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Two: The Machine of Political Theology and the Place of Thought
Two: The Machine of Political Theology and the Place of Thought
Two: The Machine of Political Theology and the Place of Thought
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Two: The Machine of Political Theology and the Place of Thought

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The debate on “political theology” that ran throughout the twentieth century has reached its end, but the ultimate meaning of the notion continues to evade us. Despite all the attempts to resolve the issue, we still speak its language—we remain in its horizon.

The reason for this, says Roberto Esposito, lies in the fact that political theology is neither a concept nor an event; rather, it is the pivot around which the machine of Western civilization has revolved for more than 2,000 years. At its heart stands the juncture between universalism and exclusion, unity and separation: the tendency of the Two to make itself into One by subordinating one part to the domination of the other. All the philosophical and political categories that we use, starting with the Roman and Christian notion of “the person,” continue to reproduce this exclusionary dispositif.

To take our departure from political theology, then—the task of contemporary philosophy—we must radically revise our conceptual lexicon. Only when thought has been returned to its rightful “place”—connected to the human species as a whole rather than to individuals—will we be able to escape from the machine that has
imprisoned our lives for far too long.

LanguageEnglish
Release dateSep 1, 2015
ISBN9780823267637
Two: The Machine of Political Theology and the Place of Thought
Author

Roberto Esposito

Roberto Esposito is Professor of Theoretical Philosophy at the Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa. His many books in English include Bios: Biopolitics and Philosophy and Two: The Machine of Political Theology and the Place of Thought (Fordham).

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    Two - Roberto Esposito

    TWO

    COMMONALITIES

    Timothy C. Campbell, series editor

    Copyright © 2015 Fordham University Press

    All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher.

    This book was originally published in Italian as Roberto Esposito, Due: La macchina della teologia politica e il posto del pensiero, © 2013 by Giulio Einaudi editore s.p.a., Torino.

    The translation of this work has been funded by SEPS

    SEGRETARIATO EUROPEO PER LE PUBBLICAZIONI SCIENTIFICHE

    Via Val d’Aposa 7 - 40123 Bologna - Italy

    seps@seps.it - www.seps.it

    Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate.

    Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.

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    Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

    Esposito, Roberto, 1950–

        [Due. English]

        Two : the machine of political theology and the place of thought / Roberto Esposito ; translated by Zakiya Hanafi.

           pages cm. — (Commonalities)

        Includes bibliographical references and index.

        ISBN 978-0-8232-6761-3 (hardback) — ISBN 978-0-8232-6762-0 (paper)

      1.  Political theology.   2.  Philosophy, Modern—19th century.   3.  Philosophy, Modern—20th century.   I.  Title.

        BT83.59.E8713 2015

        195—dc23

    2015006051

    Printed in the United States of America

    17 16 15   5 4 3 2 1

    First edition

    CONTENTS

    Introduction

    Passage: Gestell

    1  Machination

    Passage: Katechon

    2  The Dispositif of the Person

    Passage: Nexum (Economic Theology I)

    3  The Place of Thought

    Passage: Sovereign Debt (Economic Theology II)

    Notes

    Index

    TWO

    INTRODUCTION

    If there is one concept that remained impermeable to critical analysis during a discussion that lasted for the entire twentieth century, it is political theology. The reasons for this resistance—historical, philosophical, and semantic—are many. A stable, unambiguous definition was made impossible by the diversity of contexts, on the one hand, and by the variety of meanings given to the terms politics and theology, on the other. But on top of this thematic and lexical difficulty there lies another, more essential obstacle that on closer examination is the origin and cause of the first: namely, our inherent relation to the phenomenon that we seek to interpret. The basic obstacle to fathoming the ground of political theology, fundamentally, is the fact that we find ourselves already on it. This is why it has proven to be so intractable—not because its entrance is bolted, but because back in the mists of time we crossed over its threshold, before the door slammed shut behind us, barring our exit. This is why it is impossible for us to take the sort of distance required for an analytical and critical examination. Just as when we are inside an environment to the point of being confused with its elements or when we look at an object from too close up, it is impossible to make out its contours. To do so—to grasp the overall meaning of political theology—we need to look at it from the outside, expressing ourselves in a different language from its own. But this is exactly what its excessive proximity stops us from doing, by crushing us up against its interior walls. The problem is that for at least two thousand years we have spoken using a vocabulary that is inherently political-theological. We therefore have neither mental schemas nor linguistic models that are free from its syntax. All the categories that have been employed on various occasions to arrive at the connection between politics and theology—like disenchantment or secularization or profanation—turn out to have political-theological origins themselves. By this I mean that they presuppose what they should explain, because without some sort of enchantment there could be no disenchantment, and without something sacred there would be nothing to desecrate.

