Politics in the Wake of Divine Violence 1

Political Theology after the Great Separation

One important response to the erosion of the secular state’s monopoly on violence under the rule of law has stressed the threat posed by the resurgence of religious actors that do not accept the terms of the modern political order. Mark Lilla offers one of the most sophisticated versions of this response in The Stillborn God: Religion, Politics, and the Modern West. He begins with an etiology that attributes the terrible violence in the last six centuries of European history to Christianity’s ambiguity about the relation between religious and secular powers. A religion like Islam, Lilla writes, is very clear: the political order is subordinate to religious authority. But Christianity’s emphasis on the age to come makes it less clear about the politics of this present age. This ambiguity touches off a spiral of violence:

Christian fanaticism and intolerance incited violence; violence set secular and religious leaders against one another; and the more violent and fearful political life became, the more fanatical and intolerant Christianity became. Christendom had found itself in a vicious theological-political cycle unknown to any previous civilization. ⁶

Christianity’s ambiguity opened the door to conflict. And its sense that eternal life was at stake in the actions of this world, Lilla writes, accelerated the conflict. ‘The reason human beings in war commit acts no animal would is, paradoxically, because they believe in God’. ⁷ Religion drives violence beyond the bounds of law.

In Lilla’s account, it was the genius of Thomas Hobbes to discern this dynamic and undo it by developing ‘habits of thinking and talking about politics exclusively in human terms, without appeal to divine revelation or cosmological speculation’. ⁸ Hobbes found ways to ‘change the subject’ of political thought from ‘God and his nature’ to ‘man and his religious nature’. ⁹ This shift marked what Lilla calls the ‘Great Separation’ of political and theological thought. It is a separation, he writes, which defines the exceptional nature of the modern West. And its emblem, its crown jewel, is the juridical ordering of violence that divides religion from the state and then consolidates violence under the rule of law within the state. This Great Separation is fragile and contingent, Lilla writes, always vulnerable to a theological impulse that seems to be an enduring part of human life. Thus if the state’s juridical ordering of violence is coming undone, Lilla’s story knows in advance the source of the problem and the nature of the solution. The erosion of this order must be due to a crossing of the theological impulse back into political life. And the best response must be to hew again the cleft between theological and political thought.

Lilla rightly sees that challenges to the state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of violence often do proceed by drawing on reasons or institutions associated with religious traditions like Christianity, Islam or Judaism. But he writes as if all the threats to the present constellation of state, violence and law come from outside of it—and especially from religious actors who take up violence in the names of their gods. Lilla misses the ways that the state itself has contributed to the unbundling of differentiation, the state’s monopoly on violence, and the rule of law.

Some challenges to the state’s monopoly on legitimate violence have come from outside the state. Terrorist networks may be the most visible form of these challenges, but they are far from the only ones. From pirates in Somalia to drug cartels in Mexico to warlords in Afghanistan, non-state actors around the world possess capacities to resist and elude state forces. The violence of these non-state actors often enjoys a kind of legitimacy, especially in zones where they have the greatest capacity for violence. ¹⁰

But not every challenge to the state’s monopoly on the legitimate use of violence has originated outside the state. That monopoly has also eroded as states have tolerated or supported violence by non-state actors. The government of Iran, for instance, has depended on the Basij militia for violent action against protestors. The most radical Israeli settlers and Hamas militiamen have ambiguous relationships to official state power. The United States has outsourced state violence to private contractors for prisons, security details, and a widening array of military services. ‘Stand your ground’ laws in the United States devolve legitimate violence even further, to individual gun owners. I do not mean to suggest a moral equivalence between any of these groups or phenomena. I only mean to say that they demonstrate a broad, varied pattern in which states have participated in blurring the lines that would mark their monopolies on the legitimate means of violence.

The order Weber described is unraveling not only at the edges of the state’s monopoly on violence, but also at the edges of the rule of law. States’ exercise of violence beyond the ordinary confines of law has been most obvious when a government turns violence on its own citizens, as in Syrian security forces’ devastation of the city and people of Homs. It can also be seen in states’ active sponsorship of terrorism, like Libya’s support for the attack that downed Pan Am Flight 103. But state-sponsored violence at the edge of law has taken many forms. The declaration of a Global War on Terror loosened the hold of law on violence directed by the military and executive branch of the United States. The administration of George W. Bush made extensive use of zones deemed outside normal legal jurisdictions, like the detention camp at Guantánamo Bay and the so-called ‘black sites’ used for interrogation of suspected terrorists. Even after Barack Obama narrowed the scope of this war to ‘war against al-Qaeda and its allies’, his administration has continued to prosecute the war through means at the gray edges of law. The Obama administration has pursued covert wars in Yemen and Somalia that do not fall under the ordinary legal procedures and reviews for armed conflict. While it has significantly reduced the number of ‘extraordinary renditions’ of suspected terrorists to sites where US laws do not clearly apply, and while it has established a policy against torture at these sites, the Obama administration still retains the prerogative to execute the renditions and so exercise force beyond the rule of law. ¹¹ It has also broken a significant precedent in killing a US citizen, Anwar al-Awlaki, without trial. ¹² And it has dramatically escalated the use of drone-launched missiles in Pakistan, a practice subject to review within the executive branch but not the full range of authorizations and oversight that normally attend combat operations. ¹³ Again, I do not mean to declare a moral equivalence between all of these actions. There are surely differences that matter between the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 and the detention of a leader of al-Qaeda. And I do not mean to offer a blanket condemnation of every one of these actions. Cases for their necessity have been made, and I have not refuted those cases here. I only mean to highlight the prominence of this language of ‘necessity’, and to describe its role in a process in which states initiate violent actions that press against and sometimes beyond the limits of their own laws.

