The Labor of Job: The Biblical Text as a Parable of Human Labor 9780822392019

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the labor of job New Slant  religion,

politics & ontology

A series edited by Creston Davis, Philip Goodchild, and Kenneth Surin

t he l a b or of j ob The Biblical Text as a Parable of Human Labor

antonio negri Foreword by michael hardt Translated by matteo mandarini Commentary by roland boer

duke university press Durham & London 2009

© Bayard, 2002 3 et 5 rue Bayard, 75008 Paris English translation © 2009 Duke University Press All rights reserved Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper ♾ Designed by Jennifer Hill Typeset in Carter and Cone Galliard by Tseng Information Systems, Inc. The translation of this work was supported by the John Hope Franklin Center at Duke University. The English translation of this work is from the Italian edition: Il lavoro di Giobbe. Il famoso testo biblico come parabola del lavoro umano. Roma: Manifestolibri, 2002.

Ai pochi che non sono pentiti Alle nuove generazioni To the few unrepentant To the new generations

Contents



Foreword 

Creation beyond Measure  michael hardt

vii

Preface to the 2002 Edition

xv



Introduction 1 One 



Two 

Of the Absoluteness of the Contingent 18 Three 



The Adversary and the Avenger 31 Four 

Five 



The Chaos of Being 48

The Dispositif of the Messiah 63

Six 



The Constitution of Power 79 Seven 



The Difference of Job 5

Commentary 

Ethics as Creation 95

Negri, Job, and the Bible  roland boer 109



Bibliographical Appendix 129



Index 133

Foreword 

Creation beyond Measure Michael Hardt

N

egri’s interpretation of the book of Job turns on an analogy between justice and economic value. Both are supported, he contends, by theories of measure and equivalence, and in both realms the theory of measure is in crisis. To follow Negri’s reasoning the reader must tack back and forth not only between legal and economic arguments but also between the ancient scene of the narrative and contemporary capitalist society. The result is a complex text in which many paths are woven together. I want to navigate one of these possible routes to explore how, once the mechanisms of measure and equivalence no longer function, value can be conceived on the basis of human creativity. By posing the problematic of justice in the book of Job in terms of measure, Negri does not stray far from the text and its conventional interpretations. Justice is conceived by Job and his interlocutors primarily according to a logic of retribution, which rests on a calculus that equates crimes with punishments and virtues with rewards. Job’s initial complaints emphasize that his sufferings are unjust because he has done nothing to deserve them. His three interlocutors—Eliphaz, Bildad, and Zophar—all maintain, in one way or another, that divine justice and its system of measure are intact, perhaps based on a calculation or information that is beyond human understanding. Job instead insists that the theory of measure has been violated: no equation can justify his suffering in terms of his actions. In any case, by focusing on the centrality of measure and equivalence as the

  M i c h a e l H a r d t bases for justice, Negri engages with some of the standard themes in the interpretation of Job’s travails. Negri does depart from conventional interpretations when he proposes an analogy between the injustice Job suffers and the position of labor in contemporary capitalist production. The correspondence rests on the notion that the relationship between labor and economic value is determined by a theory of measure and equivalence. This requires some explanation for those not familiar with Marxist theory. The so-called labor theory of value posits that in capitalist society the value of a commodity (although not necessarily its price) is proportional to the quantity of labor required on average for its production. The early nineteenth-century political economist David Ricardo is often considered the originator of the theory, but Karl Marx develops it in the opening chapters of Capital and it has been the subject of a long history of debate. Marx uses the quantitative measures of this theory—focusing especially on the value of labor-power, which is a special commodity—in order to reveal that in capitalist production labor is not paid the equivalent of the value it produces. Surplus value is precisely the difference between the value paid to the worker and the value the worker’s labor contributes to the commodity produced. The labor theory of value thus allows Marx to give a quantitative definition of surplus value (and thus exploitation) as well as demonstrating how the capitalist ideology of equal exchange is a mystification that hides systematic unequal exchanges. Just as Job’s suffering demonstrates a violation of the theory of justice based on equivalence, then, so too the exploitation of the worker and the capitalist expropriation of surplus value violate the notion of an equal exchange of value between worker and capitalist. Based on Negri’s analogy between the injustices to Job and the capitalist  Negri undoubtedly identifies with Job’s unjust suffering, at least in part. As he explains in the preface to the 2002 edition (reprinted here), Negri conceived of this book when he was being held in preventive detention in Italian prisons from 1979 to 1983 in relation to his political activities. On Negri’s imprisonment and legal case, see Timothy Murphy, “Editor’s Introduction,” in Negri, Books for Burning (London: Verso, 2005), ix–xxviii.  For a classic presentation of the labor theory of value in Marxist theory, see Paul Sweezy, The Theory of Capitalist Development (New York: Oxford University Press, 1942), 41–71.

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exploitation of workers, one could easily construct a socialist interpretation that focuses on the violation and possible restitution of the theories of measure and equivalence. Such a reading would likely highlight the prose coda to the text in chapter 42, in which God validates Job’s complaint and punishes his three interlocutors for speaking falsely. God restores the fortunes of Job, resurrecting his dead family members and giving him twice as much wealth and possessions as he lost. The justice of measure is reestablished. If we shift back to the economic realm, the corresponding resolution could be conceived as a socialism of equal measure and equivalence, which has, in fact, animated the dreams of certain streams of Marxist theory. For economic justice to be established, according to this view, values have to be exchanged for their equivalents and, specifically, labor must be paid the quantity of value it produces, thus eliminating the surplus value expropriated by the capitalist. Socialism conceived in this way takes the form of a rationalized capitalism, a just capitalism, a capitalism without capitalists, which makes good on the capitalist ideology of equal exchanges and restores the integrity of measure. Negri, however, does not pursue such a socialist interpretation. “Socialism,” he writes, after reading Zophar’s defense of divine justice, “is the apologia for a retributive theory of justice, human action, and social rewards” (36). Negri’s interpretation, in fact, discounts the coda to the text, which restores divine order and measure, and focuses instead on Job’s suffering and complaints. Job himself, Negri argues, mocks the claims that any just system of measure exists or could be restored. In Job’s sarcastic reply to Zophar, for example, Negri situates Job as already “beyond Stakhanov.” A Soviet miner who was heralded as a hero of socialist labor, Alexey Stakhanov is a symbol for the illusory promise of a society of labor based on just measure and equivalence. Negri reads Job’s suffering not as a violation of the theory of measure, which could be restored, but rather as a symptom of the impossibility of measure and the exhaustion of the mechanisms of equivalence. Since the 1970s Negri has argued, against most streams of Marxism, that the labor theory of value is in crisis. Capital can no longer measure and quantify value in relation to labor. Ricardo and Marx theorized the

xii  M i c h a e l H a r d t labor theory of value in the context of manufacturing and large-scale industry, in which a clearly defined working day could function as a relatively stable basis for the measurement of labor-time and its correspondence to the quantity of value produced. The labor theory of value functioned in that period to the extent that factory production effectively represented in some sense economic production as a whole. In the late twentieth century, however, as the center of gravity of capitalist production moves outside the factory walls, Negri contends that the bases of measure tend to break down. Economic value is increasingly produced by forms of “social” labor that cannot be measured by the temporal schemes of the factory and its working day. More recently, in books that Negri and I have written together, we have elaborated notions of “immaterial” and “biopolitical” production to grasp together the processes that produce ideas, images, information, codes, affects, and the like. In biopolitical production, we claim that, on the one hand, the definition of the working day and the divisions between work-time and nonwork-time become increasingly unclear such that the quantity of labor cannot adequately be measured. On the other hand, the value of immaterial products such as ideas and affects cannot be quantified in the same way as the value of material commodities such as refrigerators and automobiles. In fact, entire new fields have sprung up in the discipline of accounting to try to come to terms with what accountants call intangible assets. The notion that the labor theory of value is in crisis rests, at least initially, on an empirical claim that quantifying both labor-time and the value of its products is becoming increasingly difficult, thus undermining any mechanism that would pose an equivalence between them. This is not the place to work through the minutiae of Marxist debates, but I should point out that many Marxists object to the claim that the theory of value is in crisis, in large part because they maintain that such a  On the crisis of the labor theory of value, see Negri, Marx beyond Marx, translated by Harry Cleaver, Michael Ryan, and Maurizio Viano (New York: Autonomedia, 1991); and, especially, Negri, “Twenty Theses on Marx” in Marxism beyond Marxism, edited by Saree Makdisi, Cesare Casarino, and Rebecca Karl (New York: Routledge, 1996), 149–80. See also Hardt and Negri, Multitude (New York: Penguin, 2004), 145–53.

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notion undermines some of the central elements of Marxist analysis and politics. Their primary concerns are, first, that the concept of exploitation loses its force when surplus value can no longer be quantified and, second, that the fundamental claim that labor is the source of all economic value in capitalist society is nullified or at least diluted when no quantitative relation can be established. Negri, in contrast, approaches the crisis of the theory of value as a challenge to rethink the concept of exploitation and the relation between labor and value in non-quantitative terms. Workers are still exploited by capital, in other words, even when the quantity of value expropriated cannot be calculated; labor is still the source of all value even when its productivity cannot be measured. This conceptual and political challenge points us back to Job and helps us understand Negri’s focus on both his suffering and his creative powers. Before returning to Job, however, we need to articulate one more crucial consequence of the crisis of the labor theory of value. Negri links the functioning of the labor theory of value in the factory with the ability of the capitalist to manage labor in the production process. As Marx says, the capitalist provides cooperation, bringing workers together in the factory, giving them the tools to work together, and imposing on them the discipline of collective production. Negri identifies the crisis of the labor theory of value, then, with the decline of capitalists’ capacity to manage labor in an era when the center of gravity of economic production moves outside the factory. In the context of immaterial or biopolitical production, the schemes of cooperation are not furnished by the capitalist but developed within the productive circuits of labor. As labor becomes more autonomous and the productive role of the capitalist declines, the capitalist expropriation of surplus value becomes an ever more pure and empty form of domination. Instead of focusing on the unequal exchanges of value, in other words, this perspective highlights the antagonism toward capitalist command. The rule of capital becomes merely and brutally a matter of power. Now turning back to the book of Job we can see that here too Negri emphasizes the arrogance of power. When God finally responds to Job’s complaints, there is no attempt to argue, as Job’s three interlocutors

xiv  M i c h a e l H a r d t have done, that Job has been treated justly and that his sufferings can be equated to his wrongdoings. God speaks not of justice but only of power and hierarchy. God appears as pure command, ruling over the animals and the earth, dictating the course of the sun and the movements of the seas, as well as controlling the monstrous Behemoth and Leviathan. God is all-powerful and absolutely transcendent, whereas humans are virtually powerless. Job regards God, according to Negri, not as judge or father or even as the source of discipline and mediation, but merely as antagonist, the locus of an empty, unjust command. There is no longer a question of measure—equating sins and punishment or virtues and rewards—that could support a conception of divine justice. But Job is not powerless, nor is he patient, as the conventional interpretations would have it. According to Negri’s reading he stands before God angry, indignant, unrepentant, and rebellious. Negri’s reading relies on a rather indirect analogy between Job and workers, which rests primarily on two connections. The first emphasizes Job’s suffering. Job’s primary affect with regard to God’s power is not fear but pain. Fear is the primary weapon of transcendent sovereign power, as Thomas Hobbes and numerous other authors throughout the history of political theory have taught us. A subject that fears is willing to give up freedom for security. The fact that Job does not react with fear even to God’s display of absolute power is itself an act of insubordination. Instead of fear, Job expresses only his pain. Negri claims that, whereas fear establishes the vertical relation between subject and sovereign, pain is the foundation for horizontal relations among humans. “Pain is a key,” he writes, “that opens the door to the community” (90; orig. emph.). The common pain we share—the pain of survival, toil, and struggle—is a positive basis of sociality. The second and more significant connection between Job and workers rests on the human powers of creativity. Negri attaches great importance to Job’s statement in his final response that he now sees God with his eyes (42:5). One might read this line to mean that Job now understands God’s infinite power and will thus willingly submit himself to it. Negri inter-

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prets “seeing God,” on the contrary, as a sign that Job is now in a position equivalent in some sense to that of God or, even, as implying an inversion of the position of humanity with respect to the divine, specifically with regard to the powers of creation. “Job is the power of man on earth,” he writes, “social, constructive power—he is production, collective labor that becomes value” (83; orig. emph.). The figure of Job serves in this way as an allegory for the suffering, struggles, and ultimately the power of human labor. Negri’s analysis moves back and forth, as we have seen, from justice to economics and from the ancient world to the contemporary, asking the reader to follow him through some fascinating correspondences that are held together by the concept of measure. In the end, however, the theories of measure and equivalence in the realms of both justice and economic value are completely left behind. Negri is not even nostalgic for them. Any effort to restore either a divine justice of retribution and reward or a just relation between labor and capital would be not only futile but also mystifying. At this point there is no more back and forth movement, and no more analogies. The different social realms and the different time periods seem finally to come together in Negri’s analysis. The only system of value that can be legitimate—in justice as in economics and in the ancient world as well as the contemporary—is one that is based on human power and creativity. The creation beyond measure that characterizes human labor is the true figure of the divine.

Preface to the 2002 Edition Antonio Negri

I

began writing The Labor of Job long ago, in 1982 or ’83. I was in the fourth year of my prison term and I was writing my book on the poet Leopardi at the same time. I was working on the question of suffering. Leopardi provided a phenomenology and a poetics. Job was an exemplum. The situation I found myself in was desperate. I had been held in a highsecurity prison for some time, solely on political grounds, and I had no idea of how to get out. I sought a means to resist through the analysis of suffering. Once I had overcome the illusion that one could defend oneself from an absolute Power, the problem became that of not becoming immersed in the pain and misery of prison. It was the question of how to develop an adequate understanding of repression so as to resist it and to find a way to interpret political defeat as a critique of Power. Once I left prison and was forced into exile in 1983, the problem remained unchanged. To interpret that state of suffering had become for me an essential element of resistance. There were numerous interpretations of Job but none of them had been able to provide a theological explanation of  Negri, Lenta Ginestra. Saggio sull’ontologia di Giacomo Leopardi (Milan: Mimesis, 2001).  [Trans: I shall follow throughout the now-established tradition in Negri translation of rendering potere as Power and potenza as power. See the translator’s introduction to Negri, The Savage Anomaly, translated by Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).]  I told the story of these events in a book that is now impossible to find, Diario di un’evasione (Milan: M. B. P., 1986).

xviii  P r e fa c e t o t h e 2 0 0 2 E d i t i o n evil. Si Deus est, unde malum? Si malem est, cur Deus? It was not a question merely of understanding. It was a case of discovering how one could set oneself on a path of liberation. It was a practical problem, not a theodicy. It was the problem of liberation, in prison and in exile, from within the absoluteness of Power: liberation from a political defeat that appeared as an epochal passage—as well as a question of the evaluation of the end of an epoch that could not be reinstated and the explanation of the nightmare of a utopia that had become terror. How could one travel Job’s path in search of liberation? It had been simpler with Giacomo Leopardi. Like all the Romantics, Leopardi was full of irony (that is, capable of critical distancing from the passions) and was able to reflect on praxis, as well as to free up reflection and praxis in poetry. In the different periods of Leopardi’s poetic activity, I observed the critique of philosophy, which became great poetry, and I saw it explicating itself in an ethical and political phenomenology. I saw it being shattered only to be reborn, till it became a secular and materialist utopia of human solidarity. I found none of this in Job. In the book of Job the senseless pain of life is undergone immediately and we encounter an enormous capacity for refuting that pain, to the point that every possibility of critical reflection, all attempts to reach an accommodation between existence and destiny, are excluded. Leopardi’s path of liberation was political, that of a great existential phenomenology and of its poetic double—he thereby became a precursor of Nietzsche—whereas the experience of Job was constituted on the basis of an unreflecting violence, entirely within the immediate perception of being—from an unbearable ontological pain. It was the materialist experience of absolute pain. Job is an oriental Niobe who nevertheless resists from within his identity. He does not change, he resists. Thus I was  [Trans: Giacomo Leopardi (1798–1837) was a brilliant poet, essayist, and philosopher who remains relatively unknown in the Anglophone world.]  [Trans: Niobe is a figure from Greek mythology. She boasted of her fourteen children to Leto, who had only two, and as a punishment Apollo killed all of Niobe’s sons and Artemis all of Niobe’s daughters. Distraught, she fled to Mount Sipylus where she wept unceasingly and was turned into a stone waterfall.]

