Moten’s thought suggests one avenue of exploration for what happens when immanence does not merely designate the secular world of modernity and the self-transcending, self-possessed subject acting in that world—but, freed from this adequation, immanence opens in a number of diverse directions. One could think here of Denise Ferreira da Silva, who theorizes a Deleuzian-Leibnizian immanence of “plenum” as a way of thinking the ultimate destitution of the world of subjugation, indeed its apocalyptic end, for the sake of a total reconstruction or the restitution of all value.27 In a different vein, Daniel Whistler theorizes a Schellingian immanent indifference to the (Hegelian-modern) world of negativity and incessant differentiation.28 Alex Dubilet articulates an immanence decoupled from the subject, a dispossessed life without a why, through a reconstruction of Meister Eckhart’s speculative experimentalism.29 None of these configurations of immanence can easily be designated as merely religious or secular; they are critical and constructive tools that index what is foreclosed and violated by transcendence (be it divine or worldly) and explore novel theoretical pathways of thinking otherwise than through the religious-secular binary.
At stake is not only ungrounding modern forms of sovereignty and decoupling immanence from its equation with the secular world, but also the subversion of modernity’s self-legitimating conceptual narratives. This involves precisely a rejection of theoretically playing off the Christian and the secular against each other, a playing off that tends to yield a legitimation of the secular modern or a call for a return to the Christian against the secular. Instead, we must take seriously the insights of those scholars who have argued that, in important ways, secularism is another name for Christianity, that the fundamental operations of secularism and Christianity are not as opposed as they claim.30 We should insist on the insight that the logic of conversion and universality, no less than the logics of possibility and mediation, fundamentally persist across the Christian-secular divide.31 We might also consider the way both the Christian and the secular are apparatuses of deferral and futurity, of distension and reproduction, generating subjection as their lot and foreclosing the radical utopian immanence of the Real.32 It is a question of rejecting the frame of secularity, but doing so without affirming Christianity as its supposed proper other—something that theological critiques of modernity have too often presumed. In this formulation, political theology is no longer a space for a reactivation of Christianity or theology against the secular, but a theoretical site for the speculative incubation of concepts that critically insists that the Christian and the secular form a unitary conjuncture essential to the ideological self-description of the world of modernity.
Cutting across and putting into question the religious-secular binary, this volume works political-theologically with concepts other than sovereignty—concepts such as immanence, nothingness, the world, the earth, utopia, indifference, justification, tsimtsum, or kenosis—in and through German Idealism. As such, this volume partakes in the kind of genealogical explorations that have always played a central role in the field of political theology. One only needs to recall the contestation over the role of premodern figures (e.g., Paul or the Gnostics) or early modern figures (e.g., Hobbes or Spinoza) to detect the importance that genealogy has played for the articulation of central elements of political theology. From Schmitt, Blumenberg, and Taubes onward, the genealogical dimension has always had a complex function: it has redrawn historical origins and recovered historical materials in unexpected ways in order to transform the structuring concepts of present-day political theology. Indeed, each significant genealogical investigation contains the capacity to transfigure the entire political-theological problematic, determining it anew for the contemporary moment and generating novel theoretical trajectories for its future.
Whereas the early modern moment grappled with the question of the political constitution of the state in the aftermath of the Reformation and the Wars of Religion, German Idealism was the first speculative attempt to think the entanglement of modernity and religion in the philosophical register in the wake of the Enlightenment and the French Revolution. Put this way, it is clear that German Idealism should be no less important for the contemporary political-theological imaginary than its early modern counterpart—but this has hardly been the case.33 By staging an encounter between German thought from Kant to Marx and contemporary reformulations of the political-theological problematic, this volume seeks to remedy this theoretical lacuna.
German Idealism and the Political-Theological Diagnosis of Modernity
Without much exaggeration, German Idealism may be called the first philosophical articulation of the political-theological problematic in the aftermath of the Enlightenment and the advent of secularity. The philosophies of history, philosophies of religion, and histories of philosophy in German Idealism were all sites for the historical and conceptual tracing of continuities and inheritances, of dislocations and transformations, connecting Christianity and modernity. Indeed, one might say that German Idealism advanced, for the first time, a comprehensive political-theological genealogy of modernity—of the modern subject, the modern world, the modern state or community, and even the modern colonial project34—in its conjunction with Christianity and its various inflections. In German Idealism, we encounter a political-theological diagnosis of modernity as coimplicated and coimbricated with Christianity—a diagnosis guided by a set of questions: How does the project of Neuzeit relate historically and conceptually to Christianity, from its early to its late-medieval and modern forms? In what ways did Christianity lead to and remain constitutively at the heart of modernity? What makes modernity’s structures of rationality, subjectivity, freedom, community, and universality Christian or non-Christian—an inheritance and transformation of Christianity or a deviation from it? What sort of Christianity was it that modernity inherited? In these lines of questioning, German idealist engagement with Christianity ceases to be a project of either secularization or resacralization—frameworks through which Hegel’s philosophy in particular has often been interpreted—and becomes genealogical and conceptual.
Hegel, Fichte, and Schelling are all exemplary in the genealogical nature of their speculative investigations. In turning to them, we can make visible some of the ways German Idealism elaborates entanglement with Christianity as the fundamental condition of modernity and modern thought. For Hegel, modern freedom and subjectivity—as well as the very tripartite structure of thinking—are inextricable from Christianity and its structures of individuality, its ideas of hierarchy and universality, its eschatology and its justification of the world and of suffering, and the figure of Christ as the mediator and the notion of kenosis, with the result that Hegel’s own historical moment constitutes for him the culmination of this Christian trajectory. More generally, Hegel’s basic approach to philosophy of history may be seen as genealogical: in his analysis of how history has led up rationally to the present moment, Hegel begins from the actual in order to trace its origins, structures, and presuppositions. Of course, in the same gesture, Hegel also idealizes the actual and justifies the current point of world-history, but the genealogical aspect should not be obscured by this. The Owl of Minerva only begins its flight once the movement has been completed—flying back so as to trace how this movement came about and developed.
Theologically, it is the Lutheran line of Christianity—understood in a heterodox way that unites it with the eschatological tradition exemplified by the likes of Joachim of Fiore—that stands at the heart