On the Tragedy of the Modern Condition: The ‘Theologico-Political Problem’ in Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and Hannah Arendt

Abstract

This article addresses Eric L. Santner’s claim that “there is more political theology in everyday life than we might have ever thought” by analyzing the “theologico-political problem” in the work of three prominent twentieth-century political thinkers—Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and Hannah Arendt. Schmitt, Strauss, and Arendt share a preoccupation with the crisis of modern political liberalism and confront the theologico-political problem in a similar spirit: although their responses differ dramatically, their individual accounts dwell on the absence of incontestable principles in modern society that can justify life-in-common and the persistence of the political order. Their writings thus engage with the question of the place of “the absolute” in the political realm. In particular, Arendt’s indirect approach to the theologico-political problem is crucial to understanding the radicality of a political world in which traditional certainties can no longer be re-established. The theoretical trajectory I present suggests that the dispersion of political theology in everyday life has a specific corollary: modern politics operates within the tragic and paradoxical nature of its unstable and common origins that cannot be incorporated in exceptionalist versions of the body politic.

Keywords:

• Carl Schmitt
• Leo Strauss
• Hannah Arendt
• Claude Lefort
• the theologico-political problem
• disenchantment of the world
• secularization
• political beginnings

Acknowledgment

This essay owes a great deal to conversations with Étienne Balibar, Peg Birmingham, Bruno Bosteels, Wendy Brown, Jorge Dotti, Grant Farred, Jason Frank, Carlos Forment, Werner Hamacher, Wolfgang Heuer, Claudia Hilb, Andreas Kalyvas, Fabián Ludueña Romandini, Jean-Luc Nancy, Julio Pinto, Diego Rossello, Luis Rossi, Eric Santner, and Geoff Waite. I am also deeply indebted to Andrew Amstutz, Ophélie Chavaroche, Janet Hendrickson, Miriam Minak, Adam Schoene, Bécquer Seguín, Matías Sirczuk, the two anonymous reviewers and the editor of The European Legacy for their invaluable comments on earlier drafts. Finally, I am grateful to the Deutscher Akademischer Austauschdienst (DAAD) and the Rosa-Luxemburg-Stiftung for financial support.

Notes

1. Santner, The Royal Remains, 46. See also Kahn, “Political Theology and Liberal Culture,” 23.

2. See Agamben, Homo Sacer, 91–103; and Kingdom and the Glory; De Vries and Sullivan, eds., Political Theologies; Žižek, Santner, and Reinhard, The Neighbor; Meier, Was ist politische Theologie?; Scattola, Teologia politica; Scott and Cavanaugh, eds., Companion to Political Theology; Manemann and Wacker, eds., Politische Theologie; Cheng, Radical Love; Crockett, Radical Political Theology; Kahn, Political Theology; Robbins, Radical Democracy and Political Theology; Santner, The Royal Remains; and Weight of All Flesh; Hammill, Mosaic Constitution, 2012; Hammill and Lupton, eds., Theology and Early Modernity; Papanikolaou, The Mystical as Political; Kessler, ed., Political Theology for a Plural Age; Kahn, Future of Illusion; Rust, The Body in Mystery; Esposito, Two: The Machine of Political Theology; Raschke, Force of God; Gourgouris, “Political Theology as Monarchical Thought,” 145–59; and Kajewski and Manemann, eds., Politische Theologie.

3. Strong asks: “What then is the problem of political theology? Put simply it is that in the contemporary world the transcendental criteria for justifying the social order are rejected by more and more people.” Strong, “Exile and the Demos,” 718. On the abyssal character of modernity, see Arendt, “The Abyss of Freedom,” 195–217. See also Panis, “La Question,” 59–78 ; Keenan, “Promises, Promises,” 76–101; and Zerilli, Feminism and the Abyss, 125–64.

4. On this concept, see Meier, Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss.

5. Santner, The Royal Remains.

6. Weber, The Vocation Lectures, 12–13, original emphasis; translation modified.

7. Weber, The Vocation Lectures, 90.

8. On Schmitt and political theology, see Schmitt, Political Theology; and Politische Theologie II. See also Hirt, “Monotheismus als politisches Problem?” 319–24; Maier, “Politische Theologie?” 73–91; Bendersky, Carl Schmitt, 3–20; Koslowski, “Politischer Monotheismus oder Trinitätslehre?” 26–44, Nicoletti, Trascendenza e Potere; Meier, Die Lehre Carl Schmitts; Galli, Genealogia della politica, 331–459; McCormick, “Political Theory and Political Theology,” 830–54; Balakrishnan, The Enemy, 53–65; Hollerisch, “Carl Schmitt,” 107–22; Duso,“Teologia politica,” 189–218; and Arato, “Political Theology and Populism,” 143–72. For a critique of Schmitt’s juxtaposition of theologico-political analogies and secularization, see Blumenberg, Die Legitimität der Neuzeit. See also Monod, La querelle de la sécularisation.

