Tag: Carl Schmitt

…I see my list on political theology functioning like Wittgenstein’s ladder metaphor in his Tractatus. Once graduate students read and grasp these important texts, they should “throw away the ladder”, so to speak, and deconstruct all they have learned about political theology to illuminate contemporary problems on their own. Once they reach the top, they can throw away the ladder.

Even while the concept of canon has been thoroughly critiqued and deconstructed, implicit canons remain and it may be best to acknowledge their presence rather than seek to repress them.

…Political Theology is the sedimented yet changing and multifarious ways in which Christianity divides itself and (which is to say also: from) the world.

My point is that in addition to being annoyingly Eurocentric, the discourse of political theology focuses more on administrators and theorists of the modern State than the victims of State.

Is it the case that the European political theology is indeed derived, not from the universal requirements of any sovereign order (as Schmitt sometimes claimed), but rather from specific Christian underpinnings? Or is it the case that a fundamentally similar political ideology, one which depends on the logic of sovereignty rather than on parochial cultural assumptions, can indeed be found elsewhere?

The field has often shown a Eurocentric bias…As such, the field has left out important reflections on political theology during the anticolonial and postcolonial struggles in the Global South.

If one speaks of Political Theology as a “field” with its own “canon” one must surely be preparing to deconstruct it.

Why does Trump’s face matter? Why does Trump—a world-class performer and master of the craft of showmanship—practice shaping his face? What does his face do? Is Trump’s face part of his power?

There seems to be, then, a road not yet taken by political theologians in North America and Europe: to participate with Arab thinkers in the work of writing comparative political theologies that decolonize knowledge and seek a more just alternative to the world as it stands.

Join a reading group sponsored by the Political Theology Network treating a classic text.

Political Theology Must Follow Agamben’s “Double Paradigm” of Sovereignty. The following is the guest editorial for the current issue of the print journal Political Theology (Volume 19, Issue 1, February 2018).