In Defense of the Idea of Christian Nationalism

 **As a disclaimer: I am not a Christian Nationalist & have not read the recent apologetic for it. This essay is primarily responding to the basic claims in it, the criticisms of it (most of which are idiotic), & the vicious attempt to discredit it through an ugly guilt-by-association takedown**

The basic point of Christian Nationalism is that it is neither contrary to Scripture nor reason to love what is more like you than not. Homosociality is not, and should not, be an alien or hostile thing. Boys like to play with boys, girls like to play with girls. Children will find physical differences - hair, eyes, clothes, smells, and, yes, skin color - to be odd when outside their normal experiences. This may lead to aggression (bullying), fear, or curiosity. Nevertheless, it is not a defect of nature for this reality to come about. Even Thomas Aquinas argued that God loves sinners not as sinners, but because they resemble him. It is God's love for his Goodness, Beauty, and Truth that spills down to even the lowest creature.

None of this is controversial even among carbon-copy Non-Denominational Evangelicals. However, the obvious point of contention appears effortlessly. If the above is true, then how should Christians, in the realms of political thought, consider racial and cultural differences? What exactly is a nation?

As fairly good academic literature has demonstrated, it is true that national-ism is a product for the eighteenth century. As part of the fiery revolution, 1789 saw the explosion of a new idea of a consolidated and homogenized people. Napoleon crowned himself Emperor of the French, not of France, signifying a shift in ideas about statehood. Kingdoms and republics were increasingly organized around the idea of citizenry bound to soil and blood, rather than bonds of personal loyalty (a foundational concept for the loose heuristic "feudalism") or geographic dominion. This is not to say that the ideas of National Socialism or Wilsonian Liberalism were nascent to Jacobinism. Nevertheless, the notion of a homogenizing force to produce a people began in the explosive rise of the French Republic. The idea of "French" was pursued rigorously over and against regional varieties in custom, language, and home. Benedict Anderson's "Imagined Communities" is foundational for this new notion of belonging to a Nation, often combined with the rising "bourgeois" notion of "society" found in the work of Jurgen Habermas.

I say the above to get it out of the way, for usually the semi-learned will stop there and smooth out their academic robes. It is also incontrovertible that the idea of 'nation' has existed since antiquity. Even though the Hellenes had an innumerable amount of cults, loyalty to their city, and variations in ethnic constitution and language, they were always Greek. They saw themselves as Hellene against the Barbarian. Outsiders recognized that they possessed a homogeneity that spanned across the Mediterranean. Similarly, the diaspora of Jews across the ancient world possessed a similar kind of ethnic unity. Jews developed different customs and rites in places as far flung as Rome and Babylon, yet they still had a core sense of ethnic identity. Second Temple literature has debated what exactly this unity looked like. Some scholars take a much more post-modern (and mostly dull) approach that such conceits of unity only existed in texts and the "reality" was much more fluid. It should not surprise that this sentiment is the dominant paradigm within the North Atlantic (but I will return to this point later).  Nevertheless, despite various differences in language, custom, and culture, Jews recognized one another through both a shared constellation of practiced ideas (Jerusalem Temple, Hebrew as sacred tongue, monotheistic/monolatrous), but also ethnicity. They were, after all, the seed of Abraham and were bound through kinship. There were ways (found in and after Scripture) to assimilate foreigners, but it was seen by all as a transition. Even foreign affairs involved this question of kinship. One of the Hasmonean Priest-rulers wrote to the King of Sparta extolling their shared blood to justify a treaty. For some Jewish apologists, who admired and envied the Greeks, the sons of Israel were Greek! They just happened to have the best city (Jerusalem), customary law (Nomos-Torah), and best cult (Temple).

It's from this vantage one can understand the point of Christ's intervention. The peculiarity of Israel was not to be crowned the best among nations, but to be called out from the nations. With the Temple having fallen into the hands of politiques, Israel seemed doomed. It's perhaps this juncture which created the Essene movement (which is nowhere mentioned in the Gospels), who were themselves radical Sadducees (meaning 'the righteous'). They remained loyal to the Temple, but found Jerusalem inextricably corrupt. It is possible many early Christian converts came from the informal network of Essenes. They were deeply opposed to another movement hostile to the Temple establishment: the Pharisees (meaning "the pure"). Whereas the Hasmonean priest dynasty and their supporters seemed to have saved Israel, they did so at the expense of their purity. The Pharisees were akin to middling grass-roots reformers, who challenged the Temple cult to not compromise fidelity to Torah and the Prophets. Nevertheless, the Pharisees could be themselves cunning (which perhaps explains Christ's constant condemnation that they were 'hypocrites', or actors). They used their public piety to try to force the Hasmonean hand, only resulting in their massacre (an event the Pharisees never forgot). Between the two factions, Israel overwhelmingly had lost its way. Rather than a light unto the nations, the fountain of their redemption from the devil and death, they had become embroiled in the same mode of thought. They had forgotten the point of their circumcision - a scar upon the instrument that created life,  a sign of the Passion that was to come. The importance of their race - which St Paul enumerates as the adoption, the glory, the covenants, the law, the service of God, and the promises (Rom 9:4) - had come from God. With the revelation of the God-man & his atonement before the foundation of the world, the dividing wall had perished. Israel had now accomplished His mission and freedom was available to the Gentiles.

But what does that have to do with contemporary questions of race and culture? For many today, the answer seems obvious. Just as Christ put an end to the separation between Jew and Gentile, so too should the church facilitate racial reconciliation. But what, precisely, does this mean? The unity of Christians, which St Paul described in his Epistle to the Galatians, described that there was no Jew or Greek in Christ (Gal 3:28). But there is also no freedman or bondman, not man or woman. Have these categories ceased? For many modern interpreters, the arc of exegesis bends towards Quakerism. Nevertheless, the Apostle will describe elsewhere peoples according to these categories. Modernist scholars, deriving from the Luther Renaissance of the late 19th c. and its liberal Nationalism, often argued that pseudonymous authors steered the churches away from this charismatic radicalism. The Paul who exalted freedom *appears* to contradict the Paul who silenced women and created a government of "overseers" with moral qualifications. If this path is not taken (and it should not be), then what is Paul saying? The obvious context from Galatians, and the entire crisis of Judaizing, emerged from a reimplementation of Torah. It was once again the idea that the Law (Nomos) was a set of ideal cultural instructions. The Galatians were not turned away for being ethnically different from Jewish Christian. Rather, they were expected to become Jews. It was a confusion of the Gospel for a cultural universalism, as if this culture was in se part of redemption. It had nothing to do with questions around the cultural composition of churches and their diversity.

In contrast to modernists and contemporary Evangelicals, who believe the early church was a charismatic house-church drum circle, early Christians were fairly loyal to St Paul's injunctions in the Scripture. Roman Christians did not cease to be Roman, or praise the good of the Empire, even as they criticized Rome's failings. The "anti-imperial" reading of Paul has, thank God, fallen off into disrepute. Ante-Nicaean Christians (and Ante-Constantine) did not hate Rome. Justin Martyr, Origen, Irenaeus, to name a few, all wrote encouraging things about the good of the empire. Justin's account of the Thundering Legion was proof of a more sublime way to stave off the barbarians (prayer, not violence). Origen countered Celsus that Christians did more than the Legions through their prayers. Irenaeus believed it was providential that Caesar established safe roads and sea-lanes for the Gospel to spread. They were also highly critical of Roman idolatry, sexual immorality, greed, brutality, and lust for conquest. But even the Pagan republican Tacitus would exalt the austere and free morality of the Germans against Roman decadence. Thus when Apologists praised barbarian Christians over their countrymen, it was a rhetorical technique to shame their fellow citizens. They wanted to save their kinsmen, not to abandon them. They still spoke Latin-Greek and adhered to the customs of their fathers, except in as much as they contradicted the Evangel. Hence many were considered anti-social, for when a nation was as soaked in idolatry as ancient Rome, it became almost impossible to function. Nevertheless, Eusebius of Caesarea's church history was in this same spirit. There was no radical transition pre- and post-Constantine (though the influx of poorly educated converts became a major challenge). Despite the unjust reputation that Eusebius was a bootlick, his history is very clear that it was a victory of the martyrs. It was not a celebration of violence. Christ had conquered Rome through the prayers of the faithful and the blood of the martyrs.

Thus again, unless one takes the hermeneutics and historiography of Quakers, you are left with nothing. Rome was fairly diverse and multicultural within its borders, but what is found? Congregations separated according to ethnicity, which implied culture as much as biology. The controversy between Bishop Victor and the Asians in Rome is solved if one recognized that Victor was dealing with Asian churches within the city of Rome. It was a question of imperious claims over churches on the other side of the Mediterranean (and the fairly absurd logistical question of how they carried over the eucharist on a long boat ride). Instead, it was a debate about the unity of traditions, with Victor expecting conformity to Roman norms around the Pascha. Befitting his name, Irenaeus preached unity amid diversity: the Asians could practice their Easter fast and dating, the Romans could practice theirs. Victor could tolerate this divergence and recognize both as Christian. Irenaeus did not expect uniformity within a jurisdiction, but this judgement was predicated upon the normalcy that different peoples would congregates together separately. It was no blow against the catholicity of the church. Of course, in the expedience of imperial uniformity, Constantine would later determine the proper norm for all Roman Christians, encouraging the bishops of Nicaea to side against the Quartodecimans. But rather than a case of imperial bullying, let alone a cynical ploy to use the church, the bishops had their own reasons. The Asian tradition had become fairly parochial and there was apologetic-pastoral value in separating out Easter from the Passover. Many ignorant Christians found Jewish festivals and apologetics compelling enough to convert, or at least double-dip. It's in this way that Judaizing returned as a serious problem. Yet even as the bishops of Nicaea believed they had helped settle a number of problems (most important involving Arius), this council pertained to the Roman world. Hence why these kinds of councils were called "ecumenical", which referred to the oikumene (household) of the Roman Empire. There still, at the same time, existed churches throughout the Persian Empire. These Christians did not follow lock-step, but held their own council (called and under the oversight of philochristian Zoroastrian Shah of Iran, Yazgird I) to ratify Nicaea.

This recognition that there could be wide unity that crossed nations, yet did not overthrow them, seems to be a fairly natural norm that ceased in the West. Over the 19th and 20th centuries, more radical forms of Protestantism (emergent in the Radical Reformation) became increasingly normative. The expectations of a universal world producing a universal culture seemed to be on the cusp. There was an idea that the British Empire or the United States (or some kind of combination of the two) would usher in a postmillennial dream of a fully Christian world. For those of a more Liberal persuasion (found among Whigs and Republicans in the US), there was a strong expectation that Anglo-American culture was the universal bond, having been fully Christianized. For those of a more Tory bent, there was a simultaneous revulsion and admiration of these different nations. Nevertheless, it is among the most radical visions of this potential, which saw Christianity increasingly more according to social change than doctrine, which became dominant. The fairly progressive and modernist Baptist John D. Rockefeller (and most especially his son, Junior) helped create ecumenical Christianity through funding the World Council of Churches. It was world where war, famine, illness, and poverty ceased. It both offered ideological justification for the First World War, as well as the solutions to repair a broken world. J. Gresham Machen referred to this kind of Christianity as "Liberalism" and considered it an entirely alien faith. It was what led Woodrow Wilson triumphantly into Paris, a dream which would not come about until his heir, Roosevelt, brought about the United Nations.

Now this situation poses a bizarre irony. Wilson was a liberal nationalist, believing all the nations of Europe should possess their own government, according to their own culture and race along democratic norms. However, Wilson also believed in the idea of a world government. Woodrow's right-hand man, Colonel House, admired Wilson deeply and believed he could be the caesarist savior found in his anonymous fiction, Philip Dru: Administrator. For some on the right, Wilson appears as the precursor to globalism. For some on the left, Wilson is the racist Anglo-Saxon imperialist who admired the heroism of the Ku Klux Klan as freedom-fighters. Which is it? Both, as Walter MacDougall describes in The Tragedy of U.S. Foreign Policy: Wilson's globalism was truly hyper-Americanism, Anglo-America (he was a consummate Anglophile) as a universal empire, the American flag as the flag of Man. 

