Political theologies and development in Asia

Transcendence, sacrifice, and aspiration

Giuseppe Bolotta, Philip Fountain, R. Michael Feener

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781526149398
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Política y relaciones internacionales
• Subtopic: Política comparada

This innovative and timely reassessment of political theology opens new lines of critical investigation into the intersections of religion and politics in contemporary Asia. Moving beyond a focus on the (post-) Christian West, this volume locates 'development' – conceptualised as a set of modern, transnational networks of ideas and practices of improvement that connect geographically disparate locations­­ – as a vital focal point for critical investigations into Asian political theologies. Investigating the sacred dimensions of power through concepts of transcendence, sacrifice, victimhood, aspiration and salvation, the chapters in this collection demonstrate how European and Asian modernities are bound together through genealogical, institutional, and theo-political entanglements, as well as a long history of global interactions. With contributions by leading anthropologists, sociologists and political scientists, this volume brings new theoretical approaches into conversation with detailed empirical case studies grounded in modern Asia, offering a fresh and critical analysis of the ways in which political theology is imagined, materialised and contested both within and beyond nation-states.

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Transcendence, sacrifice, and aspiration: the political theology of development in Asia

Giuseppe Bolotta, Philip Fountain, and R. Michael Feener

Scholarship on political theology has made important interventions toward deconstructing the official script of secularism and revealing the ‘secular conversion’ of a Christian ethos into the constitutional-juridical scaffolding of modern nation-states (Schmitt, 2005; Lefort, 2006). In the context of Enlightenment Europe, political theology developed a number of critical analytical tools to ‘unmake’ the secular fiction of political modernity. Recognising that political theology discourse emerged as a transgressive, deviant expression of modern thinking, we argue that the employment of these analytical tools outside of Europe is promising, including in contexts where the project of secularism has historically proved less effective, produced unintended consequences, and favoured the multiplication of alternative ‘theological secularities’. It is for this reason that this volume focuses on Asia. But a shift beyond Western modernity is not simply a rejection of previous articulations of political theology. European and Asian modernities are bound together through genealogical, institutional, and theo-political entanglements and our analysis of each must take into account this long history of global interactions. Our focus on development – conceptualised here as a set of transnational networks of ideas and practices that connect geographically disparate locations in complex political and religious entanglements – seeks to resituate the objects and locations of political theological analysis within a more expansive horizon. As the chapters in this volume will demonstrate, just as political theology scholarship stands to benefit from new critical attention to development in Asia, so too the critical analysis of ‘modernity’ and ‘development’ in Asia gains new traction through active engagement with political theology. We argue that a political theology of development will especially benefit from careful examination of themes of transcendence, sacrifice and victimhood, and aspiration and salvation.

The theological foundations of the political

Scholarship on political theology has not only revealed the elusive character of the separation between religion and politics as has been thought to be characteristic of Western modernity, but it also addresses ‘the political’¹ as intrinsically and ontologically theological. Without providing any essentialist definition of ‘the political’, prominent scholars in political theology are mostly preoccupied with ‘perturbing’ the rationalistic framing of modern political theory through ‘theological’ considerations. According to scholars like Claude Lefort (2006), Paul Kahn (2011), and Harald Wydra (2015), for example, the political is not solely reflected by politics² – that is, administration, policies, and the various juridical-institutional arrangements which regulate political authority and state sovereignty. More fundamentally, ‘the political’ refers to the hidden symbolic principles and sources of ‘truth’ (the theological) that generate different forms of society; transcend the institutional fabric of everyday politics; and give normative meanings, shape, and stage to historically situated modes of collective life and individual experience. The theological foundations of politics enable the possibility of social coexistence by connecting power to the limits and finitude of human experience. The ‘transcendent’ legitimation of ‘immanent’ sovereignty – this is an important point to be stressed – might or might not refer to God or gods, even if traditionally religions have provided the kind of metaphysical assumptions political power is founded on, both within and beyond Christian Europe.

