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1 1. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George Schwab (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1988), 36. Hobbes’s Leviathan is particularly important for Schmitt’s understanding of both how the concept of sovereignty was historically transferred from theology to politics and how modern sovereignty was structurally the same as divine sovereignty. See Carl Schmitt, The Leviathan in the State Theory of Thomas Hobbes (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008). More generally, Hobbes may be said to be determinate for Schmitt’s entire project of political theology insofar as he defines for Schmitt the paradigm of modernity and modern sovereignty.

2 2. See Walter Benjamin, “On Violence,” in Selected Writings, vol. 1, 1913–1926, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1996), 236–252; Walter Benjamin, “On the Concept of History,” in Selected Writings, vol. 4, 1938–1940, ed. Howard Eiland and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2006), 389–400; Karl Löwith, Meaning in History: The Theological Implications of the Philosophy of History (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1949); Jacob Taubes, Occidental Eschatology, trans. David Ratmoko (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2009); Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, trans. Dana Hollander (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2004); and Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, trans. Robert M. Wallace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1983).

3 3. For Blumenberg’s discussion of immanent self-assertion of reason and the overcoming of Gnosticism, see Legitimacy, esp. 125–226. For more on these implications for and in Blumenberg from a political-theological perspective, see Joseph Albernaz and Kirill Chepurin, “The Sovereignty of the World: Towards a Political Theology of Modernity (after Blumenberg),” in Interrogating Modernity: Debates with Hans Blumenberg, ed. Agata Bielik-Robson and Daniel Whistler (New York, NY: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020).

4 4. Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West (New York: Vintage, 2008); Victoria Kahn, The Future of Illusion: Political Theology and Early Modern Texts (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014).

5 5. For a useful critical genealogy of political theology, see Yannik Thiem, “Political Theology,” in The Encyclopedia of Political Thought, ed. Michael T Gibbons (Malden, MA: Wiley Blackwell, 2015), 2807–2822.

6 6. Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1998); State of Exception, trans. Kevin Attell (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005); The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government, trans. Lorenzo Chiesa (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2011).

7 7. Roberto Esposito, Two: The Machine of Political Theology and the Place of Thought, trans. Zakiya Hanafi (New York: Fordham University Press, 2015).

8 8. Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism, trans. Ray Brassier (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003); Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology (London: Verso, 1997); Antonio Negri, The Labor of Job: The Biblical Text as a Parable of Human Labor, trans. Matteo Mandarini (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2009); Catherine Malabou, “Before and Above: Spinoza and Symbolic Necessity,” Critical Inquiry 43, no. 1 (Autumn 2016): 84–109; Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the Collège de France 1977–1978, trans. Graham Burchell (London: Picador, 2009).

9 9. Another inventive example of this line of thinking is Adam Kotsko, Neoliberalism’s Demons: On the Political Theology of Late Capital (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2018).

10 10. Taubes, Political Theology of Paul, 103.

11 11. Hussein Ali Agrama, Questioning Secularism: Islam, Sovereignty, and the Rule of Law in Modern Egypt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012).

12 12. Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2003), 5.

13 13. See Albernaz and Chepurin, “Sovereignty of the World.”

14 14. For Jean Hyppolite’s description of the Hegelian movement of spirit in these terms, see his Genesis and Structure of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit, trans. Samuel Cherniak and John Heckman (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 1974), 544 and 557. For an account of the transcendent telos of the modern world, see also Albernaz and Chepurin, “Sovereignty of the World.”

15 15. One detects something similar—a structure of transcendence persisting in modernity under the guise of immanence—in the logics of self-organization that arise across the Enlightenment. Although in a sense breaking with theologies of salvation, discourses of self-organization generate knowledges that justify a faith not in God but in history and the world—thereby underwriting a secular form of providence and legitimating modernity. See Alex Dubilet, review of Jonathan Sheehan and Dror Wahrman, Invisible Hands: Self-Organization and the Eighteenth Century (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2015), Immanent Frame, May 26, 2016, https://tif.ssrc.org/2016/05/26/invisible-hands/.

16 16. Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being/Power/Truth/Freedom: Towards the Human, After Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3, no. 3 (2003): 264, 260, 296, 319. Relatedly, Nelson Maldonado-Torres writes, “It is as if the production of the ‘less than human’ functioned as the anchor of a process of autonomy and self-assertion.” Maldonado-Torres, Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008), 238. For a discussion of the way the modern logics of separation, otherness, and exclusion lead to hierarchical arrangements of the human, the less-than-human, and the non-human through a theory of racializing assemblages, see Alexander G. Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2014). On the production of “colonial difference” in and as modernity, and on the conjunction of colonialism and the exploitation of nature/the earth, see Walter D. Mignolo and Catherine E. Walsh, On Decoloniality: Concepts, Analytics, Praxis (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), esp. chaps. 7 and 8. For an important analysis of the conjunction of globalization and racialization in modernity, see also Jared Hickman, Black Prometheus: Race and Radicalism in the Age of Atlantic Slavery (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2017). What Hickman, inspired in many ways by Blumenberg’s association of modernity with immanence, calls the new “planetary” or “global immanence” of modernity is, however, what we analyze as fundamentally an immanent-transcendent structure.