It was this vision which inspired Roosevelt's United Nations, which both globalized American power and constructed the basis of Third World socialist nationalism that spanned across the globe. Again, the paradox is often misunderstood. Rightwing critics, in the mold of the John Birch Society, often saw the Washington Consensus as a sell-out of America for a global elite. Leftwing critics will damn American foreign policy as unabashed Neo-colonialism and world-wide dominion. But both are correct: it is the transubstantiation of an "American nation" (meaning, the values of cosmopolitan urban businessmen, bankers, and professionals) into a global world-order. The US will spend trillions of dollars on foreign aid, not only to Europe but Africa, as well as intervene in various coups. Washington was not only worried of losing ground to their main ideological universalized competitor, the Soviet Union, but losing any of the "global community" to resistant impulses. Third World nationalism was supported, until it interrupted the normal channels of the UN and the IMF. Conservatives (in the precise sense of those who defended the Ancien Regime of throne, altar, and nobility) were often obliterated through compromise or defeat. Eisenhower laid the final blow to the British Conservatism in the Suez Crisis. The CIA was involved in OAS coordination to kill off DeGaulle. These events paralleled efforts to remove Third World social nationalists, such as the Assads in Syria, when they threatened to defy this order. Understanding the mechanism of this ideology explains how the US can simultaneously support and oppose communist, Third World nationalists, military juntas, and conservatives. It depends on the meat of practiced doctrine, not talking-points.

What does this have to do with Christian Nationalism? In contrast to the sneers of "bigotry" or "racism" that this term has been smeared with, it is often the critics who take for granted this globalized hyper-Americanism. Some ignorantly attacked The Case for Christian Nationalism by drawing a genealogical tie between J.G. Herder and Hitler's National Socialism. Besides the boilerplate Hitlerian demonology that all accepted as a given, Herder was himself a liberal republican! He believed races developed separately, but not according to any fixed hierarchy. Races could degenerate, but also regenerate. Part of this self-conscious effort at cultural formation was establishing scholarly means to collate and recognize a culture. This was not through Napoleon's cannon, but Grimm's Fairy Tales. It was the beginning of a serious development of historical study, philology, and literary criticism. Herder's ideas were critical of the universalizing impulse of Jacobin France, as well as imperial Britain. He was firmly against empire, which smashed and smoothed over various national developments, in defense of the nations. It was no different than the ancient effort to find the ur-text of Homer in the Library of Alexandria. Herder's nationalism was more akin to the ancients, than modern efforts at universalizing. Anarchis Cloots, a German delegate to the French National Assembly, believed in the universality of revolution, but the Republic of Man had a capital in Paris! The paradox is not difficult to solve.

Thus, for all the wincing about Christian Nationalism, it in fact emerged from the modernist impulse that many Evangelicals (as well as self-professed "Traditionalists") claim to deplore. The same who lament the evils of "populism" and "nationalism", and their concomitant bigotry, are often the same who cheerlead the Empire's intervention in Iraq and Ukraine. They are basically of the same spirit as the Pharisees, who want a little moral gloss on imperial adventures. Maybe Ukraine - a depot of sex trafficking, child pornography, and vegetable oil before the Russian intervention - will be smashed up by transgender mercenaries, but at least it will be a little bit better. Similarly, these same conservatives will wrinkle their nose at the effects of Black Lives Matter and the evils of critical race theory. Yet they do not cast off the same universalizing impulse that provoked this kind of grievance mongering. If the only race is the Human race - a Marxist-lite cliche - then it really does not matter how its complexion changes. If it becomes all black, who cares. But if it becomes all white? The value judgement has become reversed. Perhaps a more reasonable Christian would bite the bullet and, in the name of Gospel equity, commit to either side of the statement. But that's not what seems to be coming forth. For these types, the minor grumbles about replacement theory are gauche and low-brow. They belong to jump rednecks who "cling to their guns and bibles" (Obama) and monitor Tucker for updates on the world. And like many cosmopolitan liberals on the media: it's conspiracy disinformation, but even if it is true, so what. All's the better to remove the sting of white culture from the world.

Given the fact that Christians, since their very inception, have not abhorred racial differences and recognized their existence (and preservation) could coincide with a Catholic Evangel, then perhaps the reaction against Christian Nationalism (which all-in-all is fairly tame) reveals more about the critics. It shows the lines between those who defend the hyper-"American" global order and those who criticize it. And to iterate, one can admire traditionalism while at the same time expect universal expectations. Clinton bombed Yugoslavia into oblivion to punish the Serbs for their recalcitrance to the "rules based order", while at the same time dressing up in a pre-packaged West African garb for his arrival in Ghana. You can have you parochialism and your traditions, just make sure file down your teeth before you bite. If you are concerned for an idea of "American" that is not a set of universalized ideas, but a particular people with a culture, language, border, and, yes, racial composition, than you have stepped out of line. The West is simultaneous gutted of particularity and universalized into dominion. It is the reign of an empty-signifier, which leftists would condemn as capitalism. 

The idea of Christian Nationalism is, simply, that you may like what is like you, without losing the Catholicity of the Gospel. It requests a masculine defense of these ideas, lest Christians remain handmaidens to a globalized hyper-American Universal Social Democracy of the Rainbow Flag. It is this notion that is admirable and worthy of defense against all its unworthy and spineless critics.

After all this, why am I not a Christian nationalist? Primarily because I do not think it is truly tenable. It is a rearguard defense of a particularity that cannot be sustained. I am not talking about things like limiting immigration and having a secure border (though these are beneficial policies). I am referring to the technological integration that our world entirely depends upon. Like the 19th c. self-conscious efforts of self-professed nationalists of small and fairly fictitious nations, there is too much fabrication and contrivance necessary for an adequate result. American culture has primarily been turned into plastic. The national culture of most Americans is football, rap, and marijuana. Obviously there is much more beyond this, and like the Apologists of old, these degeneracies would be criticized by fellow Americans as lapses. Christians will increasingly become anti-social pariahs in order to maintain their fidelity. And while the goal of reestablishing what an evangelized American culture would look like, there is not much in the way of a political platform. Perhaps I would benefit from reading the eponymous book. Nevertheless, reminiscing about the old ways of Sabbath laws and prosecution of blasphemy are not a way out of the current morass. While these discussions put self-professed "Confessional Protestants" in their place as foolish progeny who have abandoned their fathers, I do not think a return to the 17th c. (let alone a return to any particular era) will bear much fruit. The fundamental reality of a surveillance-security state, which operates according to the bio-political apparatus of managing bodies and resources, is universally present in NATO as much as it is in the PRC. This threat, which conducted a global experiment in gene therapy, operates at a far deeper level. 

But let me state an agreement before I continue. Most modern Evangelicals assume a kind of multiculturalism in Heaven that operates on some absurd levels. Some Evangelicals think all our Human achievements will be translated, so we will be no less gross and grubby than most Muslim accounts of Paradise. Would I really want to play baseball in the New Jerusalem, when there is infinite beauty splayed out before me? On the other side, there's an old Fundy instinct that everything will be obliterated. But what language will we speak? Obviously Paradise will maintain the totality of all nations, and what that entails is not known. But this means there is nothing wrong in the sheer preservation of these nations, whatever they may be, whether Jew or Greek. The Herderian project, to uncover what American culture is (with all its distinctions of the English from which it emerged), is a good and necessary one. In light of vile post-modernists who have eviscerated any sense of canon, it would be good to recover American folkways. Against localists, who have often turned their face into a mask, there really is an American culture that was apparent to men like Ben Franklin and George Washington.

To conclude, I want to turn to the Parable of the Good Samaritan, which is often touted as a rejection of any kind of nationalism whatsoever. In Ivan Illich's masterly exegesis, the point of parable is particularity. Who is your neighbor? It is the man right face-to-face. It is not an abstract group, but a particular name and face. It was this burden which enflamed Christian ethics. It was in no way against nature (even Pagans recognized the need to treat the alien well), but intensified nature. One must love the particular man before you, not only when he is alien to you, but even when he is your enemy. However, modernizing tendencies from the Enlightenment onwards had metastasized this catholic ethic into universal morality. Your neighbor is not this particular man, but all Humanity. The Messianic politics of the Gospel do not obliterate difference, but suspends it in clear relation. It is precisely that the Samaritan and the wounded Jew are entirely different to one another that this love may reach out across. While the familiar may breed one kind of love, the other breeds a sense of eros, a transcendent love which may be poured out. This new bond of friendship does not replace or synthesize the differences between, but allow them to exist. This ethic in no way contradicts admiration for what belongs to you, but should intensify it. The same love you have for your family, kin, culture, language, and so on, should breed a love to see the same preserved in the other. Such is part of what it means to love your neighbor as yourself. Yet the corruption of Christian invites a sinister reversal, where nature is obliterated for an apocalyptic grace. You must love your neighbor, despite yourself. As Illich would say corruptio optimi pessima.

My hope for the future is a disintegration of this false gospel of antichrist, where catholicity becomes universalized and grace becomes debt. It should not be a coincidence that the reign of fiat money and financialization coincided with an increasingly culture-less people reduced to their basest appetites. As Marx waxed, all things solid have melted into air. Yet communism is in no way approaching and, instead, it produced the ugly and plastic people that marks out most socialist regimes. The Evangel must start afresh amidst people, where bonds are reestablished. I hope in a return to Christian federalism, the kind that helped unite and ameliorate various warring and barbarized Germanics into the settled kingdoms of Europe. For all its faults, the so-called "Dark Ages" glimmered with a light, which shone amidst the decay and chaos of this world. Despite his roaring like a lion, men and women continued to trample Satan under his feet. The power of Christ in the saints was memorialized in painting, song, and architecture, testimonies that the Devil has been overthrown despite how vile things may be.

American Political Future

 The shadow remains.

The future of American politics will be, in the main, fairly grim. I hope to offer an analysis that is not a value judgement, but an examination of the conditions. First, I want to recapitulate a criticism of the reified myths of the generic liberal textbook:

 No government has been unified, but usually criss-crossed by various factions or cliques that find mutual alignment. FDR held together a complex coalition of New York Yankee oligarchic finance, southern & western populists, and Rockefeller Republicans interested in defense of American business in Asia. With FDR's death and the end of World War Two, Republicans increasingly became frustrated with Truman's administration and its lack of attention to Asia, particularly China. Truman was a machine politician, but he depended upon FDR's brain-trust to conduct his foreign policy. Barely winning out against Yankee Progressive-lite Dewey, Truman alienated many conservatives when he sacked MacArthur and allowed China to go Red. With the voter animated, the Republican Party defended the legacy of the New Deal when it allowed Eisenhower to cheat his way into the nomination. The Me Too Republicans brought the old mid-west conservatives to a close and continued the same policies, with a pivot to Asia. Eisenhower struggled to placate these critics, while his government was full of Yankee money and Rockefeller influence, along with the growing Military-Industrial Complex and a combinatrix of business and labor. The 50s were booming. In 1960s, the Yankee establishment and the southern populists helped catapult John Kennedy into office, stealing enough votes in Texas and Illinois to pull it off. But Kennedy was a caesarist, treating the "Whiz Kids" as tools to cement his own popularity and power. Disgusted with the growing power of the Establishment, Kennedy was willing to slash to carry out his own policies, until he met his own end.

After Kennedy, Johnson inherited a cabinet full of Establishment, WASP intellectuals, and a splash of Southern populists. However, many Southern populists had become alienated from Johnson, as he had made a deal to side with Kennedy. The government largesse of the New Deal was strained and being deployed to minorities. Additionally, efforts to fix racial imbalances through social engineering angered southern whites, who felt their culture was being put under armed guard. Southern populists increasingly bolted from Johnson, who had been a mediating figure, and would turn against his '68 successor, Hubert Humphrey. But then again, Johnson did not care much for Humphrey and had become exhausted from his failures. He had bridled and channeled the Civil Rights Movement, by making them apart of the welfare coalition, turning black politics into one more ethnic enclave looking for goods. He had also expanded the scope of government through his vain monument to self, the Great Society. But Vietnam was another story. Confused by spooks, state department reps, military generals, and the national security advisors who talked him into a tizzy, Johnson was through. This left the door open to Nixon. Having built a coalition on conservative frustration, southern populists (who were moderate New Dealers from Dixiecrat Wallace's white welfare programs), and the rump of Me Too Republicans, Nixon snatched a narrow victory over Humphrey. Having deigned to end the war in Vietnam as a mechanism towards world stability, Nixon spent the next four years secretly trading a Vietnam victory for a triangulation between the United States, the Soviet Union, and the People's Republic of China. He succeeded. Combined with his moderated domestic policies, welfare-warfare proved a powerful combination. The acid and abortion candidacy of McGovern was blown apart. But not everyone was happy. The Watergate burglary, concerned as it was with covering up a CIA honey-pot and using Nixon's umbrella, embroiled the president in scandal. Now, his enemies sharpened their knives. Frustrated Establishment Liberals lamented his conservative rhetoric and law and order policies. Federal bureaucrats despised the loss of their powers as the presidency concentrated in Nixon's choices. The military felt sold out over Vietnam being determined by Jew Kissinger. All conspired in Nixon's downfall. With the alliance between Washington Post liberals and military asset Woodward, internal leaks and animosities would bury Nixon. In his last gasp, having lost his protective threat in the corrupt Agnew, Nixon resigned himself to his fate. He nominated a moderate and mundane Ford, and took his leave.

