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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

I let the reader “decide.”

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

*  *  *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*  *  *

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

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

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

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

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

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

*  *  *

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

*

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.”

However, Kahn’s depersonalization of the sovereign does not entail the disappearance of the sovereign subject, which remains, for without a subject there could be no decision, in Kahn’s (or Schmitt’s) sense. Yet, as one realizes later in the text, especially with Kahn’s remarks on the decision of the philosopher—which is, as Kahn would have it, the decision of “every man”—the subject is potentially everyone, and thus not the sovereign as such, or the classic figure of the sovereign. In fact, the true subject, for Kahn, is simply anyone who is free, and this freedom includes, eminently, the willingness to sacrifice oneself for the sake of the political, which, from the point of view of political theology, means the constitution, security, and freedom of the nation-state. The decision that grounds and sustains the nation-state, just like god’s decision to create the world, or the decision that commences the creative work of the artist, constitutes, in Kahn’s existential reading of Schmitt’s Political Theology, the essence of freedom, by positing itself as a free, yet not arbitrary, act.

Kahn builds his argument on the dichotomy between liberal theory and political theology. In liberal theory, essence is privileged over existence, reason over will, and endless discussion over decision. In political theology, things stand the other way around: existence, will, and decision have primacy over essence, reason, and endless discussion. If Kahn, like Schmitt, is right to criticize liberalism (albeit for the wrong reason), this does not mean that the either/or logic he seems to employ (either liberal theory or political theology) ought to be accepted at face value. An alternative to this either/or comes from the perspective (and practice) of the common, which maintains the decision as singular but rejects it as sovereign. The sovereign decision is a decision of separation, exception, and exclusion; the singular decision of the common is instead a decision geared toward all-inclusiveness and democracy. The possibility of this alternative is made clear today, not only by those theories that reject both the sovereign, autocratic decision of traditional political theology and the contract modality of liberal theory (which are more similar to one another than we tend to think), but also by the wonderful wave of leaderless revolutions and revolts (contra Kahn’s curious claim that we live in a postrevolutionary time) from Tunisia and Egypt to Spain and even the U.S. (notably, Wisconsin), just to mention a few instances of a common situation known to everybody. Both the sovereign decision and the contract operate according to a logic of inclusion and exclusion unacceptable to the singularity of the common, which is univocal and outside of the either/or of inclusion and exclusion. (Who is included? The citizen, the wealthy, the law-abiding, the able-bodied, and so on. Who is excluded? The poor, the migrant, the prisoner, the physically and/or mentally impaired, and so on.)

The perspective of the common is singular and universal: singular because its reality (or individuation) is unalloyed and uncompromising, and universal because it wills all-inclusiveness and is based on the dignity of all life. To say that it is singular, in particular, means that it reconstitutes the whole within itself and self-sufficiently. This is also its uncompromising nature: it does not suggest that deliberation is futile but that it must occur within the reconstituted whole, which opposes the separation between sovereign and non-sovereign. Indeed, it is not the exceptional decision of the sovereign (even when the sovereign is, paradoxically, everyone) but the singular decision of the common that is truly revolutionary. The singular decision does not imply readiness to kill and be killed; rather, it leads to care. It does not propagate, but rather rejects the ideology of sacrifice and brings about the concrete possibilities of joy and of the good life for everyone. In rejecting the paradigm of sovereignty, the singular decision of the common also rejects the solely formal (hence false) truth of the contract, yet it maintains the accord of being with one another, of cooperation, solidarity, friendship, and love.

