Political Theology of the Death of God
This essay attempts to complicate Carl Schmitt’s claim that most of modern political concepts demonstrate a “continuing vitality” of God, by evoking another theological figure which, already for Hegel, constituted the gist of modern religiosity: “the sentiment of the death of God,” as he calls it in his Faith and Knowledge. Reading Hegel through Derrida’s lenses, most of all his Glas, the essay shows the inherent subversion of the political theology, which focuses not on God’s vitality but, to the contrary, on God’s demise. Yet, the death of God appears here not as the Nietzschean metaphor of radical atheisation, but as the antinomian moment within the modern political theology: the moment of the paradoxical a/theologisation which occurs in the theological realm itself. Modern political theology would thus be the paradoxical political a/theology of the death of God: not of the Schmittian forever vital, undying, powerfully decisionistic God, but the God who himself agrees to die and cedes his legacy to the finite world.