Racism and the Weakness of Christian Identity: Religious Autoimmunity (Routledge New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies) 9780367185275, 9780429196720, 036718527X

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Racism and the Weakness of Christian Identity

With this sophisticated and illuminatingly interdisciplinary book Kline delivers a profound blow to received understandings of religion and race which is sure to send resonant shockwaves through our experiences of the political. Locating the twinned histories of race and religion at the heart of contemporary theories of auto-poetic social systems and their regular explosions of auto-immunitary or reactionary violence, Kline shows us how we will never really engage such violence without working through a repressed history of Christianity as a form of violent racialization—and violent racialization as a form of Christianity. —Ward Blanton, University of Kent, author of A Materialism for the Masses: Saint Paul and the Philosophy of Undying Life David Kline offers a theoretically rich analysis of the violent, colonial, white supremacist state, buttressed by western Christian theologies and racist modes of domination, that seeks to make itself immune from the threat of the contaminating “other” through militarized policing and security forces. In his work, we find compelling arguments not for the resilient power, but rather for the performative fragility, of the white supremacist state as it confronts challenges to its immorality and brutality. —Rima Vesely-Flad, Ph.D., Warren Wilson College, author of Racial Purity and Dangerous Bodies: Moral Pollution, Black Lives, and the Struggle for Justice A powerful and enlightening study of race and religion, David Kline’s “Racism and the Weakness of Christian Identity” finds in the heart of Christianity a conflict between the radical openness “without condition” to the Other that is the essence of the Christian ethic and the immunitary closure—the concepts of the sacred, pure, or unscathed—that protects the identity of any religious system. Through rigorous engagement with theories of immunity from the likes of Niklas Luhmann, Jacques Derrida, and Roberto Esposito, Kline exposes this hidden struggle within Christian

identity as the driving force behind the ongoing catastrophes of white supremacy and anti-black racism. Most provocatively, Kline finds hope by suggesting that the paradoxical destiny of faith may lie in the ultimate risk of leaving even Christian identity itself behind. —Ryan White, author of The Hidden God: Pragmatism and Posthumanism in American Thought Despite the command from Christ to love your neighbor, Western Christianity has continued to be afflicted by the evil of racism and the acts of violence that accompany it. Through a systems theoretical and deconstructive account of religion and the political theology of St. Paul, this book traces how the racism and violence of modern Western Christianity is a symptom of its failure to secure its own myth of sovereignty within a complex world of plurality. Divided into three sections, the book begins with a philosophical and critical account of what it calls the immune system of Christian Identity. Focusing on Pauline political theology as reflective of an inherent religious “autoimmunity” built into Christian community, a theory of theologicalpolitical violence is located within Western Christianity. The second section traces major theoretical aspects of the historical “apparatus” of Christian Identity. It demonstrates that it is ultimately around the figure of the black slave that racialized Christian identity becomes a system of anti-blackness and white supremacy. The book concludes by offering strategies for thinking resistance against such racialised Christian Identity. It does this by constructing a “pragmatics of faith” by engaging Deleuze’s and Guattari’s use of the term pragmatics, Moten’s theory of black fugitivity, and Long’s account of African American religious production. This wide-ranging and interdisciplinary view of Christianity’s relationship to racism will be of keen interest to scholars of Religious Studies, Theological Studies, Cultural Studies, Critical Race Studies, American Studies, and Critical Theory. David Kline is Lecturer in the Religious Studies Department at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. His academic specialties are religion and race in the Americas, critical race theory, critical theory, and political theology. He is the co-author of Embodiment and Black Religion (2017).

Routledge New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies

The Routledge New Critical Thinking in Religion, Theology and Biblical Studies series brings high quality research monograph publishing back into focus for authors, international libraries, and student, academic and research readers. This open-ended monograph series presents cutting-edge research from both established and new authors in the field. With specialist focus yet clear contextual presentation of contemporary research, books in the series take research into important new directions and open the field to new critical debate within the discipline, in areas of related study, and in key areas for contemporary society. Biblical and Theological Visions of Resilience Pastoral and Clinical Insights Edited by Nathan H. White and Christopher C.H. Cook The Fourth Pentecostal Wave in South Africa A Critical Engagement Solomon Kgatle Resacralizing the Other at the US-Mexico Border A Borderland Hermeneutic Gregory L. Cuéllar Paradoxical Virtue Reinhold Niebuhr and the Virtue Ethics Tradition Edited by Kevin Carnahan and David True Theology and Evolutionary Anthropology Dialogues in Wisdom, Humility, and Grace Edited by Celia Deane-Drummond and Agustín Fuentes Racism and the Weakness of Christian Identity Religious Autoimmunity David Kline For more information about this series, please visit: www.routledge.com/ religion/series/RCRITREL

Racism and the Weakness of Christian Identity Religious Autoimmunity David Kline

First published 2020 by Routledge 2 Park Square, Milton Park, Abingdon, Oxon OX14 4RN and by Routledge 52 Vanderbilt Avenue, New York, NY 10017 Routledge is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group, an informa business © 2020 David Kline The right of David Kline to be identified as author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with sections 77 and 78 of the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988. All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilised in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. Trademark notice: Product or corporate names may be trademarks or registered trademarks, and are used only for identification and explanation without intent to infringe. British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been requested ISBN: 978-0-367-18527-5 (hbk) ISBN: 978-0-429-19672-0 (ebk) Typeset in Sabon by Apex CoVantage, LLC

Contents

Acknowledgementsix Introduction

1

PART I

Religion, Christian Identity, and political theology15 1 Genre, system, observation: Sylvia Wynter and Niklas Luhmann on autopoiesis and religion

17

2 Immunity and autoimmunity: the two sources of religion

42

3 Becoming Christian: Pauline political theology and the apparatus of Christian Identity

62

PART II

Apparatuses97 4 Apparatus one: Spanish colonialism and nonChristian bodies as theo-juridical problems

99

5 Apparatus two: anti-blackness and white supremacy in Spanish and English colonialism

131

6 Apparatus three: race and biopolitical intensification in America

150

viii  Contents PART III

Thinking resistance177 7 Being’s salvation: political ontology, apocalyptic theology, and the apparatus

179

8 The fugitive and the katechon: blackness and pragmatics195 Index215

Acknowledgements

There are many wonderful people that have made this book possible. I would first like to thank my superb Ph.D. dissertation committee at Rice University in Houston, Texas. My advisor, Anthony B. Pinn, has been and continues to be a wonderful mentor and teacher. The investment and energy that he puts into his students and their professional futures is humbling and astounding. I am keenly aware that such personal commitment from an advisor is extremely rare in the academy, and I will be forever grateful for his guidance and the many opportunities he has provided me. Elias Bongmba was a superb teacher and conversation partner throughout my time at Rice. I am particularly grateful for his kind-hearted approach to teaching and mentoring. Cary Wolfe has been a model for the kind of intellectual life I seek to cultivate. The conceptual seeds of this book go back to a seminar I took with him on biopolitical thought, where his teaching opened up my thinking to vast new intellectual possibilities. At Rice, I was very fortunate to be surrounded by a wonderful group of fellow graduate students. Particularly inspiring and influential colleagues include Justine Bakker (who has been such an insightful reader of so much of my work), Jessica Davenport, Eliot Berger, Mark DeYoung, Chris Driscoll, Emerson Zora Hamsa, De’Anna Daniels, Cleve Tinsely, Jason Jeffries, Biko Mandela Gray, Terri Laws, Jonathan Chism, Darrius Hills, Renee Ford, and Nathaniel Homewood. Other important conversation partners and/or mentors over the last few years have included Tim McGee, Brandy Daniels, Tim Kumfer, Dan Rhodes, Thomas Cole, J. Kameron Carter, Willie Jennings, Ken Surin, Josh Busman, Joseph Winters, Ryan White, Ward Blanton, Ashon Crawley, An Yountae, Janice McRandal, Bill Murrah, and John Gill. My colleagues in the Religious Studies department at the University of Tennessee have been encouraging, supportive, and insightful as I’ve finished this book. I owe a special thanks to Tina Shepardson, Rosalind Hackett, Erin Darby, Mark Hulsether, Manuela Ceballos, Megan Bryson, Rachelle Scott, and Helene Sinnreich. I have learned so much from all these incredibly smart and talented people. I owe an unpayable debt of gratitude to my parents, Bill and Karen Kline, for the unceasing support and love they have so generously given throughout

x  Acknowledgements my life. My siblings—Elizabeth, Peter, Matthew, and Rebecca—are all so important to me, and inspire me in various ways. I love them all dearly. I want to thank Peter in particular for the time we shared while he was living in Houston and finishing his own first book. Those two years were a profound point of grace for me, and I am so grateful to have such an incredible intellectual and spiritual conversation partner that is also a brother and a friend. Our friendship is felt deeply throughout the following pages. This book was written during a simultaneously wonderful and difficult period of my life. My son Theo was born on the first day of my second year of Ph.D. coursework, and my daughter Winnie was born just after I achieved candidacy. We moved to Knoxville, Tennessee in a whirlwind a week after I defended the dissertation, and we have all felt the stressful effects of me bringing this book to a close and learning to stay afloat emotionally and spiritually as I’ve navigated the soul-crushing reality of the academic job market. Theo and Winnie are the grace of my life and have opened me up to an experience of joy I could not possibly have anticipated. Parenting two young children on a precarious academic’s income and teaching schedule while finishing this book has been exhausting, to say the least.1 That I am still standing is a testament to the most beautiful, thoughtful, loving, and resilient person I know: Hannah Jane Kline. She is my deconstruction, my wonder, my future to come. This book is dedicated to her, with all my faith, hope, and love.

Note 1 Here I’d like to bring attention to the fact that as a non-tenure track academic, I have received zero institutional or financial support related to the writing of this book.

Introduction

In the contemporary United States, the “Black Lives Matter” movement has powerfully thrust the legacy and ongoing reality of police violence and antiblackness into the broader public consciousness. Founded in 2013 by three black women (Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, and Opal Tometi) in response to the legal acquittal of the murderer of seventeen-year-old African American Trayvon Martin, self-proclaimed “neighborhood watchman” George Zimmerman, Black Lives Matter is a movement committed to an “ideological and political intervention in a world where Black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise.”1 The targeting of Martin was articulated by Zimmerman in his 911 call preceding the murder in terms of “suspicion”: “this guy looks like he’s up to no good, or he’s on drugs or something. It’s raining and he’s just walking around, looking about.”2 This was enough to put into motion the brutally violent altercation that led to Martin’s death. In his trial, Zimmerman claimed self-defense. The fact that Zimmerman was the initial and unprovoked aggressor in the encounter that led to Martin’s violent death seemed to have little relevance. The court’s not-guilty verdict spoke loud and clear: black lives do not matter—only the defense of white life and property. With this verdict, paranoid anti-black racism and its violent practices of policing was, once again, affirmed as a natural and necessary function of the white social order. Zimmerman was simply acting as a weapon of the “white gaze” that cannot observe blackness as anything other than that which does not belong and therefore must be targeted for demise. The practice and rhetoric of white self-defense is further clarified when examining other high-profile cases of anti-black violence in recent years. In response to protests over Michael Brown’s murder by white police officer Darren Wilson, who described Brown as a “demon” in his deposition after the shooting, the Ferguson police department sprang into powerful action, deploying an excessive militarized police force against protestors demanding justice for Brown and his community. As journalist Jamelle Bouie wrote during the Ferguson protests, “the most striking photographs from Ferguson, Missouri aren’t of Saturday’s demonstrations or Sunday night’s riots; they’re of the police. Image after image shows officers clad in Kevlar vests,

2  Introduction helmets, and camouflage, armed with pistols, shotguns, automatic rifles, and tear gas. In one photo, protesters stand toe-to-toe with baton-wielding riot police; in another, an unarmed man faces several cops, each with rifles at the ready.”3 The juxtaposition of human beings gathered in solidarity and demanding justice with a military machine of tanks, snipers, patrolmen, and S.W.A.T. teams elicits an absurd imbalance. The wildly disproportionate police response against the Ferguson protesters suggests a profound fear at the heart of American policing. The sheer presence of black protesters and others calling for justice against a clear case of unjust and brutal state violence is viewed as enough of a danger to call up the full resources of an apparatus of military power. There is something religious about such disproportion. The firepower of the police suggests the wrathful power of the white American God, which will not be mocked. Officer Wilson’s reference to the demonic reflects an unshakable white belief in the righteous and divinely sanctioned function of the police’s war on blackness. In his imagination, this is a theological war of good versus evil, righteousness versus lawlessness, whiteness versus blackness. Such theological framing goes well beyond the police. As Adam Kotsko points out, Wilson’s language of the demonic resonates with the prominent use of theological language in mainstream media and cultural discussions of black victims of police shootings. Black victims are so often described as being “no angels,” which is “effectively a euphemism for being a ‘demon’—a being hardwired for evil.”4 Brown’s mere bodily presence in the street, just like the bodies gathered in anguished protest over his murder, signifies for the white system a lawless blackness “out of place,” something evil that “does not belong.” The very presence of a black person in the street calls forth a violent response. Ferguson is not alone in its witness to white fear. Eric Garner was murdered by a white police officer when he merely protested being harassed and arrested for selling untaxed cigarettes (“loosies”) to his own Staten Island community, a victim of New York City’s “broken windows” policing policy that “protects” urban neighborhoods by preemptively and disproportionately targeting black people with no probable cause. Tamir Rice, a twelveyear-old black child playing with his sister in a public park with a toy gun that was described by a 911 caller as “probably fake” was shot and killed by police officers within two seconds of their arrival.5 Rice was never given a chance to put down the toy gun; he was simply presumed as a deadly threat. The list goes on and on. One of the common elements in the vast majority of police violence cases and other forms of white violence against black and non-white peoples are appeals to public protection, self-defense, and the prevention of criminal activity. These anti-black police killings are particular instances of a general white operation of protecting, at all costs, the security of the white system of power against threats of black justice. There is a powerful white “immune system” at work across American society that observes and codes the field of resistance against white violence as a threat to white “ways of life,” private property, and “law and order.” This immune

Introduction 3 system functions in various modes and intensities as a kind of omnipresent protector of the white-owned world. It is not just the institution of the police. The immune system of whiteness takes myriad forms across multiple social, economic, and political spheres. It is reflected in the massive wealth gap between whites and blacks sustained by recurring black disenfranchisement from wealth building privileges such as generational inheritance and access to capital. It is reflected in the mass incarceration of African American men and women that has occurred over the last three decades through a “war of drugs” that disproportionately targets nonwhite communities. It is reflected in ongoing campaigns of voter suppression that target communities of color. In virtually every socio-political and economic sector, the system of whiteness is designed to protects and secure itself against its dangerous environment of anything it observes as threatening to its power.

The weakness of the system In a 1978 interview titled “Clarifications on the Question of Power,” Michel Foucault attempts to clear up some misconceptions of his theory of power: power is not omnipotent or omniscient—quite the contrary! If power relationships have produced forms of investigation, of analysis, of models of knowledge, etc., it is precisely not because power was omniscient, but because it was blind, because it was in a state of impasse. If it is true that so many power relationships have been developed, so many systems of control, so many forms of surveillance, it is precisely because power was always impotent.6 The overarching argument of this book is that the system of whiteness and anti-blackness described above is not omnipotent or omnipresent, and that despite its fantasies of absolute immunity and sovereignty against its others, it is precisely its “blindness” and “weakness” that has driven its massively overdetermined historical operations of violence against all that it observes as threatening. As I will argue, while there is no doubt that the violence of the system of whiteness wields enormous amounts of force, it can never achieve absolute immunity against its environment of resistance and counter-forces of human living that it seeks to manage and control. The impossibility of absolute immunity is not something that is unique to whiteness, but, as Foucault points out, is a built-in reality of any social system of power relations. Where there is power there is also vulnerability. “Resistance comes first,” Foucault tells us, “and resistance remains superior to the other forces of the process.”7 In power’s performance, there are always contingencies and counter-movements of resistance that precede it and that it cannot control. This is why the history of white power in America, from its colonial beginnings in 1492 to the present context of neoliberalism, has required the development of so many power relations and complex forms of

4  Introduction surveillance and control, and why it has had so many different manifestations that mark adjustments to changing environments of resistance. This book seeks to uncover the roots of the system of whiteness’ weakness by tracing it back to its Christian origins. I argue that this system does not emerge from a kind of historical tabula rasa in which the “targeting of black lives” is some kind of accident of western history. The system of white supremacy does not “just happen;” it does not simply appear out of nowhere. This, of course, is not a new insight. Entire libraries of books have been written on the historical emergence of the category of race and its accompanying forms of racism and white supremacy, usually beginning with the advent of the modern world and the history of European colonialism in the Americas going back to the 15th and 16th centuries. I agree with this periodization if the reference refers to the specific category of race and the full-blown development of structures of global anti-blackness and white supremacy. However, as I will argue, the making of the racial world is a symptom of something that goes all the way back to the origins of Christianity itself and marks a particular event in the history of religion. This event is the particular performance of religion that I will call the system of “Christian Identity.” The system of Christian Identity is something that goes well beyond the particular name of Christianity and its specific theologies, dogmas, creeds, and sacraments (although these are not without major significance for its assemblage). Rather, Christian Identity is a global system of religious, political, social, and economic power whose operation is the observation and division of the world into distinctions of true/false, proper/ improper, pure/impure, saved/damned, selected/deselected, and so on. Gil Anidjar, drawing on Edward Said and Jacques Derrida, captures this idea of Christian Identity with his description of (western, “globalatinizing”) Christianity: a massive institution, the sum total of philosophical and scientific, economic and political achievements, discursive, administrative, and institutional accomplishments, the singularity and specificity of which are not to be doubted (‘culture and imperialism,’ ‘societies for, rather than against, the state,’ and so forth).8 Within these terms, and as I will explore throughout this book, Christian Identity is a powerful and highly complex force of subjectification and worldly order that produces on a global scale a general system of power and order that is sustained by a truly massive range of entangled political, economic, social, aesthetic, and religious sub-systems.

System, religion, and deconstruction Christian Identity and its various forms will be articulated in this book largely through the language of systems theory. Following the work of

Introduction 5 Niklas Luhmann, the name “system” will stand in for the fact of organization and communication that arises out of the unconditioned plane of immanence.9 Another way to say this is that systems name the possibility of making distinctions within a field of absolute indistinction. Making distinctions means that observation is taking place. By “observation,” which will be an important term throughout this book, I mean the ability to identify and handle distinctions. Observation is about identifying something as one thing or another. To observe is to posit an identity of difference that is useful to a particular system, which is to say a particular observer. Christian Identity is a system, or set of systems, of observation. Being a human being within the system of Christian Identity means being observed, distinguished, ordered, and harnessed by a self-generating and self-reproducing system of religious, social, political, and economic communication, differentiation, meaning, and power relations. The relationship between Christian Identity and religious observation will be a central focus throughout this book. Religion is a complicated and contentious term. Following Émile Benveniste’s well known etymology, the discourse of religion emerges historically within a broader Indo-European linguistic context that initially has no term for “that omnipresent reality” that “religion” would eventually come to represent.10 The modern use of religion has its etymological roots in the Latin “religio,” which can be linked to both “relegere” (“scrupulous,” “to gather, collect”) and “religare” (to tie, bind, or “place an obligation on”). The former “relegere” would emerge as referring to a subjective “scruple,” a “holding back” in the context of some cultic observance or even a personal matter of uncertainty. The latter, “relegare,” as Benveniste notes, is the invention of Christians and provides the renewal or transformation of “religio” as an “obligation, an objective bond between the believer and his God.”11 Following this etymology, there are certain implications for how this inheritance of religion conditions it as a descriptive term. First, the discourse of religion is inseparable from genealogies of Christianity. By speaking of religion, we are already speaking Latin and, as Derrida and Anidjar remind us, in the last instance, Christian.12 Using the language of religion means already being linked to a discourse and observational system that has come from somewhere particular and applied as if it were an “omnipresent reality” of human existence. “As soon as one begins to speak religion,” Derridean scholar Michael Naas notes, “one is already speaking the language of a certain empire and a certain universalization, and thus, a certain religious idiom.”13 As I will trace, it is the religious idiom of “globalatinizing” colonial Christianity that has provided the modern means through which this discourse has spread and manifested as a globally relevant term of distinction and description—“world religions,” the “religious,” “religion and the secular,” and so on. Second, and related to the first, from my own observational perspective within the discipline of religious studies, I follow J.Z. Smith’s description of religion in its modern academic usage as “solely the creation of the scholar’s

6  Introduction study.”14 Within this academic frame of reference, religion names an analytical category produced through what systems theory means by a “second-order” observational perspective, or the “observation of observation.” As its own system of knowledge with specific and particular (although by no means uniform) protocols of analysis, distinctions, and codes of meaning, the system of religious studies produces a second-order observational perspective in which it observes what it self-referentially produces as religious observation. In this way, my own observation of religion in this book can be described as the “observation of religious observation.” This means that, as part of the religious studies system, my use of religion remains selfreferential and therefore subject to the same formal laws of any other observational system: it remains limited within its own horizon of meaning. One important implication of this is that I am making no claims to anything sui generis. Religion is not something that simply exists in itself, but is observed (by me and others within the religious studies system) as the product of another observational social system that constructs “religious” concepts and meanings. Because of this, I acknowledge up front three things that would differentiate my own observational perspective from other (equally “meaningful”) observations of religion coming from other observational systems outside of the academic study of religion. First, that others may understand the term “religion” as not applicable to a given context or frame of analysis (for example, political and economic contexts that might be categorically distinguished from religious ones), even as my own observation may apply it to those contexts. Second, that religion may be understood and described in very different ways by people that understand themselves as “religious.” Third, and finally, that religion has a specific genealogy within Christian and western intellectual discourse and remains a contested term in the way it can be applied to various human communities and forms of life. The specific way that I use the term “religion” is informed primarily by theories from three distinct theorists: Sylvia Wynter, Niklas Luhmann, and Jacques Derrida. From Wynter I derive the category of “auto-religion,” which names the human capacity to project human beings’ own autoinstituted authorship of society—that is, the entirely immanent production of a subjectively observed reality—onto transcendent or “extrahuman” agents of determination and behavior regulation.15 From Luhmann, and closely related to Wynter, I describe religion as a social (sub-) system that produces observational perspectives of transcendence or perspectives that produce experiences of origins and the ability to observe “reality” in its totality.16 From Derrida I theorize religion’s “two sources:” what he calls the dual experiences of the “unscathed” and “faith.” Christian Identity, as I theorize, is an effect of the former, where socio-political borders of identity are violently formed and protected around the basis of an imagined “sovereign self” that is immunized from the threat of environmental “others” that might penetrate and bring it harm. This experience is in direct contradiction to the other source, faith, which opens Christian Identity up to an

Introduction 7 unconditioned future of absolute contingency. Together, these two sources are performed as what Derrida refers to as the “autoimmunity” of religious identities, where the religious system turns against its own protective mechanisms and opens itself up to that which will contaminate and eventually transform it. Because it is conditioned by the two sources, the closure of Christian Identity can never be complete and therefore remains vulnerable to the resistance of others against which it constitutes itself. By combining these theories of religion, I construct my own theory of Christian Identity and its historical transformation into a system of antiblack and white supremacist racism. Throughout the book I will refer to this system by multiple names correlating to distinct forms and historical instantiations. These will include “Christian Identity,” “racialized Christian Identity,” “white Christian Identity,” “white supremacy,” and “antiblackness.” I argue that the assemblage of Christian Identity’s racialized forms is an effect of its repeated and self-imposed failures to immunize itself from encounters with its (always self-referential) environment of social, cultural, and religious plurality. In other words, I theorize the assemblage of the Euro-American colonial system of race, anti-blackness, and the ongoing global catastrophe of white supremacy as a particular event within the long history of Christian Identity’s reactionary responses to the inescapability of its own autoimmunity—its “weakness” that has led to the reactionary development of a massive immune system of racial violence. The colonial history of racialized Christian Identity’s reactionary violence against the Indigenous peoples of the American continents, Africans, African Americans, and other non-white and non-Christian peoples has utilized the extremes of everything from elaborate theologies of a human ontological hierarchy to the most banal social structures of normativity. With its recurring autoimmune failure to keep itself fully intact as an unchanging and unscathed identity, racialized Christian Identity has consistently had to find new and increasingly complex ways to sustain its domination over its others. Racialized Christian Identity knows that its others enact a profound threat to its immunity and imagined sovereignty. It knows that it is a profoundly dangerous thing to subjugate and enslave bodies that can never be fully eradicated as fleshly and aleatory forms of life that move and respond in unpredictable ways, fight back, and resist. This is why the history of racialized Christian Identity is marked by a complex series of assemblages, strategies, technologies, and identity constructions that have always been forced to adjust and change as others infiltrate and break apart its borders of security—again, as Foucault says, “so many power relationships, . . . so many systems of control, so many forms of surveillance.” If the system of Christian Identity produces an immune system against its others, and if all systems of observation, as Luhmann describes, are based first and foremost on a self-referential “system/environment” distinction, then this book explores what it might mean to take the side of the environment of Christian Identity. Taking the side of the environment, as Ryan

8  Introduction White describes, means taking the side of “the hidden, negated, unthinkable, incomprehensible, and unaccounted for.”17 Observing the system of Christian Identity, it is that which remains hidden from its gaze, that which escapes and eludes its self-referential observations of proper and improper that will be privileged. This is where my analysis links to the tradition of deconstruction. Jean Luc Nancy, known for his project of a “deconstruction of Christianity,” provides a definition: “to deconstruct means to destructure, to dismantle, to loosen up the assembled structure in order to bring into the play of its pieces the various possibilities from which it stems but which, as a structure, it covers over.”18 Following this approach, I seek to deconstruct Christian Identity, identifying the various pieces that construct its fantasies of omnipotence and an indivisible sovereignty, finding the “play of its pieces” that present openings through which that which hidden forces of resistance might disrupt its operations of violence. Here, deconstruction names the impossibility of sovereignty and of absolute immunity—how every social and political organization is ultimately a fragile construction that therefore can be dismantled. Furthermore, deconstruction does not imply some sort of nihilistic refusal to take a stance on anything or affirm any system of identity and meaning. Rather, I understand deconstruction as the very condition for thinking what it would mean to produce countersystems of meaning, relation, and responsibility in the face of powers that seek to suppress and control the contingencies and possibilities of other forms of life. The point here is that deconstruction is both the condition of the very act of invention as well as the limit to invention, or, to put it another way, invention’s temporality and finitude. In this way, deconstruction can also be understood as synonymous with the “law of autoimmunity” that will inform this book’s account of Christian Identity. Autoimmunity, as Naas puts it, “is not opposed to immunity but is . . . secreted by it; it is a self-destructive ‘force’ produced by the immunizing gesture itself, a weak force that undoes the force or power of sovereignty.”19 In terms of the autoimmunity of racialized Christian Identity, I find particularly powerful resources for thinking its deconstruction in contemporary American black studies. For example, I read Fred Moten’s and Nahum Chandler’s theorizations of black “para-ontology” as a deconstructive force that breaks open the imposed ontological boundaries of any identity’s attempted immunization or enclosure. Engaging this field of theorization, I explore blackness as a kind of rhizomatic, dynamic, creative, and desiring counter-force of racialized Christian Identity’s environment in which lines of flight present possible modes of creativity and sociality in excess to the system’s operations of power. Blackness, then, names an anti-sovereign environmental movement critically and creatively opposed to the immunitary paradigm of white Christian Identity. Taking this side, I seek to develop conceptual resources for thinking the ongoing deconstruction of (racialized) Christian Identity toward new possibilities of living on the earth.

Introduction 9

Whiteness and self-observation My own limited observational perspective within the system of religious studies also relates to my own subject position as a white cis-gendered male with deep ties to Christianity writing on the topic of race. I want to gesture toward a quotation from Donna Haraway’s 1988 essay “Situated Knowledges: The Science Question in Feminism and the Privilege of Partial Perspective”: I would like to insist on the embodied nature of all vision and so reclaim the sensory system that has been used to signify a leap out of the marked body and into a conquering gaze from nowhere. This is the gaze that mythically inscribes all marked bodies, that makes the unmarked category claim the power to see and not be seen, to represent while escaping representation. This gaze signifies the unmarked positions of Man and White.20 It is my earnest intention to try to avoid this white and male “view from nowhere.” However, I am keenly aware that as a white male scholar, I am indeed marked by the system of whiteness in a way that has positioned me within a certain observational space where the temptation to wield “the power to see and not be seen” is ever present. Resisting this temptation (in all its religious connotations), I try to always be aware that my own subject position links me to a system whose operation is to produce the fantasy of a “privileged” observational position of knowledge and authority. It is this fantasy, of which I have no pretension of being fully free, which ends up significantly limiting an ability to see and understand the full scope of my own observations as well as the experiences and counter-observations of others. This is especially true when considering issues of race, class, sexuality, gender, and religion. I take very seriously Alicia Garza’s call for white people such as myself to “defect from white supremacy,”21 and I consider this text part of my own attempt to do so. Part of this, no doubt, will involve some serious self-reflection. From the observational vantage of my own whiteness, it is crucial to see how my own identity as a white male is complicit with broader systems of violence and dehumanization, both toward others and, indeed, myself. Real self-reflection will certainly involve the realization that, as Fred Moten points out, “this shit is killing [me] too, however much more softly.”22 However, as the arguments of part one will suggest, such selfreflection is complex because, as a white male, I am entangled with the system of whiteness in such a way that binds me within its closed codes of identity and, from within its observational perspective, leaves me no recourse to full self-observation and interrogation. In other words, white people like me can never fully observe their own observations—my embodiment does not allow me to transcend my own whiteness and maleness. I do not think the fact of embodiment and the impossibility of full self-observation means that

10  Introduction there is no hope for white people to defect from the system of white identity (although such defection can never be claimed as achieved), but rather that white people cannot simply defect by way of their own observations of themselves. This means that it is only other observations from other systems of identity that can disclose what it might mean to begin to see beyond the confines of the white system’s own conceptual horizons and boundaries. To be sure, other systems of identity are also constitutionally beset by a limited perception as systems of observation with their own self-referential codes of meaning. But as parts of the (self-referential) environment of the white system, it is only other systems that can observe white identity from the outside and therefore disclose what whiteness cannot see from its own vantage. Because of this, I suggest that the task of thinking defection from white identity and white supremacy calls white people to open themselves in vulnerability to the counter-observations of others, observations that, as Luhmann puts it, “are able to realize what systems themselves are unable to realize.”23 To be clear, this is not to displace white people’s responsibility for themselves onto others. The onus of responsibility is absolutely on white people to do the hard and vulnerable work of opening up to and engaging, in good faith, other perspectives of critique that are able to describe and disclose what whiteness itself cannot. It is my hope that this book somehow reflects this kind of hard work. As to my confidence that it actually does, this is for others to say.

Chapter layout This book is divided into three sections and eight chapters. Part one, titled “Religion, Christian Identity, and political theology,” consists of three chapters that set up the theoretical, philosophical, and theological categories through which I theorize Christian Identity as a system of immunitary self-protection. In Chapter 1, “Genre, system, observation: Sylvia Wynter and Niklas Luhmann on autopoiesis and religion,” I explore the concept of autopoiesis (self-creation) and its relation to theories of society and religion in the work of Sylvia Wynter and Niklas Luhmann. Autopoiesis, a term coined by the biological systems theorists Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, centers a systems theory of social organization based around the self-producing and self-referential nature of all systems of observation. Through the lens of Wynter and Luhmann, religion names a social technology providing an observational perspective of transcendence, or a perspective that provides a reliable and “lawlike” sense of grounding in an inherently groundless reality, which also functions as a mechanism of “immunizing” the social system from its outside environment of absolute contingency. As an observational system with its own autopoietic organization, religion, like all other social systems, is interpreted as an autonomous social system that exists independent of human beings in its operation. In order to explore the independence and contingency of the religious system, I unpack Wynter’s

Introduction 11 and Luhmann’s understanding of autopoiesis, their understanding of religion as a technology of producing meaning and the observational perspective of transcendence, and explore the limitations of Wynter’s attempt to get beyond the religious perspective in her constructive “human project.” From these engagements I move on to Chapter 2, “Immunity and autoimmunity: the two sources of religion.” This chapter provides a thorough exploration of the technological and immunitary aspects of religion introduced in Chapter 1 and provides philosophical prolegomena for understanding the particular nature of the system of Christian Identity. Following Derrida, I argue that all religious identity is conditioned by the inherent tension of what he calls religion’s two sources of the experiences of “the unscathed” and “faith.” The experience of the unscathed, or the experience of “absolute immunity,” closes off a self to its dangerous outside of “otherness.” The other source, the experience of faith, is the experience of opening a self to the absolute contingency of an unconditioned future “to come.” These two contradictory sources of religion—the dual closing and opening of the identity’s integrity as an autonomous entity—condition all religious identity as “autoimmune” to itself, always in a process of selfimposed transformation and destruction. In Chapter 3, “Becoming Christian: political theology and the apparatus of Christian Identity,” I address the specific form of religious autoimmunity that Christian theology performs. I provide an interpretation of Christian theology that is derived primarily from engagements with modern philosophical interpretations of the Pauline corpus that I suggest provide clear expositions of the theological form of religious autoimmunity I outline in Chapter 2. I argue that the Pauline theological vision of salvation is divided between his account of faith as a radical and unconditioned openness to difference and the establishment of a supersessionist Christian community as a particular identity requiring immunity. In this division I find a religious autoimmunity at work that is the condition of both Christian Identity’s formation and its assemblage into an apparatus of empire. In order to unpack this, I address Christianity’s theological vision of salvation, philosophical interpretations of the dual figures of faith and identity in Paul, and how the theological figure of the katechon provides the hinge around which what I call Christian Identity transforms into a political apparatus of empire. Part two, titled “Apparatuses,” consists of three chapters that trace major conceptual and historical events in the assemblage of the apparatuses of Christian Identity and its eventual transformation into racialized Christian Identity. Chapter 4, “Apparatus one: non-Christian bodies as theo-juridical problems,” traces major discursive and theo-juridical developments in the Spanish colonization of the New World that condition the assemblage of a racialized Christian Identity. Looking to Gil Anidjar’s reading of Christian blood, I trace the development of medieval European Christianity’s discourses and set of practices around notions of blood purity as the initial condition that opens Christian Identity’s articulation of itself as a spiritual

12  Introduction and institutional identity toward that of an embodied identity of “flesh and blood.” I then move to Sylvia Wynter’s genealogy of what she calls (western) “Man” as opening up the epistemological, political, and social conditions in which the apparatus of a racialized Christianity is explicitly assembled. I focus on the theo-juridical framing of Spanish colonial encounters with the Indigenous peoples of the Americas in the 15th and 16th centuries as producing the question of what kinds of beings are legitimately enslaveable within the theo-juridical terms of the Christian colonial state. The resolution of this question, as I explore, provides the political theological grounding for the category of race as that which divides the human species into a racialized hierarchy of being. Chapter 5, “Apparatus two: slavery, capital, and the making of racial modernity,” focuses on how the figure of the “black” African and its diasporic descendants are ontologically construed by racialized Christian Identity as its “ultimate enslaveable others.” Focusing on Spanish and English colonial contexts in the 16th and 17th centuries, I show how the theo-political justification of the black African’s “ultimate enslavability” was materially and politically grounded in the colonial state’s growing labor demands in the context of an emergent global racial capitalist system. I show that it is around the figure of the black slave and the attempt to contain the contingencies and resistance of black flesh that the apparatus of racialized Christian Identity assembles new relations of power-knowledge that ultimately transform it into a full-blown apparatus of anti-blackness and white supremacy. In Chapter 6, “Apparatus three: race and biopolitical intensification in America,” I trace the extension of the apparatus of racialized Christian Identity, now operating as “white Christian Identity,” into the contemporary moment by theorizing what I call its “biopolitical intensification” that occurs in the broad aftermath of the American civil war. By “intensification,” I follow Jeffrey Nealon’s theorization of biopower’s perpetual search for new and more effective tactics of control that require the least amount of visible force. I identify two general phases of racialized Christian Identity since the end of chattel slavery in the United States. The first is grounded in the deployment of explicit and highly visible forms of white supremacist terror, while the second is shaped around the deployment of more concealed and dissipated forms. I conclude the chapter with a discussion of what I argue is the most recent assemblage of a new mode of white supremacist power in the United States through neoliberal discourses of “post-racialism,” “multiculturalism,” and new conceptions of biological racial identities. Part three of the book is titled “Thinking Resistance,” and gestures toward a constructive philosophical and theological framework for thinking resistance to racialized Christian Identity. Chapter 7, “Being’s salvation: political ontology, apocalyptic theology, and the apparatus,” centers a critical response to the problem of anti-blackness and white supremacy through a reading of Giorgio Agamben’s political ontological critique of the apparatus and the theology of what I refer to as Christian Apocalyptic. I read

Introduction 13 these theoretical and theological approaches as representative of what I call the “political ontological” frame of critique. Within this frame, I argue that thinking resistance to the apparatus of racialized Christian Identity hinges on the idea of faith in an apocalyptic messianic event or revelation that recovers a lost experience of unmediated being through the total destruction or “deactivation” of the apparatus of Christian Identity. While I suggest that these frames of critique provide powerful ways of thinking resistance, I ultimately side with a more “pragmatic” approach that does not hinge around the apocalyptic event as the condition of pursuing counter forms of living within and against the apparatus. In the eighth and final chapter, “The fugitive and the Katechon: blackness and pragmatics,” I provide my own constructive and pragmatic path forward by engaging Fred Moten’s theory of “black fugitivity,” among other theoretical resources from black studies, as a way of thinking resistance and the cultivation of modes of living within the structure of autoimmunity that conditions all religious identity. Informed by the theory of blackness as the “lawlessness” against racialized Christian Identity’s katechonic attempt at absolute control, and Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the term “pragmatics” in A Thousand Plateaus, I argue for a theoretical approach that emphasizes practical modes of thought, writing, struggle, evasion, and creation that are located within spaces opened up by the autoimmunity of racialized Christian Identity. These are the spaces in which faith pragmatically moves in “lines of flight” as it opens itself up to the contingency of the other through its ongoing assemblage of new forms of power-knowledge. As a conclusion, I link what I call a “pragmatics of faith” to history of religions scholar Charles Long’s critique of “theologies opaque” and suggest that the possibility of a religiously informed resistance to racism and anti-blackness is not found in theological claims of “victory,” resolution, or salvation—but rather, in a movement back toward the materiality and ever-evolving sociality linked to forms of religion that remain open to temporal contingency.

Notes 1 Alicia Garza, “A Herstory of the #Blacklivesmatter Movement,” accessed September 30, 2019, http://blacklivesmatter.com/herstory/. 2 “Transcript of George Zimmerman’s Call to the Police,” accessed September 30, 2019, www.motherjones.com/documents/326700-full-transcript-zimmerman. 3 Jamelle Bouie, “The Militarization of the Police,” accessed September 30, 2019, https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2014/08/police-in-ferguson-military-wea pons-threaten-protesters.html. 4 Adam Kotsko, The Prince of this World (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2016), 1. 5 Los Angeles Times Staff, “Hear the 911 Call About Tamir Rice: ‘Gun is Probably fake’ Caller Says,” accessed September 30, 2019, www.latimes.com/nation/ nationnow/la-na-nn-tamir-rice-911-call-20141126-htmlstory.html. 6 Michel Foucault, “Clarifications on the Question of Power,” in Foucault Live: Interviews 1966–84, ed. Sylvère Lotringer (New York: Semiotext(e), 1989), 255.

14  Introduction 7 Michel Foucault, “Sex, Power and the Politics of Identity,” in The Essential Works of Foucault 1954–1984 Volume 1: Ethics: Subjectivity and Truth, ed. P. Rabinow (London: The New Press, 1998), 163–73. 8 Gil Anidjar, Semites: Race, Religion, Literature (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), 44. 9 See Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari, What Is Philosophy? (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), chapter 2. 10 Emile Benveniste, Indo-European Language and Society (Miami: University of Miami, 1973), 516–19. 11 Ibid., 516. 12 Jacques Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of ‘Religion’ at the Limit of Reason Alone,” in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), 80; Anidjar, Semites, 43ff. 13 Michael Naas, Miracle and Machine: Jacques Derrida and the Two Sources of Religion, Science, and the Media (New York: Fordham, 2012), 57. 14 J.Z. Smith, Imagining Religion: From Babylon to Jonestown (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1988), xi. 15 Sylvia Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being / Power / Truth / Freedom: Toward the Human, after Man, Its Overrepresentation—An Argument,” CR: The New Centennial Review 3 (2003): 273. 16 Niklas Luhmann, A Systems Theory of Religion (Stanford University Press, 2013). 17 Ryan White, The Hidden God: Pragmatism and Posthumanism in American Thought (New York: Columbia University Press, 2015), 8. 18 Jean Luc Nancy, “The Deconstruction of Christianity,” in Religion and Media, ed. K. DeVries (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 121. 19 Michael Naas, Derrida from Now On (New York: Fordham University Press, 2008), 140. 20 Donna Haraway, “Situated Knowledges,” Feminist Studies 14, no. 3 (Autumn, 1988): 581. 21 Accessed September 30, 2019, www.showingupforracialjustice.org/why-surj. html. 22 Fred Moten and Stephano Harney, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (New York: Minor Compositions, 2013), 140. 23 Niklas Luhmann, “Tautology and Paradox in the Self-Descriptions of Modern Society,” Sociological Theory 6, no. 1 (1988): 28.

Part I

Religion, Christian Identity, and political theology

1 Genre, system, observation Sylvia Wynter and Niklas Luhmann on autopoiesis and religion

For Sylvia Wynter and Niklas Luhmann, worlds apart but also folding into and across one another, human life takes place within systems. What we refer to as society is a social system of communication, meaning, order, and differentiation. Both thinkers ground their extensive and complex reflections on social systems in the theory of “autopoiesis,” Humberto Maturana’s and Francisco Varela’s neologism for self-generating living systems of observation that operate according to their own self-produced rules and requirements.1 In contrast to allopoietic systems (for example, a mechanical assembly line) that produce something other than itself, an autopoietic system produces nothing but itself. As Maturana and Varela describe, an autopoietic machine [system] continuously generates and specifies its own organization through its operation as a system of production of its own components, and does this in an endless turnover of components under conditions of continuous perturbations and compensation of perturbations. Therefore, an autopoietic machine is an homeostatic (or rather relations-static) system which has its own organization (defining network of relations) as the fundamental variable which it maintains constant.2 One of the crucial concepts that the theory of autopoiesis provides is the systematicity and self-referentiality of all forms of “life,” radically expanded beyond the organic/inorganic bifurcation. As Arthur Bradley notes of Maturana and Varela’s theory, “autopoiesis recognizes no qualitative difference between organic and inorganic systems: all living systems are autopoietic, and so any physical system—whether social, cultural, artificial—can, if autopoietic, be said to exhibit life.”3 Within this autopoietic frame, social systems are “living” organizations made up of specific components and operations that, just like any other form of life, operate according to systematic laws of self-production and -reproduction. Within these laws are questions of power and violence, but also questions of resistance and creation. Despite their shared interest in autopoietic social systems, and even though their academic projects were being written during the same time period,

18  Religion, Christian Identity, theology Wynter and Luhmann never mention each other in their respective work. This is not so surprising in Luhmann’s case, as his sources remain essentially Eurocentric and specific to sociology and the insulated and overwhelmingly white and male school of systems theory. Luhmann is also about as far away as one could imagine from the commitments of the kind of black studies Wynter represents. While it is not surprising that Luhmann never engaged one of the preeminent black studies scholars of a generation, I take Wynter’s lack of reference to Luhmann more interesting given her immensely impressive use of sources covering extensive interdisciplinary ground that engages key figures of systems theory and cybernetics and would easily suggest a broader working knowledge of the systems theory being written over the course of her decades long (and ongoing) career. It may be possible that Wynter simply has not been aware of Luhmann’s work (although this is unlikely as she cites secondary literature that includes references to him), or that she simply found him not worth engaging. Yet the resonance between the two thinker’s descriptive projects would have provided an interesting and perhaps productive dialogue in light of Wynter’s theoretical commitments. In terms of his theoretical importance, I view Luhmann’s work as essential for understanding the machinery of autopoietic systems of observation, and most importantly, the technological and non-human nature of social systems and their sheer indifference to human life. I find Luhmann convincing on the point that social systems are totally distinct from human beings in their operations and therefore have nothing in themselves that would reflect any kind of essential “concern” or “care” for human happiness, ultimate well-being, peace, fulfillment, etc. In Luhmann, we hear the emphatic declaration that “society does not and cannot care about you!” While I think Luhmann crucial for a post-humanist analysis of society and social systems, he is at best neutral on questions of justice and human suffering in the face of the system’s indifference, and at worst supportive of modern status quos of normative political, economic, and racial order. While Luhmann himself might express technical accounts of certain human desires for change and justice within the cold and inhuman operations of social systems, his sheer theoretical indifference to these things, which might be summed up in the notion that he represents a clear example of a particular kind of white and western privilege that can afford to be indifferent to the system’s indifference, puts him on the side of an implicit valorization of social and political order and stability against projects of liberation and justice. While I find Luhmann highly interesting and productive for social theory and analysis—I think of his work as a kind of thorough blue-print for the machinery and inner-workings of social systems—I still want to remain open, in faith, to an idea and a force that I will spend a great deal in this book reflecting upon: a justice to come. Trying to think along with Wynter and the broader tradition of black studies, which as we will see is a kind of non-systematic (un)disciplinary form of thought that moves within and against systems of proper identity and order, I am committed to a mode of

Genre, system, observation 19 thinking that remains open to the coming of what Ashon Crawley describes as “otherwise possibilities, otherwise inhabitations, otherwise worlds.”4 The coming of justice signals the possibility of creative and liberative forms of living in search of otherwise conditions outside of, underneath, and within the cracks of formalized systems of racism and dehumanization. Holding on to this possibility, I suggest that Luhmann should be approached with caution and suspicion in terms of a constructive intellectual project rooted in a commitment to the otherwise which, if it may come through the contingencies of faith and resistance, would include upending the current system(s) of racism and what Wynter calls the colonial violence of “Man.” It is toward these ends that I hope the current study can be considered. The primary reason I am interested in reading Wynter and Luhmann together is that I believe Luhmann provides a crucial supplement and at times corrective to Wynter’s use of the category of autopoiesis that fills in and updates some of her central claims (with almost overwhelming technicality) about the nature of social systems and their relation to human beings. While Wynter does engage the technical aspects of autopoiesis and systems theory to some extent through engagements with Humberto Maturana and Francsico Varela and other cognitive, sociological, and scientific theories of consciousness such as Gregory Bateson, Thomas Nagel, D.T. Campbell, and James Denielli, she does not go much beyond Maturana’s and Varela’s initial contributions and remains almost entirely confined within the language of cognition even as she links this language to broader frameworks of social theory. Holding the two thinkers’ radically divergent theoretical commitments in a kind of unresolved tension, I suggest that reading Luhmann and Wynter together provides a path for expanding and complexify Wynter’s liberationist-minded theory of autopoietic genres of being human beyond human cognition and toward a more updated technological and ecological frame of analysis. More than any other thinker in the late 20th century, Luhmann took up theories of autopoiesis initialized by Maturana and Varela and applied them to questions of society well beyond the cognitive framework. I suggest Luhmann is most relevant for conversing with Wynter on questions of the system/environment relation and its implications for thinking through issues ranging from the production and protection of social realities and meanings to the human capacity to “steer” the direction of society. In what follows, I will pair the two thinkers on the specific themes of autopoiesis and religion with these questions in mind.

Wynter on autopoiesis Engaging various streams of cognitive and biological science, anthropology, and philosophy of religion, Sylvia Wynter theorizes the origins of human social systems in evolutionary terms. Going all the way back to the emergence of identifiable human culture “some fifty-thousand years ago”5 in the upper paleolithic period, human beings are described as a

20  Religion, Christian Identity, theology “hybrid-auto-instituting-languaging-storytelling species” (homo narrans for short)6 that have spread out and manifested in distinct cultural forms of life across the geographical landscape of the earth. She calls these forms of life “genres of being human,” which are performed and communicated through a range of distinct languages and cultural significations, including origin stories, cosmogonies, symbolic codes of life and death, and communicative systems of social meaning informing identities of kinship, sex, gender, social hierarchies, economy, political forms, and so on. The theory of genres of being human provides an account of human being that is pluralist, non-essentialist, and grounded in local, non-universal, and non-idealist productions of meaning and knowledge. While all genres of being human are grounded in the same basic species condition, each is self-referentially autonomous and unique in its own particular cultural production. Wynter’s foundation for this ontology of human plurality are theories of human cognitive and biological functionalism—namely, the cognitive systems theory of Gregory Bateson and Maturana’s and Varela’s theory of autopoiesis. The importance of the theory of autopoeisis for Wynter cannot be understated, as it provides the theoretical foundation upon which almost the entirety of her later intellectual project is built. Autopoiesis provides the means for conceiving human beings and their cognitive agency as determined by a whole range of immanent and contingent processes, forces, and relations that environmentally ground human agency and capacity, forms of meaning, and social production. For Wynter, the turn to autopoiesis foregrounds a methodological concern with the relationship between human cognition and mediating apparatuses of immanent social organization and meaningproduction. Wynter’s primary methodological question is how human communities and their perceptions of reality are harnessed and controlled by various autopoietic forces and networks (biological, neurological, social, religious, political, etc.) that are entirely self-produced and that capture human beings within a given system of meaning and knowledge. Describing her interest in Maturana’s and Varela’s theory of autopoiesis for genres of being human, she says, they wanted to think about the idea of biological organisms as autonomously functioning, living (i.e. autopoietic) systems. And this is related to our human social systems—a point they also put forward in their later work. Now if you look at living systems such as the beehive, they are purely biological eusocial systems. Our human eusocial systems are instead hybrid languaging cum storytelling (if biologically implemented) living systems; but they function according to laws analogous to those regulatory laws of the supra- autopoietic system, which is the beehive. So I call these the laws of hybrid human auto-speciation, thereby of autopoiesis.7 Wynter divides human autopoiesis across three specific levels through a combined reading of Maturana and Varela and Frantz Fanon: 1) the level of

Genre, system, observation 21 ontogeny, which is determined by laws of sheer biological production and reproduction; 2) the level of phylogeny, which follows laws of evolutionary adaptation and development; and 3) the level of sociogeny, a term coined by Fanon which links 1) and 2) to social, cultural, and religious codes of meaning (language, stories, myths, etc.) as “lawlike” forces (equal to those of ontogeny and phylogeny) governing human cognition and behavior.8 Together these three levels provide Wynter with the “sociogenic principle:” human beings are “hybrid” autopoietic beings of both “bios” and “logos.” Contrary to the purely biological human subject of the natural sciences, the origin stories, myths, and semantic codes of meaning invented by human beings play just as much of a crucial role in human autopoiesis and evolution as do biological processes. It is culture (as storytelling) that makes the human difference, allowing for endless variations of forms of life grounded in phylogeny and ontogeny but also set loose by particular stories of origin, representation, socio-political differentiation, and so on. Human societies are like a beehive in that they operate around genetically determined laws of biological and social reproductive behavior. Yet, unlike a beehive, human beings have the capacity to override their genetically predetermined instincts of social behavior through the phenomenon of culture. Following sociologist D.T. Campbell, Wynter notes, “our genetically determined mode of primate competitiveness and its correlated ‘animal type’ mode of instinctual and narrow kinship must be continually overridden by the process of cultural conditioning effected by the culture-specific systems of representation that can alone induce the modes of altruism on which our social orders are based.”9 Each genre of being human, conditioned by its specific environment and the contingency of its specific cultural production, has a particular form of (cultural) life that identifies a specific “we” informed by an utterly taken for granted (because autopoietically produced) imperative of altruistically “helping those who have been socialized within the same cosmogonic categories as ourselves.”10 An interesting implication that arises out of this, and one that Wynter attempts to think beyond in her constructive “human project,” is that contrary to notions of built-in solidarity or altruism across the human species writ large, the autopoiesis of genres of being human suggest that there is no natural solidarity across differing human cultures but rather a lawlike effect that Wynter sums up like this: “there is . . . no such altruism toward, or genuine co-identification with those whom our founding origin narratives have defined by the oppositionally meaningful marker of Otherness to the ‘us.’ ”11 As closed autopoietic self-referential social systems, genres of being human necessarily establish firm boundaries between the inside and outside, self and other, “we” and “them,” system and environment. The end “goal” of social autopoiesis is the policing and controlling of these oppositions for purposes of the system’s survival and reproduction. The integration of outsiders may occur, but only through processes of filtering them as subordinated to the proper “we” of the particular genre of being human. While this does not mean that inter-genre altruism is impossible as autopoietic cultural identification of otherness is always

22  Religion, Christian Identity, theology subject to contingent development and synthesis with outside elements, it does mean that genres of being human are constituted through an ipseity or self-referentiality that, as will be discussed in depth in Chapter 2, keeps the communal identity always turning inward and seeking immunity against its others.

Luhmann’s non-human frame and the system/environment relation While Wynter’s sociogenic principle and law of cognitive autopoietic nonaltruism hinges around the system-environment relation, Luhmann takes the relation to its farthest and most complex logical conclusions by pushing it toward a thoroughly technological and non-cognitive framework of interpretation. What makes Luhmann’s theory of society distinct from other sociological and philosophical accounts of society, including Wynter’s cognitive centered genres of being human, is its radical disavowal of human beings (i.e. human cognition) as the subject of sociological analysis. Social systems, according to Luhmann, are composed not of human beings but of communications. Human beings are not part of the social system but are “psychic” systems that make up part of the social system’s external environment. Society is made up entirely of communications, and, as Luhmann puts it in a rather counter-intuitive formulation, “Humans cannot communicate; not even their brains can communicate; not even their conscious minds can communicate; only communication can communicate.”12 One way to understand this is by looking to Derrida’s famous deconstruction of the “auto-affection” of the voice-as-presence, or the valorization of speech (as self-presence) over writing (as techne). As with deconstruction, Luhmann takes the side of the latter: writing as a technological communication separate from human consciousness, intention, or ultimate control. Social processes and the production of social meaning are driven not through human cognition, intentions, or even actions, but are entirely self-contained as technological systems of communication that are external to human beings. This does not mean there is no relation between human beings and the social system. In their difference we find a “unity of distinction” between the cognitive mind that Wynter privileges and everything outside it, which includes genres of being human (as social systems). The unity of distinction between the two means that each is part of the other’s own self-referentially produced environment, and this produces an unresolvable paradox—they are both simultaneously “the same” and “different.” What human beings experience as their own minds is really just another recursive and self-referential autopoietic system with its own specific and operationally closed protocols whose existence can only be identified in distinction from its environment. The same holds for genres of being human. The relation of genres of being human to individual human beings, then, is not as the social whole representative of the cognitive transmission of individual human parts, but as the

Genre, system, observation 23 unity of distinction that both separates and inextricably links two different systems through the production of their two respective observations of “environment.” In The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, Jurgen Habermas calls Luhmann’s social systems theory “metabiological” in orientation. A play on metaphysics, Luhmann’s metabiological (or as Hans-Georg Moeller calls it in an attempt to avoid biological determinism, “metabiotic”)13 approach refers to the autopoietic “ ‘for itself’ of organic life and goes behind it— the cybernetically described, basic phenomenon of the self-maintenance of self-relating systems in the face of hyper-complex environments.”14 Not to be confused with the biological determinism of a Richard Dawkins or E.O. Wilson, this approach links both biological life systems and other non-biological autopoietic systems under an ecological and evolutionary rubric. One of the most important implications of this rubric is its ability to account for highly complex social systems of relations and communications that go well beyond the frame of human cognition for making sense of systems of social meaning and order. If genres of being human are not cognitively grounded but are technological autopoietic social systems of (non-human) communication comprised of various sub-systems (economic, political, ­religious, etc.), each particular system and sub-system has its own autopoietic operations and a specific environment made up of other systems that too have their own specific environments made up of other systems, which have their own specific environments made up of other systems, and so on. This irreducibly “hyper-complex” field of systems and environments names a general ecology of autopoietic system communication determined by ­contingent co-evolutions of system-environment relations. Luhmann stresses that the co-evolution of autopoietic systems/environments is “blind,” meaning that there is no all-seeing position (i.e. “Godlike” view) from which to “steer” the evolution of systems. Society is like a ship without a rudder in an infinite ocean. It can observe its own movement in the water and make interventions into the ship’s various parts, but it cannot control where the ship ends up because it has no central steering mechanism. This unavoidable and ultimately out-of-control “drift” of the social system reflects the entirely self-referential and self-attending nature of autopoietic systems that forecloses the possibility of any kind of observational position from which to see and steer the system through the totality. At any given moment, the members of the rudderless ship can only see part of the infinite ocean. Its environment can only be observed partially, and so it has no ability to predict where its drift will take it. The only observational reference points are the ship itself and other systems making up the oceanic environment: the water, other vessels, fish, the wind, weather systems, etc., each conditioned by their own system operations and own self-referential environments. Furthermore, the ship, as far as its members are concerned, is the only place that matters because it is the only place from which anything can be perceived as “real.” As Maturana and Varela put it, “we do not see

24  Religion, Christian Identity, theology what we do not see, and what we do not see does not exist.”15 Outside the ship, which is to say outside the observer’s own self-reference, is only an endless void: symbolic and real death through drowning in an infinite oceanic environment. One of the key insights here is the non-representational relationship between seeing and knowing. What is seen with the observing eye is not a representation that corresponds to some objective outside reality, but rather the internal and autonomous production of a completely subjective image of the world through the processing of “environmental triggers.”16 Nonrepresentational self-reference, however, does not mean the system is simply closed off to the external environment, unable to respond and adapt to changes and “perturbations.” The hull of the rudderless ship can be reinforced so as to remain strong against crashing waves or avoid rust or decay; sails can be set to utilize changes in wind direction; the crew can take shelter below the deck in a storm. All of these things serve as effective responses to changes in the environment, but without the central steering mechanism of the rudder, there is no ability to have ultimate control of where the ship eventually ends up. The ability to respond to the environment reflects what Maturana and Varela identify as the difference between the system’s organization and its structure. It is this distinction that provides the conceptual hinge around which systems become adaptive to their given environments. Organization “denotes those relations that must exist among the components of a system for it to be a member of a specific class.”17 For example, the water vessel called a ship is organized around a specific set of necessary component parts such as hull, bow, stern, starboard, etc. that together function to produce the specific effect of floating on the water. However, though any standard ship will necessarily have the same organization, ships can vary widely in terms of structure, which names the actual manifestation of the organization for a given example. A ship can be designed for carrying people, as in a cruise ship, or industrial materials, as in a cargo ship; wooden materials can be swapped for steel materials; an engine can replace sails, and so on. Such structural changes make a specific ship particular, and may even substantially change its function, but do not alter the basic required organization that makes a ship a ship. In the same organizational sense, a given genre of being human is organized around a specific set of necessary component parts such as language, social norms, the distribution of power, kinship relations, gender and sexual constructions, religious meanings, and so on. Genres of being human exist within the parameters of these (and other) organizational categories, but can perform these functions in virtually infinite structural ways—what Wynter would describe as “culture”—without altering the organization. This also works to complexify particular genres of being human through the production of different structural performances of basic organizations. For example, in modern American society, two different sets of parents may raise their children in radically different ways so as to influence their child’s political perspective. As an effect of their

Genre, system, observation 25 upbringing (their structural reality), one child may grow up to have a traditionally conservative perspective while the other may have a traditionally liberal perspective. The structure of raising children is different in that there are different performances of child-rearing that result in different outcomes, but the organization of raising children as such remains unaltered. The distinction between organization and structure is a crucial conceptual move that allows for a productive relationship between the system, defined as “organization + structure,” and environment, defined as everything outside the system. Autopoietic systems are operationally closed at the level of organization but open at the level of structure.18 Cary Wolfe’s phrase for this is “openness from closure,”19 a retort to the idea that autopoietic systems can be reduced to isolationism, solipsism, or even idealism.20 As with Wynter’s self-referential genres, being operationally closed means that systems are driven solely by the reproduction of the specific codes and communications that the system has identified as coherent and vital to its continuing reproduction. Therefore, as Luhmann notes, resonating with Wynter’s lawlike effect of “non-altruism” between genres of being human, such systems “allow no other forms of processing in their self-determination”; they must “define their specific mode of operation [in order] to be able to regulate which internal meaning-units enable the self-reproduction of the system and thus are repeatedly to be reproduced.”21 However counter-intuitive, this closure is actually the very thing that makes possible a relation to an outside: “the concept of a self-referentially closed system does not contradict the system’s openness to the environment. Instead, in the self-referential mode of operation, closure is a form of broadening elements more capable of being determined, the complexity of the environment that is possible for the system.”22 Therefore, “the closure of the self-referential order is synonymous here with the infinite openness of the world.”23 Each system relates to all other systems as part of its environment, which is always of overwhelming complexity to the point where no system can possibly establish an all-seeing or “point-for-point” correspondence with all environmental elements.24 In the face of this overwhelming complexity, autopoietic systems develop a selection process that filters the information received from the environment into the system’s own self-referential code. This process of reducing environmental complexity, moreover, serves to increase the system’s own internal complexity through a “re-entry” of the system-environment distinction back into the system itself. If the most fundamental aspect of operationally closed, self-referential systems is the difference between system and its environment, which it must necessarily take for granted if it is to have any internal coherence, this basic distinction provides the elementary condition for developing further internal distinctions able to better adapt to and manage environmental complexity. The simple code of “system/not system” does not have much of a capacity to filter and manage an unpredictable and entirely contingent environment. If the system is to develop a selection process that enables greater ordering, management, and dispersal of environmental

26  Religion, Christian Identity, theology information within the system, it must expand its filtering capacity. By reentering the system/environment distinction internally (i.e. re-entering the distinction back into the system itself), “the whole system uses itself as environment in forming its own sub-systems and thereby achieves greater improbability on the level of those sub-systems by more rigorously filtering an ultimately uncontrollable environment.”25 The more systems are able to internally divide themselves across multiple re-entries of the system/environment distinction, the more they are able to recursively build up complexity within the system and thus able to register changes in the environment and adapt. “Only complexity,” Luhmann tells us, “can reduce complexity.”26 So, for example, in order to deal with the overwhelming contingency of its environment, the social system somewhere along the line re-enters its own system/environment distinction multiple times and produces new internal distinctions (i.e. sub-systems) that we call the political, the religious, the economic, the educational, and so on. In turn, these new sub-systems make their own re-entries that produce even more distinctions. All of this produces a massive and irreducibly complex, as well as perpetually evolving, social system able to handle, separate out, and distribute the environmental “noise” by which the system is always being “perturbed,” and then turn it into particular forms of “information” that is subjective to the system producing it. Here we also find the condition for certain systems to be “structurally coupled” with others while still remaining entirely autonomous in their own operations. Structural coupling in the social system occurs when different sub-systems, which are the result of multiple re-entries of the system/ environment distinction, begin to “rely on each other’s complexity to build up internal complexity.”27 Using a biological example, though the cardiovascular system and the nervous system are totally separate in their function, they are structurally coupled. If the cardio-vascular system ceases to function, or if it begins to function in unexpected ways, the normative coupling is interrupted and the nervous system begins to react to this environmental “information” in entropic ways. For social systems, we find the same idea. Though the political system and the economic system are two totally distinct and separate systems in their operation and function, they both are normatively triggered by each other. The economic system can only operate through self-referentially economic communication, and therefore cannot operate politically or make political decisions. Money, for example, cannot actually sign a congressional bill into law. However, it can influence the way that political decisions are made as the political system reacts to economic changes in its environment. Gun sales in America go up in the aftermath of a mass shooting, and politicians react to this economic event by deciding not to pursue new gun regulation. The decision not to pursue gun regulation is a political communication that is the response to a perturbation from the economic system. This reaction does not mean that the economic system is actually communicating with the political system, and it does not mean it

Genre, system, observation 27 has any direct control over it. The economic system has no ability to force the political system to react in any particular way, at least not in terms of producing a precise and controlled result. Furthermore, the economic system, like all other systems, is also perturbed or affected by other systems that make up its environment.

