A RC H I V I O DI FILOSOFIA A RC H I V E S O F P H I L O S O P H Y STARTING FROM HUSSERL AMERICAN AND ITALIAN APPROACHES TO PHENOMENOLOGY Editors Stefano Bancalari · Stefano Semplici Associate Editors Enrico Castelli Gattinara · Francesco Paolo Ciglia · Pierluigi Valenza Editorial Board Fr ancesco Botturi · Bernhard Casper · Ingolf Dalferth · Pietro de Vitiis Adriano Fabris · Piergiorgio Gr assi · Jean Greisch · Marco Ivaldo Jean-Luc Marion · Virgilio Melchiorr e · Stéphan Mosès † · Adriaan Peperzak Andrea Poma · Richard Swinburne · Fr anz Theunis Managing Editor Fr ancesco Valerio Tommasi * Si invitano gli autori ad attenersi, nel predisporre i materiali da consegnare alla Direzione, alle norme speciicate nel volume Fabrizio Serra, Regole editoriali, tipograiche & redazionali, Pisa-Roma, Serra, 20092 (Euro 34,00, ordini a: fse@libraweb.net). Il capitolo Norme redazionali, estratto dalle Regole, cit., è consultabile Online alla pagina «Pubblicare con noi» di www.libraweb.net. 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Fabrizio Serra editore incorporates the Imprints Accademia editoriale, Edizioni dell’Ateneo, Fabrizio Serra editore, Giardini editori e stampatori in Pisa, Gruppo editoriale internazionale and Istituti editoriali e poligraici internazionali. * «Archivio di Filosoia»: autorizzazione del Tribunale di Pisa n. 27 del 14 giugno 2007 «Archives of Philosophy»: autorizzazione del Tribunale di Pisa n. 19 del 14 giugno 2007 Direttore responsabile: Fabrizio Serra Stampato in Italia · Printed in Italy issn 0004-0088 SOMMARIO Angela Ales Bello, Preface Stefano Bancalari, Introduction 9 11 Angela Ales Bello, The Sense of Things. A Relection Starting from Husserl Thomas Nenon, Husserl’s God in the Fichte Lectures from 1917-1918 Stefano Bancalari, A totally diferent Absolute. Remarks on Husserl and the Phenomenology of Religion Francesco Valerio Tommasi, Phenomenology of Religion as a Historical Problem. The Theologico-Political Approach Shahid Mobeen, The Question of Sacred according to a New Phenomenological Approach Federica Buongiorno, Is There Something Like an Italian Phenomenology ? Some Remarks on Husserl’s Early Reception in Italy Gabriella Caponigro, Phenomenology of Religious Pragmatism. Truth and Testimony in Franz Rosenzweig Nicoletta Ghigi, Einfühlung : Transposition or Transmission ? Nicola Zippel, From Strangeness to Otherness : A critical Reading of Husserl’s Fifth Cartesian Meditation Rosemary R. P. Lerner, A Husserlian Phenomenology of Responsibility Francesco Saverio Trincia, Ethics and Axiology : Remarks on the Phenomenological Sense of Ethics Roberta Lanfredini, Analytical or Continental ? The Phenomenological Notion of Noema Lester Embree, Further Relective Analysis of Sensuous Appearances in Humans Andrea Marchesi, Is There Something like a (‘Raw’) Visual Sensation ? Daniele De Santis, Once Again, Gigantomachy : Prolegomena to a Reinterpretation of the Schlick-Husserl Quarrel on the Synthetic A Priori Marco Tedeschini, From Phenomenology to Formal Ontology : How Barry Smith and Kevin Mulligan Made Husserl’s Descriptive Psychology into a Form of Realism Federico Boccaccini, Brentano or Husserl ? Intentionality, Consciousness, and Selfconsciousness in Contemporary Phenomenology of Mind 15 27 37 47 59 71 85 97 105 113 125 131 145 151 161 177 189 PHENOMENOLOGY OF RELIGION AS A HISTORICAL PROBLEM. THE THEOLOGICO-POLITICAL APPROACH Francesco Valerio Tommasi Abstract Qua « regional ontology » directed toward an essential content or objective correlate, or qua discipline founded upon an a priori, phenomenology of religion appears to be characterized by a theoretical approach which is, in basic principle, ahistorical. This aspect has been subjected to a critique by Carl Schmitt. By contrast, « political theology » is an approach which emerged and asserted itself within the context of a confrontation with the historical model of « secularization ». In its more recent developments political theology has tended to abandon a linear reading of this latter model and to adopt a more neutral approach based on the history of ideas. In this way, the current theological-political paradigm is apt to be understood as itself a speciic, and more radical, form of phenomenology of religion. This is the thesis we aim to defend in this paper. Contemporary political theology now appears to be succeeding, to a greater and better extent than did the classic authors of the phenomenology of religion, in accounting for a paradox : a deinition of the phenomenon : « religion » presents itself as at once incircumventible and impossible. Keywords : history of philosophy of religion, phenomenology of religion, political theology, Carl Schmitt, philosophical archeology. 