Calls for the end of the world inevitably provoke a series of questions: What is this world? Why should it end? What would it mean to think of such an ending? A more developed response to these questions will require passing through Hegel, Taubes and Malabou, but an initial exploration of political theology, the world and apocalypticism will serve to orient the following discussion.
For the purposes of this book, political theology is a methodology focused on the relationship between political and theological concepts. It seeks to understand the political history and significance of theological ideas, the theological history and significance of political ideas and to use theological ideas to explore the nature of the political.
This approach is clearly indebted to Carl Schmitt while also complicating his famous, if now clichéd, description of political theology. While it is true that Schmitt writes ‘[a]ll significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularised theological concepts’, his work is often reduced to this genealogical approach.1 However, this genealogy is only a part of his wider work in the sociology of concepts.2 ‘This sociology of concepts transcends juridical conceptualisation oriented to immediate practical interest. It aims to discover the basic, radically systematic structure and to compare this conceptual structure with the conceptually represented social structure of a certain epoch.’3 At times this takes the form of identifying structural analogies, such as that between the exception and the miracle.4 At other points, he investigates the limits of specific political situations and the emergence of novel social structures that initiate new historical epochs.5 Schmitt’s point is that politics operates within a political framework that it cannot justify. The structural analogy between the political and theology is found in beginnings, ends, the dynamics of change and modes of control.
Even though his approach is more multifaceted than its contemporary invocations sometimes indicate, it is certainly not without issue. Aside from the obvious problem of his National Socialism, there are other, more methodological problems.6 For the purposes of developing a concept of political theology, the most important is his privileging of the theological. In critically receiving his work, it is thus particularly important to question the simplicity of his notion that the theological is converted into the political.7 Such a framing too readily accepts an easy division between the theological and the political – a division which is itself both theological and political. The political and theological are two modes of expressing power. These modes are interconnected and mutually informing. There is no neat, linear process of secularization. Theological ideas appear in the political, not as the result of transformation or importation, but because those ideas were always already caught up in power relationships and their concomitant forms of knowledge. The more philosophically inclined political theology developed here maintains that there is no theological thought isolated from the political, nor thinking the political in isolation from the theological. There are, however, discourses that emphasize one or the other.
This form of political theology is thus not concerned with ‘political religion’. Rather, it focuses on the theological illumination of the political (and vice versa) as well as the processes by which religion and politics are divided such that they can be recombined to name a problem. The political is a discourse of beginnings and endings, transformations and collapses. In this sense, the political is outside the bounds of politics. It is a zone of teleological suspensions, exceptions and miracles.8 There is an exercise of power at the origin of any order that lies beyond that rules of that order. The preservation of that order legitimates its suspension. Though the day to day of politics displays symptoms of the political, political theology is concerned with those symptoms only to gain access to the underlining condition. It is concerned with the political itself.
Moving beyond Schmitt’s genealogical and analogical forms of political theology, Taubes offers a more constructive approach. Taubes summarizes this approach as a ‘working with theological materials’ (PT, 69). He goes on to describe his method in terms of intellectual history, but his texts show experimentation as well as historical investigation. Combining Schmitt and Taubes, political theology is an investigation of the intertwined history of theological and political concepts in order to utilize those concepts to critique the world.
Of course, there are other understandings of political theology. Vincent Lloyd identifies three approaches: broad (the general intersection of religion and politics), narrow (associated with Schmitt and the legacy of his work) and sectarian.9 The above definition is most amenable to a narrow, particularly philosophical form of political theology, but that in no way discounts these other views. Indeed, there are important overlaps between this vision of political theology and more sectarian versions of political theology. For instance, Michael Kirwan offers a political theology concerned with religion understood as ‘complexes of belief, worship and action which are deeply embedded in practices and traditions, and which are felt to be crucial to both individual and communal self-understanding’.10 This understanding of religion, and the political significance of practices and traditions, is essential to the implicit political theology I will later identify in Hegel. However, Kirwan goes on to ask questions such as: ‘Can a polis exist, be sustained, without God? . . . But how, then, does such a polity and its leaders avoid placing themselves on the Messiah’s throne.’11 These questions begin to raise issues of political religion, straying into more sectarian territory.
Similarly, emphasizing the theological aspect, Andrew Shanks takes political theology’s essential task to be understanding
the gospel as a practical basis for the belonging-together of a community. Not just at the level of all speaking the same religious language, or all operating within a common framework of symbolism and ritual; but at a much deeper, and broader, level than that. This deeper level is constituted, partly, by a body of shared experience, underlying and coming to expression in the symbolism and ritual. And partly it is constituted by a set of shared ethical standards, a general consensus to what is to be admired and what condemned, or how disagreements are to be managed and resolved.12
Shanks is doing political theology. It is a different conversation.13
Differentiating a narrower, more methodical understanding of political theology is a clarification, not a dismissal. Emphasizing political theology as a methodology merely distances this notion of political theology from analysis of political religion or religious politics. Recent discussions of political theology are often positioned in relation to the return of religion, whether that return is greeted as a crack emerging in the facade of Western liberal order or decried for the same reason.14 While political theology in a narrower sense can be part of those conversations, it can also operate without concern for the political views or roles of specific religious communities.
This differentiation of forms of political theology is particularly important in the light of recent critiques of political theology. These arguments often blur any distinction between political theology as a methodology, as religiously motivated political movements and as theocracy. The broad question of religion and politics quickly shifts to a critique of sectarian examples. Mark Lilla’s The Stillborn God, for instance, is an explicit critique of political theology.15 He understands this term to indicate ‘a primordial form of human thought’ many thought had been superseded by Western liberal democracy.16 The main concern of his argument is to analyse the enduring appeal of political theology, particularly messianic ideas, and the challenges they pose for contemporary politics.17 In Lilla’s condemnation, however, one struggles to identify anything resembling the narrow form of political theology defined above. There is no mention of any of the central figures traditionally associated with political theology, such as Schmitt, Benjamin or Agamben (though he has addressed Schmitt elsewhere).18
If Lilla takes aim at political theology in the broader sense, John Gray strikes closer to the narrower form.19 He frames his critique in terms of utopianism, millenarianism and apocalypticism rather than political theology, but the focus of much of his analysis is a familiar historical account tracing dangerous theological ideas from Joachim of Fiore through the secularizing influence of Hegel to Marx, National Socialism and other forms of extremism or totalitarianism. For Gray, these later seemingly non-religious ideas remain tainted by an original theological sin. Their theological origins may have been forgotten, mutated by secularization, but they continue to shape the political imaginary of the West.20
If Shanks is doing political theology, Lilla and Gray are critiquing the same. Shanks emphasizes the political implications of theology, while Lilla and Gray argue against the theology’s political implications. Leaving aside the question of whether Lilla, Gray or Shanks is correct, they all share a similar configuration of religion or theology and politics. Though Gray’s analysis is sometimes a kind of political theology in the narrow sense, this analysis remains focused on the problematic relationship between religion and politics. For Gray, the concept of a world transforming revolution is itself religious and hence problematic.21
Lilla’s and Gray’s critiques can thus be split into two veins. First, they are focused on critiquing political theology in the sense of political religion. In this respect, there is often insufficient awareness of political theology beyond political religion, with Lilla in particular reducing the former to the latter. These critiques are ultimately affirmations of secularism. While it is true that political religion, theology and political theology all offer examples of the celebration of the failure of secularism and the announcement of the post-secular, these categories themselves are subject to political theological dismantling. Triumphalist, theological forms of post-secularism risk repeating the flaws of secularization theory in arguing that religion was waning but has now returned to address the limitations of Western liberalism.22 By contrast, the political theology I am developing here is asecular or desecularizing.23 It is not interested in celebrating or denigrating the relationship between the political and the theological. It thinks with an indifference to these distinctions. Political theology is not about offering theological solutions to political problems but maintaining that the political as such is inseparably mixed with the theological.