Immune systems and religion The communicative closure of autopoietic systems and their structural coupling means that though normative relations can be constructed across different systems, contingency and hyper-complexity ultimately goes all the way down. This also means that there is always the possibility, or even inevitability, of entropic destruction. As Luhmann describes, “when evolution builds, and is in need of, structural couplings with more and more preconditions in order to adjust the systems with their autopoiesis to the environment, it simultaneously increases its own potential for destruction.”28 In the face of this always present threat, if systems are to maintain their internal coherence and essential operations against hyper-complex environments, they must develop modes of self-protection that increase their capacity for continued autopoiesis and survival. Because any particular system’s own self-reference will always be premised on the general distinction of what is proper to the system (self) and what is not (environment), and with the possibility of contradictions and environmental perturbations that have the potential to overwhelm the system, the system produces qualities “that promote the development of an immune system.”29 Whether biological or social, the basic function of an immune system is to prevent outside elements from overwhelming or disrupting the system’s normative operating procedures— its autopoiesis. Operating around complex processes of selection, rejection, and adaptation, immune systems serve as a filter and barrier between the system and its outside environment. Immune systems “discriminate things as not belonging,” rejecting, managing, and filtering anything foreign to the internal elements and processes essential to the system’s autopoiesis.30 In Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life, Roberto Esposito speaks in these terms when he defines immunization as a “protective response in the face of risk.”31 Immunization is concerned with “trespassing,” with preventing a violation or contamination of the established system/environment distinction of a particular (self-secure) system. The threat or risk from which immunization attempts to protect the body has a certain location within the system. It is not completely outside the constituted system, for something that remains isolated outside of the system does not pose a threat to it, but rather between the inside and the outside, “on the border” between “the self and other, the individual and the common”—i.e. the unity of distinction. Immunization ensures that the system, stabilized in its own structural autonomy, is not contaminated by “common” elements, or that which constitutes “community” in the most general sense of the

28  Religion, Christian Identity, theology term. In Luhmann’s terms, the “common” is another name for the system’s hyper-complex environment—that which is “not proper” to the system. The greatest threat to a closed system of meaning and self-reference is the “contagion” of being overwhelmed by the common, which implies “what was healthy, secure, identical to itself is now exposed to a form of contamination that risks its devastation.”32 Following both Wynter and Luhmann, the religion system plays a key function of social immunization, especially in relation to overarching “existential” (i.e. autopoietic) concerns. The production of a religious system provides the social system a powerful way to respond to, filter, and construct meaning out of the overwhelming complexity of its ungraspable and ultimately unpredictable environment. Religion, in other words, provides a particularly productive autopoietic resolution to the general empirical problem of observing what we call “reality.” If reality names everything that exists combined with everything that is possible, religion observes the distinction between what can be observed of reality and what remains unobservable. Logically speaking, the totality of reality, which must include all observations of reality, can never be observed as a totality. This is the case on two levels. First, there is the obvious empirical impossibility of omnipotence. The world, let alone the cosmos, is simply too big and complex to grasp from the standpoint of any one observation. Second, and more importantly in terms of the self-referentiality of autopoiesis, the observer cannot observe its own observation, which is included within the set (totality) that it is trying to observe. There is a necessary paradox in every observation that hinges around the unity of distinction. To observe something means that there is a distinction being made between a “marked” side (that which is identified) and an “unmarked” side (everything else that is not identified). For example, to observe the color “red” necessarily means to exclude everything else that is not marked as red. Thus, the form “red/not red.” The unity (represented in the slash) of red/not red creates a paradox of observation: “red” and “not red” are, simultaneously by way of their unity, the same and not the same. However, if the observer wishes to observe “red,” they must stay on one side of the distinction (the marked side). Staying on the marked side allows for observation to take place as the paradox is deferred. To observe the form as such, or the unity of the distinction, would be to make the observed object, in this case “red,” indecipherable as there would no longer be a marked and identified side. The implication here is that the observer can never observe the unity of the distinction (which would be to say the observer observing her or his own observation) without dissolving the distinction itself. Luhmann refers to this as the unavoidable “blind spot” of every observation. If reality names the unity between everything that can be observed and everything that cannot, which necessarily includes the observer doing the observing, there is no God-like point of view that allows human beings to achieve a view of this unity. Because of this, reality (as an object of observation) is necessarily indeterminate and indefinite.33 The unity of reality is unobservable,

Genre, system, observation 29 or, as Luhmann puts it in his typically enigmatic phrasing, “reality is what one does not perceive when one perceives it.”34 It is in the space of the unobservability of the unity of reality that religion comes into the picture. Religion provides a way out of indeterminacy and indefiniteness by, to turn an awkward phrase, observing the unity of distinction between the observable and unobservable and thereby making the unobservable observable. By positing a new observational standpoint that is removed from the limitations of reality’s empirical observability, it transforms the indefiniteness of the world into definiteness. The production of this observational standpoint ultimately provides a crucial immunitary function protecting the social system from being overwhelmed by the empirical indeterminacy of its outside environment. For Luhmann, this transformation becomes possible through the religious distinction of transcendence and immanence (the formal unity “transcendence/immanence”). Observation is religious, Luhmann argues, when it “observes immanence from the standpoint of transcendence.”35 Immanence here refers to the infinite totality of reality, the indefinite single plane of all that exists and all that is possible. Transcendence refers to a definite point of view or observational position in which the totality of immanence can be observed. Transcendence, then, is the “privileged” point of view that makes the religious resolution of the “blindspot” of observation possible. The unobservable becomes observable, the unknowable becomes knowable, origins come into view. Of course, this is not to suggest that religion achieves this in any “real” sense. It does not actually achieve an empirically verifiable perspective of the unity of all that exists and all that potentially can exist. Religion, like all other observational systems, is also subject to the laws of observation and therefore cannot observe its own observation as part of the immanent reality that it claims to transcend. Religion simply produces an obserational system (i.e. a unity of the system/environment distinction) of meaning and communication that provides the conceptual and experiential sense of an observation of the totality. In its immunitary function, the system of religion is achieved through the building up of complexity through a series of re-entries of the system/ environment distinction coded as “transcendence/immanence.” If the transcendent perspective is to become useful to the broader social system, that is, if it is to actually be performed in a practical and effective way, it too must observe on the marked side of immanence even though the religious system itself claims the perspective of transcendence. For example, as William Rasch describes, “within Catholic theology, one distinguishes between the immanent worldly world and transcendence. One longs to occupy transcendence but can do so only if one re-enters the distinction within the world. So, for example, the absolute difference between the immanent and the transcendent is re-entered as the immanent distinction between the profane and sacred.”36 As I will discuss in Chapter 3 in relation to Christianity, this re-entry of the general religious distinction of transcendence/immanence

30  Religion, Christian Identity, theology proves immensely productive as it makes possible a whole array of institutional, political, social, sexual, and other distinctions within the immanent world that all refer back to a transcendently observed and determined “reality” within a Christian frame. The more distinctions that are produced, the more options for control the system gains. Wynter’s notion of religion within genres of being human can also be understood within these terms. Each genre produces its own distinction between a transcendent reality informing immanent identity by assembling a specific set of codes, internal distinctions, and forms of meaning that mark it as distinct in relation to everything outside it. She refers to this as a transcendent “truth-for” (as in, “truth for X”) through which each genre of being human observes and knows the world in entirely subjective senses: for any physical event to exist as a subjective feeling, it could only do so for some entity for which that event ‘mattered.’ For which, in effect, that was what it meant. So truth came into the world at the same time also. But it could only do so as truth-for. Since every sentient form of life, every living species, would now be able to know its reality only in terms of its specific truth-for; that is, in terms that were/are of adaptive advantage to its realization, survival, and reproduction as such a form of life—to know its reality only adaptively.37 Because genres of being human cannot observe the unity of distinction that makes possible their own truth-for, which in Luhmann’s terms would be understood as total self-observation, they remain “blind” to the fact that they are actually the ones that have produced their own reality. In other words, they remain blind to their own autopoietic origins. Genres of being human cannot observe their origins, or “observe their own observation,” without making another kind of distinction, and therefore another point of observation, that allows for a new form of meaning that “refers back to the unity of the difference between observable and unobservable.”38 Wynter reads this operation as providing human beings the idea that their own immanently human production of reality—along with its assumed concepts, institutions, hierarchies, behavioral norms, etc.—is the original product of a transcendent (i.e. “extrahuman”) agent. Simply put, religion is the human species’ mode of grounding itself in an inherently groundless reality. In an immanent reality of unobservable indeterminacy, religion provides a privileged perspective that transcends the limitations of empirical experience and brings forth a pre-given determinate reality. This production of religious transcendence should not necessarily be interpreted negatively but simply as a matter of function. Religion serves a specific purpose that has been vital for the construction of human societies throughout its long history, providing a means through which to inscribe the codes of each human genre’s specific and entirely subjective modes of socio-cultural order that produce an utterly taken for granted, “lawlike”

Genre, system, observation 31 epistemology and accompanying pattern of behavior serving its survival and reproduction. Here religion is linked to “storytelling” frameworks of origin and social meaning. The stories of transcendence human beings invent to account for where they come from and who they are deeply—or even entirely—shape their perceptions of reality. It is the system of religion that has been the key driver of the autopoietic creation of human narratives of origin and cosmic meaning. In an interview with Katherine McKittrick, Wynter describes the “third event” (after the first and second events of the “origin of the universe and the explosion of all forms of biological life”) of the evolutionary development of the human faculties of language and storytelling and mythmaking as already presupposing the “behavior-regulatory phenomenon of religion, together with its vast range of Holy Kosmoi.”39 In whatever way that human beings emerged, religion was there from the beginning as a mechanism ensuring a particular order of meaning and behavior. Genres of being human rest on religious foundations. I suggest Wynter’s use of the general category of religion can be divided into two distinct senses broken down into what I call “particular” and “auto.” First, there are particular religious forms such as Christianity, Islam, Judaism, Yaruba, Hinduism, etc. that play out in specific historical and cultural contexts, and normatively involve specific Gods or divine agents. Across her academic work, Medieval European Christianity is the only particular religion that Wynter consistently engages. In her focus on the western genre of being human, “Man,” which has its origins in the Medieval European distinction between “True Christian” and its “untrue other,” Christianity and its theological conceptual order is at the heart of the west’s early modern construction of its particular world and its “overdetermined” conception of itself as the universal (i.e. only legitimate) form of being human. While Christianity was the conceptual ground of pre- and early modern Man (“Man1”), Wynter describes later Man (“Man2”), beginning around the mid-19th century, to have moved beyond this particular religion as its fundamental ground. Whereas the Medieval European Christian cosmology and human subject was once fully informed by Christian theology, it began to undergo an “exit from religion” in the wake of Renaissance humanist revolution in the 14th century.40 What this revolution opened up, first by way of the Cartesian rational subject and the advent of the modern secular state, and later through the Darwinian concept of a purely biological human essence, was “the postulate of the non-arbitrarily and autonomously functioning (rather than divinely and arbitrarily regulated) laws of nature . . . indispensable to the emergence of the natural sciences.”41 Following a pretty standard secularization narrative where modernity is marked by an “exit from religion,” the move toward a paradigm of the natural sciences signifies the movement toward a disenchanted or “degodded” world in which Wynter claims religion no longer provides the primary ground of knowledge and truth. In the present global order of Man, religion (which is largely to say Christianity) has been decentered by “rationality” and modern scientific knowledge.

32  Religion, Christian Identity, theology Wynter’s suggestion of an exit from religion is somewhat confusing when the other level of religion in her work is examined, which I suggest is more theoretically important in terms of both the category of religion itself and its autopoiesis as a social sub-system. When she speaks of Man’s exit from religion, she is referring primarily to the west’s shift away from Christianity being the explicit frame of meaning for the genre of Man. Remaining underneath the conceptual space of Christianity and its reoccupation by the natural sciences is what I call her category of auto-religion that has been and continues to be a universal aspect of genres of being human. Auto-religion, which is the religion that is “already presupposed” with the emergence of human language, names the universal human capacity to project human beings’ own auto-instituted authorship of society—that is, the entirely immanent production of a subjectively perceived reality—onto transcendent or “extrahuman” agents of determination and behavior regulation.42 Concepts of extrahuman agents of determination provide human beings with the sense that their own immanently produced concepts of truth, proper being, life and death, etc. are all part of an indisputable order of reality given in advance and from a point of transcendence. Wynter uses philosopher of religion Ernesto Grassi’s description of religion as “man’s [sic] endeavor to construct a holy and intact cosmos which he conceives to be an overpowering reality other than himself. . . . The [cosmos] surrounds man and encloses him in its order of reality.”43 In other words, auto-religion is a subjective human technology for producing a transcendently given world of objective meaning and order. It is clear that this does not go away in the “exit from religion” that Wynter describes. Even in the disappearance of “supernatural” agents in Man’s conceptual paradigms, auto-religion remains firmly in place as it is simply transposed onto the natural sciences and its particular stories of transcendent determination. Wynter shies away from actually calling this modern development “religion”—although she does occasionally— but more frequently, she refers to it as a “story,” which, following her description of the origins of genres of being human, is essentially coterminous with (auto-) religion. I attribute this lack of explicit reference to (auto-) religion, especially once she gets to Man2, mainly to her prioritization of the narrative of the particular religion of Western Christianity’s secularization. However, it is clear that auto-religion remains in place for Wynter as she still emphasizes the scientifically-imagined world’s continuing reliance on stories of extrahuman agents of determination. Her primary example for Man2’s auto-religious story is “natural selection” and its division of the human species into “selected” and “dysselected [sic].” As Wynter puts it, even . . . in the case of our now purely secular order, the extrahuman agency on which our authorship [of society] is now projected is no longer supernatural, but rather that of Evolution/natural selection together with its imagined entity of “Race.”44

Genre, system, observation 33 These human-produced narratives of transcendent “natural” order and determination purport themselves as objective realities of order and truth outside of religious observation but remain essentially religious. Auto-religion, which precedes and provides the conditions for particular religion, can also be directly connected to an immunitary function. It is always accompanied by the idea and promise of communal protection defined around what Wynter, drawing from philosopher of religion Patrick Burke, calls the “postulate of significant ill,” or the always present threat of the negation of the community’s identity.45 Religious plans of salvation function as autopoietic behavioral motivating devices both in terms of avoiding failure to live up to the transcendent agent of determination’s will, directives, or boundaries, and of protecting the genre of being human from the threat of an “otherness” that cannot be assimilated or absorbed into the genre. Within the particular constructed world that informs understandings of truth, goodness, evil, properness, and so on, what is identified as “other” or “outside” the genre of being human is perceived as a potential threat to its autonomy and survival. The identification of otherness is a function of a religious “master code of symbolic life (the name of what is good) and death (the name of what is evil).”46 Wynter links religious identifications of otherness on the side of symbolic death and evil. In the Medieval order of European Christianity, for example, it is the Jew that is identified as the paradigmatic other, and therefore as the “name of what is evil” to the “true Christian” self: “the Jew is the deicide, the Christ-killer, the obdurate Christ refuser. So in times of crisis, the Jew is massacred.”47 Such violent othering is an immunitary mechanism that protects and secures the specific form of life of the Medieval Christian genre and its grounding “truth-for” narratives and myths.48 While the particular terms of “true Christian/untrue other” signify the particular religious manifestation in that given context, autoreligion is the primary operation. In the “exit” from the Medieval Christian paradigm of othering centered on a supernaturally ordered cosmos, the genre of Man introduces a “secular substitute monohumanist religion of Darwin’s neo- Malthusian biocosmogony” where “symbolic life/death” is mapped onto an evolutionary narrative of “selection/dysselection [sic] and eugenic/dysgenic codes.”49 Even though no longer articulated in terms of divinity or supernatural causation, there is still the auto-religious immunitary drive to protect Man’s own self-articulated symbolic life from symbolic death.

The human project and the goal of an objective phenomenology One of the most important questions Wynter takes up is human being’s capacity to take hold of their own autopoietically produced genres of being human and construct a desirable world of inter-human relations. This proves

34  Religion, Christian Identity, theology a very complex question, and one that I suggest gets to the heart of the logical limitations that the category of autopoiesis places on human observation and agency in directing the “outcome” of the social system. If human beings and their behaviors are the product of mediating apparatuses of lawlike forces (ontogenic, phylogenic, and sociogenic), and if genres of being human are produced only through self-referential autopoietic adaptation, how can human beings achieve a position in which they consciously observe their own production and experience of the world? In other words, how can human beings harness their own conditions of knowledge if those conditions unavoidably necessitate the self-referential “blindspot” of all observational autopoietic systems? Moreover, how can human beings “take hold” of the social system if the system is comprised not of human beings but of nonhuman (sub-) systems of communication that have their own independent autopoietic forms that only respond to non-human communications? These questions arise when turning to Wynter’s constructive “human project,” a project that closely relates to the question of auto-religion. This project can be understood as an attempt to imagine a fully realized human agency no longer “blind” to its own immanent production of reality and therefore no longer subject to religious “extrahuman” agents of determination. As I will discuss below, hidden beneath her brilliant critique of the “overdetermined” genre of western Man and its (still religiously driven) claim of universality, there remains the largely unexplored suggestion of moving beyond the system of (auto-) religion itself, at least in terms of moving beyond religion’s concealment of the auto-referential production of human knowledge and genres of being human. It is this idea, I suggest, that is undermined by the above understanding of autopoietic observation. Wynter’s “human project” is premised on the idea of humanity writ large achieving an observation of a “common reality” that would enable the human species to develop a wholly new epistemology premised on a conscious understanding of the autopoietic grounding of their diverse subjective perceptions of reality. Achieving this new universal epistemology would “set man free,”50 specifically articulated in relation to Man’s auto-religious production of transcendent and “extrahuman” agents of determination. While the pre-modern history of human beings has been determined by a kind of useful epistemological state of unawareness regarding the immanent and auto-referential production of particular genre’s own reality, the ascendance of Man as the globally overdetermined genre of being human has brought about a profound evolutionary change that has concealed the reality of auto-religion under the authority of the natural sciences. This has proven a catastrophe for both the human species and the earth itself, while also opening up the possibility of new directions for humanity. Man and its religions of political rationality and biocentricism have been a scourge of the earth, responsible for the making of the global racialized world, the colonial division of global humanity into dominating and dominated, and the production of the conditions of anthropogenic climate change and its

Genre, system, observation 35 threat to the very existence of human life. Despite this world-historical catastrophe, however, as Wynter consistently points out, Man has also provided the conditions for a truly unified global humanity and has also driven various “breakthroughs” in knowledge that have given human beings an unprecedented ability to know the world in more and more precise ways that are free of (particular) religious myths. Modern science and philosophy have opened the possibility of a hitherto51 unrealized “true victory” in which human beings across the entire human species can know the truth of their own immanent and subjective production of reality. From the 16th century on, western scientific and philosophical thought has increasingly “desupernaturalized” knowledge through the development of the natural sciences and modern philosophical epistemology. Although such knowledge has fueled the “overdetermination” of western Man and driven the colonial production of a racialized world in which the human species is divided across a hierarchy of human authenticity, it has also made possible “breakthroughs” of knowledge such as Maturana’s and Varela’s work on human being’s reality as biotic beings subject to the same laws of autopoiesis that define all other living systems. Wynter’s human project brilliantly fuses these breakthroughs to Franz Fanon’s sociogenic principle and the global anticolonial revolutions of the 1960s. Like the “ruptures” of normative knowledge that the natural sciences enacted in the transition from the Medieval to the modern, the black freedom and anti-colonial movements in the 20th century were also genuine ruptures of Man’s normative knowledge and have made possible the advent of a new human consciousness able to transcend the “half-starved” achievements of the natural sciences regarding genuine knowledge of human worlds. For example, in an interview with Proud Flesh where Wynter is describing black studies as a movement of thought rupturing the religiously conditioned idea of the biocentric human being of natural evolution, she says, “just as the West enables . . . the exit from religion . . . for me, Black Studies is about enabling the exit from the substitute religion ‘evolution,’ a substitute religion which represses the fact that once language had co-evolved with the brain, the process of evolution was followed by the Event of human auto-institution, of autopoesis!”52 By combining the insights of the natural sciences and Fanon’s sociogenic principle, the new science needed for the now “fully integrated” globalized human species to finally break through to a “true victory” over the “repression,” which is to say the observational “blind spot,” of the truth of human existence has come into view. Drawing from the cognitive science of Thomas Nagel, the “true victory” is achieved through what she calls an “objective phenomenology.” Such a phenomenology would be “analogous to that of the natural sciences, yet different from it,” beginning with a full acknowledgement of the “particularity of the point of view” while postulating a “ ‘common reality’ outside the terms of that point of view.”53 In other words, this phenomenology would be able to be fully conscious of the objectivity or “realness” of sociogenesis—the

36  Religion, Christian Identity, theology fact that one’s culturally conditioned and therefore subjective perception of reality is experienced as “lawlike”—while at the same time be able to transcend that experience through objective knowledge of the common autopoietic nature of all genres of being human. This two-level perspective represents what I refer to as Wynter’s observation of the “human real,” or the unity of distinction between one’s own autopoietic and therefore subjective observational perspective and the outside observational perspective of an objective phenomenology. The observation of this unity signals for Wynter the ability to fully understand the universal ontology of autopoietic social systems where human beings are driven by the trifecta of phylogeny, ontogeny, and sociogeny. Wynter’s objective phenomenology, then, would be an observation of this unity of distinction, the “ceremony” of being human now “found” (i.e. observed) with the discovery of autopoiesis and the sociogenic principle.54 These discoveries have opened up the possibility of the objective observation of the universal or “common environment” in which all human genres exist without denying or stratifying the massive range of difference and uniqueness that makes up the species. The effect of this will be the objectively verifiable truth that all subjective human truths are legitimate and no more authentic than any other in their perspectives of reality. There is no “the human” but only unlimited possible forms of human life. In this way, observation of human autopoiesis offers an answer to the ontological question of “what and who we are” that is prior to, or rather is the condition of, any construction of a particular genre of being human. By deconstructing the genre of Man’s violent claim over human being itself through this observation, Wynter argues for the possibility of breaking through to an epistemological level able to harness the human real, and therefore human being itself, toward an open-ended affirmation of the full range of genres of being human. Such harnessing would hinge around a prioritization of those forms of being human that have been violently excluded through the overrepresentation of Man. These excluded genres of being human, the “wretched of the earth” forged in the fires of their own damnation and oppression by western Man, would serve as counterknowledges against the dominant order of consciousness and provide studies in an objective phenomenology that does not claim universality but rather a “poetic” and ecological relation to other forms of being human as praxis (as performance) rather than as fixed essences. As Mina Karavanta describes in her engagement with Wynter, the ceremony of the human that must be found would therefore be drawing on this shared ground of autopoiesis that all humans practice in mimesis or aversion toward their radical opposite in order not to coalesce the oppositional elements into a whole but rather to effect a poetics whereby the self as same would be deconstructed by the “counter-cosmogonies” . . . and “minority discourses” . . . of political

Genre, system, observation 37 and social communities formed by liminal beings who autoinstitute themselves through their alienation and expropriation.55 This deconstruction of “the self as same,” which in Chapter 2 I will link to Derrida’s discussion of the “ipseity” of the self’s “phantasmatic” quest for sovereignty, is a key theoretical move that opens up a concept of resistance to the overdetermined regime of western concepts of racialized humanity. However, while I follow Wynter’s deconstruction of Man by way of the observation of autopoiesis and alternative epistemologies of minority discourses, and while I think her project invaluable to an anti-colonial project pursuing alternative modes of being human, there remain questions of what it means for genres of being human to truly break through to an “outside” of the present order and achieve a kind of “common” environment of observation with all other genres of being human. Wynter’s human project basically attempts to clear away the blindspot of human cognitive constructions of reality in order to present a universal epistemological point of view that allows for human beings to observe the common reality of their existence and harness their own autopoiesis toward a desired end. Yet, what is clear in the Luhmannian framework that I have introduced is that there can be no common environment for different self-referential systems because “environment” is only and always the product of a particular, and therefore necessarily, “blind” observational point of view. There is no view in which one could objectively observe their own observation. In this way, there is the question of what it would look like for Wynter’s objective phenomenology to apply this limitation to itself. David Marriott interrogates Wynter’s interpretation of sociogenesis on this point and links her reliance on the language of science (as objectivity) to the religious language of transcendence and fantasy. As he describes, It strikes me as odd, perhaps, that an argument for humanistic reinvention should be illustrated as a new way of making the human calculable and predictable, a ‘science’ that also happens to show why the ‘we’ who know better (who have somehow become scientists of the codes of consciousness) can see more clearly why the narratives by which we “objectively construct ourselves” remain “opaque to us.” . . . Yet if sociogeny is to explain what it means to be human, how it “transcends” (the natural sciences) and illumines that opacity is never developed beyond a narrative that already presupposes a certain fantasy of science.56 In this sense, Wynter’s human project ends up performing the very thing that it is attempting to get beyond. By arguing that through scientific cultural criticism human beings can “stand outside and above [the reality of sociogenesis]”57 and can finally achieve an objective phenomenological perspective in which they can see the totality of their own immanent productions of

38  Religion, Christian Identity, theology reality, Wynter places human beings right back in an auto-religious observation of immanence from the perspective of self-transcendence. Though her “new science” attempts to observe the human condition free of the blindspots of a transcendent, extrahuman perspective, this is essentially where she ends up. Furthermore, the other question related to Wynter’s human project that comes into view here is the Luhmannian distinction between human consciousness and social systems of communication. If all social sub-systems that make up genres of being human are themselves separate and nonhuman autopoietic systems of communication, the possibility of consciously “steering” the social system toward a desired end is impossible. If the social system is fundamentally comprised of communication and cannot be located within or as an operation of human cognition, there is no possible conscious epistemological perspective that could somehow decisively intervene into the productions, operations, and most importantly, contingency of the hyper-complexity of the social system writ large. This, of course, goes against (in a rather alienating sense, I might add) the bulk of theories of society that are rooted in a hope that with the proper knowledge of the nature of human being and its environment, human beings might consciously steer their social realities toward a desired future. What Wynter implies in terms of her human project is basically that such a steering mechanism of selfdetermination has come into view with the discovery of the autopoiesis of human societies. By becoming free of the illusions and repressions of autoreligion, the human species can now “remake, consciously and collectively, the new society in which our now existential referent ‘we . . . in the horizon of humanity’ will all now live.”58 As I have tried to show, the necessary epistemological “blindness” that constitutes all genres of being human as autopoietic social systems, and the non-human reality of social systems of communication, means that any point of social observation, which must include Wynter’s own observation of autopoiesis, will always be limited in terms of its ability to know what it can and cannot see and, even more importantly, control the way in which it co-evolves with other systems. This is not to say that Wynter’s human project should be discarded or that it is misguided in its quest for conceptual tools for thinking liberation. The observation of human autopoiesis and the striving for a genuine inter-human or inter-genre framework of observation certainly opens up new possibilities for human projects of justice and inter-genre relations, possibilities that no doubt might include religious forms. Yet the formal logic of autopoietic observation, which would include any observation of autopoiesis, suggests the impossibility of producing a truly objective observational perspective of human reality—a “true victory” in Wynter’s sense—that seeks to harness the particularity of subjective experience with the universality of the autopoietic production of reality. In what follows, I want to think alongside Wynter’s human project in a slightly different key that frames

Genre, system, observation 39 analysis not on the capacities of human cognition but on the formal limitations of technological social systems of control. In order to do this, I turn to forms of deconstruction and black studies that begin from the resistance of the object within given systems of violence, where new modes of thought are always potentially opening to enhancing and desirable assemblages of living and praxis through an embrace of the “blindness” of experimentation and resistance against the given systems that envelope human life. This deconstructive force is certainly already there within Wynter’s brilliant life of thought. To quote one of Wynter’s most astute readers, Katherine McKittrick, Wynter points us to forms of experimentation and resistance that have always staged and presented human life in transient and limited forms of “creativity, politics, sex, violence, struggle and diaspora connections . . . as [sites] of invention, reinvention, parody, performativity, community, and critique.”59 By pushing the category of autopoiesis to its full implications, I suggest these will not emerge through the conscious attainment of a position of phenomenological objectivity, but only through acts of experimentation and vulnerable connection to ultimately unobservable possibilities. In the next chapter, I further engage the question of auto-religion’s technicity and automaticity outside the cognitive agency of human actors. The persistence of auto-religion even within so-called “secular” frames of reference suggest that religion automatically persists and transforms itself in the face of contingent encounters with new forms of social, political, scientific, economic, and other systems of knowledge. This will link religion to a number of idioms related to the “autos” itself: automaticity, autonomy, and auto-referentiality, to name just a few. In the following chapter, I will look at this “autos” of religion in depth, following Derrida’s reflections, among other aspects, on religion’s “machinality” and its relation to the immunization and, as we will see, “autoimmunization” of human community and identity.

Notes 1 Humberto Maturana and Francisco Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition: The Realization of the Living (Boston: D. Reidel, 1980); and Tree of Knowledge: The Biological Roots of Human Understanding (Bolder: Shambhala, 1992). 2 Maturana and Varela, Autopoiesis and Cognition, 79. 3 Arthur Bradley, Originary Technicity: The Theory of Technology from Marx to Derrida (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 13. 4 Ashon Crawley, “Stayed | Freedom | Hallelujah,” LA Review of Books, accessed September 30, 2019, https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/stayed-free dom-hallelujah/. 5 Sylvia Wynter, “Re-Enchantment of Humanism,” Small Axe 8 (September 2000): 198. 6 Sylvia Wynter, “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species?” in Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, ed. Katherine McKittrick (Durham: Duke University Press, 2015), 25.

40  Religion, Christian Identity, theology 7 Ibid., 28. 8 Sylvia Wynter, “Toward the Sociogenic Principle: Fanon, Identity, the Puzzle of Conscious Experience, and What it is like to be ‘Black’,” in National Identities and Socio- political Changes in Latin America, ed. Mercedes F. Durán-Cogan and Antonio Gómez-Moriana (New York: Routledge, 2001). 9 Sylvia Wynter, “Columbus and the Poetics of the Propter Nos,” Annals of Scholarship 8, no. 2 (Spring 1991): 263. 10 Ibid., 264. 11 Ibid. 12 Niklas Luhmann, “How can the Mind Participate in Communication?” in Materialities of Communication, ed. Hans Ulrich Gumbrecht and K. Ludwig Pfeiffer (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 371. 13 Han Georg Moeller, The Radical Luhmann (New York: Columbia University Press, 2011), 143–44, note 6. 14 Jurgen Habermas, The Discourse of Modernity (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1987), 372. 15 Maturana and Varela, Tree of Knowledge, 242. 16 Ibid., 96. 17 Ibid., 46. 18 Cary Wolfe, Critical Environments: Postmodern Theory and the Pragmatics of the ‘Outside’ (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1998), 60. 19 Cary Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2008), 15; also see Wolfe, Critical Environments, 59–61. 20 Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? 15. 21 Niklas Luhmann, Social Systems (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), 34. 22 Ibid., 37. 23 Ibid., 62. 24 Wolfe, What Is Posthumanism? 14. 25 Luhmann, Social Systems, 7. 26 Ibid., 26. 27 Eva M. Knodt, “Forward,” in Social Systems, ed. Niklas Luhmann (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995), xxviii. 28 Niklas Luhmann, Introduction to Systems Theory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2013), 88. 29 Luhmann, Social Systems, 369. 30 Ibid., 368, 370. 31 Roberto Esposito, Immunitas: The Protection and Negation of Life (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011), 1. 32 Ibid., 2. 33 Rudi Laermans and Gert Verschraege, “The Late Niklas Luhmann’ on Religion: An Overview,” Social Compass 48, no. 1 (March 2001): 7–20. 34 Niklas Luhmann, “The Cognitive Program of Constructivism and the Reality That Remains Unknow,” in Theories of Distinction: Redescribing the Descriptions of Modernity, ed. N. Luhmann and W. Rasch (Stanford: University Press, 2002), 145. 35 Luhmann, A Systems Theory of Religion, 53. 36 William Rasch, “Introduction,” in Theories of Distinction: Redescribing the Descriptions of Modernity, ed. N. Luhmann and W. Rasch (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 28. 37 Wynter, “Re-Enchantment of Humanism,” 196. 38 Luhmann, A Systems Theory of Religion, 21. 39 Wynter, “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species,” 25–26. 40 Ibid., 26.

Genre, system, observation 41 1 Wynter, “Toward the Sociogenic Principle,” 55. 4 42 Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being,” 273. 43 Enesto Grassi, Philosophy as Rhetoric: The Humanist Tradition (Carbondale: Southern Illinois Press, 1980), 102–3. 44 Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being,” 273. 45 Ibid., 279. 46 Ibid., 287. 47 Wynter, “Re-Enchantment of Humanism,” 179. 48 Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being,” 263; also see N.J. Girodot, Myth and Meaning in Early Taoism: The Theme of Chaos (Berkley: University of California, 1988), 6–8. 49 Wynter, “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species,” 37 (Emphasis mine). 50 Wynter, “Toward the Sociogenic Principle,” 60. 51 This is a term Wynter uses often to describe the present context of human knowledge. I owe this observation to Timothy McGee. 52 Sylvia Wynter and Greg Thomas, “Proud Flesh Inter/Views Sylvia Wynter,” Proud Flesh: A New Afrikan Journal of Culture, Politics & Consciousness 4 (2006), accessed October 20, 2019, www.proudflesh-journal.com/issue4/wynter. html. 53 Wynter, “Toward the Sociogenic Principle,” 55. 54 See Sylvia Wynter, “The Ceremony Must be Found: After Humanism,” Boundary II 12, no. 3/13 and 1 (Spring/Fall 1984): 19–70; and “The Ceremony Found: Toward the Autopoetic Turn/Overturn, Its Autonomy of Human Agency and Extraterritoriality of (Self-)Cognition,” in Black Knowledges/Black Struggles: Essays in Critical Epistemology, ed. Jason R. Ambroise and Sabine Broeck (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2015). 55 Mina Karavanta, “Human Together: Into the Interior of Auto/OntoPoeisis,” Symploke 23 (2015): 162. 56 David Marriot, “Inventions of Existence: Sylvia Wynter, Frantz Fanon, Sociogeny, and ‘the Damned,” CR: The New Centennial Review 11, no. 3 (2011): 80. 57 Ibid. 58 Wynter, “The Ceremony Found,” 245 (emphasis mine). 59 Katherine McKittrick, Demonic Grounds: Black Women and the Cartographies of Struggle (Minneapolis: Minnesota University Press, 2006), 138.

2 Immunity and autoimmunity The two sources of religion

As we have seen, a key part of the social system’s autopoiesis is the production of an immune system that distinguishes what is proper to the system and what is not. The immunitary movement to manage and control an ultimately uncontrollable outside environment provides a conceptual link between the theory of autopoiesis and Jacques Derrida’s writings on religion and the question of technicity. Reading autopoiesis as the condition of all living systems, we are already in the realm of technicity: organization, repetition, calculation, and recursivity. In an interview on his intellectual relation to Nietzsche, Jacques Derrida, sounding very close to a description of autopoiesis, notes that “as a self-relation, as activity and reactivity, as differential force, and repetition, life is always inhabited by technicization. . . . Life is a process of self-replacement, the handing down of life is mechanike, a form of technics.”1 This does not mean that life, which as I will explore below can only ever be a phantasm, is, in itself, technicity, but rather that life will always be conditioned by and performed as technicity. This inherent technicity of life has much to do with religion, not only as an autopoietic system, but also because, as Derrida explores in great depth, religion will always have to do with a certain aporia between life and technicity: the discourse of the sacrality of life, its transcendence, and its protection from the very thing that makes it possible, which is this “originary technicity” of autopoiesis.2 As we have seen in Chapter 1, this aporia relates to what Cary Wolfe calls the “openness from closure” principle enabling the survival and reproduction of any autopoietic system. As an autopoietic system, religion begins and ends with the “operationally closed” self, its purity and autonomy being immunized against outside threats. Achieving this immunization, however, always involves an opening to the environment that poses a risk of contamination and division. The religion system must expose itself to the outside through its performance in and against its environment, taking in outside elements as information to be processed by the system’s internal operations. For Derrida, this will be articulated in terms of two counter-movements within religion: on the one hand, a drive to protect against technicity’s necessary performance in time and space that exposes life to contamination and corruption and, on the other hand, the automatic

Immunity and autoimmunity 43 and “machine like” drive to blindly and automatically open the system to its other, the unavoidable extension of the system into the absolute contingency of an incalculable future that always holds the threat of destruction. This necessary exposure to the outside environment, or “other,” also leads Derrida to reflect on what seems to be modern religion’s seemingly unavoidable engagement with and use of technology, which he links closely to the objectifying knowledge of science and, as he often evokes, the modern world of increasingly sophisticated and complex “tele-technoscience.” The engagement of religion and science, normally viewed as opposed to each other, is driven by a shared source of faith manifest in a “performative of promising.”3 In order for religion and science to be powerful modes of discourse, both require an “elementary act of faith” in an ultimately unverifiable promise that its truth can be trusted. Religion and science rely on a certain kind of credit to their respective names that ultimately comes down to a faith in something that can never be objectively observed. Science and religion are both forms of address to an other. As observational systems that make claims about reality, they ask to be believed and witnessed as telling the truth. For Derrida, this means that it is the figure of God (even if this figure is not named as such), as the quintessential figure of faith “beyond proof,” that is the ultimate witness of both science and religion. As systems of observation, religion and science both claim a fundamental truth of resolving the limitations of observability by producing a perspective that can “see” objectively and exhaustively. Both systems call forth a faith in its guarantee of trustworthiness beyond any limitation of immanent observability. “Presupposed at the origin of all address,” Derrida writes, “coming from the other to whom it is also addressed, the wager of a sworn promise, taking immediately God as its witness, cannot not but have already, if one can put it this way, engendered God quasi-mechanically. A priori ineluctable, a descent of God ex machina would stage a transcendental addressing machine.”4 In this shared relation to a transcendent God as the promise of truth, or, as Luhmann would put it, the observation of immanence from the perspective of transcendence, religious belief and technological-scientific reason—“faith and knowledge”—are linked inextricably. In this shared addressee, technological reason, on the one hand, always bears the trace of religious faith, and on the other, religion will always be found to engage technology as it performs itself in the world. The stakes of this religio-scientific relation are immense. In his most sustained reflection on religion and technology in the essay “Faith and Knowledge: The Two Sources of Religion at the Limits of Reason Alone,” Derrida is concerned primarily with what he refers to as the “return of the religious” in contemporary global society. Resonant with Wynter’s “overdetermination” of Man, in the wake of the history of western Christian colonialism, a movement of “globalatinization” has subsumed virtually the entire globe into the Latin-Christian West’s human model of rationality, epistemology, and economy. One of the most important manifestations of this is modern

44  Religion, Christian Identity, theology religion’s deployment of “technoscience” and “telecommunication” for its own purposes of securing its presence and reach across the world. Writing in the early 1990s against the backdrop of the global media’s fascination with what was identified as the seeming return or resurgence of (primarily Islamic) religion opposed to the secular and “developed” global capitalist order—a return articulated in the orientalist terms of “terror vs. reason,” “religious violence vs. Enlightenment,” “fundamentalism vs. modern science,” etc.—Derrida argues that what was being called a “return of religion” was in fact the identification of something that was always-already the case: religion’s unavoidable alliance with technology as its means to secure and expand its identity and power. What technology, or perhaps more precisely, the modern technology of technoscience and telecommunications, does first and foremost is abstract. It uproots and delocalizes. Technology, like religion and even as religion, enables the power to transcend particular locations and boundaries, which in their particularity are always closed to themselves and limited in their (observational) scope. Derrida relates the deracinating movement of technology to the Kantian thesis of “radical evil,” although his use of the phrase is much different from Kant’s notion of human being’s intrinsic propensity to transgress the moral law through self-interest. In Derrida, radical evil is related to self-interest but is conceived around religion’s aporetic and autopoietic attempt to close itself off from the deracinating and abstracting effects of technology by means of the very technology it rejects. The “evil of abstraction,” Derrida writes, links to forms of evil that are traditionally tied to radical extirpation and therefore to the deracination of abstraction, passing by way . . . of those sites of abstraction that are the machine, technics, technoscience and above all the transcendence of tele-technology.5 Religion resists abstraction while at the same time perpetuating it; it protects itself from technology by employing technology. Here, what is being protected from abstraction is everything that would fall under its particular idiom of the autopoietic system’s proper “identity.” In the very drive to protect the proper, religion must utilize the very technological abstraction it rejects in order to secure itself. In modern globalization, for example, there can be no religious community, let alone so-called “religious violence,” without the aid of tele-technological modes of communication and visualization. Religious communication travels through “digital systems and virtually immediate panoptical visualization, ‘air space,’ telecommunications satellites, information highways, concentration of capitalistic-mediatic-power— in three words . . . digital culture, jet and TV without which there could be no religious manifestation today.”6 Though it may seem that the relationship between religion and technology has been ramped up in the modern world, this relationship has always been the case as religion has sought to protect and secure itself. Religions have always utilized technology, the most

Immunity and autoimmunity 45 fundamental being the deployment of languages that travel—and therefore disseminate uncontrollably—through storytelling, the production of texts, theologies, and so on. In this double movement, the simultaneous attempt to control and resist the disseminating effects of technology and the necessity to employ it for the sake of furthering its power and reach, religion cannot help but move toward its own dissemination, and therefore abstraction, even as it seeks to secure itself in its properness and particularity.

The two sources of religion and the structure of autoimmunity With a nod to Henri Bergson, and through Emile Benveniste’s etymological work on the Latin term religio, Derrida relates the link between religion and technicity to what he refers to as religion’s two sources: the experience of belief, on the one hand (believing or credit, the fiduciary or trustworthy in the act of faith, fidelity, the appeal to blind confidence, the testimonial that is always beyond proof, demonstrative reason, intuition); and, the experience of the unscathed, of sacredness or of holiness, on the other.7 Both of these sources, faith and the experience of the unscathed, remain in themselves independent of religion and are posed against each other as contradictory experiences. Yet, wherever there is religion, there will be the convergence of these two sources. Derrida links these two sources of religion to the French word salut, which, correlating to “the unscathed” and “faith,” can be translated both as “salvation” and “greeting.” In Rogues, he speaks of the problems opened up by this double meaning: if . . . one were to separate as irreconcilable the notion of salut as greeting or salutation to the other from every salut as salvation (in the sense of the safe, the immune, health, and security), . . . you can guess into what abysses we would be drawn.8 The abysses of the two meanings connect to a central category for Derrida’s later work, usually associated with more explicit political and religious themes, and one that is at the heart of religion’s link to the aporia of technicity. The category is autoimmunity, defined as “the illogical logic by which a living being can spontaneously destroy, in an autonomous fashion, the very thing within it that is supposed to protect it against the other, to immunize it against the intrusion of the other.”9 Why the specific term “autoimmunity?” What does this term have to do with religion? Why not just “self-destruction” or “self-sabotage?” The primary reason for Derrida’s use of the term is that he is interested in a general philosophy of “life,” and how the very concept of life is linked to the religious production of transcendence. As Derrida

46  Religion, Christian Identity, theology points out, autoimmunity is a term taken from the “domain of biology” and names a process in which biological life compromises its own immunity. Yet, “life” is a category that goes well beyond its biological connotations and exists as one of religion’s central objects of observation. Part of religion’s function as a system that produces transcendent observational perspectives of immanence is the production of a transcendent concept of “life” that, when pushed to its conceptual threshold, is conditioned by a general logic of autoimmunity.10 Autoimmunity is directly linked to the continuous process of seeking protection for the system through the very thing that will inevitably expose the system to its environmental others. As explored in the previous chapter, the most fundamental element of autopoiesis is the distinction between system and environment. In order for the autopoietic system to survive, to keep the system/environment distinction intact, it must open itself up to the environment by filtering the information received from the environment into the system’s own self-referential code. Despite the system’s ability to manage and control complexity, the environment will always be infinitely more complex than the system itself. In the most basic sense, this opening up to the environment signals the absolute inevitability of entropy and the eventual overcoming of the system by the environment. Here we have a basic principle of any life-system that points toward autoimmunity: the survival of life hinges on its opening to the inevitability of death. This general logic is also closely related to what Derrida calls the trace structure—the absent “difference” that any sign requires in order for it to carry meaning. Resonant with Luhmann’s formal structure of observation, where the possibility of any observation requires a hidden unity of distinction, the trace structure provides the basis of Derrida’s critique of autoaffection and the voice as self-presence, or as is commonly described, the priority of speech over writing. One way to characterize this critique is the insertion of a fundamental and uncrossable wedge between internal cognition (or what Luhman would refer to as the system’s operational closure) and any outside object that would “receive” an expression of such cognition. According to the Sausserian model of semiology, which is a main object of critique for Derrida, communication is defined around the transmission of a “present” thought, concept, or intention onto an other that receives the transmission. What is presupposed in this model is a coherent and fully present subject that precedes and thus remains untouched by the technical medium—i.e. language/writing—through which communication must travel. What is often pointed to as evidence of this internal presence is the experience of an inner-monologue of one’s own thought. This would be the realm where the voice is totally present, unmediated by anything outside the conscious mind doing the (internal) speaking. Yet, any actual experience of the auto-affection of the voice, which would also be its performance through the medium of language, must necessarily be posited by a difference or distinction between the self-as-speaker and the self-as-hearer. Any experience of auto-affection must necessarily give way to a hetero-affection

Immunity and autoimmunity 47 in which there is always-already an otherness at work. This necessary otherness means that every self is essentially divided in itself by the necessary “spacing” of all experience: “the becoming-space of time and the becomingtime of space.”11 The trace names the impossibility of escaping the dividing force of time and space, or the impossibility of an autonomous and fully present self, unmarked or undivided by both the past and the future. The present is always and inescapably “related to something other than itself, thereby keeping within itself the mark of the past element, and already letting itself be vitiated by the mark of its relation to the future element.”12 Autoimmunity is another name for this impossibility of presence. It is the deconstructive force of life conditioned by the hidden and unobservable unity of distinction between self and environment. The self can only exist if it has an other or outside against which to distinguish itself, and therefore must always be exposed to this other if it is to continue existing. For life, death is the ultimate other. Life must embrace the danger and risk of exposure to that which signals its annihilation for the very purpose of surviving. As Martin Hagglund describes the trace, every now passes away as soon as it comes to be and must therefore be inscribed as a trace in order to be at all. . . . The trace is . . . the minimal condition for life to resist death in a movement of survival. The trace can only live on, however, by being left for a future that may erase it.13 Life (as autopoiesis) is possible only by opening itself up to death. Religion, conditioned by this (il)logic of autoimmunity, is driven by the desire to protect and secure life against death while at the same time exposing it to a future that signals the inevitability of death. In the most basic sense, this implies that no religion or any religious identity can ever arrive at absolute stability or salvation: “no community that would not cultivate its own autoimmunity, a principle of sacrificial self-destruction ruining the principle of self-protection (that of maintaining its self-integrity intact), and this in view of some sort of invisible and spectral survival.”14 Self-protection always gives way to self-dissolution; immunity always gives way to autoimmunity.

The unscathed life: ipseity, sovereignty, immunity The structure of autoimmunity for religion follows the lines of its two sources. If autoimmunity signifies the impossibility of presence, the inevitability of a self-imposed destruction through the attempt at absolute security and autonomy, then it is the experience of the unscathed that is on the side of undoing. The experience of the unscathed arises out of the (autopoietic) desire for salvation: salut as the desire to be “safe and sound,” the desire for closure from harm, and the desire for health or its restoration. As I have already discussed, this has something to do with the concept of “life” as

48  Religion, Christian Identity, theology a signifier of transcendence. Life is expressed as a pure essence and as a transcendent force making possible all things we understand as “living.” As the desire for pure life’s health or restoration, which is to say the desire to be immune from death, life in its religious frame is related to the idea of the “sacred,” which, following Derrida, generally implies something utterly closed off from responsibility to an other.15 Being sacred means existing in absolute autonomy, free of any contamination that would occur in an encounter with an other. In terms of the sacrality of life, sociologist of religion Peter Berger’s definition of the sacred provides a clear example of what I mean by “unscathed life.” As he says in The Sacred Canopy, “sacred . . . is a quality of mysterious and awesome power, other than man and yet related to him, which is believed to reside in certain objects of experience.”16 Berger is talking about what he calls religion’s construction of a “sacred cosmos” in which an array of objects are given the quality of sacredness as part of human beings’ construction of meaning. Yet his definition could just as easily be applied to the concept of life: mysterious and awesome in its transcendence, other than human beings and yet related to them. Life is something that has its own sacred integrity as it is the universal source of all living things and yet remains set apart in its transcendent and ungraspable essence (what exactly is life?). All living things must have life, and yet there is no “thing” called life that can be grasped or touched materially. The (Indo-European) etymological history of the idea of the sacred, moreover, has a strong link to the idea of an unscathed life, specifically in terms of health as salvation. Its etymology draws a direct line to the idea of health and healing, “the idea of soundness, health, physical integrity.”17 This etymology, for Derrida, suggests “the necessity for every religion or all sacralization . . . to involve healing—heilen—health, hail, or promise of a cure—cura, Sorge—horizon of redemption.”18 This is to say that there is no religion without a concept of sacred, healthy life as the object of salvation. Or, referring back to Sylvia Wynter, there is no religion without salvation as the remedy for the “significant ill” threatening the particular genre of being human. It is with the theme of salvation that Derrida begins his reflections on religion. At the very beginning of “Faith and Knowledge,” he asks, “can a discourse on religion be disassociated from a discourse on salvation; which is to say, on the holy, the sacred, the safe and sound, the unscathed [indemne], the immune.”19 If the answer to this question is no—and how could it be otherwise?—what would religion be without the promise of salvation, of deliverance in some sense? Then, the discourse on religion, which is also a discourse on salvation, cannot be disassociated from a discourse on unscathed life. Unscathed life is defined against death. This goes for the living in general. Whatever is alive is first and foremost not dead. That is, what is alive is surviving the threat of death that is always present to life. Another way to say this is that life always bears the trace of death as its other to which it cannot exist without. There is no life without death on the horizon. Life is framed

Immunity and autoimmunity 49 by the death that marks its threshold. Therefore, life can never achieve absolute immunity against death because without death it has no conceptual frame. This implies a general law of autoimmunity at work within the concept of life. Life is always and necessarily open to its death. As Hagglund describes, the co-implication of life and death spells out an autoimmunity at the heart of life as such. Even if all external threats are evaded, life still bears the cause of its own destruction within itself. The vulnerability of life is thus without limit, since the source of attack is also located within what is to be defended.20 Because of this inseparability, life is always both limited by death and vulnerable to its attack. Life is autoimmune to itself; it can never achieve absolute immunity against death because death is a constitutive element of life. The autoimmunity inherent in its concept throws the religious desire of unscathed, pure life into question. Because pure life can only be conceptualized and cannot be pinpointed as a material substance or essence, life is construed as transcendent and elusive to the actual body through which it becomes a perceivable force. This is to say that pure life is a specter, a fantasy or “phantasm,” an object of faith that cannot be proven or experienced empirically as a material reality. Life can only be accessed as a fantasy. The religious “experience of the unscathed,” then, is never actually present because it means an experience of pure life that can never concretely be experienced, only desired. Even though living bodies are associated with the concept of pure life, there remains an unbridgeable gap between pure life (unscathed by time and space) and the living body (exposed to time and space). If religion is about transcendent sacred life and its health, how then does it relate to actual living beings? The gap between pure life and living bodies opens up a tension that plays out in religion through sacrificial violence. As Derrida puts it, the desire for the unscathed is what drives the “absolute respect of life” that “always involves sacrifice of the living.”21 This absolute respect for life, sacred and unscathed, is premised on the idea that “life has absolute value only if it is worth more than life” and that “it is sacred, holy, infinitely respectable only in the name of what is worth more than it and what is not restricted to the naturalness of the bio-zoological (sacrificable).”22 Wherever there is the valorization of life as sacred, there is sacrifice. Religion is always structured around this pairing: “on the one hand, the absolute respect of life, the “Thou shall not kill: (at least thy neighbor, if not the living in general). . . . and on the other (without even speaking of wars of religion, of their terrorism and their killings), the no less universal sacrificial vocation.”23 Sacred, unscathed life’s indemnification depends both on making life “worth more than life”—that is, making life transcendent of actual living bodies and thus not conditioned by their contingency, and on the

50  Religion, Christian Identity, theology sacrifice of certain living bodies for the sake of its continuing purity. Within the religious framework of the unscathed, living beings are associated with sacred life only to the extent that they reflect something worth more than themselves. When living bodies are useful toward transcendent life’s indemnification, or when they threaten life’s purity and sanctity, they are sacrificed: God’s glory is reflected in the blood of martyrs and in the defeat of infidels; the nation’s survival depends on the sacrifice of soldiers, both of themselves and of the enemy; the Father’s authority depends on the willing sacrifice of women’s and children’s desire. Living bodies are sacrificed either because they are deemed necessary supplements to transcendent life’s survival—for example, the killing and consumption of non-human animals as food—or because certain living bodies pose a threat to life’s survival, for example, inter-human conflict where one in-group kills another out-group under the justification of the in-group’s continuing existence and health. Following Derrida, all religious communities find their origin in the desire for unscathed life (the myth of salvation) and therefore are structured around the drive toward self-protection through sacrifice. In this sense, sacred life and the sacrifice of the living are the objects of religion’s discourse on salvation: healthy, unscathed life’s protection, restoration, and immunity; its “indemnification,” which refers to “processes of compensation and restitution, sometimes sacrificial, that reconstitutes purity intact, renders integrity safe and sound, restores cleanliness . . . and property unimpaired.”24 Being saved means being healed of all wounds; life remains unscathed, free of all malady or harm that would come from an other. The experience of the unscathed and the sacredness of life also relates to what Derrida calls ipseity. Derived from the Latin ipse often used to translate the Greek autos, or “self,”25 ipseity refers to the self in its own singular integrity and purity. The French philosopher of Christianity Michel Henry makes the connection between ipseity and pure, unscathed life in terms of its absolute self-referentiality (or “auto-referentiality”): ipseity belongs to the essence of life and to its phenomenality as well. . . . Ipseity is the Logos of life, that in which and as which Life reveals itself by revealing itself to itself. Ipseity is there in the beginning and comes before any transcendental “me.”26 The idea that life is its own pure concept, that it is in itself and contaminated by no other essence, including the individual body that houses it, is its ipseity. In Rogues, a book dealing with questions of sovereignty and democracy, Derrida relates ipseity to the figure of the wheel: the rotary motion of some quasi-circular return or rotation toward the self, toward the origin itself, toward and upon the self of the origin, whenever it is a question, for example, of sovereign self-determination, of the autonomy of the self, of the ipse, namely, of the one-self that gives

Immunity and autoimmunity 51 itself its own law, of autofinality, autotely, self-relation as being in view of the self, beginning by the self with the end of self in view.27 This wheel of ipseity, always turning inward, drives the perpetual return to the self that has no purpose apart from the power and preservation of itself. Ipseity is directly linked to a concept of liberty grounded in the ability to move according to one’s own desire and decision. Derrida describes this notion of liberty, which has dominated the Western political imagination, as “essentially the faculty or power to do as one pleases, to decide, to choose, to determine one-self, to have self-determination, to be master, and first of all master of one-self.”28 The theo-political term linked to this most directly is sovereignty, grounded in a structural analogy to a monotheistic God. Sovereignty, like the concept of pure life, aims at absolute identity: a self that is autonomous, stable, and secure. The sovereign self is that which is safe from the threat of contamination; no other can penetrate it or alter its form. In a word, sovereignty is indivisible.29 As the Pledge of Allegiance defines the United States as a sovereign nation, or body-politic, it says, “one nation, under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” The United States declares itself as an undivided one. There is no other United States, nor is there another nation-state that can challenge it in its own self-referentiality. The United States gives itself its own legitimacy, its own law. The reference to God in the pledge suggests an essential element of the concept of sovereignty. Fundamentally, sovereignty is a theo-political category that rests on the idea of a transcendent and self-referential God of absolute power and autonomy. God, as Derrida describes, is the “most sovereign Sovereign” that “guarantees all identity.”30 God is the quintessential figure of indivisibility. As all three of the monotheistic Abrahamic religions insist, God is one. Even the orthodox Christian doctrine of the Trinity insists that God is three-in-one. The oneness of God, as Michael Naas notes, is the exceptional case of sovereignty. While earthly political sovereignties “can, at least in appearance, be divided up, shared, distributed in time and space, the sovereignty of God is the exceptional case that defines the very essence and exceptionality of sovereignty.”31 All political sovereignties, even the “secular” versions that structure the modern geopolitical world, are grounded in this figure of a sovereign God that legitimates and witnesses their authority beyond the burden of proof. Though modern states may no longer explicitly profess that a sovereign God lies at the root of their legitimacy and authority, the conceptual structure that informs their notions of legitimacy and authority is constituted by and grounded in a theo-political system of meaning. Because of this, political power and authority remain inseparable from the fantasy, or “phantasm,” of a sovereign God that sanctions earthly sovereignties. “Sovereignty has only ever run on fantasy,” Derrida notes, “it has never had any other theme or motive, this thing called sovereignty, than that old fantasy that sets it going.”32 The sovereign claim to legitimacy

52  Religion, Christian Identity, theology can only ever be an object of faith. In the Declaration of Independence, the United States constitutes itself by declaring its right to independence—that is, to sovereignty—given in “the laws of Nature and Nature’s God.” Such a declaration can only ever be a fantasy. It requires a faith that can never prove God or God’s law. There is no way to prove or even demonstrate that the right to independence and sovereignty “exists.” There is no empirically verifiable “law of nature” handed down from above that human beings can touch and feel in time and space. This has significant implications for earthly sovereignty’s actual performance. In its phantasmatic concept, the sovereign is indivisible or it is not sovereign. “Sovereignty,” as Naas puts it, “must be unshareable, untransferrable, undeferrable, and silent, or it ‘is’ not at all. Sovereignty can never thus be parceled out or distributed in space, deferred or spread out over time, or submitted to the temporality and spatiality of language.”33 Sovereignty does not give itself to time and space, which would mean that it has become vulnerable to the contingency of an encounter with an other. Encountering otherness poses a threat to the autos/ipseity of sovereignty and its ability to remain independent and self-sufficient. However, sovereignty cannot just “be there.” It must perform and inhabit an actual body in space and time. Otherwise, it has no force. Therefore, sovereignty must extend itself in time and space through “performative violence.”34 To again use the United States as an example, its sovereignty cannot be performed without a governmental body and military/police force enforcing its laws through various mechanisms of violence. The sovereignty of the state has no power if it does not performatively impose its reality and enforce its claim to legitimacy. The way it accomplishes this imposition is through the performance of law. The performance of law is always violence because it is premised on the forceful imposition of a singular and transcendent sovereign’s authority over its others. This is what Walter Benjamin called the “mythic violence” of the state that both constitutes and preserves the law. Mythic violence, as he puts it in “Critique of Violence,” “is a mere manifestation of the gods. Not a means to their ends, scarcely a manifestation of their will, but primarily a manifestation of their existence.”35 In other words, the manifestation of sovereign power in space and time simply is the performance of an immunitary violence aimed at extending and preserving the phantasm of transcendent sovereignty that legitimates earthly sovereignty in the first place. The violent manifestation of sovereignty, however, does not mean that it is secure and wholly immune from its others. Performative violence opens it up in time, space, and language as it extends its power over others in order to prevent these others from challenging its ipseity. This opening also means exposure to the contingency and the counter-sovereignty of other selves. This exposure means sovereignty becomes susceptible to contamination and alteration by what it is attempting to control and resist. Such susceptibility is infinite because time and space are inexhaustible. There will always be more time and space for another to pose a threat, and therefore performative

Immunity and autoimmunity 53 violence can never be exhaustive or free from contingency. In this way, there is no absolute immunity against sovereignty’s others because it is always in the process of exposing itself by its very attempts to protect itself. The actual performance of sovereignty negates the very possibility of its concept. This is where the concept of sovereignty appears as an irresolvable aporia. There is a double bind at work in sovereignty as it “must remain silent and yet must go on speaking endlessly about its silence—protecting itself and so compromising itself.”36 Correlating to the two sources of religion, sovereignty must close itself off to others in order to remain unscathed and yet at the same time open itself up to others in order to remain powerful.

