Schmitt both denies and performs the passage between theology and politics.

Evidence

Starting from the “often quoted” passage he finds at the source of Western theology-”Love your enemies”-Schmitt moves on and away from it and reaches for a political example. Yet he paradoxically arrives at this example without passage, without transition. More precisely, Schmitt denies the possibility of a passage and a transition between theology and politics, between the theological teaching of the Gospels and the political example that follows. No less clearly, however, Schmitt’s text also syntactically makes the passage from one to the other, from the nonpolitical Gospels to the political example. In other words, even though the one follows the other in the text of the Concept of the Political, Schmitt nevertheless distinguished the theological teaching of the Gospels and the example of the political, the example of the political enemy. — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 278

Categorization

Category: Contrarian or Surprising Claims

• XREF: Connects to the reader’s broad interest in how ideology, religion, and state power interlock; also parallels Milgrom’s work on how institutions bridge domains that surface-level discourse keeps separate.
• DEEPTHINKING: The double move - explicitly denying a passage while syntactically performing it - is a genuinely subtle reading of Schmitt that resists easy summary.

Related

• Schmitt’s text performs the political passage its argument denies (similarity 0.94)
• Schmitt asserted an intense continuity between theology and politics. (similarity 0.89)
• Schmitt left the link between sovereign exception and enemy unstated (similarity 0.82)
• Schmitt opposed conceiving political existence as detached from theology (similarity 0.82)
• Schmitt distinguishes the political enemy from private adversaries (similarity 0.79)
• Schmitt left obscure exactly what theological status the Gospels held for him (similarity 0.79)
• Schmitt alone established the friend-enemy distinction as the condition of the political (similarity 0.79)
• Islam is politically constitutive yet positioned outside the political (similarity 0.78)
• Deciding that something is unpolitical is itself a political act. (similarity 0.78)