States themselves, drawing on language of necessity, give explicit or tacit approval to violence by non-state actors. That same sense of necessity leads states to operate at or beyond the edges of their own laws. Black sites, drone strikes and violent collusion between state and non-state actors may strain at our laws and grate on our sensibilities, but they proceed because they are understood as necessary for the preservation of the state. The preservation of the state, shorn of any appeal to ideology that would define an origin or purpose beyond the state’s existence, becomes an end in itself. Indeed, it becomes the good that promises to secure all others. It becomes necessary in the deepest sense.

The language of necessity has then led states into gray zones in which the fact of violence becomes a kind of law and the law, because it does not limit or alter the course of violence, blurs into the fact of organized violence. The ideal of violence within the rule of law depends on a distinction between law and violence. For the rule of law to be able to contribute to the legitimacy of a political order, the law must be something other than the rules made by the people who happened to have the greatest capacity for violence at the time the rules were made. But language of necessity imagines moments when the facts on the ground become the source and content of norms. Necessity smelts fact and norm into a single complex imperative, and so threatens the distinction between violence and law on which the rule of law depends. Thus dynamics within the modern state—reasons and institutions on what Lilla identifies as the secular, political side of the Great Separation—have eroded the juridical ordering of violence just as surely as incursions from some religious power outside the state. ¹⁴

Lilla’s analysis occludes these dynamics. And his proposed remedy would not address them. If some of the dynamics that lead to violence beyond law are indigenous to the state, purifying the state of religion will not prevent those dynamics from unfolding. On the contrary, insulation of the state from forms of reasoning rendered alien to it—including religious reasoning—can allow the state’s logic of necessity to develop into a logic in which the state’s own existence comes to be seen as the good which secures all others. Such necessity underwrites the zones where fact and law dissolve into one another. It can become itself a kind of myth.

The mythical nature of disenchanted political thought becomes clear through analogy to Theodor Adorno’s critique of positivism. Positivist social science holds out the promise of an objectivity free from the distortions of ideology. Like Lilla’s purified political science, it refuses talk of any reality beyond the facts on the ground, and so dissolves ideologies into strictly human phenomena. ‘Yet demythologization devours itself’, Adorno writes, ‘as the mythical gods liked to devour their children. Leaving behind nothing but what merely is, demythologization recoils into the mythus; for the mythus is nothing else than the closed system of immanence, of that which is.’ ¹⁵ Pre-modern myths fused heaven and earth by seeing the things of this world as direct manifestations of other-worldly goods and gods. They collapsed earth up into heaven. Projects of demythologization proceed in the opposite direction. Casting anything that appears to be beyond the empirical order as nothing more than projections from the empirical order, demythologization pulls heaven down to earth. If the directions of these moves are different, the results are worlds that share a one-dimensional nature. This one-dimensional nature, this equation of is and ought, fact and norm, force and law, is what Adorno calls mythological. Just so, the Great Separation that promises to demythologize the political order, to cleanse it of every trace of theology, ends up denying the reality of anything but the existing political order. It elevates ‘what is’ to the status of ‘all there is’. Its flattening of fact and norm invites the discourse of necessity. It allows and even underwrites the mythologization of the state and the global political order in which it is at home. ¹⁶

A great separation between ‘politics’ and ‘theology’ in the sense Lilla uses those terms gives up the resources necessary to critique this process. He is right to call for a disenchantment of violence by the state. But we need a deeper sort of disenchantment, something more than the complete and categorical rejections of ideology that themselves recoil into myth. In particular, we need an account of myth-shattering divine violence that breaks the hold of violence on the law and so makes possible a politics of the saeculum. In the sections that follow I will develop this argument through a consideration of the idea of divine violence in the work of Carl Schmitt, Walter Benjamin and Gillian Rose. I do not call for a better myth, as some theological critics of modernity have. I rather argue for a ‘dialectical disenchantment of disenchantment’, ¹⁷ a critique of the political by the light of a redemption that is not yet fully realized. I argue that we need a kind of political theology to keep secular politics secular.

