May is wrapping up with a theory bang around town; let some of these events this week from our calendar inspire your proposals to us!

17-19 May Which Way Forward for Psychoanalysis?
19-21 May Phenomenology Roundtable
20-21 May two talks presented by Paul of Tarsus Working Group

I don’t think anyone who finished The Golden Compass thought that the next two books in Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy were going to lead to the death of God (or The Authority, as he’s called in the series). The first book is a beautifully written, classic piece of fantasy, with witches, talking polar bears, and a hefty dose of world-building. But what began as a story about a young girl in a single magical world became an epic story about destroying the corrupt power of a single deity over all worlds (including our own). It’s heavy stuff, but Pullman wasn’t interested in just telling a story for young readers; he had a theological point to make. Pullman is a noted atheist, and His Dark Materials isn’t a religious work, but a humanist one. Plenty of fantasy series have religious overtones (The Chronicles Of Narnia is my favorite example, but Twilight is chock full of allusions to Mormonism), but usually they’re pretty obvious from the get-go, not themes that dawn on the reader halfway through. The three books work beautifully in tandem, and His Dark Materials is one of my favorite series in any genre. But I do feel like I got hoodwinked. I don’t mind that the books are a kind of counter-allegory to Paradise Lost, but it seems to me Pullman was a little coy about his intentions.

One of the things I really appreciated about His Dark Materials is its quite the opposite, that it was pretty clear that the book was moving in somewhat Nietzschean directions from the outset with its critique of the church, and that these directions made the meshing together of Milton, with elements of Blake’s Marriage of Heaven and Hell and The Everlasting Gospel in the final book even more stunning.  Perhaps it is that I read these texts though the lens of Altizer, that these connections would make sense, and I thought that Pullman’s His Dark Materials created a Nietzschean fantasy series that eclipsed, for example, James Morrow’s Godhead trilogy, at least in terms of contributing to a conversation about radical theology.

That being said, is reading His Dark Materials really making a point about atheism?  Perhaps I want to read radical theology into the texts, because a radical theology reading of Pullman seems to “make sense” rather than appear to be a “bait-and-switch.”  What do you think?

ADAM KOTSKO, Shimer College
author of Zizek and Theology (T&T Clark, 2008), Politics of Redemption: The Social Logic of Salvation (T&T Clark, 2010), Awkwardness (Zero Books, 2010), and Why We Love of Sociopaths (Zero Books, 2012), and translator of Giorgio Agamben’s The Sacrament of Language (Stanford UP, 2010), The Highest Poverty (Stanford UP, 2013), and Opus Dei (Stanford UP, forthcoming)

will present a paper written for Northwestern’s Paul Group entitled:

“What St. Paul and the Franciscans Can Tell Us About Neoliberalism: On Agamben’s The Highest Poverty”.

Tuesday, May 21st
6-8 PM
French & Italian Seminar Room, Kresge 2-380
Northwestern University
Evanston, IL 60208

Preparatory Readings:
-Agamben, The Highest Poverty: Monastic Rules and Form-of-Life, Part I, Chapters 2-3 & all of Part III (“Rule and Law,” “Flight From the World and Constitution,” “The Discovery of Life,” “Renouncing Law,” “Highest Poverty and Use,” “Threshold”)
-Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government, Section 6 (“Angelology and Bureaucracy”)

Email virgil@u.northwestern.edu if you would like a copy of any or all of these texts.

If you have time, other supplementary texts worth visiting include:
-Agamben, The Time That Remains
-Agamben, The Church and the Kingdom

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This event is co-sponsored by the Kaplan Institute for the Humanities, Religious Studies, and French & Italian

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AIDAN TYNAN, Cardiff University
author of Deleuze’s Literary Clinic: Criticism and the Politics of Symptoms (Edinburgh UP, 2012)
will present a paper written for Northwestern’s Paul Group entitled:
“Belief in This World: Deleuze, Paul and the Apocalyptic Mood”.

Monday, May 20th
6-8 PM
CLS Seminar Room, Crowe 1-125
Northwestern University
Evanston, IL 60208

