political theologies · claude lefort 148 violence in the state of exception: reﬂections on...

Political Theologies

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P U B L I C R E L I G I O N S I N A P O S T - S E C U L A R W O R L D

Edited by H E N T D E V R I E S

and L AW R E N C E E . S U L L I VA N

F O R D H A M U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S N E W Y O R K 2 0 0 6

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‘‘On the Prepolitical Moral Foundations of a Free Republic,’’ by Pope Benedict XVI �2006 Libraria Editrice Vaticana

Copyright � 2006 Fordham University Press

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrievalsystem, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy,recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the priorpermission of the publisher.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Political theologies : public religions in a post-secular world / edited by Hent de Vriesand Lawrence E. Sullivan.

p. cm.Includes bibliographical references.ISBN-13: 978-0-8232-2644-3 (cloth : alk. paper)ISBN-10: 0-8232-2644-1 (cloth : alk. paper)ISBN-13: 978-0-8232-2645-0 (pbk. : alk. paper)ISBN-10: 0-8232-2645-X (pbk. : alk. paper)1. Political theology. I. Vries, Hent de. II. Sullivan, Lawrence Eugene, 1949–

BT83.59.P65 2006201�.72—dc222006032059

Printed in the United States of America08 07 06 5 4 3 2 1First edition

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Contents

PrefaceHENT DE VRIES AND LAWRENCE E. SULLIVAN ix

Introduction: Before, Around, and Beyond theTheologico-PoliticalHENT DE VRIES 1

PA R T I . W H AT A R E P O L I T I C A L T H E O L O G I E S ?

The Gods of Politics in Early Greek CitiesMARCEL DETIENNE 91

Church, State, ResistanceJEAN-LUC NANCY 102

Politics and Finitude: The Temporal Status of Augustine’sCivitas PermixtaM. B. PRANGER 113

The Scandal of Religion: Luther and Public Speech in theReformationANTÓNIA SZABARI 122

On the Names of GodERNESTO LACLAU 137

The Permanence of the Theologico-Political?CLAUDE LEFORT 148

Violence in the State of Exception: Reflections onTheologico-Political Motifs in Benjamin and SchmittMARC DE WILDE 188

Critique, Coercion, and Sacred Life in Benjamin’s‘‘Critique of Violence’’JUDITH BUTLER 201

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C O N T E N T S

From Rosenzweig to Levinas: Philosophy of WarSTÉPHANE MOSÈS 220

Levinas, Spinoza, and the Theologico-Political Meaning ofScriptureHENT DE VRIES 232

PA R T I I . B E Y O N D T O L E R A N C E : P L U R A L I S M A N D

AG O N I S T I C R E A S O N

On the Relations Between the Secular Liberal State andReligionJÜRGEN HABERMAS 251

Prepolitical Moral Foundations of a Free RepublicPOPE BENEDICT XVI 261

Bush’s God TalkBRUCE LINCOLN 269

Pluralism and FaithWILLIAM E. CONNOLLY 278

Subjects of Tolerance: Why We Are Civilized and TheyAre the BarbariansWENDY BROWN 298

Religion, Liberal Democracy, and CitizenshipCHANTAL MOUFFE 318

Toleration Without Tolerance: Enlightenment and theImage of ReasonLARS TØNDER 327

Saint John: The Miracle of Secular ReasonMATTHEW SCHERER 341

PA R T I I I . D E M O C R AT I C R E P U B L I C A N I S M ,

S E C U L A R I S M , A N D B E Y O N D

Reinhabiting Civil DisobedienceBHRIGUPATI SINGH 365

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C O N T E N T S

Rogue Democracy and the Hidden GodSAMUEL WEBER 382

Intimate Publicities: Retreating the Theologico-Political inthe Chávez Regime?RAFAEL SÁNCHEZ 401

The Figure of the Abducted Woman: The Citizen as SexedVEENA DAS 427

How to Recognize a Moslem When You See One: WesternSecularism and the Politics of ConversionMARKHA G. VALENTA 444

Laı̈cité, or the Politics of Republican SecularismYOLANDE JANSEN 475

Trying to Understand French SecularismTALAL ASAD 494

Pim Fortuyn, Theo van Gogh, and the Politics ofTolerance in the NetherlandsPETER VAN DER VEER 527

Can a Minority Retain Its Identity in Law? The 2005Multatuli LectureJOB COHEN 539

Prophetic Justice in a Home Haunted by Strangers:Transgressive Solidarity and Trauma in the Work ofan Israeli Rabbis’ GroupBETTINA PRATO 557

PA R T I V . O P E N I N G S O C I E T I E S A N D T H E R I G H T S

O F T H E H U M A N

Mysticism and the Foundation of the Open Society:Bergsonian PoliticsPAOLA MARRATI 591

The Agency of Assemblages and the North AmericanBlackoutJANE BENNETT 602

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C O N T E N T S

Automatic Theologies: Surrealism and the Politics ofEqualityKATE KHATIB 617

Theoscopy: Transparency, Omnipotence, and ModernitySTEFANOS GEROULANOS 633

Come On, Humans, One More Effort if You Want to BePost-Christians!THIERRY DE DUVE 652

The Right Not to Use Rights: Human Rights and theStructure of JudgmentsWERNER HAMACHER 671

Contributors 691Notes 697

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Preface

Hent de Vries and Lawrence E. Sullivan

The age of globalization, as we seem destined to regard it, confrontsus with more ironies than sources of clarity. The apparent triumph ofEnlightenment secularization, manifest in the global spread of politicaland economic structures that pretended to relegate the sacred to astrictly circumscribed private sphere, seems to have foundered on anunexpected realization of its own parochialism and a belated acknowl-edgment of the continuing presence and force of ‘‘public religions’’ (theterm is José Casanova’s).

As Nobel laureate for economics Joseph Stiglitz notes, ‘‘A particularview of the role of government and markets has come to prevail—aview which is not universally accepted within the developed countries,but which is being forced upon the developing countries and the econo-mies in transition.’’1 Even in the Western world, the prevailing modelfor the organization of political and economic life, representative orparliamentary democracy, and the capitalist enterprise have come underincreasing pressure from a variety of social and cultural movementswhose religious origins and overtones are more and more difficult toignore. Both the model of limited governance in political liberalism,with its corollary conception of civil society (implying religious freedomand tolerance), and the unstoppable engine of globalization find theirmatch in spreading expressions of discontentment and resistance, whichare often articulated in theologico-political terms. But does this makethem necessarily ‘‘religious’’? Or were the pillars of sovereign power notfrom the outset theologico-political, if not mythico-religious, at core,just as the engines that continue to drive the forces and interests ofeconomic exchange, their real and virtual monetary flows, have, as MaxWeber was the first to realize, affinities with mental dispositions fosteredby certain conceptions of faith and belief? Should we (still or again)study current tendencies in society and politics with reference to the

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tradition called ‘‘the religious’’? Or is that tradition merely an epiphenomenon of largerempirical processes, which need no reference to transcendent-transcendental motifs andmotivations in order responsibly to be explained and engaged?

The rigid boundaries, once imagined to be universal, with which the Enlightenmentsought to separate the public sphere of political processes from private commitments tothe values inculcated by religious and spiritual traditions have come to be a focus ofmounting opposition. In the most poignant cases, expressions of ‘‘religion’’ inform ororient resistance by the supposed beneficiaries of globalization to pressures from withoutto modernize, rationalize, democratize, liberalize, individualize, and (hence?) secularize,integrate culturally and politically, and ultimately assimilate. A renewed and ever moredesperate appeal to the separation of church and state and the neutrality of the publicdomain, with its institutionalized agnosticism, seems unlikely to be a successful counterto such resistance. After all, the resistance is often benign enough, de facto enrichment ofour understanding and experience of the common good, despite the widely, indeed exces-sively, mediatized cases in which it becomes dangerous and a threat to the security of all.Against this, to raise the chant of secular humanism, resolute atheism, the religion ofsecularism, or the sacredness of laı̈cité seems no more than whistling in the dark, vainlyhoping that the specter of ‘‘religion,’’ roaming like a zombie, dead-alive, through thepolitical landscapes of the modern world, will go away (again). A different form of politi-cal, legal, cultural, and even psychological accommodation may need to be envisioned.

