A brief review of a brief book: Taubes, To Carl Schmitt

Only a Christian would make a deal with the devil. That’s what’s so disturbing about the gesture of selling your soul — it only makes sense if you know what’s at stake, yet it’s precisely because you know what’s at stake that it doesn’t make sense. It seems to me that this is a possible lens through which to view Jacob Taubes’s complex relationship with Carl Schmitt, as expressed in the brief collection To Carl Schmitt: Letters and Reflections, which the introducer of the volume, Mike Grimshaw, has already announced and discussed here on AUFS.

What makes Schmitt a great thinker in Taubes’s eyes is that he really did understand what was at stake in his historical moment. He just chose the wrong side in the decisive conflict that was unfolding. Taubes grapples with this gap between the diagnosis and the course of treatment throughout the fragments collected here, and he never comes to any firm conclusion on Schmitt the man. On Schmitt the thinker, though, he is unequivocal in asserting his brilliance and signal importance — an assertion for which he can draw on the authority of Walter Benjamin. In what for me is one of the most interesting passages in the collection, Taubes makes his point by means of the passage from “On the Concept of History” about the “tradition of the oppressed” and the “real state of exception”:

Schmitt’s fundamental vocabulary is here introduced by Benjamin, made use of, and so transformed into its opposite. Carl Schmitt’s conception of the ‘state of exception’ is dictatorial, dictated from above; in Benjamin it becomes a doctrine in the tradition of the oppressed. ‘Contemporaneity,’ a monstrous abbreviation of a messianic period, defines the experience of history on the part of both Benjamin and Schmitt; both involve a mystic conception of history whose principal teaching relates the sacred order to the profane. But the profane cannot be constructed upon the idea of God’s empire. This is why theocracy did not, for Benjamin, Schmitt, and Bloch, have a political meaning, but solely a religious significance. (17)

Sandwiched in between Benjamin and Bloch! All of them understand that this world is permanent, that no worldly structure can claim God’s allegiance or legitimation, but that they are all ways of heading off the apocalypse. Yet Schmitt can see in the apocalypse nothing but destruction. He sees the horizon of this world, yet cannot see anything of value beyond it — and so throws his weight behind a katechon who turns out to be the Antichrist. Taubes continues in an enigmatic paragraph that follows up on the implicit reference to the “Theological-Political Fragment” that the mention of Bloch evokes:

If I understand anything at all of the mystical historical construction that Benjamin here constructs with one eye on Schmitt’s theses, then this: what is superficially a process of secularization, of desacralization, the dedeification of public life, a process of step-by-step neutralization right up to the “value freedom” of science as an index of a techno-industrial form of life; this process also has an inner face that testifies to the freedom of God’s children (as in the letters of St. Paul), hence an expression of a reformation that is nearing its completion. (17-18)

The alternative that Taubes, with Benjamin, is gesturing toward here remains unclear to me, but the reflections in this slim volume convince me of the value of reading Schmitt against the grain in order to think toward it.

A Brief History of Latin American Liberation Theology

This post is my transcription of a recent lecture by Ted Jennings, with some minor additions, posted with his permission.

Latin America has a unique situation that distinguishes the theology that is done there from the theology that is done elsewhere. In fact, very early on in the development of Latin American liberation theology, there was a book by the Protestant theologian José Míguez Bonino, translated in English as Doing Theology in a Revolutionary Situation. It’s a wonderful book that was published before Gutiérrez. Bonino was involved in the human rights movement in Argentina. He pointed out that what was happening and needed to happen in Latin America, including the kinds of questions that had to be addressed, were fundamentally different from the questions in European theology, even among the political theology of figures like Moltmann, Metz, and Söelle.

The distinctive character of Latin America theology is the hegemony of Catholicism. Until quite recently, the Catholicism of Latin America could be characterized as Pre-Tridentine, that is, the kind of Catholicism that was characteristic of the Late Middle Ages prior to the council of Trent.

Time to reboot?

This semester, we’ve been discussing documents relating to the American Founding in my Social Sciences 2 class, and I asked both my classes: “Should we tear out and start fresh?” There was widespread discomfort with the idea, mostly based in the fear of who would be tasked with writing the new Constitution. I understand that fear, but I think that a lot of the pitfalls could be avoided by means of a ratification process — if the New Founders knew that a two-thirds majority of all American citizens had to approve it, that would presumably keep them from enshrining fetal personhood as a Constitutional principle, for instance. Even in the worst case where the CEO of Goldman Sachs simply dictates the form of the document, I assume the most crazy and unworkable aspects of our system — the recognition of a weird form of quasi-sovereignty for the states and the anti-democratic Senate — would be eliminated just for the sake of simplicity. (I would note that as difficult as amending the Constitution is in any case, state sovereignty and the Senate are two aspects of the Constitution that are nearly impossible to effectively amend away because of clauses stipulating that no state can be involuntarily deprived of equal representation in the Senate. Hence any state that held out and didn’t ratify an amendment to introduce equal representation would still get as many senators as California — and I can’t even imagine the logical paradoxes that would arise with any amendment proposing to do away with the Senate altogether.)

