F RCE POLITICAL THEOLOGY and the
F CRISIS of LIBERAL DEMOCRACY
G D CARL A. RASCHKE
Preface
In 1922 Carl Schmitt wrote that “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.” What Schmitt did not say is that often crisis arises because the metaphysical structure—Gilles Deleuze’s “image of thought”—is no longer in alignment with the political form. Jacques Derrida perhaps intended something similar when in Specters of Marx he introduced the concept of the “messianic” in the context of his diagnosis of the present time, what Shakespeare had in mind when he wrote that “time is out of joint.” Our time is out of joint because the principal political form on which Derrida began to meditate with the fall of Communism—i.e., democracy—is increasingly dislodged from its own “metaphysical structure.” This metaphysical structure was forged through various historical circumstances from the seventeenth through the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a metaphysical structure we know simply and perhaps too uncritically as “modernism.” The political form is what we know as “liberal democracy.” As we slide onward into the newborn millennium and become increasingly cognizant that both the present and the future will be in many ways vastly different from the previous century, the daily headlines as well as a distinct but cloying feeling for the disjointedness of the times reinforce an unprecedented sense of reality. It is quite
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obvious that liberal democracy as we know it is in crisis. Since the end of the totalitarian era, most dramatically symbolized in the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, many new democracies have come and disappeared with a disturbing rhythm. At the same time, the Western democracies, both in America and in Europe, have descended into profound crises of historically unique proportions. Deepening political dysfunctions are exacerbated by economic challenges that have grown overwhelming for a variety of reasons. The sources of this crisis are multilayered: unsustainable demands on the capacity of governments to provide for the general welfare while maintaining its tax base; insatiable consumerist fantasies combined with an epidemic of narcissistic personality pathologies propagated by the substitution of pure signs for useful commodities ( Jean Baudrillard’s so-called hyperreality), which can best be described in Fredric Jameson’s phrase “the logic of late—global—capitalism”; an explosion of ethnic and cultural identitarian politics as well as resurgent types of religious exceptionalism and zealotry that go hand in hand with the slow but steady collapse of the institutions of civil society and authority of the nation-state that, from a generic standpoint, underpins liberal democracy; what Olivier Roy has termed the “de-culturing” of worldwide religious belief, leading to the divorce of faith from politics and the many metastasized manifestations of what Mark Lilla terms “the great separation,” including religious fanaticism and terrorism as well as the sort of smarmy, kitschy, mindless, pseudo-intellectual, and slyly bigoted brand of unbelief expressed in the movement known as the “new atheists.” The crisis remains imperceptible only to the most wizened ideologues and those who are historically and culturally trend-deaf. Normally the response, which reflects our own sordid and self-referential subcultural (what we mistakenly describe as “partisan”) politics, is to find, assign, and embroider the countless constructs for blame. As Nietzsche himself diagnosed, generalized social ressentiment cannot be disentangled from an addiction to causal explanations. In the age of the social sciences with their exhaustless capacity to single out “problems,” victims, and therapeutic or policy remedies, such ressentiment goes viral and the engines driving it become a juggernaut. “Scientific” causal analysis failed most theatrically with the global economic meltdown of 2008, a failure that in many ways can traced
