idolatry article in social research

7/30/2019 Idolatry Article in Social Research

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Stathis Gourgouris

very eligion Is Idolatry

social research Vol. 80 : No. 1 : Spring 2013 101

the assertion i have chosen for a title is a quotation from

a very important essay by Cornelius Castoriadis on the imaginary insti-

tution of religion. This essay is unique in his overall oeuvre and has not

really received the attention it deserves. It is especially pertinent to the

discussion of political theology and the question of what politics theol-

ogy mobilizes. Before I address Castoriadiss essay and the quotation

specifically, let me first say a few words, by way of introduction, about

political theology, not in the abstract but specifically about the ques-

tion of its politics.

Since the term political theology established itself fully in the

academic theoretical sceneI wouldnt quite date it with the advent of

the Carl Schmitt obsession but rather with the secularism obsession,

which emerged about 10 years agothe term it overtook and silenced

was not political theory, as Paul Kahn argues in his recent book,

Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (2011),

but rather political economy. The eclipse of political economy as a

primary interpretive concept is all the more stunning given the dire

circumstances of our day, when the power of the economic sphere hascome to occupy the political in undisguised fashion. While since Marx

we have known that economic interests ultimately determine the polit-

ical trajectory of societies, we have now come to see economic agents

explicitly exercising governmental powernot only according to the

well-documented control of American government officials by Wall St.

lobbyists but even the appointment of unelected trained bankers or

financial managers to positions of heads-of-state (note Greece and Italyin 20112012). Such is the state of what, especially after the American

constitutional precedent ofCitizens United, signifies the deregulation of


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102 social research

the political. Both names are absurd. The first one is relentlessly sarcas-

tic and even cruel; the Supreme Court of the United States has legalized

the annihilation of citizenship by legislating the economic determina-tion of the citizen. My naming is just ironic. Deregulation has always

been, even in strict economic terms, about specific (partial and stealth,

but nonetheless hardcore) regulation: in other words, invisible rules (in

the name of no rules) whose benefit is not only to maximize control of

the game by those who gain from it but exterminate those who oppose

them (Gourgouris 2013).

So, in a context where the economic is exercising explicit regu-

lation over the sphere of the political while simultaneously effacing

political economy from the language of social and historical analysis,

it seems even more problematic to me that the political is ever more

thought to be determined by the theological. It is not only that the

famous Carl Schmitt quotation (all significant concepts of the modern

theory of the state are secularized theological concepts)1 seems to

be circulated ad absurdum as fact; it is that, even in its own terms,

Schmitts dictum has been irresponsibly considered. To say that some-

thing has been secularized, grammatically speaking, is to mean that

an action has been taken upon this something and that this something

(the theological) has thereby been altered. Secularization is an altera-

tion of the forms and conditions of the theological, which is not to say

the annihilation of the theologicalbut neither it is to say the mere

repetition of the theological in other guise. While we are fond of saying

that history repeats itself, it most brutally does not. And it is preciselyhistory as finite action that makes even the apparent repetition of form

in actuality a shift from tragedy to farce, or what have you. As elemen-

tary as this point is, it is indicative of a profound lapse in the prolifera-

tion of Schmitts dictum in the present secularism debates.

From this standpoint, although theological elements continue to

abound in contemporary societies worldwide, they are neither primary

(in some sort ofa priori hierarchy of determination) nor have theyalways existed in strict historical termsall the more so in relation to

the political. As a concept, historically speaking, political theology is a


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Every Religion Is Idolatry 103

Christian notion (see Thiem 2012). Although the name is first encoun-

tered in Stoic philosophy, it is given there the significance of one

category of politics among many, and by that token, the theological ismerely an account of specific elements of service to statecraft. It is only

when the Roman Empire refashions itself as a theologically endowed

regime under Emperor Constantine that the term begins the trajectory

we are now debating. Eusebius of Caesaria (c. 263340), the first histo-

rian of Christianity, is also the first to fashion the idea that the trans-

portation (and transformation) of Roman Imperium to Byzantium is

the historico-political actualization of what is theologically announced

in the Biblical texts. There is an intricate nexus here, especially the

relation of Eusebiuss position with the theological arguments about

Gods Trinitarian consubstantiality that brought about the decisions of

the Council of Nicaea (325), which form the theological and legislative

foundations of Christianity until the schism in the eleventh century.

Especially significant, but not possible to address here, is

the famous dictum of Gregory of Nazianzus (329390) in his Third

Theological Oration (379) that the Trinitarian arch? consists in the

notion of the One being instasis with itself [to En stasiazon pros eaut]

an extraordinary notion, not only as the epitome of the Christian theo-

logical imaginary and, altogether explicitly, of how political theology is

necessarily monarchical, but also, more broadly, in its equally explicit

contradistinction from the ancient Greek philosophical and political

vocabulary that enables it to begin with. However, it is in the hands of

Augustine, as is well known, that the horizon of political theology isenhanced with a transcendental teleology, the substance of which has

yet to be conceptually outmaneuvered. The City of God is still the last

instance (telos) of political theology, whatever name might be invented

for it in the course of time and the various social-historical languages

deployed.

Philosophically speaking, the transcendental Civitas Dei is the

limit of the concept of political theology, making the political ulti-mately subordinate to the theological, an instrument of the theological,

as is after all grammatically all too evident: political is just an adjec-


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104 social research

tive to the substantive theology it qualifies. From a historical stand-

point, however, political theology is to be understood from the outset,

long before Carl Schmitt came to exist upon this earth, as theologygrounded and constituted against an enemy. This enemy would have

to have both theological and political dimensions, although this is not

to say that the two are necessarily dialectically entwined. The political

history of Christianity is exemplary as a political history of the concept

of enmity and has come to infect its historical enemies with the same

logic (Anidjar 2003). While the transcendentalist element in political

theology is thus outmaneuverable and primary, the usage (or actualiza-

tion) of political theology in different epochs, including our present

time, testifies simultaneously to its insurmountably worldly character.

Thinking from the nodal perspective of this naming, two crucial

sets of questions emerge. They are of a different order but linked by a

demand to focus our interpretation on the political:

1.Is theology necessarily political? That is, can we speak of an apoliti-

cal theology? And what would this mean? How could apolitical

possibly stand on its own, undetermined by the political? Moreover,

can we really speak of theology as such? Unqualified? Substantial?

