INTRODUCTIONtheir traditional definitions, based upon the existence of and dealings among states and
sovereigns—seems needed, together with a different attunement to nonstate actors and
actions whose sensibilities, passions, and affects obey a logic and rhythm that eludes the
modern understanding of data, numbers, cause, and effect.
Has the theologico-political tradition prepared us for that task? Has the time come
for it to release its critical potential? Or is its legacy part of the problem, merely symptom-
atic of the present difficulty in thinking about the political, politics, and policies in alto-
gether different terms, perhaps by turning toward what lies beyond, before, and around
them? This task may be more challenging than the appeal to what recent ‘‘progressive
realists,’’ in search of an alternative to the impasses of American liberalism, on the one
hand, and neoconservatism, on the other, have called ‘‘moral imagination,’’ putting one-
self in the shoes of the other political actor.^14
More often than not, we now realize, minimal, seemingly negligible differences and
differentiations, whether ideational, sociological, or organizational, can cause maximal
effects (whether enormous havoc, countless blessings, or both), whereas, conversely, max-
imal investments in, say, lofty ideas or excessive economic or military power too often
result in minimal or virtually no effects at all. Indeed, these maximal investments may
very well, in their expansion and promulgation, revive or provoke the minimal differences
whose larger—but structurally elusive—effects unsettle the distribution of forces and re-
sources that state-regulated social and cultural policies, market-inspired measures, or
high-tech military strategies had sought to bring about in a comprehensive and controlled
manner, whether by piecemeal engineering or in a single stroke.
This paradoxical tendency obeys a logic that one may be tempted to analyze as a
‘‘dialectic of Enlightenment’’ (as Theodor W. Adorno and Max Horkheimer argued), as
the paradox of Western rationalization (as Ju ̈rgen Habermas, following Max Weber,
added), or as the performative contradiction of universalism (as Judith Butler, Ernesto
Laclau, and Slavoj Zˇizˇek have insisted in more psychoanalytically informed ways). The
difference matters little for present purposes. What remains important is to rethink and,
as it were, reframe these paradoxes and aporetics in terms that are suitable for the novel
problems and challenges that face us at present. How is one to ponder the imponderable,
manage the unmanageable? And what experiences or sensibilities are most likely to pre-
pare us for this increasingly difficult—and, we might add, eminently political, perhaps
quintessentially theologico-political—task?
This question has become all the more difficult to answer because in the present,
post-secular domain the inspiration, motivation, and effectuation of political theologies
no longer lie within the cultural and institutional, ecclesial or communal heritage of the
major religions or within the modern forms of political sovereignty with which their
theologically (or cynically) driven politics were, historically, geographically, empirically,
and conceptually linked. Instead, their authority (to the extent that it still, or once again
exists) resides in infinitely mediated and refracted forms of ‘‘make believe’’ (call them
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