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Incognito Ergo Sum: Political Theology and the Metaphysics of Existence
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 01 January 2024
Extract
Even if politics and theology are perceived to be fundamentally distinctive areas of enquiry, they share a common problem. Indeed, one could even suggest that thought itself—as a practice among disparate practices—is subject to the formidable difficulty of the formation and subsistence of community. ‘The gravest and most painful testimony of the modem world,’ suggests Jean-Luc Nancy, ‘the one that possibly involves all other testimonies to which this epoch must answer ... is the testimony of the dissolution, the dislocation, or the conflagration of community’. This crisis of community, or its very possibility, is illustrated in a contemporary unwillingness to engage in the hard labour of politics that is part and parcel of either the espousal of individualistic, psychologistic and spiritualistic solutions to the existential problems of subjects and communities or the arrogation of secure and unequivocal identity claims based on nation, race or some other undifferentiated category. Nevertheless, a constant remains in the midst of this confusion. In the western context of modem liberal governance, the possibility of identity, whether individual or national, is predicated on the division of religious and political idioms and practices. There is no room for a tension-filled political/religious nexus which, according to Kierkegaard, produces an ‘arousing restlessness’. In the wake of religion comes a political subjectivity that is marked and re-marked by somnambulance and atomisation.
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References
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40 I am grateful to Dr Ian Bryan for discussing PACE with me at length.
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