Political theology in the 21st century
Our collective energy is wilting
I met Geminello Preterossi, an eminent Italian philosopher of law, on the outdoor patio of the same casual restaurant in the Pigneto neighbourhood of Rome to which he always summons his interlocutors. He values familiarity and being recognised, I suppose – though with his formal attire and briefcase, he stands out. Nello, as he is known, has a booming voice tinged with a Tuscan accent and a quick, curious mind. I have seen him give a talk for four hours straight without tiring, the words, theories and citations pouring out of him like a cascading body of water. He is meticulously erudite and knows the ins and outs of his complex material (legal and constitutional philosophy), which is also his passion. Those who challenge him must do so wearily.
I was coming in peace, thankfully. We had a long conversation about his most recent book Political Theology and Law (2023), the Italian version of which came out the year prior. Rather than print our meandering chat – interspersed with coffee orders and mentions of our top vacation destinations (Greece for both) – this article will sketch out some of the basic elements of his book.
What is political theology?
Diagnoses and analyses of the malaise of our time – one of rampant neoliberalism, or is it late capitalism? – abound. Preterossi’s contribution, however, brings some refreshing novelty to the discourse, though of course he is re-fashioning a political notion that is about one hundred years old: Carl Schmitt’s political theology. It is a timely one to recast, and indeed has recently seen something of a reprisal across academia (e.g., Zizek’s 2024 Christian Atheism).
The central reference for the concept of political theology is Schmitt’s seminal (and always controversial) 1922 work, Political Theology: Four Concepts on the Concept of Sovereignty, where he famously argues that ‘all significant concepts in the modern theory of the state are secularised theological concepts’ (Schmitt 2005, 36). Religion – as form, not as content – is the organising principle of our political collective life[1]. The State, during that grand project of secularisation that was the unfolding of modernity from the Renaissance on, Schmitt argues, took the place previously occupied by God, and left most else untouched. Christianity, being the religion that ushered Europe into modernity, and which shapes neoliberalism today, is the focus of both Schmitt and Preterossi.
What religion generally did was provide a qualitative leap in the organisation of a people, allowing them to reach a next level of collective co-existence. Separate individuals could more easily transcend their limitations and, synergistically, form one cohesive unit with shared values and expectations. For, as Preterossi asks in a 2016 essay that serves as a precursor to his book, ‘what is the glue that keeps the social order together?[2]’ (40). It is something we marvel at all too rarely, the extraordinary accomplishment of organising large masses of individuals who do not know each other personally and have different needs and interests. What keeps at bay the doubts, and leads people to accept one system over another, even when it may be disagreeable to them (requiring them to pay taxes, or agree to a certain education system)? The barest Hobbesian social contract – a few parties signing on to a mutually beneficial agreement – gives no basis for the depth and energy of a vibrant and functioning mass society – something, Preterossi suggests, that Hobbes knew very well, hence his emphasis on the essential role of a powerful, almost mythological origin to his, embodied in the aptly named Leviathan as the mythical-spiritual side of the state apparatus (Preterossi 2022, 20, 30-31).
In a religious society, order is maintained through the legitimising power of divinity (to put it simply, the divine stamp of rulers and the fervour of religious masses[3] enabled the transcendence[4] of the reigning order). This divine order transfigures into the legitimising power of the sovereign in a secularised society. In a nutshell, that is Schmitt’s argument in Political Theology.
Who or what is this sovereign? ‘Sovereign is he who decides on the exception’ (Schmitt 2005, 5). Danke schön, Carl. What Schmitt means with ‘exception’, since transfigured into a commonplace phrase (‘state of exception’), is the immense power to decide what is normal, business-as-usual, and what is not, and thus when the abnormal is acceptable and when it is not. Even more important than the precise make-up of these decisions is the capacity to make a decision that then births an exception, an order, a normal and abnormal: that mystical, all-powerful moment of origin. As mentioned, Hobbes also gave prime importance to the origin (which also revolves around a decision – to enter into a contract, in his case). The origin is unavoidable to any given order or situation: it radiates energy and explains / justifies what comes after it (think of the importance of the Big Bang, despite the scientific fluffiness of its explanation, in upholding the sense of the rule-bound cosmos we inhabit). The decision to instate a state of exception is similar in that it is crucially fecund, constitutive (costituente). In its declaration of what is and is no longer allowed, and thus its implicit self-legitimation as authority, it is transcendent: it contains the power to birth a political system, while simultaneously going beyond that simple system, thus legitimating it, drawing energy from elsewhere. That elsewhere is what religion provided and whose legitimating resources we are now saying rest with the origin of a sovereign order (though without religion’s claim to mystical truth, legitimacy and transcendence can enter a kind of tautological loop, dangerously fragile, as we shall see). Though I do not have the space to discuss this here, the state of exception contrasts interestingly with a contemporary state of emergency, which, according to Preterossi, de-constitutes a given system and radiates nothing.