    The first author to grasp this difficulty was Heidegger, when he clearly took his distance from the concept of secularization, defining it as not only inadequate but also misleading. Secularization must be rejected, not because it dilutes the specificity of the modern era by making it continuous with the preceding period, but because by presupposing the theological origin from which it severed itself, it implicitly affirms what it seeks to negate. Just as it makes no sense to talk about secularization unless we understand in advance what seculum is, it is useless to theorize a mundanization before having called into question the category of world. But Heidegger goes a step further, which brings us back to the problem of the impenetrability of the political-theological paradigm. The fact that this paradigm remains out of reach not because of its distance but because it is too near—because it precedes us and envelopes us in its effects of meaning—shows that what we are dealing with is not a simple concept but something much more enigmatic, which Heidegger refers to as machination. In reality, he does not directly relate machination to the political-theology nexus, but the moment he uses it to replace the category of disenchantment—tracing machination back instead to a sort of enchantment or bewitchment—he effectively makes it an interpretive key for political theology. Like political theology, machination also proves to be impenetrable because it manifests itself in the form of its exact opposite, and because it tends to swallow us up inside itself as well, making its modus operandi invisible. This is not the crucial point in Heidegger’s argument, however. There is an estrangement process connected with the capturing effect of machination that penetrates our experience, separating it from itself. In a similar fashion to the dispositifs that Foucault talks about—whose main features were anticipated by Heidegger in the 1940s—people are caught in a mode that escapes them but that also leads to a splitting of their lives into two spheres, one of which is subjected to the domination of the other. It is precisely this splitting, or doubling, in the human race but also in each individual, that ushers us into the secret heart of the political-theological dispositif. Even its name is composed of two terms that are connected but that never fully correspond, and indeed they are bound together by a kind of excess that each holds in relation to the other. In its dynamic, what defines the political-theological process is not the joining together so much as the difference that puts in opposition what it unites. Both historically and conceptually, the two poles of the political and the theological enter into relationship with each other in the continuous attempt to overcome the other. As in the clash between the two powers of Church and Empire, never definitively resolved, the twentieth-century debate on political theology is marked by the effort each interpreter made to substitute his or her perspective in the place of others, thereby excluding the opposing view from the hermeneutic horizon. The controversy between Carl Schmitt, Erik Peterson, and Jacob Taubes is emblematic of this defiant struggle for monopoly over the political-theological concept—as if the only way to achieve semantic unity between the political and theological lexicons is by having one surrender to the domination of the other.

    I argue that this process of exclusionary assimilation is the fundamental, defining action of the political-theological machine. It operates precisely by separating what it purports to join and by unifying what it divides, by submitting one part to the domination of the other. The entire philosophical inquiry into political theology, inaugurated by Hegel at the beginning of the nineteenth century and pursued throughout the following two centuries, expresses but at the same time conceals this violent crossing—the presence of the Two in the One, the imposition of one that seeks to eliminate the other. The ultimate meaning of Hegel’s political theology lies in his insistence that the task of Christianity is to include inside it what it has historically overcome. According to this perspective—presented as a destiny—the history of the world includes a nonhistorical portion inside it that constitutes both its dialectical driving force and the excluded remainder. This happens because one part—defined as the West—is at the same time also considered the whole, to the point of reducing the other to an inner propellant of its own expansion. Hegel’s philosophy of history rotates around the axis that divides and separates outside and inside, whole and part, present and past, in a process aimed at functionalizing the second term to develop the first. This constitutive link between the One and the Two—which gives the form of exclusion to the universal—expresses both the profundity and the reticence of the gaze that first fathomed the political-theological machine of the West, without revealing its secret. The fact that the geospiritual process described by Hegel culminates in the connection between reformed Christianity and the advent of the Germanic regime lends his perspective a political tone, expressed in the personal figure of the sovereign.

