Survival: A Theological-Political Genealogy 9780812297867

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SURVIVAL

INTELLECTUAL HISTORY OF THE MODERN AGE Series Editors Angus Burgin Peter E. Gordon Joel Isaac Karuna Mantena Samuel Moyn Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen Camille Robcis Sophia Rosenfeld

SURVIVAL A Theological-Political Genealogy

•

Adam Y. Stern

Universit y of Pennsylvania Press Ph i l a de l ph i a

Copyright © 2021 University of Pennsylvania Press All rights reserved. Except for brief quotations used for purposes of review or scholarly citation, none of this book may be reproduced in any form by any means without written permission from the publisher. Published by University of Pennsylvania Press Philadelphia, Pennsylvania 19104-4112 www.upenn.edu/pennpress Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper 1 3 5 7 9 10 8 6 4 2 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Stern, Adam Y., author. Title: Survival : a theological-political genealogy / Adam Y. Stern. Other titles: Intellectual history of the modern age. Description: 1st edition. | Philadelphia : University of Pennsylvania Press, [2021] | Series: Intellectual history of the modern age | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2020020776 | ISBN 9780812252873 (hardcover) Subjects: LCSH: Survival—Philosophy. | Political theology. | Jews—Identity. | Jews—History. | Judaism—Relations— Christianity. | Christianity and other religions—Judaism. Classification: LCC BT83.59 .S74 2021 | DDC 261.7—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020020776

Who do those people think they are, that they can make light of or ignore what they have done to us and still wrap themselves in the mantle of “the survivors”? —Edward W. Said, “Bombs and Bulldozers”

CONTENTS

Preface

ix

Acknowledgments

xi

List of Abbreviations Introduction. Beginnings

xiii 1

1. The Elements of Survivalism

17

2. The Archaeology of Survival

50

3. The Imitation of Christ

82

4. The Sovereign in the Age of Its Eucharistic Reproducibility

119

5. The Empty Tomb

148

Epilogue. Other Thoughts

176

Notes

189

Index

247

PREFACE

This book began with two observations. The first was that survival occupies a prominent place within the modern, secular political imagination. One need only think of the ways that the figure of the survivor has come to mediate the representation of current events, from genocide, climate catastrophe, and mass shootings to disaster capitalism, sexual violence, nuclear war, terminal illness, and more. The second was that one could also identify a popular association between survival and the Jews. Consider here not only the primacy accorded to the Holocaust survivor in our time but also the extent to which survival underwrites the narration of both Jewish history (the survival of the Jews) and Jewish politics (the survival of Israel). The question I wanted to ask was this: What, if anything, unites these two horizons? Could an examination of secular survival shed light on the issue of Jewish survival? And what could a study of Jewish survival tell us about the dissemination of survival more broadly? From an early stage, it became clear that any attempt to write this history would have to go beyond two obvious foci: Darwinism and the Holocaust. Neither biology nor biopolitics seemed to fully account for the theological and theological-political resonances of the discourse on Jewish survival. My hunch, moreover, was that any theologicalpolitical perspective on (Jewish) survival would have to acknowledge the codes sedimented by the asymmetric legacy of the Jewish-Christian debate. This gave rise to a hypothesis. Perhaps the link between Jewish survival and secular survival could be found in the invisible space between them and in the very thing that other wise managed to erase itself from view: the theologicalpolitical history of Christianity. Survival: A Theological-Political Genealogy interrogates the possibility that Latin Christianity has played an overwhelming role in shaping survival as a word, theme, and figure. More than that, the book is an attempt to follow the language of survival as it modulates, disarticulates, and rearranges categorical distinctions between the secular, the Jewish, the Judeo-Christian,

x

Preface

and the Christian. My strategy throughout has been to read secular and/or Jewish writers who have contributed (or been made to contribute) to the vast proliferation of survival-talk. What I show is that these arguments— arguments that appear to highlight the secular and/or Jewish signature of survival—also consent and even demand attention to a diferent set of readings. Again and again, they return survival to a Latinate field of translation, to scenes of incarnation, passion, and resurrection—in short, to a stage dominated by the body of Christ. In this sense, the book is less a history of survival than a genealogy of its contemporary force. It does not seek to address the whole of survival’s manifold uses, forge a linear narrative of its development, or contextualize it in reference to a single historical event. Instead, the book moves backward from the present, in order to rewrite the interpretative regimes that have dominated survival’s insistent circulation. These genealogies of survival take major texts of twentieth-century philosophy, theology, and political theory as sites—indeed, as insurgent occasions—for collecting and constellating the scattered elements of survival’s theological-political archive. My hope is that this labor of narrative bricolage will establish a framework for thinking survival as a Christian question and, in doing so, will ofer a critical assessment of Christianity’s role in the constitution of modern, secular, and Jewish politics.

ACKNOWL EDGMENTS

In writing this book, I have become more aware than ever of my infinite debt to others. First to Amy Hollywood and Peter Gordon. Amy is simply the most insightful reader I know. Her critical acumen has motivated the best parts of this book and taught me what it means to say that “efficacious action comes not solely through melancholy, but also through joy.” I can only look forward to learning more from her. Peter is a careful scholar and an unwavering mentor. His questions, comments, and provocations have continually prompted me to think further and more clearly. If I have said anything of historical merit, it is surely because of his resolute direction. I also express my deep thanks to John Hamilton and Gil Anidjar. John’s enthusiasm for this project—philological and other wise—has been absolutely vital. Gil has been educating me in the “requisite art of reading” for a long time. I can safely say that without his work and teaching, this book would not have been possible. A special shout-out as well to Na’ama Rokem, whose acute perspicacity is matched only by the magnitude of her generosity. I am thankful to count her as a friend. And to Ryan Coyne and Sarah Hammerschlag: for too much. At Yale, I had the opportunity to join a vibrant intellectual community. I thank especially Carolyn Dean, Hannan Hever, Nancy Levene, Katie Lofton, Paul North, Elli Stern, and, of course, Maurie Samuels! Since coming to Madison, I have been fortunate in new colleagues. Special thanks to Tom DuBois, Hannah Eldridge, Sabine Gross, Mark Louden, Venkat Mani, Tony Michels, Jordan Rosenblum, and Manon van de Water. For advice over the years, I extend my gratitude to Emily Apter, Raphael Gross, Dana Hollander, Paul Mendes-Flohr, Ilana Pardes, James Robinson, Daniel Weidner, and Liliane Weissberg. Thanks to Alina Bothe and Markus Nesselrodt for inviting me to participate in their special issue of the LBI Yearbook (2016). Friends and colleagues have contributed to this book in ways tangible and intangible. Between New York, Cambridge, Chicago, Berlin, New Haven,

xii

Acknowledgments

and Madison: Kenyon Adams, Niv Allon, Yael Almog, Chris Beam, Rami Boundouki, Sam Brody, Josh Cohen, Josh Connor, Anastatia Curley, Ofer Dynes, Yaniv Feller, Itamar Francez, Tatyana Gershkovich, Novina Goehlsdorf, Irving Goh, Allyson Gonzalez, Elad Lapidot, Daniel Luban, Maria Anna Mariani, Jamie Martin, Hannah Roh, Francey Russell, Adam Sachs, Sam Spinner, Willem Styfhals, Davey Tomlinson, Kris Trujillo, Kirsten Wesselhoeft, Daniel Wyche, Klaus Yoder, Saul Zaritt, Dominik Zechner, Simos Zeniou, and Alexandra Zirkle. And needless to say: Ernie Mitchell, Larisa Reznik, Daniel Schultz, and Xiaobo Yuan. This project has benefited from fellowships awarded by the Harvard Center for Jewish Studies, the Leo Baeck Fellowship Programme, and the Studienstiftung des deutschen Volkes. These grants allowed me, among other things, to spend a semester writing and studying at the Zentrum für Literatur- und Kulturforschung Berlin (ZfL). I am grateful as well for the support provided by the Mosse/Weinstein Center for Jewish Studies at the University of Wisconsin–Madison and by the Office of the Vice Chancellor for Research and Graduate Education with funding from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation. At the University of Pennsylvania Press, I thank Damon Linker, Bob Lockhart, Erica Ginsburg, and Zoe Kovacs. For their constant encouragement, I thank my parents, Marian and Robert; my brothers, Ari and Zach; and my in-laws, Judy and Neal. For his wonder, laughter, and more—Theo. Finally, this book is for Sunny—azoy vi zi iz.

ABBREVIATIONS

Throughout this study, I use the following abbreviations for frequently cited texts. In order to acknowledge my reliance on others, and for the sake of consistency, I cite existing English translations whenever available. However, I regularly amend, and sometimes rewrite, these versions for both accuracy and argument. A AS

CM

CP D DL DN

EU FM

Friedrich A. Kittler, Aufschreibesysteme 1800 · 1900 (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1995). Pseudo-Dionysius, Die angeblichen Schriften des Areopagiten Dionysius, trans. J. G. V. Engelhardt (Sulzbach: Seidel Kunst- und Buchhandlung, 1823). Henri de Lubac, Corpus Mysticum: The Eucharist and the Church in the Middle Ages, ed. Laurence Paul Hemming and Susan Frank Parsons, trans. Gemma Simmonds, Richard Price, and Christopher Stephens (London: SCM, 2006). Elias Canetti, Crowds and Power, trans. Carol Steward (New York: Penguin, 1973). Pseudo-Dionysius, Dionysiaca, ed. Philippe Chevallier, vol. 1 (Paris: Desclée, de Brouwer, 1937). Robert Jay Lifton, Death in Life: Survivors of Hiroshima (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). Pseudo-Dionysius, “The Divine Names,” in Pseudo-Dionysius: The Complete Works, ed. Paul Rorem, trans. Colm Luibheid (New York: Paulist Press, 1987). Hannah Arendt, Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft (Munich: Piper, 2011). Michel de Certeau, La fable mystique: XVIe–XVIIe siècle, vol. 1 (Paris: Gallimard, 1982).

xiv

Abbreviations

Walter Benjamin, Gesammelte Schriften, ed. Tillman Rexroth, Rolf Tiedemann, and Hermann Schweppenhäuser (Frankfurt am Main: Suhrkamp, 1991). H Carl Schmitt, Hamlet or Hecuba: The Intrusion of the Time into the Play, trans. David Pan and Jennifer R. Rust (New York: Telos Press, 2009). Ham. William Shakespeare, Hamlet, ed. Ann Thompson and Neil Taylor, The Arden Shakespeare (London: Bloomsbury, 2013). HD Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Paul B. Armstrong (New York: W. W. Norton, 2005). HS Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1990). KT Ernst H. Kantorowicz, The King’s Two Bodies: A Study in Medieval Political Theology (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1997). LA Georg Simmel, Lebensanschauung: Vier metaphysische Kapitel (Leipzig: Duncker & Humblot, 1918). LT Rudolf Kleinpaul, Die Lebendigen und die Toten in Volksglauben, Religion und Sage (Leipzig: G. J. Göschen’sche, 1898). MF Michel de Certeau, The Mystic Fable: The Sixteenth and Seventeenth Centuries, trans. Michael B. Smith, vol. 1 (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1992). MM Elias Canetti, Masse und Macht (Frankfurt am Main: Fischer, 1980). MW Franz Rosenzweig, Der Mensch und sein Werk: Gesammelte Schriften (The Hague: Martinus Nijhof, 1976). N Friedrich A. Kittler, Discourse Networks 1800/1900, trans. Michael Metteer and Chris Cullens (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1990). O Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1994). OG Walter Benjamin, The Origin of German Tragic Drama, trans. John Osborne (New York: Verso, 1998). OT Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism (New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1976). PK Louis Marin, Portrait of the King, trans. Martha Houle (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1988). Q Giorgio Agamben, Quel che resta di Auschwitz: L’archivio e il testimone (Turin: Bollati Boringhieri, 1998). R Giorgio Agamben, Remnants of Auschwitz: The Witness and the Archive, trans. Daniel Heller-Roazen (New York: Zone, 2002). GS

Abbreviations

S SA

SD

SE

SR SW

T TI

TS TT VL

xv

Franz Rosenzweig, Der Stern der Erlösung, vol. 2, in MW. Sigmund Freud, Studienausgabe, ed. Alexander Mitscherlich, Angela Richards, and James Strachey (Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 1982). Michel Foucault, “Society Must Be Defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976, ed. Mauro Bertani, Alessandro Fontana, and Arnold I. Davidson, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003). Sigmund Freud, The Standard Edition of the Complete Psychological Works of Sigmund Freud, trans. James Strachey (London: Hogarth Press and Institute of Psychoanalysis, 1964). Franz Rosenzweig, The Star of Redemption, trans. Barbara E. Galli (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005). Walter Benjamin, Selected Writings, ed. Marcus Bullock and Michael W. Jennings, trans. Harry Zohn (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2004). Emmanuel Lévinas, Totalité et infini: Essai sur l’extériorité (The Hague: Martinus Nijhof, 1961). Emmanuel Levinas, Totality and Infinity: An Essay on Exteriority, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Dordrecht: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1969). Terrence Des Pres, The Survivor: An Anatomy of Life in the Death Camps (New York: Oxford University Press, 1976). Walter Benjamin, “The Translator’s Task,” trans. Steven Rendall in The Translation Studies Reader, 3rd ed. (New York: Routledge, 2012). Georg Simmel, The View of Life: Four Metaphysical Essays, trans. Donald Nathan Levine and John A. Y. Andrews (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2010).

INTRODUCTION

Beginnings

It is so difficult to find the beginning. Or, better: it is difficult to begin at the beginning. And not try to go further back. —Ludwig Wittgenstein, On Certainty Let us not begin at the beginning, nor even at the archive. But rather at the word “archive”—and with the archive of so familiar a word. —Jacques Derrida, Archive Fever

Who is speaking about survival? Let us begin at the beginning and with that ancient archive of beginnings that just so happens to begin “in the beginning.” The Hebrew Bible seems to have no trouble speaking about survival.1 In the book of Genesis, Joseph says to his brothers: “God sent me before you to preserve for you a remnant on earth, and to keep alive for you many survivors” (45:7).2 Later, in the book of Exodus, God establishes the rules and ordinances governing the practice of slavery: “When a slaveowner strikes a male or female slave with a rod and the slave dies immediately, the owner shall be punished.  But if the slave survives a day or two, there is no punishment” (21:20–21). The book of Numbers eventually recounts the Israelites’ conquest of Canaan and their decimation of the Amorite king Og: “So they killed him, and his sons, and all his people, until there was no survivor left” (Num. 21:35). It is a story that the book of Deuteronomy repeats in almost identical terms and one that the book of Joshua echoes in its description of another Israelite campaign against the people and city of Ai:

2

Introduction

“Israel struck them down, until no one was left who survived or escaped” (Josh. 8:22). Altogether, variations of the verb “to survive” appear no fewer than fifty times across the text of the Hebrew Bible, be it in the books of Judges, Kings, Joel, and Obadiah or in Zephaniah, Job, Lamentations, and Ezra. The most well-known examples come from later prophets like Ezekiel, where God’s judgment turns toward Israel. Isaiah declares: “If the Lord of hosts had not left us a few survivors, we would have been like Sodom, and become like Gomorrah” (1:9). God says to Jeremiah: “The people who survived the sword found grace in the wilderness; when Israel sought for rest, the  Lord  appeared to him from far away” (31:2–3). As for Nehemiah, he worries from exile about the state of his people: “I asked them about the Jews that survived, those who had escaped the captivity, and about Jerusalem. They replied, ‘The survivors there in the province who escaped captivity are in great trouble and shame; the wall of Jerusalem is broken down, and its gates have been destroyed by fire’ ” (1:2–3). These scattered citations hardly amount to an exhaustive account of the meaning and significance of the Hebrew Bible’s survival-talk. But even such a restricted cata log should be enough to register the biblical beginnings and archaic origins of an entire theological-political tradition focused on the primordial affinity between survival and the Jews—not to mention “the ‘mystery’ of Jewish survival through the ages.”3 The history has been told in a variety of overlapping and sometimes conflicting ways.4 Many point to the Talmud and its concern with the eternality of Israel.5 Others focus on the reception of the rabbinic dictum: “af ‘al pi she-ḥata yisra’el hu, though he sinned, an Israelite he remains.”6 There are those who recount the aftermath of the Temple’s destruction;7 those who read Maimonides;8 those who quote Spinoza;9 those who cite Franz Rosenzweig;10 and those who look to Zionism.11 For certain writers, like Simon Rawidowicz, Jewish history has never been anything other than a history of “survival,” a chronicle of an “ever-dying people” and a people “constantly on the verge of ceasing to be, of disappearing.”12 Meanwhile, scholars such as David Biale have spoken of the more proximate transformations of a no less extensive history. After the Holocaust, says Biale, “a new ideology of survival revived the old ideology of divine election as the basis for Jewish life, decisively altering the Jewish politics of the new state of Israel and the Diaspora community in America.”13 In a notable remark from late 1969, Hannah Arendt links this “survival business” back to the book of Nehemiah and to “the survival passion which has

Introduction

3

possessed this people since antiquity and has actually made it survive.”14 More recently, the Israeli historian Benny Morris has confirmed that Jews “are one of the few people from ancient times who have managed to moreor-less survive and endure into the twenty-first century.”15 A comparable sentiment also underlies the work of the American Jewish historian David Myers, who characterizes the dialectic between “professional integrity and Jewish survival” as the central tension animating the writing of Jewish history.16 There is perhaps no denying the simple and obvious truth: “Jewish politics really begins with the question of survival.”17 Beginnings, of course, are always problematic, usually deceptive, sometimes treacherous. The King James Bible (1611), for example, says next to nothing about survival, survivors, or surviving. There, Joseph promises “a great deliverance [li-feletah gedolah]”; slaves “continue [ya‘amod] a day or two”; the Israelites smite their enemies until none are “left . . . alive [sarid]” and until there are none to “remain or escape [sarid u-falit]”; the book of Jeremiah discusses “the people which were left of the sword [seride ḥarev]”; Isaiah prophesies a “very small remnant [sarid]”; and Nehemiah asks about “the Iewes that had escaped [ha-yehudim ha-peletah]” as well as the “remnant [ha-nish’arim] that are left.” Not until the immediate postwar period, with the publication and dissemination of the Revised Standard Version of the Bible (1952), would these prevailing interpretive choices give way to a more pervasive and more unified survivalist lexicon. Since then, the language of survival has only ramified, now appearing throughout the text of many English Bibles and translating a series of Hebrew terms (ya‘amod, sarid, peletah, ha-nish’ar, she’erit, etc.) for Jewish and Christian readers alike.18 The decision to begin, then, may begin with a decision to translate.19 Take the Hebrew expression nitsol ha-shoah and its English equivalent, the “Holocaust survivor.” As Idith Zertal has argued, the rabbinic word nitsol (“saved”) does not bear “the semantic charge” delivered by the words “survivor in English or survivant in French.”20 The same could be said of the phrase she’erit he-peletah (“survivors,” “remaining survivors,” or “surviving remnant”), which in the postwar years emerged as a biblical anchor for the travails of “Jewish survival.”21 There is, finally, the intervening force of the Latin Vulgate, where two passages allude to the divided legacy of survival’s two possible etymological sources: superstare and supervivere. In the first, Jacob says to Joseph: “I can die now, having seen for myself that you are still alive [Heb., ‘odkha ḥay; Lat., superstitem te relinquo]” (Gen. 46:30). The

4

Introduction

second, once again, reads: “If the slave survives [Heb., ya‘amod; Lat., supervixerit] a day or two, there is no punishment” (Exod. 21:21). When it comes to the genealogy of survival, I am trying to say, a great deal rides on the history of the word “survival”: how one defines it, how one traces its particular constellation of meanings, and how one locates it within a scrambled matrix of discursive asymmetries, linguistic hegemonies, and translational imperatives. Survival’s beginnings will have a lot to do with where one decides to begin.

• So who is speaking about survival? Let us begin again in English, in America, and with the rise of the survivor as a “secular saint.”22 As Peter Novick and others have argued, the postwar era in America attests to a remarkable set of changes in the perception and valorization of what has only recently consolidated into the “shocking, massive, and distinctive thing” now known as “the Holocaust.”23 The Eichmann trial, so the story goes, was the first time that American audiences found themselves exposed to the Holocaust as a discrete event separated from the wider context of Nazi destruction.24 A series of political and cultural incidents—including the October War (1973), the television series Holocaust (1978), and the establishment of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (1993)—further contributed to the production of the Holocaust as an “American memory.”25 The emergence of the survivor was a crucial stage in this narrative, one summed up in striking fashion by the oft-cited words of the author Werner Weinberg: “Immediately after the war, we were ‘liberated prisoners’; in subsequent years we were included in the term ‘DPs’ or ‘displaced persons.’ . . . In the US we were sometimes generously called ‘new Americans.’ Then for a long time . . . there was a good chance that we, as a group, might go nameless. But one day I noticed that I had been reclassified as a ‘survivor.’ ”26 Students of American culture have framed this transformation as a shift from victim to survivor, whereby those formerly identified as the passive, silent, and weak objects of Nazi aggression gradually became figures endowed with agency, speech, and power, capable of moving “from the realms of exclusion and invisibility to public recognition and moral authority.”27 According to one familiar rendition of this argument, early attitudes toward victims showed a profound ambivalence, combining a contempt for their supposed lack of resistance (“going like sheep to the slaughter”) with a

Introduction

5

simultaneous reverence for the redemptive virtues of their sufering and death.28 Those who had managed to display some degree of defiance often found themselves accused of collaboration in bringing about the death of others. With time, this image began to change, such that once-demonized examples of the worst could become celebrated as symbols of courage, heroism, and virtue. Major public events like the Eichmann trial “positively differentiated survivors from victims for the first time by imbuing only the former with the new social function of juridico-historical witness” (33). This revaluation would lead to the construction of the Holocaust as an occasion for feelings of pride. It meant that one could stress the survivor’s triumph over death as well as resignify the meaning of survival more generally, divesting it of its collaborationist connotations and accepting it as an “exceptional accomplishment” (37). Matters are significantly more complicated than this linear chronology would suggest (as this study as a whole will attempt to show). The basic outline, however, does go some way toward specifying the various factors that have contributed to the production and dissemination of the survivor as a recognizable figure. One could think here of the early medical work done by psychiatrists and Freudian psychoanalysts such as William Niederland on the emotional disorders sufered by those who had spent time in concentration camps.29 Over the course of the 1960s, Niederland and others undertook clinical research into the so-called problem of the survivor, eventually identifying “survivor syndrome” as a distinctive diagnostic category.30 In his 1968 summary of the issue, Niederland isolated a series of archetypical symptoms, ranging from anxiety, depression, and psychosis to loss of personal identity, psychosomatic disturbance, and the feeling of being a ghost or living corpse (313). The psychiatric contribution to the “issue of survival” found its most far-reaching extension in the work of Robert Jay Lifton.31 By the time Niederland was outlining his theory of “survivor syndrome,” Lifton had already begun his immense research into the “general psychology of the survivor,” where he developed a broad comparison between Hiroshima and “other ‘extreme’ historical experiences,” including the destruction wrought by the plagues in fourteenth-century Europe (DL, 479). In sum, he says, we can “define the survivor as one who has come into contact with death in some bodily or psychic fashion and has himself remained alive” (ibid.). Like Niederland, Lifton would go on to specify a number of characteristics common to the survivor experience: the sense of being bound to images of destruction,

6

Introduction

feelings of guilt, the loss of emotion, and the struggle to give meaning to  one’s experience or reestablish the form of a moral world. In the end, what Lifton discovered was that these categories describe not only the effects of a par ticular historical experience but also a set of “universal psychological tendencies” (ibid.). Across time and space, the “survivor becomes Everyman” (ibid.). Lifton eventually saw fit to organize his findings into a singular and universally applicable “concept of the survivor.”32 But this was not before the psychologization of survival itself had come under suspicion. Famously, in a 1976 book titled The Survivor, the literary critic Terrence Des Pres argued that the Holocaust had given “rise to the survivor as a significant human type” (TS, 206–7). For the first time, Des Pres explained, the simple struggle for life had occurred beyond the “compulsions of culture” and in a context stripped of the normal institutions and structuring symbols of civilization (207). This experience brought to light not psychological guilt but a “biologically determined ‘talent’ long suppressed by cultural deformation, a bank of knowledge embedded in the body’s cells” (193). In a hostile response to Des Pres’ affirmative biologism, Bruno Bettelheim defended the psychological importance of guilt as “the most significant aspect of survivorship.”33 Guilt, he said, arises not from the commission of a crime but “from the ability to know that one must not acquiesce in the evils of a concentration camp world, must not buy one’s own life at the expense of the lives of others” (284). Guilt and responsibility, not the celebration of mere survival, is what “makes us human” (313).34 From the psychological to the biological to the ethical, the “problem of the survivor” had become a divisive issue by the 1970s, the topic of heated debate and disciplinary conflict. But the feud between Bettelheim and Des Pres conceals more than it reveals. In its narrow focus on the Holocaust, it occludes the survivor’s vast proliferation as a comparative figure of extreme situations. The real question, says Edith Hall, may be how the noun “survivor came to be applied, in an ontological sense, to anybody who had committed or sufered anything involving trauma, and by extension to the ontological status of virtually everyone.”35 For Christopher Lasch, the profusion meant reflecting on the creation of a more general “culture of survivalism,” in which everyday life had “begun to pattern itself on the survival strategies forced on those exposed to extreme adversity.”36 Many have attempted to account for the transformation of survival from a sign of the extreme to an element of the everyday. This has included more

Introduction

7

and less persuasive judgments concerning the language of personal liberation introduced in the 1960s, the expansion of psychotherapeutic discourse, and the emergence of a “new Romantic age” of post-nationalist, multiculturalist identities.37 Observers have also underscored the tremendous impact of the women’s movement on the recognition of sexual abuse as a traumatic memory comparable to the experience of Holocaust survivors.38 Another parallel story emphasizes the role played by Vietnam veterans in gaining acceptance of PTSD as an official mental disorder.39 In the wake of “survivor syndrome,” Lifton and others “suggested that these soldiers . . . had been consumed by the same survivor guilt as the Jewish and Japanese survivors.”40 It is a critical development in the militarization of a term that has increasingly combined perpetrators and victims of violence into a single generic category (92).41 None of this, though, carries the weight of the apocalyptic thinking and “siege mentality” of the Cold War.42 The anthropologist Joseph Masco has demonstrated that “the nuclear danger became a complex new political ideology” specifically aimed at engineering the population’s afective response to the threat of mass ruination.43 Already by the early 1950s, the Eisenhower administration had begun eforts to prepare its citizenry for the nuclear crisis by creating a “program of ‘psychological defense’ aimed at ‘feelings’ that would unify the nation in the face of apocalyptic everyday threat” (367).44 Although the propaganda campaign took a number of forms, probably none was more spectacular than Operation Cue, which, on May 5, 1955, gave 100 million Americans the opportunity to watch “live on television a ‘typical’ suburban community blown to bits by an atomic bomb” (372). The motto: “Survival Is Your Business” (378). And business has been good. One need only think of Hollywood and those “yearly technoaesthetic displays” that still allow Americans to survive their own destruction with “fetishistic glee” (384). Popular media have no doubt served as a major vehicle in survival’s fluid movement across “seemingly disparate contexts” and discursive domains.45 In one sardonic critique, Larry David stages a vicious debate between an elderly Holocaust survivor and a winner of the television series Survivor (2000–present). The feuding parties duel over the question: Who has the most rightful claim to the title?46 Elsewhere, cinema theorist Carol Clover situates survival within the shifting gender dynamics of the modern “slasher” film. As she shows, the camera in these movies almost always sets its (male) gaze upon a distressed “Final Girl,” who, through a sheer “will to survive,”

8

Introduction

manages to overcome an experience of horror and live on as the movie’s sole “survivor.”47 From a diferent angle, the anthropologist Talal Asad asks viewers of contemporary visual culture to recognize their implicit identification with the sufering, endurance, and healing of a male hero. In the era of Abu Ghraib, this “neat conceit” has sometimes taken the form of a CIA agent who “survives torture” and moves on to discover the truth of his mission.48 The irony is that survival’s capacity to transform abjection into power also makes it a cunning dissimulating mechanism for the transformation of power into abjection. Within the camera obscura of postwar American “wound culture,” even serial killers call upon the “deadly logic of the survivor” to portray acts of murderous violence as triumphant moments of selfdefense.49 Consider, on another level, the renewed applicability of “survival guilt” to veterans of America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. Beyond its success or failure as a palliative device for individual sufering, the phrase has the curious rhetorical advantage of recoding and disavowing the overwhelming presence of American imperialism (permitting guilt over the loss of friends and reticence over the death of enemies).50 One other relevant iteration is the spread of doomsday thinking and lavish bunker building among the wealthiest of elites.51 The gilded apocalypticism of the words “survival of the richest” is just another reminder of the inversions and transposition that support an inclination toward neutralization and depoliticization.52 There is more to say about survival’s uses and abuses in postwar America. But at this point, the history I have been sketching could risk advancing a case for American exceptionalism.53 That is why it is important to take a global—by which I mean globalizing—perspective on this “pressing problem.”54 After all, the search for survival’s beginnings has regularly brought scholarship to nineteenth-century England and its convoluted combination of Romanticism, Malthusianism, and Darwinism. Imaginings of the “last man,” ideas about “population,” and slogans like “survival of the fittest” have ofered vocabulary and conceptual resources for the emergence of biopolitics and catastrophic thinking in the time of the Anthropocene.55 A more capacious evaluation of survival in European intellectual history would follow the chains of transmission that move these lines of thought through a series of other names: Jules Michelet, Mary Shelley, E. B. Tylor, Marcel Proust, Walter Benjamin, Maurice Blanchot, Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, Franz Kafka, Robert Antelme, Primo Levi, Elias Canetti, Karl Jaspers, and W. G. Sebald (to name only a few). If Jacques Derrida is right, this literary-philosophical lineage bears directly upon a set of planetary

Introduction

9

concerns, wherein the figure of the survivant evokes the questions of “ human rights” facing all beings living in a world “that is more inegalitarian than ever.”56 On this scale, one could recall the work of Willy Brandt in establishing the Independent Commission on International Development Issues. In 1977, the former chancellor of the Federal Republic of Germany tasked the group with investigating global problems “arising from the economic and social disparities of the world community.”57 The commission promised to set forth guidelines aimed at allaying the vast structural inequalities dividing a wealthy, economically, and technologically developed global North from an increasingly impoverished and still economically underdeveloped global South. When published in 1980, the Brandt Report fulfilled this objective by proposing political and economic avenues for a more symmetrical reorganization of the North-South divide. But in doing so, the final report also advocated the construction of a new global morality “based on what appears to be the simplest common interest: that mankind wants to survive [überleben, survivre], and one might even add has the moral obligation to survive” (13). Thus the official title of the report: North-South: A Program for Survival.58 The question is whether another “ethics of survival” could result in strategies that resist the tendency of markets and states to reduce all human beings to mere life.59 The Brandt Report is one leading manifestation of survival’s intersection with a set of global apprehensions about statelessness, refugees, concentration camps, border walls, climate crisis, racial capitalism, neoliberalism, and other “economies of abandonment.”60 What is telling is that this growing list of predicaments has frequently led back to the “continued symbolic power of the Jewish survivor.”61 This is true of intellectual historians like Carolyn Dean as well as political theorists like Robert Meister, for whom “the global politics of human rights after Auschwitz is still about the Jews.”62 Meister’s argument is that the protocols governing the “survival of the Jews” have made the Holocaust a virtual shibboleth for the acceptance of others into a universal discourse on human rights (ibid.). The most important consequence of this politics of survival is the paradoxical rhetoric surrounding the defense of the Israeli state.63 In the name of Jewish survival, says Meister, Western institutions have classified the State of Israel as an exception “to the norms of human rights” and looked the other way when it “bombs civilians in Hebron, Jenin, and Lebanon and detains large numbers of Palestinians without trial.”64 Talal Asad summarizes the situation by noting the Israeli

10

Introduction

state’s ideological interest in representing itself as the “symbolic survivor” of a genocidal experience.65 Through the looking glass of Jewish survival, Palestinians become “the present representatives of Nazi exterminism” and Israelis the protector of human rights (100–101). There is likely no better display of this geopolitical configuration than the stunning act of biblical exegesis performed by the prime minister of Israel for the U.S. Congress in March 2015. The speech seizes the book of Esther as the theological-political setting for a veritable coup de théâtre, in which the persecution of Jews in ancient Persia becomes the threat of nuclear annihilation by modern Iran; the government of modern Iran becomes the political regime of Nazi Germany; and the experience of Holocaust survivors becomes a lesson about the survival of the State of Israel.66

• So who is speaking about survival? My repetitive insistence on the question suggests something about the genealogical objective of this study. Its central purpose is not to affirm or deny survival. It is not to accept or reject its rhetoric or to say yes or no to the stances it defines. Following Michel Foucault, genealogy is an attempt to gauge the fact that survival “is spoken about, to discover who does the speaking, the position and viewpoints from which they speak, the institutions which prompt people to speak about it and which store and distribute the things that are said” (HS, 11). I understand genealogy as a methodological scheme for provincializing the presumed universality of regnant codes, for analyzing the text of dominant discourses, and for exposing how speech that “has not always been self-evident to everyone has been made to look obvious” and even universal.67 This is also another way of saying that genealogy is a science of beginnings. To write a genealogy of survival is not to write a history of survival but instead to ask where such a history might begin. What are survival’s limits? What are its archives? What are its languages? And what field of translations mediate its generalization? The genealogy presented over the course of this book is therefore and, at best, a prolegomenon to a history that has not yet been written. However restricted, and however partial, these aspirational constraints acknowledge the need for a preparatory inventory of the major questions, texts, and structures of speaking that have made survival an identifiable element of our current political horizon.

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My preliminary hypothesis is that the genealogy of survival begins with the specific political and theological-political anxieties surrounding the survival of the Jews.68 In choosing this point of departure, I am not arguing for a direct and transparent return to the Jewish textual tradition but rather for a more complex encounter with the vicissitudes of history and translation that have contributed to the adoption of this language (by both Jews and others). Robert Meister again motions in a helpful direction by speculating that the political prominence of Jewish survival is as much about Jews as it is about the Christian West and the history of the Jewish question that goes as far back as Paul: “Why are there still Jews?”69 According to Meister, the recognizability of the “Jew-as-survivor” signals the ongoing influence of a hyphenated Judeo-Christian tradition upon the terms of global human rights discourse (179–80).70 Survival reveals the theological-political rules that govern the history of “secular Judeo-Christianity” and mark the “Judeo-Christian character of our secularism.”71 The insight could take the genealogy of survival in a number of directions. On the one hand, a shared concern with Jewish survival could serve as a means of reconciling the commonalities of a Judeo-Christian tradition that runs from the Bible until today (177). On the other hand, survival could also be an opportunity to explore the “historical grammar of concepts” underlying the secular’s unique organization of power and discipline.72 Critics of secularism like Talal Asad have argued, for instance, that the Judeo-Christian heritage assumed by modern secularity is actually a retrospective reconstruction, whose vision of unity has particular political stakes (i.e., the “grammatical exclusion of Muslims”).73 The problem is that neither Meister nor Asad can fully divest himself of the suspicion that the secular embrace of a Judeo-Christian past is the reiteration of an older “Christian perspective” on the theological place of the Jews in Christendom.74 This is because both know that, far from being a simple term of reconciliation, the Judeo-Christian has often functioned as a supersessional “redescription of Christianity itself,” a duplicitous attempt to suppress the polemical asymmetries that have characterized the long history of Jewish-Christian diference and debate.75 The very idea of a secular, Judeo-Christian civilization would be the end (and not the beginning) of a protracted Christian mission to erase, deny, and redeem the anti-Christian elements at the center of premodern Jewish discourse.76 In this light, I approach Jewish survival neither as a Jewish nor as a Judeo-Christian question but instead as a counterintuitive index for the way

12

Introduction

survival refracts the “secularized forms of Christianity that mark modernity in the West.”77 Versions of this claim are by now familiar. Few philosophers of religion, notes Liane Carlson, would be surprised to learn that Christianity provides “the inescapable backdrop to all Western philosophy.”78 The statement applies as much to individual thinkers explicitly involved in projects of de-theologization as it does to more abstract and far-reaching endeavors to unearth the theological traces at play in modern political economy.79 Yet the stark obviousness of Christianity’s significance has not necessarily led to any further clarity on the kind of object or subject that Christianity is.80 At times, even the most sophisticated genealogical work “struggles to contain the slippages” between Christianity and a host of other historically freighted terms—not the least of which is the word “religion.”81 The awful truth, says Gil Anidjar, is that we have yet to formulate, yet to attain, anything like an adequate “concept of Christianity.”82 Worse still is the possibility that we do not know whether there is “such a thing as ‘the Christian question.’ ”83 After Asad and others, Anidjar has argued that generalizing categories like the “religious” and the “secular” are not universally applicable concepts but translations that a protean Christian tradition has used to define, divide, and sometimes mask the extent of its own operations.84 “Religion,” he writes, “is the result of a tradition and name, which Christianity gave itself, part of a style of thought, which it elaborated over centuries in order to achieve some degree of unity.”85 By continuing to speak of itself as a “religion,” Christianity has engaged in a strategic essentialism, where the secular marks a fundamental break with the past and not its internal transformation or furtive expansion. If we need a concept of Christianity, it is because we need a concept that analyzes Christianity as a singular “structure of possible actions, the enactment of essential divisions, and their distribution across a hierarchical diferential of power” (392). This assemblage of diferences includes, but is not limited to, the religious and the secular, theology and race, politics and economy, sovereignty and biopower, humanitarianism and civilizing mission, orientalism and antisemitism, church and state, as well as the medieval and the modern. For my purposes here, I read Anidjar as the most evocative interpreter and amplifier of an idea that Jacques Derrida introduced under the heading globalatinization.86 In contradistinction to concepts like secularization and de-theologization, Derrida’s neologism (mondialatinisation) manages to capture in a single gesture the indistinguishability of Latin Christianity from the

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13

centuries-long “process of universalization” and “hyper-imperialist appropriation” now called globalization (mondialisation).87 The term stands alongside a chain of other signifiers in Derrida’s grammatological lexicon (“Western metaphysics,” “white my thology,” “phallogocentrism,” etc.) concerned with the problem of “historical closure.”88 As Gayatri Spivak puts it, “not a general problem, but a European problem.”89 Or rather: a Christian program that has “erased within itself the fabulous scene that has produced it” and mistaken its own idiom for a universal form.90 Globalatinization, in this sense, marks out the “essentially Christian” itinerary of translation and “worldwide Latinization” that has guided the name “religion” from Rome to Europe to the United States and into the “conceptual apparatus of international law and global political rhetoric.”91 The point is to stay vigilant “against too great a claim for transparency” and to remain aware of the contours of a conceptual maneuver that may have “no meaning outside of Christianity.”92 What this also implies is that the question I have been asking—who is speaking about survival—cannot ignore the fact that with the name “survival,” as with the name “religion,” “we are already speaking Latin.”93 The genealogy of survival begins as an investigation into the diferences disseminated across a history of translation, as it has made its way from Rome (superstare, supervivere) to Europe (survival, survie, Überleben) to the United States (survival) and has imposed itself within the apparatuses of a worldwide Christianization. It is from this perspective that I pursue Jewish survival as a cipher for that shocking, massive, and distinctive catachresis known as Judeo-Christianity—in other words, as the cynosure of an elusive globalatin closure. Survival, as Saba Mahmood might have said, is “symptomatic of the fundamental centrality of Christian norms, values, and sensibilities (however Judaic they are made out to be) to European conceptions of what it means to be secular.”94

• It is against this fraught background that I read a series of writers who have—willingly or other wise—made pivotal contributions to the building up of survival’s prismatic architecture. These aforementioned figures are Hannah Arendt (1906–75), Walter Benjamin (1892–1940), Franz Rosenzweig (1886–1929), and Sigmund Freud (1856–1939). In choosing this canonical library of names, I am compelled by two textual strategies. First, because the work of Arendt, Rosenzweig, and Freud has been so central to the postwar

14

Introduction

expression of Jewish survival, their writings are efective sites for its provisional disarticulation. Second, because the writings of Arendt, Benjamin, and Freud have circulated well beyond the discourse on Jewish survival and become major resources in the propagation of survival-talk across geographic and topical contexts, they can also serve as occasions for a further globalatin reorientation of survival’s theological-political archive. The selected readings I attempt here seek to turn the dominant interpretative traditions of survival inside out by showing that they always already inscribe the notion of survival within the theologico-political legacy of Latin Christianity. These various genealogical strands weave a history of subjectivity and sovereignty, mysticism and spectrality, as it coheres around the body of Christ (crucified, resurrected, and multiplied) and as it produces an ambivalent supplement in the mysterious body of Israel. It is a tradition, I argue, that continues to condition the ways an increasingly globalatinizing Christianity defines, diferentiates, and disseminates its reasons of power. Like Karl Löwith, I assume that every interpretation of history is a “regressive” enterprise.95 But I endorse Asad’s wager that genealogy presents a particularly potent way of “working back from our present to the contingencies that have come together to gives us our certainties.”96 The genealogy of survival thus begins in English, in America, and with a reading of Arendt’s postwar opus The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951). It has become commonplace to identify Arendt’s reporting on the Eichmann trial as a representative moment in the rise of the survivor. I challenge this popu lar periodization by surveying Arendt’s earlier writing and its rhetorical investments in the language of survival. My claim is that survival runs like a “red-thread” through Origins, stringing together its intersecting analyses of antisemitism, imperialism, and totalitarianism. Through a comparative reading of these sections and their respective representations of Jewish survival, African survival, and European survival, I establish Arendt’s text as an elementary digest of survival’s theological-political archive. The themes I introduce here are sovereignty, mysticism, and spectrality. In charting the interaction of these elements, I argue that survival traces Christian Eu rope’s eforts to divide itself from Jews and Africans (ghostly survivals) and consolidate its own sovereignty (as a redemptive survivor). It is a story that finds its exemplary image in Arendt’s description of the concentration camps, where she figures the survivor as Lazarus—saved and resurrected from the ruin of a ghostly realm that she repeatedly compares to the “Dark Continent.”

