Reading these responses to my Political Theology has always been interesting, but not always enjoyable. Generally, I try to focus on the issues of interest and ignore misunderstanding or misplaced critiques. My interim posting took this approach. Some of the subsequent postings, however, are so disturbing as examples of intellectual exchange that they require a more pointed response. Let me dispose of these before I take up the thoughtful commentators.

Miguel Vatter has lots of advice on the book I should have written to “advance the discussion of the theme of ‘political theology’ in Schmitt.” I don’t think I could have been clearer that this was not my project. Quoting me, Vatter characterizes my work as an “exegesis” of Schmitt’s text. What I actually said was “This work is neither an exegesis of [Schmitt’s] text, nor an intellectual history.” Remarkably, Vatter rewrites this sentence to read, “Kahn says at one point that he is doing ‘an exegesis of his [Schmitt’s] text, not an intellectual history.’”

Jean-Claude Monod agrees with my “diagnosis” of the facts of American political life, but criticizes me for deploying political theology in defense of American policies of torture. His critique is rooted in my “defense” of the Israeli Supreme Court’s torture decision and my failure to criticize the ticking time bomb argument. Both points are frivolous. First, I have no reason to defend the Israeli Court. Rather, my point was about how difficult it is, even for a court, to adhere to the legal rule of no torture, as if stating the rule were the end of the matter. I described this resurgence of the exception even within a decision declaring the absolute character of the no torture rule as a “paradox.” For what it’s worth I would never say what Monod attributes to me: “Even if it is an illegitimate practice, it can be made legal by virtue of a political decision.” That view is sophomoric. The point of my work is to explore the double nature of a political commitment to law and sovereignty, not to reduce one to the other.

This problem of managing the incommensurable has been the point of my work with the ticking time bomb hypothetical. I am frankly amazed by Monod’s description of my work on this point as uncritical. I don’t think anyone has devoted more time to trying to unpack the way in which the ticking time bomb argument actually works than I did in Sacred Violence, which devotes an entire chapter to the problem. Of course, one cannot do everything everywhere, but I do provide the references to the essential debate on this issue, including my prior work.

With Vincent Pecora, we move from the merely sophomoric to the outrightly offensive. His strategy is first to state the obvious and then to taint me by association with the Nazi theorist Otto Brunner. On the obvious, who would deny that the differing attitudes of contemporary Europeans and Americans on the use of force is in large part to be accounted for by their different experiences of violence in the twentieth century? And who would claim that sacrifice is a unique possession of the West? Pecora seems not to understand the meaning of the “American exceptionalism” that I explore, which has nothing to do with the idea that every nation is “somehow unique.” Rather, American exceptionalism has to do with the way in which American law and legal institutions place themselves with respect to foreign and international law and institutions. Pecora doesn’t see this because he believes there is something “unfortunate” in the legal mind. At least it can hold on to some distinctions: for example, that the United States is committed to both the rule of law and popular sovereignty. The puzzle is to understand how this constitutional double actually works in our law and politics, both now and in the past.

Jason Stevens does a little better. Much of his long “detour” on Schmitt and Blumenberg rehearses points with which I agree but that are not at issue in my work. Most of what he says about the operation of religious categories in American political history simply illustrates my argument. My point is not about a single possible use of these categories, but about how they offer an imaginative frame, and thus conceptual resources for the multiple, contesting parties. When he actually comes to my work, he seems so bent on finding a point of disagreement that he turns to an article I wrote some ten years ago critiquing the idea that popular democratic deliberation is likely to be an effective method of responding to moral atrocity around the world. Stevens makes the leap of saying that my suggestion of presidential leadership on such foreign policy matters “follows from Kahn’s argument, in Political Theology, that the President play a Christological role when mediating the sovereign presence and committing it to sacrifice.” What I actually said was:

If we are concerned with deploying the immense military power of the United States for good in the world as we confront the twenty-first century, then we need to appreciate opportunities for presidential leadership. More than Congress and more than the public, the president is subject to the demands of international organizations and the pressures brought to bear by civic and political leaders from around the world. If we want the United States to stop genocide in places like Rwanda, we need to reject arguments that every risky deployment of U.S. forces requires a Congressional declaration of war and advance democratic approval. We should do all that we can to encourage international policing, military deterrence, and the threat of real intervention against those who would commit mass atrocities. We should encourage U.S. participation in such deployments of force. The Constitution was not designed for such a task, nor is Congress likely to assume it. Intervention is, however, demanded of the United States by much of the world. They are right to make this demand, and I do not believe that the structure of the Constitution undermines the morally compelling response.

