Radical Political Theology: Religion and Politics After Liberalism

4. One of the best ways to read the history of the civil rights movement is through the lens of Taylor Branch’s monumental trilogy, focusing largely but not exclusively on Martin Luther King: Parting the Waters: America in the King Years 1959–63 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1989); Pillar of Fire: America in the King Years 1963–65 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1998); and At Canaan’s Edge: America in the King Years 1965–68 (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2006).

5. See Branch, Pillar of Fire, 404.

6. See Kevin Phillips, American Theocracy: The Perils and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century (New York: Penguin, 2006), particularly chapters 4–6. My reading of the rise of the Religious Right accords with Phillips’s to a great extent, although I differ from his interpretation of minor aspects of the religious history of the United States prior to the 1960s. Phillips does an excellent job of explaining the historical development of religious conservatism in the United States, and he ties these views to dangerous attitudes concerning disturbing financial and economic situations such as the peaking of world oil production and the weakened status of the U.S. dollar. For another source in addition to Phillips and Marsden that addresses this understanding of the Religious Right in relation to the aftermath of the Civil War, see David Goldfield, Still Fighting the Civil War: The American South and Southern History (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2002).

7. See Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism, trans. Katherine Jones (New York: Random House, 1967),160–164, for a discussion of the notion of the return of the repressed.

8. See Rousas John Rushdoony, The Institutes of Biblical Law (Nutley, NJ: The Craig Press, 1973). I will return to the notion of biblical law and compare Christian Reconstruction to aspects of Islamic fundamentalism in chapter 6.

9. Gary North and Gary DeMar, Christian Reconstruction: What It Is, What It Isn’t (Tyler, TX: Institute for Christian Economics, 1993), xii.

10. See Jeff Sharlet, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 348. On Dominionism more generally, see Michelle Goldberg, Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006).

11. See the ties between conservative Christianity and the Republican party documented by Theocracy Watch, www.theocracywatch.org.

12. For more on some of these imminent dangers, particularly the peaking of global oil production, see Phillips, American Theocracy, chapters 1–3, 8–10. See also, Kenneth S. Deffeyes, Beyond Oil: The View From Hubbert’s Peak (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005); Michael T. Klare, Blood and Oil: The Dangers and Consequences of America’s Growing Dependency on Imported Petroleum (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2004); and Michael C. Ruppert, Crossing the Rubicon: The Decline of the American Empire at the End of the Age of Oil (Gabriola Island, British Columbia: New Society Publishers, 2004).

13. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), 6.

16. On the Death of God theology, see Gabriel Vahanian, The Death of God: The Culture of our Post-Christian Era (New York: George Braziller, 1966); Thomas J. J. Altizer, The Gospel of Christian Atheism (Philadelphia: Westminster Press, 1966); Thomas J. J. Altizer and William Hamilton, Radical Theology and the Death of God (Indianapolis: Boobs-Merill, 1966). See also Michael Grimshaw’s account, “Did God Die in The Christian Century?”Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 6.3 (2005).

17. See Mark C. Taylor, Erring: A Postmodern A/theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1984); Carl A. Raschke, Alchemy of the Word (1979), republished as The End of Theology (Aurora, CO: Davies Group Publishers, 1999); and Charles E. Winquist, Epiphanies of Darkness (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1986).

18. Jeffrey W. Robbins, “Terror and the Postmodern Condition: Toward a Radical Political Theology,” in Religion and Violence in a Secular World: Toward a New Political Theology, ed. Clayton Crockett (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006), 196.

20. Ibid., 199. This orthodox theological framework has been challenged somewhat by recent representatives of Latin American liberation theology, including Marcella Althaus-Reid and Ivan Petrella. According to Althaus-Reid in her edited book on Liberation Theology and Sexuality (Burlington, VT: Ashgate Publishing, 2006), “the fact is that over time Latin American Liberation Theology also developed its own orthodoxy,” although she and others are opening up this orthodoxy by “doing a theology of liberation grounded on people’s own sexual life and struggle” (1). See also Ivan Petrella, Beyond Liberation Theology: A Polemic (Reclaiming Liberation Theology) (London: SCM Press, 2008). Petrella calls for a relinking of liberation theological struggles around the theme of poverty, beyond their disruption and distraction into constraining categories mapped by identity politics.

21. Ibid., 204–205. Process theology does reject theological orthodoxy, and while it has sometimes been less explicitly political, its focus on nature and ecology provides important resources for political and economic engagement. A struggle for process theology, in addition to its occasional overadherence to Whitehead’s philosophy as applied to metaphysics and theology by Charles Hartshorne and John B. Cobb, is the temptation to have it both ways, to place divinity in time and thus overcome traditional theological problems like omnipotence but still find creative ways to assert faith in such a God in a way that links up with traditional Christian ideas and practices, without the result becoming a vague and fuzzy feel-good spirituality. Certainly many process theologians do not fall into this category: see especially the work of Catherine Keller, an eco-feminist and process theologian whose work engages with postmodern themes and theorists, and whom I address in chapter 3, in particular her stunningly original The Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (London: Routledge, 2003). Although less explicitly political in their implications than Keller’s work, two very good recent books from a process theology perspective are Roland Faber, God as Poet of the World: Exploring Process Theologies (New York: Westminster John Knox Press: 2008) and Whitney Bauman, Theology, Creation and Environmental Ethics: From Creatio Ex Nihilo to Terra Nullius (London: Routledge, 2009). For the engagement of a couple of the most influential process theologians with critical issues of economics and politics, see John B. Cobb’s constructive work with the economist Hermann Daly, For the Common Good: Redirecting the Economy Toward Community, the Environment, and a Sustainable Future (Boston: Beacon Press, 1994); and David Ray Griffin’s courageous although controversial work concerning the events of 9/11, including The New Pearl Harbor: Disturbing Questions About the Bush Administration and 9/11 (Northampton, MA: Olive Branch Press, 2004).