Second, Lilla and Gray are concerned with the continuing political legacy of theological ideas. More specifically, they react to a political theological critique of liberalism. Both reject the optimism that accompanies revolutionary ideas and are worried by visions of fundamentally different social and political orders. Here, their critiques are more pertinent to a narrow conception of political theology. This tradition has indeed been marked by a deep ambivalence with regard to liberal politics. From Schmitt onwards, political theology has accused the liberal narrative of denying the violence that marks its origins and continuation. For example, both Schmitt and Benjamin argue, in different ways, that this violence is not a misapplication of liberal principles but endemic to the political. Lilla’s and Gray’s rejection of political theology is thus rooted in real concerns, even if that rejection is muddled by a mixing of terms and traditions.
These concerns are shared by those who focus more exclusively on political theology in the narrow sense. For instance, Jayne Svenungsson has recently argued for a theopolitics defined in opposition to political theology. Yet, there is still an ambiguity regarding the concept of political theology that complicates her survey of prophetic practice, messianism, apocalypticism and political theology. Svenungsson is arguing in favour of a ‘ “theopolitical” interpretation of the prophetic motif, invoking a form of justice that does not allow itself to be reduced to any existing political order, in contrast to has come to be known as “political theology” – the tendency to use theological claims to support a specific political agenda’.24 Though she returns to this definition of political theology as ‘theologically sanctioned politics’, her focus is on politics in the most general sense, rather than particular states, parties or other organizations.25 In this sense, she remains less concerned with political religion or religious politics, and more on the political as such.
As with Lilla and Gray, Svenungsson offers a critique rooted in a definition of political theology that misses key aspects of Schmitt, Taubes, Benjamin and other central figures that have come to define this narrower political theology. Their work is not a theologically legitimated politics but an analysis of the political as such that reveals its structural analogy to theology. Yet, again paralleling Lilla and Gray, at the heart of this critique is a rejection of political theology’s suspicion of liberalism. Svenungsson wants to defend a concept of divine justice, but one that is part of an intrahistorical process of redemption rather than an external apocalyptic intervention.26 Theopolitics offers an unachievable, transcendent and divine justice that endlessly interrogates any and all concrete political arrangements. It has faith in this process of interrogation as a means of achieving justice. Contra Taubes, Benjamin, and other apocalyptic political theologians, law and order are the preconditions of emancipation rather than obstacles to be overcome.27 Where Svenungsson departs from Lilla and Gray is her integration of theological perspectives into this vision of a legal and political progress oriented at a justice it can never ultimately realize.
Considering Schmitt, Taubes, Benjamin, Agamben as well as Derrida, Badiou and Žižek, it becomes clear that there is something happening in a body of literature that escapes these critiques of political theology – an element irreducible to the various forms of theologically legitimated politics. Thinking about political theology in terms of method, rather than focusing on the relationship between religion and politics, helps clarify this ambiguous issue. This methodological political theology can then be used to analyse the ways that politicized theologies are rooted in political theological perspectives but without reducing political theology to this concern. This form of political theology concentrates on the historical and contemporary significance of the analogy between theology and the political.28 It is interested in the political limitations of any politics and the way those limitations are negotiated, repressed or confronted.
This approach, in its focus on these limitations, must still respond to critiques that identify an ambivalence, suspicion or hostility to liberalism. For even the more methodological forms of political theology, liberalism often stands for a politics that denies the political. Political theology’s fascination with the problems of origins, limitations and exceptions means that it is often focused on disruption, revolution, messianism and, occasionally, apocalypticism. From this perspective, it offers thoughts on how to think about the pervasive forms of injustice that persist in an era defined by at least nominal commitments to liberal ideas.
Whether or not Lilla’s, Gray’s and Svenungsson’s critiques of political theology’s suspicion of liberalism are fair depends on how one views this era. If gradual and intrahistorical progress within the existing order is capable of rendering the world more just, then Svenungsson is right to emphasize slow change and the importance of continuity.29 If something more intrinsic is wrong with the world, then it is necessary to investigate the resources of apocalypticism.
Evaluating political theology’s critique of liberalism thus requires an account of the world. The possibility of change within the world depends on the nature of both the change and the world. What is it that makes the world a world rather than a political economy, ideology or social reality?30 And what kinds of change are possible within that world? This section lays out an initial account of this world, for understanding the peculiar hope of its end requires addressing the nature of the world itself.31 Such a clarification is especially necessary given recent critiques of the notion of world.32
Schmitt’s analysis of the transformation of the earth33 into a global legal order provides a political theological starting point. His notion of the nomos shows the constitution of the world through the organization of land, people and things. Expanding on Schmitt, I argue that this organization occurs through a set of divisions that can be summarized by the terms nature, capital, gender and race. These divisions do not operate independently but are shaped through a series of complex intersections. These intersections are the difference between an arbitrary set of relations and the enduring configuration worthy of the name ‘world’. These divisions are not divisions within the world – they are the world. It is this inescapable configuration that presents the question of the end.