Ford carried on the Nixon coalition, and policy, but alienated the conservative wing. Barely surviving a 1976 primary from Cowboy insurgent Reagan, Ford dumped his liberal aspects and tried to appeal to a middle. But this was not enough. Democrats had reeled from the New Left take over in 1972, and brought the party around a moderate governor, with personally conservative bonafides, James Carter. The Carter government was made up of conflicting elements. On the one hand, Nixon's policies had opened the door to absorb the USSR and PRC into the market-order that the Anglo-American victors of World War Two forged in Bretton-Woods. This order, having reformulated by jettisoning the gold-standard, required reworking. Including Western Europe and Japan, the Trilateral Commission hoped to defend the globalist order through a diffusion of American power. This approach could woo these regional powers to the table. On the other hand, Carter's government had old-school liberal hawks. They did not want the Soviet Union on its feet, but on its knees. Sabotaging efforts at SALT II, Carter's government by 1978 had become increasingly hawkish. But this could not staunch the critique he had become soft. Additionally, the 1970s saw the wartime boom of American global dominance dry out. The US economy was no longer the industrial aid producer, with both West Germany and Japan on their feet. Reagan clubbed Carter with these failures, consolidated with his October Surprise shadow agreement with the new Iranian Revolution government. The Nixon doctrine was dead.

Reagan, however, was an actor with a fairly liberal background. A former Democrat, Reagan was effectively a Me Too Republican. However, he channeled his hawkishness to attract conservatives and presided over a fairly liberal gubernatorial reign. In 1980, the same contradictions remained. Reagan's government had both southwest Cowboys and Me Too liberals. The former represented up-and-coming oil interests and defense contractors in the southwest. The latter represented the remnants of the internationalist liberal republicans, which were willing to use state power to crack down on crime and communism at home and abroad. The failed, probably Bush encouraged, assassination of Reagan left the Cowboys in charge. But the Iran-Contra scandal, which sent Oliver North to jail and jeopardized a number of Cowboys in government, put Bush in charge. From 1988, Bush coasted into office from the boom years of Reagan, channeling his legacy, using his rhetoric, but keeping his Internationalist efforts. As one example, Bush was the last member of his government to realize that Gorbechev could not be saved, and the Soviet Union would dissolve. The idea was international order, and rule breakers would be punished. Whether it was former allies Noriega or Hussein, anyone who threatened to deviated from this globalist hyper-American order was shut down. What made this global rules-based order hyper-American was its projection of a certain elite vision of a plastic alchemical universal peace, against the concrete historical American culture that existed. Bush would eventually give way to Clinton, who attacked him as a hawk and from his right. Clinton slid into government, bringing back east-liberals, but also the up and rising tech sector in California, as well as Wall St which knew they had an ally. Clinton maintained his position, waged his wars, and expanded the tech sector through his Dot-Com Boom. While Gore seemed a shoe-in, some Americans were wary of this endless war, especially as human-rights violations had replaced the far more sinister and ideological potent threat of Communism. Bush II won, barely, through a little bit of vote rigging in his brother's Florida.

Bush II brought in a mixed coalition. The ruling faction was his father's men, the liberal internationalists who came under the banner of "compassionate conservatism" as a reformatted Me Too Republicanism. Tech sector and Wall St would get their support, yet international intervention would slow down. However, part of this coalition were Neo-cons, post-Trotskyist democratic ideologues which sought a full-frontal war for civilization. These dovetailed with a rump of Cowboys (manifest in Cheney and Rumsfeld) who wanted access to Arab oil on their own terms, coupled with battles which would increase defense spending. 9/11 became the means for these people to seize control. However, it was limited. Unable to gain absolute victory over Afghanistan and their ramming through the Iraq War, the liberal internationalists and career bureaucrats struck. With events like the Plame Affair as serially undermining Bush's legitimacy, he was given reelection through a combined voter inertia and concerted effort to keep the election in his hands (a little bit of vote rigging and media kid gloves). Bush cleaned up his act and the liberal internationalists, with their Me Too socialism, triumphed. No Kid Left Behind and the TARP are only two ways this economic interventionism, without any oversight over profits from government funds, continued. Bush gave way to Obama, who channeled populism to overcome the basically identical McCain. Obama carried on, and expanded, Bush's policies. He abandoned the Neo-con Middle East project, winding down the Iraq War. With the War in Afghanistan as "the good war", Obama made his "pivot to Asia". Instead of ideological confrontation, liberal internationalists chose color revolution. Instead of actively invading Egypt or Libya or Syria, the state department fomented a mix of liberal democratic angst with Islamist politics. The end result saw the brief overturn of Egyptian secularism, the death of Gaddafi for slave markets, and the attempt on Assad. In Asia, America sought to secure its presence in Western Asia (buoyed with the killing of Osama bin Laden), and strengthen its command in Eastern Asia. However, Obama himself owed much of his power to the Clinton networks. These pursued the old liberal internationalist concern about Russia, while Obama's tech supporters revealed a growing concern over China's industrial capacity. Under Xi, China had removed its pro-Western leadership and pursued increasingly independent policies outside the rules-based order. Nevertheless, with weak challengers from the Republicans (McCain and Romney as militant liberals, who channeled conservative nationalist rhetoric about overseas expansion and government overreach), Obama maintained this coalition. Obama's two terms signified a clear shift to preserve this global order.

In comes Trump. The almost arrogant presumption that Hilary Clinton would win, as heir apparent, was dashed against clever campaigning. Clinton had the backing of Wall St, the tech sector, and the full push of Democratic urban political machines. Trump seemed to bluster into the nomination on rhetoric alone (a victory Clinton celebrated). Without infrastructure or clear party command, Trump was supposed to flounder. However, as clear in his choices, Trump had made deals of his own. He had signed up with the Blue Team of the military establishment, promising increased conflict with Asia. Clinton had shifted towards Russia, not China, and this had alienated some. Additionally, some in the tech sector (particularly the brilliant and well-organized Peter Thiel) had failed to appreciate Clinton as anything but a worn out act. A gay heterodox Christian of dual citizenship, Thiel had a more robust vision for American geopolitics. It was not possible for America to continue at the rate it was going if it were to remain a world power. The globalist network was already beginning to shake, as the US struggled to find victory in the Middle East, retain its European allies, and additionally contain China and, perhaps, a resurgent Russia. For Clinton, Putin was the scariest. A dyed-in-the-wool national liberal, Putin attempted to defend Russia from international investors (driving out many oligarchs to London), while at the same time extending a hand to Europe. He hoped greater partnership would see both Europe and Russia grow wealthy. Thiel saw this reality and, as a rogue tech sector faction and investor, believed the proper enemy was China. Russia, a historic antagonist to its southern neighbor, may be an aid to contain the rising dragon. For Thiel, the only future for American global power was for America to abandon the globalist project. Akin to China, America should develop a regional sphere of influence, that then could expand to offer a friendly monetary hand to the rest of the world. Like China, America's tech sector could aid in governance and control, even if this policy was pursued through public-private partnership instead of direct state snooping. Palantir, not the Total Information Awareness system, could provide a more robust means to root out criminals and subversives.

Trump's four years in office reflected some of these goals. His immigration policies restricted skill-less workers, but attracted competent tech sector employees (under the auspices of his son-in-law, Jared Kushner). Trump lost his Pentagon support (manifest in Mathis and Kelly departing), but he retained critical support from some of the old deep-state cowboys (eg Bill Barr, Eliot Abrams). Steve Bannon was a foreign policy pundit who signaled this growing Blue Team concern about China's military, economic, and technological growth. As an internal CIA powerpoint presentation shows - acquired through FOIA - there is a concern that China may simply overcome the US' technological capacity. To that end, the malleability of the US economy needs be improved. Things that hinder quick adjustment (eg individual ownership of cars, paper money, property ownership) must be abandoned. Instead, a more fluid economy must be adapted, one that prioritizes division of labor over private property. It's only a fast paced economy, with rapid overturn in technology and lots of spending, which will thrive in the growing struggle between nations. All of these things represent the kind of vision Thiel wants to enact. It is only through these means that can bring an age of American power, even as it abandons its claim as global hegemony. The seemingly innocuous "rules-based order" cannot sustain itself. If it falls while America still upholds it, ruined through catastrophe and crisis, then not only would the American global empire fall, but it would plunge the American nation into chaos.

Trump haphazardly pursued these ends. The reality of the Trump presidency was not ideological conformity, but destructive revelation. Trump revealed the limits of the presidency before a sprawling bureaucracy. Trump exposed the interconnections between military, media, and deep-state. He operated as a battering ram, even as his actual governing was impotent. It was not his policies, but his impotency which demonstrated a deep-rot to the American people. Many began to realize the deep-rot at the heart of the global liberal internationalist order, which both Clintons and Bushes wished to stave off. The Clinton Humanitarian crusade and the Bush War on Terror are now both placed under judgement. Through media talking-heads like Tucker Carlson, more and more Americans have adopted paleocon lines of critique about endless wars, global governance, and unlimited surveillance. That doesn't mean it does not happen. Corona restrictions and vaccinations, embraced by both parties, dovetail with bipartisan support for bolstering Ukraine. Silence and criticism of reckless spending has been, at best, the legacy of the most vocal Trump Republicans sitting in Congress. Criticisms may be disingenuous, especially as the useless war in Ukraine is juxtaposed about the growing threat in China. Nevertheless, they open up a new view in American politics. The World War Two order of endless militancy seems to be reaching its nadir. If the global order cracks under support, or withers from American abandonment, both will result in a radical global realignment. Europe will increasingly take a move towards independence. China will be dealt with as an enemy competitor. Russia, and perhaps Iran and Turkey, will be allowed to enter into a regional hegemon status. Many new things, unexpected and undetermined, may appear with rapid speed.

Here we enter into the current era. Trump, by hook or crook, his bid for reelection, coalesced around the corpse of Joe Biden. A sock puppet for the same Clinton-Obama forces, representing California through courtesan Kamala, Biden began a process of pivoting. Biden ramped up Corona protocol, reflecting the broader global frenzy to contain the disease until the protocol ran out its use. It is not to say Corona was part of a Plandemic, as if a cabal decided to unleash it. Rather, it reflects a greater shift to bio-politics, far more extensive than anthrax, H1N1, ebola, or zika virus. However, corona (likely a lab-altered virus that escaped) was erratic and thus put bio-medical government into full-force. As government pre-planning, like Dark Winter had predicted: containment was primarily about the perception of competence than effect. Whether the government was effective depended on obedience, a commitment to common good in a medical war to defeat a virus. It was no different than efforts to unify against communism, human-rights violators, and religious terrorists. It required surveillance, management, and governing in a way that did not seem too overbearing. It was not China's fairly draconian lockdown procedures. Yet it still produced a backlash, especially as Trump refused to implement a national policy. Now Biden has tried, combined with massive Ukrainian defense spending, and the fruits of the Fed's insane lending policies, leading to great frustration. Increasingly the American people realize he's a zombie, and the question is what will succeed this current regime, especially as midterms loom.

2022 will almost surely bring some kind of red wave. A number of purple states will flip, for the time being, red. There are a few exceptions: such as Pennsylvania's celebrity ditz Oz being, perhaps, out-maneuvered from native Fetterman. Nevertheless, 2022 will signal some level of Democratic defeat. The senate, if not the house, will become Republican. The level of success of Trump endorsed candidates will determine the future. Everyone has been coy about the future election. Trump has neither announced nor stepped back. Trump-affiliated candidates, like Kemp or DeSantis, will remain mum until the big guy speaks. The Democrats will most surely dump Biden for someone else (not likely Kamala, but maybe Pritzker or Newsom). Republicans have a few options and a few possible results. If Trump declares, he will likely only attract a Never Trumper (perhaps Liz Cheney, Romney, McMullin, or some outside businessman) and an artificially propped-up super-Trumper (who will attack Trump for failing his promises; maybe Cruz or Cotton). Perhaps even Rand Paul would make another run. Trump would almost surely win the primary. If he wins the election, this will solidify Trump's populist-tinged nationalism and will cement this faction as the dominant force in the GOP. If he loses, this faction will suffer major setbacks, but the GOP won't recover. Enough of the voters have staked the future of the party on Trump and Trump alone. Thus some Trump-adjacent candidate, who will mouth his rhetoric and play coy with his policies, will likely take up the future mantle. If Trump, however, decides not to run, he will become a king-maker. If Democrats dump Biden, as they likely will, this will offer fresh-blood which can pander to the left-liberals that orbit the Justice Democrats, while maintaining strong ties with Wall St, the tech sector, federal bureaucrats, and increasingly the Pentagon. Trump may stir up old animosities, and an alternative may lessen the controversy while keeping the rhetoric of policies. The result would be perhaps an easier victory, but will lesson the battering ram aspect of Trump's insurgent presidency. No one appears to have a substantial vision that won't melt back into Bush's "compassionate conservatism" of criticism foreign expansionism (while doing it anyway) and decreasing economic intervention (but simply shift to a more private approach). It will take on a more paleocon aspect, but who knows if it will be meaningful. If a Trump endorsed candidate lost, which would be fairly surprising in this climate, it might doom the entire movement.

