Divine

violence

WALTER BENJAMIN AND THE ESCHATOLOGY OF SOVEREIGNTY

JAMES R. MARTEL

Divine Violence

Divine Violence looks at the question of political theology and its connection to
sovereignty. It argues that the practice of sovereignty refl ects a Christian
eschatology, one that proves very hard to overcome even by left thinkers such
as Arendt and Derrida, who are very critical of it. These authors fall into a trap
described by Carl Schmitt whereby one is given a (false) choice between
anarchy and sovereignty, both of which are bound within – and return us to
– the same eschatological envelope. In Divine Violence , the author argues that
Benjamin supplies the correct political theology to help these thinkers. He
shows how to avoid trying to get rid of sovereignty (the ‘anarchist move’ that
Schmitt tells us forces us to ‘decide against the decision’) and instead to seek
to de-center and dislocate sovereignty so that its mythological function is
disturbed. He does this with the aid of divine violence, a messianic force that
comes into the world to undo its own mythology, leaving nothing in its wake.
Such a move clears the myths of sovereignty away, turning us to our own
responsibility in the process. In that way, the author argues, Benjamin
succeeds in producing an anarchism that is not bound by Schmitt’s trap but
which is sustained even while we remain dazzled by the myths of sovereignty
that structure our world.

Divine Violence will be of interest to students of political theory, to those

with an interest in political theology, philosophy and deconstruction, and to
those who are interested in thinking about some of the dilemmas that the
‘left’ fi nds itself in today.

James R. Martel is a professor of Political Theory at San Francisco State
University. His research areas include early modern and contemporary polit-
ical thought. Recent books by the author include Textual Conspiracies: Walter
Benjamin, Idolatry and Political Theory (University of Michigan Press, forth-
coming, 2011) and Subverting the Leviathan: Reading Thomas Hobbes as a Radical
Democrat (Columbia, 2007).

Divine Violence

Walter Benjamin and the Eschatology
of Sovereignty

James R. Martel

First published 2012
by Routledge
2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN

Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada
by Routledge
711 Third Avenue, New York, NY 10017

A GlassHouse Book

Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business

The right of James R. Martel to be identifi ed as author of this work
has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the
Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or
reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic,
mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter
invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any
information storage or retrieval system, without permission
in writing from the publishers.

Trademark notice : Product or corporate names may be trademarks or
registered trademarks, and are used only for identifi cation and
explanation without intent to infringe.

British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library

Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data
Martel, James R.
Divine violence : Walter Benjamin and the eschatology of

sovereignty/James R. Martel.

p. cm.
“A GlassHouse Book.”
Includes bibliographical references.
1. Benjamin, Walter, 1892-1940. 2. Sovereignty. I. Title.
B3209.B584M37 2012
193--dc22

2011012431

ISBN: 978–0–415–67345–7 (hbk)
ISBN: 978–0–203–80326–4 (ebk)

Typeset in Garamond
by Refi neCatch Limited, Bungay, Suffolk

Acknowledgments

This book would not have happened without the help of my editor, Colin
Perrin. We talked about the book many years ago and, even while I was
working on another book (also on Benjamin), I continuously worked on this
one, keeping our conversation in mind. Thanks to the anonymous reviewers
for GlassHouse Books for their excellent suggestions. Thanks also to Melanie
Fortmann-Brown for being a delightful follow-up editor at Routledge.
Several other people were particularly helpful in the process of writing this
book. Peter Fitzpatrick helped connect me with Colin in the fi rst place and
has been a great sounding board and critic. Austin Sarat, and the Association
for the Study of Law, Culture and the Humanities that he helped to found,
have also been instrumental in keeping up my interest in sovereignty. Austin
has always been a great supporter and friend. Kate Gordy and the other
members of my reading group, Keally McBride, Sarah Burgess and Darien
Shanske, helped refi ne my argument. Kate is the one who came up with the
fountain analogy that I found so helpful in Chapter 1. Nasser Hussain was, as
always, indispensible for my thinking process (among other things). David
Bates also helped hugely; one conversation that we had in particular really
helped me to form the central argument of this book. Other readers, friends
and colleagues that gave advice include Vicky Kahn, Aaron Belkin, Marianne
Constable, Jodi Dean, Angelika von Wahl, Bonnie Honig, Jackie Stevens,
and Jane Bennett, among many others. Thanks are also due to Joel Kassiola
and San Francisco State University for giving me a sabbatical that helped me
to complete the work on this book, as well as the department of rhetoric at
UC Berkeley, which allowed me to work as a visiting scholar, giving me
access to Berkeley’s library and on-line resources in addition to those
from SFSU.

I presented part of my fi nal chapter (on ‘the Hebrew Republic’) at a meeting

of the International Hobbes Association (concurrent with the American
Philosophy Association annual meeting), where the comments were extremely
helpful. Thanks to Martin Bertman and Rosamond Rhodes for helping to
place me on that panel. Thanks also to Edwin Curley for his own observations
and comments from that meeting.

Acknowledgments vii

Many chapters in this book had an earlier incarnation as papers in other

publications, whose editors I want to thank for their input and support
(permissions will follow at the end of this acknowledgment). Austin Sarat and
Peter Fitzpatrick were both extremely helpful in the formation of Chapters 1
and 2. George Pavlich and Charles Barbour were very helpful for my writing
of Chapter 3. David Bates and Dan Edelstein were critical for my writing of
Chapter 4. Alexander Keller Hirsch was very helpful for my writing of
Chapter 5. Many thanks to all of you. Thanks also to Nina Ackerberg and
Laura Webb for their assistance with the cover image.

Finally, my family and their support are essential and deeply appreciated:

thanks to my husband, Carlos, my children Jacques and Rocio, my co-parents
Nina and Kathryn, the ‘uncles’ Elic and Mark. Thanks also to my father,
Ralph, my mother, Huguette, my brother, Django, sister-in-law, Shalini and
wonderful new nephew, Shaan.

Permissions: bits of the introduction and parts of Chapters 1 and 2 contain

pieces of an essay entitled ‘Can there be Politics without Sovereignty? Arendt,
Derrida and the Question of Sovereign Inevitability’, published in a special
issue entitled ‘Why Sovereignty?’ of Law, Culture and the Humanities 6(2) June
2010. An earlier form of Chapter 3 was published as ‘Walter Benjamin and
the eschatology of sovereignty’ in Charles Barbour and George Pavlich (eds)
(2009) After Sovereignty: On the Question of Political Beginnings , New York:
Taylor and Francis. An earlier form of Chapter 4 appeared as ‘Waiting for
Justice’ in a special issue on sovereignty in Republics of Letters , 2, no. 2, July,
2011. An earlier form of Chapter 5 appeared as ‘Can Human Beings Forgive?
Ethics and Agonism in the Face of Divine Violence’, a chapter in Alexander
Keller Hirsch (ed.) (forthcoming, 2011) Theorizing Post Confl ict Reconciliation:
Agonism, Restitution and Repair , Routledge. All are published with permission.

Introduction

Divine violence and political fetishism

As I am writing this (a moment that no doubt will have been superseded by
many other moments by the time this book comes to print) Egypt is being
swept by a wave of popular activism; things are happening so quickly that the
‘opposition’ has been scrambling to get ahead of this movement it is suppos-
edly leading. This is one of those rare moments described by Hannah Arendt
in On Revolution when politics is not simply an idea about government and
command (which, in her view, is not actually political at all) but is a way of
life, a collective experience of power. What had once seemed impossible, the
overthrow of the decades-long authoritarian rule of Hosni Mubarak, suddenly
became a reality (thus conforming to what Alain Badiou would call a ‘singu-
larity’, something whose possibility does not come out of existing conditions,
but occurs all on its own, self-actualizing its own possibility in the moment).

The act of one person, Muhammad Bouazizi – a poor Tunisian fruit vendor
who set himself on fi re in public after being humiliated by a local fruit
inspector and having his complaints dismissed by government offi cials –
spread a confl agration, fi rst in Tunisia itself and then to Egypt, then to Bahrain
and Libya, and much of the rest of the Arab world, and, hopefully, elsewhere.

This moment is fi lled with endless possibility. The great powers of the

world are watching nervously. This could be the end of an era of authoritar-
ianism in the Arab world, the harbinger of a new more accountable form of
government (or not – other outcomes are possible too, hence the nervousness
of Europe and the US). One thing that is not in question however is that
sooner or later this revolutionary moment will end, and things will be
‘righted’. Whether the ensuing regime is Islamist, moderate, good, bad
or indifferent, Egypt will return to a ‘normal’ state, that is to say, a state of
sovereignty.

Sovereignty is so much a part of the fabric of ordinary political life (or what

passes for that life, anyway) that we rarely, if ever, question what it is or what
it means for us. Although we speak of ‘failed states’, places like Somalia that
exist in a state of ‘anarchy’, in fact there is no place in the world that is inno-
cent of sovereignty. Even Somalia is not in fact ‘lawless’, but is governed by a
mixture of the Shabab – the Islamic radicals in the south – a weak,

2 Divine

Violence

Western-supported quasi-state in the center – mostly enforced by local
warlords – and an entirely separate (although not generally recognized) ‘state’
of Somaliland in the north. All of these ‘regimes’ in effect function as sover-
eign entities. Phenomena like pirating, something for which Somalia has
become notorious, are ways to raise revenue and engage – in however perverse
a fashion – with the global economy. The basic facets of sovereignty, the
last word in decisions about trade, currency, law and other forms of decision-
making, rest somewhere; even if there are wild and arbitrary shifts in
where such decisions are made, such authority continues to function, to be
insisted upon.

In Arendt’s view, which I share, the return to ‘normalcy’ and sovereignty

that will inevitably come to Egypt means an end to the political life – and
hence the democratic experience – for the people of Egypt. If I were going to
offer a provisional defi nition of sovereignty, what it is and how it functions,
I’d say that it is a system of authority that usurps power from the very people
in whose name it is fomented.

I think this is true in every state and semi-state

in the world today, whether in North Korea or in the United States. Even in
a state where the government is relatively popular, there is a great difference
between a people that avoids all forms of rule altogether (I wouldn’t say that
‘rules itself’) and a people that is ruled by a sovereign authority. Claims that
the people are themselves sovereign do not belie the fact that sovereign
authority is always an authority over a political community. Regardless of the
form of government, be it communist, liberal, fascist or authoritarian, be it a
‘strong’ state or a ‘weak’– or even failed – state, sovereignty is always a form
of representation, a way to speak for an ‘imagined’ community, a power over
and on behalf of a particular place and a particular group of people.

My argument in this book is that, as a form of political representation,

sovereignty in its contemporary practice is always idolatrous, that is to say it
is a form of representation that interferes with rather than facilitates or
expresses popular power. In the case of Egypt, the inevitability of sovereignty
means that, sooner or later, some one or some group is going to speak ‘for’ the
Egyptian people. Even if they are currently acting for (or as) themselves, at
some point, as Arendt attests, the Egyptians will become represented and, as
such, will return to a state of de-politicization. An alienated political authority
is fomented on behalf of the people it is taken from and sovereignty (at least
as it is currently conceptualized) is the result.

Where I would part company from Arendt is in her claim (a complicated

one, as we will see further in this book) that representation is itself inherently
anti-political. For Arendt, representation – because it insists on one position
to stand for many – inherently denies the plurality of human beings in a
particular context. It pre-empts the kinds of spontaneity and unpredictability
that constitute what she calls freedom. In Divine Violence I will be revisiting
this question via the work and philosophy of Walter Benjamin. From
Benjamin I take the notion that representation per se is not the problem, but

Introduction: divine violence and political fetishism 3

rather an idolatrous form of representation. The solution to the problem of
sovereignty is not to eschew representation and go for a ‘real’ and ‘unmedi-
ated’ self-expression of a people (as Arendt sometimes suggests). As I will
repeatedly argue in this book, the idea that a people can exist as such without
any representational forms is itself an ultimate idolatry, a bogus truth that is
perhaps the most pernicious form of representation of all insofar as it pretends
to be simply ‘true’ and hence seems to have no remedy.

Instead, I will argue, along the lines of Benjamin, that we have no choice

but to engage with representation. In his view, there can be no community,
no politics at all without some way of representing it to ourselves. Rather
than giving up on politics altogether we must instead engage with non-
idolatrous forms of representation and, by extension, non-idolatrous forms of
sovereignty. For Benjamin, representation works best when it visibly fails to
achieve its purpose. When representation pretends to offer us a true vision of
a given community, it is inherently idolatrous. When representation instead
points to the non-existence of such a truth, it offers a negative impression of a
community, an empty shell within which the community can exist in its own
variety, its own ever-shifting political practices (even as it is contained within
some kind of common frame).

If we apply such an insight more specifi cally to the question of sovereignty,

we can look for a form sovereignty that ceases to function as an image
of authority that is superimposed over a community and which becomes
instead merely the site upon which the drama of democratic – I would say
anarchic – politics becomes enacted. In this way, revolutions such as the one
in Egypt can be more than simply a chance to do away with dictators and
tyrants, only to replace them with some other form of government that is
equally de-politicizing. Revolution can become a mode of political expression
that obviates the need for any rule, any form of government at all (perhaps
more accurately, it keeps the ‘form’ but nothing else; the content is totally
undetermined).

Sovereignty today

In order to more clearly establish this argument, it is worth spending a bit
more time considering the idea of sovereignty, both as a subject of academic
scholarship and a political practice that continues to evolve in history. The
idea of sovereignty has held a monopoly for several centuries, not only over the
practice, but also over our conceptions of politics in the world. The term
‘sovereignty’ can have many meanings ranging from state sovereignty to
personal sovereignty, from something adhering to ‘a people’ to something
that is controlled from above. In all of these permutations, there are a few
constants: a sense of command and authority, a concentration of decision-
making, a sense of delineation and boundaries that exclude as much as they
include.

4 Divine

Violence

In its most usual sense, sovereignty refers to a particular form of state sover-

eignty, the so-called ‘Westphalian order’ set up by the Peace of Westphalia in
1648. This order set up the basic parameters of what we still see in operation
today: a world composed of mutually respecting nation states (although, of
course, they don’t always do that) who are not supposed to interfere with one
another’s domestic concerns (although, of course, they do sometimes – or even
often – do that).

If the Westphalian order has controlled, at least symbolically, the way

states and populations have comported themselves internationally for the last
few centuries, its recent history seems to have been more turbulent. Right
now we seem to be at a historical cross-roads wherein numerous scholars
argue that the Westphalian order is on the wane. Many have claimed that
the Westphalian system – and, for some, sovereignty more generally – will
vanish into a new world order of globalization, terrorism and other non-
state forces (more on that at the end of this chapter). At the same time, the
Bush years – and, so far, the Obama years as well – have revived for many
the specter of power and unilateral state sovereignty (paradoxically, the
power of the US serves to undermine the sovereignty of other nations, another
sign that the Westphalian system has never functioned quite as it was
supposed to).

In contemporary scholarship two important books promote this view of a

resurgent sovereignty; against an earlier trend to see sovereignty as being
outdated and outmoded (seen among many Foucaultians, for example,
although not necessarily including Foucault himself), these texts attest to a
sovereignty that may survive and even thrive, despite the troubles it currently
faces. Giorgio Agamben’s famous Homo Sacer (1995) gave new impetus to the
notion (specter might be a more accurate word) of an increasingly unaccount-
able sovereignty that reduces us to ‘bare life’, wherein the concentration camp
becomes the model for – rather than the exception to – politics.

Subsequently, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s Empire similarly offers a

place for a new sovereign dynamic. They famously tell us in the preface to that
book that ‘sovereignty has taken a new form, composed of a series of national
and supranational organisms united under a single logic of rule. This new
global form of sovereignty is what we call Empire.’

More recent scholarship has stressed the continuing vulnerabilities of the

contemporary sovereign order. Wendy Brown has noted that increasingly
bellicose and theatrical gestures towards state sovereign power – the very
gestures of building walls and engaging in exclusions and bans that could be
read as evidence that Agamben was right – may in fact spell its opposite, a
desperate attempt to appear authoritative when non-state actors are under-
mining the state in profound and varied ways.

Brown also notes the dispersal

of sovereign functions to non-state actors whereupon vigilante groups like the
Minutemen along the US/Mexico border and illegal (but state-encouraged)
settlers in the West Bank serve as de facto arms of sovereign power, engaging

Introduction: divine violence and political fetishism 5

in the duties of occupation, delineation and patrol that once were assumed to
be the unique province of the state.

Other contemporary thinkers offer more evidence for this vulnerability.

Panu Minkkinen speaks of sovereignty as ‘heterocephalous’, wherein the unity
that is ascribed to sovereignty is itself a product of sovereign-produced
discourses of knowledge.

Jean-Luc Nancy speaks of sovereignty as being

delineated ‘around a hollow’.

As such, sovereignty is revealed to be a perform-

ance of authority, one that is subject to exposures and challenges, to change
and decline, despite its own insistence on its sempiternity.

Yet these authors do not necessarily suggest the end of sovereignty per se

but once again only its transformation. Although Brown acknowledges the
radical challenge to the state posed by recent (and not so recent) events, she
speaks of ‘sovereignty after the fence, sovereign powers (capital, religiously
sanctioned violence) without specifi ed jurisdiction or enclosure and without
even the promise of containment or protection.’

Capital in particular

continues to hold for Brown the kind of unchallenged centrality of position
that we once ascribed to absolute monarchs (a subject I’ll return to at the end
of this chapter). Thus, even if we are seeing a shift from state sovereignty to
other forms, even if the appearance of autocephaly is being undermined, the
central function and expression of sovereignty remains the centerpiece of our
contemporary political and economic order.

Sovereignty and liberalism

For many, the enduring nature of sovereignty would be good news. In the
generally accepted liberal capitalist genealogy, sovereignty (usually meaning
state sovereignty, but with implications for other forms as well) is the guar-
antee of personal freedom and personal and collective safety. Historically,
liberalism came into being out of the same social, political and intellectual
ferment as sovereignty itself and it is largely because of the global triumph of
liberalism, both as a political theory and a form of political and economic
order, that sovereignty (particularly in its modern, liberal guise) and politics
have become virtually, or even completely, synonymous.

Almost by defi nition, liberal thinkers presume the necessity and value

of sovereignty, of the need for central and decisive mechanisms that control
our economic and political lives in ways that ideally brook no challenge
or rival. At the same time, liberalism is often marked by a desire to downplay
or ameliorate the absolute qualities that mark sovereignty as a form of govern-
ment. Even in some of the earlier expressions of sovereignty, in the sixteenth
century, we see attempts by fi gures like Hotman and Knox to argue that
sovereignty adhered to ‘the people’ as a whole, rather than being set above and
in some sense against them.

Somewhat later, we see in authors such

as Constant and Mill (and later still with Berlin and Rawls) a similar desire to
smooth sovereignty’s harsh edges by attempting to limit it, usually by making

6 Divine

Violence

it subservient to rights.

In contemporary political economy, neoliberals

often seek to downplay or sidestep sovereignty as an impediment to
globalization.

Given these sorts of ambivalences, it seems fair to say that a transition from

a Westphalian order to some other type of sovereign system would not neces-
sarily be an entirely bad thing from a liberal perspective. Indeed, if what
emerges is a truer form of capitalism, one unfettered by state interference (as
so many liberals have longed for – at least on the right wing end of liber-
alism), some might well consider this change to be an improvement. What
would not be tolerated by any liberal from any part of the liberal spectrum is
a collapse of sovereignty altogether; even if they are squeamish about certain
aspects of sovereignty, no liberal will ever renounce it outright; the core
schema of liberal theory, the notions of individual autonomy and ‘unfettered’
access to the market would not be possible without some form of sovereignty,
without some fi nal judge and executive to adjudicate and order us. Even if
sovereignty can occasionally (or even often) lead to the abuse of power and
political misrepresentation, liberals see sovereignty as the only alternative to
a total breakdown of society (i.e. ‘anarchy’), and hence well worth the risks
that it poses.

As a result of liberalism’s entanglement with sovereignty, the harsher or

more realistic critiques of sovereignty come not from liberalism but from the
left, as with Foucault or, in a different way, from the right, as we see in
Schmitt’s criticism that liberalism does not fully recognize the degree to
which it is determined by sovereignty.

Without the long history and accom-

panying baggage of liberalism’s relationship with sovereignty, these alterna-
tive schools of thought are better able to see sovereignty as a usurpation of
authority undertaken in the name of ‘the people’ that it purportedly takes that
authority from (for the right this is not necessarily a problem, of course).

On the left, criticism of sovereignty is often paired with an attempt to

think of alternative systems of governance, ones that do away with the connec-
tion between politics and sovereignty altogether. And yet, what is perhaps
most interesting to note is that many of these leftist critics – even those
thinkers that directly oppose sovereignty – are often reluctant to completely
break with it, echoing some of the same confl icts that we see with the liberal
thinkers themselves.

Even for many left non-liberal critics it seems as though

sovereignty has so insinuated itself into contemporary conceptions of politics
that it seems almost – or maybe completely – impossible to imagine a politics
without it.

Overview of Divine Violence

This book is an attempt to think about sovereignty in a way that avoids the
sense that it is both necessary and inevitable, at least in its current form(s). In
Divine Violence , I will look at thinkers on both the right and the left (but

Introduction: divine violence and political fetishism 7

especially the left) to show how so many of them acquiesce to sovereignty due
to a conviction that there is no viable alternative. As I will argue in the
following pages, such a view refl ects an ongoing relationship between the
political and the theological – one seen, for example, in the connection
between Christian eschatology and the contemporary political order (to be
described in the following chapter) where time itself appears to structure and
deliver the necessity and inevitability of a particular model of sovereignty.
Authors ranging from Ernst Kantorowicz to Hans Blumenberg have suggested
that the secular form of political sovereignty refl ects and interacts with earlier
Christian notions of temporality and order, giving sovereignty itself an aura
of sempiternity.

Even in our own time, when the fashion is, as we have seen,

to think our current sovereign order is possibly on the wane, we generally
view such an eventuality with dread, as the coming of the end of time, the
undoing of the eschatological framework that has guaranteed and structured
our order for two millennia.

Divine Violence

focuses on three prime interlocutors, Hannah Arendt,

Jacques Derrida and Walter Benjamin (especially the latter), in order to think
about the question of the resilience of sovereignty as a concept. It will be my
goal to bring these three thinkers into conversation – in part by highlighting
the conversations they actually had. Arendt and Derrida, I will argue, seek to
resist sovereignty but ultimately do not completely succeed. Both of them
succumb in one way or another to a sense of sovereign inevitability, despite
their staunch criticisms of the entire edifi ce of sovereign power. These
thinkers’ complex relationship with sovereignty demonstrates the ways that
sovereignty is hard to get away from (suggesting too the staying power of
liberal ideology and the eschatological framework that helped to spawn it). Or
perhaps more accurately, they do succeed, to some extent, in subverting and
questioning sovereignty but they do so in ways that are not always apparent,
at times even to themselves.

Given that the staying power of sovereignty comes from a potent mix of

political and theological legacies, as I see it, a political theology that tackles
such a legacy head-on is required. This is supplied by the work of Walter
Benjamin. Benjamin, I would argue, offers both Arendt and Derrida a strategy
by which to get around the kinds of eschatological traps and ambivalences
that to some extent hamper or obfuscate both of their respective critiques of
sovereignty. Because Arendt and Derrida do not recognize the distinction
between idolatrous and non-idolatrous forms of political representation (as
Benjamin does), they have no real alternative to sovereignty; ultimately they
are forced back into the arms of a system of governance and representation
that they both despise. In his concept of divine violence and in his larger
understanding of the way that time, order, progress and history are to be
understood as discontinuous and ‘in ruins’, Benjamin shows how to scramble
and dissipate the sovereign order, without seeking to annihilate it alto-
gether.

He shows how this form of representation can be, in effect, hollowed

8 Divine

Violence

out (perhaps the same hollow described by Nancy), allowing its representa-
tional failures to be rendered legible. In this way, Benjamin shows how to live
with sovereignty such that it does not totalize the world that it purportedly
represents. He shows how sovereignty can be defl ated and de-centered without
undoing its ‘positive’ functions (i.e. without undoing the communities whose
very existence is based on its collective relationship to sovereign signs of
authority). He shows how the eschatology that generates and sustains sover-
eignty can be similarly revisited so that time itself no longer serves as the
guarantor of certain forms of sovereign authority. By reading (or re-reading)
Arendt and Derrida through a Benjaminian lens – that is to say, by reading
them all in ‘constellation’ with one another – we can see them as doing some-
thing similar in their own texts, enhancing their own acts of resistance and
subversion of sovereignty in the process.

The fi rst part of Divine Violence , Chapters 1 to 3 , considers the questions of

sovereignty and the trap it sets for many left would-be resisters of its political
structures. In the fi rst chapter, I consider a brief genealogy of sovereignty,
both in terms of its connections to earlier Christian eschatology and further as
it has been conceived by some key theorists on both the right and the left in
(relatively) contemporary times. In terms of such theory, I deal with the chal-
lenge of Carl Schmitt and his reading of sovereignty as a kind of trap that
there is no escaping from. I also look at the responding theories of Étienne
Balibar, who sees sovereignty as being much less coherent than Schmitt, but
still enduring and perhaps inescapable.

In Chapter 2 , I consider the work of Arendt and Derrida more specifi cally,

to delineate both their resistance to and accommodation with sovereignty. I
show how both of these thinkers look to alternative notions of time as a way
to do an ‘end run’ around sovereignty, but argue that ultimately neither
thinker manages to shake off the conviction that sovereignty cannot be utterly
avoided.

In Chapter 3 , I consider Benjamin’s ‘dissipated eschatology’ as an answer

to the problem of sovereign inevitability; there, I outline how Benjamin re -
occupies our eschatological framework to reconfi gure our position within it as
political subjects. Rather than seeking to eliminate sovereignty altogether
(which may indeed be impossible), it is broken into its constituent pieces,
scattered and diffused so that it ceases to function as a coherent, overwriting
ideology that shapes politics into its own image. I also look at Benjamin’s
crucial distinction between idolatrous and non-idolatrous forms of representa-
tion. I argue that in his notion of divine violence, an act of God that undoes
all the idols that are fomented in the name of the divine (including sovereign
idols), we see the potential for alternative sovereign practices, alternative
forms of representation and politics.

The second half of the book, Chapters 4 to 6 , discusses ways that an alterna-

tive form of sovereignty might operate. Here, I seek to address some of the
concerns that sovereignty as we currently conceive it offers the only viable

Introduction: divine violence and political fetishism 9

form of political authority. Would a more diffuse sovereignty perform the
same crucial functions as contemporary sovereignty does? Would it protect
us? Would it offer us judgment and justice?

To address these questions, Chapter 4 argues that so long as we live in the

expectation of some great delivery of justice, the promise that animates and
sustains sovereignty as a contemporary practice, we will remain bound by the
political doctrines we already subscribe to. I argue that Derrida, in his partial
retreat from Benjamin’s Messianism, puts himself into an ambivalent stance
whereby he both mistrusts the justice that is promised by liberalism but also
misses the justice that is delivered by a Benjaminian-style Messiah. Arendt
too, by insisting on a wholly secular this-worldly form of Messianism, loses
any perspective from which to discern between the kinds of delivery from
contemporary sovereign practices that we might desire and the kinds that we
actually have. Benjamin shows us how to position ourselves in terms of a
Messiah who is already here and who does nothing except interfere with our
expectations of delivery and perfection (via acts of divine violence). For
Benjamin, justice (such as it is) only becomes possible in the wake of
the failure of the Messiah to deliver some perfect ‘Justice’ to us (and hence
‘save’ us, rendering us all the more subject to idolatrous forms of sovereign
authority).

Chapter 5 extends this discussion by looking at the question of forgiveness

and judgment. Although we tend to think that forgiveness and judgment are
impossible without some last (and sovereign) voice to decide on punishment
and expiation, we can see that it is only in a more de-centered, diffuse model
of political authority that judgment and forgiveness are actually possible
(i.e. the very kinds of judgment that emerges from Benjamin’s model).

Chapter 6 discusses the ways that an alternative and non-totalizing form of

sovereignty may already have been conceptualized by two early modern
thinkers, Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza, in their respective analysis of
what Spinoza calls ‘the Hebrew Republic’, that is to say the Kingdom of God
as it existed in ancient Israel. By returning to what these authors both see as
the roots of the original sovereign authority, that of God, we can see a way to
rescue even God’s authority from the contemporary eschatological framework
that binds us (just as Benjamin suggests). For both Hobbes and Spinoza, when
God is actually king of a human nation (in this case, ancient Israel), authority
is diffused and fractured. Sovereignty is not dispensed with, but rather
removed from the earthly sphere, taken out of the realm of human politics.
Since God as sovereign is both absolutely central and silent, the mechanisms
for interpreting and enforcing devine authority are of necessity more widely
available, more radically democratic (or even anarchist).

In thinking about the ‘Hebrew Republic’ as an alternative genealogy of

sovereignty (even alternative to the one that Hobbes himself tells throughout
the fi rst half of Leviathan ), I seek to return to Benjamin’s understanding of
alternative forms of sovereignty in the face of the forms of sovereignty that we

10 Divine

Violence

already subscribe to. Hobbes and Spinoza’s comments on the ‘Hebrew
Republic’ offer one example of what an alternative practice of political
authority might look like; how, even within the eschatological umbrella we
currently occupy, there is room for maneuver and repositioning.

But there are other, and I think better, forms of alternative political prac-

tices as well, practices that I would consider to be anarchist. Accordingly, in
the conclusion, I seek to apply these fi ndings to contemporary political prac-
tices. I argue that the kind of politics that emerge from Benjamin’s political
theology can be considered to be anarchist, offering the kind of ‘no-rule’ that
Arendt seeks in her own comments on isonomy in the Greek polis and perhaps
akin to Derrida’s ‘democracy to-come’ as well. In this way, Arendt and Derrida
can offer Benjamin the kind of political models that he tends to eschew even
as he offers them a way to contend with the paradoxes of sovereign authority.
I end by considering Alain Badiou’s The Communist Hypothesis as a work that
suggests how even the most radical leftists can, to some extent, repeat the
hesitations and indecision regarding sovereignty that we see with Arendt and
Derrida as well. I argue that Benjamin’s attention to political idolatry offers
us both the courage and possibility of stepping into an anarchist politics that
in many ways we have already been practicing without being aware of it.

Reading Benjamin in conjunction with Arendt and Derrida offers, as we

will see further, a way to understand how this alternative political space can
emerge from within the confi nes of sovereign space, within the border, the
territory and the population that defi nes sovereign authority. While Benjamin
provides the overall concept I will be working with, Arendt and Derrida offer
their own contributions, strategies and insights. Even though, as Balibar
suggests (and Nancy as well), we may always be ‘haunted’ by the notion of
popular sovereignty, by our investment in and requirement for sovereignty as
it is currently conceived, this investigation shows how we can learn to live
with that haunting without being determined by it.

At the same time, as I will argue further, Benjamin in particular shows us

that the political is not ‘autonomous’ from sovereign conceptions. There is no
‘pure political’ that we can move into in order to escape from sovereignty’s
grasp; the political can only be formed from the concepts that we possess of it
(and from sovereignty in particular) and it can only emerge out of the parti-
cular eschatology that anchors it. Rather than look for an autonomous polit-
ical (a search, I will suggest, that returns us to the maw of contemporary
sovereignty), we need to look for a political that is distinct (as opposed to
autonomous) from its own conceptualization, for a political that is not merely
reducible to the signs that produce it.

Divine violence and the fetish of sovereignty

This notion will be explained in more detail in the following chapters. As a
preliminary discussion, we can return to the notion previously discussed, that

Introduction: divine violence and political fetishism 11

for Benjamin sovereignty is a kind of idol or fetish. The term ‘fetish’, when read
in Marxist or anthropological terms, tends to mean a reality that is occluded by
its own representation. This, for example, is often the thinking behind the
frequently employed Marxist term ‘commodity fetishism’. This is a term that
Benjamin himself uses all the time, but in his own terminology, fetishism has
a different connotation. For Benjamin, a fetish does not obscure a knowable
reality. In his political theology reality certainly exists, but it is unknowable by
human beings. Although we live ‘under the eyes of heaven’ (the divine perspec-
tive that sees the truth), the world for human beings is composed of a jumble
of signs, a ruin.

Fetishism for him is the denial of that ruin.

For Benjamin, human beings have been fetishists since the Fall of Adam;

we seek knowledge as a way to assert truth, even in the face of God’s injunc-
tion against such knowledge. Such fetishism produces what Benjamin calls
‘the phantasmagoria’, a swirl of misreading and idolatry that produces what
passes for reality in our world. Commodity fetishism is perhaps merely the
modern expression of this ongoing practice (Benjamin is not always clear on
this point).

In such a context, for Benjamin, fetishism has a perspectival connotation. A

fetishist for him is someone who believes that the truth is accessible, even
though it is not. In this sense, underlying the notion of fetishism is a notion
of truth itself; the ‘truth’ becomes an ultimate fetish, (mis)guiding all of our
myriad expectations and practices. To be an anti-fetishist (one cannot really
speak of a ‘truth-teller’ in Benjaminian terms) means to be aware of inevi t

ability of misreading, of the false promise of signs. In a sense, both the fetishist
and the anti-fetishist engage in the same behavior; both seek to juxtapose
signs as a way to approximate a truth that has long been lost to us. But only
the anti-fetishist knows that they have no hope to truly capture a truth; even
if they accidentally stumble on truth, they would have no way of knowing it
for what it is. Our acts of representation – of juxtaposition, of shuffl ing and
rearranging the building blocks of that form our reality – are a gesture, a way
of reaching out towards a reality and a truth that is totally obscure to us.
Through an awareness of the failure of representation to convey truth, we can
avoid becoming completely determined by the ‘mythologies’ (to use another
term of Benjamin’s) that fetishists engage with.

For Benjamin, we have one crucial aid in our battle with fetishism, a form

of Messianic deliverance. In his ‘Critique of Violence’, he tells the story of
Korah, an idolator who challenged the rule of God (and, by extension, that of
Moses), who was swallowed up by the earth in an act of divine violence.

Benjamin writes that such a punishment ‘strikes privileged Levites, strikes
them without warning, without threat, and does not stop short of annihila-
tion. But in annihilation it also expiates.’

Such an act of punishment (which

I will return to in Chapters 3 and 4 in greater detail) not only erases but
forgives (expiates) the sin. God erases Korah’s sin (literally by incorporating
him into the ground), leaving a blank space where a space of idolatry once

12 Divine

Violence

stood. In doing this, God does not reveal ‘truth’ but simply undermines
untruth. God’s action serves as a kind of Messianic undoing of the fetishism
of divinity. In the absence of such a fetish, another relationship with reality
becomes possible (although far from certain), one that acknowledges the
absence of truth, God’s aporia in the world.

The fountain of sovereignty

Such an understanding of fetishism illuminates our understanding of sover-
eignty as well. To think of sovereignty as a fetish in Benjaminian terms is only
to say that when we think of politics, we think of it via a series of signs that
are, inevitably, false, misleading and misread. Sovereignty has become what
we think of when we think of power and authority, the stuff of political life.

To make an analogy that might be helpful at this point, if we think of

sovereignty as a fountain of water, the political is itself a part of that foun-
tain.

We can think of sovereignty as representing the spectacle of the foun-

tain, its awesome display. The political may be said to be the water that
composes this fountain; it is the material expression or concrete substance that
is animated by the fountain. The two aspects of water and fountain seem
almost indistinguishable; there can be no fountain (i.e. sovereignty) without
the water, the political material that it draws from, and at the same time the
water seems to be almost an afterthought in the face of the wonderful display
that the fountain makes. Even so, we can speak of the political as distinct from
the fountain; we can see it on its own terms even while acknowledging the
interrelationship. We can think, for example of the periphery of the fountain,
where the water is visible as itself, distinct if banal and barely noticed.
Furthermore, as this analogy suggests, the political has its own ‘power’ over
sovereignty itself. Just as the fountain would not be possible without the
water that composes it, so too is sovereignty not possible without the political
(as Hosni Mubarak has recently learned). We give expression to sovereignty
in our political lives and hence there is a kind of perpetual feedback loop
between these conceptions.

The image of sovereignty as a fountain is directly invoked by Thomas

Hobbes, when he writes:

For in the Soveraignty is the fountain of Honour. . . . As in the presence
of the Master, the servants are equall, and without any honour at all; so
are the Subjects, in the presence of the Soveraign. And though they shine
some more, some lesse, when they are out of his sight; yet in his presence,
they shine no more than the Starres in the presence of the Sun.

In Hobbes’s depiction, we can see more of the effects of thinking about sover-
eignty as a fountain or spectacle; we see both its power and its weaknesses and
limitations. Here we see that as a ‘fountain’, sovereignty overawes all other

Introduction: divine violence and political fetishism 13

aspects of human – especially political – life. These other aspects are not
erased by the display of sovereignty but live in its shadow, like the stars as
they stand before the spectacle of the daylight sun (in another helpful meta-
phor that Hobbes offers to us).

In order to turn our gaze towards ‘the political’ in its own distinction, i.e.

towards those political aspects that are eclipsed but not removed by sover-
eignty itself, we might ask what would happen if the fl ow of the fountain were
somehow disrupted? Not turned off, because that would suggest the very
strategy of ‘doing without sovereignty’ that I have already suggested leads to
more rather than less of the idolatrous form of sovereignty we struggle with
(by imagining that there could be a pure or true representation of the people,
i.e. by imagining yet another fetish). But, it seems fair to say, if the fountain
suddenly didn’t function as it usually did (and/or if our attention could
be drawn to the way it malfunctions) it would change our relationship to
the water as well. We might come to ‘see’ the water as itself, what beforehand
had simply been a part of the fabric of the fountain. Insofar as our relationship
to sovereignty and to the political is similarly perception-based, it would
matter a great deal if it became possible to ‘see’ the political in its own terms.
This, once again, is not to say that the political is autonomous from
sovereignty, but rather to see it in its own distinction, as something that
is not totalized by the fetishes that produce it. What would the political be
in this case? How (if at all) would we act differently (i.e. what would it
mean to act in a more distinctly ‘political’ way)? I will turn to these sorts of
questions at the conclusion of this book. For now, let it suffi ce to say that
Divine Violence seeks to think further about this disruption, about the illumi-
nation of a distinct political life that we are already living even as we remain
dazzled by the ‘fountain’, the sovereign superstructure that determines our
reality.

Conclusion: sovereign theologies

As already mentioned at the beginning of this chapter, although it seems to
be increasingly vulnerable and disrupted, sovereignty has not ‘gone away’ but
rather has been (or is being) transformed. Sovereignty remains the formidable
force it always has been; if anything, the disruptions that increasingly seem to
mark its performance reveal the underlying edifi ce of sovereign power. Wendy
Brown makes this argument in Walled States, Waning Sovereignty . She claims
that the true – and theological – face of sovereignty emerges more clearly as
the Westphalian, secular mask that it has worn for hundreds of years starts to
dissipate. The rise of an unchallenged and unchallengeable capitalist sover-
eignty returns us to the omnipresent God that gave birth to sovereign
authority in the fi rst place. Brown writes: ‘as capital, God is not dead, but
rather fi nally deanthropomorphized – fi nally God.’ She goes on to write of the
paradox that:

14 Divine

Violence

While weakening nation-state sovereigns yoke their fate and legitimacy
to God, capital, that most desacralizing of forces, becomes God-like:
almighty, limitless, and uncontrollable. In what should be the fi nal and
complete triumph of secularism, there is only theology.

Brown further tells us that under such conditions, ‘nation-state sovereignty
becomes openly and aggressively rather than passively theological.’

What we see in the case of the misperformance of sovereign authority that

Brown describes is evidence that the fountain of sovereignty can and frequently
is disrupted, leaving the theological ‘pith’ exposed. Yet we also see that such
disruption affords only an opportunity, one that is lost if we remain mired in
the belief that there is no viable or desirable alternative to contemporary
sovereignty, if we cannot shake off our infatuation with and allegiance to such
power systems. And here, the question of idolatry, of standing in for God (as
capital clearly does), of fetishism – especially of commodities – becomes an
increasingly central political question. If we remain bound by the idolatry of
sovereignty – even (or especially) in its post-Westphalian phase, whatever
that entails – then combating idolatry, the kinds of false gods that capital
itself epitomizes, is the central problem of our time. Perhaps even more than
during the full expression of Westphalian sovereignty, when the claim to
secularization was more plausible, we see unresolved theological questions
return to haunt us (although I would argue that those questions have always
been present, if only less visible).

It is for this reason, therefore, that I would argue that Walter Benjamin’s

work is more timely than ever, if only in the sense that the subjects he treats
have emerged ever more clearly as questions that we cannot afford to ignore.
Benjamin, as I see it, is the thinker who is most interested in how to combat
the effects of political idolatry, of occult theological principles that are misrec-
ognized even as they organize the basis of our political life. Benjamin under-
stood, as few other thinkers have, the extent to which all people, all theorists
and even he himself were compromised by the lures of commodity fetishism.
He understood how fetishism produces a false reality. He also understood
how reality itself is perpetually unavailable, how we live in a post-lapsarian
world where representation (that is to say, misrepresentation or failed repre-
sentation) is our only option.

Through Benjamin, we can better come to terms with our predicament,

attuning ourselves to a world in which truth is not possible, where we have no
recourse but to engage with the myths and ideologies that constitute our
order (without however capitulating to them). Rather than try to shake sover-
eignty, and in particular its strong theological basis, we can confront that
theology head-on, fi ghting the fi re of idolatry with the fi re of Benjamin’s
Messianic conceptions. Benjamin shows us how to engage with the world
that we inhabit; a world in which everything is appearance and theater, where
everything is show. He understands both the powers of such a show (the

Introduction: divine violence and political fetishism 15

‘fountain’) as well as its vulnerabilities, the ways that it can be combated on
its own terms.

But before we can come to a fuller appreciation of Benjamin’s political

theology, we must come to understand the political theological nature of
sovereignty itself, at least as it is currently conceived and as it is currently
practiced. To understand this better, we must turn to a closer inspection of
the theological origins of sovereignty as well as to note the ongoing resilience
and even centrality of that theology (as Brown mentions) in our own time.

Notes

1 Badiou 2010: 221.
2 Although, as I’ll argue further, it is possible for sovereignty to be otherwise.
3 This is not to say that all regimes are alike; surely some are more friendly, more

interested in benign forms of ‘representation’ than others. I for one would much
rather live in a generally well-meaning northern European society like Sweden
than in a brutal dictatorship like North Korea. Yet, in the end, all states, whether
Sweden or North Korea, are idolatrous, all chasing after some central organizing
narrative that explains ‘what the people want’ (or what they want the people to
want). To make choices and comparisons between states (as we all do to some
extent) is to disregard an entirely different possibility – or perhaps an impossibil-
ity that only becomes momentarily possible via such events as the ones we are
seeing now in Egypt and Tunisia. This is the possibility of politics itself, of a col-
lective life that is not over-determined by political idols.

4 Agamben tells us that against such a behemoth, political theory has nothing to

say, writing: ‘the restoration of classical political categories proposed by Leo
Strauss and, in a different sense, by Hannah Arendt can only have a critical sense.
There is no return from the camps to classical politics’ (Agamben 1995: 187–8).

5 Hardt and Negri 2001: xii. In the conclusion to this book, I will return to Hardt

and Negri’s work, albeit in a critical light. Jean-Luc Nancy is one exception to
this belief. He argues that Empire is not the same as sovereignty, telling us
that ‘Empire does not pertain to sovereignty: it pertains to domination’ (Nancy
2007: 108).

6 See Brown 2010.
7 See Minkkinen 2009.
8 Nancy 2007: 106.
9 Brown 2010: 71.
10 Hinstley 1966: 132. Donald Lutz proposes that in the early modern period there

are four models of popular sovereignty: 1) Hobbes’s ‘Leviathan’ model, where
there is basically only transitory popular sovereignty; 2) the ‘traditionalistic’
model of Hotman, Bellarmine, and others whereby ‘the people are superior to and
therefore create the king’; 3) the ‘constitutional Republic model’ of James
Harrington and Locke wherein the ‘people erect and judge a supreme legislature’;
and 4) the ‘Constitutional Democracy Model’ of Rousseau and Hooker in which
‘the people are directly active and participatory’ (Lutz 2006: 76).

11 See Constant 2003; Mill 1993; Berlin 1997; Rawls 1999.
12 This is especially true of neoliberal political economists such as Friedrich von

Hayek and Milton Friedman. See Hayek 1978, 2007; Friedman 2002. Of course,
the much-vaunted succumbing of the state to globalizing market forces presup-
poses the very sorts of sovereign authorities that such actions are supposed to

16 Divine

Violence

overtake. As David Harvey points out, the operations of a globalized market
requires a neoliberal state (Harvey 2005: 7).

13 See Schmitt 1985.
14 Foucault is a clear exception to this tendency; Jacques Rancière is perhaps another.

However, as I will argue throughout this book, it is the work of Walter Benjamin
that I fi nd best addresses and resolves the left tendency to compromise with
sovereignty.

15 See Kantorowicz 1957; Blumenberg 1983.
16 It would probably be more accurate to say he seeks to take advantage of the scram-

bling and dissipations of sovereignty that happen all around us.

17 See Balibar 2004: 184–5.
18 Benjamin 1998: 232.
19 In the actual biblical tale, it seems Korah and his followers are both buried and

burned at the same time. Numbers 16: 28–35.

20 Benjamin 1978a: 297.
21 Kate Gordy came up with this analogy as a way to explain what I was trying to

say about sovereignty and politics.

