The Invisible Armada

2025/08/25

What is it, in Trump’s braggadocio about annexing Canada, about the United States buying Greenland from Denmark, about transforming Gaza—emptied of its inhabitants—into a Riviera promised to wealthy tourists from the West and the Emirates (etc.), that produces in the ordinary person of liberal democracies not only an effect of stupefaction, but above all of exhaustion (both moral and political)?

It is not only that one hears in it the language of force, inasmuch as force would oppose law ever more decisively. It is the language of arbitrariness, of excess (the famous Trumpian hubris), that of a new despotism, entirely obscure. It is also (and perhaps above all) that one perceives in it the echoes of a subtle and more dangerous little tune: that of the powerful return of the theological-political, of which the disaster of the present would be at once the stage and the stake.

Trump’s swaggering boasts, accompanying his thunderous comeback to the White House, naturally fall in line with his everlasting slogan “Make America Great Again.” But it would be a mistake to reduce this simply to the conditions of the reactionary neo-patriotism Trump is supposed to embody. One truly grasps its reach only if one seizes it in its thickness and its theological-political scope. MAGA, far from being just a demagogic slogan meant to be displayed on the red caps of the populist leader’s fans, takes on meaning only when it is heard as the reactivation, relaunch, and re-intensification of the founding, instituting motif of the United States as a power and a community of destiny—namely, manifest destiny.

Manifest destiny bears an openly conquering, hegemonic, imperialist vocation. And it is an explicitly theological-political motif, inasmuch as it is providentialist—it is a “higher,” religious, divine power that decrees (is supposed to decree) that the United States has the vocation of enlightening the entire world by colonizing it through the most varied means—Starbucks no less than the Fifth Fleet…

The followers of Carl Schmitt who go on repeating the consecrated formula (“Almost all the prominent concepts of modern state theory are secularized theological concepts”) miss the essential point. The primary trait of a theological-political motif like the one revitalized here by the MAGA slogan is that it is situated strictly outside the field of discussion, of deliberation. “Manifest destiny,” in all its versions, is, par excellence, that which stands beyond the reach of all deliberation. It is postulated, affirmed, displayed, and it can impose itself as fact or as truth only on condition of having the means to realize itself in act(s).

The primary problem we have with the theological-political is not metaphysical in nature; it concerns the regimes of truth under which political life is placed. In principle, in liberal democracies, the latter is situated under the deliberative regime—proposals and political projects must not only be presented in the public sphere, but argued for. Argumentation itself is founded on communicational rules (Habermas) and on norms (Max Weber). Values, when appealed to, are not supposed to refer to any transcendence but rather to a spiritual, cultural, moral heritage that the community of the living holds in common. They entertain close relations with rationality.

It is when the theological-political makes a forceful return into this world placed, in principle, under the regime of truth of the deliberative, that the contemporary public of liberal democracies suffers a shock, a concussion—any discussion of the foundations of the political, of the claims advanced by one side or another, breaks off. The irruption, brutally regressive, of the theological-political into a world in principle under the deliberative regime produces the stunning effect evoked above—we no longer discuss; the theological-political, with the regime of revealed truth that supports it, has a pact with the fait accompli, unilateral decisions, a politics founded on pure and simple power relations.

Historical Trajectories of the Theological-Political

Whether in the domain of the domestic politics of liberal democracies or in that of international relations, the little tune of the theological-political has never fallen completely silent. The notion of a “vocation,” of a “mission,” of a singularity associated with the exception of the nation-state continues to haunt the way States and peoples in the West represent their “destiny.” This kind of collective representation rests on images transmitted from generation to generation. In France, as paradoxical as it may appear at first glance, one could say that a phrase like “France, homeland of human rights,” is typically, exemplarily, secularized theology, à la Carl Schmitt.

