Political Theology and Its Vicissitudes

Political Theology and Its Vicissitudes

Bernard Flynn

In his celebrated article “Athens and Jerusalem,” Leo Strauss poses a stark opposition betweenpolitical philosophy and political theology, between the Greek and biblical conceptions ofwisdom. He writes, “According to the Bible, the beginning of wisdom is the fear of theLord. According to the Greek philosophers, the beginning of wisdom is wonder. We are thuscompelled, from the very beginning, to make a choice; to take a stand.”1 Strauss then goeson to say that the very fact that we are in a position to make a choice is an indication that wehave already made a choice in favor of Greek philosophy, because for the person to whomrevelation speaks, there is no question of a choice.

In this article, I argue that the Judeo-Christian conception of “the creation of the worldfrom nothing” contains within itself the possibilities for the political transformation of atheological concept. It does this in two respects: on the one hand, the conception of divineprovidence appears in secular thought in the guise of philosophy of history. I follow KarlLowith’s path, in Meaning in History, of unmasking this secular theory as theology. On theother hand, the theological notion of creation ex nihilo becomes the political concept of theEvent. In order to show the centrality of the notion of the Event in recent political thought, Iinvestigate certain aspects of the thought of both Carl Schmitt and Walter Benjamin. Then Iconclude by invoking the thought of Claude Lefort who, while practicing political philosophy,is sensitive to the role of theological concepts in the constitution of the political.

For the thinkers associated with political theology, this disjunctive opposition betweenpolitical theology and political philosophy comes to be blurred. It is possible that whilepracticing political philosophy, in their own self-representation, they are, in fact, in the gripsof political theology, notwithstanding even a militant atheism. My claim is that beneath thesurface of a secular theory, a theological problematic continues to operate. This claim isstronger than the claim that there are structural similarities between the two; rather it is thatunbeknownst to themselves these secular theorists are pursuing a theological enterprise by“other means.” The philosopher that I will consider initially is Karl Lowith who in his ownway seeks to demonstrate that apparently secular philosophies are, in fact, transformations,or secularizations, of theological concepts.

The question that I will pose is, “Exactly what in the theological tradition of the Westcan lend itself to a secularized transformation?” For Lowith what is secularized is thedrama that is orchestrated between the creation of the world from nothing, a primal falland an ultimate redemption, between arche and telos. The conception of a linear historyis introduced by Judaism and continued by Christianity. For the Greek experience, time iscircular; the Greeks have historians, but no philosophers of history. For them the subjectof philosophical knowledge is “what is eternal, unchangeable?” This is to say, what has nohistory? As anthropologists and historians of religion have shown, this circular conceptionof time is not unique to the Greeks, but is shared by most pre-modern people.

The circular conception of time is incompatible with major doctrines of both Judaism andChristianity. For both of these religions, the creation of the world from nothing is a uniqueevent. In fact, later I will argue that it is the paradigm for a certain conception of the event, anotion that comes center stage in some recent political theology. For Christianity, the birth,

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death and resurrection of Christ are unique events that cannot be thought in terms of a circularconception of time. Augustine refers to the circular conceptions of time, prominent duringhis time in the thought of the Stoics, as “wicked dances in circles.”

Both Remy Brague, in The Wisdom of the World,2 and Thomas Pangle, in PoliticalPhilosophy and the God of Abraham,3 link this transformation of the concept of temporalityto the Judaic belief in the “creation of the world from nothing by an omnipotent God.”Brague argues that the Bible has no conception of world, nothing analogous to the Greekconception of “cosmos.” The Book of Genesis does not give us a cosmology, rather it givesa list of the things that have been created, and the order in which they were created. Pangleargues that there is no conception of nature in the Bible. He writes,

In teaching us at the outset about the creaturely character of heaven and earth, and everythingthey contain, the Bible ignores, or does without, what the Greek philosophers have taughtus for centuries, to speak of as Nature (physis).4

