redemption(s):notes on the future

Reflections on an Obscure Hope

2008-11-05T14:15:00.005-05:00

Today, of all days, I began what will be my first significant archivable contribution – however meager – to the store of human knowledge. Today, of all days, I put finger to keyboard and electronically inscribed text, some of which will – hopefully – make it to the final form of my doctoral dissertation.

I find it worth registering and archiving this moment, this day, not in order to make any promises about the quality or importance of the work that I will – hopefully – one day complete. I single out this moment, this day, because the work that I began today cannot really be begun today.

I planned to compose a chapter on the relation between history and redemption – a relation that is, in fact, a non-relation. I planned to explore what Gershom Scholem calls a “theory of catastrophe.” This is a theory whose practice would seem exceedingly problematic, if not terroristic. The fact is, however, that this theory of catastrophe has no practice, properly – historically – speaking. This theory of catastrophe only names a transition, or a lack of transition, between the temporal and profane movement of history on the one hand, and the end of history on the other.

History can be thought of as the temporal flow that many would like to believe is carrying us toward a redemption that is immanent, calculable and implementable – what we could call a theory of “progress.” It is only from this perspective, from the perspective of the ideology of progress, that the end of history appears to be a “catastrophe.” That is, from the perspective of history, redemption (and redemption is still a category of modern “secular” politics) would be the completion and fulfillment of human progress and not its interruption.

But should, indeed, can redemption be forced to produce and endure such a “progress.” History as progress is, in one sense, an archive of human knowledge and accomplishment. But it is one that has been purchased at the price of innumerable atrocities. It is thus, a “document of barbarism” and an archive of violence. Would not redemption better be thought of as the “end” of history in terms of the dissolution of violence and barbarism instead of its “end” as its telos and justification? Would not redemption be the interruption of history…maybe even today?

This seems to me, or it seemed to me before today – and probably only for today – to be an important category of historiography, and of politics. But today, and – hopefully – only for today, the archive of human progress has displayed itself one-sidedly: in honor, despite its shame; in peace, despite its wars; in freedom, despite its slavery. This is not to say that what we have witnessed today is honor, peace and freedom, but it has displayed itself as such. This is a spectacle, no doubt, but it is a spectacle that in some oblique way – hopefully – points to, promises, that which exceeds its own immanent progress and escapes its ineffaceable violence.

de-dialectizing

2008-08-14T15:38:00.003-04:00

Proper 15 (20) Year A - Romans 11:1-2a, 29-32
11:1 I ask, then, has God rejected his people? By no means! I myself am an Israelite, a descendant of Abraham, a member of the tribe of Benjamin.
11:2a God has not rejected his people whom he foreknew. Do you not know what the scripture says of Elijah, how he pleads with God against Israel?
11:29 for the gifts and the calling of God are irrevocable.
11:30 Just as you were once disobedient to God but have now received mercy because of their disobedience,
11:31 so they have now been disobedient in order that, by the mercy shown to you, they too may now receive mercy.
11:32 For God has imprisoned all in disobedience so that he may be merciful to all.

Strange choice: to break up a section of text, leaving a rhetorical question hanging – thus making it cease to be rhetorical and to become a question of knowing or not knowing. So, “do you not know?” Whether or not one knows, what will be clear to the hearers of this week’s text is that of the total irrevocability of a promise.

The final verses are dialectical in their reasoning: the total negation of innocence in order that this negation of innocence might be negated. Mercy is the result.
Nothing, it seems, is outside the totality – no innocence in guilt, no guilt in innocence. No remainder, no remnant.

But the remainder or the remnant is precisely the trope that sustains the argument Paul is developing here (in the occluded verses). It is not a totalizing or dialectical co-implication of guilt and mercy. Total guilt is thwarted by a remnant of the just and mercy is possible because of the minimal continuity of this thin thread of justice. This reasoning is not dialectical and the totalizing that does emerge is a totalizing that is absolute: it is that which absolves itself from any dialectical movements of history. If the eschaton is history’s telos, it is, from the perspective of the historical – the “profane” in Benjamin’s terms – not its completion or its supplement, but its (catastrophic) end.

The Theological Death Drive

2008-02-18T12:06:00.002-05:00

Lent 3: Romans 5:1-11
5:1 Therefore, since we are justified by faith, we have peace with God through our Lord Jesus Christ,
5:2 through whom we have obtained access to this grace in which we stand; and we boast in our hope of sharing the glory of God.
5:3 And not only that, but we also boast in our sufferings, knowing that suffering produces endurance,
5:4 and endurance produces character, and character produces hope,
5:5 and hope does not disappoint us, because God's love has been poured into our hearts through the Holy Spirit that has been given to us.
5:6 For while we were still weak, at the right time Christ died for the ungodly.
5:7 Indeed, rarely will anyone die for a righteous person--though perhaps for a good person someone might actually dare to die.
5:8 But God proves his love for us in that while we still were sinners Christ died for us.
5:9 Much more surely then, now that we have been justified by his blood, will we be saved through him from the wrath of God.
5:10 For if while we were enemies, we were reconciled to God through the death of his Son, much more surely, having been reconciled, will we be saved by his life.
5:11 But more than that, we even boast in God through our Lord Jesus Christ, through whom we have now received reconciliation.

The Lectionary doubles back and returns to Romans 5, 2 weeks later and 11 verses earlier. The excess of grace is again (or already) given in comparative terms: “much more surely…” The limit between abundance and superabundance, between grace as gift and grace as gratuitousness is the limit between death and life. This limit is doubly significant. It is significant eschatologically: As proleptic, Christ’s death and resurrection is the possibility of our resurrection – death is already our “ownmost possibility” (according to Heidegger) – death will ultimately loose its grasp. But it is significant also in terms of historical action. Participation in the eschatological resurrection is deferred by a temporal interval and a historical demand. Death is no mere natural fact. If Christ’s death is the paradigm, then death is a political act. But, of course, death can only be understood as a political act if resurrection is considered a possibility. Further, the historical iteration of the death of Christ takes “symbolic” form. Both in terms of a certain withdrawal from the symbolic order (from the demands of the big other) and in terms of the liturgical (re)citation.

Iterability and the Christ Event

2008-02-13T10:27:00.002-05:00

Lent 1: Romans 5:12-19

5:12 Therefore, just as sin came into the world through one man, and death came through sin, and so death spread to all because all have sinned-
5:13 sin was indeed in the world before the law, but sin is not reckoned when there is no law.
5:14 Yet death exercised dominion from Adam to Moses, even over those whose sins were not like the transgression of Adam, who is a type of the one who was to come.
5:15 But the free gift is not like the trespass. For if the many died through the one man's trespass, much more surely have the grace of God and the free gift in the grace of the one man, Jesus Christ, abounded for the many.
5:16 And the free gift is not like the effect of the one man's sin. For the judgment following one trespass brought condemnation, but the free gift following many trespasses brings justification.
5:17 If, because of the one man's trespass, death exercised dominion through that one, much more surely will those who receive the abundance of grace and the free gift of righteousness exercise dominion in life through the one man, Jesus Christ.
5:18 Therefore just as one man's trespass led to condemnation for all, so one man's act of righteousness leads to justification and life for all.
5:19 For just as by the one man's disobedience the many were made sinners, so by the one man's obedience the many will be made righteous.

Why is the Christ here figured as a type, as the iteration (which means a repetition that includes both difference and deferral, that is, the general structure of differance) of someone who has come before? The Christ event is here still just that – an event – but it is not absolutely singular, it is not without precedent. Does this thereby diminish the eventfulness of the event? Does it mean that Christ is somehow just the provisional name of an archetypal form? Or, is this a purely hermeneutical/rhetorical move?

A certain principle of iterability does seem to be at work here. Derrida implores: “Let us not forget that ‘iterability’ does not signify simply…repeatability of the same, but rather alterability of this same idealized in the singularity of the event…” (Limited Inc, 119) The event is not diffused in the light of the revelation of its iterability, it is simply re-imagined. The singularity of the Christ event does not lie in its purely arbitrary divine origin, but in its adherence to and, at the same time, divergence from a previous moment. The grace that the second Adam unleashes is gratuitous. But gratuitousness is still a measure: it is “more than…” it is “in excess of…” The singularity of the grace inaugurating Christ event is here thematized in terms of small displacements – “much more surely.” In this way the aphorism – a condensed Talmudic image – that claims that when the Messiah comes there will be only a “slight difference.” But, this is a small difference that makes all the difference.

The Production of a Mourning Machine

2008-02-07T10:38:00.000-05:00

Lent 1: Ash Wednesday

Joel 2:1-2, 12-172:1
Blow the trumpet in Zion; sound the alarm on my holy mountain! Let all the inhabitants of the land tremble, for the day of the LORD is coming, it is near-
2:2 a day of darkness and gloom, a day of clouds and thick darkness! Like blackness spread upon the mountains a great and powerful army comes; their like has never been from of old, nor will be again after them in ages to come.
2:12 Yet even now, says the LORD, return to me with all your heart, with fasting, with weeping, and with mourning;
2:13 rend your hearts and not your clothing. Return to the LORD, your God, for he is gracious and merciful, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love, and relents from punishing.
2:14 Who knows whether he will not turn and relent, and leave a blessing behind him, a grain offering and a drink offering for the LORD, your God?
2:15 Blow the trumpet in Zion; sanctify a fast; call a solemn assembly;
2:16 gather the people. Sanctify the congregation; assemble the aged; gather the children, even infants at the breast. Let the bridegroom leave his room, and the bride her canopy.
2:17 Between the vestibule and the altar let the priests, the ministers of the LORD, weep. Let them say, "Spare your people, O LORD, and do not make your heritage a mockery, a byword among the nations. Why should it be said among the peoples, 'Where is their God?'"

I find two things interesting in this text. The first is a not so surprising surprise, as it is a kind of tradition in its own right: it concerns the day of the Lord. The day of the Lord, here as in Amos, is not the day of redemption, but the day of judgment – and the prospects for a positive judgment are grim. This is not a day to be awaited with hope, but the day to be anticipated with dread.

The second issue is the universalism that this judgment occasions. There is a call to public worship that does not discriminate; and there are no exceptions that would exempt one from service. All are called and instrumentalized, to some degree, in that call. It is something like military conscription: the nation is at war against an enemy too great to be defeated by normal means, a volunteer army will not do. Each is called to do their part, but the equality is absolute. The part of each is the same as every other: they are all to weep and plead for mercy. This “state of exception” has occasioned a universal interpellation of each individual into a national mourning machine. The prospects are not as dark as they look, however. The universal conscription in the face of universal judgment will result, soon enough, in a universal redemption: “I will pour out my spirit on all flesh.” (2.28)

An analogy: The scandal of having my 1 year old daughter marked with ashes – a mark that signifies both transience and penitence, a feeling all too obvious (in the former) and altogether inappropriate, or better, inappropriable, for an infant (in the latter) to warrant its physical inscription. “You’re the youngest person I’ve ever put ashes on” said my priest to my daughter (i.e. to me). In other words, “how could you do that to an innocent child?” How could I conscript her in an act that was not hers to appropriate? But after the ashes came the bread of heaven – the sign of eternity and redemption, a sign both inappropriable and obvious to my daughter and to me.

The repetition of a cycle, now, that institutes another practice of time, the inscription of another temporal order. If the fiction of individual agency is betrayed, the truer fiction of eternity is commemorated.

On the Promise (Epiphany 3)

2008-01-24T11:26:00.000-05:00

Isaiah 9:1-4
9:1 But there will be no gloom for those who were in anguish. In the former time he brought into contempt the land of Zebulun and the land of Naphtali, but in the latter time he will make glorious the way of the sea, the land beyond the Jordan, Galilee of the nations.
9:2 The people who walked in darkness have seen a great light; those who lived in a land of deep darkness on them light has shined.
9:3 You have multiplied the nation, you have increased its joy; they rejoice before you as with joy at the harvest, as people exult when dividing plunder.
9:4 For the yoke of their burden, and the bar across their shoulders, the rod of their oppressor, you have broken as on the day of Midian.

The promise of a new tomorrow, a new and better future. This is not a utopia – a “no-place” – or an abstract wish. This glimmer of new life shines among the concrete ruins of a “historicized” and thoroughly geopolitical reality – Assyrian conquest of the southern kingdom of Judah. And this divine future represents no escape from the geopolitical context. Assyria is not pure enemy, but also an instrument of divine judgment: “Ah, Assyria, the rod of my anger, the staff of my fury!” The shards of the promise of a messianic future are interspersed amongst a decaying present and do not represent a clean break from it; such that the present would not be somehow essential to the future hope.

What happens is that promise as promise is set to work in the present, opening it up to a new future and thus a new configuration. “And a promise,” as Derrida says in Specters of Marx, “must promise to be kept, that is, not to remain ‘spiritual’ or ‘abstract,’ but to produce events, new effective forms of action, practice, organization, and so forth.” (112) Promise – that of a divine future or even the dialectical becoming of a classless society – lodges a device within the present that is charged with explosive possibility. The present cannot remain simply given, it becomes and remains fractured and haunted by the future that it cannot contain. The (liturgical) rehearsal of the promise, the repetition of its potentialities in forms of life, are conducive of an energy that charges this device to the breaking point; in which case there would not be simply “the present” but a performatively multiplied series of presents.

The present, therefore, would not be captured by the indicative mood – “it is how it is” – but by the subjunctive: every assertion about the way things are is read under the sign of the conditional or the contingent. Rosenzweig names the imperative as the mood characteristic of the present, in the sense that it is bound to the moment of Revelation, of the commandment to love. But in either case – subjunctive or imperative – the present is put into question. This questionablness of the present and of humanity’s place in it is illuminated by Jurgen Moltmann in his Theology of Hope.

Christian theology has one way in which it can prove its truth by reference to the reality of man and the reality of the world that concerns man – namely by accepting the questionableness of human existence and the questionableness of reality as a whole and taking them up into that eschatological questionableness of human nature and the world which is disclosed by the event of promise (94).

Promise is the possibility of the future and the condition of the present.

