To the question that animated the twentieth-century debate on political theology—namely, whether Christianity is exclusively a religious phenomenon, which must separate itself from all things political, or whether its concepts instead underpin secular politics, thereby conditioning and informing its practices—this book advances a third alternative: Christian anti-politics, it contends, entails its own distinct conception of politics. Yet this politics, it argues, in concert with Giorgio Agamben’s recent intervention in this field of inquiry, assumes the form of what today we call “administrati ... More

To the question that animated the twentieth-century debate on political theology—namely, whether Christianity is exclusively a religious phenomenon, which must separate itself from all things political, or whether its concepts instead underpin secular politics, thereby conditioning and informing its practices—this book advances a third alternative: Christian anti-politics, it contends, entails its own distinct conception of politics. Yet this politics, it argues, in concert with Giorgio Agamben’s recent intervention in this field of inquiry, assumes the form of what today we call “administration,” which the ancients termed “economics.” The book’s principal aim is thus genealogical: It seeks to understand our current conception of government in the light of an important but rarely acknowledged transformation in the idea of politics brought about by Christianity. This transformation in the idea of politics also in turn precipitates a concurrent shift in the organisation of power; an organisation whose determining principle, the book contends, is liturgy (understood in the broad sense as “public service”). To date, only an emphasis on its acclamatory dimension has made the concept of liturgy available for political theory; this book seeks to position it instead as a technique of governance. What Christianity has bequeathed to political thought and forms, it argues, is thus a paradoxical technology of power that is grounded uniquely in service.