The Anointed Judge

Political Theology and Charismatic Constituent Authority

“The Messiah will only come when he will no longer be necessary. He will come one day after his advent. He will not come on the day of the Last Judgement, but on the day after.” -Franz Kafka

“That these put an end to the slavery that is in the world, and rescue us from a multiplicity of rulers and ten thousand tyrants.” -Tatian

When Proudhon, the nineteenth century patriarch of anarchism, brandished his pen against the constitutional liberals of his day, he did not do so as a theoretician or policy-maker. Proudhon did not criticize liberals for inefficiency, that their form of government did not benefit the majority or remove social burdens. Rather, Proudhon made a theological critique, a counter-myth against the God of liberalism as the Satan of freedom:

God is stupidity and cowardice; God is hypocrisy and falsehood; God is tyranny and misery; God is evil. As long as humanity shall bend before an altar, humanity, the slave of kings and priests, will be condemned; as long as one man, in the name of God, shall receive the oath of another man, society will be founded on perjury; peace and love will be banished from among mortals. God, take yourself away! for, from this day forth, cured of your fear and become wise, I swear, with hand extended to heaven, that you are only the tormentor of my reason, the spectre of my conscience. (God is Evil, Man is Free)

Proudhon’s rage was directed focused on the liberal reformers of his day. It was Voltaire and Rousseau who, not believing in God personally, believed God was a necessary fiction for morality to sustain society. But Proudhon believed that even if God did exist it would be necessary to destroy him. God was the idea of government and authority, though one that was associated now with the bourgeoisie and not the throne or aristocracy. The new clergy of France advocated for a political theology of parliamentarian debate, a far cry from the royal absolutism of Bossuet but no less tyrannical. No different than Deists, the new liberal Catholics valorized the constitution and rule of law. Therefore, Satan was still necessary to war against this god, a demand to tear down all powers for a religion of man. Mixing his metaphors, this liberation was also the essence of Jesus Christ’s mission when he overthrew the money changers. “Christianity has been the prophecy, and socialism the realization,” Proudhon proudly declared against all capitalists. A new theology would soon set man free.

What Proudhon grasped, along with other Romantics (such as Blake and Wordsworth), was the need for a new myth to establish a new order. Every polity, even an anarchic socialist polity, required a divinity to found it. The new order could only come through the voice of a god, even if that god was man himself. Antiquity bore this out consistently, where Sparta had her Lycurgus and Athens her Solon. Even Socrates, after his dialectical rejection of all custom and opinion, relied on the divinity of his daemon to craft the myths of the new Republic. Only a god could legislate and only a new law could establish a new order.

A century later, Alexandre Kojeve understood this process unfold through the Hegelian dialectic. A Marxist and Materialist, Hegel had alone accomplished what all philosophers sought for Human history, an exit from history and the completion of the myth. Every myth, even Plato’s myths, could be challenged and remythicized. The theology of deistic liberal Christianity could elicit Proudhon’s Satan, Wordworth’s Prometheus, or Blake’s Orc. The process had no end, and thus the tradition of Western philosophy was an endless search to prove these myths, only ever eliciting an eventual backlash as a process of social forces. Every myth and counter-myth engaged in monologue, even when it was formed as a dialogue (as Augustine’s discussions with God or his soul were, according to Kojeve, only monologue). Hegel, in contrast, finished the dialectic as it worked through political history. Royal and Jacobin absolutisms resolved themselves in Napoleon on horseback, the weltgeist at the Battle of Jena. History had closed in this synthesis and the ideal had emerged as an end. It was not the need for a myth, but for the mythic powers to be imbued in a historical figure. In Napoleon “world history judges the world,” and brings the political-theological conflict to a close.

What this dialectical historical completion meant was visible in the ultimate political question of justice. The ancient aristocratic thesis was Equality, the peerage of great men that existed clearly in the Homeric world. These nobles, however, depended on a sub-world of drudgery, the existence of the non-person slaves. These slaves would then negate the peerage of Equality for an ethic of Equivalence. For the slave, all should receive an equal share regardless of social status. The distinction between better and lesser was dissolved into masterless slaves, the bourgeoisie. It was the regime of Equality that the Jacobins turned against for Equivalence, but this flattened equality masked a greater division. Not everyone had the same possessions, even as they were all treated as equals. The classless society of the bourgeois masked the division of those who owned and those who continued to labor. The class-war, marked in the Thermidorian Reaction during the Revolution, threatened to tear France apart until the great tyrant, Bonaparte, resolved the contradictions. The synthesis of Equality and Equivalence was Equity, the republican citizenry that received what they needed (be it less or more) in service to the state (embodied in the tyrant). Napoleon overcame the contradictions between Ancien Regime and National Assembly, the living lawgiver and historical god.