Nor does the singular decision of the common will the constitution and preservation of the state; rather, it wills the dismantling of the state’s apparatuses of violence (the prison, the army, and so on) and the implementation of new modalities of care. Thus, if the sovereign decision and the contract are two expressions of the same logic, we can suggest an interesting, as well as surprising, moment of identity between liberal theory and political theology. Indeed, the former is often a euphemism, a mask, for the latter, and the latter a pretext for a regime of terror: the police state and the readiness to sacrifice oneself (and others) for abstractions such as the nation, the flag, and so forth. It is telling that the liberals in power in the U.S. today are not very different from the decisionists of the Bush administration; they normalize the exception, making it permanent (consider, for instance, the routinization of drone attacks in Pakistan and other countries). Hobbes’s Leviathan, suggests exactly this identity. We also realize that the paradox in Hobbes whereby we voluntarily decide to defer the decision by transferring our rights (i.e., our freedoms and powers) to the plane of sovereignty (whether of the absolutist or the popular type) always means that the determinant decision is in fact made for us: we don’t decide, we are decided. This becomes apparent toward the end of Political Theology, where Kahn makes an unsettling remark on the notion and reality of conscription. The remark comes after a brief discussion of Abraham’s decision to sacrifice Isaac. Abraham’s experience of the decision—his having been decided by god—is not understood here, with Kierkegaard, as the experience of fear, anxiety, and despair. There is only a leap of faith, the “Here am I” answering a demand that, in turn, the “modern state extended to every citizen: anyone can be called upon to defend the state with his life.” I quote the remark on conscription in its entirety:

We are radically mistaken if we think this moment of conscription is behind us. The contemporary war on terror represents the point at which conscription becomes truly universal, escaping even the formal structures of juridification. 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 is no further discussion, there is only the act. We exist, then, inside the Schmittian exception. The question is what we will do, not what arguments will we make. To say that this is unjust is not to explain its political meaning. It is not even to begin to approach the way in which the political imagination constructs the violent act as a moment of sacrifice.

Kahn’s discussion of conscription would seem to complicate what is perhaps the main thesis of his Political Theology: “The decision is the free act.” Kahn, however, understands the dialectic of conscription and freedom in the sense of the Sartrean existential situation. That is, the fact that we decide under circumstances not of our own choosing makes the decision that follows no less “free.” Still, it makes sense to ask whether this is an adequate account of the “free” act. Aristotle, for instance, explains that acting in situations over which we have no power, in which we are “victims,” cannot be called free. And there are also situations of a mixed type, in which we act voluntarily and involuntarily at the same time. How can the decision made in such situations be called sovereign? How can it be the power “of deciding on the exception,” when the exception is entirely fabricated for us? It does not seem to me that Kahn distinguishes between the sovereign decision and any other type of decision—a distinction that must be made, not formally, but contingently and existentially.

As Kahn reminds us, in the decision there is a separation, a cutting off. But in contrast to the sovereign decision, the common decision is a choice to encompass difference in the reconstituted social whole. Thus, knowing the location of the separation is fundamental, for only thus will we know whether the decision is sovereign or not. Is the point of decision reached through the process of deliberation, or is the point of decision attained by virtue of a preexisting (e.g., institutional) separation? In other words, in deciding, do we separate ourselves from a plurality of real possibilities that are thereby not (though they could be) actualized, or is the decision a distortion of the real and an attempt to say that there is no alternative to it? It is only in the latter case that we recognize the sovereign decision. Unlike the sovereign type, the singular decision (or the decision that aspires to the experience of the singular) is not sustained by any preexisting, institutional measures (often amounting to forms of institutional violence). Rather, it is sustained and made possible by a thoroughly contingent, yet careful process of deliberation, whose true value only becomes visible in the light of the decision itself. It is for this reason that Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics, first deals with the decision, and only after with deliberation, although the order of their occurrence is the opposite in reality. Yet, without deliberation, one cannot arrive at a proper point of decision, that is, a decision determined by the situation itself in its immanent unfolding and not extrinsically, by the sovereign, which is to say, by a single, transcendental subject abstracted from the immanent multiplicity of the common. Without deliberation, in other words, the decision has already been made in the separateness of the sovereign or transcendental sphere, and the performance of the point of decision is a spectacular and grotesque clip, a mockery of freedom. The two types of decision may well have the same formal appearance, or structure, but their ontological formation is entirely different.