1. ‘Phenomenology of religion’ and ‘political theology’ : some disciplinary remarks T he task of studying the relationship between philosophy and religion is assigned, within the context of the academy, to a discipline usually deined as « philosophy of religion ». This latter discipline has not always existed but is rather an historical creation of the modern era. This expression is attested to only by occurrences in modern publications and it is only from the time of Hegel’s teaching activity onward that there begin to be ofered university courses of this title. « Philosophy of religion » takes the place, in modern academic institutions, of philosophical theology. It had been the business of this latter to investigate, by the light of « natural reason », the object « God » and all His attributes ; « philosophical theology » (also called « natural » or « rational » theology) had thus been considered a discipline preliminary to « revealed » theology. However, as a consequence of the critiques of metaphysics developed during the siècle des Lumières and during the modern age in general, the concept « God » gradually became too weak and insubstantial a concept to be able to continue to function as the object of a particular branch of knowledge. For this reason, philosophical attention tended to be shifted over onto those human practices which are collectively deinable as « religion », inasmuch as such practices are actually met with in real empirical experience and therefore constitute a potential object of observation and of scientiic veriication. This historical development has been reconstructed, among others, by the Rome-based 48 francesco valerio tommasi scholar Marco Maria Olivetti and – given that this paper has been presented during a congress devoted to Italian Phenomenology on the occasion of the constitution of an Italian « Society for the Phenomenology of Religion » – I intend repeatedly to emphasize, in the course of this paper, the contribution of scholars working speciically within this Italian, and Roman, milieu. 1 I need hardly point out the paradoxical nature of the dynamic that we are addressing here : the « philosophy of religion » is a discipline which emerges only subsequent to the dissolution of that which forms its principal object : namely, « God ». This process of dissolution, however, appears not to have reached its term with the loss of the concept « God » alone. The deinition of « religion » too has proven to be an extremely fragile and unstable one and to cover either too little or too much : the documented occurrences of this neo-Latin term « religion » are narrowly circumscribed both historically and geographically ; the empirical phenomena, however, which display characteristics susceptible of linking them to one or another of those various deinitions of religion which have, from time to time, gained acceptance (be these deinitions in terms of « beliefs », of « forms of worship », of Marx’s « sigh of the oppressed creature », or of Schleiermacher’s « feeling of an absolute dependence ») appear to be innumerable and extremely diicult to gather under a single heading. Thus, another Italian scholar, Giovanni Filoramo, has written that : the deining of religion is a task as arduous as it is incircumventible. Because it is obvious that, if a deinition cannot replace an enquiry into the nature of a thing, neither can any such enquiry take place if a deinition is lacking. 2 This problem of the deinition of religion, an urgent one for all branches of knowledge that refers to it as an object – sociology, psychology, history etc. – is all the more serious a problem within the philosophical context, where, as a basic principle, the attempt is made to answer the fundamental question tiv ejstiv. It is within the sphere of such considerations on the diiculty of establishing the philosophy of religion as a circumscribed discipline and on the equally diicult task of deining its speciic object that we wish to situate the analyses which we are on the point of conducting here : we will discuss, in fact, two other approaches emerging in the modern era which, taking their point of departure from philosophical presuppositions, concern themselves with objects of enquiry of a theological and religious nature : namely, phenomenology of religion and political theology. In the case of the former we are dealing with an approach which, in one sense, radicalizes the perspective of the philosophy of religion, inasmuch as the programme of the phenomenology of religion is, precisely, to concern itself solely with « the phenomena », that is to say, with the appearing expressions of its declared object. It is constitutive of this approach that the irst methodological step taken is that of the so-called « phenomenological epoché ». This epoché consists in a suspending, or « bracketing » of the question as to the reality or non-reality of those objects to which the empirical experiences in question (are presumed to) refer, and which are assumed to be structurally transcendent to the investigation proper. Some phenomenologists of religion, however, have also suggested – relecting and repeating, in this respect, certain luc1 2 See M. M. Olivetti, Filosoia della religione, in P. Rossi (Ed.), La ilosoia, vol. i, Torino 1995, pp. 137-220. G. Filoramo, Religione in Dizionario delle religioni, in Idem (Ed.), Torino 1993, p. 21. phenomenology of religion as a historical problem 49 tuations in philosophical attitude which were to be observed already in the work of Edmund Husserl – that, in order to acquire full phenomenological comprehension of that Sache selbst which is in this case religious experience, the phenomenologist needs to « empathically live out » the actual lived experience of the religiously practicing or believing subject. The forms adopted by this undertaking have indeed been many and various, each with its own speciic emphases and characteristics. There has been talk of « two » phenomenologies of religion but one might perhaps count many more than just two. 1 Some of them, as it is well known, are not directly derived from Husserlian philosophy. But in all its various forms the phenomenology of religion has airmed the importance of a non-reductionistic and purely descriptive view of its object. 