[PT 11.

1 (2010) 5-14] Political Theology (print) ISSN 1462-317X

doi:10.1558/poth.v11i1.5 Political Theology (online) ISSN 1473-1719

Editorial Introduction

Political Theology—The Continental Shift

Creston Davis
Assistant Professor
Department of Philosophy and Religion
Rollins College
1000 Holt Avenue, Box 2659
Winter Park, FL 32789
USA
creston.davis@gmail.com

What is at stake for political theology today? This is the basic question this
issue attempts to address. It is true that the subject of political theology
resists a singular definition; indeed the term functions like a nebulous
concept—a Rorschach test whose ink markings are given meaning by
the individual perceiver taking the exam. In this way, political theology
can dangerously become like the joke of universal refutation where the
individual perspective defines the very terms of the discipline without
being familiar with the discipline itself. There once was a philosopher
who had a dream.
First Aristotle appeared, and the philosopher said to him, “Could you give
me a fifteen-minute capsule sketch of your entire philosophy?” To the
philosopher’s surprise, Aristotle gave him an excellent exposition in which
he compressed an enormous amount of material into a mere fifteen min-
utes. But then the philosopher raised a certain objection, which Aristotle
couldn’t answer. Confounded, Aristotle disappeared. Then Plato appeared.
The same thing happened again, and the philosopher’s objection to Plato
was the same as his objection to Aristotle. Plato also couldn’t answer it and
disappeared. Then all the famous philosophers of history appeared one-
by-one and our philosopher refuted every one with the same objection.
After the last philosopher vanished, our philosopher said to himself, “I
know I’m asleep and dreaming all this. Yet I’ve found a universal refutation
for all philosophical systems! Tomorrow when I wake up, I will probably
have forgotten it, and the world will really miss something!” With an iron
effort, the philosopher forced himself to wake up, rush over to his desk,
and write down his universal refutation. Then he jumped back into bed

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010, 1 Chelsea Manor Studios, Flood Street, London SW3 5SR.
6 Political Theology

with a sigh of relief. The next morning when he awoke, he went over to
the desk to see what he had written. It was, “That’s what you say.”1

This joke fully reveals the end-point where philosophy or political

theology ends up once traditions and communities are systematically
removed from learning a discipline both in its historical and conceptual
materialization. What you end up with is a Protagoras-cum-Prometheus
moment in which “Man is the measure of all things” precisely because
he has stolen the Law [fire] from Heaven. So you get a general shift from
community based epistemological claims to the individual who steals the
law for himself such that the subject now become the sole arbiter of truth
and so forth. In Kierkegaardian terms, then, this would be an example of
the subject castrating himself in the very act of stealing the law because
to transcend or suspend the “ethical-universal” stage would be to dissolve
the subject into nothingness. In psychoanalytical terms this would be
what Žižek calls the superego as ethical agent whereby the law is all there
finally ever is beyond which there is nothing, no subject and no substance
and so by extension the political is rendered impossible.
Of course, there is a positive side to the nebulousness of a subject like
political theology, namely, that its very open-ended nature welcomes
and even nurtures debate about how and under what conditions theol-
ogy and the political function together and on what terms. What’s more,
the connection between the subject of political theology and its inherent
need for active debates, discussions and arguments about different and
rivaling traditions, the nature of sovereignty and authority and so forth,
are crucial not just for the future of theology, but for the very truth of
the political and its various ideological formulations (from communism,
socialism, democracy and fascism). The history of how theology and the
political mixed with each other, as Pierre Manent rightly argues, began in
ambiguity and even contradiction in what he and others have called the
theologico-political problem.
The definition that the Church gave itself embodied a contradiction. On
the one hand, the good that it provided—salvation—was not of this world.
“This world,” “Caesar’s world,” did not interest it. On the other hand, it had
been assigned by God himself and by the Son the mission of leading men
to salvation, for which the Church, by God’s grace, was the unique vehicle.
Consequently it had a right or duty to oversee everything that could place
this salvation in peril. But since all human actions were faced with the alter-
native of good and evil (except those actions considered “immaterial”), the

1. From Raymond Smullyan, 5000 B.C. and Other Philosophical Fantasies (New York:
St. Martin’s Press, 1983). Retrieved from http://consc.net/misc/univ-joke.html on 29 July
2009.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.

