Tuesday, March 29, 2022

The Kingdom of God is Within You: Poverty, Justice, and the Inappropriable

"Poverty" is a major conceptual interest for Agamben in searching out the escape from social democracy leviathan we live within. Hence Agamben spent time researching St. Francis and the Franciscans (in The Highest Poverty) to understand both how they grasped the Messianic Secret and failed. The key was Francis' irreducibility of life to property, a form-of-life without appropriation, or "to live according to the holy Gospel" [vivere secundum formam sancti evangeli]. However, as the order expanded and came under increased scrutiny (from seculars, Dominicans, and ultimately the pope) Franciscans began to defend their non-appropriation within legal categories, eventually dividing the order between the spirituals (those who reject all property) and conventuals (those who reject any sense of ownership in the heart). Caught in the trap of defining their inappropriable form-of-life within a juridical order, later critics (most importantly pope John XXII) made easy work of them from within the legal order. The Franciscans lost their sense of Messianic escape.

But what is this poverty that marked out their form-of-life? Heidegger attempted to grasp this dynamic within his wartime conditions. As Germany became fodder to both the Western Allies and the Bolshevik East, Heidegger determined to find in poverty (the current future of his home) a way towards overcoming. Poverty was not a sheer negativity, a pure renunciation of goods towards a state of abjection (as if the telos was mankind becoming a rug). Rather, true poverty was true wealth. For it was in renunciation of material surplus for the willingness to embrace sheer need that the richness of spirit was proven. In abandoning all worldly goods one became a spiritual hero. It was precisely in this path that Germans, who must simply toss aside the vast wealth of the Empire's liberal cartelization policies, could defeat the materialist logic of Bolshevism. Rather than irreparably wounded, the loss to the Americans and the Soviets prepared Germans to become spiritual tycoons capable of outspending and overwhelming their materialist barbarian enemies. However, for Agamben, this approach was caught in a cycle of its own self-appropriation. It didn't grasp the ungraspable nature of what was sought, seeing in a choice of material poverty as a choice for spiritual wealth.

Juxtaposed against Heidegger is Benjamin's odd fragment on justice. Against Kantian ethics, which emphasized a subjectivist, purely formal, virtue as necessary for justice (a neo-neo-stoic turn, to coin a barbaric and somewhat ill-fitting neologism), Benjamin posited the opposition between justice and virtue. Justice was "the condition of a good that cannot be a possession [Besitz]" (Benjamin, "Notes Towards a Work on the Category of Justice" [1916] in Agamben, Creation and Anarchy, 36 [2019]). What Benjamin means, ultimately, is that Justice is not a subjective mode, but an objective state emergent from the Good. And most importantly, the state of nature out of which the Good appears is Nature as such. Thus justice is part of a dialectical (in the logical, not ontological, sense) unfolding of Reality, as one finally gains proper perspective. Justice is to see things as they really are as a human being who has fully become. It's in this sense poverty gains a definition. For Agamben, to be poor means "to maintain oneself in relation with an inappropriable good" (37).

Agamben lists three discrete examples of the inappropriable: the body, language, and landscape. In terms of the body, Levinas' inversion draws out the ungraspable center. He touches on the paradoxical feelings of nausea, shame, and absolute need. In nausea, one is drawn entirely to one's stomach, and yet is entirely repulsed by it, only seeking to escape the need to vomit. In shame, in terms of nudity, one is simultaneously most at home (naked in one's own body), yet inescapably drawn away (the yearning to be anywhere else, but trapped in one's exposed, yet alien, flesh). In bodily need, say the need to urinate, one is entirely consumed with the desire for relief, as well as the reflection that one is more than simply this function. Thus the body is both itself and the shadow it casts, our flesh and blood is our own but also alien. Such is not to introduce a gnostic dualism, which is erroneous fundamentally in its ontological fictions. There is no polarity of substances. Rather, the inappropriable center of our bodies - the naked body which is rejected - unveils that a body ultimately belongs to no one. Beyond Agamben's analysis, this destroys pro-choice logic that demands a woman's body belongs to her. This logic may be an echo of 19th c. bourgeois self-ownership, but it is unable (as much of philosophy conceptually linked to the same modern liberal conceptions of self) to grapple with more substantive problems. How am *I* alone in possession of my body when it seems unownable precisely at the moment of its most severe need? How is it mine when *it* appears disgusting at its most impoverished? The hatred of pregnancy is precisely rooted in this self-alienation that is sublated in this fixation to entirely identify with the same. Perhaps it's why the same logic of the Sexual Revolution, which produced TERF Lesbian feminists, also gave way to Transgenderism and its tragedy. The body as plastic property rapidly breeds increasingly divergent alienations that diffuse the problem (in a way like the global economic structures) than bring it to a crisis.

The same logic applies as well to language and landscapes. Language is something to grasp and master, but it always is fleeting and apart. As much as habituation makes a language natural - the very mode of reasoning - the phenomena of forgetfulness and slips reveal its alienness. It's the role of the poet, as an oracle of the divine, which presses into this paradox, making the familiar alien and mastery as child-like novitiate. The landscape too is something that defies any simple definition. But, unlike the Heideggerian animal who is entirely absorbed in his faculties (ie Heidegger gives an example of a bee sucking honey who, after its abdomen is surgically removed, continues to feed without recognition of futility), man becomes himself when totally absorbed in his world. True peace is true belonging. When the alienation from the gap is replaced back into its environment - such as a landscape - an Italian can't help but yell out "Pais!" He is; such is simply the world. It's the dripping melody of Sweet Home Alabama, it's not somewhere, it's home.

The Messianic Secret is: the Kingdom of God is Within You. The Christian, in an eschatological sense, posits the resurrection of the dead -- but it begins now! The world of glory is not a new creation, but a new Heavens and Earth precisely in their meeting. It's a world that cannot be brought into a single subjectivity. It's the freedom of allowing oneself to simply belong, aware that all sorrow has passed. It is finding a home in The Age to Come, precisely in recognizing exile from This Age. Creation does not cease, but the order of things changes in the blink of an eye. Righteousness is an era, an epoch, not something drawn up within oneself from a Kantian urge of total subjective freedom. Let there be justice, even if the Heavens fall! Riches are washed away as all find the true justice of the highest poverty. Nature remains, yet in a moment, a heavenly homeland, with a heavenly language, in heavenly bodies appears. All tears wiped away. Maranatha!

Monday, March 28, 2022

"Not my will": Christology, Command, and the Apparatus of the Will

 A key problem is the apparatus of the will. Philosophy is primarily an investigation of "void verbs", verbs that have no meaning or significance apart from what they reference. These are non-apophantic verbs, which have no truth claim. To say "John walks" is to posit something verifiable (either he is walking or isn't). However, the non-apophantic verbs attempt a reference to a possible reality. "John can walk" or "John will walk" ultimately refer to a non-existent reality without itself summoning it. These are not pure commands - imperatives - that attempt to manifest a reality: "Walk!" However, they, in their own way, open a space of contingency where something may or may not occur. This is the central crisis of Western metaphysics, which has only become more perverse in democratic regimes. Agamben notes that the democratic regimes do not issue commands, only authoritarian prescriptions. They suggest, insinuate, and prod, but with a looming shadow of force. Participation does not free you (as if you, the Sovereign Voter, manifest your ideal), but enslaves you. Agamben dovetails with Jacques Ellul, who worried about the extent of "technique", a disposition of a certain mode of life. It's not the mere fact of an existent object, it's the web of social relations it draws you into. Hitting a button on a smart phone is not the imperious will of the user, but enactment of prescripted pathways (coded into an app) through the human sock puppet. Per technique, a device (like a phone) lives through the human wetware.

This is precisely the error in "the will" as an apparatus, a phenomenon which plagued Medieval metaphysics. The "will" becomes a mechanism to not only solve embarrassing problems, but a way to transmogrify the imperative into something new. Ivan Illich, a renegade Roman priest, made it clear that the 20th c. was neither a rejection or supercession of the Christian Era (as if we had entered an anti-/post-Christian epoch), but a fully Christian. Such is not to say it's obedience to Christ, but rather reflects a certain current of theology which sought to remake the world. It's the Grand Inquisitor cleaning up after Jesus. Corruptio optimi pessima. The apparatus of the "will" was a mechanism to solve the potential embarrassment of divine omnipotence. If God is all-powerful, as the creed states, then what would stop him from gross immorality? Could a world exist where Jesus incarnated as a lizard? What if God willed rape as moral? What if Judas were saved and the Twelve damned? The solution, per Medieval theologians, was to split God: potentia absoluta and potentia ordinata. The former was God-in-himself, in pure potentiality, the possibilities of God in fathomless numbers of worlds; the latter was God in reality, per his will, what he had bound himself to. God could not save Judas, begin a regime of fornicators, or take the skin of a salamander because he had chosen otherwise. This choice - the apparatus of the will - bound God to a particular form of action. Thus, the hyper-Christianity of the Mass Democracy New World Order is apparent in the passive phrase "There Is No Alternative". It's not that *we* wanted this! It's the way it is! Deus Vult! We can do nothing other than we do.

Agamben sees in Kant's ontological wrangling the pure emptiness at the heart of liberal democracies. The pure potency of the "I can" is none other than the Kantian "we must be able to will", an apparatus which wraps three distinct void verbs into a daisy chain of pure formality. A demonic triad, such a disposition neither requires nor expects, yet it demands indirectly. It's this apparatus which marks out the current regime, where governments do not command, but represent what simply is back to what is through a sleight-of-hand. The totalizing cruelty of democratic regimes are in their offloading responsibility back onto the victim. The democrat does not imperiously command "Obey!", for he is none other than The People staring back at itself. Rather, facing a vaccine mandate, the citizen-subject must be able to choose the common good. His inability is disqualification. The People ought to be able to choose the Good, and so do (thus the public displays of Representatives of The People receiving shots, from Jerry Ford to Joe Biden). Refusal places one outside the body-politic, and thus the pure impotency is erased. Rather than reveal the void at the heart of the system, it must be brutally suppressed through the proper media epithet to diagnose the alien substance. Terrorist! Racist! You are not *us*, and thus in a manner reflective of Nazi efforts to square the circle of nationalism, they increasingly must be purged. It is not violent as if it were murder (where one kills an other). It is more akin to combing lice out of your hair or taking antibiotics to kill off bacteria. Thus, the medieval apparatus of God's ordained will secularizes as The People's Representative government carrying out its approved mandate.

Agamben ends with a gesture towards one of the most bizarre, yet entrancing, characters of Herman Melville: Bartleby the Scrivener. Confronted with the imperious demand of a fair minded liberal capitalist (Melville's corrupted successor to the New England puritan), Bartleby simp refuses: "I prefer not to". Such is a negation of the will's apparatus, an exit from the regime. The story, narrated through the boss, constantly gropes forward from desperation to desperation. Bartleby is the Hegelian negative consciousness, a pure "No", an immovable object. The liberal sentiments of the boss result in the brutal end of Bartleby, but not at his hand. Having fired him (yet still he remained), the boss decides to move his company and sell the building than involve the police. However the next occupants (as expected) do not tolerate Bartleby's loitering, and he's hauled off to jail. The boss visits, only to find Bartleby ultimately expired. On the jail yard, Bartleby simply refused to move without force and his ghostly life came to an end. The boss, a handwringing post-puritan liberal of fair sentiments, lamented the fate of Bartleby, even as it existed as his hand. Bartleby, and his death, represent the negation of not only the imperious demands of a capitalist ("work!"), but also Melville's prescient predictions of democracy's offloading of responsibility ("you fired yourself because you would not do x!"). Such is the current state of the imperative, an archaeology of the command buried within the empty (yet deadly) advice column.

