INTRODUCTIONgetherness between strangers/enemies from the Palestine side could reasonably be ex-
pected only once certain conditions had been fulfilled, not least the acquisition of a
‘‘thematized ontology,’’ a collective ‘‘dwelling,’’ a state of their own.
Opening Societies and the Rights of the Human
The political, we have said, regardless of ideological justification and representation, has
often been seen asinherently theological, premised upon a ‘‘mystical foundation,’’ that is
to say, on some reference to an ‘‘empty signifier,’’ whose historical and systematic connec-
tion to the tradition of religion, in particular, to the divine names, seems evident. Con-
versely, both historical religions—‘‘primitive’’ religions as well as the monotheistic
religions of the Book—and those that haunt the contemporary imagination, including
alternative religions associated with New Age forms of spirituality, have always supple-
mented their beliefs, rituals, and institutions with a practical politics in addition to a more
abstract interpretation of the political.
In order to understand the relationship between the domains of the religious and the
theological, on the one hand, and the political and politics, on the other—as well as the
violence and horrors they might each separately and in relation provoke (or allow)—we
must interrogate the historically fairly recent assumption of the autonomy, neutrality, and
homogeneity of the public realm, just as we must rethink the origin and range of the
state’s sovereignty in light of its more elusive constituents. This assumption should not
only be understood against the background of an age-old tradition, whose metaphysical
premises and religious elements have, in modernity, often been ignored or played down,
and whose very idea and structure is captured by the termpolitical theology. We should
simultaneously recast it in light of the new dimensions opened up by the late-twentieth-
century revolution in and exponential development of modes of communication and the
newest technological media, as well as in view of global processes, economic markets, and
the ideas that they have accompanied, enabled, indeed, expressed and propelled. An even
greater challenge, broached in some of the contributions discussed above, remains the
task of rethinking the theologico-political in view of the twentieth- and twenty-first-
century revolutions in the ‘‘technologies of life,’’ both organic and artificial, and the onto-
logical and existential, not to mention ethical and juridical, consequences they entail.
These questions are more complex than current references to Foucauldian bio-politics or
reductionist neuroscientific explorations of artificial intelligence, gene technology, and so
on suggest. The final part of this book discusses some of these issues and their repercus-
sions for our understanding of life and living together, experience and perception, agency
and human rights.
Paola Marrati’s lucid opening essay raises the question of what light the evolutionary
perspective set out by Henri Bergson in his lateThe Two Sources of Morality and Religion
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