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HENT DE VRIES

And what, exactly, is the religious echo that colors or burdens such a politics (including
a ‘‘politics of life,’’ rather than a bio-politics)?
Or will this archive and resource, whose richness we have, perhaps, not fully realized,
one day exhaust itself, having nothing more to add, nothing left to teach or inspire? With
that possibility in mind—and who would wish to exclude it?—should we not rather begin
by observing and interpreting the relentless process of fragmentation then inflation that
the concept of the theologico-political—and everything for which it stands—has under-
gone and continues to undergo? Indeed, do the real questions not situate themselves
before,around, andbeyondthis notion, to the point where a different vocabulary—
different words, gestures, things, and powers—needs to be invoked or invented? Or has
the theologico-political—as a concept and term—drifted away from its historical legacies,
its dense and multilayered vocabularies, its varied argumentative archives, its suggestive
imaginary, its hopes and nightmares, while nonetheless staying on in mere obsolescence?
But then, how are we to explain the recurrent—and now and again virulent—investments
in this notion? In other words, how are we to understand the diminishing yet abiding
intelligibility of its concept, practice, and imaginary?
Would an ontology, indeed, a metaphysics, of the political or a pragmatic, skeptical-
agnostic turn to the politics of the everyday provide more promising solutions to contem-
porary predicaments that allow no concrete answer so long as they remain phrased in a
language reminiscent of ‘‘religion,’’ albeit of its disconnected and dislocated words, things,
gestures, and powers? Perhaps. But if any plausible meaning can be given to the designa-
tion of the present time as the ‘‘post-secular,’’ it is precisely that an answer to our ques-
tions must be left in suspension, though they call for our utmost vigilance nonetheless.
There is no more urgent project, therefore, than to ask in what sense the legacies of
‘‘religion’’ disarticulate and reconstellate themselves as the elementary forms of life in
the twenty-first century. The dissemination of political theologies—in the plural—is an
important terrain (sometimes, a military ‘‘theater’’) on which this ambivalent process
plays itself out. To interpret its historical background and to analyze its present poten-
tial—again, for good and for ill—is the purpose of this volume.

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