Yet to further elaborate beyond Agamben: the hope is found in Christological debates. While it's true certain elements of the debate furnished the medieval theological apparatus that would prove damning when secularized, it also offers the means of escape. The key here is the diothelite debate and the sixth ecumenical council. Christian in the 7th c. debated whether Christ had one or two wills, whether the will pertained to person or to nature. Monothelites (including both Chalcedonian and non-Chalcedonians) possessed the upper hand and saw a staunch diothelite, like Maximus the Confessor, effectively martyred. But rather than a trivial obscurity of doctrine, it was a question of biblical interpretation. The question was Jesus' prayer in the garden of Gethsemane: "Lord take this cup from me...yet your will, not mine, be done". Was this prayer a juxtaposition between two appetites in Christ? Was it human weakness overrode by divine command? Was it a charade? For Maximus, and the diothelites, it was the twinning of human and divine wills that made this prayer profound. It was entirely human, and entirely divine, to ask to survive (had not God created human nature to live?). It was also entirely human, and divine, to submit through negation. Christ does not assert his own will, or offer justification in transition between two modes of thought. Rather, Christ's prayer is a negation of his own will: "not my will". In this way, Bartleby is a crypto-messianic figure, who chooses death before absorption into the system (whether Roman or New England capitalist). But such is in light of resurrection, where the darkness of the dark is exposed before the light of morning casts it aside.

Thus the Messianic call that Agamben highlights, in rejecting the apparatus of will, is negation. The darkness reveal as dark is a necessary moment towards the lightness of light. The "I prefer not to" exposes the impotency of the command, and opens up the potency of thought. For what is it that I prefer?

Friday, March 11, 2022

Justice Without Law: Messianic Time and an Exposition of Giorgio Agamben's "The Time That Remains"

Paul a servant of Jesus Christ called to be an apostle separated unto the gospel of God

 Outside of Homo Sacer, but integral to its understanding, is Giorgio Agamben's The Time That Remains.  A commentary on St. Paul's Letter to the Romans, it was given during a week long conference on the text in light of current political crises and continental philosophy. The essay is structured along the Creation week (six days with the last day as an extension, a significant decision as will be later shown) and focuses on the first verse of the Epistle. Thus, in no sense, is this work a traditional commentary or operating along the lines of strictly biblical scholarship (though this fact makes the work more profound). On the contrary, Agamben participates in the larger retrieval of St. Paul within continental philosophy, and in so doing aids in recognizing the potency of the New Testament to be the true revelation of any political or ethical assessment to both damn and save Western civilization from itself.

Agamben's primary focus is to retrieve the messianic logic of St. Paul from many commentators (Christian or otherwise) who misunderstand his mission. St. Paul was not creating a new religion, a supercession of Judaism (itself a false claim), which simply added another phase to an economy of salvation. This point is not, necessarily, a depreciation of Christian cult or rite (to the contrary in many ways!), but a certain conceptualization that became normative in Christendom. Whether it's the Augustinian theory of seven ages (which may not be loyal to Augustine, but certainly not to Augustine's influence, Tyconius) or modern Protestantism, Christianity is not a/the step to perfection. In other words, the New Testament is not the "Second" Testament (or the Old Testament the "First"). Such would be to entirely misunderstand the Messianic as a fulfillment of the Torah, not its replacement. As a servant of Jesus Christ (which Saul-Paul playfully recapitulates in his renaming), Paul is not the bearer of another. He's not even the bearer of the end. But, as an Apostle, Paul is unveiling and proclaiming the time of the end.

If we can call this a religion (and I don't think it's out of place, as long as it's clear what we mean), what marks out Christianity is the religion of the Messiah (an obvious fact, sometimes obscured through the Latinization of christos as a mere cognate). And what is that? A key element is in what it meant for St Paul to be "called" and to exist in a calling. Within German, the call (klesis) is translated as a term similar for class (beruf), which reflects the English vernacular of discussing a profession. A misinterpretation, which we will return to several times, is to read this in the crude form of classical Marxism, where the proletariat *is* the industrial wage labor force. But in the messianic logic of St Paul, the call is a disrupter manifest in his use of "as not" (hos me). The call is not to create a new category which will inherit the future, or restore the past. It is to live "as not" whatever the particular offices and roles we have. The servant lives "as not" a servant, and a master lives "as not" a master. Instead the pure formalism of the call is the freedom to live:

"Vocation calls for nothing and to no place. For this reason it may coincide with the tactical condition in which each person finds himself called, but for this very reason, it also revokes the condition from top to bottom. The messianic vocation is the revocation of every vocation." (23)

What this effectively means is that the Christian (the one living in this Messianic call) has no particular task. There is no call to be a Christian that means a separate, or additional, task added on to, or superseding, other tasks, callings, and classes. Rather to be a Christian is the suspension of all other professions, so that they may be made use of. This disjunctive logic is why many Christians (or not) have puzzled over why St Paul himself does not take a clear position on the slavery question. St. Paul speaks of freedom and yet offers ethical formulae for masters and slaves. Which one is it? This question, wondering whether Christianity creates, modifies, or abolishes particular classes in society, is the wrong one. Rather the "as not" is the self-negation that allows the Christian to act freely no matter his station. The technical term, for both Agamben himself and his St. Paul as an ancient trained within a Hellenic world, is "use" (chresis). The messianic vocation is to make use of whatever class, standing, or profession one finds oneself in. In Agamben's terms:

"The messianic vocation is not a right, nor does it furnish an identity; rather, it is a generic potentiality [potenza] that can be used without ever being owned. To be messianic, to live in the Messiah, signifies the expropriation of each and every juridical-tactical property (circumcised/uncircumcised; free/slave; man/woman) under the form of the as not. This expropriation does not, however found a new identity; the 'new creature' is none other than the use and messianic vocation of the old" (26)

This focus on property/ownership and use took up a section of Agamben's messianic genealogy of the Fransicans in The Highest Poverty. The vision of St. Francis and his order of small brothers was not to institute a new religious way of life, but to deactivate the increasing intermixture (and indeterminate confusion) of the Empire and the Church. Francis was not seeking to offer an alternative, but to make use of the structures of the Church. The Spiritual Franciscans (who Agamben sees as truly loyal to their founder) sought to "create a space that escaped the grasp of power and its laws, without entering into conflict with them yet rendering them inoperative", which followed the same messianic logic in St. Paul. The goal is not found yet another order, or restore an old one, but to escape from the misuse of the Law into the killing machine which will unleash total destruction.

The above is why most Marxist movements, especially the Soviet Union, would find themselves the very beasts they sought to overthrow. "Class" is an operative divider, distinguishing the individual from the factual vocation of his social standing. In classical Hegelian-Marxian thought (though Agamben sees precisely this as its betrayal), it is this process where this historic class gains its self-awareness to act. The mere social standing of proletariat is revolutionized through this new consciousness of itself as the revolutionary vanguard, not the mere wage labor subject. Yet it was this process which then easily became shipwrecked. If considered an inevitable force of economic factors, it seemed to easily collapse before the factual reality that the proletariat were often opposed to revolution. An alternative, offered by Leninists like Lukacs, was to posit the party as the revolutionary consciousness of the proletariat class. Yet this often created the constant, but failed effort, to bring the proletariat and the party into indistinguishable overlap, yet always creating disjuncture. Thus, the effort at coinherence with remainder provoked the violence of conformity, as the Party and the People (which were identical) were anything but in practice. Hence one finds party officials acting as a new clerical class over the people. And like them, they either lazily use an ideological apparatus to line their own pockets or sincerely pursue this mutual identification through increasingly ruthless indoctrination. 

The third option, perhaps the worst in the long run, is the democratic socialist idea of infinite deferment, a negative identification of perfection and time. The reality is that the deferment is a fiction, that Progress is a myth. Yet the intellectual party-leader may live "as if" the perfection is coming and on the horizon. While doctrinaire Marxism or vanguard Leninism may represent a form of naive clericalization of the revolution, the democratic socialism of "as if" infinite progress is an inversion of the messiah. Rather than to come to terms with the given by self-negation, thus allowing the free use of all things, the "as if" enshrines a fiction as the operative ideology. Things are never what they seem, but must be interpreted within the progressive vision, even if the sober theorist (like Adorno) knows they never will be. Aestheticization of politics, society, and all cultural products, glossed with this hope, is this self-enchantment of Progress:

"This is why aesthetic beauty cannot be anything more than the spell over spells. There is no satisfaction in it, for the as if is the condemnation that the philosopher has already inflicted on himself" (37)

This point is increasingly necessary, as this philosophical idol is quite common. The "as if" of Progress is what fuels the complete confusion between fantasy and reality, to constantly be transfixed with history as it could be otherwise or a history infused with the fantastical (the M.O. of Disney). For the negative dialectics of the truly pessimists (the sorcerers of Progressivism who know its secret), there is a contempt for reality. Rather than its turn to the imaginary of "what if", the messianic logic lodged in a marxist like Walter Benjamin defends exigency. The mere facticity of things is the source of the imagination and the sed contra to a certain regime. In a reversal of the Leibnizian "every possibility demands existence", Agamben advanced that "every existent demands possibility". Thus the task of the philosopher (or the Christian more broadly) to remember. If something can be remembered, it was and could be. Thus it may exist once more since its existence never ceases. Its existence, even in its smallest and most insignificant form, demands its imaginative possibility. It will never be forgotten. And so the Messianic logic brings about the redemption of the unredeemable, that trash heap and train wreck of historical time. Benjamin's dialectic of time, where the angel of history remains suspended between the winds of the future and the gaze upon the past, opens up possibility, the small gate of every moment through which the Messiah may enter. It is precisely in what is unredeemable is there redemption:

"He who upholds himself in the messianic vocation no longer knows the as if, he no longer has similitudes at his disposal. He knows that in messianic time the saved world coincides with the world that is irretrievably lost, and that, to use Bonhoeffer's words, he must now really live in a world without God. This means that he may not disguise this world's being-without-God in any way. The saving God is the God who abandons him, and the fact of representations (the fact of the as if) cannot pretend to save the appearance of salvation. The messianic subject does not contemplate the world as though it were saved. In Benjamin's words, he contemplates salvation only to the extent that he loses himself in what cannot be saved" (42)

In other words, salvation comes not to those whose imagination is invigorated to think of his life *as if* it were sinless. Such is manifest not only in the bad substitutionary theology of Evangelicals with fictitious bank account exchanges, but also average Progressives who obscure the carnage of their world with the *as if* it were being saved. Yet this doom does not darken the world. It is precisely as a sinner that the unredeemed is redeemed, and salvation comes to the sinner who lives *as not*, freed from his past at the same moment he commits to it. Forgiveness is not erasure, but deactivation and disownership. Like the Apostle in Romans 7, the ascription of guilt results in this schizophrenic placement between flesh and spirit, law of faith and law of sin, and so on. The salvation of this world is precisely in its godlessness. There's no taking back the wreckage, but it's in re-use, that its having happened becomes the opening to its being done a different way. In this way, the Messiah frees the saint up for the very nightmare he lives in, a seed cast into the dirt and shit of the world, yielding a crop.

