2. SOVEREIGNTY AND THE WEAKNESS OF GOD

WHAT IS SOVEREIGN POWER, OR WHAT DOES IT MEAN TO THINK OF sovereignty as power, as traditional theology and political theory have consistently done? The complicity of political and religious power is extremely dangerous. In the introduction, I discussed the emergence of the Religious Right and its complicity with global capitalism. As Jeff Sharlet shows in his book on The Family, however, a more secretive and elite form of theocratic fundamentalism emerged in the wake of the Great Depression and the Second World War, which co-opted Christianity to serve the interests of American power. Founded as the Fellowship by Abraham Vereide, this organization formed links to powerful politicians and businessmen, impelled by the vision of ministering to the elite. It was, Sharlet claims, “the most ambitious theocratic project of the American century, ‘every Christian a leader, every leader a Christian,’ and this ruling class of Christ-committed men [were] bound in a fellowship of the anointed, the chosen, key men in a voluntary dictatorship of the divine.”¹ The only public event sponsored by the Fellowship is the National Prayer Breakfast, inaugurated by president Eisenhower in 1952 and held annually.² Renamed the Family by Vereide’s successor, Doug Coe, this movement has gone underground to the extent that it does not advertise or publicize its activities, and it does not advance a determinate theology, but rather the vague claim of “Jesus plus nothing.”³ Its main tactic, pioneered by Vereide, has been the employment of prayer-cells, small groups in which members can talk and pray together. Forged in the heart of the Cold War, “the Family’s faith is not that of a walled-off community but of an empire; not one to come but one that stretches around the globe, the soft empire of American dollars and, more subtly, American gods.”⁴ Sharlet claims that America has always had a theocratic strand, going back at least as far as Jonathan Edwards, and that to ignore its presence throughout its history is to misunderstand what the United States is and represents.

As Sharlet explains in his important study of this underground but well-connected Christian movement, the slogan proclaimed by its leader Doug Coe, “Jesus plus nothing,” opens onto a void:

 

Let J stand for Jesus. J + o = X. Is X a body of cells, or a social order, or a vision? Yes. All three. X = a vision. The vision isn’t the Sermon on the Mount; it’s not the beatitudes; its so simple it hurts … : the vision is total loyalty. Loyalty to what? To the idea of loyalty. It’s another M. C. Escher drawing, the one of a hand drawing the hand that is drawing itself. The Communist Party, plus Jesus. The Nazi Party, plus Jesus. The Red Guard, plus Jesus. What is the common denominator? Jesus? Or power? Jesus plus nothing equals power, “invisible” power, the long slow building power of a few brothers and sisters. J + 0 = P.⁵

 

Who doesn’t want power? And what country would be worth anything without military, political, and economic power? How could anyone worship God if God is not all-powerful? “Sovereign power” names existing power, and the question is whether positive sovereignty is unavoidable, which is another way of asking whether might makes right. That is, if sovereignty is necessarily thought of as power, then there is only the choice of what power reigns, legitimately or illegitimately. We could oppose the sovereign political power of the monarch or the people to the sovereignty of God, and vice versa. One way to call into question the powers-that-be is to assert another power, a stronger and more effective power that renders the powers-that-be relatively impotent.

But what if sovereignty is divorced from power, or at least actual power, and thought rather along the lines of Agamben’s impotentiality, Negri’s potentia, or Deleuze’s virtuality, as suggested in the introduction? Sovereignty has been deconstructed, and the question is whether or not it can and should be reconstructed, and in what way. This chapter will briefly survey modern notions of political sovereignty, paradigmatically founded by Thomas Hobbes, and then examine Derrida’s deconstruction of sovereignty in one of his last books, Rogues. Then I will turn to two theological attempts to think divinity without power, in the work of John D. Caputo and Catherine Keller. Finally, I consider Judith Butler’s reading of Walter Benjamin’s essay “Critique of Violence.” I argue that we must resist positive sovereign power in both political and theological terms. Sovereignty, if it can still be called sovereign, will be seen as the “power not to,” the ability to resist exercising positive power.

In modern political philosophy, The Leviathan of Hobbes founded the modern liberal state by denigrating religious claims to sovereignty for royal, monarchial, and national sovereignty. Here, the absolute power of the monarch replaces the sovereignty of the Church as God’s representative. I want to consider Hobbes as founder of modern sovereignty in this chapter, although in the next chapter I will shift to Spinoza for an alternative to Hobbes. They prefigure my discussions of Strauss and Schmitt, liberalism, and democracy in chapters 4 and 5. Spinoza, however, is strangely absent from Pierre Manent’s influential book, An Intellectual History of Liberalism. According to Manent, liberalism emerges out of a “bitter struggle against Christianity, and particularly the Catholic Church.”⁶ Manent’s genealogy locates the origin of modern liberal politics in Machiavelli, and he devotes later chapters to Hobbes, Locke, Montesquieu, Rousseau, Constant, and de Toqueville, but leaves out any chapter or specific reference to Spinoza.

