Kahn’s political theology again

I very much enjoyed Paul Kahn’s Political Theology but Lars Vinx was less impressed. Now you can decide for yourself, because Immanent Frame have posted the introduction and are going to be discussing it.

Lloyd’s Problem with Grace (2)

I can finally start to blog about Lloyd’s new book The Problem with Grace. It helps to outline an important part of Lloyd’s thinking first. Lloyd thinks there are only practices and norms (‘Law’ is the symbol for this). What else could there be? Norms are related to practices but are always mismatched. We can’t help but give reasons, arguments and justifications for our norms – in other words, get involved in metaphysics and ethics. Norms have no ontological ground in an ultimate sense, but they are they are real and have social force: they are fictions we live. There is no principle or scheme that would make everything make perfect sense, that could ground all morality and from which everything could be derived (‘Grace’ is something like this). If we assume this then we distract from our own violence and prevent ourselves from changing it [e.g. assuming the church or America is the paradigmatic society]. When we attempt to redeem the world as a whole through some scheme, we refuse to accept its tragic and messy nature. We need to accept and mourn this, not get fixated on it in melancholia. We need to focus on what we actually do, not some ideal scheme of ‘if only everyone would…’ Supersessionism is replacing one thing with another: dismissing the actual world for some hoped-for melancholic object. Lloyd is against utopian thinking, in favour of dialectical thinking that starts in the middle of the messiness and works to improve it. (For more on norms and practices see his Law and Transcendence).

The subtitle of the book is Reconfiguring Political Theology and this is about removing a supersessionist logic from political theology and philosophy, by which Lloyd means that the ‘world is amiss, fallen; some redemptive force, with its origins both inside and outside the world, is needed to make it right.’ One way Lloyd will go about this is broadening the number and scope of theological ideas used to understand politics and political philosophy. Rather than simply relating political structures to transcendence and immanence he draws on the theological virtues and some practices such as tradition, liturgy and sanctity. A major claim is worth quoting in full.

I take religious language seriously, and I do so in a way that retains the rich legacy of Jewish and Christian reflection on and refinement of religious concepts without subordinating those concepts to an overarching theological narrative. We gain something of value when concepts like tradition, liturgy, and sanctity are made available for political theorizing, but we lose something of value when such concepts are stripped of their religious heritage. We also lose something of value when every mention of concepts like tradition, liturgy, and sanctity brings with it unwarranted commitments that are specifically theological. Some middle path must be possible: it is precisely the task of this book to identify and traverse that path.

On key question, then, will be how well these concepts function outside of their larger theological context and how much of their ‘rich legacy’ can be maintained without it. This is what the following chapters must display. This is intended to be a ‘postsectarian, postsecular political theology’. Each chapter focuses on a religious practice but tries to understand it in relation to social norms and practices, ‘detaching it from an overarching theological narrative’, in order to help us understand the political and social norms and practices, rather than to mobilize the affect of these concepts for apologetic purposes.

Lloyd’s ‘The Problem with Grace’ (1)

I’m up against some tight deadlines at the moment so I won’t be able to post much for the next couple of weeks but I’ve just had an exhilarating day and a half reading The Problem with Grace by Vincent Lloyd. I hope to post in more detail about it towards the end of May but here’s a quote to whet your appetite.

I take religious language seriously, and I do so in a way that retains the rich legacy of Jewish and Christian reflection on and refinement of religious concepts without subordinating those concepts to an overarching theological narrative. We gain something of value when concepts like tradition, liturgy, and sanctity are made available for political theorizing, but we lose something of value when such concepts are stripped of their religious heritage. We also lose something of value when every mention of concepts like tradition, liturgy, and sanctity brings with it unwanted commitments that are specifically theological. Some middle path must be possible: it is precisely the task of this book to identify and traverse that path.

Arendt’s Human Condition

Arendt thinks that political philosophy from Plato to Marx has neglected the plurality of humanity and the open-endedness of action (beginning/natality). It has tried to understand political agency on the model of making (or labour and making for Marx) instead – in which humanity is in control of a process and the end product. If we take plurality and natality seriously then we need forgiveness and promise to deal with the inability to control history. Though we cannot fully control events or history by definition, so these are only partial measures, but they are all we have (and some evils are beyond forgiveness).

It is a curious book because it does not offer a straightforward argument in favour of a thesis. Instead it offers a philosophical exposition of ancient Greek history in order to bring to light the dimension of action that has been occluded in western political philosophy. Margaret Canovan suggests (in her Introduction) that it is a phenomenology of labor, work and action, yet there are never any examples of what would count as action. Action ‘appears in the guise of a miracle’, because it bucks statistical trends (178). And although for the Greeks, normal behaviour must be judged by moral standards, taking account of aims, consequences, motives and intentions, but ‘action can be judged only by the criterion of greatness because it is in its nature to break through the commonly accepted and reach into the extraordinary, where whatever is true in common and everyday life no longer applies because everything that exists is unique and sui generis.’ All of which suggests that actions in the technical sense are outside the norm, challenge how things have been done up till now. But how often does this happen? And how useful is this as an interpretation of politics if it doesn’t happen often? If the coalition government is trying to re-structure the state at national and local levels and society too, does that count as an action? It is certainly not without precedent, and people make moral and political arguments for an against, so it wouldn’t seem to count as action, even though it is potentially a major change in Britain’s political culture. So what would count as an action? A revolution? But again, people make arguments for and against revolutions. If one tries to think of what the Greek citizens of the polis might have done – build some infrastructure, donate money for a war, pay for a festival – none of it seems unusual in the life of the polis, which is the context from which she derives her idea of action. Arendt points out that the Greeks saw performance as the highest type of human activity (whereas modernity denigrates them as unproductive) and that performance was taken as a model for political action. So she hints at seeing political action as a performative affair, but in contrast to what? Following procedures? But not all of politics consists in following procedures.

Whilst very suggestive about political philosophy as a tradition, and in the suggestion of forgiveness and promise as a response to plurality, The Human Condition would have been more perspiscacious with some examples.