Advent Reflection 3: Isaiah Isaiah 35:1-10 & James 5:7-10

2007-12-17T09:49:00.000-05:00

Isaiah 35:1-10
35:1 The wilderness and the dry land shall be glad, the desert shall rejoice and blossom; like the crocus
35:2 it shall blossom abundantly, and rejoice with joy and singing. The glory of Lebanon shall be given to it, the majesty of Carmel and Sharon. They shall see the glory of the LORD, the majesty of our God.
35:3 Strengthen the weak hands, and make firm the feeble knees.
35:4 Say to those who are of a fearful heart, "Be strong, do not fear! Here is your God. He will come with vengeance, with terrible recompense. He will come and save you."
35:5 Then the eyes of the blind shall be opened, and the ears of the deaf unstopped;
35:6 then the lame shall leap like a deer, and the tongue of the speechless sing for joy. For waters shall break forth in the wilderness, and streams in the desert;
35:7 the burning sand shall become a pool, and the thirsty ground springs of water; the haunt of jackals shall become a swamp, the grass shall become reeds and rushes.
35:8 A highway shall be there, and it shall be called the Holy Way; the unclean shall not travel on it, but it shall be for God's people; no traveler, not even fools, shall go astray.
35:9 No lion shall be there, nor shall any ravenous beast come up on it; they shall not be found there, but the redeemed shall walk there.
35:10 And the ransomed of the LORD shall return, and come to Zion with singing; everlasting joy shall be upon their heads; they shall obtain joy and gladness, and sorrow and sighing shall flee away.

Comment:
It starts to feel gratuitous, like fanning the flames of a forest fire, the recurrence of hopeful expectation. To make my intervention, this year, at the advent of Advent, is to miss the ups and downs – particularly the downs – of the liturgical year. Even if we are officially at the “beginning” of the year (Year A), liturgical time cycles, repeats, iterates itself. So to be at the beginning is also to be in the middle and even at the end. Into what suffering does this word of hope speak? The texts of the church’s calendar address themselves to two moments: the interpretively constructed moment of the lectionary – now we read Isaiah with Matthew instead of Jeremiah with Luke – and to the singular moment of the reading subject or community. The nature of my intervention cuts me off from the first moment; what of the second? Perhaps the images from nature offer hope to a planet whose finite “resources” are being quickly used up, to a creation who longs for redemption. Perhaps the lack of predatory creatures offers a vision of a world without predatory nation states.

James 5:7-10
5:7 Be patient, therefore, beloved, until the coming of the Lord. The farmer waits for the precious crop from the earth, being patient with it until it receives the early and the late rains.
5:8 You also must be patient. Strengthen your hearts, for the coming of the Lord is near.
5:9 Beloved, do not grumble against one another, so that you may not be judged. See, the Judge is standing at the doors!
5:10 As an example of suffering and patience, beloved, take the prophets who spoke in the name of the Lord.

Comment:
Some differences emerge when we get to James. First, the expectation is given a more circumscribed referent: the church. Second, the (equivocal) content of the prophecy is slimed down to its most basic element: “The Lord is near.” Another difference is that the prophecy is not meant to bring an unbounded hope but it is accompanied by an explicit demand: “be patient.” Finally, in another “formalization” of the prophetic message, what a critical idealist might call a “purification of the mythical content,” the prophet is held up as a figure of patience and suffering, not as the bearer of a more important truth.

Advent Reflection 2b: Romans 15:4-13

2007-12-08T09:40:00.000-05:00

Romans 15:4-13
15:4 For whatever was written in former days was written for our instruction, so that by steadfastness and by the encouragement of the scriptures we might have hope.
15:5 May the God of steadfastness and encouragement grant you to live in harmony with one another, in accordance with Christ Jesus,
15:6 that together you may with one voice glorify the God and Father of our Lord Jesus Christ.
15:7 Welcome one another, therefore, just as Christ has welcomed you, for the glory of God.
15:8 For I tell you that Christ has become a servant of the circumcised on behalf of the truth of God in order that he might confirm the promises given to the patriarchs,
15:9 and in order that the Gentiles might glorify God for his mercy. As it is written, "Therefore I will confess you among the Gentiles, and sing praises to your name";
15:10 and again he says, "Rejoice, O Gentiles, with his people";
15:11 and again, "Praise the Lord, all you Gentiles, and let all the peoples praise him";
15:12 and again Isaiah says, "The root of Jesse shall come, the one who rises to rule the Gentiles; in him the Gentiles shall hope."
15:13 May the God of hope fill you with all joy and peace in believing, so that you may abound in hope by the power of the Holy Spirit.

The Christian destiny of the messianic prophecy is here given its formal structure. This is the hermeneutical context in which the church is to understand its place in the promise of God – as a grafted branch. Not, it is obvious here, as the sublation of Judaism, but as its supplement. If the church has a share in the promise, it is a share; i.e. that which it shares with Judaism. The shares are different, however. The keyword that distinguishes the Christian share is the one that Paul highlights here: hope. Hope is the crux of this text and hope is unique to Christianity vis-à-vis Judaism. Jews are, if Rosenzweig is correct, without hope. But what is the nature of this hopelessness? Hopelessness stems from a response to a lack – to that which is not-yet. Hope bridges the gap between the now and the not-yet and, in this case, its opposite would be despair. However, hopelessness can also be thought of prior to the lack; in which case the opposite of hope is not despair, but plenitude, a lack of lack, as it were. Jews, as Rosenzweig says, are already in eternity, they already in their liturgical practice – hourly, daily, monthly, yearly – bring eternity into the present. History, so he argues, is a detour that it does not follow. The Church, on the other hand, is not already in eternity, it must attain to it. And hope is what sustains us on this journey.

Jameson and the Present

2007-12-06T11:35:00.000-05:00

Partly inspired by a lecture by Fredric Jameson last night, I’m thinking about the status of the present when the future becomes the privileged temporal mode. Jameson’s talk was on the theme of utopia and the presence of the utopian impulse under the regime of global capitalism – which seems to admit no possible outside. His primary example of such a possibility was the genre of “cyber-punk.” I know almost nothing of the genre – except for what I’ve learned from The Matrix – but to him a story such as William Gibson’s Neuromancer seemed to register a utopian possibility, despite a reigning totality. The excess of productive activity on the part of the hackers represented, to him, the presence of another sphere of action, “outside” the matrix. He also referred to the uneven development of globalization: wherein the very existence of another form of life – one that would be called “underdeveloped” – is enough of an opening for something like “hope” for another world.

He failed though, I think, to answer the question posed by the respondent. It had something to do with the ontological status of the present. Is it, he asked, really total, undifferentiated, whole? Or, is it fractured, differentiated, incomplete, as such? This was no doubt a “political” question, but concerned something more like a “political ontology.” Jameson seemed not to be willing to go there (admittedly, it was a public lecture). It got me thinking, about Derrida, for one – clearly a subtext of the respondent’s question – but, behind Derrida, to the theme of much Jewish thinking on messianism.

The privileging of the future in terms of messianic expectation is a form of hope, but it is not simply that. It is not just a matter of a dissatisfaction with the present and a longing for something better; in this sense it is not utopian. It concerns, in Rosenzweig’s terms, the way that the past (Creation) only becomes legible in the present (Revelation) and the present and the past together only attain an ontological completion from the perspective of the future (Redemption), that is apres coup – which is to-come only in a specific sense: as a bringing of eternity into the present by way of human action. This seems to me to be a much more robust critique of the present, a much better “philosophy of history” than a mere subjective or collective longing for something better. And this why thinkers like Derrida and Benjamin have undertaken in different ways, not just a rethinking of history, but a re- or dis-articulation of the temporality that is history’s engine. Agamben is right, therefore, when he says, in Infancy and History, that the “original task of genuine revolution…is never merely to ‘change the world’, but also – and above all – to ‘change time.’ (91)

[Wow, an occasional post. I’m going to become a blogger if I’m not careful.]

Advent Reflection 2: Isaiah 11:1-10 (Messianism: between Judaism and Christianty)

2007-12-05T10:40:00.000-05:00

Isaiah 11:1-10
11:1 A shoot shall come out from the stump of Jesse, and a branch shall grow out of his roots.
11:2 The spirit of the LORD shall rest on him, the spirit of wisdom and understanding, the spirit of counsel and might, the spirit of knowledge and the fear of the LORD.
11:3 His delight shall be in the fear of the LORD. He shall not judge by what his eyes see, or decide by what his ears hear;
11:4 but with righteousness he shall judge the poor, and decide with equity for the meek of the earth; he shall strike the earth with the rod of his mouth, and with the breath of his lips he shall kill the wicked.
11:5 Righteousness shall be the belt around his waist, and faithfulness the belt around his loins.
11:6 The wolf shall live with the lamb, the leopard shall lie down with the kid, the calf and the lion and the fatling together, and a little child shall lead them.
11:7 The cow and the bear shall graze, their young shall lie down together; and the lion shall eat straw like the ox.
11:8 The nursing child shall play over the hole of the asp, and the weaned child shall put its hand on the adder's den.
11:9 They will not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain; for the earth will be full of the knowledge of the LORD as the waters cover the sea.
11:10 On that day the root of Jesse shall stand as a signal to the peoples; the nations shall inquire of him, and his dwelling shall be glorious.

Comment:
Here we are presented with messianic prophecy; messianism in one of its earliest forms. The full scope of the “messianic idea” will not come into view, Gershom Scholem tells us, until it is extended through the reflections of the rabbis and, even more importantly, the historical or “acute” messianisms, the popular messianic movements, that have punctuated the history of Judaism. Of course the problem with acute messianisms – and Christianity can be counted among them – is that its idea becomes subsumed in its figure: messianism, as it were, is abolished in the Messiah – Bar Kokba, Sabbatai Zvi, Jesus. In order for messianism to survive beyond the Messiah it must render each messianic figure, each messianic movement provisional or void. The moment the messianic idea becomes an acute messianism, all bets are off. It is for this reason that Scholem ends his reflections on the messianic idea with a calculation: the “cost of messianism” to the Jewish people. The tremendous richness of the idea has been subsidized by a refusal on the part of Jews to enter history (e.g. in the form of politicized messianic movements – Scholem has his version of Zionism in mind). By virtue of a certain kind of sublimation – a redirection of libidinal/messianic energy – the messianic idea comes to us in all of its intellectual and theoretical splendor.

The text from Isaiah arrives here (in the lectionary) in this moment (Advent) in the mode of a determinate expectation, not the indeterminate hope that conditioned its first announcement. There is a certain telos in view here. In its lectionary form, this prophecy is not merely messianic, but Christological. (Although the Gospel reading that this text supplements (Matt 3:1-12) is not yet Christological [perhaps proto-Christological], it too is still anticipatory: it is the story of John the Baptist’s preparation for the coming of the Messiah Jesus.) This is the Christian destiny of the messianic idea, it has allowed the Messiah to subsume messianism; and it had to for the sake of its own emergence and survival. I am not questioning the legitimacy of this move, but one potential (and often actual) consequence that results when we return, after the Messianic arrival, to a text like Isaiah’s is that the prophetic-predictive moment is privileged over the prophetic-political; the figure that is announced is given a greater importance than the messianic vocation. Thus, the figure who is the “shoot from the stump of Jesse” is given precedence over the task of judging with justice. If in Judaism the figure of the Messiah gives way to a universal human calling – such that the Messiah as an individual merely demonstrates or symbolically enacts what is the task of the messianic community, and ultimately the whole of creation – then in Christianity the messianic task gives way to its singular incarnation – the Christ. The messianic vocation does not thereby disappear in Christianity, it simply becomes refracted. The messianic community – the Church – is still subject to the demands of justice. Refraction does not diminish the demand, in fact it may even increase it such that the messianic community will do “greater works than” those of the Messiah (John 14:12).

Advent Reflection 1: Isaiah 2:1-5 and Romans 13:11-14

2007-12-01T14:07:00.000-05:00

My reflections have been interrupted by the AAR meeting and time away -- I plan to post the paper I read at the conference (on Agamben's messianism), but I may be reading a version of the same paper at another conference, in which case I will hold off a little longer. In the meantime, Advent...

Isaiah 2:1-5
2:1 The word that Isaiah son of Amoz saw concerning Judah and Jerusalem.
2:2 In days to come the mountain of the Lord's house shall be established as the highest of the mountains, and shall be raised above the hills; all the nations shall stream to it.
2:3 Many peoples shall come and say, "Come, let us go up to the mountain of the LORD, to the house of the God of Jacob; that he may teach us his ways and that we may walk in his paths." For out of Zion shall go forth instruction, and the word of the LORD from Jerusalem.
2:4 He shall judge between the nations, and shall arbitrate for many peoples; they shall beat their swords into plowshares, and their spears into pruning hooks; nation shall not lift up sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more.
2:5 O house of Jacob, come, let us walk in the light of the LORD!

Romans 13:11-14
13:11 Besides this, you know what time it is, how it is now the moment for you to wake from sleep. For salvation is nearer to us now than when we became believers;
13:12 the night is far gone, the day is near. Let us then lay aside the works of darkness and put on the armor of light;
13:13 let us live honorably as in the day, not in reveling and drunkenness, not in debauchery and licentiousness, not in quarreling and jealousy.
13:14 Instead, put on the Lord Jesus Christ, and make no provision for the flesh, to gratify its desires.

Comment:
I want to read these texts together. Firstly, because they arrive together in the lectionary – not without someone else’s interpretive decision, of course; but also, because I don’t know what to do with the Isaiah text. I don’t know how to read today, as sacred, as normative, a text which celebrates a particularity, a place with such geo-graphical, -political, -theological significance and antagonism. My intuition is that the place of which this text speaks needs to be read in light of the time of which it speaks.

The text from Isaiah speaks of both place and time, but first of all of place. It is here to which the nations will stream, not for the establishment of a statist project, not out of a desire to force the coming of the kingdom by way of some prophetic blueprint (and thereby becoming what Rosenzweig calls a “tyrant of the Kingdom”), but for a justice that exceeds these orders; not to perform military service or to build “fences,” but to unlearn war.