Faith in the promise: opening toward the other As I’ve already alluded to in the performance of sovereignty, the violence that necessarily opens it up to otherness is linked to religion’s other source, the experience of faith. We have already established the faith at the heart of both religion and technology, where faith is aligned with the very technicity of autopoiesis that operates on the principle of openness from closure. But what exactly is faith? As a deconstructive concept, faith is not faith unless it is unconditional and completely open to the infinite contingency of encountering an other. Faith is an opening to the other, an act with no assurance of outcome, no element of calculation or conditionality. A conditional opening to the other, based on knowledge employed to exercise control, is something other than faith because it is based on some level of calculated self-protection. If I welcome in absolute faith another into my home, for example, I am relinquishing my ability to impose conditions on how the other acts or inhabits my home. If it is truly in faith—that is, if it is truly an act of absolute openness toward the other—there are no stipulations imposed on the other. Otherwise, what is occurring is merely tolerance, as opposed to hospitality, which for Derrida is another word for a welcoming in absolute faith. Simply put, faith is the negation of self-protection. In this sense, faith is a kind of insanity, a total abandonment of the attempt to secure survival. Absolute faith means blindly opening one’s self to the future that always carries within it the possibility of death and destruction. To be sure, absolute faith is not a basis for maintaining or ensuring a peaceful or ordered existence. This is why no one lives in absolute faith, which would be essentially suicidal. I am not going to be completely open to anyone doing anything they please to me or stop making calculations and decisions that help me survive on a moment-to-moment basis. I would not survive very long if I lived in absolute faith at every moment. And yet, there is a paradox at work here because faith is the fundamental condition for survival itself. This is because, as I discussed with the trace structure, survival’s condition of possibility is openness to the future and its absolute contingency. To survive, by definition, is to remain open in faith to a future in which I can continue living. Yet, the future always signals the possibility that death may

54  Religion, Christian Identity, theology arrive at any moment. Faith, in its most fundamental concept, means stepping out into this possibility with the (ultimately blind) hope that you will survive. Derrida refers to the absolute openness of faith to the future in relation to a “messianicity without messianism.” Thinking with the Jewish figure of the messiah as a redemptive force that breaks into the world from beyond and institutes justice, he extracts the basic premise of an unanticipatable “to come” of the messianic that “would be the opening to the future or to the coming of the other as the advent of justice, but without horizon of expectation and without prophetic prefiguration.”37 Just as there is no religion without the desire for pure, sacred, unscathed life, there is also no religion without a messianic faith. The desire for unscathed life, a concept transcendent of (and thus outside) living bodies, is not possible without faith’s opening toward that transcendence. The messianic, then, eludes all concrete establishments of religion; it both precedes and exceeds the performance of religion. As the unconditioned figure of a “to come” that is always yet to arrive, the messianic force of the other cannot be anticipated or appropriated by the religious community. It is what prevents the religious community from ever closing itself off completely. The messianic is what always keeps the community open to an unanticipatable future always announcing the threat of its contamination and transformation. What does the unanticipatable coming of the other have to do with justice, as the passage just cited mentions? In this context, justice does not refer to some notion of the “good” or legal right but names a relation to the other in which otherness itself is engaged without condition. This concept of justice, which announces the possibility of a “universalizable culture of singularities”38 is an impossibility, to wit, an “impossible possibility,” that nevertheless is the condition of a “general structure of experience.”39 There is no experience, (or survival) without the possibility of a justice “to come,” without an initial and absolute openness to all otherness qua the wholly otherness of the self’s environment. The very possibility of experience itself suggests an originary faith in otherness, a trust that there is some-one—indeed, an infinity of some-ones, an inexhaustible culture of singularities—beyond the self that announces a future that can be experienced as an encounter with difference. As the structure of experience, the messianic (im)possibility of justice also means that what comes can never be anticipated or controlled: the messianic exposes itself to absolute surprise and, even if it always takes the phenomenal form of peace or of justice, it ought, exposing itself so abstractly, be prepared . . . for the best as for the worst, the one never coming without opening the possibility of the other.40 The possibility of justice means that the future always contains both a chance and a threat. The opening of the future might provide the condition for something unanticipated and possibly enhancing and peaceful. It also

Immunity and autoimmunity 55 provides the conditions for the possibility of the worst violence to occur. The messianic opening to the future, the opening to which faith is directed, is the general structure of absolute contingency. Anything can happen. Faith testifies before all else, “ ‘I bear witness.’ . . . ‘I affirm (rightly or wrongly, but in all good faith, sincerely) that that was or is present to me, in space and time.”41 Faith witnesses an encounter with the other as the condition of experience. Yet, witnessing something does not mean access to that something. There remains an absolute heterogeneity between the witness and the other, system and environment. This means that the other witnessed can never be accessed in all of its singularity, its inaccessible “secrecy” as Derrida describes it.42 It is only through an act of faith—an act of complete openness to whatever may arrive—that the self engages, and thus experiences, the other. Naas describes how this testimony or witness to the presence of the other is nothing short of a miracle: miracles happen, and—miraculously—happen every day: nothing more ordinary, more extraordinary, than the miracle. If the miracle is thus to be read as a sign, it signals not some supernatural or superhuman presence or power but the extraordinary relationship to an absolute other, not some miraculous event within the world but the miracle by which a world first opens up. The miracle is thus not an event within history but the condition of history itself. As opposed to all those things we can see coming on the horizon, the miracle—what Derrida also calls the event—is what falls upon us from above, what befalls us without expectation or warning.43 Faith, as the condition for experiencing anything at all, means an openness to the miracle of the very possibility of the other. There is no shared horizon of meaning with the other, no “common environment” of knowledge that unites or makes present the one with the other. The outside, the environment, or “the side of the other,”44 remains inaccessible and therefore requires an act of faith in order to engage. The experience of faith also relates to the promise. A promise is a declaration or an act that declares a future to come. The promise points to a future outside the self, linking it to an infinite otherness in distinction from its own ipseity. The act of the promise, as Naas puts it, is the form of an originary gage or engagement to the other, an experience of faith that has to do not with the indemnified community [i.e. the unscathed] but with credit, confidence, and the good faith of witnessing . . . with a kind of elementary faith, reliability, or trustworthiness before any particular religion or any attempt at indemnification.45 The promise is a gesture of faith, a witness to the sheer encounter with an other. For example, if I extend my open hand out to a person in front of

56  Religion, Christian Identity, theology me, a handshake is promised. In the act, or the performance, the handshake has not been realized, but remains to come, that is, it remains promised. But the promise is not reducible merely to the realization of a handshake. The promise “would precede, exceed, and condition” the very prospect of a handshake.46 Before all else, the act of the extension of my hand to the other contains within it a faith that the other really is other, that the other stands before the self as wholly other, because “tout autre est tout autre” [“every other (one) is every (bit) other”47]. The notion of faith in wholly otherness is not just an arbitrary point about the singularity of all entities. The wholly otherness of all others is at the heart of why all performances of the self/system/ipseity/sovereignty can never signal its actual presence or secure its total immunity. The faith or promise contained within the performance means that the self has opened itself to the wholly otherness of the other, which means that it has opened itself to absolute contingency. This means that within the promise or act of faith there is always both a threat and a chance, the possibility of both “the best” and “the worst.” There is always the possibility of justice but by that very fact there is also the possibility of the worst injustice. This originary faith, the “greeting of the other” purely as the “to come” without condition or identification, is what opens up religious communities to all that exists outside of their own ipseity. This necessary opening of faith is religion’s inherent autoimmunity. The violent performance of immunization driven by the desire for the unscathed promises the salvation of a body or self. In contrast to the experience of the unscathed, which works on the condition that the self’s borders of identity remain closed off from all otherness, faith works as an opening and a rupture of the desired immunity (the opening of the closure) that links up with something beyond the self, again, something “wholly other.” Within Christianity, as with the other Abrahamic religions, the experience of faith in the wholly other is linked to the sovereign God that ensures and indemnifies the sovereign self that desires immunity. But the important thing here is not so much “God,” which is always a (phantasmatic) name given after the experience of faith in the other, but the “link” itself, the sheer opening to an outside that the promise and desire of immunity and salvation enacts. In bodily terms, the very thing that leads the body to want to close itself off in order to protect itself—the desire and promise of the experience of the unscathed—is the thing that opens it up in faith to an outside that it cannot control.

The performance of immunity: always autoimmunity How does the performative violence that determines the self-same/system/ ipseity/sovereignty as an autoimmune aporia actually work within real collective bodies? What are the material and practical implications of a theory of religion premised on the two sources discussed above? Focusing on the language of immunity provides a helpful starting point, both in terms of its general conceptual relation to a philosophy of sovereignty and in its

Immunity and autoimmunity 57 contemporary relevance as a dominant biopolitical metaphor for understandings the life processes of populations. Going back to the autopoietic system’s production of an immune system that “discriminates things as not belonging,”48 immunization names the processes that protect a particular body from the threat of the outside “common” and, as Esposito puts it, “saves, insures, and preserves the [qualified] organism, be it individual or collective.”49 The idea of immunity is a negative term that first emerges in an ecclesial context, where its “meaning derives from what it negates or lacks, namely, the munus.”50 Going through the etymology of immunitas, the root munus (contained both within community and immunity) means an “office, a task, an obligation, a duty.” Therefore, the person that is “immunis is someone who performs no office.” Those who are immune owe nothing to anyone and are part of no “common,” whether by the fact of an originary autonomy or a release from a previous debt. Immunity is the “exemption from the obligation of the munus, be it personal, fiscal, or civil.” The important thing here is that immunity is not only an exemption from the obligations of community but also a privilege: “Immunity is perceived as such when it occurs as an exception to a rule that everyone else must follow.”51 One way to put this is that immunity is another name for absolute sovereignty, which is safe from the threat of contamination and, as an autonomous, stable self, has no obligation to anything outside itself. The most significant implication of this etymology is that immunity functions as a foil to the assemblage of a pluralist community. The true opposite of immunitas is not the munus, but rather where munus becomes generalized in the form of communitas, or community. Here, community translates into Derrida’s notion of a “culture of singularities,” meaning that there is no “proper” or “improper” but rather an unconditioned otherness held in common: “tout autre est tout autre.” Community, if taken to mean “an infinite heterogeneity” bound by no single substance,52 is the conceptual opposite of sovereignty and immunity. Immunity means that sovereignty remains indivisible with its “proper” form intact. As Esposito puts it, “immunity is the condition of particularity: whether it refers to an individual or collective, it is always ‘proper,’ in the specific sense of ‘belonging to someone’ and therefore ‘un-common’ or ‘non-communal.’ ”53 Immunity wards off the possibility of general community, keeping it at bay. Immunity is constitutionally inherent and necessary for all living bodies. In other words, it is essential to autopoiesis. All bodies must have some level of immunity if they are to survive. In this sense, immunity is simply a generic part of the survival of living bodies. This is true for both individual and collective bodies. However, in terms of socio-political immunization grounded in a religious desire for the unscathed, it is in the quest for absolute immunity that violent processes of exclusion turn around the “wheel” of ipseity. In the contemporary context, as I will address in more detail in later chapters, the expansion and strengthening of social immune systems through biopolitical forms of surveillance, security, and policing is a fear-based response to a

58  Religion, Christian Identity, theology growing perception of an uncontrollable and dangerous “common” made up of everything from the specter of the AIDS virus to the endless influx of non-white refugees and immigrants into western nation-states to the proliferation of radical forms of anti-racist and anti-capitalist resistance. What is feared above all else within these contexts is not so much the basic reality of these “threats” but rather their proliferation to the point of an uncontrollable dispersion throughout the whole of the “proper” community.54 Here, the “American self” is articulated as a sovereign body-politic that has clearly demarcated borders of identity that face an outside common increasingly seen as encroaching its borders. Immunization attempts to prevent at all costs the absolute alteration of this self by elements that it cannot control or ward off. In other words, the proliferation of violent immunization mechanisms in the American social system is a response to a fear of what essentially amounts to the death of its sovereign self. The logic of immunization shapes the organization, management, and protection of power structures in which certain bodies are differentiated from others as worthy of sovereign status. In her influential essay “The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Constitutions of Self in Immune System Discourse,”55 Donna Haraway outlines how immune system discourse has deeply shaped modern conceptions of politics and individualism. In modern pluralistic societies, the figure of the immune system dominates the contemporary social and political imagination as the paradigmatic model for managing difference. As she puts it, “the immune system is an elaborate icon for principal systems of symbolic and material ‘difference’ in late capitalism” and is a “plan for meaningful action to construct and maintain the boundaries for what may count as self and other in the crucial realms of the normal and the pathological.”56 Discourses of immunity produce conceptual, political, and social boundaries throughout human society that distinguish the proper (as the “self-same” of ipseity/sovereignty) from the improper (the “common”)—the system from its environment. As the response to the risk of being open to a world of difference, immunization is the performative and sacrificial violence of sovereignty’s attempt to secure itself from its threats. However, because immunization is always the performance of sovereignty’s claim to autonomy and mastery, it will always be inseparable from the structure of autoimmunity. As sovereignty’s performative violence, immunity operates in ways that make its conceptual goal of absolute security impossible. Immune systems do not function according to an absolute division that keeps the self totally separate from its others. Immunization is something that always involves contact, engagement, and management. If there is no contact with the threatening element, there is no need for immunization. As part of its management of difference, the socio-political immune system conditionally absorbs foreign elements into the body through control and management in order to prevent them from overwhelming its operations. Immune systems allow for “contamination and hybridization,” as Haraway

Immunity and autoimmunity 59 puts it, blurring the lines between what constitutes a self, or subject, and that which is distinguished from the self.57 The immunized body, though its aim is to keep itself secure from the threat of its outside, becomes a “semipermeable” self that is open to difference and encounter. In this way, immunity functions by using the very thing it opposes. Drawing on medical terminology, Esposito refers to this proactive use of foreign elements as “acquired immunity.” Survival itself depends on immunity’s strategic appropriation of what threatens it. A living body attempts to preserve its life as it “combats what negates it through immunitary protection, not a strategy of frontal opposition but of outflanking and neutralizing.”58 Threats are brought into the body as the very means of keeping the threat under control. The immune system protects the body through a negation of a negation. This exclusionary inclusion, or affirmation of life through negation, is not without bodily consequences. Immunity’s protection of the body takes place not under the form of a positive addition but under the form of subtraction. Immunity does not mean that something good has been acquired that protects the body. Rather, the living body’s protection takes place by something within the body being taken away, diverted, or deferred. This means that the living body’s preservation depends on placing something inside it that contradicts it, something that negates life as unscathed and wounds it beyond healing because “the wound is created by life itself.”59 The autoimmunity inherent in the concept of life is why religiously conditioned forms of life are always inherently unstable in their attempts to secure indemnification and immunity. The performance of immunity, especially in terms of the strategic appropriation of threats as “acquired immunity,” is only possible through an act of faith that exposes the collective religious body to its others. This means an unavoidable exposure to absolute contingency, which always presents the possibility that what the body has exposed itself to will lead to its destruction or existential transformation. This is the structure of religion as its two sources work together to keep it turning around the “wheel” of ipseity, the cycle of immunity and autoimmunity. In the next chapter, I will explore how Christianity marks a particular theological performance of this autoimmune structure.

Notes 1 Jacques Derrida and Richard Beardsworth, “Nietzsche and the Machine,” Journal of Nietzsche Studies 7 (1994): 52. 2 Bradley, Originary Technicity. 3 Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” 80. 4 Ibid., 64. 5 Ibid., 43. 6 Ibid., 62. 7 Ibid., 70. 8 Jacques Derrida, Rogues: Two Essays on Reason (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 114.

60  Religion, Christian Identity, theology 9 Ibid., 123. 10 Although the use of the term autoimmunity is certainly connected to its biological and medical connotations, here it should not be held to stringent technical scientific standards and should be understood philosophically rather than scientifically. For a critical analysis how Derrida’s use of autoimmunity measures up to scientific and medical understandings of the term, see Andrea Timar, “Derrida and the Immune System,” et al.: Critical Theory Online, accessed February 7, 2019, http://etal.hu/en/archive/terrorism-and-aesthetics-2015/ derrida-and-the-immune-system/. 11 Jacques Derrida, Margins of Philosophy (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 13. 12 Ibid. 13 Martin Hagglund, Radical Atheism: Derrida and the Time of Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2008), 1. 14 Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” 87. 15 For J. Derrida’s most thorough account of responsibility and religion, see The Gift of Death (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996). 16 Peter Berger, The Sacred Canopy: Elements of a Sociological Theory of Religion (New York: Anchor, 1990), 25. 17 Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” 84, note 30. 18 Ibid. 19 Ibid., 42. 20 Hagglund, Radical Atheism, 14. 21 Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” 86 (bold in the text). 22 Ibid., 87. 23 Ibid., 86. 24 Ibid., 61. 25 Derrida, Rogues, 11–12. 26 Michel Henry, I am the Truth: Toward a Philosophy of Christianity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2002), 124. 27 Derrida, Rogues, 10–11. 28 Ibid., 22–23. 29 Ibid., 75. 30 Ibid., 70ff. 31 Naas, Derrida from Now On, 143. 32 Jacques Derrida, Paper Machine (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 106. 33 Naas, Derrida from now On, 127. 34 Derrida, Paper Machine, 106. 35 Walter Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” in Selected Writings, vol. 1, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael Jennings (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004), 248. 36 Naas, Miracle and Machine, 128. 37 Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” 56. 38 Ibid. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid. 41 Jacques Derrida, Sovereignties in Question: The Poetics of Paul Celan (New York: Fordham, 2005), 76. 42 See Derrida, Gift of Death, 3ff. 43 Naas, Miracle and Machine, 98. 44 Ibid., 99. 45 Ibid., 67.

Immunity and autoimmunity 61 46 47 48 49 50 51 52

Ibid. Derrida, The Gift of Death, 82ff. Luhmann, Social Systems, 369. Roberto Esposito, “The Immunization Paradigm,” Diacritics 36, no. 2 (2006): 23. Esposito, Immunitas, 5. Ibid., 5. Roberto Esposito, Communitas: The Origin and Destiny of Community (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 10. 53 Esposito, Immunitas, 6. 54 Ibid., 3. 55 Donna Haraway, “The Biopolitics of Postmodern Bodies: Constitutions of Self in Immune System Discourse,” in Biopolitics: A Reader, ed. Timothy Campbell (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 275. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid. 58 Esposito, Immunitas, 8. 59 Ibid.

3 Becoming Christian Pauline political theology and the apparatus of Christian Identity

Having examined religion’s two sources and the inherent autoimmune structure of religion, I will now turn to the specific form of religious autoimmunity that Christianity performs. To be sure, there is no one thing called Christianity or Christian theology. There is a multitude of Christian theologies that have existed historically, geographically, and culturally, distinguished by highly particular forms and often competing interpretations of Christianity’s broad meaning. What follows is my own interpretation of Christian theology and what I will call “Christian Identity” as it has developed in dominant western and colonial forms. My interpretation of Christian theology and Christian Identity is derived primarily from engagements with modern philosophical interpretations of the Pauline theological corpus, represented in thinkers such as Jacob Taubes, Daniel Colucciello Barber, Amayrah Armstrong, and Ward Blanton. I look to these interpretations of Paul because I believe they provide interesting and productive expositions of the theological form of religious autoimmunity I outlined in the previous chapter. Paul is also a key figure for understanding the politics of religious autoimmunity because his writings, and as we will see, his invention as the founder of Christianity, have been the foundation of the dominant strand of Christian political theology that has shaped the western theo-political imagination. From Augustine to Luther to Carl Schmitt and Giorgio Agamben, the figure of Paul has been the primary interlocutor for thinking the political through theology. Before going into the argument, it is important to state up front that I make a distinction between Pauline theology and Christian theology. This is a somewhat complex distinction to maintain, however, because of course there is no Christian theology without Pauline theology. However, my interpretation of Pauline theology rests on the fact that Paul himself (along with those that made up the core of the early Jesus movement) is a distinctly Jewish thinker that never had any intention of breaking with Judaism. Christian theology, in contrast, emerges precisely as a supersessionist identitarian discourse that defines itself in distinction from Judaism and Jewish identity. In what follows, I will argue that the Pauline theological vision of salvation is divided between an account of faith that is anti-identitarian and radically

Becoming Christian 63 open to human difference and a nascent inclination toward the establishment of a Christian Identity in distinction from the world. It is the latter that Christianity will invent as a transcendent representation of a universally “true” identity linked to the imperial state. In this Pauline division, I find a religious autoimmunity at work that is the condition of both Christian Identity’s formation into an apparatus of imperial state power and its perpetual inability to secure itself as absolutely sovereign. In order to unpack this, I will address the Christian (and Pauline) theological vision of salvation, philosophical interpretations of the dual figures of faith and identity in Pauline theology, and the theological figure of the katechon.

The body of Christ Pauline-Christian theological teaching on salvation is structured around the constitution of new bodies. The death and resurrection of Christ’s body signifies the constitution of both a redeemed individual body (that of the believer) and a collective body (the church). True to religion’s experience of unscathed life as health or restoration, Christian salvation is articulated as eternal, incorruptible life. As any young Christian learns in Sunday school, Christianity is about saving human beings from their sinful and corrupted condition. Christianity teaches that because of sin, human beings are in a dire situation and are heading for death, but the good news is that through Christ, eternal life is possible: “for the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord” (Romans 6:2, NRSV, emphasis mine).1 In the Pauline corpus, salvation means transforming fallen bodies into redeemed, unscathed bodies of uncorrupted life. In 1 Corinthians, Paul describes the salvific sequence of being transformed from merely living as a fleshly and fallen being into a spirit filled life: so it is with the resurrection of the dead. What is sown is perishable, what is raised is imperishable. It is sown in dishonor, it is raised in glory. . . . It is sown a physical body, it is raised a spiritual body. . . . Thus it is written, “The first man, Adam, became a living being; the last Adam became a life-giving spirit. . . . Just as we have born the image of the man of dust, will also bear the image of the man of heaven.” (1 Corinthians 15: 42–48, emphasis mine) In this way, the basic narrative of Christian salvation is about the eternal indemnification of living bodies through their transformation into transcendent life. Saved bodies are those eternally secure from corruptibility and death, which is to say secure from living in (fallen) time and space. Here is how this works theologically: God in Christ takes on a material, earthly body and thereby takes on the vulnerability, corruption, and contingency to which earthly bodies are subject through the reality of sin. As God incarnate and the perfect one without sin, Christ dies a bodily death which

64  Religion, Christian Identity, theology theologically signifies the spiritual death of earthly bodies corrupted by sin and subject to the fallen powers of this world. Through the power of God, Christ’s resurrection and ascension into heaven announces the triumph over sinful bodily corruption, constituting a new reality in which earthly bodies will be resurrected with Christ into their new spiritual state of redemption and liberation from their captivity to earthly sin. The time of this new reality has already begun on earth in the wake of the resurrection and with the establishment of the collective body of Christ (the church), but it awaits a final eschatological consummation in which the saved will enter into eternal and incorruptible life: “you have died, and your life is hidden with Christ in God. When Christ who is your life is revealed, then you also will be revealed with him in glory” (Colossians 3: 3–4). When Christ returns to earth in his final eschatological triumph and establishes “the new heaven and new earth,” no longer will saved bodies be subject to pain, suffering, or the corruption of the temporal and fallen world. Sickness, suffering, violence, death, scathed life—these things are passing away, the bodies given in God’s act of salvation are bodies of eternal life immune from the threat of death. Here, again, we arrive at salvation as the experience of the unscathed. Whether or not salvation is something universal to humanity in general or limited to a specific group that has met a certain set of theological criteria is a question that has divided theologians throughout the history of Christian theology.2 However, that this salvation is for and offered to all human beings is clear. The primary concern of Pauline-Christian theology is articulating what this offer of salvation means for the universal past, present, and future of human relations, both in terms intra-human and human-divine. The question of a universal and harmonious human community within a world of human difference is right at the center of this. At stake is thinking the production of a new and universal collective body that transcends human difference, most importantly the Jewish-Gentile ethno-religious distinction that had reserved the “people of God” title exclusively on the side of Jewish identity. Looking to the Pauline corpus, however, transcending the JewishGentile distinction is no simple theological matter. In the writings attributed to Paul, who throughout his life and thought remained thoroughly Jewish and committed to a Jewish framework of interpreting the Christ event, we see a profound struggle to think a new and open differential community of Jews and Gentiles in seamless continuity with the Abrahamic covenant and Jewish identity. Paul is trying to imagine a new differential community of Jews and Gentiles, within a Jewish framework, as “the body of Christ,” which will in turn come to be referred to in its most common Christian reference, the church (cf. 1 Corinthians 12: 27–28). This body, like all religious bodies, is conditioned by a structure that determines it as two contradictory things at once. Within Pauline theology, the Christ event simultaneously calls for the body of Christ to be completely open and hospitable to all human difference while constituting itself as other than the world made up of this difference. In systems theory terms, if Paul is to make a new

Becoming Christian 65 observation aimed at dissolving the Jewish distinction that has prevented God’s salvation from being offered to Gentiles, there still must be made another distinction that makes this the offer of Gentile inclusion coherent by positing a new observational perspective, and therefore a new identity (the Church), that remains subject to the formal laws of observational systems. There is an opening and there is a closing. The Church claims universality but must be articulated and experienced on the side of its own particularity. However hard he tries, Paul cannot avoid distinctions. “There is no longer Jew or Greek” must be accompanied by “now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.”3 There are two sides to the Pauline (theological) body, two sources. The open side remains a call for the inclusion of all human difference across cultural, religious, political, gendered, and social lines through faith in the promise of Christ’s universally redemptive act. Christ opens up all borders and boundaries of human separation postulated on the irreconcilability of identitarian difference. All are welcomed into the body of Christ unconditionally and made into a single body founded on the promise of unscathed life. In contrast, the closed side enacts the establishment of a new difference or distinction where what will become a transcendent Christian Identity is set apart from other religious and cultural identities and begins to enact processes of immunization. This closed identity is built on Christianity’s supersessionist self-description as the one “true” identity in relation to all “false” others, most importantly Jewish identity. The Pauline body of Christ on earth, the dual and doubled body of the church, is where these two sides meet as an aporia. For Paul, the Church welcomes unconditionally all others while at the same time constitutes itself as set apart from everything that it welcomes. In this dichotomy, we find a clear representation of Derrida’s two sources of religion: the experience of faith and the experience of the unscathed.

The Pauline declaration versus Christian identity: law, difference, and survival The open side of the body of Christ manifests theologically in what theorist of Christianity and secularism Daniel Colucciello Barber names the “Christian declaration” and what the philosopher Jacob Taubes understood as Paul’s apocalyptic political theology. Together, Barber’s and Taube’s accounts help conceptualize the “open” side of Pauline faith, specifically in terms of its “discontinuity” with any immunized transcendent identity, while avoiding some of the pitfalls of supersessionism and cryptic anti-Judaism that has plagued so much of continental philosophical engagements with Paul. Going forward I will refer to these readings under the name “Pauline declaration” to maintain the distinction between Pauline and Christian theology and avoid the kind of identitarian connotation that I will later link to “Christian Identity.”4 The Pauline declaration can be understood

66  Religion, Christian Identity, theology around the dissolution of the Jewish/Gentile distinction discussed above. The theological force of the Pauline declaration is that God’s promise of salvation through the Christ event has opened up all barriers—religious, political, social, sexual, and economic—that would prevent human belonging within the new community that Paul envisions. Barber’s account is useful for my purposes because he offers an immanent interpretation of Pauline discourse that draws out a faith not bound by an affirmation of transcendent and sovereign versions of Christian truth. He focuses on the (theo-) logic inherent within the Pauline formulation of faith, which for him resists any formulation of transcendent or metaphysical truth and identity—i.e. “­Christianity”—but rather announces the possibility of new, immanently assembled forms of human collectivity. By critically engaging Paul’s Christological affirmation of difference and human particularity, Barber shows that within Paul’s theology is a kind of originary faith, or performative declaration unconditionally open to assemblages of difference and therefore always in a process of immanent becoming. While Barber’s account is committed to an immanent Spinozist-Deleuzian framework that forecloses the idea of a transcendent (or “quasi-transcendental” in Derrida’s terms) outside breaking into the inside of immanence, and should not be confused with Derrida’s notion of the messianic on which I base much of my own understanding of faith, his account of the inherent duality of the Pauline discourse around faith and community provides a clear demonstration of the autoimmunity inherent within Christian Identity. Jacob Taubes’ reading of Paul in his The Political Theology of St. Paul, a key source for Barber, is also helpful within this analytical frame of autoimmunity. Like Barber, Taubes account of the political theology of Paul is helpful because he too is interested in the conceptual and political possibilities of Paul’s declaration of a faith open to difference, divorced from a concern with any kind of metaphysical truth claims and committed to a reading of Paul that does not de-link him from his own material commitments to Judaism. Taubes offers a Jewish “apocalyptic” reading of Paul’s theology premised on a radical break from the political power structures of the Roman imperial world. Engaging mostly with the Epistle to the Romans, he stresses that for Paul the word “Christian” does not exist and argues that his theology is first and foremost a Jewish political theology aimed at the creation of a new kind of community inclusive of both Jews and Gentiles. The theological claim that makes this possible is that the law, as both a marker of the exclusivity of Jewish peoplehood (God’s chosen people of whom the Torah has been given) and as a general structure of a Roman imperial authority, has been deactivated as a dividing social and political force. For Taubes’s Paul, the law poses the most pressing problem for the vision of a community affirmative of and open to difference in itself. It is, after all, proper Jewish identity given in law that is the primary object around which the conflict in both the churches at Galatia and Rome (which included a mix of Jews and Gentiles) were taking place. Taubes sums up the conflict from the point of

Becoming Christian 67 view of the Jewish law-abiding members looking down upon Gentiles that refuse to observe Jewish law: “it’s all well and good that you have your Christ, but without circumcision there can’t be anything to it. I’m not even going to sit at the table with you!”5 Such mundane legal questions of Jews and Gentiles being able to eat at the same table together, sleep together, form a single congregation, and so on were the questions that were at the heart of the working out the new community that would no longer be determined by identitarian separation. For Paul, these questions are resolved by removing the requirement of Gentile conversion into the legal-ritual requirements of Jewish identity. This does not mean that the Jewish law is made null and void, but that it no longer functions as a barrier for Gentile inclusion into the people of God. If there is no legal identity to which difference must assimilate, what exactly is the Pauline vision of community? In his first letter to the Corinthians, Paul again turns to the language of the body to characterize those who have come to faith in Christ as a singular and unified community made of different kinds of people: The body is a unit, though it is comprised of many parts. And although its parts are many, they all form one body. So it is with Christ. For in one Spirit we were all baptized into one body, whether Jews or Greeks, slave or free, and we were all given one Spirit to drink. (1 Corinthians 12:12–13) Within this theological frame, the Christ event fundamentally undoes divisive forms of earthly identity whether political, religious, national, cultural, ethnic, or gendered: “there is no longer Jew or Greek, there is no longer slave or free, there is no longer male and female; for all of you are one in Christ Jesus” (Galatians 3:28). Though these identities stay in place as embodied and material realities—Jews remain ethnic Jews; males and females remain sexed and gendered males and females; and, more troublingly, as I’ll discuss below, slaves remain slaves (cf. Philemon 1)—the new transcendent observation of reality that Pauline theology is producing is that religious, political, gendered, and social identity no longer have any bearing on who can legitimately be included in the new community. Binary identity oppositions that function antagonistically (Jew/Gentile; male/female; slave/free) are dissolved into the universal and transcendent body of Christ, a body without a determinative identity. Though difference remains in its material forms, the higher transcendent reality means that there is no longer the antagonism of division. In language Carl Schmitt would find anathema, enemies become friends. Oneness in Christ, however, does not mean that difference is synthesized into a new identity that cancels out the particularity of each side so that everyone is the same. Instead, the body of Christ names a new identity without identity; a mode of differential community that does not posit any identitarian essence; a hospitable collective body that welcomes all

68  Religion, Christian Identity, theology particular individual bodies unconditionally. Pauline faith opens up the borders of identity that define and preserve difference as divisive and antagonistic. The promise of salvation here means that there is no longer any sense in dividing the universal human community into competing political, religious, social, ethnic, gendered, and sexual parts. Bodily, cultural, nationalist, and religious differences no longer function as borders of separation. This is Paul’s declaration, his gospel.6 The Pauline declaration is not just about a new reality internal to the Jewish community. As Taubes shows, the concern of the law being an obstacle for Jewish-Gentile relations goes well beyond the Torah as the legal referent. There is Jewish law, but there is also law as such. Here, it might be helpful to conceive the law not in terms of religious or juridical codes and proscriptions, but in terms of nomos, or the power of order and identity that imposes itself upon all earthly and material reality. In this Pauline frame, nomos would go beyond the Torah, which Paul by no means rejects but qualifies in its relation to the Christ event’s opening of Jewish salvation to Gentiles, and represents the world’s general structure of governing power. Paul’s critique of the law, as Taubes argues, “is a critique of a dialogue that Paul is conducting not only with the Pharisees—that is, with himself—but also with his Mediterranean environment.”7 For Paul, it is the power of nomos, as the symbolic guardian and guarantee of worldly political order, that is the main obstacle to the realization of the universal community of difference that the Christ event opens up.8 This is because in the old world, that is, the fallen world that Christ has come to redeem, nomos is that which prevents difference from being free in its very difference. For Taubes, this is a political point above all, and Paul’s apocalyptic antinomianism should not be read in terms of the supersessionist and anti-Jewish “reject and replace” theological formula, but within the specific context of Roman imperial authority: “the concept of law—and this . . . is political theology—is a compromise formula for the Imperium Romanum.”9 The Roman Empire was nothing if not composed of a wide array of cultural, religious, and ethnic difference, including Indo-European, Hebrew, Egyptian, Sub-Saharan African, and other ethnocultural-religious identities. With such diversity and division, the problem of control and order remained a constant concern for the Empire’s sovereign power. The law, as nomos, functioned as the answer to this problem. Taubes identifies a general assumption of law in Paul’s Roman-Hellenistic context that he describes (anachronistically) as a kind of “liberalism” that gathered and unified difference (particularly religious difference) under a single “aura” of authority. “All of these different religious groups,” Taubes notes, especially the most difficult one, the Jews who of course did not participate in the cult of the emperor but were nevertheless religio licita [“an approved religion”] . . . represented a threat to Roman rule. But there was an aura, a general Hellenistic aura, an apotheosis of nomos. One could sing it to a Gentile tune—I mean, to a Greek-Hellenistic

Becoming Christian 69 tune—one could sing it in Roman, and one could sing it in a Jewish way. Everyone understood law as they wanted to . . . law as hypostasis.10 Law of course played out in differing ways as various groups within the Empire had their own specific legal codes and regulations, which often produced conflicts in terms of their relation to the broader Roman imperial authority. But what was common across all of them was the law as the general concept of Roman imperial sovereignty. As Barber puts it, law named a form of forms, it named the character of formality, such that the specific differences between one version of law and another remained, at least in the last instance, accidental. Thus to stand against the law, as Paul did, was not just to stand against Torah-defined identity; it was to stand against ‘Greek-Hellenistic’ cosmic order and Roman power—it was, in short, to stand against a simultaneously flexible and delimiting liberalism, a multicultural context of resonance that, as nomos, spanned differences of specificity.11 This nomos, to the extent that it represents the corralling of human difference into a pre-given and formal order and hierarchy of identity, is precisely what the Pauline declaration opposes. The Christ event is the apocalyptic declaration that human beings are no longer subject to the delimiting power of the law’s social and political order but are now affirmed unconditionally in their own particularity and modes of social and cultural organization. This freedom is played out as the body of Christ: a messianically opened and perpetually becoming assemblage of difference without nomos. At stake here is the question of two opposing types of solidarity in relation to human difference. The law (as nomos) is a force that supersedes and thereby suppresses all difference for the sake of solidarity under its authority. The solidarity of nomos, in other words, welcomes difference only to synthesize and absorb it into its own operations of power. In this way, law can be read as an immunizing mechanism of the state that welcomes difference only to neutralize difference’s threat to its sovereignty. As a theojuridical system of managing difference, it protects the sovereignty-ipseity of the state by allowing in under its authority anyone who is willing to give up their own claim to counter-sovereignty. Those who follow the law and/or do not pose any threat to its authority are allowed to live. If the “common” of particularity becomes a threat, if it imposes its own difference as a challenge to the state’s authority, the law reserves the right to do whatever necessary to secure the state’s sovereignty, including kill. The solidarity of the Christ event, in contrast, brings difference together by affirming unconditionally difference in itself. The Pauline declaration signals a deterritorializing and diasporic movement of faith that breaks with nomos and resists the temptation to take on a juridical representation and signification of the law that synthesizes difference for the sake of a higher identity. In other words, Paul’s

70  Religion, Christian Identity, theology Christ event is the anti-Hegel, affirming the production of ever becoming assemblages of difference that do not require any synthesis of identity. What does this mean for the question of community, specifically in the sense of a “universal culture of singularities?” How are we to perceive the body of Christ if it is by nature open and unconditional in relation to difference? How are we to perceive the body of Christ if it is missing the key element that makes a body a body, that is, closure and distinct form? The answer to these questions hinges on a new conceptualization of community without a determinative identity. As Barber notes, community . . . cannot be founded on an identity that is already present, for such an identity is precisely what is challenged by [Pauline] declaration. . . . At stake is the very idea of what it would mean to be, or to become, “Christian.”12 Engaging Gilles Deleuze’s philosophy of immanence as a frame to explore the concept of diaspora, Barber imagines a version of the Pauline declaration as the affirmation of “the freedom of particularity to be interparticular.”13 As with Deleuze’s and Guattari’s anti-dialectical philosophy of difference, particularities are not construed as subjects or objects—i.e. representational identities with transcendent points of reference—but immanent and coconstituting points of difference perpetually moving in processes of deterritorialization and reterritorialization.14 With Paul’s apocalyptic break with worldly political power and authority, deterritorialization—understood here as the movement by which something departs from a given organization or constituted identity15—is the primary message of Pauline declaration, which refuses the prioritization of any closed off version of identity that would exclude on the basis of distinguishing hierarchically between identities. Speaking of the transmission of the declaration to other cultures, Barber says, deterritorialization is both the object and subject of Christian [Pauline] declaration, precisely because it refuses to grant priority to the subjectivity of Christian discourse or to the objectivity of the host culture, both of which have a tendency to sediment into auto-referential—which is to say transcendent—territories.16 Linking this with the question of community, what is sought is a mode of collectivity that is “in common” without being thinkable in terms of a unified body, such as “the people.” This is to say that in each case divergence is seen as central to, rather than as the ruin of, commonality.17 Such a disavowal of a unified body is not so much a rejection of “solidarity across difference,” but an affirmation of an open and always-becoming

Becoming Christian 71 body composed of singularities. In other words, the community envisioned in the Pauline declaration, which was always one assembled in anticipation of the end of the world, is a collective body without immunity. The body of Christ has no use for distinguishing “that which does not belong,” which makes it a perpetually becoming assemblage with no fixed identity. Perpetual deterritorialization, read in terms of Derrida’s general structure of experience, links to an originary faith open to an unconditioned engagement with the (wholly) other. In order to declare the “good news” of the Christ event that makes possible a community of unconditioned difference, Paul must first imagine a new form of Jewish identity that opens itself unconditionally to difference, which means a deterritorialization from a previously established identity that continues to close itself off from difference. This deterritorialization is the faith that makes the engagement and assemblage with otherness (Gentile identity) possible. However, this faith hits an obstacle when the assemblage of difference called for by the Pauline declaration attempts to constitute itself as an actual, corporeal body that can survive and withstand an environment of contingency. The body of Christ, even if it is differentially composed, cannot avoid becoming another auto-referential identity as it establishes itself in time and space, and this means making distinctions between an inside and outside. In the deactivation of old forms of divisive identity, the new discourse of Christian Identity, unnamed in the Pauline text but nascent in his theological formulation and in the narrative arche of the early Christian communities,18 emerges as the reterritorialization of religious transcendent identity. Part of this reterritorialization, again, has to do with the problem of the law. The apocalyptic and anarchic thrust of Paul’s antinomianism, though providing a trenchant critique of worldly power and the suppression of human difference, ultimately gives into what Barber calls an “ambivalence” regarding what exactly the Pauline declaration means for the time between Christ’s ascension and his eschatological return, or as commonly referred, “the time between the times.” Part of this ambivalence plays out in the acceptance of the necessity for nomos to preserve order while the church waits for the final consummation of its salvation with Christ’s return. This acceptance arises out of a distinction between the theological reality of the law’s dissolution and the worldly reality of its present persistence. Though the declaration announces the law’s ultimate power annulled by Christ, its material effects continue as a reality in the present world. Faced with this reality, Paul must come up with a justification for why God allows the law (which is also part of a broader set of worldly authority called the “principalities and powers”) to remain in place as a mechanism of human ordering. Barber describes the ambivalence of Paul’s apocalyptic antinomianism in relation to the present order that the law imposes: It might be possible to affirm apocalyptic in such a mode that one is simultaneously able to inoculate oneself—this could be done by deferring the realization of the apocalyptic to a future time, or by internalizing the

72  Religion, Christian Identity, theology apocalyptic. In such instances, apocalyptic is affirmed, but as something that transcends the present. Its discontinuity is mapped onto a separation between the already and the not-yet, the flesh and the spirit, the material and the spiritual. When this takes place, partial hegemony is granted to the Powers, one cuts a deal between order and apocalyptic.19 The ambivalence of Paul’s account makes the new distinction between the immanent world and the transcendent reality of the Christ event the basis of a theo-political compromise that will end up having highly significant political effects on Christianity’s relationship with the state, as I will discuss below. Here, the apocalyptic and antinomian character of the Pauline declaration which poses the transcendence of the body of Christ against the immanent reality of the fallen world yields to the necessity of a stabilizing and immunizing a political identity for the body of Christ. In line with Luhmann’s and Wynter’s description of religion’s production of observations of immanence from the perspective of transcendence, this yielding makes way for Pauline theology to re-enter the unity of the distinction transcendence/immanence back into itself, introducing a new internal distinction between the body of Christ both as a perfect transcendent reality and as an immanent reality. The function of this distinction is to allow the emergent system of Christian Identity to affirm the promise of eternal, unscathed life as a transcendent reality even while its immanent experience seems to negate this promise through the persistence of bodily mortality. The promise of eternal life in Christ is reinterpreted as a purely transcendent and eschatological reality that is anticipated immanently, meaning that the transcendent life of the church is lived immanently on earth as a body still susceptible to corruption and sin. This is where the distinction between flesh and spirit takes on its full significance as a fault line separating the immanent realm of sin from the realm of grace. While Paul does not think of the flesh as inherently evil or dangerous, but rather fallen and therefore in need of saving along with the rest of the cosmos, he posits the spirit as the side on which the true body of Christ exists. As Paul puts it in the letter to the Galatians, “for what the flesh desires is opposed to the Spirit, and what the Spirit desires is opposed to the flesh” (Galatians 5:17). The spirit enacts the phantasmatic body of salvation, with its observational perspective of immanence (the flesh) from the perspective of transcendence (the spirit). Left unchecked, the flesh threatens to pollute the entire body. As the outside to the true and transcendent Christian body, the flesh comes to name the dangerous environment of the system of (what will become) Christian Identity. Speaking of Paul’s first letter to the Corinthians, Dale Martin notes that when this outside “gains entry into the body, the only remedy is violent expulsion of the polluting agent, which will result in the return of the body to a clean, healthy state.”20 The necessary expulsion of the flesh will prove highly determinative for the history of Christian theology, not to mention the history of anti-Judaism, anti-Semitism, and modern colonial racisms.

Becoming Christian 73 The flesh/spirit distinction has significant implications for a whole range of other social distinctions, including sex-gender and what will develop historically into the category of race. Amaryah Armstrong finds in Pauline typology troubling links between the flesh/spirit distinction, the declaration of a universal new community of difference, supersessionism, and Christian understandings of gender and slavery. In Paul’s discussion of the story of Abraham, Sarah, and the slave girl Hagar in Galatians 4, Paul separates Abraham’s two sons Ishmael and Isaac into two allegories of God’s covenant with Israel. Ishmael, the first son born to the slave Hagar, is “born according to the flesh,” while Isaac, Sarah’s son, or “the child of the free woman,” is “born through the promise” (Galatians 4:21–26). As Armstrong points out, it is only Hagar that is named in Paul’s allegory, while Sarah is left unnamed or simply as the “free woman.” Hagar’s naming “marks” her as the figure of “enslaved difference,” while Sarah’s “unnaming signals the woman’s proper disappearance in the shadow of the patriarch, Abraham.”21 The unnaming of Sarah signifies both the ordering of sex-gender within the frame of Christian salvation as Sarah is made invisible under the Patriarch, but it also might be read as reflective of Paul’s dissolving of the distinction male/female into the spiritual body of Christ in Galatians 3:28. While Sarah “the free woman” is included in the covenant, Hagar remains outside the covenant altogether as she signifies the flesh-as-enslavement. While the former represents both a kind of gendered-patriarchal occlusion of female flesh from the body of Christ and a spiritual new creation, the latter is a more troubling outcome for Paul, especially in light of the fact that the Galatians 3:28 verse also dissolves the slave/free distinction. Here, Paul’s allegory of the slave as flesh negates the dissolution, thus significantly qualifying Paul’s universality precisely as limited by the figure of the slave. In Paul’s attempt to formulate a universality that “is both revealed in a particular Jewish tradition and extended to the Gentiles,” this universality “becomes surprisingly undone when Hagar is considered . . . in order to articulate how the universal community is a spiritual reality that supersedes the flesh, Paul requires the distinction between the slave and the free to be upheld.”22 In Paul’s spirit/flesh distinction, it is the figure of the enfleshed slave that cannot be included in spirit. Following Daniel Boyarin, the allegorical reading of Hagar’s fleshly exclusion provides a grounding for Christian supersessionism: Christianity becomes the true “Israel in the Spirit,” while Judaism remains “enslaved” in the flesh and the “materiality” of the law, leaving the “particular Jewish people [as] not what the Bible speaks of.”23 Here, the materialist new community of differentiation that Paul envisions is displaced by a spiritual community that excludes the particular as it remains linked to the flesh. The establishment of the allegory of spirit into the “true” body closed to the dangerous environment of flesh has been at the core of Christian Identity’s construction as a distinctly Gentile identity that demonizes Jewish identity as that which must be surpassed and ultimately excluded from God’s promise of salvation. For Armstrong, the “repetition of the allegory is required

74  Religion, Christian Identity, theology to secure the truth of the universal against the difference the flesh marks,” and, as we will see in part two, it is this “allegorical inheritance [that] figures greatly into the transformation of the flesh that grounds the invention of blackness.”24 All of this is part of the immunitary function of the religious system within which Christian Identity is being assembled. The basic immunitary objective here is thinking how the immanent body of Christ will survive the remaining time on earth while trusting the promise that the Christ event really has brought it salvation. The way it achieves these objectives is by founding and then immunizing a definitive identity on earth whose sovereignty (i.e. indivisibility) is guaranteed by its transcendent and perfect reference in the eschatological and spiritual body of Christ. In this founding, Christianity as a proper name emerges as an ipseity with its own auto-referentiality and autopoiesis that turns around the identification of a spiritual bodily life requiring protection from an outside fleshly environment that now poses a threat to its survival.

Christian origins: a Platonism for the masses and the turn to the imperial state Against Pauline faith’s orientation to difference as the deterritorialization of identitarian political discourse, the invention of a Christian Identity meant to cope with both the practical challenges of establishing and maintaining a corporeal body of Christ on earth and the experience of a non-consummated eschatological salvation marks the advent of the narrative of Christian origins as a specific identity of universal truth against all others of non-truth. In A Materialism for the Masses, Ward Blanton traces how the narrative of Christianity as an anti-Jewish new religion founded by Paul emerges through various historical departures from Paul’s more radical political theology of a differential Jewish-Gentile community, and how this narrative became the object of Nietzsche’s famous description of Christianity as “Platonism for the masses.” Nietzsche’s phrase maps on easily to Christian spirit and refers to Christianity’s adoption of Platonic metaphysics grounded in a transcendentally represented identity. In the introduction to Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche draws a line in the philosophical sand: “the worst, most prolonged, and most dangerous of all errors to this day was a dogmatist’s error, namely Plato’s invention of pure spirit and the Good in itself.”25 For Nietzsche, the Platonic metaphysics of transcendent identity is the root of all philosophical error. It trades an affirmation of this world for a transcendent and phantasmatic ideal world unavailable to worldly experience. The specifically Christian difference here with Platonism is its universalism. According to Plato’s account, the only way to access the transcendentally “true” world is to acquire special knowledge of it through the pursuit of wisdom. Plato taught that this knowledge was basically only attainable for the elite

Becoming Christian 75 (i.e. aristocracy) and therefore limited from the masses. With Christianity’s adoption and popularization of Platonic metaphysics, famously associated with Augustine’s theology, this limitation is removed. Christianity proclaims that the good is for everyone; it is “Platonism for the ‘people.’ ”26 The Christian Platonism described here does espouse a kind of universalism meant to bring in all worldly identities into the body of Christ, but it does not involve a deterritorialization from the identity produced through the nomos of imperial Rome and its immunizing machinery. Blanton’s reading of Acts provides a helpful framework for understanding how this resistance to deterritorialization is grounded in a kind of “media history” in which Jewish partisan conflicts around the meaning of the Christ event following the destruction of the Jerusalem temple in 70 C.E. are resolved through the invention of a “Christian origins” narrative. Within Acts, the early forms of this narrative are seen with the emergence of the name “Christian,” a “political reduction of the earlier complexity of identity markers among Jews, Gentiles, and Galilean followers of Jesus alike.”27 The name “Christian,” moreover, is linked to a particularly non-threatening orientation toward the Roman state. As Blanton describes the book of Acts’ narrative appropriation of the Pauline declaration, “Acts may be read as a significant shift in the strategies of self-presentation within the Jesus movement, and this precisely as these strategies of self-presentation occur in relation to Rome.”28 In Acts’ telling of the Pauline narrative, Paul becomes a kind of “hero” against bad forms of zealous Judaism that threaten to evoke the wrath of Roman authorities down upon the emergent community of Jesus followers. In the time of the first major Jewish zealot revolt against Rome beginning in 66 C.E. and after the destruction of the temple in Jerusalem in 70 C.E., Roman power was especially targeting any group that even hinted at challenging its imperial authority. Within this context, Acts represents a kind of reimagining of the “Christian’s” relationship to Rome, posing the Empire as a kind of protector of the community and that which provides the backdrop of the “moral subjectivity” being imagined. As Christina Petterson argues in her Acts of Empire: The Acts of the Apostles and Imperial Ideology, Paul is narratively situated as a kind of “hero” within the symbolic power and subjectivity of the “elite males” within the Roman empire.29 Tracing Paul’s encounters with Roman authorities and his eventual arrival in Rome, Petterson notes that “the text . . . constructs Paul as a Roman through the emphasis on his citizenship and his appeal to the emperor.”30 This narrative device in turn has the effect of furthering the distinction between Paul and “the Jews,” where Roman subjectivity is posed as the proper frame of reference for Paul’s character. “Indeed,” Blanton notes, “the narrative repeatedly imagines that the machinations of Roman policing are altogether safer for Paul than those of ‘the Jews’ in Jerusalem.”31 Even with the backdrop of Paul’s radical critique of empire, the ambivalence of Paul’s orientation toward the state provides the narrative with a recasting of

76  Religion, Christian Identity, theology Paul as something distinctly non-Jewish precisely through his identification as a Roman subject. This narrative of Christian origins, which turns Paul into a popularizer of the Platonic metaphysics of representation, captures the invention of Christianity as a political identitarian discourse. In other words, this is a key moment in the reterritorialization of religious identity, grounded in the experience of the unscathed, against Pauline faith. Here, the Christian declaration of an unconditioned faith in difference is eclipsed by Christian Identity. The experience of the unscathed, the turn inward toward the autoreferential self and its protection, emerges as the political-religious identity of Christianity. According to Blanton, such a turn, already at work in the New Testament, buries Paul “underneath what can only be called a weaponized form of Platonic-historical narration which came to dominate accounts of the foundations and origins of that name, Christianity.”32 Repressed below the narrative-myth of “Christian origins” is the “Jewish partisan” Paul of radical faith concerned with debates about the nature of Jewish (sectarian) identity in relation to the Roman Empire. This “partisan” Paul is the apostle of the declaration, Taubes’ Paul of Jewish-apocalyptic faith in the liberation of the world from the power of nomos. With the Christian adoption of Platonic metaphysics of representation, Paul the Jewish partisan is replaced with Paul the inventor of a Christianity that constitutes itself as an identity with “an idealist or Platonic capacity for historical representation [making possible] the Paul of Nietzsche’s Platonism for the masses.”33 The idealist-Platonic notion of historical representation means that there exists some ideal and transcendent Christian Identity given by a sovereign God—a Christian ipseity—that promises and guarantees its truth and salvation. Here, we arrive at the basic structure of Christian onto-theology, where the Christian God serves as the transcendent ground and guarantee of truthful being-identity. Christian Identity on earth, then, is driven by the desire to experience and protect the guarantee of its phantasm of salvific identity. It becomes invested in establishing and protecting an immanent form (or body) that correlates to its transcendent and pure referent. Even though the declaration promises salvation to all forms of human particularity, Christianity comes to narrate itself as the sole possessor of salvation and therefore requires protective mechanisms that secures its survival in a world that is constantly threatening its claim to universality. The invention of exclusive identity does not mean that the faith of the declaration goes away, but that its promise finds new objects to open itself toward. Instead of the promise of an all-inclusive community of assembled differences, the promise of salvation is mapped onto the project of securing a particular Christian Identity. The most important political implication of the founding of Christian Identity is its linking with worldly political power. In terms of Paul’s acknowledgement of the law’s worldly persistence, the relationship between the body of Christ and worldly political powers is ambiguous. He instructs Christians to remain obedient to the “powers,” yet

Becoming Christian 77 there is a clear sense that these powers remain separate from the body of Christ. In Romans 13, for example, he admonishes Christians to let every person be subject to the governing authorities; for there is no authority except from God, and those authorities that exist have been instituted by God. Therefore whoever resists authority resists what God has appointed, and those who resist will incur judgment. (Romans 13:1–2) Here, Paul is clearly distinguishing between the body of Christ and earthly powers. The body of Christ is to remain subject and obedient to the powers, which are part of God’s creation, yet there is no sense that it is to become part of the powers themselves, which would amount to the church itself becoming the vehicle of nomos. This ambiguous relationship to the powers, while already a point of conflict in the New Testament, changes radically when the promised second coming of Christ began to look as if it would be delayed indefinitely. Paul’s theology may have assumed that the eschatological return of Christ was imminent, but as time went on this looked more and more unlikely. As this delay set in, and as Christian Identity became more and more sedimented as a distinct religious identity, “Christianity,” as Han Blumenberg observes, “had to adjust itself to the rules of the game in the given and persisting world.”34 Part of “adjusting itself,” or immunizing itself against a dangerous political landscape of competing religious and cultural identities, meant replacing its initial apocalyptic and anarchic anticipation of the imminent end of the world with a stabilized political framework that gave a positive theological valence to worldly political order. The marriage of state and church increasingly was seen as the condition of its survival in a seeming world without end.35 Blumenberg suggests that this is what enables the church to transform itself into a secular and stabilized political institution actively involved in the administration and governance of the world while still affirming the eventual return of Christ. The church attempts to immunize itself from the Roman state (which had both executed its savior and previously persecuted it) by theologically affirming its necessity and absorbing it into its operations. In just a few centuries, on the foundation of a Christian origins narrative that had positively reworked the churchempire relation, and through the Constantinian revolution and Christianity’s imperial enthronement as the official religion of the Empire in 381 C.E by Roman Emperor Theodosius I, this immunizing assemblage had fundamentally transformed Christian Identity into an imperial power. Here we find the rapid transformation of a minority Jewish-Gentile sect (or set of sects) with a mission of spreading the gospel of God’s affirmation of intercultural and religious difference to a new Christian political identity devoted to the protection of empire. This new identity is grounded in the necessity of a theologically justified political and sacrificial violence against its others

78  Religion, Christian Identity, theology as it requires a whole new set of immunitary mechanisms that ward off new outside threats created by the new borders of identity it had adopted. The immunitary mechanisms emerge as Christian Identity is coupled to various forms of knowledge and power that eventually fuse together as a larger system. These include political, legal, and economic presuppositions inherited from Greek and Roman state forms, and religious, spiritual, and social sensibilities derived from its broader Mediterranean environment. In this assemblage, Christian Identity emerges as a powerful autopoietic sociopolitical-religious system that protects and reproduces social, political, economic, theological, historical, and juridical elements that together form a normative Christian subject. The emergence of an institutional church and its offices of authority, doctrines, liturgies, theologies, histories, traditions, and other discourses and rituals sediment this identity around a distinct set of beliefs and proper behaviors. The institutionalization of Christian Identity marks an immune system that identifies “heretical,” “improper,” or “deviant” forms of Christianity associated with “wrong” theologies such as—to name but a few—Gnosticism, Marcionism, Donatism, and Pelagianism.36 The development of “orthodoxy,” intrinsically linked to imperial power and authorization (after all, it was the Emperor Constantine himself that authorized the council of Nicea in 325 C.E.) plays a major role in this. Orthodoxy sets the parameters and distinctions of “proper” Christian belief. Orthodoxy is about boundaries and identifying threats to the purity of the Christian theological body. It is about an authentic and sovereign identitarian truth that is safeguarded and protected in order to be reproduced from one generation of the body of Christ to another unscathed and intact. In his account of the origins of orthodoxy, historian of Christian theology William Placher provides a clear example of how Christian Identity understands what it takes to be the proper, authentic, and universal truth of Christianity: When [early Christians] encountered someone proclaiming a different message in the name of Jesus Christ, they wanted to rush in and say, ‘No, that really is not Christianity’—or, more formally, ‘Our message is orthodox; that is heresy.’ At first it was not clear who had the right to say that, or how to settle a dispute between competing claims to orthodoxy. By the end of the 2nd century, however, most Christians had agreed that some interpretations of Christianity, especially those known under the labels of Gnosticism, Montanism, and Marcionism, were heresies. In reaching those decisions they defined their faith more carefully, established a hierarchical organization, and began to define some writings as ‘scripture.’ In trying to stay the same, Christianity had changed.37 It is the immune system of Christian Identity that produces the “consensus”—which was never really the case, but rather a reflection of the

Becoming Christian 79 resolution of power struggles—around what distinguishes authentic Christianity from heresy. In other words, it is this immune system that identifies certain beliefs or theological pronouncements as not belonging within the proper body of Christian truth. There was no original Christianity given to a specific group of people handed down from above whose truth was spelled out—although this idea is essentially what the religious system of Christian Identity makes appear as reality. It is the religious system and its production of a perspective of transcendence that conceals the fact that the development of Christianity is an entirely immanent assemblage of various and diverse points of power and not a singular event of revelation. It conceals the fact that Christianity’s truth is the construction of specific religious distinctions and boundaries that arise through a multiplicity of encounters and struggles with a broader environment of social, political, and religious forces. In this way, as a form of power-knowledge, orthodoxy is what emerges as various forces meet and assemble to produce the multiple lines that together divide the proper self/ipseity of the body of Christ, that is, Christian Identity, from its (improper) others. As with Derrida’s “wheel of ipseity,” the system of Christian Identity keeps the wheel spinning “toward the self, toward the origin itself.”38 Concealing the phantasmatic nature of the ipse/sovereign self, it produces the unquestioned assumption that there is a definitive point where an authentic and original Christianity emerges. Placher’s “early Christians” refers to what he takes for granted as the “original Christians” that were the progenitors of, again, what he takes for granted as, the original gospel. Placher is certainly correct that the development of orthodoxy reflects a transformation of the earliest forms of Christian Identity as later represented in the writings that became the New Testament. Yet, he still harkens back to an original community that provides the original locus of Christianity’s revelation, even if the specific contours of this revelation were not totally clear from the beginning. Placher’s and other orthodox accounts of Christian origins’ understanding of the development of orthodoxy as a system of “proper identity” can be observed as accounting for the Pauline declaration’s outward movement of faith that contingently establishes new relations with various elements outside itself, including imperial power. When these relations find points of resonance with other elements and form specific relations of power/knowledge, a social-religious system of identity begins to emerge. For example, the development of theologically orthodox doctrines such as the divine-human nature of Christ and the connection between salvation and the concept of a soul happens via encounters and engagements with various strands of Greek philosophy and stoicism, “foreign” (in relation to the foundational Jewishness of the Jesus movement) modes of thinking that played significant roles in Christian Identity becoming the object of Nietzsche’s “Platonism for the people.” This is to say that the emergence of orthodoxy only happens through Christian Identity’s exposure to and appropriation of other forms of thinking, culture, and political forces that are linked to the body of Christ

80  Religion, Christian Identity, theology as part of its apparatus. At the same time, these exposures and appropriations both, at the same time, immunize Christian Identity and open it up to transformation: in order to strengthen itself and defend against threats to its self-referential authenticity, it keeps itself open to new elements that might expand its power but also transform it into something different. The invention of Christian orthodoxy played a key role in making Christianity such an unprecedented force of inner subjectification. Luhmann attributes the power of Christian orthodoxy to the idea that “never before had religion been so articulate.”39 According to Luhmann, Christianity is unique in the history of religion because of its professionalization and bureaucratization of theological interpretation and the centrality of belief as a marker of salvation. As theological truth is based around distinctions of transcendent significations (orthodox/unorthodox, proper/ improper, salvation/damnation, etc.) that must then be applied onto an infinitely complex and contingent immanent field of reality, the emergence of a Christian professional class of interpreters ensured the expansion and complexification of a world built around the ultimate distinction between belief and unbelief. The particular binary division of belief/unbelief is something new in the history of religion and, as some have argued, actually marks the invention of religion as distinct from culture. As Daniel Boyarin notes of the Christian-Jewish distinction emergent in the early Christian church, the question of who’s in and who’s out became the primary way of thinking about Christianicity. The vehicle to that question was . . . orthodoxy and heresy. ‘In’ was to be defined by correct belief; ‘out’ by adherence via an alleged choice to false belief. This notion that identity is achieved and not given by birth, history, language, and geographical location was the novum that produced religion, having an impact . . . on the whole semantic system of identities within the Mediterranean world.40 Correct belief became inseparable from theological distinction. What a Christian believes in—God, the atonement, the church, sin, etc.—are theological ideas, which are not self-evident but require a whole system of transcendent observations and decisions handed down from those authorized to interpret what is orthodox and what is not. As theology takes over the meaning of religious truth, Luhmann notes, “never before was [religion] so completely on its own in regulating inclusion and exclusion. . . . never before did [religion’s] own unity of reproduction become so dependent on [theological] interpretation, i.e. professional skill in handling distinctions.”41 The theological system and its professional class served Christianity’s innercomplexification and thereby provided greater means through which to protect and enforce its subjectively observed truth. In other words, theological complexity provides a key immunization mechanism.