 Editorial Introduction 7

Church had a duty to oversee all human action. And among human actions,
the most important were those carried out by rulers.2

Enter the political! Manent summarizes this problem as follows:

“although the Church leaves men free to organize themselves within the
temporal sphere as they see fit, it simultaneously tends to impose a the-
ocracy on them. It brings a religious constraint of a previously unheard
of scope, and at the same time offers the emancipation of secular life.”3
So, essentially what you have played out here is a struggle for a supreme
power, a plenitudo potestatis as Manent puts it. This raises the question:
What is the Church or the rulers of “this world”? This struggle to give
clarity of who can rightly claim a supreme power (Church or secular
rulers) was fundamentally reformulated in the secular theories of both
Machiavelli and Hobbes (in the sixteenth-seventeenth centuries) which
devised new secular ways of thinking about the world in terms that could
finally win the struggle over who possessed absolute (sovereign) power.
In doing so it had to invent new versions of power, authority, and its
materialization into constituent forms of governance. Moreover, this
so-called “secular” position of the modern nation-state whose operat-
ing assumption was antithetical to any belief in the theological view was
a distinct product of a human-centered outlook subsequently raised
to its final apex in the twentieth century in the controversial thought
of Carl Schmitt. For Schmitt the tension between the secular-political
and the theological spheres (or any other sphere, economic, social, etc.)
finally and forever gave way to a more fundamental and existential truth,
viz. that the essence of all truths was not the reality of the Incarnation
founding a politics of exceptionality/love but was finally founded on
a stripped-down naked and vulgar reality of the political. This is what
Schmitt means when he asserts: “all significant concepts of the modern
theory of the state are secularized theological concepts.”4 In other words,
the secular for Schmitt finally neutralizes the “theological-political prob-
lematic” into a more sinister and base concept called “the political.” For
Schmitt, then, politics as supreme power is the bedrock of all reality and
consequently determines the truth of the world, which is precisely what
Marx did, only his conclusion was the base Economic sub-structure that
gives the conditions of possibility to everything else. In this way Schmitt’s
outlook vulgarly reduces the world down to the primacy of naked power.

2. Pierre Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism, trans. Rebecca Balinski (Princ-

eton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 4–5.
3. Ibid., 5.
4. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1985), p. 36.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.

8 Political Theology

In as much as this is the case for Schmitt could we not say that he was
NOT in fact a thinker of political theology, but of the political (or power)
altogether sundered from the theological? Furthermore, this ominous
and sinister reduction to base-power as the locus of the world’s truth
explains the importance of Schmitt’s essential friend/enemy distinction
that grounds his theory of identity and so too grounds his politics. An
enemy is defined, for instance, “in a specially intense way, existentially
something different and alien, so that in the extreme case conflicts with
him are possible.”5
What Schmitt is saying is that human beings are strictly defined in terms
that cannot finally be related other than reductive appeals to violence. In
other words, violence is de facto the a priori for Schmitt. And this is where
one can see Hobbes most clearly in his work in so far as Schmitt thinks
that the state of our existence is replete with violence checked only by the
absolute sovereignty of the ONE through the process of state-formation.
But is this vulgar reduction to violence really the only terms on which
humans ultimately relate? Does not the very core of political theology
suggest the possibility that humans could relate in non-violent terms
(and that the nexus between non-violence might well be bound up in the
aesthetics of revelation)? To raise another question: Is there something
more hopeful about our existence than a simple and insulting distinc-
tion between my identity and someone else’s identity? Might the kernel
logic of Christianity break with this sinister reduction to violence based
on one’s identity and its other? Counter to the ontological assumptions of
violence one can think of Jesus’ interpretation of the Torah in the Sermon
of the Mount in Matthew’s gospel where he defines the core of the law as
love. “You have heard it said: ‘You shall love your neighbor and hate your
enemy.’ But I say to you, Love your enemies and pray for those who per-
secute you.”6 Similarly St. Paul’s understanding of the message of Jesus is
not based on identity-politics as most fundamental, but rather on the dis-
possession that the death of God unleashes in the world. “There is no longer
Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and
female…”7 For Paul it is not violence (or the law stolen by the subject) but
love that becomes the measure of all things. But—and here is the sticking
point—the measure of love itself cannot be measured, at least in terms
of human standards solidified in abstract false universal laws, rules and
norms—this was Kierkegaard’s basic point in Fear and Trembling. In this

5. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1996), 27; emphasis added.
6. Matthew 5:43–44 (nrsv).
7. Galatians 3–28.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.

 Editorial Introduction 9

sense, then, love, as my friend Slavoj Žižek has pointed out, is VIOLENT!
Love is violent precisely because it is the opposite of being committed
to indifference to difference (i.e., a general liberal stance toward being).
Rather, love is exclusive and absolutely committed to a singularity and so
flies in the face of the idea of inclusiveness and in this sense ruptures the
ideology of tolerance. Of course this is not to say that Christianity has not
been responsible for violence in the name of love; indeed, examples of
this abound. The point here is that nevertheless Christianity proffers the
universal-exception for love that breaks with the ideology of tolerance and
identity politics.
The core of the cosmic scandal to which Paul refers and whose very
meaning irrupts in the void of the cross, in death as such, is love. Indeed, it
is this dis-possessive exceptional scandal that ruptures the immediate fake
“universal” (law, morality, ethics, politics etc.) and founds a new universal
based on the infinity of love that gives birth to rethinking the very founda-
tions of political theology in our time. What’s more, this irruption of the
status quo (of the fake universal) establishes the universal-exception of
the Incarnational Event, which affords the world new coordinates for how
humanity is defined in a manner that radically breaks with Schmitt’s false
dichotomy of friend/enemy, among other things. This radical thesis is
what we may call the “continental shift” in political theology. But this shift
is not the result of two pre-existing entities that simply bump up against
each other and so shift from their original position. It is, rather, more
like a cataclysmic Event defined by Paul and Kierkegaard, and recently
expressed in the atheism of the Continental theorist Alain Badiou and
Slavoj Žižek who both articulate the notion of an irruptive Event which
breaks from the ruling ideologies of our time and in the wake of which
new subjects emerge whose identities are shaped by their very fidelity
to this singular Event. It is a fidelity to a materialization of an Event and
not to an abstract idea that signals a shift on a concrete register.8 What’s
more, this shift radically breaks with nearly the entire twentieth century
theological tradition from Barth to Hauerwas and from Tillich to Volf in
that all foundational security apparatuses on which theology rests are no
longer secured. This means that theology itself is shattered by the very
reality of Incarnation-Event as such!
It is our hypothesis that this continental shift redefines the very debate
over what defines the terms of the political and the theological in the
wake of the deconstruction of both modernist “liberal” theology and

8. I own this insight to Marcus Pound. For a more fleshed-out version of Pauline
“Event” in relationship to political theology see my forthcoming book (co-written with
Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank), Paul’s New Moment: Continental Philosophy and the Future of
Christian Theology (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic).

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.

