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Empire
and Eschaton
Adam Kotsko
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1.
One thing’s for certain: time is moving forward. Decisive
and irreversible changes take place in history, and attempting to
go back is not only naďve, but inevitably disastrous. Yet there
is no predefined goal, no “process” that will definitively redeem
all past stages. Such, at least, is the burden of Hardt and Negri’s
Empire, written between the first Gulf War and the Kosovo
intervention in an attempt to reformulate the leftist project in
the face of rapid changes in the structure of sovereignty and production.
In a daring reappropriation of the rhetoric of the New Economy and
the political Third Way, Hardt and Negri argue that the most significant
trends of the 1990s—the informatization of production, the claim
that “the era of big government is over,” the breakdown of institutions—are
coming together to create a situation of unprecedented emancipatory
potential.
2. Yet at the
same time that they assert that every day, in every way, the multitude
is getting better and better, they disavow the teleological view
of history that has been a consistent temptation for the Marxist
tradition:
“We are not
proposing the umpteenth version of the inevitable passage through
purgatory (here in the guise of the new imperial machine) in order
to offer a glimmer of hope for radiant futures. We are not repeating
the schema of an ideal teleology that justifies any passage in the
name of a promised end.”1
The extreme optimism
of Empire, the conviction that here, finally, the multitude
has been provided with the tools to rise up on a global level—this
is not a teleological claim, but a rhetorical strategy. Hardt
and Negri are, above all, motivational speakers, and motivational
speakers may be exactly what we need.
3. We live in
an era when the left, by its own admission, is on the brink of death,
barely able to summon up enough energy for revolutionary literary
criticism and emancipatory film theory. In the wake of the collapse
of Real Socialism, the task of the leftist political theorist has
been not simply to develop the existing tradition or apply that
tradition to contemporary situations, but to find new theoretical
foundations for the leftist political project itself. For example,
in The Ticklish Subject, Slavoj Žižek, fully aware of this
deadlock, wishes to stage “an engaged political intervention, addressing
the burning question of how we are to reformulate a leftist, anti-capitalist
political project in our era of global capitalism and its ideological
supplement, liberal-democratic multi-culturalism.”2 After
nearly four hundred pages of theoretical critiques and amusing asides,
he concludes with a recommendation of Lacanian psychoanalysis, claiming
that “Lacan’s maxim, ‘Do not compromise your desire!’ fully endorses
the pragmatic paradox of ordering you to be free: it exhorts you
to dare.”3 In casting about for examples of those who
took up that exhortation to dare, Žižek finally settles on Lenin
and the apostle Paul.
4. For the latter,
Žižek is drawing on Alain Badiou’s account of the apostle, who is
for him “a subjective figure of primary significance.”4
His purpose is not to reactivate Christianity, but rather to help
in the
“widespread
search for a new militant figure—even if it takes the form of denying
its possibility—called upon to succeed the one installed by Lenin
and the Bolsheviks at the beginning of the century, which can be
said to have been the party militant.
“When a step forward is the order of the day, one may, among other
things, find assistance in the greatest step back. Whence this reactivation
of Paul. I am not the first to risk the comparison that makes of
him a Lenin for whom Christ will have been the equivocal Marx.”5
5. Badiou’s account
of the ways in which Paul is our contemporary is similar to Hardt
and Negri’s continual, almost involuntary, references back to the
Roman Empire (similar to the irresistible parallels to the contemporary
scene among the scholars of “Paul and Empire”)—time may be moving
forward, but it’s not out of the question for patterns to repeat
themselves. If, as Hardt and Negri claim, the only possibility for
revolution today is “an absolute alternative to the spirit of imperial
right... within Empire, but also against and beyond Empire, at the
same level of totality,”6 then why not look back to Paul?
Paul was, after all, the one who rejected the reactionary impulse
of merely preserving Jewish identity as a stop-gap against Empire,
and instead saw in Christ an event of universal significance, an
event that, in principle, included every person of every nation
and that must be spread throughout the entire Empire—a counter-community
of resistance, “at the same level of totality.”
6. For Paul,
the promised redemption has already happened; the resurrection has
guaranteed the victory of Christ’s body, the church. The promised
Messiah has already come, and precisely for that reason will
come—we can and do in fact participate in his coming Kingdom
here and now. Hardt and Negri provide a seeming parallel in their
insistence on the “always-already” of the revolutionary power of
the seething multitude:
“Don’t the
necessary weapons reside precisely within the creative and prophetic
power of the multitude? ... Don’t we already posses “arms” and “money”?