This redemption takes places through separation. But what kind? Agamben notes St. Paul's playful/rueful use of this concept in relationship to his own life. For St. Paul truly was separate, for this meaning is the etymological root of the "Pharisees". And yet now, as an Apostle, St. Paul is again separated. But this cut is not an additional division into a smaller group, since this cut happens universally. Thus the Jew is set apart from the Gentiles, the People from the sea of the Nations. Yet the Jew was, prophetically, redivided into the remnant. Again, the remnant is not merely a smaller group, a subdivision of the division. Rather, it's the negation. Thus, the Jew is set apart from himself to fulfill the very task of being set apart. If the Jew does not become the remnant, he cease to be the Jew. And the Gentile, in fulfilling this vocation, cease to be a Gentile. The messianic vocation operates at this point of suspension for the not-not-Jew and the not-not-Gentile. And it's as such that the Christ's people are the not-not-people. They neither represent the All nor the Part, but reveal the disjuncture between the two. And as such, the remnant become the instrument of redemption, that the world is only savable in its revelation as unsavable:

"The only possible meaning of Kafka's aphorism, in which there is salvation, but 'not for us' is found here. As remnant, we, the living who remain en to nyn kairo [in the now time -cal], make salvation possible, we are its 'premise' (aparche; Rom. 11:16). We are already saved, so to speak, but for this reason, it is not as a remnant that we will be saved. The messianic remnant exceeds the eschatological all, and irremediably so; it is the unredeemable that make salvation possible" (57)

Applied politically, it's this inappropriable distinction between All and Part that can break the back of democratic government's march towards totalitarian expansion. For the people is neither a majority nor a minority, but it is the remnant, the unrepresentable which represent themselves to force this disjuncture. Democratic government does not rule for the people as a mere representation of a majority or a minority, and it is the remnant (those left out, yet refuse to be silenced) which force the government's hand. Only in this way can the people have a voice to summon justice against the worst excesses of a democratic government.

It's this present oriented focus, the "now time" (nyn kairo) of the Messiah, that makes St. Paul an Apostle, not a prophet. The Christ's coming, for this reason, is not an apocalypse (a future oriented catastrophe and realignment), which holds little interest for Paul. Rather. The Messiah effects the beginning of the end, or the time in which the end makes its coming about. The messianic time is a transformation of our relation to the present:

"messianic time, as operational time, implies an actual transformation of the experience of time that may even interrupt secular time here and now. The kingdom does not coincide with any chronological instant but is between them, stretching them into parousia. This is the reason for its particular 'nearness,'" (73)

 It's worth stating here my objection to Agamben on this point. Agamben is concerned to understand the separateness of St. Paul's vocation in relation to the messianic cut into time. Just as St. Paul is separated from separation, that he is a not-not-Jew and thus free to minister to the Gentiles, so too is time now made available to serve a new means to relate to the phenomena of the here and now. Thus the call is neither to primitive man nor to cybernetic man, but man as such. Thus St. Francis goes and preaches to the birds, wears his sandals, and finds himself in an entirely new relationship to all of creation as his brothers and sisters. But that's precisely the notion of the apocalyptic in Scripture. It is not a vision of the future, and its catastrophe. "Apocalyptic" is a genre created by academics joining together many texts that resemble the biblical book. And the Revelation of Jesus Christ to St. John is, as the title suggests, an unveiling of the present. Yes it is things yet to come, but these things are themselves contained in the pages of the Scripture (which is why Revelation can only be read with a firm knowledge of the Old Testament). It is not merely a Revelation of what is to come, but a Revelation of Jesus Christ. It is the very display of the shape of time, where past and future coinhere within the present, though with remainder. Beware! Look! Watch! These are key phrases throughout the New Testament, as the Present becomes a site of conflict as the symbols of what was and the potentiality of their reappearance (both holy and evil) is certainly uncertain. Agamben gives too much away by accepting the misrepresentation of the apocalyptic and then denying St. Paul follows it. This sense of the apocalyptic is what St. Paul, indeed, represents:

"And just as the past frees itself only in memory from the distant strangeness of what has been lived - thereby becoming my past for the very first time - so too, in the 'economy of the plenitude of times,' men appropriate their history, and what once happened to the Jews is recognized as a figure and reality for the messianic community. And just as the past becomes possible again in some fashion through memory - that which was fulfilled becomes unfulfilled and the unfulfilled becomes fulfilled - so too in messianic recapitulation do men ready themselves to forever take leave of the past in eternity, which knows neither past nor repetition" (77)

What was destroyed now may live, and what had won may now be ended. The arrogant are cast down and the poor lifted up.

It's precisely through this messianic appearance and calling that marks out the good news, the gospel, Paul was commissioned to preach. A fact that has bedeviled many commentators of Paul is his seemingly contradictory approach to the Law. At the very moment the Apostle has leveled severe criticisms against it, that it is the bearer of sin and is overthrown, that Paul exuberantly bursts out that he has defended the Law. And what is the gospel that he brings? Is it a new law? Agamben highlights Paul's distinction between the Law as law of sin and the Law as law of faith. The distinction, and antagonism, has not two laws in view, but the Torah's normativity. The Law of the Messiah is not a replacement or overthrow of the Torah, but it's deactivation. Hence Paul's emphasis on the deactivation (katargeo) of the Torah in the crucifixion of the Christ. This deactivation is not the destruction or removal of the Law, but its fulfillment through inoperativity, where is no longer effective in its normative authority. Agamben highlights that, in German, the fulfillment of the law in Luther is aufheben, the same concept used for the Hegelian aufhebung. Such does not implement a kind of non-law ethics of the post-historical society. Such was what Kojeve misunderstood, conflating the above with the messianic time, seen as the appendage of a seventh day, a negative infinity of chronos. If the Messianic is seen as such, which results in the *as if* of infinite deferment, Kojeve (and other Hegelians as well) is right to find Christianity to be both boring and repulsive. But the Messianic is the operation of the Remnant to rupture all chronos with the appearance of the kairotic "as not", the imagination of what was as what could be.

 It's worth quoting Agamben at length:

"This remnant - the non-non-Jews - is neither properly inside nor outside, neither ennomos nor anomos (according to the way Paul defines himself in I For. 9:21); it is the cipher of messianic deactivation of the law, the cipher of its katargesis. The remnant is an exception taken to its extreme, pushed to its paradoxical formulation. In his reading of the messianic condition of the believer, Paul radicalizes the condition of the state of exception, whereby law is applied in misapplying itself, no longer having an inside or an outside. With regard to this law that applies itself in misapplying itself, a corresponding gesture of faith ensues, applying itself in disapplying itself, rendering law inoperative while carrying it to its fulfillment.

Paul calls this paradoxical figure of the law in the state of messianic exception nomos pisteos, 'the law of faith"'(Rom. 3:27), as it can no longer be defined through works, the execution of the miswoth, but as a manifestation of "justice without law" (dikaiosyne choris nomou; Rom. 3:21). This amounts, more or less, to "observing the law without law," especially if one takes into consideration the fact that in Judaism, justice is, par excellence, with him who observes the law. This is why Paul says that the law of faith is the suspension - literally, the 'exclusion' - (exekleisthe; Rom. 3:27) of the law of works. Paul's formulation of this dialectical aporia, which affirms that faith is both deactivation (katargein) and preservation (histanein) of the law, is nothing more than the coherent expression of this paradox. Justice without law is not the negation of the law, but the realization and fulfillment, the pleroma, of the law" (106-107)

The Messianic dispossession of the Law frees it for its use to frame a life of justice outside of the law (or as usually translated "righteousness outside the law"). This suspension of the law is its fulfillment, the Torah's proper end. Such destroys the alternative, the Nightmare Apparatus under which we live, which sees the "as if" ab-use of the Law through its full norming operativity. Such is where All and Part are forcibly made to coinhere. The logic of the Nazi camp was, truly, the full unleashing of the logic of nationalism, that the People and the Leader/Government were one and the same. The Camp became the exception, the ex-ceptio, where what was outside the Law was captured within it at the same moment it's placed outside. The Camp is the construction of Hell, the effecting of paradise where the angelic bureaucrats guide the songs of the saints-people, as this heavenly triumph (signaling nothing) sits upon fires of Hell. It's precisely here, where the Law becomes completely blurred, unable to be followed or disobeyed, that it maximizes its power. The law's transgression becomes its proper use, even as its obedience becomes guilt for disobedience. In our time, such was the criminalization of unmasked or unvaccinated breathing (outside or inside), yet simultaneous unconstitutional (yet legal) use of police powers to surveil, harass, and arrest. Agamben's Italy was often ground-zero for unrolling this unleashed Nomos of the Earth, but its potency was clear throughout Western Europe and Israel. 

The result is manifest in schizophrenic split in Paul's conscience (Romans 7). The law ceases to offer any clear norm or framework, but merely produces guilt. The Law merely destroys, without law or reason, but wrapped all under sin. The Messiah came to use the Law to end this regime, rather than produce the Kafka-esque Trial where man stands damned as judged criminal, pure guilt without any particular law or precept violated. God's intent was to unveil the Law's impotency, that it cannot constitute righteousness which it expects. It's precisely in failure to recognize the Law's limitation, or its inability to norm, only to be used, that marks out the reign of the antichrist. The Messiah's reign ends the Nightmare:

"Once he divides the law into a law of works and a law of faith, a law of sin and a law of God (Rom. 7:22-23) - and thus renders it inoperative and unobservable - Paul can then fulfill and recapitulate the law in the figure of love. The messianic pleroma of the law is an Aufhebung of the state of exception, an absolutizing of katargesis."(108)

It is faith which is the proper use of the Law, allowing a righteousness without norm. The Scripture becomes a mosaic to draw from so as to appropriate the spirit of justice, that is the Spirit of Christ. Faith, which Agamben recognizes as fidelity, or loyalty and allegiance, is precisely the operative use of an inoperative Law, and part of its origin. The Covenant (berit) is a pre-law arrangement that should not be fetishized as unique to divine relations (the term, equally translatable as pact or contract, refers to agreements between humans). Agamben could appreciate the scholarship of Meredith Kline, where the structure of the Mosaic covenant reflects suzerainty treaties between a superior and his vassal. Nevertheless, this pre-law arrangement between God and his friends required a disposition of fidelity between partners. And this element is what grounds the historical transition from pre-law (which is more akin to magic) into Law, reified the borders and boundaries of a particular people (rather than the loose knit personal arrangements of a tribe). But it's at the moment of Law that Faith becomes locked in a paradoxical antagonism. For Paul, this juxtaposition is revealed in the promise-covenant to Abraham and the Law to Moses. Translated into modern law, it's the constitution against positive law, or constitutive power against a written constitution. This distinction - between what constitutes a government and the government thus constituted - has constantly moved towards a greater state of crisis. And it's this rupture that the Messianic fulfill through inoperativity:

"The messianic is therefore the historical process whereby the archaic link between law and religion (which finds its magical paradigm in horkos, oath) reaches a crises [sic] and the element of pistis, of faith in the pact, tends paradoxically to emancipate itself from any obligatory conduct and from positive law (from works fulfilled in carrying out the pact" (119) 

The energy that mobilizes faith, remaining true to the constitutive covenant against a collapse into nomos, is charis (grace). Rather than operating within the framework of law through carrot and stick, grace reflects the pre-law state of gratuitous action within the dynamics of gift exchange. It's not this-that, or a system that establishes meritorious equivalence (or, negatively demeritorious penalties). The lack of qualification for every act according to this pact do not allow any pure coincidence; one is never square and thus the life between all parties continues. This marks out, fundamentally, a form-of-life, where the emergence of Law is suspended, and its form preserved for use. The very messianic community, in whatever form it takes, is the law's fulfillment. The lived church, as St. Paul says, is "our letter" (II Cor. 3:2). And this grace through faith is placed upon the crucified and risen Messiah. Agamben is somewhat ambiguous over the historical question of Jesus of Nazareth, but this disposition emerges from following St. Paul. It's not that the Apostle does not believe in the historicity of Christ, only that he has no interest of a "historical" Jesus against the Christ of his faith. Such is not from ancient naivety (there was already a well developed historical genre and hermeneutic in antiquity), but love. There is no Jesus, who happened to become or who (eternally even) has the predicate of Christ. Love collapses subject and predicate, as Jesus the Christ is - to those of faith - Jesus Christ:

