5 - Political Theology beyond Schmitt

Summary

Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, Schmitt's most sulphurous opusculum, written in a halfscholarly, half-propagandistic vein, throws its ideological weltanschaulich roots right in the post-First World War defeat of the German left, evincing its contribution to the German revolution. Only two years before it was written, in January 1919, Berlin had experienced the murder of revolutionaries Rosa Luxemburg and Karl Liebknecht. Even considering the questionable humus that had been favouring the growth of the seeds it had planted, Schmitt's brochure did have the indisputable merit of having fired the first broadside against the fortress of secularist and scientistic convictions, against those for whom the theological paradigm needed to be viewed as obsolescent or simply ‘overcome’. Schmitt must be credited for his early understanding of the fact that the pivotal ‘difference’ of modernity, in the name of which the socalled Dark Ages are lost in oblivion, is conspicuously fragile, and sits uncomfortably with the double rejoicing about the innovations that had been achieved and the further innovations and achievements that, from this base, could now be hoped in the future.

Carl Schmitt's unmasking of the concepts of the modern theory of the state as depending closely on ‘theology’ was immediately supplemented with a second reading according to which ‘political theology’ also offers the means to escape the ‘small-p’ politics of parliamentary, liberal and socialdemocrat modernity, and return to ‘capital-P’ politics. Yet a third reading of the Schmittian argument is possible, focusing on Schmitt's failure to even start to fine-tune what exactly ‘theology’ refers to. Such a third reading requires rejecting the common assumption implicit in the first two: that we find in ‘theology’ and ‘secularisation’ two mutually exclusive elements. Rather, they produce together and as complements the half-carelessly and half-wilfully ambiguous unity of the reinvented political theology that Schmitt seeks to offer. We are dealing here with two distinct flawed ideas: that ‘theology’ epitomises something like an immemorially mediaeval discipline, linked irremediably to a non-modern mindset; and that ‘secularising’ consists of dismissing and replacing religion in each and all of its occurrences, vocations and employments, by something ‘non-religious’.