Political Theology: Demystifying the Universal (Encounters in Law and Philosophy) (Encounters in Law & Philosophy)

269 Pages·2017·2.218 MB·English

by  Marinos Diamantides, Anton Schutz

POLITICAL THEOLOGY:
DEMYSTIFYING THE UNIVERSAL
ENCOUNTERS IN LAW AND PHILOSOPHY
SERIES EDITORS: Thanos Zartaloudis and Anton Schütz
This series interrogates, historically and theoretically, the encounters
between philosophy and law. Each volume published takes a unique
approach and challenges traditional systemic approaches to law and
philosophy. The series is designed to expand the environment for law
and thought.
Titles available in the series
STASIS: Civil War as a Political Paradigm
Giorgio Agamben
On the Idea of Potency: Juridical and Theological Roots of the Western
Cultural Tradition
Emanuele Castrucci
Political Theology: Demystifying the Universal
Marinos Diamantides and Anton Schütz
General Advisor
Giorgio Agamben
Advisory Board
Clemens Pornschlegel, Institut für Germanistik, Universität München,
Germany
Emmanuele Coccia, Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales,
France
Jessica Whyte, University of Western Sydney, School of Humanities
and Communication Arts, Australia
Peter Goodrich, Cardozo Law School, Yeshiva University, New York,
USA
Alain Pottage, London School of Economics, Law School, UK
Justin Clemens, University of Melbourne, Faculty of Arts, Australia
Robert Young, NYU, English, USA
Nathan Moore, Birkbeck College, Law School, University of London,
UK
Alexander Murray, English, University of Exeter, UK
Piyel Haldar, Birkbeck College, Law School, University of London,
UK
Anne Bottomley, Law School, University of Kent, UK
Oren Ben-Dor, Law School, University of Southampton, UK
Translator: Nicholas Heron is a Postdoctoral Research Fellow in the
Centre for the History of European Discourses at the University of
Queensland. He is the editor, with Justin Clemens and Alex Murray,
of The Work of Giorgio Agamben: Law, Literature, Life (Edinburgh
University Press, 2008) and the author of a forthcoming monograph
entitled Liturgical Power: Between Economic and Political Theology.
www.edinburghuniversitypress.com/series/enlp
POLITICAL
THEOLOGY:
DEMYSTIFYING
THE
UNIVERSAL
Marinos Diamantides and
Anton Schütz
Edinburgh University Press is one of the leading university presses
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© Marinos Diamantides and Anton Schütz, 2017
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Contents
1. Premises and Arguments 1
Part 1: Religions R Us
2. From Sovereignty to Negeschatology 23
3. Social Systems on the Cross 39
4. The Religion of Progress 56
5. Political Theology beyond Schmitt 78
Part 2: Historicised Political Theology
6. From Jerusalem to Rome via Constantinople 117
7. The Transition from Secularism to
Post-secularism 153
8. Deeds without Words 179
Notes 214
Index 254

