*  *  *

NS: What exactly do you mean by the sacred in All Things Shining?

SK: Usually when we talk about the sacred, we punt the question and kick it off to Nietzsche. He said that the sacred is whatever you’re not allowed to laugh at in a given culture. One of the ways that you might characterize our age is to say that there’s almost nothing left that people aren’t allowed to laugh at. You can take a kind of ironic distance with respect to almost anything. That gives us a certain kind of freedom, of course. You might think of that as progress over what we had before. On the other hand, it also destabilizes lives, because it makes it very difficult to know on what basis one should make decisions. In a sense that I think we owe to Charles Taylor, we call this a secular age, an age without a notion of the sacred. That doesn’t mean there are no religious believers in it—obviously there are a lot of religious believers in America, for instance. Instead, it means that the role of religious belief in a person’s life today is different than it was in earlier epochs in the history of the West.  Our commitments, including our religious commitments if we have any, seem to take place in the general social context of what is always and essentially retractable, and for that reason they cannot ground our lives in the way they might.

NS: How does it differ, would you say, beyond everything being potentially funny?

SK: As a matter of caricature, for instance, you could say that in the Middle Ages, if you came across someone who didn’t share your religious beliefs, then it was socially justified for you to think of them as less than human. This was a justification for all sorts of religious wars. But this move doesn’t seem to be socially sanctioned in the modern West. That doesn’t mean that there aren’t people who make that move, but we call them fanatics. I think this is a kind of progress. But such progress has an undermining effect. If it’s true that you have to take seriously the possibility that someone who doesn’t share your religious beliefs is nevertheless living a life worthy of your admiration, then you can’t think that the life that you aspire to live is a life whose principles can be gotten from your religious beliefs alone.

NS: Then is the kind of polytheism that you call for structured by the condition of pluralism?

SK: Yes, I think it is. But this polytheism is importantly different from relativism. It is not the view that any set of values is equally good as any other set of values. Rather, it’s the view that there’s a plurality of possible good lives that people could aspire to live—some of which are incommensurate with others. It leaves open the possibility that some lives are just objectively bad and not worth living. But we’re not in the position, and don’t want to be in the position, of identifying what the objectively bad lives actually are.

NS: Does this polytheism address the existence of gods?

SK: That’s a really good question. And a hard question. I think the book is neutral with respect to that question, at least on one interpretation of it. What the book is against is the idea that the only source of meaning in life is the individual. That’s the view that we think ultimately leads to a kind of destructive nihilism, of the sort that we find in David Foster Wallace, say. In a certain way, we’re against the Enlightenment ideal that the most basic characterization of us is as autonomous agents who can freely give meaning to our own lives. You can’t make something be meaningful for you just by deciding that it’s going to be meaningful. There’s something psychologically plausible about this. If you’re going to experience certain aspects of your life as mattering more than others, you can’t expect that to happen just by deciding it will be so on your own.

NS: But you can expect it from gods? Are your gods really there in some sense?

SK: It would be silly for us to say, for instance, that Athena really exists. Almost nobody would accept that. But there’s a genuine phenomenon that Homer understood, which is the phenomenon of human excellence taking place in the context of masterly, skillful activity, which, when you perform it, isn’t experienced as having you as its source.

NS: Such excellence has to be, even in a vague sense, given to us?

SK: That’s right. Especially if a culture is in danger of nihilism—that we’re going to experience nothing as having any more meaning than anything else—then the conception of human beings that characterizes us essentially as autonomous is going to be inert. We need to look somewhere else. And no other epoch prior to our own was characterized so centrally by the threat of nihilism, precisely because no other epoch rejected so totally the importance of experiencing the meaning of a situation as in some sense given to us. So the question is, is there something in earlier epochs that we could appropriate, consistent with the progress we want to hold on to, that would give us the resources for resisting that threat?  One thought in the book is that it may be worth retrieving and appropriating from our history the various accounts it offers us of how one might cultivate in oneself the capacity to experience the demand for a certain type of excellence as given to one in a life or a situation

NS: It’s common for Western philosophers to go back to the ancient Greeks to answer these sorts of questions, but it’s less common for them to turn to Homer, rather than to Plato. Why do you turn to Homer?

SK: The Homeric age was one in which people stood in wonder at the amazing things—and awful things—that could happen to them in their lives. That’s something like the opposite of the nihilistic threat that many say characterizes our contemporary age. This led us to ask what is operating in the background of Homer’s understanding of the world that motivates him to emphasize this mood of wonder. One thing seems especially important for him: that human beings can’t be acting at their best unless they’re in a situation that is drawing them to act, in which the gods are present in their acting. In the Odyssey, at any rate, in example after example, when the heroes do something extraordinary, it is explained by Homer as involving the work of the gods in the agent’s activity.  That doesn’t mean that the gods are responsible for the agent’s action, but it doesn’t mean the agent’s action was performed autonomously either.  The two need to come together in a kind of Homeric middle-voiced action for human excellence to emerge.  Even when characters are acting at their worst, Homer seems to explain it in terms of characters having provoked the gods to abandon them. This runs directly counter to our age, in which being at one’s best is understood as making free decisions, rationally and autonomously. Of course, we can’t endorse everything Homer said. There are ways in which our culture has made progress over Homer’s culture—abolishing slavery, for instance—and that make us want to hold it at arm’s length. A long arm’s length.  But there’s something interesting in this central thought of his culture nevertheless.

NS: So where does that leave the thinker? You mention passages like—quoting the Odyssey—“Be silent; curb your thoughts; do not ask questions.” Isn’t this antithetical to the very philosophical task you’re engaged in? How does one think about not thinking?