The modern critique of religious conviction—focused on theological truth- and nor-mative claims by churches, councils, or charismatic leaders, which sought to speak aboutthe ordering of society with unanswerable authority and in universal terms—now appearsutterly misplaced. It seems to have missed the point or, perhaps, just to have done toolittle too late. Religious authority and power seem, in what has, rightly or wrongly, beencalled the ‘‘information age’’ or ‘‘network society’’ (Manuel Castells) to be manifest (re-vealed?) and effective in increasingly diffuse and globally mediatized and marketed, somewould say commodified, ways, for good and for ill. The legal barriers of separation, oncethe salutary and defining characteristic of modern democracies, seem to be contestedboth de jure and de facto in hitherto unimaginable and, indeed, undesirable ways. Evenpolicymakers in the West have come, if only recently, to understand this. ‘‘It is clear,’’ averHarlan Cleveland and Mark Luyckx, in a recent policy study prepared for the EuropeanCommission, ‘‘that the wall between religion and government is now so porous as to bean unreliable guide to attitudes and actions.’’2

It is time to take stock of this development, which has its chances as well as its perils.But that complex task can only be undertaken in a collective effort, aided by intellectualtools and interdisciplinary methods and inquiries that historically, culturally, conceptu-ally, analytically, even ontologically and metaphysically reach beyond the equally urgentinterrogation of pragmatic issues in the politics of the everyday, governments and non-governmental bodies, national and international law, social policy and diplomacy, or so-

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P R E FAC E

cial critique and cultural exchange. Yet such an ambitious assertion poses more questionsthan it answers. In what precise ways do the claims of religious belief—concerning wordsand gestures, powers and things—exert pressure on structures of governance? What im-plications do theologically imbued justifications of substate and interstate violence—thatis, of terror and ‘‘just war’’—have for the credibility of religious traditions in much-needed attempts to reshape patterns of representation and structures of authority, socialcohesion and cultural integration? Do the teachings of the world’s faith traditions a priorisupport or undermine the political institutions and economic markets that arise throughglobalization (or that enabled it to take on massive proportions)?3 Can the resurgentinterest in ‘‘political theologies’’ offer any insights to the scholarly approaches now beingemployed to examine globalization’s historical and contemporary effects?

These questions, and others following from them, were debated during a three-dayconference entitled Political Theologies: Globalization and Post-Secular Reason, in Am-sterdam in June 2004. This gathering was the culmination of a collaboration between theCenter for the Study of World Religions (CSWR) at the Divinity School of Harvard Uni-versity and the Amsterdam School of Cultural Analysis (ASCA) at the University of Am-sterdam. Lawrence E. Sullivan (at the time Director of CSWR) and Hent de Vries (at thetime Director of ASCA) headed the project, and it was jointly funded by the NetherlandsOrganization for Scientific Research (NWO), the CSWR, and ASCA. The 2004 gatheringbuilt upon two preceding conferences from the same project—in Amsterdam in June2001 and at Harvard in May 2003. The present volume offers a selection from the papersread and discussed during the three conferences, as well as essays solicited afterward inorder to strengthen its overall historical and analytical breath and the depth of its com-bined perspectives.

When this collaborative effort was first discussed, in 1997–98, political theology was aterm seldom heard in the wider academic debate, beyond historical references to thewritings of Ernst Kantorowicz, Carl Schmitt, and ‘‘theologies of liberation.’’ In the yearssince September 11, 2001, however, the concept has become so relevant a focus of interestthat similar conferences have blossomed at other universities. The present volume will,we hope, widen the number of people who can benefit from the research and ideas de-bated during the conferences. Given the range of the questions brought up and left open,it should both resonate with other collective interdisciplinary endeavors that have longbeen underway and offer correctives and directions to the wave of more recent interest inthe domains of religion and the political.4

We would like to thank our host institutions, the University of Amsterdam and Har-vard University, as well as NWO, for their generous support. We would like to extend aspecial word of gratitude to Dr. Eloe Kingma, Managing Director of ASCA, Mark D. W.Edington, at the time Senior Administrator at the CSWR, who drafted a memo on whosewording we have freely drawn for this preface, and Rebecca E. Kline, the CSWR’s EventsCoordinator. We would also like to acknowledge the financial support of the Johns Hop-

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kins University’s Zanvyl Krieger School of Arts and Sciences and its Dean of Research andGraduate Education, Professor Eaton E. Lattman, and of the University of Notre Dame.

Our grateful thanks go to Jeff Fort, Eduardo Mendieta, and Fr. Joseph T. Lienhard,S.J., for vetting translations of the essays by Jean-Luc Nancy, Jürgen Habermas, and PopeBenedict XVI, respectively. Thanks, too, to Neil Hertz, who has allowed us to use hisremarkable photographs of Baltimore on our display pages.

Without the indefatigable energy, sustained support, and editorial skills of HelenTartar, Editorial Director of Fordham University Press, the publication of this volumecould not have succeeded. We are immensely grateful for her wise counsel and persistenteffort in bringing this project to a good end.

HdV & LS, Baltimore-Amsterdam-South Bend May 2006

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IntroductionBefore, Around, and Beyond the Theologico-Political

Hent de Vries

What has happened to ‘‘religion’’ in its present and increasingly publicmanifestation, propelled by global media, economic markets, and foreignpolicies as much as by resistance to them? How should we understandthe worldwide tendencies toward the simultaneous homogenization andpluralization of our social and cultural practices, that is to say, of ourindividual and shared forms and ways of life? To answer these questions,we must interrogate a complex and shifting semantic, axiological, andimaginative archive, whose historical origins and modern dissemina-tions have pragmatic ramifications for burning contemporary issues ofthe political (le politique) and politics (la politique), of commerce andexchange, of economics and law. In doing so, we will touch upon thelegal separation and accommodation between church and state, thefreedom of religion, and the professed confessional-ideological neutral-ity of government and the public sphere. But our questions also concernissues of pluralism and social cohesion, the quest for identity and theneed for integration, respect for others (that is to say, for their beliefsand values), as well as the liberty in principle to express oneself (albeitin ways that others may perceive as idolatrous, blasphemous, or offen-sive in nature).

Religion’s reassigned place and renewed function in the public do-main may owe their contours to the very theological traditions andpractices, the systems of thought and sensibilities, whose authority theyseek to curb or hold in check and whose explicit or subterranean work-ings—in words, things, gestures, and powers—we have hardly begun tocomprehend. To open or, rather, reopen an inquiry concerning reli-gion’s engagement with the political (i.e., with its very concept and itsconceptual analogues, such as sovereignty, democracy, etc.), as well aswith politics (i.e., in its juridical, administrative or policy-oriented, na-tional, and international aspects), is the aim of this volume.

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Before investigating the term political theology and the reasons for its pluralization,we should begin by asking: What in fact, in its very definition, is this phenomenon we soeasily call ‘‘religion’’? With that generic term, we not only invoke monotheisms but sup-pose that we identify cultic and cultural objects, together with accompanying individualand collective dispositions.1 How should we conceptualize ‘‘religion’’—realizing that, inorder to avoid abstraction, we ought perhaps to begin by saying ‘‘religions,’’ in the plural,given the notional, ethical, figurative, and rhetorical complexity, including the differentideational systems, corporeal senses, and overall affects, expressed by the religious idiomand by religious imagery? To this equation we should also add ‘‘religion’s’’ irreducible, ifoften ignored, materiality, as well as its increasingly mediatized performance, that is tosay, its now troubling, then promising forms of authority, sovereignty, and empower-ment. In other words, how should we approach such basic analytical and descriptivecategories as its words, things, gestures, and powers, which offer points of entry into thiselusive yet stunningly manifest phenomenon, which at once inspires and terrifies—eventerrorizes—civil society, that is to say, the domain of public life, as it traverses the politi-cal, politics, and policies, whether we like it or not, for good and for ill?

More specifically, what pre-, para-, and post-political forms do religion and its func-tional equivalents and successor beliefs or rituals assume in a world where the globalextension of economic markets, technological media, and informational networks havecontributed to loosening or largely suspending the link that once tied theologico-politicalauthority to a social body determined by a certain geographic territory and national sover-eignty? Is a disembodied—virtual, call it transcendental—substitute for the theologico-political body politic thinkable, possible, viable, or even desirable? A corpus mysticum, asit were, in a new, post-secular guise? Or might we eventually dispense with referenceto the theologico-political and the religious archive on which, in all its transformations(including secularist ones), it continues to rely for genealogical, conceptual no less thanrhetorical-strategic, reasons? And what forms—in Emmanuel Levinas’s idiom, what ‘‘cur-vatures’’—would its functional equivalents or structural analogues impose upon the limitsand enabling conditions of our ‘‘social space,’’ that is to say, upon the unique and singu-larly experienced as well as the shared times of our lives, if not in community or evenfriendship, then at least by way of a ‘‘living together,’’ whose contours are less fixed thanever (as Jacques Derrida taught us in his last writings)?2

These questions are relevant when discussing contemporary religion in the publicdomain or ‘‘public religions in a post-secular world’’ (echoing José Casanova’s PublicReligions in the Modern World), especially if one understands the term post-secular not asan attempt at historical periodization (following upon equally unfortunate designationssuch as the ‘‘post-modern,’’ the ‘‘post-historical,’’ or the ‘‘post-human’’) but merely as atopical indicator for—well, a problem. In the words of Hans Joas: ‘‘ ‘Post-secular’ . . .doesn’t express a sudden increase in religiosity, after its epochal decrease, but rather achange in mindset of those who, previously, felt justified in considering religions to be