Preterossi and others, including Gramsci, argue that when the king was removed during the French Revolution, the empty throne lived on, for the sovereign was replaced with the people (il popolo) as the new legitimating force behind government (Preterossi 2016; 2023). Just a couple of years earlier, the new US Constitution had identified ‘we the people’ as its rightful subject. The abstraction behind the word ‘people’, rather than their literal number, became the new glue that held a political unit together and aloft. The people possess an immanent transcendence – a paradox Preterossi enjoys (e.g., 2022 153-156). What he means by it, put simply, is that the power to overcome the specific elements of one’s given situation (to transcend them) is paradoxically inherent to the situation itself rather than stemming from something external to it. So, in popular democratic systems, the people achieve transcendence through their own organisation, without any contribution from an external source (e.g., God)[5], unlike in the case of religion. This seems paradoxical because immanence and transcendence are typically opposed, but in this case, due perhaps to some unique trait of human togetherness or sociality, a self-enforcing loop opens between them. The collective category ‘people’ possesses a quality that it is unable to wholly contain[6].
Ultimately what Preterossi seeks to do with his continuation of Schmitt’s analysis is to re-introduce, or simply re-emphasise, the necessity of a kind of transcendent political energy and force that can hold together a collective – the larger the collective, the more this is necessary. And as this is a somewhat abstract or metaphysical claim, the book is dedicated to rigorously grounding it in political theology’s intellectual lineage and in our current moment.
Why now?
It is the current moment that takes centre stage in Preterossi’s book: neoliberalism and its attempt to quash any political transcendence. Neoliberalism represents a new beast, according to our philosopher, because of its attempt to neutralise collective life from politics and transition us into an economic, rather than political, theology. The argument goes that until this moment, the capacious structure of religion had morphed into political formations; now, however, the economy is what orders and needs legitimation, rather than any political model. Perhaps this transition was a long-time coming, since the advent of capitalism. Schmitt had already sounded the alarm bell on the liberalism of his time in 1922 due to its tendency to depoliticise and neutralise politics, avoiding moral or political conflict of any kind[7]. Of course, meanwhile, he in many ways embraced a form of destructive, ethno-nationalist politicisation – Nazism – as embodying his theoretical conclusions – something which should make us cautious in our analysis of them. Either way, with our current global and institutionalised neoliberal order, the cat seems out of the bag in terms of the paramount importance of economics.
Preterossi, on the other hand, seeks to emphasise the centrality of politics. Politics is a common word, but (borrowing again from Schmitt’s framework, though not his conclusions) we can understand it as the realm in which the moral, ideological, preferential, etc., conflicts that inevitably arise within a diverse collective are expressed and continuously settled. It is the realm in which a certain political theology[8] operates in the background and can eventually be contested or energised. Preterossi’s intellectual project is expressly modern – he does not concern himself with whether early Christians had an active functioning politics, for example, but rather limits his questioning to how we can build an active political sphere in our era. The crowning political achievement of modernity, in his opinion, is the mass constitutional democracy of the post-war period, in which the people were sovereign, mass politics was regulated through constitutional innovations, and we were still beholden to a political, rather than economic theology, with il popolo at the heart of government. He confided in me that he still hopes we can do even better than such mass democracies – for who shouldn’t hope, after all?
