Religion in Philosophy and Theology Editor INGOLFU.DALFERTH(Claremont) Advisory Board THOMASRENTSCH(Dresden) HARTMUTVONSASS(Berlin) HEIKOSCHULZ(Erfurt/Frankfurt a.M.) 105 Calvin D.Ullrich Sovereignty and Event The Political in John D.Caputo’s Radical Theology Mohr Siebeck Calvin D.Ullrich, born 1990; 2019 PhD in Systematic Theology at Stellenbosch University, South Africa; currently Research Fellow in the Ecumenical Institute at Ruhr-University- Bochum, Germany. orcid.org/0000-0002-7129-1488 ISBN 978-3-16-159230-0/eISBN 978-3-16-159231-7 DOI 10.1628/978-3-16-159231-7 ISSN 1616-346X/eISSN 2568-7425 (Religion in Philosophy and Theology) The Deutsche Nationalbibliothek lists this publication in the Deutsche Nationalbibliographie; detailed bibliographic data are available at http://dnb.dnb.de. © 2021 Mohr Siebeck Tübingen, Germany. www.mohrsiebeck.com This book may not be reproduced, in whole or in part, in any form (beyond that permitted by copyright law) without the publisher’s written permission. This applies particularly to repro- ductions, translations and storage and processing in electronic systems. The book was printed on non-aging paper by Laupp & Göbel in Gomaringen and bound by Buchbinderei Nädele in Nehren. Printed in Germany. For my sister, Chloé. Preface In the evolution of any book one learns that it is never a wholly remote un- dertaking, occurring across several junctures that interact and blend into a variety of dynamic contexts; intellectual, geographic, and personal. As is often the case, graduate study provided the catalyst at the genesis of this en- deavor, more precisely, after reading the philosophical writing of Simon Critchley and his 2012 work, Faith of the Faithless. The general tenor of the latter was that faith was more ambiguous than simply observing normative religious beliefs and that it could also operate exterior to confessional bound- aries, while being implicated at the same time in a complex process in which political subjects are constituted. This thesis provided the architectonic for the present study’s central interests. But while Critchley innovatively situated the poles of continental philosophy and political theology, respectively, an approach which amounted to a secular ethics, it did not satisfy the conditions for an adequate theological perspective. I then encountered the ‘radical’ the- ology of John D. Caputo; in particular, his Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida (1997) and Weakness of God (2006). Reading these texts, it became possible to imagine an alternate horizon for theology; one which might resist the temptations of coerciveness or desire for ideological stability. Moreover, this original and idiosyncratic theological architecture, would also not have to relinquish Critchley’s appeal to non-confessional persuasions, nor at the same time would it have to be an obstacle, but rather could be deployed as a critical resource for invigorating traditional and confessional convictions too. If Ca- puto’s work established a novel project which decoupled some of theology’s associations with force and violence, then it was the implicit connection to power, and therefore the implications to ‘the political,’ that still needed to be drawn out and made explicit; that is, the question of how a radical theology could be (or become) political. This is what the present book will describe as a ‘radical political theology.’ The notion of political theology has a complex and textured history in the country I call home, South Africa. Indeed, the nationwide student-protests that occurred there while undertaking graduate study at Stellenbosch Univer- sity in 2015–16, could be explained as a tacit response to the ongoing effects of the theologically-inspired politics of apartheid. But just as unconventional a theological confrère was Caputo in that context, so too was the way of entry VIII Preface into political theology. Diverging from the dominant mode of theologizing in the ‘post-apartheid’ dispensation, which emphasizes the ‘public’ nature of theology and draws from the archive of liberation theology, my energies instead turned to the political theology of the German jurist, Carl Schmitt, during my time at the Tübinger Stift in Baden-Württemberg in 2017. Between walks along the Neckar and days spent in the Theologicum library, it was not the figures of Barth, Bonhoeffer, and Moltmann, but rather Schmitt’s political theology of sovereignty and the subsequent hermeneutic link it forged with Caputo’s radical theology, which occupied my energies. This ultimately gave shape to the current monograph. What followed appeared to be a relatively straight-forward attempt to map this link onto Caputo’s project of a radical theology of the ‘event.’ However, amidst further investigation it also became necessary to trace the genealogy of Caputo’s radical theology and its key concepts. In compiling these stages together, then, this book seeks to recon- struct Caputo’s œuvre according to the analytic of ‘sovereignty and the event’; beginning in his early engagements with Heidegger – where the dis- course concerning event first emerges – to Derrida and the ethics of the event, and finally to religion and theology, where the encounter with the political is more acutely revealed. In a broad sense, what emerges in this philosophical-theological exploration, is a vindication of the continued signif- icance of the relationship between postmodern thought and theology, and specifically, a certain gravitas that is to be accorded to Caputo’s contribution to this ongoing dynamic. Finally, and more controversially perhaps, not only does Sovereignty and Event argue for the indispensability of radical theology for problematizing the nature of power and politics in secular democracy, but also for a poetic efficacy that radical theology produces in the ongoing strug- gle to re-imagine new political ways-of-being. Sections of chapter two, “Overcoming Metaphysics,” have appeared in “On Caputo’s Heidegger: A Prolegomenon of Transgressions to a Religion without Religion,” in De Gruyter: Open Theology, 6 no. 1 (2020): 241–255 (doi: 10.1515/opth-2020-0020); sections of chapter five, “The Event of Sov- ereignty,” have appeared in “Theopoetics to Theopraxis: Toward a Critchlean Supplement to Caputo’s Radical Political Theology,” in Forum Philosophi- cum, 26 no. 1 (2020): 163–182 (doi: 10.35765/forphil.2020.2501.10). I would like to thank these journals for their permission to include parts of these texts into this monograph, which is the realized product of my doctoral disserta- tion, completed in 2019. Calvin D. Ullrich August, 2020, Cape Town, South Africa IX Table of Contents Preface .......................................................................................................... VII Introduction.................................................................................................... 1 A. Protests, Masters, and Events ........................................................................ 3 Sovereignty .............................................................................................. 8 The Event .............................................................................................. 15 B.Notes on Methodology ................................................................................. 22 C.Outline of Chapters ..................................................................................... 25 Chapter 1: Carl Schmitt, Sovereignty, and Democracy ................ 30 A.Introduction ................................................................................................. 30 B.The Crisis of Liberal Democracy ................................................................. 41 Three Examples in Democracy’s Crisis ................................................. 43 The Postdemocratic Condition .............................................................. 45 C.Schmitt’s Political Theology ........................................................................ 48 The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations ................................. 50 The Friend-Enemy Distinction ............................................................. 53 Carl Schmitt’s Concept of Sovereignty ............................................... 56 Political Theology ............................................................................... 58 D.Schmitt’s Eschatology ................................................................................. 61 Schmitt’s Concept(s) of History ............................................................. 63 The Katechon ........................................................................................ 65