The kind of money that Machiavelli insists is necessary [for revolution]
may in fact reside in the productivity of the multitude, the immediate
actor of biopolitical production and reproduction. The kind of arms
in question may be contained in the potential of the multitude to
sabotage and destroy with its own productive force the parasitical
order of postmodern command.”7
7. Hardt and
Negri’s “realized eschatology,” however, is far too “realized” and
not nearly “eschatological” enough—“resistance is actually prior
to power.”8 In their libertarian railing against the
state, Hardt and Negri show themselves to be nostalgic for a Romantic,
pre-civilized “natural man,” to wish to go back to the garden rather
than strictly forward to the Kingdom.
8. This is not
to undercut the value of their analysis of the contemporary political
and economic system: when, for example, Simon Critchley recently
echoed many of Hardt and Negri’s critics by saying, “It is rare
for books to be refuted empirically, but I think this happened to
Empire on September 11th, 2001,”9 he seemed to
be strangely missing the point. In point of fact, the events since
September 11 can be read as supporting their thesis. The
war in Afghanistan was viewed as legitimate, largely due to its
international imprimatur, while the war in Iraq, an assertion of
crass nationalism, prompted massive worldwide protests. In itself,
the self-assertion of the United States is simply not enough to
“disprove” Hardt and Negri’s argument that a new form of sovereignty
is taking shape. The very illegitimacy of such action in the eyes
of most of the world, and the manifest failure of straight nationalist
foreign policy lend plausibility to the idea that Empire was called
into being by a multitude that has grown tired of the horrors of
nationalism.
9. At the same
time, Hardt and Negri’s hands-off approach to the exigencies of
concrete political action does seem particularly inadequate in the
light of the supremely nihilistic gesture of September 11. Their
particular brand of Deleuzeanism suffers from the same flaw as so
many vitalistic philosophies: they have no answer to the question
of how the unambiguously good productive energies of the multitude
ended up producing such a long succession of terrible situations.
Their “official” rejection of a naďve teleology, in the form of
the standard portrait of Hegel whereby everything will always work
out in the end, is unconvincing insofar as they continue to rely
on Hegelian thought patterns throughout. It is unclear how else
are we to make sense of their basic contention that
“the construction
of Empire is good in itself but not for itself....
[it is] a step forward in order to do away with any nostalgia for
the power structures that preceded it and refuse any political strategy
that involves returning to that old arrangement, such as trying
to resurrect the nation-state to protect against global capital.”10
In light of the rejection
of the dialectic, it is also unclear how one is to understand Empire
or any previous form of power as “parasitical” on the multitude,11
since its only possible source is the productive energy of the multitude.
10. Put in theological
terms, the problem with Hardt and Negri, in short, is that their
inadequate doctrine of original sin undercuts their realized eschatology.
They should know better than to trust the “spontaneous” actions
of the multitude, since it is always already too late for “spontaneous”
actions to take place. The disciplinary formation of subjectivity
has in fact always already happened, and there is no going back.
Lacanian psychoanalysis understands the human being as constitutively
misshapen by the very process of entering the linguistic space of
human interaction. Rather than longing for the impossible pre-linguistic
experience that Deleuze and Guattari glorify under the name “schizophrenia,”
psychoanalysis seeks to reshape the subject’s relationship to the
symbolic order, the social substance, to turn the constitutive division
in the subject into an opportunity rather than a burden. As Žižek
says in his recent book on Deleuze, Organs Without Bodies:
“Is the Freudian
Oedipus complex (especially in terms of its Lacanian interpretive
appropriation) not the exact opposite of the reduction of
the multitude of social intensities onto the mother-father-and-me
matrix: the matrix of the explosive opening up of the subject
onto the social space? Undergoing "symbolic castration"
is a way for the subject to be thrown out of the family network,
propelled into a wider social network....”12
While he is admittedly
overstating his case for polemical reasons (the Oedipus complex
is initially the means of constraining the subject within
the daddy-mommy-me matrix), Žižek here hits on the liberatory dynamic
underlying psychoanalysis—a dynamic thoroughly homologous to that
which allows the church to say O felix culpa... in the Easter
Vigil.
11. The key to
effective liberatory political action is thus not nostalgia for
the impossible pre-linguistic experience, the impossible “opting
out” of original sin, but rather for redemption, for post-linguistic
experience, the concrete way to be “in the world, but not of the
world.” The refusal of discipline is the unwitting submission to
the consumerist discipline of Empire; the challenge is to find the
concrete practice of liberation. Even if Christianity always
runs the risk of becoming a tool of Empire, even if empirical Christianity
achieved little more than granting us “Empire with a human face,”
the Christian tradition offers us valuable resources for formulating
such a practice, not through the hopeless Leninist quest of overthrowing
it, but rather through concrete counter-imperial practice in the
present. The essays in Richard Horsley’s Paul and Empire
and Paul and Politics make a convincing case that Paul offers
“both an alternative constitution or form of government and an alternative
emperor for an alternative society.”13 The parallels
between the all-subsuming cult of the emperor and the rampant consumerism
of Christmas alone provide sufficient grounds for reappropriating
Paul for today’s circumstances.14
12. The project
becomes one of reading the New Testament as a collection of strategies
for the formation of liberatory counter-communities. Professor Theodore
W. Jennings, Jr., provides a model for such a reading in his Insurrection
of the Crucified, which outlines, among other things, how Mark
the evangelist developed the strategy of martyrdom as a way of shoring
up the nascent church after the decapitation of its leadership.