The State of Exception

German jurist Carl Schmitt (1888–1985) argues against the modern state’s conception of itself by identifying a series of scarcely secularized theological concepts that give order to its form. Chief among these is the concept of sovereignty. Parliaments might pass bills, but they cannot, by themselves, make those bills function as laws. Making law, Schmitt argues, requires some kind of sovereign power that exceeds the limits of what the parliamentary state could be or even acknowledge. Schmitt’s sense of the limits of a secular state governed by the rule of law contributed to his decision to join Adolph Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers Party in 1933. The connections between his ideas and this decision are not incidental. Without radically altering the trajectory of thought he established in the Weimar years, Schmitt was able to write works that provided theoretical support for the role of the Führer and the politics of anti-Semitism. He insists on the need for both some sovereign power beyond the system of law and some clear earthly identity for that power. He opens a theological dimension that can interrupt the mythologization of the state that Lilla’s Great Separation would encourage. But Schmitt fills that dimension with a dangerous idol.

In Political Theology (1922), Schmitt describes the progressive flattening of political thought in the West. Schmitt’s method—what he calls a ‘sociology of the concept’—assumes a structural analogy between the political and theological imaginations of an age. ‘The metaphysical image that a definite epoch forges of the world has the same structure as what the world immediately understands to be appropriate as a form of its political organization’ (50/46). ¹⁸ European Christian theologies of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Schmitt argues, were dominated by the idea of a transcendent God who served as the architect for a system of laws that proceeded in regular fashion. Just so, the political imagination of Europe was dominated by the idea of single sovereign ruler who established a rule of law that could then be relied upon to function in regular ways. To illustrate the social significance of the analogy, Schmitt quotes a letter from Descartes to Mersenne: “It is God who established these laws in nature just as a king establishes laws in his kingdom” (51-52/47). Over time, Schmitt writes, the scientific worldview that relied on a closed, unchanging system of natural laws came to exert greater and greater influence over political thought. By Schmitt’s own time, ‘the sovereign, who in the deistic view of the world, had remained the engineer of the great machine, has been radically pushed aside. The machine now runs itself’ (52/48). Traces of sovereignty survived longer in the United States by migrating to the people (53/49). But on both sides of the Atlantic (and now increasingly around the globe), the rule of law as a comprehensive and self-generating artifact—law without exception—has become the ideal. And it has no place for any sort of sovereign power beyond the law.

Schmitt argues that a system of laws without exception cannot account for the fundamental nature of political life. It cannot account, he says, for the shared, social experience of obligation to the law, the community, and one another. A legal system might assume an intricate form that displays remarkable coherence and consistency. But that form does not make it law, for the form, in itself, cannot account for a people’s sense of obligation to it and connection to one another. The juridical order is incomplete, Schmitt writes, neither because of a gap in some particular law, nor because of a gap in the aggregation of every individual law, but because of a gap in ‘law as a whole, which can in no way be filled by juristic conceptual operations’ (20-21/15). ¹⁹ Giorgio Agamben describes this gap by making an analogy between Schmitt’s understanding of law and Ferdinand de Saussure’s distinction between langue and parole. Langue, for Saussure, names a system of signs that do not necessarily denote anything beyond themselves. To become the meaningful speech of parole, the system of signs requires not some further corollary that extends the system from within—for it could develop in infinitely intricate ways without ever touching reality—but a social, practical action that is of another order. ²⁰ Schmitt calls that action a decision. And the need for decision introduces an aporia into the otherwise closed system of laws. For a decision to close the gap between a juridical order and a social world, Schmitt says, it must not be contained within the juridical order. It cannot be a mere application of the law. The kind of decision necessary for the creation of political life demands the possibility of what Schmitt calls an exception.

‘The exception’, Schmitt writes, ‘is more interesting than the rule. The rule proves nothing; the exception proves everything: it confirms not only the rule but also its existence, which derives only from the exception’ (21/15). The exception, as an exception, confirms the rule. If it did not confirm the rule, it would not be an exception, but an anomaly that demanded revision or rejection of the rule. As an exception, though, it confirms the content of the rule. It also confirms what Schmitt calls the ‘existence’ of the rule. It confirms the rule as a rule, that is, as something to which people are obliged in a distinctly political way. The exception closes the gap between sign and signified, law and reality. It does not close the gap directly, by announcing a new law. The exception, as exception, sets no precedents of its own. It contains no ‘should’ that can be generalized. ²¹ It is in itself infinitely particular to a concrete situation. But it establishes the existence of the order to which it is an exception, for it declares—indirectly—the binding applicability of that system in every case except this one. As the decision about an exception, it comes from outside the juridical order to which it names an exception. If it came from inside that order, if it could be determined by extrapolation from that order, it would only refine the law without making a real exception. The nature of an exception in Schmitt’s sense means that the decision must come from beyond the order to which the exception is declared. The exception, then, occupies a curious space: it is both beyond the juridical order and necessary for its existence as a juridical order.

