On Black Study and Political Theology James Edward Ford III (bio) THE UNAPPROACHABLE THRESHOLD; OR, THE LONG DURéE OF IMPERIAL THOUGHT His fantasies, however unreadable they were for him, were inscribed in every one of his gestures, were betrayed in every inflection of his voice…. There was something unspoken between them, unspeakable, undone, and hideously desired…. It had yet to reach the threshold of his imagination; and it had no name, no name for him anyway, though for other people, so he had heard, it had dreadful names. — James Baldwin, Another Country Despite how ready-made black lives appear for the category of bare life, the more pressing issue is how political theology serves as an object for black study. Black study is a multidimensional phrase that, for this review essay's purposes, refers to a mass research and intellection that operates within but is irreducible to the university or its credentialing functions.1 The university cannot do with or do without this study. Such (in)hospitality provides unexpected ground for altering critical vocabularies, methodologies, and canons. Giorgio Agamben's step away from his impressive Homo Sacer project signals the need to inventory that project's evolution and consider paths not taken. This essay begins by critiquing received political theology, epitomized by Agamben's Homo Sacer project, carried on between 1995 and 2014, though its many nuances cannot be addressed here. Nevertheless, pressing against the project's habitual avoidances, with an epigraph from James Baldwin as a hermeneutic, brings attention to missed opportunities for intellectual exchange that might have strengthened this inquiry into sovereignty and forms of life. Most important, this essay's first section identifies a theoretical aporia troubling Agamben's Homo Sacer project and Western knowledge production in general. [End Page 187] The second portion of the essay reviews Alexander Weheliye's Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (2014), Ted Smith's Weird John Brown: Divine Violence and the Limits of Ethics (2014), and David Roediger's Seizing Freedom (2014). These works are read at the intersection of political theology and black study in hopes of finding a way out of this aporia. Therefore, this essay assumes knowledge of Agamben's writings on the part of the reader. Many references, allusions, and provocations from black thought inhabit this essay as well. This essay welcomes their inhabitation, since black study "narrat[es] thinking as generating complexities and complications in their density rather than resolving difference in its translucence."2 The essay aims to provoke new intellectual possibilities, to stage new intellectual encounters, and to perform black study's rhizomatic character. When Agamben revisited Carl Schmitt's thesis that political concepts are secularized theological concepts, he revitalized research into political theology in the U.S. academy. Because no review essay could cover political theology's broad range, this essay restricts itself to the "sovereign" and "non-sovereign" strands of political theology closest to Agamben's work.3 Agamben critically appropriates insights from the sovereign strand influenced by Carl Schmitt. However, Agamben's research is inspired by Walter Benjamin's nonsovereign political theology, encapsulated in the eighth thesis from "Theses on the Philosophy of History": "The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that 'the state of emergency' [ausnahmezustand] in which we live is not the exception but the rule. We must attain a conception of history that is commensurate with this insight…. It is our task to bring about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle against fascism."4 Can Agamben claim to have taken Benjamin's eighth thesis seriously without addressing the vagaries of race, slavery, and colonialism in modernity? Marcelo Svirsky and Simone Bignall, the editors of Agamben and Colonialism (2012), would answer "no" to this question. Consequently, they assembled a collection of scholarship attending to the invisibility of colonialism in Agamben's analysis. Several scholars deem this invisibility stunning, since "at the beginning of the twentieth century Western colonies occupied some 85 per cent of the world's territory" and were organized through "legal patchwork[s] and ad hoc arrangements [End Page 188] of exceptions" composed of "foreign jurisdiction, extraterritorial jurisdiction, administrative decrees, partial...