ABSTRACT
“Modernity, having removed God from the world, not only has not exited theology, but it has only, in a certain sense, brought to completion the project of providential oikonomia.” 1 With these lines, Giorgio Agamben closes his latest, and longest, addition to the Homo Sacer project begun in 1995, Il Regno e la Gloria. Per una genealogia teologica dell’economia e del governo [The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government]. 2 This magniloquent declaration (there are many in Agamben’s work, and in this book especially) encapsulates two key posits of Agamben’s research. Firstly, the claim, which drives Il Regno e la Gloria, that the Church Fathers, in developing Trinitarian theology, Christology and angelology lay the groundwork for an economic theology of government that remains operative in the current dispensation of Western modernity. Secondly, the idea that the atheism or secularism which nominally characterise contemporary political philosophy – be it liberal, conservative, or Marxist – are surface effects beneath which lie the compulsions of a theological matrix, a “governmental machine” with its roots sunk deep in the Christian past. In other words, the limits and impasses of today’s political thought are to be understood in terms of a cunning of secularisation: the apparent disappearance of Christian theology from the commanding heights of politics is but the determinate form taken by the ultimate origination of contemporary political action in the double apparatus composed of a political theology of sovereignty and an economic theology of government and administration – with the latter, as Il Regno e la Gloria endeavours to show, playing the key part.