This was an argument about morality, law, and the pressures of foreign policy on different institutions of government. There was no claim for Christology or sacrifice. My point from 2002 has recently been quite precisely illustrated in the American intervention in Libya, which was not about sacrifice but did require presidential leadership.

In Political Theology, Christology comes up in exactly one sentence when I am considering the locus of the actual power to decide with respect to issues of national security. Historically, I note, the Court has been reluctant to get involved, and power has been successfully claimed by the President in “moments of national crisis”—not at all the topic of human rights intervention considered in the earlier article. After pointing out that the President’s power in this respect seems to be weakening, I go on to say that it would be useful to think about his claim to embody the nation in such instances, not in terms of a sovereign act of creation, but in terms of the imaginative frame of Christology—an individual subject embodying the whole of the community. Understanding the nature of power is not the same as approving of its use.

The rest of the essays are thoughtful engagements with the book, from which I learned a good deal. They pose serious questions of two sorts: those about which I can say something and those about which I wish I could say something. In the latter category, I particularly place Ward Blanton’s beautifully written plea that I transform my political tract into a “political experience” by giving name to “the phenomenon of a new beginning.” I have never claimed to have a prophetic voice, nor to be able to found a new “Us,” although I don’t think that the depth of our estrangement is quite as bleak as this question might suggest. I can offer two sorts of response to Blanton.

First, when I described my ambition in the book as phenomenolgical, not normative, part of my ambition was to speak of the American political imaginary in a way that reminds the reader of just how powerful its claim has been. I want the reader to recognize that this constellation of popular sovereignty, sacrifice, and rule of law is still doing considerable work. We must be careful to understand exactly what is at issue. The political imaginary to which I am trying to give voice can be at work among those who believe that government is failing and that law is no longer representative. The question is what sorts of values do they hope to see realized in political experience. Similarly, the domain within which the imaginary works is hardly limited to our actual political institutions. One has to look, as well, at the many fictional and historical representations of contest and success, of struggle and resolution. My work has tried to explore that archetypical presence in legal opinions, institutional structures, political rhetoric, public memorials, historical narrative, film, and other expressions of popular culture.

Second, when I am not writing about politics, I am often writing about love—and often about the intersection of the two. The experience of a new beginning for which Blanton longs, and which I have called the point at which being and meaning coincide, has not disappeared from our experience, even if the sacred has withdrawn from our political experience. One of the problems with liberal political theory has been its “privatization” of the family. I understand the love of the family, and particularly of the child, as world creating and world affirming. It is not about justice or representation, but about that longed for new beginning that gives meaning to the world. What Blanton really wants to know, I suspect, is what forms of erotic community will emerge in the social order as the state is increasingly dislocated from the center of our experience of meaning. He rightly observes that to answer that question is to move beyond theory and speak from a position in thrall to the sacred. I can’t do that, but what I can still affirm, or at least hope, is that our deep and abiding commitment to love suggests that we do not live in a disenchanted world. Love will continue to draw us forward into new social formations.

Several commentators challenge my claim that popular sovereignty offers an imaginative framework within which a politics of ultimate meaning moves forward in America. I don’t deny that this entire imaginative structure may be passing. When I say my work is not normative, I mean that I take no position on whether such a passing would be good or bad. Yet, it is too soon to declare its death. Most of the critical points the commentators bring up strike me as more supportive than critical of my views. I hardly take it as a point against my argument that there is very substantial dissatisfaction with government today, that many express frustration and disappointment with the government and laws that we have, and some even make extreme threats—the last a point brought up by several commentators. What is interesting in so much of the critique is the way in which the concept of popular sovereignty is invoked. The unsettled place of the popular sovereign is a part of the account I too would give. Precisely my point is that the popular sovereign is not measurable, not reducible to a process or a vote. It is a resource put to work to make particular claims. Those claims will be contested—mostly peacefully, but sometimes violently.