The time of which the passage speaks is a time of the future, in “days to come.” That is, not now. The time is not ripe for such a place. I want to read Paul’s text along with this one, not because of a tacit superscessionism, but because, in Romans we get an intensification of the temporal dimension, and an effacement of the spatial. The time is no longer merely to-come, as salvation is, but it is now that the text summons us to. Not because the time has arrived for learning justice and unlearning war, but because we need to work, to wake in order to make it so. There is not promise so much as exigency, but it is also promise –; exigency without promise is messianic tyranny; promise without exigency is the neutralization of the messianic.

Proper 33: Isaiah 65:17-25

2007-11-13T14:36:00.000-05:00

Isaiah 65:17-25

65:17 For I am about to create new heavens and a new earth; the former things shall not be remembered or come to mind.
65:18 But be glad and rejoice forever in what I am creating; for I am about to create Jerusalem as a joy, and its people as a delight.
65:19 I will rejoice in Jerusalem, and delight in my people; no more shall the sound of weeping be heard in it, or the cry of distress.
65:20 No more shall there be in it an infant that lives but a few days, or an old person who does not live out a lifetime; for one who dies at a hundred years will be considered a youth, and one who falls short of a hundred will be considered accursed.
65:21 They shall build houses and inhabit them; they shall plant vineyards and eat their fruit.
65:22 They shall not build and another inhabit; they shall not plant and another eat; for like the days of a tree shall the days of my people be, and my chosen shall long enjoy the work of their hands.
65:23 They shall not labor in vain, or bear children for calamity; for they shall be offspring blessed by the LORD-- and their descendants as well.
65:24 Before they call I will answer, while they are yet speaking I will hear.
65:25 The wolf and the lamb shall feed together, the lion shall eat straw like the ox; but the serpent--its food shall be dust! They shall not hurt or destroy on all my holy mountain, says the LORD.

Comment:
I’ve always been taken by the thought and the possibility of newness, of novelty to the point of a rupture with the old. This is partly the reason that the text for my wedding was one very close to verse 17, “Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old. I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it?” (Isaiah 43:18) My research into the different trajectories of the messianic idea – the inflationary and the deflationary traditions – have pushed me to think seriously about the idea of the unredeemablity of the world, such that eschatology would be a break without continuity, the end of this world as the condition for the next. Does such a thinking lead only to a politics “whose method,” according to Benjamin, “must be called nihilism”? Or, conversely, does the thinking of a (minimal) continuity require a politics whose method must be called liberalism?

This question does not need to be settled in order to read these texts, but it does give some sense of the difference between the possible destinies of a Christian and a Jewish interpretation; which also happens to reverse the political stakes. The Christian reading would be one in which the concrete references are transposed into an eschatological future. The houses would adorn streets of gold and the vineyards produce only the finest wine. The Jewish, on the other hand would hear these texts resonate among the houses and the vineyards of historical existence. These are, of course, caricatures and yield no lasting hermeneutical power, but it does attest to differences.

The text speaks of a redemption in which the injustices of the past are remedied. But it does not begin totally anew. Creation is the stopping point. The residues of created life are not erased in the interest of a complete novelty: death is not overcome, but deferred, labour is not superfluous, but immediately productive – from the land and from the body, predators are not now prey, but docile vegetarians. The exception is the serpent – the serpent continues on exactly as since Genesis: “The LORD God said to the serpent, "Because you have done this, cursed are you among all animals and among all wild creatures; upon your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life.” (3:14)

Redemption is thus neither a radical newness: that would be re-creation; nor a total continuity: that would be the opposite of redemption. Perhaps this is why it is said of the messianic era that it will be like this one with only a slight adjustment.

Proper 32 C: Haggai 1:15b-2:9

2007-11-08T14:52:00.000-05:00

I’m going to begin a series of biblical reflections based on the revised common lectionary. I’m doing this first of all because I found my Lenten reflections of last year to be a worthwhile exercise – both as a Lenten discipline and as a hermeneutical practice. But I am also acting on an intuition that I have yet to fully articulate. It has something to do with an alternative practice of time. If I am attempting to elaborate a thinking of messianic time, then this will not be unconnected to notions of repetition, distention, contraction, etc….none of which are unconnected to the reading of sacred texts in a liturgical context.

Haggai 1:15b-2:9
1:15 on the twenty-fourth day of the month, in the sixth month.
2:1 In the second year of King Darius, in the seventh month, on the twenty-first day of the month, the word of the LORD came by the prophet Haggai, saying:
2:2 Speak now to Zerubbabel son of Shealtiel, governor of Judah, and to Joshua son of Jehozadak, the high priest, and to the remnant of the people, and say,
2:3 Who is left among you that saw this house in its former glory? How does it look to you now? Is it not in your sight as nothing?
2:4 Yet now take courage, O Zerubbabel, says the LORD; take courage, O Joshua, son of Jehozadak, the high priest; take courage, all you people of the land, says the LORD; work, for I am with you, says the LORD of hosts,
2:5 according to the promise that I made you when you came out of Egypt. My spirit abides among you; do not fear.
2:6 For thus says the LORD of hosts: Once again, in a little while, I will shake the heavens and the earth and the sea and the dry land;
2:7 and I will shake all the nations, so that the treasure of all nations shall come, and I will fill this house with splendor, says the LORD of hosts.
2:8 The silver is mine, and the gold is mine, says the LORD of hosts.
2:9 The latter splendor of this house shall be greater than the former, says the LORD of hosts; and in this place I will give prosperity, says the LORD of hosts.

Comment:
First a general comment about prophecy. Rosenzweig points out that God speaks both in human language and in a human voice. Divine speech is not merely mediated, but contingent upon, a human voice: the voice of the prophet.

The prophet is not a mediator between God and man, and he does not receive Revelation so that he can transmit it further; on the contrary the voice of God comes from him immediately, out of him God speaks immediately as I. In contrast to the master who committed the great plagiarism of Revelation, the true prophet lets God speak and transmits to the amazed audience the Revelation that took place in secret. Strictly speaking, it is not at all that he lets God speak, but at the moment [when] he opens his mouth, it is already God who is speaking; the prophet scarcely has time to start with the formula: “Thus speaks the Eternal One [Lord]” or with the still briefer and quicker formula that dispenses even with the verbal form, “Word of the Eternal One [Lord],” and before God has taken possession of his lips the I of God remains the root word resounding through Revelation like a pedal-note, it rises in protest against any translation by He, it is I and must remain so. Only an I and not a He can speak the imperative of love; it must never say anything except: love me. (192)

I have commented before on the role of the imperative in Rosenzweig. Here the general point about prophecy holds true. It is not Haggiai who speaks, but the “word of the Lord.” This is not to say that the biblical text does not narrate theophanic moments, but, on the one hand, these are the exception more than the rule; secondly, the result tends to be less than ideal. So, for instance, the paradigmatic theophany of the Hebrew scriptures – the appearance of God to Moses at Sinai – is in immediate proximity to the embarrassment of the Golden Calf; the originary encounter between God and man in the Garden is one of shame and banishment.

The divine voice that resounds in the prophet’s mouth speaks of hope, restoration, prosperity. But, the condition of this hope is the ruin of the present. “Who is left among you that saw this house in its former glory? How does it look to you now? Is it not in your sight as nothing?” The truth of the present is its ruin, what is phrased as a question is in truth a proposition: what was is no more. Courage is offered to the weak, the ruined; not the strong and the established, such would not be courage, but haughtiness, pride. Furthermore, the promise of restoration is not merely a repetition, but a deep repetition. That is, it is not simply the rebuilding of a house that has been destroyed: it is the recurrence of an old redemption (from Egypt) and an older creation (of the world). This is also an iteration – a non-identical repetition – insofar as the new does not start from scratch, but combines creation and redemption in a single act. The work God performs on the earth (“shaking”) this time does not bring forth natural produce, but cultural produce: “the treasures of the nations.” Finally, these treasures do not cycle back into an exchange economy, they are not simply expropriated from a nation or nations and appropriated by another (Israel), but they return in a similarly deep repetition to their originary source: “The silver is mine, and the gold is mine, says the LORD of hosts.”

Interstitial Exigency: Theology and Philosophy

2007-10-23T21:43:00.001-04:00

"...They complete each other, and together they bring about a new type of philosopher or theologian, situated between theology and philosophy."
Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption

For Rosenzweig it is a matter of symmetrical structures of lack: philosophy lacks an adequate basis (subject) to retain the status of a science; theology lacks an adequate basis (truth) to ground its experience.

Philosophy’s totalizing ambitions under German idealism has produced it’s other in the form of the “point-of-view philosopher” (Nietzsche); aphorism replaces a totalizing system. But how can the philosophizing subject, having fled the totality of knowledge/being, acquire an adequate “objectivity” to still be philosophy? A “bridge” is needed to bind this subjectivity – “a deaf, blind ipseity” – to the “luminous clarity of an unlimited objectivity.” (116) This luminous clarity is Revelation – divine self-disclosure in the present, to the subject – the bridge to arrive at this unlimited objectivity is provided by theology.

Theology, on the other hand, has, at least in modern German “liberal” theology, focused so much on Revelation (present, faith) and Redemption (future, hope) that it abandoned its connection to the past, its auctoritas. But this break with the past – due primarily to an judgment about the lack of credulity of witnesses and martyrs and thus the miracles they bore witness to – was effectively a break with truth. Revelation without Creation (past) floats groundlessly and points aimlessly.

How is this interstitial exigency energized today? How is the co-dependency or co-implication of philosophy and theology productively deployed in our moment?

The Messianic and the Eschatological

2007-09-26T21:05:00.000-04:00

Almost the whole of Agamben’s thinking on the messianic can be read under the sign of neutralization, or something in that semantic neighbourhood. I don’t know which analogical elaboration is exemplary (katargein, Aufhebung, aphorismo, hos me), but the “rabbinic apologue” that he refers to (which is Benjamin’s citation of Scholem’s gloss on Maimonodies’ gloss etc. on a Talumic text that winds up as the insight that the messianic era will be a only “minor adjustment” of the secular world) speaks to this as well. What is at stake is a certain distance that is marked between the effects of the messianic arrival and total negation. In each case the result is not a complete destruction (of law, for instance) but a minor modification. This is not to say, however, as in a deflationary messianism, that the world is thus redeemable and not worthy of total negation: this minimal difference is, for Agamben, “in every way, a decisive one” (TR, 69), it is a small difference that makes all the difference.

There is something here that is not unlike the status of the event in Badiou. From the perspective of the “state of the situation” an event is little more than a minor disruption; if it had its way, it would not develop into anything more than that. From the perspective of a subject of fidelity, however, the minor disruption is the opening onto the void that is constitutive of the situation: it is the potential beginning of a trajectory of truth. To stay with Badiou’s theoretical apparatus: Agamben does not develop his messianic thinking beyond the “evental site.” This, perhaps is connected to his refusal to allow a confusion between the messianic and the apocalyptic.

The most insidious misunderstanding of the messianic announcement does not consist in mistaking it for prophecy, which is turned toward the future, but for apocalypse, which contemplates the end of time. The apocalyptic is situated on the last day, the Day of Wrath. It sees the end fulfilled and describes what it sees. The time in which the apostle lives is, however, not the eschaton, it is not the end of time….What interests the apostle is not the last day, it is not the instant in which time ends, but the time that contracts itself and begins to end (1Cor 7.29), or if you prefer, the time that remains between time and its end. (TR, 62)

According to thought I am developing here, we could call Badiou an apocalyptic or eschatological thinker. Not, to be sure, in the common religious sense, but in terms of the coming to an end of time. It would not be, for Badiou, a matter of a consummation of history or any final end, however. It would be instead the pluralized eschatology of situations in general: each situation, insofar as a trajectory of truth has been initiated, comes to an end. There is no substrate of time or history to hold one event in continuity with the next. Therefore, times come to an end incessantly.

It’s not, I don’t think, that Agamben is not interested in the end, in the future, in the possibility of absolute novelty. It is a matter of pushing the immanent messianism of Paul (at least as Agamben reads it) as far as it will go. There is an eschatological dimension to Agamben’s thought, but it is not to be found in his messianism (this is something his “secular” critics do not always realize), at least not in its fullest elaboration. A coming community, a coming politics, a new political future are all aspects that can be found in Agamben’s work, but the messianic has to do with the “now.”

Agamben's Messianism

2007-09-18T13:15:00.000-04:00

From what I’ve seen, Kafka’s parable “The Coming of the Messiah” is treated mostly as a series of detachable aphorisms as opposed to a literary unit. Thus, for instance, Agamben can take the second paragraph as an isolatable piece with no necessary connection to what preceded it. (Perhaps this is why he refuses the generic identification of “parable” and refers to it as an “enigmatic passage in Kafka’s notebooks.”) For his part, Agamben reads this passage as a gloss on the constellation that he identifies between another of Kafka’s parables, “Before the Law,” the exchange between Benjamin and Scholem on the status of law in Kafka, the Schmittian idea of the state of exception and a Jewish messianism. He says:

The messianic task of the man from the country…might then be precisely that of making the virtual state of exception real, of compelling the doorkeeper to close the door of the Law…For the Messiah will be able to enter only after the door is closed, which is to say, after the Law’s being in force without significance is at an end. This is the meaning of the enigmatic passage in Kafka’s notebooks where he writes, “The Messiah will only come when he is no longer necessary, he will only come after his arrival, he will come not on the last day, but on the very last day.” (Homo Sacer, 56-57)

This reading of messianism in connection to law – an essential connection, according to Agamben – occurs in what I might call Agamben’s “Jewish” phase. While he hints at the Pauline elaboration of the messianic idea several times in Homo Sacer and some of his earlier essays (notably, “the Messiah and the Sovereign” in Potentialities), he ruminates on the “unrealized” dimension of messianism long enough to make a political point. That point: “From the juridico-political perspective, messianism is therefore a theory of the state of exception – except for the fact that in messianism there is no authority in force to proclaim the state of exception; instead, there is the Messiah to subvert its power.”(Homo Sacer, 58) The fact that, following Kafka, Agamben sees a deferral of the arrival of the Messiah until “the door is closed…after the Law’s being in force without significance is at an end,” echoes a Talmudic tension. In the Talmud (Tractate Sanhedrin 97b – 98a) there is an exchange about when the Messiah will come:

Rab said: All the predestined dates [for redemption] have passed, and the matter [now] depends only on repentance and good deeds. But Samuel maintained: it is sufficient for a mourner to keep his [period of] mourning.