SK: It’s true that thinking of the sort that is central to Western philosophy doesn’t seem to play a central role for Homer. He was interested in a paradigm of human excellence that happens in skilled activity, in one domain or another. When you’re at your best in that domain or activity, you don’t experience yourself as the source of the activity. That’s the phenomenon that we’re interested in. Now, I think you could say that this kind of masterly, skillful activity can happen in the context of thinking. Homer doesn’t say that; his paradigmatic characters are characters of action, not contemplation. But when the great nineteenth- and twentieth-century French mathematician Poincaré talks about the moment of insight, he talks about working really, really hard on a problem, and banging his head against it for days and weeks on end, until some moment when he’s not thinking about it at all and the answer finally comes. He doesn’t experience it as having himself as its source, but as having been given to him. That’s parallel to what Homer was talking about.

NS: How does one cultivate this kind of orientation toward the world, if not by just rationally assenting to it?

SK: In order to put yourself in the position of being able to experience these moments of excellence, you have to acquire certain skills that allow you to navigate certain domains. Whether it is Achilles’ domain of being a great warrior, or Odysseus’s domain of being a great adventurer, or the domain of being a great pianist, there’s some kind of skill—often a bodily, physical kind of skill—that you need to perfect before you have the experience of being drawn to do what the domain demands. I think we’re with Pascal on this. He realized that even if you’ve come to be convinced by his Wager—his argument that it is better to believe in the existence of God than not—it doesn’t mean you’re a believer yet. You can’t make yourself a believer by deciding you should be. Rather, you need to find people who are believers and cultivate in yourself the skill of doing the things that they do. Partake in their rituals; learn their skills. Through that, you at least open yourself up to the possibility that you’ll experience some non-identical authority that leads you to act in certain kinds of situations.

NS: How, then, do you choose which domains are worthy of cultivating?

SK: That’s a difficult question, and I don’t think there’s any general answer to it. We don’t have a substantive proposal in the sense suggested by the question. But what we do think is that, insofar as you’re a human being, you’re the kind of being that already cares about particular domains. One way that you could try to figure out what those domains are is by asking yourself whether your life would be as full if you gave up a certain practice for another one of equal functional value. If you think you could make that substitution without loss, then the domain isn’t really one that you care about. But if you feel somehow that it wouldn’t be right to make that substitution, then you’ve discovered that it’s a domain you care about, and that there’s more you could uncover by developing the skills for navigating it.

NS: So, it’s a process of discovery.

SK: It’s a process of discovery, that’s right. We’re the kind of beings that already care about stuff. But we can fail to recognize that about ourselves by taking an ironic distance from everything. To the extent that we’re successful in achieving that kind of distance, it will eventually become the case that nothing matters for us. It’s a kind of self-fulfilling prophecy. But it also means that we’re the kind of beings that can undo that by coming to recognize what we do care about and allowing ourselves to rediscover the distinctions of worth that are already there.

NS: The subtitle of the book speaks of “rereading the Western classics.” But it also seems like a lot of the classics get tossed out, or at least harshly criticized—everything from the advent of Greek philosophy to Herman Melville is stricken with a kind of blight in this account.

SK: Well, Melville is the savior.

NS: That’s what I mean. So, how would one go about reading Western literature on this account? What do we do with the thousands of years in between? What do we do with Shakespeare?

SK: We don’t talk about Shakespeare in the book, of course. It would take another whole book to talk about Shakespeare.

NS: What, then, are we to get out of the authors you do consider?

SK: On our reading of the history of the West from Plato forward, there’s an increasing emphasis on seeing people as rational, autonomous agents, until it finally becomes the central characterization of ourselves in the modern age. But to the extent that earlier works of art still have in them a sense of us as beings open to an already-given meaning, we think they’ve got something important. Interestingly, different epochs in the history of the West articulate this kind of openness in radically different ways. The wonder Homer has in describing the beauty of Odysseus when he encounters Nausicca, or in describing Helen’s beauty, is a completely different way of being receptive than the sort you find in Dante. Dante thinks that what you’re receptive to is God’s love, which grounds a very different kind of conception of how to live an admirable life than the one we find in Homer. Indeed, their views about the life worth aspiring to are so different that in Dante’s account of the universe Odysseus is consigned to one of the lower circles of Hell. Yet despite this difference, Dante shares with Homer the idea that trying to give meaning to our lives autonomously is what makes things likely to go awry. For him, the people inside the city of Dis are full autonomy freaks, so to speak. They really believe—and Satan is the worst of them all—that the meanings in the world come from the decisions they make rather than from God. Some aspects of Dante’s story are hard to be devoted to, on our view, but he got this really right.

NS: What do we do with the ways in which they fundamentally differ, though? Do we have to choose one over the other—Homer’s Olympians over Dante’s Christ?

SK: The polytheism of the book is a polytheism that runs across Western history. In it, there are lots of different modes of receptivity, and some are incommensurate with each other, but each might nevertheless ground a life that’s worthy of our admiration. It’s up to you and me and every one of us to ask ourselves whether there is anything in a given story that we can appropriate. Each represents a possible way for us to resist the threat of nihilism.

NS: Might this kind of polytheism threaten to bring us around full-circle? You call for “a life attuned to the shining things,” yet this sounds to me suspiciously like a really good description of modern consumer culture.

SK: Those are shiny things, not shining ones!

NS: What, then, is the difference between shining things and shiny things?

SK: David Foster Wallace, for one, was concerned about all the shiny things. He was concerned about the massive amounts of entertainment that we find in our environment, things which won’t let us stop looking at them, and yet looking at them undermines our ability to be at our best. Those are shiny things. Shiny things attract us to themselves, but make us less worthy of people’s admiration in the end. Shining things, as I take it, are the opposite. They’re the kind of things it takes work to be attracted to. You have to cultivate in yourself a skill for recognizing them as attractive. Once you do, they draw you to act in ways that are worthy of admiration.

