Детиен и Полит-теологията (II)

Marcel Detienne, Jean-Luc Nancy, Jurgen Habermas, Ernesto Laclau, Chantal Mouffe, Thierry de Duve, Judith Butler няколко имена, които казват много, и те са събрани в една книга (от 800страници):
Political Theologies,
еd. by Hent de Vries and Lawrence Sullivan,
2006 Fordham University Press, лесно намираема из мрежата.
При интерес, всеки би могъл да погледне, ако не друго, съдържанието: трийсетина статии в четири рубрики:
What are political theologies
Beyond tolerance: pluralism and agonistic reason
Democratic republicanism, secularism and beyond
Opening societies and the rights of the human

Като предмет на интерес тук остава преди всичко Марсел Детиен: именно на него се пада честта да стои в началото на първата секция. Неговият текст е Les Dieux du Politique en Grece Ancienne, преведен като The Gods of Politics in Early Greek Cities от (Janet Lloyd) била The 2002 Henry Myers Lecture at The Royal Anthropological Insititute of Great Britain and Ireland, и публикуван в Arion 12 (fall 2004) p 49-66. След финала стои негова бележка, че работел върху книга с подобна тематика, която десет години по късно все още не е налице. За превод на български е нужен ентусиазъм, повече отколкото има тук, но все пак ето поне няколко цветисти прагарафа от английския вариант

I think we should try to discover whether or not gods, particular gods, were directly involved in what I shall - if I may - call ‘‘the autonomy of the political domain in itself.’’ Let me spell this out. I have described the practices of the deliberative assembly and the repeated and regulated exercises performed by a decision-taking group that progressively comes to think of itself as a unity made from a plurality and that creates for itself this new public space. All these practices sooner or later, depending on the circumstances, played their part in forging the by no means ordinary idea of the group’s sovereignty over itself. Yes, sovereignty, and I am of course thinking of those first Greek cities, which never needed to behead a sovereign or to abolish an ancien re´gime. But now, as a careful comparativist, my thoughts also turn to the whole of ‘‘traditional’’ West Africa, which does not appear to have any ‘‘public places.’’ Indeed, you could even say that there is no space at all there between the power of the king or royal chieftain and society, which is organized into clans. The king accumulates in his person all the powers that are disseminated among the clans and lineages. As the Africanist Alfred Adler puts it, in many cases the sacralized power that is vested in him leaves no separating gap between his person, which is set about with prohibitions, and the society, made up of clans and lineages. This society seems to base its idea of itself on its recognition that the king assumes the (often weighty) privilege of ensuring the society’s union with the whole collection of the forces of nature, both visible and invisible. On the one hand, we thus find a society that forms an image of itself through a sacred king; on the other, one in which a certain idea of the city, Hestia, is formed by a group that, for its part, comes to believe that the sovereignty of this new unit, the city, resides in itself.

Тhere was pressure, already in the Christian Augustine, to consider polytheisms as vast terrae incognitae that were destined eventually to receive True Religion, whether from Christianity or from Islam. As our experts have established, over three-quarters of the world is naturally polytheistic. Consider for a moment the eight hundred myriad deities in Japan, the countless metamorphoses of the deities of Hinduism, the thousands of genies and powers of Black Africa. Likewise, the forests and mountain ranges of Oceania, the Indian subcontinent, and South America are teeming with pantheons with great clusters of deities.

It is probably fair to say, without fear of contradiction, that, in the limitless horizon of polytheisms, monotheism appears as a kind of religious mistake—for these do occur, just as sentimental mistakes do, although the latter fortunately tend to be more shortlived. Polytheistic societies revel in their ignorance of churches and episcopal authorities, whether pastoral or papal. They mock these upstart monotheists for their insistence on ‘‘having to believe’’ and their proselytizing efforts. As we all know, the field of polytheisms constitutes a vast continent, one that awaits all those wishing to experiment in the world of the possible relations that link divine powers.

As all Hellenists know, the ritual calendar, with all its information, relayed about fifty percent of the ‘‘laws’’ of Solon. But the essential point for me is that ‘‘the affairs of the gods,’’ the first section of ‘‘public matters,’’ were debated, discussed, and decided in the assembly and - moreover - in the first part of the assembly. The assembly decided by a majority vote how the new calendar should be organized and the order in which the various gods would be honored. So the sovereignty of the group over itself clearly also covered its gods and their affairs. I should perhaps interject, in passing, that there was a hierarchy in the way that things were ordered: the affairs of the gods were dealt with first, and by this select circle of citizens from long-established families. But why and how did mortals, human beings, gain such a hold over ‘‘the affairs of the gods’’? It turns out that among these people, ‘‘our’’ Greeks, the gods, the gods of Olympus and the whole world, never thought of inventing such a thing as a ‘‘city.’’ Cities were an invention of men, of mortals, and one fine day the gods woke up to this fact. In no time, they were jostling at the gate, clamoring for the privileges of a so-called poliad deity - as it were, a better paid ‘‘chair’’ than an ordinary seat in the pantheon