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.

I come into this debate at the very end, with the benefit of hindsight and having taken stock of what has been already written and discussed by the author and the reviewers. Others have focused on several relevant aspects of Kahn’s re-elaboration of Schmitt’s themes, and their translation, or mistranslation, into the context of contemporary American politics (for instance, the curious association between Schmitt’s work and a philosophy of freedom). I agree with many of the comments on this philological quotation/re-signification of Schmitt, especially with most of Jean-Claude Monod’s contribution, as well as the emphasis on the “geopolitical imperative” (to quote Anders Stephanson’s title) with regard to the debate the book opens.

Kahn’s book represents an attempt to “think with Schmitt” in order to tackle, unambiguously, the fate of the state of exception in recent American domestic and foreign policy. According to Kahn, political theology is needed to counter the limits of the political doctrine of liberalism for comprehending the shape of the contemporary American definition of the “concept of the political,” to use Schmitt’s terminology. Indeed, opposing legal positivism as well as contemporary re-incarnations of natural law theory, Kahn locates, within the frame of the constitution, an ineffable remainder or excess—violence, the sacred—that liberal legal theory cannot subsume.

Kahn’s effort is aimed at focusing the debate on the political on the question of the exception, as opposed to the norm. (“The concept of popular sovereignty links the Constitution—and thus the Rule of Law—to the Revolution, and thus to the exception”). Political theology is thus presented here as the “mirror image,” or inversion of liberalism and any such theories that “ignore the exception.” Political theology, writes Kahn, locates “sacrifice” in the place where liberal theory locates “contract,” that is, at the source of political community. We could add that political theology operates at the level of essence, not appearance. It finds its roots in revolution, as foundation of the law, as well as in revelation as a fundamental register of the political.

Hence, the tenets of liberal positive theory are opposed in Kahn’s book via recourse to questions of state violence, revolution, terror, and sacrifice as the key political categories that are the platform for a post-foundational constitutional theory and juridical doctrine. That is, what is presented here as the underlying objective basis of the political, instead of Kant’s categorical imperative-as-transcendental judgment, is the immanence of popular sovereignty embedded in the Constitution. Or, if we interpret somewhat freely: instead of the fullness of Kelsen’s foundational law or Ground Norm, the absolute void of Ground Zero.

Indeed, Ground Zero, although not explicitly referenced, is a spectral figure in Kahn’s text, as a ghostly evocation, as the perverse core of a foundation-less political ontology, as the dénouement of the law’s tautological nature. If political theology is the “mirror image” of liberal theory (“not law but exception; not judge but sovereign; not reason but decision”), we could consider Ground Zero as the inverted, opposite reflection of Rawls’s “original position,” undisclosed after the proverbial veil of ignorance has been ripped away (and Rawls is one of the main implicit interlocutors of this text, as Kelsen was for Schmitt). Ground Zero, appears thus unconcealed, standing for the empty locus of power, as in Claude Lefort’s conception of democracy, which takes the form of a question in his seminal study on the “permanence of the theologico-political.”

Kahn identifies as the main contemporary political problem the question of the unmediated and unlimited sovereign decision over the space of that void, beyond any norm, even ground norm. “The defining conceptual struggle of our political age is whether the response to terrorism should be thought of a matter of law enforcement or as a matter of war,” asserts Kahn, quoting a recent key article in the Harvard Journal of Law and Public Policy. Thus, the problem of terror, or, more precisely, a war on terror without end, which immanently violates and transforms national and international law as it unfolds, is the background of the discussion explored in this text. There is a genealogy that is implicitly evoked in the book, in its emphasis on the limitations of liberal theory to address the present state of things and its source in the “terrorist threat.” This is the genealogy of modern liberalism, universal rights, and the contemporary source of the political doctrine of terrorism, famously located in the Terror of revolutionary France, as well as in the actions of then-labeled “terrorists” of the original Tea Party, and the American revolutionary war (the historical event often quoted by Kahn as foundation of the power of the American Constitution).

This evocation, which could be read between the lines of Kahn’s arguments, leads to what I would paraphrase as one of the book’s main corollaries, as I see it, which could be summarized as follows: the problem that all justice is, in the end, revolutionary justice. Thus, Kahn’s book is a terrific tool to render open a debate in the current geopolitical moment, in which it seems that certain minor, yet perhaps key steps have been taken in the direction of the dismantling of the state of exception de facto implemented in the last decade. The text references in particular legal and historical documents on the pronounced disdain for internal regulations and global jurisdiction enacted by the U.S. executive, as well as the location of the authority of that Executive above and beyond the control of the law, as stated by the U.S. Department of Justice.

The main framework of the text deserves praise for its emphasis on a revelatory and sacrificial notion of the political. However, one may also note a theoretical sleight of hand in Kahn’s work, whereby critique becomes “neutral” phenomenology, and political theology is transposed onto an extreme version of liberal theory. This slippage is most evident in the passage from exception to exceptionalism, from situated critique to apparent neutral description; in sum from the study of the American state of exception to a view on America as an exceptional state. As other participants in this debate have already pointed out, this slippage occurs in particular around the dubious generalization about “Americans,” which is a key indexical term operating in many of the main arguments in this text. This salvage of a unified national(ist) subject as the locus of popular sovereignty paves the way to the analogous slippage from “we the people” to various instantiations of “we” and “us,” which in my view undermine many of the important assertions that the text offers.

From the viewpoint of governance and geopolitics, we can observe many continuities between recent administrations of seemingly opposite political orientations. The alleged religious undertones audible in the “deep pragmatism” of the ghost-writers of current governance, their underwriting of a spectral global sovereignty might not be all that different from a previous political theology of mythic war and suspension of national and international law. Indeed, some of the personnel in charge of the Treasury, or war and defense operations, have, pragmatically, remained the same.

A similar structure of sovereignty, of revelation-as-revolution, might still be in place. And yet, these continuities do not grant the certitude endowed in this text to the all-encompassing figure of the “Americans,” or the generalizations about “American ” legal theory or political doctrine. Even at that level of the juridico-political there exist certain ruptures which reflect aspects of sheer historical difference (historical, cultural, political, ideological, or ethnic) present in the spectrum of this apparently unified national “popular sovereign.” It remains unclear how these differences can be put to the side—unless “America,” as a central political category of our times, is considered as yet another theological category that has become secularized, as Schmitt claimed of most all-encompassing modern concepts relating to “the doctrine of the state.” In Kahn’s book, we might find the liberal, secularized version of the conservative credo on a national manifest destiny.

And yet, the slippage from exception to exceptionalism produces assumptions that are quickly taken for granted, undermining some of the book’s own premises. It is not readily apparent that a “global sovereign” would dismiss international law and global jurisdiction only on the basis that those are allegedly “not founded on popular sovereignty.” Similarly, a global sovereign conducting over the long term a Schmittian politics pivoting on the absolute distinction between friend and enemy through “state violence”—directly or by proxy—will constantly encounter opposing threats from actors that are more than “imagined potential enemies.”

Such an outcome appears more likely when one considers the logic of sacrifice. Kahn offers an impressive reflection on this topic, and its centrality for political theory and international relations. Yet this perspective is oddly one-sided. Sacrifice most commonly refers to “an act of slaughtering an animal or person or surrendering a possession as an offering to a deity.” Kahn, however, focuses on self-sacrifice, the risking of one’s own life in the pursuit of political transformation by revolutionary means. It is an angle that leaves little said regarding those acts of “mythic violence” that would found the law through the sacrifice of the other. After all, it is Abraham, not Isaac, the focus of the reflection at the end of the book, who performs the sacrifice upon hearing the “command of the sovereign God.”

Finally, I will elaborate on a broader point. In his pursuit of popular sovereignty as the locus of the legitimacy of the Constitution, Kahn displaces sovereignty to the realm of the ordinary, in the everyday practice of ruling by decision within courts of law, and in the authentic “existential choices” that individual citizens make as members of a larger popular sovereign. Beyond the theoretical discussion on where popular sovereignty actually resides within a liberal democracy (from Rawls to Derrida’s Rogues), this approach recalls a different, if related, perspective on law and violence than that of Schmitt. Walter Benjamin’s conception of sovereignty and exception emerged from an implicit conversation with Schmitt’s work on political theology and elicited explicit responses from the latter. The Möbius strip of correspondences between Schmitt and Benjamin (different commentators argue about who was responding to whom in that intellectual debate), even if opaque, fits well with the perspective on sovereignty presented by Schmitt.

Kahn, seemingly falling back into the main principles of liberal constitutional theory, conflates two levels, or two scales, of legal decisionism. But here the blindness of justice produces a blind spot. Something exceeds the implicit analogy between sovereign decision—which is always already theologico-political—and the minor scale of sovereignty in terms of jurisdiction, as exercised by courts. Benjamin’s proverbial dialectical distinction between the violence that founds the law and the violence which preserves the law illuminates the remainder at play in that fast operation that runs through Kahn’s book. The text has the virtue of locating in the original historical context of revolution the moment of emergence of a violence that founds the law. Yet courts of law, enacting the power of jurisdiction, solely embody, through localized judgment, a mythic violence that conserves the law.

Moreover, a theoretical hypothesis which haunts the text through various scattered references, that of the possibility of the sovereign destruction of the whole world—of a force founding sovereignty on a global scale—articulates perfectly with the other type of force defined by Benjamin: divine violence. Benjamin’s divine violence refers to an absolute anomic violence, residing beyond any juridical order, as the tain of the law’s mirror, as a violence of pure means without end, which opposes the law and legally mandated violence. Benjamin ascribes to it an enigmatic “bloodless” character, which would accommodate the question of nuclear power invoked often by Kahn.

The book’s emphasis on sacrifice and death gives it a mournful tone, which seems to reflect a contemporary landscape in which legal theory and historiography, in the context a of war without end, of violence as pure means, becomes a “play of mourning.” This is not unlike the historical backdrop of Benjamin’s study of political sovereignty in the German baroque drama, where he paraphrased Schmitt, crucially displacing his notion of exception. Schmitt’s political theology was a perspective on the alleged inaction and the dead-end “crisis of parliamentary democracy” as well as on a profound crisis of consciousness of the concept of the People in a specific nation-state, at a precise historical moment. Kahn’s invocation of this doctrine in an altogether different space and time highlights interesting potential parallels. Kahn’s analysis of the competing juridico-political terrain of the American “response to the threat of terrorism,” ends with a description of liberal democracy as a system that cannot localize the place of the power to decide. There is more than a tacit invocation of Schmitt in that passage.

In this contemporary moment of history as a politics of mourning, the figure of the sovereign might correspond to the one studied in Benjamin’s treatise on the Baroque. This mannerist sovereign “excludes exception,” endlessly deferring the moment of decision, incapable of achieving judgment in a political world managed by courtiers and intrigants. Our present might belong to the figure of the Bataillean sovereign, destined to be sacrificed by the logic of sovereignty itself.

One issue I want to raise, though, is the specter of American exceptionalism that haunts the book. Haunts, actually, may be too mild a word, since Kahn enthusiastically embraces the exceptional nature of American politics and law, and does so in absolutist terms (perhaps this is just the unfortunate sign of the legal mind at work, as is also the case in Schmitt). Of course, much of the book is devoted to pointing out how “extra-legal” America’s use of violence for political ends is, as opposed to that of Europe, while the typical right-wing elaboration of American exceptionalism tends to avoid this issue in favor of a reliance on the USA’s special, God-given dispensation to address the evils of the world wherever they occur. Even those who do not directly invoke the divinity or the duty of foreign adventurism in expressing their high regard for the country nevertheless often slip into a discourse in which the Sonderweg of the United States is dearly held. Kahn’s is a more sobering account of that Sonderweg, though it still weirdly (as Monod points out) ends up discovering a notion of freedom in Schmitt that could be appropriately applied to America’s exceptional (and exceptionally permanent, for Kahn) “state of exception” where extra-legal violence is concerned.

But it seems to me that all versions of political exceptionalism, whatever the ends to which they are put, are fundamentally wrong-headed. That is, no one would deny that each nation, even each Western liberal democracy, is somehow unique—France’s religious and courtly heritage is obviously quite different from Britain’s national (if we can call it that) Bildung. But if we are going to be historically circumspect and careful, then it does us little good to make such differences absolute. No matter how large the gap when it comes to legal or constitutional formations and predispositions (Napoleonic and codified in France, common-law to a large extent in the UK), we also need to acknowledge how far nation-state structures and geo-political exigencies create remarkable similarities (for example, France and Britain, despite chauvinist claims on both sides, ran empires with similar goals, similar legal chicanery, similar brutality, and similar denouements; both countries today attack the Islamic veiling of women in ways that would be unthinkable in the US; both are highly secular, and so on).

