Friday, May 20, 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Tuesday, May 17, 2022

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Friday, May 6, 2022

Mercy Triumphs: Crime, Guilt and Judgement's End in Agamben's "Karman"

 "How can a human being be guilty?" Kafka's question, manifest in the brutalizing bureaucratic nightmare of The Trial, is not an obvious one. Many may simply assume guilt emerges instantaneously from a moral action (act/action emerges from Latin actio, a court-proceeding), but even this supposition makes little sense. What makes an action moral? And where does this guilt emerge from? Many commentators will offer superficial distinctions between guilt and shame, where the former is internal/personal against the external/social. But again, what is the feeling of guilt? How am *I* guilty? The reality of guilt emerges from an accusation (the original meaning of "cause" [causa]), but where does this accusation come from? In the basic sense, the question of accusation and guilt comes from the court-room. There is no such thing as intrinsic guilt, it is imputed. And the question of imputation emerges from an accusation, where one (a singularity constituted through law) is charged. And what is proof of guilt? It is not only the judgement, but its subsequent punishment, which then gives it significance. For what would a judgement be without punishment? What is law without accusation? 

Of course, the question of an internal court - the feeling of guilt before a moral law - depends upon theology. Before the final judgement, God stands as judge before mankind to determine guilt or innocence, whether they had obeyed the law or had broken it as sinners (the primary significance of "sin" as "missing the mark" or not obeying the totality of the law). But what, exactly, makes a man guilty of breaking a law? How can punishment be just? Free-will becomes an important apparatus to sort innocence and guilt, the choice to break the Law or uphold it. Thus the gap - between guilt and law, action and actor, judgement and punishment - is held together through the will. The justification for the violence the law unleashes is because one freely chose to act in such and such a way. This claim becomes a kind of comfort for a lack of divine action. God could not stop a school shooter because prayer had been banned from school. Free-will is why a someone receives punishment for an act. Yet, as many laws recognized - whether ancient Torah or contemporary American jurisprudence - a crime may be ascribed without will, where harm is ascribed to an accidental action. Free-will is not necessary to explain the violence of the law, and thus the conjunction between person and act still remains.

Yet nevertheless, the punishment is meted out. The truest expression is in the description of penalty as a "sanction". Etymologically related to sacred and sanctuary, the sanction operates in a double-move. On the one hand, the sanction puts the guilty outside the protection of the law. On the other hand, this places the guilty under the violence of the law, an exception - a capturing of what's outside on the inside. It is precisely this moment that defines the modern view of law that has incorporated all life and established the endless trial of Josef K:

"The sanction, which was initially nothing other than the immediate and unmotivated consequence of a certain action, now becomes the apparatus that founds, on the one hand, the 'holiness' of the law and, on the other, drives the behaviors that transgress its command outside itself as faults and crimes. In the very action in which the law is sanctioned as inviolable, it opens the space of legality, which is to say, of the juridical order in which it is  in force. Thus, the process begins that, by means of a long series of infamous and glorious episodes, will lead to the sanctification of the law that will conclude in the modern age when Kant - perhaps for the last time in the history of the West - will make the legal imperative the summit of human spiritual life" (19)

It is for this reason that law has become all-consuming and violence. Rather than law recognizing phenomena already in existence, law becomes increasingly important to determine all events. Litigiousness become important to describe the varieties of minorities which receive protections, receiving this existence in their juridical encodement, and may use the court to unleash the law's violence against violators. The law becomes the supreme form of morality, as the question of "guilt" continues to haunt Westerners even as God has ceased. Instead, history or fictitious future generations have become a secular final judgement. Ethics is entirely swallowed up beneath this supposed law court, and thus guilt is always already about the corner. The free-will only intensifies the guilt. And it is precisely the sanction, the applied punishment assigned to the guilty, which sanctifies the law. Punishment must exist if justice is to reign. Violence has swallowed up justice, where the law must strike if it is to realize its purpose. The law's supremacy and its holiness.