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In Chapter 2, I turn from English to German and from postwar America to prewar Europe, in order to follow two of Arendt’s thematic elements— mysticism and sovereignty—into Walter Benjamin’s essay “The Task of the Translator” (1923). After a short survey of the text’s importance in contemporary debates about survival, I take up Derrida’s suggestion that Benjamin actually distinguishes between two forms (or translations) of survival: Fortleben and Überleben. Countering kabbalistic understandings of Benjamin’s writing, I claim that a reevaluation of Benjamin’s distinction betrays the influence of a Christian mystical tradition that runs as far back as PseudoDionysius. Benjamin, I argue, participates in a history of translation that has invested the word Überleben with the “hyper-life” of God’s omnipotent sovereignty. I conclude with the possibility that Benjamin’s experiments in translation lead to a plausible rewriting of the Gospel of John: in the beginning was Survival, and Survival was with God, and Survival was God. Chapter 3 further elaborates the diference between Überleben and Fortleben in Franz Rosenzweig’s book The Star of Redemption (1921). Against conventional appraisals of the text as a theology of Jewish survival, I demonstrate that its division between Überleben and Fortleben maps a tension between two discrete narratives of Christian survival: one that constructs a theologicalpolitical anthropology around the body of Christ; and one that rehearses the Augustinian history of Jewish witness. I also show that Rosenzweig introduces a third term with the neologism Übersterben (“out-dying”). Consistent with an old tradition of orientalist thought on the nature of “despotism,” Rosenzweig deploys the word as a polemical marker of Islam’s submission to death. I argue that survival in the Star organizes a set of fundamentally Christian discriminations between Christ, the Jew, and the Muslim—a theologicalpolitical arrangement, I maintain, that anticipates and supplements the biopolitical genealogy of survival given by Giorgio Agamben. In the conclusion to my reading of Rosenzweig, I note the significance of sacramental theology to his depiction of Christ’s body. It is a hint that I examine more closely in Chapter 4, where I return to Benjamin and undertake a reading of his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility” (1939). I start by setting Benjamin’s famous distinction between “aura” and “reproducibility” in relationship to wider debates about the singularity and multiplicity, proximity and distance of Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist. I then trace this tradition back into the theological-political histories of the corpus mysticum, the king’s two bodies, and the portrait of the king. This ultimately leads to Shakespeare’s

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Hamlet (1600), where I delineate the Eucharistic logic behind two images of sovereignty: the “survivor” and the “ghost.” Coming back to the present, I submit the survivor-ghost as a theological-political figure for the aura and reproducibility of the sovereign in the age of televisual hegemony. I write the sequel to this Eucharistic episode in the genealogy of survival with a final chapter devoted to Freud. Chapter 5 begins with an assessment of Freud’s decisive place in postwar debates about Jewish survival and the general psychology of the survivor. But it then redraws the parameters of this history by calling attention to the problems of translation that have beset Freud’s reception in English. In search of an alternative paradigm, I look back to The Interpretation of Dreams (1900) and Freud’s own Shakespearean meditations on the survivor-ghost. It is in this context that Freud analyzes the subjectivity of sovereign power as a transferential dialectic between the aura of a survivor and the repeated returns of a revenant. The story reaches its climax in a dream about the crossing of mourning and sovereignty, where, much like the resurrected Christ, Freud finds himself standing in triumph over a gloriously empty tomb. With this biblical image as guide, I close with a brief reading of Moses and Monotheism (1939) and take one last look at the mystery of Jewish survival. Each work that I read here is at once a chapter in the genealogy of survival and an unfinished beginning to the equally incomplete genealogies of others. While there is no way to read this book without following the story it unfolds, it is also true that the stories it tells never quite coalesce into a simple, linear narrative. In their incompleteness, tangency, and supplementarity, these chapters in the genealogy of survival are better understood as writerly interventions into the “haunting history” of a globalatinizing present.97 My view is that individual texts by Arendt, Benjamin, Rosenzweig, and Freud traverse and inflect contemporary formations of survival and, for that reason, can help us think through the contingencies that have come together to give us our certainties. In the Epilogue, I return to the political implications of this position by ofering a final set of reflections on the translation of survival in colonial Palestine. I ask about the possibility of decolonizing this framework of “hyper-imperialist appropriation”; about the potential for a “diferent syntax and grammar of history and memory”; and, indeed, about the necessity of thinking “other political beginnings.”98 I ask, in short, whether the genealogy of “the word [‘survival’] should in principle forbid every nonChristian from using the name [‘survival’], in order to recognize in it what ‘we’ would designate, identify and isolate there.”99 Who is speaking about survival?

CHAPTER 1

The Elements of Survivalism

The most frightening thing about imperialism, its longterm toxic efect, what secures it, what cements it, is the benevolent self-representation of the imperialist as savior. —Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, An Aesthetic Education in the Era of Globalization What survives is thus both ruined and vibrant. —Judith Butler, Parting Ways

Let us begin again with the problem of beginnings. In a now “fabled exchange” on Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963), Gerhard Scholem famously accused Hannah Arendt of two intolerable transgressions.1 First, he thought that Arendt’s summary phrase, “the banality of evil,” blurred the boundaries between theses and slogans; as such, it came close to trafficking in the same “stock phrases” that, so Arendt had argued, were signs of Eichmann’s inability to utter “a single sentence that was not a cliché.”2 Second, Scholem reproached Arendt for lacking ahabath Israel: that “absolutely indefinable and yet totally concrete” feeling of love for the Jewish people.3 Arendt responded to this second allegation by refusing to adopt her friend’s assumptions about love and group-belonging and by further recommending that he look more deeply into the history of his chosen expression, ahabath Israel. “Incidentally,” she wrote, “I would be very grateful if you could tell me since when this concept has played a role in Judaism, when it was first used in Hebrew language and literature, etc.”4 With this polemical reversal, Arendt sought to turn the tables on Scholem, hinting that he (and not she) was the

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one involved in an Eichmann-like repetition of stock phrases, clichés, and “empty talk.”5 At the very least, she implied, Scholem was not thinking critically or historically about the beginnings of a phrase that he took for a concept but that might be nothing more than a slogan. Although this chapter is not about Eichmann, love, or the meaning of ahabath Israel, I begin it here because Scholem and Arendt’s conceptual conflict gives voice to the issues I will raise concerning survival.6 Like Arendt, I want to stress the political importance of sustained reflection on the history, use, and force of language, the stock phrases and sayings that proliferate precisely because they have not yet become questions that require “thinking, pausing, lingering and wandering.”7 Arendt teaches Scholem that the swift appropriation and application of a word should be met by the slow, patient, and possibly never-ending process of “conceptualization”: the readiness “to waste the time required in order to think” (16). I follow Arendt by asking about the history of survival, about the obviousness and primacy of Jewish survival, and about the problems posed by survival’s translation. Here, as elsewhere in this book, my goal is to waste some time by lingering on survival so as to temporarily defer the banality of its routinization.

• For some, Arendt’s work is a pivotal starting point for the conceptual history of the survivor in the postwar era. In a passing remark in her book on Eichmann, Arendt writes that ninety of the witnesses who appeared before the court “were survivors in the strict sense of the word, they had survived the war in one form or another in Nazi captivity.”8 The comment confirms that by the early 1960s, the word “survivor” had entered into American public discourse and acquired a familiar definition. This simple attestation, however, says very little about the presence or absence of survival in Arendt’s lexicon of “fundamental concepts” and even less about her work’s potential contribution to a broader, pre-Holocaust genealogy of its language.9 Claude Lefort, for one, has made the troubling suggestion that Arendt never confronts survival as an urgent problem, neither thematizing it with any rigor nor analyzing it in any systematic fashion.10 If Lefort is correct, it would mean that survival has no place “among Arendt’s best known categories, such as world, action and plurality.”11 Survival would likewise fail to appear alongside equally important “diagnostic concepts” like loneliness, terror, and statelessness (64). The observation would also help to explain the

Elements of Survivalism

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miscellaneous eforts to read survival as a translation of more recognizable Arendtian refrains, including animal laborans (“the conditions for biological survival”), natality (“the measureless rhythm of a recurrent ‘survival’ ”), naked life (“survival is a situation of exception”), and Jewishness (“Jewish survival”).12 The fact is that survival remains a rather elusive theme in Arendt’s work: an enigmatic question always in the process of slipping away and withdrawing from sustained historical and conceptual attention. This portends a potentially precarious state of afairs, since, as Seyla Benhabib reminds us, Arendt insisted time and again on the importance of thinking “through the human history sedimented in layers of language and concepts.”13 Her goal was the production of a Begriffsgeschichte that could bear “witness to the more profound tectonic shifts occurring beneath the visible course of events” (x). In this light, survival threatens to escape the purview of Arendt’s methodological gaze and fall beneath her ability to analyze the historical shifts sedimented within the layers of its conceptual landscape. The very real possibility is that Arendt ultimately has nothing more to say about survival and nothing to add to its genealogy. Either survival is a mobile metaphor applicable to a series of heterogeneous concepts in her thought, or it is a term fundamentally tied to the protocols of post-Holocaust representation. In this chapter, I ofer a corrective to these perspectives by arguing that Arendt has much more to say about survival than others have recognized. While she may never formulate a concept of survival, her work nonetheless compiles a diverse repository of survivalist vocabulary—those slogans, clichés, and stock phrases that never quite rise to the status of concepts. I do not attempt to produce a comprehensive account of survival across the entirety of Arendt’s extensive corpus. Instead, I pursue a limited reading of her postwar (but pre-Holocaust) opus, The Origins of Totalitarianism (1951), as a “field manual” for the genealogy of survival: a geological survey of its contingent elements and rhetorical constellations.14 Survival runs like a “red thread” through Arendt’s book, tying together its disjointed analyses of antisemitism (Jewish survival), imperialism (African survival), and totalitarianism (the survival of Western civilization).15 The unifying factor throughout is globalatinization (Latin, Christianity). With Arendt, the genealogy of survival passes along an Anglo-American extension of an older globalatin itinerary and into English as its dominant mode of expression. I highlight the fragility (read: contingency) of this

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trajectory by calling attention to the ways that the overt, monolingual solidity of Arendt’s text dissimulates the multiple languages that overrun and unbind it. We know that Arendt incorporated and translated a number of preparatory essays first written in German; that she relied on Alfred Kazin and Rose Feitelson to “English” or “de-Teutonize” the rough draft of her manuscript; that she subsequently rewrote the book in German under the title Elemente und Ursprünge totaler Herrschaft (1955); and that she introduced portions of this substantially modified German edition into later revisions of the English text.16 The “book” so often discussed under the single name, The Origins of Totalitarianism, is really only one moment in a diferential scene of writing. By attending to the linguistic fissures punctuating Arendt’s English text, I aim to unsettle the clarity of survival as a transparent mark. Like Cynthia Ozick, I also suspect that English is already a Christian language.17 But I track the Christian dimension of Arendt’s globalatinizing prose further by intervening in an early debate about the place of theology and secularization in her book. From one angle, Eric Voegelin critiqued Origins for ignoring the “secular evolution” of medieval Christian eschatology in its economic-political assessment of totalitarianism.18 Philip Rief, on the other hand, speculated that Arendt had actually written a covert “theology of politics” and that she was a “prophet-historian, moralizing history as the burden of our time.”19 What I would like to suggest is that from beginning to end, and buried under the rubble of an already fragmented historical terrain, Arendt’s book secretes (in the double sense of the word) a singularly Christian topography of survival.20 Its major elements are mysticism, spectrality, and sovereignty. Survival traces the collapsing division between these themes as they modulate Arendt’s attempts to distinguish modern, secular antisemitism from medieval, religious Jew-hatred; Eu rope from Africa; and total domination from the Western tradition. Arendt longs for the stability of a lost Christianity, marginalizing it throughout her study, in order to both guard it from the histories she criticizes (antisemitism, imperialism, and totalitarianism) and to rescue its archive for the future. Survival confounds these most essential distinctions and ultimately throws into question the diference between the destruction of the world and its salvation: between sovereign and savior. I show that the tensions traversing survival in Arendt’s book find their exemplary condensation in her redemptive turn to a mystical body and a miraculous resurrection.

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But I begin again slowly and follow Arendt as she winds her way through an argument that once more starts elsewhere and with another mystery: the survival of the Jews.

Jewish Survival According to Arendt’s well-known argument, the emergence of modern antisemitism belongs to a more general history of the European nation-state and its decline. She observes that across the nineteenth century, Jews became the model for a new economic-political program: an ideology capable of overcoming the boundaries of the nation-state and achieving a new consistency in the supranational ties of “blood and family” (OT, 28).21 The development, Arendt thinks, reflects the profound ambivalence at the heart of modern antisemitism, which hated and condemned the Jews for already possessing the body (economic-political-hematological) that it, too, desired to create: “an international trade organization, a worldwide family concern with identical interests everywhere, a secret force behind the throne which degrades all visible governments into mere facade, or into marionettes whose strings are manipulated from behind the scenes” (OT, 28). This is the logic that guides Arendt in her attempt to explain how and why it was the “seemingly small and unimportant Jewish problem that had the dubious honor of setting the whole infernal machine in motion” (3). It registers for her the curious symmetry between antisemitic theories about Jewish politics and the political goals of antisemitic movements themselves.22 Arendt’s lesson is that the “Jewish” paradigm eventually leads to the decay of the nation-state and to the emergence of a dangerous, supranational unity of politics, economics, and race. The question of survival enters the story with the addition of another factor: religion. It is true, of course, that Voegelin criticized Arendt for relegating religion to the periphery of her argument and for ignoring its role in the constitution of modern totalitarian violence. Arendt makes it easy to justify this reading, especially because of her persistent attempts to distinguish modern, secular antisemitism from medieval, religious Jew-hatred. In a revised preface to the book, she writes: “Antisemitism, a secular nineteenthcentury ideology . . . and religious Jew-hatred, inspired by the mutually hostile antagonism of two conflicting creeds, are obviously not the same; and even the extent to which the former derives its arguments and emotional appeal from the latter is open to question” (OT, xi).23

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There are, then, good reasons for thinking that Arendt rejects religion as a primary causal factor in her narrative. She is simply more interested in emphasizing the discontinuities between epochs than she is in tracing the mathematics of subtraction promoted by theories of secularization. Modern, secular antisemitism is not the end result of a transformation that began within the religious frame of the Middle Ages; it is instead a pure product of modernity and the spontaneous generation of a wholly secular order. Yet Arendt does not always remain consistent in her commitment to these impassable ruptures of epochal diference. At the end of her preface, for instance, she reclaims the transhistorical perspective that she other wise eschews, writing that the central concern of “Jewish history . . . since the Babylonian exile has always been the survival of the people [Überleben des Volkes] against the overwhelming odds of dispersion” (OT, xv).24 The remarks point to Arendt’s wider interest in the span of Jewish history and echo comments she makes elsewhere on the direct link between Jewish survival and secularization. In the opening pages of Origins, Arendt adds that “the birth and growth of modern antisemitism has been accompanied by and interconnected with Jewish assimilation, the secularization and withering away of the old religious and spiritual values of Judaism” (OT, 7). For “Jews concerned with the survival of their people,” it became easy to “hit on the consoling idea that antisemitism, after all, might be an excellent means for keeping the people together . . . an eternal guarantee of Jewish existence” (ibid.).25 As Arendt sees it, the belief in eternal antisemitism is a “superstition,” a “secularized travesty” of a traditional faith in chosenness and messianism” (OT, 7; EU, 37). In the past, Jews had a religious answer to the question of Jewish survival (faith, eternity, chosenness, messianism); in secularized modernity, they turn to the counterfeit belief that only antisemitism can provide the “mysterious guarantee of the survival of the Jewish people [Weiterbestehen des Volkes]” (OT, 8; EU, 38). The mysterious relationship between Jewish survival and Jewish secularization returns again and again in Arendt’s argument. In one instance, Arendt pauses to note that antisemitic ideology alone does not wholly explain how and why the Rothschild family became a metonym for the Jewish people in general. She insists that the image of Jews as a community of “blood ties and family characteristics” also had something to do with Jews themselves (OT, 28). Beyond the efects of antisemitism, Jews became “more family-conscious in the centuries of their spiritual and religious dissolution” (ibid.). After losing “the old hope for Messianic redemption and the

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firm ground of traditional folkways, Western Jewry became over-conscious of the fact that their survival [Fortexistenz] had been achieved in an alien and often hostile environment” (ibid.). Arendt concludes that Jewish secularization turned family into “a kind of last fortress,” encouraging the idea that group identity belonged to an extended kinship of blood (ibid.). These beliefs, she says, provided Jews with the most powerful means for resisting assimilation and dissolution, secularizing a once “half-religious and halfnational” concern: the “preservation of the Jewish people” (OT, 28; EU, 82). Throughout her inquiry into modern Jewish identity, Arendt reads the secularization of Jewish survival as a series of historical movements from religion to family, belief to blood, and spirit to body.26 The Jews once defined themselves as a national religion; now in the era of emancipation, they discover that bonds of blood and family advance a “more conserving force than Jewish religion” (OT, 64; EU, 164). But in an uncanny twist, Arendt suggests that these “internal” developments also happen to coincide with unrelated changes in a wider European context. “When, for reasons which had nothing to do with the Jewish question,” she writes, “race problems came to the foreground of the political scene, the Jews at once fitted all ideologies and doctrines which defined a people by blood ties and family characteristics” (OT, 28). Emancipation and secularization—that strange confluence of politics and economics, religion, and race—come together as the central tropes of Jewish survival in secular modernity. Modern antisemitism simply mirrors and weaponizes a secular Jewish ideology. Arendt eventually follows this difficult story into the exceptional figure of Benjamin Disraeli. What she sees in Disraeli is a spectacular specimen of secularization, emancipation, and antisemitism: a man born and baptized into an assimilated family, raised outside the Jewish community, and without the slightest knowledge of Jewish religious tradition who nonetheless could do nothing to escape “the fact” of being a Jew (OT, 68–69). In one sense, Disraeli’s position reflects another moment in the degeneration of Jewish religion into an afair of the body and blood or, as Arendt puts it here, the “simple fact of birth” (73). However, his exemplary situation also explains the introduction of another element into the secularization of Jewish survival: chosenness (ibid.).27 Although Arendt admits that Jewish religion had always considered chosenness and messianism to be two inextricable aspects of God’s singular plan for the redemption of humanity, she argues that Jewish secularization evacuated these concepts of their religious content (OT, 74). The belief in belonging to God’s chosen people gave way to “a

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fantastic delusion, shared by unbelieving Jews and non-Jews alike, that Jews are by nature more intelligent, better, healthier, more fit for survival [widerstandsfähiger]” (OT, 74; EU, 180).28 From this point forward, “the old religious concept of chosenness was no longer the essence of Judaism; it became instead the essence of Jewishness” and helped to produce a “real Jewish chauvinism” and a “perverted nationalism” (OT, 74; EU, 180). Disraeli simply combined the “empty concept” of chosenness with birth and blood, in order to produce “a full-blown race doctrine,” turning himself into the “chosen man of the chosen race” (OT, 73, 71). Jewish survival, in Arendt’s text, undergoes a process of sanguification, becoming a secular sign of chosenness as well as a naturalized marker of Jewish power. Throughout his life, Disraeli continually fetishized the Jewish race as an “ideal” or “idol” that one could worship in the place of God (ibid.). He never relinquished a belief in the “secret and mysterious influence of the chosen men of the chosen race” (OT, 75). Nor did he ever abandon his conviction “in the idea of a Jewish world sovereignty” (EU, 182). The idea of a chosen race became a way to imagine Jewish sovereignty as a mysterious, supranational union of “money and blood,” a spectral, even phantasmatic, family afair capable of conducting global afairs through “mystical-esoteric action” (189). Jewish survival takes its place at the center of a secularized ideological complex, which, in working against the boundaries of the nation-state, infuses the blood of the chosen race with both “mysterious power” and “ghostly existence” (OT, 78; EU, 189).

• This more or less summarizes what Arendt has to say about Jewish survival. Her account touches on the dense interaction of politics and economics in the nineteenth century as well as the inscrutable variables of Jewish secularization. The various strands converge in the figure of Benjamin Disraeli and the image of the mysterious, chimerical power of the chosen race. The problem is that, even as Arendt ofers many answers to the question of Jewish survival, she does not reflect on the historicity of the question itself. Like Hans Blumenberg, Arendt seems to think that questions remain “relatively stable” across epistemic divides and that, as a consequence, one need only chart how “diferent statements can be understood as answers to identical questions.”29 What Arendt does not ponder is: Who is asking the question? Since when? And for what reasons?

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There is also a second, related issue: Arendt’s strangely asymmetric application of the secularization hypothesis. On the one hand, Arendt describes Jewish secularization as an internal process of transformation, whereby a once-national religion emptied out theological concepts like chosenness and messianism, in order to redefine itself in the immanent terms of hate, blood, and race. On the other hand, Arendt makes it clear that secularization fails as an explanatory framework for the shift from medieval, religious Jew-hatred to modern, secular antisemitism. In this anti-secularization narrative, the old, “Christian brand of hostility” simply disappears, receding without a trace onto the other side of a deep historical rupture. As Arendt notes, modern antisemitism is as much “anti-Christian as it is anti-Jewish” (OT, 7). It arises not through an internal renovation or redefinition of Christianity but rather in direct opposition to Christianity and as a dangerous attack on its medieval-religious structures. In other words, Arendt asks her readers to fall prey to a spectacular sleight-of-hand. At the instant she turns religious Jews into secular Jews and Judaism into Jewishness, she also shows that with only one stroke of the wand, she can make secular Christians and Christianness disappear. When Jews become secular, they become Jews of a diferent kind. When Christians becomes secular, they cease to be Christian altogether. My point is that Arendt’s writing consistently diverts attention away from Christianity, away from the complications that come with asking about its involvement in the formation of modern, secular Europe, and away from the difficulties that accompany eforts to ponder its definition as “a religion or a nation, a people or a race, a state or a tribe,” a family or an economy (as Arendt does, in better and worse ways, when it comes to Jews).30 Arendt, for example, never considers the significance of chosenness in the history of Christianity or its relevance for the rise and fall of the nationstate. Nor does she entertain the possibility that Jewish chosenness (or Jewish blood) belongs to the Christian perspective.31 Here, finally, Arendt also fails to interrogate Christianity’s contribution to the question of Jewish survival (be it secular or religious, medieval or modern, spiritual, political, or racial). And this is all despite the fact that Arendt cannot help but observe the continuities between medieval Christianity’s role as “a powerful agent of preservation” and emancipatory Europe’s “conscious preservation of the Jews as a separate group” (OT, 7, 12; EU, 37, 49). In the following section, I attempt to uncover these suppressed possibilities within Origins by turning to one of its intertexts: Arendt’s early writing on antisemitism from the

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1930s. I demonstrate that the very terms of Arendt’s argument (mystery, chosenness, ghostliness) betray her participation in the history of an old, ambivalent, and always sublime Christian question.32

• By the late 1930s, Arendt had already committed herself to the distinction between medieval, christliche Judenhass and moderne Antisemitismus. But in an early draft for her study of antisemitism in Origins, she admits that certain continuities cut across this other wise strict divide. These include the perplexing fact of Jewish survival: that “incomprehensible phenomenon of the survival of an ancient people [Ueberlebens eines antiken Volkes], which has survived [überlebt] so many European catastrophes, which does not live in an earthly manner and which, unlike other peoples, cannot die, preserving itself like a ghost [Gespenst] from days long past, in order to nourish itself like a vampire on the blood of the living.”33 With these words, Arendt summarizes a widely held set of beliefs. As the Romantic author Clemens von Brentano (1778–1842) once stated, the Jews invert and debase the sacrality of Christ’s eternal life by “lingering on earth as signs of their downfall, as the indelible bloodstains of an evil guilt, and as ghosts of their unblessed historical death.”34 Arendt later identifies how readily Jews adopted this Christian perspective, employing “such images and metaphors” in a derivative efort to “portray the survival of the Jewish people as a ghostly phenomenon, das Ueberleben des jüdischen Volkes als ein gespenstisches Phänomen zu schildern.”35 For Ludwig Börne (1786–1837), the “evil calamity” of Jewish history proceeded “out of a dark, unexplained horror, which infuses Judaism, and which, like a ghost, or like the mocking and threatening spirit of a slain mother, accompanies Christianity from its cradle onward” (ibid.).36 The historian Paul Lawrence Rose has traced many of these themes and detailed how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century writers made ghostly figures like the “eternal Jew” and Ahasuerus central to the “mystery of Jewish survival.”37 Rose emphasizes, though, that ghostliness was only one element in an immense and immensely ambivalent discourse running throughout the writing of Kant, Herder, Fichte, Hegel, Schopenhauer, Heine, Marx, Wagner, and others. Herder, in particular, believed that the people of Israel “was and is the most outstanding people on earth.”38 In “its origins and in its survival [Fortleben] until today, in its fortunes and misfortunes, in its virtues and its flaws, in its lowliness and its heights, it is so unique, so peculiar,

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that I consider the history, the manner, and the existence of the people to be the most established proof for the miracles [Wunder] and scriptures, which we know and have from them.”39 Some years later, Kant responded to this kind of ambivalent exultation by observing that the preservation of the Jews “strikes many as being so wondrous [wundersam] that, in their judgment, it certainly could not have been possible by nature but only as an extraordinary event designed for divine purpose.”40 He posed an antimony: one side regarding the preservation of the Jews as “proof of a par ticular beneficent providence which is saving the people for a future kingdom on earth” and the other as “the admonishing ruins of a devastated state which stands in the way of the Kingdom of Heaven to come but which a particular providence still sustains, partly to preserve in memory the old prophecy of a messiah issuing from this people, and partly to make of it an example of punitive justice” (ibid.). In her own commentary, Arendt quickly situates the wondrous and ghostly lingering of the Jews within an older theological tradition. “For Christians,” she writes, “a member of the chosen people is still visible in every member of the cursed people, whose misfortune is so necessary for the Church, because the Jew is a ‘living witness to Christian truth,’ a witness whom ‘the Christian should not exterminate, lest he lose the knowledge of God’s laws.’ ”41 She takes her cue from the words of Pope Innocent III (1160– 1216), whose precise formulation gives voice to a doctrine that begins as far back as Augustine and eventually comes to justify the continued presence of Jews in Christendom.42 In The City of God, Augustine had explained that, although they “have been conquered and oppressed by the Romans, the Jews have not entirely perished: lest they should forget the Law of God and so fail to bear witness of the kind of which we are speaking.”43 The Jews remain as long as they bear witness to the truth of the Old Testament and its prophecies, their continued subjugation further testifying to the fate that awaits all unbelievers: “It is for the sake of such testimony, with which, even against their will, they furnish us by having and preserving those books, that they themselves are scattered throughout all the nations, wherever the Christian Church spreads” (ibid.).44 Over the centuries, Augustine’s remarks became the standard doctrine of the Church. In Jeremy Cohen’s words: “Medieval Christianity ordinarily recognized the Jews as a textually defined community that still had a role to play in Christian history and therefore had to survive.”45 Bernard of Clairvaux (1090–1153), Pope Gregory IX (ca. 1145–1241), Peter Alfonsi (twelfth century),

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and Peter the Venerable (1092–1156), to name only a few, all looked to the words of Augustine as the theological and eschatological validation for the preservation of the Jews in Christendom. During the Second Crusade, Bernard himself wrote a series of letters exhorting the crusaders to refrain from violence. “The Jews are not to be persecuted, killed, or even put to flight,” he said.46 “The Jews are for us the living words of Scripture, for they remind us always of what our Lord sufered” (ibid.). And if they are “utterly wiped out, what will become of our hope for the promised salvation?” (463). There is some scholarly debate about if and when the witness doctrine ceased to be the governing policy of the Church.47 Already in the twelfth century, the “discovery” of the Talmud encouraged the suspicion that the Jews had vacated their role as “living letters of the law.”48 Arendt suggests that the break came only with Luther, who, in the sixteenth century, was presaging “true campaigns of extermination.”49 But the contemporary critic Stephen Haynes reminds us that the theological significance of the Jews is a “conviction that is deeply embedded in the Western (Christian) imagination. The Jews are a unique people and their dispersion, survival, and very existence are a ‘miracle.’ ”50 This means that outside the strict institutional boundaries of the witness doctrine, the Augustinian legacy has supported the proliferation of a more extensive fascination with the mystery of Jewish survival. In terms Arendt knew, the French theologian Jacques-Bénigne Bossuet (1627–1704) described God’s singular and incomparable decision to “conserve the Jews,” observing that while “one no longer finds any remnant of the ancient Assyrians, the ancient Medes, the ancient Persians, the ancient Greeks, or even the ancient Romans . . . the Jews, who had once been the prey of these ancient nations, so celebrated in history, have survived them [survécu].”51 It is “a mystery [mystère],” he concludes, “so marvelous, and so edifying to the human species” that it cannot but merit careful consideration.52 Like Augustine, Bernard, and others in this tradition, Bossuet found his explicit inspiration in Paul’s Letter to the Romans. This is where Paul allegorizes the diference between Israel of faith and Israel of the flesh, between those who have a part in salvation and those who have rejected it, between the “remnant chosen by grace” and the “hardened” (Rom. 11:5–7).53 In a crucial supplement, Paul adds that the whole of Israel continues to play a role in the history of salvation. For the “hardened” are the “enemies of God” only in their refusal of the Gospel: “as regards election they are beloved, for the sake of their ancestors” (Rom. 11:28). From an eschatological perspective,

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the eventual inclusion or conversion of these beloved enemies heralds the final coming of redemption. Erik Peterson presented this modern gloss: “That the Jews have not yet perished, that today the synagogue still exists, that is a sign of the eschatological patience of God, who is still always waiting ‘this year’ for the conversion of the fleshly Israel.”54 Until then, Jews live an existence entirely “ambiguous, and the ambiguity of this Jewish existence will only cease when all Israel becomes believers and our Lord will have returned from heaven.”55 This history, he concluded, is “the mystery [Geheimnis] of the Church from Jews and Gentiles” (67).56 As Paul himself announced: “So that you may not claim to be wiser than you are, brothers and sisters, I want you to understand this mystery [mystērion]: a hardening has come upon part of Israel, until the full number of Gentiles has come in. And so all Israel will be saved” (Rom. 11:25–26). That Peterson continued to make an appeal to this “mystery” after 1933 has led some to wonder whether he was fully “aware of the terrible ambiguity that tied both the existence and the fulfillment of the Church to the survival or the disappearance of the Jews.”57 The same question has inspired others to see the “murderous outburst of Nazi anti-Semitism” as the last in a series of ends to the Pauline tradition and a final abrogation of the Augustinian witness doctrine.58 In truth, Nazism did little to quell interest in the mystery of Jewish survival.59 Already in 1949, Karl Barth was hoping that Paul could help him find a more definitive “Christian answer” to this “mystery of faith.”60 He discovered that the “puzzling survival [Fortexistenz] of the Jews is a sign which cannot be ignored, a sign of what the one true God has done for us all, once and for all, in this one Jewish person . . . the one Jew on the cross, in whom lies salvation for everyone, without whom there is no salvation for anyone” (148–49).61 Before and after Barth, it was probably Jacques Maritain who went furthest in formulating the theology behind “the mystery of Israel.”62 Following Peterson, and in direct reference to Paul, Maritain observed that across an “abominable history, it was not God’s anger, but his pity and his love that accompanied his people and preserved them . . . through all the pain, the blood, and the tears that have been the price of its vocation and mission in the world.”63 Like the Church itself, Israel has a task to fulfill on earth, remaining there as a sign of humanity’s tragic struggle (31). This is what makes Israel a mystery, a mystery “of the same order as the mystery of the world and the mystery of the church” (29). The Jews are nothing less than a corpus mysticum, a repudiated and intolerable church but one still indispensable to the work of redemption (32).

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Later, the American Jewish writer Arthur Cohen expressed his deep discomfort with Maritain’s endeavor to revive “the Pauline conception of  the ‘mystery of Israel.’ ”64 From the Christian perspective, he wrote, “the authentic corpus mysticum of Israel is made doubly mysterious by its defection and default” (83). While “Judaism acknowledges the fact of Christianity as a real fact . . . Christianity does not really consider Judaism to have survived” (125). For Christians, “the survival of Israel is made a sign and witness, a testimony of historic guilt, a mystery . . . a ficelle of Christian history”: a people not fully “alive and present” (ibid.). The mystery of Jewish survival for Cohen was only a final confirmation of the Christian investment in the Jews’ “living death. The Jew, having died with the advent of Christianity, must be either ghost or devil to survive so persistently” (161). Not everyone echoed Cohen’s conscious hostility to Maritain or his insights into the dangers of this resolutely ambivalent corpus mysticum. On the contrary, many Jews and Christians both knowingly and unknowingly chose to take up the Christian position (if often from a slightly diferent, marginally less ghostly, perspective). In Maritain’s context, there is probably no better example than the French Jewish author Jean-François Steiner, whose novelistic eforts to imagine resistance in the concentration camp end up inscribing this “no man’s land between life and death” with the triumphant mystery of Jewish survival.65 Steiner writes: After a night of agony, in the first glimmer of dawn that heralded the return of day and the new victory of light over darkness, once again the Jews began to believe in the miracle. There is a mystery [mystère] here whose explanation can be found only in another and greater mystery, which is the survival of the Jewish people [la survivance du peuple juif ]. Reason can enumerate a certain number of causes for this phenomenon—devotion to a faith, sense of solidarity, familial fanaticism, and so on—but other nations in which these same conditions applied have disappeared, at best leaving behind only a few fragments of stone. Heirs of this age-old mystery, the Jews of Treblinka revived it once again. And yet this time all the conditions seemed to point to its not being renewed. Perhaps it is in this individual denial of death, this congenital inability to imagine it, that one can find the underlying cause of this miracle of survival. (136–37; 149)66

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With Steiner, the story comes full circle and arrives back at the mysterious power of Jewish survival in modern, secular Europe. But if this short and varied genealogy has shown anything, it is that Jewish survival is already Christian survival and that the survival of the Jews is an ambivalent, paradoxical, anxious, and constantly shifting Christian question (religious or secular, medieval or modern). One could object, as Arthur Cohen might, that this simply contributes further to the foreclosure of an independent and authentically Jewish perspective on survival. But Cohen and others should also recall Arendt’s strained eforts to read the economic, political, and racial aspects of this question (ghostliness, chosenness, mystery) through the history of Jewish secularization. Her text is minimal proof that it is not always easy to separate the Jewish from the Christian or to make a clean break with the sometimes-hidden asymmetries of the Christian point of view. What this means, in any case, is that it is probably necessary to move beyond Jewish survival, in order to gain a better sense of the other elements that constitute survival as a Christian mystery. For instance: in the “phantom world” of colonialism (OT, 186).

Imperial Survival Like antisemitism, the question of imperialism in Arendt touches on the amalgamation of economic, political, and racial forces responsible for the destruction of the nation-state. The primary goal of my reading in this section will be to chart the significance of this complex discourse on race, economics, and politics for the genealogy of survival. It is, in part, a familiar story: one that bears on religion and secularization as well as chosenness, ghostliness, and mystery. In this new presentation of modern Europe, though, Arendt makes a unique set of supplemental additions to survival’s archive, including Darwinism, anthropology, worldliness, and tribalism. Beyond antisemitism, these elements allow Arendt to evaluate survival as a critical factor in the history (or “nonhistory”) of Africa. But as I will show, this passage from Jews to Africans is less a departure than a perspectival shift. To borrow a metaphor from Freud: antisemitism and imperialism relate to each other as the discrete layers of a “composite photograph,” which only as a whole captures the various angles and individual elements of its subject (SE5:139). From one exposure to the next, the image of the Jew and

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the image of the African mingle as diferent gradations of a single Christian vision. The history of imperial survival traces another dialectical movement between the mystical world of a chosen race and the ghostly worldlessness of a forsaken race.

• Although Arendt’s analysis of imperialism focuses on the political developments of the nineteenth century, she begins her discussion in the seventeenth century with Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651). For Arendt, Hobbes’s importance lies in his transposition of the economic and behavioral patterns governing bourgeois society into the building blocks of the body politic. Hobbes, Arendt argues, was the first to recognize that an interminable pursuit of wealth will eventually breach all “territorial limits” and seize political power as the only guarantee of further uninterrupted economic expansion (OT, 146). Because this view imagines political organization as an instrument for the never-ending production of power, Arendt thinks that it bears responsibility for the ideas that “Might is Right” and that the human being is a “power-thirsty animal” (OT, 160, 143). She hypothesizes that this political machine will continually destroy all weaker structures until the “last war,” when, in “Victory, or Death,” it will “overcome all political limitations that go with the existence of other peoples” and “envelop the whole earth in its tyranny” (146).67 In formulating the political fallout of this logic, Arendt asserts the significance of modern race theory (OT, 157). By the nineteenth century, she says, imperialists began looking to race as a means of supporting their drive toward political and economic expansion. Like antisemitism, imperialism found in “tribal nationalism and outright racism” the possibility of constructing a supranational movement capable of reaching beyond the constraints of the nation-state (153). This included the specific ideological development that allowed the might-right doctrine to “conquer natural science and produce the ‘law’ of the survival of the fittest [Erhaltung des Stärkeren]” (OT, 160; EU, 356). In Arendt’s telling, liberalism found in Darwin’s axiom biological support for its optimistic belief in civilizational advancement (OT, 173). Darwinism combined the old “principle of inheritance” with the nineteenth century’s political investment in “progress,” in order to arrive at the conclusion that a struggle for existence determined the gradations of diference along a more general continuum of living beings (78).