Similarly, the fact that America has a long history of injustice with respect to exclusion of different groups from the popular sovereign is not a challenge to the imaginative force of the idea of popular sovereignty. Precisely because the concept is understood as the point of origin of an ultimate meaning that cannot be reduced to representational form, the varieties of American racism have often played out as an issue of what I have elsewhere called the “material cause” of the popular sovereign. This is the question of which bodies can support the weight or meaning of the sovereign. Groups seen as incapable of taking on that meaning were in a difficult and dangerous position from which law could not easily protect them. To be seen as “incapable” meant, in part, that they could not be seen as embodying the state in and through sacrifice. For this reason, extension of the corpus of the sovereign has so often in American history been linked to sacrifice at war. The proof text of instantiation of the body politic has not been a theory of justice, but a common experience of sacrifice.

Several commentators take issue with my terminology. Politics, they insist, is not necessarily about ultimate meanings, freedom can be located in negative liberty as much as in authenticity, and meaning can be located in the mundane as well as the sacrificial. Of course, all of this is true. If we mean by politics the institutionally organized, public life of the community, then politics goes on as a legal, bureaucratic formation all the time. Many national communities don’t want any other form of politics because of a history that associates a politics of ultimate meaning with authoritarianism, injustice, and violence. I make no claim that they are wrong or that somehow they fail at the essential form of politics. The same can be said about freedom in its positive and negative forms. My book, however, is not a catalogue of political conceptions or a survey of different theories. I am using these terms for rhetorical as well as analytical purposes: not to convince the reader to do anything, but to draw his or her attention to certain imaginative formations. I’m hoping for a certain resonance in this rather violent taking possession of terms from our everyday experience.

This is probably the source of the accusation that I am an “absolutist” or an essentialist. These are difficult claims to make out in a work that puts at its center contingency and the necessity of the decision. The driving point of the book is to make vivid an idea of freedom that begins in the creative act of the discursive engagement, moves from there to law, and then to sovereignty. It strives to provoke in the reader a sense of wonder and respect at the endless fecundity of the imagination. It tries to shift attention from reason to imagination, from causes to actions, from rules to decisions. It offers itself as an example of the free, and therefore surprising, conversation that it theorizes. Accordingly, I react with a certain disappointment when some of the commentators reject out of hand the idea that a discourse with Schmitt can be an inquiry into freedom. My project might not persuade, but its point is not about Schmitt. The aim is to see what we might discover about ourselves through the discursive engagement.

This brings me to the question with which Peter Gordon ends his thoughtful commentary. He asks whether it is right to look to sacrifice as the point at which we find the highest or authentic meaning of a life. First, let me clear away a possible confusion. I am not suggesting that we either do or should seek a sacrificial moment as the point at which we achieve some sort of authentic existence. People are not generally hoping for an opportunity to sacrifice themselves, although I have no doubt that exceptions arise. Second, I am not arguing that a politics of sacrifice is better than one without. That political life has been the locus of a practice of sacrifice is, from the perspective of my work, entirely contingent. There are historical reasons for this, but I am not claiming that there is something about human nature that demands of us sacrificial politics.

How then does sacrifice continue to operate? It stands for the point at which an incommensurable value breaks through our ordinary calculations of interest. Imagining sacrifice, we imagine that possibility, that is, we acknowledge the possibility of such a claim upon ourselves. Sacrifice is for this reason linked to love. Indeed, love absent the imagination of sacrifice is a problematic idea—one better described as desire, interest, or satisfaction. Love is characterized by the awareness that there is a value outside of myself that stands to everything else as a sort of transcendent claim. Sacrifice is another way of speaking of this experience of ultimate value outside of ourselves. How and where we find this value changes through time. That sacrifice has taken a particularly violent form in politics tells us something about the nature of our political formations, not something essential about ourselves. There is nothing necessary about state, religion, or even family as the locus of the experience of such a claim.

That people will continue to search for and find such an ultimate value is, in the end, nothing more than a belief on my part. I don’t know how one might go about proving such a claim. The most one can do is use the rhetorical and conceptual tools available in one’s tradition to try to invoke a recognition of this experience. This is the reason Political Theology is both a philosophical project and a rhetorical project. It is why I describe the project as “phenomenological,” but link that to persuasion. Gordon is right to point out that there are multiple theological sources in our tradition to which one could appeal. But I don’t agree that it follows that political theology should proceed by first settling on a theology and then applying it to politics. The project I pursue begins from within political and legal experience and moves back and forth between that experience and theological resources—analogies, narratives, symbols, and ideas. I tried in the book to give expression to this idea as follows: “Arguments succeed when we find ourselves operating in the world with one set of meanings rather than another. In this sense, every genuinely philosophical inquiry is autobiographical, both as a theoretical and as a practical endeavor.”