The question of the location of the decision is thus very important. As Tracy B. Strong notes in his foreword to Schmitt’s Political Theology, it belongs to the essence of the sovereign, not simply to make the decision (a task more readily acknowledged and understood), but also, in a less visible yet more foundational way, “to decide what is an exception.” Thus, to decide on the exception is not the same as to decide what to do when one finds oneself within an exceptional situation that is not of one’s own choosing. The sovereign decides on the exception, and that means: the sovereign creates the exception, precisely in virtue of the fact that, like god in Abraham’s tragic experience, the sovereign, as a subject/structure of power and violence, is always-already separated from the everydayness of the simple and common decision.

To conclude, we do not need sovereignty in order to decide, and to decide freely. In truth, sovereignty, itself a paradigm of transcendence and domination, makes the free decision impossible for the vast majority of people. The free decision and the free act cannot be separated from life, nor can they occur without deliberation, which takes place collectively, for the sake of procuring the good life for all. The free decision, namely, the decision that has and wills dignity, cannot be the prerogative of this or that nation-state and its pathology of sacrifice. The genuine decision—like freedom, like democracy—can only be common and universal. And it is precisely because of this all-inclusive participation that what is common and universal remains within the immanent fragility of life. The separation and transcendence inscribed in the concept of sovereignty (powerfully analyzed by Jacques Maritain in Man and the State) must be completely eliminated; sovereignty itself must be abandoned if we are to find the route back to the singularity of the common.

After the manner of psychoanalysis, political theology reflects the larger, darker, contours that liberalism—the discourse of the modern nation-state—fails to see or imagine for itself. For, “just as Freud argued that the modern idea of the individual as a self-determining, rational agent mistakes a normative theory for the reality of lived experience, Schmitt argued that the modern, liberal understanding of the state mistakes a normative theory for the phenomenon of political experience.” In this new version, the mirror stage deals a double whammy. Ego recognizes itself, no doubt, but it also has to integrate a vastly broader field of meaning. We, citizens of the nation-state, may think ourselves children of the Enlightenment, but our inheritance is ultimately larger; it reaches back further—to Christianity. “This is Christianity not as source of religious doctrine,” Kahn pointedly clarifies in an earlier work, Putting Liberalism in its Place, “but as a form of understanding of self and community.”

There is much that is appealing and compelling in the return to binaries (reason and will, law and sovereignty, contract and sacrifice, word and act, enlightenment and religion, liberalism and political theology, friend and enemy) that Kahn has been advocating in his work for a while now, most recently in Political Theology. As there is in the fact that he—a legal scholar—calls for this return in the name of a reflection that he calls philosophical, at once universal and firmly grounded in the empirical (“the reality of lived experience,” or “the phenomenon of political experience” as in the quote above). The universal, in his view, is always rooted in the particular, but for just that reason it is not always easy to identify the full extent, the limits, as it were, of his theoretical and empirical reach. Insofar as it speaks to us, philosophically, of the nation-state as a form, the work promises to be about the world at large in its political ordering. On the other hand, Kahn’s unapologetic insistence that he is interested in the West and in the “Western experience of political life,” his repeated invocation of Christianity, and his constant reminders that his concerns are prominently with us, “we Americans”—these indicate that map is not territory, and that the precise boundaries of that collective self may yet be difficult to discern.

What I mean is that Kahn is not really exploring a “dark continent” in excess of the (liberal, Christian, American) self, or state. Nor is he interested in fundamentally displacing “his majesty the ego.” To the contrary, he rightly underscores the enduring importance—and by no means the waning—of sovereignty, and, indeed, of popular sovereignty (which he often translates as “freedom,” with some stretching of the philological evidence found in Schmitt). This alone would suffice to observe that, for him, the center still holds. The force of Kahn’s critique is therefore only and precisely that liberalism fails to recognize the visible fact of sovereignty, the manifest experience of individual attachment (love, sacrifice) to the political community, and the explicit significance of war as a foundational and existential expression of commitment to our collective being. “My enterprise is descriptive,” writes Kahn; it is “to explore the political imagination we have, whether or not we should have it.” And what we have is by no means latent, nor is it opaque. America is a sovereign state, which has affirmed at once its democratic character and the fact of popular sovereignty, proclaimed the rule of law and the freedom of contractual agreement. It is also, and simultaneously, a “walled state” (as Wendy Brown calls it) that has repeatedly engaged in war, calling on its citizens’ free willingness to sacrifice, to defend its values and indeed its borders, by all means necessary. Accordingly, and to return to that mirror, “America, we might say, finds itself equally when it looks to the court and the bomb.”