For biblical thought what is truly at work, in every single thing we experience, is theexpression of an unfathomable and totally autonomous will. Pangle continues by citingthe commentary on Genesis by Nicodemus, “In the entire scope of the Torah, there areonly miracles, and no nature or custom.”5 The exclusion of nature, or essence, brings tocenter stage a conception of history as a succession of discrete events. There are no lawsgoverning this succession, and as such, laws would constrain the absolute freedom of God.In The Law of God: The Philosophical History of an Idea,6 Brague argues that in the JewishBible, the concept of law is equated with that of legislation and, in the first instance, divinelegislation. Laws are not, as they were for the Greeks, derived from the observation ofperceived regularities that emerge from the essence, or nature, of a thing. For the schoolmencommenting on Aristotle, “action follows essence,” but if there is no essence, then action isthe product of legislation. The notion of the creation, by an omnipotent and good God, of theworld from nothing bears within itself the notion of Providence, for presumably, God createdthe world and man for some reason. The fact that God created the world out of nothing installsa vast distance between the worldviews of Judaism/Christianity and the Greeks. From theJudaic/Christian viewpoint, the ills and suffering that befall man cannot be conceptualized assimply in the nature of things (as it is for the Greeks), because things have no nature; nor canthese ills and sufferings be caused by a God who is conceived of as perfect and just. There isone, and only one possible suspect, that is, man himself. For the pre-Socratic philosophers,and for the Plato of the Timaeus, matter is not a product, it is simply given; and for him it isrecalcitrant to the reception of form, thus the impossibility of realizing the idea perfectly inmatter. If Job were to complain to Plato’s demiurge concerning his undeserved suffering, thedemiurge could reply, “It’s not my fault. Look what I had to work with.” However, this routeis not open to the biblical God, who instead asserts his power as creator and Job’s duty ofcreaturely obedience. As Martha Nussbaum claims, undeserved suffering is in the nature ofthings, “those things that merely happen.” Whereas in a universe created from nothing by anomnipotent God, there are no things that just happen. Tragedy is the genre that is based on theexperience of contingency; that is, from a moral point of view, not everything makes sense.

In the Greek experience, not everything makes sense. Here we can evoke the doublesignification of the word “sense” in French, which is not totally absent in English, asmeaning “signification” or “direction,” for example, sens unique (one way), or “Did youfollow the film?” In the Judaic-Christian experience, suffering is encoded as punishment forsin, and it is accompanied by the promise of redemption. In the Garden of Eden, before the

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fall, Adam and Eve live in perfect harmony with nature, without the necessity of work, thepain of childbirth or the fear of death. It is an act of disobedience, which begins the dramathat confers a meaning, a direction, to history. In Judaism, it is the Book of Daniel whichpromises a Messiah, and in Christianity it is the belief in the second coming of Christ, abelief that in the early Church was of equal importance with the resurrection of Jesus, whichprovides an end of history, that is, an “end” in the sense of a terminus, a completion, or aresolution of history.

It is my contention that the notion of creation from nothing contains within itself twolatencies that will, in a secular form, become the foundation for political theology: on theone hand, the idea that history has a direction, a terminus; and on the other hand, the conceptof an event. In the sense in which I mean it, an event is an occurrence that is in no wayanticipated prior to its appearance, neither in the order of knowledge nor in the order ofbeing. It falls outside of what Husserl calls “temporal protensions,” that is, the horizonsthat accompany all present perceptions. For Heidegger, this notion becomes what he calls“a horizon of pre-comprehension.” However, the event, like creation, comes from nowhereand falls outside of all horizons of pre-comprehension. Within the apocalyptic thought ofthe Judaic-Christian tradition, there are two dimensions that correspond to these notions,namely, that of a history that leads towards an end, a consummation, and that of an event thatinterrupts history as a process. My sense of this tension is well expressed in H.H. Rowley’sremark, “The prophets foretold the future that should arise out of the present, while theapocalyptists foretold the future that should break into the present.”7 The secularization ofthe first notion gives rise to the great philosophies of history of the 19th and early 20thcentury, most notably that of Hegel and Marx. The second notion gives rise to a type ofapocalyptic thought that emerges in the late 20th century and at the beginning of our owncentury. Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt are philosophers that we associate with this wayof thinking.

We can reflect on the first mode of secularization, the notion of a grand narrative, byconsidering the work of Karl Lowith. Turning first to the Introduction to his book, Meaningin History, where he writes,

The outstanding element . . . out of which an interpretation of history could arise at allis the basic experience of evil and suffering, and man’s quest for happiness . . . It is anattempt to understand the meaning of history as the meaning of suffering by historicalaction.8

This is to say that from the beginning, the notion of a philosophy of history is a theologicalproject, and as we argued above, one specific to the Judaic-Christian tradition. In his studyof philosophies of history, Lowith proceeds in a reverse historical order, beginning withBurckhardt and ending with the Bible. He goes from the secular versions of historicalinterpretation to their original theological sources. Whether explicitly or implicitly, Christian-inspired philosophies of history, in which past events are interpreted as pro-tending a futurethat gives these events a meaning, are “prophecies in reverse.”