At the same time, I’m reminded of what Bruce Rosenstock has told me on more than one occasion when this topic has come up: the saving grace of the American political system is that the founding document has the status of Scripture, and one should never throw that away. If you attempt a reboot, all bets are off. (I’m paraphrasing — if I’m misconstruing, hopefully he will show up in comments to more accurately portray his views.)

What do you think, dear readers?

Announcement: English translation of Taubes-Schmitt correspondence

[The following is a guest post from Mike Grimshaw, Associate Professor in the School of Social & Political Sciences at the University of Canterbury in New Zealand.]

How can we rethink political theology? One way is though a fascinating collection of the letters between Jacob Taubes and Carl Schmitt that has been translated by Keith Tribe and- with an introductory chapter I have written- been published by Columbia University Press: To Carl Schmitt: Letters and Reflections, by Jacob Taubes; Translated by Keith Tribe and with an introduction by Mike Grimshaw. (By the way: Anyone who uses the promo code “TOCTAU” to buy the book from this site will receive a 30% discount off the price of the book).

This collection of letters not only increases our knowledge of
Taubes, it also demands a rethinking of the role of Schmitt in 20th century thought, theology and philosophy. Part of it takes the form of an intellectual confession from Taubes that provides the background, for the first time really in English, of how a Jewish scholar became a ‘friend’ (Taubes’ term) of a Nazi jurist.

Political theology and money

I’ve finally gotten around to reading Paul Kahn’s Political Theology: Four New Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty. The project provides an interesting lens for thinking through American political institutions, but I have one major reservation that might be at the root of the other reservations I have about the book. The problem arises in his discussion of Schmitt’s idea of a sociology of concepts. The reading he offers of Schmitt’s own usage is similar to what I arrive at in the linked post, but he concludes that Schmitt was wrong to assume that every epoch will have its own correspondence between political and metaphysical outlooks, because our age doesn’t even have a metaphysical outlook:

In the postmodern world, the sources of fundamental belief, the diversity of metaphysical approaches, the conflicts between religious and secular outlooks, and even the conflicts between the biological and physical sciences are just too many and too deep to think that we can offer a single theoretical model to characterize the epoch. Perhaps we should say that we live in a “postepochal” age. We find that people operate with diverse systems of belief, which do not fall into any coherent order. We have discovered that we can live with this incoherence. The center does not hold, but things do not fall apart. (118)

I suppose this is true as far as it goes, but I’m not sure Schmitt is really thinking about explicit metaphysical systems — he’s thinking about the deep assumptions about the order of the world, which will often surface in the most representative metaphysical systems. And in our contemporary postmodern era, that role is filled by economic reasoning. Yes, any particular school of thought has trouble gaining hegemony, but that’s just the nature of our contemporary “marketplace of ideas” (for example).

Kahn can’t see this because he, like Schmitt, has already dismissed economic rationality as a kind of anti-idea. “Follow the money” is his chief example of the kind of reductionism that he and, by his account, Schmitt are trying to avoid — yet isn’t it reductionistic not to think of economic rationality as a form of rationality, one with its own assumptions and values? At the risk of being pedantic: don’t you at least need to concede that the accumulation of money is valuable in itself before you would act in a way that is explicable by means of “following the money”?

Hence I propose that Kahn’s account needs to be supplemented by Goodchild’s Theology of Money.

Scattered remarks on political theology

From one perspective, it is possible to isolate three types of “political theology.” The first is a liberal one, which seeks to reveal the unconscious theological inheritance in the hopes of purging it and reaching a true secularity. One might include Löwith and Derrida under this heading. The second is a reactionary one, which seeks to preserve whatever homologies are possible with the theological tradition in order to maintain some kind of horizon of meaning over against modernity, which is understood to be a nihilistic mechanism — obviously here one could place Carl Schmitt. Finally, there is the radical leftist approach, which mines the theological tradition for any possible site of radical transformation (and perhaps indulges in the pleasure of “provocatively” needling liberal fussiness about how we must handle the dangerous materials of religion). I would place Zizek in this category.

For all three perspectives, there is a “special relationship” between political theology and eschatology. The reactionary position is basically focused on the katechon, that enigmatic figure from 2 Thessalonians who holds the man of lawlessness at bay and heads off the apocalypse (here one could place Peterson alongside Schmitt). The leftist position is apocalyptic, openly courting the very dissolution that for the reactionary is the worst possible outcome. The liberal position is awkwardly situated in this respect, but I think that we can draw on Dan Barber’s On Diaspora and call liberal political theology basically supercessionistic — a kind of “messianism without messianism” where secularity is continually overcoming religion as such, albeit without any concrete hope of a final consummation.

