Force of God: Political Theology and the Crisis of Liberal Democracy

4. This argument, bolstering the critical importance of Schmitt today, is laid out rather forcefully by Heinrich Meier. According to Meier, Schmitt is a dominating presence for today’s political theology—like Nietzsche for poststructuralism—because he liberated the term from its “old negative valence” and helped gain the term gain worldwide prominence, set across “all political and theological fronts as well as across disciplinary and national boundaries.” Heinrich Meier, The Lesson of Carl Schmitt: Four Chapters on the Distinction Between Political Theology and Political Philosophy, trans. Michael Brainard (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), xvi. For other important scholarship on Schmitt, see also William Scheuerman, Carl Schmitt: The End of Law (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1999); Michael Salter, Carl Schmitt: Law as Politics, Ideology, and Strategic Myth (New York: Routledge, 2012); Kam Shapiro, Carl Schmitt and the Intensification of Politics (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2008); David Dyzenhaus, Law as Politics: Carl Schmitt’s Critique of Liberalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998).

5. Christopher Lasch, The Culture of Narcissism: American Life in an Age of Diminishing Expectations (New York: Norton, 1979).

6. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. I. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967), 9.

7. “Therefore nothing but the idea [Vorstellung] of the law in itself, which admittedly is present only in a rational being … can constitute the preeminent good which we call moral, a good which is already present in the person acting on the idea.” Immanuel Kant, The Moral Law: Groundwork of the Metaphysic of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton (London: Routledge, 2005), 45.

8. Friedrich Nietzsche, Untimely Meditations, ed. Daniel Brazeale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 67.

10. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press), 75.

11. Michel Foucault, Language, Countermemory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), 148.

12. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1966), 50.

13. For example, see Leo Strauss: “[Politeia] is the order, the form, which gives society its character.” Leo Strauss, What Is Political Philosophy and Other Studies (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1957), 34. See also Mary Nichols, Citizens and Statesmen: A Study of Aristotle’s Politics (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 1992); as well as William Bluhm, Theories of the Political System: Modern Political Analysis (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1978).

14. Alan D. Schrift, Nietzsche’s French Legacy: A Genealogy of Poststructuralism (New York: Routledge, 1995), 45. See also David Owen, Maturity and Modernity: Nietzsche, Weber, Foucault, and the Ambivalence of Reason (New York: Routledge, 1994); Yvonne Sherratt, Continental Philosophy of Social Science: Hermeneutics, Genealogy, and Critical Theory from Greece to the Twenty-First Century (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005); C. G. Prado, Starting with Foucault: An Introduction to Genealogy (Boulder: Westview, 1995).

15. Plato, Republic, 330d. The Collected Dialogues of Plato, Including the Letters, ed. Edith Hamilton and Huntington Cairns (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1961, 579.

16. See Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion, edited by Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), 228–98.

17. Raschke, Postmodernism and the Revolution in Religious Theory, 109ff.

1. Alexandre Kojève, Introduction to the Reading of Hegel: Lectures on Phenomenology of Spirit, ed. Allan Bloom (Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1980).

2. The motif of deconstruction amounts to the continual exertion of a force on inert structures of meaning by dint of the fact that these structures are the sediment of writing, which is dynamic. Derrida makes this point (forcefully) about force in his book Limited Inc. He argues that “a written sign, in the current meaning of this word, is a mark that subsists, one which does not exhaust itself in the moment of its inscription and which can give rise to an iteration in the absence and beyond the presence of the empirically determined subject.” Furthermore, “a written sign carries with a force that breaks with its context, that is, with the collectivity of presences organizing the moment of its inscription.” Derrida terms this force a “breaking force” (force de rupture), which is the key to deconstruction. The breaking force “is not an accident predicate but the very structure of the written text.” Jacques Derrida, Limited Inc., trans. Samuel Weber (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988), 9. Even the notorious “undecidability” of readings, according to Derrida, can be ascribed to conflicts of force. Derrida insists that the reason that he prefers the phrase undecidability to indeterminability is because the former constitutes and is based upon “relations of forces” and “differences of force,” which permit, “precisely, determinations in given situations to be stabilized through a decision of writing.” Ibid., 148. See also David Wood and Robert Bernasconi, eds., Derrida and Diffèrance (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1988).