NS: One of the great aspirations of modern, autonomous reason is to universalize ethics, to agree on what is valuable and what we reject. How does one go about thinking about ethics in your view? There’s a worry among people reading the book that you don’t quite give us what we need to stay away from Hitler rallies. Maybe they see the ghost of Martin Heidegger in what you’re doing.

SK: The Hitler rallies are an important issue; we don’t underplay that. But it’s true that the book doesn’t offer a prescription one can follow that will allow us to distinguish between rhetoric it’s worthwhile to allow yourself to get caught up in and rhetoric it’s dangerous to allow yourself to get caught up in.  We don’t think there is any general rule that will distinguish these cases from one another, and so we don’t think there’s a general principle to apply.  Still, we’re committed to the idea that there is such a distinction, and that one darn well better learn to develop the skill for recognizing it—just as a wheelwright can recognize the distinction, through his skill for working with the wood, between a piece that’s worth using and one that should be thrown out. This might sound risky. It might sound safer to just avoid rallies altogether and stick to just dispassionate rational discourse. But if you are worried about the threat of nihilism, then dispassionate, rational discourse is never going to help. Besides, it really seems as though progress wouldn’t have been made on various issues of social importance if people didn’t allow themselves to get caught up in the passionate rhetoric of an articulate leader devoted to the cause of change.  The example we use in the book is civil-rights legislation.  If there weren’t lots and lots of people who allowed themselves to get caught up in the passionate rhetorical discourse of Martin Luther King, Jr., then it seems likely that the important social changes he provoked would never have occurred. The danger of never allowing yourself to get caught up in those kinds of situations, therefore, is that it keeps changes for the better from happening. That’s the danger that our critics have to confront.

NS: But I don’t think you necessarily have to choose between a King rally and dispassionate, rational discourse. You could think of someone like Dietrich Bonhoeffer, whose response to Nazism was by no means cool and rational, but was still predicated on a kind of universalism. He felt that the one God was speaking to him through history, telling him to assassinate Hitler. Could you claim Bonhoeffer as representing what you propose as well? Or even King himself?

SK: Universalism might be a red herring in this case. In a secular age like ours, nobody really wants to deny that, at least on the surface, there’s an apparently incommensurate range of admirable lives. Universalism, in this context, is just committed to the idea that there is a single, unifying principle that brings them all together. But this is a kind of eschatological hope that I think we can step back from, at the moment. Given that we’re not at the end of time, how are we supposed to live in the context of apparent plurality? It seems to me that even somebody who is committed to an ultimate universal story has to deal with this question. So, yes, maybe Bonhoeffer is the kind of figure we could appropriate.

NS: So, to be clear: you’re not requiring people to abandon their monotheism to partake in your polytheism?

SK: I don’t think our position should require anyone to give up their commitment to monotheism—though it puts pressure on monotheism when it’s interpreted in a particular, fanatical way, and most people in our culture can agree that such fanaticism is something more or less to be avoided anyway. Take, for instance, Ishmael in Moby-Dick. He confronts the character of Queequeg, whose way of life is radically different from his. He’s a cannibal! He eats fifty people before breakfast, he’s tattooed all over, and he’s perverse in all sorts of ways—as far from the Christian way of life as you could possibly imagine. Yet Ishmael, who says he was “born and bred in the bosom of the infallible Presbyterian Church,” concludes that he needs to take seriously what he finds to be admirable in Queequeg’s life. It’s Queequeg’s coffin that finally saves Ishmael. Melville seems to be describing a kind of Christianity open to what is admirable in other ways of life.  This kind of open Christianity may still be committed to the idea that, in ways we cannot fathom from here, there is a kind of unity to the apparently incommensurate goods with which we are confronted.  We have nothing to say against that kind of monotheism.  But we are against Ahab’s idea that the meaning of a life cannot be grounded except in an ultimate understanding now of that eschatological unity.

NS: I’m curious about your reflections about how the book has been discussed and received. What do you think was at stake, for instance, in the vitriolic response from Garry Wills?

SK: It’s a good question.  I’m afraid I don’t really understand Wills’s personal background well enough to know what’s at stake for him. It seems to me clear that something rubbed him the wrong way early on in his reading of the book.  Sometimes when that happens a person loses interest in finding out what the book is really about and starts reading it instead for whatever examples he can find of how to win points against it.  I think that something like that must have happened, since that’s the only way I can explain the huge range of mis-readings that the review promulgates.   I will say that on our blog, Charles Spinosa has written an essay analyzing Wills and David Mikics’s responses as motivated by the very commitment that the book is trying to diagnose as what leads to the danger of nihilism.  That seems to me an interesting possibility.

There are a range of other interestingly motivated responses to the book as well.  I recently discovered, for example, that some people are misreading our appropriation of the Homeric Greeks as something like what Nietzsche did: admiring nobility and strength instead of weakness and humility. Nietzsche thought that the noble warriors of the Greeks were worth admiring because they were noble warriors. But that’s not our position at all. We’re admiring them for almost the opposite reason. We’re interested in the idea that you can’t become noble on your own, that there’s a sense in which we require for our excellence non-self-identical authority, and that, in moments of excellence, we experience that what is not-us as drawing us to act in the way we do.

NS: Since we started on Nietzsche, maybe that’s a good place to end.