My repetition of the phrase “existence before essence” is not a claim that I have access to the facts themselves, stripped of any interpretive approach. Quite the opposite: I argue throughout that every interpretation rests on a free act of the imagination. The risk of such a project is that it can be as impossible as describing color to the blind. The rewards of such a project are when the reader comes away with a sense that something deeply important about the world in which she finds herself has been illuminated. In the end, this series of commentaries has shown me that I have had both sorts of readers.

Framing my book as an exercise in “thinking with” Schmitt, I have to bear the consequences of the association.  While most of the commentators acknowledge my effort to democratize Schmitt’s concept of the sovereign, my sense is that, for the most, part they continue to read me through the familiar lens of a reactionary Schmitt.  They voice worries about the exclusionary character of the sovereign, about compulsion in place of freedom, and about those who suffer from the violence of the state, both internally and externally.  Despite my efforts to describe a project rooted in American history and law, they worry about an essentializing tendency in my work.  All of these are legitimate worries about the character of American politics, but I am not offering a defense of American practices.  Rather, I am trying to bring some clarity to the way in which we have imagined politics, for good and for evil.

More importantly, reading me in the Schmittian register, the commentators have tended to focus on the specifically political parts of the book, spending far less time with the chapters on legal judgment, discourse, and creativity.  Contra someone like Agamben, my effort has been to “normalize” the exception, not by arguing that we are in a constant political crisis, but by showing the pervasiveness of decision in our ordinary lives.  At the center of my inquiry is an attempt to understand a free act as one that neither follows from a rule nor is arbitrary with respect to rules.  This is the notion of freedom that links revolution to legal judgment, and both to the creative acts of the imagination, including ordinary discourse.

My interlocutors in this round, however, want to speak of the relationship of theory to power, and so I will focus my remarks on this.  I will not repeat the arguments of the book.  Rather, I will try to respond “in the spirit of the book.”

My central project has been to study the American political imaginary. I show that it makes use of symbolic resources that are in wide circulation in the West.  This makes a comparative project compelling, but I leave it to others to offer a rich account of how these same elements are configured—combined and juxtaposed—elsewhere.  The American political imaginary has combined revolution and constitution, sacrifice and well-being, violence and law.  This combination has made our politics a source of ultimate meaning for many, but also a very dangerous practice.

There is no necessity in any of this.  We have no reason to think that politics takes the same form elsewhere; and we have every reason to think that these elements are deeply contested in American political life today.  There is an analogy to religion, which has taken certain forms in the West, and more particularly in American history, but there is no universal necessity in this either.  Similarly, there is not one political life that we must live.  A central idea of the book is that we must decide.  Some of the commentators will immediately ask, “Who is the we?”  There is no answer that exists apart from the way in which individuals think of themselves, and that is both a cause and effect of power.  I agree with a number of commentators who argue that we have to examine how it is that various discourses have been used, and continue to be used, to construct a collective subject—as well as to contest that subject.

While I have in view American political experience, a number of commentators have also pointed to recent events in the Middle East as a sort of challenge to, or check on, my views.  If I were claiming something essential about politics, perhaps that would make sense, but I am not.  I have, nevertheless, been struck by how much the popular accounts we are offered of the events in the Middle East adhere to the narrative structure of revolution and constitution that I explore.  First, we see the centrality of sacrifice to the revolutionary claim.  Sacrifice appears as the presence of the people themselves. Second, who are the people?  I am struck by the importance of national boundaries.  Of course, revolutionary actions invoke universal values—equality, human rights, democracy—but the complex relationship between the particular and universal is at the center of the themes I have explored.  The recent events seem to invoke “we the people” as a nation-state, not an ethnic, religious, or transnational community.  Third, we see that the appearance of the people is a moment of violence prior to law; a nonviolent politics is not one without sacrifice.  Fourth, we see the way in which peoples first constitute themselves as such before they take up the question of what the law should be: constitution follows revolution.   Finally, watching these communities of committed young people, one feels that here, too, one is witness to an erotic communion: love and the sacred are bound together.