3. A similar presentation and discussion along these lines can be found in John Russon, “Reading: Hegel in Derrida’s Understanding,” Research in Phenomenology 36 (2006): 181–200. See also Kathleen Dow Magnus, Hegel and the Symbolic Mediation of Spirit (Albany NY: State University of New York Press, 2001); Stewart Barnett, ed., Hegel After Derrida (New York: Routledge, 1998); Catherine Kellogg, Law’s Trace: From Hegel to Derrida (New York: Routledge, 2010).

4. Jacques Derrida, “Preface,” to Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality, and Dialectic (New York: Routledge, 2004), viii. See also Catherine Malabou, “Is Confession the Accomplishment of Recognition?” in Slavoy Žižek, Clayton Crockett, and Creston Davis, eds., Hegel and the Infinite: Religion, Politics, and the Dialectic (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 19–30.

5. Derrida, “Preface,” ix.

7. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 101.

8. Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 13.

9. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester with Charles Stivale (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 100.

10. Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 172.

11. Jacques Derrida, Writing and Difference, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978), 11.

14. Ibid., 27, emphasis mine.

15. G. W. F. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. A. V. Miller (New York: Oxford University Press, 1977), 81.

16. Jacques Derrida, “The Pit and the Pyramid: Introduction to Hegel’s Semiology,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982), 69–108.

17. G. W. F. Hegel, Enzyklopädie der philosophischen Wissenschaften im Grundrisse (Hamburg: Felix Meiner, 1991 [1830]), 372. Von Humboldt’s importance for understanding Hegel, as well as later Hegelian scholarship when it comes to the problem of language, has been stressed by Jere O. Surber. See his introduction to Jere O. Surber, ed., Hegel and Language (Albany: SUNY University Press, 2006), 3. An overview of Hegel’s treatment of language more from a conventional Anglo-American than a Continental perspective is John McCumber, The Company of Words: Hegel, Language, and Systematic Philosophy (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993. See also Jere Paul Surber, ed., Hegel and Language (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007); Quentin Lauer, S.J., A Reading of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit (New York: Fordham University Press, 1993).

18. Hegel, Enzyklopädie, 373.

19. “Diese Kraft is in der Tat die Intelligenz selbst, das mit sich identische Ich, welches durch seine Erinnerung ihnen unmittelbar Allgemeinheit gibt, und die einzelne Anschauung unter das bereits innerlich gemachte Bild subsumiert.” Hegel, Enzyklopädie, 367.

20. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufman (New York: Vintage, 1974), 182.

21. Hegel, Enzyklopädie, 367.

23. Jacques Derrida, Of Spirit: Heidegger and the Question, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1991), 5.

25. Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundation of Authority,’” in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2013), 228–98.

27. According to Simon Critchley, the Derridean Kehre is predicated on Heidegger’s own recognition that “all questioning requires the prior pledge, or Zusage of that which is put in question. Thus, for the later Heidegger, the primary datum of language is das Hören der Zusage, listening to the grant or pledge. Derrida picks up, according to Critchley, on the close correlation in the German of Heidegger’s philosophy between zusagen and versprechen (“to promise”). Simon Critchley, “The Question of the Question: An Ethico-Political Response to a Note in Derrida’s De l’Esprit,” in David C. Wood, ed., Of Derrida, Heidegger, and Spirit (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1993), 96.

28. Derrida, Writing and Difference, 68.

30. As Derrida’s biographer Jason Powell quips, “writing is the original Valley of the Other within Being, and it is from the Other that writing comes.” Jason Powell, Jacques Derrida: A Biography (New York: Continuum International, 2006), 54.