This puts some pressure on the universal tone recently heard in political theology, or on the universal-sounding claim that political theology might “help us to understand the way in which the modern nation-state—particularly our nation-state—has occupied the place of the sacred for its citizens.” For what does “particularly our nation-state” mean? Is the U.S. of A. an example or an exception? Is Christianity? Is it a particular to the global universal (the form of the nation-state, the power of the sacred) or is it deserving of a more targeted and singular treatment? Does every nation-state really look with comparable equanimity to “the court and the (nuclear) bomb”? To the bank even? Although he concludes Political Theology by reminding us that “the deepest complaint against liberal theory is not that it pushes God out of politics but that it fails to recognize the character of freedom upon which modern politics has rested,” it would seem that the modern politics—the freedom—that Kahn ultimately extols, is not quite universal either. Again, his insistent engagement with the West and, particularly, with America suggests that his analysis is better served if understood as a focalized reflection, through a diminutive mirror of “our political experience,” of us. What Kahn sets out to understand is us, ourselves, “we Americans,” we Christians—not the larger, global or universal field of the political imagination. He does not reveal the vast contours of a dark continent (or, if there is any difference in this context, the rest of the world, which barely makes an appearance) but reminds us of who we are, we who are “authentically free” (the book’s last words).

Political Theology is a mirror. It is a mirror that articulates a “science of sacrifice” (as Susan Mizruchi called this well-established American endeavor). The mirror tells us that, like it or not, we are a sovereign nation. Which means that, as a people, we are constantly called upon to make decisions, freely renewing our sacrificial commitment to each other, to our values, and to our collective existence. Such is popular sovereignty, and it decides on the exception. Which means that it sends people—we send people—to their death. Actually, to adhere precisely to Kahn’s term, we send ourselves to our death, since we are constantly and simultaneously doing the sending and the sacrificing. “Every political sacrifice has the character of the decision,” and vice-versa. That is how meaning is made according to our political imagination, understood in its broad dimensions: law and sacrifice, the court and the bomb. And that is why “at stake in our political life has been not our capacity to be reasonable, but our capacity to realize in and through our own lives an ultimate meaning.” Amen to that.

His majesty, the (collective) ego, then. But is it really in charge? Are we really in charge? All of us? Do we all, freely and equally, decide on the exception? The answer, inscribed on every page, is un-ambivalently yes, yes, and yes. For we, we the people, are the popular sovereign. We are the judges and the generals, the legislators and the lobbyists. And the bankers too. Who else, after all, could conscript us into that meaningful, sacrificial struggle?

But the decision, it surprisingly turns out, is in fact the decision of the other. Jacques Derrida told us as much, though not quite in these terms or with the same results. Here is Kahn’s striking version: “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 is no further discussion; there is only the act. We exist, then, inside the Schmittian exception. The question is what will we do, not what arguments we will make.” (Kahn’s own argument, as it happens, is about word and act: talk is cheap, actions speak louder than . . ., etc.; hence law and war, reason and will, and so forth). So who decides? Is it the sovereign or the terrorist? The emperor or the pirate? And who—in the age of unmanned drones, foreign soldiers vying for citizenship, exploding numbers of “security contractors,” and weapons of mass financialization—is sending whom to what kind of death? Is it always the case that “the political imagination constructs the violent act as a moment of sacrifice”? The enemy is not necessarily theologico-political. He does not have to function as a mirror (single or dual) for the self, nor do his actions mechanically occasion a sacrificial reaction. At the very least, one might grant that such is not the case for everybody, nor for all political (or theologico-political, if the term can be so extended) “traditions.”

