Apocalyptic Political Theology

Hegel, Taubes and Malabou

Thomas Lynch

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781350064751
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Political Philosophy

Hegel's philosophy of religion contains an implicit political theology. When viewed in connection with his wider work on subjectivity, history and politics, this political theology is a resource for apocalyptic thinking. In a world of climate change, inequality, oppressive gender roles and racism, Hegel can be used to theorise the hope found in the end of that world. Histories of apocalyptic thinking draw a line connecting the medieval prophet Joachim of Fiore and Marx. This line passes through Hegel, who transforms the relationship between philosophy and theology by philosophically employing theological concepts to critique the world. Jacob Taubes provides an example of this Hegelian political theology, weaving Christianity, Judaism and philosophy to develop an apocalypticism that is not invested in the world. Taubes awaits the end of the world knowing that apocalyptic destruction is also a form of creation. Catherine Malabou discusses this relationship between destruction and creation in terms of plasticity. Using plasticity to reformulate apocalypticism allows for a form of apocalyptic thinking that is immanent and materialist. Together Hegel, Taubes and Malabou provide the resources for thinking about why the world should end. The resulting apocalyptic pessimism is not passive, but requires an active refusal of the world.

1

Philosophy, political theology and the end of the world

Calls for the end of the world inevitably provoke a series of questions: What is this world? Why should it end? What would it mean to think of such an ending? A more developed response to these questions will require passing through Hegel, Taubes and Malabou, but an initial exploration of political theology, the world and apocalypticism will serve to orient the following discussion.

What is political theology?

For the purposes of this book, political theology is a methodology focused on the relationship between political and theological concepts. It seeks to understand the political history and significance of theological ideas, the theological history and significance of political ideas and to use theological ideas to explore the nature of the political.

This approach is clearly indebted to Carl Schmitt while also complicating his famous, if now clichéd, description of political theology. While it is true that Schmitt writes ‘[a]‌ll significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularised theological concepts’, his work is often reduced to this genealogical approach.¹ However, this genealogy is only a part of his wider work in the sociology of concepts.² ‘This sociology of concepts transcends juridical conceptualisation oriented to immediate practical interest. It aims to discover the basic, radically systematic structure and to compare this conceptual structure with the conceptually represented social structure of a certain epoch.’³ At times this takes the form of identifying structural analogies, such as that between the exception and the miracle.⁴ At other points, he investigates the limits of specific political situations and the emergence of novel social structures that initiate new historical epochs.⁵ Schmitt’s point is that politics operates within a political framework that it cannot justify. The structural analogy between the political and theology is found in beginnings, ends, the dynamics of change and modes of control.

Even though his approach is more multifaceted than its contemporary invocations sometimes indicate, it is certainly not without issue. Aside from the obvious problem of his National Socialism, there are other, more methodological problems.⁶ For the purposes of developing a concept of political theology, the most important is his privileging of the theological. In critically receiving his work, it is thus particularly important to question the simplicity of his notion that the theological is converted into the political.⁷ Such a framing too readily accepts an easy division between the theological and the political – a division which is itself both theological and political. The political and theological are two modes of expressing power. These modes are interconnected and mutually informing. There is no neat, linear process of secularization. Theological ideas appear in the political, not as the result of transformation or importation, but because those ideas were always already caught up in power relationships and their concomitant forms of knowledge. The more philosophically inclined political theology developed here maintains that there is no theological thought isolated from the political, nor thinking the political in isolation from the theological. There are, however, discourses that emphasize one or the other.

This form of political theology is thus not concerned with ‘political religion’. Rather, it focuses on the theological illumination of the political (and vice versa) as well as the processes by which religion and politics are divided such that they can be recombined to name a problem. The political is a discourse of beginnings and endings, transformations and collapses. In this sense, the political is outside the bounds of politics. It is a zone of teleological suspensions, exceptions and miracles.⁸ There is an exercise of power at the origin of any order that lies beyond that rules of that order. The preservation of that order legitimates its suspension. Though the day to day of politics displays symptoms of the political, political theology is concerned with those symptoms only to gain access to the underlining condition. It is concerned with the political itself.

Moving beyond Schmitt’s genealogical and analogical forms of political theology, Taubes offers a more constructive approach. Taubes summarizes this approach as a ‘working with theological materials’ (PT, 69). He goes on to describe his method in terms of intellectual history, but his texts show experimentation as well as historical investigation. Combining Schmitt and Taubes, political theology is an investigation of the intertwined history of theological and political concepts in order to utilize those concepts to critique the world.

