Edible Entanglements

On a Political Theology of Food

S. Yael Dennis

• Publisher: Cascade Books
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781532643651
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

Obesity in the Global North and starvation in the Global South can be attributed to the same cause: the concentration of enormous power in the hands of transnational agricultural corporations. The food sovereignty movement has arisen as the major challenger to the corporate food regime. The concept of sovereignty is central to the discursive field of political theology, yet seldom if ever have its theoretical insights been applied to the concept of sovereignty as it appears in global food politics. Food politics operates simultaneously in several registers: individual, national, transnational, and ecological. A politics of food takes a transdisciplinary approach to analyzing Schmitt's concept of sovereignty in each of these registers, employing Giorgio Agamben's political philosophy to elucidate vulnerability in the national and transnational registers; Jane Bennett's vibrant materiality, Karen Barad's agential realism, and nutritional science to describe the social production of classed bodies in the individual and national registers; data from climate science and the political ecology of Bruno Latour to examine the impact of sovereignty in the ecological register. Catherine Keller's theology of becoming and Paulina Ochoa Espejo's people as process will be explored for their capacity to enliven a democratic political theology of food.

Part I

Sovereignty in Theory and Action

Chapter 1

Fertilizing the Garden

Carl Schmitt’s Sovereign in Interwar Germany

Despite the importance of the concept of sovereignty to the politics of food, few have endeavored to trace the historical trajectory of sovereignty as a political concept as it appears in global food trade. Historian and political theorist Daniele Conversi is among the handful to do so. Conversi opens his historical contextualization of the food sovereignty movement by arguing that “the link between sovereignty and food sovereignty has scarcely been theorized across human and social science disciplines.”13 And indeed, with the notable exception of the 2015 issue of Globalizations, including Conversi’s, there is a dearth of such analysis.

Conversi begins his account of the concept of sovereignty with the Peace of Westphalia, which established territorial boundaries within which a given monarch could legitimately rule without interference.14 The territorially bounded nature of sovereignty carried forward as monarchical rule gave way to the nation-state, and the sovereignty of the king was supplanted by the (presumably unified) will of the people as the hallmark of legitimate sovereignty.15 Conversi flashes forward to our current era, which he characterizes as “post-sovereign,” because the contemporary transnational economic situation has differentially fortified the sovereignty of certain nation-states while eroding that of others.

Thus historically contextualized, food sovereignty appears as “the most significant incarnation of the historical notion of sovereignty” according to Conversi.16 The significance of this movement is attributed in no small part to the dual nature of the claims to sovereignty: “While sovereignty [in the food sovereignty movement] still concerns the state’s right to adopt and shape food policies, the subject has moved from the state to small-scale producers mobilizing, with or without the state, to defend their ‘models of production and reproduction.’”17 Rhetorically, the food sovereignty movement deploys the term sovereignty in a new register that simultaneously fortifies, relies upon and destabilizes the sovereignty of the state itself.

According to theorists in the field of political theology, the “historical notion of sovereignty” with which Conversi concerns himself derives from theological concepts.18 Yet Conversi situates food sovereignty within the broader historical trajectory of sovereignty in its political forms, altogether ignoring the religious motifs animating the concept of sovereignty. Similarly, the discourse of political theology has yet to grapple with the concept of sovereignty as it appears in food politics or to wrestle with the central role of global food trade as a driver of geopolitics. A political theology of food attempts to bridge that gap.

I will focus on two primary eras: an interwar Germany between 1918 and 1939 and a post-9/11 United States. Two prominent theorists emerged in interwar Germany whose conceptualizations of sovereignty and politics continue to shape contemporary discourse: German jurist Carl Schmitt and German-Jewish literary critic Walter Benjamin. This chapter will elaborate upon the finer points of contention between Schmitt and Benjamin during the interwar period, as these points largely inform the contemporary (post-9/11) conversation pivotal to this political theology of food.19 The following chapter will hone in on facets of post-9/11 political theology most relevant for a political theology of food.

This exploration will not only reveal the theological dimension of the concept of sovereignty, but it will also reveal a cluster of concerns relevant to the politics of food as humans grapple with climate change in a post-secular, allegedly post-sovereign context. These concerns exist as contrasting pairs, such as unity versus plurality; technicity versus Luddism; traditionalism opposed to progressivism; nationalism against globalism; and can be reduced to esoteric theory. However, as I will discuss, these concerns have practical ramifications that merit consideration. The trauma of World War I elicited these concerns within Schmitt, Benjamin, and many others who endured its horrors. These concerns rise to the forefront again at the outset of the twenty-first century, in some measure due to the conjunction of terrorism and the crisis of the nation-state. Schmitt’s and Benjamin’s wrestling with these concerns is worth revisiting, as their theoretical approaches reverberate in contemporary political theology.

Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology

Carl Schmitt’s political theology, and in particular his concept of sovereignty, is widely engaged in the academic discourse in political theology. Although Schmitt is by no means an uncontroversial figure, his theory holds something of fascination for anti-liberal thinkers from every position of the political spectrum, from far-left progressives to far-right conservatives.20 As radical political theologian Clayton Crockett remarks, “On the right, Carl Schmitt’s concept of the political conjoins perfectly with the neoconservative ideology of domination. On the left, it is Schmitt’s analysis of the crisis of liberalism that is seen as prescient, even if his embrace of fascism is roundly rejected.”21 Schmitt perceived liberalism to be in crisis because in his view notions of freedom and equality collapsed to relativism or mere normativism with no capacity for true moral decision-making. Implicit in Schmitt’s analysis of the crisis of liberalism is a critique of attempts to establish a legitimate sovereignty without the benefit of a transcendent divine. His embrace of domination, and ultimately fascism, constituted an effort to reinstate a source of transcendence capable of assuring moral order.

Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty first appeared in March 1922 and, by Schmitt’s own account, remained unchanged at the time of its second publication twelve years later.22 In his preface to the second edition, Schmitt identifies his primary contention was with “liberal normativeness and its kind of ‘constitutional state.’”23 Schmitt mentions the German Weimar period (1919–1933) as his example of normativism. In Schmitt’s opinion the legislators of that period did little more than authorize behaviors and attitudes that were already norms, rather than evaluate the morality, ethics, or rationale behind the particular norms themselves. The Weimar period was characterized by Schmitt as “a deteriorated and self-contradictory normativism . . . a degenerate decisionism, blind to the law, clinging to the ‘normative power of the factual’ and not to a genuine decision.” As a consequence of its failure to cling to “a genuine decision,” it proved powerless in the face of ...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• Part I: Sovereignty in Theory and Action
• Part II: Sovereignty Undone
• Part III: A Tehomic Political Theology of Food
• Conclusion
• Bibliography