“Love in the Time of War”

Contra Autonomy of the Political

Abstract

The political as a category and politics per se involves the war — historically and substantively, but ambivalently. The war, according to Schmitt, is the basic premise of politics, and politics is war, at least in potency; at the same time, politics is a way to limit war, delay it, suspend it, or at least civilize it. This was essentially the aim of the process of political autonomy, during which a meaningful revision of the concept of autonomy made it almost indistinguishable from the notion of sovereignty. Decisive theoretical turn in this direction was performed by Kant. After a long pause filled with the rise and decline of national, nationalist, and totalitarian projects, Kantian political praxis has become an almost universally binding standard in the West. By now, however, it is clear that the possibilities of political autonomy as a means against war have been exhausted — a palliative, not a panacea. War is irremovable from the political, even an autonomous one. The author suggests that the solution to the deadlock may be a partial de-autonomization of the political, returning the notion of autonomy to the pre-Kantian content, consisting in the opening access into the political for at least some non-political values, and subordinating it to the latter. The author shows that such a value can become love — in its Christian understanding, not identical and not orthogonal, but directly antagonistic regarding to the war. The author demonstrates that the well-known phenomenon of the civil religion is an effective institutional channel for partial de-autonomization of the political. The author insists that his considerations are not yet another version of political theology, as they are grounded within the boundaries of mere reason.