Becoming Christian 81 We can see this clearly in Christian notions of salvation and its impact on individual believer’s behavior. While the religious distinction of transcendence and immanence has always provided important structures of differentiation and meaning for human cultures, Luhmann notes that Christianity was able to replace the older and much more general cultural-religious distinction between sacred and profane with an unprecedentedly complex and highly specific theological distinction of individual salvation and damnation, “accessible to all kinds of clerical and private manipulation” and “presented to the believer as the most important question of his [sic] life.”42 The theological distinction of salvation and damnation served as Christianity’s most powerful mechanism for enforcing a perpetual and inexhaustible selfregulation driven by the necessary uncertainty of salvation. For Christianity, if salvation names the resolution of the distinction between a fallen world of original sin and a transcendent and therefore immanently inaccessible perfect creation, then the actual immanent experience of salvation remains impossible as long as it is articulated on the side of the fallen world. Salvation, then, is a transcendent phantasm “contingent upon grace and, finally, in itself turns into an impenetrable and unrecognizable determination.”43 Such indetermination conditioned the production of an almost infinite array of theological distinctions (i.e. “re-entries”) relating to every aspect of living (both inner-life and public life) that turned precisely around the problem of salvation’s uncertainty. Theology came to provide an overarching system for answering the general question, “will what I am thinking or doing at any given moment lead to salvation or damnation?” This, as later represented in the Calvinist theological tradition that Max Weber famously linked to the emergence of capitalism precisely through its built-in uncertainty of salvation, also included the question of whether or not one could be sure of one’s belief: “do I really believe I am one of the elect?” As these questions remained necessarily unanswerable in any definite sense—any answer would always be the outcome of a particular interpretation that had no way of being empirically (i.e. immanently) verified—the basis of a system of authority designed to absorb or defer uncertainty through the professional positing of theological decisions, along with the mandate for lay individuals to not only follow these decisions but to arrange their entire existence around them, emerged. Especially as it sedimented during the medieval period in European Christendom, the distinction between the professional wing of the church (clergy, theologians, lawyers, etc.) and the lay population guaranteed the constant reproduction of an order of truth by making the system of theological veridiction increasingly complex and therefore necessarily tied to professional knowledge. The complexity of the theological system worked in favor of a professional theological class (i.e. the guardians of the Christian system’s borders) as it essentially enabled the means by which to address, regulate, and immunize itself against any possible contingency that would disrupt the system’s normative operations.

82  Religion, Christian Identity, theology

The katechon and political theology As the system of Christian orthodoxy assembled, it became necessary to include a theological basis for stabilizing its operations and immunizing them against Christian Identity’s environment. Theo-politically, this stabilization and immunization can be centered on the Pauline figure of the katechon, the mysterious “restrainer” in 2 Thessalonians that, in the “time between the times,” holds off evil from swallowing up the world so that the church may complete its mission before Christ returns. Again, nomos’ continuing necessity in the time between the times is the main object of contention. The evil threatening to overrun the world is “lawlessness”: “for the mystery of lawlessness is already at work, but only until the one who now restrains it [katechon] is removed.”44 The katechon has been interpreted as many things, but the predominant interpretation has been as the state, or even the political as such. In the 2nd century, for example, Tertullian interpreted the katechon as the Roman Empire, which prevents “the great force which threatens the whole world, the end of the age itself with its menace of horrendous suffering.”45 Precisely because of its immunitary function of keeping the world intact so that the church might fulfill its mission, the Roman Empire was worthy of support and obedience from Christians. In holding off the total catastrophe of absolute political disorder—the complete deterritorialization from the old regimes of political, religious, and cultural identity and division (i.e. “lawlessness”)—the katechon extends the nomos’ reign over the immanent world, in effect delaying the appearance of the Anti-Christ and, in a kind of theological betrayal of the early Jesus movement’s hope for imminent second coming of Christ, the final triumph of Christ, which is to say salvation itself. As Esposito describes, by holding back evil, [the katechon] prevents the ultimate good from manifesting itself. Indeed only when the katechon has been ‘cleared away’ will the Parousia come to pass. In order to protect people from the Anti-Christ, the katechon defers the final battle that will lead to the victory of the good. . . . The need to incorporate evil, controlling it, issues from this imperative: to safeguard the possibility of the good by delaying its realization.46 This deferral of salvation can also be described as an immunitary principle of self-protection. In Immunitas, Esposito characterizes the katechon’s function as an antibody (a protein that identifies and neutralizes pathogens) that protects the religious body from assimilation into the antigen (foreign substance) of the broader, fallen, sinfully “diseased” world. Just as the antibody cannot prevent contact with the antigen and therefore must welcome it in conditionally in order to manage it, so too does the katechon work in terms of management. The katechon restrains evil by holding it within itself. This remains a compromising immunitary strategy as it not only prevents evil

Becoming Christian 83 from taking over the body, but it also delays evil’s ultimate defeat. In this way, the katechon is a figure of political theodicy. It essentially justifies the political use of evil in order fight evil. According to its most famous modern interpreter and the evil father of 20th century western political theology, the German legal theorist and Nazi advisor Carl Schmitt, the katechon names a crucial theo-political concept informing a political realism made to the measure of a pluralist world. In The Nomos of the Earth, Schmitt establishes the katechon as a central category for a (secular-) political theology, or as Julia Hell describes it, an “imperial theology” of Christian empire,47 that enables a compromise between the Christian eschatological promise of redemption—the “end of the world,” which for Schmitt is completely undesirable from a human point of view— and the desirability of worldly political stability and continuity made possible by the state and its determinations of order and security, however imperfect these operations may be.48 Taubes describes this fear of the eschatological as a kind of Schmittian prayer: “One prays for the preservation of the state, since if, God forbid, it doesn’t remain, then chaos breaks loose, or, even worse, the Kingdom of God!”49 Ever the realist, Schmitt defines the katechon as the power that “prevents the long-overdue apocalyptic end of time from already happening now,” aligning the concept with his broader defense of executive state power and the necessity of the sovereign decision.50 Both of these, Schmitt believes, are essential for the constitution of the law and political continuity in a world always holding within it the possibility of apocalyptic catastrophe. In this sense, the katechon captures a kind of general and abstract Christian political-theological imagination in which his categories of the “concrete situation”—i.e. sovereignty and the state of exception—find their theological grounding.51 The katechon is about “the time that remains.” Schmitt knows that the state and its political order is temporal. State time is always limited time, meaning that it is always headed toward an end. Christian political empire is not eternal, and this is the point. As a jurist and political theorist, Schmitt does not concern himself with what is eternal. “Schmitt had one interest,” Taubes notes, “that of the Party, that chaos did not reign, that the state stood firm.”52 What is eternal has no bearing on real political actuality in which uncontrollable chaos is always threatening to unleash itself. Schmitt cares about worldly survival, or self-preservation against the looming threat of anarchy and chaos. This is where the katechon comes in: “[Christian Empire] always had its own end and that of the present eon in view. Nevertheless, it was capable of being a historical power. The decisive historical concept of this continuity was that of the restrainer: katechon.”53 The restrainer, not the savior; preservation, not salvation; deferral of the messiah, not its arrival. Here we also arrive squarely at Schmitt’s concept of the political constructed around the friend/enemy distinction, which leads precisely to the katechonic notion of incorporating and managing evil by shaping its force

84  Religion, Christian Identity, theology into “political conflict.” As is well known, the “friend/enemy” distinction is premised on the affirmation of conflict that this binary provides as the necessary condition for limiting violence toward the end of survival in an inherently violent world.54 Friends need enemies and enemies need friends. The positive needs the negative. A world in which one exists without the other is simply an undifferentiated world without form or order. The idea that “everyone can be friends” is especially suspect, as this is essentially the liberal fantasy of a “universal humanity” that Schmitt abhors for its neutralization of genuine political conflict.55 It is only the political’s friend/ enemy couple that relegates, and therefore limits, violence to the realm of legitimate human conflict. This is essentially the function of the katechon: to create conflict through the friend/enemy distinction as a structure of restrained immunitary violence. Chantal Mouffe captures this function of creating restraining conflict by mapping what she calls the “dimension of antagonism that is inherent in human relations” onto the political as such, while correlating politics with “the ensemble of practices, discourses and institutions that seek to establish a certain order and organize human coexistence in conditions that are always potentially conflictual because they are affected by the dimension of the political.”56 In other words, the Schmittian friend/enemy distinction serves as a refusal to avoid or deny the reality of what she would call the inherent antagonism running through all human relations—we might say here the violence of the Hobbesian “state of nature” sort running all the way down humanity—which serves as the very material through which a limited but ordered coexistence can be arranged under a structured rubric of legitimized conflict. In short, within this Schmittian frame of the katechon, the political is constituted as a sphere in which antagonistic violence is “contained, limited and redirected, but never abolished.”57 (As we’ll see in part three, the language of “antagonism” and “conflict” will have much more specific implications when read within the critical frame of black studies.) This is also where the political (as katechon) links back up to the theojuridical figure of sovereignty. Without the famous “included exclusion” of sovereign power both included in the law while remaining unbound by it through the sovereign decision, there cannot be politics. We should again stress that the sovereign decision to enact the state of exception is not simply about restoring sovereign power for its own sake; the sovereign decision is necessary precisely to restore the space in which political conflict can ensue. If law is related to the norm that provides the form of the political sphere of friendship but is also dependent on the exception for its very existence, then Schmitt believes this logically requires the sovereign figure that can suspend the law temporarily in the extreme situation of an existential threat to political continuity itself.58 In terms of the katechon as the name for the political theological ground of such earthly survival and order, what is interesting here is that the ultimate existential threat is not exactly the formal figure of the political enemy, but the threat inherent in the relation between the antiChrist and Christ. If the anti-Christ’s arrival also means the arrival of Christ

Becoming Christian 85 and therefore the defeat of the anti-Christ, this relation holds within it the threat of the end of the world. What the katechon fears above all is not the enemy per se, but the absolute evil and chaos signified against the limited evil manifest in the friend/enemy distinction that it holds in place. Without this distinction, from the immanent observational perspective of Christian Identity, the ability to manage and limit earthly violence is lost. Giorgio Agamben, who critically employs Schmitt’s theory of the katechon as a key problem for modern western political theory, expands Schmitt’s theory so as to encompass virtually all modern politics as katechonic: “every theory of the State . . . which thinks of it as a power destined to block or delay catastrophe—can be taken as a secularization of this interpretation of 2 Thessalonians.”59 For Agamben, this state function of delaying catastrophe, however well intentioned, has been nothing short of disastrous, as western Christianity’s alliance with katechonic mechanisms of political protection has cleared the path for an infinitely broad governance that “extends its blind and derisive dominion to every aspect of social life.”60 Here we arrive at the general structure of western biopolitical governance that has reached down into all areas of life itself and operates around the (katechonic) protection of politically qualified life (bios) at the expense of the abandonment, exclusion, and sacrifice of bare life (zoe).61 In short, “Life” indemnified by the sacrifice of the living. The extension of the katechonic marriage of Christian Identity and the state has been theopolitically imagined through two distinct forms of political power. In The Kingdom and the Glory, Agamben makes a distinction between two political paradigms within early Christian theology derived from the katechonic function of state power: “political theology” (understood strictly within the Schmittian focus on sovereignty and the exception) and “economic theology.”62 Political theology, in the tradition of Schmitt, bases state power on the transcendence of a sovereign God that provides a structural analogy for the sovereign power of the state. Sovereign power is the foundation of state legitimacy and operates around the sovereign’s right to suspend the law in the state of exception in order to save the state from an existential threat.63 But this theologically grounded notion of sovereignty has its political limits in terms of the katechonic function of maintaining order and holding back chaos. As I have already discussed, theological sovereignty is the ground for a Christian Identity whose salvation is guaranteed and protected in its claim to the one true God. However, sovereignty and identity based on such a phantasm must open itself to the world as it (in faith) performs itself in space and time. In order to remain undivided and autonomous, sovereignty must remain a transcendent theological category not contaminated by an engagement with the world. Of course, earthly sovereignty must engage the world in its “performative violence” of immunization, and, as Foucault famously explores, is deployed most effectively through spectacularly visible forms of violence, with its paradigmatic example of the death penalty.64 This autoimmune weakness of such a spectacular and singular force is clear when considering that sovereign power’s necessary performative

86  Religion, Christian Identity, theology violence cannot possibly control everything outside itself, that is, its environment. It is, by its singular and autonomous nature, vulnerable to the counter-power of the “common” that surrounds it. This is what Foucault means when he says power is not omnipotent or omniscient—quite the contrary! If power relationships have produced forms of investigation, of analysis, of models of knowledge, etc., it is precisely not because power was omniscient, but because it was blind, because it was in a state of impasse.65 This “state of impasse,” as I understand it within the context of Christian Identity, reflects the autoimmunity of state sovereignty’s necessary performance that exposes its observational “blindspots” and limitations. In order for state power and identity to survive and remain intact, it must look to other modes of performance that are less centralized and that expand the complexity of the political systems so as to better manage and control the complexity of its environment. While the earlier Agamben of Homo Sacer and State of Exception focuses on the formal structure of (Schmittian) state sovereignty and bare life, at times coming off as an all-powerful katechonic force that cannot be resisted save for some spectacular apocalyptic dissolution of its entire structure, in The Kingdom and the Glory he goes well beyond sovereignty by excavating another category from the history of Patristic theology in distinction from a political theology of transcendent sovereignty. This is the paradigm of economic theology. Emerging through the Patristic’s development of Trinitarian theology, and focusing on the figure of the Holy Spirit, this paradigm is grounded in the immanent performance of power that extends its reach far beyond the limitations of the sovereign paradigm. Whereas the political theology of sovereignty undergirds the modern theory of state sovereignty based around the sovereign’s power to suspend the law in the state of exception, economic theology undergirds the modern field of “biopolitics up to the current triumph of economy and government over every other aspect of social life.”66 Drawn from the Greek oikonomia, which means “administration of the house,” Agamben applies this notion of economy as a kind of technology—techne oikonomike in Greek—for governing bodies on a mass scale. For my purposes in this chapter, the important thing for the concept of economy and its connection to a katechonic violence is its never-ending expansion through the technologies of what Foucault calls dispositifs (which Agamben links to the theological term dispositio, a Latin term translating oikonomia as referring to Christ’s government of human history),67 or as commonly translated in English, apparatuses. Foucault defines an apparatus as a heterogeneous set consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, scientific

Becoming Christian 87 statements, philosophical, moral, and philanthropic propositions—in short, the said as much as the unsaid. . . . The apparatus itself is the system of relations that can be established between these elements.68 These systems of power function according to a series of complex relations of bodies, forces, and technologies that by definition cannot be formalized under the sort of singular sovereignty that the political theological paradigm privileges.69 In this way, economic theology picks up where (Schmittian) political theology falls short; the Holy Spirit picks up where God the Father cannot reach. The deployment of apparatuses reflects the rhetoric of a theological system that does not concentrate power within the singular body of the sovereign—theologically this means God the Father; politically this would find its analogy in the King—but disperses it into the world through a multiplicity of forces that produce and sustain normative subjects. Like the Holy Spirit’s mysterious and invisible work in the world, an apparatus has no center of power. Its function is to, with the least amount of direct force, capture, produce, govern, and order subjects across a wide field of social complexity that unquestioningly move to the rhythm and order of its power relations because they cannot imagine or conceive another mode of living. The concept of an apparatus also expands an understanding of power well beyond a kind of “top down” structure of force. Apparatuses are produced through the contingent assemblage of power relations out of the “chaos” of forces and elements that make up the environment. These assemblages produce subjects of knowledge that are the result of what Foucault calls a general “strategy” of power that aims at the production and reproduction of the specific relations that produce the subject. As theorist Gregg Lambert articulates Foucault’s use of the term, “a strategy can be defined as a line of force that is exterior to the elements but assembles them in a certain order and according to a certain end.”70 Across the multiple and specific power relations that make up the apparatus is a “general line of force” that traverses the elements and holds them together as a whole. This assemblage should be understood not as a “natural” process but rather as a technology, as in the Aristotelian understanding of techne, which links to the idea of a “technique that is employed in the exercise of power, or in the intervention into power relations in order to shape them into a particular form.”71 The idea of an apparatus as techne or technique relates it to the Nietzschean understanding of the will to power as a kind of art. For example, the painter’s art of assembling lines and colors into a particular picture; the sculptor’s art of chiseling the stone into a particular form; and, as Foucault’ describes the state’s technique of ordering and assembling bodies within the polis, “the art of government.”72 That apparatuses are akin to a kind of artistic technique of ordering and shaping something does not mean that there is some figure that is making decisions about what element relates to another or how the elements are arranged. The most basic point about apparatuses is that they constitute

88  Religion, Christian Identity, theology a specific yet wholly contingent organization of power relations that constitute a subjectifying system of identity. This means that power cannot be understood or sought “in the primary existence of a central point” (for example in the figure of the sovereign King or in a single regime of ideology), but from literally everywhere: the omnipresence of power: not because it has the privilege of consolidating everything under its invincible unity, but because it is produced from one moment to the next, at every point, or rather in every relation from one point to another.73 The apparatus is organized as a complex system of power-knowledge relations that make up a wide field of organizing practices, assumptions, and “ad hoc” strategies of intervention that are taken for granted as “natural” or as “truth.” Power is not imposed from above or produced externally but emerges through wholly immanent processes of assemblage and organization that happen spontaneously and without prior planning or decision. Power is not reducible to repression, suppression, or the domination of one group over another. It is not reducible to negative and externally imposed relations of domination because it also constitutes productive and therapeutic relations and the possibility of novel forms of creativity. All specific relations of knowledge, in this way, are only examples of the “terminal forms power takes.”74 There are various implications of this “analytics” of power relations that are continuous with the themes of autopoiesis, immunity, and autoimmunity developed in the first two chapters. First, power is able to organize as an autopoietic system with specific functions that produce and reproduce a given subject. As an autopoietic system, the apparatus has a specific organization around which its components operate, but is flexible in terms of its structure that allows for ad hoc strategies of adaptation in order to reproduce itself in the face of complex environments. Second, the apparatus opens up an understanding of power that is essentially “weak,” which is to say never absolutely immune from forces of division. In fact, a power relation is nothing but division. Power is what opens one thing to another. In order for there to be a power relation, there must be at least two elements around and through which power operates, meaning that both elements are opened up to one another, exposed to the force and/or resistance of each other. Without two, there is no form to power. Or, without one opening up to another there is no performance of power. Without performance, power does not exist. Third, the performative nature of the apparatus means the inherent autoimmunity of any attempt of immunizing a body that necessarily must in faith open itself up in space and time, which exposes it to the inevitability of being divided through linking to an other. Any notion of power conceived as a transcendent force or essence that exists in and of itself outside of its objects of control is a phantasm, a sheer fantasy that has

Becoming Christian 89 no material reality in time and space. Power is both immanently produced within and distributed across time and space. It is perpetually being ordered, fractured, and distributed across a multiplicity of points, or “force relations immanent in the sphere in which they operate and which constitute their own organization.”75 This does not mean that there occurs no overarching dominant effect of power over the general “sphere” in which the multiplicity of relations form. The apparatus as a whole has the singular effect of holding (albeit always terminally) the specific relations together, which produces the overarching effect of a specific and normative knowledge around which a general subjectivity is formed. The main point here is that any overarching effect of power cannot be attributed to a pre-given and top down “binary and all-encompassing opposition between rulers and ruled,”76 which is to say between an absolute sovereign and its subjects. Rather, as power takes shape over a wide field of relations including economic, political, familial, and institutional, there emerges a “general line of force that traverses the local oppositions and links them together,” forming “major dominations [that are] the hegemonic effects that are sustained by all these confrontations.”77 This linking forms the general apparatus of power that is always aimed at an overarching production and reproduction of a specific form or order of relations. When the linking or assemblage of various points of power relations solidify enough to resonate and thus strengthen the intensity of its connections, an organized and autopoietic “chain or a system” of a “proper” identity is formed that begins to reproduce itself.78 Finally, this analysis of the apparatus also opens the possibility of resistances and the production of novel spaces and sites of creativity. Because any apparatus of power, which has the sole aim or objective of immunizing and reproducing itself, must perform its power relations in space and time, it is susceptible to the absolute contingency of the future that will always signal an encounter with the other. As in the case of the immunization of any socio-political body, power relations are always unstable and variable, which means that there is always the possibility of future openings that present new possibilities of resistance and novel production, including social, political, religious, economic, et cetera. This possibility of resistance aligns with a Derridean idea of faith that is inherent in any religious formation of an identity. Faith is what negates the possibility of absolute identity, which is to say absolute power or sovereignty. Faith is resistance to an operationally closed systems of identity, the turn toward an unanticipatable future and the autoimmune opening of any body attempting to close itself off as autonomous and immune from its others. As Foucault says, “where there is power, there is resistance, and yet, or rather consequently, this resistance is never in a position of exteriority in relation to power.”79 Faith does not come from outside, but opens the body to the possibility of the outside, which is to say the possibility of something different that can never be anticipated or calculated in advance. The contingent nature of power’s possibility aligns with Derrida’s notion of the messianic and the exposure to absolute surprise,

90  Religion, Christian Identity, theology including the possibility of the “best and the worst.” The possibility of resistance means that the future always contains both a chance and a threat. The opening of the future might provide the condition for power to take shape in dominating forms of oppression or as something unanticipated and possibly enhancing and desirable. In other words, the messianic opening to the future, the opening to which faith is directed, is the general structure of the absolute contingency of power. Implicated in this is the apparatus as an always-evolving set of relations that has no grounding essence or form, but only a performative orientation toward the future that keeps it open and always becoming. As I will explore in Part II, the ever-expanding apparatus of Christian Identity—seen on the grand historical scale with European Christian empire’s (“Christendom”) massive global expansion and imposition of its own forms of government, culture, and norms—functions and is justified as the katechonic delay of catastrophe. Christian Identity poses itself against the “lawless” commons of its non-Christian environment, self-describing itself as the salvation of the world, or at least that which makes possible the salvation of the world as it waits for the return of Christ. In this way, the katechonic deployment of apparatuses serves to protect Christian identity as the sovereign site of salvation. Yet because the katechonic function of the paradigm of economic theology is achieved through the deployment of ever-expanding apparatuses, Christian Identity’s proclivity toward autoimmune transformation (already there in the relation between its phantasmatic ipseity-sovereignty and its performance) is ever increased. This is the crux of why Christian immunity from its others can never be secured absolutely, and why (as I’ll address in the final part of the book) there are always openings through which its hegemony can be resisted. By its very nature as an autopoietic system of identity, Christian Identity remains always caught in a double bind of self-protection and self-exposure. As it extends itself more and more into the world in order to protect itself, it is forced to keep itself open to the contingency of encounters with its others. The further Christian power is dispersed into the world, the more complex its apparatus of power relations becomes, contingency increases ever more. In the face of the new threats that come along with this increase, Christianity has developed new modes of protecting its identity that have always turned out to be doubleedged swords. From the affirmative assimilation of the state into its theology to the theologically sanctioned project of colonizing the known world, (western) Christian Identity has unleashed massively violent mechanisms of self-protection that certainly increase its broad hegemony while at the same time expose it to new threats that always eventually lead to its transformation. Such transformations should not be confused with the liberation of its objects of control, but rather as presenting openings through which the production of new modes of resistance become possible. As the remainder of this book will explore, the category of race and the production of racist modes of control and domination have been the major katechonic forms of

Becoming Christian 91 self-protection that have transformed Christian Identity as a political body and made possible new forms of resistance to its hegemony.

Part I conclusion: Christian autoimmunity as an opening toward white supremacy The three chapters making up part one have offered an abstract and generalized theory of how Christian political theology and its effect of Christian Identity is shaped by the religious structure of immunity and autoimmunity. For a book purportedly about the intersection of Christianity and race, particularly concerning the issue of white Christian Identity and its violent forms of immunization, the minimal mention of race so far may seem suspect. This absence is intentional, as I am offering a philosophical and theological foundation for understanding how and why the emergence of western-Christian race and racism happens within the general structure of religious immunity-autoimmunity. This is to say that the theories offered in Part I represent a kind of general philosophical and theological ground upon which the specific phenomena of race and racism become possible. In terms of the book’s broader argument, whiteness qua normative western-Christian identity and its practices of violence do not simply appear out of nowhere, but are transformations of something within religion itself that is played out in its western Christian performance. I am not making the argument that Christianity is inherently racist, or that whiteness has secretly been hidden within Christianity all along. Rather, I am suggesting that the emergence of white identity as an autopoietic system of racism in the Christian West is a historically specific and extraordinarily violent symptom of Christianity’s theological expression and performance of religion’s two sources. In the marriage of state and Christian Identity, which no doubt has had multiple autoimmune transformations over the long and complex history of the west, the conditions for the emergence of white supremacy arise. In this sense, white supremacy can be understood as intrinsically conditioned by a religious drive toward absolute immunity for one particular identity (or genre of being human) against its non-white others. As I will explore further in Part II, true to the cycle of autoimmunity, race and racism occur as transformations of the problem of the religious self and its others within this larger framework of Christian Identity, particularly as it has developed in its western political form.

Notes 1 Cf. Galatians 6:8, 1 Timothy 1:16. (All biblical citation from the New Revised Standard Version). 2 See Gregory Macdonald, ed., All Shall be Well: Explorations in Universal Salvation and Christian Theology from Origen to Moltmann (Cambridge: Lutterworth Press, 2011). 3 Galatians 3:28; 1 Corinthians 12:27.

92  Religion, Christian Identity, theology 4 Daniel Colluciello Barber, On Diaspora: Christianity, Religion, and Secularity (Eugene: Cascade Books, 2011), 62ff. 5 Jacob Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2004), 21. 6 I am not arguing that this description of Pauline theology captures some essence or “kernel” of “true” Pauline theology, much less Christianity, that has been distorted by its historical performance. This would imply that there exists some transcendent version of Paul and/or Christianity disconnected from its immanent performance and actually existing manifestations. Rather, this interpretation of the declaration signals one possible direction in which this particular side of Paul might be taken. If there is no transcendent essence of Paulinism and/or Christianity, no “proper” faith to which all performances of it are held up, then the content of its declaration is subject to an infinite amount of interpretations and directions, none of which are more “true” than any other. In other words, just like any other performance of an idea, Pauline (and Christian) theology is subject to contingency all the way down. 7 Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, 25. 8 One could also relate nomos to natural law in the sense it is both in a categorically different sphere than the Torah and, like nomos, encompasses both Jew and Gentile alike. Concetta Principe, in her Secular Messiahs and the Return of Paul’s ‘Real’ (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), provides a helpful reading of the law in Paul by linking it to the philosopher Philo’s conception of natural law. Arguing against a dialectical relationship between the law of Christ (i.e. the Pauline declaration) and the Mosaic law, she argues for a Philonian reading of Paul’s conception of the universality of Christ’s law for Jews and Gentiles alike that is not based on a nullification of the particularity of Mosaic law, but on the universality of human mortality inherited from Adam and Eve’s sin (i.e. natural law): “clearly Paul and the philosophers recognized that the first prohibition brought our mortality; thus, what is universal in Paul’s message is not the vague concept of God for all, but the real fact of human existence: what the Gentile and Jew share because of their original father is mortality. They are both equal in the single unequivocally definitive characteristic of life; death. . . . In Paul’s terms, Christ’s resurrection signaled that the law of Christ, reflecting eternal life, pointed to the abrogation of natural law: this logic means that the Mosaic law did not change.” (104). 9 Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, 23. 10 Ibid., 25. 11 Ibid., 68. 12 Barber, On Diaspora, 63. 13 Ibid., 57. 14 G. Deleuze and F. Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1987), 10. 15 Ibid., 508. 16 Barber, On Diaspora, 58. 17 Ibid., 144–45, note 43. 18 See Ward Blanton, A Materialism for the Masses: St. Paul and the Philosophy of Undying Life (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 18ff. 19 Barber, On Diaspora, 80. 20 Dale Martin, The Corinthian Body (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1999), 170. 21 Amaryah Armstrong, “Of Flesh and Spirit: Race, Reproduction, and Sexual Difference in the Turn to Paul,” Journal for Cultural and Religious Theory 16, no. 2 (Spring 2017): 131. 22 Ibid. (emphasis in original). 23 Daniel Boyarin, A Radical Jew: Paul and the Politics of Identity (Berkley: University of California Press), 36.

Becoming Christian 93 4 Armstrong, “Of Flesh and Spirit,” 133. 2 25 Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil: Prelude to a Philosophy of the Future (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 4. (Emphasis mine). 26 Ibid. 27 Blanton, A Materialism for the Masses, 21. 28 Ibid., 20. 29 Christina Petterson, Acts of Empire: The Acts of the Apostles and Imperial Ideology (Taiwan: CCLM, 2012), 85. 30 Ibid., 85–86. 31 Blanton, Materialism for the Masses, 22. 32 Ibid., xii. 33 Ibid., 24 (Italics in text). 34 Hans Blumenberg, The Legitimacy of the Modern Age (Boston: MIT Press, 1985), 131. 35 Blumenberg argues that the Christian inheritance of the stoic philosophy of “providence” was the key to this transition into worldly permanence and a positive valance to the state. See The Legitimacy of the Modern Age, chapter 5. 36 See Joan O’Grady, Early Christian Heresies (New York: Barnes and Noble Inc., 1995). 37 William C. Placher, A History of Christian Theology: An Introduction (Louisville: Westminster John Knox Press, 1993), 44. 38 Derrida, Rogues, 10. 39 Niklas Luhmann, “Society, Meaning, Religion,” in Essays on Self-Reference (New York: Columbia University Press, 1990), 152. 40 Daniel Boyarin, Borderlines: The Partition of Judeo-Christianity (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2004), 17. 41 Luhmann, “Society, Meaning, and Religion,” 152. 42 Ibid. 43 Ibid. 44 2 Thesselonians 2 6–7. 45 Tertullian, Apology, Loeb Classical Library, trans. Terrot R. Glover (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1977), 154–55. 46 Roberto Esposito, Two: The Machine of Political Theology and the Place of Thought (Bologna: Commonalities, 2015), 77. 47 Julia Hell, “Katechon: Carl Schmitt’s Imperial Theology and the Ruins of the Future,” The Germanic Review: Literature, Culture, Theory 84, no. 4 (2009): 283–326. 48 Carl Schmitt’s famous passage in Political Theology that all modern concepts of the state being secularized theological concepts might be reformulated as “all modern concepts of the state are secularized interpretations of the katechon.” See Carl Schmitt, Political Theology: Four Chapters on the Concept of Sovereignty (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1985), 36. Also see Giorgio Agamben, The Time that Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005), 110: “Every theory of the state, including Hobbes—which thinks of it as a power destined to block or delay catastrophe—can be taken as a secularization of 2 Thessalonians 2.” 49 Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul, 69–70. 50 Quoted in Hell, “Katechon,” 305. 51 See Schmitt, Political Theology. 52 Jacob Taubes, To Carl Schmitt: Letters and Reflections (New York: New York University Press, 2013), 54. 53 Carl Schmitt, Nomos of the Earth: In the International Law of the Jus Publicum Europaeum (New York: Telos Press, 2003), 59. 54 See Carl Schmitt, The Concept of the Political (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2007).

94  Religion, Christian Identity, theology 55 As William Rasch points out, from this Schmittian perspective, the liberal dream of a “universal humanity” can only unleash a kind of unchecked inhumanity as any enemy by definition cannot be human, and therefore subject to unchecked and unrestrained violence. see William Rasch, Sovereignty and Its Discontents: The Primacy of Conflict and the Structure of the Political (London: Burbank Law Press, 2004), chapter 1. 56 Chantal Mouffe, The Democratic Paradox (New York: Verso Books, 2000), 101. 57 Rasch, Sovereignty and Its Discontents, 99. 58 “The exception 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,” Schmitt, Political Theology, 15. 59 Agamben, The Time that Remains, 110. 60 Giorgio Agamben, The Church and the Kingdom (Salt Lake City: Seagull Books, 2012), 35. 61 The definitive text here is Giorgio Agamben, Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1998). 62 Giorgio Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011). This book marks a shift of perspective from Agamben’s previous work within the Homo Sacer series. The category of economic theology allows Agamben to expand his political lexicon to a much more dissipated notion of power and move beyond the limiting framework of sovereignty and “the camp” as the paradigm of modernity. However, Agamben still focuses overwhelmingly on the negative aspects of economy to the point where he is stuck in the still limiting framework of thanatopolitics. I will address this negative focus in the last section of the book and offer an alternative. In terms of the distinction between political sovereignty and theological economy, it should be noted that political economy, while distinct from the specific form of sovereignty to which Agamben (as well as Foucault as we’ll later see) speaks, is still part of the sovereignty/ipseity of the self (in this case the state) discussed in part one. In other words, political sovereignty and political economy are both technologies that perform a more generally philosophical notion of sovereignty-ipseity. 63 See Giorgio Agamben, State of Exception (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005). 64 See Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison (New York: Vintage, 1995), part one. 65 Foucault, “Clarifications on the Question of Power,” 255. 66 Agamben, Kingdom and the Glory, 1. 67 Giorgio Agamben, What Is An Apparatus? (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2009), 4. 68 Quoted in Ibid., 2. 69 This is a point taken from Cary Wolfe’s description of the difference between political sovereignty and the complex field of biopolitics: “to firmly distinguish between biopolitics in its declension toward sovereignty as constitutive and biopolitics as a relation of bodies, forces, technologies, and dispositifs which, by definition, could entail no such formal symmetry between sovereignty and bare life of the sort we find in Agamben.” Before the Law: Humans and Other Animals in a Biopolitical Frame (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2012), 33. 70 Gregg Lambert, unpublished paper, “Foucault’s Geometry,” Rice University, September 23, 2015, accessed September 30, 2019, www.academia.edu/25507453/ Foucaults_Geometry_Rice_University_Sept_2015. 71 Ibid.

Becoming Christian 95 72 See Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population, Lectures at the College de France, 1977–1978 (New York: Picador, 2009). 73 Michel Foucault, History of Sexuality, vol. 1 (New York: Vintage, 1978), 93. 74 Ibid., 92. 75 Ibid. 76 Ibid., 94. 77 Ibid. 78 Ibid., 92. 79 Ibid., 95.

Part II

Apparatuses

4 Apparatus one Spanish colonialism and non-Christian bodies as theo-juridical problems

This chapter describes what I take to be major assemblages of key power relations that make possible the emergence of a racialized Christian Identity, specifically in the Medieval European and Spanish theo-political contexts. My analysis does not claim to capture the general history of racial world and its multitude of historical, social, and political variations that have occurred over its long history. Rather, what follows is a broad diachronic overview of how various “major dominations” of Christian power formed in relation to other identities and were assembled as the general system and apparatus of Christian Identity that played a key role in shaping the modern west’s epistemological, political, economic, and social forms of power/ knowledge. The historical developments that I am tracing are not meant to be taken as a history of race, but rather as a kind of conceptual “map” for uncovering the major forms of knowledge that have provided the conditions for the category of race and the various technologies/techniques of racism to emerge as the foundation of western understandings of “authentic” human being. In order to do this, I begin with a discussion of medieval European Christianity’s discourse and set of practices around notions of blood purity as an initial condition for Christian Identity’s opening toward a racialized identity. I then turn to Sylvia Wynter’s account of the emergence of what she calls “Man” within New World Spanish colonial settings as the figure around which the apparatus of a racialized Christianity is assembled. The argument that follows is that when the apparatus of Christian Identity links up with a theological concept of an embodied essence of truth— what Gil Anidjar names “Christian blood”—then the general conditions for the emergence of the category of race and its deployment of technologies and techniques of racism in western modernity arise. With the discourse of Christian blood and its ritual and institutional practices centered on the Eucharist, the problem of human embodiment in relation to Christian truth emerges as a key question that will set in motion various historical processes of transformation (political, theological, philosophical, aesthetic) eventually coalescing around the invention of the concept of race. The

100  Apparatuses production of an apparatus of Christian Identity assembled around the protection and reproduction of an embodied Christian Identity occurs through a theological modulation where the possession of the blood of Christ is acquired through participation in the Eucharist. By locating the blood of Christ within real, particular bodies—European Christians—the conditions in which a system of racialized Christian Identity begin to come together. Again, this is not to say that Christianity is inherently racist or that race was some kind of a dormant category that existed from the beginning waiting to emerge under the right conditions.1 Rather, the argument here is that the (contingent and entirely immanent) assemblage of a modern apparatus of racial Christian Identity—that is, a Christian Identity that finds its primary mode of self-referentiality around racial categories of identity—is grounded in the contradictory movements of a performative faith that opens its body to new relations, connections and assemblages; and the general religious drive toward the unscathed that conditioned the emergence of Christian identity in the first place. Racial Christianity is the entirely contingent outcome of an autoimmune process within Christianity itself. The assemblage of a racial Christian Identity is a complex process that spans multiple centuries and happens across an array of different geological, theological, cultural, political, economic, and social contexts. No single study can possibly capture all of its specific elements, major events and transformations, or historical complexities. Much scholarship has already done extensive historical and theoretical work that provides important and far reaching frameworks for understanding the emergence of the racialized modern world and its grounding in Christianity.2 Below I offer what I think are three general theological assemblages within Christian Identity that provide decisive elements for its transformation toward a thoroughly racialized identity. The first is the medieval production of a discourse and set of practices that made the notion of “possessing” the blood of Christ as the metric for authentic Christian Identity. The second is the production of new forms of scientific, political, and theological knowledge in the European Christian humanist revolution that lead to the emergence of what Sylvia Wynter calls “Man,” the “overdetermined” figure of the (European) human that immunizes its self-description as the singularly authentic mode of being human. The third is the Spanish-Iberian theo-political construction of the Indigenous peoples of the New World as theological-juridical problems in relation to questions concerning the enslavement of non-Christian others. It is through the combined effect of the various theological relations emerging out of these three major developments in which race becomes the dominating category through which Christian Identity understands itself in relation to its “others.” All of this will set up Chapters 4 and 5, which will focus on the figure of the black slave as the “ultimate other” to Christian Identity, the gradual assemblage of white identity and its anti-black system of chattel slavery in English colonial America, and the general anti-blackness that is the theo-political foundation of the modern world.

Apparatus one 101

Preparing the biopolitical way: medieval blood and the opening toward a racial Christian apparatus The apparatus of racial Christian Identity finds a crucial condition in what I suggest constitutes a proto-biopolitical form of Christian immunity where the body as a biological reality becomes wedded inextricably to political identity. Though the term “biopolitics,” and especially “biopolitical racism,” is often associated (in its Foucauldian connotation) with the postEnlightenment period, Medieval theological discourses of blood purity should be read as an important precursor to a biopolitics of racialized Christian Identity. While Foucault’s genealogy of biopolitics does include pre-modern Christian material focused on pastoral power as a precursor to governmentality and the paradigm of medieval monarchical sovereignty as a “power over death,” he does not make an explicit connection between Christian theological discourses and racial identity formation in the west. Furthermore, while Foucault’s account of racism in Society Must Be Defended remains an important contribution to genealogies of state racism, especially in terms of an account that jettisons concern with phenotype as the primary object of racism for the more important terrain of state governing practices, he basically ignores both the importance of racial slavery and the transatlantic colonial dimension of race and state racism.3 While Alexander Weheliye’s Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human does a great deal to correct this lacuna in biopolitical thought, he too passes over the Christian dimension of biopolitical racism’s genealogy even as he partially centers his own account on Sylvia Wynter.4 As I will argue, biopolitical racism cannot be understood without explicit attention to medieval Christian theological discourses of human difference and their historical dispersal into modern frames of knowledge. The notion of what Foucault calls power over life goes well beyond modern biological species discourse. Going much farther back than Foucault, who begins with the inter-European “race wars” of the 16th and 17th centuries, biopolitical racism finds its foundation in relation to what Gil Anidjar calls the Christian “community of blood—‘Jesus’ Kin.’ ”5 For Anidjar, it is Christian blood that provides the inextricable link between religion and race, two categories often articulated as marking different sides of a thorough conceptual break. Following Foucault’s and other’s influence, race is typically thought of as a modern secular category that emerges through the biological sciences and the modern nation-state. Within the modernist reading, race finds its initial locus in the “nation,” pre-figuring Foucault’s biopolitical category of the population, and this, as Anidjar notes, has been predominately interpreted as “not the theo-political.”6 Yet, this genealogy typically leaves out the explicitly theo-political category of Christian blood that provides the foundation of the biopolitical nation as the marker of a “difference between bloods.”7 For Anidjar, while separate categories, “race and religion, nation and religion, emerge as co-constitutive in their distinction.”8

102  Apparatuses Though the emergence and development of Christian Identity has always been conditioned by a drive toward the Christian self’s immunity in its religious desire for the unscathed, the Christian discourse of immunizing the body-politic as a material essence of bodily purity—one of “flesh and blood”—is a development that finds an initial condition within Medieval European Christianity’s emergent theology of bodily and religious purity. This purity is worked out and articulated specifically in Christian Identity’s encounter with its Jewish and Muslim others. In this sense, if one follows Agamben’s (much broader and quasi-ahistorical) genealogy of the biopolitical partitioning of life as originally emerging in Greek antiquity’s separation of “bare life” (zōē) and “qualified life” (bios),9 the specific western Christian turn of this general division finds its defining moment in the Medieval separation of non-Christian blood from Christian blood. In the Medieval European context, particularly within (but not limited to) the Iberian-Spanish context of the later Medieval period, there occurs another re-entry of the spirit/flesh distinction back into Christian Identity as “true” Christian life increasingly becomes coded as the authentically embodied life of the body of Christ against the contaminated or pathological bodies of its others, paradigmatically represented by the Abrahamic figures of the Jew and Muslim internal to Europe. From the legal to the literary spheres, concerns with Christian bodily purity saturate the medieval imagination. As medievalist Lynn Ramey notes, “law codes of fifteenthcentury Spain exhibit a preoccupation with ‘purity of blood,’ and literary works from Germany and France indicate that despite conversion, a trace, or taint, of infidel blood could remain and preclude complete integration. All medieval European societies showed legal and literary fears of miscegenation.”10 The Christian obsession with blood purity did not come out of nowhere, but had precursors in various discourses and practices within early medieval theological and social norms. Within medieval Christian life, fear of improper human amalgamation played out in strict social and religious segregations. Ground zero of this segregation was located internally within the Christian church itself as it constructed an intense social and religious hierarchy at the institutional level. A major line of force that conditioned this hierarchy was an emergent discourse of sexual purity as a distinctive marker of the “true church.” Sexuality and sexual practices were viewed as particularly powerful vessels through which the body could be either reproduced or sustained as pure (through proper sexual relations) or become contaminated (through improper sexual relations). Medievalist Jacques Le Goff notes a shift in clergy-laity relations during the 11th and 12th centuries where clergy life is increasingly understood as the symbolic realm of both bodily and spiritual purity. Priests and other holy officers of the church increasingly were segregated from secular society and its profanations. It was in this context that priestly celibacy became law and Christian marriage was developed as a regulatory institution keeping lay

Apparatus one 103 sexuality properly ordered and restrained from devolving into dangerous licentiousness. As Le Goff writes, marriage became the property of lay men and women; virginity, celibacy, and/or continence became the property of priests, monks, and nuns. A wall separated the pure from the impure. Impure liquids were banished from the realm of the pure: the clergy was not allowed to spill sperm or blood and not permitted to perpetuate original sin through procreation. But in the realm of the impure the flow was not stanched, only regulated. The Church became a society of bachelors, which imprisoned lay society in marriage.11 With these distinctions, we see a clear immunitary set of relations being formed where lay Christian society functions as part of the outer edge—the “border”—of the body that is able to absorb and “manage” the unavoidable “flow” of sexual contamination deemed threatening to the (phantasmatic) purity of the body, paradigmatically represented by the celibate clergy. Management of the flow of improper forms of sexuality (homosexuality, fornication, miscegenation, etc.) included stricter state and church regulation and enforcement of sexual codes and boundaries, and the intensification of certain sexual acts as sinful. It was during this period that the church began to severely condemn and prosecute homosexual acts, which, as John Boswell shows in Same Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe, had enjoyed the relative tolerance (and even occasional blessing) of the church prior to the medieval period.12 With the institution of Christian heterosexual marriage as a sacrament for the purification of lay bodies, homosexual desire and other forms of prohibited sexual unions became coded as a profound threat to the bodily and spiritual purity of the body of Christ. The result of this immunitary coding was a concentrated discriminatory response toward homosexuality and other non-normative sexual practices: “sodomy was linked to heresy and combatted as a redoubtable enemy. Sexual sinners were condemned in the great operation of exclusion that took place in the thirteenth century.”13 Such medieval codes of strict segregation reflect the assemblage of a specific apparatus of bodily (both individual and collective) immunity taking shape in medieval Christian Identity. It is the category of blood that becomes Christian Identity’s most important marker of an embodied essence of truth and purity that draws a new line between the proper and improper, an inside and an outside, system and environment. In Blood: A Critique of Christianity, Anidjar goes so far as to claim this “line drawn in blood” is the foundation of western modernity’s social, political, and economic organization around proper and improper human being. In a variation on Carl Schmitt’s famous thesis on secularization, he says, “all significant concepts of the history of the modern world are liquidated theological concepts.” The specific liquid in question is the blood of Christ, which is “the element of

104  Apparatuses Christianity, its voluminous mark. . . . It is the way in which and upon which [western] Christianity made its mark.”14 Christianity imprints upon the its (always self-referential) world identities of “flesh and blood” that divide it into “True Christian” selves of purity and “Untrue others” of impurity. What Anidjar’s theorization of blood in the medieval context makes clear is the emergence of a distinctly new kind of Christianity—a new apparatus of Christian Identity—that finds its internal truth in a specific bodily essence as opposed to merely in a spiritual or “mystical” essence. It is around blood as an embodied substance that Christian Identity opens upon a set of discourses, legal codes, institutions, rituals, and other practices that will eventually assemble into a new colonial apparatus aimed at protecting and reproducing a thoroughly racialized Christian Identity. Taking Anidjar’s category of blood as marking a Christian theological turn toward material bodily immunity, the conditions of an embodied immunization paradigm emerge when the medieval European Christian community—the Catholic Church—begins to understand itself theologically as an undivided “community of substance, partaking of, which is to say as sharing rather than dividing, some thing.”15 The reference to division links to the faith of the Pauline declaration and its infinite and unconditioned division of community across the multiplicity of human difference. Recalling my discussion in part one, taken in its theological implication, this means that any identity arising out of the declaration would be infinitely divisible by its welcomed particular parts and therefore deferred into a culture of singularities devoid of any proper form. In part one this was referred to as an “identity without identity;” there is no proper form but only an ongoing assemblage of difference against the movement toward closure. Following Esposito, this limitless division is the basic meaning of the original Christian conception of communitas, which hinges around participating in divine life within the “infinite heterogeneity of substance” that God’s relation to humankind—one of “wholly otherness”—conditions.16 For Esposito, Christianity has no doubt had a long and violent history of understanding community through immunization measures, but early on a proto-biopolitical enactment of immunitas was subservient to the theme of communitas, preventing the sedimentation of an ethnocentric notion of Christian Identity. It is not until the modern era (beginning with Hobbes) that immunitas becomes “so important that it can be taken as the explicative key for the entire modern paradigm.”17 Following Anidjar, however, it would seem this periodization is much too late, and brackets the tension of communitas (as a faith opening up the assemblage of differential community) and immunitas (as the experience of the unscathed) within Christian Identity that was there from the beginning. At the very latest, we should locate the origins of the modern immunitary paradigm much earlier in the medieval European turn to blood as a central category for conceptualizing a Christian community of “flesh and blood.”18

Apparatus one 105 This becomes clear when immunitas is understood as fundamentally about salvation, the desire for health and its restoration. In Wonderful Blood, Carolyn Bynum characterizes the medieval obsession with the blood of Christ deriving from a web of theological, devotional, and practical discourses fixated on the sacred and saving power of the Eucharist. In the medieval context, Jesus’ blood took on a signification of spiritual purity and became not “merely one among many objects in a struggle for control or one among many themes in an extravagantly emotional religiosity” but the “central symbol and central cult object of late medieval devotion.”19 Part of this turn meant a theological articulation of the Christian community as a unified and undivided substance of purity. Here, Christian Identity is transformed (or “transubstantiated”) from being entirely an invisible and transcendent reality—ala Augustine’s civitas God—into a material bodily identity qualified through possessing, rather than being divided by, a particular thing. What is this thing that is shared? Nothing but the blood of Jesus, the blood that saves. The fixation on Jesus’ blood informs Christian Identity as a “kinship” of “shared substance.” The language of kinship had been a significant factor in both Jewish and early Christian notions of community, but had never been associated as a shared substance of purity that marked some bodies as pure and others as impure. The idea that kinship is about blood relations is foreign in both the Hebrew bible and the New Testament. It is only during the medieval period that “the ubiquitous link in the Christian west between blood and community—the Eucharist or the language of ‘blood ties’ spoken through family, tribe, class, nation, or race,” is formed.20 This is not to say that blood had no role in the discourse of Christian Identity prior to this period, but rather that it had very little to do with how the community understood the ontological basis of its unity and purity. As Anidjar notes, The Bible clearly “knows” blood and suffuses it with multifarious meanings, and though many of these meanings invest blood with a powerful charge (ritual, symbolic, and other), none suggest that blood could ever be what the community is made of, a measure of difference or of distinction, let alone running pure in anyone’s veins.21 Through the Eucharist’s transubstantiation of the bread and wine into Christ’s literal body and blood, partaking of Christ’s blood-as-a-substance is what transforms the “mystical body” of Christ into the material reality of Christ’s body (-politic) on earth. In other words, it was the medieval understanding of the Eucharist that constitutes the body of Christ specifically as those that visibly partake of the blood of Christ and in so doing are tied together as a community of “true blood” kinship. That the “real” body of Christ is understood both in its transcendent reality and as visibly and materially manifested on earth in the Eucharistic church is the key shift here. With the sedimentation of the Eucharist

106  Apparatuses cult as a cornerstone of Christian Identity’s embodied essence, the once “mystical” and invisible body of Christ is reassembled as the embodied and visible community of “flesh and blood” that “weaves a [hematological] fabric at once medical and juridical, theological and political.”22 This community, of course, would not remain intact without the ever-expanding European political territory controlled by Christians, which meant the particular bodies of European Christians within those territories were coded as the representation of a true political identity. Within these terms, Augustine’s division of the City of God from the City of Man no longer signifies the impossibility of locating the “true” Christian community in the fallen world. Instead, with the medieval distinction between Christian and nonChristian blood, the City of God becomes, at least politically speaking in terms of what constitutes the true and sovereign body-politic, identifiable on earth, in both bodily and geographical terms, as the community that is visibly united by sharing the blood of Christ. Here, the apparatus of Christian Identity reconfigures into a set of new relations aimed at the protection of a particular worldly and embodied essence that “true” Christians possess and “untrue” others do not. This self-fashioning of the Christian community as the “community of true blood” marked the assemblage of a whole new set of protective immunitary borders excluding “those whose blood, by logical deduction and historical consequence, is deemed impure or tainted.”23 The distinction between Christian and non-Christian blood first took place internal to Europe, later exported through Europe’s insatiable conquests of the “new world” and the African continent. Prior to European Christendom’s “discovery” and colonization of the Americas, the primary environmental others that Christian Identity distinguished itself against were Jews and Muslims. As “infidels” who refused to accept the Christian gospel as ultimate truth, Jews and Muslims were coded as bodies of disobedience and untruth, as threats to the “health” of Christian Identity. The obsession with blood and the fear of contamination was at the center of this coding. For example, Jews were often the targets of the “blood libel” myth, a fear-based Christian supremacist story that claimed Jews would kidnap Christian babies in order to drink their blood for ritual purposes.24 Such a preposterous myth and similar stories of Jewish maleficence served the justification of widespread Christian persecution against Jews throughout the medieval and modern periods, reinforcing the order of Christian sovereignty against any that fell outside its truth. One only has to mention the Crusades and the Spanish Inquisition to evoke the massive movements of bloody Christian violence against Muslims and Jews meant to combat or root out and kill the threat that Islamic identity posed to the power of Christian Identity. For both Jewish and Islamic identity, bodily substance— i.e Jewish or Muslim blood—could not be transcended, even through the act of converting to Christianity, and meant an always precarious existence in relation to true Christian Identity. As Willie Jennings notes of the medieval

Apparatus one 107 Iberian world’s preoccupation with blood purity vis a vis conversion into Christianity: it did not matter whether the conversion of Jew or Muslim was forced or chosen; their Christian identity was troubled. It was a dangerous Christian identity owing to the possibility of their return to Judaism or Islam. There was also the frightening possibility that they might be secretly practicing Jews or Muslims, lodged deep in the Christian body . . . anyone with Jewish or Moorish “blood” must be ferreted out and barred from leadership in the church.25 Limiting Jewish and Muslim bodies from full inclusion into the church reflects how the immune system of Christian identity “manages” and prevents threats from overwhelming or contaminating the purity of identity. Theologically speaking, Muslims and Jews are welcomed into the Christian community via the universality of Christianity’s call for gathering all human difference into the unity of Christ’s transcendent body. Yet the immunitary drive of Christian Identity—the “desire for the unscathed” against the faith that keeps a body open to otherness—reacts to prevent these bodies of impure blood from contaminating the body to the point of any real transformation of its “substance.” The important thing I want to highlight in terms of the periodization of an emerging immunitary paradigm of bodily/blood purity in the medieval context is that here we find the formation of a visibly embodied Christian Identity that is theologically tied to a specific bodily essence and therefore produces the problem of Christian and non-Christian embodiment as the code for distinguishing proper from improper. Having proper blood (acquired through participation in the Eucharist), as opposed to merely proper belief, was what qualified a true theological subject. The primary point regarding the role of medieval blood in forming a Christian community of bodily substance is that this is where Christian Identity theologically begins to reference itself as a visible and bodily community on earth that distinguishes itself against other bodies of non-Christian blood. The material impacts of this “hematological incarnation” of what had previously functioned as a purely transcendental true identity of the eschatological body of Christ, rooted in belief, into specific bodies of blood purity are incalculable in its relation to the history of (Western) Christianity. With the new description of blood as “what the community is made of,” the immunization of Christian Identity begins to move toward a new conceptual and lexical valence that still shapes the western political imagination today. This is the biopolitical valence of a biological-bodily immunity that will find its most powerful ontic marker in the category of race. It is the discourse of blood that conditions the initial formation of a racialized Christian body (both in an individual and collective sense) immunized from racial others that threaten to contaminate it and destroy its phantasmatic sovereignty.

108  Apparatuses This internal closure of the Christian body-as-substance signals a profound transformation of the relations that make up the theological apparatus of Christian identity. However, in its very question to expand its sovereign power, when this “bloody” Christian Identity is exported to the “New World” through European colonialism, its apparatus will once again be opened up to new relations and further transformations. What is happening in the Christian immunitary reactions and “management” of Jewish and Muslim bodies will ultimately spill out into an unforeseeable future that will bring with it new assemblages of self-referential description. As we will see, this immunitary performance will eventually travel into new spheres of otherness, making new connections that will introduce and establish new points of relationality and coding. As it travels outside of Europe in the colonial expansion of Christian empire, Christian Identity’s apparatus is transformed as it gathers together a “racializing assemblage of subjection,” use Alexander Weheliye’s term, linked to a Christian humanist discourse in which bodies are partitioned “into full humans, not quite humans, and non-humans.”26

Racializing the human: Christian humanism and the colonial assemblage of a racialized Christian Identity Sylvia Wynter’s work is crucial for understanding how the Medieval paradigm of Christianity’s “blood purity” transitions toward the western “monohumanist” conception of a singular authentic human being and its subordinated forms of racial difference. Focusing on the Medieval scholastic cosmology and its earthly geography dividing the earth and its inhabitants into “graced” and “graceless,” like Anidjar, Wynter finds the initial Christian conception of a singularly authentic form of embodied human life located in the medieval European distinction between the bloods of the “Untrue other to the True Christian self.”27 Centering much of her theses on the figure of Christopher Columbus and the year 1492 as symbolic markers of the transition from the medieval world of theologically-centered forms of epistemological and political authority into modern paradigms of rationality and political secularity, Wynter shows how a “Christian Humanism” emerging out of the European renaissance opens up Christian Identity out of its scholastic theological structure and toward a secular-scientific structure of truth. This structure is assembled through of a new set of theological, political, economic, and most importantly, racial power-knowledge relations that will coalesce around the colonial racial triangulation of White, Red, and Black. With the distinction of an embodied and visible true Christian Identity firmly in place, Columbus’ Atlantic journey in 1492 will represent both a profound threat to Christian Identity as it begins to unravel in the encounter with newly identified environmental elements in the “New World” and the occasion for a radical transformation as it seeks to sustain its (always phantasmatic) sovereignty.

