Liturgical Power

The second chapter seeks to deepen and extend Agamben’s analysis by describing the terms of a specifically Christian technology of power. Its point of departure is Erik Peterson’s suggestion that the form of political action specific to Christianity coincides with the Church’s appropriation of the practice that in the ancient Greek polis was termed leitourgia; a suggestion which in turn stimulates a reappraisal of Foucault’s influential notion of pastoral power. “Pastoral power,” the chapter argues, on the basis of a detailed reconstruction of the semantic history of the term (laos) that in the Greek biblical tradition designates the “people” as the referent of pastoral intervention, is more precisely conceived as “liturgical power.” Only by emphasising its liturgical dimension, it contends, can we fully grasp the stakes of the process that Foucault himself suggestively described as the “institutionalisation of the pastorate” and which coincides with the establishment of a fundamental division in the single people of God.