2 Due to this, its constitutive aspiration to found a certain ‘objectivity’, phenomenology of religion has found itself in confrontation with a general tendency which had previously been the dominant one within the philosophy of religion, and which had been common to Positivism, Marxism, Idealism and, in part, also to Neo-Kantianism : namely, the tendency to reduce religion to something comprised within a philosophy of history. 3 Phenomenology of religion has often, for its part, assumed an ahistorical form. The phenomenology of religion has sought for some « essential » deinition of that object which constitutes its proper sphere of knowledge (or its – in Husserl’s phrase – « regional ontology ») ; this would involve revealing either the possibility of constructing an « objective correlate » or the existence of an « a priori » ; in any case, it would be a matter of intangible nucleus which alone makes it possible for a phenomenon to be deined as a « religious phenomenon » at all – an intangible nucleus which, for just this reason, would not be subject to the contingencies of history. This characteristic is one which is common to the thought of many of the most renowned exponents of the phenomenology of religion, from Reinach to van der Leeuw, from Eliade to Otto, from Söderblom to Heiler ; and it often takes on – as already mentioned – explicitly Husserlian features. Among other writers, one noted scholar of religion belonging to the so-called « School of Rome », Ernesto De Martino, has expressed in especially emphatic form this particular criticism of the phenomenology of religion, including in his critique not only van der Leeuw and Otto but also Scheler and Heidegger. In an article on Phenomenology of Religion and Absolute Historicism De Martino has written : [Phenomenology of religion expresses] a « thought-drama » which is extremely broad and intense and is characterized [...] not by the attempt to overcome positivistic naturalism and positivistic psychologism by recourse to « historical reason » – that is to say, by the drawing of a rigid distinction between true knowledge, which is in every case historiographic knowledge, and the practical and normative knowledge of the natural and mathematical sciences. Rather, the attempt to overcome such positivistic naturalism and psychologism is made here by appealing to the irrationality of life, to the heat of Erleben and to the contemplation and intuition of ideal essences and structures which are alone supposed to make possible a comprehension of life itself. 4 1 See J. Greisch, Le Buisson ardent et les Lumières de la raison. L’invention de la philosophie de la religion, vol. ii (Les approches phénoménologiques et analytiques), Paris 2002. 2 See S. Bancalari, Rudolf Otto e le due fenomenologie della religione, « Archivio di Filosoia », lxxv, 2007, 1-2 (Filosoia della religione ogi ?), pp. 169-182. 3 Philosophy of religion has therefore been deined as a « historical problem » : see M. M. Olivetti, Filosoia della religione come problema storico. Romanticismo e idealismo romantico, Padova 1974. 4 E. De Martino, Fenomenologia religiosa e storicismo assoluto, « Studi e Materiali di Storia delle Religioni », xxiv-xxv, 1953-1954, pp. 1-25, here, p. 2. 50 francesco valerio tommasi Certainly, critiques as radical as this one do not do justice to the vigorous efort invested by the phenomenology of religion in the task of transcending the limits of reductionistic conceptions of religion ; and sometimes they were also lacking in detailed knowledge of the whole body of thought which they undertake to critique : as unavoidably overlooked here, for example, one might mention the course given by Heidegger in the academic year 1920-’21 entitled Einleitung in die Phänomenologie der Religion, the central concept of which is precisely das Historische. Nevertheless, there can be no doubt but that critiques like De Martino’s do succeed in grasping a certain dominating tendency within the approach represented by the phenomenology of religion : namely, the search for an essential and ahistorical deinition of the object « religion ». As regards the second of the two disciplinary ields we have referred to – political theology – this latter can be traced back to Augustine’s tripartite division of theology into « mythical », « natural » and « civil » theology ; the discipline of political theology was given new life, however, in the early 20th Century thanks to the writings of Carl Schmitt. Schmitt’s starting point consists in his recognition that certain key terms and concepts have passed over from one – namely, theology – into the other – namely, politics – of these two ields which are combined in the ield of « political theology ». The passing-over in question is formulated by Schmitt in terms of the notion of « secularization » and thereby in terms of a speciically historical development : « All signiicant concepts of the modem theory of the state are secularized theological concepts ». 