Schmitt is fundamentally concerned with the imposition, maintenance and protection of order. One of his key names for this order is nomos: the ‘Greek word for the first measure of all subsequent measures, for the first land-appropriation understood as the first partition and classification of space, for the primeval division and distribution’.34 As Schmitt explains, the nomos is an order governing ‘appropriation, distribution and production’ instituted by power.35 It is ‘a matter of the fundamental process of apportioning space that is essential to every historical epoch – a matter of the structure-determining convergence of order and orientation in the cohabitation of peoples on this new scientifically surveyed planet’.36 This apportioning begins with an appropriation of land that institutes a complex social, economic and political order. The concrete division of the earth and the organization of people that is the origin of the very law that now perpetuates that order. Nomos takes the earth and makes it a world through a process of divisions and distributions that are just as fundamental as the physical world in which we live.37
Schmitt’s nomos is defined first in terms of land, then sea and finally air (with brief nods to the possibilities of space). This nomos is thus a question of the governing of terrain or space. He is particularly concerned with a spatial, political and legal order that exceeds the state but is still Eurocentric.38 The sea, for example, is initially an anarchic space that gradually becomes subject to a law that is not simply imposed unilaterally but emerges in the course of developing relations among empires.39
Schmitt’s account of nomos helps develop a concept of the world in two ways. First, nomos captures the connection between earth and the world. Sovereignty requires territory; power is rooted in material appropriation.40 However, this connection is not fully developed by Schmitt as he is concerned with the way that nomos divides the earth. This focus ignores the way that nomos becomes part of the earth. It is not enough to describe nomos as it acts on material reality – nomos and material reality shape one another.41 Analysing the relationship between nomos and material reality from only one direction, as will be clear later in this section, makes the nomos seem more fragile than it is.
Second, Schmitt’s discussion of nomos reflects his anxiety about the possibility of its collapse and the shape of the nomoi to come. Nomos of the Earth, as well as Schmitt’s later work on the partisan, are fundamentally works reflecting an anxiety about the contingency of this nomos. He is conscious of the fact that the emergence of new ages entails new nomos.42 Yet, even more terrifying is the prospect that the nomos will be overwhelmed – order will give way to the chaos that it struggles to contain.
This anxiety is most clear in his discussion of the katechon. Schmitt argues that the historical Christian empire was always aware of its end. It was shaped by the promise of eschatological fulfilment and the desire to delay its arrival. For although the end ushers in the Kingdom of God, it equally heralds a time of judgement and destruction. It is this delay, the preservation of the continuity of the imperial world, that is its defining task. ‘The decisive historical concept of this continuity was that of the restrainer: katechon. “Empire” in this sense meant the historical power to restrain the appearance of the Antichrist and the end of the present eon; it was a power that withholds.’43 The end will come, but the empire fights to delay that end.44
Schmitt raises this concern about the possibility of the end in relationship to utopian ideas as well. In the midst of a discussion of England and changes within maritime law, he offers a passing remark on Thomas More’s Utopia. Again, the passage reflects Schmitt’s awareness of the contingency of the nomos, ‘manifest in this book, and in the profound and productive formulation of the word Utopia, was the possibility of an enormous destruction of all orientations based on the old nomos of the earth’.45 Though this notion of utopia is never connected to katechon or the chaos it entails, Schmitt clearly associates destruction and utopia. For Schmitt, all order is haunted by the possibility of collapse. As Julia Hell argues, such anxiety about the endings of empires is not uncommon. Yet Schmitt’s work is marked by a particular ‘apocalyptic urgency’.46
This katechonic anxiety is flawed in two ways. First, his identification of threats to the nomos is predictably problematic. For Schmitt, the naming of the enemy of the nomos is foundational to the possibility of international law.47 He uses the katechon to explore an imperial fear, so the locus of that anxiety is the real or perceived enemies of empire.48 Schmitt understands the enemy as the collective other or stranger. The war against the enemy is a war between peoples.49 His declaration that ‘[w]ar is the existential negation of the enemy’ is chilling when viewed in the light of his Nazism.50 Nomos and katechon can still be used to think both the world and its end, but it must be done in the shadow of Schmitt’s own use of those concepts. Second, he underestimates the ability of the world to persist. Underlying Schmitt’s dynamic account of nomos is a fundamental continuity. Empires rise and fall, but there is always an empire. True, the transition of power from one empire to the next is often a violent and destructive process, but nonetheless it is the preservation of a distinct form of power. Even as the division between land and sea changes, it is not a radically new relationship, but a reconfiguration and expansion of recognizable modes of rule. He is right to recognize the possibility of the end of the world, but too quick to declare its advent. ‘The world survives.’51
Schmitt himself seems to recognize this point to a degree, cautioning those who see the end on the horizon.
The new nomos of our planet is growing irresistibly. Many see therein only death and destruction. Some believe that they are experiencing the end of the world. In reality, we are experiencing only the end of the former relations of the land and sea. To be sure, the old nomos has collapsed, and with it a whole system of accepted measure, concepts, and customs. But what is coming is not therefore boundlessness or a nothingness hostile to nomos.52
And yet, Nomos of the Earth concludes with Schmitt’s concern about the anti-political tendencies of globalization and liberalism. He is torn between the assertion that what appears as the possibility of utter annihilation and chaos is really just another coming nomos and the fear that, perhaps this time, the destruction will be real.
It is this second flaw that necessitates a deeper exploration of the world. While Schmitt helpfully describes the way that nomos converts the earth to a world, his account of this process must be deepened. The earth has been divided (land, sea and air), but imperial conquest and the friend/enemy distinction are insufficient explanations for the shape that the world has taken. The nomos that divides the world is also itself a feature of that same world. The appropriation, distribution and production of land, sea and air (as well as the human and other-than-human bodies that live on and in these territories) are not merely surface alterations but fundamental transformations of the world they made and are making. What Schmitt fails to recognize is the materiality of nomos. Understanding the materiality of these processes and the manner in which they constitute a world will require naming a new set of divisions. Thinking through these new divisions, it becomes apparent that the world will not end as easily as Schmitt fears.
To move beyond the divisions of land, air and sea, I argue that the contemporary order is divided according to nature, capital, gender and race. With the exception of gender, these divisions are already present in Schmitt, but only occasionally. There is passing acknowledgement that land appropriation is a question of capital and the taming of nature. This process of land appropriation is racialized; whose land can be appropriated by what means depends in part on one’s position in the racial hierarchy.53 Like Schmitt’s land, air and sea, these divisions are fundamentally about appropriation, distribution and production, but it expands Schmitt’s focus on land to include bodies. It is these relations between land and bodies that constitutes a world.
Discussing how these divisions make a world is difficult and contentious. For one, why should these divisions be taken as constitutive rather than a wider or completely different set of relations? Sexuality and religion, for example, would seem to be key to understanding the world. The divisions of nature, capital, gender and race are particularly significant in three ways. First, as will be explained below, they take a particularly oppositional form. These are antagonistic divisions, leading towards a ‘Manichean worldview’.54 Second, they incorporate many other divisions. While sexuality is not reducible to questions of gender, nor religion to race, understanding these four divisions provides resources essential to analysing those divisions. Finally, nature, capital, gender and race are deeply related such that it is impossible to tell the story of one without incorporating the others. This interrelatedness is not reductive. Race cannot be reduced to the division of capital, but a full account of race requires an account of capital. In addressing each of these divisions, the others are slowly pulled in. As such, this process of gradual mixing will be the model for the following outline of the world. In discussing nature, the consequences for gender emerge. Then the parallels (and differences) between gender and race reveal something of the nature of capital, all of which returns the conversation to the topic of nature. In the course of this discussion, an ontology capable of describing the relationship between nomos and materiality will gradually take shape.
