Archipelago of Exception - Zygmunt Bauman and Giorgio Agamben in conversation

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Lenten Reflection 2a: Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18

Genesis 15:1-12, 17-18
15:1 After these things the word of the LORD came to Abram in a vision, "Do not be afraid, Abram, I am your shield; your reward shall be very great."
15:2 But Abram said, "O Lord GOD, what will you give me, for I continue childless, and the heir of my house is Eliezer of Damascus?"
15:3 And Abram said, "You have given me no offspring, and so a slave born in my house is to be my heir."
15:4 But the word of the LORD came to him, "This man shall not be your heir; no one but your very own issue shall be your heir."
15:5 He brought him outside and said, "Look toward heaven and count the stars, if you are able to count them." Then he said to him, "So shall your descendants be."
15:6 And he believed the LORD; and the LORD reckoned it to him as righteousness.
15:7 Then he said to him, "I am the LORD who brought you from Ur of the Chaldeans, to give you this land to possess."
15:8 But he said, "O Lord GOD, how am I to know that I shall possess it?"
15:9 He said to him, "Bring me a heifer three years old, a female goat three years old, a ram three years old, a turtledove, and a young pigeon."
15:10 He brought him all these and cut them in two, laying each half over against the other; but he did not cut the birds in two.
15:11 And when birds of prey came down on the carcasses, Abram drove them away.
15:12 As the sun was going down, a deep sleep fell upon Abram, and a deep and terrifying darkness descended upon him.
15:17 When the sun had gone down and it was dark, a smoking fire pot and a flaming torch passed between these pieces.
15:18 On that day the LORD made [literally, ”cut”] a covenant with Abram, saying, "To your descendants I give this land, from the river of Egypt to the great river, the river Euphrates...."

Comment
Apart from containing the Pauline proof text for the possible inclusion of the Gentiles or goyim into the people of God – the faith of Abram that was “credited to him has righteousness” –this text is about the promise of (1) offspring and (2) land; and it is about the making, the cutting, of a covenant. The first promise takes place in the evening (how else could Abram count the stars?); it involves a dialogue between God and Abram; it concerns the material extension of Abram’s seed and it concludes with a word of promise: the deal is sealed with a word made in good faith. The second promise begins in the evening and concludes in the “terrifying darkness” of a deep sleep; it begins with dialogue and concludes with an opaque, nocturnal manifestation of divine presence; it concerns the material territory which Abram’s offspring should populate and the deal is sealed with a covenant, with a highly symbolic ritual which translates a promise in good faith to an externalized and binding obligation – the cutting of the covenant corresponds to the cutting of the animals; the passing of the divine between the cuts obligates, through threat of being cut in half himself, God to follow through.

Lenten Reflection 1b: Romans 10.8b-13

Romans 10:8b-13
10:8b "The word is near you, on your lips and in your heart" (that is, the word of faith that we proclaim);
10:9 because if you confess with your lips that Jesus is Lord and believe in your heart that God raised him from the dead, you will be saved.
10:10 For one believes with the heart and so is justified, and one confesses with the mouth and so is saved.
10:11 The scripture says, "No one who believes in him will be put to shame."
10:12 For there is no distinction between Jew and Greek; the same Lord is Lord of all and is generous to all who call on him.
10:13 For, "Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord shall be saved."

Comment
Jacob Taubes makes much of the connection between Paul and Moses: the deepest connection concerns their mutual willingness to be “blotted out” or “accursed,” with respect to God, for the sake of the people of Israel (Moses in order that God not destroy them after the golden calf incident, Paul in order that God would save more than a remnant). Here is another example of a Pauline repetition of Moses. Paul reads Deut 30 and inserts “faith” where Moses says “commandment,” turning Moses’ assurance to Israel of the closeness of the law into the Gentile’s immanent potential for salvation. (It is only a hermeneutical depravity that would read v.9 as an isolatable formula for salvation.) The demands of the law are not as much mitigated as displaced. The fact that, as Paul says earlier in the chapter, “Christ is the telos of the law,” should not be read only as cessation, but also as a fulfillment. Agamben takes the ambiguity of telos as the key to the Pauline reading of the law; as a kind of fulfillment in cessation.