To effect these punishments, to be brought to the court-room, an accusation must summon the accused. Within the Bible, The Accuser (Satan) is the shadowy spirit that points his finger at the People of God for their sins. This unmasks a dual role that haunts certain aspects of Christian theology. Satan is an evil figure who harasses the People of God, an enemy of the Lord's purposes in Israel. But at the same time, it is in the form of an accusation that law-breakers receive sanction, and thus Satan is God's means to punish his wayward creation. Satan is in someway integral to the task of divine judgement. While the imagery of satan has faded for many in the West, Karma has replaced it. Derivated from the Indo-Aryan world karman meaning simply "action", Karma is in effect the interrelation of all actions in a series of cause and effect. Every moral action metaphysically summons a moral judgement, transmuting an assignable human action into a crime (crimen in Latin originally meant action prior to its juridicization). Thus every action is in potential a crime, sanctioned before the law and requiring due punishment. While the specifics of Hindu metaphysics remain external to Western civilization, this core interrelation defines the relationship of cause and effect. It is not because Karma is Oriental mystique, but precisely the opposite, tapping into the core of Western (understood in its broader Indo-Aryan origins) metaphysics. The core of reality is an endless judgement, where karma links together agent and action, crime and punishment in a never-ending wheel. Whether it is the Hindu wheel of Samsara or the eternal punishment of Hell, both have received a moralistic designation where a negative infinity of the law's violence becomes permanent.

The apparatus of the will makes this situation even more intolerable. It is precisely in the ability to choose that action remains a permanent condition of Human nature. As long as Humanity possesses a free-will, pertaining to nature, it has the potential to sin. Human nature becomes fundamentally culpable in itself, a guilt nature that belongs to every single person who can stand before Final Judgement. Christian theologians had struggled to understand, in what way, Human nature could remain in tact, yet misses of this nature become possible. The free-will was the potential for man to go astray. While some Christian theologians, like Maximus, distinguish a hypostatized accident of this will (the gnomic will; the decision, and thus possible indecision, in carrying out an action from its potential), this has been completely swallowed up in modernity. Potentiality has increasingly been identified with actuality, and the will becomes the apparatus to continually convert. If God, as in classical metaphysics, is actus purus, entirely actualized, modernity has meant drive towards a self-divinization. It's no longer the case that man may exist in potential, but must actualize all potentials. Human rights discourse has reframed around mere potentiality (the king's prerogative) to act towards a demand that all potentialities be realized. Modern man must be fully actualized and the will, like a task-master, drives on this process. The anthropological novum has reached a critical level: one must be or not, but one must will to be. The law becomes the tool of the will to self-divinize. The man-god is one who wills, where all ethics is the morality, the demand of the law to act. Such would make Earth into Hell.

It's from this vantage that Agamben seeks to recover an alternative tradition that recognized these fundamental caesurae within metaphysics. If the Law operates as a conjunction between Justice and Violence, what is to prevent this conjunction from collapsing into itself, where Justice is swallowed up in Violence? What is to stop the Law from becoming a killing machine, eradicating the guilty, which in short becomes all Humanity? If the above is so far a tragedy - this falling together of events into anarchy - then the only thing that can save us is comedy.

This ambiguity is explored in a midrash Treatise on Satan, which sees God's final judgement against his accuser. However, how can God accuse the accuser? It's here Satan offers a damning retort: "You say to me: Vanish from the world! Yet I resemble you because I am associated with you: you created the heavens and the earth, and I created hell" (8) If God damns Satan it is precisely because the Creator of Heaven and Earth has drawn upon the infernal powers of the Accuser, involving a self-destruction. If Judgement is Judged, if Satan and Law reach a climactic conclusion, there must emerge a hidden God, the God beyond God.

The comedy of history - an unveiling of its mystery (a revelation of the sacred drama, an original meaning of mysterion) - is thus the inoperativity of the court-room. Justice and Violence meet at a dialectical stand-still, separated and incapable of interrelation, where guilt and punishment ceases. In Hindu cosmology, it is enlightenment that produces nirvana and ends the wheel of samsara. Nirvana is not so much an end to being, but ceasing the legal machine which constitutes agents to assign guilt. It is a vision of life after judgement, the world of forgiveness. It is this vision, in its totality, that Christ crucified enacted in history. It is the moment of God under God's own judgement, God handed over to Satan, that the radical disjuncture that allows the Law to function, this gap between Violence and Justice, is made available. As St. Paul put it: the charges of the Law were nailed to the cross (Gal. 2:14). This resulted not in the destruction of the Law, but it's inoperativity. The Law ceased to judge, and now can be the basis for a living justice, an ethics freed from the assignment of guilt. The internal court is shut down permanently. Instead, through the forgiveness of sins, the comedy of life emerges:

"Praxis - human life - is not a trial (an actio), but rather a mysterion in the theatrical sense of the term, made of gestures and words.