Abstract:
How can the philosophy of Gilles Deleuze contribute to current forms of political theology based around leftist re-evaluations of the work of Saint Paul? Deleuze, with his Nietzschean and Spinozist inheritance, would seem to be diametrically opposed to the kind of work recently produced by Zizek, Badiou and Agamben, each of whom has attempted, in different ways, to extract from Paul’s theology an account of revolutionary political agency. In this paper I argue that Deleuze develops, from his early work on Nietzsche to his collaborations with Felix Guattari and beyond, the problem of ‘belief in this world’ as a political task. Deleuze and Guattari’s political theory is based on the fact that, as they put it, ‘beliefs and desires are the basis of every society’. In Anti-Oedipus, their famous but often misunderstood polemic against psychoanalysis, they inquire into the status of an unconscious that is said to ‘believe’ rather than produce. In this sense, Deleuze and Guattari may be seen as developing the political implications of Lacan’s claim that ‘God is not dead; God is unconscious’. The task thus becomes, for Deleuze, how to believe in the world as it is, as we have made it with our desire, and not in the representations of the world as an object separate from desire. I will draw on D.H. Lawrence’s Apocalypse, which provides a Nietzschean reading of the Book of Revelation, and Deleuze’s interpretation of Lawrence’s work, in order to suggest ways in which Deleuze may contribute to a political theology for our own apocalyptic times.
Preparatory readings:
-Deleuze, Nietzsche and Philosophy, Chapters 4-5
(“From Ressentiment to the Bad Conscience” and “The Overman: Against the Dialectic”)
-Deleuze, Essays Critical and Clinical, Chapters 6 & 15
(“Nietzsche and Saint Paul, Lawrence and John of Patmos” and “To Have Done with Judgment”;
especially pp. 132-135)
-D.H. Lawrence, Apocalypse

Email virgil@u.northwestern.edu if you would like a copy of any or all of these texts.

If you have time, other supplementary texts worth visiting include:
-Deleuze, Empiricism and Subjectivity: An Essay on Hume’s Theory of Human Nature, Chapter 4
(“God and the World”)
-Deleuze, Pure Immanence, Chapter 3
(“Nietzsche”; especially pp. 80 & 96)
-Deleuze, Difference and Repetition, p. 12
-Aidan Tynan, Deleuze’s Literary Clinic, Introduction, Chapters 1 & 3
(“A Case of Thought” and “Symptoms, Repetition, and the Productive Death Instinct”)

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https://www.facebook.com/groups/paul.of.tarsus/

In the U.S., the party-state operates by pretending that it’s not a party-state. Constitutional norms and the division of power are given continual lip-service, as when Obama castigates “Congress” rather than the Republicans, and the Founders’ desire to prevent factions is presented as an operative norm of contemporary politics. Nevertheless, the constitutional division of powers is less important to the functioning of the government than the party structure. Indeed, both parties instrumentalize American constitutional quirks whenever the opportunity presents itself. More broadly, both parties seek to cover up their own corruption or incompetence by pointing toward the other party’s illegitimate “partisanship” — and the much-vaunted “bipartisanship” mainly serves as a mechanism to allow them to congratulate themselves for subverting the will of the American people.

More important than the rhetorical and political strategies, however, is the sense that the party duopoly is above the law — both in the sense of instrumentalizing it to maintain its hold on power and in the sense of evading legal sanction. On both counts, the major U.S. parties qualify. The legal hurdles to developing a viable third party are considerable, and meanwhile, the formal state apparatus subsidizes and coordinates party activities (such as primary elections). Even in areas where one party has an insurmountable advantage, the official elections are almost always formally between a Democrat and a Republican, although the decisive vote is carried out in the context of a party primary. (This is the case in most Chicago elections, for instance.) The rules of legislative bodies are written with the assumption of an alternation of power between the two parties, and any independents must “caucus” with one of the parties to have any input.

The really disturbing thing is that the party duopoly renders both parties above the law. We can see this in the IRS scandal that is currently unfolding: although there are very good reasons to suspect Tea Party organizations of being less than completely upright when it comes to taxes, the formal state apparatus is likely to back down and sanction the agents who carried out those investigations, because the appearance of neutrality vis-à-vis the two parties is more important than the rule of law. Similarly, one cannot prosecute Bush-era war crimes, because that would be an illegitimately “partisan” move. Given that Clinton and Obama have both committed similar atrocities, one might have some sympathy with the inevitable Republican whining that would accompany a Bush prosecution — it genuinely wouldn’t be “fair.” But it’s when one asks why we don’t just prosecute Bush and Obama that we realize that the two parties are truly above the law — a bipartisan agreement on foreign policy trumps even the most sacred norms of international law.

This is not a recent development in U.S. history. I do not have the expertise to pinpoint a decisive “turning point,” but a two-party system developed early on, and even such important issues as the admittance of the Western states into the Union were carried out with an eye toward maintaining a balance between the two dominant factions. While that mostly took the form of North vs. South, in the 20th century things became scrambled — the parties have traded positions on many issues during that period, most famously with Republicans taking over for Democrats as the dominant party of the South, and many genuinely ideological factions were split between the two parties (both parties had liberals and conservatives, etc.). The result of this ideological incoherence and promiscuity is that the U.S. party-state is uniquely nihilistic in the sense of having no real goal besides maintaining the power of the party duopoly for its own sake.