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presented with a number of themes. The first was that of the incommensurability of pain. In this I found myself directly in contrast with my Marxist heritage, which (like all modern cultures) is a culture of measure. In my youth, in particular, I had absorbed the good, civilized Marxism of the Italian Communist Party. It was a culture of measure, a labor of measure, the measured passion of the Raison d’Etat. And when I had concerned myself with workers’ labor, I was confronted with that fanaticism of measure in which the trade unions excelled. When I had turned to international problems, it was once again measure that emerged, as in the good old Westphalian tradition. Reasonableness and cynicism, utopia and realism always came together in their search for the sense of measure. It was only with the events of 1968 that I realized, with astonishment, what a great transformation in the destiny of humanity was possible, and that it could overturn all worldly measure. I perceived this in ’68. Later, throughout the 1970s, it became ever clearer and more precise. I asked myself again whether it was this acute perception of the crisis of measure and of the laws that structured it that so disturbed my reason, to the point that I sought, with a few friends, the revolutionary clash with the state. It ended badly. I was in prison. And yet there had been something solid and real in our rebellion. We were faced with a profound transformation in the mode of production, of our world. It was as though we were confronted with a new cosmogony. So, when asked why we rebelled, I answer that reason and measure were at stake. At stake were the entire social edifice, industrial production, and the forms of life. At that time in the early 1980s, when I was working on the great themes of pessimist thought, the laboring classes (in our wealthy and developed continents) realized that the nature of work had completely changed. The transformation of work that lay behind the defeat of the workers’ movement, and which was the source of the bastardization of its parties, rested upon the ruins of the measure of value. Without a measure of value, socialism became impossible. But so did capitalism. One had to create anew. The ruination of the law of measure was something that would profoundly upset the world: Job had been loyal to

xx  P r e fa c e t o t h e 2 0 0 2 E d i t i o n all the measures that regulated the world supported by God; the workers had been loyal to all the measures that regulated the world governed by capital. Now, though, measure had exploded. Job protested against measure and he suffered from the pain of the incommensurability of life: now all measure had blown up. What has all this to do with my anxiety for liberation? The reason is minor and simple but also profound: both the workers’ movement and I experienced what Job had, that is, the pain of incommensurability and the consequent discovery that to the end of measure one could reply only with the passion for creation. Where old measures had fallen it was necessary to create new ones; and passion could only play itself out now in its capacity to move with joy beyond measure. Only from this perspective was it possible to imagine communism anew. But how? How could one draw this concern for creation into the political struggle and, in particular, into communist struggle? This led to some further reflections. I felt a certain amount of dissatisfaction with the fact that I had lived my political engagement in the abstract, that is, through books, in ideology. Now repression had brought my brain into contact with my body. My criticism was not of the role of the intellect, which was central and increasingly more productive in society. It was simply a rediscovery of the body. A reaffirmation of its presence and its resistance. This was the second line of interpretation of the book of Job. Job is always a body, even when his discourse becomes progressively more metaphysical, which it increasingly does when he discovers his incommensurable distance from God. It is in this situation of absolute distance, of the complete lack of measure, that Job’s bodily struggle with God begins. My body and the bodies of my comrades were also drawn into this incommensurable relationship of struggle. Hence my thought and my abstract passions had to be brought to bear on this. The whole of my history would have been senseless had our bodies not been in the grip of events. We had to begin with the body in all its concreteness. “To liberate” was to liberate the body. Only in this way would the communist project free itself of idealism and reveal its materialism. The more we insisted on the body the more communist we became. (It was during this time that I encountered Wittgenstein’s proposi-

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tions on pain in his Philosophical Investigations. I realized that the theme of the incommensurability of pain and the discovery of the social, pain and recognition, suffering and the dialogue between bodies, were fundamental for human experience. It was the basis of communication. It was, of course, a very different route from that traveled by classical theodicy, and by Job in particular, but in the end it was all the same: the incommensurability of pain was recognized through the relationship between people, within the dialoguing multiplicity, and it was in this way that pain produced the world and language demonstrated its creativity). A third element became central to my reading of Job. In the book of Job the ethical experience of pain (via the body) opens onto the definition of truth. But where there is no measure, where is truth? Where there is no logic, in what way can truth be grasped? Job’s ethical drama, as well as the catastrophe of the workers’ movement and of our experience of resistance, could conclude only in a situation beyond measure and beyond the logic of measure. Job recognizes God again because he sees him. We also need to see anew a free humanity beyond the disproportionate [smisurato] dominion of capital and of Power over existence. Truth could consist only in a new collective vision in which destiny had been made subject to power. Reflecting on these events today, I feel just how much they were linked, on the one hand, to the exacting experience of prison and, on the other,  Negri, “Piacere, dolore, senso,” Annuario di itinerari filosofici 4, no. 2.  [Trans: The term smisurato appears repeatedly in The Labor of Job. I have decided to render it in multiple ways, according to the context (that is, as “disproportionate,” “immense,” “immoderate”), and keep the Italian in square brackets. It is related to the Italian for measure, misura, as are other terms that Negri uses frequently throughout this book and elsewhere, most important, that of immeasure (dismisura). Dismisura has become a technical term for Negri, growing out of his critique of the labor theory of value, and he has since dropped smisurato from his technical vocabulary. In The Labor of Job we see Negri’s early attempts to develop this concept of the immeasurable, which we recognize today as being central to his thinking. The focus on measure is a core concern of Negri, stemming from his critique of the labor theory of value in his texts from the mid-1970s collected in Books for Burning, edited by Tim Murphy (London: Verso, 2005), and his hugely influential Marx beyond Marx, translated by Harry Cleaver, Michael Ryan, and Maurizio Viano (New York: Autonomedia, 1991) (published in Italian in 1979), to the works written with Michael Hardt of recent years.]

xxii  P r e fa c e t o t h e 2 0 0 2 E d i t i o n to the cultural atmosphere across Europe in the early 1980s. How can this be defined except as the beginning of postmodernity? Postmodernists said that grand narratives were over. They insisted on the end of all measure and on the disproportion of all the terms of philosophical thought. But the arguments advanced were slight or, if you prefer, feeble—in Italy at the time one spoke of weak thought [ pensiero debole]. In the case of Job, however, the immeasurable presented itself as a grand and dramatic narrative, and within this narration there was no weakness but all that mattered was the laceration of the flesh. In Job, the postmodern was presented as a positive contamination and, ultimately, that fantastic biblical book exhibited a postmodern cosmogony. Can I then claim to have experienced, through Job, the passage from the modern to the postmodern? Whatever else this little book represents, it is the first book that I completed in France, at the start of my Parisian exile, which lasted from 1983 to 1997. And although it is true that it was started, or at least conceived, in Italy, it is also true that here I began to “wash my clothes in the Seine.”  I had already written Italie rouge et noire, which was a sort of diary of what had happened in the last months of my incarceration and the first of my liberation in Italy in 1983—a memoir of what had led me into exile. I had also written a little book with Félix Guattari, Communists Like Us (1983– 84), which was a summary of our political ideas. It was a way of beginning to do politics again. In these books I had not, however, added anything to my previous thought. I had simply described some theoretical and practical events through which my thought had developed. “Washing my clothes in the Seine” was something else entirely. It was a case of bringing Italian workerism into contact with French poststructuralism and thereby producing a short-circuit between Foucault and Deleuze and the workers’ struggles that had developed in Italy and linking these with the thought those struggles had produced.10 Michael Hardt, reprising a famous phrase  To “wash one’s clothes in the Arno” was the leitmotif of the nineteenth-century Italian patriotic writers during the time of the struggles for Italian unity. We cosmopolitan Italians prefer the Seine, as well as many other rivers and seas.  Negri, Diario di un’evasione (Milan: M. B. P., 1986). 10 [Trans: Operaismo or workerism is a heretical version of Marxism that posits the working

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of Marx concerning France and Germany in the nineteenth century, has written that in the twentieth century revolutionary thought develops in France and revolutionary practice takes place in Italy. I think this motto describes this history well.11 But if this was the backdrop, it was a case of “incarnating” French theory in Italian practice and, consequently, excavating the subversive content of practice from within the theoretical ontology of freedom. It is ironic that this should happen through a reading of one of the books of the Bible—and yet that’s what happened. It is Job who enabled me to explore that terrain of French theory of freedom on whose basis Insurgencies and then Empire would advance.12 It is Job who led me to a close friendship with Foucault, and then with Guattari and Deleuze, which would encourage me to attempt a synthesis. If Job’s desert ends with a vision of God, defeat and every prison of the multitude will end in a new insurrection. I almost forgot a last thread: the fascination negative thought [ pensiero negativo] exerted on us all. Negative thought is serious stuff. From Nietzsche and Benjamin to Taubes and Agamben, what was being discussed was the touching of an extreme limit in the experience of being. But all too often these discussions flattened the thought of crisis. Negative thought became a poignant but impotent piety (and justification) of defeat. It represented a fleeting “ontology of decline.”13 Instead, what was needed was the strength to recognize that the crisis was not only real but that it class as the dynamic but autonomous core of capitalism. As Mario Tronti writes in one of the founding texts of workerism (collected in Operai e capitale [Turin: Einaudi, 1966]): “We too saw first capitalist development and then workers’ struggles. This is an error. The problem must be overturned, its terms must be changed and one must start again: at the beginning is the class struggle. At the level of socially developed capitalism, capitalist development is subordinated to workers’ struggles; it comes after them and it must make the political mechanism of its production correspond to them.”] 11 Michael Hardt, “Laboratory Italy,” in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, edited by Hardt and Paolo Virno (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 1–10. 12 Negri, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State, translated by M. Boscagli (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999); Hardt and Negri, Empire (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 2000). 13 [Trans: This expression is taken from Gianni Vattimo’s Al di là del soggetto (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1981).]

xxiv  P r e fa c e t o t h e 2 0 0 2 E d i t i o n also constituted a new field of struggle and of reconstruction of being. (At that time, when we were all still in prison, any such recognition was a way to force a path out of the present into the future.) One could not turn crisis into the principal quality of reality. Nor could one consider all action and all struggle fated to defeat or insignificance. Job understood as a caricature of misfortune appeared on the outer horizon of the world of negative thought. Between the mid-1970s and the mid-1980s, I resisted such siren songs. First, I attempted the impossible in the field of political agitation and militancy. Then, I studied pessimism in prison but illuminated it with Spinoza’s thought. Spinoza was my other important object of study in prison.14 Spinoza began where Job left off, with the sight of God. It was a case, then, of insisting on a bodily confrontation analogous to the one that Job fought with God. In effect, we were once again Jobs fighting against the Powers that exercised their command over the world and enslaved it, fighting the wretchedness to which the dominion of the strong and the cruel subjected it. We can understand, therefore, how the ancient Christian Fathers recognized in Job a precursor of Christ. He, like us, crossed the desert to win back life at a higher level, in an entirely materialist redemption that signifies the discovery of the joy in revolutionizing the world. Rome, June 2002

14 Negri, L’anomalia selvaggia (Milan: Feltrinelli, 1981) (The Savage Anomaly, translated by Michael Hardt [Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991]).

Introduction

T

he book of Job is a sacred text and, at the same time, a great poetic work. Like every sacred text it summons the reader to mystical fervor and to the intoxication of transcendence. Like every great poetic book it demands the exercise of all the reader’s faculties and excites his or her critical senses and imagination. On the one hand, contact with the divine and, on the other, Job’s blasphemy. On the one hand, the creation of the world and, on the other, the labor of Job. On the one hand, the liturgical drama of the most sublime theology is played out and, on the other, we are faced with the materialist course of human liberation. The story of this set of contradictions within the book of Job has been always strongly felt over two millennia. This unique and exceptional book emerges through the elaborations, corrections, and successive additions, and in the struggle— over the five centuries of its formulation—to impose upon it the orthodox interpretation. The history of the interpretation of the book of Job in the Christian era is equally varied: from Paul to patristic readings, from Thomism to the Theology of Liberation, we find at the center of the readings and polemics an alternation between the exaltation and the penitence of the flesh, the exercise of theological virtues and the propaganda of Christian humanism. The same is true of the secular and materialist interpretations in which Job appears either as a wise stoic, as a Promethean figure, or as an impassioned example of an irrationalist view of the world. In the encounter with this labyrinth of readings and interpretations, I aimed to

  I n t r o d u c t i o n excavate the idea of power and creation. Because it is there that the divine and the human touch; it is there that Job begins, from within the drama of creation, to speak to our humanity of the divinity of man and of the matter within which it exists. I do not think that I am adding much to other interpretations in that respect. I am merely showing that which they all conceal behind their homogeneous contradictoriness: the centrality of a creative cosmogony in which humanity and God clash and are united. Creation extends into the Messiah and labor is realized in the construction of the world’s new being. I felt it was useful to represent this creative ontology of labor because it has been the great repressed of the last decade in Western culture. In the nihilistic euphoria of weak thought, in the obtuse truculence of postmodernism, in the indecent disingenuousness of the new natural law theorists this, above all else, was forgotten. The Leviathan and Behemoth had disappeared in the ocean without a trace—leaving not a ripple. Today, so that the winds of history might begin to be felt again, so that the cosmogonies might become current and open again to the ancient and powerful human passions for life, for the progress of mores and for the equality of wealth, Job labors. His questioning of the reasons for evil, his blasphemy and his protests against exploitation, his challenge to command are the ontological machine of the rebirth of passions. Let us then descend with Job to the deepest point of creation. And let us ascend with him to the highest point of ethical experience—where he tackles God head-on. The current significance of the labor of Job lies here, in knowing how to radically build a new world, a divine world. Job does not redeem but frees and constructs. The idea of liberation is an idea of creation. The book of Job is a strange book, partly in prose, partly (a large part) in poetry; it evinces clear imbalances. So as to understand it better and to better understand the commentary that follows, I will briefly recall some information regarding the composition of the book. It exhibits at least five different strata of composition. The first is extremely old and consists in a folkloric tale that corresponds to the (initial and final) parts in prose in which nothing more is explained than the wealth, the opprobrium, and the restoration of Job’s fortunes. The figure of Satan was probably absent from this traditional, folkloric tale. It was possibly inserted later, so as to

I n t r o d u c t i o n  

avoid placing the responsibility for Job’s temptation in God’s hands. This is, perhaps, the first example of the theodicy (the theory of the justification of God), to which we have already alluded, to be found in the very composition of the book of Job. The second stratum includes a large section of the poem inserted between the parts in prose. This constitutes the theological link between Job’s disgrace and the restoration of the fortunes of the pious Job. This is the heart of the book. It includes Job’s confrontation with his first three friends and a large part of God’s intervention. This stratum can be dated between the sixth and fifth centuries bce (but according to the latest investigations, perhaps even a century earlier). A third stratum consists of passages of mythical cosmogony and, in particular, regards the monsters (Leviathan and Behemoth) that, having themselves been drawn from very ancient sources, are said to have been inserted and reelaborated within the second stratum. As we shall see, these passages are linked to Canaanite traditions and have been widely studied independently. A fourth stratum in the composition of the book of Job is the precise one that comprehends Elihu’s dialogues—Job’s fourth interlocutor. This latter interlocutor was probably only introduced into the text around the fourth century bce so as to attenuate the violence of the debate between Job and the first three friends/adversaries. This stratum exhibits a more developed theological conception and is skilfully inserted into the text both to complete the response to earlier objections raised against Job and to anticipate the arguments presented in God’s intervention. Finally, the fifth stratum of the book is that of the “Hymn to Wisdom,” that is, chapter 28. Certainly added in the third or second century bce, contemporaneous with the sapiential books, it insists on the eminence of the divinity in the face of Job’s contestation. In the development of this work I have taken into account a number of important interpreters of the book of Job—authors that I consider central and irreplaceable for a contemporary reading of the text. These are mentioned in the bibliography. Here I would simply like to express my gratitude, with all the enthusiasm of a neophyte, to everything they have taught me. To conclude this introduction, I ask my few readers to take the old

