INTRODUCTIONApart from the singular occurrence of the term in Spinoza, another modern articula-
tion of the theologico-political can be discerned in the motif of the ‘‘omnipotence of
God’’ and its Hobbesian translation.^86 Since the ‘‘radical Enlightenment’’ (to use Jonathan
Israel’s provocative ascription of Spinoza’s influential role throughout Europe at the time)
there have been still other ways to trace to religious sources the concepts of the political,
authority, the law, and sovereignty, including the state’s prerogative of violence, in partic-
ular, war. Even where these political concepts tended to be defined in down-to-earth
terms, in the wake of a seemingly irreversible ‘‘disenchantment of the world’’ (to use
Max Weber’s expression), their formal features and fundamentally ontological weight
continued to be invested in—indeed, produced by—the very religious tradition whose
historical privilege they sought to overcome or at least to hold in check.^87
In the following, I will draw out the most important elements of these traditions in
order to provide some relevant historical and systematic background to the diverse studies
collected in this volume. This will require, as the title of this introduction suggests, shed-
ding light on what has preceded or escaped (or might yet come to exceed) the theoretical
matrix and practical delimitations of ‘‘political theology.’’ I will ask what constitutes the
origin and dissemination as well as thehomogenizationand possiblepluralizationof this
concept, no less than its (now desirable, then deplorable) effects on key issues in contem-
porary policy. Is there a future for its past and present meaning? Does its role exhaust
itself where traditional and modern notions of sovereignty (of ‘‘nation-states’’ and their
relations, of peoples and their geographical boundaries, which convey seemingly obvious
modes of belonging, hence ofjus sanguinisandjus solis) have been rendered virtually
obsolete or are at least steadily undermined by the flows of capital and information,
immigration and migration, bodies and ideas? And how, exactly, do we counter those
progressivists, whether market liberals and technocrats or left-leaning communitarians
and secular pragmatists (to say nothing of Muslim humanists and atheists), who, without
being reductionist naturalists, and often with the best intentions, urge us to see (at last)
that ‘‘religion has absolutely nothing to do with it’’ and that we would do better to focus
on economic and socio-cultural deprivations and inequalities instead of speculating about
a turn, let alone a return, to religion? Why and in what way does—or should—‘‘religion’’
matter at all in discussing the question of the political, of politics? But then, why is the
disengagement of church and state still considered to be the primary event in the ‘‘order
of separations’’ that constitutes the modern concepts of democracy and political liberal-
ism? Why consider the theologico-political problem as a peculiar ‘‘vector,’’ of sorts?^88
Can we not also envision societies that open onto the beyond of the theologico-
political (assuming, for a moment, that a return to its antecedents would be impossible,
undesirable, or in any case regressive)? Or will the theologico-political, as Lefort suggests
in a famous essay, reproduced in this volume, have a certain ‘‘permanence,’’ so that it will
continue to cast its shadow on—and beyond—its functional equivalents and eventual
substitutes, hence even on some of the most challenging ideas concerning the end of
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