Only, in what has been fallaciously called the international order since the Second World War (fallaciously, because this “order” is nothing but a disorder laboriously contained, streaked with tensions, crises, coups de force and infractions of all kinds), this persistence of the theological-political has been dammed up and put on standby by the existence of norms tending to loosen (decouple, disjoin) political practices from theological feelings and references. At the height of the Cold War, at the time of the balance of terror, or again throughout the period marked by decolonization, it was not references to Providence nor revealed truths (of one side or the other) that structured tensions and conflicts, that accompanied confrontations. These took place in a political field that was essentially secularized, where, notably, movements of emancipation were placed under the sign of communism, where nationalism and Marxism got along quite well. Of course, if one looks a bit more closely, one realizes that things were not so simple (the Algerian War of Independence…). And Foucault was not wrong to discern in the Iranian uprising of the late 1970s, with the place religious spirituality held there, the premises of a historical turning point. And then, on the side of the masters of the world, the theological-political made a first notable comeback under Reagan, even before the fall of the Soviet regime, with the circulation of the phrase “evil empire” to designate the systemic enemy. And as every time the theological-political returns, extreme simplifications of political, ideological, geostrategic (etc.) complexities accompany it: the “evil empire” is where the “bad guys” are at work (as opposed to us, the people of the “free world,” the “good guys”).

What makes an epoch today, what defines the disastrous singularity of the present, is that the theological-political, as it returns in force, plays not in the camp of the masses risen up against a bloody dictatorship, as in the Iran where Foucault conducted his “reportages of ideas,” but in that of the victors of illiberal Restoration, of the most rabid white-Western-centric hegemonists. The providentialism that sustains Trumpist MAGA is exactly of the same nature as that which inspires the Israeli settlers who today harass Palestinian villagers and annex their lands; in this case, reference to religious texts serves as a safe-conduct and an unlimited justification for all their exactions.

Here the theological-political is the convenient finery of a new form of fascism, openly racist and conquering, just as, in other historical circumstances, it can sustain the energy of masses rising up against despotism or colonization. In today’s configuration, the theological-political of the powerful (“from above”) sinks into the breach opened by the collapse of everything that, until a recent period, could still stand in for an international order governed by legitimized norms and usages. It also accompanies, in domestic politics, in Western democracies in the process of illiberalization, the collapse of the system of parliamentary democracy, along with the regulating role that could be played there (however relative) by the separation of powers, the balancing game of parties, the existence of a (again, relatively) independent press, etc. The theological-political returns in force to the minds and practices of the masters of the world wherever disorder and deregulation prevail in international relations, where the production of chaos becomes a common means of asserting power; where, in domestic politics, the brutality of conflicts (the struggle of classes and of species) was tempered by the possibilities of their institutionalization (the composing of “majorities,” the formation of compromises, the moderating effects of the social state)…

When Theology Replaces Ideology: The End of Deliberative Politics

The return of the theological-political to the sphere where rulers are active is taking place in a space-time in which all the ideologies of power are coming apart—reformism, nationalism (the kind before its fall into murky ethnicism, the philosophy of “gnawers” Renan speaks of), the cult of growth (promising prosperity), of freedom of exchange… It is in the outer-space vacuum left by the dereliction of all these ideologies that shored up liberal democracy that these regressions and these recourses to the theological-political are occurring.

In France, unlike in the United States or Israel, reference to “sacred” texts, the recourse to a regime of truth grafted onto religious discourse, is obviously made awkward, if not impossible, by the weight of the republican, secular tradition founded on the separation of the political (secular) from the religious. But one could say, conversely, that in the context of this historical singularity (established with the separation of Church and State at the beginning of the twentieth century), providentialism has simply secularized itself and taken root in the notion of the “great nation,” with a destiny quite naturally exceptional, out of the ordinary, precisely; the effect of which is that one is not sensitive to the glaring gobbledygook constituted by a phrase like “homeland of human rights”; and, above all, today, that everything in this whole—top to bottom and bottom to top—resists with all its might the idea that France today could be just one country among others, if not a second-rank nation, and rather in decline than on the rise…

The institution in France of laïcité as a barrier against encroachments of the religious domain upon the political domain and upon the prerogatives of the republican State is an ambiguous singularity. Laïcité has become an ideological apparatus akin to an increasingly fundamentalist, despotic, and intolerant counter-religion of State when it must confront the rise of the theological-political erupting from the very bottom—that of the postcolonial plebs. This theological-political that has arisen from the depths of colonial history, in a postcolonial situation, is the recourse of a category of the oppressed in a general configuration where the political spaces mapped out by the secular and republican ideology exclude them or confine them to subalternity. It is not nourished, like that from above, by the fantasy of absolute power and the spirit of conquest, but by the aspiration to equality and emancipation—which makes all the difference.