  I n t r o d u c t i o n family Bible from their bookcases and, if they do not have one, to buy one, and read the book of Job at the same time as reading this intervention. Because this is an intervention and not a commentary, nor is it an exhaustive interpretation—just one among many literary and philosophical works that the book of Job has inspired since its beginnings. Hence, it is always worth keeping the entire book of Job before the mind’s eye. One last piece of advice: if the first chapter seems, at first, difficult, there is nothing to stop one beginning with the second and returning to the first at the end of the book. In the course of one’s life, one always returns to the subjects of labor and liberation, because it is impossible to forget suffering—and the wise one knows how to change chapter but not change passion. Paris, Christmas 1988

One 

The Difference of Job

1  The Immeasurableness of the World

I

s Job so far from modern metaphysics and rationalism as to be related to the problematics of contemporary humanity only via ideas of the “untimely,” of mystery, and of irrationality? Some interpreters think so. Guido Ceronetti, for example, poses the question of the current relevance of Job and of Spinoza. In the appendix to his translation of the book of Job, Ceronetti affirms that Spinoza considered Job as alien to metaphysics (that is, to modern rationalism) as he might have considered Ariosto to be. It is not so. Certainly, to Spinoza Job is remote and speaks a barbarous language: “Ibn Ezra asserts in his commentary that it was translated into Hebrew from another language and that this is the cause of its obscurity.” But acknowledging such a remoteness is quite different from implying that Job has an alien conception of being! To begin, in Spinoza there is nothing like the profound antipathy toward Job the blasphemer that characterizes the rabbinic tradition. There is, of course, a substantial difference between the two great authors of Judaism, but not one that can be summed up in the distinction between the ancient and the modern, the mythical and the rational. This difference concerns only the form of the movement of being, not its foundation, nor its tendency, nor our destiny. Let us pursue the question of this difference then. In all probability things will become clearer. Firstly, the book of Job is a provocation against  Spinoza, Theological-Political Treatise, chap. 7, 110.

  C h a p t e r O n e the seduction of reason, the insolence of knowledge, and the euphoria of ethics—whatever the motives underlying them. Spinoza’s thought, on the other hand, is touched by this powerful surface (the enchantment of being’s power, the innocence of the highest egotism, a certain quiet Prometheanism, the faith in the great passion as a good in itself—“all this smells even more of Spinoza,” says Nietzsche ). Secondly, Job’s world does not have the same metaphysical shell as that of Spinoza—that is, a flat surface of an extremely powerful substrate that is always on the edge of overflowing but that is always held back. Job, on the other hand, is from the start subject to a violent rupture of the mythical-metaphysical surface of existence. Thirdly, whereas for Job reason and imagination stand in radical opposition, for Spinoza the one exists within the other and vice versa—operating in a constructive crescendo (as, once again, Nietzsche reminds us: “‘The Meaning of Knowing—Non ridere, non lugere, neque detestari, sed intelligere! ’ says Spinoza as simply and sublimely as is his wont. Yet in the last analysis, what else is this intelligere than the form in which we come to feel the other three at once?”). And yet, despite the sharpness of these differences, one feels in Job that same scansion of the ontological unity of experience that one finds in Spinoza. Neither in the one case nor in the other does difference lead to the ruination of the unity of being. On the contrary, once all idealist presumptions are destroyed, the different tensions weave themselves around the problem of an ontology of the human and the divine, of the drama of its construction and of the ethical significance of this process. Thus, the book of Job describes the path of the reconstruction of an ethical world once faith in God’s justice has been deconstructed; and Spinoza’s Ethics builds the salvation of humanity once all theological illusions have been removed (and revealed as the results of repugnant ignorance). They thus both work toward an ontology of the Messiah. The Messiah, movement, and ascesis. Immensity [smisurato] then? Hegel accuses Spinoza at the very moment that he exhibits the most fetid  Nietzsche, The Gay Science, §99.  [Trans: Ibid., §333. The phrase “not to deride, bewail, or execrate human actions” comes from Spinoza’s Political Treatise, p. 681 in Complete Works.]

T h e D i f f e r e n c e o f J o b  

presumption of controlling everything through the dialectical mechanism of Spirit—within its “measure.” Spinoza is an exemplary case of the flight from this—exemplary par excellence: “Spinoza’s mode, like the Indian principle of change, is the ‘measureless.’ The Greek awareness, itself still indeterminate, that everything has a measure—even Parmenides, after abstract being, introduced necessity as the ancient limit by which all things are bounded—is the beginning of a much higher conception than that contained in substance and in the difference of the mode from substance.” Spinoza’s world, then, is that of the “immense” [smisurato]. There could be no more profound analogy with Job’s horizon! And what tragedy and how much wealth this world is able to contain! But Hegel will not admit that the world refuses to be vampirized by the system. He denounces this refusal for being the confession of metaphysical immobility, and that tragic struggle within the immeasurability of the world he makes slide into indifference—the consequence of which is annihilation. The Jewish Spinoza and the oriental Job stand in perfect continuity. That is how an irritated and impotent Hegel describes these two philosophies—with their repeated genealogy of immense [smisurato] resistance to all norms of homologation. Thus, Hegel is right when—from his point of view—he links Spinoza and Job. And yet this commonality, whether one understands it negatively like Hegel or positively as we do, does not resolve the problem. Let us reconsider the problem in the light of the discussion so far. We have seen some superficial differences; we have also noted the same condition of ontological immeasurability and the breadth of its effects. Can we, however, on a second examination, discover any ontologically qualified subtle differences? Let us compare Job and Spinoza once again. When we put them on the same logical level and identify the same ontological foundation, the difference between them is revealed with such ethical intensity and as so epistemologically radical that it puts their similarities in the shade. The intensity of Job’s question dramatizes the ethical situation more than Spinoza’s and radically informs the order of its exposition. Let  Hegel, Science of Logic, 329.

  C h a p t e r O n e us adopt the basic assumptions of a materialist ethics: the project-drive of existence; the indefinite dynamic of the project of the construction of sense; the collective constitution of values; the principle of responsibility and cooperation; a radically inductive epistemology; a genealogical subjectivism in the constitution of the world and of the definition of reason. . . . To compare this materialist horizon with Spinoza’s philosophy is merely to confirm it. In contrast, we will recognize in the superior intensity of Job’s question a qualitative metaphysical leap—despite the substantial homogeneity of the problematic fields. This slight but consistent difference should be noted. Because the book of Job is not only a provocation against the seduction of reason—it is the phenomenological discovery and the metaphysical announcement of the disaster to which instrumental reason leads. The tragedy invests being and pain affects its most intimate fibers. The immense [smisurato] cannot be numbered—and when tempted to do so reason folds back upon itself and goes mad from its attempt. Tragedy cannot be experienced, subjected to manipulation, and dominated. It dominates all perspectives. It impedes all escape routes. It demolishes all instruments of salvation. This is what Job shows us— and it is truly a difficult obstacle to remove. It is perpetually renewed in history and aggravated by the present. How can one believe in reason after Auschwitz and Hiroshima? How can one continue to be a communist after Stalin? When we begin to read the book of Job, these are the confused and weighty problems that mount up, raising new questions and renewing ancient ones—from within the long trajectory of the metaphysics of refusal within modernity, from Machiavelli to Spinoza to Marx. We have not answered the question of evil, nor does theodicy appear an obsolete doctrine. Indeed, the ancestral character of these times and problems takes nothing away from their force today. The fact that we no longer speak of God or Satan, nor of Man as an abstract entity, and that we have swept away all theological references with Spinoza’s broom, removes the mystified and authoritarian solution to the problem but does not remove the problem itself. It merely requalifies it. Why do we produce evil? How can we find our way in a world in which every dialectic has shown its revolting inef-

T h e D i f f e r e n c e o f J o b  

fectiveness—where killing and the destruction of values have reached the immeasurable and where absolute non-being, that is, the nuclear, absolute destruction of what exists, is for the first time at the disposal of Power? And what is salvation?* All the certainties that we have inherited and the values for which we have fought are up for discussion. We would willingly accept this discussion if only it were a case of a logical or moral debate. The history of philosophy has accustomed us to methodological crisis, to its warnings, and to its provisional morality. But this is not a game. The confrontation takes place on the edge of the abyss from which the smell and sound of death rises up. Sometimes the pain is unbearable. But there is no other way than confrontation. We are Spinozists, but if we want to confirm our rational faith, we must accept Job’s challenge. We pass—ascending? descending?— from the moral terrain to that of ontology. Myths, horrors, and monsters await us. “My soul is consumed by doubt and terror.” The disarticulation of the paths of being does not simplify matters. How can Job guide us if being is senseless? And how can being not be senseless if reason fails to enlighten us and if our pain denounces its eclipse?

2  The Negative Ontology of Labor The problem of salvation is all the more important for those who have been Marxists. The reference to Job is central, above all, for those who were convinced that truth was rooted in the power of labor, more than for Spinoza or other materialist or revolutionary thinkers. An almost obvious consequence arises from confrontation with the question of labor and its value, from the encounter with the crisis that this undergoes both doctrinally and in terms of praxis today: labor has ceased to be a value, it has become a problem—and that is all. This is the immediately contradictory articulation of value that one also finds in Job. That value emanated from labor; that the extraction of value constituted, on the one hand, production and, on the other, exploitation; that, * See Note A on page 16.

10  C h a p t e r O n e from whatever angle one approached it, the distribution of this value founded the social order; and that the transition to a different, more just order and a path of emancipation was to be constructed on the struggles against the mechanism of the production of value and the reproduction of its social division—all this not only constituted the core of Marx’s critique of political economy but was a truth that was advanced everywhere, becoming part of the consciousness of millions of people and almost a commonplace of social theory. Little of this remains in place. Perhaps none of it. To begin with, the theory of value is, as far as its use goes, so much scrap iron. Today it is impossible to quantify production on its basis. Moreover, one is no longer able to distinguish what is productive from what is not; no longer able to tell the tale of the transformation of commodities through the different components of production and reproduction. “The theft of alien labour, on which the present wealth is based, appears a miserable foundation,” said Marx. The productivity of work has now overtaken the temporal rule of value. But no one could have predicted that Marx would have buried his own theory. In reality wealth, accumulated value, forms the horizon within which we operate, the second nature that constitutes us. But precisely because this common genus is so widespread, there is no longer any space left for its specific difference. Value has become immeasurable at the same time that all measure fails. Of course, the fact that the criterion of measure is lacking does not remove the measured phenomenon. The suffering of the man who labors, who sacrifices himself and sacrifices to wealth—the pain and misery remain. But where is the antagonism that used to characterize this situation? Where is Marx’s fortunate paradox that transformed the classical theory of nature and of value into an instrument to identify the antagonism that constituted it and into a weapon for the destruction of exploitation? We are thus thrown into a world in which exploitation is shown to be simply the effect of strength. We are forced into the peripheral or simply cruel spaces of the exploitation of labor. The most productive labor, the most refined and powerful, the most intellectual and abstract, seems to repeat the course of development of slave labor, of un [Trans: Marx, Grundrisse, 705.]

T h e D i f f e r e n c e o f J o b  11

paid female labor, of forced labor. Pain has become “immense” [smisurato] at the very same time that its causes, its rules, and its measure have become incomprehensible. Once labor is no longer subject to the rationality of measure, it becomes evil. That is, evil and not simply irrational; practically evil, and not merely lacking rational sense. This is all the more true insofar as labor is no longer one activity among many others in a society that leaves open various other vital spaces—it is life itself. Neither is society definable other than as a general productive synergy that draws together all the singular times that cross the circle of life along a value tangent. The only figure able to coagulate this senseless circulation, the peak of absurdity and emptiness, is money. Instead of being the measure of value, it is now the numéraire, the rule of immense indifference [indifferente smisurato]. Where can one fix not measure but a measure, a definition of labor? That relationship of force that could be the brutal and crude but effective element by which exploitation could be identified disappears in the mystification of money. Not those who are exploited but those who do not make money; not those who are subordinated but those who do not work; not the worker but the marginalized—this is how the panoply of exclusion appears and, at least in part, has been redefined in reality. Exclusion is evil. It is a chasm into which one falls—an indefinable dimension. All social relations reflect this primal evil. Once measure is removed, labor works without an end—more precisely, any apparent end is removed and is assumed to operate in technologically neutral and transcendent fashion. The law that sustains it is that of second nature, which is a confused determination until it is shown to be an implacable law and a destructive nature. The relationship between labor and its product is completely indeterminate. But in this way labor tips precariously between the inessentiality of its ends and the tragedy of events. The tragic event arises from the multiplicity of ends thereby expressing its inessentiality. The tragic arc of reality reveals itself suddenly as the filigree of events. Once again Hiroshima and Auschwitz are the indices and results of technical knowledge, of labor directed to the realization of the inessential. Once again a murky and definitive tragedy is revealed. Labor is tech-

12  C h a p t e r O n e nology, is senseless instrumentality that does not reveal value—­instead, it exhausts it. Thus labor becomes something soft and hard: soft and pervasive like communication, hard and senseless like the tragic destiny of instrumental reason. And the one articulates the other, so that no one can distinguish the two except in the abstract; the attempts of those philosophers to present communication as the fabric of the pure transcendental are entirely useless (where does truth end and falsification begin?). In reality communication is the fabric upon which unfree human activity communicates. To the permanent falsification of the means are added the pain of the senseless and the tragedy of a destructive destiny. We are faced with the topicality of the book of Job. In it the senselessness of action is fully demonstrated. Labor is dominated by absolute heteronomy. There is no experience that allows one to justify the world, other than the discovery of a pain that is so profound and irresolvable that it is, in an extreme reversal, the negative cause and end of the world. The world is the result of a negative labor, the projection of a tragic mechanism, the definition of a negative theology. But is this pain the Promethean point of a subjective revolt? This is laughable. There is no Prometheus here, because there is no universe of values, which “fire” represents, to sustain the heroism of man. And yet there is the possibility (were it not entirely rhetorical to speak of it in the abyss of sadness) of an ontological resistance, of a refusal as profound as the pain that one has endured: an ontological refusal that follows an ontological pain.

