Theocratic Biopolitics

Paipais delivers an impressive and original synthesis of the debates on political theology and biopolitics of the last decades, reining in the former from its tendency to escape into transcendence and keeping the latter from foundering in a vitalist immanence. -- Miguel Vatter, Deakin University
Paipais’s book eruditely brings together the fields of biopolitics and political theology in a way that enriches and transforms both of them. His vision of a theocratic biopolitics affirms hope, faith and love amidst the despair of our times. This is one of the most significant works of political theory in recent years. -- Sergei Prozorov, University of Jyväskylä
Vassilios Paipais’s Theocratic Biopolitics is a daring new proposal which skilfully navigates between the twin dangers that dominated the discourse of political theology: the sovereignty of the divine transcendence, on the one hand, and the desacralised biopolitics of pure life, on the other. It argues that we need to find a more dialectical way between the sovereign power based on the wrong idea of the divine and the total profanation of biopower. By grounding his notion of the divine in the incarnational kenosis, Paipais shows that a right kind of theocracy is nothing to be feared. -- Agata Bielik-Robson, University of Nottingham