22. See Creston Davis, John Milbank, and Slavoj Žižek, eds., Theology and the Political: The New Debate (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005). For example, Antonio Negri critiques Giorgio Agamben in his essay on “The Political Subject and Absolute Immanence” (231–239). While Negri criticizes Agamben’s understanding of the political subject as too negative and too marginal, he absolves Agamben of the charge of theology, associating theology with “verticalization” and transcendence (236). One question I am raising here is whether it is possible to imagine a fully immanent theology, or whether theology necessarily refers to transcendence. This question will be more explicitly developed in chapter 3.

23. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1974), 181.

24. See Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, trans. Frederick Lawrence (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1987).

25. See Carl A. Raschke, The Next Reformation: Why Evangelicals Must Embrace Postmodernism (Grand Rapids, MI: Baker Academic, 2004).

26. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 181.

27. Mark C. Taylor, Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World Without Redemption (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004), 30.

30. See ibid., 126–127.

31. Taylor traces the connection between John Calvin’s understanding of God’s absolute sovereignty and providence and Adam Smith’s invisible hand of the market. The metaphor of the invisible hand derives from Calvin’s emphasis on the providential hand of God (Confidence Games, 84). In After God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), Taylor argues that “After God, the divine is not elsewhere but is the emergent creativity that figures, disfigures, and re-figures the infinite fabric of life” (xviii). I agree with Taylor for the most part, and I will develop a compatible reading later in the introduction, focusing more explicitly upon the concept of freedom. But at the same time, Taylor’s captivation by the technological fabric of global capitalism and his dismissal of Marxist political theory severely limits the effectiveness of his theological intervention. He claims that contemporary critics of “late capitalism” such as Antonio Negri, Michael Hardt, and Frederic Jameson presume “a Marxist perspective in which cultural processes can always be reduced to a supposedly material economic base” (Confidence Games, 29). This is a very crude assessment that ignores the subtleties of some of the most observant Marxist and post-Marxist theories, including thinkers mentioned here. Taylor is one of the best thinkers of religion and culture of his generation, but his thought is somewhat idealistic and ideological despite his desires to the contrary and despite the complexity of most of his work. I will develop my understanding of ideology and its connection to theology in chapter 1.

32. Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1967), 161.

33. Ibid., 161 (emphasis in original).

34. Charles E. Winquist, Desiring Theology (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), ix.

35. See Richard Dawkins, The God Delusion (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2008); Sam Harris, The End of Faith: Religion, Terror and the Future of Reason (New York: Norton, 2005); Daniel Dennett, Breaking the Spell: Religion as a Natural Phenomenon (New York: Penguin, 2007); and Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Hachette Publishing, 2007). I contend that these new secularists are too reactionary and risk becoming mirror images of the so-called intolerant faiths they seek to resist.

36. Charles H. Long, Significations: Signs, Symbols and Images in the Interpretation of Religion (Aurora, CO: Davies Group, Publishers, 1999), 7.

37. Geoffrey Bennington and Jacques Derrida, Jacques Derrida (Chicago: University of Chicago Press), 155.

38. Immanuel Kant, Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals, trans. H. J. Paton (New York: Harper, 1956), 116.

39. Ibid., 119 (emphasis in original).

42. Nietzsche, The Gay Science, 264 (emphasis in original).

43. Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Random House, 1966), 29 (emphasis in original)

44. Ibid., 25 (emphasis in original).

45. Ibid., 25 (emphasis in original).

47. Jacques Derrida, The Gift of Death, trans. David Wills (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 108.

50. See Martin Heidegger, Aristotle’s Metaphysics Θ 1–3: On the Essence and Actuality of Force, trans. Walter Brogan and Peter Warnek (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1995).

51. Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 180.

52. As John D. Caputo puts it in On Religion (London: Routledge, 2001), deconstruction and deconstructive theology concerns “thinking the possibility of the impossible, of the possible as the ‘im-possible,’ and to think of God as the ‘becoming-possible of the impossible’” (10).

1. See also Clayton Crockett, ed., Secular Theology: American Radical Theological Thought, ed. (London: Routledge, 2001).

2. Wilfred Cantwell Smith, The Meaning and End of Religion (1962; New York: Harper & Row, 1978), 46.

3. Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 327.

5. See Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion: Discipline and Reasons of Power in Christianity and Islam (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1993); Jonathan Z. Smith, Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1982); Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” in Religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998); Dipesh Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); and Arvind Mandair, Religion and the Specter of the West (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).

6. See Russell T. McCutcheon, The Discipline of Religion: Structure, Meaning, Rhetoric (London: Routledge, 2003), ix, 147.

7. Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions, 328.

8. Partha Chatterjee, The Politics of the Governed: Reflections on Popular Politics in Most of the World (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 128.

10. Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe, 237.

11. See the impressive book by Ananda Abeysekara, The Politics of Post-Secular Religion: Mourning Secular Futures (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008). Abeysekara deepens the political significance of Derrida’s work by formulating the aporias of democracy, sovereignty, and community as a complex and convincing postcolonial political theory.

12. Hent de Vries, introduction to Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World, ed. Hent de Vries and Lawrence E. Sullivan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 88.