If the answer is no to either of the last two questions then the

emphasis on the original question inevitably falls on the issue of

necessity. Is theology necessarily political? This, I believe, is the

bottom line in the discussion of what might be signified by the

name political theology and its uses. If indeed this is the case, weneed to ask, what are the terms of this necessity? What authorizes

it? My tendency would be to say that such terms cannot be merely

theological, strictly speaking. That we cannot speak of an internal

history of political theology as a formal philosophical concept. In

the last instance, political theology is an instrumental logic.

2. What is the politics enacted by political theology? Can we speak of a

politics in this paradoxical singular-plural way, that is to say, ofa certain kind of politics, an eidos of politics, which can nonethe-

less be manifested differently according to the historical specifics?


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All the more so, given that political theology remains articulated

unquestionably in the singularindeed, this begs the question.

The question of whether political theology is monological or not is,for me, an outmaneuverable dimension of the problem. We cannot

assume an agreement on this issue but neither can we go ahead

without seriously encountering it as a question. If in fact political

theology enacts a specific politics, regardless of the theological or

historical content, then a whole other can of worms is opened.

I venture an answer by conviction but also for the sake of argu-

ment. Schmitt is, again, a crucial reference point. I have always argued

that Schmitts notion of sovereignty as decision on the exception entails

a monarchical theory literally speaking, not in reference to royalty. This

I hold in spite of his arguments in Verfassungslehre (Constitutional Theory)

(1928), which, on the face of it, seems an aberrant text. Its bona fide

impetus is a democratic constitutional theory, even if as corrective of

the Weimar situationhence, here too the enemy is liberalism and the

metaphysics of representative democracy. Despite stunning statements

such as A democracy must not permit the inevitable factual differ-

ence between governing and being governed to become a qualitative

distinction. . . . It is clear that all democratic thinking centers on ideas

ofimmanence [and] the appeal to the will of God contains a moment of

undemocratic transcendence. . . . Under democratic logic, only the will

of the people must come into consideration because God cannot appear

in the political realm other than as the god of a particular people andso on, Schmitt ultimately understands the people as a unitary subject

that authorizes a unitary figure of the state. Ultimately, a democratic

Schmitt would argue for the dmos as monarch (see Schmitt 2008b,

26667, and Kalyvas 2009 for an exemplary discussion of this text).

Certainly, in Political Theology (1922)a purely juridical book

in his words (Schmitt 2008a, 49)Schmitt conceives sovereignty

explicitly as singular arch, and it is elementary to say that the radi-cal democratic imaginary that honors Aristotles dictum that no ruler

can rule without the knowledge of being ruled and vice versaa


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106 social research

veritable anarchic positioncould not possibly be entertained in the

Schmittian universe. But I would go further and argue that this liter-

ally monarchical element permeates all (post-Hobbesian) theories ofsovereignty, including those such as Paul Kahns that advocating popu-

lar sovereignty, that see the sovereign position as extra-dimensional

of the polity. In this sense, one could paraphrase Schmitts famous

dictum inPolitical Theology to say instead that all significant concepts of the

modern theory of the state are residual monarchical concepts. This might give

us a better sense of why I assert that political theology has meaning

only within a monarchicalthat is to say, monological, monomythi-

cal, and indeed monotheisticimaginary.

Let us remember that Schmitt writes his secondPolitical Theology

treatise practically 50 years later (1970) not at all as a sequel, despite

the name, but as a response to his critics: primarily to a long essay by

Catholic theologian Erik Peterson, written in 1935, on monotheism

as a political problemboth the date and the specific focus point to

a response to the monarchical dogma of the Fhrer principle, which

Schmitt acknowledges, though not exactly in these words (Schmitt

2008a, 43)and secondarily to Hans Blumenbergs contemporary

critique in The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (1976). But it is actually the

second text (Blumenberg) that authorizes Schmitts impetus to take on

the first (Peterson), thereby expressly staging an argument with a theo-

logian as a political rather than a theological matter. If monotheism is

a political problem, according to Peterson, Schmitt seems to suggest

that political theology is not about monotheisma shrewd shift ofthe framework of argument, very typical of Schmitts tactics. Hence

he predicates his argument on the assertion that political theology is

a polymorphous phenomenon [with] two different sides to it . . . each

directed to its specific concepts. This is already given in the compositum

of the phrase. There are many political theologies because there are, on

the one hand, many different religions and, on the other, many differ-

ent kinds and methods of doing politics (2008, 66).One does not suddenly discover a relativist Schmitt, so this

passage requires an equally shrewd reading. I dont have the time to


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conduct it fully here, but I would draw our attention to the central-

ity of the compositum. I have always found insightful the assessment of

the great German playwright Heiner Mller that Schmitts thinking isexemplarily theatrical. He is a political thinkerfor some, the thinker

of the politicaland, simultaneously, though in a furtive way for many

reasons, driven by a theological desire. The two are in constant agonistic

relation. The compositum is precisely the staging of this agonism disguis-

ing a compromise formation. (The reason I use this term will become

evident shortly.) For Schmitt, political theology, though a concept

delineated in the singular (as part of a demonstrable Begriffsgeschichte),

becomes by the 1970s text a performative domain, which thereby, by

virtue of its very performativity, is articulated as the work of myth.

Schmitt explicitly applauds Petersons suggestion that political theol-

ogy is a myth, albeit by turning against Petersons negative signification

of the notion of myth. Without invoking Georges Sorel, whose work he

knows profoundly, Schmitt essentially adopts here a Sorelian notion of

political theology as the myth necessary for the specific socio-historico-

political actionin his language, essentiallyjuridicalhe demands in

most of his post-World War II texts. The problem that needs to be inves-

tigated in depthand I am just announcing it; I cant do it hereis

in what sense this mythical performative, even in Schmitts staging in

Political Theology II, can outmaneuver the transcendentalist imperative

of a politics that desires to be theological above and beyond all, a poli-

tics that, by virtue of this untamable desire, can never be democratic.

for years i have been fascinated by a couple of sentences

in Cornelius Castoriadiss essay Institution of Society and Religion

(1980): Every religion is idolatryor is not socially effective religion.

