Konturen: Vol 1 (2008)

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https://hdl.handle.net/1794/23929

Political Theology: the Border in Question

Konturen opens with a series of essays on the law of the limit between politics and religion. The question of this law today is of a piece with the broader contemporary problem of the border, threshold, or determining framework, because the modern, Enlightenment privatization of religion repeats and reverses itself as the politicization of privatized religion, and as a consequence the modern subject finds itself in the paradoxical situation of a radical limitation (or finitude) doubled by an equally radical limitlessness (or infinite capacity).

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Browsing Konturen: Vol 1 (2008) by Subject "Political theology"

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    The Gap in the Law and the Border-Breaching Function of the Exception
    (University of Oregon, 2008) McNulty, Tracey
    This paper evaluates the status and function of the border in the two polemics that bookend the long history of political theology: Paul’s polemic against the Jewish law, and Carl Schmitt’s critique of constitutional liberalism. Paul and Schmitt both challenge spatial notions of law that establish a boundary between an “inside” and an “outside” by topologizing “inside” and “outside” as continuous: through the “fulfillment of the law” in Paul, and through the strategy of sovereign exception in Schmitt. Schmitt even describes sovereignty as a “border concept,” a Grenzbegriff: a concept that pertains to borderline cases, but perhaps at the same time a concept of the border, one that proposes a particular interpretation of the border and its logical function. The essay argues that Schmitt’s contribution to the logical problem of law as border is to claim that the border need not be written, and that the sovereign exception is not of the order of a writing, but a “miracle” that is by nature unwritten and unwritable. The Hebraic tradition of law that is the object of Paul’s polemic offers another way of considering the border, as the function of the written law. It conceives of law not as a normative representation of an existing situation, but as the delimination of a space or gap that may not be transgressed. While the fulfillment of the law and the sovereign exception bypass the limit implied in the law, offering a topological interpretation of the border as what integrates “inside” and “outside” into a new whole, the Hebraic law aligns the border with the logical function of negation. The essay approaches these different accounts of the border by way of Lacan’s distinction between the imaginary and symbolic dimensions of law. The imaginary is the “incarnated” dimension of law, while the symbolic corresponds to the function of speech as a barrier or limit, and involves a spacing and negation, the introduction of a gap or emptiness that precludes anything like a “whole.”
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    Religious Turns: Immigration, Islam, and Christianity in Twenty-First Century German Cultural Politics
    (2008) Breger, Claudia
    The paper analyzes recent German headscarf legislation in the context of early twenty-first-century religious turns, that is, on the one hand constructions of “Islam/ism” as the newly dominant figure of cultural difference on the political stage, and on the other hand the renewed prominence of Christianity in public discourse. Against the background of current academic work on and in political theology, I analyze the “post-secular” concepts of collective identity developed under the sign of the headscarf by associating them with two different theoretical models. Berlin’s headscarf legislation can be compared to the French “Law on Laicity,” which has been criticized as a vehicle of hidden political theologies in Carl Schmitt’s sense: the Republic performs its sovereignty through the ways it manages religious exceptions. The openly asymmetrical headscarf bans passed in a number of other German states, however, do not just make “exceptions” for Christianity; rather, they privilege “Christian tradition” as the foundation of the “secular” German state. Critically relating this rhetoric to the ways in which Jean-Luc Nancy and Slavoj Zizek conceptualize the (presumably inescapable) destabilization of secular democracy through the forces of heteronomy and tradition, the paper pleas for replacing such uses of political theology in both politics and theory.
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    Schmitt, Locke, and the Limits of Liberalism
    (University of Oregon, 2008) Feldman, Leonard C.
    This article brings Carl Schmitt's Political Theology into conversation with John Locke's Second Treatise of Government. Two fundamental issues are considered: the relationship between Locke's theory of prerogative power and Schmitt's sovereign/commissarial distinction, and the place of the theological—in particular the “miraculous” nature of the exception. While some have claimed that Locke's theory of prerogative fits the model of “commissarial dictatorship” I argue that Locke actually complicates the sovereign/commissarial distinction by maintaining the tensions between prerogative, law and popular judgment. Schmitt, on the other hand, dissolves the tension by absorbing popular sovereignty into sovereign exceptionalism. Concerning the miraculous nature of the exception, I argue that Schmitt's claim should be understood as part of a broader effort to render politics serious and so I situate his remarks in light of the complex relationship between the political and the moral in his Concept of the Political. Because Locke's politics is “already” serious in the sense of being firmly situated within natural law, exceptional circumstances do not perform the same redemptive function.