13. Gianni Vattimo, The End of Philosophy, trans. Jon R. Snyder (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), 172.

15. See Gianni Vattimo, Belief, trans. Luca D’Isanto (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999).

16. Vattimo, The End of Philosophy, 179.

17. De Vries, “Introduction,” 8.

19. William E. Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 5 (emphasis in original).

21. William E. Connolly, Capitalism and Christianity, American Style (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 94.

23. Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 191.

28. Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge: MIT Press, 2006), 4.

31. Louis Althusser, Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays, trans. Ben Brewster (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2001), 109.

34. Antonio Negri, Time for Revolution, trans. Matteo Mandarini (New York: Continuum, 2003), 253.

35. Ellen Meiksins Wood, Empire of Capital (London: Verso, 2003), 4 (emphasis in original).

37. See Immanuel Wallerstein, The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1974) and The Modern World-System II: Mercantilism and the Consolidation of the European World Economy 1600–1750 (New York: Academic Press, 1980).

38. Immanuel Wallerstein, The Decline of American Power: The U.S. in a Chaotic World (New York: The New Press, 2003), 46.

42. See Philip Goodchild, Capitalism and Religion: The Price of Piety (London: Routledge, 2002).

43. Philip Goodchild, Theology of Money (London: SCM Press, 2007), 84.

44. See Kevin Phillips, American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century (New York: Viking, 2006), 21. On peak oil, see also Kenneth S. Deffeyes, Beyond Oil: The View From Hubbert’s Peak (New York: Hill and Wang, 2005), as well as the analyses offered by The Oil Drum, www.theoildrum.com.

45. See Phillips, American Theocracy, chapter 7, 218–262.

46. See Niusha Boghrati, “Iran’s Oil Bourse: A Threat to the U.S. Economy?” Worldpress.org, April 11, 2006, www.worldpress.org/Mideast/2314.cfm (accessed September 11, 2007).

47. See Connolly, Capitalism and Christianity, 79.

48. Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of Religion at the Limits of Reason Alone,” trans. Samuel Weber, in Religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 58.

50. Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View, 105.

51. Slavoj Žižek, “Towards a Materialist Theology,” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 12, no. 1 (2007): 26.

1. Jeff Sharlet, The Family: The Secret Fundamentalism at the Heart of American Power (New York: HarperCollins, 2008), 91.

5. Sharlet, The Family, 256.

6. Pierre Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism, trans. Rebecca Balinski (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), xvii.

8. Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Richard Tuck (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 341.

15. See Philip Goodchild, A Theology of Money (London: SCM Press, 2007).

16. See Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957).

17. Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), xii (emphasis in original). See also Jacques Derrida’s 2001–2002 seminar, The Beast and the Sovereign, Volume I, trans. Geoffrey Bennington (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2009), which includes a specific discussion of Hobbes’s Leviathan.

28. Jean-Luc Nancy, Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, trans. Bettina Bergo, Gabriel Malenfant, and Michael B. Smith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 31.

32. John D. Caputo, The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), 85.

33. See Jacques Derrida, Rogues, 110.

34. John D. Caputo, “Without Sovereignty, Without Being: Conditionality, the Coming God, and Derrida’s Democracy to Come,” in Religion and Violence in a Secular World, ed. Clayton Crockett (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2006), 143.

35. Caputo, The Weakness of God, 39 (emphasis in original).

41. Catherine Keller, The Face of the Deep: A Theology of Becoming (London: Routledge, 2003), xv.

46. Ibid., 227 (emphasis in original).

47. Catherine Keller, God and Power: Counter-Apocalyptic Journeys (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress Press, 2005), xi.

48. Ibid., 50–51 (emphasis in original).

51. Laurel Schneider, Beyond Monotheism: A Theology of Multiplicity (London: Routledge, 2007), 167 (emphasis in original).

52. Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality, The Limits of Love and Knowledge 1972–1973: Encore, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book XX, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), 22–23.

53. Alain Badiou, Deleuze: The Clamor of Being, trans. Louise Burchill (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 11. See Alain Badiou, Being and Event, trans. Ray Brassier (London: Continuum, 2006).

54. Caputo, “Without Sovereignty, Without Being,” 154.

55. Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1999), 179 (emphasis in original).

57. Ibid., 246–47.

61. Ibid., 184 (emphasis in original).

63. Ibid., 271. Recall the subtitle of Taylor’s book: “Money and Markets in a World Without Redemption.”

64. Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, ed. Hannah Arendt, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 254, 263 (emphasis in original).

65. In addition to Caputo, The Weakness of God, see Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority,” trans. Mary Quaintance, in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (London: Routledge, 2001); Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994); Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005); Slavoj Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2003); and Hent de Vries, Religion and Violence: Philosophical Perspectives from Kant to Derrida (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2001). See also Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, Vol. 1, 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1996).

66. Judith Butler, “Critique, Coercion, and Sacred Life in Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence,’” in Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World, ed. Hent de Vries and Lawrence E. Sullivan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006).

70. Ibid., 210 (emphasis in original).

74. Ibid. Butler’s reading of Benjamin is indebted to Eric Santner’s extraordinary book On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life: Reflections on Freud and Rosenzweig (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2001). Butler reads Benjamin along similar lines that Santner interprets Rosenzweig and Freud, where God is not a transcendent Being or super-ego, but rather an ethical (or meta-ethical) force: “God is above all the name for the pressure to be alive to the world, to open to the too much pressure generated in large measure by the uncanny presence of my neighbor” (9); and this counters traditional forms of sovereign power. Santner discusses Rosenzweig’s proximity to Benjamin, including Derrida’s reflections on Benjamin in “Force of Law,” on 56–60.

1. Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Barbara Habberjam (New York: Zone Books, 1991), 96.

3. Ibid. (emphasis in original).

5. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 211–212.

8. Deleuze, Bergsonism, 15.

9. Antonio Negri, The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 191.

12. See Deleueze and Guattari’s claim that Spinoza was “the Christ of philosophers.… Spinoza, the infinite becoming-philosopher: he showed, drew up, and thought the ‘best’ plane of immanence” (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 60.

13. Yirmiyahu Yovel, Spinoza and Other Heretics: The Marrano of Reason (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1989), 20. See also my discussion of Spinoza in relation to Kant, Derrida, and John D. Caputo in “Post-Modernism and its Secrets: Religion Without Religion,” CrossCurrents 52, no. 4 (2003): 500–503.

15. Jonathan I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001), 159.

16. Baruch Spinoza, Ethics, Treatise on the Emendation of the Intellect and Selected Letters, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1992), 31.

20. See Spinoza, The Principles of Descartes’ Philosophy, trans. Halbert Hains Britan (La Salle, IL: Open Court, 1974.

22. Etienne Balibar essentially follows Deleuze’s lead in Spinoza and Politics, trans. Peter Snowdon (London: Verso, 1998) when he claims that “the whole of Spinoza’s philosophy … can be understood as a highly original philosophy of communication” (99).

23. Gilles Deleuze, Spinoza: Practical Philosophy, trans. Robert Hurley (San Francisco: City Lights Books, 1988), 199.

25. Gilles Deleuze, Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Zone Books, 1992), 54–55.

27. See Spinoza’s distinction between obedience to God, which is required by revelation, and intellectual knowledge of God, which is known by reason, in his Theological-Political Treatise, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 1998), 158.

28. See Gilles Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, trans. Hugh Tomlinson (New York: Columbia, 1983), 57: reactive forces “decompose: they separate active force from what it can do; they take away all or almost all of its power.”

29. See Antonio Negri, Marx Beyond Marx: Lessons on the Grundrisse, trans. Harry Cleaver, Michael Ryan, and Maurizio Viano (New York: Pluto Press, 1991), 45–46.

30. Antonio Negri, The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 62.

37. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Press, 2004), 329.

42. See John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990), 37.

43. Graham Ward, Christ and Culture (Oxford: Blackwell, 2005), 89.

44. See Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michel Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005).

45. Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols in The Portable Nietzsche, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, 1968), 486.

46. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 172.

1. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 36.

2. Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957), 58.

3. See Max Weber, Economy and Society: An Outline of Interpretive Sociology, ed. Gunter Roth and Claus Wittich, 2 vols. (New York: Bedminster Press, 1968).

4. See Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, trans. Oscar Burge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1999).

5. See Schmitt, Political Theology, 36–37. See also Schmitt, Political Theology II, trans. Graham Ward and Michael Hoelzl (London: Polity Press, 2008).

6. On the development of Schmitt’s thought, see Gopal Balakrishnan, The Enemy: An Intellectual Portrait of Carl Schmitt (New York: Verso, 2000).

7. Heinrich Meier, Carl Schmitt & Leo Strauss: The Hidden Dialogue, trans. J. Harvey Lomax (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1995), xv.

9. Heinrich Meier, Leo Strauss and the Theologico-Political Problem, trans. Marcus Brainard (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 84.

11. Leora Batnitzky, Leo Strauss and Emmanuel Levinas: Philosophy and the Politics of Revelation (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2006), 5.

12. Ibid., 14 (emphasis in original).

13. Carl Schmitt, The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, trans. Ellen Kennedy (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1985), 35.

14. Schmitt, Political Theology, 62.

15. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 70.

16. Leo Strauss, “Notes on The Concept of the Political,” trans. J. Harvey Lomax, in Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, 83–107 (quote on 84).

17. Ibid., 101. See also Meier, Carl Schmitt & Leo Strauss, 47: “Ultimately, for Schmitt the affirmation of the political is nothing but the affirmation of the moral. But Schmitt sees the affirmation of the moral as itself based in the theological.”

20. See Leo Strauss, What is Political Philosophy? (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1959), 28–29.

21. Meier, Carl Schmitt & Leo Strauss, 47.

22. See Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007).

23. Karl Polanyi, The Great Transformation: The Political and Economic Origins of Our Time (Boston: Beacon Press, 1957), 72.

26. See Kevin Phillips, American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century (New York: Viking, 2006).

27. Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 71.

28. Samir Amin, The Liberal Virus: Permanent War and the Americanization of the World, trans. James H. Membrez (New York: Monthly Review Press, 2004), 9.

29. See Amin, The Liberal Virus, 39.

30. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Eyes of the Heart: Seeking a Path for the Poor in the Age of Globalization (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 2000), 49.

33. Peter Hallward, Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment (London: Verso, 2007), 235–249.

35. See Polanyi, The Great Transformation, 40–41.

36. John Locke, A Letter Concerning Toleration, in John Locke on Politics and Education, ed. Howard R. Penniman (Toronto: D. Van Nostrand Company, 1947), 24. See also the critique of Locke which suggests that his effort to demarcate separate spheres for religion and politics necessarily fails, in my editorial introduction, coauthored with Creston Davis, to the special issue of Angelaki that Creston Davis and I coedited on “The Political and the Infinite: Theology and Radical Politics,” Angelaki 12, no. 1, (2007): 1–10.

37. Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 183 (emphasis in original).

38. Ibid., 191 (emphasis in original).

40. Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), 25.

