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In recent years numerous authors have claimed that underneath everything political there lies something religious - an underground religious substance, as it were. These religious elements, it is said, are the essence of political phenomena and the driving force of their history. Even in our modern "secularized" politics, the heart of the matter, it is alleged, is religious, just as it was in the past. This fashion for the theological-political can be observed in the most varied trends in contemporary philosophy, from the work of Giorgio Agamben and Charles Taylor to that of Richard Rorty and Jürgen Habermas.
In Géraldine Muhlmann's view, this "theological-political" idea is a sham. It sheds no light on the factors that underlie key political developments, such as the crisis of liberal democracies and the rise of authoritarianism. It has nothing to say about the concrete ways in which religious points of reference, when they do exist, are used to wage war or to make politics. It contributes nothing to reflection on political matters and it leads us astray by failing to attend to their specific, complex and intertwined logics.
So what accounts for the rise of theological-political thought? Muhlmann argues that its popularity has less to do with a genuine attempt to understand politics and more to do with a desire by philosophers to demonstrate their ability to grasp the substantial basis of politics and the true direction of political history. In other words, the triumph of the theological-political is a philosophical hubris - and a dangerous one at that.
This ambitious inquiry into the rise of a troubling philosophical zeitgeist will be of great interest to students and scholars in philosophy, political theory and religious studies and to anyone interested in the ideas that are shaping our world today.
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction
The end of previous warnings against the philosophy of history, a philosophy that claims to reach a "total" point of view
Much more than a simple "interest" in religion
"Politics" has exited religion, but "the" political has not - or so they say...
Theoretical forcings
A phoney zeitgeist
A philosophical break: the end of the Machiavellian-Spinozan protective dam of the 1960s-1980s
1. The sirens of "historical substantialism": a new wave of the "secularization theorem" (Hans Blumenberg)
Blumenberg's insights
And yet, a singular "Carl Schmitt seduction" emerged towards the end of the 1980s, and proved to be enduring
In the current wave, we find a much more total version of the "secularization theorem" than in Schmitt
The ultimate resource for political modernity, if we are to avoid despair
In the current wave, religious substance has many different faces (all foreign to Schmitt)
2. The hyper-romantic line, the apocalyptic-messianic line, and the old-Hegelian line
The hyper-romantic line (Rorty). The shadow of the later Bergson
The apocalyptic-messianic line (Agamben). The later Heidegger as a tutelary figure
The old Hegelian line (Taylor, Habermas). The later Hegel rides again
3. Passers-on and go-betweens
Problematic "passers-on": Jaspers, Taubes, Voegelin
Complex "go-betweens": Vattimo, Gauchet
4. The history-solution
Not "God", but "religion"
Philosophies of history always evoke a religious attitude, but they invent something else in relation to religious thought
The challenge of the history-solution, so well identified by Leo Strauss
Why "religion"?
5. Farewell to the safeguards of the "Marx-Freud-Nietzsche" period and of the social sciences
An "innocent" historico-genealogism
The plague-bearers
Causally simplistic, dogmatically continuist: Durkheim is Bergsonized and Max Weber has disappearedd
6. The circumvention of the most acute problems posed by totalitarianism. And... the pits: Agamben's "reconstruction" of Auschwitz
The issue of totalitarianism is omnipresent in the current theological-political wave
Totalitarianism as a "substitute religion"? - A debate on this has already taken place, although it seems to have been "forgotten"
The problem of the theological-political smoothing of all kinds of political regimes in Western history
Totalitarianism from the theological-political point of view: at last, the liquidation of politics?
The forcing of reality to validate the theological-political logic: Agamben and Auschwitz
7. Philosophical exhaustion and the desire to absorb evil
An attraction to the sacred develops, but is obliged to respect the ban on religious thought
The sidestep towards the "history of the relationship to the sacred", and the opportune encounter with the desire for the history-solution
After "religious philosophy", the "philosophy of religion" - or the "forgotten" temptation
Power through dispossession
Conclusion: For critique
Notes
Index