And yet Kahn has no difficulty speaking in absolutes about the US. “The juridification of politics is the leading idea of the Western European political order today. To the question of whether there can be sovereign action beyond the rule of law, European institutions have answered with a resounding no. All political violence is limited to law enforcement: no exceptions.” By contrast, Americans “live comfortably with their long history of citizen sacrifice in national wars,” so that popular history is the history of “violent force against enemies,” which is then “endlessly reinforced” when “Americans take their families to Valley Forge and Gettysburg, and even Omaha Beach.” (For the record, I have been to none of these places.)

I have read these passages numerous times, and I still do not get the supposed appropriateness of the contrast on page 16, the “on the one hand, on the other hand” structure that Kahn presumes is obvious to his reader. Yes, I agree, Americans do wave flags more than Europeans, and yes, as Kahn suggests, they do not see their history through the prism of the concentration camp or bombed out cities. But how the notion of “sacrifice” in war—and “sacrifice” is a crucial term in Kahn’s argument—came to be a uniquely American characteristic, one clearly absent on the Continent, remains a historical puzzle in Kahn’s book. It is as if this sense of “sacrifice” derived solely from the constitution (and I mean this in both the conceptual and legal sense) of the US, whereas its absence in Europe is also fundamentally constitutional. But this makes a hash of twentieth-century political history.

First, as should be obvious, the idea of “sacrifice” for the nation (or the city-state) goes back at least to Pericles. Second, modern European history is in many ways nothing but what Kahn (referring only to the US) calls “the long history of citizen sacrifice in national wars.” The scale on which French and German “citizens” (and they were that) sacrificed themselves during WWI alone dwarfs by orders of magnitude all American “sacrifices” in the last hundred years. We will not even begin to talk about Soviet or German “sacrifices” in WWII, or the sacrifices of Japanese soldiers in the Pacific or in kamikaze squads. Only one American war even comes close—the Civil War—and this of course was the one war not fought against foreign “enemies.” Given the level of the carnage, it is little wonder that Europeans have less of a taste for foreign adventurism than Americans do today. But even this reluctance did not happen overnight (even the Europeans, that is, learn slowly). French soldiers continued to sacrifice themselves in large numbers in Vietnam and—with a fairly enthusiastic use of extra-legal torture against their “enemies”—in Algeria in the 1950s. Of course, outside Europe, Korea and Vietnam made the sacrifice of citizens against foreign enemies something of a sacred cause. The Vietnamese were far more enthusiastic about sacrificing themselves for their nation than the disaffected Americans were between 1965 and 1973—the results prove it, I think. It would be hard to show that the Americans were more willing than the French to sacrifice themselves in Vietnam, and both were less willing than the Russians were (for a time, at least) in Afghanistan. The enthusiasm among British citizens for war in the Falklands was palpable and was far greater than Americans’ willingness to sacrifice themselves, in a comparably ridiculous war, in Granada. Had I the time or space, even a cursory discussion of Israel, where the willingness of citizens (again, in a Western European sense) to sacrifice themselves for the sake of the nation remains unabated to this day—just try throwing stones over the border—and far outstrips, say, US citizens’ willingness to sacrifice themselves in defending the border with Mexico. (Ok, in Arizona, I agree, there are some folks who may feel this way, but even big-chested Rick Perry in Texas has more or less admitted, to the dismay of the Tea Party, that he will not lay down his life to defend El Paso from Mexicans.)

When Kahn writes about the exceptional and unique nature of Americans’ willingness to sacrifice themselves, even in extra-legal circumstances, for the nation, and then traces this willingness back to the unique nature of the US’ political constitution, I cannot avoid thinking of the great Viennese scholar Otto Brunner, perhaps the most important follower of Schmitt, völkisch thinker, and Nazi-identified historian of the Third Reich. Brunner’s summa is (in English) called Land and Lordship: Fundamental Questions on the Territorial Constitutional History of Southeast Germany in the Middle Ages. Like Kahn, Brunner accepted Schmitt’s definition of the political as the opposition of friend and foe; like Kahn, he accepted the irreducibility of political theology in the liberal state, that is, the state defined by the opposition of state and society. Like Kahn, he believed that the unique political constitution (both conceptual and legal) of a particular people (in this case, the Germans) was completely unsuited to the dominant liberal nation-state juridical and political order of Europe, an order based (just as Kahn himself puts it) on the idea that the rule of law and the state’s consequent monopoly on violence (only the state’s violence is permitted, and it is only permitted when it is lawful—no exceptions) is the essence of justice. And like Kahn, Brunner argued that one people, and only one people—the Germans—were constitutionally incapable of following the rule of such a European order of nation-states, and hence needed to reclaim a sense of freedom in the extra-legal use of violence, such as could be found in feuds and clan retribution, in the sense of the sacred that binds them organically to the soil and to one another, and most of all, in the sacrificial loyalties of the medieval Austrian Reich. When Kahn writes, late in his book, that “political authenticity, as it emerges in a study of political theology, is that experience of the unity of being and meaning that marks the presence of the sacred,” Brunner would have agreed wholeheartedly. And Brunner would also have agreed with Kahn that, alas, such an “experience” could not be found among the liberal nation-states of Europe, though he certainly hoped, in 1939, that Germany would soon show Europe how it might be achieved.

Kahn surely shares little of Brunner’s rabid, expansionist, and anti-Semitic nationalism. But his critique of the modern liberal nation-state from the vantage point of political theology is of a piece with much that has appeared recently, a fair amount of it deriving from both Schmitt and Walter Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence,” which rejects both the earlier natural law tradition and the positive law of the nation-state. From the work of Giorgio Agamben, for whom the inevitable denouement of the nation-state is totalitarian Nazism, to the “Red Tory” revanchist theology of John Milbank, and the delirious Christian Stalinism of Salvoj Zizek, a certain strain of academic theory has emphasized that the nation-state after Hobbes rests on an absolutist basis—a monopoly on violence—that its own constitutional presumptions must constantly disavow under the guise of “lawfulness.”  Ironically, Brunner’s own deeply conservative, National Socialist thinking is in complete agreement with such indictments. Yet what Brunner demonstrates at the same time, albeit unintentionally, is that the attempt to find a final solution to the aporia of the liberal state’s political theology—its seemingly endless and irresolvable process of secularization—may be far worse than the aporia itself.

There are, of course, many ways of reading Schmitt, depending, I suspect, on the reasons that one is led to Schmitt in the first place (and the particular texts from Schmitt’s long and prolific career that one wishes to emphasize). Kahn treats Schmitt primarily as a jurisprude and political philosopher. Although he is well aware of Schmitt’s biography, including, obviously, his fateful alliance with Hitler and the Nazi Party in the 1930s, he focuses on the enduring importance of Schmitt’s ideas for those of us who, almost a century later, are struggling to think about the meaning of “law” and, more particularly, the degree to which law allows for human freedom. That freedom is captured, most expansively, in the idea of “sovereignty,” i.e., the ability to transcend or transgress legal commands when the situation warrants. One will find in Kahn’s book no discussion of the tortured politics of Weimar Germany, nor of Schmitt’s brilliant critique of parliamentary democracy. Anyone whose interest in Schmitt derives at least in part from worries about the “Weimarization” of American politics in the twenty-first century will find little in this book of interest. On the other hand, if one agrees, as I do, that Schmitt is one of the key jurisprudential thinkers of the twentieth century, Kahn’s meditations are catnip (or caviar). One can only hope that the book gets the wide readership—and, more to the point, discussion—that it deserves.

Very near to the beginning of his meditations, Kahn writes that “Rawls and his followers never took seriously the violence of the state.” The fact that for half a century we lived under the threat of “[m]utual assured destruction never appears within liberal political theory. . . . The defense policies of the United States are always seen as somehow exceptional—more transitional arrangements than expressions of national identity,” or, one might say, than an essential feature of the polity. Thus, he writes, “If we are to understand state violence as no less an expression of political identity than law, we must take a perspective upon ourselves other than that offered by liberal political theory. We must take up the perspective of political theology, for political violence has been and remains a form of sacrifice.” Indeed, writes Kahn in the conclusion to his book, “Not reason but decision describes that most characteristic of all political acts: killing and being killed for the state.”

It is no coincidence that Kahn has also written one of the most probing—and troublesome—meditations on torture (Sacred Violence: Torture, Terror, and Sovereignty), nor is it coincidental that one finds in that title the keywords of his new book. But note one important difference between torture and, say, “mutual assured destruction,” or the encouragement of citizens, whether through conscription or through a “volunteerism,” to join the armed forces. Torture is quintessentially directed against the other (and the Other). Indeed, I have elsewhere argued that the essence of torture is ultimately less the infliction of any given technique of torture (e.g., waterboarding, sleep deprivation, etc.) than the creation of a phenomenology akin to that of slavery, in which, as in Chief Justice Taney’s notable claim in Dred Scott, the person tortured “has no rights that those doing the torture must respect.” It is the abject denial of the most basic claim of liberal political theory, that all individuals possess some ineluctable (and inalienable) body of rights that cannot legitimately be transgressed.

One can certainly speak of torture as a mode of sacrifice, but only as one comparable to the sacrifice of animals, rather than that which Kahn has in mind. (And, of course, one is free to evoke the Akedah—the submission by Abraham to God’s sovereign command to slay Isaac, which is prevented only by God’s arbitrary decision to substitute a helpless ram for the equally helpless son.) The sacrifice suggested by “mutual assured destruction” or by service in the armed forces, however, is the willingness, contra Hobbes, to give up one’s own life on behalf of the sacred cause. I am old enough to remember when it was accepted as a self-evident truth that one would rather be “dead than red,” which meant nothing less than that one accepted the legitimacy of the threat to obliterate the entire world rather than accept surrender to the Communist menace. It is that willingness that Kahn is at pains to explain through his explication of political theology. “For Americans,” Kahn writes, “the rule of law is not that which eliminates the need for the violent defense of the nation, but that for the sake of which violence is deployed.” He also refers to “our easy recourse to violence, and our willingness to sacrifice,” which includes, crucially, not only the lives of the victims of American violence, but also some number of those who inflict the violence in the first place.

These are fundamental questions, well worth the emphasis that Kahn places on them. I want to suggest, however, that one important facet of “American exceptionalism” is its denial that violence is the unique prerogative of the state. Here, we must confront the specter of Max Weber. The great German sociologist, who died just as Weimar was coming into being, for better or worse, appears in Kahn’s book, but only as the theorist of an ultimately freedom-killing notion of bureaucracy (notably described by Weber as an “iron cage”) that, if operating according to at least ideal-typical norms, would successfully suppress any notion of creativity and personal discretion in favor of rigid adherence to the norms of law. It should be clear that Kahn finds such a vision dystopian in the extreme, and there are many eloquent paragraphs celebrating the priority of existential self-creation over submission to generalized norms.

But Weber is also famous for defining the state as possessing a monopoly over the legitimate use of violence (which could, presumably, range from ordinary policing to torture to sending ICBMs across the skies to Moscow—or, perhaps, Tehran). It should be clear, however, that this is a highly controversial assertion, whether one treats it empirically or normatively. Quite obviously, as an empirical matter, any revolutionary (or “insurgent”) political movement rejects the state’s exclusive prerogative to decide when recourse to violence is legitimate; at the same time, such movements make normative arguments as to why their rejection of the state’s putative monopoly is itself legitimate. The United States itself owes its foundation to a violent revolution in which “patriots” defined themselves as “insurgents.” Moreover, the constitutional order established in 1787 professes to rest on the bedrock of popular sovereignty (“we the people”), a shared interest of Schmitt and Kahn alike inasmuch as it suggests the ability of “the people,” even if viewed normally as a sleeping giant, to awaken and exercise its sovereign capacity to transform the existing order. After all, many American state constitutions included explicit recognition of the right of the people to “alter or abolish” existing government whenever they thought it desirable to do so.