10 Political Theology

“Christianity.” Liberal theology is defined in terms of the fake universal

(i.e. the ideology of capitalism, the logic of utilitarianism and its constitu-
tive laws that secure it, viz. the ideological state apparatus [ISA]). This
shift is made even more acute in the wake of the collapse of any ideo-
logical system that challenges and checks capitalism. So it is little wonder
why Marxist (materialist) atheists have recently been attracted to theology
(especially Christian theology) as a means to reclaim a materialist front to
capitalism. Thus, after the fall of secular-socialism there is a great need
to reorganize the conceptual and practical resources of existence in terms
neither determined by the logic of the secular nation-state nor capitalism’s
barbarism nor even a return to a theocracy. Indeed there are a growing
number of continental thinkers and theorists who have engaged theol-
ogy as a means by which to recover a profound meaning structure in the
midst of corporate-cum-banking fascism. Some of these theorists include
G. Agamben, Alain Badiou, the late J. Derrida, Slavoj Žižek, Catherine
Malabou, Jean-Luc Nancy, Judith Butler, Ernesto Laclau and Toni Negri.
At the same time, new developments within theology have also addressed
the fundamental problem of the ideological twin of the nation-state and
capitalism in the name of a new radical theology, Radical Orthodoxy.
Like the atheist counterpart, Radical Orthodoxy seeks to develop the
resources to circumvent a politics trapped within the register of capital-
ism and neo-liberalism. In order to do this they developed a thick enough
account of the world that does not fold to the fake universals that seem to
be operative. The key here, then, is to organize an ontology that tells a dif-
ferent story about our world, its history and truth than the one(s) en vogue,
and by and large Radical Orthodoxy is the best school in theology that has
been able to accomplish this. In effect, then, everything really turns into
philosophizing the equivalent of a prison-break from the appearances of a
self-enclosed system, or what Max Weber famously called the “Iron Cage.”
And that is really what unites the new theoretical trajectories within recent
political theology that finally brings this discipline out from under the
influence of Carl Schmitt and his theoretical opposite, lukewarm, Ameri-
can liberal theology. Of course, we should not ignore significant and pro-
nounced differences between Radical Orthodoxy and atheistic theologies
especially over theological doctrines such as the nature of God, Church,
the Incarnation and so forth. And what’s more, the authors represented in
this issue in some way transcend the two camps of Radical Orthodoxy or
atheistic theology, especially Mary-Jane Rubenstein. Yet, despite all these
differences (differences that mark a real difference), what is significant for
us now is to realize the emergence and intensity of trying to address and
overcome the crisis of the political that we confront today. With this we can
begin to see the basic thesis that this issue attempts to argue.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.

 Editorial Introduction 11

The thesis is that there is a great need to redefine the very coordinates
of the discipline of political theology especially in light of the return to the
theological in our time. In following this thesis this issue presents essays
that flesh-out this stance either by positing a new way to address and over-
come the impasse of the political in our time or else challenge specific and
recent attempts to define political theology. Let me briefly highlight the
contents. We begin by laying out a new way to think about theology. To
this end Catherine Malabou and Clayton Crockett unite forces by devel-
oping a theoretical and political critique of the contemporary notion of
the deconstruction of Christianity primarily in the later work of Jacques
Derrida and Jean-Luc Nancy. Their essay, “Plasticity and the Future of
Philosophy and Theology” argues that the deconstruction of Christian-
ity relies upon an understanding of temporality and messianicity derived
from Heidegger and Benjamin. They go on to challenge the privileging
of messianism in contemporary philosophy and theology. In contrast to
Messianism they pick up the Hegelian idea of plasticity, which they show
to have resources that finally overcome the impasses of contemporary
thought in a counter-messianic way. Malabou and Crockett’s opposition
to messianism should not be read as being opposed to theological think-
ing, but rather to opening out a creative and productive political space for
a radicalizing theological and philosophical reflection.
In the spirit of radicalizing thought, this essay turns from Malabou/
Crockett to Antonio Negri. Negri is one of the greatest thinkers of the
Continental philosophical tradition and in this issue he contributes an
essay entitled “The Eclipse of Eschatology: Conversing with Taubes’s
Messianism and the Common Body” which is about Jacob Taubes’s
thoughts on Paul and messianism. Negri wrote this seminal piece in
prison in the late 1990s and we are delighted to be publishing it in English
for the first time here. Once we have radicalized thinking beyond the
messianic within political theology we turn to Kenneth Reinhard’s direct
engagement with Carl Schmitt.
Kenneth Reinhard contributes an ingenious reconceputalization of the
very foundations of political theology in his piece, “There is Something of
(One) God: Lacan and Political Theology.” He asks us to think differently
about political theology predicated on the conception of “sovereignty”
theorized by Carl Schmitt and others, which is indebted to a limited if
historically conditioned view of the One (the one king, the one dicta-
tor, and the one God etc.). What Reinhard proposes is that we dislodge
the grip on the sovereign “One” by drawing on Lacanian psychoanalysis.
In doing this he is able to reconceptualize the idea of political theology
not bound to the One (of the primal father materialized in the Master’s
Discourse) but to the exterior neighbor. He specifically moves away from

