First, as the entries by Noah Salomon, Mathijs Pelkmans, and Robert Hefner, among others, show, it is useful to step back from the US, and even from Western Europe, to consider alternative ways of organizing diversity. In northwest Madagascar, where I have conducted ethnographic fieldwork sporadically over a couple of decades, there has been religious freedom in the sense that the boundaries between practicing Christians and Muslims are fairly open and, even more, insofar as it has been perfectly acceptable to be neither Christian nor Muslim, without thereby being designated as immoral or ‘primitive’ or subjected to undue missionary activity. As I’ve written elsewhere, some families might gently direct one of their children toward Islam, another toward Christianity, and a third to ‘ancestral practices,’ which are simply referred to as “non-congregating” (tsy mivavaka) rather than by any substantive definition. Some people engage in combinations of each. Although I would not advocate a causal explanation, the pattern fits nicely with the logic of bilateral kinship and wide exogamy. Most people can recognize at least four grandparents and probably eight great-grandparents (and beyond), each of whom may have a distinctive identity with respect to social, political, religious, and geographical affiliation. From among these senior living or deceased relatives people make choices of stronger or weaker identification, influenced by such factors as which grandparent one is sent to stay with on vacations as a child and ending with in whose tomb and which mode of burial one finds oneself.

This enables an open society with a good deal of mutual understanding and respect, in which no single identification or institution behind it is absolutized. In some respects one could say the individual has a good deal of freedom of choice. However many Malagasy do not experience things in quite this way. In explaining why they live in one place rather than another or carry out a particular set of ‘religious’ or ‘ancestral’ practices they would say they had been called to it by a particular ancestor, who by showing them signs, notably manifest as illness or troubling dreams, subjects them to prohibitions which align them more firmly with that ancestor rather than others. Servants at the ancestral shrines were forced some generations ago to work there. Today those who remain as their successors cite the wrath of their own ancestors as the reasons for staying on.

In all this there is also a logic of the negative. People are defined and define themselves in the first instance by what they don’t practice, by the kinds of praying they don’t do, the foods they cannot eat, the days they cannot work, or the kinds of work or acts of deference they cannot perform, rather than by positive attributions. This is a kind of freedom by restriction; in clarifying the boundaries of what you cannot do, it leaves wide open what you can do.

My second general comment is that however we want to define religion (and perhaps we could take a leaf from northern Madagascar and leave it open, specifying only what it is not), one of the general features, as the Malagasy ethnography also suggests, is a kind of submission to something conceived as larger, higher, or more powerful than oneself. Durkheim called it society; Maurice Bloch calls it deference to authority or to other persons; Roy Rappaport describes it as one of the entailments of engaging in ritual performance. In participating in a ritual, whatever one’s state of mind or ‘belief’ at the time, and irrespective of the semiotic ideology that Webb Keane rightly and compellingly points to, one is accepting the outcome (assuming that the felicity conditions of the performative event are met) and moreover accepting the meta-performativity, i.e. that acts and utterances of this kind, felicitously produced, have the consequences that they do. To perform a ritual is, in the end, to accept a certain liturgical order of which it is part (irrespective of whether this also entails deference to specific officials, like priests). In other words, the freedom to carry out certain kinds of acts is premised on subjection to an order that defines what such acts are, that puts things under a definition and regulates the changes in definition. As I elaborate elsewhere, the process is one of the instauration of ethical criteria and it is intrinsic to human speech acts. Insofar as what we refer to as specifically ‘religious’ includes the most formal and consequential kinds of performative acts (baptized or not, etc.) one might say that what religion is not is freedom.

Hence the very idea of freedom of religion is paradoxical; it is the freedom to be unfree in a particular kind of way. Judicial and legislative bodies need to take this point, call it the relativity of freedom or unfreedom, or the deconstruction of freedom, into account. They need to notice Sullivan when she points to “the reinstatement of the rights of religious authority by political authority—in the name of religious freedom.” They then need to make informed decisions about which versions of unfreedom to support—and we should all, as Saba Mahmood emphasizes, pay attention to the politics and ideologies that underpin such decisions (a skepticism I share with Lori Beaman, concerning federal government initiatives at the present time in, of all places, Canada). If Muslims were the ones taking the lead in the US courts asking for certain rights and freedoms, surely the self-same justices would have argued another way.

