3 - Glory and the Significance of Political Theology

Summary

KINGDOM, GOVERNMENT AND SOVEREIGNTY

The strength of Agamben's analysis of economic-governmental forms in the Homo Sacer series lies squarely in his ability to discern the ways in which a particular political-theological nexus of relations ultimately founded and legitimated the Western subject as we know it. This is something routinely enacted through the presupposition and division of being, which lies at the heart of sovereign power, that I have been discussing. Quite profoundly, he concludes that what we typically regard as philosophical and theological speculation (such as Aristotle's distinction between potentiality and actuality) is, in truth, a highly political discourse with genuine consequences for how our political reality is lived out. What the fields of theology, politics, economics and philosophy today are to make of themselves after such a rereading of their primary (metaphysical) operations remains to be seen. This is why Agamben is also always calling for a ‘coming politics’ or a ‘coming community’, as he well knows the implications of his analyses are significant and long-reaching. I will turn in the chapter that follows to Agamben's The Kingdom and the Glory because it offers us the opportunity to re-examine relations between these fields and to provide another reading of reason, logic and order altogether. I will begin with the division he introduces between kingdom and government, as this distinction is pivotal for comprehending the scope of Agamben's rearticulation of the relationship between these fields.

From the start, the split between kingdom and government is one that is based on the division, introduced in historicaltheological discussions of Trinitarian oikonomia, between Being and Act (or praxis). In time, this became the essential division that established the Trinitarian formulation of God's being in three separate but related ‘persons’, as defined by early theologians (though such forms of subjectivity, in Agamben's reasoning, could also be considered as ‘actions’, though no one has actually labelled them as such). The resultant dualism predicated upon a certain Christological political-theological interpretation of reality is what ultimately split formulations of the Trinity into ones that were dependent upon a binary representational system, precipitating a movement from an inherently ambiguous Trinity to a Binity.