It is through a certain telos that the events of the past become meaningful. Here we seethat there is a condensation between historical interpretation and eschatology. Lowith claimsthat the bearing of eschatological thought on the historical thought of the Occident is thatit conquers the flux of historical time, “which wastes away and dissolves its own creation,unless it is defined by an ultimate goal.”9 He points out that neither of the two great Greekhistorians, Herodotus or Thucydides, had any inclination to view the past in terms of a future



that would fulfill an ultimate goal or purpose. At this point, I must make it absolutely clearthat Lowith, himself, is not practicing political theology. In fact, he is profoundly distrustfulof any attempt to give history a universal or ultimate meaning; rather he is inclined to returnto the Greek conception of time as circular, and to view it as a part of nature. In his exileduring the Second World War in Japan, he was influenced by Eastern thought. He seeshimself as unmasking allegedly secular philosophies of history by showing their theologicalfoundation. He does this by demonstrating that these philosophies are practicing politicaltheology, unbeknownst to themselves.

Before turning to the thought of Hegel and Marx, let me begin by a consideration ofthe “proto-philosophy of history” in the work of Kant. The moral and onto-theologicaldimension of Kant’s reflection on History is evident. Kant judged that the violence of theFrench Revolution was immoral, that one should not participate in such action, and thosewho did deserve moral censure and shall receive no forgiveness either in this world or thenext. However, for the spectator of the revolution, the enthusiasm provoked by the principle,not by the violence, of the revolution – e.g., the rights of man, the installation of a republicanform of government and so forth – gives an indication of the noumenal course of historywhich cannot be known. As we know from The Critique of Judgment, teleological judgmentstake the form of reflective judgments rather than that of determined judgments. In the critiqueof teleological judgment, biological phenomena are elicited as instances of phenomena thatbehave as if they serve teleological ends.

In the case of history, the sign, the enthusiasm elicited from moral universality, does notprove that history is finalized towards the eventual recognition of man by man, rather it leadsus to a point at which we may judge reflectively (though it cannot be known) either thathistory has a direction, a sense, or that it is simply madness.

In an article, “On the Proverb: That May be True in Theory, But is of no Practical Use”(1793), Kant speaks of the spectacle of human history not viewed as if it serves teleologicalends. He writes “Observing this tragedy for awhile may perhaps be moving and instructive,but the curtain must finally fall. For in the long run it becomes a farce; and if the actors donot become weary of it, since they are fools, the spectator will when, after one or anotheract, he has sufficient grounds for assuming that the never ending piece will be eternallythe same.”10 In even stronger language, in his essay “Idea For A Universal History With ACosmopolitan Purpose,” he claims that “such a spectacle (human history) will force us toturn away in repulsion, and, by making us despair of ever finding any completed rationalaim behind it, would reduce us to hoping for it only in some other world.”11 It appears thatKant, like Shakespeare, entertains the idea that human history may well be a tale told by anidiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.

In an article entitled “The Concept of History,” Reinhart Koselleck makes the argumentthat when the concept of History, as a singular noun, emerges in the 18th century it quicklyeffects a metamorphosis into the philosophy of history. He writes, “Until then it had beenimpossible to think the term [history] without a subject.”12 Up until this time, it was a historyof Charlemagne, a history of France, and so forth; history appeared with the genitive of. Inthe 18th century History became its own proper agent. He agues that from the beginning thisfreestanding concept became a “meta-concept.” “Behind this new conceptuality which refersto itself, history as agent, it is not far to see the Providence of God, hidden or transformed.”13

It is in Hegel’s thought that this metamorphosis of History into the philosophy of Historyachieves its most elegant expression. Lowith begins his chapter on Hegel with the famousquote from the Preface to the Lectures on the Philosophy of History:



But even regarding history as the slaughter bench at which the happiness of peoples, thewisdom of states and the virtue of individuals has been sacrificed, the question necessarilyarises: To what final aim these enormous sacrifices have been afforded?14

According to Lowith, the theological dimensions of Hegel’s thought is evidenced in thephrase, “the question necessarily arises: To what final aim?” He argues that it does notnecessarily arise; it only arises within the framework of the Judaic-Christian tradition. Asevidence that the question does not necessarily arise, he cites a letter of Goethe, the modernpagan, which states that “The truth [of history], namely, that at all times, and in all countries,things have been miserable.”15 According to Goethe, men have always been in fear andtroubled, they have always pained and tortured one another. For him this is life; it is the wayit always has been and the way it will always remain, it is the lot of man.