Now one might object that by my standards, there are no genuine constitutional republics, but only party states. That may well be true, though there are many countries where the party system is genuinely more open, so that the formal levers of power are more “neutral” with regard to who operates them — and more importantly, almost every modern state has a more professionalized state apparatus that maintains continuity while governments change, as compared to the U.S. state apparatus that relies heavily on a rotating cast of political appointees to run basic government services. (In the U.S., the only portion of the state apparatus with notable autonomy and public respect is the military, which is remarkably effective in playing the two parties off each other in order to get what it wants.)

If it is true that most governments are closer to party-states than constitutional republics, though, that might mean that the normative liberal-democratic analysis of politics has greatly exaggerated the importance of the state. In reality, the formal state apparatus tends toward weakness and passivity, and that’s because almost no one cares about the state as such. The state for most people is one among many sites of political struggle, a set of apparatuses to be mobilized in favor of their own preferred agenda — though many will pay lip service toward the importance of maintaining the neutrality of the state apparatus, almost no one will do so when it puts their own side at a disadvantage. We can see that in the debate over fillibuster reform. While the ineffectiveness of the Senate destroys the credibility of Congress and the federal government as a whole in the eyes of the people, neither party is willing to pull the trigger on streamlining procedures, because neither wants to lose the potential advantage the fillibuster rule gives them when they are in the minority.

The only counterweight to this natural tendency is to develop a robust ésprit du corps in the state apparatus itself, so that the state can be a political actor in its own right, protecting its own prerogatives. Yet the American system of political appointments mainly prevents anything like this from happening, and neither party has an incentive to change that. And in any case, the political ideology Americans are fed from birth teaches them to fear an effective state bureaucracy offering a wide range of well-administered services as the first step toward totalitarian fascist communism — when in reality, the party duopoly that prevents such a thing from arising is actually what makes our system most akin to 20th century “totalitarianism.”

In other words, the show is being castigated for remaining true to its original vision and for continuing to explore the same themes it’s always focused on. And again, fair enough: people are allowed to get tired of things. Yet it seems to me that there’s always an underlying demand, an unspoken grievance motivating these complaints. “Yes, yes, we get it, we realize that Don Draper is a terrible fraud, a pure surface whose success is an indictment of the system he operates in — so can you please get back to plotlines that allow us to view him as a charismatic character with real depth?” “Yes, yes, we understand, the system is rigged so that do-nothing old white dudes continue to triumph over more talented young people and particularly women — so now that we’ve acknowledged that, can you give us a fantasy portrayal where Peggy is totally put in charage and succeeds brilliantly?” “Okay, God, we hear you, we know that the advertising milieu is so toxic that even an apparently innocent character is ultimately pulled into the self-centered scheming — but why did you have make Megan seem to be more or less a naturally good person at first and deprive us of the fantasy that everyone is always-already a backstabbing social climber?”

As Gerry Canavan said on Twitter yesterday, Mad Men, like other “high quality” shows, succeeds because its audience doesn’t understand it. They tune in for the suave Don Draper, and they resent being deprived of that fantasy — even though the entire work of the show has always, from day one, been to deprive us of that fantasy. They tune in looking for a soap opera filled with sexy people and elaborate sets (and “fan service” such as more screen time for Peggy or the triumphant return of Sal), and they resent that the show has a moral critique of the milieu it’s documenting. If you really “got it,” you’d either stop watching — or start watching the show differently. As it stands, the backlash seems to be driven by the fact that the show’s viewers simply don’t want to “get it.” And the fact of that paradoxical combination of addiction and resistence makes me wonder if Mad Men will turn out to be the most interesting and artistically successful example of the early 2000s “high quality cable drama” genre.

“You better stop, and think about what you’re doing.” This is the refrain from a Dionne Warwick song, in 1973, addressed to the lover she is losing, the lover with whom she is in a fractured relationship. What is the lover doing? What is it that the lover ought to stop and think about? Leaving the singer. And if the lover were to stop and think about it, what would the lover realize? The lover would realize what the singer already knows, and what the singer knows is what the song is titled: “You’re Gonna Need Me.”

I want to point out two things about this song. First, the temporal structure of its argument. The lover needs to stop and think because the lover has not yet realized that it will need the singer in the future. Perhaps the lover does not feel this need at present, but what’s interesting is that Warwick does not contest this fact. Warwick implicitly grants the lover’s present lack of need, the fractured nature of the present, focusing instead on the future. The lover is not thinking about the future, but the singer is thinking about it, and the singer wants the lover to do so as well. If the lover were to stop and think, the lover would realize that the singer will be needed “one day,” and most definitely at “the close of the book.” The future is one in which “all your rainbows have turned to gray,” one in which the darkness will set in and in which the lover will realize that, “There’s no splendor in the darkness of night.” In short, the argument goes like this: the relationship, no matter how fractured it is in the present, must survive into the future, because the future without the relationship will be even worse.

