Balibar Étienne - Political Theology and Early Modernity

Graham Hammill is professor of English at University at Buffalo, SUNY. He is the author of Sexuality and Form, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Julia Reinhard Lupton is professor of English and comparative literature at the University of California, Irvine. She is the author or coauthor of four books on Shakespeare, most recently of Thinking with Shakespeare: Essays on Politics and Life, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637

The University of Chicago Press, Ltd., London

2012 by The University of Chicago

All rights reserved. Published 2012.

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ISBN-13: 978-0-226-31497-6 (cloth)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-31498-3 (paper)

ISBN-10: 0-226-31497-9 (cloth)

ISBN-10: 0-226-31498-7 (paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-31499-0 (e-book)

Portions of Adam Sitzes essay, The Tragicity of the Political: A Note on Carlo Gallis Reading of Carl Schmitts Hamlet or Hecuba, appeared as A Farewell to Schmitt: Notes on the Work of Carlo Galli in CR: The New Centennial Review 10, no. 2 (2010), published by Michigan State University Press. Part of Carlo Gallis essay, Hamlet: Representation and the Concrete, first appeared in Italian as the introduction to the Italian translation of Carl Schmitts Hamlet or Hecuba, Amleto o Ecuba (Bologna: Il Mulino, 1983). An earlier version of tienne Balibars Postscript was published as Quelle universalit des Lumires? in Le Bottin des Lumires, edited by Nadine Descendre (Paris: ENSBA, 2005), and adapted as Sjourner dans la contradiction: Lide de nouvelles Lumires et les contradictions de lUniversalisme, in Formen des Nichtwissens der Aufklrung, edited by Hans Adler-Rainer Gdel (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag).

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Political theology and early modernity / edited by Graham Hammill and Julia Reinhard Lupton ;with a postscript by tienne Balibar.

pages : illustrations ; cm

Includes index.

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-31497-6 (cloth : alkaline paper)

ISBN-10: 0-226-31497-9 (cloth: alkaline paper)

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-31498-3 (paperback : alkaline paper)

ISBN-10: 0-226-31498-7 (paperback : alkaline paper) 1. Political theologyHistory. 2. Political theologyHistoriography. I. Hammill, Graham L. II. Lupton, Julia Reinhard, 1963 III. Balibar, tienne, 1942

BT83.59.P64 2012

322'.1094dc23 2011050365

This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Political Theology and Early Modernity

EDITED BY

GRAHAM HAMMILL AND JULIA REINHARD LUPTON

WITH A POSTSCRIPT BY

tienne Balibar

The University of Chicago Press

Chicago and London

Contents

Graham Hammill and Julia Reinhard Lupton

Victoria Kahn

Adam Sitze

Carlo Galli

TRANSLATED BY ADAM SITZE AND AMANDA MINERVINI

Graham Hammill

Jennifer Rust

Kathleen Biddick

Paul A. Kottman

Jane O. Newman

Jacques Lezra

Julia Reinhard Lupton

Drew Daniel

Gregory Kneidel

Jonathan Goldberg

tienne Balibar

TRANSLATED BY VIVIAN FOLKENFLIK

Illustrations

Acknowledgments

We would like to thank the Humanities Collective at the University of California, Irvine for co-sponsoring the symposium on political theology and early modernity that brought many of the contributors represented in this volume together for a stimulating set of exchanges. UCIs Humanities Collective also provided a generous subvention toward publication costs of this volume. The Baldy Center for Law and Social Policy at the University at Buffalo, SUNY, provided a grant so that the two of us could meet in Buffalo to draft our introduction. Nick Hoffman prepared the initial manuscript for submission, and Richard Allen has provided expert copyediting. C. J. Gordon assisted with the index. Alan Thomas has been an inspiring editor of this and kindred projects at the University of Chicago Press. Finally, we would like to thank our husbands, Richard Ridenour and Ken Reinhard, for their loving support of all that we do.

Graham Hammill and Julia Reinhard Lupton

Buffalo, New York, and Irvine, California

Introduction

GRAHAM HAMMILL JULIA REINHARD LUPTON

. The Problem

Lets get this straight. Political theology is not the same as religion. Instead, we take it to name a form of questioning that arises precisely when religion is no longer a dominant explanatory or life mode. Political theology reflects and feeds on a crisis in religion, whether that crisis is understood historically (as Reformation) at home, and the disorienting friction between sacred and secular jurisdictions, calendars, economies, membership protocols, textual operations, and styles of violence.

We take the phrase political theology to identify the exchanges, pacts, and contests that obtain between religious and political life, especially the use of sacred narratives, motifs, and liturgical forms to establish, legitimate, them of a portion of their aura. Bankrupting the Peter of the medieval church in order to pay off the Paul associated with new forms of secular authority also produced subterranean and symptomatic forms of alliance between religion and politics in a modernity founded on their putative division. (On the Peter-Paul alliance, see Julia Luptons essay on Raphaels cartoons.)

In the study of early modern Europe, political theology is often used to name a gallery of icons, rites, and narratives associated with sacred kingship and the evolving offices of the state, themselves often drawn out of the administrative care of the royal household. In this collection, however, political theology takes on a second, more polemical meaning, in which politics and theology, understood as contest rather than alliance, delineate the schism around which early modernity is constituted. Less an ideology and more of a recursive crisis, political theology unlocks the occasion in which personal sovereignty transforms into its opposites: as citizenship, the corpus mysticum, the multitude, or civil society. Political theology is thus bound up in epochal breaks and period definitions: whereas Renaissance engages primarily with the challenge of antiquity, Early Modern concerns the wars of religion and the attempt to resolve the new heterodoxies and troubling new pluralisms of the Reformation in a secular key.

Political theology, then, is neither a set of themes nor a particular form of government, but rather a scene of recurring conflictboth that which defines the early modern period as the attempt to resolve the challenges of the Reformation and that which continues to unfold today as the impossibility of the state to totalize politics. There are many political theologies, Western as well as non-Western, ancient as well as modern, that could be associated with civil religionthe use of religious belief to ensure obedience to the state or other kinds of political community. In early modern Europe, however, political theology has the status of a founding eventan event that, from the backward glance of the twenty-first century to be sure, makes early modernity modern. In post-Reformation Europe, when multiple states and sects individually claimed to embody the one true universal church, a theology that should have led to peace turns into a source of civil war and transnational conflict. Political theology isolates the knot binding religious and secularizing impulses in early modern texts in order to confront the unexpected recurrence of the same conjuncture today. For some writers in this volume, including Victoria Kahn, tienne Balibar, and Paul Kottman, this means claiming the secular with renewed intellectual vigor and vigilance, while for other writers, including Jennifer Rust and Julia Lupton, this means mining the remainders of theology for conducts of living and styles of comportment that are neither secular nor religious. Whether taken up critically or creatively, political theology confronts its readers as crisis and not content, as recurrent question rather than established doxa.