42. On the paradoxical nature of belief, with attention to its ideological and political implications, see the work of Slavoj Žižek, including On Belief (London: Routledge, 2001). On the relevance of ideas of the unconscious in Freud, Lacan, and Žižek for radical theology, see my book Interstices of the Sublime: Theology and Psychoanalytic Theory (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007).

43. See Sam Harris, Letter to a Christian Nation: A Challenge to Faith (New York: Bantam, 2007) and Christopher Hitchens, God is Not Great: How Religion Poisons Everything (New York: Hachette Books, 2007).

44. Jacques Derrida, “Taking a Stand for Algeria,” in Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (London: Routledge, 2002), 306.

45. Asad, Formations of the Secular, 200.

46. See Secular Theology: American Radical Theological Thought, ed. Clayton Crockett (London: Routledge, 2001), especially the introduction, 1–9, and chapter 1, “Theology and the Secular” by Gabriel Vahanian, 10–25.

1. For a similar approach to these issues, see Jeffrey W. Robbins, Radical Democracy and Political Theology (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011). Robbins and I both critique the theoretical understandings of political theology that are dominated by Carl Schmitt, and we argue that a serious engagement with political theology does not foreclose democracy; but democracy must be radicalized, as I suggest and offer conceptual tools for in this chapter.

2. Jeffrey Stout, Democracy and Tradition (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2004), 289.

4. Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007), 288.

6. Ananda Abeysekara, The Politics of Postsecular Religion: Mourning Secular Futures (New York: Columbia University Press, 2008), 2.

7. Jean-Bertrand Aristide, Eyes of the Heart: Seeking a Path for the Poor in an Age of Globalization (Monroe, ME: Common Courage Press, 2000), 36.

8. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1985), 36.

9. See Gopal Balakrishnan, The Enemy (London: Verso, 2000), 180.

10. Baruch Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, 2nd ed., trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 1998), 3.

12. Matthew Stewart, The Courtier and the Heretic: Leibniz, Spinoza, and the Fate of God in the Modern World (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), 101.

14. See Etienne Balibar, Spinoza and Politics (London: Verso, 2008), 17

15. Baruch Spinoza, Political Treatise, trans. Samuel Shirley (Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing Company, 2000), 44.

17. Rocco Gangle, “Sovereignty and State-Form,” in The Sleeping Giant Has Awoken: The New Politics of Religion in the United States, ed. Jeffrey W. Robbins and Neal Magee (New York: Continuum, 2008), 141.

18. Pierre Manent, An Intellectual History of Liberalism, trans. Rebecca Balinski (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1995), 116.

19. Claude Lefort, Complications: Communism and the Dilemmas of Democracy, trans. Julian Bourg (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007), 190.

20. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 5.

22. Antonio Negri, The Savage Anomaly: The Power of Spinoza’s Metaphysics and Politics, trans. Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991), 202.

23. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2007), 110. See also Giorgio Agamben’s genealogical extension of Foucault’s notion of governmentality back into theological understandings of economy in Il Regno e la Gloria (Rome: Neri Pozza, 2007).

31. Jacques Rancière, The Hatred of Democracy, trans. Steve Corcoran (London: Verso, 2006), 13.

38. Alain Badiou, “A Speculative Disquisition on the Concept of Democracy,” in Metapolitics, trans. Jason Barker (London: Verso, 2005), 78 (emphasis in original).

39. Ibid., 85 (emphasis in original).

42. Catherine Malabou, La plasticité au soir de l’écriture: Dialectique, destruction, déconstruction (Paris: Éditions Léo Scheer, 2005), 25. The English translation is Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction, trans. Carolyn Shread (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).

45. See, for example, Jean-Pierre Changeux, Neuronal Man: The Biology of Mind, trans. Laurence Garey (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997); Jean-Pierre Changeux and Paul Ricoeur, What Makes us Think?, trans. M. D. Bevoise (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2000); and Antonio Damascio, Looking for Spinoza: Joy, Sorrow, and the Feeling Brain (Orlando: Harcourt Books, 2003).

46. Catherine Malabou, Que faire de notre cerveau? (Paris: Bayard, 2004), 32. The English translation is What Should We Do with Our Brain?, trans. Sebastian Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008).

48. On destructive plasticity, see Catherine Malabou, Les nouveaux blessés: De Freud à la neurology, penser les traumatisms contemporains (Paris: Bayard, 2007), 48–49. The Newly Wounded concerns our traumatic brain injuries, whether from war or disease, and their ability to render us completely other than who we are.

49. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations: Essays and Reflections, trans. Harry Zohn (New York: Schocken Books, 1968), 263.

1. Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michel Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 92.

2. “President Signs Military Commissions Act of 2006.” Available online at http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2006/10/20061017–1.html.

3. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 5.

5. Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 39.

6. See John Locke, The Second Treatise of Government (Indianapolis: The Liberal Arts Press, 1952), 84; Jean-Jacques Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, trans. G. D. H. Cole (London: J. M. Dent & Sons, 1973), 200–202.

7. Rousseau, The Social Contract and Discourses, 136.

8. See Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 34–35.

10. Rousas John Rushdoony, The Institutes of Biblical Law (The Craig Press, 1973), 4.

11. Gary North and Gary DeMar, Christian Reconstruction: What It Is, What It Isn’t (Tyler, TX: Institute for Christian Economics, 1991), xi, 37.

