4

Force of the Political

All efforts to render politics aesthetic culminate in one thing: war.

—WALTER BENJAMIN

But if the force of art converges with the force of the political, do we not know what this strange union begets, as was frighteningly evident throughout the twentieth century? Does it not give birth to fascism? At the same time Derrida was conducting his own odd archaeology of the religio-political, starting in the 1980s, the controversy over Heidegger’s Nazism was gathering full force in France and spilled relentlessly onto American shores. In retrospect there are a number of factors in the virulence of the controversy. The controversy itself was triggered by the French publication in 1987 of Victor Farías’s Heidegger et le Nazisme, translated into English in 1987.¹ But, as Richard Wolin observes, the hullabaloo was most intense in Gallic climes because, first, early Heidegger had permeated the French intellectual tradition since the 1930s, leaving its mammoth imprint on figures such as Jean-Paul Sartre and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, and, second, the Heideggerian critique of ontology had been the persistent background noise of the then ascendant and globally influential poststructuralist movement. Wolin asserts that “Paris was the logical staging ground” for debate about Heidegger’s Nazism if one takes seriously the oft-quoted maxim ‘Today, Heidegger lives in France.’”²

But we find far more in the Heidegger controversy, especially as it played out in France, than meets the eye. While in Anglophone letters the invective against Heidegger has largely been bundled into an ongoing contempt for the putative obscurantism of Teutonic thinking, allegedly fueling fascism, in France it has sometimes taken on a more subtle style of Gallic nationalistic insinuations that duplicate what anti-German rhetoric since perhaps the time of Napoleon has routinely engaged in.

Thus we have Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe’s contention that Heidegger’s Nazism follows almost by necessity from his fundamental philosophical agenda. At its core Heidegger’s “project” is “theopolitical,” says Lacoue-Labarthe. “It is a formidable project, in that it tries to deepen and insists on verifying fascism.”³ Lacoue-Labarthe claims that Heidegger’s entire prospectus of thinking the “originary,” and thus too his ontological quest for the archai-convergence of poetry, language, and the Seinsfrage, is a not-so-veiled rehabilitation of Romantic mythology, which itself can be viewed as a kind of concretized metaphysical theatrics in its own right. The peril of remythologizing, Lacoue-Labarthes implies, lies in its tendency to transmute the Being of the predicate within Greek ontology into performance, and that celebration of the performance principle through art—Wagner’s Gesamtkunstwerk is a good illustration—conjures up a “theopolitics” that culminated, for example, in the pageantry of the Third Reich and the Nuremburg rallies.

Lacoue-Labarthes goes way too far in indicting the entire Heideggerian enterprise as a subterfuge for the purely political advancement of the Hitlerian agenda of a German “peopledom,” a deutsches Volkstum. He fails miserably in his efforts to tie directly the Nazi use of neo-Romantic culture for its totalitarian program. Lacoue-Labarthes, who admires Alain Badiou, does not see the irony in winking at the “romantic” politics of Maoist, collectivist totalitarianism while reviling German totalitarianism. The totalitarian temptation of philosophy, given the right historical conditions, is as applicable for the French—we tend to forget that Pol Pot was a disciple of Sartre—as it has been for the Germans.

MYTH AND CONSTITUTIVE FORCE

But, polemics aside, Lacoue-Labarthes raises an issue that the horrific era of Nazism to this day has left unresolved. That is the issue of how the seemingly “originary” question of constitutive force, which Derrida through his reading of Benjamin sees as the key to a new democratic, albeit “messianic,” futuricity can skirt the temptation of the totalitarian. Derrida suggests, following Benjamin, that the divine “violence” of Yahweh and his eschatological demand for justice is only formally cognate with the “founding violence” of the mythic state. The former deconstructs all statist polities, which in themselves resist the heterological mandate of the Hebraic “I am that I am” and hence manifests itself as the true type of justice that is ultimately and infinitely “undeconstructible.”