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I N T R O D U C T I O N

moribund.’’3 Joas analyses the term in a critical discussion of Jürgen Habermas’s work,where it designates the situation in which a nation-state, paradoxically, ‘‘counts on thecontinuous presence of religious communities in a continually secularizing society.’’4 Asociety is ‘‘post-secular’’ if it reckons with the diminishing but enduring—and hence,perhaps, ever more resistant or recalcitrant—existence of the religious. In this view, asecond interpretation of the term post-secular is possible, one that stresses less a changein the societal role of religion than a different governmental or public perception of it:‘‘ ‘Post-secular’ doesn’t mean, then, an increase in the meaningfulness of religion or arenewed attention to it, but a changed attitude by the secular state or in the public domainwith respect to the continued existence of religious communities and the impulses thatemerge from them.’’5 In such a reading, what undergoes transformation is less the natureof the secular state, let alone its constitutional arrangements guaranteeing, say, a separa-tion between church and state, but rather the state’s ‘‘secularist self-understanding.’’6

Needless to say, it is far from clear what kind of ‘‘self-understanding’’ might come tosubstitute for the secularism (or ‘‘secular fundamentalism’’) of old, not least because thephenomenon on which the post-secular condition reflects—namely, religion’s persistentrole—is increasingly difficult to grasp conceptually and to situate empirically. Strictlyspeaking, neither the locus of ‘‘self ’’ (often implying self-identity and self-determination)nor that of ‘‘understanding’’ (with its now cognitivist, then historicist, culturalist, andhermeneutic overtones) can be of much help where religion and the theologico-politicalare concerned.

Here, let it suffice to mention just one reason for this predicament. Religion and thetheologico-political (like so many historical, social, cultural, and political words, things,gestures, and powers) tend to show a Janus face. Religion, at least in its present-day publicmanifestations, reveals a dual possibility, for better and for worse. Moreover, it does soat once intelligibly (for reasons that we can make perfectly transparent) and obscurely,miraculously (that is to say, inexplicably, driven by causes, forces, or affects that escapeus, whether in principle or just for now). A potential source of inspiration and democraticopenness, it simultaneously—inevitably?—presents a danger of dogmatism and hence ofclosed societies and mentalities. As Derrida suggests, its striving toward perfection (orperfectibility) and its tendency toward perversion (or, more precisely, ‘‘pervertibility’’) gohand in hand. Religious orthodoxies of all stripes seek to interpret the latter possibility orvirtuality as external to themselves—and, by extension, as inessential to their theologico-political project. They portray these aberrations as idolatry, blasphemy, apostasy, heresy,scandal, or offense.

But what if one belongs to the other and does so necessarily, as a standing possibility,a danger that must—indeed, ought to—be risked? Then it is important to ask how thisdouble, potentially duplicitous, and often deeply contradictory or even treacherous—terrorist or rogue—tendency emerged in the first place. What historical articulations andinterpretations has it received? What chances and perils does it (still or yet again) hold in

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store? Finally, what new possibilities might it set free, create, or open up, for us or forothers, known and unknown? Could one address such questions concretely, with existingand alternative national, inter- and non-governmental policy orientations in mind?

Timely Considerations?

The conference that provided the core papers of this volume examined interrelationshipsbetween the political, economic, and cultural characteristics of the ‘‘age of globalization,’’on the one hand, and the vision of society and structures of governance developed overmillennia by major faith traditions, as well as by supposedly less systematized indigenoustraditions, on the other. That such an undertaking has about it an element of urgencycannot be doubted, in view not only of 9/11 and subsequent attacks in Madrid and Lon-don but also—more broadly and perhaps, in a longer view, more importantly—of reli-giously informed resistances and responses to pressures to secularize and to assimilate incultural and political terms. These resistances and responses are implicit in the continuingsources of tension and conflict between the self-proclaimed secularism of the West andits allies, on the one hand, and the self-perception of developing, often postcolonial, socie-ties with their state-sponsored, popular, or alienated fringe political movements, on theother.

The West still imagines developing societies and underprivileged communities andindividuals to be inevitable beneficiaries of globalization, of its markets no less than itscultural goods, its constitutional democracy as well as its interpretation of human rights.In the end, if somewhat indirectly, they very well may be. But these societies’ presentplace in a hegemonic world ruled by imbalances in power, news, money, and marketsis a source of permanent frustration, indeed, of humiliation and contention. This hasrepercussions for internal relationships in Western nations, with their significant immi-grant communities, no less than for the establishment and maintenance of internationallaw. The recent dramatic difficulties with policies of integration and accommodation inEuropean countries (for example, in France and the Netherlands, whose respective politi-cal troubles are extensively discussed in this volume), as well as the recent escalation inthe Middle East of hostilities between Israel and the Palestinian authority (Hamas) andHezbollah in Lebanon. So is the immobility, not to say paralysis, of European governancein dealing with its internal affairs, to say nothing of the inability or unwillingness of theinternational community to enforce an immediate end to reiterated acts and crimes ofwar or to guarantee minimal assurances for security, justice, and peace for all.

To illustrate that, sadly, the studies of political theologies collected here are all tootimely, let me refer to the example of ‘‘political Islam,’’ especially the much-debated dan-ger represented by dispersed militant movements. Having emerged in the wake of global-ization, after the failure of so many of its state-based and ‘‘secular’’ nationalist projects,

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these groups are at times merely virtual, then again all too real in their operation as ‘‘cells’’and informal, ad hoc ‘‘networks.’’ What has emerged in some of the more careful schol-arly and journalistic analyses of this phenomenon is the need for a theoretical matrix thatalso has relevance for engagements of religion with the political and politics (or viceversa) in major religions other than Islam, such as Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism, andBuddhism. Since many of the current troubles have little to do with Islam per se—othermajor and minor religious and nonreligious traditions and sensibilities are potentially justas entangled with the question of the political and of politics as it presents itself globallytoday—we might expect such a theoretical matrix also to illuminate some of the develop-ments and prospects of secularism. The phenomenon of secularism constitutes more thana modern public religion in disguise, which some have accused it of being, but its implica-tion in our conception of the political and in our formulation of policies follows a logicsimilar to that of political, public religions in the modern world. The theoretical matrixwe are seeking should thus be able to encompass religious and nonreligious or secularsystems of thought, practices, and other modes of expression. Its central concepts andinsights should hold for religious communities or groups that are numerically smallerthan the major religions, just as it should offer indirect lessons, if not for the policies ofgovernments and international institutions or nongovernmental organizations as such,then at least for the intellectual and affective dispositions with which their representativesapproach religions in a post-secular world. This being said, let me now turn to our exam-ple and discuss some of its implications.

The Western fixation on political Islam is unfortunate but consequential, not leastsince it is echoed and amplified in the United States, where in some influential circles acaricature has taken hold, that of an emerging ‘‘Eurabia’’ or ‘‘Londonistan,’’ the mirageof an ‘‘ever-growing Muslim-Europe-within-Europe—poor, unassimilated, and hostile tothe United States.’’7 In this hyperbolic view—which in the words of a respected Europeanjournal, The Economist, looks very like ‘‘scaremongering’’—a fatal process would seem tobe unfolding: ‘‘Stagnant Europe, goes the argument, cannot offer immigrants jobs; ap-peasing Europe will not clamp down on Islamo-fascist extremism; secular Europe cannotdeal with religiosity (in some cities more people go to mosques than to churches). Europeneeds to study America’s melting pot, where Muslims fare better.’’8 Just as it downplayedthe Soviet threat during the Cold War and let ethnic cleansing rage in the Balkans, Europethis time around lacks both the socio-political flexibility and the moral stamina to ‘‘eithergive the newcomers a decent economic life or to confront extremism successfully.’’9 Inthe final analysis, so the narrative concludes, this political-cultural weakness runs agroundnot only in ‘‘a godless continent’s failure to understand the depth of other people’s faith’’but in an apparent inability or unwillingness to give quite the same public space to theculture of free speech as is characteristic of the United States.10

Demographically, economically, and culturally these negative and slightly resentfulassessments may soon prove false. The Muslim inhabitants of the European Union consti-

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tute an estimated 15 million, or 4 percent of the total population, a figure that is expectedto rise to 30 million, or 10 percent, by 2025, not taking into account Turkey’s eventuallyjoining the E.U. By contrast, the current estimated figures for the U.S. and Canada are1.7 percent and 2.3 percent, respectively. Moreover, the fear of an emerging ‘‘Eurabia’’ignores the vast economic and cultural differences between immigrant populations in thedifferent European countries—and between these and the U.S. Moreover, references to‘‘Eurabia’’ simultaneously overestimate and underestimate the present force of the politi-cal elements and forms of Islam—and other major and minor religions. The fact thatreligions constitute both an integrative and a potentially disintegrating or even violentaspect of modern societies has to do less with persistent or newly emerging ties to nationand traditional doctrine and law than with a novel configuration of post-secular identities,whose volatile dynamics contain as much promise as potential for political havoc. Tobegin to acknowledge and then interpret this built-in ambivalence of religion in relationto the very definition of the political, as well as to concrete politics or policies, may wellbe a key to the understanding and mitigation, if not anticipation or prevention, of reli-gion’s most pernicious effects.