To every human being a secret has been consigned, and the life of each one is the mystery that puts this arcane element - which is not undone with time, but becomes ever more dense - onstage, until it is ultimately displayed for what it is: a pure gesture, and as such - to the extent that it manages to remain a mystery and not inscribe itself in the apparatus of means and ends - unjudgable." (83)

Or, as St. James wrote: Mercy triumphs over Judgment.

Wednesday, May 4, 2022

The War of Leviathan and Behemoth: Civil War, Hobbes, and Messianic Politics in an Exposition of Giorgio Agamben's "Stasis"

 The current state of global politics is "civil war", where a state of war has all but ceased to exist within global conflicts. The United States has not had a legal war since World War Two, with every subsequent action as a policing. The Korean War was a Western driven civil war between Koreans. Americans entered into the Vietnam War to sustain a civil war between Vietnamese. Intervention in a range of conflicts - from Nicaragua to Yugoslavia - involved an intervention on the side of one faction within a state of internal civil war. Even wars like the Gulf War, Afghanistan and Gulf War II, which ostensibly were wars between states, were never considered as such. America did not enter into a state of war, but claimed the need to police an internal dispute within the global household of nation-states. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, and a "second world" of politically unified states, the United States emerged as a hyper-power over the affairs of all nations. With the "end of history" and the cessation of all political questions, the future of conflict was a household activity, an economic affair.  Thus Saddam's crime was not a dispute between the United States and Iraq, over some territorial claim or abuse of citizens, but a global intervention over oil trade. Kuwait was not considered a state, so much as a member of the "global community", a neologism which blurs together the political and household-economic. Even Russia's intervention into Ukraine was not a war, but a police action. Conflict seems unable to become a war, unable to transition from one state of affairs into another. Instead, the two seem to consistently blur together. Thus civil war is the paradigm to understand this current state of affairs.

The Civil War (Stasis in Greek) is a moment of indistinction within a political community between what is proper to politics and what remains outside in the home. The war - which belongs properly to the polis - becomes a familial affair, a stand-still conflict within blood kinship [stasis emphylos]. Civil war is a phenomenon that originates from within the family, where the city transforms familial relationships into political ones, a war of brothers against brothers. And at the same time, the political forms a new fraternity, where political allies transform into new brothers. The civil war reveals the gap between household and the city, between the economic and the political, and how one transfers into another. Patriarchal mythologies not withstanding, it's unclear at what point a collection of households recognize the gap between them and constitute it as the political. Civil war becomes a means of realizing and reconstituting these bonds through their indistinction. For if the political is the zone outside the household, which absorbs households within its bonds, where then does the civil war take place, since the political is brought into the household and, simultaneously, blood relationships are fictitiously reconstituted in political faction. The civil war is a threshold concept:

"The stasis - this is our hypothesis - takes place neither in the oikos nor in the polis, neither in the family nor in the city; rather it constitutes a zone of indifference between the unpolitical space of the family and the political space of the city. In transgressing this threshold, the oikos is politicised; conversely the polis is 'economised', that is , it is  reduced to an oikos" (16)

The civil war is the apparatus that constitutes the relationship between the family and the city, even as the same fall in together. Yet this happening is not a bug, not an accident of collapse or misunderstanding, but a feature. The civil war becomes a central means through which the polis and oikos become distinct, yet interrelated. Hence it becomes important that all citizens, when there is a state of stasis, choose a side and fight. Solon's Law punished those who failed to become partisan with atimia (dishonor), which removed their citizenship. The civil war becomes the supremely political act and, in failure to participate, the former citizen is stripped of his political rights, banished to the home, no different than a slave. Additionally, Athenian law prescribed that at the conclusion of a civil war, reconciliation was mandatory. All citizens, now reconstituted as such, must forget what took place. More properly this oath of "amnesty" [amnestia] - of forgetting - was not so much a demand for ignorance, so much as prohibiting the public use of bad memories. A citizen was bound to refuse to resume the conflict of the civil war once it was over, in a way similar to the requirement of all citizens to pick a side. The Ancient Greek idea - where civil war was mandatory and must be put aside at its conclusion - has been completely inverted for moderns. Civil war must now become impossible, yet if/when it occurs, the modern must never cease to recall the events of civil war.