Apparatus one 109 Wynter identifies the new conception of human being that emerges in the colonial history of Christian Identity as the European humanist figure of “Man.” Man is a general name for the Christian west’s genre of being human that “overdetermines” itself as the universally authentic form of being human. I theorize Man as the product of an autoimmune mutation occurring within the medieval “True Christian” self as it is exposed to new forms of power-knowledge developing around technological, scientific, philosophical, theological, and political innovations that increasingly displace or weaken Medieval scholastic theological knowledge as the dominant paradigm of truth. As I discussed in Chapter 1, Wynter calls this a process of “degodding,” where the “god” part of the term signifies at the level of “particular religion” the notion of a supernaturally guaranteed ground of Christian truth. Though this process of degodding, which below I will also discuss in relation to the emerging discourse of “secularism,” meant a profound shift in how theology and religion were articulated in relation to broader understandings of the human and the meaning and purpose of the state, following Maturana’s and Varela’s distinction between autopoietic organization and structure, the transformation from medieval Christian Identity to its modern form of “Man” does not alter the general immunitary organizations developed within the medieval context that divides the human species into the two distinct embodied categories of proper and improper. Rather, the assemblage of new relations of power-knowledge that constitute Man marks a re-created structure for immunizing a transformed Christian Identity no longer grounded in the paradigm of explicit theological knowledge. Man has two primary phases spanning across the 15th through 21st centuries. The first, which Wynter names Man1, is the figure of proper human being correlating to the European Christian humanism which developed over the 14th through 18th centuries. The most significant contribution of Christian humanism in this genealogy is the valorization of the human being as a rational and political subject created by God to think and act for itself. What is new about this figure of the human being is its opposition to the medieval European scholastic understanding of the human being as a purely religious subject that is totally dependent on theological paradigms of truth and knowledge. Following Man1 is Man2, which emerges in the 19th century around Darwinian theories of evolution and an understanding of the human as a purely natural, biological species that is divided up between “naturally selected” superior human beings and “de-selected” inferior human beings. Man2 is where the category of race is fully sedimented as a biological category in service to the order of white supremacy and antiblackness, and will be discussed in depth in Chapter 5. There were many philosophical, theological, scientific, and epistemological (autoimmune) openings and “breakthroughs” during the later medieval period that made possible new forms of power-knowledge that fundamentally changed Christian perceptions of truth and knowledge. Of particular

110  Apparatuses importance were epistemological shifts in how humanity was perceived in its relation to God and creation. Wynter focuses on the scientific and epistemological breakthroughs occurring during the late 15th and 16th centuries represented in Copernicus’ new astronomy, which collapses the universe into a single ontological plane. Copernicus’ astronomy is not an entirely new conceptual breakthrough out of the medieval paradigm, but represents within this genealogy a culminating moment where the observational perspective of the system of Christian Identity undergoes a major shift toward a scientific and human-centric epistemology. A major philosophical precedent to Copernicus is found in Duns Scotus (ca. 1265–1308 C.E.), who challenged the absolute ontological chasm between God and humanity by positing all being (including that of God) as conceptually equal, or “univocal.” Scotus’ philosophy upends the idea that there is a clear hierarchical differentiation between the being of God and God’s creation. Rather, both are understood within a “levelled” ontology where differentiation occurs only as a matter of degree, rather than a fundamental ontological difference. Scotus, in this way, prefigures an understanding of the cosmos that collapses a strict ontological differentiation between God and creation into a “homogenous” plane of being. Here, the infinite is absorbed into the finite. A century later, Copernicus’ theory of the solar system would scientifically affirm this homogenous universe by discounting the medieval scholastic notion of the earth as the unmoving center of the solar system by putting it in motion around the sun. Within the scholastic imagination, the earth being at the center of the universe meant that it was of a different ontological substance to the heavenly realm that surrounded it. The ontologically heterogeneous cosmos signified an ultimately devalorized humanity and earth that reflected a strict theo-ontological hierarchy where earth stood below the heavens in a separate and subordinate realm. This hierarchical division was part of the “great chain of being” that signified the proper metaphysical ordering of the created cosmos as a strict ontological hierarchy where various beings— from rocks to insects to human beings to angels—had strictly delineated metaphysical substances and roles to play. In the medieval scholastic context where theology was the unquestioned authority of knowledge, the existence of human beings was understood as being solely for the sake of God’s glory. Human beings were homo religious: their existence was limited entirely to a theological description serving the sovereign creator Christian God. Within this description, God created the world not for human beings (and therefore not for human knowledge of it), but simply for the sake of witnessing God’s glory. As Wynter notes, this reflects a God that is “absolute and conceptually all powerful, [the] uncaring and arbitrary God of the church’s then late-medieval orthodox theology.”28 The “macro-cosmological” ontological division of earth and the heavenly realm set the basis for a whole range of “micro-cosmological” divisions—i.e. systemic observational distinctions— reflecting the theo-ontological hierarchy of the cosmos.29 For example, the clergy/laity and the Christian/non-Christian distinctions served as mirror

Apparatus one 111 images of this heaven/earth division where the clergy stood above the laity as representationally transcendent and pure, just as Christian blood stood as pure and above non-Christian blood. The mirror of creation’s heterogeneity also had important implications for conceptions of the earth’s geography, which was also heterogeneously divided between two hierarchically understood levels: graced (habitable) and ungraced (uninhabitable) lands.30 The uninhabitable lands of the earth were those of the “torrid zones,” including the submerged lands of the western hemisphere and certain imagined parts of sub-Saharan Africa where climate conditions were thought incompatible with human life. The lands of the torrid zones of the western hemisphere, according to this order of knowledge, necessarily had to be submerged under water because this was land’s “ ‘natural place’ as the heavier element of the earth, under the lighter (and by implication, more spiritually redeemed), element of water.”31 The idea of the earth’s ontological heterogeneity marking the distinction graced/ ungraced was conceptualized through interpretations of the biblical Flood in Genesis. As Bench Ansfield describes it, the aftermath of [the Flood] was understood to have determined the areas suitable for habitability. Within this schema, the uninhabitable areas (or all spaces surrounding the island of habitable land whose center was Jerusalem) were left as a depository for the waters of the Flood.32 The submerged geographies left underneath the flood waters were thought of as outside of the “arbitrary grace” given to the “temperate zones” of the northern and eastern hemispheres with its center of the holy city of Jerusalem. It was only within the temperate zones that human life was thought to be possible. All other “torrid” zones were simply observed as environmental “voids” not supposed to have human inhabitants. Any beings imagined as existing in these zones could not be human and therefore did not exist within the bounds of God’s grace. The “theologically absolute order of knowledge” that produced such a conceptual geography, or the “truth-for” of the Medieval Christian genre of being human, was virtually unchallengable within the pre-Copernican epistemological framework. The whole feudal world of Medieval Europe rested on its “lawlike” conceptualization of an ontologically heterogeneous cosmos. The class division of nobility and peasants, for example, was unquestioned as the natural and theologically ordained order of the world that mirrored the greater cosmological division of heaven and earth. What Copernicus’ theory of a moving earth orbiting the sun does to the conception of the cosmos’ and earth’s heterogeneous division is to crack open the scholastic imagination and make way for new conceptual possibilities for knowledge of the cosmos. One of the new possibilities was the earth’s ontological continuity with the rest of creation. With the earth being set in motion as

112  Apparatuses one decentralized element among the many making up the heavenly bodies of the solar system, the earth no longer held a unique place in the cosmos. This folding together of the heavens and earth into one single substance had highly significant implications for a burgeoning Christian humanism that valorized human beings as rational and political subjects created by God to think and act for themselves. Emerging out of Florence, Italy with the school of studia humanitatis and spreading throughout western Europe, renaissance Christian humanism, broadly speaking, was inaugurating a break with the dominant Medieval scholastic order of knowledge centered on logical, natural philosophical, and metaphysical thought underwriting a religiously determined order of truth.33 Studia humanitatis, which is where the modern term humanism originates, is usually associated with an educational turn in the late 14th century toward a recovery of Greek antiquity and its interest in the human subject and its worldly activity and potential.34 Interest in the arts of grammar, rhetoric, poetry, history, and ethics—all key subjects for Studia humanitatis—mirrored the medieval obsession with religiously informed individual self-governance, but broke with its theological metaphysics in the turn toward an interest in human beings and their activities as valorized subjects in themselves. Interest in these subjects were already there within medieval scholasticism, but it is with the Florentine humanists that they were taken up as inherently human activities valorized and embraced as worthy pursuits for the sake of human beings. The theological impact of this shift was immense. Human beings were now understood as having a reciprocal relation with a God whose creation is not merely an arbitrary instrument of God’s own glory, but existed “on behalf and for the sake of humankind.” As Wynter puts it, seen theo-centrically . . . to be at the center was to be at the dregs of the universe. The center was then the most degraded place to be! So when Copernicus says that the Earth also moves, he is revalorizing the Earth. With this challenge, what now has to be recognized is that since the Earth also moves, and is therefore a star like any other, it also has to be, over against the traditional astronomy, of the same homogeneous physical substance as the heavenly bodies.35 With the heterogeneity of the Heavenly realm/Earth division giving way to a homogenous cosmos that implied a completely different human-divine relationship where God’s creation was observably knowable and bound by physical laws, Copernicus’ astronomy and the broader scientific revolution of the 15th and 16th centuries infiltrated and contaminated the theological structure of Christian Identity and began to unravel the scholastic theological hegemony that had been almost entirely unquestioned—which is to say taken as true—during the medieval period. The humanist revolution provides two points of new human-centric knowledge that significantly alter the theological-political imagination.

Apparatus one 113 First, secrets once relegated completely to the mystery of God and his ultimately unknowable creation were now knowable because they must be correlated to natural and universal rules that governed the natural processes of the universe. The scientific revolution provided the foundation for the Cartesian philosophical transformation where the rational mind became the measure of all truth. Truth was something that was now derived through human reason, an endowment gifted from God but not dependent on divine revelation through the sole medium of theology. Second, because the truth of the earth mirrored the greater truth of the cosmos, no longer was the earth understood as arbitrarily divided between habitable and uninhabitable, but as a homogenous sphere “intended,” as Wynter describes Columbus’ reasoning, “for life and the creation of souls.”36 Such new theological knowledge discounted the idea of “submerged” lands of gracelessness and made possible the speculation of undiscovered lands containing human life ripe for conversion into Christian truth, which for Columbus was inseparable from the European imperial state. Columbus’ millenarian goal of converting the entire world to Christianity through the expansion of the European Christian state fit perfectly into this new geographical schema and provided legitimation for his theory of the Atlantic ocean’s navigability: for such an [homogeneous] earth . . . there could be no longer habitable and inhabitable, inside the sheepfold and out. All was now one sheepfold, and if not, was intended to be made so. Above all, the seas that would make this possible all had to be navigable.37 No longer was the edge of the world viewed as an uncrossable abyss, but as a bridge to salvific possibility for Christian Identity’s sovereign quest. All of this had a profound impact on the system of Christian Identity’s political observation. As Wynter describes, the humanist and scientific revolutions set in motion a “revalorizing/reinvention of Latin-Christian medieval Europe’s homo religious Adamic fallen Man as homo politicus, a figure now self-governed by reason, articulated as reasons of state.”38 Reason-of-state (raison d’etat) names a political theory emerging around the 16th century where the essence of the state is understood according to its own set of rational principles that are understood in categorical distinction from natural or divine laws. Such a political theory is only possible within an epistemological frame that values the world and human activity within it as meaningful in and of itself. A major political implication of the humanist valorization of the human being was the emergence a consciously self-referential and self-governing figure, a homo politicus that rationally orders the world with no intrinsic need of divine revelation. Reason-of-state does not locate the state’s essence or reality in terms of divinely or transcendentally sanctioned rules, principles, or revelations. Rather, as Foucault describes in his genealogy of governmentality, “the state, like nature, has its own proper form of rationality, albeit of a different sort.”39 This is a

114  Apparatuses stark contrast to the theo-political imagination of the scholastic-medieval world, where politics was not aimed at organizing society around human flourishing as an end in itself, but rather to align the state’s purpose with the orthodox description of God’s created cosmos and its sub-systems of social and political order. The Christian state, then, existed in subordination to the church as its “temporal and military arm”: a katechonic force supplementary to the body of Christ.40 With the humanistic shift toward a mode of knowledge breaking open the imposed limits of theological revelation and authority, a shift that is an autoimmune effect of the church’s initial embracing of the state as a protective katechonic force ensuring its survival in a post-resurrection world, the authority of the church was weakened and reason-of-state began to reverse the church-state relationship so that the church “would now be made into the spiritual arm of these newly emergent absolute states.”41 With this reversed relation, Christian Identity’s phantasm of salvation was no longer framed wholly within an other-worldly reality of an invisible City of God, but in the “this-worldly goal of the growth, expansion, and political stability of each European state.”42 The incarnated body of Christ is fully hypostatized in the state. The effects of this development cannot be overstated. It is the idea of a “this-worldly” salvation premised on the sovereign state through which a political discourse or doctrine of “secularism” and its accompanying category of “modernity” arises. One of the reasons that I will still call this new observational perspective of western secularism “Christian Identity,” and thus a particular and lingering form of auto-religion, is both because of its continuity with the previous form of Medieval Christian Identity’s division of humanity into proper and improper, and because of its universalism whose global expansion will bring “into being our present single world order and single world history” specifically as an order and history cut from the cloth of Christian universalism. To be sure, this analysis is somewhat complicated to hold together as secularism will articulate itself in explicit distinction from both Christianity and religion. The claim here is that secularism can be understood as a kind of recuperation or reproduction of (the apparatus of) Christian Identity under another name against the destructive effects of the humanist revolution to Medieval structures of Christian Identity. Here I follow the work of scholars such as Talal Asad, Gil Anidjar, Tomoko Masuzawa, and Dan Barber, who all provide helpful accounts of the link between secularism and Christianity. The key distinction upon which the historical marker of “modernity” as a secular epoch rests, according to Asad, is the distinction between “religion,” which is relegated to the realm of private reason, and “the secular,” which is a “public principle.”43 The notion of a public principle of secular reason does not come out of nowhere, with precedents in Augustine’s saeculum and then later within the discourse of reason-of-state as the site of “this-worldly” salvation. With the full realization of these terms, the

Apparatus one 115 discourse of religion, which is not the system of religion itself but rather its observations by the broader social system, increasingly maps religion onto the “spiritual realm,” marking a new “re-entered” distinction of “private/public” that places religion on the side of the former and subordinates religious experience and expression to the political priority of the secular state’s sovereignty. For Asad, it is the modern state’s mediation of identity, which replaced the prior epoch’s mediation by the church, that play’s the primary role in shaping people’s sensibilities and guaranteeing their experiences.44 This transformation of the mediating apparatus can be read in terms of an autoimmune medieval opening toward discourses of the secular state. The medieval theological apparatus of Christian Identity essentially opened itself to a process of self-dissolution and self-remaking through its newly configured humanist distinctions between private/public and religious belief/secular knowledge. In this structural transformation, however, the organization of Christian Identity stays intact. In the wake of the Christian humanist revolution and reason-of-state, as Daniel Barber traces, the newly configured religion/secular distinction signals the invention of a new transcendental perspective of secularism that essentially claims to solve the very problem that the Pauline declaration originally posed: how to create a transcendent identity that holds within it all identities without the necessity of giving up one’s particularity. Though Barber insists that there are significant discontinuities between Christianity and the secular, he hones in on the idea that the very problems of Christian Identity, namely the inevitable immunitary closing of the new transcendent identity that attempts to remain open to difference, are repeated and reproduced almost identically in the secular. Whereas the early invention of Christian Identity named a form of imperial and belief-based identity that invented the distinction between “true” and “false” religion, which we might say is the invention of what I characterized in Chapter 1 as Wynter’s “particular” religion, with Christianity of course possessing the one true form, secularism introduces the new distinction of “religion as such”/secular. Secularism describes itself in opposition to religion, which includes Christianity, but in a way that essentially repeats Christianity’s own self-description as the superior religion vis a vis all others. Where the continuity lies, and the reason I still refer to the secular as an event happening inside Christian Identity’s autopoiesis, is that both Christianity and secularism make the identical gesture of declaratively remaining open to all earthly particularism while at the same time positing a stratifying distinction between its own sovereign essence and all others that fall outside of it. With the secular, the difference is that the “religious” is transmuted into one of the names for Christian Identity’s others. While this kind of othering around the distinction religion/secular marks a profound shift in terms of the European Christian epoch and its religion centered epistemology that had been in place from the Medieval context, this also marks

116  Apparatuses Christian Identity’s ability to rebuild itself anew out of its autoimmune contamination of new knowledges that inevitably transform it into something different. As Andidjar puts it, Christianity . . . actively disenchanted its own world by dividing itself into . . . religious and the secular. And Christianity turned against itself in a complex and ambivalent series of parallel movements . . . while slowly coming to name that to which it ultimately claimed to oppose itself: religion. Munchausen-like, it attempted to liberate itself, to extricate itself from its own [religious] conditions: it judged itself as no longer Christian, no longer “religious.” Christianity . . . judged and named itself, reincarnated itself, as “secular.”45 This secular reincarnation, far from a clean break with the system of religion and its Christian performance, is ultimately the product of an ongoing movement of autopoiesis and autoimmunity within Christian Identity that evokes a reactionary response to the inescapability of the religious system’s own self-opening to new forms of knowledge. Within this genealogy, secularism simply names an autoimmune mutation of Christian Identity’s distinction between “true Christian” and “untrue other” into a new distinction between rational truth and religious other. It is within this transformation that the cultural and political backdrop for Christian Identity’s invention of race as a theo-political category emerges through questions of political empire, emergent capitalism, and human enslavability. To these questions I now turn.

Theo-juridical problems: the question of Indigenous enslavability, the re-entry of ontological heterogeneity, and the invention of race The “religious,” as it is expressed by secularism, also serves as an emergent racial signification of Christian Identity’s others. In The Invention of World Religions, Tomoko Masuzawa traces the history of modern western perspectives of religion as a discourse secularization which is also a “discourse of othering” that serves the construction of the “essential identity of the West.”46 For the (self-described) modern secular west, echoing the distinction between Christian spirit and Jewish flesh being worked out Pauline thought, the paradigmatic “others” of the West’s orientalist discourse are religious others that have been unable to accede to western paradigms of rationality and evolve out of a religious-theological paradigm of (political) truth. This was focused both on Europe’s others within and without, marking a sweeping distinction across humanity between proper and enlightened European identity and its outside environment of irrational religious others. As Masuzawa describes the observations of the two emergent modern

Apparatus one 117 sciences of the non-European world (or “environment” to Christian Identity), anthropology and orientalism, this thing called “religion” still held sway over all those who were unlike [secular Europeans]: non-Europeans, Europeans of the premodern past, and among their own contemporary neighbors, the uncivilized and uneducated bucolic populace as well as the superstitious urban poor, all of whom were something of “savages within.”47 The kind of othering happens inside a “this worldly” salvation narrative of state expansion derived and articulated through the assemblage of Christian humanism’s new forms of epistemology and political theory that opened up Christian Identity to “degodded” frameworks of rational knowledge and politics that would produce this kind of “savage” marking onto its others. Again, this did not happen as a clean break, and the racialization that will be the culmination of such degodding is complex and slow to arrive. Despite the weakening of the church’s claim to absolute authority and the shifting paradigms of “secular” knowledge, early European modernity was still structured around a strong theological-juridical and political framework of knowledge tying reason-of-state to explicitly Christian categories of theological truth and salvation. It was this Catholic theological-juridical framework provided the backdrop for the Spanish-Iberian colonial empire’s global expansion and Christopher Columbus’s (and those that followed him) encounters with the “Amerindians” of what was to be self-referentially named the Americas by Christian Identity. What Columbus brought with him in his transatlantic journey was a theojuridical apparatus in which human beings were divided into three separate categories in relation to Christian Identity. First, there were true Christians who had heard and accepted the truth of the gospel and possessed the blood of Christ through their visible participation in the Eucharist. Second, there were infidels and the “enemies of Christ” (inimicos Christi), primarily Muslims and Jews internal to or in close proximity to Europe who had heard but rejected the gospel, visibly marked by their exclusion from the Eucharist and therefore in their “impure” blood. Third, there were idolaters: “pagans” and polytheistic peoples who did not worship the Abrahamic God and had not yet heard the gospel.48 The latter two, united as non-Christian others but categorically distinct within the theo-juridical framework, were construed as theological-juridical problems to be filtered by the immune system of Christian Identity. In Columbus’ Spanish context, the peoples he encountered in the New World were classified under the third category, idolaters, but also under the “discover-and-gain” clause of his commission by the Spanish state. The non-Christian and non-enemy status of the natives meant that Columbus was legally49 and epistemologically authorized (within his own European Christian “truth-for”) to acquire the discovered land and the

118  Apparatuses people within it for the Spanish crown. From Columbus’ Christian identitarian observational perspective, there was no question regarding the legitimacy of appropriating the native populations as an acquired function of Christendom and the Spanish state’s realization—whether as slaves, as gold-tribute givers, or as encomienda serf, or even as converts who could bear witness to the power of the state, to the truth of the faith, and to their respective “economies of greatness.”50 For Columbus himself, as Wynter shows, there was a specific religious aspect that allowed him to break out of certain epistemological constraints of his broader culture’s truth-for. What is remarkable about Columbus within his own context is his “leap of faith”—the opening of Christian Identity—beyond the conceptual limits of the theological geography of his time. Wynter points out the significance of Columbus’ association with the European millenarian movement that had forged conceptual alliances with reason-of-state against the scholastic orthodoxy of the church and was a fringe-component of Christian humanism. Columbus’ millenarianism was politically motivated around the idea that the expansion of European Christendom to the entire (known and unexplored) world and the consummation of the church’s mission of making the earth’s inhabitants into “one Christian flock” was the condition of bringing about the return of Christ.51 Here we find the two sources of religion driving an autoimmune movement within Christian Identity. On the one hand, the goal of converting the world into “one flock” is reflective of the Christian drive toward absolute immunitysalvation where Christian Identity secures itself as the absolute sovereign and universal identity in relation to all “false” others. On the other hand, the realizing of this “one flock” requires a general faith that drives Columbus toward exposing Christian Identity to its “others,” even if such an exposure is part of a calculated effort to further immunize Christian Identity, and that will open up Christian Identity toward an incalculable future ultimately transforming its apparatus into a wholly new form. With the new epistemological understanding of the earth’s and humanity’s ontologically homogeneous makeup observed via the scientific and humanist revolutions, and Columbus’ millenarian dream of the earth’s total conversion, the lands and peoples discovered were subsumed into the theo-juridical system of Christian Identity’s truth-for. While the theological imperative of conversion was important for shaping Columbus’ encounter with the Indigenous peoples, it cannot be separated from the broader context of reason-of-state and the emergent merchant capitalism in need of an adequate labor force that could meet the demands of European state’s imperial global interests. Increases in wealth would only come about if the Spanish state could find a cheap way of extracting the natural resources of the newly discovered lands. While the Indigenous peoples of the Americas were observed as “idolaters” and therefore as legitimate

Apparatus one 119 converts into the Christian faith, signifying their potential as sources of spiritual wealth for Christendom, they were equally viewed as a standing labor force possessing valuable resources of local knowledge of the land and ready to be put to work, signifying a potential source of material wealth for Spanish empire. For the former, conversion of the Amerindians into Christianity was initially thought of as something that would be easily achieved. Part of this assumption was based on the initial “friendly” encounter with the Amerindians that Columbus experienced on his arrival. As he noted in a letter to the Spanish crown, all of Christendom should hold great celebrations . . . for the finding of such a multitude of such friendly peoples, which with very little effort will be converted to our Holy Faith, and so many lands filled with so many goods, very necessary to us in which all Christians will have comfort and profit.52 The material reality of this dual commission, however, was almost always weighted toward the acquisition of wealth. In his history of the encomienda system in Spanish colonial American, historian Lesley Byrd Simpson captures this inevitable disproportion: on the one hand the Crown undertook to protect and evangelize the native populations; on the other it was bound to favor the numbers of Spaniards who had conquered the Indies at their own expense and who might reasonably expect some material reward, while the fiscal needs of the Crown itself could not be lost sight of.53 The balance tipped early on when Columbus’ evangelistic efforts were met with resistance and confusion from the Amerindians (confusion because the presentation of the gospel message by Europeans would have been completely outside of their own genre of being human’s parameters of truth and knowledge). In 1494, the first major Indigenous uprising against the Spanish occurred at one the township-forts Columbus had founded, sparking the first mass roundup of Indigenous slaves.54 In this failure to easily convert, the immunitary strategy for bringing the natives into control shifted dramatically. Faced with both a struggle to convert and a growing sense that Indigenous rebellions were becoming a major problem, and coupled with the Spanish imperial common sense that “enslavement of the natives was the most ancient and obvious solution for the chronic labor shortage,”55 the Spanish colonizers fully embraced the violence of suppression and slavery. The primary mechanism for instituting a formal structure of native enslavement was the encomienda system. While I use the term enslavement here, it should be noted that the encomienda system was significantly different from the kind of chattel slavery that would come later in the form of imported Africans.

120  Apparatuses Based on the logic of the conqueror’s right to seizing land and levying tribute on his vassals, the encomienda was a “vigorous offspring of the [European] feudal system.”56 In theory, the encomienda system was conceived in the New World so that Amerindians would remain “free” vassals of the crown and therefore would curb any egregious exploitation of them by the Spanish. Of course, the limitations imposed upon the status and treatment of the Indigenous did very little to mitigate the violence. In actual practice, the encomienda reflected Wynter’s autopoietic law that “there is. . . no such altruism toward, or genuine co-identification with those whom our founding origin narratives have defined by the oppositionally meaningful marker of Otherness to the ‘us.’ ”57 As Simpson puts it, the institution which grew out of [Isabella’s decree of instituting the encomienda], although shocking to modern nerves, was in theory no more oppressive than the European serfdom of her day. In practice, of course, it was much more brutal, because there was no immediate bond of sympathy between master and serf, who were of different races [sic], different languages, and different cultures.58 This undeniable fact of Spanish brutality against the Indigenous peoples drove a theological debate that would have significant implications for both the Indigenous peoples of the Americas and for enslaved Africans. This was the context for the life and thought of Bartoleme de Las Casas, most famously known in Spanish Catholic history as the “protector of the Indians.” Born in (ca.) 1484, Las Casas was the son of a Spanish merchant that had participated in Columbus’ second journey to the Americas in 1494. On his father’s return to Spain in 1495 he brought back with him an Arawak slave captured in one of the conquests he had participated in during his time in the New World and gave him to Las Casas as a gift. As Wynter points out, for the good Catholic Las Casas, receiving a slave as a gift involved no moral qualms as it was perfectly normal behavior in the context of his own Christian genre of being human that simply assumed the “non-racial and non-credal slavery” that served as a bedrock of the Spanish aristocracy.59 Furthermore, Las Casas life was situated right at the beginning of the world’s first truly global empire that had deployed the concept of Christian blood (limpieza de sangre) as a weapon against the previous hierarchy of the Medieval feudal system. While purity of blood had been used to fortify the rigid feudal structures of Medieval Spain, in the new reason-of-state context it was deployed as a class weapon by lower class people aspiring to higher levels of the Church and state.60 With the rise of the “lettered class” of theologians, scholars, and jurists, proving one’s blood lineage as pure Christian, or “old Christian”—meaning primarily without any Jewish or Islamic “conversos” blood or intermarriage—provided an avenue through which to ascend into statuses previously reserved for those born into the nobility or those in the church. One of the most promising avenues of this ascension

Apparatus one 121 within the context of 16th century Spain would have been participation in conquests of the New World, which was officially reserved for those with purity of blood. With the potential acquisition of New World land being a ticket to riches, there was a “powerful psychoeconomic motivation to emigration and settlement.”61 Being born into this lettered class of blood purity, Las Casas the young adult was eager to seize his chance at acquiring land and climbing the social and political ladder of Spanish society. Sailing to Hispaniola (modern Haiti and the Dominican Republic) in 1502, Las Casas joined 2,500 Spanish adventurers and participated in the newly appointed Governor of Hispaniola Fray Nocolás de Ovando’s mission of instituting “a viable colony on Hispaniola for the benefit of the Spanish Crown, based on the exploitation of Indian labor to extract gold.”62 Exploiting Amerindian labor required active conquests of the New World territories, which involved the brutal raiding and rounding up of Native populations, dispersing them as de facto slaves to various encomenderos (encomienda holders), and imposing upon them Christian teachings and “ways of life.” Las Casas’ early participation in these conquests put him in contact with some of the most famous Spanish leaders of the early conquests, including Hernando Cortés, Pedro de Alvarado, and Diego de Velásquez, whom he accompanied on a conquest of Cuba as a chaplain.63 During this time, he also learned several native languages and began to develop the interest in Native American culture that would possess him for the rest of his life. Las Casas’ early participation certainly caught the attention of his superiors, and he was rewarded for his service to the Crown with his own encomienda, essentially securing his future as one who had risen to the wealthy land-owning class. The security of Las Casas’ encomienda, however, hit a contingency that he did not anticipate and one that would unravel his “truth for” providing him an assurance that his actions toward the Amerindians and the accumulations of wealth acquired on their enslaved backs were just. It is a kind of unanticipated movement of faith within Las Casas that enables him to open up to a different future that would have highly significant implications for both his own life and the fates of the “others” of Spanish Catholic empire. The initial movement of unraveling occurred in 1511 when Las Casas heard a sermon by fellow Dominican Antonio Montesinos that decried all encomienda holders as being in danger of mortal sin. Montesinos had been a sharp critic of the atrocities of the encomenderos, and, as a theologian of his time, had interpreted the theological status of Amerindians through the theo-juridical category of just war and the new humanist paradigm of rational souls. Going against the general perspective of the Spanish conquistadors and encomenderos, Montesinos condemned the encomiendas as illegal and unjust. Representing the Dominican position in the New World, he argued that under the laws of just war only “enemies of Christ” could be legitimately enslaved. As he says in his 1511 sermon, “By what right or justice do you keep these Indians in such horrible servitude? Have they not rational souls?”64 Montesinos’ opening shot of the decades long struggle

122  Apparatuses to determine the theo-juridical status Amerindians—a struggle that was thoroughly conditioned by the autopoietic system of Christian Identity that could only observe the native peoples as environmental objects to be filtered through its immune system—would eventually reach Las Casas and move him toward a complete spiritual and theological transformation. While he initially resisted the condemnation of the encomienda system, as “his position was [at the time of the sermon] not only that of the majority but the state position,”65 the “conversion” of Las Casas was completed in 1514 when, Augustine like, after reading a verse from Ecclesiastes he realized the profound errors of his thinking which “were in explicit contradiction to the teachings of the Catholic Christian faith.”66 Following this realization, he renounced the encomienda system and his own title as “unjust and tyrannical” and “against the purposes of Jesus Christ.”67 For the rest of his life, Las Casas would commit himself to the abolition of the encomienda system and fighting for the full humanity of the Amerindian peoples. Las Casas’ conversion, while certainly inspiring and admirable at the level of interpersonal experience, can also be read inside of Christian Identity’s autoimmune structure. In Christian Identity’s opening to new humanist forms of knowledge that reconfigured theological descriptions of the “proper/improper” distinction between human beings along an axis of rational endowment, the contingent lines of flight that splay out in the New World find one vehicle through the life of Las Casas, who represents what is both an opening for a justice to come and a catastrophic closure to its possibility. In Las Casas’ conversion, he performs both a genuine welcoming of the Amerindian other that relinquishes the immunitary boundary of the encomienda system and, in this very act, helps set in motion the contingent assemblage of what will become the largest slave trade in human history. Las Casas can be read as representing the kind of religious autoimmune duality that both enables the system of Christian Identity to open up and re-establish its borders of closure in the same motion. Following his conversion, Las Casas, given the official title “protector of the Indians” by the Spanish Crown, spent a number of years lobbying the state to abolish the encomienda system and convert the Amerindian’s status to full “free tributepaying vassals of the Crown.” While this was certainly an opening gesture toward the full inclusion of Amerindians into the protections of the Spanish theo-juridcal system, Las Casas’ reasoning was still very much within the general logic of the imperial state and the system-observations of Christian Identity, which meant that the effects of his activism remained limited by the boundaries of system communication. As Daniel Castro puts it in Another Face of Empire: Bartoleme de Las Casas, Indigenous Rights, and Ecclesiastical Imperialism, Las Casas’ “inability to act outside the totality of the royally sanctioned legal system . . . made the success of his self-appointed mission to help the Indians a largely formalistic endeavor.”68 Despite his severe critique of Spanish colonial brutality, Las Casas never questioned the political and religious legitimacy of the Spanish presence in the Indies, and

Apparatus one 123 he never thought that the abolition of the encomienda system should mean any reduction in the Spanish state’s quest for wealth and power. The acceptance of the state’s right of occupation would have severe consequences. Inside the theo-juridical logic of just war, in order to ensure the continuity of the economic benefits that the encomienda system had provided the Spanish while they figured out an alternative, Las Casas suggested to the Crown that a limited number of legitimate slaves acquired through a “just title” be brought to the Indies. With the expanding and highly lucrative growth of sugar farming in the Indies, this included the suggestion that “any peasant who built a sugar mill should be allowed a license to import 20 Black slaves directly from Africa as the labour complement of the mill.”69 While Las Casas’ African solution was meant not as a permanent fix but as a kind of stop-gap, and one that in his framework met the theo-juridical criteria as he believed that the black slaves he was recommending had been acquired as part a just war (most commonly in terms of Christian-Moorish conflict in Africa), it would be this suggestion that would lead to the first charter given by the Spanish crown to import African slaves into the Americas.70 While Las Casas’ specific suggestions were never implemented by the Crown, “as a direct result of his proposals, the Spanish Crown granted a license to a Flemish courtier, Gouvenot, which gave him permission to import 4000 African slaves . . . into the Indies.”71 The transatlantic slave trade had begun. While Las Casas, ever the faithful theologian, repented sincerely when he realized later that the Africans whom he suggested be imported into the Americas were not won with a just title and were captured within the same kinds of injustice and brutalities as those in the New World, the damage had been done. As Wynter stresses, this was not simply a logic of “replace ‘Indians with Africans,’ ” but was a theological reasoning firmly embedded “within the Christian evangelizing imperative” that sought to replace those whom he knew from first hand to have been enslaved and enserfed outside the “just title” terms of orthodox Christian theology with others whom, as he thought at the time, had been acquired within the terms of those “just titles.”72 The kinds of theo-juridcal problems and resolutions that the differences between Amerindians, Africans, and European Christians presented were the backdrop for a racializing assemblage now well underway. With Las Casas’ activism and lobbying for the humane treatment of Amerindians, there was an indelible effect both in terms of imperial policy, which did in fact grant legal rights and privileges to Amerindians, and a change in strategy for those arguing against the abolition of the encomienda system and the justification of keeping Amerindians in a subservient status to European Christians. While the Spanish Crown actually had been, for the most part, convinced of Las Casas’ arguments for Amerindian humanity and rights, the

124  Apparatuses effects of its new policies did very little to actually change Spanish treatment of them. While the Amerindians had been theologically framed by Columbus and Las Casas as essentially idolaters, or those that had never heard the gospel and were therefore objects of the Spanish evangelizing mission—a status that had legally prevented, however superficially, certain egregious forms of treatment, and one that Las Casas seized upon in his post-conversion activism—this theological status gave way to the burgeoning secular reasonof-state logic of a “new stereotyped image based on the Aristotelean concept of natural slaves” as a mark of distinction from African slaves, which were to be classified through an entirely different status. These new distinctions would coalesce around the new symbolic construct of “race.”73 When the Spanish empire realized that the New World was a promising site in which to greatly expand the state’s economic power, it sought legal ways to dispense pesky theological roadblocks on its way to further economic and political expansion. One of these roadblocks was the papacy and its theological prioritization of the natives’ conversion over all other economic or political goals. The legitimacy of Spanish sovereignty over the newly discovered lands, Wynter notes, was based “on the condition that it carry out the work of evangelizing the peoples of the New World and of converting them to Christianity.”74 It is in this context Christian Identity opens itself even more toward a non-theologically grounded politics, even if theology remained an important element. As the theological category of “idolater” could not provide an adequate justification for the state to fully appropriate native bodies for its economic and political purposes—after all, idolaters were still people that needed evangelistic efforts aimed at conversion—the Aristotelian category of “natural slaves” provided an alternative. Through a series of councils in the early 16th century that debated the legal and theological status of unconverted natives, Spanish lawyers and theologians utilized the category as a way to legitimately claim an authority over the Amerindian populations and force them into roles of labor serving the interests of the empire. Continuous with the Christian/non-Christian blood distinction that established Christian Identity as an observable embodied identity of bodily substance, the natural slave distinction was “expressed in degrees of rationality, with the symbolic-cultural distance between [European Christians and natives] being seen as an innately determined difference.”75 Wynter focuses on the famous debate at Valladolid between Juan Gines de Sepulveda and Las Casas in 1545 as a key representation of the conflict between the old theo-centric orientation of Christian Identity and its new modern secular-humanist reason-of-state orientation. At the center of this conflict were competing understandings of the primary purpose of the Spanish state in the Americas. For Las Casas, what the Spanish state was doing in the Americas was first and foremost fulfilling its evangelizing mission as commissioned by the Catholic church. From this theo-centric perspective, everything that the state was pursuing in the Americas, including its economic and political ambitions, was to be in service to the mission of the

Apparatus one 125 church. For Sepulveda, who was representing the humanist and state-centric perspective and working within the framework of reason-of-state, the purpose of the state’s presence was simply the imperial expansion of the state. This certainly included a missionizing imperative, but one that was subordinated to the state’s larger political and economic interests. From Sepulveda’s reason-of-state perspective, the church no longer served as the state’s political sovereign, but as its “spiritual arm.” These different perspectives had highly significant implications for how the Amerindians, as well as Africans, would be represented and categorized. Las Casas, as I have already covered, argued in theo-centric terms for the full humanity of Amerindians as potential converts to the Christian faith. Sepulveda, drawing from Aristotle, argued in state-centric terms and through the philosophy of natural law that the Spanish state had every right to enslave the Amerindians because of their status as natural slaves. This was a new argument on the Spanish side, one that had arisen as a response to ever growing “perturbations” against the theo-juridical sub-system that Las Casas and other religious advocates for Amerindian humanity had produced. The logic involved much technicality and subtle reasoning. According to Aristotle, natural slaves are technically “free,” meaning that they are not born as chattel, but because of their status as sub-rational human beings, they are in a naturally subservient position to those that are their rational superiors. Within the Spanish theojuridcal framework of Christian humanism and its rational human subject, the rational superiors were of course the European Christians. However, as the top of the human chain of being, this status implied certain responsibilities and a built-in theological limitation that forbade the European Christians from treating the Amerindians simply as chattel objects. As part of God’s created order, because irrational natural slaves have natural rational masters, an implicit relationship of altruistic care and relative freedom was implied. The theo-juridical rules of the Spanish state meant that such slaves could not be bought or sold (even though this still occurred), but were simply predisposed to exist under the patriarchal care of their superior natural masters. In this sense, natural slaves were qualified as the “natural children” to the Spaniard’s “natural adults.”76 The specific designation of natural slave, an immunizing tactic that protected Christian Identity’s sovereignty in the face of the native resistance and internal critique that the Spanish Christians were experiencing, would end up having significant implications for the racializing assemblage now well underway. The natural slave designation would be particularly powerful in its comparative reference to how African slaves came to be classified as purely political and economic objects devoid of any positive theological status that would mitigate their treatment as pure commodities. With the mark of an innate inferiority written into the bodies and minds of the natives (which also applied to the figure of the African, but to a much different degree that will be addressed in the next chapter), there occurs a kind of reterritorialization of the Medieval understanding of the ontological

126  Apparatuses nonhomogeneity of the cosmos, now applied to humanity itself. This can be viewed in the same sense of the reterritorialization of identity onto the Pauline declaration as an (re-) immunizing mode of protecting the ipse of the sovereign Christian body. The reterritorialization of ontological heterogeneity onto humanity serves as a kind of counter-immunization against the opening of the Christian body toward a theological openness to the (potential) human equality of its others made conceptually possible through the idea of a homogenous cosmos. The epistemological, theological, and political shifts that had occurred over the Christian humanist revolution through the developments of a Copernican scientific epistemology, reasonof-state, and the theological folding of the earth and heavens into a single substance had challenged the foundational Christian supremacist concept of humanity’s heterogeneous ontological reality divided through the categories of blood and geography. Within the new apparatus of knowledge emerging during the humanist revolution, major new conceptual movements had reclassified humanity (including both European Christians and their others) as a singular substance that reflected the potential for its ultimate realization into a single body of Christ gathered together on earth. In response, as the racializing assemblage of Spanish humanist arguments over the status of Amerindians shows, ontological heterogeneity was reterritorialized back onto the apparatus as an immunizing measure to reconstitute the power of a Christian Identity that was undergoing a profound transformation. The reterritorialization of ontological heterogeneity onto the new epistemological frame of the post-Copernican and Christian humanist revolutions provided the conditions for the concept of race to emerge as the new determining marker of the system distinction of “true identity/untrue otherness.” Race marks a re-entry of this distinction and pushes the difference between bloods further so that humanity is divided into holistically heterogeneous subgroups of body, mind, and spirit. The category of race is a signification assigning predetermined meaning for purposes of governance and control to human groups based on their physical appearance, rational capacity, and religious/theological worldviews and practices. As Wynter describes, race is an “essentially Christian-heretical positing of the nonhomogeneity of the human species.”77 Race is a “heretical” intervention into a post-1492 Christianity because of its contradicting character within of a post-Copernican theological homogeneity of the earth and humanity, which, as Columbus had imagined, affirms all land on earth “as intended for life and the creation of souls.” If the ontological homogeneity of the earth and cosmos is true, then all human beings must exist on the same ontologically homogenous plane, articulated precisely in terms of their equal potential to convert to Christianity. The category of race marks an intervention into this equality, inventing and qualifying various levels of embodied human existence that marks European Christian citizens as possessing a full, authentic humanity while all others are classified under a “not-quite” fully human and even nonhuman status stipulating their proximities to enslaved status. The category

Apparatus one 127 of race refuses a homogenous humanity as it divides it up into a heterogeneous hierarchy of being. To conclude, the racializing assemblage of Christian humanism and its division of humanity into a hierarchy of racial being is the immunitary reaction to an autoimmune unraveling of a previous theological paradigm of Christian Identity. As medieval Christian Identity was exposed to new frames of scientific, political, theological, and philosophical knowledge, and as it encountered the Indigenous peoples of the new world, it opened itself up to new relations and the assemblage of new relations of power/ knowledge. These relations came together as the transformed Christian Identity of what Wynter calls “Man,” the “overdeterminded” European Christian genre of being human that references itself as if it were the only legitimate form of human life and for which race immunizes against the idea of a single humanity of created ontological equality. Looking ahead to the next chapter, in the post-1492 historical context, with the designation of the Amerindians as natural slaves functioning essentially as a compromise between reason-of-state and the theological imperatives of the papacy, the Amerindian populations were construed as existing within a kind of liminal space where they could be legitimately appropriated as a source of labor, but also remained potential converts that could still enter into the symbolic fold of Christian Identity. Because of the limitations of the category of natural slave, the Indigenous peoples could not be viewed simply as “disposable” objects of labor, but only as “children” requiring care and guidance, however antagonistically carried out by the colonizer “parents.” As the European colonizers realized, however, this still did not solve the problem of building an adequate labor force that could measure up to the demands of the land. What the Spanish needed was a labor force with an unlimited capacity to be used for the European states’ insatiable economic desires. To gain this kind of labor force, there would need to be invented another kind of being that could be used exhaustively and discarded without it posing a theo-juridical problem. As the European colonial world of the Americas settled in, the theological strategies required to justify Amerindian enslavement in the Spanish colonies became more difficult and were largely abandoned in the face of Las Casas’ (and other reformer’s) theological defense of native humanity and freedom in the early 16th century, a defense that included the suggestion of replacing native slave labor with imported African slave labor, and the rapid decline of Amerindian populations due to the colonial effects of disease and murder. In reaction to these horrific contingencies, another kind of being emerged as the answer to the labor demands of the European state. This was the being of the black African, a being that would be classified as ontologically non-human and therefore as a commodity within the burgeoning order of merchant capitalism. It is around the figure of the black African slave that a new apparatus of racialized Christian Identity is assembled that divided the human species into “full humans, not-quite humans, and non-humans.”78 This division signals the advent of a modernity that

128  Apparatuses finds its general organizing principle around an anti-blackness that relegates African bodies as non-human commodities to be used for the enhancement and pleasure of those that embody a full and authentic humanity within the apparatus of Christian Identity. This will be the focus of Chapter 5.

Notes 1 A compelling variation of this argument has been made by Denise Kimber Buell in her book Why This New Race? Ethnic Reasoning in Early Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2007). Challenging the commonly presumed notion that “ethnicity and race were irrelevant to early Christians,” she focuses on the notion of “Christian peoplehood” as formulated in specific terms of “ethnic reasoning” that “overlap with our modern concepts of race and ethnicity, as well as national and civic identity.” I am in agreement with this argument, particularly in terms of its resonance with my understanding of Christian Identity in distinction from the Pauline declaration. However, the fact of a conceptual overlap of peoplehood and race still does not mean that race was “there” all along (an argument I don’t take Buell to actually be making). Rather, I interpret “peoplehood” as a general description of the move toward a self-referential identity of embodiment. 2 For two important examples see J. Kameron Carter, Race: A Theological Account (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2008); and Willie Jennings, The Christian Imagination: Theology and the Origins of Race (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2011). 3 Michel Foucault, Society Must Be Defended: Lectures at the College de France, 1975–1976 (New York: Picador, 1997). 4 Alexander Weheliye, Habeas Viscus: Racializing Assemblages, Biopolitics, and Black Feminist Theories of the Human (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014). 5 Gil Anidjar, Blood: A Critique of Christianity (New York: Columbia University Press, 2014), 31ff. 6 Ibid., 64. 7 Ibid., 67. 8 Ibid., 62. 9 See Agamben, Homo Sacer, chapter 1. 10 Lynn Ramey, Black Legacies: Race and the European Middle Ages (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2014), 2. 11 Jacques Le Goff, The Medieval Imagination (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992), 102. 12 John Boswell, Same Sex Unions in Pre-Modern Europe (New York: Vintage, 1995). 13 Le Goff, The Medieval Imagination, 102. 14 Anidjar, Blood, viii–ix. 15 Ibid., 37. 16 Esposito, Communitas, 10. 17 Ibid., 12–13. 18 See Anidjar, Blood, 35–38. 19 Carolyn Bynum, Wonderful Blood: Theology and Practice in Late Medieval Northern Germany and Beyond (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2007), 258. 20 Anidjar, Blood, 49. 21 Ibid. 22 Ibid., 58.

Apparatus one 129 23 Ibid., 67. 24 See Joshua Trachtenberg, The Devil and the Jews: The Medieval Conception of the Jew and its Relation to Modern Anti-Semitism (Philadelphia: The Jewish Publication Society, 1983). 25 Jennings, The Christian Imagination, 79. 26 Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 4. 27 Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being,” 265. 28 Wynter, “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species?” 16. 29 Ibid., 15. 30 Sylvia Wynter, “1492: A New World View,” in Race, Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas: A New World View, ed. Vera Lawrence Hyatt and Rex Nettleford (Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1995), 26; Also see Fernand Hallyn, The Poetic Structure of the World: Copernicus and Kepler (New York: Zone Books, 1993). 31 Wynter, “1492,” 26. 32 Bench Ansfield, “Still Submerged: The Uninhabitability of Urban Redevelopment,” in Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, ed. Katherine McKittrick (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 129. 33 William J. Bouwsma, The Culture of Renaissance Humanism (Washington, DC: The American Historical Association, 1973), 15. 34 This is the standard narrative, mostly influenced by Georg Voigt (1827–1891), and has been challenged in various ways. For a helpful overview of debates over the origins and character of renaissance humanism, see Alexander Lee, Humanism and Empire: The Imperial Ideal in Fourteenth-Century Italy (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2018), xiii–xxii. Furthermore, the humanist “recovery of antiquity” against its alleged abandonment in the Medieval period should not be understood as if interest in the ancients and the human being in itself was altogether absent in Medieval scholasticism. William Boewsma even identifies a “medieval humanism” that “valued and appreciated the natural capacities of man.” What is most significant in the emergence of renaissance humanism is the emphasis on rhetoric and the “particular value it attached to graceful, persuasive, and effective verbal communication, both orally and in writing.” Bouwsma, The Culture of Renaissance Humanism, 5, 9. 35 Wynter, “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species,” 14 (italics in text). 36 Wynter, “1492,” 25. 37 Ibid., 28. 38 Wynter, “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species,” 15. 39 Michel Foucault, Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, 2001), 213. 40 Wynter, “1492,” 13. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid., 14. 43 Talal Asad, Formations of the Secular: Christianity, Islam, Modernity (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 8. 44 Ibid., 14. 45 Anidjar, Semites, 45. 46 Tomoko Masuzawa, The Invention of World Religions: Or How European Universalism was Preserved in the Language of Universalism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005), 20 (italics mine). 47 Ibid., 21. 48 Wynter, “1492,” 29. 49 Though not without significant debate and disagreement within Spanish theojuridical circles. See Anthony Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man: The American

130  Apparatuses Indian and the Origins of Comparative Ethnography (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). 50 Wynter, “1492,” 32. 51 Ibid., 16. 52 Quoted in Margarita Zamora, “Christopher Columbus’s ‘Letter to the Sovereigns’: Announcing the Discovery,” in New World Encounters, ed. Stephen Greenblatt (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1993), 7. 53 Lesley Byrd Simpson, The Encomienda in New Spain: The Beginnings of Spanish Mexico (Berkley: University of California Press, 1950), 1. 54 Karen Anderson-Cordova, Surviving Spanish Conquest: Indian Fight, Flight, and Cultural Transformation in Hispaniola and Puerto Rico (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2017), 31. 55 Simpson, The Encomienda in New Spain, 6. 56 Ibid., ix. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid., 14. 59 Sylvia Wynter, “New Seville and the Conversion of Las Casas, Part One,” Jamaica Journal 17, no. 3 (August–October 1984): 26. 60 Ibid., 27. 61 Ibid., 29. 62 Anderson-Cordova, Surviving Spanish Conquest, 35. 63 Bartoleme de Las Casas, The Devastation of the Indies: A Brief Account (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1974), 4. 64 Quoted in Wynter, “New Seville,” 30. 65 Ibid. 66 Ibid. 67 Ibid., 31. 68 Daniel Castro, Another Face of Empire: Bartoleme de Las Casas, Indigenous Rights, and Ecclesiastical Imperialism (Durham: Duke University Press, 2007), 5. 69 Wynter, “New Seville,” 48. 70 Ibid., 49. 71 Ibid. 72 Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being,” 294. 73 Wynter, “1492,” 34. 74 Ibid. 75 Ibid., 34–35. 76 Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man, 104–6. 77 Wynter, “1492,” 34. 78 Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 3.

5 Apparatus two Anti-blackness and white supremacy in Spanish and English colonialism

In the previous chapter, I focused on Christian Identity’s transformation into a distinctly embodied form of identity with the assemblage of a discourse of Christian blood, and then focused on the theo-juridical framing of Spanish encounters with Amerindians in the 15th and 16th centuries over questions of what kinds of beings are legitimately enslaveable within the political and theo-juridical terms of the Christian state. The resolution of these questions through the category of “natural slave” and the opening up of the transatlantic slave trade in black Africans provided the political theological grounding for the category of race to emerge as a governing technology that divides the human species into a racialized hierarchy of being. In this chapter, I continue exploring these colonial productions of race by looking at the anti-blackness that constitutes the heart of modern Christian Identity’s operations of racial power and violence. As in previous chapters, what follows does not claim to provide a full historical account, but rather a broadly diachronic look at certain “major dominations” of anti-black Christian Identitarian power with a focus on Spanish and English New World colonial contexts.

Perceptions of pre-modern blackness The colonial signification of black skin as a mark of extreme otherness already had a long history in the Abrahamic religions, where historically the color black was (and still is) treated as a symbol of evil and impurity.1 As far back as the 4th century C.E., a particularly powerful discourse of antiblackness was assembled around the biblical “Myth of Ham,” which was made to provide a link between cursedness, blackness, and slavery. In Genesis 9, Noah’s son Ham sees his father drunkenly passed out naked in a tent, and when Noah wakes up curses Ham as “the lowest of slaves” (Genesis 9:25). While the Hebrew bible story itself has no concern with dark skin or race, all the Abrahamic traditions during the first millennium C.E took up its symbolism and connected it to a narrative linking cursedness, geographical areas where darker skin predominated, and slavery. As Sylvester Johnson notes, “trends in medieval Christian, Muslim, and Jewish traditions

132  Apparatuses would represent Ham more exclusively as the progenitor of Africans or dark skinned peoples.”2 In this representation, sub-Saharan Africans in particular were observed as degenerate beings whose black skin was effect of the curse and sin.3 In City of God, Augustine describes Ham as separating himself from both Noah and his others sons, and “keeping his position between them, is included neither in the first fruits of Israel nor in the full harvest of the gentiles, and he can only stand for the hot breed of heretics.”4 Ham, in other words, is excluded from Christian salvation; he is the figure of the damned, part of the environment of Christian Identity and that which it immunizes itself against. Augustine’s use of the adjective “hot,” moreover, links this “breed of heretics” to the geographic “graceless” zones discussed in the previous chapter. To be a “black African” was to embody the curse of Ham and be excluded from God’s grace. “Ham and Ham’s descendants,” Johnson describes, “had always been evil. They were discursively located in extreme antithesis to the people of God.”5 Linking dark skin to the curse of slavery, the myth of Ham would serve the legitimation of both the Arabic slave trade in medieval Africa and the transatlantic slave trade of European Christians inaugurated by the Spanish and Portuguese in the 16th century. Though the Islamic slave trade is an important part of the history of African slavery and anti-blackness, the signification of black Africans as inherently degenerate beings born to be subjected to race-based chattel slavery for life is the invention of the European Christian transatlantic slave trade.6

Making the black slave Returning to the scene of Christian Identity’s assemblage of its modern racialized apparatus, while anti-blackness was already a constitutive element, the complete political-ontological abjection of black Africans occurring under the name of chattel enslavement does not happen in a single historical event. The modern sedimentation of the relationship between blackness and permanent slave status is part of a centuries-long process of assembling the apparatus of racialized Christian Identity that finds its unity of identity in the European Christian/non-European distinction and its plurality of racial re-entries including colonizer/colonized, master/slave, white/black, and citizen/non-citizen. Within the New World colonial context, while both the Amerindians and black Africans had been signified as “human others” to Christian Identity’s newly assembled subject of rational and political identity, a spectrum (i.e. a series of distinctions) of rational being within Christian Identity’s political-ontological classificatory schema was further developed along the lines of an anti-black racializing assemblage. Based on their status as “natural slaves,” Amerindians in the Spanish New World context came to be observed as technically “free” and therefore could not be treated merely as a “disposable” labor force. In other words, they could not be observed as pure commodified objects of labor. As their “natural masters,” Spanish Christians had a theological-juridical obligation

Apparatus two 133 to guide the Amerindians to Christian salvation. Of course, such guidance, intrinsically condescending and violent in itself, never materialized in any tangible sense. In the end, the classification of natural slave did little to slow the catastrophe playing out on a continent-wide scale as the Indigenous populations were being mass murdered through the combination of infectious diseases brought over from Europe, outright slaughter, and economic violence leading to extreme levels of poverty and destitution. In the last instance, the effects of the system of Christian Identity on the Indigenous peoples was the literal and cultural genocide resulting in the loss of ninety percent of the Indigenous populations of the Americas. The fate of black-sub-Saharan Africans and their American descendants was both indelibly linked to the genocide of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas and significantly different. Within the Spanish context, imposed upon black Africans was a different theo-juridical status that determined them from the observational perspective of Christian Identity not as natural slaves but as “civil slaves”: legal property-merchandise acquired with a just title that could be bought, sold, and used to the sole discretion of their captors-owners-masters. As historian Anthony Pagden describes, the original Aristotelian description of civil slaves was based on a categorical distinction that separated them from natural slaves as “[men] like any other who had, for reasons that have no bearing on [their] nature, been deprived of [their] civil liberties.” The key distinction with natural slaves is that the causes of civil slave status were always “accidental ones,” linked to the “imperfect spiritual conditions of man.”7 In this original Aristotelian sense, race plays no part in the conditions of civil enslavement as it had nothing to do with “natural” identity. However, in the Spanish colonial context, while this distinction served the purpose of justifying the importation of African slaves ostensibly acquired through just causes to legally satisfy the problems associated with the theo-juridical status of Amerindians as the “natural children” of European Christians, it was folded into the larger continuum of the European “biblical system of representation” that coded both Amerindians and black Africans as “intended by Natural Law to be controlled by their slave masters.”8 Within the colonial Christian system of representation, black civil slaves were absorbed (or “re-entered”) into the ontology of natural slavery as a new distinction able to provide a further basis for fully “legitimate” legal slavery. While Africans were classified as civil slaves, they were also, like Amerindians, observed as naturally subservient to European Christians. This, for Wynter, is the observational mark of Man1’s rational schema of representation: black Africans were made to occupy the zero-point of “sub-rational” natural being. This would prove a crucial distinction for Christian Identity’s racializing assemblage, providing the ontological “non” (non-rational, non-citizen, non-subject, nonbeing) against which both Christian Identity (as fully rational human) and Indigenous “savage” identity (as less rational human) was measured. As Wynter puts it, the figure of the black civil slave was “assimilated [into

134  Apparatuses the ‘irrational Other’ category] as its extreme form: that is, as a mode of the human so irrational that it constituted the missing link between (the divinely created) rational human species and the (equally divinely created) animal species.”9 In this assimilation, black skin came to effectively signify the status of a “non-human” human, the extreme and defining other to proper human being.

