To the question, "Which part of God's Law is the highest?" Jesus famously replies: "You shall love the Lord your God...and the second, which is like the first, you shall love your neighbor as yourself!" The first part of Jesus's reply is understandable: okay, we should love God, got it. But then he adds this second part: love your neighbor! Neighbor?! Who is that? Why should I love him? And why as myself? This basically summarizes Sigmund Freud's response to the Judeo-Christian ethic of neighborly love.
In this fabulous work three psychoanalytic commentators take as their basic point of departure this response of Freud's to develop the groundwork for a politics of the neighbor. The other point of reference here is Carl Schmitt's friend/enemy politics. The neighbor being a third overlooked category that is neither a friend nor an enemy.
If you are interested in political theology, then, you should pick up this book. But the real gem of this book is Kenneth Reinhard's contribution. I believe you can find Zizek's and Santner's contributions in other works, but Reinhard's is original. But it is original in the sense of novel: I think Reinhard provides the most comprehensive look at what a politics of the neighbor might look like. I get the feeling that Reinhard is providing here a short synopsis of a larger political theology of the neighbor, and if so, I cannot wait for it to come out!
