Showing papers in "Political Theology in 2022"

Blackness Before Race and Race as Reoccupation: Reading Sylvia Wynter with Hans Blumenberg

Abstract: This essay explores Sylvia Wynter’s appropriation of German philosopher Hans Blumenberg’s “reoccupation thesis” to clarify a number of key metaphysical moves in Wynter’s oeuvre with respect to her sociogenic method. We are motivated by the sense that attending to Wynter’s reading of Blumenberg will afford appreciation of her return to Scholastic questions, including 1) how this return activates the problem of race in the longue durée and 2) what this means for her excavation of cautionary parallels for our present predicament. The diffusion of Blumenberg’s concept-metaphor “reoccupation” into Wynter’s linguistic tool-kit responds to political-theological questions, we argue, by configuring race as the reoccupation of long-standing metaphysical problems. After first providing an overview of Blumenberg’s reoccupation thesis, we navigate how Blumenberg and Wynter address transformations to our social field through their differently configured analytics—counter-exertion and sociogeny. Following Wynter’s articulation of sociogeny as the generative principle of our mode of existence, we access the payoff in Wynter’s retrieval of reoccupation’s rejection of historical substantialism, particularly in the ways her theory of blackness becomes the firmament for her reworking of theology and materialism.Taking race as the grounding of being, our heretical approach to the political theology of race reads Wynter’s sociogenic principle in order to rethink the centrality of race to philosophies of history that undergird secularization stories. As an apparently natural (“extra-human”) form of social objectivity, race succeeds, at great cost, in stabilizing tensions emergent from the reoccupation of persisting theological questions. In part, Wynter’s social history of the Latin-Christian order works as a necessary historiographical description of what comes before race, with divisions between the spirit and the flesh manifesting new forms of hierarchy with every iteration. While this orientation, which we call “blackness-before-race,” seems to butt up against our other proposition—“race-as-reoccupation”—we activate this tension to elaborate the differentia specifica of modernity and index its aporetic foundations. The precedence of blackness-before-race elaborates race’s emergence and intractability, the way race-as-reoccupation exceeds empirical decipherability, for it is the substrate through which the world is rendered intelligible. Wynter’s elliptical approach to these questions eclipses those criticisms that take her to be a secret historical substantialist by providing an explanatory field for the past that is attentive to its fraught political purchase in the present.

Unhomeliness—Afterlife and Testimony

Abstract: The article considers the unhomeliness of blackness by interrogating aspects of the controversial 2019 Dallas Country District Court case in which Judge Tammy Kemp ruled the jury to consider the state’s “ castle doctrine” and “mistake of fact” in the trial of Dallas police officer, Amber Guyger, who claimed to shoot Botham Jean, an unarmed black man in his own apartment, by mistake. In doing so, the article places together the notion of afterlife as conceptualized separately by Walter Benjamin and Saidiya Hartman to raise the role of testimony as a fundamentally anti-black structural dilemma rooted beyond legal theory and notions of evidence.

What Must I Do to Be Saved? Punishment and Redemption under Incarceration

Abstract: ABSTRACT This essay tells a story about how American Protestant theologies of sin and redemption, realized in a racialized caste system, have shaped an American culture of punishment where brutal forms of imprisonment have been and continue to be socially acceptable. To explore these Protestant traces, the founding theological vision of penitentiaries in the Northeast and its evolution into professional bureaucracy is described. I contrast this standard modernist account with the distinctive development of prisons in the Southern/Sun Belt states where white domination excluded African-Americans (and other non-white peoples) from redemption/rehabilitation. This Southern heritage of racializing criminal justice has been critical for the rise of mass incarceration, turning away from rehabilitation to support harsh punishment of those who are both “sinful” and a “risk” to “order.” The conclusion points to small signs of change in this discourse.

Rethinking Responsibility: Moral Injury from War to Prison

Abstract: ABSTRACT A moral injury framework, adapted to the carceral context from veterans' affairs, challenges the concept of “crime” and why people commit them. Moral injury asserts that human begins are moral agents and that no one violates their own moral code lightly. Healing from moral injury requires individuals and communities to get curious about the matrix of social factors and individual choices involved in any given “crime,” challenging both individual responsibility and social theory narrations of criminality. This article names the ways that theological and political concepts like sin and crime have been laminated together in the narratives upholding mass incarceration. The moral injury framework challenges the language of this laminated theo-political narrative at all three of its major loci: the naming of moral violation as sin/crime, of people as sinner/ criminals, and of the process of restoration as redemption/rehabilitation thereby opening pathways toward new modes of both thought and practice.