    When Schmitt reopened the political-theological dossier in the 1920s, he would meet with the same question posed by Hegel. For him, too, the sovereign apex of political theology was the ultimate decision that unifies the national body through potential conflict with other states. But, unlike Hegel, Schmitt locates the polemical relationship between unity and exclusion inside as well as outside the body politic. In a framework that opposes the original energy of the political to the ongoing neutralization, the possibility of democracy depends on identifying an internal enemy who must be expelled. In this case as well, the unity of the political body appears to be the violent outcome of a reduction of the Two to its dominant part. The fact that duality is not only the outcome but also the constitutive character of Western politics is what emerges from Ernst Kantorowicz’s studies on the two bodies of the king. While Hegel had located the split in universal history and Schmitt in the state form, Kantorowicz places it in the body of the sovereign itself, split into a private, mortal part and a public part, made eternal by the continuity of dynastic succession. The fact that this metaphysical construct is derived by analogy from the dual nature of Christ testifies to its theological origin but also to its bipolar formation. The construct is recognizable in the theological figure of the Trinity as well, in which the Third person is pushed into the background in favor of an exclusive relationship between Father and Son. Not by chance, every time the theological vocabulary takes on a political connotation, the Three slips into the semantics of the Two, hardening the dynamic into an oppositional schema. This explains why Peterson’s frontal attack against Schmitt’s political theology in the 1930s took its impetus from a Trinitarian perspective. For him, it served the purpose of preventing any analogy between religious monotheism and political monotheism. But it also served to prevent any split—always latent in the economy of salvation—between the Father who reigns and the Son who governs in His place. Strikingly enough, thirty years later, Schmitt would diametrically reverse his argument: Peterson, intending to protect the theological from any form of political influence, ended up opposing it to the political, thereby restoring a political conflict to it.

    Positioning himself precisely at the point of tension between the two authors, Jacob Taubes confirmed this inevitability when he reversed the relationship of priority between theological and political, putting the political first. To speak, as he does, of negative political theology—which is to say, removed from any form of earthly power—means to endow theology with a power that is opposite, but symmetrical, to that of the political. How is one to define a nonpeople (which for Taubes is the Jewish people) if not by presupposing, by contrast, the characteristics of a people? The fact that one never escapes outside the political-theological lexicon, as we have said from the beginning, is what Jan Assmann asserted at the close of the twentieth-century debate. Because the viewpoint he adopted on the entire question stood at a distance from both the Christian and Jewish interpretations, it seems to have caused a shift in emphasis. What he saw, gleaned from the perspective of ancient Egypt, was not a different proportion between theology and politics, but the inevitability of their involvement, in a form that both politicizes theology and theologizes politics. With a passage that seems to take us back to Heidegger’s Machenschaft, he recognized the prevailing effect of political theology in mutually concealing its terms. Outside of any harmonious perspective, what unites the two competing poles of the political and the theological is the exclusionary capture that each performs on the other.