*  *  *

What does political theology describe that at the same time eludes political theory? Political theology begins with the existential, and thus pre-legal, moment of revolution and sacrifice to make sense of modern political experience; for revolution, as a form of war, entails sacrifice. That is to say, in war, sovereignty, or preserving the life of the people at all costs, is affirmed. But at the origins of political experience, life, or society, is not merely defended. In the beginning, or, in theological language, at the “Creation” of sovereignty, the community of the living is constituted, as are the structures put in place so that it can be maintained. This constituting moment is called revolution. It is the exceptional moment, the moment of the (declared) exception, the moment of (popular) sovereignty.

But is this just an example of an incomplete break from “premodern forms of religious influence on political order”? No, says Kahn: political theology argues instead for “the discovery of the persistence of forms of the sacred in a world that no longer relies upon God. [It] 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.”

Here we are at the heart of Kahn’s argument. Indeed, it is the key point that Kahn insists must be taken away from Carl Schmitt’s classic Political Theology: Four Chapters on Sovereignty, around which his own book is structured. First published in 1922, at the dawn of the Weimar era in Germany and on the heels of the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, which effectively subordinated Germany to England and France (its two main rival European powers) and stripped it of its colonial holdings—forcibly rendering it, as one theorist has said, “a postcolonial state in a still colonial world”—Schmitt’s Political Theology offered an account of contemporary political experience given the crisis of (German) sovereignty, or the collapse of German peoplehood. Schmitt saw this moment of political crisis as an existential crisis tantamount to death, and as a threat to which liberal political theory as such could not respond. Surrounded by perceived enemies without (its revival European and imperial competitors) and within (the Jew as abject), Germany faced an existential crisis that could be summed up in the Shakespearean phrase: “to be or not to be . . . .” Thus, Schmitt took the question of the political to be at best only secondarily a question of law or constitutionalism. It was principally a question, rather, of authenticity, of being. Hence, “the political,” as Kahn explains, “begins with the distinction of friends from enemies. This is a world in which subjecthood—who you are—makes all the difference.” Schmitt understood that the future of Europe would develop in accordance with such a concept of the political.

Kahn’s objective is to seize upon Schmitt’s deepest insights precisely at this juncture. Now, while I wish he would have done more reflection on the issue of identity (i.e., identity as subject and object, and even more, as abject, as Jews came to be figured within the political field, of which he says nothing at all; I will return to this below), Kahn is surely right to attend to this part of the Schmittian description of politics, sovereignty, and the exception in his effort “to develop a political theology for our [post-Cold War, post-September 11] time.”

When political theology takes the Western political imagination as its object of inquiry—in Schmitt’s case, post-World War I Germany; in Kahn’s and our case, the United States in the age of the war on terror—what is discovered? Kahn argues that one finds an imagination of the exception, or of exceptionalism, as a practice of “ultimate meaning.” Exceptionalism functions within a political and social imaginary fueled by a quest to secure national life by holding at bay an imagined death (think of the ticking time bomb scenario, which the television series 24 put on cinematic display) at the hands of a perpetual if undefined enemy.

This imaginary thus includes as a basic possibility the suspension of law and the use of violence. Exceptionalism, in other words, functions within an imaginary that rests, beyond the rule of law, on the sovereignty of the people, which, before being legal, is first and always existential, a sovereignty that decides who lives and who must die for the sake of life itself, or the preservation of the people. Within this framework for understanding modern political experience, sovereignty is what enables law (not the other way round) and law is shaped by sovereignty, which, as a logic of sacrifice, is invested in securing life over death—by means of death.

The experience of political sovereignty for the sake of life over death, or for the sake of the life that at all costs must stave off death, exceeds theory and discourse. It is a matter of authenticity and freedom, through which the sacred—our own sacredness—appears in history. This is what political theology describes as it looks back to the originary moment of sovereignty, and it is what liberal or political theory cannot describe, and cannot describe because of what might be thought of as its own melancholic disavowal and reinscription of its origins.

*  *  *

From my perspective as a theologian and critical theorist of religion, one of the great gifts of Kahn’s book, as a constructive interaction with Schmitt on the notion of the exception, are the possibilities that it opens up for understanding what’s at stake in the discourse of theology as a mode of humanistic inquiry into the current political machinations of our world, and of America as a state of exception/alism. With Kahn we begin to understand why theology ought not to be reduced to being the parochial or fideistic pursuit of like-minded, if at times fractious, believers and increasingly inconsequential theologians, though far too often, certainly, it is this too. As Carl Schmitt once said, in a letter to Jacob Taubes, “everything is theological, except what the theologians are talking about.” Zeroing in on the heart of Schmitt’s thinking about the political (despite that he put his insights to fascist ends), Kahn calls attention to the form of political life that is coordinated with Christian theological and doctrinal ideas. And it’s worth saying again that I speak of the Christianity that has been collapsed into the project of West. Kahn has put his finger on how the political in which we have come to “live and move and have our being,” as St. Paul put it (Acts 17:28), is a theological field, a field, as I would put it, whose deepest operations remain “Christian”  (again, as it came to be bound up with Western hegemony), though it functions between the denial and the forgetfulness of its ongoing theological being.

Political theology refuses to dwell in such forgetfulness and denial. It attends to sovereignty as the alpha and omega of modern political experience.  It calls attention to the moment of destruction and construction, the moment of apocalyptic eschatology and sovereign creation, that lies at the heart of lived political experience, an experience that also lays claim to the sacred. The political is a sacred field. Inasmuch as it is a correlate of Christian theology, it sovereignly posits itself as “a joint community of gods and men” (Cicero), the community of the God-Man. This is the moment of sovereignty, the constitutive moment of We the People.

Moreover, political theology understands that mediating between eschatology (the telos of such a community) and creation (its origin), between death (as a threat to the community) and life (as its preservation at all costs), is atoning sacrifice. Therefore, atonement is at the heart of the political. Kahn notes, “Our tradition of the theological—in both its religious and political forms has always modeled that double moment of destruction and creation as sacrifice. Sacrifice has been our tradition in the democratic revolutions of the past, on the battlefields of the great wars of the nineteenth and twentieth century, and perhaps now in the sites of confrontation with the terrorist.”