The Inheritances of Immigration

Abstract: Rahima is a financial services professional in her early thirties, working for a bank and living with her parents in La Courneuve, a neighborhood of Seine-Saint-Denis, north of Paris. She grew up in the Islamic culture that was the result of the revivalist institution-building of the 1990s, listening to recorded lectures by Tariq Ramadan, enthusiastically attending the annual gathering of Muslims at Le Bourget, and participating in a young women’s study circle at her local mosque. Her religious path evolved, from a period in her youth that she later described as “rather salafist” to a period of deep engagement in French Muslim civic life during her undergraduate years to a period of relative distance from organized religion. At the time of our interview she described herself as “just Muslim, neither more nor less. I love Allah and I’m doing my best in the day-today.” Rahima explained that “Islam has always been the same. But my way of living it has changed over the years.” Despite these changes in her way of living, Rahima felt an abiding constancy in her piety, and in her connection to spaces of Muslim collectivity. Over dinner at a halal Thai restaurant in eastern Paris, she spoke of this piety as an affective inheritance from her family.

On Fredric Jameson’s Allegory and Ideology

Abstract: That a literary critic should have written a long book on allegory and ideology in our allegedly disenchanted, putatively post-ideological age might be otherwise noteworthy; that Fredric Jameson has done so is testament only to his consistency as a thinker, and his conviction that Marxism remains the “untranscendable horizon” of thought for our historical moment. Even so, Allegory and Ideology opens with a comment on its unfamiliarity. “Some topics,” Jameson admits, “need no introduction.” Others “require some preliminary account of their significance in the scheme of things.” Such initiation, he says, may well take the form of an author “describing his personal discovery of the subject and its importance.” Jameson does not begin this way, opting instead for a series of theoretical remarks on his concepts. But the other option seems like a useful exercise. Though I can’t, of course, chart the biographical paths that led to Jameson’s “personal discovery” of allegory, let alone ideology, I can outline at least some of the role they’ve played in his work up until now. Doing so should place these untimely topics in the context of a career-long effort to show that and how a “hermeneutics of suspicion” like Marxism should be just as restorative as it is critical, even as it also promises to point up the secret alliances between revolutionary praxis and religious theoria.

Race, Immigration Law, and Christianity: Reflections and Tensions Raised by United States v. Wong Kim Ark

Abstract: In 1898, the United States Supreme Court held that the Fourteenth Amendment of the U.S. Constitution guarantees citizenship to the children of immigrants born on U.S. soil. The case, United States v. Wong Kim Ark, involved the son of Chinese immigrants who was born in and had spent the vast majority of his life in the U.S. Immigration officials denied his claim to citizenship when he attempted to return to the country after a trip to China. Its direct legal holding—that birthright citizenship is a constitutional right—continues to have salience for immigration law debates and discourse today. The historical context associated withWong Kim Ark also underscores broader lessons about race, dignity, membership, and the role of law. Wong Kim Ark’s claims arose during a time when racial animus towards Chinese-Americans was widespread, especially on the West Coast, and when the rise of Jim Crow in the post-Reconstruction Era South was well underway. Hostility towards Chinese communities shaped the enactment of a host of immigration and naturalization laws in Congress, and also influenced the judiciary’s development of foundational immigration law doctrine that persists today. The Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882, various aspects of which were upheld by the Supreme Court in the prior decade, had barred new entrants from China to the U.S. That same law also prohibited Chinese persons from acquiring U.S. citizenship through the adjudicative process known as naturalization. Given that background, Wong Kim Ark was a rare victory for Chinese immigrants seeking to vindicate their membership in the U.S. through the federal courts. This Essay, written for a joint symposium between the JOURNAL OF LAW AND RELIGION and POLITICAL THEOLOGY on Wong Kim Ark and James Baldwin’s 1955 essay, Equal in Paris, reflects upon several themes—and tensions—present in the case and echoed in contemporary society. The Essay first explores the influence of race in the development of immigration law, along with the simultaneous discomfort with race as a basis for legal rights and remedies. The second theme, raised by Wong Kim Ark’s holding and subsequent history, is the necessity and shortcomings of law as a source of protection, particularly in the context of bureaucratic systems with the power to incarcerate. Finally, the conclusion briefly highlights ways in which Christianity might serve as