The opening lines of Political Theology name that curious space—and its occupant. ‘Sovereign is he who decides on the exception’ (13/5). Sovereignty, Schmitt writes, is a ‘borderline concept’ [Grenzbegriff]. This does not mean that it is ‘vague’. And it does not mean that it appears only in select and extreme situations. Schmitt argues instead that ‘the exception is to be understood to refer to a general concept in the theory of the state, and not merely to a construct applied to any emergency decree or state of siege’ (ibid.). The state of exception, in itself, may be an isolated event. But the sovereignty that names it as such permeates the whole of a polity’s life. The border is within, for it defines the space. The exception is always present, for it establishes the rule. And the sovereign, Schmitt writes, both ‘stands outside of’ and ‘belongs to’ the ‘normally valid juridical order’ (7/14).

Schmitt’s notion of sovereignty shatters the flat immanence of the legal systems he sees taking hold in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. It has a power to critique a disenchanted system of law that pretends to comprehensiveness, denies the possibility of exceptions, and refuses to acknowledge any authority outside itself. Schmitt not only names the possibility of an exception, but shows the dependence of the system of law upon an exception. Schmitt therefore prevents the kind of closure that makes a legal system appear to be (at least potentially) complete and comprehensive. He makes possible a kind of critique that Lilla’s Great Separation would block. He provides ways of seeing the political order that can interrupt the recoil of disenchantment into new mythology.

In particular, Schmitt helps illumine the dynamics at work in contemporary decisions to use state power in ways that move to or beyond the edge of law. Moving beyond the law requires the declaration of an exception, and so the assertion of some sovereignty. In the United States, leaders can sometimes appeal to ‘the American people’ as standing in a sovereign role with the power to decide on an exception. The leaders, as the representatives of the people, then execute that sovereignty by declaring the exception. Such appeals to popular sovereignty are especially effective in moments like the immediate aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, when public opinion is relatively focused, united and passionate. But assertions of popular sovereignty are less persuasive in ordinary times, when popular opinion is diffuse and divided. And declarations of popular sovereignty grate against commitments to the rule of law. The ideology of a juridical order that is complete in itself would reject not just assertions of popular sovereignty, but the whole category of sovereignty. With no value outside of the juridical order itself, exceptions would have to be justified in the name of that order’s survival—just as they have been. But Schmitt makes clear the ideological nature of such justifications. They are not a rejection of sovereignty in the name of a juridical order, but the elevation of the juridical order itself to the role of sovereign. ‘The existence of the state is undoubted proof of its superiority over the validity of the legal norm’, Schmitt writes. ‘The decision frees itself from all normative ties and becomes in the true sense absolute. The state suspends the law in the exception on the basis of its right of self-preservation, as one says’ (18-19/12). A Great Separation of politics and theology does not eliminate sovereignty, but allows the state to assume the role of sovereign, in all its theological significance.

Exceptions could be only temporary for a juridical order that understood itself as comprehensive. Even exceptions undertaken in the name of necessity would need eventually to come under the rule of law. The juridical order would have to expand and the law would have to catch up, as it has in the Obama administration’s creation of policies to govern extraordinary rendition and drone strikes. But the creation of new policies does not eliminate the exception. Nor does it eliminate every trace of the sovereign violence involved in declaring the exception. The new policies, forged in the name of necessity, introduce ‘a zone of anomie’ into the heart of law. ²² In declaring the political order sufficient and comprehensive, the Great Separation does not eliminate violence beyond the law. It rather obscures the process by which extralegal violence enters into the legal order itself. ²³

Schmitt’s political theology makes these dynamics visible with fresh clarity. And his phenomenology of political life rightly calls for recognition of some kind of sovereign power that is beyond the existing juridical order. Critique of that order’s tendency to mythologize itself will require such recognition. Schmitt sees the need for political theology. But he offers an idolatrous one. Schmitt’s sovereign may be ‘beyond’ the particular order it secures through decision in the state of exception. But Schmitt’s sovereign is still very much within the world of human beings and their creations:

Whether God alone is sovereign, that is, the one who acts as his acknowledged representative on earth, or the emperor, or prince, or the people, meaning those who identify themselves directly with the people, the question is always aimed at the subject of sovereignty, at the application of the concept to a concrete situation (16/10, emphasis mine).

Schmitt considers the possibility of ‘God alone’ [nur Gott] as sovereign, but quickly defines the phrase to mean ‘the one who acts as his acknowledged representative on earth’. There is no distinction, no gap even of representation, between the two. For the purposes of Schmitt’s political theology, God just is the one who acts as God’s acknowledged representative on earth, whether prophet, pope, pastor or prince. Schmitt describes a sovereign who is beyond the order of law that sovereign creates and sustains. But he cannot imagine a sovereign who is beyond the sum total of human relations. Thus the analogy that Schmitt initially drew between politics and theology collapses into a single term. As Samuel Weber writes, Schmitt ‘construes the analogy between [politics and theology] above all in terms of identity, rather than in terms of transformation or alteration’. ²⁴ In using the structure of theological thought to open up a space outside the rule of law, but then losing any politically relevant sense in which theology can engage realities that exceed the order of human history, Schmitt opens the door to political theologies that would put humans, individually and collectively, in the role theology set aside for God. Schmitt breaks the mythology of a self-sufficient juridical order. But he does so by shifting the site of mythologization—the place where heaven and earth are fused together—from the juridical order to a sovereign who is very much of this world. And so he ends up writing briefs on the limits of parliamentary democracy in the name of the Führer.