Generally speaking—and this is completely foreign to the now-canonical approach to the theological-political put into circulation by Schmitt at the beginning of the twentieth century—the political theology of the oppressed is not organized around the motif of sovereignty—that is to say, in the mind of the conservative-Nazi jurist, of the State—but rather around emancipation. If it is spontaneously inclined to “secularize” notions borrowed from texts, images, figures belonging to religious corpuses and traditions, it is within a horizon not only different but opposed to that sketched by the theorist of sovereign exception: doctrines of salvation point toward emancipation, the parousia of a time freed from oppression, etc.

The contemporary collapse of the foundations of the “system” established on the precarious and contested balances set up after the Second World War has had the effect of raising a bare-knuckled confrontation (a fight to the death, in truth) between the theological-political promoted by a new species or race of dominants (of which Trump is the prototype, no more than a new fascism perfumed with neo-providentialism) and a political theology of the oppressed with multiple faces, which has arisen on the ruins of the discourses of emancipation—revolutionary, Marxist, nationalist—formerly borne by national liberation movements in the colonies, by the youthful “new vanguards” in the countries of the global North, etc.

It is not some natural propensity to “fanaticism,” with its twin brother “terrorism,” that inspires movements like Hamas or Hezbollah; rather, it is the collapse of the grand narratives and strategies that nourished the movements of emancipation in the high days of decolonization that has called forth the forceful return of the theological-political into the field of struggle between the new imperialism and the plebs of the world—where, notably, the Colony, in its classical forms, has given way to regimes of domination and oppression no less intolerable—Palestine serving here as the example of examples.

In truth, the categorical objections we can oppose to the return of the theological-political into the sphere of a “modern” politics (in the sense that it would be placed under the primary sign of the loosening of the bond between the profane and the sacred, the religious and the secular) do not concern the irruption of references, feelings, intensities that find their sources in religious traditions, whatever they may be. We no longer live in a time when the existence of a link between the democratic institution—understood as the natural state of modern politics—and the Enlightenment or Reason would impose itself as self-evident. What we have learned through the tumultuous political experience of the last century is that the democratic world is no less populated by images, phantasmagorias, myths, and fictions than any other political cosmology or cosmogony. Politics in general, including modern politics, is a composite or an impure milieu populated by images no less than by notions or concepts, by regulative ideas.

The approach to democracy (institution, system, regime…) as a whole placed under the sign of rational procedures has long since been dismissed, amid the jeers of the democratic “public” itself, particularly in the global North. To take just one example—and obviously not the least: who still believes, in liberal democracies, that the system of representation (parliamentary…) is to be taken in its literal sense, the representatives truly and literally representing the represented—that it is anything other than a useful fiction—but profoundly imaginary—for the reproduction of the system (which is, by definition and first of all, inequitable rather than founded on the loyal and faithful representation of the governed by the governing)?

As concretions of narratives and images, modern democratic myths are no less fictions caught up with the imaginary than political ideologies more or less directly connected to religious narratives. In practice, it turns out that the grand narratives underlying liberal democratic modernity are no less riddled with superstitions than those that sustain anything that could resemble a theology of liberation.

What can therefore constantly separate us (keep us at a distance) from the theological-political is not the suture it effects, against the grain of political modernity, between images and narratives borrowed from the religious domain and politics understood as the profane domain where human beings are masters and in charge of their own destiny; if this suture takes place again and again, counter to the secularization of the political domain and its break with the ancient worlds, counter to the general movement of including political life in the disenchantment of the world, it is because there is no shortage of reasons for it: not only has liberal democracy not kept its promises, but the momentum given to the “democratization of the world” after the fall of the Soviet bloc has, in less than three decades, found its outlet in the current chaos. The forceful return of religious intensities into the spaces, in principle sanctuarized, of politics placed under the regime of the profane is thus a “logical” recourse against the collapse of these promises and the dark disasters that accompany them—today, Gaza first and foremost.

