The Haunting Image of the Frozen Jew (in Christian Self-Understanding), the Self-Determining Universality of Human Reason, and Anticipating the Secular-Nation-State: From Hobbes to Kant and Beyond

Abstract:The following article takes aim at the deeply contested relationship between the secular and the religious in the contemporary: in its conceptual but also genealogical dimensions. Toward this end the essay analyzes Hobbes's Leviathan and Kant's Religion Within the Boundaries of Mere Reason by adopting a bifocaled lens in exposing what is seen as two interrelated forms of universality. One consisted in the (historical and pre-Christian) image of Judaic law and the Jewish people in the self-understanding of what claimed to be a universalizing (moral) Christianity, while the other consisted in a notion of reason that articulates and expresses human morality as a characteristic and index of freedom therein constituting a political society and its laws. The essay argues that the secular-religious dialectic is best understood in terms of this relationship between the image of the Judaic as it operates within Christian and "modern" aspirations toward universality. This dialectic is thereby shown to be essential to thinking and reflecting about the modern emergence of categories like the secular, the national, and the religious in their distinctions: their development as much as their ruin. In such an analysis a critique of the contemporary forms of political-theology—prominently in Schmitt and reiterated in Agamben and Badiou—is also undertaken as conclusion.