The political significance of confession should also not be missed. Paul rereads Jewish law in light of its messianic transformation and, in this same gesture, undermines Roman law. To name as sovereign anyone other than Caesar would be treasonous; especially a Jewish peasant whom this same empire had executed. (Jesus would, in this way, fulfill the political function of the empty signifier as Laclau understands it: as that signifier which “empties itself” [cf. Phil 2.7] of content, or dies, in order that disparate demands and desires cohere – i.e. become universal – under a particular name.) In the text of Deuteronomy that Paul is glossing, the exhortation to keep the law turns quickly to the prohibition of idolatry: “But if your heart turns away and you do not hear, but are led astray to bow down to other gods and serve them, I declare to you today that you shall perish”. Turning to law is also a turning away from idolatry – an idolatry exemplified in the religious practices of the Canaanites. The turning to faith carries over this prohibition of idolatry – exemplified in the theologico-political practices of the Romans.

Lenten Reflection 1a: Deut 26.1-11

In an effort at Lenten discipline I have decided to try to offer reflections on the readings from the revised common lectionary. I have attempted this for several years in a row and rarely make it past the second Sunday in Lent. We'll see what happens this year.

Deuteronomy 26:1-11
26:1 When you have come into the land that the LORD your God is giving you as an inheritance to possess, and you possess it, and settle in it,
26:2 you shall take some of the first of all the fruit of the ground, which you harvest from the land that the LORD your God is giving you, and you shall put it in a basket and go to the place that the LORD your God will choose as a dwelling for his name.
26:3 You shall go to the priest who is in office at that time, and say to him, "Today I declare to the LORD your God that I have come into the land that the LORD swore to our ancestors to give us."
26:4 When the priest takes the basket from your hand and sets it down before the altar of the LORD your God,
26:5 you shall make this response before the LORD your God: "A wandering Aramean was my ancestor; he went down into Egypt and lived there as an alien, few in number, and there he became a great nation, mighty and populous.
26:6 When the Egyptians treated us harshly and afflicted us, by imposing hard labor on us,
26:7 we cried to the LORD, the God of our ancestors; the LORD heard our voice and saw our affliction, our toil, and our oppression.
26:8 The LORD brought us out of Egypt with a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, with a terrifying display of power, and with signs and wonders;
26:9 and he brought us into this place and gave us this land, a land flowing with milk and honey.
26:10 So now I bring the first of the fruit of the ground that you, O LORD, have given me." You shall set it down before the LORD your God and bow down before the LORD your God.
26:11 Then you, together with the Levites and the aliens who reside among you, shall celebrate with all the bounty that the LORD your God has given to you and to your house.

Comment
1.The first thing: abundance is not something to be spurned or denounced, but received and used in a certain way – abundance is a gift. The abundance that Israel experiences in Canaan is an inheritance, a gift from God; not a gift received in symmetry to an act – like produce to labour – but a gift that exceeds calculable reciprocity. There is a proportionality characteristic of covenant: an act of faithfulness was required of each party – this is the fundamental nature of a covenant (theological or juridical). However, this is a radically disproportionate proportionality. Israel’s obedience to the word of God, as difficult as it is, does not approximate the gift that is received in return: a new life in a new land as a great nation.

2. In order that historical memory not fail and the gratuitousness of a gift not be confused with what is due, a liturgical act is instituted. In this act the economy of the gift is continued: Israel gives back to God. In this gesture the excess of God’s initial gift is symbolically reciprocated: the first fruits are given. Before Israel can enjoy the produce of the land they must sacrifice it; offer it up to the one who has given it to them. Materially the sacrifice does not diminish the abundance, enjoyment is allowed, even if it is deferred. The scriptural significance of offering what is first has a precedent in the story of Cain and Abel (Gen. 4). It seems that the preference God shows to Abel has to do with the fact that he offered the “firstlings of his flock” (v.4) while Cain simply brought “an offering of the fruit of the ground” (v.3). Cain did not offer the premier fruit, his offering was not primordial or originary enough – the exigency of “fundamental ontology”—the demand for the more originary – is here prefigured as a theological exigency (is ontotheology overcome?)