As the case of Nietzsche shows us, what we have termed the “force of God,” coming to disclosure through a genealogy of the political, does not simply come down to a decision over whether we prefer to be Greeks or Jews. The mythic imagination, especially as it is found in Schelling in his quest for the origin of the “gods” and human, is the controlling dynamic of a philosophical genealogy. Ever since Žižek began his rehabilitation of Schelling in Continental philosophy via Lacan two decades ago, a sense that origin (Ursprung) is not necessarily the same as inauguration (Entstehung), as Foucault first discerned in his reading of Nietzsche, has been gathering steam. This differentiating distance—Žižek’s “parallax” factor—between the two seemingly cognate renderings of “first things” can be traced, as Žižek makes us obliquely aware, back to Schelling. Schelling’s postulate of a primordial “abyss” (Abgrund) of freedom out of which both God and subjectivity arise, can only be approached, as far as Schelling is concerned, through mythologemes, which are metaphysical ideas in germination.

Contrary to Lacoue-Labarthes charge that Heidegger appropriated the “mythological” as a stratagem for an ideology of neopagan power politics, we know enough about Heidegger’s self-declared indebtedness to Schelling to acknowledge that he most likely and quite consciously absorbed the many resonances of his nineteenth-century predecessor’s rejection of all idealist ontologies, even the Kantian one. Heidegger’s principle of “difference” between Being and beings is a second-generation variant on Schelling’s epochal discovery. The so-called ontological difference arises from a kind of protological fissure in Being itself. “Mythology says or seems to say something different than is meant,” Schelling says in Historical-Critical Introduction to the Philosophy of Mythology” (German title in translation).⁴

Mythology in many ways can be considered a first-order genealogy, because the “gods are not just present abstractly and outside these historical relations: as mythological, they are by their nature, from the very beginning, historical beings.” If such a quote sounds like eighteenth-century “euhemerism,” the ancient thesis that the gods are but heroic but forgotten mortals in disguise, it is not at all. The historicity of the gods is tied in indispensably with the historicism of language. They are archaeological placeholders for semantic and grammatical structures of signification.

Thus philosophy can only decode its own discourse when it delves into the mythemes that both gave rise to, sustain, and have inspired it. In the presence of the gods “we face the peculiar whole of human ideas [Vorstellungen], and the true nature of the whole is to be found and mediated and grounded in” this deep historical set of conditions.⁵ Schelling’s brief against Hegel toward the end of his life, according to Joseph Lawrence, revolved primarily around his resistance to the “totalitarianism of reason,” which he saw as the critical danger of the dialectic. Schelling worked out this resistance through his own philosophical mythology in the System der Weltalter (“System of the Ages of the World”), in which metaphysical abstractions such as God and self are generated in a timeless but “evolutionary,” matter from the autogenerative chaos that subsists in the primordial dark night that is both Abyss (Abgrund) and the Absolute.⁶ There can ultimately be no sovereign, willful God—either in a religious or a metaphysical sense—because even God, in a rather strange façon parler, for Schelling, “comes to be.” There is indeed a divine theogony, which makes metaphysics possible.

It is no accident that Schelling’s revival has corresponded to the age of poststructuralism with its struggle against Hegel and all totalitarianisms of language and logos. Derrida’s logocentrist philosophy is incarnate in Hegel. Mythology, however, suggests that language is not being, as in most idealisms but, as Heidegger would say, the “opening” with its finite system of self-limiting, signifying relations to a disclosure of Being that seizes, but does not freeze in, linguistic constellations. But behind the theogenesis of language there is also a play of forces, a productive Wirbel (“maelstrom”) that makes what we “theologically” mistake as the directed handiwork of a creator God. In the beginning there is a Platonic khora, Derrida’s pregnant negative, yet there is no demiurge or “craftsman” to guide it with intelligent design.