To go along with Kahn, as it seems to me we should, is indeed to hold up a mirror, but only to ourselves—we Americans, we Christians. It is to recognize our peculiar, and particular, commitment as (and to) sacrifice. And sacrifice, Kahn says—the kind of sacrifice whereby we send ourselves, and a few others, to our death (Our Will be Done)—belongs to us and to our political imagination, our enduring freedom. It is our decision and it defines us. So be it. And yet how did we come to this? How did we come to oscillate between two sites of decision? Kahn’s political theology does not explain why it is the other and not ourselves that appears to be sending us to our airborne death. How did the glorious sovereign become a sacrificial, if free and principled and willing, victim? And how come most of the dead these days (and the prisoners too) in our courts and under our bombs, never get a chance to vote, or indeed, to “choose life” (that is, in our tradition, to choose sacrifice), rarely even bare life?

That is Political Theology 101, of course, if you recall that political theology, as Kahn makes very clear (and Carl Schmitt too), is hardly a universal. It stands for Christianity, “Christianity not as a source of religious doctrine but as a form of understanding of self and community.” And this form of understanding, the shape of our political understanding, is indeed sacrificial. It is, to put it otherwise, full of love for every popular body. Law and love, old and new, liberal and political-theological—are these not after all the very coordinates of the expanded terrain of a Christianity that is both legal (or liberal) and sacrificial (sovereign)? Call it Operation Geronimo, or call it loving the enemy. So one might ask again whether there really operates a universal here, and a universally accepted notion of law, of sacrifice, or of the sacred, of self and of community, even of the state.

Now, Kahn knows, and explains at length in Sacred Violence, that there is no sacrifice that is not also self-sacrifice. And so it makes a difference, does it not, if we pause, with him still, to reflect on the words and actions of this self and its limits, on the quick turnaround, the universalizing drive that lingers and grows, whereby not only our laws, but our loves and our murders as well, our enduring sacrifices of the body of that glorious and abandoned sovereign—“we have all killed Him”—so easily become the universal nature of the (liberal) nation-state and of sovereignty, of a global yet particular commitment to that sacred beast. And it makes a difference whether we lovingly fault others, or ourselves, for our death or His death (hell, and for their death too!) and then go on to say “we who are free,” or, as Freud fabulously phrased it in Moses and Monotheism, “it is true, we did the same thing, but we admitted it, and since then we have been purified.”

What, then, in Schmitt’s text is worth reiterating? First, Kahn rightly emphasizes Schmitt’s claim that secularization has not abolished the sacred but entails, rather, its remaking and relocation: “Political Theology is best thought of as an effort to discover the persistence of forms of the sacred in a world that no longer relies on god.” Kahn thus elaborates Schmitt’s theory of the state and sovereignty as a modern site of the sacred: the point of political theology is not to endorse fundamentalism or subordinate the state to “religious doctrine or church authority, but to recognize that the state creates and maintains its own sacred space and history.” Second, Kahn is also right to emphasize how Schmitt’s articulation of “the political” is a credible and still necessary critique of “liberal political thought.” In this regard, he compellingly lays out Schmitt’s view of the dimensions of “the political” that are avoided by liberal thought but undeniably present in state practices and political experiences that liberalism lacks the vocabulary to acknowledge.