3. The instituted liturgical act is fundamentally a repetition. It is the perpetual reiteration of the founding gesture of divine gift – as an exodus from Egypt (and a violence inflicted) and an entrance into the land of the Canaanites (and a violence inflicted) – in the form of autobiography or etiology: “a wandering Aramean was my ancestor…” Israel lives the new as the constant iteration of the old. Life in Canaan is a double life: it is lived in both the promised land and the desert at the same time. The comfort and abundance of life in the promised land is perforated by the memory of the privation of the desert – perhaps this is why Derrida calls both the desert and the promised land “aporetic places.”

4. The identity of this people does not coincide with itself. First of all Israel qua Israel is only constituted in this liturgical repetition. It is this practice that prevents the people of God from becoming “like the other nations.” This will be the recurring problem for Israel in Canaan, primarily in terms of its desire for a King (cf. Deut 17.14). Israel is distinguished from the Canaanites not by virtue of ethnicity but by way of its relation to it itself by way of its relation to God. Second, the story that is repeated – “a wandering Aramean…” – points to a heterogeneous origin in terms of ethnicity, but more importantly in terms of the indefiniteness of wandering. Finally, even Israel present in the land, bound together through a collective subjectivation, is not permitted to settle into a fixed identity: the “alien among you” will be a full participant in the liturgical life of this people – and in this way be an originary “member” of the community.

Messianic Politics (iii b): The Commandment

In the last post I left a quote from Benjamin's "Critique of Violence" hanging with one from Rosenzweig's Star of Redemption, on the meaning of commandment. I would like to return to this juxtaposition. But here again, I will end by leaving a quotation in suspension, this time from Gershom Scholem's 1919 essay "On Jonah and Justice." It is my hope that the three quotations will eventually circulate with some coherence.
Benjamin:

For the question “May I kill?” meets its irreducible answer in the commandment “Thou shalt not kill.” This commandment precedes the deed, just as God was “preventing” the deed. But just as it may not be fear of punishment that enforces obedience, the injunction becomes inapplicable, incommensurable once the deed is accomplished. No judgment of the deed can be derived from the commandment. And so neither the divine judgment, nor the grounds for this judgment, can be known in advance. Those who base a condemnation of all violent killing of one person by another on the commandment are therefore mistaken. It exists not as a criterion of judgment, but as a guideline for the actions of persons or communities who have to wrestle with it in solitude and, in exceptional cases, to take on themselves the responsibility of ignoring it. Thus it was understood by Judaism, which expressly rejected the condemnation of killing in self-defense. But those thinkers who take the opposed view refer to a more distant theorem, on which they possibly propose to base even the commandment itself. This is the doctrine of the sanctity of life, which they either apply to all animal or even vegetable life, or limit to human life (298).

Two things seem significant to me: (1) the temporality of the commandment, and (2) the discontinuity between commandment and judgment. The temporality of the commandment is what prevents it from functioning as an a posteri judgment (but, no more does it function as an a priori judgment – contra Kant, such a possibility does not exist). Judgment and command are incommensurable by virtue of their temporal modes. Judgment takes place, by definition, after the deed, good or bad. In contrast Benjamin says of the commandment that it “precedes the deed”. Benjamin does not say explicitly whether the command comes from the present or the past, but it certainly cannot be addressed to the future: it cannot judge a deed already done – for this the substrate of law would be necessary. At this point the Rosenzweig connection comes into view.

Whereas the indicative has all the circumstances behind it that established the objectivity and whose purest form seems to be the past, the commandment is an absolutely pure present for which nothing has prepared it. And not only has nothing prepared it; it is absolutely unpremeditated. The imperative of the commandment makes no forecast for the future; it can imagine only the immediacy of obedience. If it were to think of a future or an “always,” it would be neither a commandment nor an order, but a law. The law counts on periods of time, on a future, on duration. The commandment knows only the moment; it waits for the outcome right within the moment of its growing audible, and when it possesses the spell of the genuine tone of a commandment, it will never be disappointing in this awaiting (191).