    There is a limit that the hermeneutics of political theology cannot overstep, however, unless it crosses up with another paradigm that constitutes its semantic operator and linchpin, so to speak. In order to make the political-theological machine run—separating what unifies and unifying what divides—it needs one more dispositif: the category of person. The fact that the great interpreters of political theology—from Hegel to Weber to Schmitt—appeal to personhood as the focal point of their perspective is certainly not a coincidence. The personal element, although different for each of them, is both the subject and the horizon of meaning for every possible relationship between theology and politics. While Hegel, along a path opened up by Hobbes, made the notion of person the essential epicenter of the sovereign’s function, Weber saw the resurgence of the charismatic personality as the only force capable of curbing the increasing political entropy. Schmitt, in his turn, combined the two positions, making personal decision at the same time the line of resistance and the point of excess for modern processes of neutralization. The accusation he brought against Kelsen’s legal normativism was precisely directed against its impersonal nature. Without reference to a personal entity, the political order cannot constitute itself or is destined to crumble. Only by being embodied in a concrete person can it find the essential energy for reproducing itself. But Schmitt added something more important still, regarding the dialectic between friend and enemy, which he made an a priori of political action: the category of person produces order because it draws the possibility of conflict inside oneself. It creates political subjectivity through the line of division that, by discriminating against one part of the body politic, locates enmity inside the space of friendship.

    Even before delving into this antinomic aspect, let us stay on the genealogical plane, with the formation of the concepts. One might well say that the notion of person constitutes the original place of intersection between the Christian religion and ancient Roman law—to the point that historians are still divided on the question of which of the two paradigms appeared first. Whether the legal lexicon influenced Christian dogma or vice versa, the lexical and conceptual exchange that took place between the two from the outset remains undisputed. If only by being in contact with the Roman legal conception, the Christian notion of person took on the consistency that solidified its dogmatic status; this, in turn, acted on the Roman notion, gradually altering its meaning. Whatever took place historically, despite enormous differences between the two contexts, there is a striking sort of correspondence, or resonance at least, connecting the two concepts. In both the juridical person of ancient Rome and the theological, Christian person, unity and separation are linked in a productive nexus of specific effects. Although developed in the two, separate laboratories of the Trinity and the Incarnation, the Christian category of person was still used by the Church Fathers to articulate identity and plurality within the divinity. Against the opposing heresies of Gnosticism and Monarchianism, what they sought to safeguard through the idea of the person was a form of monotheism not locked up in itself, but rather, devised as three persons in the same substance, or as two natures in the same person. As we have said, even in Trinitarian dogma there can be seen a tendency—never declared but practiced in actuality—to contract the triadic formula into a dual model, centered on the hierarchical relationship between Father and Son. In the salvific economy developed by Tertullian—the first to give the Christian category of person a fully developed dogmatic status—this binary paradigm took on the character of a functional distinction between first person, owner of the sovereign power, and second person, delegated to the effective governing of people. This is how the Two took up residence at the economic junction between the One and the Three, thus reproducing the splitting of the Incarnation on Trinitarian grounds as well. Like the dual nature of Christ, both divine and human—or the relationship between body and soul in every human being—a duality tends toward unity through the submission of one part to the domination of the other.

    The same thing happens—at a different level but with performative outcomes that are certainly comparable—in the Roman dispositif of the legal person. According to Gaius’s summa divisio, persona is the general category under which all the others fall, ranked progressively lower until arriving at the category of slave, who lacks any personal prerogative at all. In this way the status of personhood became an agent of depersonalization, along an interlinking chain of subordinations that ultimately thrust a certain type of human being into the domain of things. Moreover, the qualification of person in ancient Rome was always a function—or, according to the etymology of the term, a mask—that never coincided with the living body in which it inhered. This duality within unity characterizes the entire legal order originating from ancient Rome. With the passage into the modern era, it passed from an objectivistic lexicon to a subjectivist one, since even the idea of subject—as it took form between Leibniz and Kant—underwent the same splitting, clearly transposed from the legal to the philosophical sphere. Thus, the link between unity and separation, which in the Roman ius sliced humankind up along thresholds of mutual subjugation, was reproduced inside the individual human being, who was divided into two asymmetrical parts: a properly personal part, of a rational and voluntary type, and another with a corporeal character, akin to the animal kingdom.