Nature is the natural starting point. The divide between humanity and nature is often essential to the definition of the human. The gender and racial hierarchies that come to define the world draw on this essential division. To be less than human is to be more of nature.
In recent years, the designation of the present geological epoch as the ‘Anthropocene’ has taken on a significant role in shaping humanity’s conceptions of its relationship with the rest of nature. The term designates the epochal shift from the Holocene to an age in which humanity has taken on a geologically significant role.55 Dating this transition is understandably difficult, but Paul Crutzen, who first proposed the term, has suggested that the shift occurred between 1800 and the 1950s.56 By the mid-twentieth century, humanity had created its own geological epoch.
The term and debates about dating immediately generate questions that extend beyond nature itself to questions of capital and intrahuman differences. Clearly a long series of developments, from the discovery of fire to the burning of fossil fuels to the Industrial Revolution, led to this shift. Conceiving of these changes in terms of the Anthropocene risks eliding that the series of events affected different groups of people differently. The intensified consumption of fossil fuels during the Industrial Revolution was an uneven process inaugurated by an incredibly small group of people. ‘Capitalists in a small corner of the Western world invested in steam, laying the foundation stone for the fossil economy; at no moment did the species vote for it with feet or ballots, or march in mechanical unison, or exercise any sort of shared authority over its own destiny and that of the Earth System.’57 The Anthropocene, in describing humanity’s impact on the Earth, artificially unites humanity. Culpability is distributed much more equally than the wealth generated by the processes primarily responsible for climate change.
In other words, considering ‘humanity’s’ relationship to nature requires investigating the way that the Industrial Revolution and capitalism divided some humans from other humans and nature. As Jason Moore argues, the capitalist economy was and is reliant upon ‘cheap nature’.58 Cheap food, cheap energy and raw materials are all taken from an uncompensated nature.59 The basic human relationship to nature is one of expropriation. For Moore, the Anthropocene can thus be more accurately described as the ‘Capitalocene’. Humanity’s impact on the environment is due to its reliance on fossil fuels and that reliance is inextricably caught up with capitalism. Without the energy provided by fossil fuels there is no capitalism and the spread of capitalism accelerates their usage.
Not everyone agrees with this assessment. Dipesh Chakrabarty, in particular, has argued that there are two flaws with this critique of the Anthropocene. First, he argues that ‘leaving aside the question of intergenerational ethics that concerns the future, anthropogenic climate change is not inherently – or logically – a problem of past or accumulated intra-human injustice.’60 Chakrabarty readily admits that there is an inequality of consumption and waste, but argues that it is reductive to explain all aspects of climate change by an appeal to capitalism.61 While it may indeed be reductive to reduce all aspects of climate change to capital, Moore, Andreas Malm and Alf Hornborg convincingly argue that the climate change being experienced today is inextricably linked to the form of the global economy. As Malm argues, that form and its reliance upon fossil fuel was imposed on a large percentage of the world’s population.62 Responding to Charkrabarty’s objection requires taking into consideration the way that capital is related to nature, both now and historically, as well as the way that capital shapes other key forms of social relations (or non-relation). In other words, it requires an account of the world.
The relationship between nature and capital is particularly important for providing such an account. First, it is nature, more than any other division that reveals the inescapability of the world. As will become clear in the following sections, the world names a set of intersecting material and social relations.63 Second, as the terms Anthropocene and Capitalocene indicate, human actions are both part of nature and capable of changing that nature. As Moore, Malm and Hornborg demonstrate, this vision of nature is essential to the relations named by ‘capital’. The emergence of an economy rooted in fossil fuel was from its inception connected to uneven development and the exploitation of labour. The antagonism is not between humanity and nature, but between some humans, other humans and nature. The damages of climate change will be unevenly distributed.64
To expand this account of the world beyond nature and capital, it is useful to view Moore’s discussion of cheap nature and Malm and Hornborg’s critique of the Anthropocene narrative within the context of Silvia Federici’s analysis of capitalism, gender and race. Federici argues that the human–nature relationship directly shapes European (and eventually North American) views of women and informs the shifting notions of race that accompany colonial expansion. For Federici, the process of primitive accumulation is central to the transformation of these relationships. The rapid privatization of land, through both the enclosure of public land and colonialism, not only intensified existing relations and enabled new means of extracting value from the natural world, it also transformed social relations.65 While this is obviously true in terms of labour, it may be less obvious how these changes shifted ideas about gender and race.
With regard to enclosures, Federici tracks numerous ways that land expropriation impacted the lives of women in Europe.66 Most crucially, women were deprived of the commons, a space of at least limited social autonomy, which made it increasingly difficult to find ways to support themselves outside of reproductive labour.67 As the market became the determiner of value, this reproductive work, the literal production of the worker, became increasingly devalued.68 By the time this process culminated in the emergence of the full-time housewife in the nineteenth century, the implications of this devaluing become clear: ‘the separation of production from reproduction created a class of proletarian women who were as dispossessed as men but, unlike their male relatives in a society that was becoming increasingly monetarized, had almost no access to wages, thus being forced into a condition of chronic poverty, economic dependence, and invisibility as workers.’69 The willing transformation of some humans’ relationship to nature disrupts other humans’ relationships to each other and nature.
The shift in humanity’s relationship to the rest of nature brought about by the move from production for use to the money economy (capital) also introduced new and intensified forms of sexually differentiated labour (gender).70 ‘Proletarian women became for male workers the substitute for the land lost to the enclosures, their most basic means of reproduction, and a communal good.’71 As work became increasingly defined in terms of the wage, women’s labour was defined as non-work, ‘a natural resource, available to all, no less than the air we breathe or the water we drink’.72 For Federici, this change marks the key difference between gender dynamics under capital and the unequal relations of earlier periods. Though such inequality is undeniable, ‘women’s subordination to men had been tempered by the fact that they had access to the commons and other communal assets, while in the new capitalist regime women themselves became the commons, as their work was defined as a natural resource, laying outside the sphere of market relations.’73 As Federici’s language reflects, it is not only nature that provides the cheap labour necessary for the functioning of capital. The transitions during the period of primitive accumulation simultaneously mark the emergence of the world of the Capitalocene and effect ‘a unique process of social degradation that was fundamental to the accumulation of capital and has remained so ever since’.74
As women’s labour became as economically vital as it was uncompensated, it became ever more important for the state or church to regulate women’s bodies. In particular, the European population crisis of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries lead to increasingly brutal punishments for women who do not reproduce or who in any way challenge the stability of the patriarchally ordered home.75 The primary means of recognizing the indispensable role of women was the severity of the persecution that accompanied any deviation from that role. Federici finds this same anxiety around women’s shifting roles and the regulation of the body at the heart of European and North American witch-hunts. ‘The witch-hunt condemned female sexuality as the source of every evil, but it was also the main vehicle for a broad restructuring of sexual life, that conforming with the new capitalist work-discipline, criminalised any sexual activity that threatened procreation, the transmission of property within the family, or took time and energies away from work.’76
Federici notes that these gender issues are often viewed in isolation from other concurrent developments. She draws connections between the expropriation of communal lands and the way that witch-hunts ‘expropriated women from their bodies’.77 The relationship between these changes in conceptions of nature, capital, gender and race too often go unnoticed.