31. Derrida, Writing and Difference, 77.

34. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 80.

37. Jacques Derrida, On the Name, trans. David Wood (Stanford: Stanford University Press), 25.

1. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Modern Library, 1995), 51.

4. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. I. Hollingdale (New York: Random House, 1967), 333 (my emphasis). Kaufman’s translation of the phrase “inner event” seems to be something of a waffle based on doubts concerning what exact German word Nietzsche in his handwritten literary remains actually employed. According to Marie-Luise Haase, Nietzsche’s original editor, Peter Gast, who put together the various aphorisms from the Nachlass in collaboration with the former’s sister Elizabeth, apparently deciphered the expression “an inner event” as ein inner Wille (“an inner will”). Yet other scholars have claimed that the phrase should be eine innere Welt (“an inner world”). See Marie-Luise Haase, “Nietzsche und …”, in Volker Gerhardt, Renate Reschke, and Jørgen Kjaer, Ästhetik und Ethik nach Nietzsche (Berlin: Akademie, 2003), 27. Given the context in which the aphorism appears, Gast’s original rendering is probably closer to what Nietzsche intended, although Kaufman’s translation also most likely captures a good deal of whatever meaning was originally projected.

5. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press, 1983), 49.

7. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 550.

8. “Because Nietsche’s fundamental metaphysical position is the end of metaphysics … it performs the grandest and most profound gathering … of all the essential fundamental positions in Western philosophy since Plato and in the light of Platonism.” Martin Heidegger, Nietzsche, trans. David F. Krell, 2 vols. (San Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco, 1991), 1:205.

9. Nietzsche, The Will to Power, 550.

10. Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, trans. Adrian del Caro (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 17.

11. Michel Henry, Seeing the Invisible: On Kandinsky, trans. Scott Davidson (New York: Continuum, 2009), 13.

13. Wassily Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, trans. Michel T. H. Sadler (Boston: MFA, 2006), 96.

14. According to Hans Belting, Kandinsky in no way simply wanted to “paint music.” He was “inspired” instead by Arnold Schoenberg’s invention of atonal music, which “opened up new spaces of freedom” for the painter. Kandinsky strove to show in atonality a “dissonance” that “would become the ‘consonance’ of tomorrow,” in other words, the “new harmony.” Such a harmony was tantamount to a “field of force” that served as the fundamental condition of “an absolute color painting.” Hans Belting, Das Unsichtbare Meisterwerk: Die Modernen Mythen der Kunst (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2001), 337. See also Igor Aronov, Kandinsky’s Quest: A Study in the Artist’s Personal Symbolism, 1866–1907 (New York: Peter Lang, 2006); Christopher Short, The Art Theory of Wassily Kandinsky, 1909–1928 (Bern: Peter Lang, 2010); Klaus von Beyme, Das Zeitalter der Avantgarden: Kunst und Gesellschaft, 1905–1955 (Munich: C. H. Beck, 2005).

15. Kandinsky, Concerning the Spiritual in Art, 97.

16. Henry, Seeing the Invisible, 66.

18. Ibid., 123 (my emphasis).

19. As art historian Arthur Jerome Eddy noted in 1914 at a time contemporaneous with the pre–World War I incarnation of Der Blaue Reiter, citing one of Kandinsky’s essays in the “almanac,” which his friends published with the same name as the actual group established during the 1920s, Kandinsky’s argument is that “our inner forces … mature and the result is a longing to create something, and we try to find a material form—manifestation—for the new value that exists in us in spiritual or intellectual form.” This new value that is art is immanent in both the material world and the spiritual insight of the painter. “Matter is but the store house out of which the spirit selects the necessary elements to secure the objective result.” Arthur Jerome Eddy, Cubists and Post-Impressionism (Chicago: McClurg, 1914), 131. See also Peg Weiss, Kandinsky and Old Russia: The Artist as Ethnographer and Shaman (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1995); Frank Dersch, Über das Geistige im Expressionismus: Der Blaue Reiter und der Glaube (Norderstedt: GRIN, 2005).

