Sanctifying Profanation – Agamben's Critique of Apophatic Theology as a Call for Revision

In the study of how societies organize power, a persistent puzzle has long haunted political thinkers: how can a person break free from the absolute authority of a state without accidentally rebuilding that same authority in the process? This question sits at the intersection of political philosophy and theology, a field where scholars examine how religious ideas shape the way governments claim to rule. For centuries, thinkers have argued that the idea of a hidden, all-knowing divine power often serves as a blueprint for human leaders who claim to know the perfect way to live. When a government acts as if it possesses absolute truth, it treats its citizens as subjects to be controlled rather than people to be free. The challenge, then, is to find a way to remove this false sense of absolute authority without simply replacing it with a new, equally rigid system.

A recent article by Pinhas Luzon, a researcher at the University of Haifa, tackles this problem by looking at the work of Giorgio Agamben, a prominent Italian philosopher. Agamben spent his career analyzing how modern governments trap people in a state of "bare life," where they are stripped of rights and reduced to mere biological existence under the shadow of sovereign power. Agamben suggested that the only way out was to "profane" these sacred powers—to take them out of their special, untouchable status and return them to common, everyday use. However, Agamben left a critical question unanswered: how do we pass this freedom to future generations without the act of passing it down turning into a new kind of rule? Luzon argues that Agamben himself provided the key to this puzzle, but only if we look closely at his critique of a specific type of religious thinking called apophatic theology. This is the tradition of describing God by saying what He is not, emphasizing that the divine is ultimately beyond human understanding. Luzon proposes that Agamben was not rejecting this tradition, but rather asking for it to be fixed, or revised, to solve the political problem of freedom.

The paper begins by mapping out how other scholars have tried to understand Agamben's work, finding that they all miss the mark in the same way. Some read him as a pure philosopher of existence, ignoring the religious roots of his ideas. Others see him as a moral guide who needs a clear, commanding God to give his ethics weight. A third group views him as a pessimist who believes that waiting for a messianic end is the only option, effectively giving up on active political change. Luzon argues that all these readings fail because they discard the theological structure that Agamben actually relies on. They treat the religious elements as obstacles to be removed, rather than the very tools needed to dismantle power. By ignoring the "apophatic" structure—the idea that true authority cannot be fully known or grasped—these interpretations lose the ability to explain how freedom can be sustained over time.

Luzon's central move is to treat Agamben's critique of apophatic theology not as a rejection, but as a request for an internal upgrade. Agamben criticized a version of this theology where hiddenness was used to magnify a tyrannical divine majesty, making God seem like an oppressive ruler. However, Luzon points out that Agamben continued to build his entire philosophy on the same theological foundation, specifically using the ideas of the Jewish philosopher Walter Benjamin and the writings of the Apostle Paul. This suggests that Agamben did not want to throw away the structure; he wanted to repair the part where it went wrong. Luzon reads Agamben's work as a "revise and resubmit," a term used in academic publishing when a reviewer sees potential in a paper but asks the author to fix a specific flaw before it can be accepted. In this view, Agamben identified the flaw—the distortion of hiddenness into oppression—but left the actual repair work for others to complete.

To perform this repair, Luzon develops a framework built on seven connected steps, which he calls "Critical Political Theology." The process starts with the simple, undeniable fact that human minds are limited. We cannot fully grasp the infinite or the absolute. When we encounter this limit, we are forced to infer the existence of something beyond our understanding, a concept Luzon calls the "incomprehensible God." This is not a god we can define or control, but a presence that remains mysterious. The second step is that this realization happens again and again. Every time we truly encounter reality or another person, we hit this same wall of limitation, and we must make the same inference anew. This constant repetition prevents us from ever settling into a state where we think we have all the answers.

The third step brings this into human relationships. When we meet another person, we realize that they are just as mysterious and separate from us as we are from them. This mutual recognition creates a deep sense of humility, not just as a nice feeling, but as a structural fact of our existence. No one can claim to know everything about another person or about the world. This humility then moves into the political sphere as the fourth step. If no human mind can hold absolute knowledge, then no human government can legitimately claim absolute authority. Any regime that tries to act as if it knows the perfect truth is building its power on a lie. The structure of their claim collapses from the inside because it contradicts the fundamental limits of human consciousness.

The fifth step is resistance. This is not a violent uprising, but a continuous political movement that stops absolute authority from forming in the first place. Whenever a leader or a doctrine tries to claim they have the full truth, this resistance activates the previous steps, forcing them to reveal the shaky ground they stand on. The power of this resistance lies in the simple act of disclosure: showing that the claim to total knowledge is impossible. The sixth step introduces a new kind of holiness, which Luzon calls "transgressive sanctity." Unlike traditional holiness, which is attached to a known object or rule, this sanctity arises only after the act of resistance. It is a sacred quality that belongs to the act of breaking free from false authority. Because it has no fixed content or rulebook, it cannot be turned into a new set of laws or a new authority. It remains free and ungraspable.

The final step, and the title of the paper, is "sanctifying profanation." This is the ultimate political act where we remove the false sacred status that power has stolen for itself. By stripping away the illusion of absolute authority, we clear the way for a genuine encounter with our own limits and the mystery beyond them. In doing so, the act of profanation itself becomes holy, not because it follows a rule, but because it preserves the freedom of the mystery. This creates a unique solution to the original problem: the freedom gained from this act can be passed down to future generations because the "gift" being passed is not a set of rules or a new leader, but the very form of the act itself. The next generation inherits the tool of dismantling authority, not a new authority to obey.

Luzon concludes that this framework does more than just finish Agamben's thought; it offers a way for critical political thinking to survive without collapsing into a new tyranny. By sharpening the apophatic tradition—keeping the focus on what cannot be known—it creates a ground for politics that is inherently resistant to domination. The paper suggests that theology, often seen as the enemy of critical thought, can actually be its strongest ally when it is understood as a practice of acknowledging limits. The transmission of freedom becomes possible because the very shape of the transmission carries the same structure that made the freedom possible in the first place. In this way, the work completes the project Agamben started, offering a path where the extraction of the individual from sovereign power can be bequeathed across time without ever restoring the power that was removed.