For Kojeve, the Hegelian dialectic was a logical process that unfolded in time, but was not part of some evolving organic process. The Cold War was thus once more the appearance of the historic myth, with both America and the Soviet Union moving towards this historic synthesis. Kojeve had high hopes that Stalin would carry this process through, uniting capitalism and socialism in his person for a new republican polity. Kojeve later translated his loyalty to Charles de Galle, who he hoped would forge a Latin Empire of Equity against the Anglo-Saxons and the Soviet-Slavs. American Capitalism and Soviet Socialism were still mired in bourgeois Equivalence, still failing to rectify the inequalities in a formally equal polity. Through the tyrant, be he Stalin or de Gaulle or some other figure, the contradiction would be overcome through time. Then man would move into post-man, an animal that had finally achieved his place in the world as an unconsciously performing creature. Art would no longer exist as art, it would have no intention towards something but be generated by instinct, like a spider crafting a web. There would be no more need for escape for man would become the perfect animal that he struggled to become.

Kojeve’s odd Hegelian Marxism overcame the core problem of time, where the revolution and end never came, for Communists. It could only be embodied in a tyrant, the philosopher-king of Plato, that could solve the constitution crisis of justice in his own body. He could issue law that was not simply one more myth, for he had absorbed the anti-myth into himself. He was neither God nor Satan, but some hidden figure behind both. There was, therefore, little need for ceremony or pomp that was not directly related to his person. He did not need a choreographed reception of the Declaration of the Rights of Man and the incineration of atheism, as Robespierre did. He crowned himself, without appeal to God through pope or statues of Reason. The National Assembly could never exercise the constituent power to craft a constitution because they were a teeming abstraction of politicians. They could not become, let alone claim, to be the constituent authority of the law-giving tyrant. They failed to overcome history through power.

But there was a way this process could unravel. What was this power to act in this way? Baudrillard understood the antithesis once more appear in the work of Michel Foucault. The power of this political theology was only through the secret of power, namely that power did not exist. Like his fellow anarchic socialist, Foucault was a critic of power and he crafted a counter-myth through genealogy. A technique learned from Nietzsche, but flipped on its head, Foucault’s historical analysis demonstrated how Power was an evil god that became worse as it spread. The limited power of the royal monarch was not erased through the French Revolution, but dispersed. Liberalism, in concentrating power in a self-disciplined citizenry, forged a race of masterless slaves. Or, rather, all slaves were their own masters, and thus projects like Bentham’s Panopticon was a way of instilling this Power over self into every citizen. Everyone, from highest to lowest, was both a prisoner and a jailer. Every system of law, knowledge, science, and so on reflected accretions of Powers. Therefore, Resistance, the rejection of Power, was the only means to true liberation. Satan once more took flight against Heaven.

But, Foucaultian genealogy hid the secret. Proudhon’s counter-theology was open and symbolic, Foucault’s disguised. What was “Resistance” than simply one more counter-theology? The process of critique was a never ending excoriation of Power, but, like a shattered windshield (an image borrowed from Deleuze), no matter how many criticisms the whole persevered. How could Power withstand this force? How come Resistance never came without becoming another mode of Power? That was because Power was nothing. The erasure of Power did not come with criticism of the powerful. It was not the jeering of the crowds the destroyed the Ancien Regime in the Revolution, it was the moment Louis XVI donned the red-white-blue cockade. Power “seduces,” it summons men to play the game, a rule that does not have ontological existence until the game starts. The National Assembly had rejected royal power, but could not fully absorb this power without immediate contradiction. Every speaker for the People was shouted down by another faction who also claimed to speak for the People. Every act of Resistance reinstantiated another form of Power. Every anarchist becomes a government of sorts.

