The nation, even after secularizing revolution, still occupies the church’s structural place

Evidence

In it, one can witness an attempt at reunification, the production of a body politic that is “at once political and mystical,” a recasting of sovereignty as the sovereignty of the people, of the assembly, and no longer of the king: “the nation comes to occupy a very singular place in the ‘theologico-political’ apparatus of which we are trying to write the history. Constituted as what assembles itself (as what brings about the common, the being of what is in common), it occupies precisely the place of the church, if one is willing to recall that the church is nothing else than the transposed name of the assembly as such” (143). What is perhaps one of the most forceful illustrations of secularization-the French Revolution as the detheologization of politicshowever, fails to erase the division, the constitutive theologico-political structure of politics. — Gil Anidjar, The Jew, the Arab, 70

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Sacred legitimation persisted in land policy even during the allegedly secular founding phase. — Nadim N. Rouhana and Nadera Shalhoub-Kevorkian, When Politics Are Sacralized:…, 504