Theocratic BiopoliticsA Political Theology of Creaturely Life
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Published 31 January 2027
About this book
Brings together theocratic political theology and affirmative biopolitics to explore the inseverable link between life and its political nature
- Develops a novel synthesis of political theology and affirmative biopolitics, rethinking the relationship between life, power and governance
Offers a sustained critique of Schmittian political theology, challenging the theological legitimation and sacralisation of sovereign power
Mobilises messianic eschatology as a critical resource for reimagining political temporality, emancipation and world order
Contributes to the reconfiguration of affirmative biopolitics as a framework for thinking life beyond domination
Advances an original account of creaturely life that reconfigures political ontology through an engagement with incarnational phenomenology
This book argues for a synthesis of theocratic political theology and affirmative biopolitics. Theocratic political theology is an anti-Schmittian political theology that challenges the sacralisation of sovereign power, or the different ways secular power has usurped the aura of religious transcendence. Affirmative biopolitics encompasses a series of approaches that advance positive forms of biopower.
The book explores a paradigm of political life that counters the negative effects of biopolitical governmentality and restores the indivisible link between life and its political/historical nature. It interrogates the complex entanglement between the persistent sacralisation of power in modernity and the irrepressible biopolitical surplus produced by the operation of neoliberal governmentality.
Reviews
Paipais delivers an impressive and original synthesis of the debates on political theology and biopolitics of the last decades, reining in the former from its tendency to escape into transcendence and keeping the latter from foundering in a vitalist immanence.
Paipais’s book eruditely brings together the fields of biopolitics and political theology in a way that enriches and transforms both of them. His vision of a theocratic biopolitics affirms hope, faith and love amidst the despair of our times. This is one of the most significant works of political theory in recent years.
Vassilios Paipais’s Theocratic Biopolitics is a daring new proposal which skilfully navigates between the twin dangers that dominated the discourse of political theology: the sovereignty of the divine transcendence, on the one hand, and the desacralised biopolitics of pure life, on the other. It argues that we need to find a more dialectical way between the sovereign power based on the wrong idea of the divine and the total profanation of biopower. By grounding his notion of the divine in the incarnational kenosis, Paipais shows that a right kind of theocracy is nothing to be feared.
Table of contents
Prologue: From Political Theology to Affirmative Biopolitics
1. Neutralising Eschatology: Carl Schmitt’s Katechontic Anti-Apocalypticism
2. Political Eschatology and the Allure of the Apocalyptic: the Dialectics of Antinomianism
3. St Paul’s Eschatology and the Persistence of Antinomianism
4. Creaturely Life: Towards a Phenomenology of Transimmanence
Epilogue: The Politics of Creaturely Life
Bibliography