9. Schmitt, Der Leviathan.

10. For a contemporary critique of this formulation, see Gourgouris, “Political Theology as Monarchical Thought,” 146.

11. Schmitt, “Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations,” 80–96.

12. Ibid., 90, translation modified.

13. Schmitt, Political Theology, 59. See also Schmitt, Concept of the Political, 69–70.

14. Schmitt, “Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations,” 93. Weber also plays the role of interlocutor in Schmitt, Political Theology, 27–28, 42, 65. See Engelbrekt, “What Carl Schmitt Picked Up,” 667–84.

15. McCormick, “Fear, Technology, and the State,” 627.

16. Schmitt, Roman Catholicism and Political Form; and Political Theology. See Smith, “Leo Strauss’s Discovery,” 388–408. See also Dotti, “Jahvé, Sion, Schmitt,” 147–238. Interestingly, Keedus states in Crisis of German Historicism that Strauss wrote his dissertation on a Christian religious thinker, Friedrich Jacobi, yet his “interest in Christianity was above all driven by its relation to the contemporary predicament of the Jewish community” (13). See Strauss, “Das Erkentnisproblem,” 237–98. According to Batnitzky, in “Leo Strauss and the ‘Theologico-Political Predicament’,” “Strauss strongly criticizes what he regards as a particularly Christian view of revelation not to banish revelation from intellectual conversation once and for all but to suggest that modernity’s intellectual ills stem in large part from the legacy of Christian theology” (54–55). 

17. Meier, Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss. See also Shell, “Taking Evil Seriously,” 175–94.

18. Strauss, Political Philosophy of Hobbes. 

19. Strauss, “Preface to Hobbes’ politische Wissenschaft,” 453; original emphasis.

20. Rather, what is a stake in Weber’s positions requires political scrutiny. In his letter to Jacob Klein, of June 23, 1934, Strauss wrote: “National Socialism is just the last word of ‘secularization’.” Gesammelte Schriften, Hobbes’ politische Wissenschaft, 516.

21. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 35–80.

22. Tanguay notes that Strauss introduces the conflict between revealed religion and philosophy under the rubric of “Jerusalem and Athens” in his letter to Löwith of August 15, 1946 (Gesammelte Schriften, Hobbes’ politische Wissenschaft, 660–64). Between 1946 and 1948, he planned to publish an essay under this title, as “an elementary discussion of the most important points of agreement and divergence between Judaism and classical Greek philosophy.” Strauss, “Plan of a Book,” 468. In Leo Strauss, Tanguay claims that “Strauss did not consider the opposition between Jerusalem and Athens in order to propose a solution to overcome it. On the contrary, he stressed the opposition and rejected all attempts at conciliation or harmonization of the two spiritual powers” (145).

23. Strauss, “Progress or Return?” 239.

24. Ibid., 245, 252, 270.

25. Strauss, “Preface,” 28–29. In “Leo Strauss and the ‘Theologico-Political Predicament’,” Batnitzky claims that “revelation for Strauss does have a particular content and form. Its content is not blind belief in the grace of God but the prophetic call to care not just for one’s neighbor but also for the stranger, and its form is law.” She adds: “Strauss’s conception of revelation must be understood in Jewish as opposed to Protestant terms, which means that religion should be understood as public practice rather than private faith” (59, 61).

26. Still, the presumption that “what Leo Strauss termed ‘the theological-political predicament’… left virtually no imprint upon Arendt’s thinking” seems to be inexact. See Gordon, “Concept of the Apolitical,” 857. See also Gordon, “Hannah Arendt’s Political Theology,” 325–39; Chacón, “Hannah Arendt in Weimar,” 73–107; Chacón, “Arendt’s Denktagebuch,” 581. In “Natality and Biopolitics in Arendt,” Vatter argues that Arendt’s thought can be understood as a negative political theology (137–59). See also Moyn, “Hannah Arendt on the Secular,” 71–96; and Camp, “Hannah Arendt and Political Theology,” 19–35.

27. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 69. Arendt develops a similar theorization in The Human Condition, 253.

28. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 70, 74–75.

29. Ibid., 133.

30. Arendt, The Human Condition, 253–54, 251–55.

31. Ibid., 277–78. See also Heins, “Reasons of the Heart,” 715–28.

32. Arendt, On Revolution, 160, emphasis added, 161.

33. See, in particular, Meier, Die Lehre Carl Schmitts; Die Denkbewegung von Leo Strauss; Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss; and Das theologisch-politische Problem. For a critique of Meier’s accounts of Schmitt and Strauss, see McCormick, “Fear, Technology, and the State,” 619–52; “Post-Enlightenment Sources,” 175–80; “Educable or Sinful Evil?” 179–98; and “Authority beyond the Bounds,” 171–83. See also Howse, “From Legitimacy to Dictatorship,” 56–90; and Vatter, “Strauss and Schmitt,” 161–214.

34. On the relationship between Arendt and Schmitt, see Jay, “Political Existentialism of Hannah Arendt,” 237–56; Kateb, “Death and Politics,” 612–13; D’Entrèves, Political Philosophy of Hannah Arendt, 86–87; Arato, “Forms of Constitution Making,” 191–231; Villa, Arendt and Heidegger, 115–17; Scheuerman, “Revolutions and Constitutions,” 252–80; Kalyvas, “From the Act to the Decision,” 320–46; Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary, 194–253; Emden, “Carl Schmitt, Hannah Arendt,” 110–34; Sluga, “The Pluralism of the Political,” 91–109; Honig, Emergency Politics, 89–93; and Jurkevics, “Hannah Arendt,” 1–22.

35. See Beiner, “Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss,” 238. See also Kielmansegg, Mewes, and Glaser-Schmidt, eds., Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss, 911–33; Villa, “Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss,” 246–98; Havers, “Between Athens and Jerusalem,” 19–29; Young-Bruehl, Hannah Arendt, 98; Gordon, “The Concept of the Apolitical,” 856–57; Owens, “Beyond Strauss,” 265–83; Chacón, “Reading Strauss from the Start,” 288, 298; Zuckert and Zuckert, “Strauss and His Contemporaries,” 254–88; and Keedus, Crisis of German Historicism.

36. In a footnote to “Truth and Politics,” however, Arendt invokes Strauss’s “noble lies” in a derogatory way: “I hope no one will tell me any more that Plato was the inventor of the ‘noble lie.’ This belief rested on a misreading of a crucial passage (414C) in The Republic, where Plato speaks of one his myths—a ‘Phoenician tale’—as a ψεῦδος. Since the same Greek word signifies ‘fiction,’ ‘error,’ and ‘lie’ according to context—when Plato wants to distinguish between error and lie, the Greek language forces him to speak of ‘involuntary’ and ‘voluntary’ ψεῦδος—the text can be rendered with Cornford as ‘bold flight of invention’ or be read with Eric Voegelin… as satirical in intention; under no circumstances can it be understood as a recommendation of lying as we understand it. Plato, of course, was permissive about occasional lies to deceive the enemy or insane people. … But, contrary to the cave allegory, no principle is involved in these passages.” See Arendt, Between Past and Future, 291.

37. Arendt and Jaspers, Correspondence 1926–1969, 244, emphasis added. Interestingly enough, Strauss evaded responding to Karl Löwith’s question whether Arendt was “worth reading”: “I have not seen H. Arendt’s articles of Political Philosophy.” Strauss, Gesammelte Schriften, Hobbes’ politische Wissenschaft, 689.

38. Strauss, “Preface,” 1; and “Preface to Hobbes’ politische Wissenschaft,” 453.

39. Smith, Reading Leo Strauss, 51; and “Leo Strauss’s Discovery,” 389. See also Jaffa, “Crisis of the Strauss Divided,” 593–97; Green, “‘In the Grip of the Theological-Political Predicament’,” 41–74; and “In the Grip of the Theological-Political Predicament,” in Jew and Philosopher, 5–27; Batnitzky, “Revelation and Commandment,” 181–203; and “Leo Strauss,” 43; and Janssens, Between Athens and Jerusalem, 7–30.