3  Liberation as Beginning There is a moment in the history of thought—and even more so in that of labor—in which liberation is a push that comes at the beginning of the phenomenology of being. Liberation is not an end but a beginning. The book of Job is, in this light, the book of the discovery of the most abject misery that explodes toward the light. Job is the symbol of the Messiah. On the one hand, the book of Job speaks of a human destiny and of

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its confusion. The patristic readings of the book of Job are twofold. As in the rabbinic readings, Job is understood as a subject beyond measure, who is desperate and a blasphemer. A powerful and continual interpretive tendency seeks to reduce this barbarous hero to order. The poetic part of the book of Job, the one that expresses the highest potential for revolt, is deleted or, rather, is contrasted with the patient, elderly saint of the prosaic part. On the other hand, the experience of salvation through faith is released. The mirror of virtues is broken. In the course of the doctrinal debate of the fifth and sixth centuries, Job becomes the free man in the chaos of the world. Through him passes the spectacle of the indeterminacy of evil, the refusal of any fatalistic conception, and the affirmation of the total mercifulness of God, of the gratuity of grace before the sinner. Chrysostom, Ambrose, Augustine, and Gregory the Great construct this colossal analogy of the story of Job and of divine grace. Paul’s message of the experience of the miracle of redemption, always undergone by individuals and by the church, is presented anew in this reading of the book of Job: “Job preaches the mysteries of the passion of Christ, prophesizing it not only through his words but through his torments as well” (Gregory the Great). The successive readings of the book of Job in the course of a millennium of Catholicism, as well as in the course of the Protestant Reformation, do not modify this interpretation, but rather repeat its twofold character. It is only in more recent times, after Auschwitz and Hiroshima, and in the course of the liberation of the colonial peoples, that theology broadens its understanding of the book of Job. It does so by problematizing the relationship of man and God, and by showing, as in Job, the alliance between God and Satan and the scandal of the “silence” of God in the face of the suffering of man. In this way the theology of liberation arrives at a qualitatively central point for the evaluation of the book of Job and for our present predicament of suffering and struggle in a world characterized by the collapse of all horizons of value. That is to say, it repeats what Paul wrote concerning Job: “For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did  “Giobbe e il silenzio di Dio,” special issue of Concilium, French edition, 189 [?].

14  C h a p t e r O n e not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe.” But it is repeated from the perspective that concedes nothing to a detached and ironic contemplation of God, that instead reclaims for struggle the capacity to challenge divine mercifulness and with it the soliciting of God’s grace. The absolute abstraction of the act of divine mercifulness is joined to the total concretion and singularity of man’s acts of love, struggle, and hope. As in other times, perhaps this will be the theological fable that, in this part of the century, traces the ethical parabola of humanity? Will it be, as Ernst Bloch wanted, the sublime moment of militant and revolutionary materialism? “It is really in the Book of Job that the great reversal of values begins—the discovery of the Utopian potency within the religious sphere.” In addition to this perspective there is the awareness that “there is always an exodus in the world, an exodus from the particular status quo. And there is always a hope, which is connected with rebellion—a hope founded in the concrete given possibilities for new being. As a handhold in the future, a process which, though by no means achieved, is yet by no means in vain, thanks to the never-abating pregnancy of its solution, our solution.”  Whatever answer one gives to these problems, it is certain that the topic of materialist philosophy today, and even more so, the topic of a critique of political economy adequate to our time, can be the reconstruction of a horizon of value and, therefore, the identification of the moments of exploitation and antagonism via the equation of the constitutive power of struggle and its militant qualification. This is the hypothesis that we are interested in: the rupture of the horizon of axiological insignificance and vital indifference that is able to reconstitute a world of values. But this reconstruction is something that already is—that exists in struggle, is revealed in the course of its advance, which defines the world as a system, as an alterity of antagonistic development. The product of labor is no longer simply surplus labor and surplus value but the collective creation of a new world. At the terminus of the process is the creative principle of  [Trans: First Letter to the Corinthians, 1:21.]  Bloch, Atheism in Christianity, 108, 121–22. [Trans: Thanks to Roland Boer for tracing these quotations in the English translation of Bloch’s text.]

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every process, but one made independent, that is absolutely, radically, irreducibly autonomous. We have, in practice, discovered the “unknown god” [dio ignoto]. The crisis of value and of labor leaves us with a decisive choice between alternatives. Either the continuity of a mortal ailment that expands in the inertia of the world, in the confusion of every choice, in the irrational determination of Power; or the creative discontinuity and its system—the system of the alternative, a river that courses and the banks that it gradually constructs around itself—a system of power. We propose to follow the second course. It is the one that, against the backdrop of the tragedy that invests us, illuminates the human power of creativity. This creativity, this hope and risk of reason, I call Job. The pages that follow do not constitute a commentary on the book of Job. This would be a futile endeavor given that for twenty centuries there has been no letup in such work. Even less do these pages intend to resolve the problems of value or those of the social organization of labor. Here it is simply—and fundamentally—a case of posing the question of foundation, the question of genealogy, that is, the question of the origin of value and of the dynamic of its system, and therefore of the value of labor and its creative procedures. Why Job then? Because those problems cannot be resolved, if they can be resolved at all, and those questions cannot even be posed, unless we assume Job as backdrop (and perhaps as parabola) and as condition (and perhaps as analogy) of our advance. The reality of our wretchedness is that of Job, the questions and the answers that we pose to the world are the same as Job’s. We express ourselves with the same desperation, uttering the same blasphemous phrases. We have known riches and hope, we have tempted God with reason—we are left with dust and inanity. Will we be able to lead our wretchedness through an analytic of being and pain, and from that ontological depth rise up again to a theory of action, or better still, to the practice of the reconstruction of the world? Up to what point, until when? Until we are able to say through this practice, “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you” (Job 42:5), I have made you with my hands. Is there no other order in the world than that which unites absolute indeterminacy to absolute power? This is the hypothesis, the extremely human hypothesis of Job.

16  C h a p t e r O n e

Note A In Le Christ et le salut des ignorants chez Spinoza, in which Alexandre Matheron once again transformed the traditional reading of Spinoza’s thought, the author analyzed the Ethics from the perspective of the Christian theme of salvation, highlighting its importance. Now, while we place Spinoza’s thought alongside Job’s, underlining the analogies and differences between them, it is perhaps also interesting to discuss the problem of salvation. The analogies are easy to pinpoint. They concern all three levels on which Spinoza places the problem of salvation. Firstly, on the moral and theological plane: here salvation is understood as the mediation between the sacred and the worldly—the making sacred of morality and the making worldly of the sacred constitute two lines of development which, encountering one another in nature and history, constitute the basis of ethics. On this plane salvation is intraworldly ascesis. Secondly, the theme is confronted on the political plane: salvation is also a collective destiny. In this case the universality of the interhuman relationship attenuates or even negates the salvationist link to an abstract ideal of justice. The universality of the relationship, its multifunctional validity, its 360-degree opening, withdraws virtue from measure, from retribution: ethical action occurs in a multidirectional framework which comes to realization in political action. Democracy is actualized on this terrain. Democratic virtue, as Machiavelli shows us, demands no recompense. Virtue is not justice but generosity—a virtue open to love. Lastly, on the metaphysical plane, there exists a fundamental analogy between Spinoza’s Ethics and the book of Job, where the relationship between power and infinity disengages the infinite from an intensive actuality and instead opens it to the practical perspective of indefiniteness—the infinite becomes history, the path or dispositif of the construction of being, dystopia. Thus, we find in Spinoza’s thought what we already found in Job’s. Human power opens itself, as such, to divine salvation. If these are the analogies with respect to the problem of salvation, then the difference is equally clear. The relationship between “sacred abyss” and “surface-worldliness” that constitutes—in the variety of its articulations—the terrain upon which the action of salvation

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is accomplished, is in Job in contrast to Spinoza experienced as an absolute paradox. The immeasurable in all natural and historical relations is turned by Spinoza against the traditional definition of divinity, against its transcendence and the anthropomorphic nature of its image—this operation is also carried out by Job. However, Job—at the same time as traversing the abyss of the immeasurable—also experiences its attraction. Of course, on this extreme relationship, salvation loses none of its human characteristics and concedes nothing to the pull of transcendence: it is not transformed into grace. Transcendence is unable to assert its demands. That said, the difference is evident—although not to the extent of inducing us to oppose, conclusively, Job to Spinoza. Why not? Because the standpoint of salvation remains anchored in Job to the positivity of ethical affirmation. On this basis Job refuses to retread the path of a negative definition of divinity, which appears more adequate to the depth of the paradox registered by metaphysics. The fact is that Job keeps to the terrain of positive ascesis, to that of the virtue that augments being—just as Spinoza does.

Two 

Of the Absoluteness of the Contingent

1  The Constitution of the Process

T

he book of Job begins with two scenes. The first is a description of Job with his family and of his wealth, which concludes with the saintly man carrying out purifying sacrifices as he fears the consequences of the sins of his young sons:



5 “It may be that my children have sinned, and cursed God in their hearts.” (1:5)

The second is a description of the Court of Yahweh, in which the Sons of God make their appearance.





6 One day the heavenly beings came to present themselves before the LORD, and Satan also came among them. 7 The LORD said to Satan, “Where have you come from?” Satan answered the LORD, “From going to and fro on the earth, and from walking up and down on it.” 8 The LORD said to Satan, “Have you considered my servant Job? There is no one like him on the earth, a blameless and upright man who fears God and turns away from evil.” 9 Then Satan answered the LORD, “Does Job fear God for nothing? 10 Have you not put a fence around him and his house and all that he has, on every side? You have blessed the work of his hands, and his possessions have increased in the land.

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11 But stretch out your hand now, and touch all that he has, and he will curse you to your face.” 12 The LORD said to Satan, “Very well, all that he has is in your power; only do not stretch out your hand against him!” So Satan went out from the presence of the LORD. (1:6–12) This is a strange world comprising two sets of lives, two group scenes— the two communities unified only by the figure of “Satan,” by the “adversary.” . . . It’s not much. “Satan is not a proper name but a title meaning ‘the adversary.’ Here Satan is not equivalent to the devil of later Christian theology, but functions like a prosecuting attorney in a court of law. . . . He also seems to be engaged in espionage activities, ranging the entire earth to check on the lives of men. . . .” Moreover, whereas Job suspects that his sons might have sinned, Satan insinuates before God that Job could sin if he got into a tight spot—sin, that is, curse God. The suspicion of sin unifies the two strata of the world, the human and the divine, while one waits for the sin to be carried out and God’s malediction to strike man. The two communities recognize that suspicion is the element that negatively links them to one another in a preconstituted dialectic leading to a dramatic finale: sin and its punishment. Satan relishes this process: only life constitutes the limit of his action. The permanence of life—“only do not stretch out your hand against him” (1:12)—imposes God upon Satan. In addition to finding this imperative in the verses cited, we find them further on in the prosaic part as well, 2:6, where Satan is given permission to produce the second temptation, making illness, the pestilence, fall upon Job’s flesh. On the other hand, Job appears pious and timorous of God because God has granted him a wealthy life, filled with joy and vigor. It is something almost divine. “Does Job fear God for nothing?” (1:9). Life cannot be touched because it is the condition of the trial. It is not dialectics that allows life, but life that posits the dialectic. Dialectics does not provide a foundation for life but is realized within it. God, Job, and Satan live in the same reality, the same life—but God is God, Job is Job,  Norman C. Habel, The Book of Job, 17.

20  C h a p t e r T w o and Satan is Satan. Satan distinguishes, whereas God and Job are united, immersed in life. Even in misfortune God and Job are tied closely together. The structure is the same. Job’s sons have died, the herds and herdsmen have been killed or are lost, all the riches have been set on fire or have been stolen. 20 Then Job arose, tore his robe, shaved his head, and fell on the ground and worshipped. 21 He said, “Naked I came from my mother’s womb, and naked shall I return there; the LORD gave, and the LORD has taken away; blessed be the name of the LORD.” (1:20–21) For good or evil, the relationship cannot be broken. Shortly afterward, the sores cover Job’s body and he lies on a dunghill, listening to his wife’s vulgarities: “Do you still persist in your integrity? Curse God, and die.” (2:9) Job responds: 10 “You speak as any foolish woman would speak. Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?” (2:10) The relationship is constitutive. God and man form a relation that defines reality: a relationship that is so profound as to be the condition of being. Divine omnipotence is relative for human existence. (Is a God ever imaginable without someone to honor him, whether it be a court of angels or a kingdom of people?) The entire prose introduction to the book of Job expresses, in the simplicity of a folkloric discourse and in the piety of popular religiosity, the ancient, profound, and stringent ancestral relationship between God and man. This prose introduction, which commentators date to the tenth or ninth century bce, and its characters are in all probability tied to Canaanite mythologies. These figures, whom Ezekiel (14:12–23) already considered ancient in 600 bce, and this folkloric introduction that the true author of the book, writing in the fifth or sixth century bce (according to Pierre Vidal-Naquet, “Confucius, Gautama Buddha, l’auteur du Livre de

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Job et Eschyle” are almost contemporaneous) breaks open so as to insert the poetic and theological discourse—these chapters in prose that open and close the book of Job express the notion of a unitary substrate of the world. As we shall see, this unitary—ontological—determination of duality, this universal constitution of duality, is the real problem of the book of Job. The two principal actors in the drama attempt to break this relationship without being able to do so. Then a crowd of other actors appears. Theirs is a secondary dialogue. It is a dialectical discourse: a continual attempt not to break but to confirm unity; a continuous parabola of the measure of value; an uninterrupted frustration that tries to drown the emergence of subjects in indifference. But that is not the problem here. It is sufficient, here, to insist on the initial determination—that which constitutes the actual, lower limit of life, the relationship of the I to the other, the fear that the I feels in the face of nature and the world, and which it personalizes in other subjectivities. It is the relationship of alienation, but in terms of its critical function, in its constitutive instance, as Ernst Bloch argues. The incredible modernity—and the radical originality—of the book of Job consists in this, that no mystification is authorized from the start: the world is presented as duality, as relationship. The conditions of the dialectic are posed in the very constitution of the world—but so are, particularly, the conditions of the non-dialectic, of the constitutive tear, of the appearance of the Messiah. This is all the more true from the perspective of crisis and of the critique of labor. God and Job are necessary for one another; they are necessarily implicated in the nexus of a sublime production, of a command that feeds off labor, and of a labor that organizes itself within discipline—tied, like master and slave, by a destiny, which even when bizarre and mad, is always common: “only do not stretch out your hand against him!” (Job 1:12). And yet this relationship of implication prepares and nourishes the imminent rupture.  Pierre Vidal-Naquet, Atlas historique (Paris: Hachette, 1987).  [Trans: The Italian translation, here rendered in English, is more specific: “but do not take his life.”]

22  C h a p t e r T w o

2  Job’s Challenge Thus the relationship contains within itself a dual formative dynamism— Job rebels from within suffering, against the arbitrariness of command. (With regard to the other subject, God, after appearing in the first two chapters as a bored figure of Power, and perhaps driven by an “ironic melancholy,” acquires the marks of a complete personality only by intervening, at the end of the book, where the ontological veil of creation is lifted.) Now, Job’s rebellion is a constitutive act. But it has nothing to do with a Promethean position, or more precisely, it corresponds to it negatively—what appears before us is a blinded Oedipus or a King Lear driven mad by pain. An extraordinarily powerful theatricality constructs the scene that we are beginning to analyze. Three friends arrive from afar, knowing of Job’s misfortune: 12 When they saw him from a distance, they did not recognize him, and they raised their voices and wept aloud; they tore their robes and threw dust in the air upon their heads. 13 They sat with him on the ground for seven days and seven nights, and no one spoke a word to him, for they saw that his suffering was very great. (2:12–13)

1 After this Job opened his mouth and cursed the day of his birth. 2 Job said: 3 “Let the day perish on which I was born.” (3:1–3)

But this theatricality does not bring the substance of the drama to the surface. It is an entirely ontological drama. Job is pure, guiltless, even of the sublime sin of the theft of fire. The injustice that he endures is, therefore, absolute. The cry of protest is raised against this absolute injustice, against this ontological condition. Existence is shown, for Job, to contain its opposite—nonexistence. In existence’s contingency lies the possibility of its destruction, of its annulment. Job’s desire to live is not to be found in this ontological situa-

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tion—there is only the cry of protest, the scream, the ontological assertion opposed to that of destruction: even the contingent is absolute.* Commentators, when faced with this third chapter, which marks the opening of the poetic part of the book, have insisted on philological or even anthropological themes of some importance. Before a poem of such high quality, with such powerful ontological aspects, it is worth stepping back for a moment to give it some philological attention before precipitating on the great adventure. The theatrical structure of the composition of the book of Job has, on the one hand, been traced to the traditional seasonal rituals of the Orient; on the other hand, from the literary standpoint, analogies have been detected with Greek theater, Aeschylus in particular. Others have insisted on the oriental backdrop to the book and on a series of texts, both Egyptian and Mesopotamian, that have analogous forms to that of the book of Job and that pose the problem of theodicy. More recently, important elements of mythology and Canaanite theology have been used to explain the singular cosmogonic structure developed in the book of Job. It goes without saying that none of these elements are able to explain the thinking in the book—for a simple reason, from Job’s point of view: no folkloric form or rhetoric is able to contain a moral experience that is immediately an ontological drama, an ethical experience that is projected without mediation onto metaphysical dimensions, and a subject that is posed as the limit between existence and the abyss of nonexistence. 11 “Why did I not die at birth, come forth from the womb and expire? 12 Why were there knees to receive me, or breasts for me to suck? * See Note B on page 29.  Samuel Terrien, Job, Commentaire de l’Ancien Testament, 7.  Ibid., 8–14.  See Robert Gordis, The Book of Job and Man; Martin H. Pope, Job; and Norman C. Habel, The Book of Job.