It should . . . have seemed significant that the witch-hunt occurred simultaneously with the colonization and extermination of the populations of the New World, the English enclosures, the beginning of the slave trade, the enactments of ‘bloody laws’ against vagabonds and beggars, and it climaxed in that interregnum between the end of feudalism and the capitalist ‘take off’ when the peasantry in Europe reached the peak of its power but, in time, also consummated its historic defeat.78
To overlook the connections between these changes is to miss the emergence and sedimentation of the world.
This parallel between nature and gender has of course long been a central thesis of ecofeminist critique.79 Federici’s contribution is to position the connection between gender and nature within the development of capitalism. There are certainly forms of pre-capitalist patriarchy, but the world she describes is one of the mutual reinforcing divisions of nature, gender and capital.
As indicated by Federici’s references to colonialism and slavery, these divisions intersect with race as well. The founding of European capitalism and colonial expansion were dependent upon ‘the subordination and exploitation of their own women, on the exploitation and killing of Nature, on the exploitation and subordination of other peoples and their lands’.80 The concept of nature as beneath humanity and ripe for exploitation informs understanding of both gender and race and that exploitation is essential to the flourishing of the form of capitalism that eventually assumes global dominance. Federici draws attention to the parallels between attitudes towards women and ‘Indian savages’. In both instances, degradation and terrorization are part of a sustained project of expropriating labour (in the case of women) and land (in the case of indigenous people).81 The parallels are clear – these categories are considered inferior due to being more ruled by nature, not yet having been liberated by Enlightened rationality (or not being capable of such liberation).82 There are similar connections between gender and other racial classifications. ‘For the definition of Blackness and femaleness as marks of bestiality and irrationality conformed with the exclusion of women in Europe and women and men in the colonies from the social contract implicit in the wage, and the consequent naturalization of their exploitation.’83 Both groups are considered untrustworthy or fickle and the sexual powers of both groups are to be feared. Women, for example, were judged more prone to witchcraft due to their inability to control their sexual urges.84 In the seventeenth century, the devil became Black and his race became associated with ‘an abnormal lust and sexual potency’.85
Federici touches on the figure of the slave, but recent work in the theory of race and Blackness goes much further in examining anti-Blackness as constitutive of the world. Perhaps the strongest version of this argument comes from Frank B. Wilderson III who argues the exclusion of Blackness from the sphere of the human is essential to the structure of the world – ‘No slave, no world.’86 This exclusion is what Wilderson and others, following the work of Orlando Patterson, call social death:87
Blackness, refers to an individual who is by definition always already devoid of relationality. Thus modernity marks the mergence of a new ontology because it is an era in which an entire race appears, people who, that is prior to the contingency of the ‘transgressive act’ (such as losing a war or being convicted of a crime), stand as socially dead in relation to the rest of the world.88
Blackness is not like other racial categories. For Wilderson, it does not hold the hope of other racial positions or the focus of other forms of oppression. The liberation of the slave is not analogous to the liberation of women, the indigenous or the worker.89 In fact, ‘the so-called great emancipatory discourse of modernity – Marxism, feminism, postcolonialism, sexual liberation, and the ecology movement’ rely on ‘grammars of suffering’ derivative of but separated from the position of the slave.90 Nancy Fraser makes a similar argument, showing that the Marxist emphasis on the exploited worker does not sufficiently consider the expropriation of racialized subjects that is constitutive of capitalism. By tracing ‘historical regimes of racialized accumulation’, Fraser moves her analysis beyond the figure of the worker.91
Yet, Wilderson’s Afro-pessimism goes even further than Fraser’s argument that racialization is a precondition for capitalist exploitation, arguing that ‘the structure of the entire world’s semantic field . . . is sutured by anti-Black solidarity. Unlike the solution-oriented, interest-based, or hybridity-dependent scholarship so fashionable today, Afro-pessimism explores the meaning of Blackness not . . . as a variously and unconsciously interpellated identity or as a conscious social actor, but as a structural position of noncommunicability.’92 Here Wilderson echoes Fanon’s analysis of the Holocaust. For Fanon, ‘the Jew can be unknown in his Jewishness. He is not wholly what he is.’93 While the exclusion of Blackness from the world is constitutive of the world, other divisions (what I will discuss as conflicts in the following section), no matter how violent or prolonged, remain ‘little family quarrels’.94 Both Fanon and Wilderson see these fights as taking place within humanity, while Blackness remains excluded.
While the logic of capital can explain some elements of race as a constitutive division within the world, Wilderson’s analysis of anti-Blackness reveals a libidinal element that exceeds the economic.95 He describes this excess as the gratuitous violence of slavery. While in earlier periods of history most people were susceptible to gratuitous violence, Wilderson argues that in the late Middle Ages this violence begins to ‘mark the Black ontologically’.96 In light of this marking, this constitutive exclusion, Wilderson, citing Fanon citing Aimé Césaire, reaches an apocalyptic conclusion: the only thing worth starting is the end of the world.97
Wilderson’s analysis of race shows that the divisions of nature, capital, gender and race are connected in their constitution of the world, but they are neither analogous nor reducible to one another. The racial division of the world brought about by slavery cannot be reduced to capital, but, along with the racial divisions of colonialism and settler colonialism, it is coeval with capital.98 Capital without these divisions is inconceivable, but aspects of patriarchy, racism and ecological destruction precede and escape the logic of capital. Yet it is also true that capital shapes the function of each of these divisions today. Even if capitalism cannot explain slavery, it is still the case that slavery and the colonial system it enabled was essential to the industrialized capitalism that has come to define the world.99
Much more could be said about each of these divisions, both individually and as they overlap and intersect with one another. There are debates within the attempts to theorize each division, questions of logical and historical priority and different conceptions of the relationship between divisions. The purpose of this chapter is not to provide an exhaustive account nor to adjudicate between perspectives but to indicate the general shape of the world. Combining Schmitt and this account of nature, capital, gender and race provides this overview. Schmitt provides the history of the legal and political transformation of the earth into a world through processes of appropriation, distribution and production. That history leaves out or insufficiently develops how territory and bodies are selected as appropriable, the way that identities determine distribution and the different forms of productive labour: slave, housewife and worker. There are two levels of analysis: territory versus culture; the political, legal and economic versus the libidinal.
