Details

Autor(en) / Beteiligte

• Newman, S.

Titel

Stirner and the Critique of Political Theology

Ist Teil von

• Telos (New York, N.Y.), 2016-06, Vol.2016 (175), p.127-148

Ort / Verlag

New York: Telos Press, Ltd

Erscheinungsjahr

2016

Quelle

Worldwide Political Science Abstracts

Beschreibungen/Notizen

• Here, Newman explores the problem of political theology from a different and opposed perspective. He wants to find ways of exercising this spirit forever. For Jacob Taubes, the problem of political theology is a problem of power: Only when the universal principle of power is overruled will the unity of theology and political theory be superseded. A critique of the theological element in political theory rests ultimately on a critique of the principle of power itself. However, people could also say the converse: a critique of the absolutist element of political theory depends on dispelling the theological specters that animate it. Yet, this should not be taken as a simple affirmation and extension of the liberal project of secularization. Things are not quite so simple and this is because of naivete and hypocrisy of liberal theory in imagining that it can secularize politics and suppress the absolutist state through legal frameworks and constitutions. The survival of any constitutional order presupposes precisely the exceptional moment of sovereignty that it seeks to restrict--and thus they remain caught in the trap of sovereign power. Indeed, people could say that liberalism is, in essence, a politics of sovereignty in which the formalization and regularization of state power through legal and democratic mechanisms and constitutional frameworks legitimizes this power all the more effectively by disguising its absolutism.