The basis of the disagreement consists in whether the Messiah will come as a result of good deeds or whether he will come of his initiative. Levinas summarizes the stakes as follows:

The two theses propounded by Rab and Samuel seem clearer: they testify to a basic alternative. Either morality … will save the world, or else what is needed is an objective event that surpasses morality and the individual’s good intentions. (Difficult Freedom, 72)

Agamben, by asserting that the Messiah will come “after the door is closed” seems to be aligning himself with Rab, insofar as the Messiah’s coming is contingent upon human action. We are situated, so it seems, on the hither side of the Messiah’s arrival. When we get to The Time that Remains, this unrealized dimension is little more than a “thwarted [Christian] messianism” – of which Derrida is the main proponent. There’s a shift in register in the latter book. What remains to be thought is how to appropriate the real state of exception that the Messiah inaugurates. This would be the “Christian” phase of Agamben’s messianism. But this is only a provisional reading of the issue. The categories of “Jewish” and “Christian” in this context are problematic for any number of reasons. It could be affirmed, however, that Agamben’s perspective on both sides of the Messiah correspond to an inflationary messianism. That is, a messianism in which human intervention is an essential part – e.g. Scholem’s Zionism – and the status of law is decisively confronted.

The Coming of the Messiah

2007-08-30T09:25:00.001-04:00

by Franz Kafka

The Messiah will come as soon as the most unbridled individualism of faith becomes possible- when there is no one to destroy this possibility and no one to suffer its destruction; hence the graves will open themselves. This perhaps, is Christian doctrine too, applying as much to the actual presentation of the example to be emulated, which is an individualistic example, as to the symbolic presentation of the resurrection of the Mediator in the single individual.

The Messiah will come only when he is no longer necessary; he will come only on the day after his arrival; he will come, not on the last day, but on the very last.

the theologico-political nexus: updated

2007-07-09T17:20:00.000-04:00

In preparation for SECT IV – and my comprehensive exams – I have been thinking and reading about “political theology” or the “theologico-political.” My research, so far, has circled around a very simple question: what is the nexus that binds the theological to the political? Now, this question already takes for granted that the vulgar narrative of secularization is, well, wrong – both as a description of politics and as a conception of the political, if I can put it that way. If it is true that the religious or the theological survives, lives on, empirically and specterally, in this era of the secular-political, then in what ways does it bind itself to or even condition the political? Here are the possibilities I have come across until now.

(1) Kant: The religious is related to the political order in terms of a kind of logico-practical necessity. Humanity in its ideal form would create for itself an order of just relations based on an unalloyed reason: treating others only ever as ends in themselves, never as means. However, we exist, here below, as imperfect – given to self-love – we pursue ends that instrumentalize others. We are stuck in this predicament, we are “radically evil,” thus we require a representations of just ends that capture our moral imaginations: stories of neighbour love and a God-man. These theological vehicles taxi our tainted reason to the ends, albeit by detour.

(2) Hegel: The religious is absorbed or sublated by the political. Here (Christian) religion is seen to offer a corrective or a suture for the tear that politics itself is not able to mend. The Terror of revolution – which had overcome the incomplete or one-sided gains of faith – can only be overcome in the concept of forgiveness that Christianity offers. But the suture only strengthens the dialectical machine and no singular religion will resist it.

(3) Schmitt: The political is analogously related to the theological. That is, the theology or metaphysics of a given epoch gives form to the political configuration of that epoch. Thus, a theology that emphasizes a sovereign, transcendent God who intervenes in natural processes (miraculously) will give rise to a notion of the state that emphasizes a mode of sovereignty that transcends the political order and can intervene, by fiat, in that order. Similarly, if the theologians or metaphysicians of the time emphasize a deistic God or some other immanent force, then the political order will mirror this structure: it will recognize power as derived immanently, from below, from the people. In a slightly different mode of this analogical relation, the monarch is said to have “two bodies,” one natural and mortal, the other mystical and immortal – thus granting a continuity and a perpetuity to the people there ruled. This possibility arises as the adaptation of the Christological doctrine of the two natures – human and divine. In both these cases the theological conditions the political, but so too does the political provide a criterion for judging the theological.

(4) Agamben: The political precedes religion, but religion precedes politics. Religion and politics enter into a zone of indistinction. The political realm is permeated by a theological remainder that it has not expunged, even if it has been displaced. But, at the same time, notions called “religious” themselves betray a juridical provenance – e.g. the sacred. Secularization covers over a religo-political structure, fundamentalism merely ignores (or in some cases, exploits) the deeply political significance of religious concepts.

(5) Derrida: The religious inhabits the secular-political in a radical way. Religion is a kind of minimal but ineradicable condition of the political. So, for instance, the divine right of kings is no longer invoked in the modern era but – here too there is a displacement of the (minimally) theological – the contract does not erase the religious. There is an elemental “faith” that is the condition of any being-with, any contract. The modern critiques of the religious are not misdirected, but nor are they absolute. The divine, the absolute is absolved from the indictments of delusion, false consciousness, etc. only because the it already evades full inscriptions in the historical faiths.

(6) Lefort: There is also the question of the “permanence” of the theologico-political form. If there is a nexus that binds the theological to the political, is there, should we so desire, a way to sever it? It would seem that until the advent of modern democracy this question would have been unthinkable. So, if it is thinkable today, how so? The idea of democracy, so it seems, resorts to no transcendent authority as the source of its legitimacy – explicitly or implicitly; it requires no recourse to civil religion, it seeks no principle of unity beyond the mutual affirmation of an immanently derived difference. Religion is not thereby extricated from the political, but it is no longer a necessary element. Religion would arise only at the “weak points” of proper political functioning, as a fantasmatic supplement. A severing of the nexus would thus seem possible, but, it should be added, such a break only becomes possible because of a distinctly (Protestant-Christian) religious imperative: to distinguish between the “two kingdoms,” to create the structural possibility of a non-religious space.

(7) Levinas: The religious, conceived as the concrete and normative demand of the neighbour (i.e. as ethics), is the most primordial of human experiences. The political, in many ways the ethical or religious in diminutive form, is a necessary, though always subordinate, supplement. The political is the possibility of ordering the anarchic reign of ethics, it is the possibilty of accounting for and thus responding to more than one neighbour. Were it not for the preservation of this originary ethical experience -- and this is what (Jewish) religion does -- politics would be nothing more than "war with a good conscience"; were it not for political orders -- just institutions, even the state -- human sociality would remain unrealized in the botomless demands of a singular ethics.

(8) Badiou: One may also simply formalize – and thereby neutralize – the religious element. Here religious texts (again, Christian) are mined for structural affinities with the current situation – for instance, the dialectic of abstract universality (capitalism/cosmos) on the one hand, and mere particularism (identity politics/Judaism) on the other. The nexus is effectively denied and the “fable” of a risen Messiah is either reactivated in a secularized form or left as a decaying remnant of a battle fought (and lost) with modernity.

apres coup and the Democratic debate

2007-06-03T20:08:00.001-04:00

It is interesting how many questions directed to the Democratic "front runners" during Sunday's debate had to do, not so much with what one would do -- the real political question -- but with what one would have done (differently). Not to belittle the importance of consistency, integrity, etc., in political decision making, but the questions that seemed to be pushed most firmly -- and, it should be noted, the ones whiched faced the most resistance and evasion from the candidates -- were the ones that concerned, for instance, Hillary's early support for the Iraq war, her husband's policy of "don't ask, don't tell," what's his names support for the southern border fence. At the basis of these questions: was it a mistake and will you name it as such?

This concern, unfortunately, had nothing to do with memory or "redemption" in Benjamin's sense -- there was no concern with bringing the past into a new constellation and presenting a new political possiblity now.

Lenten Reflection 5b: Philippians 3:4b-14

2007-03-23T16:59:00.001-04:00

Philippians 3:4b-14
3:4b If anyone else has reason to be confident in the flesh, I have more:
3:5 circumcised on the eighth day, a member of the people of Israel, of the tribe of Benjamin, a Hebrew born of Hebrews; as to the law, a Pharisee;
3:6 as to zeal, a persecutor of the church; as to righteousness under the law, blameless.
3:7 Yet whatever gains I had, these I have come to regard as loss because of Christ.
3:8 More than that, I regard everything as loss because of the surpassing value of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord. For his sake I have suffered the loss of all things, and I regard them as rubbish, in order that I may gain Christ
3:9 and be found in him, not having a righteousness of my own that comes from the law, but one that comes through faith in Christ, the righteousness from God based on faith.
3:10 I want to know Christ and the power of his resurrection and the sharing of his sufferings by becoming like him in his death,
3:11 if somehow I may attain the resurrection from the dead.
3:12 Not that I have already obtained this or have already reached the goal; but I press on to make it my own, because Christ Jesus has made me his own.
3:13 Beloved, I do not consider that I have made it my own; but this one thing I do: forgetting what lies behind and straining forward to what lies ahead,
3:14 I press on toward the goal for the prize of the heavenly call of God in Christ Jesus.

Comment:
Paul here sets up a series of oppositions: between life according to the law and life according to faith, and he himself is the test case. The structure is not symmetrical, however. Paul’s list of credentials with respect to the “flesh” (sarx) are extensive: Circumcised, Israelite, Tribe of Benjamin, Pharisee, Zealous, Righteous. Yet on the other side, his achievements under Christ, we find only “the loss of all things” the greatest possible attainment: to become like Christ in his death. The shift from law to faith, from flesh to Christ (or spirit) represents a kind of emptying or hollowing out, a negation. (There is almost a hint of resentment here -- “look what I had, look what I have given up!”). This experience is not, for Paul, an exchanging of one religious content for another, it is the undoing of all religious content, the subjective appropriation, not of a ritual, but of a singular – indeed the most singular – act: death. But this total emptying, this taking up of death stops short of a Heideggerian “being-towards-death” insofar as there remains, for Paul, a life beyond death – the most proper or authentic possibility is not, as it is for Heidegger, the possibility of one’s own impossibility. There is a need to go through this impossible possibility but there is a possibility in excess of this: resurrection. A resurrection, not guaranteed, but hoped for, “strained towards.” The life of faith is a life negated, emptied. Thus, a kind of lack remains in place of religious content, a lack that induces desire for “what lies ahead.”

Politics Unborn: A Thougth Experiement on the (Re)production of a New Political Subject

2007-03-21T18:07:00.000-04:00

[Partially in response to this post at the weblog]

Once the category of the “state of exception” is mastered in its formality, such states begin to appear ubiquitous. However, pointing out such instances serves no real political purpose. It is, at most, diagnostic. Similarly, numerous examples of the homo sacer, even beyond the extensive catalogue that Agamben cites, can be named without too much difficulty. But again, the identification of such instances is not the important point – nor, however, is nostalgically working to restore things to the way they were before the emergency or the sovereign decision. The political exigency that follows from the biopolitical predicament, according to Agamben, is to conceive of such “zones of indistinction” as themselves sites of new political possibilities.

Thus, to point out that the “fetus” or the “unborn” represents an exemplary figure of the homo sacer is not to say too much. To point out that a child in utero is neither living nor non-living properly speaking – insofar as the decision on this status is the one constantly in dispute – and that such an existence occupies a “zone of indistinction” between fact and law, by virtue of this undecidability, is not to see in Agamben’s analysis a tacit pro-life agenda.

Of significance, however, are the political consequences of such a realization when it comes to discerning the true political subject. The liberal model understands the political subject, in this case, to be the autonomous individual who is free to deal with the fact of pregnancy in the way that she sees fit – or the way that she sees fit within the realm of available law and technology. The conservative model locates the final say in an unimpregnable male (legislator, priest, doctor, ethicist). But there is yet another assessment of this situation, a third political subject, who becomes available in light of Agamben’s work. The site of resistance to biopolitics is life itself, a zoe that has become its own bios. Life itself becomes both the object of biopolitical capture and the subject of its resistance. Would not the unborn then become the political subject par excellence, insofar as such a life is the one which is inseparable from its form. The question then becomes: how to conceive of an unborn politics?

Lenten Reflection 5a: Isaiah 43:16-21

2007-03-21T10:34:00.001-04:00

Isaiah 43:16-21
43:16 Thus says the LORD, who makes a way in the sea, a path in the mighty waters,
43:17 who brings out chariot and horse, army and warrior; they lie down, they cannot rise, they are extinguished, quenched like a wick:
43:18 Do not remember the former things, or consider the things of old.
43:19 I am about to do a new thing; now it springs forth, do you not perceive it? I will make a way in the wilderness and rivers in the desert.
43:20 The wild animals will honor me, the jackals and the ostriches; for I give water in the wilderness, rivers in the desert, to give drink to my chosen people,
43:21 the people whom I formed for myself so that they might declare my praise.

Comment:
The possibility of novelty, of the utterly new, is a consistent theme of emancipatory political thinking, but, before that, it is the concern of an ancient people and a more ancient God. If there were a common thread that could unite all of the failings of biblical people it would be the incapacity to imagine the new, the temptation to settle for what “is” as opposed to being attuned to what “happens” – this is Badiou’s distinction between the order of being and the order of the event.

The “new thing” that is about to happen concerns another repetition: Israel has gone from desert to promised land and now returned to the “desert,” this time in the form of exile. But just as the desert, a place of lack and scarcity became the site of sustaining abundance, the new “desert,” a place of political subservience and religious compromise, is a place which will not remain hidden from divine generosity. Water will cover the dryness of the desert, justice will bisect the sovereignty of empire (Amos 5:24 But let justice roll down like waters, and righteousness like an ever-flowing stream.).

