Introduction
Before, Around, and Beyond the Theologico-PoliticalHent de VriesWhat has happened to ‘‘religion’’ in its present and increasingly public
manifestation, propelled by global media, economic markets, and foreign
policies as much as by resistance to them? How should we understand
the worldwide tendencies toward the simultaneous homogenizationand
pluralization of our social and cultural practices, that is to say, of our
individual and shared forms and ways of life? To answer these questions,
we must interrogate a complex and shifting semantic, axiological, and
imaginative archive, whose historical origins and modern dissemina-
tions have pragmatic ramifications for burning contemporary issues of
the political (le politique) and politics (la politique), of commerce and
exchange, of economics and law. In doing so, we will touch upon the
legal separation and accommodation between church and state, the
freedom of religion, and the professed confessional-ideological neutral-
ity of government and the public sphere. But our questions also concern
issues of pluralism and social cohesion, the quest for identity and the
need for integration, respect for others (that is to say, for their beliefs
and values), as well as the liberty in principle to express oneself (albeit
in ways that others may perceive as idolatrous, blasphemous, or offen-
sive in nature).
Religion’s reassigned place and renewed function in the public do-
main may owe their contours to the very theological traditions and
practices, the systems of thought and sensibilities, whose authority they
seek to curb or hold in check and whose explicit or subterranean work-
ings—in words, things, gestures, and powers—we have hardly begun to
comprehend. To open or, rather, reopen an inquiry concerning reli-
gion’s engagement with the political (i.e., with its very concept and its
conceptual analogues, such as sovereignty, democracy, etc.), as well as
with politics (i.e., in its juridical, administrative or policy-oriented, na-
tional, and international aspects), is the aim of this volume.
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