INTRODUCTIONtic: for example, the concept of the omnipotence of God has been translated into the idea
of an all-powerful lawgiver, just as the miracle prefigures the decisive event.
But historical derivation is not the only possible consequence of Schmitt’s position.
He seems equally interested in the descriptive value of the systematic and formal resem-
blance between the domains of the theological and the political. Only by taking into
account the conjunction between two elements—two poles or two sources, each of which
is constitutive of human finitude—can one arrive at a sociology of legal concepts. As Jean-
Franc ̧ois Courtine and others have noted, Schmitt hesitates between these two analytically
distinct positions. According to the first, politics finds its origin in the theological, which
it seeks to suppress and forget, albeit it in vain and to its peril; according to the second,
there is merely a structural analogy between the two.^116 Courtine attributes this oscillation
to a change in intellectual position in Schmitt’s thinking between the publication, in 1922,
ofPolitical Theologyand the appearance, in 1970, of its sequel,Political Theology II: The
Legend of the Demise of All Political Theology.^117 In the later text, Schmitt revised certain
of his earlier views, mainly in response to criticism from two authors: Erik Peterson, in
hisMonotheism as a Political Problem, had sought to establish ‘‘theological impossibilities’’
and insisted on the ultimate liquidation of political theology, and Hans Blumenberg, in
hisThe Legitimacy of the Modern Age, had claimed that Schmitt’s political theology could
be taken only as ‘‘a metaphorical theology.’’^118 Whereas in his 1922 study Schmitt seems
to imply a relationship of foundation—and nothing else would authorize one to speak
of historical processes of ‘‘secularization’’ or ‘‘neutralization’’ of antecedent theological
tropes—his later position is more cautious. InPolitical Theology II, Schmitt merely insists
on the structural similarity in outward features between the political and the theological.
Indeed, the hypothesis of a simple homology seems less vulnerable to historical and sys-
tematic objection than the earlier, stronger, genealogical claim. Yet the weaker hypothesis
still allows him to think the ‘‘transposition,’’ the ‘‘translation,’’ or the ‘‘redistribution
[Umbesetzung]’’ of fundamental concepts and doctrinal schemes from one domain to the
next.
On closer scrutiny, however, the oscillation between the earlier and later reading is
already present in the first volume ofPolitical Theology. Here, Courtine argues, Schmitt
likewise hesitates between the historicist reduction of the theological to the political (the
more metaphysical genealogical view) and a mode of reasoning reminiscent of Max We-
ber’s insistence on the elective affinity between one domain and the other (the more
modest analogical view). In other words, Schmitt from the outset attempts to avoid the
alternatives of either transcribing the theological into the political (by way of ‘‘seculariza-
tion’’ and ‘‘neutralization’’) orstrategically re-theologizingthe political, binding its central
concepts backward to their supposedly religious origins. The contributions to the present
volume illuminate these alternative (descriptive-reductive or normative-strategic) ways of
assessing and using the theologico-political across a broad spectrum of historical and
analytic positions.^119
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