Part 1
Apocalyptic Messianism and Political Theology
1
Living âAs If Notâ
Messianic Becoming or the Practice of Nihilism?
Where is the wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Hath not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? . . . But God has chosen what is foolish in the world to confound the wise; God has chosen what is weak in the world to confound the things which are mighty. And base things and things which are despised in the world hath God chosen, yea, and things that are not, to bring to nought things that are. (1 Cor 1:20, 27â28)
What might this confounding messianic wisdom have to say to contemporary political philosophy? In The Antichrist Nietzsche cites this passage at length to show how completely out of touch with reality the dysangelist Paul really was. He calls Paul the greatest of all apostles of revenge, an insolent windbag who tries to confound worldly wisdomâbut to no effect, says Nietzsche. Nietzsche notwithstanding, certain recent Continental philosophers have been reading Paul the Apostleâs confounding letters to great effect, allowing his messianic message to disrupt certain modern conventions, political ontologies, and habits of mind; to challenge the technological globalizing wisdom and rulers of this age and suggest a hidden messianic counter-sovereignty not conceived in any human heart. Modern political theory has often regarded messianic political theology in particular as a dangerous threat to secular liberal democracyâand not without reason. Yet it is also the case that the first theory of the saeculum in the West, Augustineâs City of God, was developed precisely within a Pauline apocalyptic messianic understanding of history and the political. It is also the case that notions of neutral technology and juridical state sovereignty that underlie current conceptions and embodiments of the secular are themselves dangerously totalitarian, exclusivist, and violent, though this is often hidden beneath the veneer of progressivist liberal assumptions.
This is the position articulated in the apocalyptic messianism of Walter Benjamin, whose position is closely related to that of Paulâs in the New Testament on the question of sovereignty, which is the central focus of this essay. The political theological concept at the heart of modern secular politics and political theory was given its classical formulation by Carl Schmitt. âSovereign is he who decides on the exception,â says Schmitt, which requires that sovereignty be seen not in strictly juridical terms but as a limit concept in which there is an agential power behind the law who decides on the âstate of emergencyâ that suspends the normal rule of law. This founding notion of sovereignty must be read together with Schmittâs founding definition of the political, namely, the distinction between friend and enemy. For Schmitt the ultimate challenge to this basic political principle is found in the words of Jesus: âLove your enemiesâ (Matt 5:44)âwhich Schmitt, in keeping with conventional Christendom ethics, regards as a private ethic, a spiritual and individual, not a public political, ethic. Surely former President George W. Bush would agree. So also would ultraliberal Canadian Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau have agreed when he invoked the War Measures Act in Canada during the FLQ (Front de LibĂ©ration du QuĂ©bec) kidnapping crisis of 1970, thus deciding the exception that suspended ânormal lawâ in the face of an âemergency situation.â
Walter Benjamin had precisely this definition of sovereignty in mind when he wrote his eighth thesis on the philosophy of history:
Benjamin clearly sets himself against this secular progressivist politics to which all seeming political options are conformed, and he does so in the name of a âweak Messianic powerâ in which each day is lived as the day of judgment on which the Messiah comes, ânot only as the redeemerâ but also âas the overcomer of Antichrist.â Such a âMessianic timeâ may not be thought of within the categories of historicism but only from the perspective of a Jetztzeit (Thesis 18), a âreal state of emergencyâ that calls into fundamental question the normal state of emergencyâthe politics of modern secular state sovereigntyâin which we live. It will bring into view the violent and destructive foundation of this sovereignty with its homogeneous and totalitarian order by remembering another sovereignty, a messianic counter-sovereignty that reorders the secular on completely different terms, terms compatible, argue certain recent Continental philosophers, with Paulâs gospel.
The apostle Paul stands in the messianic tradition of biblical political theology, where the central overriding claim is âYahweh is sovereign,â a claim that subverts any merely human claim to sovereignty and political authority. This includes, as Jacob Taubes points out, any claims for the sovereignty of lawâwhether that law be the Torah mediated by Moses or the nomos mediated by Greco-Roman philosophy, or (we might add) the Christendom tradition of secular juridical state sovereignty and its many modern liberal copies. âWe preach Messiah crucified,â says Paul, âto the Jews a stumbling block and to the Greeks foolishnessâ (1 Cor 1:23), and to triumphalist globalizing Christians, one might add, a foolish scandal. Paulâs messianism will not accommodate conventional discourses of human masteryâwhich is to say, all conventional political discourses. As Alain Badiou puts it, for Paul the âbecoming subjectâ founded by the messianic event âis a-cosmic and illegal, refusing integration into any totality and signalling nothing.â For Badiou, Paulâs relevance for the contemporary political situation is precisely to counter the relativism of postmodern identity politics, the multicultural consensus of neoliberal progressivism that has become conscripted to the globalized logic of capital. Here the only common currency is the abstract imperialist count of commercial and economic homogeneityâan empty universality that cashes out all communitarianisms. The beneficence of contemporary French cosmopolitanism that gets worked up at the sight of a young veiled woman nicely displays this problem.
Into this political context Badiou proposes the radical disruption of Paulâs messianic proclamation concerning the conditions for a âuniversal singularityâ that defies the globalizing logic of the count, and its prevailing juridical and economic abstractions. It does so by an appeal to what Badiou calls an âevental truthâ that reconfigures the universal messianically with reference to the resurrection, as a human âbecoming subjectâ in relation to a truth that is universal but not abstract. For Badiou, Paul is a âpoet-thinker of the eventâ that neither constitutes nor claims authority from an identity or a law. It cannot therefore be a logic of mastery. Rather it is a discourse of rupture, a discourse of the sending of the Son that is detached from every particularism and every form of mastery. Paulâs apostolic calling is characterized by âmilitant peregrinations,â a ânomad leadershipâ that is equally out of place everywhere, a ânomadism of gratuitousnessâ that exceeds every law and therefore disrupts every established identity and difference. Evental grace has a particular site, of course, but the âbecoming subjectâ that it founds is one that must âdisplace the experience historically, geographically, ontologicallyâ: it can do that not by escaping the embodied particularity of customs and differences, but rat...