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),