Lowith views Marx as a practitioner of political theology, with the proletariat playing therole of the chosen people. It is because of the total alienation of the proletariat that it is thevehicle for the creation of the new man. He cites Marx’s 1856 article, inserting an exclamationpoint in one sentence, “We know that the new forms of social production to achieve a goodlife need only [!] a new man.”16 He finds it astonishing that Marx does not recognize thereligious origins of notions like: the creation of a new man, the total redemption of history,the entering into an historical epoch in which all conflicts of prehistory would be resolved,and so forth. As Marx viewed the ideological superstructure as being fueled by productiverelations, Lowith views Marx’s “scientific” theory as being driven by a religious spirit ofprophetism. The Communist Manifesto is, first of all, a prophetic document.17 Accordingto Lowith, the “final struggle” between the bourgeois and the proletariat mirrors, in secularform, the struggle between Christ and the Antichrist at the last stage of history, accordingto the Book of Revelation. He views the total vindication of the most oppressed class as arepetition of the theme of the cross and redemption; and the transformation from the realmof necessity into the realm of freedom, as a secular mirror image of the transformation of thecity of man into the city of God.

Lowith views Hegel as no less a political theologian than Marx. While I am generally,with reservations to be sure, sympathetic to Lowith’s critical reading of Marx, I am lessso with his treatment of Hegel. He acknowledges, but does not sufficiently reflect on, thefact that Hegel, unlike Marx, recognizes the relation of his philosophy to the theology ofthe Christian religion. He speaks of his own philosophy as a “theodicy, a justification ofthe ways of God.”18 Therefore, to show an essential relation of Hegel’s philosophy to theChristian religion does not count as a critique of Hegel’s thought as it does for Marx’sphilosophy. Hegel claims that religion, Christianity in particular, is “true” but it is trueas “picture thinking.” Religion does not reach the level of conceptual thought. Its truth issublated, negated and preserved in philosophy. According to Lowith this is simply hubris:the pretention to transform faith, which for him is aware of our finitude, into a knowledge thatbelieves itself to be absolute. One need not underwrite Hegel’s contention of the universal“truth” of Christianity, nor accept his elevation or degradation, depending on one’s point ofview, of religion into philosophy in order to maintain that Hegel may not have been wrongin refusing to dismiss the role of religion in the constitution of the political. We will returnto this below, in the context of a discussion of the thought of Claude Lefort.

My claim is that this mode of secularization, that of the grand narrative, has becomeapoiratic. It bears within itself no further possibilities; it has been exhausted. Severe critiquesof Marx, including that of Lowith, have rendered anything resembling orthodox Marxism



an anachronism. The constitution of Marxism as a legitimating ideology of a totalitarianstate is not irrelevant is not adequately disposed of by claiming, for example, that SovietMarxism is not “genuine Marx.” A Christian may denounce the Church as not practicing“genuine” Christianity, since Jesus said, “My kingdom is not of this world.” But Marx neversaid anything like this; his theory cannot be divorced from its presence in history.

The phrase “philosophy of history” was coined by Voltaire. It is not by chance that it wasinvented by the author of Candide, perhaps the most biting satire on the belief in DivineProvidence. I am in agreement with Koselleck when he writes, “The philosophy of history isfrom the beginning a polemical concept, it is directed from a critical point of view, against thebelief in Scripture and on a metaphysical plane, against Divine Providence.”19 It is a critiqueof Providence but, employing the concept of Hans Blumenberg, it is a critique that comes tore-occupy the place of Providence, thus acquiring its totalizing and absolute dimension.

Nonetheless, the issue of the secularization of theological motifs is not a closed book,because another mode of transformation has emerged that, I contend, is not linked to thenarrative structure that the Judaic and the Christian Bibles impose on history. Rather it islinked to the notion of event exemplified in the idea of creation from nothing: “the emergenceof absolute novelty.” The dominant notion of such a theory will not be “the consummation,or fulfillment, of history either as accomplished or as exhausted,” but will be linked to thenotion of “the radical interruption of history.” It is worth noting that Augustine’s argumentagainst the circular conceptions of the Greeks is not a theoretical or a cosmological argument,rather it is a moral argument. In the Greek notion of a universe, the absolute singularity ofan event is precluded. However, for Christianity, the creation of the world, and the deathand resurrection of Christ, are unique events not subject to repetition, and not portendedin any prior state. In Greek thought there could be no hope for eternal salvation, therewould only be cycles of misery and of bliss. Augustine makes it clear that his defenseof “the concept of the unique event” is ultimately tied to Christian doctrine. For him thedoctrine of cyclical recurrence is an abomination, “hostile to Christian faith and thereforefalse.”