I do not put this forward to support a claim that what we are watching is the unfolding of the universal character of the political.  It is hard to know how much of the narrative is a matter of Western press coverage, for example.  I suspect, however, that we are seeing the power of a certain imaginative structure.  Why do we see this configuration of Middle Eastern politics now? I would point the inquiry in a different direction than have some of my interlocutors.  We need to look well beyond politics, economics, and religion.  This imaginative structure is embedded in multiple cultural productions that come at us from every direction: film, television, novels, song, and reporting, as well as popular rhetoric at both the local town hall and the national capital.  If we want to understand the global reach of the American imagination, we are going to have to consider these sources of reproduction – and, indeed, my next book does just this.

Emphasizing these sources of cultural reproduction will not satisfy most of my critics, who are interested in the way that hegemony fails.  They point out that there is no single political narrative in the United States; there are groups that have understood American power, not as something in which they share, but as something from which they suffer.  Of course, that is correct.  We have to remember that we are dealing here with imaginative resources, not with natural structures.  Every narrative construction presents an opportunity for disavowal as well as avowal.  Contention is part of every order of belief.  For this reason, the project is necessarily historical.  Indeed, ours is a moment at which there is a good deal of pressure on the imagination of sovereignty – popular or otherwise.  The structure of that tension puts at issue the relationship between law and sovereignty.  Theory, however, will not tell us the outcome of this conflict.

Some will say that I have so far missed the point of the examples of both the Arab Spring and the politics of marginalized groups.  The point is not about diversity or its absence, but about political possibilities.  These events and groups show us the potential for an alternative politics.  This is a normative claim about what our political life should be.  I insist that my work is not normative—a claim about which many are skeptical.

Of course, I do not mean that I am indifferent to conceptions of justice.  I repeatedly try to make clear that my own values are liberal.  Nor do I think that it is impossible to do liberal political theory.  My book on this subject was called “Putting Liberalism in its Place,” not “Putting Liberalism Down.”  Commentators on my new book are particularly skeptical because of my frequent invocation of “authenticity.”  I ask and answer the question of whether we can conceive of our political practices as supporting such a norm.  But my point here is not different in kind from what I have had to say about justice.  Our political practices bear on a number of norms or values.  There is no neutral, non-normative way of engaging in politics.  The theoretical inquiry I pursue, however, does not offer an ordering of these different and incommensurable values.  Theory does not tell us whether anyone should find the value of authenticity in political practice.

This comes out in my argument that conscription can now occur outside of law, through the misfortune of finding oneself on a highjacked plane—a problematic claim for some of the commentators.  I do not suggest that one cannot resist at this moment—just as there were resisters to the formal draft.  The question, I say, is, “What will you do?”  I don’t have an answer to the question of what you should do.  It is not some sort of mistake to reject a political practice of sacrifice.  It is, however, a mistake of theory to refuse to recognize the power that sacrifice has played and continues to play in shaping the American imaginary.

My exploration of the American political imaginary is non-normative in the same way that an inquiry into the Christian or Jewish imagination is non-normative.  I respect the fact that millions of people have lived and died for these beliefs.  There is nothing universalizing or essentializing about respect.  Moreover, what these structures shape is a field of possible contention.  Americans actively contest virtually every aspect of their political lives—except perhaps the continuation of the American political project itself.  Trying to understand the shape of the political imagination will not and cannot settle these debates.  Noting the role that war has played in our understanding of sovereignty hardly tells us whether we should engage in any particular war, or whether we should devote ourselves to ending all war.

Some worry that describing a hegemonic form of the imagination is itself an act of hegemony.  I simply don’t agree.  Academics often write as if theory were a form of politics.  But theory will not do the hard work of politics for us.  I don’t believe that theory gives me a privileged place in politics.  Actual politics requires situated judgment; it requires evaluation of the possibilities in a complex fact situation.  Theory provides no training in judgment and it never reaches the particular.  At best, theory as I pursue it can help us to understand why our politics assumes certain forms.

My ambition has been to plot the diverse normative valences at work in American political experience.  That which is incommensurable cannot be made commensurable in theory.  Thus, authenticity is a value, but so is justice; revolution is one form of political experience, but so is the rule of law.  The aims of law are no less contestable than those of revolution.  Theory can bring some self-consciousness to these multiple forms of life, but it cannot tell us what we should do when we must choose. I cannot tell anyone whether they should put love over justice or justice over love.  We all hope that we do not face such conflicts.  When we do, the choice is our own to make.

