INTRODUCTIONlatter’s borrowings from other traditions of political reflection: paganism (beginning with
Varro), Judaism, Islam, or even Hinduism and Buddhism. In his view, we had to wait for
an elaboration of the ‘‘comparative’’ concept of ‘‘the religious’’—indeed, for the concept
of ‘‘world religions’’—before the fundamentally Christian designationpolitical theology
could be significantly broadened, extended, and retroactively projected into the histori-
cally and culturally different contexts of ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, India, China, and
the pre-Columbian empires of the Americas. We might add that, mutatis mutandis, the
same argument could be made for the so-called primitive, nonscriptural cultures that
formed a central object of study in the emerging discipline of anthropology.^95
But if the expansive use—indeed, the pluralization—of the termpolitical theologyis
permitted, what might be the intrinsic or external limits of its concept, of its governing
idea and, perhaps, ideal? Does everythingturn aroundthe theologico-political? Or could
we just make itturn around, make itturn around itselfby speaking of what, in its very
genesis and meaning, it unwittingly involves, what obscurely revolves around it, again,
what lies before and beyond it, that is to say, what orients—and troubles—it from a
distance? Is there, in light of this (spatial or temporal, transcendental or virtual?) distance
not also a certain intrinsic limit that our Greco-Latin Christianity—including its concept
of the theologico-political—must encounter, without thereby being negated, sublated,
rendered obsolete, or reduced to a mere historical curiosity? If not everything has a theo-
logico-political significance, what, exactly, remains exterior to its concept and the very
diversity of its reception?
The question, if not the explicit concept, of the theologico-political and everything
for which it stands—the contested nonseparation and irremovable imbrication of religion
and thepolis, the disputed consubstantiality of the two orders of theecclesiaand the
imperial state, but also of an emphatic understanding of love (agape ̄) as the normative
source and affective life of thecommunitas—already makes its appearance in the ancient
world of pre-Christian Greece and the arrangement of the Roman empire before, in the
year 325, the Emperor Constantine declared Christianity to be its official religion. From
two different angles, Marcel Detienne and Jean-Luc Nancy, in their opening contributions
to this volume, suggest that the theologico-political problem is perceived and lived well
before being theorized and named as such. Starting out either from an original nonsepara-
tion of the theological and the political (Detienne) or from their inaugural separation
(Nancy), both the historical-anthropological-comparative and the philosophical-decon-
structive approaches of their respective essays uncover a remarkable me ́lange, whose dis-
tinctive threads, though they can be identified analytically and conceptually, cannot be
disentangled or disengagedin fact.
Detienne, in his suggestive essay ‘‘The Gods of Politics in Early Greek Cities,’’ makes
clear that the question of the political (captured since Herodotus by the neuter termto
politiko ̄n) hardly originated with the Greek city-state, thepolis, with Athenean democracy,
nor did it make its first appearance with the definition of ‘‘power’’ or even the distinc-
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