From Jerusalem to Rome via Constantinople

The globalisation of the Western-Christian institutional order in its manifest legal aspects, but not necessarily of its latent religious aspects, puts a supplement of importance onto the need of grasping its genesis. The most decisive note is located — or so we argue — in unfolding the classical division between polis and politics on the one hand, and the household and the art of handling it (management or oikonomia) on the other, in Christian times. These divides delivered the blueprint for the divide that would differentiate, over more than a millennium, the public power of the Roman Empire in its Eastern and Western re-embodiments from that of the Church. We also refer, by way of contrast, to the pre-Christian biblical model of the divide. Further, by contrast to Giorgio Agamben, we specify that while the today thoroughly studied occidental West, availing of a simplified trinitarian creed, instituted legitimate public power as subject to on-going conflictual competition between the so-called ‘two powers’, the still much less studied East struggled to preserve the unity, or as the Byzantines called it, 'symphony', of the Whole in line with its (original) version of Trinitarianism.

Social Systems on the Cross

While early 20th century Social Darwinism has been discredited, post-WW2 theories have re-emphasized Darwin's notion of the environment. On this basis, and substituting social systems for natural species, society has been analyzed as a system-in-evolution, a machinery that, reflexively or self-referentially, produces itself at every moment anew. Modern society, according to social systems theory, continuously makes itself, thanks to countless simultaneous communications taking place at once. There are two equally disquieting lessons here. On the one hand, modern law, understood as the communicative system that applies the distinction lawful/unlawful to everything that gets in its way, is placed within an environment constituted by other communicative social systems (the economy, politics, religion, art etc) and the conditions created by those. On the other hand, social systems at large are separated from the realm of human consciousness, i.e. of collective or individual identity (the ‘psychic systems’). While ‘social' and ‘psychic’ systems never meet, they rely on absolute indifference with respect to their other side, as only this indifference enables especially social systems to assure their (superior) fact-creating potential. Our own project consists in spelling out the implications of this scissile sense of ‘meaning’, at once understood as a shorthand for what is actually happening (fragmented communications) and as consciousness-as-identity (imaginary unity).

Political Theology beyond Schmitt

This chapter takes off from the discovery that Western Christianism does not fit into the paradigm of one ‘religion’ among many and should, instead, be considered as offering a meta-paradigm governing the modern understanding of politics in all its elements, religious as well as anti-religious. As a discovery, this is generally traced back to Carl Schmitt's re-appraisal of political theology. Indeed, Schmitt — as well as some contemporaries such as, in our narrative, Eugene Rosenstock-Huessy — dared to heed the fact that the main axis of the transmission of Western Christianism had not been ‘religious’ in the sense of the particulars of the Christian Faith. Rather, its key stake was a success-program of trans-disciplinary nature that had as its centre of gravity the administration of power and the institutions and doctrine of government. Comparing Schmitt's attempts of capturing the claims of his medieval theological sources with recent relevant scholarship, we try to show that Schmitt lacked the depth of focus required to deal with such decisive issues as, inter alia, specific doctrinal evolutions between Eastern and Occidental versions of Trinitarianism between the first and second millennia CE or, the 13th and 14th century Franciscan debates concerning subjection and rule.

From Sovereignty to Negeschatology

In this chapter we argue, first, that, since early modernity and its political innovation (absolutism), the model and basis of any sovereign power that has been taken as just and trustworthy is built upon a precisely circumscribed postulate: the double fixture between a mundane potential to reign in emerging challenges and a spiritual belief that this super-power happens to be in the right hands, or on ‘the right side of history’. Secondly, we show how this occurred in a manner directly informed by the medieval religious canon's outline of the events due to take place at the end of times (eschatology, the doctrine of the Last Things). Comparing with the situation at the beginning of the 21st century, we find that this correlation has been done away with and, in its place, another, secularised paradigm has been put into place: one of permanent crisis and of mere coping with contingency by momentary measures accepted even before their specific features have been elucidated. Everything looks as if this new paradigm revoked the previous eschatological promise of something that holds out beyond the present horizon.