Whereas liberal political thought imagines “law without end” through the self-evident application of moral norms or legal precedents, Schmitt (and so Kahn) instead emphasizes the inescapability of “decision” about “exception” to signal the constitutive role of interpretation, judgment, choice, and commitment in the making, interpreting, and enacting of the norms (or precedents) that actors invoke as authorizations. Kahn thus follows Schmitt in insisting on the impossibility of escaping “the political,” as the practice of fraught, and to some degree self-authorizing, “decision,” which is also an experience of freedom situated between the norms whose meaning we must interpret and the exceptions we must declare. Kahn also draws on Schmitt’s The Concept of the Political, which defines “the political” as constituted by the distinction between friend and enemy; thus, any association of human beings achieves a specifically “political” existence at moments of existential definition that articulate experiences of intensified attachment and enmity. Kahn, too, finds “ultimate meaning” in such moments, which call us beyond mere living as we judge and declare a life worth dying or killing for. Invoking Heidegger alongside Schmitt, Kahn insists that only if an individual or collective confronts the possibility of its death can it achieve the “authenticity” that he links to “freedom.” Because liberal political thought imagines a foundation of contractual relations and posits a horizon of dispositive consensus, Kahn follows Schmitt in arguing, it displaces this experience of chosen sacrifice, which, in joining the political and the sacred, endows human life with ultimate significance. Like Schmitt, therefore, Kahn links the political—as decision about the exception, about friend and enemy, and so about mortal sacrifice—to the state and/as a sovereignty relocated by war or revolution but never escaped. But, like other theorists who would democratize Schmitt, Kahn thinks of sovereignty as a revolutionary (constituent) power to declare an exception and (re)found a regime, and as “popular sovereignty,” a sacred but never fully manifest “presence” recurrently invoked to authorize political action.

In sum, because “liberal political thought” emphasizes reason, interest, and contract, and in these terms seeks a foundation for rational deliberation about justice, Kahn claims that it cannot grasp the political experiences—of decision, exception, state violence, revolution, and chosen sacrifice—crucial to constitutive political moments in American history, like the Civil War, the Cold War, and the “War on Terror,” while it is precisely such moments that Schmitt’s emphasis on “faith,” “will,” “decision,” “identity,” “authenticity,” and (sacrificial) violence can help us to understand. “We will always be surprised by the violence of which the state—even the liberal state—is capable. Liberalism as a theory of the political fails when political practice turns to killing or being killed, whether that violence is turned inward in the form of revolution, or outward in the form of war.” In this sense, Kahn is not replacing a liberal orientation that relates freedom to contract and justice but contesting it by way of a Schmittian supplement. In other words, he would maintain the ideal of the lawful, as well as the freedom he affirms in the liberal ideas of contract and consent, but would have it avow rather than disavow the phenomena of decision, exception, and violence that exist in tension with it.

Though he retains Schmitt’s emphatic investment in the state, violence, and sacrifice as the loci of the sacred in political life, Kahn offers his reading of Political Theology, not as a theory of the state and of sovereignty, but as a “phenomenology” of the political as it is experienced in modernity. Whereas Schmitt makes a structural argument about the character of the political—as depending on decision, as opposed to rational deliberation, and as incorporating a secular correlate of divine sovereignty in the figure of “he who decides”—Kahn addresses specifically how the political is “experienced” by the subjects of the state. That is, he follows a “phenomenological” approach that emphasizes the perspective of the subject and the terms and narratives that construct its experience of the political. Accordingly, he defines “the work of political theology” as giving “theoretical expression to those understandings that already inform a community’s self-understanding,” to expose how “our political life remains embedded in a web of conceptions that are theological in origin and structure” and how these form “the common background of the political imaginary which is shared” even by ostensible adversaries. Thus, as a phenomenology of political experience, political theology parallels cultural anthropology. But Kahn insists, surprisingly, that his account of “experience” is simply descriptive, and that his phenomenology has neither normative premises nor direct worldly implications. One must ask, however, what is hidden and what is justified by his “description” of the “imaginary” that frames “our” political perception and experience?

If the drawback of a phenomenological approach is that it gives the first and last word to the subject and its imaginings, rather than interrogate the conditions of its experience, then it can be said that Kahn, too, fails to critically examine the discursive, institutional, and, I would add, unconscious determinants that shape how subjects perceive and experience the political. Similarly, just as the historic danger of cultural anthropology was that analysts imposed and yet effaced their own perspectives in the name of a pure ethnography that would disclose the authentic experience of the native, Kahn likewise casts his particular interpretation as a neutral description. And by interpreting culture as “experience,” he denies how culture involves hegemony, whereby a “common sense” reflects unequal social power.