However, the reality is within the effort of Thiel to run a nationalist network to put an end to globalism. This will be an effort to replicate the Chinese model of efficiency, without its party-state or doctrinaire communism. American Empire has not yet suffered enough to be clearly in decline. Unlike Britain, which suffered with global decline for 40 years before the First World War, America will probably not suffer a catastrophic shock. Therefore, it will not likely appear to be headed for decline, as global power decreases. However, the fiat-dollar is not the gold-pound, it may crash in the blink of an eye. Therefore, it's difficult to say an almost imperceptible slow decline will happen, or a nearly instantaneous crash. However, the success or failure of Trump will probably determine whether the Thile-adjacent nationalist can pivot America away from globalism towards a national power that will be far more direct and regional in result.

The future is, to me, unknown. To offer a limited value judgement, all of this bolds ill. I don't want to live in a nationalist surveillance system, anymore than an internationalist and liberal one. I hope to be suspicious of the mask whether it's Tucker saying to stock up or CNN warning to wear it at all costs. I hope to doubt pharmaceutical companies whether they're jolted through Trump's Operation Warp Speed or Biden's obeisance and fawning over the efficacy of Pfizer. I would not mind a nationalist and regionalist America, but on terms that are decentralized and unsupportive of corporate technology. I want an American nation without an American empire. However, I do not think the Thiel effort is anything less than to defend an American Empire shorn of its globalist niceties. Involvement in Ukraine would continue, but not as a "liberal world order" but as American geopolitical interest. Even as Thiel was more conciliatory, a loss of European opportunities for America was treated the same as the Biden administration. I don't think a Trump victory will substantially put an end to the great evil at work in this nation. I don't see in any current politician, except perhaps a Thomas Massie, the spine to not simply replicate another version of watered down social democracy. Nevertheless, as someone both anti-imperialist and anti-globalist, the future looks fairly dim. Restraints on kulturkampf simply meaning rolling back a few decades, where the conservative position was the moderately liberal in the 1990s. It's hard to imagine Bill Clinton or Bob Dole endorsing transgender commentators as worthy supporters! Thus, it seems that only if America recovers some general sense of normative ethics at the heart of its governing, which may very result in its united dissolution, that something more just may emerge.

sic.

Martyrdom: Memory, History, and the Limits of Humanity in an Exposition of Giorgio Agamben's "Remnants of Auschwitz"

 How do you explain the unexplainable? How can someone bear witness to something not only unbelievable, but unexperienced? And if it is experienced, how can it be explained? 

One of the most perplexing elements of the Holocaust is its simultaneous historicization and mythologization. The latter term does not refer to its non-existence, but a shroud of language that narrates what cannot be directly understood. It is simultaneously something that must be remembered, indefinitely, so that its horrors may not repeat. However, at the same time, it is considered as a singularly unique event (often its comparison to other twentieth-century genocides or massacres is decried as diminishing its importance). If it is absolutely unique, how can it be described in historical terms? Instead, the Holocaust becomes a core mythologme for modern theology: theodicy. As Ellie Wiesel famously painted in Night: the Jewish boy hung from the gallows was a kind of judgement on God. The question of modern theology is how God could be good, or omnipotent, or all wise, if he permitted the Holocaust to occur. The Trial (as in Kafka's novel) becomes definitive for coming to terms with history and theology, ethics and civilization. God survives this ordeal, but as the powerless one, the one who weeps, the one unable to act. And thus as men cry out "may It never happen again!", the juridical-order of The Camp continues to spread across the world. The Trial upon The Holocaust continues indefinitely, without resolution or clarity.

But what, exactly, is being judged? And what would resolution look like? Often, the resolution is that this judgement is assumed at a collective level, in a theological key. Germany, as well as most of the West, performed rituals of humility, to recognize that they had failed and now had the obligation to never let It happen again. But what does guilt without punishment mean? Ironically, Adolf Eichmann took this defense in his trial at Jerusalem. He wanted to kill himself so the German people may be relieved of the weight of guilt, that he knew his actions were guilty before the eyes of God, but, at the same time, he was not guilty of the assembled court in Israel. Similarly, phenomena such as white guilt continue to generate a sense of guiltiness without any particular law or penalty. While some have compared this disposition to something almost medieval, this claim is misguided. At least in Roman Catholicism, there are means to concretely put an end to one's sin, one's guilt and debt (interestingly the same word - schuld - in German). Instead, this new disposition, this obligation to always remember, where morality is entirely constructed around a Trial that has no end (history moving into mythos), marks a break with the past. Instead, no resolution may come and the mythological glory only continues. Even the framework of "Holocaust" is peculiar, given its reference to an immolated sacrifice before God. In this case, the sacrifice becomes a permanent fixture. There is a Trial, but no sentence; there is guilt, but no expiation. It is a new theology.

But what language can this new theology speak? Many Holocaust survivors lament that they cannot, in fact, bear witness of what happened because they bear the guilt of survival. It was those who perished in the Camp, by starvation or bullet, fire or gas, which could speak. And those who survived cannot speak. If this disposition marks out the entrance into history, and language, of the event of the Holocaust, then it can never be spoken. Yet, whether it is Israeli containment of Palestinians, the incoherence of an American "overflow facility" at the border, or the Australian compulsory quarantine zones, the event of The Camp continues to exist. It is, as Agamben describes elsewhere, a moment of indistinction and exception: excluded from the polity at the same time that it is captured entirely within its power. If The Camp cannot be described, trapped within the logic of The Trial (Judgement looming but never rendered), then what took place will never be understood. It is, as Josef K discovered, a glorious baroque edifice that has unlimited power, incapable of direct action and murderous in indirect confrontation. While no language may exist for the Holocaust, its repetition continues.

The figure that best represents the impotent living, the man without speech, was the Musselman. Called "Muslims" because of their complete subjection (from the belief that Islam was fatalist), the Musselmaner had lost all shreds of their humanity. They did not speak. They did not think. A faceless mass of workers whose only concern was sheer survival, from meal to meal, moment to moment. Addressed by a guard, they remained speechless. Beaten for insolence, they urinated and defecated themselves without shame or awareness. Without a will or consciousness, the Musselmaner persevered without end. There was no "after" The Camp. There was an eternal present, a complete collapse into a zone indistinguishable between man and beast. This transformation is part of the nightmare of the camp, yet they can't speak of what took place. The Musselman becomes the ultimate form of modernity's biopolitics:

"At times a medical figure or an ethical category, at times a political limit or an anthropological concept, the Musselmann is an indefinite being in whom not only humanity and non-humanity, but also vegetative existence and relation, physiology and ethics, medicine and politics, and life and death continuously pass through each other. This is why the Musselmann's 'third realm' is the perfect cipher of the camp, the non-place in which all disciplinary barriers are destroyed and all embankments flooded" (48)

This eternal present, this totalized immanence, where everything is everything (and thus nothing), marks out the true horror of the Camp. The Musslemanner have no past and no future, they are creature of The Camp, pathetically clawing to survival until it simply slips away. They become indescribable and unbearable. Their state of un-living reveals the pure extraction of biological subsistence from anything distinctly human. And it is this figure, buried within the theodicy of theologians, that marks out the modern god. Wiesel's narration spoke better than he knew: the suffocating (but not quite dead) teen, the un-living, had become the fully immanent god. The world was a camp and God was the God of the un-living. Like the Greek Gorgon, the Event could be gestured at through a euphemism, but direct analysis would paralyze and remove a man from the world of speech, from his humanity. If this takes place, how can anyone bear witness to this possibility? 

But this is the purpose of language. Speaking is always, in itself, a bearing witness to a reality that exists outside the parameters of speech. Whether it is a social bond, a discrete object, another subject, language constantly exhausts itself in its own impotence. But then the Musselmann, who cannot speak, cannot bear witness to what is beyond language, language at its very limit. In parallel terms, the Musselmann is also beyond all dignity within human society. Opposition to mistreatment emerges from a claim to rank, that one is treated as if one is in another place. A king objects to being treated as a servant, a slave blushes in his treatment as a noble. The man in line for McDonald's believes he is entitle to a certain caliber of service, in possession of the rank as patronizing customer. But within The Camp, all questions of dignity are drowned. The Musslemann simply receives abuse, simply consumes, simply survives day to day. But what kind of human being is one that does not have a place, except in the "non-place" of The Camp? In both of these cases - language and dignity - a pure form of de-humanized life emerges. A dog cannot cease being a dog, a cat cannot cease being a cat. Yet in mankind, there lays a real risk that the unique calling of a man may be erased. The Camp becomes an alchemical experiment. For just as human beings experience, through their lives, a coming-to-be as mature and fulfilled, so too may this process be reversed. The Musselmann is the residue, the remnant, of The Camp.

Perhaps strangely, if this figure cannot quite be called a human being - it being like a zombie in a state of un-living - then it can not be said to die. And what is a human being? Within Western history, the rise of the modern era coincided with the shift from territorial sovereignty towards a national sovereignty. The House of Bourbon (kings of France) shifted towards the Napoleonic (Emperor of the French). Nationality had an integral connection with birth (natio) and thus began the process of bio-politics. Sovereignty had always included the right over life and death (the differentiation between judicial execution and illicit murder), but the rites of a polity now referred to a citizenship connected to the appearance of a life. However, the obvious ambiguities (who is "French"?) require legal definitions, that the law grants and recognizes the citizenship of this individual, to person them within the law. But this process could work in reverse: the law may strip you of citizenship and reduced to a different legal category. As Hannah Arendt noticed in the national tumults and movements after World War One, these national constitutions could say nothing to peoples who lacked a state. If the nation-state only existed for the nation that constituted it, then what becomes of foreigners who lack a legally constituted land of their own? Democracy also required demography. Thus National Socialists were only radical in their commitment to this system of government. They would produce a state that was entirely democratic, entirely popular, where no remainder was left between people and populace. The fabrication of corpses that emerged from The Camp was the residue of a machine accomplishing its end.

"Beyond the Muselmann lies only the gas chamber" (85)

The above is the shadow cast from the modern phenomena of nation-state, democracy, and human rights. Mere existence is not sufficient to frame questions of justice. Since The Trial, and its juridical apparatus of producing guilt, has completely subsumed ethics, it is impossible to think life beyond what the letter of the law represents. Human Rights may seem benign to many liberal minded, but as much as it sketches out what it is to be a Human in the abstract and basic sense, it also suggests the loss or deprival of said rights. The legal prescription is not denotative, but creative, a cloaked imperative about what must be done. Thus the regime of Human Rights has simultaneously produced an infinite flood of Identity Politics. It is not enough to condemn murder, but the death of protected minorities becomes important for the preservation of this or that sub-group. In a majority of minorities, the infinite proliferation of groups means an infinite proliferation of means of removal. The law thus must increasingly determine what constitutes a man or woman, a religion, a sexual preference, and so on. Conservatives lamenting trans-gender bathrooms, and liberals panicking over penis inspection tests for athletes, both participate in the same bio-political logic of governance. The body becomes the site of what constitutes a person, which constantly swaps between bio-medical realities (surgeries, hormones, chromosomes, etc.) and the fictitious legal personage the law creates (man/woman, religion, sex preference, and so on). The constant swap back and forth will inevitably produce a remnant that require classification or exclusion. Is it any wonder that the primary out-label in use is privative? The "unvaccinated" is a designation that verged on the de-peopling of citizens, moving them beyond the protective guard of the law. The Musselman is the visible remainder of this process, of what life looks like beyond all aspects of peopling, mere biological susbsistence, a vegetable man.

This process of de-humanizing is the subjection of shame. A man is not stripped if he is naked, he must be clothed in order to receive the degrading, the removal from his place, his dignity. Thus, as Carl Schmitt recognized in the exception, only the possibility of degradation establishes the significance of the grade. The law's power is only visible when it ceases to function, when it is suspended to carry out a punishment. In antiquity, often the violence of the law could only take place outside the polity, outside the boundary that separate the domain of men from beasts. It is the process of removal, such as Christ being led out in a reverse royal procession, that separated what was man and what was left of man. But if the man is left behind, who experiences this subjection? The subject (literally what is sub-ject, cast beneath) is the remainder behind all grades, the one who can bear witness of what he is (or experiences) outside of his role. It's no surprise that the importance of this subject coincided with the rise of the nation-state, a position that became increasingly interiorized and psychologized. It was precisely the brave cogito that found its full expression in the Aufklarung imperative Sapere Aude, the call for all to recognize and assume their subjection. Simultaneously, the subject (like the citizen) remains sovereign and servant, the subject and a subject. One is The People and subject to The People. The sovereign man stands alone, naked, to act, but is infinitely crushed beneath the Moral Imperative of Universal Law. 

