Political Theology/Theopolitics: The Thresholds and Vulnerabilities of Sovereignty

Abstract

Anthropological work on political theology has been informed by Agamben's work on the state of exception and, thus, by a Schmittian account of sovereignty as analogous to that of the God who bestows miracles. In this review, we read gestures to this analogy's limits in recent ethnographies of the state, vital force, and the Anthropocene as also pointing to the limits of anthropology's secularity and its embedding in the colonial enterprise. In so doing, we recover a potential opening to theistic force that anthropology has long fought to foreclose. We conclude by proposing a conceptual counter to political theology, grounded in negative theology as well as critical theories drawing on the force of the negative, which we call theopolitics. Theopolitics refers to a sovereignty from below characterized by vulnerability and openness to an ever-provisional messianic force that partakes in history, including the colonial history of anthropology itself. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Anthropology, Volume 50 is August 2021. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Epiphenomenal suasion: Jehovah's Witnesses and the politics of preaching against the state

“…Theopolitics as such has recently garnered the interest of anthropologists (McAllister & Napolitano 2020; 2021; see also Mahadev 2022; Napolitano 2021; Norget 2021; Oliphant 2021; Thomas 2022: 246; and for the idea being taken beyond anthropology, see Schmiedel 2022), mostly stemming from McAllister and Napolitano's reading of Brody's work on Buber. What this growing body of anthropological literature points towards is both a shift in the anthropology of religion from ‘just ethics’ back to ‘politics’, but also a broader ‘humanist’ moment in the discipline (see Thomas 2022: 246), drawing on similar veins to the work that figures politics to be otherwise, whether that is the ‘non‐political’ (e.g.…”

Embracing precarity across species: Muslim ethics and care for stray dogs in Russia

“…Despite her assertion of working 'together for the same cause' , the ways in which Aliya offered her bed to and ate from the same plate as stray dogs, as well as how she prayed in their vicinity and allowed them to tread on her prayer rug, illuminated something particularly Islamic about her case. How might we enrich our understanding of care between precarious humans and animals if we also consider a place of divine alterity and its force in these relationships (McAllister & Napolitano 2021)? What kind of piety and Islamic ethics emerge through this interspecies care?…”

The theopolitics of protest: Martyrdom in the GujjarAndolan, the army and the epic

“…Schmitt’s neo-Hobbesian interpretation of the state as the deus ex machina vests the state with ‘magical properties because of its ultimate control of violence and its capacity to authorize (arbitrary) definitions of the normal, and to decide on the suspension of the law in a state of exception’ (Hansen 2008: 1). 2 While there have been many interlocutors of Carl Schmitt’s conception of political theology (Thiem 2013), recent anthropological interventions into the concept have examined the privileged position of Abrahamic monotheistic traditions in Carl Schmitt’s work that led him to ‘posit a “decisionist” totalizing authority’ (McAllister and Napolitano 2021; Singh 2012: 386). For Singh (2012), these interventions call for a more pluralised sense of the theos .…”