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While Arendt argues that the new scientific model was politically neutral, she highlights the dangerous ideological links that tied it to the old mightright thesis and gave credence to those who interpreted the “survival of the fittest [Auslese der Tüchtigsten]” as a natural distinction between higher and lower races (OT, 178; EU, 393). One could challenge Arendt’s interpretation of Darwinism on a number of levels.68 But Arendt may be right in thinking that theoretical diferences do not necessarily amount to meaningful historical distinctions. By 1900, Darwinism had made the might-right doctrine and its corollaries “virtually omnipresent”: ideas of “struggle,” “fitness,” and “survival” as well as individual, species, and national iterations of the “eternal Hobbesian war of all against all.”69 The survival of the fittest also ofered a new answer to an old anxiety about the extinction of “unfavoured races.”70 In the eighteenth century and in the context of Romanticism, writers “tended to view the vanishing race in terms of loss” (ibid.). Darwinian theory, by contrast, emphasized progressive advance, seeing the “victory of a stronger form” as the sign of a “higher stage of development” and the progress of certain civilizations as dependent “on the extermination of their immediate predecessors” (ibid.). Beginning in the 1830s, Darwin himself came to believe that, even though “humanity formed a single species, certain primitive races were so far behind civilization—so lost in the immense past of social evolution— that their extinction was likely if not inevitable.”71 He accepted the fact that the struggle for life could only develop and ennoble the human species. In the long term, “the eradication of the lower races would gradually reduce the diferences between races until the world would again be inhabited by one single almost homogeneous race in which no one was inferior to the noblest example of the humanity of his day.”72 By the end of the nineteenth century, Europeans “widely assumed that ‘inferior’ races would fall victim to the onward march of progress.”73 But Arendt also reminds us that the “doctrine of the necessary survival of the fittest” actually eroded in subsequent decades, as some began to doubt “whether those who were ‘fittest’ today would still be the fittest tomorrow” (OT, 178). In this context, she says, “eugenics promised to overcome the troublesome uncertainties of the survival doctrine,” which made it “impossible either to predict who would turn out to be the fittest or to provide the means for the nations to develop everlasting fitness” (179). Eugenicists like Huxley, Haeckel, and Lapouge feared the possibility of extinction and decided that they could convert the survival of the fittest from a natural “process of

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selection” to a system of artificial control (OT, 179; EU, 394). Through “selected inheritance” and “pure breeding,” they believed not only that they could ward of the threat of racial decline but also that they could ensure the biological improvement of the race. Their goal was to transform “the whole nation into a natural aristocracy from which choice exemplars would develop into geniuses and supermen” (OT, 179–80). Here, the survival of the fittest becomes something more than a mere slogan of evolutionary triumph. It also summarizes a biological project to transform the human being into “a god” (179). Arendt’s theological turn is unsettling. On the one hand, it fits uncomfortably within her assessment of race-thinking in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, where she makes clear that eugenics abandoned the “Christian tenet of the unity and equality of all men” (OT, 176). On the other hand, even as Arendt separates Christian theology from race-thinking, she also betrays the possibility of a more complicated genealogy. Arendt fears that the history of bourgeois power accumulation—from the doctrine that “Might is Right” to the “survival of the fittest”—simply perpetuates the danger already inherent in a theological logic that has either overcome or forgotten the abyss separating human beings and God. Far from deserting the history of Christian theology, eugenics proves to be a modern, biological attempt to transform the human being from a natural subject of creation into its supreme creator: Arendt’s biotheology of bourgeois survival.

• As Arendt makes her way across nineteenth-century Europe, she examines a series of other moments in the history of race-thinking: Romanticism’s ideas about innate personality, natural nobility, and organic history; Gobineau’s blood-soaked thoughts on degeneration and decay; Burke’s ideology of national inheritance; and Renan’s distinction between Semites and Aryans (OT, 171–78). But the whole of Arendt’s argument about imperialism takes a pivotal turn with the “scramble for Africa” and the exposure of “Western humanity to new and shocking experiences” (183). In Africa, she writes, race became “the emergency explanation of human beings whom no European or civilized man could understand and whose humanity so frightened and humiliated the immigrants that they no longer cared to belong to the same human species” (185). Racism eventually became a form of colonial administration, a justification for imperial deeds as well as an excuse for

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inflicting another slogan on “a whole continent populated and overpopulated by savages”: Exterminate all the brutes (ibid.). These comments and others have often led scholars to interpret Arendt as a thoroughgoing critic of imperialism, racism, and the entire tradition of political reasoning that made it possible to execute and rationalize “the most terrible massacres in recent history” (OT, 185).74 Arendt, after all, spends pages interrogating the construction of race as a historical category and critiquing its use in the extermination and decimation of populations. Still, recent readers have understood Arendt’s “emergency explanation” as something other than a strategic attempt to immanently inhabit and undo a dominant discursive frame.75 For one thing, Arendt stresses that racism was not simply the product of a European ideological formation but was a response to “experience itself, a horrifying experience of something alien beyond imagination or comprehension” (OT, 195). Europeans in Africa, she writes, encountered “tribes which, as far as we know, never had found by themselves any adequate expression of human reason or human passion in either cultural deeds or popular custom, and which had developed human institutions only at a very low level” (177). In another passage, Arendt adds: “Under a merciless sun, surrounded by an entirely hostile nature, they were confronted with human beings who, living without the future of a purpose and the past of an accomplishment, were as incomprehensible as the inmates of a madhouse” (190). Arendt is not merely cata loging the representational conventions of Eu ropean race-thinking. She is narrating the “actual race experience in Africa” (OT, 185). As she explains, neither race-thinking nor racism manages to get at the exact meaning of the word “race,” which, once “removed from the fog of pseudoscientific theories,” finds its proper referent in Africa— specifically, in those “tribes which lack all their own historical memories and all memory of worthy deeds” (EU, 426). Even in her own time, she says, these tribes remain the only “real races,” the “only humans that we know of who are completely without history and without action, the only ones who have neither constructed a world nor, in some sense, subdued nature into their ser vice” (ibid.). Arendt’s racializing imagination transforms Africa into a massive “state of nature,” an artless landscape, entirely devoid of the basic ethical, cultural, and political structures of civilization, and a region wholly populated (or overpopulated, as she says with a Malthusian ring) by races that know nothing of history, memory, or work: a “world of native savages” and “prehistoric men” (OT, 190–91).

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Arendt’s discussion of Africa benefits in important ways from Hegel, who, as she likely knew, had spoken at length about the worldlessness, death, and historical-political oblivion of the “Dark Continent” (OT, 191).76 Hegel, however, is only a textual “archetype of what would become the colonial mode of speaking about Africa.”77 In the nineteenth century, European thought relegated Africa to “a frozen state in the evolution of humankind,” an archaic or primitive remnant of the prehistoric past that Europe had overcome.78 The “myth of the dark continent,” in par ticular, was the product of a nineteenth-century imperial ideology that sought to blame Africa for the evils of slavery and reimagine British colonialism as a philanthropic mission for the salvation of the continent from its own “tribal savagery.”79 In a more general way, Africanist discourse has long made Africa a sign of “absolute otherness,” an idea or concept that “has historically served, and continues to serve, as a polemical argument for the West’s desperate desire to assert its diference from the rest of world.”80 Achille Mbembe writes: Africa “stands out as the supreme receptacle of the West’s obsession with, and circular discourse about, the facts of ‘absence,’ ‘lack,’ and ‘non-being,’ of identity and diference, of negativeness—in short, of nothingness.”81 Like many other contributions to this tradition, Arendt’s probably would not have been possible without Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness (1899): the “strongest of all Africanist texts” and the most “condensed” of all Africanist narratives.82 In one characteristically impressionistic scene, Conrad describes Marlow’s journey through the Congo: “Going up that river was like traveling back to the earliest beginnings of the world, when vegetation rioted on the earth and the big trees were kings. An empty stream, a great silence, an impenetrable forest” (HD, 33).83 Arendt interprets Marlow’s voyage as an atavistic journey into an archaic world of incomprehensible horror.84 She cites these similarly devolutionary words: “We were wanderers on a prehistoric earth, on an earth that wore the aspect of an unknown planet. . . . We were cut of from the comprehension of our surroundings; we glided past like phantoms, wondering and secretly appalled, as sane men would be before an enthusiastic outbreak in a madhouse. We could not understand because we were too far and could not remember because we were travelling in the night of the first ages, of those ages that are gone, leaving hardly a sign—and no memories” (HD, 35–36). There is something undeniably ghostly, even mysterious, about the whole of Marlow’s regressive descent into this primeval landscape. As he observes, “beyond the fence the forest stood up spectrally in the moonlight

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and through the dim stir, through the faint sounds of that lamentable courtyard, the silence of the land went home to one’s very heart—its mystery, its greatness, the amazing reality of its concealed life” (HD, 26).85 From these lines and others, Arendt draws a picture of Africans as “obscure shapes who move nimbly and randomly against the dark rim of the forest, shadows of shadow, evanescent specters.”86 They are the prehistoric inhabitants of the anachronistic space she calls “the phantom world of the Dark Continent,” die Gespensterwelt des Schwarzen Erdteils (OT, 186; EU, 408). Africa is a province of “worldlessness,” where “outside all social restraint and hy pocrisy” and “against the backdrop of native life,” Europeans discovered “the full realization of their own phantom-like existence” (190; 426–27). Africa is a ghostly scene of civilizational privation. It is a place of horror, worldlessness, and mystery—and, as Arendt soon adds, the setting for a puzzling history of survival: Whether these [tribes] represent “prehistoric man,” the accidentally surviving specimens [Residuen] of the first forms of human life on earth, or whether they are the “posthistoric” survivors [überlebenden Abfallprodukte] of some unknown disaster which ended a civilization we do not know. They certainly appeared rather like the survivors [Überlebenden] of one great catastrophe which might have been followed by smaller disasters until catastrophic monotony seemed to be a natural condition of human life. At any rate, races in this sense were found only in regions where nature was particularly hostile. What made them diferent from other human beings was not at all the color of their skin but the fact that they behaved like a part of nature, that they treated nature as their undisputed master, that they had not created a human world, a human reality, and that therefore nature had remained, in all its majesty, the only overwhelming reality—compared to which they appeared to be phantoms, unreal and ghostlike [gespenstisch]. They were, as it were, “natural” human beings who lacked the specifically human character, the specifically human reality, so that when the European men massacred them they somehow were not aware that they had committed murder. (OT, 192; EU, 426) Arendt once more discovers in Africa an indecipherable riddle. She never really decides whether its apparent worldlessness represents the persistence

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of “prehistory” or the debris of “posthistoric” catastrophe. Are African tribes the still-surviving remnants of “the night of the first ages,” the traces of a primordial humanity, which has always lived and continues to live outside the artifice of civilization and without sovereignty over nature? Or are they the survivors of a once humanly constructed world, the waste products of a devastating civilizational collapse, and the efects of a thoroughgoing normalization of catastrophe? Is African survival a matter of the “before” or the “after”? The “still” or the “already”? Continuity or decline? Natural history or cultural degeneration? In either case, Arendt assumes that Africa remains a site of survival: a dark continent haunted by the untimely ghosts of a subjected, naturalized, and all but inhuman humanity. The spectral turn confirms that survival always describes more (and less) than the might of a god. Survival also represents a history of “lingering and being last,” where not only the fittest survive but also the “most unfit” and those who simply refuse to die.87 Arendt’s decision to participate in this rhetoric of “excessive life” points in a number of directions and echoes discursive formations that run from ancient Rome to early modernity to contemporary “humanitarian intervention.”88 In its most proximate expression, however, Arendt’s language recalls the “doctrine of survivals” developed by nineteenth-century British anthropology. Under the impact of evolutionary theory and “extinction discourse,” Victorian scholars like E. B. Tylor (1832– 1917) intoned a “proleptic elegy” for races that appeared to be in the process of vanishing (i.e., “self-exterminating”).89 Tylor argued that the “early rude condition of mankind” made it possible to explain “some phenomena of our present civilization as being traceable survivals from more primitive states of culture.”90 From these anachronistic and ghostly vestiges, he maintained, the “anthropologist” could gain insight into the prehistory of civilization, collecting and classifying traces of primitive thought even as the “settler,” the “trader,” and the “missionary” were hard at work trying to “civilize and Christianize the unhappy lingering savage races.”91 Tylor saw himself as one player in the redemptive and destructive project of “improving them of the face of the earth.”92 Tylor’s mission of improvement presents itself as an exercise in exorcising the world’s unworldly specters from the progression of Christian Eu rope’s own happier and more divine survival. In this sense, the anthropological mission civilisatrice refracts another mysterious and spectral example of excessive life: the history of Jewish survival. One could ask: Do Arendt’s surviving ghosts belong to a broader story? Does the haunting

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history of Jewish survival run parallel to the haunting histories of other supposedly vanishing races: Africans, Native Americans, Tasmanians, and so on?93 And are all these spectral survivals part of a single Christian mission to those who have “overlived,” lived too long, or somehow become ghosts in their own time?94 Arendt’s book does not answer these questions. But it does raise the possibility of a comparison and contextualization easily foreclosed by a distinction between antisemitism and imperialism.

• I have been trying to show that Arendt’s scattered writing on racial survival—from the biotheological sovereignty of the fittest (eugenics) to the spectral subjection of the unfittest (Africans)—traces the entire dialectic staged by a “phantom world of white gods ruling over black shadows” (OT, 197). The vacillating story continues as Arendt makes her way back to Europe, and it ultimately envelops almost every thing that she says about the intersection of imperialism, nationalism, and ideology. Beginning with the Boers, Arendt tells a story that again exposes her own racializing anxieties about the regression of European nationalism into the tribalism of Africa.95 She argues that white Europeans in South Africa first discovered the meaning of tribal consciousness and, in a heretical theological twist, learned the value of turning themselves into a “chosen race.”96 This experience, says Arendt, was, in turn, the horrific catalyst for the formation of continental imperialism in Europe and its messianic, quasi-mystical movements of divinely chosen survivors (OT, 197). Arendt has in mind the antisemitic pan-movements (e.g., Pan-Germanism) that arose in Europe at the end of the nineteenth century and declared their open opposition to the nation-state (OT, 225). She attributes the racism of these movements to a general loss of faith in the unity of “God’s creation” as well as a concomitant rejection of any metaphysical basis for human equality (234). The movements formulated a “new religious theory,” a “new concept of holiness,” and a “veritable theology” of race, which not only denied the Christian belief in common human origins but also introduced in its place a radically new “concept of the divine origin of one people” (233). Arendt quickly makes sure to distinguish such racial theologizing from the Jewish concept of chosenness. However, she also follows thinkers like Voltaire, Renan, and Taine, in suggesting that the history of Jewish chosenness bears partial responsibility for introducing into Western civilization

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“an other wise unknown element of fanaticism” (OT, 240–42). This means that even as she separates the religious chosenness of Judaism from the racial chosenness of tribal nationalism, she nonetheless reestablishes Jewish history as the site where a transcendent belief “in Him who chooses and rejects” becomes an immanent faith in the body of the race (73). Here again, the trompe l’oeil of secularization allows Arendt to ignore another possibility, namely, that the pan-movements’ belief in racial chosenness was less a perversion of Judaism than a moment in the history of Christianity. Her inquiry into the racial theology of chosenness nonetheless ends up right back at a familiar Christian topos: the mystery of Jewish survival. She writes: It seemed “that the Jews were the one perfect example of a people in the tribal sense, their organization the model the pan-movements were striving to emulate, their survival [Vitalität] and their supposed power the best proof of the correctness of racial theories” (OT, 239; EU, 507). For the pan-movements, the image of Jewish survival held up a model of the community they wanted to become: an “incarnation” or living “embodiment” of “some mysterious inherent psychological or physical quality” (OT, 240). If it is no accident that Arendt once again stumbles upon the mystery of Jewish survival, it is because the language of “mysterious forces” pervades her reading of continental imperialism (OT, 221). In an efort to supplant human experience, she says, the ideological movements demanded from their adherents a total “self-efacement,” so that each individual could forge a “mysterious alliance with forces necessarily bigger than himself” and become an “incarnation” of the movement (219). This “enlarged tribal consciousness” linked one’s national identity to birth as well as to the “mysterious qualities of body or soul” that came with it (226). The racism of tribal movements measured “a people, its past and present, by the yardstick of exalted inner qualities” while at the same time rejecting “its visible existence, tradition, institutions, and culture” (ibid.). Every thing was to become part of the movement: all singularity and contingency dissolved into “a pseudomystical cloud of divine eternity and finality” (234). Arendt’s repeated returns to the “aura of pseudomysticism” fit well with her persistent attempts to read the movement of continental imperialism as the perverted (always non-Christian) product of a more authentic (Jewish) theology (OT, 245). But the striking peculiarity of her secularizing narrative comes into view only when compared with another take on the mystery and mysticism of movements: Carl Schmitt’s 1933 investigation into the triadic political structure of National Socialism.97 Arendt cites the book on a

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number of occasions in Origins and was familiar with its basic conceit (OT, 266). In Schmitt’s argument, movements enable a unity between leader and people that goes beyond mere image or metaphoric representation. “It is a concept,” he writes, “of the immediately present [unmittelbare Gegenwart] and of the real presence [realer Präsenz].”98 Through the idea of racial consistency, movements guarantee a continuous, “absolute ethnic identity between leader and follower” (ibid.). The real presence of race—the three-part unity of state, movement, and people—is nothing less than the “most unavoidable premise and foundation of the political leadership of the German people” (ibid.). Although Schmitt leaves things here, his precise choice of words evokes the medieval Christian context that Arendt mostly ignores: the theological doctrine of Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist and the tangled history of theological-political disputes about the corpus mysticum.99 In the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries, debates about Christ’s presence in the Eucharist gave rise to a new organological and corporational theory of kingship. The individual monarch became the head of a single mystical body whose collective members were his subjects (KT, 193). Like the corpus mysticum of the Church—at the head of which was Christ—the corpus mysticum of the state “never died, but was ‘eternal,’ ” ensuring the collective continuity and unity of people and sovereign even after the death of the individual king (231). Over the centuries, a series of legal, theological, philosophical, and political developments contributed further to the concrete formation of the theory of the “king’s two bodies”: one body natural and another body mystical, one individual and the other collective, one subject to death and the other immortal (271). In William Blackstone’s eighteenth-century condensation of the doctrine, “the king never dies. Henry, Edward, or George may die; but the king survives them all.”100 This brief sketch only begins to touch on the complex relationship between mysticism, sovereignty, and survival (a constellation that I elaborate in later chapters on Walter Benjamin, Franz Rosenzweig, and Sigmund Freud). For now, I simply want to point out that Arendt’s pseudomystical interpretation of continental imperialism bears within it a series of otherwise discarded hypotheses about the theological-political history of Christian sovereignty.101 Arendt’s secularizing narrative sets aside (and silently polemicizes against) the possibility that well before the rise of the Nazi movement and its “perverted” theology of race, the aura of a body at once individual and collective, mystical and natural, “superhuman” and

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“invulnerable” was already projecting itself as an “image of survival”: the body of Christ.102

Total Survival There is a scene in Heart of Darkness that can help clarify this image of salvation and sovereignty as well as provide a frame for one final encounter with Arendt’s representations of survival. After returning to Europe, Marlow carries with him the vivid memory of Kurtz’s dying words: “The horror! The horror!” (HD, 69). In an attempt to throw of the burden of this past, he makes a journey to visit Kurtz’s still-grieving Intended. By the time he arrives, the haunting shadow of Kurtz has grown only stronger and Marlow begins to hear in the spectral twilight “those broken phrases” coming back to him “in their ominous and terrifying simplicity”: that “whispered cry, ‘The horror! The horror!’ ” (73). No longer able to separate out the present from the past, the light from the darkness, or the living from the dead, Marlow narrates his meeting with Kurtz’s Intended as a plunge into a place of “cruel and absurd mysteries” (ibid.). He recalls: “She said with a deep catch of the breath, ‘I have survived’—while my strained ears seemed to hear distinctly, mingled with her tone of despairing regret, the summing-up whisper of his eternal condemnation” (ibid.). For one fleeting moment, Kurtz’s voice—The horror! The horror!—blurs into the mournful voice of his Intended: “I have survived.”103 Throughout their meeting, Marlow wants to believe that Kurtz’s Intended is an “unextinguishable light of belief and love” (HD, 74). He wants to bow “his head before the faith that was in her, before that great and saving illusion that shone with an unearthly glow in the darkness” (75). He wants to know that “she is out of it” and that her beautiful world has survived the approaching darkness (48). But Marlow cannot shake the feeling that this image of survival is only an illusion, just one more iteration of the ignorance that keeps others happily unaware of the reality that he has come to know. When he eventually tells the Intended that Kurtz’s last words were not “the horror, the horror” but “your name,” he subtly admits that the light of ideality is the brilliant mask and fetishistic idol of an illusory survival (77). The whole spectral scene rehearses Marlow’s opening injunction about the ugliness of imperialism: “What remains is the idea only . . . something you can set up, and bow down before, and ofer a sacrifice to” (7). Conrad’s dizzying

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prose makes it difficult to decide whether survival holds the promise of salvation or the threat of destruction. Is survival a sign of divinity? Or is survival a sign of the horror? Is there a diference? These are the impassable uncertainties that Arendt inherits and inscribes into her concluding analysis of totale Herrschaft. For just as she turns the survivor into a monstrous figure of total sovereignty, she concludes with the strange, paradoxical, and downright Heideggerian moral: only a survivor can save us now.

• Every thing that Arendt says about the spread of continental imperialism and the decline of the nation-state reaches a point of par ticular intensity in her discussion of statelessness. With the close of World War I, she writes, “a growing number of people and peoples suddenly appeared whose elementary rights were as little safeguarded by the ordinary functioning of nationstates in the middle of Europe as they would have been in the heart of Africa” (OT, 291). The critique reiterates a certain racializing anxiety about the becoming-Africa of Europe. Arendt’s specific fear is that the expulsion of people from the “world of the living”—their loss of legal rights—will reduce the civilized nations of Europe to a “state of savagery,” where all that remains is the “abstract nakedness of being nothing but human” (295, 300). She emphasizes in this context that savagery describes a modality of existence that does nothing to master nature and contributes in no way to the artificial production of a common human world (300). Statelessness risks throwing Europe back into this “state of nature” and, “in a world that has almost liquidated savagery,” bringing about a “regression from civilization” that leads only to Africa (ibid.). Arendt rests her presentation on a number of crucial distinctions: nature/artifice, worldliness/worldlessness, savagery/civilization. On the one hand, these divisions express the belief that “man can act in and change and build a common world” (OT, 301). Politics begins with a certain “contempt for reality,” with the human capacity to construct something new, something synthetic, something that goes beyond the mere fact of untamed nature (458). On the other hand, this essential negation of reality can lead those living within the political world to devalue the natural: to “resent every thing they have not produced, every thing that is merely and mysteriously given to them” (301). By ignoring “unqualified, mere existence in all matters of public concern,” political communities erase the “dark background

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of mere givenness, the dark background formed by our unchangeable and unique nature” (ibid.). They risk eliminating the alien presence of anything that reminds them of their limitations (ibid.). As Arendt says, nation-states have often insisted “on ethnic homogeneity,” precisely when they have wished to purge “as far as possible those natural and always present diferences and diferentiations,” which “indicate all too clearly those spheres where men cannot act and change at will” (ibid.). Arendt goes on to argue that totale Herrschaft begins with the same “ideological contempt for factuality” already at work in every “proud assumption of human mastery over the world” (OT, 458). Total sovereignty does not break with the history of politics; it intensifies a logic already inscribed into every possibility of worldliness: the endeavor to dissolve or destroy the elements of natural heterogeneity that constrain human fabrication. The question for Arendt is how any political body can restrain this normal drive toward mastery from transgressing the limitations of nature. She answers historically by suggesting that such violations of the human order were more or less impossible “so long as a stable Christian theology provided the framework for all political and philosophical problems” (299). She adds: Only after the “absolute and transcendent measurements of religion or the law of nature . . . lost their authority” did human beings forget that they are not the sovereigns of all (ibid.). In short: that they “are perhaps the masters [Herren] of the world, but never its creators [Schöpfer]” (OT, 302; EU, 623).104 Total sovereignty, in Arendt’s sense, describes any political movement that seeks to replace the “natural givenness” of God’s creation with its own God-like artifice (OT, 302).105 The central tenet of totale Herrschaft— “that every thing is possible”—betrays the belief that the movement itself has the power to force its ideological fiction into reality (OT, 427). Along with the heretical drive toward political apotheosis, total sovereignty also attempts to annul other signs of divinity: “the disturbing miracle contained in the fact that each of us is made as he is—single, unique, unchangeable” (OT, 301). Beyond a denial of transcendence, it is this artificial efacement of miraculous singularity that makes the lives of those forced out of the common world so precarious. Without a theological investment in “mere existence,” or in “that which is mysteriously given us by birth,” nothing prevents “a highly organized and mechanized humanity” from deciding one day, “quite democratically . . . that for humanity as a whole it would be better to liquidate certain parts thereof” (299, 302).106 The danger lies in the possibility that a “global, universally interrelated civilization may produce

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barbarians from its own midst by forcing millions of people into conditions which, despite all appearances, are the conditions of savages” (OT, 302). In their loss of any connection to the world—in their worldlessness—these “savages” end up becoming something “like an injunction to murder” (EU, 624). At the heart of Europe, Arendt thinks, a fictional ideology produces the “horrible reality” of Africa: unmiraculous lives that can be killed but not murdered (OT, 197).107 The deaths of these new Africans have no consequences, since the fiction of the movement always already absolves the perpetrators of all criminal responsibility. They kill with impunity because they are the artificial gods still residing in the world of the living. Arendt calls them “survivors”: die Überlebenden (EU, 624).

• The survivor ofers one image for the biotheological heresy of total sovereignty. But this simple representation gains in complexity as Arendt looks more closely to the movement’s paradoxical goals: the destruction of everything and everyone. The hypothesis parallels her earlier claims that total sovereignty aims to “establish the fictitious world of the movement as a tangible working reality of everyday life” (OT, 391). In committing itself to absolute ideological consistency, the movement must overcome every challenge posed by the interruptions of the given world. The role of a secret police, for example, lies not only in killing the regime’s opponents but in expunging any evidentiary traces of the victims from the world of the living, so as to ensure that they “never existed at all” (OT, 435; EU, 900). “Doing away with people” in this way means that the regime has to confront “the memory of survivors [Gedächtnis der Lebenden]” (434–35; 900–901). The secret police must also erase the identity of the victim from the “memory of the surviving world” and purge the survivors themselves from the realm of the living (OT, 435). It is a logic that inevitably leads to a possibly infinite, auto-immunitary regression: the self-sacrificial result of the belief “that every thing outside the movement is ‘dying’ ” (381).108 As Arendt concludes, nothing matters more than the “survival of the movement [das Überleben der Bewegung]” and the fictitious world that it ceaselessly attempts to create (EU, 741). This is Arendt’s definition of total sovereignty: a movement of autoimmunitary creation in which everyone is either worldly or worldless, living on or going extinct, survivor or victim. The process of selection (or Ausleseprozeß) follows “the principle that whoever is not included is excluded,

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whoever is not with me is against me” (OT, 380). While Arendt might have cited Carl Schmitt’s writing on friends and enemies here, she instead refers to Hitler and a slogan that he was fond of repeating in “innumerable variations” (EU, 739). Its words: “At the end of this war there will really be only survivors and the annihilated,” Überlebende und Vernichtete, those who beckon “eternal glory” and those who experience absolute “woe.”109 Elias Canetti probably had it right when, at the end of the very same war, he declared the survivor—“whatever his halo of glory”—to be “mankind’s worst evil, its curse and perhaps its doom” (CP, 544). Hitler’s chant, though, also recalls Marlow and an entire tradition of extermination that desperately desires to see in survival (and imperialism) an “idea” one can set up and bow down before.110 Or, as Arendt calls it: the “unwavering faith in an ideological fictitious world” (OT, 417).

• All this brings Arendt to a final evaluation of the concentration camps as the spaces of total sovereignty’s most extreme experiments in proving that “every thing is possible” (OT, 437). In her view, the camps existed to produce the “model ‘citizens’ ” of a regime that desired nothing more than strict conformity and absolute obedience to the dictates of the movement (455). The camps attempted to achieve this goal by transmuting human beings from spontaneous and unpredictable agents into “ghastly marionettes with human faces” capable of responding with perfect reliability to every demand placed upon them (455). Arendt characterizes the creation of these “inanimate men” and “living corpses”—the stripping of their specific “psyche, character, and individuality”—as an expulsion from the “intelligibly human world” into a region of spectral degradation (441, 447). The “real horror” of concentration camps, she writes, resides in their ability to cut human beings of from the “world of the living” and enter them into a “society of the dying” (443, 456). They embody “Hell in the most literal sense” and realize nothing less than “a phantom world” of living death (445). Arendt insists throughout her study on the uniqueness of the concentrationcamp universe. But the language she deploys to describe it unleashes a series of unavoidable resonances and marks a moment of stunning rhetorical condensation for a story that runs from the phantoms of Jewish survival to the ghosts of African survivors. The “logic of her argument,” as Michael Rothberg writes, “is that the Nazis turn their victims (and even their own

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adherents) into the deindividualized humans that the Africans already are.”111 In Arendt’s rewriting of Conrad, the camps become the hellish laboratories that turn Europeans into Jews, Jews into Africans, and Africans into the living corpses of an earthly inferno (HD, 16–17). Her anxious assumption is that the concentration camps in Europe create an ideological reproduction of the ghostly reality that has long existed on the “phantom world” of the Dark Continent. Arendt’s representation of the hellish, phantom world of the camps also reveals the significance of Christianity to her story. In the concentration camp, she says, it became clear that possibilities that “for thousands of years the human imagination had banished to a realm beyond human competence can be manufactured right here on earth, that Hell and Purgatory, and even a shadow of their perpetual duration, can be established by the most modern methods of destruction and therapy” (OT, 446). Arendt insists more than once that hell is not a metaphor. It is, rather, a literal description of what happens when human beings forget that they are the masters but never the creators of the world: proof of humanity’s heretical usurpation of God’s creative power. And yet, far from suggesting that a secularized Christianity bears some responsibility for producing this hell on earth, Arendt again sees in the archives of an abandoned Christian theology the critical resources for the world’s salvation. That is why, at the end of a long investigation into the elements and origins of total sovereignty, she famously closes with a citation from Saint Augustine. She reminds her reminders that human beings are the created and never the creators: “Initium ut esset homo creatus est—‘that a beginning be made man was created’ ” (479). As I have been trying to say, Origins is a lament for the demise of Christianity and a confession of Arendt’s longing for its resurrection. It is a fact nowhere more apparent than in her last image of the survivor (der Überlebende). She writes: “[The] horror can never be fully embraced by the imagination for the very reason that it stands outside of life and death. It can never be fully reported for the very reason that the survivor returns to the world of the living, which makes it impossible for him to believe his own past experiences. It is as though he had a story to tell of another planet, for the status of the inmates in the world of the living, where nobody is supposed to know if they are alive or dead, is such that it is as though they have never been born” (OT, 479).112 Whether the camps manufacture the reality of Africa (i.e., Conrad’s “unknown planet”) or realize “medieval pictures of Hell,” they represent a

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horror that resists comprehension even for those who have survived (OT, 447; HD, 35–36). The survivor returns to the world of the living, no longer an inanimate bundle of reactions, a living corpse, a ghost of living death, or an African but an individual and inviolable human personality capable of participating in the collaborative construction of a human world (OT, 441).113 The survivor’s rebirth, Arendt says, most “closely resembles the resurrection of Lazarus” (ibid.). For, like Lazarus, the survivor “rises from the dead” and returns to life unchanged by the total domination of the camp inferno (ibid.). The survivor is “out of it”: a glimpse of light resisting the impending force of an impenetrable darkness. Arendt was not the only one to evoke Lazarus’s resurrection in these years. While she knew and likely adopted the image from her reading of Georges Bataille and David Rousset, her choice also resonates with the work of such other writers as Jean Cayrol and Elie Wiesel.114 However, in turning to Lazarus as a figure for the survival of horror (Africa, the camp, total sovereignty, etc.), Arendt also recalls Lazarus’s long-standing role as a figura for another, more glorious, resurrection.115 In the biblical story itself, it is not Lazarus but Jesus who declares: “I am the resurrection and the life: he that believeth in me, though he were dead, yet he shall live” (John 11:25). When Lazarus finally emerges from his tomb after four days lying in death, his miraculous resurrection allows others to see “the glory of God” that Jesus has proclaimed (John 11:40). Every thing that Arendt writes about Lazarus thus converges in an image of survival that one can set up and bow down before: the victorious and redemptive “mystery” of Christ’s resurrection (1 Cor. 15:51). What Arendt does not consider here is the relationship between the various survivors that she proliferates and, most especially, the proximity between the two glorious survivors who shine through her text: Lazarus and Hitler. Indeed, Arendt does not reflect upon the category of the survivor, upon its peregrinations across her histories of antisemitism, imperialism, and totalitarianism, or upon her own salvific retrieval of its image from these ambivalent archives of destruction. But perhaps such disquieting uncertainties only underscore the need for further genealogical work on a figure who passes so invisibly across contexts and so easily thwarts other wise important thematic diferences—for example, between savior, sovereign, and specter. If one thing remains certain, it is that there is no simple escape from the mystery of Christian survival, especially now, at this moment, and in final view of the composite picture that Arendt renders: the survival of

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the Jew, the survival of the African, the survival of the movement, the survival of Christ.

Destruction and Survival Hannah Arendt once admitted that in composing Origins she had to confront a “simple” yet “baffling” problem.116 Because all historiographical approaches threatened to justify her subject, she could not “write historically” about total domination without conserving a phenomenon that she felt an urgent need “to destroy” (ibid.). The solution, so she thought, “was to discover the chief elements of totalitarianism and to analyze them in historical terms, tracing these elements back in history” (77–78). She considered her book less “a history” than “an analysis in terms of history,” an attempt to fracture totale Herrschaft into its constituent parts and map the path of its crystallization (78). As Heidegger put it, destruction “does not relate itself toward the past: its critique is aimed at ‘today’ and at the dominant way of treating the history of ontology, whether it be doxography, intellectual history, or the history of problems.”117 My goal in this chapter has been to annex Arendt’s text as an elemental index for the destruction of survival and its slogans. Through a reading of survival in Arendt and through a critique of her exemplary tendencies toward secularization, I have attempted to disassemble and constellate a fragmented, globalatinizing genealogy of sovereignty, mystery, and spectrality that gathers around the body of Christ. In pursuing these questions, I have also tried to underline Arendt’s importance for a wider set of postwar phenomena: the Christianization of the Holocaust, the sacralization of the survivor, and the mystery of Jewish survival.118 Similarly, I have wanted to show that these postwar figurations inherit and organize a series of marks already at work in the prewar period: biology (“survival of the fittest”), anthropology (“survival of the unfittest”), and theology (corpus mysticum). The task of the remainder of this book is to ofer a more detailed outline of these elements and their place in survival’s theological-political archive. I begin these eforts again with Walter Benjamin, his essay on translation, and a set of “mystical” insights into survival’s sovereign beginnings.

CHAPTER 2

The Archaeology of Survival

Ἐν ἀρχῇ (archē) ἦν ὁ λόγος (logos), καὶ ὁ λόγος ἦν πρὸς τὸν θεόν, καὶ θεός ἦν ὁ λόγος. In principio erat Supervivens et Supervivens erat apud Deum et Deus erat Supervivens. Au commencement était la Survie, et la Survie était avec Dieu, et la Survie était Dieu. Im Anfang war das Überleben und das Überleben war bei Gott, und Gott war das Überleben. In the beginning was Survival, and Survival was with God, and Survival was God. —The Gospel of John 1:1

In the assessment of a work of translation, Walter Benjamin writes, consideration of the recipient never proves fruitful.1 Like other objects of art, translations are never intended for their audience. They are never meant for their readers. They may, in fact, not mean anything at all. This explains my decision to begin this chapter with a nearly inscrutable attempt to retranslate one of the Bible’s most recognizable phrases. Even a casual reader of the New Testament would take issue with my apparently mistaken and rather awkward rendering of the first verse from the Gospel according to John (being more familiar with a tradition that has varyingly placed Verbum, la Parole, das Wort, and the Word at the divine beginning of all things). There are also probably good philological grounds for thinking that the suggestion is a betrayal of both the spirit and the letter of the original text as well as a willfully unfaithful interpretation of the semantic range captured by the Greek Logos. I embrace such infidelity here, however, because my goal is to justify this experimental translation as a plausible account of the exegetical interventions undertaken by Benjamin in his 1923 essay “The Task of the Translator.” Indeed, strange though it may be, Benjamin’s short text once again brings together three vectors guiding my asymmetric inquiry into the question of survival: Christianity, Jews, and translation. Benjamin’s prewar

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reflections are a pivotal hinge on the globalatin itinerary that I have been exploring through the postwar writings of Hannah Arendt, following survival as it moves along a path that traces the Latinate legacy of Christian Europe—its mystery and its sovereignty. My specific thesis is that Benjamin’s translational insights efectively constitute the Prologue to the Gospel of John as the site for an archaeology (en archē ēn ho logos) of survival.2 Over the course of his essay, survival comes to name the “mystical foundation” of translatability, the groundless ground upon which the very form of translation rests and the sacred source from which it draws its sovereign power.3 This also means that survival’s various regimes of definition (biological, anthropological, psychological, etc.) find themselves within a theological or theological-political closure that has long read survival (to borrow a phrase from Benjamin) as a “basic mystical conviction” (GS1:87; SW1:165). In “The Task of the Translator,” Benjamin silently signals toward a history of Christian mysticism, where, like the Logos and as the Logos, survival already appears at the archē as an apophatic sign of God’s omnipotent sovereignty. Benjamin disseminates a theology of authority, violence, and force. In short: reine überlebende Gewalt, pure surviving power.4 What this means, how it operates, and how it comes to occupy the archaeological place of the Logos are the questions posed by this chapter in and on translation: In the beginning was Survival, and Survival was with God, and Survival was God.

