by Sophia Jaworski
Alumni Hall, Victoria College, University of Toronto, January 17th & 18th, 2019
The Connaught Initiative, Entangled Worlds: Sovereignty, Sanctities and Soil emerged from an ethnographic moment, an emplacement in Toronto’s landscape, wherein which a whole set of spiritual devotees were mobilized by the conjoining of the relic of the arm of St. Francis Xavier with the language of theodicy, warding off evil in the Church. This expression bore vast political implications as the Cardinal preached from the pulpit of Toronto’s Cathedral, thereby sparking the themes of this Initiative (see previous blog post) and the very topic of the Connaught’s first research workshop.
The “Expressions of Sacred Legitimacy and their Political Implications” research workshop brought together scholars from three different continents and many more disciplines, as it forged new inter-disciplinary connections and networks. It sought to approach sovereignty as a question, rather than solution, in its tracing of the displacements and re-assertions of sovereignty. And its aim was to understand sovereignty’s sacralization through political theology, the sensoria, and the ecstatic.
From the proceedings of this two-day workshop, four key ideas emerged as presenters, commentators and questioners alike thought “in-common”. These terms were: theopolitics, ensoilment; aura, or radiance; and vulnerability.
Theopolitics is a query into regimes of the invisible, which inform specific forms of power, life forms and gendered performativity. Theopolitics question not just how theological categories infuse everyday life, but how they emerge within long, affective histories regarding bodies, flesh, racial relations, and material religion. Theopolitics thus takes seriously the question of Incarnation and of the substance of politics, as an enfleshed medium that underpins theology into everyday life. As was the intervention of Jayne Svenungsson, theopolitics is also inspired by the idea of divine justice; specifically, a justice focused on the provisional nature of political orders, rather than a transcendental, out-of-time political legitimacy. Elettra Stimilli prompted the rethinking of Weber through the substance of sovereignty and charisma, by considering “faith” in the market and the guilt-traction of the invisible hand that moves it. There is a displacement taking place through the financialization of faith-guilt, as both the imagined liberation and freedom of the market, but also the entanglements of different forms of entitlement and precarity to the market.
The second key term, ensoilment (perhaps a word of our inventing) is not an abstract idea of what is buried into the soil, but a thinking through the palimpsest of the earth; the creativity, unpredictability and transformation of the soil. Soil is never fixed, but rather, is a mobile infrastructure. This idea was prompted by the long debate on the tension between property and possession, a tension germane to colonial history and primitive accumulation. It was promulgated by the need for a language, expression of what forms of life and what forms of sovereignty make take form through emplacement. Possession and property are not enough for our analytical language.
Through soil/ensoilment, we can think about the commons, as that which is always in movement. And in focusing on the relationship between soil, land, law and the lives of the First Nations, we began to discuss the mobilization of the law and how it may make a claim to the sacred. Such was the intervention of Meaghan Weatherdon, who discussed the actions of young Cree, walking with the law, from Northern Quebec to Ottawa, Canada. This was then an invitation to dwell on the multiple connections between law and the sacred; the long, affective history of the relation between soil and the commons. Hence also, of soil as an interrogation of the relationship to land as wealth, as health, but also as a refusal to the law. Here, soil became a means of thinking of resilience with the world. The big questions that emerged were what forms of ensoilment could be sacred, could be divine, could be theopolitical? And what form of ensoilment does justice take? This was where soil emerged as a mobile infrastructure; and as something to be studied in its alignment, its orientation.
The third term emerged over questions of radiance, refraction and aura, through a questioning of the extension and elasticity of sovereignty. There is a need to disrupt hegemonic understandings of sovereignty as a theopolitics that draws exclusively from a Judeo-Christian tradition. In the works of both Armando Salvatore and Jeremy Stolow, they demonstrated how multiple forms of charisma do not fit squarely within Weberian types. This is especially true if we consider body politics as elasticity, an elasticity of charisma. For example, Armando Salvatore’s intervention demonstrated the importance of brotherhood in the Islamic Caliphates of the 10th century, reflecting how messianic charisma can be acquired through forms of intimacy and proximity, rather than exclusion and exception. How can the idea of sovereignty be stretched and reframed, as the saintliness of Sufi brotherhoods point not to an omnipresent, organic Leviathan body, but to a much more porous body that radiates from a matrix of lived and transgenerational brotherhood, operating at various levels of society and cosmic scale. Thus, what happens when the issue of scales and cosmic scale enter into debates over sovereignty?
This moved our discussion to vulnerability, particularly in thinking about violence and borderlands. Through the intervention of Jeremy Stolow, we began to think through the carnality, the aura and manifestation of forms of sovereignty, and how it may help to capture the complex and ensoiled nature of belonging. The discussion then moved to manifestation, to a recalibration of analytics of borderlands beyond a secular-religious divide and across a human-Anthropocene divining of history (to echo Svegnungsson once more). Vulnerability emerged from our interrogation of another interface between Christian theology and the social sciences, particularly that of migration and the management of difference. Here, vulnerability emerged as a theme, both as a manifested condition, but also as analytics. Migration, especially now – in its transnational, transborder formation – unsettles the outside/inside distinctions within sovereignty. Hence, the intervention of Ulrich Schmiedel revealed how making oneself vulnerable, in opening a window to the other, can be an emancipatory project. But there is also an economy of circulation and mediation of vulnerability as suffering that can be co-opted, as it is in more traditional, and in some cases, white-supremacist projects.
As a last point, the substance of politics and its medium is often nested in an oscillation between ambience; as a tonality that wishes to be a totalizing colouring of space. Ambience, as a spatial-temporal modality of life, provokes a senso-reality and a constant remediation of substance and charisma, as was the intervention of Sonja Luehrmann. Sovereignty is a mode that is never fully made and constituted from the outside, but is only ever partially achieved from within its folds.
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