And yet, there’s the rub: neoliberalism has stopped hoping for something better (however unachievable or far-off); it has stopped even conceiving of something better and, as far as it is able, it is removing from others the imaginative power to do so as well. Neoliberalism’s project of political neutralisation is that of a hegemonic articulation pretending to fall outside the realm of hegemonic cycles and conflicts: in neoliberalism’s self-fashioning, there is no outside to its inside, there is no worthy antagonist (or, agonist) to keep in the game – only dangerous enemies to be completely annihilated. It must contain all of reality within itself: so we can understand perhaps why social conflict shifts to ‘culture war’ issues and the like, which do not threaten the foundations of our current system but can be contained within it.
Here we begin to grasp the contours of neoliberalism’s economic theology, which Preterossi highly disdains. The market and its mechanisms have become, implicitly if not explicitly, the new source of social organisation and even of transcendence, rather than any of our human efforts at collective living (pace Agamben’s belief in the human lineage of oikonomia). I find this argument more convincing than one around a simple end to political theology. For the essentiality of political theology lies in the thesis that human beings require a transcendence-producing organisational structure to survive together. Neoliberalism can no more evade this than it can evade being just one among many hegemonies, despite its best efforts. What makes it so distinct, according to Preterossi and others, is its wholesale rejection of politics and its Polanyian turn to the market as bearing the weight of it all: transcendence, collective organisation, and so on. Yet the specific paradox of the market’s dominance is its effort to deny its own transcendence: it does not seek anything beyond itself, it does not search for a higher plane. It pretends to be completely self-sufficient and self-evident[9].
So we have landed on a second paradox within transcendence: transcendence as self-denying. Preterossi’s argument is that a social order of any kind which aims at cohesion requires an energy that extends beyond itself (that is transcendent) to stay intact. As that which keeps our diverse global society marching on somewhat harmoniously, at least in theory, neoliberalism should have this function today. Thus, beliefs in the all-powerful nature of the market, the divine right of merit and success: these help legitimate our order. However, neoliberal ideology simultaneously rejects its own need for transcendence, for going beyond the state of things: neoliberalism is anti-theology, anti-transcendence. It seeks to ground itself in so-called rational facts, to be immanent, as if this would somehow prove its claim to being the total truth. It is, after all, one of the products of that scientific, positivist, modern process of disenchantment that openly rejects any appeal to the beyond as ungrounded nonsense. Yet in the very claim of embodying ‘truth’, an ideology is already elevating itself above and outside its material existence – it becomes difficult to separate from an aspiration for Platonic transcendence. So, in a sense, neoliberalism achieves a kind of transcendence through its own self-negation. That being said, there are reasons to doubt the neoliberal order’s success in maintaining this transcendent social glue, the proof being the ever-increasing cracks in the system (populist regimes and so on).
Due to neoliberalism’s paradoxical relationship to transcendence, we can explain another aspect of our current paradigm, according to Preterossi: its so-called global ‘religion of human rights’. Preterossi lifts from Schmitt here and the latter’s critique of the weaponisation of ‘the concept of humanity… in its ethical-humanitarian form’ as a ‘vehicle of economic imperialism’ (Schmitt 2007 54). Schmitt was critiquing the dangerous conceit behind any use of the concept ‘humanity’ to excuse violent acts, for they would then become morally unassailable, necessary even, thus paradoxically opening the road to ‘the most extreme inhumanity’[10]. Pretrossi’s attack on contemporary human rights rhetoric takes this idea a step forward. He sees it as having become a fully-fledged ideological apparatus agile enough to excuse whichever move maintains the status quo. He terms it a ‘religion’ because it draws once again on theology, consciously or not, such as in the concept of ‘just war’ to justify foreign interventions. And because it does not invite political or rational discussion around itself: there is no contesting the dominion of human rights. Nonetheless, it appears little more than a crude injection of morality and humanity into liberalism’s market logic.
Preterossi is not against human rights (as a Benthamite might be), but against the way these rights continue to be instrumentalised, no matter the felt genuineness of the belief behind them, to maintain the current hegemonic order. Yet no matter how easy this is to reveal (Schmitt’s discriminatory conception of law is as cogent now as ever[11] – for example, but there are countless, we condemn the Russian invasion but Israel’s long-standing presence in the West Bank is internationally accepted), their use does not go away. If there is purportedly no outside to the current paradigm, then all the world is neoliberalism’s stage, and the moralism that serves as its lazy moral justification applies everywhere.
