The Future of Illusion

The Future of Illusion By Victoria Kahn Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2014 Victoria Kahn's The Future of Illusion has already received deserved praise from many reviewers in various venues. I want to echo much of that praise here, and also to raise a few questions. Kahn is surely one of the most careful scholars of the early modern period today, and in this new book she moves with finesse between discussions of Shakespeare, Hobbes, Machiavelli, Spinoza and Vico, and later modern thinkers of "political theology" (Freud, Schmitt, Strauss, Arendt, Kantorowicz, Cassirer) for whom these earlier figures form an essential canon. Given this framing, The Future of Illusion has been rightly perceived as a timely riposte to trends in two broad quarters of inquiry. On the one hand, Kahn responds to a resurgent interest in political theology (in the wake of 9/11, the Arab Spring, and ISIS) by reminding us of the centrality of the early modern canon for any genealogy of "political theology" by which she means, "not the theological legitimation or theological essence of political authority, but rather the problem of the relationship between politics and religion once this theological legitimation is no longer convincing." On the other hand, Kahn is concerned to correct a somewhat ironic tendency, on the part of many early modern scholars, to take (too) seriously certain implications of the notion that we are now living in a "postsecular world, in which the Whiggish narrative of increasing secularization in the West has come up against the fact that religion has not withered away." Against critics who affirm the permanence of a "theological imaginary" in politics and who, somewhat tellingly, rely on Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss or Lacan to make their case Kahn insists (with Hans Blumenberg, Erich Auerbach, and Hannah Arendt as her guides) that "a decisive break between modernity and theological modes of explanation" means that, so far as we can know, political authority cannot be explained by revealed religion, or the ahistorical power of the theological "symbolic." When political authority and legitimacy become the explanandum, Kahn suggest, then the explanans can only be what human beings have believed, done and made the self transforming history of human values, works and practices. She thus links "the possibility of a purely secular politics" to "a purely secular conception of poiesis" and she sees the latter as "central" to the work of Hobbes, Vico, Shakespeare and Spinoza, all of whom (she avers) suggest that human beings "can know only what we have made ourselves." (I will return to Kahn's discussion of poiesis in a moment. With respect to early modern studies, at least, Kahn has left those who advocate a "return" to the explanatory power of revealed religion with a lot of explaining to do. Odes to the enduring power of the "religious symbolic," in analyses of early modern social history or of so called "sacramental poetics," might yield something of interest to historians of ideas or antiquarians; but the contribution made by such work to contemporary debates about modernity's secular legitimacy is, Kahn thinks, limited and questionable. She thus calls upon critics of the early modern period to better explain their views with respect to the "neglected dialogue" between contemporary discussions (across the human sciences) about the legitimacy of modern values and institutions, and the early modern figures in whose writings the terms of this dialogue first took shape. After all, if there is one thing on which Schmitt, Benjamin, Strauss, Cassirer, Blumenberg, Arendt, Lowith, Freud, Auerbach, and the rest agree their stark differences notwithstanding it is that we are not 'done' with Renaissance or early modern writers and artists when it comes to thinking about what it means to be "modern," or about what, if anything, distinguishes forms of life that have emerged over the course of the past four or five centuries in the 'West' and elsewhere.