When it comes to placing a figure like Taubes or Agamben, I think things become more difficult. Bruce Rosenstock has a great essay forthcoming in New German Critique on the Taubes-Schmitt relationship where he argues that while Taubes aligns more closely with the apocalyptic, he also sees the necessity of the reactionary impulse represented by Schmitt in order to keep the apocalyptic impulse from spiralling into sheer nihilism. His exegesis of the final pages of Occidental Eschatology is absolutely essential in this regard — he clarifies that for Taubes, finding humanity’s center in God requires a special kind of balance, because humanity’s orbit is always elliptical rather than spherical and so constantly threatens to go off course. I wonder if one could read Agamben similarly, particularly in light of his recently published lecture The Church and the Kingdom, which in many ways is so difficult to reconcile with his other writings insofar as it seems to call for a kind of “balance” between the messianic impulse and the structure of authority.

This talk of balance seems liberal from a certain perspective, but it is not a secular liberalism — indeed, the question of secularity is simply sidestepped altogether in the meeting of the two extremes. Or is it perhaps instead a question of creating a space for a tenuous secularity, keeping God at a respectable distance without becoming completely untethered from it? Is this elliptical balancing act perhaps the way we render the theological “inoperative” precisely by maintaining the constant reference to it — like the legendary rabbinical school that bases all of life on the divine law while pointedly telling God to shut up when he tries to intrude on the debate?

From this perspective, it appears that we could add a fourth position of Jewish political theology as a distinctive alternative to the liberal model. The question that then arises is whether this kind of political theology can really be practiced by a non-Jew, or whether it will always wind up spiralling into a one-sidedly katechontic or apocalyptic position.

New issue of Political Theology

Political Theology volume 14, number 1 is now out, featuring expanded versions of the articles from the blog roundtable over The Kingdom and the Glory from this summer (with contributions from me, Jay Carter, Colby Dickinson, and others), as well as Dan Barber’s review of Clayton Crockett’s Radical Political Theology.

More thoughts on “political theological method”

The other day, I suggested that Schmitt’s argument in Political Theology has a narrower application than one might suspect — it is primarily about the “special relationship” that developed between politics and theology in the early modern period (and not even explicitly Christian theology, but the philosophical theology that played such a decisive role in early modern thought). What was unique in this moment was that theology/metaphysics and politics reached the same totalizing ambition at the same time. I also suggested that in this reading of Schmitt, the historical genealogy that has preoccupied many in the field of political theology is a subordinate concern.

Where does this leave the task of political-theological genealogy of the kind seen in Agamben’s The Kingdom and the Glory?

The Agamben symposium continues

The most recent contribution is from William Robert of Syracuse University.

Rowan Williams and the Fairweather Postsecular

Mea culpa update: comments have shown that at least one of the quotes from the article is taken completely out of context. The others, though, remain to my mind problematic. But since the quote under discussion in this post is the very one discredited it does render the post itself mostly useless.

Rowan Williams is often held up as the paragon of theological humility and excellence, but his time as Archbishop has shown that when it comes to dealing in the public sphere he is nothing but a muddled thinker, regardless of how beautiful of a soul he may have. While claims about the radicality of the Anglican Church were always laughable (seeing as it is a State church), the notion that they the Church could somehow act as a moral centre for British society (already a strange notion for a religion claiming universality) has always been problematic when you actually look at the stands officials make. So, some grunts and words of protest when the welfare state is completely dismantled, and strong threats of breaking down the relationship between the State and the Church when gay marriage looks likely to happen. In other words, even for the supposedly more enlightened Anglicans, sexual issues are still more important than questions of class and justice. Williams has always seemed to me to embody this particular tension leading to political worthlessness and nowhere is that clearer than in a recent Guardian story about leaks from his forthcoming book.

The Guardian, of course, focuses on the scorn heaped (and rightfully so) upon the concept of the Big Society, a concept first developed by Phillip Blond and John Milbank (who ghostwrote about 1/3 of Red Tory), but passes over some rather troubling remarks concerning Muslims in Britain. This is what I found interesting, since everyone who reads this site either already knows that the Big Society is (to put it bluntly) bullshit used to try and cover up an attack on civil society that sees wealth being directly taken from the worst off, or, if they don’t think that, are never going to be convinced since this sort of politics has now been taken as a kind of creedal element of their thought.

Consider this long extract form the article, including quotes from the forthcoming book:

The archbishop also says that the Labour party was wrong, in 2006, to make incitement to religious hatred a criminal offence, arguing that anti-Muslim statements or images could show courage. “The creation under British law of a criminal offence of incitement to religious hatred has provoked bitter and sustained controversy. Disproportionate attention has been given to a hypersensitive minority.

“Some anti-Muslim images or words (foolish and insulting as they may be) may well exhibit courage in a world where terrorist violence reaches across every national boundary.”

He also calls for greater integration of Muslims living in Britain and insists they make their loyalty to “the nation state” rather than “the international Muslim community”. “To suggest that the Muslim owes an overriding loyalty to the International Muslim Community [the Umma] is extremely worrying,” he writes. “Muslims must make clear that their loyalty is straightforward modern political loyalty to the nation state.”

This coming from a thinker who often has praised the notion of the postsecular, the idea that religion now has returned to public life, and a thinker often held up by those Christians who assume themselves radical in their allegiance, not to the State, but to the Church. It would appear that the postsecular is fine if it can help Christianity to colonize the world, but thankfully for the Anglican Church it will always have the police power of the nation state when any other religion wishes to compete.