One might hope that alteration or abolition would be peaceful, but that is contingent, among other things, on the willingness of those in power to accept (and submit to) the “winds of change” instantiated in popular movements or uprisings. If they resist, and invoke the state’s purported “monopoly of violence,” they may discover that many of “the people” have something else in mind, including recourse to their own means of violence, however obtained.

The American approach to the means of violence is especially interesting, though, inasmuch as the Second Amendment to the Constitution, however one interprets it, appears to deny the Weberian monopoly at the very least to the national government and, if one has a latitudinarian interpretation, even to state governments as well. The Supreme Court, in its recent decisions ostensibly concerning the Second Amendment, has made a complete hash of the Amendment’s actual history, inasmuch as the majority, including Justice Scalia, is clearly “embarrassed” by its civic-republican origins and its potential legitimization of an insurrectionary populace resisting what they believe to be political tyranny. Instead, the majority turns the Second Amendment into a protection of an individual right to protect oneself in one’s household against criminal depredations. I cannot help but wonder, then, whether Kahn agrees, not only that this is a colossal failure of intellectual nerve, but also that it represents a willful evasion of the violence and potential sacrifice—either of others or, ultimately, even of one’s self—that is suggested by any serious grappling with the notion of popular sovereignty and the “theology” underlying it.

At a moment when some of the theoretical gestures being inspired by old, new, or futuristic political theologies have become ineffective, Paul Kahn’s Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty is a book of extraordinary significance. Or, perhaps I should say that I think it might be a book of extraordinary significance, inasmuch as it bears a potential to do something which has remained impossible, not only for Carl Schmitt, but also for some important contemporary critics of neo-liberal political economy. I want to reflect specifically about the way this impossibility might become possible, strangely, by way of a new migration of Abraham into the territory of philosophies of freedom and difference.

Throughout, Kahn constructs a stage on which is presented a complex encounter between a decidedly American revolutionary heritage, a deeply European critique of liberalism, and a repeated and self-conscious reflection on Jewish traditions. In this encounter, each figure appears bathed in mutually illuminating light, a situation which is much more difficult to stage than one might think. Just for a start, it would have been impossible for Schmitt himself to conjure a similar forcefulness for his ruminations on intractable questions of freedom with these three actors. A sporadic anti-Judaism and anti-Americanism endemic not only to Schmitt’s writings in the ‘20s but also to the larger conversation about legality, freedom, and authenticity in which his work participated saw to that.

Much more pressingly, however, Kahn’s inflection of questions about freedom and political constitution through Judaism, the American experiment, and classic European critiques of liberal political economy also seems to me something that recent brushes with political theology by Giorgio Agamben, Slavoj Žižek and Alain Badiou (to name three whose importance should not be denied) have not attained either.

In this first respect my hope is that Kahn’s constellation of figures could help to save for political thought something of an American revolutionary inheritance which seems otherwise to be very effectively disavowed by the dominance of liberal political philosophy in North America, namely, the ineluctable assertion of non-juridical forces which precede or exceed the forms of self-grounding imagined by representational politics. The redemption (so to speak) that Kahn’s work might afford occurs at one level by virtue of the fact that it remains faithful to this revolutionary heritage by likewise remaining faithful to thoughts also rooted in nineteenth-century European anti-capitalist movements. Here I note simply that convincing expositions of such mutually affecting fidelities are not forthcoming from thinkers who are never (or should never be) far from Kahn’s analysis of Schmitt, namely, Agamben, Žižek, and Badiou in their recent work. Kahn’s book is extraordinarily significant, therefore, because it signals—even incites—a certain need. Are there not too many students of the American revolutionary tradition stuck outside the particular rapprochement that Kahn’s work establishes so effectively with European critiques of liberalism?  Such students remain mired—just read the signs—in awkward jokes about Stalin (cf. Žižek), defensiveness about naming atrocities under Mao (cf. Badiou), or in a minimalist form of political speech burdened by neo-Heideggerian poetics (cf. Agamben). If there is a viable North American future for these critical theorists—and this is something we should struggle for—the ideas at work in their texts need to remain nourished by a singular fidelity to the American experiment. These three thinkers have all reflected more or less explicitly about what is “worth fighting for” in the Western theological inheritance. Kahn’s book also asks more pointedly, and to better effect: why is the American Revolution worth fighting for?

But these migrations of individuals and translations of political visions are all bound up with an equally interesting Auseinandersetzung with the figure of Abraham. Notice the call that Abraham receives within Kahn’s tableau. He is called not so much to leave his home among the nations. Nor is Abraham’s migratory passage through time and space (from inhabitant of the nations to sacrificial founder of a new community) of interest here as it was for the ancient Philo, obsessed as his text “on the migration of Abraham” was with a Platonic psychagogy from the sensuous to the ideal. On the contrary, the point of Abraham’s call in Kahn is much more focused, namely, to exemplify a founding principle, not only of a people but of all peoples. Recall Kahn’s Conclusion: no one (at least none of Us) escapes the Schmittian moment of Abraham’s sacrifice. And if, as the book argues throughout, phenomenological or existential attention to political constitution will effectively pierce the “states’s self-presentation as an efficient means of justly advancing welfare,” what Kahn’s analysis will glimpse through this phenomenological unveiling of the state form is, above all, a founding patriarch with a knife in his hand.

Kahn’s work exhorts that, “We should begin with a kind of phenomenology of the political, which is just what political theology must be today.” And, as mentioned above, in the Conclusion he suggests that, “We will not recover a theory adequate to the decision for and against life unless we turn from political theory to political theology. We must go back to the beginning and, for us, that is Abraham and Isaac.” Obviously, the We’s in question here are protreptic, open-ended, potentially otherwise. Of course, we might add, the We who must return to the figure of Abraham is plural, not one, certainly not already given in any factical sense. (This is not even to mention the multiple Abrahams we could discover back there at “the beginning.”) Kahn is certainly not unaware of any of this. He even pre-emptively responds to this pluralism throughout the book when he sometimes wonders at the multiplicity of founding irruptions of a force he nonetheless glosses under the one name of the “sacred.”

Against some of the other recent posts, however, I’d like to stir the pot by saying that the standard—even ideologically clichéd—issue of eliding difference is not really the pressing problem here. Rather, the problem for Kahn’s book is not that it will become a tyrannically limiting paradigm, eliding too many We’s who will not be interpellated by his repeated, invitational We. Nor is the issue that the Abraham to which We must return, the Abraham this We would call toward a migration into a new philosophical state, is also multiple. Is not the real issue, the real problem, precisely the opposite: whether there is—for a non-representational Us—an event which would enact a fidelity at once to the American Revolution, to European anti-capitalism, and to central figures of Jewish thought?  Is not the real issue, in other words, whether there is, for Us, something here—even a sacrifice—that We might believe in, and believe in as that which is in Us more than ourselves?

Kahn points out that Schmitt’s book had no conclusion and then appends one of his own, which asserts that contemporary political freedom cannot escape an encounter with Abraham. Fine. For the moment let’s accept what is only an invitation for thinking, after all. In reading the tale of Abraham in relation to Schmitt, Kahn even hints at the possibility of rendering God’s “I am that I am” as a kind of pressure immanent to existence rather than as a discretely transcendent substance. Good. In such a case, Abraham’s “Here am I” would be a kind of odd repetition of the biblical God’s “I am,” instead of an indication of a submission to or answer for an external other in any typical sense. Our return to Abraham could thus generate a new founding myth of repetition in which an obscurely excessive becoming emerges in Us as an affirmation that scrambles the usual calculations. This affirmation would more intimately unite what, in the biblical story, might otherwise be easily mistaken for discretely separate figures of God and Abraham, that exemplary cause-and-effect of revolution. Such an interpretive move would be comparable to Stanislas Breton’s efforts to link a radicalized Althusserian interpellation to biblical accounts of calling.

But such a conclusion would only repeat a (democratized) Schmittian aporia, whereby a grounding sovereign exception emerges like a miracle to found a new community. The return to Abraham in this way serves only to repeat the essential thematic issue of the book in a new key. What I want is a conclusion in truth, and not from Schmitt but from Kahn—or, perhaps even better, from that still opaque site of freedom that is an Us yet to come. Is there a ‘belief’, an affirming Yes, which would construct a synthesis or found a communal space in which the faithful of the American Revolution, of European anti-capitalism, and of Judaism alike would recognize themselves, even if—necessarily—transfigured? Or, to return to the Abraham story, is there a viable transformation of the current state of the neo-liberal economic order which would be creative enough as to evoke this primal scene of violence?

In this respect, Kahn, like Schmitt—and perhaps more like the biblical text than he acknowledges—elides a conclusion. After all, Kahn’s conclusion is just a repetition of the book’s basic theoretical assertion, that (at least in this tradition) new political creations occur like the founding gesture of Abraham: before the law. But, detective that I am of religion’s past and future primal scenes, I am greedy to see filled out Kahn’s concluding, and perhaps prophetic, turn back toward the biblical tale. If revolutionary creation, for a protreptical or emerging Us, will bear an Abrahamic inflection, then what shall be that collective which an energetics of creation transformatively unites across readymade identitarian lines? And if this miracle of exception, or this fragile invention of possibility, begins to cut the umbilical links it bears in relation to old states and outmoded identity formations, then who or what might end up on our altar, the site through which creative affirmation will have been voiced?

In this sense, I find a productive—even protreptical—irony in the way Kahn’s book concludes with a repetition of the theoretical state of ideas about the ineluctable necessity of a founding sacrificial event (even if this thematic repetition is provocatively repeated by way of a biblical myth). And—pace the crazy and (therefore) perennially fecund tale of Abraham—in the conclusion we are still repeating theory rather than participating in the specifics of “existential and phenomenological” intensities Kahn earlier evoked as precisely the dagger with which to pierce through theoretical or merely representational discourses on political experience. To repeat Kahn’s premise against his own conclusion (and perhaps even against his own desire not to inhabit a normative discourse), if we are to pierce through the self-descriptions of the state and its current assemblage of identities with an actual experience of the political, we will do so only when we find ourselves naming the items missing from Kahn’s concluding repetition of the Abrahamic tableau, some of which I enumerated above. To name these otherwise elided or absent terms, and to affirm these names with a vibrancy which produces Us in their very affirmation, would of course be the transformation of Kahn’s exemplary political tract into a political experience. And here, fearing and trembling as usual over the specificities of the Abrahamic tale, is where our conclusion remains a merely thematic conclusion rather than the phenomenon of a new beginning. Reverberating throughout Kahn’s book, however, are the rustlings of a subterranean “here I am,” which might just yet expose Us to (and as) an occurrence of freedom from which our states, philosophies, and religions alike are currently constructed to shield us.

This is a wonderful book. I hope it yields more than is safe, and more than we hope for, we strange children of Abraham.

Kahn wants to show the relevance of this view to American politics, which requires making room for dimensions of politics slighted by liberal theory and theories of justice. Domestic or international, politics in the “state of nature”—that is, still awaiting rational regulation—is not, or not simply, defective, since politics, as Schmitt points out, is never purely a matter of following norms. It’s also a matter of will and of “existence.” This existential dimension will always privilege exception over norm, as long as the existence of the people or the nation is at stake. Or perceived to be at stake.

On the level of the “facts,” this diagnosis is hard to dispute. A very good illustration can be found in recent American foreign policy. Like Kahn, I’ve defended (in a paper called “Vers un droit international d’exception?” and in my book Penser l’ennemi, affronter l’exception) the idea that the USA could be seen as a de facto sovereign in the current international situation, at least in Bodin’s sense: they “have nobody above them.” As the Bushian “War on Terror” shows, every international norm, including the norms of the Geneva Conventions, can be suspended as long as this “sovereign“ decides that it faces a state of exception that gives it “emergency powers.” This practice and view have been supported by Bush administration lawyers such as John Yoo, who has deployed arguments very close to those used by Carl Schmitt during the Weimar and Nazi periods in order to defend the presidential prerogatives or the extensive rights of the Führer, the “source of every law.” But even disregarding analogies to Schmitt’s support of the Nazi regime, the question is: what value should we grant to this, to the “fact” that a “sovereign” can indeed see himself as “above” every norm as long as he states that national security is at stake? Should we accept this view of sovereignty  and concede that it is legitimate or inevitable that “sovereigns” can suspend the norms of the Geneva Conventions, treat their prisoners as “alien enemies” and deprive them of most of the basic rights which have been granted to war prisoners during the twentieth century, because, following 9/11, we are all in a “exceptional situation?” Should we admit, as the Bush administration suggested in one memorandum, that torture itself should be accepted as a legitimate means “in exceptional circumstances?” Or should we struggle against this logic, not, of course, in the name of any “political theology” or Schmittian concept of non-liberal democracy, but in the name of our view of what a democracy should be, even in times of “exception?”

