This essay returns to Jacob Taubes’s messianism in order to short-circuit a contemporary political and conceptual impasse between left- and right-wing Schmittianisms. It first seeks to expose the limits of both Schmitt’s originary political theology and post-war Italian Marxist rehabilitations of Schmitt, which, it is argued, remain caught in the same political-ontological matrix. To answer the question of what (if anything) might come after political theology, the essay turns to Jacob Taubes’s “counter-political theology” in order to find an alternative genealogy (...) for modern democracy, not in Schmitt’s Christian conservative hierarchy, but in the antinomian and heretical elements within the Judaeo-Christian tradition. In conclusion, the essay argues that Taubes transforms the political theological impasse and makes possible a new reading of the contemporary political false choice we face between democracy and authoritarianism, liberal pluralism and populism. (shrink)

When stressing how ‘Christian pastoral power’ defined the specificity of ‘governmental power’, Foucault never explicitly acknowledged the German debate on modernity or theological-political issues. My hypothesis is that – whatever the actual reasons for this omission might be – this oversight is symptomatic of Foucault’s unique interpretation of the role of Christianity in Western culture and of his different approach to the theme of power. After analysing the positions of two of the leading exponents of the German debate, Karl Löwith (...) and Carl Schmitt, the essay substantiates this hypothesis by looking at Foucault’s investigations of pastoral power. In particular, the essay aims to demonstrate how the latter’s apparent omissions are linked to Foucault’s challenge to two central questions in the 20th-century debate on modernity, namely: (1) the possibility of interpreting modern political revolutions as expressions of a linear and secularized vision of history; and (2) the centrality of the category of sovereignty in the definition of Western power. (shrink)

First authoritative testimony of the debate that has characterized contemporary Italian critical thought, which has recently caught the attention of an international audience.

Immanence is a key concept in Gilles Deleuze's thought. It emerges in 1968, in the book Expressionism in Philosophy: Spinoza and it is a focus until his last text. Immanence is a concept steeped in theological resonances, which disturbs Western metaphysics and politics. But, according to Deleuze, immanence is not really a concept, rather it is a ‘plan’. ‘The plan of immanence’ is the ‘prephilosophical’ working plan of philosophy. The point is that, according to Deleuze, philosophy cannot be understood only (...) conceptually, although it begins with the creation of concepts. Here, rather, what is at stake is a prephilosophical origin of philosophy itself. This relationship between the plane of immanence and philosophy is the most important aspect that some of best-known exponents of contemporary Italian philosophy have inherited from Deleuze. The focus of this essay is on three expressions of the plane of immanence in the sense of Deleuze that have been developed in contemporary Italian Thought: the ‘constituent power’ of politics in Antonio Negri; the ‘impersonal’ in Roberto Esposito; and the ‘potentiality’ in Giorgio Agamben. (shrink)

El artículo desentraña la relación entre Carl Schmitt y Jacob Taubes en sus interpretaciones sobre el Leviathan de Thomas Hobbes y la teología política. El jurista del nazismo y el rabino mantienen posiciones opuestas sobre el filósofo inglés hasta el punto de encontrar Taubes en Spinoza una alternativa aún por desarrollar. Frente a la interpretación de Schmitt que situaba a Spinoza como origen de la enfermedad que condujo a la muerte del Leviatán, Taubes lo sitúa en Pablo de Tarso (“primer (...) judío liberal”) y la separación entre interino y externo en el mesianismo paulino. (shrink)

This article focuses on a religious structure that is intrinsic to the contemporary mechanisms that have enabled the global domination of economic power: faith in the market. Following Foucault’s transition from biopolitics to governmentality, this article articulates the mechanism that generates the ability for human beings to give shape and value to their lives. Through a reading of Schmitt and Hayek, as well as an updated reading of Weber’s thesis on the origin of capitalism, this article argues that we must (...) turn our attention to the Christian motifs that shape our contemporary understanding of the ‘economy’. (shrink)

An analysis of theological and philosophical understandings of debt and its role in contemporary capitalism. Max Weber’s account of the rise of capitalism focused on his concept of a Protestant ethic, valuing diligence in earning and saving money but restraint in spending it. However, such individual restraint is foreign to contemporary understandings of finance, which treat ever-increasing consumption and debt as natural, almost essential, for maintaining the economic cycle of buying and selling. In The Debt of the Living, Elettra Stimilli (...) returns to this idea of restraint as ascesis, by analyzing theological and philosophical understandings of debt drawn from a range of figures, including Saint Paul, Schmitt and Agamben, Benjamin and Marx, Nietzsche and Freud, and Foucault. Central to this analysis is the logic of “profit for profit’s sake”—an aspect of Weber’s work that Stimilli believes has been given insufficient attention. Following Foucault, she identifies this as the original mechanism of a capitalist dispositif that feeds not on a goal-directed rationality, but on the self-determining character of human agency. Ascesis is fundamental not because it is characterized by renunciation, but because the self-discipline it imposes converts the properly human quality of action without a predetermined goal into a lack, a fault, or a state of guilt: a debt that cannot be settled. Stimilli argues that this lack, which is impossible to fill, should be seen as the basis of the economy of hedonism and consumption that has governed global economies in recent years and as the premise of the current economy of debt. Elettra Stimilli is research fellow of theoretical philosophy at Scuola Normale Superiore in Pisa, Italy. Arianna Bove is the translator of many books, including Factory of Strategy: Thirty-Three Lessons on Lenin, by Antonio Negri. (shrink)

The aim of this paper is to focus the use and development of some key concepts of the Italian contemporary thought – as, for example, General Intellect, Biopolitics, Political Theology, Economic Theology, Debt – in order to reflect on some critical moments and to identify new possibilities still open for the future. In this regard, in the final part of the text, particular attention is given to Giorgio Agamben’s thought. A critique of the current global order of neoliberalism is the (...) main purpose of this analysis, focused on very different reflections, which share the necessity to avoid theories separate from history. (shrink)