Both Benjamin and Apess discern that historical narratives are imbricated with notions of futurity, that is, which bodies and polities are allowed to inhabit and thrive within the temporality in which the “not yet” and the “always already” co-constitute each other.
The modern state form itself is inextricable from the commandement, not just as an emblem for sovereignty in Schmitt’s sense, but also because the exemplary political form of modernity, the nation-state, has racist and exclusionary tendencies that can be understood as political-theological transfers of monotheistic principles.
To read genealogically in this mode is to read anachronistically, to theorize the present through temporally removed contexts while allowing for their difference.
Join a reading group sponsored by the Political Theology Network treating Wynter’s essay “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom”.