If there is any lesson to be drawn from the more extreme—and heavily mediatized—phenomena of violence inspired or framed by religion, it is that the relationship betweenthe theological and the political is no longer obvious, let alone direct. Previously limitedto problems of national sovereignty (pitting the Holy Roman Empire against the princes,stipulating religious allegiance based upon one’s belonging to a given territory) or ofconstitutional law (the separation of church and state, the ban on ‘‘conspicuous religioussigns’’ in public schools in France and Turkey), the most interesting and troubling casesof religion’s continuing and renewed role at present are more elusive, more delocalizedand hence difficult to grasp, both conceptually and empirically. We are left with blanksand dots (that is to say, words, things, gestures, and powers)—the very stuff of utterancesand affects (both passive and active, destructive and salutary)—which we continue toattribute to ‘‘religion,’’ as if we knew what that means. The ways these disarticulate andreconstellate themselves as the elementary forms of political life in the twenty-first centuryare no longer transparent, nor can they be reduced to simple empirical (naturalistic or,philosophically speaking, immanent) terms. Rather, for all their this-worldly, indeed,down-to-earth impact, they place great demand on our theoretical skill, even our specula-tive imagination and sensibilities, in reading not so much the transcendent as the ab-solute: that which tends to loosen its ties to existing contexts (including the context ortext of ‘‘existence,’’ hence of ontology, onto-theology, and its substitutes). New conceptsneed to be coined, novel practices of research attempted, even though they may turn outto be—may even need to be—out of sync with the phenomena in question (and henceuntimely in their intended timeliness). Such is the life of the mind. At least for now.

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To return to our example, the contemporary political and public presence of ‘‘religion’’seems no longer dependent upon—or especially effective through—broad popular, letalone democratic support (although such is, of course, not excluded either, as is witnessedby the victory of Hamas in the January 2006 Palestinian elections, just as it is furtherillustrated by the success of ideological-nationalist, left- and right-wing populist move-ments in Venezuela, Poland, and elsewhere). The journalistic and scholarly debate con-cerning the exact meaning and impact of public religions in the post-secular world (ofthe theologico-political, that is) has remained fragmentary and disoriented. The reasonsfor this impasse are not difficult to determine. For one thing, it seems as if the morechallenging issues raised by these public religions address a multidimensional space andtime before, around, and beyond the ‘‘theologico-political,’’ at least in its ancient, medieval,and modern definition, even though no plausible account of current transformations canignore the historical archive for which this term, with its many semantic connotations,visual associations, rhetoric, and affects, still stands. That the most burning political issuesare not so much directly but indirectly—some would say, tangentially or negatively—related to the ‘‘theological’’ can already be glimpsed in the unforeseen ways in which thesubject of ‘‘religion’’ has entered the contemporary public domain and debate, nationallyand internationally.

‘‘Religion,’’ in its more concrete and abstract, local and global determinations is per-ceived as a ‘‘problem’’ to which policy- and opinion-makers, social and political scientists,cultural critics and philosophers, media theorists and economists tend to direct theirattention with either increasing fascination or barely veiled irritation. Yet the phenome-non manifests itself in more and more ethereal ways—elusive and ab-solute, but then alsoquite visceral. It is upon this paradox, if not aporia, that the contemporary presence andoften virulence of ‘‘religion’’ (of its words, things, gestures, and powers) is premised. Nolonger a given, it cannot simply be given up, either, not even by the most persistent—andsupposedly enlightened—of its detractors. The post-secular condition and its correspond-ing intellectual stance consist precisely in acknowledging this ‘‘living-on’’ of religion be-yond its prematurely announced and celebrated deaths. While it increasingly escapes pre-established contexts and concepts, horizons and expectations, it nonetheless takes on anever more ghostly appearance. In order to track its movements, new methodological toolsand sensibilities are needed.

For this ‘‘retreat’’ yet ‘‘permanence’’ of ‘‘religion’’ and the theologico-political (toecho titles coined by Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Claude Lefort11),several complementary explanations could be given. They include the fate of metaphysicsin the philosophical and cultural discourse of modernity, especially the critical onslaughtson metaphysica specialis or theologia naturalis, the overcoming of ‘‘onto-theology’’ onwhich Heidegger mused, and the symbolic interpretation of the ‘‘popular metaphysics’’with which Schopenhauer, not unlike Spinoza, equated historical and revealed or positivereligion (that is to say, superstition). More material trends, having to do with the develop-

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ment of markets and the fortune or failure of nation-states, have contributed to the deter-ritorialization, delocalization, mediatization, and even virtualization of religion, togetherwith the invention of new forms of agency and community. No unified theory is currentlyavailable to hold these trends together in a compelling explanatory account or historicalnarrative. No political theology, in the singular, ever will. But several building blocks canbe discerned along the road leading up to the post-secular condition, as the contributionsto this volume testify.

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The geographical and demographic-sociological base of physical struggle inspired or atleast verbally legitimated by religion—no religion without (at least some) violence, no vio-lence without (at least some) religion12—is characterized by an increasingly delocalized,deterritorialized, and volatile mobility. The beliefs and theological rationalizations thatmotivate spectacular forms of violence against states and civilians need no longer takehold in the minds and hearts of whole groups and generations—and general stoicism, ifnot resignation, may well be the dominant public response. Yet the elusive effects of suchmilitant religious manifestations and the terror associated with them have come to perme-ate the life of all institutions and to affect the substance of legal systems, political hopes,and cultural sensibilities, well beyond the borders in which they are committed and outof all proportion. How should we explain this discrepancy? And how can citizens, non-governmental organizations, and nations respond to it in a responsible and effective way?Is there a policy of and for the unpredictable and the disproportional?

Clearly, the ‘‘war on terror’’—or any other version of military preemption and judi-ciary, let alone para- or extra-legal, repression—cannot be it. Sweeping gestures invokinglabels such as ‘‘global terrorism’’ (or ‘‘terrorists of global reach’’) and a ‘‘global war onterror’’ are no more helpful, since they cling to an outdated concept, ‘‘war,’’ and fail tospecify the—often ‘‘local’’—conditions and special effects to which the adjective globalrefers.13 Other approaches are required, ones that can engage local issues of legal, political,economic, and cultural integration or dialogue, though without any certainty, whateverother ills they may undo, that they can identify a single, now moving, now immobile—inany case, invisible, inaudible, ungraspable, and often unintelligible—target. Can such ap-proaches be learned and taught, let alone be planned or institutionalized? Where theproclaimed ‘‘enemy’’ has no clear strategy other than inflicting terror and provokingwrath, can one develop strategies? And without them, what would the political be? Wherethe perceived threat turns out to elude the state apparatus’s horizon of expectation, isthere anything left to do? Or is acting and reacting no longer the proper modality ofresponse? Where diplomacy is not an option, is one condemned to respond either toolittle, too late, or in a disproportionate way? A whole new art of conducting war andestablishing peace—something other than war and warfare, peace and peacefulness in

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their traditional definitions, based upon the existence of and dealings among states andsovereigns—seems needed, together with a different attunement to nonstate actors andactions whose sensibilities, passions, and affects obey a logic and rhythm that eludes themodern understanding of data, numbers, cause, and effect.

Has the theologico-political tradition prepared us for that task? Has the time comefor it to release its critical potential? Or is its legacy part of the problem, merely symptom-atic of the present difficulty in thinking about the political, politics, and policies in alto-gether different terms, perhaps by turning toward what lies beyond, before, and aroundthem? This task may be more challenging than the appeal to what recent ‘‘progressiverealists,’’ in search of an alternative to the impasses of American liberalism, on the onehand, and neoconservatism, on the other, have called ‘‘moral imagination,’’ putting one-self in the shoes of the other political actor.14

More often than not, we now realize, minimal, seemingly negligible differences anddifferentiations, whether ideational, sociological, or organizational, can cause maximaleffects (whether enormous havoc, countless blessings, or both), whereas, conversely, max-imal investments in, say, lofty ideas or excessive economic or military power too oftenresult in minimal or virtually no effects at all. Indeed, these maximal investments mayvery well, in their expansion and promulgation, revive or provoke the minimal differenceswhose larger—but structurally elusive—effects unsettle the distribution of forces and re-sources that state-regulated social and cultural policies, market-inspired measures, orhigh-tech military strategies had sought to bring about in a comprehensive and controlledmanner, whether by piecemeal engineering or in a single stroke.

