Nothing Absolute. Группа авторов

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      Library of Congress Control Number: 2020925114

      First edition

       Nothing Absolute

       Introduction

       Immanence, Genealogy, Delegitimation

       KIRILL CHEPURIN AND ALEX DUBILET

      Across its recent renaissance, political theology has remained a notoriously multivalent term, a contested terrain defined by wide-ranging political and theological commitments. What political theology brings conceptually into play, what is theoretically at stake in this interdisciplinary site of inquiry, and what genealogical resources are pertinent to it—all of this is decided on anew with each political-theological investigation. New theoretical engagements repeatedly redraw the entire problematic: the debate is as much within a constituted field named political theology, as it is about the very existence and coherence of the field as such, as well as the status, scope, and significance of its fundamental concepts. There seemingly is no neutral space one could term political theology, concepts being always polemical and neutral space being always only a neutralized one. This instability of definition has made the field at once fecund and elusive, generative and highly contested. Why is the invocation of the name political theology significant today? And why invoke it alongside the post-Enlightenment—and also highly generative and debated—movement of thought known as German Idealism?

       Political Theology and the Contemporary Moment

      Within modern theoretical space, the term political theology came into prominence with Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (1922). There we find Schmitt’s famous dictum: “All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts not only because of their historical development—in which they were transferred [übertragen] from theology to the theory of the state, whereby, for example, the omnipotent God became the omnipotent lawgiver—but also because of their systematic structure.”¹ Already at this juncture, a number of key elements cluster around political theology as a problematic: the structural systematic analogy and historical transfer of concepts and operations between the theological and the political realms; the focus on problematizing the supposedly secular character of modernity; and the centrality of transcendence and sovereignty. Of course, the question of secularization, so central to political theology, was not exhausted by the Schmittian frame—it was a topos richly debated by such figures as Walter Benjamin, Karl Löwith, Jacob Taubes, and Hans Blumenberg.²

      Aligning his project explicitly with the Enlightenment tradition, Blumenberg resisted the idea that modernity is the continuation of Christianity by other means, seeing in the idea of secularization an attempt to delegitimate the world of modernity, to reduce it to a cover-up operation of seizing the contents and structures that were originally Christian without acknowledging it. Instead, as the charged title of his groundbreaking study of modernity indicates, Blumenberg sought to legitimate the modern world as a distinct epoch, that of the “immanent self-assertion of reason.” In this, he also rejected the term political theology, associated by him with Schmitt’s delegitimation of modernity in the service of transcendence. And yet, from a broader standpoint, Blumenberg’s study itself engages with what may be seen as the central problematic of political theology: the interrogation of the continuities and discontinuities between theological pasts and the secular-modern world.

      At one point in the book, polemicizing against Löwith’s thesis on the secularization of Christian eschatology in modernity, Blumenberg identifies the beginning of what Löwith sees as the specifically modern secularization process already in early Christianity’s neutralization of Jewish apocalypticism. Against the latter’s apocalyptic urgency and demand for the immediate end of the world, Christianity made, per Blumenberg, the move of postponing the end indefinitely, transforming apocalypticism into eschatology and granting new value to the world itself, precisely as the space between creation and redemption, as the not-yet in which we must live. At another point, Blumenberg traces in detail the emergence of the basic metaphysical structures of the world of modernity—alienation, contingency, self-assertion, the possibility of “immanently” mastering and altering reality—out of and in response to late-medieval nominalism. And, no less importantly, he sees the main task of modernity as the overcoming of Gnosticism—a characteristic modernity shares, for him, with Christianity. In other words, the structural continuities between the Christian and the modern world are there for Blumenberg as well, even if their implications are distinctly different.³ The assessment of these structures and implications is precisely at the core of political theology, which continues to this day to interrogate the interactions and interchanges between the Christian and the secular—against any simplistic theories of overcoming, against any easy disburdenment.

      The term political theology has also elicited fully countervailing understandings. For example, more explicitly theological—predominantly, though not exclusively, Christian—formulations of the problematic have arisen. Here, political theology begins to mean something different: it asks after the politics that form or should form within specific theological traditions, in other words, after the political dimension of the theological—explored under theological rubrics such as natural law, eschatology, justice, or faith. Such positions may disregard the previous debates, or be situated against them, pointing out how Schmitt and others have failed, in their political theology, to be properly theological in one way or another—and offering robustly theological constructions as a corrective and the supposedly more proper way of doing political theology. The politics that emerge as a result vary, but the fundamental questions of these investigations are different from the previously mentioned debates: What are the proper politics of a given theological tradition? What is a suitably theological vision of politics? And yet, these debates often remain provincially and dogmatically theological, failing to problematize the standing and standpoint of theology itself—and hence overlooking Christianity’s own imbrications, political and metaphysical, with secular modernity.

      In