40. Strauss’s letter to Karl Löwith of August 15, 1946, is revelatory. In Das theologisch-politische Problem, Meier reads this letter, particularly its reference to a “shipwreck,” as Strauss’s confrontation with faith in revelation (49). Strauss refers to the querelle des anciens et des modernes and suggests: “I do not deny, but claim, that modern philosophy has many essential things in common with Christian medieval philosophy; but that means that the attack of the moderns is directed resolutely against ancient philosophy.” The letter emphasizes what Strauss will later analyze under the rubric of the theologico-political predicament. The continuities between modern and Christian medieval philosophy show that “modern philosophy emerged by way of transformation of… Latin or Christian scholasticism” and is an invitation to recover ancient philosophy. Strauss, “Preface to Isaac Husik,” 252. Although Strauss sees Christianity as the counterpart of the ancients, he defines ancient philosophy as the proper and genuine philosophy. In sum, he writes that we should “attempt to learn from the ancients.” Strauss, Gesammelte Schriften, Hobbes’ politische Wissenschaft, 662, original emphasis. See also Pangle and Tarcov, “Epilogue,” 911.

41. On the “diagnostic” and “reconstructive” senses of the theologico-political predicament, see Batnitzky, “Leo Strauss,” 41–62. On the predicament as either a naïve or a critical attitude to a set of fixed assumptions, see Zank, “Beyond the ‘Theologico-Political Predicament’.” See also Jaffa, “Leo Strauss Remembered,” 41.

42. Meier, Das theologisch-politische Problem; Pangle, Leo Strauss, 27; Smith, Reading Leo Strauss, 75–76; “Leo Strauss’s Discovery,” 389; and Tanguay, Leo Strauss. See also Gordon, “The Concept of the Apolitical,” 856–59.

43. Strauss, “Reason and Revelation,” fol. 4 recto/4 verso, in Leo Strauss Papers, Box 11, Folder 13. See also Strauss, Natural Right and History, 74–75; and Meier, Das theologisch-politische Problem, 17.

44. See Scattola, Teologia politica. In “On Political Theology,” Espejo detects five different meanings of the term (477–78). See also Lezra, “The Instance of the Sovereign,” 183–211; and Thiem, “Political Theology.” DOI: 10.1002/9781118474396.wbept0794.

45. In Taubes, To Carl Schmitt, Schmitt states: “The term ‘political theology’ really is one that I coined” (25). Spinoza, to be sure, refers to this notion, albeit as an adjective, in his Tractatus Theologico-Politicus (1670). The term is also introduced in other treatises such as Morhof, Theologiae gentium politicae (1662), and Van Heenvliedt, Theologico-Politica Dissertatio (1662).

46. See Koselleck, Kritik und Krise; and Gauchet, Le désenchantement du monde.

47. See Mehring, Carl Schmitt, 101–11.

48. Schmitt, Political Romanticism, 17.

49. Ibid., 58, 97.

50. For a critical exploration of the relationship between political theology and decisionism, see Espejo, “Does Political Theology Entail Decisionism?” 725–43.

51. Schmitt, Political Theology, 13, emphasis added.

52. Ibid., 15, emphasis added.

53. See Meier, Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss; and Das theologisch-politische Problem.

54. In a letter of May 19, 1933, Strauss responded to the Nazis’ triumph by saying he would rather live in a ghetto than bow to “the cross of liberalism” [Kreuz des Liberalismus]. Strauss, Gesammelte Schriften, Hobbes’ politische Wissenschaft, 625.

55. Strauss, “German Nihilism, Leo Strauss,” 358. See also Altman, “Leo Strauss on ‘German Nihilism’,” 587–612.

56. Strauss “German Nihilism, Leo Strauss,” 358.

57. Strauss, “What is Political Philosophy?” 13.

58. Batnitzky asserts: “The theologico-political problem that Strauss wishes to reinstate is not a return to medievalism of any kind but a return to the wisdom of doubt, or put another way, a return to a philosophy, theology, and especially a politics of moderation.” Batnitzky, “Leo Strauss,” 60.

59. Strauss, “Three Waves of Modernity,” 83.

60. See Gourevitch, “Philosophy and Politics I,” 58–84; and “Philosophy and Politics II,” 281–328; Lampert, “The Argument of Leo Strauss,” 39–46; Tarcov, “Philosophy & History,” 5–29; “On a Certain Critique of ‘Straussianism’,” 3–18; and “Leo Strauss’s ‘On Classical Political Philosophy’,” 72–76.

