Divine Violence

Walter Benjamin and the Eschatology of Sovereignty

James Martel

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781136632556
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Law
• Subtopic: Law Theory & Practice
• Index: Law

Divine Violence looks at the question of political theology and its connection to sovereignty. It argues that the practice of sovereignty reflects a Christian eschatology, one that proves very hard to overcome even by left thinkers, such as Arendt and Derrida, who are very critical of it. These authors fall into a trap described by Carl Schmitt whereby one is given a (false) choice between anarchy and sovereignty, both of which are bound within—and return us to—the same eschatological envelope. In Divine Violence, the author argues that Benjamin supplies the correct political theology to help these thinkers. He shows how to avoid trying to get rid of sovereignty (the "anarchist move" that Schmitt tells us forces us to "decide against the decision") and instead to seek to de-center and dislocate sovereignty so that it's mythological function is disturbed. He does this with the aid of divine violence, a messianic force that comes into the world to undo its own mythology, leaving nothing in its wake. Such a move clears the myths of sovereignty away, turning us to our own responsibility in the process. In that way, the author argues, Benjamin succeeds in producing an anarchism that is not bound by Schmitt's trap but which is sustained even while we remain dazzled by the myths of sovereignty that structure our world.

Divine Violence will be of interest to students of political theory, to those with an interest in political theology, philosophy and deconstruction, and to those who are interested in thinking about some of the dilemmas that the 'left' finds itself in today.

Part I

Sovereign temporalities

Chapter 1

The political theology

of sovereignty

Having laid out some of the bare bones of the claims of this book, let me begin the argument proper by examining the ongoing connection between theology and politics that has constituted sovereignty for as long as the term has been in use. Here, as already suggested, I want to examine the relationship between Christian eschatology and the practice of politics. It would be wrong to consider this description a ‘history’ of sovereignty, insofar as I am not suggesting a direct causal relationship between one set of events and another (although most of the sources I will be looking at do make such a claim). Instead, I am trying to think of the origins of sovereignty in Benjaminian terms, as when he writes:

The term origin is not intended to describe the process by which the existent came into being, but rather to describe that which emerges from the process of becoming and disappearance. Origin is an eddy in the stream of becoming, and in its current it swallows the material involved in the process of genesis.¹

I want to undertake the following examination of the ‘origins’ of the concept of sovereignty in this spirit. Commensurate with his understanding of truth in the world more generally, Benjamin cautions us that we can never truly know the ‘origin’ of something. Instead, we can be attuned to its coming and going, its appearance, disappearance and reappearance in new guises. It is this stream of continuity between theological concepts and political ones that I would like to briefly focus on here, connecting two (or more) moments in time not as being in a causal relationship but rather as being mutually reflective and interactive. Let me begin with the question of the relationship between sovereignty and Christianity in the Middle Ages.

Sovereignty and Christian eschatology

The idea that sovereignty is connected to Christian doctrine has long been noted by scholars. In looking at the concatenation of eschatological doctrine and the production of sovereignty in its ‘modern’ form, many scholars concentrate on the period between the eighth and seventeenth centuries in Western Europe.²

Focusing on the rise of the Carolingian dynasty, Walter Ullman tells us that in the high Middle Ages, as Western Europe grew increasingly Christianized, a more traditional form of what he called ‘royal monarchy’, based on blood and ancestry, was usurped and superseded by a new form of ‘theocratic’ or ‘eccle-siological’ monarchy, based on grace and anointment.³ With the backing of Frankish bishops and other leaders of the Church, the Frankish monarchy was reinvented and in some ways subverted by this new form of authority. Ullman reads this as an attack on the political by the ecclesiastical. At the same time, however, the usurpation of royal monarchy (which Ullman suggests does not disappear but is merely subsumed by the ecclesiastical) allows for a far broader and more universal application of royal power and prerogative. By turning the Frankish people into a ‘Christian body’, Christian doctrines were extended to the political realm in ways that served to permit its later form to develop.⁴ The notion of power and authority went from something very specific and local, based on fealty to one dynasty and one blood, to a far more generalizable principle of rule that could extend indefinitely into the world.

