By: Roger Haydon Mitchell

Roger Haydon Mitchell — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 10:29:05 +0000

I agree that a genealogical approach is less than proof of historical origins but certainly can give us insight into past reimaginings and their impact on the present. My research attempts to trace such a genealogy from a supposed subsumption of transcendence by sovereign power in the fourth century and its trajectory to the present day. [Shortly to be published by Wipf and Stock under the provisional title Church, Gospel and Empire: how the politics of sovereignty impregnated the West.] As I see it, the Tea Party movement is a continuing part of the genealogy of sovereignty as the way forward for peace. As such it is only a variation on a theme of empire of which the Western nation state is the progeny and remains the deep structural substance of "the American political imaginary." From this perspective the Tea Party is one with the proponents of bourgeois liberal democracy. But it may be that Schmitt's idea of the exception can give us still deeper insights into the structure of the West, as Agamben's work suggests, on the basis of which a new theopolitics might be configured in answer to Hardt and Negri's cry in Multitude for a new motivation of Judaeo-Christian love.

Comments on: Don’t tread on me

By: Roger Haydon Mitchell