According to Manent, Machiavelli provides the initial formulation of what later becomes modern liberalism, but Hobbes provides the clearest instantiation of it. Manent says that “the nonreligious, secular, lay world had to be organized under a form that was neither city-state nor empire,” and this political form of liberalism is essentially “absolute or national monarchy,” of which later popular sovereignty of representative democracy is merely a derivation.⁷ Hobbes opposes the legitimate political power of the sovereign to “the Kingdome of Darknesse” of the Roman Catholic Church, claiming that the ecclesiastical power of the apostles “is but the power to teach,” because “the Kingdome of Christ is not of this world.”⁸

Hobbes begins empirically with the human senses and builds up a social contract out of human fear and impotence in the face of nature. Ultimately, the law of nature and human civil law mirror each other, even though civil law requires a unitary sovereign: “the Law of Nature, and the Civill Law, contain each other, and are of equal extent.”⁹ Sovereignty, in contrast to the multiplicity of nature, is predicated upon unity. “A Multitude of men, are made One person, when they are by one man, or one Person, Represented,” Hobbes writes.¹⁰ The commonwealth is formed when the many become one, and are represented by one sovereign power:

 

The only way to erect such a Common Power, as may be able to defend them from the invasion of forraigners, and the injuries of one another, and thereby to secure them in such sort, as that by their owne industrie, and by the fruites of the Earth, they may nourish themselves and live contentedly; is, to conferre all their power and strength upon one Man, or upon one Assembly of men, that may reduce all their Wills, by plurality of voices, unto one Will.¹¹

 

The sovereign does not have to be one person, an individual monarch, but whatever comprises the sovereign power must by a unity.

In this way, “the Multitude so united in one Person, is called a Common-Wealth, in latine Civitas.”¹² The formation of a commonwealth or a state comes about by uniting the multitude into one person, whether a single individual or a representative assembly: “And he that carryeth this Person, is called Soveraigne, and said to have Soveraigne Power; and every one besides, his Subject.”¹³ The sovereign corporate person is the soul of the commonwealth, and all of its members are subject to this power. The idea of God is retained by Hobbes but distanced from human affairs and relegated to an otherworldly power. Ultimately, “the End of Worship amongst men,” which is the concern of public worship or civil religion, as opposed to a purely private worship of God, “is power.”¹⁴ Hobbes fashions a concept of modern sovereignty by limiting ecclesiastical power and reproducing theological power in the civil sphere.

Later, in the work of Locke and Rousseau, this sovereign person becomes a general will, and the sovereignty of the monarch devolves in modern democracy into the notion of the people. Popular sovereignty is derived from absolute, monarchical sovereignty because it is the unitary will of the people that is sovereign, not the individual whims of the multitude. Today, political power is mediated and mediatized in complex ways that render the will of the people impotent and irrelevant to the will of corporations; sovereignty can be seen as divided between a more naked military force and a more subtle sovereign wealth, or money.¹⁵

If modern political sovereignty is seen to issue from medieval forms of theological power, which is a complex transition,¹⁶ then one way to read contemporary forms of liberation theology is to see the sovereignty of God reasserted over human powers and principalities. If there is no alternative to sovereignty in a positive sense, then the question is which power, who is to be king? But what if sovereignty is deconstructed? What if God can be thought without or beyond the concept of divine power? And if this is possible, can a God without power be mapped onto the political sphere, into a dislocation of political power? A radical political theology does not simply replace one power with another but calls into question all power, including that of God.

I suggest that the sovereign power of God is intrinsically connected to the oneness of God. As Hobbes shows, sovereignty is constructed by opposing the unity of the sovereign to the multiplicity of the multitude. But, a counter-sovereignty can be thought by attending to Negri’s reading of multitudo in Spinoza, as mentioned in the introduction and will be more fully addressed in the next chapter. I understand Hobbes’s thought as described above as the instantiation and paradigmatic representative of modern political sovereignty, which can and should be criticized both politically and theologically. In the next chapter, I suggest that Spinoza’s idea of sovereignty, at least as read through Negri and Deleuze, provides a more potentially viable understanding of sovereignty that can inform a radical political theology.