22 Hobbes 1996: 2.18, p. 128.
23 Brown 2010: 66.
24 Ibid.: 62.

Part I

Sovereign temporalities

Chapter 1

The political theology
of sovereignty

Having laid out some of the bare bones of the claims of this book, let me begin
the argument proper by examining the ongoing connection between theology
and politics that has constituted sovereignty for as long as the term has been
in use. Here, as already suggested, I want to examine the relationship between
Christian eschatology and the practice of politics. It would be wrong to consider
this description a ‘history’ of sovereignty, insofar as I am not suggesting a
direct causal relationship between one set of events and another (although
most of the sources I will be looking at do make such a claim). Instead, I am
trying to think of the origins of sovereignty in Benjaminian terms, as when he
writes:

The term origin is not intended to describe the process by which the
existent came into being, but rather to describe that which emerges from
the process of becoming and disappearance. Origin is an eddy in the
stream of becoming, and in its current it swallows the material involved
in the process of genesis.

I want to undertake the following examination of the ‘origins’ of the concept
of sovereignty in this spirit. Commensurate with his understanding of truth
in the world more generally, Benjamin cautions us that we can never truly
know the ‘origin’ of something. Instead, we can be attuned to its coming and
going, its appearance, disappearance and reappearance in new guises. It is this
stream of continuity between theological concepts and political ones that I
would like to briefl y focus on here, connecting two (or more) moments in
time not as being in a causal relationship but rather as being mutually refl ec-
tive and interactive. Let me begin with the question of the relationship
between sovereignty and Christianity in the Middle Ages.

Sovereignty and Christian eschatology

The idea that sovereignty is connected to Christian doctrine has long been
noted by scholars. In looking at the concatenation of eschatological doctrine

20 Sovereign

temporalities

and the production of sovereignty in its ‘modern’ form, many scholars concen-
trate on the period between the eighth and seventeenth centuries in Western
Europe.

Focusing on the rise of the Carolingian dynasty, Walter Ullman tells us that

in the high Middle Ages, as Western Europe grew increasingly Christianized,
a more traditional form of what he called ‘royal monarchy’, based on blood and
ancestry, was usurped and superseded by a new form of ‘theocratic’ or ‘eccle-
siological’ monarchy, based on grace and anointment.

With the backing of

Frankish bishops and other leaders of the Church, the Frankish monarchy was
reinvented and in some ways subverted by this new form of authority. Ullman
reads this as an attack on the political by the ecclesiastical. At the same time,
however, the usurpation of royal monarchy (which Ullman suggests does not
disappear but is merely subsumed by the ecclesiastical) allows for a far broader
and more universal application of royal power and prerogative. By turning the
Frankish people into a ‘Christian body’, Christian doctrines were extended to
the political realm in ways that served to permit its later form to develop.

The

notion of power and authority went from something very specifi c and local,
based on fealty to one dynasty and one blood, to a far more generalizable prin-
ciple of rule that could extend indefi nitely into the world.

If the Carolingian renaissance for Ullman represents an early usurpation of

the political by the ecclesiastical, this process perhaps comes to its culmina-
tion several centuries later in the rise of formal doctrines of state sovereignty.
Ernst Kantorowicz famously tracks the development of sovereignty as it stems
from and is infl uenced by medieval theology and political practices, specifi -
cally focusing on the eschatological underpinnings of this relationship. While
the Carolingian monarchs were constrained by their reliance on ecclesiastical
ministers, later iterations of the state formally shed their religious trappings.
Yet, as Kantorowicz notes, the march towards a secularized state preserves the
fundamentally Christian character of rule by creating an analogous set of
institutions that mirror Christian practices (albeit with important and key
differences). Kantorowicz traces a rough passage of authority from divine
sanction to law and then to the state itself. Tracking this development,
Kantorowicz tells us that the original Christian distinction between ‘human
nature and Divine Grace’:

moved towards a juristically formulated polarity of ‘Law of Nature and
laws of man’, or to that of ‘Nature and man’, and, a little later, to that of
‘Reason and society’, where Grace no longer had a discernible place.

We see in this secularization the perpetuation of a form of analogy where the
secular and the divine remain in tension, even as the divine transforms itself
into something no longer recognizable as such.

For Kantorowicz, a key transformation of Christian eschatology, starting

around the thirteenth century, permitted the transition from a purely

The political theology of sovereignty 21

theological form of order to a political one. The long-standing Augustinian
model of time, whereby heaven was eternal and the world was impermanent
and temporary, was replaced by a concept, derived from Aristotle via Aquinas,
that the world was continuous. In this way, time, which for Augustine repre-
sented the transitory frailness of the world, became ‘the symbol of the eternal
continuity and immortality of the great collective called the human race.’

Here, an earthly politics became possible and itself sacred; time became the
envelope that contained earthly striving in a way that could be remembered,
revered and sanctifi ed. In this way, Kantorowicz tells us that time was ‘trans-
ferred from heaven to earth and recovered by man.’

Summarizing this transfer of eschatological principles, Kantorowicz writes

that what was:

epidemic in the thirteenth century became endemic in the fourteenth and
fi fteenth: one did not accept the infi nite continuity of a ‘World without
End,’ but accepted a quasi-infi nite continuity; one did not believe in the
uncreatedness of the world and its endlessness, but one began to act as
though it were endless; one presupposed continuities where continuity
had neither noticed nor visualized before; and one was ready to modify,
revise and repress, though not to abandon, the traditional feelings about
limitations in Time, and about the transitoriness of human institutions
and actions.

Kantorowicz tells us that the older, Augustinian sense of time was not lost
but that this new sense of time as continuity was emphasized over and above
it. We thus do not have a ‘new’ eschatology so much as we have a shift of
emphasis within the doctrine (a shift worth bearing in mind when we ourselves
feel bound by eschatology in ways that do not feel particularly ‘shiftable’
today).

This newer sense of time became the basis for the rise of the new, sovereign

state. The ‘transfer’ to earth of the celestial kingdom and its sense of possi-
bility and endurance, permitted the rise of the idea of sempiternity, the
endurance of institutions and nations on earth and in time.

Kantorowicz notes how these ideas took on very specifi c forms in terms of

the rise of the state during this period. The idea of a Church that would last
until the day of judgment was readily transferred to the courts, to the state’s
fi scal holdings and to the dignity and crown of the monarchy. All of these
functions were said to ‘never die’ (as opposed to the mortal individuals
who fulfi lled these roles at any given time). Eventually these so-called para-
ecclesiastical institutions left the Church itself behind. The usurpation of
political power by ecclesiastical power that Ullman describes in the ninth
century is thus reversed by the fourteenth century (or perhaps, more accu-
rately, the distinction between the political and the ecclesiastical, never clear
or stable, keeps changing in favor of one form over another).

22 Sovereign

temporalities

The ultimate bearer of this notion of endurance in time becomes vested in

the idea of the ‘the people’. Kantorowicz speaks of the ‘co-agency of an eternal
God and a sempiternal people’.

The people form what he calls a ‘ corpus

mysticum ’, which eventually becomes a ‘ corpus politicum ’.

And at the head of

the people was the king and, perhaps even more crucially, the ‘crown’.
Whereas, as already noted, the king as an individual would die, the crown did
not. And the crown was not merely a symbolic reference to the king but to the
‘prerogative and sovereign rights … responsible for the whole community’ (as
distinct from the body politic itself).

Kantorowicz further tells us that the

crown was the ‘embodiment of all sovereign rights – within the realm and
without – of the whole body politic, was superior to all its individual members,
including the king, though not separated from them.’

This doctrine then,

which bears, by analogy, the divine, as opposed to the physical, nature of
Christ, serves as the anchor of modern eschatology; the divine spark now rein-
carnated as the crown is what makes human sempiternity holy, what resists
the corrupting and fl eeting infl uences of time. This concept, Kantorowicz
tells us, is further metamorphosed so that by the sixteenth century (at least in
England) it becomes vested in the state ‘which was not only above its members,
but also divorced from them.’

Here, we begin to see the recognizable outlines

of contemporary forms of sovereignty already coming into place and refl ecting
various earlier iterations.

As Daniel Engster also emphasizes in his own work on this period, the

critical point to note is that the state’s power and authority remain valid
because of this connection to the divine. As he tells us, speaking specifi cally
of the seventeenth century:

The state was no longer said to be the universal representative of God on
earth but instead the universal representative of the people. Liberal theo-
rists likewise continued to call upon the state to establish a moral and
unifi ed community standing apart from the outside temporal world.
While the state was stripped of its overtly sacred veneer, it thus remained
an exalted institution in form and purpose. Only the surface features of
state theory were detached form their divine origins.

In this way, doctrines such as raison d’état , the state’s prerogative to carry out
seemingly immoral acts for the sake of the public interest, were justifi ed as
refl ecting the state’s unique and sanctifi ed role. Without this sanction, the
state itself would share in the temporary and fallen aspect of temporality that
we suffer as individuals (and, by extension, so would ‘the people’). The divine
continues to justify the state’s separation from the people that it nominally
only represents. As we will see further in Balibar’s commentary, this divine
connection to sovereignty does not fade, even in modern times; it is preserved
in the very sense of time and authority that constitute the bases for sover-
eignty as a contemporary practice.

The political theology of sovereignty 23

While these authors tend to treat Christian eschatology as an ‘origin’, taken

in the ordinary sense of the word, as already mentioned, I prefer to focus on
the ongoing and complex dance that we see between the theological and the
political in this genealogy. The point here, once again, is that one cannot
easily separate the political from the concepts that help to produce and shape
it. At times, the political seems to emerge, alone and autonomous. At other
times it seems to disappear into its ecclesiastical rival. As sovereignty itself
changes as a concept and as a practice, we see an ongoing dynamic which does
not and cannot resolve itself. Such a state of affairs continues into our own
time (as we have already seen with Brown’s analysis of the ‘reemergence’ of the
theological at a moment when the secular guise is increasingly being
disrupted).

Modern readings of Christian eschatology

In terms of contemporary readings of sovereignty, the idea of sovereignty as a
kind of break with past practices (very much including Christian ones) has
tended to predominate in the literature. Authors ranging from Kant to
Habermas have promoted an idea of sovereignty as being sui generis and not
merely a reiteration of earlier theological practices. But of course there are
many, and important, exceptions to this literature. Even as he himself partici-
pates to some extent in a discourse of modern sovereignty as a distinct break
from past practices, Carl Schmitt articulates exactly how this notion of a break
itself disguises the crucial (and theological) continuities with medieval and
Christian notions of sovereignty. In Political Theology (and especially in the
chapter by that name), Schmitt argues that modernity is born out of a formal
rejection of an earlier theological (and Christian) conception of the miracle.

The idea of God as a sovereign who directly intervenes in the world via the
‘exception’ of the miracle gives way to a new concept of a legal order which
‘reject[s] the exception in every form’.

In this way, modernity has a new

‘political theology’, one that serves to disguise both the more traditional
Christian inheritance of the modern state as well as the fact that the modern
sovereign, like the Christian God, continues to decide upon the exception.
The main difference, the real ‘break’ with past practices that Schmitt espies,
is the secular disguise itself (a disguise which, in his view, liberal thinkers
have accepted hook, line and sinker).

As is well known, Schmitt sees Thomas Hobbes as a key fi gure in the

production of the new modern political ‘theology’. Schmitt tells us that
Hobbes’s sovereign is not an anthropomorphism, a simple refl ection of God
now turned into a discernible, if still omnipotent, being. Instead it represents
‘a methodical and systematic postulate of [Hobbes’s] juristic thinking’.

Yet,

for all of this, Schmitt calls Hobbes’s contrast between the Immortal God and
the Sovereign ‘Mortall God’ ‘a confusion’.

Here, the emerging scientifi c and

impersonal discourse of sovereign power and law is confused with, as opposed

24 Sovereign

temporalities

to overwriting and replacing, an earlier understanding of a God with absolute
power (i.e. a God who directly and immediately decided upon the exception).
In this confusion of theological and juridical notions of sovereignty, we get for
Schmitt not a full break, but a set of parallel orders that intersect at various
points.

For Schmitt, this confusion or parallelism works to produce a notion of

sovereignty that is impossible to resist or avoid. He offers that on the surface
the doctrine of sovereignty seems to offer us a stark choice between the kinds
of sovereign dictatorship he attributes to Hobbes and also to Catholic jurid-
ical thinkers such as Donoso Cortés on the one hand and the kind of anar-
chistic reaction he attributes to Bakunin on the other. If Schmitt himself
prefers the former (and offers that even the most liberal of thinkers would
make a similar choice, given that decisionism is the heart and soul of sover-
eignty), he sees that anarchists have no choice but to ‘decide against the deci-
sion’.

Such a choice, as Schmitt portrays it, is in fact no choice at all; it is to

become ‘in theory the theologian of the antitheological and in practice the
dictator of the antidictatorship’.

In other words, in the false dichotomy or

‘confusion’ between theology and secular law that produces modern sover-
eignty, the anarchist must choose a secularism (an ‘anti-theology’) which is
nothing of the kind. By retreating into a faux sense of the secular (when in fact
the secular is just a different articulation of the theological), the anarchists
inevitably perpetuate the very decisionism they set out to oppose. A success-
fully disguised God becomes an occult dictator (‘a dictator of the anti-
dictatorship’) recast as some kind of purely secular – and democratic – ‘will’.

Although Schmitt does not speak of the alternative position, a recourse to a

deeper or ‘fundamentalist’ theology as a way to reject modernity, we see the
potential for the same false choice at play (and the same outcome). In this
view, to return to a pre-modern God does not avoid the secularized form of
sovereignty; it merely redirects it.

Here, modern-day theocracies and funda-

mentalists similarly cannot avoid sovereignty but they can (and do) attribute
their sovereign decisionism to God.

As already noted, towards the end of this book I will offer an analysis of

Hobbes’s (and Spinoza’s) understanding of the ‘Hebrew Republic’ to offer
why such a move towards theology does not necessarily perpetuate the
dilemma that Schmitt describes. I will also argue, in the conclusion of the
book, that it is possible for anarchists to avoid having to simply ‘decide against
the decision’, thereby escaping Schmitt’s (false) dichotomy. For the time
being, however, let us grant him these points in order to see how effective
they have been in fl ummoxing a range of theorists, especially on the left.

Taken as a whole, Schmitt’s argument neatly ties up the bases for sover-

eignty. He demonstrates that sovereignty, like the monotheistic God that
it is intricately connected to, is unchallengeable and irreplaceable exactly
because it stages a false dichotomy of alternatives that merely reproduces
itself. Schmitt thus describes a kind of trap wherein sovereignty cannot be

The political theology of sovereignty 25

opposed or sidestepped. In this way, the kind of endurance in time and deci-
sionism that was once attributed to God’s law (and hence the king) is, in its
contemporary incarnation, preserved via the very act of disguising the theo-
logical roots of modern sovereignty. This is precisely why we see so many
thinkers being boxed in by the concept of sovereignty in the fi rst place; to
turn away from the theological roots of sovereignty is, as Schmitt shows,
to turn towards the very mechanism that produces ‘modern’ sovereignty in
the fi rst place. Similarly to turn towards theology seemingly offers no help
either – it returns us to a decisionism that cannot be avoided. What, we
might ask, can be done with a sovereignty that is everywhere and nowhere
simultaneously? How might such a sovereign trap, a trap rooted in the very
eschatology that underpins it, be avoided?

Haunted by sovereignty

In his own response to Schmitt and the traps of sovereignty he describes in We
the People of Europe?,

Étienne Balibar sees much more contradiction and

dysfunction than Schmitt himself, even as he seems to remain convinced that
we cannot easily (or perhaps at all) escape the vise of sovereign authority.
Balibar, not unlike Schmitt, sees the practice of sovereignty as being to some
extent a perpetuation of medieval European theology but in this case, he
argues, religion has largely been substituted for (or transformed into) culture.

Speaking of eschatology more generally, Balibar critiques the opposition
between the kind of secularized, positivist eschatology of liberalism (the ‘end
of history’) and the more clearly Messianic and apocalyptic views of the
left (here, he supplies a series of fi gures ranging from the revolutionary leader
Subcomandante Marcos to Jacques Derrida; Benjamin is not mentioned in
this context). In all cases, he suggests:

such a situation, which takes the human condition to extreme ( ta eschata
in the Greek of the church fathers) [is] in reality unbearable , tending to
destroy human desire itself, the mainspring of personal life and of the
construction of any ‘social bond.’ . . . There is no lack of reasons for seeing
this opposition of positivism and the apocalypse – which, as one might
suspect, is by no means completely new in the history of ideas – as the
two sides of a single vision.

In this way, we see something of the trap that Schmitt describes as well
(Balibar calls it a ‘nihilistic dichotomy’).

The effects of the theological and

eschatological connections with modern sovereignty can be seen perhaps even
more clearly in a paradox that Balibar fi nds in Schmitt’s own work:

Schmitt keeps running up against the fact that while the state can be
personifi ed as a subject, the people cannot be. What reason is there for this

26 Sovereign

temporalities

asymmetry other than the fact that the very notion of the people implies
a multiplicity (or even a confl ictuality) that resists absolute unifi cation . . .
The individuality of the historico-political ‘subjects’ postulated by sover-
eignty never stops putting sovereignty itself into question.

As Balibar recounts it, this paradox gets to the heart of Schmitt’s theory of the
political. The sovereign must be both above and of the people. As with medi-
eval theology, the sovereign has two bodies, but in Balibar’s understanding
they stand in contradiction to one another. The sovereign as an ongoing and
permanent font of unity (sempiternal, divine) comes up against the sovereign
as representative of the people (mortal, individual). As Balibar points out, the
unity of the people represented by the sovereign masks or blurs the real distinc-
tions that exist between the people (Schmitt’s famous ‘friends and enemies’
distinction of necessity does this as well; friends are all effectively the same, as
are enemies, regardless of their individual or group identities). What emerges
from this paradox is thus less a clear-cut distinction (as Schmitt might want to
suggest) but rather a sort of overwriting and overlapping of categories:

Sovereignty does not abolish statuses and belongings, but it does envisage
them ‘as null’ in the eyes of the law and, as a consequence, superimposes
on them another belonging, which is personal rather than ‘corporative,’
egalitarian rather than equitable, and which alone is political . What is
instituted by sovereignty is thus a reciprocal belonging of the mass of
individuals (the population rather than the people ) and the territory over
which a certain apparatus of power is deployed.

Here too we see the political being produced (and perhaps compromised) by
the same kinds of tensions that Schmitt describes.

Balibar’s own version of Schmitt’s trap can most clearly be found in

his description of the diffi culty in separating a community’s own political
actions from the idea of ‘popular sovereignty’, an idea that brings with
it all of the paradoxes and dilemmas that come with sovereignty more
generally:

despite everything that . . . seems to militate for eliminating the idea of
popular sovereignty, with the decisionist and even mythical connotations
it carries, from our defi nition of citizenship, it never stops coming back to
haunt it. Borrowing a favored term from Jacques Derrida, I would call
this the ‘spectral’ existence of sovereignty as popular sovereignty in the
functioning of contemporary democracies and in projects to enlarge or
transpose democracy beyond the limits of the nation-state.

This is akin to Schmitt’s claim that every anarchism disguises a secret deci-
sionism. At bottom is once again the fact that the sovereign itself, the divine

The political theology of sovereignty 27

and sempiternal core at the heart of the very sense of belonging and commu-
nity, interferes with and distorts the actual expression of any tangible (that is
to say plural and multiple) form of community that may be expressed. Balibar
writes of this further:

it seems to me that the specter that haunts us here is in fact the communal
obsession – the impossible requirement that the ‘community of citizens’ be
both, and contradictorily, the community of communities before which every
other principle of belonging and allegiance becomes relative so that
universal rights and genuinely impartial guarantees can be put into effect,
and also a community without community , or, if you prefer, a community
without an ‘identitarian’ substance of its own (in particular without
ethnic, cultural, or ideological substance), so that it cannot be able to
supplant those who compose it in a fearsome hypostasis of the collective.

This lack of content or identity reproduces the very core of sovereign deci-
sionism that the move towards popular rule seeks to avoid in the fi rst place.
Sovereignty is thus not so easily escaped; even its seeming opposite (as we see
with Schmitt too) turns out to be ‘two sides of a single vision’.

In this way, Balibar – in an argument that accords with Brown’s – sees

sovereignty as enduring even despite what he calls the ‘ impotence of the omnipo-
tent ’.

Balibar cautions us not to see the apparent disintegration of sovereign

coherence as a sign of its immanent demise. He tells us that ‘we need to avoid
simplistic dichotomies between national and postnational eras, between
sovereignty and the withering away of the state.’

Despite its ‘tensions and

oppositions’, sovereignty as a phenomenon persists, often in forms that we do
not recognize as sovereign at all (as I argued in the previous chapter).

Given

its intrinsic structural incoherence, further incoherence is not in and of itself
a fatal threat to the practice of sovereignty. For Balibar, we therefore tend to
overstate the chances of its imminent demise; he looks for ‘an unpredictable
mutation’, rather than an ending to sovereignty altogether.

Although he shares some of Schmitt’s analysis, Balibar does not resign

himself to the trap they both espy. Balibar’s goal is fundamentally to chal-
lenge and possibly subvert the ongoing workings of the king’s two bodies. In
this, he is in good company with other thinkers like Benjamin (of which
much more will be said in Chapter 3 , specifi cally on his own relationship to
Schmitt) and Foucault.

In seeking to better negotiate between the particularity of individuals and

groups and the universal pretentions that are embedded within a sovereign
political system (the dilemma of the king’s two bodies and, in Balibar’s case,
a dilemma confronting Europe today), Balibar looks to ideas like the practice
of translation as a way to have the particularities talk to one another without
the necessary recourse of the impossible ‘community of communities/commu-
nity without community’ that sovereignty represents. And yet, the problem

28 Sovereign

temporalities

Balibar describes seems bigger than his solution(s). If indeed, the very idea of
community itself, the fabric of our political life, is fully saturated by sovereign
myths and Christian eschatology, then do the kind of ‘sideways’ transactions
inherent in the idea of translation really get us out of the dilemma? Insofar as
the individual units of community do not seem to have an independent exis-
tence (independent, that is, from the sovereign idea that animates them),
is there truly a space that is free from the perversions of contemporary
sovereignty in all of its guises?

Is the political autonomous?

In looking at Balibar alongside Schmitt, we see a problem in discovering the
‘autonomy’ of the political. The relatively neat story that Schmitt tells about
the genealogy of the political becomes, in Balibar’s hands, far more muddied
and complex, but in both cases there is a similar dilemma. Although Schmitt’s
goal was to fi nd the autonomy of the political, it may be that in fact he has
discovered its non-autonomy instead. However paradoxical it may sound, I
would argue that with Schmitt, the principle of sovereignty reveals and deter-
mines the non-autonomy of the political. The political, in other words, is
compromised and constituted by the very concept via which Schmitt seeks its
‘discovery’; it is a product of the fetishism inherent in sovereignty. We can
perhaps see this even more clearly in the case of Balibar: without the need
to depict sovereignty as coherent and unitary, Balibar allows us to see
sovereignty in all of its representational dysfunction. In the face of such
dysfunction, it seems that the political itself is similarly compromised.

If the political is indeed non-autonomous, produced in concert with the

potent mix of forces we have been describing, do we have any recourse? Are
we condemned to the trap of our own time, haunted by the unresolved para-
doxes that come with such concepts? Insofar as Schmitt himself shows us that
decisionism is the inevitable outcome of subscribing to the concept of sover-
eignty as we have received it (a position he happily accepts), it may seem as if
we are stuck with existing patterns.

But what if we could see the political in its own distinction? What if, to

return to our earlier analogy, made in the Introduction, we could see the
resting water at the periphery of the fountain as something in and of itself
(not autonomous, to be sure, but worthy of notice nonetheless)? Much of the
rest of this book will be an attempt to think further about this view of the
political. The provisional (and probably as yet unsatisfying) answer I make
here is that the political emerges as distinct only after sovereignty’s haunting
of the population has been exposed as a fetish. It should be recalled that for
Benjamin, this does not mean that a ‘false’ sovereignty has been superimposed
over a ‘true’ political community and that it merely needs to be lifted. Instead,
we must think about what happens to the political when the fetishes that
produce it are de-centered (i.e. when the spray of the fountain is disrupted).

The political theology of sovereignty 29

What happens to a community when its central organizing mythologies are
shattered (albeit temporarily) and it does not simply disappear along with
them? Such a space is not ‘free’ either of sovereignty or the eschatology that
serves as its temporal vehicle but such terms do not totalize it either. If, as
Schmitt and Balibar both imply, we require sovereignty to form even the
most basic units of a would-be political order (at least in its Western, ‘modern’
iteration), if we cannot avoid being ‘haunted’ by such constructions, then we
will see, from Benjamin in particular, that such an order must not be the end
of the story but only part of the process, something to encounter before the
political itself can become legible.

Prior to a turn towards Benjamin himself, we must fi rst explore the frustra-

tions and attempts by two key twentieth-century thinkers, Hannah Arendt
and Jacques Derrida, to deal with the complex mix of theology and politics
that Schmitt and Balibar have described. These two thinkers will show both
how much sovereignty can be subverted even on its own terms, and also expose
the limits of such subversion without the critical attention to fetishism itself
that is offered by Walter Benjamin. In their respective overreliance on secu-
larism (Arendt) and inability to fully engage with Messianic thinking (Derrida),
these thinkers show the strengths but also (and perhaps more critically) the
weaknesses of trying to tackle sovereignty head on and without the kind of
political-theological engagement we fi nd in Benjamin. This is not to say that
these authors do not also engage in political theology of their own; as I will
show in Chapter 4 they do, but unlike Benjamin they do so from within the
confi nes of an eschatological order that is set by contemporary sovereignty, that
is to say, from within the confi nes of Schmitt’s trap. Accordingly let us turn our
attention fi rst to these thinkers before coming to the work of Benjamin himself.

Notes

1 Benjamin 1998: 45. For a discussion of his notion of origins, see Weber 1991.
2 This understanding largely pertains to the traditions and practices of the West,

and so when I speak of ‘modernity’ and ‘contemporary practices’, I am largely
referring to that tradition. It is true that the Western practice has spread itself
over much of the globe. It is equally true, however, that the Western practice is
itself infl uenced by counterpractices, other histories from other parts of the world
that have long gone unrecognized.

3 Ullman 1969: 54–5.
4 Ibid.: 62.
5 Kantorowicz 1957: 142.
6 Ibid.: 277.
7 Ibid.: 281.
8 Ibid.: 283.
9 Ibid.: 297.
10 Ibid.: 448.
11 Ibid.: 363.
12 Ibid.: 381.
13 Ibid.: 382.

30 Sovereign

temporalities

14 Engster 2001: 10.
15 By the time we come to the concept of divine right monarchy itself, which rose to

prominence in the sixteenth century (under the guidance of fi gures like Jean
Bodin) it seems to Strayer that ‘both divine right and sovereignty were attempts
to fi nd theological or legal terms to explain and justify a change that had already
taken place in the position of the head of the state. Once these doctrines had been
formulated, they reinforced already existing attitudes toward monarchy, but the
attitudes existed before the doctrine.’ Strayer 2009: 91.

16 Schmitt 1985: 36.
17 Ibid.: 37.
18 Ibid.: 47.
19 Ibid.: 48.
20 As when, as Schmitt notes, Weber sees the relationship between a ‘radical materi-

alist philosophy of history’ and a ‘similarly radical spiritualist philosophy of
history’. Ibid.: 42.

21 Ibid.: 66.
22 Ibid.
23 There is some historical evidence to support this argument. For example, such an

outcome can be seen in the actions of the so-called ‘Barebones parliament’ that
held power in England following the English civil war. Many of the radical
Puritans who led that parliament belonged to the so-called ‘Fifth Monarchist’
movement, led by Thomas Harrison, who believed that Jesus Christ himself
should become the king of England. Such a move threatened to establish a de facto
theocracy ruled, not by Jesus, but by the fi fth monarchists themselves. Cromwell,
perhaps sensing this, ended up making himself the effective sovereign, establish-
ing the Protectorate and ending the Barebones parliament. See Nuttall 1947: 109.

24 Balibar 2004: 152.
25 Ibid.: 108.
26 Ibid. 140.
27 Ibid.: 140–1.
28 Ibid.: 144.
29 Ibid.: 184–5.
30 Ibid.: 185.
31 Ibid.: 135.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid.: 154.

Chapter 2

In the maw of sovereignty

To look at the question of how the concept of sovereignty can overwhelm even
the most dedicated opponent, as noted in the introductory chapter, two
the orists, Hannah Arendt and Jacques Derrida, are particularly helpful. These
thinkers tell a different story about sovereignty than Schmitt does. In their
rendition, sovereignty is not identical with politics but is in fact a threat to
political life. For Arendt in particular, sovereignty is a usurpation of the non-
sovereign, alternative forms of governance that underlie – even as they are
eclipsed by – sovereign practices. Sovereignty is given credit (and therefore
seen as necessary) for the functioning of the very communities it has taken
over (even as it has also produced those selfsame communities, as we will see
further).

Both Arendt and Derrida purport to oppose (or at least resist) sovereignty

and yet, as I will argue further, both end up accommodating themselves to it,
at least to some extent. In the accommodations that these thinkers make, we
will see both the seductions of sovereignty as a concept as well as the successful
way that the concept of sovereignty overshadows any political alternatives,
even in thinkers like Arendt and Derrida who have a keen sense of the dangers
that sovereignty poses to the polity. In this sense, they do not quite escape the
political theological dilemma that Schmitt poses for opponents of sovereign
practices.

In this chapter I will attempt to show that a large part of the tenacity of

sovereignty can be explained by the way these thinkers understand time and
history as refl ecting the eschatological structuring of sovereignty described in
the previous chapter. As we saw there, sovereignty presents itself as some-
thing that is inevitable, something that we are stuck with for better or for
worse. Sovereignty is the conveyance of sempiternity in the world; it is what
saves human societies (or so we believe) from succumbing to the randomness
and the fl eetingness of time itself. As we will now see, for all of their resistance
to sovereignty, both Arendt and Derrida compromise or make peace with it,
refl ecting their own position within this eschatological framework. Yet, espe-
cially when read in tandem, we can see that these writers potentially subvert
the very sense of inevitability and oneness of sovereignty that they succumb

32 Sovereign

temporalities

to. They do this by conceiving of both a past (in Arendt’s case) and a future
(in Derrida’s case – although as we will see, it is not the future as such) where
sovereignty is absent or at least altered. In both cases these temporal moves are
purely fi ctional; Arendt’s evocation of a fable of classical, pre-sovereign (at
least taken in the political sense) times, and Derrida’s famous ‘ démocratie à
venir ’ (‘democracy to come’) do not so much describe different temporal states
as a different form of possibility for the present.

In what follows, I will argue that Arendt and Derrida’s failure or even reluc-

tance to truly overcome sovereignty come from the way they try to directly attack
its eschatological structure and also by the way that they do not quite recognize
the fetishistic nature of sovereignty, both producing and over-determining our
political practices. In terms of the fi rst problem, that of eschatology, both
thinkers are to some extent constrained by the very temporality that they would
seek to escape. Arendt herself acknowledges that she is a creature of modernity, a
product of the temporal and eschatological framework that produced her. We
can see something similar in Derrida as well (although not as clearly acknow-
ledged in his case). Accordingly the very fabric of time – or at least of time as it
is conceived of in the modern West – brings along all of the problems that
Arendt in particular would seek to escape. Attempting to remove herself to some
fi ctional and pre-sovereign ‘past’ does not escape the sempiternity of sovereignty
which is projected in all possible directions (and, again, a somewhat similar argu-
ment can and will be made about Derrida).

As for the second problem, the failure to fully recognize the fetishistic

nature of sovereignty, we see that for both Arendt and Derrida, their own
attempts to consider the political are complicated by the way that sovereignty
has served to represent – or just plain be – the political. For all their attempts
to get away from this thinking, we see them being drawn back into the maw
of sovereignty because, by seeking recourse to the political, they bring along
the representational form of politics that they know, the fetish of sovereignty
itself (hence, in their own way, once again reiterating Schmitt’s trap). It may
be that even a belief in ‘the political’ as such (which may be more true of
Arendt than Derrida), an autonomous position that is independent of any
other human formulation, may lead to such traps. In Chapter 4 , I will return
to this engagement with Arendt and Derrida, looking at their respective
understandings of Messianism, and in Chapter 5 , I will examine their (resul-
tant) notions of forgiveness and judgment. For the time being let us examine
each thinker’s basic relationship to sovereignty in turn to see how this plays
itself out and with what consequences for contemporary understandings of,
and possibilities for, politics.

Hannah Arendt

In her own struggle with the political expression of sovereignty, Arendt gives
it a history, and a modern one at that. As is well known, Arendt argues that

In the maw of sovereignty 33

classical forms of politics were marked by an entirely different set of political
assumptions and principles. Although in some ways, for Arendt, contem-
porary sovereignty represents a return to the pre-political forms of rule by
force that preceded the classical age (a form which lingered on as private
absolute household authority during the classical age itself), it enters modern-
ity with a crucial new feature: the rise of the human will as the central locus
of agency.

As Arendt puts it:

[P]hilosophers fi rst began to show an interest in the problem of freedom
when freedom was no longer experienced in acting and associating with
others but in willing and in the intercourse with one’s self, when, briefl y,
freedom had become free will … Because of [this] the ideal of freedom
ceased to be virtuosity in the sense [of action and association] and became
sovereignty, the ideal of a free will, independent from others and eventu-
ally prevailing against them.

Sovereignty for Arendt is thus based on ‘the ideal of a free will independent
from others and eventually prevailing against them’. While it is often
disguised as the ‘will of the people’ or of ‘the nation’ or (in the words of
Rousseau, whom she perceives as one of her main adversaries on this issue)
‘the General Will’, for Arendt, sovereignty represents a particular will that
imposes itself on the rest of us. In this way, sovereignty creates a faux unity
that then becomes ‘proof’ of its own authenticity.

In works like On Revolution , Arendt condemns fi gures like Robespierre and

Lenin for hijacking genuinely popular political (and revolutionary) move-
ments and taking power for themselves in the name of such movements
(although in her view, Lenin, at least, has a moment of recognizing and appre-
ciating that spontaneous power). She opposes a politics of ‘councils’ (the revo-
lutionary movements themselves in all of their plurality) to a pseudo-politics
of parties. The latter serve as vehicles for ideologies that determine ‘what the
people really want’, thus promoting a sovereign ‘will’ that in her view ignores
and overwhelms the people it ‘represents’. The concept of representation is
itself (at least some of the time) suspect for Arendt, insofar as the claim by a
party to ‘represent’ the people is one of the ways that they bypass and over-
come what she sees as the genuine political expression of a particular commu-
nity. In this way, the Jacobins, the Bolsheviks – as well as countless other
party movements – have displaced a potentially radically democratic political
movement with the basis for a new, and modern, form of political power,
namely the sovereign state itself.

Ultimately, for Arendt, a sovereign system of rule cannot even properly be

called ‘political’ at all, since it prevents citizens from being active members in
their own political existence. As we have seen, in Arendt’s view, ‘representa-
tion’ is sovereignty’s answer to the lack of popular participation. Yet, given
the way it conceptualizes ‘the people’ as a projection of its own will and

34 Sovereign

temporalities

position, this becomes an empty gesture. Thus while for liberals sovereignty
is the guarantor of human plurality, for Arendt it is the very opposite.

Sovereignty thus seems to be an almost entirely pernicious force for Arendt.

At best, we must hope that those who impose their order upon the rest of us
will be decent and peaceful. But in no way would such a state of affairs approx-
imate the value of having us involved in our own political existence. In her
starkest commentary on the matter, Arendt concludes: ‘If men wish to be free,
it is precisely sovereignty they must renounce.’

Yet even as she makes such defi nitive claims, Arendt’s approach to sover-

eignty is quite nuanced and often quite ambivalent.

In On Revolution , for

example, we see in Arendt’s enthusiasm for many of the American Federalists
a great deal of sympathy for what in other circumstances (such as the French
revolution), she would see as a sovereign usurpation of public power. Although
she claims that the US constitution ‘eventually cheated [the American people]
out of their proudest possession [their revolutionary spirit]’,

she also praises

Madison and his idea of a “medium of a chosen body of citizens” through
which opinions must pass and be purifi ed into public views.’

She argues that

such a medium would not be present if we had a literal and direct democracy
(as promoted by the Anti-Federalists).

In The Human Condition

, Arendt accommodates sovereignty in a more

general fashion. She writes:

Sovereignty, which is always spurious if claimed by an isolated single
entity, be it the individual entity of the person or the collective entity of
a nation, assumes, in the case of many men mutually bound by promises,
a certain limited reality.

Here, Arendt seems to be backing off from an absolute criticism of sover-
eignty. She suggests that sovereignty can be somehow tamed if it refl ects ‘the
case of many men mutually bound by promises’. Promising, which is mutual
and contingent rather than unilateral and preordained, potentially renders
sovereignty itself an instrument of, rather than the usurper of, politics.
Promising preserves human plurality and, at least in this version of her poli-
tics, it seems to somehow be able to rein in the unitary phantasms of sovereign
government. She goes on to write that:

The sovereignty of a body of people bound and kept together, not by an
identical will which somehow magically inspires them all, but by an
agreed purpose for which alone the promises are valid and binding, shows
itself quite clearly in its unquestioned superiority over those who are
completely free, unbound by any promises and unkept by any purpose.
This superiority derives from the capacity to dispose of the future as
though it were the present, that is, the enormous and truly miraculous
enlargement of the very dimension in which power can be effective.

In the maw of sovereignty 35

Here, we have gone from a vision of sovereignty that has been tempered in
order to make political life possible, to an idea of sovereignty as a collective
capacity that actually improves public life. These divergent depictions reveal
Arendt’s ambiguous attitude towards sovereignty; even as she reacts against
the notion of sovereignty as a form of absolute and irrefutable authority, she
seems drawn to what sovereignty can accomplish (including the way it
serves to produce a community in the fi rst place).

As Bonnie Honig notes,

how ever much Arendt might want to insist that sovereignty and the kind
of political absolutes that it tends to invoke are anathema to the formation
and maintenance of political orders, she cannot avoid but can only resist its
constative power.

It is here that the temporal dimensions of sovereignty become pertinent. It

may be that Arendt accommodates sovereignty in part because, as a modern,
she feels as if she has no choice.

In her own genealogy, Arendt tells us that

political practices of the classical age were marked neither by will nor sover-
eignty. Insofar as modern society is composed of a collective of individual
wills, we turn to sovereignty because we fear the wills of other persons and feel
safer and more secure with some overarching, sovereign will to protect us and
guard against the unknown, potentially terrifying future (by ‘dispos[ing] of
[it] as though it were present’). When Arendt speaks about how sovereignty
allows for a ‘limited independence from the incalculability of the future’, she
may be capitulating to the idea that sovereignty protects us. At the very least,
she is acknowledging that modern subjects feel the need for such protection.

Yet such an accommodation leaves us with a lot of questions. If it is true

that sovereignty is itself an illegitimate, violence-based form of arbitrary
force, not political at all, how can it be accommodated? Given that she shows
that those systems based on promises are actually destroyed by parties that
seek to impose sovereignty (and not just once in a while, but each and every
time), her own genealogy seems to deny the kinds of accommodations she
appears to put forward.

What we seem to have in Arendt’s work is (as Honig implies) not so much

an accommodation as a battle.

We see even in a thinker who is dedicated to

the exposure and defeat of sovereignty as a basis of political life, a tendency to
succumb, at least at times, to the idea that that there simply are no viable
alternatives to sovereignty. Arendt seems trapped by her own sense of history,
by a genealogy that associates modernity inevitably with sovereignty. Arendt’s
history reproduces within itself the central conceit of sovereignty, that it arose
inevitably, that once it was established it could not and should not be
displaced. In her attempts to accommodate sovereignty, Arendt may be
rhetorically demonstrating her own conviction that sovereignty broaches no
compromise.

On Revolution can be read as a microcosm of Arendt’s treatment of sover-

eignty wherein it is fi ercely resisted and then, in her failure to condemn
Madison as an American Robespierre, succumbed to. But here we do not need

36 Sovereign

temporalities

to read Arendt as a tragic fi gure so much as a writer who demonstrates both
how insidious sovereignty can be and how it must be resisted utterly rather
than partially. Sovereignty has always established itself as the system that
assuages fear: the fear of too much freedom, too much spontaneity, and the
violence of others. Arendt’s work shows both how effective this fear is, and at
the same time how it is in fact sovereignty itself that is most to be feared; it is
the source of rather than the solution to the many ills that it purports to
protect us from. While her evocation of a non-sovereign, classical form of
politics may be an example of what Honig calls Arendt’s telling of ‘fables’, it
represents a serious attempt on her part to consider what a non-sovereign
politics might look like, undermining her own conviction that such a politics
may be impossible, even ‘unthinkable’.

We see in Arendt’s notion of sovereignty as a form of ‘representation’ shades

of Benjamin’s own approach to idolatry (which will be dealt with in much
greater detail in the following chapter). But there is a crucial difference in their
portrayals. For Benjamin, it will be recalled, there is no underlying truth that
fetishism occludes. The sin of idolatry lies in its own claims to be truthful in the
fi rst place. For Arendt, however, sovereignty does seem to occlude a kind of
truth (‘the political’). In Arendt’s view, unlike Benjamin, we see the basis for an
autonomous politics that is obscured by faux sovereign claims. As I will argue
further in the conclusion to this chapter, such a view ends up reproducing the
very eschatological traps that Arendt would seek to escape by recourse to a clas-
sical ‘before’. To have an idea of the political suggests a fully blown alternative
model, a space that is free of misrepresentation. Yet such a space is, as Schmitt
and others have pointed out, simply a negation of the constructions that deter-
mine our time; it is, once again, to ‘decide against the decision’, to allow the
forces of sovereignty to reproduce themselves unseen in the guise of their
purported absence. It is a source as well, I would argue, for Arendt’s ambiva-
lence and compromise (as we’ll see, Derrida doesn’t commit himself quite as
much to the denial of sovereignty; his ambivalence is of a different sort).

As we will see further, Benjamin’s understanding of politics does not deny

its connection to the eschatologies and mythologies that produce it; rather it
seeks to amplify moments of resistance and dislocation, to bolster a kind of de
facto differentiation between politics and sovereignty even in the face of the
ongoing spectacle of sovereign authority. Unlike Arendt, Benjamin seeks to
render politics visible in its distinction from sovereignty, even while allowing
sovereignty itself to remain (as it apparently must). By avoiding the dream of
getting rid of sovereignty once and for all, he also avoids contaminating that
‘non-sovereign space’ with just more of the same.

Jacques Derrida

Arendt’s troubled relationship to sovereignty is not unique. We see in no
small number of important thinkers of the middle to late twentieth century a

In the maw of sovereignty 37

strange mixture of condemnation of sovereign politics (although it is not
always referred to as such) with a reluctant acquiescence or at least accommo-
dation. Another major fi gure of twentieth-century thought, Jacques Derrida,
displays a highly ambivalent stance in his well-known text Rogues [ Voyous ], a
text that I will focus on (although not exclusively) in what follows.

already noted, Derrida’s ambivalence is different from Arendt’s; his position
is already closer to Benjamin’s own but he is ambivalent nonetheless.

In Rogues , Derrida approaches the question of sovereignty by focusing on

the concept of ipseity, that is to say the claim that sovereignty merely ‘is’ what
the people (it represents) want and do. He writes:

Now, democracy would be precisely this, a force (

kratos

), a force in

the form of a sovereign authority (sovereign, that is,

kurios

kuros ,

having the power to decide, to be decisive, to prevail . . .), and thus
the power and ipseity of the people (

demos

). This sovereignty is a

circularity.

As with Arendt, Derrida sees problems that are inimical to any sovereign
system. He argues that with sovereignty, the very ipseity that is demonstrated
in the practice of democracy brings with it a kind of ‘ipsocentric[ism]’,

‘long cycle of political theology that is at once paternalistic and patriarchal,
and thus masculine, in the fi liation father-son-brother’.

This ipsocentricism

is ‘revived or taken over’ by a newer version of itself, moving from monarchic
sovereignty to ‘the unavowed political theology . . . of the sovereignty of the
people, that is, of democratic sovereignty.’

Thus all of this circularity

disguises or even enables a kind of assertion, a force ( kratos ) that is in the end
self-defeating in terms of the promise of democratic politics (very much as
with Arendt herself). To put this in a nutshell, for Derrida, under conditions
of sovereignty ‘the people themselves’, an idea and production meant to
‘represent’ the popular will, seizes power from the people, themselves. There
are shades here too of a belief in ‘the political’ but Derrida is too skeptical,
perhaps too tragic, a thinker to really hold to a perfect form of politics. As we
will see further, such a politics may exist, but not yet, not in a tangible, actual
form in our world. Rather the idea of the political (i.e. his notion of ‘democ-
racy to-come’) exists to haunt and trouble our contemporary practices, to
show us how the politics that we do practice are not democratic, not neces-
sarily ‘political at all’.

In such a context, behind every respectable form of sovereign state Derrida

tells us that there lurks a rogue, the ‘bad’ sovereignty hidden or smuggled
within the ‘good’. Derrida says of this:

As soon as there is sovereignty, there is abuse of power and a rogue state.
Abuse is the law of use; it is the law itself . . . There are thus only rogue
states. Potentially or actually.

38 Sovereign

temporalities

For Derrida, democracy and sovereignty are in a sense twin-born. But the

relationship is not quite reciprocal. If sovereignty does not need democracy, it
seems democracy still needs sovereignty to exist:

For democracy to be effective, for it to give rise to a system of law that can
carry the day, which is to say, for it to give rise to an effective power, the
cracy of the demos . . . is required. What is required is thus a sovereignty,
a force that is stronger than all the other forces in the world.

Here we have a quandary not unlike Arendt’s own. Derrida says that the force
of sovereignty ‘betrays and threatens’ democracy ‘from the very outset, in an
autoimmune fashion’.

And yet, democracy, it appears, cannot even exist

without sovereignty.

We fi nd that in the end, Derrida ends up with a remarkably similar conclu-

sion to Arendt herself. He tells us that: ‘It is thus no doubt necessary, in the
name of reason, to call into question and to limit a logic of nation-state sover-
eignty.’