Lenten Reflection 4b: 2 Corinthians 5:16-21

2007-03-15T09:40:00.000-04:00

2 Corinthians 5:16-21
5:16 From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way.
5:17 So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!
5:18 All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation;
5:19 that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us.
5:20 So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.
5:21 For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

Comment
I spoke earlier of Paul’s biopolitics – such that the passage to redemption is corporal. Here is yet another perspective on this biopolitics. Agamben argues, at the conclusion of Homo Sacer, contra Foucault, that there is no escape from the biopolitical predicament: every body is always already a biopolitical body. Thus, the “new economy of bodies and pleasures” that Foucault gestures towards at the end of History of Sexuality 1 is not really conceivable. Foucault, as far as Agamben is concerned, is not critical enough with his concepts. It is not merely a new relation between body and pleasure that is necessary but a, in some sense, a new body, a new corporal destiny. Further, this new body cannot be the return to an old body, there can be no nostalgia for a pre-biopolitical existence -- “There is no return from the camps to classical politics” (187).

In Paul we find something like the possibility of a new corporal destiny, not in terms of an escape from bodily existence – as it sometimes sounds in 2 Corinthians – but in terms of a participation in another future for the body: “we are convinced that one has died for all; therefore all have died. And he died for all, so that those who live might live no longer for themselves but for him who died and was raised for him” – these are the words that immediately precede our text. These are the conditions under which Paul can claim that “if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation.” There is here the possibility of not just a new relation between body and world, but the possibility of a new body, of a new site for a biopolitical resistance to biopolitics. In this way Paul represents a possible completion of Agamben’s project to found a new politics which would be a zoe which is its own bios – this, by the way, is not a possibility that Agamben names in his Paul book.

Lenten Reflection 4a: Joshua 5:9-12

2007-03-13T15:39:00.000-04:00

Joshua 5:9-12
5:9 The LORD said to Joshua, "Today I have rolled away from you the disgrace of Egypt." And so that place is called Gilgal to this day.
5:10 While the Israelites were camped in Gilgal they kept the passover in the evening on the fourteenth day of the month in the plains of Jericho.
5:11 On the day after the passover, on that very day, they ate the produce of the land, unleavened cakes and parched grain.
5:12 The manna ceased on the day they ate the produce of the land, and the Israelites no longer had manna; they ate the crops of the land of Canaan that year.

Comment
Rosenzweig describes Jewish liturgical practice as a circular repetition – the Torah scroll is unrolled, rolled, read, re-read the same way, year by year – this is what situates Jews already in eternity. Eternity is brought into the moment, an infinite now, by this repetition. But how? "There is only one way out," says Rosenzweig, "the moment we are seeking must, since it has flown away, begin again already at the same moment, in the sinking away it must already begin again; its perishing must be at the same time its beginning again (307).

In the text from Joshua, Israel, finally on the far side of the Jordan, undertakes the first repetition of the Passover. The initial meal was not yet liturgical, it was singular, the (violent) act of divine liberation: the manifestation of God’s unrivaled power and deep solidarity. It was the event that finally lead Pharoh to (provisionally) concede and release Israel from bondage. Now, in this first repetition the experience of Egypt is both maintained and erased – we might even say it undergoes a sort of Aufhebung or sublation. Such a repetition is enacted in order to serve as a reminder to this generation and those that follow: “And when your children ask you, 'What do you mean by this observance?' you shall say, 'It is the passover sacrifice to the LORD, for he passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt, when he struck down the Egyptians but spared our houses.'" (Exodus 12.26) the memory is retained in the practice of repetition. But, it is retained in a particular form: not as the melancholic reliving of the trauma of slavery, but as the perpetual announcement of liberation. The event is repeated, but the “disgrace of Egypt” effaced in the very reenactment.

There is another shift that is named here and it too has to do with food and a different temporal existence. Much like the liturgical practice of Passover is a movement from singularity to repetition – which is its own form of singularity – the shift from manna to the produce of the land is a change from the miraculous, singular, appearance of manna each morning – which is its own form of repetition – to the repeated cycles of agricultural practice. In each case the life of this community is bound up with a certain type of temporal existence. We have two models of time here, two modes of faithful existence. What Derrida says with respect to the spatiality of the desert and the promised land – that they are both aporetic places – applies, it seems to me, temporally as well -- they are both aporetic times. That is, both times -- the time of repetition (which is its own singularity) and the time of sigularity (which is its own repetition) -- are not the coincident with chronological time: the one breaks regular time open in its aleatory irruption, the other exceeds common time in its junction with eternity.

Lenten Reflection 3b: 1 Corinthians 10:1-13 / Messianic Politics iv: Contraction

2007-03-07T10:58:00.001-05:00

1 Corinthians 10:1-13
10:1 I do not want you to be unaware, brothers and sisters, that our ancestors were all under the cloud, and all passed through the sea,
10:2 and all were baptized into Moses in the cloud and in the sea,
10:3 and all ate the same spiritual food,
10:4 and all drank the same spiritual drink. For they drank from the spiritual rock that followed them, and the rock was Christ.
10:5 Nevertheless, God was not pleased with most of them, and they were struck down in the wilderness.
10:6 Now these things occurred as examples for us, so that we might not desire evil as they did.
10:7 Do not become idolaters as some of them did; as it is written, "The people sat down to eat and drink, and they rose up to play."
10:8 We must not indulge in sexual immorality as some of them did, and twenty-three thousand fell in a single day.
10:9 We must not put Christ to the test, as some of them did, and were destroyed by serpents.
10:10 And do not complain as some of them did, and were destroyed by the destroyer.
10:11 These things happened to them to serve as an example, and they were written down to instruct us, on whom the ends of the ages have come.
10:12 So if you think you are standing, watch out that you do not fall.
10:13 No testing has overtaken you that is not common to everyone. God is faithful, and he will not let you be tested beyond your strength, but with the testing he will also provide the way out so that you may be able to endure it.

Comment
Paul establishes a relation between Israel of the Mosaic era and the church of the messianic era by way of a bizarre – but not unprecedented – form of interpretation: a typological interpretation (each occurrence of the word “example” [vv. 6 & 11] is a translation of a form of the Greek typos). Agamben is helpful here because he takes seriously Paul’s method in both its historical and normative aspects. He does not shy away in embarrassment from the method, nor does he allow it to evolve into the, now discredited, medieval mode of allegorical interpretation. What he does is examine this relation in terms of its role in shaping messianic temporality – the theme of his book. “What matters to us here,” he says,

Is not the fact that each event of the past – once it becomes figure [typos] – announces a future event and is fulfilled in it, but is the transformation of time implied by the typological relation. The problem here does not simply concern the biunivocal correspondence that binds typos to antitypos together in an exclusively hermeneutic relationship, according to the paradigm that prevailed in medieval culture; rather, it concerns a tension that clasps together and transforms past and future, typos and antitypos, in a inseparable constellation. The messianic is not just one of the two terms in this typological relation, it is the relation itself. This si the meaning of the Pauline expression “for us, upon whom the ends of the ages [aionon, the olamim] are come to face each other.” The two ends of the olam hazzeh and the olam babba contract into each other without coinciding; this face to face, this
contraction, is messianic time, and nothing else. Once again, for Paul, the messianic is not a third eon situated between two times; but rather, it is a caesura that divides the division between times and introduces a remnant, a zone of undecidablity, in which the past is dislocated into the present and the present is extended into the past. (74)

For Agamben Paul’s method does not negate the initial Israelite experience, it does not co-opt it for Christian purposes. Instead Paul discloses something of the structure of messianic time where the past does not relate to the present and the future according to a linear movement, where one event follows another in a determinate manner, “like the beads on a rosary.” The messianic event – which is for Paul, if not for Agamben, the resurrection of Jesus and the calling into existence of the ekklesia under the power of the Holy Spirit – inaugurates a rupture in the structure of time and renders its relationship to itself and our relationship to it substantially different. Agamben sees this realization in Benjamin’s description of messianic time as a “monstrous abbreviation” (as in the epigraph to this blog). Benjamin’s “now time” (Jetztzeit) and Paul’s “present time” (ho nyn kairos) both name, not a moment that follows chronologically from an earlier moment, but the possibility of past and future forming a “constellation” in an unpredictable, revolutionary moment.

Lenten Reflection 3a: Isaiah 55:1-9

2007-03-06T10:04:00.000-05:00

Isaiah 55:1-9
55:1 Ho, everyone who thirsts, come to the waters; and you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.
55:2 Why do you spend your money for that which is not bread, and your labor for that which does not satisfy? Listen carefully to me, and eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food.
55:3 Incline your ear, and come to me; listen, so that you may live. I will make with you an everlasting covenant, my steadfast, sure love for David.
55:4 See, I made him a witness to the peoples, a leader and commander for the peoples.
55:5 See, you shall call nations that you do not know, and nations that do not know you shall run to you, because of the LORD your God, the Holy One of Israel, for he has glorified you.
55:6 Seek the LORD while he may be found, call upon him while he is near;
55:7 let the wicked forsake their way, and the unrighteous their thoughts; let them return to the LORD, that he may have mercy on them, and to our God, for he will abundantly pardon.
55:8 For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the LORD.
55:9 For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.

Comment
There is a paradigmatic text, which occurs in various forms, that condenses the whole of divine activity into a single formulation:

"The LORD, the LORD, a God merciful and gracious, slow to anger, and abounding in steadfast love and faithfulness, keeping steadfast love for the thousandth generation, forgiving iniquity and transgression and sin, yet by no means clearing the guilty, but visiting the iniquity of the parents upon the children and the children's children, to the third and the fourth generation." (Exodus 34.6-7)

In a single figure of the divine resides the impulse to mercy and to punishment. The book of Isaiah can be seen as an extended meditation on this tension between retribution and forgiveness. However, in Isaiah it happens in reverse: anger precedes forgiveness – the liturgical formulation, prefers the softer side of God and thus presents it first, warning, nevertheless, that this is not the whole picture. In practice –an intra-textual “practice” – anger comes first, mercy and forgiveness come to substitute for anger. This difference is so apparent in Isaiah that scholars divide the book into two parts: “first Isaiah” where anger and punishment (i.e. exile) takes precedent and “second Isaiah” where mercy reigns. The shift can be seen in the following:

For a brief moment I abandoned you, but with great compassion I will gather you. In overflowing wrath for a moment I hid my face from you, but with everlasting love I will have compassion on you, says the LORD, your Redeemer. This is like the days of Noah to me: Just as I swore that the waters of Noah would never again go over the earth, so I have sworn that I will not be angry with you and will not rebuke you. For the mountains may depart and the hills be removed, but my steadfast love shall not depart from you, and my covenant of peace shall not be removed, says the LORD, who has compassion on you. (Isa 54.7-9)

Today’s text, well into “second Isaiah,” further articulates the compassion that God longs to show to Israel. What is interesting here is the “materialist” cadence. The promise of a new covenant is bound to a new economy. This is an economy that is not administered by (the Babylonian) empire, not ruled by the market, not driven by scarcity: it is an economy of abundance where, like the divine compassion that manifests in rhetorical excesses, the things of human need become, in there excess, the things of human enjoyment: “eat what is good, and delight yourselves in rich food”. This is an abundance that destroys, in exceeding, a calculable exchange: “you that have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without price.” Under the new covenant, a new regime of enjoyment, an abundance dispensed from a source, itself in excess of the calculable: “For my thoughts are not your thoughts, nor are your ways my ways, says the LORD. For as the heavens are higher than the earth, so are my ways higher than your ways and my thoughts than your thoughts.” This is the utopian hope offered to a people in exile.

Messianic Politics (iii c):Jonah and Justice

2007-03-02T17:20:00.000-05:00

On the matter of distinguishing between law and justice, and partially in response to the questions from Steve and Doug, we can look, in more detail, at Scholem's, “On Jonah and Justice”(1919).

Scholem’s very interesting – perhaps even idiosyncratic – reading of Jonah leads him to some striking conclusions on law and justice. He explains that the seemingly exceptional character of the book of Jonah among the prophetic books – its reluctant prophet, its conspicuous lack of prophecy (a single line, Jonah 3.4) – point to its status as a book not primarily of prophecy, but about prophecy: God teaches the prophet what justice is. Justice, on Scholem’s reading of this divine lesson, is precisely the deferment that I mentioned in the earlier post, but in this case, instead of the deferment between commandment and judgment – which, now that I come back to it, is better said to be a constitutive difference, not a provisional or temporal gap – it is the one between judgment and execution.

Scholem pursues the issue of law and justice in Jonah in terms of the two conflicting ways of interpreting the only properly prophetic speech of the book: "Forty days more, and Nineveh shall be [lit. “is being”] overthrown!" (3.4b). Scholem relies upon the literal translation and in this way speaks of Jonah’s interpretation of prophecy as “historiography.” According to the prophecy Ninevah is destroyed – its as though Jonah’s speech is transposed forty days into the future, thus he speaks in the present (participial) tense, as though he were bearing witness to an event under way: Ninevah is being destroyed. (It would be interesting to read Jonah’s “Ninevah is being overthrown” in light of Freud’s take on fantasy in his essay “A Child is Being Beaten” – written, interestingly, in the same year as Scholem’s essay.) Now, according to Jonah, it is simply a matter of history following suit, there is no gap between prophecy and historical fact. For God, on the other hand, prophecy qua prophecy is not historical fact, but warning. The difference between the historiographic and prophetic points of view correspond to the difference between law and justice. As Scholem claims,

Jonah takes the standpoint of the law, and from this side he is indeed in the right; God takes that of justice; God denies the (mythical) law in history. In the act of repentance, the law is overcome and the judgment is not carried out.(On this, compare Psalm 94:14-15, particularly the interconnection of the two verses.) This, and nothing else, is the meaning of justice in the deepest sense: that judgment is allowed, but the execution of it remains something tirely different. The unequivocal connection of the judge's decision to the executive power--a connection that defines the actual order of law--is suspended by the deferment on the part of the executive power. This is what God does with Nineveh. The conclusion of 4:10--he had passed a sentence in order to carry it out, and he did not (yet) do it--is a classic statement of the idea of justice. Where the court pronounces a verdict, justice raises a question. As Daniel says:"In the counsel of the guardians a decree and in the verdict of the holy ones a question"—this is justice (357).