Do Crowds Need Leaders?: Representing the Body Politic after the Decline of Monarchy in Western Europe, from Hobbes to Durkheim

Abstract: The Political Imaginarium, which is the topic of this special issue, is not static. Older modes of representing the body politic, as illustrated by Ernst Kantorowicz’s account of the King’s Two Bodies, were focused on the figure of the monarch. With the transition to democratic republics based on popular sovereignty, was this older aesthetic of sovereignty abandoned, extended, or transformed? I argue that the shift to focus on the People represented only a partial break with older modes of representation, due to the difficulty of figuring the masses as such in their unformed condition. Case studies from England and France suggest that the problem of representation remains without a final solution.

Competing Theodicies: The Rabaa Massacre and the Problem of Suffering

Abstract: The political failure of the Islamist project in Egypt was cemented after the 2013 military coup and subsequent massacre in Rabaa al-Adawiyya Square. For Islamist activists, their cultivation of moral and political agency was directly linked to their understanding of the problem of suffering and God's action. This article shows three accounts of theodicy. The first account is a traditional Islamist one exemplified in Sayyid Qutb's theodical interpretation of the story of the Christians of Najran in the Qur'an which affirms otherworldly retribution. The second account is an account of a citizen journalist in which he contends with the silence of God and the devaluation of Islamist theodicies. The final account is that of state theodicy – which has to contend with its “good fortune” thereby creating categories of legitimate suffering. These competing theodicies thus function in creating social and metaphysical structures of suffering and privilege.

Sacred Anarchy Instead of Divine Democracy

Abstract: After a religious turn in philosophy in the 1980s and a theo-political turn in political philosophy in the 1990s, sovereignty became a demonized political concept. This is the case of continental political philosophers like Levinas, Derrida and Agamben, as well as of John D. Caputo, Merold Westphal, Richard Kearney and Antonio Negri. And it is particularly the case of so-called “radical political theology” found in scholars like Creston Davis, Clayton Crockett, Jeffrey W. Robbins. These approaches emerged in the wake of the death of God brought on by “radical theology.” As Robert A. Yelle has shown, following to some extent Carl Schmitt’s inspiring definition of sovereignty, the sacred and sovereignty share an antinomian or ambivalent nature, that is, “a dynamic interplay between a normative order and the drive to go beyond this order, either to escape or to legitimate it.” Politics cannot disregard any part of these two aspects, as Yelle also explored through many different political phenomena in Sovereignty and the Sacred. Miguel Vatter’s thesis in Divine Democracy also insists on the idea that representational sovereignty is unavoidable since democracy belongs to the sovereignty paradigm, albeit the popular sovereignty variety. Given this fact, only a theory of “soft” sovereignty can sustain democratic legitimacy, he argues. For him, this means limited sovereignty,

Politics as a Confession: Confronting the Enemy Within

Abstract: In this article, we claim, firstly, that the turn to an “ethical” politics focused on subjectivity and its transformation, announced by post-structuralist theorists in the 1970s, can be found today in forms of progressive politics, illustrated by struggles against racism and their articulation by consultants and educators. Secondly, this turn entails targeting the “enemy within,” whether it be the inner fascist (Guattari, Foucault) or white privilege (Di Angelo, Kendi). Rather than an extension of Lasch’s therapeutic “culture of narcissism,” it is a turn to practices reminiscent of public rituals of expiation of guilt and acts of purification (exomologesis) characterizing what Weber referred to as “sects.” Pace Foucault, the “main danger” lies not in the “subjectifying” practices of the human sciences descended from auricular confession and the Christian pastorate, but rather the displacement of formal politics and attendant “civil religion” (Bellah) by conflicts between charismatic sects claiming exemplary subjectivity and virtuosity.

