Thursday, November 04, 2004
(9:18 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
That Cantankerous Jew
I re-read Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul. Long-term readers should know of my deep abiding love for this book -- just as I ultimately learned French for Derrida, when I learn German, it will probably be for Taubes (not even for Barth!). I am going to post some quotations from this book, because I have nothing more to say about the election, at least not directly:You notice that Paul has very peculiar worries about nature. Of course they're not ecological worries. He's never seen a tree in his life. He traveled through the world just like Kafka--never described a tree, or mentioned one. I know types like this in Jerusalem. He doesn't write: Dear Friend, Nice weather here, or: Glorious nature all around me--he doesn't notice any of that. Just find me one place in a Pauline letter where he lets up from this passion, from this obsession, from this one theme that moves him. None at all, it persists through and through. Look through Kafka's novels some time, whether there is a tree there. Maybe one on which a dog pisses. That is the only form in which a tree can even come up in The Castle of The Trial. Nature appears only as judgment...From a different section:
The political potential of Kierkegaard has long been underestimated. The first to point it out was Karl Löwith, when he underscored the sentence: There are no longer rulers, no kings who can still keep a rein on the masses, the rabble; there remains only the image of the martyr. What is this but a political statement! The rabble in 1848 can no longer be held in check by means of figures of legitimacy, a king, a Kaiser, a general, but only by a martyr, because it has gotten out of hand.Yet another:
[Schmitt] is a clerk, and he understands his task to be not to establish the law but to interpret the law. Schmitt's interest was in only one thing: that the party, that the chaos not rise to the top, that the state remain. No matter what the price. This is difficult for theologians and philosophers to follow, but as far as the jurist is concerned, as long as it is possible to find even one juridical form, by whatever hairsplitting ingenuity, this must absolutely be done, for otherwise chaos reigns. This is what he later calls the katechon: The retainer that holds down the chaos that pushes up from below. That isn't my worldview [sic], that isn't my experience. I can imagine as an apocalyptic: let it go down. I have no spiritual investment in the world as it is. But I understand that someone else is invested in this world and sees in the apocalypse, whatever its form, the adversary and does everything to keep it subjugated and suppressed, because from there forces can be unleashed that we are in no position to control.I'm with Taubes on the apocalyptic thing: a couple days ago, I was advocating mob rule in the United States, and it's too simple to say that I was joking. I had a long discussion with some of my fellow seminarians last night -- a frustrating one, to say the least, but hopefully a productive one -- in which I came out and said that as a white straight male, I have the entire system at my disposal. The world was designed with people like me in mind -- the skills that I lack are not many, and I can fake it when necessary. No matter how liberal or Marxist I try to be, when the end comes for this system, I am going down with it. I see no reason to deny that or to begrudge the unwashed masses their opportunity to murder me due to my skin color and my glasses -- am I going to show them my marked-up copy of the 1844 Manuscripts and they'll say, "Okay, move along"?
I explained this in theological terms, using the metaphor of going to hell when I die. I don't mind going to hell when I die, and I don't know what's supposed to happen to change that. Maybe something will -- who knows? But even with all this in mind, I embrace a certain kind of pacifism that may well amount to nihilism. There's a section in Taubes where he talks about Benjamin's concept of "world politics as nihilism" -- and while I'm very adept at saying no, for instance to the Iraq War or to Bush as a person, I don't know that I have anything to offer. I leave it to the tough-minded liberal realists to do that kind of thing -- very annoying of me, I know. I think that when millions of people came out onto the streets to protest the Iraq War, they were probably being unrealistic. A lot of them -- I include myself here, although I didn't actually march -- were unreflective about that whole thing. What exactly were we supposed to do about it? What feasible plan did we have to deal with this problem?
I'll admit it: we didn't have a feasible plan. I wish we wouldn't have gone to war in Iraq, but I don't know what else we should have done. Sanctions were evil, clearly. But maybe giving Saddam a free hand would have proven to be a terrible idea, too. I don't know! I don't know what to do about that, just like I don't know what to do about the fact that Bush got re-elected. I'm so angry right now that the slightest thing can set me off -- I threw a glass against the wall, hard, so that it would shatter, for only the second time in my life. But I think that the people out there protesting, even if they couldn't articulate it very well or even at all, were saying no to the options presented. We -- again, I wasn't physically there, but we -- were saying no to a system in which the president of the United States has to "do something" about Iraq and in which tens of thousands of people have to die to remove one guy from power.
World politics as nihilism -- throw out the whole damn thing. The options that the system presents us with are no longer acceptable. There are no good, feasible options. If we have to have a US President and a commander in chief, then fine -- let it be Kerry instead of Bush. In fact, please let that be the case -- I wanted that very badly, and I don't think I have to prove that to anyone. I have a picture of Kerry and Edwards hanging on my wall, and it will remain. But seriously -- throw this whole fucking world order out. If chaos will result, I say, "Fine," because the only thing that consistently works in an orderly manner is the circulation of capital, and even that has its flaws. Chaos is continually produced by the world order itself. John Kerry could well have made that more livable, and I wish that it would have turned out differently Tuesday -- but throw the whole thing out. It's not worth it. The world order is not worth fighting for or preserving.
Do I believe that because I'm a Christian? Is this a pathology of thought that I need to get over? Maybe it is. I don't know. I'll be a good liberal for once: there are other possible viewpoints. I'll be a good Cartesian liberal, step into the space of the evil-white-male-Cartesian-subject and say: I am only saying this because of my social conditioning, my position in the system (and somehow, despite being thoroughly conditioned by the system, I can know exactly how my background affects me -- that's what fucking pisses me off about all these "ethnic theologies" or whatever else, this pretense that you can be so fucking sure exactly what it means that you're a black Latina Jewish lesbian and you can know exactly what special perspectives you bring to the table -- I don't believe we're that transparent to ourselves, and I'm not going to play the game of positioning myself like that. If I only have the luxury of doing that because I'm a white male, then fine -- but I'm not going to presume to say it. Once again -- Zizek is right).
I'm so frustrated right now, and I'm sick of all the easy answers -- and you're fooling yourself, you're lying to yourself if you think that the right wing is the only place where you can find people peddaling easy answers. Come sit in my Christian Ethics class, my wonderful liberal Christian Ethics class at the most liberal seminary in this part of the country, and you'll find plenty of easy answers. We have not even begun to understand the consequences of the Republican takeover of this country, and as Mike Schaefer says in a comment below, it's been going on for twenty years or more. Right now, I'm not sure I have much to offer other than nihilism. I know it's useless. I don't know what else to do, though.
Sorry this is so long.