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.

12 Political Theology

the masculine formulas of sexuation that is bound up in a vertical logic

of the love of the One God to one based on the feminine formulas of
sexuation whose trajectory is exteriorized and emptied into a love of the
neighbor. He thus structures a political theology that not only supple-
ments Schmitt’s doctrine but also potentially undoes the One in the very
action toward the other-one.
From radicalizing thought to thinking of another political theology not
predicated on the sovereign “One” we move to an essay that founds the
truth of democracy not based on recent trendy Continental theories but on
Augustine. In his attempt to develop a postliberal materialist Augustinian
political theology, Daniel Bell’s article “ ‘The Fragile Brilliance of Glass’:
 

Empire, Multitude, and the Coming Community” engages the recent

thought of three continental philosophers: Michael Hardt, Antonio Negri
and Giorgio Agamben. Bell argues that these figures offer many seminal
insights about basic notions of political organization but these insights are
cast in a negative register, that is, their accounts of the political problem
of the early twenty-first century West are helpful but finally incomplete
and unsatisfactory. Bell systematically argues that their theories ultimately
fall short basically because they fail to provide a materialist body capable
of escaping the terrorizing ideology of capitalism. In the end, he argues
that the hope nurtured by Agamben, Hardt and Negri fails to hold out the
promise of life beyond empire and this is because finally they, and not an
Augustinian church, are insufficiently materialistic and democratic.
Chad Pecknold adds to Bell’s position by materializing the political
specifically in and through the practice of the Eucharist. His essay, “Migra-
tions of the Host: Fugitive Democracy and the Corpus Mysticum” begins
by showing how Sheldon Wolin’s critique of liberal democracy is largely
dependent upon Henri de Lubac’s book Corpus Mysticum. This, according
to Pecknold, reveals the importance of the theological tradition and how it
provides an essential stance against the ill-fated logic of liberal-democracy.
Pecknold constructs his stance by looking into the genealogy of the term
corpus mysticum through how this concept has “migrated.” By tracing this
“migration” out through its historic variations Pecknold tightly argues for
a new political theology premised on a materialist-mysticism seen most
intensely in the Eucharist revealed in the Church as it unfolds the City of
God.
But, even within the scope of the shared common-thesis, there is room
for different stances. Mary-Jane Rubenstein’s essay, “Capital Shares: The
Way Back into the With of Christianity” keenly and carefully critiques
recent claims that Christianity represents the only true and universal politi-
cal stance. In doing this, Rubenstein examines the relationship between
Christianity and empire, and challenges the idea that these two concepts

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.