The second thing I want to point out is the connection between stopping, thinking, and doing. For Warwick, stopping is necessary for the sake of thinking. The demand to stop is in service of the demand to think, and to think in a certain way. The lover needs to stop, and to think about the threat of a future that has nothing to do with the relationship. The lover, upon thinking of this threat, will do something different. The lover who stops and thinks will stop doing without the relationship and will instead do the continuation of the relationship. To stop and think is thus to do survival. And the implication is that not doing survival is possible only where one has not stopped and thought. If the lover does not do survival, if the lover is doing something that is not survival, this is because the lover has not been thinking; if the lover stops and thinks, then the lover will do survival, since thought demands survival.

We should keep in mind that Warwick is not the first to issue the demand to stop and think about what you’re doing. She has many predecessors, including such luminaries as Plato and Descartes, or Hegel and Aretha Franklin. In fact, Warwick is especially linked to these last two, for her demand belongs to an intersubjective context. Though we have been schooled to recollect the intersubjective context of Hegel’s supposedly world-historical thought, the context of Franklin’s thought is less often presumed to be universal (despite Judith Butler’s pointing out how Franklin troubles the “natural woman”). So let’s pay particular attention to what Franklin says in a song released five years before Warwick’s: “You better think … think about what you’re trying to do to me.” Like Warwick, Franklin addresses this demand—to stop and think about what you’re doing—to a lover. Unlike Warwick, however, Franklin expands this demand outside of the context of the couple. Franklin says “you need me … and I need you,” but this intersubjective need of the couple is derived from a larger horizon, of which the couple is but an example: “Without each other there ain’t nothing people can do.”

Franklin thus moves the intersubjectivity of the demand to stop and think about what you’re doing from the context of the couple to the context of the social, i.e. of people in general. Does this mean Franklin is doing something different from what Warwick is doing? When Franklin contextualizes the couple within the social, does she rethink the couple in virtue of a non-heterornormative social freedom? Or is it the case that Warwick, in speaking only of the couple, gets at the fact that the couple and the social are indistinguishable, that the bonds holding together society are already there in the normative intimacy of the couple? Though I would side with latter interpretation, I want to stick to the obvious commonality between Warwick and Franklin, the element that binds their injunctions together in the last instance. This element is the threat of the future, and more exactly of a future that would not be the survival of the present. For Warwick, we have seen, this threat is a future of being alone, of living without what one is supposed to need, of being in a dark night without splendor. For Franklin, this threat is a future in which, because people are alone, meaning that people are split from the bonds of the couple or the social, “there ain’t nothing people can do.” In short, then, the threat is of a future in which we are unable to do anything, a future in which people can do nothing, a future that has nothing to do with being able to do, a future that is disabled. The threat, in other words, is of a future that is nothing. Borrowing from Lee Edelman, we could say that the threat is that of a future that is unrecognizable, a future that is “no future.” Such a future, or such no-future, has nothing to do with the present, with the reproduction of the present in the name of the future. To stop and think about what you’re doing, at least as it is said by Warwick and Franklin—and no doubt by Hegel too—is to stop, think, and do “reproductive futurism.”

What is at stake in everything thus far, then, is the temporal structure of stopping, thinking, and doing, which is bound up with a logic of survival. One stops and thinks because to do so is to make survive what has been done. There is, in this sense, an assumption, and this assumption is that thought is on the side of survival. Is this assumption built into the demand to stop and think about what you’re doing? In other words, is this demand necessarily a demand for survival?

I don’t think so. My proposal is that the logic of survival, or the assumption that thought is on the side of survival, is produced not by the demand to stop and think about what you’re doing, but by the temporal structure of this demand, i.e. the temporal structure I’ve just been discussing. Additionally, then, my proposal is to find a different temporal structure in this demand. To find this difference we can look at a re-use of Warwick’s song by the rapper and producer J Dilla. This re-use appears on Donuts, released in 2006. It should be noted that this album, though 43 minutes long, consists of 31 tracks. In other words, these songs are very short, and this is important because of the affective environment that is thereby produced. One cannot listen to the album without constantly being cut. One is repeatedly interrupted, and very often this is an interruption of longing or excitement. This means that one is immersed in intensities of joy and sadness yet constantly being interrupted from and by these intensities. The effect is that one can never settle down in any specific intensity, since the mood is constantly being cut off, where this cutting off is also a cutting into another mood. To put this somewhat bluntly, every time one gets immersed, one gets stopped. This continual stopping makes it difficult to think of survival, for the stop becomes more important than the survival. In this regard, it’s worth noting that Dilla made this album on what was effectively his deathbed; existential stopping formed the horizon of its production. And it’s not incidental that the song in which Dilla re-uses Warwick is simply entitled “Stop.”