So we are stuck with economic theology buoyed by the dogma of human rights. We have veered away from the great political theological projects that arguably characterised the last millennia, at least in the West. Not that those were always preferable to our current predicament. Yet situating ourselves in this manner may at least help us understand the particular failings and fragility of this moment.
That being said, while I agree with some of the claims around this system’s uniqueness, I wonder if that which makes neoliberalism really unique is simply the fact that we are living in it. It is our water and hence the most convincing articulation of political and economic reality for us, whose dismantling requires more serious effort than just historical contextualisation.
So what? What now?
What are we left with then: simply the need to find hope and energy despite the current paradigm’s efforts at blinding us to them? Right before the current status quo, we experienced a completely different effort at political/hegemonic dominance – communism – that fell through. Communism is a unique political ideology for, as both Gramsci and Preterossi would contend, it is not just one among others, not an ideology, but rather the ideology for the masses. It is the ‘religion of the oppressed’ – arguably a secularised form of Christianity (in content, not just form) [12] – and, like all religions, it carries within it a utopian nucleus. The utopia is the idyll of the garden of Eden, of heaven, in which all humans frolic together as free and loving equals, an eternal siblinghood. Unachievable on Earth, perhaps, due to the contradictions, frictions and conflicts of our imperfect world; yet what we’re after is not necessarily its realisation, but rather the genuine desire for it – its ability to become theology, rather than strictly teleology. That desire reveals the inequalities of our world as ‘unjust’ and artificial, and provides the energy to attempt to change them. A transcendent buzz. No political transformation, according to Gramsci and thinkers like Georges Sorel, could do without it (Pretrossi 2023, 145-155; 2016, 49-51). Communism and its millions of adherents over the globe ran in part on this drive, on this gap between what was and what should be[13].
And yet even a committed communist like Gramsci had to recognise a challenge to the communist project: maintaining cohesion across the wide range of differences in a population over time, even a degree of class differences, before ushering in the new utopian era. This is something that, at the largest temporal and numerical scale, only religion has ever achieved (Preterossi 2016, 49-51).
Preterossi does not chart the path out of our neoliberal predicament for us. We cannot just re-create the communist aspirations of the 20th century. Marx, by the way, was none too good at prediction, the few times he left us any, but we all know the power of his analysis. Preterossi has left us with a critical and quite original analysis of our time – especially in the Anglo-Saxon world his dissection of political theology does not follow the usual tenets of discourse (for one prominent example, take Charles Taylor, who ignores Schmitt’s heritage almost entirely and focuses instead on questions of multiculturalism and civic religion).
Preterossi invites us to see our predicament in the light of the theological lineage he sketches out, and to oppose its disregard for politics and conflict, for collective cohesion and transcendence. Neoliberalism is simply (another) neutralising, totalising status quo, operating at the global level (a Negrian-Hardtian Empire, perhaps): it is not reality or necessity. After Gramsci, we knew that, perhaps. But Preterossi puts his finger on the essential piece we are lacking and that we often ignore: that surging and conflict-ridden feeling of belonging and engagement that allows us to move forward as collectives and attempt utopias.
I find myself wondering what an authentic or politically salient or simply non-abstract response to these analyses might be. I am aware that I don’t even know how to act myself – join a political party (Gramsci’s heir to religion)? Be more sceptical of some classic left-wing approaches that reject conflict’s generative force (but I already was)? With Preterossi, we ultimately have one more perspective that scratches away at neoliberalism’s glazed façade. Who knows, perhaps the point is that eventually, this cover might become so thin and threadbare that it will be easier for us to shrug off.
To that end, however, we must be vigilant of its last-ditch self-protection attempts, its non-stop states of emergency that seem a sign of its inability to exert legitimate authority in a ‘normal’ (non-emergency) state of affairs. In analysing neoliberalism’s demise, Preterossi’s perspective is useful: its fragility may stem precisely from its refusal to embrace transcendence. So, to end with a banal, yet true note, and perhaps the only one that makes sense: Preterossi reminds us never to give up hope, curiosity, or interest in alternatives. To reject prevailing logics that encourage apathy or nihilism or incessant emergency. Perhaps some of those living in mediaeval times felt similarly to us, stuck in a wide and all-encompassing system that seemed impossible to overcome, and, yet, their paradigm is long gone…
by Alyssa Erspamer
References
Losurdo, Domenico. Stalin: The history and critique of a black legend. London: Iskra Books, 2023.