This paradoxical tendency obeys a logic that one may be tempted to analyze as a‘‘dialectic of Enlightenment’’ (as Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer argued), asthe paradox of Western rationalization (as Jürgen Habermas, following Max Weber,added), or as the performative contradiction of universalism (as Judith Butler, ErnestoLaclau, and Slavoj Žižek have insisted in more psychoanalytically informed ways). Thedifference matters little for present purposes. What remains important is to rethink and,as it were, reframe these paradoxes and aporetics in terms that are suitable for the novelproblems and challenges that face us at present. How is one to ponder the imponderable,manage the unmanageable? And what experiences or sensibilities are most likely to pre-pare us for this increasingly difficult—and, we might add, eminently political, perhapsquintessentially theologico-political—task?

This question has become all the more difficult to answer because in the present,post-secular domain the inspiration, motivation, and effectuation of political theologiesno longer lie within the cultural and institutional, ecclesial or communal heritage of themajor religions or within the modern forms of political sovereignty with which theirtheologically (or cynically) driven politics were, historically, geographically, empirically,and conceptually linked. Instead, their authority (to the extent that it still, or once againexists) resides in infinitely mediated and refracted forms of ‘‘make believe’’ (call them

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special effects), which are in many ways elements of ‘‘belief in the making.’’ Indeed, they,more than anything else, are the wonders and miracles—sometimes the ‘‘shock andawe’’—of the contemporary world.

The very shrinkage and evaporation of the doctrinal substance of historical religionmay propel the remainder of its believers into rhetorical overdrive—a whistling in thedark that becomes shriller as fewer and fewer give heed—just as the staunch defenseof self-proclaimed Western Enlightenment values (whether in the name of a ‘‘clash ofcivilizations,’’ laı̈cité, tolerance, militant humanism, or political liberalism; the differencematters little) may find itself adopting a no less troublingly devout and often even ‘‘apoca-lyptic tone’’ (irrespective of its professed atheism, humanism, materialism, naturalism,skepticism, or immanentism).15 In a latest twist of the dialectic of Enlightenment, of theparadox of universalism, secularism might find itself to have become sacral—and, as ‘‘sec-ular fundamentalism,’’ even parochial—while the so-called religious fundamentalisms ofthe world continue to express and further the very disenchantment of the modern worldagainst whose vehicles (global markets, media, hegemonic political models, economicliberalization, and cultural liberties) they believe they protest. Religion, in its most dra-matic and terrifying, even terrorist forms could thus be seen as the flipside of modernity,not just in the ‘‘age of extremes,’’ but, in this century, in the hyperbolic effects of exponen-tial growth, the expansion and displacement of populations, the movement of capital andideas, the spread of democratic ideals—in short, of openings and closures alike.

Olivier Roy sees one consequence of ‘‘deterritorialization’’ as being a paradoxical‘‘congruence between contemporary Islam and Christianity,’’ which lose nothing of theirpotential for conflict and confrontation even as they disarticulate and reconstellate them-selves in the same geographical spaces, becoming contemporaries and cohabitants in aincreasingly global realm.16 On the contrary, he writes, even as they ‘‘become closer’’ they‘‘become more antagonistic, precisely because they are no longer separated by linguisticand territorial borders.’’17 In other words, ‘‘globalization does not necessarily imply mod-eration.’’18 Where we are all more or less the same, the need to manufacture differences,to create and stigmatize ‘‘others,’’ may become a temptation, one easily susceptible topolitical exploitation. The psycho-sociological, possibly even biological mechanisms ofmimetic rivalry, aggression, and a death drive, visible in larger groups and nations, maywell first emerge in small disaffected factions and cells that can seem to constitute them-selves out of the blue, parting ways with the familial, parental, and religious-culturalenvironments into which they had heretofore blended, gray on gray.

A case in point is violent jihadism, which, as international investigations and pollsrepeatedly demonstrate,19 finds little overall support among Muslim populations in pre-dominantly Muslim countries and entertains a complicated relationship with the internalcolonies of immigrant communities in the West. The special report ‘‘Muslim Extremismin Europe,’’ published in the aftermath of the July 7, 2005, London attacks, which killedfifty-two victims (and the four bombers) and which, while not unexpected, struck the

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intelligence community, political elites, and the general public because of their home-grown, suburban origins,20 gives important indications of how jihadism is a product ofglobalization and its vehicles (markets, modern secularism, and media).21 The reportmakes two related claims, both of which illustrate the changing meaning of national sov-ereignty and the redefinition—one is tempted to say the virtualization and perhaps evenprofanization—of the theologico-political. First, it suggests that ‘‘in an age of globalizedcommunication and porous borders, there is no real distinction between domestic andforeign threats.’’ Indeed, it continues: ‘‘Even if everyone involved in terrorizing Londonturns out to have been British-born [as turned out to be the case], it is clear that thebombers had access to sophisticated explosives, not easily available in suburban Yorkshire;and, more important, that they were influenced by ideas, images, and interpretations ofIslam that would continue to circulate electronically, even if every extremist who tried toenter Britain were intercepted.’’ Second, profiling the suspects of the London attacks re-vealed a pattern: disaffection with the home country, familial authority, local community,and mosque often preceded petty criminalization, conversion, and reterritorialization, asit were, in what is often a merely virtual group of like-minded, radicalized individuals,which establishes itself through the Internet and which—when effective guidance by expe-rienced veterans from actual battlegrounds is finally found—may or may not coalesceinto an ad hoc death squad that dissolves (through suicide, arrest, or flight) after thefateful action has been undertaken.

In ‘‘The Ideology of Terror,’’ Roy observes that what inspires this religious violencehas, in the end, little to do with circumscribed local conflicts, often of a postcolonialnature (say, Israel/Palestine, Bosnia, Chechnya, Kashmir, Afghanistan, Iraq, Indonesia, orSomalia).22 Rather, it is characterized by a process he calls the ‘‘delinking of Islam as areligion from a given culture—from any given culture.’’23 He stresses the striking moder-nity—including the increasing irreality—of the ideological outlook of Islamic militancy.It cannot, he suggests, be adequately captured in terms of ‘‘fundamentalism,’’ ‘‘Islam-ism’’—that is, the ‘‘movement that conceives of Islam as a political ideology’’24—or inté-grisme, but instead acquires near-phantasmatic features, which are increasingly difficultto read, let alone respond to. Not mechanistically linked to such causes as geopolitics inthe Middle East or the publication, on September 30, 2005, of cartoons of the ProphetMuhammad by the conservative Danish journal Jyllands Posten,25 these relatively sponta-neous acts of violent rebellion lack a political aim that could merit the title of a strategy,an agenda, or a concerted effort to change or reform anything in and of this world. If thereis any communitarian aspiration in militant jihadism or Islamism, it is, Roy suggests, oneof virtual belonging, a belonging without belonging, an identitarianism without identity,a communality without community.

Pointing out that the 9/11, Madrid, and London bombers were not from regionsdirectly affected by the conflict in the Middle East and were often ‘‘Western-born convertsto Islam,’’ Roy makes a further observation: ‘‘What was true for the first generation of Al

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Qaeda is also relevant for the present generation: even if these young men are from Mid-dle Eastern or South Asian families, they are for the most part Westernized Muslims livingin or even born in Europe who turn to radical Islam.’’26 Their imagination of belongingto a worldwide community of believers finds its ground not in deeply ingrained participa-tion in the daily life of traditional families, groups, or mosques in the West, let alone intheir countries and cultures of origin, but in their increasing alienation from both.

Roy compares their ‘‘dream of a virtual, universal ummah’’ not with Muslim historyin general (as historians such as Bernard Lewis had somewhat ominously suggested) butrather with the fantasies of a ‘‘world proletariat’’ and ‘‘Revolution’’ that inspired the ter-rorist movement of the ultra-left in the 1970s, notably the Baader-Meinhof Group in theFederal Republic of Germany, the Red Brigades in Italy, and the Japanese Red Army.27

Like the jihadists, these groups had no clear (or particularly effective) strategy other thanacting out what they perceived to be a universal—a global and near-cosmic—conflict,to which their response was one of theatrical or almost ritual behavior (acting out or‘‘performance violence’’). As Roy notes: ‘‘The real genesis of Al Qaeda violence has moreto do with a Western tradition of individual and pessimistic revolt for an elusive idealworld than with the Koranic conception of martyrdom.’’28 It is not even the case, he adds,that ‘‘most present-day conflicts involve Muslims’’; rather, it would be more appropriateto say that ‘‘most conflicts that are of interest to the West involve Muslims. . . . But clearlyfew of these conflicts involve Islam as such, even if the reference to Islam contributes inthe aftermath to reshaping these conflicts in ideological terms.’’29