Kahn’s final chapter brings the argument home by turning to the biblical story of the sacrifice of Isaac. This story of sacrifice is the singular narrative of the preservation of the father(-land) in the person of Abraham and the appearance of the divine or the sacred in history to authorize or legitimate self-preservation. History, Kahn notes, unfolds as sovereign sacrifice for sake of the life of the people. This biblical story is at the root of modern politics. It portrays our politics as a politics of sacrifice, which is to say, as a politics that carries out a logic of atoning death to preserve the nation. It is a story in which the human is conceived of as fundamentally a sacrificial animal, a being caught within a kind of “death contract” (Abdul JanMohamed), or within a politics that is always and fundamentally a “necropolitics” (Achille Mbembe).

Theologically, this way of understanding the story of the sacrifice of Isaac eventually became a hermeneutical key for interpreting the death of Jesus Christ, who in classical Christian thought is the God-Man, the head of the ecclesial community. In this way, modern political experience, as the experience of sovereignty, acquired footing in the life of Jesus Christ (i.e., Christology) and in his death (i.e., soteriology, or atonement theory). All of this is to say that death is a most strange political gift, as we have learned from Jacques Derrida, a gift in dialectical relationship with life.

To grasp the deep architecture of the political today, therefore, is to venture into the theological domains of Christology and especially atonement, that area of theology (particularly, Christian theology) that deals with the logic of (redemptive) death. But the journey cannot be simply phenomenological in the way Kahn carries it out. Or, put differently, it may need to be phenomenological, but in a way that Kahn himself has not considered. Atonement thinking, and the “death contract” that binds politics, must, from within a different phenomenology (and therefore from within a different approach to political theology), be redirected. There must be a new future of death and the political.

*  *  *

I have only scratched the surface of Kahn’s richly provocative and, indeed, on so many levels, clarifying text, mainly in celebration of what he has accomplished in it. But I have also just suggested that we must not rest with his phenomenology of the political. I want to conclude with a few thoughts meant to gesture toward what I mean.

Earlier I mentioned that I wish Kahn would have reflected more on the issue of identity formation (i.e., the making of subjects, objects, and abjects) in the constitution and in the telos of the politico-theological field of political experience. This is an important matter, for it provokes the question of what an account of modern political experience, generally, and U.S. exceptionalism, particularly, might look like if it were tied to actual bodies in the world. It is precisely here that Kahn’s account of political theology does not go far enough.

For the most part, Kahn carries out his fine analysis of political theology from a vantage point that privileges those constituted as subjects in the political field of the sovereign We the People. What might a politico-theological examination of the political look like if it were carried out from the vantage of those constructed as “enemy,” or, moreover, (and this is what I’m most interested in) from the vantage of those deemed “abject”?

My colleague Rey Chow (see The Protestant Ethnic and the Spirit of Capitalism), drawing on Julia Kristeva, Elizabeth Grosz, and others, notes that abject is that which is neither wholly a part of the body nor wholly apart from it. Examples of abject substances are tears, saliva, feces, and urine. In terms of political theology as a description of the field of the political, the abject is neither friend (subject) nor enemy (object). The abject exists in the zone between life (full citizenship) and death (the enemy as one who must be killed). As with tears and similar substances that are never fully expelled from the body but that it rather produces as waste matter to maintain itself as a “clean and proper body,” so too is the abject within the field of political theology. Thus, even more than the enemy, it is the abject, as that which is produced in order to maintain the cleanliness and propriety of the body politic, that might prove to be key in understanding the field of the political as a sacred field of sacrificial sovereignty.

Thus, the abject is a figure neither of life nor of death but of living death, or, as Orlando Patterson has put it, of “social death.” This space in-between is both a precarious space of brutality and a flexible space that can be the harbinger of new possibilities. Kathleen McKittrick, in her work on black women in modern social space, has called this “the space between the legs” (see Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle). It is a space that crushes, but also a space that functions as a “loophole of retreat” (Harriet Jacobs), where the project of the human is carried out in a different key. In its flexibility, it is the space of the death of death itself and the space of new human life. The quintessential figure of this political space is the figure of the slave, modernity’s abject par excellence. Could it be that this is the sacrificial figure, along with this figure’s unassimilable progeny, who actually funds sovereignty or peoplehood in the making or constitution of normalized social and political space? And could it be that this is the figure who offers an alternative site, a space “to be” politically otherwise?

Most accounts of political theology today do not approach the political from the vantage of abjection. A qualified exception—no pun intended—can be found in the work of Giorgio Agamben. Agamben, however, theorizes the homo sacer (the abject) as passive, without agency, and therefore does not consider the possibility of an agency particular to the homo sacer—an agency through death itself. Put somewhat differently, death, according to Agamben, is that which acts upon the homo sacer, and not that through which it acts to risk transforming the political structure and experience of death itself. It is perhaps this mode of “abject agency” that Frederick Douglass, to cite but one example, gave voice to in his 1845 Narrative, in which, after his fight with Covey, he declared a “resurrection” of the abject self in the transformed subjectivity of the slave with the words, “I rose.”