This change in title marks a change in temporal structure: whereas Warwick subordinated the stop to the thought of the title, “You’re Gonna Need Me,” Dilla just tells us to “Stop.” In other words, the stop is given autonomy from the temporality of survival; the stop becomes prior to the past and future doing of survival; the stop becomes its own, recurrent temporality. This shift is indicated not only in the title but also in the performance. When Dilla gets to the demand—“You better stop and think about what you’re doing”—he plays it four times in a row. Such repetition takes the demand out of the linearity of an argument about the relation between what one is doing and what one is supposed to be doing. And in taking it out of the linearity of argumentation, Dilla also takes it out of the linearity of temporal survival. The demand to stop is followed by the demand to stop, followed by the demand to stop, followed by the demand to stop. In fact, in the third repetition, right after the word “stop,” the sound actually stops. There is pure presentation of the stop, of the cut, as silence. In this way, the demand to stop and think about what you’re doing doesn’t even belong to the flow of the song; it belongs instead to the performance of a stop that literally stops the flow of the song.

But what does all of this have to do with philosophy, and what does it have to do with nihilism? I’ll get to nihilism in a second, but the connection with philosophy emerges with this question: Does the demand to stop and think about what you’re doing belong to philosophy? If one is involved in this demand, is one automatically involved in philosophy? Or is philosophy one particular way of addressing this demand? Or could it even be that philosophy is a way of capturing this demand and turning aside its force?

It’s not possible to consider every philosophical endeavor, so I’ll stick here to the last text from Deleuze and Guattari. Here, as with Warwick and Dilla, the title is important: “What is Philosophy?” As they pose and follow this question, there emerges—once again—a relation of stopping, thinking, and doing. This is because they connect their question to the doing of philosophy. They claim that one can pose the question of what philosophy is only after having done philosophy for a very long time. They are stopping and thinking, “What is it I have been doing all my life?” (1)

What’s relevant is not their specific answer to this question, it’s how they secure the conditions of its poseability. What guarantees the poseability of “what is philosophy?” is the assumption of the doing of philosophy. If one can ask what philosophy is, this is because one assumes that there is something being done that is called philosophy. Thus philosophy is already assumed to exist when one asks what philosophy is; the questioning of philosophy may put many things up in the air, but in the same stroke it maintains a ground, which is that there is philosophy. Deleuze and Guattari are questioning philosophy’s essence, but simultaneously assuming and securing its existence. (As an aside, and in reference to the comment with which I’ll end my talk, it’s worth noting that this resembles Aquinas’ claim about natural knowledge of God—he says that reason is not able to know what God is, but it’s certainly able to know that God exists.)

For Deleuze and Guattari, then, stopping and thinking about what they are doing stays within the horizon of philosophy. Asking “what is philosophy?” means stopping and thinking about what they are doing in the name of philosophy. This assumption of a philosophical horizon is, for me, precisely the obstacle. To indicate where I depart from them, consider this question: What is philosophy doing when it asks what philosophy is? Deleuze and Guattari answer that it is thinking about what philosophy does. I answer that it is securing the existence of philosophy. For me, the most important characteristic of the question “what is philosophy?” is the assumption it depends on and leaves out of question, namely that philosophy exists. When philosophy asks what it is, it is deflecting attention from whether it is. To ask “what is philosophy?” is to do philosophy into existence. And here is the question that Deleuze and Guattari never ask: What are we doing when we do philosophy into existence? They stop and think about what they’re doing in the name of philosophy; but they never stop and think about what they’re doing when they stop, think, and do in the name of philosophy. For this reason, we can say that the act of stopping, thinking, and doing, as such, is prior to philosophy; stopping, thinking, and doing is not intrinsically philosophical, rather philosophy is the capture of the act of stopping, thinking, and doing; this act has no intrinsic need for philosophy.

Deleuze and Guattari’s stopping, thinking, and doing, like Warwick’s, is involved in a certain temporality. Their stopping of philosophy, because it’s a doing of philosophy into existence, is bound up with the survival of philosophy. Specifically, we find that there is a past of philosophy, since one has already done philosophy when one asks what philosophy is. Additionally, since asking what philosophy is ensures the existence of philosophy, there is also a future of philosophy. The question “what is philosophy?,” even if it fails to give us an answer, even if it fails to give us a philosophical essence, most certainly does not fail to give us a temporality of philosophy. It succeeds in giving, by giving, philosophy something to be inherited and something to go on). It makes philosophy succeed. This is why the question “what is philosophy?” is bound less to an answer or even to a concern for an answer, and more to the survival of philosophy. Even when philosophy has left behind all of its objects (God, the world, and man), even when philosophy calls itself into question and emerges as undefined or indefinite, philosophy still pursues the object of its survival. Or, put differently: even when philosophy gives up, or puts into question, all of its objects, even itself, it still succeeds in surviving, it still succeeds as philosophy, and philosophy still survives.

