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INTRODUCTION

To return to our example, the contemporary political and public presence of ‘‘religion’’
seems no longer dependent upon—or especially effective through—broad popular, let
alone democratic support (although such is, of course, not excluded either, as is witnessed
by the victory of Hamas in the January 2006 Palestinian elections, just as it is further
illustrated by the success of ideological-nationalist, left- and right-wing populist move-
ments in Venezuela, Poland, and elsewhere). The journalistic and scholarly debate con-
cerning the exact meaning and impact of public religions in the post-secular world (of
the theologico-political, that is) has remained fragmentary and disoriented. The reasons
for this impasse are not difficult to determine. For one thing, it seems as if the more
challenging issues raised by these public religions address a multidimensional space and
timebefore,around, andbeyondthe ‘‘theologico-political,’’ at least in its ancient, medieval,
and modern definition, even though no plausible account of current transformations can
ignore the historical archive for which this term, with its many semantic connotations,
visual associations, rhetoric, and affects, still stands. That the most burning political issues
are not so much directly but indirectly—some would say, tangentially or negatively—
related to the ‘‘theological’’ can already be glimpsed in the unforeseen ways in which the
subject of ‘‘religion’’ has entered the contemporary public domain and debate, nationally
and internationally.
‘‘Religion,’’ in its more concrete and abstract, local and global determinations is per-
ceived as a ‘‘problem’’ to which policy- and opinion-makers, social and political scientists,
cultural critics and philosophers, media theorists and economists tend to direct their
attention with either increasing fascination or barely veiled irritation. Yet the phenome-
non manifests itself in more and more ethereal ways—elusive and ab-solute, but then also
quite visceral. It is upon this paradox, if not aporia, that the contemporary presence and
often virulence of ‘‘religion’’ (of its words, things, gestures, and powers) is premised. No
longer a given, it cannot simply be given up, either, not even by the most persistent—and
supposedly enlightened—of its detractors. The post-secular condition and its correspond-
ing intellectual stance consist precisely in acknowledging this ‘‘living-on’’ of religion be-
yond its prematurely announced and celebrated deaths. While it increasingly escapes pre-
established contexts and concepts, horizons and expectations, it nonetheless takes on an
ever more ghostly appearance. In order to track its movements, new methodological tools
and sensibilities are needed.
For this ‘‘retreat’’ yet ‘‘permanence’’ of ‘‘religion’’ and the theologico-political (to
echo titles coined by Jean-Luc Nancy, Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, and Claude Lefort^11 ),
several complementary explanations could be given. They include the fate of metaphysics
in the philosophical and cultural discourse of modernity, especially the critical onslaughts
onmetaphysica specialisortheologia naturalis, the overcoming of ‘‘onto-theology’’ on
which Heidegger mused, and the symbolic interpretation of the ‘‘popular metaphysics’’
with which Schopenhauer, not unlike Spinoza, equated historical and revealed or positive
religion (that is to say, superstition). More material trends, having to do with the develop-

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