Here I will petition Derrida’s philosophy, particularly in his late work Rogues, to elaborate a critical reading of Hobbesian sovereignty, and then suggest that Derrida’s deconstruction of sovereignty and affirmation of democracy leads into a serious critique of monotheism. The question about the limits of monotheism brings us to the contemporary relevance of Caputo and Keller, who provide resources to think theologically beyond monotheism, or to conceive God other than as sovereign power.

According to Jacques Derrida, to analyze the contemporary situation of reason and politics requires an analysis of sovereignty, “the huge, urgent, and so very difficult question, the new-old enigma, of sovereignty, most notably nation-state sovereignty—whether it be called democratic or not.”¹⁷ I will consider the discussion of sovereignty in the first essay in Rogues, “The Reason of the Strongest.” Derrida first deploys the image of a turning wheel and claims that “the act of sovereignty … is an event, as silent as it is instantaneous, without any thickness of time” that institutes a sort of “rotary motion” around the self, the origin, or the self as origin.¹⁸ This rotary motion constitutes the unity of the sovereign event, which instantiates an originary force: “sovereignty is a circularity, indeed a sphericity. Sovereignty is round; it is a rounding off.”¹⁹

Democracy itself is not exempt from this circular sovereignty. For democracy to exist, it must be enforced, which makes it is a form of sovereignty: “Now, democracy would be precisely this, a force (kratos), a force in the form of sovereign authority.”²⁰ This circularity also marks democracy because democracy derives its authority from the people, in whose name it exercises power. For democratic sovereignty to function, however, the multitude must be fashioned into a people with a unitary will. Derrida traces a genealogy of democratic sovereignty from an original (here, Greek) sovereign authority “of the One, of the One and Only (Unique), above and beyond the dispersion of the plural.”²¹ There exists “a long cycle of political theology” from ancient Greece to modern Europe and even an “unavowed political theology … of the sovereignty of the people, that is, of democratic sovereignty.”²² Democracy is unquestioned as the proper form of political power, but this form of sovereignty is still extremely problematic and needs to be seen as deconstructed.

Democratic sovereignty is tied to the nation-state and perhaps cannot be thought without the state: “Only a state can have a sovereign.”²³ At the same time, the state’s legitimacy and authority is being called into question. In this situation, democracy turns into voyoucracy. Voyoucracy is a neologism taken from the French title of the book, Voyous. If sovereignty as such is deconstructed, then states do not possess legitimate sovereign power, but rather all states are rogue states. Derrida claims that we cannot simply divide existing states into legitimate and rogue states, but rather, “as soon as there is sovereignty, there is abuse of power and a rogue state.”²⁴ Sovereign power depends on the turning of a wheel, a sort of merry-go-round whose centrifugal force creates a form where there was previously a void and provides that form an authority to subject other forces, whether the form of a self, a people, a nation, a monarch, or a god.

Is there any alternative to sovereignty and voyoucracy? Derrida suggests that we need to think a “democracy to come” beyond or without sovereignty.

 

This implies another thinking of the event … which is marked in a “to-come” that, beyond the future … names the coming of who comes or of what comes to pass, namely the newly arrived whose irruption should not and cannot be limited by any conditional hospitality on the borders of a policed nation-state.²⁵

 

A “democracy to come,” then, must think “an extension of the democratic beyond nation-state sovereignty, beyond citizenship.”²⁶ Here, Derrida raises the crucial question of radical democracy that I will consider further in chapter 5. With sovereignty, however, he considers the link between a democracy to come and a god to come in the context of Heidegger’s famous interview, “Only a God Can Save Us.” At the end of his provocative essay, Derrida raises the possibility of a “god without sovereignty,” by reading save or salut as greeting, salutation as opposed to salvation. “If, god forbid,” Derrida exclaims, “a god who can save us were a sovereign god, such a god would bring about, after a revolution for which we have as yet no idea, an entirely different Security Council.”²⁷ Such a sovereign god would be another rogue.

