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!