Let us now turn toward a mode of transformation of theological concepts into politicalcategories that can no longer actually be called secularization, since its end product is notsecular. For this mode of thought, the unique event comes center stage. Let us begin witha reflection on aspects of the thought of Carl Schmitt. In Schmitt’s thought, the meaningof political theology undergoes a thorough transformation. When he writes in his bookPolitical Theology, “all significant concepts of the modern state are secularized theologicalconcepts,”20 his meaning is quite different from what the same statement would have meanthad it come from the pen of Karl Lowith. Although Lowith never used this formulationin Meaning in History, he does argue such a thesis, but for him it is an unmasking of ap-parently secular notions that are really theology in disguise. For him this is clearly meantto be a critique of these political theories. The great philosophies of history, especially thethought Marx, do not understand themselves. Lowith’s understanding of them is incom-patible with their own self-understanding. He views these theological origins as a scandal.Whereas for Schmitt, the theological origins are their strength, it is the secularization that isa scandal.

Before Schmitt, the term “political theology” was a term of opprobrium, an accusation thatone hurled at one’s opponents. “Schmitt made it, this polemical concept [political theology]his own, he used it to characterize his own position. By means of it, and simultaneously, heturned it against his opponent”21 Schmitt is practicing political theology; he is not accusinghis opponents of practicing it in spite of themselves. According to him, political theology



is not a fact of intellectual history or an effect of the disenchantment of the world; itis, essentially, a political process. He characterizes political modernity as a movement ofneutralization, of depoliticization, in which the state becomes a bureaucratic mechanism inwhich the centrality of decision is suppressed and transformed into an infinite discussion inwhich it is impossible to distinguish friend from enemy. The product of this neutralization,he calls political romanticism. If the political romantic were offered a choice between Jesusand Barabbas, he would propose the formation of a committee of inquiry.

Although often nuanced and insightful, in the end Schmitt’s characterization of democraticdecision-making is a caricature, due to his contention of the primacy of the state of exception.During normal times the sovereign sleeps. It is the state of exception that shows the “truth”of the political. He writes: “The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle intheology.”22 For the modern understanding, a miracle is a divine intervention in the naturalcourse of things. I must recall that above we have cited both Remi Brague and ThomasPangle, to the effect there is no concept of nature, the Greek physis, in the Bible; there areonly miracles. The behavior of things is always an effect of the will of God. One simplygets used to the way God usually does things. In like manner, Schmitt claims that to anobserver who takes the trouble to look at the total picture of contemporary jurisprudence,there appears a huge cloak-and-dagger drama in which the state acts in many disguises, butalways as the same invisible person. The secularization that leads to political romanticism isprecisely the effacement of the figure of the sovereign, thus initiating the cloak-and-daggergame by which the sovereign is effaced behind the Law. We shall return to the notion of thefigure and the place of the sovereign below in our discussion of the thought of Claude Lefort.

Nevertheless, for Schmitt, it is in the process of neutralization that “the decisionistic andpersonalistic element in the concept of sovereignty was lost.”23 The reason that decisionisticcreation is the truth of the political is that what has been created from nothing cannot takeon an ontological inertia of its own. As the chair, fashioned by the carpenter, can existautonomously from the carpenter, because the wood used in its “creation” existed prior tothe carpenter. What is created from nothing must be continuously maintained in existenceby the act of its creator. Schmitt at times introduces a certain ambiguity into the relation ofhis political concepts to Christianity, and specifically to Catholic dogma, suggesting that itis perhaps only an analogy. Nevertheless, any ambiguity is dispelled in a letter quoted byMeier: “That is the secret key word of my entire spiritual and political existence: the strugglefor the particularly Catholic sharpening (against the neutralizers, the aesthetic idlers, againstabortionists, body-burners and pacifists)”24 In Schmitt’s political theology what has beentransformed from Christian dogma into political theory is not the narration of the fall and thesalvation, but the notion of creation from nothing, the absolute, unmotivated, unanticipatedevent. The normal state is an illusion that occults the creative activity of the sovereign,of God. In my seminar on Hobbes, when we were reading Schmitt’s book on Hobbes, astudent captured Schmitt’s mentality in remarking, “Normality sucks.” In 1916, Schmittraged against the bourgeois’ obsession with security, this “age of security.”25 He writes thisin 1916, in the middle of the most horrific bloodletting known in history up until that time.He reiterates the same sentiment in 1970, 25 years after the end of the Second World War.