My claim and concern, then, is not only that Kahn is captured by Schmitt’s particular view of political theology as a disclosure of the sacred in modernity, but also that he de-politicizes culture by imagining it as consensual, while he also disowns the positioning and perspective that drive his “description” (as if from nowhere) of a foundational “imaginary” defining (indeed sacralizing) national identity. What premises constitute his avowedly Schmittian, but also “American,” position? And how do the blind spots of this position—what it implicitly disavows, excludes, or fails to acknowledge—reemerge into the theoretical framework that Kahn elaborates? Here, I will pursue these questions from two vantage points, first by way of canonical political theorists who share Schmitt’s critique of liberalism but depart from his view of the sacred and the political, and then by reading Kahn’s “political theology” through American racial history and African-American responses to it.

One way in which Kahn is captured by Schmitt is exposed by his selective use of Hannah Arendt. Rightly arguing that Schmitt’s emphasis on decision and sacrifice is a theory of freedom, Kahn invokes her as an ally. Granted, Arendt also refers to the “miracle,” as the exceptional moment that ruptures linear, mechanical causality, bureaucratic rationality, positive law, and the ordinary, as routine “behavior,” to use her word. But, while Schmitt conceives of freedom as the decision that establishes sovereignty over an unstable and heterogeneous political field, Arendt depicts freedom as natality, or the capacity to initiate a novel sequence of events, links it to what she calls “action-in-concert,” and insists that it depends on renouncing, not resuscitating, the very idea of, and aspiration to, sovereignty. In her view, political freedom arises out of human plurality and generates “boundless” reverberations among agents who cannot master their actions, whereas sovereignty entails the violent domination of the plurality both in the self and the world, in the name of securing the rule (and, for some, the rationality) of a “free will.” In Arendt’s phenomenology of the experience of the political and its place in “the human condition,” the sacred (as the miracle rupturing the routine of life) thus appears in and as a political freedom that is antithetical to sovereignty. For her, modern experiences of the sacred occur horizontally, through the action-in-concert that reveals its own foundation in plurality and natality—not vertically, through the state as a transcendent power vested with the task of consolidating the identity of the nation.

More recently, however, some political theorists have objected to the investment in exceptionality that joins Schmitt and Arendt in relating the sacred and the political. In contrast to Christian (or perhaps Pauline) juxtapositions of law and grace, or deadening routine and its miraculous rupture, Bonnie Honig (in Emergency Politics), for instance, elaborates a “Jewish” political theology, drawing on Franz Rosenzweig, for whom the miraculous is not a violation of law but an as-yet-undisclosed possibility (Jonathan Lear calls it “a possibility for new possibilities”) for which people are prepared by immersion in—not by rupturing—the ordinary (liturgical) practices of life. And whereas for Kahn, “in politics as in ordinary life, the ordinary is first of all and most of the time a domain of inauthenticity,” some have used Cavell or de Certeau to show how capacities for creativity and change, for risk, sacrifice, and self-overcoming, are embedded in “the ordinary” and can be cultivated only by practices seen as liturgical in character. They locate—and would engender—experiences of faith, commitment, and sacrifice, as well as the freedom to initiate the new, in sites and practices that resist Schmitt’s state-centric account of the sacred and the political and its inflection by Kahn’s nation-building civil religion.

In the very way he theorizes the sacred and the political, then, Kahn is not describing the world so much as advancing a political theology that is selective in what it renders visible, and how. In doing so, however, he repeats but obscures the interpellation of subjects into the particular imaginary of the American nation-state. He is surely right that, in the American case, experiences of the political are framed by a “civil religion” that joins nation and state; if the task of theory in this context is to examine the foundations of that civil religion, as Kahn says, then any such effort has to attend to the structures of power that it sustains as well as the refractory plurality and alternative voices that it de-legitimizes. Otherwise, the theorist risks sustaining hegemony in the name of describing “culture.” Likewise, Kahn is surely right that the American regime enacts “Schmittian” dimensions of politics—the return of what liberal theory represses—by defining existential threats, declaring exceptions, and demanding violence. But in this regard, his account bespeaks only the privileged or enfranchised position of one standing with the state as a “friend” and not with those declared its enemies. Invested in instructing “us” in the necessity of such distinctions to the constitution of “our” identity, he does not register the contingency or judge the credibility of specific antagonisms, let alone “visit” an alternative perspective on that identity.