20. There are always “tensions,” Kandinsky asserts, within the materials, and these “tensions, for their part, permit the inner nature of the element to be expressed.” Such elements vary from lines, to colors, to “number.” Composition feeds on such tensions. Composition is “nothing other than an exact law-abiding organization of the vital forces which, in the form of tensions, are shut up within the elements.” Wassily Kandinsky, Point and Line to Plane, ed. Hilda Rebay (New York: Courier Dover, 1979), 117.

21. Charles Harrison and Paul Wood, Art in Theory, 1900–2000: An Anthology of Changing Ideas (London: Wiley-Blackwell, 2003), 251.

22. For example, consider Kurt Pinthus’s “Speech for the Future” in 1918: “die Wirklichkeit ist nicht außer uns, sondern in uns.” Kurt Pinthus, “Rede für die Zukunft,” in Die Erhebung. Jahrbuch für neue Dichtung und Wirkung, ed. Alfred Wolfenstein (Berlin, 1919), 1:412.

23. “What is great in man is that he is a bridge and not an end: what can be loved in man is that he is an overture and a going under. I love those who do not know how to live, except by going under, for they are those who cross over.” Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 15.

24. Ibid., 4. Kaufmann’s translation here seems to miss much of the subtle implications of Nietzsche’s rhetoric. Genügsamkeit implies more the self-satisfaction of the conventional, “bourgeois” thinking of the “last man,” a thinking that the “lightning” (Blitz) of the “overman” dispels. Furthermore, Geiz suggests less simple mean-spiritedness than the kind of invidious, rationalistic, and pragmatic kinds of calculation that hold back philosophy and culture.

25. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 77.

26. “We will never find the sense of something … if we do not know the force which appropriates the things, which exploits it, which takes possession of it or is expressed in it.” It is the manifestation of the force that articulates the sentence, or proposition, as semiosis rather than as predication. “A phenomenon is not an appearance or even an apparition but a sign, a symptom which finds its meaning in an existing force. The whole of philosophy is a symptomatology, and a semiology.” In effect, “Nietzsche substitutes the correlation of sense and phenomenon for the metaphysical duality of appearance and essence and for the scientific relation of cause and effect. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 3 (my emphasis).

27. Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, 2.

1. See Victor Farías, Heidegger and Nazism (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1991).

2. Richard Wolin, “French Heidegger Wars,” in Richard Wolin, ed., The Heidegger Controversy: A Critical Reader (Cambridge: MIT University Press, 1993), 274. See also Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger, Art, and Politics, trans. Chris Turner (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1990); Tom Rockmore, Heidegger and French Philosophy: Humanism, Antihumanism, and Being (New York: Routledge, 1995); as well as Tom Rockmore and Joseph Margolis, eds., The Heidegger Case on Philosophy and Politics (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1992); more recently, Mahon O’Brien, “Re-assessing the ‘Affair’: The Heidegger Controversy Revisited,” Social Science Journal 47 (2010): 1–10; Jeff Collins, Heidegger and the Nazis (London: Icon, 1996).

3. Philipp Lacoue-Labarthe, Heidegger and the Politics of Poetry, trans. Jeff Fort (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 104.

4. F. W. J. Schelling, Critical and Historical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology, ed. and trans. Mason Richey, Markus Zisselsberger, and Jason M. Wirth (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2007), 23.

6. Joseph Lawrence, “Philosophical Religion and the Quest for Authenticity,” in Jason M. Wirth, ed., Schelling Now: Contemporary Readings (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2005), 14.

7. A comparison can also be drawn here between Schelling, Benjamin, and Schmitt, who understood sovereignty as akin to creatio ex nihilo. For a general overview of the question, see Jens Bartelson, A Genealogy of Sovereignty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995).

8. See Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (New York: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1945).