In this notion of ‘limiting’ sovereignty, we fi nd echoes of Arendt’s

own idea that when it is bound by promises, sovereignty could offer a ‘certain
limited reality’.

Such a move amounts to what Wendy Brown has called

Derrida’s ‘sovereign hesitation’, his realization that sovereignty has its values
despite the challenges that it poses.

If in Arendt’s case, there seems to be a

conviction that sovereignty simply can’t be done away with in our time, for
Derrida, we actually don’t want to get rid of it, or at least, we haven’t yet
fi gured out how or if we should go about doing such a thing.

Derrida writes (and here is perhaps where the true ‘hesitation’ occurs):

[I]t would be imprudent and hasty, in truth hardly reasonable , to oppose
unconditionally, that is, head-on, a sovereignty that is itself unconditional
and indivisible. One cannot combat, head-on , all sovereignty in general ,
without threatening at the same time, beyond the nation-state fi gure of
sovereignty, the classical principles of freedom and self-determination.

In other words, too much that we cherish, too many of our goals, are in fact
tied up with the conception (or conceptions) of sovereignty.

For Derrida, unlike Arendt, there is no break between ancient and modern

forms of politics – in his view, both Plato and Aristotle assert sovereign prin-
ciples. Thus there is no earlier time, no prior democratic practice for him that
was genuinely political but not yet sovereign. Instead, as we have seen, Derrida
turns to what might be called a future without sovereignty, with his famous
notion of ‘democracy to come’ ( la démocratie à venir ).

In considering this concept it is crucial to note that this future is not located

in our own sense of time; the ‘future’ ( avenir ) he is referring to stands in an
entirely different order of temporality. As Derrida famously tells us at the end
of his Politics of Friendship:

In the maw of sovereignty 39

For democracy remains to come; this is its essence in so far as it remains:
not only will it remain indefi nitely perfectible, hence always insuffi cient
and future, but belonging to the time of the promise, it will always
remain, in each of its future times, to come: even when there is democ-
racy, it never exists, it is never present, it remains the theme of a
non-presentable concept.

Democracy to come is thus Messianic (at least somewhat Messianic; in Chapter
4 we will return to the question of just how Messianic Derrida really is).
Democracy ‘trembles on the edge’ of our own time, troubling and haunting
our own conceptions of time and justice.

As Simon Critchley points out,

‘democracy to come’ ‘happens as the now blasting through the continuum of
the present’.

Thus in some ways, ‘democracy to come’ is already ‘here’ even

as it is endlessly deferred, impossible. Yet, for all of its hereness, democracy to
come is not ‘here’ in the same way as the actual practices that Derrida opposes;
its hereness is not of that kind.

Like Arendt’s own conception of a pre-sovereign past, Derrida’s account

of ‘democracy to come’ is a kind of fi ction, a genealogy. As Foucault says of
genealogy more generally in ‘What is Enlightenment?’:

[Genealogy] will not deduce from the form of what we are what it is
impossible for us to do and to know; but it will separate out, from the
contingency that has made us what we are, the possibility of no longer
being, doing, or thinking what we are, do, or think.

In Derrida’s case in particular, such a genealogy seems to serve, as Foucault
also suggests, a historical sense of our own time, a ‘refl ection on “today” ’ from
the perspective of genealogical analysis.

Such a perspective may offer a

new space of possibility, or what Derrida elsewhere calls ‘another space for
democracy’.

Whether such a perspective actually avoids sovereignty altogether is an

important question. In Rogues , Derrida does allow himself to consider what a
‘non-sovereign’ politics might look like. He notes that:

wherever the name of God would allow us to think something else, for
example a vulnerable nonsovereignty, one that suffers and is divisible,
one that is mortal even, capable of contradicting itself or of repenting (a
thought that is neither impossible nor without example), it would be a
completely different story, perhaps even the story of a god who decon-
structs himself in his ipseity.

In speaking of ‘nonsovereignty’ Derrida is ‘think[ing] something else’; even if
it is conveyed in the most partial of glimpses, that ‘something else’ begins to
describe an idea of politics, and even democracy, without sovereignty.

40 Sovereign

temporalities

Yet, it is not clear that such glimpses or moments affords any actual

breaking away from sovereignty in that, as we have already seen, ‘democracy
to come’ is not really about a future time without sovereignty but a kind of
genealogical ‘future’ that allows us some perspective and a sense of our own
time and its possibilities. As such, it may not allow us to escape, either
partially or fully, the conundrums of sovereignty that Derrida describes.

When facing the future that actually is ‘to come’ (i.e. the future of our own

time, a future that is ‘not-yet-present’), Derrida adopts quite a different atti-
tude towards sovereignty.

He notes the rise of new non-sovereign forces in

the world, especially the specter of global terrorism and the post-September
11 order it has ushered in. In addition to the violence such acts produce, these
phenomena also threaten the notion that the sovereign is the most powerful
force that there is (and hence threaten the basis for Derrida’s hesitation about,
or requirement of, sovereignty). Derrida tells us that ‘From now on it will no
longer be a question of inter-national war in the classical sense . . . nor will it
be a question of civil war.’

The very structures of sovereignty rely on certain

beliefs about power and authority which the ‘new world order’ does not seem
to match. Derrida concludes:

There are thus no longer anything but rogue states, and there are no
longer any rogue states. The concept will have reached its limit and the
end – more terrifying than ever – of its epoch.

Here we see the invocation again of limits, but this time of limits of a different
sort; not limits that the demos puts on the sovereignty to make democracy
possible, but rather a limit on sovereignty’s ability to order and control our
world (i.e. to make us safe).

In this rather fearful account of the (actual) future we see once again how

sovereignty has insinuated itself into Derrida’s account and made itself a
necessary safeguard against some darker alternatives. Derrida’s anxiety in the
face of such a future is further evidence of his ambivalence about sovereignty
more generally; while he embraces a Messianic democracy to come, Derrida
also fears, once again, losing the democratic baby when throwing out the
sovereign bathwater. Here Derrida echoes Arendt’s own grappling with the
fearfulness of the future. In his case it seems that if ‘democracy to come’ is
always deferred, even if it is in some ways already here and ‘now’, we can’t
quite afford do without sovereignty. We must cling to sovereignty, it seems,
in order to protect ourselves from much uglier things that are fully potential,
if not already present.

The prosthetic sovereign

We see some of this same ambivalence about sovereignty in Derrida’s The
Beast and the Sovereign as well. In this case Derrida evinces some ideas that are

In the maw of sovereignty 41

more in line with Benjamin’s own (although not enough, I would argue, to
overcome his ambivalence altogether). In the series of lectures (which became
the book), Derrida calls sovereignty a ‘prosthesis’, an imitation that ‘amplif[ies]
the power of the living’ and which can ‘extend, mime, imitate, even reproduce
down to the details the living creature that produces it.’

Such an under-

standing focuses on how sovereignty operates. The ambivalence here comes in
terms of whether we need this prosthesis or not.

On the one hand, Derrida calls sovereignty ‘a fetish’ and a ‘substitute for

the being of the thing itself.’

He argues that sovereignty refl ects the escha-

tology that produces it. Like God, the sovereign ‘does not respond, he is the
one . . . who always has the right not to respond, in particular not to be
responsible for his acts’.

In the idea of non-responsiveness, we see shades, not

so much of Benjamin, but of Arendt, of an idea of ‘the political’ that is not
being responded to. Yet it is never clear what this ‘something else’, this
community, consists of without sovereignty (i.e. what an autonomous politics
would consist of).

At the same time, it seems that for Derrida we cannot quite do without the

fetish of sovereignty, regardless of what it overwrites (if anything). Even as
sovereignty insists on its unity and oneness (again refl ecting its eschatology),
Derrida fi nds that it is everywhere at once, in multiple guises and forms. He
tells us that ‘there is not SOVEREIGNTY or THE sovereign . . . There are
different and antagonistic forms of sovereignty, and it is always in the name
of one that one attacks another.’

He goes on to say that:

In a certain sense, there is no contrary of sovereignty, even if there
are things other than sovereignty . . . even in politics, the choice is
not between sovereignty and non sovereignty, but among several
forms of partings, partitions, divisions, conditions that come along
to broach a sovereignty that is always supposed to be indivisible and
unconditional.

Even though he tells us that ‘a divisible sovereignty is no longer a sover-
eignty, a sovereignty worthy of its name, i.e. pure and unconditional’,

sover-

eignty nonetheless eludes us; it is at once absolute and unitary and fragmented
and elusive (Derrida himself calls it a ‘trap’).

In this way, sovereignty cannot,

perhaps should not, be avoided. It remains the name for all the various
practices that we might call political (even ‘if there are things other than
sovereignty’).

Here we see, once again, Derrida’s ambivalence. Such ambivalence perme-

ates his text, even to the level of sentence construction. In his lectures on
sovereignty, Derrida repeatedly uses the construction ‘on the one hand . . . on
the other . . .’, producing an ambivalent rhythm that underlies the entire
argument. Part of the problem is that even as he is clearly opposed to the
artifi ce and non-responsiveness of the sovereign (much of which he lays at

42 Sovereign

temporalities

Hobbes’s door), Derrida is himself in favor of many of the subforms of sover-
eignty, in particular, personal sovereignty. He tell us that:

[W]e must not hide from ourselves that our most and best accredited
concept of ‘liberty’, autonomy, self-determination, emancipation, freeing,
is indissociable from this concept of sovereignty, its limitless ‘I can’, [here
we see his distance from Arendt’s own genealogy] and thus from its all
powerfulness . . . [W]e can’t take on the concept of sovereignty without
also threatening the value of liberty. So the game is a hard one.

Derrida wants to ‘deconstruct, both theoretically and practically, a certain
political ontotheology of sovereignty without calling into question a certain
thinking of liberty in the name of which we put this deconstruction to work’.

Here again, Derrida has a baby and bathwater dilemma. He wants to preserve
parts of sovereignty while getting rid of others. He can dream of a non-
sovereign world (as he does in Rogues ) but recognizes that our struggle cannot
be with sovereignty per se, but with some current iteration(s) of it.

Putting his ambivalence into a nutshell, Derrida uses the already noted

construction of ‘on the one hand . . . on the other’ to signify a kind of stasis or
trap in the construction of sovereignty. He calls for:

a quite different thinking of liberty: on the one hand , a liberty that binds
itself, that is bound, heteronomically, precisely to the injunctions of this
double bind, and therefore, on the other hand, responsibly putting up with . . .
this diffi cult but obvious fact [of a divisible sovereignty].

Derrida calls for a ‘poetic’ as opposed to a political revolution, or rather to
‘prepare perhaps some poetic revolution in the political revolution, and
perhaps too some revolution in the knowledge of knowledge’.

He also calls

for ‘a slow and differentiated deconstruction of this logic and the dominant, classic
concept of nation-state sovereignty’ and seeks ‘another concept of the
political’.

Here, Derrida both replicates and approaches Arendt’s stance of simulta-

neous combat and compromise, even as he hints or suggests at alternative
strategies. He acknowledges that sovereignty works through a series of ‘narra-
tive fi ction[s]’,

and yet it seems that he has no recourse except through a set

of fi ctions of his own: poetic revolutions, the notion of the ‘perhaps’ (he also
speaks of the ‘who knows’).

Thus, for all the ways that The Beast and the Sovereign approaches Benjamin’s

own approach to political idolatry in terms of his identifi cation of fetishism as
a central facet of sovereign authority, we see Derrida remains, as ever, ambiv-
alent. He recognizes the dangers of fetishism yet feels as though he can safely
negotiate with those fetishes, producing a kind of à la carte or selective
approach to sovereignty. Or, more accurately, he may understand the danger

In the maw of sovereignty 43

he faces (the bathwater) but he remains captured by the promises that sover-
eignty yet retains (the baby).

We are left here with a lot of the same puzzles as we fi nd with Arendt.

Although Arendt’s alternative to sovereignty is quite a bit more developed
than Derrida, both of them seem to jettison or at least turn away from the very
idea of a non-sovereign alternative due to a conviction that sovereignty cannot
be avoided in our own time. Indeed, it is not clear that it should be avoided,
given what comes along with sovereignty: security, order, peace, even – at
least for Derrida – liberty. Even if he sees it for what it is, divided despite
being indivisible, built out of its own self-transcendence, an imitation of
Godhood and a fetish, Derrida remains committed to some extent to the
sovereign project.

Time without sovereignty?

While both Arendt and Derrida appear stuck with sovereignty, when we read
them in tandem, we see that they are potentially both quite a bit more subver-
sive – at least as it is currently constituted – than they initially seem. For one
thing, as we have seen, both thinkers set out very clearly that for all their
compromises with sovereignty, it is in fact not something that can be compro-
mised with. Both thinkers clearly establish how the single-mindedness and
bloodiness of sovereignty kills off the democracy that it helps to spawn (just as
in Politics of Friendship , Derrida shows how the bloodiness of friendship destroys
its promise for political community). We are presented with an impossibility
that is less paradoxical than simply destructive in its effects.

The overall effect of reading these authors together is to render the trap that

they fi nd themselves in legible to others; even as they themselves take the
route of compromise, their own analysis delineates exactly why sovereignty
cannot be limited or tamed insofar as it is a usurper of, rather than comple-
ment to any kind of democratic politics.

Perhaps even more powerfully, when we read Arendt and Derrida together,

we fi nd a new genealogy in which sovereignty appears to have no past (with
Arendt) and no ‘future’ (with Derrida). It is true that neither thinker locates
this form of politics that is free from sovereignty in ‘real’ time. In effect, both
of these evocations are fi ctional (not so much in the sense of being ‘untrue’ as
genealogical). Arendt’s evocation of a non-sovereign classical form of politics
is part of her tendency, as we have seen, to tell fables. Similarly, Derrida’s
evocation of a democracy to come does not, as we have seen, occur in our own
future, but in a Messianic (or quasi Messianic) time frame that coincides with
and troubles our own time.

But as we saw with Foucault, to engage with

genealogies is to reconsider the question of the possible, to give us a new
‘refl ection of “today” ’. Thus in the case of both writers, their fable-telling and
genealogy affects and engages with our current conceptions of sovereignty (so
they are not so unrelated to our own time after all).

44 Sovereign

temporalities

Reading these thinkers together, we can think further about the possibility

of a sovereignty that is plural and de-centered (that is to say, a sovereignty
that is largely unrecognizable from our contemporary perspectives). In
Arendt’s fable of non-sovereign political practices that exist amidst and along-
side our sovereign ones (such as the practice of revolution) and in Derrida’s
genealogies that describe both non-sovereign practices and other possibilities
even within sovereignty, we see the potential to reconsider (or indeed ‘decon-
struct’) the contemporary form of sovereign power.

In this regard there are some important differences to note between Arendt

and Derrida’s approach. Arendt attempts a wholesale rejection of sovereignty,
while Derrida is more openly ambivalent. Derrida’s approach may serve less to
escape sovereignty altogether (although he does try to imagine ‘nonsovereignty’,
as we have seen) than to alter or reassess sovereignty, to think of new possibili-
ties even within the rubric of sovereign politics (in this way, he is somewhat
closer to Benjamin’s own approach to the question). Unlike liberals, Derrida
does not merely try to overwrite or ameliorate sovereign power with claims for
‘rights’ which are actually issued from within sovereign authority. Instead he
resists and subverts from within the depths of sovereignty even as he appreciates
its constituting powers.

In the very way that he pluralizes and complicates

sovereignty, in the way he imagines multiple nodes and models of authority
(the democracy that ‘trembles’ amidst and against our current practices),
Derrida does damage to the notion of sovereignty as indivisible and one.

Of the two of them, as already suggested, it may be Derrida who is closer

to Benjamin’s position. He, more than Arendt, resists the temptation to think
of a politics that is completely free from sovereignty, that is to say a politics
that is completely ‘autonomous’. His ‘fi ctions’ are more self-evident, more
marked as such and hence less likely to replicate the phantasms of sovereignty
in the fi rst place. And, unlike Arendt, Derrida embraces, to some extent, the
language of fetishism and a deep problematic of representation. But even in
Derrida, we see a frustration amidst his ambivalence (perhaps these two
stances are the same). We see a reluctance (one that will be described in much
greater detail in Chapter 4 ) to think about concrete and tangible resistance.
The à-venir , Derrida insists, is not the same as our future, it is perhaps not a
future at all. In this way, Derrida may be less engaged with contemporary
politics and with the time we actually occupy than Arendt herself.

We see then the strengths and weakness of each position. In order to

complete this conversation (or constellation, to use Benjamin’s own term) we
must turn to Walter Benjamin himself. He shares qualities with both Arendt
and Derrida but has something that neither of them have, a sense of the possi-
bility for real, as opposed to fi ctional resistance, a sense of how to reoccupy
this time, as opposed to haunting or troubling it with alternative views. He
offers a way to think about politics that neither capitulates to sovereignty nor
simply puts up with it. Without recourse to a grand phantasm of escape,
Benjamin shows us how sovereignty can be reoccupied in such a way that

In the maw of sovereignty 45

nothing is lost and in which we do not need to compromise. Ultimately,
Benjamin shows us how we can engage with and resist sovereignty without
ambivalence. In battling a political and theological concept like sovereignty,
it is Benjamin who possesses the requisite political theology to successfully
counter the stranglehold our current conceptions of sovereignty have on us. It
is thus to him and his work that we will now turn.

Notes

1 For Derrida, as we will see, this position is somewhat more ambivalent.
2 Andreas Kalyvas tells us that ‘Whereas in Greek antiquity, for Arendt, sover-

eignty was restricted to the private realm of the oikos , in modern times it con-
quered the public space to become the regulative principle of politics . . .’ (Kalyvas
2008: 211). He goes on to state: ‘This . . . development signifi es that the modern
state is somehow a mere replica, in a larger scale, of the private realm . . .’; ibid.

3 Hannah Arendt, ‘What is Freedom’, in Arendt 1954: 163.
4 Ibid.: 165.
5 I have made a version of this argument in several other writings. See, e.g., Martel

2008.

6 Arendt 1986: 239.
7 Ibid.: 237.
8 For more on this issue, see Disch (unpublished) (cited with permission of the

author).

9 Arendt 1958: 245.
10 Ibid.
11 It also raises the question of whether, for Arendt, sovereignty is one discrete phe-

nomenon. Hanna Pitkin suggests that Arendt may be referring to more than one
version of sovereignty in the passages described above. See Pitkin 1998.

12 Honig 1991: 108. In that article, Honig is not referencing sovereignty directly,

but a broader category of constative bases for political authority. She writes that
Derrida accepts, as Arendt does not, that the constative is not necessarily equiva-
lent to the absolute, and that in either case, a politics of resistance against this
extra political source of authority (mixed with a certain inevitable acquiescence)
links these two otherwise disparate thinkers together.

13 I make this point in Martel 2008.
14 Arendt 1958: 245.
15 Or, to cite Honig once again, a form of resistance (Honig 1991: 108).
16 Ibid.: 111.
17 Although Rogues is certainly not the only text where Derrida discusses sovereignty

at length, coming towards the end of his life as it does, this book encapsulates
Derrida’s hesitations and ambivalences on this subject. Other texts where Derrida
deals with sovereignty (some more directly than others) include: Derrida 1976,
1986: 7–15, 1992, 1994, 1997, 2005, 2009.

18 Derrida 2004: 13.
19 Ibid.: 17.
20 Ibid.
21 Ibid.
22 Ibid.: 102
23 Ibid.: 100.
24 Ibid.
25 Ibid.: 157.

46 Sovereign

temporalities

26 Such an idea of limiting sovereignty also mimics, at least superfi cially, the atti-

tude of many liberals. Although, as I’ll show, for very different reasons.

27 See Brown 2009.
28 Derrida 2004: 158.
29 Derrida 1997: 306.
30 Derrida 1994: 169.
31 Critchley 1999: 280.
32 Foucault 1984: 46. I am indebted to Karen Feldman for the insight that both

Arendt and Foucault can be said to be working with ‘fi ctions’ and furthermore to
connect those fi ctions to Foucault’s genealogy.

33 Ibid.: 38.
34 Derrida 1994: 169.
35 Derrida 2004: 157.
36 Ibid.: 106.
37 Ibid.
38 Ibid.
39 Derrida 2009: 28.
40 Ibid.: 219.
41 Ibid.: 57.
42 He does at one point offer that sovereignty – in its guise as the phallus – is not so

much autonomous as it is an ‘automat’ (ibid.: 222).

43 Ibid.: 76.
44 Ibid.
45 Ibid.: 76–7.
46 Ibid.: 290.
47 Ibid.: 301.
48 Ibid.
49 Ibid.: 301–2.
50 Ibid.: 273.
51 Ibid.: 75.
52 Ibid.: 289.
53 It should be pointed out that in Specters of Marx , among other places, Derrida

subscribes to Benjamin’s notion of a ‘weak Messianism’, a force that is not put off
in some distant and eschatological timeframe, but present in our own time (i.e. a
different form of eschatology). Derrida 1994: 55.

54 Honig tells us that ‘Like [Arendt, Derrida] refuses to allow the law of laws to be

put unproblematically

above

man; but he recognizes, more deeply than does

Arendt, that the law will always resist his resistance . . . His unwillingness to pas-
sively accept that is a commitment to politicization, resistibility, and interven-
tion.’ Honig 1991: 108.

55 It may be that Derrida’s attempt is the more successful one insofar as Arendt may

remain unaware of the degree to which her fables of Greek and Roman non-
sovereign political practices may remain resonant with a sovereignty that she
denies but does not erase.

Chapter 3

Walter Benjamin’s
dissipated eschatology

Benjamin’s cosmology

In order to better understand Benjamin’s own contribution to the question of
sovereignty, eschatology and temporality – and how best to address the trap
that Schmitt sees for any would-be resisters of this system – it is necessary to
turn to some of his most basic philosophical and theological concepts. Part of
my argument about Benjamin is that when we leave out his theology, we
leave out the core of his philosophy as well. In fact, I would not really distin-
guish between the two in his case. Benjamin is (as will be discussed at greater
length in the following chapter) profoundly theological without necessarily
partaking in much of the accompanying baggage that usually goes with such
a set of beliefs. He is Jewish and Messianic, but not in a way that any conven-
tional Jewish scholar would recognize. Similarly, he is a Marxist in a way that
most Marxists would not accept or welcome. It is the convergence of these
attitudes and beliefs that forms the core of Benjamin’s opus and contribution
to our inquiry.

In another work, I have laid out what I see as the basis for Benjamin’s basic

cosmology.

Here, I will briefl y reiterate that argument for the purposes of

setting up what he has to say more specifi cally about sovereignty. For
Benjamin, as already noted, the world is beset by a widespread and near total-
izing practice of idolatry, what he often calls ‘the phantasmagoria’. The phan-
tasmagoria is essentially a misreading of the world based on our interactions
with the objects (i.e. fetishes) that constitute that reality. In his Exposé of
1939, Benjamin describes the effect of material objects on human subjects in
his study of late nineteenth-century Paris (a moment in time of immense
importance for Benjamin). He writes:

The riches . . . amassed in the aerarium of civilization . . . appear as
though identifi ed for all time. This conception of history minimizes the
fact that such riches owe not only their existence but also their transmis-
sion to a constant effort of society – an effort moreover, by which these
riches are strangely altered. Our investigation proposes to show how, as a

48 Sovereign

temporalities

consequence of this reifying representation of civilization, the new forms
of behavior and the new economically and technologically based creations
that we owe to the nineteenth century enter the universe of a phantasma-
goria. These creations undergo this ‘illumination’ not only in a theoret-
ical manner, by an ideological transposition, but also in the immediacy of
their perceptible presence. They are manifest as phantasmagorias.

Thus, the physical objects (in the form of commodities) that we coexist
with exert an infl uence on the human subject, producing a miasmic faux
reality, the phantasmagoria. The term ‘phantasmagoria’ comes from a magic
lantern show that was used to evoke ghosts and spirits during the time
of the French revolution. It is a term that Marx applied to his discussion of
commodity fetishism and it is one that Benjamin adopts for his own purposes.

While he generally attributes the phantasmagoria to the pernicious effects

of commodity fetishism (as we see here), a broader view of his work – and
especially of his theology – establishes this idolatrous practice as dating all the
way back to Adam and the Fall. In the

Origin of German Tragic Drama ,

Benjamin lays out the genealogy of human fetishism (and, by extension, the
possibility of anti-fetishism). Before the Fall, Benjamin tells us that in para-
dise, ‘there is as yet no need to struggle with the communicative signifi cance
of words.’

Adam’s role in paradise is to name the objects of the world.

Benjamin tells us that for Adam, ‘ideas are displayed, without intention, in
[this] act of naming’.

Here, Adam engages in a direct, dare we say non-

representational, activity that is ‘far removed from play or caprice’.

Naming

is a ‘primordial mode of apprehending’.

Under God’s careful watch, the name

and the thing have a harmonious and perfect correspondence. In short, para-
dise is marked by truth:

Truth is not an intent which realizes itself in empirical reality: it is the
power which determines the essence of this empirical reality. The state of
being, beyond all phenomenality, to which alone this power belongs, is
that of the name.

With the Fall comes the requirement of representation. For Benjamin, it is
critical to note that the Fall doesn’t actually change anything in terms of
material reality. Instead it produces an entirely subjective change in human
consciousness, one that leaves us separated from God even as we continue to
dwell in the very same terrain we have always inhabited:

The serpent’s promise to the fi rst men was to make them ‘knowing both
good and evil’. But it is said of God after the creation: ‘And God saw
everything that he had made, and behold it was very good.’ Knowledge
of evil therefore has no object. There is no evil in the world. It arises in
man himself, with the desire for knowledge or rather for judgment.

Walter Benjamin’s dissipated eschatology 49

Knowledge (or at least the knowledge of good and evil) thus insists upon its

own authority in the face of a divine sanction from God (one that remains in
force). Here, the relationship between object and sign is distorted, becomes an
open question. Benjamin further tells us:

This knowledge, the triumph of subjectivity and the onset of an arbitrary
rule over things, is the origin of all allegorical contemplation. In the very
fall of man the unity of guilt and signifying emerges as an abstraction.
The allegorical has its existence in abstractions; as an abstraction, as a
faculty of the spirit of language itself, it is at home in the Fall.

For Benjamin, as is well known, allegory is a mode of exposure, of unsettling
the false truths that are ascribed to the material objects of the world. Yet,
allegory is itself a product of the Fall, of the turn towards representation or
misrepresentation (for Benjamin, it is fair to say, these two terms are
syn onymous). It is ‘a faculty of the spirit of language itself’, a response to the
postlapsarian loss of truth that constitutes and frames our reality.

This turn to representation produces, as it were, two courts of judgment:

the human and the divine. Of this distinction, Benjamin tells us:

[W]hile, in the earthly court, the uncertain subjectivity of judgment is
fi rmly anchored in reality, with punishments, in the heavenly court the
illusion of evil comes entirely into its own. Here, the unconcealed subjec-
tivity triumphs over every deceptive objectivity of justice . . . as hell.

Thus, even as we fi nd a subjectivity that anchors itself in the pseudo-truths of
the phantasmagoria, we see that same phenomenon is exposed in its true
nature before ‘the heavenly court’. In the court of heaven, all false images and
untruths are exposed and unmade.

The key point to grasp here is that there is truth in the world, but such

truth is never available to human beings. We remain held in the ‘earthly
court’. Crucially, even when the truth is stumbled upon or reproduced as
such, we have no way of recognizing it for what it is. Ideas, Benjamin tells us,
are the ‘objective, virtual arrangement [of phenomena], their objective inter-
pretation’,

but on earth, that is to say in the realm of representation, we do

not see these ideas ‘displayed, without intention’. Our hubris, our desire for
knowledge, means that we become incapable of seeing the reality that is quite
literally staring us in the face. Instead, we can only approximate (i.e. repre-
sent) truth, juxtaposing and rejuxtaposing different arrangements of what
passes for reality.

Benjamin famously tells us that ‘Ideas are to objects as constellations are to

stars.’

This means we make connections between phenomena in order to try

to understand the truths that they constitute. In this way a phenomenon is
both ‘subdivided and at the same time redeemed’, both seen as itself and

50 Sovereign

temporalities

connected to other phenomena so as to reach towards the truth it takes part
in.

Over the course of history, the various possible combinations and juxta-

positions of phenomena are laid out. Benjamin says of this: ‘The representa-
tion of an idea can under no circumstances be considered successful unless the
whole range of possible extremes it contains has been virtually explored.’

Only when we consider the display of the idea in this fashion, when all possible
connections and constellations have been made, do we achieve what Benjamin
– citing, but also subverting, Leibniz – calls the monad, a refl ection of the
unity of all existence.

As I discussed in a previous work, I fi nd an analogy

between Benjamin’s notion of the monad and the Jewish mystical conviction
that only when all possible combination of letters are made to form the name
of God will we have fi nally a snapshot of truth (i.e. the true name of God). But
the span of time this requires is beyond human life, perhaps beyond the exis-
tence of humanity altogether, and so such truth is unread or unreadable by
any of us; the proper audience for the monad, it would appear, is God alone.

In the search for such truth, both the idolator and the anti-fetishist engage

in profoundly similar behavior – both seek to make connections, tell stories
about the world, read sense into it. The key difference is that the idolator
thinks they are talking about truth while the anti-fetishist knows that the
truth is unavailable to them. For the anti-fetishist to speak of truth at all is
nothing more than a gesture, an acknowledgment of a truth that is actually
present but completely inaccessible. The anti-fetishist has no recourse to
actual truth, no escape from representation.

This is why it is vital to note that for Benjamin, fetishes do not overwrite

an otherwise knowable reality. The fetishist is trapped in an eternal now that
has no past and no future.

To believe that the truth lies just beneath the

fetish is, in fact, to simply replace one set of fetishes with another (and hence
fall into a yet greater fetishism). Benjamin’s cosmology does not rely on a
disagreement over what is true (so that the fetishist is simply wrong and the
anti-fetishist is right) but instead calls the idea of truth itself into question, to
assert that we will never know it.

Fetishism does not only produce a false sense of space but also of time. The

fetishist’s attempt to grasp reality represents one iteration of the monad but
the fetishist insists that that iteration is the monad, is the truth itself. In this
way, the history of the monad, its ‘past and subsequent history’, is ignored or
lost. Instead of delivering the monad, time becomes seen instead as a sequence
of events that are meaningful simply by virtue of temporal ordering. In the
Exposé of 1939, Benjamin speaks of Auguste Blanqui, the French revolu-
tionary who violently opposed the coming phantasmagorical order. He tells
us that:

Blanqui . . . revealed . . . in his last piece of writing, the terrifying features
of this phantasmagoria. Humanity fi gures there as damned. Everything
new it could hope for turns out to be a reality that has always been present;

Walter Benjamin’s dissipated eschatology 51

and this newness will be as little capable of furnishing it with a liberating
solution as a new fashion is capable of rejuvenating society. Blanqui’s
cosmic speculation conveys this lesson: that humanity will be prey to a
mythic anguish so long as phantasmagoria occupies a place in it.

Here we see that the phantasmagoria threatens, not only our political lives
but the very spatial and temporal contexts that form our most basic existence.
It both constitutes and undermines the eschatological envelopes that contain
us (as we have already seen in Chapter 1 ). Any political theory that comes
from such a cosmology must address this basic challenge to human life.

Mythical and divine violence

When we move from the Origin to some of Benjamin’s other (and generally
later) writings, we begin to see more clearly the political salience of this
discussion of idolatry and anti-fetishism. Perhaps the key text to consider
when discussing Benjamin’s political theology and its relationship to sover-
eignty is his ‘Critique of Violence’. Critical to that essay is the distinction that
he makes there between mythical and divine violence. For Benjamin, the key
difference between these two kinds of violence (or forces) is that mythological
violence is a projection of fantasy by human beings while divine violence
serves to undermine that fantasy. He tells us that divine violence:

constitutes [mythical violence’s] antithesis in all respects. 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.

We see here that mythical violence is very much connected with the human
project; it creates laws, it establishes boundaries, in other words, it is tied up
with the business of sovereignty itself (human sovereignty that is). Faced with
an abyss between the human and divine realms, mythical violence seeks to
stand in for God, as it were; it seeks to produce a human version of what God
wants, i.e. what justice is and what the sovereign should do in God’s name. In
other words, mythical violence is idolatrous. This may be part of what Derrida
is himself implying when in ‘Force of Law’ he calls Benjamin’s notion of
mythical violence ‘Greek’ as opposed to divine violence which is ‘Jewish’.

The Jewish preoccupation with fetishism and idolatry is central to Benjamin’s
narrative.

Divine violence on the other hand is anti-fetishistic. It does not instantiate

truth in the world. For Benjamin, as we have seen, such truth can never be
known by human beings. Instead it removes the untruths that we ascribe to
God (that is, it removes myths). The prime example of divine violence that
Benjamin offers in his ‘Critique of Violence’ is that of Korah. As we saw in the

52 Sovereign

temporalities

Introduction, Korah was an idolator who rebelled against Moses’ authority.
God had the ground open up and swallow Korah and his followers, leaving no
trace of them behind. Benjamin famously says of this act that:

It . . . strikes them without warning, without threat, and does not stop
short of annihilation. But in annihilating it also expiates, and a deep
connection between the lack of bloodshed and the expiatory character of
this violence is unmistakable. For blood is the symbol of mere life. The
dis solution of legal violence stems . . . from the guilt of more natural life,
which consigns the living, innocent and unhappy, to a retribution that
‘expiates’ the guilt of mere life – and doubtless also purifi es the guilty,
not of guilt, however, but of law.

We see here the core of Benjamin’s argument about the nature of divine violence.
Korah was attempting to engage in mythology, in a new form of lawmaking.
God’s act of divine violence erases the guilt of idolatry (a guilt that, as we have
seen is for Benjamin a central component of postlapsarian human life) and with
it the law and political authority that such guilt produces.

This act of divine

violence thus cleanses away our sin of idolatry. Once again, it leaves behind not
truth, but rather only the possibility of non-fetishism. It allows us to begin
again, to re-see and re-read the world around us without the certainty of the sin
of idolatry. With such acts we are ‘purifi e[d] . . . of law’. We are given a space
that is not already determined by our own mythical projections.

Rebellious idols

For Benjamin, such acts of Messianic destruction of idols are, however, only
half the story. For Benjamin, it will be recalled, evil and the phantasmagoria
are purely subjective; they occur only in our (mis)reading of the world and
therefore the true battleground lies within ourselves and our interpretation of
the world around us. In his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’ Benjamin
speaks of a ‘Messianic cessation of happening, or, put differently, a revolu-
tionary chance in the fi ght for the oppressed past’.

Here we see that the

Messiah causes a cessation in the ‘happening’ of the phantasmagoria, a rent in
our (idolatrous) sense of space and time. In this space or cessation we get ‘a
revolutionary chance’. The Messianic act of eliminating its own idolatry
affords the possibility of our own response. The rest is up to us.

And, for Benjamin, we have one other vital ally in our fi ght with myth,

namely the very idols that compose our world. This is perhaps the key stra-
tegic insight that Benjamin affords us, because it offers us a way not to have
to rely on our own intentions (which for Benjamin are always compromised,
even for the most ardent leftists amongst us). It means that we do not have to
‘wait for God’ to deliver us (the subject of the next chapter), insofar as there is
an element of divine violence that is always present in the world.

Walter Benjamin’s dissipated eschatology 53

In Benjamin’s writings on Kafka we see this possibility perhaps most

clearly. In ‘Some Refl ections on Kafka’, Benjamin distinguishes between
Halakah (the true, divine Law) and Haggadah (its representation in the
world). He tells us that ‘[Kafka] sacrifi ced truth for the sake of clinging to its
transmissibility, its haggadic element.’

Here the question of representation

itself becomes paramount, how one goes about ‘representing’ a truth that
cannot itself be known. Although we normally think of representation as
attempting as best as possible to stand in for the truth, Benjamin offers that
with Kafka, that relationship is radically altered: representation must learn to
live without even a modicum of the truth at all. For Benjamin, Kafka’s texts
succeed by failing; in failing to convey truth, by taking every effort to subvert
and deny meaning, Kafka’s representation points to what it cannot convey.

Perhaps even more importantly in Kafka’s texts, representation can unmake

the very pseudo truths that it posits. Benjamin tells us that Kafka’s parables:

do not modestly lie at the feet of the doctrine, as the Haggadah lies at the
feet of the Halakah. Though apparently reduced to submission, they
unexpectedly raise a mighty paw against it.

Here, we begin to see more clearly how Benjamin conceives of human action
being coordinated with divine violence. The answer is not, as we might
imagine, to seek to actually replicate the truth; that is the stance of idolatry
and myth. Instead, as Kafka shows, we see that we must allow the very idols
that represent ‘truth’ to turn against that portrayal (since such a portrayal will
inevitably be idolatrous). We must align ourselves with such an uprising,
recognizing it as a moment of divine violence. In this way, we clear our sense
of reality of mythical ‘certainties’; we make a space for non-idolatrous forms
of representation, that is to say a representation of the ruin of reality that we
currently and actually inhabit. (We will return to this view in the next
chapter.)

Thus with Benjamin we have a two-pronged approach to combating idol-

atry; on the one hand, God interferes forcefully in the world to eradicate
mythology that human beings have falsely attributed to the divine. On the
other hand, and simultaneously with such gestures, human beings can align
themselves with the very idols that constitute their world in order to do battle
against mythology and fetishism. Thus do the divine and the human coincide
in a way that meshes Messianic ‘delivery’ and political revolution.

Resisting sovereignty from within

At this point, we are ready to apply Benjamin’s cosmology, his tactics and
strategies of resistance, directly to the question of sovereignty. We have seen
Derrida’s and Arendt’s attempts to do an end run around sovereign inevit-
ability. As I argued in the last chapter, where Arendt seems to founder on her

54 Sovereign

temporalities

own turn to fi ction, Derrida founders – maybe less than Arendt, but he
founders nonetheless – on his chronic ambivalence (something I will discuss
at greater length in the next chapter). Given the intransigence of sovereignty,
its rootedness in eschatologies that determine both time and history, we have
seen these authors compromising with sovereignty despite its terrible costs.
They both face the terrible paradox that politics seems only possible through
the organizing principle that renders it moot.

It is here that the force of Benjamin’s argument makes itself most apparent.

We will see that giving up the belief in a pure and true politics that somehow
defi es or eludes sovereignty (an autonomous politics or ‘the political’) enables
us to consider the kinds of political options that are actually existent and/or
possible. Rather than stepping out of the world to escape from our current
eschatological structuring, or looking to the margins of our reality for a source
of resistance and contradiction, Benjamin suggests that we confront our
subjectivity head on, turning deeper into it – right down to the signs and
symbols that we are subjected to – in order to possibly scramble and alter the
overwhelming power and authority of sovereignty.

In particular, Benjamin offers a political theological weapon against a polit-

ical theological power. Insofar as sovereignty itself never ceases to partake in
theological constructs even as it remains a (or perhaps the) political phenom-
enon, a properly theological approach is required, such as Benjamin provides.
Let us then examine in some detail how Benjamin helps us to understand such
a form of resistance.

Benjamin and Schmitt

If we return to the dilemma posed in Chapter 1 of this book, the ‘trap’ Schmitt
espies (and celebrates) in sovereignty, we can begin to see how Benjamin helps
us rethink this dilemma (a subject I will return to at the very end of the book).
It is widely held (as Agamben, among others, argues) that when Benjamin
wrote his Origin of German Tragic Drama , he was in part responding to Schmitt
( Political Theology was published in 1922, the Origin was written some three
years later).

In particular, he seems to be laying down a challenge to Schmitt’s

famous notion that ‘Sovereign is he who decides on the exception.’

In the

section of the Origin entitled ‘Trauerspiel and Tragedy’, Benjamin lays out an
argument that has been read as a refutation or at least a resistance to Schmitt’s
understanding of sovereignty. It is worth exploring this resistance a bit further
to think more about how Benjamin seeks to resist sovereignty more generally
in accordance with his wider theological and philosophical views.

For Benjamin, the German baroque dramatists who wrote the Trauerspiele

(mourning plays) in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries wrote at a key
moment in time. Many thinkers, ranging from Foucault to Schmitt himself,
have marked this period of time – the period of Bodin and Hobbes and just
afterwards – as the inauguration of modern sovereignty. Yet for Benjamin,

Walter Benjamin’s dissipated eschatology 55

this period marks not so much (or not only) the birth of modernity, but also a
period when the absoluteness of modern sovereignty had not yet fully devel-
oped. For Benjamin, this period was characterized by the simultaneity of
Christian belief (Benjamin writes: ‘Of all the profoundly disturbed and
divided periods of European history, the baroque is the only one which
occurred at a time when the authority of Christianity was unshaken’) and a
rising secularism (what he calls ‘a new secular will’).

In this way the potent

stew of theological and political forces leading to modern sovereignty is on
full display during the Baroque period. Benjamin tells us that Christendom,
once whole, had by this point been ‘divided into a number of European
Christian provinces whose historical actions no longer claim to be integrated
in the process of redemption’.

In this context, one set of eschatological

beliefs has not quite replaced (or transformed from) another. Thus, Benjamin
tells us:

The baroque knows no eschatology [es gibt keine barocke Eschatologie]
and for that very reason it possesses no mechanism by which all earthly
things are gathered in together and exalted before being consigned to
their end.

The question of the German Baroque dramatists’ refutation of eschatology is
critical (later in the book, Benjamin writes that they ‘reject[ed] eschatology’).

As we have seen throughout this book, eschatology organizes the objects of
the world in both spatial and temporal ways. As we have also seen, for
Benjamin, these eschatologies are false and idolatrous; time itself is organized
as a product of the profound idolatry that marks and compromises human
agency. In earlier, more profoundly Christian times, theological doctrine
united the meaning of all things into an overarching scheme of salvation. In
later times, in the face of the phantasmagoria produced by commodity
fetishism, all things are united by a false sense of the unity of price and market
‘order’. In the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, however, at least for a
time, the objects of the world were relatively unarranged, not as subject to
some grand order of meaning. For Benjamin, this moment then represents an
opportunity to reconsider the absoluteness and inevitability of eschatological
certitudes.

When Benjamin says that the Baroque dramatists ‘know no eschatology’,

he is not suggesting that eschatology has been dispensed with once and for
all (clearly that is not the case). Instead, he argues that given their unique
moment in time, these dramatists were relatively innocent of the kinds
of totalizing eschatological forms that overwrite and overawe the political
life that takes place in its shadow. Rather than working in tandem (with an
occult theology supporting an overt political practice), the theological and
the political seem to cancel each other out or overwrite one another, at least
for a time.

56 Sovereign

temporalities

For Benjamin, the plays of the German Baroque take on a political valence

not because of the conscious intentions of the playwrights (as we’ll see further,
their desires were largely to promote the very sovereign principles that their
plays served to undermine), but because of the uniqueness of their temporal
context. This moment represents the kind of disruption, the interference with
the production of sovereign authority that allows the political ‘starres’ to
re-emerge out of the shadow of the sovereign sun (or, to use our fountain
analogy once again, to see the water in the fountain as distinct from the foun-
tain itself).

But what use, one might well ask, are these plays when they come from a

time that is utterly unlike our own? If these playwrights lived and wrote in the
interstices and transitions between two grand eschatological principles (or,
more accurately, between two iterations of one great phenomenon), how does
that help us who live in the full expression of the ensuing eschatological order?

There are two possible answers to this question. First, given that our own

time may be a moment of transition (as Wendy Brown, among others, has
suggested), it may be that we too live in a moment when the performance of
sovereign authority is relatively disrupted and thinned out, providing us with
an opportunity to see beyond its totalizing vision of politics. Secondly, and for
Benjamin more crucially, any moment can be an inspiration or disruptive
element for any other. Benjamin, as is well known, tells us in his ‘Theses on
the Philosophy of History’ that the events of one age can affect the other, even
‘through events that may be separated from [one another] by thousands of
years.’

As he also tells us:

A historian . . . stops telling the sequence of events like the beads of a
rosary. Instead, he grasps the constellation which his own era has formed
with a defi nite earlier one.

Through such constellations, including the one between his (and our)
own time and the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, Benjamin seeks to
destabil ize the inevitability or totalizing effects of sovereignty (even in our
own time) by turning to a moment when its vulnerability was laid bare.
The resistance to sovereignty comes in this case not from the dramatists
themselves but is inherent in their very texts, in the material objects of their
plays and in their general failure to produce transcendent, ‘redemptive’ works.
The very fact that these texts exist as testaments to a different time brings
some of that spirit into our own time; insofar as these texts remain available
to us, the challenge which they pose to sovereignty remains.

Beyond merely inspiring our time, however, a focus on the German Baroque

dramatists allows us a view of those strategies that actually succeeded in
further disrupting the eschatological principles of their day (as we have seen
in the Introduction’s examination of the current woes of sovereign authority,
disruption per se does not necessarily amount to subversion of sovereign

Walter Benjamin’s dissipated eschatology 57

temporality). If we think of the temporal moment the Baroque dramatists
occupied as a kind of lucky accident (an act of divine violence in its own way),
we can also think of the deeds performed by human actors (albeit not always
– or even ever – intentionally) that helped to bolster this opportunity. In this
way, once again, human action comes to meet divine violence in a way that
undermines idolatry from both directions, as it were.

In his focus on these playwrights, what is striking is that for Benjamin their

talents lay (as with Kafka, albeit in a very different sense) more in their failure
than in their successes. Of the various Trauerspiel traditions of the time, the
German dramatists were perhaps unique even in a unique time. Whereas both
Shakespeare in England and Calderón in Spain rose above the uncertainties of
their age with their sheer skill as playwrights, producing transcendent and
salvational tales out of the broken pieces of their day, the German dramatists,
in Benjamin’s view, did not possess equivalent skills. It is their very inepti-
tude which, for Benjamin, allows the German baroque dramatists to uniquely
(if accidentally) undermine the sovereignty, whether of the Christian God or
of the coming new world order (or both).