One way to understand the death of God is as the need to think God as other than sovereign. At the same time, because of the nature of sovereign power, we may also need to think God other than as one. In an essay on “A Deconstruction of Monotheism,” Jean-Luc Nancy follows Derrida in linking the unity of God to a hierarchy of power that founds and supports humanism as well as the nation-state, including the unicity of its “general form of value or sense today, that is by way of the worldwide reign of a monetary law of exchange.”²⁸ Nancy claims that our contemporary global world, at least in the West, must be analyzed for its “fundamentally monotheist provenance (thus, to put it rapidly, the universal, law, the individual; but also, in a more subtle manner, the motif of an infinite transcendence surpassing man, and within man).”²⁹

Nancy asserts a continuity between the identity of Christianity and the West, and suggests that this identity is essentially monotheistic, even if it is a self-emptying or self-deconstructive form of monotheism. At the same time, this monotheism founds the global confrontation of the War on Terror, even if we do not recognize it. For Nancy, monotheism has two sides, one that is similar to Derrida’s description of the working of sovereign power: a “Unifying, Unitary, and Universal model, also Unidimensional, and finally Unilateral (which is its internal contradiction) has made possible the symmetrical and no less nihilistic mobilization of a monotheistic and no less unilateralist model,” which is the second side.³⁰ The first model is the American version, the “national theism of the United States,” while the second is the theocratic and fundamentalistic opposition to American theism as constituting an idol or false god; this second kind is the terroristic form of monotheism.

Both the nationalistic and the theocratic monotheism are two sides of the same monotheistic coin, but both also lose “the very essence of monotheism” according to Nancy, which is closer to Derrida’s god, or democracy, “to come.” Nancy argues that

 

the “one” of the “god” is not at all Unicity qua substantial present and united with itself; on the contrary, the unicity and the unity of this “god” (or the divinity of this “one”) consists precisely in that the One cannot be posited there, neither presented nor figured as united in itself.³¹

 

Although Nancy tries to rescue monotheism from the tyranny of the One, I suggest that, following Derrida’s logic, the force or sovereign authority of monotheism works according the rotary motion of this lack of presence. For Nancy, monotheism is a self-emptying, which is why the essence of Christianity is also the deconstruction of Christianity. I will return to Nancy’s idea of the deconstruction of Christianity in the last chapter, but here I want to trouble the motion that Nancy sees as inherent in the process of the unfolding of monotheism, which is simply the flip side of sovereign rotary motion. The one motion is centripetal, accumulating force into itself, which Derrida calls sovereignty. The other motion is more centrifugal, distributing the effects of this sovereign power, which is the enforcing of sovereign power as opposed to the instantiation of sovereign power.

The question is ultimately whether self-emptying, whose theological name is kenosis, is ultimately a distribution of a properly sovereign power, or whether it is an overcoming of that very power. One possibility, of course, is that this process of self-emptying is a ruse. Is the current theological interest in the weakness instead of the power of God a ruse, a means of appearing weak while preserving divine power, or a radical and thorough dissociation of sovereignty from the idea of divinity? As Caputo warns:

 

It would be mere cunning to side with the lowly of this world in order to spring a trap on the unwary, who would then be visited by the mighty power of God Almighty, who smites his enemies. The humbling of human power in order to exalt the power of God is a ruse; it uses weakness in a bait-and-switch game, as a lure in order to spring power at the crucial moment.³²

 

If weakness is a ruse, then it is part of the cunning ring of sovereignty, the appearance of weakness that preserves a sovereign core. The rotary motion of sovereignty must be turned inside out, which is a genuinely revolutionary action.

Derrida asserts that there is an “unavowed theologism” in all sovereign power that ultimately refers back to the sovereignty of God, and this trace of sovereignty haunts democracy.³³ Caputo develops the theological implications of Derrida’s work and imagines a thinking of God that is weak, or nonsovereign, although he is also committed to the political significance of Derrida’s reflections on democracy. Caputo understands Derrida’s description of a certain “undecidability” at the heart of faith, but he wagers on a more robust and determinate religious affirmation. In an essay called “Without Sovereignty, Without Being,” Caputo says that

 

What Derrida has in mind by the unconditional is neither a hyperpower nor a hyperbeing, neither the form of the Good nor God the Father Almighty, but the power of powerlessness, the power of a powerless solicitation or promise or provocation.³⁴

 

In The Weakness of God, Caputo argues that God’s sovereign power is tied to God’s being, and it is important to think the Name of God as an event dissociated from being: “By ‘God,’ on the other hand, I do not mean a being who is there, an entity trapped in being, even as a super-being up there, up above the world, who physically powers and causes it.”³⁵ The weak power of God is the power of God’s powerlessness, which is “a promise made without an army to enforce it, without the sovereign power to coerce it.”³⁶ God’s power is a radical promise, the hope of an event to come, an event absolutely unforeseen and unconditional.