Shame then emerges out of this infinite subjection, which also generates the sum-zero pleasure of duty. Obedience to a law that generates bliss threatens to undo the very fabric of pure obedience. In this way, a perverse form of Kantian ethics is the S&M chamber. The masochist submissive cannot admit the pleasure of subjection without ruining the rules of the game. The role-play requires dominance and submission, where the subjected is simultaneously the subject (who commands the game to go on). While grotesque, the dimensions of S&M unveil the same mechanism of the "turn to the subject" and the transcendental formalism of Enlightened modernity. What is simultaneously in control and controlled requires an infinite movement between the two, as much as The People governs and is governed. The Subject must subject itself to the Law through a self-duplication. The absolute subject (who is in perfect conformity to the universal law) calls and commands its own subjectification to obedience. The "self" is the remainder of this process, of what should and must obey. In the S&M scenario, the masochist and the sadist both require duplication (the subjected masochist who also controls the scenario, the subject sadist who also be subject to the masochist's whim). This split allows the game to continue, even as it remains an irresolvable contradiction. Democracy too requires the self-same serious moment of inner and outer subjection, even as the People (as subject) remains triumphant. Every electoral loss must be received without soreness ("we'll win next time"), or else the game's dimensions would begin to crumble. Electoral losers, like the self, are what remain, which both constitute the game and remain a threat to it.

But what remains at the center of this exchange? Stripped of the eroticizing rules, what is S&M besides two bodies faced with their own actions and preferences? Stripped of the glorious hue of "the system works", what is mass democracy but government through corporate advertising? Shame is what occurs when the lights turn on, the game ends, the social relations dissolve. What is revealed at the heart of this swirling movement is a void, though one ascribed with the will to continue the dance. But rather than suspend the game, shame is also a means to preserve its ongoing. The moment of exclusion, the production of the remnant, is to remove one from the game. The guilty self, charged of crime, is degraded, removed from citizenship. The Musselman has not simply been shorn of his German citizenship or even his second-class Jewishness, he has been removed from humanity. And what is this? The paradox is fundamental to all subjectivity, which has only become most pronounced in the modern era with the exaltation of the 'I'. But what is an 'I'? It is worth a lengthy citation:

"Once stripped of all extra-linguistic meaning and constituted as a subject of enunciation, the subject discovers that he has gained access not so much to a possibility of speaking as to an impossibility of speaking - or, rather, that he has gained access to being always already anticipated by a glossolalic [speaking in tongues] potentiality over which he has neither control nor mastery. Appropriating the formal instruments of enunciation, he is introduced into a language from which, by definition, nothing will allow him to pass into discourse. And yet, in saying 'I,' 'you,' 'this,' 'now...,' he is expropriated of all referential reality, letting himself be defined solely through the pure and empty relation to the event of discourse. The subject of enunciation is composed of discourse and exists in discourse alone. But, for this very reason, once the subject is in discourse, he can say nothing; he cannot speak.

'I speak' is therefore just as contradictory a statement as is 'I am a poet.' For not only is the 'I' always already other with respect to the individual who lends it speech; it does not even make sense to say that this I-other speaks, for insofar as it is solely sustained in a pure event of language, independent of every meaning, this I-other stands in an impossibility of speaking - he has nothing to say. In the absolute present event of discourse, subjectification and desubjectification coincide at every point, and both the flesh and blood individual and the subject of enunciation are perfectly silent." (116-117)

The problem of democracy is fundamentally a problem of language. For in saying 'I', there is a duplication between speaker and the subject now entered into discourse. What this means is that, behind the language-game of role-play, there emerges two figures that cannot relate: the body and the linguistic figure. The one sustains the latter, but cannot be brought to coincide with it, anymore than flesh and blood people could ever be represented within the democratic sovereign of We, The People. Every time we say 'I', the moment has already passed and the subject of speech is no longer within the present. However, rather than the rabid effort to make the two coincide (which the absolute subject of the moral imperative erases all remnants of biological failure), the two must reach a dialectical stand-still. Here the possibility of testimony emerges:

"Testimony takes place where the speechless one makes the speaking one speak and where the one who speaks bears the impossibility of speaking in his own speech, such that the silent and the speaking, the inhuman and the human enter into a zone of indistinction in which it is impossible to establish the position of the subject, to identify the 'imagined substance' of the 'I' and, along with it, the true witness" (120)

The witness avoids the discursive see-saw between humanism and ethno-narcissism, between all humans are human and some humans are human. In both instances, the impossibility to establish the human-being often meltdown. The humanistic crusade of National Socialism, to preserve humanity as humanity, met the inhumanity of liquidating those who could not (or should not) carry on the masquerade. The witness (in Greek, martyr) is the one who shares what happened, to gesture towards the world outside of discourse. It is not a question of establishing guilt or culpability, only to reveal the truth. What took place at Auscwitz was inhuman, and it is precisely in the possibility of speaking the impossible that man's linguistic nature is fulfilled. To move off from Holocaust, it is also the importance for how the New Testament Gospels were recorded. While tradition preserves the names of the (likely) authors, the importance is not in an authorial 'I' dictating to the hearer. Instead, it is a bearing witness to the coming of the Christ and the fulfillment of an otherwise impossible task. How was it that the people of God would kill God? How could the fount of blessing be cursed? The only knowledge of this event is from those who cannot bear witness bearing witness. It is only in the indirect gesture that what cannot be said can be said. 

In contrast to post-modern theorists of democracy, such as Derrida, which have shrunk back from the fulfillment of their thought into infinite deferral, the witness confronts the concrete limits of language. Symbols do not infinitely cycle in a game of indistinct references. The result of this fashionable academic theology is nothing but the masochistic acceptance before the sadistic imperative. The impotent suffering god is simply to sacralize what took place in Auschwitz, the transformation of the Musselmanner into a Holocaust. In a sick irony, it's those Christian theologians who most agonize over the Holocaust's theodicy are those who agree with what the National Socialist camp commanders had accomplished. Derridean theology, one that sees the dead god of vegetation, agree that The Camp could successfully dehumanize and push what was fundamentally human into oblivion. The past gives way to an eternal present, and what took place can never be re-membered.

But against this process of destruction, the martyr is a resurrection from the dead. If the Musselman is the remnant of this process of dehumanization, the survivor is the one who can bear witness to what befell him, even as he has ceased. The animalized body has not ceased, only that the logos or reasoned imagination of the speaker may testify what had happened. The entire stakes of humanity are unveiled:

"The human being is the speaking being, the living being who has language, because the human being is capable of not having language, because it is capable of its own in-fancy. Contingency not one modality among others, alongside possibility, impossibility, and necessity: it is the actual giving of a possibility, the way in which a potentiality exists as such. It is an event (contingit) of a potentiality as the giving of a caesura between a capacity to be and a capacity not to be. In language, this giving has the form of subjectivity. Contigency is possibility put to the test of a subject" (146)

In other terms, it is precisely because the process from baby to adult - from the speechless to speaking, from irrational to rational - may fail or reversed, mankind hangs in the balance. However, precisely because the Human project requires the conjuncture (the full entanglement between the two) and such is demanded, the Human gives birth to the Inhuman. The constant effort to resolve this contradiction ends in a lowest-common-denominator. Governments exist to maintain this state of conjunction, which is also a mere hair-breadth from dehumanization. To maintain the vegetable man of the Musselman becomes, effectively, the ground floor for all modern politics. Identity politics becomes a fantastic rendering, like an S&M game, of what this plant like subsistence could be "as if", and thus these scenarios require codification in law to exist as life. But government may as well restrict or remove these, such as in the case of a lockdown or medical mandate. All of the lifestyles, supposedly codified, melt away before this primary injunction to survive. If this logic is accepted, its complete perfection appears in The Camp.

Opposed to this view, the suspension between the phonetic body and the logical subject mean that, fundamentally, there is no ultimate coinherence. In a mystical turn, Agamben would even express that the tongue as such does not speak, but Language itself speaks through the animal-like body. The result is that the pure speech-act, the one that reveals this dialectical stand-still, is witness. The story of what occurred, that can reveal the contingency of the human being between its humanity and animality, allow a different kind of existence. Life is not the same thing as survival, that the mind, in its reason and imagination, can be reduced to what is necessary. Like Christian martyrs in the past, it would be preferable to die in the truth than be conformed into a false or unbecoming life. As St. Ignatius of Antioch pleaded with the Roman Christians who wanted to rescue him:

"If you keep silent about me, I will become a word of God; but if you love me in a purely human manner, I will become a meaningless sound. Allow me to become a sacrifice to God; let my blood be spilled while there is still an altar at hand." (Epistle to the Romans, 2)

 Everyone who picks up and reads this letter may recognize what Ignatius had, in fact, achieved. He suffered imprisonment and arrest for his life as truth. Mere survival would reduce it to the burble of the gibbering ape, which every bio-politics threatens to do, suspended between men as men and men not quite as men. Hence why the abortion debate often rotates around questions of the baby's brain activity, heart-beat, movement, and so on. The passage from non-life to life, as much as babe to adult, becomes a question of coinherence around an increasingly thin definition of what constitutes life and what constitutes human. Instead of a polity constituted around the freedom of the un-identifiable and un-governable living how they are, it becomes a question of increasingly strict measures to preserve a humanized animality that is, at its core, Musselman.

The theology of the immanent dead god, the full corruption of a hyper-Christian theology, must depart before it sacralizes the continued Camp that continues to appear in modern politics. The Deistic architect (a god believed in by both Jefferson and Hitler) has died, but its corpse continues to pulsate in the constipated agnosticism of post-modern theology. Instead, the resurrected Logos, the ever-present Kingdom of God within, may put a permanent end to the machine. The S&M role-play of mass democracy breaks down: where individuals may come to terms that there is no We, The People, as much as the imagined rules obscures the shame between two in bed. The forgiveness of once-and-for-all Christ may put away the perversion, the regimentation, the government, and open up a new form of politics. Thus the truth of The Camp may be historicized and put away from the ex-Musselmann who learn to speak, not as the 'I' of the camp-dweller but as the one who remembers. The God who is all in all, in whom all live, move, have their being, and speak, is the one who remains. The Remnant - the Christ dead and yet alive, hands pierced with nails - means that no matter what, man may go on speaking. We all may look on him whom was pierced and weep. A life, beyond gradation and degradation, may appear.

The Glorious Empty Throne An Exposition of Agamben's "The Kingdom and the Glory"

 The modern West has become - in Guy Debord's term - a "society of the spectacle", where the unreality of media begins to assume the place of politics within the constitutional nation-state. Another term that this essay will use - mass democracy - refers to rapid domination of undifferentiated masses and their votes to determine questions of government. Agamben's project is to interrogate two interwoven and crucial aspects to this new order: economy and glory. In the case of the former, economy (and government as we will see) has completely swallowed up politics. There are no longer questions of substances to address, only crises that afflict the biological subsistence of citizenry (increasing a formless concept, replaced with "human rights"). In the case of the latter, the praise heaped on the system becomes the very task of politics. It does not matter who wins, only that "the system works" and popular politics results in praise for this system, which media conducts in an endless routine. But where do these concepts emerge from that have so defined the West? And how do we escape the increasing destruction of bio-politics and unlimited police powers of the state?

To begin, one must turn to theology. Carl Schmitt has insightfully recognized that all political concepts were secularized theological concepts. What remains between the original use and the novel, between the religious and secular, is a "signature". A signature marks out a point of reference to investigate what continued and what changed between this transmutation from one category of thought to another. Therefore, the question of "economy" must be approached through the theological notion of oikonomia.

To be clear: Agamben's archaeology, his study of the signature, is not to claim a causal relation. It was not inevitable that Aristotelian metaphysics or Medieval theology led down this path. In fact, in many ways, the modern is distinctly a betrayal or reversal of many points of contact. Nevertheless, Agamben's purpose in this study is excavate the syntactic links. It is to explain the transition of meaning in a growing array of homonyms. The logical problems do not necessitate any particular course, in fact the change of historical circumstances (whether from long term structural changes or rapid events occasioned by the actions of individuals) may precipitate the semantic shift. However, the point is that these conceptual problems would explain why - through the series of treatises and exposition that respond to each other down time - these terms appear, disappear, and reappear in varied guise. To understand how economy was used is to gain some conceptual ground as to how it has taken the role it possesses now today.