This brings me back to the central theme of the book: freedom.  I have tried not just to trace the ways in which the locus of sovereign decision has moved to everyman, but to show that the decision always exceeds the norm.  My effort was to explore this idea of freedom in its political, jurisprudential, and discursive dimensions.  This hardly amounts to a proposal to subordinate justice to authenticity.  How we should exercise our freedom remains an open question, not just in politics but in every domain of our experience.

America, I would insist, and many of my interlocutors would agree, has not been a project centrally concerned with justice.  The liberal political theorist wants to contribute to the amelioration of this condition.  That is an admirable political ambition but a poor ground for understanding the field of meaning that has been American history.  The choice cannot be between justice and apologetics.  Theory must have its own integrity.

To think that organized religions make a complete claim to the sacred—that is, claims title to all that is sacred—is to confuse legal categories with political phenomenology. It is an accident of history that the struggle of the state to free itself of the church was framed not as a conflict of faiths but as a conflict over the place of faith in the organization of political power. In part, this was a consequence of organized religion’s tendency to side with conservative political forces. In part, it was because these political revolutions began two hundred years after the Reformation, which did indeed use the language of the sacred against the established Church. When modern revolutionaries took up the task of translating the felt meaning of political revolution into a constitutional order of law, they thought of themselves as men of the Enlightenment using the language of reason to push religion out of the public sphere. This hardly means that they neither experienced nor relied upon the sacred. In Arendt’s classic analysis, they began by demanding legal rights but ended with an experience of the absolute character of public action. Rights as a means to private ends became a lesser theme to the experience of a kind of transcendent meaning in and through political engagement. In a crisis, it remains true today that the secular state does not hesitate to speak of sacrifice, patriotism, nationalism, and homeland in the language of the sacred. The state’s territory becomes consecrated ground, its history a sacred duty to maintain, its flag something to die for. None of this has much to do with the secular; these are matters of faith, not reason.

The great separation of church and state was intended to place religion squarely within the private domain, outside of the public order of the state. Some supported this position on the grounds that it was good for faith, others on the grounds that it was good for the state, and some on both grounds. Some of our most troubling issues today arise from the crossing of this line of separation, for example, debates over the legal status of abortion or of gay marriage. These debates show us the porousness of the line, for the values we bring to public debate will inevitably reflect our basic beliefs about what it is we owe each other. Those beliefs come from all of our experience, including the ethical practices of our religious faiths. Such tensions are something we all understand. Coming from a religious tradition of monotheism, however, it is much harder to understand a multiplicity of forms of the sacred. Indeed, to speak the language of the sacred about the state suggests not just a violation of the public/private divide, but to many it also suggests a practice of idolatry. Both the religious person and the secularist may agree that they want no gods in the public space: the former because there is only one god, the latter because there are no gods.

Political theology recognizes a multiplicity of forms of the sacred. If sovereignty is grounded in sacrifice, then public life is as much about the realization of a transcendent truth of the self as it is about the maintenance of a just legal order. Political theology, unsurprisingly, has no place in the liberal conception of the state, which begins with Lilla’s great separation not as a historical fact but as a philosophical premise. This difference at the level of theory, however, does not necessarily produce any tension between political theology and the political practices of liberalism. If the political order maintains both an idea of the sacred and an idea of justice, of sovereignty and law, then the point of political theology is not to undermine a particular concept of justice but to expand the horizon within which we understand the operation of the political imagination. Liberal politics may strive to achieve a defensible idea of justice, even as liberal theory fails as an explanation of the source and character of political experience.

The interesting way in which Schmitt was against liberalism had nothing to do with his personal political beliefs and practices, which were indeed antiliberal. Rather, his theory of the political denies the fundamental premises of liberal political theory. This is an argument over the nature of political experience, not over what we should or should not do within the polity. Although Schmitt may not have thought so, one can be liberal in one’s personal political values and practices and still think that we need a theological account of political experience. This is no more difficult than practicing a politics of liberalism while recognizing the importance of revolution to the normative—and historical—foundation of the state. There is nothing liberal about revolution. The relationships at stake here are the political form of that which appears to the individual as the relationship of love to justice. The objects of our love do not earn our affection because they are just, but that does not make us indifferent to justice. We love our children and, therefore, we want them to be just. But we do not abandon our love if they act unjustly.

