Political Theology and the State of Exception

Bonhoeffer ◽  
2019 ◽  
pp. 79-100
Author(s):  
Petra Brown
Keyword(s):  
Political Theology ◽  
The State ◽  
State Of Exception

Postlude Pardoning and Liberal Constitutionalism

2019 ◽  
pp. 249-274
Author(s):  
Bernadette Meyler
Keyword(s):  
Immanuel Kant ◽  
Hannah Arendt ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
The State ◽  
State Of Exception ◽  
Constitutional Theory ◽  
Liberal Constitutionalism

Its historical association with monarchical sovereignty has tarred pardoning with an illiberal brush. This Postlude examines Carl Schmitt’s Constitutional Theory, Political Theology and other writings to argue that the pardon resembles the sovereign decision on the state of exception. The vision of pardoning as opposed to liberal constitutionalism dates further back than Schmitt, however; it appears as well in the writings of Immanuel Kant, one of the foundational figures of modern liberalism. Only by disassociating pardoning from sovereignty can it be reconciled with constitutionalism. The Postlude concludes by turning to the work of Hannah Arendt as one source for a non-sovereign vision of pardoning.

Occasional decisiveness: Exception, decision and resistance in Kierkegaard and Schmitt

2015 ◽  
Vol 18 (1) ◽  
pp. 89-107
Author(s):  
Birte Löschenkohl
Keyword(s):  
Political Theology ◽  
State Politics ◽  
The State ◽  
Political Order ◽  
State Of Exception ◽  
The Political ◽  
The Face ◽  
Main Protagonist

This article explores the political potential of Kierkegaard's Repetition and develops a model of non-sovereign agency by analysing the figure of the ‘young man’, the main protagonist of the book. A curious reference in Schmitt's Political Theology serves as a cue for exploring Repetition through contrast with Schmitt's notions of sovereignty, decision and exception, as well as his critique of occasionalism in Political Romanticism. As in the case of Schmitt's sovereign, the young man's conflict is centred on the question of the exception. But by contrast to the former, the young man struggles with the exception from a position of opposition to the powers that govern. Furthermore, the exception in Repetition does not seek to stabilise a given order in the face of a threat, but, rather, to destabilise and transform order. The perspective offered facilitates a shift from thinking the exception as a state of exception, a concept that mostly concerns state politics, to an exception from the state. Kierkegaard's Repetition is thus shown to be relevant for conceptualising transformative agency from a position of marginalisation and exclusion from the hegemonic political order.

A Postmodern Hetoimasia—Feigning Sovereignty during the State of Exception

2019 ◽  
pp. 189-233
Author(s):  
Marinos Diamantides
Keyword(s):  
Sovereign Debt ◽  
Political Theology ◽  
Debt Crisis ◽  
The State ◽  
State Of Exception ◽  
Sovereign Debt Crisis ◽  
Sovereign Power ◽  
Coercive State ◽  
Game Of Thrones

Inspired by images from Greece during its sovereign debt crisis—including of a dog that ended up on the Hellenic President’s throne!—this chapter both illustrates Agamben’s notion of a Christian economic-political theology, for which the sovereign’s glory is never affected by his impotence, and nuances it as specifically occidental. Contrasting it with the earlier, embarrassingly incoherent political theology during the era of Byzantine “game of thrones”—when no reasons were offered for why a religion that claimed to be a fraternity of equals was in bed with a coercive state—the chapter shows how the anomie of oikonomia has been repressed in the Occidental constitutional imagination that obsesses over the so-called paradox of constituent/constituted sovereign power. The chapter further speculates on how this repressed sense of embarrassment can be recuperated together with an ethical sense of responsibility.