Weimar-era political theorist Carl Schmitt (2005) identified the theological foundation of the political in the fundamental binary distinction between friends and enemies, whereas the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben (1998), drawing on Schmitt, has provided a reading of sovereign power as an historical production of ‘states of exception’ and homini sacri, the latter being an exceptional figure in Roman law that is set apart as both sacred and accursed. The theological foundations of the political inform questions related to the limits and ultimate ends of human conditions, what Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe (1985) name ‘empty signifiers’. The ‘emptiness’ of the domain addressed by these questions – the fact that questions of salvation, death, life, or God are so large as to escape definitive and final closure – makes the theological an ontologically open and contested field. Across considerable differences of cultural context and historical change, however, we observe processes through which – as Hent De Vries (2006: 46) points out – the anxieties of cosmic indeterminacy become ‘dogmatically fixated, socially reified, and aesthetically fetishized’ as ‘the only Universal Truth’ and source of authority. Or, as Wydra (2015: 10) puts it: ‘Voids of meaning have to be kept in check by transcendental signifiers, symbols and ritual.’ Indeed, ‘the extraordinary’ for Wydra plays a decisive role, such that people ‘require transcendent images that express the eternity of their collective groups and the world’. These might be ‘religious’ or ‘secular’. They might refer to God(s), ‘the People’ (demos), Dharma, science, civilisation, human rights, the market, or development – each taking on new valences when observed as elements of particular political theologies.

For Lefort (2006) the theological-political is located at the crossroads between the transcendent Other (the end of life and the realm beyond life) and the immanent One (the necessary illusion of the unity of the body-politic). The theological signifier of sovereignty, in other words, symbolically generates power as a mediator between the One and the Other, in ways that facilitate a certain configuration of political authority and general understanding of social reality to become experienced and accepted as legitimate and ‘natural’ by its subjects. Political theology thus requires us to consider a set of concepts that are commonly excluded from modern political theory but which nevertheless greatly contribute to shape our political imagination, such as faith, sacrifice, and the sacred (Kahn, 2011: 8). In analysing state violence against the enemy, war-making political rhetoric, and all the practices of legal exceptions related to the defence of modern sovereign existence, Khan for instance puts sacrifice, rather than social contract and reasonable agreement, at the origins of the (modern American) political community. The patriotic willingness to die, the ‘ultimate sacrifice’ (Kahn, 2011: 7) for the nation, is grounded on faith rather than policy.

We argue that an optic of political theology that recognises the sacred as fundamental to the establishment of worldly power can be useful in framing affective, aesthetic, and unconscious dimensions of socio-political imagination, including what political theorist Benjamin Arditi (2007), drawing on Freud, has called ‘the return of the repressed’, and Russian philosopher Mikhail Bakhtin (1968) referred to as humanity’s ‘cosmic fear’. In these frames, elements such as desire, aspiration, hope, seduction, and existential anxiety are recognised as driving forces in the theological dynamics of political subjectivity – ranging from the hope for radical change and spiritual elevation informing nineteenth-century notions of progress, and the emotional fervour triggering ultra-rightist anti-migrant political rhetoric, to the outpouring of sentiment by Singapore’s citizens during Lee Kuan Yew’s national funeral in 2015. These can all be seen as modes of action, thought, and feeling that unveil the eruption of the theological-political into purportedly immanent and ‘secular’ everyday politics, including the politics of development.

Differently from conventional political theory, the use of political theology can reveal the ways in which, as Thomas Molnar (1988) expresses it, politics and the sacred work as ‘twin powers’. This volume examines their complex entanglements in processes of governance and ‘development’ in Asia, illustrating the theoretical productivity of a decentralised, postcolonial political theology.

Our work here attempts to expand the framing of political theology outside of ‘the West’, pioneering analyses of the political-theological nexus in Asia. The chapters collected in this volume investigate historically situated, non-linear entanglements between religion, politics, and development through the lens of political theology, in contexts ranging from Thailand (Edoardo Siani and Eli Elinoff) and South Korea (Sam Han) to India (Sunila Kale and Christian Lee Novetzke) and Indonesia (Kenneth George), as well as in reference to wider transnational spaces and multi-vectored genealogies as the Islamic ecumene to the ‘East of Westphalia’ (Armando Salvatore) and Twelver Shi

a humanitarian networks across Asia, Europe, and Africa (Till Mostowlansky).