    The antinomic connection between politics, law, and theology that was destined to mark the entire post-Christian history with the exclusionary results that we have recalled was thus reconstructed. The modern notion of person, by regulating its slices, was precisely what set into motion this mechanism whose consequences and presuppositions are still in effect today. Originating in the semantic segment that combines Christian theology and Roman law, it acquired the importance of a true dispositif, nestled in the performative kernel of the political-theological machine. Its formation was anything but uniform; it appeared in at least three different strains, which are described here in a brief genealogy. The first—already introduced in connection with the category of sovereignty—is the one connecting Hobbes to Schmitt through Hegel, although the latter eludes any unidimensional classification. At its origin there lies the link between subjectivity and subjugation that, as Foucault argued, makes one the function of the other. To argue, as Hobbes did, that in the founding covenant of the state it is the contracting parties themselves who authorize the sovereign means to recognize them as subjects of their own subjugation and therefore as objects of the one subject who is fully endowed with a personal status—in other words, the sovereign himself. From this point of view, despite obvious differences in vocabulary, all three authors remain in the wake of the Romanistic tradition that Hegel sought to deconstruct, but without managing to surpass it. True, he extended to every human being the personality that had previously been reserved to only one kind. But, by identifying the right of property as the prototype of all rights, he remained within the patrimonial semantics of ancient Rome, all the while adapting it to the forms of modern society. What connects Hegel backward to Hobbes and forward to Schmitt is the role acquired by sovereign decision, embodied in the concrete person of the monarch.

    The second strain that joins the dispositif of the person to the theological-political machine is the one leading from Locke to Kant. While Hegel looked to the dogmas of the Incarnation and the Trinity as his landmarks, Locke turned to the idea of Universal Judgment. The desubstantialization of the subject that he produced made it not so much a substrate or a compound as a function intended to secure the individual identity required to make each person responsible for his or her own thoughts and actions. What is important for my argument, however, is that this process of attributing personal identity does not reduce the internal splitting, transferred from the gap dividing the person from the body to the person itself, which is now divided into a judging I and a judged I. In this sense, the attribution (a forensic one, as Locke defines it) coincided with the imputation through which the person came to be identified in legal terms. When Kant split the subject into two different, opposing orders—a sensible one of efficient causes versus an intelligible one of ends—by subjecting the first to the control of the second, all he did was reinforce the binary effect of the dispositif. On this basis, the person came to be one of two poles and at the same time the horizon on which they relate. In the ethical and rational sense, the person is what directs its own bodily part, which is thus placed in a position of ontological inferiority.

    The third vector for the dispositif of the person is the utilitarian conception that runs from John Stuart Mill all the way to the liberal bioethics of contemporary authors like Peter Singer and Hugo Engelhardt. In the division they proclaim between a genuine person and a simple member of the species Homo sapiens the two previous lines of thought seem to converge, mutually reinforcing each other. To maintain that not all human beings are persons and that nonpersons and semipersons are entirely at the disposition of the former, who even wield the power of life and death over the latter, is further proof of the extraordinary persistence of the Roman summa divisio. It is striking to see how any attempt to heighten the level of personalization is met with a corresponding, inverse, and necessary depersonalization. Their economic considerations on the material cost for maintaining these nonpersons, which form the basis for deciding whether to allow them to live or leave them to die, can be considered an outcome of the utilitarian perspective as well as a trace of the original oikonomic version of the dispositif. But even more striking is the importance attached to thought in qualifying someone as a person. Only a being who thinks can be introduced into the sovereign enclosure of personhood. In reality, these authors do nothing but take the metaphysical assumption of an entire tradition to its final conclusions: just as the possession of thought qualifies the individual, similarly thought is entirely enclosed within the limits of the individual subject. From this springs the attitude of excluding from the confines of personhood any life that lacks or is insufficiently endowed with thinking substance. The conditions of childhood, old age, or mental illness thus become the part excluded from a humanity defined by the thinking character of its individual members.

