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.

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.]

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

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).

Proper 33: Isaiah 65:17-25

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.

Agamben's Messianism

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.

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

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.

Messianic Politics (iii c):Jonah and Justice

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).

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).

Messianic Politics (iii): Law

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Messianic Politics (ii): Neutralizations of Carl Schmitt

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

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).