17 17. On blackness as the nothingness that allows the modern world and the modern subject to emerge and affirm themselves as the universal being, see Calvin L. Warren, Ontological Terror: Blackness, Nihilism, and Emancipation (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018). On the relation between the human, the world, and the slave, see Frank B. Wilderson III, Red, White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010).

18 18. See, for example, Jared Sexton, “The Social Life of Social Death: On Afro-Pessimism and Black Optimism,” InTensions, no. 5 (2011): 1–47; Jared Sexton Interviewed by Daniel Colucciello Barber, “On Black Negativity, or the Affirmation of Nothing,” Society and Space, September 18, 2017, https://www.societyandspace.org/articles/on-black-negativity-or-the-affirmation-of-nothing/.

19 19. For an encapsulation of Laruelle’s thinking of the world and the Real, see “A Summary of Non-Philosophy,” trans. Ray Brassier, Pli 8 (1999): 138–148. For the ethico-political dimension of this conceptual dyad, see François Laruelle, General Theory of Victims, trans. Jessie Hock and Alex Dubilet (Cambridge: Polity, 2015).

20 20. See Anthony Paul Smith, “Against Tradition to Liberate Tradition,” Angelaki: Journal of the Theoretical Humanities 19, no. 2 (2014): 145–159; Anthony Paul Smith, Laruelle: A Stranger Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2016), esp. 153–160; and Laruelle, General Theory of Victims.

21 21. For a useful intellectual-historical overview of the role of Gnosticism as an appellation and position, see Willem Styfhals, No Spiritual Investment in the World: Gnosticism and Postwar German Philosophy (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2019).

22 22. Adolf von Harnack, Marcion: The Gospel of the Alien God, trans. J. E. Steeley and L. D. Bierma (Jamestown, NY: Labyrinth Press, 1990; German original: 1923).

23 23. Fred Moten, Black and Blur (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017), 67.

24 24. Fred Moten, Stolen Life (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2018), 181. Of course, all discussion of the flesh, Moten’s included, returns to the locus classicus: Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” in Black, White, and in Color: Essays on American Literature and Culture (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003), 203–229.

25 25. Moten, Stolen Life, 113.

26 26. Moten, 27. For the full articulation of the undercommons, see Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2013).

27 27. Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Toward a Black Feminist Poethics: The Quest(ion) of Blackness Toward the End of the World,” Black Scholar 44, no. 2 (2014): 81–97.

28 28. Daniel Whistler, “Abstraction and Utopia in Early German Idealism,” Russian Journal of Philosophy and Humanities 2, no. 1 (2017): 3–22. See also Whistler’s essay in this volume.

29 29. Alex Dubilet, The Self-Emptying Subject: Kenosis and Immanence, Medieval to Modern (New York: Fordham University Press, 2018). Dubilet further elaborates immanence as decoupled from the logic of the subject and the world, in dialogue with Harney and Moten’s undercommons and Laruelle’s non-philosophy, in “An Immanence without the World: On Dispossession, Nothingness, and Secularity,” Qui Parle (forthcoming).

30 30. See Gil Anidjar, “Secularism,” Critical Inquiry 33, no. 1 (2006): 52–77; Webb Keane, Christian Moderns: Freedom and Fetish in the Mission Encounter (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2007). As Anidjar notes, secularism should be seen as “the means by which Christianity forgot and forgave itself” (63).

31 31. Daniel Colucciello Barber, “World-Making and Grammatical Impasse,” Qui Parle 25 (2016): 179–206; Daniel Colucciello Barber, On Diaspora: Christianity, Religion, and Secularity (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2011). On the articulation of immanence decoupled from the secular, see also: Daniel Colucciello Barber, Deleuze and the Naming of God: Post-Secularism and the Future of Immanence (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2014).

32 32. Alex Dubilet, “The Catastrophic Joy of Abandoning Salvation: Thinking the Postsecular with Georges Bataille,” Journal of Critical Religious Theory 16, no. 2 (2017): 163–178, and Dubilet, Self-Emptying Subject, esp. 173–178. On the figure of utopian immanence, see Kirill Chepurin, “Beginning with Kant: Utopia, Immanence, and the Origin of German Idealism,” Russian Journal of Philosophy and Humanities 2, no. 1 (2017): 71–90; for this question, in a different intellectual context, see Kirill Chepurin and Alex Dubilet, “Russia’s Atopic Nothingness: Ungrounding the World-Historical Whole with Pyotr Chaadaev,” Angelaki 24, no. 6 (2019): 135–151.