24  C h a p t e r T w o 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

Now I would be lying down and quiet; I would be asleep; then I would be at rest with kings and counselors of the earth who rebuild ruins for themselves, or with princes who have gold, who fill their houses with silver. Or why was I not buried like a stillborn child, like an infant that never sees the light? There the wicked cease from troubling, and there the weary are at rest. There the prisoners are at ease together; they do not hear the voice of the taskmaster. The small and the great are there, and the slaves are free from their masters.” (3:11–19)

The drama is displaced in the ontology. There is no possibility of dialectics. God cannot allow himself to wager the contingent in the movement of being. The contingent lays claim to its punctual and firm absoluteness. This behavior is repeated throughout the book. Chapter 6 and 7 perform their lament in the tones of a soliloquy spellbound by nothingness, by the demand for death. All values are reduced to nothing. Nothingness is the only destiny—both nearby and possible. In this, against this horrendous backdrop of ontological suffering, the character of Job is proclaimed. Suicide is systematically refused. Therefore, chapters 16 and 17 transform the curse into a challenge— ­invoking a celestial witness to suffering, and blaspheming against a God that takes man as his quarry. The strength of the subject lies in the anticipation of death: 11 “My days are past, my plans are broken off, the desires of my heart. 12 They make night into day; ‘The light,’ they say, ‘is near to the darkness.’  Samuel Terrien, Job, Commentaire de l’Ancien Testament, 10.

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13 14 15 16

If I look for Sheol as my house, if I spread my couch in darkness, if I say to the Pit, ‘You are my father,’ and to the worm, ‘My mother,’ or ‘My sister,’ where then is my hope? Who will see my hope? Will it go down to the bars of Sheol? Shall we descend together into the dust?” (17:11–16)

The nonpossibility of dialectics is also demonstrated in another way. The relationship of God and Job, master and servant, is situated in a single substance, but recognition does not mean being in the other, being for another—recognition simply brings the other with it. The ethical trial of the book of Job does not raise the servant to the level of the master (and beyond) but lowers the master to the level of the servant. It is this that constitutes recognition. Here knowing is the key to liberation; it is the constitution of freedom. When we identify the consistency and the depth of this passage, we do nothing other than anticipate the meaning of the book of Job itself—its philosophy and all the steps of its development. Job’s protests, his invectives are the privileged place for an attack on the dialectic that leaves no space to a logical solution of the drama of existence, which itself establishes in the contrast, in the struggle, the reality of the subject. The insistence on the emergence of the moment of struggle as the soul of the mechanism of recognition brings us to the reflections that follow in the last part of this section. In order to proceed more easily, we shall first give some consideration to a final possible way of proceeding: this Job who suffers is a type of protostoic, an exemplar of man’s stance in the face of his destiny. Is it then a case of stoicism? No, this quality is completely inapplicable to Job. In Job there is no resignation. The feeling of defeat is for Job a sign of identification. Job lacks one fundamental element of stoicism: the separation of the ethical from the ontological, the conviction that ethics takes place despite the vicissitudes of being. And with this we have reached the crucial point: for Job ethics is being; the relationship of man with being is divine. There is no possibility of isolating the ethical.

26  C h a p t e r T w o For this reason Job does not commit suicide—suffering would continue in hell. So the question is: why does this human subject resist pain? To the curse of the day he was born comes the reply: one is born to suffer, and it would have been better had one not been born. But the third chapter continues: to suffer is to resist; it is to insist in ontology: 20 “Why is light given to one in misery, and life to the bitter in soul, 21 who long for death, but it does not come, and dig for it more than for hidden treasures; 22 who rejoice exceedingly, and are glad when they find the grave? 23 Why is light given to one who cannot see the way, whom God has fenced in? 24 For my sighing comes like my bread, and my groanings are poured out like water. 25 Truly the thing that I fear comes upon me, and what I dread befalls me. 26 I am not at ease, nor am I quiet; I have no rest; but trouble comes.” (3:20–26)

3  War Two absolute subjects standing in opposition to one another is war. But we find ourselves here in a community that refuses to experience itself as divided. Therefore, the relationship between the two subjects in the absolute is a trial. A juridical, formal trial. 1 Then Job answered: 2 “Today also my complaint is bitter; his hand is heavy despite my groaning. 3 O that I knew where I might find him, that I might come even to his dwelling! 4 I would lay my case before him, and fill my mouth with arguments.

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5 6 7

I would learn what he would answer me, and understand what he would say to me. Would he contend with me in the greatness of his power? No; but he would give heed to me. There an upright person could reason with him, and I should be acquitted forever by my judge.” (23:1–7)

But the trial is not a simple, coherent one, because God is both one of the parties and the judge. The trial is therefore a fraud. Whereas Job, the actor in this trial, seeks justice, the decision, and the party of the trial God, he instead finds himself simply confronted by indifference, immersed as in a sea, in a liquid landscape of absolute indecision of action—where everything is divine and nothing is: 8 “If I go forward, he is not there; or backward, I cannot perceive him; 9 on the left he hides, and I cannot behold him; I turn to the right, but I cannot see him. 10 But he knows the way that I take; when he has tested me, I shall come out like gold. 11 My foot has held fast to his steps; I have kept his way and have not turned aside. 12 I have not departed from the commandment of his lips; I have treasured in my bosom the words of his mouth.” (23:8–12) How can one break out of this situation? How can one identify a solid ground able to guarantee the rationality of action, the solution to the trial? To this point the trial has shown the emergence of two subjects. But due to the imbalance one is placed in, the trial has no solution and cannot result in justice. God is a party of the trial—but here Job takes him for judge, an unjust judge that carries out the sentence without having provided evidence for it. 13 “But he stands alone and who can dissuade him? What he desires, that he does. 14 For he will complete what he appoints for me; and many such things are in his mind.

28  C h a p t e r T w o 15 16 17

Therefore I am terrified at his presence; when I consider, I am in dread of him. God has made my heart faint; the Almighty has terrified me; If only I could vanish in darkness, and thick darkness would cover my face!” (23:13–17)

The immeasurable has become disproportion, imbalance, organic prevalence of God over man. The fact that God is presented as immeasurable demonstrates—once again—that all dialectics are impossible. The trial is not dialectical, it is not and cannot be. It is not dialectical because it cannot be “overcome”; or rather, it can be only by negating one of the terms— but this is not dialectics, it is destruction. Is it possible to restore a measure, even a completely arbitrary one, but one that is accepted within that community that forms the base of all movements of conscious being—a measure that permits dialectics to function and for the affirmation of overcoming? Before considering this question again and more directly, seeing how in the book of Job it is developed in the discussion between the three friends who are Job’s true legal representative, that is, who are therefore not ambiguously participants in the community of the trial but intend to establish the measure of decision—before returning to consider all of this through a commentary on their discussion—let us reflect on some of the associated aspects of the situation of crisis. The first of these aspects is the analysis of the possibility that the rationalization of the rules of overcoming and pacification of the conflict can— eventually—take place. What rules? The immanent rules (criteria of material retribution) or transcendent rules (norms of overdetermination). What result would they have? None, if we look at Job’s rebellion and at his declaration of the absoluteness of contingency in contrast to the opposite one of the destruction of the contingent absolute that is outlined by the divinity. And so? The first methodological idea that we can draw from this potential conclusion is that the simple possibility granted to the divinity to reopen the dialectic consists in the disempowering of Job’s being. But one cannot touch being. Job’s pronouncement of absoluteness

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is not moralistic, it is ontological. Only by disempowering being is dialectics possible. But to what extent? To the point of destruction? What dialectics can exist in destruction? There is no dialectics where the subject is destroyed. A second problematic aspect emerges from reflection on the power of the subject in the face of the Power of the divinity. If the subject, which is indestructible, cannot even be made relative within a dialectical process, if, that is, absoluteness is irreducible, then its determinateness will exist not only as resistance but also as an innovative proposition. A contingent and effective absoluteness stands in opposition to the possible but ineffectual disempowering of being, a power that is positively turned to expansion, to the expansion of being. The questions Job poses God, when they are not emotional and desperate, when they are not irritated and aggressive, are trustful and programmatic. If in this unfinished relationship there is a creative subject, then it is Job. His power opposes the Power of God. But we shall turn to something else first. Our path is downhill. We must first consider the maximum effort that the theodicy develops to justify the divine folly—theodicy: the justification of divine action, the demonstration of his justice, in whatever way he chooses to act. What a sublime and, at the same time, sordid vocation this theological discipline has.

Note B One will never reflect enough on the ontological nature of Job’s “pessimism.” The strata of the book are various, as are the poets, the times, and the inspiration, but the ontology is the element that attracts all and each of this variety of elements. The “positivity” of Job’s “pessimism” has not escaped the interpreters of the text, whether they be theologians, philosophers, or poets. Indeed, Kierkegaard, Schopenhauer, and Leopardi all thought of Job in these terms—a certain suspicion, in any case a definite uneasiness, is evident in their reactions when they note that Job’s pessimism cannot be given a “negative” form, cannot be traced back to nihilism. All the more misleading seems René Girard’s recent interpretation of the book of Job in La route antique des hommes pervers. Girard attempts

30  C h a p t e r T w o to reduce the narration of the book to the schema of the “scapegoat”— while at the same time recognizing the exceptional resistance of Job to being caught up in the game and, thus, the extraordinary importance of the “positivity” of his discourse for the recognition of the nature of primitive society. But the acknowledgment of these aspects (in themselves extremely important underlinings of what we have called the “positivity” of Job) does not eliminate the fact that Girard’s interpretation takes away the primacy of the ontology and, therefore, tends to flatten the meaning of the book onto the postulates of positivism. This attitude leads to such false results that Girard himself is forced to revolt against the consequences of his own analysis. So just where Girard should be lauding Job’s sacrifice as being able to produce social order, he is forced to acknowledge that in Job there is nothing of all this, that instead social order and morality are reborn from a contrasting perspective, from within a process of liberation that refers not to a fierce and avenging god but to a living god, the Messiah. That is to say, the schema of the “scapegoat” does not hold up; its pitiful dialectic fails. Job, therefore, is irreducible. Now, this irreducibility, this extremely materialist trace, this body, this refusal of being a symbol, this singular subject, and this object of the Messiah’s extremely singular action of salvation—all this constitutes the “positivity” of the ontology of Job. The absoluteness of the contingent. Elsewhere and in relation to another subject, we called an analogous metaphysical situation ­“disutopia.” We feel entitled to again take up this term and the richness of its ontological reference.

 Negri, The Savage Anomaly, translated by Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).

Three 

The Adversary and the Avenger

1  The Illusion of Measure

J

ob’s friends are lawyers. Like all lawyers they are part of a trial. They want the trial to take place and want justice to be served. Justice occurs in the course of the trial. Job is already serving a terrible sentence. This sentence has preceded the trial—and only now is God, the judge, asked to appear as participant in the trial. The lawyers must discover the reason for the preceding sentence; they must justify it. In this case justice is—above all else—the justification of God, theodicy. Eliphaz is the first to intervene. 7 “Think now, who that was innocent ever perished? Or where were the upright cut off? 8 As I have seen, those who plough iniquity and sow trouble reap the same. 9 By the breath of God they perish, and by the blast of his anger they are consumed. 10 The roar of the lion, the voice of the fierce lion, and the teeth of the young lions are broken. 11 The strong lion perishes for lack of prey, and the whelps of the lioness are scattered.” (4:7–11) Here the dogma of retributive justice is established. What does it mean? It means that man receives a reward or a punishment according to his works. This is the anthropocentric thesis of justification through work. Of course, only God knows which works deserve reward and which punishment:

32  C h a p t e r T h r e e 17 “‘Can mortals be righteous before God? Can human beings be pure before their Maker? 18 Even in his servants he puts no trust, and his angels he charges with error; 19 how much more those who live in houses of clay, whose foundation is in the dust, who are crushed like a moth. 20 Between morning and evening they are destroyed; they perish forever without any regarding it. 21 Their tent-cord is plucked up within them, and they die devoid of wisdom.’” (4:17–21) “Without doubt, the origin of man’s affliction is sometimes enigmatic, but the dogma of individual retribution is verified by experience.” The guilt that determines the punishment is concealed in Job’s memory. That guilt and that punishment must be unveiled—divine justice is as implacable as human nature is corrupt. 2 “Surely vexation kills the fool, and jealousy slays the simple. 3 I have seen fools taking root, but suddenly I cursed their dwelling. 4 Their children are far from safety, they are crushed in the gate, and there is no one to deliver them. 5 The hungry eat their harvest, and they take it even out of the thorns; and the thirsty pant after their wealth. 6 For misery does not come from the earth, nor does trouble sprout from the ground; 7 but human beings are born to trouble just as sparks fly upward.” (5:2–7) Divine justice exists as a dialectical theodicy. In the words of Eliphaz: God is zealous in the use of evil for the reconstruction of good.  Samuel Terrien, Job, Commentaire de l’Ancien Testament, 69.

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8 9 10 11 12 13 14 15 16

“As for me, I would seek God, and to God I would commit my cause. He does great things and unsearchable, marvelous things without number. He gives rain on the earth and sends waters on the fields; he sets on high those who are lowly, and those who mourn are lifted to safety. He frustrates the devices of the crafty, so that their hands achieve no success. He takes the wise in their own craftiness; and the schemes of the wily are brought to a quick end. They meet with darkness in the daytime, and grope at noonday as in the night. But he saves the needy from the sword of their mouth, from the hand of the mighty. So the poor have hope, and injustice shuts its mouth.” (5:8–16)

Hence Job, who like all other men is prisoner of a sinful predisposition, should entrust himself to his Lord. 17 “How happy is the one whom God reproves; therefore do not despise the discipline of the Almighty. 18 For he wounds, but he binds up; he strikes, but his hands heal. 19 He will deliver you from six troubles; in seven no harm shall touch you. 20 In famine he will redeem you from death, and in war from the power of the sword. 21 You shall be hidden from the scourge of the tongue, and shall not fear destruction when it comes. 22 At destruction and famine you shall laugh, and shall not fear the wild animals of the earth. 23 For you shall be in league with the stones of the field, and the wild animals shall be at peace with you.

