
The Illegitimate Age
Description
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In The Illegitimate Age Federico Vercellone explains contemporary affinities for both apocalypse and media imagery from the perspective of political theology, drawing from St Paul's mysterious figure of the katechon - the withholding power that prevents the arrival of the Antichrist and the end of times while also delaying the Messiah, therefore containing the very evil it restrains. Vercellone highlights representation as a crucial aspect of the katechon myth, finding within it the roots of current political and aesthetic forms. In the context of contemporary populism, charismatic leaders build their power on presumed prestige, mimicry of sacred figures, and pandering invocations of kitsch, all recurrent aspects of the katechon and Antichrist trope in Western art and history. Political power, Vercellone argues, has been deeply aestheticized, and the path that led us here was laid long before mass media, mass consumption, and our society of the spectacle.
A new interpretation of the political and aesthetic categories first suggested by Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin, and Jean Baudrillard, The Illegitimate Age turns a fresh lens on the legitimacy of political power, the appeal of populism, and the role of the image in our society.
Reviews / Votes
"The Illegitimate Age is a remarkable work of political, theological, and aesthetic synthesis that take the existing debate around the katechon into new territory." Arthur Bradley, Lancaster UniversityMore details
Other editions
Additional editions

Persons
Robert T. Valgenti is professor of liberal arts and food studies at the Culinary Institute of America and a desk editor for Gastronomica.
Content
- The Illegitimate Age: Aesthetics and Political Theology
- Cover
- Half Title Page
- Series Page
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Contents
- Foreword
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- The Age of Anti-Utopias
- 1 The Anti-Utopian Age
- We Have Never Been Postmodern
- A Truly Secularized Modernity?
- Aestheticization
- Democracy and the Community of Desire
- 2 The Aestheticization of Power: More on the "Withholding Power"
- The Event of the New Testament
- The Return of the Katechon and the Legitimacy of Our Time
- 3 The Katechon Between the Ancient and the Modern: From Epiphany to Prestige
- Paul and the Second Letter to the Thessalonians
- Tertullian and Augustine
- Eusebius of Caesarea
- 4 From Dostoevsky to Today
- The Grand Inquisitor
- The Actuality of the Antichrist
- 5 Still in the Christian Era
- Seeing or Looking at Images?
- The Society of the Image after the Civitas Christiana?
- Autonomy (of the Politician) Denied
- The Nomos and the Messiah
- 6 The Aesthetics of "The Withholding Power"
- Unstable Power
- Aesthetics and Politics after the Katechon
- Kitsch
- Yet Another Step: Hamlet and After
- Nothing New
- The Re-enchantment of the World
- Notes
- Index
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