Within the ancient world, per standard Aristotelian dichotomies, the city (polis) was distinct from the life of the home (oikos). Whereas the city had a deeply-rooted customary and constituting law (nomos), the home had a master (despotes) who governed his family and his servants/slaves through a series of pragmatic actions to preserve its order (taxis). The home-life is compared, in Xenophon, to a dance, where a series of rhymic orders preserve the certain character of the house. Things are taken out, things are put away, bodies move here and there to carry out their tasks and perform their pattern of life. Thus, an oikonomia requires administration to preserve the basic, unwritten, order of things. For the master of house, his role is to provide, where the verb (oikonomein) means to give sustenance and nourishment to those under his care. The series of gestures to preserve this order requires no necessary law or principle to fulfill, no telos or end. Instead, the economy requires a series of actions that may seem to conflict with the good ends, but are pragmatic necessity amidst efforts to maintain the order of the home. In the Aristotelian sense (not so much Plato, who is far more vague about differences), the opposition between city and home must be preserved in order to carve out the distinct categories of politics and home-governance. But it's precisely these oppositions, this dichotomy, that has created a problem of interrelation. When do enough homes constitute a city? When does a city melt down into a series of separated home-economies? How does this transition come about? At what moment? This fracture becomes the inspiration of later political theory, as well as theological questions about the relation of God to his creation.

Within the New Testament, St. Paul as fierce preacher of the gospel, offers an entirely exoteric definition of the Gospel. In a crucial syntagma, the Apostle announces that

"To me, though I am the very least of all the saints, this grace was given, to preach to the Gentiles the unsearchable riches of Christ, and to make all men see what is the oikonomia of the mystery hidden for ages in God" (Ephesians 3:9 per Agamben's translation, 23)

What was important for Paul, as well as other Apostolic authors, was the revelatory nature of the Cross of Christ. The ministry that the evangelists bore was to announce what was revealed. Christ crucified - putting away sin and reconciling Humanity - thus unveils God's purposes from the very beginning. Mystery (mysterion) referred to the dramatic and poetic presentation of the truth of the world. Often the mysteries were preformed in an esoteric and cult-like setting, such as the Eleusian mysteries. However, in the Apostolic setting, the oikonomia (dispensing, administration) of the mystery is performed in the preaching of the Gospel. Redemption is now manifest before all. Within this early Christian theology, the conception of the Church is not a political community, but a household. The Church is the oikos theou, which is constantly built up through the ritual of the Word (e.g. Ephesians 4:16; Romans 14:19; 1 Corinthians 14:3, 2 Corinthians 12:19). In these cases, the oikonomia are a series of administrative acts to reveal this mystery before the world. What was hidden in the Old Testament would now be manifest in the preaching of the New.

Early Christian theology tended to continue this definition of Church and oikonomia, seeing a series of discrete acts that manifest the will of God. However, the Gnostic movement offered a radical challenge that saw the Church adopt certain aspects of their paradigmatic rescripting of the "economy of mystery". While divergent, most Gnostics accepted a fairly complex cosmogony that revealed the processes by which the world was made, fell, and redeemed. The divine one began to fragment in his emanations, until the point where one such emanated beings - the demiurge - created the prison-world of matter. In this dark abyss, many other emanations that constitute living souls were cast. The gospel of redemption was now to reveal this cataclysmic fracture within God and see its healing through this saving knowledge (gnosis), which would allow the enlightened to escape this dark world. In the hands of the Valentinians or the Marcionites, the emanations introduced a mythological element,  a demonstration of the "mystery of the pleroma", which explained why the world was degraded. Gnostics had drawn upon the cosmic warfare imagery that is all over Second Temple Judaism, the Gospels, and the Pauline letters. In this war against flesh, sin, and the devil, the Gnostics gave a metaphysical account of how this came about. 

The orthodox critics - ranging from Irenaeus to Tertullian - challenged these gnostics on the point of what, precisely, this economy was. They countered with historicization, where in time, God's actions happened amidst men according to the purposes of his will. This primarily took place in the series of actions among God's persons - the Father sending the Son in the Spirit - which mark out the biblical drama. This account prevented the infinite fracture of the divine, where in any Gnostic cosmology, there was no reason to explain why God would not divide beyond eight, twelve, or thirty into an infinite number of beings. But in reframing the Apostolic theology in these terms, the order these economic-administrative acts demonstrated became more mysterious. If the Gnostic cosmology was historicized, it had also now taken on an inexplicable character:

"While in Paul, the economy was an activity carried out to reveal or accomplish the mystery of God's will or word (Colossians 1:24-25; Ephesians 3:9), now it is this very activity, personified in the figure of the son-word, that becomes a mystery. [...] the sense of 'plan hidden in God,' which was a possible though imprecise paraphrase of the term mysterion, tends now to be transferred onto the very term oikonomia, give it a new significance. There is no economy of mystery, that is, an activity aimed at a fulfilling and revealing the divine mystery; it is the very 'pragmateia,' the very divine praxis, that is mysterious" (38-39)

The Pauline syntagma - economy of mystery - had now been reversed: the mystery of the economy.

This reversal, for Agamben, reflected a change in metaphysical priorities. For a theologian like Tertullian - the first Latin theologian to serially reflect and analyze God as Trinity (trinitas) - this framed knowledge of God primarily around knowledge of God's economy. God as Trinity is not primarily a question of divine being - as it had been with much of ancient pagan theology - but divine action. The question of the Trinity is not so much a question of understanding how God is in himself, but how God interacts with his creation. And primarily, the interaction is a question of how God-in-three-persons acts to both judge and redeem the world. Tertullian, drawing on the ancient biblical imagery of God as king, translates this royal imagery into economic governance. God as Trinity is primarily a question of how God acts to manage, administer, and govern his world, which he does through the Son and Spirit as well as a host of angels. It is in history that man can discern theology, scrying the meaning of history in the series of God's actions. Against pagan theology, which had utilized myth and legend to explain the being of the gods, God was to be understood through his actions in time. Against accounts of fate or nature's necessity, the divine economy emerged from the will of God. But this will was active and providential, not inextricably flowing from the determinations of Nature. Instead, the free will of God enters into save man, which includes the series of divine miracles in Scripture. These exceptional acts - which define "economy" in canon law - then reaffirm the order. Economy becomes the absolute basis of theology.

However, this "economization" of theology, of discerning God through the series of actions in history, introduces a gap. How do then Christians know or understand God as he truly is? How do the series of actions relate to God's very being (or Being)? This fracture becomes the serious problem of understanding, precisely, where God's government of the world emerges from. It is worth quoting Agamben at length:

"The economy through which God governs the world is, as a matter of fact, entirely different from his being, and cannot be inferred from it. It is possible to analyze the notion of God on the ontological level, listing his attributes or negating, one by one - as in apophatic theology - all his predicates to reach the idea of a pure being whose essence coincides with existence. But this will not rigorously say anything about his relation to the world or the way in which he has decided to govern the course of human history. As Pascal will lucidly realize with regard to profane government many centuries later, the economy has no foundation in ontology and the only way to found it is to hide its origin [Pascal, Pensees, 1962, p.51]. For  this, God's free decision to govern the world is now as mysterious as his nature, if not more; the real mystery, which 'has been hidden for centuries in God' [Colossians 1:26] and which has been revealed to men in Christ, is not that of his being but that of his salvific praxis: precisely the 'mystery of the oikonomia,' following the decisive strategic reversal of the Pauline syntagma. The mystery that, from this moment on, will not cease to startle theologians and philosophers, and to arouse their attention, is not of an ontological, but of a practical nature." (54)

In other words, the original revelation in the Apostolic preaching is now what God is, but how God acts. And why does God act? It is according to his will. While ancient theology will hold together God's being and act through the will, the inscrutable will continues to loom as a hanging aporia. How does God will what is natural to him into act? And why? This adumbrates the mysterious nature of it. Why did God create the world? And what was he doing before it? To this question, Augustine would offer the snarky answer that God was preparing hell for those who asked these silly questions. This gesture is more of an avoidance of what cannot be thought, rather than a serious or satisfying answer. The free will of God, which Christians will claim in opposition to pagan theologies of fate and necessity, will never satisfactorily explain how God's being and act remain together. It is only in modern theology that this problem will radically transform into the all-consuming will, where being and action start to blur together, and the only reason is because. This "an-archic" (literally without arche, without a principled foundation) basis of God's willing (since God's being, either as Father or Son, is an-arche) means that the entire administration flows from mystified nothing. Anarchy is power: the order is as it is because it is willed such. This becomes the basis for all government.

Now government must be distinguished, as it has been in most ancient and medieval political theory, from sovereignty. Both flow from a theological paradigm, where God as King both reigns and rules. However, in Agamben's telling, theories of medieval kingship picked up on the "wound" between kingdom and government, between reigning and ruling. The Fisher King - the wounded king of Arthurian mythos - cannot move. He enjoys himself by fishing, but the governing of his realm takes place when his ministers roam the forests to maintain order. However, these archers and falconers that rule require the king's name for legitimacy. The authority of the king provides the legitimation for the exercise of power that the king's ministers possess. But the king himself does nothing and - in truth- may be nothing. This mythologeme will provide the basis of an idea, that intensified in European history, of a sovereign that reigns, but cannot himself govern. Authorized power depends upon authorizing power in order to order, to govern.

But what is this order by which government regulates? As stated above, order is nothing but the relation to how things are (or should be). It's the dance-like rhythm of the household, servants and children moving here and there, things taken out and things put away. The immanent-concrete order of things always refers to a transcedental-true order of things. God as supreme governor seeks to order the world according to his divine order. Order is the empty concept that relates between how things should be and how things are through the power of the master over his home, the general over his army, the captain over his ship, and the shepherd over his sheep. 

What Gnosticism had threatened was to introduce a radical split, rather than coincidence, between the transcendental power of nature and the immanent order of the governor. Ontologically, there are now two gods (the Good and the evil Demiurge), which may contest one another, unveiling the anarchy between ordering and ordered power. It would be as if the shepherd ruled his sheep in a war to defy all principles of agriculture and zoology. Yet these categories themselves attempt to impose a vision of what ought to be with regards to the realities of sheep on the ground. The good shepherd governs his sheep in coincident with how nature governs the lives of the sheep so they flourish as such (healthy weight, energetic, bleating, eating grass, and so on). However these factors are themselves immanent and thus refer upwards to a transcendental order that is only recognized in the concrete realities of life. Thus a paradox emerges: the transcendental order is a reflection of an immanent order, and the immanent order is produced in response to the transcendental order. It is a circle, and the question may be posed whether the chicken or the egg first appeared, but nevertheless it poses a question of preeminence. But what if there's no resolution? What if an immanent order, which claims transcendental authority, turns upon a kind of nihilism. This, again, is the anarchy of power.

The problem is compounded through the ordering order of the transcendental reign. Why does not the king simply step in? Why does the Fisher King's wound never heal? According to some forms of the legend, the Fisher King's thigh was pierced with the Holy Lance (the spear which pierced Christ's side). This mythologeme could suggest that it is precisely the transcendental sovereignty, in the possession of a man's body, which fundamentally renders his authorizing power inexercisable. Instead, the power of the sovereign expresses itself through the plethora of ministers who rule in his name. Rather than diminish his power, the vast number of agents express his power. In very simple terms, it is precisely the king's many servants within his palace that makes his reign appear glorious (a term we will return to). Sovereignty cannot be divided, but it can emanate and spread. Thus the glory of God appears in his ability to govern, not directly, but through a whole host of angels and saints. The power of sovereignty is only fully expressed in the power of government. The more that is governed the greater the sovereign. 

Within the Medieval world of Christianity, this distinction primarily appears in the division between spiritual-authorizing power and temporal-authorized power. While Christ had given the Kingdom of God to the Apostles (and their successors, the bishops, most importantly the Pope of Rome), they were not to govern the earthly world of men. In the classic articulation, pope Gelasius exegeted the "two swords" the Apostles found (Luke 22:38) as two exercises of an undivided power. The priesthood wielded the spiritual sword and the civil ruler wielded the temporal sword: one punished through penance and excommunication; the other through fines, jailing, and execution. Again, why not simply grant the pope (or king) both swords? Why must the power to authorize and legitimate be separated from the power to carry out the execution of government? Similarly, in medieval theology, God's omnipotence came across the potential expression of absurdities (e.g. Christ incarnated as a donkey instead of a man, the Father took flesh, Judas was saved and Peter damned). God's omnipotence met a similar split, between an authorizing total power (potentia absoluta) and the power limited to the order of things (potentia ordinata). But again, what separates these two? It is the will - which as we have seen is anarchic - that demarcates these distinctions. The being and act of God are pulled apart, as much as during the medieval period the authorization of power in the sacerdotal pope tore at the authorized governing power in the temporal emperor. What was it that linked emperor and pope together? It was this ordered world (God's division of the two swords) that flowed from the mystery of the economy, the inscrutable will of God.