With recourse to its grammatical structure, Rosenzweig ties the commandment, as imperative, to the present. In this respect, he offers a more precise temporal indexation than Benjamin, but like Benjamin he identifies the commandment as blind to the future. The commandment – and the commandment of love, the “greatest commandment,” is exemplary here – knows only the present and anticipates only obedience, not consequences. When “Love me!” (or “Do not kill!”) becomes “Love me, or else…” it falls into law. For while the law “counts on periods of time, on a future, on duration…the commandment knows only the moment.” The binding of the commandment to the present marks its fundamental difference from law. In this way the divine violence that Benjamin is speaking of meets its historical limit not by virtue of the illegality of murder, but because of the commandment not to kill. He can still speak of the law-destroying character of divine violence, so it seems, while not lapsing into a kind of anarchism.

The second aspect that I would like to elaborate is the discontinuity that Benjamin names, between commandment and judgment. He says that “no judgment of the deed can be derived from the commandment” and further that “neither the divine judgment, nor the grounds for this judgment, can be known in advance.” Judgment, Divine judgment, does take place, but it cannot be seen to follow necessarily from the commandment. It depends upon a double contingency: (human) disobedience and (divine) decision. The only way for this contingency to be overcome, for the semiotic relation between commandment and judgment to be established, is for law to become operative. Law is the guarantee of continuity. But commandment precedes both the deed and law. Furthermore, the very task of the “critique of violence” is to interrogate violence that is subtracted from any law: a pure violence. There is a necessary hiatus or “deferment” between one and the other. Without this deferment the distinction between law and justice is undone.

On the matter of distinguishing between law and justice, we can look behind Benjamin’s Critique to the early essay by Gershom Scholem, “On Jonah and Justice.” But, as I mentioned, I will leave this quotation in suspension for now.

Justice is the idea of the historical annihilation of divine judgment, and just is that deed which neutralizes divine judgment upon it. Justice is the indifference of the Last Judgment; that means, within it unfolds that sphere in which the enactment of the Last Judgment is infinitely deferred. Messianic is that realm which no Last Judgment follows. Therefore the prophets demand justice, in order infinitely to eliminate the Last Judgment. In just actions, the messianic realm is immediately erected (357).

A Recent Agamben Lecture

"The Power and the Glory"

A lecture on the theme of "economic theology"

Messianic Politics (iii): Law

Agamben is basically correct when he says of messianism that its “essential character” concerns a “particular relation to the law.” He argues that “in Judaism as in Christianity and Shiite Islam, the messianic event above all signifies a crisis and a radical transformation of the entire order of the law… The Messiah is… the figure through which religion confronts the problem of the Law, decisively reckoning with it” (Potentialities, 163). This would be true of both the inflationary and the deflationary traditions of messianism. The fundamental difference between them, then, would be the way that law is “reckoned” with. In either case the law would be “read” differently. However, while for the latter it is basically a hermeneutical question of a fidelity to the law in a new interpretive context, for the former it is ultimately a political question that has to do with the validity of the law as such. Agamben falls much more into the inflationary category but his reading of law (and of Benjamin) in the messianic era, as I hope to show before too long, is more complex than a simple antinomianism – the Pauline notion of katargein, which means to “render inoperative” (e.g. Rom 7.6), is significant here.

But behind Agamben, in the inflationary tradition, stands Benjamin. Inspired by Judith Butler’s excellent essay, I would like to examine Benjamin’s early text on law: “Critique of Violence.” Here it would be relatively easy to identify an antinomian or anarchistic impulse which does away with law in the interest of a radically new, indeed miraculously ordained, order. However, there is more at work in this text than that. Butler notes that “Benjamin nowhere argues that all legal systems should be opposed, and it is unclear on the basis of this text whether he opposes certain rules of law and not others. Moreover, if he traffics here with anarchism, we should at least pause over what anarchism might mean in this context and keep in mind that Benjamin takes seriously the commandment “Thou shalt not kill”” (203). Thus, according to Butler, Benjamin evades the charge of antinomianism in two moves. First, by way of occlusion: law receives no positive valuation in this essay, but this does not mean that it has none for Benjamin; and second, by recourse to a certain understanding of commandment. It is the second that most interests me here.