In religion, words themselvessacred wordsfunction, and can only

function, as idols (Castoriadis 1997, 325) The unequivocal phrase

every religion is idolatry comes with an explicit qualification: or is

not socially effective religionthereby underscoring religion as a soci-etal (indeed, we can easily say political) issue, rather than a theological

problem. In this sense, the mysticism that might produce an abyssal


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108 social research

language in which no idols remain standing can never be, by defini-

tion, socially effective, a social binding force. Mystical practice config-

ures instead a social unbinding, a rejection of society, and aims, at itsmost extreme, at the incapacity of worldly assembly. This is not to say

that the unintelligibility of mystical language is not socially readable

as, after all, Michel de Certeau has inimitably shown. It is to say that,

however society might be able to read this unintelligibility, it none-

theless cannot but turn it into an idol, thereby turn against it, read it

as another language, by another language: The mystical relation to

the Abyss, whether it be an authentic or hallucinatory phenomenon,

does not matter here: there never was and there never will be mystical

religion or a religion of mystics. . . . The lives of mystics themselves

function as . . . instituted simulacra of the Abyss (1997, 325). How often

socially effective religion has turned mysticism into dangerous idol-

atry (even while bestowing sanctification to specific practitioners) is

one of the key indications of how far it goes to deny its own idolatrous

investment.

Castoriadiss unambiguous signification of religion in this fash-

ion is actually the result of thinking about representation against the

grain of traditional use. For Castoriadis, the need for religion corre-

sponds to the refusal on the part of human beings to recognize absolute

alterity (1997, 324). This is primarily an ontological problem (much

like it is for Blumenberg), but the question of capacity or incapacity of

encounter with alterity is entirely a matter of social-imaginary insti-

tution. I should clarify, even if absurdly briefly, that, in Castoriadisslanguage, absolute alterity is an immanent, not transcendental, condi-

tion. This is expressed in twofold fashion. On the one hand, alterity is

literally internal: a radical otherness within a self who is forever torn

between the compulsion for self-reproduction (identity) and the neces-

sity for internalizing the resolute otherness of the world (self-altera-

tion). On the other hand, it is precisely the second: a radical otherness

pertinent to the world as a natural substratum, which is immanentbecause upon it rests every imaginary institution of society even if this

imaginary institution is not determined by it. There is no causal rela-


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tion between nature and society, even if without a specific biochemi-

cal molecular structure human beings would not exist. While the first

(psyche) is ontological at the level of the living being, the second (world)is always configured according to the specific social imaginary at work.

If this immanent radical otherness exists at the level ofphysis, both at

the psychical and cosmological level, it becomes the reason why, in

the world of the human living being at least,physis must be divided by

nomos. When this nomos is occluded and presented as physis, this radi-

cal otherness of self is externalized and fashioned in all kinds of soci-

etal institutions as transcendental otherness; this is how, on behalf of

society, the existential cosmological abyss is overrun by the work of

the sacred: The Sacred is the reified and instituted simulacrum of the

Abyss: it endows itself [il se donne] as immanent, separate, localized

presence of the transcendent (1997, 325).

Responding to this existential predicament, society produces a

compromise formation that emerges out of the refusal to recognize

absolute immanent alterity so as to cover over this refusal, so as to fill

its void and in this respect unwittingly to fulfill it. Before the so-called

secularization process takes place, this fulfillment of the refusal of abys-

sal alterity that produces a precisely circumscribed and socially mean-

ingful alterity accounts for what Castoriadis calls religion. Religion is

instituted in order to counter the abyssal terrain of being, the fact that

there is nothing in human existence that presupposes it, hypostatizes

it, or exceeds it; that human existence is at the limit groundless and

all established signification fails it. This abyssal condition is, of course,unrepresentable, unlocalizable, and meaningless. It may be perhaps

intelligible in the desacralized language of psychoanalysis that specu-

latesbecause it can never really know, and Freud said this explicitly

on the abyssal constitution of the psyche, but even there the object is at

the core unrepresentable, unlocalizable, and meaningless. Castoriadis

concludes:

Religion covers the Abyss, the Chaos, the Groundlessness

that society is for itself; it occults society as self-creation,


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as source and unmotivated origin of its own institution.

Religion negates the radical imaginary and puts in its place

a particular imaginary creation. It veils the enigma of theexigency for significationwhich makes society as much

as it is made by societyinsofar as it imputes to society a

signification that would come to it from elsewhere (1997,

326).

In this respect, to put it bluntly, societycreates itselfand to

begin with, creates itself as heteronomous society (1997, 328; empha-

sis in original). This utterly paradoxical condition is not open to

simple explanation, which is why all pseudosociological or pseudo-

psychological theories about some sort of structural or hardwired

propensity in human beings toward heteronomy are utter nonsense.

Surely, such theories never seem to wonder about the epistemologi-

cal position from which their investigations and explanations

are promulgated. They do not seek to explain why they conduct and

achieve a self-understanding that comes from elsewhere and doing

so, as conscious self-realization, simultaneously obliterate this very

knowledge. Theologians, certainly in the monotheistic traditions,

have been performing these sorts of contortions for centuries. The

inordinate genius for self-occultation that characterizes some of the

most glorious and brilliant manifestations of the theological mind

over time testifies to the fact that the enigma of heteronomous society and

the enigma of religion are, in large part, one and the same enigma (1997, 329;emphasis in original).

One may raise the counterargument that this essentially onto-

logical signification of religion (because it pertains to a general anthro-

pology) remains silent about the social-historical emergence of the

very concept or name of religion. This name, the counterargument

goes, might be said to be inscribed with the secularization claim and

all its politics: to wit, the geopolitical establishment of Christianityas the worlds dominant religion, which claims to go beyond religion

so as to emancipate itself from that constraint while relegating every


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other such mode to it. For those who make the latter argumentin a

broad range of ways, from Marcel Gauchet to Talal Asad, from Tomoko

Masuzawa to Gil Anidjarthe question of secularization is in a sensefalse or deceptive: a ruse by which Christianity erases itself as religion

in order to establish the realm of religion for all others.

