It is important as well to recall the ways the modern world remains linked with transcendence in its temporalized form, under the rubric of progress. In modernity, the world becomes a (supposedly immanent) field of projects and possibilities that the subject can make use of, actualize, master—and reality thereby becomes producible.13 The modern idea of progress, accordingly, sees the world as the process of such actualization, production, and mastery. This process functions within the horizon of an ideal end point where reality is supposed to be mastered and human life is supposed to be fulfilled or reconciled. Regardless of whether we take it to be attainable or merely regulative, this goal is at once immanent and transcendent, driving it from within toward an external telos. The entire process thereby turns into a process of constant self-transcending—of fixing humanity’s gaze on a phantasmic telos of complete mastery, freedom, or fulfillment that is constitutively not-yet. The proliferation of images of utopian futurity in modernity are indicative of such a telos. Modernity structures its immanence with a view to a transcendent future and installs the figure of the subject as the one who masters this future; but the subject thereby is also subjected to and by that transcendent futurity, indeed, only becoming subject (and not a mere object on the path of progress) by means of striving toward the telos of absolute mastery and efficiency, an operation through which the world-process reproduces itself. In this “horizontal transcendence,”14 the subject is always in the process of self-transcending.15
State sovereignty and the not-yet of a transcendent futurity are hardly the only ways to expose the modern world as a transcendent structure. In its explorations of the way the modern world is constituted through coloniality and slavery—and the attendant logics of separation, otherness, enclosure, hierarchization, and exclusion—contemporary work in black studies and decolonial studies offers another. As Sylvia Wynter argues, the birth of the modern world coincides structurally with that of the (transcendent) figure of Man as the new model of being human, with its constitutive exclusion of the non- or sub-human (colonized and racialized) other—a model of the human that reoccupies, politically and theologically, the earlier figure of the Christian. Racialized otherness functions, from the onset of modernity, as the condition of possibility of the modern subject’s seemingly immanent self-assertion and universalist self-description, forming “the non-supernatural but no less extrahuman ground,” the transcendent beyond to the properly human, “on which the world of modernity was to institute itself.” This excluded ground is thereby inscribed into the “new grounds of legitimacy” of the modern world, and the “new notion of the world,” as at once the assumption and the production of separation, domination, colonial difference, and other forms of transcendence through which the world of Man goes on to reproduce and legitimate itself. In this, the earth becomes an immanent-transcendent racialized globe—a globality imposed, as it were, from above upon the degraded earth as well as upon the enslaved as the bare earth’s inhabitants and structural correlate.16
The logic of modern racialized transcendence is further explored in contemporary radical black studies, in the latter’s interrogation of the modern world as built on and perpetuating itself through the constitutive exclusion of blackness. Here, blackness indexes what is foreclosed from the modern (human) subject and its concomitant values and logics, including those of coherence, freedom, futurity, and possibility. In the overall distribution of race and the extra-human in modernity, blackness occupies the structural (non-)position of nothingness. As such, blackness becomes the zero point that remains beneath the binaries in and through which the world operates, as that over and against which, by way of obliterating its being, the modern subject and the modern world can assume their transcendent sovereign function.17 To affirm this nothing or zero point, as some of the central work in radical black studies suggests,18 is to refuse the regime of being of and in the world that is shown to be intrinsically violent, and to do so without any call for the world’s redemption or justification—without and against all attempts (whether religious or secular) to legitimate the world, a legitimacy that is violently imposed upon the excluded, the obliterated, and the enslaved.
Thus, while the modern world may appear as equatable with immanence when narrated by and from various perspective engaged in polemics about theology and secularization, it is exposed, across the spectrum of contemporary critical theory, as a violent transcendent apparatus. In a more abstract register (which should, however, be thought together with the explorations of the modern world’s transcendence considered so far), François Laruelle and those inspired by his thought have likewise worked to diagnose the world as a transcendent structure. For Laruelle, the world names the horizon of reality as coherent, rationally cognizable, and supposedly self-sufficient. The world, this transcendental illusion, as Laruelle terms it in a nod to Kant, operates by way of doubling and separation, by way of dividing the Real, creating the binaries that structure our thinking, such as light and dark, good and evil, human and nonhuman, which are then (to be) mediated into a coherent whole. This reality is not only divisive but also hierarchical, insofar as one of the binary terms is considered to be higher than the other—and thus a structure of authority and domination, no matter the (philosophical, Christian, or secular) guise it takes. The Real, which is for Laruelle an ante-ontological reality that is prior to the imposition of a world thus understood, is thereby completely foreclosed: the world is, in fact, nothing but a complex apparatus of authorities and decisions that, as it were, colonize and impose themselves upon the Real—an apparatus of desire, exploitation, and conquest. The world is, significantly, a transcendent structure; by contrast, it is the Real, as preceding all division, that Laruelle associates with radical immanence. The philosophical and ethical task becomes, accordingly, to expose the world as an illusion: an imposed construction, an inherently violent demand for coherence and sufficiency, which obscures and excludes the radical immanence of the Real while feeding off of it.19
These lines of political-theological reflection put into question the legitimacy and beneficence of the world and its authorities—whether secular or religious—and, by insisting on the unredeemable perspective and role of (the world’s) victims, reject the justifications found in theodicy and its secular counterparts. As such, this reactivates what may be termed a Gnostic perspective within the political-theological debate, one that refuses the world and its modalities of justification.20 This refusal is, in fact, what Gnosticism indexes already in twentieth-century philosophy and political theology, including Blumenberg’s characterization of Christianity as the first and modernity as the second overcoming of Gnosticism.21 In this sense, Gnosticism operates as a generic and transhistorical concept beyond its initial function as an umbrella term for early heresies that variously conceive the creator of the world (known as the demiurge) as malevolent and the world as illegitimate. It names an apocalyptic orientation that radically disinvests from the world and strips it of all legitimacy—an orientation in which all purposefulness of this world’s reality, and all sense of this world as worthy of being upheld and invested in, disappears. It was Taubes who most unapologetically claimed the position of antiworldly Gnosticism, and by doing so disclosed an overlooked moment of coincidence between the two seemingly opposite sides structuring the political-theological debates: Schmitt and Blumenberg may have disagreed on everything, but they each display a strong anti-Gnostic tendency. This coincidence suggests that whatever their oppositional and polemical self-situating, sovereignty and the world form a single bipartite mechanism of legitimation.
No less significantly, even though Gnosticism, at least since the classic study by Adolf von Harnack,22 has been associated with radical transcendence, as soon as the (Christian-modern) world is exposed as an apparatus of transcendence, it becomes possible instead to associate Gnosticism with that which simultaneously opposes the transcendence of the world and of God the creator, and thus with radical immanence. Such is, indeed, an important move performed in contemporary thought from Laruelle onward. In response to the bipartite mechanism of transcendence, the new Gnostic tendency is to immanently refuse the world and to insist instead on a dispossessed and dispossessive immanence, indexing not the way of the world or the subject in the world, but what refuses to take part in what the world declares to be the only possible existence: existence in the service of transcendence, be it God, the sovereign,