This is certainly not to say let everyone be free to do as they please. Not only is such freedom impossible in the human condition, but there is the matter of whether my freedom impinges on yours. To emphasize a point in Mahmood’s account and mentioned in some of the other posts, the freedom of religion we demand elsewhere (though the point applies internally as well) too often means the freedom to missionize other people. The freedom to practice my religion impinges on the freedom to practice yours in peace.

We need to be careful here. I am not a historian but I imagine that religious freedom once meant freedom from oppression by the proponents of a stronger religion rather than freedom from interference by the state or the right given by the state for specific religions to interfere in other peoples’ business. Certain proponents of religious freedom in the US now seem to want to have it both ways: the state is criticized both for being secular and for promoting a ‘religion’ of its own. What is missing in such arguments is attention not to one’s own rights or freedoms but the obligation to enable the rights and freedoms of others.

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.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Kahn’s surprising conclusion is that political theology is fundamentally an examination of freedom. The free act of will, undetermined by law, reason or interest, appears in the decision for revolution; in the maintenance of the state through civic sacrifice in moments of existential crisis; in the judge’s decision in applying norm to fact; and in the philosopher’s free inquiry into forms of meaning. A theory, a life, or a state committed to law without exception denies the reality that law alone can never grasp the foundational act or the existential situation.

Kahn evokes an essential unity between citizen, popular sovereign, and state in the moment of sacrifice that exemplifies the free act. Working within, alongside, and at times against Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology, Kahn argues that the freedom of the decision is inexplicable by strictly “secular” categories, whether empiricist or rationalist.  That is why it is free, and why we need theology to understand it.

Thus Kahn’s political theology does not provide yet another vantage point from which to debunk the conceptions of human freedom declared by the Enlightenment, by secularism, or by liberalism by pointing to a deeper form of unfreedom at their root. It is liberalism (or secularism or Enlightenment) in itself and on its own terms—for instance, in its studied avoidance of the decision—that fails to grasp the free act. He debunks, or, rather, supplements such conceptions by pointing to a deeper form of freedom. Kahn’s, then, is not a conception that focuses on the fundamental otherness of the sovereign and the state in modern politics. Rather, Kahn largely inverts such a topography of the political: we are (potentially, ideally, and sometimes actually) the sovereign, and the sovereign, by definition, is free.

The freedom depicted by Kahn in Political Theology is certainly not a negative freedom. It is, among other things, the collective freedom of a community to found a state and to sustain it. It is, given Kahn’s emphasis on the notion of popular sovereignty, a freedom enacted through individuals’ participation in the life of the sovereign—paradigmatically through the giving of one’s own life. It is a freedom to sacrifice, to suffer an immortalizing, sacred death. It is thus the freedom to transcend the self: “Where we find that meaning [i.e., an ultimate meaning], we will find freedom.”

*  *  *

Yet precisely that which is striking and appealing in Kahn’s account—his interweaving of sovereignty, freedom and political theology—and which should serve to broaden the ambit of political theological inquiry, rather seems to confine it. For Kahn asserts the mutual exclusivity of an order committed to law and one guided by political theology: “If politics has become a domain wholly ordered by law, then there is no need for a political theology.” There is no political theology, for instance, “appropriate for the institutions of the European Union: it is politics as a fully secularized practice of reason.” Nor is it to be found in many parts of the international legal order, which are often systems set against the decision, against sovereignty, and thus, per Kahn, against freedom.

While the European Union may claim ideologically to be a sovereignty-free project, Kahn’s own analysis of the decision operative in the routine legal case suggests that there is freedom in the establishment and maintenance of a legal order. So why does Kahn draw the boundaries of the political theological inquiry in this manner? A footnote provides a good metaphor for some of the exclusions he makes: “if my arguments sound more Protestant than Catholic, that too reflects the American political imaginary.”

Even if Kahn is right to situate the “domain wholly ordered by law” beyond freedom, we may still wonder why it follows that there is no “need for a political theology.” Is freedom the only inexplicable, hence theological, feature of our political landscape?

Political theology, conceived rather as applying in the last instance to more than freedom alone—for instance, as the examination also of a society’s supposedly sacred or highest values—might provide an illuminating perspective on the oft-asserted sanctity of humanity, of property, of reason, of nature, or of the rule of law itself. To approach such commitments and projects as forms of political theology is to underscore that they, too, rest on premises that cannot be derivative, which is to say, on a leap of faith of sorts. Perhaps, in maintaining that there is no political theology in the workings of the EU, Kahn concedes too much to the liberal self-conception that he otherwise adeptly deflates.