Perhaps most critical for Benjamin is the fact that the playwrights were

somehow unable to evoke the kind of clear decisionism that for Schmitt is the
hallmark of sovereign authority. For Benjamin, given the simultaneity of
Christian and secular doctrines of the time, the question of emergency and
states of exception was paramount for the baroque dramatists, refl ecting
perhaps the crisis of shifting bases for political authority and power. The
majority of the plays he examines focus on monarchs and court life in the face
of terrible challenges. Benjamin tells us that ‘the function of the tyrant is the
restoration of order in the state of emergency: a dictatorship whose utopian
goal will always be to replace the unpredictability of historical accident with
the iron constitution of the laws of nature.’

This function, however, is exactly

what the German baroque dramas undermine. In what is perhaps Benjamin’s
most direct answer to Schmitt, we see that, in the face of the rising deci-
sionism of modern sovereign authority, the sovereigns portrayed in these
plays are almost pathologically indecisive. In one play, for example, Benjamin
has the sovereign equivocating on slaying a subject, saying ‘Well, then let her
live, let her live, – but no, – yes, yes, she shall live . . . No, no, she shall die,
she shall perish, let her be killed . . . Go, then, she shall live’.

Of this kind of indecision, Benjamin further writes that:

This enduring fascination of the downfall of the tyrant is rooted in the
confl ict between the impotence and depravity of his person, on the one
hand, and, on the other, the extent to which the age was convinced of the
sacrosanct power of his role.

For Benjamin, the sovereign is ‘the lord of creatures, but he remains a crea-
ture’.

Sovereignty is thus both a bearer of a kind of universal transcendence

58 Sovereign

temporalities

even as it is forcefully localized, rendered quite literally unexceptional.

The

baroque Trauerspiele thus render legible the impossible demands put upon this
fi gure; it shows the impossibility of bearing the ‘two bodies’ (to cite
Kantorowicz) that he or she carries in their person.

This is similar to Balibar’s claims that sovereignty contains and performs a

contradiction but it will be recalled that for Balibar himself such a paradox
does not disable sovereignty from functioning. In Benjamin’s case, however,
we see this contradiction collapsing of its own weight. The resistance we see
in the plays is not, once again, conscious or deliberate. It seems that the
dramatists on the whole mainly sought to portray the majesty and authority
of the monarch. Yet the mournfulness of their plays (a mournfulness once
again that seems unique to or at least especially bleak in Germany at the time)
attests to the failure of this project. Here, the German dramatists are rescued
even from their own desire to portray sovereign invincibility (an urge that has
become in our own time far less avoidable, as we have seen in the previous
chapter).

Even as the sovereigns they portray subvert and undermine Schmittian

decisionism, we see a corresponding lack of ability on the part of these play-
wrights to portray divine decisionism, in the form of an intense anti-fatalism
that marks these plays. Unlike the Greek tragic tradition, the German
Trauerspiele are marked by an absence of a sense of fate or inevitability, that is
to say from the full trappings of eschatological certainty (Benjamin writes
that they were ‘not able to develop the drama of fate’).

While Greek trage-

dies at least potentially offer a deus ex machina , a God who redeems, or punishes
us, according to our actions (and in ways that are predetermined by the order
of the universe itself), we fi nd in the German plays (in the words of one of
their own writers) ‘not . . . a god from the machine, like the ancients, but
rather a spirit from the grave’.

The spirits that haunt the Trauerspiele are not of people but rather of ‘appar-

ently dead objects’ which, unfettered from their previous (or future) eschato-
logical signifi cance come to subvert the grand narratives and morals these
playwrights wish to convey.

In these plays, ‘trivial stage property’ comes to

interfere with or even take over the central drama of the plays (whereas in
Greek tragedy, there were virtually no props and violence was always depicted
off-stage).

In a sense, these stage properties take on a life of their own,

avoiding or denying the messages and meanings that the playwrights them-
selves may be seeking to represent. This is another version of what Benjamin
appreciates in Kafka as well: the idols, or objects that are meant to represent
and promote sovereign power turn against that very thing, undermining the
idolatry they would otherwise be fomenting. Indeed, Benjamin evokes this
same sentiment when he tells us that ‘The language of the baroque is constantly
convulsed by rebellion on the part of the elements which make it up.’

Unleashed from a clear eschatological principle which determines what

each moment and each object means in some kind of overarching whole (the

Walter Benjamin’s dissipated eschatology 59

ambition of sovereignty itself), we see that the sundry objects and moments of
time as portrayed in the German Trauerspiel produce an atmosphere of broken-
ness and defeat. Neither God nor king is able to set a defi nitive path for sover-
eign authority, thus avoiding idolatry in both its theological and political
guises. In their defeat and failure, these plays depict what today seems impos-
sible: a politics that is not over-determined by sovereignty, a zone that effec-
tively ‘knows [or has] no eschatology’.

Bound by eschatology

Here again, we can see a kind of alliance between God, human actors and the
material objects that compose the phantasmagoria, all colluding to subvert
and ruin the idolatry they would otherwise promote. In the face of Schmittian
decisionism, we can say that the German tragic dramatists have not so much
sidestepped or overturned his trap so much as they have ruined it from within.
Insofar as these plays represent attempts to bolster sovereign authority, they
subvert its logic and its form, and by its own terms. Not unlike Baudelaire,
who for Benjamin was especially subversive to the coming phantasmagoria
because he was so ensconced within its maw, these playwrights offer a posi-
tion from which to do maximal damage to the theatricality of sovereignty by
quite literally turning the theater itself into a site of its subversion. By
producing a series of misperformances, they help to destabilize and expose
the fi ctions of sovereign authority. Once again, this does not leave any kind
of ‘truth’ in its wake but only the ruins and pieces of sovereign and eschato-
logical logic, a site temporarily cleared of its idolatrous and mythological
certainties.

Against Schmitt’s notion that the sovereign decides the exception, we see

here a portrayal of sovereigns who are incapable of making any decisions at all.
Against the desire for the sovereign to rescue us from the void of authority
produced by the withering away of Christian certitudes, we fi nd instead a
moment in time when such a void seems to overwhelm – or at least dampen
– the very force which is supposed to banish it. Whereas sovereignty is meant
to assert the return of fate, of order and destiny, we see a rebellion in its
component parts. Here, once again, sovereignty and eschatology are not
rejected wholesale so much as set against themselves. This may be something
of what Derrida was seeking when he speaks, in The Beast and the Sovereign , of
multiple and contradicting forms of sovereignty. But in Benjamin’s case it
emerges much more clearly as a tactic, a real possibility rather than a ‘perhaps’.
Here, internal contradictions play themselves out, offering breathing room
and a space for resistance for the human actors who inhabit these narrative
realms (I will return to this argument in the next chapter).

This is why it is critical to note, once again, that when Benjamin says that

the Baroque dramatists ‘know no eschatology’ or ‘reject eschatology’, he is not
suggesting that they are somehow free from eschatology altogether. As already

60 Sovereign

temporalities

suggested, such a conceit would simply be to reproduce eschatological
mythologies in a new guise (one that is even more intractable than what it
replaces since it is supposedly already ‘non-mythological’). To think in this
way is to return to Schmitt’s trap after all insofar as he seems to be turning
towards a ‘secular’ solution to the problem of sovereignty (even if it is a very
radically secular one). If this were the case, Benjamin could be said to be
going down the same path as Bakunin (or at least the path that Schmitt
portrays Bakunin as taking), becoming a ‘theologian of the anti-theological’
and reproducing once again sovereignty in yet another guise.

But to make this argument ignores Benjamin’s own relationship to idolatry,

to the ways that its lures can be felt or subscribed to, even as it is resisted and
subverted. In his view, for the German dramatists to not ‘know’ or to ‘reject’
eschatology means for them to deny or resist the totalizing image of sovereign
power and temporality that they themselves sought to convey. They are
ensconced in eschatology and yet, somehow, they are not completely deter-
mined by it; by an accident of time, by virtue of their own inaptitude, by the
spirit of the material objects that constitute their plays (the text, the stage props
etc) we see a ‘mighty paw’ being raised against the Halakah of sovereignty.

The eskhaton

In his own comments on Benjamin and his refutation of Schmitt, Giorgio
Agamben offers us a way to think further about what Benjamin is doing in
the Origin . In his essay ‘The Messiah and the Sovereign’ (which appears in
Potentialities ), Agamben reminds us that in his Eighth Thesis (from the ‘Theses
on the Philosophy of History’), Benjamin speaks of bringing about a ‘real
state of exception’.

Whereas for Schmitt, we always live in a state of emer-

gency, Benjamin would like to interrupt this inevitability with an exception
that is in fact exceptional, not simply a reiteration of existing power relations,
an extension of the faux time of the phantasmagoria. Benjamin does so,
Agamben suggests, with an ‘ eskhaton – that is, something that belongs to
historical time and its law and, at the same time, puts an end to it.’

In other words, in his subversion of sovereignty, Benjamin does not abandon

history, law or time in order to do battle. Here again we can see how Benjamin
is not so much anti-eschatological as he is against the various iterations of
false eschatology that have proliferated in the world since the Fall. Both the
modern capitalist phantasmagoria and the Christian order which preceeded it
produced such myths and by them they rule(d) the world in turn.

The subversion of or resistance to these eschatologies does not mean that we

must embrace either an absolute secularism or a new theology. As we have
already seen, to embrace the former is to succumb to a false sense of ‘escape’ or
freedom from determination. To embrace the latter is to embrace just more
myth (since God as such cannot be known by us in our fallen, compromised
state). Either way, we are returned to Schmitt’s trap.

Walter Benjamin’s dissipated eschatology 61

Instead, for Benjamin, we must embrace God as an aporia , a failure of

representation and a site that must be diligently cleansed of all mythological
superimpositions. As we have seen several times now, this cleansing has both
a human and a non-human aspect to it. In terms of the non-human, and espe-
cially divine aspect, we see that similar to his call in the Eighth Thesis for a
‘true’ state of emergency, in his earlier ‘Critique’, Benjamin calls for ‘a pure
immediate violence that might be able to call a halt to mythical violence’.

He writes further that ‘Just as in all spheres God opposes myth, mythical
violence is confronted by the divine.’

As we have seen, divine violence is a ‘pure power over all life for the sake of

the living’.

To the mythical violence fomented by sovereignty itself, we see at

the very end of the ‘Critique of Violence’ that Benjamin opposes a divine
violence which ‘may be called sovereign violence’.

This is not a perfect trans-

lation from the German, which says ‘mag die waltende heißen’.

‘Waltende’

does not mean exactly the same thing as ‘sovereign’ (which, after all has the
Latinate cognate in German of souveranität); it has connotations of ruling and
order as well, but it also suggests a form of rule that is not exactly the same as
sovereignty (in that it does not share that name) and therefore is not identical
to the mythological structures that form our current conceptions of politics.
The alternative thus may have some features in common with sovereignty as we
understand it, but it is of a different order, a different form of representation.

In keeping with his larger cosmology, although God has a monopoly on

divine violence, there is clearly a role for human action in this struggle.
Immediately after he tells us that the Baroque ‘knows no eschatology’,
Benjamin goes on to write that:

The hereafter is emptied of everything which contains the slightest breath
of this world, and from it the baroque extracts a profusion of things which
customarily escaped the grasp of artistic formulation and, at its high
point, brings them violently into the light of day, in order to clear an
ultimate heaven, enabling it, as a vacuum, one day to destroy the world
with catastrophic violence.

In this view, the German baroque dramatists cease to be merely accidental
and hapless resisters to the mythologies of sovereignty that we have since
utterly succumbed to. They have indeed allied themselves (even if not delib-
erately) with the rebellion that is fomented by their own words, props and
other failed forms of artistic ‘self’-expression. And this alliance thereby
becomes available to us, not despite but because of the fact that we live in a
different time and in a different context. When he tells us that for these
dramatists ‘the hereafter is emptied of everything which contains the slightest
breath of this world’, Benjamin is referring to the way these plays have them-
selves wiped away the idolatrous traits that have stood for God in their (and
by extension, our) time. This cleansing, akin to God’s own act of cleansing

62 Sovereign

temporalities

(such as when God ‘cleansed’ the world of Korah by swallowing him into the
earth) serves to ‘clear an ultimate heaven’, that is to say a heaven which is not
overwritten and over-determined by our phantasms and myths. This act of
cleansing ‘enabl[es] a vacuum [i.e. an aporia ] one day to destroy the world’,
not in a purely negative and destructive sense (although he does call it ‘cata-
strophic’) but in the sense of radically resignifying the order and structure of
the world and our role in it. Although we are not permitted to know God’s
decision, we can put ourselves into an alliance with divine violence – both in
terms of the ‘Messianic cessation of happening’ such violence produces as well
as in terms of allowing the idols and misrepresentations that form our reality
to disrupt and unmake myths – making our own acts of resistance possible in
the process.

Here, Schmitt’s trap is ‘ruined’ once again from the inside. God’s acts of

divine violence undo mythology from the very center of these myths, from
their theological sources. By displacing sovereignty in the face of a divine
competitor, Benjamin de-centers it from its stranglehold on human agency
without actually getting rid of it. (This is something we will see in much
greater detail in Chapter 6 when we consider the ‘Hebrew Republic’ wherein
God was actually the sovereign of the people of Israel, with a corresponding
de-centering of terrestrial political power and authority as well.) And, in
human terms, these playwrights have avoided Schmitt’s description of the
‘dictator of the anti-dictatorship’, that is to say of being political actors who
in the name of clearing away myths, insert myths of their own. Although
failures in every conceivable sense, the German Baroque playwrights show us
how to enhance the internal contradictions of sovereign authority in such a
way as to permit a space that is temporarily clear of mythology. Put another
way, they show us how to render legible those practices that occur in the face
of mythology but which are not themselves purely mythological.

Conclusion

Through the work of Walter Benjamin we can see a way to continue to inhabit
our eschatology (which we have no choice but to do) in a way that disrupts
rather than reproduces the workings of sovereign inevitability. Benjamin’s
notion of Messianism places the Messiah inside (or maybe between) rather
than beyond eschatological time(s).

In the simultaneity between God’s acts

of divine violence and our own resistance to the myths of sovereignty, we see
such redemptive moments as remaining within the contexts of time, history
and eschatology itself. Such a moment disrupts the false temporalities that
proliferate, those promises of fi nal meaning and truth, of fate, destiny and an
‘end of history’. In the face of this disruption we are left potentially (and
happily) bereft of the great organizing principles (and strictures) such notions
promote and produce.

Of this kind of action, we might return to Agamben, who writes that:

Walter Benjamin’s dissipated eschatology 63

the event of the Messiah coincide[s] with historical time yet at the same
time [it is not] identifi ed with it, effecting in the eskhaton that ‘small
adjustment’ in which , according to the rabbi’s saying told by Benjamin,
the messianic kingdom consists.

We see here how a ‘real state of exception’ can occur and be experienced. The
idea of the Messianic represents a true interruption (or ‘cessation’), a true
exception which reveals the impotence and indecision of the terrestrial sover-
eign (despite its trappings of omnipotence). To turn to the Messianic is to
enlist the theological in exposing the vulnerabilities of the political that it
otherwise (idolatrously) underwrites. Such an interruption ‘coincides with
historical time’, as Agamben informs us; it enters into and affects our present
lives, but it is not ‘identifi ed’ with our time; it is not itself bound by the
constraints and traps of our own (subjective) temporality, even as it too is part
of time, bound within history. In this way, Benjamin remains tied to history
and to action; he therefore does not abandon politics but offers a way to
redeem or recognize it in its distinction from sovereign authority.

To look anew at politics from the perspective of an eskhaton that has

collapsed into itself (a consequence, I think, of Benjaminian Messianism, as
will be clearer in the next chapter) is to deform the principle of terrestrial
forms of sovereignty to the point where it no longer serves the same functions
as it once did. For Benjamin, insofar as we have no recourse besides represen-
tation, misrepresentation is an inevitable part of the human landscape
(including in terms of politics), but we can perhaps make that misrepresenta-
tion work for us. Rather than accepting the grandeur and unity of sovereignty
as an organizing principle for political life, we can focus instead on the way
that message is constantly being upended, distorted. We can fi ght misrepre-
sentation with misrepresentation, allying ourselves with the representational
process at its most radical, and its most rebellious. To trust in our own powers
to defy sovereignty (as Arendt and Derrida do at least to a greater extent than
Benjamin himself ) is to risk returning ourselves to the phantasms that we
seek to defy. Sovereignty can only be subverted, Benjamin seems to tell us, by
turning towards it, by looking at the very materiality of what makes it what it
is and seeing its undoing in that very place.

To briefl y return to the analogy of the fountain proposed in Chapter 1 , as

we have seen, we cannot turn off the fountain (sovereignty) but we can disrupt
it, we can look at historical moments when it faltered (as Benjamin does). In
this way, we can focus on the political forms that exist in its shadows. It may
well be that without an idea like sovereignty, without some form of
(mis)representation, we would have no political conception in the fi rst place.
Yet to focus on this is to think of origins in terms of cause and effects, to look
at a history of events that are lined up like rosary beads, wherein the sense of
fate and inevitability (from which, it will be recalled, the German baroque
dramatists were mercifully free) seems to trump everything else.

64 Sovereign

temporalities

In the chapters that follow, I will try to lay out an argument for how even

that greatest idol of all – the notion of sovereignty itself – can be turned into
an ally. By uprooting and subverting this most basic premise of our political
existence we can discover or produce a notion of politics that is as yet unde-
termined, even as it remains in the shadow of the phantasms that produced it
in the fi rst place. To better make this argument, we have to look deeper at the
nature of Benjamin’s Messianism and how it contrasts with the Messianism
that we fi nd with Derrida and even Arendt.

Notes

1 Martel 2011 forthcoming.
2 ‘ Exposé of 1939’, in Benjamin 1999: 14.
3 Cohen 2004: 207.
4 Benjamin 1998: 37.
5 Ibid.
6 Ibid.
7 Ibid.
8 Ibid.: 36.
9 Ibid.: 233.
10 Ibid.: 233–4.
11 Ibid.: 234.
12 Ibid.: 34.
13 Ibid.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid.: 47.
16 Ibid.
17 ‘ Exposé ’ of 1939, in Benjamin 1999: 15.
18 Ibid.
19 ‘Critique of Violence’, in Benjamin 1978a: 297.
20 Derrida 1992: 56.
21 Benjamin 1978a: 297. For an interesting take on Benjamin and the story of Korah,

see Bojanic´ 2008.

22 For more on guilt and Benjamin, see Hamacher 2002: 81–106.
23 ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Benjamin 1968: 263.
24 True to his Jewish beliefs, for Benjamin the Messiah is, in a sense, always with us.

Famously, in the ‘Theses’ (and in a passage Derrida himself makes much of)
Benjamin tells us that ‘Like every generation that preceded us, we have been
endowed with a weak Messianic power.’ Ibid.: 254.

25 ‘Some Refl ections on Kafka’, in Benjamin 1968: 144.
26 Ibid. I discuss this at greater length in Martel 2011 forthcoming.
27 See Agamben 1999, 2005: 284–97. See also Weber 2008.
28 Schmitt 1985: 5.
29 Benjamin 1998: 79.
30 Ibid.: 78.
31 Ibid.: 66. In original German: Benjamin 1978b: 48.
32 Benjamin 1998: 81.
33 ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Benjamin 1968: 263.
34 Ibid.
35 Benjamin 1998: 74.

Walter Benjamin’s dissipated eschatology 65

36 Ibid.: 72 (footnote).
37 Ibid.: 72.
38 Ibid.: 85.
39 Samuel Weber notes that in these plays, we fi nd the fi gure of the plotter ( der

Integrant ) who occupies the vacuum produced by sovereign indecision. In the face
of a radical absence or voiding of the very powers the sovereign is meant to convey,
the plotter schemes and serves to further undermine the grand narratives of sover-
eign authority. As Weber notes: ‘[The plotter’s] function is to in-trigue, to con-
fuse, and the condition of such confusion is precisely the particular spatialization
and localization of processes that are usually considered to be temporal or histori-
cal in character.’ Weber 2008: 142.

40 Benjamin 1998: 130.
41 Ibid.: 134 (footnote).
42 Ibid.: 132.
43 Ibid.
44 Ibid.: 207.
45 Agamben 1999: 174, In the thesis itself, Benjamin writes: ‘The tradition of the

oppressed teaches us that the “state of emergency” in which we live is not the
exception but the rule. We must attain to a conception of history that is in keep-
ing with this insight. Then we shall clearly realize that it is our task to bring
about a real state of emergency, and this will improve our position in the struggle
against Fascism.’ ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Benjamin 1968: 257.

46 Agamben 1999: 174.
47 ‘Critique of Violence’, in Benjamin 1978a: 297.
48 Ibid.
49 Ibid.
50 Ibid.: 300.
51 ‘Zur Kritik der Gewalt’, in Benjamin 1991: 203.
52 Benjamin 1998: 66.
53 As Samuel Weber tells us, the gesture, a kind of pointing to God that he derives

from Kafka, ‘stag[es] fi nitude’ (Weber 2008: 208).

54 Agamben 1999: 174.

Part II

Politics in its own
distinction

Chapter 4

Waiting for justice

Cursed I call those too who must always wait ; they offend my taste: all the
publicans and shopkeepers and kings and other land- and storekeepers.
Verily, I too have learned to wait – thoroughly – but only to wait for myself .

Friedrich Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra

Introduction

Having sketched out the basic premises of this argument (leaving behind
Part I of the book), we can begin to think about what a world with a de-centered
form of sovereignty might look like. In the following three chapters I will try
to think about how such an order might function, what a non-idolatrous or
de-centered form of sovereignty (for reasons that are hopefully clear, I wouldn’t
use the term ‘post-sovereign’) might look like. I will argue that the vital func-
tions of sovereignty, justice, forgiveness, judgment and order are not lost when
sovereignty is either dislocated or relocated. We fi nd that it is possible to have
a politics that contains many of the features we look for in our current concep-
tion of sovereignty, minus the overdetermination and totalization that usually
comes with contemporary understandings of politics.

In this chapter, I will focus on the way that contemporary conceptions of

justice are tied up with the expectation of some kind of perfect delivery, a
refl ection of the ongoing eschatological connection between divine and polit-
ical truth (the king’s two bodies) as well the idolatrous nature of political
mythology previously discussed. What kind of justice can we have when we
do not live in such expectation, when we do not look to the state, or to God
(or both) to deliver truth to us? Here, I will engage once again with two of
Benjamin’s principal interlocutors, Derrida and Arendt (as I will in the
following chapter also). In my discussion – especially in terms of Derrida – I
will add one more fi gure to our constellation: Franz Kafka. Insofar as both
Derrida and Benjamin read Kafka (and Arendt does as well), we see points of
both commonality and difference that are illuminating. The key difference, as
I see it, comes in their respective forms of political theology. Whereas

70 Politics in its own distinction

Benjamin (and Kafka as well) largely dispense with waiting for justice insofar
as they see that justice is, in a sense already ‘here’, both Derrida and Arendt
have a more compromised and ambivalent position on this matter. Derrida, I
will argue, lies part-way between Benjamin’s position and that of more
conventional thinkers on the subject (i.e. those who wait in the expectation of
redemption, of justice itself).

Arendt is less openly ambivalent but also

perhaps more secretive about her Messianism, and hence is in something of
the same position as Derrida. Despite Arendt’s insistence that justice can only
be made and found in the world that is created by human beings in their
collective capacities, we fi nd that, in the end, she, not unlike Derrida, is left
‘waiting for justice’, some external and perfect justice that she (and he) know(s)
will never actually arrive. Because they don’t submit themselves to a true
Messianic function, these thinkers remain bound to some extent by the fetishes
that Benjamin’s concept of divine violence helps to unmake and de-center.

At the end of this chapter I will consider how a justice that has been revealed

as empty, unavailable and unobtainable – that is, a justice that has been
disrupted by an act of divine violence – can yet help to produce or reveal
something like justice in our world. Even if – or especially when – the sover-
eign has been stripped of its function of producing and promising law and
justice for us, we can produce these concepts for ourselves. More accurately, as
already noted, we fi nd that the justice and democratic practices that we seek
are in fact already here; our act of waiting (i.e. our participation in phantasms
of justice) may be part of what has made those practices possible in the fi rst
place, but it is not until we realize that we wait in vain that they may fi nally
become legible to us.

Waiting before the law

To begin this inquiry, I’d like to fi rst turn to Kafka and, in particular, his
parable, ‘Before the Law’, which directly inspires Derrida (and perhaps Arendt
as well, at least indirectly). Kafka’s parable helps to set up our inquiry insofar
as it offers an image of waiting for justice; it has the merit of both articulating
the contemporary stance of the sovereign subject who waits for delivery even
as it simultaneously exposes and subverts that stance. Given that it is a text
that Derrida and Benjamin shared in common, it also gives us a way to see
clearly, in Derrida’s case at least, how these thinkers differ in terms of their
respective understanding of sovereignty and its relationship to Messianism
(and hence, political theology).

In ‘Before the Law’ we see, quite famously, that the story’s protagonist

(known only as ‘the man from the country’) is forced to wait before the gate of
law for his whole life. The gatekeeper, whose only purpose in life seems to
be to bar the man’s way, keeps him sitting on a stool just before the gate. As
the man is dying from old age he has this well-known exchange with the
gatekeeper:

Waiting for justice 71

‘Everyone strives to attain the Law,’ answers the man, ‘how does it come
about, then, that in all these years no one has come seeking admittance
but me?’ The doorkeeper . . . bellows in his ear: ‘No one but you could
gain admittance through this door, since this door was intended only for
you. I am now going to shut it.’

We see here a well-known parable that epitomizes our relationship to the law
and thereby to politics more generally. Although Kafka doesn’t mention
justice here, it seems to underlie the concept of law described here. Justice is
what is promised by law; its possibility is what keeps us obedient, patient and
hopeful. In the face of the law, the man from the country spends his whole life
(just as we in turn spend our whole life) waiting for a justice that never arrives.
He is rendered an obedient subject, subordinate to and refl ective of an abso-
lute, sovereign authority in whose name he continues to wait.

Yet, while it never arrives, the idea of justice does not seem to leave the

practice of law itself unaffected. Indeed, the law can itself be said to be a
product of our expectation for justice. Although the man from the country
never gets ‘access’ to law in its perfect and fullest sense (a law infused with
justice, we could call this Law with a capital ‘L’), it permeates and regulates
his life nonetheless. The gatekeeper is effectively a lawmaker to the man of the
country. He doesn’t allow him entry; he exercises authority over him, even as
the basis of his power lies in what happens beyond the gate. It is his own
(purported) access to and relationship with Law that makes the gatekeeper a
fi gure to be reckoned with. The respect and deference that the man from the
country displays toward him are due to this imagined connection.

As is his wont, Kafka’s parable about the law both describes the way that

we experience and understand law and justice even as it also playfully subverts
our expectations. Insofar as the parable demonstrates both the immanence of
Law and its non-arrival, it suggests that the nature of waiting in this case may
not be what we think it is. Kafka’s parable invites us to think about what the
law (in its ordinary ‘small-l’ sense) is when it is not connected to the Law,
when it is experienced only in its banal ordinariness, its day-to-day medioc-
rity. In this way I would suggest that Kafka himself may help us to think
further about a de-centered, non-idolatrous sovereignty (at least when he is
read through the lens of Benjamin’s reading – a lens that I began to articulate
in the last chapter). What if, Kafka seems to be asking us, there were nothing
behind that gate? Or perhaps more accurately, what if we knew that we were
never going to get through it (something the man from the country fi nds
out only at the very end of his life, when it is too late)? Would that change
our relationship to law and to our idea of justice? Would it alter the quality
of our political obedience? Would it change the nature or even the fact of our
waiting?

In other works, such as The Castle , Kafka asks similar questions and suggests

similar responses.

Kafka’s texts depict a world (our world, in fact) in which

72 Politics in its own distinction

complex and intense relationships are formed in the expectation of great
deliveries, instances of Law, justice and fulfi llment. Like the man from the
country, we, as subjects of law, are also kept obedient, patient and dutiful in
the face of our own expectation of justice; this is in some sense the basis for
sovereignty itself, the source of political authority. But even as he reveals this
source of authority, Kafka subverts the center of this process. True to
Benjamin’s understanding of him, Kafka exposes or at least defi nitively and
radically fails to reveal the ‘truth’ at the heart of these legal and political prac-
tices. In his tales, we never get to see or know the Law; we never get to really
meet the denizens of the Castle (or, when we do, we don’t recognize them as
such, so fi xated are we on the fl eeting glimpses and symbolic signs that stand
in for truth in our world).

Kafka scrupulously prevents us from learning

anything about these mysteries, but he does very clearly demonstrate that
such mysteries are not for us.

Such an insight does not however deny the reality of the political and affec-

tional communities that we have formed while we wait for justice. In the face
of the transcendent gate of Law we see actual lived experiences, a tangible
reality, developing between the two characters who people this text; we see
this reality in the stool the man from the country is permitted to sit on, in the
gatekeeper’s fl eas, in his ‘furred robe, with his huge pointed nose and long,
thin, Tartar beard.’

Here, then, we get a glimpse – but just a glimpse – of a

political life that exists in distinction from the display of authority that other-
wise dominates the setting of ‘Before the Law.’ The question that I would like
to explore further in this chapter is what happens when the central organizing
narrative – of law, of justice, and of the sovereign authority that such concepts
delineate – is disrupted or de-centered? What happens when the spectacle of
sovereign authority ceases to directly compete with and overwrite – however
temporarily – the ordinary and unnoticed forms of political life, the practice
of everyday law and justice? What happens next?

Kafka’s stories don’t directly answer this question: as we have seen, the man

from the country dies at the moment of this revelation. In fact, his death is the
delivery of that message; while he’s alive there is still hope that he can enter the
gate of the Law. Similarly, K., the fi gure in The Trial who is told the parable of
‘Before the Law’, is also killed at the end of that story; here too his death
announces that justice in fact never does arrive and that the life he lived in
expectation of it was not what he thought or hoped it would be. Although the
main character in The Castle , also called K., does not actually die, it seems that
Kafka intended to have him die as well, thoroughly frustrated and exhausted by
his attempts to capture, know or see the law. In the case of that book, Kafka
pre-empted such an ending by dying himself, leaving the book unfi nished. Yet,
in all three cases, while justice was never delivered, lives were lived, communi-
ties were formed and politics was enacted in the expectation of its delivery.

Kafka’s novels and parables put us in a strange stance vis-à-vis the law,

justice and sovereignty. By denying the law as a kind of Messiah (or, more

Waiting for justice 73

accurately – as we will see further – by showing us that the law’s Messianism
saves us by denying us access to its fullest phantasmic expression), Kafka is
ushering us into another reading, another form of waiting. In this version we
come to know that we aren’t waiting for anything at all; or rather, that what
we wait for has, in a sense, already arrived, such as it is. We fi nd that the life
we are living, the justice that we seek, can only be found ‘here’ in the world
that we occupy (with a concomitant alternative set of political practices
as well).

In the following discussion, I intend to show how for both Derrida and

Arendt, the stance of waiting for justice as a form of deliverance is not over-
come, despite the fact that both thinkers seek a human-centered notion of
justice. The kind of Messianic interruptions that we fi nd with Kafka, which,
I will argue, accord very strongly with Benjamin’s notion of divine violence,
serve to undo the mythologies associated with law, with justice and with
sovereignty. But Derrida and Arendt, as I will show further, do not embrace
this kind of Messianism. While Derrida is more openly Messianic than
Arendt, he hesitates to embrace Benjamin’s more full-throated form of
Messianism, falling, in a sense, between the stools of the theological and the
political (i.e. Schmitt’s trap). For her part, Arendt insists on a purely terres-
trial, purely human form of Messianism, thereby eliminating the crucial non-
human perspective that erases mythology from the world. Without such a
perspective, Arendt is left hoping for human self-delivery from idolatry (not
that she would quite use those terms) even as she strongly doubts that such a
self-delivery is possible. Let me now spell this argument out more closely,
beginning with Derrida.

Derrida’s justice

In looking at Derrida’s own treatment of law, justice and sovereignty – what
Derrida has to say about ‘waiting for justice’ – I would like to focus on the
constellation between Kafka, Derrida and Benjamin as a way to explain both
the similarities and critical differences between the latter thinkers. It must be
said from the outset that the differences between Derrida and Benjamin are
subtle. Derrida derives a great deal of his own philosophy from Benjamin, or
at least attributes quite a bit of it to him. The differences between these
thinkers are therefore, I would argue, largely of degree rather than kind, but
there are still crucial differences between them. As I see it, Derrida’s ‘part way
position’, his partial embrace of Benjamin’s Messianism (with a concomitant
retreat), his complex relationship to Judaism (not that Benjamin’s isn’t
equally complex) and his general ambivalence towards justice and sovereignty
create diffi culties for Derrida’s notion of politics. As in previous chapters, I
will argue that a fuller embrace of Benjamin’s model – an embrace, that is to
say, of a model he already formally espouses to a great extent – would resolve
some of that diffi culty, relieving Derrida of some of his chronic ambivalence.

74 Politics in its own distinction

At the same time, I will argue that Benjamin himself can benefi t from some
of Derrida’s insights about the temptations and lures of sovereignty and
‘justice’, about the diffi culties of engaging with a political practice that is so
deeply buried in mythologies of power. Reading them in tandem therefore
helps us to get a clearer idea of what kinds of justice actually are possible (or
existent) in the world.

In terms of his own conception of waiting for justice, Derrida demonstrates

a typically (for him) paradoxical position. On the one hand, in ‘Force of Law’
he tells us that justice ‘doesn’t wait. It is that which must not wait.’

He goes

on to say that ‘a just decision is always required immediately , “right away”. It
cannot furnish itself with infi nite information and unlimited knowledge of
conditions.’

Citing Kierkegaard, he calls this ‘instant of decision’ a ‘madness’.

And yet (in a way that Derrida acknowledges as paradoxical), although it
cannot wait, justice is also is not quite here, not quite with us in our own
time. Derrida writes:

it is . . . because of this always excessive haste of interpretation getting
ahead of itself, because of this structural urgency and precipitation of
justice that the latter has no horizon of expectation (regulative or messi-
anic). But for this very reason, it may have an avenir , a ‘to-come’, which I
rigorously distinguish from the future that can always reproduce the
present. Justice remains, is yet, to come, à venir , it has an, it is à venir , the
very dimension of events irreducibly to come . . . ‘Perhaps’, one must
always say perhaps for justice.

Derrida’s point here is that justice is both that which ‘does not wait’ and also
that which exists only as potential, as à-venir . Several times in ‘Force of Law’
he mentions (as we have just seen) that such a justice is not Messianic but at
the same time its ‘presence’ remains wholly (and only) immanent (perhaps we
could call it ‘not-not Messianic’). For Derrida such a paradoxical status is not
disabling; he tells us ‘incalculable justice requires us to calculate’.

In fact, it

is this very paradox that helps to generate the ‘force of law’ itself; justice must
be immediate but it remains aloof, just out of reach and (therefore) requiring
our own response in the process.

This paradoxical view of justice is reinforced by the rhythms of the essay (an

oscillation that we also saw in the analysis of The Beast and the Sovereign in the
previous chapter); throughout ‘Force of Law’, Derrida both approaches (and
appropriates) and distances himself from Benjamin. At moments of approach,
he makes Benjamin an early prophet of his own philosophy. Thus he tells us,
for example, that for Benjamin:

what makes for the worth of man, of his Dasein and his life, is that
he contains the potential, the possibility of justice, the yet-to-come
( avenir

) of justice, the yet-to-come of his being-just, of his having

Waiting for justice 75

to-be just. What is sacred in his life is not his life but the justice of
his life.

At other times (and especially in the coda to the essay), he retreats from a full
embrace of Benjamin. He tells us at one point that Benjamin is ‘too
Heideggerian, too messianico-marxist or archeo-eschatological’ for him.

thus both depicts Benjamin as anticipating the idea of justice à-venir and
somehow distorting this expectation with a kind of Messianic recklessness or
literalness that comes to ‘resemble too closely . . . the very thing against which
one must act and think . . . that with which one must break (perhaps,
perhaps).’

In other words, even as he sets the ground for understanding the concept of

a justice ‘to-come’, Derrida tells us that Benjamin offers insuffi cient ground
to distinguish his Messianic delivery from the evils that come from human
actors. He says, for example, that Benjamin’s claim that divine punishment is
‘bloodless’ (i.e. that it leaves no bloody sign in its wake – as we saw with the
punishment of Korah) risks the determination that the Nazi death camps,
which tended to kill by gas rather than by bullet, could be seen as ‘an expia-
tion and an indecipherable signature of the just and violent anger of God.’

How then, Derrida is asking, do we know true ‘justice’ when it is manifested
before us? Insofar as many brutal acts have and will continue to be attributed
to divine justice, any notion of actual justice will always hold this danger
(including Benjamin’s own position). For Derrida, we should rather hold
to the immanence of justice, to its status as always being ‘perhaps’ and
‘to-come’. In this way justice remains transcendent, able to ‘haunt’ and trouble
our practices rather than being hijacked for the purposes of retroactively
justifying them.

Another version of Derrida’s concern about what could be called the danger

of ‘false prophecy’ (and hence Messianism) in Benjamin can be glimpsed in his
discussion of the tension between the decidability of justice and the undecid-
ability of law. As noted in the preceding chapter, in his analysis of the
‘Critique of Violence’, Derrida labels Benjamin’s idea of mythical violence as
being ‘Greek’, while divine violence is ‘Jewish’. It seems as if law (at least
with a small l) lies on the Greek side and justice lies on the Jewish side in this
schema. Derrida tells us further that:

There are two violences, two competing Gewalten : on the one side, deci-
sion (just, historical, political, and so on), justice beyond droit and the
state, but without decidable knowledge [that is, the ‘Jewish’ divine
violence]; on the other, decidable knowledge and certainty in a realm that
structurally remains that of the undecidable, of the mythic droit of the
state [Greek, mythic]. On the one side [Jewish] the decision without
undecidable certainty, on the other [Greek] the certainty of the undecid-
able but without decision.

76 Politics in its own distinction

For Derrida, the violence of law comes from its undecidability; from ‘the fact
that one could not distinguish between founding violence and conserving
violence.’

Without decidability, that is to say without justice, one seems

forced to accept the kind of decisionism that Carl Schmitt sees as the basis for
politics in the fi rst place. Decisions are of necessity arbitrary and random, only
retroactively given meaning and a sense of purposefulness by sovereign fi at.
For Derrida, as we have seen, Benjamin puts too much store in the possibility
of divine justice acting in the world. Derrida reiterates that justice must
remain as a ‘perhaps’ to haunt and de-center the authority of just decisions, to
remind us that they are not justice and that justice itself remains ‘to-come’.

Here again, we see how for Derrida any sense of actual, practicable justice

carries grave dangers. Given that divine violence has no ‘decidable know-
ledge’, no concrete manifestation, it remains available mainly for being
‘bastardized’ into law (an idea Derrida takes from Benjamin). Sovereignty (as
Derrida suggests elsewhere, including in The Beast and the Sovereign ) wraps
itself, either directly or indirectly, in the mantle of divine justice; it defi nes
and produces what is deemed ‘just’ in our world. Insofar as it speaks for justice,
it becomes impossible to distinguish it from ‘real’ justice, hence Derrida’s
concern.

In the face of such dangers, Derrida’s own answer is to retreat from

Benjamin’s Messianism (as we have seen) in order to avoid providing the
grounds for a mere repeat of such sovereign usurpations (or bastardizations).
Derrida acknowledges the irony that an essay like ‘Critique of Violence’ –
which is explicitly set against such usurpations – might itself contribute to
them.

At the same time, his retreat is only partial; to move away from the

Messianic altogether is to completely give up on justice (something Derrida is
not prepared to do). Here, Derrida is (we too?) left in the strange position of
waiting for a justice wherein we fear the possibility of its arrival exactly because
we can’t distinguish false prophets from divine acts. Does Benjamin himself
have any recourse against such a state of affairs? Is his belief in the possibility
of justice always going to risk such sovereign (and other) usurpations?

Divine violence revisited

If, for the time being, we stick just to the ‘Critique of Violence’ itself, we
already may begin to see why for Benjamin justice is already here (or at least
why it is not only ‘to-come’) and also how it does not serve as the potential
basis for false prophecy that Derrida fears. If we return to the crucial distinc-
tion between divine and mythic violence described in the last chapter, we can
ask Derrida’s question once again: why isn’t the holocaust a moment of divine
punishment? How do we, fallen and fallible humans that we are, distinguish
a divine act of violence from a mythical one (and, if we can’t tell the differ-
ence, shouldn’t we submit ourselves to Schmittian decisionism and sover-
eignty after all, given the lack of alternatives)? In response, I would say that

Waiting for justice 77

perhaps in this case Derrida is making too much of the literalness of blood
rather than its signifi cation (a fairly ironic claim in Derrida’s case, to be sure).
For Benjamin, blood is a sign; he calls it a ‘symbol of mere life’.

Insofar as

mythical violence traffi cs in idols, it requires the sign of life in order to
demonstrate or produce its own power (or even its own existence). On the
other hand, divine violence, as we have seen, undoes the phantasmic power of
signs; it creates spaces where signs cease to determine reality, cease to be idols
altogether.

In this way the fact of blood is not in and of itself the key to mythical

violence. The perpetrators of the holocaust may not always have shed blood
(although of course they shed copious, horrifying amounts of it), but their
actions are in some ways the culmination (as Derrida himself suggests) of
mythical violence, an ultimate expression of idolatry, of seeking to impose
control over all life in the pursuit of some fantastic truth or order. One could
say that the Nazi regime represents the sovereign impulse at its most uncon-
strained, its most mythical. As Benjamin famously goes on to say in his
Critique: ‘Mythical violence is bloody power over mere life for its own sake,
divine violence pure power over all life for the sake of the living. The fi rst
demands sacrifi ce, the second accepts it.’

Thus Benjamin does offer a way to discern between acts of divine and myth-

ical violence, namely in terms of its relationship to the sign, to idolatry and
how we read and interpret the world. To put this in a nutshell: Benjamin’s
Messiah acts to erase and remove idols, not to replace one set of idols with
another. It is not a question of ‘blood or no blood’, but rather a question of
‘idol or no idol’. Just as with Kafka’s narratives (something Benjamin acknow-
ledges in his own writings on Kafka), Benjamin’s Messiah only serves to
unmake and de-center; while Benjamin acknowledges (once again) that myth
‘bastardizes’ divine violence into law, we see that he also supplies us with the
means (the critique) by which to recognize and resist that bastardization.
While Derrida clearly denotes the semiotic basis for Benjamin’s theory, he
does not necessarily apply such insights to Benjamin’s brand of Messianism.
Because the question of Messianism is key to understanding the differences
between these thinkers, a closer examination of their respective views is in
order.

Benjamin’s Messiah

In Specters of Marx

, Derrida tells us that Benjamin is ‘messianic without

messianism’.

Such a description, however, is probably a better fi t for Derrida

himself than for Benjamin (akin to when Derrida is described as having a
‘religion without a religion’

). I’d say that Benjamin is just plain Messianic

but, as already mentioned, his Messianism has very little in common with an
avenging Old Testament Messiah. When Derrida calls him ‘messianic without
messianism’, he is refl ecting Benjamin’s (and perhaps his own) simultaneous

78 Politics in its own distinction

distance from and participation in a longstanding Jewish Messianic tradition.
He cites Benjamin’s Messianism, his notion of divine violence as ‘Jewish’,
even as he distances himself from Benjamin’s version of ‘Jewishness’. In ‘Force
of Law’, Derrida says that he ‘leaves to [Benjamin] responsibility for [his
interpretation] of Judaism’, leaving his own position rather unvoiced and,
once again, ambivalent.

In terms of the distinctions between their own versions of ‘Messianism’, it

is crucial to note that Benjamin’s Messiah is both more and less in the world
than Derrida’s concept of justice ‘to-come’. For one thing, as Derrida himself
suggests, Benjamin’s Messiah is always in the world in some sense. The ‘ weak
messianic force’ he describes in Specters of Marx (citing Benjamin’s ‘Theses on
the Philosophy of History’) is present with ‘every generation’. It will be
recalled too that Benjamin speaks further on in the ‘Theses’ of ‘a Messianic
cessation of happening, or, put differently, a revolutionary chance in the fi ght
for the oppressed past.’

Here, once again we see the way that Benjamin’s

Messianism overlaps with his Marxist revolutionary views; the two events (i.e.
divine intervention and human action) as two sides of the same coin. The
Messiah’s function is to allow for a ‘cessation of happening’, hence a cessation
of idolatry as well; human actors fi ll the breach of that cessation with revolu-
tionary violence (Arendt would say with ‘power’).

These two gestures, the divine and the human, are simultaneous and

mutual. This is why Benjamin can speak of a ‘ weak messianic force’ that ‘every
generation’ has been endowed with. It is this intense connection between
Messianic disruption and human action that makes Benjamin’s Messianism a
force in the world that is not purely ‘to-come’, not just perhaps but continu-
ally erupting in the world, in the here and in the now in a very tangible,
actual way.

But at the same time, Benjamin’s Messiah is further away from the world

than Derrida’s because, as also discussed in the previous chapter, we are unable
to ever know if what we have done is divinely sanctioned or not (Derrida is not
wrong about this). In the ‘Critique of Violence’ Benjamin writes:

Less possible and also less urgent for human kind, however, is to decide
when unalloyed violence has been realized in particular cases. For only
mythical violence, not divine, will be recognizable as such with certainty,
unless it be in incomparable effects, because the expiatory power of
violence is not visible to men.

This is the dilemma that Benjamin poses to us; we may well, at some point,
approximate the kinds of truths that are held ‘under the eyes of heaven’, but
we would not know it if it happened.