    Given that the inherence of thought in the individual space of the subject is the epicenter of the political-theological dispositif of the person, it is not surprising that a philosophy of the impersonal entails a dislocation of the place of thought. The fact that, over the course of time and in widely disparate contexts, the metaphysical tradition has launched full frontal attacks against anyone who has practiced a philosophy of the impersonal is no coincidence, then. One thing that authors persecuted to the point of damnation, exile, and death—such as Averroes, Bruno, and Spinoza—have in common with others who remained isolated or misunderstood for long periods of time—like Schelling, Nietzsche, Bergson, and Deleuze—is a common tendency to externalize thought with respect to the interiority of consciousness. The subversive potential perceived (quite rightly) in their works is that by sabotaging the dispositif of the person, this shift will end up derailing the machine of political theology on which it rests. Compared to this danger—whose generative nucleus erodes the entire ethical, legal, and political dominant order—even the separation that they set up between the religious and philosophical spheres remains more an effect than a cause. Averroes, Bruno, and Spinoza, albeit in different forms, separated the purpose of religion, aimed at social cohesion, from that of philosophical study, directed instead toward knowledge of truth. But, when examined from a different point of view, their irreligious attitude appears to be the outcome of a much deeper theoretical rumbling regarding the place and role they attributed to thought.

    What they all maintained in various ways was the exteriority of thought with respect to the individual subject, which the political-theological machine instead bound to it—as if the individual subject were the natural container of thought. The idea that thought belongs to a single consciousness, which owns it—something that we take today as indisputable fact—was in no way taken for granted by the thinkers of classical Greece, especially for those with an Aristotelian bent. They would have considered the idea of thought enclosed within the confines of a subject or a person quite bizarre, regardless of the meanings assigned to these terms. At least before the time when Augustine, in revisiting a Platonic theme, began the work of internalization that was completed first by Locke and then by Kant, the driving force of thought was located in a circuit that was separate from the properly human sphere. It is precisely this Aristotelian concept, obscured by centuries of personalist philosophy, that Averroes radicalized in his thesis on the unity and impersonality of thought—one that was picked up by a heterodox line of thinkers situated on the margins of the philosophical tradition. Of course, the idea that thought is not a possession or inherent quality of the personal subject does not mean that it cannot be considered the most worthy, and almost divine, activity of human beings—something that we can attain to only by going beyond our natural faculties. But this is not to say that thought is what makes human beings human, to the point that those who do not think, or have not begun to think, or have stopped thinking are subhuman, as presumed by the tradition that distinguished itself by the classical formulation of the cogito. What shuts down the dispositif of the person, by its own assumption, is the idea put forward by these authors that the relationship between thought and the individual is not essential and permanent, but potential and contingent. To say that a human being is not a subject but an occasion or vehicle of thought means, on the one hand, to ask what a human being is when it does not think—because it is an infant, forgetful, asleep, or even insane—and on the other hand, what a thought is when it is no longer or not yet thought.

    The answer that Averroes provides to these questions in his Long Commentary on the De anima of Aristotle, at the origin of a philosophy of the impersonal, is the following: if thought does not preliminarily belong to anyone—if nobody owns it to the point of being able to identify himself or herself with it—then it belongs to everyone. All people can think, even if this does not put them in a condition of ontological or metaphysical superiority with respect to those who do not. For Averroes, the possible intellect is a simple potentiality, a pure receptivity, devoid of any prerogative other than that of making visible the objects that are illuminated by the agent intellect. The possible intellect is the medium that connects the celestial intelligences with the imaginative power of human beings. In this sense, the separateness of thought theorized by Averroes should be seen as a kind of ability that everyone can draw on without ever being able to definitively own it, rather than as an exclusionary principle. Of course, in an interpretation of this sort, which pushes the Aristotelian text to the limits of intelligibility, it is easy to gather up references, arguments, and implications that cannot be assimilated into our vocabulary, because they are rooted in a pre-Copernican universe that no longer has the capacity to speak to us. And yet, when we read it from a different point of view—as a radical alternative to the system of knowledge that became established in modernity—the impression remains that Averroes’s Commentary opens up an avenue that was prematurely abandoned. As its keenest opponents first perceived—from Thomas Aquinas to Leibniz—it contains a principle that is potentially subversive to the order based on the theological-political relationship between transcendence of the law and imputability of the individual. The full ownership of thought by a single individual, rather than its autonomy, became the noetic assumption of the subjection of the individual to a legal order that is always able to impute to individual people the responsibility

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