Sovereignty and sacrifice in American politics
In The Utopian, Yale Law professor Paul W. Kahn argues that the discourse and imaginary of secular political theory fail to grasp the deep and abiding theological—specifically, sacrificial—dimensions...
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“The Lady Twilight”
Over at Killing the Buddha, William Dalrymple is excerpting his new book, Nine Lives: In Search of the Sacred in Modern India, in a five-part series of posts too rich in surprises to adequately...
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Political theology and liberalism
Over the coming weeks, The Immanent Frame will host a discussion of Paul W. Kahn’s recent book Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. What follows is an excerpt from the...
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Pluralizing political theology
Paul Kahn’s book offers bracing yet troubling meditations on the four chapters of Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology. Because Kahn aspires “to think with rather than think about” Schmitt, he necessarily...
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Mirror, mirror on the wall
Political theology, Paul Kahn tells us, following Carl Schmitt, provides “a kind of mirror image of the political theory of liberalism.” It is the mirror liberalism should be holding up to itself. For...
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The geopolitical imperative?
Unending controversy, raw and existential, attaches to Carl Schmitt, but Paul Kahn cleverly (and, given his aims, rightly) avoids all, or almost all, of that by taking Political Theology as a pure...
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Paul Kahn’s roots
Nothing stands still for us. This is our natural state and yet the state most contrary to our inclinations. We burn with desire to find a firm footing, an ultimate lasting base on which to build a...
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Paul Kahn’s mis-prognosis of America’s social imaginary
As I argued in my previous post, there are indications that Paul Kahn subscribes to Carl Schmitt’s belief in the substantial cultural indebtedness of the modern to “the theological.” Most of these stem...
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Political theology and political existentialism
“At stake in our political life,” Paul Kahn observes, “has been not our capacity to be reasonable, but our capacity to realize in and through our own lives an ultimate meaning.” While it would require...
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Not for the squeamish
Paul Kahn has written a remarkable meditation on Carl Schmitt’s Political Theology. A truly adequate response would undoubtedly require a book at least as long as Kahn’s own. Instead, I want to offer...
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American exceptionalism redux
I come late to the discussion of Paul Kahn’s Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, and will add only a few brief remarks before the conversation closes down. In part,...
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Ground: Zero
Paul Kahn’s brilliant and timely text must be welcomed for many reasons; in particular, for the way it re-introduces in the field of constitutional law and legal theory the debate on sovereignty and...
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A response to critics
I knew that my new book, Political Theology, would be controversial. It covers a lot of ground; it produces odd conjunctions; and its rhetoric can sound extreme. It pays little attention to academic...
View ArticleOne nation under Gun?
Following Friday’s horrific mass shooting at a Connecticut elementary school, the fake newspaper The Onion published a short satirical piece in which the word “gun” is replaced with the kind of...
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Theologies of American exceptionalism: Cohen and Kahn
Oliver Laric Sun Tzu Janus, 2012 24.2 x 40 x 29.7 cm Plinth: 80 x 32 x 29 cm (LARIC-2012-0024) Courtesy of the artist and Tanya Leighton, Berlin The paired posts in this series were developed in...
View ArticleMartyrdom as sacrificial witness
I am happy to have been invited to participate in this forum on oaths—these powerful declarations—because I have been wrestling for some time with the question of how scholars in religious studies and...
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