While I think this argument has meritand in fact a great deal of

historical accuracyit is ultimately shortsighted and indeed compro-

mised by its unwillingness to consider the essential animating force

of what has been called secularization: namely, the desire of (some)

human beings to relieve themselves of their self-imposed constraints

and confront the consequences of encountering the cosmological

abyss without safeguards. Whether or how far this desire has been

realized is not the issue. Secularization, I have been arguing for some

years, is unfinishable by definition; the cosmological abyss cannot be

encountered once and for all. Although one could again raise the coun-

terargument that all kinds of other safeguards were indeed put into

placeconstitutions, nations, ideologies, scientific truths, or utopian

dreamsthe fact remains that all those new delusions ushered by

secularization were acknowledged to be human creations, for better

or worse, thereby shifting the knowledge framework so as to enable

the thought that religion too could be understood as a human

creation. Even if secularization can be disputed as having occurred at

allwhether according to Schmitts argument inPolitical Theology or the

work of the thinkers I just mentionedthis shifting in the framework

of knowledge cannot be disputed. Regardless of the persistence of thefaithful the world round, some number among the worlds popula-

tion (indeed impossible to measure precisely) understands that religion

is one glorious (if sometimes perilous) human creation among many.

Whoever ridicules this simple historical fact as ideology is enshrouded

in profound ideological darkness.

In the end, what one thinks of secularization is secondary.

Religious practices (under different names) seem to have existed in allsocieties in known history, even if their exact domain of significance

is both enormously varied and inordinately contested. As one category


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of social formation among many (a schema enabled by seculariza-

tion), religion is at this point an epistemological domain in itself. This

is to say, it is religion as a categoricalor cognitiveframework thatenables the recognition and naming of a certain typology of practices

we call religious, and if this distinction is itself a symptom of the secu-

larization process, it doesnt matter. Or rather, it is a matter of histori-

cal understandingof an emergent horizon of perception that enables

the recognition of religion as a human creation. Marxs thought contin-

ues be indispensable here. I quote extensively a well-known passage:

The basis of irreligious criticism is:Human beings make reli-

gion; religion does not make human beings. Religion is the

self-consciousness and self-esteem (Selbstgefhl) of human-

ity which has either not yet found itself or has already lost

itself again. But the human is no abstract being encamped

outside the world. The human is the world of humans,

state, society. This state, this society, produces religion,

an inverted world consciousness, because they are an inverted

world. Religion is the general theory of that world, its ency-

clopaedic compendium, its logic in a popular form, its spir-

itualisticpoint dhonneur, its enthusiasm, its moral sanction,

its solemn complement, its general ground of consolation

and justification. It is the fantastic realization of human

essence because human essence has no true reality (Marx

1975, 175; emphasis in original).

There is no need to elaborate on this exquisite passage, except to

point out that what Marx calls irreligious criticism is precisely

what recognizes humanitys reality to be a concrete manifestation, a

poitic creation, of confronting its groundlessness, its abyssal essence.

Human essence has no true reality he saysno ground other than

itself, which is why whatever it is, it derives its capacity to be fromits phantasmatic propensity to imagine, create, and realize what we

call historical realities. That these realities shape or formand thereby


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makespecific modes of human-being does not mean that they create

humanity in some ontological fashion, no matter the voluminous myths

of such creation in all kinds of cultural traditions over time. Rather,the myths themselves, in their sublime multiplicity, are perfect instan-

tiations of the insurmountable groundlessness of human essence.

As a human creation, religion is basically a social practice of

encountering and concealing the abyss of existence. What Castoriadis

calls socially effective religionfor him the only meaning of reli-

gionis the outcome of creating a name, a representation, a locus

for this abyss of interminable self-created otherness. Though such

creations are oftentimes concrete material objects (icons, statues,

totems, sacred texts), they are equally likely and often more powerfully

to be abstract and immaterial (the Word become Flesh, the Trinitarian

substance, the unpronounceable Name of God, the 99 names of God,

the Unrepresentable, the transcendental Absolute, the Goddess Reason,

and so on). Christ himself is called, by Paul, the image of the invisible

God eikn tou theou tou aoratou (Col. 1:15). In all cases, such social imagi-

nary creations that constitute the space of the sacred are idols, reified

simulacra of the abyss they represent and at the same time conceal. This

is the sense of the statement every religion is idolatry. To the extent

that religion is not merely the representation of societys desire to ritu-

alize its existence and not restricted to an individuals mystical claim

to merge with the abyss, but is instead the institution that occludes the

groundlessness of existence as such and thus builds an imaginary insti-

tutional scaffolding on which society may find rest, then the workingsof religion are essentially psychical (by which I do not mean psychologi-

cal) and indeed not unlike those of sublimation, whereby all invested

representations are categorically objectified, be they images, words, or

cognitive abstractions. This is why, for Castoriadis, idolatry is at work

even in those cases when religion emerges from the foundational

monotheistic injunction, the prohibition of images (Bildverbot).

Certainly in historical terms, idolatry would not even exist as aconcept without this monotheistic injunction: Idolatry is a word that

mainly appears in the discourse of iconoclasm, a militant monotheism


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114 social research

obsessed with its own claims to universality. . . . There is no idolatry

without an iconoclasm to label it as such, since idolaters almost never

call themselves by that name (Mitchell 2011, 5673).

3

Mitchell addsyet another obvious but crucial historical dimension that is unacknowl-

edged in theological or philosophical discussions (although Freud makes

it explicit in Moses and Monotheism): namely, since the initial Biblical

injunction, the iconoclastic prohibition is directly linked to territorial

claims, either in terms of exclusionary defensiveness or expansionist

conquest, almost always expressing itself with annihilating violence:

the practical enforcement of the ban on images involves destroying

the sacred sites of the native inhabitants (2011, 59). Perhaps because

the notion and name of idolatry exists as the hate-filled repressed core

of its own prohibition, it is animated, in Mitchells words, by a surplus,

a moral panic that seems completely in excess of legitimate concerns

about something called graven images (2011, 58) that inspires all-

out gestures of erasure, a desire to annihilate all traces of peoples and

cultures, backward and forward in timeimplicitly genocidal (2011,

60).4 Understanding how idolatry works at the heart of iconoclasm is

key to unraveling the profound influence ofBildverbotas the most prev-

alent all-around social command (arch) in todays world.

