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This study claims that only by revisiting Buber’s entire oeuvre does one fully grasp his position on the relation between politics, religion, and ethics. I argue that Buber’s writings in the thirties are an act of resistance against national socialism and that his consistent political resistance before, in, and after this period appears in many of his writings. Buber was as a political thinker, not only in his exegesis, but also in his dialogical philosophy, in his view on Judaism and Zionism, in his translation project with Rosenzweig, and in his creative reinterpretation of Hasidism. Rereading these interrelated writings allows us to rediscover Buber as a political thinker whose humanist and social concept of religion allowed him to resist a politics disconnected from a dialogical ethics.

The article tells the story of the remains of the last Russian Tsar Nicholas II and his family, who were killed in Ekaterinburg in 1918, discovered in 1979, found again in 1991, solemnly buried in 1998, and canonized as saints by the Russian Orthodox Church in 2000. Thoroughly researched in the cause of official criminal investigation and identified with genetic tests in several labs in Russia and abroad, the royal remains have not been recognized by the Church. The failure to reach a consensus on the veracity of the remains of the Romanovs occurred in parallel with the inability to decide what to do with the mummified body of Soviet founder Vladimir Lenin, a contemporary of Nicholas II who has been kept in a mausoleum in the Red Square since the 1920s. Though, after 1991, voices have been raised for removing his body from this symbolic center of the country, no consensus has been reached so far as to where to move it and why. Revisiting Verdery’s famous work, the present article argues that such a movement necessitates a political commitment to voicing new notions of belonging and citizenship. The liminal status of these two bodies proves that the contemporary state in Russia is a continuation of both the Soviet and imperial state programs, not a new political structure like other post-socialist countries. Based on the works by Kantorowicz and Cherniavsky, this research develops the concept of popular theopolitics and aims to examine how people’s political and religious ontologies make use of the Tsar’s image.

Abstract This introduction outlines an anthropological concept of ‘theopolitics’ emergent from ethnographic engagements with the oldest site of European colonialism—the (Latin) Americas. Defined as a query into the sensorial regimes enabling incarnate forms of power, theopolitics focuses on the sovereignties from below that are immanent in struggles between the universalisms of Christian imperialisms and the autochthonous forces they seek to police and unmake. The articles comprising this special issue advance this query by exploring processes of attunement to the prophetic voices of the dead and life itself, of the elasticity of incarnate forms of political charisma and crowds, and the potencies of precious matter and touch as domains for rethinking relationships among political anthropology, political economy, and political theology beyond a focus on the state.

The recognition of the autocephaly of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church (UOC) by the Ecumenical Patriarchate in 2019 sparked a debate in the Orthodox world about the legitimacy of such an act. In the present study, we aim to explain, through the concept of theopolitics, this event which has caused a schism in the contemporary Orthodox Church. Following a brief introduction to Buber’s concept of theopolitics, we focus on a historical overview, demonstrating that the problems of the Orthodox world do not originate in theological issues, as it might seem at first glance, but primarily in political issues. The case of the autocephaly of the Ukrainian Orthodox Church proves the importance of theopolitics.

Abstract This article suggests that Buber's idea of the community may hint at an alternative to the more common foundations of political thought, usually grounded on notions of power or rationality. Showing how Buber's idea of the community developed from a neo-romantic form (in his early writings) to a principle informed by the dialogical dimension of human life (from I and Thou onwards), I will point out the vertical dimension of political life ensuing from Buber's discourse. A discussion of the theopolitical principle as expressed in Buber's Kingship of God will lead to the conclusion that, both descriptively and normatively, politics needs an openness to transcendence.

We ask how the theopolitics of a nation-state, and especially its soteriology, engage with traditions that preceded the state and relay messages that contradict this theopolitics. To discuss this question, we address the evolving (re-)interpretation of the Ninth of Av—a ritual commemoration of the destruction of Jerusalem and the end of Jewish (Judean) self-rule in ancient times—by Religious-Zionist commentators. We further compare this interpretation to the Religious-Zionist appropriation of Jerusalem Day, a civic holiday celebrating the establishment of Israeli control over East Jerusalem in the June 1967 war. We argue that the statist imperative of the superiority of nation-statist theopolitics suggests that traditions are co-opted to fit in with its soteriology, with varying degrees of resistance or willing accommodation by carriers of these traditions. This co-opting may result in either the de-politicization of what the statist view would see as religion or the religionization of the state's own civic and so-called secular holidays.

Abstract This article addresses the ‘touch-event’ as a mediated affective encounter that pivots around a tension between intimacy and distance, seduction and sovereignty, investment and withdrawal. Through a rereading of the Pauline event of conversion to Christianity, it argues that an analysis of the evolving significance of touch-events for Catholic liturgy and a religious congregation shows the theopolitical as always already constituted within an economy of enfleshed virtues. Focusing on contemporary examples of touch-events from the life of Francis, the first pope from the Americas, as well as from fieldwork among a group of female Latin American Catholic migrants in Rome, I argue for a closer examination of touch-events in order to grasp some of their theopolitical, radical, emancipatory, and, in some contexts, subjugating effects.

Abstract This article analyzes Venezuelan Chavismo as an unstable formation gnawed by the unsolvable contradiction between, on the one hand, the politico-theological ambition to totalize sociality as a visible ‘people’ collected around the invisible ‘Spirit’ of Venezuela's ‘Founding Father’ Simón Bolívar and, on the other, the non-totalizable theopolitical energies of a social field suffused with myriad globalized ‘spirits’ that admits no clear-cut demarcation between ‘visible’ and ‘invisible’ or ‘material’ and ‘spiritual’. Incapable of totalizing sociality as a discrete ‘society’, the political logic informing Chavismo, as with other recent populisms, shifts from hegemony to ‘dominance without hegemony’, a situation where, à la Humpty Dumpy, the ‘people’ is whatever is ‘lovingly’ decreed as such from above, always in tension with a host of deconstructive, often theopolitically imbued agencies and spirits.