Roy’s position is ultimately based upon the assumption that ‘‘politics’’ prevails overthe religious—as well as over its metaphysical understanding and inflection of ‘‘the politi-cal’’—so that political Islam must necessarily fail. Roy calls this its ‘‘becoming common-place,’’ ‘‘being integrated into politics,’’ and suggests that political Islam has ‘‘ ‘social-democratized’ itself.’’ Indeed, in its very appeal to Muslim law or sharia, it does not invent‘‘new political forms’’ but is ‘‘condemned to serving as a mere cover for a political logicthat eludes it—a logic in which we ultimately find the traditional ethnic, tribal, or com-munal divisions, ever ready to change their discourse of legitimization, hidden beneaththe new social categories and regimes.’’30 Roy goes so far as to claim that political Islamor Islamism ‘‘is no longer a geostratic factor; it is at most a societal phenomenon.’’31 The‘‘illusion’’ of its supposed fundamentalism, that of a ‘‘return’’ to a purer origin, is, likesuch movements in all religions, above all a reaction to the failure of other models. Roysingles out three: secularism, Marxism, and nationalism, all of which reflect a broaderspectrum of ‘‘symptoms of state crises’’: ‘‘Islam is not a ‘cause.’ ’’32 With the revolutionarymoment gone, Roy draws a sober conclusion: ‘‘Only the rhetoric remains.’’33 Yet thisdiminished role of religion in its ontological—or onto-theological—weight does not ex-clude its continued appeal as a semantic, axiological, figural, and, indeed, theologico-political archive and resource. Roy sees in this circumstance the reduction of politicalIslam to a culturalized and individualized—a marketed and mediatized—notion of religi-

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osity. But other interpretations might be possible. Might religion, precisely in its minimalremainder—despite or thanks to being elusive, erratic, volatile, and virulent—be all themore able to produce maximal effect? And to do so for good and for ill, as historicalcircumstance, fate, and luck allow?

Political Islam shares its ‘‘failure’’—in a sense, due to the success of its accommoda-tion—with other claims to political authority, indeed, with the theologico-political con-cept of sovereignty as such. Wherever it engages in down-to-earth concerns of governanceand policy, law and order, it cannot but secularize—that is to say, ultimately renderprofane—its ways. The ways of politics are the ways of the world. One cannot but be ofthis world, that is, come to belong to this world, as soon or as long as one is in this world,in other words, as soon or as long as history and human finitude follow their course. TheEconomist’s special report gives a concrete example:

In the municipal politics of Britain and the Netherlands, some radical Muslims quiteoften find themselves doing political business with other anti-establishment groupson the secular left, to the dismay of older immigrants. During a recent contest in eastLondon, the candidate for the new Respect party—a young Muslim lawyer—waschided by his co-religionists for sharing a platform with homosexuals. But Abdurah-man Jafar held his ground: ‘‘We want equality for Muslims and we would seeminsincere if we didn’t stand together with other minorities who face discrimination.’’The rhetoric that emerges from this sort of politics in a variety of European countriesis not always attractive to American ears, since one of the few common denominatorsbetween angry Muslims and secular leftists is hostility to America. But, given a choicebetween pious self-segregation and plunging into public affairs, many EuropeanMuslims are choosing the latter. . . . A process of political assimilation is, hesitantlybut visibly, taking place. This will change the politics of Europe. It may affect Eu-rope’s relations with the outside world. But, in the process, Muslims also change—and perhaps settle into their homelands as comfortably as most American Muslimshave done.34

In also assuming this general trend, Roy approaches Gauchet, who, in The Disen-chantment of the World, albeit from a different genealogical and a more philosophicallybased perspective, claims that the role played by religion proper (in Roy’s formulation,‘‘Islam as such’’) is, in the modern world, basically over.35 While Christianity, for Gauchet,is instrumental in its own demise—being ‘‘the religion of the end of religion’’—Islam, orat least political Islam, undermines its own stature the more successful, that is to say, themore globalized and mediatized, it becomes.

Roy draws another conclusion, which seems at once to exculpate and to implicatereligion (and hence the theologico-political) as a determining factor. He takes his observa-tion to imply that ‘‘the key to understanding the contemporary ‘territorial’ struggle is

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nationalism and ethnicity, not religion. Two factors give Islam a post hoc importance: thereciprocal rationalization of some conflicts in religious or civilizational terms, and thegrowing deterritorialization of Islam, which leads to the political reformulation of animaginary ummah.’’36

In this view, radical jihadism is merely the contemporary successor form of an inter-nationalist struggle, taken up by marginalized youths from Muslim immigrant communi-ties (or, in a few cases, by converts) for whom the old leftist movement—or, for thatmatter, present-day antiglobalization movements—are no longer available options. Weare thus dealing with ‘‘a ‘modern’ coalition of ‘negative’ and radical forces whose rootsare not in the Koran but in a Western tradition of a ‘red-brown’ confusion, which hasrecently been given some green brushstrokes by Islamic radicals.’’37 This conjunction haseverything to do with the influence of popular culture and the role of media:

the fault-line between Europe and the Third World goes through Muslim countries,and former spaces of social exclusion in Western Europe are partly inhabited byMuslims at a time when the radical Marxist Left has disappeared from them. But acloser look shows that these antagonistic identities are less entrenched in the actorsthan ‘‘played’’ by them. The Islamization of the French suburbs is largely a myth:youngsters are fascinated by Western urban youth subculture (baseball caps, ham-burgers, rap or hip hop, fashionable dress, consumerism).38

Indeed, he notes, we should understand that in the outburst of rioting in fall 2005 indestitute neighborhoods and slum-suburbs (cités or banlieus) of Paris and other Frenchcities there was ‘‘nothing particularly Muslim or even French,’’ and that the phenomenonwas merely ‘‘the temporary rising up of one small part of a Western underclass culturethat reaches from Paris to London to Los Angeles and beyond.’’39 The insight that thoseinvolved were second-generation immigrant (and male) youth of French citizenship, whowere burning property (cars, schools, gymnasiums, etc.) belonging to their own commu-nities in a self-destructive response to unemployment and racism, economic and socialexclusion, with a counter- or subcultural gusto whose model stems from Western urbancenters rather than from the rioters’ Arab or African countries and communities of origin,inspired New York Times columnist David Brooks to see in it a tragic paradox of globalhegemony: the fact that the pop- or counterculture of gangsta rap and hip hop, withits accompanying ‘‘poses of exaggerated manhood,’’ by now defines ‘‘how to be anti-American.’’40

This being said, the local detail of the events in France and their context in theeveryday lifeworld were barely reported by the media (an exception being the work doneby the blogger-reporters on location in Bondy for the Swiss journal L’Hebdo and by a newgeneration of scholars in France who align themselves under the ambitious title ‘‘La Nou-velle Critique Sociale’’).41 What apparently stuck in viewers’ and readers’ minds was yet

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another instance of a seemingly inevitable clash of religions (or, rather, of religion, notablyIslam, on the one hand, and the ‘‘religion of secularism, or laı̈cité,’’ on the other). Thisperception, however, is largely a media-induced effect.42

If deterritorialization and deculturalization are keys to understanding urban unrest,well-intended appeals to multiculturalism are not of much use in addressing contempo-rary religious violence. In Roy’s words: ‘‘In the end, we are dealing here with problemsfound in any culture in which inequities and cultural differences come in conflict withhigh ideals . . .—the struggle to integrate an angry underclass is one shared across theWestern world.’’43 This is not to say that jihadists are not recruited under such conditions.But other forms of violent destructiveness—aptly documented, long before the events of2005, in Mathieu Kassovitz’s 1995 film La Haine—may be more prominent (not least ofthem sexual violence against women within the suburban communities themselves).

As in the case of the Bondy blog, the role of new media, notably the Internet, in thisconstitution of contemporary identities is not exclusively that of social and psychologicalisolation, compensated by a merely virtual, phantasmatic, and disembodied communityof likeminded souls. Another and more surprising tendency can be observed.