Caputo remains faithful to Derrida’s “to come,” which means not simply an extension of the present into the future, what will happen, but rather the possibility of the impossible, the opening and noncoincidence of the present with itself, the chance that the future might be radically different than the present and the past. This futurity is the chance for democracy and is also the event that the Name of God signifies, for Caputo. The weak force of possibility is opposed to the strong force of present power, and traces of this alternative way of thinking God are read in the creation narrative of Genesis, the sayings of Jesus, the letters of Paul, and other aspects of the Christian tradition. A weakening of God disrupts the forcefulness of the tradition and allows Christians to reconnect with the hope and love promised in the Gospel texts.

Ultimately, the message of the Christian Gospel is one of forgiveness or pardon. God does not magically undo the past but remakes it anew with an impossible forgiveness that happens, which hearers are called to enact, to forgive debts and debtors radically. Such a weak power of forgiveness must “somehow be able to reach back across the temporal distance and alter the past, but do so without annihilating it.”³⁷ Forgiveness is a form of salvation, a salve and a salut, welcoming and healing, which is a true resurrection rather than the magical resuscitation of corpses. Death and sin are two sides of the same coin because they represent the damning isolation of the solitary self. The self is folded in on itself and as such cannot be saved: “neither time nor salvation, neither rebirth nor resurrection, is possible in the solitary ego.”³⁸ The ego imagines that it is sovereign and turns on itself. This unitary motion constitutes sovereignty but not salvation. Salvation consists “in the messianic coming of the Other.”³⁹ So long as God is sovereign, God turns on God’s self and cannot save or be saved but only damn. For Caputo, God is liberated from being, from being God, and is also an event to come, an “à-Dieu.”

Although Caputo is critical of the formulation of the death of God, he does assert that “it is necessary to rid ourselves of God in order to witness to God.”⁴⁰ And furthermore, if that good riddance is not to be a simplistic dialectical overturning and recouping of God’s power after the death of God, then it has to bid adieu to God. The unitary rotary motion that constitutes and distributes sovereign power is only reinforced by a ruse, a pretense of weakness that preserves strength. If God reserves or preserves sovereignty, then this weakness is a sham. The radicality of the “to come” is without reserve and without restoration or reconstitution.

Catherine Keller is another postmodern theologian who is committed to thinking of God without or beyond hypermasculine power. She is influenced by Derrida and deconstruction, but she is also influenced by Whiteheadian process thought, eco-theology, feminism, and Deleuze. In The Face of the Deep, Keller develops a provocative and theo-poetic reading of creation as becoming, a continuous cocreation between God and material existence. In a subsequent book, God and Power, Keller opposes her theo-poetics of creation to an apocalyptic theo-politics of power.

In her reading of the first verse of Genesis, Keller fastens upon the Hebrew term tehom, which is usually translated as “deep”: “When in the beginning, Elohim created heaven and earth, the earth was tohu va bohu, darkness was upon the face of tehom, and the ruach elohim was vibrating upon the face of the waters.”⁴¹ Keller reads tehom in the light of Derrida’s reading of the Platonic conception of khora, a receptacle which in the Timaeus is described as a third thing between matter and form. Keller suggests that Derrida’s “politics of khora finds an echo in the theoethics of tehom. It carves a place in which the defaced depth of the others can register as spiritual demand.”⁴² If tehom is khora, or khoric, then it functions as a third between creative divinity and created matter, a “deep” that can be figured more as feminine than masculine, and one that disrupts the simple sovereign of God’s omnipotent power.

In her counterreading to the traditional theological account of creation ex nihilo, out of nothing, Keller develops a sophisticated reading of Genesis and Job, as well as aspects of the Christian theological tradition. She uses Derridean deconstruction and Whitehead’s “differential pluralism of becoming” to articulate her position.⁴³ She also appeals to Deleuze’s idea of the explication of a “pure implex,” which is the “actualization of an implicate potency. That which is ‘pure implex,’ not yet explicated, is the potentiality he calls ‘the virtual.’”⁴⁴ Keller brings together Derrida, Whitehead, and Deleuze around an understanding of potentiality that expresses the depth of creation theologically. Elohim becomes decentered, at best a pole or “strange attractor of creation” rather than the sole creator or creation itself.⁴⁵

What is important in reference to divine sovereignty is that Elohim cannot be fully God in the traditional sense, but neither can tehom be God because divinity itself is distributed across different principles, and cannot simply unite. Keller says:

 

In the course of this meditation, Tehom has taken on the names and aura of a certain goodness. But it has never been identified with “God,” nor with the All; it “is” not pan or theos. It signifies their relation: the topos of creation, where the world surges in its virtuality, in the complicatio, or “folding together,” the matrix of all relations. The relations, the waves of our possibility, comprise the real potentiality from which we emerge. So tehom, metonym of the divine womb, remains neither God nor not-God but the depth of “God.” We do not come to know this infinity.⁴⁶

 

Although she does not explicitly discuss monotheism (she does, however mention Nietzsche’s term “monotonotheism”), Keller enacts a radical dislocation of sovereign power in The Face of the Deep that calls monotheism as such into question.