The Transition from Secularism to Post-secularism

Modernity has been forcing upon the entire world population a mercilessly uniform presto-accelerando tempo resulting in a de-regulated march towards ever more condensed rhythms of adaptation, competition, decision, transformation and, most decisively, self-transformation. It is a movement in which the adagio rhythm of human existence, understood as a matter of generations and inter-generational transmission, has been giving way to the feverish rattling of technogenous, e.g. micro-informatic-driven, innovations. In this chapter we first show how this process, far from stemming from a rupture with the medieval world, spans from origins in religious rituals and dogmas all the way to the moving target of secularization. In this regard we try to make graspable the differential social-cum-governmental techniques that set off, for a millennium and more, the Christian-cum-post-Christian West from the Byzantine East, and, specifically, the game of ‘hide and seek' forever underlying the relation between ‘glorious’ politics and oikonomia/management that was perfected in the Occident. We argue that this occidental-cum-universalist dualist machinery has, no doubt foreseeably, been fated to grind to a halt once the horizon of a boundlessly successful continuation of its ambitious logic elicited the first signs of its long-term un-sustainability, i.e. of its incapacity of providing endless further sequences of increase or escalation.

The Religion of Progress

Western Christianism has been in the cross hairs of inquiries into the political and social identity of the West for several decades now. It has shaped centuries, at least, of politico-theological interrogations. Even so, it is barely ever considered otherwise than as one more "religion". This attitude – which we explore in more depth in the following chapter – was typical in Christian Western Europe after the French Revolution until the threshold of the 20th century, for the simple reason that during this period Christianism had finally acquired an intra-social outside: society no longer thought of itself as exclusively rooted in religion, but rather in emerging secular fields, such as science and knowledge, industry, trade, rights. Two unintended collateral casualties resulted: First, other religions were conceived as comparable to Christianism (if less enlightened); secondly, and partly explaining the interest in ‘political theology’, deficiently secular human consciousness reacted by ‘deifying’ two function systems, politics and law, just as economy and the media are today 'deified' before, eventually, becoming aware of the religious nature of the preference for politics-led law or/and economy-led deregulation that they stand in for. Taking into account a vast and growing literature, we ask especially how politics replaced religion in the job of preaching the ' gospel of progress' as a prelude to political action, before being replaced in its turn by the supremely fake evangelism of economics.

Premises and Arguments

The big news on the global horizon at the end of the second decade of the 21st century concerns the promise of politics. At stake is no political promise in particular; that would barely be news — the presence of some such promise has been Western humankind's invariable self-endowment throughout modernity. The news is that the emancipatory promise proposed by political discourse sounds hollow to most. The equality of human lives appears to be at an all-time low just at the moment in which politics, the site at which such a state of things encounters objections and oppositions, has fallen into silence, but for the noise of populist fake news and regardless of the continuing enjoyment of its theatrical side. Declared king only a few centuries ago, politics, in the age of "function systems" has fallen far below the rank of others, including the economy and the media, which appear today perfectly able to outdo politics in energies, powers, deeds. Take the vast academic success of Political Theology during the past fifty years: what is at stake here, if not the disaster inflicted, first, upon religious devotion by the triumph of ‘glorious’ secular politics and secondly, by the self-inflicted disaster of the latter?

Deeds without Words

Following on from the previous chapter we first point out how a number of current politico-intellectual programs continue, in different ways, to believe in, and postulate as unquestionable, a ‘glorious’ intervention to end managerialism. Ways and steps ‘forward’ are proposed with enthusiasm while silencing the numerous unmistakable signs to the contrary, in the name of Hegelian philosophy, of Leninist revolution, of neo-constitutionalism, of human rights, to name just some examples of "fiat’-credit institutions" of political innovation. Secondly, we point to philosophical works that are not trying to provide communities with a portion of Good News or founding optimism, but, more modestly, seek to make further headway in the inquiry of some of the structural problems inherent in the Western tradition. Giorgio Agamben's multi-volume Homo Sacer, written between 1995 and 2015, presents its readership with the tentative formula of inclusive exclusion (with the thesis, in other words, that, in the West, the flourishing of a universal human community is necessarily predicated on the existence of those abandoned within it). If bare life underlies and accompanies political or any form of "supplemented life", political history is given the chance of describing a state of things that does not exhaust itself in nourishing political meetings with the necessary quanta of confidence to ‘overcome’ tradition.