"what then is the world of faith? Not a world of substance and qualities, not a world in which the grass is green, the sun is warm, and the snow is white. No, it is not a world of predicates, of existences and essences, but a world of indivisible events, in which I do not judge, nor do I believe that the snow is white and the sun is warm, but I am transported and displaced in the snow's-being-white and in the sun's-being-warm. In the end, it is a world in which I do not believe Jesus, such-and-such a man, is the Messiah, only-begotten son of God, begotten and not created, consubstantial in the Father. I only believe in Jesus Messiah; I am carried away and enraptured in him, in such a way that 'I do not live, but the Messiah lives in me' (Gal. 2:20)." (129)

The point here is not to shutdown all theological questions (or to crudely toss away doctrinal history as so much wrangling). Rather, it's the same way one must rebuke scientism out of love for practiced science. The ascension of faith to grace leads finally to love. At the end, the commitment to the Messianic logic of justice/righteousness outside the law emerges from love. It is to taste and see that the Lord is good. It is the joy of a world, not its stripping and vivisection. The love of Christ is the love of his person, where subject and predicate merge. That is who he is. On this point, Agamben could easily sound like a fideistic Evangelical. And so much the better for Agamben! It is easy to lose the fundamental love of God behind a wall of dogmatic debate and distinction, so much so that one loses fidelity, fails to understand grace, falls out of love. Such is to reenter the realm of the original cut, that separation where one rapidly seeks to carry out the Law no matter the cost. It becomes a covenant without God, Law without Justice. Such is the conflict throughout all ages and the alternative (Law without Justice) is bleak:

"As the history of the Church clearly demonstrates - as does that of societas humana in its entirety - the dialectic between these two experiences of the word is essential. If, as it inevitably happens and seems to be happening again today, the second falls to the wayside leaving only the word of nomos in absolute force, and if the performativum fidei is completely covered by the performativum sacramenti, then the law itself stiffens and atrophies and relations between men lose all sense of grace and vitality. The juridicizing of all human relations in their entirety, the confusion between what we may believe, hope, and love, and what we are supposed to do and not supposed to do, what we are supposed to know, not only signal the crisis of religion but also, and above all, the crisis of law." (135)

This crossroads is not (necessarily) an attack on all sacraments. Rather it's the sacramental theology, demonstrated elsewhere, of act without agent, and potency without power. It's the sacramental theology of the priest who acts persona ecclesiae/persona christi, yet God, who is thus acting, can only act through the person. Thus the priest's authority to give grace or condemn is not his own, yet this constituting authority is impotent without this governing act. It would be interesting to see what Agamben would make of early modern and modern Orthodox theology on this point. Nevertheless, it's an interest in a eucharistic meal sans sacramental canonicity. Again, it's an interest in righteousness without law.

Agamben concludes with a philological investigation of Benjamin's ideas as drawn (at least in part) from St. Paul (revealed through spaced terms that reflect Luther's translation - the standard in German). The importance of this discovery was the interrelation of these two texts, whose urgency appears simultaneously for the current moment. The messianic never ages, it appears at the right time, even if it's not evident that it has, in fact, appeared. Thus must we - people of the Christ - return again and again to the present solution to the present crisis. Justice without law must reign.

Thy will be done, on Earth as it is in Heaven.

Thursday, March 10, 2022

Warm, Pulsating, and Urinating: An Exposition of Giorgio Agamben's "Homo Sacer"

Homo Sacer is both the name of the series and the first book in Agamben's detailed genealogy of the current Nightmare which casts its gloomy shadow over the globe. It is not a substance or a system, in the sense of a concrete organization or network of affiliated criminals, banksters, or elites. Rather, utilizing a Foucaultian concept, the Homo Sacer is an apparatus (dispositif), an ideological framework which only exists through use. It is precisely this threshold concept, which neither exists nor not exist, but possesses a zombie like property of a tertium quid, an unexistence. Apparently obscure, this framework is best exposited through the arcane and primordial Homo Sacer designation, which Agamben will apply to fully understand the truly modern Social Democratic state-of-exception, The Camp.

Beginning, as he is wont to do in several of his works, Agamben begins with the ancient fracture between zoe and bios, between bare-biological life and personal-characteristic life. Each of these referred to distinct zones of living, between the home (oikos) and the city (polis), between the economic and the political. The conflation and indetermined confusion marks out the dawn of Modernity, and its potential horrors:

"the entry of zoe into the sphere of the polis - the politicization of bare life as such - constitutes the decisive event of modernity and signals a radical transformation of the political philosophical categories of classical thought." (4)

It is this indistinction between one and the other, defined and defining through their use, which signals this new bio-political order, which politicizes precisely through its apoliticizing (for it is only a political decision which determine what is, indeed, outside of its bounds). In contemporary times, it is precisely the a-political nature of pandemic emergency governing (i.e. "A virus isn't politics! We must act for Humanity!") that marks out this form of hyper-politics, obscuring its own enthronement precisely through its self-effacement. It's precisely in this sense that Agamben will argue the bio-political is the enthronement of total domination:

"the inclusion of bare life in the political realm constitutes the original - if concealed - nucleus of sovereign power. It can even be said that the production of a biopolitical body is the original activity of sovereign power. In this sense, biopolitics is at least as old as the sovereign exception. Placing biological life at the center of its calculations, the modern State therefore does nothing other than bring to light the secret tie uniting power and bare life, thereby reaffirming the bond [...] between modern power and the most immemorial of the arcana imperii" (6)

It is this prolegomenon that justifies Agamben's examination, with double vision, of ancient philosophy and modern politics, of Roman law and Nazi jurisprudence. Hence the need to examine the Homo Sacer: the sacred man who "may be killed and yet not sacrificed" (8), who neither belongs to the profane world of men or the realm of the gods. He is both divine and yet not, both human and not. He cannot be murdered or sacrificed, but snuffed out. It is in this sense that the law, which constitutes the body of the violator, defines through its pronouncement who, as criminal, is worthy of death. By designating a citizen as the judged, the law's application exposes this state-of-exception, of the one who belongs yet no longer belongs. In this way the law, the arbiter of justice (equalization within the city) is also the arbiter of violence. It's dual identity that ancients, as far back as the theologian-poet Hesiod, designated:

O Perseus, keep these things in mind and

forget violence [Biaia] when you attend to justice [Dike].

To men, Zeus gave this nomos:

what is proper to the fish, the wild beasts, and the winged birds

is to devour each other, since there is no Dike between them.

But to men Zeus gave Dike, which is must better. (Works and Days in pp.31)

While justice strictly separates man from the violence of beasts, both are contained in the law (nomos) of Zeus to govern the world. Thus it is in the excepting of violence (to the world of beast) it is also included, since the Law must define what pertains properly to each. And it the Law, which operates sovereignly (the living voice of Zeus; an important concept to appear later) threatens the possibility of indistinction, since law and violence are held together by a tenuous bond (between what marks out the beasts from men). It is this bond, and the passage between both distinctions, which marks out Law as "made of nothing but what it manages to capture inside itself through the inclusive exclusion of the exceptio" (27). 

The Law, preserved in most Human history, maintained these distinctions, even through the threat of its incoherence. But it's precisely the incoherence, where the exception appears, where the Law exercises its true power. It is the exercise of violence, the suspension of justice, in which the Law carries out its preservative functions. This analysis is not unlike Girard's scape-goat, which in the same moment that barbarous savagery is carried out against the bearer of the community's sin is the community restored. It is the Augustinian critique that Rome's civilized foundation depended on original violence, that the justice of Rome depended on the murder of Remus. Yet while this blending helped to preserve distinctions, it is Modernity which has seen the normalization of this ordered anarchy.

The first major theorist of this blurred unexistence was the Monster of Malmesbury. Rather than the ancient philosophy of Plato, which ascribed justice to nature (the original sense of laws ruling over men) and closed the gap between law and nature, Hobbes pulled them apart to inscribe them into the Leviathan. Justice belongs not to nature, but to nature's suspension. The law of "all against all" is only overcome through the sovereign, which takes into itself the absolute indistinction between justice and violence as a living law. Therefore the modern definition of sovereignty:

"presents itself as an incorporation of the state of nature in society, or, if one prefers, as a state of indistinction between nature and culture, between violence and law, and this very indistinction constitutes specifically sovereign violence. The state of nature is therefore not truly external to nomos but rather contains its virtuality" (35)

The violence of the beasts is not kept out through the Sovereign exclusion through the constitution of the commonwealth. Quite to the contrary, it becomes the very heart and seat of rule. Per Carl Schmitt's expert analysis, the rule only lives through the exception. The State has right and legitimacy to exercise justice precisely when it kills. As Benjamin would put it,  "there is no document of civilization that is not also a document of barbarism". Yet the sovereign may also not kill, which again reinscribes the potency through impotency. Hence Agamben focuses on the bifurcation intrinsic within Aristotle's distinction between act and potentiality. For potency is clear enough in the act, but potentiality manifest simultaneously at the moment of action (the potential is a given) and inaction (since one may refrain from acting, yet retain the ability). Hence Hobbesian Leviathan smacks of a kind of voluntarism, which marked out many of the problems of early modern monarchic absolutism. For the prince's restraint, as much as his exercise of the exception, reveals again sovereign capture of both civilization and barbarity, justice and violence, in the Law. 

Thus far the Sovereign is a question between man and beast. What of the divine? It's precisely this apparatus which suspends mankind from ever itself being man, even as Humanity is precisely the object of the law. But again, it's the exclusion in which the power of the Law, and its bestial violence, is unleashed. After dispatching the emptiness of much western anthropology, and its neat structural categorizations of the "sacred". For as much as the sacred pertains to a world beyond the world of men, it is itself defined in the very same Law. For as Hesiod said, the Law was from Zeus, yet it was for the justice of men. The arcane concept of Homo Sacer (which bedeviled even Republican Roman lawyers) was an example of the Law's potency through its hazy coincidence. Unlike the religious rites of Rome, in which consecratio moved an object or person outside of Human law into the custody of the gods, Homo Sacer never fully made the transition. He was not able to be murdered (since he was no longer under man's law), but he was also not fit for sacrifice (not under divine law). And thus the double-movement of the Law (a removal from its jurisdiction and its placement in another) fails at the critical juncture, losing the legal person through the excepting power. The Homo Sacer can be killed, but neither murdered nor sacrificed. Thus it is as this juncture that the original purpose of sacrality appears, for it is the life that can only be destroyed which is truly set apart. The Homo Sacer is a revelation of Sovereignty's origin:

"homo sacer presents the originary figure of life taken into the sovereign ban and preserves the memory of the originary exclusion through which the political dimension was first constituted. The political sphere of sovereignty was thus constituted through a double exclusion, as an excrescence of the profane in the religious and of the religious in the profane, which takes the form of a zone of indistinction between sacrifice and homicide. The sovereign sphere is the sphere in which it is permitted to kill without committing homicide and without celebrating a sacrifice, and sacred life - that is, life that may be killed but not sacrificed - is the life that has been captured in this sphere" (83)

Thus it is at the moment in which Sovereign Law constitutes and is constituted that it gains dominion over bare life, basic biological functions, which it defines, governs, and can disappear. The Sovereign not only decides the exception, but in so doing decides its jurisdiction. But the Law can only do this straddling between its own jurisdiction and the supposed, and negated, world outside its authority (the war of all against all). Thus the Sovereign, as Law-Giver, must be both in and out, itself the exception which allows it to except. For in the Hobbesian state of nature, it is primarily the threat of death, in the killing and being killed, which is the pretext for the founding of the commonwealth. Yet if the Sovereign has this power to kill, excepting one from justice as an enemy (to kill without murder), the Sovereign is itself not unlike those who may be killed and kill without murder or sacrifice. The arcana imperii is that the Sovereign is the Enemy of Mankind, the Pirate, the Werewolf, hidden at the source of power. The Sovereign is the excepted precisely in its ability to except, making it that "mortal god" which Hobbes so reverently defined. The primordial fact of exception as constitutive, rather than some positive mutuality, is what defines the modern state. Thus Agamben condemns modern mass democracy:

"The understanding of the Hobbesian mythologize in terms of contract instead of ban condemned democracy to impotence every time it had to conform the problem of sovereign power and has also rendered modern democracy incapable of truly think a politics freed from the form of the State.