Racial capitalism While Christian and Islamic anti-black observation was an extensive and uneven reality prior to the modern era, the positioning of blackness as the absolute zero-point of racial abjection finds it determinative condition with the emergence of capitalism in the modern west. Following the work of Cedric Robinson, modern racism and anti-blackness is a constitutive part of capitalism as it emerges out of European feudal society. In all European colonial contexts, the kind of (proto-) nationalist and biopolitical racism internal to European society grounded in distinctions between bloods would find powerful lines of flight and new territorializations as the capitalist mode of production and its socio-political imagination was transported across the Atlantic: Racism . . . was not simply a convention for ordering the relations of European to non-European peoples but has its genesis in the ‘internal’ relations of European peoples. As part of the inventory of Western civilization it would reverberate within and without, transferring its toll from the past to the present. . . . The development, organization, and expansion of capitalist society pursued essentially racial directions, so too did social ideology. As a material force, then, it could be expected that racialism would inevitably permeate the social structures emergent from capitalism.10 The European colonial world-system built around ontological and material distinctions between human groups translated into economic, social, political, and religious hierarchies conditioned the rise of what Robinson calls “racial capitalism.” Robinson meant many things by this term, but it can essentially be understood as the name for the idea that capitalism is based fundamentally on a process of producing divisions of extreme inequality among human groups for purposes of European domestic and foreign governance and economic accumulation and exploitation.11 In the modern era, racial capitalism transforms Christian Identity by assembling a new set of codes for Man’s social categories of life and death that pushes the biopolitical partitioning of social, political, and economic realms and geographies in explicitly racial directions. Ruth Wilson Gilmore, drawing from Robinson,

Apparatus two 135 describes the function of racism within capitalism in these terms: “racism is the state-sanctioned and/or extra-legal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerabilities to premature death, in distinct yet densely interconnected political geographies.”12 For both the Spanish and English, the global expansion of capitalism through the vehicle of colonialism was made possible by biopolitical racial divisions and their accompanying technologies of colonial governance, including the massive expansion of the transatlantic slave trade, that provide the original means through which global capitalism’s divisions of extreme inequality were achieved, sustained, and reproduced. By the 15th century, the burgeoning system of merchant capitalism had already begun to replace the European feudal model as the dominant economic system of Christian Europe. Along with the shift to reason-of-state, the political economy of merchant capitalism emphasized national expansion and international trade as a primary mode of state wealth accumulation. Trade and the accumulation of cheap labor sources was the motivating force behind Portuguese, Spanish, and Italian forays into areas surrounding Western Europe and the horn of Africa during the 15th and 16th centuries. As slavery had already been a key element of European wealth accumulation, “the use of African slave labor in the New World of the 16th century by the Spanish crown (and soon after the Portuguese) and its merchant concessionaires was consequently a most natural step.”13 By the end of the 17th century, following the extensive debates around the status of Amerindians in both Spanish and English New World contexts, imported black Africans and their progeny had become the dominant source of slave labor in the Americas. By 1650, for example, more than 500,000 Africans were living and laboring in New World Spanish colonies.14 For the developing economies of the Americas, black Africans were the essential element of the primitive accumulation of colonial wealth. As historian Rodrick McDonald writes, labor was the key to the development of the Americas; initially land was plentiful, capital was available to “prime the pump,” and labor was provided by African and Afro-American slaves. The source of all value is labor; the value of the New World [and its fabulous wealth], created by slaves.15 Within the colonies, the use of African slave labor proved incredibly lucrative and outweighed the limits of the wage-labor system and various forms of non-chattel slavery, laying the groundwork that would condition the ascendance of capitalism as the West’s dominant economic system. Frank B. Wilderson frames this in no uncertain terms: Capital was kick-started by the rape of the African continent. . . ‘the socio-political order of the New World’ . . . was kick-started by

136  Apparatuses approaching a particular body (a black body) with direct relations of force, not by approaching a white body with variable capital.16 Within the system if racial capitalism, the African slave is observed as containing no sellable or exchangeable labor power (variable capital) and is reduced entirely to a pure laboring commodity, providing the object of capitalism’s crucial distinction between waged labor and slave labor that enables New World capital’s primary means of primitive accumulation. Thus, “one could say that slavery . . . is closer to capital’s primal desire than is waged oppression.”17

High crimes against the flesh The slave trade transformed African human beings into capitalist objects of exchange and into what Hortense Spillers refers to as “being[s] for the captor.”18 As she or he is violently taken from their home and community, the captive African is observed as positioned outside the identity of human being. Here, the distinction “human/black” becomes the key code for capital’s economy of labor. Black identity is reduced to an other-object, transformed into a non-being in relation to human being whose sole purpose is the production of value and pleasure for the “sovereign human,” or slave master. As Spillers reminds us, the objectification of Africans into slaves was not merely an abstract process of signification, but involved “actual mutilation, dismemberment, and exile.”19 These acts signify the transformation of (black) flesh into a useful “body.” Flesh, for Spillers, is antecedent to the body as “that zero degree of social conceptualization that does not escape concealment under the brush of discourse.”20 As its antecedent condition, flesh is what precedes and defers the ontological imposition of a body. Flesh is “para-body.” Here, recalling both the distinction between life and the living (Chapter 2) and Paul’s exclusion of the flesh from God’s covenant with Israel (Chapter 3), flesh signifies the category of the living in its sheer immanent potentiality, a kind of messianic potentiality that opens all life to an unpredictable future. Alexander Weheliye, drawing from Spillers, classifies flesh as “element in the vein of the classical quadfecta of earth, wind, (water,) and fire.”21 A body is formed out of the manipulation of this element that serves as the environment for any form or body, the result of the “brush of discourse”—Christian, European, capitalist, etc.—that marks (or captures) the flesh as this or that. In Spillers terms, the mark of black slave bodies is the violent mutilation of the flesh. As she describes, even though the European hegemonies stole bodies . . . out of West African communities, . . . we regard this human and social irreparability as high crimes against the flesh, as the person of African females and African males registered the wounding. . . . its seared, divided, rippedapartness, riveted to the ship’s hole, fallen, or “escaped” overboard.22

Apparatus two 137 As the captive African person’s flesh is kidnapped, confined, beaten, and ripped apart, a “cultural text” is written that locks the flesh into a bodily schema of enslavement. The “black slave body” is a cultural text that signifies for the racialized Christian Identity and its katechonic state apparatus (“including judges, attorneys, ‘owners,’ ‘soul drivers,’ ‘overseers,’ and ‘men of God’ ”)23 a being that exists to be controlled, disciplined, and, when necessary, killed without it being observed as murder. Spillers’ theorization of flesh finds significant resonance with systems theory’s autopoietic framework. Going back to Maturana’s and Varela’s distinction between organization and structure, we find the same kind of schema as Spiller’s body/flesh distinction. Here, the body, as the figure that locks in identity, whether in legal, political, social, or economic terms, signifies the system “organization” that self- produces and reproduces a set of components that it deems necessary for its continued existence and for its particular function. The body, then, is the closure of autopoietic organization, the “locking in” of a determined set of operations. The flesh, in contrast, “obtains at the level of ‘structure,’ opening the autopoietic unity to the flows of energy and organic material that both sustain [the body-organization] and potentially threaten it.”24 Here, we see the threshold against which the immune system establishes itself and against which it moves and relates in ungoverned “commonness.” “The flesh,” Esposito writes, “is neither another body nor the body’s other: it is simply the way of being in common of that which seeks to be immune.”25 In this sense, flesh, as that “zero degree of social conceptualization,” is the material of intra-being, the material of the “community of the living” that keeps open, on the one hand, possibilities of belonging and the production of forms of life, and, on the other hand, the closure and division of this material into hierarchized bodies. The movement of black flesh occurs at the intersection of such openness and closure, organization and structure. It is black flesh that is observed by the system of Christian Identity as both the condition of its own proper body and the “black slave body” that it must invent as an environmental object of control. Transforming black flesh into a (captive) body means identifying black flesh, in all of its open and unruly multiplicity and contingency, under the figure of “the African,” erasing any normative marker of potential humanity, including gender. As Spillers describes, “under these conditions [of captivity], we lose at least gender difference in the outcome, and the female body and the male body become a territory of cultural and political maneuver, not at all gender-related, gender-specific.”26 A particularly destructive effect of this is the erasure of kinship as a given aspect of the African’s social world. This is perhaps most discernable in terms of the social impossibility of slave parenthood. When the African person is captured and thrust into the organizational system of slavery, she or he is transformed into a fungible object—an objectified slave “body”—that exists for the master’s use and pleasure. Dion Brand describes the transformation of black flesh into fungible object as making “bodies emptied of being, bodies emptied

138  Apparatuses of self-interpretation, into which new interpretations could be placed.”27 In other words, bodies emptied of flesh. The slave body does not relate to the master as a distinct and particular fleshly human being with biological markers or (self-referential) gender traits that determine a person’s capacity or potential for maternity and paternity, among a multiplicity of other social relations. There exist no slave “mothers” or “fathers” in the sense of socially recognized kinship. Rather, the slave body, regardless of biological markers of sex or normative cultural markers of gender, functions merely as an undifferentiated object of labor’s reproduction on which the master can interpret and use for whatever purpose he sees fit. This includes utilizing the reproductive capacities of male and female bodies (differentiated only according to sex, not gender) to produce more slaves while negating any potential kin relationship that would develop after the child (as commodity) is born. From the position of the slave, there is no respect, attention, or consideration given to what Spillers calls the “symbolic integrity” of “female” and “male” gender identity markers that signal the potential for a whole range of social roles and experiences; there is only the master’s singular concern of extracting labor power from the slave for the production of value within capitalist relations of exchange. Any fleshly or personality characteristic that might be recognized as part of the slave’s humanity beyond the biopolitical mutilation and harnessing of her or his flesh is disregarded and unrecognized for the sake of making the captured body as efficient as possible for the production of value. In this way, the protocols surrounding what constitutes an appropriate or “natural” relation to the black slave body (as captured, marked flesh) “demarcate a total objectification, as the entire captive community becomes a living laboratory.”28 The historical practice of “slave breeding” in the Americas reflects this horrific ungendering.29 Male and female slaves were often paired for the specific goal of reproducing more slaves. In the order of American chattel slavery, slave begets slave, mother does no beget son or daughter. The childbearing capacity of female bodies has nothing to do with any potential relational bond between parent and child outside of the reproduction of commodities. Toni Morrison’s novel Beloved provides a vivid fictional example of this process and cycle of objectification, and shows how the status of slave continues to mark black flesh as “captive body” even after legal emancipation. In the novel, the character Sethe provides an intimate glimpse into both the physical and psychological realities stemming from the commodification and the ungendering of persons within slavery. As a former slave, Sethe carries on her flesh the marks of slavery in the form of a “still growing” “tree-like” scar on her back, the effect of years of brutal whippings by her slave masters. The scars that Sethe acquired as a slave remain a bodily symbol of the impossibility of realizing the full potentiality of her humanity (including the “symbolic integrity” of her own gender identity) within the apparatus of racial capitalism. As a slave, her fleshly capacity to be a mother to her infant children, materially manifest in the

Apparatus two 139 breast milk she produces, is negated as she is thrust back onto the status of commodity: [Sethe, speaking to Paul D:] After I left you, those boys came in there and took my milk. That’s what they came in there for. Held me down and took it. I told Mrs. Garner on em . . . Them boys found out I told on em. School-teacher [the overseer] made one open up my back, and when it closed it made a tree. It grows there still.30 Sethe had given birth to her child and displayed indisputable signs of a human bond between mother and child—both physical (the child’s need for breast milk) and emotional (the mother’s desire to care and nurture the child). Yet because she is marked as a slave, Sethe has no claim on these things. Her flesh-turned-body exists only to be used. White plantation workers (“those boys”), needing breast milk for an unstated purpose, approach Sethe as a commodity, as a source of use and pleasure. Nothing of her fleshly and personal existence is recognized as having any symbolic import that would determine her right to be a mother to her child. Her maternal capacity, if anything, is only a vehicle through which the master can utilize the production of future value. Both the child and the breastmilk—both extensions of her flesh—can be taken at will. Her motherly love and desire toward the child (and vice versa) are denied by the fact that these things have no import for the production of value. Any attempt to challenge this arrangement results in her body being further punished and disciplined. Violent ungendering is but one example of colonial (performative) violence undertaken by the apparatus of racial capitalism, which observes blackness as purely exploitable labor, deracinated—i.e. made distinct—from all markers of humanity including gender, kinship ties, and political identity. In spite of their incalculable contributions to the production of wealth, black African slaves and their descendants received no benefit of the wealth created. Entranced by the figure of the black slave’s endless potential as a source of wealth, European colonialists and slave traders, especially the English, more and more came to view the “Negro” as a sub-human and commodified object bearing no trace of authentic humanity. This in spite of a growing presence within colonial society that inevitably meant African assimilation into cultural norms: “the more that Africans and their descendants assimilated cultural materials from colonial society, the less human they became in the minds of the colonists.”31 Here we find another immunitary reaction meant to keep Christian Identity—as “overdetermined authentic humanity”—pure of its observed environmental others. The ontological status of slave provides the immunitary means to pursue total control over Africans while at the same time keeping them excluded from Christian Identity. This can again be understood as a series of further re-entries into the distinction of Christian Identity/non-Christian. While Christian Identity could not actually posit an absolute distinction between its own human

140  Apparatuses subjects (white Christian Europeans) and its racial others as the unity of the two sides would always be necessary to the system’s identity, it re-entered this distinction into itself as a means of positing further internal distinctions that enabled it to maintain the observed exclusion of blackness from its own proper being. This is to say that the more slaves assimilated into the New World culture, which often included conversion to Christianity, and the closer black slaves appeared to approach the kind of humanity that Christian Identity claimed exclusively as its own, the more the status of object was violently imposed upon them.

Spanish-English differences and the assemblage of English racism As I discussed in the previous chapter, the 16th century Spanish colonial conflicts around the theo-juridical status of Amerindians increasingly pointed in the direction of African enslavement as the “solution” to challenges posed against the legitimacy of the institution of slavery. The theo-juridical domain housing these conflicts in the Spanish context was also coupled with the more concrete issue of labor needs. The New World land claimed by the Spanish was essentially valueless without a steady supply of cheap labor, something the Spanish could not adequately provide themselves. While the Amerindians were initially thought to be the solution to the Spanish’ labor needs, this turned out to be too difficult to achieve with the combination of the theo-juridical limitations “protecting” Amerindians from being made into commodified slaves and the rapid decimation of native populations due to conquest and disease. In the face of these limitations, the Spanish increasingly turned to African slaves to meet their labor needs. While this turn to African labor certainly meant the intensification of anti-blackness within this context, it would be the Anglo-American context where the signification of the black slave would take on its most theologically and politically abject status. In the Spanish context, the ontological status of Africans and the legal stipulations of their enslavement were still framed around theo-juridical thresholds of just title and political subjecthood within the context of the Spanish state. As in the case of Las Casas’ suggestion of importing Africans into the Spanish colonies to satisfy labor needs in the face of the crown’s decision to halt Amerindian enslavement, the imported slaves still had to meet certain political theological criteria in order to be qualified as legitimate. Although in many contexts these criteria were either simply ignored or exploited, the theo-juridcial status of Africans influenced the overall context and the range of possibilities that African slaves (as well as others) had at their disposal. Because of the strong institutional influence of the Catholic church in the Spanish context, combined with the perceptive effects of centuries of Spanish experience of heterogeneous peoples and cultures within its own geographical Iberian context, Africans lived within a much more elastic (although no less brutal) framework

Apparatus two 141 of the experience of enslavement. Both the religious and geographical context provided African slaves with a much wider range of theological and political possibilities than their North American counterparts. For one thing, the general Spanish context was much more urban-based and therefore “enabled advantageous manipulations of labor systems, markets, and infrastructure.”32 The Catholic Christianity of New Spain also provided an environment where slaves had recourse to certain theological resources that could be exploited to their advantage. For example, as Johnson describes, Spanish African slaves’ status as royal subjects of the Spanish crown could exploit “the tension between the Crown and [slaves’] masters by appealing to Christianity’s sexual regime, which guaranteed to all Spanish subjects the right to Christian marriages and conjugal privileges. When faced with the recalcitrance of dominating masters who might deny them the right to marriage, slaves could appeal to church authorities.”33 Pointing out these “advantages” is in no way meant to mitigate the brutality and violence of the Spanish contexts of African enslavement, nor is it meant to make the claim that the Spanish enslavement of black Africans was in some way better for Africans than other contexts. Rather, it is to point out that the particular apparatus of the Spanish context produced a different kind of regime of slavery and anti-blackness that operated around very particular Catholic theological, economic, and political relations. Spanish anti-blackness, in other words, was performed within its own complex racializing assemblage and apparatus of theological, juridical, economic, and political relations that made it significantly different than the English context, which is where I suggest that anti-blackness and slavery forged its most powerful and resonant relation. The English connection to the history of racism, like that of the Spanish, is linked to pre-modern internal European conflicts around ethnic and classed groups. While English perspectives of Jews and Muslims mirrored those of greater Europe, it was the Irish that provided a particularly powerful and effective distinction of “proper/improper” for English identity. Going as far back as the 12th century, the English had attempted to colonize Ireland as part of the expansion of Anglo-Norman Christian civilization. While the English imposed political control over the territory by giving English nobility titles to Irish land, Indigenous Irish clans—genres of being human mostly based around nomadic forms of life—proved stubbornly resistant to English colonization. With the English failure to successfully colonize Ireland in the Medieval period, the perception of Ireland from the English increasingly developed around notions of “contempt for Irish culture and lifestyles.”34 Feelings between the English and the Irish were mutually antagonistic. As Audrey Smedley describes, “this was a fundamental conflict between two very different lifestyles, two different views of the world, two different value systems, two different sets of problems and solutions for them.”35 For the English, perhaps the most important defining characteristic of the “wild” Irish was their pastoral forms of life that had “very little of what sedentary

142  Apparatuses peoples would identify as private property.”36 Irish forms of life were viewed as inimical to the developing capitalist order of English society that was coming into fruition by the 15th century. Especially in the English context, the merchant capitalism that was rapidly replacing feudal society fostered intense forms of individualism, a private property based social and economic order, and the unrestrained accumulation of material wealth. Combined with the philosophical influence of thinkers such as John Locke who had helped enshrine the idea that ownership of private property was the ultimate measure of “proper political and civil identity,” the rising capitalist mentality of this new order produced stark class, gendered, religious, and racial distinctions that would assemble new relations and observations of what constituted proper and improper forms of life.37 The key difference in the English religious-racializing assemblage was its Protestantism, famously inaugurated by Henry VIII in the 16th century, that influenced a kind of anti-Catholic proto-racial bias aimed powerfully at the Irish. From certain English observational perspectives, particularly those of the protestant capitalist elite, Catholicism increasingly became a name for cultural backwardness and heresy. The “nominally Catholic” Irish were “heathens” devoid of morality and virtue: “their alleged wildness, lack of self-control, and tendencies toward drunkenness and violence were all evidence of insufficiency of the Catholicism to uplift people.”38 In this context, “uplift” would mean bringing the Irish into capitalist ways of life and modes of production and the assembling of a Protestant cultural ethic of individualism, private property, and material wealth. While the English’s anti-Catholicism had certainly complicated its relationship with the Spanish in the 16th century (although this relationship remained economically and politically close through commercial and diplomatic ties), a political resonance formed around shared experiences of colonial difficulties. As word spread about the Spanish struggles to subdue and make productive Amerindians in the New World, “Englishmen began to regard their problems with the Irish as similar to those presented by the Natives of the New World to the Spanish.”39 Spanish laws instituting labor regimes for the Amerindians were particularly attractive to English politicians and jurists, who encouraged the establishment of plantations in Ireland resembling the Spanish encomienda system. As with any regime of colonialization, dehumanization became the key to justifying such brutal treatment of the Irish, who were more and more observed as sub-human. By the end of the 16th century, the “English view of the Irish had solidified . . . into an image summed up by the term savage.”40 The idea of the Irish savage was a cornerstone of the particular English character of brutality. The savage was “lazy, filthy, evil, and superstitious; he worshipped idols and was given to lying stealing and murdering, double-dealing, and committing treachery.”41 The savage’s nomadic form of life and the absence of any “real” social order and legal system were posed in stark contrast to those of the English, who, from their own self-referential vantage, were the epitome

Apparatus two 143 of order and civility. The long sedimentation of the English observation of the Irish as savages was a key part of its own particular racializing assemblage grounded in what Smedley calls the English’s “extreme ethnic chauvinism.”42 By the 16th century, this ethnic chauvinism had isolated England in its “belligerent or competitive relationships with virtually all other groups with whom they had any contact . . . Even before they established settlements in the New World, the English had developed a view of the world composed of unequal groups, at the bottom of which were the ‘savages.’ ”43 It was the Irish savage as a figure of unredeemable political and social being that provided a model for the English’ own foray into the New World. While the Spanish racializing assemblage taking place in the southern geographical contexts of the New World marked the advent of New World colonialism and its racializing assemblage, in many ways the English northern context of Protestant New World capitalism marks its intensification. This is the case particularly with English perceptions of the relationship between race and slavery based on much more rigid racial distinctions and forms of enslavement that had no recourse to the kind of Catholic theological apparatus that framed the Spanish experience. As Smedley notes, “the English took the term race and molded it into a phenomenon unlike any of their competitors, structuring closed and exclusive groups out of the mélange of peoples of the Americas.”44 By the time England arrived in the New World in the early 17th century and began to establish its own colonial presence, its racial imagination grounded in English ethnic chauvinism had already been worked out through the experience with the attempted colonization of the Irish. Founded in 1607, the earliest permanent settlement of Jamestown was met with various (North) Amerindian forms of generosity and an eagerness to trade. Despite this hospitality, the English were from the beginning distrustful of any outside group. Distrust was often articulated by comparisons with the Irish. From the English perspective, both the Irish and the Amerindians were observed as nomadic savages that resisted generous offers of English civilization and true religion. The “worst blemish was their refusal to accept the civilizing blessings of Protestant Christianity, preferring instead to worship idols, spirits, and devils.”45 Violent conflict quickly ensued. In 1608 Captain John Smith carried out the first large-scale military campaign against the Powhatan tribe to extort food and labor from them that set off a centuries-long series of wars between the settlers and general Amerindian populations.46 For the English, the racial perception of Amerindian populations as savages did lead to attempts at enslavement, yet this project was eventually abandoned. This was due to many factors, including Amerindian susceptibility to European diseases and knowledge of the land and communal support that enabled greater resistance. With consistent failed attempts to enslave the Amerindian populations, and with hardly any theological or legal stipulations that would impose limits on English brutalities, it was genocidal militarism, carried out through colonial militias, that would quickly

144  Apparatuses become the English’s dominant strategy of management, control, and selfindemnification. Military historian John Grenier describes the de facto policies of settler “unlimited” and “irregular” warfare this way: For the first 200 years of our military heritage, . . . Americans depended on . . . razing and destroying enemy villages and fields; killing enemy women and children; raiding settlements for captives; intimidating and brutalizing enemy noncombatants; and assassinating enemy leaders. . . . In the frontier wars between 1607 and 1814, Americans forged two elements—unlimited war and irregular war—into their first way of war.47 Warfare through brutal militarism was the immunitary response to the English’s outside environment of Amerindians. While the “Indian wars” of American modernity would prove highly effective in terms of English projects of expansion and land theft, it would have to construct a new observational object to meet its capitalist labor needs.

English anti-blackness, chattel slavery, and white freedom Like the Spanish, the English would come to view the figure of the black African as occupying the very bottom of the ontological-racial hierarchy. Also like the Spanish, the process of making black Africans the only legitimate and legal slave source in the English New World colonies was gradual and did not come to full realization until the 17th century. Up until the 1690s, not all Africans in the English colonies were slaves and some even owned property and served in militias. Two broad developments over the course of the 17th and 18th centuries brought about a deep intensification of antiblackness that formed an assemblage with the institution of slavery. First, as mentioned above, as in the Spanish context, due to numerous factors including both Amerindian resistance and their decimation due to disease and colonial violence, North American Amerindians were eventually given up on as an adequate labor force able to meet English economic demands, creating a vacuum in which black Africans became the sole option for free labor.48 Again, the context of an emergent capitalism and its labor needs for the English’ expanding colonial holdings was the key element of this racializing assemblage. Second, various conflicts involving the laboring class’s social and political resistance to the colonial ruling classes enacted new lines of flight for the racializing assemblage that would coalesce into a discourse of whiteness. As Theodore Allen shows in The Invention of the White Race, “white identity” is essentially a classification based on the intensification of European labor hierarchies, both internal and external to the Europe.49 In the New World colonial context, white racial identity emerges as a unifying signification that functioned to prevent the ethnically diverse lower laboring classes of Europeans in America from rebelling against the land-owning English aristocracy. In the wake of events such as Bacon’s rebellion in 1676,

Apparatus two 145 the English aristocracy sought to appease its European peasant work force of a growing economic and social discontent by introducing the prospect of social mobility by way of an embrace of white identity. As Allen puts it, the solution was to establish a new birthright not only for Anglos but for every Euro-American, the white identity that “set them apart at a distance” . . . from the laboring class African Americans, and enlisted them as active . . . supporters of lifetime bondage of African Americans.50 Simply put, the wager of whiteness was that the unification of European ethnic difference against non-European identity would provide a bulwark against the threat of the ruling class enslaving fellow white Europeans. Being white came to signify a free subject, where freedom found its point of self-reference in specific distinction from slavery. This is a crucial point in terms of the broader system of Christian Identity’s coding of freedom within its modern recreation into “white Christian Identity.” Sylvester Johnson makes an important point in insisting that within the context of New World colonialism we understand freedom as an institution in the same way that slavery is described as an institution. There is a unity of distinction between slavery and freedom (slavery/freedom) which means without the one there is no other. “Slavery,” Johnson notes, “constituted both the symbolic and institutional framework that made freedom socially real.”51 The “mark” of freedom’s identity is white, and this identity is unified in its distinction against blackness as slave being (i.e. white/black). In events such as Bacon’s rebellion, white identity enacts an immunitary strategy against the threat of blackness contaminating free subjects—that is, white bodies becoming chattel property—by enacting a whole series of re-entries into the distinctions of European/non-European, Christian/nonChristian, English/Irish, etc. that would make possible the flattening out of European ethnic and religious particularity—i.e. Irish, English, Italian, Catholic, Protestant, etc.—into the singular identity of whiteness. Where once the distinction between the English and Irish was a hard division that excluded the Irish as part of English identity’s environment and therefore from access to “true” European identity, in the re-entry of the English/Irish distinction back into itself, the distinction is absorbed into the system’s own internal differentiation and posits a series of different kinds of true European identity around the signifier of whiteness. With these re-entries, one could now be white and Irish, white and Catholic, etc. The key signification here is the distinction of all these from blackness (white-x,y,z/black). To be sure, this meant that some groups absorbed into white identity had a much more difficult time in accessing and assuming the full symbolic and material privileges of whiteness. For example, up until the 19th century, Irish Catholics were generally excluded by Protestant Anglo-Europeans from enjoying the full symbolic stature of white freedom in economic, social, and political spheres. Indeed, the Irish did not assimilate fully into white identity until

146  Apparatuses the mass migration of Irish to the United States in the 20th century, where they strategically aligned themselves with the American working class that aggressively oriented itself against the idea of black American’s economic and political enfranchisement.52 The more broad point is that whiteness as an identity functions as an anti-black immunitary boundary that first and foremost prevents blackness from entering its authentic sphere of being human. For early North American colonialism, the invention of white identity meant that Africans were consistently and increasingly disenfranchised and treated more and more as objects without any kind of rights or privilege. By the turn of the 18th century, the end result was clear: the total social, legal, and political disenfranchisement of black people through their permanent status as slaves. As historian Gary Nash describes the plight of Africans in the Americas over the course of the 17th century, In rapid succession Afro-Americans lost their right to testify before a court; to engage in any kind of commercial activity, either as buyer or seller; to hold property; to participate in the political process; to congregate in public places with more than two or three of their fellows; to travel without permission; and to engage in legal marriage or parenthood. In some colonies legislatures even prohibited the right to education and religion, for they thought these might encourage the germ of freedom in slaves. . . . Gradually they reduced the slave, in the eyes of society and the law, from a human being to a piece of chattel property.53 Though the figure of the black African was always relegated to the bottom end of the ontological spectrum of Man1’s “rational” humanity, the point here is that slavery as an institution had a very gradual development that only by the end of the 17th century landed on the African as its sole object. The assemblage of the apparatuses of anti-black slavery and white supremacy provided the racial backdrop for the constitution of the United States in 1776 specifically as what Johnson and others have called the U.S. “racial state.” The United States,” Johnson notes, “was the product of white settler colonialism” and was “created as an Anglo-American republic of White-only citizens.”54 This racial state of white supremacism was also one of Christian supremacism. Though the constitution separates church and state, and not all the founding fathers considered themselves orthodox Christians, the constituted political order of white supremacy worked in concert with a Christian supremacist culture in which, functionally speaking, white identity simply was Christian Identity, and vice versa. It was this political recreation of Christian Identity into a distinctly white Christian Identity that opened up the system to greater policing and control over its observed environmental others. “The rise of a democratic republic,” Johnson notes, “inaugurated a greater alterity between whites and the dominated African or American Indian subjects living under White racial rule.”55 It was

Apparatus two 147 the twin powers of colonialism and slavery and their observational claims to racialized bodies of Amerindians and Africans that was “simultaneously a productive system in the economic sense and a foundation for establishing a body-politic by constituting a social body (Blacks and American Indians) that lay beyond the pale of inclusion.”56 Here, we seen a regime of American freedom born through these violent distinctions. In the English genocide of the North American Amerindians and the sedimentation of American chattel slavery’s exclusive use of black slave labor, the apparatus of white Christian Identity emerged fully assembled. However, this did not mean that it had achieved stability or that its strategies and tactics of control were not subject to more autoimmune transformations as it continued to encounter new outside forces and points of resistance. In the next chapter I continue my analysis of the apparatus of American anti-blackness and white supremacy, tracing what I refer to as its “biopolitical intensification” as it extends itself more and more over the human species as a biological entity.

Notes 1 Wynter, “Unsettling the Coloniality of Being,” 302; also see Sylvester Johnson, The Myth of Ham in 19th Century American Christianity: Race, Heathens, and the People of God (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2004), 30–31. 2 Johnson, Myth of Ham, 30. 3 Ibid. 4 Saint Augustine, City of God (London: Penguin Books, 1972), 650. 5 Johnson, Myth of Ham, 31. 6 The character of the Islamic slave trade in Africa is beyond the scope of this book, but it should be noted that there are substantial differences between the Islamic and Christian perspectives of black Africans. Though blacks were certainly treated as an ontologically inferior group by Arab Muslim enslavers, they were not viewed as total commodities as was the case in the Christian European/ American context. As Cedric Robinson describes, “The Islamic ideal concerning slavery was without parallel in Christian law and dogma. Islamic jurists had codified both the liabilities and the rights of slaves’ customs among the Sunni, Shia, and Maliki schools had limited the rights of masters and extended the legal, religious, and social capacities of the slave. The Koran encouraged manumission as an act of piety, in many instances the punishment for criminal acts was less harsh for the slave than the freeman, slaves might purchase their freedom and might assume second-rank offices in state administration and the religious hierarchy.” Cedric Robinson, Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1983), 95. 7 Pagden, The Fall of Natural Man, 41. 8 Wynter, “1492,” 35 (Emphasis mine). 9 Ibid., 36. 10 Robinson, Black Marxism, 2. 11 See Jodi Melamid, “Racial Capitalism,” Critical Ethnic Studies 1, no. 1 (Spring 2015): 76–85. 12 Ruth Wilson Gilmore, “Race and Globalization,” in Geographies of Global Change: Remapping the World, ed. R.J. Johnston et al. (New York: WileyBlackwell, 2002), 261. 13 Robinson, Black Marxism, 109–10.

148  Apparatuses 14 Ibid., 111. 15 Rodrick McDonald, “The Williams Thesis: A Comment on the State of Scholarship,” Caribbean Quarterly 25, no. 3 (1965): 65–66. 16 Frank Wilderson, “Gramsci’s Black Marx: Wither the Slave in Civil Society,” Social Identities 8, no. 2 (2003): 229. 17 Ibid. 18 Hortense Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe: An American Grammar Book,” Diacritics 17, no. 2 (1987): 67. 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 44. 22 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby Papa’s Maybe,” 67. 23 Ibid. 24 Wolfe, Before the Law, 50. 25 Esposito, Immunitas, 121. 26 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby Papa’s Maybe,” 67. 27 Dionne Brand, A Map to the Door of No Return: Notes to Belonging (Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2001), 25. 28 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby Papa’s Maybe,” 68. 29 See Marie Jenkins Schwartz, Birthing a Slave: Motherhood and Medicine in the Antebellum South (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2010). 30 Toni Morrison, Beloved (New York: Vintage, 2004), 16–17. 31 Robinson, Black Marxism, 118. 32 Sylvester Johnson, African American Religions, 1500–2000: Colonialism, Democracy, and Freedom (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015), 130–31. 33 Ibid., 131. 34 Audrey Smedley, Race in North America: Origin and Evolution of a Worldview Second Edition (Boulder: Westview Press, 1998), 54. 35 Ibid. 36 Ibid., 55. 37 Ibid., 52. 38 Ibid., 59. 39 Ibid., 60. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid. 42 Ibid., 106. 43 Ibid. 44 Ibid., 70. 45 Ibid., 87. 46 Ibid., 78ff; also see Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples History of the United States (Boston: Beacon Press, 2014), 60ff. 47 John Grenier, The First Way of War: American War Making on the Frontier (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005), 5. 48 Smedley, Race in North America, 104–5. 49 Theodore Allen, The Invention of the White Race, Volume 2: The Origin of Racial Oppression in Anglo-America (New York: Verso, 2012). 50 Ibid., 561. 51 Johnson, African American Religion, 167. 52 See Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995), chapter 4. 53 Gary Nash, Red, White, and Black: The Origins of Racism in Colonial America (Columbus: Charles E. Merrill, 1992), 159.

Apparatus two 149 54 Sylvester Johnson, Katherine Gin Lum, and Rhys H. Williams, “What is ‘American’ in American Religion?” Center for the Study of Religion and American Culture, 2014, accessed October 5, 2019, http://raac.iupui.edu/forum/ what-american-american-religion-february-2014/. 55 Johnson, African American Religion, 161. 56 Ibid., 167.

6 Apparatus three Race and biopolitical intensification in America

From the observational perspective of white Christian Identity, being human in the West means being observed as a racial being positioned within a series of mobile ontological distinctions between “fully human, not-quite human, or sub-human.” While the two formal poles of this racial series are constituted by the white/black distinction, there is a whole middle scale of racial being that fills in the “not-quite (fully) human” category. These positions are always observed in their relative proximity to whiteness. As I have covered, the paradigmatic metric for these positions in the 16th and 17th century was European standards of rationality and political citizenship within a European Christian state. Forms of human life that did not measure up to White Christian Identity’s standard of rationality and political identity—evident in perceived deficiencies in aesthetic, scientific, economic, political, and religious categories and practices—were distinguished as lesser and improper forms of human life. In the 18th and 19th centuries, white Christian Identity’s coding of “true” humanity would transform itself in the wake of scientific revolutions in the biological sciences. In Wynter’s terms, in the 16th and 17th century, Man1’s apparatus of “rational truth” had conditioned the emergence of the human sciences and an affirmative human-centric (as opposed to theo-centric) paradigm of deductive reasoning based on observation, classification, and comparison. As she theorizes it, the most significant contrast between Medieval Christian Identity and Man1 is the severing of a theo-centric worldview and the emergence of philosophical and scientific articulations of human knowledge as open ended and perpetually perfectible. Man1’s paradigm of “rational truth” would articulate human knowledge as “cognately open— because . . . imperatively self-correcting.”1 In contrast to a theo-centric paradigm of knowledge that closes off human cognition from producing its own order of knowledge, which was always subordinated to divine (biblical) revelation, Man1’s observation of the human and the earth refigured itself an open-ended knowledge with infinite room for new discovery and more precise description. Its metric of truth was increasingly understood as a “secular-scientific” as opposed to theological. This cognitive openness served the emerging discourse of the secular and became a further comparative

Apparatus three 151 metric for making distinctions against Amerindians and Africans as stuck in degrees of “religious” or superstitious conceptual frameworks that prevented them from exercising a truly rational mode of human knowledge. The human sciences provided an observational perspective for analyzing and classifying human differences within a “natural scientific conceptual space” that eventually opened up the possibility of a Darwinian conception of a purely biological human species. As Wynter notes, “this conceptual space [of science], then, was therefore to make possible Darwin’s epistemological rupture or leap. . . [into a] purely biocentric version of humanness.”2 Wynter describes this new biocentric paradigm as “Man2,” which names the reinvention of Man1 as a fully “degodded” human being determined entirely by evolution and natural selection. A biocentric conception of human being would have profound effects on the category of race. Though the hierarchy of rational capacity would still remain an important metric, race was now linked to the biological category of human hereditary and the auto-religious story of natural selection and its “deselection” of weaker races. The narrative of selection/deselection would reconfigure the hierarchy of race and its borders of “proper” and “improper” being into natural history. This is where “whiteness” and “blackness” become the symbolic pillars of a natural-evolutionary hierarchy of being, representing the remaking of the phantasm of white Christian Identity out of its (selfimposed) demise as an explicitly theologically-articulated identity. The new knowledge of evolution and its mechanisms of natural selection provided an equally transcendent, and therefore equally (auto-) religious, story of the “extrahuman” agent of evolutionary determination that immunized white Christian Identity’s phantasmatic sovereignty as the authentic representative of a biologically-evolutionarily determined proper human being. It is the observation of evolution and natural selection that divides the human species into “biological races.” Out of Man2’s paradigm of the biocentric human would emerge the story of human evolution where the black African would be the consistent figure of evolution’s deselection of “weaker” and “improper” modes of human being. This would be articulated in the story of human ascension toward Homo sapiens from its previous evolutionary stage as pre-human “monkey-ape.” In this ascension, a section of the primate class of homo sapiens would be “selected” to inherit a fully developed human being while others would be deselected and relegated to an “underdeveloped,” and thus “improper,” human being. Those of “black African heredity” would be narrated as deselected from the evolutionary process that resulted in the full humanity of European whiteness, “ ‘held to a mere state’ in the slow process of evolution from monkey into man.”3 In the same sense, those of European descent (the white biological race), “allegedly proven by the very nature of their dominant position in the global order over all other groups,” would embody the authentic human form seen as a kind of natural telos, which is to say “extrahumanly determined goal” of the evolutionary process.4

152  Apparatuses At the turn of the 20th century, W.E.B. Dubois called this division of selected/deselected the “color line,” which he announced as the primary problem for inter-human relations in a context of global white supremacy.5 Read within the systems framework, the color line names a key immunitary technology-technique of white supremacy and anti-blackness and the categorical racial distinctions that separate whiteness from its non-white others. The color line functions in the same way as previous instantiations of Christian Identity’s definitive distinctions such as Christian blood/nonChristian blood and rational European Christian/sub-rational others. With Man2’s biocentric human, the color line marks a specifically biological racial opposition that provides a reconstructed racial instantiation of Christian Identity’s earlier constitutive opposition of “true” and “untrue” human existence. Black people, as the negative image of white people, as “problems” for white sovereignty,6 come “to reoccupy the earlier signifying place of the earlier torrid and Western Hemisphere,” representing the “damned of the earth” within the “logic of the contemporary globalized and purely secular variant of the [Christian] culture of the West.”7 The color line, in other words, is the new system boundary around which white Christian Identity reconstructs and sediments itself as biocentric white supremacy and anti-blackness. Here we can observe another reconstructed border of Christian Identity’s (phantasmatic) sovereign self qua biological racial self. The color line grounds a new kind of “project of purity,” a new metric of categorical distinction and observation in which white Christian Identity assembles a concept of human representation determining that “any identity or position [is] one thing or another . . . by way of a distinction or heading that has come to be called ‘race.’ ”8 In order to protect itself from the threat of biological contamination within its racial purity, white Christian Identity gives itself “a telos of preventing, or justifying the preclusion of, the mixture or intermixture of any kind among the races.”9 As a function of its immune system, it is this telos that activates new technologies and assemblages of white-antiblack racism and the resulting hierarchy of biocentric conceptions of being that discriminates bodies as either biologically selected or deselected, pure or impure.

Biopolitical man(2) The shift toward a biocentric paradigm was not limited to the Darwinian scientific revolution but also represents the culmination of a broad political movement beginning with reason-of-state’s self-governing political subject (homo politicus) that increasingly weakened the hold of a transcendent and theologically grounded political authority. Wynter’s understanding of the shift from Man1 to Man2 is mirrored by Foucault’s genealogy of biopower, or “power over life,” and the shift from the political paradigm of sovereignty to the paradigm of biopolitics.10 Coinciding with the rise of reason-of-state

Apparatus three 153 and its “art of government,” as well as the rise of the human and natural sciences, a “biopolitics of the population” emerges in the 18th century and displaces the paradigm of sovereign power. For Foucault, biopower introduces a new kind of political technique and strategy specifically in distinction from a sovereign “right of death.” Whereas sovereign power is centered on legal subjects (i.e. the theo-juridical subject of the medieval scholastic order of knowledge) and the sovereign’s absolute right to kill (“the power to take life or let live”), biopower is centered on harnessing life itself as a reservoir for a whole range of productive capacities spanning sexual, social, political, and economic spheres of activity (“the power to make live and let die”).11 Aimed at harnessing what is articulated as the bodily-biological capacities of the human species toward the state’s ends (i.e. reason-of-state), biopower emerges as “the set of mechanisms through which the basic biological features of the human species became the object of a political strategy, of a general strategy of power.”12 Biopower connects Man2’s biocentric conception of human being to the two specific forms of disciplinary power and governmentality. The former is centered on an “anatomo-politics” of the individual body that approaches the body as a complex machine able to be made docile in order to fit within strict and rigid institutional and social boundaries. In disciplinary society, individual bodies and their organization come into view as the primary problem for power. Disciplinary power aims at organizing individual bodies according to a strict spatial distribution throughout society that conditions various modes of intervention and subjectification. Within disciplinary society, individual bodies are slotted into a grid comprised of schools, prisons, hospitals, factories, and other institutional forms that produce new techniques of control through separation, alignment, serialization, and panoptic surveillance. In contrast, governmentality does not focus on individual bodies, but observes and intervenes into the “massified” body of the population and its own “vital” processes such as birth rates, life span, hygiene, and production of wealth and economic circulation. This happens in isomorphic step with reason-of-state, specifically in terms of the state’s need to manage, control, and make productive its own “living” body-politic that depends on political intervention in order to survive and thrive. With governmentality, “political economy” emerges as the state’s primary metric of state “health.” Political economy is focused on the creation and expansion of wealth through the production of “new networks of continuous and multiple relations between population, territory, and wealth.”13 As Agamben explores in The Kingdom and the Glory, western political economies of governmentality have their roots in the Christian paradigm of theological economy. Emerging through Christianity’s development of Trinitarian theology during its first few centuries, this paradigm provides a contrasting concept of theological power with that of the transcendent sovereignty of God. Theological economy is grounded in the immanent performance of divine power in the Holy Spirit that extends its reach far beyond the limitations of the sovereign

154  Apparatuses paradigm. Whereas theological sovereignty (i.e. God the Father) undergirds the modern theory of state sovereignty based around the sovereign’s power to suspend the law in the state of exception, theological economy undergirds the modern field of “biopolitics up to the current triumph of economy and government over every other aspect of social life.”14 As the secular incarnation of theological economy, governmentality functions as a kind of katechonic “providential machine” that manages the contingency of the state’s living body.15

Power’s intensification As Jeffrey Nealon explores in his illuminating book Foucault Beyond Foucault, broad shifts in political power paradigms—such as the one from disciplinary societies to governmentality—are the effect of the intensification of power that occurs when resistance becomes effective enough to warrant the assemblage of new techniques and strategies.16 These shifts resonate with the logic of autoimmunity: as power seeks to protect itself from change and transformation through intensifying its force and reach in the face of resistance, it inevitably transforms itself as it forges more and more points of relational contact with its others. In Discipline and Punish, for example, the panoptic modality of disciplinary power is described by Foucault in such terms: the panoptic schema makes any apparatus of power more intense . . . it assures its efficacity by its preventative character, its continuous functioning and its automatic mechanism . . . it arranges things in such a way that the exercise of power is not added on from the outside, like a rigid, heavy restraint to the function it invests, but is so subtly present in them as to increase their efficiency by itself increasing its own points of contact.17 While disciplinary power starts with the individual body, the intensification of the panoptic disciplinary apparatus as it faces more and more environmental contingency means that it actually becomes less centered on the literal, individual body as it shifts to the “massified” body of the population. In its ever-shifting reactions to the contingencies of the individual, aleatory body as a targeted object of control, discipline opens itself to more and more relations as part of ensuring and maximizing its effectiveness. The control of individual bodies transitions to a control of the collective body. As disciplinary power intensifies itself farther and farther beyond the limits of the individual body, it becomes more effective while simultaneously becoming less recognizable as disciplinary power. When the intensity of disciplinary power reaches a critical mass, it begins to morph and assemble into new forms of control that in turn begin to produce their own distinct tactics and new relations. Whereas disciplinary

Apparatus three 155 power works on individuals through the mediation of institutional sites of training and reform, governmentality goes beyond discipline’s reach by intensifying its relation to the body so as to locate power directly in the biological processes of life itself. Discipline works to control bodies through mapping them into rigidly ordered institutions of bodily training and making them docile; governmentality names an even more intense instantiation of power that runs through the whole of society, targeting the very level of life’s biological processes, massified into the population, so that the individual within the population is maximally subjected to power’s controlling reach. One way to understand this intensification is to compare the ways disciplinary power and governmentality deal with criminality. Disciplinary power specifies the criminal or the delinquent through the mechanism of the law’s observation of individual juridical subjects. The subject either breaks the law or does not, and the criminal is treated as someone who has clearly transgressed the law and is in need of reform. Governmentality, as Nealon points out, is “born from the intensification of a particular strand of panoptic disciplinary power, the normative medical or rehabilitative gaze that seeks to ‘understand’ the causes of crime and criminality.”18 Governmentality intensifies the place of the norm, which “does not ‘repress’ anything, but . . . introduces a heightened productivity into the disciplinary apparatus.”19 Preemptively policing the criminal or delinquent becomes the primary objective. In other words, governmentality emphasizes the prevention and regulation of criminality rather than the criminal act itself. Within this paradigm, it becomes much more difficult to carve out spaces of reprieve. A governmental strategy of control fills in all the spaces that were once out of the reach of disciplinary power. In a fully realized biopolitical society, spaces where individuals could once find refuge from the reach of controlling power have been uncovered and infiltrated. In his late essay “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” Gilles Deleuze theorizes a similar transition from disciplinary power to what he calls “control society.” Whereas in disciplinary society, the individual could step outside the physical walls of the factory, be discharged from the prison and hospital, and graduate from school, in a biopolitical society, these outside spaces and conclusions to treatment and training have essentially been eliminated. Within control society, the traditional institutional “enclosures” of discipline—the prison, school, factory, and hospital—find substitutions that allow for disciplinary power to continue its operation of training and control under different forms that are not necessarily institutional in nature. The mechanisms of control society give “the position of any element within an open environment at any given instant.”20 For example, the traditional disciplinary institution of the prison system will “attempt to find penalties of ‘substitution,’ at least for petty crimes, and the use of electronic collars that force the convicted person to stay at home during certain hours.”21 The electronic collar modifies the institution’s limited ability of enclosure and attaches it to the full range of movement that the subject possesses. Movement and distance

156  Apparatuses are no longer hindrances to power’s reach. The institutions of discipline are still around, of course, but have adapted in terms of new practices and modes of power. The prison modifies itself so as to find a substitutionary space and supplement power’s new intensified form of biopolitical control, making infinite surveillance and technologies of self-control normative parts of the expanding mechanisms of the prison. Here, discipline’s reach is so intensified that it becomes ubiquitous at the level of life itself and therefore is no longer recognizable as discipline, meaning that it has morphed into a different form.

Biopolitical racism beyond the European frame Racism plays a particularly important role in biopolitics and control society, even an essential one. This is because the “life” of the population that biopolitics aims at protecting and immunizing is indecipherable outside of categories of racial identity. Outlined in his 1976 College de France lectures Society Must Be Defended, Foucault shows how the shift from sovereign power into biopower sets the conditions for the emergence of a racistbiological discourse of state racism. Within a biopolitical context, racism functions as mechanism of differentiation that utilizes the evolutionarily determined “selected/deselected” racial binary in order to observe populations through distinctions of good and bad, pure and impure, higher and lower, true and false, and so on. Racism establishes the color line that separates “what must live and what must die.”22 As Foucault outlines, without referencing these markers of distinction first worked out in New World colonialism and slavery, by the end of the 19th century, the modern European nation-state comes to be defined in large part by a biopolitical state racism functioning as a protective mechanism aimed at managing the true population’s enemies and preventing them from contaminating or disrupting its constructed and mythological borders of biocentric identity. By far the most cited example of biopolitical racism in the standard literature, from Foucault to Agamben to Esposito, is the European holocaust and the genocidal Nazi state. For these authors, the focus overwhelmingly falls on the mid-20th century era of Nazism as the central point of reference for biopolitical racism. Foucault characterizes the Nazi eugenic project of racial purification as the absolute culmination of the “blood myth” beginning with the Medieval obsession with Christian blood. Nazism was “doubtless the most cunning and the most naïve . . . combination of the fantasies of blood and the paroxysms of disciplinary power.” The biopolitical project of protecting the German Volk’s blood purity led to an “unrestricted state control” carried out through the “systematic genocide of others” as well as exposing the population to the risk of “total sacrifice.”23 As Esposito elaborates, the sacrificial fantasy of the absolute immunization of the German volk was ultimately a politics of autoimmune state suicide. This is most dramatically seen in Hitler’s “telegram 71,” where, in the face of the Third

Apparatus three 157 Reich’s imminent defeat by Soviet forces, he ordered “the destruction of the means of subsistence of the German people, who had shown their weakness.”24 The biopolitical racist state is an autoimmune state in which the phantasm of the sovereign body-politic is “sanctioned only by the death of everyone,” which is to say that the “life” of the volk—its phantasm of the sovereign self—is sanctioned by the sacrifice of the merely living.25 Foucault suggests that this autoimmune-suicidal drive is inherent in all modern states, but he, along with Agamben and Esposito, does not explore this claim beyond the European context and its privileging of the Holocaust as the paradigmatic event of biopolitical racism. The extreme and gratuitous nature of the Nazi context certainly provides a crucially important site for biopolitical analysis. Such (rightful) attention, however, has virtually relegated anti-blackness and colonial white supremacy out of the biopolitical frame, specifically in the context of the Americas and the United States. Histories of colonialism, the middle passage, chattel slavery, and Jim Crow are generally not to be found in standard biopolitical genealogies.26 The elisions of colonialism and anti-blackness are a major problem for biopolitical thought that do serious disservice to thinking the full scope of modern race and racism, particularly anti-blackness and white supremacy. The Christian element has also been traditionally obscured. By making Europe and the Holocaust the primary or paradigmatic sites of biopolitical racism, the long history of Christian Identity’s immunitary violence against its colonial external others is excluded as apparently irrelevant, or at least as “functioning elsewhere,”27 to European biopolitics. This exclusion ends up producing an extremely myopic frame of biopolitical analysis, limiting biopolitical forms of racist state control to what Fanon referred to as Europe’s “inter-family quarrels.”28 While these inter-European relationships of violence are crucial for understanding biopolitical racism, the exclusion or bracketing of the global European colonial system through which the anti-black and anti-Indigenous apparatuses of racial violence and control were largely worked out simply functions to reproduce notions of Eurocentrism and white normativity. Or, in other words, it functions as the reproduction of the observational system of white European identity/ environment. As Alexander Weheliye asks, “how would Foucault’s and Agamben’s theories of modern violence differ if they took the Middle Passage as their point of departure rather than remaining entrapped within the historiographical cum philosophical precincts of fortress Europe?”29 One answer to this question is that the biopolitical frame would be extended well beyond the borders of inter-European conflict, finding a more global grounding of the vast reality of biopolitical colonial racism, which includes the mechanisms that made possible the Holocaust but understands that these mechanisms were antecedently “perfected in colonialism, Indigenous genocide, racialized indentured servitude, and racial slavery.”30 Even the most surface level reflection on the canon of biopolitical thought coming from European writer’s impressive projects that provide incredibly detailed

158  Apparatuses and obscure accounts of the history of European racism, the production of bare life, and sovereignty, one is left simply maddened by the exclusion of blackness from their frames of analysis. The defense that Agamben, Foucault, Esposito, et al. are consciously working within the limited framework of European history does not stand, as it is this very history from which the colonial apparatuses of anti-blackness and white supremacy are assembled, a history that indelibly links the Holocaust and anti-Semitism to a broader reality of global racialization, anti-blackness, and colonial violence. In order to do political ontological justice to the issue of race and anti-blackness, what is needed in order to move beyond mainstream biopolitical critique is a much deeper account of the apparatus of (racialized) Christian Identity’s anti-blackness. This is not to say that there is no difference between biopolitical forms of racism across differing geographical and cultural contexts, but rather that there is needed a reframing of the history of biopowerbiopolitics within a broader account of racialized Christian Identity.

American biopolitics: the intensification of white supremacy While the full colonial and anti-black genealogy of biopolitics and its grounding in white Christian Identity is certainly important, a genealogy that I have very broadly outlined through my general diachronic (albeit incomplete) account of the assemblage of white Christian Identity, such an exhaustive account is beyond the scope of this book. As a gesture forward for this history, and to move it toward a modern American frame, I suggest that the post-civil war context of the United States, which will be the focus of the remainder of this chapter, provides an interesting and illuminating context through which to explore how biopolitical racism functions and evolves along with the assemblage of the apparatus of anti-blackness and white supremacy in the U.S. Though biopower and biopolitical racism were certainly at work in the context of chattel slavery, particularly in practices such as “slave breeding” that I discussed in the previous chapter, it is after the legal abolition of chattel slavery that the apparatuses of white supremacy deploy a full-blown biopolitical set of techniques aimed at sustaining its power within a new legal environment. In this context, population becomes the political category that marks a particular distinction between the pre- and post- civil war history in America, particularly because of the fourteenth amendment’s inclusion of former slaves into the official citizenrypopulation. The political inclusion of emancipated slaves posed a particular problem for white supremacy as it now had to develop and assemble new modes of keeping the “true” white population distinct and protected by the “untrue” and excluded elements (former slaves-African Americans) now threating its purity. As the remainder of this chapter will explore, the apparatus of white supremacy in the post-civil war United States provides an illuminating context through which to trace the intensification of biopower aimed at the control of environmental black (and other non-white) bodies.

Apparatus three 159 Within this (admittedly massive) genealogial frame, I identify two general paradigms of white supremacy since the end of chattel slavery in the United States, correlating to different strategies of white supremacist governmentality that are marked with differing modes of intensity. The first phase lasts roughly from the end of the Civil War and Reconstruction until the Civil Rights Movement in the 1960s. This phase is marked by the legal structure of Jim Crow and the socially normative reality of an explicit and highly visible white supremacy and state racism. The second phase begins around the end of the Civil Rights Movement and continues to unfold into the present. This phase is marked by the biopolitical concealment of white supremacy and the liberal discourse of “multiculturalism,” or “post-racialism.” This phase does not represent a clean break from the technologies and tactics of the first, as explicit and visible tactics of white supremacy are certainly still at work in certain discursive and institutional realms. Rather, the second phase marks the introduction of a new set of power-knowledge relations that emerge out of the intensification of prior tactics and that shift and reconfigure the norms of white supremacy in significant ways.31

First paradigm: explicit white supremacy, spectacular violence, and disciplinary order The first paradigm of post-slavery biopolitical racism begins roughly from the end of the Civil War when slaves are granted the legal standing of citizen, thus legally becoming part of the population of the territory. Whereas during the chattel slavery era black slaves were observed by the legal and political systems as outside its constituted order of citizenship and therefore fully distinct from the official population, in the post-civil war context these systems begin to observe African Americans as fully incorporated legal and political subjects. Of course, and this is a crucial point, this incorporation does not mean that the law somehow ceases to be anti-black and that this legal and political equality translated into equal access to rights and privileges. The legal and political observation of African Americans was (and is) still structurally coupled with the white life/black death distinction that continues to sustain white immunity through the brutal control and governance of blackness. Following the legal emancipation of slaves, the system of white supremacy shifted its general strategy and began to be carry out its reproduction primarily through publicly normative and legally “sanctioned” institutional, political, and social fields designed to allow white racism to freely unleash practices and strategies of direct and excessive terror within a new environment that included the legal prohibition against such force and terror. This shows up clearly in the “separate but equal” clause of the Plessy vs. Ferguson decision. The “equal” part of the clause is the legal observation that African Americans are technically incorporated into full legal and political subjectivity, which includes—however tenuously prevented and virtually impossible to achieve—access to voting rights, legal services,

160  Apparatuses and political representation. The “separate” part is an observation meant to underwrite the broader reality that black legal and politically subjectivity is intensely structurally coupled to the anti-black operations of other systems that fall outside of the law’s jurisdiction. For example, following reconstruction the extra-legal terrorist organization named the Ku Klux Klan operated with legal impunity as it carried out a white supremacist immunity function. Instances of African Americans being lynched for almost any reason that upset the wrong white person are examples of this kind of “extralegal” biopolitical mechanism that functions to keep white identity pure and unscathed from the threat of black contamination. From the post-Civil War period through roughly the Civil Rights period in the 1960s, lynching was a highly effective extra-legal mechanism that reinforced white supremacy’s power over black life via a strategy of public terror. White supremacy exercised a power that invested the public with a kind of extra-legal sovereign power that could literally decide at will whether or not black people were killed or allowed to live. The violence of the lynching tree reflects the order of white supremacy’s fantasy of “power over black life,” performed through excessive and disproportionate acts centered on individual bodies, meant to “forcefully [remind] blacks of their inferiority and powerlessness.”32 As a function of the system of white supremacy, lynching occurs as a function of the observational technology of white supremacy that produces norms of real violence through, for example, accusations of criminal activity or trumped up charges of sexual transgression against the integrity of white women’s innocent “purity.” Taking Foucault’s political distinction between sovereignty and biopolitics seriously, lynching is not actually an operation of state sovereign power as it is not a “right to kill” sanctioned by the law, but a kind of biopolitical act of white immunization performed as the selfcleansing of the “true” population. However, the strategy mirrors that of sovereign power’s tactic of spectacular and highly visible violence against its enemies. Like the torture of the King’s guilty subject on the scaffold, the excessiveness of torture and the intensity of the physical pain expressed through highly dramatic and visible screams and screeches of the black victim is the “proof” of his or her guilt and the reinforcement of white supremacy’s ultimate power as an apparatus. “In the ‘excesses’ of torture,” Foucault says, “a whole economy of power is invested.”33 Of course, the first post-Civil War phase of white supremacy is not limited to or even primarily defined by spectacular expressions of power expressed through extreme violence against individual bodies. Coupled with its violent excesses, white supremacy was also displayed in more banal aspects throughout society such as the norm of segregation and other more quotidian realities of Jim Crow order, which was the legal set of laws that enforced and legitimated the social and political segregation between whites and blacks. From separate drinking fountains to the suppression of black voting rights, Jim Crow provided a grid of segregation that clearly marked off where certain bodies belonged and certain bodies did not. In more broad

Apparatus three 161 terms encapsulating the logic of power at work, Jim Crow can also be generally identified as disciplinary. With the legal prohibition of chattel slavery, legally emancipated slaves were absorbed en masse into disciplinary institutions such as the sharecropping industry, the factory, school systems, and prisons that functioned in varying degrees as training sites of black docile bodies. Ensuring that freed slaves would not escape the power of white supremacy’s social, political, and economic reach solidified during the constitutive era of chattel slavery, African Americans were captured into a disciplinary system that transformed ex-slaves into a productive and legally legitimated labor force that continued to serve the ultimate interests of white political and social economy. The disciplinary grids and institutions in which African Americans found themselves reinforced the color line that segregated African Americans from the “true” white makeup of the population. In Foucault’s biopolitical terms, the segregations of the color line name forms of “indirect murder”—“the fact of exposing someone to death, increasing the risk of death for some people, or, quite simply, political death, expulsion, rejection, and so on”34—against the African American population that ensure the life of the “true” white population. Here, the “make live and let die” of biopolitics takes on a clear anti-black function. The African American factory worker, domestic worker, sharecropper, and prisoner were simply “allowed” to die as they were excluded from the general political and economic benefits (healthcare, pensions, voting rights, legal recourse, etc.) that ensured the “health” of the white population.