Preterossi, Geminello. “La teologia politica è inestinguibile?” Polémos – Materiali di filosofia e critica sociale IX, no. 2 (September 2016): 40-65.
https://www
.rivistapolemos.it/la-teologia-politica-inestinguibile/?lang=en (Accessed 31.09.2024).
Preterossi, Geminello. Teologia politica e diritto. Roma: Editori Laterza, 2022.
Schmitt, Carl. The concept of the political. London: The University of Chicago Press, 2007.
Schmitt, Carl. Political theology: Four chapters on the concept of sovereignty. London: The University of Chicago Press, 2005.
Zizek, Slavoj. Christian atheism: How to be a real materialist. London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2024.
[1] Hence the distinction between this theory and that of thinkers like Auguste Comte, who believed liberalism to be a watered-down Christianity: theirs is a comment on content, not form.
[2] Translation my own.
[3] Termed by Émile Durkheim ‘collective effervescence’: the intensification of individual emotions during collective rituals.
[4] The word ‘transcendence’ will be thrown around frequently here. There is no scope for the rich analysis this term invites. So, to simplify, following Preterossi and related thinkers (though they do not use these exact words), I intend transcendence as something that lies beyond our material and experiential understanding, rather than stemming from these (as an immanent thing would); in a social and political context, I see transcendence being akin to synergy: a force that goes beyond the sum of its given parts, that achieves a state or condition that is no longer reducible to them. When people come together in church and engage in rituals and by so doing access or create a spiritual state, this is transcendence.
[5] Beyond the scope of this essay is Preterossi and others’ claim that the discovery of an immanent transcendence originates in Christianity itself, in the figure of Jesus Christ: his humanity soiled, as it were, the perfection of divine transcendence and directly laid the seeds for the death of God.
[6] There is admittedly a danger in the immanence-transcendence dialectic (something both Preterossi and Gramsci recognise) as it tends to be less stable. Indeed democratic systems have not endured successfully for as long as religions have.
[7] ‘Liberalism, with its contradictions and compromises, existed for Donoso Cortés only in that short interim period in which it was possible to answer the question “Christ or Barabbas?” with a proposal to adjourn or appoint a commission of investigation’ (Schmitt 2005, 62).
[8] There are evident overlaps with Gramsci’s hegemony, such that I use them almost interchangeably for my argument here, though they are distinct. Preterossi also comments on the similarities between hegemony, state of exception, and political theology. Much could be said about their differences as well, but for the sake of this essay they all represent a transcendent force theoretically able to birth and legitimate a political collective.
[9] An interesting and relevant analysis that is beyond the scope of this essay can be found in Onofrio Romano’s recent book Go Waste: Depensamento e decrescita (2023). Romano divides history between societies defined by their verticalism (a self-conscious collective organisation that structures society and allows it to pursue specific goals) and those that are horizontal (more or less allowing interactions to happen between parties without intrusion, thus reverting humans to a quasi state of nature, unable or unwilling to direct themselves towards a telos of some kind). As may be evident, I see political theology as corresponding to vertical societies that require cohesion at large scales, while neoliberalism would follow a horizontal model that refutes the pursuit of wider goals beyond itself. But this comparison would require further thought and study.
[10] It is worth noting in any discussion of Schmitt’s ideas how Schmitt’s own affiliation with the Nazi party can seem to undermine them. As the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy notes, ‘Schmitt was an acute observer and analyst of the weaknesses of liberal constitutionalism and liberal cosmopolitanism. But there can be little doubt that his preferred cure turned out to be infinitely worse than the disease.’ Still, we endeavour to look at the ideas for their own merit.
[11] See an excellent description of this and more on the theme here https://newleftreview.org/issues/ii143/articles/perry-anderson-the-standard-of-civilization.
[12] As Marx claimed, ‘nothing easier than to give Christian asceticism a socialist tinge’ (Losurdo 2023:43).
[13] While we could arguably see neoliberalism as an attempt to bridge the gap between what is and what will be.