The relation of abandonment is so ambiguous that nothing could be harder than breaking from it. The ban is essentially the power of delivering something over to itself, which is to say, the power of maintaining itself in relation to something presupposed as non relational. What has been banned is delivered over to its own separateness and, at the same time, consigned to the mercy of the one who abandons it, at once excluded and included, removed and at the same time captured." (109-110)

The sacred controls the profane through its own self-exclusion. The political control the economic through its own self-exclusion. The public controls the private through its own self exclusion. Thus the modern state, in this entire collapse, is only defined precisely through its total domination of the profane, economic, and private. That's all that matters and marks out, through Sovereignty's self-effacement, the modern deposits of the sacred, political and public. Democracy is thus trapped to always replicate, and intensify, this relationship as it is replicated again and again and again. And it is thus no surprise that only in Weimar Germany, a modern social democratic state in crisis, out of which Hitler and NSDAP biopolitics emerged.

Modern Democracy intensifies, rather than erase, the distinctions (and their undetermined coincidence) through diffusion. Unlike ancient or medieval polities (even Hobbes' absolutist monarchism), Democracy infuses the sacrality of Sovereignty into the body of single citizen. When the nation was in the single body of the king, continuity depended on the bifurcation of the king's body. For as he lay moldering in the ground, he remained. The king is dead, long live the king. But mass democracy has not abolished this concept, but extended it to all in the individual "sovereign subject", which again bifurcates into the corporaeal citizen and his congealed form as The People, the Sovereign. Therefore, just as medieval politics often revolved around maintenance of the body of the king, so too does Democracy:

"If it is true that law needs a body in order to be in force, and if one can speak, in this sense, of law's desire to have a body,' democracy responds to this desire by compelling law to assume the care of this body." (124-125)

Thus the indeterminate space in royal politics (egthe bedroom as the source of diplomacy) becomes universalized, but precisely as the moment that the private becomes public, so too does the public efface before the private. Thus humanitarian discourse is not concerned with citizens as much as humanity. The prescriptions of law in the nation-state increasingly decrease before efforts to improve efforts at human life. The confusion intensifies, for how can the Law, which deals with citizenship and the rights thereof, take aim at things explicitly outside of its juridical purview? Through the increasing normalization of the state of exception. Human Rights is the discursive move in this direction, in a way not unsimilar to a Constitution fixated with pirates and refugees. The logic creates a zone of constant confusion, for as nation-states continue to push non-citizens to the brink within their own societies (the smiley liberals welcoming refugees into camps, slums, and "overflow facilities" as the Biden regime has termed border jails) so too do humanitarians aid this effort through intensifying the crisis. The indeterminacy becomes the point; the bug is a feature:

"On the one hand, the nation-states become greatly concerned with natural life, discriminating within it between a so-to-speak authentic life and a life lacking every political value. (Nazi racism and eugenics are only comprehensible if they are brought back to this context.) On the other hand, the very rights of man that once made sense as the presupposition of the rights of the citizen are now progressively separated from and used outside the context of citizenship, for the sake of the supposed representation and protection of a bare-life that is more and more driven to the margins of the nation-states, ultimately to be rectified into a new national identity" (132-133)

On this point, Agamben has often been misunderstood to support a UN NGO liberal global state. Many who've cited Homo Sacer (or State of Exception) for their graduate work believed this amounted to a rejection of the racism in the War on Terror. It was quite mainstream for academics to rattle their sabers against Bush II's regime of rendition and torture. And so Agamben rejected this perversion, where a certain body (over which the state was sovereign) was exempted from protection. "Terrorist" became a zone of exception between the political Citizen and sacral Soldier. For a war zone was both a place of lawlessness and law, for its abnormality (a return to the state-of-nature) was itself included in the regulations of Law. Thus there are military tribunals, war crimes, etc. Yet this zone is outside the laws of nations proper, taking on certain elements of the sacred in their self-constitution. It is precisely at the moment of excepting, moving the human-citizen into the sacred-soldier, where the terrorist drops off. He never makes it into the next category and effectively becomes a Homo Sacer, killable, but neither murdered or executed (a sacrifice for Ares). True enough. 

But the focus primarily biological, not the cultural appendage. It is not a question of applying a biopolitical solution to a radicalized bigotry (the average liberal misstep), but radicalizing as a means of executing the biopolitical apparatus. NSDAP policies of eugenics, euthanasia, racial extermination (of Jews or Slavs) flowed not from some primeval German (or Christian) hatred of Jews. It's not race that drives biopolitics, but the opposite. Nazi geneticists were already quite clear that race, defined strictly in terms of genetics, was impossibly confused among the intermixing of peoples. Rather, policy derived not from politics but policing. It was necessity of preserving and sanitizing the body-politic (in the most literal sense) which drove these policies. It was about preservation of human bodies as such from contamination and contagion. Thus the Jews, whom Hitler considered lice (filth, not as Holocaust theologians imagine it, a perverse human sacrifice), were simply to be cleansed. The logic of biopolitics results in this determination of life, its quality and protection, which operated through racial miscegenation and cultural influence. It was, in the end, a police question for the common good.

Not grasping this point, moron academics were "shocked" at Agamben's consistent stand against Rona Reich. As apparent in the same kind of discourse, the Unvaccinated (through their actions and politics) had made themselves unfit for life. They were excepted, targeted as citizens and as human bodies, since these two had coincided without clarity. What were the rights of the citizen if these were increasing abstract rights of human biological subsistence? And what was human biological subsistence if it was not a phenomenon to defined legally? Thus Life Itself is now the question of sovereignty: "In modern biopolitics, sovereign is he who decides on the value or the non value of life as such" (142). Thus the need for a sovereign definition of life in medical jurisprudence. The use of technology to artificially sustain breathing, heart-pumping, and all bodily functions allows the body to survive brain death.  The "neomort" (defined as "warm, pulsating, and urinating") could be held as a source of future transplants. With a legal declaration that brain-death is death, a body could be sustained for future used. An undead body, killable without murder or execution, demarcates the pinnacle of this logic:

"in modern democracies it is possible to state in public what the Nazi biopolicians did not dare to say" (165)

The Unvaxxed, deprived of livelihood and dignity in Agamben's native Italy (fined, harassed, supervised, and increasingly limited to basics of nutritive life), were unworthy of Life. They were excepted, as a matter of policy and police, from the vagueries of Social Democracy. And this decision came from something quite similar to the Fuhrer principle which empowered Hitler to act. He had no constitutional power to act as he did, but as representative of The People, his word was a living law. In a state of emergency, where constitutional provisions allow a gaping hole of exceptional action (as seen in Canada, with Trudeau's use of emergency power to ruin the livelihoods of protestors), the legality of the law is in its very issuance. Exception becomes the norm, norming and normed simultaneously, a groundless being calling itself into existence. And spatialized, the application of this state of exception is The Camp. It is a zone that is neither under constitutional law nor outside of it, created by it to be outside of it. Despite the insane propaganda to glamorize, Australia's unvaccinated camps were an exercise of this logic. And yet this zone is not on the fringe of the city, or clear in any predictable pattern. As many across CANZUK and the North Atlantic experienced, the home can suddenly turn into a camp, with police showing up to make sure one was not threatening the body-politics. Bare life in the insufficiently healthy (proven through legal decree, printed on an ID card, shifting as to how many jabs made you sufficiently life-as-such) was condemned to containment. As Agamben concludes:

"The camp, which is now securely lodged within the city's interior, is the new biopolitical nomos of the planet" (176)

This is the supreme political crisis of our age, which has been building for over a century. The Corona madness has been its latest, and most widespread, manifestation. To be frank: if you thought it was simply a health measure, that those who refused were "selfish" or "ignorant", that this is not political but medical, you are absolutely, unequivocally, a blind fool.

However, there is still a hope on the horizon. But it is not in simply rolling things back:

"Just as the biopolitical body of the West cannot be simply given back to its natural life in the oikos, so it cannot be overcome in a passage to a new body - a technical body or a wholly political or glorious body - in which a different economy of pleasures and vital functions would once and for all resolve the interlacement of zoe and bios that seems to define the political destiny of the West. This biopolitical body that is bare life must itself instead be transformed into the site for the constitution and installation of a form of life that is wholly exhausted in bare life and a bios that is only its own Zoe." (188)

In other words, the hope is neither to retreat back into the past to restore a traditional way nor in a future development of man out of this problem. There is no possibility of return and there is no future which will save us from the new Nomos of the Earth. The only way out is in the here and now, in these vessels of clay, dependent and weak as they are. Though explicated in later works in a fare more substantial way, Agamben offers crumbs of the coming politics of the Messiah. He quotes a curious thought from Franz Kafka's notebook: 

"The Messiah will only come when he is no longer necessary, he will only come after his arrival, he will come not on the last day, but on the very last day" (57)

Derrida (and Baudrillard for that matter) interpreted this as the nihilistic non-event of an event (the resurrection, but into the bestial zombie, life too late, the happening of nothing). In contrast, Agamben argues Kafka saw the Messiah's an non-eventful event. No one will notice, no one will see, and yet the world will change in the twinkle of an eye. The Messiah will neither restore Eden nor bring about The Kingdom, but suspended between the two, Law is deactivated. The Kingdom of Heaven is nothing more than the reign of Justice without Law ("not in tables of stone, but in fleshy tables of heart"), where the Nomos is made inoperative through its fulfillment. In its place, in the place of the sovereign state, righteous love will reign as the thrones of men cast down their crowns before the Lamb's throne. Let there be hope against hope, and may Agamben's deeply Christian vision steel us for the times ahead. 

Let thy kingdom come

Wednesday, March 9, 2022

Millennial Reign: An Exposition of "The Kingdom and the Garden"

 In The Kingdom and the Garden, Agamben frames this question of form-of-life around the fracture of eschatological time. Though unfair to Augustine's thought (though not his legacy), it is this separation between past golden age (Paradise) and future hope (Kingdom) which bleeds out the Present of any potential hope. Defined by suspension, pulled apart by two poles which seek fulfillment without overlap, the result is regime which erases hope while it proclaims itself fulfilled. It is the paradox of perfect imperfection, that nothing more could be done and There Is No Alternative, which absorbs all efforts to bring an end to the apparatus. It's not for nothing that traditionalist "retvrn" movements (oriented to restoring Paradise) and progressive utopia movements (oriented towards the Kingdom) end up in a similar place. Not a few trads will simply baptize a current flavor of regime as much as Marxist agitators will do the same. It does nothing to end the colonization of the mind, where the technique of discourse is not used, but uses, as the future of the Revolution or the past of Golden Age rapidly dissipate.