Second paradigm: post-civil rights and the strategy of indirect murder The second paradigm of post-slavery white supremacy begins somewhere around the end of the civil rights movement in the 1960s, with the dismantling of the legal structure of Jim Crow. The distinction of a pre- and post- civil rights context is not meant to ignore the highly complex historical period spanning the civil war until the 1960s. The intensification of white supremacy, which in general has made white supremacy more and more diffuse and therefore concealed throughout society, runs through a highly complex process of change that certainly cannot be captured fully within two very broad historical periods. My focus here is on one significant and highly consequential shift that becomes particularly clear in a post-civil rights movement. This is the shift of a normative discourse of “anti-racism” that, as I argue, actually ends up providing white Christian Identity with a new assembly of power-knowledge relations and technologies that enable it to reconstruct its apparatus of white supremacy in the face of black resistance. The civil rights movement, which finds a symbolic origin around 1954 with the Brown v. the Board of Education, was a highly organized and unprecedented movement of black resistance in the United States. Through its various legal victories and its political and social critiques on the blatant

162  Apparatuses injustice of Jim Crow, one effect was the transformation of norms in the United States regarding the public acceptability of explicitly racist discourse and excessively violent acts of racism. The transition from the post-Civil War phase to the next can be understood according to two significant developments. First, in the wake of the civil rights movement and the changes in the law represented by legal decisions such as the civil rights act of 1964 and the voting rights act of 1965, the explicit language of white supremacy and its public displays of excessive violence slowly began to decline as a visible and normative aspect of public discourse. Much like the raw display of violent force that defined sovereignty in the 16th and 17th centuries transitioned into the much more diffuse and efficient power of discipline, so too has the power of white supremacy recalibrated itself into a more subtle and diffuse form, at least in part. In the post-civil rights United States, the highly visible and explicit relationship of brutal violence centered directly upon the individual black body, while certainly still deployed through various mechanisms such as the anti-black function of the police, is no longer centrally determinative of white supremacy’s ongoing and broadly-based strategy of power. This is to say that white racism in the United States is no longer centered on spectacularly violent displays of public violence against individual black bodies. To be clear, public violence directed against individual black bodies are certainly still a highly effective and visible reality of anti-black power, and in the age of “Trumpism,” we are clearly seeing a turn back toward the authorization of explicit racism within political and social contexts. However, I suggest that it is still too early to tell the longterm effect that Trumpism will have on the discourse and apparatus of race in America other than its confirmation that white supremacy remains at the center of American identity. The more pressing analytical task here is to think through how we can still observe the reproduction and recreation of white supremacy when the law’s ambivalence to acts of extreme racial violence at the individual level as well as general public acceptability of them has diminished significantly. In contemporary United States, for example, the lynching of a black person in the south would most likely be prosecuted as a “hate crime” murder, and there would also most likely be a large-scale public condemnation of such an act carried out through the mass media. For example, the brutal murder of African American James Byrd by three white supremacists in Jasper, Texas in 1998 was met with huge public outcry at the national level. All three of the murderers were arrested and convicted in legal courts, with two out of the three receiving the death penalty and the other a life sentence without parole.35 Fifty years prior, this kind of public reaction was unheard of, and the norm was for white murderers of black victims to legally walk free. From 1900 to 1930, only 0.8% of lynching resulted in a criminal conviction.36 Up until the civil rights movement, the non-punishment of explicit—that is, highly visible—white supremacist violence remained the norm. This is no longer the case in the contemporary context. Aside from

Apparatus three 163 normative police violence against black people, which still remains relatively immune from legal prosecution,37 white mob violence carried out by non-state actors is not something that regularly occurs or is accepted as normative by mainstream white society. The dramatic shifts in general public and legal relations to explicit white supremacist violence is not just an effect of a successful civil rights movement or some sort of liberal change of heart across the general public—although the legal, political, and social impacts of the Civil Rights Movement have certainly had an effect. Rather, as I suggest, this is part of the apparatus of white supremacy’s intensification as it becomes further and further invested in biopower. The intensification of white supremacy in this paradigm plays out in its attempted self-concealment as a meaningful socio-political reality. As it develops more and more points of power-knowledge coinciding with a biopolitical strategy of power’s saturation within the population itself, the apparatus of white supremacy is transformed through new technologies of control. This is most evident in its changing strategies of “indirect murder.” In contrast to more explicitly racial-based state policies of Jim Crow that legally sanctioned a field of biological racial difference, in the contemporary biopolitical racial frame, the law itself no longer operates in terms of an explicit aim of social and political racial order and purity based on a “separate but equal” paradigm, but rather is performed through an ostensibly “fair” economic plane of opportunity that ends up reconstructing a kind of “color line without color.” The centralization of political economy as the state’s primary political object of concern is an important backdrop to this change in strategy. The most common name given to this centralization is “neoliberalism.” In the 20th century, the emergence of the discourse of neoliberalism emerged as the dominant political-economic ideology of the capitalist west.38 Emerging through the political-economic revolution that began in the late 1970s with the Reagan-Thatcher disavowal of “big government” and the ideological valorization of the “free market” as the one true hope of economic expansion and prosperity, neoliberalism “proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong private property rights, free markets, and free trade.”39 “Human well-being” is essentially a code for the “health” of the biopolitical population that within this context has its ultimate metric in the creation of economic competition aimed at the production of material wealth. Resonating with the biopolitical investment in the productive capacity of populations, conceived as a living entity, neoliberalism attempts to harness every facet of human life as valuable to the market, as a potential source of wealth creation. In this frame, the free market takes the symbolic place of God as the source of all truth and providence, presiding over all spaces of living and acting, public and private, and elicits constant input through participation. Social media and the perpetual production of data for capitalist corporate interests (advertising, speculation, valuation, et cetera) is

164  Apparatuses a quintessential neoliberal activity. Corporate freedom to extract value in whatever way proves lucrative, without governmental interference or regulation, is a conceptual cornerstone. Because it is the objective and ultimately “blind” reality of the market that provides the real means for opportunity, neoliberalism (especially as an economic system) has no direct observational preference for any one group over another, including racial groups. Within a neoliberal political economy, in terms of a normative perspective on human potentiality, race supposedly has no bearing on human social, political, and economic outcomes. As long as one performs fealty to the market, is willing to invest their labor power creatively, and perhaps has a little luck, they (gender neutral of course) will be able to craft a life of stability, wealth, and prosperity. The market, as the story goes, rewards those that maximize their participation. In this theory of meritocracy, an African American person has just as much of an equal and fair chance at success as a white person. Neoliberalism, in other words, conditions a kind of “post-racial market colorblindness” based on a political and economic “equal playing field” that the market supposedly provides. In reality, however, an “equal” economic and political playing field is simply a new discursive tactic that conceals and “naturalizes” the biopolitical structure of indirect racial murder. There is an abundance of sociological data to support this. For example, Dierdre Royster addresses this problematic directly in her Race and the Invisible Hand.40 Royster’s basic question comes down to this: what happens on an “equal playing field” when race is thrown into the mix, particularly blackness? Tracking a multi-racial Baltimore trade school and the quest for employment for some of its graduates, she shows that black people are overwhelmingly excluded from the benefits of the “free market” in terms of access to jobs and opportunities. The conventional wisdom for black people that are seeking to find secure careers is to get a trade of some sort. If one has a particular set of skills in a needed and predominant area of industry, so the thinking goes, one will always have a job lined up. As Royster shows, however, even if one acquires the skill set, getting a job is not exactly an easy thing to do if you happen to be black. Royster shows that the African American students in the trade school had a much harder time securing employment than did their white counterparts. This despite the fact, on the whole, they outperformed the white students in hard work, attendance, and grades. Whites, as Royster shows, have the benefit of an extensive history of racial discrimination in the trade fields, and they also have access to a whole network of connections and resources that helped them secure employment. Scholars such as Royster refute the idea that the “free market” as an objective force that simply levels the playing field and purges race of its significance for outcomes in employment, education, income, and opportunity. Royster is addressing employment opportunities, but this is only the tip of the iceberg in terms of black exclusion from the market’s supposed objectivity. Even if black people were to see real gains in employment opportunity

Apparatus three 165 and equality, as Melvin Oliver and Thomas Shapiro show, this doesn’t really get at the “big picture” of race’s ongoing factor as a kind of predestined political-economic fate of exclusion. In Black Wealth/White Wealth, Oliver and Shapiro show that the path to equality and actual economic progress for African Americans does not begin or end with issues of income, but rather wealth. Despite the apparent rise of a “black middle class” over the last forty years in the United States, African Americans have not experienced increases in wealth. Even if Royster’s trade school subjects were to acquire employment, this doesn’t answer the deeper problem of systemic racial discrimination that structures the general economy of life chances and stability. Even if African Americans were to experience a significant increase in waged jobs, they still would not possess the wealth that provides longterm and inter-generational stability and privilege. Wealth is the surplus that allows people to build assets and secure resources that will still be there even if income goes away. Wealth is what affords long-term financial stability, not income. The gap between white wealth and black wealth is massive. In the United States, African American families still “possess a dime for every dollar of White families’ wealth.”41 The wealth divide, cut along the color line, reflects the structure of white supremacy as something that is inherited from one generation to the next. This structure has been built by a calculated multi-generational process of wealth build up by whites that has deliberately left blacks out of the opportunities and resources that it takes to build wealth, resources that are also passed down from generation to generation. These two examples, which are a drop in the bucket of white-black social, political, and economic disparities, reflect the general structure of neoliberal and biopolitical racism that protects and sustains the “selected/deselected” immunitary strategy of white supremacy. Black exclusions from job opportunities and wealth acquisition do not generally include explicit or highly visible forms of “spectacular” violence. Rather, these are all part of a general strategy of indirect murder that ensures the thriving of the “true” population of the white supremacist state.

The contemporary context: beyond biological race? Neoliberal shifts in the observation and articulation of racial equality were also influenced by a post-WWII shift in the discourse of biological racial distinctions. Whereas in the 19th and early 20th centuries the biopolitics of population control produced an explicit discourse of biological racism, in the second half of the 20th century this discourse was transformed dramatically. In a post-WWII context, public rhetoric in defense of the racial “purification” of populations steadily faded into the taboos of an ostensibly outdated state racism that, from the perspective of western governments, saw its extreme horror played out in the holocaust and the eugenics experiments carried out on racialized groups throughout the 20th century.

166  Apparatuses Reflecting on the reality of normative racism in contemporary west, Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose note that a biological understanding of racial categories was no longer “in the true” in political or policy discourse. In part due to the persistent interventions of radical critics, the link between biological understandings of distinctions among population groups and their socio-political implications seemed broken or at least de-naturalized.42 While biological racism remains a powerful force in certain contexts, it has largely been delegitimized as a political discourse. Within the public sphere, it has become for the most part unacceptable—that is, outside of a norm— to talk about preconceived categories of behavior or intelligence according to a biological and evolutionarily determined notion of race. One reason for this shift is a kind of (neo)liberal construction of “white liberal guilt” that emerged in a post-Holocaust context and the global era of decolonization. With the decolonization movement that swept the globe beginning in the 1960s, Western governments began to attempt to absolve themselves of a racist history of colonialism and re-establish their moral legitimacy in an expanding global capitalist market. Jodi Melamed describes this as a kind of “racial liberalism” that emerged in the decolonization era. “At racial liberalism’s core,” she writes, “was a geopolitical race narrative: African American integration within U.S. society and advancement toward equality defined through a liberal framework of legal rights and inclusive nationalism would establish the moral legitimacy of U.S. global leadership.”43 This is what is largely behind the United States’ shift from a discourse of racist segregation to one of neoliberal “multicultural” participation in the market economy. According to this narrative, all races are welcome to pursue economic prosperity within the universal truth of free market capitalism, which prioritizes no race over another as long as each is willing to assimilate into its norms. Here racism functions not so much in terms of the observation of inherent biological inferiorities or predispositions, but in terms of cultural incompatibilities within the “level playing field” of free market capitalism. Ettiene Balibar describes this in terms of a “neo-racism”: “[a racism] whose dominant theme is not biological heredity but the insurmountability of cultural differences, a racism which, at first sight, does not postulate the superiority of certain groups or peoples in relation to others but ‘only’ the harmfulness of abolishing frontiers, the incompatibility of lifestyles and traditions.”44 In terms of an explicit racism still normatively acceptable in the United States, it is this kind of distinction and discrimination that continues to operate even in an era of the so called “post-racial.” Post-racialism by and large reflects a non-biological understanding of race that allows whiteness (as the universal “race without race”) to continue to claim a superiority through appeals to culture, economic wisdom, political sophistication, western liberal “tolerance,” and so on. In the contemporary discourse of

Apparatus three 167 race, all of these things are separated from biological determination. By eliminating biological notions of racial purity from normative social discourse and claiming no official or legally sanctioned preference for any one racial group, the state racism that was once explicit and visible is now concealed within a discourse that has been evacuated of the concept of biological race in terms of determinate social meaning. Moved to the domain of pluralist cultural differences, there is a kind of “racism without race” discourse at work.45 “Racism without race,” however, does not necessarily mean that the idea of race as an essentialist category of identity has gone away entirely. The discourse of culture simply conceals race as immaterial to identity. Culture, as Balibar points out, “can still function like a nature” as it locks individuals, a priori, into a “we” that is “immutable and intangible in origin.”46 A person does not choose a cultural identity, but is born into one. The socio-political effect of the discourse of cultural identity, even though it has abandoned the language of evolution and selection/deselection along biological lines, is basically the same. Culture, like race, predetermines an individual’s or group of individual’s fate: “It may also be admitted that the behaviour of individuals and their ‘aptitudes’ cannot be explained in terms of their blood or even their genes, but are the result of their belonging to historical ‘cultures’.”47 It is here that the “racism without race,” which is really to say “racism that conceals race,” marks just one more new immunitary mechanism for protecting racialized Christian Identity. As culture functions as a new nature, the “naturalness of racial conflict” stays in place as “ways of life” compete for dominance and self-preservation. In the contemporary United States, such racism without biological distinction can still be understood as biopolitical white supremacy because the social, political, and economic structures that are constitutive of white supremacy—i.e. society arranged for the benefit of white people to the sacrificial detriment of all other races, now articulated as “cultures”—are held in place and sustained by such racism without biological distinction. This reconstruction and intensification of the apparatus of white supremacy through this “post-racial” or “multicultural” turn is perhaps most visible in the contemporary prison system and its residual effects on white-black inequality. As Michelle Alexander has demonstrated in The New Jim Crow: Mass Incarceration in the Age of Colorblindness, in spite of a justice system that self-referentially articulates itself as impartial to race, the staggering statistics of black incarceration reflects a contemporary reincarnation of Jim Crow society as the prison system reconstructs the overarching mechanism of indirect biopolitical murder as it “permanently locks a huge percentage of the African American community out of the mainstream society and economy.”48 The mass incarceration of African Americans, in other words, still reflects the white supremacist biopolitical intervention into the population, which still protects its “truthful” racial population as white (even if it does not articulate it as such). Over the last thirty years, changes and developments in state drug policy, sentencing guidelines, and crime prevention

168  Apparatuses strategies, all of which barely try to conceal the specific targeting of nonwhite populations, have led to an explosion in the prison population. Not only does the United States have the highest rate of incarceration per capita in the world, its male prison population overwhelmingly consists of African Americans, most of whom are incarcerated due to drug related charges. One in nine African American males in the United States are incarcerated, and an African American male is eight times as likely as a white male to be incarcerated.49 For African American women, the statistics are comparably high. For example, African American women make up thirty percent of the female prison population in the United States, even though they represent only thirteen percent of the general population.50 Functioning as a biopolitical technology of racial segregation in an era where racial targeting and discrimination is officially against the law and where the normative cultural and political discourse disavows racism as a historically shameful reality, the prison system continues to provide the immunitary function of keeping the “true” white population uncontaminated as the socially, politically, and economically privileged. As Joy James describes this immunitary function, The U.S. carceral network kills . . . more blacks than any other ethnic group. . . . American prisons constitute an “outside” in U.S. political life. In fact, our society displays waves of concentric outside circles with increasing distances from bourgeois self-policing. The state routinely polices the unassimilable in the hell of lockdown, deprivation tanks, control units, and holes for political prisoners.51 The outside circles of black life that are being pushed evermore to the margins of social life reflect a calculating system that is “letting die” in horrendously brutal way African Americans for the sake of the safety and purity of the nation. The fact that the prison population is overwhelmingly imbalanced on racial lines does not reflect an official, which is to say legal, state project of biological purity. The rhetoric of the state’s biopolitical project of immunizing the “proper” population of white supremacy has shifted within a post-racial, colorblind discourse. Officially, the contemporary prison system is articulated by the state as existing for the sake of correcting the problem of criminality in the United States through disciplining, punishing, and reforming criminals, regardless of their racial-cultural identity. From the state’s perspective, the prison system’s imbalance of African American prisoners is not due to the “colorblind” policy of criminal justice reflective of the neoliberal turn to “post-racialism.” From its own observational perspective, the mass incarceration of African Americans is not the state’s fault, but rather the “criminal culture” of African Americans themselves. Under such a criminal justice policy that does not officially discriminate according to race, the position of legal and political plausible deniability emerges as an immunitary mechanism that makes it appear that the mass

Apparatus three 169 imprisonment of African Americans is not actually due to an explicitly racist justice system. Yet if we consider various glaring disparities in how law enforcement actually operates, and how the law remains weighted toward protecting the social and political structure of white supremacy, it is clear that the state’s apparatus of power does in fact actively perform the criminal targeting and prosecution of African Americans specifically as a racial group. For a few examples, consider the law enforcement focus on urban areas populated by African Americans; the implementation of “gang injunctions” in certain local neighborhoods that allow police to prevent suspected (mostly nonwhite) criminals from gathering together; or drug sentencing differences between “crack” cocaine, which us used predominately by African Americans, and “powdered” cocaine, which is used predominately by whites.52 All of these policies reconstruct and perpetuate the historical reality white supremacist American immunity. None of them are justified or articulated in terms of protecting the white “race,” and yet it is precisely these and other similar policies that sustain the status quo of white supremacy and antiblackness. All of this is possible in a biopolitical context that largely disavows discrimination based on race. This is to say that white supremacy and anti-blackness have been so intensified within its contemporary biopolitical frame that its mechanisms of immunity operate without the need for official programs of state racism such as Jim Crow premised on biological racial distinctions. Though there are certainly white racist individuals in America, even on a mass scale, that might make state decisions still based on simplistic and outdated views of biological racial distinction, white supremacy does not actually need such racist individuals in order to immunize itself from the threat of anti-racist resistance. In many ways, explicit racists or the expression of racist sentiments are liabilities to white supremacy in the contemporary context, and are often used as an object of scorn in terms of their transgression of the new norm of post-racialism. Consider, for example, the almost total reversal of the mainstream social and political acceptance of the Ku Klux Klan that has occurred over the last fifty years. Compared to its general acceptance during the Jim Crow era, where its white supremacist ideology fit in without scandal with the broader cultural and political climate (especially in the South), in the contemporary context K.K.K. members are normatively described as “backwards thinking” and on the “wrong side of history.”53 And it is not only extremist groups or figures that have been shunned from normative discourse on race. For example, in 2013, Justine Sacco, a communications director for a major corporate firm and by all accounts a normal liberal bourgeois subject, made an offhanded joke on the social media platform Twitter about not having to worry about getting A.I.D.S. on a trip to Africa because “I’m white.” Within hours of making the racist joke, Sacco had experienced a worldwide media campaign of scorn and denunciation, ultimately losing her job.54 As this case exemplifies, in mainstream civil society, the system has adjusted to make explicit racism

170  Apparatuses out of the norm. “Those people do not represent us!” cries the state and civil society, all the while sustaining and reinforcing the apparatus of white supremacy through its “color blind” policies that conceal the apparatus’ overarching strategy of racial immunization.

Postscript to post-racialism: the new site of biological race The fact the United States government does not have an official, legally sanctioned program of state racism aimed at purifying the nation biologically does not mean that biological race has gone away, or that biological understandings of race have no significant role in perpetuating white supremacist state violence. Rather, the discourse of biological race has been reconstructed so as to align with a broader social and political discourse that deems suspect appeals to biological determined forms of human behavior. This reconstruction has been bolstered by scientific discourses of genomic mapping that re-establish race as an objective part of the biological makeup of the human species. As legal scholar Dorothy Roberts outlines in Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Recreate Race in the Twenty First Century, there is a new racial science focused on the 0.1 percent of human difference found across the human genetic code that “is increasingly seen as encompassing race.”55 Though the new racial science is quick to deny any racist motivation for keeping the biological concept of race around—it is justified as leading to more precise practices of medicine and treatment that can only help the distinct racial groups to which its programs are tailored56—a reconfigured notion of a natural racial division of the human species serves in many ways as a foundation for the continued use of race as part a news state biopolitical strategy of white supremacist control. The primary area where genetic understandings of racial difference play out in terms of a state racist effect is surveillance and its connection to criminalization. For example, the use of D.N.A. for criminal investigation has increased dramatically over the last few decades and has led to the development of a massive database of genetic information used for purposes of law enforcement and crime prevention. In 1994, the DNA Identification Act was passed by the federal government, greatly expanding law enforcement agencies’ ability to collect genetic samples and store them in giant database.57 Other significant bills over the last decade have expanded the government’s right to genetic collection even more, including the Patriot Act of 2001 that expanded the requirement of genetic collection from any terror related crime (a highly elastic criteria that has been abused to a great extent), and the DNA Fingerprint Act of 2005 that authorizes law enforcement agents to collect and store DNA from anyone they arrest or detain.58 Much of this data has been obtained through criminal arrests. The United States federal government alone possesses over eight million genetic samples taken from criminal offenders, whose offenses range from check fraud to

Apparatus three 171 murder.59 Directly related to the racial imbalance of the prison-industrial complex, this database is highly skewed along racial lines. A 2006 study of the federal genetic database estimated that forty percent of the profiles were taken from African Americans, who only make up thirteen percent of the national population.60 Such a racial imbalance reflects the persistent reality of police (legally) using biological race as a profiling device targeting urban areas where African Americans make up the majority population.61 Arrests of African Americans for low-level crimes has skyrocketed over the past few decades, and the data collected and stored from these arrests essentially amounts to a criminal database of biological race. Here we find a new wing of the biopolitics of race based not on an explicit strategy of the state’s biological purification, but rather on the prevention and surveillance of criminal activity. Race, within this strategy, is not officially linked to any natural social hierarchy, but simply referenced as a biological marker enabling more precise surveillance and identification. In terms of state racism, biological race is only observed as important at the genetic level as it is seen as the “body’s truth” for legal identification and the state’s ability to predict and prevent a whole range of social and legal problems. By locating biological race at the genetic level rather than at the social, the state produces a kind of built-in plausible deniability in the face of black and other non-white bodies bearing the most intense and brutal implications of race’s persistence as a biological category. Once again, this marks an immunitary strategy. Genetic racial surveillance and collection is articulated in terms of the state’s goal of trying to keep it citizens safe. Here the mechanism of plausible deniability plays a strong role: if biological race helps to identify the criminals that threaten the state’s citizens and therefore keeps them safe, then it is not the fault of the state that black and other nonwhite bodies are the ones being overwhelmingly identified as threatening criminals. Because the databanks of genetic information are racially skewed to such a sharp degree, non-white minority groups, in a way continuous with the racial history of the U.S., end up being the most vulnerable to the state’s programs of surveillance. However, because it has been framed in terms of its neutrality regarding racial differentiation within the social and political sphere, the new genetic understanding of race ends up obscuring and concealing the continuing biopolitical function of preserving the racial hierarchy of white supremacy in the United States. The master stroke of the new biopolitics of race is that it has managed to conceal the power-knowledge of biological race from the level of the social, at least in terms of its discourse as a meaningful aspect of social reality, while providing the very foundation through which the state is able to continue various strategies of social control, most notably through mechanisms of surveillance coded into life itself at the genetic level, that inadvertently reinforce racial inequality and segregation. The new genetics of race (as a scientific discourse) is generally premised on the idea that racial genetic identities have no bearing on social,

172  Apparatuses cultural, or political predispositions. Yet, this is precisely where biological state racism re-emerges, or re-enters itself, not as a conscious program on the part of the state, but as a scientifically articulated discourse that simultaneously affirms the objectivity of racial equality while making possible a biopolitical technology of surveillance that provides new avenues for white supremacist violence to continue in a context that has concealed race as a meaningful aspect of social and political reality.

Part II conclusion Up to this point, I have articulated the problem of white Christian Identity as the violent drive toward the phantasm of absolute immunity from the contaminating threat of its observed racial others. To conclude this section, as I have tried to show, the apparatus of white Christian Identity is a massive system of power-knowledge relations aimed at protecting its self-referential and phantasmatic sovereignty. Through the modern colonial invention of race the apparatus has re-created itself through a multitude of anti-black and white supremacist distinctions. This web of relations has many parts and has gone through many transformations. New assemblages relating to discourses of ontology, biology, evolution, and political economy have meant a perpetual transformation of the apparatus as it strives to remain powerful in the face of new epistemological, theological, philosophical, and political encounters. As the structure of autoimmunity ensures, these encounters will continue to occur, opening up white Christian Identity to new processes of unraveling and reconstruction. With new technologies of control emerging in the fields of genomic science, state surveillance, and normative cultural discourse, there is little evidence that the apparatus will any time soon shift away from the deployment of racism and its cycles of brutal violence. Even though it has shifted into to broad discourses and a politics of post-racialism and multiculturalism, the contemporary political and socio-economic structure of the United States still very much reflects a racialized system of anti-blackness and white supremacy as it continues to find new and unanticipated ways of sustaining its power in the face of its own autoimmunity. In part three, I will address this ongoing problem and offer two potential theological and philosophical frameworks of response.

Notes 1 Wynter, “Unparalleled Catastrophe for Our Species?” 16. 2 Ibid. 3 Sylvia Wynter, “On How we Mistook the Map for the Territory,” in Not only the Master’s Tools: African American Studies in Theory and Practice, ed. Louis Gordon and Jane Gordon (New York: Routledge, 2005), 127. 4 Ibid.

Apparatus three 173 5 W.E.B. Dubois, The Souls of Black Folk (New York: Dover Classics, 1994), 9. 6 Ibid., 1. 7 Wynter, “1492,” 39. 8 Nahum Chandler, X: The Problem of the Negro as a Problem for thought (New York: Fordham University Press, 2013), 22. 9 Ibid., 29. 10 Foucault’s political paradigm of sovereignty should be read in distinction from the “sovereignty-ipseity” that I draw from Derrida. The former connotes a specific political technology/power relation of the state, while the latter is a philosophical concept linked to the “autos/ipseity” of the self and religion’s source of the “experience of the unscathed.” While the two are certainly related, this distinction should be kept in mind in the discussion that follows. 11 Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 241. 12 Michel Foucault, Security, Territory, Population: Lectures at the College de Frace, 1977–1978 (New York: Picador, 2004), 1. 13 Michel Foucault, “Governmentality,” in Power: Essential Works of Foucault, 1954–1984, ed. James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, 2001), 217. 14 Agamben, The Kingdom and the Glory: For a Theological Genealogy of Economy and Government (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2001), 1. 15 Ibid., chapter 5. 16 Jeffrey Nealon, Foucault Beyond Foucault: Power and Its Intensifications Since 1984 (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007). 17 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 206. 18 Nealon, Foucault Beyond Foucault, 46–47. 19 Ibid.,48. 20 Gilles Deleuze, “Postscript on the Societies of Control,” October 59 (Winter, 1992): 3. 21 Ibid., 7. 22 Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 254. 23 Foucault, History of Sexuality. 24 Roberto Esposito, Terms of the Political: Community, Immunity, Biopolitics (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), 84. 25 Ibid. 26 For a representative collection, see Timothy Campbell, ed., Biopolitics: A Reader (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013). 27 Foucault, Society Must Be Defended, 254. 28 Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks (New York: Grove Press, 2008), 97. 29 Weheliye, Habeas Viscus, 25. 30 Ibid. 31 A note of qualification regarding my use of historical periodization: my categorization of these two (very broad) phases do not even begin to address the historical complexity and variation of a one hundred and fifty-year time span. I do not claim that my characterization of these two periods is a precise rendition of an historical reality. Rather, my characterizing of these two phases are meant to name highly generalized historical paradigms of power that have formed the particular instantiation of the apparatuses of white supremacy and anti-blackness on a broadly diachronic scale. 32 James Cone, The Cross and the Lynching Tree (New York: Orbis Books, 2013), 7. 33 Foucault, Discipline and Punish, 35. 34 Ibid., 256. 35 See Ricardo Ainslie, Long Dark Road: Bill King and Murder in Jasper, Texas (Austin: University of Texas Press, 2004).

174  Apparatuses 36 Clay S. Conrad, Jury Nullification: The Evolution of a Doctrine (Durham: Carolina Academic Press, 1998), 173. 37 For two recent high-profile examples, the police murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson by Officer Darren Wilson and the police murder of Tamir Rice by Officers Timothy Loehmann and Frank Garmback both ended in non-indictment of the officers. 38 For an account of the rise of neoliberalism in the 20th century, see David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007). Adam Kotsko’s, Neoliberalism’s Demons: On the Political Theology of Late Capital (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2017) is an important recent account of neoliberalism that links it to political theology and processes of “demonization” that produce a world in which the victims of capitalism are made to shoulder the blame for structural failures. 39 Harvey, Brief History of Neoliberalism, 2. 40 Deirdre Royster, Race and the Invisible Hand: How White Networks Exclude Black Men from Blue-Collar Jobs (Berkley: University of California Press, 2003). 41 Melvin L. Oliver and Thomas M. Shapiro, “Disrupting the Racial Wealth Gap,” Contexts 18, no. 1 (February 2019): 16–21. 42 Paul Rabinow and Nikolas Rose, “Biopower Today,” Biosocieties, no. 1 (2006): 205. 43 Melamed, Jodi, “The Spirit of Neoliberalism: From Racial Liberalism to Neoliberal Multiculturalism,” Social Text 89 24, no. 4 (Winter 2006): 4. 44 Balibar, Etienne, “Is there a Neo-Racism?” in Race, Nation, Class: Ambiguous Identities, ed. E. Balibar and I. Wallerstein (New York: Verso, 1991), 21. 45 See Bonilla-Silva, Racism without Racists: Colorblind Racism and the Persistence of Racial Inequality in America, 4th ed. (New York: Rowan and Littlefield, 2013). 46 Balibar, “Is there a Neo-Racism?” 22. 47 Ibid., 22. 48 Michel Alexander, The New Jim Crow: in the Age of Colorblindness (New York: New Press, 2012), 13. 49 Loic Wacquant, “Class, Race and Hyperincarceration in Renchavist America,” Daedalus (Summer 2010): 74, 78. 50 “Facts About the Over-Incarceration of Women in the United States,” accessed June 2, 2019, www.Aclu.org www.aclu.org/other/ facts-about-over-incarceration-women-united-states. 51 Joy James, Resisting State Violence: Radicalism, Gender, and Race in U.S. Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 1996), 34. 52 See “The War on Drugs,” accessed June 2, 2019, www.aclu.org, www.aclu.org/ issues/mass-incarceration/war-drugs. 53 Even the extreme political conservative Ted Cruz uses the KKK as a rhetorical weapon to level against his political enemies. In a recent speech, in order to emphasize the evil of the opposition party, he called the Democratic part the “party of the KKK.” See Kristine Philips, “Ted Cruz: The Democrats are the Part of the KKK,” accessed June 2, 2017, www.washingtonpost.com, www.washing tonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2017/02/08/ted-cruz-the-democrats-are-the-partyof-the-ku-klux-klan/?utm_term=.c88732e0402f. 54 See Jon Ronson, “How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life,” accessed June 2, 2017, www.nytimes.com, www.nytimes.com/2015/02/15/magazine/ how-one-stupid-tweet-ruined-justine-saccos-life.html. 55 Dorothy Roberts, Fatal Invention: How Science, Politics, and Big Business Recreate Race in the Twenty First Century (New York: The New Press, 2012), 26.

Apparatus three 175 56 See Roberts’ discussion of “pharmacoethnicity” and “color coded pills” in Fatal Invention, chapters 7 and 8. 57 DNA Identification Act of 1994, 42 U.S.C. §§ 14132–34 (2006). 58 Roberts, Fatal Invention, 265–66. 59 Ibid., 264. 60 Ibid., 278. 61 Ibid.

Part III

Thinking resistance

7 Being’s salvation Political ontology, apocalyptic theology, and the apparatus

To begin, there is the question of human being itself. Turning to the most influential thinker of ontology in the 20th century, Heidegger’s question of human being asks of the human’s proper essence. Human being, “Dasein,” is a particular kind of being that authentically relates to itself by asking the question of the meaning of one’s own being. The question is about “beingthere” (the literal translation of Dasein) in such a way that reveals human being’s authentic relation to itself and to its world. A key issue through which this authenticity is revealed is the human’s relation to technology, which gets us back to part one’s discussions of genres of being human, technicity, immunity, and apparatuses. The question of technology is so central to Heidegger’s philosophy that, as Richard Rojcewicz argues, “technology is nothing other than knowledge of what it means to be in general.”1 The essence of technology lies in its “revealing.” A proper understanding of technology does not reduce it to making or doing things, but understands it as “bringing forth” things in their authentic essence which precedes the act of doing or making. In this way, a Heideggerian philosophy of technology can be linked, however precariously as we’ll see, to my Luhmannian reading of Wynter’s genres of being human as autopoietic social systems. It is the social system of communication (as technology) that discloses the “truth-for” to any particular genre of being human. The history of genres of being human, then, is the history of the human’s own techno-autopoietic knowledge of itself as a particular essence. However, in contrast to Wynter and Luhmann, the Heideggerian difference is that he posits a proper human relationship to technology and therefore a proper relationship to being itself. Whereas for Wynter and Luhmann, there is no essence “at hand” (vorhanden) that waits to be disclosed by the system, Heidegger insists that being itself (as essence) precedes any technological system. While there is a proper relation to technology that reveals the true essence of the world and human being, something has gone drastically wrong with modern technology. No longer does technology reveal things in their essence, but functions to control the means of revealing as it “challenges forth” resources out of the world to be used for predetermined ends. Such a wrong turn in the human’s relation to technology has thrown knowledge

180  Thinking resistance of being into disarray. Challenging forth has produced the illusion that the human being has mastered its own being and destiny. Here, we should depart with Heidegger and not assume that what we are talking about is the human being but rather Wynter’s “overdetermined” “Man” that describes itself as if it were the human being. Through its own assumption of mastery, Man declares himself “lord of the earth,” when in reality “precisely nowhere does man today any longer encounter himself [sic], i.e. his [human] essence.”2 Heidegger’s term for this improper knowledge of being, or challenging forth, is “enframing” (das Gestell), which, as Cary Wolfe points out, can be viewed as “deep background . . . for what Foucault and others call the dispositifs or apparatuses of modern biopolitics.”3 In its enframing, the world ceases to be experienced as an essence connected to human being’s own proper and authentic self and instead is transformed into a “standing reserve” of resources to be merely used and exploited.4 The objects that technology reveals are no longer viewed as essential objects in themselves, but rather as raw materials to be categorized, ordered, and used as means to an end. For example, as standing reserve, Heidegger notes that an airplane that is challenged forth out of the earth’s material is not viewed as an object in itself. Modern technology does not reveal an airplane to be admired in its “airplane-ness;” as standing reserve it is only revealed as that which sits on a tarmac ready to transport people from one point to another. In other words, the airplane is the product of an enframing whose function is sheer calculation and utility, a means to a predetermined end. For Heidegger, as calculation and utility have taken over human being’s relation to technology, human beings themselves inevitably become objects of calculation and utility, transformed into standing reserve. The history of slavery, of which Heidegger is silent, provides the original site of this transformation of human beings in standing reserve, but we also see this in more contemporary frameworks of “human resources,” “human capital,” and “bio-metric data” that serve as mechanism of capture and control. Under the tyranny of technological enframing, humanity itself is captured and harnessed toward the perpetuation of technology’s inhuman ordering of the world. Enframing means the endless reproduction of a technological network of power relations that increasingly order and control life itself. The improper relation to technology finds a crucial symptom in modern humanity’s relationship to the act of writing, which links the Heideggerian question of technology to Derrida’s own grammatology. The act of writing serves for Heidegger as a foundation for thinking technology as such. Writing represents a kind of originary ground of humanity’s relation to technology that goes back to the origins of humanity itself as that which has language as its “house of being.”5 In Parmenides, Heidegger relates the proper mode of human writing to the hand, or the “hand that writes” as an extension of one’s being: “the hand holds the essence of man [sic], because the word as the essential realm of the hand is the ground of the essence of man.”6

Being’s salvation 181 Hand-writing, then, is the mark of the human’s essence. It remains unique and specific to the person doing it. There are no two examples of handwriting that are exactly alike. The writing and the hand-writer are inseparable. Hand-writing is an extension of the writer’s authentic being. This, as Heidegger argues, is in stark contrast to the modern technology of the typewriter. Though in the contemporary context of computers the typewriter is simply an artifact of a previous era, its general impact on how human beings relate to their world has been enormous. The typewriter imposes a predetermined and generic form to all writing, obscuring and flattening out the particular writer through the total mediation of a technology that imposes an objective uniformity instead of particularity. The typewriter separates the writing from the being doing the writing, it “deprives the hand of its rank in the realm of the written word and degrades the word to a means of communication. . . . the typewriter makes everyone look the same.”7 It is here that we find an “improper writing” that poses a grave danger to humanity, one that has been radically intensified with the advent of the computer age. Following Heidegger, the ever-expanding regime of “improper writing,” which begins with enframing, threatens to cut off humanity entirely from its own authentic being. It is important to reiterate that Heidegger’s analysis is not a critique of technology as such. Technology in and of itself is not the issue, but rather the way in which humanity relates to it. His critique is more concerned with the specifically modern appropriation of technology through enframing that has spun out of control and put humanity at risk of becoming permanently alienated from its own proper being. Heidegger is also more concerned with the general philosophical question of being, remaining only peripherally invested in its specific political stakes (although, as is well known, his philosophy readily served his own political endorsement of Nazism). In Heidegger’s wake, however, the question of technology and the recovery of authentic being has been taken up in earnest with a shift from the general terrain of ontology to the more specific terrain of political ontology, which is concerned with the political stakes of the question of being. Giorgio Agamben, one the more influential thinkers of the apparatus (as techne), radicalizes Heidegger’s critique of enframing and extends it to the very foundations of the political sphere. Agamben’s approach gives particular weight to theological discourses, and takes aim at onto-theology as a kind of mediating apparatus separating the human being from the divine, which for Agamben signifies the immanence of the world itself. As a discourse that mediates, orders, and represents being, thereby alienating it from its singular essence, Agamben links onto-theology to the apparatus (oikonomia and dispositio as Christ’s governance of history) in an almost entirely a negative sense that reduces it to a function of political subjectification and objectification, governance, and control. Going well beyond Foucault’s various explorations into particular apparatuses of the modern era,

182  Thinking resistance this leads to a negative account of literally everything that mediates human experience and action: I shall call the apparatus literally anything that has in some way the capacity to capture, orient, determine, intercept, model, control, or secure the gestures behaviors, opinions, or discourses of living beings. Not only, therefore, prisons, madhouses, the panopticon, schools, confession, factories, disciplines, juridical measures, and so forth, . . . but also the pen, writing, literature, philosophy, agriculture, cigarettes, navigation, computers, cellular telephones, and—why not—language itself.8 Without differentiating any of these things in terms of intensities or scale, they are all simply absorbed into a massive theo-ontological-technologicalmachine that does nothing but control and govern life. The apparatus exists only as a force that mediates being so as to divide and conquer it. This all begins with the last object on the list, language. Language can be said to be the most ancient of apparatuses, “one in which thousands and thousands of years ago a primate inadvertently let himself be captured, probably without realizing the consequences that he was about to face.”9 Though this claim of capture might sound absurd, it is a political ontological point that goes all the way back to the loss of an “authentic” or “unscathed” living being that knows no separation between animal and human life, and whose origin precedes and resists its capture by technology and the apparatus. Language, in this way, is the human being’s “original sin,” “the original ground of the onto-theological par excellence.”10 As Jeffrey Librett has pointed out, all of Agamben’s reflections on language’s negative relation to the apparatus can be understood around his understanding of the replacement of the voice by writing in western metaphysics. In this way, it is not so much language itself that marks the fall into original sin, but rather the loss of language as an “event,” the “taking place of language as Being.”11 Agamben’s philosophical project, as Librett writes, “has been the overcoming of what he takes to the graphocentrism of metaphysics from Aristotle onwards.”12 While “graphocentrism” may be a surprising way to describe western metaphysics, especially in light of Derrida’s famous critique of its “logocentric” character, the point for Agamben is that the voice, as the originary and unmediated event of language, is always-already posited as something that has been lost, or “captured” by writing (as technology). In Potentialities, Agamben goes all the way back to the origins of western philosophy, noting that the trouble began when “Aristotle absolves writing of its weakness,” positing that the letter, as the interpreter of voice, does not itself need any other interpreter. It is the final interpreter, beyond which no hermeneia is possible: the limit of all interpretation. . . . The gramma is thus the form of presupposition itself and nothing else.13

Being’s salvation 183 For Agamben, the problem with writing as an apparatus, as techne, is that it is the original technology through which humanity is divided in itself. As is well known, this is born out politically in the ancient Greek’s biopolitical split of human being into bare-animal life (zōē) and qualified-political life (bios). Qualified life, which is a stand-in for a sovereign and phantasmatic political self whose immunization is dependent on the exclusion and sacrifice of the merely “living” (i.e. bare life), produces bare life as a purely disposable, undifferentiated object that serves as the negative image, and therefore condition, of what it conceives as “proper” human life. In this split, society, or in Greek terms the “polis,” becomes the site of human beings that have mastered writing and thus have been able to overcome and exclude their own animal existence (i.e. bare life). This overcoming and exclusion of bare life is the metaphysical ground for the west’s politics of sovereignty. All political distinctions between beings, most importantly the “friend-enemy” distinction that Carl Schmitt theorizes as the foundation of the political, find their origins in this originary exclusion. This split is evident in the colonial relationship and the way proper political life in the West is associated with “civilization” and its mastery of technology (both abstractly speaking in terms of language, art, rationality, etc., and in terms of techno-scientific innovation), while bare-animal life is associated with more “primitive, “underdeveloped” non-western peoples that, from the observational gaze of the western self, seem to blur the lines between the animal and the human. Here we find a split written down the middle of the human species: two kinds of human being where one is subordinated to the superiority, authority and sovereignty of the other. In this Agambenian sense, writing (as apparatus, system, mediation, division, etc.) poses a kind of all-encompassing problem where being itself has been thoroughly mediated by technology and thus has separated human beings from their own authentic essence—the “taking place” of their being. In this way, Agamben is trying to think outside of an auto-religious and onto-theological production of mediating apparatuses that prevents access to a true experience of human being’s own production of reality. The key for philosophy, then, is to “get back” behind the letter (as writing), which is to say the onto-theological apparatus as techne, and to recover the voice as an unmediated experience of being itself. For Librett, it is in the rejection of the letter in favor of the voice that Agamben reveals himself as a certain kind of Christian thinker of revelation and salvation (and supersessionism), where, as Librett notes, “Christian thinking . . . [functions] in the Pauline tradition, as the metaphysics that poses God qua logos by polemicizing, in favor of the living spirit (spirit as life), against the ‘dead letter’ of the [Jewish] law.”14 While Agamben does provide a positive place for Jewish thought throughout his writings, especially that of Walter Benjamin and Jacob Taubes,15 his emphasis on a very Christian notion of revelation that suspends the Jewish law leads Librett to take Agamben as “inscribing his project still under the heading of the notion that the letter of the (Jewish) law kills, while the spirit

184  Thinking resistance of the (Christian) revelation gives life.”16 This becomes more clear when Agamben locates revelation in the terms of a kind of “pure” Christian theology that precedes onto-theology (as writing), as “Christ himself, as the word of God,” where “the content of revelation is not a truth that can be expressed in the form of linguistic propositions about a being (even about a supreme being), but is, instead, a truth that concerns language itself, the very fact that language (and therefore knowledge) exists.”17 Revelation, in this way, becomes a kind of Christian-Heideggerian ontological recovery of being itself, the “that of the Being (existence) of language, and so the world.”18 Linking revelation’s ontological precedence to an originary voice that precedes the mediations of the letter, technology, and the law (each basically synonymous in their general function), it is the recovery of revelation as an overcoming of the perennial ontological problem of technology’s splitting the human being into two ontological spheres that is the task of philosophical and theological critique. Here that Agamben makes an intervention into traditional theological conceptions privileging the sacred as God’s realm of transcendence and poses salvation as a purely immanent, “profane” possibility. In The Coming Community, Agamben writes, Revelation does not mean revelation of the sacredness of the world, but only revelation of its irreparably profane character. . . . Revelation consigns the world to profanation and thingness—and isn’t this precisely what has happened? The possibility of salvation begins only at this point; it is the salvation of the profanity of the world, of its beingthus. . . . The world—insofar as it is absolutely, irreparably profane—is God.19 In the revelation of the voice, God will have re-appeared without the sin of technological “religious” mediation. Around the concept of revelation an important difference between the messianic in Agamben and Derrida comes into view. For Derrida, as we discussed in Chapter 2, the messianic signals the “to come” of the other as it exists within the play of difference that makes up the system’s (always paradoxical) observational distinctions. Linking the messianic to the structure of autoimmunity, in the system’s performance there is an opening that exposes the self to its other, that is, to its self-referential outside, and makes it vulnerable to the contingency of its environment. The messianic, then, is a principle embedded within writing itself as infinite deferral and that never fully “arrives” in presence. For Agamben, the messianic posits a form of pure revelation that comes wholly from the (non- self-referential) outside— the original word of God (as being itself) that precedes and exists in absolute distinction from the letter. Here is where Agamben looks to Walter Benjamin’s notion of divine violence. In Benjamin’s “The Critique of Violence,” the messianic event is understood in relation to what he articulates as two distinct forms of violence. The first he names as “mythic violence,” which

Being’s salvation 185 is the violence of the state apparatus that both constitutes and preserves the law as a violent mediating and ordering mechanism. Benjamin associates this kind of violence with “fate,” or the predetermination and arrangement of humanity as a particular order of stratified being. Mythic violence is the violence of the apparatus. It is purely a means to preserve what we would call the social-political system’s autopoietic order. This is the violence of the unscathed, a function of the autopoietic reproduction and immunization of the enclosed sovereign self for its own sake. In contrast to mythic violence is the “weak messianic” form of “divine violence.”20 This violence, which is always lying in wait within the oppressed as a potential revolutionary force, signals a messianic event of faith that is “law destroying” and shuts down entirely the structure of law as the protector of state sovereignty. Divine violence can only be referred to negatively, and it refers only to the abstract and empty idea of the possibility of the “new” itself—i.e. whatever it is that this world-system is not. The coming of the absolute other in divine violence constitutes the messianic event that the sovereign self cannot possibly anticipate or control. Trying to imagine what this event might actually look like, Benjamin gestures toward Georges Sorel’s theory of the proletarian general strike that employs a “bloodless” violence that, in the absolute refusal of the capitalist system, shuts the entire apparatus down and stops the juridical machine of cyclical mythic violence in its tracks. The proletarian general strike is distinguished from the “political” general strike, which aims at concessions from the capitalist such as better working conditions, wages, rights, etc. The proletarian strike, in contrast, is a “pure means”—the event of being—that “nullifies all theoretical consequences of every possible social policy.”21 This is what Benjamin elsewhere calls the “messianic cessation of happening”, where the collective history of the oppressed “flashes up” in a spontaneous and unanticipated action and destroys the apparatus and its perpetual reproduction.22 Agamben extends Benjamin’s thinking on divine violence and links it to Carl Schmitt’s description of the state of exception, where the law (read here in its sense of “the dead letter”) is suspended so that the state may act through extra-legal means in a state of emergency. Agamben’s messianic event can be understood as a kind of inversion of the Schmittian state of exception, expressed in the formulation “force of law.”23 In this formulation, the law is suspended and thereby authorizes the state to act purely through force in order to restore order. The state of exception, which Agamben theorizes as the foundation of modern sovereignty, is the point at which the law’s protection is revoked from bare life precisely in order to ensure qualified life’s continued survival. The messianic event of divine violence, in contrast, exemplified in the “bloodless” general strike, is an event that would reverse the formula into force-of-law, stripping the law of its violent power. This is the “true state of exception,” where no longer does the juridical-political apparatus have power over life. Here, the refusal to adhere to the law’s authority—basically the refusal to play by the “written”

186  Thinking resistance ontological and mediating rules of the apparatus that divides and orders humanity into a hierarchy of being—evacuates the apparatus of force and thereby “deactivates” it, making it “inoperative.” It is this weak messianic force of ­deactivation that puts the cycle of mythic violence to an end as being is freed from its external mediations. Here there are loud echoes of St. Paul, at least the Paul on the side of the Pauline Declaration, which essentially “deactivates” or “profanes” the law and frees the inter-human community of Jews and Gentiles to inhabit a differential community without the violent mediation and imposition of predetermined forms of identity. Here, there is a rejection of the other Paul of an onto-theologically grounded Christian Identity and the katechon, where the necessary “holding back” of the ­lawless “commons” (difference as such) that threaten Christian Identity’s sovereignty is construed as preventing the recovery and salvation of an authentic human existence. It is only in doing away completely with the immunitary function of the katechon through the messiah’s arrival that an authentic and therefore free humanity will emerge once again. Agamben’s messianic event, although significantly different than traditional Christian notions of salvation, resonates significantly with a certain kind of Christian theology of apocalypse. While Agamben does take pains to avoid eschatological utopian thinking through his decidedly immanent notion of “messianic time,”24 what is striking is his resonance with notions of a kind of apocalyptic solution to the political ontological problem of the apparatus as the “original sin” of life’s division. His version of the weak messianic event as force-of-law essentially names an apocalyptic neutralization of the political ontological field (as apparatus) in toto as the condition of recovering an unmediated experience of life. Within this political ontological frame, if the apparatus does indeed represent a kind of original sin that has shut down any possibility of authentic human experience of its own being, there is no sense of effective resistance within the apparatus itself. It is only the pure revelation of apocalypse that provides a legitimate answer to the problem of the apparatus. In this apocalyptic frame, where revelation signals the absolute suspension of the system-as-writing and its mediating operations, a certain kind of Christian salvation of the unscathed arrives with the inbreaking of a pure realm of unconditioned possibility. Here, salvation is expressed only in the purely negative terms of this world’s absolute otherness, existing on the other side of the fallen human being’s capture by the apparatus. As Dominick LaCapra notes of Agamben’s political ontological intervention into the structure of bare life and sovereignty, A further enigmatic conjunction in Agamben is between pure possibility and the reduction of being to mere or naked life, for it is the emergence of mere naked life in accomplished nihilism that simultaneously generates, as a kind of miraculous antibody or creation ex nihilo, pure possibility or utterly blank utopianism not limited by the constraints of the past or by normative structures of any sort.25

Being’s salvation 187 With life’s political ontological reduction to the abjection of bare life, the only possible way out, it seems, is the apocalyptic event of what Agamben refers to as the “suspension of the suspension,” the absolute laying aside of the distinction between bare life and political life, the destruction of what he calls of the “anthropological machine” as the “Shabbat of both animal and man.”26 This is to say that the idea of a future in which life is not determined entirely by the violent division of qualified humans and their disposable others (i.e. the racial division of “human” and “animal” within humanity itself) is premised on the total dismantling of the apparatus and the opening toward an undifferentiated and unconditioned environment of forms of life. It is in this sense that this political ontological frame offers, again in the words of LaCapra, a “negative theology in extremis . . . an empty utopianism of pure, unlimited possibility.”27

Christian apocalyptic: faith and salvation This political ontological gesture toward salvation as deliverance from the apparatus finds significant resonance with a recent form of political theology that I will call Christian Apocalyptic. I turn to this form of theology as it links the political ontological framework back to my discussion of the Pauline Declaration that I outlined in Chapter 3, and provides a powerful form of posing the declaration (as faith) against Christian Identity as the desire for the immunitary experience of the unscathed. Represented by theologians such as Nathan Kerr and Craig Keen, Christian Apocalyptic, I argue, marks an attempted recovery of Pauline faith over Christian Identity, and is fundamentally opposed to the concept of the katechon, which I have also linked to the formation of the immunitary apparatus of racialized Christian Identity. In this sense, Christian Apocalyptic proposes a way to think the restoration or recovery of a Christian theology uncontaminated by the sin of Christian immunity, particularly in its katechonic alliance with the state. Reading it this way, I frame Christian Apocalyptic as attempting to think an “anti-immunitary” Christian politics premised on an absolute openness in faith to the apocalyptic inbreaking of revelation, of the wholly other Godin-Christ. As a theological approach, the recent theological turn of Christian Apocalyptic is not necessarily concerned with the genre of apocalyptic literature focused on narratives of the “end times” of history, but rather as a theological category that prioritizes faith in the singular and concrete history of the person Jesus Christ precisely as an utter openness to the messianic coming of the Kingdom of God on earth. In its contemporary form, Christian Apocalyptic can be identified as a renewal (and even radicalization) of the “Krisis” theology that the Swiss theologian Karl Barth made famous in his 1922 publication of the second edition of The Epistle to the Romans.28 Its theology of messianic apocalypticism follows in the wake of Barth’s own apocalyptic Christology that foregrounds the life, death, and resurrection of Jesus Christ as the singular and unconditioned event in which God has

188  Thinking resistance liberated the world from its bondage to what St. Paul calls “the Powers.” The powers can be conceived as another name for the katachonic apparatus as they subjectify and order the fallen world toward its survival and reproduction. This immunitary function of the powers is meant to secure Christian Identity’s existence against the “lawless” and violent world of sin. The contingency of human particularity—the “general culture of singularities” against which the sovereign self closes itself—is what the powers seek to nullify through the imposition of normative and universal power relations. Kerr puts it this way: the Powers function according to the priority of. . . “universal” modes of social organization, which are de facto sovereign with respect to the particular and the contingent. . . . Thus the concrete socio-political function of “the Powers” is what might be called “ideological;” that is, the powers function to provide the given structural “handle” by which one can ‘get a hold on’ the course of history and move it in the “right direction.”29 In what Kerr calls “the particular operation of God’s transcendence,”30 God-in-Christ, free of any correlation with anything outside of God’s own free decision to act, “invades” the immanent world governed by the powers and exposes its order as fundamentally violent. In Christ’s death and resurrection, the powers are stripped of their immunizing force and the new reality of God’s Kingdom on earth, the community where difference has no bearing on inclusion, breaks free. Though this new reality still awaits final consummation with the eschatological return of Christ, the apocalypse really has occurred and is transforming the world into something wholly new. Christ really has liberated humanity. The powers have been dethroned and stripped of their dominating authority, they just don’t realize it yet. In this “time between the times,” in which “messianic time” overlaps with the “empty” historical time of the fallen world31—the Christian community is called to perform the Pauline Declaration by remaining absolutely open in faith to human difference, awaiting the return of Christ as it witnesses the arrival and new reality of God’s Kingdom by following Christ to his cross in absolute solidarity with the oppressed—those “others,” who, like Christ, have been rejected by the powers as unworthy of their political order. In this way, Christian Apocalyptic names a political theology premised on absolute openness to otherness as non-resistance and self-dispossession: the Christian community has no “identity” as it abandons any claims to security or selfdefense and gives itself over entirely to the singular event of Jesus Christ, who as theologian Ry O. Siggelkow describes, is “the one who ‘is not’ for our sake—the one with no borders to police, no property to defend, and no identity to produce and maintain.”32 Siggelkow’s connection of Apocalyptic’s refusal of categories associated with mechanisms of socio-political protection—“police,” “property,” and

Being’s salvation 189 “identity”—gets to the main point that I want to stress here. In short, Christian Apocalyptic has no place for anything resembling the self-preservation of established political bodies of socio-political immunity. It is to welcome unconditionally the risk of embracing the other-as-Christ, as pure revelation. The Christian community, from this perspective, is a community of non-calculation, hospitality, and vulnerability. By welcoming the other unconditionally, it welcomes Christ. From this perspective, the enclosure of the Christian community as an identitarian body seeking out its own protection from the risk of the world is an act of sin. This is where a Barthian theological sensibility shows up strongly and links to the immunitary paradigm. The risk of openness that spurs on the protective response of Christian Identity is the wholly other God-in-Christ, who in the incarnation “infects” history from the outside and transforms it from within. Indeed, Christian Apocalyptic theologian Craig Keen speaks of Jesus’ ministry to the poor and oppressed in just these terms when he says, “Jesus crosses over to them. He touches and is touched by them. He eats and works with them—and is undefiled. He loves them and he takes them in—and is uninfected. Rather, they are infected by him.”33 To describe the work of Christ further in such pathological terms, Jesus is the “biological host” that carries the infection of God’s absolute otherness into the world, destabilizing and deactivating immunitary structures of mediation and filtration so that the world is totally converted in an event of death and resurrection. This is not too far from St. Paul himself, who understood salvation in terms of Christ’s putting to death the earthly body of flesh and replacing it with his own eschatological body of spirit: “I have been crucified with Christ and I no longer live, but Christ lives within me” (Galatians 2:20). The immanent, fallen body is infected and killed, or, “converted” to death, and the transcendent other (God in Christ or “spirit”) that invades the body lives on in its place in the event of resurrection. As we discussed in Chapter 3, this Pauline theological reality has profound revolutionary implications, as all worldly or immanent structures that ensure the immunity of dominating identities have been infected to the point of effective death, negating all social borders that pose the one against the other. The apparatus, in these terms, has been exposed and therefore stripped of its power to order and govern. Of course, as we have already seen, there is an unavoidable tension in St. Paul, as the “open” body of Christ on earth and its environment also leads to the establishment of another identity (Christian Identity) that in turn must be closed off and immunized from outside threats. Yet, for ­Christian Apocalyptic, priority is given to the radically open and revolutionary and “anti-immunity” part of Paul. It is here that the church, insofar as it is ­mediating identity that would posit a “protecting border” around God’s work in the world, is also subject to apocalyptic rupture. There is a direct racial implication of this for modern Christian existence. The C ­ hristian community and its theological reflection is fundamentally opposed to the “white church” and its immunitary mechanisms that violently exclude blackness as

190  Thinking resistance a threat to its claim on authenticity. As Kerr insists, “any apocalyptic theology that does not proclaim the liberation of those black bodies that even today continue to be enslaved, lynched, and imprisoned by the demonic powers of white supremacy is ideological and precisely thereby heretical.”34 The apocalyptic coming of Christ exposes the violence of the powers of whiteness and breaks open the truth of a liberated humanity. The way the Christian community performs this witness is by welcoming without condition the other, the stranger, the foreigner, and those whom the apparatus of white Christian Identity has identified as threatening to it order. To be sure, as I discussed in Chapter 2, the rejection of any protective mechanism that would secure a body from outside danger means being open to the possibility that welcoming the other might mean the destruction of one’s very self, even to the point of existential or even physical death. Even the idea of protecting and preserving the church itself as a distinct political body is chalked up as resistant to the apocalyptic imperative of openness to Christ-as-other. As Siggelkow puts it in terms of the church, which is meant to be in stark distinction from Christian Identity, “the church is not to be oriented around the preservation and maintenance of its own form of life, but is rather to be shaped by radical kenotic solidarity with the world” and therefore called to “ ‘disestablish’ itself, to reject not only violence but the ‘compulsiveness of purpose that leads the strong to violate the dignity of others.’ ”35 Yet, there is a kind of irony within this radical claim of the rejection of violence through openness and self-emptying, as there remains the soteriological guarantee of Christian eschatology. Indeed, it is the (divinely violent) destruction of a worldly order built on self-interested security that will ultimately produce the world’s total conversion to God’s new reality, and so, the world’s destruction is welcomed enthusiastically. Indeed, one of the distinct literary markers of the new apocalyptic is the use of violent and catastrophic imagery to capture the sheer force of the event of Christ’s penetration and transformation of worldly order. Words and phrases such as “inbreaking,” “rupture,” “invasive action,” “irruption,” and “blow apart” are commonplace as markers of the arrival of the Kingdom. God, to sum up, is a force of worldly destruction making way for heavenly presence.

Deconstructing Christian apocalyptic: the autoimmunity of the Christ event Compared to most contemporary evangelical theology, Christian Apocalyptic offers a potentially radical conception of Christian theology that provides a theological avenue for thinking a faith-based resistance to the apparatus, with an emphasis on the messianic arrival of salvation as the destruction of white Christian Identity. Yet, despite Christian Apocalyptic’s anti-immunitary commitments, I suggest there remains an immunitary aspect built into its theology safeguarding against the full implications of its own apocalyptic logic, a safeguarding that has certain political implications

Being’s salvation 191 in terms of thinking resistance to the apparatus. While this radically open account of Christian faith rejects the closure of a Christian Identity that would posit a strict distinction between inside and outside, all of this is still framed within a Christocentric event that necessitates a grounding in a particular identity (observational perspective) that cannot avoid making distinctions. Christocentric theology must ensure the continuity of its primary code, and this means securing the soteriological guarantee of salvation in Christ. As I have explored, any faith that attaches itself to the discourse of salvation must be associated with an experience of the unscathed, or the immune. Christian Apocalyptic’s insistence on the absolute transcendence of God-in-Christ as the singular and unconditioned event of salvation—that is, the event that redeems the world from “sickness” to “health” or from “sin” to “righteousness”—is in itself something that must be immunized, protected, and left unscathed. God-in-Christ is only the liberating event—a word used by Christian Apocalyptic meant to foreground the unconditionality of Christ’s messianic coming—insofar as “Jesus is Lord,” (that is, “Jesus is sovereign”), and insofar as Christ is the “particular operation of God’s transcendence” that remains immune from any contamination by the world. Here, Christ is not conceived as sovereign in the worldly sense—his is not an “earthly” kingdom of violent rule—but in an utterly subversive sense that disrupts all worldly sovereignty based on immunitary protection. Yet, this does not escape the problem of immunity, as Christ’s sovereignty still means that the proclamation “Jesus is Lord” must be protected and hedged off from the contamination of heresy or, more to the point, the total conversion into something unrecognizable that would inevitably occur if the Christian community were to be absolutely open in faith. “Jesus is Lord,” then, serves as a kind of “backstop” that prevents faith in the apocalyptic event of Christ from fully opening up the body to a becoming that is neither calculable nor anticipatable. Here, “Jesus is Lord” and “God’s absolute transcendence” can only mean something like “unscathed,” as it is the proclamation and category that ensures God’s total autonomy, freedom, independence, and immunity from immanent contamination. In other words, absolute transcendence is what ensures God’s absolute sovereignty, which, in the form of an eschatological guarantee of ultimate redemption, immunizes the performance of faith from the risk of being contaminated, transformed, and even dissolved in its encounter with otherness. This is perhaps most evident in Christian Apocalyptic’s vision of the Christian community. From the side of faith (i.e. the Pauline Declaration), the Christian community is supposed to be that which has its identity in its non-identity. The community that Christ enacts and sends into the world as a self-emptying body given over to a complete solidarity with oppressed “others” must remain open to the unanticipatable future and contingency of Christ-as-other’s action in the world. Apocalyptic is meant to function as the category that ensures that the church never closes off its borders in order to stabilize an identity that in turn requires immunization. Following

192  Thinking resistance this logic to its end, then, would mean an inherent autoimmunity where the very thing meant to protect the community in its proper form—as an open body—is the thing that leads to its transformation into something beyond its control. This means that in order for the apocalyptic event to be truly welcomed, Christian Apocalyptic would have to let go of its insistence that “Jesus is Lord,” or at least “Jesus is Lord” as an immunized proclamation that defines the shape (or non-shape) of the community specifically as Christocentric. To follow the full logic of apocalyptic, it would have to be opened up to the risk of absolute change, the risk of losing the ability to name its own outside object of faith and worship because that very object has opened it up to its conversion into something it cannot anticipate. In this way, Christian Apocalyptic represents a theology that, by its very nature, is open to its own self-imposed destruction as a specifically Christian theology. As long as Christian Apocalyptic retains an evangelical insistence on God’s sovereignty through Christ’s Lordship, it remains immune to the full implications of apocalyptic.