The effort of combining these two levels results in an ontology of the world. The material division of territory, bodies, libidinal fears and vulnerability to gratuitous violence interweave to create a whole. Nancy Tuana formulates this kind of ontology in terms of the ‘viscous porosity of the categories “natural,” “human-made,” “social,” “biological” ’ that are materially related in an ‘interactionist ontology’.100 As the above account of the world argues, the interpenetration of these categories does not collapse into an undifferentiated unity. Rather than abandoning these categories, they can be reframed within a wider unity – not the static unity of the Western metaphysical tradition, but a dynamic, interactionist unity.101 The result is an ‘ontology that rematerializes the social and takes seriously the agency of the natural’.102 This materialization of the social is the key to the combination of the two modes of analysis.
Take the earlier discussion of nature as an example. Malm and Hornborg argue that climate change ‘has arisen as a result of temporally fluid social relations as they materialise through the rest of nature’.103 Thinking about climate change within the framework of the Capitalocene requires not only considering how human actions impact the rest of nature, but the way that those actions actually change nature.104 This material mixture of nature and the social, cultural and political does not mean that these distinctions cannot still serve an analytical purpose.105 Understanding that human actions are themselves part of nature and that there are other actors responding to climate change is the first step in taking the agency of the natural seriously. It is to grasp the material nature of what Anna Tsing calls ‘multispecies world making’.106 Likewise, race may not be a biological category, but the consequences of historical racial formation is not just ideological, but material.107 The world was and continues to be constituted by the ‘emergent interplay’ of these categories.108
Looking forward to the next chapter, Tuana’s ontology can also be expressed in Hegelian terms. World spirit, for all the vitriol its various deployments have rightly attracted, is about nature becoming self-conscious. Human subjectivity is the world thinking itself.109 While nature and spirit are often read as opposed in Hegel, this is too simplistic. As Angelica Nuzzo argues, ‘spirit’s liberation from nature is more precisely its liberation within (and with) nature.’110 While Hegel himself would not go as far as Tuana’s viscous porosity, his notion of spirit is one that is necessarily in an ongoing entanglement with nature.111 Though he preserves a hierarchy between spirit and nature, taking this ongoing entanglement as a dependency on nature allows for a more porous interpretation of Hegel.112
This rejection of hierarchy is also the key difference between this account of the world and Heidegger’s.113 His understanding of world is similar in emphasizing ‘the worldhood’ of Dasein’s environment and the way that a series of relations come to form a whole that provides the often-invisible background against which humans live.114 Yet in claiming that ‘the stone is worldless, the animal is poor in world, man is world-forming’, he fails to think through the deeper form of interaction described by Tuana.115 Though his inclusion of the stone and animal in his account of the world challenges the denigration of the ‘natural world’ in much of Western philosophy, he still upholds what Philip Tonner describes as ‘transcendental anthropocentrism’ in which the wider world is reduced to its significance for Dasein.116
Tuana’s ontology is also helpful in highlighting the contingency of these material and social relations without denying their reality. Nature, capital, gender and race are similar in that they all mark constructed but naturalized distinctions. Nature is conceived in opposition to ‘the human’ or culture, but both the human and cultural are natural. Nature simply is what is. Or as Sally Haslanger puts it, ‘If we endorse a broad naturalism that takes the world to be a natural world that includes as part of it social and psychological events, processes, relations and such, then it would seem that to be non-natural (at least within the empirical domain) is to be nonexistent.’117 Capital divides the world into worker and owner. Race splits the world into Black and white. Gender poses woman against man. These binaries may be socially constructed and culturally determined, but they are not individually chosen. Masculine and feminine are assigned. Rejection of these labels does not undo the initial assigning or remove their social implications. Racial classifications can be discarded, but that does not change the fact that the world racializes people.
Nature, capital, gender and race summarize the set of relations that constitute the world. In considering the materiality of these relations, it becomes clear that the world is not something chosen but something individuals are positioned by. Humans and the rest of the nature are subject to the world and this world is both violent and inescapable. Establishing this violence and inescapability is key to understanding the need for apocalyptic thinking. Objections to apocalypticism often focus on its violence and destruction. Yet these objections often speak of the world as if it is not already violent, not only in the sense of arbitrary interpersonal violence but also in the sense of the violence inherent to the divisions that are the world. To return to Schmitt’s language, the katechon is neither passive nor pacific. Even if this violence is acknowledged, however, one could hold out hope for an alternative rather than call for the end of the world. There could be different arrangements of material and social relations. Societies can gradually change. Communities can conceive of alternative ways of living together, becoming examples of ecologically responsible, egalitarian, non-gendered and deracialized forms of life. Apocalypticism should have good reasons for rejecting these hopes. Considering the nature of violence and the inescapability of the world will result in a more precise understanding of the divisions – nature, capital, gender and race. These are not merely conflicts within the world but antagonisms that define it.
As the discussion of gender and race shows, the divisions constitutive of the world entail violence that is often gruesome and interpersonal. Yet the world is violent in another sense – the world itself is violent. Slavoj Žižek differentiates these modes of violence by referring to the first as subjective and the second as objective. Subjective violence can be policed. Charges can be filed and punishments handed out. Objective violence, on the other hand, is more difficult to address. Objective violence can itself take the form of the law and police.118 It is this second that is the violence of the world: ‘the more subtle forms of coercion that sustain relations of dominance and exploitation, including the threat of violence’.119 It is a habitual violence that accompanies being in the world. Rob Nixon describes this mode of violence as ‘slow violence’: ‘a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all . . . a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and accretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales’.120 It is this often imperceptible, dispersed, ‘normal’ violence that is the violence of the world.
The reason that nature, capital, gender and race are so important for thinking the world is that these are spheres of objective or slow violence. There are clearly forms of interpersonal racism or gender-based violence, but these divisions are also violent in ways that remain invisible (to many people) in the process of constituting the world.121 In moving from thinking of these divisions individually to considering the ways they overlap and intersect, the world becomes an intractable problem. How does one address climate change without reinforcing racial or economic inequalities? How can economic issues be addressed without re-entrenching racial tensions? Attempts to redress oppression or inequality may not only result in unintended consequences but the mutually reinforcing nature of these divisions also reveals the difficulty of addressing any one. ‘Solving’ gender inequality would involve rethinking the functioning of capitalism as a whole, because the uncompensated domestic labour of women is essential to sustaining monetarily recognized labour of workers.122 The same is true for nature – capitalism predicated on cheap nature is unsustainable. Rethinking humanity’s relationship to the rest of nature requires rethinking the fundamentals of economic life.