The Politics of Pure Means

Walter Benjamin (1892–1940) saw the catastrophic failure of Schmitt’s political theology. But he also saw the significance even of Schmitt’s errors, and so developed his own political theology in extended if sporadic conversation with Schmitt. While there is some dispute about who wrote the first work to which the other responded, the record of correspondence and footnotes over many years makes clear that the exchange was significant for both men. ²⁵ Benjamin shared with Schmitt a sense of the significance of the extreme case, the outlier that gives identity to the whole system. Like Schmitt, he wanted to name an exception that was both beyond and within an earthly order.

But Benjamin broke sharply with Schmitt in describing the relation of this outlier to the order it defied and defined. In the ambiguously theological language Benjamin favored for developing these ideas, he insisted that ‘The question of “manifestation” is central’. ²⁶ While Schmitt spoke of a ‘God’ who was in practical terms identical to the body or bodies accepted as God’s representatives on earth, Benjamin described a divine power that could never be identified directly with any earthly power. He perhaps has the Catholic Schmitt in mind when he writes that

The problem of Catholicism is that of the (false, secular) theocracy. The guiding principle here is: authentic divine power can manifest itself other than destructively only in the world to come (the world of fulfillment). But where divine power enters the secular world, it breathes destruction. That is why in this world nothing constant and no organization can be based on divine power, let alone domination as its supreme principle. ²⁷

The contrast between Schmitt and Benjamin should not be reduced to a contrast between Catholicism and Judaism, as some commentators have tried to do, for both traditions display a pluralism that defies such flat contrast. But the question is a theological one. It concerns the way in which ‘divine power enters the secular world’. The contrast between Schmitt and Benjamin is better articulated in terms closer to the principals: for Schmitt, the sovereign manifests a sacred violence in the state of exception, and that sacred violence grounds or renews a social order; for Benjamin, divine presence manifests itself only in the destruction of existing social orders. Divine presence enters history only in negation.

The contrast with Schmitt can be clarified through consideration of Benjamin’s ‘Critique of Violence’, an essay first published in 1921. Benjamin tries to describe the shape of a ‘divine violence’ (göttliche Gewalt) that he opposes to mythic violence (mythische Gewalt). ‘Just as in all spheres God opposes myth, mythic violence is confronted by the divine’ (199/249). ²⁸ Like Schmitt’s decision in the state of exception, mythic violence produces and reproduces a social order. It is not instrumental action, in the narrow sense, so much as ritual. But it still produces something. Divine violence, on the other hand, produces nothing. It is, Benjamin writes, a politics of pure means (reine Mittel). Benjamin unpacks the distinction in a catalog of contrasts:

If mythic violence is lawmaking, divine violence is law-destroying; if the former sets boundaries, the latter boundlessly destroys them; if mythic violence brings at once guilt and expiation, divine power only expiates; if the former threatens, the latter strikes; if the former is bloody, the latter is lethal without spilling blood (199/249).

Each contrast invites commentary. Mythic violence makes and sustains the law through cycles of lawmaking violence (rechtsetzende Gewalt) and law-preserving violence (rechtserhaltende Gewalt). Divine violence, on the other hand, interrupts those cycles, unmasks the violence within the law, and so undoes the binding power of the law. Mythic violence relies on an economy of sacrifice that marks the boundaries of a community. Divine violence shatters the economy of sacrifice and so unmakes the boundaries it created. Mythic violence creates a system of law by which some violent acts are judged legitimate and others illegitimate—it creates ‘both guilt and expiation’, in Benjamin’s language—but divine violence only expiates. It only releases from obligation. Divine violence does not create or renew a system of obligations, as Schmitt’s decision does. It invites instead a free response. And it does not just threaten, as mythic violence does, that if this or that act of violence is not done the whole fabric of society will be rent. It strikes. It rends the fabric from top to bottom.

In all this, Benjamin insists, divine violence is ‘lethal without spilling blood’. Mythic violence is bloody—a juridical order arises and sustains itself through the very real sacrifice of bodies. But divine violence comes ‘not by miracles directly performed by God, but by the expiating moment in them that strikes without bloodshed’ (199/250). That is, divine violence is not simply identical to any action done by humans. As the divine in Benjamin is not identical to any earthly power, divine violence is not identical to any earthly action. It might be accompanied by this-worldly violence, either before or after. But it is not identical to violence done to human bodies and it does not cause this violence. It works at another level, at the level of what Benjamin calls ‘systems of relations’ (199/250), at what a social theorist might call ‘structures of legitimation’, and at the level of what the Apostle Paul calls ‘principalities and powers’.

