Theopolitics

Abstract: This article addresses the ‘touch-event’ as a mediated affective encounter that pivots around a tension between intimacy and distance, seduction and sovereignty, investment and withdrawal. Through a rereading of the Pauline event of conversion to Christianity, it argues that an analysis of the evolving significance of touch-events for Catholic liturgy and a religious congregation shows the theopolitical as always already constituted within an economy of enfleshed virtues. Focusing on contemporary examples of touch-events from the life of Francis, the first pope from the Americas, as well as from fieldwork among a group of female Latin American Catholic migrants in Rome, I argue for a closer examination of touch-events in order to grasp some of their theopolitical, radical, emancipatory, and, in some contexts, subjugating effects.
Keywords: Atlantic Return, economies of virtues, incarnation, Pauline event, Pope Francis, sovereignty, theopolitics, touch-event

This paper is a positive response to the increasing post-liberal tendency within the various disciplines to move away from merely solving problems and correcting dysfunctions towards more prophylactic and transformative interventions into the deep structural roots of culture itself.  This trend will be exposed with reference to recent developments in medicine, psychology and peace studies where it can be seen to involve a return to issues of values, ethics and the common good. The current emphasis on new political space and the burgeoning re-emergence of political theology will be viewed as a corollary of these innovations as will contemporary examples of urban practitioners connecting temporarily or permanently to rural locations, desert fathers’ style, in order to find the space and time for reflection and research.

The paper proceeds to explore the possibilities emanating from a complementary reading of work done on naked life, self-transcendence, and enemy love for an innovative configuration of the self for the city. Beginning with a brief evaluation of Paulo Virno’s particular development of biopower as potential power in his Grammar of the Multitude, the paper proposes that the naked self, if activated, is replete with potential for the peace of the city.  Viktor Frankl and Abraham Maslow’s prescient counter-modern configuration of the liberal self beyond self-actualisation towards self-transcendence will then be briefly assessed for its capacity to escape reductionist evolutionary approaches to human development and substantiate the necessary motivation by which the bare self might escape what Giorgio Agamben describes as the prison camp of the contemporary biopolitical world.

Finally, the paper will investigate the capacity of a politics of enemy love to substantiate the fulness of self-transcendence commensurate with the testimony of Jesus as recently configured by such practitioner-theologians as Keith Hebden, Brad Jersak, Derek Flood and Brian Zahnd, and to provide a genuinely practical resource in a world where the violent enmity of extreme fanaticism is encroaching daily. It will conclude by contemplating the insight it adds to the questions raised by post-secular thinkers such as Alain Badiou and Simon Critchley. The former questions whether a politics of love is ever meaningful and the latter asks whether abandoning the utopian impulse is to imprison ourselves within the world as it is and to give up all hope, however slight, of discovering a world that might yet be.

Since 2009, in the aftermath of Sri Lanka’s ethnic war, certain contingents of Sinhala Buddhists have lodged attacks against religious minorities, whom they censure for committing violence against animals in accordance with the dictates of their gods. Considering these interventions against sacrifice in spaces of shared Hindu and Buddhist religiosity, this article examines the economies of derogation, violence, and scapegoating in post-war Sri Lanka. Within Sinhala Buddhism, sacrifice is considered bio-morally impure yet politically efficacious, whereas meritorious Buddhist discipleship is sacrificial only in aspirational, bloodless terms. Nevertheless, both practices fall within the spectrum of Sinhala Buddhist religious life. Majoritarian imperatives concerning postwar blood impinge upon marginal sites of shared religiosity—spaces where the blood of animals is spilled and, ironically, where political potency can be substantively shored up. The article examines the siting of sacrifice and the purifying majoritarian interventions against it, as Buddhists strive to assert sovereignty over religious others. [Excerpt only. please find full article at https://doi.org/10.3167/arrs.2019.100110  or email me for full PDF.]

This chapter is an intervention in an ongoing debate between theology and socio-cultural anthropology and it takes as a starting point the relation between apophatic theology and the ethnographic practicum. Building upon the work of Amy Hollywood, Michel de Certeau, Begoña Arextaga and my own research on the Atlantic Return and the Catholic Church, it argues that a reading of the figure of the migrant and the (Christian) mystic together can bring new perspectives on studies of undocumented migration. Both migrants and mystics are endowed with a potential to interject a different time into history. To consider the figures of the mystic and migrant together raises theological questions on how the infinite breaks through the incarnate moment, while at the same time poses anthropological questions on migrants’ conditions of abjection, their experience of loss, the homely and the unhomely.