We are condemned to untruth and

mistaken knowledge, the very state of being that our idolatry strains to defy
and overcome. We recognize mythical violence ‘with certainty’ because ulti-
mately, it is of human origin. Being of our own making, we know it for what

Waiting for justice 79

it is. But for this very reason, it does not allow us any view other than itself;
it perpetuates its own mythology. Divine violence is transcendent but being
so, it has nothing to tell us. It cannot tell us how to lead our lives, how to
engage in politics or how to properly read the signs that constitute our reality.
All it can do is to de-center and disrupt the misreadings of God (and the rest
of the world as well) that have been promulgated in its name. At that point,
human responsibility and possibility begins.

Derrida’s ‘Messiah’ (if we are permitted to call it that) lies on the boundary

between the divine and the human. It haunts the human; it ‘trembles’ at the
periphery of our lives but it does not enter directly in the world. Benjamin’s
Messiah sits, as it were, on both sides of this position: on the one hand, it is
very much ‘in the world’, expressed and manifested as human action even as
it is, on the other hand, absolutely behind a wall of unknowability, not immi-
nent in any way. It is this simultaneity, I think, that Derrida misses; his own
ambivalence refl ects, perhaps, his straddling stance. While his justice
‘to-come’ similarly reminds us that sovereign projections and myths are just
that, he lacks a notion of a God that directly interferes in the world to rid us
of idolatry, thus making an actual, tangible and local human politics legible.
Without the discriminating force of the idea of a God that unmakes idolatry,
Derrida is left suspicious of all claims for justice, all acts that may (or may not)
be Messianic. Yet, he is not free from the desire for justice; thus he is forced,
to some extent, to continue to wait for it.

Revisiting before the law

We can see some of this more clearly when we directly compare the way that
Derrida and Benjamin read Kafka. In his own analysis of ‘Before the Law’
(entitled ‘Devant la loi’), Derrida shows, perhaps even more clearly than in
‘Force of Law’, the ways that he is both similar and dissimilar to Benjamin:
once again, the difference between them is a matter of degree rather than kind
but the crucial distinction between them remains based in the question of
Messianism and idolatry.

In his analysis of Kafka’s text, Derrida shows how the law, like a text,

consists of a set of ‘fi ctions’ (he begins ‘Devant la loi’ by citing Montaigne,
who speaks of law’s ‘legitimate fi ctions on which it bases the truth of its
justice’

). Kafka’s text demonstrates how the law’s authority literally comes

from ‘nowhere’ (Derrida uses the term ‘atopy’) by allegorizing its inaccessi-
bility. (In ‘Before the Law’, the gatekeeper informs the man from the country
that the door he is poised before is just one of many he would have to get
through.) As Derrida puts it, ‘this atopy annuls that which takes place, the
event itself. This nullifi cation gives birth to the law, before as before and
before as behind.’

The ‘nullifi cation’ of its own possibility is the basis,

Derrida argues, for law’s authority; law can neither reveal its secret nor can it
let us think that there is no secret to reveal.

80 Politics in its own distinction

This reading replicates Derrida’s straddling sense; the law must be ‘visibly

invisible’. It must lurk inaccessibly, just out of sight (as Kafka’s story itself
suggests). We can see how readily this view shades into Derrida’s notion of a
justice that is always ‘to-come’; if justice were to reveal itself, to be fully in the
world, it seems, it would remove its own basis for authority. Law must remain
immanent in order to avoid undoing itself. After all, Derrida reminds us, the
gatekeeper does not tell the man from the country that he can never have
access to the law, just that he can’t have access ‘yet’ (although, as he points
out, the man from the country does not in fact ever get access to law).

And here too, we can see a difference between Derrida’s reading of Kafka

and that of Benjamin. Derrida’s reading, once again, leaves out what is the
central component of Benjamin’s analysis, his focus on idolatry and the possi-
bility of its removal. For Benjamin, as we have seen, law is produced, not by
self-assertion but by hubristic imitation (‘bastardization’) of divine violence.
Like Derrida, Benjamin does not deny the power of this misrepresentation, its
tangible effect on life, the way such aporias nevertheless produce responses.
Whole lives are lived in its wake, entire political systems are affected. But
Benjamin does not leave it at that. Kafka’s stories, as we have already seen, do
not only tell us how law is produced but they themselves actually participate
in the unmaking of those stories. In this way they can be said to model the
possibility of human beings refl ecting and acting in congress with divine
violence, affording us an alternative to the false choice between ‘truth’ (which
for Benjamin, as for Derrida, can only exist as a phantasm) and the idolatry of
the phantasmagoria.

In the previous chapter, we saw Benjamin’s analysis of Kafka wherein repre-

sentation is not seen as conveying (however imperfectly) some kind of truth.
Instead, representation for Kafka (and hence, for Benjamin as well) in effect
turns its back on what passes for truth in order to save us from the phantasms
we associate with it. We saw in particular in his comment that for Kafka the
very idols that constitute our world can ‘unexpectedly raise a mighty paw’
against the idolatry that they (normally) foment. We see here the possibility
for an alliance between human beings and signs and objects, an uprising that
can occur even in the printed pages of a text.

In contrast to this radical possibility, we see in Derrida’s analysis much less

in the way of subversion. It is true that in his essay on Kafka, Derrida hints at
a more radical relationship to truth and its possibility. He suggests that The
Trial – the narrative that contains the parable ‘Before the Law’ – ‘produces a
mise en abîme [a ruination] of everything you have just heard’.

Derrida ends

‘Devant la loi’ by citing the priest who converses with K. (the protagonist of
The Trial ) about the meaning of the parable. He says, ‘The script is immu-
table and the commentaries often merely express the despair that this causes.’

Here, at the tail end of his discourse, Derrida suggests something far more
radical going on in Kafka’s parable, but it is only a suggestion. Yet, at the
same time in that essay he speaks of the ‘limits of subversion’.

The bulk of

Waiting for justice 81

the text, as we saw, focuses on the way Kafka describes the production and
nature of law, its fi ction and its self-assertion. Derrida fears that without these
fi ctions, these distancing mechanisms, we could have no justice whatsoever –
not even the hope for it. His analysis may ‘expose’ the law in some sense, but
it doesn’t leave us any alternatives either. What for Derrida exists as hints and
possibilities, something that is ‘perhaps’ and ‘to-come’, is for Benjamin (as
already noted) actually happening on the physical pages of Kafka’s texts.

The key point to note is that for Benjamin human beings are not fated to

merely replicate mythical violence. They can coordinate their actions with acts
of divine violence, voiding the site of idolatry, in this case with the collusion of
the idols themselves. When their acts of subversion are oriented, not towards
deciphering truth but undoing the untruths that compose our reality, we are
working with the ‘ weak Messianic force’ that is present in ‘every generation’.
Kafka’s parables, Benjamin tells us, serve to do this work. They disrupt the center
of the very narrative of law (and with it, notions of truth, justice and sovereignty)
even as they demonstrate how the law is produced, how it operates. Although
they appear to be submissive (like any form of representation), they unexpectedly
rebel against the very idolatry they would otherwise foment. In this way the text
itself becomes an ally of the reader, a way to enact a moment of ‘divine violence’;
it produces a disruption of meaning and representation that permits us to engage
with the text (and the truths it promises) in a different way.

Why is this any different from Derrida’s notion of deconstruction? Doesn’t

Derrida too seek to live in the ‘ruins’ that follow our exposure of the myths
that constitute our reality? Here we see once again that Derrida and Benjamin
are not so much in opposition as going for similar goals but in different ways.
I would offer that deconstruction, as Derrida describes it, refl ects his strad-
dling position. Here too, he pulls back from a full embrace of Benjamin’s
Messianism, suspicious as he is of the dangers that such a belief (i.e. the idea
of having rather than simply waiting for justice) falls into the trap of the very
mythology it seeks to expose and subvert. And this would be the case if it
were not for Benjamin’s careful attention to the question of idolatry and how
it can be resisted. Benjamin shows how there is an alternative to truth and
fi ction, a kind of ‘middle path’, if you will, that allows for a space between
idolatry and truth. For Benjamin, God’s acts of divine violence show us that
we are not condemned to idolatry. God does not merely hover at the periphery
of our world (as for Derrida) but interferes forcefully for the sake of creation.
And, by turning towards the material forms that constitute our representative
order, we see that we can access those non-idolatrous spaces ourselves, with
crucial help from the very idols we would otherwise deliver ourselves to.

Back to waiting

In the essay on Kafka cited above, Benjamin is not directly referencing ‘Before
the Law’, although his analysis can readily be extended to that parable. In

82 Politics in its own distinction

terms of ‘Before the Law’ itself, we can say that the gatekeeper in some way
fulfi lls the Messianic function of that story in that he prevents the man from
the country from having access to the Law. Derrida himself argues that the ‘I’
of the gatekeeper (as when he says ‘now I will go and shut [the gate]’) ‘is also
that of the text or of the law’.

If we extend Benjamin’s analysis of Kafka

more broadly to this parable, we can see that this ‘I’ can be considered to act
as a ‘mighty paw’ which, even as it produces the authority of law and justice
(in the way that Derrida delineates), also suspends and de-centers that law (by
showing that the man from the country was never meant to cross into it). This
works very much like the plays of the German Baroque dramatists as well. In
other words, in the very act of announcing the ultimate authority of the law
and text (i.e. the pure immanence of justice), the gatekeeper also reveals the
empty core of that concept. The authority it produces, the effects that it has
(in this case on the man from the country and his relationship to the gate-
keeper) is not dispelled, yet the law itself becomes, as it were, almost irrele-
vant. We become ‘purifi ed of law’; the secret that the law must keep is ‘ruined’
but justice may not itself be lost. In his last moments, in his internal thoughts
(about which Kafka keeps a sphinx-like silence), the man from the country
can perhaps begin to see what happens to his relationship to law and justice
when the central concept has been de-centered. What Derrida hints at (with
seemingly equal measures of fear and hope), for Benjamin becomes a real
possibility.

In ‘Franz Kafka: on the Tenth Anniversary of his Death’, in which he

directly references ‘Before the Law’, Benjamin writes:

The gate to justice is learning. And yet Kafka does not dare attach to this
learning the promises which tradition has attached to the study of the
Torah. His assistants are sextons who have lost their house of prayer, his
students are pupils who have lost the Holy Writ.

Here we see a way to be Messianic and Jewish without some of the traditional
baggage. It is perhaps this baggage that Derrida seeks to avert when he
partially distances himself from Benjamin, but I’d suggest that in doing so he
has reduced the Messiah to an immanence which denies us (or at least impedes)
access to its most subversive functions. With Benjamin, we see that Kafka’s
‘pupils . . . have lost the Holy Writ’. But such a loss does not condemn them
to mythology. On the contrary, it is the belief that the Holy Writ itself
contains truth that renders the believer an idolator; ‘losing’ such a belief is our
salvation, our deliverance from idolatry. Since God and the truth are not
knowable by us, we cannot directly approach God via the signs and symbols
that convey divinity to us. Only by turning our back on – i.e. ceasing to wait
for – God, justice and truth, can we avoid the fate of being trapped by idolatry
and mythology. For Benjamin, it is God who shows us how to avoid this fate:
God comes into the world to erase all signs of divinity. Or, if not God then

Waiting for justice 83

some agent of God; even the signs and symbols that form our world can raise
‘a mighty paw’ in the service of divine violence, as we have seen. It is not that
God wishes to be forgotten but rather that thanks to acts of divine violence it
becomes possible for us to rethink our relationship to God, to justice, to law
and to sovereignty.

With Derrida’s partial Benjaminism, we are part of the way to this possi-

bility. Derrida clearly sees the emptiness of the law, its need for secrecy (albeit
not to the point where we do not know that a secret is being guarded), but he
does not see the alternative. His Messiah cannot be trusted to interfere in the
world because so many untruths have been attributed to God. Benjamin
begins with the same presumption about untruth but shows how God can and
does intrude, making a space for our own response, our own imitations of
divine violence. As Benjamin tells us in his ‘Theologico-Political Fragment’:
‘just as a force can, through acting, increase another that is acting in the oppo-
site direction, so the order of the profane assists, through being profane, the
coming of the Messianic kingdom.’

In other words, by turning in the oppo-

site direction from God, we come back to God after all. Benjamin also tells us
in that same fragment that ‘the Kingdom of God is not the telos of the histor-
ical dynamic’.

In saying this, he turns his back on the anticipation of justice

as being something that will be delivered from a transcendent place and in
this regard, he is in good company with Derrida himself. But Benjamin offers
us something more; by turning away, by ceasing to wait for justice altogether
(as Derrida doesn’t quite bring himself to do and as the man from the country
fi nally may have done at the last minute of his life), we can perhaps fi nd
justice in the world after all. This may not be the justice we expect, but it is
the justice we can have, a practice that goes on even in the face of the obscuring
and overwhelming promise of Law that animates so much of our political and
personal life.

Arendt’s Justice

For her own part, Hannah Arendt seems to directly part company with Kafka
when it comes to the metaphor of waiting for justice, at least insofar as she
suggests that Kafka himself is ultimately bound by traditional notions of
temporality, even as he challenges those conventions. She makes this argu-
ment, not by turning to ‘Before the Law’, but a different Kafka parable that
she considers in the beginning of Between Past and Future . The parable in ques-
tion describes a person (referred to as ‘he’, as opposed to K.) who ‘has two
antagonists: the fi rst presses him from behind, from the origin. The second
blocks the road ahead.’

Both of these antagonists press in on the protagonist

from two directions. At fi rst, Arendt praises Kafka for his depiction, which
she interprets as a refl ection on our temporal position. For Arendt, this
moment depicts an instance where ‘the course of action has run its course and
when the story which was its outcome waits to be completed’.

84 Politics in its own distinction

In this suspension, Arendt sees Kafka as playing havoc with our traditional

understandings of time. She notes that in his narrative ‘the past . . . does not
pull back but presses forward, and it is, contrary to what one would expect,
the future which drives us back into the past.’

Yet she notes that it is pecu-

liar that, for all his radicalism, ‘Kafka retains the traditional metaphor of a
rectilinear temporal movement.’

In the parable itself, Kafka tells us that,

rather than being fully trapped by his situation, Kafka’s protagonist dreams
that he might ‘jump out of the fi ghting line and be promoted, on account of
his experience in fi ghting, to the position of umpire over his antagonists in
their fi ght with each other’.

Of this, Arendt says ‘what else is this dream and

this region but the old dream which Western metaphysics has dreamed from
Parmenides to Hegel of a timeless, spaceless, suprasensuous realm as the
proper region of thought?’

She goes on to write:

Obviously what is missing in Kafka’s description of a thought-event is a
spatial dimension where thinking could exert itself without being forced
to jump out of human time altogether. The trouble with Kafka’s story in
all its magnifi cence is that it is hardly possible to retain the notion of a
rectilinear temporal movement if its unidirectional fl ow is broken up into
antagonistic force being directed toward and acting upon man.

Instead, Arendt looks for a ‘diagonal force, whose origin is known, whose
direction is determined by past and future, but whose eventual end lies in
infi nity’.

Such a perspective, Arendt offers, allows some critical distance but

does not pretend to be outside of human time. It offers, instead, the proper
parameter of thought, one that remains bound by temporality even as it is not
determined by it. Arendt suggests that insofar as Kafka’s characters, in so
many of his parables and tales, remain ‘unable to fi nd the diagonal’, they tend
to ‘die of exhaustion’ (a fate she sees as eventually consuming K., the protag-
onist of The Castle among other fi gures).

His characters fi nd themselves

stuck between their origins and their future.

Although this is not a direct commentary on ‘Before the Law’, we see that,

in Arendt’s eyes, Kafka does not offer a way to avoid the fate of his own
antagonist in that parable. For Arendt (not unlike the man from the country),
Kafka cannot avoid the fate he reveals. His belief in the possibility of stepping
outside of time condemns him to a kind of waiting, an exhausting and endless
struggle that is also completely futile.

Clearly, I do not share this reading of Kafka. I see him, as with Benjamin

himself, as offering exactly what Arendt is looking for; a way to remain in
human time and still not be over-determined or totalized by the forces that
construct such a temporality. It is Arendt herself , I would say, who does not
quite achieve this goal. My argument with Arendt in this case is somewhat
different from the previous consideration of Derrida. Unlike Derrida, Arendt’s
version of ‘Messianism’ (if we can call it that) does not sit at the edge of the

Waiting for justice 85

world. Her understanding of redemption, of thought and of action all must
occur, as we have seen, exclusively in the sphere of human space and time; it
can only be found defi nitively in the here and the now. Yet, while she rejects
a faux sense of escaping from temporality (something I think she wrongly
ascribes to Kafka, of all people), Arendt herself is not able to escape the faux
sense of temporality itself. The world that she is so fi rmly anchored in remains
itself totalized by mythology. She accepts the notion of human time unprob-
lematically and so remains trapped by its strictures, by its eschatology.
Because she sees that thought, justice and politics can only appear in this
world and because she accepts that world, in a sense, as is, I argue that Arendt
remains stuck, not unlike Derrida (and despite their considerable differences)
waiting for a form of justice that she both knows will never arrive and doesn’t
even desire.

It should be said at this point that justice per se is not the preoccupation for

Arendt that it is for Derrida.

She tends to favor notions of freedom and poli-

tics over the concept of justice itself, but we can say that for Arendt some-
thing like justice will come along with the practices that she favors. Justice is,
perhaps, the (relatively) unspoken corollary, the end product of her political
theory (something that may be evident, even if only by negative example, in
Eichmann in Jerusalem ).

Arendt’s inconspicuous Messianism

In order to explain these questions further, a closer look at Arendt’s Messianism
is in order. Here again, the contrast with Benjamin’s own Messianic views is
central. In Arendt’s view about what, if anything, redeems human life, we see
both her this-worldly orientation and also the limitations of such an orienta-
tion as regards the kinds of results Arendt is looking for in her political anal-
ysis. In her own reading of Arendt’s work Susannah Young-ah Gottlieb speaks
of Arendt’s ‘inconspicuous’ Messianism.

This seems like an apt term to

apply to a Messianism that rarely announces itself (and when it does, it does
so garbed in multiple and confl icting traditions).

If Derrida’s ‘Messianism

without Messianism’ exists at the edge of the world, trembling just beyond it
to haunt and decenter our actions and thoughts, Arendt’s ‘inconspicuous’
Messianism, as already mentioned, sits very much in and only in the world.
This is a Messianism where there is indeed no Messiah, no outside force to
rescue or redeem us. Arendt’s Messianism does not solve the world’s problems
in any direct and tangible way; instead it seeks a way for human beings to
avoid being determined by time, by eschatology, by the ruin of the world.
This may seem similar to Benjamin and Kafka’s conceptions (although she
would not necessarily agree, at least not with Kafka, as we have seen), but
there is a key difference. Arendt’s version of Messianism completely avoids a
sense of divinity, a force that helps human beings to overcome their own
ensconcement in idolatry, whereas for Benjamin, human beings require

86 Politics in its own distinction

something external to avoid being determined by the phantasms that each
and every one of us subscribe to.

There is a cost to this avoidance. Arendt’s version of Messianism comes via

action and the chance to begin again that comes with each birth. But such a
chance will be defeated over and over again (as Arendt’s own work clearly
attests to) if there is no means by which the phantasm that surrounds each act
and each birth cannot be removed or disrupted, if we cannot distinguish the
idolatrous from the non-idolatrous (hence duplicating the dilemma that we
found with Derrida as well).

But the external perspective that would afford such a view is exactly what

Arendt denies; her distrust of anything that appears ‘outside’ the human
realm is such that, as we already saw in her reading of Kafka, anything that
evokes a sense of non-human time or space is instantly suspect for her. What
she misses by this blanket rejection is a sense of a non-human time that is
exactly commensurate with human time; a Messiah (Benjamin’s Messiah, and
Kafka’s as well) that lives and acts in the world . This Messiah allows both for the
kind of this worldliness that Arendt seeks but avoids being determined by the
conceptions that produce that world for us in the fi rst place.

For all of her Messianism, I would argue that Arendt is not quite Messianic

enough. To allow for the possibility of a Messianism that isn’t purely contained
within the world of human action (and hence subject to its phantasmic
origins) would greatly enhance the political possibilities that are so attractive
about Arendt’s work in the fi rst place. Put simply, Arendt correctly discerns
one half of Benjamin’s Messianism, the potential for power, for human action.
But she misses the other half, the moments of divine violence that clear a path
towards human action in the fi rst place.

This can be seen more clearly when we look at actual instances of Arendt’s

discussion of Messianic redemption. In a well-known passage from The Human
Condition that Gottlieb cites as well, we can see one of Arendt’s most clearly
Messianic sentiments:

The miracle that saves the world, the realm of human affairs, from its
normal, ‘natural’ ruin is ultimately the fact of natality, in which the
faculty of action is ontologically rooted. It is, in other words, the birth of
new men and the new beginning, the action they are capable of by virtue
of being born. Only the full experience of this capacity can bestow upon
human affairs faith and hope . . . It is this faith in and hope for the world
that found perhaps its most glorious and succinct expression in the few
words with which the Gospels announce their ‘glad tidings’: ‘A child has
been born unto us.’

We see a similar sentiment expressed in On Revolution as well. Speaking there
in this case of the Roman tradition, Arendt reads Virgil’s fourth Eclogue to
note that the child it celebrates, is ‘far from being the prediction of the arrival

Waiting for justice 87

of a divine child and savior, it is, on the contrary, the affi rmation of the
divinity of birth as such, that the world’s potential salvation lies in the very
fact that the human species regenerates itself constantly and forever’.

In both cases, Arendt’s Messianism is less about the possibility of a prophet

coming to earth (although she does discuss Jesus at several points) but rather
about the kinds of self-delivery that come from the mere fact that we enter
into an already existing world. Each new child represents a new beginning,
a new chance in the context of all that has happened and all that is yet
to come.

In her own analysis of Arendt’s Messianism, Gottlieb explicitly compares

Arendt’s Messianism, to Benjamin’s:

Arendt’s work . . . can be understood to draw some of its strength from
Benjamin’s late refl ections, since she charges natality with precisely that
‘ weak messianic force’ with which, according to Benjamin, ‘every genera-
tion’, including our own, has been ‘endowed’: natality is able to save the
world from its inherent ruination. This messianic force is ‘weak’ because
natality is the precise opposite of sovereignty: it is self-exposure not self-
assertion. As she replaces Benjamin’s vague word generation ( Geschlecht )
with the technical term natality , Arendt goes one step further than her
friend in constructing an account of ‘the human condition’ according to
models of thought developed within the parameters of Jewish messianic
tradition. Unlike his messianism, hers is inconspicuous, since she nowhere
calls on a supreme being to abrogate the conditionality of human beings,
does not use the term messiah , and makes no explicit reference to any
fi gure who might be associated with messianic Judaism – with the pecu-
liar and perhaps even ironic exception of Jesus.

For Gottlieb, Arendt’s worldliness gives her Messianism its peculiar and
radical focus. She says that in contrast to usual theological understandings of
the purpose of human life, Arendt’s understanding ‘both interrupts and is
interrupted by the meaningfulness expressed in the daring statement that
human beings are “born in order to begin”’.

Such a beginning, she tells us is

not a transcendent utopian overwriting of the world; it does not avoid death
or danger. As Gottlieb tells us, ‘Redemption, then [for Arendt] remains only
a schema internal to the activities of the vita activa in relation to one another:
this schema cannot be embodied in a salvational fi gure, nor even can it proceed
into the world as an independent force.’

Clearly, for Gottlieb this recommends Arendt to us; she admires the way

that Arendt refuses to engage in any kind of supernatural invocation of a
Godlike or Messianic fi gure. Even in the face of the some of the worst calami-
ties of the twentieth century (the same calamities that were to end Benjamin’s
life), Arendt fundamentally accepts that human beings are on their own
and that the hope we have – the only hope that there is to be found in the

88 Politics in its own distinction

world – lies in our own natality.

But such a view does not resolve some of

Arendt’s own suspicions and worries (indeed, Gottlieb would probably be the
fi rst to acknowledge this: the subtitle of her book is ‘Anxiety and Messianism
in Hannah Arendt and W.H. Auden’).

Ambivalent realities and the perils of ‘the absolute’

Arendt’s struggles to engage with time and reality are fl ummoxed by a chronic
ambivalence that, while different than Derrida’s (hers seems more pessimistic),
ends up with similar results. In her case, ambivalence comes from the fact that
even as she locates reality wholly within the human sphere, she acknowledges
that this sphere is constituted by human beings who are easily misled,
unmoored by the very self-positing that constitutes the ground of human
freedom and action.

Even as she holds to the miracle of birth and action, Arendt worries about

what she calls ‘the absolute’, which, as I see it, corresponds roughly to
Benjamin’s notion of political idolatry. The absolute for Arendt is a ‘despotic
power’ that corresponds to the ‘revealed truths of religion or the axiomatic
verities of mathematics’.

The absolute is what is irrefutable, a monolith of

so-called truth that cannot be touched by action or by politics (or, perhaps
more accurately, something seems so irrefutable that it precludes action in the
fi rst place). Her opposition to sovereignty, as we began to see in Chapter 2 , is
in part motivated by the connection that Arendt sees between sovereign poli-
tics and the absolute; the former serves as a vehicle for the latter to manifest
itself in the world, at the expense of ‘the political’. Perhaps the worst thing
about the absolute for Arendt is that it – like the action that would seek to
banish it – comes from human beings. Thus even as we are called upon to act
in human time in ways that are not determined by existing strictures, we
simultaneously are producing those strictures, defeating our own possibility
for redemption in the name of non-human forces that may not even exist. If
we are our own Messiah, we are also our own devil, tempting ourselves with
false hope and a false sense of time and reality (in this sense too, I see Arendt
and Benjamin as being very much in agreement, if only in terms of the nature
of our predicament).

Against doubt

In thinking about the absolute, how to resist it and its alternatives, we come
closer to the cycle of ambivalence and pessimism that characterizes Arendt’s
work more generally. The problem is that for Arendt we can never be certain
about what is authentic, what is real in the world. This is the price that she
willingly pays for her refusal to limit human freedom by recourse to an
external force. As a result of this refusal, Arendt accepts a lower order of truth
as well. In order to avoid the absolute she turns to those looser, more

Waiting for justice 89

problematical forms of truth that can only come from intersubjectivity, from
human decisions made in a collective manner.

Arendt tells us that for human beings, reality can only really be experienced

through a collective and public process. She writes famously that:

Each time we talk about things that can be experienced only in privacy or
intimacy, we bring them out into a sphere where they will assume a kind
of reality which, their intensity notwithstanding, they never could have
had before. The presence of others who see what we see and hear what we
hear assures us of the reality of the world and ourselves.

For Arendt, we thus can distinguish between the absolute and these forms of
publically held (and made truths). As Bonnie Honig argues, Arendt makes such
distinctions even within a (part of a) single sentence, Jefferson’s famous line in
the Declaration of Independence, ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident’.
Here, the ‘we hold’ is a collectively held public truth. ‘Self-evidence’ is the
absolute, raising up to potentially defeat such a moment of self-assertion.

When we think about such collective and local forms of truth, we also

begin to see some of the vulnerabilities of such truth claims. There is a
constant struggle and a delicate balance in Arendt’s work between the need
for some kind of bedrock, some certainty by which to anchor our values and
judgments and avoid the pre-emption of politics than comes with absolute
truths. Ultimately, Arendt sees the public production of truth as a kind of
faith, a faith we have in ourselves, but this faith is very fragile and easily
destroyed. For this reason, Arendt is highly opposed to what she sees as the
treacherous turns in Western thought that make any human-derived forms of
truth so problematical. In the last chapter of The Human Condition , Arendt
attacks Cartesian doubt as one of the great fl aws of modernity. Citing
Whitehead, Arendt tells us that ‘Cartesian reason is entirely based “on the
implicit assumption that the mind can only know that which it has itself
produced and retains in some sense within itself ”.’

Here, the danger of

solipsism and phantasm are evident; doubt chips away at the very collective
faculties by which we might discern between what ‘we hold’ and what is held
over us. In this way doubt erodes judgment, the most critical faculty perhaps
of all in Arendt’s view (we’ll return to this question in the next chapter).

Even something as seemingly unobjectionable as reason has, for Arendt,

become a hazard for the Western tradition:

What men now have in common is not the world but the structure of
their minds, and this they cannot have in common, strictly speaking;
their faculty of reasoning can only happen to be the same in everybody.

Reason itself, in this analysis, is the source of the absolute, at least in its
modern guise. The idea that thinking becomes structured according to a

90 Politics in its own distinction

common rubric (one of the hallmarks of liberalism) denies the plurality that
individual and separate minds produce when acting in conjunction (we
already saw her complaint that even a thinker as esoteric and original as Kafka
can easily fall for old platitudes about standing outside of time and the world).
When this happens, the plurality of human actors becomes reduced to a single
mentality, what she calls the social or what Hanna Pitkin, speaking of Arendt’s
work, calls ‘the blob’.

Accordingly, The Human Condition reads, especially by the end, as a tale of

a steady dwindling away of reality, such as it is. The absolute emerges from
private phantasm that poses as public truth, as reality itself (once again
aligning her views with Benjamin’s own to some extent). Arendt seeks a
virtuous cycle of reality producing, but we seem instead to be caught in a
vicious one where unreality is reinforced and circulated through the very
mechanisms of thought and speech that could otherwise deliver us to a polit-
ical life. Doubt in ourselves and our collective endeavors becomes the purchase
by which private wills and mythologies become promoted as something that
we all can, and must, believe in.

Arendt is implicitly suggesting that the problem with Western thought is

not that it is secularized but that it is not secularized enough. The absolute
lurks even behind as unobjectionable a faculty as reason because it cannot be
fi rmly denied by rational principles. Doubt creeps in because we have insuf-
fi ciently given ourselves over to our own political life. Thus we fi nd the
paradox that Arendt understands our public life in pseudo-theological terms,
i.e. her ‘inconspicuous’ Messianism. To turn away from the semi-secularism of
Descartes we must embrace, it seems, an almost mystical semi-theology, a
Messiah that is only ourselves. But here, once again, we fi nd a political
theology that is nothing of the sort. The doubt that Arendt struggles with
cannot be dispelled by the political process because the absolute itself does not
come from the theological (as Benjamin explains) but rather also comes from
human beings. In this way, Arendt works with a kind of false dichotomy
between the theological and the political (the very one that Schmitt describes)
and ends up, not unlike Derrida, falling between two stools.

In this way, and by a very different path, Arendt seems to somewhat end up

in a similar place to Derrida. Both of them react against the idea of waiting
for justice. Derrida does this directly by engaging with Kafka and seeing him
as offering another way. Arendt does this indirectly by refuting Kafka and
seemingly suggesting a way to have justice, or what passes for it, in our world.
In their respective readings, it might seem as if one or the other of these
fi gures alternatively approaches and distances Benjamin’s own work and yet,
I think, in the end they are both hampered by ambivalence and (especially in
Arendt’s case) pessimism. Given that they don’t expect justice, or anything
like it to come soon – or ever – and given that, for Arendt in particular, what-
ever modicum of human constructed reality there is grows fainter rather than
stronger, both thinkers end up in a sense waiting for justice after all insofar as

Waiting for justice 91

they seem to have no other choice. Both of them end up, however paradoxi-
cally, in the position of the man from the country, only in their case they
know that justice will never come, that the gate before them has nothing on
the other side.

Conclusion

In ‘Men in Dark Times’, Arendt describes the life and work of Walter
Benjamin. Among the many quotes she ascribes to him is one that concerns
waiting. As such, it suggests an alternative response to the modern dilemma
that Arendt herself may have done well to consider further. She cites a 1935
letter by Benjamin in which he writes:

Actually, I hardly feel constrained to try to make head or tail of this
condition of the world. On this planet a great number of civilizations
have perished in blood and horror. Naturally, one must wish for the
planet that one day it will experience a civilization that has abandoned
blood and horror; in fact, I am . . . inclined to assume that our planet is
waiting for this. But it is terribly doubtful whether we can bring such a
present to its hundred- or four-hundred-millionth birthday party. And if
we don’t, the planet will fi nally punish us, its unthoughtful well-wishers,
by presenting us with the Last Judgment.

At fi rst glance, Benjamin seems to share or even exceed Arendt’s pessimism.
But notice that there is a shift of perspective in Benjamin’s essay, one that
Arendt would not herself adopt; it is not we who wait for justice but the
planet. And it is not ‘ we ’ who can bring salvation to the earth but perhaps
someone or something else can. If Arendt is trapped by her own hope, by her
‘inconspicuous Messianism’, Benjamin offers another perspective, another
agency that might deliver what we ourselves cannot.

If Benjamin’s focus is planet-wide, on the material sphere that we occupy,

we see that for Arendt, the very term ‘world’ already assumed human construc-
tions, human dimensions. Where Benjamin, as we have seen, puts us in rela-
tionship to materiality, Arendt, perhaps in part because of her rejection of the
materialism of homo faber and animal laborens , turns to a purely human sphere
of reality, hence returning her to the very troubled human sources of episte-
mology that she struggles with. At one point towards the end of The Human
Condition , Arendt writes that ‘Modern man, when he lost the certainty of a
world to come, was thrown back upon himself and not upon this world; far
from believing that the world might be potentially immortal, he was not even
sure that it was real.’

Although she writes this in a critical fashion, I would

argue that these words could be applied to Arendt herself. She too has ‘lost the
world’ insofar as she avoids grounding it in any force that is not itself entirely
comprised by human life and thought. In this way, she misses what Benjamin

92 Politics in its own distinction

sees: both the theological and material dimensions (which in Benjamin’s case
amount to the same thing) that are not captured by phantasm, an anchor for
our own strivings to not always be what we already are and a way to oppose
the false, human derived theology that Arendt wrongly ascribes to the divine
itself (and which results in her own ‘counter-Messianic’ response).

Benjamin’s own solutions might seem completely theological and hence

undesirable from an Arendtian (and Derridean) perspective, but let us
remember that for Benjamin, moments of Messianic action are simultaneous,
perhaps even identical with our own acts of self-delivery. All the Messiah does
for Benjamin, it will be recalled, is to make it possible to remove those idols
that have been projected onto it; it merely serves to guarantee that there will
always be a space for resistance and non-totalization. This is a space that
Arendt looks for too, but by insisting that it can only reside in the human
realm, she denies a perspective that could alleviate her own ambivalence, her
own doubt. In turning her back both on the divine and the material (which
for Benjamin are really two sides of the same coin) Arendt has nowhere to turn
except back to the realm of the human, which is inherently set with doubt,
vulnerable to the manipulations that the practice of sovereignty has brought
into the world.

Benjamin’s answer to doubt is not to assert truth but to give up on truth as

something that ‘we’ can achieve. We don’t have to worry about uncertainty; it
is in fact the only certainty that we have. When we know that we will never
have any answers, we can give up on ‘reality’ altogether; or, more accurately, we
can trust in a reality that we will never know and gesture towards it, as Kafka
offers as well. Insofar as Arendt, more than Derrida, is looking for something
like reality, she may be importing into her purely human temporality a shadow
of the absolute that she would deny. To assume that we can have some access
to truth is, however subtly in her case, to return us to the kind of idolatry, at
least potentially, that Benjamin would oppose

In Derrida’s case, he might lean too far in the other direction; he is so

fearful of idolatry (although that is not necessarily a term that he would be
wont to use) that he hesitates to enter into the fray at all. To be fair – and as
already noted – Derrida’s notion of ‘democracy to-come’ is, in its own way,
‘already here’, but it is not here in the same tangible sense as sovereignty and
non-democracy are; as mentioned in Chapter 2 , its ‘hereness’ is of a different
order.

Although he seems initially more pessimistic than either Arendt or Derrida,

I have been arguing that Benjamin offers them something that can help fulfi ll
the promise in their own theorizing. Benjamin shows us that even in the
context of idolatry, all is not lost (and never will be). The presence of idolatry
does not prevent us from forming alliances, connections and relationships
with one another, but it does override and usurp these relationships, making
them seem as if they can only exist through more idolatry. We become
confused (as we see with Arendt) between ‘reality’ and ‘fi ction’ (as well as

Waiting for justice 93

between ‘theology’ and ‘the political’) when in fact both of these ontological
compass points are refl ections of mythology (i.e. Schmitt’s trap). Benjamin
offers us a vision of how to combat such mythology by aligning ourselves with
acts of divine violence, by joining in with the rebellion of the signs and
symbols that constitute the phantasmagoria. When myths and idols are
disrupted, we fi nd that our own political practices do not disappear but
become increasingly legible to us; in this way we can see, at least temporarily,
the resting water or even the water of the ‘fountain’ of sovereignty itself as
being distinct from the spectacle that keeps us in its thrall.

Here, we can see how such a view pertains to ‘Before the Law’. Imagine the

moment just before his death when the man from the country fi nally realized
that he would never have entry to the law – that the justice that he expected
wasn’t coming. Such a moment exposes not only the mythologies that or ganize
life but also the life that was actually lived. What, Benjamin and Kafka seem
to ask us, would we do if we knew such things not only at the moment of
death (when it is too late) but all along? What kind of life, what kind of
politics would we pursue in the face of such a realization? Would not the
kinds of ‘justices’ that we practice (but do not normally recognize) become
more legible to us? Would the ‘starres’ of our ordinary life (to turn to Hobbes’s
other analogy for sovereignty), which pale in comparison to the kinds of
justice we expect and wait for (the ‘sun’), fi nally come into our fi eld of vision?

This is also the kind of disruption and possibility that Derrida and Arendt

clearly long for but hesitate to embrace because of his fear of false Messiahs
and her fear of ‘the absolute’, more mythology in the guise of ‘reality’ or truth.
Benjamin may offer both of them a way out of their hesitation; what Benjamin
offers is not ‘actual truth’ but simply the possibility of non-idolatry. Neither
Derrida nor Arendt are interested in reproducing traditional religious
Messianism; Derrida’s own version of ‘Messianism without a Messiah’ could
be said to simply be the idea that the world can be other than it is (or appears
to be); that is the essence, perhaps, of deconstruction. Arendt’s ‘inconspicuous
Messianism’ seeks to fi nd in the world the solution to the problems we
ourselves have made. Benjamin adds just one thing to these ideas: the notion
that this otherness – this zone or practice of non-idolatry – is an ongoing and
present feature in the world. His Messianic (or revolutionary; in Benjamin’s
case these moments are identical) goal is to acknowledge these non-idolatrous
practices even in the face of the overwhelming mythologies that constitute
sovereignty. Benjamin tells us (consistent with Judaism) that the Messiah
‘would only make a slight adjustment in [the world]’).

This ‘slight adjust-

ment’ (which has already been made and which will be made again and again)
is all that we need to avoid being utterly determined.

An engagement with Benjamin shows these authors that one does not have

to choose between waiting for a justice that one knows will not come and
giving up on justice altogether (which amounts to the same thing). Justice
emerges as that which is being practiced in the face of phantasm; it is the

94 Politics in its own distinction

side-relationships, the friendships and small intimacies that occur in and
amongst the fetishisms that produce our vision of justice in the fi rst place.
When such a vision is disrupted by moments of divine violence – what Alain
Badiou would call ‘singularities’ – we are better able to see the justice that
remains even as the greater shining vision, the justice that we have been
waiting for, proves to be empty.

Because his Messianism is both in the world

and out of it at the same time, Benjamin offers us the best perspective from
which to experience the small, local justices that coexist with (and are usually
overwritten by) the phantasmic ones. We gain both the capacity to have the
grand image disrupted as well as the ability see what is going on amongst us,
to see what remains when such visions are lifted (however temporarily).

Even if we require such phantasms to have an idea of justice in the fi rst

place (an idea that is implicit in Kafka’s parable, ‘Before the Law’), we can
experience justice in distinction from what it promises. Rather than waiting
for ever for a justice that will not come, we can discover that while we have
been waiting, we’ve also been ‘having’ justice. The next question becomes, if
we have justice already, then what are we waiting for?

I would be doing a great disservice to both Derrida and Arendt if I left this

discussion with the distinct impression that they have much to learn from
Benjamin, but he has nothing to learn from them. This would not be a
‘constellation’ so much as a one-way discourse. But there are several crucial
aspects that Derrida and Arendt fi ll in that can help us in having a clear and
better understanding of what a Benjaminian-inspired political project might
look like. In terms of Derrida, I would say that in his hesitations, his ambiva-
lences, Derrida attests to the diffi culty of resisting the temptations of
mythology, of the lure of sovereign authority, the urge to protect and repli-
cate its secret. Benjamin himself offers that an author like Baudelaire was a
most effective subverter of the phantasmagoria because he was so deep in its
maw. In this way, Derrida too offers a closer view of what is to be struggled
with because he seems to feel its lure more strongly than Benjamin himself (or
at least he is more open about its pull than Benjamin is). Derrida serves to
remind us that our responses to sovereignty will always be partial, imperfect.
His warning about Benjaminian philosophy, its potential for becoming what
it opposes, should not paralyze us but it should make us proceed with caution.

As for Arendt, she provides something that Benjamin never does: a fully

developed version of ‘the political’, of what a properly political life might look
like. In doing so, she of course seems to hold to an autonomous view of poli-
tics. She also does so, as we have seen, without a real solution for the falsities
that plague political life in her view. Yet, even if she lacks a way to realize her
political vision, her intense focus on politics as such allow her to give us a
glimpse of what a political life in distinction from its sovereign formations
might look like. We do not need to cast out her political theory even though
it effectively fails to distinguish idolatry from non-idolatry. If we recall once
again that the Messiah in Benjamin’s view only makes a ‘slight adjustment’ in

Waiting for justice 95

the world, we can see how Arendt’s view of ‘the political’ may not be all that
different from politics in its own distinction. What she perceives via her
intense devotion to human politics, Benjamin makes possible through his
conception of divine violence. In this way both Arendt and Derrida offer
important contributions to our constellation, something that should become
clearer in the following chapter.

In the next chapter, we will explore one more key dimension of the ques-

tion of sovereign function, namely that of forgiveness and judgment; here too,
it seems that we might fear giving up sovereignty when it offers a transcen-
dent position from which to be able to forgive and judge. Here again I will
engage with Derrida and Arendt to show how their responses, while crucial,
would greatly benefi t from Benjaminian politico-theology (and visa versa).
And here again, I will argue that Benjamin offers us an understanding of how
both of the critical faculties of forgiveness and justice can not only be sustained
in the absence of a clear marker of sovereign authority, but can even thrive,
when they cease to be over-determined by phantasm and mythology.

Notes

1 Nietzsche 1995: 195.
2 Although it is not itself necessarily all that conventional, the theme of waiting is

explicit in Weil 1992.

3 Kafka 1961: 65.
4 I describe this in detail in Martel 2011 forthcoming.
5 Once again, see Martel 2011 forthcoming.
6 Kafka 1961: 61.
7 Derrida 1992: 26.
8 Ibid.
9 Ibid.
10 Ibid.: 27.
11 Ibid.: 28.
12 Ibid.: 53–4.
13 Ibid.: 62.
14 Ibid.
15 Ibid. Derrida even goes a bit farther than this when he suggests that the ‘Critique’

‘belongs . . . to the great anti-parliamentary and anti “Aufklärung” wave on which
Nazism so to speak surfaced and even surfed in the 1920s and the beginning of
the 1930s.’ Ibid.: 64 (footnote).

16 Ibid.: 56.
17 Ibid.: 61.
18 Ibid.: 62.
19 ‘Critique of Violence’, in Benjamin 1978a: 297.
20 Ibid.
21 Derrida 1994: 181 (footnote).
22 See Caputo 1997.
23 Derrida 1992: 53 .
24 ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Benjamin 1968: 263.
25 We see the same possibility at the very end of the ‘Critique of Violence’ when

Benjamin writes somewhat optimistically that: ‘If the rule of myth is broken

96 Politics in its own distinction

occasionally in the present age, the coming age is not so unimaginably remote
that an attack on law is altogether futile. But if the existence of violence outside
the law, as pure immediate violence, is assured, this furnishes the proof that
revolutionary violence, the highest manifestation of unalloyed violence by man,
is possible, and by what means.’ ‘Critique of Violence’, in Benjamin 1978a: 300.
It is true, that this is in the future but only the future as an extension of what
already is.

26 Ibid.
27 Benjamin 1998: 232.
28 Derrida 1987: 128.
29 Ibid.:143.
30 Ibid.:141.
31 Ibid.: 148.
32 Ibid: 149.
33 Ibid.: 148.
34 Ibid.: 145.
35 ‘Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of his Death’, in Benjamin 1968: 139.
36 ‘Politico-Theological Fragment’, in Benjamin 1978a: 312.
37 Ibid. I want to thank Catherine Kellogg for this insight. She makes this point in

her as yet unpublished essay, ‘Walter Benjamin and the Ethics of Violence’.

38 Arendt 1954: 7.
39 Ibid.: 7–8.
40 Ibid.: 10–11.
41 Ibid.: 11.
42 Ibid.: 7.
43 Ibid.: 11.
44 Ibid.
45 Ibid.: 12.
46 See Arendt 2007: 297. I write more about Arendt’s reading of Kafka, particularly

of The Castle in Textual Conspiracie s (Martel, 2011).

47 Hanna Pitkin writes of this that: ‘the idea of justice, central for Aristotle, is con-

spicuously absent from Arendt’s otherwise closely parallel account [of the polis ].’
Pitkin 1981: 327–52; 39.

48 Arendt 2006.
49 Gottlieb 2003: 139.
50 Gottlieb, following Frederick Dolan, describes for example how Arendt attributes

the ‘glad tidings’ that ‘a child has been born unto us’ to the gospels whereas that
phrase actually comes from Isaiah, suggesting a Christian overlay of a Jewish
Messianic understanding. Ibid.: 136–7.

51 Arendt 1958: 247.
52 Arendt 1986: 211.
53 Gottlieb puts this succinctly, telling us that ‘The “glad tidings” Arendt announces

express faith in the world – not in God.’ Gottlieb 2003: 137.

54 Ibid.: 139.
55 Ibid.: 143.
56 Ibid.: 160.
57 For another reading on Arendt’s Messianism, see Ring 1997. For Ring, Arendt is

less Messianic than simply Jewish (in a way that is compatible, at times, with
Messianism).