At times Benjamin seems to mean this talk of ‘bloodless’ violence as a metaphor that might still allow for the blood of actual bodies. He answers worries about the cost of divine violence with a critique of systems of meaning that take ‘mere life’ [bloße Leben] as an absolute value (201-202/250-51). And he defends his notion of divine violence by saying that it never destroys what he calls ‘the soul of the living’ (200/250). Slavoj Žižek seizes upon this distinction to claim Benjamin’s support for violent revolutionary action. It might cost mere life, but it saves the souls of the living—and so is ‘bloodless’ in the sense that matters. ²⁹ But, as Judith Butler has argued, such an interpretation of Benjamin relies on a dangerous dualism of body and soul. ³⁰ Benjamin is right to name the violent potential of laws that protect ‘mere life’ above all. (Agamben has spun this insight into a wide-ranging critique of contemporary society. ³¹ ) But the danger of valuing mere life over richer forms of human being need not lead us to define divine violence in ways that implicate it in the destruction of actual bodies. The better reading of divine violence, and the one that is more true to Benjamin’s fundamental insight, describes its operation at the level of systems of relation. The annihilation of a system of relations might bring bloodshed in its wake. But that bloodshed was not required, commanded or caused by the divine violence. Indeed, the hallmark of the Christian imagination is a vision of suffering without retaliation that dismantles every power and principality.

In offering this concept of divine violence, Benjamin joins Schmitt’s critique of the self-conception of the modern, parliamentary state as a source of laws that are distinct from (and therefore capable of restraining) violence. He shares with Schmitt a sense of the significance of extralegal violence for founding and sustaining any system of laws. Benjamin does not reject Schmitt’s analysis so much as reframe it within a wider angle of vision. In this wider angle, Schmitt’s ‘sovereign’ violence appears as what Benjamin calls mythical violence. Such bloody violence does indeed create and sustain social orders. But Benjamin refuses Schmitt’s equation of real sovereignty with the authors of these cycles of violence. He holds out a place for a divine violence that is outside of—and so capable of interrupting—the cycles of mythical violence that Schmitt describes as ultimate. He describes a sovereignty that exceeds, relativizes and deposes the earthly powers Schmitt identifies. He develops the contrast with Schmitt most pointedly in the final sentence of his essay: ‘Divine violence, which is the sign and seal but never the means of sacred dispatch, may be called “sovereign” violence’ (203/252). The argument is about the nature of sovereignty. By framing Schmitt’s notion of sovereignty as mere mythic violence, and then developing a contrasting category of divine violence, Benjamin offers a way to think about the sovereignty of God in relation to political life without slipping into the violence of theocracy.

Trial-and-Error Theocracy

Benjamin insists on the transcendence of divine violence against Schmitt’s more mythical accounts. But as Benjamin’s divine sovereign gains in transcendence, it becomes more and more elusive to human reason. And as Benjamin’s notion of ‘divine violence’ becomes more alien to this world, it becomes more difficult to recognize and name. Benjamin describes the ways divine violence works, but he hesitates to identify particular moments or movements as divine violence. It is essential to insist on the possibility of ‘the highest manifestation of unalloyed violence’, he writes (202/252). ‘Less possible and also less urgent for mankind, however, is to decide when unalloyed violence has been realized in particular cases’. Mythic violence can be recognized with certainty, Benjamin writes, but divine violence cannot, ‘because the expiatory power of violence is invisible to men’ (202-203/252). Benjamin can give no criteria, no guidelines, that might help identify a particular moment as a moment of divine violence, for then the criteria would become a kind of mythic violence, a law before the god who gives the law. Divine violence, by its very nature, is inscrutable. It comes without precedent, apart from any category or criteria, ex nihilo.

But if there are no resources for discerning a moment of divine violence, then there is no way, Gillian Rose (1947–95) argues, ‘to distinguish law-abolishing violence from law-instating violence that decides in the state of emergency to usurp divinity, because there is no recognizable rule of law and no benign or wise judgment, no phronesis’. ³² Benjamin gives, Rose writes, no way to distinguish the violence of Nazism from that of its opponents. Benjamin’s divine violence thus becomes, in practice, indistinguishable from Schmitt’s state of exception. The world becomes one gray wash of violence. The mere possibility of divine violence, the mere promise of the category as empty placeholder, will not shine the light that can illumine the differences between the shades of gray. If divine violence cannot be known for what it is, then it does not enhance our capacity to critique mythic violence as merely mythic, for there is no contrast case in this world. And it does not give us the resources we need to discriminate between legitimate and illegitimate violence—which is the need the whole essay is designed to address. On the contrary, Rose argues, a notion of the divine as inscrutable will only stir up the purposeless longing of melancholy and the random lunges towards this or that candidate for divine violence that it breeds.

