Books by Clayton Crockett

This book offers a new materialist interpretation of Derrida's later work, including his engagements with religion and politics. It argues that there is a shift from a context or background motor scheme of writing to what Derrida calls the machinic, and Catherine Malabou calls plasticity.

First published in 1997, Alain Badiou's Deleuze: The Clamor of Being cast Gilles Deleuze as a secret philosopher of the One. In this work, Clayton Crockett rehabilitates Deleuze's position within contemporary political and philosophical thought, advancing an original reading of the thinker's major works and a constructive conception of his philosophical ontology. Through close readings of Deleuze's Difference and Repetition, Capitalism and Schizophrenia (with Felix Guattari), and Cinema 2, Crockett argues that Deleuze is anything but the austere, quietistic, and aristocratic intellectual Badiou had portrayed. Instead, Crockett underscores Deleuze's radical aesthetics and innovative scientific, political, and mathematical forms of thought. He also refutes the notion Deleuze retreated from politics toward the end of his life. Using Badiou's critique as a foil, Crockett maintains the profound continuity of Deleuze's work and builds a general interpretation of his more obscure formulations.

The first major response to the controversial series, Radical Orthodoxy. Develops a constructive radical theology from the philosophy of Immanuel Kant - a philosophy attacked by Radical Orthodoxy.

The sublime refers to a conflict of the Kantian faculties of reason and imagination, and involves the attempt to represent what is intrinsically unrepresentable. Through topics such as sublimation, schizophrenia, God, and creation ex nihilo, this book contributes to a form of radical theological thinking that is involved in the world.

In the 1960s, the strict opposition between the religious and the secular began to break down, blurring the distinction between political philosophy and political theology. This collapse contributed to the decline of modern liberalism, which supported a neutral, value-free space for capitalism. It also deeply unsettled political, religious, and philosophical realms, forced to confront the conceptual stakes of a return to religion.Gamely intervening in a contest that defies simple resolutions, Clayton Crockett conceives of the postmodern convergence of the secular and the religious as a basis for emancipatory political thought. Engaging themes of sovereignty, democracy, potentiality, law, and event from a religious and political point of view, Crockett articulates a theological vision that responds to our contemporary world and its theo-political realities. Specifically, he claims we should think about God and the state in terms of potentiality rather than sovereign power. Deploying new concepts, such as Slavoj iek's idea of parallax and Catherine Malabou's notion of plasticity, his argument engages with debates over the nature and status of religion, ideology, and messianism. Tangling with the work of Derrida, Deleuze, Spinoza, Antonio Negri, Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, John D. Caputo, and Catherine Keller, Crockett concludes with a reconsideration of democracy as a form of political thought and religious practice, underscoring its ties to modern liberal capitalism while also envisioning a more authentic democracy unconstrained by those ties.