Leben, “Überleben,” Fortleben One of the striking, and strikingly Johannine, things about Benjamin’s essay on translation is that beyond its interrogation of linguistic diference, it also pursues a critical perspective on the question of life.5 Scholars are correct to note that Benjamin’s sustained interest in life, both here and throughout his early work, corresponds to “an intellectual climate that was still dominated largely by an influential vitalism [Lebensphilosophie].”6 The par ticu lar association that Benjamin draws between life and translation also stands in accord with his methodological tendency to invert the priority of concepts and broaden them beyond their presumed anthropocentric domains. While elsewhere he informs us that “every thing real thinks” and “absolutely every thing” has language, here he claims that works of art also possess life “with completely unmetaphorical objectiv-

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ity” (GS4:11; TT, 76).7 Even in “the ages of the most prejudicial thinking,” he adds, “it has been presumed that life must not be attributed to organic corporeality alone” (GS4:11; TT, 76). Only a more recent hermeneutic fundamentalism has made it possible to take the “organic” and “corporeal” as life’s most evident and primary definitions. Against this tradition, Benjamin insists that “it is only when life is attributed to every thing that has a history, and not merely the scene of history, that this concept comes into its own” (ibid.). It falls to the philosopher to assume this particular task by thinking “all natural life on the basis of the more comprehensive life of history” (ibid.). From the outset, Benjamin conceptualizes the task of translation through parallel inversions and expansions of life’s horizon. The significance of this connection appears most prominently in his elaboration and modification of life (Leben) as a matter of survival (“Überleben,” Fortleben): “Just as expressions of life [Leben] are connected most intimately with the living being [Lebendigen] without having any significance for the latter, a translation emanates from the original. Indeed, not so much from its life as from its ‘survival’ [‘Überleben’]. For the translation is later than the original and indicates for significant works, which never find their chosen translators in the time of their appearance, the stage of their survival [Fortleben]” (GS4:10; TT, 76). There has been no shortage of attempts to explain these well-known sentences.8 In Paul de Man’s paraphrastic reading, for instance, Benjamin’s remarks indicate that “translation belongs not to the life of the original, the original is already dead,” but rather “to the afterlife of the original, thus assuming and confirming the death of the original.”9 For others, Benjamin’s emphasis on “the capacity of the work to live on” refracts the historicity of life and points toward a more general “recognition that translation is itself articulated within a specific temporal schema.”10 According to Bella Brodzki, translation is what permits “a literary work’s potentially limitless afterlife in succeeding generations.”11 In Werner Hamacher’s formulation, “the language of the original leaves behind its signification” so that it may live “forth in another.”12 Any further evaluation of this passage would require a deeper engagement with what Benjamin has to say about translation in the remainder of the essay. But a close consideration of Benjamin’s propositions must also acknowledge the difficulties presented by their locution and,

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in par tic u lar, their largely unmarked transition from Leben to “Überleben” to Fortleben.13 The cultural historian Daniel Weidner has posed a series of crucial questions regarding the interpretive problems raised by Benjamin’s “anacoluthic” lines, asking: Is “Überleben” simply “another name for ‘Leben,’ ” or does it signify something altogether diferent?14 Why does Benjamin choose to set the word Überleben in quotation marks? Does this mean that, unlike Leben and Fortleben, Überleben should not be  understood with fully unmetaphorical objectivity? What, finally, is the  “semantic relationship” between “Überleben” and Fortleben? Does Benjamin employ “the two terms for survival in German interchangeably”?15 And, if so, why suddenly abandon one and then adopt the other, without comment? Benjamin’s lack of guidance suggests that survival is less an analytically identifiable concept in this context than a Denkfigur, a thought-figure that displaces the fixity of conceptual relations in order to make “the paradoxes of cultural semantics readable.”16 Such problems of readability mirror the varying and inconsistent approaches that Benjamin’s translators have taken to the diference between “Überleben” and Fortleben. In his influential translation of the text, Harry Zohn marks the discontinuity through a distinction between “afterlife” and “continued life” (SW1:254).17 Steven Rendall’s more recent translation, meanwhile, gives both “afterlife” and “survival” for “Überleben” and modifies Zohn’s rendering of Fortleben with the phrase “continuing life” (TT, 76). In French, Laurent Lamy and Alexis Nouss diferentiate “survie” (“Überleben”) from survivance (Fortleben), altering the previous translation given by Maurice de Gandillac: “survie” and survie.18 Perhaps no one has ofered more sustained attention to the difficulties posed by the passage from “Überleben” to Fortleben than Jacques Derrida, whose reading continually insists on the diference that translation makes. Derrida does not settle on a set of stable equivalences but rather lets the difference between “Überleben” and Fortleben solicit the irreconcilable dialectic within the single French term that (following de Gandillac) translates them both: survie. Survival captures the double significance of a life “post mortem” (Überleben) and the “continuation of life” (Fortleben).19 As Derrida explains later, “such survival gives more of life [plus de vie], more than a surviving [survivance]. The work does not simply live longer [plus longtemps], it lives more and better [plus et mieux], beyond its author’s means” (ibid.).20

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Derrida’s reading identifies one alternative for understanding the hiatus between Überleben and Fortleben: reprieve and potency, surviving and thriving.21 He recalls that even “in the usual sense of the term,” survival means both “to continue to live, but also to live after death.”22 This is the double meaning that Benjamin translates through “the distinction between überleben, on the one hand, surviving death, like a book that survives the death of its author, or a child the death of his or her parents, and, on the other hand, fortleben, living on, continuing to live.”23 At the very instant that survival declares a negation of life, its irremediable loss, division, and death, it also signals the affirmation of life, its equally essential continuation, growth, and expansion. “Derrida rejects the starkness of a choice between mere life and more life,” Bonnie Honig writes, and instead ofers a concept of survival that captures its double significance as both need and reward.24 The word survie marks “the uncertainty of a transition or apposition” between Fortleben and Überleben, suspending any decision between concepts like death and life or “that which remains” and “the most intense life possible.”25 Benjamin’s vastly underdetermined division between Überleben and Fortleben has underscored the obstacles preventing any definition or translation of survival as a coherent and univocal concept.26 Samuel Weber notes that the word Fortleben itself means not only “living on, but also living away,” a life always already marked by finitude and mortality.27 In another commentary, Douglas Robinson reminds us of the additional resonances emanating from the über of Überleben, with its emphasis on the size, mass, and superiority of figures such as the Übermensch and slogans such as “Deutschland, Deutschland über alles.”28 Even if Überleben and Fortleben remain more or less synonymous—“under the broadest possible semantic umbrella of ‘survival’ ”—it may still be necessary to distinguish between a life that lives on after the death of another (Überleben) and a life that lives on after the death of the self (Fortleben).29 The influence of Benjamin’s essay has also moved well beyond the restricted field devoted to the study of translation. From the politics of emergency (Honig) to the ethics of sociality (Butler) and from the anthropology of illness (Fassin) and the study of Romanticism (Guyer) to the history of biblical exegesis (Linafelt), the distinction between Überleben and Fortleben has become an almost unavoidable proposition.30 Think here of Homi Bhabha’s sweeping, Benjamin-inspired observation that “our existence today is marked by a tenebrous sense of survival, living on the borderlines of

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the ‘present,’ for which there seems to be no proper name other than the current and controversial shiftiness of the prefix ‘post’: postmodernism, postcolonialism, postfeminism.”31 To repeat: Benjamin’s enigmatic and elusive essay on translation—a cryptic set of meditations on language from 1923—has become a locus for contemporary discussions of survival across a variety of discursive domains: literary, political, philosophical, anthropological, and theological. Because of this broad and unlikely postwar influence, I return to his prewar text as a preliminary site of organization for an archaeology of survival (“Überleben,” Fortleben).

• My reading of Benjamin begins with Derrida, whose postwar writing on survival routinely avoids the tenebrous sense of “post” in order to insist, in a premodern fashion, “on the Christian dimension.”32 It should, in principle, be rather difficult to read Derrida’s work on survival without noticing the recurring significance of certain Christian motifs.33 Christological references structure the whole of his early writing on survie, where the chiastic, crosswise movement of “the Christ-like figure” marks the “double excess” of survival as a “triumph of life”: a life that triumphs over death and a death that triumphs over life (140, 208; 122, 180). Derrida writes in other contexts of the ways that survival reiterates “through the Passion” and “through a memory haunted by the body lost yet preserved in its grave, the resurrection of the ghost or of the glorious body that rises, rises again—and walks.”34 In a Spinozistic turn of phrase (Deus sive natura), he adds: “ ‘sur-vival’ or ‘resurrection.’ ”35 What I want to claim here is simply that the “evangelical dimension” authorizes a provisional inscription of survival within a Christian closure and, more specifically, within the history of Christian mysticism (173; 151). To be sure, Derrida never quite calls for a mystical reading of survival. But his writing on the “super, hyper, ‘over,’ über, and even above and beyond” workings of sur-vie echoes the “logic of the super, of the hyper” that he identifies in the history of Christian mysticism and apophasis (120; 104).36 In his study of the fifth-century theologian Pseudo-Dionysius, Derrida examines “the hyper of the superessential [hyperousios]” and the tradition of mystical theology that speaks of God as “more (being) than being: no more being and being more than being: being more.”37 The question that I follow in this chapter is whether a rereading of the diference between Fortleben and Überleben

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can reinflect a story that Derrida gestures toward but does not quite complete. Is there a divine life in Pseudo-Dionysius? A life-beyond-life? Beyond life and death? A hyperlife, Überleben, and survival?

Mysticism (the Judeo-Christian) One might harbor skepticism about Benjamin’s relevance for an inquiry into the historical connection between survival and mysticism. For starters, Benjamin never mentions mysticism in the essay on translation (much less in explicit reference to his threefold movement between Leben, “Überleben,” and Fortleben). In addition, readers of Benjamin’s wider corpus of writings know that survival rarely returns as a major theme and never as a concept unequivocally extracted from an identifiable mystical tradition.38 There is nonetheless no avoiding the curious fact that Benjamin’s text on the survival of translation has long played host to debates about Benjamin’s belonging to the history of the kabbalah and Jewish mysticism.39 The responsibility for this line of research lies most obviously with Gershom Scholem, whose intellectual and biographical account of Benjamin suggests that he was from an early period and “for a long time to come an adherent of mystical views of language.”40 Scholem’s perspective has subsequently ramified into a foundational framework of analysis for “The Task of the Translator.”41 And this notwithstanding Benjamin’s repeated failures “to say a word about Jewish mysticism or Messianism, or to refer to any text from this Jewish tradition.”42 Although Benjamin neglects to mention Jewish mysticism in the essay, nowhere citing “any kabbalistic thinkers or sources” or quoting Jewish texts of any kind, scholarship has discovered a “subterranean connection to Kabbalah” in the metaphors that he uses to describe the relationship between languages.43 Benjamin writes: “Just as shards of a vessel, in order to be fitted together, must correspond to each other in the minutest details but need not resemble each other, so translation, instead of making itself resemble the sense of the original, must fashion in its own language, carefully and in detail, a counterpart to the original’s mode of meaning, in order to make both of them recognizable as fragments of a vessel, as fragments of a greater language” (GS4:18; TT, 81). Benjamin deploys this image of fragmentation in an attempt to illustrate a practice of translation that consists in “something other than the reproduction of sense” (17; 80). The translator must turn away from “trying to communicate something, away

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from the sense” and instead remain faithful to the original in its particular form or contingent ways of meaning. Benjamin calls for a literalism of syntax (Wörtlichkeit der Syntax), in which a word-for-word rendering of the original language “completely thwarts the reproduction of the sense and threatens to lead directly to incomprehensibility” (18; 81). The goal is not to transpose meaning from one language to another but rather to make visible the diferential, supplementary, fragmented, and irreconcilable relation between distinctive modes of communication. Translation should not reproduce the original’s sense; it should allow for a provisional “harmony” of two languages’ conflictual ways of meaning: a nonsensical symphony of linguistic shards (ibid.).44 Many of Benjamin’s readers have assumed that the image of the broken vessel is a thinly veiled reference to Lurianic kabbalah.45 In one early example from this line of thinking, Carol Jacobs cites Scholem to suggest that “Benjamin has in mind the kabbalistic concept of the Tikkun, the messianic restoration and mending which patches together and restores the original Being of things, shattered and corrupted in the ‘Breaking of Vessels.’ ”46 Jacobs goes on to distance Benjamin’s thesis from the seemingly restorative goals of the Lurianic narrative, seeing in his image of the broken vessel an expression of the destructive and not redemptive capacity of translation. For the most part, however, Benjamin’s readers have continued to associate his theory of language with “the cosmogenic and messianic antipodes of Jewish mystical-thought” and its attempt to recapture the “redemptive potential of a language sundered from its wholeness in creation.”47 One troubling question for this lineage has always been the exact nature of Benjamin’s acquaintance with the Jewish kabbalah (as filtered through conversations with Scholem).48 But let me also suggest another, more complicated, problem: the role of Christianity in the formation (and translation) of the kabbalistic tradition.49 Moshe Idel and others have pointed out that the transformations introduced by the history of Christian kabbalah mediated and shaped ideas that Scholem later adopted and perpetuated in his construction of Jewish mysticism.50 Similarly, any familiarity that Benjamin had with kabbalistic ideas most likely derived from his substantial engagement with themes found in Baroque and Romantic linguistic philosophy as well as in the works of Christian writers like Jakob Böhme, Johann Georg Hamann, and Franz von Baader.51 Following in the wake of Christian kabbalism, Hamann gave his essay “Aesthetica in Nuce” the subtitle “A Rhapsody in Cabbalistic Prose.”52 Baader, for his part, often invoked the shekhina for explicitly Christological ends.53

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In addition, an abundance of research has shown that the term “mysticism” belongs to a Christian genealogy and that scholars like Scholem simply embraced this “specifically Christian theological notion,” identified it with “the kabbalah,” and then constructed Jewish mysticism “as the Jewish national manifestation of a universal mystical phenomenon.”54 This is one reason that the question of mysticism has often led scholars to consider the place of Judaism in Benjamin’s essay on translation and so rarely inspired investigation into what the text has to say about Christianity.55 But as Naomi Seidman has shown, Benjamin’s literalist theory of translation already places him within a broader history of “Jewish-Christian polemic.”56 More than a passing sign of his interest in Jewish mysticism, the whole of Benjamin’s intervention is an attempt to overturn the priority of Paul’s spiritletter distinction by privileging literal translation as a “species of Jewish power.”57 The even broader lesson here is that “the debate over free versus literalist translation has been shaped by Christian theology for the greatest part of its history” and only from within this par ticular regime of reading did literalism come to be “perceived as Jewish” in the first place.58 Such is the “oppositional structure” and “discursive asymmetry” that has defined and continues to define Christian figurations of the “Judaic.”59 These issues are enough to demonstrate the inexorable difficulties of reading “Benjamin” alongside “Jewish mysticism.” They also highlight the much noted (if less frequently interrogated) fact that Benjamin cites only one biblical text in support of his literalist (wörtlich) understanding of translation. He looks not to the Hebrew Bible but to the first verse of the Gospel according to John: “ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, im Anfang war das Wort” (GS4:18; TT, 81).60 If the choice is significant, it is because this particular passage has long been a battleground in debates over the “borderlines” between Judaism and Christianity. Rudolf Bultmann, for example, admits that the Evangelist could not have begun “his work with ἐν ἀρχῆ without thinking of the ‫בראשית‬ of Gen. 1.1.”61 In the Hebrew Bible, he recalls, “the creation is attributed to God’s word by means of the declaration, ‘And God said.’ ”62 But Bultmann quickly retreats from the comparison, in order to show that the Logos of the John Prologue has no real basis in the Old Testament and no real “relation to Judaism” (21). While Genesis begins with the Word of God, it fails to anticipate John’s invocation of the Word itself as a unique name, title, or divine hypostasis (21). Bultmann’s attempts to move the John Prologue “as far as possible from ‘Judaism’ ” have led scholars like Daniel Boyarin to seek a more complex

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dynamic of diferentiation and disavowal.63 In this history, the Logos traces the development of a “doctrine that was originally shared but finally became central to opposing self-definitions” of Judaism and Christianity (90). Boyarin claims that the Logos theology introduced in the opening verse of the Prologue performs a perfectly unexceptional and “traditional Jewish midrash on Genesis 1” (103). It only diverges from Jewish history in its assertion that “the Logos is incarnated as Jesus, the Christ” (104). This is how the Logos takes its place as one of the “most significant indicia for Jewish and Christian separate religious identity . . . a virtual shibboleth for the production” of Jewish-Christian diference (21, 29).64 Once identified with Christology, “the Logos became Christian and the rejection of binitarianism the very touchstone of Judaism.”65 It is against this background that I want to invert the perspectival hierarchy that has long guided debates over the Jewish and/or Judeo-Christian character of Benjamin’s text, in order to ask what a Christian reading of his essay might look like. How does Benjamin intervene in the Christological legacy of the Logos? How does he participate in the exegetical history of John 1:1? And what, if anything, is he trying to teach us about the role of the incarnation in the theology and history of translation? These questions, I wager, can help clarify Benjamin’s decision to end his essay with the claim that “the interlinear version of the Holy Text is the prototype [Urbild] or ideal of all translation” (GS4:21; TT, 83). I argue that Benjamin’s use of this verse testifies to his participation in a long legacy of linguistic theology, where “nothing is less innocent, pleonastic and natural, nothing is more historical,” than the proposition that “applies in the realm of translation: In the beginning was the word” (GS4:18; TT, 81).66 A reading of this history will allow us to redirect Benjamin’s text from the history of kabbalah and Judaism to Christianity, the genealogy of mysticism, and, finally, to the archaeology (en archē ēn ho logos) of survival.

“In the Beginning Was Blabla” In his well-known work on linguistic thinking, Michel Foucault observes the fundamental break introduced by nineteenth-century philology into “the whole mode of being of language” (O, 281). The seismic shift occurred most notably in the research of Grimm, Schlegel, Rask, and Bopp on IndoEuropean languages and comparative grammar, where philological study revealed that language constrains and determines the possibilities of thinking.

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Even though people believe that “speech is their servant,” they are in truth “expressing their thoughts in words of which they are not the masters,” enclosing themselves “in verbal forms whose historical dimensions they are unaware of,” and failing to “realize that they are submitting themselves to its demands” (297). This means that the very truth of any discourse comes up against a philological procedure that places grammatical formations before the contents they communicate. The philologist works back from “opinions, philosophies, and perhaps even from the sciences, to the words that made them possible, and beyond that, to a thought whose essential life has not yet been caught in the network of any grammar” (ibid.). Foucault points out that these new philological developments had important implications in the theological domain. In the sixteenth century, the act of interpretation proceeded “from the world (things and texts together) towards the divine Word that could be deciphered in it” (O, 298); by the nineteenth century, thinkers could no longer assign the production of meaning to “the sovereignty of a primal discourse” (ibid.). Foucault’s account suggests that the rise of philology coincided with, recapitulated, and completed the displacement of the biblical Word (John, Genesis) as a theological-linguistic paradigm. As Hans Aarslef has shown, prior to the eighteenth century the most widely accepted views held that all languages, “in spite of their multiplicity, and seeming chaos,” contained elements of the primordial, perfect language spoken by Adam in Eden.67 According to the Adamic doctrine, languages bore traces of “the divine nature of their common origin” and remained “in fundamental accord with nature . . . themselves part of creation and nature” (ibid.). In this light, Edward Said has suggested that the rise of philology was “a secular event that displaced a religious conception of how God delivered language to man in Eden.”68 Beyond “comparative grammar” and “the reclassification of languages into families,” philology dealt the “final rejection of the divine origins of language.”69 Once European philologists discovered “that the so-called sacred languages (Hebrew, primarily) were neither of primordial antiquity nor of divine provenance,” it became possible to consider language “an entirely human phenomenon” (ibid.). Orientalists like Ernest Renan (1823–92) gave up on the idea of a “first Edenic language” and instead turned their attention to “the heuristic notion of a protolanguage (Indo-European, Semitic),” the existence of which was not a subject of debate, since all “acknowledged that such a language cannot be recaptured but can only be reconstituted in the philological project” (136).

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This is the secularizing narrative that Foucault and others present. But even for Foucault, the elimination of the divine Word does not necessarily correspond to a complete erasure of theology.70 Maurice Olender, moreover, has maintained that nineteenth-century philological scholarship did not so much abandon Christian paradigms as “impose a Christian providential meaning on the new comparative order.”71 Philologists like Renan and Bopp went to great lengths to forgo a biblically determined theory of language and “ free themselves from its community of meaning.”72 They consciously turned away from the belief in Eden, in order to undertake the historical study of Semites and Aryans. Yet for Olender, this new scientific ordering of languages, religions, and races only perpetuated “older hierarchical classifications” and reflected a belief that—from Semites to Aryans—“history was moving in a Christian direction” (136). In this “divine drama whose theater is universal history,” providence ensured that each played its proper role (18). The Aryans brought “the West mastery over nature, exploitation of time and space, the invention of my thology, science and art”; the Semites discovered “the secret of monotheism—at least until that fateful day when Jesus [came] into the world at Galilee” (18). In other words, Olender sees the philological distinction between Semite and Aryan (race, religion, language) as a recasting of “the great providential design that was impressed on humanity in the first days of creation” (92). One must “be careful not to minimize the importance of [the] biblical references, shared by scholars and theologians alike” (137–38). In “one of Western Christendom’s founding myths,” God created the world “by breathing the syllables of certain words in a language that dispelled the chaos” (137). Later, in the Garden of Eden, Adam used language to name every one of God’s creatures (ibid.). The Gospel of John, finally, revived the “creative power of the word” and incarnated it in “an intermediary, a mediator, a Messiah whose divine body was also an overt utterance, a decipherable truth inscribed in its own unique history” (141). Far from a story of secularization, nineteenthcentury philology’s innovative fusion of race, religion, and language harkened back to the Gospel of John and the theology of the Logos: one reason for thinking that there is “no philology without Christianity.”73

• The importance of the Gospel of John in the history of philology reinforces the tradition of exegesis and translation that has accompanied its opening

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verses. Recall that Benjamin’s citation of the Gospel includes not only the Greek text but also the German of the Luther Bible (1522): “ἐν ἀρχῇ ἦν ὁ λόγος, im Anfang war das Wort.” In an essay centrally concerned with the historical movement (or life) of literary works—with issues of temporal and linguistic diference—the juxtaposition calls for analysis. This is especially true because the comma that Benjamin inscribes between the Greek and German texts occludes a history of disagreement over the meaning and translation of the word “Logos.” Luther himself had significant precedent for choosing das Wort. Like the King James Bible (1611), his German edition followed closely on the Vulgate’s use of Verbum. In his later commentary on the Prologue, Bultmann confirms that “if the Logos is to be translated, the translation can only be ‘Word,’ the meaning already given to it through the Gnostic myth.”74 This is the proper understanding, “insofar as the authentic function of the Λόγος is that of Revealer; that is to say, in so far as the Logos makes God known” (ibid.). Despite the manifest consistency of this tradition, Luther’s substitution of Wort for Logos presents certain complications. For one thing, it marks a theological displacement of the contemporaneous perspective ofered by Erasmus (1466–1536) and the humanist school of textual criticism. As Marjorie O’Rourke Boyle explains, Erasmus’s Latin translation of the New Testament (1519) introduced alterations that at times departed significantly from the Vulgate and, most notably, in its translation of the first verse of the Gospel of John.75 With the help of “historical evidence, philological argument, and liturgical practice,” Erasmus disposed of Verbum and instead rendered John 1:1 as: “In the beginning was the Conversation” (ibid.).76 Not unlike Bultmann, Erasmus argued that Christ is Speech (sermo) because only through him did an incomprehensible God become known to the world (ibid.). But by writing speech and not word, this Christological paradigm insisted that meaning belongs to the entire context of composition and communication: “Christ the Logos was not a single word in isolation but a complete speech to an audience” (49). According to Boyle, Luther set his translation of the Bible in direct opposition to this culture of rhetoric and eloquence. He traded the opacity of “persuasive discourse” for the transparency of the “assertive word” and formulated a theology of reading (sola scriptura) that promoted the “literal sense of the text as understood by ordinary usage” (51–52).77 Although exegesis and the history of interpretation lead to confusion, Luther believed that the text itself could bring clarity by allowing the observation, recording,

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and transmission of meaning to occur without interpretation and in a “literal mimesis.”78 In his sermons on the Gospel of John (1537–38), Luther ranges freely between Wort (word), Rede (speech), Gespreche (conversation), and Gedanke (thought).79 The apparent diplomacy, however, does little to undermine the assertive or even performative conception of language that he attributes to the Word. In “His majesty and nature,” Luther writes, God “is pregnant with a Word or a conversation in which He engages with Himself in His divine essence and which reflects the thoughts of His heart” (46:545; 22:10). God exists in a state of pure divine solipsism, “so absorbed in this Word, thought, or conversation that He pays no attention to anything else” (ibid.). This “invisible and incomprehensible conversation”—the Word that existed before all else in and as God—is the very agent of all created beings (ibid.). Luther’s commentary on the creative power of God’s Word also carries with it a distinctly political cast, relying on a comparison to the performative speech of “a great and mighty prince or king” (546; 11). Beyond the communication of meaning, the royal word “penetrates with force [Gewalt]” and immediately brings about “the obedience of all” (ibid.). While the king himself is “a mortal being like any other person . . . the plain word of his mouth is carried to the ears of his subjects and proves so powerful [krefftig] that they do its bidding and are governed by what he says” (ibid.). By analogy, “heaven and earth, all creatures, both the visible and the invisible, come into being when the eternal, almighty, and divine Majesty speaks to Himself or carries on a conversation with Himself” (546; 12). In the language of Ps. 33:9: “He spoke and it came to be.” Luther’s reading of the Logos mediates a theological-political thesis concerning the productive force or violence of language. God’s Word calls for neither interpretation nor reasoned speculation. There is no discussion with another that might open up room for disagreement and debate. Like a royal command, the Word orders, constitutes, and creates.

• The continuities and discontinuities between Erasmus and Luther already touch on the difficulties posed by the Logos: Is it word or thought? Conversation or performative act? Rhetorical problem or theological-political question? Benjamin himself never resolves these issues. But his early writings on language do inherit this history of translation and its reverberations across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In “On Language as Such

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and on the Language of Man” (1916), Benjamin looks to the first chapter of Genesis for a linguistic theory capable of contesting the emptiness of the bourgeois theory of language (GS2:144; SW1:65). Here, too, he rejects any philosophy that presumes the essence of language to be the communication of some information or content. He instead begins with the premise that language “knows no means, no object, and no addressee of communication” (ibid.). More than a human instrument for the transmission of meaning, language belongs to the whole continuum and very essence of God’s creation. Benjamin cites Hamann: “Language, the mother of reason and revelation, its alpha and omega” (147; 67).80 The first chapter of Genesis provides Benjamin with the resources for conceiving of language as “an ultimate, inexplicable, and mystical reality” (ibid.). Following a threefold movement of creation—from “Let there be” to “He made (created)” to “He named”—Benjamin identifies the “deep and clear relation of the creative act to language” (148; 68). Just as God’s creation “begins with the creative omnipotence of language [Allmacht der Sprache],” so it ends with the giving of names and the assimilation of creation back into a linguistic domain. “Language is,” Benjamin concludes, “both creative and consummative,” the production and completion of creation through the divine Word (“And God said: Let there be . . .”) and the divine name (“And God called . . .”) (149; 68). Just as the latter makes things knowable, the former is the performative power of creation itself: “In the word, creation took place, and God’s linguistic essence is the word. . . . The infinity of all human language always remains limited and analytic in nature, in comparison to the absolutely unlimited and creative infinity of the divine word” (ibid.). Benjamin summarizes the point by once again citing Hamann, proving that his reading of Genesis has never strayed too far from the Gospel of John: “Every thing that man heard in the beginning, saw with his eyes, and felt with his hands was the living word; for God was the word” (151; 70).81 Benjamin’s citation of Hamann recalls the complex reception of Luther’s translation. In his eighteenth-century commentary on the New Testament, for example, Herder remarked that nothing “is more efectual, more blessed than this Word. It is Will [Wille], the prefiguration of what is to become Power [Kraft], Act [That]: a drop from the ocean of God’s omnipotence, omnipresence and blessedness in his creations: the root of our most inner being, most noble enjoyment, work and life.”82 Herder interpreted John 1:1 classically as an account of the performative and creative force of divine language. But in doing so, he registered more concretely than those before him

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an unease with the standard translation of Logos as Verbum and Wort. He asked: Is the Logos not also Will, Act, and Power? Soul, Thought, and Love (ibid.)? Herder exclaimed: “Wort! But the German Wort does not mean what the primordial concept [Urbegrif] means” (320). Herder’s avowed dissatisfaction never led him to undertake any systematic eforts to retranslate Logos in a manner that better captures its theological significance. However, his anxious call did not go entirely unheeded. A short time later, Goethe took up Herder’s unfinished task of translation in his version of Faust (1808). In the tragic drama, the eponymous character sits in his study, lamenting his struggles to adequately render the first verse of John into German: I would for once like to determine—/ Because I am sincerely perplexed—/ How the sacred original text / Could be translated into my beloved German. / It says: “In the beginning was the Word.” / Already I am stopped. / It seems absurd. / The Word does not deserve the highest prize, / I must translate it otherwise / If I am well inspired and not blind. / It says: In the beginning was the Mind [Sinn]. / Ponder that first line, wait and see, / Lest you should write too hastily. / Is mind the all-creating source? / It ought to say: In the beginning there was the Force [Kraft]. / Yet something warns me as I grasp the pen, / That my translation must be changed again. / The spirit helps me. / Now it is exact./I write: In the beginning was the Act [Tat].83 Faust’s swift, if also hesitant, retranslations of the Logos move from Wort to Sinn to Kraft before finally settling upon Tat as the most accurate and most divinely inspired (“the spirit helps me”) German formulation. Even after Luther, Erasmus, and Herder, Goethe still wondered how to communicate the activity of the Logos as an all-creative power. The question is whether his translation betrays the tradition by committing “a grave philological and theological error.”84 Did he “destroy the substance of Christian belief with his translation of John 1:1,” or did he see “something correct” in his reworking of the Lutheran tradition?85

• Goethe’s experiments in translation (heretical or not) had a momentous impact on later attempts to reread the first verse of John.86 For Friedrich Kittler,

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they mark an epistemic shift in the history of the human sciences and the medial transformation of “discourse networks.” Kittler argues that around 1800, philosophy began to separate itself from previous epistemological constraints and reconstitute itself according to a new set of suppositions. Kant’s critical project attributed the “origins” of human subjectivity to the free and spontaneous action of “the transcendental ego” or “sheerly active Ich.”87 Goethe attested to this change by writing: “In the beginning was the Act” (ibid.). His free translation substituted “the divine institution of the Word and the Law with the freedom of originary, generative subjectivity” (ibid.). With this epistemological break, Goethe’s text revealed its exit from a previous discourse network still beholden to the “rules decreed by Humanism and the Reformation” and its entrance into a new authorial regime (ibid.). After “two hundred years of inscribed faithfulness to Scripture,” obedience to the text suddenly began to sound “pathological to the new science of man” (N, 10). In Faust, the age of the Word has passed, and another discourse network has arrived to take its place: the age of the author. According to the discourse network of 1800, “the authorial act, that of writing act for word at the beginning of the gospel, provided the ground and measure of all doctrine in the unthinkable reduplication of authorship” (149). God ceased to be Word at the moment that the human became the singular author and origin of all meaning. Kittler stresses again that “Faust lays claim to the beginning as an act this side of all representation, an act that is first of all his own” (N, 16). But his pretention toward absolute autonomy does not mean that he writes with “complete freedom” (ibid.). Faust “translates according to the spirit and not the letter” and must exclude all words that “could not possibly mean logos” (16–17). What the discourse network of 1800 forbids is a Gospel that declares: “In the beginning was blabla” (16). Faust cannot tolerate a translation that produces something other than sense. Famously, he even finds it necessary to silence the noisy disruptions and nonsensical sounds produced by the barking of his dog (ibid.). But this exclusion of meaninglessness from the origins of discourse eventually comes undone around 1900, when a “type of writing assumes power that does not conform to traditional writing systems but rather radicalizes the technology of writing in general” (211). This radicalization appears in a discourse network defined by the phonograph, cinematography, and other technological apparatuses for the mass storage of data. Under this new paradigm, the author, the spontaneous human act, and the communication of meaning withdraw in the face of

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technological and psychosocial “generators that produce discourse without sense or thought” (229). These novel systems function to exclude “the ordinary, purposeful use of language—so-called communication with others” and instead cultivate a discourse whose origins lie not in sense but in nonsense: syllabic hodgepodge, automatic writing, the language of children, and static (229). White noise now appears on all channels as “the incessant and ineradicable background of information” (183). If, after 1900, the Gospel no longer follows the Lutheran or Faustian readings, this is because “blabla” replaces both Word and Act at the beginning (and end) of communication. As we have seen, Benjamin’s citation of John 1:1 has less to say about the transmission of sense than it does about the production of nonsense. In Benjamin, translatability is simply another name for the discourse network of 1900: a nonsensical moment in the theological, theological-political, or mystical history of the divine Word. I return now to Benjamin’s text on translation and follow him as he rewrites the archaeology of the Gospel: In the beginning was Survival.

Absolute Nonsense Fortleben, “Überleben.” This is the crucial distinction for Benjamin’s exegesis and translation of the John Prologue. Again, Benjamin does not ofer much guidance, mentioning “Überleben” only once in the essay and never returning to comment upon its precise relationship to his more resolutely determined use of Fortleben. I nonetheless find some elucidation for this diference in Benjamin’s proximate opposition between the history of works and the superhistorical kinship of languages (GS4:13; TT, 78). While Fortleben describes the historicity or “afterlife” of works, Überleben names the prehistorical or transcendental condition of the text’s translatability: its hyperlife or superliving.88 To unravel this doubled and divided enigma of survival, I begin by tracing out the distinctive metaphorics that accompany Fortleben: the political, the theological, and the biological. I follow a series of commentators who have observed that the “challenge of this par ticular text” is its simultaneous reproduction and refusal of certain metaphorical analogies.89 “Whenever Benjamin uses a trope which seems to convey a picture of total meaning,” Paul de Man notes, “he manipulates the allusive context within his work in such a way that the traditional symbol is displaced in a manner that acts out the discrepancy between symbol and meaning”

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(ibid.). Benjamin does not merely comment on the reliability of the bond between language and meaning; he also performs this problematic by sliding the crucial terms of his argument through a series of shifting metaphors. The whole thing, Derrida says, is a “metaphoric catastrophe.”90 Benjamin opens his account of Fortleben by displacing the question of life (“considered with completely unmetaphorical objectivity”) from a natural to a historical domain. He then adds: “The history of great works of art records their descent from their sources, their shaping in the age of the artist, and the periods of their basically eternal Fortleben” (GS4:11; TT, 76–77). This third stage is called “fame,” and only when a work has reached this “period” in its history does translation become possible (11; 77). In one of several counterintuitive claims made throughout the essay, Benjamin explains that translations “do not so much serve the work’s fame as owe their existence to it” (ibid.). The Fortleben of a work does not result from a translation’s expansion of the original’s recognition or notoriety across diferent languages. On the contrary, Fortleben precedes translation as the historical condition of the latter’s emergence. According to Benjamin, the changes that occur in translation are something already at work in the historical life of the original. Benjamin emphasizes throughout that the most pertinent question for translation is whether a text “by its very essence . . . allows itself to be translated, and thus—in accord with the significance of this form—also calls for translation” (9; 76). He continually directs his attention away from existing translations and toward the question of translatability as a “specific significance inherent in the original texts” (10; 76). Without regard for an eventual outcome or determinate efect, translation concerns the “form . . . properly essential to certain works” or their intrinsic potentiality to be displaced into another language. Benjamin’s difficult claim is that the translatability of a work lies in the variable changes that occur to a text over the course of its history or its Fortleben (the “transformation and renewal of the living being”) (12; 77). A text’s translatability emerges not from the persistence of a fixed meaning in the original but rather from the fact that even well-defined or “established words also have their after-ripening [Nachreife]” (ibid.). Like a fruit, a seed, or any living organism that has continued to change after reaching the pinnacle of its maturity, “the tendency of an author’s poetic language in his own time may later be exhausted, and immanent tendencies may arise anew out of the formed work” (12–13; 77). It is possible that “what once sounded fresh may come to sound stale, and what once sounded idiomatic may later sound archaic” (13; 77). This incessant movement holds for the translator’s

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language as well, because “just as the tone and significance of great literary works are completely transformed over the centuries, the translator’s native language is also transformed” (13; 78). Language as such—or, more accurately, human language—consists in nothing other than the absolute historicity and temporal inconstancy of its various modes of signification. A text’s Fortleben unfolds this essential property of language. In Samuel Weber’s summary, the Nachreife of languages indicates that in the process of living, texts “are also dying, or at least, departing, taking-leave from themselves and this from their birth.”91 The continuing life of the work—its growth, expansion, and accretion of tonality and significance—transpires only through the exhaustion, decline, and perpetual demise of its words. This transformation and renewal ensure that no work bears its language as the static expression of meaning but instead already finds itself caught within language’s historical variations and its separation of form from content. Benjamin reaffirms that translation does not seek a similarity with the highly elusive essence of the original. Its goal is, rather, to mark out a particu lar moment in the growth of languages by highlighting the essential disjunction between what a language means and its always highly contingent ways of meaning. Translation reveals that the inescapable conflict between two languages and their divergent modes of signification also signals their supplementarity. Because ways of meaning present themselves as mutually exclusive, they are not “interchangeable and in fact ultimately seek to eliminate one another” (GS4:14; TT, 78). Yet Benjamin insists that in every language, “one and the same thing is meant” and that “with respect to their intended object, taken absolutely, they signify one and the same thing” (ibid.). No single language attains this intention on its own, since languages remain always bound to their par ticular ways of meaning. Only the totality of languages and their “mutually supplementary intentions” achieve this objective in the form of “pure language” (13; 78). Benjamin writes: “In the individual, unsupplemented languages, the intended object never occurs in relative independence, for instance in individual words or sentences, but is rather caught up in constant transformation, until it is able to emerge as pure language from the harmony of all these modes of meaning” (14; 78). Until this point, pure language “remains hidden in languages” (ibid.). Even as pure language remains outstanding, translation’s displacement of the original’s way of meaning into another afords an anticipation of this “messianic end” of linguistic history.92 As Benjamin reiterates a few

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pages later, “the singular and violent [gewaltige] capacity of translation is to unbind pure speech from meaning, to turn the symbolizing element into the symbolized itself, to win back pure language formed by linguistic movement” (GS4:19; TT, 82). Benjamin identifies the particularity of translation’s form as its ability to deform or disfigure the nexus between the symbolic system of a given historical language and its content. Through the expropriation of the symbolic from its historical tie with the symbolized, translation announces the redemption of language as its complete divestment of significance: “In this pure language—which no longer means or expresses anything but is instead, as expressionless and creative word, what is meant in all languages—all communication, all sense, and all intention arrive at a level where they are destined to be extinguished” (ibid.). Translation promises the end of linguistic history as the dissolution of all sense as well as the final return of language to its origins in the expressionless and creative word. In the beginning, Benjamin suggests, language does not mean anything. It is pure nonsense, total metaphor, absolute insignificance. Benjamin is already reading the John Prologue and performing an exegesis of the creative word for the discourse network of 1900. As an anticipation (or a recollection) of pure language, translation brings the movement of linguistic history—its formation and investment of words with meaning— to a momentary standstill. This messianic mobilization is only the intensification or amplification of a potentiality already operating in the original—in “the eternal Fortleben of the works and the endless revivification [Aufleben] of languages” (14; 78). The purpose of translation is to “constantly test the sacred growth [heilige Wachstum] of languages, to determine how distant what is hidden within them is from revelation, how present it might become in the knowledge of this distance” (ibid.). Translation is the “critical epistemological” procedure that makes knowable the nonsense and insignificance incessantly punctuating the meaning of history. The Fortleben of a text is nothing less than a sign of the asymptotic approach toward the limits of comprehensibility—what Benjamin refers to as the creation, revelation, and redemption of language.