Political Theology/Theopolitics: The Thresholds and Vulnerabilities of Sovereignty

2021 ◽  
Vol 50 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Carlota McAllister ◽  
Valentina Napolitano
Keyword(s):  
Political Theology ◽  
The State ◽  
State Of Exception ◽  
Annual Review ◽  
Publication Date ◽  
Colonial History ◽  
History Of Anthropology ◽  
Negative Theology ◽  
Critical Theories ◽  
History Of

Anthropological work on political theology has been informed by Agamben's work on the state of exception and, thus, by a Schmittian account of sovereignty as analogous to that of the God who bestows miracles. In this review, we read gestures to this analogy's limits in recent ethnographies of the state, vital force, and the Anthropocene as also pointing to the limits of anthropology's secularity and its embedding in the colonial enterprise. In so doing, we recover a potential opening to theistic force that anthropology has long fought to foreclose. We conclude by proposing a conceptual counter to political theology, grounded in negative theology as well as critical theories drawing on the force of the negative, which we call theopolitics. Theopolitics refers to a sovereignty from below characterized by vulnerability and openness to an ever-provisional messianic force that partakes in history, including the colonial history of anthropology itself. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Anthropology, Volume 50 is August 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Playing with Death

2021 ◽  
pp. 647-660
Author(s):  
Steed Vernyl Davidson
Keyword(s):  
The State ◽  
State Of Exception ◽  
Systematic Analysis ◽  
The Earth ◽  
Book Of Jeremiah ◽  
Central Claim ◽  
Rhetorical Violence

The task of identifying a single rationale for the violence on display in the book of Jeremiah may end with a coherent answer, but perhaps not a satisfactory one. That violence serves a reforming purpose seems satisfactory to theological readers in search of theodicy, as well trauma analyses that find the violence problematic but understandable. Other interpreters of Jeremiah, such as feminists and postcolonialists, struggle with the gratuitous and seemingly arbitrary nature of the violence. While not an attempt to rationalize the violence, this chapter engages the arbitrariness of the violence through a systematic analysis of four targets of violence in the book of Jeremiah: the prophet, the feminized Israel/Judah as adulterous wife, foreign nations, and the earth. By distinguishing these separate targets, the chapter examines how gender, sexuality, nationality, and speciesism intersect in the enactment of the rhetorical violence in the book. These delineations also set the stage for a central claim of the chapter, that of exceptional violence. Building upon Carl Schmidt’s notion that exceptional violence stems from exceptional vulnerability that requires the state of exception to use unrestrained violence, the chapter considers how the violence as narrated in Jeremiah not only performs this exceptionalism but also has exceptions. By examining who/what dies from the violence in the book, the chapter points out how the politics of death is played out upon different targets.

Between the utopian imaginaries of literature and international law: The question of the insurgent child in international legal discourse and Kris Montañez’s Youth

2021 ◽  
pp. 1-20
Author(s):  
José Duke S. Bagulaya
Keyword(s):  
Civil War ◽  
International Law ◽  
Legal Discourse ◽  
The State ◽  
The Other ◽  
State Of Exception ◽  
Utopian Vision ◽  
The World ◽  
Realistic Representation ◽  
The One

Abstract This article argues that international law and the literature of civil war, specifically the narratives from the Philippine communist insurgency, present two visions of the child. On the one hand, international law constructs a child that is individual and vulnerable, a victim of violence trapped between the contending parties. Hence, the child is a person who needs to be insulated from the brutality of the civil war. On the other hand, the article reads Filipino writer Kris Montañez’s stories as revolutionary tales that present a rational child, a literary resolution of the dilemmas of a minor’s participation in the world’s longest-running communist insurgency. Indeed, the short narratives collected in Kabanbanuagan (Youth) reveal a tension between a minor’s right to resist in the context of the people’s war and the juridical right to be insulated from the violence. As their youthful bodies are thrown into the world of the state of exception, violence forces children to make the choice of active participation in the hostilities by symbolically and literally assuming the roles played by their elders in the narrative. The article concludes that while this narrative resolution appears to offer a realistic representation and closure, what it proffers is actually a utopian vision that is in tension with international law’s own utopian vision of children. Thus, international law and the stories of youth in Kabanbanuagan provide a powerful critique of each other’s utopian visions.

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