5 5. For a useful critical genealogy of political theology, see Yannik Thiem, “Political Theology,” in The Encyclopedia of Political Thought, ed. Michael T Gibbons (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 2807–2822.
6 6. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government, trans. Lorenzo Chiesa (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011).
7 7. Roberto Esposito, Two: The Machine of Political Theology and the Place of Thought, trans. Zakiya Hanafi (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015).
8 8. Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1997); Antonio Negri, The Labor of Job: The Biblical Text as a Parable of Human Labor, trans. Matteo Mandarini (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009); Catherine Malabou, “Before and Above: Spinoza and Symbolic Necessity,” Critical Inquiry 43, no. 1 (Autumn 2016): 84–109; Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978, trans. Graham Burchell (London: Picador, 2009).
9 9. Another inventive example of this line of thinking is Adam Kotsko, Neoliberalism’s Demons: On the Political Theology of Late Capital (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018).
10 10. Taubes, Political Theology of Paul, 103.
11 11. Hussein Ali Agrama, Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty, and the Rule of Law in Modern Egypt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).
12 12. Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 5.
13 13. See Albernaz and Chepurin, “Sovereignty of the World.”
14 14. For Jean Hyppolite’s description of the Hegelian movement of spirit in these terms, see his Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 544 and 557. For an account of the transcendent telos of the modern world, see also Albernaz and Chepurin, “Sovereignty of the World.”
15 15. One detects something similar—a structure of transcendence persisting in modernity under the guise of immanence—in the logics of self-organization that arise across the Enlightenment. Although in a sense breaking with theologies of salvation, discourses of self-organization generate knowledges that justify a faith not in God but in history and the world—thereby underwriting a secular form of providence and legitimating modernity. See Alex Dubilet, review of Jonathan Sheehan and Dror Wahrman, Invisible Hands: Self-Organization and the Eighteenth Century (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2015), Immanent Frame, May 26, 2016, https://tif.ssrc.org/2016/05/26/invisible-hands/.
16 16. Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 264, 260, 296, 319. Relatedly, Nelson Maldonado-Torres writes, “It is as if the production of the ‘less than human’ functioned as the anchor of a process of autonomy and self-assertion.” Maldonado-Torres, Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 238. For a discussion of the way the modern logics of separation, otherness, and exclusion lead to hierarchical arrangements of the human, the less-than-human, and the non-human through a theory of racializing assemblages, see Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). On the production of “colonial difference” in and as modernity, and on the conjunction of colonialism and the exploitation of nature/the earth, see Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh, On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), esp. chaps. 7 and 8. For an important analysis of the conjunction of globalization and racialization in modernity, see also Jared Hickman, Black Prometheus: Race and Radicalism in the Age of Atlantic Slavery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). What Hickman, inspired in many ways by Blumenberg’s association of modernity with immanence, calls the new “planetary” or “global immanence” of modernity is, however, what we analyze as fundamentally an immanent-transcendent structure.
17 17. On blackness as the nothingness that allows the modern world and the modern subject to emerge and affirm themselves as the universal being, see Calvin L. Warren, Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018). On the relation between the human, the world, and the slave, see Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).
18 18. See, for example, Jared Sexton, “The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism,” InTensions, no. 5 (2011): 1–47; Jared Sexton Interviewed by Daniel Colucciello Barber, “On Black Negativity, or the Affirmation of Nothing,” Society and Space, September 18, 2017, https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/on-black-negativity-or-the-affirmation-of-nothing/.
19 19. For an encapsulation of Laruelle’s thinking of the world and the Real, see “A Summary of Non-Philosophy,” trans. Ray Brassier, Pli 8 (1999): 138–148. For the ethico-political dimension of this conceptual dyad, see François Laruelle, General Theory of Victims, trans. Jessie Hock and Alex Dubilet (Cambridge: Polity, 2015).
20 20. See Anthony Paul Smith, “Against Tradition to Liberate Tradition,” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 19, no. 2 (2014): 145–159; Anthony Paul Smith, Laruelle: A Stranger Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), esp. 153–160; and Laruelle, General Theory of Victims.
21 21. For a useful intellectual-historical overview of the role of Gnosticism as an appellation and position, see Willem Styfhals, No Spiritual Investment in the World: Gnosticism and Postwar German Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019).
22 22. Adolf von Harnack, Marcion: The Gospel of the Alien God, trans. J. E. Steeley and L. D. Bierma (Jamestown, NY: Labyrinth Press, 1990; German original: 1923).
23 23. Fred Moten, Black and Blur (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 67.
24 24. Fred Moten, Stolen Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 181. Of course, all discussion of the flesh, Moten’s included, returns to the locus classicus: Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” in Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 203–229.
25 25. Moten, Stolen Life, 113.
26 26. Moten, 27. For the full articulation of the undercommons, see Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2013).
27 27. Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics: The Quest(ion) of Blackness Toward the End of the World,” Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (2014): 81–97.
28 28. Daniel Whistler, “Abstraction and Utopia in Early German Idealism,” Russian Journal of Philosophy and Humanities 2, no. 1 (2017): 3–22. See also Whistler’s essay in this volume.
29 29. Alex Dubilet, The Self-Emptying Subject: Kenosis and Immanence, Medieval to Modern (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018). Dubilet further elaborates immanence as decoupled from the logic of the subject and the world, in dialogue with Harney and Moten’s undercommons and Laruelle’s non-philosophy, in “An Immanence without the World: On Dispossession, Nothingness, and Secularity,” Qui Parle (forthcoming).
30 30. See Gil Anidjar, “Secularism,” Critical Inquiry 33, no. 1 (2006): 52–77; Webb Keane, Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter (Berkeley: University