The nullification of apocalypse I affirm the general thrust of Christian Apocalyptic in its orientation of a radical faith posed against the experience of the unscathed. This kind of response, as I have discussed, is rooted in a prioritization of resolving the political ontological problem of the mediated human being as the only sphere of critique that matters. Yet, as I have tried to show, this political ontological sphere tends to produce forms of critique that necessitate some kind of definitive end to the power of the apparatus, whether it be through the arrival of a restored humanity unmediated by “improper writing” and its divisions (Heidegger-Agamben) or through a kind of absolute divine violence that wipes away any trace of the political ontological regime of the powers (Christian Apocalyptic). However, the autoimmunity of Christian Apocalyptic suggests that the messianic event can never be identified as an end, but only as that which makes possible an opening to a future of more writing and mediation, of more observations and distinctions, and of material contingency. Looking to Derrida (once more!), I argue that the autoimmunity of apocalyptic, specifically as a category of worldly disruption, leads to the necessary forsaking of any eschatological guarantee of salvation premised on Christ’s Lordship or God’s sovereignty. In his essay, “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Recently Adopted by Philosophy,” Derrida reduces apocalyptic to the gesture “come,” a gesture devoid of object, eschatology, or any “operation” with a predetermined end attached. “Come,” he says, addresses without message and without destination, without sender or decidable addressee, without last judgment, without any other eschatology than the tone of the “Come,” its very différance, an apocalypse

Being’s salvation 193 beyond good and evil. “Come” does not announce this or that apocalypse. . . . it is in itself the apocalypse of apocalypse.36 Here we find an apocalyptic orientation that is absolutely open—if only because there is no way around this—to what may come with the arrival of that which can never be anticipated in advance. There is no object that links it to a guarantee of salvation nor, for that matter, a guarantee of disaster. Rather, there is only the guarantee that time will go on, that there will always be more to write, that contingency will triumph, and that the world in its present state will never remain immune to the coming of time and the otherness that it brings. This apocalyptic orientation has no object of unscathed sovereignty or guaranteed eschatology. It has no end, meaning that apocalyptic, contrary to a Christian apocalypse arriving in the singular act of revelation and an eschatology that preconditions this act’s ultimate outcome, is simply the condition for a writing without end, a world in which “otherness” does not arrive by way of revelation but only through the positing of new observations and distinctions that never cease to come and transform the world into something different, something new. And so, apocalypse paradoxically means that there is “not, there has never been, there will not be apocalypse.”37

Notes 1 Richard Rojcewicz, The Gods and Technology: A Reading of Heidegger (New York: SUNY Press, 2006), 9. 2 Martin Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, and other Essays (New York: Harper, 2013), 27. 3 Wolfe, Before the Law, 3. 4 Heidegger, The Question Concerning Technology, 18. 5 Frank A. Capuzzi and Martin Heidegger, “Letter on Humanism,” in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeil (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 239. 6 Martin Heidegger, Parmenides (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 1982), 80. 7 Ibid., 81. 8 Agamben, What Is An Apparatus? 14. 9 Ibid. 10 Colby Dickinson, “Beyond Objects, Beyond Subjects: Giorgio Agamben on Animality, Particularity, and the End of Onto-theology,” Cosmos and History 7, no. 1 (2011): 92. 11 Jeffrey Librett, “From the Sacrifice of the Letter to the Voice of Testimony: Giorgio Agamben’s Fulfillment of Metaphysics,” Diacritics 37, no. 2–3 (2007): 12. 12 Ibid. 13 Giorgio Agamben, Potentialities: Collected Essays in Philosophy (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2000), 37. 14 Librett, “From the Sacrifice of the Letter,” 15. 15 Librett suggests that Agamben’s use of Benjamin as an “almost Christian” Jew be read in terms of the debate between Benjamin and Gershom Scholem’s reading of Kafka’s parable “Before the Law.” As Librett puts it, for Agamben,

194  Thinking resistance “Scholem’s all-too-Jewish, or ‘bad’-Jewish (traditionalist), reading loses out Benjamin’s non-too-Jewish, or ‘good’ Jewish (messianic), reading. And also not surprisingly, Agamben positions Derrida’s reading as a version of Scholem’s, while he advances his own as a version of Benjamin’s. Benjamin plays here the role of the almost-Christian Jew, the one who is rigorously opposed to (Jewish) legalism and the one who correspondingly objects to the opacity of the letter.” Ibid., 22. 16 Ibid., 17. 17 Agamben, Potentialities, 39. 18 Librett, “From the Sacrifice of the Letter,” 15. 19 Giorgio Agamben, The Coming Community (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1993), 90. 20 Benjamin, “Critique of Violence,” 251. 21 Georges Sorel, Reflections on Violence (London: Allen and Unwin, 1915), 147. 22 Walter Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in Illuminations: Essays and Reflections (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 264. 23 Agamben, State of Exception, chapter 4. 24 In The Time that Remains, which is a commentary on Paul’s Letter to the Romans, Agamben dismisses the language of apocalyptic as “eschatological time” in favor of “messianic time” ala Benjamin. Here, however, I am using “apocalyptic” as a signifier of a messianic event that would deactivate the apparatus-system in its totality as the condition for ushering in a new reality. See Agamben, The Time that Remains, 62ff. 25 Dominick LaCapra, History and its Limits: Human, Animal, Violence (Ithaca: Cornel University Press, 2009), 168. 26 Giorgio Agamben, The Open: Man and Animal (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003), 92. 27 LaCapra, History and its Limits, 166. 28 Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1968). 29 Nathan Kerr, Christ, History, and Apocalyptic: The Politics of Christian Mission (Eugene: Cascade, 2008), 138. 30 Ibid., 13. 31 See Benjamin, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” 263. 32 Ry Siggelkow, “Toward an Apocalyptic Peace Church: Christian Pacifism After Hauerwas,” Conrad Grebel Review (Fall 2013), accessed December 6, 2019, www.uwaterloo.ca, https://uwaterloo.ca/grebel/publications/conrad-grebel-review/ issues/fall-2013/toward-apocalyptic-peace-church-christian-pacifism-after. 33 Craig Keen, After Crucifixion: The Promise of Theology (Eugene: Cascade Press, 2014), 94. 34 Nathan Kerr, “Standing Out into the Coming Reign of God: Some Apocalyptic Reflections on James Cone’s, The Cross and the Lynching Tree,” Theology Today 70, no. 2 (2013). 35 Siggelkow, “Toward an Apocalyptic Peace Church,”. 36 Jacques Derrida, “Of an Apocalyptic Tone Newly Adopted in Philosophy,” in Derrida and Negative Theology, ed. Harold Coward and Toby Foshay (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1992), 67. 37 Ibid., 66.

8 The fugitive and the katechon Blackness and pragmatics

In “Blackness and Nothingness: Mysticism in the Flesh,” Fred Moten elaborates his differences with the “Afro-pessimism” of Jared Sexton and Frank Wilderson. Despite their differences, which Moten makes clear cannot be reduced down to any simple opposition, all three agree on the crucial description of blackness as nothingness, as the absolutely excluded position of modernity’s regime of political ontology. Blackness is the “non-ontology” against which human subjectivity itself—to wit, “the human”—is constructed, or, as Moten puts it, the “relative nothingness of the impossible, pathological subject and his fellows.”1 The key difference with Afro-pessimism, as Moten’s writing tries to perform, is nothingness’ relation to sociality. While the Afro-pessimism of Wilderson and Sexton describes the nothingness of blackness in terms of social death (ala Orlando Patterson),2 in which blackness names the absence or eradication of sociality, Moten asserts that the nothingness of blackness is the very condition of sociality. In its exclusion from the identity of subjectivity, blackness is the uncontrolled and ungoverned field of non-identity that is the antecedent condition and possibility of social relations. Reading this understanding of blackness with a systems theory bent, blackness is the other side of the unity of distinction, the environment of white Christian Identity’s political ontological organization of immunized identity.3 In this way, blackness provides a name for a kind of (living) immanent resistance preceding and conditioning the organization of white Christian Identity. Deleuze calls this resistance “a life,” the very possibility written into any living being preceding its encounter with the world that imposes upon it a form, subjectivity, or objectivity.4 This notion of “a life” is in critical opposition to the religiously phantasmal concept of pure “life” itself, which as I outlined in part one, can only be thought in terms of the unconditioned becoming of its own performance in space and time. The “living performativity” of life, its blackness as environment to white Christian Identity, means that the living within and against the system of white Christian Identity are always in resistance to any final “presence” or closure of life, captured under the phantasm of a sovereign identity dependent on the sacrifice of the living. It is in this sense that Moten links blackness to what he (following Nahum Chandler) calls “para- ” or “ante-”

196  Thinking resistance ontology, a general movement and improvisation in opposition to any imposition of proper being.5 As he puts it, “blackness is prior to ontology; or in a slight variation of what Chandler would say, blackness is the anoriginal displacement of ontology, that it is ontology’s anti- and ante-foundation, ontology’s underground, the irreparable disturbance of ontology’s time and space.”6 Thinking in terms of the theo-politics of white Christian Identity, where the katechon names the immune function of discriminating and controlling elements that threaten to disturb or destroy its proper form, the social life of blackness finds a vessel in the figure of the fugitive, the “lawless” one, the “outlaw” against the katechon who moves “in and out of the frame, bar, or whatever externally imposed social logic—a movement of escape, the stealth of the stolen that can be said, since it inheres in every closed circle, to break every enclosure.”7 In this relationship, the sociality of blackness is posed directly against the political as the sphere of proper subjectivity, and this gets us back to white Christian Identity’s structural alliance with the apparatus of the state as its immunitary border of protection. For Moten, the specific enclosure that the political in modernity marks is anti-black, anti-social. In distinction against Afropessimism’s ontological diagnosis of social death, he says, “what I assert is this: that black life—which is as surely to say life as black thought is to say thought—is irreducibly social; that, moreover, black life is lived in political death.”8 As the mark of slavery and its biopolitical afterlife, political death configures blackness as a stateless status of “inhuman unaccommodated bios,” or what Spillers calls the flesh as the “zero degree of social conceptualization,”9 a status that for Moten is not the “absence or eradication” of sociality but its very mark. At its base, the political names a system of state identity that imposes its phantasy of sovereignty upon the ungoverned environment of social life, the sphere of generative possibility “given in common, instantiated in exchange,”10 marking a “a radical disjunction between sociality and the state-sanctioned, state-sponsored terror of power-laden inter-subjectivity.”11 As its environment, the sociality of blackness is the antecedent resistance to the political that protects the distinction of system/environment through the violent prevention of blackness from disrupting the unity of distinction. Blackness is therefore the political’s deconstruction, the perpetual threat of its unraveling as a structure of self-reference claiming sovereign unity and wholeness. In its resistance, blackness exposes the political’s machinery and operations as fundamentally divisible. Such an assertion of black sociality marks a distinction with Afropessimism, but it also foregrounds an agreed upon problem relating closely to the description of the political introduced in Chapter 3 with Christian Identity’s figure of the katechon. Recalling that the katechon-as-the-political is arranged around the Schmittian friend-enemy distinction, what both Moten and Afro-pessimism make clear is that this distinction is premised

The fugitive and the katechon 197 on the exclusion of blackness from the political sphere all together. This is because blackness (as nothingness) is identified not out of a structural political distinction that functions to manage and control inherent human conflict but out of (black) sociality’s a priori and absolute exclusion from the political distinction itself. Blackness, in other words, names the hidden unity of political system: the negated, unthinkable, and absent difference that we can observe as part of the political’s abyssal environment. We see a version of this in Frank Wilderson’s distinction between what he calls an antagonism and a conflict. The relation between humanity and blackness, Wilderson argues, is a relation of antagonism, where “gratuitous violence. . . constitutes Black being [as nothingness] rather than acting upon it.”12 One way to put this in political theological terms is that it is sovereignty qua state of exception that constitutes the law (and therefore politics) precisely by, and in the same stroke, constituting blackness as the permanent exception itself, the absolutely excluded position of nothingness against which the political becomes conceivable and as something to protect and restore in the event of the emergency situation. While antagonisms rest on this gratuitous and constitutional violence, conflicts are inter-human encounters involving “contingent violence,” or violence that involves the loss or alienation of something—humanity, citizenship, subjectivity, the status of “friend”—and therefore involves the possibility that what is lost or alienated can be recovered (even in the most extreme cases),13 or that the conflict can be limited through legitimated violence such as a legal war of mutual recognition. The sphere of conflicts is the sphere of the political; its violence is between friends and enemies, both of which are constituted in the exclusion of blackness. I suggest that the difference between antagonism and conflict is the constitutive distinction of white Christian (political) Identity that the katechon protects. From white Christian Identity’s self-referential observational vantage, what is at stake for this protective function is the world (system) itself. To remove the katechon, to remove the immune system that holds back the “lawlessness” (i.e. nothingness) of blackness from contaminating the political sphere, would signal the end of the world (as the self-reference of white Christian Identity), the apocalypse of world political order hovering over the ungoverned abyss of sociality. Here, the connection between the katechon and white supremacy presents itself. As an immunitary identification of environmental non-whiteness as threatening to the proper order of white Christian Identity, the katechon is the system of white supremacy’s particular response in the face of perceived risk and vulnerability. The katechon is only called into being when a threat is self-referentially identified. The “lawlessness” the katechon observes signifies the threat of chaos, the outside “common environment” of sheer and uncontrollable contingency. White Christian Identity’s paradigmatic figure of “lawlessness” is blackness, signified onto the bodies of black people.14 Kelly Brown Douglass, in her book Stand Your Ground, captures this white

198  Thinking resistance self-defensive paranoia in the United States in terms of “white property” and the notion of Anglo-Saxonist exceptionalism: black people are viewed as more than just inferior to white people. They are perceived as a threat. They are viewed as a chronic danger to cherished white property. That which makes the black body most dangerous is when it betrays its created nature. Within the social-cultural context of Anglo-Saxon exceptionalism, that nature has been established as chattel. Thus, a free black body and a dangerous black body are practically equivalent, according to the theoretical logic of America’s AngloSaxonist exceptionalism.15 For the system of white Christian Identity, the “free black body” is the environmental figure of the improper, or that which the system cannot turn into what it understands as proper: property. Blackness is observed as the chaotic and ungovernable environment of the property-less that calls into action the immune system of paranoid racism and its violent practices of control and exclusion. Against this immune system, blackness is the antecedent refusal and resistance of white Christian Identity and its attempt to capture all human difference into its laws of racial categorical distinction. To white Christian Identity’s figure of humanity (Man), blackness signifies the nonhumanity that must be prevented from contaminating its true humanity; to its political subject of citizen, blackness signifies the criminality that must be policed; to its rational subject of reason, blackness signifies an unbridled and dangerous imagination that must be caged in; to its figure of purity and salvation, blackness signifies corruption and damnation. All of these distinctions are fundamentally about identifying environmental threats and protecting white Christian Identity’s phantasm of human authenticity. If blackness occupies the bottom of the hierarchy of “proper” humanity, then whiteness is at the top; if Blackness signals non-humanity, “Whiteness is the most impeccable embodiment of what it means to be Human.”16

The katechon, the political, and blackness If blackness is the “demonic ground”17 of the katechon’s political immunitary function, then what bearing does blackness have on the concept of the political as such? What of the political when it is conceived as the katechonic ground of human survival in a world of violence, as we saw in Carl Schmitt in Chapter 3? To a realist like Schmitt, the political sphere, even in its limitations and imperfections, is absolutely essential for human survival in an ultimately chaotic and violent environment as it is the only sphere that can produce the necessary conflict able to absorb, contain, and limit the threat of catastrophe that would break loose in the absence of the friend/enemy binary. There is something appealing about this embrace as it seems to provide a realist and sober approach to the problem of the

The fugitive and the katechon 199 ineluctability of violence. Bracketing Schmitt’s more dubious loyalties, even in its limitations, a recovery of Schmittian reverence for the political as the only social system that can contain and manage the inherent conflict within human life seems vitally necessary in a post-modern context of depoliticized neoliberal managerialism, nihilistic aestheticism, and religious fanaticism. This, for example, is the path Wendy Brown takes in Undoing the Demos, where she argues that it is the absorption of the political into the economic and the loss of society’s ability to have productive conflicts and deliberations over the public good that has let loose powerful forces of anti-democratic violence and control.18 In order to stave off the disaster that encroaches as the “distinctly political character, meaning, and operation of democracy’s constituent elements” are converted into economic ones, a recovery of the political becomes vitally necessary if life is to remain protected from the sheer nihilism of purely economic ends. It is in this sense that a political theology of a kind of “responsible” katechon presents itself as the answer. Is not the katechon—as that force of order that limits the worst of human nature precisely by embracing it, taking it in, and managing it—the very thing that provides the space in which to mitigate these effects and arrange a world of limited violence and secured order? Political theorist William Rasch thinks so. In his unflinching study Sovereignty and its Discontents: On the Primacy of Conflict and the Structure of the Political, he argues from a systems theory perspective that the political (as katechon) is the most important social system precisely because of its function of embracing and managing conflict.19 Speaking against the certain form of theoretical messianism we saw in Agamben and Benjamin, as well as thinkers from Badiou to Deleuze to Hardt and Negri, Rasch rejects any hint of “eschatological desire” for a messiah or savior, whether a “coming community,” “the multitude,” a “new ontology,” “the event,” “divine violence,” or Christ himself, all of which would signal the “end of the world” precisely as redemption from the Katechon as worldly political violence and order. From Rasch’s realist perspective wishing to stave off the worst scenarios of domestic and global violence, such desire for removing the katechon and ushering in ultimate redemption, a desire for the total dismantling of the apparatus as the condition for an unconditioned form of life, presents a highly dangerous refusal of human responsibility. As he puts it in his chapter on Agamben’s anti-political messianism, The katechon, as a figure for the political, rejects the promise of Parousia and protects the community from the dangerous illusions of both ultimate perfection and absolute evil. . . . What if the katechon were not primarily a theological figure but a political one, or rather a figure of the political itself . . . those human institutions that keep us human, that keep us ensnared in our many, ordinary guilts—perhaps this is all we have. And to long for divine destruction of the imperfect world of the political—perhaps this is the greater nihilism.20

200  Thinking resistance From Rasch’s Schmittian-realist perspective, to embrace the hope for a messianic arrival after the removal of the katechon is not only to pursue a worn-out utopianism of “unmediated life” that has yet to be realized in any world-historical discernable sense, but also to reject the one thing that we have that may give us actual hope in an existence hovering over that fine line between the possibility of going on and the ever-threatening possibility of catastrophe. Politics may not be perfect, but it’s all we have to keep us from the worst. While I think Rasch is correct to reject the utopian promise of a “new ontology” that offers the complete deactivation of politics through the recovery of a “pre-“ or even “post- political” human being, and while this critique provides a compelling realism against the kind of political ontological and theological apocalypticism analyzed in the previous chapter, the question of blackness’ relation to the political remains stubbornly, or defiantly, posed against its offer of limited protection through the mediation of conflict. It is telling that all of Rasch’s anti-katechonic interlocutors are white Europeans that, for the most part, exclude blackness from their frames of reference.21 What of blackness when the political is elevated to the status of all that stands between the world and its apocalyptic end? If blackness names the threat of an ungoverned and ungovernable environmental sociality to the system of politics, if it is altogether excluded from the friendenemy doublet, then what does blackness mean for the question of a political theology, whether Schmittian or otherwise, that seeks some kind generative relation between the political and the theological precisely as a relation of protecting the sphere of politically qualified life? It is here that such championing of the katechon as the political and the dismissal of any messianic desire for its overturning as “a greater nihilism”—which Schmitt and Rasch would say is a refusal of the political itself—is exposed as structurally antiblack, unable to think blackness within the frame of the political. One way to put this is that Rasch and Schmitt can only see from the observational position of whiteness that assumes the political as a mirror of itself as the position of a transcendent and all-seeing civilized and civilizing force that serves the general and universal interest of some kind of fallen, violent, and pre-political human “social blob.”22 In its political theological function, this white katechon claims not salvation per se against the ungoverned social environment of blackness, but rather poses itself as the only chance to limit its lawlessness and cultivate spaces of relative peace. In short, whiteness here names the theo-political colonial imagination: politics as the necessary and benevolent protector of those that do not have the law and cannot govern themselves. As Moten and Afro-pessimism show, such a katechonic offer of relative order conceals the deeper constitutional anti-blackness of the political whose gratuitously violent operation is to distinguish and exclude blackness as the nothingness against which political subjects come into being. Such a critique of the political’s structural anti-blackness suggests a profound challenge to the very grounds of a political theology invested, however

The fugitive and the katechon 201 ambiguously as we saw with the figure of St. Paul, in katechonic immunity. This is especially true to the extent that political theology is concerned with capturing being’s proper relation to political authority, order, and governance. Most famously represented by Agamben’s Homo Sacer, critiques of Schmittian sovereignty and the katechon have long recognized the problem of political theology as a question of how sovereignty’s violent exceptionality puts a wedge down the middle of human life that separates the politically qualified from the merely living, but few have taken seriously blackness’s challenge to the assumption that the modern political as such, and therefore the political-theological, is something that can be thought outside of structural anti-blackness. Furthermore, I suggest the specific challenge that blackness poses to political theology is not its rethinking or reimagining, nor its apocalyptic “deactivation” that would make way for a recovery of authentic life, but its deconstruction through the ongoing fugitive resistance of blackness’ “general antagonism” to the political. In the Undercommons, Moten and Harney describe this fugitivity as simply “actually existing social life” that, in its very living, refuses the “responsibility” of politics: An abdication of political responsibility? OK. Whatever. We’re just anti-politically romantic about actually existing social life. We aren’t responsible for politics. We are the general antagonism to politics looming outside every attempt to politicise, every imposition of selfgovernance, every sovereign decision and its degraded miniature, every emergent state and home sweet home. We are disruption and consent to disruption. We preserve upheaval. Sent to fulfill by abolishing, to renew by unsettling, to open the enclosure whose immeasurable venality is inversely proportionate to its actual area, we got politics surrounded. We cannot represent ourselves. We can’t be represented.23 This deconstruction of the political is the performance a black fugitive sociality as the environment of the political, as moving in and through the unity of distinction “practiced on and over the edge of politics, beneath its ground, in animative and improvisatory decomposition of its inert body.”24 In this way, blackness-as-nothingness—as environment—provides the occasion to think improvisatory and transient forms of social life assembled against any political protocol of proper or normative being. This opposition names not an apocalyptic messianism that would signify a recovery of some originally lost being or voice, but rather the ongoing fugitive escape of improvisatory writing (as transient assemblage) against the katechon’s imposition of political order.

The pragmatics of resistance The environmental, aleatory life of blackness precedes the gratuitous violence of its attempted political theological capture. As we have seen, Moten

202  Thinking resistance reads the history of blackness as a history of its resistance to the capture of identity, the fugitive drive toward connection and commonality where an untraceable, stateless, and ungoverned life of “improvisational immanence” is always becoming.25 Moten’s performative writing of fugitivity opens the frame of resistance and social possibility to the aleatory field of living in all of its materiality, transience, and fleshly becoming. Here is where I locate what I call the “pragmatics of resistance” as an ethical (as opposed to a political ontological) orientation within and against white Christian Identity that begins with a faith in the coming of the other within the always shifting and transforming autoimmune process of closure and dis-enclosure. As I have theorized, the apparatus of white Christian Identity’s mechanisms and processes of immunization can never fully protect its (phantasmatic) self from danger and eventual dissolution as a fully in tact subject, and the history of its ever-changing character and form testify to its failure of full immunization. This is where autoimmunity, as opposed to apocalyptic, comes in as a productive category through which to think resistance. Entropy is, perhaps, the only universal category. All bodies die by the sheer fact of their temporality; all bodies are transformed by their encounters with their environment. The immunitary systems that define white Christian Identity’s political structure cannot ensure the protection of its phantasy of sovereignty. It is the attempt to immunize itself through the extension of its power that opens it up to the contingency and “danger” of the common, thus exposing itself to risk and the possibility of dangerous encounters. I suggest thinking these spaces of “danger and risk” as sites for a pragmatics of resistance that recognizes the inevitable autoimmunity of the apparatus of white Christian Identity that will always be limited by its “blindspots” of observation. Informed by Deleuze and Guattari’s use of the term in A Thousand Plateaus, I interpret “pragmatics” as temporal, transient, and practical modes of thought, writing, struggle, evasion, and creation that reflect an open faith in an otherwise future that is always possible as the apparatus of white Christian Identity persistently opens itself up to the contingency of new encounters and assemblages which in turn mark new blindspots and possible avenues of struggle. Without downplaying or denying the sheer violence and negativity of the apparatus, a pragmatic approach does not dwell on the imposition of the ontological hierarchy of racialized being as if it were the only reality that matters. With the prioritization of political ontology as the sole frame of analysis, the apparatus is observed as completely negative, full stop. Its only effect is the complete sedimentation of political ontological positions that have their ground in the sheer abjection of those falling outside the “proper.” From these theoretical perspectives, the focus is almost entirely on how the apparatus politically orders, excludes, and kills ontologized bodies of exclusion and abjection. While the political ontological critique is certainly essential to understanding the structures of violence that order and determine the normative operations of the world, looking to the way Foucault and Deleuze understand

The fugitive and the katechon 203 apparatuses, and the way that Moten understands the resisting movement of blackness, there emerges another way of thinking resistance and the production of creative and experimental modes of living as a kind of condition of the apparatus itself. For Foucault and Deleuze, apparatuses name the sites not only of governance and subjectification, but also the sites in which “lines of flight” become possible within its blindspots that escape absolute control by forming new relations and assemblages. In contrast to the political ontological sedimentation of racial positions freezing racial identities in place—both black and white (and everything in between)—without the possibility of resisting movement save for some apocalyptic event that destroys the entire thing, pragmatics provides a basis for thinking the apparatus as a process in which relations, networks, and assemblages are ever evolving through the system’s own autoimmune transformations. As Timothy Campbell describes, for Deleuze, the dispositif [apparatus] cannot be thought apart from lines of force or flight that condition the processes of subjectification. . . . The result of these lines of flight is a mobile notion of self that shifts as the process of subjectification shifts.26 What this means is that apparatuses function simultaneously as the basis of control (i.e. negative subjectification) and as a materiality that is always shifting and which can be put to use in or order to construct something outside of control (positive-creative mobility). The deployment of apparatuses, then, always contains within it the possibility of what it is trying to control will find ways of relating and moving that develop within its blindspots and thereby sabotage and escape its normative operations. Here is where the performance of pragmatics within the apparatus is about the creative use of technology (as writing), of which the most fundamental human form is language, that opens the autopoietically closed system to its outside. Pragmatics, as Deleuze and Guattari describe, “brings to light variables of expression or of enunciation that are so many internal reasons for language not to close itself off.”27 There is no one strategy, event, subject position, truth, or anything else that would reduce the task of thinking resistance and the production of forms of life to a singular or predetermined category such as “original being.” Rather, pragmatics names “assemblages [that] are in constant variation, are themselves constantly subject to transformations” as they remain (necessarily) open to developing experimental strategies, tactics, assemblages, and new forms of living in response to the contingency of encounters with others.28 This also links to Deleuze and Guattari’s distinction between what they call a “macropolitics” and a “micropolitics.” The macropolitical names the political ontological field that privileges the politics of sedimented ontological positions immunized from the threat of contingency and disruption what (Deleuze and Guattari describe as “molarisation”). The macropolitical

204  Thinking resistance reflects the political as such, structured around the friend/enemy distinction that serves to order conflict and relegate blackness as the excluded (non-) political position. In contrast, the micropolitical names the spaces within the apparatus in which various relations of contingency produce the conditions for “lines of flight, which are molecular.”29 The micropolitical field is where movement and resistance happens against or in excess of the macropolitical in ways not reducible to the political ontological frame. While the political ontological hierarchy of being names the macropolitical reality of the world’s socio-political ordering, “every politics is simultaneously a macropolitics and a micropolitics.”30 This means that there is always the possibility of resistance within the apparatus as it is constantly assembling new relations that themselves produce ever more conditions of contingency. We might say that the micropolitical is the autoimmunity of the political itself in which the opening of faith (as lines of flight) moves against its attempted protection of the phantasy of the unscathed. Of course, this is no formula for utopianism, and, as Amaryah Armstrong cautions against, fugitivity is not some kind of “heroic” activity as “being in the wilderness,” or environment, “exposes the precarity of liberation as non-achievement— something one must repeatedly fight for.”31 Lines of flight is not an inherently positive concept, as it first names a contingency that always poses the risk that whatever develops or assembles can become “capable of the worst.”32 Or, in Derrida’s messianic language, pragmatics “ought, exposing itself so abstractly, be prepared [ . . . ] for the best as for the worst, the one never coming without opening the possibility of the other.”33 However, it remains that this is all there is. It is this very contingency, the sheer forces and foldings of immanence, that conditions all movement in time and space, all assemblages, and all productions of knowledge, opening the possibility of creative and experimental practices, language games, and socio-political assemblages that provide temporal and transient means of possible escape from macropolitical sedimentations.

A pragmatics of faith: faith without faithful(l)ness Turning back to the frame of white Christian Identity and its larger frame of religion, I suggest that blackness names a kind of pragmatic faith within white religion’s autoimmune structure. As it inevitably opens up to new power relations for the very purpose of immunization against others within its self-referential environment, white Christian Identity necessarily produces new contingent spaces in which new movements and experiments of living become possible as it seeks to manage and control environmental contingencies. These spaces arise through the assemblage of new conjunctures of social, political, sexual, religious, and economic relations that provide conditions of new and contingent forms of connection and creativity. Within the apparatus, to riff on Moten, pragmatics is the performance of faith as a “fantasy in the hold.”34 Fantasy, in Moten’s terminology, means

The fugitive and the katechon 205 not the “phantasmatic” dream of securing some future immunized from suffering and divisions, but the relational movement of a faith in the possibility of discovering new and unanticipated languages, relations, and assemblages that escape the political ontological frame of violent colonization and racialization. Fantasy is real: it is on the move, in search not for a political identity that would provide some kind of proper subjectivity posed against an enemy but instead simply in search of connections with others. As performance, this can only ever be improvised and oriented in vulnerable openness to the other (as “other possibility”), unified with the system in its mark of distinction and yet existing on the other, non-marked side precisely as the negation of its identity. This might be one way to interpret Moten’s supplementation of the first line in In the Break—“the history of blackness is a testament to the fact that objects can and do resist”35—with the antecedent of that line from Black and Blur— “performance is the resistance of the object.”36 Against the political and its marked subject, against the identity of white Christianity and its apparatuses of racialization and objectification, there is the resistance of blackness’ performance, witnessed in “the mobile hold and block chapel of pidgin, the little Negro’s church and logos and gathering, this gathering in and against the word, alongside and through the word and the world as hold, manger, wilderness, tomb, upper room, and cell: there is fantasy in all of these.”37 Within these and other sites of micropolitical connection and the practices that take place in them, and in vulnerable coalition with and beside them, there is flight, resistance, and the creation of new forms of sociality. Prioritizing these sites and practices as the basis for resistance against white Christian Identity’s apparatuses of anti-blackness and white supremacy provide a much wider set of resources for approaching the complexity of the full scope of the social field that exists in excess—which is to say in the autoimmune openings of every enclosure— to the political ontological frame, and, in the same way, orients the fight against anti-blackness in pragmatic, rather than apocalyptic, terms. Here, I read the fantasy of blackness as a faith in the pragmatic embrace and movement toward an unconditioned and uncontrolled future that comes into view with every autoimmune opening. Faith links to pragmatics as its opens to a contingent future of new relations in which experimentation with lines of flight seek to change a given set of conditions with the hope for the emergence of spaces in which living can flourish. “Change” does not refer to some ultimate liberation where the apparatus has been discarded or circumvented in its totality nor does it imply a change that is preconceived and pre-calculated. The faith of pragmatics defers the notion of the very possibility of absolute liberation, which simply ends up as a form of absolute immunization existing on the other end of a kind of eschatological salvation. As Derrida describes the efficacy of deconstruction, “not to change things in the . . . rather naive sense of calculated, deliberate and strategically controlled intervention, but in the sense of maximum intensification of a transformation in progress.”38 To press the point further, this

206  Thinking resistance (autoimmune) “progress” has no ultimate horizon; change is all there is, and it is only through a pragmatics of faith in the unconditioned coming of the future that the production of desirable spaces for living within this never-ending cycle of change is possible. In this way, pragmatics performs what I call a “faith without faithful(l) ness.” Faithful(l)ness signals the arrival of something; faith is fulfilled, made full, made present. In contrast, a truly open faith never arrives at presence. Faith defers the fullness of an arrival of salvation as the unscathed, breaking apart and fragmenting in its vulnerable exposure to the contingency of systems, leading to wholly unanticipated assemblages and new relations. As Marcella Althaus-Reid writes of discrediting traditional notions of salvation in her reading of the hidden excesses or “fetishisms” of liberation theology, in all of its oppressive limitations for sexually non-normative folks and queer movements of “indecency” and impropriety, [traditional] Salvation becomes the theological place of what Derrida has called ‘the safe and sound, the unscathed , (sacer, sanctus, heilig, holy. . .)’ . . . but simultaneously . . . it is that place of sensual excess, which carries with it pleasures of insecurity, or the excitation of the unsafeness of the unknown.39 Althaus-Reid’s queering of liberation theology to connect its “sensual” or “fleshly” material excesses to the possibilities of the unknown—to the outside environment of phantasies of the unscathed—provide a key model for pragmatic faith, a means through which theological language remains open and always in desiring fugitive movement toward new connections. Pragmatic faith marks what Althaus-Reid calls an “aleatory theology, which works from contingency and encounters, instead of a teleological theology, which works from idealism.”40 In short, a pragmatic faith would be the study of the lines of flight that are set in motion by risk, transgression, and the insecurity of being marked as “other” to white Christian Identity’s proper identity. Such would be the fleshly and material negation of any attempt at the absolute immunity of a system of truth and identity that posits itself precisely against other, aleatory realities of its environment. This does not necessarily mean that faith’s referent of an infinite and absolutely contingent “otherness” cannot remain under particular referents or names. “God,” for example.41 The point is that “God” is only that: a material and name iterated through the performance of language that will always mark an excess and an opening to any system claiming that very name as sovereign. In this way, God might be useful as a name for the future’s unconditioned coming, “the inevitable negativity and endless referral to Other that all attempts to think a positive infinity and full presence must meet.”42 Of course, there are certainly other ways and names to describe this, and to be sure, God is always a dangerous name to insist upon both in terms of its historical baggage and violent use and its propensity toward being

The fugitive and the katechon 207 onto-theologized as an “exemplary revelation” that would make the “trace subservient to full presence.”43 Yet, in the face of such risk, which cannot be avoided, the name of “God” is not any more (or less) dangerous in its penchant for overdetermination and violence than, say, “the human,” “nature,” or the “nation.” Here, the name of God is observed as material that is put to use as an improvisatory experiment, devoid of value, beyond ontologized good and evil, and beyond absolute salvation. There is nothing preventing the name of God to be queered and used in productive and creative ways for the construction of spaces and practices of lived connection. “Border of thinking are crossed,” Althaus-Reid writes, “borders of prayer are crossed. Body-borders. God may cross God’s own borders too.”44 Deleuze’s reflections on the name of God’s function in the history of painting and its relation to philosophy is helpful here. “God,” as he puts it, offered an extraordinary opportunity for painting to free lines, colors and movements from the constraints of resemblance, so God and the theme of God offered the irreplaceable opportunity for philosophy to free the object of creation in philosophy—that is to say concepts—from the constraints that had been imposed on them . . . the simple representation of things.45 Here, God is put to pragmatic use as part of the plane of immanence, the “reality” in which the contingencies of systems are always marking new distinctions. Such a use of God exceeds any traditional notion of ontotheological (or, to wit, political ontological) essence and sovereignty, and it resists the attempt to find safety and assurance in some kind of stabilized and immunized identity. This conception of the name of God is a pragmatics of faith aimed at finding openings and new blindspots within the apparatus in order to discover, cultivate, and explore spaces and practices of living. Always and nothing but pragmatics. God is a name that is retained only to the extent that it remains useful for producing desirable spaces of living in which the living might pursue its quest for flourishing. When its particular use becomes a hindrance or when it becomes something that must be absolutely protected or enforced, pragmatics keeps moving in its inevitable opening to new points of relations and encounters. Wherever the name of God attempts to secure itself as immune from the contingency of its own performance-iteration, which is to say its contingency as it is dispersed into the world, it meets the impossibility of securing its sovereignty. Attuned to this, pragmatics is always ready to give up on any particular iteration of God if need be, to replace one description of God with another, or to look for new names of the other that it orients its faith toward. To press the point, pragmatics retains a kind of “hermeneutics of suspicion” when it comes to the name of God. It uses it to the extent that it provides a sign of the coming of an otherness that opens up spaces in which an ungoverned living becomes possible, but it knows that when it

208  Thinking resistance ceases to remain useful or becomes a hindrance to living it can abandon or transform it into something else. For example, when God names a concept or set of ontological assumptions that becomes contradictory or inhibiting to the kinds of experimentation (for example, sexual, relational, social) necessary to cultivate new forms of living, pragmatics authorizes itself to abandon that particular concept of God in favor of cultivating a new one or turning to something else altogether. Jean-Luc Nancy is worth quoting at length here: “God” could be the name that, as a proper noun, names the unnamable and, as a common noun, designates the division dies/nox, day and night, opening the rhythm of the world, the possibility of distinctions in general, and therefore of relation and of passage . . . But we can erase this sign if it begins to dominate, take control, subjugate: it then becomes contradictory, in effect, as it annuls passage, annuls us as passers-by, attempts to fix us permanently before altars, temples, books. This is what happens, perhaps unavoidably, in all the theological and metaphysical determinations of “God,” and it is perhaps impossible for this name, as for any other, not to be determined in some way. It is ­perhaps impossible for this name to retain the movement, the trembling of the gap and the passage . . . “God” should only be named in passing, and as a passer by.46 A truly open faith means the willingness to relinquish the name of God, to “go on” in survival without the necessity of trying to save (the name of) God from its contamination and transformation. This is a pragmatic faith that exceeds the borders of belief; a faith that has no object to which it is faithful(l). If faith in “God” instead turns out to be faith in an immunized name, a name of a closure or a binding instead of an opening, “a demand rather than a letting-be, an identity rather than an affect . . . then in the name of God let us erase the name of God, let us pray God to rid us of God.”47

The pragmatic refusal to claim victory: from theology back to religion A pragmatics of faith privileges the negotiation and cultivation of modes of temporal and therefore finite living in all of its difference, limitation, and contingency. Thinking the production of forms of living within the autoimmune openings of the apparatus is prioritized above any attempt to indemnify phantasmal identities and secure their immunity-as-salvation. In this way, a pragmatics of faith is performed against a complex understanding of power and the apparatus, attuned to the multi-layered relations of aleatory bodies, discourses, and technologies of control tied to the apparatus’s ambiguous and oftentimes hidden mechanisms of power. It prioritizes a practical and ongoing search for new tactics, orientations, assemblages,

The fugitive and the katechon 209 vocabularies, and processes of becoming that are aimed toward actual social and political change within the limits of a contingent world of power relations that are always conditioning the opening up of white Christian Identity beyond its attempted enclosure. The modes of searching for these things are virtually endless: language games, arts, communal organizations, music, protests, clothing, food, sex, and anything else that makes a finite world, which is to say anything else that makes new distinctions against and in excess of that which is trying to contain the living. These searches, or “quests,”48 for complex and liberative forms of living find an array of possibilities in religious frameworks of meaning, and have interesting implications in terms of how religion and theology might be part of thinking resistance to racialized Christian Identity. I suggest history of religions scholar Charles Long’s critique of what he calls the “opaque theologies” of the oppressed in his seminal text Significations provides a productive site in which to explore a pragmatics of faith that takes the side of white Christian Identity’s environment and so “denies the authority of the white world to define [‘the opaque one’s’] reality.”49 Long’s description of opaque theologies, which refer primarily to the liberation theologies of authors such as Vine Deloria Jr. and James Cone, might be read as a kind of obverse of white onto-theologies of transcendent observation in their refusal to be defined by another system as “transparently” knowable.50 In terms of an engagement with Long, I am interested in his refusal of theology as a “powerful” and “normative mode of discourse;” theology as a kind of “battle-field” for contesting political ontological hierarchies in terms of claiming or recovering a universal notion of authentic human being.51 Long is highly suspicious of theological moves that would claim some kind of ultimate eschatological “victory” in the face of forces of oppression, the idea that one “hegemony of power” could be replaced or overcome by another. Such moves that seek to secure a description of the order of things seem susceptible to the temptations of power by recreating the system of oppression through self-determined projects of world-making.52 Instead of “going forward” with theology as a powerful mode of discourse, Long proposes that theologies interested in resisting the racist structures of the west should become “deconstructive theologies” that return to the space of religion and its “resources that might enable us to generate another kind of meaning for the temporal-spacial existence of human beings on this globe.”53 Such resources will not be found by repeating onto-theological and eschatological gestures of white theology, or by positing some kind of objective observational perspective of human autopoiesis. Rather, these resources are found in the stuff of human living, especially those forms of living performed as the underside of the white world, its environment, where experimentation and encounters contingently create “narratives of meaning . . . commensurate with the quality of beauty that was fired in the crucible of oppression.”54 One of Long’s primary critiques related to this deconstructive project is how the study (or, observation) of black religion in America has historically

210  Thinking resistance taken place. Much of the scholarship of the 20th century on black religion in America has focused on Christian theology as the vehicle through which black liberation has been conceived, but as Long emphasizes, religion always precedes the theological. “Even if one is to have theology,” Long notes, “it must arise from religion, something that is prior to theology.”55 If religion is prior to theology, the study of black religion, and religion in general, cannot involve reduction down to Christianity and its theological boundaries and protocols, which has so often been the case. As Long understands it, the study of black religion, if it is to serve rethinking what it means to be human within this modern world (system) of anti-black inhumanity, must be free from any particular faith that has immunized itself through its borders of essential identity and meaning. This is a return to auto-religion as the “arena for the constitution of consciousness” and the production of an “original authenticity of all persons which precedes the master-slave dichotomy.”56 This marks a “crawling back” toward an originary religious faith in humanity’s “first creation” as an unconditioned site of invention and storytelling. Against the “second creation” of the African as a slave, a new story was invented within the cracks and loopholes of racialized Christian Identity’s apparatus of capture and immunization. The encounter with new Gods, new cultures, and new knowledges in colonial modernity signaled the assemblage of new forms of religious meanings, stories of transcendence and origins, and rituals of resistance. The emphasis on religion’s antecedent relation to theology leads Long to ponder a possible future for “theologies opaque” as forms of thought committed to a critique of the hegemony of white power and its structuring of the western world. Long asks how might theology done by those concerned with resisting white supremacy remain open to the lives shaped within historical, religious, and philosophical structures that are determined from top to bottom by racism and white supremacy. For Long, both James Cone and Vine Deloria Jr. center their thought around oppressed community’ resistance to white, western supremacism. Their theology begins with the “opacity of reality” and flows specifically out of the religious experience that has shaped non-white existence.57 As theologies of resistance to the hegemonic power structures that condition the oppression of opaque peoples, which is to say as resistance to the apparatus of white Christian Identity, they affirm the complexity of living against the oppressor’s signification of them as “that which does not belong” within their codes of belonging and properness. This is to say that these theologies exercise a faith in the fugitive blackness contained with the cries of “Black is beautiful; “God is red!”58 that break open and disrupts the apparatus’ attempt at immunizing its sovereignty against this uncontainable environmental movement. These discourses of theologies opaque offer a pragmatic renaming of God that is put to use as a weapon on the side of those oppressed by the violent ontological claims of whiteness.

The fugitive and the katechon 211 To the extent, however, that theologies opaque (as liberation theologies) carry in them “a familiar Enlightenment ring with their emphasis on liberation and their open consorting with Marxism,”59 there remains an internal ambiguity that goes beyond these Enlightenment categories of liberation. Theologies opaque “grow out of the realization of the primordial meaning of color and they push this signification into the critical and constructive arena of intellectual construction, yet they do not wish to claim simple ethnic goals or superiority.”60 The primordial meaning of color referenced here points toward a conception of blackness as a religious drive of faith always evading and deferring any fixed notion of identity. Theologies opaque avoid the notion that the oppressed are just another exclusive group claiming superiority based on a particular counter-identity. They are concerned with broader issues that have implications going well beyond identity politics. They wish to make claims on all people, even the white oppressor: “for it is [the white oppressor’s] consciousness and acts of oppression that constitute their unfreedom and inhumanity.”61 In other words, the immunitary drive that has produced the apparatus of racialized Christian Identity as an utterly violent attempt to secure its own salvation is also a violent act, however less intense, upon the very bodies that it has ontologically signified as “proper” and sovereign. In the racialized ordering of the world, all people—as flesh— are targeted and captured by the apparatus, it is just that this capture happens in much more intense and violent ways for some compared to others. This is precisely the reality attacked by opaque theologies, who base their critiques on “power, the power of God, but equally about the power of specific forms of discourse about power.”62 It is because this critique is so powerful that Long argues that it should not move forward in the goal to wrest the theological mantle from its foes: If God is red, if black is beautiful, then this modality of the godhead has always been the case and there are those who have lived this testimony. The opacity of God forms a discontinuity with the bad faith of the other theological modes. There is a theology of accusation and opposition which is to the fore in the theologies opaque. But it is precisely at this point that these theologies should not move forward to possess the theological battlefield wrested from their foes. It is at this point that theologies opaque must become deconstructive theologies—that is to say, theologies that undertake the destruction of theology as a powerful mode of discourse.63 The discourse on the religion of the oppressed, as a discourse of a pragmatics of faith in the face of violent apparatuses of power, must resist the temptation of “claiming victory” as it searches for new and alternative forms of meaning and truth. The emergence of theologies opaque is certainly a powerful critique of the ontological ordering that has attempted to capture

212  Thinking resistance and control the unconditioned blackness of being. They are deconstructive to the extent that they point to a mode of existence that is not determined by their political ontological position but by their faith in otherwise possibilities against the apparatus. However, in order to become truly deconstructive theologies, which perhaps means simply being deconstructed as theology, they must remain open in an unconditioned faith that does not point toward a God that is sovereignly on the side of one and not on the other, thereby recreating the very immunitary system of inside/outside it is resisting, but rather to the always becoming human being as a fleshly movement of desire, creativity, and endless invention. Deconstructive theologies grounded in the (auto-) religious material of storytelling defer and resist theological claims of sovereign truth. They assemble around the experiences of flesh that can never be reduced down to (onto-) theological categories or claims. The resources that make this possible are found not in the discourse of theology as a mode of power but in the religious experience of those who have undergone the oppressive cultures of the modern period. . . . [meaning] that attention must be given in a precise manner to the modes of experience and expression that formed these communities in their inner and intimate lives.64 This is to say that attention must be given to the religious experience that has made possible oppressed people’s understanding of their own subjective forms of humanity, their own “genres of being human.” The faith of blackness that has sustained the others to Christian Identity and has continuously produced lines of flight that have resisted and challenged the violence of whiteness cannot be fit into white Christian theologies of immunization. A deconstructive theology of opacity will be an altogether different kind of theology: one that refuses victory as it turns to a faith that opens new possibilities of living and surviving in a finite world, even if these possibilities can never be secured as salvation.

Notes 1 Fred Moten, “Blackness and Nothingness: Mysticism in the Flesh,” South Atlantic Quarterly 112, no. 4 (Spring 2013): 741. 2 See Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social Death: A Comparative Study (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1982). 3 The theme of blackness as the environment or outside of “racial-sexual-ecological enclosures” has been taken up by J. Kameron Carter and Sarah Jane Cervenak in their project “The Black Outdoors.” “The Black Outdoors: Humanities Futures after Property and Possession,” Duke University, Humanities Futures, Franklin Humanities Institute, accessed October 5, 2019, https://humanitiesfutures.org/ papers/the-black-outdoors-humanities-futures-after-property-and-possession/. 4 A life is “an immanent life carrying with it the events or singularities that are merely actualized in subjects and objects.” Gilles Deleuze, Pure Immanence (New York: Zone Books, 2001), 29. 5 Moten, “Blackness and Nothingness,” 739.

The fugitive and the katechon 213 6 Ibid. 7 Fred Moten, “The Case of Blackness,” Criticism 50, no. 2 (2008): 179. 8 Moten, Blackness and Nothingness, 739. 9 Spillers, “Mama’s Baby, Papa’s Maybe,” 67. 10 Moten, “Blackness and Nothingness,” 740. 11 Ibid. 12 Frank Wilderson, Red White and Black: Cinema and the Structure of U.S. Antagonisms (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), 66. 13 For Wilderson, the extreme case of the conflict is represented in the possibility of recovery for the Jewish victim of the holocaust. He describes the impossibility of any analogy between the conflictual violence between non-black Jews and Nazis and the antagonism between non-black identity and blackness: “Jews went into Auschwitz and came out as Jews. Africans went into the ships and came out as Blacks. The former is a Human holocaust; the latter is a Human and a metaphysical holocaust. That is why it makes little sense to attempt analogy: the Jews have the dead (the Muselmann) among them; the dead have the Blacks among them.” Wilderson, Red, White and Black, 38). 14 Following Moten, blackness is irreducible to black people, although they “are given (to) an understanding of it” as those that have endured the most intense and concentrated effects of White Christian Identity’s anti-blackness. Moten and Harney, The Undercommons, 47. 15 Kelly Brown Douglas, Stand Your Ground: Black Bodies and the Justice of God (New York: Orbis Books, 2015), 68. 16 Wilderson, Red, White and Black, 25. 17 Sylvia Wynter, “After/Word: Beyond Miranda’s Meanings: Un/silencing the ‘Demonic Ground’ of Caliban’s ‘Woman’, in Out of the Kumbla: Caribbean Women and Literature, ed. Carole Boyce Davies and Elaine Savory Fido (Trenton: African World Press, 1990). 18 Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (New York: Zone Books, 2015). 19 Rasch, Sovereignty and Its Discontents. 20 Ibid., 100. 21 In Sovereignty and Its Discontents, Rasch has chapters on Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, and Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri. 22 See Hanna Pitkin, The Attack of the Blob: Hannah Arendt’s Concept of the Social (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2000). 23 Moten and Harney, The Undercommons, 20. 24 Ibid., 73. 25 Fred Moten, In the Break: The Aesthetics of the Black Radical Tradition (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2003), 255, note 1. 26 Timothy Campbell, Improper Life: Technology and Biopolitics from Heidegger to Agamben (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), 45. 27 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 82. 28 Ibid. 29 Ibid., 216. 30 Ibid., 213. 31 Armstrong, “Of Flesh and Spirit,” 137. 32 Deleuze and Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 205. 33 Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” 56. 34 Ibid. 35 Moten, In the Break, 1. 36 “In the Break was my first book and is therefore, the cause and the object of a great deal of agony. For instance, I suffered, and continue to suffer, over the first sentence, which I can’t repeat because it was meant to be second. I can only tell you what the first sentence was supposed to be: ‘Performance is the resistance

214  Thinking resistance of the object.’ ” Fred Moten, Black and Blur (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), vii. 37 Moten, “Blackness and Nothingness,” 775. 38 Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: The ‘Mystical Foundations of Authority’,” in Acts of Religion, ed. Gil Anidjar (New York: Routledge, 2002), 236. 39 Marcella Althuas-Reid, Indecent Theology: Theological Perversions in Sex, Gender, and Politics (London: Routledge, 2000), 153. 40 Ibid., 29. 41 See Rudolph Gasche, “God, for Example,” in Inventions of Difference: On Jacques Derrida (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1994). 42 Ibid., 161. 43 Ibid., 161, 170. 44 Marcella Althaus-Reid, The Queer God (London: Routledge, 2003), 50. 45 Gilles Deleuze, “Spinoza: 25/11/1980,” accessed December 6, 2019, www. webdeleuze.com, http/:www.webdeleuze.com/textes/17. 46 Jean-Luc Nancy, Adoration: The Deconstruction of Christianity II (New York: Fordham University Press), 78. 47 Peter Kline, A Passion for Nothing: Kierkegaard’s Apophatic Theology (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2016), 105. 48 Anthony B. Pinn defines black religion as the “quest for complex subjectivity.” See Anthony Pinn, Terror and Triumph: The Nature of Black Religion (Minneapolis: Fortress Press, 2003). 49 Charles Long, Significations: Signs, Symbols, and Images in the Interpretation of Religion (Aurora: Fortress Press, 1986), 207. 50 Ibid., 206. 51 Ibid., 210. 52 This is also the basis of Denise Ferreira da Silva’s critique of Wynter’s human project. See Denise Ferreira de Silva, “Before Man: Sylvia Wynter’s Rewriting of the Modern Episteme,” in Sylvia Wynter: On Being Human as Praxis, ed. Katherine McKittrick (Durham: Duke University Press, 2014), 104. 53 Long, Significations, 210. 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid., 188. 56 Ibid., 184. 57 Ibid., 207. 58 Ibid. 59 Ibid., 208. 60 Ibid. 61 Ibid., 208–9. 62 Ibid., 209. 63 Ibid., 209–10. 64 Ibid., 210.

Index

Agamben, Giorgio 13, 62, 85 – 6, 102, 153 – 4, 157 – 8, 181 – 7, 192, 199, 201 Alexander, Michelle 167 Allen, Theodore 144 Althaus Reid, Marcella 206 – 7 Anidjar, Gil 11, 15, 114, 101 – 5, 108, 114 Ansfield, Bench 111 apocalyptic 13, 65 – 72, 77, 83, 86, 186 – 94, 200 – 204 apparatus 86 – 90 Armstrong, Amaryah 73, 204 Asad, Talal 114 – 15 Augustine, St. 62, 75, 105 – 6, 114, 122, 132 autoimmunity 8, 11, 13, 39, 45 – 7, 49, 56 – 9, 62 – 3, 66, 85 – 91, 100, 109, 114 – 16, 118, 122, 127, 147, 154, 172, 184, 190 – 2, 202 – 3, 204 – 5, 208 autopoiesis 10, 17 – 41, 42, 44, 46 – 7, 53, 57, 74, 115 – 16, 209 Balibar, Etienne 166 – 7 Barber, Daniel Colluciello 62, 66, 75 – 6, 69 – 71, 114, 115 Barth, Karl 187 Benjamin, Walter 52, 183 – 5, 199 Benveniste, Emile 5, 45 Berger, Peter 48 Bergson, Henri 45 biopolitics 85 – 6, 101 – 2, 104, 107, 152 – 6, 180, 183; and blackness 156 – 8; and white supremacy 158 – 72 blackness 8, 13, 131 – 2, 134, 139, 145, 151, 158 – 9, 164, 195 – 212 Blanton, Ward 62, 74 – 6 body of Christ 63 – 5 Boswell, John 103 Bradley, Arthur 17 Brand, Dion 137

“broken windows” policy 2 Buell, Denise Kimber 128 Burke, Patrick 33 Bynum, Carolyn 105 Campbell, Timothy 203 Carter, J. Kameron 212 Castro, Daniel 122 Chandler, Nahum 8, 195 – 6 Christian blood 99 – 108 Christianity 4 – 5 Columbus, Christopher 108, 113, 117 – 20, 124, 126 Cone, James 209 Crawley, Ashon 19 deconstruction 8, 22, 37, 39, 201 Deleuze, Gilles 13, 70, 155, 195, 199, 202 – 3 Deloria, Jr., Vine 219 Derrida, Jacques 5 – 7, 11, 22, 37, 39, 42 – 59, 65 – 6, 71, 79, 89 – 90, 180, 182, 184, 192 – 3, 204, 206 Dickinson, Colby 182 Douglas, Kelly Brown 197 DuBois, W.E.B. 152 Esposito, Roberto 57, 59, 82, 104, 137, 156 – 8 faith 6 – 7, 13, 18 – 19, 43 – 5, 53 – 9, 62 – 3, 65 – 74, 76, 79, 88 – 90, 100, 104, 107, 118, 121, 185, 187 – 90, 202, 204 – 12 Fanon, Franz 20 – 1, 35, 157 flesh 136 Foucault, Michel 3, 7, 85 – 9, 101, 113, 152, 153 – 4, 156 – 8, 160 – 1, 180 – 2, 202 – 3 fugitivity see blackness

216 Index Garner, Eric 2 Grassi, Ernesto 31 Grenier, John 144 Guattari, Felix 13, 70, 202 – 3, 207 Habermas, Jurgen 23 Hagar 73 Hagglund, Martin 47, 49 Hardt, Michael 199 Heidegger, Martin 179 – 81, 192 Henry, Michel 50 humanism 108 – 18, 125 – 7 immanence 5, 29, 38, 43, 46, 66, 70, 72, 81, 181, 202, 204, 207 immunization 8, 11, 56 – 8, 65, 80, 82, 85, 104, 107, 156, 160, 183, 191, 202, 204 ipseity 22, 37, 47, 50 – 3, 55 – 9, 69, 74, 76, 79, 90 James, Joy 168 Jennings, Willie 106 Jim Crow 157, 159 – 63, 169 Johnson, Sylvester 131 – 2, 141, 145 – 6 Karavanta, Mina 36 katechon 11, 63, 82 – 6, 90, 114, 137, 154, 186 – 7, 196 – 201 Keen, Craig 187, 189 Kerr, Nathan 187, 188, 190 Kline, Peter 208 Kotsko, Adam 2 LaCapra, Dominick 186 Lambert, Gregg 87 Las Casas, Bartoleme 120 – 5 law see nomos Librett, Jeffrey 182 – 3 life 45 – 54 lines of flight 13, 18, 122, 134, 144, 203 – 7 Long, Charles 13, 209 – 12 Luhmann, Niklas, Chapter 1, 5, 7, 10, 43, 46, 72, 179; and autopoiesis 19; and Christianity 80 – 1; and immune systems 27; and religion 29 – 30; and system/environment relation 22 – 7 Martin, Trayvon 1 Masuzawa, Tomoko 114, 116 McKittrick, Katherine 31, 39 messianic 13, 54 – 5, 66, 69, 89 – 90, 136, 184 – 92, 200, 204 Morrison, Toni 138

Moten, Fred 8 – 9, 13, 195 – 6, 200 – 205 Mouffe, Chantel 84 Myth of Ham 131 – 2 Naas, Michael 5, 8, 51 – 2, 55 Nancy, Jean Luc 8, 208 Nash, Gary 146 Nealon, Jeffrey 12, 154 – 5 Negri, Antonio 199 new genetics of race 170 – 2 Nietzsche, Friedrich 42, 74, 76, 79, 87 nomos 68 – 71, 75 – 7, 82 orthodoxy 78 – 9 Pagden, Anthony 133 para-ontology 8, 195 – 6 Pauline Declaration 65 – 79, 104, 115, 126, 186 – 8, 191 Petterson, Christina 75 Pinn, Anthony 214 Placher, William 78 political (concept of) 83 – 7, 183, 196 – 201 political ontology 13, 132, 158, 179, 181 – 3, 186 – 7, 195, 202 – 5, 212 post-racialism 12, 164, 166 – 70, 172 pragmatics 13, 201 – 9 Ramey, Lynn 102 racial capitalism 134 – 6 radical evil 44 Rasch, William 29, 199 – 200 religion 4 – 7, 10 – 11, 27 – 33; and autoimmunity 56, 204; and belief 80; and pragmatics 208 – 12; and race 101; return of 43; and salvation 48, 50, 63; and secular 114 – 16; and technology 44 – 5; two sources of 42 – 3, 45 – 7, 53, 59, 65 resistance 3, 39, 88 – 90, 186, 195 – 6, 201 – 5 Rice, Tamir 2 Roberts, Dorothy 170 Robinson, Cedric 134 Rojcewicz, Richard 179 Sacco, Justine 169 salvation see religion Schmitt, Carl 62, 67, 83 – 7, 103, 183, 185, 196, 198 – 201 Schwartz, Marie Jenkins 148 Scotus, Duns 110 Sexton, Jared 195 Siggelkow, Ry 188, 190

Index  217 slavery 12, 73, 100 – 101, 119 – 20, 131 – 47, 156 – 9, 180, 196 Smedley, Audrey 141, 143 Smith, J.Z. 5 Sorel, George 185 sovereignty 37, 47 – 53, 56 – 8, 69, 74, 84 – 7, 89 – 90, 101, 107, 124, 151 – 2, 154, 160, 172, 183, 185 – 6, 193, 197, 201, 207, 210 Spillers, Hortense 136 – 8 supersessionism 65, 73, 83, 183 system: and autoimmunity of 3; and blindspots 38, 86, 202 – 3, 207; and environment 21, 46, 55, 103; and organization and structure 25, 109, 137; and re-entry 25, 29, 102, 106, 126, 145 Taubes, Jacob 62, 65 – 6, 68, 76, 83, 183 technology 10 – 11, 32, 43 – 5, 53, 86, 131, 152, 160, 168, 172, 179 – 84 Tertullian 82

trace structure 46, 53 transcendence 11, 16, 29 – 32, 37 – 8, 42 – 3, 45, 48, 54, 72, 79, 81, 85, 184, 188, 191, 210 Weber, Max 81 Wehelye, Alexander 101, 108, 136, 157 White, Ryan 17 – 18 whiteness: invention of 144 – 7; and the katechon 200; and post-racialism 166; and self-observation 9 – 10 Wilderson, Frank B. III 135, 195, 197 Wilson, Darren 1 Wynter, Sylvia 17 – 39; and autopoiesis 19 – 22; and genres of being human 19 – 24, 30, 34 – 8, 179; and “human project” 21, 33 – 9; and “man” 100, 109, 127, 133, 150 – 2, 180; and Medieval Christianity 31; and religion 6, 28 – 33; and sociogenic principle 21 – 2, 35 – 6 Zimmerman, George 1