The political significance of Keller’s reading becomes more explicit in God and Power. In this work, Keller critically analyzes contemporary apocalyptic themes in Christianity and American political culture, and she advocates a “‘counter-apocalypse,’ which finds relevance in apocalyptic narrative without acquiescing in its cruelties or its literalizations.”⁴⁷ Keller opposes divine sovereignty, claiming that “the theopolitical problem is not just that a nation pretends to a godlike unilateral power, but that unilateral power still appears as godlike at all.”⁴⁸ Keller claims that a simple antiapocalyptic perspective fails to adequately grapple with the scope and significance of apocalypticism and its appeal, especially to poor, marginalized, and dispossessed peoples.

A counterapocalyptic approach does not simply oppose divine weakness to power, but develops an alternative approach that she calls theo-poetic. Keller does “not reject the politics of theology or the theology of politics, but [wants to] move desirously toward a theopolitics of becoming.”⁴⁹ This theopolitics of becoming is entwined with the theo-poetic reading of creation developed in The Face of the Deep. The common strand, as difficult as it is to flesh out, is love, a “physics of love” that counters the spell of greed and power. Keller concludes that a “constructive theology of becoming sustains a political theology of love,” but “if God ceases to be a poetic invocation, however, and beings to control the political context, we have no longer to do with the God of love, but with the idol of omnipotence.”⁵⁰

Considering both Caputo and Keller together, we can suggest that an insistence on poetic becoming or the undermining of a hypermasculine, powerful God counters divine sovereignty, and furthermore, such weakness is not literally the opposite of strength on the register of being (although Keller does not specifically use the term “weakness” to characterize God). “Weakness” functions beyond the alternative strength/weakness for Caputo, just as “counterapocalypse” exceeds the opposition between apocalyptic and antiapocalyptic for Keller. I think that both theologians are creatively developing languages of potentiality, along the lines mentioned in the introduction, and that potentiality or virtuality in a broad sense, however distinctly specified, constitutes an attempt to reconfigure a nonsovereign sovereignty, or a power that exceeds actual power or crude force.

To escape or deconstruct sovereignty, however, one must also find a way to get around the One that accrues sovereign power. Beyond sovereignty means developing a theology beyond monotheism, as Laurel Schneider attempts in her provocative book Beyond Monotheism, and which Keller and Caputo both offer important resources to do. For Schneider, divine multiplicity exceeds “the logic of the One” and is incarnated in bodies that “become difference and so create the world.”⁵¹ Schneider draws upon Keller’s theology of becoming, although she also engages with contemporary poetry and literature, and her expression is often beautifully theo-poetic. The vulnerability of God prescribes a lessening of the sovereign One, which is only possible after the death of God; that is, God can only be thought without sovereignty after the link of substantial belief in omnipotent divine power is broken. At the same time, Caputo and Keller (as well as Schneider) understand that it is not enough to banish God to overcome the problematic effects of sovereign theo-political power. The One must be carefully decentered or deconstructed, which is why Keller and Caputo are two of the most radical and creative theologians writing today, at least in American.

According to Jacques Lacan, there is such a thing as a One, formed by the knot that marks the intersection of the three registers of the imaginary, the symbolic, and the real.⁵² This One is constituted by a rotary motion or a sovereign power, and monotheism names this sovereignty as God. To truly deconstruct divine and political sovereignty, we must abandon monotheism. In his thinking of the irreducible multiplicity of being, Alain Badiou seeks to formulate an alternative philosophy to the tyranny of the One and even identifies “a metaphysics of One in the work of Deleuze.”⁵³ Democracy is a step in the direction of multiplicity, but in its classical liberal form it is entangled in a univocal sovereignty, the popular sovereignty of a general will or a united state(s) or people. I will return to the explicit question of democracy, specifically a radical democracy, in chapter 5.

What would it mean to think divinity as democracy? Even the Christian Trinity preserves at least the trace of a hierarchy (Father, Son, Holy Spirit), not to mention patriarchal masculinity. According to Caputo, “What is called for is to imagine God otherwise, to turn our thinking about God around, almost upside down or inside out,” which is a revolutionary way of thinking, at once religious and political.⁵⁴ We can think God. We can think democracy. Can we think God without sovereignty? Can we conceive a radical democracy without sovereign power? Is this a potentiality, a thinking to come?