• The “religious code is essential.”93 But so, too, is the “organic.” And by now, it should be clear that Benjamin’s concatenation of metaphors verges on the

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limits of comprehensibility. In one of his more convulsive formulations, he claims that the Fortleben of works is a “sacred growth” of language and explains that “the growth of religions ripens [reift] the seed hidden in languages into a higher language” (GS4:14; TT, 79). These phrases and others perfuse Benjamin’s text with a collapsing cascade of catachreses and season his metaphoric mélange with ingredients from a variety of discursive spheres (e.g., mathematics, architecture, music, pottery, politics, and more). Once again: Benjamin’s text does not simply provide a commentary on the historically contingent bond between the form of language and its meaning. It performs these slippages through a proliferation of mixed metaphors and shifting symbolics. Beyond the organic and the theological, I call attention to the figures of law and power.94 The references occur most prominently in Benjamin’s division between the translatability of the original and the translatability of the translation. He writes: “If in the original, content and language constitute a certain unity, like that between a fruit and its skin, a translation surrounds its content, as if with the broad folds of a royal mantle” (GS4:15; TT, 79).95 Unlike the original, where language still remains closely bound to meaning, “translation indicates a higher language than its own and thereby remains inadequate, violent [gewaltig], and alien with respect to its content” (GS4:15; TT, 79). Derrida reads the looseness and inadequacy of the royal robe as an “index of power and the power to lay down the law.”96 In translation, language liberates itself from its role as the mere casing for a core content and reveals itself as sovereign. With these images, Benjamin imagines the anticipation of a “pure,” “true,” or “creative” language that could manifest its sovereignty as a sign totally independent of content and a power relieved of its dependence on any prior meaning: a rule without a ruler, a kingship unburdened by a king, and a sovereignty above and beyond every sovereign. Translation’s violent capacity signals the “unfolding of a singular and high life” of language that reigns in the free-flowing folds of absolute power (GS4:11; TT, 71). Benjamin comes close to speaking here of reine göttliche Gewalt, pure divine violence.97 After Luther, he looks to translation as a force capable of heralding the expressionless and creative power of the pure sovereign Word. While the messianic Fortleben of a text remains historically bound to an organic unity between language and content, translation unleashes a messianic violence that is “never positing, forming, or transforming, but aformative,” deforming, and destructive.98 One could schematize this diference

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by drawing a distinction between the organo-theological movement of Fortleben (messianism, Nachreife) and the theologico-political procedure of translation (reine göttliche Gewalt, royal robe). But Benjamin also insists that translation itself proceeds only from a potentiality already inherent in the historicity of the original text. He says: “The more distinctive the work, the more it remains translatable, in the very fleeting nature of its contact with sense. This is of course true only of original works. Translations, on the contrary, prove to be untranslatable not because the sense weighs on them heavily, but rather because it attaches to them all too fleetingly” (GS4:20; TT, 83). By slicing the unity of language and content, translation thwarts any further attempts at translation. For the original, precisely the opposite is the case. The more distinctive its ways of meaning, the less closely connected its language will be to the communication of a specific content. In such originals, Benjamin claims, language has already detached itself from its organic unity with sense and acquired some of that linguistic sovereignty other wise anticipated only in the work of translation. Following the logic of Benjamin’s essay, and to mix its metaphors further, the messianic translatability (Fortleben) of an original is an organo-political condition defined by the power of the text’s peel, the looseness of its folds, and the sacred sovereignty of its rind.

• The whole of Benjamin’s bio-political-theological reflections on translation culminates in his search for a single paradigm or ideal (Urbild) of absolute translatability. He first locates the possibility in Hölderlin’s nineteenthcentury translations of Sophocles, where “the harmony of languages is so deep that the sense is touched by language only in the way an Aeolian harp is touched by the wind” (GS4:21; TT, 83). By departing from any strict attempt to transmit the meaning of the original, Hölderlin’s translations verge on total nonsense and, for that reason, appear to confirm the task of translation that Benjamin elaborates throughout the essay. But as Benjamin goes on to say, this fleeting relationship with sense also reveals the “monstrous and original danger of all translation: that the portals of a language broadened and made malleable in this way may slam shut and lock up the translator in silence” (ibid.). In Hölderlin’s translations, “the sense plunges from abyss to abyss until it threatens to become lost in the bottomless depths of language” (ibid.). Benjamin worries that a translation’s departure from the

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primary significance of the original will result in the absolute loss of any fixed connection to the ground of meaning. When the “harmony of languages” becomes too profound, translations risk falling into the abyssal depths of pure nonsense. Lost in this groundless void, they no longer remain capable of producing or anticipating the messianic end of pure language. After every thing that Benjamin has said about the messianic ends of translation, his comments on Hölderlin could appear to present a contradiction or even suggest a manifest abrogation of the thesis that he seems to defend. What is pure language, if not the production of abyssal nonsense? This is the question that finally allows Benjamin to consider the true Urbild of translation: a text capable of bringing the endless plunge of language to a temporary halt. This capacity, he says, belongs “to no text other than the sacred, in which the sense has ceased to be the watershed for the flow of language and the flow of revelation” (GS4:21; TT, 83). When “the text belongs in its literalness, immediately and without the mediation of sense, to the true language—to truth or to doctrine—it is absolutely translatable” (ibid.). In the final ironic reversal, translation reaches its highest form only in the text of an original whose language has always already abandoned any contact with sense and has never required any displacement into a higher, more literal, language. The sacred text is an original that needs translation neither to decouple its language from its content nor to provide it with a sovereign anticipation of pure language. From the beginning and without translation, it is absolute nonsense, purely translatable, because it is already completely “expressionless” and totally without meaning (19; 82).99 Benjamin does not believe that the Bible is any less abyssal, any less groundless, than Hölderlin’s translations. He does think, however, that the nonsense of the biblical word marks a stratum at which “language and revelation coincide absolutely” (GS4:19; TT, 82). Although Holy Scripture never ceases to hover over an abyss of meaning, it also never runs the risk of falling into oblivion. Unlike all other originals and all other translations, it produces a ground in the very truth that it disseminates. The language of revelation is the creative Word in its pure, insignificant sovereignty, the groundless ground that precedes all meaning as the originary, performative Gewalt of translation. This is why, for Benjamin, “the interlinear version of holy scripture is the prototype or ideal of all translation” (ibid.). The power of its nonsense is what makes all language possible and what constitutes translation as a violence or force capable of purifying language from meaning.100

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As Benjamin notes, the Bible is unconditionally translatable “not for its own sake, but solely for that of the languages” (GS4:19; TT, 82). This is the theological-political ideal or prototype of all translation. Never bound to any content—or to an incarnational distinction between fruit and rind—the divine Word possesses the only life or Fortleben that is always already absolutely meaningless and always already absolutely sovereign. Pure language as pure political theology: reine göttliche Gewalt.

Pure Surviving Power I have been arguing that the entirety of Benjamin’s text elicits an extended commentary on the Gospel of John and the sovereign power of the divine Word. Following Luther, Herder, and others, Benjamin reads the Logos as a language of pure, sovereign nonsense, the originary and meaningless theological-political force that precedes and produces, forms and deforms, all meaningful communication. Benjamin efectively rewrites the Gospel of John for the discourse network of 1900: the abyssal babble of reine göttliche Gewalt. The question is: Does this exegetical exercise also amount to an archaeology of survival? Does Benjamin translate the power and life of the Logos as Fortleben? Certainly, Benjamin closely links a text’s “living forward” or “living away” to its translatability. The Fortleben of a text—the historical variation and contingency of its language—is what provides translation with its conditions of possibility. Still, the inescapable historicity of Fortleben also divides it from the pure divine power of the biblical Word. As Benjamin explains, the translatability of the Bible does not simply extend the form of translation that generally pervades great works but enacts a decisive reversal of the priority between original and translation. Because the sacred text needs neither the after-ripening of languages nor translation in order to purify itself from meaning, it no longer possesses two of the major characteristics that define the historical life of texts (their Fortleben). The incongruities can return us to “Überleben” and to the pause that Benjamin inserts between survival’s two forms of life (fort, über). Benjamin’s general reticence about the opposition does not stop him from surreptitiously signaling the diference on at least one other occasion. In a brief aside, he suggests a tentative resemblance between his evaluation of translation and the Romantic “insight into the life of works of art” (GS4:15; TT, 79).

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While the Romantics “hardly recognized the significance of translation,” they did turn their attention “toward criticism, which also represents a genuine, though narrower, element in the Fortleben of works” (ibid.). The words refer to Benjamin’s dissertation on The Concept of Art Criticism in German Romanticism (1919) and, specifically, to the parallel role played by “irony” in elevating individual works of art into a “more definitive linguistic domain” (ibid.).101 Much like translation, formal irony wields a violence that does not simply destroy the work that it seizes but instead “draws the work nearer to indestructibility” (GS1:86; SW1:164). The paradox of this nondestructive destruction is that it brings only the “par ticular representational form” to ruin (ibid.). Even as the particular form of a work “becomes the sacrifice [Opfer] of ironic dissolution,” its universal form survives (ibid.). “Above [über] it,” Benjamin writes, “irony tears open a heaven of eternal form, the idea of forms, which one might call the absolute form, and proves the Überleben of the work, which draws its indestructible subsistence from that sphere, after the empirical form, the expression of its isolated reflection, has been consumed by the absolute form” (ibid.).102 By evoking his earlier comments on Romanticism, Benjamin confirms the tight proximity of Überleben and Fortleben. On this reading, the Überleben of the work in the essay on criticism coincides with (or at least approximates) the Fortleben of the work in the essay on translation. However, I think it is also possible to read this intertextual exchange diferently, by taking Benjamin’s brief reference to Romantic criticism as a sign of the singularity that he accords to Überleben and as an explanation of his decision to place the term between quotation marks (“Überleben”). Benjamin does so not simply to dissociate an idiosyncratic usage from a common meaning but to indicate that the word is coming from elsewhere: that he is citing himself. The hypothesis highlights the fact that no similar punctuation surrounds the word in the essay on Romanticism (and this despite the peculiar definition it bears). In that context, Benjamin deploys Überleben both as an indication of the text’s capacity to live on or live forward after its own destruction and as a name for the absolute form achieved by a work that lives über, above, over or beyond itself in a heavenly and eternal sphere of absolute indestructibility: its “hyper-life” or “super-living.” So just as Benjamin translates Überleben as Fortleben, he also silently gestures toward his interest in their morphological diference and asymptotic incommensurability. This leads to the question: What constitutes the “hyper-life” of Überleben? Does it stand at the archaeological beginning of all things?

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And does it better translate the nonsensical force, pure divine power, and life of the Logos?

• Benjamin was not the only thinker to contemplate the particularity of Überleben around 1900.103 His teacher Georg Simmel (1858–1918), who produced a vast body of writing on vitalism and Lebensphilosophie, also touches at times on the significance of Überleben.104 In a short essay published not long before “The Task of the Translator,” Simmel writes that “life as a whole may be perceived as an adventure.”105 Amid all the accidents, chances, and contingencies of life, one retains a sense of the system or necessity that draws all these diferences together. This sense of purpose is the adventure, the firm belief that there exists “above [über] this whole a higher unity, a sur-vival [Über-Leben], so to speak,” which stands over or beyond all of life’s exigencies.106 Simmel sometimes refers to this super-life in more directly “theological” terms, reflecting on the intensity of the faith that has driven historical religions to situate God outside and beyond themselves. For certain inspired individuals, the “inner religiosity was so powerful and so expansive, that they became dissatisfied with the configuration of collective life” and instead “reached out beyond all of its possible contents toward a sur-vival [Über-Leben]” (14:382).107 Simmel defines divinity as infinite life, the highest life, the life above all life as well as the absolute beyond of life. According to a certain translation, God is the sur-vivor. Simmel ultimately recoils from the link between God and Überleben, expressing his concern that life’s imbrication with death could lead to a contamination of God’s divinity. In a late work, Simmel comes to the conclusion that the “interweaving of life with death can serve as one symbolic motivation . . . for the claim that there is no unquestionable warrant for calling the divinity ‘living’ ” (LA, 109; VL, 69). He adds that nothing would be gained by describing “God as das Überlebendige,” since “even the most careful attempt at precise definition oversteps what we are justified to think” (ibid.). Simmel holds that every attempt to conceive of God in terms of life (Leben or Überleben) invests God with death and transgresses the barriers of language and thought preventing any naming of what transcends humanity. This limitation, Simmel notes, is one reason that the “negative theology of the mystic is freer and deeper than all earlier or later dogmatics and philosophy of religion” (ibid.). Like every word, the name

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Überlebendige comes up against the inefable boundaries of human language and fails as a “legitimate determination of the divine absolute” (ibid.). Simmel’s theological reflections conclude here in a mystically inspired rejection of any possible link between Überleben and God. With a little help from negative theology, he recants his previous attempts to think God’s “hyper-life” and lodges a protest against all those who might mistake das Überlebendige as a divine name. Simmel’s passing denegations, however, can inspire another inquiry into the relationship between survival and mysticism, Überleben and negative theology. My hypothesis is that Benjamin, like Simmel, is already participating in a tradition of translation and exegesis that, far from excluding Überleben, bears some responsibility for constituting it as one apophatic name for the unnameable One. It is a history that belongs not to the Lurianic kabbalah but to the text and reception of an early Christian treatise, On the Divine Names, written by the pseudonymous author Dionysius the Areopagite (fifth or sixth century).108

• The Dionysian corpus is a foundational moment in the history of mysticism. For if scholars are correct, only with Pseudo-Dionysius does theology first become “explicitly mystical,” his texts being among the first to formulate “mystical theology” as a distinctive category.109 The central question posed by this theologia mystike concerns the possibility and impossibility of naming or knowing the mystery of God’s transcendence. How can one “speak of the divine names,” Pseudo-Dionysius asks, if “the Transcendent surpasses all discourse [logos] and all knowledge, if it abides beyond the reach of mind and being, if it encompasses and circumscribes, embraces and anticipates all things while itself eluding their grasp and escaping from any perception, imagination, opinion, name, discourse, apprehension, or understanding”? (DN, 53). Pseudo-Dionysius enters further into and deepens the paradox by distinguishing between two modes of discourse: the kataphatic (saying) and the apophatic (unsaying). Since any single proposition concerning God inevitably falsifies God’s essentially unknowable transcendence, one can only speak of God by cultivating a language of “double propositions, in which meaning is generated through the tension between the saying and the unsaying.”110 The practice can “reach a point of intensity such that no single proposition concerning the transcendent can stand on its own” (2). This also means that “any saying (even a negative saying) demands a correcting proposition,

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an unsaying,” since even this “correcting proposition which unsays the previous proposition is in itself a ‘saying’ that must be ‘unsaid’ in turn” (ibid.). In the treatise, Pseudo-Dionysius executes this mystical logic by following a via superlativa or a “form of negation that is negation precisely because it is superlative.”111 As Derrida and others have observed, the Areopagite employs a “treatment of ‘hyper-terms,’ that is, super-eminent predications such as More-than-Good, More-than-God, More-than-Being (to hyperagathon, to hypertheon, to hyperousian) as a way of underlining the point that the divine unified names are ‘more than inefable and more than unknowable.’ ”112 Here, the prefix “ὑπέρ re-establishes neither essence nor knowledge, but transgresses them both in view of praising what precedes and makes possible all essence.”113 To speak of God as “superessential” is not simply to say what God is but also to say what God is not. Thus “what superficially seems to lack negation is strongly negative in meaning,” combining in one fraught gesture both the kataphatic and apophatic registers of theological discourse (ibid.). Just as this applies to God’s “Essence,” “Goodness,” and “Godliness,” so, too, does it apply to God’s “Life” or zóé—one of the “many names” of the “Nameless One” (D1:368). Above all name, beyond name, and without name, God also finds a name as the “Life which is above every life and is beyond the source of life” (DN, 103). God bears a “superlative life” or “lifebeyond-life” that is both the source of life and above the source of life, inexhaustibly pervading and sustaining every thing living while also transcending life and every living being.114 In a single divine Word or name: God is hypérzōos, the super-living, supra-vital, hyper-life (DN, 60; D1:71). Pseudo-Dionysius borrows this vocabulary from earlier Neoplatonic sources.115 But I am less concerned with origins than with the changes and variations introduced by the history (Fortleben) of Latin Christian translation. John the Scot Eriugena (c. 810–77) addresses the matter in an early commentary on Pseudo-Dionysius, where he notes that Latin does not regularly pronounce “under a single accent or by a unitary harmony of composition” what Greek expresses “by a single compound.”116 In at least one place, Eriugena suggests that the best Latin approximation of hypérzōos is the phrase plus quam vita.117 Such obstacles did not stop others from trying to imitate the unity of the Greek form. In the first full translation of the treatise On the Divine Names, the ninth-century bishop of Paris Hilduin simply ignores the potential limitations of Latin and chooses the terms supervitale and supervitalis vita as the two most plausible ways of expressing the apophatic tenor of the original (D1:71, 379). Eriugena later revised his translation

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of the text and, in the process, abandoned his grammatical reservations by introducing two new options for hypérzōos: plusquam vivens and supervivens (ibid.). The trend continued. Toward the mid-twelfth century, John Sarracenus undertook another translation, this time rendering hypérzōos as supervivens (and including the Latin term in a few places where the Greek word does not appear) (ibid.). But this, too, did not quite settle things. While supervivens never disappears, later translators like Robert Grosseteste (1235), Ambrose Traversari (1436), Marsile Ficin (1492), and Joachim Périon (1536) inscribed a series of other novel alternatives: superviva, supra vitam, super vitam, supra quam vivens, vitaque superior, excelsiorque vita, and vitalior superiorque vita (ibid.). The list reflects the striking contingency of translating hypérzōos as supervivens as well as the par ticular history that has made it possible to read or misread survival as a divine name. Did Benjamin know any of this? Like his many Lurianic readers, I can only hint at the possibility, turning, in similar and perhaps inevitably ironic fashion, to his discussions with Scholem on the nature of language, mysticism, and translation. At the conclusion of a long letter to Scholem, Benjamin mentions Pseudo-Dionysius’s treatise On the Divine Names, thanking his friend for “the reference to the book by the Areopagite.”118 Had he followed Scholem’s advice to read this volume, he probably would have done so with the help of Johann Engelhardt’s nineteenth-century German translation. There, he would have read about the mystical sublimity of God’s transcendent life, about a life that is at once the source of life and a life that rises sublimely above all life. He would have learned, that is, about the singular, high, and divine hyper-life of the One sometimes called and sometimes named hypérzōos. In Engelhardt’s translation: das Ueberlebende (AS, 66; DN, 60; D, 71).119 One could hardly ask for a more direct example of how a particular tradition of translation first made it possible to speak of God as das Ueberlebende and to take Überleben as an apophatic expression of divine super-life.120 In Engelhardt’s rendition, das Ueberlebende is one of the many names that expresses the inexpressible majesty of the divine, a superlative synonym of sorts for God’s transcendent Goodness, Divinity, Essentiality, Righteousness, Salvation, Perfection, Truth, and Word (AS, 60; DN, 55).121 Like the Logos, as the Logos and beyond the Logos, das Ueberlebende is a name for the primordial or super-primordial cause of all things, which “goes forth from the beginning of the world through all things until the very end” (145; 120). It is a name for the “omnipotent,” all-mighty One, who “has power

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over all, and governs all totally,” who rules every thing, “is the goal of all yearning,” and the object of all love (ibid.). It is a name, finally, for the nameless One praised “as the Leader of Life, as Wisdom, as Spirit, as Word . . . as Power, as the Possessor of Gewalt, as the King of all sovereigns” (60; 55). Pseudo-Dionysius’s On the Divine Names is, therefore, and in no uncertain terms, a theological-political treatise on the archaeology of survival: reine überlebende Gewalt, pure surviving power.

• Let me rehearse once more what Benjamin has tried to teach us about life, language, and the creative Word. Throughout the essay, he insists that “in translation, the original grows into an at once higher and purer atmosphere of language,” translation itself being the interruptive violence or deforming force that flays the organic union between a language’s meaning and its particular mode of expression (GS4:14; TT, 79). Translation provides an anticipation of the “high life” of pure language, marking a stage in the messianic movement or eschatological exfoliation that is the Fortleben of works (11; 79). But in truth, the highest and purest life of language also belongs to the beginning. Unlike other originals, Holy Scripture bears the veridical force of a language that has never known any organic bond with sense. The language of revelation is already the absolute excess of insignificance and contentless power that precedes all language as its abyssal ground: the high or superlative life that generates, in complete unmetaphorical objectivity, the life of history. Without the mediation of meaning, the nonsensical Gewalt of the divine, creative Word becomes nothing less than the pure performative force carried forward in the Fortleben of texts and anticipated by the proleptic violence of translation. It is the meaningless, prehistorical, and transcendentally sovereign hyper-life of the Logos. After Luther and after Goethe, Benjamin rewrites the political theology of John for the discourse network of mysticism: Im Anfang war das Überleben, in the beginning was Survival.

The Heavenly Victim This chapter has focused on decidedly heavenly themes: mysticism, hyper-life, and the sovereignty of divine power. Among other things, it has meant temporarily marginalizing other important questions, including some mentioned

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by Benjamin in his essay on Romanticism. For instance: victimhood, sacrifice, and destructibility. Beyond Benjamin, though, one knows that “in common sense as in scientific discourse, to survive means . . . to undergo sufering.”122 Survival is a matter of “negativity,” “passivity,” and “passion” (ibid.); it is a triumph of life that is not only triumphant life but also a triumph over life; and it is a name for figures like Lazarus’s death and resurrection. These aspects of survival seem to lead away from mysticism and the history of translation that has taken us from Pseudo-Dionysius’s hypérzōos to Eriugena’s supervivens to Benjamin’s Überleben. They are questions, in other words, that could inspire a search for a supplement to the sovereign power and super-life of mystical survival, with a more “scientific,” “commonsensical,” or even “resurrectional” perspective on survival’s passion (as if such a thing were possible). Consider, in closing, the path opened up by Benjamin’s contemporary and occasional interlocutor Erich Auerbach. In his 1946 study of Mimesis, Auerbach turns to Christ’s Passion as the doctrinal key to the representation of reality in Western literature.123 One of Auerbach’s many examples comes from a “eulogistic and hortatory” epistle by Saint Jerome, which deploys a language of rhetorical sublimity in order to achieve “extremes of vividness in the gruesome.”124 Jerome writes: “This one, sickly from childhood, no longer needs to beg . . . for his alms; that one, decomposed by disease . . . survives his own corpse [supravivit cadaveri suo].”125 According to Auerbach, “the showy pictorial style of the rhetoric is apparent from the beginning in the contrasting expressions of the greatest luxury and the most pitiful misery, where the opposite poles of style are consciously displayed.”126 This includes “the play with verbal and conceptual antitheses” like supravivit cadaveri suo (ibid.). What Auerbach does not explain is the meaning of this phrase: to survive one’s own corpse. His analysis does not explain the relationship between this conceptual antithesis and the histories of mysticism and sovereignty suggested by Arendt and Benjamin. To answer these questions, I turn now to Franz Rosenzweig’s book The Star of Redemption (1921). From heavenly victim to God-corpse, Rosenzweig will ofer a renewed reading of the corpus mysticum of Christian survival as well as its various excarnations (Jews, Muslims).

CHAPTER 3

The Imitation of Christ

Follow me. I am the Way, the Truth, and the Life. Without the Way, there is no going. Without the Truth, there is no knowing. Without the Life, there is no living. I am the Way which you must follow, the Truth which you must believe, the Life for which you must hope. I am the inviolable Way, the infallible Truth, the unending Life. I am the Way that is straight, the supreme Truth, the Life that is true, the blessed, the uncreated Life. —Thomas à Kempis, De imitatione Christi What is important is, on the contrary, that Christianity is present even where—and perhaps especially where—it is no longer possible to recognize it. —Jean-Luc Nancy, “A Deconstruction of Monotheism”

When it comes to Franz Rosenzweig and survival, matters seem simple enough.1 In a comment on “Jewish destiny” in his 1921 book The Star of Redemption, Rosenzweig writes: “In Judaism man is always somehow a remnant [Rest], always somehow a survivor [Übriggebliebener]” (S, 450).2 Scholarship on this passage has explained that the “remnant of Israel” is the “true people in the people,” a narrow remainder that continually and eternally forms itself through a separation from every thing non-Jewish (S, 449; SR, 427). Judaism produces itself through an infinite process of fission: a division and subtraction that leaves behind only the most faithful and essential nucleus of the faith.3 Some recall that already in the book of Isaiah, this remnant forms a “band of survivors,” which, in following the messianic

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path, turns away from “absolute hopelessness,” in order to acquire “the vital mobile intensity” of a higher and more blessed life.4 Richard Cohen observes that “Judaism’s miraculous survival over thousands of years depends not on expansion but on retraction, on the strength of a hard but faithful core of practitioners.”5 Jews survive through a perpetual self-diferentiation, concentration, and discrimination that constantly yields an authentic remainder. In Gregory Kaplan’s words: “Judaism puts the survival of the Jews to the test, promising for them only a remnant in history.”6 A definitive accretion of commentary has furnished Rosenzweig’s terse statement on the “remnant of Israel” as the exemplary evidence for reading the Star as an exegesis of Jewish survival: an inquiry into the meaning of cultural persistence, dissimilation, chosenness, isolation, anti-historicism, and more. The citation has further justified a reading of survival as a Jewish question, as a question for Jews and Jewish history, and as the very question of Judaism (if not the “Jewish question”).7 Its Judeocentric perspective has ensured that if there are survivors in the Star—and there are—they must be Jews (and not Buddhists, Muslims, Christians, pagans, or any of the groups that Rosenzweig proliferates in his massive work of comparative religion).8 Alain Finkielkraut and Benny Lévy concur that for Rosenzweig, the Jew always emerges “through the formation of the remnant, the positive production of the survivor [survivant].”9 In truth, they add, “every Jew is essentially a survivor.”10 The question I ask in this chapter is: Are things as simple as they appear to be? Is survival Jewish, primarily Jewish, or obviously so? Is the “remnant” the literal and uncontroversial translation of “survival” in the Star? What diference does this comma—remnant, survivor—make? The hiatus is crucial. Dana Hollander has compellingly shown, for example, that William Hallo’s canonical English version of Rosenzweig’s Der Stern der Erlösung “misleadingly gives ‘survivor’ for the German Übriggebliebener.”11 Rosenzweig “maintains in this word the emphasis on bleiben, on remaining (übrigbleiben as remaining-over)” and, at least here, does not ask what it means that something has been “survived (überlebt)” (ibid.).12 As many have noticed, the “deceptively modest word” bleiben is a critical term for Rosenzweig and recurs throughout the Star as both a mark of the book’s structure and as a trace of its author’s life.13 In the well-known narrative, Rosenzweig decided to forgo his promised conversion to Christianity and, in choosing to remain Jewish, stated: “Ich bleibe also Jude” (MW1.1:133).14 Within the Star, Rosenzweig frames his work as an investigation into the meaning of the mortal desire to remain (bleiben) in life.15 A number of studies

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have devoted themselves to explicating the significance of this vocabulary for Rosenzweig’s philosophy of finitude, his theology of revelation, his logic of totality, his notion of the remnant, and his doctrine of Jewish election.16 Hollander’s insight, however, also promises the beginnings of a diferent task. For even as a great deal of attention and debate has succeeded in defining bleiben as a basic concept in the Star, almost no consideration has been given to that other word: überleben.

• The path from Arendt to Benjamin has already underscored the risks that linguistic diference poses to the logical systematicity of the English “survival” and the safety of its hermeneutical uniformity.17 Rosenzweig calls attention to the eruptive efects of the “foreign voice” (either anticipating or confirming Talal Asad’s more recent assertion that “all good translation seeks to reproduce the structure of an alien discourse within the translator’s own language”).18 In another reading of survival (Fortleben, Überleben), Derrida explores the impossibility of making “accessible a meaning that can be transmitted as such, in its own unequivocal, translatable identity.”19 More and less than a termination of reading, the unreadable or “untranslatable in a language” represents the condition for any reading and any contextualization, the paralytic starting point that permits a new mobilization for “reading and writing and translation” (ibid.). Barbara Cassin notes on this score that speaking “of untranslatables in no way implies that the terms in question . . . are not and cannot be translated.”20 Untranslatables are, rather, “what one keeps on (not) translating,” a signal that “translation, into one language or another, creates a problem” (ibid.). Far from abandoning the question of survival in Rosenzweig, I deepen the problem by accounting for the possibility or impossibility of its readability. I begin with the fact that, just as Benjamin was postulating a diference between Leben, Überleben, and Fortleben, Rosenzweig was engaging in his own textualization of these distinctions (as well as adding a few others). At stake, once again, is a definitive reorientation of the “Jewish” lines of sight that have dominated previous scholarship: a perspectival shift that seeks to disaggregate the all-too-obvious, all-too-solid, and all-too-visible bond between Jews and survival. My argument is that Rosenzweig stages survival (Überleben, Fortleben, etc.) in the Star not as a particularly Jewish question but as a warring site of “the association and dissociation, the accord

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and the disaccord of the Jew, the Christian and the Muslim.”21 I show that Rosenzweig’s text coordinates these bellicose encounters through a stasiology of Christ’s body and the anthropological unrest that it contains: a fluctuating antipodal movement that swings from the heights of the divine to the depths of the corpse.22 The survival of human subjectivity, Rosenzweig suggests, receives its limits and conditions in the paradox of a God-corpse, through “the imitation of Christ’s sufering,” and along a globalatin itinerary of imitatio Christi.23 In a preliminary efort to sketch the contemporary significance of this story and to set the stage for Rosenzweig’s own intervention, I look first to Giorgio Agamben’s more recent, postwar work in the Remnants of Auschwitz (1998).24 The book opens up a comparative path by distinguishing the biopolitical history of “survival” from the theological history of the “remnant” and by making this diference a site of association and disassociation for the names Jew, Muslim, and Christian. What Agamben hints at, but does not fully interrogate, is the possibility that the biopolitical history of survival already contains its own theological element. In other words, his argument reveals the discursive investments that both beckon and divert the possibility of thinking survival as a Christian question. Rosenzweig’s own theological-political anthropology, I wager, is a precursor and supplement.

Survival, Remnant (Politics, Biology, Theology) Like Rosenzweig, Agamben begins his analysis of the “remnant” by stressing its messianic or eschatological structure. “The remnant,” he tells us, “is a theologico-messianic concept” (R, 62). It refers not so much to a numerical portion of Israel as to “the consistency assumed by Israel when placed in relation with an eskhaton, with election or the messianic event” (R, 162).25 The theologian Oscar Cullmann has defined the redemptive function of the remnant as a “progressive reduction,” whereby the whole people acquires its salvation through the representation of a few.26 In the divine saga of redemption, “the history of one people becomes determinative for the salvation of all men. Out of sinful humanity God chose one community, the people of Israel, for the salvation of the world.”27 Agamben sees in this “relation to salvation” not only the dissolution of any distinction between part and whole but also a mechanism by which a whole people can posit “itself as

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remnant” (R, 163). This image, Agamben argues, is a “redemptive machine” for the biopolitical fracture of modernity he defines as survival (ibid.). Following Émile Benveniste, and adhering to the proposition that “philosophical problems become clearer if they are formulated as questions concerning the meaning of words,” Agamben turns to the Latin term superstes.28 The survivor is the witness, he writes, not in the juridical sense of being a third party at a trial but rather in the sense of being one who has “experienced an event from beginning to end” and therefore is able to bear witness to it (R, 17). The survivor is one of the privileged few who, having lived through the “gray zone” of the camp, can report on the ethical paradox that occurred there. The lacuna of this testimony is that the survivor is never more than a “pseudo-witness,” who always speaks by proxy for those who remain silent (34). The alienated position of the survivor’s speech attests to the irrecoverable absence and the irretrievable silence at the core of every testimony. In the essential paradox, the “true witnesses” and the “complete witnesses” are those who cannot speak and who cannot in any sense bear witness to what they saw (ibid.). The name for this contradictory figure of the “untestifiable” is “der Muselmann, literally, the ‘Muslim’” (41). According to several hypotheses, the most degraded prisoners of the camp, the most malnourished and most irremediably deprived of will and consciousness, received this name because their immense resignation evoked “Islam’s supposed fatalism” and gave the “impression of seeing Arabs praying” (43).29 To become a Muslim was to have “touched bottom,” to have become a figure of “Oriental” agony, and to have become a walking corpse: a member of the living dead, the mummy men, and the drowned. The Muslim marks the point at which life passes into death and the human passes into the inhuman (R, 55). This “phenomenology of testimony” animates the entirety of Agamben’s meditation on Auschwitz and becomes the basis for his more general rethinking of human subjectivity.30 The account situates itself in the “impossible dialectic between the survivor [superstite] and the Muselmann, the pseudo-witness and the ‘complete witness,’ the human and the inhuman” (R, 120; Q, 111). More than individual or dissociable forms of life, these two figures (the survivor and the Muslim) form the poles of a double movement that defines the human subject as “the absolute concomitance of subjectification and desubjectification, self-loss and self-possession, servitude and sovereignty” (R, 107). The camps reveal in horrifying brutality the essential lack that distinguishes the human being in its irreducible diference between the speaking being and the living being. Whereas the survivor figures

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the subjectification of the human being through the appropriation of language, the Muslim figures the continued existence of the living being who never comes to speech and whose bare life testifies to the survivor’s own inhumanity. The survivor and the Muslim bear witness to “a zone of indistinction in which it is impossible to establish the position of the subject, to identify the ‘ imagined substance’ of the ‘I’ and, along with it, the true witness” (120). In one of Agamben’s various synoptic phrases: “The human being exists in the human being’s non-place, in the missing articulation between the living being and logos” (134). The subject witnesses its own perpetual subjectification and desubjectification, its own becoming-survivor and becoming-Muslim. Being human means never coinciding with oneself but always living errantly in the disjunctive conjunction between the life of language and the life of the corpse. In short: the human being survives. This, at least, is how Agamben puts it in his first formulation of the “thesis that summarizes the lesson of Auschwitz” (R, 133). Other wise devoted to a commentary on testimony, Agamben pauses his argument to consider the history of the word “survival” and the irrevocable ambiguity it contains. The verb supervivo (“equivalent” to but also distinguishable from the term superstes) “designates the striking idea of survival with respect to one’s own life” (132). An examination of its attestations within the history of Latin “implies that in human beings, life bears with it a caesura that can transform all life into survival and all survival into life” (133). On the one hand, survival indicates the “continuation of bare life,” the persistence of the Muslim’s inhumanity beyond the cessation of human life. On the other hand, survival “has a positive sense” and refers to the survivor (il superstite), the “person, who in fighting against death, has survived the inhuman” (R, 133; Q, 124). Agamben’s singular thesis is: “The human being is the one who can survive [sopravvivere] the human being” (ibid.). Survival is the name for the oscillating, if empty, center of human subjectivity: a double movement of subjectification and desubjectification that crosses the unity-in-diference of the survivor and the Muslim. This capacity for survival, Agamben concludes, means that the human being has no definable essence. Human is only “what remains [ciò che resta] after the destruction of the human being” (134; 125). The remnant (of Auschwitz) is this “fracture between the living being and the speaking being, the inhuman and the human” (R, 134). On one reading, then, survival (la sopravvivenza)—and not the survivor (il superstite)—is the proper translation of the remnant. Still, Agamben

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never quite manages to write the sentence: the remnant is survival. Instead, he quickly resumes his phenomenology of testimony and says: “the witness is this remnant” (R, 134). The absence of an overt link between the two concepts registers only a small displacement of the bond that obviously joins them together. Yet the decision not to read survival as the explicit conceptual translation of the remnant also reinforces the distance between survival and the theologico-messianic discourse of the remnant. This suggests that survival belongs to a genealogy that does not immediately correspond to the remnant’s redemptive narrative.

• For this history, Agamben turns to Foucault, who, in an early articulation of biopolitics, observed that “one of the basic phenomena of the nineteenth century was what might be called power’s hold over life” (SD, 239). Under this new regime, Foucault claimed, “the biological came under state control” and, for the first time, acquired power over man as “a living being” (239). The old power “to take life and to let live” gradually gave way to another right: “to make live and to let die” (241). Power took hold of the life of the population and began to manage its birth and death, health and illness. One outcome of this transition from sovereignty to biopolitics was racism, which introduced “caesuras within the biological continuum addressed by biopower” (255). The biopolitical protection of the population became the justification for verdicts on the definition of the population. Nazism only brought biopower to its terrifying conclusion because it made “the field of the life it manages, protects, guarantees, and cultivates in biological terms absolutely coextensive with the sovereign right to kill anyone, meaning not only other people, but also its own people” (260). It made it possible for the citizen to pass “into the Staatsangehörige of non-Aryan descent, the non-Aryan into the Jew, the Jew into the deportee, and, finally, the deported Jew beyond himself into the Muselmann, that is, into a bare, unassignable and unwitnessable life” (R, 156). The Muslim was not an aberration but rather the “final biopolitical substance” separated out from a longer chain of auto-immunitary distinctions meant to protect the population through its own negation (86, 156). Anyone could become a non-Aryan, anyone could become a Jew, and anyone could become a Muslim once politics became biopolitics. In his supplemental critique, Agamben turns to Xavier Bichat’s eighteenthcentury research on the physiology of life and death. Bichat’s thesis was “that

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life can survive itself and that life is, indeed, constitutively fractured into a plurality of lives and therefore deaths” (R, 151). According to Agamben, “whether what survives is the human or the inhuman, the animal or the organic, it seems that life bears within itself the dream—or nightmare—of survival [della sopravvivenza]” (R, 155; Q, 144). In this sense, Agamben proposes a modification to Foucault’s biopolitical formula. The function of biopower is no longer “to make die or to make live, but to make survive [far sopravvivenza]” (155; 145).31 Power consists not in the “production of life or death” but in a “mutable and virtually infinite survival”: “In every case, it is a matter of dividing animal life from organic life, the human from the inhuman, the witness from the Muslim, conscious life from vegetative life . . . until a threshold is reached: an essentially mobile threshold that, like the borders of geopolitics, moves according to the progress of scientific and political techniques. Biopower’s supreme ambition is to produce, in a human body, the absolute separation of living being and speaking being, zoe and bios, the inhuman and the human—survival” (R, 155; Q, 144).32 The fabrication of survival is the “final secret” of biopolitics: the sundering of the human being from itself (R, 156; Q, 146). For Agamben, this arcanum appears in the figure that also represents the “true” or “perfect cipher” of the camps (R, 48). In the Muslim, biopower creates “a survival separated from every possibility of testimony, a kind of absolute biopolitical substance that, in its isolation, allows for the attribution of demographic, ethnic, national, and political identity” (156). The Muslim does not describe a member of a particular community; the name attests to the limit of every biopolitical organization and the lines that draw its borders. Agamben speaks here of “an indefinite being in whom not only humanity and non-humanity, but also vegetative existence and relation, physiology and ethics, medicine and politics, and life and death continuously pass through each other” (48). The Muslim is a non-place “in which all disciplinary barriers are destroyed and all embankments flooded” (ibid.). If not the last survivor, the Muslim is nonetheless the last survival.

