Stasis : beyond political theology?

Political theology refers to the impossibility of both to completely separate and to completely conflate politics and religion. As Kenneth Reinhard describes political theology, "the political order is sustained by theological concepts that it cannot completely assimilate." It remains a point of contention, however, what the repercussions of the trespassing of theological concepts into the political are. For Carl Schmitt, this indicated the centrality of the sovereign power to decide. It led Walter Benjamin to diagnose religion as a symptom of capitalism. Claude Lefort emphasized that the Enlightenment both rejected the possibility of such a trespassing and could not do without it. Jan Assmann has shown how political theology can lead to fruitful historical investigations. Ernesto Laclau's "empty signifier" articulated the disjunctions and conjunctions of the political and the theological, insisting that the "recognition of the constitutive nature of this gap and its political institutionalization is the starting point of modern democracy." Despite the differences between these thinkers, there is one abiding characteristic. There is a constitutive disjunction between politics and the political, between law and justice. As a result, political theology forecloses meaning in politics—that is, no political party or representative can be thought to represent the political ideal. More emphatically, there is no end of history. I will explore here whether it is possible to understand the foreclosure of meaning not as the conclusion, but rather as the condition of the possibility of the political. Can the meaningless or the irrational function as the basis of the intertwining and imbrication of the secular and the sacred? I hasten to note the oxymoron of seeking to establish a basis for a non-teleological politics. Is not the proclamation of a state beyond already a tacit re-introduction of a teleology? A metaphysical politics of foundations and essences is perfectly capable of establishing itself upon a basis that dissimulates its own presence. A simple negation of teleology can be nothing but teleological. What is needed instead, as I will argue at the end, is the operative presence of an interruption that marks both the relation between the theological and the political, as well as the possibility of judgment