I’ve always defended the latter view, and I was happy to see that the Obama administration reintroduced a more “democratic” view of international relations, a respect for the Geneva Conventions, a moral condemnation of torture and of the conditions of “indefinite detention” in Guantanamo, and a criticism of a certain view of American “exceptionalism.” Of course, even in this supposedly more democratic framework, the question of exception and sovereignty does not disappear, so we can say that we still have to deal with Schmittian questions—I would entirely agree with Kahn on this point. But my worry is that the philosophical approbation for political theology risks participating in a justification of an attitude that sees no alternative to conceding “sovereign rights” in exceptional circumstances.

I agree with Kahn (and with Schmitt) about the fact that political theory should leave room for decision and exception. But to me, the main question is: to what extent? Are there no principles that admit no exception? When I read Kahn, as when I read Schmitt, I don’t seem to encounter any such principles—anything like what Habermas thematized in Law and Morality as “indisponibility,” that is, rights that are not at the disposal of the sovereign. Can the sovereign decide that torture is a legitimate practice? The answer, to me, should be no without exception. Kahn would perhaps respond that even if it is an illegitimate practice, it can be made legal by virtue of a political decision. “Torture is the exception outside of law, but the state may be legally justified in defending itself,” he writes at one point in a comment on a decision of the Israeli Supreme Court, apparently persuaded by its logic. It has always been the same (and, according to me, awful) argument, used by some French military officers during the Algerian War, or by the dictators of the Near East who are today falling one after the other, in part as a result of their disregard for human rights and the norms of habeas corpus.

The famous argument of the ticking time bomb, evoked without criticism by Kahn, proves to be a failure of juridical imagination. First, by such an extreme hypothetical case, it is possible to legitimate any practice by contrasting the prohibition you want to challenge to the possibility of state, national, or—why not?—human annihilation. (It’s significant that Kahn feels the need to reinforce this pseudo-argument by saying that this bomb might be nuclear, and that, in a situation that is not specified, the use of torture could here save the state from annihilation: “Implicit in the hypothetical [of the ticking time bomb] is the idea that the bomb might be nuclear. Without an exception to torture prohibition, we face the possibility of the nuclear detonation, that is, we imagine the death of the state.”) Second, the fact is that this argument for the “vital necessity of torture” on the logic of self-preservation has been recently used to legitimate de facto torture in cases where, of course, no such threat could be alleged. Is it this kind of exception that Kahn’s political theology intends to defend? The book’s conclusion suggests that “we” are all, as western citizens, soldiers in the “war on terror”:

The contemporary war on terror represents the point at which conscription becomes truly universal. . . . Conscription can now occur to anyone at any moment: It is just a matter of finding oneself on the wrong airplane at the wrong time. At that moment, there will be no discussion, there is only the act.

In this political ontology, the war on terror is constituted as a permanent condition. But this was precisely what was so false and dangerous in the Bushian conception of the struggle against terror, which was presented as a real war—not against a state (indeed with not definite enemy) and not having a beginning or an end—but a war indefinitely “open,” in which the U.S. would be free to launch as many preventive wars as the would judge necessary.  Here Schmitt, the author of The Nomos of the Earth, could be useful in deconstructing this confusion of traditional categories of international law, a confusion that transforms the category of war, which applied to the relationship of one state toward another (two sovereigns!), into a permanent condition, with no precise enemy, no possibility of a negotiated peace. Further, we could add, echoing Agamben more than Schmitt, that the domestic consequence of this confusion is the limitation of liberties in the name of this indefinite state of exception.

Here is the last point of my perplexity: how can Kahn claim that freedom is the center of Schmitt’s thought? I put aside Schmitt’s 1938 book on Hobbes’s Leviathan, where he claims that Hobbes’s distinction of an inner faith and a external confession opened a space for freedom of consciousness, which, with “the first liberal Jew, Spinoza” and his followers Heine and Marx (!), was to become a principle fatal to the organic State. Already in Political Theology, Schmitt is radically opposed to all the theorists who put freedom at the center of their political conceptions and demands. How can one claim that a thinker who approves Joseph de Maistre’s motto, “tout gouvernement est bon lorsqu’il est établi” [any government is good as soon as it is established], puts freedom at the center of his thought? The last chapter of Political Theology is devoted precisely to defending all those Catholic antimodern thinkers (De Maistre, Donoso Cortès, Bonald) who refused to consider freedom as the key to political organization. They wished to put obedience in its place, mainly through the theological argument of original sin (coupled with historical arguments evoking the disorders of revolution). Kahn’s strange interpretation of Schmitt as a thinker of freedom can be explained when we finally grasp Kahn’s own conception of freedom, namely the freedom to sacrifice for a “sacred” authority—God or the nation-State. So Kahn calls freedom what is generally called “obedience,” self-sacrifice, or “duty.” In the conclusion of the book, Abraham’s acceptance of God’s will becomes the paradigm of freedom. But is the will to ultimate sacrifice in obedience to an absolute will a good example of political freedom?

I let the reader “decide.”

Kahn’s book is fascinating, insightful, and a delight to read. But it is many things. Although its arguments are set forth in a largely holistic fashion, one can distinguish at least three distinct aims: 1) a more or less faithful and analytic reconstruction of Carl Schmitt’s 1922 work, Political Theology; 2) a meditation on the applicability of Schmitt’s political-theological insights to specific features of contemporary American political-legal practice; and 3) a bold proposal, only loosely grounded in Schmittian textual evidence, that argues for political theology as the indispensable framework for grasping the character of politics in the modern world. The first of these aims helps to explain why the book owes its title and its chapter-by-chapter architectonic to Schmitt’s original work. The second explains why Kahn not infrequently departs from the task of reconstruction by offering illustrations drawn from contemporary American law and politics. The third leads us to Kahn’s most provocative conclusion, that there is something distinctive about modern politics qua politics that can only be understood if we remain alive to the theological sources that animate this dimension of our experience. Unlike some of the other commentators, my training and interests do not lie in the sphere of contemporary politics, and most certainly not American politics. I will therefore refrain from offering any challenge to Kahn’s reconstructive or illustrative purposes and will focus my attention chiefly on the third and final strand of the book.

Kahn develops his brief for politics as a sphere of “ultimate meaning” through a stylized portrait of American political experience. Although he characterizes his descriptive method as an exercise in “phenomenology,” it is not clear what distinguishes this method from a more hazardous recourse to generalities—for instance: “America, of course, remains a land of religious faith, while Western Europe has become a largely secular society.” As a specialist in law, Kahn certainly recognizes that such generalizations obscure as much as they reveal. (Think, for example, of the German public educational system, with its compulsory religious instruction, as compared to the separation principle that in the United States disallows any such public instruction.) Still, in Kahn’s view, America remains exceptional insofar as “[f]aith in one form or another is a deep part of our political culture and of our political psychology.” It follows that we can only make sense of American politics if we make sense of the peculiar hold of religious belief on our collective imagination: “We need to understand the set of beliefs that sustain and support American exceptionalism as a practice of ultimate meaning for generations of Americans.” But the quality of religious faith that Kahn claims to find in American public life bears a distinctive character: “In our imaginations, political life remains a matter of life and death—that is exactly the meaning found in 9/11.”

Whether observations cast across such vast terrain truly permit us to understand the peculiar character of American politics in our own age is a worry I will not address here. Nor will I contest Kahn’s use of the first-person plural in phrases such as “our collective imagination,” notwithstanding the considerable risks that attend this sort of ethnographic holism, especially when speaking about a polity as diverse as this one. These are generalizations that permit Kahn to move from the analytic-reconstructive purposes of his book to its evidentiary purposes, as I noted above. What concerns me is that Kahn occasionally seems tempted by the far more ambitious possibility that his ethnographic portrait of the social imaginary is applicable not only to the contemporary United States but to all of modern experience as such.

It is this far more ambitious exercise in what one might call a generalized political phenomenology that, in my view, may come at too high a price. To be sure, at times Kahn seems willing to confine his diagnostic-interpretive observations to the contemporary United States, a political order that remains captive, he claims, to a species of mythico-religious imagery. In such moments, Kahn seems to be describing only the beliefs of what he calls “ordinary Americans,” but he often permits himself the far greater latitude of pronouncing upon the nature of modern politics as such. Here he follows the principle (also familiar from psychoanalysis) that the pathological is our best guide to the norm: “Politics,” Kahn writes “is not striving to be a perfect system of reason. Not reason but decision describes that most characteristic of all political acts: killing and being killed by the state.” To such a dictum one might reply that the limit of the political does not furnish the most instructive insight into the essence of the political. But in what register are we to access such a claim? Its truth is apparently unbounded by time or place: it extends (or so Kahn proposes) all the way back to Abraham and Isaac, insofar as it is already in the origins of biblical religion, in the paradigmatic moment of anticipated sacrifice, that the truth of politics is ostensibly revealed: “As long as we can imagine such a moment of sacrifice,” Kahn concludes, “we remain within the political imaginary.”

In such moments I detect in Kahn’s book something more than a merely methodological appeal to political theology. It may be that political theology can serve as a helpful diagnostic instrument for comprehending the pathologies of the contemporary American political imagination, but I also detect in his arguments a singular kind of political existentialism, that is, a philosophical doctrine regarding the basic character of political experience.

It is this facet of his book that troubles me most of all. Kahn professes to abjure any speculative interest in pure theorizing insofar as an “authentic political theory” must be one that “stops” before the actual experience of politics. Against the merely discursive constructs of liberal theory as exemplified by both Dworkin and Habermas (toward neither of whom is Kahn entirely fair), political theology, in Kahn’s characterization, points to “an experience beyond discourse.” It rests on “faith, not argument, and on sacrifice, not contract.” But what goes unacknowledged in this contrast is that the characterization of politics as a non-rational event is already a characterization of politics according to a specific and necessarily discursive traditional schema: It is not a successful evasion of mere theory for the sake of phenomenological accuracy. Nor is it a bold rejection of intellectualist naiveté that obeys the existentialist credo, “existence precedes essence,” which Kahn often evokes as a methodological justification. The difficulty with this apparent reversal is that the attempt to escape mere theory for the sake of description ends by reproducing another highly conditional and contingent understanding of political practice. The sophisticated rejection of liberalism as a merely discursive evasion of “decision” is ultimately a decision for a different image of human experience. But this image of politics is no less conditioned by theory and interpretation than the image it is supposed to displace. Kahn’s quasi-existentialist appeal to “existence” (as against essence) is presumably meant to signal that he is not interested in anything more essential than our actual political practices. But his arguments recapitulate a familiar error of existentialism by transforming existence itself into the privileged field for revealing what is “most characteristic” in human experience.

To grasp this point we need only to consider Kahn’s highly controversial claim that the “most characteristic of all political acts” is to be found in decision rather than reason, and, more specifically, the decision to sacrifice. This is ostensibly a truth of politics (or, at least, a truth about politics in the contemporary United States: this is one of several moments in the book where Kahn strays well beyond a description of specific practice.) In any event, it is a truth that enjoys a tremendously ancient lineage, for the political-theological underpinnings of our political life have not yet emancipated themselves from the sacrificial imagery of biblical religion.

To cast better light on Kahn’s political existentialism, let me pause to consider in greater depth the Akedah, the tale of Abraham’s near-sacrifice of Isaac, which Kahn mentions only in passing. It deserves mention that (pace Kahn) the Hebraic conception of this event does not typically fasten upon the moment of sacrifice itself. On the contrary, the sacrifice never comes.  One might therefore read the episode not as a call to sacrifice but as a lesson in the contractualist beginnings of collective life: The polity, conceived here as a patriarchal chain of generations who will eventually take on the burdens of the law (and, significantly, the Decalogue’s renunciation of murder) appears to find its point of origin not with sacrifice but with its annulment. The human community persists only because we are inducted into a logic of conceptual abstraction by which one particular can stand for another: the ram for the son. Although I am wary of attempts to derive political doctrines through biblical exegesis, if one felt compelled to read the biblical narrative as a lesson in political founding, its lesson might be not the indispensability of sacrifice but rather the necessity of its annulment through our induction into a symbolic order. The non-murderous collective would find its origin not in a decision to sacrifice but precisely in the readiness to forgo sacrifice. Nor should we forget that politics in ancient Israel begins not with a mystical event of divine theophany (God’s appearance to Moses) but only when this event is displaced for the sake of a legal-juridical discourse (the law). Theology itself would enter into politics only thanks to the conceptual-symbolic renunciation of God’s immediacy—a renunciation that, ironically, also inaugurates the possibility of secular law.