To follow Kahn and Schmitt, perhaps we should not call these other sacred or highest values political theological if they do not self-consciously evoke Schmitt’s friend/enemy distinction or entail the possibility of human sacrifice (although they may do so more often than we would like to think). But rather than accept their “secular” self-declarations as Kahn seems to, we might have recourse to other labels (such as “legal theology,” to cite John Comaroff). On the other hand, I am skeptical of using the Schmittian friend/enemy distinction as the criterion for the political as it seems, through inversion and thus replication, to privilege the core liberal values—of life and self-ownership—over other highest values. Conjoining “political” and “theological” presents an opportunity to focus on the creation and maintenance of a cultural order more broadly—something that can take place in settings aside from the confrontation with the enemy, such in as the creation of a trade zone. Another way, then, of understanding the exclusions that Kahn makes—of the EU, and its lack of an enemy, for example—is that he emphasizes the “political” side of the conjunction more than the “theological.”

If one concern, then, is that Kahn gives up too much in terms of the self-declared secularity of substantive areas and sites of legal activity, a second fear is that by treating freedom and popular sovereignty as a kind of prerequisite for engaging the theological, Kahn excludes from its scope the experience of being unfree. That is, Kahn’s political theology consists of the internally generated, not the externally imposed or imported, political order. But to return to the examples of the sacred nature of property, trade, or humanity—such valorizations might very well be, and in fact often are, imposed by external powers. Indeed, in the postwar era, juridical sovereignty itself is the form through which many states have been governed, as much as it is the form through which they have engaged in self-government and freedom. A conception of the sovereign, accordingly, as an outsider and alien—like Marshall Sahlins’s “stranger king,” who comes from abroad and is joined to the local people through marriage and sacrifice—is still relevant. In many postcolonial contexts, though, it may be hard to decide who is the best candidate for such a designation: the estranged national elite; the global banking class; the U.S., on which Kahn focuses; or, most recently, China.

Even in the U.S., popular sovereignty is not the only conception of sovereignty. I heartily agree with Kahn that popular sovereignty merits a political theological analysis, in the U.S. and elsewhere. But in legal doctrine and state practice, governmental sovereignty often derives directly from the Crown and international law, not from popular sovereignty. (See, for example, Justice Sutherland’s remarkable opinion describing the sovereign powers transmitted from the Crown to the Union, and not derived from the Constitution. United States v. Curtiss-Wright Export Corp., 299 U.S. 304 [1936]). The exclusion of these genealogies of sovereignty is surprising in a study of American political theology, because it is from within this lineage that the United States government proclaimed itself to be sovereign. This dimension of American sovereignty is no less free, and no less theological, than Kahn contends, though it is not grounded in popular sovereignty.

And, as Kahn notes, even within the tradition of popular sovereignty it is possible, indeed common, for the manifestations of popular sovereignty of one moment to be alien to those living at a later moment. Put another way, the freedom he describes entails the power to create order for others. It may even include the freedom to present one’s own commitments to property, trade and humanity as non-political, non-theological, and universal. The experience of the recipients of such intergenerational or imperial beneficence need not be ruled out of the bounds of political theological inquiry because they do not act freely.

*  *  *

In sum, I would ask whether political theology ought not to be construed in a frame wider than Kahn allows, as a study of the continued forms and presence of the god-like within the nominally secular—whether or not they derive from free self-governance. Nonetheless, Kahn’s interweaving of popular sovereignty, freedom, and political theology is a powerful corrective to a sense of political theology as an inquiry only into unfreedom, into the condition of living in a world made by others. Documenting such unfreedom seems an obvious sense of what political theology is about, and Kahn compels us to consider additional possibilities.

Within the frame Kahn has chosen, it can be difficult to discern the status of the form of freedom that he describes. Is it actual and present in everyday life, a reading encouraged by his depiction of his project as phenomenological and almost ethnographic? In that case, he confronts factual claims to the contrary. Or is it latent, a necessary background condition underlying the creation and maintenance of the state? In fact, one can discern both senses of freedom in Kahn’s work. To my mind, Kahn’s freedom has a status similar to Habermas’s ideal speech situation. Such an ideal sacrifice situation shares something methodologically with Habermas’s construct as regulatory ideal while inverting much of its content. Kahn’s is an ideal of the potential unity between citizen, sovereign, and state in the moment of sacrifice; a unity, that is, of the body of the citizen, the ethereal, non-institutionalized popular sovereign, and the bricks and mortar of the state. Seen from this perspective, those who would critique Kahn for failing to see that we are not free at the moment, or that the state is actually a monster, take up a methodological and analytical position like that of critics who have attacked the unreality of Habermas’s ideal. They may be correct in any given instance, but perhaps they miss the main points at issue, one of which is to determine where and when such an ideal as ideal might be thought to exist.

