INTRODUCTIONimaginary of sacredness, even in the most secular of its articulations—has more often
than not been presented as inherently ‘‘theological’’ or ‘‘theologico-political,’’ premised
upon a ‘‘mystical foundation,’’ as Derrida, following Montaigne and Pascal, reminds us
in his ‘‘Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundations of Authority.’ ’’ One need not share
Schmitt’s appeal to the state of exception and its theological presuppositions to discern
the systematic—at once structural and hence more than merely metaphorical or analogi-
cal—relevance of the divine and the transcendent for the terrestrial and the profane, that
is to say, for immanence.
From Augustine’sCity of God, whose distinction between the heavenly and earthly
cities, if not their interpenetration, their being set in parallel, sets an intellectual standard
for as recent and dialectical a thinker as Theodor W. Adorno, in his pivotal essay ‘‘Prog-
ress,’’ beyond the early modern contractarian theories of natural right analyzed by Patrick
Riley in hisThe General Will Before Rousseau, to Michael Theunissen’s characterization of
Hegel’s doctrine of absolute Spirit as a ‘‘theologico-political treatise,’’ it seems that some
version of political theology has always played a determining, if often oblique, historical
and conceptual role.^104 This is made clear by Hans Kelsen’s co-implication of ‘‘God and
State,’’ by Leo Strauss’s studies of the motif of thetheos nomosand its transformation into
revealed positive law, all the way up to the critical reexaminations of the theologico-
political, community, and bio-politics in the writings of such authors as Roberto Esposito,
Giorgio Agamben, and Myriam Revault d’Allonnes.^105
The systematic point that interests us here is made nowhere more poignantly than in
the theoretical studies of Ernesto Laclau concerning the ‘‘empty signifier’’ of sovereignty
and investigating its unexpected precursors in the negative-theological tradition of divine
names. Laclau gives the clearest possible formal analysis of the parallel sense in which the
tradition of theological thinking—here, in its heterodox, negative, apophatic, or, in his
words, mystic current—may well have constituted (and, indeed, still form) the basis of
the most concrete and everyday forms of political engagement and disengagement, of
militancy, revolution, and populist action.
Beginning with his rediscovery and reformulation of the theory of hegemony and
radical democracy, in the wake of Antonio Gramsci and in close collaboration with Chan-
tal Mouffe,^106 Laclau has worked toward elaborating a ‘‘grammar of emancipation’’ that
culminates in the reconceptualization of a notion of universality that is ‘‘not a static
presumption, not an a priori given’’ but that ‘‘ought instead to be understood as a process
or condition irreducible to any of its determinate modes of appearance.’’^107 The political,
as it were, does not let itself be absorbed into various elements and movements—words,
things, gestures, and powers—of ‘‘politics,’’ even though (like the Saussurian system of
languein relation to anyparole) it is has no existence and relevance elsewhere, that is,
before or beyond them. These are important implications for an innovative theory of
human rights, emancipation, and international law. Central elements in this program can
be found in such seminal works as Laclau’sNew Reflections on the Revolution of Our
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