The theological reading I have offered above is hardly uncontroversial. Nor am I concerned here with its defense. But I presume it would be a condition for any political-theological interpretation of contemporary politics that it specify which theology it considers pertinent to its claims. Kahn does not pause to consider the many sources of the American social imaginary, its disunity and its diversity. Instead he seems to take it on faith that the theology in political theology consists in a set of ready-made mythico-religious themes—“sacrifice,” “the sovereign,” and so forth—terms whose very abstraction would appear to contravene Kahn’s statements that he prefers practice to theory and the phenomenology of felt experience to liberal-intellectualist pieties. Indeed, one explanation for the great appeal of Schmittian political theology may be that it dissolves the bewildering specificity of political experience into the gauze-like profundities of mytho-poetic discourse. Schmitt’s theological lexicon, unfortunately, is rather impoverished: If political theology were to serve as a useful device for understanding contemporary politics, one would have to provide a far more detailed anatomy of contemporary political experience, and one would have to move some distance away from the abstractions of Schmitt’s political existentialism to specify exactly which strands of our tremendously variegated theological tradition are truly of relevance today.

What troubles me in Kahn’s argument (as in Schmitt’s) is the assumption that we already know what theology is and how it speaks in today’s world. But if theology is not just a univocal preserve of themes, such as “decision” and “sacrifice,” then the movement from theology to politics already demands (or has already achieved) a certain doctrinal specification: only certain theological gestures enjoy legitimacy. It is precisely this unacknowledged moment of theological interpretation that is also at work in Schmitt’s “political theology.” When Schmitt asserts that the moment of political “decision” is analogous to the moment of divine intervention, he has already imported into theology the specific interpretation he wishes to discover. As critics before me have observed, the God that underwrites Schmitt’s illiberal species of political theology is a post-nominalist God who exercises his powers unconstrained by nature or reason. Whether this is the God of biblical monotheism is another question entirely. But it is a question that could be decided only on the basis of further interpretation, and not by appealing to some ostensibly theory-free site of religious existence. Lest I be misunderstood, I should explain that this is not an objection to Schmitt based on an objection to his politics (though it always bears repeating that his politics were abhorrent). The grave error of political theology in the Schmittian style is not the ideology it helped to support. Its deeper error is conceptual: it imports into theology precisely the politics it wants to find.

Kahn makes a strong case for political theology, perhaps especially when he entertains the startling notion, somewhat at odds with the rest of the book, that the epoch of political theology may have come to an end. I find a great deal of what he has argued both thoughtful and thought-provoking, but I fear that his inquiry has committed the same sleight-of-hand as Schmitt’s: In the name of a norm-free phenomenological “description,” it has insinuated into theology what is already an interpretation of theology, and, in analogous fashion, it has insinuated into political “existence” what is already a specific interpretation of the political. On my reading, this means that Kahn has been misled into believing that there is a non-theoretical way of pursuing a description of politics, as if liberalism could be defeated by demonstrating that it has evaded some realm of ostensibly self-evident political facts. But the notion that we can discover what political existence actually is—or, in Kahn’s language, the notion that we might disclose politics as the site of human “authenticity”—is a notion that indulges in the anti-intellectualist ideology of political existentialism. Securing its credentials from a gesture of anti-theoretical renunciation, it endorses a different but no less determinate political theory.

This recourse to political existentialism is evident most of all in Kahn’s repeated allusion to moments of crisis and decision as signposts to the nature of contemporary political experience. Though the idea has obvious origins in Protestant theology (especially that of Kierkegaard), it has been a trademark of existential argument ever since Karl Jaspers, who argued that a certain kind of Grenzsituation, or “limit-situation,” had the power of shattering the comfortable shells of everyday life so as to bring us face to face with the very core of our existence. The argument was further developed by Heidegger and acquired a starkly political meaning in the political-theological musings of Carl Schmitt. What troubles me most of all, then, in Kahn’s argument (as in much of the contemporary literature indebted to political theology) is the normative belief that such a crisis-situation really does bear a revelatory significance, that it illumines a deeper, if less comfortable truth, (or, in Kahn’s own words, a certain “authenticity”) in our experience.

After the terrorist attacks of September 11, a great many editorialists casually indulged in this sort of argument: 9/11 assumed an iconic status as the Grenzsituation of our time. Kahn, too, mentions the events of 9/11 in just this fashion. He concludes his book with the surprising, and very un-Schmittian, observation that we must balance our longing for authenticity with the pursuit of justice. But the book’s denouement hardly suffices to undo the political-existentialist premises of the argument as a whole. Kahn seems to believe that the violence of those attacks tore away the veil from the comfortable illusions of liberal theory. But his gestures in this direction leave me uneasy: Is the true structure of the political best revealed only in its moments of greatest threat? Is it really the case that one can properly understand the constitutive meaning of political experience when its principles are most in jeopardy?

The old axiom of mid-century existentialism—that only human phenomena in extremis reveal our authentic condition—still survives today in much of the theoretical literature inspired by Schmitt. But even while I appreciate the need to develop theoretical insights that unsettle the pieties of American liberalism, I doubt that political existentialism is the right way to proceed. Perhaps this is because what Adorno called the “jargon of authenticity” leaves me profoundly unmoved. Or perhaps it is because I simply don’t participate in the sacrificial religion that Kahn sees at the core of American politics today. There are different sorts of political theologies. But not all of them draw their spiritual nourishment from Schmittian intimations of mortality.

I would therefore be grateful to Paul Kahn if he might explain what I take to be the two underlying premises of his argument: 1) that we still look to politics as a source of “ultimate meaning.” This already strikes me as unconvincing, or, at the very least, requires further explanation. In a lifeworld of competing value-commitments it remains uncertain how any one value-sphere might be said to enjoy preeminence. But even if one were to accept such an idea, there is still 2) the premise of political existentialism, namely,  that the highest significance of our lives is to be found in moments of mortal danger. What warrants the specific assumption that we discover such a higher sort of meaning only in the moment when sacrifice is required? After all, the establishment of politics has as its regulative ideal the establishment of an order in which danger has been brought to an end. Those who are still hoping to discover some sense of ultimacy in our collective lives would do well to consider the possibility that we will find it—and we will find the true beginning of politics—only when the angel appears and sacrifice is forbidden.

Consider, first, Kahn’s comparison of modern democratic revolutionaries and early Protestants. To paraphrase: the trans-temporal, collective subject of the revolutionary sovereign, instantiated in every citizen, is a secularization of the mystical body of Christ, which the Protestant Reformation, in an act tantamount to “revelation,” had already transferred from the king and the sacraments to the inwardness of believers contemplating the scripture. Kahn is describing a double displacement of a mystical presence (from sacral monarch and sacerdotal forms to Protestant saints, and from Protestant saints and the Word to democratic subjects and their constitution) and then tracing a line of descent back to the sixteenth-century quarrel over the Christian concept of transubstantiation. A great deal of scholarship has been written about the Protestant legacy in American culture, and certainly the radicalization of some Protestant teachings, such as the importance of secular vocation, the internalization of religious discipline, the priesthood of the laity, and the lordship of God alone, lay the conditions for the English revolution of 1642-1651. Most eighteenth-century Americans counted themselves part of the Dissenting tradition, and they came to see their own quest for independence from the crown as continuing the Reformation and carrying forward the earlier Puritan revolution in England. (Even Tom Paine made use of evangelical rhetoric.) What they stressed, however, was not Kahn’s invented analogy to the transfer of the mystical presence but the righteousness of both religious and political resistance; both priestly power and political tyranny (whether of King Charles I or of the colonial authority) were illegitimate and deserved to be felled.

Kahn is simply invoking Protestant “legacyism” to unify his theory that revolution must involve a transfer of the sacred.  This narrowness of insight leads him to overlook (or not mention) significant facts about the Protestant Reformation (more specifically, the Puritan Revolution) that would have emphasized its modernizations rather than its atavisms. Thus, take Kahn’s assertion that the Puritan settlers imbued Americans with a permanent reverence for law. This is a statement so abstract as to mean multiple things, but the general sense, I gather, is that Americans have incurred some sort of cultural debt to the Puritans that they exhibit in their attitudes toward the Constitution and toward jurisprudence. One wonders how, for instance, decisions of the Warren court verify Kahn’s assertion: Engel vs. Vitale or Abington School District vs. Schempp (which, respectively, declared unconstitutional the formal observance of prayer and assigned Bible reading in public schools). Are these examples proof that when the Court refers to “the nation,” “national life,” or “the people” in its decisions, it is invoking a secularized theological concept? Of course, Kahn would counter that his notion of “political theology” encompasses concepts that, while not manifestly theological in content, amount nonetheless to “secularized” (displaced from their origin in) theology. The problem here, as with Schmitt’s logic, is that one can make a “secularization” of any idea by striking an analogy to a theological one if the only ground for the comparison is the analogy itself.

Consider, for instance, this statement: “The concept of sovereignty is incomprehensible if stripped of its theological origins.” Here is a case where the imperative to pinpoint an origin—a foundational point of authentic ownership—obscures a much more complex interaction of social and intellectual forces. Nathan Hatch, in The Democratization of American Christianity, has demonstrated how American national identity was “an impromptu creation” in which the past was re-written to make the Constitution its culmination. So far, this seems to support Kahn’s thesis. However, “the theological,” in this case, was not a foundation but a poly-vocal discourse in which social class defined lines of dissent over the identity of the sovereign and the limitations of the Constitution of 1787. Fears of elitism and centralization and fears of mobility and fragmentation enlisted diverse religious proponents. In the post-revolutionary period, Hatch argues, revivalistic evangelicalism posed an epochal populist challenge to the Whig predilections of Old Light Calvinism and Unitarianism. The attitudes of the moderate British Enlightenment and of the Federalists, which had their religious support in the New England colleges, were made to give way before a more radical democratic vision. Populist preachers, aligning the right to religious free conscience and egalitarian forms of worship with political liberties, gave religious credence to Jeffersonianism, and the evangelical masses laid claim to the birthright of the nation. This process was also accompanied by additional transformations in social practice that had nothing to do with religious observance and no manifest theological intention. Elected legislatures and large assemblies, Charles Taylor underlines in A Secular Age, emphasized “representation” rather than “incarnation.” These practices helped to legitimate the discourse of popular sovereignty by building on the continuity of past colonial institutions, such as elected assemblies, that had earned respect, not because they were sacred, but because they had protected local liberties against the imperial government.

Kahn’s “genealogical” technique yields no evidence persuading me that American political ideas originate in and are indebted to theological sources. Through his architectural technique, however, he does point to evidence supporting another notion of secularization: that ideas and symbols from a religious sphere of discourse can be commuted to a profane or non-theistic sphere of discourse, and vice versa, through the internal secularization of religious traditions. Religious messages, images, and stories routinely circulate in the U.S. through entertainment, mass media, literature, the arts, campaign writing and fundraising that are not under ecclesiastical control or exclusively religious in allegiance. The dissemination and transformation of religion, or the relocation of “the sacred” or “the spiritual,” through consumption, new technologies, democratic populism, and the emergence of the public sphere have been the subjects of abundant monographs in Cultural Studies and American Studies.

Unfortunately, the term “the sacred” is one of the most obscurant in our critical lexicon, and it often agglomerates phenomena that should be examined discretely. Talal Asad, in his Formations of the Secular, has criticized the common use of “the sacred”—designating a mythical, mysterious force that imposes itself upon subjectivity and space—and shown that it is constituted in the nineteenth century through misunderstandings of ancient sacramental practices. Anthropologists in comparative religion, working from the idea of “taboo,” fashioned the term “the sacred” to stand for a universal essence common to all religions. The term was subsequently taken up by theologians, and in the twentieth century it was expanded (by figures like Mircea Eliade) to designate the religious sources of all cultural and social formations. Kahn seems unaware of Asad’s criticisms and contributes to further mystification of this already abused term.

