Invitation to a Totem Meal: Hans Kelsen, Carl Schmitt, and Political Theology

Abstract

The term ‘political theology’ has come to designate the interests of a range of scholars in early modern studies who aim to pursue critical theory (especially psychoanalysis, later deconstruction, and the Baroque meditations of Walter Benjamin) in a direction defined by secularization, sovereignty, and bio-power in the Renaissance and in contemporary life.2 In this volume, we see signs of this interest not only in the specifically theological-political reflections mounted by Graham Hammill, Ken Jackson, and Gary Kuchar, but also in Julian Yates’ provocative re-zoning of humanist pastoral around the specter of bare life, and in William West’s generous yet acute critique of the religious turn in critical theory. In his essay on the Marlovian sublime, Hammill demonstrates how Marlowe rethinks and reshapes the sovereign’s capacity to decide, itself linked to the creator’s capacity to create, in order to stage new scenes of political making. Both Jackson and Kuchar work with new readings of St. Paul by Giorgio Agamben and Alain Badiou in order to draw out what Kuchar, following Eric Santner, calls the Epistles’ ‘psychotheology’: the psychic conditions implied in religious thought, as well as the political-theological affinities of Freud’s own thinking of subjectivity in modernity.3