Shortly after the beginning, on July 12, 2006, of new hostilities between Hezbollahand Israel, which soon involved missile launches into Israeli cities and relentless bombard-ments by Tsahal on southern Lebanon and Beirut, it was widely reported that Israeliand Lebanese bloggers established or kept open lines of communication with personalobservations and video images concerning events and developments on the ground thatlargely escaped the official media of television and the printed press, to say nothing ofofficial channels of diplomatic exchange and military propaganda. Not for the first time,though in a significant international conflict—and for worldwide Internet users to witnessdirectly—citizens refused to play by the rules laid down by states and semipolitical fac-tions, armies, and ideological movements. They are helped by an informational network(the Internet) that is decentralized and allows no (simple or direct) control. Israelis con-sulted Lebanese blogs and vice versa, and both sides expressed themselves—for example,on the blog of a certain Ramzi (‘‘Ramzi blah blah’’)—thus maintaining a dialogue, findingmutual sympathy otherwise frustrated, and preventing the war and its victims (most ofthem civilians) from being anonymous. But would attempts to personalize or singularizethe effects of war—rendering them visible, audible, palpable through media that are nolonger simple instruments of propaganda in the hands of governments and organizations(as happened during the Balkan wars, as well)—make it easier one day to interrupt ormitigate its violence?44 It is clear that in affluent societies and emerging economies (China,India, and several countries in Southeast Asia and Latin America) new technologicalmedia—the Internet and the relatively recent phenomenon of personal participatorymedia such as blogging, text and instant mobile phone messaging—are already dramati-cally transforming the mass media industry, as well as the socio-cultural and politicallandscape as a whole, albeit not everywhere with the same intensity, pace, and conse-

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quences.45 Time will tell whether and how this process will shape third-world regions.Could cheap and easily maintainable computers, laptops with instant access to the In-ternet—which are currently being designed by MIT’s Media Lab under the direction ofNicholas Negroponte (the brother of John Negroponte, former ambassador to the U.N.and at present the national director of U.S. intelligence)—change the face of the earth,with its inequalities in income, health, education, and democratic powers?46 Or can thisdream—some twenty-five years after the invention of the personal computer (of whichapproximately one billion are currently in use around the world, albeit unequally distrib-uted)—be fully realized only with newer, cheaper, and more easily accessible digital tech-nologies, such as ‘‘pocket computers’’ in the form of, say, mobile phones or ‘‘handsetswith simple web-browsers, calculators, and other computing functions’’?47

We might be witnessing a transition paralleling that from the technology of movabletype introduced in 1448 by Gutenberg, via mass media production, through the Internetand beyond (the blogs, etc.), whose general features will be those of generalization, inten-sification, and trivialization: a transition from undivided sovereignty (one nation, underGod48) to a multiplication and diversification of the theologico-political that simultane-ously echoes, produces, and expresses not only transformations in the so-called first, sec-ond, and third worlds but also the remarkably swift shift from the bipolar world of thesecond half of the twentieth century, through the unipolar episode of American suprem-acy after the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, to a more complicated and volatile twenty-first-century multipolar world, characterized by the rise of non-Western nations, interna-tional corporations, nongovernmental organizations, regional and ethnic movements, theemergence and multiplication of new countries, and, increasingly, nonstate actors, net-works, and so on—most if not all of them invoking ‘‘religion’’ as a referent. The undeni-able promises of this development, given the unprecedented sharing of power andinformation, communication tools and publicly heard opinions, it implies, are overshad-owed only by its perils:

Developments in technologies with violent potential mean that very small groups ofpeople can challenge powerful established states, whether by piloting an aeroplaneinto the World Trade Center in New York, targeting a missile at Haifa, taking on themilitary in Iraq, bombing the London underground, or squirting sarin gas into theTokyo subway. Developments in information technology and globalized media meanthat the most powerful military in the history of the world can lose a war, not on thebattlefield of dust and blood, but on the battlefield of world opinion. . . . The neteffect of these very disparate trends is to reduce the relative power of establishedWestern states, above all the U.S.49

The British journal The Economist, in its yearly outlook, predicts changes in the multipolarworld in these terms:

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By 2026, China’s economy will be bigger than America’s, and India’s will be muchlarger than that of any individual European country (Russia, Brazil, and Indonesiawill not be far behind). The press will be full of articles about ‘‘Asian values’’ and the‘‘Beijing consensus.’’ As these countries develop, so will their voracious appetite fornatural resources and human capital. . . . But even the biggest powers will be vulnera-ble. The privatization of destruction—with computer nerds able to wreak havoc fromthe bedroom and terrorists able to buy weapons of mass destruction in a globalmarket—will allow groups of individuals to take on nation-states. This vulnerabilitymay encourage ‘‘defensive imperialism’’: powerful countries taking over states to pre-vent them from serving as bases or breeding grounds for hostile groups. As economicmight shifts from the north and west to the south and east, so will cultural power.The rise of al-Jazeera and Bollywood already means that the world no longer looksat things overwhelmingly through American eyes. Ancient civilizations like Chinaand India will become more self-confident and will project their own ideas ontoconcepts such as democracy, freedom, and the rule of law.50

The introduction of more and more actors on the geopolitical stage seems to clashwith an international order whose ideals and institutions, forms of cooperation and con-flict, dreams of peace and declarations of war, were for at least a century premised uponthe primacy of nation-states and the explicit formulation and official guaranteeing of theirbi- or multilateral agreements. In short, the rules of the game have dramatically changed,and all drawn into it make up the rules as they go along.

Recent surveys suggest that identities online succeed in reaching out to members ofdifferent faith-based or ethnic groups more often and more easily than was previouslyassumed. So-called allochthonous and autochthonous youth, a Dutch report claims, over-come social and cultural segregation in virtual forums, in which religion, the relationbetween the sexes, and homosexuality—all subjects on which they are likely to disagreewith their parents or educators—are the topics of the day. ‘‘The Internet is good forintegration,’’ a Dutch newspaper quipped on its front page, noting that more than 80percent of Turkish, Moroccan, Antillean, and Surinam youths communicate—albeit itvirtually—with peers from different ethnic backgrounds, whereas only 20 percent limitthemselves to their own groups, shunning kaaskoppen (‘‘cheese heads,’’ as Dutch autoch-thonous people are unflatteringly called).51

The reports in question also find that more than half those interviewed present them-selves as someone different on the Internet from who they are in ‘‘real’’ life. And onemight argue that integrating verbally, perhaps even visually (through webscams, etc.) isnot quite the same—or at least not as demanding and promising—as integrating as bodiesin space that do or do not ‘‘get along.’’ Is virtual coexistence, being mindful of otherswho may be other still than one thinks (and not necessarily present themselves in theirtrue identity) a way of coming to terms with the otherness of others, a way of learning to

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live with the skepticism concerning ‘‘other minds,’’ as Stanley Cavell might say? But it

should not be forgotten that the medium in question also gives rise to more disturbing

phenomena, such as mob ‘‘Internet hunting’’ and ‘‘Internet wars.’’52

In his recent Market Islam, Patrick Haenni claims that, since the second half of the

1990s, political Islam and radical jihadism are slowly but steadily being overcome by

strategies of engagement and accommodation centered less on the state (the nation, the

ummah), let alone on violence and terror, than on more subtle promises of economic

achievement. The ensuing ‘‘ ‘theology of prosperity’ announces a new Muslim pride, which

no longer passes through armed confrontation or affirmation of an ostentatious piety,

but via performance and competitiveness.’’53 Haenni observes that a management- and

bourgeoislike individualistic culture of ‘‘free riders’’ of islamization, an emphasis on the

powers of ‘‘positive thinking,’’ is emerging, to be substituted for past disappointments

concerning the restitution of the Caliphate and the general introduction of sharia—in

short, a ‘‘neo-liberal politicization of Islam,’’ which, ironically, resembles the agenda of

‘‘faith-based initiatives’’ and ‘‘compassionate conversation’’ of the American Republican

Party more than anything else.54 No longer focused on acquiring power in the nation-

state and shunning the Jacobin (but also Marxist and Keynesian) models of intervention-

ist policies in state-sponsored socialist and welfare states, the new practice of ‘‘market

Islam’’ puts its money on reforming mores in ‘‘civil society.’’

This development goes hand in hand with tendencies in recent Islamic global invest-

ment and private banking in the Middle East and in Malaysia, Singapore, and Indonesia,

operating in compliance with the requirements of sharia (which bans usury, the charging

of interest on loans, and all commercial transactions having to do with alcohol, tobacco,

and gambling), while attempting to provide competitive returns (such as sukuk, or nonin-

terest rent on revenue). Since February 2006, the Singapore stock exchange lists a ‘‘Shariah

100 Index,’’ which covers Asian banking and trading indexes that comply with traditional

law.55

Tracking the disillusionment of former Muslim Brotherhood militants, notably in

Egypt, both in conversation and on the Web site islamonline, Haenni sees an aspiration

to turn away from pyramidical hierarchies toward ‘‘operating in networks.’’56 Its result

will be a ‘‘multipositioned’’ engagement, which no longer aspires to a global political

agenda for Islam but opts instead for a variety of managerial (antiglobalist, ecological,

feminist, cybercultural, etc.) local interventions, whose overall effect will be that of a ‘‘new

mental universe,’’ based upon ‘‘bricolage.’’57 Again, this new agenda would seem to be

carried out by individuals rather than movements, brotherhoods, or small groups and

cells. They are typically well integrated, oriented toward self-realization, and weary of

great global causes. Its guiding concepts are that of a nonviolent ‘‘civil jihad’’ or even an

‘‘electronic jihad’’ (or ‘‘hacktivism,’’ also meaning, it should be added, taking out anti-