34  C h a p t e r T h r e e 24 25 26 27

You shall know that your tent is safe, you shall inspect your fold and miss nothing. You shall know that your descendants will be many, and your offspring like the grass of the earth. You shall come to your grave in ripe old age, as a shock of grain comes up to the threshing-floor in its season. See, we have searched this out; it is true. Hear, and know it for yourself.” (5:17–27)

Justice is immanent to the human relationship. Justice is the narrative of the human relationship. After Job’s protest, Eliphaz returns to the theme in chapter 15—but this time not to positively press Job toward divine rewards, nor to justify the different times in which God’s action takes place and the enigma of his decisions, but in order to threaten him with the negative aspects, which are devastating for the theory of individual retribution. The wicked, the sinner will be cruelly punished: 30 “They will not escape from darkness; the flame will dry up their shoots, and their blossom will be swept away by the wind. 31 Let them not trust in emptiness, deceiving themselves; for emptiness will be their recompense. 32 It will be paid in full before their time, and their branch will not be green. 33 They will shake off their unripe grape, like the vine, and cast off their blossoms, like the olive tree. 34 For the company of the godless is barren, and fire consumes the tents of bribery. 35 They conceive mischief and bring forth evil and their heart prepares deceit.” (15:30–35) Not only Eliphaz—although he does so exclusively—but also the other visitors insist on this theme of retribution. Lévêque summarizes the situation as follows: The visitors develop three themes in particular: a The unhappiness of the wicked: Cycle I of the discourses: 4:7–11;

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5:2–7; 8:8–19; 11:20; Cycle II: 15:17–35; 18:5–21; 20:4–29; Cycle III: 22:15–18; 27:13–23; 24:18–24; b The happiness absolutely guaranteed to the just. Cycle I of the discourses: 5:17–26; 8:5–7; 8:20–22; 11:13–19; Cycle III: 22:21–30; c Man’s impossibility of being pure before God: 15:14–16; 25:4–6.”

In particular, it is Zophar who, in his second intervention (chapter 20), completes the elaboration of the theory of retribution. And he does so with a violence that fits the tone reached at this stage in the discussion: with the ardor and contempt of the fallacious positions of the others, and with a missionary hatred for sin (and/or the sinner?). The happiness of the impious lasts not an instant: his pleasure is filth, precipitating toward the grave. 12 “Though wickedness is sweet in their mouth, though they hide it under their tongues, 13 though they are loath to let it go, and hold it in their mouths, 14 yet their food is turned in their stomachs; it is the venom of asps within them. 15 They swallow down riches and vomit them up again; God casts them out of their bellies. 16 They will suck the poison of asps; the tongue of a viper will kill them.” (20:12–16) “Zophar does not allow Job to forget that a) his guilt is the cause of his unhappiness, and b) the universe, with its elements that are the instruments of moral sanction—the night, fire, and the flood—manifests the justice of its creator.” Chapter 21 contains Job’s response to this specific framing of the discussion—the theory of individual retribution, he argues, fails to hold up from any point of view. There is no ethical measure. All our experience  Jean Lévêque, “Le livre de Job.”  Samuel Terrien, Job, Commentaire de l’Ancien Testament, 160.

36  C h a p t e r T h r e e shows it and the dialectical efforts of the visitors—lawyers who try to reveal the “just measure”—are false and deceptive. 30 “That the wicked are spared on the day of calamity, and are rescued on the day of wrath? 31 Who declares their way to their face, and who repays them for what they have done? 32 When they are carried to the grave, a watch is kept over their tomb. 33 The clods of the valley are sweet to them; everyone will follow after, and those who went before are innumerable. 34 How then will you comfort me with empty nothings? There is nothing left of your answers but falsehood.” (21:30–34) We have arrived at the crucial point. Value, labor, and justice cannot be apportioned according to a common measure. The more the world is constituted in accordance with a unitary measure of value, and each of the natural and historical expressions is the revelation of this narrative, the more this commonality shows itself to be meaningless. Perhaps labor and justice can sometimes find a linkage in cases where they are submitted to the same horizon of scarcity—but this is the exception rather than the rule. Outside of this ambiguous condition nothing leads us to the necessity of a retributive rule. If labor and justice are forcefully led to it, then rebellion is clear and necessary. Job’s protest to the retributive model, in which he recognizes pure and simple charlatanry, is merely intelligent—not yet revolutionary. Despite this, the great historical time of the Occident has been dominated by empty retributive conceptions—from Aristotle, through Christianity’s reactionary accounts of it, to the more advanced capitalist ones. Socialism is the apologia for a retributive theory of justice, human action, and social rewards. In contrast, Job in his first bored and sarcastic reply has already moved beyond Stakhanov.

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2  The Mystical Deception The rational relation of life and value, labor and justice, is given by the measure of value. When this measure is missing, there is no way to give a rational solution to the problem of value, and so rationalism must give way and the problem can no longer be posed. Otherwise the problem remains, but instead of a rational solution (which has been discarded), attempts are made to put other theories—having the same function—in the place of the theory of retribution. With the breakdown of the immanent measure of value and the impossibility of restoring it, the attempt is made to overdetermine it, that is, to make it work again on the basis of heterodirected, transcendent, theological systems. 1 Then Bildad the Shuhite answered: 2 “How long will you say these things, and the words of your mouth be a great wind? 3 Does God pervert justice? Or does the Almighty pervert the right? 4 If your children sinned against him, he delivered them into the power of their transgression. 5 If you will seek God and make supplication to the Almighty, 6 if you are pure and upright, surely then he will rouse himself for you and restore to you your rightful place. 7 Though your beginning was small, your latter days will be very great.” (8:1–7) It is then the second of Job’s guests who takes on the task of reestablishing retribution through a rule that is not only immanent and eudemonistic but mediated with the transcendent action of the divinity: the end remains eudaimonistic, whereas the means are those of theological overdetermination. “The soteriology of Bildad is clearly anthropocentric. After all, the salvation of man does not rest only on the grace of God but on the character of he who implores, who appropriates the fruits of grace

38  C h a p t e r T h r e e voluntarily.” Human action and divine grace grow together like Lebanese cedars, one alongside the other. Anthropocentric reason is guaranteed by divine grace and the measure of the world by divine omnipotence. Bildad’s second dialogue, in chapter 18, restates the theme. But rhetoric and threats take the place of the positive theological argument of the first dialogue. Bildad is the jurist who describes the effectiveness of the sentence in cases where man fails to bow to the will of the supreme judge. The rebel (and his repression) substitutes for the sinner (and his repression) the more the level of legitimation of justice increases. If God intervenes directly in the fixing of the measure of value, this will not be simply impartial or biased—it will simply be holy. The obstinacy of Job in refusing the relationship value-labor-justice, even in the form of overdetermination, leads Bildad to consider him a threat to the established order. When Job decisively rejects the transcendent motif as well, his lawyers—who are on the brink of becoming his ideological enemies—accuse him of titanic hybris. For, against Job, they continue to insist that the wicked will be punished and their prosperity will be short lived—so short lived as to demonstrate immediately its sterility and, in any case, so enduring as to provide an absolutely exemplary punishment. 11 “Terrors frighten them on every side, and chase them at their heels. 12 Their strength is consumed by hunger, and calamity is ready for their stumbling. 13 By disease their skin is consumed, the firstborn of Death consumes their limbs. 14 They are torn from the tent in which they trusted, and are brought to the king of terrors. 15 In their tents nothing remains; sulphur is scattered upon their habitations. 16 Their roots dry up beneath, and their branches wither above. 17 Their memory perishes from the earth,  Ibid., 90.

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18 19 20 21

and they have no name in the street. They are thrust from light into darkness, and driven out of the world. They have no offspring or descendant among their people, and no survivor where they used to live. They of the west are appalled at their fate, and horror seizes those of the east. Surely such are the dwellings of the ungodly, such is the place of those who do not know God.” (18:11–21)

It is clear that the idea expressed here by Bildad is—even in the increasing sophistication of the exposition and of the foundation (divine overdetermination, the act of grace)—the same as that narrated in the folkloric part of the book, the same that in the many centuries of Christian history will be adopted by all manner of theologians. “Despite its psychological profundity, the folkloric legend reflects a type of theology that has little to do with that of the poet, since it searches desperately for security, even if an illusory one, within the incongruity of history. It wants to empirically prove, through a series of miracles—the pagan deus ex machina—that the intervention of a just god always makes the ideal of human justice true. To impose the lesson of the epilogue onto the theology of the poem is to return via a side door to moralistic idolatry against which the poet had fought.” How should we react if we want to avoid being imprisoned by these mean-spirited mediations, by these parodies of the theological drama? Zophar, Job’s third interlocutor, perfects the argument of overdetermination by transforming it into a mystical discourse. In this way, the fiction of the process is brought to an end. There is no longer a problem of justice but only one of surrender, of devotion and adoration. 4 “For you say, ‘My conduct is pure, and I am clean in God’s sight.’ 5 But O that God would speak,  Ibid., 48.

40  C h a p t e r T h r e e 6 7 8 9 10 11 12

and open his lips to you, and that he would tell you the secrets of wisdom! For wisdom is many-sided. Know then that God exacts of you less than your guilt deserves. Can you find out the deep things of God? Can you find out the limit of the Almighty? It is higher than heaven—what can you do? Deeper than Sheol—what can you know? Its measure is longer than the earth, and broader than the sea. If he passes through, and imprisons, and assembles for judgment, who can hinder him? For he knows those who are worthless; when he sees iniquity, will he not consider it? But a stupid person will get understanding, when a wild ass is born human.

13 “If you direct your heart rightly, you will stretch out your hands toward him. 14 If iniquity is in your hand, put it far away, and do not let wickedness reside in your tents. 15 Surely then you will lift up your face without blemish; you will be secure, and will not fear. 16 You will forget your misery; you will remember it as waters that have passed away.” (11:4–16) Thus one returns via a mystical path to the objectivity of retribution. As always, religious thinking that aims to mediate God and world, justice and labor, turns back upon itself, involving itself in the nullity of circular argument. Overdetermination and mysticism follow orders by retribution, that is, by a eudaimonistic conception that turns religion into an instrument of Power. It becomes an apologia not for wealth but for the rich, for Power. The third cycle of dialogues (Eliphaz, 22:1–30; Bildad, 25:1–6; 26:5–

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14; Zophar, 27:13–23; 24:18–25) reveals the violent animosity of Job’s friends. Eliphaz does not stop reminding Job of his sins, for which his current suffering is a deserved punishment; Bildad persists in the statement of divine omnipotence, weighing down the image of God with the entire mythical armory of terror: hell and its demons, Rahab and the sea serpent, the void and the cosmogonic nothing, all are summoned to validate the request that the rebel should bow down; and Zophar moralizes the framework and exalts the divine foundation of morals and law. Nothing new, aside from the violence of the arguments, is added to the metaphysical discourse. But it is precisely by rolling out these theories that the philosophical framework has been decisively moved forward. Every immediate determination of value has revealed itself to be incapable of representing the entirety of the drama. The process of validation shows itself to be totally senseless. At this point, Job’s interventions enable us to find a new standpoint.

3  The Need for Redemption “Indeed I know that this is so; but how can a mortal be just before God?” (9:1–2). We have now come to Job’s responses to the banalities expressed by his guests and friends. He seems to say: you have defended the theory of retribution in all of its forms, immanent and transcendent, materially determined and underdetermined, to the point of rooting it mystically within the immeasurableness of man and God. All this is clear. 3 “If one wished to contend with him, one could not answer him once in a thousand. 4 He is wise in heart, and mighty in strength —who has resisted him, and succeeded?” (9:3–4) 15 “Though I am innocent, I cannot answer him; I must appeal for mercy to my accuser.  For the reasons behind this account, see Gianfranco Ravasi, Giobbe, 527ff., in which he summarizes the results of the best of the research.

42  C h a p t e r T h r e e 16 17 18 19 20

If I summoned him and he answered me, I do not believe that he would listen to my voice. For he crushes me with a tempest, and multiplies my wounds without cause; he will not let me get my breath, but fills me with bitterness. If it is a contest of strength, he is the strong one! If it is a matter of justice, who can summon him? Though I am innocent, my own mouth would condemn me; though I am blameless, he would prove me perverse.” (9:15–20)

But having clarified this, Job protests; he unleashes his rebellion. 1 “I loathe my life; I will give free utterance to my complaint; I will speak in the bitterness of my soul. 2 I will say to God, Do not condemn me; let me know why you contend against me. 3 Does it seem good to you to oppress, to despise the work of your hands and favor the schemes of the wicked? 4 Do you have eyes of flesh? Do you see as humans see? 5 Are your days like the days of mortals, or your years like human years, 6 that you seek out my iniquity and search for my sin, 7 although you know that I am not guilty, and there is no one to deliver out of your hand?” (10:1–7) Why is Job so bloody-minded? Why does he persist in seeking a justice that cannot be accorded to him and which, were he to receive it, would in any case not reconstitute a common fabric between man and God, would be unable to form an event of justice? Gradually the real problem comes to light. If it is not justice that Job wants, because it is impossible, what does he want? Divine omnipotence

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seems amoral to Job; the power of God over the universal empire appears despotic. Not only does God impose the right of the mighty, he laughs at man’s unhappiness. 22 “It is all one; therefore I say, he destroys both the blameless and the wicked. 23 When disaster brings sudden death, he mocks at the calamity of the innocent. 24 The earth is given into the hand of the wicked; he covers the eyes of its judges— if it is not he, who then is it?” (9:22–24) Let us keep the theme of the laughter of God in mind—we shall return to it shortly. For now God’s sarcasm removes him from the position of judge—this is Job’s charge. This is one of the central themes, and here we see the intimation of what he wants: first of all he wants to remove the ambiguity from the divine figure who is at once judge and adversary. He reduces the divinity to a mere adversary. “There is no umpire between us, who might lay his hand on us both” (9:33). The judge is no more—just as there is no longer the function and the matter of retribution. God confers impunity upon criminals, he renders prayer useless, he renders them equal—or rather flattens—in death (chapter 21 develops variations upon this theme). The scandal is all the greater when one looks at society: God is the seal of the clearest, fiercest, deepest of social injustices (chapter 24 screams forth human anger and desperation in this regard—from within the darkness, the misery, and the most terrible unhappiness). So, God is not judge. Nor is there a common matter constituting the ground of justice. Every illusion and utopia of a common measure has dissolved. Hence the relationship is one of conflict, of war. Parity between subjects is created in these chapters. Job rises as a power standing before divine power. Job is innocent and honest. 1 Job again took up his discourse and said: 2 “As God lives, who has taken away my right, and the Almighty, who has made my soul bitter, 3 as long as my breath is in me

44  C h a p t e r T h r e e 4 5 6

and the spirit of God is in my nostrils, my lips will not speak falsehood, and my tongue will not utter deceit. Far be it from me to say that you are right; until I die I will not put away my integrity from me. I hold fast my righteousness, and will not let it go; my heart does not reproach me for any of my days.” (27:1–6)

It is on this basis that Job exclaims, “But I would speak to the Almighty, and I desire to argue my case with God” (13:3). Between chapter 12 and 14—which repeat the mechanism that we have extensively considered of the emptying of the terrain of measure, wisdom, and justice—appears chapter 13, in which Job’s power officially rises against God. 13 “Let me have silence, and I will speak, and let come on me what may. 14 I will take my flesh in my teeth, and put my life in my hand. 15 See, he will kill me; I have no hope; but I will defend my ways to his face. 16 This will be my salvation, that the godless shall not come before him.” (13:13–16) Between chapter 12, which considers natural harmony and history as parodies of a rule of justice, and chapter 14, which constructs nothingness as the essence of being, as its foundation and destiny, Job constructs his challenge—a challenge of power against power, a legal challenge that may end in death. 18 “I have indeed prepared my case; I know that I shall be vindicated. 19 Who is there that will contend with me? For then I would be silent and die. 20 Only grant two things to me, then I will not hide myself from your face: 21 withdraw your hand far from me,

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22 23 24 25 26 27 28

and do not let dread of you terrify me. Then call, and I will answer; or let me speak, and you reply to me. How many are my iniquities and my sins? Make me know my transgression and my sin. Why do you hide your face, and count me as your enemy? Will you frighten a windblown leaf and pursue dry chaff? For you write bitter things against me, and make me reap the iniquities of my youth. You put my feet in the stocks, and watch all my paths; you set a bound to the soles of my feet. One wastes away like a rotten thing, like a garment that is moth-eaten.” (13:18–28)