Since the 1970s, Buber has often been suspected of being a Volkish thinker. This essay reconsiders the affinity of Buber’s late writings with Volkish ideology. It examines the allegations against Buber’s Volkish thought in light of his later biblical and Hasidic writings. By illuminating the ideological affinity between these two modes of thought, the essay explains how Buber aims to depart from the dangers of myth without rejecting myth as such. I argue that Buber’s relationship to myth can help us to explain his critique of nationalism. My basic argument is that in his struggle with hyper-nationalism, Buber follows the Baal Shem Tov and his struggle against Sabbateanism. Like the Besht, Buber does not reject myth, but seeks instead to repair it from within. Whereas hyper-nationalism uses myth to advance its political goals, Buber seeks to reposition ethics within a mythic framework. I view Buber’s exegesis and commentaries on biblical and Hasidic myths as myth-activism.

Link to the essay (open access):
https://www.mdpi.com/2077-1444/10/2/96

The current article revisits the tenuous relationship between Martin Buber's conception of divine rule on earth (theopolitics) with Carl Schmitt's famous notion of political theology, by underscoring their shared, though diametrically opposed interest in Gnostic ideas. Based on a reading of Buber's heretofore unpublished lectures on Judaism and Christianity, the study outlines the nexus between the German tradition of scientific research, religious ideology and political visions, in order to show that Buber's treatment of Gnosticism in the lectures is belied by an implicit critique of Schmitt's dualistic distinction between friend and foe that legitimizes the subversion of liberal democracy. The Gnostic canon that Buber identifies in certain parts of the New Testament is shown to be based on the very same scientific research that fed Schmitt's fascination with Gnostic teachings.

This workshop aims to establish a dialogue between the critical turn in religious and secular studies and debates around the rise of the radical populist right in the Americas. It explores comparatively new populist theopolitical formations in their relation to a) sovereignty and soil, b) charisma and theatricality; c) neoliberalism and secular-religious assemblages. Whereas the correlation between the continent’s recent turn to the extreme right side of the political spectrum and changes in the religious field (growth of evangelical and Catholic charismatic Christianity) has been widely noticed, the nature of such cross-fertilization remains insufficiently theorized. Our purpose is to explore this theme through comparative inquiry on the shifting structures of religious and political authority in the region, including their theo-political entanglements. We assume that the concept of theopolitics (political theology “from below”) can be a valuable resource to grasp why and how political authority is being newly infused with a theological dimension at a moment in which the liberal democratic social pact is going through a widespread legitimacy crisis. From a geopolitical inception of the Americas and an intra-disciplinary standpoint, we also argue that theopolitics allows for a better understanding of ongoing transformations of theological discourses and practices in the light of an incarnated politics.
https://www.ircpl.columbia.edu/calendar/populism-and-new-theopolitical-formations-in-the-americas?fbclid=IwAR2nHSLFiTZC3RmmGJPppnWctfLtp74zKdhjKcglZpf0ahKaBvcu5b9_Vx0

This introduction opens a collection of seven articles which investigate how religious communities negotiate demands for physical distance induced by governmental responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in accord with their religious and spiritual aspirations to establish presence and togetherness. Grounded in ethnography and media analysis, our contributors offer studies on Pentecostal healing, Mormon eschatology, Hindu diasporic rituals, Chinese spirit mediums, the virtual Burning Man festival, Sufi sonic meditations, and televised Shia Muslim mourning. These studies collectively demonstrate that in pandemic rituals (1) Media are reflexive and enchanted; (2) The religious sensorium is sticky and lingers in embodied and mnemonic ways even under new circumstances of mediation; (3) Space and time emerge as modular, transposable, condensed, yet expanding. Ritual innovations can provoke new kinds of mediations, sensory engagements, and temporal-spatial arrangements, while revealing continuities with pre-pandemic cosmologies, theologies, liturgies, and social hierarchies, and relying on memories of previous ritual sensory experiences.