As indicated in the introduction, Giorgio Agamben has theorized potentiality and its relation to sovereignty. In the essay “On Potentiality,” Agamben discusses Aristotle’s distinction between potentiality and actuality in De Anima and Metaphysics. According to Agamben’s reading of Aristotle, potentiality is a capacity or a faculty that touches on “the existence of non-Being, the presence of an absence.”⁵⁵ Aristotle distinguishes two kinds of potentiality, one of which is the capacity to acquire a knowledge or ability, such as the potential to learn a foreign language. This is a generic potentiality. But, humans have existing potentialities, that is, a person who has already learned a foreign language has the potential at any moment to read or speak it, even if not doing so at a certain moment. Agamben states that an existing potentiality, precisely insofar as it remains potential, exists as “potential to not-do, potential not to pass into actuality.”⁵⁶

Because of this capacity to not do, potentiality is related to its own privation, or non-Being. Of course, potentiality can pass over into actuality, but its significance here is that it does not, that it maintains itself in its potentiality and refuses to act. In an essay on Herman Melville’s short story “Bartleby, the Scrivener” called “Bartleby, or On Contingency,” Agamben suggests that as a scribe who has the capacity or potentiality to write but does not, or “prefers not to,” Bartleby represents a “complete or perfect potentiality.”⁵⁷ This potential not to be or not to do is a “fundamental passivity” that at its extreme limit can be called impotentiality. “Beings that exist in the mode of potentiality are capable of their own impotentiality,” Agamben writes, “and only in this way do they become potential.”⁵⁸

Impotentiality means not only that every potentiality is related to a possible actuality, which Agamben in the essay on Bartleby calls “will,” echoing Nietzsche’s language, but also, more importantly, that every potentiality is related to its own impotentiality, its own capacity not to become actualized. Impotentiality is the limit of potentiality and the key to understanding human power. “Every human power is adynamia, impotentiality,” and this is “the origin (and the abyss) of every human power, which is so violent and limitless with respect to other living beings.”⁵⁹ Impotentiality is the source of limitless human power, but it is also, strangely, the abyss or ruin of this violent power. Impotentiality is related to human freedom, which is the power and freedom to accomplish radical good and radical evil based on the abyss of potentiality at the heart of humanity: “To be free is, in the sense we have seen, to be capable of one’s own impotentiality, to be in relation to one’s own privation.”⁶⁰

Agamben’s thought is complex, but I am drawing upon it to make a distinction between the potentiality for any idea to actualize itself in a determinate way and the impotentiality of that same idea, its power not to actualize itself but to preserve its relation to privation and non-Being, which is where Agamben locates true freedom, a freedom from the necessity to actualize itself: “Here potentiality, so to speak, survives actuality, and, in this way, gives itself to itself.”⁶¹ This is the gift of which Derrida speaks in The Gift of Death, the giving of potentiality in impotentiality, which precedes the giving that takes place in the process of the actualization of potentiality. The limit of potentiality in impotentiality is freedom, according to Agamben, even though technically speaking it does not exist in actuality. And this freedom is theological, even though it concerns not only beings but also nonbeings.

At the end of his essay on Bartleby, Agamben claims that Bartleby is a Christ figure, a new Messiah, but Bartleby “comes not, like Jesus, to redeem what was, but to save what was not.”⁶² Bartleby, as the ultimate figure of potentiality, indicates not creation but a second creation, a decreation, “in which God summons all his potential not to be.” Decreation is the limit of creation, and salvation is the end of redemption where “the creature is finally at home, saved in being irredeemable.”⁶³ That is, the freedom of the creature is its own decreation, its own restoration to (im)possibility, a balancing out of all that is by what is not but could be or could have been. Decreation applies to God as well, the decreation as the freedom of God to not be, which is the only way to save God now, to restore God to God’s own impotentiality. A task for theology’s task, in light of Agamben’s work, is to think this impotentiality as the limit of potentiality.

In many ways, thinking potentiality as impotentiality counters an emphasis on sovereignty, which Agamben’s work as well as Derrida’s helps to challenge and to deconstruct. Sovereignty is first of all the sovereign, fully actual power of God, which is instantiated in and exercised by the political ruler. During the modern period, sovereignty becomes associated first with absolute monarchy, then, as popular sovereignty, with representative democracy, as discussed earlier in connection with Hobbes.