Therefore, the utility of Foucault is to understand a clever process of counter-theology. Foucault did not unearth some thing called Power, but he had created a way to move it from one group to another. It took an atheist, for Baudrillard, to grasp the nonexistence of the god he criticized:

Power did not always consider itself power, and the secret of the great politicians was to know that power does not exist. To know that it is only a perspectival space of simulation, as was the pictorial Renaissance, and that if power seduces, it is precisely - what the naive realists of politics will never understand - because it is simulacrum and because it undergoes a metamorphosis into signs and invented on the basis of signs. (This is why parody, the reversal of signs or their hyperextension, can touch power more deeply than any force relation.) This secret of power's lack of existence that the great politicians shared also belongs to the great bankers, who know that money is nothing, that money does not exist; and it also belonged to the great theologians and inquisitors who knew that God does not exist, that God is dead. This gives them incredible superiority. Power is truly sovereign when it grasps this secret and confronts itself with that very challenge. When it ceases to do so and pretends to finds a truth, a substance, or a representation (in the will of the people, etc.), then it loses its sovereignty, allowing others to hurl back the challenge of its own life or death, until it dies in effect at the hands of that infatuation with itself, that imaginary concept of itself, and that superstitious belief in itself as a substance; it dies as well when it fails to recognize itself as a void, or as something reversible in death. At one times leaders were killed when they lost that secret" (Forget Foucault, 59)

Foucaultian counter-theology of Resistance, like Proudhon’s Satanism, was always stuck in its own trap. It would immediately immolate the moment when Resistance became Power, but Resistance was empty because it was not Power. Baudrillard compared this destituent impotence to some graffiti he found in Los Angeles: “when Jesus arose from the dead, he became a Zombi.” That was Foucault’s counter-theology, a zombified messiah that could never act, but only shamble, always chasing life to feed upon but never, in the process, returning to life. Every act of reversal, every defeat of Power by Resistance, led to dissolution, a game that did not understand itself as a game. Or, rather, a game that made the playing of the game into another game, which meant the original game could never be played. It was dead, yet alive, empty and meaningless.

What can break this cycle of death? Kojeve was right in that a living theology was necessary to overcome the constituent crisis involved in any law. Yet that process itself could dissolve itself, even if understood as process through historicity. The problem of political theology in the twenty first century is not the existence of tyrants, but the existence of zombie governments. Power is always seized in the name of Resistance, which then is never exercised, but only possessed until seized from another faction. But the refusal to exercise Power does not mean there is no governance. The tyranny of petit bureaucrats suffuses throughout every western polity, preventing any means to play the game through a never ending consultation of the rules. Like the AIDS that ravaged Foucault himself, Resistance eviscerates all polities into maximal governance through political anarchy. Satan has expanded his wings over the whole West.

But the alternative to the problem of law and power was an issue that defined the (political) theology of the Apostle Paul.

In Galatians 4, Paul offered a typological interpretation of Isaac and Ishmael, the son of the promise and the son of necessity. It is worth quoting Paul’s analysis in entirety:

Tell me, ye that desire to be under the law, do ye not hear the law?

For it is written, that Abraham had two sons, the one by a bondmaid, the other by a freewoman.

But he who was of the bondwoman was born after the flesh; but he of the freewoman was by promise.

Which things are an allegory: for these are the two covenants; the one from the mount Sinai, which gendereth to bondage, which is Agar.

For this Agar is mount Sinai in Arabia, and answereth to Jerusalem which now is, and is in bondage with her children.

But Jerusalem which is above is free, which is the mother of us all.

For it is written, Rejoice, thou barren that bearest not; break forth and cry, thou that travailest not: for the desolate hath many more children than she which hath an husband.

Now we, brethren, as Isaac was, are the children of promise.

But as then he that was born after the flesh persecuted him that was born after the Spirit, even so it is now.

Nevertheless what saith the scripture? Cast out the bondwoman and her son: for the son of the bondwoman shall not be heir with the son of the freewoman.

So then, brethren, we are not children of the bondwoman, but of the free. (Gal 4: 21-31

This passage perplexed Martin Luther, for he expected Paul to compare Sinai and Moriah, the place where man received the Torah and the place where God had provided the sacrifice for Abraham:

A little while ago Paul called Mount Sinai, Hagar. He would now gladly make Jerusalem the Sarah of the New Testament, but he cannot. The earthly Jerusalem is not Sarah, but a part of Hagar. Hagar lives there in the home of the Law, the Temple, the priesthood, the ceremonies, and whatever else was ordained in the Law at Mount Sinai.

I would have been tempted to call Jerusalem, Sarah, or the New Testament. I would have been pleased with this turn of the allegory. It goes to show that not everybody has the gift of allegory. Would you not think it perfectly proper to call Sinai Hagar and Jerusalem Sarah? True, Paul does call Sarah Jerusalem. But he has the spiritual and heavenly Jerusalem in mind, not the earthly Jerusalem. Sarah represents that spiritual Jerusalem where there is no Law but only the promise, and where the inhabitants are free.