God is not judge, God is the adversary. Who then is this God? We have here two answers. One (developed in chapter 28) appears in the so-called Hymn to Wisdom. It is almost certainly a passage inserted very late into the book of Job—perhaps the very last of the additions to the text. But, like the other additions, it is a logical and fitting one—this, and only this, interests us: “Hymn to Wisdom” or, better still, a first discourse before the altar of the unknown God. This anticipates the tone of the sapiential books. The fact that the passage has been inserted in chapter 28, precisely at the end of Job’s dramatic dialogue with his three friends, confirms the logicality of its position: the attempt to respond (if somewhat belatedly in the third century ce) to the problem that has now explicitly opened up—if God is not judge, if there is no basis upon which to judge, is there still a God? Is there still a possible way to define Wisdom? Once the question has been posed—“But where shall wisdom be found? and where is the place of understanding?” (28:12), “Whence then cometh wisdom? and where is the place of understanding?” (28:20)—let us not expect an answer. As in the other sapiential books the phenomenology of Wisdom, and its liturgy as well, take the place of definition and founda-

46  C h a p t e r T h r e e tion. The difficulty the critics have in accepting this chapter of the book of Job appears banal if one fails to understand that the analogical style, in this matter, corresponds to the urgency and profundity of the question. “Inserting the poem of Wisdom in its current place the anonymous editor has given evidence of a dependable taste.” This is confirmed in a chapter that is much less philologically controversial (chapter 19), in which we find a second answer that is developed much more profoundly—both more profoundly and newly developed. Justice is founded in a radically new form. Job’s lament is transformed into an appeal, into a declaration of hope; it is founded anew. “For I know that my Redeemer [ go’el] lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth” (19:25). 25 “For I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth; 26 and after my skin has been thus destroyed, then in my flesh I shall see God, 27 whom I shall see on my side, and my eyes shall behold, and not another. My heart faints within me! 28 If you say, ‘How we will persecute him!’ and, ‘The root of the matter is found in him’; 29 be afraid of the sword, for wrath brings the punishment of the sword, so that you may know there is a judgment.” (19:25–29) Terrien translates “go’el” with “Mon redempteur ” [my Redeemer]. This translation resolves many interpretative problems, I believe, positively. It eliminates, for instance, the possibility that this is simply an eschatological reference to Yahweh’s function at the “end of the days”—that is, of the Avenging God; it also excludes the possibility that this is simply a  Jean Lévêque, “Le livre de Job,” coll. 1204.  Samuel Terrien, Job, Commentaire de l’Ancien Testament, 150.  [Trans: The reference is to Daniel 12:13: “But you, go your way, and rest; you shall rise for your reward at the end of the days.”]

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case of a reference to that God against whom hostility has been shown to this point. It is to another that the text refers here; certainly it is easy to read this as a prophecy of the Christ, and rightly so for the believer. But undoubtedly more correct is the reference to the avenging prince of Egyptian and Canaanite legend. The theme that we are concerned with is that of the living God, of concrete justice—it is, therefore, the theme of the foundation of another order of values, not one in line with the measure of the world but one against or, alternatively, in place of this world of injustice and pain. A reconstruction of the world and its value. It is no coincidence that Job speaks as a perfect materialist—it is his body that will be ceded because it is from it, from the state of extreme prostration, from the abyss “without flesh” in which he finds himself, that the cry of pain and faith is sounded. From exploited labor to the resurrection of the flesh.

Four 

The Chaos of Being

1  Cosmogonic Materialism

I

n the course of chapters 29–31 a long monologue by Job unfolds. We are at the heart of the book. We have already seen what the material problem is: the construction of a new possibility of justice. There is no longer any judge; there is only the adversary. In what way can one construct a norm that regulates this world and resolves its conflicts? How and where can this new normativity be founded? The “Hymn to Wisdom” had closed peremptorily: “And he said to humankind, ‘Truly, the fear of the Lord, that is wisdom; and to depart from evil is understanding’” (28:28)—which is a conclusion that, as we have seen, is unsatisfactory. But more than the conclusion, it was the path of the investigation that was of interest—a path that led through all the difficulties of nature, that had traversed its depths and extension, and that confronted the untold bitterness of social commerce and history, leading then onto the knowledge of a foundation of Law through a tear in a strip of the universe. Of Wisdom it is said: 23 “God understands the way to it, and he knows its place. 24 For he looks to the ends of the earth, and sees everything under the heavens. 25 When he gave to the wind its weight, and apportioned out the waters by measure; 26 when he made a decree for the rain, and a way for the thunderbolt;

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27 then he saw it and declared it; he established it, and searched it out.” (28:23–27) We are again in that place in which measure fades into the disorder of the universe and evil is reflected in chaos, in the immeasurable. The passage is ontological. It is a dislocation of the problematic. The new foundation should be sought where the crisis originated. Job’s first words, following the evidence of his misfortune (3:1ff.), are, in the book, an invocation, a dramatic wish, an anxious request to return to earth, to obscurity, to chaos. His personal drama was from the beginning modeled on the cosmic drama. Now that the individual crisis is concluding and the search for a new foundation is emerging, the entire set of events will have to be once again projected onto the screen of the cosmos. At the base of this dislocation there is a logical necessity that the poem willingly makes its own. Let us follow the path that leads to this point. Chapter 29 speaks of the past, the memory of happier times in their various aspects, works and days, social and moral virtues, justice, generosity, and happiness. The narrative is linear, the optimism is fresh like a powerful and happy nature. The linearity of the story turns into hope. Says Job: 18 “Then I thought, ‘I shall die in my nest, and I shall multiply my days like the phoenix; 19 my roots spread out to the waters, with the dew all night on my branches; 20 my glory was fresh with me, and my bow ever new in my hand.’” (29:18–20) The relation between individual and cosmos is positive and happy. But then comes the crisis: the relation of individual and cosmos is demystified. The tranquillity of the relationship and its linearity, its measured productivity of happiness and linearity, is broken. Nature becomes a stepmother and murderous. Day and night, and all the figures of nature, persecute Job atrociously. Nature is violently animated. Chapter 30 leads the unhappy Job to confront cosmic wickedness. Crisis breaks the happy continuity of the linear process of virtue. The irruption of crisis in moral life, moral abjection within the cosmic framework.

50  C h a p t e r F o u r 15 “. . . Terrors are turned upon me; my honor is pursued as by the wind, and my prosperity has passed away like a cloud. 16 “And now my soul is poured out within me; days of affliction have taken hold of me. 17 The night racks my bones, and the pain that gnaws me takes no rest. 18 With violence he seizes my garment; he grasps me by the collar of my tunic. 19 He has cast me into the mire, and I have become like dust and ashes. 20 I cry to you and you do not answer me; I stand, and you merely look at me. 21 You have turned cruel to me; with the might of your hand you persecute me.” (30:15–21) We witness a slow but continual and growing accumulation of monstrous elements, which form the moment where the theme of foundation can be proposed anew. When, once again, shortly thereafter, Job will propose the trial and vigorously ask God to answer him—the scene will be the cosmic one, completely developed and logically necessary. We find ourselves on a metaphysical rim and within a cosmic perspective. But before entering it, we should make one last observation. In these pages Job not only narrates the crisis of his relationship with the deity—he also widens and socializes his concern. The elements of socialization that, in nonexemplary but constitutive manner, are presented (positively) in chapter 29 and (negatively, since the crisis of the relationship with God breaks the social condition and allows that the perverse effects—persecution and terror—are realized through socialization) in chapter 30, well, these elements of sociality will nevertheless be fundamental to the development of the argument. Sociality is, here, universality. On this basis the book of Job frees itself from the task of providing a moral example: redemption aims to free Job-Adam, this extremely singular member of the human race. This universality is spoken of here and it is spoken of with caution, in the same difficult manner of the materialism of this book, but also with the same

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straightforwardness with which the resurrection of the bodies from pain, unhappiness, and death has already been prophesied above. It is worth emphasizing the materialist power of Job’s definitions. At other times, his interlocutors—Bildad in particular—had proposed that the values be founded anew in transcendental terms. Others had insisted on the mystical perspective. In reality Job poses not only the problem of a new foundation of the norms of measure but also that of the materialist character of this new foundation—against, therefore, every transcendental definition, whether it be overdetermined or mystical. The path is a difficult one. Job, a contemporary of Aeschylus, indicates a different philosophical path from that which the great classical tradition of metaphysics—and then all the philosophies of reflection—will follow. Universality is here sociality, society. Values are materially orientated. They need not be translated into concepts in order to be affirmed; they need not be transfigured in order to appear. These acrobatic moves are unknown to Job. It is in the immateriality of pain that his existence is universal, is socially universalized. 28 “I go about in sunless gloom; I stand up in the assembly and cry for help. 29 I am a brother of jackals, and a companion of ostriches. 30 My skin turns black and falls from me, and my bones burn with heat. 31 My lyre is turned to mourning, and my pipe to the voice of those who weep.” (30:28–31)

2  The Struggle of Monsters Some interpreters deny that Behemoth and Leviathan, as they appear in chapters 40 and 41, the very heart of God’s conversation with Job, represent essential parts of the discourse. They understand them instead as later and inessential additions.  See Jean Lévêque, “Le livre de Job,” for the concluding comments in this regard, as well as Etienne Glasser, “Autour du livre de Job,” 161–67.

52  C h a p t e r F o u r On the other hand, another group of commentators considers the appearance of the two monsters to be crucial: the problem of cosmic evil is thereby placed at the forefront, revealed in its mystery and in the maximum violence of its expression. What benefits from this is the dialogue between God and Job that is thereby immediately shifted onto the massive plane of cosmogony and is compared to the most extreme divine hybris. There should be little doubt about where I place myself on the question of the interpretations of these passages: where we are led necessarily by philology we are also led by strictly poetic and philosophical considerations. Behemoth, the primordial force, and Leviathan, the primordial chaos and violence, are the very ground of production, that ground without measure or law—to which our discussion has led us—where, therefore, the now-separate subjects clash. We say separate subjects because they are not hierarchically situated. And yet they are subjects that participate in one and the same generic and fundamental community: that of the force and chaos of production, and the immense [smisurato] interweaving of productive forces and moments of command. The destruction of the ancient order has offered us not a well-ordered world but precisely the opposite: a great chaos, a great immeasurableness. In following Job we have been led from labor to its exploitation; from its exploitation to the rationale of value; and from the rationale of value to its crisis. This crisis does not only represent negativity; on the contrary, it exhibits a terrible and creative indeterminacy: a new ontological fabric for a new creative capacity. Let us take a look at these pages. We can provide them with a twofold reading. On the one hand God states that his victory over these horrendous monsters is proof of his omnipotence: “Look at Behemoth, which I made just as I made you” (40:15). “It is the first of the great acts of God—only its Maker can approach it with the sword” (40:19). This verse concludes the description of the pure strength that the hippopotamus represents. “Can one take it with hooks or pierce its nose with a snare”  See Norman C. Habel, The Book of Job, 156, but more importantly Samuel Terrien, Job, Commentaire de l’Ancien Testament, 258–59, who summarizes the entire discussion and provides a useful bibliography.

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(40:24)? In the face of pure evil, God represents absolute freedom. He creates according to a logic unknown to man and to a measure that is immeasurable for man. But what does all this mean for man? Does it mean that he must accept all of this? Does it mean that what is evil and chaos for him is cosmos for God, and that man must accept this cosmos? The cosmological framework allows for a wide range of interpretations, but it does not change the substance of the problem—except in the sense that man is allowed to penetrate this immensity. The same question and the same ambiguities are raised in relation to Leviathan. But here matters become more complex, because although in the first place there is a restatement of the paradox of divine omnipotence, this paradox is soon put into question and God seems to have to engage in a tough struggle—a struggle that leaves “the deep to be white-haired” (41:32)—in order to impose his dominion over the monster. 24 “Its heart is as hard as stone, as hard as the lower millstone. 25 When it raises itself up the gods are afraid; at the crashing they are beside themselves. 26 Though the sword reaches it, it does not avail, nor does the spear, the dart, or the javelin. 27 It counts iron as straw, and bronze as rotten wood. 28 The arrow cannot make it flee; slingstones, for it, are turned to chaff. 29 Clubs are counted as chaff; it laughs at the rattle of javelins. 30 Its underparts are like sharp potsherds; it spreads itself like a threshing-sledge on the mire. 31 It makes the deep boil like a pot; it makes the sea like a pot of ointment. 32 It leaves a shining wake behind it;  [Trans: A literal translation from the Italian would read, “Who could ever paralyze him with his eyes, or pierce his nostrils with a hook?”]

54  C h a p t e r F o u r 33 34

one would think the deep to be white-haired. On earth it has no equal, a creature without fear. It surveys everything that is lofty; it is king over all that are proud.” (41:24–34)

Here we stand before the abyss, before the chaos, the most violent natural hybris. God has won here as well; he has once again resolved the paradox of his omnipotence. What then will man do? God’s advice is not to challenge this immense beast whose terrible existence is an irrational proof of divine omnipotence. What then will man do? Once again, the argument that was supposed to be final reopens the discussion: because this demonstration of the divine certainly does not end with omnipotence but simply reveals that God is nothing if not an element, or more precisely, the result of a struggle in which chaos dissolves into cosmogony. Why is God, and not man, the result of this process? Why propose God as the result of a process that is unable to produce measure (or theory, or norm, or hierarchy, or a judge able to apply it)? This filling in of the background, this cosmic construction of the scene, this ferocious battle between monsters and of natural forces forms an inexhaustible view—or at least one that is not completed or able to be completed. An event is necessary within this monstrous horizon. A new creative event. If it is not like so, then “these chapters underline nothing other than that God’s works place man before a series of insoluble and discouraging enigmas. The mystery . . .” This mystery is not an answer. Mystery stands in the same relation to reason as mysticism does to the Will: it is a nothing which we allow to satisfy us. For those of us who wish to be satisfied. But not for Job. The picture has widened here. Mystery cannot be accepted. The idea of the redeemer, of the Avenger, of the new judge presses upon us. But confronted with the monsters of cosmic evil, what will this new character and his creative capacity be capable of? Job does not come to a halt before the exhibition of mystery. Instead  Karl Barth, Dogmatique.

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he insists. He attacks goodness, wisdom, and sanctity itself, and so God’s justice. Job is driven by his unhappiness—but he is above all offended by God’s omnipotence, by his inability to bring about justice. Of course, justice is not a human measure—but in any case Job observed all the customs of justice and supplemented them with generosity, humility, and love. If this is not enough, what is justice! It certainly cannot be nothing. 35 “O that I had one to hear me! (Here is my signature! Let the Almighty answer me!) O that I had the indictment written by my adversary! 36 Surely I would carry it on my shoulder; I would bind it on me like a crown; 37 I would give him an account of all my steps; like a prince I would approach him.” (31:35–37) And God appears to him. Job can see him.

3  The Laughter of Being Theorists of laughter—which is that purely human activity of which so little is known—tend to put the occasion for it down to contrast, to one’s reaction to the immeasurable. What better occasion than the one in which we find ourselves (one of extreme tension between a psychological demand for justice and the immensity of the cosmic order) for the comical to arise? The protagonists put themselves to the test through irony. Job first of all. In the reply he gives to his interlocutors in chapters 12 and 13, he arranges his discourse in ironic terms. 2 “No doubt you are the people, and wisdom will die with you.” (12:2) The discourse of Job, our young Lear in his misfortune, soon rises to a sarcastic climax:  On the radical force of this attack of Job’s blasphemy, see Jean Lévêque, “Le livre de Job,” 1204.

