HENT DE VRIEStry (hence, in a sense, blasphemy, scandal, and conflict) would be the order of the day;
indeed, only thus can we avoid the totalitarian ‘‘collapse into simple identity.’’ The polar
opposition of radical finitude and absolute fullness is de facto and de jure tainted—and
enabled—by what Laclau, in Derridian terminology, calls ‘‘contamination,’’ because of
the fact that ‘‘differential remainders’’—and the ‘‘complex language games’’ to which they
give rise—are the very ‘‘condition of possibility’’ of the discourses of mysticism, ethics,
and politics alike (p. 145).
In consequence, democratic politics can only consist in keeping nominations and
terms (and, by extension, principles and rights, norms and rules, customs and causes)
open for revisions that can have no determinable end, just as in negative theologies there
has always been ‘‘an alternative way of naming God, which is through the self-destruction
of the particularized contents’’ that theological language can come up with. But does that
not mean that (the strife for) political hegemony must be held in check by an apophatic
critique of all political idolatry (whether that of party and parliamentary politics as usual,
or of states of exception, popular revolutions, etc.)? Amidst the unstoppable flight toward
fullness, it might, indeed, help to plant empty (translucent, plastic) flags here and there.
Claude Lefort, in a by now classic essay, circles in a different way around the question
of the emptiness of the signifier of sovereignty and suggests that the denunciation of
religion and its constitutive role in the political are of little help in capturing its contem-
porary function. Lefort provocatively suggests that the religious ‘‘survives in the guise of
new beliefs and new representations,’’ and that such beliefs can at any moment ‘‘return
to the surface, in either traditional or novel forms, when conflicts become so acute as to
produce cracks in the edifice of the state.’’ To say this undercuts the presupposition of a
teleological development of Western intellectual and political history (read: Hegel), of
seemingly irreversible learning processes (read: Habermas), and the like. Yet more than
the well-known paradoxes of modernity or the dialectic of Enlightenment is at stake here.
The ‘‘permanence of the theologico-political’’ is more abrupt, instantaneous, undecid-
able—out there, but only virtually. The ‘‘permanence’’ in question is not an indubitable
presence but rather a permanent possibility, for good and for ill. It is never given once
and for all, in its purity, as such, or intact.
Lefort further suggests that ‘‘the ‘modern’ notion of politics’’ has become ‘‘an index
of our ignorance or disavowal of a hidden part of social life, namely the processes that
make people consent to a given regime—or, to put it more forcefully, that determinetheir
manner of being in society.’’ Exploring such attachments requires rethinking one’s terms,
to begin with,the religiousandthe political. Lefort writes: ‘‘We can definethe religiousin
broader or narrower terms, and the threshold beyond which the word loses all pertinence
is a matter for debate; it would, however, seem that we can readily agree that certain
beliefs, attitudes, and representations reveal a religious sensibility.’’ Taking a genealogical
approach, he argues that the ‘‘expression ‘religious sensibility’ retains a fairly precise con-
tent if we relate it to historically and culturally determined phenomena; in other words,
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