Ancient Greece had achieved an equilibrium, unique among most nations, between this process of politicization and economization. The cyclical movement became a metaphysical ground in an almost Heraclitean way - the constant pulling apart through Hate and coming together of Love. However this paradigm, where the civil war is what mysteriously links yet distinguishes the political from the economic in the moment of indistinction, has become constipated in modern political theory. The civil war continues to erupt throughout the world, yet it has no potential to resolve. The impossible possibility of "never again" continues to appear without acknowledgement, and the effort to maintain permanent remembrance means an inability for nations to ever reconstitute themselves. Unlike the Greeks, this metaphysical cut threatens to absorb the entire world in a never-ending war that has no distinct significance. If it was a war, the killing would be military combat; if it is domestic, the killing would be murder. All deaths are now simultaneously war and murder, yet neither. 

For Agamben, it's for this reason that the War on Terror has become a dominant paradigm in the world. The Terrorist is both enemy combatant and civilian murderer, yet neither. No law applies, and thus this depoliticized subject has not the rights of citizen or soldier. The result is a camp, a zone of detainment that is both under political authority yet exiled outside of it. Whether it's the camps for Jews, Slavs, Gypsies and other undesirables in Dachau, the Japanese in American internment camps, Terrorists in Guantanamo Bay, or Australian unvaccinated in quarantine camps, all of these are genetically related phenomena. They are zones to deal with the figure of the one caught amidst civil war that does not cease to exist from one set of authorities (blood kinship dissolving between brothers) and reconstitute in another (the refraternization of former partisans). There seems no way out of this zone of indistinction, this global civil war, that has no ability to end.

Therefore it's precisely at the threshold between the Ancients and the Moderns that the theory of civil war receives another crucial analysis. In the early modern period,  the collapse of Christendom unleashed a century of civil war around confessional differences. Whether the French Wars of Religion, the Dutch War for Independence, the English Civil Wars, or the Thirty Years War, all resulted in new efforts to reconstitute a polity utterly divided. It was the English confessional war, however, that revealed the true nature of this social collapse. Unlike the other major European conflicts, which often divided between Rome and Reformer, England's confessional war split down the middle among Protestants. The conflict was not simply against popery (which was an accusation leveled against insufficiently reformed Protestants), but a radical moment of indistinction between spiritual and temporal powers. Why Medieval Christendom distinguished between the civil authority of the prince and the spiritual authority of the pope, these were united (in theory) as a seamless whole. Strife over authority, where earlier kings claimed a spiritual potency and later popes claimed temporal supremacy, reached its zenith in the Reformation. The dogmatic content of Luther (which many Roman hierarchs found amenable) was not ultimately significant for the historical conflict of the Reformation. Rather, it reached a melting-point which the Investiture Controversy, the Babylonian Captivity, and the Conciliarist movement had failed to sustain. This essay will not relitigate the entire history of the Reformation. However, its aftershocks, manifest in a century of civil war, were a threshold towards modern political theory. 

Hobbes attempted to solve this crisis on novel, but extremely scandalous, terms. Contrary to Strauss and Schmitt, who sees in Hobbes' Leviathan an esoteric account of his own atheism, Agamben argues Hobbes was entirely anti-esoteric. And as much as Quentin Skinner's historicization gave a much richer account of Hobbes' education and thought-world, it's hard to believe someone as infamous as Hobbes, who flirted with a materialist metaphysics of God and put forward an extreme form of absolutism that did not depend on royal lineage, would hide at the point of his atheism. The work of Jeffrey Collins has also helpfully shown how Leviathan was received well among the Independents in Cromwell's court. Thus, Leviathan should be read on its own terms as Hobbes presents them, with its symbols and concepts as Hobbes develops them within the matrix of early modern thought. Additionally, Leviathan must be read as a whole, which includes the second half which focuses strictly on ecclesiological questions. Hobbes was not a secularist, interested in Newtonian mechanized statism that flourished in the twentieth century. Rather, as Schmitt rightly noted in his book on Leviathan, Hobbes represented a threshold between medieval and modern, where the automaton of the Leviathan possessed living and organic qualities. Far prior to any strict division between the organic-living-subject and the mechanical-dead-object, Hobbes held the two together as integrally related. Thus, Hobbes' description of human biology as similar to air-pumps and water wheels is not only to mechanize man but to humanize machine.