Benjamin begins his essay by highlighting the essential connection between law (and justice) and violence. “The task of a critique of violence,” he says, “can be summarized as that of expounding its relation to law and justice…With regard to [law], it is clear that the most elementary relationship within any legal system is that of ends and means, and, further, that violence can first be sought only in the realm of means, not ends” (277). Violence is only ever justified legally in terms of the legitimacy of the reason for which it is dispensed (“because they are an immanent threat to our national security,” “because it’s the only way to be sure he doesn’t do it again,” etc.). But, according to Benjamin, this is no valid criterion for critiquing violence, as it does not target the violence itself, but only the particular cases of its use (international disputes, capital punishment, etc.). Therefore, “a more exact criteria is needed, which would discriminate within the sphere of means themselves” (ibid).

In order to critique violence itself – as means – it is necessary to understand more fully its essential connection to law. The state’s monopoly on violence, claims Benjamin, is attained in the interest of preserving, not any particular law, but law as such (this is what Benjamin calls “law-preserving violence”). The eruption of any violence that falls outside of the rule of law threatens: (1) to reveal the violence constitutive of any legal order (what Benjamin calls “lawmaking violence”); and (2) to potentially found a new legal order. The state recognizes that violence is threatening to the whole legal edifice and therefore mostly opposes and extra-state exercise of it or, in some cases, strategically negotiates with it by making certain concessions (e.g. legalizing labour strikes).

Benjamin summarizes the connection between law and violence in its two modes: "All violence as a means is either lawmaking or law-preserving. If it lays claim to neither of these predicates, it forfeits all validity. It follows, however, that all violence as a means, even in the most favorable case, is implicated in the problematic of law itself" (287).

With respect to law-preserving violence, Benjamin claims that a legal contract “leads finally to possible violence. It confers on both parties the right to take recourse to violence in some form against the other, should he break the agreement. Not only that; like the outcome, the origin of every contract also points toward violence” (288) This latter aspect of law – its originary or lawmaking violence – is illustrated by what Benjamin calls “mythical violence.” Such a violence is “not a means but a manifestation.” (294) That is, “mythical violence in its archetypal form is a mere manifestation of the gods. Not a means to their ends, scarcely a manifestation of their will, but first of all a manifestation of their existence. Benjamin refers to the legend of Niobe in this respect (294). This is the fateful nature of violence in its lawmaking form, it is by fiat that violence is dispensed, not by virtue of a criminal act, as though a prior law had been transgressed; instead, law comes along after the fact, retroactively translating suffering into guilt. This is what distinguishes such violence from sheer destructiveness: “Although it brings a cruel death to Niobe’s children, it stops short of the life of their mother, whom it leaves behind, more guilty than before through the death of her children both as an eternally mute bearer of guilt and as a boundary stone on the frontier between men and gods.” (295) Thus law, originally violent and violently maintained, can establish itself as “power,” but never as “justice.” (295) Justice, which is singular, not generalizable, must be sought elsewhere, in another force, another violence that is “unalloyed” to any ends and binds itself no system of legality. Such a possibility exists, for Benjamin, only in a “divine violence.”

If mythical violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-destroying; if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them; if mythical violence brings at once guilt and retribution, divine power only expiates; if the former threatens, the latter strikes; if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood (297).

Where the legend of Niobe was an exemplary case of lawmaking, mythical violence, Benjamin refers to the biblical story of Korah in Numbers 16 as an instance of divine violence. It is not clear to me that the story meets all of the criteria that Benjamin has just delineated as characteristic of divine violence – law-destroying, boundary-destroying, expiatory, bloodless (he does mention that the law-destroying aspect “cannot be shown in detail here”) – however, the bloodlessness of the Levites’ who went down “alive into Sheol (v.33) is an essential part of the story; and their “becoming holy at the cost of their lives” (v.38) speaks to the expiatory character. Benjamin acknowledges that holding up as exemplary a story of annihilation will itself provoke “violent reactions” and anticipates the counter argument that “taken to its logical conclusion it confers on men even lethal power against one another.” (298) Without a doubt, this counter argument should be raised. But Benjamin takes this opportunity to insert a discussion on the “commandment” as distinct from law. I will cite Benjamin at some length.