Now we turn our attention to certain aspects of the thought of Walter Benjamin. Althoughin fact they corresponded with regard to their notion of the event, nonetheless it is notwithout a certain distaste that one moves from a thinker deeply implicated in Nazism toone who was, to use the phrase of Antonin Artaud, “suicided by” the Nazis. However, theirenormous difference notwithstanding, they have at least one thing in common, namely, theirtransformation of the event motif from theology into political theory. And, as we argued



above, the event par excellence is Divine creation. Unless one is willing to dismiss his ownstatements, the fact that there is a theological dimension in Benjamin’s thought is beyonddispute. In the first of his theses on the philosophy of history, “the little hunchback” pullingthe strings from under the table, by which the Turkish puppet wins all the chess games, istheology that must today be “kept out of sight.”26 Again in the Arcades Project, he writes,“my thinking is related to theology as a blotting pad is related to ink. It is saturated withit.”27 In his article “Body politics: Benjamin’s Dialectical Materialism between Brecht andthe Frankfurt School,”28 Reiner Nagel notes the proximity of the thought of Benjamin toSchmitt on the notion of the exception. Benjamin approvingly cites the opening sentence ofCarl Schmitt’s Political Theology: “The sovereign is he who decides the exception.”29 Henotes that Benjamin could have underwritten a line of Schmitt: “In the exception, the forceof real life breaks through the crust of mechanisms perfected in repetition.”30

Now I will discuss the theological dimensions of Benjamin’s thought through a reflectionon his philosophy of language, as I believe that it is there that “the little hunchback” becomesmost visible. In his essay “On Language as Such and in the Language of Man,” Benjaminbegins with the sentence, “Every expression of human mental life can be understood asa kind of language.”31 At first it would appear that Benjamin is simply evoking a broadnotion of language, one in which we could speak of the language of music, or even of bodylanguage, the idea of language as significant expression. However, it soon becomes apparentthat his notion of language is even broader than the one we had expected. For him language isinherent in “absolutely everything.” He writes, “There is no event or thing in either animateor inanimate nature that does not in some way partake of language, for it is in the nature ofall to communicate their mental meanings.”32

At this point, it is necessary to recognize that the “in some way” in which everythingpartakes is not that language is projected on them, for then language would have its origin insubjective, or even in intersubjective, intentions. Nothing could be further from Benjamin’smind. In his “Epistimo-Critical Prologue” he writes, “Truth is an intentionless state of be-ing . . . Truth is the death of intention.”33 He rejects intentionality in its ordinary voluntaristicsense, and also in its meaning within Husserl’s phenomenology, which as Derrida has shown,are not unconnected. The “mental being” of things communicates itself in language, and notthrough language. For Benjamin, “Languages have no speaker.”34 Language is not to beconceived of as an instrumental expression of a subject; rather “Language communicates thelinguistic being of things,” which is to say, “All language communicates itself.”35 I do nottake this to mean that all language is self-referential, but that there is a logos of the world,that things have a linguistic being. Man, too, has a linguistic being; the linguistic being ofman is his language. If things express their linguistic being to man, we must ask: “how doesman express his linguistic being?” And the answer would be: “the linguistic being of man isto name things.”

It is at this point that Benjamin brings up, in order to reject, the conventionalist theoryof language which claims that man names things in order to communicate with other men.He argues that if this “bourgeois theory” were to be maintained, then the relation of wordand thing would be arbitrary. According to Benjamin, Man, by the verbal act of naming,participates in the act by which God created the world. “God’s creation is completed whenthings receive their names from man, for whom in name language alone speaks.”36 Man,Adam, in Paradise completed God’s creation by naming it. Language is fundamentallyrevelation. “The proper name is the communion of man with the creative word of God.”37

Nevertheless, the equation of name and reality is only realized perfectly in the word of God.Adam’s naming, in the paradisiac original language, is already a translation.



But this paradisiac language is not the language that we speak, because between it andus stands the Fall. Benjamin interprets the Fall linguistically. He seizes upon an archaicmotif; namely, that Evil is nothingness, a privation of being. As nothingness, it has noname. “The knowledge to which the snake seduces, that of good and evil, is nameless.”38

It is at the moment of the Fall, that the conventionalist theory of language “becomes true.”From then on, there is no longer a motivated relation between word and thing. “The wordmust [now] communicate something (other than itself).”39 The immediate and motivatedlink between word and thing is destroyed, and in its place the word of judgment emerges;and judgment does not impart a knowledge of good and evil. Since evil is non-being andnameless, there can be no knowledge of it, because knowledge is a translation of names. TheFall, as a mediation, introduces abstraction, the multiplicity of languages, and the arbitraryrelationship of signifier and signified. The Fall imposes a silence on nature. This is the greatsadness of nature: that things have lost their proper names, that they have become subject to“overnaming,” the deepest linguistic cause of all melancholy. The proliferation of names isthe condition of myth, and of judgment, understood as a privative mode of language, as the“mythical origin of law.”40

The task of the revolutionary is to oppose mythical violence with divine violence. ForBenjamin, “mythical violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-destroying.”41 In virtuallyevery sphere of life, he opposes the mythical and the divine, the secondary and the original,particularly, in the sphere of language. The opposition is always structured in terms of atheological problematic, even if, at times, theology is under the table.