 Editorial Introduction 13

are really independent from each other; indeed, she argues that the very
logic of Christianity’s proposed universal ontology recently espoused by
the adherents of Radical Orthodoxy is finally unable to ground a coun-
tervailing socialist praxis. Her argument is solidly premised on the history
of Christian universalism, which has in fact precipitated the actual emer-
gence of global capitalism. Rubenstein thus identifies an intractable and
dialectical “gap” located in the very core of Christianity—the gap between
both giving the conditions for Empire and a resistance to it! This aporia
within Christianity is situated by Rubenstein by appealing to Jean-Luc
Nancy’s “deconstruction of Christianity” specifically seen in his attempt
to find “a source of Christianity, more original than Christianity itself,
that might provoke another possibility to arise.” So, in sum, we begin by
examining the ground for a radical theology and philosophy (Crockett/
Malabou and Negri), and suggest a way the Schmittian ontology of the
“one” can be subverted via psychoanalysis (Reinhard), then articulate a
robust Christian political theology premised on Augustine and the Eucha-
rist (Bell and Pecknold) and finish our thesis by tracing out the logic of
universalism and empire found within the very core of Christianity. The
issue will then present another round of the Žižek/Milbank debate which
was first recorded in The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?9 This
time Joshua Delpech-Ramey will introduce round two with his brilliant
insight about what’s at stake between Milbank and Žižek.
What, then, is this “shift” that this issue proposes? No doubt the mere
mention of a “shift” signals the famous Kuhnian “paradigm shift” which
describes a fundamental change in the way in which science was framed—
how problems themselves were perceived as problems and so forth. In
this way, Kuhn’s “shift” was indebted to the epistemological—that is, it
was concerned about knowledge claims (i.e., justified true beliefs etc.).
In a fashion this issue’s thesis is like Kuhn’s idea in that it is an attempt
to radically rethink the foundations of political theology (especially the
one indebted to Schmitt’s idea of the sovereignty of the One). But in
another sense some of the philosophical and theological tradition that
this issue draws on, viz. the Continental tradition, is much more radical
in a way analogous to the difference that Lenin makes between formal
and actual freedom.10 Formal freedom, as Žižek points out, is the space
in which the subject can choose from among the available options pre-
sented to them within that domain.11 By contrast, actual freedom is the

9. Creston Davis, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?, ed. Slavoj Žižek and
John Milbank (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009).
10. Thanks to Slavoj Žižek for this insight.
11. See Slavoj Žižek’s gloss on Lenin’s distinction between formal and actual freedom
at http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/ot/zizek.htm.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.

14 Political Theology

freedom to choose the domain itself. That is to say, it can choose to reject
the actual framework in which formal freedom appears. Said differently,
formal freedom is linked to the epistemological because it gives you a
coherent “world” but the problem is that it does not let you think of it as
being contingent but operates as if it were a necessary world or domain.
Again, by contrast, actual freedom gives the subject the coordinates to
make the appearance of this world—this domain—contingent and thus
one can traverse the epistemological closure. So we take Lenin’s distinc-
tion and apply it to political theology and here we introduce a decisive and
exclusive EVENT that rests in the very heart of the world, namely the
Christian concept of Incarnation. It is the singularity of Incarnation—of
God becoming human—that gives rise to a destabilizing force that calls
into question the given coordinates of our world within the very core-
middle of the world. In this sense, the continental shift does not simply
move a few big ideas slowly around but frames it with the fragility of
contingency within the heart of political theology in our time.
Creston Davis is an Assistant Professor in the Philosophy and Religion
Department at Rollins College. He is the author, with Slavoj Žižek and
John Milbank, of Paul’s New Moment: Continental Philosophy and the Future
of Christian Theology, and co-edits the book series, Insurrections: Critical
Studies in Religion, Politics, and Culture, published by Columbia Uni-
versity Press.

Bibliography
Davis, C. The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?, ed. S. Žižek and J. Milbank. Cam-
bridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009.
Davis, C., S. Žižek and J. Milbank. Paul’s New Moment: Continental Philosophy and the Future
of Christian Theology. Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, forthcoming.
Manent, P. An Intellectual History of Liberalism, trans. Rebecca Balinski. Princeton: Princeton
University Press, 1995.
Schmitt, C. Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. Chicago: University
of Chicago Press, 1985.
—The Concept of the Political. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996.
Smullyan, R. 5000 B.C. and Other Philosophical Fantasies. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1983.
Retrieved from http://consc.net/misc/univ-joke.html on 29 July 2009.

© Equinox Publishing Ltd 2010.