For the question “May I kill?” meets its irreducible answer in the commandment “Thou shalt not kill.” This commandment precedes the deed, just as God was “preventing” the deed. But just as it may not be fear of punishment that enforces obedience, the injunction becomes inapplicable, incommensurable once the deed is accomplished. No judgment of the deed can be derived from the commandment. nd so neither the divine judgment, nor the grounds for this judgment, can be known in advance. Those who base a condemnation of all violent killing of one person by another on the commandment are therefore mistaken. It exists not as a criterion of judgment, but as a guideline for the actions of persons or communities who have to wrestle with it in solitude and, in exceptional cases, to take on themselves the responsibility of ignoring it. Thus it was understood by Judaism, which expressly rejected the condemnation of killing in self-defense. But those thinkers who take the opposed view refer to a more distant theorem, on which the possibly propose to base even the commandment itself. This is the doctrine of the sanctity of life, which they either apply to all animal or even vegetable life, or limit to human life (298).

I want to place this extended citation alongside another: a text from Rozensweig’s Star of Redemption that, no doubt, stands somewhere in the background of Benjamin’s reflections on commandment. I will reserve my own reflections on this juxtaposition for the next post.

Rosenzweig’s takes up the recurring biblical question: “What then is the commandment of all commandments?” He responds with the recurring biblical answer: “Love!...” (Deut 6.4-5; Mark 12.29-30; 1Cor 13.13; Gal 5.14). He then offers the following commentary:

Surely, love cannot be commanded; no third party can command it or obtain it by force. No third party can do this, but the One can. The commandment of love can only come from the mouth of the love. Only the one who loves, but really he can say and does say: Love me. From his mouth, the commandment of love is not a strange commandment, it is nothing other than the voice of love itself. The love of the lover has no other word to express itself than the commandment. Everything else is already no longer immediate expression, but explanation – explanation of love. The explanation of love is very deficient, and like every explanation, it always comes after the event; and therefore, since love of the lover is the present, it really always comes too late. If the beloved, in the eternal faithfulness of her love, did not open her arms to receive it, the explanation would fall completely into the void. But the commandment in the imperative, the immediate commandment, springing from the moment and already on the way to being said aloud at the moment of its springing up – for saying aloud and springing up are one and the same thing in the imperative to love – the “Love me” of the lover, this is the absolutely perfect expression, the perfectly pure language of love. Whereas the indicative has all the circumstances behind it that established the objectivity and whose purest form seems to be the past, the commandment is an absolutely pure present for which nothing has prepared it. And not only has nothing prepared it; it is absolutely unpremeditated. The imperative of the commandment makes no forecast for the future; it can imagine only the immediacy of obedience. If it were to think of a future or an “always,” it would be neither a commandment nor an order, but a law. The law counts on periods of time, on a future, on duration. The commandment knows only the moment; it waits for the outcome right within the moment of its growing audible, and when it possesses the spell of the genuine tone of a commandment, it will never be disappointing in this awaiting.

The commandment is thus – pure present. But, whereas every other commandment, at last when considered from the outside and as it were after the event, could have been just as well a law, the commandment of love alone is absolutely incapable of being law; it can only be commandment. All other commandments can pour their content into the form of the law, this one alone refuses to be decanted, its content tolerates only the form of the commandment, of the immediate presentness and unity where consciousness, expression and waiting for fulfillment are gathered together. So, as the one pure commandment, it is the highest of all commandments, and where it takes the lead as such, then all that could also be law by another route and seen from the outside also becomes a commandment. God’s first word to the soul that is united with him is the “Love me”; so, everything that he could still reveal to it otherwise under the form of law, is transformed without further ado into words which he commands it “today”; all this becomes the setting forth of the one and first commandment, the commandment to love him. All Revelation is placed under the great sign of the today; it is “today “ that God commands and it is “today that his voice is to be heard. It is the today in which the love of the lover lives – this imperative today of the commandment (190-192).