The will of God (a mystery that can only be contemplated, not understood) is what holds these distinctions between authorizing power and authorized power, between the spiritual and temporal, between transcendental order and immanent order. The former, whether as the pope governing the empire or God exercising potentia absoluta, cannot come about without threatening the entire order of things. Thus the wounded king allows the expression of his many ministers. Such is a secular expression of a more fundamental problem:

"God's impotence functions to make possible a righteous government of the world" (106)

Yet it is also the fact that since this transcendental ordering power exists, it must (theoretically) always exceed the ordered power of governance. Thus, a pope may call for an interdict, which suspends the exercise of spiritual power and delegitimates a temporal ruler (altering the civil order). Again, the means this disjuncture is crossed is through the free exercise of the will. In strictly theological terms, God's government of the world splits into two distinct orders: general providence and special providence. General Providence manifests in the normative-natural order of things, through which God sustains his creation. Not a Deist Watchmaker, God must constantly sustain the universe. Thus the rain that waters the field, the rising sun that enlightens the earth, the rotation of the seasons, these are all God's active efforts to preserve creation. Special providence, on the other hand, are the excesses of divine power that intervene, from time to time, to preserve. The miracle, the wonder, the sign, all of these represent God's involvement beyond the normed order of the universe. The distinction between general and special providence becomes necessary precisely to preserve any rational sense to things. If there was no special providence, then general providence could be mistaken for something like pagan fate: impersonal and inviolable. If there was no general providence, then special providence would become chaos as the will of God erratically (and violently) reordered things. It is this problem that the will covers over: general providence reflects a broad approach to macro-systems of universal governance, while special providence deals with individualities. In more modern terms, general providence has become the rational law of nature, whereas special providence appears as coincidence and the vague New Age support from "the universe" in the particular life of a man.

However, as stated above, it would be unbecoming of God, as sovereign, to actively govern the world. Instead, a plethora of ministers maintain the world. The medieval doctrine of primary and secondary causes allows a whole host of agencies to involve themselves in the carrying out of divine providence. While God may will a general providence to the ordering of the world (primary cause), created agents (whether beasts, spirits, or men) carry out these actions (willingly or not). Thus God may will the Earth to be watered, but he does so through the atmospheric water cycle or human gardeners. This interrelation between God's causative will and creature's causative wills allows one to preserve the coincidence of divine and human freedoms. And the dispersal of the grace to carry out these actions - from the High Middle Ages through early modern theology - will mark out disputes between various groups. As Pascal would mock in his Provincial Letters, the Dominicans and Jesuits end up parsing terms to slam the simplicity of truth that the Augustinian Jansenists defend. If the Jansenists were right, the power of God's rule would become entirely mysterious and absolute - like the baroque divine right monarchies of the seventeenth century - and the entire providential system would become a harsh aristocracy of the elect. The distinctions between sufficient and efficient grace allowed a providential system that could administer the world without diminishing the agency of creatures. When this paradigm became secularized, in the works of Rousseau and Adam Smith, this referred to the pseudo-divine invisible hand of the world economy. But of course, this requires an increasingly diffusive system, where the governing hand (God/Market) must give way to justify the order as it stands in the activities of creatures. This has birthed our modern system:

"theology can resolve itself into atheism, and providentialism into democracy because God has made the world just as if it were without God and governs it as though it governed itself" (286)

As has happened among libertarians and self-professed liberalism, laissez-faire has become a means to justify actions simply as they are. It is not a question of man interfering in the market (how can he?), but that every economic action of man thus justifies the proper government of affairs. Governments have claimed the mantle of free-trade to offer special dispensations (invasion, trust-busting, threat of debt collection) when interference is necessary, when aberrant market forces prevent the functioning of the economy. Thus government receives its mandate to continue in order to enforce this global market order. And this order must continue to express itself as long as the natural order of economics continues to exist. The drive of this system is to free up the agency of more and more market actors, a secularized version of the democratic drive of secondary causation. It is the Market's operations, but secondarily through all the market actors. The liberal drive towards greater involvement - whether Feminist drives to include house-work within the paid economy or Lyndon Johnson's Great Society's efforts to include black men and women within the welfare state - requires greater government involvement. Thus the irony, which can puzzle the uninitiated, that an increasing "free-trade" government flowed together with expanded powers of government. Leftist criticism of Reagan "neoliberalism" and Clinton's New Democrat economic "conservatism" parallels the paleocon's fear that socialism had won out in the United States. The global market - the secularized providence - has become atheistic (there is no general providence) and democratic (the individual market actor is definitive). The steady order of Medieval theology has completely collapsed into confusion.

As stated above, the suspension of the sovereign and the continued exercise of government depends upon the king's ministers. The Fisher King may wounded and unable to govern, but his presence is known throughout the land through his able servants. In the divine economy of the world, this process is primarily carried out through angels. The celestial hierarchy pursued two different, but interrelated, tasks: contemplation of God and administration of creation. Per the biblical imagery of Jacob's Ladder, these two tasks met and were continually exchanged as angels ascended and descended constantly. All angels saw the divine essence (contemplation) and all angels were involved in governing the world. In Pseudo-Denys,  the anonymous and mysterious fifth/sixth century author involved in a marriage of Christian orthodoxy and Proclean Neoplatonism, the angels mirror the clergy. There was "hierarchy" in both heaven and on earth. Among the angels, the thrones, dominions, and powers descended down into archangels and angels. Among the ministers of the Church, the primate bishops would descend down into priests, deacons, readers, and so on. Denys, whoever he was or why ever he assumed the mantle of St. Paul's Athenian convert, was a key figure that made the Church's ministry into a mystery. The priest was no longer the bearer of an exoteric message, an economy of the mystery, but a constituent part within the mystery of the economy. God, at the summit of this divine hierarchy, ascribed the order (taxis) to the various offices and actions of the ministry. In secular terms, divine sovereignty is defined through the right to form a government. The primary expression of this governing ministry is glory. While the administration of creation will one day pass away, the angels will all return to their primary task of contemplating the divine. The contemplation of God is expressed in the never-ending songs, the choreographed celebration, that defines liturgy. Thus, the ultimate expression of divine power is nothing else than worship. It is the production of glory.

This glory, in political terms, was the acclamation of the people. Though lacking any particular juristic function (acclaim was not necessary for legitimate succession), the roar of the crowds glorified the newly crowned sovereign. This dovetailed identically with liturgical celebrations of divine power. Thus in the Byzantine Empire, the liturgical shouts of "Alleluia!" to God paralleled the political acclamation "Axios!" (something like "he is worthy!"), which celebrated the appearance of the sovereign. However this appearance itself produced something almost lifeless. Often a Roman Emperor appeared before the jubilant crowds like a statue. Arrayed in purple and military garb (both of which were prohibited for non-rulers), the radiant appearance matched the celebration of the people. The glory and the power coincided, for it was in the ornate apparel that authority appeared as authorized (thus pretenders must be punished with sumptuary laws). This conjunction of authorized power with the appearance of glory suggests something like a speech-act, something said that creates what it describes (e.g. the pastor/judge's "I pronounce you married" in a ceremony). However this glorified apparel is a signature of a much more primal symbolization of authorized power: the fasces. The Roman Consuls (the elected executives of the Republic) were followed by the Lictors, who bore the fasces. A symbol of unity (a bundle of reeds) and power (combined with an axe), the fasces was the instrument of punishment. The reeds would be used to beat offenders and the axe would be used to execute criminals. However the imperial purple and acclaims of "Axios!" took the place of this direct symbolism. And what is symbolized? As suggested above, the acclamation of the sovereign prince paralleled the liturgy of God. The acclamation seemed to unite the purposes of the Heavenly Creator and the Earthly monarch, a twinning between spiritual and temporal authority. However, this moment of conjunction left the bearer of this sovereign power frozen. How could a mere man, the bearer of the divine kingdom, act? Like God, his glory increases as his ministerial government expands, thus leaving the sovereign able only to reign, not rule. The wounded Fisher King can only observe his government, never intervene.

Let us bring all of this above analysis down into concrete historical terms: Agamben frames the primary scope of the book around a debate between Carl Schmitt and Erik Peterson. Both Continental Catholic thinkers, they violently disagreed with one another. For Schmitt, the political remains the key solution to the problem of economic dissolution which liberalism signaled. The constitution-state, which had dissolved politics into a government which no longer legislated but executed the law, was doomed to degeneracy. Instead, Schmitt's juridical work on the concept of "dictator" offered the hope that sovereignty, though buried under procedural parliamentary politics, could re-exert itself against the growing tide of socialist mass movements. Thus Schmitt, belonging to the Roman Catholic Center Party, argued President Hindenburg must use his constitutional dictatorial powers to suspend the law in order to save it. A dictatorship could reverse the tide of Bolshevism (as well as the revolutionary right), arresting and removing his enemies. The introduction of a "state of exception" would preserve the normative force of the law, as much as a miracle reaffirms God's good providence over creation.

However, Schmitt would eventually find himself in his "exceptional period" as a jurist for National Socialism. During these years, Schmitt focused on the legitimating feature of primal democracy (as opposed to liberal representation democracy) which acclaimed the sovereign (we will return to this point later). However, most importantly, Schmitt developed his thoughts on the concept of Fuhrung (leadership). Schmitt gained late admiration for Hitler when, as Chancellor, he was able to press for a suspension of the Weimar Constitution (though it remained the formal law until 1945, when Germany was dissolved) and ban his political enemies. The brutal violence in the Night of Long Knives demonstrated the political will to preserve Germany from subversives. However (and this is what provides a hidden and embarrassing link to Peterson), Hitler acted not from the position of sovereign. Hitler was only ever elected to the office of Chancellor, head of government. It was through an analysis of Fuhrung that Schmitt theorized Hitler's effective position of indistinction. Like the providential shepherd, the Fuhrer offered a transcendental order to his sheep even as he pragmatically moved them here and there. Sovereignty and government, political and economic, transcendental and immanent, general and specific providence all blur together. Politics becomes defined as administration of the Fuhrer's will (an administration which becomes increasingly democratized, as any may act to carry out the will of the nation), and, more importantly, defined through the mass rally. The screaming throngs of "Hail Hitler!" becomes a form of worship and celebration. This then saw a blur of indistinction between what is political and what is economic, between the authorizing power of the sovereign and authorized executive power of the government. All ordering becomes reduced to what is ordered, thus giving an unlimited premium of government. The continued shadow of the Constitution opened the possibility that any act, whatsoever, could become ipso dixit licit or illicit through the show of force. It was at this moment the anarchy of power was on full display.

It was this latter problem that had marked out Schmitt's opposition to Peterson. While the former believed in the necessity of a Christian politics, the latter saw it dissolved as a contradiction in terms. Schmitt - whom Peterson dubbed "Eusebian" - believed that the earthly sovereign had the task to restrain the forces of evil that threatened to bring about the end of time. The German Emperor -as a katechon, restrainer - could intervene to prevent a collapse into chaos. But for Peterson, Augustine in City of God had demonstrated how Christianity put an end to all politics. In contrast to Eusebian Schmitt, the revelation of the Trinity ended monarchy and instead put into an effect a new regime of worship. In a blurring of terms, Peterson argued that liturgy was the supremely political act. In reversing the clearly household terminology of the New Testament, Heaven would become an unending city-state, whose supreme political expression was no longer in deputized administration, but unending praise. However, at the same time, a shadow of government must be preserved in the administration of the damned. Government would remain excluded from the primary task of politics, which was nothing other than praise of the system of government itself. Yet at the same time government would continue at full-steam. Here the shadow is cast, for the government of the damned coincided with contemplation and worship of God. In facing this problem head-on, Thomas admitted that for paradise to truly be paradise, the sufferings of the damned must contribute to the full beatitude of the saints. It is not pity or remorse, but enjoyment, that Heavenly citizens feel, a satisfaction in the order of divine judgement. Thus is complete the relation between never-ending infernal government with the economized politics of liturgy.

It's in this moment that Agamben signifies Schmitt's embarrassment with his own work. His opposition to Peterson revealed, at the same time, a proximity. While Schmitt may have morphed his monarchic sovereignism into praise for Chancellor Hitler's revolutionary government, the truth was that this slip was simply to recapitulate the logic of Peterson. The exceptional punishment of the damned in the Camps (whether Jew, Slav, Gypsy, political criminal, etc.) coincided with the cheerful praises of the Nation, encapsulated with its Leader. This form of democracy was not nude, but guided and guard through the functionaries that performed and scripted the liturgy of power. The banners, the choreographed marches, the singing, the call-and-response between representative and crowd, all of these required the determined skillful hands of bureaucrats. Like angels leading the procession of worship, so too did government officials write, promote, and solicit spontaneous odes of celebration. The supreme manifestation of government would be a litany of unending praise for the leader and the exterminating penalty afflicted upon the enemy. And while Schmitt had made a temporary peace with this regime, was this any different than Peterson's economized politics of liturgy? What if the full expression of supreme never-ending, ever-expanding, governance was not in National Socialism, but its successor: Social Democracy? 