Now we can explicitly raise the question of nihilism. It’s connection to philosophy is this: nihilism is what threatens philosophy’s survival; what gets called nihilism is what gets at the stopping of philosophy. In this sense, the term nihilism will be affixed to whatever says that philosophy should not go on. Philosophy is able to embed the stop within the temporality of philosophical thinking and doing; nihilism frees the stop from this temporality of philosophy, it makes thinking and doing belong to stopping, to stopping philosophy. Philosophy is willing to conceive nihilism, but nihilism stops conceiving, for nihilism stops survival. Nihilism just stops. If we ask what philosophy is, even if we ask whether philosophy ought to be, we still have to do with philosophy, we still want to do things with philosophy. Nihilism, on the other hand, goes even further than wanting to do nothing with philosophy; nihilism wants nothing to do with philosophy.

Deleuze and Guattari stop, but they make sure philosophy does not. And philosophy does not stop because it does the not. If the stop says no, philosophy survives by making the no a matter of philosophy. Along these lines, it’s no surprise that Deleuze and Guattari, after beginning with “what is philosophy?,” end by confronting what says no to philosophy. Philosophy, they tell us, “needs a nonphilosophical comprehension.” (218) It most definitely does, if it wants to survive. But note the direction of dependence: it is philosophy that needs nonphilosophy, it is philosophy that depends on the no, it is not the no that depends on philosophy. Philosophy cannot stop the no, it is the no that can stop philosophy. So if philosophy needs a nonphilosophical comprehension, this is because it needs to survive the no by incorporating the no into philosophy. Philosophy must capture the no, the stop that has nothing to do with philosophy, by doing philosophy with the no. Philosophy wants to redeem the no because it wants to redeem itself. But if you stop, so does the need for redemption.

One final comment: We have seen what the stop, the no, looks like from the perspective of philosophy. But what does philosophy look like from the perspective of the no? When we stop and think about what philosophy is doing, what do we see? François Laruelle, who has sought to provide such a diagnosis, says that philosophy looks like this: an attempt to reconcile Athens and Jerusalem by means of war, an attempt to conceive a world in which the need for reconciliation survives by means of irreconcilable war. I would like to add to this diagnosis a question: Who is it that has done such a thing? Philosophy, of course—but the emphasis ought to be put on the “who” … yes, the philosophers give birth to this world of survival through war, they conceive it … but who are the philosophers? Are they everyone, or are they a particular group of people? Do philosophers spring forth from human nature, or do they belong to a particular history, a history in which particular people conceived the world in order to divide the world, a history in which particular people thus conceived their own survival, succeeding over others? In case my point’s not clear, let me ask one last question: Where are the philosophers? Where do we find those who give birth to this world in which the need for redemption and the need for war are inseparable? I do not think they are everywhere.

Otto Maduro’s Drew Webpage

From Drew University’s Facebook page:

It is with sadness that we share the news that Professor Otto Maduro passed away at 8:45 p.m. last night. In a note to the Theological School community this morning, Jeffrey Kuan wrote: “He was surrounded by his wife Nancy, son Mateo and fa…mily members when he died. I went with Professor Laurel Kearns and Dr. Tanya Bennett to be with Nancy and the family. Professor Maduro looked very peaceful. When I have information about memorial service I will let all of you know. We have lost a great theologian and a great friend.” Share your comments on Prof Maduro below or on his retirement page. http://www.drew.edu/otto/

First points:

• This is a book about the debate between Carl Schmitt and Erik Peterson — but not on their own terms. Rather, it’s about what they both disavow (economy) and what they both unwittingly share (glory). This is a big source of misunderstanding, because it’s easy to think that Peterson is supposed to be the source of the economic paradigm Agamben is developing (particularly back before Peterson was actually translated into English).
• While the analysis of economy takes up slightly more space, the goal is to get to glory. Angels provide the hinge between the two parts, as the chapter “Angelology and Bureaucracy” seems to establish that there is no redemptive possibility in economy, while there are hints that glory is at least pointing toward something beyond our destructive power structure.

So I’ll just go through the chapters one by one.

1. The Two Paradigms: Agamben begins by contrasting the political-theological paradigm and the economic-theological paradigm. The former is obviously associated with Schmitt, and so we get a treatment of his notion of secularization — and a hint that the same logic might not hold for economic theology, given that theological concepts are somehow “already” economic. Then we get the debate between Schmitt and Peterson, wherein Peterson claims that the development of the doctrine of the Trinity somehow renders political theology impossible. Agamben finds this claim to be far from self-evident and turns to investigate one of Peterson’s quotes from Gregory of Nazianzen — and lo and behold, there’s all this stuff about “economy” that Peterson totally ignores, even though Gregory says you have to understand the discourse of the economy to get what he’s saying. The same holds for one of the passages Peterson quotes from Tertullian. Given that Peterson is a great scholar, surely something is up here — and so this sets up the immediately following chapter. But it also opens up a bigger question of Peterson’s alternative to political theology, namely his view of liturgy as somehow a directly political action, which will only come back in chapter 7. Again, the two paradigms aren’t Schmitt and Peterson — they’re Schmitt and whatever he and Peterson are both trying to fight against (i.e., economy).

