On the Promise (Epiphany 3)

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 2b: Romans 15:4-13

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

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.]

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

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.”

Lenten Reflection 4a: Joshua 5:9-12

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.

Messianic Politics (iii b): The Commandment

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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