58 Arendt 1986: 192.
59 Arendt 1958: 50.
60 Here again, see Bonnie Honig’s ‘Declarations of Independence’ (Honig 1991).

Waiting for justice 97

61 Arendt 1958: 283. She also calls this ‘the Cartesian removal of the Archimedean

point into the mind of man.’ Ibid.: 285. She cites Kafka for this insight;
ibid.: 248.

62 Arendt tells us that judgment ‘has far more to do with man’s ability to make dis-

tinctions that with his ability to organize and subsume’. ‘Introduction into
Politics’, in Arendt 2005: 102.

63 Arendt 1958: 283.
64 Once again see Hanna Pitkin’s The Attack of the Blob (Pitkin 1998).
65 Arendt 1968: 192.
66 Arendt 1958: 320.
67 For more on this, see again Critchley 1999: 280.
68 ‘Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of his Death’, in Benjamin 1968: 134.
69 Badiou 2010: 221.

Chapter 5

Forgiveness, judgment and
sovereign decision

Introduction

Having discussed the question of justice itself in the previous chapter, in this
chapter, I will focus on some other crucial aspects that are normally attributed
to the sovereign function, namely the question of forgiveness and judgment.
The basic question I will pose here is whether it is possible to fi nd a form of
human forgiveness and/or the ability to make judgments in the face of the
Benjamin concept of divine violence. At fi rst glance, Benjamin’s notion of
divine violence may seem to suggest that judgment and forgiveness are exclu-
sively the province of a God that is utterly unknowable. For Benjamin, when
human beings make judgments, they inherently risk idolatry and myth, a
hubristic replacement of the true (divine) font of justice with some imagined
(and false) alternative. In the face of the awesome and irrefutable power of the
divine, what do we make of the ability of human beings to make their own
judgments? How are human beings able to forgive, when they cannot know
the bases for justice that underpin such decisions? Insofar as sovereignty is
invested, among other powers, with ‘standing in for God’ in terms of making
these kinds of judgments, is there any alternative to the kinds of pseudo
divine powers that we ordinarily invest in our political leaders?

In this chapter, in keeping with earlier arguments, I will claim that for

Benjamin we are able to forgive not despite but because of divine violence. As
we have seen, divine violence cleanses, not only those who are punished, but
also all of our phantasms of authority and power that take on universal, and
idolatrous, pretensions. When such idolatrous forms of judgment are removed
or subverted by the notion of a cleansing deity, we are returned to our own
contingent and agonic forms of justice and forgiveness. From such a perspec-
tive we can think further about what we can and cannot forgive and judge. In
this way too we can see that sovereignty as it is currently practiced overwrites
our own access to such faculties, leaving us with an arbitrary and mythical
form of forgiveness and judgment in the process.

In making these arguments, I will continue to examine Benjamin’s own

contribution to this question in constellation with the work of Derrida and

100 Politics in its own distinction

Arendt. Here too – and by extension from the claims already made in previous
chapters – I see that Derrida and Arendt have something to gain from
Benjamin’s understanding (even as Benjamin’s work is aided by their work as
well) insofar as it allows them to avoid some of the traps and dilemmas that
trouble their own considerations. Here again, we will see that it is possible,
even necessary, to have forgiveness and judgment without the current and
idolatrous practices of sovereignty. Similar to what we saw in the previous
chapter, I will argue that the forgiveness and judgment that we seek from our
terrestrial sovereigns, rather than being mapped onto an even more unim-
peachable deity, are returned to us even as moments of divine violence help to
make their accessibility evident to us.

Korah’s punishment

To begin this consideration, I would fi rst like to return once again to the story
of Korah, the main instance of divine violence that Benjamin furnishes in his
‘Critique of Violence’. It will be recalled that Benjamin tells us that Korah’s
punishment ‘strikes privileged Levites, strikes them without warning,
without threat, and does not stop short of annihilation. But in annihilation it
also expiates.’

In this immediate moment of divine justice, both punishment

and atonement are simultaneous acts. This is an absolute verdict and broaches
no compromise or negotiation.

Benjamin compares the divine violence promulgated against Korah with the

mythical violence seen in the punishment of Niobe. Niobe’s children were killed
by poison arrows shot by Apollo and Artemis after she bragged that, while their
mother only had two children, she had fourteen. Benjamin focuses on the fact
that Niobe’s punishment involved bloodshed while Korah’s did not. It will be
recalled (in a passage that Derrida makes much of as well) that for Benjamin:

Mythical violence is bloody power over mere life [das bloße Leben] for its
own sake, divine violence pure power over all life for the sake of the
living. The fi rst demands sacrifi ce, the second accepts it.

But what does it mean that divine violence is done ‘for the sake of the living’,
if it seems so removed from the realm of human life? Given the absolute
and irreversible authority of God’s action, even if divine violence potentially
allows us a cessation from idolatry, what does such an intervention actually
mean for our own ability to make judgments or to forgive? By its very nature,
divine violence seems so opaque, so illegible, that it appears impossible
to think that human beings could also dare to make their own judgments,
to either punish or forgive crimes or evil deeds that have been fomented
against them.

The upshot of the story of Korah seems to be that we must obey our leaders

(like Moses, or even God – more on that in the following chapter) and not

Forgiveness, judgment and sovereign decision 101

dare to presume anything ourselves. This may be one of the reasons that we
turn to sovereignty in the fi rst place; to channel a God or a divine authority
that has the right and the ability to make judgments, to forgive offenses, that
we ordinary mortals manifestly do not possess.

Yet in fact, even in the story of Korah, we can see that ordinary human

forgiveness is not occluded but actually modeled by God’s awesome power.
Recall that ‘in annihilation [divine violence] also expiates’. Korah is swal-
lowed up but his sin is also forgiven. This is not the case in the mythological
violence enacted against Niobe; she is turned into a weeping rock, forever
mourning her children. Her punishment is thus endless. Perhaps, we might
say, the fact that divine punishment expiates, also permits or models our own
acts of expiation and forgiveness.

Quite paradoxically, it seems that in fact, for Benjamin, the source of our

own individual abilities to judge and forgive is also, in a sense, divine. In his
‘Theologico-Political Fragment’ , Benjamin tells us that in many ways the small
and human perspective which seeks happiness, and the infi nite divine perspec-
tive which produces justice are complete opposites and have no point of inter-
section. And yet, as we already saw in the previous chapter, he concedes that:

If one arrow points to the goal toward which the profane dynamic acts,
and another marks the direction of Messianic intensity, then certainly the
quest of free humanity for happiness runs counter to the Messianic direc-
tion; but just as a force can, through acting, increase another that is acting
in the opposite direction, so the order of the profane assists, through
being profane, the coming of the Messianic kingdom. The profane, there-
fore, although not itself a category of this Kingdom, is a decisive category
of its quietest approach.

Here we see, as is often the case with Benjamin, that there is a kind of rela-
tionship, however unexpected it may seem, between divine and human forms
of judgment. Although they are unrelated, unconnected and even opposi-
tional, divine and human actions (and thereby judgments and forgiveness) are
mutually implicated.

Although unfathomable, the ‘quietest’ approach of the Messianic Kingdom

for Benjamin sustains and promotes human life in all of its locality and speci-
fi city (a concept that is reinforced by Benjamin telling us that divine violence
is executed ‘for the sake of the living’). In this sense, a contemplation of divine
violence might return us to ourselves, to our own perspectives (once they are
cleansed of idolatry). Thus, as we move from a consideration of justice to a
consideration of forgiveness and judgment, we move closer towards the actual
practices, the day-to-day operations of a political life that is distinct from
sovereign authority. Keeping the unknowability of the divine foremost in our
minds, our own judgments, our own ability to forgive, become legible to us.
We can engage in such acts, not as a myth we project onto God, but as a set

102 Politics in its own distinction

of guesses, prayers and gestures. In this way, we can better see the connection
(and indeed, the simultaneity) between God’s acts of divine violence and our
own political actions.

A storm of forgiveness

Benjamin does not discuss forgiveness per se all that much in his written
work. One short essay of his, ‘The Meaning of Time in the Moral Universe’, is
one of his few writings that directly addresses the issue.

A brief examination

of this essay offers us a good overall understanding of Benjamin’s basic connec-
tion between forgiveness and other forms of redemption, between divine
judgment and human politics. Here, true forgiveness is depicted as an act that
comes only through an inhuman time span (and, as we have seen, from a
superhuman, divine judge). Benjamin writes:

[T]ime not only extinguishes the traces of all misdeeds but also – by
virtue of its duration, beyond all remembering or forgetting – helps, in
ways that are wholly mysterious, to complete the process of forgiveness,
though never of reconciliation.

It may be that for forgiveness to be ‘complete’, we must turn to such a super-
human perspective (a perspective that Benjamin takes great pains to point out
is utterly denied to us). This is not unlike his concept, noted in the previous
chapter, that it is not we but the planet that ‘waits’ for justice; such a view
offers, once again, a seemingly inhuman, unavailable and remote concept. Yet
I would argue once again that an ‘incomplete’ form of forgiveness – a human
and political form – can be derived from Benjamin’s theologico-politics as
well. Further on in this same essay, Benjamin writes:

In order to struggle against retribution, forgiveness fi nds its powerful ally
in time. For time, in which Ate pursues the evildoer, is not the lonely
calm of fear but the tempestuous storm of forgiveness which precedes the
onrush of the Last Judgment and against which she cannot advance. This
storm is not only the voice in which the evildoer’s cry of terror is drowned;
it is also the hand that obliterates the traces of his misdeeds, even if it
must lay waste to the world in the process. As the purifying hurricane
speeds ahead of the thunder and lightning, God’s fury roars through
history in a storm of forgiveness, in order to sweep away everything that
would be consumed forever in the lightning bolts of divine wrath.

I will return to (a longer version of ) this citation later in this chapter. For now
it is worth noting Benjamin’s depiction of a divine ‘storm of forgiveness’. Like
all acts of divine violence, this storm is both destructive and purifying; even
as it destroys, it expiates. We are in effect enveloped in a turmoil of God’s

Forgiveness, judgment and sovereign decision 103

forgiveness. The image of a storm poetically reconstitutes our predicament as
human actors. It will be recalled that for Benjamin the world is always good,
even after the Fall; evil only lies in our subjective misreadings of that world.
For this reason, we cannot wait to be ‘forgiven’ by God. God has in fact already
forgiven us and keeps forgiving us over and over as the storm of forgiveness
rages on.

In the face of such a storm, we can and must model God’s acts of forgive-

ness. We must, in effect, forgive ourselves. Forgiveness must be something
that we do together in the face of an unknowable God who nonetheless reveals
to us the possibility of forgiveness. Forgiveness must be, like redemption, a
state of surrender, a capitulation toward our subjectivity and away from our
(false) power over the signs and objects of the world (including one another).
In other words, forgiveness must be political, part of the fabric of our actual
and mutual existence. Even as we turn our back on God we cannot forget the
tether to the original acts of forgiveness that literally envelop us, refusing to
abandon us to our idolatrous ways. To put this matter plainly, for Benjamin,
God has not given up on us; divine violence, seen here as a kind of tumult that
constantly roils the phantasmagoria, creates a context for us to be able to act,
to forgive and to judge, without the crushing, preordained certainties of
idolatry.

Derrida’s forgiveness

Such an understanding of forgiveness is quite different from Derrida’s notion
and it is worth spending some time looking at Derrida’s concept of forgive-
ness to highlight the dissimilarities. Although Derrida is, as we have already
seen, in many ways deeply indebted to Benjamin, I will argue once again that
his own turn towards a ‘religion without religion’ and ‘Messianism without a
Messiah’ entails a theology that cannot quite help us to forgive.

In his essay ‘On Forgiveness’, Derrida notes that forgiveness in our own

time is too often confused with reconciliation, with the kinds of negotiated
and political (read sovereign) outcomes that follow great political crimes (i.e.
‘crimes against humanity’) such as the holocaust and apartheid (and we saw in
the passage cited above from ‘The Meaning of Time in the Moral Universe’
that Benjamin is against reconciliation as well). For Derrida, the purpose of
major and public trials (like Nuremberg in Germany) or processes (like the
Truth and Reconciliation Commission in South Africa) is to produce a return
to normalcy, where people who have done terrible things can live with their
victims in a way that allows the country to continue to function. Yet, Derrida
warns us that:

Forgiveness is not, it should not be , normal, normative, normalizing. It
should remain exceptional and extraordinary, in the face of the impossible:
as if it interrupted the ordinary course of historical temporality.

104 Politics in its own distinction

In his understanding of forgiveness, Derrida parts company both with Arendt
(about which more will be said shortly) and Vladimir Jankélévitch, insofar as
both of those thinkers argue that we can only forgive what we can understand
and what we can punish. ‘Inexpiable’ crimes like the holocaust ( Jankélévitch
argues) cannot be forgiven at all.

For Derrida, these thinkers are ceding

forgiveness to the ‘sovereign’ impulse (a harsh commentary in Arendt’s case,
for obvious reasons). In this view, the sovereign alone decides who can and
cannot be forgiven. It decides on the meaning of a crime and only it has the
right to absolve (or not absolve) us from that crime.

For Derrida on the other hand, forgiveness must be excluded from the realm

of sovereignty and politics entirely. He ‘insist[s] . . . on the necessity of main-
taining the reference to an aneconomical and unconditional forgiveness:
beyond the exchange and even the horizon of a redemption or reconcilia-
tion.’

He calls forgiveness ‘heterogeneous to the order of politics or of the

juridical as they are ordinarily understood.’

For Derrida:

[a] pure and unconditional forgiveness, in order to have its own meaning,
must have no ‘meaning’, no fi nality, even no intelligibility. It is a madness
of the impossible. It would be necessary to follow, without letting up, the
consequence of this paradox, or this aporia.

Typical of his ambivalent, straddling position, Derrida tells us that he is ‘torn’
between the pragmatic requirement of reconciliation on the one hand and a
vision of pure forgiveness on the other. He insists that this ‘torn-ness’ is in fact
necessary in order to temper the sovereign tendency towards mandating and
negotiating forgiveness (and hence ensuring that there is no actual forgiveness
at all). He argues that insisting upon an a-political and a-juridical form of
forgiveness (despite its impossibility and its ‘madness’) ‘alone can inspire here,
now, in the urgency, without waiting, response and responsibilities’.

Derrida concludes his essay by arguing:

What I dream of, what I try to think as the ‘purity’ of a forgiveness
worthy of its name, would be a forgiveness without power: unconditional
but without sovereignty

. The most diffi cult task, at once necessary and

apparently impossible, would be to dissociate unconditionally and sover-
eignty . Will that be done one day? It is not around the corner, as is said.
But since the hypothesis of this unpresentable task announces itself, be it
as a dream for thought, this madness is perhaps not so mad.

We see once again a dream of escaping from sovereignty even as Derrida puts
off such a moment into a distant (perhaps permanently distant) future. As is
often the case, Derrida presents a moment of hope but one that is almost
completely engulfed by hesitation and ambivalence (a kinder way to phrase
this would be to say by prudence).

Forgiveness, judgment and sovereign decision 105

The inside and the outside

In terms of forgiveness then, Derrida and Benjamin do not seem to be in
agreement. As we have seen, for Benjamin – at least by analogy to his larger
understanding of redemption – forgiveness must be political, a thing we do
with one another, while for Derrida it must not be political at all.

mentioned earlier, I think that the difference here stems from their different
understandings of theology and also what constitutes an ‘inside’ and an
‘outside’ from and to the human perspective. For Derrida, we need the
‘outside’ perspective that forgiveness offers. It is ‘impossible’ and a ‘madness’
which is ‘perhaps not so mad’. Yet, from a Benjaminian perspective, even the
idea of a pure forgiveness, a dream that is private and a secret (Derrida says ‘I
must respect its secret’) risks becoming another form of idolatry.

In the

Benjaminian scheme, the solution to the subjectivity of forgiveness (which
risks a ‘sovereign’ solution – i.e. more mythology) is not to turn to a ‘mad’
vision of a redemptory and pure form of forgiveness – a way to haunt and
subvert the sovereign wish – but, as we have already seen, rather to turn
deeper into that subjectivity. Just as for Benjamin allegorical knowledge – a
product of the fall and a sign of our distance from truth – is part of the way
back towards redemption, so too must our subjective acts of forgiveness
become the means by which to make forgiveness something other than myth-
ical. Whereas Derrida’s Messiah stands just beyond our reach (or not even just
beyond, since the redemption it might offer is not ‘around the corner’),
Benjamin’s Messiah is always with us (the aforementioned ‘ weak Messianic
power’ that he attributes to every generation.)

By voiding itself as a cite of idolatry (as it voided Korah), the Messianic

function serves to return us to the necessity of our own judgments, that is to
say, it (potentially) leads us to politics as we have practiced them (even in the
shadow of the sovereign spectacle). Like the other political practices that we
engage with but do not recognize as such, our forgiveness, far from being
impossible, is undertaken in ways both banal and extraordinary; far from
being ‘mad’ such acts are the stuff of our life and, with Benjamin’s insight, we
can begin to recognize and recuperate them.

Arendt and forgiveness

In this formulation of recognizing the forgiveness that we already practice, we
begin to see the convergence between Arendt and Benjamin (this, despite
their many and important differences). Indeed, I will argue that when we read
Arendt and Benjamin in conjunction, we get a clearer sense of the possibility
of what might be called a ‘politics of forgiveness’ than we would taking either
thinker in isolation.

As I see it, Arendt’s understanding of forgiveness may help to render the

politics of Benjamin’s conceptions (or the conceptions I have inferred to

106 Politics in its own distinction

Benjamin) more clear. Similarly, Benjamin’s turn to theology helps Arendt to
better avoid Derrida’s charge about the sovereign nature of her understanding
of forgiveness (a charge with some merit, as I will explain further), as well as
helping her overcome her general sense of pessimism and helplessness about
the state of politics and the possibility of forgiveness.

In many interesting ways, Arendt’s understanding of forgiveness echoes

Benjamin minus his intensely theological orientation. For Arendt ‘what saves
man . . . comes from the outside.’

However, she hastens to add that it comes

‘not, to be sure, outside of man’.

For Arendt, consistent with the ‘incon-

spicuous Messianism’ that was discussed in the previous chapter, the capacity
to forgive comes only from and by other human beings, but it remains a
‘miracle’ to us nonetheless.

Arendt sees forgiveness as an explicitly political activity insofar as we

cannot forgive ourselves but only other people.

In her own understanding,

forgiveness is crucial to the possibility of human politics because without it
we would not be able to dare to act at all. Given the irreversibility of our
actions, and given that we can never know with full accuracy what the conse-
quences of our actions will be, we require forgiveness to be able to risk both
action and speech. Otherwise we would ‘be confi ned to one single deed from
which we could never recover’.

In this sense, we see the similarities between her views and Benjamin’s.

Here again is an agonic and human-centered form of judgment and forgive-
ness. Here too, the divine and theological functions of forgiveness are super-
seded by human gestures (although in Benjamin’s case the relationships is
more mutual and complex). Finally, here too, forgiveness involves risk; it is
part of how we face the void of uncertainty and doubt that comes in the
absence of divine and sovereign assurances.

The dangers of ideology

And yet, for all her convergence with Benjamin, Arendt is troubled once
again by the fact that her version of human-centered politics is always threat-
ened, virtually impossible. Arendt explicitly links forgiveness to promising, a
faculty that in her view is both essential for the practice of politics and also
always under threat. In The Human Condition, she famously writes that:

The possible redemption from the predicament of irreversibility – of
being unable to undo what one has done though one did not, and could
not, have known what he was doing – is the faculty of forgiving. The
remedy for unpredictability, for the chaotic uncertainty of the future, is
contained in the faculty to make and keep promises. The two faculties
being together in so far as one of them, forgiving, serves to undo the deeds
of the past . . . and the other, binding oneself through promises, serves to
set up in the ocean of uncertainty, which the future is by defi nition,

Forgiveness, judgment and sovereign decision 107

islands of security without which not even continuity, let alone durability
of any kind, would be possible in the relationship between men.

Here we see her clearest and best articulation of how forgiveness crucially fi ts
into a politics that is based on human plurality, on collective and mutual acts.
This is a politics, as already mentioned, that directly addresses the void left
by divine sanction. And yet, despite this seeming optimism, Arendt sees that
in fact communities based on promising and forgiveness – agonic, local and
explicitly political though they may be – ultimately founder in the face of
ideological doctrines that supplant the political experience altogether.

On Revolution is perhaps the book that most clearly lays out this dilemma.

There, she lauds the virtues of local political practices in revolutionary America,
France and Russia but, as we saw in earlier discussions, in each case (more
quickly in the latter cases but even in the American case) these ‘council’-based
systems of politics were overtaken by ‘parties’, ideologically based, top-down
organizations. In other words, politics is, once again, eclipsed by sovereignty.

Given her convictions, it may seem peculiar that Derrida accuses Arendt of

having recourse to sovereignty in her own rendition of forgiveness. To some
extent, Derrida may be confl ating her position with Jankélévitch’s own. He
may be confusing her own brand of politics, her own collective basis for
forgiveness, with the kind of sovereign politics that are practiced by states.
And yet, in some sense, he is right. As we have seen, Arendt does turn to sover-
eignty to some extent and does compromise with it (although for that matter,
so does Derrida).

Perhaps such a compromise is the best that Arendt can hope for, but even

such a relatively hopeful argument pales in the face of her own acknowledge-
ment that there is no compromise with sovereignty and parties (as her analysis
in On Revolution shows). With the loss of the power of the councils, the power
of forgiveness, promising and judgment disappears as well; even politics itself
becomes impossible under such conditions.

We are left at a familiar impasse. And here, once again, it seems to me that

aligning Arendt more closely with Benjamin may help to protect the kinds of
politics she seeks from the forces of ideology (or idolatry), from sovereignty
and the will. In Benjamin’s analysis, our current predicament comes not from
an inviolable and unalterable force like ‘the will’ (which we can do nothing
about) but rather from the effects of commodity fetishism, from the phan-
tasms that are produced by the phantasmagoria. This kind of ideology can and
must be fought now, in our own time. A greater awareness of the dangers of
fetishism – even for the left – marks Benjamin’s life work and could be of
service to Arendt’s own goals. It gives her an option for fi ghting with rather
than resigning herself to (and compromising with) the very forces that threaten
what she most cherishes about political life. Above all, an attention to idolatry
may help to fulfi ll what is perhaps Arendt’s most crucial component of human
politics, the faculty of judgment.

108 Politics in its own distinction

Judgment

The ways that Arendt and Benjamin converge and diverge on these issues can
perhaps be seen even more clearly if we turn to a discussion of judgment
which, as mentioned in the previous chapter, is for Arendt perhaps the most
important faculty that human beings possess, with the greatest consequences
for notions of politics. If Arendt has a way out of her pessimism, her sense that
human beings are doomed to sovereignty, to doubt, and to becoming nothing
more than animal laborans , the faculty of judgment offers her last, best hope.
Judgment is, of course, the name of the fi nal book – the third part of The Life of
the Mind – that Arendt never lived to write and it is tempting to say that
Arendt’s theory remains incomplete without it. But Arendt wrote on judg-
ment throughout her life and the series of lectures she made on Kant’s polit-
ical philosophy are often read as a precursor to what she was going to write on
in Judgment itself.

For Arendt, the critical aspect of judgment, what most recommends this

faculty to her, is its commonality. Citing Kant, she tells us in her Lectures on
Kant’s Political Philosophy that unlike genius, which is creative and unique,
judgment – the reception of what genius produces – is common. Judgment,
akin to the sense of taste, is in each of us, regardless of our distinct character-
istics. Of this Arendt writes:

The faculty that guides [general] communicability is taste, and taste or
judgment is not the privilege of genius. The condition sine qua non for the
existence of beautiful objects is communicability; the judgment of the
spectator creates the space without which no such object could appear
at all.

For Arendt, judgment is the faculty that most corresponds to the kinds of
politics that she seeks; it offers a collectively held, mutually regarding perspec-
tive in which we all react based on those things that we have in common (but
also based on those things that we do uniquely and individually).

In the connection that she makes between judgment and taste, Arendt

notes that taste is something that we cannot help but respond to (she writes:
‘the it-pleases-or-displeases-me is immediate and overwhelming’).

This

quality, where we cannot help but discriminate, becomes public and shared
via acts of imagination. Citing Kant once again, for Arendt, the imagination
transforms an object of perception into a representation via ‘the operation of
refl ection’.

The space afforded by representation turns taste into judgment:

Only what touches, affects, one in representation, when one can no longer
be affected by immediate presence – when one is uninvolved, like the
spectators who were uninvolved, in the actual doings of the French

Forgiveness, judgment and sovereign decision 109

Revolution – can be judged to be right or wrong . . . One then speaks of
judgment and no longer of taste because, though it still affects one like a
matter of taste, one now has, by means of representation, established the
proper distance, the remoteness or uninvolvedness or disinterestedness,
that is requisite for approbation and disapprobation, for evaluating some-
thing at its proper worth. By removing the object, one has established the
conditions for impartiality.

As already suggested in the previous chapter, this collectively based form of
truth or judgment is perhaps the closest Arendt comes to having an answer to
the problem of idolatry. She suggests that a political response, a form of
collective judgment is possible so long as that judgment is properly rooted in
the existential fact of human plurality (in which the faculty of taste anchors
us) even as it also stands at a bit of a remove from the immediacy of sense.
Such a form of judgment, it seems, may be the anchor that Arendt looks for;
a way for human beings to make their own decisions without recourse to the
absolute and a way to shield against those pseudo truths that would otherwise
bring the absolute creeping back into our collective reality. It may offer the
discerning mechanism that Arendt requires in order to battle the absolute
itself.

Let us for the moment ignore the fact that this treatment of judgment is

only preliminary (in that sense, it truly is a tragedy that Arendt was unable to
complete even one page of Judgment ). Let us also ignore the paradox that
Arendt here is calling (it would seem) for a kind of disinterested spectatorship
even as her own political theory calls for something quite different. She herself
wants engaged actors not mere spectators but it would be impossible to make
such a claim via Kant who is absolutely clear on this question.

More to the point, as I see it, the problem with Arendt’s idea of judgment

is that here again, without some notion of political idolatry, she cannot guar-
antee that the process itself does not become contaminated by what it would
guard against. In a nutshell, insofar as the act of judgment requires a move
towards representation, it is the quality of representation itself that comes
into question. There is this danger with Arendt (one that I think Derrida is
more concerned with but as a result is also more halting in his politics),
namely that having found the proper process to produce judgment, the results
of that process will be called ‘just’ even if the process itself has no way to check
itself. One could argue that Arendt poses the danger of declaring one’s judg-
ments to be just and political, refl ective of human plurality and leaving it at
that – thus entrenching a non-just, apolitical phantasm into the heart of her
political program. A public and plural process may not itself avoid the
problem of a ‘mob mentality’ (refl ecting her fear of the social) if a community
remains subject to commonly held idolatrous beliefs. Perhaps Arendt herself
was aware of this danger; certainly her pessimism was itself a kind of guard
against any easy resolution to political questions. As I see it the way to ensure

110 Politics in its own distinction

that the idea of publicness and plurality do not merely become empty forms
(which could be fi lled with idolatry) is once again to align Arendt with
Benjamin’s notion(s) of idolatry.

In fact, I would argue that Arendt’s notion of judgment is really not that

distant from Benjamin’s own, as when he describes the way (discussed in
Chapter 3 ) that Kafka ‘sacrifi ced truth for the sake of clinging to its transmis-
sibility, its haggadic element’.

This appreciation for transmissibility itself,

for representation over content, is something that these thinkers have in
common. Yet Arendt remains relatively uncritical of representation itself.
Although she attacks it when it takes on clearly idolatrous forms (as when it
is used by a party to overrun spontaneous political movements in a revolution)
she does not question whether this same form of phantasm can’t infect people
in their collectivity, can’t stand in for reality itself.

On the surface of it, Benjamin seems to call for the opposite of Arendt when

it comes to judgment. Because he is so suspicious of human intentionality,
because he is so enamored of subversion that comes inadvertently from the
mouths or pens of the world’s biggest stooges (like the German tragic drama-
tists), it seems that he would prefer that we do not judge at all. He writes for
example in a circa-1930 fragment entitled ‘The First Form of Criticism that
Refuses to Judge’ (the title, which is also the fi rst sentence of the fragment,
suggests his desire to unseat judgment) that our judgments are always formed
in response to our own time, to the baggage that has been built up by the
past and our own view of that baggage. Speaking here specifi cally of judg-
ments of literature, he writes that ‘the exegesis, the ideas, the admiration
and enthusiasm of past generations have become indissolubly part of the
works themselves, have completely internalized them and turned them into
the mirror-images of later generations.’

Here ‘refusing to judge’ may be the

fi rst step towards acknowledging the degree to which we are a refl ection of
phantasm, our judgments, far from being objective, are utterly subjective,
utterly caught up in the swirl of the phantasmagoria.

This correlates with a question expressed at the beginning of this chapter as

to whether the notion of a truth that is totally opaque to us (known only to
God) might not be the death-knell for any hope for human judgment. And
here again, we see that Benjamin’s theology not only permits but requires –
and makes possible – human judgment. Returning to a passage from ‘The
Meaning of Time in the Moral Universe’ considered earlier in this chapter, we
see that judgment is not only a human province (as it is for Arendt), but also
that it comes from God. Indeed, the idea of judgment – and, as we will see, of
forgiveness as well – is at the heart of the concept of divine violence itself. To
return to a citation considered earlier in this chapter but now in a longer form,
we see that Benjamin writes:

The Last Judgment is regarded as the date when all postponements are
ended and all retribution is allowed free rein. This idea, however, which

Forgiveness, judgment and sovereign decision 111

mocks all delay as vain procrastination, fails to understand the immeasur-
able signifi cance of the Last Judgment, of that constantly postponed day
which fl ees so determinedly into the future after the commission of every
misdeed. This signifi cance is revealed not in the world of law, where retri-
bution rules, but only in the moral universe, where forgiveness comes out
to meet it. In order to struggle against retribution, forgiveness fi nds its
powerful ally in time. For time, in which Ate pursues the evildoer, is not
the lonely calm of fear but the tempestuous storm of forgiveness which
precedes the onrush of the Last Judgment and against which she cannot
advance. This storm is not only the voice in which the evildoer’s cry of
terror is drowned; it is also the hand that obliterates the traces of his
misdeeds, even if it must lay waste to the world in the process. As the
purifying hurricane speeds ahead of the thunder and lightning, God’s
fury roars through history in a storm of forgiveness, in order to sweep
away everything that would be consumed forever in the lightning bolts of
divine wrath.

This passage is perhaps a singularly detailed description on Benjamin’s part of
divine violence. The fi gure of Ate represents someone who cannot tell wrong
from right, a mythical fi gure who craves God’s judgment as a way to resolve
all the questions that are part of the human experience. The idolator (Ate)
seeks judgment as a way to confi rm her own beliefs. She also represents the
law (and mythological violence in general), the desire for retribution that is
promised by sovereign forms of political authority. As we have already seen,
God’s ultimate answer to this mythology is to withhold that judgment, to
surround us instead in a ‘storm of forgiveness’. In this way we do not get what
we want but we get instead a kind of divine mercy which frees us from the
awful, fateful destiny that we deserve.

And, in the absence or refusal of divine judgment, given the fact that we are

always forgiven by a deity that we have endlessly wronged, we are permitted,
once again, a space for human judgment to appear. Not ‘Judgment’, that
objective and fi nal answer that the Ates and Korahs of this world crave, but
rather judgment, that daily response, that local and unnoticed action that is,
as with justice itself, obliterated and overshadowed by the spectacle of sover-
eign authority. Thus, just as there is more than one form of justice in the
world for Benjamin, there is also more than one form of judgment. The failure
of the phantasmic form of Judgment (as revealed by acts of divine violence)
affords the space for the local, accessible judgment to be recognized.

Accordingly, it may be that what saves Arendt is not judgment itself but

actually its failure to appear. Were ‘Judgment’, that Kantian-style refl ective
‘objectivity’ to truly emerge, we would risk losing that very subversive and
differentiated agonism that attracts so many scholars to Arendt in the fi rst
place. In her hands, Kant’s judgment becomes something better than this,
something more political and plural. Or, put another way, Arendt makes

112 Politics in its own distinction

Kant the best that he can be, but she remains tied by Kant’s suspicion of
subjectivity and his hostility to action (as opposed to spectatorhood).
Benjamin’s answer is to turn his back on what judgment ought to be in order
to understand what it actually is. For Benjamin we are fortunate that acts of
divine violence save us from our own desire to be saved (and ‘completed’).
God’s forgiveness, the divine refusal to ultimately judge us, preserves us in
our local humanity; such an act serves as a check on our desire to judge and to
know; it suggests a critical alternative to the sovereign function wherein
judgment becomes not a righteous pronouncement but merely a refl ection of
our lived experience.

Conclusion: A politics of forgiveness?

Taking Arendt and Benjamin together, we get a fuller vision of what a poli-
tics of forgiveness and judgment (with a decidedly small ‘j’) might look like.
Arendt gives us a much fuller vision of such a politics than Benjamin does but
her work is stymied by a mix of ambivalence and pessimism (not all of which
is bad, as I suggested above). Both of these thinkers share, as we have seen, an
orientation towards human-centered politics, but Benjamin’s theology,
however paradoxical it may seem, actually makes such a human-centered
politics more possible.

Derrida too has something to add to this conversation in his own insistence

that politics – and hence forgiveness – have nothing of the sovereign in it, or at
least none of sovereignty as it is currently conceptualized. But Derrida projects,
I argue, his view of forgiveness onto the screen of an impossible, unavailable
sense of justice that haunts the actions that we do actually perform (repro-
ducing his ‘torn-ness’ which I see as disabling his politics). Here again, I think
a greater attention to the power of fetishism would – in Derrida’s case as in
Arendt’s – better enable him to embrace a human-centered form of politics (the
politics I see him as actually pursuing) with less ambivalence, less of a sense
that something was being occluded or left out (the ‘outside’ perspective).

To be clear, the politics that emerges from this constellation between

Benjamin, Arendt and Derrida would not automatically be good or desirable.
Agonic politics are not in and of themselves perfect or complete (quite the
contrary); we will continue to make mistakes, to forgive for ill-conceived, self-
serving or just plain awful reasons (a point I will return to in the conclusion
to this book). But without the overwhelming effect of idolatry, it becomes
possible to engage in a politics – or rather to recognize a politics in which we
are already engaged – where the outcome and the value judgments to measure
such outcomes are not preordained, predetermined in ways that bypass poli-
tics itself. In such a circumstance, even our forgiveness can become, as it were,
subject to forgiveness, a product of a human-centered politics that knows that
the Messiah has already been here, leaving us, for all intents and purposes, to
our own devices.

Forgiveness, judgment and sovereign decision 113

In the next chapter, we will turn, as previously mentioned, to the work of

Hobbes and Spinoza in order to examine a relatively well-fl eshed-out version
of a form of sovereignty that does not overwrite and over-determine human
politics. This is the story of the ‘Hebrew Republic’ that both writers pay great
attention to: the polity of ancient Israel from the time of Moses until the elec-
tion of Saul as king of the Hebrews. From the outset I want to make it clear
(as I will again in the next chapter) that I do not think the kind of semi-
theocracy that is described by these thinkers is an ideal or perfect setting. But
it does allow us a chance to think about an actually functioning society (even
if its ‘reality’ is subject to question) in which sovereignty does not work as it
usually does. By returning to the most evident political theological roots of
our contemporary eschatology and the polity that most contributed to setting
that up, we have an opportunity to revisit a story that has served as a kind of
model for what politics are possible in the world. By seeing, through the work
of Hobbes and Spinoza, a different sort of reading of that origin myth (for
both thinkers, ancient Israel is the font of modern sovereignty), we can perhaps
begin to learn how to reoccupy our temporality in a way that aligns with
Benjamin’s work, along with that of Arendt and Derrida (although none of
these thinkers will be the focus of the chapter). At the same time, by revis-
iting the setting for Benjamin’s paramount instance of divine violence (the
story of Korah), we can also see how divine violence can play an ongoing and
repeating role in the kinds of communities that are produced in the wake of
that event. As we will see further, for both Hobbes and Spinoza, the Hebrew
Republic virtually institutionalized (although surely that is not the right
word to use in this context) ongoing and episodic visitations of divine violence.
The effect of such visitations on the ongoing practice of terrestrial sovereignty
is the key point to take away from any study of that polity as it is described
by Hobbes and Spinoza.

Notes

1 ‘Critique of Violence’, in Benjamin 1978a: 297.
2 Ibid. German in ‘Zur Kritik der Gewalt’, Benjamin 1991: 201.
3 ‘Politico-Theological Fragment’, in Benjamin 1978a: 312.
4 I am indebted to Erik Doxtader for bringing this writing to my attention.
5 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Meaning of Time in the Moral Universe’, in Bullock and

Jennings 1996: 287.

6 Ibid.: 286–7.
7 ‘Religion without religion’ is the subtitle of John Caputo’s book The Prayers and

Tears of Jacques Derrida . The term ‘messianic without messianism’ is used on p. 99
of that volume.

8 Derrida 2001: 32.
9 For his text see Jankélévitch 2005. In a related text, Derrida cites Arendt in The

Human Condition to make his case that for Arendt, forgiveness ‘is always a correlate
of the possibility of punishing’. He quotes her saying there that ‘men are unable to
forgive what they cannot punish and . . . they are unable to punish what has turned

114 Politics in its own distinction

out to be unforgivable.’ Derrida, ‘To Forgive’, in Caputo, Dooley and Scanlon
2001: 30. See also ‘On Forgiveness: A Roundtable Discussion with Jacques Derrida’
in that same volume. For a set of treatises on the ‘inexpiable’ see Copjec 1999.

10 Derrida 2001: 37–8.
11 Ibid.: 39.
12 Ibid.: 45. He also tells us that ‘Forgiveness is thus mad. It must plunge, but

lucidly, into the night of the unintelligible.’ Ibid.: 49.

13 Ibid.: 51. Derrida reproduces this kind of torn-ness for example in ‘To Forgive’

when he writes: ‘Thus forgiveness, if it is possible, if there is such a thing, is not
possible, it does not exist as possible, it only exists by exempting itself from the
law of the possible, by impossibilizing itself, so to speak, and in the infi nite
endurance of the im-possible as impossible’: ‘To Forgive’, in Caputo, Dooley and
Scanlon 2001: 48.

14 Derrida: 59–60.
15 To be fair, I’m not sure that the same defi nition of politics applies here.
16 Ibid.: 55.
17 ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Benjamin 1968: 254.
18 Arendt 1958: 236.
19 Ibid.
20 In considering the primacy of politics over theology she writes:

It is decisive in our context that Jesus maintains against the ‘scribes and
pharisees’ fi rst that it is not true that only God has the power to forgive, and
second that this power does not derive from God – as though God, not men,
would forgive through the medium of human beings – but on the contrary
must be mobilized by men towards each other before they can hope to be
forgiven by God also. Jesus’ formulation is even more radical. Man in the
gospel is not supposed to forgive because God forgives and he must do ‘like-
wise’ but ‘if ye from your hearts forgive’ God shall do ‘likewise’. Ibid.: 239.

Thus forgiveness is for Arendt a human miracle, something of our own devising
(without necessary precluding or negating the possibility of God’s forgiveness, as
we see here).

21 Arendt contrasts forgiveness with vengeance which ‘remains bound to the process,

permitting the chain reaction contained in every action to take its unhindered
course.’ Ibid.: 240–1. She goes on to write that: ‘forgiving, in other words, is the
only reaction which does not merely re-act but acts anew and unexpectedly,
unconditioned by the act which provoked it and therefore freeing from this con-
sequence both the one who forgives and the one who is forgiven.’ Ibid.: 241.

22 Ibid.: 237.
23 Ibid.
24 Ronald Beiner makes this argument for one. See his Preface, in Arendt 1982: vii.
25 Arendt 1982: 63.
26 In Chapter 6, I am going to criticize Hardt and Negri’s idea of commonality. I don’t

quite see it as being identical to those features of commonality that we fi nd in
Arendt.

27 Arendt 1982: 64.
28 Ibid.: 67.
29 ‘Some Refl ections on Kafka’, in Benjamin 1968: 144.
30 Walter Benjamin, ‘The First form of Criticism that Refuses to Judge’, in Bullock

and Jennings 1999: 372.

31 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Meaning of Time in the Moral Universe’, in Bullock and

Jennings 1996: 286–7.

Chapter 6

Sovereignty de-centered

The Hebrew Republic

Introduction

In this fi nal chapter before the conclusion, we leave behind the comparison
between Derrida, Arendt and Benjamin, in order to think further about the
possibilities produced by the conversation (or constellation) that emerges
between them. More accurately, I want to allow that discussion to illuminate
a discussion that doesn’t directly involve these interlocutors. In this way we
are extending our constellation yet further, to include two much earlier
thinkers, Thomas Hobbes and Baruch Spinoza. In particular, I want to think
further about what it would look like if sovereignty were in fact de-centered,
were not as dominant and overwhelming as it is today. I propose to accom-
plish this by looking at what Spinoza called ‘the Hebrew Republic’ and
Hobbes calls ‘The Kingdome of God’.

This was their respective examinations

of ancient Israel, when God was the sovereign of the Hebrews (including, of
course, the rule of Moses and the moment when God punished Korah). In
their respective analyses (which are often quite critical of that period) we see
the possibility of a kind of sovereign practice that is quite different from that
usually attributed to these thinkers (and especially to Hobbes). We see in a
plainly theological form the possibility of a kind of politics that could poten-
tially be practiced (or potentially is already being practiced) in other settings
as well. Namely, we see a sovereignty that is removed from daily human life,
leaving gaps and holes that can only be fi lled by our own actions, our own
potential for what Benjamin would call ‘revolutionary violence’. Here we see
that peace and order, key aspects that are generally attributed only to sover-
eignty in its present form, are possible even when (I’d say only when) sover-
eignty itself has been, as it were, lifted out of the human sphere and returned
to God (or, whatever force or power is implied by the German word waltende
instead of sovereignty). In the discussion that follows, I want to make it clear
that I once again am not arguing that a return to some kind of ancient theo-
cratic model is the solution to our current predicament. In many ways the
‘Hebrew Republic’ is highly problematical, as we will see. Rather, I am trying
to show that this model has something to say to our own time, to show how

116 Politics in its own distinction

politics can be practiced differently than it already is (or more accurately, how
the different practice that already exists can be rendered legible to us, the
practitioners). Above all, we will see how the regular and ongoing acts of
divine violence, the periodic disruptions of idolatry that marked the Hebrew
Republic, show how a polity that is continuously being delivered from its
own idolatry is also a polity that, in effect, escapes – at least to a great extent
– the requirements of sovereignty as it is currently conceived and practiced.

Reading Hobbes and Spinoza

To begin this inquiry, it is worth acknowledging that some readers might
regard it as odd to evoke Hobbes and Spinoza as sources for a radically
de-centered sovereignty, especially Hobbes.

Hobbes is, after all often consid-

ered the chief author of modern forms of sovereignty; he is generally held to
be one of the prime authors of the secular ‘disguise’ (albeit a fairly thin one)
that sovereignty has worn to this day. And Spinoza, for all of his advocacy for
tolerance, was, when it came to the question of obeying one’s sovereign
government, surprisingly conservative. He writes in the ‘Theologico-Political
Treatise’ (TTP) that private individuals must obey the sovereign in all things,
‘however absurd these may be’.

How then is it possible to argue that these

authors are in fact offering a portrait of a form of sovereignty that avoids the
totalization that they themselves generally seem to subscribe to (or even
produce)?

Yet there are reasons for thinking that Hobbes and Spinoza may be under-

mining their own overt political claims. For one thing, even if these thinkers
formally advocate sovereign authority, their texts are in a sense often at odds
with their pronouncements (in this way, their texts too may partake in the
kinds of textual rebellions that we see with the German Baroque dramatists,
among others). Both of these thinkers offer radical and extremely decentral-
ized notions of interpretation when it comes to reading Scripture. For all of
his stated desire to give the sovereign the ‘last word’ on all matters of state and
politics, Hobbes’s method of interpretation suggests that interpretation
cannot and should not be the monopoly of one reader and that meaning comes
out of complicated and highly decentralized social and linguistic processes.
Spinoza for his part similarly sees interpretation as a highly decentralized and
individual process. Although both thinkers supply clear rules and methodolo-
gies of interpretation that suggest that there is a ‘right way’ to read Scripture,
both of them pull back from asserting that the Bible therefore means one
thing only. They both insist on interpretation as a process rather than a simple
act of decoding. They also insist on myriad private readings even as they
acknowledge that such readings lead to the very dissent and difference of
opinion that they perceive as a threat to sovereignty.

Also, and just as importantly, these writers both engage in the same kind

of political theology that Benjamin does himself. While Hobbes is known as

Sovereignty de-centered: the Hebrew Republic 117

a highly secular writer, in fact the second half of Leviathan (and large sections
of other works as well, including De Cive and Behemoth ) are given over to reli-
gious writing and scriptural interpretation. Spinoza is more openly theolog-
ical (as the title of his ‘Theologico-Political Treatise’ clearly suggests).

In this

way, these authors, rather than suppressing the religious sources of and rela-
tionship to politics are exploring these relationships in ways that might be at
odds with their overt and ‘secular’ political messages. As such, they allow us
a way to return to the early modern construction of sovereignty to revisit and
rethink the troubled and long relationship between theology and politics in
a way that accords (is in constellation) with Benjamin’s own work on the
subject.

