ABSTRACT
Carl Schmitt’s proclamation that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of state are secularized theological concepts” because “of their systematic structure” highlights the structural relationship between theological and political concepts (1985: 36). The last two chapters have highlighted the normative affiliations between secular and Hindu nationalism. In this chapter, I hope to discuss how complicities are enabled between these nationalisms through a closer examination of the structure of sovereignty and its inscriptions of the religious and the secular which inform a normative Indian secularism. At stake is the fraught issue of how to rethink Indian secularism. Debates on this issue have been ongoing since the 1990s. I offer this chapter as a contribution to, and an intervention in, those arguments through a discussion of the role of sovereignty in the formation of Indian secularism. For Schmitt, the exception is a secularized theological concept. The argument
that “all significant concepts of the modern theory of state are secularized theological concepts” does not owe its basis only to “historical development,” Schmitt suggests; instead, a “systematic structure” governs this secularization (1985: 36). Schmitt posits that “the exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology” (1985: 36). He links the operation of the exception in jurisprudence to the manner in which divine sovereign intervention functions through the miracle, which transgresses the laws of nature. The exception in jurisprudence, for Schmitt, makes visible the manner in which “the state intervenes everywhere” (1985: 38). Thus, it intervenes sometimes, Schmitt argues, “as a deus ex machina, to decide according to positive statute a controversy that the independent act of juristic perception failed to bring to a generally plausible solution” and at other times, “as the graceful and merciful lord who provides by pardons and amnesties his supremacy over his own laws” (1985: 38). So, the sovereign ability to decide on an exception manifests itself in the “lawgiver, executive power, police, pardoner, welfare institution” (1985: 38).1 This sovereign ability is likened to the God in the machine or deus ex machina. Citing Jean-François Courtine’s analysis of Schmitt’s description of the
relation between the theological and the political, de Vries suggests that Schmitt oscillates between a historical genealogy (reading how the juridical
derives historically from the theological) and a structural analogy (between theological and political concepts). de Vries argues that this oscillation allows for reading “the theologico-political across a broad spectrum of historical and analytic positions” (2006: 47). The “weaker hypothesis” of a structural analogy, de Vries suggests via Courtine, allows Schmitt “to think the ‘transposition,’ the ‘translation,’ or the ‘redistribution (Umbesetzung)’ of fundamental concepts and doctrinal schemes from one domain to the next” (2006: 47). Talal Asad has critiqued Schmitt’s formulation of the structural analogy
between the theological and the political. He argues that Schmitt’s statement implies that “secularized concepts retain a religious essence” (2003: 189). An essentialized reading of either the religious or the secular, Asad argues, fails the task of diagnosing how they are organized or defined in different historical formations. He suggests that “what we now retrospectively call the social, that all-inclusive secular space that we distinguish conceptually from variables like ‘religion’ … and on which the latter can be constructed, reformed, and plotted, didn’t exist prior to the nineteenth century” (2003: 191). Asad’s objection to the notion that a religious essence can be traced in contemporary secularized political concepts is a compelling one. But the question as to whether a structural analogy necessitates the transfer of the essence of one concept to another – the religious to the secular – needs further discussion. As Courtine’s discussion regarding Schmitt cited above suggests, the analogous relationship between the theological and the secular allows for transposition and translation rather than a wholesale transfer of an essence. In this chapter, I examine how these complex colonial transpositions of the
structure of sovereignty have consequences for the postcolonial Indian state. Religion and religious identity, for example, are visible categories through which Indian secularism is articulated. Colonial categorization of religion played a crucial role in an organization of the Indian secular. These are now commonplace assertions in the field of postcolonial studies as discussed in the previous chapters. My concern is to probe how attention to sovereignty reveals the normative mechanisms of the Indian secular state, which can account for its complicities with Hindu nationalism. A robust scholarly conversation regarding the Indian secular has been conducted over the past couple of decades. Taking some of the relevant strands of this discussion into account, I will discuss how a focus on sovereignty is necessary in the task of rethinking the Indian secular – a task which has been proclaimed as urgent since the rise of Hindu nationalism. To begin with, I examine how a deconstruction of the philosophical underpinnings of the religious and the secular sheds light on the structure of colonial sovereignty which had enormous consequences for the Indian context.