From a genealogical and historiographical point of view, the translation of political theology insights into analyses of Asian developmental modernities might be suspected of being yet another orientalist operation (Said, 1978). A few epistemological clarifications are thus in order. First, unlike some Christian theologians (e.g. Pieris, 2003; Kwok, 2016), for ‘political theology’ we do not exclusively or necessarily mean ‘political Christianity’ or ‘Christian secularity’ in Asia. Although we recognise the Euro-American and Christian genealogy of the concept as well as the valuable contribution of contemporary theologians to this increasingly plural field of scholarship, we are here proposing a decentralised and postcolonial political theology, to rethink its scope and analytical value beyond just ‘Christendom’. Second, and relatedly, despite its etymological foundations, we are not bounded to any monotheistic formulation of theos. Instead, our ‘theological’ approach to ‘the political’ embraces polytheistic, monotheistic, animistic, as well as non-theistic and officially secular frameworks of power sacralisation, without requiring these to be mutually exclusive possibilities. This is particularly important in the context of Asian political and development formations, where it is often exceedingly difficult to draw sharp dividing lines between religion(s) and state institutions, supernatural forces and modernity, neoliberal capitalism and millennial cosmologies. Finally, a historiographical note on political-geographical nomenclatures is needed. Although we refer to ‘Asia’ and ‘Asian’ political theologies out of convenience, we fully acknowledge the embeddedness of such categories in twentieth-century Western (confessional) imperialism and colonial imagination. Our take on political theology thus reworks normative, ‘Occidental’ historiography by re-tracing non-linear, multi-directional, and trans-confessional entanglements within ‘Asia’ and between ‘Asia’ and elsewhere (Hodgson, 1993; Duara, 2015). This volume, therefore, deliberately expands the analytical boundaries of conventional scholarship on ‘political theology’, ‘development’, ‘religion’, and ‘politics’, grounding these concepts in a variety of different areas of research. As we show, the theoretical space opened up by this expansion is empirically filled with historically deep, culturally rich, and illuminating cross-comparisons that provide innovative perspectives on the theo-political and the (re)making of Asia.

Asian political theologies?

Even though political theology as a body of scholarship was born in Europe and has focused primarily on the relationship between sovereignty and Christianity, we argue that the genealogical, functional, and cosmological interrelation between politics and Christianity is just one of the possible arrangements that the theological-political can take. Within European history itself the theological-political has undergone radical re-articulations with the passage from its incarnation in the king’s ‘two bodies’, as argued by Ernst Kantorowicz (1957), to its modern disincorporation, migration, and reincarnation into ‘secular’ notions such as ‘democracy’, ‘the Law’, ‘progress’, or ‘the people’. Even when political theology scholarship has been used on more explicitly ‘confessional’ formations, such as in the analysis of political-religious movements of Latin American liberation theology (e.g. Sobrino, 2002; Bolotta, 2017a), it can still shed light on particular configurations of the theological-political that might analogously be tracked in non-Christian political religions, such as in various historical and contemporary strands of socially engaged Buddhism (Queen and King, 1996) and political Islam (Turner, 2002).

As in medieval Europe, also in pre-modern Southeast Asia political power was derived from a hierarchy taken as the earthly manifestation of a cosmic order (Keyes, 1994). Well before the appearance of significant encounters and interactions with European influences, Asian political theologies presented varying degrees of historical distinctiveness, and encompassed differently situated articulations of symbolic processes, economic practices, and ethno-linguistic forms of life. While the theological foundations of European political orders have been symbolically and ritually filled with different strands of Greco-Roman and Judeo-Christian themes, in pre-modern Southeast Asia the king’s ‘two bodies’ were spiritually and politically animated primarily by Hindu-Buddhist cosmologies.

Stanley Tambiah (1977) famously coined the notion of ‘galactic’ or ‘mandalic’ polities to represent the design of pre-modern Southeast Asian kingdoms, a design that coded in a composite way cosmological, topographical, and politico-economic features. The gravitational centre of Indic galactic kingdoms was the devaraja – a ‘God-King’ – as the incarnation of the Hindu deity Indra, located between the heavens and the world of men.³ For Clifford Geertz (1980), this Brahamanic conceptualisation of kingship was a fundamental source of political legitimacy and charismatic power in pre-modern Southeast Asian ‘theatre states’. In the case of Siam, the king was not only the Hindu ‘world-conqueror’ (devaraja) but also the Buddhist ‘world-renouncer’ (dhammaraja), the embodiment of the Dharma (Tambiah, 1977). The double nature of the king as both ‘world conqueror’ and ‘world renouncer’ in turn provided the ‘theological’ bases for the socio-economical and geo-political organisation of the kingdom.

It should be noted that the diversity of cosmological groundings of state formations in pre-modern Southeast Asia encompassed not only Indic, but also indigenous and Abrahamic conceptualisations. For example, Anthony Milner (1983) characterises the Muslim states of Southeast Asia in the pre-modern archipelago as ‘an expanding galaxy of Persianised Muslim Sultanates whose rulers exercised a system similar to that of the region’s pre-Islamic “sacral kings” paired with Sufi theological conceptions such as the “Perfect Man” (insan al-kamil)’. Michael Feener (1994) has argued for an even wider range of ways in which Islamic cosmologies were interpreted and deployed across the region in the early modern period in ...