Of course, there are other understandings of political theology. Vincent Lloyd identifies three approaches: broad (the general intersection of religion and politics), narrow (associated with Schmitt and the legacy of his work) and sectarian.⁹ The above definition is most amenable to a narrow, particularly philosophical form of political theology, but that in no way discounts these other views. Indeed, there are important overlaps between this vision of political theology and more sectarian versions of political theology. For instance, Michael Kirwan offers a political theology concerned with religion understood as ‘complexes of belief, worship and action which are deeply embedded in practices and traditions, and which are felt to be crucial to both individual and communal self-understanding’.¹⁰ This understanding of religion, and the political significance of practices and traditions, is essential to the implicit political theology I will later identify in Hegel. However, Kirwan goes on to ask questions such as: ‘Can a polis exist, be sustained, without God? . . . But how, then, does such a polity and its leaders avoid placing themselves on the Messiah’s throne.’¹¹ These questions begin to raise issues of political religion, straying into more sectarian territory.

Similarly, emphasizing the theological aspect, Andrew Shanks takes political theology’s essential task to be understanding

the gospel as a practical basis for the belonging-together of a community. Not just at the level of all speaking the same religious language, or all operating within a common framework of symbolism and ritual; but at a much deeper, and broader, level than that. This deeper level is constituted, partly, by a body of shared experience, underlying and coming to expression in the symbolism and ritual. And partly it is constituted by a set of shared ethical standards, a general consensus to what is to be admired and what condemned, or how disagreements are to be managed and resolved.¹²

Shanks is doing political theology. It is a different conversation.¹³

Differentiating a narrower, more methodical understanding of political theology is a clarification, not a dismissal. Emphasizing political theology as a methodology merely distances this notion of political theology from analysis of political religion or religious politics. Recent discussions of political theology are often positioned in relation to the return of religion, whether that return is greeted as a crack emerging in the facade of Western liberal order or decried for the same reason.¹⁴ While political theology in a narrower sense can be part of those conversations, it can also operate without concern for the political views or roles of specific religious communities.

This differentiation of forms of political theology is particularly important in the light of recent critiques of political theology. These arguments often blur any distinction between political theology as a methodology, as religiously motivated political movements and as theocracy. The broad question of religion and politics quickly shifts to a critique of sectarian examples. Mark Lilla’s The Stillborn God, for instance, is an explicit critique of political theology.¹⁵ He understands this term to indicate ‘a primordial form of human thought’ many thought had been superseded by Western liberal democracy.¹⁶ The main concern of his argument is to analyse the enduring appeal of political theology, particularly messianic ideas, and the challenges they pose for contemporary politics.¹⁷ In Lilla’s condemnation, however, one struggles to identify anything resembling the narrow form of political theology defined above. There is no mention of any of the central figures traditionally associated with political theology, such as Schmitt, Benjamin or Agamben (though he has addressed Schmitt elsewhere).¹⁸

If Lilla takes aim at political theology in the broader sense, John Gray strikes closer to the narrower form.¹⁹ He frames his critique in terms of utopianism, millenarianism and apocalypticism rather than political theology, but the focus of much of his analysis is a familiar historical account tracing dangerous theological ideas from Joachim of Fiore through the secularizing influence of Hegel to Marx, National Socialism and other forms of extremism or totalitarianism. For Gray, these later seemingly non-religious ideas remain tainted by an original theological sin. Their theological origins may have been forgotten, mutated by secularization, but they continue to shape the political imaginary of the West.²⁰

If Shanks is doing political theology, Lilla and Gray are critiquing the same. Shanks emphasizes the political implications of theology, while Lilla and Gray argue against the theology’s political implications. Leaving aside the question of whether Lilla, Gray or Shanks is correct, they all share a similar configuration of religion or theology and politics. Though Gray’s analysis is sometimes a kind of political theology in the narrow sense, this analysis remains focused on the problematic relationship between religion and politics. For Gray, the concept of a world transforming revolution is itself religious and hence problematic.²¹

Lilla’s and Gray’s critiques can thus be split into two veins. First, they are focused on critiquing political theology in the sense of political religion. In this respect, there is often insufficient awareness of political theology beyond political religion, with Lilla in particular reducing the former to the latter. These critiques are ultimately affirmations of secularism. While it is true that political religion, theology and political theology all offer examples of the celebration of the failure of secularism and the announcement of the post-secular, these categories themselves are subject to political theological dismantling. Triumphalist, theological forms of post-secularism risk repeating the flaws of secularization theory in arguing that religion was waning but has now returned to address the limitations of Western liberalism.²² By contrast, the political theology I am developing here is asecular or desecularizing.²³ It is not interested in celebrating or denigrating the relationship between the political and the theological. It thinks with an indifference to these distinctions. Political theology is not about offering theological solutions to political problems but maintaining that the political as such is inseparably mixed with the theological.

Second, Lilla and Gray are concerned with the continuing polit...

Table of contents

• Cover
• HalfTitle Page
• Dedication
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations and Notes on Translation
• Introduction
• 1 Philosophy, political theology and the end of the world
• 2 Implicit political theology: Reading Hegel’s philosophy of religion
• 3 Spiritual disinvestment: Taubes, Hegel and apocalypticism
• 4 Plastic apocalypticism
• 5 Pessimism and hope in apocalyptic living
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index
• Copyright Page