This Pathless Hour | 275marily Christians and Muslims who felt the need to legitimize sovereign power
through political theology, and ultimately bury the human origins of the system
of divine monarchy.^142 The canonical sites of a “modern” attitude to sovereignty,
beginning perhaps in the Monarchomach treatises and continuing in Hobbes
and Locke, often reinterpret 1 Samuel 8 and can be read as an effort to remember
the human origins of monarchy so as to hold the king to his contractual commit-
ments to the people.^143 But the public’s recollection that it created the sovereign
itself is traumatic, as Santner and other readers of Kantorowicz have shown, be-
cause it undermines the perception of a secure natural order of which the king
was the linchpin, bringing to mind once again the fundamental groundlessness
of all human orders. The specter of this groundlessness must be immediately
abolished through the reestablishment of the natural order, this time in natural
rights, the idea of the nation, and the invisible hand of the market. However,
in modernity the human origins of the polity are not easily forgotten, thus the
explosion of ideas and ideologies purporting to locate the ultimate ground or
meaning of political life. The era of liberatory politics, wherein each new move-
ment tries to outdo the previous one in terms of what it liberates, exemplifies this
phenomenon: socialism denounces liberal rights as merely formal; classical an-
archism views state socialism as a sham equality; poststructuralism declares the
entire Western philosophical heritage, including the very concept of the subject,
to be a stricture on our every thought and action. Even the attempts to acknowl-
edge the groundlessness of political order seem to partake in this type of out-
flanking, through implicit claims that it is only through such acknowledgment
that oppression can be defeated.
Theopolitics, by reminding us of the sovereignty of God, also reminds us of
the groundlessness, which we would prefer to forget, of all human order. It does
not provide a new foundation, but neither does it enjoin paralysis until we can
discover the logical way out of the deadlock of outflanking. It absorbs the posi-
tivity of Nietzsche’s stance along with his critique. Landauer once proclaimed,
“Someone who understands and pronounces the ills of his times further increas-
es t hem.”^144 This Dionysian insight can also be found in a more pragmatic regis-
ter, in the contemporary Jewish theologian Steven Kepnes:
Modernity was and continues to be, in its transformed postmodern stage, an
age of revolutions with promised utopias.... [A]ll these revolutions failed pre-
cisely because they were built on a rejection of that which came before them.
And so we see the dialectic of rejection or repression of the past followed by
the return of the repressed, in which the revolution is denied and the past rein-
stated.... The lesson of the political and philosophical revolutions of moder-
nity and postmodernity is that it is impossible to move forward without taking
the past with you. Taking the past into the future for the sake of the future,
however, requires creative strategies—strategies of repetition, interpretation,
and mediation—that sublimate and re-present the past as a usable past.^145