Similarly, we might read the authentic letters of Paul as illustrating
the strategy of hijacking the language of Empire and forming counter-imperial
“cells” throughout the Empire, or the Pastorals as illustrating
the strategy of becoming “more Roman than the Romans.” We may very
well be able to reuse some of the biblical strategies, but we also
need to face the possibility that none of those strategies
are available to us any longer. Hardt and Negri vividly illustrate
the dangers of hijacking imperial language: by repeating the slogans
and rhetorical moves of the 1990s business elite, so thoroughly
documented in Thomas Frank’s One Market Under God, Hardt
and Negri run the risk of being reappropriated as “ideologist[s]
of late capitalism.”15 Clearly the Pastoral approach
has shown itself to be an utter failure in the case of what could
be termed generic “church growth”-style Evangelical Republicanism,
and it is difficult (for me at least) to imagine a situation in
which a martyrdom would register as such in a society where punishment
and execution have been so thoroughly removed from public view.
The church, or a subsection of the church like the early Methodist
societies, may have to develop entirely new strategies or borrow
strategies from sources outside of, or even opposed to, the church.
13. If there
is a scripture for our time, it is the parable of the dishonest
manager. Although (or perhaps because) it usually baffles readers
and preachers alike, I have long thought of it as a key to the gospel
as a whole:
“Then Jesus
said to the disciples, ‘There was a rich man who had a manager,
and charges were brought to him that this man was squandering his
property. So he summoned him and said to him, “What is this that
I hear about you? Give me an accounting of your management, because
you cannot be my manager any longer.” Then the manager said to himself,
“What will I do, now that my master is taking the position away
from me? I am not strong enough to dig, and I am ashamed to beg.
I have decided what to do so that, when I am dismissed as manager,
people may welcome me into their homes.” So, summoning his master’s
debtors one by one, he asked the first, “How much do you owe my
master?” He answered, “A hundred jugs of olive oil.” He said to
him, “Take your bill, sit down quickly, and make it fifty.” Then
he asked another, “And how much do you owe?” He replied, “A hundred
containers of wheat.” He said to him, “Take your bill and make it
eighty.” And his master commended the dishonest manager because
he had acted shrewdly; for the children of this age are more shrewd
in dealing with their own generation than are the children of light.
And I tell you, make friends for yourselves by means of dishonest
wealth so that when it is gone, they may welcome you into the eternal
homes. ‘Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in
much; and whoever is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also
in much. If then you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth,
who will entrust to you the true riches? And if you have not been
faithful with what belongs to another, who will give you what is
your own?” (Luke 16.1-12)
14. There are
several points about the story that have always caught my eye. First,
the manager does not completely eliminate the debts of his master’s
clients. Instead he gives them a discount—enough to make a difference
to the clients, but probably not so much that the master will go
out of his way to demand the whole amount. It is a realistic strategy,
sustainable in the short- to medium-term. Second, when Jesus gives
us the moral of the story, he says, “And I tell you, make friends
for yourselves by means of dishonest wealth so that when it is gone,
they may welcome you into eternal homes” (16.9). The example of
this unprincipled principle is a man who makes friends for himself
using someone else’s money. In the Roman world as in our world,
however, there is no wealth other than dishonest wealth, no wealth
that doesn’t stem from “primitive accumulation”—or, more bluntly,
from outright theft—somewhere along the line. Third, Jesus challenges
the very notion of what it means to make good use of resources.
“Whoever is faithful in a very little is faithful also in much;
and whoever is dishonest in a very little is dishonest also in much.
If then you have not been faithful with the dishonest wealth, who
will entrust to you the true riches?” (Luke 16.10-11) Again, the
example of this principle is someone who has been dishonest by the
standards of the world, which deploys ideological fictions in order
to make sure that wealth is concentrated in only a few “deserving”
hands: as Marx says, “Accumulate, accumulate! This is Moses and
the Prophets.”16
15. True honesty
and faithfulness in the use of dishonest wealth consists in using
it precisely to make friends. The theme of friendship recurs
throughout the gospel traditions. Jesus’ enemies use it as a reproach:
“The Son of Man came eating and drinking, and they say, ‘Look, a
glutton and drunkard, a friend of tax collectors and sinners!’”