The problem is Humanity. Broken either by a fall from glory or innate weakness, both haunt the political theology of Christianity as well as its secular successors. The result is dire:

"The expulsion from paradise acquires from this perspective its true meaning: man is the living being that can corrupt his nature, but not heal it, thus consigning himself to a history and to an economy of salvation, in which the divine grace dispensed by the Church through its sacraments becomes essential" (31)

And thus Agamben is able to earlier claim that "not paradise, but its loss constitutes the original mythologize of Western culture, a sort of originally traumatize that has profoundly marked Christian and modern culture, condemning to failure every search for happiness on earth" (15). Of course this seems to exclude secular utopians, but Marxism (drawing from its Hegelian roots) requires its own redemptive narrative. Man may not have had a dramatic fall, but Genesis is appropriated for that state of primitive communism which must pass away so as to reconstitute itself in the glory of human works. Man must individuated through successive regimes of private property, hitting its zenith in industrial capitalism (or perhaps late-financial capitalism), until the Dictatorship of the Proletariat can bring about true Communism. Yet that future seems as fleeting as the past. The result is often a form of Progressivism, where things are as best as they are and will continue to move towards the inevitable conflict. In all cases, a false-present (strung out between past and future) becomes the absolute. The Status Quo justifies itself out of its own failures.

But what's the problem? How did this fall come about? Is it something wrong with human nature? And if not, how did sin enter the equation? How did the fallenness become present prior to its existence? Agamben offers several different theological approaches, but sets his eyes on Augustine. For the bishop of Hippo, in supposing in-built lack through the missing donum superadditum, put the question in a bind. For how could, as Augustine writes in De Natura et Gratia, "that which belongs properly to God [that is, human nature - cal] put itself forward as deprived of the grace of God?" The crisis is clear:

"Augustine most have recourse to the doubling of human nature worked out by sin: the possibility that was available to man in the paradisiac condition was lost when his nature was corrupted and estranged itself from grace, which he needs, like a sick body, as a remedy" (33)

Thus there's two forms of human nature: the human nature as God made (perfect and immaculate as a form) and human nature as it is stained. But how can the former have any purchase if the latter is lived experience? Anselm attempted to resolve the Augustinian fracture in human nature, but only brought it into further crisis.  As he wrote in de conceptu virginali et de originali peccato: "That sin which is assumed in the origin itself is called 'original' and can also be called 'natural', not because it belongs to the essence of his nature, but because it is assumed together with it because of its corruption" (36). Yet this sin was entirely personal (an act of Adam properly). So how can this action cause an ontological change in Human nature? It was treated as original because of its natural effects, but how could this be? How did it have the power to effect a change the world in the blink of an eye?

As a detour: much of Agamben's analysis (reflecting his use of his sources) reveals the importance of covenantal theology. While not nearly important in much medieval theology, the covenantal relationship could elucidate terms and conditions that don't reflect questions of natures as much as relations. Thus, in Scripture, the question of God's presence is not a metaphysical one. It's not what it means to be, or not be, in the presence of God. But as is evident from the text, it's a relational question (as much as one says that "she is distant" when your spouse acts cold or disinterested; these are not metaphor, but perhaps the primary use of spatial language). However, this emphasis on covenant (to this extent) would require much revision to medieval metaphysical questions. Yet one may still receive the fruit of their efforts. For just as a rich sacramentology emerges out of the covenantal fidelity in the Reformed tradition (apart from the opus operatum of most transubstantion), so too does the relation (the form-of-life through Law & its perfection) offer an equally rich appreciation of original sin and nature. But I leave this off for now. 

But what if the problem is not so much a historical one, but a theoretical one. Agamben cites several church fathers, from Origen to Eriugena, that mark out the question of Paradise as a symbolic one. There was no literal wooded fatherland from which our ancestors departed in exile. Rather, it's a state of existence, it is human nature itself. Here Agamben quotes Eriugena's Periphyseon

"With the word 'paradise', divine scripture has expressed in a figurative way the human nature made in the image of God. The true plantation of God is this nature that he created in Eden in the image and likeness of himself [...]. The fertile land of this plantation was a potentially immortal body [...] And the water of this land capable of all forms was the sensitive faculty of an incorruptible body" (66)

In other words, Paradise is not a question of Past and the current state of human relations. Truly, if Paradise was restored, it was mankind's immortality in body and soul. And thus the glorious return is neither to be found in the past, or even the future, but in the present. It may a vision of what could be but never was. The telos toward which man strives is thus not supernatural at all, but nature itself!

"if the Garden is only human nature, then man has never entered into his nature or has always already exited from it. That man has not yet even entered into paradise, that what scripture narrates about sin and the fall should be understood as having happened outside paradise, this means that sin happened outside human nature, that human nature was never contaminated by it" (66-67)

This, for Agamben, represents a total rejection of the Augustinian tradition within Western metaphysics. Eruigena embraced Pelagius, not Augustine, in the valorization of nature and not its corruption through an internal split between the ideal nature in God's mind and the corrupted nature of lived historical experience. Therefore, Eruigena was not far from the later Spinoza. Sin was not in nature, but in deviation from nature in man's potential to not realize his nature. Nature is not stained or punished, but the human will which chooses to stay outside, or be exiled, from Eden. Thus Agamben juxtaposed two rival paradigms running through Western thought, from which I quote at length:

"In the Augustinian tradition, which wound up prevailing in the Latin Church, nature and sin are indissolubly linked and human nature is irrevocably split into an originally nature, now lost, and a natura lapsa. Paradise is, consequently, a real historical place, where man was placed by God, but from which he exited forever when sin contaminated his nature. [...]The only possibility of restoring in some measure the original nature, which is incurably corrupted, is consigned to a history and an economy of salvation - in which the Church works through the sacraments - and to another paradise, the heavenly one, which does not coincide with the first and is reserved only - in the future and never in the present - to the elect. The natura lapsa continues and will continue to exist in hell, where it eternally suffers its penalty.

In the second model, which is that of Eriugena, paradise - that is, human nature - is completely alien to sin and the history of the fall narrated by Genesis must be understood to have happened outside of it. There is not properly a history of salvation, because human nature is always already saved." (72-73)

Here, one can take exception with Agamben's way of framing things. Certainly, he is not wrong to assess a larger trajectory, especially as the concept of "grace" became an increasingly abstract (and somewhat spooky) metaphysical substance. I have limited experience with Medieval theology, and Agamben himself is not offering a recrudescent Renaissance sneer against the Scholastics. As clear in this work and others, Agamben draws quite a bit from Scotus and Scotist metaphysics. It would be better to frame this problem around what, in fact, is human nature. If human nature, as detailed in Scripture, is the Image of God, then this nature itself is departed when it ceases to do so. Thus, the Augustinian frame is not the problem, so much as what could become of it. The argument between Pelagius and Augustine was not nature vs grace, but the definition of these terms. If Augustine understood grace as union with Christ (which I think a stronger argument can be made, sans some slippage in his texts), than there's no problem. The return to Nature is the image of God. And this image is none other than Christ, revealed in the pages of the Gospels. 

Nevertheless, there is an Augustinian reification which takes place, where the eschatological urgency of Christian living formed the basis of a world-order. Christendom may have been a betrayal of this openness, the flattening of time between an ever-fleeting Past (whether of Paradise or the Apostles) and Future End (seemingly deferred indefinitely). The Augustinian Sixth Age did not have any particular parameters, and thus the Age of the Church mirrored, in someways, the End of History bleated throughout the Twentieth Century. But the Middle Ages (and the Spirit of God working through them) revolted from this confinement. Just as much as Islamisms, the truculent remains of the Communist Second World, and Christian Fundamentalists defied the 1990s as simply the End, so too did movements like the Spiritual Franciscans arise to stir up the mind. Whatever their errors or exaggerations, they reflected a revolt against this top-down, supranational, flattening. There Is No Alternative may be a secularized Sixth Age, but it's less a description than a proscription. It's an ideological spear thrust at the regime's enemies, not a recognition of what has come about:

"With the Augustinian neutralization of the thousand-year Kingdom, historiography eliminated from itself a deeply heterogenous element, which would have introduced into chronology an irreducible rupture" (146)

And Agamben draws upon no better Medieval critic of this mechanism of separation, flattening, and capture than Dante. As a White Ghibilline, a partisan against the Emperor but equally opposed to papal worldly gain, Dante saw in Human nature and in Human civilization the potential for that original, paradisiac, justice which was simultaneously most human and divine. Dante exalts human civilization, even the goodness of a pagan like Virgil. Yet he also recognizes the original corruption of the Fall, the breakaway from human nature. There is no contradiction, for it is precisely in God becoming a man to make satisfaction for man's sins that God exercised his authority to pardon. But in this, the final deed is done: human nature is open:

"the incarnation of Christ is perfectly sufficient for the cancellation of sin and his position with respect to the sacraments - which he never mentions in the Comedy, except with reference to the corruption of the Church - is instead comparable to that of those - whom Aquinas takes care to contradict - who affirm that 'there was no need for any sacraments after Christ came" (94)

Thus, for Dante (and the alternative Western tradition of sin and nature), the Incarnation unleashed a whole new mode of life. Paradise is possible in this world, as much as it is Human nature and that has been totally rectified through the Word taking flesh. His form-of-life is available, manifest through the Gospels, echoed through his disciples (canonically formed in the life/teaching of Ss. Paul, Peter, James, John, Jude, et al., but less authoritative in the lives of the saints).

Again, one can take exception with Agamben from a wider view of Christian tradition. Within the Reformed tradition especially, the sacraments are not so much "the medicine of immortality" or a need to trans-temporally revisit and reappropriate the meritorious sacrifice of Christ. Instead, it is a ritual incorporation of the life. To eat the Supper is not so much a return to the Cross, but a return to the Last Supper. It is a public memorial of the Christ (or, in Agamben's argument, restored/opened Human nature), and in partaking one is seated with Christ. Such is not a mere intellectual act, as if one must engage in a series of mental acts to gain the benefits of such. Rather, the potency of the symbol is in the logic of a ritual. By eating and drinking, you choose to live as God did, knowing the joy of divine friendship and mercy. The potency of this signification is in covenant, a constitutive speech act of promise, reward, and blessing. What makes the New Covenant eternally new is not that it is an appendage, upgrade, or sequel to the "Old Covenant", but that is makes the entirety of Israel inoperative. The fulfillment is on both sides, it is something that one simply appears into, as in media res, not something one begins. It is like a marriage which no longer stands under the threat of sanction, of divorce or separation. Rather, it's as if one simply appears amidst the Marriage of the Lamb. One may step out (or be thrown out), but the wedding vows are already said and done. And like a marriage, reflecting ritual and not substance-chemical logic, it is not a thing, but a relation. The ceremony is not something that has material properties or a temporal quality (e.g. a battery being charged, and examinable as having 73% capacity). Thus, Dante may be said (tongue-in-cheek) to be a Protestant avant la lettre, or at least offering an alternative vision that some (not all!) Reformers embraced.