In the American context, Kahn has identified an ideal—the sacrificial ideal of freedom—that exists both as an ideal and at times in practice. And while the U.S. is certainly his main subject, he describes an ideal of freedom that has purchase well beyond American borders. Perhaps this freedom is what we’ve seen evoked by some of the protesters in the Middle East and North Africa in recent months. And Kahn is right to draw our attention to the claim that there is something miraculous in the plausible appearance of “the people.” Conjuring the people by giving up one’s self seems to represent just the kind of freedom and popular sovereignty that Kahn has in mind. The challenge for those who accept Kahn’s ideal is how to bring the individual and the conjured popular sovereign into a sufficient degree of unity with the apparatus of government, for such is the condition of more lasting freedom. These are the directions in which Kahn pushes us, and we need not think that he is correct on a factual or phenomenological level all of the time in order to examine this ideal, to ask when and how it emerges, and to see it as something astounding and “theological.”

Kahn’s ideal might also serve a regulatory function, furnishing a critical perspective from which to view efforts by policy makers to unbundle sacrifice, the sacred and the state. For example, might we not interpret the rise of the private military contractor in the U.S. as an attempt to “outsource” sacrifice, to avoid or undermine the ideal of sacrifice that makes possible the unity of citizen, sovereign, and state? We might interpret in a similar fashion the reliance on immigrant soldiers. These policies are illustrations of the gap between Kahn’s ideal of popular sovereignty, on the one hand, and contemporary global and imperial practices, on the other. And yet, Kahn’s ideal of sovereignty as civic sacrifice is not completely evaded: contractors are now seeking out the same honors as soldiers, and contractors from Fiji killed in Iraq, for instance, have been honored by the State department for their sacrifices. Immigrants in the military become—even posthumously—eligible for citizenship.

Kahn’s perspective also helps underscore the oddity of the sacralization achieved through the terrorist killing of American citizens, who are thereby “conscripted” in the war on terror, writes Kahn. This is a sacralization and sacrifice brought on from the outside, one where the terrorist is—awkwardly and impossibly—in the position of sacrifier. Kahn stresses the essential continuity of different modes of sacrifice: “There is a direct line from the revolutionary consciousness of 1776 to the mass weapons of today.” But there is a jagged line too. Reading Kahn’s concept of freedom as an ideal made actual—and hence experienced, or phenomenologically manifested—on occasion, it can serve as one baseline from which to examine how different contexts and technologies recalibrate the distribution of sacrifice.

*  *  *

In The Nomos of the Earth, Schmitt evinces fascination with the rise of U.S. power, which potentially entails, he says, a new kind of nomos, a lived legal order, one not based on the divide between land and sea, Europe and its colonies, but that would encompass land and sea and operate through economic domination. Juxtaposing this post-World War II book to Schmitt’s interwar Political Theology provokes a number of questions—which I pose here but do not answer—that are pertinent to Kahn’s American political theology. Namely, “where” is America? In other words, who falls within—and who remains outside—its political theology, and in what way? If not defined by a territorial boundary, how is it delimited? What is the relation between the individual and collective experience of political theology that Kahn evokes and sovereignty as it is practiced?

The juxtaposition of Schmitt’s two books also raises the question of whether we might relegate his assertions about the political theology of some states to an earlier moment—before the end of World War II, as Kahn sometimes suggests, or at the time of the collapse of the European nomos, which for Schmitt was around World War I? Is it that after the Second World War the Western European states are no longer “theological,” having been secularized by the terror of war and the fact of their encompassment by America and the Soviets? Or is their apparent political diminishment not necessarily an index of a decline in their theological commitments but simply a shift towards human dignity, the rule of law, or other values?

As the colonies become formally sovereign in the decades after World War II, does each become “theological” inversely to a possible “secularization” of its former European colonial state—a kind of global zero sum game of the theological? How are the European states and their former colonies embedded within an American (and/or Soviet) nomos and political theology? If there is a new nomos—let us say one of free trade, human rights, anti-Communism, state sovereignty, etc.—is it “theological” for the U.S.? And for these others? An examination of American political theology should ask how it intersects with these transformations, since it certainly participates in them.