• In tracing this genealogy, I have emphasized the distance that Agamben’s discussion of survival takes from any easily readable association with the discourse on the remnant. The question is whether survival remains restricted to the spheres of biology and politics or whether it also bears a trace

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of the theological. There are a number of reasons for raising this possibility, not the least of which is the theological register betrayed by the name “Muslim.” I point here to Agamben’s citation of Primo Levi, whose well-known remarks on the Muslims gesture in a “quasi-theological” direction: “Their life is short but their number is endless; they, the Muselmänner, the drowned, form the backbone of the camp, an anonymous mass, continually renewed and always identical, of non-men who march and labour in silence, the divine spark dead in them, already too empty to really sufer.”33 The Jewish philosopher Emil Fackenheim makes an impor tant attempt to comprehend the theological implications of the Muslims in Levi’s text by asking about the death of the “divine spark.”34 He poses the unsettling question: “Could Jesus of Nazareth have been made into a Muselmann?”35 And answers: If the incarnate Son of God was as fully human as all humanity, then the trinitarian Christian, like the liberal Christian and lest he heap a posthumous insult on all actual Muselmänner, must acknowledge the possibility of an incarnate Muselmann. And if the incarnate Son of God remains divine in spirit and power even in his incarnate state in Auschwitz, then, to be sure, the “divine spark” within him remains untouched, for it is untouchable. However, this very untouchability cruelly mocks all those who were not untouchable— equally those who were destroyed and those who remained undestroyed only by the dint of a desperate, day-and-night, life-and-death struggle. (287) Fackenheim does not ofer a theological reading of survival, but his difficult image—a Muslim Christ—raises the possibility of reading Levi’s “divine spark” as a Christian issue. His words at least authorize a series of questions concerning the possibility or impossibility of Christ becoming a Muslim: How does one locate the diference between the Muslim and Christ? Does the withdrawal of the divine from one correspond to an oppositional investment of divinity in the other? How does one measure the distance between the God-man and the corpse-man? Are the Muslims merely an inversion of Christ’s absolute divinity, the final biopolitical substance separated out from a continuum that leads from the sovereignty of the walking god to the subjection of a walking corpse? And where does the human subject—survivor and Muslim, witness and living dead—fall between these two extreme

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figures of humanity? To anticipate slightly: Does survival’s double movement of subjectification and desubjectification rely on the addition and subtraction of a divine spark? By separating the biopolitical (survival) and the theological (remnant), Agamben obscures these questions and deflects the possibility of a Christian theological contribution to the genealogy of human subjectivity. Yet his text does provide a partial response to Fackenheim’s hypothesis as well as an alternative configuration for the history of survival.36 Recall here Agamben’s commentary on the semantics of supervivo. Following the Latin history of the term, Agamben cites texts by Pliny and Apuleius as evidence of the word’s dative and reflexive meanings. But in his elaboration of a second meaning (the idea of a “genuine posthumous existence”) he tracks the word’s entrance into Christian sources (R, 132). According to Saint Ambrose, “Christ—and every Christian along with him—is both testator and inheritor—insofar as he has survived death” (133). For Saint Cyprian, on the other hand, survival applies to the sinner “who survives on earth on account of being spiritually dead” (ibid.). The citations suggest that the biopolitical genealogy of survival contains a theological prehistory, in which survival refers to both the higher life of Christ and the excessive life of the sinner: the life of the divine and the life of one condemned to live on even after the withdrawal of a “divine spark” (or “miracle,” as Arendt put it). These are the “conceptual antitheses” and ambivalent polarities—spirituality and sin, Christ and Muslim—that I explore as they appear on the other side of the rupture that Agamben calls “Auschwitz”: in Franz Rosenzweig’s Star of Redemption.

Seeing Like a Christian (a User’s Guide to The Cross of Redemption) Interpreters of Rosenzweig have frequently approached the Star through a Jewish optic. He is commonly even consistently understood as a “Jewish philosopher,” “Jewish thinker,” “Jewish theologian,” or representative of “Weimar German-Jewish” culture.37 But from the beginning, matters have also been more complicated. The Star’s earliest audience remained puzzled over how to identify its difficult text. While some readers celebrated it as a “nice ‘Jewish book,’ ” others “were convinced that he had finally accepted Christianity as the true path to salvation.”38 In his response to this oppositional reception, Rosenzweig only fomented the confusion by insisting that

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the Star was “not at all a ‘Jewish book,’ ” since it does not “treat Judaism . . . more extensively than Christianity, and hardly more extensively than Islam” (MW3:140). Benjamin Pollock has more recently noted that Rosenzweig’s “discussions of Judaism and Christianity do not transform the Star into a ‘Jewish book,’ in any ordinary sense of the term,” since they are only moments in his more comprehensive “system of philosophy.”39 Beyond “philosophy,” scholars have also registered the affinities between Rosenzweig’s thought and the theology of “contemporaneous Christian intellectuals.”40 In Samuel Moyn’s argument, the emphasis on Rosenzweig’s “choice to ‘remain a Jew’ ” has distracted from the fact that his return to Judaism occurred “in common with the renovation of Christianity” then advocated by a “circle of young protestants.”41 At a broader level, Paul Mendes-Flohr shows that Rosenzweig inhabited the “symbolic and spiritual world of Christianity that pervaded German culture.”42 To participate in the “dialogue and debate” that characterized the Jewish-Christian conflict was to speak “in terms of the Christian sensibility and conceptual framework,” as part of an asymmetric struggle within the sphere of a dominant “laicized Christianity” (ibid.).43 This is something that Rosenzweig knew well.44 Prior to writing the Star, he stated that “we are Christian in all things, we live in a Christian state, go to Christian schools, read Christian books, in short our entire ‘culture’ is founded on Christian principles through and through” (MW1:94).45 Is Rosenzweig a Jew? Is he a Christian? 46 My goal is not to arbitrate the authenticity of Rosenzweig’s identity or his degree of belonging to the Jewish tradition. Nor am I interested in rendering a final decision on the essential character of his unclassifiable book. The imperative, rather, lies in recognizing how the Star inscribes the perspectival problem textually and how it manages a succession of shifting positions, changing apertures, and fluctuating focal points. Rosenzweig’s book does not proceed across its various divisions through the unfolding of a continuous point of view.47 Certain changes introduce vertiginous discontinuities that lead at times to a “total inversion of perspective” and to “another order” or “viewpoint” from which “every thing begins anew.”48 Amos Funkenstein describes the movement as a series of “continuous translations, a constant shift of points of view,” by means of which Rosenzweig assumes “the vantages of paganism, Christianity, and Judaism—and explains, so to say from within, the manner in which they conceive the interaction between God, World, and Man (or fail to do so).”49 This “progressive change of perspectives,” he adds, resembles the

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workings of a “kaleidoscope”: a specular apparatus for the alternation of a text’s reflections, the adjustment of its composition, and the reconfiguration of its colors, shapes, and patterns (ibid.). Reading Christianity in the Star means assessing its specific chromatic arrangement and distinctive visual translation; it means measuring the dimensions of its frame, the depth and breadth of its field, and the refraction of its rays; it means asking whether Christianity is a “revealed religion,” “a form of civilization,” or a sociological phenomenon that persists beyond the limits of both church and state as “a set of social practices and institutions” (S, 104; SR, 104).50 It means, finally, asking whether Rosenzweig thinks that the world is “still Christian in this post-Christian age.”51 Another approach to Rosenzweig’s kaleidoscopic text could pursue a more multivalent, even multicolored, reading and one attentive to the book’s pluralism: its Judeo-Christian, Greco-Christian, or even “Über-Jewish, Über-Christian perspective.”52 I persist here, however, in a myopic mode, because it allows for a sharp refocusing of the sometimes warped magnifications that have guided the Star’s commentators between two extremes of interpretation: the Jewish and the general.53 Rosenzweig himself hinted at another hierarchy when he wrote that his book deals with no community more extensively than Christianity. In this regard, he is quite a good reader of his own text. Even a cursory glance confirms that Christianity appears far more than Judaism in the Star and contributes to the book’s argumentative structure in a way that far exceeds Judaism’s other wise limited scope. Always dividing and subtracting, isolating and withdrawing itself from history, Judaism actually remains rather difficult to read in the Star (despite its “ontological priority”).54 Rosenzweig’s theological and philosophical exposition develops from within the span of “the Christian centuries” and adheres to a historical framework that is “tantamount to the history of Christianity.”55 Always “expanding,” always “exploding the borders” that attempt to contain it, Christianity refuses even to abide by the limits imposed by the Star’s manifest organization, multiplying and spreading itself well beyond the domain explicitly devoted to it as Judaism’s communal counterpart in the work of redemption (S, 386; SR, 369). That is why Amos Funkenstein was right to say that Rosenzweig’s very ability “to see Judaism and Christianity as correlatives may be more Christian than Jewish.”56 It is a fact that also explains the saturation of Rosenzweig’s language “with Christian images and terms,” “churchlike images,” and virtues “traditionally extolled by Christianity” (295, 269). Leo Strauss, too,

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stressed early on that Rosenzweig’s doctrine of election “approaches Judaism from the point of view of Christianity” because it “looks for a Jewish analogon to the Christian doctrine of the Christ.”57 In another comment, Jacob Taubes observed the “weight and relevance” that the “historical victory of the church” and the “triumph of the cross” assume for Rosenzweig.58 The Star of Redemption may ultimately privilege the redemptive power of Judaism. But it also situates the entirety of its critical intervention within a Christian closure, a Christian economy, and a Christian vision. As Taubes insistently claimed, the Star makes a stunning contribution to the Christianization of world history. I recommend that before trying to recognize Jewish survival, one take a moment to see survival like a Christian—to scope out Christianity.

Life (Biology, Theology, Politics) A plausible point of departure for a reading of survival in the Star is the question of life. As some have shown, “life” is one of the most significant and frequently mentioned terms in Rosenzweig’s text and a mark of its “basic interpretive horizon.”59 This much is clear from the book’s first pages, which begin in a vital, if morbid, key: “From death, from the fear of death, all cognition of the all arises” (S, 3; SR, 9). In the polemical remarks that inaugurate his thought, Rosenzweig unleashes an assault on the entire history of philosophical idealism. The specific target of his relentless ofensive is the tradition’s disregard for the fact of death. While all thinking finds its originary provocation in the terror of human finitude, philosophy has repeatedly falsified its own foundations by avoiding the only question that deserves its sustained attention. Gesturing toward a world beyond this one and abandoning the mortal body for the sake of an immortal soul, philosophy dismisses the “fear of the earthly” and snatches “from death its poisonous sting” (ibid.). It abdicates its responsibility for the mortal human being, who from birth crawls “like a worm into the folds of the naked earth before the whizzing missiles of blind pitiless death” (ibid.).60 Even as death subjects the human being to an essential vulnerability and animality, philosophy responds by fleeing from this battlefield and by imagining the possibility of an escape from the “narrowness of life” (S, 3; SR, 9). It exhibits this profound cowardice by replacing concrete fear with a sheer fabrication: the idea of the all. This is the promise of system, the ruse of a totality that “would not die”

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and in which “nothing would die” (4; 10). Philosophical idealism deserts the singular, mortal human being and forgets the most basic thing: “the human being does not at all want to escape from any fetters; he wants to remain [bleiben], he wants—to live” (3; 9). Rosenzweig’s opening salvo sounds the mission that consumes his “militant book” and its specific strategic formation: a tactical deployment that begins with the dismantling of the solid unicity of philosophy’s metaphysics and the reconstitution of its shattered pieces as the three basic concepts of “God,” “ human,” and “world.” In a second deployment, Rosenzweig supplements these still-isolated terms with the categories of theology. While “creation” establishes God’s general providence over the world, “revelation” introduces the possibility of resistance to death’s ineluctable sting. Without overcoming death or ignoring it, revelation teaches man (i.e., man) that God’s “love is as strong as death” and that love is the only thing capable of declaring “war on it” (S, 174; SR, 169). To cultivate this martial love and to anticipate its absolute expansion over the entire world is what Rosenzweig calls “redemption.” It provides the ultimate answer to the essential questions posed by Rosenzweig’s text: What does it mean to remain in life? To continue living under the threat of death? And to live through this perpetual struggle without the consolation ofered by immortality?

• This is all good evidence that Rosenzweig’s entire book is a commentary on survival. Life is always already remaining. Leben is bleiben. But if my introductory remarks mean anything, it is that the simple equation obscures a more complex dynamic. Consider, for starters, Rosenzweig’s participation in the discourse of Lebensphilosophie.61 Writing in 1918, Georg Simmel claimed that at the end of the nineteenth century, life emerged as a new Weltanschauung capable of integrating “reality” with the “metaphysical, psychological, moral, and aesthetic values” of the age.62 Like being, God, and nature before it, life took hold as the “secret-king of the intellectual epoch” and the “central concept from which intellectual movements originate and towards which they seem to be oriented” (13).63 The concept of life became a Kampfbegriff in a cultural war that privileged “ ‘authentic experiences’ . . . dynamism, creativity, immediacy and youth” as the only means of resistance against a deadened and mechanized civilization.64 Thinkers such as Nietzsche, Bergson, Scheler, Klages, Spengler, and Haeckel were the varied

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disseminators of a “jargon of life” that cut across the boundaries of biology, philosophy, theology, and politics.65 In the German context, Wilhelm Dilthey’s concept of Erlebnis proved especially crucial in popularizing life as a designation for the holistic, intuitive experience that preceded any conceptual thematization or logical reflection.66 Before writing Being and Time (1927), Heidegger observed that the term “life” had assumed reference “to a comprehensive, ultimate, and meaningful reality.”67 For a while, he even adopted the term as a “basic phenomenological category” (70).68 Heidegger also noticed that the concept of life carried with it a remarkable “vagueness and ambiguity.”69 Its semantic reach had become so extensive that it had somehow become possible to say “anything and every thing about ‘life’” (ibid.). Hans Blumenberg has observed that “this ambiguity in the use of the word ‘life’ is no random or arbitrary equivocation.”70 The life “that one lives, between birth and death, pressed between natality and mortality, manifests not only the substrate and scope but rather the appearance and reality of precisely that life, which is also questioned in biological language” (ibid.). This apparent “polysemy” is one reason for arguing that vitalism is only “a name for the set of multiple doctrines and movements premised on life variously understood.”71 Life is nothing until specific interpretive authorities have come to impose their distinctive “regimes of meaning” upon it.72 In this light, there is no ignoring the contingent hegemony of biology.73 This is something that Benjamin recognized and sought to resist in his attempts to invert the hierarchy between the life of “organic corporeality” and the more comprehensive life of history.74 As he claimed, the phrase “organic corporeality” goes well beyond the limited horizon or set of authorial regimes that come together under the name Lebensphilosophie. For example, his link between life and art could also recall nineteenth-century Romantic life science and its facilitation of an “analogy between aesthetic and biological form.”75 Schiller, Coleridge, and others “helped to found Romantic aesthetics on an organic model” by borrowing insights from contemporaneous developments in physiology and embryology (25). Foucault argues that this comparison was only possible beginning at the end of the eighteenth century, when an “opposition between the organic and the inorganic [became] fundamental” (O, 232).76 In this new taxonomical space, “the organic becomes the living and the living is that which produces, grows, and reproduces” (O, 232). The inorganic, on the other hand, “is the non-living, that which neither develops nor reproduces; it lies at the frontiers of life, the inert, the unfruitful—death” (ibid.). This distinction, Foucault concludes, is

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what finally permitted a shift away from “natural history” toward “something resembling a biology” (ibid.). As Agamben has reiterated, the eighteenth-century analyses of Bichat were particularly important for establishing this decisive reorganization of knowledge and for the production of a “fundamental opposition of life and death” (O, 232). Over the course of the nineteenth century, the construction of life in organic terms solidified the “rupture from rigidly mechanistic conceptions of the world.”77 For the metaphorical trajectory of European moral, political, and aesthetic thought, the externally determined and hierarchically managed image of the machine gave way to the paradigm of “organic life as a dynamic process of self-formation and self-generation, a spontaneous, rational-purposive and autocausal becoming.”78 In the post-Nietzschean context, Simmel delivered an influential version of this anti-mechanistic discourse and its alignment of the living with the organic (LA, 100; VL, 64).79 The vitality of the “organic body,” he wrote, difers from the lifelessness of the inorganic because it “produces its configuration [Gestalt] from within” (LA, 99; VL, 63). Its “innate formative energies” guarantee that “conditions of its overall existence are the same as the conditions of its manifest form” (ibid.). The inorganic body, by contrast, has no such autonomous unity or self-formative potency for the simple reason that “the conditions of its form reside outside itself” (ibid.). Much like life in the “mechanistic view” of the world, the inorganic thing acquires the beginning and end of its operation through the intervention of an external agent (ibid.). From the organic perspective, the need for exogenous causation and cessation negates vitality. The true “mystery of the organic form” is its capacity to determine its own boundaries and, in doing so, to produce and include within itself its own antithesis (ibid.). “In every single moment of life,” Simmel summarizes, “we are beings that will die, and each moment would be other wise if this were not our innate condition, somehow operative within it” (101; 64–65). In one of his most explicit definitions of life, Rosenzweig echoes Simmel’s organicism by describing the possibility of “an individuality that sets its own limits, that determines its size and configuration by itself and can only be impeded but not determined by others” (S, 247; SR, 238).80 Following the anti-mechanistic tradition, he argues that the name for self-forming, self-determining, and sovereign subjectivities is life. Living beings “are not the mere product and mere point of intersection of forces, but once there, a something that seeks to affirm itself in its own configuration against all forces” (S, 247; SR, 238). Rosenzweig’s inheritance of the modern discourse

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on the organic even leads him to repeat one of its founding definitions. According to Bichat’s well-known formulation, “life is the totality of those functions that resist death.”81 In Rosenzweig’s own reprisal of the doctrine: “Life ofers resistance; it resists, that is to say, death” (S, 248; SR, 239).82 This is the Star’s unavoidable vitalism, organicism, and biologism. But for Rosenzweig, this understanding of life emerges only through a history of the world’s disenchantment. Before the nineteenth century, and beyond biology, life receives its determination through the theological-political investment of Christianity.

“The Life of Christ” In his continuing attempts to dismantle the philosophical tradition’s evasion of death, Rosenzweig charts a history of human subjectivity from its first moments in Greek and Roman antiquity. His privileged representative for the ancient encounter with death is the “tragic hero,” whose desire for immortality corresponds to the singular finitude “that dominates his life” (S, 83; SR, 85). The tragic hero’s confrontation with mortality leads to his alienation from the world. Removed from its “cries and silences” and thrust into a sphere of “sovereign muteness,” he becomes disengaged from others and consigned solely to his own self (ibid.). For the tragic hero, “there is no bridge to any outside” but only the atomizing force of death (S, 85; SR, 87). His “ultimate longing” for immortality is a response to this silent estrangement from the world (S, 86; SR, 88). According to the ancient doctrine, Rosenzweig says, the belief in the “liberated self’s inability to die” takes the form of psychology—the soul becomes that “something that already by its nature is incapable of death” (ibid.). By separating itself from the body, the “psyche” becomes the bearer of the self’s immortality, the vehicle for the self’s perpetuation of its own uniqueness beyond the demise of its corporeal form. The tragic hero achieves immortality for the self only at the expense of a division between body and soul. While the self succeeds in remaining itself, its dependence on the soul entails a fluctuating journey of constant change and transmigration. The soul passes through “the most unrecognizable configurations, for none of those configurations becomes its possession” (S, 87; SR, 88). In the end, “there remains nothing recognizable from its passage through the forms” (ibid.). Even in its immortality, the self fails to secure its permanence and preserves itself “only in perfect muteness and absence of

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relationship . . . always the singular, solitary, unspeaking self” (ibid.). Against this unending alienation, Rosenzweig seeks something else: a new sense of immortality that moves the whole of the “ human being beyond the opposition of ‘body and soul’ ” (S, 87; SR, 89). From the perspective of antiquity, this prospect remains impossible. For a view beyond, Christianity must first explode the limits imposed by its borders.

• Rosenzweig presents the appearance of Christianity in the ancient world as an unanticipated eruption and conceptual fissure. Christ’s revelation creates a caesura in history, a breach in the order of things that, in destroying the familiarity of the old, broaches an entirely new epochal consciousness. It tears apart the coherent fabric of antiquity and makes clear that “a new life has now begun” (S, 245; SR, 236). This perspectival inversion means that the disenchantment of antiquity is neither the beginning nor the culmination of a linear historical development but a discursive about-face that makes a formerly comprehensible and familiar world seem uncanny. Those who were at home in the self-evidence of the Platonic and Aristotelian cosmos now for the first time feel themselves dispossessed of their previous comfort and confronted with a world that appears “enchanting and enchanted” (S, 246; SR, 237). They find themselves subject to “another concept of the world”: a novel set of epistemic definitions that reclassifies old objects according to a new conceptual order (ibid.). From this point forward, history follows a different periodization: a past defined by the falsity of enchantment, a present still struggling against the lingering elements of this pagan past, and a future that will succeed in overcoming and finally eliminating enchantment from the world. The crucial concept that precipitates this massive restructuring of time is “creation,” which, in placing the world under God’s providential governance, refuses “to tolerate any violent interference by means of magic, any artificially indirect exploration” that could intervene in the divine plan or other wise attempt to force its course (ibid.). It inaugurates a millennium-long efort to disenchant the world—a project, Rosenzweig says, that does not reach its conclusion until the seventeenth century and the birth of “modern science” (ibid.). Rosenzweig explains that in Christian antiquity the idea of creation breaks apart the solidity of philosophical thought by reconceiving existence according to a new relationship between the universal and the particular,

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genus and individual. God’s providence imposes universal sovereignty over a world still contaminated by finite particularities and their ephemerally passing moments. In its created existence (Dasein), the world persists as an incessantly fleeting objectivity, which receives its transient permanence only through the constant renewal imposed by divine governance (S, 133–35; SR, 131–33). With the emergence of modern science and the final vanishing of the ancient cosmos, the long dialectical trajectory of disenchantment arrives at a unilateral understanding of the world “as existence [Dasein], and only as existence, momentary existence” without any fundamental source of stability or permanence (ibid.). This history gives rise to the “pure thought of the creature [Kreatur]” (ibid.). As Rosenzweig describes it elsewhere: the “poor subject of creation” (S, 247; SR, 238). Once it ventures out from under the “strong protection of divine providence,” it loses its source of persistence and threatens to sink “back into nothing” (ibid.). Still absent from this thoroughly disenchanted world is an “individuality that bears within it something that does not pass away but rather once there endures” (ibid.). In a word: life. With this, Rosenzweig’s theological genealogy of modernity returns to the organic. The process of disenchantment first inaugurated by Christian revelation leads to a world defined by the continuing, even intensifying, transience of existence. But this dearth of life is not a total absence. Organic life appears scattered across creation from the very beginning: the disparate paradigm of life’s primordial excess over the world’s fleeting objectivity. Simple organisches Leben becomes a “visible sign of a concept of life that extends its sphere of influence [Machtbereich] well beyond the limits of organic nature” (S, 248; SR, 239). As Rosenzweig reminds us, not only “merely living beings but also institutions, communities, feelings, things, and works—every thing, really every thing can be alive” (ibid.). Any objective individuality can become a vital subjectivity, a “self-possessing, self-forming and thus necessarily enduring configuration” (ibid.).83 Life intervenes into the evanescence and destructive force of mere existence by becoming the “knowledge of its preservation” (S, 248; SR, 239). It signals the possibility for an always vanishing individuality to assume its own “configuration” and become ruler of its own “kingdom [Reich]” (ibid.). For a world still poor in life, the organic alone resists the transience of existence. But the sporadic presence of organic life also announces something else: the potential for another, higher form of life. In “preserving its permanence through resistance life now indicates after all that it does not entirely correspond to what we are seeking” (S, 248; SR, 239). The goal is not

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to uncover “permanent points, that is to say, foci of life in a still unliving world”; it is, rather, to discover “the permanence of the world itself . . . an infinite permanence” (ibid.). Finite life is “simply the not-yet-infinite” (ibid.). What matters is that “the world . . . become fully alive” (ibid.). From its primal sign in the organic world, life contains within it the possibility of overcoming resistance to death and abandoning its dependence upon external forces. Rosenzweig anticipates an “infinite life” that would extend over all of existence and sustain its transience with an enduring permanence: unending life, life without death, form without resistance (S, 249; SR, 239). In theological terms, organic life promises life’s fulfillment: the prediction of its miraculous completion in and of the world. This constant and eternal movement toward the final “vitalization of existence” is what Rosenzweig calls redemption (S, 250; SR, 241). While creation introduced God’s providence over an objective world, redemption furnishes God’s kingdom (Reich) as the possibility of the world becoming wholly and holistically alive in its own subjective, autonomous, and sovereign infinity. Although it remains uncertain whether life will ever win the war it fights with death, Rosenzweig insists that, despite the common and “very widespread experience” of mortality, it is “not a necessity that all life must die” (ibid.).

• Rosenzweig introduces the possibility of infinite life through a lesson in the history of geopolitics. He recalls that across its various definitions—be they literal or metaphorical, worldly, or divine—life consists in the gradual institution of a single Reich over mere existence. The story begins with the establishment of God’s kingdom on earth as the fulfillment and overcoming of the “political realization” first achieved by the Roman Weltreich (S, 250; SR, 240).84 Coming into the world under the unity established by the “scepter of Caesar,” God’s vital kingdom transcends its political limitations, outlasts its collapse, and transgresses its borders, all in an efort to achieve the complete unity of “the humanly inhabited world” (S, 309; SR, 296). The name for this expansion of sovereign life over the whole of existence: the Church of Rome. It is the institutional manifestation of a form of life first announced by Christianity at the moment that it entered the world with a “contrary law of life seated on the throne” (ibid.). The epochal rupture of Christian revelation brings life “under the sovereignty [Herrschaft] of another life, the life of Christ and, once this has happened . . . solely in the efect of the power

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flowing from there” (308; 295). Only with Christ does life become “equally unconditioned, equally bound to the destiny of the whole world” (309; 296). Christ proclaims life—his own sovereign life—as what surpasses the Greek opposition of body and soul and makes possible a fully autonomous, selfforming, self-actualizing subjectivity: one that not only resists death but overcomes it in the form of eternal life. The history of life, Rosenzweig writes, is nothing less than the “imitation of Christ” (ibid.). Before and beyond the biological, the meaning of life develops from within a theologicalpolitical genealogy of Christian sovereignty (and does “not rest until the image of the crucified one cloaks the whole world”) (S, 385; SR, 368).

The Survivor’s Prayer I have been slowly trying to parse the bio-theologico-political convolutions surrounding Rosenzweig’s engagement with Christianity as a history of law and life: the expansion and generalization of imitatio Christi. Here, I follow Rosenzweig further as he traces this history of life from its primordial enunciation in antiquity toward its intensification and completion in modernity. In pursuing this narrative, Rosenzweig relies upon a historical scheme that runs from Joachim of Fiore to Schelling and views history as the temporalization of the hypostases of the Trinity: the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.85 Rosenzweig calls these phases the Petrine, the Pauline, and the Johannine, and uses them to document the shifting forms and strategies taken by Christianity in its millennium-long efort to convert the pagan to a properly Christian way of life. In the first of these periods, the Church assumes a “visible body” and enables the work of conversion by establishing a “unity of empire” over any and all fulminations of national diference (S, 311; SR, 297). Christian missionaries go out into the world and, through their acts of love, seek to interlace the destiny of every individual “with the destiny of the whole world” (311; 298). This Petrine authority remains the dominant force from Augustine through the sixteenth century, when, for the first time, a protest erupts against the “outer, visible edifice” of the Church (311; 297). Despite its attempts to link the destiny of the individual to the destiny of the world, the gospel of love succeeded only in operating upon the exterior, corporeal body of paganism and failed to act internally upon its still-unaltered thoughts and still-unconverted soul. The “modern” Pauline centuries thus begin with Luther’s proclamation

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that justification comes by “faith alone” (313; 299). A now-invisible Church abandons its outward mission to the body and strives to convert the pagan within: “to win the soul and only the soul, the solitary soul, the soul of the individual, without any world” (312; 299). Protestantism’s focus on the primacy of faith, however, also leads in these same centuries to the faltering of “the world unity established by the Petrine Church” (S, 313; SR, 299). Pagan configurations seem to come to life again everywhere, nations rise up to destroy Christianity, states seek to demolish the empire, and individuals look to overturn the distinctions of class and rank. Only around 1800 does another epoch begin to take hold. Under the reign of this Johannine Church, the Christian finally tries to transcend the duality of body and soul and achieve the integral wholeness that had remained all but impossible in previous eras. For the first time, life becomes visible: “life not as life of body or soul, but as something for itself which draws body and soul into itself, into its destiny” (314; 300). The search for the essence of the human being gives up its wavering investments in the spiritual or material and “completes itself only in the full course of its life” (ibid.). Every life remains essentially incomplete: a being always on its way, always outstanding, and always awaiting its final consummation and completion in death. For this reason, each moment of life receives its meaning only in relation to the whole. Life becomes a fully temporal afair totally “integrated into the movement of the world” (315; 301). In this final phase of Christianity, the pagan learns what it means to live a life like Christ: a life fully bound to the destiny of the world. Christianity reaches that “great moment in human history, when for the first time the human being raises his arms praying to his own destiny” (S, 308; SR, 295). The conversion of the pagan becomes an autonomous process, in which “the converter and the converted are one and the same” (305; 301). Unlike the Church of Peter, the Church of John does not ask the “outer pagan” to sacrifice “his body” for the sake of “love.” Nor does it follow the Church of Paul in asking the “inner pagan” to sacrifice “his spirit” for the sake of “faith.” Instead, the pagan “sacrifices [opfert] his life and receives nothing for it other than this: the permission and the ability to sacrifice” (316; 302). To be like Christ is to be ready and willing to sacrifice one’s own life for hope in the future of one’s own destiny and the destiny of the world—one dying for the sake of all. Rosenzweig’s unexpected figure for this actualization of Christian life is Goethe. Just as Augustine was the father of the Petrine Church and Luther the father of the Pauline, so Goethe is the father of the Johannine. In praying

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for nothing other than his own destiny, Goethe shows “that all the power flowing from Christ has collected ‘today’ in him and, in its vital flowing forth is bound somehow to him and his apparent paganism” (309; 295). The paradox is that the ultimate “imitation of Christ”—the arrival of the “only Christian”—realizes itself in the act of a pagan: “Goethe is really at the same time the great pagan and the great Christian. He is the one because he is the other” (308, 315; 295, 301). The dictum brings Rosenzweig, in Jean-Luc Nancy’s phrase, “to the very end, to the ultimate extremity of Christianity.”86 The history of Christian expansion dissolves all borders and achieves its mission by making itself appear to disappear. Rosenzweig reminds us that the Johannine era “does not have a specific form; it is simply not a piece anymore, but only the consummation of the still piecemeal” (S, 316; SR, 302). As he writes elsewhere: “Every thing must vanish in order to become every thing.”87 The outcome of Christianization is that the least Christian, the most unworthy Christian, the last to deserve the title of authentic Christian is at the same time the one who is most Christian of all: most and least like Christ.88 Goethe’s prayer is a decisive moment in the history of Christianization. When he prays to his own destiny, “he makes a piece of life ripe [reif] for eternity” (S, 318; SR, 304). But the moment is a fragile one and always threatens to turn into a demand for a still-unrealized eternal, infinite life. That is why “Goethe’s life is really a walk on a ridge between two abysses” (ibid.). Although he always managed to keep his footing, the dangers of his life continue to haunt all those who follow his path. For every contemporary Christian, the “piety of the prayer to one’s own destiny borders directly on the prayer of the sinner who presumes that he may pray for every thing” (ibid.). The risk of Goethe’s prayer is that it can lead to the abandonment of a proper imitatio Christi. One could, for instance, become a witting or an unwitting disciple of Nietzsche: “an immoralist who breaks all the tablets” (319; 304).89 In Nietzsche, the pursuit of imitatio Christi deforms the life of the properly Christian subject: a deviation that leads away from the piety of Goethe’s prayer to the heretical prayer of the sinner. And it is here, in this diferential space between the life of Christ and the life of sin, that Rosenzweig, like Agamben, arrives at the question of survival.

• From the outset, Rosenzweig insists that the content of prayer holds no significance for the question of sin. The “pious pagan” may consider any

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prayer for one’s own benefit “an abomination,” the expression of an intolerable and objectionable egoism (S, 304–5; SR, 291–92). What, after all, could be more impious or more criminal than forgetting to pray for others? In the most extreme case, a resolute regard for the self might even lead one to pray “for the death of another” (ibid.). Rosenzweig nonetheless maintains that a petition for murder is not enough to make the prayer properly sinful, because it is time and not content that is the crucial factor in a prayer’s piety. This is not to say that Rosenzweig is condoning hom icide. He simply thinks that to pray for the death of the other is to pray at the wrong time and, in the process, to reveal a profound ignorance of the theological order of existence. God creates the human not as a living subjectivity but as an “individual”: one particularity among the many fleeting things that inhabit the created world (ibid.). In the beginning, the human is not an “I”; the human is an “it” or a “he,” or an “other” always already passing away into death (ibid.). Even before one prays for the death of another, “it is already so: the other must die” (ibid.). In fact, “only others can die, only as an other, as a he, does the human die” (ibid.). Rosenzweig adds: “The ‘I’ cannot imagine itself dead, das Ich kann sich nicht gestorben denken” (ibid.). Death is the becoming-other of the self to itself. The other is death, and death is the other. For Rosenzweig, that is, death is never “essentially my own.”90 But if this is the case—if the “I” cannot imagine itself dead and if death is always the death of the other—how does the self come to think of death and even fear it? Do not forget the Star’s opening declaration: “From death, from the fear of death, all cognition of the all arises.” Rosenzweig explains that the human subject is never “afraid of its own death” but only “fears becoming what it can see with its eyes in dead others: a dead he, a dead it” (S, 304–5; SR, 291–92). This means that “the human being is not afraid of its own death, because the I that has awakened in revelation cannot at all imagine itself bound to the forms of creation; rather it fears its own corpse [Leichnam]” (ibid.). The fear of death, in other words, is the efect of a specific theology of subjectification. Only by standing before the body of a dead other does the self first recognize death as the possibility of its transformation into a transitory, merely created, and “solitary thing” (ibid.). Rosenzweig says in no uncertain terms that the formation of a human subject depends entirely on God’s revelation: the kindling of mere existence with a divine spark that both exceeds death and makes life possible as the sustained resistance to creation’s unceasing demise (ibid.).91 Life is,

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strictly speaking, late with respect to death. Life is a divine intervention into an order of creation that from the beginning lacks any structures capable of providing permanence for the other wise pure finitude of the world. In its encounter with the corpse, the self learns nothing other than the simple truth of its existence: the corpse that it always already is. What Rosenzweig suggests is that the human is a walking corpse with the capacity for revelation. The self can only shudder upon seeing the dead body of the other. Without a divine spark, nothing remains except the corpse. The human being becomes other to itself at the very moment that it becomes the other of God. Consider, then, the following Agambenian formulation: the human subject is located in the missing articulation between God and corpse. At one pole, the human belongs completely to the order of creation. As a corpse, the human is “created as other” and “is dead already as other, already from the beginning of the world” (S, 304–5; SR, 291–92). The other’s destiny is “not to sur-vive [über-leben] any other” but only to pass away continually and without any remainder into death (ibid.). God intends the other only sich zu über-sterben (ibid.). Creation demands more death, an excess of death, an over-death, which constantly dies on by outdying and dying out, over and beyond itself in a perpetual movement of sur-cease.92 At the other pole is the self, which, unlike the corpse, rests fully in the light and life of divine revelation and, for precisely this reason, “sur-vives [über-lebt] the others, all others” (S, 304–5; SR, 291–92). The self never ceases to live on, after, over, and longer than the death that operates within it. Life is the survival of one’s own corpse. The hyphen, moreover, indicates that the life of this divine self exceeds mere life and participates in another loftier life. Through revelation, the self lives more, higher, and better in a super-life that is, above all, life and beyond it (as Benjamin might have it). Survival thus names that nearly unreadable moment between God and corpse: the comma marking the pause between the transcendence of life and its loss. The prayer to one’s own destiny—the pious prayer of the Christian—is always a prayer for survival. The subject is this survival. This is what the sinner fails to understand when praying for the death of the other. A certain act of “mystical” misreading leads the supplicant to imagine that survival signifies nothing other than the possibility of being “one’s own self, awakened to one’s own life, and thus simply survivor [Überleber], survivor of all that is eternally other” (S, 304–5; SR, 291–92). Like the “mystic,” the sinner desires to “stay thoroughly in revelation and leave creation to

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the ‘others,’ ” not only forgetting the corpse that he is but also abandoning redemption as the possibility of a wholly vitalized existence (ibid.). In this parody of the survivor’s prayer, the surviving subject imagines itself as the purest, greatest, and most triumphant survivor, the lone survivor capable of living after the death of all others and overcoming death itself, living above and beyond death in a divine super-life. The logic of Rosenzweig’s argument reckons the true ofense of the survivor’s prayer as its mystical blasphemy. In striving to become the absolute survivor, the survivor of all survivors, the self comes close to demanding for itself the superlative, hyper-life that belongs only to God. Such mystical arrogance makes the sinner a true disciple of Nietzsche. Earlier in the Star, Rosenzweig identified him as the first thinker to deny God “in the really proper theological sense of the word” (S,  20; SR, 25).93 In his (Christian) atheism, Nietzsche went beyond the treachery of Saint Peter by asking: “If God existed, how could I bear not to be him?”94 Atheism is the intensification or realization of the subjective desire for deification. How could I not bear to possess the absolute sovereignty of survival?

• The question of sovereignty is once again central because it anticipates Rosenzweig’s elaboration of his theological anthropology along specifically political lines. After the sinner’s prayer, he returns to survival as part of a “sociolog ical” analysis of community formation, turning, in a recognizably militant mode, to an analogy with the army as an illustration of how collective prayer finds its support and authentic form in the act of common salute (S, 357; SR, 341). The discussion begins with a look at the proper structure of Jewish prayer. But in keeping with the kaleidoscopic movement of the Star, Rosenzweig quickly confounds the parallel between Jewish worship and military organization by inscribing the entirety of the scene within a Christian frame.95 He turns specifically to Augustine’s distinction between salus and fides: preservation of the self and loyalty to one’s allies.96 While Cicero understood these two grounds for war as oppositional and potentially contradictory, Augustine interprets the Church as the occasion of their reconciliation. In “holy war,” there is no longer any discord “between one’s own salvation and the loyalty of faith in one who is higher” (S, 366; SR, 349). Christian war resolves the conflict by demanding “sacrifice” (367; 350).97

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The sacrificial tenor of this martial language clearly evokes Goethe’s prayer to his own destiny. Rosenzweig repeats the logic when he turns to the army as a context of communal worship. Here, the “whole, and the fact that one belongs to it, is experienced [erlebt] only in the parade, in the flag salute, in the marching before the highest commander of war [Kriegsherrn]” (S, 358; SR, 342). In facing this “lord of war,” the soldier “ faces him who no longer has to face anyone, or one who like the flag is not able to do it at all” (ibid.). The salute does not concern the “common obedience of the subordinate and the superior” but “the commonality of all the members of this army through all time” (ibid.). At this moment, “the soldier feels that the flag and the sovereign dynasty are older than the living and will survive [überleben] them.”98 The appeal to survival rests on a manifestly temporal dimension. The flag and the dynasty live longer than any individual soldier and ensure the future life of the community. But in addition to time, supreme survival is also a sign of sovereignty. The moment of community formation is nothing other than an anticipation of the community’s dissolution and sacrifice in the name of “one who is higher.” The army as a whole survives only by ceding the possibility of its own survival to a sovereign symbol (the flag or the dynasty) that never belongs to any single member of the community. Fidelity to the flag and sacrifice for the community are the elements of salvation: salus and fides. The relationship between soldier and commander thus captures the same paradox that Rosenzweig locates in the diference between God and human. The possibility of political insurrection or mutiny is a primary stage in the heretical desire of the Nietzschean for apotheosis (insofar as rebellion already exemplifies the transgression of proper boundaries between subjects and sovereigns, soldiers and commanders, that is at stake in the question of survival). A certain survival is always necessary as the very condition of subjectivity itself. But for this same reason, survival is also always the ineluctable potentiality for a revolt, a betrayal, or a desertion that would attempt to overcome the necessary sacrifice in the name of survival itself: the desire to survive everything and everyone by occupying and possessing the place of sovereignty. Political survival is the threat to community posed by every individual soldier who wants to be lord of all. If the sovereign exists, how could I bear not to be it?