To show that the Law has been quite abolished, the earthly Jerusalem was completely destroyed with all her ornaments, temples, and ceremonies.(Luther, Commentary on Galatians, 4.25)

Luther had expected the binary between Law and Gospel to be in terms of imperative and declarative. The Law threatened sinners, while the Gospel offered satisfaction. As in the Old Testament God made provisions for forgiveness, which foreshadowed the sacrifice of Christ, so too did the New Testament tighten the demands of obedience. But for Luther, the spiritual Jerusalem must have meant a total abrogation of the Law, framing the destruction of the earthly Jerusalem as the destruction of the Law. But the Law is not destroyed for Paul, but the power of the flesh. An earlier commentator, the sixth century Augustinian Isidore of Serville, offered a better schematization:

The difference between the Law and the Gospel is that in the Law there is the letter, in the Gospel, there is grace. The Law holds a shadow, the Gospel, a form. The first was given because of transgression, the latter for the sake of justification. The Law shows sin to the ignorant, the Gospel helps the one who acknowledges sin, so that it may be avoided. , Book of Differences, 31)

It was not that the Gospel was the satisfaction of the Law, but rather the fulfillment and end of the Law. The shadow gave way to the reality, in the same way that an earthly Jerusalem was only ever a symbol for the ideal City of God. The binary was not between imperative and promise, but between what was purely temporal and mortal, under the corruptible mind of men, against the eternal order that would transfigure men. What the earthly revealed was the earthly status of men. Every commandment was twisted, every promise abused. The Law given to establish the polity of Israel became a means of death and betrayal. Israel saw the glory of God and then went whoring after Baal. God gave purification to Israel, who then immediately polluted its flesh in the most vile forms of demon worship. The crisis in Pauline theology was how God seemingly failed with the Law, that it did not produce holy men but made sin utterly sinful. But that had been the purpose of the Torah, to draw out wickedness and smash its head under the Christ, in the fullness of time, to cleanse sin and redeem the remnant.

The Gospel, for Paul and Augustine, was the spirit’s victory over the flesh. As Kojeve failed to understand in Christian theology, there was a historical dialectic of failure, the moment of political theology met with a counter-myth. The Davidic monarchy was replaced with alternates. The Temple in Jerusalem and its Levitical priesthood was replaced with rivals in Dan and Bethel. The revelation of Jehovah as the God above all gods and Lord above all lords resulted in new pantheons. The historic Gospel was, and remains, the revelation of heilsgeist on the back of a donkey at Jerusalem. This end to history would be revealed, and break into time, repeatedly, most importantly in the rise of Constantine and the foundation of a Christian New Rome. The Gospel is the eternal order now transfiguring the universe into a new order that defies any single location of flesh or stone. It defies a center and can be replicable anywhere and everywhere, for the Kingdom of God, the Gospel, is within you.

This political theology recognizes the capacity for any people, in any time, and in any place to receive this lordship. As God blessed Constantine and the New Rome as a new Israel, the blessing was contingent on the fidelity of the elect. As Augustine understood, seeing his Roman African being conquered by Germanic Vandals, the lordship defied any single empire. In an age of corruption, God could raise up an Geiseric to judge. Kingship and authority was not something localized in a way that could become corrupt, but authority was a gift from God. In a much later time, the radical Augustinian John Wycliffe understood that lordship was the gift of righteousness and did not inhere in a single institution or bloodline. While not calling for the downfall of the Plantagenets, Wycliffe understood that the authority of kings reflected the authority of God, and God could raise up a David from the sheepfold. The universal monarchy of the Spirit did not work according to the logic of flesh. The empire of Spirit did not construct Babel.

The historical dialectic comes to an end in the resurrected Christ, an authority that has continued to rule over the cycles and spirals of time. The Christian is not, contrary to liberal interpretations, mere refusal. The Gospel does not end in the death of Christ, but in the Spiritual Christ who cannot be grasped, who appears and disappears, who reveals himself in the unexpected day. A true political theology, one that would overcome the constant siege of counter-myths, is one that defies the logic of time, the necessary decay and death of all mortal flesh, for resurrection, the restoration of the eternal law in time and space, may appear at any moment. In a flash a judge may be lifted up and satan fall like lightning.