In positing that these divisions are forms of objective or slow violence that constitute the world, I am arguing that they are not merely unresolved tensions and conflicts. They are what Wilderson calls antagonisms: ‘an irreconcilable struggle between entities, or positions, the resolution of which is not dialectical but entails the obliteration of one of the positions’.123 Humanity cannot be reconciled with nature, for it is the opposition to nature which is definitive of humanity. It is human rationality and volition in contrast to instinctual animality and the cold determinism of nature, that defines the enlightened and Enlightened (hu)man. To change humanity’s relationship to nature is not a matter of recycling, driving hybrid cars and walking to the farmer’s market. It is the obliteration of a humanity that is anything more than natural. Similarly, the relationships between worker/owner, Black/white and masculine/feminine are not dialectical.124 There is no possibility of resolution. These terms are defined in opposition to one another. To anticipate the discussion of Malabou, the world is plastic. It is plastic in the sense of malleable, for the world has clearly seen changes. Yet, plasticity also has an explosive sense and there are limits to the malleability of the world.
These limitations mark the world as inescapable. It takes the form of a totality with no beyond or outside. Daniel Colucciello Barber makes this point, arguing that the world ‘presents itself in two moments – as the given and the as the possible . . . it serves as the name of the already existent, or of that which may be subjected to critique, but it likewise serves as the name of the alternative that is imagined or invoked (even if only implicitly) by such a critique’.125 As Malabou will show, that is not the same as claiming that there is no hope or no possibility of something new. Rather, it is to claim that such hopes and possibilities must be hopes and possibilities that are not of this world. Or, as Benjamin says through Kafka, ‘there is an infinite amount of hope, but not for us’.126
Apocalypticism is rooted in this conviction that it is not just aspects of this world, but this world itself that is unethical.127 There is no world underneath these antagonisms. It is not the world, on top of which is laid capitalism, sexism, racism and other ideological formations. Those formations, in their complex intersection, are the world. There is a saying, often attributed to Frederic Jameson, that it is easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.128 This sentiment is redundant – the end of capitalism would be the end of the world. There is no remainder not positioned in relation to capital. There are pre-capitalist, ‘pericapitalist’ and post-capitalist forms of life and exchange that are not yet capitalism or resist capitalism, yet these are all still positioned in relation to capital.129
This world is hegemonic, but not homogenous. All people do not all exist in the same relation to the world. There are different versions of racial logics, but there is no world outside of racial logic. That logic is tied to a conception of nature, human and other-than-human, that is employed to differentiate people according to a hierarchical system. That hierarchy legitimates practices of appropriation, distribution and production. Different people have different conceptions of nature, but those conceptions exist in a world structured by capital’s configuration of nature. The ecological consequences of this configuration are not equally distributed, but follow established patterns of inequality: capital, gender and race. Put another way, there may be ‘many worlds in the World’,130 but they all exist in relation to the discipline of the world. The globalized nature of capitalism combined with the material manifestations of the social, political and economic relations required by and shaped by capital – the Capitalocene – means that there is nothing left untouched.
Even those positions that seem to exist outside of the relations of capital live in capitalism’s world. Take, for example, Eduardo Viveiros de Castro’s perspectivism.131 As he explains, in certain Amerindian cosmologies, the nature–human relationship is reversed. Rather than a universal nature experienced by different species (human, jaguar, macaque, etc.), there is a universal humanity differentiated by its experience of a multitude of natures. Yet even this perspectivism cannot escape the hegemony of the world. The jaguar may be a human, but the jaguar is a human in a world where the ice caps are still melting.
As Malm, describing the connection between nature and capital, explains,
[t]he fossil economy has the character of a totality, a distinguishable entity: a socio-ecological structure, in which a certain economic process and a certain form of energy are welded together. It has some identity over time . . . A person born today in Britain or China enters a preexisting fossil economy, which has long since assumed an existence of its own and confronts the newborn as an objective fact. It possesses real causal powers – most notably the power to alter the climatic conditions on planet Earth.132
The world is a dynamic whole, to return to Tuana’s language, that is both a set of constitutive antagonisms and the conditions of possibility for conceiving responses to those antagonisms. And as both Tuana and Haslanger show, these antagonisms are material. There is objectivity to the world. It imposes itself on all living and non-living things. To be real, material and objective does not mean necessary in any ontological sense. These antagonisms are necessary, but only necessary for the world. If one is willing to abandon the world, new, if indefinable, possibilities become possible. The world can be rejected, but this rejection requires more than updating ideas or shifting social attitudes. It is a real and material change.
The possibility of this change is the focus of apocalyptic political theology. As Bruno Latour argues, there is a form of apocalypticism that historicizes the world, revealing its contingency.133 It is a reminder that humanity has not, in fact, reached the end of history. Apocalypticism is thus not concerned with meteors destroying the Earth. It is not necessarily interested in climate change, strictly speaking. Rather, apocalyptic political theology explores the essentially traumatic process of addressing the antagonisms that constitute the world. These material and social relations cannot be resolved within the world, because they are the world. This impasse requires imaging the end of the world – a traumatic end that exceeds the legitimizing discourses of ethics and politics (understood in opposition to the political). Such an end is the possibility of other possibilities.
There are a number of ways of living in a violent and inescapable world. One is to accept this situation and develop social and political projects within its constraints. Or, one can hold out hope for the redemption of the world. Such hope can take a variety of utopian forms, including messianism. Finally, one can apocalyptically reject the world. Recent political theology has focused on the eschatological or messianic, often defined against apocalypticism. Much as the term political theology has come to be used to cover a diverse set of concerns, eschatology, messianism and apocalypticism have become increasingly ambiguous. In philosophical writing, the distinctions between these terms can become obscured, but as Svenungsson’s critique of political theology demonstrates, whether one adopts messianic or apocalyptic has significant political consequences. Indeed, Roland Boer critiques Taubes for this lack of precision.134 While Boer may be right that the distinction between these terms is at times elided in Occidental Eschatology, Taubes nonetheless develops a distinctive and philosophically rich apocalyptic political theology. I will return to an exploration of Taubes’s idiosyncratic version of apocalypticism in later chapters, but a more general definition of apocalypticism in contrast to these other concepts will provide context for that discussion.
