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Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
Even if politics and theology are perceived to be fundamentally distinctive areas of enquiry, they share a common problem. Indeed, one could even suggest that thought itself—as a practice among disparate practices—is subject to the formidable difficulty of the formation and subsistence of community. ‘The gravest and most painful testimony of the modem world,’ suggests Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘the one that possibly involves all other testimonies to which this epoch must answer ... is the testimony of the dissolution, the dislocation, or the conflagration of community’. This crisis of community, or its very possibility, is illustrated in a contemporary unwillingness to engage in the hard labour of politics that is part and parcel of either the espousal of individualistic, psychologistic and spiritualistic solutions to the existential problems of subjects and communities or the arrogation of secure and unequivocal identity claims based on nation, race or some other undifferentiated category. Nevertheless, a constant remains in the midst of this confusion. In the western context of modem liberal governance, the possibility of identity, whether individual or national, is predicated on the division of religious and political idioms and practices. There is no room for a tension-filled political/religious nexus which, according to Kierkegaard, produces an ‘arousing restlessness’. In the wake of religion comes a political subjectivity that is marked and re-marked by somnambulance and atomisation.
1 Nancy, Jean‐Luc, The Inoperative Community ed. Connor, P. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), p. 1Google Scholar.
2 Kierkegaard, S., Journals and Papers, Vol. 3 trans. Hong, Howard V. & Hong, Edna H. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1970), p. 100Google Scholar.
3 Indeed, for Kant, the very existence of religious difference threatens the constitution of international peace—thus his desire for ‘religion’ to become one. Cf. Kant, Immanuel, ‘Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch’Political Writings ed. Reiss, H. (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 114n.Google Scholar
4 Cf. Machiavelli, Niccolò, Selected Political Writings trans. & ed. Wooton, D. (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1994), p. 36ffGoogle Scholar.
5 Hobbes, Thomas, Leviathan ed. Tuck, Richard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), pp. 117‐121Google Scholar.
6 Ibid., p. 372.
7 Ibid., p. 360.
8 Cf. for example, Plato, The Republic, 434D‐441C; 5880 & D3‐4. For Plato's discussion of the parallel structures of the soul and the city, cf. 557D 1ff.
9 Cf. Bernard Williams, ‘The Analogy of City and Soul in Plato's Republic’ Pluto's Republic: Critical Essays ed. Kraut, Richard (Oxford: Rowman & Littlefield, 1997), pp. 49‐59Google Scholar.
10 Cf. Plato, The Phaedrus, 246‐248.
11 John M. Rist, ‘Plato says that we have tripartite souls. If he is right, what can we do about it?Man, Soul and Body: Essays in Ancient Thought from Pluto to Dionysius (Aldershot: Variorum, 1996), pp. 103‐124Google Scholar.
12 Ibid., p. 116. Rist presents a Platonic ‘formula’ for this divinization: T (god) =H (human) ‐ B (beast).
13 Ibid., p. 121.
14 Cf. especially Socrates' comments on the improbability of such an ideal commonwealth existing ‘anywhere’ but in the heavens, The Republic, 591C‐592B.
15 Millennium Experience, The Guide, p. 19.
16 Ibid.
17 Cf. Franklin, Sarah, ‘Dolly: A New Form of Transgenic Breedwealth Environmental Values 6: 4 (1997), 430.CrossRefGoogle Scholar This biogenetic—or quantitative— value practically controverts Aquinas's assertion that ‘the soul is not a quantitative whole, neither considered in itself nor per accidens.’ St Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, 1a, 76, 8.
18 Cf. Certeau, Michel de, The Writing of History trans. Conley, T. (New York Columbia University Press, 1988), p. 149Google Scholar.
19 Baudelaire, Charles, ‘Perte d'auréole’Petit Poèmes en prose (Le Spleen de Paris) (Paris: Éditions Gamier Frères, 1980). pp. 203��4Google Scholar
20 Benjamin, Walter, ‘The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction’Illuminations trans. Zohn, H. (London: Fontana, 1973). p. 235Google Scholar.
21 Gasché, Rodolphe, ‘Objective Diversions: On Some Kantian Themes in Benjamin's “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction”Walter Benjamin's Philosophy: Destruction and Experience eds Benjamin, A. and Osborne, P. (London: Routledge, 1994), p. 201Google Scholar.
22 For a thorough discussion and elaboration of Benjamin's understanding of the loss of experience cf. Agamben, Giorgio, Infancy and History: the Destruction of Experience trans. Heron, Liz (London: Verso, 1993)Google Scholar.
23 Hegel's reflection on religion is significant here, particularly his attempt to bring together nature and Geist under the rubric of religion. ‘Spirit is thus posited in the third element, in universal self‐consciousness; it is its community.’ Hegel, G.W.F., Phenomenology of Spirit trans. Miller, A.V. (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1977), p. 473Google Scholar. Baudelaire signifies the failure of Hegel's (modern) unifying project.
24 Agamben, Giorgio, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life trans. Heller‐Roazen, D. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), p. 4Google Scholar.
25 Ibid., p. 1.
26 Ibid p. 9.
27 Ibid., p. 71.
28 Cf. Schmitt, Carl, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty trans. Schwab, G. (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), p. 19Google Scholar.
29 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 15.
30 Ibid., p. 84.
31 Ibid., p. 101.
32 Ibid p. 106.
34 Walter Benjamin, ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’illuminations, pp. 248‐249. Although Zohn translates Ausnahmezustand as ‘state of emergency’, I will use the term ‘state of exception’ as it is the more common translation used by students of both Benjamin and Carl Schmitt. Cf. the original in Benjamin, Walter, Gesammelte Schriften Vol. 1, Pt. 2 ed. Tiedemann, R. & Schweppenhauser, H. (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1974), p. 697Google Scholar.
34 Ibid p. 248.
35 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 115.
36 Ibid., p. 114.
37 Hobbes, Thomas, De Civet The English Version ed. Warrender, H. (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983)Google Scholar, Ch. IX, VII, p. 124.
38 Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer, p. 128.
39 Ibid., p. 129.
40 I am grateful to Dr Ian Bryan for discussing PACE with me at length.
41 Indeed, Marcel Gauchet calls Christianity the ‘religion of the exit from religion’ because of its over‐development of interiority. While there is some truth in this claim, it can be argued that this is most obvious in the context of the early modern period and beyond. Cf. Gauchet, M., Le désenchantement du mode: Une histoire politique de la religion (Paris: Gallimard, 1985), p. 12Google Scholar.
42 Agamben, Giorgio, The Coming Community trans. Hardt, M. (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), p.85Google Scholar.
43 Ibid.
44 Heidegger, Martin, Gesamtausgabe II. Band 60, Phänomenologie des religiösen Lebens (Frankfurt, a.M.: Klostermann, 1995), p. 342Google Scholar.
45 Cf. Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough ed. Rhees, Rush (Doncaster: Brynmill Press, 1979), pp. 3e & 10eGoogle Scholar.
46 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Culture and Value ed. Wright, G.H. von, trans. Winch, P. (Oxford: Blackwell, 1980), p. 73eGoogle Scholar.
47 Agamben, Giorgio, ‘Kommerell, or On Gesture’Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy ed. & trans. Heller‐Roazen, D. (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), p. 83Google Scholar.
48 Cf. Metz, Johann Baptist, Faith in History and Society: Toward a Practical Fundamental Theology trans. Smith, D. (London: Bums & Oates, 1980), pp. 200‐4Google Scholar
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