"What Are the Gods to Us Now?": Secular Theology and the Modernity of Law

Abstract

Integrating responses of Nietzsche to the death of God with classic instances of modernist political theory, a constituent parallel is drawn between monotheistic religion and modern law — a parallel in that each matches the other, but a parallel also in that neither ever meets the other. This relation yet differentiation reveals an ontologically challenging modern law that conforms to, yet completely counters, its positivist and instrumental subordinations in modernity.