In “Ages of the World”—or what part of the intended manuscript we actually have at our disposal—Schelling suggests that the historicity of the gods and the historicism of language cloaked in myths somehow mirror this primordial state, which following modern physics we might term a dynamic archaeo-cosmic indeterminacy. It is going too far perhaps, as Žižek does, to Lacanize and make God a fit subject for the analyst’s couch. But Schelling’s own strange theogony in the Weltalter, where he probably took an immediate cue from his own interpretation of myth, provides a genealogical marker for Derrida’s much later venture into the “mystical foundation of authority.” In the German version of the text Schelling employs extensively the word force—both as Kraft and as Gewalt. The former seems to be more routinely used in reference to those forces that play against each other, a motif we find pervasive in Nietzsche, as Deleuze reminds us. The latter is used in that kind of syntax where the play results in a singular act of constituting, founding, or “authorizing”—as Derrida notes in Benjamin’s own text and Schelling intimates becomes the basis of God’s actual creative sovereignty.⁷ The “force of God” thus is subordinate to the force of the coming into being of the “representations” (Vorstellungen) of language. The primeval struggles and conflicts among the gods portrayed in mythology are similar to the ancient mythical gigantomachy, of which Plato speaks in The Sophist and that Heidegger cites in Being and Time as the source of the Seinsfrage. Heidegger and Plato recognized something (as did Kant in certain measure) of which ferocious critics of the ancient philosophical tendency to resort to myth remain ignorant—the inability of “pure reason” either to master or to replace the strife, or discord (eris), that lies at the heart of what logos seeks to engage. Both mythology and rationalism have historically launched their own “totalitarianisms,”⁸ but the drive to totalization stems from other sources.⁹

In the Weltalter Schelling ascribes an “irrational principle” to the beginning of the world that is lodged within the divine itself. “Without this principle which resists thinking, the world would actually already be dissolved into nothing.” This principle is “the real might (Macht) in God.” It is not only Macht but also Gewalt, whereby Being becomes determination, whereby God’s forceful singularity establishes the world in its specificity and particularities. But this authorization remains as well behind its governance and administration. “It is necessary to acknowledge this as the personality of God, as the Being in itself and for itself of God.” Ontology is inseparable from kratology, the logos of authorizing force, which is what “theology” ultimate implies. Furthermore, this principle as “an active principle … precedes the principle of the existing God.” However, Schelling laments, “many do not want to acknowledge that ancient and holy force of Being and they would like to banish it straightaway from the beginning.”¹⁰

When it comes to a genealogy of the political, Schelling’s Weltalter has multifaceted implications. Western political thought in general, and political philosophy in particular (including the current strand that has come to be known as “political theology”), has resisted, or been impervious to, the kind of genealogical treatment that has been routine in the last 150 years for other forms of thought. The effort to relativize Western political thinking through different kinds of supposedly “heterological” critiques such as intercultural, postcolonial, or other fashions, which could all be lumped together as an attack on Enlightenment universalism, through the myriad strategies of “identity politics” (feminist, disability, African American, Latino, LGBT, etc.), are nothing more than ideological axes that have adopted their respective customized discourses of critical theory. But they do not amount to either genealogy or even political theory in the deeper sense. Theory as the handmaiden of any political theology requires genealogical subtlety, and one must read behind the familiar conceptual waddles of idealist and crypto-idealist “philosophies of history” that have been passed on through Marxism—and neo-Marxism—since Hegel in order to reestablish what Nietzsche would term a certain “perspectivalism,” whereby we can follow the intricacies of political thinking, and the kind of anti-ideological historical sensibility that is its correlative field of inquiry, that enable us to confront the crisis.

As Foucault makes us aware, Nietzschean genealogy was invariably an exposure of the lie that poses as “truth.” Nietzschean genealogy, therefore, was a much more complex project than the mere reversal of Platonism, which had identified truth with the “good” (to kalon), a perverse crossbreeding of a theory of knowledge with the production of values. Foucault draws a careful distinction between what he sees as the deliberate, finely tuned substitution of the synonymous German words Ursprung, Entstehung, and Herkunft, all of which imply beginnings, sources, or provenances of some ilk.