A few of points on this to conclude: (1) justice is not constitutively different from law, but an adjustment of it. Justice, in Scholem’s telling is a disruption of the continuity of law, which is the necessary connection between judgment and execution. Without this connection law is toothless, impotent. Thus, Scholem says, “Justice and the law complement each other and coincide.” Justice relies upon the logic of law – as the continuity between judgment and execution – insofar as it is defined as the disruption of this logic and the breaking of this continuity, as “deferment.” (2) Justice is fundamentally a theological (perhaps, “Jewish”) concept. This is not to say that it harbours no historical or profane exigency –Scholem highlights this exigency when he says that “Justice is the idea of the historical annihilation of divine judgment, and just is that deed which neutralizes divine judgment upon it.” In this way Scholem’s justice, much like Benjamin’s divine violence, is opposed to and resists fate. (3) Justice is associated with the question, law with an answer. The question, as opposed to the verdict, is something like a Benjaminian “unalloyed means.” Subtracted from its relation with an answer, it is a means without and end or a mediality.

The question is an unending cycle; the symbol of this infinitude, in which the possibility of an empirical end is given, is the rhetorical question. This ("Jewish") question can be justly characterized as medial; it knows no answer,which means its answer must in essence be another question; in the innermost basis of Judaism the concept of an answer does not exist (356).

Lenten Reflection 2b: Philippians 3:17-4:1

2007-03-01T10:31:00.000-05:00

Philippians 3:17-4:1
3:17 Brothers and sisters, join in imitating me, and observe those who live according to the example you have in us.
3:18 For many live as enemies of the cross of Christ; I have often told you of them, and now I tell you even with tears.
3:19 Their end is destruction; their god is the belly; and their glory is in their shame; their minds are set on earthly things.
3:20 But our citizenship is in heaven, and it is from there that we are expecting a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ.
3:21 He will transform the body of our humiliation that it may be conformed to the body of his glory, by the power that also enables him to make all things subject to himself.
4:1 Therefore, my brothers and sisters, whom I love and long for, my joy and crown, stand firm in the Lord in this way, my beloved.

Comment
Paul is speaking here of a politics – citizenship is a political category – that is “otherworldly.” But at the very moment when he says that “our citizenship is in heaven,” he limits access to this other world by deferring its arrival: we are still “expecting” the arrival/return of the Messiah. Furthermore, in the next verse he shifts from the present to the future tense: “He will transform…” It is important to keep in mind here that Philippi is a Roman colony and this is not a broad condemnation of worldly political involvement, it is a call for the followers of Jesus to withdraw their loyalty – if not their bodies – from empire.

Paul is speaking here of a biopolitics. Not in terms of the more recent phenomena of governmentality and medicalization that Foucault identified, but in terms of the locus of political struggle being essentially corporal. Both the preset order of the world and the order that is to come concern a bodily disposition. The “enemies of the cross,” as Paul says earlier in the passage, are those who are corporally disposed to the present order alone: “their god is their belly…their minds are set on earthly things.” There is no sign of Gnosticism here: the fault that Paul finds with these enemies is only the lack of a supplement to the immanent arrangement. These bodies of “humiliation” are the bodies that we are, there is no escape from them. But these bodies will “conform,” in the future, to another corporality: they will take the form of “glory.” The glorified body, the body of Christ, the resurrected body that still bears the marks of its permeability, is not completely other than the humiliated body, it is its supplement. There is no room here for a hyper-eschatological escapism: the content of the form of the glorified body is the humiliated body. The passage to redemption is corporal.

Archipelago of Exception - Zygmunt Bauman and Giorgio Agamben in conversation

2007-02-28T13:34:00.000-05:00

Link

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

2007-02-27T10:05:00.000-05:00

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

2007-02-24T11:16:00.000-05:00

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

2007-02-23T12:43:00.000-05:00

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

2007-02-21T16:27:00.000-05:00

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

2007-02-16T21:07:00.000-05:00

"The Power and the Glory"

A lecture on the theme of "economic theology"

Messianic Politics (iii): Law

2007-02-16T11:28:00.000-05:00

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).

Messianic Politics (ii): Neutralizations of Carl Schmitt

2007-01-31T11:47:00.000-05:00

One of the characteristics of inflationary messianism is its totalizing propensity. It ruptures the status quo with an absolute division. The political field is split between those who are faithful to the messianic event and those who would deny or resist it. This is the nature of the messianic in its inflationary mode: it accounts for the resistance of the status quo and defines itself, in part, in opposition to it. Thus, the greatest danger to a messianic politics, it would seem, would come not from those who would resist it from without, but those who would neutralize it from within. At least this is the impression one gathers from the tradition I am dealing with here – Scholem, Benjamin, Taubes, Agamben. Alongside this tradition of inflationary messianism has emerged a critical sub-tradition: the one which seeks to cleanse messianism of its neutralizing elements. Each thinker not only articulates his own vision of messianic politics, but also identifies those elements that would defuse a messianic intensity. In the coming posts I will follow this critical line as it takes on various opponents. Here, however, I will offer, by way of context – historical and conceptual – some thoughts on Carl Schmitt’s critique of “neutralization.” Schmitt is clearly in the background of this tradition.

In his 1929 essay “The Age of Neutralizations and Depoliticizations” Schmitt defines the contemporary European political situation as reducible to a single formula: the “legitimacy of the status quo.” (131) In order to describe how Europe had gotten to such a point, he names a series of stages that conceptually capture Europe’s (theologio-)political development; which are really a “series of progressive neutralizations”. (137)

There are four great, simple, secular stages corresponding to the four centuries and proceeding from the theological to the metaphysical sphere, from here to the humanitarian-moral and finally to the economic sphere. (131)

With respect to these stages, Schmitt considers

the strongest and most consequential of all intellectual shifts of European history to be the one in the 17th century from traditional Christian theology to “natural” science [i.e. the shift from the theology to metaphysics]. Until now this shift has determined the direction of all further development…At the core of this astounding shift lies an elemental impulse that has been decisive for centuries, i.e., the striving for neutral sphere. (137)

The attempt to mediate theological disputes by way of a “neutral” secular sphere is criticized by Schmitt not on practical grounds – for certainly this mediation lead to a certain mitigation of violence. What is at issue here is the neutralization, thus nullification, of the political as such. The antagonism constitutive of the political (friends and enemies) cannot be negated without the consequent negation of the political itself. Schmitt says,

the essential point for me is that theology, the former central sphere, was abandoned because it was controversial, in favor of another – neutral – sphere. The former central sphere became neutralized in that it ceased to be the central sphere. On the basis of the new central sphere, one hoped to find minimum agreement and common premises allowing for the possibility of security, clarity, prudence and peace. Europeans thus moved in the direction of neutralization and minimalization, whereby they accepted the law which “kept them in line” for the following centuries and constituted their concept of truth. (137)

But is such a neutralization of conflict really a neutralization; or is it merely a displacement? What is the locus of neutrality? Who maintains the neutrality of the neutral?

In the 19th century, first the monarch and then the state became a neutral power, initiating a chapter in the history of political theology in the liberal doctrines of the pouvoir neutre and the stato neutrale in which the process of neutralization finds its classical formula because it also has grasped what is most decisive: political power. But in the dialectic of such a development one creates a new sphere of struggle precisely through the shifting of the central sphere. (138)

Antagonism is not overcome, it is simply shifted: “The religious wars evolved into the still cultural yet already economically determined national wars of the 19th century and finally into economic wars.” (138) No one is nostalgic for the days when one’s life could be taken for being baptized at the wrong age, however, the egalitarian and sanitized warfare of the guillotine or the smart bomb produce a corporeal remainder that no amount of quicklime can blot out. Is profit a more excusable pretense than dogma?

But the pinnacle of neutralization, for Schmitt, emerges in the 19th century’s religious faith in technology. The seeming blindness of its potential deployment, however, is a sign of a whole new breed of attempted neutrality.

The process of continuous neutralizations of various spheres of cultural life has reached its end because technology is at hand. Technology is no longer neutral ground in the sense of the process of neutralization; every strong politics will make use of it. For this reason, the present century can only be understood provisionally as the century of technology. How ultimately it should be understood will be revealed only when it is known which type of politics is strong enough to master the new technology and which type of genuine friend-enemy groupings can develop on this new ground. (141)

Technological “neutrality” is different in kind from the previous attempts at a neutral sphere in terms of the positivity of its attempt. While previous spheres, like the secular, attempted to rid itself of political content, thereby making itself less available for religious appropriation and particular hegemonies, technology functions more as a universality than a neutrality: it makes itself available to anyone. “Technology is always only an instrument and a weapon; precisely because it serves all, it is not neutral.” (139)

The details of Schmitt’s analysis are less important here than his overall criticism of neutrality, the attempt to develop a non-antagonistic consensus – i.e. a neutralization of the political as such. This criticism of neutrality, of political – or messianic – neutralizations will become important for Scholem, Benjamin, Taubes and Agamben.

Messianic Politics (i): Two Traditions

2007-01-30T16:10:00.000-05:00

After a long hiatus, I hope to begin posting again on a semi-regular basis. It is always difficult to maintain the intensity of expectation once the one who is expected actually arrives. It was probably no coincidence that the series of posts that I had planned to compose on the theme of the messianic were more difficult to write while in the midst of my daughter's parousia.

There are at least two traditions of messianism; but I am not thinking here of the ones that correspond to the different Abrahamic faiths. The traditions I have in mind transcend and encompass, to some degree, those of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. We can call the one an inflationary messianism and the other a deflationary. The former corresponds roughly to a "revolutionary" model while the later to a "reform" model; however, these names are imprecise enough to be abandoned. What is at stake in both the inflationary and the deflationary modes of the messianic is the status of law -- but again, this is not, fundamentally, the difference between Judaism and Christianity.

In the deflationary mode messianism represents a relatively minor alteration of the order of things. Here is the classic talmudic formulation of the messianic era:

"This world differs from [that of] the days of the Messiah only in respect of servitude to [foreign] powers." (Sanhedrin 99a)

The messianic era -- as distinct, it should be noted from redemption -- will differ for the Jews in one important respect: they will not be living under the power or law of any foreign nation. But law as such -- and this is the important distinction -- is not different. Torah will still be followed. Christian analogues can be found as well. For instance when Jesus says,

"Do not think that I have come to abolish the law or the prophets; I have come not to abolish but to fulfill." (Matt 5.17)

This tradition of messianism continues up to the present day. The majority voice within both Judaism and Christianity is that of a deflationary messianism -- even if the church imagines itself to be beyond (Jewish) law, it persists, for the most part, in subjection to (state) law; this is due, no doubt, to a certain way of reading Romans 13 that favours the status quo. This is not to say, however, that deflationary messianism is commensurate with a reactionary politics or a rigid conservatism. Levinas and Rosenzweig, for instance, are thinkers of deflationary messianism.

Inflationary messianism, on the other hand, takes a different view of law in the messianic era. Agamben, borrowing heavily from Gershom Scholem's work on the messianic idea states the matter this way: "The Messiah is... the figure through which religion confronts the problem of the Law, decisively reckoning with it." (Potentialities,163).

Scholem saw the origins of this tradition less in the biblical literature -- which, in the Jewish tradition, according to Scholem, does not have a fully developed idea of messianism; it merely anticipates the messianic era -- and more in later messianic movements. Here the Sabbatian movement of 1648 is exemplary. This movement saw the messianic era as inaugurating a time where the Torah should no longer be kept; indeed, when the Torah should be overtly disobeyed. Other modern proponents of inflationary messianism would include Marx (in a disavowed form) and Benjamin (especially his "Critique of Violence" essay). Derrida is a figure who is slightly more difficult to place within this framework. His thinking of "the messianic without messianism" does not speak of a messianic era, only the messianic interruption of the present. To pursue the thought further would inevitably leave him too close to a "historical messianism" of one kind or another.

I preface my future posts on the messianic with this in order to show that messianism can be deployed in at least two modes. For now my focus will be on the inflationary messianism of Scholem, Benjamin, Agamben (and Taubes).

Losing Hope

2006-12-05T22:17:00.000-05:00

Introducing Isabel Lenka.

The familial has won out over the conceptual: we have decided on the name Isabel Lenka instead of Isabel Hope. However, according to my idiosyncrataic and retroactively assigned etymology, Isabel comes from the Croatian word "izbavi" which means redemption. In this way the loss of Hope does not erase the "weak messianic power" that this little one has been endowed with...and everyone is happy.

she who was to-come...

2006-12-02T13:32:00.000-05:00

We are very glad to welcome Isabel ~~Hope~~.

~~Hope~~: a "weak messianic power."

Epigraphs: The Messianic, Law, Time

2006-11-27T15:49:00.000-05:00

"Like every generation that preceded us, we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim."

"The tradition of the oppressed teaches us that the 'state of exception' in which we live is the rule. We must arrive at a concept of history that corresponds to this fact. Then we will have the production of a real state of exception before us as a task."

- Walter Benjamin

"Messianic time has the form of a state of exception...Here it is not a matter of a problem of political philosophy in the strict sense but of a crucial issue that involves the very existence of philosophy in its relationship to the entire codified text of tradition, whether it be Islamic shari'a, Jewish Halakha, or Christian dogma. Philsophy is always already constitutively related to the law, and every philosophical work is always, quite literally, a decision on this relationship."

- Giorgio Agamben

"Well, what remains irreducible to any deconstruction what remains undeconstructible as the possibility itself of deconstruction is, perhaps, a certain experience of the emancipatory promise; it is perhaps even the formality of a structural messianism, a messianism without religion, even a messianic without messianism, an idea of justice – which we distinguish from law or right and even from human rights – and idea of democracy – which we distinguish from its current concept and from its determined predicates today."

"[The messianic]or messianicity without messianism. This would be the opening to the future or to the coming of the other as the advent of justice, but without horizon of expectation and without prophetic prefiguration."