13. Chris Hedges, American Fascists: The Christian Right and the War on America (New York: Free Press, 2006), 11.

14. See Khaled Abou El Fadl, The Great Theft: Wrestling Islam from the Extremists (New York: HarperCollins, 2005).

15. See Wael Hallaq, The Origins and Evolution of Islamic Law (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

16. Tamara Sonn, “Phases of Political Islam,” in Religious Fundamentalism in the Contemporary World, ed. Santosh Saha (Lanham, MD: Lexington Books, 2004), 95.

17. See Abu A’la Mawdudi, Islamic Law and Constitution, trans. Khurshid Ahmad (Lahore: Islamic Publications, 1967).

18. Abou El Fadl, The Great Theft, 83.

20. Sonn, “Phases of Political Islam,” 101.

21. Olivier Roy, Globalized Islam: The Search for the New Ummah (New York: Columbia University Press, 2004), 32–33.

22. See Irving Kristol, Neo-Conservativism: The Autobiography of an Idea (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, Publisher, 1999), 6–9.

23. Agamben, State of Exception, 39.

30. Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The Mystical Foundation of Authority, trans. Mary Quaintance, in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (London: Routledge, 2001), 233.

33. Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 79.

37. Ibid., 81 (emphasis in original).

39. See Jacques Lacan, Écrits: The First Complete Edition in English, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton, 2006), 232–34.

40. See Jacques Lacan, Seminar XVII: The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Russell Grigg (New York: W.W. Norton, 2007).

41. See Alain Badiou, Metapolitics, trans. Jason Barker (New York: Verso, 2005); Alain Badiou, Being and Event., trans. Oliver Feltham (New York: Continuum, 2006); Slavoj Žižek, Tarrying With the Negative: Kant, Hegel, and the Critique of Ideology (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1995); Slavoj Žižek, The Parallax View (Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2006).

42. Jacques Lacan, The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psychoanalysis, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: W.W. Norton, 1978), 20.

43. See Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan Book XX: One Feminine Sexuality, the Limits of Love and Knowledge 1972–1973, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998). On Freud and Lacan and their significance for theological thinking, see my Interstices of the Sublime: Theology and Psychoanlytic Theory (New York: Fordham University Press, 2007).

44. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 22.

49. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1983), 26.

55. See Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence: Essays on a Life, trans. Anne Boyman (New York: Zone Books, 2001).

56. Peter Hallward, Out of This World: Deleuze and the Philosophy of Creation (London and New York: Verso, 2006), 2. Although I am critical of Hallward’s interpretation of Deleuze, which follows too closely upon his influential reading of Badiou in Badiou: A Subject to Truth (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), I want to affirm the incredible importance of Hallward’s book on Haiti, Damming the Flood: Haiti, Aristide, and the Politics of Containment (London: Verso, 2007), which is a searing engagement with contemporary politics and a damning critique of neoliberalism.

58. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 216.

59. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 369, 493.

1. In The Weakness of God: A Theology of the Event (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2006), John D. Caputo invokes Deleuze’s paradoxical thinking of the event and Deleuze’s discussion of Alice in Wonderland in relation to Caputo’s reading of the Bible (see 109, 204–205), although overall Caputo’s notion of the event is more influenced by Derrida, and while Caputo has a chapter specifically devoted to Paul (“St. Paul on the Logos of the Cross”), he does not discuss Deleuze explicitly in relation to Paul.

2. Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 2.

3. In the prologue, Badiou singles out two secondary works on Paul, one by a Catholic, Stanislas Breton, Saint Paul, trans. Joseph Ballon (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), and one by a Protestant, Günther Bornkamm, Paul (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 1995). In situating his contribution, Badiou writes: “A Catholic, a Protestant. May they form a triangle with the atheist” (3). Now, any book that seriously considers Paul’s political significance today would have to have at least four sides or corners to take into account the 1987 lectures by Jacob Taubes, published as The Political Theology of Paul, trans. Dana Hollander (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004).

4. Witness the conference at Syracuse University, “St. Paul Among the Philosophers: Subjectivity, Universality and the Event,” April 12–14, 2005, featuring Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, along with New Testament and St. Paul scholars and historians. See my review, from which the first part of this chapter partially draws, “St. Paul and the Event,” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 6.2 (2005), and the book that resulted from this conference, St. Paul Among the Philosophers, ed. John D. Caputo and Linda Martín Alcoff (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2009).

5. See Slavoj Žižek, The Indivisible Remainder: An Essay on Schelling and Related Matters (London: Verso, 1996), especially chapter 2, “Schelling-for-Hegel: The Vanishing Mediator,” 92–186.

6. Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limits of Reason Alone,” in Religion, edited by Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 33 See also Jacques Derrida, Monolinguism of the Other; or, The Prosthesis of Origin, trans. Patrick Mensah (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998.

7. See Dominique Janicaud, et.al., Phenomenology and the “Theological Turn”: The French Debate (New York: Fordham University Press, 2000).

8. See my constructive elaboration of a radical theology developed out an encounter with Continental philosophy and psychoanalytic theory in Interstices of the Sublime: Theology and Psychoanalytic Theory (Fordham: Fordham University Press, 2007).

9. See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist in The Nietzsche Reader, ed. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin Books, 1976), 565–656.

10. Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, 40.

12. Martin Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life, trans. Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004), 63.

15. Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper & Row, 1962), 373.

16. Gilles Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, trans. Paul Patton (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 64–65.

24. Ibid. Deleuze also privileges Hölderlin as an alternative to Hegel, whose philosophy he strongly opposes. I wonder, however, whether it would be possible to rehabilitate Hegel for a Deleuzian reading of history, to render a Deleuzian reading of Hegel, something like: “From the Science of Logic to the Logic of Sense.” Such a project, however, is far beyond the scope of this chapter and this book.