33 33. One might recall that Slavoj Žižek has offered innovative political-theological reinterpretations of Hegel through a Lacanian lens. Within Žižek’s Hegelian reading, the true radicality of Christianity lies in its uncompromising affirmation of the death of God as the loss of all transcendent guarantees. Ultimately, Žižek’s reading connects Christianity with radical atheism in a way that affirms the unity and singular trajectory of the West. See Slavoj Žižek and John Milbank, The Monstrosity of Christ: Paradox or Dialectic?, ed. Creston Davis (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009), 234–303. The present volume points to a different set of theoretical directions. Neither ascribing primacy to psychoanalytic paradigms nor invested in recuperative gestures in relation to Christianity, it moves beyond the Žižek-Milbank polemics, as significant as those polemics may have been for political theology in the first decade of this century. For a useful synthetic but critical account of Žižek’s trajectory in relation to theology, see Marika Rose, “Slavoj Žižek,” in The Palgrave Handbook of Radical Theology, ed. Christopher D. Rodkey and Jordan E. Miller (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 479–495.

34 34. Hegel’s philosophy of history, Fichte’s Characteristics of the Present Age, and Schelling’s Exhibition of the Purely Rational Philosophy all variously inscribed colonialism into the project of modern universalism grounded in Christianity.

35 35. See especially Cyril O’Regan, The Heterodox Hegel (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1994).

36 36. On the figures of refusing and even annihilating the world of mediation and history in Schelling, see Kirill Chepurin, “Indifference and the World: Schelling’s Pantheism of Bliss,” Sophia 58, no. 4 (2019): 613–630; “To Break All Finite Spheres: Bliss, the Absolute I, and the End of the World in Schelling’s 1795 Metaphysics,” Kabiri: The Official Journal of the North American Schelling Society 2 (2020): 40–67; and Chepurin’s paper in this volume.

37 37. On the inversion characteristic of modernity—which makes the finite world (rather than God) into the exemplification of reality—and the theoretical implications thereof, see, for example, Schelling, Aphorismen über die Naturphilosophie (Hamburg: Felix Meiner Verlag, 2018), 61.

38 38. We should recall that German Romanticism is frequently read today within the broader post-Kantian ambit of German Idealism (and rightly so). Recent examples include Frederick C. Beiser, German Idealism: The Struggle against Subjectivism, 1781–1801 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2008), and Dalia Nassar, The Romantic Absolute: Being and Knowing in Early German Romantic Philosophy, 1795–1804 (Chicago: Chicago University Press, 2013).

39 39. F. H. Jacobi, The Main Philosophical Writings and the Novel Allwill, trans. George di Giovanni (Montreal-Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1994), 515.

40 40. Jean Paul, “School for Aesthetics,” trans. Margaret R. Hale, in German Romantic Criticism, ed. A. Leslie Willson (New York: Continuum, 1982), 32.

41 41. Jacobi, Main Philosophical Writings, 524.

42 42. For nonsubjectivist readings of early Romanticism, see, for example, Walter Benjamin, “The Concept of Criticism in German Romanticism,” in Selected Writings, vol. 1, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings (Cambridge: Belknap Press, 1996), 116–200; Maurice Blanchot, “The Athenaeum,” in The Infinite Conversation, trans. Susan Hanson (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 351–359; Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe and Jean-Luc Nancy, The Literary Absolute, trans. Philip Barnard and Cheryl Lester (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1988).

43 43. F. W. J. Schelling, “Vom Ich als Princip der Philosophie,” in Werke: Historisch-kritische Ausgabe (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1980), 1.2:104, 109, 122–123.

44 44. See Chepurin, “Indifference and the World” and “To Break All Finite Spheres.”

45 45. F. W. J. Schelling, “Philosophische Briefe über Dogmatismus und Kriticismus,” in Werke: Historisch-kritische Ausgabe (Stuttgart-Bad Cannstatt: Frommann-Holzboog, 1982), 1.3:96.

46 46. Schelling, Aphorismen über die Naturphilosophie, 61.

47 47. Schelling, “Vom Ich,” 109, 119, 122; see also 101.

48 48. For a reading of the early Hegel, however, that aligns him with immanence and the annihilation of finitude, see Alex Dubilet, “Speculation and Infinite Life: Hegel and Meister Eckhart on the Critique of Finitude,” Russian Journal of Philosophy and Humanities 2, no. 1 (2017): 49–70.

49 49. Whistler, “Abstraction and Utopia,” 7.

50 50. See Albernaz and Chepurin, “Sovereignty of the World.”

51 51. F. W. J. Schelling, Sämmtliche Werke (Stuttgart: Cotta, 1856), 2.1:509, 513–515.