Kahn makes a critically important contribution in drawing attention to the “we” invoked through popular sovereignty, a move in contrast to the formulation of the sovereign as the “other.” We find both in the American tradition: self-government and a global role. Kahn helps us see the interior idealizations of that tradition, and he provokes the question of whether American political theology can interpret its own global significance. Can the popular sovereign recognize itself from the outside, or must it remain locked in an internal perspective and thus structurally unaware?

Thus, allow me, in closing, to add one additional stop to Kahn’s tour of the sites of American political theology. While conducting fieldwork in an immigration detention center in California in 2000, I encountered in the basement of the U.S. federal building a number of detention tanks holding people awaiting imminent deportation from the U.S. as well as persons just arrived. Officials had installed one-way mirrors, but they had inadvertently installed the mirrors the wrong way, such that they saw their own reflection while the detainees had a clear view of the officials. Yet the officials did not correct the mistake. Not only was it useful for occasional grooming, this inverted panopticon, to my mind, captured multiple truths about the overall situation: the desire of officials—and by extension, “America”—to be free of the awareness of those under lock and key; the desire, nonetheless, to be seen, but not to see; and the great knowledge that outsiders have of the U.S. Is this arrangement part of American political theology, or is political theology, rather, the perspective from but one (the reflective) side of the glass?  For my part, I believe the study of American political theology should endeavor to see from both sides of the glass.

*

Paul W. Kahn’s Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty is a compelling book, though compelling in a sense not unlike an intellectual bruise one is drawn to press on again and again. Ostensibly a re-purposing of Carl Schmitt’s 1922 Political Theology, Kahn’s book possesses a more ambitious armature than his title and the format of following Schmitt’s chapter scheme might suggest. Kahn is a legal scholar by training, and interested here in the problem of sovereignty, which takes him deep into questions of law, jurisprudence, constitutional reasoning, and forms of political organization. It is no less notable, however, that Kahn’s project weighs in on four classic philosophical and political problems: a) the problem of whether and how freedom is possible; b) the question of how a social body is constituted, reconstituted, and reformed; c) the question of whether there is anything human beyond reason (i.e., the question of whether reason comes to an end); and d) the question of when modernity begins, and thus of what its signature concepts and practices are. Subsidiary matters in Kahn’s disquisition on sovereignty include the nature of artistic creation; the motif of creation as such, in relation to religion, politics, and art; and the question of what the origin of a social body has to do with its subsequent operations. This last issue is the one that connects Kahn to Schmitt, since it is Schmitt’s famous contention that the primal act (decision) of collective origin is recapitulated in the ordinary operations of statecraft, a fact it behooves us to remember, but—and this is Schmitt’s raison d’être—also a fact that we subjects of modern liberal democracies, with our proper procedures and our endless debates, largely repress (consistent perhaps with Freud’s famous contention that this repression was itself the primal act of collective origin). We should not be surprised, says Schmitt, that undemocratic phenomena erupt in the midst of democratic structures, for such eruptions tell us something ineradicable about the political as such, and thus about ourselves.

This claim, if true, might be seen as yet another dark myth for our dark times. However, for Kahn, and presumably for other thinkers similarly drawn to Schmitt, it is most definitely not a depressing claim. It is not simply about wiretaps and orange alerts and foreign ambushes. And this makes sense. Why write a book renewing our interest in a sometime Nazi thinker who merely says that, at their heart, democracies are also undemocratic? Don’t we have plenty of our own tyrants and failures to keep us foul company in the long and laborious struggle toward a more democratic and free universe?  On the contrary, Kahn seeks the counsel of Schmitt because he thinks Schmitt’s observations about the political—specifically his observation that politics is about deciding, not about reasoning—are liberating, indeed, are a theory of liberation. In contrast with “a theory of politics as reasonable discourse,” alongside which Kahn places discourses driven by questions of rights, justice, procedural equality, and so on, a political theology of the kind Schmitt offers captures “the character of our political experience as authentically free.” Free, he tells us, like Picasso was free. Free, he writes, somewhat more disturbingly, like Abraham was free.

