THE THEOLOGICO-POLITICAL?What conclusions are we to draw from this brief incursion into the theologico-political
labyrinth? That we must recognize that, according to its schema, any move toward imma-
nence is also a move toward transcendence; that any attempt to explain the contours of
social relations implies an internalization of unity; that any attempt to define objective,
impersonal entities implies a personification of those entities. The workings of the mecha-
nisms of incarnation ensure the imbrication of religion and politics, even in areas where
we thought we were dealing simply with purely religious or purely profane practices or
representations.
If, however, we look back at the democratic society that began to take shape in the
nineteenth century and that the philosophers and historians of the period were exploring,
do we not have to agree that the mechanisms of incarnation were breaking down? The
disincorporation of power is accompanied by the disincorporation of thought and by the
disincorporation of the social. The paradox is that any adventure that begins with the
formulation of a new idea of the state, the people, the nation, or humanity has its roots
in the past. In that sense, Tocqueville has more reason than he might suspect to denounce
the illusion that the French Revolution was a radical beginning and to want to reconstruct
the prehistory of democracy. Although we have been able to do no more than allude to
the fact, there was at the time of the Renaissance a humanism tinged with a political
religiosity, and Michelet could still find traces of it, almost without realizing it. Far from
leading us to conclude that the fabric of history is continuous, does not a reconstruction
of the genealogy of democratic representations reveal the extent of the break within it?
And so, rather than seeing democracy as a new episode in the transfer of the religious
into the political, should we not conclude that the old transfers from one register to the
other were intended to ensure the preservation of aformthat has since been abolished,
that the theological and the political became divorced, that a new experience of the insti-
tution of the social began to take shape, that the religious is reactivated at the weak points
of the social, that its efficacy is no longer symbolic but imaginary, and that, ultimately, it
is an expression of the unavoidable—and no doubt ontological—difficulty democracy has
in reading its own story, as well as of the difficulty political or philosophical thought has
in assuming, without making it a travesty, the tragedy of the modern condition?
—Translated by David MaceyPAGE 187187.................16224$ $CH6 10-13-06 12:35:10 PS