Nothing Absolute. Группа авторов

From its less sophisticated (Mark Lilla) to its more sophisticated (Victoria Kahn) variants, such a position sees political theology predominantly as the cunning deployment of theological supplements within the realm of the political—rendering political theology a question of transcendent authority and mystification, a question of legitimation, sanctification, and grounding.⁴ Equating political theology with the theological legitimation of political authority, as for example Kahn does, produces as its corollary the necessity of its critique: it is produced as a concept against which to polemicize. Kahn rejects wholesale the diagnosis of the political-theological underpinnings of modernity and sees this suggestion as entirely a retrograde “return” that must be resisted.

      In positions such as Kahn’s, the secular is defended against theological supplements, but the critical purchase of political theology as a discourse is lost. This critical dimension has always sought to reassess modernity, secularity, and politics: not in order to mystify them but in order to prevent them from all-too quickly disburdening themselves of their theological pasts and declaring themselves to be free from theology, enacting a sort of self-mystification through which they appear absolutely novel and free. Broadly liberal positions, whatever their scholarly merits, fail to register that the significance of political theology as a problematic and a discourse lies less in the way it transcendently legitimates power or authority—thereby requiring a self-righteous secular critique that stages a reenactment of the Enlightenment critique of religion—and more in the way it undercuts the triumphalist narratives that secularized modernity produces of itself, shedding critical light on the claims of secular self-legitimation that occur through polemical dissociations from Christianity.

      In other words, the task is never as easy as affirming a theological tradition to generate a politics or, by contrast, purifying the political of all theology—this is precisely what political theology as a discourse, at its best, disallows. This dominant binary—which in a way reproduces the Schmitt-Blumenberg opposition between conservative or Christian delegitimations of secular modernity and the quasi-Enlightenment legitimation of its specifically secular character—is not all that political theology offers. Over the last two decades, the field of political theology has reemerged as a fundamentally critical field for exploring the religious entanglements of secular modernity and for uncovering the theological underpinnings of philosophical and political concepts. Rather than a conservative project that seeks the reassertion of transcendent sovereignty, political theology, in this articulation, has entailed new ways of theorizing the status of modernity and secularity and also thereby of rethinking the very nature of the religious-secular binary.⁵ At stake is neither a theological grounding of political concepts nor a working out of the politics of specific theological traditions, but a calling into question of modernity’s own secularist presuppositions.

      What this means in practice is varied. The Italian trajectory offers one important version of such a practice: it carries out a theoretical diagnosis of the apparatus of political theology in order to better trace an exit out of it, but without thereby mistakenly defending a phantasmatic secular politics. On one side of this trajectory, we encounter Giorgio Agamben’s retheorization of the relation of sovereign power, the state of exception, and bare life and an outlining of the providential machine of the West.⁶ On the other side, we see Roberto Esposito articulate such an exit through a critical reconstruction of the dispositif of the person, a theorization of the exteriority of thought to the subject, and a novel rearticulation of the questions of community, life, and immanence vis-à-vis the political-theological paradigm.⁷ Broadly aligned with this theoretical trajectory is a general formation of political theology that includes Alain Badiou’s and Slavoj Žižek’s recuperation of St. Paul, Antonio Negri’s investigation of Job, Catherine Malabou’s work on Spinoza and the sacred and, earlier, Michel Foucault’s elaboration of pastoral power.⁸ Whatever their difference, for all of these thinkers—across their various projects—the fundamental question is neither a theological legitimation of politics, nor the formation of a purely secular politics, nor a reactivation of a Christian paradigm, but the tracing of complex conceptual morphologies that counteract any easy separation between theology and secular thought.⁹ These projects inquire into some of the fundamental categories of modernity and its forms of self-relation in expansive assemblages and narratives that are not afraid of the powers of the theological and its archives.

      Within this general critical orientation, there is a particularly compelling trajectory, one that pursues the delegitimation and ungrounding of the world of modernity without the saving grace of theological recuperation. It endeavors to diagnose the co-imbrication between—and to jointly subvert—the logics of transcendence in their secular as well as their religious forms. It seeks to unground the legitimacy of the world and all salvific and sovereign transcendences—thereby refusing the absolutization of either side of the duality. This kind of political theology from below had its twentieth-century precursors in Benjamin’s explorations of divine violence, no less than in Taubes’s apocalyptic questioning of the world and its legitimacy. Benjamin’s messianism and Taubes’s apocalypticism—precisely the kind of apocalypticism that, on Blumenberg’s account, both Christianity and modernity foreclose—are irreducible to the Schmitt-Blumenberg opposition, broadly conceived, and delineate positions that remain crucial for ongoing articulations of political theology. Here, political theology amounts to a struggle against the combined interplay of secular and theological transcendences and legitimations, rather than merely the choice of one against the other in perpetual polemical oscillation. We are no longer talking about crises of legitimation, as though the world of which we were a part is coming undone, but rather about a discourse that acknowledges that perhaps this world never should have been granted any legitimacy at all. Or, as Taubes famously declared, in opposition to Schmitt: “Let it go down. I have no spiritual investment in the world as it is.”¹⁰

      Rather than taking the secular world and what is transcendent to it as the central theoretical opposition, the dividing line must be located elsewhere: between immanence and the entire bipartite apparatus that unites the world and sovereign transcendence. Whatever exactly immanence indicates—and that is, as we will show shortly, a contested terrain—it is, significantly, decoupled from any easy adequation with secularity or the modern world and, as such, no longer serves as an index of its legitimacy. It becomes, instead, a fulcrum for the delegitimation of the world-whole and the subversion of all transcendence—with the remaining theoretical task being the novel articulation of this kind of immanence. To many, this attempt to think immanence as separate and separated from the world, in all of its entanglements with secularity and modernity, will undoubtedly sound foreign and paradoxical. After all, immanence has indexed and named the condition of the modern world, in various ways, for a variety of conflicting positions, from Schmitt to Blumenberg, from Charles Taylor to Radical Orthodoxy, and many others. It is one of the most common tropes in theorizing modernity. And yet, the morphology and thus the force of immanence is more complex than it might appear in the customary identifications of the framework of modernity with immanence and immanentization.

      There are different approaches that make clear why, despite being commonly figured as such, immanence cannot be simply equated with secular modernity. First, we should recall the fact that modern secularity is indelibly tied with the rise of the modern nation-state. It was no lesser a figure than Thomas Hobbes that at the origin of political modernity established the conjunction of secular state power with sovereignty and transcendence. Perhaps, if we focus exclusively on the secular, as a domain of sensibilities, behaviors, and ways of knowing, we might think we live in an immanent age; but political modernity, with its ineluctable centrality of the state and sovereign power, has always been deeply imbricated with transcendence. As Hussein Ali Agrama, among others, has taught us to see, secularism—as a political doctrine and mode of statecraft that stresses the state’s sovereign and transcendent power to continually produce and reproduce the charged boundary that separates the political from the religious—has been intimately entangled with and even productive of the lived reality of modern secularity.¹¹ One could not have the latter without the former. Nor is the transcendence of secularism only figured in its sovereign power. As Talal Asad has argued, the production of the citizen-subject—at the expense of other forms of attachment and identity—is based on transcendent mediation, and “in an important sense, this transcendent mediation is secularism.”¹²