1 While not simply adhering uncritically to their theoretical approach, Schmitt derived this central thesis from his study of the works of the so-called theorists of the Counter-Revolution. According to these authors (Donoso Cortès, Joseph De Maistre, Louis de Bonald), the political and economic thought of the modern era, while purporting to refuse theological ideas, remains in fact profoundly inluenced and permeated by these ideas. Theology constitutes, in fact – so these authors contend – an incircumventible presupposition which always play an active forming role – even if at an invisible or ‘subterranean’ level – in every vision of the world. In these authors, then, political theology is above all a critique of secularization and of the Legitimität der Neuzeit. Schmitt’s adoption of this model is one which only partially takes over its element of value-judgment ; he aims above all at producing a political theology that is descriptive. What we wish primarily to emphasize here, however, is that exactly by virtue of his own recognition of the necessity to take account of secularization Schmitt diferentiates his viewpoint from that of the « phenomenology of religion ». 2. The political (and the historical) as the total There is to be found in a passage of Schmitt’s work which might initially appear to be quite marginal – namely, the Introduction to the second edition of that essay of Schmitt’s which he entitled, precisely, Political Theology – a claim raised by the author which is, nonetheless, of the greatest signiicance for the argument we wish to present here : Among Protestant theologians, Heinrich Forsthof and Friedrich Gogarten, in particular, have shown that without a concept of secularization we cannot understand our history of the last 1 C. Schmitt, Politische Theologie. Vier Kapitel zur Lehre der Souvranität, Berlin 2004 (reprint of the 1934 revised edition) (19221), 43 (eng. trans. By G. Schwab, Cambridge Massachussets 1985, p. 36). phenomenology of religion as a historical problem 51 centuries. To be sure, Protestant theology presents a diferent, supposedly unpolitical doctrine, conceiving of God as the « wholly other » (Ganz Andere), just as in political liberalism the state and politics are conceived of as the « wholly other ». We have come to recognize that the political is the total (das Totale), and as a result we know that any decision about whether something is unpolitical is always a political decision, irrespective of who decides and what reasons are advanced. 1 In writing of an « unpolitical » current within Protestant theology which conceives of God as « wholly Other », Schmitt is clearly making reference to Rudolf Otto – an author very much « in vogue » at this period, and considered by both Husserl and Heidegger to be a « Phenomenologist of religion ». 2 Schmitt’s observation, then, is closely ained, in substance, with the observation of De Martino’s which we have quoted above, and it seems highly signiicant that substantially the same criticism can be enunciated in this way by two thinkers so far removed from one another, both geographically and in terms of the wider group of ideas to which they respectively adhere (even if a possible point of contact between the two can be identiied in Croce, whose ideas are central to the argument of those pages of De Martino’s which we have quoted from, and were very well known to Schmitt as well). But our concern here is speciically to emphasize two elements of the passage which we have just cited from Schmitt : 1) « the political » is deined here as « the total » ; 2) any consideration which dispenses with the notion of secularization and thereby with an historical understanding is deined as « unpolitical ». The political is therefore also strictly bound to the historical. The former of these two points seems proven beyond contest as soon as we accept Schmitt’s contention that the decision regarding what is to count as political and what is to count as unpolitical « is itself a political decision ». Thus, Schmitt begins his own meditations on the question of how it is possible to deine « the political » with the observation that the only characterizations that people have been able to give to this notion have been negative ones : One seldom inds a clear deinition of the political. The word is most frequently used negatively, in contrast to various other ideas, for example in such antitheses as politics and economy, politics and morality, politics and law ; and within law there is again politics and civil law, and so forth. By means of such negative, often also polemical confrontations, it is usually possible, depending upon the context and concrete situation, to characterize something with clarity. But this is still not a speciic deinition. 3 The notion of « the political » that Schmitt is looking for here is, however, a particularly strong one – a notion which secures a clear and deined speciicity for the concept and which functions, in and of itself, as an implicit polemic against any confounding of « the political » with the merely « statal ». It is the « total State » (totale Staat) which seeks to neutralize the polemical antitheses between various spheres (religious and political, juridical and political etc.). If, then, « the political » forms a segment of human experience which displays a highly speciic and distinct character of its own, it appears to be very diicult to conceive of it as something « totalizing ». 1 Ibidem, p. 8 (eng., p. 2). See S. Bancalari, Rudolf Otto e le due fenomenologie della religione..., op. cit., p. 170. 