ABSTRACT

Hyphenated terms, in their very formulation, suggest transgression or hybridization across boundaries that are presupposed. In the case of the “political-theological” (or the “theologico-political” or “theo-political”), the boundary in question is the one between church and state worked out in Latin Christendom over centuries but gathering real momentum with the Protestant Reformation and the Age of Revolution. 1 Built into the verbalization “political-theological” is both a concession to the historical force of secularization—in its narrow political sense—and a questioning of the exact nature and efficacy of that force. “Political-theological” both acknowledges the liberal state’s official partitioning of “political” and “theological” and implies that the partition has proven porous. More precisely, the term might suggest that an institutional demarcation of the “political” and “theological” provokes new theorizations and alternative enactments of the particular relation between these domains staked out by the doctrine of political secularism. By first nominating the “political” and “theological” as separate spheres and then theoretically obligating itself through disestablishment to allowing the free(r) play of public discourse, political secularism enables and incites a heated debate about its constitutive dyad.