Political Theology: A Reading List

Some Facebook friends have asked me about my personal “canon” of political theology, and I decided it would make a good idea for a blog post. This list, like any attempt at a canon, does not simply reflect the state of a field but aims to change it. It is about what political theology is and also about what it could and should be. While some of my choices are presumably obvious, others reflect my conviction that political theology must grapple with questions of economics, race, gender, and sexuality, that our contemporary neoliberal order is an order of political theology, that political theology is a genealogical discipline, and that the root of political theology is not the homology between politics and theology but the problem that motivates both — in political terms, the problem of legitimacy, and in theological terms, the problem of evil. In other words, this could be taken as a reading list to understand the style of political theology I practice in The Prince of This World and Neoliberalism’s Demons. But more broadly, it is an attempt to group together a body of works that can be productively read with and against each other. [UPDATE: I have added two works to the list as several people have pointed out that I underemphasized the specifically Jewish contribution to the field.]

Here’s the list, in something like chronological order:

1. Baruch Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise: Spinoza coins the term political theology in reverse, with a foundational work of modern political theory that is at the same time the foundational document of modern biblical scholarship.
2. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Genealogy of Morals: So many of the key questions of political theology — the complex intertwining of morality, religion, economics, and power, as well as racial and ethnic differentiation — are front and center in this text, which also provides the basis for the genealogical method.
3. Max Weber, The Protestant Ethic and the Spirit of Capitalism: The conventional blinders of political theology, which defines the political as excluding the economic, is the only thing that keeps this text from being an obvious classic for the field. Everything we expect from a political theological study is present in this text, and the exclusion is even more egregious when we recognize how deeply Weberian Schmitt is (precisely because he is also deeply anti-Weberian).
4. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: I’d be laughed out of the room if I didn’t include this one, and rightly so. I have been living for years in the tension between the promise of Schmitt’s research project here and the blinkers that lead it into a destructive blind alley.
5. Sigmund Freud, Moses and Monotheism: psychoanalysis has always played a role in political theology, and this is Freud’s most theological text. I would accept Totem and Taboo as well, but I lean toward Moses and Monotheism in recognition that most classics of political theology tend to be total unwieldy messes on the textual level.
6. Ernst Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: Another “gimme.” In dialogue with the other texts in this list, however, we can see in Kantorowicz a version of political theology that takes the interweaving of the political and economic for granted — this study is just as much about fiscal policy and corporate charters as it is about the vaunted parallel between Christ and the king.
7. Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition: This book provides the groundwork for the absolute qualitative distinction between the political and the economic — which in Neoliberalism’s Demons I call “Arendt’s axiom” — that will decisively shape subsequent studies in political theology. It takes Schmitt’s incohate bias against the economic realm and equips it with real theoretical rigor and a full-dress genealogy. I view the influence as unfortunate, but we need to confront it head-on to get past it.
8. Jacob Taubes, Occidental Eschatology: Taubes’s account of the dynamics of eschatological thought and the way that different political-theological paradigms tend to grow out of the deadlocks in their predecessor helps to connect the genealogical and synchronic elements of political theology.
9. Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: This is really a stand-in for the entire lecture series, but this particular volume does a lot of heavy lifting with the influence of pastoral management techniques on modernity. So far, Foucault is presumably the author who would be most puzzled by my designation of him as a political theologian, but I don’t think we can understand the field as it is today, nor do the kind of genealogical work that needs to be done, without drawing on and extending Foucault’s analyses.
10. Silvia Federici, Caliban and the Witch: a masterwork of genealogy that ties together the rise of capitalism with the rise of race thinking, the disciplining of gender and sexual expression, and the ever-evolving place of theological and metaphysical thinking.
11. Jan Assmann, The Price of Monotheism: A conceptually elegant account of the political ambivalence of monotheism, recognizing it as an ultimately unsustainable revolutionary demand.
12. Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: here again, this is more a stand-in for his entire body of work, which has pushed political theology forward in so many ways. The Kingdom and the Glory has been most influential for my thought as well as for the field as a whole, forcing the question of the economic — albeit in a way that I find to be incoherent, due to his near-fanatical loyalty to Arendt’s axiom. (And of course, it meets the “unwieldy mess” standard.)
13. Alexander Weheliye, Habaeus Viscus: A profound critique of Foucault and Agamben that homes in on their blindness to the question of race. His account of the unruly flesh provides one way of getting at the “unfixability” of the problem of legitimacy and the problem of evil that stand at the root of my account of political theology.
14. Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: While she would surely not relish the comparison, Brown’s study of neoliberalism is deeply Schmittian in structure and approach and gets at the question of the legitimacy (or lack thereof) of our present order. Brown is guided by an unwavering faith in Arendt’s axiom that ultimately undermines her project in my view, but her way of posing the question of neoliberalism was what opened me to the possibility of thinking of it in political theological terms.
15. Jared Hickman, Black Prometheus: This study of the enduring influence of the figure of Prometheus in modern race thinking is also (in Peter Coviello’s estimation as well as mine) the definitive political-theological account of race in the modern world. His theory of competing racialized political theological paradigms within the global space of immanence opened up by 1492 cuts through any number of the false binaries that prevent us from truly grasping the deep dynamics of modernity.

Of course, it would be arrogant to put my own books on there, though presumably if you were puzzled as to why these texts all belong together, taking a look at my work might help. And if anyone wants to hire me to teach a grad class with this reading list, you know how to reach me….