3 C. Schmitt, Der Begrif des Politischen, Berlin 2004 (reprint of the 1963 revised edition) (19321), pp. 20-21 (eng. trans. by G. Schwab, Chicago and London 1995, p. 20) 2 52 francesco valerio tommasi The way, however, in which Schmitt presents his deinition of « the political » and of the conceptual categories which are proper to this latter – namely, the well-known conceptualization in terms of the « friend-enemy » dichotomy – seems once again to betray the presence of a « totalizing » vision at the heart of Schmitt’s own thought. The speciic political distinction [...] is that between friend and enemy [...] The political enemy need not to be morally evil or aesthethically ugly ; he need not to appear as an economic competitor, and it may even be advantageous to engage with him in business transactions. But he is, nevertheless, the other (der Andere), the stranger ; and it is suicient for his nature that he is, in a specially intense way, existentially something other and alien (existentiell etwas anderes und Fremdes), so that in the extreme case conlicts with him are possible. These can neither be decided by a previously determined general norm, nor by the judgement of a disinterested and therefore neutral third party. 1 It is « otherness », conceived of in a sense that is quite literally ontological (« existentially other ») that is the speciic characteristic of the enemy ; and no neutral sight of a phenomenological unbeteiligter Zuschauer seems to be possible. If, then, the concept of « the political » embraces the distinction, understood in an ontological sense, between the identical and the diferent, then it does indeed appear to be something « totalizing » in the fullest sense. Schmitt, moreover, deines it as a fundamental concept : the political category is « the strongest and most intense » and « draws upon other distinctions for support ». 2 It is no accident, then – Schmitt goes on to airm – that, by virtue of this extreme opposition, there can be demanded of people that they sacriice even their own lives, inasmuch as the enemy is of a nature such as to be able to put into question, and to deny and negate, my own mode of existence. Conlict, which in other spheres is understood by Schmitt in a merely metaphorical sense, is, in the political sphere, a real struggle for physical existence. The political unit, therefore, is deined as that unit which decides upon the decisive and extreme case, that is to say, upon the case in which a decision is made about life and about death. In fact, the « presupposition » (and the only one) of politics is war. 3 All these remarks of Carl Schmitt’s recall the opening passages of Emmanuel Levinas’s Totalité et inini in which Being is presented as coinciding with precisely these two categories : totality and war – not to mention the role of « otherness » and the problem of the « third ». Although there is no direct relation between Schmitt and Levinas, the philosophers whose work forms these writers’ respective intellectual backgrounds in such passages – Hobbes on the one hand, Spinoza and Hegel on the other – do stand in communication with one another. But the key to the reading whereby « the political » forms the most fundamental of all orders – that is to say, forms an order on which all other spheres of reality depend – lies rather in the second of the points which we have highlighted : namely, Schmitt’s thesis regarding secularization. Referring explicitly back to Vico, Comte, Marx and Croce, Schmitt conceives of secularization as a theory of the development of the European 1 Ibidem, pp. 26-27 (eng., pp. 26-27, slightly revised). Ibidem, p. 27 (eng., p. 27). See also : “The political is the most extreme and intense antagonism, and every concrete antagonism becomes that much more political the closer it approaches the most extreme point, that of the friend-enemy grouping”, ibidem, p. 30 (eng., p. 29). 3 Ibidem, pp. 34-35 (eng, p. 34). 2 phenomenology of religion as a historical problem 53 mind and spirit and of its centres of orientation ; he reads in it a passage progressively from the « theological », through the « metaphysical » and the « moral », to the « economic ». Schmitt deines this line of development also as a line of increasing « neutralization » and « depoliticization ». 1 And it is on this basis that the ahistorical reading of religion which is attributed to the phenomenology-of-religion approach can also be deined as an « unpolitical » reading. Above all, it is still the history of ideas that forms the horizon and the testing ground of this theory – as, indeed, was already the case of the thesis claiming that the conceptual vocabulary of modern politics is nothing other than a secularized theology. Ideas, for Schmitt, are susceptible of bearing many meanings, and each idea receives its efective signiication only from that broader context in which it comes primarily to be inscribed. In the Age of Enlightenment, for example, which was dominated by an orientation toward moral concerns, the idea of « progress » tended to assume a diferent signiication from the one which is assigned to it in our current age, which is an age focused rather on economic considerations : « All concepts in the spiritual sphere – Schmitt writes – including the concept of spirit, are pluralistic in themselves and can only be understood in terms of concrete political existence ». 