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to a certain deficit in the professional disciplines themselves, which many contemporary theorists have lamented for well over a generation. Aside from the “great” separation of the political from the religious, a more telling rupture has been the separation of political theory from economic thinking—in short, the default of what was once known as “political economy.” It can be said that Karl Marx—or at least the Marx of the 1830s and 1840s—was the last great political economist in the omnibus sense, and it is the raw economism and intellectual dogmatism of later, “orthodox” Marxism-Leninism, from which the subtleties of communal interaction along with the inscription of social life within some sort of wider, far more nuanced, ontological matrix are completely absent, that commentators have only surmised as the leading factor in the elaboration of its darker totalitarian legacy as well as in its eventual historical demise. A more supple and genuinely “humanized” Marxism could easily have provided a warning of the economic disaster of 2008. The question of capital is not at all dead, and it will take a bona fide political economy of the future to chart its vicissitudes and anticipate its crises to come. But the default of political economy, particularly in the twentieth century, has had hitherto undetected side consequences that go a long way toward accounting for the crisis of liberal democracy in the main. In the forthcoming pages we shall explore at length the nature, indications, and social-theoretical intricacies of the default by seeking to conduct, à la Nietzsche and Foucault among others, a genealogical investigation into the crisis of liberal democracy, conceptually as well as historically. In short, we will seek to revive the angle of classical political economy by deploying the genealogical perspective, if not its exacting method. Yet, as we shall discover, any political economy redivivus remains impossible without some approach that accounts once more for the authorization of the political as a whole. The authorization of the political has been the persistent preoccupation of so much twentiethcentury social thought, amounting to what Jürgen Habermas once dubbed a “legitimation crisis.” The end of Marxism has served to deprive political economy of its putative “historical-materialist” justification. Certainly we have seen even the wannest ghosts of natural rights reasoning, except perhaps in some revanchist corners, fly off into
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the great historical night. The late twentieth-century phenomenon— perhaps the word insurgency would be more apt—Derrida has named the “return of the religious” has filled the void in a certain measure, generating a dynamic comeback in the twenty-first century of a certain once highly discredited form of political thinking that Schmitt christened “political theology.” Political theology has partnered both directly and indirectly with a reenergized discipline of the theory of religion (or “religious theory”), distinctively within the new globalized, multicultural, and multidisciplinary frame of analysis. What do we mean for the purposes of this book by “political theology?” There are many different ways of construing the expression these days, but briefly we will summarize what it signifies for the strategic and operative purposes of our undertaking. Political theology is never political theory, of course. Nor is it ever sensu stricto what commonly passes for “theology.” Political theology is only conceivable and plausible at a time where we have witnessed, and are continuing to witness, the end of theology. Political theology is not a theology of the political. Instead it aims to inquire into the grounds—or perhaps we should say the ontological grounding—of the political as we know it. It inquires into the apparition of the political, which has its origins in Greece and has evolved, drawing on the “metaphysical” superstructure of that inaugural formation or representation, into modern liberal democracy. Understanding this grounding—in German we would choose along with Marx the term Grundrisse—is what Nietzsche meant by genealogy, and it is back to Nietzsche’s understanding we are compelled to turn. With his critique of “moral-Christian” (i.e., Platonic) metaphysics as well as the politics of the democratic “herd,” which he pursued with a genealogical scalpel that laid bare the secret of all cognitive certainty as valuation, Nietzsche genuinely discerned political theology as genealogy. The “out-of-jointedness” of today can be laid at the feet of the very forces Nietzsche divined. It is impossible to arrive at a sense of crisis without a commitment to a genealogical adventure, which one must forthwith undertake. It is no longer a question of the Owl of Minerva taking flight, but of the mongoose going for the coiled cobra, the cobra that is the senescent metaphysico-political order in its dying gesture of defiance.
