Christ’s Subversive Body offers a fascinating exploration of six historical examples of politically or culturally subversive usages of the body of Christ. Shining a light on the enabling potential of religious rhetoric, Solovieva examines how in moments of crisis or transition throughout Western history the body of Christ has been deployed in a variety of discourses, including recent neo- and theoconservative movements in the United States.Solovieva s survey includes the iconoclastic polemics of Epiphanius at the moment of struggles for supremacy between the Roman state and the Christian church, the mystical theologico-political alchemy of an anonymous treatise circulated at the Council of Constance, Lavater s counter-Enlightenment visions of the afterlife expressd through physiognomy, Dostoevsky s refashioning of ethical communities, Pier Paolo Pasolini s attempts to provoke the scandal of Jesus s mission once more in the modern world, and the elaboration of a political theology subordinating democratic dissent to the higher unity of a corporately conceived unitary executive in early twenty-first-century America.Solovieva presents her findings not as an entry into theological or Christological debates but rather as a study in comparative discourse analysis. She demonstrates how these uses of Christ s body are triggered by moments of epistemological, political, and representational crisis in the history of Western civilization.
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