Thursday, December 01, 2005
(1:24 PM) | Brad:
The Currency of a Calling
A couple of people have inquired about how my paper at the AAR/SBL went this year. In short ... not too shabby. If nothing else, for once, my reach wasn't overwhelmed by my ambitions. It took four years of attending conferences & reading papers to realize small points are the ones better made.What with Adam's absence on Thurs., I thought I'd go ahead and post a short excerpt.
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In his 2004 Inaugural Address "President" Bush declared that "Freedom is the permanent hope of mankind. . . . One day this untamed fire of freedom will reach the darkest corners of our world." For Bush (& co.), such freedom, indeed, is unavoidable, for "history has a visible direction, set by liberty, and the Author of liberty." Such a sentiment, we recall, is not an unprecedent rhetorical flourish. Indeed, it echoes his 2002 State of the Union Address, during the run-up to the Iraqi war, in which he declared: "History has called American and her allies to action." As well as that of his 2003 State of the Union Address: "We can move forward with confidence, becaue this historical call has come to the right people. . . . Once again, this nation and our friends are the unique force which stands between a world in peace and a world in chaos and constant alarm. Once again, we are called to defend the security of our people and the hopes of all mankind. And we accept that responsibility." In the same sense, then, that Bush was "called" to leadership (the Presidency, in particular), America has been chosen by God (or some other anthropomorphized abstraction) and commissioned by history to be not only the model of justice before the world -- but the primary dispenser of this justice.
Indeed, it is in this same address, i.e., the 2003 State of the Union Address, that Bush is most prophetic, false or otherwise. Speaking of the American military presence in Iraq, for example, we note his quickness to fuse what Andrew Bacevich has termed the "New American Militarism" and the religio-political basis of the American call. For, in the words of Isaiah 35, "the light [i.e., the U.S.] has shone in the darkness [i.e., the enemies of the U.S.], and the light was not overcome." As such, with its purported victory in Iraq, Bush credits the U.S. military as a material Messiah: [For] "wherever you go, you carry a message of hope, a message that is ancient and ever new. In the words of the prophet Isaiah: to the captive, 'go forth,' to those who are in darkness, 'be free.'"
In short, what we find here is a kind of salvation that is predicated upon the American call, in a way not unlike that of Abram in Genesis 12. Here, a people are made a great nation inasmuch as they are a blessing to all peoples, and curse to those who curse such a blessing. In this way, too, Bush can explain the American mission "as a blessed nation to make the world better . . . and confound the designs of evil men." My contention here is that the exceptional status of such a people or a nation (i.e,. as "chosen") is provocatively analogous to the notion of sovereignty developed by Giorgio Agamben in his recent essay State of Exception.
For Agamben, the problem that has plagued the thinking of exceptionality -- and by this he is referring to the state of emergency, whereby the legislative order / Law is suspended, and effectively replaced by the autocratic rule of the executive -- is its status as both inside and outside the juridical order that is thus suspended. If the exceptional status was simply an exigence that could be anticipated, and therefore codified in the law, the juridical order (as that which is normative) would be built around (and thus marginalized from within by) its own suspension. In contrast, if the exceptional status was simply a "de facto situation," and thus unrelated to the juridical order, the legality (or, indeed, illegality) of deciding to suspend the law would be established as such retroactively, that is after the decision was already made.
Therefore, in his reading of Carl Schmitt's Political Theology, Agamben finds the state of exception as, essentially, a theory of sovereignty. The sovereign, in short, is that which decides on the state of exception, whilst also guaranteeing its relation to the juridical order. That is to say, because its decision is that of annulling the norm, the sovereign is beyond the normative order of things (i.e., non-called "exceptionality"); and yet, inasmuch as the sovereign is ultimately responsible for deciding whether it is even possible for the normative order to be completely annulled / suspended, the sovereign also necessarily emerges from it.
It is in this way, I would submit, that it is ultimately inadequate to regard the exceptional status of Bush's sense of being called as simply a means to move beyond established domestic & international norms (i.e., of international law, common sense, precendence, etc.), but is in fact the assertion of its sovereign power to determine the state of exception from within these established norms. Such then is Schmitt's invoking of the state of exception as a kind of miracle, whereby (in terms of my paper here) the sovereign actor is that which calls itself. As such, the sovereign is outside the norm, but only insofar as it establishes itself as the power to suspend the norm in teh act of its (self-)calling. (At this point, we can perhaps see the justification of Walter Benjamin's characterisation of the state of exception as a staged production or fiction.)
We may, I think, call this the speculative function, indeed, the very currency of, "the calling," for that which is called to become itself as exception. There are profound theological points to be made here about the production of the Absolute as "fictionalized" exception, but for the purposes of this paper I will maintain my present course. In this case, the sovereign power of the call is not, strictly speaking, God; rather, it is the God that is instantiated / embodied in and as that which is called (i.e., Abram, Bush, America, democracy, etc.). In this way, George Bush, Jr. can say in his 2004 Inaugural Address, "Freedom is not America's gift to the world . . . but God's gift to humanity," and thus affirm America as the self-called sovereign whilst simultaneously appearing to distance it from any such claim. (Cf., "Not because we consider ourselves a chosen nation; God moves and chooses as he wills.")
We may see this primarily in the Bush Administation's policy on detention and torture. Earlier this month, for instance, Bush asserted in unequivocal language: "We are finding terrorists and bringing them to justice. We are gathering information abotu where the terrorists may be hiding. We are trying to disrupt their plots and plans. Anything we can do to that effort, to that end, in this effort, any active we conduct, is within the law. We do not torture." Subsequent to this statement, journalists and human rights organizations debated the reasons the Bush administration should or should not be taken at its word, given the revelation of Abu Ghirab, the suspicions surrounding the treatment of detainees at GITMO, and the so-called "black sites" in Eastern Europe. This is a debate, of course, that should certainly should happen. Of equal importance, however, is the degree to which, in the logic of sovereignty detailed above, where the sovereign decides on the state of exception and thus the suspension of normative and legal identifications of torture, Bush's declaration is true. That is to say, the Bush Administration does not sanction torture because, as the (self-)called sovereign, it asserts the authority to dictate the limits of what torture means. (Thus you have Vice President Dick Cheney insisting that his position is not pro-torture, but simply that he does not want "any options off the table.") This, I would argue, is the deepest scandal of torture, and why it is now, for many of my theological peers anyway, the theological issue of contemporary times.
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I go on from here to address domestic economic policy. But I think I've thrown enough into one blog post for now.
