Sunday, November 06, 2005
(11:59 AM) | Dave Belcher:
The Cross, lynching, and the exception
John Milbank asks a hypothetical, but engaging, question in his essay on "Crucifixion" in Being Reconciled: Was Christ, crucified, homo sacer? Milbank comes to the conclusion that yes, indeed he was, but in a qualified sense from Agamben's understanding. Milbank highlights two major differences from his own account of "Christ as exception" and Agamben's homo sacer: the first is that it's not clear that one killed by the Roman sovereign was not sacrificed, or that that killing was not a "ritual." The second is that Christ was not executed by the sovereign, necessarily--or even by a direct executor of the sovereign's will--but by the angry mob. Thus, Milbank comes to the conclusion that instead of dying a death at the hands of the exceptional state, Christ dies at the hands of an angry mob--Christ died by "mob lynching." Milbank's point, here--that "Jesus was crucified only virtually even though this really killed him; for neither Jewish nor Roman law had succeeded in condemning him"--at once seems to miss the point. That Jesus died by mob lynching does not reveal that Christ escapes the exceptional state--that Christ is the exception to the exception--but in fact shows Christ's solidarity with those lynched by the exceptional "state." James Cone, in his Friday night lecture at the UofC said that white theology talks all the time about reconciliation, but it's afraid of retribution...and this, he said, is a result of not taking seriously the black bodies who died in the South, hanging on the lynchin' tree. Milbank's words, "But if only Christ reconciles us to each other...then this can only mean that the specific shape of Christ's body in his reconciled life and its continued renewal in the Church...provides for us the true aesthetic example for our reshaping of our social existence," thus completely misses the point insofar as Milbank's own admission that Christ died by "mob lynching" does not recognize that the black bodies hanging from the lynchin' trees in the south were crucified. In fact, it seems as though Milbank is attempting to explain away the power of Christ's death for those who have been terrorized under the exception, by claiming that Christ died "only virtually." The Cross, according to Cone, and the lynchin' tree in the South, must be understood as mutually interpreting one another; white theology will never understand the Cross until it learns to recognize the horror and beauty of black bodies hanging from the lynchin' tree. As Cone put it, "The crucifixion inverts our aesthetics by claiming that beauty is revealed in a lynched black body." Perhaps Cone's understanding of the Cross/lynching is much closer to Agamben's bare life...and perhaps Milbank will never fully understand what Agamben is getting at until he reads some James Cone, and reflects seriously on the black bodies "swaying from the lynchin' tree" as Billie Holiday sung about.This fulfills my post on Agamben and my review post of Cone I promised Adam, but I reserve the right to say more.