However, the most striking element to Leviathan is its frontispiece. Hobbes had specifically designed it as a symbolic representation of the work. Thus Agamben devotes much of his analysis to understanding it. The sovereign stands at the center of the piece, constituted with many faces. In the original, these faces stared outwards, but a later version all find themselves staring up at the face of the sovereign. In the sovereign's hands are a crozier and a sword, representing spiritual and temporal power within the hands of the state. All of these are fairly standard observations, but Agamben brings out some of the stranger aspects. The Sovereign claims absolute political power, yet he stands outside of the city, menacing it. Additionally, the Sovereign holds the crozier in the left hand and the sword in the right hand. This reversed the traditional iconography, where the spiritual power was most proper and temporal a product of sin. God's right-hand worked through the Church, whereas his left-hand (his improper power) worked through coercive restraint. This reversal itself is scandalous, but it begs the question: why did Hobbes name this mortal god "Leviathan"? A serpentine water-born creature, often identified with satan and the forces of darkness, why would Hobbes claim this ominous figure for the majestic force that prevented the State of Nature? And, again, why is the Sovereign stands outside a city that is nearly empty?

Agamben cites the rich scholarship of Noel Malcolm to explain the relationship between the faces of the constituents and the sovereign. Rather than disaggregated individuals absorbed, as if souls trapped within the body of the sovereign, Malcolm relates Hobbes' vision to new inventions in optical illusion. Hobbes was interested in new inventions that created a unified face out of a kaleidoscope of many different faces. The sovereign's face is, from various perspectives, a whole variety of different faces. It is perhaps the case that Hobbes believed representation - with the sovereign as The People of the political community - was illusion. It was this threshold of political constitution which formed a political "people" out of the pre-/post-political "multitude", who existed in the State of Nature. However, once the multitude formed a people to constitute a state (whether monarchic, aristocratic, or democratic) they resumed their multitudinous state within the protection of the sovereign. It was this multitude that, if agitated and stirred to rebellion, which could plunge a kingdom into chaos, where the masses of individuals wage war against The People represented in the sovereign. To end the civil war, the multitude must once again resolve this return to the State of Nature. With a "war of all against all" - reducing life to being nasty, brutish, and short - a People must reconstitute a stable form of sovereignty and dissolve again into the multitude, which may again wage war. The cycle continues, but it is precisely the exogenous element of the non-political "multitude" which government must restrain within itself, though it can never resolve it.

To return to the question of the empty city, Agamben notes that the only figures that exist in the frontispiece are guards and plague-doctors. Like plague victims, the multitude must remain excluded through a quarantine, banished from the city. Yet it is precisely through their exclusion (which Agamben notes is a form of belonging; ex-clusio as a form of capture) that the multitude are held under political power. One is banished from the city, but subjected to its most extreme power. Thus in the Hobbesian vision: it is the multitude captured within the city's politics, held in check by military guards and the bio politics of plague doctors, whereas The People remain within the Leviathan, outside the City, looming over it. The Sovereign is above the politics, which it establishes, and the non-political households remained trapped beneath its authority through their exclusion. The People is none other than the Sovereign, which as a single royal prince or an assembly of citizens, possesses a unified power. However the People cannot belong to politics. Therefore, the permanent state of civil war, which has become our norm, appears in this confusion. The People can never be represented except as an illusion, and the power of the state based upon this illusion must be used to subjugate the multitude which threaten to plunge the state back into a state of nature. But the power the Sovereign has assumed is a monopoly of violence, the very freedom in the state of nature. Thus the paradox emerges: the sovereign is nothing other than the institutionalization of the state-of-nature.

