INTRODUCTIONveneration of gods such as Apollo and Hestia in the emergence and territorial organiza-
tion of cities, including their sanctuaries, lies here. They bestow foundation and authority
upon the political or public (demosion) space, theagora, which, Detienne notes, thereby
‘‘functions as a deity of effective publicity,’’ to ‘‘make known to all,’’ by way of decisions
and their decrees, the ‘‘words solidly established’’ (as Solon reportedly called them; p. 98).
These first experimentations, in the early Greek cities, with the independence of the
political, while drawing upon references to the divine, extended their deliberations even
to the affairs of the gods, if only by deciding on the calendar of their honoring. While the
gods had their place in politics, politics was seen as originally and ultimately a matter of
human autonomy, that is to say, of ‘‘law unto itself.’’ What the comparativist approach
would invite us to see, Detienne concludes, is, first of all, the elementary forms of a
concrete ‘‘politico-religious configuration,’’ before taking, in all too abstract ways, ‘‘the
combination of politics and religion, or that of theology and politics, or even that of
politics and ritual as some kind of universal standard’’ (p. 101). As with religion’s words,
things, gestures, and powers, the elementary forms of political life can enter into a variety
of possible combinations, depending on spatiotemporal determinants whose arrangement
is never settled once and for all, defying the dream—or, rather, nightmare—of the
autochthonous.
Jean-Luc Nancy insists on a persistence of the Greco-Latin-Christian model, which,
in a sense (as has been argued by Gauchet inThe Disenchantment of the World), provides
the reasons and means of its own deconstruction. Following up on his seminal ‘‘The
Deconstruction of Christianity,’’^96 Nancy argues that the relationship between church and
state must be rethought in light of the fact that religion, while ‘‘not a ‘private’ preference’’
but rather ‘‘a mode of representing and organizing both personal and collective exis-
tence,’’ is the original and polar opposite of the political. Being ‘‘nothing more or less
than the collective or communitarian possibility other than that constituted by politics,’’
the separation ofecclesiaandimperium, of church and state, should be seen as ‘‘the one
true birth of politics’’ (p. 103).
Indeed,ekkle ̄sia, Nancy reminds us, is ‘‘a term taken from the institutions of the
Greek city, which now designates an ‘assembly’ and a specific mode of being together,
distinct from the social and political mode’’ (p. 106). We find this distinction echoed in
the differentiation and at times separation between the Kingdom of God and the Kingdom
of Caesar, in the Old Testament’s ‘‘law of sin’’ and the New Testament’s ‘‘law of love,’’ in
St. Augustine’s evocation of the heavenly and earthly cities, and even in Kant’s distinction
between the phenomenal and noumenal realms, the domain of freedom and of spatio-
temporal necessity.
Christianity, in this reading, echoes and amplifies a primary act of separation and
subsequent mediation that forms the paradigm for the establishment and maintenance of
the political—indeed, of politics—as such. Paradoxically, it is as if the Greeks and Romans
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