- Jacques Derrida

Transition

2006-11-25T18:34:00.000-05:00

The trajectory of these recent posts has not been as fruitful as I had imagined. I would like to move instead to a discussion of the messianic in Derrida (in order to later bring it into discussion with Benjamin and Agamben).This is not an utterly new direction, nonetheless some sort of a transition would be preferable. As luck would have it, I found a passage from Specters of Marx that offers just such a transition.

More than ever the future-to-come [a-venir] can announce itself as such and in its purity only on the basis of a past end: beyond, if that’s possible, the last extremity. If that’s possible, if there is any future, but how can one suspend such a question or deprive oneself of such reserve without concluding in advance, without reducing in advance both the future and its chance? Without totalizing in advance? We must discern here between eschatology and teleology, even if the stakes of such a difference risk constantly being effaced in the most fragile and slight insubstantiality – and will be in a certain way always and necessarily deprived of any insurance against this risk. Is there not a messianic extremity, an eskhaton whose ultimate event (immediate rupture, unheard-of interruption, untimeliness of the infinite surprise, heterogeneity without accomplishment) can exceed, at each moment, the final term of the phusis, such as work, the production, the telos of any history? (Specters of Marx, p.45)

In order to make use of the future anterior -- the decision to name what "will have been" -- in a Derridian (or, Levinasian-Derridian, to make appropriate use of Zizek's often inappropriate convention of hyphenating-adjectivizing the two names) and not Hegelian sense, it will be necessary to distinguish the teleological from the eschatological. "Concluding in advance" is what is necessary if we are to speak of the future at all -- even if to speak of its unknowability. But how to speak of the future, the a-venir, in a responsible and hospitable way; how to remain open to its coming (which is to say open to its arrival as promise or as threat); this is Derrida's task. It is only an act of messianic faith which welcomes an eschatology that is devoid of content -- and thereby lacking a telos -- that can accomplish this.

There will be much more to say about the messianic.

“il aura obligé”

2006-11-12T09:49:00.000-05:00

I'd like to draw back a little bit from the line that I have been pursuing with respect to the future anterior. In an earlier post I spoke of Derrida's "suspicion" of that verbal mode. I think it is better to speak of his ambivalence towards it. Consequently, the opposition that I was attempting to identify between Derrida and Badiou on the temporal basis of politics will not be as simple as I had imagined. This is not to say that there is no disagreement, only that this is not the precise plane upon which the disagreement lies.

I was brought to this realization in re-reading the "gift" that Derrida composed for Emmanuel Levinas -- his contribution to a feschrift for the latter (The English translation is included in Re-reading Levinas). This is a dense text with much going on. Derrida is a consistently careful reader of texts, but he seems to be all the more attentive when reading Levinas -- at the end of this essay he speaks of a certain "incest" between them.

The thematization of the future anterior in this text stems from the obscure epigraph (or "exergue" -- for some reason Derrida maintains the proximity between the exergue and the future anterior) that Derrida places at the beginning of the essay: “il aura obligé," "he will have obligated." This line, along with a series of quotations from Levinas' Otherwise Than Being ("At this very moment in this work here I am" -- the title of the essay), constitute the source of Derrida's reflections. I'll leave aside the questions related to the "he" (who is the il? is it E.L.? why not el?, etc.) and concentrate on the form of the verb.

"The future anterior could turn out to be -- and this resemblance is irreducible -- the time of the Hegelian teleology (p.36)." This is the ambivalence I spoke of. Derrida's reservations about this temporal mode are clear, but what is the other side of this ambivalence? In the Levinasian lexicon there is another possibility:

the future anterior...will have designated "within" language that which remains most irreducible to the economy of Hegelian teleology and to the dominant interpretation of language. From the moment when it is in accord with the "he" as Pro-noun of the wholly-other "always already past," it will have drawn us toward an eschatology without philosophical teleology, beyond it in any case, otherwise than it. It will have engulfed the future anterior [my emphasis] in the bottomless bottom of a past anterior to any past, to all present past, toward that past of the trace that has never been present. Its future anteriority will have been irreducible to ontology....

That future anteriority there would no longer decline a verb saying the action of a subject in an operation that would have been present. To say "il aura obligé"... is not to designate, describe, define, show etc., but, let us say, to entrace (entracer)
(p.37).

It seems, then, that the "otherwise" of the future anterior lies in its irreducibility to ontology, certainly, but also, as far as I can tell, a reducibility to the temporality of the "trace," what is referred to as the absolute past, the past anterior to any present, the immemorial past, etc.. (In this case, Simon Critchely's commentary on Derrida's essay in the same volume would be incorrect. Critchely claims that Derrida favours the future anterior as such. He claims that for Derrida "it is a tense that escapes the time of the present; it simultaneously points toward a future -- aura -- and a past -- obligé -- but never toward a present" (p.168). This assessment of the tense may be correct, but this does not seem to be Derrida's own assessment.) Levinas understands this strange temporality in terms of a kind of "anachronism" which "takes apart the recuperable time of history and memory" (OTB, p.88). The obligation that I bear towards my neighbour is not of the order of a contract or a recognition and my response does not derive from a free choice; all of which would assume a coincidence of oneself to another in the present. For Levinas,

[m]y reaction misses a present which is already the past of itself. This past is not in the present, but is a phase retained, the past of this present, a lapse already lost which marks ageing, escaping all retention, altering my contemporaneousness with the other. It reclaimed me before I came. The delay is irrecuperable. "I opened....he had disappeared." My presence does not respond to the extreme urgency of the assignation. I am accused of having delayed. The common hour marked by the clock is the hour in which the neighbor reveals himself and delivers himself in his image, but it is precisely in his image that he is no longer near...[This kind of] proximity does not enter into the common time of clocks, which makes meetings possible. It is a disturbance.

Proximity as a suppression of distance suppresses the distance of consciousness of... The neighbor excludes himself from the thought that seeks him, and this exclusion has a positive side to it: my exposure to him, antecedent to his appearing, my delay behind him, my undergoing, undo the core of what is identity to me...

One can call that apocalyptically the break-up of time. But it is a matter of an effaced but untameable diachrony of non-historical, non-said time, which cannot be synchronized in a present by memory and historiography, where the present is but the trace of an immemorial past...(ibid, p.89).

This temporality of the trace is clearly not the Hegelian or the Lacanian version of the future anterior. It is an altogether different temporality, one that is defined, first of all by a lapse or a missed encounter. Ageing is one metaphor that Levinas uses. Ageing is the fact of a temporality that effects me, effects my body, despite me. I cannot identify my encounter with ageing, I
only know that I am effected by it, I can only respond to it.

The Future Anterior Again

2006-11-08T10:45:00.000-05:00

Inspired by a more sophisticated reading of Lacan than I can offer, I'll continue with the thought of the future anterior.

Consider Lacan:

What is realised in my history is not the past definite of what was, since it is no more, or even the present perfect of what has been in what I am, but the future anterior of what I shall have been for what I am in the process of becoming (Ecrits, 247).

In this case, the perspective of the future anterior is not the one which speculates about the world from the point of its completion, the twilight of history. Here the psychoanalytic cure works according to a temporality that betrays the consecutive flow of memory. What transpires is a restructuring of memory such that what was will only have been by route of the talking cure.

I'll get to Badiou's appropriation of this temporality soon.

The Future Anterior

2006-11-05T15:33:00.000-05:00

I am interested, above all, in the politics of time, or the temporality of politics. I am interested in understanding the political event as an interruption of the normal order. Order implies not just stability of structure, but sequence or flow (as in ordinal numbers). What flows in the current order, the liberal-democratic hegemony, is both capital and time. There is a connection between the two, I am almost certain, but it is a connection I have not yet explored. For now the idea of a political event interrupting the ordered flow of time -- for instance, clocks and calendars -- is what I am attempting to pursue.

There is much to explore in this regard, for now I want to look at Derrida's suspision of a certain temporal mode: the future anterior. The future anterior, the verbal form that names what "will have been," is a form that betrays the future as such: the absolute future of the a-venir.

The future [the a-venir] can only be anticipated in the form of an absolute danger. It is that which breaks absolutely with constituted normality and can only be proclaimed, presented, as a sort of monstrosity. For that future world and for that within it which will have put into question the values of sign, word, and writing, for that which guides our future anterior, there is as yet no exergue.
Of Grammatology, p.5

This lack of an exergue -- named in the exergue of Of Grammatology -- is not a deficency of method, Derrida is not attempting a Hegelian "phenomenology" where the telos is perceptible; as though we stand (or fly) in the dusk of the event which provides us a glimpse of its fullness. The future that Derrida anticipates here -- the arrival of a "science of writing, a grammatology -- would be the anticipation of "a way of thinking that is faithful and attentive to the ineluctable world of the future which proclaims itself at present, beond the cloure of knowledge" (ibid, p.4). How can that which is beyond the present, beyond knowledge be present and known? Certainly not in the terms of the present. Not, to be sure, in terms of the Prussian state (Hegel) or of liberal democracy (Fukyama). What is to-come cannot properly be accommodated to what is. This is, according to Derrida, what is at stake in the logic of the future anterior: to say here and now, what will have been the result of a completed temporal flow, a realized eschatology. To anticipate the future in the present is to disrupt it's order, to speak or act against order, to be untimely or seditious.

The question that remains for me, however, is whether the future anterior is, in every case, subordinate to the metaphysics of presence. For Badiou (following Lacan's notion of the apres coup), the role of the "will have been" does not bespeak a subordination of the future to the present, but the undecidability of the event until it has run its course. The aleatory dimension of the political intervention that is underway.

Hope Against "Heideggerian Hope"

2006-10-26T17:04:00.000-04:00

Once again: is there a passage beyond differance?

Derrida names one mode of this attempted passage in the 1968 essay "Differance." The perpetrator in this case is Heidegger. Derrida is always reading Heidegger, but in the texts of this period (cf.Of Grammatology, 1969), Heidegger plays a specific role. Heidegger is the one - along with Nietzsche and Freud - who has come closest to deconstruction: by challenging the (metaphysical) assumptions of the Western tradition; all the while remaining within its "circle." Heidegger's - and Nietzsche's and Freud's - attempts, however, are not rigorous enough. There are moments when he falls prey to these very assumptions. One such moment, one such attempt to escape the play of differance takes place, according to Derrida, in his "The Anaximander Fragment." Here Heidegger seems to be doing exactly what Derrida is doing in the "Differance" essay, attempting to name, as a word and a concept, what is unnamable and what is "neither a name nor a concept." Differance, is the (non-)word that Derrida comes up with. But he is clear that "differance" too is subject to differance - it too functions within an infinite chain of substitutions. He says early on in the essay that "the efficacity of the thematic of differance may very well, indeed must, one day be superseded, lending itself if not to its own replacement, at least to enmeshing itself in a chain that in truth it never will have governed" (p.7). "Differance" the concept/word is not sufficient to the fact of differance, but no word/concept is or will be. This is the great Heideggerian mistake, the "Heideggerian hope" that Derrida derides. Without going into the specifics of Heidegger's reading of the Anaximander fragment (which I have not read), it is enough to point out Heidegger's misguided daring:

"...in order to name the essential nature of Being, language would have to find a single word, the unique word. From this we can gather how daring every thoughtful word addressed to Being is. Nevertheless such daring is not impossible, since Being speaks always and everywhere throughout langauge" (p. 52, quoted in Derrida, p.27).

One could easily replace every instance of "Being" with "differance" and you would find a trace of Derrida's argument. That is, until the point when the non-impossibility of such an arrival is affirmed. This is the "Heideggerian hope" that must be abandoned, according to Derrida. To the Kantian question "what may I hope?" Derrida answers: "you cannot."

I too would question any "Heideggerian hope" (e.g. Heidegger's own hope in the German nation). However, I will wonder, indeed hope, that differance do not preclude another hope.

A Theological Fragment

2006-10-25T10:33:00.000-04:00

In the comments to an earlier post Dave asked about the degree to which I bought in to the Derridian idea of differance. I read between the lines of this question and interpreted it as the following: is there a passage beyond differance? In other words, and here I'm reading even further between the lines, is there a place for a theological affirmation - transcendence, plenitude, truth, infinity, etc. - while also affirming an unsurpassable finitude qua differance? My response, a response with which I am still not satisfied, was to identify a dichotomy between a fallen and a redeemed world. If the fallen humanity awaits its redemption, we have a responsiblity to seek to understand something of the structure of this fallenness. This, I suggest, is what Derrida does very well.

I am returning to this thought because I came across an interesting analogue. I am beginning a first reading of Adorno's Negative Dialectics. While I don't have much of a sense of what he's doing yet, the Introduction offers an attempt to explain what he means (and doesn't mean) by the term negative dialectics. I came accross a line that seems to me to distill the (concrete) sense of the term - even while it betrays that sense by formalizing it. He says, "...dialectics is the ontology of the wrong state of things. The right state of things would be free of it..." (p.11). Negative dialectics is not, as in Hegelian dialectics, the progressive, ultimately positive, movement (albeit through negation) toward the absolute spirit, as the state. It is the immanent critique of the structure of the "wrong state of things," perhaps we could say, of the fallen world. It would certainly sound too telological, indeed too onto-theo-teleological, to Derrida to know that deconstruction was being undertaken in the interest of an immanent critique, in the interest of somehow attaining to the "right state of things." But this betrayal of finitude is not so much my concern. What is more problematic, and what remains a larger question for this project, is the relation between a fallen and a redeemed world.

Derrida would also not adhere to this dichotomy and his thinking of "redemption" - if I can call it that - does not rely upon a passage beyond; it relies upon the im-possibility of a promise. Benjamin, too, problematizes the sharp distinction between the fallen (the profane) and the redeemed and, in the Theologico-Political Fragment, alludes to their mutual contribution to the coming of the Kingdom of God - i.e. an emancipated humanity. How should a modern thinking of redemption take shape? As the "wrong state of things" persists with increasing visibility - the state of exception that is becoming the rule - the ability to counteract it seems even more obscure. We await here below, in eager expectation, the redemption of creation. But should we await or should we hasten? What would it meant to hasten?