My point in positing this other possibility is to suggest that the political experience of abjection, as a mode of being politically otherwise, can supplement, if not reorient, Agamben’s as well as Kahn’s (and others’) work on political theology. But for Kahn to have pulled off a phenomenology of this sort, one that begins with the lived experience of abjection and incorporates the friend-enemy-abject distinction as it has been pressed into the flesh, he would have needed a different set of interlocutors. Among these could have been transnational black intellectuals (or similarly positioned figures), a number of them contemporaries of Schmitt, who in thinking in terms of their own position of abjection, and the position of black folks more broadly in the socio-political and cultural world of modernity, were themselves engaged in reflections on political theology, though many of them did not use the term “political theology” to describe what they were doing. They had to think and act from within what W. E. B. Du Bois often referred to, in an allusion to the psalmist of the Hebrew Bible, as “the Valley of the Shadow Death.”

Besides Du Bois and Douglass, in this group we find thinkers like Olaudah Equiano and Phyllis Wheatley, David Walker and Maria Stewart, and others like Richard Wright and Caribbean intellectuals Amié Césaire, Frantz Fanon, C. L. R. James, Édouard Glissant, and, contemporarily, Sylvia Wynter, Paul Gilroy, and Toni Morrison. This tradition of wide-ranging thinkers has approached the concerns of political theology, concerns over sovereignty in the creation and telos of the field of the political in colonial modernity (which of course is not apart from the field of the social and the cultural), from the sites of abjection and “social death.” Such abject sites are those of the slave ship, the transatlantic slave routes, the slave plantation, the black body itself, or what Fanon called “the lived experience of the black.” These were the sites where sacrificial sovereignty, or normalized peoplehood, was constituted—and contested—in modernity. These were sites of the death-world—the excremental sites, wastelands, archipelagoes (Wynter), and uninhabitable zones of under- and uneven development that helped maintain and regulate Western political life-worlds, worlds like the United States and the European metropoles.

In providing phenomenological descriptions of political sovereignty from the vantage point of abjection, black intellectuals of the sort just named have been involved in a project similar to the one Kahn embarks upon in Political Theology. They have been about the task of both describing and renarrating death, of trying to think toward a new future of atonement and therefore toward a new future of the political itself.

Perhaps the next horizon of political theology as a mode of inquiry is to learn from these and similar kinds of intellectuals. Perhaps it is to begin the work of political theology (understood as a phenomenology of the political) neither from the subject (the citizen) nor the object (the enemy), but from the abject (the one who is “both-and” and “neither-nor”). Until then, we have been given much to think about with Paul W. Kahn’s fine and timely book.

I don’t doubt that this interesting focus is quite different from mine, though I think it would be wrong to represent my view as being focused on the theological. In my analysis, the theological had only a central genealogical role to play in the process of “disenchantment.” But, I had argued that the fallout of the theological—once the theological transformations were exploited in alliances forged between established religious interests, commercial interests, and the mandarin interests of organized scientific bodies (such as the Royal Society)—was impressively diverse, ranging from transformations in political economy to political governance and, further yet, to the mentalities of human culture in its relation to the natural world. So the focus, if any, on the theological was intended wholly to emphasize that, unlike purely materialist accounts, I was following more refined Marxists like Christopher Hill, who had written of the importance of the conflict of religious ideas in shaping the period of history in which I had invested my genealogical efforts.

I may have misled Bennett with the remark she quotes in her comment: “The point is not that nature in some self-standing sense is to be understood as enchanted, but rather that the world, understood as nature in its relations with its inhabitants, and a tradition and history that grows out of these relations, comprises the external evaluative enchantment.” One theme in my essay was to ask the question: “When and how did we transform the concept of nature into the concept of natural resources?” But, having raised the question, I had worried that it may seem to some that my interest in raising it was a narrow, ecological one. Because I didn’t want to ghettoize the question of nature into just this narrow self-standing concern, I wanted it to relate the “natural” with larger issues of politics, history and culture, and the quoted remark was only intended to convey that broader interest. The idea was not to deny—indeed, it was to assert—that material nature was suffused with value properties that made normative and affective demands on one. It’s just that nature was not to be seen as merely the value-laden material elements among the “actants” that Bennett describes, but also the relations between the actants and human actors and a tradition and history of those relations.  The idea was never to say that the latter in some way canceled the possibility of the former.

I think if there is disagreement between us, it is not about the relevance of the material elements and their normative status but about whether the fact of this circulatory mood that she describes as central to her idea of enchantment can support her claim that there was no loss of enchantment in the modern period. She says: “There is thus no need (contra Bilgrami) to  ‘re-enchant’ the secular world, though there remains the task of becoming more sensitized to the enchantments, the callings, already at work.”  But, in my view, there can be no understanding of the fact of our having become desensitized to enchantments without conceding what she doesn’t want to concede to me, which is that the world is viewed by us in ways that are properly described as disenchanted in just the way I had expounded.

Disenchantment, in my understanding of that process, was a result (a fallout, as I said above) of our having (among other things) over-intellectualized our relations to the world (including nature) as a result of having come to see it in a certain way: as not containing the properties that would make normative demands on us. Because of theological changes that led to viewing the world (including nature) as desacralized, one fundamental source of seeing the world as containing the value properties (good or bad, hostile or benign) that make normative demands on us was removed from our conception of the world. And this played a central role in seeing the world as alien to our sensibilities of practical engagement, something which became for us something either to be studied in a detached way or, when practically engaged with, to be engaged with as something alien, to be mastered, conquered, and controlled for our utility and gain, as in the extractive economies that were systematically generated first in that period.

I’ve italicized “conception” and “for us” in order to make clear that disenchantment cannot be understood as a process without understanding the desensitization that Bennett opposes when she says she wants us to be more “sensitized.”  She can’t have what she wants here without also opposing “disenchantment,” as I understand the term and, therefore, equally proposing “re-enchantment,” as I understand the term.