But again, we must pause. Social Democracy is an expression of the zone of indistinction: collapse of sovereignty into government,  the economization of politics (leading government to only concern administration for continued biological existence), and the increasing suspension of law to carry out its penalties. This blurring is what took place within National Socialism and the revolutionary mass politics of the mid twentieth century. But why do these phenomena require "glory"? Why are millions, if not billions, spent on media spectacles? Why must the will of the people require choreographed song, celebration, and participation? Why do representative democracies spend an inordinate amount to broadcast activism, gestures of power, and so on, despite that formal power is exercised through the mundane processes of parliamentary procedure and party politics? Why do these rites, which conjoin the heavenly and earthly, continue? Here we must turn to an archaeology of Glory.

Glory means an opinion or expression of evaluation (doxa). Within the Hebrew world, the Biblical term for glory (kavhod) implied a heaviness or weightiness, the reputation of one established. God's glory was his objective reputation, the appearance of his majesty with fear and trembling among men. However, glory took on aesthetic dimensions as well. Glory was beautification, to exclaim how wonderful the divine is. And within Christian theology, glory was what was exchanged between the persons of the Godhead (the Father glorified the Son, the Son glorified the Father), as well as between God and his people (the Church glorified God, God glorified the Church). Here the term begins to develop a double-significance in homonymy. Glory could be divine reality (the weight of God's presence) or human opinion acclaimed. These blurred together in the mutual glorification of the liturgy: God was celebrated precisely in that his presence was unknowable. The blinding light of the glory of God was beautiful, but it also hid a beauty far beyond created eyes. What man may know, and celebrate, is the divine accomplishment of salvation, even as at the same moment God remains beyond this light. 

Where medieval theology suggested the radical disjuncture between God-in-himself and God-to-us (the fearful Deus absconditus that predestined in his inscrutable will), modern theology has tried to radically identify the immanent Trinity (God-in-himself) and the economic Trinity (God-as-revealed). Rahner's Rule - named after twentieth century Jesuit priest and theologian Karl Rahner - claimed that the immanent and economic trinity were identical. It's thus no surprise that this modern emphasis coincided with the Liturgical Movement, with a renewal of liturgical studies to form doctrine. The emphasis on lex orandi, lex credendi (in other words, "the way you pray is the way you believe") focused study on liturgical reform to revive the Church. The immanent trinity and economic trinity found complete overlap in the worship of salvation, celebrating God's mighty acts to redeem his creation in an endless cycle of praise. God is what he does, and his actions reveal (if not define) his being. Glory is the luminous cycle which bring the two together. God as sovereign creator and God as omnipotent governor of providence coincided in celebration. But what this signifies is that the center of the circle is empty:

"Of course, the operation of glory - or at least its pretension - is to express the pleromatic figure of the trinity, in which economic trinity and immanent trinity are once and for all securely articulated together. But it can only fulfill this task by continuously dividing what it must conjoin and each time reconjoining what must remain separated. For this reason, just as in the profane sphere glory was an attribute, not of Government but of the Kingdom, not of the ministers but of the sovereign, so the doxology refers ultimately to the being of God, not to his economy. And yet, if one removes Government, and the Government that which remains if the Kingdom removes itself, in such a way that the governmental machine always consists in the articulation of these two polarities, equally, one could say that the theo-doxological machine results from the correlation between immanent trinity and economic trinity, in which each of these two aspects glorifies the other and steams from the other. Government glorifies the Kingdom, and the Kingdom glorifies Government. But the center of the machine is empty, and glory is nothing but the splendor that emanates from this emptiness, the inexhaustible kabhod that at once reveals and veils the central vacuity of the machine." (211)

 In other terms, the praise of God emerges from his series of acts to save the Human race. These actions reveal the internal being of God: that the Father out of his deep love sent the Son with the Holy Spirit to redeem Adam's children. However, this means that the being of God is only visible in his actions, which in turn constitute his being. Medieval theology - whether Latin nominalists like Occam or the Greek essence-energies distinction of Gregory Palamas - had maintained that there was still something beyond, a sovereignty beyond the economy of salvation. Modern theology, however, had tried to reconcile the possible problems this encouraged (an agnostic apophatic excess of divinity) with complete identification. The economy is God's being, God is constituted through his act of will to save humanity. But if God's being is in his act, what was God prior to this act? Modern theology refers to a transcendental series of internal actions that refer to this economy (Father sending Son in Spirit, Spirit bringing Son to Father). If this is true then God's being is none other than glory (Father glorifies Son through Spirit, Son glorifies Father in Spirit). But the cycle of activity (for this constitutes God's being) is an-arche (since, in Augustinian theology, the Trinity as the series of God's relations, is an-arche). Therefore, at the center of the government and providence, is nothing. The origin of action is a void. There can be no reason that God wills to act as such, or to constitute his being as such, besides naked arbitrary choice. Once again, at the heart of modern theology, the anarchy of power appears. The aestheticization of glory exists to bedeck this void. The glorious golden and bejeweled throne, receiving endless praise and worship, is empty.

Mankind's task in this process is expansion. According to the Jesuit motto - which seems absurd on its face - man's task is ad maioram Dei gloriam (to the greater glory of God). If glory is defined according to God's presence, this task makes no sense (how can finite man add to the perfect God). However, if glory is this intensification of worship, this celebration of the empty seat, then the liturgics must become more intense, more expressive, more involved. Perhaps it is no surprise that the Liturgical Renewal movement within Rome reached a certain climax in the Novus Ordo Mass. An effort to restore ancient purity, the worship of God, which had been a hieratic affair, was democratized to include the people. Prayer towards the altar (an established practice) was changed to prayer towards the people. An unintended gesture, the mysterious sovereign God beyond was now transmuted into the void between priest and people, as all now belong to the ministry of God. The greater the ministry, the greater the government, the greater the glory. The politics of the Church, in this guise, takes on increasingly totalitarian dimensions, as the government must be of all and belong to all. This logic explains the Vatican II's Jesuit Pope working hand-in-hand with David Rockefeller to establish "ethical capitalism". Like the twentieth century transformation of liberalism, this form of capitalism is similar to the World Economic Forum's praise for "share-holders capitalism" and its democratizing effects. In secularized terms, the Global Market's being is manifest through the flurry of market actions of its constituents. Mass Democracy, in a politics that is primarily about access to resources and administration of goods for biological survival, requires unending praise of its own rites. Thus it's quite common to hear the empty platitude "the system works" when a democratic election is carried out. What does it mean that it "works"? The metric is simply continuity as a basis of stability, not whether citizens languish in poverty, incarceration, suppression, immorality, fear for life or the despair these cause.

But why is glory necessary for this process? What does it contribute if it adds nothing but greater involvement? What does that accomplish? And why does the democratic process - saturated with social media and advertisement - require this constant cycle of self-validation? Why are polls constantly conducted about the popularity of the government? And in Europe, why have referendums (of dubious legal validity) and motions of no confidence become more frequent? From a theological point, once again, the idea of worshiping God as necessary seems peculiar. Why does God need man's glory?

Agamben turns to anthropological research of Emile Durkheim and Marcel Mauss in ancient societies, where the discrete categories of modern thought (religion apart from politics, law apart from magic) blur. In the Vedic tradition, a startling claim is made: the gods are themselves constituted through the sacrifices of men. Thus, prayer and praise, sacrifice and service, constitute the very birth of the divine itself:

"Perhaps glorification is not only that which best fits the glory of God but is itself, as effective rite, what produces glory; and if glory is the very substance of God and. the true sense of his economy, then it depends upon glorification in an essential manner and, therefore, has good reason to demand it through reproaches and injunctions." (226)

This then gestures at the secret link between glory and power which determine the continued exercise of government in the name of the sovereign. The power of the authorized power in government depends upon its own summons into existence. The translation from fasces (an effective ritual symbol) into the imperial purple and heavy crown was not an emptying out of signification (a mere shadow of authority), but a distinction that further disguises the power of glory. For the Emperor would not exist without the crown or purple, his government would immediately dissolve, thus the ritual must be performed. Within the chaos of mass democracy, in the society of the spectacle,  whatever balance or possibility simply evaporates. Totalization takes place precisely through the dispersion of this power and this blur together of kingdom and government through the unending procession of glory. The void of the will to power is dispersed through these separations, but modern politics has unleashed its potential violence. Only glory may sustain this system to continue its whirlwind of never-ending government over all things, which can't stop without collapse:

"Glory, both in theology and in politics, is precisely what takes the place of that unthinkable emptiness that amounts to the inoperativity of power. And yet, precisely this unsayable vacuity is what nourishes and feeds power (or, rather, what the machine of power transforms into nourishment). That means that the center of governmental apparatus, the threshold at which Kingdom and Government ceaselessly communicate and ceaselessly distinguish themselves from one another is, in reality, empty" (242)

In contemporary terms, this glorification of the political sovereign is through public opinion. The People - what Richard Tuck has called the "sleeping sovereign" - must continually be exalted. The Will of The People is what authorizes and legitimates the government that acts in its name. Yet, this public opinion itself must be constituted through the media apparatus of opinion polls, surveys, and votes. There is no The People without these efforts to diagnose what The People think on the variety of pre-packaged issues. This fact has been recognized from early on in the twentieth century from theorists like Walter Lipmman (Propaganda) and Edward Bernays (Propaganda). The chaos of individual thought was not capable of constituting itself into any sort of political sovereign. Instead, without these clerical mediations of supplication and exaltation, The People were merely the masses, chaotic and confused. The fear that a demagogue would take control, which animated these new and hawkish liberals, would not come true, despite the anti-fascist mythology of the twentieth century. What took place among National Socialism was not a demagogic despotism, where the strongman refounds the political community around his family and his law. Rather, its elaborate liturgies of primal acclamation are an exhausted form of the public opinion polling that has now dominated the West. It is this communicative society, the discursive politics that Jurgen Habermas and the anticommunist left has so celebrated, which expresses unlimited government:

"Consensual democracy, which Debord called 'the society of the spectacle' and which is so dear to the theorists of communicative action, is a glorious democracy, in which the oikonomia is fully resolved into glory and the doxological function, freeing itself of liturgy and ceremonials, absolutizes itself to an unheard of extent and penetrates every area of social life" (259)

It is out of this paradigm that all of life falls under government, every aspect of human existence must be upheld. The benign goals of welfare may result in temporary uplift, but find their final goal in the dance of democracy. While it is quite common, and fairly widespread, that true democracy sees government increasingly devolve to every individual citizen, this only intensifies the power of government. Power exercised by all over all leads to the chaotic state of exception that has become common to the west. Whether it is vaccine mandates, lockdowns, quarantines, all these exhibit The People governing to the best of their ability, increasingly deputizing all citizens to fulfill the government as if they acted as The People. It's not uncommon to find ideologues in media to speak as if they are The People, calling for the punishment of those who have excepted themselves from the process. It is in the glorious democracy that this expression of power will happen simultaneously with rituals of popular consultation. Just as ancient acclamations were often not spontaneous, but elicited or choreographed, so too does media technique and advertisement (made more efficient through data collection) attempt to shape The People which justifies the government that regulates and administers the state's control of resources. The endless cycle of praise for Democracy, celebrations about "the system works", will dovetail with oversight of the infernal penal colony of the damned. The punishment of regime dissidents only elicits more praise. Social Democracy's telos leads to endless self-valorization, total government, and a carceral state for those who have made themselves outside the blessed community.

The anarchy of power can only continue to operate as long as the political liturgy of mass democracy continues. The modern west has become what Ivan Illich has called the most explicitly Christian era, a time of never-ending apocalypse. The only solution must come from within an alternative political theology, and it is the one that St. Paul had declared. Christ Crucified was not a step in a history of salvation which constitutes the redemption of humanity. Rather, Christ Crucified is an eternal revelation of God. The angelic and Human ministers, who had only expanded the government of Torah in order to carry it out through human traditions, must be stopped. The Wounded King will not justify his endless proliferation of glorious government, but put it to a stand-still:

"[Pauline messianism] acts as a corrective to the demonic hypertrophy of angelic and human powers. The Messiah deactivates and renders inoperative the law as well as the angels and, in this way, reconciles them with God (katargeo is the technical term that Paul uses to express the relation between the Messiah and the power of angels and men; I translate argos as "inoperative" and not simply as 'I destroy'). (One reads in Colossians 1:15-20 that all things, 'whether they be thrones, or dominions, or principalities, or powers,' have been created through the Messiah and through him they will be reconciled with God.) The theme of the law no longer applied, but studied, that in Kafka's novels goes hand in hand with that of the constantly inoperative angel-functionaries, here reveals its messianic pertinence. The ultimate and glorious telos of the law and of the angelic powers, as well as of the profane powers, is to be deactivated and made inoperative." (166)

The cycle between the sovereign and the government grounds to a halt. The exchange of power manifest in the acclamatory public opinion ceases. The individual freed from discursive and communicative politics. The machine which generates and flows from public opinion evaporates. The being of God is none other than the gift the shatters the cycle. The Christ offers an opening of a life beyond government. Beyond discourse and identity, a new politics begins to appear.