2 With regard, then, to the line of development of secularization, « the political » can be understood as a sphere which is constantly in action : it is always « the political » that decides the speciic orientation, and therefore the efective signiication, of the concepts that is proper to each historical period – even if this occurs, given the course of modern history, in a manner that is progressively more neutralized, technicized, and thereby « de-politicized ». The political is the fundamental sphere, also when it decides on its own suspension and retreat. Therefore the political as constantly active and grounding is again totalizing. But, moreover, if it is the political as a « totalizing » sphere that ills each epoch’s concepts with a diferent meaning, then any reference to a completely transcendent conceptual horizon, a « wholly other », appears impossible in very principle. The « other » relies indeed on the concrete decision of the political, which can change in each epoch. But – according to Schmitt – there exists no order transcendent in itself. Every foundation and every fulillment of meaning is grounded in a political decision and therefore historical. Indeed « the political » conceptually encompasses also that which is ontologically « other », namely, the enemy. There exists no absolute order beyond « the political ». The sole presupposition of « the political » is war. Thus, in any case, the thesis regarding the secularization of theological concepts loses at least part of its evaluating, anti-modern aspect, according to which it was theology alone which formed the necessary – even if invisible – presupposition of the modern world. The order which is constantly exerting its orienting and determining efect is now conceived to be the immanent order of « the political ». The thesis, then, of a structural analogy between theology and politics – that is to say, « political theology » itself – means nothing else than that : on the plane of political immanence, there is decided upon the referral of certain ideas to a horizon of signiication which is considered to enjoy priority. This horizon may be diferent from time to time (theological, ethical, economic etc...) without it thereby ever being possible to discover the « absolute truth » 1 2 See Das Zeitalter der Neutralisierung und Entpolitizierung in ibidem, pp. 79-95. Ibidem, p. 84 (eng, p. 85). 54 francesco valerio tommasi of a moment of origin and transcendence. It is in « the political » that there is constituted, in each epoch, the axiology of the spheres of reality. It is not by chance that theses regarding the dependence of the political on the theological have recently often been turned on their head ; one thinks here – to cite just one recent case – of Jan Assmann, who argues for the origin of certain theological models in political paradigms. 1 Every supposedly absolute origin, in fact, qua fruit of a political decision, is always already a ‘constituted’ and never a ‘constituting’ instance. The most that can be done is just to trace out the history of those horizons of (supposed) transcendence on which « the political » relies. It is thus that we ind, in the thought of Giorgio Agamben – another scholar originally coming from Rome – a certain hybridization, which has proven intellectually very fruitful, of Schmitt’s political-theological approach with a form of research which he describes as « archaeology » : Agamben’s eforts have been directed toward revealing a certain originary « threshold of indistinction », a primordial level of genesis at which disciplinary distinctions (religion, law...) prove not yet to be operative. It would be a good idea here to avoid the terms ‘religion’ and ‘law’, trying instead to imagine an x, for the deinition of which we need to take all possible precautions, indeed practicing some sort of archeological epoché which suspends – at least provisionally – the attribution to it of the predicates which we use habitually whenever we refer to religion and to law. 2 3. Political theology as phenomenology of religion Not only the proximity to Levinas which we have identiied, or the more general diiculty of identifying a « wholly other », but also these terms which we have just evoked along with Agamben – namely : primordial, genesis, epoché, archaeology – all direct us back once again toward phenomenology. It is a phenomenology, however, which, in the speciic case of Agamben, is mediated by the thought of Foucault. And Foucault himself, for his own part, was probably familiar, through Merleau-Ponty, with Husserl’s manuscript on Phenomenological Archaeology, in which the process of the revealing of the strata of the genetic constitution of phenomena is deined precisely as an « archaeology ». 3 It was also to these pages that Angela Ales Bello turned her attention – once again here in Rome – using them to emphasize, in her studies on phenomenological hyletics, the incircumventible nature of the noetic-noematic correlation. 