It is therefore not this return that is the problem; it is not new that religion proves to be, under given circumstances, not the sigh of the afflicted creature but the recourse of the oppressed and the weapon of their resistance or their riposte. The poison of the theological-political today can be identified much more distinctly: it is the forceful return of providentialism allied with power, the armed, over-armed providentialism of the masters of the world. The oppressed who draw on texts and narratives, on traditions and images borrowed from the religions in which they are immersed do not for all that hand their destiny over to the decrees of a suprasensible power, of this or that divinity. They fight on their own behalf and count on their own forces. They find inspiration in religious corpuses, but they nonetheless know that politics—that is, the field of struggle where the power relations between dominants and dominated are established, politics as the field of the struggle of classes and of species—politics is above all a human affair, the terrain of confrontation between some categories of human beings and others; for that, they do not need to have read The Devil and the Good Lord to know it, and to know it with assurance.

It is not because their struggle may be placed, under given conditions, under the sign of religion, because it is experienced and formulated in terms that borrow, in varying proportions, from religious discourses and traditions, that the struggle of the oppressed entrusts itself to the decrees of Providence. The opposite is true—from the English Civil War to the struggles inspired by liberation theology in Latin America in the 1970s, passing through the Iranian uprising against the Shah and the Algerians’ war of independence.

The poison is providentialism rammed into the destiny of the nation-state or of the race, of the bloc of power, and set in orbit by those who self-institute themselves in the position of vicars of that Destiny, with a capital letter. Trump as prophet and governor of MAGA—that is, of revived U.S. manifest destiny, at the very hour of the empire’s decline—is today the incarnation of this scourge that saturates the screens. But, on closer inspection, this specter haunts the spaces of modern History and, underlyingly, of political modernity—the Thousand-Year Reich, the Soviet Union as homeland of the proletarians of the whole world, the Atlantic Alliance as the spearhead of the “free world,” etc. In all its forms, and whatever the singularity of the ideology that supports it, the figure of manifest destiny is never anything but the other face of hegemonism, its transcription into theological-political language—explicit or implicit, even subliminal. And, as we are better placed than ever to hear today, hegemonism, particularly when wounded, is the sore in the flank of peoples, a wound all the more gaping as those peoples are disinherited, mistreated, made subaltern.

What political life (and with it the life of peoples) must first of all be freed from is this: any kind of providentialist approach to their history, to struggle, to the existence of the forces at play, to the illustrious men and women active in this field… The loosening one must not concede is this one: History and politics must remain foreign to the notion of destiny, immunized against it. There is no more a destiny of peoples, of state powers, than there is a destiny of illustrious men (or women). There are only combinations of trajectories, events, configurations and chains of circumstances. Sartre against Trump, definitively, irrevocably.

The Disastrous Singularity of the Present

In France and, by contagion, in Western democracies, the forceful return of the theological-political in its disastrous rogue and gore version crystallized over the last two decades of the previous century around a very particular arrangement: the advent of a sacralization of the Shoah, as a singular, unsayable, incomparable object, inseparable from the consolidation of the condition of absolute exception under which Israel is placed in all its turns and manifestations. The Shoah, absolute singularity, figure of absolute Evil, ceased to be a historical object comparable to others to become the object of a (supposedly civic) cult, but whose effective constitution was theological—an object surrounded by memorial rites legitimated by the highest political and moral authorities, an object whose trait of exception was underlined by the fact that it was withdrawn from the deliberative regime—any “discussion” about it, any intellectual, scholarly, public confrontation around its narration constituting, in the pure version of this theologization of the object—the one that accompanied the promotion of the film Shoah—a profanation, the most guilty obscenity clearing the way for pure and simple negationism.

The decisive turn that occurred here concerns the acceptance, by both the political sphere and scholarly circles, of this clause of exception: the withdrawal of the object “Shoah” from the public sphere placed under the deliberative regime, where, among other things, historical objects and past events are debated. What happened with the genocide perpetrated by the Nazis (reduced here to the extermination of the Jews of Europe) is the same as with phenomenology: its over-theologization removed it from the field of academic and public discussion for distinctly political purposes (to secure Israel’s immunity by compacting Yad Vashem and the colonization of the West Bank), just as the theological turn of phenomenology led to blurring the boundaries separating the Sorbonne from the Archdiocese of Paris—Claude Lanzmann and Jean-Luc Marion, same theological-political horizon, same fight…

The theologization of a historical object does not occur without being accompanied by the formation of a dogmatic apparatus and a learned scholasticism—the multitude of scholarly works composing the catechism in which what is not to be discussed is condensed and taught—the absolute singularity of the Shoah. It is today, in the light of Gaza, with before our eyes the field of ruins and the cemetery peopled by survivors condemned to famine programmed by the State of Israel, that one can measure the disaster constituted by this forceful return, under present conditions, of this version of the theological-political, according to which the suspension of the deliberative combines with the hubris of destructive and conquering power.