Blood Power: US v. Wong Kim Ark and the Theo-logic of Belonging

Abstract: Although Wong Kim Ark’s case is a touchstone in Asian American studies and legal studies, it is less familiar to the general public, not to mention theological circles. While the Supreme Court determined Wong Kim Ark’s citizenship as American almost 125 years ago, the contours of his case still resonate today. With rhetoric around “anchor babies,” chants of “Blood and Soil” reappearing at white supremacist rallies in Charlottesville, and more recent federal and state policies that seek to prohibit pregnant asylum seekers at the US-Mexico border to have their cases heard until after they have given birth, Wong Kim Ark’s case provides a historical tableau to contemporary questions about citizenship, with accompanying questions of political rights and existential belonging. In this essay, we offer a theological analysis of two legal concepts, jus sanguinis (right of blood) and jus soli (right of soil), that stand at the center of the case in its determination of citizenship. Given that their formal legal definitions – while relevant and clarifying within the original nineteenth-century context – tend to obscure the rich philosophical, historical, and religious provenance of the terms, we are interested in the implicit “theo-logic” that guides their use. On the one hand, our analysis highlights the limits of blood discourse, both theological and political, in connection with the notions of blood purity, mixture, and contamination. On the other, our analysis intends to provoke further inquiry into the constructive theological potential of the nature of blood and land relations as they bear on legal and political renderings of experiences of acceptance, belonging, and alienation. To situate our reading of blood and land in Wong Kim Ark, we begin with a brief overview of the intersection of political allegiance and ethnicity in American legal history by way of the development of a panethnic Asian American political community vis-a-vis the formation of other non-European politico-ethnic configurations. Tracing the “theo-logic of blood” in Western and North Atlantic societies, we underscore that blood discourse – with its deep theological roots in early Christianity – establishes boundaries of social inclusion (and exclusion) that can descend into a bare polarity

Reprising Islamic Political Theology: Genre and the Time of Tribulation

Abstract: Contemporary Islam has long been presented as the object of modern crises (from colonialism to globalization). But the secular idiom of crisis reproduces the logic of norm and exception, continuity or closure. This essay instead briefly traces the Quranic figure of tribulation in selected Islamic genres (ethics, theology, and historiography) in order to animate another tradition of thinking the difficulty of the present. Because it resists the secular periodization of Islam even while retaining a productive relationship to history, tribulation reprises the rupture conventionally narrated in and of Islamic political theology. More generally, developing “tribulation” as an analytic term may allow for a more adequate conceptualization of the temporal architecture of Islamic forms of life. Finally, foregrounding genre in attending the temporalities of tribulation and tradition allows for methodological resonances between anthropology, psychoanalysis, and poetics.

On Slaves, Aliens, and Other Threats to the Body Politic

Abstract: Both texts that we were asked to comment on – James Baldwin’s “Equal in Paris” (1955) and the U.S. v. Wong Kim Ark (1898) – although written in different voices, converge in presenting the problem of alienation within the legal system. On one side is Baldwin’s first-person narrative of his Kafkaesque brush with French police, prisons, and the justice system. On the other is a Supreme Court case – written in the relatively emotionless and measured cadences of legal argumentation – involving the question of whether a person born the child of Chinese citizens in the United States is a U.S. citizen. The Court answered in the affirmative, based mainly on the Fourteenth Amendment. We hear almost nothing of Wong Kim Ark’s voice in the court’s decision, nothing of the anxiety or agony of being deprived of what many of us regard as a birthright. As an expatriated American living in Germany, I could identify, however distantly, with both narratives. (I have, thankfully, never been imprisoned or detained: something my middle-class white status renders far less likely.) The question of alienation, or perhaps of ambivalent loyalties, is both abstract (legalistic) and highly personal. Since moving to Germany in 2014, due to my status as a Beamter (official or, less grandiosely, civil servant) of the state of Bavaria, I enjoy the right to reside there permanently. (My wife is still waiting to be granted this right.) Meanwhile, to become a Beamter, as most Professors in Germany are, I had to swear a loyalty oath, despite not being a German citizen: something I could not become without further time, exertions, and above all the renunciation of my status as an American citizen, which I have not yet formed the intention to do. Acquiring this status also entailed a change of religion. When my wife and I were married in the Roman Catholic Church in 1995, the priest, Father Kennedy, applied what I presume was a simple canon law-derived test to determine whether I was a Catholic in good standing. (He already knew that I had been baptized, but not confirmed.) He asked whether I had ever done anything to renounce my Catholicism, or to embrace another religion. I answered “No” truthfully to both questions. As a former lawyer, I detected here the threshold requirement of taking an “overt act” to signal intent, in this case to leave the Church. (Compare the claim that Wong Kim Ark “[n]ever renounced his allegiance to the United States, and that he has never done or committed any act or thing to exclude him therefrom.”) In 2014, I took such an act while completing the paperwork to move to Germany and begin my new position. The German state collects tax on behalf of the established churches (Kirchensteuer). The amount that