• The Star’s mystico-political narrative of survival reaches its most extreme, even apocalyptic, point when it fi nally arrives at the name for such an

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absolute lordship. In the closing pages of the book, Rosenzweig returns to survival one last time in an exegesis of a passage from the book of Zechariah, which reads: “And the Lord will become king over all the earth; on that day the Lord will be one and his name one” (14:9). The verse’s messianic significance lies in its anticipation of the day when God will be “redeemed from every thing outside him that is again and again compared to the incomparable one” (S, 426; SR, 406). On that day, “he will be one and his name will be: one” (ibid.). Redemption completes itself by releasing God “from his revealed name,” leaving in insuperable silence the one name that lies beyond all names and heralds an end that “is nameless, above all name” (ibid). Like Benjamin, Rosenzweig comes close to citing the words of Pseudo-Dionysius, who recalls in the Divine Names the “wondrous name which resides above all name, nameless, above every name that is named” (AS, 60).99 With this apophatic paradox, Rosenzweig looks out beyond the strictures of the Jewish or Christian perspective and gazes toward the ultimate redemption of an Überwelt: a super-world that would be nothing other than life itself. The ruler of this world would be “the lord of life,” “the lord of life and death,” and the one who governs all life and death while at the same time transcending them (S, 427, 425; SR, 407, 404). This world would bring about the “simple existence [Dasein] of the highest one,” the “unimpaired all-sovereign [allherrschende] and solely sovereign reality beyond all of the poverty and pleasure of realization” (427; 406). The sovereign (nameless) name would be the single truth that reigns above all, the one name that “survives [überlebt] the people that confesses it, survives even the revealed name by which that surviving-superliving [überlebendüberlebendige] name of the future becomes known” (ibid.). Every thing in the present falls silent “for the sake of this survival [Überlebens] that belongs to the one in the future” (ibid.). Rosenzweig, too, verges here on the political theology of überlebende reine Gewalt. God is both absolute sovereign and absolute survivor; the one because of the other. This also means that from supplicant to soldier, survival is the original sin and sedition of human subjectivity, the theologicalpolitical risk of “over-living” that emerges whenever the essential survival of the subject leads to too much life, whenever the light of revelation causes the subject to forget its own hostile intimacy with the death of the other and abandon the endless struggle against the corpse. As Rosenzweig insists, human subjectivity is nothing other than the survival of the corpse, the persistent negation and overcoming of the threat of absolute finitude

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posed by Übersterben. Humanity finds itself caught within a paradox that makes survival both its condition and its ideal, as well as its inescapable transgression. The question is: Does Rosenzweig ofer a figure for these conflicting crosscurrents? Is there a paradigmatic image for all the tensions that survival gathers within the opposition between God and corpse? In this fragile history of imitatio Christi, there is, of course, only one model or one icon that manages such an aggregation, only one body that bears within it the promise and threat, sovereignty and subjection, of the God-corpse. Rosenzweig speaks at times of this “dead God on the cross,” of this Opfer am Kreuz, and of this God with a “head full of blood and wounds” (S, 383, 411, 406; SR, 366, 392, 387). More than anything, though, he condenses and translates the complex movement of survival within the space of a single sacramental word: Fronleichnam (415; 395). In its Corpus Christi celebrations, or Fronleichnamsfeste, he says, the Church carries its prayer out into the world, radiating and besieging every thing that does not yet recognize the redemptive power of Christ’s sovereign body or the triumphant survival of this divine victim—this Host—over his own corpse.100 The sacramental event repeats and makes present before the eyes of its worshipers Christ’s passion, sacrifice, and resurrection: the blood of this dead God that ran “down from the cross . . . through the landscape of time” and finally entered “into the ocean of history” (S, 420; SR, 401). This is Rosenzweig’s lesson in theologicalpolitical anthropology: the subject is the survivor, the survivor is Christ, Christ is the God-corpse.

Muslim Survival, Jewish Survival Throughout this chapter, I have been arguing that Christ—and Christian survival, more generally—carries a discursive primacy in the Star and that neither the question of Muslim survival nor the question of Jewish survival can be asked without first recognizing the dominance of the Christian perspective. The same remains true as I return to the two issues that I have been avoiding. Far from abandoning the Christian perspective, I wish only to rotate the kaleidoscope and consider how these two other “communities of revelation” stand in relation to the Christian paradigm, how they reflect or refract the figuration of Christ’s survival, and how they traverse the oppositional moments of the God-corpse. How do Jewish survival and Muslim

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survival emerge from within the paradox of Christ’s body? What joins and separates Jews and Muslims from Christ? What separates Jews and Muslims from each other? What positions or fronts do Muslims and Jews occupy within the stasiology of Christian survival?

• As we have seen, the rhetoric of war is crucial in the Star and, particularly so, when it comes to the border between Christianity and Islam.101 As Kathleen Biddick has noted, much of Rosenzweig’s commentary simply repeats “the terms of the twelfth century Christian polemic.”102 Rosenzweig says as much in his narration of the Church’s struggle against the lingering threat of paganism. He reminds us that by the end of its first epoch, the Church had succeeded in establishing its empire of love over “the corporeal world of living peoples” as well as asserting “itself in a victorious counter-attack in the war against the thronging paganism of the crescent” (S, 311; SR, 298). Not simply a community of revelation (if it is that at all), Islam is one face of Christianity’s multifaceted pagan adversary, one of the external bodily threats that must be lovingly—that is, bellicosely—converted before Christian life can assume its proper form. Rosenzweig adds here that it was only through the conquest and exclusion of the Muslim body that the Church first came to feel that it had “created for itself its own world, its new world” (ibid.). The Pauline age of faith begins as Christianity divides itself from Islam and attempts to make for itself a world without Muslims. Rosenzweig’s brief remarks on Islam’s role within the history of Christian salvation testify to its significance for the constitution of Christian space. Islam is not an isolable community in the Star but one pagan moment within the history and movement of Christian conversion. This structural inclusion of Islam helps explain the Star’s recurrent accusations concerning Islam’s theology. Like Christianity, Islam possesses the concepts of creation, revelation, and redemption and, consequently, stands in close proximity to the other communities of revelation. But at every turn, Rosenzweig contends that Islam’s understanding of these concepts corrupts their proper theological meaning. One reason for this is that even though “Muhammad took over the concepts of revelation outwardly, he necessarily remained deeply pagan as regards the fundamental concepts of creation” (S, 129; SR, 127–28). Despite its pronouncements concerning the “unity of God,” Islam continually “slips into a monistic paganism” (137;

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134). It “remains stuck at the unchanged figures bequeathed to it by the pagan world, and thinks it can put them in motion just as they are, owing to the concept of revelation” (193; 187). At the border between paganism and God, Islam never manages more than a parody of revelation. It is a warped mirror of all the theological categories that sustain Christianity—less an instance of theology than a test of theology, an anti-theology that exists only as the impossibility of theology. At its core, Islam is thoroughly pagan—a paganism always awaiting the loving conquest of the Church. Does Islam survive this war? Rosenzweig comes close to answering this question by examining Islam’s role in the reception and perpetuation of pagan thought. In its “theology” of revelation, he says, Islam involuntarily becomes “heir of the ethics prevalent during paganism’s decline—the heir of Stoicism—while also being a precursor [Vorbote] of the neo-pagan ethic of virtus, as it survives [fortlebt] up until our times” (S, 192; SR, 186). Islam stands at a critical juncture in paganism’s historical survival: a site of gathering and release for the traces of antiquity’s fading life. It is a crucial transit point for the legacy of paganism and a harbinger of its future transformations. What remains strikingly unclear, though, is whether Rosenzweig also attributes this same historical Fortleben to Islam itself. As a distinct entity, Islam seems to be only a vanishing moment in paganism’s continuing life, never anything more than a precarious and contingent reflection of paganism’s Fortleben. Rosenzweig presses the claim further in his elaboration of Islam’s theological fallacies. “In Islam,” he writes, “revelation is not a living event between God and human being, a process into which God himself enters to the point of negating himself” (S, 185–86; SR, 180). On the contrary, Islam severs revelation from its proper link with life. This occurs because, unlike Christianity and Judaism, Islam does not understand the relationship between God and human being as a matter of orality. From its first moments, “Islam is a religion of the book” (ibid.). God remains all but absent, “enthroned in his highest heaven,” and refuses to come down to meet the human being directly in a fully living present (ibid.). Is there, Rosenzweig asks, “any greater renunciation of the notion of God himself ‘descending,’ giving himself to man, of disclosing himself to him”? (ibid.). Islam replaces the life of revelation with the revelation of a mere thing. The book is a “sign” of life’s privation (ibid.). The Muslim enters into revelation only at the moment of God’s withdrawal. There only in not quite being there, present only as absent, the God of

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Islam fails to make revelation a moment in the vitalization of existence. Rosenzweig later adds that in Islam, it is not even God but “actually the human being who, in his need, forces revelation” (S, 193; SR, 187). Revelation proceeds from God to the individual only as a loveless and merciful response to the call that arises from the poverty of the human condition. The singularly thanatological consequence of this thoroughgoing distortion of revelation’s order is that Islam “confounds the beloved soul and the creature [Kreatur] in need” (ibid.). Never a geliebte Seele, the Muslim remains a Kreatur: a poor object of disenchanted creation lacking an essence of its own. Always dependent on God’s momentary providence, always bound to the fleeting existence of the created world, the Kreatur stands on the brink of passing away into nothing. In Agamben’s terms, the Muslim’s falsification of revelation amounts to a process of desubjectification.103 Without God’s love, the Muslim never becomes a self-organizing, self-forming, self-determining individual. The Muslim remains lifeless, existing (but not living) in a world of distorted theology: one thing among the many things incapable of resisting the force of absolute finitude. The Muslim, then, is no survivor. Like others in the history of Christian Europe, Rosenzweig finds in Islam not only the lack of any “survival imperative” but also—“beyond impassivity and indiference”—an “absurd passion for dying.”104 A perpetual existential demise efectively forecloses any subjective position that would permit a sustainable opposition to death or render possible the lofty sin of deificatio. Following the Star’s terminology, one could say that the Muslim is the other. The Muslim is death. The Muslim is a name for the unceasing movement of expiration that inhabits der Übersterbende: a corpse bereft of God. Primo Levi might have specified here that the Muslim is the walking corpse in which the “divine spark is dead.” Rosenzweig speculates that the Muslim needs love, the divine love that declares war on death and the love spread by the Church in its war on the body of the pagan. Resistance to the other, to death, and to Islam, in Rosenzweig’s argument, is one path toward the life of Christ: the crusade through which the Christian becomes ein Überlebender. In death, for death, and as death, the Muslim occupies nothing less than a “site of excarnation.”105

• One can summarize Rosenzweig’s stasiology of survival by distinguishing between Christian ity (Überleben) and Islam (Übersterben). But this

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warring economy—this inner Christian conflict—remains incomplete without its third term: the survival of the Jews. I argue that, beyond making a Jewish contribution to the question of Jewish survival (bleiben), Rosenzweig’s text demands another reading of this impenetrable mystery: one that calls again upon Paul, Augustine, and the mystery of Israel. Before Arendt, before Agamben, and after many others, Rosenzweig reminds us that Jewish survival is indeed a remnant—what remains of Christian ity. The question leads to the nuclear core of the Star’s perspectival problem. In one of the more dizzying of the book’s narrative leaps, Rosenzweig moves from the history of Christianity (Petrine, Pauline, Johannine) to a structural account of the three moments that form the configuration of redemption: das ewige Leben (Judaism), der ewige Weg (Christianity), and die ewige Wahrheit (Star). With this unmarked gesture, Rosenzweig interrupts the smooth passage of Christian history—the eternal life of imitatio Christi—by inserting a sudden and unexpected commentary on the eternal life of the Jews. What few have noticed is that Rosenzweig’s threefold partition of redemption into the “eternal life” of Judaism, the “eternal way” of Christianity, and the “eternal truth” of the Star is a silent exegetical intervention into the text of the Gospel of John.106 There Christ declares: “I am the way [Weg] and the truth [Wahrheit] and the life [Leben]” (John 14:6).107 The entirety of his book leads toward a commentary and structural reworking of the Gospel: the eternal life of the Jews reoccupies the position held by the eternal life of Christ.108 The reading harbors an undeniably polemical valence. But it also hints once again at the structural importance of the Christian perspective (or, at least, the difficulty of deciding between the Christian and the Jewish points of view). The significance of this problem becomes all the more apparent as Rosenzweig enters into Christianity’s theological figuration of Judaism. As with Islam, the discussion begins with the question of the “book.” From the beginning, Rosenzweig says, “the disguised enemies of Christianity” have always sought “to remove its ‘Old Testament,’ ” hoping that, through this purge, they could achieve their dream of a total “deification” and release themselves from the constraints of an unredeemed life (S, 460; SR, 437). The canonizing of the Old Testament was a form of resistance against the possibility of a blasphemous heresy. More than a “mere book,” the Old Testament enables Christianity to resist its own danger (461; 437). As Rosenzweig goes on to say, this “being-more” gains its confirmation only

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“through our life” (ibid.). The Jews are the living words of scripture, and it is their “palpable and undeniable” vitality that prevents the survival of Christianity from transgressing itself into an idolatrous demand for apotheosis (461; 438). Unlike the Muslims (the people of the mere book), the Jews (the people of the more-than-book) never get any love (martial or other wise) for the essential ser vice that they provide. They become instead the target of Christianity’s eternal hate. For Rosenzweig, hatred of the Jews is one of the essential stations on the Christian path toward eternal life. Above and beyond imitatio Christi, Christians must undertake the redemptive task of odium judaeorum: “Whether Christ is more than an idea—no Christian can know. But that Israel is more than an idea, he knows it and sees it. For we are living. . . . [W]e are actually that which cannot be doubted” (S, 461; SR, 438). The Jews are the vital witnesses to eternal life, the exemplary testimony that Christ can never quite be, precisely because, unlike the Jews, he has “vanished from the earth” (ibid.). The Jews are an amplification of Christ, a supplement for Christ, and a fulfilment of the role that he fails to properly embody. According to an oft-repeated legend, Frederick the Great asked one of his pastors for conclusive proof of Christianity. In response, the pastor responded: “Majesty, the Jews” (ibid.).109

• By way of an infinite oscillation between Christ and the Jews, Rosenzweig inscribes Jewish-Christian diference within an impassable aporia and makes it all the more difficult to decide whether his is a story of polemic or a story of reconciliation. Yet in rehearsing the brief anecdote about Frederick the Great, Rosenzweig also shows that the terms of the perspectival problem (Judeo-Christian diference) already belong to the history of Christian theology. He recognizes in the pastor’s reply the position enunciated in Paul’s Epistle to the Romans, where, Rosenzweig writes, “the Jews remain [bleiben] until the end—until ‘the fullness of peoples has come in,’ just until that moment where the son gives the kingship to the father” (S, 461; SR, 438).110 Like Arendt, Maritain, Arthur Cohen, and others, Rosenzweig identifies the “remaining” of the Jews as a central article of Christian theology.111 At least since Paul, the Jews have occupied a definitive position within the Christian economy of salvation and played a crucial role in the drama of Christian eschatology. For Augustine, and for an entire tradition

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after him, they became the “living letters of the law,” degraded but vital witnesses to the truth of Christianity and its books, conclusive proof and testimony of Christ’s revelation. Rosenzweig surmises that in the age of “emancipation,” the Augustinian tradition no longer carries the force it once did. In a letter to his friend Eugen Rosenstock, he writes: “It would no longer be possible today to suggest, as Duns Scotus once did, that after the forcible conversion of the masses, one could secure the truth of Romans 11 by artificially preserving a few Jews on some remote island until the full number of the Gentiles has come in” (MW1:304).112 Such reservations, however, do little to stop Rosenzweig from finding in this history his own answer to the mystery of Jewish survival: “The theologoumenon from the origins of Christian theology expresses what we were explaining here: that Judaism in its eternal survival [ewigen Fortleben] through all times, Judaism, which is testified to in the ‘Old’ Testament and which itself bears witness to this book through its life, is the one core from whose glowing embers the rays are invisibly nourished, which in Christian ity break forth visibly and fractured into the night of the pagan primeval world and underworld” (S, 462; SR, 438).113 After the survival of Überleben (Christianity), and opposite the “survival” of Übersterben (Islam), Rosenzweig inscribes the survival of the Jews in another word: Fortleben. Always remaining, always surviving, the Jews live forward through time even as they live away from history. They survive at the core of the Star because they are the “living letters of the law,” the sublime witnesses to the rays of the Christian testament and a supplementary body (substitution and augmentation) for the vanished life of Christ. Through their Fortleben, the Jews bear witness to the eternal life of redemption. As Christ himself puts it in yet another theologoumenon from the origins of Christian theology: “Salvation is from the Jews” (John 4:22). This is Rosenzweig’s contribution to the ambivalent history of Jewish survival. This is his reading of a dialectic that swings between sublimity and spectrality, salvation and damnation. This is Rosenzweig’s Paul. Rosenzweig’s Judaism. And in one more twist of the kaleidoscope: his Christianity. In this diferential stasiology of survival, the survival of Christ is the star around which the survival of the Jews and the “survival” of the Muslims orbit. Christ’s Fronleichnam is the image from which Jews and Muslims are added and subtracted, incarnated and excarnated, vitalized and thanatized,

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hated and loved, saved and destroyed as well as infinitely divided and separated from each other. If the Jews are eternal life (community) and the Muslim is the corpse (individual), then Christ is the cross between them (singular plural). In this history of imitatio Christi, survival—Überleben, Übersterben, Fortleben—is one cleft name for the accord and disaccord, the melee, of the God-corpse, the Jew, and the Muslim.

Imitations of Survival The war continues. Even today, one can easily witness an opposition between Islam (“culture of death”) and Judaism (“culture of life”), Palestinians and Israelis, suicide bombers and soldiers.114 These are but a few of the “contingent elements,” Talal Asad says, that structure the “contradictory view of life and death” in the modern secular world: crucial components in the “shifting pattern of convergence and dispersal” that make up a “complex genealogy.”115 Asad himself reflects on the Christian legacy of this history, by pointing to the ways in which “modern liberalism . . . has inherited and rephrased some of its basic values from medieval Christian tradition” (88). Echoing Rosenzweig, he asks how Christ’s life became a “model for redemptive imitation (Imitatio Christi)” (ibid.). One answer he gives is: the media. “In popu lar visual narratives (film, TV, etc.),” Asad writes, one often watches the replay of a “modern secular crucifixion story in which the truth of the lonely figure is sustained by his willingness to sufer in mind and body, to undergo unbearable pain and ecstasy that can become through sympathy an exquisite part of the spectator’s own sensibility” (86). The mediatized representation, dissemination, and imitation of Christ’s redemptive death—“ dying to give life”—aids in the constitution of “a par ticu lar kind of human subject” and its derivatives (the Jew, the Muslim, the African, etc.) (88). In closing this chapter, I want to ask how Asad’s observations bear upon the equally central role of the media in “the production and proliferation of survivor discourse.”116 I pursue the question with a hint from Rosenzweig and the genealogy of human subjectivity that he inscribes in the survival of Christ’s Fronleichnam (divine body, sovereign corpse, Host, etc.). As Rosenzweig explains, the imitation of Christ’s body finds its major point of orientation within the space of Eucharistic theology. “In the breathless silence before the transubstantiation,” he writes, Christianity

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“kneels before the sacrifice on the cross, which is made present again in the sacrifice of the Mass . . . the celebration of the first origin and always renewed presence of the Lord” (S, 411; SR, 392). The comment certainly echoes the history of representation given by Arendt in her pseudomystical reading of the Nazi movement. It is also the beginning of a more complex genealogy, which follows the convergence and dispersal of the Eucharist’s contingent elements as they make their way into the age of technological reproducibility.

CHAPTER 4

The Sovereign in the Age of Its Eucharistic Reproducibility

Then he took a loaf of bread, and when he had given thanks, he broke it and gave it to them, saying, “This is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me.” —Luke 22:19 L’état, c’est moi. —attributed to Louis XIV The spectacle is not a collection of images but a social relationship among people that is mediated by images. —Guy Debord, The Society of the Spectacle

This genealogy of survival has proceeded thus far by splicing together a series of discrete shots. The curtain opened on Hannah Arendt and her shattering of survival into the fragmented elements of a composite photograph. From Jewish survival and African survival to total survival and European survival, Arendt projected the outline of a single redemptive image: a portrait of the glory and horror, spectrality and mysticism, of Christ’s death and resurrection. This iconic figuration led to Walter Benjamin and his attempts to rewrite the discourse network of 1900 in the mystical shape of reine überlebende Gewalt, pure surviving power. He narrated a story about sovereignty, about the “ontotheology of sovereignty,” and about “the name of God, this One and Only God” who has long been the glorious, transcendent,

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and unnameable paradigm of absolute power.1 Finally, and with a twist of the kaleidoscope, Franz Rosenzweig helped divert this Benjaminian gaze from the sublimity of divine super-life toward the warlike passion of imitatio Christi. Rosenzweig’s stasiology of survival—Muslim, Jewish, Christian— performed an autopsy of Christ’s Fronleichnam and exposed the paradoxes crossing his sovereign body, sovereign corpse, and Eucharist. I replay these sequences because in this chapter, I bring the montage to a momentary halt, pausing its progressive accumulation and juxtaposition of moving images, in order to recut and reshuffle its major frames of investigation: mysticism, sovereignty, spectrality. This new edit aims to zoom in more closely on the representation of Christ’s sovereign body and spotlight the narrative arc that links the legacy of Christ’s real presence in the Eucharist to the aura and spectrality of survival. Beginning again with Benjamin, I ask whether it is possible to plug the theological-political history of sacramental mediation into the discourse network of 1900. I expect that this adjusted field of vision and reorganized mise-en-scène will bring into sharper focus the survival of the sovereign in the age of technical media: the first installment of a two-part remake that concludes only in the next chapter and a Freudian sequel.2

• My point of departure is once again Friedrich Kittler and the medial transformations of the nineteenth century: the gramophone and cinematograph’s mass recording of unordered noise and visual data. These shifts in the modality of signification, Kittler writes, lead from a “kingdom of sense” to a kingdom of nonsense, from a regime dominated by the communication of meaning to a regime defined by the “diferentiality that precedes all meaning: the naked, elementary existence of signifiers” (N, 209). He observes that “messages become meaningless when there is no king at the origin and destination of discourses” (338). The collapse of the “kingdom of sense” alters not only the form of communication but also the structure of sovereignty: the king disappears as the sole site of ontotheological power and authorial force. Kittler’s analysis concludes that “no despot can survive [überlebt] when a whole multimedia system . . . goes after him” (N, 356; A, 452). Confronted with the “conditions of information technology, the old-European despot disintegrates into the limit value of Brownian motion, which is the noise in all channels” (ibid.). In the discourse network of 1900, the sovereign

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does not survive. What remains is a shattered royal body, whose ruins now appear as the snow flickering across screens and scrambling the transmissions still trying to come through. One could restate Kittler’s passing reflections on the withdrawal of sovereignty in more familiar biopolitical terms. For Foucault, the diference between sovereignty and biopolitics highlights a rupture in the order of power that develops over the course of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. While power once expressed itself through the “ancient right to take life or let live,” it now seeks “to foster life or disallow it to the point of death” (HS, 138). The subject of sovereign power, on this reading, possesses neither the right to life nor the right to death (SD, 240). As a matter of “life and death, the subject is neutral, and it is thanks to the sovereign that the subject has the right to be alive, or possibly, the right to be dead” (ibid.). The shift toward biopolitics means that death ceases to be the most “spectacular manifestation of the absolute power of the sovereign” (248). Power no longer realizes itself through the sword or through death’s entrance into the space of sovereignty (HS, 144). It wields its might through the distribution of “the living in the domain of value and utility” and by acting to “qualify, measure, appraise, hierarchize, rather than display itself in murderous splendor” (ibid.). Sovereignty’s formerly juridical institutions become enmeshed in a network of regulatory apparatuses (medical, administrative, etc.) (ibid.). A “normalizing society” establishes itself as the power to govern the overall mechanisms and statistical processes that calibrate the life of the population: birthrate, mortality rate, longevity, ability, and so on (SD, 243–46). Along with Kittler, Foucault intimates that the ontotheological or theological-political paradigm of the sovereign ceases to reign as a “unified locus for state power.”3 Whether one calls it biopolitics or the discourse network of 1900, the unavoidable conclusion is that power no longer rests on the “personal decision” of the king.4 Power no longer belongs to the “transcendence of a single point of command above the social field” and no longer expresses itself through the ipseity of the monarch or through a system where “only one can be sovereign.”5 For Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, these substantial adjustments coincide with the formation of the “global market and global circuits of production” and testify to the emergence of a new global order: “a new logic and structure of rule—in short, a new form of sovereignty” (xi). By duplicating, multiplying, and extending itself across borders, sovereignty remakes itself as a system of “flexible and fluctuating networks”—a “rhizome of networks, webs, and mediascapes where the buck

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never stops, the telephone trees never stop growing, and no one is in charge” (23).6 Biopolitics bids farewell to “traditional imperialist objects—real territories, fixed locations of sovereignty, and (implicitly) the chief object of empire, the figure of the emperor as godlike ruler of the world” (152). At the same time, it also gives rise to the proliferation of the mass media as a style of governance. Modern communications industries reoccupy and disseminate the “central position” of the emperor: virtual sites of operation that manage the biopolitical body of the population through imaginary and symbolic representation.7 The media harness the power of image and word and assume the sovereign task of ordering, arranging, and creating political subjectivities.8 Within the horizon of modern biopower, sovereignty becomes spectacle: “a virtual place, or more accurately, a non-place of politics.”9 But even in this “age of disembodied, immaterial virtuality,” the ontotheological and unitary body of the sovereign does not entirely vanish.10 Judith Butler, for one, argues that the sovereign continues “to ‘survive’ as a site of power” after its apparent “devitalization”: a “reanimated anachronism within the political field unmoored from its traditional anchors.”11 On this point, Wendy Brown references the modern mania for walling (border fences, concentration camps, occupation zones) as one example of a more general political desire to “project an image of sovereign jurisdictional power and an aura of the bounded and secure nation” at the very moment when the flows and forces of globalization have begun to erode the borders of territorial sovereignty.12 From another perspective, Giorgio Agamben reasons that, far from heralding the end of sovereignty, modern biopolitics actually enables its expansion and multiplication into a global state of exception, where not only the king but a series of biopolitical operators bear the sovereign power to decide on the value or nonvalue of life.13

• This brief overview afords only a rough sketch of the complex ways that contemporary governmentality operates as a shifting set of sovereign, disciplinary, biopolitical, and mediatic strategies. Sovereignty has been fractured across a delocalized network of biopolitical apparatuses, and it continues to exercise a singularly decisive power; it survives as more life and as mere life; as the aura of a real presence and as the projection of a virtual reproduction. I explore these contradictory possibilities further through a return to Walter Benjamin and, in particular, his essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Its

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Technological Reproducibility” (1939).14 On the one hand, the text has long been a canonical resource for research into the history of the modern media and an inescapable point of reference for debates on the relationship between aesthetics and politics.15 Benjamin’s essay has had a lasting influence on scholarly attempts to assess the structure and conditions of contemporary visual culture.16 On the other hand, scholars have noticed something “fishy” about Benjamin’s meditations on technical reproduction.17 There is a pervasive sense that his critique is “invalid,” that his predictions have proved to be “failures,” and that his theories no longer carry the “currency” they once did.18 Critics now suspect that his essay is more at home in the historical archive of an earlier and now outdated discourse network and has ceased to be useful as a diagnostic map of our medialogical modernity. My own feeling is that, if there is a problem, it lies less in Benjamin’s misperceptions concerning the future than in his misprisions concerning the past, less in his presentation of postmodernity than in his presentation of premodernity, and less in his failed prophetism than in his own preferences for the periodic divisions sedimented by the history of secularization.19 I also think that these missteps—these obfuscations, evasions, and foreclosures— hold the key to renarrating the historical tensions of sovereignty in the age of biopolitics. With and against Benjamin, I trace the localizations and delocalizations of sovereign power as the globalatinizing efects of a discourse network that begins neither in 1900 nor in 1800 but somewhere around 1200. It is a story about the corpus mysticum, about the two—nay, three—bodies of the king and about the royal body of Christ: its proximity and distance, departures and returns, mediation and dissemination, aura and reproducibility. It is also a story about the sacramental space of the Mass, about the transubstantiation of the Host, and about the mystery of the Eucharist; a story, finally, that culminates in the theological-political struggles of Hamlet (1600), where, at the rotten and disjointed core of a long and mournful narrative, Shakespeare redraws the portrait of the king in the mystical image of the survivor-ghost: the sovereign in the age of its Eucharistic reproducibility.

Aura, Reproduction, Sovereignty Benjamin distinguishes centrally in the essay between original works of art and works of technological reproduction. “In even the most perfect reproduction,” he explains, “one thing [eines] is lacking: the here and now [Hier

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und Jetzt] of the work of art—its unique [einmaliges] existence in the place where it finds itself” (GS1:475; SW4:253). For Benjamin, the exemplary characteristic of the original work is its spatio-temporal oneness: its singular presence in a definitive time and place as well as its position within a circumscribed historical tradition. The Hier und Jetzt of the work, he says, is the source of its “authenticity” and the “core” that guards its “authority” (476–77; 253–54). This authority and authenticity is precisely what the rise of technological reproduction threatens to destroy. By multiplying the work, technology efectively “detaches the reproduced object from the sphere of tradition,” divesting it of the meaning attributed to it by a particular community, and replacing its “unique existence” with “a mass existence” (ibid.).20 Once art becomes reproducible, the “ here and now” of the work fades, and the specific motile relationship between the work and its recipients undergoes a dramatic inversion. The transmission of the work abandons its own spatial, historical, and material existence in order to accommodate consumers in the “ here and now” of their own situation. The reproduction no longer belongs to a specific time and place but now presents itself as the same anywhere and everywhere. In summary, Benjamin says, “what withers in the age of the technological reproducibility of the work of art is the latter’s aura” (ibid.). Stripped of its uniqueness and expropriated from the context of tradition, the artwork loses the inimitable quality that once gave it the “unique apparition [Erscheinung] of a distance, however near it may be” (479; 255). With this terse formulation, Benjamin unfolds the concept of aura as a complex dynamic of distance and proximity.21 The English translation even intimates an apparitional structure. Through a constant centrifugal movement, the aura resists the appropriative forces of reproduction and re-roots the work of art back in its “ here and now.” It creates a decidedly vertiginous efect, as Alfred Hitchcock might put it, by means of which the work recedes into an infinite distance even as it anchors itself in its own time and place. There is something ungraspable, even untouchable, about the original work of art. It possesses not simply a spectrality but a “sacrality,” which secures its authenticity, uniqueness, and presence by ceaselessly drawing away from anyone or anything that might displace it.22 The Grimm Dictionary recalls that the word Erscheinung possesses a range of meanings (including the ghostly), all of which seem to relate back to the notion of a “divine” or “spiritual” appearance, a “becoming-visible, with the idea of light, radiance in the background.”23 The Luther Bible speaks about “die Erscheinung unsers Heilandes Jesu Christi,” rendering in German both the Greek epipháneia

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and the Latin illuminatio (2 Tim. 1:10).24 Accordingly, one could retranslate Benjamin’s definition of aura as a mark of the sacred. In addition to exhibiting the unique apparition of distance, however near it may be, the aura reveals the original work as the unique epiphany of a distance, however near it may be: the glorious advent of a presence that can never be seized. Benjamin pursues this sacral signature by insisting on the central roles played by religion and the history of secularization. Originally, he says, a work’s aura arose from its embeddedness within a tradition of cultic practice. Before becoming an object for exhibition and enjoyment, the work of art served a ritual function, the performance of which endowed it with a “unique value” and an “original use value” (GS1:480; SW4:256). By the end of the Renaissance, though, “the secularization [Säkularisierung] of art” releases the work from its religious foundation and detaches it from its ritual context (481; 272). These same transformations, in Benjamin’s view, lead to the decline of the aura. As soon as the cult value of an image becomes secularized, its essential uniqueness became harder to discern (ibid.). In the place of auratic distance, Benjamin identifies a “passionate desire . . . ‘to bring things closer’ spatially and humanly,” a “tendency toward an overcoming of the uniqueness of every circumstance by taking it up [Aufnahme] as a reproduction” (GS1:479; SW4:255). With each “take,” so to speak, the urge grows “stronger to get hold of an object at close range in an image, or better, in a copy” (ibid.). While the aura of the original once demonstrated a tight weave of “uniqueness and duration,” the reproducibility of the copy reflects a state of “fleetingness and repeatability”: not that unique epiphany of distance, however near it may be but that desire for ubiquitous proximity, however distant it may be (ibid.).

• Benjamin’s theses on secularization chart a relatively straightforward historical narrative. The religious aura of the work—its uniqueness and locality, sacred power and epiphanic distance—surrenders to a secular scene of multiplicity and ubiquity, sameness and proximity. In the case of photography, it makes no sense to isolate an “authentic print” because no single copy ever has the priority of the original (GS1:482; SW4:256). Slowly but surely, “the reproduced artwork becomes . . . the reproduction of an artwork designed for reproducibility” (481; 256). As Benjamin points out, these historical transformations extended “far beyond the realm of art” (477; 254). The

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waning of the aura generalizes a form of “perception whose ‘sense of sameness in the world’ has so increased that, by means of reproduction, it extracts the sameness even from what is unique” (480; 256). It is a sign that the world has entered an age of statistical judgment, in which the uniqueness of the individual succumbs to the generality of the mass and the singularity of the par ticu lar to the calculability of the population (ibid.).25 In the age of technological reproducibility, the secularization of art documents a shift from the singular, localized, and sacred power of auratic authority to the multiplicity, delocalization, and profanity of mass politics (GS1:482; SW4:257). Benjamin, of course, never calls these changes “biopolitical.” But he does recognize the consequences that these variations in the structure of power hold for the life of the human being. Early in the essay, he remarks, in passing, that “tradition itself is something fully living” and hints at a close connection between aura and life (GS1:480; SW4:256). This link, as well as the possibility for its dissolution, becomes clearer as Benjamin considers the possibility of life’s technological reproduction. In film, he observes, the camera usurps the stage, separates the actor from the presence of a “living audience,” and places the human being “in a position where he must operate with his whole living person, while relinquishing its aura” (489; 260). Benjamin reiterates: “The aura is bound to [the human being’s] here and now. There is no copy of it” (ibid.). Film is not merely another step in the history of theater but a revolutionary new apparatus for the technological destruction of the coincidence between aura and life. It tears the life of the human being from the “ here and now” of a fully living present and, through the process of mass mediation, transforms it into a state of residual half-life, multiplied, reproduced, and disseminated in a ubiquitous proximity. The human being on screen represents the more life of mere life: the profuse proliferation of a life alive but absent, living but not living, present here, everywhere, and, for that reason, also nowhere.26

• At the conclusion of the essay, Benjamin arrives at the political stakes of the diference between auratic and non-auratic life in the potential dangers posed by any violation of their distinction.27 He confronts the possibility that fascism has pressed the apparatuses of technological reproducibility “into serving the production of ritual values”: investing a Führer with religious

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glow and auratic singularity (GS1:506; SW4:269). Benjamin fears that a certain transgression of form undoes the historical rupture of technological reproducibility and reconstitutes the link between aura and life on a mass scale. On the other side of secularization, fascism attempts to convert the desire for ubiquitous proximity, however distant it may be, into the unique epiphany of a distance, however near it may be. Aura becomes reproducible, politics becomes power, and art becomes the medium for the mass production and reproduction of sacred authority: the ubiquitous proximity of the sovereign, however distant it may be. Benjamin’s argument about fascism is a mediatic version of Foucault’s lesson about the absolute coincidence of biopower and sovereignty under Nazism (SD, 260). The problem is that Benjamin reads the intersection of aura and reproducibility in fascism as an accidental occurrence: the distinctive disturbance of an other wise impassable historical diference between two eras of art and two eras of power.28 He does not investigate the possibility that the sacralization of the reproducible image is a potentiality already lurking within the structure of technological reproduction or that the aura of an original is always already infinitely reproducible. This much is evident in Benjamin’s very attempts to avoid the issue. In one efort to delineate the historical threshold of art’s technical reproducibility, he notes that the birth of photography did not immediately succeed in abolishing the aura. “Cult value,” he writes, did “not give way without resistance” but fell “back to a last entrenchment: the human countenance” (GS1:485; SW4:257–58). That is why “the portrait” was so central in the earlier years of photography (ibid.). In the ritual “remembrance of dead or absent loved ones,” the portrait functioned as a last refuge for “the cult value of the image” (ibid.). Photography made it possible to look into “the fleeting expression of a human face” and to glimpse the aura beckon “for the last time” (ibid.). Benjamin identifies in early photography at least one instance of auratic reproducibility. In these rites of mourning, the reproducible image multiplies and disseminates the aura of an irretrievably absent life. Benjamin’s text thus suggests a certain resemblance between the desire for a return of the dead and the longing for a singular sovereign. From a political perspective, it means that the paradoxical threat of reproducible sovereignty never remains entirely restricted to the domain of fascism; it surfaces in any performative act that combines auratic distance with reproducible proximity. The question is how Benjamin’s sequestered examples of these accidental collusions bear on the framework of theoretical distinctions that make up

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his text. Indeed, an example is never the uninterrupted illustration of a model; it never simply applies “the discourse of generalizing formalities in which it is grafted.”29 An example is also a movement of disappropriation, which displaces the discourse it represents “toward an alterity” or “other-ofthe-text” that exceeds the paradigm it is called upon to embody (ibid.). In this case, Benjamin’s examples may call toward an older and more extensive history of auratic reproducibility.

• Benjamin speaks almost entirely in the general terms of “religion,” “ritual,” and “tradition” and largely avoids any sustained engagement with the specificity of the Christian legacy. In one overt gesture in this direction, he simply assimilates the Christian paradigm into a narrative about the secularization of art. The Catholic Mass, he says, is one example of the cultic tendency toward occlusion and the resistance of religious ritual to mass exhibitionism (GS1:484; SW4:257).30 Although Benjamin does not reflect further on the role played by the Mass in his analysis of aura and reproducibility (despite his broader interest in the transformations of Christianity), his fleeting mention of the Mass does reveal the substance of a history that the appearances of his essay efectively conceal.31 This is, ironically enough, because the entirety of his essay on technological reproducibility falls under the shadow of Marxism.32 Benjamin names Marx in the first sentence of his essay and, from there, goes on to frame his remarks as a contribution to the critique of art “under the present conditions of production” (GS1:473; SW4:252). The critique of technological reproducibility ofers a series of revolutionary categories for the political struggle against capitalism and its superstructural formation (ibid.). Benjamin’s distinction between “cult-value” and “exhibition-value,” for instance, translates Marx’s distinction between “use-value” and “exchangevalue.”33 While one defines the diference between the uniqueness of art and the mass uniformity of its reproduction, the other expresses the diference between the qualitative singularity of the commodity and its abstract sameness, convertibility, and quantitative equivalence within the field of exchange. What Benjamin does not mention here is that Marx’s own analysis of commodity circulation (i.e., the value relation) consistently returns to the site of the Mass: “Paris vaut bien une messe!”; and frequently speaks “in terms of transubstantiation and other miracles and mysteries” (53; 144).34

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Under present conditions of production, Marx says, the character of the commodity form is nothing less than “mystical.”35 The mysticism of commodity relations under capitalism imposes a form of social perception: one that invests things themselves with life.36 Guy Debord calls it the “society of the spectacle” and contributes, in his own way, to an understanding of the affinity between the “commodity,” the “communications media,” and the “real presence” of the Eucharist.37 He explains that the political struggle against capitalism and its modes of seeing also requires a more pervasive détournement of Christianity’s Massification of vision. But Debord is only one of many to think about the Mass and its political efects.38 In a subsequent argument, Derrida detects something “fundamentally Christian” about “televisual globalization” and the “power and structure of Christian mediatization.”39 He supposes that “the future of media, the history of the global development of media” belongs to “the history of the ‘real presence’ ” and “the time of the Mass.”40 Beyond the modern communications industries, televisual hegemony harkens back to the “dead body of Christ,” its disappearance, and the mournful desire for its return in a visible and fully living present.41 From Marx to Derrida, the history of the Eucharist haunts Benjamin’s distinction between aura and reproducibility and risks transforming his secularization narrative into a narrative of globalatinization. My hypothesis is that Eucharistic representations of Christ’s absent body bear importantly upon the portrait of the aura and reproducibility of the sovereign in the age of technological reproducibility.