If the Carolingian renaissance for Ullman represents an early usurpation of the political by the ecclesiastical, this process perhaps comes to its culmination several centuries later in the rise of formal doctrines of state sovereignty. Ernst Kantorowicz famously tracks the development of sovereignty as it stems from and is influenced by medieval theology and political practices, specifically focusing on the eschatological underpinnings of this relationship. While the Carolingian monarchs were constrained by their reliance on ecclesiastical ministers, later iterations of the state formally shed their religious trappings. Yet, as Kantorowicz notes, the march towards a secularized state preserves the fundamentally Christian character of rule by creating an analogous set of institutions that mirror Christian practices (albeit with important and key differences). Kantorowicz traces a rough passage of authority from divine sanction to law and then to the state itself. Tracking this development, Kantorowicz tells us that the original Christian distinction between ‘human nature and Divine Grace’:

moved towards a juristically formulated polarity of ‘Law of Nature and laws of man’, or to that of ‘Nature and man’, and, a little later, to that of ‘Reason and society’, where Grace no longer had a discernible place.⁵

We see in this secularization the perpetuation of a form of analogy where the secular and the divine remain in tension, even as the divine transforms itself into something no longer recognizable as such.

For Kantorowicz, a key transformation of Christian eschatology, starting around the thirteenth century, permitted the transition from a purely theological form of order to a political one. The long-standing Augustinian model of time, whereby heaven was eternal and the world was impermanent and temporary, was replaced by a concept, derived from Aristotle via Aquinas, that the world was continuous. In this way, time, which for Augustine represented the transitory frailness of the world, became ‘the symbol of the eternal continuity and immortality of the great collective called the human race.’⁶ Here, an earthly politics became possible and itself sacred; time became the envelope that contained earthly striving in a way that could be remembered, revered and sanctified. In this way, Kantorowicz tells us that time was ‘transferred from heaven to earth and recovered by man.’⁷

Summarizing this transfer of eschatological principles, Kantorowicz writes that what was:

epidemic in the thirteenth century became endemic in the fourteenth and fifteenth: one did not accept the infinite continuity of a ‘World without End,’ but accepted a quasi-infinite continuity; one did not believe in the uncreatedness of the world and its endlessness, but one began to act as though it were endless; one presupposed continuities where continuity had neither noticed nor visualized before; and one was ready to modify, revise and repress, though not to abandon, the traditional feelings about limitations in Time, and about the transitoriness of human institutions and actions.⁸

Kantorowicz tells us that the older, Augustinian sense of time was not lost but that this new sense of time as continuity was emphasized over and above it. We thus do not have a ‘new’ eschatology so much as we have a shift of emphasis within the doctrine (a shift worth bearing in mind when we ourselves feel bound by eschatology in ways that do not feel particularly ‘shiftable’ today).

This newer sense of time became the basis for the rise of the new, sovereign state. The ‘transfer’ to earth of the celestial kingdom and its sense of possibility and endurance, permitted the rise of the idea of sempiternity, the endurance of institutions and nations on earth and in time.

Kantorowicz notes how these ideas took on very specific forms in terms of the rise of the state during this period. The idea of a Church that would last until the day of judgment was readily transferred to the courts, to the state's fiscal holdings and to the dignity and crown of the monarchy. All of these functions were said to ‘never die’ (as opposed to the mortal individuals who fulfilled these roles at any given time). Eventually these so-called para-ecclesiastical institutions left the Church itself behind. The usurpation of political power by ecclesiastical power that Ullman describes in the ninth century is thus reversed by the fourteenth century (or perhaps, more accurately, the distinction between the political and the ecclesiastical, never clear or stable, keeps changing in favor of one form over another).