We must carefully distinguish established facts from power-grabs: the project by Nazi leaders to destroy the Jews of Europe is an established, indisputable fact. The religion of the Shoah as uniquely unique and about which there is to be no discussion, as circulated by Lanzmann and his sequel—this is a seizure of ascendancy, that is, an operation of taking power in the form of a fait accompli. The worst variant of the performative, when one measures it against the political calculations that accompany it. It is not necessary to be a fervent supporter of liberal democracy in all its finery to be irreducibly—one could almost say fanatically—attached to the regime of discourse (Lyotard) and the regime of truth (Foucault) associated with deliberation; to be resolutely allergic to revealed truths, particularly—and naturally—when what is at stake is human political life. We never submit gladly to the command “we don’t discuss!”, and least of all when our political existence and the political questions of the moment are at stake. We insist on exercising our capacities for deliberation and, if we must rally to a position that is not ours at the outset, we insist that this be after having been convinced. We are rather the sort who, when told in a peremptory and categorical tone “that’s just how it is!”, quibble and object: and why couldn’t it be otherwise, and why couldn’t it be said otherwise (Foucault)? We are the sort who, when both common sense and the dogmatics of the season hammer us with compact, indisputable statements, go so far as to say: and why couldn’t we change the terms of the conversation (Mignolo)?

What animates us, in this kind of configuration, is not so much our attachment to general principles (freedom of opinion or expression) as the taste for discussion, for argumentation, even for dispute. The passion for the discursive, whose condition is that an assertion or a position calls for an argumentation (a reasoned chain of sentences) in its favor and always presupposes the possibility of an opposing position.

On the other hand, a positive approach to politics necessarily consists in foregrounding the motif of autonomy: it is the sphere par excellence (with that of art) in which human beings are called upon to exercise their own power, free of any tutelage, of whatever kind it may be. Here is where the opposition, more than the difference, between praxis and poiesis takes root. Politics is situated, in its original figure, on the side of creation, that is, of displacements and events that wrench human communities or societies from the sphere of pure repetition. Politics is, in principle, placed under the sign of difference (or différance in Derridean style), understood in its active sense—the active and dynamic production of the new of today wrenching itself from yesterday’s conditions.

On the other hand, politics is placed under the sign of what Sartre calls freedom: it is for human beings, and human beings alone, to endow themselves with a destiny—their condition is not placed in the hands of Providence but in their own acting—“help yourself, and Heaven will help you!”, and indeed that is the order in which things come; Heaven comes after, for those who believe in it, and it can be understood in all sorts of ways—chance, favorable circumstances, a lucky star… but in all cases, the first and founding maxim is indeed: help yourself—your destiny (which is understood at the individual as well as at the collective scale) is in your own hands, which means that it is everything except a destiny in the proper sense, but rather something like a work belonging to creation and acting. That is the very substance of politics in its modern sense, the sense which is precisely what lies buried today under the ruins of liberal democracy.

Modern politics, in this original/originating sense, does not belong to the sphere of production nor to that of organization, nor to that of management, nor to that of care. It rather falls under the paradigm of creation or self-invention, a gesture whose principle is the unsealing of given conditions and the radical loosening from all kinds of suprasensible determination, attached to a transcendence. But this very gesture can be supported by all sorts of inspirations, profane or not; certain forms of messianism or millenarianism or belief in the eternal return are, as such (as inspirations), worth just as much as the trafficked religion (the trafficking of relics) of universal suffrage in its Third-Republic version (rather than Rousseauist).

It is in this sense that, when we are faced with the return of the theological-political, our first gesture is not instinctive rejection—rather, we ask to see: racialized proletarians who hear in prayer rooms the little tune of insubordination, the one that nourishes dignity and the rejection of the spirit of subalternity, are our friends and our allies. The new Vandals of the Western upper spheres who attribute Trump’s good fortune and impunity to the exercise of divine power are not only obscurantists but enemies of humanity. Their very low-cost theology-politics increases the world’s misfortune day by day and stubbornly brings it closer to the abyss.