Detranscendentalizing Decisionism: Political Theology after Gayatri Spivak

This essay uses the thought of Gayatri Spivak to reread one religious trope—the antichrist—commonly used in conservative political discourse to motivate a masculinist theopolitical decisionism. Runions draws a connection between Spivak's insistence on detranscendentalizing radical alterity—which is a deconstructive literary approach to religious narratives—and Spivak's larger concern with ethics. The project of detranscendentalizing is an important first step toward the impossible ethical encounter with the other; it thus charts a course for critiquing theopolitics and imagining new modes of political engagement, in ways that resist the usual conservative accusations of neutrality. To illustrate, the essay draws to the fore the ancient Near Eastern mythological filiations between Christ and antichrist; it reads the antichrist as a detranscendentalized figure that ironically disrupts the masculinist authority of decisions made in the name of Christ and makes room for the singular encounter with the political other.