9. Michael Gagarin, for example, has shown that the ancient Greek ambivalence about the relationship between eris and logos, not to mention their mutual conditioning necessity, is not merely a Platonic, or post-Platonic, concern. It can be found in Hesiod himself. In Hesiod and subsequent thinkers “a unity divides into opposites, which then recombine into a new unity, resulting in a complex tension among the unity and its parts.” Michael Gagarin, “The Truth of Antiphon’s Truth, in Anthony Preus, ed., Essays in Ancient Greek Philosophy VI (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2001), 173. Thus because Hesiod’s “ambivalent truth” runs throughout Greek thought, it is perhaps only an irenic misreading of the origins of the Western ontological tradition that we tend to associate logos with pacification. Indeed, Gagarin suggests, eris (discordant or disruptive strife) and agon (integrative or competitive conflict) are intimately bound up with what today we call reason. All the major “idealist” thinkers, particularly Kant, Schelling, and Heidegger, have engaged with varying ventures of this kind of genealogy into the interplay of myth and reason. The temptation to “totalitarianism,” of course, can be found in the Hegelian dialectic, where the eristic component becomes the all-sufficient and all-comprehending comprehension (Begriff) of logos as pure, mediated opposition. The real hence becomes totally rational, and the rational totally real—the formula of totalization. By “sublating” myth into reason, as critics such as Lacoue-Labarthe perhaps would prefer, and many detractors from the use of myth in philosophy would prefer, the kind of political totalitarianism attributed to Heideggerianism is far more inviting.

10. F. W. J. Schelling, The Ages of the World, trans. Jason Wirth (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2000), 107.

11. Michel Foucault, Language, Countermemory, Practice: Selected Essays and Interviews (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1980), 143.

13. Ibid., 149–50.

15. Aristotle, Nichomachean Ethics, 1094a–b, trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1985), 2–3.

16. Aristotle, Poetics 1448a, in Poetics and Rhetoric (New York: Barnes and Noble, 2005), 5.

17. Aristotle, Rhetoric, 1365b, ibid., 167–69.

18. Walter Benjamin. “Doctrine of the Similar,” trans. Knut Tarnowski, New German Critique, no. 17, special Walter Benjamin issue (Spring 1979): 68. Taken from Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Rolf Tiedemann and Hermann Schweppenhauser, vol. 2, 1 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1977), 204–10.

19. Richard Wolin, Walter Benjamin: An Aesthetic of Redemption (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1994), 243. See also Lutz Peter Koepnick, Walter Benjamin and the Aesthetics of Power (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1999), 213ff.; Jan Mieszkowski, “Art Forms,” in David S. Ferris, ed., The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin (Cambridge: Blackwell, 2004), 35–53. See also Andrew Benjamin, Art, Mimesis, and the Avant-Garde (New York: Routledge, 1991); Michael Taussig, Mimesis and Alterity: A Particular History of the Senses (New York: Routledge, 1993).

20. See Walter Benjamin, Reflections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings, trans. Edmund Jephcott (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 335.

21. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Harcourt, Brace, and Jovanovich, 1968), 257–58.

1. According to Richard Posner, the paralysis of competing demands and desires in our fractious democracy has become unsustainable. “Every sensible path to a long-run solution to the nation’s long-run fiscal problems seem blocked by special interests and political demagoguery.” See Richard Posner, The Crisis of Capitalist Democracy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010), 241. See also Nolan McCarty, Keith T. Poole, and Howard Rosenthal, Political Bubbles: Financial Crises and the Failure of American Democracy (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013).

2. Jean-Joseph Goux, Symbolic Economies: After Marx and Freud, trans. Jennifer Curtiss Gage (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1990), 9. For a careful analysis of Goux’s project, see Martha Woodmansee and Mark Osteen, eds., The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics (New York: Routledge, 1999), 13ff.; also Robert Markley, “Boundaries: Mathematics, Alienation, and the Metaphysics of Cyberspace,” in Robert Markley, ed., Virtual Realities and Their Discontents (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1996), 70.

3. Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government , trans. Lorenzo Chiesa and Matteo Mandamini (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011), preface, lov. 207 of 6397.

4. I am using the more common English word resentment here in place of Nietzsche’s ressentiment, which is normally employed for the kind of technical purposes this analysis pursues. My motive is less a deference to common usage than a preference for a certain stylistic smoothness with a secondary importation of Nietzsche’s French usage, which sounds more natural in German than in English. Furthermore, the specific subject of “economy” here requires instead the contemporary construal of resentment as a political phenomenon, which Nietzsche’s psychological and exclusively “genealogical” method unfortunately forecloses. For a consideration of this issue from a variety of viewpoints, including different takes on the role of resentment in the formation of political theory, see Richard Schacht, ed., Nietzsche, Genealogy, Morality: Essays on Nietzsche’s Genealogy of Morals (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995). See also Peter Poellner, Nietzsche and Metaphysics (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995), 130; Jeffrey Metzger, “How Deep Are the Roots of Nihilism? Nietzsche on the Creative Power of Nature and Morality,” in Jeffrey Metzger, ed., Nietzsche, Nihilism, and the Philosophy of the Future (New York: Continuum, 2009), 135ff.

5. See Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West (New York: Knopf, 2007).

6. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (New York: Penguin, 2004), 290.

7. See Robin Small (1997), “Ressentiment, Revenge, and Punishment: Origins of the Nietzschean Critique,” Utilitas 9:39–58. Dühring’s ideas are mostly expounded in his Der Werth des Leben: Eine Philosophische Betrachtung (Breslau: Eduard Trewendt, 1865). “Tracing the concept of justice traced back to ressentiment or revenge is no frivolous effort, but has for years been considered a [genuine] insight” (ibid., 70, translation mine).

8. See Karl Eugen Dühring, Die Judenfrage als als Frage des Racencharakters und seine Schädlichkeiten für Völkerexistenz, Sitte, und Kultur (Berlin: Personalist Verlag von Ulrich Dühring, 1901).

9. Friedrich Nietzsche, Zur Genealogie der Moral, Projekt Gutenberg. 56.

10. Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia University Press), 110.

11. Frederic Jameson, Postmodernism, or The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991).

12. Jean Baudrillard, Symbolic Exchange and Death, trans. Iain Hamilton Grant (London: Sage, 1993), 10.

13. David Orrell, Economyths: Ten Ways Economics Gets It Wrong (Mississaugo: Wiley, 2010), 1. Other recent books that take the same line of approach include John Cassidy, How Markets Fail: The Logic of Economic Calamities (New York: Farrar, Straus, and Giroux, 2009); Franklin Allen and Douglas Gale, Understanding Financial Crises (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); Justin Fox, The Myth of the Rational Market: A History of Risk, Reward, and Delusion on Wall Street (New York: Harper-Business, 2011); Carmen M. Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff, This Time Is Different: Eight Centuries of Financial Folly (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2009).

14. See Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations (Hoboken, NJ: Wiley, 1999), § 109.

15. Jacques Derrida, Given Time I: Counterfeit Money, trans. Peggy Kamuf (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 20.

16. See Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995).

1. Immanuel Kant, “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View,” quoted from the full online text of the essay that originally appeared in “Idea for a Universal History from a Cosmopolitan Point of View,” in Immanuel Kant, On History, trans. Lewis White Beck (Indianapolis: Bobbs-Merrill, 1963). The online version can be found at http://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/ethics/kant/universal-history.htm#n1.

2. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 26.

3. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 5.

4. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 52.

5. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin, 2004), 211

6. Jean-Luc Nancy, A Finite Thinking (Stanford: Stanford University Press), 13.

7. Jean-Luc Nancy, The Creation of the World or Globalization, trans. Francius Raffoul and David Pettigrew (Albany: State University of New York Press), 109.

9. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism, rev. ed. (New York: Verso, 2006), 4. See also Partha Chatterjee, “Whose Imagined Community?” Millennium: Journal of International Studies 20 (March 1991): 521–25; Roland Robertson, “Global Connectivity and Global Consciousness,” American Behavioral Scientist 50 (October 2011): 1336–45.

10. Jean-Luc Nancy, Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, trans. Bettina Bergo, Gabriel Malefant, and Michael B. Smith (New York: Fordham University Press, 200), 33. The same point has recently been argued exhaustively and effectively by political theorist Mark Lilla in The Stillborn God (New York: Knopf, 2007).

11. Olivier Roy, Globalized Islam: The Search for a New Ummah (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 40. For related research, see Johan Meuleman, ed., Islam in the Era of Globalization (London: Routledge Curzon, 2002); Ali Mohammadi, ed., Islam Encountering Globalization (London: RoutledgeCurzon, 2002); Stephen Vertigans and Philip W. Sutton, “Globalisation Theory and Islamic Praxis,” Global Society 16 (2002): 31–46.

12. Roy’s argument is tacit, if not explicit, in the latest work of historian Philip Jenkins. See Philip Jenkins, The Next Christendom: The Coming of Global Christianity (New York: Oxford University Press, 2002). This analysis is also deployed in a slightly different manner in my own book GloboChrist (Grand Rapids: Baker Academic, 2008). See Caryn Aviv and David Shneer, New Jews: The End of the Jewish Diaspora (New York: New York University Press, 2005).

13. Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundations of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 109. For a good collection of essays on this trajectory of argument, stemming from a conference at Syracuse University, see John D. Caputo and Linda Martin Alcoff, eds., St. Paul Among the Philosophers (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009). See also Simon Critchley, “On Alain Badiou,” in Heidrun Friese, ed., The Moment: Time and Rupture in Modern Thought (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2001), 91–112.

14. Badiou, Saint Paul, 97.

18. Peter Sloterdijk, God’s Zeal: The Battle of the Three Monotheisms, trans. Wieland Hoban (Cambridge: Polity, 2010), 96–97.

19. Peter Sloterdijk, Bubbles: Spheres 1, trans. Wieland Hoban (Los Angeles: Semiotex(e), 2011), 21. See also Willem Schinkel, “The Global Sphere: Peter Sloterdijk’s Theory of Globalization,” Cultural Politics 3 (2007): 393–98; my own “Peter Sloterdijk as First Philosopher of Globalization,” Journal for Cultural and Religion Theory 12 (Spring 2013): 1–18.

20. Sloterdijk, Bubbles, 61.

22. As Jonathan Berkey notes in his probing and nuanced analysis of the rise of Islam, the entire millennium beginning with Alexander of Macedon’s lightning conquests of most of the known world in the fourth century bc can be seen as a time when localism—which within a context of political consolidation implies pluralism—became increasingly difficult, if not impossible. Empire and religious universalism go hand in hand. On that score, Berkey intimates that Constantinianism, spawning both growth of both the Roman church and Byzantine caesaro-papism, was therefore historically inevitable. The “union of Roman state and Christian religion … built upon a connection between religious truth and political power.” When the Roman state in the West collapsed in the fifth century, “the rise and success of Islam followed rather than digressed from older patterns.” Jonathan P. Berkey, The Formation of Islam: Religion and Society in the Near East, 600–1800 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2003), 7.

23. Sloterdijk, God’s Zeal, 135–36.

1. For a substantial discussion of the origins of democratic theory in the major religious traditions, see not only Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West (New York: Vintage, 2008), but also Abdulaziz Sachedina, The Islamic Roots of Democratic Pluralism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2001). For a discussion of Sachedina’s argument, see M. A. Muqtedar Khan, “The Politics, Theory, and Philosophy of Islamic Democracy,” in M. A. Muqtedar Khan, ed., Islamic Democratic Discourse: Theory, Debates, and Philosophical Perspectives (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2006), 158ff. See also Minaz C. Chenai, Recueil de textes du professuer Abdulaziz Sachedina (Paris: Publibook, 2008), 126.

