HENT DE VRIESThe permanence of the religious, thus defined, is the transcendental illusion of the
political: the ‘‘move toward immanence’’ being seemingly one ‘‘toward transcendence,’’
the insistence on social relations that reintroduces ‘‘unity,’’ and the ‘‘disincorporation’’ of
the body politic, which seems unthinkable without renewed ‘‘personification.’’ But its
permanence has other features as well.
At this point, a second preliminary result might suggest itself. Political theology seems
a intellectual discipline not of the general or universal (which, traditionally, would be
metaphysics, including general metaphysics or ontology but also special metaphysics,
within which one counts natural theology), nor of the individual or singular (of which,
traditionally, there can be no scientific knowledge at all), but of the elusive, that is to say,
of that which absolves itself (the ab-solute), the spiritually and motivationally recalcitrant,
the invisible, imperceptible, intangible, and imponderable. These give themselves to be
read through words, things, gestures, and powers, without being reducible to them. But
then, political theology could also be seen as the analysis and phenomenological descrip-
tion of the wide spectrum of all too literal, material, and figurative fixations of this theo-
logico-political difference within dogmatic forms of thought, rigid and ritualized codes of
conduct, and idolatrous images of aesthetic representation, all of which reduce the theo-
logico-political to partial—and inevitably exclusive—incarnations and sedimentations all
built upon a principle of exaggeration whose necessary effect is that of escalation. Perhaps
a final, no less crucial, task for political theology—in the singular and the plural—would
be that of a search-engine, locating and exposing theologico-political noise, often in the
form of babble and sophistry.
In his contribution, Marc de Wilde seeks to determine the status of theologico-politi-
cal motifs in the work of Benjamin and Schmitt. He argues that these authors’ intellectual
affinity, to which important references in their work testify, can be adequately understood
only in light of their shared theologico-political convictions. In their work, he shows, the
concept of political theology stands neither for an explicitly theological discourse in poli-
tics nor for some kind of hidden theological agenda. Rather, it marks the continuous
resurfacing of theological figures of thought in what seems an otherwise relentlessly secu-
larized world. The theological, in their view, resurfaces not only in fundamental political
beliefs, ideologies, and myths but also, more obliquely, in theories of sovereignty, in theo-
ries and practices demonstrating the force of law, and, last but not least, in the state of
exception (a term critically redeployed by Giorgio Agamben, with whose work de Wilde
takes issue in this context).
The second part of de Wilde’s essay consists in a close reading of Benjamin’s 1921
essay ‘‘Critique of Violence’’ and Schmitt’s 1922 studyPolitical Theology. These texts, he
argues, mark a new sensibility in the transformations of sovereignty, bearing witness to
the reappearance of the theologico-political in political discourse. Although it is uncertain
whether Schmitt was familiar with Benjamin’s essay, for both the concept of political
theology implies the task of inventing or reinventing a politics that bears witness to divine
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