In place of this tragedy in which no moment ever can be named as identical with divine violence, Rose proposes a comedy in which we risk naming a moment as one of divine violence and then, as that claim of identification plays out, realize the ways in which we were mistaken. She describes a reason that is ‘adventurous and corrigible’, ³³ a fallible Hegelianism written from the midst of history—not the end—in which Spirit just is ‘the drama of misrecognition which ensues at every stage and transition of the work—a ceaseless comedy, according to which our aims and outcomes constantly mismatch each other, and provoke yet another revised aim, action and discordant outcome’. ³⁴ In the constant work of risking and revising, history does not necessarily make progress. It drives not towards the realization of the concept, but towards its actuality.

Rose’s proposal is, as Rowan Williams sees, ‘a reprinstination of the Hegelian project in something like its full ambition’. ³⁵ She would knit immanence and transcendence back together in a more modest way that stresses human effort—work—in the long, difficult learning and unlearning of history. But in giving up Benjamin’s insistence on the solely destructive quality of divine violence, Rose ends up ‘staking’, as she comes to say, in however tentative and humble a form, a series of claims to identity between transcendent ideals and immanent historical realities. A consideration of violence displays the problem with Rose’s proposal with greatest force. Rose would stake a series of claims that depend on a violence that establishes what seems, for now, like a law that holds heaven and earth together. The corrigibility of this staking does not change its fundamental quality. Rose ends up making a case for a fallibilist mythic violence, a kind of trial-and-error theocracy.

But to name a problem with Rose’s proposal does not refute her critique of Benjamin. There are parts of Benjamin’s sprawling corpus which seem to fit Rose’s description of his work well. But there are other parts that avoid the neo-Kantianism against which Rose has honed her critique. ³⁶ Rose pushes us to develop a reading of this better Benjamin.

The Deposition of Law

Benjamin seems to fit Rose’s critique of neo-Kantianism in a short unpublished piece collected under the title of ‘Theologico-Political Fragment’:

Only the Messiah himself contemplates all history, in the sense that he alone redeems, completes, creates its relation to the messianic. For this reason, nothing that is historical can relate itself, from its own ground [von sich aus sich], to anything messianic. Therefore, the Kingdom of God is not the telos of the historical dynamic; it cannot be established as a goal. From the standpoint of history, it is not the goal but the terminus [Ende]. ³⁷

In declaring that ‘nothing that is historical can relate itself…to anything messianic’, Benjamin seems to suppose the absolute separation of history and redemption that Rose names as the source of the problem. But Benjamin does not offer the line without qualification. Nothing historical can relate itself to the messianic, Benjamin writes, ‘from its own ground’, or by its own power. This leaves open the possibility that history might be related to the messianic by a power beyond itself. But what kind of power—what kind of relation—could that be? It is, in Benjamin’s phrase from ‘World and Time’, a question of manifestation.

That manifestation cannot be direct. ‘The secular order should be erected on the idea of happiness’, Benjamin writes. And ‘the quest of free humanity for happiness runs counter to the messianic direction’ (203/305). But exactly as it moves against the coming of the Reign of God, history plays its part in the arrival of that Reign:

But just as a force, by virtue of the path it is moving along, can augment another force on the opposite path, so the secular order—because of its nature as secular—promotes the coming of the Messianic Kingdom. The secular, therefore, though not itself a category of the Kingdom, is a decisive category of its most unobtrusive approach (204/305).

Benjamin’s position in this passage does not fit the neo-Kantian mold that Rose critiques so sharply. He does not describe history as striving towards redemption, failing to reach its goal, and so bereft of any sort of divine presence and dependent on an absolutely alien and inscrutable grace. He describes instead history that is passing away and, in passing away, participating in the arrival of the messianic age. The messianic age relates to history as the sovereign relates to the political order: it is outside of and other than history, but its otherness defines and so permeates history. There is a kind of presence without identity. ³⁸

In this fragment Benjamin does not describe the Godforsaken world that Rose attributes to him. He sounds less like a neo-Kantian and more, as Jacob Taubes has argued, like the Apostle Paul. Benjamin ‘has a Pauline notion of creation’, Taubes writes. He ‘sees the labor pains of creation, the futility of all creation’. ³⁹ Creation groans in Benjamin as it does in the eighth chapter of Paul’s letter to the Romans. It groans in the realization that it is not complete. It groans in its distance from the messianic age. And exactly in that groaning, in that desperate futility, it finds itself joined by the Spirit in cries too deep for words. It participates in the work of the Spirit not through its achievements, but through its passing away.