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We say “divine” here not merely as a trope, because in his own deep politics of the Dionysian Nietzsche recognized something that placed him prophetically ahead of his time, something that perhaps can be compared to Einstein’s insight into the ontological equivalence of mass and energy. Dio-nisus is the “drive of the divine,” the Trieb that forges value-domains as Krishna in the Bhagavad Gita manufactures worlds. Every genealogical foray ends up staring in the face of the Dionysian, the occasion for Nietzsche’s own apocalyptic madness. But we must go there despite the risks. What Nietzsche grasped, and Deleuze in his use of Nietzsche so well articulated, is that genealogy leads us to an intuition of the deeper play of forces behind the deep politics of not only our era but also previous ones. The play is at the same time a Wechselspiel, an “interplay,” which both in its origins and in its outtake can be deciphered as “divine” in an authentic political theological entailment of all its inferential possibilities. It is what we will designate as the force of God. The first four chapters of part 1 lay the philosophical groundwork for this genealogical foray into the concept of the political by exploring the different ramifications of the question Nietzsche himself raised in problematizing the Western philosophical tradition overall, the question of force—specifically, the relationship between force and value. These chapters aim to show how the principle I have termed the “force of God” emerges within the Hegelian dialectic and crystallizes in radical and avante-garde thinking, including the arts, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, coming to the fore finally in the political philosophy of Jacques Derrida. Chapter 5 investigates the nature and background of the crisis of liberal democracy by using the genealogical terms and tools developed in part 1. Following a thread of analysis implicit in the thought of Nietzsche, it explores how the crisis of representation is in effect a crisis of valuation driven by the hollowing out of the “relations of production” into pure “symbolic economies” that no longer have any real, only a “hyperreal,” character. Chapter 6 frames the crisis of liberal democracy in terms of the new era of globalization and “postnationalism,” pursuing how the thought of Carl Schmitt, who invented the term political theology, can be reappropriated in a new way to comprehend the breakdown of modern representative democracy into irreconcilable claims of “identity politics.” Chapter 7
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demonstrates how the legitimation crisis of liberal democracy results not from the failure of liberal institutions to “represent” the generic will or interests of their constituents, but from the “metaphysics” of representation itself. Chapters 8 and 9 look at the collapse of the political within the growing “economy of resentment” and the overrunning of political life by the metastasis of the state. The book does not pose an articulated solution to the crisis any more than Nietzsche himself posed a “solution” to the death of God. The death of God and the crisis of liberal democracy, in fact, consist in different facets of the same epochal “event” delineating the late modern period. But, like Augustine’s vision of the city of God that lies beyond and grows almost indistiguishably within the frenzy of history on the whole, it summons us to realize that the force of God outstrips the death of God. This force is the force of both “resurrection” and “insurrection,” which etymologically have much the same meaning. The book undertakes a project framed slightly earlier by Jeffrey Robbins’s fine work Radical Democracy and Political Theology. Robbins argues that what political theology, following Schmitt, “brings is a sustained focus on the nature of sovereign power.” However, Robbins makes it clear that Schmittian sovereignty must be turned upside down in the present era and radically recast in terms of the diffusion of decision within the panoply of democractic practice and pluralism, rather than as unimpeachable executive authority. Sovereign power manifests no longer as the classical God-king prerogative, but in a “radically immanent” form of secular distribution of “generative potential” within the demos itself. Such a “political potency” turns out to be “radical democracy’s resistance to all forms of hegemony . . . not by way of a transcendent authority . . . but by way of an exodus emanating within.”1 This “exodus” in my estimation—and in light of my analysis of the capture of democratic desires by the corporate consumerist state apparatus—emanates, as I show in conclusion, from the “revolutionary” religious potentialities that are first evident in the early modern era. Finally, Force of God seeks neither to offer a scholarly review of the relationship between political theology and political economy nor a risky, bathyspheric venture into the genealogical abyss that Nietzsche himself undertook. Nietzsche is the pioneer and perfecter of our political
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faith. Ours is but probing exegesis and cautionary commentary. It is understandable that after completing this exercise, we—especially we impatient, pragmatic Anglophone readers—feel compelled to ask the perennial question of “what is to be done?” But what is to be done will become slowly evident as we begin to absorb why we are where we are. That is the task of real politics, not political theology. As Alain Badiou reminds us, the only real politics is a militant politics, a politics of the truth that can best be glimpsed far into the depths, the “truth” that generates the event, the truth that Nietzsche, in his Thus Spoke Zarathustra, wanted to marry by offering the “nuptial ring” of Ewigkeit, “endlessness.” A real, militant politics rides on the great, eschatological steed of political genealogy. But the final battle is yet to come. That is for when we sit down and write next time.