4 But precisely the radicalization of this principle of correlation leads to the idea of a structural contamination and to the impossibility of theorizing a pure pre-constituted moment – as, moreover, is also shown exactly by philosophical « archaeology » as this latter was practiced by Foucault, and by those ofshoots of phenomenology which took the forms of philosophical hermeneutics and deconstruction – which, for example in the case of Derrida, were founded precisely in the study of problems of geneses and of origins. Thus, already in the pages of the manuscript which we have referred to above, Husserl also makes explicit reference to the « zig-zag » way of proceeding which was theorized in The Crisis as a method absolutely necessary to any historical consider1 See J. Assmann, Politische Theologie zwischen Ägypten und Israel, München 1992. See G. Agamben, Il sacramento del linguagio. Archeologia del giuramento, Roma-Bari 2008, p. 24. 3 See E. Husserl, Phänomenologische Archäologie Ms. C 16 vi, p. 1 ; and M. Merleau-Ponty, Résumés de Cours. Collège de France 1952-1960, Paris 1968, p. 15. 4 See A. Ales Bello, Il senso delle cose. Per un realismo fenomenologico, Roma 2013, pp. 75 f. 2 phenomenology of religion as a historical problem 55 ation. A historical research is unavoidably circular, whereby anyone seeking to describe a historical process inds himself ‘always already’ situated within the process that he seeks to describe. 1 It appears, then, possible to identify a point of convergence between developments within political theology and those within the phenomenology of religion. On the basis of the description that we have given of it, the former ofers no precise thesis regarding the relations obtaining between theology and politics, nor does it form a discipline with a clear object and exactly deined contours. Political theology represents, rather, a form of enquiry that is, above all, historical, and the typical theoretical operations of which are of a critical and deconstructive nature – such as the drawing into the light of explicit questionability of those hitherto merely implicitly assumed horizons of reference of various concepts in various diferent historical contexts, beginning always from theology, which tends to be one of the most ancient strata of « sedimentation » in such concepts. The same concept of religion, therefore, sooner than denoting a speciic class of clearly deinable objects, refers rather to a series of signiications which, in certain determinate contexts, fulil the function which is assigned, in the contexts in question, to this name. Such a theoretical outcome does not appear to be far from certain functionalistic models of religion, such as those developed by Geertz or Luhmann. But bearing in mind what we have already pointed out regarding the injustice of over-hasty criticisms, the phenomenology of religion, for its part, has constituted an enormous efort to properly engage with the inherent diiculty of the phenomenon : « religion » : a phenomenon in which there appear to be structurally co-present elements both subjective and objective, rational and irrational, a priori and derived from experience, essential and contingent etc. The phenomenology of religion, indeed, has sought consequently, in various ways, to take on board the task of the structural correlation of various diferent factors – the as it were « constitutive contamination » – of the phenomenon « religion » ; wherever, however, we ind still present, in these eforts on the part of the phenomenology of religion, the claim to be able to isolate and deine some « pure religious content » – be it described as an essence, an a priori, an object, or a phenomenon – we must say that these eforts remain anchored in a stage of philosophical investigation anterior to that which genuinely engages with the question of constitution and genesis. This inasmuch as this claim to be able to grasp and comprehend a datum which has already been inally and deinitively constituted as to its sense and meaning implies the possibility of putting a deinitive end to interpretative circularity, to the process which Husserl describes as a « zig-zag procedure » or, in other words, to the continuous stratiication of meanings and signiications which has its origin in the intentional correlation. Indeed, we might even say, somewhat provocatively, that the claim to be able to deine the phenomenon « religion » is a claim bound up with a certain « pre-phenomenological » stage of philosophical enquiry. In this regard, then, the phenomenology of religion has not been ‘phenomenological’ in the fullest philosophical sense. The problem of history proves, therefore, to be only one aspect of this question, which consists rather in the wider problem of the univocal constituting act per se. For all that, though, the historical aspect of the problem is surely an exemplary one. It is no coincidence that it has been on the basis of ideas 1 See F. V. Tommasi, Epoca ed epoché. Sulla storia della ilosoia da un punto di vista fenomenologico, « Archivio di Filosoia » lxxxiii, 2015, 1-2 (Epoché), pp. 181-192. 