HENT DE VRIESwerealreadyChristian and as if the modern conception of the political—until its ‘‘re-
treat’’—had beenstillChristian: ‘‘The political... is autonomy by definition and by
structure. Theocracy,... as the other of politics, represents heteronomy by definition and
by structure. Manifestly, autonomy cannot but resist heteronomy, and vice versa’’ (p.
103). Nancy, who refers in this context to messianism, thus seems to echo Benjamin’s
claim, in the ‘‘Theologico-Political Fragment,’’ that there is and must be an unbridgeable
cleavage between ‘‘theocracy’’ and the political—or, more broadly, historical—realm.
But Nancy’s point is more nuanced. No simple dichotomy is observed, let alone
advocated, here. Not only does the religious form itself, in its very act of separation, on a
political model (the Kingdom of Heaven and the City of God are cases in point), what
interests Nancy even more are the concrete ways in which the question of politics is
already a reaction against the polarity expressed by the analytical distinction between
church and state. In consequence, politics—conceived as a ‘‘form of political or moral
resistance’’ (p. 103)—can be seen to imply a relation between autonomy and heteronomy,
that is to say, between the political and the ecclesial (and hence, we may suspect, ulti-
mately between democracy and theocracy).
This argument develops ideas Nancy began to explore in the days he co-founded,
with Lacoue-Labarthe and Lefort, the Center for Philosophical Research on the Political,
in Strasbourg. As in his contributions to the collective volumeThe Retreat of the Political,
Nancy insists that whenever the ‘‘relation’’ between civil autonomy and religious heteron-
omy dissipates, that is to say, wherever recourse to the ‘‘image, idea, or scheme of a ‘civil
religion’ more or less consciously underlies our principal representations of the political.
... it seems that the political is destined to withdraw [retirer] the essence we assumed it
to have, leaving this essence to dissolve into ‘administration’ and the ‘police,’ which
henceforth appear before us as the miserable remnants of what politics could or should
have done’’ (p. 105).
Before it does so, however, a different tendency can be observed, which grants reli-
gion, to the extent that it continues or emerges in the city-state, a ‘‘double aspect’’ of
appearing now as a ‘‘remnant of ’’ and ‘‘substitute for’’ heteronomous, theocratic religion,
then as a ‘‘specific religion, distinct from the ‘religion of the priests.’ ’’ This specific reli-
gion, Nancy explains, reminds us of a religion ‘‘within the limits of reason alone,’’ as Kant
said, which constitutes thepolisin principle and does so in spite (or on the very basis?)
of the latter’s foundation as an autonomous intervention. Religious ‘‘insofar as it is politi-
cal, and not the other way around,’’ this second aspect expresses the consubstantiality
of cult and culture, ofreligio—etymologically understood, this time—as a ‘‘scrupulous
observance’’ and ‘‘establishing a bond.’’ The civic, civil, or political religions of Athens
and especially of ancient Rome are cases in point. But what does it mean for religion to
be more than just a remnant? For one thing, Nancy claims, it ‘‘signifies the inclusion of
autonomy in a heteronomy that, without subverting this autonomy, gives it the double
dimension of a transcendence and a fervor’’ (p. 104). This projected image of a (theologi-
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