Roland Boer, in his work on political myth, differentiates between these eschatology, messianism and apocalyptic perspectives. He defines eschatology as concerned ‘with the transition from the present, somewhat undesirable age to another that is qualitatively better by means of an external agent, who usually turns out to be God.’135 Messianism is a subcategory of eschatology, one in which ‘a particular individual, divinely appointed and directed, effects the transition from old to new.’136 Finally, the ‘apocalyptic refers to both a means of interpretation and a body of revealed knowledge, acquired by divine message or on a journey to the heavens.’137 Boer notes that apocalypticism is characterized by dualisms and ‘is usually a sign and an expression of intense political and social oppression’.138 The need for deliverance coupled with dualisms results in a dependence on an external, divine intervention, replicating messianism’s problematic reliance on transcendent intervention.139
While Boer’s initial differentiation of these concepts is a useful starting point, he is primarily concerned with narrow theological definitions that stem from the biblical tradition rather than tracing how the concept has developed over time. As John J. Collins points out in his Apocalyptic Imagination, frequent, vague use of ‘apocalypse’ across a number of fields has resulted in a wider meaning.140 Collins, more open to this expanded range of meanings, argues that a ‘movement might reasonably be called apocalyptic if it shared the conceptual framework of the genre, endorsing a worldview in which supernatural revelation, the heavenly world, and eschatological judgment played essential parts’.141 Similarly, Malcolm Bull embraces this more diffuse meaning, comparing ‘apocalyptic’ to ‘epic’.142 It is commonplace to refer to an ‘epic’ event without this usage entailing all the nuances of that literary genre. In the same way, the term apocalypse has expanded beyond its biblical and theological origins, no longer referring only to the Jewish and Christian traditions. Bull thus agrees with Collins that ‘apocalypse’ denotes a diverse group of related literary forms and comes to refer to a group of related but distinguishable historical movements.143
Bull goes further than Collins, however, and argues that apocalypse is a universal feature of human societies. To make this argument, he shifts from considering apocalypse theologically to considering the term’s philosophical, psychoanalytic and theoretical meanings. He understands this universal apocalypticism as the reinclusion of excluded elements of society. Drawing on Kristeva’s notion of the abject, he argues,
The reversal of customary taboos embodied in apocalyptic may extend beyond the disregard for taboos in millenarian cults, and the identification of eschatological confusion with the dissolution of the taboo. There is much to suggest that the genre is not just a revelation of the dissolution of taboos, but itself a taboo revelation. What is seen in apocalyptic vision is more often than not a series of symbols embodying what is otherwise prohibited.144
Apocalyptic (and other messianic and eschatological) movements are often antinomian. The approaching end dissolves social and political norms. Chaos erupts in anticipation of the coming end of order. Bull argues that the work of Mary Douglas and others establishes that this order is rooted in binary classifications.145
If apocalyptic is a revelation of the contradiction and indeterminacy excluded at the foundation of the world, then what is revealed may require a particular form of revelation. In societies where bivalence is assumed to be natural, the undifferentiated is inaccessible to normal patterns of thought, so access can be gained only by means that circumvent the accepted modes of cognition. Conversely, in these circumstances any supernatural revelation of hidden secrets is liable to disclose a world of contradictions and indeterminacies. The more strictly binarity is maintained, the more contradictions and indeterminacies there are to disclose – hence perhaps apocalyptic’s affinity with dualism.146
Bull self-consciously extends his definition of the apocalyptic beyond its Jewish and Christian origins.147 In doing so, he contrasts his position with Christopher Rowland’s work on apocalypse. Rowland’s more traditional approach places a greater emphasis on the genre’s Jewish and Christian origins and the shared sense of direct revelation. Yet, his privileging of the original meaning underplays how these ideas are mutated and deployed. The question is not so much what apocalypse meant, but what are the different ways that it has had meaning and what could it mean for us now. Bull does not dismiss the question of origins, but offers an abstract philosophical engagement with theological ideas. He sees apocalypse as an idea that emerges in the process of making sense of the world. What initially appears as divine revelation becomes a logical category employed by humanity in its self-understanding. He uses theological concepts to critique the world. In other words, he does political theology.
As established earlier in this chapter, the world is constituted by the antagonisms of nature, capital, gender and race. These antagonisms are binaries: nature/human, worker/owner, woman/man and white/Black. The disruptive revelation at the heart of Bull’s theory of apocalypse no longer has to come from an external divine agent. The apocalyptic revelation comes from the return of the excluded. It is brought about by the socially dead, those who are subjected to ‘invisible’ forms of violence and those that the world is structured not to see. Such a revelation does not just apocalyptically threaten the existing order; it also illuminates the nature of that order. The revelation of the truth of the world is simultaneously a demand for its end.
This chapter has provided an outline of apocalyptic political theology. Political theology, in the narrow sense, is a method of philosophical thinking that uses theological concepts to critique the world. That world is constituted by the material and social relations that can be summarized in terms of nature, capital, gender and race. That world is violent and inescapable, for those relations are not conflicts within the world, but antagonisms that are the world. To envision the end of this world is to consider the traumatic return of the excluded or the interruption of the socially dead. This apocalyptic thinking is not a vision of a new world, but an imagining of the conditions in which a new world would become possible.
Of course, one can reject this account of the world by rejecting the concept of world as such or by disagreeing with the notion of an inescapable world constituted by the divisions of nature, capital, gender and race. There is much more that could be said about this world and this brief account may not be persuasive to everyone; it is clearly informed by a set of social and political views, the defence of which lies beyond the scope of this book. Moreover, it draws upon a range of Spinozist, Hegelian, Marxist, psychoanalytic, post-humanist and other perspectives that share interconnected and interactive ontologies, but differ substantially in how they develop those ideas. While this account of the world is incomplete, it at least shows why the revelation of the nature of the world might be an apocalyptic revelation.
Even for those unconvinced by the specifics of this account, apocalyptic political theology can still offer a critique of the world. For one, it is not dependent upon the details of my discussion of nature, capital, gender and race, but rather a materialist concept of world – the notion that the world is a constructed and cohesive sense of meaning that is not only discursive but also embedded in the inescapable materiality of social, political and economic relations. The world is what allows meaning. It is both what is and what is possible. The features of this world are necessary for us, but they are not necessary as such. Confronted with such a world, the hope of alternatives must pass through the trauma of the end.
This initial summary of apocalyptic political theology has raised three questions that will occupy the rest of this book. First, there is a persistent question about the nature of political theology. In order to philosophically employ theological concepts, it is necessary to develop a political theology that engages in the ‘sociology of concepts’ and then uses those concepts to think and critique the world. While this chapter differentiated this form of political theology from other broad or sectarian approaches, it remains to be seen how exactly such a political theology operates. What notions of theology and philosophy does such a method require? Is theology subordinated to philosophy? It is for this reason that I turn to Hegel. He not only offers philosophical resources for reflecting on the relationship between theology, politics and philosophy, but those resources are an important part of the history of considering the possibility of dramatic transformations of the world.
Second, while Bull provides some insights into thinking of an apocalyptic disruption without a divine agent, it remains too difficult to envision how this works. If the world is both what is and the possibilities of what is, how can one conceive of novelty? Apocalypticism has been critiqued for its reliance on an external, divine agent. The task for the ensuing chapters is to provide a more detailed account of this immanent apocalypticism. This view of the end maintains the connection between destruction and the possibility of the new, but without the intervention of a transcendent force.
This connection between destruction and novelty is the final question. Apocalypticism, as I will continue to show, is often dismissed as overly pessimistic and fixated on violence and trauma. Even if the above account of the world is convincing, it may be that apocalypticism rushes to the most hopeless conclusions. There are other utopian, messianic or progressive ways of confronting this violent and inescapable world. And, if one is convinced by this apocalyptic view, what then? What does it mean to live apocalyptically? Does it result in a form of quietism or resignation? Or, more worryingly, perhaps it confirms the fears of Lilla, Gray and Svenungsson and leads to totalitarian or absolutist political projects.