Through ethnography of recent peaceful dissent by Catholic and Protestant activists, life histories, and a reading of a postcolonial archive of contextually grounded liberation theology, I explore the theopolitics of grace that fuels the habits and habitus of Sri Lanka's ecumenical left. Pluralistic and indigenised forms of Christianity emerged in the era of decolonisation and nationalisation and were emboldened by Vatican II. Distinguishing ecumenical Christian pluralism from evangelical Christian expansion in the region, this article historicises Cold War religiosity, drawing out 'bi-polar' contrasts of politically left and right forms of Christian grace. In doing so, I situate religious pluralism within the convulsive era of class and ethnic-based insurrections in Sri Lanka. Analysing the 'catholicity' , civic nationalism, and post-nationalist self-conceptions held by Sri Lanka's Christian left, I argue that the 'something extra' of grace can be fruitfully understood as the cultural accretions and theo-political formations that accrue through localised emplacements of global Christianity.

This essay identifies a surprising, but nontheless striking affinity between Heidegger’s eventual distancing from the National-Socialist geocentrism and Rosenzweig’s affirmation of the essentially diasporic character of Jewish existence. The author shows first how Heidegger’s earlier confluence of the ethnolinguistic and the geopolitical results in his distorted critique of the Jewish people, as the ones with no home, language, world, or historical destiny. Without exonerating Heidegger’s distorted and flawed views, the essay proceeds in depicting how Heidegger’s later theological-poetic shift, inspired from and exemplified in Hölderlin’s poetry, shows itself to be highly akin to Rosenzweig’s understanding of the holiness of the Jewish people, the land of Israel, and the Hebrew language. In addition to his insistence on the special character of the German and the Greek languages, Heidegger’s later thinking is characterized by the far-reaching insight regarding the centrality of a poetics that celebrates the sense of the unhomely as essential for the possibility for human beings to feel at home in the world and, hence, the affirmation of the nomadic nature of poiesis. Heidegger’s turn is analogous to Rosenzweig’s affirmation of the essential role accorded the diasporic character of Jewish existence. According to Rosenzweig, the holiness of the land and of the language “prevents the eternal people from ever living entirely at one with the times,” a feeling that also applies to the way that the Jewish poet perceives his poetic activity and his place in the world. Despite Heidegger’s ignorant and at times overtly antisemitic characterization of Judaism, the essay identifies a deeper convergence between Jewish and the German poiesis,  encapsulated in the belief that the “serenity of being-at-home necessarily belongs together with the turbulence of not-being-at-home.”

In this paper, I present my thesis that Martin Buber offers a narrative of historical forgetfulness similar to that of his contemporary Martin Heidegger. I name this phenomenon Dialogsvergessenheit. Buber never used this term, nor did he develop this idea explicitly. Rather, It is implicit in his writings. To elucidate my thesis, I will look at Heidegger’s thought on the oblivion of Being, known as Seinsvergessenheit. The proximity of the two positions presented here is particularly interesting in light of their political implications. This common narrative leads the two thinkers to opposite nationalist conceptions.

Özet İslam Devrimi ve Şii anlayışın İran'ın dış politikası ve kamu diplomasisini derinden etkilediği varsayımından hareketle İran'ın kamu diplomasisinin Şiilik temelli transnasyonel ve teopolitik olduğu argümanı makaleyi oluşturmaktadır. İran'ın kamu diplomasisinde Şiiliği, teolojik ve ideolojik bir araç olarak kullandığı, İran'ın dış politika amaçlarını gerçekleştirmek ve nüfuzunu yaymak için Şii topluluklarla angaje olmaya dayanan bir kamu diplomasisi izlediği açıklanmıştır. Bu bağlamda İran'ın kamu diplomasisini reel-politik hedeflerini gerçekleştirebilmek için stratejik bir yöntem olarak kullandığı ileri sürülmüştür. Makalede İran'ın dış politikasının devletler yerine halklarla ilişki tesis etme düzleminde uygulandığı ileri sürülmüştür. Kamu diplomasisi yöntem ve araçlarıyla yumuşak güç kaynaklarını politikaya dönüştüren İran'ın politikalarında akıllı güç uyguladığı vurgulanmıştır. Ülkenin kamu diplomasisinin devlet kontrolünde propaganda odaklı olduğu öne sürülmüştür.