I would diagnose this misunderstanding of “disenchantment” on her part as perhaps reflecting a rather deep philosophical disagreement between us on how to conceive of nature and matter, when we conceive of it in the non-mechanized way that we both wish to do. My stress on “conception” and “for us” are meant to convey something like the following conception of nature and matter. When one views nature and matter as not merely mechanized, as not merely something that we study in the natural sciences, i.e., with relative detachment, one views it as essentially containing properties that can’t be understood correctly unless one sees our capacity for responsiveness to them with our practical agency (that is what the “for us” was doing in my use of it above, stressing the relevance of this responsiveness) as built-into the kind of properties they are. They are not properties that are anyway there, independent of the kind of sensibility (our sensibility for practical normative engagement) that we, as agents, have. This does not mean that we mentally construct and project these properties onto the world, which in itself is brutely material (in the sense that “mechanized” is supposed to convey). It is a non-sequitur to say that, just because a certain property (value properties) in the world can only be viewed by a certain kind of sensibility (the one that subjects or creatures possessed of a certain self-conscious agency possess), the subjects who possess that sensibility must be constructing these properties and projecting them onto the world. That is what Hume and others influenced by him think to this day, and they were first systematically encouraged to do so by the transformations that I was calling “disenchantment” that began in the late seventeenth century. In my view, the properties are really properties of nature and matter, they are not constructed by us. But they are properties in some sense “for us,” since those who do not possess the kind of self-conscious agency that is moved by normative demands would see darkness in the world where we might see it as containing values making those normative demands.

If her “actants” are not conceived this way, then what she means by “actants” is not what I would have meant by them, had I used that word.  In fact, I would have thought one has not gotten past mechanization, if one didn’t think of nature and matter as containing properties of the kind I am suggesting, over and above the properties studied by natural science.

Thus, when Bennett says we should be more sensitized to the participatory role of material “actants” (that is, to what I, in my terminology, call the normative demands of the value properties in nature and matter), she is precisely saying what I, in my terminology, mean when I say that our angle on the world should be less detached and more responsive to its normative demands. But this predominance of detachment was exactly what was generated by the process of disenchantment, as I understand that process. Hence, there is no avoiding “re-enchantment” if ‘sensitization’ is what you seek.

There may also be something to sort out between us (a possible disagreement, I mean) on the subject of agency, though I rather think it may be more verbal than substantial. Bennett says: “There is a difference between these nonhuman actants and a human (compound) individual, but neither considered alone has real agency. The locus of agency is always a human-nonhuman collective. Bilgrami himself makes a gesture toward the distributive quality of agency in his notion of an external calling from tradition and history, two complex assemblages formed by many different agents at work over different times and places. But these assemblages are not ones in which nonhumans qualify as real participants.”

I am going to put aside what I have already clarified, viz., I am not emphasizing history and tradition with a view to denying that material and non-human elements of nature can make normative demands on us.

Nor do I want to deny that there may be collective and distributed agency of various sorts. So, I don’t think that is the issue between us either, if there is one at all.

I gave an argument in my essay for saying that we wouldn’t be agents if there were not such things as “actants,” as I would use that term. In other words, we would not be agents if there were not normative demands being made on our agency by value properties in matter and nature, that is, value properties in the world that we inhabit. And when I say that these value properties and actants make demands on us, I suppose that I am asserting that they are “real participants,” to use her expression. But there are ways to be “participants” in “assemblages” (these are all her and Latour’s terms, not mine, but I am using them in a way that I find plausible, which may not be what is intended by them) without possessing the kind of self-conscious agency we possess. I would deny that value properties in nature and matter that make normative demands on us are themselves agents in this self-conscious sense. So their demands on us are not intentional demands. They do not intend to make those demands since they don’t have any intentions.

She might even grant this and say that intentional agency of a kind that implies the capacity for self-consciousness of the sort we possess, is not the only kind of agency that there is. I would have no objection to that, so long as one keeps different uses of the word agency apart and makes clear which one is in play. But, in the passage I have just cited, Bennett denies that we (human beings) have “real” agency. Well, in that case, she and I must mean different things by agency. And it is not credible to me that she is denying that we possess something that has been called “agency” for centuries by philosophers, and not just philosophers. So she must be stipulating a use of the term agency (let’s use her term for it, “real agency”) that is different from this. It is supposed to be something that has a more distributed locus than being located in either us, human actors, or in non-human “actants.” I think the interest of that stipulated use of the word agent (“real agent”) would depend on what systematic philosophical use it was put to. Bennett, in a short blog, doesn’t say enough for me to assess that. But, however that assessment may turn out, what we would be assessing can’t be something that stands in disagreement with me—if disagreement means that she says something that I deny or vice versa. I have not said that no one can find any form of agency in the world other than of the sort that I am discussing with the term agency.  And since it is not credible that she is denying that there is something of the sort I mean by the term agency, which human beings posses but pharmaceuticals or bacteria (to take just two examples of the “actants” that “participate” in her “assemblages”) don’t possess, we can resolve all these issues amicably in the word, by disambiguating the term agency in these ways. The disambiguation, it would appear, goes three ways. There is the kind of agency we possess. There is the kind of agency that “actants” possess. (If we see them, as I do with my metaphor, as “making normative demands” on us, or if we see them, as Bennett does, as “participants,” I suppose they must be allowed some “agency,” even if not ours).  And then there is the distributed agency that Bennett calls “real agency,” which is neither of the above. I look forward to reading her book, which, judging from the hints given in this blog, brings the third of these to centre-stage. But with this disambiguation in place, I cannot see that I have to withdraw anything I said on the basis of anything that is allowed in allowing this third notion of agency.