Benjamin’s rejection of parliamentary democracy as lawmaking and sustaining violencewas elaborated at the same time as the “leftward turn of the Comintern,” which elaborated thedisastrous doctrine of social fascism that characterized the Social Democrats as no better thanthe fascists. At this point, perhaps it has occurred to the attentive reader that the author hasno sympathy with the practice of political theology. If one thinks that, indeed, “God is dead,”why should she/he not demand, with Feuerbach, that theologians become anthropologists?And thus reject the whole business of political theology that could be then consigned to the“dustbin of history.” In a certain sense, strains of a liberal tradition have done exactly this,claiming there is no relation of the theological to the political. The political is completelya manmade artifact, generated by a contract or some other means. We wish to suggest thatthere are good reasons not to move in this direction.

There are two reasons for my doing this, the first of which would not be terribly com-pelling were it not for the second. The topic of political theology is, as a matter of fact, muchunder discussion at the present time. For example the recent publication of Hent de Vries’s700-page anthology Political Theologies: Public Religion in Postsecular Age; and CharlesTaylor’s A Secular World; the work of William Connolly and Fred Dallmayr, among others.If there were not good philosophical reasons for this discussion, we could simply dismissit as trendy. However, I think that there are such reasons. The tradition that extends fromHegel through Nietzsche and Heidegger and beyond has argued, to my mind convincingly,that our thought is not sui generis; that to think is “to respond.” We are always alreadyin a pre-structured conceptual field, and philosophy itself is an institution. Our most rig-orously enacted reflections never reach the root of things, Things present themselves to usas Kafka wrote, “not by their roots but by some point or other situated toward the middleof them.”42

The writings of Claude Lefort approach modern democracy with an eye to its noveltyand, at the same time, its continuity with the past. He begins his article, “The Permanenceof the Theologico Political?”43 with a citation from Hegel’s Encyclopedia: “It has been



the monstrous blunder of our time to try to look upon these inseparables [religion and thepolitical] as separable from one another, and even as mutually indifferent.”44

For Lefort, unlike Lowith, it is not a question of unmasking a theological dimension ofHegel’s thought, but of showing that Hegel’s position in this regard is phenomenologicallywell-founded. In details that I cannot rehearse here, Lefort adumbrates a nuanced conceptionof the relation of religion to philosophy and to political theory. He writes:

When it remains true to its inspiration . . . what philosophy discovers in religion is a modeof portraying or dramatizing the relations that human beings establish with something thatgoes beyond empirical time and the space within which they establish relations with oneanother. This work of the imagination stages a different time, a different space. Any attemptto reduce it to being simply a product of human activity is doomed . . . Of course, humanbeings populate the invisible with things they see. Yet anything that bears the mark of theirexperience also bears the mark of an ordeal.45

Once we recognize that humanity opens on to itself by being held in an opening it does notcreate, we have to accept that the change in religion is not to be read simply as a sign thatthe divine is a human invention, but as “a sign of the deciphering of the divine or, beneaththe appearance of the divine, an excess of Being over appearance.”46

In Lefort’s work, there is an ambiguous permanence of the theological dimension ofthe political. He does not base the political on religious revelation, but he does recognizethat there is an ontological dimension that subtends the political of which religion gives animaginary interpretation. This ontological dimension testifies, a term dear to Lefort, to the“non-coincidence of society with itself,” a non-coincidence that is, in very different ways,respected in the monarchy and in democracy, but is effaced in a totalitarian regime. ForLefort, political modernity retains the place of the other, the recognition of our non-self-identity, but not the figure of the other: God, the gods, ancestors, etc. To my mind, Lefort’sthought gives us a way to engage with current “post secular discourse” without dismissing itas a counter-Enlightenment reaction or succumbing to its dogmatism.