And here is the bruise. Kahn is not simply offering us Schmitt to banish the illusion that we can do without decision in political life—and thus without force, violence, or sacrifice. He is offering us a Schmitt whose meditations on decision bring us solutions to the four classic problems noted above: of freedom, of origin and practice, of reason, and of modernity. Kahn wears many colorful hats in this book, and takes many risks, assuming in one moment the mien of sober expert on institutions of law and justice, and in another the theorist or perhaps even the practitioner of art, while in yet another he writes as a philosopher returning us to the most elemental problems of the human condition. In this cornucopia, Kahn reminds me of Terence Malick trying to produce a film written by Jerry Bruckheimer. We will heed Schmitt’s voice along the way, adequately updated and made progressive for a renewed liberal polity. We will also enjoy the spectacle of the decision, clenched fist hammering on raucous, conversational table. But there is a grimness that besets Kahn as he wends through this story that belies the loftier intellectual realms in which he seems to want to take his place. There is no doubt that Kahn usefully recalls us to a consideration of the structures of political life. But Schmitt proves a wayward interlocutor on the more foundational topics those structures bespeak, and seems to support Kahn in his least convincing mode, arguing for the salience of will over reason in the problem of freedom.

Kahn has advanced this argument elsewhere, that the will, and not reason, forms the center of “Judeo-Christian metaphysics,” most notably in Out of Eden: Adam and Eve and the Problem of Evil. It is, I find, a significantly distracting claim. Does he not know, I mutter to myself, pulling Pascal and Kant and Kierkegaard off the shelf, that Schmitt’s petty algorithm of decision is woefully incapable of taking us through even problema 1 of the relationship of the universal and the particular in the problem of freedom? Kahn brings up Abraham in order to imagine for us a politics that “begins with an act of willing self-destruction that rests on faith, not reason.” But what does Kahn make of the fact that, in Kierkegaard’s telling, it is the hero Agamemnon, not Abraham, who, by the logic of Kahn’s political theology, places faith in the divine higher than his human obligation, who, as Kahn approves, leaves off “the finite in the presence of the infinite”? (And is this not the very constitution of terrorism?) For Kierkegaard, Abraham, by contrast, refuses this calculus, this “faith,” and thus, in asserting his love for Isaac as equal to his love for God, shows that these two loves, both faithful and rational, both universal and particular, do not—ultimately cannot—conflict. Faith would then be the commitment to this novum. One can certainly argue this notorious biblical episode, with or without the likes of Kierkegaard, well into the next millennium. But—Kahn knows—at some point there is (can be, should be) a decision on what it means. His is chilling, opting for decision itself as outside the framework of human understanding. Kahn is careful to overrule the arbitrary, arguing that decision (will) hews a path between the irrational or mad and the ordinary rule of rational norms and procedures. But it is startling to find on this middle ground a defense—from the finite to the infinite—that would not be out of place on a recruitment poster for martyrdom.

This conflation of Abraham and Agamemnon is repeated in diverse ways throughout Kahn’s analysis. In thinking through the origins of community—the origins of the state—Kahn writes:

The originating act rests on the faith that through death is life, the central idea of every sacrifice. There can be no nation of Israel as a community sustaining itself through history until families are willing to sacrifice their children for the sake of the existence of the state. They do so not because of a promise of their own well-being, as in Hobbes’s idea of the social contract, but because they have faith that the state holds forth an ultimate meaning. Sacrifice is the appearance of the sacred as a historical phenomenon. Its domain is silent faith, not reasoned discourse. We can talk forever and never reach a position of faith. This is the faith that connects the transcendent experience of revolution to the jurispathic moment of judicial decision, and both to the state of exception in defense of the nation.

Here, again, there is the supposed opposition between faith and reason, between reasoning as the position of deferral and naiveté, and faith and sacrifice as the signs of true politics (marked by the appearance of the sacred). But surely he knows, I mutter, pulling Spinoza and Hobbes off the shelf, that there is a whole literature that makes central the complex relationship between reason and commitment (faith) in the enactment of political being. A thinker like Spinoza, rationalist to the core, is fascinated with the question of how sovereignty is made collective—how a mass, in other words, is constituted as rational when rationality is only possible in a mass. Spinoza’s notion of reason as collective (and thus connected to power and sovereignty) is unlike Kahn’s model, which would have us debating ad nauseum in the desert until someone, call him the king, has the cojones to bring the reasoning to an end. As Kahn puts it, “sovereignty is constituted in the imagining of the sacrificial act: the willingness to kill and be killed establishes the temporal and geographic boundaries of the state. The pledge speaks the same language beyond reason that Abraham spoke to God: ‘Here am I.’” And yet, amazingly, almost as an aside, Kahn also writes that “the condition of free thought is not isolation from others. Rather, if freedom is realized in discursive engagement, then its condition is mutual recognition. Freedom is a practice we do together.”

