A politikai vallás Agamben nyomán. Határ és politikum

Abstract

My paper raises the question of political religion. Although Voegelin introduced the term (political religion) in 1938 to characterize the totalitarian powers of the 20th century, he did not specify what „religion” means in this compound term. I claim that following Agamben we can articulate the peculiarity of political religion. To substantiate my claim I retrace his steps to reconstruct his philosophical position, while placing him alongside relevant thinkers on religion, and some religious texts. According to my thesis, before the appearance of political power, the political space is originally partitioned by the duality of the sacred and the profane. The political space is criss-crossed by the intersecting boundaries of the sacred and the profane in multiple layers. Yet modern political totalitarianisms cannot be derived directly from this religious concept of the sacred, only in a modified way. As I see it, Agamben moves from the ambiguity within the sacred to the concept of the homo sacer and the zone of indistinguishability. This last move will finally allow us to specify political religion.