Finally, these authors, and especially Hobbes, lived and wrote during the

same time of transition that Benjamin ascribes to the German tragic drama-
tists. This was a time, it will be recalled, when one set of eschatologies was in
the process of being replaced by another (or, perhaps more accurately, the
same eschatology was changing its face without changing its basic character-
istics). The fact that Hobbes felt himself called upon to produce a new,
modern form of eschatology is itself evidence of the thinness or disrupted
nature of eschatology in his day. Thus, even if he wanted to produce a conser-
vative promotion of sovereign power, he may, like the Baroque dramatists,
have produced a text that – at least at times – subverts itself (and Spinoza may
have done the same).

Even if we leave off an analysis of their respective notions of interpretation

(i.e. how the text is represented, how we read and respond to it), I argue that
in their treatments of the ‘Hebrew Republic’ we see a portrayal – and not
always a positive one – that suggests how a Benjamin-style defl ated or
de-centered sovereignty might work. Both authors claim that during this
time God is the king of ancient Israel. In this way, as previously mentioned,
sovereignty is taken out of the human sphere and given (back) to God. In
practice, this leads to a radically de-centered kind of rule. Because the inter-
pretive method for receiving God’s commands are fractured and de-centered
(produced by a rivalry between the priests and the prophets as we will see
further), we fi nd a much greater role for popular interpretation in ancient
Israel than in future societies. Even as Hobbes and Spinoza do not always
appear to approve of this kingdom or republic, we see in its very portrayal a
model for sovereignty that is quite subversive vis-à-vis the overt political
messages that both authors are normally seen as conveying.

Hobbes’s and Spinoza’s interest in the period is not unique to these thinkers.

In his book The Hebrew Republic , Eric Nelson describes the fascination many
seventeenth-century scholars had with ancient Israel. In keeping with the
argument discussed in Chapter 1 of this book, Nelson argues that rather than
moving towards a greater secularism (as is generally held), seventeenth-
century thought moved towards a greater involvement with religion. While
the Renaissance was a time of increasing secularism, the seventeenth century

118 Politics in its own distinction

put Scripture and its interpretation at the center of political thought.

The

Reformation brought with it an appetite to return to the Bible, to the Hebrew
language and to the Judaic rabbinical tradition as a way to evade Catholic
orthodoxies. This had serious consequences for the way that politics were
thought about. Nelson writes:

Readers began to see in the fi ve books of Moses not just political wisdom,
but a political constitution. No longer regarding the Hebrew Bible as the
Old Law – a shadowy intimation of truth, which had been rendered null
and void by the New Dispensation – they increasingly came to see it as a
set of political laws that God himself had given to the Israelites as their
civil sovereign. Moses was now to be understood as a lawgiver , as the
founder of a politeia in the Greek sense.

The idea that God set up a ‘perfect constitution’ offered European scholars an
idea of the political that was in fact openly theological even as it set the stan-
dard for the practice of secular politics. Thinkers ranging from Bodin and
Grotius to Cunaeus wrote about the political system of ancient Israel with
strong implications for their own contemporary practices.

In terms of Hobbes and Spinoza themselves, Nelson traces a genealogy of

interest from John Selden, who wrote numerous texts on ancient Israel to
Hobbes, and thence to Spinoza. Nelson writes that ‘Hobbes’s approach to this
paradigmatic constitution would, in turn, deeply infl uence what is perhaps
the most famous seventeenth-century text on the respublica Hebraeorum . . .
Baruch Spinoza’s Tractatus theologico-politicus (1670).’

Let us then turn to their respective considerations of this ‘paradigmatic consti-

tution’ to see how it refl ects upon, or serves as a subversive counter-example to,
the modern sovereign state both thinkers are purportedly in service to.

The Kingdome of God/Hebrew Republic

To be sure, any subversive quality is not immediately apparent in reading
either the second half of Leviathan (or latter parts of De Cive as well) or Spinoza’s
‘Theologico-Political Treatise’. In the case of both Hobbes and Spinoza, a
discussion of the Kingdom of God ostensibly serves as a model for contem-
porary sovereignty; after all, God’s kingdom would seem to set an ideal model
for how any kingdom (or any political order at all) ought to be run (as Nelson
suggests). Yet, it is precisely due to the sublimity of the concept of a nation
ruled by God that we see a subversive element to this discussion; God’s sover-
eignty, in contrast to the sovereignty of terrestrial kingdoms that follow, is
non-arbitrary. God’s authority is perfect and uncompromised by various
human faults and errors, the error of idolatry very much included.

From a Benjaminian perspective, we see that it is crucial to note that God’s

kingdom is non-idolatrous by defi nition. All human pretenders and mythmakers,

Sovereignty de-centered: the Hebrew Republic 119

the Korahs and Ates of this world, who normally overshadow human politics, are
in turn overshadowed by God (sometimes quite literally, as we have seen). True
to Benjamin’s views, for both Hobbes and Spinoza, God’s kingship does not
instantiate truth into the world – at least not in any sure way. Rather, God’s
rule undoes all human competitors to speak for the truth, opening up a space
for collective acts of interpretation and judgment (of the very sort that Arendt
appreciates).

When God is king, there is a radical aporia at the heart of the political

structure. With no terrestrial sovereign to dominate and control interpreta-
tion, we have a form of authority that has no single, central voice. Both
Hobbes and Spinoza portray highly decentralized and democratic alternatives
to sovereign decisionism (before trumping them, as we will see, with sover-
eign pronouncements of their own). For both thinkers, therefore, the connec-
tion between the Kingdom of God and contemporary sovereigns unsettles as
much as it anchors current forms of rule.

One of Hobbes’s most strident complaints about the church practices of his

time was the idea that the Kingdom of God was still extant. Hobbes writes:

The greatest, and main abuse of Scripture, and to which almost all the
rest are either consequent, or subservient, is the wresting of it, to prove
that the Kingdome of God, mentioned so often in the Scripture, is the
present Church.

Such an error sanctifi ed a set of contemporary church practices as if God were
directly manifest in them. It allowed the Pope and various other clergy to
claim to be speaking for God and created an artifi cial (for Hobbes) distinction
between ‘ Civill and the Canon Laws’.

In fact, for Hobbes, to use the human word ‘kingdom’ to speak of God

requires an actual, terrestrial kingdom. This existed only once, in ancient
Israel (he says that it will be restored when Christ comes to reign on earth).
Hobbes tells us that the ‘Kingdome of God was fi rst instituted by the
Ministery of Moses, over the Jews onely’.

It lasted throughout the period of

Hebrew Judges and ended (except for a temporary afterlife following the
Jews’ return from the Babylonian captivity) ‘in the election of Saul, when [the
Hebrews] refused to be governed by God any more, and demanded a King
after the manners of the nations’.

For Spinoza too, God’s kingdom literally (and only) existed in ancient

Israel. He calls this moment the ‘Hebrew theocracy’ as well as the ‘Hebrew
Republic’. He writes that ‘God alone, therefore, held dominion over the
Hebrews, whose state was in virtue of the covenant called God’s kingdom,
and God was said to be their king.’

For both writers, one of the key aspects of the Kingdom of God was that

God’s rule was mediated, fi rst by Moses and then by a subsequent series of
high priests, judges and prophets (although Spinoza has a more ambivalent

120 Politics in its own distinction

relationship to this later group, as we will see).

Despite this division of

authority, for Spinoza (and Hobbes echoes this notion), ‘in the Hebrew state
the civil and religious authority, each consisting solely of obedience to God,
were one and the same.’

Even if there was a functional division of labor in

the Kingdom of God between clerics and military (and political) leaders, all
the laws and all forms of rule had one, single source: God.

A fractured sovereignty

For both thinkers, insofar as no human authority had ultimate power, the
various nodes of authority led to a very diffuse form of sovereignty. In the
Hebrew Republic, God’s role as author of divine violence, far from being an
occasional act, happened all the time. Here, God breaks into the human world
time and time again to disrupt the mythology that was busily spinning itself
into being, even during God’s kingdom (as we see with the case of Korah).
The key point here is that God never ‘speaks the truth’. God never directly
speaks to the Hebrew people (indeed, for Hobbes, Moses’ authority over them
is based on the fact that they are too afraid to speak directly with God).

Instead, God only ‘speaks’ through prophecy; the period of the Hebrew
Republic is marked by an ongoing interference in earthly politics by a string
of prophets, each of whom claim to speak on behalf of God.

For Hobbes, all moments of prophecy are highly mediated. He writes that

‘[God] spake alwaies by a Vision, or by Dream; as to Gideon , Samuel, Eliah,
Elisha , Isaiah , Ezekial , and the rest of the Prophets.’ Even when God is said to
speak to Moses ‘ face to face , as a man speaketh to his friend ’, Hobbes argues that
such an encounter came ‘by mediation of an Angel, or Angels . . . and was
therefore a Vision, though a more cleer Vision than was given to other
Prophets’.

Such ‘speech acts’ did (divine) violence to the existing power structure in

ancient Israel. In De Cive , Hobbes describes how the Levite high priests were
normally charged with interpreting God’s wishes. In this way, they can be
seen as the corollary to contemporary sovereigns, ruling the world in the name
of a God who tends to be silent. Hobbes writes that in this kingdom, however,
the periodic eruption of prophecy upended and disrupted the Levite’s form of
command:

The supreme civil power was therefore rightly due by God’s own institu-
tion to the high-priest; but actually that power was in the prophets to
whom (being raised by God in an extraordinary manner) the Israelites, a
people greedy of prophets, submitted themselves to be protected and
judged, by reason of the great esteem they had of prophecies.

It is to be recalled the Korah himself was a Levite and that Benjamin saw that
God’s act of divine violence in that case was oriented against ‘privileged

Sovereignty de-centered: the Hebrew Republic 121

Levites’, against a caste that had, in a sense, taken on the role of idolator for
the Hebrew people. We can say that the struggle between Moses, Aaron and
Korah may be one of the earliest examples of a clash between a prophet and an
established clergy in ancient Israel.

In contesting the Levite’s monopoly of interpretation through periodic

episodes of prophecy (which often ran counter to the priestly interpretations
and interests), Hobbes is not suggesting that God replaces Levite authority
with a direct and divine source of interpretation. As with Benjamin, Hobbes
is very clear that no actual truth can ever be instantiated in the world by an
act of God (hence his insistence on the mediated, that is to say representative,
nature of all divine ‘speech’). Instead, what is most important for Hobbes is
that the rivalry inherent in prophetic interpretations of God’s sovereignty (as
opposed to Levite interpretation) gains authority only when the Hebrew
people decide that they are actually hearing God speak through the prophets.
He tells us:

others did judge of the prophets, whether they were to be held for true or
not. For to what end did God give signs and tokens to all the people,
whereby the true prophets might be discerned from the false; namely, the
event of predictions, and the conformity with the religion established by
Moses; if they might not use those marks?

In other words, God set a series of marks and signs in the world and these
remain available for people ‘to read’ in order to interpret the words of the
prophets (who are in turn interpreting the word of God). By evacuating the
center of political and interpretive authority (by having God be king), popular
interpretation is not just nascent but critical. Ultimately it is people who
‘read’ God’s will and serve as the font of divine authority (as far as human
beings are concerned). In this depiction then, we see the tensions that are
inherent in all of Hobbes’s depictions of political community come down
fi rmly on the side of the people. With the removal of a rival, human sover-
eign, interpretative authority effectively returns to the people from whom it
is always derived.

Perhaps as a result of this disruptive and de-centered form of sovereignty,

Hobbes tells us that the executive aspects of government in ancient Israel
were diffuse and decentralized in this kingdom as well:

though penalties were set and judges appointed in the institution of
God’s priestly kingdom; yet, the right of infl icting punishment depended
wholly on private judgment; and it belonged to a dissolute multitude and
each single person to punish or not to punish, according as their private
zeal should stir them up. And therefore Moses by his own command
punished no man with death; but when any man was to be put to death,
one or many stirred up the multitude against him or them, by divine

122 Politics in its own distinction

authority, and saying, Thus saith the Lord . Now this was conformable to
the nature of God’s peculiar kingdom. For there God reigns indeed,
where his laws are obeyed not for fear of men, but for fear of himself.

Here we see the de facto fracturing of authority that marks the Kingdom of
God. When the sovereign only ‘speaks’ via those who interpret God’s will, and
when the decision is left up to the people whether or not to believe in that
interpretation (many would-be prophets were not listened to, were deemed to
be ‘false prophets’), sovereignty itself is de-centered and displaced. Note here
that sovereignty doesn’t disappear; it remains strongly in force but idolatry
itself is repeatedly shattered and displaced by eruptions of divine violence in
the form of (popularly accepted) prophecy. In this way, we might say that such
a state of affairs corresponds to what Benjamin called a ‘real state of emer-
gency’, a true exception to the sempiternal rule of sovereign governance. Rather
than serving as the ultimate idol, sovereignty here becomes its opposite, the
source of the undoing of mythology, a way for a radical democratic polity (I’d
say anarchy) to emerge from the shadows of would-be terrestrial myth-makers.

Spinoza too sees the ‘Hebrew Republic’ as a fractured and de-centered

place. He tells us that Moses left no successor to combine his dual function of
combining canonical and civil authority, leaving the former job to a high
priesthood (once again, the Levite tribe). The executive power, such as it was,
was left to a set of twelve tribal ‘captains’, each responsible for his own tribe.
Of this arrangement, Spinoza writes:

From these directions, left by Moses to his successors, we plainly see that
he chose administrators, rather than despots, to come after him; for he
invested no one with the power of consulting God, where he liked and
alone, consequently, no one had the power possessed by himself of
ordaining and abrogating laws, of deciding on war or peace, of choosing
men to fi ll offi ces both religious and secular: all these are the prerogatives
of a sovereign.

For Spinoza, the conditions produced by such a fractured form of government
meant that ‘In respect to their God and their religion [the Hebrews] were
fellow-citizens; but in respect to the rights which one possessed with regard
to another, they were only confederated.’

God’s kingship was the only thing

that these subcommunities had in common.

In practice, Spinoza tells us, this arrangement worked quite well; ancient

Israel suffered little factionalism and virtually no civil war prior to the advent
of kings. Spinoza tells us that ‘the power of evil-doing was greatly curtailed’,
insofar as the executive captains were beholden to the Levites for interpreta-
tion of God, and the Levites for their part ‘had no share in the government,
and depended for all their support and consideration on a correct interpreta-
tion of the laws entrusted to them’.

In addition, Spinoza writes:

Sovereignty de-centered: the Hebrew Republic 123

[T]he whole people was commanded to come together at a certain place
every seven years and be instructed in the law by the high-priest; further,
each individual was bidden to read the book of the law through and
through continually with scrupulous care.

Here again we see some evidence that, as with Hobbes, Spinoza sees that
people’s interpretive power is both required and powerful in the Kingdom (or
‘Republic’) of God. He tells us that even the power of the captains was checked
by popular opinion, since to defy God’s law would mean to bring on ‘the
virulence of theological hatred’.

Spinoza also reminds us that the individual Hebrews (the males at least)

were soldiers and fought not for ‘the glory of a prince, but for the glory of
God’.

As such, they formed a powerful and self-aware body of ‘readers’ keen

on preserving and fomenting God’s law. As with Hobbes, we see that for
Spinoza, the people’s interpretive authority has far less risk of being over-
written and trumped than it does in future political iterations. In the absence
of a terrestrial sovereign to whom people must pay allegiance, it seems as if,
for Spinoza, the fractured sovereignty of the Hebrew Republic led to a very
effective and decentralized polity (certainly the degree of attention Spinoza
pays to this polity – more even than Hobbes – attests to this).

The end of the Republic

For both Hobbes and Spinoza, the Kingdom of God was a unique form of
government. But, of course, this kingdom did not last. Eventually, the Hebrews
decided to have a human king instead of a divine one, effectively ending the
Kingdom of God. In the view of both writers, the transition to terrestrial
kingdoms ushered in the kinds of government that we have to this day. The
key question to ask is what does the earlier existence of God’s Kingdom, the
Hebrew Republic, mean for contemporary forms of authority? In what ways
do the diffuse and myriad forms of authority inform, or call into question
the unitary notions of sovereignty that both Hobbes and Spinoza formally
subscribe to?

For Hobbes, the end of God’s Kingdom was due to the corruption that

periodically visited the Hebrews and which, fi nally, brought down God’s
government:

Again, when the sons of Samuel , being constituted by their father Judges
in Bersabee , received bribes, and judged unjustly, the people of Israel
refused any more to have God to be their King, in other manner than he
was King of other people; and therefore cryed out to Samuel , to choose
them a King after the manner of the Nations. So that Justice fayling,
Faith also fayled: Insomuch, as they deposed their God, from reigning
over them.

124 Politics in its own distinction

As Hobbes makes clear, it is not that God has abandoned the Hebrews, but
that they have abandoned God (’Justice fayling, Faith also fayled’).

For Hobbes, the transition from God as king to human kings ushered in a

new form of sovereign authority as well. He tells us that ‘there was no authority
left to the Priests, but such as the King was pleased to allow them.’

Even so,

he concedes that along with the Hebrew kings, prophets continued to arise
whose teachings sometimes contradicted or went against the kings. In this
way the authority of the kings was not as complete (i.e. not as idolatrous) as
it would be in later, post-Hebraic iterations of terrestrial sovereignty. In
De Cive , Hobbes writes of this period that:

The civil power therefore, and the power of discerning God’s word from
the words of men, and of interpreting God’s word even in the days of the
kings, was wholly belonging to [the Israelites].

Hobbes argues that kings did not always need to follow the prophet’s teach-
ings, but this rival source of interpretation serves as an ongoing remnant of
the diffused version of sovereignty that reigned during the Kingdom of God
itself. Here again, the eruption of prophecy into the fabric of sovereign poli-
tics allowed people the room to make their own counter interpretations.
Perhaps more accurately, the political interpretations that were occurring in
all facets of life were afforded the space to have actual consequence, potentially
over and above that of the national sovereign.

Despite the radical potential of this kingdom, Hobbes insists that his

discussion of ancient Israel actually grounds future forms of sovereignty. In
both De Cive and Leviathan, Hobbes repeatedly claims that the sovereign
authority God bestowed on Moses descends through the Kingdom of God and
down to the future kings, including the kings of his own time. Yet, his own
depiction of the uniqueness of God’s Kingdom serves as a counterweight to
such arguments. Although he is careful to show that, even in the time of
Moses and the judges that followed, there was always one voice that spoke for
God, we see that human sources of political authority are consistently under-
mined by God (via the prophets and the fact of popular interpretation of
prophecy), a state of being that survives God’s Kingdom itself for some time.
So long as the Hebrews had prophets, there was always a vehicle for divine
violence to upend the idolatry of the state.

The fact that ancient Israel was marked by ongoing divine sources of

authority and interpretation means that there is not one simple and clear form
of sovereign authority that can be passed down to future kings, regardless
of what Hobbes insists on. For all of Hobbes’s conservatism, we see that
when God is King of Israel, the center of authority is literally evacuated. To
leave God as an aporia (as Hobbes always insists) means that God’s authority
comes to the world in diffuse and highly mediated forms, forms that, as
we have seen, can persist even when there are earthly kings. In this way, this

Sovereignty de-centered: the Hebrew Republic 125

disruptive and disrupted form of sovereignty serves as much to undermine as
to bolster contemporary forms of sovereignty. To argue that such a Kingdom
of God serves as a kind of unproblematic model for the highly centralized and
unilateral sovereign forms that we fi nd with terrestrial kings is to ignore the
deep contrast that Hobbes sets up by highlighting the uniqueness of the
Kingdom of God in the fi rst place. It also offers us a model for how sover-
eignty itself can be undermined by the very theological sources that it draws
upon. Lest we think that without the institution (if one can call it that) of
prophecy there is no chance for such interruptions of sovereign rule today, let
us recall that for Benjamin, God continues to interfere with mythology and
idolatry via ongoing acts of textual rebellion, divine and revolutionary
violence. If the age of prophecy has ended, we still have access to the divine
violence inherent in the world of signs and materials that form our reality.

In Spinoza’s own view, the Hebrew Republic ‘might have lasted for ever’.

However, he goes on to write: ‘it would be impossible to imitate it at the
present day, nor would it be advisable to do so.’

Such a sentiment perfectly

expresses the ambivalence with which Spinoza views the Kingdom of God as it
relates to our own time. As with Hobbes, Spinoza sees that the end of the
Republic stemmed from the disobedience of God’s subjects. He argues that
when God appointed the Levites as the priestly tribe, it was done as a punish-
ment to the other tribes (only the Levites refrained from worshipping the
Golden Calf; the paradox is that in being rewarded for this, they end up being
the nation’s chief idolators).

In setting up the Levite’s power, a source of

resentment is set into place that would eat away at the Republic. Spinoza writes:

If the state had been formed according to the original intention, the
rights and honour of all the tribes would have been equal and everything
would have rested on a fi rm basis. Who is there that would willingly
violate the religious rights of his kindred?

Even as he earlier praised the separation of the Levites as being a major factor
in suppressing private ambition and corruption in the Hebrew Republic,
Spinoza comes to argue that it would have been better to have priests drawn
from every tribe rather than making one tribe apart from the others. He writes
that ‘the obligation to keep in idleness men hateful to them, and connected
by no ties of blood’ led to discord.

Instead of a harmonious and everlasting

form of government, resentment against the Levites led to greater resentment
and distortion until ‘at last the people, after being frequently conquered,
came to an open rupture with the Divine right, and wished for a mortal king,
so that the seat of government might be the Court, instead of the Temple.’

This, then, is Spinoza’s genealogy of modern (secular) sovereignty.

For Spinoza, the move towards more ordinary forms of government was

catastrophic for the Hebrews; the election of kings provided a ‘vast material
for new seditions’. With the rise of kings, jealousy of alternative forms of

126 Politics in its own distinction

power arose. While the fi rst kings respected the authority of the high priests
(more or less), over time they ‘began gradually to introduce changes, so as to
get all the sovereign rights into their own hands’.

These struggles produced

almost constant strife and civil war.

As with Hobbes, for Spinoza, the reign of the Hebrew kings is a kind of hybrid

between contemporary unitary forms of sovereign authority and the kind of
diffuse sovereignty that we fi nd in the Kingdom of God itself.

The interpretive

authority of the kings was challenged by the people’s tenacious belief in their
religion, the ongoing authority of God and the challenges posed by the high
priests and by the ongoing presence of prophecy. In such an atmosphere, Spinoza
describes the rule of the Hebrew kings as having a ‘precarious sovereignty’.

While Hobbes is somewhat accepting of the ongoing role of prophecy in

the reign of the Hebrew kings (recall that he says that the kings were not
obliged to always obey them even when they were correct), Spinoza is quite
set against their rival sources of authority. He argues that the prophets ‘rather
irritated than reformed mankind by their freedom of warning, rebuke, and
censure’.

He also tells us that the prophets were ‘often intolerable even to

pious kings, on account of the authority they assumed for judging whether an
action was right or wrong’.

It may seem peculiar that Spinoza, who is gener-

ally seen as far more tolerant of diversity of opinion than Hobbes, would be
more intolerant of rivals to sovereign authority than was Hobbes. I would
argue that here we are in part seeing the effects of Spinoza’s allegiance to
reason as he conceives of it. Insofar as the transition to ordinary and contem-
porary forms of government suggests the beginning of the reign of the ‘natural
light of reason’, Spinoza turns against prophecy as a direct challenge to such
(secular) authority. Although formally Spinoza insists that divine truth and
reason are parallel (so that a reasonable person would come to similar conclu-
sions to what is revealed in the Bible), we see here that when they do come
into confl ict, that parallelism becomes impossible for Spinoza to maintain.
For Spinoza, reason and sovereignty are linked in a way that they are not for
Hobbes (the sovereign for Hobbes is not necessarily more reasonable than
anyone else). Thus, in the period when prophecy exists side-by-side with
terrestrial monarchy, Spinoza strongly turns against the former for the sake of
the unity and authority (and, I’d add, idolatry) of the latter.

In this way, we see the more conservative aspects of Spinoza’s political philos-

ophy (at least in the sense of being more centralizing and authoritarian), in
contrast to the more radical implications of Hobbes (however paradoxical that
may seem). Yet at the same time, it is Spinoza who spends far more time than
Hobbes on showing exactly how fractured, how diffuse authority is during the
period of the Kingdom of God. His very use of the term ‘the Hebrew Republic’
suggests this fracturing; Spinoza describes the decentralization of the tribes, the
roles of the captains and the autonomy and authority of the average citizens
soldier in ways that Hobbes does not. If Spinoza turns against the forms of
authority found in the Hebrew Republic as soon as it becomes a direct rival to

Sovereignty de-centered: the Hebrew Republic 127

the kinds of sovereignty that he fi nds in his own time, it remains true that he
leads our attention directly to the radical implications of that Republic in the
fi rst place. In Spinoza’s writing, we see the way such a republic serves as a true
alternative to contemporary sovereignty even as he then sternly overwrites such
an authority with the authority produced by the ‘natural light of reason’.

Sovereignty against idolatry

For Spinoza, as for Hobbes, the ‘Hebrew Republic’ represents a unique form
of sovereignty. Even though both thinkers claim to prefer the sovereignty that
followed after the end of the rule of Hebrew judges, they leave us with an
understanding of a highly subversive form of polity. In its continual disrup-
tion of the practice of political idolatry or mythology (including the ‘reason’
that Arendt will later rail against as a form of smuggling the absolute into our
political discourses), the alternative form of sovereignty found in the Hebrew
Republic is both viable and potent. For Spinoza, as for Hobbes, sovereignty in
the Hebrew Republic is not so much eliminated as removed, or perhaps more
accurately, sovereignty is itself fractured. Its component parts serve, not to
promote yet more mythology, but on the contrary as a counterweight to the
very idolatry that it otherwise produces.

In this reading we see that even the idol of sovereignty can be seen as being in

rebellion against the idolatry it foments. Such a reading accords with the general
strategy that we have already see in Benjamin’s work, whereby idols turn against
the phantasmagoria that they produce.

Here once again he suggests that the

even the most central of idols can become a weapon against itself.

Here too we see the possibility of a Benjaminian insurrection at its most

potentially powerful; the key building blocks of sovereign idolatry are enlisted
to undo what they have brought into the world. Under normal conditions,
such undermining does nothing at all. We continue to hold to sovereignty, to
commodity fetishism and the phantasmagoria. But when the divine violence
these rebellions convey is institutionalized (once again, for lack of a better
word) as it was in ancient Israel, we see the potential for these disruptions to
become far more subversive. Without the rivalry of contemporary forms of
sovereignty we see that in the Hebrew Republic the underlying fonts of collec-
tive authority that such sovereignty usually overwrites become far more
legible. While the authority of God is spoken for by priests and prophets in
the Kingdom of God, such an authority remains highly bound and determined
by the interpretive power of the Hebrews. It also is bound by the active partic-
ipation of the Hebrews both in their religion and in their own governance (as
Spinoza shows). Such an interpretation of the Hebrew Republic offers an
insight into how a political order might function in which sovereignty (taken
as a spectacle of authority) does not totalize political life.

To reiterate, I do not think that the Hebrew Republic should be a model for

our contemporary practices. As I will argue shortly, I see anarchism as the

128 Politics in its own distinction

ultimate challenge to contemporary forms of sovereignty and the Hebrew
Republic was, obviously, not an anarchist polity. At the same time, this model
shows an example of how sovereignty can be otherwise than it is. Rather than
burying the theological roots of contemporary sovereignty, the model of the
Hebrew Republic – at least as Hobbes and Spinoza interpret it – uses those
roots to great and subversive advantage. And, if we focus for a moment on the
transitional period when Hebrew kings had to live alongside the prophecy
and other legacies of the Republic that preceded them, we can see that sover-
eignty as a secular practice is not always unrivalled, nor omnipotent, but can
be brought low and called into question by the kinds of alternative political
forms – and the alternative sovereignties – that Hobbes and Spinoza both
describe. In this complex realignment of the theological and the political, we
see the fi rst glimpses of a way out of Schmitt’s trap.

To move towards a conclusion, let us turn to the question of contemporary

practices, the very issue that I raised at the start of the Introduction to this
book when discussing the revolutions sweeping Egypt, Bahrain, Libya,
Tunisia and, with any luck, a lot of other places as well. What are the possi-
bilities for sustaining these revolutions, of avoiding Schmitt’s trap, Arendt’s
pessimism and Derrida’s ambivalence? By applying some of the ideas we fi nd
in Benjamin – when read in constellation with the work of Arendt, Derrida,
Kafka and others – we can think further about how to avoid these same
dilemmas that are constantly defeating human attempts to free themselves
from the rule of others. Let us turn to the conclusion, then, in order to think
further about this crucial question.

Notes

1 In fact, for Hobbes, this is the fi rst Kingdom of God, as opposed to the second that

will be inaugurated by the second coming of Christ.

2 In treating these authors in tandem, it is worth noting that Hobbes and Spinoza

were roughly contemporary and did in fact read one another’s work (Sacksteder
2001: 222). Obviously the much younger Spinoza was more likely to have
been infl uenced by Hobbes than the other way around. William Sacksteder
tells us that Spinoza had a copy of De Cive in his library, writing ‘[Spinoza]
borrowed and adapted freely from that book in the sole major work he published
during his lifetime, the Tractatus Theologico-Politicus .’ Ibid. He goes on to speculate
that Spinoza might well have read other works of Hobbes as well, almost certainly
including his response to Descartes in the latter’s

Meditations

(whether he

recognized the commentator as Hobbes or not). He speculates that Spinoza
possibly even read Leviathan (at least the Latin edition, which was published in
Amsterdam in 1668), along with De Corpore, De Homine and De Cive. Ibid.: 231.
Sacksteder also tells us that Hobbes read the TTP; citing Aubrey, he tells us that
Hobbes said of himself upon reading the Treatise that he ‘durst not speak so
boldly’. Ibid.: 227.

3 Spinoza 1951: 205.
4 Although it is true that a great many scholars see Spinoza as being essentially an

atheist, going back even to the time that Spinoza was alive.

Sovereignty de-centered: the Hebrew Republic 129

5 In Subverting the Leviathan (Martel 2007), I make this argument in far greater

detail (with respect to Hobbes only).

6 Nelson 2010: 2.
7 Ibid.: 16.
8 Nelson cites Bodin’s Methodus ad facilem historiarum cognitionem for one. See also,

e.g., Cunaeus 2007.

9 Nelson 2010: 22.
10 Hobbes 1996, 4.44: 419.
11 Ibid., 4.44: 421.
12 Ibid., 4.44: 419.
13 Ibid.
14 Spinoza 1951: 219.
15 For Hobbes, this kingdom was not instituted directly by God’s word but rather

via the mediation of Moses. Citing the scriptural passage whereby the Hebrews
say to Moses ‘ speak thou with us, and we will hear, but let not God speak with us lest we
die ’, Hobbes tells us: ‘Here was their promise of obedience, and by this it was they
obliged themselves to obey whatsoever he should deliver unto them for the
Commandment of God.’ Hobbes 1996, 3.40: 324–5.

16 Spinoza 1951: 219.
17 Hobbes 1996, 3.40: 324.
18 Ibid., 3.36: 293.
19 Hobbes 1991: 323.
20 Ibid.: 325.
21 Ibid.: 323.
22 Spinoza 1951: 223.
23 Ibid.: 224.
24 Ibid.: 226.
25 Ibid.
26 Ibid.: 227.
27 Ibid.
28 Hobbes 1996, 1.12: 85.
29 Ibid., 3.40: 329.
30 Hobbes 1991: 326.
31 Spinoza 1951: 237.
32 Ibid.
33 Ibid.: 233.
34 Ibid.: 233–4.
35 Ibid.: 233.
36 Ibid.: 235.
37 Ibid.
38 Ibid.
39 Ibid.
40 Ibid.: 239.
41 Ibid.
42 In The Arcades Project , Benjamin provides another example of this sort whereby

commodity fetishism is itself disrupted by its own fetishes. He tells us that the
commodity, the source of commodity fetishism, constantly undermines capital-
ism through the device of price. He compares price with allegory; insofar as price
is always in fl ux, it suggests the unreality of the commodity fetishes that it
produces. In the Arcades Project , Benjamin writes:

the allegorist rummages here and there for a particular piece, holds it next to
some other piece, and tests to see if they fi t together – that meaning with this

130 Politics in its own distinction

image or this image with that meaning. The result can never be known
before hand, for there is no natural mediation between the two. But this is
just how matters stand with commodity and price . . . How the price of
goods in each case is arrived at can never quite be foreseen, neither in the
course of their production nor later when they enter the market. It is exactly
the same with the object in its allegorical existence. At no point is it written
in the stars that the allegorist’s profundity will lead it to one meaning rather
than another . . . The modes of meaning fl uctuate almost as rapidly as the
price of commodities. In fact, the meaning of the commodity is its price; it
has, as commodity no other meaning. Hence the allegorist is in his element
with commercial wares. (Benjamin 1999: 368–9)

In his ‘ Exposé of 1939’, Benjamin offers another example of this strategy, suggest-
ing that even the phantasmagoria can be used as a tool against itself. Writing of
Blanqui’s L’Eternité par les astres , Benjamin writes: ‘This book completes the cen-
tury’s constellation of phantasmagorias with one last cosmic phantasmagoria
which implicitly comprehends the severest criticism of all the others.’ (‘ Exposé of
1939’, in Benjamin 1999: 25.)

Conclusion

The anarchist hypothesis

Having now laid out the full argument for what I consider to be a non-
idolatrous politics – a politics, that is, in which even sovereignty itself becomes
a weapon against the idolatry it would otherwise foment – it remains to
consider what kind of politics we can recuperate from our existing practices.
Accordingly, in this concluding chapter, I want to extend this discussion of
alternative forms of politics to a consideration of contemporary possibilities.
Given the potential for avoiding the idolatry of sovereignty manifest in
Hobbes’s and Spinoza’s respective analyses of the Hebrew Republic, what
forms of politics are possible and desirable in our own time? Here, I will argue
that a turn to Benjaminian politics is also a turn to anarchism, to an under-
standing of politics as local and multiple that goes on even under the shadow
of sovereign authority. Anarchism, I will argue, is the anti-idolatrous form of
politics par excellence . Even though Benjamin did not always have charitable
things to say about anarchism as it was practiced in his own time (although,
at other times, he embraces the term), I would argue that the upshot to his
politics – and, by extension, the upshot for Arendt and Derrida – is anar-
chism, the political form that emerges in its own light when sovereign spec-
tacles are disrupted or subverted.

As already mentioned in the Introduction,

I will end this book with a discussion of Alain Badiou’s

The Communist

Hypothesis (as well as a briefer consideration of the works of Agamben, Hardt
and Negri), to examine the ways that a refusal to give up on the state or the
party can hamper even the most radical leftist (like Badiou himself). I will
argue that we need to embrace anarchism if we ever wish to avoid history
endlessly repeating itself, even in the face of the critical epistemological
ruptures that Badiou calls singularities and Benjamin would call acts of divine
– or revolutionary – violence (more on that at the end of the chapter).

In advancing an anarchist politics, we begin to leave behind even the form

of de-centered politics modeled in the previous chapter. As already noted, it
might be objected that the Hebrew Republic is hardly the kind of model that
most leftists (and, if it hasn’t been clear by now, I should note that this book
is really addressed to leftists) would fi nd attractive. The thought of having
God as king doesn’t appeal to many on the left who have had a long training

132 Divine

Violence

and enculturation in secular Marxist thought. Indeed, part of the reason why
Benjamin was long suspect by many Marxists was precisely because of his
embrace of the theological.

Must we then return to some kind of theocratic republicanism in order to

combat capitalism and commodity fetishism? Surely there must be some
other way to resist than to turn toward a God who, it could be argued, started
us down the road to sovereignty in the fi rst place (or at least is seen as having
done so).

My fi rst response to such a claim is that Benjamin’s theology is not the

same as the kind of traditional theology that so much of leftism is set against.
It is – to borrow a term employed by Aryeh Botwinick, among others – truly
a ‘negative theology’, a vision of Messianism in which the Messiah does virtu-
ally nothing except make it possible for us not to be determined by its own
fetishism.

Such a God tells us nothing and, in effect does nothing, except to

remove our expectation for salvation, the false hope that keeps us trapped in
the phantasmagoria. Rather than making us passive subjects in the face of an
almighty God, the idea of divine violence puts the entire onus of action and
responsibility on human beings.

There are other thinkers who partake in a similar form of Messianism to

Benjamin. Kafka, of course, comes immediately to mind, but also Nietzsche.
In Thus Spoke Zarathustra , we fi nd a portrayal of a prophet who does nothing
for anyone. When a group of affl icted beggars approach Zarathustra, asking
him to save them from their various maladies, he refuses to help them. He
essentially argues that to do so would be to confi rm their self-hatred, their
feeling that as themselves, they are indeed horrible, wicked and loathsome
creatures. By having the Messiah come and not save them, Zarathustra is in
fact taking away their hope for salvation, leaving them fi nally free of
the phantasm of rescue and potentially able to inhabit their own lives (some-
thing of course they are already de facto doing, but are not aware of as such).
Indeed, far from ‘saving’ them, Zarathustra identifi es with this group of
beggars:

The now and the past on earth – alas my friends, that is what I fi nd most
unendurable; and I should not know how to live if I were not also a seer
of that which must come. A seer, a willer, a creator, a future himself and
a bridge to the future – and alas, also, as it were, a cripple at this bridge:
all this is Zarathustra.

As a fellow ‘cripple at this bridge’, Zarathustra extols the kinds of local exis-
tences that we see afoot in Benjamin’s and Kafka’s work as well; the life we
lead can be overwritten by phantasms of a better world but insofar as we do
not actually live that life, we are effectively acting like self-denying nihilists
who give over our own authority in the face of some great, exterior salvation.
Nietzsche describes this situation in the Genealogy of Knowledge , when he

Conclusion: the anarchist hypothesis 133

famously writes: ‘We knowers are unknown to ourselves’, and goes on to
compare us to ‘a man divinely abstracted and self-absorbed into whose ears the
bell has just drummed the twelve strokes of noon [and who] will suddenly
awake with a start and ask himself what hour has actually struck.’

Benjamin’s

notion of time and politics is remarkably similar: we live a life that we do not
recognize, so fi xated are we on ‘knowledge’ (i.e. the hubris of the Fall, idolatry
in all of its political, social and economic forms).

In this way, I see Nietzsche and Benjamin as being engaged in roughly the

same project and purporting a very similar sort of political theology.
Zarathustra can be seen as himself being as an agent of divine violence; he
saves us from salvation, from the hope that we can be superseded by a better
version of ourselves. Benjamin’s Messiah also saves us from salvation; it
distorts and disrupts the kind of salvational visions of justice, order and
authority that are the harbinger of sovereignty. It does so by recourse to the
very theological roots that are at the heart of the sovereign project. Yet in
Benjamin’s hands, as in Neitzsche’s (and Kafka’s), the theological becomes
something quite unlike what it ordinarily functions as. Rather than being a
vehicle for truth it becomes a vehicle for untruth, for unmaking and undoing.

The question to ask at this point, the fi nal question that this book will

address, is what kind of politics emerges from this? What does it mean to see
the political in its distinction (as opposed to its autonomy) from sovereignty?
Given the compromised roots of so much of our political life, what does it
mean to try to recuperate that life? What kinds of practices does this entail
and is this project even feasible, given the overwhelming power of phantasm
and fetishism?

An anarchist politics

To begin this fi nal argument, I want to explain my claim that the form of
politics that comes out of a Benjaminian engagement with sovereignty is and
must be anarchism.

By anarchism, I am not referring to the wild, dog-eat-

dog ‘Lord of the Flies’ style of anti-politics that is often summoned up by this
name. Such a view of anarchism is a pure projection of liberal capitalism, that
is to say, a projection from deep within the maw of the phantasmagoria. Here,
the chaos of the market is projected outwards and externalized as an unpolit-
ical free-for-all. Anarchism today seems impossible, out of time and having no
form at all, nothing but disorganized chaos. Naturally, no one in their right
mind would ever choose such a thing, and if that is what anarchism were, it
would hardly be worth mentioning (except as the kind of negative incentive
to keep people obedient to capitalist sovereignty, which is largely what this
image of anarchism achieves).

Instead, I am referring to the anarchism of every day life, of politics in the

shadow of the fountain. As we have seen, for Benjamin, the coming of the
Messiah makes only a ‘slight adjustment’ to the world (via an act of divine

134 Divine

Violence

violence). Thus a world that is freed from idolatry wouldn’t be as different
from the world we live in today as one might think. This is because, as I
have tried to argue in the past few chapters, many of the features of political
life that we cherish exist in distinction from the kinds of phantasms that
organize and produce that life. This is not to claim that in our ordinary
lives we are somehow innocent of the idolatry and brutality of sovereign
authority (to make this argument would be to suggest that the political
was somehow autonomous after all). Clearly, as human beings, we respond
to our environment, including the political and economic practices that
we are ensconced in. The upshot of Benjamin’s argument is only to note
that our ordinary lives and local political practices are not totalized by the
phantasmagoria.

There is, therefore, a set of political practices to be recouped and recog-

nized. While we are obeying one set of phantasms or another, we are also
living out an existence with multiple local connections, acts, decisions and
the like. All of that local infrastructure, the ordering, the connections, the
acts, will not disappear if sovereignty itself is fractured (just as they didn’t
disappear in the practices of ancient Israel, at least as Hobbes and Spinoza
describe them). Politics might then become something that could be prac-
ticed more openly, more legibly to the communities that engage in it.

In this way, I see both Arendt and Derrida as fellow travelers with Benjamin

(i.e. in constellation with him), anarchists in spirit if not always in word
(Arendt prefers the term ‘isonomy’ which literally means ‘equality before the
law’ but which she translates as ‘no rule’).

As I have been arguing throughout

this book, Arendt’s and Derrida’s hesitation in abandoning sovereignty comes
in part because they do not always think that the positive aspects of political
life can be saved without recourse to sovereignty itself. A heightened atten-
tion to the nature of political idolatry (such as Benjamin provides) alerts us to
the fact that sovereignty has been given credit for a political system that it
tends to overwrite rather than sustain. This is why it is important to distin-
guish between thinking of the political as autonomous vs as distinct (in this
case as distinct from sovereignty). If we think of the political as autonomous,
we are then forced to imagine it having a whole new set of components that
are not to be found in our current practices. This sets up that ‘baby and bath-
water’ dilemma discussed in earlier chapters. But to see the political as being
merely distinct from sovereignty means that we do not have to choose between
those political factors that we might tend to favor and those that we usually
ascribe to sovereignty. As we have seen, in Benjamin’s system, sovereignty is
not discarded so much as displaced. The politics that comes out of this then,
an anarchist politics as I would argue, is a politics of recuperating those
practices we are already engaged with. Although it may only take a ‘slight
adjustment’, I would argue that the change it would instigate would be (and
has been at various moments in history) monumental, revolutionary. Here, I
think once again of the activists in Tahrir Square who brought down Mubarak,

Conclusion: the anarchist hypothesis 135

as well as the citizen committees that are organizing in parts of eastern Libya
now freed from Muammar Gaddafi ’s forty years of tyranny.

By adding an explicit focus on anti-idolatrous forms of representation, by

looking at a site that has been cleared of fetishes, we can fi nally avoid the false
dichotomy that I have been referring to as Carl Schmitt’s trap. The choice
between sovereignty and anarchy, which we see perpetuated throughout
scholarship on both the left and the right, is, as I have hopefully demon-
strated, an entirely false one. The ‘anarchism’ that Schmitt depicts is not anar-
chism at all but a projection from within the maw of sovereignty as it is
currently conceptualized. Because of an inherent belief in some autonomous
form of ‘the political’ Schmitt sees that politics must always have a decision.
Since the alternative of anarchism is literally unthinkable (in the way Schmitt
describes it), decisionism can never be avoided and the anarchist (Bakunin
specifi cally) can only ‘decide against the decision’, which is of course to
perpetuate that decisionism in the guise of rejecting it. Such an argument has
been a pretty good explanation of why revolutions have failed for so long
because a disavowed sovereignty does not ‘go away’ but returns, quite
palpably, to reassert itself over and above any revolutionary movement.

Yet, we have seen the challenge Benjamin poses to Schmitt – a challenge

that was relatively simultaneous to Schmitt’s Political Theology . Benjamin’s
portrayal of monarchs who are incapable of making a decision is more than a
joke at Schmitt’s expense; it points to the impossibility of decisionism itself.
Decisionism asserts a degree of knowing that is impossible in this world.
Beset as we are by idolatry, our decisions are not decisions at all but random
responses to the fetishism that determines us. For Benjamin a decision as
such is only possible in a world that has been cleared of fetishes (once again, a
‘real state of emergency’). In this way, anarchism emerges as not being
completely determined by fetishism but as what is revealed (the ‘starres’)
when that fetishism is disrupted. With his understanding of idolatrous vs
non-idolatrous forms of representation, Benjamin offers a way to inhabit the
world that is not determined by the false choices (‘decisions’) that Schmitt
asserts. Thus, Benjamin’s political theology represents an answer to Schmitt’s
political theology. Whereas Arendt and Derrida engage in their own forms
of Messianism and theology, Benjamin’s version directly addresses and
resolves the trap that Schmitt has set for all of us within the eschatology of
sovereign time.

The peripheral city

To illustrate what I mean by anarchism in this sense I would like to turn to
another parable by Kafka, a writer whose illuminations help us think much
more clearly about the diffi cult kinds of mental exercises that come with
resisting idolatry. (Benjamin approvingly says of him that ‘No other writer
has obeyed the commandment “Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven

136 Divine

Violence

image” so faithfully, pointing to his prowess in combating idolatry in all of
its forms’.)

The parable in question is called ‘The City Coat of Arms’ ( Das

Stadtwappen ). Here, a community gathers to build the Tower of Babel, a tower
that will reach into heaven.

Kafka writes that ‘The idea, once seized in its

magnitude, can never vanish again; so long as there are men on the earth there
will be also the irresistible desire to complete the building.’