In order to succeed, the exercise ofBildverbotwhich conven-

tionally may have Hebraic origins but remains the core principle in

all monotheistic imaginaries, even if performed on extreme occasions

(early Christian monophysites, Byzantine iconoclasm, Franciscan or

Calvinist asceticism, strict Islamism, or Protestant fundamentalism)must involve a rather narrow construct of image in its most literal

sense. Bild essentially comes to define the object of representation

as such, as an object that must be identified, known, and forbidden,

by virtue of representation, as representation. Nominally, the prohi-

bition is against images that dare to represent God, if only because

they will then be endowed with divine properties in themselves

and worshipped as such, as divine objectsidols. But underneaththis nominal logic what is really prohibited is the very act, the very

conception, of representation, the daring to give God a form, since


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in the monotheistic imaginary only God forms, or better yet, God is

form and the only agency of form, of which humans are thereby the

exemplary by-product.This is expressly denoted in the extraordinary notion of humans

being formed in Gods image and Gods likenessthe Greek words

translating the Hebrew ofGenesis are eikn (image, icon) and homoisis

(sameness, likeness)a notion that has been always invoked polemi-

cally against paganism. It can be understood as an explicit rollback of

anthropomorphic divinities even as it absorbs the principles of icon and

likeness and preserves them, in a Hegelian sense, by altering the core

principle: if God is form, then the project of human formation is theo-

morphic. Yet the human being cannot ultimately tolerate itself as God

(or godlike), and so an anthropomorphic notion is projected backward

onto the category of God, who may not necessarily look like the statue

of Zeus as it would have been sculpted by Praxiteles or Pheidias, but

is nonetheless imagined (since the monotheistic imaginary is and can

only be a patriarchical imaginary) as the Almighty Father, in however

abstract or concrete manifestation of this a specific social-imaginary

can handle.5

There is much to say here, in light of this sketch, about the valid-

ity of Castoriadiss provocative assertion that the institution of religion

is the supreme hubris of human existence, an ontological hubris

(1997, 318). It is provocative because the commonsensical assumption

is that hubris is committed when humans believe they are or act like

gods, not when they invent or create gods. But indeed, to imagine godspresiding over the universe is one of the most extraordinary acts of

human creation, an ordering of the universe by an agency that hereby

becomes conspicuously and conveniently absent. It is hubris precisely

in the denial of accountability for this act of radical creation (which is,

as radical creation, always an act of destruction).

Now, to imagine a single Godmoreover, a single God who

creates humans in image and in likenessis an even more formidableontological hubris, if it is at all semantically possible to produce a quan-

titative figure of the ontological. Not only does it confer the creation


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116 social research

(and, of course, meaning) of being to an entity of the imagination, but

it also authorizes the very category of Being, which thus leads to the

perverse inversion of subject-object authorization whereby the subjectdeliberately objectifies itself in the most outrageous denial of its own

accountability for creation. Worse yet, the object (the created God)

is now named Eternal Creatorthe ultimate Other, the Object who

has become the Subject, the subject without subjectivity who, more-

over, proceeds with the monopoly of the means of production of the

human as the unavowed creator now configured as created (in image

and in likeness). This perversely contorted process facilitates outra-

geous notions of grandeur: not just the concept of the chosen people

(absorbed into all, secularized or not, nationalist imaginaries) but

the notion that the human, made of/as the face of God, is, in the last

instance, of divine essence, a notion whose consequent psychic ener-

gies, I would argue, belie the worst excesses of both humanist ideology

(in its most conventional meaning) and religious fanaticism. This is a

stunning performance in the history of the human animal as a living

being that renders even the human imagination itself paralyzed before

the awe of its achievement.6

In this respect, the prohibition of images has built into it a power-

ful injunction against both form and representation as such, an injunc-

tion that seems to resurface with extraordinary urgency whenever the

desire of humans to aestheticize their universe seems to gain the upper

hand.7 In the process, another big question emerges: What is the rela-

tion between Bildung and Bildverbot? This is in many ways a Germanquestioncrucial to the development of German philosophy, indeed

both the theological and anti-theological strains in itbut it is also a

question crucial to the imaginary of modernity. It is well known that in

the Critique of JudgmentKant equates the Hebraic and IslamicBildverbot

with the sublime. On the other side of this stands the equally well-

known promise by Nietzsche in The Twilight of the Idols to touch idols

with a hammer as if it were a tuning fork. Of course, both thoughtsresonate within the same discursive economy. I take Bildverbotto be

the core element underlying the Protestant imaginary, which may be


17/28


distilled into a notion ofGeist (spirit) without Bild, not merely Spirit

without Image, but spirit that cannot be formed into an image because

of an assertion (passed on through theology to modern philosophy) thatimage ultimately despiritualizes matters. The project ofBildungat

least in the way it was configured in Wilhelm von Humboldts mind

is a worldly project. Self-formation is a process that creates both the

human being and the human world. It is not a spiritual quest, except

insofar as spirit (Geist) means also mind, intellect. Freuds Geistigkeit

which may be the only possible redeeming value ofBildverbotwithin its

tradition and this explicitly against the perils of monotheism (which, in

the very first pages ofMoses and Monotheism, he identifies as the singular

cause of religious intolerance and religious violence)is, of course, a

Bildung, apoietic process of forming, of creating form against the prohi-

bition of form.

This process is linked to what Castoriadis has named the radical

imaginationthat is, the primary social-historical process of enabling

the creation of form in advance of those institutions of society charged

with reproducing form: The term radical I use, first, to oppose what

I am talking about to the secondary imagination which is either

reproductive or simply combinatory (and usually both), and, second,

to emphasize the idea that this imagination lies before the distinction

between real and fictitious. To put it bluntly: it is because radical

imagination exists that reality exists for usexists tout courtand

exists as it exists; hence, an understanding of the imagination as the

power to represent what is not opens up a way of reconsidering therelation between image and representation so that the first is not in the

service of the second (see Castoriadis 1997a, 32122). It is not the image

as representation but the image as signification that animates idolatry.

In this sense then,the modern legacy ofBildverbotwould rest on

a reconfiguration ofBild, whereby image would be disengaged from the

discourse of representation precisely because the order of modernity

is structured around an explicit desire to create images that configurethe heretofore unseen and unknown, images that conceptualize and

signify the heretofore inconceivable image that represents nothing


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118 social research

that exists prior, the thing that is thereby created into existence. In

the imaginary of modernity, the image is not only to be disengaged

from the discourse of representation but, more so, engaged from thestandpoint of formation and transformation. Hence, the invention of

Bildungas nominal repeal ofBildverbot(even if remaining steadfast in its

orbit), which foregrounded the power ofpoietic(trans)formation in the

language of aesthetic education. In this process, words themselves are

primary imagistic units of signification. The Protestant injunction of

sola scriptura, which belongs by definition to the economy ofBildverbot,

remains throughout this process one of the most powerful idolatrous

gestures in the history of the modern world, reaching beyond the realm

of Christianity proper, as it underlies the increasing sacralization of

the letter of the law and turns legal texts into the constitutive idols of

societies around the world, whether self-identified religious or secular

(Douzinas 2000, 813830).

