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.

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.

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.

*  *  *

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

But is this just an example of an incomplete break from “premodern forms of religious influence on political order”? No, says Kahn: political theology argues instead for “the discovery of the persistence of forms of the sacred in a world that no longer relies upon God. [It] argues that secularization, as the displacement of the sacred from the world of experience, never won, even though the church may have lost. The politics of the modern nation-state indeed rejected the church but simultaneously offered a new site of sacred experience.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*  *  *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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