Kierkegaard and Political Theology

Roberto Sirvent, Silas Morgan, Roberto Sirvent, Silas Morgan, Sirvent, Morgan

• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781498224826, 9781498224840
• eBook ISBN: 9781498224833
• Topic: Theology & Religion
• Subtopic: Christian Theology

The nature of Kierkegaard's political legacy is complicated by the religious character of his writings. Exploring Kierkegaard's relevancy for this political-theological moment, this volume offers trans-disciplinary and multi-religious perspectives on Kierkegaard studies and political theology. Privileging contemporary philosophical and political-theological work that is based on Kierkegaard, this volume is an indispensable resource for Kierkegaard scholars, theologians, philosophers of religion, ethicists, and critical researchers in religion looking to make sense of current debates in the field. While this volume shows that Kierkegaard's theological legacy is a thoroughly political one, we are left with a series of open questions as to what a Kierkegaardian interjection into contemporary political theology might look like. And so, like Kierkegaard's writings, this collection of essays is an argument with itself, and as such, will leave readers both edified and scratching their heads--for all the right reasons.

part 1

Kierkegaard and Political Theology

1

Destitution of Sovereignty

The Political Theology of Søren Kierkegaard

Saitya Brata Das

And at midnight there was a cry made.

—Matthew 25:6

The Event

In his 1922 Political Theology, Carl Schmitt famously says:

A Protestant theologian who demonstrated the vital intensity possible in theological reflection in the nineteenth century stated: “the exception explains the general and itself. And if one wants to study the general correctly, one only needs to look around for a true exception. It reveals everything more clearly than does the general. If they cannot be explained, then the general also cannot be explained. The difficulty is usually not noticed because the general is not thought with passion but with a comfortable superficiality. The exception, on the other hand, thinks the general with intense passion.1

The citation is from a text entitled Repetition. At stake here is the question of “the event”: Schmitt is here thinking, with the help of the Protestant thinker called Søren Kierkegaard (who is the thinker of the event par excellence), the event of “the political” which in its verbal resonance rests on the exceptionality of “a decision and not on a norm.”2 What Schmitt here thinks as “the political” is the advent, apocalyptic in its resonance, which is inaccessible to and unattainable in the purely constituted order of the normative. It is as though, for the event to be possible, the constituted-normative order must be suspended: the event, then, cannot be said to belong to the positive order of the norm, for the intensity of the event is each time exceptional to what is given and normatively valid. The exceptional decision, taken at the limit of all situations (it is verbal, since “all law is ‘situational law’”), the event is, for Schmitt, each time irreducible to “the everyday frame of life”:3 this is so because the “homogenous medium,” like this “everyday frame of mind,” “must exist” in order for the norm to be applicable at all. This normative state of affairs (the idea that there is no space, within the concrete order of the state, which is not occupied by the law) does not explain the event of the political itself (that is, the possibility of decision and the possibility of the norm itself); it does not explain the agonal topos where the decision between enmity and friendship may erupt, the intensity of which alone accounts the very possibility of the political. The passion for the exception and the intensity of decision that break through the immanent-normative order (which is “the general”): it is this passion and intensity that is, according to Schmitt’s own claims, supposed to bring the apocalyptic Kierkegaard in proximity to his own “political theology.” By citing Kierkegaard here, Schmitt claims that even for the “Protestant” thinker (why Schmitt mentions Kierkegaard as “Protestant” is revealing as well as concealing), as much as for himself, this “passion” or “intensity” would essentially be the theological (Kierkegaard would rather say “religious”) passion (thus passion par excellence): it interrupts and tears apart the fabric of the normative constitution of existence, opening the constituted order to certain transcendence (to the absolutely heterogeneous, that which is radically asymmetrical to the “homogeneous medium” of the “everyday frame of life”). The event is the opening up of the abyss of a dissymmetry that cannot be understood on the basis of the positivistic totality of the already existing norm. The “theological” here for Schmitt has an institutional history: it has a history of institutions (that Schmitt would then go on to display), for what—at the last moment—interests Schmitt is none other than the “institutional” possibility of nomos through exception and by exception.

It is true that what Kierkegaard would call “faith” is indeed this exposing of ourselves to the event breaking through the immanent regime of the law: the event suspends the closure of immanence by tearing it from normative validity and opening it to the incalculability of decision with “utmost passion.” But, precisely for that matter—and this is important—the event refuses to be embodied in “history” (of institutions): the absolute event of Christ dying on the cross, which alone opens up the eschaton to come, is a wholly otherwise event; it cannot be understood as the historical event in the name of which “the nomos of the earth” can seek legitimacy. To understand this, it will be necessary for us to understand Kierkegaard’s decisive eschatological critique of historical Reason.

For Søren Kierkegaard, the Hegelian pantheistic immanent metaphysics of history—which is the most consummate form of “theodicy” in Occidental metaphysics—cannot address the question of faith whose distance or heterogeneity (dissymmetry or disjunction) is essentially nourished by that absolutely singular, exceptional and decisive event of Christ’s humiliation on the cross. Kierkegaard’s eschatological passion, then, lies in this self-given task that seeks to release the singularity of decision and of the exceptional event of opening to “the wholly other” (which is essentially tied up with “religion,” namely, “Christianity”) that Hegel attempts to subsume under the “general” or “the universal” (totality) by a dialectical “cunning of reason” through “mediation.”4 One can, thus, say that Hegel’s theodicy of history is none other than “the nomothetic operation”5 at the service of worldly sovereignties. Kierkegaard names the worldly kingdom (saeculum), whose legitimacy rests in eliciting from us “normative obligations”6 from a theological foundation (which nevertheless it liquidifies), as “Christendom”: when Christianity is seduced by history, it becomes “Christendom.” It thereby forgets completely (there is no more “Christian” left in Christianity) the true Christian passion, that is, to be contemporaneous to...

Table of contents

• Title Page
• Foreword
• Acknowledgments
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• Part 1: Kierkegaard and Political Theology
• Part 2: Kierkegaard and the Politics of Faith, Hope, and Love
• Part 3: Kierkegaard and the Politics of Philosophy
• Part 4: Kierkegaard and the Politics of Theology
• Part 5: Kierkegaard and the Politics of Communication