I should clarify here that my account ofBildung exceeds its

traditional meaning. In this configuration, Bildungceases to be a self-

identical process, whereby the Self comes to fulfill itselfthis was

Humboldts idealist vision. Once the concept of the Self is no longer the

agent of closure,Bildungbecomes the very instance of the force of inter-

minable self-alteration, recreated through critical self-interrogation

as performative pedagogy. Therein resides its democratic element, its

participation in the project of autonomy. Democratic paideia conducts

itself on the premise and purpose that self-interrogation shatters strict

self-referentiality.

the prohibition of images is a radical notion only when

it operates in a desacralized universe. This was, of course, Freuds

aspiration. In a monotheistic imaginary, iconoclasm merely reorients

idol worship from the utterable and representable to the unutterable

and unrepresentable. The prohibition on pronouncing the name of

God is indeed an idolatrous act. Disregarding this fact is a grave error,although indicative of the self-denial inherent in the logic of religious

iconoclasm. Making the name sacred circumscribes, in this gesture of


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erasure, of voiding, the very abyss thus announced. The sacred prohibi-

tion of the name is a name, an act of naming, of localizing in an imma-

nent sense, the Abyss that mustand does by virtue of this namingwhich is the unnaming of the Nameremain shielded. Likewise, the

ritual of the Eucharist is not idolatrous in the sense often considered,

that is, as a remnant of paganism, in the evocation of animistic eating of

the divine body. Rather, the metaphoric configuration of flesh as bread

and blood as wine is secondary idolatry, in my mind literally a superflu-

ous idolatry, a repetitive pleonasm. The most brilliant and insidious

gesture this ritual generates is to conceal the real idolatry at workthe

conjured phantasm that God, who otherwise cannot be known, who

has no name, who exists in ways unfathomable and unrepresentable,

can indeed be part of you. In other words, the ritual of ingesting God

into ones Being, even if altogether metaphorically, reveals precisely

Gods idol status, which is his real (that is, actual) status, in this case the

status of an idol that claims to destroy all idolsall otheridols, would

be, of course, the precise way to phrase it.

From this standpoint, the Byzantine iconomachy, like all debates

about the Trinitarian hypostasis in Early Patristic literaturewhich

after all feeds into iconomachy in the eighth centuryis a debate inter-

nal to the specific idolatry of Christianity. If we take seriously the notion

that signification, not representation, resides at the core of idolatrous

investment, then the battle between iconolaters and iconoclasts is a

bit like Freuds narcissism of petty differences, where the differences

are hardly petty because they pertain to the deepest shared inner core,hence the extraordinary violence. This inner core is the ineffableImago

Dei, in its Latin naming, whose representation is in any case impossible

by definition, even for the Byzantine iconolaters who had no trouble

subscribing, theologically, to the necessary deformation of the divine

image in sacred icons, creating the distortion that becomes the distinc-

tive feature of Byzantine art.

These sublime tricks exemplify the work of the sacred in sociallife, a work that, in the last instance, must remain secretive, literally a

mystery. In contrast, a desacralized universe of meaning reconfigures


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120 social research

the meaning of both iconoclasm and the sacred. In a capitalist world,

where the image is inevitably linked to the rule of commodities and

the tyranny of exchange, iconoclasm does become in effect a de-theol-ogizing gesture. (Such is the meaning of Adornos notion of utopia

as negative representation.) It is only then that iconoclasm calls into

question the idola tribus as such: the stipulation that in every soci-

ety there is a last instance that cannot be questioned and, of course,

cannot be represented. Whatever the content this last instance may

havewhatever language, symbol, sign, convention; whatever may

be identified as the idols of the tribeit is societys last instance of

the sacred.

There is a whole strain in modern art that vehemently sought

after this capacity to expose societys last instance of the sacred

through an iconoclastic strategy that paradoxically foregrounds or

hyper-privileges the image. The Dadaist tradition and the irreverent

performativity of Marcel Duchamp come easily to mind. Far from being

deconstructive, Duchamps ready-mades are iconic renamings. They do

not bar the image in order to preserve the ideal sacred of an allegedly

noncommodified space. Rather, they desacralize the contextual space

of the image, for if commodities are extensions of religious idolatry,

as Marx argued long ago, they are not so in themselves but insofar as

they render sacred their means of existence, the space of capitalist

exchange. This was also the impetus behind Situationist performativ-

ity and Guy Debords critique of the society of the spectacle. However,

Debords conviction that the spectacle had reached beyond mere visualexcess and become objective reality led him into the whirlwind of yet

another round ofBildverbotpolitics, which inevitably propels one to

seek yet another space of the sacred, ad infinitum.

Much can be learned, in this respect, from the art of Maurizio

Cattelan, who, unlike many of his contemporaries, seems especially

aware of the deadlock of avant-gardist responses to the commodified

image that breed an idolatrous aesthetic sacralization in the name oficonoclasm. It is easy, of course, to characterize Cattelans notorious

irreverence toward the entirety of the art world and its media (agents,


21/28


galleries, exhibitions, patrons, fellow artists, publications, market

publicity, etc.) as iconoclastic. That this can be said without much

thinking is itself indicative of the profoundly ingrained and thought-less use of the term iconoclasm. But Cattelans work, in its shame-

less irreverence and outrageous provocation (including explicit artistic

deception or downright art theft, so much so that many have ques-

tioned whether he should be considered an artist at all) shows quite

the opposite, namely, that it is impossible to exist in a nonimagistic

universe and that to presume it is possible is not only a nave illusion

but tantamount to the triumph of consumer capitalisms metaphysics

of the image, a metaphysics that ultimately denies peoples imaginary

capacity to think otherwise. Hence Cattelans commitment to overt

proliferation of undisguised simulacra, resin-wax or taxidermic repro-

ductions of iconic living being.