56 francesco valerio tommasi introduced by authors like Heidegger – who, as we have said, explicitly engage with the question of history – that there has been able to emerge and develop a phenomenology more attentive to the aspects of circularity and paradoxicality implicit in all acts of deinition. Described, then, in the terms in which we have described it, political theology can present itself as one possible form of the radicalization of that authentically phenomenological requirement which is implicitly raised by the phenomenology of religion. The « political » – as opposed to philosophical – speciication of this kind of « theology » represents, in fact, a pursuance of that line of enquiry whereby attention is turned toward concrete empirical phenomena rather than toward transcendental idealities, a line of enquiry which also makes the attempt to proceed upon the assumption of the intersubjective nature of human reality. Political theology as a radicalization of the phenomenology of religion represents, in short, a further step in the direction of immanence. But – quite contrary to what might seem, on a irst examination of the matter, to be the case – political theology’s link with theology – rather than with religion – can also be interpreted in this sense. We have to do here with a way of thinking which refers us to the history of ideas and not to purportedly substantial and essential realities. Also the reference to theology (instead of to religion) represents, if understood in a historical sense (namely as a reference to the history of ideas) a further step toward a genetic, and thereby toward a genuinely phenomenological approach. Given this radically historical and « archaeological » interpretation, political theology can be declined presented as a phenomenological hermeneutic of the paradoxical character of the religious phenomenon. Already many of Schmitt’s own concepts were formulated explicitly in order to account for dynamics of a paradoxical nature : one thinks here of his notion of sovereignty as a « limit concept », of his analysis of the « state of exception », or of his characterization, in terms of simultaneous otherness and excess, of the key igure of the « enemy », who must be « reduced » but cannot ever be annihilated – and it is interesting to note, taking up here a phenomenological observation regarding the problem of diferent points of view, that, for Schmitt, although I cannot ever annihilate my enemy, my enemy is certainly capable of annihilating me ! Indeed, it is precisely by virtue of this characteristic that he presents himself as « enemy ». But we could also still go on, by focusing also on the fact that the description of the friend-enemy dynamic is one where « the possibility of correct knowledge (Erkennen), understanding (Verstehen) and judging » pertains only to the « participants » (Teilnehmer) : a theoretical move – namely, the move from neutral description to participating experience – which is very close to certain conclusions arrived at by some phenomenologists in their confrontation with the paradoxes of religion. 1 The most striking example, however, of a concept apt to account for the paradoxical is that mechanism of « exclusive inclusion » on which Agamben has also focussed in order to explain the phenomenon of homo sacer as Urphänomen. Agamben sees in this theoretical device a key with which to confront precisely that ambiguity of the sacred – its paradoxically simultaneously attractive and repulsive character – upon which studies of religion are based, without these latter ever being able to fully clarify the meaning of this ambiguity. This mechanism of « exclusive inclusion » bears, for Agamben, an archaeological signiicance. It appears to describe not only the ambiguity and 1 C. Schmitt, Der Begrif des Politischen..., op. cit., p. 27. phenomenology of religion as a historical problem 57 the circularity of the sacred as a religious phenomenon but even the very gesture with which Being and God have been at the same time excluded from, and placed at the very foundation of, all metaphysics. The whole of the second part of Agamben’s recent (not yet translated) volume Uso dei corpi – which from a systematic point of view concludes the project begun with Homo sacer – is also devoted to an « archaeology of ontology ». In the Epilogue to this volume Agamben writes : In the course of our research, however, that structure of the « exception », which we had irst deined with particular reference to « bare life », has revealed itself to constitute, much more generally, the structure of the arché in every sphere and every context – that is to say, both within the juridico-political tradition and within ontology. It is, in fact, impossible to understand that dialectics of foundation which deines Western ontology from Aristotle onward if we do not grasp that this dialectic functions as an « exception » in the sense which we have examined. The strategy is always the same : something is divided of, excluded, and driven down to the bottom ; and, precisely in and through this exclusion, this same thing is included as arché and foundation. This applies to life, which (in the words of Aristotle) « can be spoken of in many ways » – vegetative life, sensitive life, and rational life, the irst of which is excluded so as to function as a foundation for the others – but it also applies to Being, which can likewise « be spoken of in many ways », one of which was likewise separated of to serve as a foundation. 1 Political theology, as an archaeological science, clariies, on an empirical and historical plane, the characteristics of metaphysics qua rational theology. In this way, it attempts to carry out that very project which had irst been that of the philosophy of religion and later that of the phenomenology of religion. Sapienza, University of Rome 1 G. Agamben, L’uso dei corpi, Vicenza 2014, p. 334. co mposto in ca r atte r e da n te monotype dalla fa b r izio se r r a e ditor e, pisa · roma. sta m pato e ril e gato nella t i po gr a fia di ag na n o, ag nano pisano (pisa). * Aprile 2016 (c z 2 · f g 1 3 )