Teologia politica del corpo : un’estetica dell’incarnazione in Schmitt, Kantorowicz e Balthasar

The body as an image of power – from Saint Paul’s letters to Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan – is a successful theological-political figure. On the body image is also centered Carl Schmitt’s political theology conceived from his studies about Roman Catholicism. Thus, starting from Schmitt’s theory of Church’s visibility, it is possible to investigate the relationship between body meta- phor and political theology. There are two opposite ways to develop this link: the first, it is structuring a transcendence through the body and, the second, it is creating an immanence trough the embodiment. The first is systematized by Kantorowicz in The King’s two bodies, the second concerns closer Carl Schmitt’s idea of incarnation shared by Hans Urs von Balthasar. The link between immanence and transcendence is therefore the key to understand how the body metaphor has to be read from an aesthetical perspective. This appears to be the only way to safeguard a secularized form of transcendence when bare immanence is evidently untenable. In this way, my aim is to ask where should be placed the mythopoetic resources that the political theology now seems unable to preserve.