However, the point is not to make Agamben (or even Dante, really) a proto-Protestant. For many of the Reformers reinstantiated the problem, which Agamben clarified once again:

"The earthly paradise - as we have seen - is the place where theologians pose the problem of human nature. And this happens by capturing human nature in apparatus that condemns every attempt to define it to a split. This split is that between nature and grace. We are not dealing with a simple opposition: the two terms in reality form a system, within which they presuppose one another and constantly refer to each other in a relationship of inseparable division" (107)

It is precisely in that Human cannot return to Paradise, yet awaits it transfigured reappearance in the future Kingdom, that allows this ideological machine to function. Grace is necessary for a restored Human nature, but does that then mean Human nature is grace itself? Certainly not, but the idealized Human nature then is held apart from the historical and experienced Human nature, fallen nature, which man labors under. And how can this nature be restored? Through grace, confected through the offices and rites of the Church. It's almost as if life itself was theorized in relation to the undead, that Humanity came about as a categorical distinction in relation to a primordial quasi-other (not unlike the schematic paradigm of control in Attack on Titan). Agamben's example is more pedestrian (though more biblical):

"Nature is now defined by the non-nature that it has lost, just as the body that has been made nude is defined by the clothes of which it has been stripped. Nature and grace, nudity and clothes together constitute a singular apparatus, whose elements seem autonomous and separable and yet, at least insofar as  it concerns nature, do not remain unchanged after their separation. This means that nature - exactly like simple nudity - is, in reality, inaccessible: there is only its being made nude, only corrupt nature exists" (114-115)

And it's precisely this corrupted nature which is captured in the apparatus, distinguished out as the primary focus of ecclesiastical life. Pure Nature may not exist (in Thomas it almost operates as a theoretical supposition, grace-like, to frame discussions of nature), but it is necessary in order to extract out corrupt nature which must be dealt with. This then justifies a regime which draws its raison d'être from the problem it poses. Agamben is not so much interested in some state of rebellion from Mother Church, as many Leftist mental insects could hear in this account. Rather, it's in the secularization of this paradigm, where defections in Human nature (competition, violence, jealousy, conservative disposition to place and people, etc) need exposition and uprooting. The State (in its martial Paternal or its nutritive Maternal visage) replaces the Church as arbiter and manager of this apparatus, where man is corralled to participate of its goods and services in order to begin the process of correction for Human nature. But this perfection is temporally dislocated and non-existent. Thus, the regime of distilling grace into commodity form is not so much the production of salvation, but damnation:

"The distinctions between 'animal body' and 'spiritual body' and between naturalia and gratuita do nothing by codify this insufficiency, just as that between natura integra and natura corrupta attests is irremediable permanence in human nature. The natura integra is something from which it suffices to subtract its clothing of grace for it to exhibit its faulty nudity, and sin is nothing but the operator of a defectiveness that was inscribed in it from the beginning. The earthly paradise, from which man, for this reason, could only be expelled, is not a cipher of human nature's perfection, so much as, instead, its constitutive lack" (125)

Again, this parallels the modern fracture of the human body between its civilized (clothed) form and its bare (naked) exposure. Social Democracy, in its liberal exaltation of tolerance, claims no power for the State over its broad multi-cultural, socially plural, form (though the Popperian "intolerance of intolerance" allows it to banish its ideological boogeymen). Everyone is allowed to live as they deign. However, the State does claim authority over material reality, the regulation and distribution of goods and services, the protection and jurisdiction over corporeal life. Thus, sexuality and gender fluidity are outside the bounds of restriction, yet highly police measures swoop down to prevent the spread of a pandemic. This fracture is what results in the Camp, because it is the exaggeration of these defects that define life in the current state of Mass Democracy. The logic of the Nazi camp was not civilizational, but biological; it was hygiene, not immorality. It was the full unrolling of nationalist logic over The People as a single organism. The nature of people - eating, drinking, celebrating, loving - is sublimated, as bare life becomes the very justification to destroy (defective) Human nature in the name of preserving it.

However, as clear above, there's an alternative to this apparatus, and its operative powers: the Messianic. As clear in The Time that Remains (requiring its own review), Christ does not introduce a successor regime, but a truly new reality here-and-now. He does so through destroying the apparatus through its inoperativity. Such happens, primarily, through the Millennial Reign. Agamben cites Irenaeus' far more sanguine defense of Human nature's restoration in time:

"In Irenaeus' theology of the Kingdom, temporal beatitude on earth must precede eternal beatitude, because in it what is at stake is the restoration of human nature to its original integrity" (139)

To clarify: Agamben is not offering a valorization of "whatever is, is" or "let it all hangout" philosophy of the present. Such abandons the Human vocation of thought, reflection, and joy for dumb bestial apathy and comfort. Rather, Humanity flourishes, is happy (in that classical sense), when it can exercise the full potential of its Nature. And this is only done when its perfection in released in the now-time that the Christ effects. It is not a quantitative transformation (a new kind of time, one more experience, one more stage), but qualitative. We transform in the twinkle of an eye because the relation of all things transforms. The effective power of the Resurrection is not its juxtaposition, as one pole, from the parousia, for which mankind still awaits. Thus Agamben hand waives the entire "delay" problem that modern theologians and biblical scholars have fixated upon. There may indeed be an end (Agamben is uninterested, if not agnostic, about it), a final day of reckoning, but it is not the hope upon which Human nature depends. Rather, the fullness of Resurrected life, the Power of the Kingdom and the Glory, breaks into Now. 

Agamben concludes with a summarization of the problem and the way out:

"the Garden and the Kingdom result from the split of one sole experience of the present and that in the present they can therefore be rejoined. The happiness of human being on earth is stretched between these polar extremes. And human nature is not a pre-existent and imperfect reality, which must be inscribed through grace into an economy of salvation, but it is what always appears here and now in the coincidence - that is, in the falling together, of paradise and Kingdom. Only the Kingdom gives access to the Garden, but only the Garden renders the Kingdom thinkable. Or rather: we grasp human nature historical only through a politics, but this latter, in its turn, has no content other than paradise - which is to say, in Dante's words, 'the beatitude of this life'." (152)

To iterate, the above has nothing to do with questions of historicity. Though Agamben may think me bone-headed, there's no reason to deny a historical Eden or a historical New Jerusalem. Nevertheless, the metaphysical point remains distinct. For it is precisely Eden and Jerusalem which must correspond to form the very basis of a lived life today. We cannot understand the full unveiling of the joys and freedom of Human nature without Christ and His Kingdom (the blessed and free life, so arranged as the coming politics). Yet simultaneously, it's only an attempt to recognize Human nature as such that opens our eyes to see its fullness in the flesh. Politics and virtue, sociality and anthropology, must go together to form the very basis of theology. Christian is the recognition of humanity, not its upgrade. It is not a new identity, or potentiality, superadded to otherwise defective Human nature. This permitted the destruction of infidels in the past, the same way the secular social-democratic homo economicus allows a justification for the eradication (far more ruthless than anything from church history) of those who are outside of this scope.

The Kingdom of God is within you.

Tuesday, March 8, 2022

The Gospel of Bio-Graphia: Form-of-Life and an Exposition of "The Highest Poverty"

The key to Agamben Homo Sacer series, the first major exposition of the flicker of light appearing in other books in the series, appears in The Highest Poverty. Building on the genealogy of the Nightmare, the Apparatus of the Camp which Social Democracy reproduces endlessly, the way out appears at the very same time. And as modernity only intensifies and immanentizes the Kingdom of Darkness, such existed for centuries at lesser forms of intensity, the building blocks one can discover in the palimpsest of Babel. But there is hope. For just as the first major appearance of Babel in the High Middle Ages darkened the skies, so too did salvation appear at the same time. The Highest Poverty holds these two in juxtaposition as Agamben sketches out both the doom and hope of our contemporary times.

In the preface, Agamben lays out the hope of his project. It is to examine the form-of-life, where life constitutes a rule, rather than its sinister alternative, where a rule constitutes the life. The former is freedom, the latter slavery. But it is in the fracture, and dialectical relationship, between "rule" and "life" which determines the redemption or damnation of humanity. Thus the life of Francis of Assisi, and his band of Little Brothers/Sisters, unveils the possibility of the new, and coming, politics. Thus, as Agamben hopes:

"the most precious legacy of Franciscanism, to which the West must return ever anew to contend with it as its undeferrable task: ow to think a form-of-life, a human life entirely removed from the grasp of the law and a use of bodies and of the world that would never be substantiated into an appropriation. That is to say again: to think life as that which is never given as property but only as a common use." (xiii)

It is in Francis that life is liberated to be lived, rather than to be divorced, divided, and sequester for particular appropriations set apart from it itself. The Franciscan monastic way thus represents a very stark departure with most of the norms of Western monasticism. The source of Western monasticism begins among the cenobitic communities, places which emphasize "common-life" of the monks. These neither reflect the ethical communities of the schools, which Foucault analyzed. Nor are they juridical communities of law and penalty. Rather these are the dominions of the Rule, an holistic and totalized view of life which absorbs all without remainder (though this, in itself, is always strained against in that which remains unregulated). This reality is manifest primarily in the use of "the hours" of monastic living. It was in the cenobitic monastery where the use of the clock first took primacy. The clock becomes necessary as an artificial nature, because the otherwise given forms of time (the movements of the sun) are not sufficient for the whole embrace of life. This flowed from a particular interpretation of the Apostolic injunction to pray ceaselessly:

The novelty of cenoby is that, by taking literally the Pauline prescription of unceasing prayer (adialeiptos proseuchesthe; 1 Thess. 5:17) it transforms the whole life into an Office by way of temporal scansion. (22)

The cenobitic project is a "sanctification of life by means of time" (24) which subjects the body, far before the Kantian philosophic revolution, to a universalized sense of temporality. Clock time regulated not only bodily movements, but every interior dialog and thought, counted indefinitely through the tick-tock of the eternal clock. This takes places through that ceaseless prayer, translated into meditatio. The mind always called to focus, and under guilt for failure to sustain this vocation, operates as a never-ending process of self-mechanization as the rule comes to life in The Monk (a category conforming all to the rule increasingly without remainder, ruthlessly snuffing out distinction). It is totalitarian:

"Meditation, which can accompany any activity, is in this sense perhaps the apparatus that permits the accomplishment of the totalitarian demands of the monastic institution. It is decisive, however, that the rule enters intros way into a zone of undecidability and with respect to life. A norm that does not refer to single acts and events, but to the entire existence of an individual, to his forma vivendi, is no longer easily recognizable as a law, just as a life that is founded in its totality in the form of a rule is no longer truly a life"  (26)

This disposition increasingly threatens to create an unending crisis of dehumanization. For the mind struggles endlessly to conform to this rule and it is threatened with its own collapse. The monk was constantly under threat from the vice of acedia, the sloth which would blind the monk's eyes from the ability to read. Yawning, eyes glazed, sleepy, leafing through pages without intent, the monk's mind is threatened with failure. Yet the alternative vision, gestured at, is in St Antony. For when a fellow monk asks Antony how he can do without books, he responds that Nature itself is his book. Summarized: "The perfect life coincides with the legibility of the world, sin with the impossibility of reading (with its becoming illegible)" (27). Perfecting the technique of the rule-as-life results in the shattering of the mind, the full reign of acedia. It's not hard to see how this applies, from Monk to Consumer, to the proliferation of boredom. One keeps consuming, yet is always threatened with the exhaustion which will bar him from the paradise of the next hot take, the next experience, etc. You simply become the node within a world prison-system, mindlessly reproducing something which does not exist without act.

It's in this sense where the very attempt at fleeing the world, which the (evil) monk attempts ends up, in the very act, reproducing the world. The monastic rule is, itself, a flight from the world. But in so doing it becomes a liturgy:

"the theme of the flight from the world, so constitutive of monasticism, is united with the exercise of an ecclesial practice in which the fugitive appears as a true minister of the community: 'the minister of God's holy altar is one who is in flight from his own' [...] And it is on this basis that monastic exile from the world could be conceived as the foundation of a new community and a new public sphere" (50). 

Though beyond the immediate scope of Agamben's analysis, it's in this way that esoteric cults often become themselves appendages of the world in which they exist. Why? Because the flight itself is a fantastical rendering of a world that is a dialectical negation of the very same. Thus, an example Agamben returns to a few times, de Sade's Silling imitates the mechanical rigor of the monastery, even as it is an experiment in total rejection of the Ancien Regime's moral framework. Thus, the gnostic cult reflected the worldly organization of guilds and colleges in city life, as much as a modern cults engage in the production and sale of cheap reproduced goods and live like an NGO. Therefore the cancer, rather than stultified or reversed, only expands into more and more dimensions of life. It's for this reason that the Reformation casts a dark shadow, as it is the monastic liturgy escaping into the entirety of society:

"If the liturgy is totally transformed into life, then the fundamental principle of opus operates - which already, beginning with Augustine, sanctioned the indifference of the priest's moral qualities with regard to the efficacy of his office -cannot hold. While the unworthy priest remans in any case a priest, and the sacramental acts he carries out do not lose their validity, an unworthy monk is simply not a monk

[...]