THE GENEALOGY OF EFFECTIVE FORCE

As we saw in Heidegger’s alternation of the first and third terms in the case of the “wherefore” of art, Herkunft is the genealogical expression, the signifier of effective force, because it implies an ongoing interspersal and reciprocal tracing back and advancing forward of the complex threads of force and action that impinge upon the “work.” As Nietzsche’s realized, history itself is such a “work” (Werk), but it only becomes “effective” (wirklich) when it becomes a “force” with impact (Wirkung). The aim of genealogy is to unravel from the weavings of historical “truth telling” the genuine forces that are forever and marginally as well as almost invisibly operating. Genealogy is distinguished from origin, according to Nietzsche. The quest for origins seeks to site the “truth” as the why of becoming itself. Such a situating of origins turns out to be a metaphysical sleight of hand, as implied in Aristotle’s use of the word aitia, meaning “causal principle” or “explanation,” that grounds our understanding of beginnings in a formal and conceptual manner of speaking. Whereas, Foucault proposes, “the origin makes possible a field of knowledge whose function is to recover it,” engendering an anachrony that amounts to our own self-deceptions peering backward from our present vantage point, “it is a new cruelty of history” pursued by the genealogist that “compels a reversal of this relationship and the abandonment of ‘adolescent’ quests.” For “the origin lies at a place of inevitable loss,” a “site of a fleeting articulation that discourse has obscured and finally lost.”¹¹ Thus “a genealogy of values, morality, asceticism, and knowledge will never confuse itself with a quest for their ‘origin.’”¹²

But in its rejection of the idea that history has its own founding principles, its aitia, its own hidden, but unimpeded gateway to the truth of history from which we can learn and “apply” to where, what, and who we are now, genealogy also recognizes the force of events. Events, as philosophers from Nietzsche onward have grasped, are not general, but singular. The singularity of the event “within” history directs us toward the point at which historical particularities do not become intelligible in some comprehensive way but suddenly intrude as observable streamlets of becoming. These points are event horizons, virtual thresholds of the actual. It is the location of these event horizons that is the overriding task of genealogy. According to Foucault, the locution Nietzsche chooses for this singular and virtual vanishing point of all “explanation” is Entstehung. Entstehung refers to “emergence,” which is “the entry of forces; it is their eruption, the leap from the wings to center stage.”¹³ The Entstehung or site of emergence “is not the unavoidable conclusion of a long preparation, but a scene where forces are risked in the chance of confrontations, where they emerge triumphant, where they can also be confiscated.”¹⁴ The theory of origins anchors history in a sense of identity, but genealogy “dissociates” all forms of identitatarian folly. Genealogy, in contrast, insinuates the artist, the political force majeur, the entrepreneur of the grand and “effective” notion into history. There is one use of genealogy, and that is to clear the ground for the yea-saying of the singular declaration, or deed, that manifests the will to power.

Nietzsche’s exaltation of the artist, together with his insistence on genealogy over the “will to truth,” contradicts the Platonic heritage, but it is not really at odds with the Aristotelian program, especially its political one. Aristotle is often misread by imputing the canons of “rationality” outlined in the Topics, Physics, and Metaphysics to the perfection of the politeia, as laid out in the Nichomachean Ethics and the Politics, which is a supplement to the former. In book 1 of the Nichomachean Ethics, Aristotle raises the framing question of how logos and polis can be properly coordinated with each other through a common telos resting on the pursuit of eudaimonia, conventionally translated as “happiness.” Thus the Lockean formulation of the pursuit of happiness as the guiding teleology of liberal, “representative” democracy—immortalized in Jefferson’s famous words from the American Declaration of Independence—is thoroughly Aristotelian to the core and informs all resultant discourse about the inseparability of an educated citizenry from the rightful exercise of their liberties. The liberal political ideal not only built on Aristotle’s insistence that eudaimonia must be derived from intelligence and prudence (phronesis), but that the aims of the politeia itself are genetically intertwined with the pursuit of an informed kind of happiness, which is in essence the true happiness. Aristotle, unlike modern thought, which sees ethics as the “science” of individual decision making and action as somehow the baseline for political theory, reversed the relationship. “Political science,” he says, is the “ruling science” because it “uses the other sciences concerned with action” that converge on the good of the polis. “Hence its end will include the end [telos] of other sciences, and so will be the human good … for though admittedly the good is the same for a city as for an individual, still the good of the city [polis] is apparently a greater and more complete good to acquire and preserve.”¹⁵

Yet in his theory of poetics, or mimesis, Aristotle departs from Plato, who was famously suspicious of the relationship between art and politics, because the organization of the politeia must center on that form of logos that makes the truth evident. Plato banished the poet, the technician of mimesis, from the genuine politeia, because his “technology” seeks simply to reproduce, in inferior and degenerate guise, the shining eidos, the purest presence of the true.