Abstract
The study examines Iran's public diplomacy on the basis of culture and theo-politics. Based on the assumption that the Islamic Revolution and the Shiite concept deeply influence Iran's foreign policy and public diplomacy, the argument that Iran's public diplomacy is Shiite-based transnational and theo-political has been developed. The article argues that Iran follows a public diplomacy based on engagement with Shiite communities in order to realize its foreign policy objectives and spread its influence. It has been argued that Iran's preference for public diplomacy is influenced by the fact that Iran cannot win the Sunni governments in the Middle East. Iran's foreign policy has been put forward on the level of building relations with people instead of states. Finally, it is concluded that Iran's public diplomacy is propaganda based on state control.

El objetivo de la ponencia aquí propuesta es el de revisar, desde una convergencia teórica entre Teología, Ciencia Política y Relaciones Internacionales, la ubicación ideológica del Estado Islámico en el espectro político asociado al Islam, específicamente en los fenómenos del Islam político o islamismo, el sectarianismo y la teopolítica, siempre atendiendo a la perfilación doctrinaria sunnita, wahabista, salafista y jihadista que proclaman las autoridades políticas, militares y religiosas bajo el mando del autoimpuesto califa, Abu Bakr Al Baghdadi.

In this article I trace the development of William Lloyd Garrison's radical abolitionism, his politics of disunion, and his evolving critique of the United States Constitution. Flawed and problematic as Garrison's politics were, I argue, his Christian anarchist critique of the Constitution was based upon a realistic reading of the document as an inherently pro-slavery document. His case for disunion was also based upon a plausible political calculation of what might be done to end slavery without bloody civil war. Garrison did more to force the slavery issue into public debate and to galvanize the nation around the slavery issue than any other individual. There are ways to work to advance the Good Society, he demonstrated in the process, that do not involve compromises with massive injustice or sacrifice of nonviolent principles.

Title: The Religious Motifs of the Second Eastern Journey (1898) of Wilhelm II which Took Place by Means of the Inauguration of the Erlöserkirsche in Jerusalem.

It is commonly agreed that the army was not the only instrument of the 19th century imperialism. Commercial representatives, schools, missionaries, hospitals and orphanages were used for imperialistic aims. Germany, who gained her political unity during the second half of the 19th century, has also made use of these experiences. Contrary to Bismarck, who wished to consolidate the empire, that he founded, in the continental Europe, Wilhelm II was in the opinion that Germany was to pursue Weltpolitik. Due to certain incompatibility, Bismarck resigned in 1890 and there remained no obscure for the Kaiser to practice his politics. One of the important steps of the Weltpolitik was gaining influence in the Ottoman Empire, both political and commercial. From 1882 onwards, the German officers were hired in the Ottoman army and the trade was developing gradually. Moreover, Wilhelm II was using every opportunity for developing the relations with the Ottoman Empire. During the reign of Sultan Abdulaziz, due to the efforts of Kaiser’s ancestors, a piece of land was granted to the Kingdom of Prussia in Jerusalem to build a Protestant church. To build a church on this land and to attend the inauguration ceremony was a great opportunity for Wilhelm II’s Ottoman policy. The foundation of the Erlöserkirche (The Church of the Redeemer) was laid in 1893 and completed in 1898. Wilhelm II, after visiting Istanbul, attended to the opening ceremony personally. The travel, in which the religious motifs were dominant, was in fact an openly challenge for Britain, France and Russia in the region. Because, including the sects which were under the protection of these great powers, every Christian sect and Jewish settlers in Palestine was visited and support was promised. By means of this journey, the wheels of German imperialism were revolved this time on religious senses to serve for the Weltpolitik.