2. The Mystery of the Economy: This chapter is almost pure philology, and the point is to fight against a tendency in theological studies that rankles me and Agamben equally — the habit of assuming that because a theologian is using a word, it becomes a kind of “insta-jargon,” even if it’s a perfectly common word whose common meaning fits perfectly well in the text. He establishes the semantic core of “economy” in the realm of home administration, which is a kind of know-how rather than a form of rigorous knowledge and shows how this was already beginning to spread metaphorically in classical times, for instance to rhetorical terminology. Then he turns to the scriptural and patristic uses of the term, which for the most part are easily understood as belonging to the same basic family of meanings, without any need to presuppose a specifically theological meaning. There’s a tendency to reverse Paul’s notion of the “economy of the mystery” (i.e., God’s prudent carrying out of his goals) into the “mystery of the economy” (so that God’s action in the world is itself the mystery). There’s also a general shift from using economic metaphors to indicate God’s prudent carrying out of his salvific goals to using them to describe the internal disposition of God’s own life as Trinity — the latter usage being an attempt to claim the term back from Gnosticism and thereby use it to seal up the gap between the transcendent god and the immanent government of the world. Agamben makes a lot of references to modern political concepts throughout, but the most important is the modern concept of history. In the threshold, he picks out the last three themes mentioned as particularly important disjunctions that the notion of “economy” is deployed in order to “manage,” and the next three chapters focus on them in turn (to the extent possible — they significantly overlap).

3. Being and Acting: This chapter sets the economic paradigm in contrast to the classical ontological paradigm exemplified in Aristotle, where the relationship between the Unmoved Mover and the world initially seems to be unproblematic in a way that the relationship between the Christian God and the world is not. Agamben believes that the economic paradigm grows out of the breakdown of classical ontology, which initially expresses itself as a gap between being and praxis — oikonomia as the know-how associated with managing conflicting demands thus becomes a strategy of managing this unbridgable ontological gap. This chapter traces the historical attempts to clarify the relationship between God the Father (being) and the Son (action/governance/economy). The Church Fathers’ attempts to chart a middle path between the Gnostics and the classical ontology produces a series of tensions or contradictions that will, in Agamben’s view, propagate themselves throughout the history of Christian thought — meaning that the structure of “economy” as a way of managing the gap between two heterogeneous levels marks all of Christian thought, even if the development of trinitarian orthodoxy meant that the term itself ultimately took up a subordinate place.

4. The Kingdom and the Government: This chapter begins with the enigmatic image of the roi mehaignié or wounded king, who is unable to exercise power but nonetheless somehow remains sovereign. This is the ultimate example of a phrase that becomes a major point of contention for Schmitt and Peterson: “the king reigns, but does not govern.” Agamben shows that they are both opposed to the sentiment that the phrase expresses — though curiously, Schmitt regards it as the very essence of liberalism, while Peterson views it as an example of the “bad” political theology that he is determined to foist onto the pagans and Jews and exclude from Christianity. Through an exploration of Aristotle, Aquinas, and others, Agamben shows that the Christian alternative to the Gnostic idea of a totally transcendent God who does nothing ultimately does not wind up giving God much to do — even in Aquinas, transcendence seems to be identical with the immanent order of the world as such. He then pushes the problem into the worldly political realm, with the medieval notion of the “two swords,” spiritual and political. Instead of asking which of the two is superior, he asks why there are two — and it turns out that there’s an inherent necessity to have a secondary sword to do the dirty work that’s beneath the spiritual sword. In other words, however the duality is hashed out in terms of names, the “transcendent” pole is always going to be idle and redundant. Every sovereign is finally the roi mehaignié. At this point, the political-theological paradigm appears to be simply a subset of the economic paradigm, wherein the two powers are simply identified. In other words, Schmitt collapses into the economic paradigm he so desperately wants to avoid. (One down…)

5. The Providential Machine: This chapter serves to address the Christian concept of history while at the same time providing the “connective tissue” between Agamben’s work on the Trinity and Foucault’s work on pastoral power as the paradigm of modern politics. The economic logic at work here is providence, which is supposed to coordinate God’s eternal plan with the contingent interaction of finite created things — this is often expressed in terms of primary causes and secondary causes. The goal of the providential apparatus is to respect human freedom and to respect the integrity of the created world more broadly, which Agamben seizes upon to claim that the providential paradigm is “democratic.” As a consequence of this democratic ethos, God cannot “force” anyone to do anything, but instead must rely on collateral effects. Finally, since everything within the providential machine is done on behalf of the transcendent God, who does nothing directly, all power is inherently vicarious in nature. At this point, Agamben thinks it’s reasonably clear that the providential paradigm matches up really closely with modern democratic techniques of government — hence we can see why Schmitt and Peterson would repress the economic theology that lies at its root!