Islamist sites).58

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While this process takes shape, other tendencies and potentialities may emerge, pres-enting threats that must be assessed and politically addressed. Jihadists, in Roy’s view,share a tendency with other religious terrorists (such as the Hindu Tamil Tigers) and alsosome Third-Worldist movements to engage in what Mark Juergensmeyer, in his seminalTerror in the Mind of God, calls ‘‘performance violence,’’ an acting out in which politicalcalculation is less prominent than the desire to make a statement in the eyes of the worldand to draw perceived enemies into a conflict of ‘‘cosmic’’ proportions. As Roy aptlynotes: ‘‘Osama bin Laden has no strategy in the true sense of the word. . . . His aim issimply to destroy Babylon.’’59

Rather than being merely retrograde or reactive, the jihadists’ expressions of religiousextremism are thus, Roy concludes, ways of mimicking and superlatively outbidding—and, in that sense, directly getting back at—what are perceived to be hegemonic Westerneconomic, political, and cultural principles and trends: ‘‘The Western-based terrorists arenot the militant vanguard of the Muslim community; they are a lost generation, un-moored from traditional societies and cultures, frustrated by a Western society that doesnot need their expectations. And their vision of a global ummah is both a mirror of anda form of revenge against the globalization that has made them what they are.’’60

It has been suggested that—fueled by repeated and nightmarish Western lapses,which can be indicated by such proper names as Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, Hadhita,and now Qana)—jihad is becoming a ‘‘global fad,’’ which, like other counter-culturalexpressions, ‘‘feeds’’ on the lurid images readily provided by the Western media (as wellas al-Jazeerah, the Internet, etc.), shaping a generation whose fascination seems increas-ingly that of ‘‘making war, not love.’’61 Jessica Stern argues that ‘‘among many Muslimyouth, especially in Europe, jihad is a cool way of expressing dissatisfaction with a powerelite that is real or imagined; whether power is held by totalitarian monarchs or by liberalparliamentarians.’’62 In other words, jihad is in the process of becoming ‘‘a millenarianmovement with mass appeal,’’ whose narratively constructed ‘‘identity of victimhood’’ isconstantly being reinforced by damaging images, that is to say, by ‘‘facts, or at least pic-tures that appear to be facts.’’63 Beyond real-life issues in Europe and the Middle East(i.e., immigration, occupation, and terror), the conflicts in question express—and re-quire—a battle for an ‘‘idea, not a state’’: ‘‘Military action minimally visible and carefullyplanned and implemented may be necessary to win today’s battles. But the tools requiredin the long run to win the war are neither bombs nor torture chambers. They are ideasand stories that counter the terrorist narrative—and draw potential recruits away fromthe lure of jihad.’’64

After the dismantling of its traditional geographical bases in Afghanistan and Pakistanthrough U.S.–led military intervention, Al Qaeda has virtually regrouped in the intracta-ble realm of the Internet. Its members are dispersed in some four thousand different Websites, leaving Western intelligence communities with the dilemma of either targeting and,where possible, destroying them or leaving them intact in order to monitor them and

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so pick up possible announcements of things to come or learn to discern nuances of‘‘disagreement’’ and ‘‘inner cleavages’’ (e.g., concerning the legitimacy, from the view-point of Islam, of violence against Muslims or ‘‘noncombatant non-Muslims’’) that mighthelp efforts to ‘‘broaden gaps’’ within these Internet communities.65 As with all technolog-ical monitoring, there are structural—logical-mathematical—difficulties in doing so, evenbeyond the question of allocating financial and other resources.66

Whereas the U.S. seeks to contain the war on terror by localizing it abroad in specificterritories (first Afghanistan, then Iraq)—thereby, paradoxically, producing the very terri-torial base for terror that, in the case of Iraq, was previously lacking—the online jihadistsdream of unleashing or at least staging a global, indeed, cosmic conflict, which wouldhave no geographical boundaries or concretely envisioned terms of political (let alonediplomatic) resolution. In fact, it now seems just as unlikely that the Bush administrationwill stop identifying, taking on, and thereby unintentionally creating potential geopoliticalthreats against its perceived economic interests, democratic ideals, and cultural values asit is unrealistic to assume that militant jihadhism would tone down its rhetoric (and putdown its arms) the moment that Western forces were to withdraw from Islamic holygrounds. In the meantime, inflammatory and inflated words and gestures, along with abrandishing of things and powers, continues unabated. There is no end to conflicts thatone does not—and, for identitarian reasons cannot—want to end or whose possible victorone cannot realistically imagine oneself to be one day.67

These processes, in which on all sides the ‘‘masters of war’’ (Bob Dylan) get theupper hand, obey a relentless logic of ‘‘escalation,’’ which Le Monde, in a telling editorialconcerning the most recent war in Lebanon, summarized as follows: ‘‘It is tempting tobelieve that military logic, when it reaches a certain level of escalation, has become afatality. Nonetheless, nothing in this conflict is uncontrollable. Israel, like Hezbollah, actsin a considered and determined manner, even though both might have been surprised bythe amplitude of the enemy’s reaction.’’68 Political theology might well become the disci-pline of studying and eventually mastering such ‘‘escalation,’’ that is, the excesses of sover-eignty and their violence, as well as the rhetorical overdrive with which they areaccompanied, ideologically justified, and irresponsibly spiced up.

� � �

One could be tempted to follow Spinoza, who in the Ethics supplements his earlier views,developed in the Theologico-Political Treatise, with a theory of the passions, more pre-cisely, of the imitation of affects—of reciprocal, near-specular affect-effects (or effect-affects)—in which individual (and, by extension, also socio-political) bodies, all of whichare composite, mimic, rival, and seek to outbid each other quasi-mechanically, quasi-machinally, quasi-automatically. He writes: ‘‘If we image a thing like us, toward which wehave had no affect, to be affected with some affect, we are thereby affected with a like

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affect. . . . This imitation of the affects . . . is nothing but the desire for a thing which isgenerated in us from the fact that we imagine others like us to have the same desire’’(Ethics III, Prop. 27 and Scholium).

According to this conception of a comparative ‘‘differential genesis of affects,’’ thesebodies mirror each other necessarily or constitutively, hence their necessary mutual depen-dency, even sociality. But, just as inevitably, they do so to their own detriment, hence theirstrife, antisociality, and perpetual relapse into the state from which they had only justemerged, with great difficulty—and by the same mechanism—the state of nature, that isto say, of the war of all against all.69 Spinoza’s view, we are reminded by several commen-tators, finds its radical modernity in precisely this relentless exposure of the compositionand decomposition of bodies in the body politic, of subjects and citizens, which breakswith the traditional Aristotelian-Thomist assumption of an intrinsic possibility of sponta-neous sociability that enables humans to take leave of nature and to turn—by way of apact—to a civil state.

If much of modern philosophy consists in demolishing the foundations of naturaltheology, Spinoza adds an extra twist by deconstructing the natural political theology uponwhich both traditional-hierarchical and modern-contractual theories of natural right(such as Hobbes’s) remained built. The risk of relapsing into the state of nature—widelyacknowledged by the theoreticians of the social contract—does not depend, in this view,on specific individuals who are, as it were, ‘‘rotten apples.’’ For Spinoza, on the contrary,entry into a pact (and a peace) is from the outset compromised, tainted, indeed, poisoned,because it is necessarily feigned, that is to say, an act not so much of promise as ofpretense. As Pierre-François Moreau writes, for Spinoza:

It matters little whether people are good or bad; by the simple game of their everydaylife, by the functioning of their bodies and of the passions of the soul that are theircorollary, they become enemies of the state. Civil war and the destruction of the stateare not a risk, but the necessary horizon of the appearance of society. . . . Spinoza isthe only one [of the seventeenth-century theoreticians] who explains why it is neces-sary that it not function. He therefore completely inverts the theoretical landscape ofthe theoreticians of the pact. For him, the question is not what are the hindrances tosociability laid down by the pact, but to push anti-Aristotelianism to the point ofsaying that not only is there no originary sociability but, moreover, there is no derivedsociability, either. The antipolitical character of individuals exists in their nature be-fore the pact and persists in their nature after the pact: the reasons that explain whythere was a state of nature remain the same once civil society is instituted. . . . TheSpinozistic problem, properly speaking, will consist in asking how to set backfires inthe passions [contre-feux passionels] to the apocalypse that perpetually menaces thestate. If the ruin of the state is not the exception but the norm, how does it come tobe that there are states that subsist?70

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The imitative expression of the affects anticipates some of Spinoza’s later views inthe unfinished Tractatus Politicus, which seeks a solution for the perpetuation—even the‘‘eternity,’’ that is to say, the internal causation—of the state’s stability in a ‘‘play’’ of‘‘counter-balance’’ and ‘‘counterweights.’’71 Spinoza’s problem is thus less that of the‘‘constitution’’ (foundation, institution) of the state than of its ‘‘victory over t

political theologies · claude lefort 148 violence in the state of exception: reﬂections on...

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