2. See, for this particular line of argument, Simon Critchley’s opening chapter, “The Catechism of the Citizen,” in The Faith of the Faithless: Experiments in Political Theology (London: Verso, 2012).

3. See especially Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies: The Spell of Plato, vol. 1 rev. ed. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1971).

4. Critchley, “The Catechism of the Citizen,” 89.

5. See Karl Mannheim, Ideology and Utopia: An Introduction to the Sociology of Knowledge (Whitefish, MT: Kessinger, 2008).

6. Critchley, The Faith of the Faithless, 161.

7. Walter Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity: Global Futures, Decolonial Options (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 275. See also Walter Mignolo, “The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference,” in Mabel Moraña, Enrique D. Dussel, and Carlos A. Jáuregui, eds., Coloniality at Large: Latin America and the Postcolonial Debate (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2011), 225–58; Walter Mignolo, “The Communal and the Decolonial,” Pavilion 14 (2010): 146–55.

8. See Ervand Abrahamian, “Ali Shariati: Ideologue of the Iranian Revolution,” in Edmund Burke and Ira Lapidus, eds., Islam, Politics, and Social Movements (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1993), 289–97.

9. Mignolo, The Darker Side of Western Modernity, 286.

10. In Greek tragedy moira (generally, “fate” or “destiny,” but more specifically one’s own “portion” granted by the universe in compensation for an individual’s actions) and nemein, from which derives nomos and meaning the process of distribution or allotment itself, are simply two dimensions of how time unfolds. We see this relationship in a close reading of certain Greek tragedies. The nomos (in English “law” in the sense of “right,” or in German Recht) of the state, as Julian Etxabe points out, is secondary to the justification of one’s moral or “judicial” decisions, which eventually become enshrined as a legal code or set of precedents. See Julian Etxabe, “Antigone’s Nomos,” Animus: The Canadian Journal of Philosophy and Humanities 13 (2009): 61. The “force of law” in Derrida’s sense and the “founding” deeds of the tragic hero are consolidated in this sense. This interpretation of nomos, which begins to emerge with Sophocles and is cited significantly in Aristotle’s Rhetoric, separates law from physis, or “nature” as what both action and its consequences are essentially embedded. See William Allan, “Tragedy and the Early Greek Philosophical Tradition,” in Justina Gregory, ed., A Companion to Greek Tragedy (Malden, MA: Blackwell, 2005), 79. Hence, the laws of the polis, or the realm of nomos as accepted precedent and practice, constitute the sense of what Hegel would later term the “world spirit” acting through “great men.”

1. Hannah Arendt, Was ist Politik? (Munich: Piper, 1993), 126.

4. Hannah Arendt, On Violence (New York: Harcourt Brace, 1969), 51.

5. See Andrew Benjamin, Walter Benjamin and the Architecture of Modernity (Melbourne: re.press, 2009), 85.

6. See Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt, 1973).

7. Richard John Neuhaus, The Naked Public Square: Religion and Democracy in America (Grand Rapids MI: Eerdmans, 1984).

8. Claude Lefort, “The Permanence of the Theological-Political,” in Hent DeVries and Lawrence Sullivan, eds., Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 150. See also Annika Thiem, “Schmittian Shadows and Contemporary Theological-Political Constellations,” Social Research: An International Quarterly 80 (2013): 1–32; Hugues Poltier, Claude Lefort: La Découverte du Politique (Paris: Michalon, 1997).

9. Lefort, “The Permanence of the Theological-Political,” 151.

12. See Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2009). Taylor understands the advent of secularity and modernity as a shift from hierarchical and “mediated” access to the plenitude of power radiated by the kingly sovereign. In such a world “human agents are embedded in society, society in the cosmos, and the cosmos incorporates the divine” (ibid., 152). In the secular world, by contrast, mediation gives way to what he calls the “buffered self” where reality is now contained wholly within the independent, sovereign subject.