THE FUNCTION OF MIMESIS

It was Plato who reduced the function of “representation”—the customary translation of the Greek mimesis—to a mere eikon, a cheap imitation of the supreme epistemic standard of both knowledge and value. But representation in Aristotle carries far more the connotation of imaginative performativity, where mimesis is more akin to the German Darstellung, or stylized enactment, than to the idealist Vorstellung, the sensuous idea or embryonic concept. If the philosopher must be king in the Platonic politeia, for Aristotle it is the dramatist or rhetorician who provides us with the models for emulation. The “objects of mimesis,” Aristotle writes in the Poetics, are “men in action,” who are of “a higher or a lower type,” those who possess arête or a moral character who may be emulated.¹⁶ The language of course anticipates Nietzsche. The chief role of mimesis, Aristotle adds in the Rhetoric, is “success in persuading audiences and speaking well on public affairs,” which at the same time facilitates the kind of “authoritative decisions” necessary to the maintenance of the polis.¹⁷ Logos as poetic persuasion and the true techne that we now refer to as the “science” of the political merge in the unitary Aristotelian depiction of mimesis that includes ethics, poetry, rhetoric, and, of course, the ordering of the polis.

The cipher, therefore, to any authentic theory for both constituting and administering the state lies in the realization that representation of political interests—that is, the proper mimetic performance that gives the politeia substance and significance as the fulfillment of informed human desires, that fashions “goods of the soul”—lies in the artistic idealization of what Nietzsche termed the “highest values.” The Nazi exploitation for its own totalitarian purposes of Wagnerian grand opera, his Gesamtkunstwerk or “total art work,” is a lesson in the hidden dangers of politics as imaginative performance. But it is neither an aberration of the “rationalist” or logos tradition in Western culture nor a cynical ploy at manipulating the masses. Contemporary “virtue ethics,” descended from Aristotle and formulated to revision politics as a surrogate for the development of character, and Artaud’s “theater of cruelty” where “high art” and street stagings with political ends in view blur into each other, are much closer cousins than we would like to admit.

But art to be “persuasive” and therefore politically effective must have force behind it. It must mobilize by elevating the phantasm of the self to an identification with imaginative action. This “creative” dimension of mimesis, as it perhaps applies to the representation of the political not as collective interest but as collective performative act, is strongly implied in Benjamin’s essay “Doctrine of the Similar.” In that short piece, composed in 1933, Benjamin emphasized the force of language itself. “Language is the highest application of the mimetic faculty: a medium into which the earlier perceptive capabilities for recognizing the similar had entered without residue, so that it is now language which represents the medium in which objects meet and enter into relationship with each other, no longer directly, as once in the mind of the augur or priest, but in their essences.”¹⁸ Benjamin calls attention to the manner in which the archaic genesis of written language was closely associated with the technique of conjuration and suggests that such a capability can be harnessed for the mobilization of social action. Having been influenced by Jewish Kabbalah, the surrealists, and the French symbolists, who experimented with what today we would call “altered states of consciousness,” Benjamin generally implied that the “essences” that combine in the new imaginative politics of his era could become expressive of a will that linked the avant-garde “image spaces” of the present era to an eschatological kind of temporality.

It would not be going out on a limb to surmise that Derrida’s democratic messianism evolved conceptually from such an analysis. The force of the imagination, which Romantic art had elevated to a kind of supernatural principle in its own right, and the force of the political could only combine effectively when such an eschatological temporality—in biblical language the power of the in-breaking kairos—came into play. The mimetic action, the reflective emulation of arête that guaranteed the integrity of the Aristotlean polis now could be transformed into the mobilizing vision of Marx’s “universal class,” shattering the self-contradictory industrial organization of production that characterized modern capitalism and would eventuate in a new, global order of constitutive justice.