Here, we see a

classic example of fetishism; in their desire to know (or even compete with)
God, these builders seek to erect a mythical tower; they are consumed by the
possibility of attaining heaven by their own hands. Although the task seems
(and is) impossible, confi dence in the future keeps the project going. Kafka
tells us that ‘one need have no anxiety about the future; on the contrary,
human knowledge is increasing, the art of building has made progress and
will make further progress.’

Thus it is the phantasm itself that produces a

sense of progress and forward movement (exactly as is the case with Benjamin’s
phantasmagoria).

Given what the builders see as the inevitability of future progress and the

intense anxieties about making a false move, the tower never actually gets
built. However, in the meantime something else does get built instead, a city
that takes its shape around the empty site of the tower itself. As Kafka tells
us, ‘the time was spent not only in confl ict; the town was embellished in the
intervals.’

We see here a perfect articulation of the relationship between the political

and sovereign phantasm. Without the phantasm, the city (‘the political’)
would never have been built in the fi rst place, but the phantasm is not iden-
tical to the city. In the parable, eventually people tire of the idea of building
a tower to heaven ‘but by that time everybody was too deeply involved to
leave the city’.

Thus we see that political life can be sustained even as the

phantasm is displaced.

Even as they engage in mythmaking, these city residents are also engaging

in a political existence. Although they don’t know it for what it is, we see that
at the end of the parable, Kafka offers us an insight into the kinds of motiva-
tions that may sustain us even when we are not directly aware of them. The
parable ends with the following passage:

All the legends and songs that came to birth in that city are fi lled with
longing for a prophesied day when the city would be destroyed by fi ve
successive blows from a gigantic fi st. It is for that reason too that the city
has a closed fi st on its coat of arms.

We see here that even as they are involved in the phantasm of their city, these
residents long for an act of divine violence that might overturn their own
idolatry. This dream or sign that underlies their participation in the phantas-
magoria is also, in a sense, what potentially redeems them. It allows them not
to be totalized by the desire for heaven; it allows them at least potentially to

Conclusion: the anarchist hypothesis 137

see their actions as their own, not independent from but not entirely beholden
to the phantasms that animated them in the fi rst place. The dream of a giant
celestial fi st destroying their city is a dream that (not unlike the successive
Hebrew prophets) disrupts and undermines the totalizing fantasy of divine
rescue. Against the notion of a God that welcomes the tower builders to
heaven (a purely idolatrous view of God if ever there was one) we see a dream
for the release from such hubris (and the agent of that release is God).

What I am calling anarchism is akin to this city that exists at the periphery

of the spectacle of sovereignty. Like sovereignty itself, this imagined tower is
not real and is never built (recall Nancy’s notion that sovereignty is built
‘around a hollow’).

Nevertheless, this tower, and the dreams it brings along

with it, animates the lives of these residents; it is the reason (and the only
reason) that they have come together in the fi rst place. Anarchism is the prac-
tice that recuperates this city for its residents; it reads their life in distinction
from the tower they serve (making such lives clear and legible to them in the
process). In this way, the tower itself, without fully disappearing (it always
remains as a kind of ‘origin’ in some sense for what follows), gradually fades
away so that this ring-shaped city takes on a life of its own around and despite
(or because of – it becomes diffi cult to tell) the void that sits at its very center.
Like the fountain imagery that I mentioned earlier in this book, this image of
a ring-shaped or peripheral community is the basis for a kind of alternative
public, an alternative – and anarchist – form of political community.

The anarchist hypothesis

To conclude my arguments, I would like to add one fi nal fi gure to the constel-
lation that I have been considering in this book, namely Alain Badiou. In his
recent book The Communist Hypothesis , Badiou beautifully lays out an argu-
ment for left revival, in this case, under the name of communism (a term that,
after all, was also employed by Benjamin himself). In thinking about his
arguments, I see much that accords with what has already been discussed in
this book, but I would like to push Badiou a bit further, to insist that even he
needs to fi nally ‘cut off the king’s head’ (in Foucault’s phrase) in order to
realize the anarchist potential that is nascent in his work.

Badiou’s points of commonality with Benjamin are striking. In

The

Communist Hypothesis , as in other works, Badiou lays out an understanding of
time that seems in harmony with Benjamin’s understanding as presented in
his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’. For Badiou, as for Benjamin, time
itself – the eschatology that determines our world – is determined according
to a calculus of promoting capitalist logic and power. He calls those things
that further the continuity of time (and, with it, the rule of capitalism and
reaction) a series of ‘facts’.

Facts reinforce history, a set of ordered under-

standings of what is and what is not possible. However, there are moments of
eruption into the fabric of time. Badiou’s book looks at three such moments:

138 Divine

Violence

the Paris Commune, the Chinese Great Proletariat Cultural Revolution and
the events of May 1968 in France. As already mentioned, Badiou calls these
moments ‘singularities’. These are moments of ‘maximal’ existence, i.e.
maximal potential for time itself to change, for possibility to be born into a
world where it is manifestly absent.

By this, he means that something

impossible (like a worker’s uprising in Paris in 1871) becomes suddenly
possible, not by realizing a potential that already exists but actually by
violently inserting itself into the fabric of space and time (the fabric, that is,
of possibility itself). Badiou says of the Paris Commune that ‘like every veri-
table event, the Commune had not realized a possible, it had created one. This
possible is simply that of an independent proletariat politics.’

If a singu-

larity can manage to establish a kind of lasting existence it becomes, in
Badiou’s terms, an event, a moment that literally transforms the world. While
each of these events is a ‘failure’, Badiou, like Benjamin, appreciates the way
that such failures can radically change and redirect the world.

Badiou’s understanding of singularities and events accords perfectly with

Benjamin’s own view of divine violence and its human corollary, revolu-
tionary violence. The idea that such moments seem to come out of nowhere,
unexpected even by their protagonists, are evidence – to return to Benjamin’s
more theological language – of the ability of God (and hence human beings)
to sweep away determinism, and even the fact of impossibility itself. This
is also something that Arendt is constantly looking for in her own view of
politics (and, I would argue, Derrida as well). We could call this moment
Messianic, although Badiou scrupulously avoids such a term. Yet clearly the
effect is the same, a subversion of established truths that normally so totalize
the political that these new events only become conceivable in retrospect.
Badiou calls these events the ‘historical appearing of a politics’, a term that
also encapsulates the kind of anarchic communities that I have been describing
(only, to be clear, as I see it, they do not so much emerge as become legible to
themselves; in a sense, they have always been there).

Why hold on to the state?

Up to this point then, I am in complete accord with Badiou. Where I part
company from him is in his (re)turn to states and parties as the instrument
of the event. Here, not unlike Arendt and Derrida, Badiou’s turn to such
institutions comes despite a high degree of criticism on his part (one that
rivals Arendt in its ferocity, although I’m sure she would recoil from his
lauding of Maoism). In his description for example of the three events (two in
France and one in China), Badiou is generally extremely critical of both states
and parties and their role in undermining each moment. In this, he is as
critical of ‘the left’ as he is of openly reactionary parties insofar as he sees actors
such as Mitterand and (for obvious reasons) Deng Xiaoping as effectively
stifl ing (but not returning to non-existence) the events that preceded their

Conclusion: the anarchist hypothesis 139

rule. Even radical parties for Badiou can serve as loci of reaction, engaging in
what was called during the Cultural Revolution ‘waving the red fl ag to fi ght
the red fl ag’.

For Badiou, every party, even one that scrupulously seeks to serve the

masses, tends to effectively replace the masses with itself. This is once again a
problem of representation. He also sees that parties, purportedly the vehicle
of these singularities, have, time and time again, come up as well against a
logic of limitation and partaken in state-like tendencies (even in Maoist
China). He tells us that the kinds of political ruptures he is looking for are
‘always a combination of a subjective capacity and an organization – totally
independent of state – of the consequences of that capacity.’

Yet, despite

being ‘totally independent of state’, in theory, that organization – the
Marxist–Leninist party for Badiou – has time and time again come to be the
state, to become itself an instrument of limitation and reaction. He writes
that ‘the Party in Lenin’s sense certainly comprised the creation of [a collec-
tive form of discipline] but one that was ultimately subordinated to the
constraints of State.’

Yet for all of this, we see throughout The Communist Hypothesis that Badiou

still feels that the party, and in particular the Maoist party, is critical to
sustain the kinds of politics (i.e. communism) that he looks for. Badiou reads
Maoism as an attempt to resist the ossifi cation of politics and the mythologies
(my term, not his) that come with party politics. In describing Mao’s cult of
personality, for example, Badiou sees it as attempting to avoid what he calls
the ‘doubtful representative capacity of the party’.

He writes that: ‘By way

of a substitute for [the guarantee that the party will accurately represent the
masses], it thus becomes crucial for there to be a representation of the representa-
tion , one that would be a singularity, legitimated precisely by its singularity
alone.’

For Badiou, Mao himself serves as a form of resistance from within the party

itself:

Ultimately, we should maintain that ‘Mao’ is a name that is intrinsically
contradictory in the fi eld of revolutionary politics. On the one hand, it is
the supreme name of the party-state, its undeniable chairman . . . On the
other hand, ‘Mao’ is the name of that which, in the party, cannot be
reduced to the state’s bureaucracy. This is obviously the case in terms of
the calls [by Mao] to revolt sent out to youth and the workers. But it is
also true within the structure of legitimacy of the party itself.

We see here the paradox that a party that is busy undermining the event can
also itself be the nucleus of resistance to that undermining. Ultimately,
Badiou concedes that this balance could not be maintained, but in his view
Mao shows that it is at least possible to do so. Yet this view puts Badiou in
somewhat of the same position as Arendt (albeit for very different – and

140 Divine

Violence

probably better – reasons) insofar as he is left supporting the party over the
very spontaneous and political movements that he favors. By labeling both
the party structure and its opposition ‘Mao’, Badiou leaves no space for this
unstructured political space to develop into its own political force, thus
undermining the very premise for which he favors Maoism in the fi rst place.
To turn to a perhaps overused metaphor, while Mao may be an unusually hen-
loving fox, he is still a fox guarding the henhouse.

And we see the same dynamic with the state as well. Badiou defi nes the

term ‘state’ as ‘the system of constraints that limit the possibility of possibili-
ties’. He also says ‘the State is always the fi nitude of possibility.’

Thus in his

view the state serves to ensure that there are no singularities, no events. Each
singularity in turn represents a defeat, a rupturing of the state and hence of
sovereignty as well. Yet via the concept of the ‘withering away of the state’,
Badiou holds on to the state as well as the party:

The Idea of communism can project the real of a politics, subtracted as
ever from the power of the State, into the fi gure of ‘another State’,
provided that the subtraction lies within this subjectivating operation, in
the sense that the ‘other State’ is also subtracted from the power of the
State, hence from its own power, in so far as it is a State whose essence is
to wither away.

We see the complicated position Badiou puts himself in: An ‘other state’ is
still a state. If it isn’t a state, it seems that it wouldn’t have the power to do
what it is meant to do, namely undo itself. But if it has that power, it won’t
undo itself after all.

Throughout The Communist Hypothesis , we see an ongoing struggle over

the question of political idolatry; how can ‘the masses’ exist to itself as
itself? How do parties and leaders ‘represent’ a movement that is radically
de-centered? Despite his conviction that the three great events of the left (I’d
have defi nitely added what, in my view, is perhaps the greatest ‘event’ of them
all: the Haitian revolution at the turn of the nineteenth century) are fl um-
moxed by the question of state, party and representation, Badiou remains
devoted to the notion of a party-led revolutionary movement.

Such a view extends beyond the case of the Chinese Cultural Revolution as

well. In the case of France in 1968, for example, he argues that the lack of a
Marxist–Leninist form of political organization led to the inability to capi-
talize on the event of the movement itself.

Instead he tells us that the French

left ‘degenerate[d] into a snobbish and party-going anarchism’.

Badiou puts his fi nger right on the central question when he writes (of

the ‘failure’ of the Cultural Revolution) that:

We know today that all emancipatory politics must put an end to the
model of the party, or of multiple parties, in order to affi rm a politics

Conclusion: the anarchist hypothesis 141

‘without party’, and yet at the same time without lapsing into the fi gure
of anarchism, which has never been anything else than the vain critique,
or the double, or the shadow, of the communist parties, just as the black
fl ag is only the double or the shadow of the red fl ag.

Here, we are back to a familiar place. Badiou acknowledges the dangers of
parties and forms of politics that unproblematically assert the possibility of
representation. As I have argued throughout this book, such a path not only
risks but ensures idolatry, unstructured and popular political movements
become superseded by their own ‘representational’ forms. Badiou, being quite
a bit more radical than Arendt (and Derrida as well, for that matter), is willing
to push the envelope a bit further, quite a bit further even. In his appreciation
of Mao (however well- or ill-placed it may be) he sees the possibility of a mass
movement that is not merely nominalist, not just a token to be spoken for
(and hence controlled) by some central sovereign fantasist.

But in his retreat from the concept of anarchism Badiou ultimately turns

more or less towards Arendt’s and Derrida’s camp, or if not there, then some-
where between Benjamin’s position and their own. In this way he reiterates
Schmitt’s trap yet again. Because ‘anarchism’ is not an option for him, he can
only ‘decide against the decision’, and in doing so throws in his lot (as we’ve
seen before) with the deciders after all.

We see several points in The Communist Hypothesis where Badiou fl irts with

but ultimately pulls back from anarchism (the name itself seems anathema to
him, perhaps in part based on his real life interactions with self-avowed anar-
chists in French politics). He comes as close as one can come to really
embracing the radical decentralizing possibility that I see in anti-idolatrous
politics without actually partaking of that politics.

In Badiou’s analysis – which is remarkably similar to Arendt’s argument in

On Revolution

(despite their obvious differences) – there is an endlessly

repeating pattern whereby radical potential is snuffed out time and time
again, and by the same forces. First, an event occurs (a miracle, a Messianic
event, in Benjaminian terms). Then a party arises to lead and represent this
event (lest it devolve into anarchy!). Finally, a state emerges that becomes
a force of reaction that seeks to stamp out the event’s ongoing life in mass
politics (and always succeeds). Why then does he insist (as Arendt does as
well) on holding onto sovereignty, and (as Arendt does not) onto some form
of the state and onto the party? In his most radical (or provocative) stance,
Badiou calls for a ‘rupture with the representative forms of politics, or . . .
a rupture with “democracy”’.

Yet in fact he has not made a rupture

with representation (or, therefore ‘democracy’ either). He never gives up on
parties, on Leninism (even though his fascination with Maoism suggests a
strong criticism of the ordinary Leninist model) and hence does not seem to
be able to fi nd a way out of (or perhaps more accurately into ) the problem of
representation.

142 Divine

Violence

Divine violence

For his own part, as we have seen, Benjamin does not abandon representation
either but he does struggle with its idolatrous variants. Perhaps because
Badiou abjures a religious vocabulary, or perhaps because he really believes
that one day the formula for ‘the idea of communism’ will get it right, he
reasserts a history of defeat, of repetitive self-destruction by the left, even as
his own critique brilliantly explains, and deplores, this tendency. As with
Arendt and Derrida, I would argue that a greater appreciation (that is to say a
Benjaminian view) of both the allures and powers of the fetish and a concom-
itant notion of how to struggle against it, would enable Badiou to embrace
the anarchism he dances around but never embraces.

As already noted, ‘anarchism’ is such a loaded term that it is easy to be put

off by images of chaos, of foolish self-destructive (or snobbish and ‘party-
going’ antics). I think this may help to explain why Badiou won’t even
consider anarchism as an option. But the anarchism that emerges out of
Benjamin’s work – even if not addressed by that name (after all, as already
mentioned, he calls his preferred form of politics ‘communism’ as well) – is a
serious and non-utopian form of politics. It seeks, as already described, to
recuperate existing practices of politics. It recognizes the need for representa-
tion and does not try to get rid of sovereignty once and for all, even as it resists
the idolatrous forms of such politics that are usually connected with it. Given
that all evidence suggests that no state, not even one charged with ‘withering
away’, will ever do so, and given that no party seems to have ever voluntarily
ended itself so that a mass expression can be given full vent, I argue that anar-
chism is not only an alternative, it is the only possible alternative to the total-
izations of contemporary sovereignty.

What is called for is not a withering

state, but rather one that has become a purely empty signifi er. When repre-
sentative terms like state and sovereignty cease to be idols, they have no func-
tion except as a holding place for some kind of collective enterprise. ‘The
state’ as we know it would cease to exist; it could no longer compete with
other forms of politics to defi ne and direct what ‘the political’ actually means.
Think here again of Kafka’s parable of the empty, non-existent tower that
gradually fades away from the city that is built around it, leaving only a void.
The state is the name I would give to this void; its emptiness is all the remains
of the state itself (by extension, if we tried to imagine what the fountain
would be if it didn’t have any water in it, that too would ‘be’ what sovereignty
was, taken as itself).

Turning specifi cally to the examples offered by Hobbes and Spinoza may

help us think further about this possibility of an anarchist politics, albeit not
without some important caveats. Even if, as we saw, the Hebrew people were
to some extent able to ‘rule’ themselves in the ‘Hebrew Republic’, we also see
that vestiges of a terrestrial state remain. First the Levites and then the Hebrew
kings effectively ruled over the community, except during periodic (but

Conclusion: the anarchist hypothesis 143

regular) eruptions of divine violence. Those eruptions or moments are anar-
chist moments. God’s sweeping away of idolatry, mediated via the unstable
institution of prophecy, produced a forum in which community could (tem -
porarily) coagulate as itself without being overwritten by human (idolatrous)
sovereignty. It allowed the form of sovereignty but its content was fi lled by
collective and pluralistic agonic acts of judgment. An anarchist society would
look very much like this only more so. Rather than having to coexist and
compete with the state (which, in the end comes to destroy the Hebrew
Republic as both Hobbes and Spinoza show) we can imagine a form of politics
where the state as such need not actually exist at all, where the contentless
form of sovereignty that we fi nd attributed to God becomes the only kind of
sovereignty, the only form of rule or state that is required (or, if not God,
some other mechanism by which sovereignty is removed from human politics
without being utterly unmade).

The supposedly irreplaceable functions of terrestrial sovereignty are, as we

have seen, already supplied by political life when taken in its own distinction.
A political community that persists without an actual state still has a name,
an identity and a narrative but these are now, once again, empty placeholders
to allow a certain politics to coagulate without eclipsing that political life
with an overriding representational form (i.e. with idolatry).

Not the multitude

It might be helpful to contrast what I see as the political upshot of this
Benjaminian stance with some of the implications in the work of Giorgio
Agamben as well as Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri (the latter two are
infl uenced by Agamben, although they do not always agree with him). These
thinkers offer a view of politics and representation which, on the face of it,
seems somewhat similar to what I am attributing to Benjamin. In my view,
their ideas, while interesting, do not succeed in overcoming the Schmittian
trap and therefore are not as radical as they initially appear. (Indeed, I’d say
they are much less radical than Badiou himself.)

In Multitude , Hardt and Negri seem to tackle Schmitt head-on when they

argue that, given the rise of new networks of communication as well as new
social bonds that are increasingly autonomous from capitalist rulers: ‘We
are . . . no longer bound by the old blackmail: the choice is not between sover-
eignty or anarchy.’

As already noted at the beginning of this book, their

enemy is not so much the Westphalian form of sovereignty, but its purer
expression as global capitalism. Let us table once again the fact that anarchism
is itself depicted in purely negative terms. In their view the choice between
dictatorship and anarchy (Schmitt’s ‘choice’, which is, in fact, not a choice at
all) has fi nally been overcome by recent developments in the practice of global
capitalism. The authors argue that the ‘power of the multitude to create social
relations in common stands between sovereignty and anarchy, and it thus

144 Divine

Violence

presents a new possibility for politics.’

The multitude – a term they oppose to

‘the people’ which to them smacks of sovereign formulations – is composed of
what they call ‘singularities that act in common’.

Singularities (not to be

confused with Badiou’s use of that term) are unique attributes that members of
the multitude possess. What unites the multitude is what is ‘common,’ those
aspects of life that unite these various individuals into some kind of network
(i.e. the multitude) without occluding their various unique characteristics.

Class in particular is, for these authors, a system that produces commonality

in the face of difference. More specifi cally, vast mechanisms of production –
especially what they call forms of ‘immaterial’ production (service, intellectual
etc) – have radically altered the political and economic landscape, allowing for
a profound challenge to the sovereignty of capitalist production. In ‘The
Common in Communism’, Hardt writes:

Although the production of the common is increasingly central to the
capitalist economy, capital cannot intervene in the production process
and must remain external, expropriating value in the form of rent . . . As
a result the production and productivity of the common becomes an
increasingly autonomous domain.

Such a view is akin to – and seems to come at least partially out of – Agamben’s
work. In The Coming Community (a book that Hardt translated into English),
Agamben writes about ‘whatever being’, a term that conveys a similar sense
of unity in the face of absolute difference:

The Whatever in question here relates to singularity not in its indiffer-
ence with respect to a common property (to a concept, for example: being
red, being French, being Muslim), but only in its being such as it is .
Singularity is thus freed from the false dilemma that obliges knowledge
to choose between the ineffability of the individual and the intelligibility
of the universal . . . In this conception, such-and-such being is reclaimed
from its having this or that property, which identifi es it as belonging to
this or that set, to this or that class (the reds, the French, the Muslims)
– and it is reclaimed not for another class nor for the simple generic
absence of any belonging, but for its being- such , for belonging itself.

Both Agamben and Hardt and Negri link such a state of being to a particular,
and political, form of love (Agamben writes that ‘the lover wants the loved
one with all of its predicates , its being such as it is’).

Hardt and Negri speak

of love as a ‘political act that constructs the multitude’.

This move seems

to offer an alternative way to solve the dilemma of the king’s two bodies,
to coordinate individuality with generality and to allow for the collective
movement that is love to overcome capitalism and sovereignty once and
for all.

Conclusion: the anarchist hypothesis 145

Leaving questions of sovereignty aside for the moment, it might seem that

the idea of treating language as ‘being- such ’ is highly similar to Benjamin’s
anti-fetishism. In other words, what the sign conveys becomes less important
than the sign itself qua sign. The sign here is – as Agamben tells us – not
‘indifferent’ to what it conveys but it is ‘reclaimed . . . for its being- such , for
belonging to itself’ (with love being the mechanism by which that ‘being-
such ness’ is recognized and appreciated). Agamben goes on to describe a situ-
ation in which a subject’s ‘own linguistic being – not this or that content of
language, but language itself , not this or that true proposition, but the very
fact that one speaks’, is the basis for a radically alternative form of political
community.

This idea of ‘being- such ’ also serves as the basis, at least to some extent, for

Hardt and Negri’s notion of the multitude. Here, as we have seen, both indi-
viduality and collectivity are reconciled without the one erasing or eclipsing
the other, thus seemingly resolving the problem of representation. Yet we
should not be too hasty in declaring this idea a success. In dealing with the
representational valence of such a view, Paul Passavant describes this concep-
tion as a ‘multiplicity of singularities [that] produces communication and
affect within the decentered networks of postmodern society. It is unrepre-
sentable, and is in exodus from the state.’

Therein, as I see it, lies the differ-

ence between what Agamben and Hardt and Negri may be calling for and
what I see Benjamin as calling for: the anarchist and local political practices I
am describing are not ‘unrepresentable’ (a term that Agamben uses himself);
they do not occupy language only at the most basic level.

Instead, these

communities emerge out of the rich network of representation that forms
them. While Agamben characterizes the relationship between sign and
referent as ‘not indifferent’, I would argue that that such a relationship is both
deep and intense (i.e. really not indifferent); representation is not something
that we can escape even if we wanted to.

Although, as indicated in Chapter 3 , I see Agamben as having great insights

into Benjamin’s work, in this case I would argue that Agamben’s own views
about representation (and, by extension Hardt and Negri’s as well) potentially
risk the kind of idolatry that Benjamin warns us against. To be ‘unrepresent-
able’ (or, more accurately, to see a ‘pure’ form of language, whose content at
once both matters and doesn’t matter) suggests being free from representation
in a way that mimics the promise of rescue or non-representation that is
always the lure at the bottom of the phantasmagoria.

As we have seen, in Benjamin’s view, there is no such position of innocence

or neutrality vis-à-vis the sign. Recall that Benjamin always turns towards the
subjective; he engages not just with the material object but the effect that our
reading of that object has on us and the world around us. His political theology
insists that materiality is always surrounded by the tragic history of the Fall,
of idolatry and the phantasmagoria; in his view, we forget this relationship at
our peril.

146 Divine

Violence

I would argue that by believing too readily in the possibility of redemption

from our bondage to the sign, in other words by neglecting the fetishistic
dimensions of politics and economics, Hardt and Negri (and perhaps Agamben
himself) have remained bound by Schmitt’s trap after all; they remain bound
by an eschatology they see themselves as having escaped (Hardt and Negri
write that ‘there is no need for eschatology or utopianism here’).

By arguing

for the autonomy of the multitude, they reproduce Schmitt’s belief in the
autonomy of the political. To think of the political as not being deeply bound
and connected to a relationship with the sign that produces it, with represen-
tation more generally, is to ignore the deep and intense ways that we are
formed by fetishism, even by sovereignty. Hardt and Negri’s language of
exodus, of people stepping away from sovereignty similarly suggests a kind of
liberation from the sign that, as I have argued, reproduces sovereignty in new
and unseen guises (their argument about how the multitude itself makes deci-
sions may itself suggest a kind of occult decisionism malgré eux ).

And to

evoke the language of love as they do similarly suggests a link to a long tradi-
tion of eschatological structures (both Christian and secular) that may be
smuggled into a doctrine that seems radically opposed to such tendencies.

This anarchism

Thus, whereas Hardt and Negri seem to offer a world where we can eat our
cake and have it too, i.e. where we can hold onto our identities, our differ-
ences, our singularity even as we rid ourselves of the sovereign tyranny that
organizes such identities in the fi rst place, I would say that for Benjamin,
things are not so easy. For Benjamin, difference, rather than being a kind of
storehouse that we can keep for ourselves while we focus on what we have in
common with others, remains far more vested in our communal life because it
is what produces struggle and resistance. As I see it, in Benjamin’s view, all
our old identities, all the relationships and confl icts, remain even after
moments of divine violence. Nor are these relationships ‘solved’ by a turn to
revolution. All that Benjamin offers is the fact that such relationships can be
revisited and reconsidered without the blinding light of the sovereign spec-
tacle as the sole point of focus. To suggest a kind of perfect exteriority where
language is purely and only ‘being- such ’ (or ‘whatever being’) is to subscribe
to the notion that somehow all identities can be de facto melted away as far as
our collective actions are concerned (which is implied by Agamben even as he
insists on their staying powers). In this view all hierarchies can be forgotten,
and something like equality can magically appear in the world. Such a view,
however, evokes the very kinds of dreams that come from the phantasmagoria
itself – a kind of sovereign perfection – even if, in this case, it comes from an
apparently anti-sovereign source (once again duplicating Schmitt’s trap).

In my view, the kinds of politics that come from a constellation with Benjamin

do not obliterate the past, and do not proclaim an equality that has never existed.

Conclusion: the anarchist hypothesis 147

Because Benjamin recognizes the link between identity and phantasm, between
community and sovereignty, we cannot step out of our roles so easily. This is
perhaps the key difference between speaking of politics as ‘autonomous’ and
seeing it as distinct from sovereignty. To think of an autonomous politics is to
think of one that is purifi ed of any taint of human mythology, as if one could
step out of the world and start all over again. To think of politics in its distinc-
tion is to recognize the tether between our political practices and the phantasms
that inspire them but to also see that such a tether is not totalizing. If we want
to bring equality into the world, it is something that we will have to make for
ourselves; it will have to be done in the face of all that has happened, all that ‘we’
have come to be (lest we succumb to liberal phantasms of pseudo equality all the
more). In my view the ‘agonic’ politics that are offered by Benjamin are both
more terrible and painful but also more possible than what we fi nd with Arendt
(an author to whom the term agonic is far more often applied).

Such a possibility becomes available to us only when we begin to recognize that

sovereignty and politics are neither identical nor unconnected. Benjamin’s posi-
tion is a negotiation, therefore, between these two extremes: the complete abdica-
tion to sovereign power that constitutes our usual stance and the pseudo escape
where we seem to be lifted entirely out of sovereign space (only to be returned to
it all the more). Acts of divine violence – whether they come from Messianic
sources or from our own responding acts of revolution – do not wipe away the
existing world; they merely make a space for our own action, for a human
judgment that is not the product of presuppositions and ‘facts on the ground’.

This anarchism, the anarchism marked by justice, order, forgiveness and

judgment, among other things, is not only possible, it is already here. For
Benjamin we are always living ‘under the eyes of heaven’, in a state of already
being forgiven, a state of perpetual non-fallenness. The same storm that
Benjamin describes in his ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, a storm that
blows out of paradise and fi lls the world with ruin, is also, as we have seen, a
storm of divine forgiveness. As we have already seen, for Benjamin we are
fortunate in that God is forever putting off the divine judgment that we
deserve. Such a forbearance allows us a space in the world for our own actions,
our own chance to remake and redo what has come to pass. We would be aware
of this state but for our own subjective hubris, which keeps us trapped in
idolatry of various forms. For this reason, the ‘slight adjustment’ that is brought
into the world by the Messiah – not just once, but at all times and in all
places – is more than enough to radically remake our world.

What we do in

the face of that ceaseless remaking is our responsibility; in this sense, we remain
radically alone, really on our own, in the face of all that is possible for us.

Notes

1 I explore the question of Arendt’s anarchism in ‘The Ambivalent Anarchism of

Hannah Arendt’ in Klausen and Martel 2011.

148 Divine

Violence

2 See Botwinick 1997.
3 Nietzsche 1995: 138–9.
4 Nietzsche 1956: 149.
5 I make this argument in Textual Conspiracies as well.
6 Arendt 1986: 30.
7 ‘Franz Kafka: On the Tenth Anniversary of his Death’, in Benjamin 1968: 129.
8 I discuss this parable in Textual Conspiracies . Eva Ziarek also discusses this parable.

See Ziarek 1995: 138–45.

9 ‘The City Coat of Arms ( Das Stadtwappen )’, in Kafka 1961: 37.
10 Ibid.
11 Ibid.: 39.
12 Ibid.
13 Ibid.
14 Nancy 2007: 106.
15 Actually, however, this phrase is probably too strong an image for the task at

hand; to ‘cut off the king’s head’ implies to be rid, fi nally of sovereignty once and
for all, and this is not really what is being called for in this project (unless we
think of that head somehow lingering about nearby).

16 Badiou 2010: 215.
17 Ibid. Badiou writes of this that ‘ something whose value of existence was nil in the situ-

ation takes on a positive valence of existence .’ Ibid.: 221.

18 Ibid.: 225.
19 Ibid.: 209.
20 Ibid.: 227.
21 Ibid.: 228.
22 Ibid.: 152.
23 Ibid.
24 Ibid.: 153–4.
25 Ibid.: 243.
26 Ibid.: 248.
27 Ibid.: 84.
28 Ibid.: 50.
29 Ibid.: 155.
30 Ibid.: 227.
31 I recognize that the term ‘mass’ is a loaded one; I use it only because Badiou does

– and, of course, Benjamin uses the term as well.

32 Hardt and Negri 2004: 336.
33 Ibid.
34 Ibid.: 105.
35 Hardt 2010: 138–9.
36 Agamben 1993: 1–2.
37 Ibid.: 2.
38 Hardt and Negri 2004: 351.
39 Agamben 1993: 83.
40 Passavant 2010: 3.
41 Agamben 1993: 25.
42 Hardt and Negri 2004: 357.
43 The very idea that some change in history can liberate us from the tyranny of

sovereignty (and the system of signifi cation that it implies) replicates the kinds of
salvational eschatologies that we fi nd in sovereign forms of discourse. Furthermore,
in suggesting, however obliquely, that the shift from a material to an immaterial
economy (one that is endlessly reproducible rather than based on scarcity) releases

Conclusion: the anarchist hypothesis 149

us from our bondage to commodity fetishism, suggests once again the ability to
step out of fetishism altogether (not that Hardt and Negri use such terms),
whereas for Benjamin, our domination by the sign has much deeper (and theo-
logical) roots.

44 Hardt and Negri acknowledge that they are drawing on Christian and Judaic

sources for their notion of love (2004: 351). Agamben evokes Plato’s notion of
erotic anamnesis (1993: 2). Yet both classical and Judeo-Christian notions of love
are deeply implicated in the production of sovereignty itself (as we have seen). In
both classical doctrine and its reemergence in Christian faith, love is evoked as a
mechanism for producing unity despite difference (as these thinkers imply as
well). But there has always been a dark side to this understanding. The unity of
love disguises tremendous hierarchy and inequality. In doctrine ranging from
Plato to Martin Luther, love is seen as ranking us from lowest to highest according
to the degree that we empty ourselves of our own particularity and fi ll ourselves
instead with agape , with a divine (I would say sovereign and idolatrous) uniting
love. (I make this argument in an earlier book Love is a Sweet Chain (Martel 2001).
See also Derrida’s Politics of Friendship (1997), which wonderfully exposes the hier-
archy and bloodiness of Christian conceptions of love.) I’m not trying to suggest
that Hardt and Negri are secretly hierarchical, but rather that by unquestionably
turning to a concept like love to produce the community they seek, they are
bringing a whole lot of bathwater in with their baby.

45 Agamben cites Benjamin as telling the following story: ‘The Hasidim tell a story

about the world to come that says everything there will be just as it is here. Just
as our room is now, so it will be in the world to come; where our baby sleeps now,
there too it will sleep in the other world. And the clothes we wear in this world,
those too we will wear there. Everything will be as it is now, just a little different.’
(Agamben 1993: 53.) In terms of Agamben’s relationship to Benjamin, given that
he is sometimes so helpful in our understanding of him, I’d argue that Hardt and
Negri’s appropriation of Agamben (if that is what it is) is perhaps just one way to
read Agamben, and that there are other ways of reading that might align him far
more closely with Benjamin (especially in The Coming Community and some of his
earlier writings, and also in Potentialities ).

Bibliography

Agamben , Giorgio ( 1993 ) The Coming Community . Minneapolis, MN : University of

Minnesota Press .

—— ( 1995 ) Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life . Stanford, CA : Stanford

University Press .

—— ( 1999 ) ‘ The Messiah and the Sovereign ’, in Potentialities: Collected Essays in

Philosophy . Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press .

—— ( 2005 ) ‘ The State of Exception ’, in Andrew Norris (ed.) Politics, Metaphysics and

Death: Essays on Giorgio Agamben’s Homo Sacer . Durham, NC : Duke University Press .

Arendt , Hannah ( 1954 ) Between Past and Future: Eight Exercises in Political Thought .

New York : Penguin Books .

—— ( 1958 ) The Human Condition . Chicago, IL : University of Chicago Press .
—— ( 1968 ) Men in Dark Times . New York : Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich .
—— ( 1982 ) Lectures on Kant’s Political Philosophy . Chicago, IL : University of Chicago

Press .

—— ( 1986 ) On Revolution . New York : Penguin Books .
—— ( 2005 ) The Promise of Politics . New York : Schocken Books .
—— ( 2006 ) Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil . New York : Penguin

Classics .

—— ( 2007 ) ‘ The Jew as Pariah: A Hidden Tradition ’, in The Jewish Writings: Hannah

Arendt . New York : Schocken Books .

Badiou , Alain ( 2010 ) The Communist Hypothesis . New York : Verso .
Balibar , Étienne ( 2004 ) We the People of Europe?: Refl ections on Transnational Citizenship .

Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press .

Benjamin , Walter ( 1968 ) Illuminations, Essays and Refl ections . New York : Schocken

Books .

—— ( 1978 a) Refl ections: Essays, Aphorisms, Autobiographical Writings . New York :

Schocken .

—— ( 1978 b) Ursprung des deutschen Trauerspiels . Frankfurt : Suhrkamp Verlag .
—— ( 1991 ) Gesammelte Schriften , Band II-1, Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp .
—— ( 1998 ) The Origin of German Tragic Drama . New York : Verso .
—— ( 1999 ) The Arcades Project . Cambridge, MA : Belknap, Harvard University Press .
Berlin , Isaiah ( 1997 ) ‘ Two Concepts of Liberty ’, in The Proper Study of Mankind: An

Anthology of Essays . New York : Farrar, Straus and Giroux .

Blumenberg , Hans ( 1983 ) The Legitimacy of the Modern Age . Cambridge, MA : MIT

Press .

152 Divine

Violence

Bojanic

, Petar ( 2008 ) ‘ God the Revolutionist on Radical Violence over the First

Ultra-Leftist ’, Filozofski Vestnik , Vol. XXIX, No. 2 : 191 – 207 .

Botwinick , Aryeh ( 1997 ) Skepticism, Belief, and the Modern: Maimonides to Nietzsche .

Ithaca, NY : Cornell University Press .

Brown , Wendy (2009) ‘ Sovereign Hesitations’, in Pheng Chech and Suzanne Guerlac

(eds) Derrida and the time of the political . Durham, NC: Duke University Press .

—— ( 2010 ) Walled States, Waning Sovereignty . New York : Zone Books .
Bullock , Marcus , and Jennings , Michael W. (eds) ( 1996 ) Walter Benjamin: Selected

Writings, Vol. I 1913–1926 . Cambridge, MA : Belknap .

—— ( 1999 ) Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings, Vol. II: 1927–1934 . Cambridge, MA :

Belknap .

Caputo , John D. ( 1997 ) The Prayers and Tears of Jacques Derrida: Religion without

Religion . Bloomington, IN : Indiana University Press .

Caputo , John D. , Dooley , Mark , and Scanlon , Michael J. (eds) ( 2001 ) Questioning God .

Bloomington, IN : Indiana University Press .

Cohen , Margaret ( 2004 ) ‘ Benjamin’s phantasmagoria: the Arcades Project ’, in David S.

Ferris (ed.) The Cambridge Companion to Walter Benjamin . New York : Cambridge
University Press .

Constant , Benjamin ( 2003 ) Principles of Politics Applicable to All Governments .

Indianapolis, IN : Liberty Fund, Inc.

Copjec , Joan (ed.) ( 1999 ) Radical Evil . New York : Verso .
Critchley , Simon ( 1999 ) Ethics-Politics-Subjectivity . New York : Verso Press .
Cunaeus , Petrus ( 2007 ) The Hebrew Republic . Jerusalem : Shalem Press .
Derrida , Jacques ( 1976 ) Of Grammatology . Baltimore, MD : Johns Hopkins University

Press .

—— ( 1986 ) ‘ Declarations of Independence ’, New Political Science 7 ( 1 ).
—— ( 1987 ) ‘ Devant La Loi ’, in Alan Udoff (ed.) Kafka and the Contemporary Critical

Performance: Centenary Readings . Bloomington, IN : Indiana University Press .

—— ( 1992 ) ‘ Force of Law: The “Mystical Foundation of Authority” ’, in Drucilla

Cornell , Michel Rosenfeld , and David Gray Carlson (eds) Deconstruction and the
Possibility of Justice . New York : Routledge .

—— ( 1994 ) Specters of Marx: The State of the Debt, the Work of Mourning and the New

International . New York : Routledge .

—— ( 1997 ) Politics of Friendship . New York : Verso Press .
—— ( 2001 ) On Cosmopolitanism and On Forgiveness . New York : Routledge .
—— ( 2004 ) Rogues: Two Essays On Reason . Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press .
—— ( 2005 ) Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan . New York : Fordham

University Press .

—— ( 2009 ) The Beast and the Sovereign Vol. 1 . Chicago, IL : University of Chicago

Press .

Disch , Lisa J. (unpublished) ‘ How could Arendt glorify the American Revolution and

revile the French? Placing On Revolution in the historiography of the French and
American Revolutions ’.

Engster , Daniel ( 2001 ) Divine Sovereignty: The Origins of Moderna State Power . De

Kalb, IL : Northern Illinois University Press .

Foucault , Michel ( 1984 ) ‘ What is Enlightenment? ’, in Paul Rabinow (ed.) The

Foucault Reader . New York : Pantheon Books .

Bibliography 153

Friedman , Milton ( 2002 ) Capitalism and Freedom . Chicago, IL : University of Chicago

Press .

Gottlieb , Susannah Young-ah ( 2003 ) Regions of Sorrow: Anxiety and Messianism in

Hannah Arendt and W.H. Auden . Stanford, CA : Stanford University Press .

Hamacher , Werner ( 2002 ) ‘ Guilt History: Benjamin’s Sketch “Capitalism as

Religion” ’, Diacritics Fall-Winter: 81 – 106 .

Hardt , Michael ( 2010 ) ‘ The Common in Communism ’, in Costas Douzinas and Slavoj

Zizek (eds) The Idea of Communism . New York : Verso .

Hardt , Michael and Negri , Antonio ( 2001 ) Empire . Cambridge, MA : Harvard

University Press .

—— ( 2004 ) Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire . New York : Penguin

Books .

Harvey , David ( 2005 ) A Brief History of Neoliberalism . New York : Oxford University

Press .

Hayek , Friedrich von ( 1978 ) The Constitution of Liberty . Chicago, IL : University of

Chicago Press .

—— ( 2007 ) The Road to Serfdom: Texts and Documents . Chicago, IL : University of

Chicago Press .

Hinstley , F.H. ( 1966 ) Sovereignty . New York : Basic Books .
Hobbes , Thomas ( 1991 ) De Cive

Man and Citizen . Indianapolis, IN : Hackett

Publishing .

—— ( 1996 ) Leviathan . Richard Tuck (ed.). New York : Cambridge University Press .
Honig , Bonnie ( 1991 ) ‘ Declarations of Independence: Arendt and Derrida on the

Problem of Founding a Republic ’, American Political Science Review 85 ( 1 ): 97 – 113 .

Jankélévitch , Vladimir ( 2005 ) Forgiveness . Chicago, IL : University of Chicago Press .
Kafka , Franz ( 1961 ) ‘ Before the Law ’ in Parables and Paradoxes . New York : Schocken

Books .

Kalyvas , Andreas ( 2008 ) Democracy and the Politics of the Extraordinary: Max Weber,

Carl Schmitt and Hannah Arendt . New York : Cambridge University Press .

Kantorowicz , Ernst ( 1957 ) The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Mediaeval Political

Theology . Princeton, NJ : Princeton University Press .

Klausen , Jimmy Casas and Martel , James (eds) ( 2011 ) How Not To Be Governed:

Readings and Interpretations from a Critical Anarchist Left . Lanham, MD : Lexington
Press .

Lutz , Donald S. ( 2006 ) Principles of Constitutional Design . New York : Cambridge

University Press .

Martel , James ( 2001 ) Love is a Sweet Chain: Desire, Autonomy and Friendship in Liberal

Political Theory . Abingdon : Routledge .

—— ( 2007 ) Subverting the Leviathan: Reading Thomas Hobbes as a Radical Democrat .

New York : Columbia .

—— ( 2008 ) ‘ “ Amo: Volo ut sis ”: Love, willing and Arendt’s reluctant embrace of

sovereignty ’, Philosophy and Social Criticism 34 ( 3 ).

—— ( 2011 forthcoming) Textual Conspiracies: Walter Benjamin, Idolatry and Political

Theory . Ann Arbor, MI : University of Michigan Press .

Mill , John Stuart ( 1993 ) On Liberty and Utilitarianism . New York : Bantam

Books .

Minkkinen , Panu ( 2009 ) Sovereignty, Knowledge, Law . New York : Routledge .

154 Divine

Violence

Nancy , Jean-Luc ( 2007 ) The Creation of the World, or Globalization . Albany, NY :

SUNY Press .

Nelson , Eric ( 2010 ) The Hebrew Republic: Jewish Sources and the Transformation of

European Political Thought . Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press .

Nietzsche , Friedrich. ( 1956 ) The Birth of Tragedy & The Genealogy of Morals . New

York : Anchor Books .

—— ( 1995 ) Thus Spoke Zarathustra . New York : Modern Library .
Nuttall , Geoffrey F. ( 1947 ) The Holy Spirit in Puritan Faith and Experience . Oxford :

Basil Blackwell .

Passavant , Paul ( 2010 ) ‘ Commitments to Democracy ’, paper presented at a round-

table entitled ‘Post-Capitalist Democracy’ at the American Political Science
Association meeting in Washington, DC .

Pitkin , Hanna Fenichel ( 1981 ) ‘ Justice: On Relating Private and Public ’, Political

Theory 9 ( 3 ): 327 – 52 .

—— ( 1998 ) The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social . Chicago, IL :

Chicago University Press .

Rawls , John ( 1999 ) The Law of Peoples . Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press .
Ring , Jennifer ( 1997 ) The Political Consequences of Thinking . Albany, NY ; SUNY

Press .

Sacksteder , William ( 2001 ) ‘ How Much of Hobbes Might Spinoza Have Read? ’, in

Genevieve Lloyd (ed.) Spinoza: Critical Assessments of Leading Philosophers . New York :
Routledge .

Schmitt , Carl ( 1985 ) Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty .

Cambridge, MA : MIT Press .

Spinoza , Benedict (Baruch) de ( 1951 ) A Theologico-Political Treatise . New York : Dover

Press .

Strayer , Joseph ( 2009 ) On the Medieval Origins of the Modern State . Princeton, NJ :

Princeton University Press .

Ullman , Walter ( 1969 ) The Carolingian Renaissance and the Idea of Kingship: The

Birkbeck Lectures 1968–9 . London : Methuen & Co Ltd.

Weber , Samuel ( 1991 ) ‘ Genealogy of Modernity: History, Myth and Allegory in

Benjamin’s Origin of the German Mourning Play ’, MLN 106 ( 3 ): 465 – 500 .

—— ( 2008 ) Benjamin’s Abilities . Cambridge, MA : Harvard University Press .
Weil , Simone ( 1992 ) Waiting for God . New York : Harper .
Ziarek , Ewa Plonowska ( 1995 ) ‘ The Beauty of Failure: Kafka and Benjamin on the

Task of Transmission and Translation ’ in The Rhetoric of Failure: Deconstruction of
Skepticism, Reinvention of Modernism . Buffalo, NY : SUNY Press .