1
Premises and Arguments
1.1
Our book is inspired by the observation that all attempts to
provide a modern Western model for a convincingly non-
imperial1 type of global civilisation have so far failed, just
as the many fruits of the modernity it has fostered have
spread, or at least are known, everywhere. The West2 has
brought about the kind of society that is complex enough to
necessitate those features that most of us cherish: subjective
right and freedom of scientific enquiry; yet apart from that,
it has also promoted the myth of a sovereign Will imposing
a universal moral duty of working for ‘progress’ (as opposed
to the idea that all work is always and essentially work-in-
progress), which, often seen as promoting ‘emancipation’, is
nearly as often the site of serial collateral damage, ending up,
as most frequently it does, with the waste of yet another spe-
cific form of life. Ironically, subjective right and the freedom
to enquire have, led us to discover, not to everybody’s liking,
that Contingency trumps Will, and that epigenetic develop-
ments trump causal explanations and require us to manage
ever new unintended and unexpected c onsequences; yet the
‘West’ continues to distinguish itself ‘from the rest’, no longer
as colonial master, but still as primus inter pares, on account of
its blind trust in the ideological notion of cumulative progress
and its concomitant indifference to the collateral damage pro-
duced, often unintentionally, in the course of its many initia-
tives that seek to lead the world to ‘progress’.
Our attempts to establish the reasons why current evo-
lution seems to follow this direction ever more resolutely,
have provoked a series of interrogations and investigations
that further extend this unhappy result. What is lacking, we
1
Demystifying the Universal
found, is not a more precise blueprint or model of a poten-
tially shareable ‘institutional vocabulary’ that would enable
us to trace the ground lines of global ‘occidental civilisation’
against its Eastern or Southern ‘other’. Nor does the solu-
tion lie in a new model of pluralism that would encompass
multiculturalism. What is needed, we found, is not the res-
toration of non-occidental cultures, most of which had been
in ruins long before some modern agent further destroyed
them (say, Lord Elgin in Athens; IS in Palmyra); rather it
is to gauge the conditions for effectively functioning and
reproducing social entities and cultural units in the emerg-
ing world society, whose key feature – namely a high degree
of functional differentiation – rests on the religious ruins of
the premodern West, with which most of the global popula-
tion, availing itself of its own ruins, has no affective relation-
ship. Dealing with matters legal, it cannot be stressed enough
that, historically, the simultaneous foregrounding of the rule
of law and of the critique of ‘the law’ corresponds exactly
with the legacy of Christianism’s critique and ‘overcoming’
of Judaism, resulting in Christian individualism. Likewise,
in politics, the postulation of sovereign will that is equidis-
tant from such binaries as immanence and transcendence,
natural and positive law, liberty and statism, revolution and
law, rights and social justice, etc., as the ‘necessary’ basis for
organised society, is indisputably what identifies occidental
Christianism (Catholicism and Protestantism), including in
its latest form: secularism.
Today, there is a vast and rapidly growing offer of studies
based upon the perception that the classically modern idea
of an uninterrupted route from municipal prejudgement and
arbitrariness to the realisation of a single and self-transparent
humanity, a global melting pot, has come to nothing, with
neo-nationalist, isolationist populism on the rise. Our ‘global
village’ increasingly resembles a world-compassing Tower
of Babel, except that it is a topsy-turvy one, in whose con-
struction conflict persists despite most of us understanding
the same conceptual languages, notably of legal and political
constitutionalism. One way of showing this is related to the
spread of Western law; as Samera Esmeir shows, referring
to nineteenth-century colonial Egypt, the widespread pres-
ence of the Western ‘positive law versus natural law’ debate
2
Premises and Arguments
took up all available space for discussion in the very name
of ‘modernity’; this, thereby, both presupposes the violent
dehumanisation of subjects of alternative, non-occidental,
institutional models, and forecloses the evolution (or even the
taking into account) of these models; today the ‘positive law
versus natural law’ model is still playing the role of a resilient
and uninterrupted consensus worldwide and is thus structur-
ing the ensuing ‘juridical humanity’, to quote Esmeir’s title.3
The ‘global village’, in other words, is real and functioning
regardless of barriers and walls extant or proposed. Yet there
is no hiding that not everyone feels equally at home in it and
that the management of the affairs of the global village is too
complicated to be a subject of sovereign will.
A first step that needs to be made in understanding this
situation is a partial rehabilitation of Samuel Huntington’s
1996 Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order,
with the immediate provision that, as we will argue, since no
viable ‘traditional’ moral or practical alternative to Western
Christian/secular/post-secular modernity is on the horizon,
any conceivable ‘clash’ can only be endo-civilisational – a
clash, or perhaps a civil war – and take place between secular
Western models. Critics have focused on Huntington’s sup-
posed and supposedly scandalous turn from mere politics
to the much ‘vaguer’ (as it was dubbed by the majority of
critics) concept of ‘civilisation’, and his supplying a divisive
substratum of geopolitical tension. The most resolute critics,
Edward Said and Noam Chomsky among them, also focused
on the other word in the title: ‘clash’, in view of its aggressive
connotations. Now the aggressive character of the title of a
book that constitutes an official contribution to US foreign
policy is barely surprising; but this should not prevent one
from noticing the presence in the title of a hint to a far more
important, indeed decisive, thesis. What has escaped all but
the most perspicacious observers is the discreet yet signifi-
cant use of the word ‘civilisation’ in the plural. For the first
time in the history of this type of literature, Huntington’s
much-disputed and bluntly conservative study has intro-
duced the notion that world conflict may be ultimately based
neither on promoting/fostering nor on blocking/sabotaging
a single humanity-wide model of evolution (say of despot-
ism by bourgeois democracy and of bourgeois democracy by
3