If Kahn were less devoted to spelunking the secular for its hidden “sacred” springs and more absorbed in identifying the practices of public religions, then he might have provided a more rounded account of America’s “social imaginary” and the variety of connections between theology, rhetoric, and the secular spheres that it has actually afforded. The current sociological theory of the “deprivatization” of religion is a model that does not precisely describe the U.S., since the melding of the secular and the religious has always been endemic here (though more visibly since World War II, because of the rise of the Religious Right). The interpenetration of the two has much to do with the rationale of prophecy: “an American idiom that is capacious and embraces many kinds of politics,” as George Shulman writes in American Prophecy. To borrow a term from Shulman, the mythology of the popular sovereign is a form of “vernacular theology,” woven out of the language and logic of prophecy, and many communities in America’s Biblical culture use this vernacular with different intentions. Kahn’s “architectural” technique presumes that the social imaginary produces a common, sanctified image of the sovereign, whereas in fact, as Shulman indicates, prophecy—joining the revolutionary past to an ongoing project of redemption—has frequently functioned to contest the identity of the sovereign rather than solidify it.

One such example, already mentioned, is the struggle that ensued in the post-revolutionary period between Federalists and Jeffersonians, in which populist preachers argued for the further democratization of church and polity by tracing their cause to both the revolutionary generation and the meaning of Biblical revelation. To fail in this project, as they charged of gentleman elites, was to betray the heroes of 1776 and the Protestant God who had elected them to enact His will by bringing about political and religious equality. In the run up to the Civil War, Confederate nationalists put forward a different image of the sovereign, which rejected the democratizing tendencies of the post-revolutionary populists who had carried the argument at that time. As Drew Faust has shown, in Confederate Nationalism, Southern elites justified secession as an act of “purification,” since the North, they alleged, had betrayed the sovereign and declined from the revolutionary generation’s republican virtues. Southern jeremiads framed these arguments in politicized prophetic idiom that imbued war death with providential significance, as if echoing patriotic narratives being elaborated by Northerners. Both bled and prayed, but the causes their sacrifices sanctified, the sovereign wills they obeyed, were different nations. Lincoln’s Second Inaugural straddles the dichotomy, but Kahn looks past it.

Most vividly, in our recent history, the civil rights and black liberation movements, reaching back to the legacies of abolitionism and the Social Gospel, reconfigured prophecy to unmask what James Baldwin called “the national innocence.” Most Americans, Baldwin explained in an address at Kalamazoo College in 1960, tend to envision their democracy descending uninterruptedly from an ancestor who was a “cross between a Celt and a Teuton,” who worshipped a “Puritan god,” and who bequeathed the wisdom of “New England” and the hope for high material status. To correct this misprision, social prophets in the fifties and sixties forced a revaluation of sacrifice and its soteriological relation to the problem of sin. Sacrifice can be interpreted as the price paid for sins under the judgment and wrath of God, or it can be understood as virtuous self-giving for a transcendent cause or contest with evil. Kahn tends to emphasize only the second meaning, but social prophets have often used the trope of judgment to contest the nation’s claim to be righteous and just. Pointing to God above the sovereign, they expose the exclusions and traumas—the repressed history—on which nationalism is founded. Pricking the bad conscience of Christians and democrats, who must atone for their self-deception and injustice, social prophets seek to transform the image of the national identity so that it can be more ethnically or racially inclusive. In the process, as Shulman has brilliantly demonstrated, social prophets empower disenfranchised communities by allotting to them the mission of redemptive suffering and self-sacrifice mythically attributed to patriots. Frederick Douglass and Martin Luther King, Jr. each called attention to caesuras in American history, ruptures between the faith of the revolutionary generation and those of its sons who have not completed but, in fact, traduced it. The cause of the founding fathers inspirited those whom the nation had sinfully, illiberally, forsworn to acknowledge as having a claim to its birthright. For King, the downtrodden’s chosen sacrifice, in the present, became the price of expanding freedom so that the promise of the nation’s founding ideals could be fulfilled. Since the sixties, liberation theology, mostly in academia, has also spoken on behalf of the silenced and the unrepresented through a prophetic discourse far more varied in its permutations than Kahn’s mono-myth of the popular sovereign. The plurality of these communities belies the uniformity of the American “We” to which Kahn repeatedly refers in his text.

There is, however, yet another, more fearsome, dimension to prophecy, also overlooked by Kahn, which might have had a bearing on his auguries about America’s prospects. The sacralizing of the American nation-state that concerns him has another dimension: messianic, millennialist, and apocalyptic. To return to Kahn’s own example—Lincoln’s sacrificial presidency—scholars have described how the North converted the president’s death and the attrition of the Civil War into a sign of redemption from sin that conferred upon the nation the divine mission of redeeming the world itself from evil. Already existing beliefs—that world salvation had begun with Christ, been continued with the Reformation, and given an earthly agent in the young republic—received a confirmation and an apotheosis. In the twentieth century, this belief in the nation’s messianic mission has coupled itself with secular liberalism’s project of universalizing human rights, by force if necessary. The rhetoric leading up to and justifying the Second Gulf War is one recent example, but the admixture of the two logics of redemption, millennial eschatology and secular teleology, has elicited valid suspicions of expansionism (markets, client states, geo-political influence) and accusations of ethically disproportional (mass destructive) means whenever the U.S. has embarked on a mission to make part of the world “safe for democracy.” During the Cold War, the realist Hans Morgenthau (who had thoroughly studied Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political) argued, in “Human Rights and Foreign Policy” and elsewhere, that the U.S. should resist the temptation to militarily impose its principles on the rest of humanity (meaning, the Third World), and Protestant realists writing for Christianity and Crisis magazine, such as Reinhold Niebuhr and John Bennett, called down the Judgment of God on what they perceived to be American hubris. After Vietnam, New Americanists such as Sacvan Bercovitch linked American neo-imperialism to the country’s Protestant eschatological idioms. One might question the motives behind certain of these critiques of messianism (as I have queried those of the Christian realists in my book God-Fearing and Free), but, notwithstanding caveats, it is a fact that America has committed political evils in the name of saving the world as well for the cause of preserving itself. And the cause has often been identified in expressly theological language as a sacred obligation.

This has implications for the prognosis Kahn has made about the future of American democracy. He is no less skeptical of the latter than he is of liberalism. Kahn is a believer in the sovereign (there is no politics without it), but he thinks the myth of popular sovereignty obscures the actual locations of power. It is institutional elites, abetted by mass media, who actually exercise the power to decide, even if they defer rhetorically to the popular sovereign. Yet Kahn does not appear to believe that a reversal of this power relationship is possible or even desirable. Certainly, he is no populist. In an essay written for Boston Review in 2002, “Democracy Won’t Help,” Kahn answers “pleas for a new American politics, one of mature deliberation among public-minded citizens who are willing to take a sober second look at their aroused passions,” by calling them utopian and misplaced. Discussion, whether in the public sphere or in Congress, will not alter the minds of the masses. Kahn believes that the U.S. has a moral obligation to use its power for the defense of strangers, to stop massive human rights violations, such as those in Bosnia, Rwanda, East Timor, and Kosovo; however, he believes the American people, by and large, are unwilling to make commitments of life and limb for something as abstract as human rights. A people cannot love a “universal,” and that, according to Kahn, is what a stranger’s humanity is. The alternative he proposes to discussion is strong executive leadership; without waiting for democratic or Congressional approval, the President can deploy “America’s immense military might,” and then mobilize the masses, pull them behind him, make them accept the exception. This recommendation 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. As this mediator, he can inspire “love” for moral right that the “universal” cannot.

Whether we live in the age of Bush or the age of Obama, reliance on charismatic presidential leadership is hardly an attractive option. The twentieth century had already seen an expansion of presidential power and a concentration on “the drama of the presidential personality,” justified by the need for the use of force and, since World War II, the assumption of a permanent war economy and wartime government (see Sean McCann, A Pinnacle of Feeling:  American Literature and Presidential Government). The president, expected to rise above particular interests and embody the popular will, invokes the messianic promise of America, recycling rhetoric of New Israel or sacrificial bloodshed. Woodrow Wilson, who took Lincoln as his inspiration, transformed the meaning of World War I into revelation, confusing the goal of multilateral peace with the world-historical destiny of the U.S. as political agent of millennial peace, an eschatological vision that, having the status, in Wilson’s mind, of a faith, may have contributed to his staunch and self-defeating refusal to compromise on the terms of Congressional ratification of the League of Nations. Wilson has often been faulted for his “idealism,” but if Wilson is guilty, his successors have no less abused his Biblical idiom and redeemer role. After committing U.S. air and naval forces, in 1950, without seeking authority from Congress, Harry Truman assured Americans, “We will win [in Korea] because God is with us.” Eisenhower, sanctified as a type of “Moses” or “Daniel” by evangelist Billy Graham, who baptized the thirty-fourth president in the Oval Office following his inauguration, led the nation in a prayer from the Capitol before committing the country to an escalated arms race, and his Secretary of State, John Foster Dulles, author of the doctrine of massive retaliation, cited as his favorite Biblical quotation, “All things work together for good to them that love God, to them who are called according to His purpose.” In John F. Kennedy’s celebrated 1961 inaugural address, he recalled Americans to “the belief that the rights of man come not from the generosity of the state but from the hand of God” and required “high standards of strength and sacrifice” of his countrymen and allies. His frequently bellicose administration, which was committed to defeating (not containing) Communism, risked nuclear brinksmanship with Russia in defense of that civil religion. This was “God’s work,” as was the use of secret forces (JFK glamorized the CIA) to skirt public scrutiny. Allen Dulles (Director, 1953-1961), who saw the intelligence agency as the chief executive’s elite cadre, had chiseled into the marble at the entrance to CIA Headquarters “And ye shall know the truth, and the truth shall make you free (John 8:32).” Dulles had in mind the truth of secret channels serving a public kept ignorant for its best interests, and in his book, The Craft of Intelligence (1963), he finds the genesis of his profession in the soothsayers, oracles, prophets, and holy men who revealed the future so that the ruler could act in harmony with divine intention. Lyndon Baines Johnson, building on the mystique and mythology of Kennedy-as-martyr (the Dean of the National Cathedral called the late president’s assassination a “new crucifixion”), would use his predecessor’s legacy to justify, among other causes, increasing American military involvement in Vietnam. Johnson exhorted Americans to re-consecrate the “God-given vision and determination to make the sacrifices demanded by our responsibilities” (remarks on the National Day of Prayer, 1965). Surely the American public has often been poorly informed, distracted, or ideologically blinded about the issues at stake in these periods, but charismatic executive leadership, especially in the Christological guise, has been no reliable substitute.

Kahn’s political theology describes the pathology of the imperial presidency, but he seems to think it is our boldest alternative, liberalism being such a leaky vessel and democracy so fundamentally irrational. At stake for Kahn, it seems, is the institutional elite’s ability to recognize political evil, see its rootedness in the duality of the human will, and therefore take steps to moderate and re-direct the country’s political behavior. Schmitt rued the Enlightenment (its secularism, humanism, rationalism) for eliminating the moral drama inhering in the political by making government mundane, concrete, positivistic. Kahn also shares the desire to reinvigorate our political life by restoring a sense of its “metaphysical” dimension, intuitively grasped by theology and its sacral texts. If Kahn were to pay more attention to actual prophetic speech instead of “secularized theological concepts,” he would see how public religions can work compatibly with liberal democratic politics, as the Social Gospel, the SCLC, the Catholic Worker movement, the Fellowship for Reconciliation, the National Council of Churches,  Clergy and Laymen Concerned, and Call to Renewal have done so in the past, to affirm norms, advocate for them, and contribute to the arguments over how they should be applied. The condition of greater cooperation is a healthy and tolerant public sphere, and this condition will not be fulfilled by impugning the Enlightenment’s legacy, especially when the denigration is premised upon a critique of Enlightenment and an account of secularization as tenuous as Kahn’s and Schmitt’s. Kahn makes some well-taken local arguments about the inconsistencies between liberal theory and democratic myth-making, between popular sovereignty and the actual locations of decision-making in American life, but America has thankfully never been quite the kind of political-theological project he depicts, and that has a good deal to do with the secular, humanist, rationalist traditions that Kahn disdains. Any liberal democracy that would rely for its political conscience on galvanizing nationalistic beliefs in shared experiences of pain, sacrifice, and mythic transcendence would be as spurious as Schmitt imagined most modern Western states to be, though they would be deserving of condemnation for reasons that Schmitt, the reactionary, considered too worldly to be moral.