Indeed, if we focus on the politics of race, the problem in American liberalism is not the denial of what Schmitt calls political theology. For white supremacy in American is a political theology: the declaration of a (racial) state of exception, and so of friend and enemy, to mark a constitutive outside and an internal enemy is constitutive of a republic that repeatedly defines itself and defends its freedom by declaring certain people and practices to be existential threats. For Frederick Douglass, W.E.B. Du Bois, or James Baldwin, for example, democratically authorized racial domination founded the liberal-nationalist regime, and racialized demarcations continue to define the meaning of a popular sovereignty and normative citizenship. Demonological obsession with existential threats—what Michael Rogin calls “counter-subversive” politics—is thus Schmittian decision in American drag. Here, then, is the paradox: Schmitt calls liberalism anti-political because an inclusive, pluralist, consensual creed defers the decision and avoids the antagonism that he defines as properly political; whereas in the American liberal state a racialized language of exception and antagonism criminalizes black agency, and thereby demonizes many features of the political.

Contra the formalism of Schmitt and Kahn, decision on the exception and the enemy neither embody “the political” as such nor give access to the sacred, for their meaning (even as forms of disavowal) is contingent and situated. Likewise, Kahn makes sacrifice—killing or being killed, he repeatedly says—central to the political and to the (American) imagination of the sacred. But, for Ralph Ellison (see “Change the Joke and Slip the Yoke”), lynching, and not, as on Kahn’s account, revolution, was that very sacramental act—surely, if ironically, a black Sabbath—whereby popular sovereignty constituted a republic through the sacrifice of actual blacks and, therewith, the exorcism of what blackness represents. Like Kahn, Ellison sees a structure of disavowal in liberalism, but one allied with the very political theology that Kahn articulates. Ellison would agree with Kahn that “we” need to acknowledge what we already practice, but for Kahn this “we” must learn to accept a logic of necessity and exception in the exercise of state power and the formation of identity, whereas Ellison calls for whites—those enfranchised through the exclusion of blacks—to acknowledge, rather than demonize and exorcise, the mortal finitude and inescapable politicality signified by blackness. The specifically political meaning of acknowledgment changes radically as we shift from the formalism by which Kahn justifies violence to what Ellison calls “the lower frequencies.”

In naming the state of exception enabling liberal nationalism, critics of white supremacy must at once depict how the grammar of political theology is racialized and take  exception to it its exceptionalizing logic, and to the American exceptionalism that it sustains. But what kind of politics could suspend the states of exception that sustain the liberal rule? Kahn’s themes—faith, love, commitment, and sacrifice, as well as the necessity of persuasion—figure prominently in African-American thought, but they problematize his insistence on the state as the center of sovereignty and violence, as well as his investment in the nation and popular sovereignty. Political circumstances, and a prophetic genre, seem to have fostered a characteristically agonal relationship of black politics to states and nations; renaming America a Babylon, critics of white supremacy repeatedly imagine a political space between nation and empire, where the miracle of freedom might appear through practices of steadfast labor and abiding love, in tension with both state sovereignty and the unmarked whiteness of popular sovereignty. Ideas of decision and exception, as in civil disobedience and violent self-defense, and themes of sacrifice in practices of communal solidarity and non-violence do intersect at points with Kahn’s Schmittian meditations, but they question his fundamental assumptions about state and nation as the sole sites at which the sacred and the political intersect in modernity.

Perhaps it is a matter of tone: whereas Kahn concludes his book by depicting “us” as inescapably conscripted in a war on and with terrorists, we instead might see him as conscripting readers into a project that replenishes state sovereignty and unifies a national subjectivity by declaring an existential crisis. And whereas he locates the sacred in a sacrificial relation to this violent state and the national subject it represents, we instead might invest the meaning of the political in practices that resist violent sovereignty, partly by refusing the language of necessity and sacrifice by which he, like Schmitt, sacralizes it.