30. Ibid. Deleuze does not distinguish between differentiation and differenciation until chapter 4, by way of explaining the relationship between the virtual and the actual. Differentiation translates the French différentier, which is a more formal mathematical term, and concerns virtual differences. Differenciation translates the French différencier, which is the more common word that means what we call in English differentiation, and Deleuze associates this word with the actualization of differences (see 207). This is a crucial distinction in Difference and Repetition, but these two terms and processes are not yet separated out in chapter 2, where Deleuze uses the more general word (in French) differenciation. See also my discussion of this term in relation to that of the virtual in the introduction to this book.

33. Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 65–66.

35. Gilles Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 22. Sense is associated with language, and the event is tied to sense. Agamben’s reading of Paul attends to the “experience of a pure event of the word that exceeds every signification,” that is, a “revelation of language itself ” (The Time That Remains, 134). This experience of the pure word is similar to what Deleuze means by sense in The Logic of Sense, and both Agamben and Deleuze relate sense or the experience of a pure word directly to event, although as I will discuss later, Agamben remains more faithful to a chronological temporality and its inherent teleology than Deleuze, whose pluri-directionality of sense disrupts linear chronology.

37. Quoted in ibid., 5.

41. See Badiou, Saint Paul, 88: “Law returns as life’s articulation for everyone, path of faith, law beyond law. This is what Paul calls love.”

42. See John Dominic Crossan and Jonathan L. Reed, In Search of Paul: How Jesus’s Apostle Opposed Rome’s Empire with God’s Kingdom (New York: HarperCollins, 2004).

43. See Jacques Derrida, “Différance,” in Margins of Philosophy, trans. Alan Bass (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1978).

44. See Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (New York: Columbia University Press, 1989).

45. Deleuze, The Logic of Sense, 22.

52. Agamben, The Time That Remains, 103.

53. See ibid., 23–24, where Agamben discusses Paul’s injunction to disciples to be “weeping as not weeping.” This tensor or tensive relationship occurs in Deleuzian time, which is “time contracted itself,” but at a micro or molecular level, not in an overarching, molar, or macro level. We could also consider Deleuze’s time as micro-messianic, or messianic in a minor sense.

54. See Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, What is Philosophy?, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Graham Burchell (New York: Columbia University Press, 1994), 60.

55. See Edith Wyschogrod, Saints and Postmodernism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).

56. Gilles Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1997), 37.

59. Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, 79.

62. See Deleuze’s opposition of two orders in his reading of Klossowski in the appendix to The Logic of Sense, the order of God versus the order of the Antichrist. The title, Antichrist, may be too literally Nietzschean, but here Deleuze understands God as the master of the disjunctive syllogism, who preserves himself from its operations, whereas the order of the Antichrist occurs when “the disjunctive syllogism accedes to a diabolical principle and use, and simultaneously the disjunction is affirmed for itself without ceasing to be a disjunction; divergence or difference becomes objects of pure affirmation” (The Logic of Sense, 296). Later in The Fold, Deleuze subjects God explicitly to this thinking of disjunction as disjunction, or pure difference, which means in Leibnizian terms that God passes through the possibles and the imcompossibles. Contrasting Whitehead with Leibniz, Deleuze claims that with Whitehead, “God desists from being a Being who compares worlds and chooses the richest compossible. He becomes Process, a process that at once affirms incompossibilities and passes through them.” See The Fold: Leibniz and the Baroque, trans. Tom Conley (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), especially chapter 6, “What is an Event?” 76–82, quote on 81. We could elaborate an alternative Deleuzian reading of Christ, specifically in terms of his divinity, along these lines, but it is beyond the scope of the present chapter.

63. See the expressions and formulations of Radical Orthodoxy, including John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory: Beyond Secular Reason (Oxford: Blackwell, 1990); Catherine Pickstock, After Writing: On the Liturgical Consummation of Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell, 1998); and Conor Cunningham, Genealogy of Nihilism: Philosophies of Nothing and the Difference of Theology (London: Routledge, 2002). See also their essays in Theology and the Political: The New Debate, ed. Creston Davis, John Milbank, and Slavoj Žižek (Durham: Duke University Press, 2005).

64. See Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason, trans. Pascale-Anne Brault and Michael Naas (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 143.

65. See Alain Badiou, Infinite Thought: Truth and the Return to Philosophy, trans. Oliver Feltham and Justin Clemens (London: Continuum, 2003), introduction: “some human beings become subjects: those who act in fidelity to a chance encounter with an event which disrupts the situation they find themselves in” (6).

66. Deleuze, Cinema 2, 172.

1. See Marcel Gauchet, The Disenchantment of the World: A Political History of Religion, trans. Oscar Burge (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997).

2. Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, The Work of Mourning, and the New International, trans. Peggy Kamuf (London: Routledge, 1994), 59.

5. Mark C. Taylor, After God (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007), 43.

6. Richard Rorty and Gianni Vattimo, The Future of Religion, ed. Santiago Zabala (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), 53.

9. See Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 145.

11. Mohammed Arkoun, Islam: To Reform or to Subvert? (London: Saqi Books, 2006), 13.

12. Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans, trans. Patricia Dailey (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 67.

14. Jean-Luc Nancy, Dis-Enclosure: The Deconstruction of Christianity, trans. Bettina Bergo, Gabriel Malenfant, and Michael B. Smith (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 140. This essay was originally published in English as Jean-Luc Nancy, “The Deconstruction of Christianity,” in Religion and Media, ed. Hent de Vries and Samuel Weber (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 112–130.