By way of background, let me make a detour through the period when the concepts of “political religion” and “secular religion” were first theorized, in the early twentieth century. These concepts have a different pedigree from Schmitt’s “political theology,” from which Kahn derives his own arguments, and they emerge a few years later (specifically, in the 1930s, in the context of both anti-fascism and anti-Bolshevism). Such differences, however, help to illuminate what is distinctive – as well as illogical – about Schmitt’s understanding of modernity and its secular foundations.

The concept of political religion, or “secular religion,” rose to intellectual prominence among clerical, conservative, liberal, and ex-Communists. It is succinctly formulated in the Swiss Catholic philosopher Denis de Rougement’s The Devil’s Share, widely reviewed upon its first publication in 1944. A political religion sacralizes a regime by deifying the state and its representatives; it arrogates to the state the powers and authority that belong to God, and so becomes totalitarian. The idea of political religion has since had a complex genealogy, and intellectual historians and sociologists (such as Emilio Gentile, Roger Griffin, Michael Burleigh, Philippe Burrin) have identified two of the contrasting ways in which it has functioned as a hermeneutic device: 1) the phenomenological, in which the regime in question travesties a traditional religion yet provides for its subjects the existentially grounding force of belonging to a faith community; and 2) the functionalist, focusing on rituals and symbols that provide means of social control and legitimation instrumental for a regime. Theologians and Christian philosophers favored the first view. It ascended in the ’30s and spread in the ’40s among figures such as Eric Voegelin, Nicholas Berdiaev, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, Adolf Keller, Jacques Maritain, Pius XI, Karl Barth, Paul Tillich, Reinhold Niebuhr, and de Rougement. They believed in the yearning of homo religiosus described by Fathers of Western theology, such as Paul and Augustine, who speak of man’s soul not resting unless it “reposeth in Thee.” This longing, they argued, was so strong that it imposed internal limits on Enlightenment since religious needs would have to be satisfied by one means or another¾authentically, by Christianity, or inauthentically, by profane culture. Political religions thus came about in a secular age, that is, after Europe had been de-Christianized. As evidence of the displacement or seizure of religious content, Christian proponents cited semantic correspondences between traditional faith and radical ideologies from which they then inferred a deeper substrate of meaning. For example, Marxism’s dialectical theory of history would be a teleologization of millennial eschatology.

In contrast with the Christian critics of secularization, Schmitt argued that his idea of political theology was non-sectarian in purpose. In particular, he objected to neo-orthodoxy’s belief that religion and politics were incompatible because faith, having a transcendent object, should not identify its Good with political ends. Schmitt believed, rather, that faith and politics could not be disentangled. Moreover, their association was not necessarily a sign of corruption. Schmitt’s own religious background has some relevance here. Mark Lilla has suggested, in Reckless Minds, that Schmitt’s Roman Catholicism and Political Form (1923) betrays the author’s nostalgia for the medieval Church, which he perceives as the ideal political form since it “represents the entire body of the faithful” rather than atomistic individuals bound inorganically by social contract. Moreover, Schmitt was influenced by counter-revolutionary Christian philosophers, such as Donoso Cortés and Joseph de Maistre¾however, he was instructed primarily by their systematic analogies between state philosophy and study of God, and he did not recommend, as they did, subordinating the state to Catholic hegemony. If faith and politics were interwoven, it was not because their association was commendable and necessary, but because “the sovereign” is a secularized theological concept. Schmitt’s theory of the decision, of course, rests on this very premise.

Schmitt saw parallels between the political transformations of the modern period¾the decline and domestication of the sovereign coupled with the emergence of liberal and democratic states¾and secularization of Western societies, which saw the disenchantment of reality and the rise of liberal theology and radical utopian atheism. The two processes, he argued, were structurally analogous: State forms corresponded to secularized concepts of god. The modern era, for example, secularized the God of “deism” as the normative construction of law in constitutionalism. The older concept of God as transcendent sovereign, as giver of the law and creator of miracles, had been fused in the Middle Ages with the figure of the sacral monarch, who incarnated both divine and political power, the authority of revelation and of the crown. The modern era sought to divorce this nexus and vilify each of its components, associating the transcendent God of revelation with irrationalism and absolute monarchy with tyranny. This suspicion and vilification of sovereignty reaches its extreme form in modern anti-statism (Marxist, anarchist), which is also militantly humanist, in its substitution of man for God. The idea of sovereignty survives in democracy by being displaced from a person to the citizenry: “In America [the aftereffects of the idea of God] manifested itself in the reasonable and pragmatic belief that the voice of the people is the voice of God,” as Schmitt writes. The people, in a strictly metaphorical sense, decide their destiny and create their laws through the exercise of a free will, much as the Biblical God creates the earth ex nihilo. Modern liberal democracies thus preserve a weak idea of sovereignty that prevents their complete slide into bureaucratization, though they may be hardly ideal states in Schmitt’s eyes. They rest on an incoherent theory of government, in which popular sovereignty and the rule of law are forced into alignment. This structure substitutes for the transcendent god and transcendent ruler of the pre-Enlightenment state the “immanent” god (national consciousness) and the “immanent” (liberal, constitutional) state of the prosaic nineteenth-century imagination.

Schmitt’s secularization theory argues that at every historical stage “the metaphysical image that a definite epoch forges of the world has the same structure as what the world immediately understands to be appropriate as a form of its political organization.” The sovereign that occupies the preeminent structural position, however, is not just a logical function in isomorphic systems. It is independent of theology, metaphysics, and the philosophy of the state, though it makes possible analogies among them. Schmitt explains his position through a method he calls “the sociology of the concept,” which approaches concepts, neither as psychologically motivated nor as interest-group driven, but instead as autonomous structures of thought having reference to “spiritual” content. And as his allusion in the text to the Scholastic “concept of substance” indicates, Schmitt conceives of the sovereign as something having permanent being, fully itself, inhering in the order of things. “The sovereign” thus designates, for Schmitt, a pre-psychological essence integral to human nature and hence constant of human history, even when it is disavowed.

Schmitt argues, moreover, that his sliding analogies, displacing the sovereign from one epoch to the next, point to transformations of this underlying content (or “identity,” “substance,” etc.). These transformations are perhaps better characterized as distortions, suppressions, or acts of seizure. The modern era, for Schmitt, is inauthentic insofar it denies the sovereign or transposes it onto a body¾that of “the people”¾that cannot truly exercise the faculty of decision. Before theology travestied itself by incorporating the methods of rationalism, it grasped two essentials that the modern era set itself against: It not only posited an identity that transcends the law and the national consciousness, but it also affirmed the necessity for transcending them in the political act. To deny, ignore, or displace these theological intuitions is to be self-deceived as to what constitutes an authentic being-in-the-world and a legitimate form of the state.

The Christian apologists who objected to political religions did not believe, simply put, that modernity was valid. And in the structure of his argumentation, if not in his conclusions, Schmitt resembles these theologians more than he might have recognized. Hans Blumenberg also classed Schmitt among the theological adversaries of modernity, in his masterwork The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (1966), a book that stung Schmitt sufficiently for him to initiate a correspondence with Blumenberg and include a long retort to the latter in his Political Theology II (1970). I agree with Blumenberg’s anatomy of Schmitt, and I also believe that Kahn repeats some of Schmitt’s errors. Blumenberg thus helps us to see the faults not only of Schmitt’s Political Theology (1922), but also of Kahn’s interpretation.

Essentially, Blumenberg argues that Schmitt is immodestly inferring substantial content from analogy instead of logically limiting his claims to illustrative parallels. He arrives at this confutation through an elaborate critique that implicates Schmitt in reactionary currents of twentieth-century thought. In the 1973 edition of The Legitimacy of Modern Age, expanded to include a chapter-long response to Political Theology II, Blumenberg specifies that Schmitt is not interested in theology for apologetic purposes. He does, however, believe that Schmitt, like the Christians from which he dissociates himself, is arguing that modernity owes an “objective cultural debt” to sources predating it. Schmitt wants to stabilize the present by denying the possibility of any rupture with the past that would introduce a radically new worldview with entirely different foundations. The modern world-view, as Blumenberg understands it, is characterized by “rational self-assertion,” its heroic moment being the Enlightenment, which liberated theoretic curiosity from theological absolutism, and its methods, historicism and scientific inquiry, both of which reject totality. Blumenberg admits that the Enlightenment overweeningly tried to supply answers to questions inherited from theology that its modern methods were poorly equipped to answer, but he believes that Schmitt’s anti-Enlightenment stance only exploits the gaps between what the Enlightenment promised (namely, a teleological explanation of the whole of reality) and the crises of authority (epistemic, moral, political) that emerged in the modern age. The Schmittian accusation says that worldly reason overlooks its “continuous historical descent from that upon which it denies its dependence.” Thus, to adopt Blumenberg’s characterization of Schmitt, the modern is “indebted” to the pre-modern.

To force his case, Schmitt’s “sociology of concepts” makes unfounded substantialist claims about the concept of the sovereign that rely more on rhetorical persuasion (analogy, metaphor, allusion, irony) than on logical proof. Blumenberg identifies Schmitt’s method of argumentation as a kind of “linguistic secularization”; it is “an intentional style” that “consciously seeks a relation to the sacred as a provocation.” The author uses a rhetoric that ironically juxtaposes the self-understandings of modern and pre-modern epochs to the detriment of one or the other. The irony can affirm the independence of the modern age or expose gaps in its self-consciousness. As an example of the former, Blumenberg cites Rousseau alluding to Augustine’s Confessions in the title to his memoir, Goethe calling Newton’s birthday the new Nativity, and Bacon exclaiming “the resurrection” upon seeing nude pagan statues. Schmitt himself points to such ironic uses of theological allusions by Rousseau as well as Tocqueville, Kelsen, Engels, Bakhunin, and Proudhon, though as evidence of the persistence of the substance of faith. For instances of anti-modern linguistic secularization, Blumenberg cites Schmitt’s own analogies as exemplary cases. They reverse the intention of the irony in Rousseau’s or Kant’s tropes.

Schmitt uses this style as a description, an accusation, and a rhetorical weapon, but he does not satisfactorily answer the overriding question: Even if one agrees that we need the language of sovereignty to decide the exception, do we need the language of theology to explain the exercise of sovereignty? Blumenberg’s ultimately simple point is that, from a logical standpoint, Schmitt does not prove that his provocative analogies are any less metaphorical than other possibilities. For instance, sovereignty can also be said to resemble the deus ex machina of theater or the artistic genius of romanticism, in which “creation” and “incarnation” are favored metaphors of the poetic process. Schmitt prefers theological comparisons because his theory of secularization requires them and because they generate pathos and shock. If Schmitt limited his use of analogy or metaphor to heuristic devices, then Blumenberg would have no objection. Schmitt, however, takes the further step of “terminologizing” the theological metaphor so that it refers to a substance. The basic structure of terminologization is as follows: the author makes one side of an analogy the origin and the other side derivative, such that the mere comparison now signifies an illegitimate transformation and, hence, indebtedness. In Schmitt’s case, theology represents the origin (ownership, authenticity, debt) of a discourse of the transcendent sovereign; it authentically grasps the concept, has ownership of the concept, and therefore removing that concept to a wholly rational, disenchanted context is to entail a debt that rebounds on the modern. In rebuttal, Blumenberg contends that Schmitt is actually not isolating theological origins but pragmatically selecting only those aspects of theology that are congruent with his decisionism. Therefore, Schmitt selects “transcendence,” “omnipotence,” “miracle,” “creation ex-nihilo,” and “law-giving,” while neglecting equally important—from the standpoint of dogmatics—aspects such as God’s “impassibility,” “omnipresence,” “aseity,” “providence,” veracity,” or “goodness.” Schmitt’s rhetoric of secularization thus conceals the pragmatism underlying his choice of comparisons.

