6 - From Jerusalem to Rome via Constantinople

Summary

An interlude is appropriate. We have seen how modernity, including constitutionalism, has been the collateral, epigenetic product of a particular religion, Christianism, which, like all other religions requires not only conceptual faith but, primarily, affective identification with cosmological postulates and views of the universal, which survives their conceptual deconstruction since it is anchored in imaginations that are effective even as ruins. The continuing impact of Western political theology, centred on the notion of an absolute power that is deployed oikonomically, is precisely explained by such love of ruins. We have argued that, as a result, the current crisis of the legitimacy of government is experienced differently across civilisations with only the Western Christian/post-Christian subject availing of a blind, affective trust in sovereignty. Thus, if an example is needed, we risk having to predict that the prolonged negotiations that will eventually follow Brexit, once Article 50 of the Treaty of the European Union is finally invoked, will lead to a situation that will make the popular ‘sovereign’ decision to leave the EU sound hollow, and yet there will be no upheaval, no violence in British streets. It is now apposite to offer an example of Westernised political and juridical cultures, fully modern, where, however, subjective identification is also directed at the ruins of different, non-Western premodern religions and where, as a result, the affective trust in the sense of sovereignty with oikonomia is weaker, leading to potentially much more explosive reactions at the level of human consciousness. To put it differently, while the whole world has bought into Western Christianity's loop of progress narrative, which rests on the image of a see-saw between sovereign will and management, causality and contingency, when the chips are down, only some of us can remain perfectly stoical, as if we believed that, at the end of the day, whatever happens must be part of a mysterious oikonomia that has always played out as a see-saw between willing and managing.