This is the point at which I have to admit my own limits—to say that, if Kahn’s argument about freedom and decision can be held together, then perhaps it is just my own dimness that cannot make it out. It seems right to say at the very least that the problem the so-called contract theorists address seems fundamentally the same as Kahn’s. How do we conceive of the moment of origin? What kind of an act is it? How do you move (if indeed you do move) from nature to freedom? Like Kahn, Spinoza has recourse to the image of the ancient Hebrews as a mass constituted before God. But they interpret this image very differently. For Spinoza, the case of the Hebrews displays both the democratic quality of the divine-human relationship, as the covenant with God “left them all completely equal,” with equal “right to consult God, to receive and interpret his laws,” and to share “in the government of the state,” and the dangers of having God as the head of state—the need, in short, to transfer this position to a human, and ideally democratic sovereign, as the Hebrews did for a time. It demonstrates the coordination of commitment and reason, for God, as the sign of democratic sovereignty, is the very embodiment of reason, while also being, in human hands, a site of conflict. Another way of putting this is that reason, for Spinoza,  is no less about decision than it is about principle, so to mark the haunting of a state by its origins is not threatening to democratic unfolding (i.e., not the sign that there is something undemocratic afoot). There is no moment, no decision, that is not subject to “talk,” no transcendent that transcends the mind making it comprehensible. For Kahn, by contrast, the presence of revelation and faith in the case of the Hebrews demonstrates the centrality of sacrifice and exception:

A politics of the exception is one that relies on revelation and faith rather than argument and reason. It is, as Schmitt writes, a politics of the miraculous, but – and this is the most important point—it is also an experience of freedom. This is the moment that liberal theory rejects as a failure of reason. Despite the failure of theoretical comprehension, the history of the nation has been the narrative of these moments of decision, just as the history of the Jews is a narrative of God’s revelation.

It is not that people cannot disagree about such things: reason, faith, origin, the political, or more narrowly, the history of the Jews, the history of the nation, America. It is that Schmitt, on these topics, is a mallet. In encountering again and again Kahn’s insistence that “political theology” is a form of authenticity and an expression of freedom insofar as it “rests on an experience beyond discourse . . . on faith, not argument, and on sacrifice, not contract,” I was moved to look again at some of the more searching accounts in the philosophical tradition (of the West) of the limits of what we can know. One does not have to look far.

There is Pascal, for one, who writes so movingly of “the supreme difficulty” that our “very being” presents to us, but who writes, nevertheless, that there is a “relationship between man and all he knows,” and who knows, thus, that, if reason’s very power is constituted through the “recognition that there are an infinite number of things which are beyond it,” this beyond is no more a receptacle for faith than it is for further scrutiny of the “greatest prodigy in nature . . . man himself.” Who better than Pascal to agree with Schmitt that faith is a wager unplumbed by reason? But how impoverished Schmitt seems next to the French early modern, who takes us with great subtlety to the frontiers of each. Commit, says Pascal, for you—your being as both rational and faithful—are already committed. Now account for both in the life you piece together in their wake.

There is Kant, for another, whose position on reason and freedom Kahn typifies as the subordination of “the self to a universal rule.” Kahn’s argument with Kant (and Rawls) launches him into an extended discussion of artistic creation, as if Kant simply failed to recognize that real freedom involves more than applying a rule. In the course of this dispute, Kahn makes some powerful connections between creation, interpretation, and imagination. But hovering over the proceedings is the Schmittian mallet: Artists “do not know how it is that they do what they do. They do not know because the imagination is not an expression of reason but of free will.” One appreciates what Kahn is saying when he says that “the artist does not apply the universal.” It is just that this maxim masks the thing that Kahn shares with Kant and his heirs, not just Rawls and Habermas, Kahn’s bêtes noir, but a wilder, more creative thinker like Alain Badiou. Of course freedom is not the application of a rule. Of course it is an “event” with no precedent and no premise. Of course, Kant would say, we have no examples of it, for it is not given in the nature of the world as we ordinarily (Badiou would say), or phenomenally (Kant would say), receive it. In this, Kant and Kierkegaard stand together. Reason and faith can each hollow out the quotidian pieties with which we ordinarily move through the world.