To think about divine power as other than sovereign and to avoid the simple opposition of power and weakness, I want to conclude this chapter by considering Judith Butler’s reading of Walter Benjamin’s essay “Critique of Violence.” Benjamin is an important locus of many contemporary theoretical discussions, in particular his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” because he claims that historical materialism possesses a “weak messianic power” to “blast a specific era out of the homogeneous course of history.”⁶⁴ This weak messianic power is the subject of serious philosophical and theological discussions by Derrida, Caputo, Agamben, Žižek, and Hent de Vries, among others, and Derrida’s so-called religious turn occurs in his important essay “Force of Law,” which partly consists of a reading of Benjamin’s “Critique of Violence.”⁶⁵ I will specifically consider the concept of messianism or messianicity later in the book, in chapter 9, but here I want to focus specifically on Butler’s interpretation of divine power in Benjamin’s essay.

In her essay “Critique, Coercion, and Sacred Life in Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence,’” Judith Butler claims that Benjamin reconfigures the biblical commandment “Thou shalt not kill.”⁶⁶ Benjamin makes a distinction between a “law-instating” and a “law-preserving violence,” along with another form of violence, a divine violence that Butler says is more properly messianic.⁶⁷ Benjamin contrasts divine violence with mythic violence, which crosses or overlaps the previous distinction. Butler distinguishes her reading from Derrida’s, which focuses more on law-instating violence, noting that Derrida “made clear that he thought Benjamin went too far in criticizing parliamentary democracy.”⁶⁸

In what Benjamin calls mythic violence, the establishment of the law is considered fate, and this instantiation of law-making violence “petrifies the subject, arresting life in a moment of guilt.”⁶⁹ Divine violence, however, is figured as destructive, as undoing the law or disestablishing the legal framework itself. Here, destruction is radically nonviolent, or excessive in relation to conventional violence. Benjamin considers divine violence along the lines of the general strike, as recommended by Georges Sorel in his Reflections on Violence.

Butler argues that for Benjamin, “mere life” is life subject to mythic violence and “bloody power,” as opposed to a divine violence “undertaken for the sake of the living” that undoes the subject who is formed by the law.⁷⁰ Here, divine violence or destructive force works against the sovereign legal subject. According to Butler, divine power expiates guilt; it “constitutes an expiating moment that strikes without bloodshed.”⁷¹ Here, the problem is positive law and its mythic violence, the sovereign power to constitute a subject as subject to the law. Most monotheistic theology understands God as a divine and sovereign subject, but this is precisely what Benjamin allows us to question. Furthermore, this divine violence can be correlated with Caputo’s weakness of God and Keller’s theopolitics of becoming.

At the conclusion of her essay, Butler reads Benjamin’s “Theologico-Political Fragment” as claiming that the rhythm of life is marked by a necessary transience, which is both a form of suffering and an experience of happiness. It is this rhythm that constitutes the messianic, a form of life that is not teleological because it is not mere life in the service of sovereign legal ends. Butler quotes Benjamin, saying that “the rhythm of this eternally transient worldly existence, transient in its totality, in its spatial but also in its temporal totality, the rhythm of Messianic nature, is happiness.”⁷² Following Benjamin, Butler dissociates divine violence from divine command and divine punishment. “If divine violence is not involved in the making of law but mobilizes the messianic in its powers of expiation,” she writes, “then divine power would release the punished subject from guilt.”⁷³ This release is not only a psychological mechanism but also existentially accomplishes the salving or salut that Derrida and Caputo both affirm. Here, the messianic event of divine violence, which is violence without violence, opposes sovereign power and its teleology. According to Butler, in a reading that accords with Eric Santner’s influential interpretation of Freud and Rosenzweig, “the messianic thwarts the teleological unfolding of time” by restoring life to its transient rhythm.⁷⁴

In conclusion, a messianic weak power of God disrupts sovereign power, including the sovereign power of divinity itself, and possesses important political implications. A strike is a model of divine (in)action because it is constitutes a refusal that creates an upheaval at the heart of political society. This model of divine violence is very close to what Agamben calls impotentiality, as discussed in the introduction, because it is the refusal to exercise a capacity to do something, not simply impotence. In our contemporary corporate-capitalist world, the most difficult and maybe the most subversive act is to choose not to do something, not to shop, not to buy, not to consume, not to work. Only a dramatic constraint of our incredible potentiality to produce, consume, and devastate natural resources can perhaps ward off social collapse and increased global warming. Such action seems incredibly urgent but virtually impossible given current political and economic arrangements. The effort required to stop or at least slow down our production, consumption, and proliferation of forms of violence is so enormous that it must be divine because “only a god can save us.” But if we await such a god it will not come; only if we find a way to realize this impotentiality of divine force or weakness can we preserve our transient happiness and be saved.