61. Strauss, “Preface,” 1, emphasis added. On the equivalent status of reason and revelation, see ibid., 28–29. See also Sorenson, “Strauss and the Defense of Western Civilization,” 193–221.

62. Strauss, “Preface,” 6.

63. Strauss, “Progress or Return?” 252.

64. Arendt, “‘What Remains?” 1. See also Arendt, Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy, 28–29.

65. In “Karl Marx,” Arendt argues that totalitarianism in fact prevents a return to tradition: the thread of our tradition, in the sense of a continuous history, broke only with the emergence of totalitarian institutions and policies that no longer could be comprehended through the categories of traditional thought. … I propose to accept the rise of totalitarianism as a demonstrably new form of government, as an event that, at least politically, palpably concerns the lives of all of us, not only the thoughts of a relatively few individuals or the destinies of certain specific national or social groups. Only this event, with its concomitant change of all political conditions and relationships that previously existed on the earth, rendered irreparable and unhealable the various “breaks” that have been seen retrospectively in its wake. Totalitarianism as an event has made the break in our tradition an accomplished fact, and as an event it could never have been foreseen or forethought, much less predicted or “caused,” by any single man. So far are we from being able to deduce what actually happened from past spiritual or material ‘causes’ that all such factors appear to be causes only in the light cast by the event, illuminating both itself and its past. (280–81). See also Arendt, Men in Dark Times, 10.

66. Arendt, nonetheless, is not intellectually indifferent to theology. She enrolled at the Philipps-Universität Marburg as a theology student and wrote her dissertation on the Christian political thinker Augustine of Hippo. Arendt, Der Liebesbegriff bei Augustin. In her interview with Günter Gaus, Arendt regards philosophy and theology as “belong[ing] together.” “‘What Remains?” 9.

67. See Arendt, Between Past and Future, 94, 140, 201; and Arendt, “Karl Marx,” 273–319.

68. Arendt, in Hill, ed., Hannah Arendt, 313–14.

69. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 163–64.

70. Ibid., 48, 71.

71. Ibid., 52. See also Arendt, The Human Condition, 314.

72. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 71–72; and The Human Condition, 20.

73. Arendt, The Human Condition, 55.

74. Ibid., 170, emphasis added.

75. See Birmingham, Hannah Arendt and Human Rights, 35–69. See also Kattago, “Why the World Matters,” 170–184.

76. Arendt, The Human Condition, 205, emphasis added.

77. See Canovan, Hannah Arendt, 146–47; Honig, Emergency Politics, 89–93; and Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary, 202–10.

78. Arendt, The Human Condition, 19. See also Arendt, Between Past and Future, 168.

79. Arendt, On Revolution, 29, emphasis added.

80. Ibid., 196, emphasis added.

81. Lefort, “The Permanence of the Theologico-Political?” 255, original emphasis; translation modified.

82. Ibid., 255, emphasis added; translation modified.

83. See, e.g, Marramao, Passaggio a Occidente. 

84. See Dyzenhaus, ed., Law as Politics; Mouffe, ed., Challenge of Carl Schmitt; and Kalyvas and Jan-Werner Müller, eds., “Carl Schmitt Legacy and Prospects,” 1469–895.

85. Schmitt, Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, 43; and Constitutional Theory, 342.

86. Schmitt, Political Theology, 15, emphasis added; translation modified.

87. Schmitt, Concept of the Political, 29, emphasis added; translation modified.

88. Ibid., 48–49, translation modified.

89. Schmitt, Constitutional Theory, 267.

90. Strauss, “Notes on Carl Schmitt,” 112, original emphasis; translation modified.

91. Ibid., 117, 122.

92. Strauss, “What is Political Philosophy?” 41.

93. Strauss, Natural Right and History, 191.

94. Meier, Die Denkbewegung von Leo Strauss, 30.

95. Strauss, “Three Waves of Modernity,” 98.

96. Beiner, “Hannah Arendt and Leo Strauss,” 239, 243.

97. Arendt, Between Past and Future, 155.

98. Arendt, The Human Condition, 9. See also Birmingham, Hannah Arendt and Human Rights, 4–34; and Kottman, “Novus Ordo Saeclorum,” 145.

99. For an attempt to emphasize the role of the ordinary within Arendt’s rendition of politics, see Honig, Emergency Politics, xviii. In Honig’s earlier account in Political Theory, however, Arendt is defined as “a theorist devoted above all to the extraordinary” (89).