If we view politics through the lens of contemporary, liberal theory, we will misapprehend the nature of political experience and the meanings that citizens realize in and through their political identities. Elements of political experience grounded in faith and sacrifice will be ignored. We will always be surprised by the violence of which the state—even the liberal state—is capable. Liberalism as a theory of the political fails when political practice turns to killing and being killed, whether that violence is turned inward in the form of revolution or outward in the form of war. We will dismiss the high political rhetoric of sacrifice as dangerous, because it is unreasonable. But only according to liberal theory must the state be a “reasonable” enterprise. Political theology reminds us that apart from reason there remains faith—dangerous as that might be.

Political theology, as I pursue it here, is a project of descriptive political analysis. We are well past the era in which theology could draw upon reason to support the sacred. Indeed, that separation of reason from revelation may be a more important “great separation” than that of which Lilla writes. We will not be convinced by any logical arguments for the existence of God, whether the god of politics or that of religion. Theological inquiry today can only be a practice of phenomenology: to identify and describe the presence of the sacred, wherever it appears.

Political theology gains its critical edge when we juxtapose the products of that phenomenological inquiry to the constructions of liberal political theory. At stake is our understanding of the social imaginary by which we frame our world. There is nothing wrong with setting oneself against the values that are revealed in this account. We are not bound to our political experience as we are bound to the experience of the senses. Understanding the power of the nation does not make me a willing recruit. But unless one begins with an understanding of the character of the social imaginary, one’s oppositional political practices are likely simply to miss their targets. Just as no one will be convinced by argument to believe in God, no faith was ever defeated by argument alone. The ground of faith is in the experience of the sacred, and this works quite independently of reason.

Political theology today is best thought of as an effort to describe the social imaginary of the political. It proceeds at the intersection of constitutional law, cultural anthropology, theology, and philosophy. The inquiry is not to take us back to premodern forms of religious influence on political order, but to the discovery of the persistence of forms of the sacred in a world that no longer relies upon God. Political theology argues that secularization, as the displacement of the sacred from the world of experience, never won, even though the church may have lost. The politics of the modern nation-state indeed rejected the church but simultaneously offered a new site of sacred experience.

By describing his work as theological, Schmitt suggests that the stakes involved are existential and phenomenological. Meaning, not efficiency—experience, not justice—is the issue. While he would no doubt vigorously object to the comparison, he is in some respects not so distant from that other existential explorer of the soul, Sigmund Freud. Both saw a culture desperately looking for possible sources of meaning in the face of a modern crisis of faith. Both doubted the capacity of reason to exhaust the sources of meaning that structure a human life. Schmitt, the constitutional lawyer, differed not so much in his concerns, as in the direction of his inquiry. For him, it was not the individual soul but the soul of the polity—of man in his political, rather than his psychological, aspect—that was the object of inquiry.

Schmitt’s work invites us to develop a political theology for our time. We must pierce the state’s self-presentation as an efficient means of justly advancing individual welfare and look to the experience of the political. Metaphorically, when we put the modern state on the couch, we find a social organism that is simultaneously deeply in fear of its own death (the existential crisis) and in deep denial of the fact that it is willing to do anything at all to put off that death (liberal theory). Looking into the soul of the modern welfare state, we can still see the mysterium tremendum of the sacred, with its tremendous power for both destruction and construction.

This work must be responsive to the particular conditions of an American superpower that simultaneously asks its young people to take up the political burden of sacrifice in the war on terror and seeks to affirm its belief in the rule of law. Many of our deepest conflicts—practically and conceptually—emerge out of this double commitment to a practice of political sacrifice and a practice of law. A sense that something has gone awry was expressed in the repeated critique that the Bush Administration did not ask the nation as a whole to take up the burden of sacrifice. We simultaneously condemned the war in Iraq as mistaken but felt that we should all be sacrificing more for the larger war on terrorism. Dissatisfied as we may be with that war, the problem is not that the nation will no longer respond to a call for sacrifice.

While liberal theory has given us tools to understand the rule of law, it has pushed out of sight the meaning of political sacrifice. To understand the latter, we must turn to something like Schmitt’s ideas of exception and decision. If we imagine the decision as the result of a logical deduction, we will never leave law and liberal theory. The decision that is the act of giving up the self is never the result of logic. It is an existential choice to be—or literally not to be. We can study liberal political theory a very long time and never find this existential moment of self-sacrifice. We can turn from theory to law and still not see the plainest facts of our political life. If politics remains even in part a practice of sacrifice, then we must follow Schmitt into the domain of the theological.

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