Political Theology 25.4 is now online!

We are excited to announce the release of Political Theology 25.4. This issue features six peer-reviewed articles on a wide range of topics and four book reviews.

Articles

“The Garden Realm of Pale Ratiocinations: Toward the Abolition of a Dark Fantastic Theological Imaginary of Human Being” by Nathan D. Wood-House

Anti-Blackness adumbrates rationality and reaches into phobic realms, what Frantz Fanon called the “paralogical.” Ebony Elizabeth Thomas’s The Dark Fantastic links the dark fantastic imagination and the Dark Other of speculative fiction to their cultural iterations and augments the paralogicality of anti-Blackness by accounting for the narrative roles of hesitation and belief. This paper argues that it is further necessary to assert the narrative significance of nineteenth century Christian, pre-Adamite and/or Serpent Seed theological anthropologies for the production of what one might call a dark fantastic theological imaginary of human being. The paper argues, further, far from being a bygone heresy, the pre-Adamite mythos lives on in the “thin blue line” anthropology of contemporary policing. The paper therefore looks ultimately for abolitionist possibilities to interrupt this imaginary, which it sees in the theological counternarrative of Black being in Matt Ruff’s novel Lovecraft Country and its TV adaptation by Misha Green.

“Erik Peterson’s Political Theology of the Modern Nation-State” by Samuel Pomeroy

Erik Peterson is primarily known for his 1935 rebuttal to Schmitt’s Political Theology. Readers like Agamben have raised the need to investigate whether Peterson himself tried to extend or substantiate his critique. Albeit in scattered reflections, Peterson developed a genealogy of the nation-state through the ambiguity of the angelic and its relation to empire. This article presents these reflections according to the systematic connections Peterson discerns across three categories: the denial of God, the claim of human rights, and linguistic unity. Throughout, attention is paid to how Peterson’s ideas resemble those in Schmitt’s works, though he often adds his own accents through the concepts of Trinitarian and eschatological thought. The result is a nuanced conception of Peterson’s appreciation of Schmitt’s genealogical methodology. It clarifies how Peterson’s envisaged the Trinity as a political-theological paradigm becomes more intelligible. His insistence on openness to the transcendent can be linked to negative political theology.

“The Liturgical Transformation of Political Community” by Matthew John Paul Tan

With reference to Andrew Linklater’s The Transformation of Political Community, this article explores how liturgical practices contribute to the critique of the exclusionary bias baked into the dominant international system. It begins by regarding the system as not a given but a series of standpoints, each of which bears the capacity for interpreting and transforming political reality. This article then looks at the directions that a liturgical transformation of political reality can take. It will explore the implications of a liturgical ontology of participation, before looking at how the liturgy redefines terms of citizenship and provides an avenue to engage with difference.

“Historical Meaning and the Care of the Soul: Ethical Reflections on the War in Ukraine with Edith Stein and Jan Patočka” by William Tullius

Amidst the human tragedy represented by the Russian invasion of Ukraine, the ideological and historical justifications for the conflict as they have been framed by Russian president Vladimir Putin themselves call for a philosophical response and ethical critique. Putin’s political theological justification for the war, grounded in the commonalities of language, historical affinity, and ecclesial unity, which he posits constitute Ukraine and Russia as one people and justifies the imposition of Russian imperial authority over the Ukrainian state, is philosophically problematic and ultimately totalitarian. In contrast, the phenomenological philosophies of Edith Stein and Jan Patočka, whose political philosophies were shaped in spiritual resistance to similar ethnic and ideologically driven imperialisms of the twentieth century, offer resources for understanding and critiquing the world-historical interpretations of the meaning of civilization, peoplehood, and national destiny which drive Putin’s foreign policy, and which have important ethical and political implications far beyond the Ukraine/Russia conflict.

“Divergent and Emergent Political Theologies of Peace Amongst Jewish Israelis” by Erica Weiss

In this article, I consider the emergent political theology of a peace from within the religious Zionist community. Given the dismal state of the Israeli-Palestinian peace process, it is surprising that the last decade has seen the spontaneous emergence of several grassroots Israeli peace initiatives, and even more surprising that many of these initiatives have emerged from the religious Zionist community rather than the Israeli peace camp. The article presents ethnographic data on the scriptural interpretations of one of these initiatives, the Citizens Accord Forum. The article illustrates their hermeneutic labor on questions of Jewish sovereignty and questions of non-Jews within the Jewish state. The article considers how this alternative political theology is emerging between two far more hegemonic political paradigms: the “religious right” and the “secular left.”

“Squatted Sacred Spaces: A Left-Radical Political Theology of Hamburg’s Rote Flora” by Ali Jones

This paper analyzes Hamburg’s (in)famous squatted Rote Flora to argue that Left-radical squats can be fruitfully read as “sacred spaces.” It uses political theology vis-à-vis sacredness to understand fringe Left-radical subjects, and elucidates their purity concerns of space and political subjectivity. To this end, the paper adapts Bataille’s “left-sacred to the left-radical subject concerned with purity in the sense of being” “unassimilable” or “holy and set apart” from society. This occurs via maintaining a space that is “non-negotiable” to profane societal values, rather than in any deity-oriented or classical religious sense. Within this reading, these heterogeneous spaces must be maintained and kept “pure” of homogeneous profane (capitalist) influences. The paper analyzes these purity concerns via three manifestations: (1) the squat’s spatial purity from profane societal contamination or influence; (2) language and the fear of discursive integration through contracts; (3) the formation and reification of the pure, ascetic identity.

Book Reviews

Modern Jewish philosophy and the politics of divine violence by Daniel Weiss, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2023, 330 pages, $99.99 (hardcover), ISBN 9781009221658

Shaul Magid

A commonwealth of hope: Augustine’s political thought by Michael Lamb, Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2022, ix + 431 pp., $35.60 (hardcover), ISBN 978-0691226330

Kristoff Reese Grosfeld

Law, populism, and the political in Central and Eastern Europe by Rafał Mańko, Adam Sulikowski, Przemysław Tacik, and Cosmin Cercel, New York, Birkbeck Law Press, 2023, 276 pp., £104, ISBN 9781032623405

Ronald Fadly Sopamena, Yosia Hetharie & Daud Kornelis Beriledang

Azusa reimagined: a radical vision of religious and democratic belonging by Keri Day, Stanford, CA, Stanford University Press, 2022, 232 pp., $32.00 (Paperback), ISBN: 9781503631625

Brooklynn Reardon