THE THEOLOGICO-POLITICAL?If, however, we specify the terms of our question in this way, we cannot fail to notice
that they are closely related to the meaning we give to the wordsthe religiousand, more
important still,the political. We must, then, examine their meaning.
We can definethe religiousin broader or narrower terms, and the threshold beyond
which the word loses all pertinence is a matter for debate; it would, however, seem that
we can readily agree that certain beliefs, attitudes, and representations reveal a religious
sensibility, even though the agents concerned do not relate them to any dogma; even
though they do not imply any fidelity to a church; and even though they may, in certain
cases, go hand in hand with militant atheism. The expression ‘‘religious sensibility’’ re-
tains a fairly precise content if we relate it to historically and culturally determined phe-
nomena: in other words, not to religion in general but to the Christian religion, whose
various manifestations we can identify without any risk of error. The wordpolitical,on
the other hand, brings us face to face with an ambiguity that must be resolved if we are
to know what we are talking about. The fact that we can choose to say eitherthe political
[le politique] orpolitics[la politique] is, as we all know, an index of this ambiguity. What
is certain is that the delimitation of the domain known as ‘‘the political’’ does not result
from methodological criteria alone. The very notion of ‘‘limits’’ in fact derives from a
desire for an ‘‘objective’’ definition—a desire that lies at the origin of the political theory,
political science, and political sociology that have developed in the course of our century.
No matter whether we attempt, for example, to circumscribe an order of social relations
that are intelligible in themselves, such as power relations; to conceive of a body of social
functions whose necessary articulation signals the coherence of a system; to distinguish a
superstructural level, based upon relations of production in which class domination is at
once expressed and disguised by institutions, practices, and representations that suppos-
edly serve the general interest; or, finally, to identify from empirical observation which of
the mass of social facts relate directly or indirectly to the exercise of power, the underlying
assumption is always the same: we assume that the object can have substance only if it is
particular. In other words, the epistemological operation through which we relate to the
object—be it posited as ‘‘real’’ or as ‘‘ideal’’—makes it appear by separating it from other
defined or definable objects. The criterion of what ispoliticalis supplied by the criterion
of what isnonpolitical, by the criterion of what is economic, social, juridical, aesthetic, or
religious. This operation is not innocent; it hides behind a truism borrowed from the
domain constituted as that of exact knowledge: science deals only with particulars. It need
scarcely be pointed out that this disposition has never prevented anyone from looking for
articulations between that which pertains to politics and that which pertains to different
realities or different systems; on the contrary, it usually acts as an encouragement to do
so. How, for example, do power relations combine with juridical relations? How is the
political system integrated into a general system as a subsystem? How are the political
institutions, practices, and representations that are essential to the preservation of a mode
of production determined, and what is their specific efficacy in different socio-historical
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