The exchange between Martin Buber and Franz Rosenzweig on the status of halakha is a well known, but also frustrating fixture in scholarship. For rather than responding to Rosenzweig's critique, Buber seems to retreat in silence, claiming to be "unable to speak" about his position on Jewish Law. Scholars have generally tried to explain Buber's failure to respond on philosophical and biographical grounds. What I propose, by contrast, is to revisit the question of Buber's silence and secrecy from a hermeneutical standpoint, arguing that Buber engaged in a deliberate strategy of concealment that constituted its own form of response. The hermeneutics of silence discloses a call for religious renewal that follows a state of Dialogvergessenheit, but which cannot be made audible. Neither dialogue nor its remembrance can be commanded. While Buber struggles with his Nichtredenkönnen, he also stands in a tradition of secretive hermeneutics-the Jewish hermeneutics of sod.

The  war,  as  a  method  in  International  Relations,  is  a  phenomenon  to  be  addressed  as  subject  to jus ad bellum for Palestine  because of its sui generis feature, even though it has occurred between the  states recognized by the United Nations. In this context, the claim for right  by  Israel  on  Palestinian  territory,  the  current  invasion  attempts,  its  historical, sociological and international dimensions and the problem and  solution offers are discussed sufficiently in the literature, nevertheless the  problem has become even bigger with the Western Bank Wall construction.  The operation on process makes us to ask these questions:  What are the reasons Israel doesn’t react according to the international  laws and universal human rights? What is the motivation (like a devotional  enthusiasm) behind these breaches? What are the religious and political  factors influencing Israel’s alienation and what is the priority for them in the  national  defense?  What  will  be  the  possible  consequences  of  Israel’s  Western  Bank  Wall  policy  within  the  context  of  just  war  theory  (jus ad  bellum) which is a product of the Occident and an internationally accepted  concept? The current consequences which serve the insolubility as a solution  is a choice for Israel or a religious obligation? If it is an obligation then what  kind of an agreement can be reached between the Arabian and Jewish world  in Middle East?  For finding answers to these questions, firstly, the stages the just war  theory  had  through  history  will  be  examined shortly, Isra el’s behavioral  patterns in the International Relations will be determined in short in terms  of  its  teopolitics,  the  causes/considerations  of  the  subject  in  the  holy  writings (Tanakh and Talmud), the shades of these causes on the Western Bank  Wall,  will  be  explained.  As  a  result  of  the  findings  the  problem  between the state with no borders, Israel and the borders with no state,  Palestine, will be discussed whether to resolve pursuant to the International  Relations  and  law  or  religion;  solution  trials  for  these  two  lines  will  be  examined.  The hypothesis of the study bases on the proposition that the problem  between Israel and Palestine is impossible to solve through military and  judicial  methods;  which  can  only  be  solved  through  a  solution  platform  consisting  of  Jewish  and  Muslim  representatives.  To  what  extent  this  objective  and  also  this  hypothesis  can  be  reached  in  the  International  Relations will be discussed in this study.

This introduction outlines an anthropological concept of ‘theopolitics’ emergent from ethnographic engagements with the oldest site of European colonialism—the (Latin) Americas. Defined as a query into the sensorial regimes enabling incarnate forms of power, theopolitics focuses on the sovereignties from below that are immanent in struggles between the universalisms of Christian imperialisms and the autochthonous forces they seek to police and unmake. The articles comprising this special issue advance this query by exploring processes of attunement to the prophetic voices of the dead and the living, the elasticity of incarnate forms of political charisma and crowds, and the potencies of precious matter and touch as domains for rethinking relationships among political anthropology, political economy, and political theology beyond a focus on the state.

In 2002, in response to the editors’ kind request, I composed an essay on Abrahamic theo-politics motivated by the aftermath of 9/1. I wrote of a need to offer more than a tradition-specific theopolitics, in my case Jewish theopolitics. There were already many versions of Jewish theopolitics available – – as well as of Christian and Muslim and others -- and among these were many versions of statist and anti-statist theopolitics. My response to events like 9/11 were that, in addition to state-specific, inter-state, and non-state/tradition-specific accounts, there was pressing need for supplementary models, including the model I presented: a theopolitics that would require Jewish-Muslim-Christian deliberation, that would address extra-state, intra- and inter-state actors and institutions, and that would examine ways of responding to a range of religion-related violent conflicts across the globe.

In this talk I chart a relation between anthropology and political theology through an emergent concept we are beginning to call Theopolitics. I pay particular attention here to its rendering of apophatic spaces (as the labor of the negative, which has a root in Christian theology) and how it lends itself to strengthen current anthropological analyses of the political and changing forms of sovereignty.