(Matthew 11.19 and Luke 7.34) In a strange example, just as he is
being betrayed, “Jesus said to [Judas], ‘Friend, do what you are
here to do’” (Matthew 26.50) Perhaps the best-known reference to
friendship, however, occurs in the Gospel of John:
“No one has
greater love than this, to lay down one’s life for one’s friends.
You are my friends if you do what I command you. I do not call you
servants any longer, because the servant does not know what the
master is doing; but I have called you friends, because I have made
known to you everything that I have heard from my Father.” (John
15.13-15)
16. In addition,
nearly all the authors of the New Testament epistles refer to their
audience as friends. As Derrida illustrates in his Politics of
Friendship, the concept of “friend” is by no means unambiguous,
tied up as it is with ideas of love, fraternity, memory, death,
the secret, and community. An analysis for the church would have
to pick up where Derrida left off, engaging in a more detailed reading
of the New Testament texts to which he simply alludes and asking
after the resonances that “friendship” evokes throughout the Western
tradition of which Christianity is a part. What does it mean, for
example, that Jesus most emphatically designates his disciples as
friends in the very gospel that pointedly omits an account
of Jesus’ command to “do this in memory of me,” in stark contrast
to the Ciceronian concept of the friend as the one who delivers
the best eulogy? What does it mean when Jesus breaks out of the
strictly fraternal metaphor for friendship by designating his community
of friends as “my brother and sister and mother?” Mark 3.35) In
what sense might the community Jesus gathers be a “community of
those without community?”17
17. In what sense
might the gospels themselves, together with Paul’s universalistic
mission, already be engaging in a deconstructive reading of the
concept of friendship, and along with them, family and community?
Derrida admits at the end of his study his aversion to the concepts
of brotherhood and especially community. Commenting on a passage
in which Blanchot claims that due to their persecution under the
Nazis, “the Jews were our brothers,” he asks:
“Reading this
sentence... I was wondering, among other questions...: why could
I never have written that, nor subscribed to it...? In the same
vein, I was wondering why the word “community” (avowable or unavowable,
inoperative or not—why I have never been able to write it, on my
own initiative and in my name, as it were? Why? Whence my reticence?”18
One might wish that
contemporary theology would show some of the same reticence, investigating
more closely what Christians are saying when they say “community”:
what it means in a world in which so many Christian communities
define themselves by their enemies (viz. generic “church-growth”
style Evangelical Republicanism); what it means to say it in a world
in which every new subdivision styles itself a “community” suitable
for the nurturing of families and in which so many such “communities”
are gated.
18. If the kingdom
of God really is at hand, we frankly might not have time to build
communities—we may well be in an emergency situation in which we
only have time to use our dishonest wealth to make friends. In our
age, which has accumulated an unprecedented degree of dishonest
wealth, the program of using it to make friends may need to take
a form similar to Hardt and Negri’s three goals for the multitude,
and it may well need to use the dishonest wealth of the old, obsolete
nation-state, without nostalgia and without idealism. It may need
to take the form of tireless advocacy of those friends who will
never join the empirical church, calling into question the stark
boundaries that many Christians see between the church and the world
and letting go of the ultimately nihilistic concern for preserving
Christian identity above all else. Above all, honesty and faithfulness
in the use of dishonest wealth must be unprincipled, even, if necessary,
to the point of working in and with the empirical church.
Notes
1. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Empire
(Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2000), 47.
2. Slavoj Žižek, The Ticklish Subject: The Absent Center of Political Ontology (New
York: Verso, 2000), 4.
3. Ibid.
392.
4. Ibid.
1.
5. Ibid. 2.
6. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 21.
7. Ibid. 65-66.
8. Ibid. 360.
9. Simon Critchley, “The Problem of Hegemony,”
Political Theory Daily Review (7 May 2004. 9 May 2004), <http://www.politicaltheory.info/essays/critchley.htm>.
10. Hardt and Negri, Empire, 42-43.
11. Ibid. 66.
12.
Slavoj Žižek, Organs
Without Bodies: On Deleuze and Consequences (New York: Routledge,
2004), 83.
13. Richard Horsley, ed., Paul and Empire: Religion and Power in Roman Imperial Society (Harrisburg, PA: Trinity Press, 1997),
211.
14. Ibid. 21.
15. Žižek, Organs, 184.
16. Qtd. in Hardt and Negri, Empire, 32.
17. Jacques Derrida, The Politics of Friendship,
trans. George Collins, (New York: Verso, 1997), 37.
18. Ibid. 304-305.
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