This paradox has haunted all modern nationalist politics, from the French Revolution onwards. The People is the constituent power which establishes the state and its politics. Yet as constituent sovereign, it can't belong to the constituted powers of government which exist at its behest. Thus The People can't belong, but remain outside or hidden, to the form of national government they produce. Instead, The People can only be represented. Yet, as Hobbes knew, this was itself an optical illusion. The core of the modern democratic nation-state is nothing other than a void. The state-of-nature becomes a simultaneous myth of past and future, a nightmare out of which man emerged and a nightmare which man may return to in the explosion of civil war. Rather than the Hellenic cycle, the Hobbesian sovereign puts an end to it through a complete collapse. Every state remains in a permanent state-of-nature, a civil war that remains at the core of the sovereign's government.

It's here the core question returns: why the demonic figure of Leviathan? Hobbes' placement of the sovereign outside of the city flows also from the obscuration of his body. Where is the sovereign standing? The likely option is that the sovereign's body is submerged in water, befitting the aquatic origins. But this too is not original, but draws on medieval iconography. It is the antichrist who is an enthroned prince, standing or seated upon the satanic serpent within the chaotic waters. He too bears the sword, but (like the Hobbesian sovereign) in his right (proper) hand. At the same time, Hobbes was fully committed to the political significance of Christ's Kingdom of God. Christ would not govern through delegated priestly authorities, but directly over a city. Yet that Kingdom, with its body the Church, was not present. This here reveals the key to Hobbes' politics and his political theology. It's worth quoting Agamben at length:

"If we take seriously the Hobbesian assertion according to which the Kingdom of God should be understood not metaphorically but literally, this means that at the end of time the cephalic fiction of the Leviathan could be erased ad the people discover its own body. The caesura that divides the body political - a body visible only in the optical fiction of the Leviathan, but in fact unreal - and the real, yet politically invisible multitude, will be bridged at the end in the perfect Church. But this also means that until then no real unity, no political body is actually possible: the body political can only dissolve itself into a multitude and the Leviathan can only live together up until the end with Behemoth - with the possibility of civil war." (63)

This analysis explains, in part, the radical scandal Hobbes unleashed. For the "monster of Malmesbury", the Church does not exist, or only exists in potential, and thus the Kingdom of God is radically invisible from the contemporary world of politics. The messianic kingdom is not represented in a priesthood, which had become a Behemoth in the Presbyterian clergy which agitated against the royal sovereign. The Kingdom of God can't be represented at all, and thus all churches cannot claim any spiritual authority to themselves. Rather than an atheistic ploy against religion, Hobbes should be taken seriously as a radical, if eccentric, Christian which would not receive any half-measures about the coming Kingdom. Politics as it was, as well as all efforts to reconstitute Christendom, cannot be realized. The unified spiritual and temporal authority of the state does not, thus, serve a truly positive function. It is not the katechon, the one which restrains evil and the coming of the Antichrist. Rather, the state precisely exhibits the characteristics of Antichrist. Here Hobbes - maybe unintentionally - opens up the possibility of a messianic politics:

"The kingdom of the Leviathan and the kingdom of God are two politically autonomous realities, which must never be confused; yet they are eschatologically connected, in the sense that the first will necessarily have to disappear when the second is realised." (67)

For Agamben, this taps into a similar tradition as Walter Benjamin. Drawing on the imagery of the saints, at the end of time, feasting upon the Leviathan, so too would the coming community, the new politics, the Kingdom of God, draw sustenance from the state which no longer rules. The only solution to the conditions of global civil war, where all distinctions are confused, is to recognize the roots from which it emerge. The Greek distinctions of political and economic - translated somewhat into the connected distinction between spiritual and temporal power in Christendom - have reached a point of complete chaos and confusion. There's no possibility of return. Instead, the hope must be found in the political theology of a Hobbes, which saw the radical separation between the Leviathan and the Kingdom of God. It means the machine, which constantly produces its own demise, must cease. There's no hope that democratic politics will produce the same kind of stand-still which Hellens and Medieval Christians achieved. Instead, democracy only intensifies the crisis, resulting in the complete politicization of the household and the complete economization of the city. Crisis will continually paper over the ambiguity of The People's simultaneous dominance and exclusion, manifest most fully in the turbulent multitude under the guard of soldiers and doctors. It is global governance under the auspices of NATO and WHO, as the normative governance of nation-states become paralyzed. Instead, hope must emerge from an end, where the Christ slays the Antichrist-Leviathan with the breath of his mouth. It is the hope beyond nation or state.