6. Angelology and Bureaucracy: Having dispatched the unsaid point of agreement in terms of what both are rejecting (economy), Agamben turns to the more overt disagreement between Schmitt and Peterson — more specifically, he turns to Peterson’s alternative to “political theology,” namely liturgy conceived as a directly political action. For this, he turns to Peterson’s book on angels, where he portrays them as continually worshipping God and as validating the worship of the church by participating in it. Here again we have repression — surely Peterson knows that angels also have a role of carrying out God’s plan, and hence an “economic” role. The contemplative and administrative roles tend to blur together, following up on the reverse-Pauline notion of the “mystery of the economy.” Nonetheless, it seems that we return to the problem of the inactive God, insofar as the economy of salvation will culminate in the Last Judgment, at which point God and the angels will presumably have no more work to do. This is what opens up the path to the investigation of glory, because worship (glorifying God) is what the angels and saints will do when they have nothing more to do. In a brilliant digression, however, Agamben points out that we also have the chance to observe what an endless “economy” would look like insofar as there are some angels who continue to carry out God’s will forever — namely, the demons punishing sinners in hell. Given that the underlying assumption of modern politics is that the state is immortal, that means we neoliberal subjects are basically living in hell, which we all suspected. The pay-off in terms of Peterson is that even his attempt to avoid economy winds up being intimately tied with economy, so that now both of them have been collapsed into the economic paradigm.

7. The Power and the Glory: The burden of this chapter is to show that Peterson’s supposed liturgical alternative to Schmitt is really no alternative at all. There’s a lot of detailed analysis of imperial ritual, with a particular focus on acclamations — and the immediate purpose of this investigation (which was not terribly interesting to me) is to connect acclamations and overt political ritual to exactly the fascist form of politics that Peterson thought he was rejecting in foreclosing Schmitt’s political theology. Hence the Peterson-Schmitt debate seems to be essentially “closed out” in this chapter. This investigation of acclamation or glory then opens up the question of why power seems to need glory — though we already have hints in his analysis of the performative nature of the acclamation, which represents a way of suspending and remobilizing the denotative force of language — setting up the last, and longest chapter.

8. The Archaeology of Glory: This is the most varied and puzzling chapter, jumping around among Judaism, Christianity, and (very surprisingly) Indian religions as investigated by Mauss. The “big reveal” of this chapter is that the human act of glorification actually creates and sustains the gods, something that is explicit in Judaism and that even Christian theology implicitly admits. While chapter 6 had broached the possibility of a glory that outlived the economy, it becomes clear that glory is itself economical in Christianity — even within the divine life itself, where the trinitarian persons ceaselessly glorify each other. The end goal of the analysis, however, is to get at the inoperativity that the machinery of glory-economy covers over, an inoperativity that opens the possibility of a life that would escape a pre-given form (foreshadowing the analysis in The Highest Poverty of a life that would simply be its own form, a form-of-life) and thus give us access to the moment of anthropogenesis (anticipating The Sacrament of Language) so that we could become human in a new and different way. Jewish messianism (which here seems to include Paul, though not the whole New Testament), with its vision of a Sabbath-rest, provides a privileged access to this inoperativity, as does poetry, which suspends the denotative force of language in a way opposite to that of the acclamation (again anticipating The Sacrament of Language, where philosophy will replace poetry). The threshold on public opinion seems to “close the circle” on the Peterson-Schmitt debate by showing that liberal democracy does fundamentally rest on acclamation — demonstrating that both Peterson and Schmitt failed to escape the liberal democracy they loathed… and that liberal democracy has failed to escape Peterson and Schmitt.

The appendix seems to me to be relatively extrinsic to the structure of the book, even though these investigations feel somehow more “natural” than the progression to glory. I think they’re important in terms of gesturing toward the kind of “connective tissue” that could substantiate his continual gestures toward how the structure of economy and glory prefigures modern liberal political structures, yet they may also be a distraction, insofar as they maintain the focus on economy (which Agamben has shown to be finally a hellish apparatus) and away from the inoperativity that glory is inadvertantly pointing us toward.

Hopefully this overview is helpful for viewing The Kingdom and the Glory as a whole and can provide a helpful framework for figuring out how individual portions fit into it.