But if messianic mimesis were to replace the reflective, representational system of signs established by the proper Aristotelian functioning of rational discourse and the ordering of the politeia in accordance with the principle of calculative choices made to secure happiness, it would be on account of a change in the fundamental understanding of the power of logos itself. The mimetic role of logos would no longer be to structure and hold together the natural communal dispositions of humanity, but rather to expand and alchemize the very “image spaces” in which human beings organically situated themselves, thereby fulfilling the tendency of language itself, as Benjamin noted in the “Doctrine of the Similar,” to bind together the familiar sensuous object with what he termed its “alien” counterpart. This “alien” otherness identified in the force of the imagination as embodied in language as performance draws to itself the force of the political in a way the original notion of the polis never could.

As Richard Wolin stresses in his masterful study of Benjamin, “language [for the latter] is rationalized mimesis.”¹⁹ But the vector of this rationality points in the direction of what Benjamin terms the “disenchantment” (Entzauberung) of the mimetic correlation through the “logical” differentiation of the tokens of language, the elaboration of a propositional architecture for meaning, and the predicative function. The propositional edifice of discursive reasoning mirrors the rise of the hierarchical and bureaucratized state apparatus. It is, therefore, no accident that Hegel’s identification of the “real” with the “rational” is congruent with his presumed incarnation of absolute Spirit as German Recht. The Socratic dialectic, first employed against the theocratic traditionalism of the original Athenian polis, now reaches its apotheosis in Prussian authoritarianism, the very incendiary condition for the “most terrible wars” of the twentieth century, which Nietzsche, the genealogist of the state, prophetically foresaw.

Implicitly, therefore, we can say that, for Benjamin, the downward spiral of decadence that has captured liberal democracy, inescapably dependent on a theory of representation that is at the same time intimately bound up with this very primal “fall” of discourse itself, can only be braked through “divine” intervention. Such an intervention is never predictable, as the messianic moment itself comes like lightning from the East. But this lightning is always that of the linguistic. The recapture of the prelapsarian “primal” force of language is only possible for the one who senses its imaginative energy as it suddenly erupts eventlike in the present—not the “general present” (Gegenwart) of the chronicler or the historian but the “flash” of inspirational presencing that seizes whomever glimpsing the “messiah,” an instant that Benjamin (coining his own word) dubs the Jetztzeit, literally, the “immediacy-now.”

We are naturally reminded here of Derrida’s time that is “out of joint” when historical specters manifest and the messianic expectation of “undeconstructible” justice suddenly blazes across our temporal horizon. The “bearer” of the Jetztzeit, according to Benjamin, can never be any dialectical resolution of unfolding concepts, but a pure singularity, what he, in his very brief essay “On the Mimetic Faculty,” terms the “semiotic element.”²⁰ The singularity of the semiotic moment is not only messianic but “religious” in a profound sense. The religious is a word Benjamin himself uses, though, more tellingly, he also refers to the semiotic indicator as the unique, “redemptive” (rettend) force of language, which is the essential aim of literary criticism, the method he preferred to philosophy.

In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History” Benjamin offers a parable of the messianic force—and thus the true genealogical force—of language. Benjamin, whom Hannah Arendt called the “oddest of Marxists,” wrote the theses perhaps as an answer to Marx’s own declaratory “Theses on Feuerbach,” as way of “Jewishly” thinking Marx in a way Marx himself could never have thought. Benjamin tells of a painting by Paul Klee showing “an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history.” The angel’s “face is turned toward the past. Where we are perceiving a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise … [it] irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward.”²¹ The angel of history cannot tarry, for the very force of history is constantly intensifying and impelling surge after surge of flotsam in its wake. But, strangely, this billowing wreckage is held together by another force that makes the litter of history appear as a coherent mass, the force of the symbolic, the force that constitutes a “symbolic economy” articulating what is meant truly by the “political.”