The artists 2011 retrospective at the Guggenheim Museum in

New York, with which he announced his retirement from the art world,

brought forth this problematic in acute, even dramatic, form. Cattelan

chose to exhibit almost every one of his art pieces from over the years

(the exhibit is titled All) by decontextualizing them to an extreme

in full cognizance of the fact that all retrospectives are dependent on

decontextualizationthat is, by hanging them all from the museums

ceiling with steel cables, in no apparent order, as an assemblage of

cadavers in display after a hangmans mass execution, a literal signi-

fication of the corps of ones artwork as corpse.8 This much could be

expected, in retrospect, from an artist whose artwork has consistentlystrived to showcase its death in order to animate some other (often

outrageous, irreverent, or even nonexistent) image of the living envi-

ronment that enables art to exist at all. But the experience of wind-

ing up and down the museums notorious rotunda, in order to get a

circular view of this enormous hanging corpse in multiple parts surely

aggravates the perilous presumption of artistic iconoclasm for its own

sake. Iconoclasm on the gallows may be an apt distillation of what thisexhibit was about. Yet what makes this exhibit so radical is that, in

strangulating artistic iconoclasm, it also exposes and thus incapaci-


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122 social research

tatesin a sort of simultaneous double deaththe latent idolatrous

desire of the presumed secular spectator.

The fact that arguably the most iconic of all of Cattelans repro-ductions, exercised against what is conventionally considered the icon

against idolatry par excellencethe popewas received as the most

scandalous of all his works should hardly surprise us. His 1999 depic-

tion of Pope John Paul II in full regalia stricken and incapacitated by a

meteorite, titled indicativelyLa Nona Ora (The Ninth Hour) in a derisory

invocation of Christs moment of death on the cross, was vandalized

when exhibited in the popes native Poland in 2001. It is easy to say that

such vandalism signifies the enraged response of the faithful who are

responding to the injury of blasphemythis was as well the consensus

around the controversy of cartooning the Prophet Mohammed in the

Danish newspaper Jyllands-Posten in 2005.9 We learn nothing by such

platitudes. The more difficult thing to engage as a point of inquiry is

that such rage is directed against what is perceived as an idolatrous

gesture, therefore propelling nominally iconoclastic action, while at

the same time, even if unwittingly, expressing the most idolatrous

investment in the unrepresentability of the object of worship, which

thereby bars it from the realm of art. Such investment is idolatrous in

the sense that it is precisely this exclusive mode of worship (latreia) that

turns the object of worship into an object that can be seen (eidolon

idol) even when it is not represented. We witness here a perverse logic:

self-acknowledged iconoclasts rage against an iconoclasm that they

perceive as idolatry while not recognizing that their own idolatrousdesire feeds their iconoclasm.10 We can speak of antagonistic idolatries

perhaps, though this is admittedly cavalier, because neither the faith-

ful nor the faithless recognize idolatry at all.11

It is here that the political workings of the concept of unrepre-

sentability become crucial. In this respect, much can be appreciated

in Jacques Rancires argument in The Future of the Image that the image

plays in a field between the visible and the sayable. This confirms myargument here, in reading Castoriadis: it is image as signification (not

representation) that animates idolatry. Rancire artfully navigates this


23/28


terrain in order eventually to raise the stakes on the phantom that

haunts the entire discussion: the presumption of the unrepresentable.

Even when invoked in the discourse of material historyor perhapsespecially there (the unrepresentable event)the iconoclastic claim

to unrepresentability is the apotheosis of idolatrous metaphysics. It

is, moreover, a self-annihilating gesture whose internal debilitating

contradiction is occluded by the denial of what is a moralistic negation

of the sensible, of the untamable desire to configure ones sense of the

worldeven its abyssal manifestationin some form (poiein). I quote

extensively from Rancires passionate conclusion:

The assertion of unrepresentabiltity claims that some

things can only be represented in a certain type of form,

by a type of language appropriate to their exceptional-

ity. Stricto sensu, this idea is vacuous. It simply expresses a

wish: the paradoxical desire that, in the very regime which

abolishes the representative suitability of forms to objects,

appropriate forms respecting the singularity of the excep-

tion still exist. Since this desire is contradictory in principle,

it can only be realized in an exaggeration which, in order

to ensure the fallacious equation between anti-representa-

tive art and an art of the unrepresentable, places a whole

regime of art under the sign of holy terror. . . . In order to

assert an unrepresentability in art that is commensurate

with the unthinkability of the event, the latter must itselfhave been rendered entirely thinkable, entirely necessary

according to thought. The logic of the unrepresentable can

only be sustained by a hyperbole that ends up destroying it

(Ranciere 2007, 137138).

The obviousand I think indisputablepoint is that nothing is

unrepresentable because whatever signifies it as unrepresentable mustconfigure its unrepresentability in some form, even if entirely in the

realm of the sayable. But it is more important to understand that nothing


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124 social research

is representable or unrepresentable as such. Surely, nothing is unrepre-

sentable as long as humanity exists; the very encounter of humans with

the abyss of the world (at least since the time marked by what went oninside the caves of Lascaux) seems to make representation a necessity.

But what is curious about the human animal is that the same capacity

that seems to make representation a necessitythe psyches unlimited

propensity for fantasyalso propels the demand for the unrepresent-

able. The phantasmatic commitment to the unrepresentable is animated

by the same force that seems to make representation a necessity, the

vital propensity that posits no limits as to what can be represented.

Once we conceptualize this coincidence and thus deconstruct its

alleged paradox, we can understand very well that nothing has ever

been beyond humanitys capacity for representation because the noth-

ing itselfhas been persistently an object of representation, perhaps the

most coveted object of all, the ever-nagging kernel of both philosophi-

cal and theological thought, whose most forceful renditions have been

the inordinate claims to its unrepresentability and the altogether real

(and often violent) action to defend the materiality of such claims.

NoTeS

1. Alle prgnanten Begriffe der modernen Staatslehre sind skularisi-

erte theologische Begriffe. The argument is about structures not

ideologies or imaginaries, and this would need to be taken up in a

closer reading.

2. It is interesting to think of Schmitt in this regard: Even the journeyinto the desert or the climbing of the stylites pillar can become a

political demonstration, depending on the issue (Schmitt 2008a, 84).

3. Idol anxiety may be precisely the term to describe a whole range

of academic discourses on so-called postsecularism these days that

consider themselves radical. This collection of essays is a welcome

exception.

