Wednesday, March 09, 2005
(12:27 AM) | Adam Kotsko:
Sovereignty Week: Barth/Schmitt
First of all, I'd like to say that I am honored to have been invited to participate in Sovereignty Week and that I have really enjoyed Brad and Old's contributions. You should probably read them in their entirety before reading mine. That is because this is an idea that I just stumbled upon in my reading and so is not as fully developed as it could be, but this crowd seems like a good place to elaborate it in the course of a blogological discussion.I'm just not sure what's really going on in the first couple pages of Schmitt's essay "Political Theology" in the book of the same name. On the one hand, his contention that political concepts are secularized theological concepts seems basically convincing. Yet in the very next paragraph, he says that the structure of the Enlightenment state basically fits the model of Enlightenment metaphysics -- just as there is no miracle, there is no continual sovereign activity. Now clearly for Schmitt, Enlightenment deism is not a theology worthy of the name; that is, he is a real, live Roman Catholic who actually "believes this stuff." And he seems to believe that political concepts, whether modern or otherwise, by rights should be based on theological concepts, should be the theologically discovered structure of the divine realm repeated in the secular sphere. Since we know that there is a real sovereign God, we should have a society with a real sovereign ruler; only in that way is it possible to build a political order that corresponds to reality. And so we see him siding with the Nazis, for a lot of reasons, but primarily, as Taubes says, to hold onto some thread of a normal legal situation, even if that means siding with the sovereign who "suspends" the law rather than abolishing it. Agamben points out: the Weimar Constitution was the law of the land throughout the Nazi period, though in suspension.
It strikes me that Schmitt's position is basically that analogia entis that Barth took to be the invention of the anti-Christ and that powered his -- ultimately unconvincing -- denial of "natural theology." That's because he is not really aiming at good, old-fashioned Thomistic natural theology, but instead at an analogical political theology that could fail to discern the Antichrist. The unconditional sovereignty of the divine sphere does not, for Barth, necessitate an analogical unconditional sovereignty in the secular sphere -- instead, it requires that we renounce any binding sovereignty in the secular sphere (though we can and perhaps should cooperate with the authorities for strategic reasons). And we can go further and see how his theological commitments finally cohere with his political commitments -- his old-style internationalist socialism (let us not forget that Barth was also in the minority in rejecting the nationalism that led to WWI) could easily flow from the idea that all ownership is found only in the divine sphere, to such an extent that when eternity touches time in Christ, Christ renounces all claims to ownership, even ownership of his own "nature," precisely in order to participate in the secular sphere as secular.
It may be only because I was reading them at the same time, but I think that Barth would find a lot to like in Hardt and Negri's politics, in large part because they don't have a well-defined plan of what is to be done. At the same time, I wonder if we can finally arrive at pure immanence without sovereignty must be based in the conviction of a real transcendent plane where "the real sovereignty" resides. This could be similar to what Derrida does with "your Father who sees in secret" in The Gift of Death -- in order to attempt a different economy here on earth, the same old economy that we understand here has to be shoved up into heaven. That is, the unwaged system of spontaneous, unselfconscious generosity is ultimately underwritten by a heavenly wage system that will sort everything out in the end. Is this just a necessary misrecognition, fostered in order to get people "in," to get the movement started by having people pull themselves out of the mud by their own hair? But how long is the misrecognition necessary? And how long until it bites us in the ass? Is the biblical assertion that many of the elect will be led astray an admission that after a certain point, precisely belief in Christ can be the obstacle to discerning the Antichrist?
In any case, the theological assertion that "the church" happens as a fragile and fragmentary thing is starting to seem more and more plausible as simply an empirical explanation and less and less like a mere excuse for ecclesial failure.
