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Theoscopy

Transparency, Omnipotence, and Modernity

Stefanos Geroulanos

To be forever seen without seeing back is to succumb to a mercy and
grace carved in religious force, to walk in fear and faith of a tremendous
power one cannot face. It is to live a paranoid existence of nakedness
before a God who is all-seeing, hence omniscient and omnipotent, and
who accordingly metes out a social experience and a knowledge of one-
self and one’s history that is based on this awareness of being seen. I
will name this conditiontheoscopy. Widespread from patristic texts to
contemporary media artifacts and works of social theory, theoscopy in-
volves the establishment of a site of perfect vision in the political, a site
endowed with transcendental, theological power, which then turns into
the sovereign structuring principle of the theologico-political.^1 Recon-
structing the world around an axis in which visual, theological, and
political problematics intermesh, theoscopy orients knowledge and his-
tory to an ethics and a social ideal of transparency before this gaze.
Because it radicalizes constant imbalance between seeing and being seen
into an absolute difference in which every man becomes entirely visible
to what watches him, theoscopy enforces a political theology of the gaze
that survives proclamations of a death of God in modernity.
The religious tradition itself offers a long series of considerations
and interpretations of theoscopy. Citing Paul’s letter to the Hebrews,
for example, Augustine writes: ‘‘Indeed, Lord, to your eyes, the abyss of
human consciousness is naked. What could be hidden within me, even
if I were unwilling to confess it to you? I would be hiding from myself,
not myself from you.’’^2 Augustine compares this penetrative divine gaze
(which, a propos, sees through sin) to his own torment over the indis-
cernability of the shape and materiality of God—God who sees him,
but who is visible, recognizable, and present to himonly insofar asHe
remains perpetually unseen and insufficiently imagined by him.^3 More

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