THE THEOLOGICO-POLITICAL?relations are always ‘‘represented’’ or ‘‘spoken’’ by religious, juridical, or scientific signs is
also of little import. This notion of the symbolic does not help us to escape an artificialist
conception. It is deployed in a play of articulation whose terms have already been sepa-
rated out, and it is grafted onto something that is assumed to contain within it its own
determination.
The opposition between philosophy and science is one between two intellectual re-
quirements. For science, knowledge finds its self-assurance by defining functional models;
it operates in accordance with an ideal of objectivity that introduces a sovereign distance
between the subject and the social. The externality of the knowing subject is of necessity
combined with the idea that the social can stand outside itself. Conversely, any system of
thought that takes up the question of the institution of the social is simultaneously con-
fronted with the question of its own institution. It cannot restrict itself to comparing
structures and systems once it realizes that the elaboration of coexistence creates meaning,
produces markers for distinguishing between true and false, just and unjust, and imagi-
nary and real; and that it establishes the horizons of human beings’ relations with one
another and with the world. It attempts to explain itself and, at the same time, to explain
its object. In that respect, it seems to me that there is no radical difference between our
present requirement and those of the philosophy of history or of ancient philosophy. We
have lost the criteria of classical reason, refuse to distinguish between healthy and corrupt
regimes, between legitimate and illegitimate authorities—a distinction based upon the
idea of a human essence—and find it impossible to invoke the idea of the development
of Mind—which would allow us to see the constitution of the modern state as both the
completion of an itinerary and the meaning of the stages (progression, regression, and
digression) that go to make it up. Nevertheless, we are still traversed by our investigation
into the meaning of the human adventure that unfolds in different forms of political
society, and that investigation is still a response to our experience of the political in the
here and now. We look for signs of truth and signs of legitimacy, for traces of the conceal-
ment of truth and right, and we do so because of the tension inherent in any thought that
is trying to define what it has therightto think.
To return to the question with which we began: that of the historical disentanglement
of the religious and the political. In the context of sociology or political science, their
disentanglement is an obvious fact, which leaves intact the categories of knowledge of the
social. The political and the religious are regarded as two separate orders of practice and
relations; the problem is one of understanding how they are articulated, or how they cease
to be articulated, by examining empirical history. The fact that for hundreds or, rather,
thousands of years human beings made no such distinction, and that they gave a religious
expression to the functions exercised by authority or to the power relations whence it
arose, does not detract from the need to recognize the pertinence of a distinction whose
value is self-evident in terms of objective analysis. Now this approach brings us up against
a double difficulty. On the one hand, history, like society before it, loses all depth; the
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