The King’s Three Bodies Like photographic cults, the spread of fascism, and the globalization of television, the Mass troubles the distinction between aura and reproducibility. It is the site of a singular repetition and mass dissemination of a unique event in a here and now that is also here and everywhere, past and present: the unique epiphany of a distance, however near it may be as the desire for ubiquitous proximity, however distant it may be. In its earliest formations, writes Henri de Lubac, the Mass plays host to a “mystical liturgy,” a “mystical rite,” and a “mystical sacrifice,” in which the Christ sacrificed on the cross is “once again ‘mystically sacrificed’ in order to ofer himself once more to his Father in a ‘mystic oblation’ ” (CM, 38). Christ displays to those “with eyes to see them, the “mystical signs of his Passion,” by serving his

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body up as “ ‘mystical manna,’ ‘mystically multiplied’ through a ‘mystical fraction,’ and then ‘mystically shared out’ to all with a view to ‘mystical participation’ ” (ibid.). The Eucharist is a “mystery of commemoration” (59). It “reproduces [reproduit], that is to say renders once again present—makes present by representing—but in the mystery—represents in the mystery—and through the mystery—renews through the mystery—this same and unique historical Sacrifice” (ibid.).42

• The wider history of the Eucharist is, at best, complicated: an unstable ground of interpretation intermittently punctuated by theological controversies and doctrinal attempts to contain its unruly force. It begins with words attributed to Christ. According to the Vulgate, he raised a piece of bread before his disciples and said: hoc est corpus meum quod pro vobis datur hoc facite in meam commemorationem, “this is my body, which is given for you. Do this in remembrance of me” (Luke 22:19). Church fathers and scholastics, Protestant reformers and rationalist philosophers, have all troubled themselves over the meaning of this utterance and its apparent identification of Christ’s body with the bread of the sacrament: Does the Eucharist refer to Christ figuratively, or does it contain Christ’s real presence? Is this presence spiritual or physical? Does the bread remain, or is it destroyed? These already difficult questions are made more unsettling by the fact that they concern not one body or even two bodies but the relationship between three bodies: the historical body (crucified and resurrected), the sacramental body in the Mass, and the ecclesial body of the Church (CM, 256). The puzzle for much of Christian history has been how to articulate their order, unity, and opposition. These are the problems, says de Lubac, that have dominated “the whole evolution of the Eucharistic theories” (ibid.). Greek and Latin theologians had confronted these quandaries as early as the fourth and fifth centuries. But the intractable diferences that their debates raised did not undermine a general consensus about the Eucharist’s meaning and function. While the Augustinian tradition worried about the organic unity and localization of Christ’s body (“The Body of the Lord in which he rose can be in one place”), its concerns did not lead to an outright rejection of teachings that solved the problem through a pervasive spiritualism (CM, 130–33). Saint Ambrose and his followers, for example, tried to resolve the unity of Christ’s body with his real presence in the Eucharist by

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adhering to the doctrine: “He died as man, he lives as Lord” (136). They distinguished the physical body in which Christ sufered from the spiritual body in which he rose and asserted that the “Eucharistic body can and must be said to be spiritual” (133). This body is “invisible, hidden within the sacrament; because it is spiritual food, thanks to the Spirit who operates within it; because it is the spiritual fulfillment of the Old Testament figures; and finally because it is the body of Him who rose totus Spiritus, rising per omnia Deus” (133). In a further paradox, the Augustinian tradition at times also employed—if in a less “literal” way—the language of spiritualism, indicating that “there was agreement, or there was thought to be agreement on a common ‘spiritualist’ vocabulary” (ibid.). Only in the ninth century did the underlying tensions in the tradition come to the surface as theologians became aware of “the diversity of the patristic period” and began to note the contradictions that its various theories contained.43 Most famously, two Carolingian monks, Paschasius Radbertus (785–865) and Ratramnus (c. 870), openly debated the positions inherited from Ambrose and Augustine. Paschasius adopted and modified Ambrose’s “spiritualism” by claiming (possibly in even more radically “naturalistic” terms) that “the body of Christ present in the Eucharist is the same as that born of Mary”; Ratramnus responded by deploying his own spiritualist interpretation in order to deny “that the body of Christ born of the Virgin was that present in the Eucharist” (27, 29). The diferences between Ratramnus and Paschasius point to the fragility of an increasingly untenable interpretive architecture. Yet the existence of the debate also demonstrates that the anxieties surrounding the Eucharist had not reached a point where a diversity of opinion could no longer be abided and where disagreements over Christ’s presence in the Eucharist could lead to charges of heresy (31). This all changed in the eleventh and twelfth centuries, with the eruption of the Berengarian controversy and the final disintegration of the spiritual consensus. As theologians sought to establish a new and more rigorously controlled framework for the Eucharist, they started to claim more emphatically that “in the phrase ‘Hoc est corpus meum’ the subject and the predicate must be fully equal.”44 The equivalence succeeded in completely collapsing the historical and sacramental bodies and committed Eucharistic theology to a difficult paradox: the belief that the appearance of the bread and wine remained after the consecration but the body and blood were actually present (CM, 95).45 It was such credulity that prompted Berengar of

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Tours (999–1088) to accuse those who believed in bodily presence of blasphemy. “To say that the body and blood of Christ were physically present after the consecration was nonsense,” Berengar asserted, “ because it was apparent to the senses that no such change in the bread and wine had taken place” (ibid.). Since “the heavens had received the historical body of Christ ‘until the time of the restitution of all things,’ what the priest held in his hand and the communicant chewed with his teeth in the Eucharist could not be that body.”46 Berengar believed that “if Christ had truly died and was by the right hand of the father, then his ‘presence’ at the altar could not be his body or blood.”47 What seems to have particularly irked Berengar was not the idea that the Eucharist could create a change in the Host. It was the idea that consecration destroys the substances of bread and wine and leaves behind only their sensible appearances. Berengar, for his part, proposed a countertheory that equated the change in the Eucharist with incarnation and conversion. Just “as Saul of Tarsus was changed into Paul the apostle by remaining what he was and yet becoming something else, so it was with the elements of the Sacrament.”48 The substance of the bread and wine remained even as they concealed beneath them the hidden but true body and blood of Christ. The suggestion ultimately led to allegations of heresy as well as a series of trials and forced recantations. Berengar had to admit that “the bread and wine which are placed on the altar are, after the consecration, not only a sacrament, but the true body and blood of our Lord Jesus Christ” (3:187). On a more general level, the fierce reaction against Berengar strengthened “a movement that had been initiated in the time of Paschasius Radbertus and that was increasingly identifying the first two of the three ‘bodies’ and detaching from them the third” (CM, 162). By the beginning of the twelfth century, the theology of Berengar’s opponents achieved a degree of normativity by repeatedly insisting on “the identification of the body of Christ born of Mary and present in heaven, and the bodily presence of Christ on the Altar.”49 For a long time, de Lubac writes, the attempt “to understand spiritually” had “described a condition of rectitude, but now, on the contrary, had come to describe a form of deviance” (CM, 161). The word “corporeal” had once “been banned as being a synonym of ‘corruptible’: now ‘incorporeal’ was being banned as the equivalent of ‘ghostly’ ” (ibid.). In the place of these divisions, “a completely other antithesis” came into being: reality and symbol (ibid.). The real presence of Christ in the Eucharist was not the corpus mysticum but the corpus verum.

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The historical and sacramental bodies were one, and the mystical body was the Church.

• One could follow the ensuing history of the Eucharist in a number of diferent ways: the doctrinal acceptance of transubstantiation at the Fourth Lateran Council (1215); Thomas Aquinas’s Aristotelian distinction between the accidents (bread and wine) and the substance (Christ’s body); Reformation controversies over “ubiquity” and “consubstantiation”; and the Church’s reaffirmation of transubstantiation at the Council of Trent (1545–63).50 Michel de Certeau also comments on “the progressive concentration of these debates around seeing” (MF, 89).51 In addition to early modern innovations in painting, optics, and cartography, this would have to include changes in the Eucharist’s public presentation (“at the moment of elevation, the people came as close to seeing Christ as possible in this life”) and in the rise of the Corpus Christi and passion-play traditions (“the Host as that place where the devout could once again see the body that had bled, sufered such extraordinary pain, and died”).52 Finally, and closer to the present, Regina Schwartz speculates that the uncertainties and disputes “about the Eucharist became the occasion for the worldview we regard as ‘modern’ to begin to be articulated.”53 These are all impor tant paths to pursue (a few of which we will). But none of them leads directly to the curious development in the sphere of sovereignty, where the theology of Christ’s three bodies came to influence and even enable the theological-political or theological-juridical tradition of the king’s two bodies. As we have seen, this is the remarkable occurrence that Ernst Kantorowicz documents in his study of medieval political theology. He attributes the transformation to a series of “interrelated impulses and ambitions by which the spiritual corpus mysticum and the secular sacrum imperium happened to emerge simultaneously—around the middle of the twelfth century” (KT, 90, 197). Following de Lubac, Kantorowicz narrates the displacement of the phrase corpus mysticum from the sphere of the Eucharist to the body of the Church. In reaction to Berengar, ecclesiastic authorities stressed “most emphatically, not a spiritual or mystical, but the real presence of both the human and the divine Christ in the Eucharist” (195). They insisted that the consecrated bread be called corpus verum, corpus natural, or “simply corpus Christi,” the last also becoming a name for the

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celebration established by the Church in the mid-thirteenth century (ibid.). For Kantorowicz, though, this curieux chassé-croisé did not end the story. He shows that around the same time, theologians and jurists began to speak of a diference “between the ‘Lord’s two Bodies’—one, the individual corpus verum on the altar, the host; and the other, the collective corpus mysticum, the Church” (198). In this “new assertion of the ‘Lord’s Two Bodies’—in the bodies natural and mystic, personal and corporate, individual and collective of Christ,” Kantorowicz identifies “the precise precedent of the ‘King’s Two Bodies’ ” (199). The Eucharistic invasion of political thought eventually meant that jurists “arrived like theologians . . . at a distinction between corpus verum— the tangible body of an individual person— and corpus fictum, the corporate collective which was intangible and existed only as a fiction of jurisprudence” (KT, 209). An entire system of monarchical power thus arose around the concept of “royal duplication” (419). Jurists enunciated a theory of kingship that divided the king’s body into two: a body natu ral (visible, mortal, and singular); and a body mystical (invisible, ageless, and collective) (271). Although there was “no will in a corpse, the dead Prince [seemed] to will even after his death” (401). This was because the invisible, immortal, and ubiquitous body mystical required a body natu ral. The “personified immortal Dignity was unable to act, to work, to will, or to decide without the debility of mortal men who bore the Dignity and yet would return to dust” (437). Kingship became a series of transient incarnations: a fusion of immortal inefficacy and mortal potency, where two bodies continually invested each other through a divided and doubled, singular and multiple, local and ubiquitous, individual and collective, mystical and natu ral, corporeal unity. As Kantorowicz puts it: “the King survives the king” (401).

• But the story does not end here, either. De Certeau recalls that the history of sacramental theology also engendered a “secular [séculière] lineage, with the transformation of the central statement ‘this is my body’ into the formulation, equally of the Eucharistic type, ‘L’état, c’est moi’ ” (MF, 87; FM, 116– 17).54 He follows a set of insights first elaborated by the French philosopher and literary historian Louis Marin, who, in a series of spectacular readings that range across the logico-grammatical treatises of the Port-Royal Logic

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(1662–83), the fables of La Fontaine (1621–95), the tales of Charles Perrault (1628–1703), the Pensées of Pascal (1623–62), and the royal chronicles of André Félibien (1619–95), shows that the structural grammar of the Eucharist underwrites the entire ideology of absolutism in the seventeenth century: the chiasmatic relationship between the representation of power and the power of representation.55 Marin argues that in addition to the body natural and the body mystical, there is a third sacramental body: a “point of transit that mediates” between the other two.56 This third body is the “portrait of the king.” It is the glorious image of absolute power that unifies and “makes possible a remainderless exchange” between the three bodies: historical, political, and sacramental (ibid.). Marin first demonstrates that the Eucharist’s power lies in its capacity to represent and reconcile the tensions between the three bodies of Christ. In one movement, the phrase hoc est corpus meum produces “a sacramental body visible as the real presence of Jesus Christ on the altar, a body present in reality that the symbolic species of the bread and wine dissimulate at the end of the performing act of language” (PK, 12). In the second movement, though, the same consecration conceals this per for mance by narrating and representing the Eucharist as a mournful scene of commemoration for the historical sacrifice and absent body of Christ (ibid.). In the final movement, the sacramental event unifies the faithful in Christ by generating an “ecclesiastical body as symbolic fictive society at once visible and invisible” (ibid.). This is the model that the portrait of the king takes up in an efort to resolve the corresponding tensions dividing the three bodies of the king. Like the Eucharist, the portrait of the king is never a matter of simple mimetic representation. It does not merely describe the king but produces the king as king. It accomplishes this, says Marin, by ofering the king “the icon of the absolute monarch he desires to be” (PK, 7–8). The portrait seals the reality of this image by further dissimulating the gap between the absolute sovereign and the “man who would be king”—presenting the image of the king as if it were nothing more than a memorial narrative for the king’s individual, historical body and life. The representation, in other words, must make everyone believe that the king and the man are the same (ibid.). His subjects cannot know that the king is king only in “his image, and that behind or beyond the portrait there is no king, but a man” (ibid.). That is why the king is never more than “a king’s portrait” (218). Between the king’s two bodies, the performative power of the portrait

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intervenes in order to transform an individual, natural, finite, and wretchedly fragile body into the glorious dignity of the body political, mystical, collective, and representational. The king becomes king only through the absolute power displayed in his portrait. The portrait is “his real presence” (8). It is the “mystery of a ‘political’ sacrament . . . whose incessant epiphany, in all places and at all times, celebrates the multiple presence” of the king (209). The portrait of the king is a critical event in the history of the work of art. The sovereign is the efect of an image: a copy taken for an original, an aura generated by a reproduction, and “a body at once local and translocal,” here and everywhere, unique and generic (PK, 10). In some sense, this also means that the historical body of the king is always already missing, returning (revenant) from the beginning in the image that produces the king as king.57 But if this is the case—“if the monarch is absolute only in the official portrait that his subjects draw of him,” if “the king is only King in his portrait,” if his secret, “the secret thought of his secrecy, so secret that he does not think it, is that he is not what he is,” and if this is the ineluctable state of dispossession in which the sovereign finds himself—then “the absolute monarch is an empty monument, a cenotaph, a tomb that shelters no body but that is royal body in its very vacuity” (PK, 238).58 Marin concludes that the portrait of the king recapitulates the inaugural tableau of Christian history: “the loss of a body—the loss of the body of Jesus Christ” (MF, 81). Every thing is as if sovereignty begins at Christ’s tomb, a “tomb found empty one morning by the tearful women,” who discover “in the place of the body they had come to anoint in order to institute it in its absent presence of corpse, a message, a word: ‘He is not here, he is elsewhere, in Galilee where he precedes you as he said he would’ ” (PK, 238). The portrait of the king projects the image of the one who was resurrected, of “the sudden appearance of the unavailable, of the other and of the one disappearing in the body itself and as the body,” an absent body that shines “with the brilliance of the invisible” through a presence that “essentially distances itself, and in distancing itself, touches you with its very distance.”59 It is the history of an aura—that unique epiphany of a distance, however near it may be—reproducible again and again in “the strangest and most obscure secrecy of all”: in that Eucharistic place where the “King of kings chose to remain until his last coming, still a tomb but also hidden manna and the bread of life of the mystical community of his faithful” (PK, 238). In short, the

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sovereign is a reproduction gazing upon the aura emanating from his own empty tomb.

The Survivor, the Ghost The history of Christ’s empty tomb (“They have taken him away”) is the “story of his loss, the history of his returns elsewhere and other wise, in ways that are the efect rather than the refutation of his absence” (MF, 2).60 In this light, de Certeau claims that only a “theology of the phantom” can analyze why Christ continues to “haunt our environs” and why he continues to reappear on many “a stage other than the one from which he vanished” (MF, 2; FM, 10). I have been trying to show that Benjamin’s essay on technological reproducibility is one such stage in the historical stagings and restagings of this spectral theology (Erscheinung: apparition, epiphany). But following de Certeau, I want to connect this Benjaminian scene to another earlier and exemplary episode in the theatrical history of sovereignty: the ghostly returns of Hamlet’s father, who “once became the law of the castle in which he was no longer present” (ibid.).61 As a few of Benjamin’s readers have suggested, Hamlet is a play about aura and reproducibility, about the cognate “conditions of ghostliness and reproduction,” and about the crossings of a “unique existence” with “a ‘plurality of copies.’ ”62 I argue here, and with continued reference to Benjamin, that Shakespeare’s dramatization of Eucharistic theology yields something more than a theology of the phantom. In a crucial historical translation—“at the heart of the ghost story called Christianity”—Shakespeare analyzes the aura and reproducibility of the king’s portrait as a political theology of a survivor-ghost.63

• Hamlet has had a “long history as the avatar of modernity.”64 Yet the “apparently secular” drama has also provoked considerable debate about the  continuities and transformations of medieval Christianity.65 Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt represent two opposing perspectives on the problem. While Benjamin reads Hamlet as the only manifestation of “Christian spirit” in an increasingly “secularized” world, Schmitt contends that “Shakespeare’s drama is no longer Christian” (GS1:335; OG, 158; H, 62). Schmitt quickly adds, though, that even if “Hamlet is not Christian in any

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specific sense,” it does play host to “theological strife and confessional civil war” (H, 61). He observes that Hamlet stands “between Catholicism and Protestantism, Rome and Wittenberg” and at the very heart of “the schism that has determined the fate of Europe” (ibid.).66 The presence of these conflicting forms of Christianity has made it “notoriously difficult to identify any consistent theological position in either the play itself or its title character.”67 The various configurations “challenge each other, clashing and sending shock waves” through a play that depicts “a young man from Wittenberg, with a distinctly Protestant temperament” haunted “by a distinctly Catholic ghost.”68 Hamlet belongs to a paradoxical moment in the history of Europe: a moment defined as much by the continuing “hegemony of Christianity” as by the threat of its destruction at the hands of the Reformation and coming wars of religion.”69 According to the “usual story,” the eventual resolution of this theological-political crisis gave rise to modernity, secularism, and the liberal state.70 Schmitt insists that “Shakespearean drama in general and Hamlet in par ticular is no longer religious in the medieval sense but neither is it state-centered or political in the concrete sense that the state and politics acquired on the European continent through the development of state sovereignty during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries” (H, 59). The argument is that “Shakespeare’s Hamlet registers more fully than any other work of art of the early modern period this tear in the fabric of the medieval order of being.”71 It represents “a kind of structural interregnum in the history of governmentality in Europe,” dramatizing the “symptomatic distortions and deformations” of sovereignty around 1600 (155–56).72 Schmitt assigns the disorder of sovereignty in Hamlet not only to the “general unrest of the era—civil and state wars between Catholics and Protestants all over Europe, religious and political persecutions of all kinds” but also to the controversies surrounding royal succession (H, 17). In the violent drama that unfolds between the murdered king, Prince Hamlet, and the usurper Claudius, a “terrible historical reality shimmers through the masks and costumes of the stage play”: the actual crisis that erupted between Queen Elizabeth and her heir apparent James I (18). This “strong core of reality” makes clear that Hamlet is more than the avenger of his dead father (44). He is “also the competitor for his own throne” (53). Claudius’s murder of King Hamlet robs the latter “not only of his life . . . but also of the possibility of naming his son Hamlet as the successor” (56–58). The murder stifles the father’s dying voice and interrupts the son’s “blood right” to the kingdom

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(ibid.). Schmitt glimpses these legal questions in Prince Hamlet’s final will to Horatio (“But I do prophecy th’election lights / On Fortinbras: he has my dying voice”), which seems to express an “authentic designation” on the question of sovereign succession (H, 55–56; Ham. 5.2.339–40). By naming Fortinbras king at the end of the play, Hamlet attempts to restore the royal legitimacy shattered by Claudius’s silencing of the sovereign voice. What Schmitt does not specifically mention is that the dislocation of sovereignty in Hamlet also touches on the doctrine of the “king’s two bodies.” Kantorowicz traces the conceptual disintegration of the notion through a reading of Richard III, where the “king that ‘never dies’ ” becomes the “king that always dies and sufers death more cruelly than other mortals” (KT, 30). In the case of Hamlet, the theological-political principle permits the decoding of an other wise inexplicable passage, where the prince playfully remarks that “the body is with the king, but the king is not with / the body. The king is a thing” (Ham. 4.2.25–26). The perplexing words appear to describe Hamlet’s insouciant refusal to identify the location of Polonius’s dead body. But they also reveal a theological-political index: “The body (i.e., the body natural) is with (necessarily conjoined to) the king (the body politic), but the king (the body politic or kingship) is not (always, i.e., after death) with the body (natural). The king (kingship) is a thing (an abstract thing).”73 As Hamlet says in an acerbic conclusion: the king is not simply a thing but “a thing . . . of nothing.”74 The double body of the king is “a composition of parts that will inevitably fall apart and decompose . . . an existence constructed around the void.”75 Jacques Lacan makes a similar point. He claims that one need only “replace the word ‘king’ with the word ‘phallus’ ” to see that “the body is tightly bound up in this business of the phallus, but on the other hand the phallus is bound to nothing and always slips between your fingers.”76 For Lacan, Hamlet ofers a political lesson about the possibility or impossibility of localizing and identifying the site of sovereign authority. It is a play about the “radical loss” of the sovereign phallus and “the enigmatic manifestation of the signifier of power as such” (347, 352). In his verbal assaults on Claudius, Hamlet concludes by naming him “a king of shreds and patches,” showing that “after the father has been killed, the phallus is still there . . . and it is Claudius who is given the task of embodying it” (352). The sovereign in Hamlet is dead but returning, absent and present, here but elsewhere. This is the uncertain structure of loss and displacement that makes Hamlet hesitate. Like Freud before him, Lacan provides an answer to the classical puzzle

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of Hamlet’s “tragic indecision,” his constant delays, his irresolution, and his inability to take vengeance on Claudius for the murder of his father.77 If Hamlet cannot strike the phallus, if he fails at every turn to kill the illegitimate but very real King Claudius, it is because the phallus is already a ghostly “shadow.”78 The body is with the king, but the king is not with the body. The king is a thing of nothing. The sovereign is a specter. Lacan is also correct to observe that from one end of Hamlet to the other, “people talk about nothing but mourning” (339). Benjamin sees this, too, and situates the play’s representation of sovereignty within the context of the German Trauerspiel.79 In general, he writes, the mourning play depicts a scene of total immanence. It registers a “total disappearance of eschatology” as well as a total renunciation of history as a story of redemption (OG, 81). The broad efects of secularization give rise to an “empty world”: a state of existence defined not by the promise of ultimate fulfillment but by contingency, devastation, and death (139). Melancholy becomes “the mood of the times” and a disinterested feeling of mournful resignation leads to the suspension of all activity in a state of “contemplative paralysis” (140). The theological predicament reaches its most acute point in the field of sovereignty, where the prince reigns as “the paradigm of the melancholy man” (142). Against Schmitt, Benjamin argues that the Trauerspiel’s melancholic horizon exposes the “antithesis between the power of the ruler and his capacity to rule” (70). Its generic conventions underscore the massive disproportion between the king’s “unlimited hierarchical dignity, with which he is divinely invested and the humble state of his humanity” (70). The sovereign is not the one who decides on the state of exception but the one who “reveals, at the first opportunity, that he is almost incapable of making a decision” (71).80 Hamlet’s own indecision makes him similarly “incapable of sovereignty” and perhaps the very archetype of the melancholic prince.81

• In one way or another, Hamlet has allowed its audiences to see “the turbulent void at the heart of their (early) modernity”: that abyssal space variously called Christian, Catholic, Protestant, or secular.82 Alongside the question of sovereignty, this site of conflict has manifested itself as a battle over the Eucharist. Many have speculated that Hamlet is a work “charged with the language of Eucharistic anxiety” and a text that “mobilises the extraordinary signifying power of the Eucharist in its attempt to dramatise the cultural

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impact of the Reformation.”83 This is not only because Shakespeare identifies Hamlet as a student at Wittenberg, “the most Protestant institute of the time” and a “key centre of the Eucharistic controversy,” but also because Hamlet participates in the dispute by ofering his own derisive satirization of the Lord’s Supper.84 Just as he “dismantles the sacramental edifice of Claudius’s sovereignty by collapsing the ‘mystical’ and natural bodies of the King,” so, too, does he echo “Luther’s denial of the sacramental authority of the Roman Church at the Diet of Worms.”85 KING. Now, Hamlet, where’s Polonius? HAMLET. At supper. KING. At supper! Where? HAMLET. Not where he eats but where ’a is eaten. A certain convocation of politic worms are e’en at him. / Your worm is your only emperor for diet. We fat all / creatures else to fat us, and we fat ourselves for maggots. / Your fat king and your lean beggar is but variable / ser vice, two dishes but to one table. That’s the end. KING. Alas, alas. HAMLET. A man may fish with the worm that hath eat of / a king and eat of the fish that hath fed of that worm. KING. What dost thou mean by this? HAMLET. Nothing but to show you how a king may go a / progress through the guts of a beggar. (Ham. 4.3.16–30) There are other clues (beyond this “monstrous parody”) that Shakespeare situates the “Eucharistic debate right at the heart of [the play’s] most crucial and complex interpretive issues.”86 In the drama’s concluding scene, the ghost’s final command to Hamlet (“Adieu, adieu, adieu, remember me”) repeats Christ’s sacramental injunction (“this doe ye in remembrance of me”) (Ham. 1.5.91).87 But Hamlet’s “grotesquely materialist reimagining of the Eucharist” is at the center of the play’s theological dilemma: be it one of “secular, skeptical protest,” Reformation polemic, or “the despair of a particularly Protestant spiritual crisis.”88 Does Hamlet’s obsessive materialism reflect a “skeptical, secular insistence on irreducible corporeality”?89 Does it signal “a progressive degradation that has lost any connection to redemption”?90 Or do his scandalous words divulge a Protestant attempt to save “Christ’s Glorified Body” from the “material contamination” of the Eucharist and

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ensure that “Christ—single, whole, and beyond corruption—dwells in Heaven at the right hand of his Father”?91 Another option is that the opposition between faithful Protestantism and skeptical secularism simply reprises the entire history of the Eucharist and the contradictions posed by the ability of Christ’s body to “be in so many places, so many masses, at the same time.”92 Shakespeare’s drama would be less as a case of periodic rupture than a fraught restatement of theological ambivalence. After all, says Katherine Eggert, Hamlet’s skeptical assault on Eucharistic materiality flanks his own belief in “a truly transcendent physical body, the product of a transubstantiation . . . that indisputably worked” (56). Hic et ubique?, Hamlet asks the ghost, “who seems to have multiplied his dimensiveness—‘ here and everywhere’—in a fashion that Aquinas claimed was available only to Christ’s substantial form in the Eucharist” (ibid.). The ghost in Hamlet is a “unique existence” and a “living original” who is also “multiply replicated” and one among a “plurality of copies” that “move about” and “reproduce” themselves without any singularly fixed time or space.93 Derrida perceives in Marcellus’s question— “What, has this thing appeared again tonight?”—a reminder that “a specter is always a revenant. One cannot control its comings and goings because it begins by coming back.”94

• These structural tensions also have important consequences for Hamlet’s theological-political organization. If the play really does mark a decisive turn in the genealogy of sovereignty, it is not only because it transforms the king into a “thing of nothing.” It is also because it locates kingship in the spectral space between the ghost and the Host, the phantom and the Eucharist, Christ’s loss and his returns, elsewhere and other wise. The Eucharistic matrix, however, does not exhaust itself in a theology or even political theology of the phantom. The operations—“distortions and deformations”—of sovereignty in Hamlet circulate within a wider field of mourning delimited by the distance and proximity between two “bodies” of the king: the ghost and the survivor.95 Consider here King Claudius’s avuncular advice to his bereaved nephew: ’Tis sweet and commendable in your nature, Hamlet, / To give these mourning duties to your father, / But you must know your father lost

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a father, / That father lost his, and the survivor bound / In filial obligation for some term / To do obsequious sorrow; but to persever / In obstinate condolement is a course / Of impious stubbornness, ’tis unmanly grief, / It shows a will most incorrect to heaven, / A heart unfortified, or mind impatient, / An understanding simple and unschooled; / For what we know must be, and is as common / As any the most vulgar thing to sense—/ Why should we in our peevish opposition / Take it to heart? Fie, ’tis a fault to heaven, / A fault against the dead, a fault to nature, / To reason most absurd, whose common theme / Is death of fathers, and who still hath cried / From the first corpse till he that died today / ‘This must be so.’ We pray you throw to earth / This unprevailing woe, and think of us / As of a father, for let the world take note / You are the most immediate to our throne, / And with no less nobility of love / Than that which dearest father bears his son / Do I impart toward you. For your intent / In going back to school in Wittenberg / It is most retrograde to our desire, / And we beseech you bend you to remain / Here in the cheer and comfort of our eye, / Our chiefest courtier, cousin, and our son. (Ham. 1.2.87–117) Hamlet, then, is a survivor.96 Or so says Claudius, whose criticism of the prince’s persistent despondency is a lesson in the ethical, theological, and political (not to mention sexual, intellectual, and historical) exigencies of mourning. To be a proper survivor, says Claudius, is to regulate one’s filial passion and assume a species of conduct more in line with the duties appropriate to something as common and unavoidable as the death of a father. Hamlet’s unmanly, simple, and impious behav ior lies in his apparent conviction that death—the death of his father—is an exceptional event worthy of extraordinary grief, a sorrow “out of joint” with the standard practices and protocols, emotional and temporal limits, of the mourner. This loss of control stands in direct contrast to the king’s own well-schooled and wellfortified heart and mind, the devout and natural comportment that he bears toward the death of his own brother. Claudius claims to understand the behavioral boundaries that both prevent a stubborn perseverance in attachment to the dead and finally permit the survivor to throw sorrow to the earth. The fraternal aspect of Claudius’s survivor discourse also appears in his seeming confusion about the history of mourning: a trajectory he traces

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“from the first corpse till he that died today” in an attempt to convince Hamlet that the death of fathers is a common theme. Scholars have emphasized that the piercing irony and biblical proportions of this reference lie in the fact that the first corpse was not a father but a brother, not Adam but Abel. The first corpse, moreover, was a murder and a fratricide not unlike the one of which Hamlet suspects Claudius. Claudius’s mistake shows that the thought of the survivor belongs not only to the ostentatious mourning of the son but to the murderous deeds of the brother—the very uncle now trying to ofer instruction in the moderation and manliness of mourning. It is here that Claudius also reveals the insidious subtext of his speech, which concludes by asking Hamlet to abandon his commitment to the dead king and recognize the new king as his true father. In this ferocious drama of succession, the proposition has serious political implications. Claudius does not fail to mention that the matter of paternity relates directly to the fact that Hamlet “is most immediate to our throne,” the son of the dead king, nephew of his successor, and himself the future sovereign. In a conspicuous attempt to consolidate his own sovereign legitimacy, Claudius advises Hamlet to abandon his radically unbridled lament, to deny himself as survivor, and to forget and forgo his father by transferring his filial love and loyalty elsewhere. Like Hamlet, Claudius suspects that the “the body is with the king, but the king is not with the body,” that he is a king of “shreds and patches,” and that his claim to the throne cannot tolerate the existence of any other survivors. The king’s speech indicates that the crises of succession and sovereignty in Hamlet pass from the ghost directly through the survivor: one name for that unbearable constellation or coincidence of murder and mourning. The logic of Claudius’s rhetoric even suggests that the true sovereign is always the survivor: the one whose manliness, restraint, and autonomy permit an absolute independence from the demands (or commands) of those (living or dead) who still hold power over him—even to the point of murder. From this perspective, Hamlet appears to be something of a failure, beset as he is by a mournful commitment to his father’s (Eucharistic) injunction: “Adieu, adieu, adieu, remember me.” In response, Hamlet pledges that “from the table of my memory / I’ll wipe away all trivial fond records, / All saws of books, all forms, all pressures past / That youth and observation copied there / And thy commandment all alone shall live / Within the book and volume of my brain / Unmix’d with baser matter” (Ham. 1.5.98–104).97 Unable or unwilling to heed his uncle’s warning, Hamlet plays the role of

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survivor by making himself “into a memorial object, a tombstone endowed with breath, the primordial prosopopoeia through which the dead continue to speak.”98 By the end of the play, he proclaims—in words “most appropriately spoken by a ghost”—his own spectral existence: “Horatio, I am dead” (Ham. 5.2.322).99 The apparition of “Hamlet’s father has not disappeared; it has been incorporated by his son,” the culminating point of a narrative that from first to last recounts the story of the survivor’s becoming-ghost (ibid.). So does Hamlet possess a unique existence? Is he a living original? Or has he become a spectral copy? The same questions also apply to Claudius. His political theology of the survivor does little to undermine the fact that his own surviving kingship (“shreds and patches”) incessantly betrays a passage toward ghostliness (“a thing of nothing”). Like Hamlet, Claudius participates in the ambiguous crossings between the sovereign, the specter, and the survivor. Together they show that the conjunctive disjunction of the survivor-ghost ofers a general image for the various fissures of subjectivity and sovereignty that punctuate Shakespeare’s drama. Is the sovereign the ghost? A dead but returning monarch, hic et ubique, “our last King, / Whose image even but now appear’d to us” (Ham. 1.1.79–80)? Or is the sovereign the survivor? The living but finite and sometimes wretched body of the heir? A man of action like Claudius? One who commands but cannot act like the ghost? Or one, like Hamlet, who seems incapable of deciding on action of any kind? My argument is that, among the many distortions and deformations of sovereignty in Shakespeare, the survivor-ghost is the one that exposes it as a Eucharistic movement of auratic reproducibility. The survivor-ghost is “in the strictest sense of the term, an analysis, an undoing, of the King’s portrait, of the site where the political theology of the two bodies simultaneously [achieves] its ultimate realization as well as its most radical transformation.”100 It is a figure for the many losses and returns that narrate the history of the empty tomb.101 “There needs no ghost, my lord, come from the grave / To tell us this,” Horatio says of “the king / That was and is the question of these wars” (Ham. 1.5.124–25). In Shakespeare’s play, the battles of Reformation Denmark give way to the clashes of ancient Rome: “a little ere the mightiest Julius fell” and “the graves stood tenantless and the sheeted dead / Did squeak and gibber in the streets” (1.1.113–15). But these eruptions only recall Jerusalem, where after another king “yielded up the ghost . . . the graves did open themselves, and many bodies of the Saints, which slept, arose . . . and came out of the graves after his resurrection, and went into the

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holy city, and appeared unto many” (Matt. 27:52–53).102 For a time, readers will remember, a surviving Hamlet lingers over the gaping vacuity of an empty tomb: the sovereign in the age of its Eucharistic reproducibility (Ham. 5.1.61–205).

Projections This is Shakespeare’s political theology of the survivor-ghost: an image of the sovereign in the discourse network of 1600. My concluding question— and the goal of the next chapter—is how to read the returns of this image on the stages of sovereignty around 1900. Let me anticipate things here with a rereading of Benjamin. In his essay on translation, Benjamin taught us to see the ontotheological power, pure violence, and mystical force of the survivor’s reine überlebende Gewalt. In his critique of violence, though, Benjamin supplements the image of the sovereign with the kinds of biopolitical change later charted by Foucault. One development mentioned by Foucault is the rise of the police as a repressive instrument for the “elimination of disorder.”103 Benjamin explains that in addition to the power of the law—a decision fixed by a singular time and place—sovereignty circulates in the “formless” form of police power: a “nowhere tangible, all-pervasive, ghostly apparition” (SW1:243; GS2:189).104 This spectral Erscheinung, he says, haunts the life of the state, brutally harassing its citizens and subjects through omnipresent surveillance and securitization. In other words, Benjamin’s distinction between ontotheological power (divine violence) and biopolitics (police power) divides sovereignty according to a distinction introduced by the discourse network of 1600. Like Shakespeare’s analysis of the king’s portrait, Benjamin’s critical dissection of sovereign force disseminates itself into the singular aura and plural ubiquity of the survivor-ghost. Benjamin never explicitly identifies the figure of the survivor-ghost that hovers between his essays. But his reflections on the age of technological reproducibility do gesture toward another possible scene and another possible staging. He observes that “film has enriched our field of perception with methods that can be illustrated by those of Freudian theory” (SW4:265; GS1:98).105 Parallel with cinematic developments, psychoanalysis “isolated and made analyzable things which had previously floated unnoticed on the broad stream of perception” (SW4:265; GS1:98). Just as new technologies were collecting a host of audial clatter and graphic confusion, Freud was

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accumulating an “immense store of nonsense” (N, 279). Like a telephone receiver, Kittler says, Freud was able to pick out of dreams and language “the parapraxes that would be mere debris under a postulate of sense” (284). More than a response “to individual miseries,” psychoanalysis was a reaction “to a discourse network that exhaustively [recorded] nonsense, its purpose being to inscribe people with the network’s logic of the signifier” (282). Freud at times traffics in such “media-technical analogues.”106 In Totem and Taboo (1913), for example, he situates himself on the borderlines of the archaic past and the technological present, by describing the experience of mourning and sovereignty that arises between two protagonists: the ghost and the survivor, das Gespenst and der Überlebende.107 Freud argues that in mourning for the dead, (primitive) survivors find themselves haunted, hunted, and mercilessly ruled by the specters of those they have lost. As he remarks elsewhere, “the dead are powerful sovereigns”: killed and yet mourned, lost and yet multiplied, absent and yet all the fiercer for it (SE13:51, 141; SA9:342, 425). What the survivors do not know—but Freud claims to see—is that this fear of ghosts is only the phantom echo of an irremediable ambivalence. In truth, these Erscheinungen are only “projections [Projektionen] of hostile feelings harboured by the survivors [Überlebenden] against the dead” (SE13:62; SA9:353). After psychoanalysis, says Laurence Rickels, “haunting belongs to the movies.”108 Survivors become the sovereign projectors of their own virtual sovereigns. Around 1900, Freud enters the question of sovereignty into a cinematic field delimited by the unity-in-diference of the survivor-ghost. It is a Shakespearean signature, to be sure, and a sign that, like Benjamin, Freud may still be moving within the wake of a legacy bequeathed to him by the history of Eucharistic reproducibility: Does the reappearance of this survivor-ghost have anything to do with the discourse network of 1200? Or with the aura and reproducibility of Christ’s three bodies? Is Freud writing about Christianity? And about the portrait of the king? I attend to these issues in Chapter 5 by following Freud as he ofers his own reading of Hamlet and as he devotes himself to thinking the sovereignty of survival and the survival of sovereignty. From the survivor-ghost to the survivor-revenant, it is a story that begins again at the scene of an empty tomb and closes with one final return to the corpus mysticum of the Jews.

CHAPTER 5

The Empty Tomb

impression, n. /ɪmˈprɛʃən/ Also ME en-, ME in-.