivization which subtend these two apparently disparate social and political formations. To this end, I make use of the philosophical thought of Gilles Deleuze, in particular his readings of Spinoza, Foucault, Nietzsche, and Sacher-Masoch. The central themes of the essay--the identity of God and money, and the vicissitudes of the creditor-debtor relation--culminate in a theory of a theodicy of money, which deploys an apparatus of forgiveness in order to obscure and displace the stakes and the site of the game of guilt and innocence. In short, to produce, by means of the Christian logic of forgiveness, a subject of forgiveness capable, not only of standing guarantor for herself, but as the ground of the formal freedom and formal equality required of liberal democracy and the capitalist mode of production.

Publication Statement

Copyright is held by the author. User is responsible for all copyright compliance.

Rights Holder

Timothy Snediker

Provenance

Received from ProQuest

File Format

application/pdf

Language

en

File Size

203 p.

Discipline

Religion, Philosophy of Religion, Economic Theory

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