Abstract
Political Theology: The Next Generation
Compiled by Mark Antaki, McGill University
Graham Hammill, The Mosaic Constitution: Political Theology and Imagination from Machiavelli to Milton, University of Chicago Press, 2012
Hammill seeks to draw out an early modern sensibility in which religious belief and human creation encounter one another by showing how Machiavelli, Spinoza, and various English authors (Marlowe, Drayton, Marvell, Harrington, Milton) interpreted and appropriated Hebrew scripture and the Mosaic constitution. Early modern political theology emerges as experimental and innovative (imaginative and not just duplicative of some divine order) and hence as politically diverse (and not simply tied to absolutism).
Victoria Kahn, The Future of Illusion: Political Theology and Early Modern Texts, University of Chicago Press, 2014
This book is interesting because it brings 20th-century figures such as Schmitt, Kantorowicz, Strauss but also Cassirer, Arendt, Freud into better focus as readers of early modern texts authored by the likes of Machiavelli and Spinoza. Kahn charts the emergence of poiesis, the human capacity to make, to poetize, to fictionalize (!) in early modern texts, and as well as the diverse reactions of their 20th-century readers, immersed in their own debates about Kultur. Kahn celebrates the poetic or cultural turn, suggesting it can reclaim the symbolic from religion and argues forcefully against a current debt of politics to religion or theology.
Paul W. Kahn, Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, Columbia University Press, 2011
This book is cool because it uses and adapts, indeed re-writes or re-stages, Schmitt’s Political Theology, in the contemporary contexts of popular sovereignty and American exceptionalism. Kahn opposes political theology to political (liberal, contractarian) theory, showing how the former sheds light on what the latter necessarily neglects: the centrality and meaning of sacrifice to the American political imaginary.
Eric L. Santner, The Royal Remains: The People’s Two Bodies and the Endgames of Sovereignty, University of Chicago Press, 2011
Santner brings psychoanalysis to bear on the passage from royal to popular sovereignty, arguing that the carnal or libidinal charge borne by the body of the king does not disappear but is henceforth borne by all bodies. In so doing, he seeks to better theorize biopolitics as a successor to or variant of political theology but also to better grasp the historical context that engenders psychoanalysis itself as a science of the (sovereign) flesh.
Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government, Stanford University Press, 2011
In another installment of Homo Sacer, one that seeks in part to complete or purse Foucault’s investigations into governmentality, Agamben locates the origins of government in early Christian theology and more specifically in an understanding of the Trinitarian doctrine as an oikonomia. Agamben sees himself as undertaking a genealogy of a whole tradition tied to immanence and economics that is neglected in the dominant tradition of political theology which is tied to transcendence and sovereignty. In considering the two traditions together, Agamben raises and seeks to answer the question of why power, i.e. government, needs glory.