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Abstract
Recent political theory has almost uniformly accepted Carl Schmitt's account of "political theology" as adequately capturing the stakes of this term: relying on extra-political absolutes to shore up worldly political powers, political theology almost certainly has authoritarian implications for politics. Where it doesn't, as in recent Pauline political theologies, it is only by virtue of turning the tables on Schmitt and his heirs, and providing a "beyond" to law—and even to politics—as such. Hannah Arendt's political thought is, in contrast, read as a statement of political secularism, centered on her rejection of the appeal to absolutes in favor of plurality. In this dissertation, I reread Arendt's political theory as engaged, unceasingly, in an extended confrontation with Schmitt on the terrain of political theology—as the terrain on which she met the challenge to plurality posed by Schmitt's particular version of political theology. This confrontation began, I show, in Arendt's earliest writings in the German Weimar Republic, when the meaning of "political theology" was the subject of vigorous contestation. It continued in her analysis of the destruction of politics by totalitarianism, and it culminated in her later reflections on the plural mode of constitution that emerged in America in On Revolution. I illuminate Arendt's and Schmitt's respective positions in this contest by bringing them into sustained conversation with the writings of the philosopher-theologian Franz Rosenzweig and his account, published on the eve of Schmitt's Political Theology , of a plural, Jewish conception of miracle that, instead of justifying authoritarian sovereignty, is mediated by prophecy and diffused among its popular addressees, whom it presses into encounter with each other in love of neighbor. The result of this reconstruction, I propose, is to rediscover in Arendt's political theory an alternative to both Schmittian political theology and to secularism: a Jewish political theology of gratitude for the given, everyday encounter with the neighbor, and ongoing, agonistic negotiation of law that is never simply the product of human autonomy. This, I argue, is the lens through which we should read Arendt's work today, allowing it to point us beyond the present impasses of the sacred-secular divide.