The groans of creation arise in the wake of a divine violence that shatters the semblance of fulfillment promised by the state and other powers. They arise in the wake of what Benjamin calls—in another deep echo of Paul—the Entsetzung of law. ⁴⁰ Schmitt also writes of the Entsetzung of law. But he uses the term to describe the ‘suspension’ of law by the sovereign in the state of exception. The sovereign, Schmitt writes, has the power to suspend existing law, rule by decrees, and eventually establish a new rule of law. For Schmitt, Entsetzung names that moment between the end of one system of law-sustaining violence and before the moment of law-making violence that then gives rise to a new system of law-sustaining violence. That is, Schmitt’s Entsetzung marks a moment entirely within the cycles of what Benjamin calls mythical violence. Benjamin, on the other hand, defines the Entsetzung of law as an interruption of these cycles. It is the work of divine violence. When Benjamin writes of the Entsetzung of law, he describes not its suspension but its ‘deposition’. By the power of divine violence the law is, in Christoph Menke’s words, ‘deposed from the office it currently occupies, and at the same time released from a power besieging it’. ⁴¹ Divine violence shatters the law’s promise to deliver redemption and so deposes the law from its place in the mythical order. It breaks the law’s power to justify violence. At the same time, divine violence frees law from the distortions imposed on it by its deep amalgamation with violence. In this deposition the law is not destroyed so much as delivered. Again the echoes of Paul are strong. Stripped of an alliance with violence, law is not overthrown, but restored to its rightful form (cf. Rom. 3:31). ‘The law is holy’, Paul writes, ‘and the commandment is holy and just and good.’ But sin seizes an opportunity exactly in the goodness of the law and turns it towards the ends of death (Rom. 7:12-13). ⁴² Divine violence deposes law from this role. In its wake we ‘die to the law’ (Rom. 7:4). Divine violence therefore destroys the existing system of obligation. And, unlike the endless cycles of mythical violence, it does not establish a new system of obligation in place of the old. The deposition of law invites instead a free response.

Seeing the nature of the deposition of the law makes clear the ways that a political theology drawing on Benjamin can learn from Rose’s main critiques. To say, as Rose does, that Benjamin does not offer criteria for discerning one historical moment as divine violence and another as merely mythical violence is to misunderstand the nature of divine violence. It is to assume that divine violence occurs in some discrete historical events but not in others. But such a view would collapse divine violence back into myth, for it would suppose a direct sort of identification between divine and human action. Benjamin’s notion of divine violence should not be understood as describing discrete acts that are, as it were, added to the history of human action. It might better be understood, as Agamben writes, by analogy to Benjamin’s understanding of a pure language that is both other than and within everyday language:

And just as pure language is not another language, just as it does not have a place other than that of the natural communicative languages, but reveals itself in these by exposing them as such, so pure violence is attested to only as the exposure and deposition of the relation between violence and law. ⁴³

The task is not to name which moments are identical to divine violence. It is rather to see divine violence—the moment when the fabric of the polity is torn open, when the goods, processes and institutions of a juridical order are revealed to be finite—in the negation at work in every moment. Such a notion of divine violence requires not criteria for identifying particular moments but a critical discernment that can hear the groaning of all creation. And, contrary to Rose’s assessment, Benjamin gives ample resources for discernment in this sense.

A better understanding of the deposition of law also makes clear the ways in which divine violence does not undo phronesis, as Rose says it does. Divine violence does deliver the law from its binding to violence, and so it frees reason in relation to the order of law whose coercive power is established. But reason that is not bound is not necessarily without resources. It is freed for a new relationship with the law, one that combines freedom and fidelity in ways Benjamin learned to imagine by analogy to kabbalah. Such freedom is not empty. And it is not a freedom only for reason. It is also a freedom of the law from the alliance with violence that distorts its inner character. The deposition of law does not end phronesis, but transposes it into a key marked by freedom and the love that freedom makes possible.

The deposition of law sets phronesis free to seek the happiness that is the right end of the secular order. Such happiness is not in opposition to law, but inclusive of a new relation to law. This happiness is not ultimate. It runs counter to the direction of redemption. Divine violence reveals it to be passing away. And so Benjamin describes the politics that pursue this happiness as a kind of ‘nihilism’. ⁴⁴ But that nihilism is not itself ultimate. It operates within a larger eschatology in which the failure of the pursuit of mortal happiness plays its part in the work of redemption. Exactly in its failings it opens history to redemption. And the nihilism of divine violence is not without phronesis. Benjamin offers a phronesis that, Taubes writes, would fit with the hos me (‘as if not’) passages of 1 Corinthians 7. ‘Those who deal with the world’, Paul writes, should be ‘as though they had no dealing with it. For the present form of the world is passing away’ (v. 31). A person who knows the work of divine violence would not cease participating in the political life that divine violence has rendered mortal. But she would participate with a different sort of consciousness, ‘as if not’. She would understand both that the politics of this age cannot achieve anything ultimate and that, exactly in their limitations, they are joined to the work of redemption. She could reject the mythology of the state and still seek its good. Delivered by divine violence, she would be capable of a rightly secular politics. ⁴⁵