100. See Heidegger, Zur Bestimmung der Philosophie, 69; and Arendt, The Human Condition, 43, 98, 141–42.

101. Arendt, The Human Condition, 176–77. See also Arendt, On Revolution, 203.

102. Arendt, The Human Condition, 4, 37.

103. Arendt, The Human Condition, 196.

104. Ibid., 197, emphasis added.

105. Ibid., 229. See also Arendt, Between Past and Future, 139.

106. Arendt, The Human Condition, 247, emphasis added.

107. Of course, this list is not exhaustive. For the authors who would have to be taken into account, see Scattola, Teologia politica; esp. Peterson, Der Monotheismus als politisches Problem; Voegelin, The New Science of Politics; Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies; Löwith, Meaning in History; Schmitt, Politische Theologie II; Kelsen, “God and State,” 61–82; Barion, Kirche und Kirchenrecht; Blumenberg, Die Legitimität der Neuzeit; Baptist Metz, Zum Begriff der neuen politischen Theologie; Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul; Barth, The Word of God and Theology; and Benjamin, “Theological-Political Fragment,” 312–13; and “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 253–64.

108. These motifs are based on a kind of “exceptionalism” that conceives of unusual political moments as the primary lens through which to comprehend everyday—but not only everyday—political life. Political exceptionalism actualizes a specific binary defined by the opposition between the normal and the exceptional, and the ontological primacy of the latter. See Schmitt, Political Theology and Concept of the Political. On the radical difference between “the exceptional” and “the extraordinary,” and between “emergencies” and “foundings,” see Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary, 3, 15, 92–97, 116, 119, 129, 135, 161–62. See also Dyzenhaus, Legality and Legitimacy, 46; and Frank and McNulty, “Taking Exception to the Exception,” 3–10.

109. On the “political paradox,” see Ricoeur, “Le Paradoxe Politique,” 260–84; Honig, “Declarations of Independence,” 97–113; Political Theory, 76–125; “Between Decision and Deliberation,” 1–17; and Emergency Politics, xv–xviii, 87–111; Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox; Keenan, “Promises, Promises,” 76–101; Näsström, “The Legitimacy of the People,” 624–58; and Frank, Constituent Moments, 41–66.

110. See Schmidt, On Germans and Other Greeks, 6; and Loraux, The Mourning Voice, 13. See also Honig, Antigone, Interrupted.

111. For the influence on him of Strauss, Arendt, and less explicitly, Schmitt, see Lefort, Travail de l'œuvre Machiavel; “Une interprétation politique de l’antisémitisme. Hannah Arendt. I,” 654–60; “Une interprétation politique de l’antisémitisme. Hannah Arendt. II,” 21–28; Democracy and Political Theory; The Political Forms of Modern Society; Écrits. À l’épreuve du politique; “Loi de mouvement et idéologie,” 193–210; and “Thinking with and Against Hannah Arendt,” 447–59. See also Labelle, “Can the Problem?” 63–81; Schaap, “The Proto-politics of Reconciliation,” 615–30; Goldman, “Beyond the Markers of Certainty,” 27–34; Weymans, “Defending Democracy’s Symbolic Dimension,” 6380; and Hilb, “Claude Lefort as Reader of Leo Strauss,” 71–86.

112. Lefort, “The Death of Immortality?” 261–63.

113. Lefort, “Permanence of the Theologico-Political?” 223, translation modified, 225, 227–28.

114. Ibid., 255.

115. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies, 506.

116. See Wolin, “The People’s Two Bodies,” 9–16; and Santner, The Royal Remains.

117. Santner, The Royal Remains, 10, original emphasis.

118. Honig, Political Theory, 76–125; and “Between Decision and Deliberation,” 9, 14. See also Lefort, “Hannah Arendt,” 45; and “Loi de mouvement et idéologie,” 208; Keenan, Democracy in Question, 99; Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics, 230; Frank, Constituent Moments, 51; and Arendt, “Lying in Politics,” 5.

119. Honig, “Declarations of Independence,” 98.

120. Honig, Emergency Politics, 136. See also Kalyvas, Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary, 194–253.

121. Honig, Emergency Politics, 92.

122. Ibid., 93, emphasis added.

123. See Espejo, “On Political Theology,” 475–94.

124. Rancière, Dissensus, 34, translation modified.

125. Ibid., 50.