The ultimate bearer of this notion of endurance in time becomes vested in the idea of the ‘the people’. Kantorowicz speaks of the ‘co-agency of an eternal God and a sempiternal people’.⁹ The people form what he calls a ‘ corpus mysticum ’, which eventually becomes a ‘ corpus politicum’.¹⁰ And at the head of the people was the king and, perhaps even more crucially, the ‘crown’. Whereas, as already noted, the king as an individual would die, the crown did not. And the crown was not merely a symbolic reference to the king but to the ‘prerogative and sovereign rights … responsible for the whole community’ (as distinct from the body politic itself).¹¹ Kantorowicz further tells us that the crown was the ‘embodiment of all sovereign rights – within the realm and without – of the whole body politic, was superior to all its individual members, including the king, though not separated from them.’¹² This doctrine then, which bears, by analogy, the divine, as opposed to the physical, nature of Christ, serves as the anchor of modern eschatology; the divine spark now reincarnated as the crown is what makes human sempiternity holy, what resists the corrupting and fleeting influences of time. This concept, Kantorowicz tells us, is further metamorphosed so that by the sixteenth century (at least in England) it becomes vested in the state ‘which was not only above its members, but also divorced from them.’¹³ Here, we begin to see the recognizable outlines of contemporary forms of sovereignty already coming into place and reflecting various earlier iterations.

As Daniel Engster also emphasizes in his own work on this period, the critical point to note is that the state's power and authority remain valid because of this connection to the divine. As he tells us, speaking specifically of the seventeenth century:

The state was no longer said to be the universal representative of God on earth but instead the universal representative of the people. Liberal theorists likewise continued to call upon the state to establish a moral and unified community standing apart from the outside temporal world. While the state was stripped of its overtly sacred veneer, it thus remained an exalted institution in form and purpose. Only the surface features of state theory were detached form their divine origins.¹⁴

In this way, doctrines such as raison d’état , the state's prerogative to carry out seemingly immoral acts for the sake of the public interest, were justified as reflecting the state's unique and sanctified role. Without this sanction, the state itself would share in the temporary and fallen aspect of temporality that we suffer as individuals (and, by extension, so would ‘the people’). The divine continues to justify the state's separation from the people that it nominally only represents. As we will see further in Balibar's commentary, this divine connection to sovereignty does not fade, even in modern times; it is preserved in the very sense of time and authority that constitute the bases for sovereignty as a contemporary practice.¹⁵

While these authors tend to treat Christian eschatology as an ‘origin’, taken in the ordinary sense of the word, as already mentioned, I prefer to focus on the ongoing and complex dance that we see between the theological and the political in this genealogy. The point here, once again, is that one cannot easily separate the political from the concepts that help to produce and shape it. At times, the political seems to emerge, alone and autonomous. At other times it seems to disappear into its ecclesiastical rival. As sovereignty itself changes as a concept and as a practice, we see an ongoing dynamic which does not and cannot resolve itself. Such a state of affairs continues into our own time (as we have already seen with Brown's analysis of the ‘reemergence’ of the theological at a moment when the secular guise is increasingly being disrupted).

Modern readings of Christian eschatology

In terms of contemporary readings of sovereignty, the idea of sovereignty as a kind of break with past practices (very much including Christian ones) has tended to predominate in the literature. Authors ranging from Kant to Habermas have promoted an idea of sovereignty as being sui generis and not merely a reiteration of earlier theological practices. But of course there are many, and important, exceptions to this literature. Even as he himself participates to some extent in a discourse of modern sovereignty as a distinct break from past practices, Carl Schmitt articulates exactly how this notion of a break itself disguises the crucial (and theological) continuities with medieval and Christian notions of sovereignty. In Political Theology (and especially in the chapter by that name), Schmitt argues that modernity is born out of a formal rejection of an earlier theological (and Christian) conception of the miracle.¹⁶ The idea of God as a sovereign who directly intervenes in the world via the ‘exception’ of the miracle gives way to a new concept of a legal order which ‘reject[s] the exception in every form’.¹⁷ In ...