From the Katechōn of Anti-Black Original Sin to the Mystery of Black Messianic Lawlessness: Notes on a Form-of-Life-Toward-Social-Death

Abstract: This essay advances my project on “the Black messianic” in Afropessimism’s apocalyptic thought through a meta-commentary on Agamben’s The Mystery of Evil ([2013] 2017) and The Kingdom and the Garden ([2019] 2020). The first study interrogates the history of (mis)reading 2 Thessalonians 2 where the Apostle Paul announces the messianic “mystery of lawlessness” that is being concealed and delayed by the katechōn. This argument anticipates Agamben’s later study, which argues that the legacy of Augustinian original sin as the irremediable alienation of humanity falsely conceals and thus restrains messianic access to the Garden. However, in the wake of racial slavery, annotating Agamben’s thought with Afropessimism reveals that access to the Garden has in fact become foreclosed. And yet, when modernity's anti-Black original sin is understood as the katechōn, Agamben’s reading of the messianic mystery of lawlessness can help us contemplate Afropessimism’s invitation to the dance of social death.

Conversation Partners

Abstract: A publication of her 2019 Ruth Benedict Lecture Series at Columbia University, Joan Wallach Scott’s book On the Judgment of History reflects upon the 2017 Charlottesville riots as an indication that history might not exhibit a linear progression towards racial justice. It hardly needs mentioning that Scott is an esteemed historian, best known for her 1986 article “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis.” Four of us were invited to write essay responses that contemplate potential application of her analysis to political theology. Scott’s use of religious terms such as expiation, sin, and messianic suggest a direct link to our field of study. About an overreliance upon history’s judgement she writes: “It is a secular version of the biblical day of reckoning at the End of Times, serving the same phantasmatic function, providing the transcendent reassurance of one’s moral positions.” Scott offers invaluable insights supported with persuasive evidence which are helpful to political theologians. Those of us versed in Black theology and womanist methods, however, begin with skepticism and criticism of historical methods: whose voices are considered authoritative and how might those perpetuate myths about Black women? Neither a scholarly article nor book manuscript, the series of lectures poses an unusual form and content to review. With that in mind, I gently propose here that by expanding interlocutors to include Black women’s fiction and poetry we might invert Scott’s assumption that scholars are the first to recognize the complexity of unjust racial histories. In other words, concrete experiences and dynamic memories ought to be more highly regarded as indispensable arbitrators of history and engaged as primary rather than amplifying conversation partners. What is the significance of Scott’s characterization of sovereignty, truth, and debt for political theology? To answer that question, I begin with a summary of Scott’s publication before placing her analysis in conversation with Black lesbian womanist ethicist Emilie Townes’ scholarship. The future of political theology as I see it depends upon expanding and diversifying the canon of conversation partners such the discipline itself might be transformed in the process of being held accountable those perspectives. Scott cites many well-known theorists—Walter Benjamin, Michel de Certeau, Carl Schmitt, Michel Foucault, Hannah Arendt, Aimé Césaire, Antonio Gramsci, Stefano Harney, Fred Moten, and others. I engage Townes at length here to demonstrate the mutual value of her insights with Scott’s. Then, I use Townes’ scholarship to offer a critique of Scott’s form and method with the aim to encourage more conversation partnerships within political theology and beyond. My intervention suggests that progress narratives are, as Scott puts it, old news, but unlike Scott I suggest that they are old news for the