Abstract
This chapter begins by engaging with Carl Schmitt’s political theology as parasitic on the modern nation State. The normative claim in this chapter is that political theology should be founded upon a non-theistic concept of religion which has at its center the ability of ritual to construct the bonds of social solidarity which in turn is the seat of religion’s authority and the condition of political possibility which operates through open, critical, and creative imagining of the way the world might be––subjunctivity. Subjunctivity is the technology that builds society and the world.
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Notes
- 1.
Schmitt, Political Theology, 5.
- 2.
Schmitt, Political Theology, 15.
- 3.
Simon Critchley, The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology (London and New York: Verso, 2012), 67.
- 4.
See, for instance, Slavoj Žižek’s tribute to Margaret Thatcher after her death in New Statesman, “The Simple Courage of Decision: A Leftist Tribute to Thatcher,” from April 17, 2013. http://www.newstatesman.com/politics/politics/2013/04/simple-courage-decision-leftist-tribute-thatcher. Žižek writes, “What we need today, in this situation, is a Thatcher of the left: a leader who would repeat Thatcher’s gesture in the opposite direction, transforming the entire field of presuppositions shared by today’s political elite of all main orientations.”
- 5.
Critchley, 104.
- 6.
Glenn Greenwald, “Unclaimed Territory,” http://glenngreenwald.blogspot.com.br/2006/01/ideology-of-lawlessness.html.
- 7.
Greenwald , “Unclaimed Territory.” The memorandum may be accessed at http://www.justice.gov/olc/warpowers925.htm. Among other comments, the Justice Department claims, “In both the War Powers Resolution and the Joint Resolution, Congress has recognized the President’s authority to use force in circumstances such as those created by the September 11 incidents. Neither statute, however, can place any limits on the President’s determinations as to any terrorist threat, the amount of military force to be used in response, or the method, timing, and nature of the response. These decisions, under our Constitution, are for the President alone to make.”
- 8.
Schmitt, Political Theology, 36.
- 9.
Critchley, 105.
- 10.
Critchley, 222.
- 11.
My gloss on Philippians 2:7.
- 12.
This is effectively Søren Kierkegaard’s argument in Attack upon “Christendom” (Walter Lowrie, tr. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1944).
- 13.
McKenzie Wark, “Preoccupying: McKenzie Wark,” http://theoccupiedtimes.org/?p=6451.
- 14.
McKenzie Wark, “How to Occupy an Abstraction.” http://www.versobooks.com/blogs/728-mckenzie-wark-on-occupy-wall-street-how-to-occupy-an-abstraction.
- 15.
Quoted in David Harvey, Spaces of Global Capitalism (London: Verso, 2006), 17.
- 16.
Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 45.
- 17.
Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 19.
- 18.
Harvey, 25.
- 19.
Harvey, 25.
- 20.
Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 26. “The specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy.”
- 21.
Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 28.
- 22.
Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 35.
- 23.
Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 168. Italics in original.
- 24.
Walter Benjamin, “Capitalism as Religion,” trans. Chad Kautzer in Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, ed. Peter Demetz (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1978), 261.
- 25.
Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 55.
- 26.
Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 57.
- 27.
Schmitt, Political Theology. On page 45, Schmitt writes, “…the sociology of concepts, which is advanced here and alone has the possibility of achieving a scientific result for a concept such as sovereignty. This sociology of concepts transcends juridical conceptualization oriented to immediate practical interest. It aims to discover the basic, radically systematic structure and to compare this conceptual structure with the conceptually represented social structure of a certain epoch.”
- 28.
Schmitt, Political Theology, 31.
- 29.
Schmitt, Political Theology, 10.
- 30.
Schmitt, Political Theology, 12–13.
- 31.
Agamben, Homo Sacer, 17.
- 32.
The reason that Christ’s sacrifice on the cross––arguably one of the foundations of political theology––works is not because it functions as a decision on the exception, but rather it creates a new world, full stop. The same could be said of the Akedah, to cite an even earlier example.
- 33.
Rappaport, Ritual and Religion, 17–18.
- 34.
Rappaport, Ritual and Religion, 17–18.
- 35.
Agamben, Homo Sacer, 18. Italics in original.
- 36.
Maybe this is the social-scientific version of the Second Law of Thermodynamics.
- 37.
See David Pan, “Political Theology for Democracy: Carl Schmitt and John Dewey on Aesthetics and Politics” in Telos, Winter 2012, vol. 2012, no. 161, 120–140.
- 38.
Michael Hardt as quoted in Jeffrey W. Robbins, Radical Democracy and Political Theology (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 83.
- 39.
Robbins, Radical Democracy, 83.
- 40.
Rappaport, Ecology, Meaning, and Religion, 243.
- 41.
Rappaport, Ritual and Religion, 31.
- 42.
Robbins, Radical Democracy, 84.
- 43.
Adam B. Seligman, Robert P. Weller, Michael J. Puett, and Bennett Simon, Ritual and Its Consequences: An Essay on the Limits of Sincerity (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), 22.
- 44.
Do a twenty-first-century barber and a thirteenth-century Sufi have much to discuss? Perhaps if the Sufi is sufficiently hirsute.
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Miller, J.E. (2019). Political Theology. In: Resisting Theology, Furious Hope. Radical Theologies and Philosophies. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-17391-3_3
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