8. A Postmodern Hetoimasia—Feigning Sovereignty during the State of Exception

Abstract

Inspired by images from Greece during its sovereign debt crisis—including of a dog that ended up on the Hellenic President’s throne!—this chapter both illustrates Agamben’s notion of a Christian economic-political theology, for which the sovereign’s glory is never affected by his impotence, and nuances it as specifically occidental. Contrasting it with the earlier, embarrassingly incoherent political theology during the era of Byzantine “game of thrones”—when no reasons were offered for why a religion that claimed to be a fraternity of equals was in bed with a coercive state—the chapter shows how the anomie of oikonomia has been repressed in the Occidental constitutional imagination that obsesses over the so-called paradox of constituent/constituted sovereign power. The chapter further speculates on how this repressed sense of embarrassment can be recuperated together with an ethical sense of responsibility.