4. The annihilation of Alexandrias Serapeum in 391 by Christian zeal-ots during the reign of Theodosius I, after the imperial ban on pagan

religious rites, signified the erasure of centuries of accumulated


25/28


knowledge and precipitated what, from this standpoint, were rightly

called the Dark Ages in the Christian world. More recently, the blow-

ing up of the Bamiyan Buddhas by the Taliban in 2001 recalls uncan-nily the dismantling of Greek temples by early Christians, as depicted

dramatically (and with great controversy) in a recent film by Costa

Gavras, commissioned by the new Acropolis Museum in 2009.

5. Xenophanes of Colophon, writing in the sixth century BC, had

enough sense to argue that if bulls, horses, or lions had hands they

would draw their gods form in their likeness, thereby affirming that

for humans divinity can only be anthropomorphic because it is a

human creation. That he articulates this thought in order to criti-

cize the anthropomorphic mythology of Homer and Hesiod, being

thus the first to suggest that divinity may be precisely what cannot

be conceptualized, is the tragic confirmation of the fact that human

creation cannot be accepted as creation.

6. I recall Marx again, from the same text. His configuration of the

realm of the profane is predicated on precisely this strange phenom-

enon, the self-incapacitation of humanity by virtue of its awesome

capacity to institute superhuman doubles of itself: Man, who looked

for a superhuman being in the fantastic reality of heaven and found

nothing there but the reflection of himself, will no longer be disposed

to find but thesemblance of himself, only an inhuman being, where he

seek and must seek his true reality (Marx-Engels, Collected Works, Vol.

3, 175).

7. This is what links the Renaissance with the Reformation to mymindtheir antithesis is a dialectical continuation precisely in terms

of humanism undoing itself in its namebut also what enables the

critique of representation to emerge out of the practice of modern-

ism, and so on. The exemplary treatment of this whole imaginary

nexus remains Vassilis Lambropouloss The Rise of Eurocentrism: An

Anatomy of Interpretation (1993), which is a remarkable book, in spite of

its baroque structure, whose flight under the academic radar is testa-ment both to its unorthodox brilliance and the academys almost

requisite tendency to protect its keep.


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126 social research

8. The compass to Cattelans history, which in the end animates

this exhibit, is provided by Nancy Spector, chief curator of the

Guggenheim Museum, in her Maurizio Cattelan All (GuggenheimMuseum Publications 2011).

9. Hence the weaknesses of the arguments regarding the Danish

cartoon controversy in Talal Asads Free Speech, Blasphemy, and

Secular Criticism and Saba Mahmoods Religious Reason and

Secular Affect: An Incommensurable Divide? in the volume Is

Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech (Berkeley: Townsend

Humanities Center, 2009), 2063 and 64100, respectively. Both Asad

and Mahmood are caught within the moral-legal framework they

seek to overcome because they do not confront the fact that the

domain of words themselves, whether in the legal texts of secularism

or the sacred texts of religion, ultimately functions as a domain of

idols. I address these arguments in detail in (Gourgouris 2013).

10. Idolatry is a form of vandalism that often inspires a violent counter-

reaction of antipathy to the idol, says the inimitable Judith Thurman,

with her penchant for phrasing a complicated thought as if its mere

observation. The phrase occurs in her essay on the photography of

Diane Arbus, and is exemplary of how the visual is always psychically

authorized, in the sense of how the subject objectifies itself in the

process of apprehending (and thus creating) the object. In this case,

Arbus, an idol herself, suffers the counter-reacting antipathy of idola-

try (see Thurman 2007, 55).

11. Hence, there is no possibility that either side can practice what W.J. T. Mitchell has named critical idolatrya kind of respectful or

nonviolent iconoclasm, as he calls it, where the idols of the other

would be understood to be no less important than ones own. See

http://d13.documenta.de/#/research/research/view/on-critical-

idolatry

refereNceS

Anidjar, Gil. 2003. The Jew, the Arab: History of the Enemy. Stanford: Stanford

University Press.


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Asad, Talal. 2009 Free Speech, Blasphemy, and Secular Criticism. InIs

Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury, and Free Speech. Berkeley: Townsend

Humanities Center.Castoriadis, Cornelius. 1997. Institution of Society and Religion. In

World in Fragments: Writings on Politics, Society, Psychoanalysis, and

the Imagination, edited by David Ames Curtis. Stanford: Stanford

University Press.

. 1997a. Radical Imagination and the Social Instituting Imaginary.

In The Castoriadis Reader, edited by David Ames Curtis. Oxford:

Blackwell.

Douzinas, Costas. 2000. The Legality of the Image. The Modern Law Review

63 (6): 813830.

Gourgouris, Stathis. 2013. Detranscendentalizing the Secular.

In Lessons in Secular Criticism. New York: Fordham University

Press.

. 2013a.Responding to the Deregulation of the Political. InLessons

in Secular Criticism. New York: Fordham University Press.

Kalyvas, Andreas. 2009. Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary.

Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Lampropoulos, Vasilis. 1993. The Rise of Eurocentrism: An Anatomy of

Interpretation. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

Mahmood, Saba. 2009. Religious Reason and Secular Affect: An

Incommensurable Divide? In Is Critique Secular? Blasphemy, Injury,

and Free Speech. Berkeley: Townsend Humanities Center.

Marx, Karl. 1975. Introduction to the Contribution to the Critique ofHegels Philosophy of Right. In Marx-Engels, Collected Works, Vol. 3.

New York: International Publishers.

Mitchell, W. J. T. 2011. Idolatry: Blake, Nietzsche, and Poussin. In Idol

Anxiety, edited by Josh Ellenbogen and Aaron Tugendhaft. Stanford:

Stanford University Press.

Rancire, Jacques. 2007. The Future of the Image, translated by Gregory

Elliott. London: Verso.Schmitt, Carl. 2008a.Political Theology II: The Myth of the Closure of Any Political

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Thiem, Annika. 2012. Political Theology. In The Encyclopedia of PoliticalThought, edited by Michael Gibbons. Oxford: Blackwell.

Thurman, Judith. 2007. Cleopatras Nose: 39 Varieties of Desire. New York:

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Vardoulakis, Dimitris. 2009. Stasis : Beyond Political Theology? Cultural

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