But Kahn’s (Schmitt’s) striking conclusion, that freedom can only be preserved outside the range of reason, seems too costly a conclusion in terms of what it blinds him to: It makes any notion of free will literally blind, for, in the idiom of the artist, the actor “does not know how it is that they do what they do,” a truly disarming and contradictory notion. And it makes Kahn blind to the, again, more subtle structures of freedom and reason present in someone like Kant. For Kant acknowledges that freedom is awesome, incredible, wondrous. We would not believe it possible were it not for the consciousness we have of the moral law, to which all of our vague, fumbling projects of self-interest (abandoning the finite for the infinite, for example, whether that infinite is God or Oprah) nevertheless—or, indeed, therefore—point, and which requires the postulate of freedom. When Kahn transposes the moral law into the language of rule-obeying contra the freedom of muses and creative daimons, he is surely confused, for the idea that, loosely translated, I can take the other’s standpoint as my own is doubtless as radically unprecedented as any human action there is, and is no less present in Guernica than in the Declaration of Independence. Or he is crazy. For the idea that there is something more free (higher, better) than finding common cause with the other is, like Agamemnon, part of a world I, with Picasso and Abraham, would disavow. Kant’s reason, like Spinoza’s, is constituted in the collective, outside of which there is only fate, self-deception, and the banality of taking oneself as the measure of all things. This does not mean it is sheerly comprehensible. But, Schmitt might grudgingly approve, it is comprehensible “in its incomprehensibility,” and this, Kant notes, with Pascal, “is all that can fairly be required of a philosophy that strives in its principles to the very boundary of human reason.”

These (Pascal, Hobbes, Spinoza, Kant, Kierkegaard, Badiou) were not the only thinkers I pulled off my shelves in reading Kahn’s treatise. Bestrewn on the floor are Aristotle (on the nature of knowledge deferred), St. Anselm (on reason and borders), Maimonides (on the fall and its disavowal), Plato (on the divided line and on killing and being killed), Sartre (on authenticity), Levinas (on Sinai and freedom) . . . the list goes on. Freud, as I note above, is actually a vital case for Kahn’s work, for Freud can look now like Schmitt, with his primal killings, and now more like Spinoza or Derrida, who conceive origins as already, i.e., primarily, repressed, which is another way, oddly enough, of saying that they are “originally” rational insofar as consciousness and unconsciousness are thereby understood to come into existence together. There is Strauss, too, a companion in arms for many readers of Schmitt, a writer who similarly loaded his ambivalence about reason into the arrows he flung at enemies theological and political. But the thought was by that point too fatiguing. The book clearly got my goat, and perhaps that is a mark of its strength. I wanted, in revisiting these thinkers, to expose Kahn’s (Schmitt’s) anemic notion of reason as the standard Trojan horse that it is, smuggling in an empty genealogy of the West and of modernity, while tapping into something importantly true and often bungled: that, as Pascal notes, it is reason that knows it is not enough, reason that is always drawing and redrawing its borders and its unknowns. And thus it is reason that is enough. It needs—god knows it needs—no mallets.

I conclude, in lieu of this longer project, with a gesture toward a better genealogy (and thus a better account) of modern reason, which would begin, Kahn might well recognize, in Genesis, on which, one could say, his treatise is a partial commentary. For, even though Kahn, like so many before him, makes Reformation and Enlightenment (in Schmittian parlance, decision and its rationalization) the twin sources of modernity (without accounting for their sources), his treatment of reason as a nattering cipher silenced by the muscular arm of the sovereign owes more than a little to that familiar story of God and the serpent and Eve and Adam. In the midrashic imagination I have in mind, however, the God character is a little different from Schmitt’s fearless, sovereign actor. Confronted with his act of creation, God tries to keep knowledge out of the relationship, himself repressing (in confusion? in vainglory?) what he has established in creating in the first place: self and other, reason and faith. There is no mystery in Genesis, no ignorance of how what is done is done. There is simply, in the serpent, mystification, as knowledge is passed off as inconsequential. There is simply, in Adam and Eve, double-mindedness, as they confront, out of Eden, the laborious commitment that da’at, knowledge, will require of them. And there is simply, in God, the combination of bluster, self-regard, and self-consciousness that artists like Malick use to great effect to bring faith and reason into ever new deliciously undecidable relation. Is it not a beautiful joke that his new film, Tree of Life, full of gauzy pieties to God in the voice-overs, is prefaced, not with a verse extolling God’s trembling mystery, but instead with God’s blunt and angrily rhetorical question to Job as God appears, finally, after a long silence: “Where were you [while I was here making the land of good and evil]?” It is a measure of the film’s depth, its own da’at, that it simultaneously acknowledges the force of this question and responds, with painstaking attention to detail, bypassing rhetoric for reason: “Here.” “Here,” the Jobs of Malick’s film say. “We were here, as you were, citizens and sovereigns of the land the knowledge of good and evil made.”