The Marlovian sublime: Imagination and the problem of political theology

Political theology might best be understood to designate a link between sovereignty and constituting power. The twentieth-century German jurist Carl Schmitt implies this understanding in his chapter, ‘Political Theology’, in his book with the same title. Schmitt adduces political theology in order to ague against the eighteenth-century French writer, Emmanuel Joseph Sieyès. Sieyès attempts to legitimate the role of the Third Estate in the French Revolution by drawing a fundamental distinction between constituting power, the power to make a new political order, and constituted power, the power to preserve the already established legal system. Associating constituting power with the nation, Sieyès goes on to propose that the nation inhabits a state of nature that precedes any social or legal bonds and, therefore, has the authority and legitimacy to remake already existing social and legal bonds.¹ In Schmitt’s analysis, political theology disproves the location of constituting power in what he disparagingly calls the ‘organic unity’ of the people.² ‘All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts’, he asserts, ʼnot only because of their historical development… but also because of their systematic nature’.³