17. Jacques Derrida, On Touching—Jean-Luc Nancy, trans. Christine Irizarry (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 54.

18. See Ibid., 60: “Let us never forget that Christian, in fact, Lutheran, memory of Heideggerian deconstruction (Destruktion was first destructio by Luther, anxious to reactivate the originary sense of the Gospels by deconstructing theological sediments.”

19. See Martin Heidegger, The Phenomenology of Religious Life, trans. Matthias Fritsch and Jennifer Anna Gosetti-Ferencei (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2004).

20. Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 45.

21. Catherine Malabou, La Plasticité au soir de l’écriture: Dialectique, destruction, déconstruction (Paris: Éditions Léo Scheer, 2005), 25n1. English translation: Plasticity at the Dusk of Writing: Dialectic, Destruction, Deconstruction, trans. Carolyn Shread (New York: Columbia University Press, 2009).

22. For a consideration of the transcendental imagination in Heidegger and Kant, as well as a theological reading of the Kantian sublime, see my A Theology of the Sublime (London: Routledge, 2001).

23. Catherine Malabou, The Future of Hegel: Plasticity, Temporality and Dialectic, trans. Lisabeth Durling (London: Routledge, 2005), 112.

24. Ibid., 113. See also Cyril O’Regan, The Heterodox Hegel (New York: State University of New York Press, 1994).

25. Malabou, The Future of Hegel, 119.

27. Derrida, On Touching, 60.

28. Jacques Derrida, Of Grammatology, trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976), 68.

29. Here Malabou’s reading of Hegel conflicts with the standard reading according to which the progression of spirit is essentially circular. Furthermore, Malabou, along with Žižek and others, provides a new way of engaging with Hegel’s contemporary significance, beyond the stereotypical postmodern critique of Hegel as a totalizing thinker. See Hegel and the Infinite: Religion, Politics and the Dialectic, edited by Slavoj Žižek, Creston Davis and myself (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011).

30. Catherine Malabou, Que faire de notre cerveau? (Paris: Bayard, 2004), 14. English translation: What Should We Do with Our Brain? trans. Sebastian Rand (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008). All translations, however, are my own.

31. See Dean Hamer, The God Gene: How Faith is Hardwired into our Genes (New York: Anchor, 2005); Pascal Boyer, Religion Explained: The Evolutionary Origins of Religious Thought (New York: Basic Books, 2001).

32. Gilles Deleuze, Cinema 2: The Time-Image, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and Robert Galeta (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1989), 17.

33. Malabou, Que faire de notre cerveau?, 83.

35. Nancy, Dis-Enclosure, 160.

37. See Alain Badiou, Polemics, trans. Steve Corcoran (London: Verso, 2006), 207 (emphasis in original).

38. Margaret Atwood, Surfacing (1972; New York: Random House, 1998), 160.

39. Nancy, Dis-Enclosure, 160.

42. Malabou, Que faire de notre cerveau?, 149.

43. Leonard Lawlor, The Implications of Immanence: Toward a New Concept of Life (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006), 43.

46. See Catherine Malabou, Les nouveaux blesses: De Freud à la neurologie, penser les traumatismes contemporains (Paris: Bayard, 2007), 342.

47. Catherine Malabou, “An Eye at the Edge of Discourse,” trans. Carolyn Shread, Communication Theory 17 (2007): 22.

50. On Verwindung, see Gianni Vattimo, The End of Modernity, trans. Jon R. Snyder (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1988), especially chapter 10, “Nihilism and the Post-Modern in Philosophy,” 164–81. Vattimo contrasts Verwindung with Überwinding in Heidegger, and claims that rather than a straightforward overcoming, Verwindung constitutes an acceptance that is a convalescence, which Vattimo also translates as “secularization” (179).

51. Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limit of Reason Alone,” in Religion, ed. Jacques Derrida and Gianni Vattimo (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998), 51.

52. Nancy, Dis-Enclosure, 160.

53. Jacques Lacan, On Feminine Sexuality: The Limits of Love and Knowledge Book XX Encore, ed. Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. Bruce Fink (New York: W.W. Norton, 1998), 45.

54. Carl Schmitt, letter to Armin Mohler, published in Jakob Taubes, Ad Carl Schmitt: Gegenstrebige Fügung (Berlin: Meuve, 1987), 34–35.

1. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 36.

3. See Naomi Klein, The Shock Doctrine: The Rise of Disaster Capitalism (New York: Metropolitan Books, 2007).

4. Carl Raschke, “The Deconstruction of God,” in Deconstruction & Theology (New York: Crossroad, 1982), 3.

5. Robbins, like myself, studied with Winquist at Syracuse University and claims the heritage of radical theology started there by Gabriel Vahanian. See Jeffrey W. Robbins, Between Faith and Thought: An Essay on the Ontotheological Condition (Charlottesville: University of Virginia Press, 2003), as well as John D. Caputo and Gianni Vattimo, After the Death of God, ed. Jeffrey W. Robbins (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). John D. Caputo’s retirement from Villanova to take a position in the Religion department at Syracuse marks his shift from philosophy to theology, and he has also embraced this tradition of radical theology in the United States. Davis studied with John Milbank at the University of Virginia and emerges out of the Radical Orthodoxy tradition, but he is also drawn to it and eventually toward a nuanced American radical theology because of its resources for theo-political critique of liberal capitalism. See Creston Davis, John Milbank, and Slavoj Žižek, eds., Theology and the Political (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2005), as well as Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank, The Monstrosity of the Christ, ed.Creston Davis (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009).