Kahn uses “secularization” more flexibly than Schmitt, but he nonetheless carries forward some of the problematic aspects of Schmitt’s thesis identified by Blumenberg. This flexibility is demanded by Kahn’s effort to adapt Schmitt to the more lately theorized notion of the “social imaginary.” In defining the latter, Kahn assumes several meanings of secularization: the rationalization/disenchantment of reality, the privatization of institutional religions, and the commutation of ideas and symbols from religious to profane contexts. However, he is not describing a triumph of the Enlightenment. On the contrary, he argues that modern consciousness is self-deceived when it asserts its rational autonomy. Even though the authority of churches may have declined at the macrocosmic level of society, secularization has failed at a deeper level to annul the “sacred” (a metaphysical need) or erase “the theological” (the conceptualization of the sacred, wherever it appears). As in Schmitt’s theory, modern culture entails an objective debt to the pre-modern. America is an obvious test case for Kahn, since “no other country in the West so easily accepts the deep penetration of religious faith into its political rhetoric” (from Kahn’s essay, “Sacrificial Nation”).

America’s political theology, Kahn argues, inheres in its “social imaginary”: “The real work of political theology, then, is done in giving a theoretical expression to those understandings that already inform a community’s self-understanding.” As theorized by Charles Taylor, the term “social imaginary” refers to the self-understandings of a culture that create the background of its moral order and co-create its social life. These form a common horizon of expectations and make sense of habits and norms without recourse to explicit, rational statements of belief. Kahn seems to adopt a usage similar to Taylor’s, but he ascribes to himself a unique hermeneutic method for sensing a culture’s social imaginary. Kahn’s method applies two techniques: “genealogical” and “architectural.” The first excavates collective memory through language to unearth resonances, semantic echoes, involuntary associations, all of which show the persistence of the past in the very stuff of thought. The second traces patterns of analogical congruence that have been built out of common narratives, images, and representations. These patterns reveal already existing analogies, implied or explicit, between theology and law, theology and political philosophy, theology and nationalism, theology and everyday democratic assumptions. As in Schmitt, political theology is both the phenomenon described and the form of the description. However, Kahn flanks himself from some of the criticism to which Schmitt opened his theory when he conflated descriptive form and content, rhetoric and substance. Whereas Blumenberg faults Schmitt because he mistakes metaphor and analogy for evolution and transformation—i.e., derives the content of his descriptions from the rhetorical forms of linguistic secularization—Kahn says that the rhetoric is the content. These forms are deeply submerged in the American social imaginary. There is little point, moreover, in criticizing the illogic of such analogies and metaphors since, regardless of their truth or falsity, they provide motives for action. In moments of existential choice, we tend to fall back on them for comprehension rather than rational discourse alone or even rely on them in place of rational discourse.

Kahn thus distinguishes himself from Schmitt by shifting the register of sovereignty from timeless substance to collective imagining, yet he seems to maintain nonetheless Schmitt’s claim that sovereignty as such is theological, and hence authentic, as opposed to the mendacious secularism and rationalism of modern, liberal politics. Having elaborated Blumenberg’s—and my own—objection to this argument, in my following post I will question whether such a notion of sovereignty and its supposedly theological content is as constitutive and constant a feature of the American social imaginary as Kahn suggests.

The guiding thread of the book is Kahn’s running commentary (“exegesis,” he calls it) of the four chapters of Schmitt’s Political Theology. At the same time, Kahn purports to be saying something “new” about political theology that is not found in Schmitt, hence the subtitle: “Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty.” If I understand him correctly, what is “new” is the claim that liberal democracy, because of its reliance on a concept of popular sovereignty, also needs to face up to its own political theology. I shall return to this claim below. First, I wish to say something about the book in terms of its exegesis of Schmitt. I don’t think Kahn is claiming to be saying anything “new” about Schmitt, either in general or on Political Theology in particular. Since there exist by now hundreds of books and articles on Schmitt and his political theology in German, French, Italian, Spanish (and, since the late 1980s, English), and since Kahn’s thin book lacks even a basic bibliographical treatment of this material and one that does not go beyond secondary literature in English, one would have to assume that this text is not really intended to contribute to the scholarly literature on Schmitt.

So, rather than belaboring the point that Kahn’s exegesis is not novel, I will say a couple of things about what would have been an advance in the discussion of the theme of “political theology” in Schmitt. The first step forward would have consisted in trying to make sense of Schmitt’s rejection of decisionism in the early 1930s and investigating from a fresh perspective his theory of “concrete normative orders,” which was intended to displace decisionism. In a footnote, Kahn does cite the work in which Schmitt is generally thought to go beyond decisionism, On the Three Types of Juristic Thought, but he ignores the doctrine of concrete orders and remains, throughout his discussion, caught within the distinction between “a normativist and a decisionist form of juristic thought.” Indeed, Kahn adopts Schmitt’s own earlier claim that liberal thought, at least with regard to philosophy of law, is entirely lacking a theory of decision and exception, and so is unable to provide an account of sovereignty. Framing Schmitt’s thought purely in terms of decisionism makes Kahn’s critique of liberal political theory at times hardly distinguishable from the fashionable use that was made of Schmitt about a decade ago to criticize Rawls’s purportedly insufficient conception of the political. I myself have shown, in an easily accessible journal article on the concept of the political in Schmitt and Rawls, published a few years ago, that this kind of opposition between them is misguided and leads only to misunderstanding both authors.

Another path Kahn could have taken, which would have made an original contribution to the debate on Schmitt’s political theology, would have been to read together Political Theology and Political Theology II. The reason why Schmitt’s second attempt at fashioning a political theology is fundamental is that it responds to the blistering critique of the first volume advanced by the theologian Erik Peterson. In Monotheism as a Political Problem, Peterson demonstrates that a Christian political theology is impossible because Christian theology is Trinitarian and gives no support whatsoever for an analogy to the “monotheistic” conception of sovereignty. Hence Schmitt’s entire “genealogical” and “analogical” (as Kahn calls them) construction of political theology – which essentially draws on the historical fact that medieval Canon Law was used to “translate” theological concepts into the construction of early modern jurisprudence and political thought, concretized in the idea of modern sovereignty as sole legitimate legislative power—was, according to Peterson, based on a poor understanding of Christian theology. Strangely, Political Theology II is never discussed by Kahn. This is somewhat bewildering because it is precisely in the latter book where Schmitt argues that political theology can be understood as a legitimation discourse for modern democracy. His defense against Peterson consists in showing that the latter misunderstood Political Theology by claiming that Schmitt’s sovereign was a secularization of the long tradition of sacral kingship—on which see the elegant volume by Francis Oakley. Political Theology II is a far better place to look for textual support to Kahn’s own project of understanding the politico-theological needs of modern liberal democracies.

This line of thought, namely, following the Peterson-Schmitt debate on political theology and democracy, has been pursued by Agamben in a fundamental book (Il Regno e la Gloria) on political theology and liberalism, which is available in various European languages, but not yet in English. (Kahn is apparently not aware of the book, and hence of the discussion of the last several years on this theme. Kahn does rely rather heavily on Agamben’s first approach to Schmitt in Homo sacer, which was indeed still a working out of Schmitt’s early decisionism.)

Let me conclude these remarks with a more general point: political theology is a discourse that does not originate with Schmitt, but in the nineteenth-century internal critique of Hegelianism, and characterizes the entire stretch that Löwith designated as “from Hegel to Nietzsche.” Political theology existed well before Kelsen’s “Gott und Staat” and Weber’s writings on the sociology of religion (the usual reference points used to situate Schmitt’s Political Theology, which are also the reference points for Kahn’s exegesis). What is interesting about this genealogy (one not given by Kahn, who uses as foil the unreliable historical reconstruction found in Lilla’s Stillborn God) is that Schmitt’s decision to narrow “political theology” down to a doctrine of sovereignty silenced both Christian and Jewish variants of political theologies without sovereignty. This operation is the “polemical” and “rhetorical” performance of Schmitt’s Political Theology. But the operation was rather quickly uncovered: as previously mentioned, Peterson’s critique opened the gates for a Christian yet anti-sovereign political theology (which then took a variety of forms in Maritain, Voegelin, Metz, and today in Milbank and in Charles Taylor, to cite some examples). Jewish political theology was revived by Hermann Cohen at the end of the nineteenth century, and then taken up—prior to Schmitt—by Rosenzweig, Benjamin, as well as pursued by Leo Strauss (it reappears today, deprived of its messianic pathos, in works by Novak and Walzer, among others). Kahn says at one point that he is doing “an exegesis of his [Schmitt’s] text, not an intellectual history”; but had he contextualized better Political Theology, his exegesis would perhaps have been more illuminating.

I now turn to what is “new” about Kahn’s use of Schmitt’s political theology, namely, his argument that modern liberal democracy, because it relies entirely on popular sovereignty, ought to recognize the political theology that underlies it. This argument relies on the false premise that there is only political theology where there is sovereignty. But I do not wish to press this point. Instead, I want to draw attention to the last chapter of the book where, in my opinion, Kahn clarifies his thesis: there he claims that the American and French Revolutions “transferred” sovereignty from the king to the body of the people, and that on this “finite body” occurs “the revelation of the sacred.” From this claim, Kahn quickly draws out his idea of a democratic political theology: “To be as a part of the revolution is to experience the mystical corpus of the sovereign. No such experience is possible without a leap of faith.” “That sovereignty could be directly instantiated in any and every citizen … was surely among the deepest changes marking the emergence of a modern social imaginary … the relationship of the individual to the sacred is now direct (without any intermediary function), mystical (outside of ordinary space and time), and of ultimate significance (a value beyond life itself). None of this is a matter of reason; all of it is a matter of will, imagination, and faith.” All of the novelty in Kahn’s understanding of political theology is expressed in the above citations. I conclude with a few critical considerations.

Kahn appears to conflate what in the history of religions is called the phenomenon of hierophany—namely, the appearance of the divine in a particular shape or form and in a moment in time and space—with “theology,” which is a rational account of divine beings that “always are.” Rather than a political theology, Kahn offers a political hierophany. I think one could even say that theology—at least from Plato through Aquinas to Barth—if anything, is precisely an attempt to deny validity to hierophanic manifestations, which belong with the mythical and irrational aspects of religious belief and cult, and which have traditionally been related to magic and worship of power. Schmitt, in any case, and as a good student of Canon Law, seems to have understood political theology in opposition to the kind of political hierophany that Kahn advocates.

An additional problem is that Kahn conflates the language of revelation with the language of the sacred. He writes as if there is some continuity between a politics of the sacred and a political theology. In Homo sacer, Agamben made the bold but interesting claim that the sacred does not belong at all in the sphere of religion nor of theology, but rather ought to be circumscribed to the sphere of law. This claim may seem at first to strengthen Kahn’s hand, but in reality it may undermine his position: if law were to depend on the sacred, and the sacred has nothing to do with theology, then the kind of conflation between sacral politics and political theology that Kahn is offering may signal a confusion. Strictly speaking, what Kahn is calling a political theology would correspond, at best, to what the Romans called “civil theology”—not to be confused with the modern idea of civil religion—and, at worst, to what Voegelin and others have called “political religion,” that is, the exaltation of a concept of earthly sovereignty that is entirely “closed off” to the “one true God.” It is hard to say, judging from this book, in which Kahn operates with an idea of “political theology” that does not carefully distinguish between the concepts of civil theology, civil religion, political theology, and political religion.

In the end, I believe the crux of the question is as follows: modern revolutions and their concepts of popular sovereignty, in my opinion, are all premised on the idea that a people exists only in and through what Rawls called “devices of representation.” It follows that no political theology that was not also a theory of representation could even qualify as a democratic political theology. Schmitt offered some such theory of democratic representation that was also a political theology. Liberalism certainly offers a theory of democratic representation, and it remains an open question, in my opinion, which of its variants entail also a political theology and which do not: Hobbes’s and Locke’s arguably do; Spinoza’s and Kant’s—I would argue—do not. Only Kahn—at least judging from this book—considers representation irrelevant to the “phenomenology” of modern revolutionary events and the construction of popular sovereignty. Remarkably, for a book on Schmitt—one of the great thinkers of the problem of political representation in the twentieth century—the term is entirely absent in this book. The concern that Kahn raises regarding the possibility that liberal democracy may have an internal relation to a variant of political theology is a pressing and important one: it is to be hoped that in his future books he will actually address it.