From this perspective, the Protestant Reformation can be seen legitimately as the implacable claim, promoted by Luther (an Augustinian monk), of the monastic liturgy against the Church liturgy. And it is not an accident if from the strictly liturgical point of view, it is defined by the preeminence of prayer, reading, and psalmody (forms proper to the monastic liturgy) and the minimization of the eucharistic and sacramental Office." (84)

One can fault Agamben painting with a broad brush, for certainly Luther (precisely as an Augustinian!) found the liturgy of the Church to be preeminent. However, it is still certainly the case that Luther's reforming program sought to bring the monastery into the village/city. Luther, and his loyal friends, may have fought to maintain this integration, the forces of reform often pushed for this collapse of the one into the other. It is only from the point of view of history and the confessions that Carlstadt or Muntzer can be pushed out of the "Lutheran" camp, but at the moment they were deviant comrades. The efforts of Martin Bucer's de regno Christi sought to transform Edward Tudor's England into the perfect monastic republic. Geneva, in which John Knox saw the finest school of Christ since the Apostles, reflected this applied vision. Though Calvin was far more irenic and moderate than many of his disciples (and later reputation) revealed, it was his struggles with Geneva's city council that revealed this monasticization. And when these efforts failed, such as the defeat of both the radical puritans and covenanters by the end of the British War of Three Kingdoms, they only birthed different forms of the same thing. Pietism, Moravianism, Methodism, and Revivalism, all of these referred to the creation of new monastic regimens. And still Roman Catholic monastic orders continued, inspiring the secular socialism of Fourier and Saint Simon.

The point is that the Augustinian system (as Agamben understands it) which birthed the work-worked sacrament (devoid of human person), was replicated in increasing intensity outside of it. Thus, as Weber described in the "worldly asceticism" of Calvinism (though misidentifying the bulk of the Reformed tradition with Baxterian post-puritanism): every aspect of life took on importance before God, but regulated before some pattern (rule) of life. Far beyond Sabbath day prohibitions and daily opportunities for worship (like the monastery), expectations of conversion and renewal were forms for framing (and thus creating) the inner life. And as happens among contemporary evangelicals, often the conformity of life into a rule creates the manic stress (and fear) of insufficient conversion. For the technique of the rule, an apparatus which exists only through its use, colonizes the mind. Thus one becomes a divine machine, turning the image of God into an idol of God.

The alternative of a lifeless rule assuming life is a life forming itself as a rule. This Agamben develops from Wittgenstein's notion of "form-of-life". It is worth quoting in bulk:

"Starting with Wittgenstein, contemporary thought and more recently philosophers of law have sought to define a peculiar type of norms, the norms called constitutive, which do not prescribe a certain act or regulate a preexisting state of things, but themselves bring into being the action or state of things. The examples Wittgenstein uses are chess pieces, which do not exist before the game, but are constituted by the rules of the game [...] It is obvious that the execution of a rule of this type, which does not limit itself to prescribing to an agent a certain conduct but produces this conduct, becomes extremely problematic [I blame a degenerate academic translator, like Adam Kotsko, for choosing this phrase for Agamben's Italian].

Paraphrasing the scholastic saying forma dat esse rei ("form gives being to the thing"), one could state here that norma dat esse rei ("norm gives being to the thing"; Conte, p. 526). A form of life would thus be the collection of constitutive rules that define it. But can one say in this sense that the monk, like the pawn in chess, is defined by the sum of prescriptions according to which he lives? Could one not rather say with greater truth exactly the opposite, that it is the monk's form of life that creates his rules? Perhaps both theses are true, on the condition that we specify that rules and life enter here into a zone of indifference, in which - as there are no longer the very possibility of distinguishing them - they allow a third thing to appear, which the Franciscans, albeit without succeeding in defining it with precision, will call 'use,' as we will see.

In reality, as Wittgenstein seems to suggest, the very idea of a constitutive rule implies that the common representation according to which the problem of the rule would consist simply in the application of a general principle to an individual case - that is, according to the Kantian model of determinate judgement, in a merely logical operation - is neutralized. The cenobitic project, by shifting the ethical problem from the level of the relation between norm and action to that of form of life, seems to call into question the very dichotomy of rule and life, universal and particular, necessity and liberty, through which we are used to comprehending ethics." (71-72)

Thus, precisely at the same time that a monk is made as such by the rule, it is also true that the monk living his own life will create a very rule (a form-of-life) out of the whole. In living his life as it is, he constitutes a rule out of the plethora of movements. And if a life becomes a rule, at the same time that a rule becomes a life, the threshold of change opens up the possibility of nullification. For at the same time that a rule seeks to alter one's behavior, one can simply frame a rule out of one's behavior. Or, in the terms of chess, is it the rule of the pawn's motions that make a pawn a pawn, or is the action of this piece what constitutes it as a pawn. This space of indeterminacy (ie does the movement make the piece or the piece make the movement?), which allows unleashes true freedom of self-awareness, that blurring of freedom and necessity Agamben highlights. And it was the life of St Francis, and the order it inspired, which saw the appearance of this, ultimately Messianic, nullification of the apparatus which would subject man to the fiction of his hands. Monasticism may reproduce the crisis of the problem, but it's also the very means of resolution:

"It goes without saying that from its origins monasticism was inseparable from a certain way of life. But the problem in cenoby and hermitage was not life as such so much as the ways, norms, and techniques by means of which one succeeded in regulating it in all it's aspects. To use the terminology of a Cistercian text, the life of the monk was traditionally conceived as 'penitential,' while now it [among the early Franciscans] reclaims its 'apostolic' character, which is to say 'angelic' and 'perfect' character [...] It is just as obvious that a form of life practiced with rigor by a group of individuals will necessarily have consequences on the doctrinal level, which can bring forth - as they in fact did bring forth - clashes and disagreements with the Church hierarchy. But it is precisely on these disagreements that the attention of historians has mainly been focused, leaving in shadows the fact that perhaps for the first time, what was in question in the movements was not the rule, but the life, not the ability to profess this or that article of faith, but the ability to live in a certain way, to practice joyfully and openly a certain form of life" (92-93)

The future conflicts of Franciscans with the hierarchy, which plenty of historians have documented, most importantly reflect this nullification of the rule, not this or that doctrinal position. The Franciscan monk, similarly to anchoritic bio-graphs of St Antony, had the world entirely intelligibly open before it as the life lived, with all its twitches and ticks, was itself the very form of the monk. Hence why St Francis left behind no rule, but only the fabric of his life recorded among his disciples to examine and draw out of. The Apostles did not leave behind the Didache (an apocryphal text, though one perhaps logical enough in its formulation) but Gospels, historical biography. For it is imitation of Christ (or St Paul or St Francis as they imitate Christ) that a holy and joyful life lay open, even in a state of destitution, subjection, and hardship. Count all things as joy, says the Apostle, and it is a counsel that Francis manifests in his own mission. Thus the very life of Christ, in all its potency and pluriformity, was the law of the monk. As pseudepigrapha attributed to St Basil laid out (translated by a Spiritual Franciscan): "Every action... and every word [pasa praxis...kai pas logos] of our Savior Jesus Christ [...] is a rule [kanon] of piety and virtue"(99). Thus the true alternative is to find your life sanctified, not in changing your life according to a sacred form: 

"It is not a matter so much of applying a form (or norm) to life, but of living according to that form, that is of a life that, in its sequence, makes itself that very form, coincides" (99)

Therefore the tertium quid of biography (a life, a rule, and neither) opens the possibility of true change. Agamben is not an apologist for the silence of the animals, the dropping down of humanity among the beasts. Rather man has the potential, as a priest of creation, to lift up all creatures and humanizes them. It is in thought, that act and potential, where the otherness between lives is recognized and respected. For as much as Francis follows Christ, and identifies with him in his miracles and teachings, he is nevertheless Francis. And yet the Francis he is, his form-of-life, stands apart from the life he imitates. And it is this inappropriable space, one through love that has no tension, where the saint finds a life apart, holy and joyful, that is him without any claim. For no one can own this identity, not even the one living it. Francis is not a possessive role or office, it is merely a name. And as Christ grew out of him many branches, little Christs (lit. Christians), so too did Francis bud little Francises, Franciscans, who continue this unending branching. And in that there is distinction in unity, manifest in the relations between these vines, branches, and twigs, yet inseparable. The problem is not a metaphysical sublation, which only will provoke further dialectical resolutions until there is only the one. Rather it is a logical, at most, process of distinction to see the revelation of the relation, an agent and patient simultaneously and not at all, a branch on the tree of Christ. It is thus this disjunctive, rather than subjunctive, that allows for true unity through the difference of love:

"Franciscanism represents the moment when the tension between forma vitae and officium is released, not because life is absorbed into liturgy [hell on earth], but on the contrary, because life and Divine Office reach their maximum disjunction. In Francis, there cannot be any claim of meritum vitae against ordo as in the religious movements contemporary with him, nor as in the origins of monasticism, a transformation of life into liturgy and incessant prayer, because the life of the Friars Minor is not defined by officium but solely by poverty" (119)

Thus Francis was truly radical in his reform movement. The purpose of the Friars Minor was not to offer a rival or sect within the Church to repair it on the same terms. A Franciscan is not an office, but a form-of-life. Thus the habit which vests the brother is not a particular role (as if a chess-piece could be reforged in the image of a pawn), but in action. A pawn is a pawn because he moves like a pawn, not because he looks like a pawn. Thus the Franciscan operates outside the norms of the Church, without seeking to overthrow or replace them. As Francis' Testament puts it: "the clergy say the Office like other clergy, and the lay brothers say the Our Father" (119). And this question of non-appropriated action (one does not own this office, but simply lives it) that applied to the Franciscan vow of poverty. Francis did not dispute private property (to communalize it, as many revolutionaries and utopians advanced), but deactivated it. For the form-of-life of Francis and his early disciples was:

"that life which maintains itself in relation, not only to things, but even to itself in the mode of inappropriability and of the refusal of the very idea of a will of one's own" (140)

Thus Agamben concludes this work:

"But what is a life outside the law, if it is defined as that form of life which makes use of things without ever appropriating them? And what is use, if one ceases to define it solely negatively with respect to ownership

[...]

How can use - that is, a relation to the world insofar as it is inappropriable - be translated into an ethos and a form of life? And what ontology and which ethics would correspond to a life that, in use, is constituted as inseperably from its form?" (144)

It is the biography, as a genre of text, that highlights this tension. For it is the revelation of an other life which one takes up as one's own, yet without appropriation. It does not belong to you, yet you use it anyway. It becomes a form, yet not through an apparatus such as "will", which shifts you from the formless into the formed. Rather use opens up the meaning that had been there all along. It is the revelation of who you always were ("born, not of blood, nor of the will of the flesh, nor of the will of man, but of God") interrupting in media res. Hence the emphasis in much of orthodox Christianity: you do not chose to be a Christian, you not decide for Christ, you simply erupt, like a butterfly out a cocoon, from the cacophony of one's life. The intelligibility of nature bursts before you, as history (as much as anything else) becomes a book before your eyes, not meaningless scribbles. The form-of-life is not a means to an end, but deactivates all ends as the telos bursts upon the scene. As St Paul would put it: "for you are dead, and your life is hid with Christ in God".

To conclude, this form-of-life is not simply the basis of a new ethics or politics, but these are themselves emergent out of a true eschatology. It is only in the hic et nunc that the joy and holy life of Christ will appear. And it is this messianic rupture, not to reinstantiate a new law, but its perfection through inoperativity, which will free us. To live is Christ, to die is gain.