INTRODUCTIONspeaking, possible, in the first place? Belonging to time, it seems, requires its polar oppo-
site, if not ontologically then at least analytically. But what would this entail? A non-
belonging, a sense of ‘‘eternity’’ (perhaps as analyzed by Spinoza, in Deleuze’s reading,
but also as introduced by Adorno and developed by Lefort)? Finally, what resources would
the theologico-political tradition(s) offer for tackling these questions?
Along lines both like and unlike Connolly’s, Wendy Brown develops a critique of
political liberalism’s ideal of tolerance, and Chantal Mouffe sets forth a conception of
agonistic pluralism in which benign or productive forms of cultural and political disagree-
ment supplant rigid—and fatally antagonistic—fixations of sovereignty and democracy.
Brown starts out with the troubling observation that recent years have seen a ‘‘culturaliza-
tion of conflict’’ (p. 299), in which (following public intellectuals such as Bernard Lewis
and Samuel Huntington in ‘‘The Roots of Muslim Rage’’ andThe Clash of Civilizations,
respectively) an opposition has been drawn between liberal culture, premised upon moral
autonomy, neutrality, and tolerance, on the one hand, and nonliberal, intolerant, and
ultimately barbaric cultures, on the other. The transposition of conflict from questions of
the market, the state, capitalism, or democracy to ‘‘culture’’ rests, Brown argues, on an
‘‘overt premise of liberal tolerance,’’ namely, that ‘‘religious, cultural, or ethnic differences
are sites of natural or native hostility’’ (p. 299). Given this association, she asks two sets
of related questions, which reflect several of the governing concerns of this volume: first,
‘‘What is the relation between the binding force of the social contract and the binding
force of culture or religion? Why isn’t the social contract sufficient for reducing the
significance of subnational group hostilities?’’ (p. 300); and second, ‘‘If national ‘civic
religion’ was featured by the classic social contract theorists—Hobbes, Locke, and Rous-
seau—as a necessarysupplementto the social contract, where did the contents of what
was deposited in that supplement go and what is the relationship of this loss to the rise
of subnational identities requiring civic tolerance?’’ (p. 729n.4).
Brown shows that an answer to these questions can be prepared only by revisiting
the assumptions that pit a formal concept of subjectivity, with its understanding of culture
as an ‘‘option’’ or ‘‘background’’ to be espoused or rejected at will, against a supposedly
‘‘organicist’’ individuality that has stayed within—or, as Freud says, can always regress
again into—a primordial understanding of ‘‘culture as religion’’ and ‘‘religion as culture.’’
In the liberal view, religion is a freely chosen—or freely accepted—source of inspiration,
whereas in the organicist view, it affectively predetermines a given course of action or
suffering. Thus, she writes: ‘‘Bush’s religiosity is figured as a source of strength and moral
guidance for his deliberations and decisions, while the devotee of Allah is assumed to be
without the individual will and conscience necessary to such rationation’’ (p. 301). She
uses Freud to deconstruct that opposition by teasing out the assumptions underlying his
conviction that ‘‘individuation’’ constitutes the ‘‘agent,’’ ‘‘sign,’’ and ‘‘telos’’ of civiliza-
tion, whereas groups, being based first on ‘‘primary mutual hostility’’ and ‘‘sexual rivalry’’
and second on mechanisms of projection and the idealization of externalized love objects
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