On the "to-come"

2006-10-19T11:26:00.000-04:00

If the to-come of democracy or justice is not a regulative idea, then it is a promise. Derrida, in Rogues, quotes himself from The Other Heading (1991): “[the to-come is] not something that is certain to happen tomorrow, not the democracy (national or international, state or tans-state) of the future, but a democracy that must have the structure of a promise – and thus the memory of that which carries the future, the to-come, here and now” (p.86). The fundamental difference here, between the promise and the regulative idea, concerns the certainty of its arrival – and the form of its arrival. For Kant, as it was mentioned, the supersensible idea serves to regulate action in the sensible realm by holding out for it the hope of its full arrival. In this way the regulative idea is close to a promise in the common sense of the word: a word that can be counted on. We demand such an economical accounting of the promise in everyday use, I think. If a word is not kept – if we were cynical we could say, if there is no return on the investment – then it will not have been a promise, only empty words. This is precisely the everyday understanding of the promise at work in the line from the Fugazi song that I cited in an earlier post.

For Derrida, on the other hand, the promise, in order to be a promise, must retain the undecidability with respect to its arrival and the form of its arrival. He says that it “is thus indeed already a question of autoimmunity, of a double bind of threat and chance, not alternatively or by turns promise and/or threat but threat in the promise itself” (p.82). The promise of a classless society, or in Derrida’s terms, a justice to-come cannot be counted on or accounted for ahead of time. This would not be a promise, but a calculable, albeit deferred, fact – this was precisely Marx’s mistake in reading history teleologically. This is the structure of the a-venir the to-come of democracy.

Democracy's autoimmunity?

2006-10-17T15:28:00.000-04:00

Bush signs into law the Military Commissions Act of 2006; effectively legalizing (certain types of) tortue for (certain types of) people.

Democracy: regulative Idea or a-venir

2006-10-09T14:20:00.000-04:00

Derrida gathers his reservations with respect to the regulative idea into a set of three. The first two concern the question of possibility. The Kantian notion remains, claims Derrida, within the horizon of possibility, even if it is infinitely deferred. He says the regulative idea “partakes of what would still fall, at the end of an infinite history, into the realm of the possible, of what is virtual or potential, of what is within the power of someone, some “I can,” to reach, in theory, and in a form that is not wholly freed from all teleological ends” (p.84). If the future is subject to the law of différance and if différance is meant to signify both difference and deferral, it is certainly not meant to signify this Kantian deferral, or at least democracy would not be deferred according to an infinite line of time.

If possibility presents a problem for thinking the a-venir, then so does impossibility. Derrida's is not a dialectical thinking and the negation of possibility through impossibility moves one no closer to the absolute future of the to-come – both retain a relation to the “I can” (or, as the case may be, the “I can’t”) of the Kantian subject. Derrida appeals instead to a notion of the "im-possible." The im-possible would be that which subtracts itself from a dialectical relation. It would be, for Derrida, that space (as in the spacing of différance) between the possible and the impossible.

The impossible is not privative. It is not the inaccessible, and it is not what I can indefinitely defer: it announces itself; it precedes me, swoops down upon and seizes me here and now in a nonvirtualizable way, in an actuality and not potentiality. It comes upon me from on high, in the form of an injunction that does not simply wait on the horizon, that I do not see coming, that never leaves me in peace and never lets me put it off until later. Such an urgency cannot be idealized any more than the other as other can. This im-possible is thus not a (regulative) idea or ideal. It is what is most undeniably real. And sensible. Like the other. Like the
irreducible and nonappropriable différance of the other
(p. 84).

The im-possible, in short, is the other in a profoundly Levinasian sense. The proximity of the category of the other to the fact of the neighbour (i.e. the one who demands my responsibility) is a little less clear in Derrida than in Levinas, but the proximity remains. The future as a-venir comes upon me much like the neighbour does: as an unexpected arrival that places a demand on me, a demand to which I must respond here and now. Kant’s thought of the regulative idea as an infinitely deferred possibility of the sensible appropriation of the supersensible would thus differ form Derrida’s. While différance – thus, deferral – is irreducible in terms of presence, what is not deferred is the immediacy of the demand (e.g. for democracy). It cannot be idealized or made into a model that we might approximate. The border between the sensible and the supersensible would be problematized in Derrida; and the stability of such limits undone. The a-venir “swoops down” in an undecidable moment. (This presents an interesting reversal of Benjamin’s concept of history: where for Benjamin the past “flashes up” (cf. Theses V & VI), for Derrida the future “swoops down”).

The second reservation Derrida has with respect to the regulative idea concerns the means of its implementation. For Kant the approximation of the regulative idea (e.g. the kingdom of ends) proceeds according to a rule: the moral law. For Derrida, on the other hand, the availability of a law annuls any real decision a priori: “It is simply deployed, without delay, presently, with the automatism attributed to machines. There is no longer any place for justice or responsibility (whether juridical, political, or ethical) (p.85). To appeal to law as a condition for justice or responsibility would be to circumvent the différance which is the condition for both.

The third reservation Derrida offers concerns the philosophical maze of the Kantian architectonic. To simply take up the theme of the regulative idea into a new discourse without doing justice to the entire Kantian system would be irresponsible. I don’t blame him for this reservation.

Democracy Against Democracy (II): Semantic Indeterminacy

2006-10-06T16:44:00.000-04:00

Derrida describes his interrogation of democracy, repeatedly, as a “double question” which is “at the same time semantic and historical, by turns semantic and historical.” (cf. p.7). Why the added emphasis?

The “by turns” refers to the etymological connections that “rogue” bears to the French word “wheel” (roue). Throughout the essay Derrida brings into play a whole series of philosophical and historical instances of the wheel or the circle – the significant point being that the wheel (e.g. as in the sovereign subject who has completed the circuit of ipseity: beginning in itself proceeding to alienate itself in otherness then returning more fully to itself) is that it cannot spin without an axel; it is conditioned by an emptiness, the “strange necessity of the zero” (p.13).

The “at the same time” refers to a essential connection that exists between these two aporetic modes of democracy: it’s historical impossibility and its semantic indeterminacy. I’ve already said some things about the former (thus, I have already betrayed the “at the same time” as has Derrida himself; albeit in a more careful way) now I would like to look to the latter. The thrust of this problem lies in another question that Derrida asks: how to speak democratically about democracy?

In short, it is not possible. The “interminable self-critique” that would condition any democracy, would preclude any settled definitions of democracy. It would be undemocratic to fix (as a sovereign decision) any definition of democracy.

To speak democratically of democracy, it would be necessry,through some circular performativity and through the political violence of some enforcing rhetoric,some force of law, to impose a meaning on the word democratic and thus produce a consensus that one pretends, by fiction, to be established and accepted - or at the very least possible and necessary: on the horizon. (p.73)

Just as democracy cannot be practiced democratically, it cannot be spoken of democratically either. Democracy is stuck in the double bind of autoimmunity at every turn.

...

So what then?

Derrida points out the aporetic structure of democracy. Every historical attempt at democracy will come up against the double bind, autoimmunity is constitutive, suicide is inevitable. Where does that leave us? Derrida's "posits?" "hypothesizes?" reocmmends? (all seem to be problematic terms in this case) the idea of a democracy to come. But what [ce qui] or who [qui] is this event that is to come? I could simply move on to Derrida's "5 foci" which characterize the democracy to come - and I will - but the question that remains for me - and this is a question that animates much of the larger project - concerns this what of the democracy to come. But discerning what it is is also a discerning of what it is not; namely, a Kantian "regulative idea."

The regulative idea of the "kingdom of ends" or what Kant calls, in the Religion book, the "ethical community" or the "invisible church" (props to John Calvin for that one!) is a supersensible idea, a goal unattainable for historical humanity. It is our task then, to approximate its instantiation, knowing full well that it will never fully measure up. It is hard not to read Derrida's democracy to come in precisely this way. Having said that, this is not an attempt to place the Derridian a-venir under suspicion; it is not to say that it necissarily collapses into a Kantian notion; it is not to say that a possible solution is not available in what I have alredy read of Derrida; it is only to say that it is a difficult question to work out. One that Derrida himself acknowledges in a quasi-confessional moment of Rogues:

Reference is...made each time to the regulative Idea in the Kantian sense, to which I would not want the idea of a democracy to come to be reduced.
Yet the regulative Idea remains, for lack of anything better, if we can say "lack of anything better" with regard to a regulative Idea, a last resort. Although such a last resort or final recourse risks becomign an alibi, it retains a certain dignity, I cannot swear that I will not one day give in to it. (p.83)

I suppose Derrida leaves the question open: has he, now that he has no days left, given in to the regulative idea?

I doubt it.

Democracy Against Democracy (I): Historical impossibility

2006-09-29T09:13:00.000-04:00

I'm going to stick with Derrida a little bit longer. The following comes from Rogues; a great little book, and one of the last texts he composed (as a talk in French) before his death.

First of all, Derrida likes democracy. He prefers the "democracy to come" of course - and this book is an extended reflection on precisely this theme - but also concrete experiments in democracy. Why is democracy good? Derrida notes (in parentheses) that democracy is...

(the only name of a regime, or quasi regime, open to its own historical transformation, to taking up its intrinsic plasticity and its interminable self-criticizability, one might even say its interminable analysis). (p.25)

Leaving aside the allusion to psychoanalysis (but noting derrida's later reference to the problem of the unconscious in conceiving of a democratic equality (pp.54-55)), this is the "definition" of democracy that Derrida sees as stretching all the way back to Plato and Aristotle - notwithstanding their mutual ambivalence towards, sometimes disdain for, the idea of democracy as a political configuration. But of course, nothing is ever so simple for Derrida. This constitutive openness of democracy is at one and the same time its condition of possibility and its condition of impossibility - what Derrida refers to as a "double bind." At this point he appeals to a biological metaphor in order to expose this double condition. He claims that democracy is structurally autoimmune.

From the ever-helpful Wikipedia we learn that autoimmunity is "the failure of an organism to recognize its own constituent parts (down to the sub-molecular levels) as "self", which results in an immune response against its own cells and tissues." To say that democracy is subject to autoimmunity is another way of saying that democracy is suicidal. I does not, can not, or will not survive the onslaught of its own consequences. But how precisely is democracy suicidal or subject to the double bind of autoimmunity?

Democracy, in it efforts to be democratic is susceptible to two possible deaths:

1. Democracy, in the vein hope of preserving itself, can roll back democratic freedoms, civil liberties, or, as in the very recent legislation passed by the US congress, it can deny rights and power to certain segments of the demos - namely, it can suspend habeas corpus for those considered terrorists. Here democracy dies ("comically" we might say) by killing itself in the interest of self-preservation.

2. Democracy can also die ("tragically") by way of a hyper-democratic openness. That is, democracy can be subverted from the inside by non- 0r anti-democratic forces which have used democratic means to achieve such a possibility. So for instance, a theocratic or even a fascist state may have emerged (indeed have emerged) by virtue of the people's will. Democracy thus commits suicide in the interest of the democratic ideal. This is, no doubt, what the U.S. and other self-proclaimed guardians/purveyors of democracy saw to be at stake with the election of Hamas to a majority of the Palestinian parliament - and thus the reason for choosing a comic suicide.

Historical democracies can and must be always subject to this double bind, this autoimmune predicament. There is no escape from this democratic "death drive." This is why democracy, if such a thing exists, must be conceived as an undeconstructible democracy to come. This is Derrida's take.

I will reserve critical comments for a post to come.

2006-08-25T16:49:00.000-04:00

"To learn to live with ghosts": Hamlet vs. Red Dawn

Derrida's Specters of Marx is about ghosts as much as it is about Marx: Marx's ghost(s) and Marx as ghost(s). It is the latter that I am concerned with here.

Derrida speaks of his gernation's experience of the specter of Marx, it's "paternal" character (p.13). Derrida's generation - the memory of 1789, the legacy of French Marxism, May '68 -conjures a certain type of ghost. This is perhaps why one of the subtexts of Derrida's reading of the Marxian injunction/promise is Hamlet. A call for justice, out of the past, into the future, issues from this specter of Marx. This is a rather different ghost of Marx, however, than the one that haunts the experience of a suburban American kid growing up in the 1980s. This would not be Hamlet's dilema of a disjointed time.

But there is no doubt that the figure of Marx haunts my generation as well. However, this was a much less ambiguous type of haunting. Marx was less an elusive ghost and more of an overtly menacing Frankenstein figure. I was haunted by "Marx" as the monstrous hybrid: Stalinist-Leninist-Titoist-Moaist-Sandinistan threats all rolled into one. This united communist force was construed less as a political and ideological bloc and more as a dangerous aberration of nature. This monster, moreover, could parachute onto American soil at any moment. As a young boy, the outrageous senario of the film Red Dawn was at once the scariest and the most exciting prospect I could have imagined. Facing the red menace with with other armed young militants was a recurring fantasy for me. The ghost of Marx called out - in Russian and Spanish - for World War III.

A specter is haunting this project.

2006-08-24T16:27:00.000-04:00

Variations on the Promise

"Promises are shit...
...there was nothing left when broken."
- Fugazi (1988)

"There would be [no] promise without this disjunction."
- Jacques Derrida (1993)

2006-08-24T15:17:00.000-04:00

Rationale

I am beginning this blog in the hopes that it will motivate and inspire movement in my own thought. I have recently conceived of what will be "my project" in the coming years - as I undertake to complete a PhD in Religion at the University of Toronto. I have provisionally called this project "New Political Futures." The particularities involved therein will become apparent (hopefully) as I post.

The movement that I hope to accomplish with this blog will take the form of - sometimes random - pathmarks. Even if the thoughts to be recorded here will not always be complete or even coherent, at least their electronic inscription and their quasi-emperical externality will provide an exit from the often circular route my thinking tends to follow if it is not given form beyond cognitive reflection. In order to disrupt the circularity of solitary thought - and, no doubt, in an effort to satisfy the immemorial desire for recognition - I will periodically update this site with quotations, reflections, questions, etc..