One final point of what seems like a more substantial disagreement. Bennett ends her blog with the following comment on my notion of enchantment: “But it [her idea of enchantment] seems also more attentive than Bilgrami is to the fact that an emergent and generative universe is not pre-designed to ensure human justice or happiness, is not fully predictable, and does not necessarily tend toward equilibrium. Thus Bilgrami’s quest for ‘a life of harmony between the demands of an external source and our dispositional responses to its demands’ seems not quite right.   A certain disharmony is built into the world at large and also into the mood of enchantment, which includes discomfort in the face of forms of material agency that one can neither master nor ignore. Thus it is that I find ethical utility in the experience of alienation, whereas Bilgrami seeks ways for secular moderns to live an ‘unalienated life.’”

I think this is a rather basic misunderstanding of my view. Indeed I think there is a straightforward and unnoticed double movement with which the words “harmony” and “unalienated” are used in this passage that leads directly to this misunderstanding.

There is one sense or use of the term harmony in which I was not suggesting that a world that was enchanted would induce an unalienated or harmonious life within it. Suppose we saw the world as enchanted, in my sense of the term. To do so is to see it as, not merely mechanized, but containing value properties that make normative demands on us. Let’s work with a simple example, simpler than the ones that involve her more complicated “actants,” though nothing that I will have to say is such that it can’t be extended to more complicated examples. Let’s say that there is a meteorological perturbation off the coast of Bangladesh. Now, if there is to be enchantment of the sort I have in mind, that fragment of the world (nature, matter) is to be described, not just in that detached way (“meteorological perturbation”), as natural science would, but also as a fragment of the world which contains a “threat.”  Threats are value properties in nature. They are not constructions of our vulnerability, which are then projected onto nature, as the disenchanted worldview would have it. But even though they are in nature, the natural sciences don’t study threats. Threats make normative demands on our practical agency, not demands for detached explanatory study, as meteorological perturbations do. Notice, however, that this particular value property off the coast of Bangladesh is certainly not harmony-inducing (in this first sense or use of the term, “harmony”) to the Bangladeshi fisherman living in a thatched dwelling on the coast, seeing it come in his direction. It is a threat, after all. It is, if you like, just what Bennett describes with her term “hostile.” It is a hostile part of the enchanted world. So, no harmony in one sense or use of the word “harmony,” despite enchantment.

Even so, it might be that that value property in that fragment of the world makes a normative demand, let’s say on the municipality of that Bangladeshi locality to do one or another thing to remove the threat to the fisherman and his hut. If there were a suitable agentive responsiveness on the part of those on whom the normative demand was made, that would be a small and, as I said, very simple example of human agency being in sync with the normative demands of appropriate properties of matter and nature. When there is such responsiveness to such demands, there is “harmony” in a second, quite different sense and use of the word than the sense I mentioned above. And this harmony is a harmony between human agency and non-human properties of matter and nature.

It seems apparent, then, that there need not be any disagreement between Bennett and me on any of this. I have accommodated what she means by hostility and disharmony in the relations in her “assemblages,” and I have shown how it is quite compatible with what I had in mind by talking of harmony generated by seeing the world as containing value properties (threats over and above meteorological perturbations) and our suitable agentive responses to them. All we need to do is avoid a conflation of two different uses of words like harmony and alienation.  Let there be all the hostility and disharmony she finds in these relations. It does nothing whatsoever to register disagreement with my points about a quite different notion of an unalienated life.

My notion of alienation is, if I understand her views, probably very close to a state of affairs that results from a too great “desensitization” to the elements of enchantment that she finds in the world. By this criterion of what is and is not alienated, one partly (though not wholly) overcomes alienation by even so much as recognizing (becoming “sensitized” to) the enchanted elements in the material environment, including what she describes as the “hostile” elements. To move from this partial to a more complete overcoming of alienation would require being responsive with our agency in the way I was describing above to the normative demands of the enchanted elements, including the hostile ones. The value properties in an enchanted world, as I said earlier, are defined upon our capacity to recognize them, but they are not defined upon our actually recognizing them and certainly not defined upon our being responsive to their normative demands in our practical agency. So she is very wide of the mark when she describes my view as being committed to something “pre-designed to ensure human justice or happiness.” I dare say, it is no more pre-designed to do so than her notion of enchantment.

She is right, however, to point out that I do stress the moral, perhaps measurably more than she does. That is already evident in the fact that my rhetoric is the rhetoric of value-properties (some of which are bound to include normative moral demands on us) whereas her rhetoric is restricted to talk of circulating “moods and affects.”  My view derives from an Aristotelian picture of morals (if some recent interpretations of Aristotle, owing to John McDowell, are correct in their interpretations), where values in the world prompt our moral agency, rather than moral agency emanating entirely from a self-standing psychology, as in Hume and the very widespread Humean legacy of contemporary Ethics, which sees the world beyond our subjectivity as evacuated of anything that is not within the purview of natural science. It looks to me as if Bennett has no interest in seeing enchantment as, in this way, being part a wider metaphysics in which the metaphysics of morals is one embedded element. I detect only phenomena such as mood, affect, and the political implications of seeing enchantment along those lines, in what she has to say.

I can’t myself see a way to a politics that flows from questions of enchantment without also seeing morals as flowing from it. Politics, in my view, can’t be in an orbit entirely of its own, independent of considerations of moral and other values. There is nothing moralistic in claiming this. It is not as if, in saying that the politics generated by recognizing such things as “actants” must be related to the normative moral demands that those things make on us, one is identifying the “politics of things” with those normative moral demands. Still, relating them together may put some theoretical constraints on how we are to understand the “politics of things.”  I don’t know if Bennett would want to impose such constraints on the politics she would want to embed in a notion of enchantment. Her rhetoric in general and her criticism of me in particular (the criticism that, unlike her, I stress the moral) doesn’t make it obvious how she would permit such a constraint. But I say all this with some hesitation. I would need to read more of her work in detail to be able to say anything more confidently.