Anthropological work on political theology has been informed by Agamben's work on the state of exception and, thus, by a Schmittian account of sovereignty as analogous to that of the God who bestows miracles. In this review, we read gestures to this analogy's limits in recent ethnographies of the state, vital force, and the Anthropocene as also pointing to the limits of anthropology's secularity and its embedding in the colonial enterprise. In so doing, we recover a potential opening to theistic force that anthropology has long fought to foreclose. We conclude by proposing a conceptual counter to political theology, grounded in negative theology as well as critical theories drawing on the force of the negative, which we call theopolitics. Theopolitics refers to a sovereignty from below characterized by vulnerability and openness to an ever-provisional messianic force that partakes in history, including the colonial history of anthropology itself.

Babylon is a surprisingly multivalent symbol in U.S. culture and politics. Political citations of Babylon are wide-ranging, from torture at Abu Ghraib to depictions of Hollywood glamor and decadence. In political discourse, Babylon appears in conservative ruminations on democratic law, liberal appeals to unity, tea party warnings about equality, and religious advocacy for family values. A composite biblical figure, Babylon is used to celebrate diversity and also to condemn it, to sell sexuality and to regulate it, to galvanize war and to worry about imperialism.  Examining the confluence and contradictions of cultural formations, biblical interpretations, and (bio)political philosophies,  The Babylon Complex shows how theopolitical arguments for war, sexual regulation, and political control both assuage and contribute to anxieties about waning national sovereignty.  Along the way, Runions interrogates the interpretive moves by which the Bible gains its political authority and proposes instead other modes of reading that  take Babylon as a figure for a detranscendentalized, queer, sublime, radically democratic polity.

Introduction: Babylon and the Crisis of Sovereignty
1. From Babel to Biopolitics: Josephus, Theodemocracy, and the Regulation of Pleasure
2. Bellicose Dreams: Babylon and Exception to Law
3. Tolerating Babel: Biopolitics, Film, and Family
4. Revenge on Babylon: Literalist Allegory, Scripture, Torture
5. Who Lives in Babylon? The Gay Antichrist as Political Enemy
6. Babelian Scripture: A Queerly Sublime Ethics of Reading
Postlude: Roads to Babel
Works Cited
Index

For selected reviews and engagements see:
http://readingreligion.org/books/babylon-complex

http://novaojs.newcastle.edu.au/ojsbct/index.php/bct/issue/view/38

http://marginalia.lareviewofbooks.org/babylons-imperial-allure-by-phillip-m-sherman/

We ask how the theopolitics of a nation-state, and especially its soteriology, engage with traditions that preceded the state and relay messages that contradict this theopolitics. To discuss this question, we address the evolving (re-)interpretation of the Ninth of Av—a ritual commemoration of the destruction of Jerusalem and the end of Jewish (Judean) self-rule in ancient times—by Religious-Zionist commentators. We further compare this interpretation to the Religious-Zionist appropriation of Jerusalem Day, a civic holiday celebrating the establishment of Israeli control over East Jerusalem in the June 1967 war. We argue that the statist imperative of the superiority of nation-statist theopolitics suggests that traditions are co-opted to fit in with its soteriology, with varying degrees of resistance or willing accommodation by carriers of these traditions. This co-opting may result in either the de-politicization of what the statist view would see as religion or the religionization of the state's own civic and so-called secular holidays.

Ortadoğu konusu Batılı siyasetçiler için teopolitikanın bir konusudur ve siyasetçinin kimliği ile siyasi tavrı arasında benzerliğin en çok olduğu alana işaret eder. Papaların modern dünyada siyasi güçleri çok olmasa da mesela Kudüs gibi bir hususta Avrupalı siyasi liderler üzerinde etki kurabilmesi mümkündür.

This short editorial explores the theopolitical significance of the citation of Psalm 139 (the psalm of surveillance) in both LGBT and pro-life circles. The psalm voices rather differently shaped imaginations of political subjectivity in each community; but both connect rights discourse to surveillance. A theopolitical valorization of surveillance can negatively affect women of color, low income women, LGBT people, and other profiled peoples (e.g. non-white, non-affluent, religious, or immigrant).