Crediting God: Sovereignty and Religion in the Age of Global Capitalism

Notes

n o t e s introduction: crediting god with sovereignty Miguel Vatter 1. On the crisis of secularization theories, see José Casanova, Public Religions in the Modern World (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994). On globalization and religion from a philosophical perspective, see Jacques Derrida, Foi et savoir. Les deux sources de la ‘religion’ aux limites de la simple raison (Paris: Seuil, 2000), and Jean-Luc Nancy, La création du monde ou la mondialisation (Paris: Galilée, 2002). 2. For recent philosophical and theological readings of the concept of credit, see Mark C. Taylor, Confidence Games: Money and Markets in a World Without Redemption (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2004); JeanMichel Rey, Le temps du crédit (Paris: Desclée de Brouwer, 2002); Melinda Cooper, Life as Surplus: Biotechnology and Capitalism in the Neoliberal Era (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 2008); and Philip Goodchild, Theology of Money (Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, 2009). 3. Hermann Cohen, Reason and Hope: Selections from the Jewish Writings of Hermann Cohen, ed. Eva Jospe (Cincinnati: Hebrew Union College Press, 1993); Derrida, Foi et savoir; Hilary Putnam, Jewish Philosophy as a Guide to Life: Rosenzweig, Buber, Levinas, Wittgenstein (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008); Jürgen Habermas, Religion and Rationality: Essays on Reason, God and Modernity, ed. Eduardo Mendieta (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 2002); Jürgen Habermas, Zwischen Naturalismus und Religion (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 2005). 4. For a paradigmatic example, see John Milbank, Theology and Social Theory, 2nd ed. (London: Blackwell, 2006), but clearly such a postmodern and antifoundationalist ‘‘return’’ to orthodoxy was anticipated by thinkers such as Strauss and Levinas. 5. New master narratives have been proposed, most notably by Charles Taylor, A Secular Age (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2007). 6. Shmuel Eisenstadt, ‘‘Multiple Modernities,’’ Daedalus 129 (2000): 1–29. 7. The term is to be understood in contraposition to Samuel Huntington’s ‘‘clash of civilizations.’’ See Tariq Ali, The Clash of Fundamentalisms: Crusades, 317 318 Notes to pages 2–4 Jihads, and Modernity (London: Verso, 2003), and Heinrich Wilhelm Schaefer, Kampf der Fundamentalismen. Radikales Christentum, radikaler Islam und Europas Moderne (Frankfurt: Insel Verlag, 2008). 8. On the messianic in this sense, see Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (London: Routledge, 1994), and Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005). 9. For other attempts at a comprehensive approach to the topic of political theology, see Peter Scott and William Cavanaugh, eds., The Blackwell Companion to Political Theology (London: Blackwell, 2006); Hent de Vries and Lawrence Sullivan, eds., Political Theologies: Public Religions in a Post-Secular World (New York: Fordham University Press, 2006); and Michael Kirwan, Political Theology: An Introduction (London: Fortress Press, 2009). 10. On sovereignty as constitution of order ex nihilo, see Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1988), and Nancy, La création du monde ou la mondialisation. 11. On this term in Schmitt, see Jacob Taubes, ed., Religionstheorie und Politische Theologie. Band 1: Der Fuerst dieser Welt. Carl Schmitt und die Folgen (Munich: Wilhelm Fink Verlag, 1983); Heinrich Meier, Die Lehre Carl Schmitts: Vier Kapitel zur Unterscheidung Politischer Theologie und Politischer Philosophie (Stuttgart: J. B. Metzler, 1994); Miguel Vatter, ‘‘Strauss and Schmitt as Readers of Hobbes and Spinoza: On the Relation Between Liberalism and Political Theology,’’ New Centennial Review 4, no. 3 (2004): 161–214; and Carlo Galli, Lo sguardo di Giano. Saggi su Carl Schmitt (Bologna: Il Mulino, 2008) and the literature therein cited. For a recent attempt at a history of political theology, see Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West (New York: Knopf, 2007). But this work does not define the specificity of political theology in its difference from civil theology, civil religion, political religion, new political theology, and so on. 12. See Schaefer, Kampf der Fundamentalismen, for evidence that fundamentalisms depend on a politicization of society that follows upon the positing of God as sovereign. 13. Erik Peterson, El monoteı́smo como problema polı́tico, trans. Agustı́n Andreu (Madrid: Editorial Trotta, 1999). 14. Jacques Maritain, El hombre y el estado (Madrid: Ediciones Encuentro, 1983), 62. 15. For a recent and interesting, though unsystematic, treatment of Maritain, Weil, Levinas, and other French thinkers as political theologians, see the essays in Philippe Capelle, ed., Dieu et la cité. Le statut contemporain du théologico-politique (Paris: Éditions du Cerf, 2008). 16. Carl Schmitt, Römischer Katholizismus und Politische Form (Stuttgart: Klett-Cotta, 1984); Der Leviathan in der...