Let me conclude by returning to the citation from Leo Strauss that opened these reflections.I wish both to retain and to problematize the disjunctive opposition between religion and thepolitical. Lefort’s thought is an oeuvre of political philosophy, not of political theology. Hepractices it within the phenomenological tradition that demands a reflection on our presentpolitical experience. In his reflection on modern democracy, he discovers a trace of itstheological origin not in the sense of some sort of residual belief in God, a philosophicallymore sophisticated concept of God, the history of which has been analyzed by Mark Lillain his book The Stillborn God.47 After the break which the democratic revolution instituted,religion remains but “its efficacy is no longer symbolic but imaginary.”48 It remains withinthe political world, but it no longer is that which structures the relation of power andlegitimacy.

NOTES

1. Leo Strauss, “Athens and Jerusalem,” Studies in Platonic Philosophy (Chicago: University ofChicago Press. 1983),147–174.

2. Remy Brague, The Wisdom of the World: The Human Experience of the Universe in WesternThought, trans. Teresa Lavender Fagan (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2003).

3. Thomas Pangle, Political Philosophy and the God of Abraham (Baltimore: John Hopkins Univ.Press, 2003).



4. Ibid., 29.5. Ibid.6. Remy Brague, The Law of God: The Philosophical History of an Idea, trans. Lydia G. Cochrane

(Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).7. H.A. Rowley, Apocalypse Theory, ed. Malcolm Bull (Oxford: Blackwell, 1995), 45.8. Karl Lowith, Meaning in History (Chicago: Chicago Univ. Press, 1949), 3.9. Ibid.10. Immanuel Kant, “On the Proverb: That May be True in Theory, But is of No Practical Use

(1793),” Perpetual Peace and Other Essays, trans. and intro. Ted Humphrey (Indianapolis/Cambridge:Hackett Publishing Co.), 61–92.

11. Immanuel Kant, “Idea For a Universal History With A Cosmopolitan Intent (1784),” PerpetualPeace and Other Essays, 29–40.

12. Reinhart Koselleck, “Le concept d’ histoire,” L’experience de l’histoire (Paris; EHESS, 1978),18.

13. Ibid., 20.14. Lowith, Meaning in History, 53.15. Ibid., 229.16. Ibid., 36.17. Ibid., 43.18. Ibid., 55.19. Koselleck, “La concept d’histoire,” 41.20. Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty, trans. George

Schwab (Cambridge: MIT Press), 36.21. Heinrich Meier, The Lesson of Carl Schmitt: Four Chapters on the Distinction between Political

Theology and Political Philosophy, trans. Marcus Brainard (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press,1998), 8.

22. Schmitt, Political Theology, 36.23. Ibid., 48.24. Meier, The Lessons of Carl Schmitt, 70.25. Ibid., 4.26. Walter Benjamin, Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (London: Jonathan Cape, 1970), 25.27. Walter Benjamin, The Arcade Project, trans. Howard Eiland and Kevin McLaughlin (Cambridge:

Harvard Univ. Press, 1999), 471.28. Rainer Nagele, “Body Politics: Benjamin’s Dialectical Materialism Between Brecht and the

Frankfurt School,” The Cambridge Companion To Walter Benjamin, ed. David Ferris (Cambridge:Cambridge Univ. Press, 2004), 152–176.

29. Schmitt, Political Theology, xviii.30. Rainer Nagele, “Body Politics: Benjamin’s Dialectical Materialism Between Brecht and the

Frankfurt School,” 175.31. Walter Benjamin, “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” Reflections, trans.

Edmund Jephcott (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1978), 314.32. Ibid.33. Walter Benjamin, The Origins of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (New York: Verso,

1985), 36.34. “On Language as Such and on the Language of Man,” 316.35. Ibid.36. Ibid., 319.37. Ibid., 324.38. Ibid., 327.39. Ibid.40. Ibid., 328.41. Walter Benjamin, “The Critique of Violence,” Reflections, 297.42. Cited by Claude Lefort in Merleau-Ponty’s The Visible and the Invisible, trans. Alphonso Lingis

(Evanston: Northwestern Univ. Press, 1968), xxvi.43. Claude Lefort, “The Permanence of the Theologio-Political?” Democracy and Political Theory,

213–255.44. G.W.F. Hegel, Philosophy of Mind, trans. William Wallace (Clarendon Press, Oxford, 1971),

156–157.45. Lefort, “The Permanence of the Theologico-Political?” 223.



46. Ibid.47. Mark Lilla, The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West (New York: Alfred Knox,

2007).48. Lefort, “The Permanence of the Theologico-Political?” 255.

Bernard Flynn is Professor of Philosophy as the State University of New York, Empire StateCollege, and an Adjunct Professor of Philosophy at the New School for Social Research. Heis the author of Political Philosophy at the Closure of Metaphysics and also The Philosophyof Claude Lefort: Interpreting the Political.


Political Theology and Its Vicissitudes

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