the theologico-political nexus: updated

In preparation for SECT IV – and my comprehensive exams – I have been thinking and reading about “political theology” or the “theologico-political.” My research, so far, has circled around a very simple question: what is the nexus that binds the theological to the political? Now, this question already takes for granted that the vulgar narrative of secularization is, well, wrong – both as a description of politics and as a conception of the political, if I can put it that way. If it is true that the religious or the theological survives, lives on, empirically and specterally, in this era of the secular-political, then in what ways does it bind itself to or even condition the political? Here are the possibilities I have come across until now.

(1) Kant: The religious is related to the political order in terms of a kind of logico-practical necessity. Humanity in its ideal form would create for itself an order of just relations based on an unalloyed reason: treating others only ever as ends in themselves, never as means. However, we exist, here below, as imperfect – given to self-love – we pursue ends that instrumentalize others. We are stuck in this predicament, we are “radically evil,” thus we require a representations of just ends that capture our moral imaginations: stories of neighbour love and a God-man. These theological vehicles taxi our tainted reason to the ends, albeit by detour.

(2) Hegel: The religious is absorbed or sublated by the political. Here (Christian) religion is seen to offer a corrective or a suture for the tear that politics itself is not able to mend. The Terror of revolution – which had overcome the incomplete or one-sided gains of faith – can only be overcome in the concept of forgiveness that Christianity offers. But the suture only strengthens the dialectical machine and no singular religion will resist it.

(3) Schmitt: The political is analogously related to the theological. That is, the theology or metaphysics of a given epoch gives form to the political configuration of that epoch. Thus, a theology that emphasizes a sovereign, transcendent God who intervenes in natural processes (miraculously) will give rise to a notion of the state that emphasizes a mode of sovereignty that transcends the political order and can intervene, by fiat, in that order. Similarly, if the theologians or metaphysicians of the time emphasize a deistic God or some other immanent force, then the political order will mirror this structure: it will recognize power as derived immanently, from below, from the people. In a slightly different mode of this analogical relation, the monarch is said to have “two bodies,” one natural and mortal, the other mystical and immortal – thus granting a continuity and a perpetuity to the people there ruled. This possibility arises as the adaptation of the Christological doctrine of the two natures – human and divine. In both these cases the theological conditions the political, but so too does the political provide a criterion for judging the theological.

(4) Agamben: The political precedes religion, but religion precedes politics. Religion and politics enter into a zone of indistinction. The political realm is permeated by a theological remainder that it has not expunged, even if it has been displaced. But, at the same time, notions called “religious” themselves betray a juridical provenance – e.g. the sacred. Secularization covers over a religo-political structure, fundamentalism merely ignores (or in some cases, exploits) the deeply political significance of religious concepts.

(5) Derrida: The religious inhabits the secular-political in a radical way. Religion is a kind of minimal but ineradicable condition of the political. So, for instance, the divine right of kings is no longer invoked in the modern era but – here too there is a displacement of the (minimally) theological – the contract does not erase the religious. There is an elemental “faith” that is the condition of any being-with, any contract. The modern critiques of the religious are not misdirected, but nor are they absolute. The divine, the absolute is absolved from the indictments of delusion, false consciousness, etc. only because the it already evades full inscriptions in the historical faiths.

(6) Lefort: There is also the question of the “permanence” of the theologico-political form. If there is a nexus that binds the theological to the political, is there, should we so desire, a way to sever it? It would seem that until the advent of modern democracy this question would have been unthinkable. So, if it is thinkable today, how so? The idea of democracy, so it seems, resorts to no transcendent authority as the source of its legitimacy – explicitly or implicitly; it requires no recourse to civil religion, it seeks no principle of unity beyond the mutual affirmation of an immanently derived difference. Religion is not thereby extricated from the political, but it is no longer a necessary element. Religion would arise only at the “weak points” of proper political functioning, as a fantasmatic supplement. A severing of the nexus would thus seem possible, but, it should be added, such a break only becomes possible because of a distinctly (Protestant-Christian) religious imperative: to distinguish between the “two kingdoms,” to create the structural possibility of a non-religious space.

(7) Levinas: The religious, conceived as the concrete and normative demand of the neighbour (i.e. as ethics), is the most primordial of human experiences. The political, in many ways the ethical or religious in diminutive form, is a necessary, though always subordinate, supplement. The political is the possibility of ordering the anarchic reign of ethics, it is the possibilty of accounting for and thus responding to more than one neighbour. Were it not for the preservation of this originary ethical experience -- and this is what (Jewish) religion does -- politics would be nothing more than "war with a good conscience"; were it not for political orders -- just institutions, even the state -- human sociality would remain unrealized in the botomless demands of a singular ethics.

(8) Badiou: One may also simply formalize – and thereby neutralize – the religious element. Here religious texts (again, Christian) are mined for structural affinities with the current situation – for instance, the dialectic of abstract universality (capitalism/cosmos) on the one hand, and mere particularism (identity politics/Judaism) on the other. The nexus is effectively denied and the “fable” of a risen Messiah is either reactivated in a secularized form or left as a decaying remnant of a battle fought (and lost) with modernity.