56  C h a p t e r F o u r 16 “With him are strength and wisdom; the deceived and the deceiver are his. 17 He leads counselors away stripped, and makes fools of judges. 18 He looses the sash of kings, and binds a waistcloth on their loins. 19 He leads priests away stripped, and overthrows the mighty. 20 He deprives of speech those who are trusted, and takes away the discernment of the elders. 21 He pours contempt on princes, and looses the belt of the strong. 22 He uncovers the deeps out of darkness, and brings deep darkness to light. 23 He makes nations great, then destroys them; he enlarges nations, then leads them away. 24 He strips understanding from the leaders of the earth, and makes them wander in a pathless waste. 25 They grope in the dark without light; he makes them stagger like a drunkard.” (12:16–25) Chapter 13, which we have already analyzed, repeats similar motifs. Irony gradually appears, and the irony flows into sarcasm. In those chapters in which the ontological break becomes stronger we find an increased amount of irony and sarcasm. In the course of listing his presumed, possible, nonexistent sins, Job eventually hypothesizes: 26 “If I have looked at the sun when it shone, or the moon moving in splendor, 27 and my heart has been secretly enticed, and my mouth has kissed my hand; 28 this also would be an iniquity to be punished by the judges, for I should have been false to God above.” (31:26–28) His attitude is so blatant it is understood by the fourth and last interlocutor, who denounces him:

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7 “Who is there like Job, who drinks up scoffing like water, 8 who goes in company with evildoers and walks with the wicked? 9 For he has said, ‘It profits one nothing to take delight in God.’” (34:7–9) Although it is easy to condemn Job’s attitude, it is wrong to do so—Job deploys irony so that his demands for a trial are granted. His irony is a lawyer’s weapon. It is not only this, however. Unfolding within separation, Job’s discourse constructs a new type of sainthood. More concretely, his sarcasm settles accounts with the adversaries’ art of mediation and exhibits the will to break with the metaphysical constructions that prejudice or block the dialogue between man and God. Laughter and sarcasm have a dual aspect: that of separation and that of unity. They restore the unity— of the separated. They draw the now-separated subjects tightly together. Irony rewrites that which logic had separated, that which within history and nature resulted in opposition, in separation—and that had been been registered by sarcasm. Irony is like an elastic band that holds the separated together.* God adds a decisive element to this structure. God laughs. His laughter is heard throughout his entire dominion. But just as with Job’s serene irony, which is united with the sarcasm of a lawyer who intends to affirm his principled position, so for God the serene, almost melancholic irony of certain passages is united with and transformed into grotesque observations. To Job’s sarcasm corresponds God’s polite inattentiveness or his sense of the grotesque. For example, in the middle of the whirlwind, we hear God turn to Job with the words: “Gird up your loins like a man; I will question you, and you declare to me. Will you even put me in the wrong? Will you condemn me that you may be justified?” (40:7–8). The irony is palpable. But the grotesque becomes evident in the passages dedicated to the monsters. 1 “Can you draw out Leviathan with a fish-hook, or press down its tongue with a cord? * See Note C on page 59.

58  C h a p t e r F o u r 2 3 4 5 6 7

Can you put a rope in its nose, or pierce its jaw with a hook? Will it make many supplications to you? Will it speak soft words to you? Will it make a covenant with you to be taken as your servant forever? Will you play with it as with a bird, or will you put it on a leash for your girls? Will traders bargain over it? Will they divide it up among the merchants? Can you fill its skin with harpoons, or its head with fishing spears?” (41:1–7)

This is a truly Rabelaisian experience. In truth, this passage—from singular to cosmic evil—is so unbearable that it can only be borne thanks to the ironic reflection on its immoderateness [smisuratezza]. But in this way the passage become empty. This may not have been the intention, but it is certainly the effect. This laughter that occupies the scene discharges the tension, but at the same time it empties it of all chance of mediation. Being laughs. It laughs tumultuously at its misfortune. The passage is psychologically notable—it stretches out, discharges, removes from Job’s lament and God’s voice some of that innocence that the incommensurability of pain and strength had attributed to him. But the passage is all the more relevant from the metaphysical standpoint: being trembles before that laughter. All this has two results: both literally and metaphysically. On the one hand, the sense of immensity is projected onto being; on the other hand, it is placated on this level.* In reality the confrontation is placated. The confrontation is over. The relation registers the mutation that the trial had produced. The problem of evil, which is inserted ever more into being and is identified with the cosmic moment, removes any relationship. God no longer has any meaning. Evil is truly absolute and unbearable. Although we may be able to laugh * See Note D on page 60.

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at it and are caught within the sarcastic jolt of being that leads us to reflection, the true result is that we recognize the exclusive basis of all valorization in our universal solitude. In the hell of production our solitude is that of creators, not that of creatures. The dynamic of valorization is developed entirely along a curve that, through pain, excludes dialectical comparison. If it is still possible to construct, it will be possible to do so only on the basis of this solitude. Rooted in being, valorization will discover itself in creativity, as creative tension. It is the only route open to it, the only metaphysical illusion. The book of Job exhibits a sarcastic existentialism that, through pain, denies all dialectics and understands being only as creation. After Auschwitz and Hiroshima God is no longer—but there is the ever more human necessity to create. It is necessary to develop power having registered (and dominated) its irreducible passive content and the pain of which power is the daughter.

Note C Probably, in a world that no longer knows anything of measure but only of the immense [smisurato], the principle of criticism consists in “laughter.” “Laughter,” “irony,” and “sarcasm” have, in this world of immense [smisurati] contrasts, the same function that doubt had in the limited world. In the same way doubt does for measure, “laughter” is able to affirm a principle of existence for the immeasurable: existence as corporeality, as singularity, and as materiality. Furthermore, laughter affirms an analogical relation between objects, situations, and otherwise incommensurable passions, and operates as the allusion between different existential orders—nature and spirit, singular and collective, labor and non-labor. . . . In this way laughter indicates the territory across which power, that is, the ontological dynamic toward the real, unfolds. The Romantics translated “laughter” into irony, turning it into a dialectical power that enervates the imagination when it plays, destroys, and recreates its objects. When we speak of laughter having an ontological power, we refuse to accept that the tension expressed by this can be understood through dialectical

60  C h a p t e r F o u r categories. No, laughter, like sarcasm and irony, participates positively in the expansive process of being. This, however, is true of Job. It is not the negativities, the pain, their imaginary dance, that make us laugh (it would be against nature); instead we find a laughter expressed in the book of Job that resembles sarcasm and refuses any consolation or pacification. It is a picaresque laughter that accompanies paradox or constructs it and intersperses the discussion with its critical effects. The demolition of the function of retribution in the relationship of morality and theology is carried out in the name of sarcasm. Perhaps negative theology itself is from this standpoint one of the possible paths of laughter. In any case, Job, besides being a tragic hero, is a hero of irony—the nature of man is most likely defined by this link between the sense of tragedy and of that of irony, defined by Pascal as that “thinking reed” between these two signs of the precarious infinity of existence, in the paradox that stretches out between the infinite power of humanity and the infinite immeasurableness (of strength, irrationality, and value) that the world opposes to it. Once again, we can only caution against those interpretations of “laughter” that limit themselves to pure psychology, all the more so if it is a case of positive psychology. In contrast, here laughter leads straight to being. It is a privileged path for the ontological discovery of human power. (Just as in Rabelais—and the literature that explores his work from Lucien Febvre to Huizinga to Bakhtin to which we feel a great affinity).

Note D This experience appears similar to that of the sublime, as it is defined at the end of the Enlightenment and at the beginning of Romanticism. It is not arbitrary that the book of Job appears in both Burke and Kant. For both these thinkers, but particularly for Kant, in whose the experience of the sublime finds its modern form, this concept is presented as a relationship and as its overcoming. The sublime is the experience of a “momentary  [Trans: The full sentence reads as follows: “homme n’est qu’un roseau, le plus faible de la nature; mais c’est un roseau pensant.” Pensées et Opuscules, edited by M. Léon Brunschvicg (Paris: Libraire Hachette, 1909), fr. 347, p. 488.]

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inhibition of the vital forces followed immediately by an outpouring of them that is all the stronger.” Furthermore, the sublime is the experience of the movement from the imagination to reason, when the imagination is unable to represent the infinite to itself and suffers from this inadequacy— but, unsatisfied, consciousness moves toward higher faculties, which placate its suffering and permit the rational conception of the infinite. Thus, the sublime is the experience of a rational displacement—while on the other hand, it is a tension, a movement of the sensibility and imagination toward a state of moral satisfaction, toward the realization of the “feeling . . . for our own vocation.”  It at least appears as such—but it is not. In the book of Job we find only certain aspects and merely formal traces of the theory of the sublime—such as the tension of the process of knowing and the placating of the tension in the passage to a higher level. But this formal dimension is in Job subjected to a specific design and direction, which are different but are the opposite of those predicted by the theory of the sublime. The direction of Job’s discourse is not epistemological but ontological. The design is not that which leads to the placation of the soul but that which leads to the ontological drama. The difference of the standpoints in the two situations could not, therefore, be more different—a difference that we discover in the text to be that of a metaphysical distance. In addition, this bears upon the relationship between the experience of the sublime and the problematic of revolution. In Kant, but especially in Burke, the theme of the sublime is directly connected to that of the representation of revolution. The experience of the immoderate [smisurato] touches upon, and certainly alludes to, that of the monstrous—but history continues, and revolution organizes itself and is placated in the constitution. Reason, therefore, gets the better of the immoderate [smisurato]; the dramatic experience is placated, even if the movement of reason brings the image of its crisis along with it. In short, revolution, which remains a  Kant, Critique of Judgment, translated by W. S. Pluhar, p. 98, ak. 245.  [Trans: Ibid., p. 114, ak. 258. Negri’s expression is “il sentimento della destinazione dell’animo.” This expression does not appear in the text of the third Critique in this precise form, although it seems to be drawn from §27 of Critique of Judgment. Thanks to Alberto Toscano for pointing this out.]

62  C h a p t e r F o u r monstrous phenomenon, can be returned to reason through that extreme experience of reason, that effort which reason takes to the limit and which we call the experience of the sublime. This is precisely what the book of Job refuses: revolution is not something which is realized in one’s mind; it is realized first in being, and minds will be modified on this basis. The extreme toughness of Job’s ontological realism continues to raise protests. But how can we pretend that revolution and the ontological sublime can be placated in the games of reason, however extreme these may be, when the risks cannot be but mortal?

Five 

The Dispositif of the Messiah

1  The Genealogy of the Messiah

C

hapters 32–37 contain the discourse of a new interlocutor, Elihu. Almost all the commentators agree that these discourses constitute a later addition designed to attenuate the power of the contrast between man and God as it arises in the clash between Job and his comforters. The position of these discourses seems to confirm this interpretation, for they are placed between Job’s challenge (which concludes chapter 31) and Yahweh’s response (beginning in chapter 38), so as to reduce the tension of the dialogues or even having the liturgical function of graduating the intensity of the theophany. In whatever manner things stand, I am interested in studying these discourses for what is said in them, for the further, strong variant that they insert in the philosophical architecture of the book of Job. These discourses are in fact far from being simply an internal articulation of the text; rather, they represent a new critical position. In the case in point, Elihu’s discourses express a philosophy of Providence. The retributive theories, whether they be immanent or transcendent, material or overdetermined, and even mystical solutions, are rejected— a solid theological voluntarism dominates the framework, imposing, as it does, the pacified and serene tones of the voluntarist theodicy against rationalist teleology, however this might be understood.  Samuel Terrien, Job, Commentaire de l’Ancien Testament, 26–28, which includes a useful bibliography.

64  C h a p t e r F i v e 5 “Surely God is mighty and does not despise any; he is mighty in strength of understanding. 6 He does not keep the wicked alive, but gives the afflicted their right. 7 He does not withdraw his eyes from the righteous, but with kings on the throne he sets them for ever, and they are exalted. 8 And if they are bound in fetters and caught in the cords of affliction, 9 then he declares to them their work and their transgressions, that they are behaving arrogantly. 10 He opens their ears to instruction, and commands that they return from iniquity. 11 If they listen, and serve him, they complete their days in prosperity, and their years in pleasantness. 12 But if they do not listen, they shall perish by the sword, and die without knowledge.” (36:5–12) 24 “Remember to extol his work, of which mortals have sung. 25 All people have looked on it; everyone watches it from far away. 26 Surely God is great, and we do not know him; the number of his years is unsearchable. 27 For he draws up the drops of water; he distills his mist in rain, 28 which the skies pour down and drop upon mortals abundantly. 29 Can anyone understand the spreading of the clouds, the thunderings of his pavilion? 30 See, he scatters his lightning around him and covers the roots of the sea. 31 For by these he governs peoples; he gives food in abundance.

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32 33

He covers his hands with the lightning, and commands it to strike the mark. Its crashing tells about him; he is jealous with anger against iniquity.” (36:24–33)

The ends of divine action cannot be comprehended by the human mind. Elihu’s is an improper teleology, based not upon intelligence but upon God’s goodness. But if that is the way things stand, God’s silence doesn’t reveal his injustice, as Job insinuated when issuing his challenge: 13 “Why do you contend against him, saying, ‘He will answer none of my words’? 14 For God speaks in one way, and in two, though people do not perceive it. 15 In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falls on mortals, while they slumber on their beds, 16 then he opens their ears, and terrifies them with warnings, 17 that he may turn them aside from their deeds, and keep them from pride, 18 to spare their souls from the Pit, their lives from traversing the River. 19 “They are also chastened with pain upon their beds, and with continual strife in their bones.” (33:13–19) Man’s failure to listen to the word that has no end because it holds up the world is what is termed God’s silence. Nor does the fact that the nexuses of retribution are difficult to discern provide evidence against God’s goodness or his justice: 12 “Of a truth, God will not do wickedly, and the Almighty will not pervert justice. 13 Who gave him charge over the earth and who laid on him the whole world?

66  C h a p t e r F i v e 14 15

If he should take back his spirit to himself, and gather to himself his breath, all flesh would perish together, and all mortals return to dust.” (34:12–15)

Human ignorance is the product of the disproportion between human and divine knowledge. Man is knowledge; God is wisdom. Man is intelligence; God is foundation. And so, Elihu concludes, how can Job profess his innocence? 5 “Look at the heavens and see; observe the clouds, which are higher than you. 6 If you have sinned, what do you accomplish against him? And if your transgressions are multiplied, what do you do to him? 7 If you are righteous, what do you give to him; or what does he receive from your hand?” (35:5–7) Man can do nothing; God everything. God dictates the seasons and historical time; he decides over the distribution of wealth and of Power— “the wondrous works of the one whose knowledge is perfect” (37:16). What can we therefore say at this point? 19 “Teach us what we shall say to him; we cannot draw up our case because of darkness. 20 Should he be told that I want to speak? Did anyone ever wish to be swallowed up? 21 Now, no one can look on the light when it is bright in the skies, when the wind has passed and cleared them. 22 Out of the north comes golden splendor; around God is awesome majesty. 23 The Almighty—we cannot find him; he is great in power and justice, and abundant righteousness he will not violate. 24 Therefore mortals fear him; he does not regard any who are wise in their own conceit.” (37:19–24)

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This idea, that God is entirely free of any anthropomorphic resemblance or analogy, is one of the highest theological ideas. It is attained through the discovery that his being is the source of life, through the exaltation of his goodness, and through the assertion of his providence. Divine transcendence is absolute, but how effective it is as the reverberation of love and life. Job, however, hears nothing of the specificity of divine love, its solely transcendent form, or its omnipotence. Job’s sin is not then either carnal or moral—his transgression attacks faith and hope. It is the sin of pride. Like a new Adam, Job sins through his pride and through this sin he forges a new nature—a humanity that only divine goodness can tear from a mortal destiny. Job, man of sin, is now incapable of hope. His relationship with the divinity is condemned to the urgency, the presence, and the immediacy that he vainly demands of it. Only love could suddenly, unexpectedly, grant this prize—undeserved by Job’s foolishness. This is Elihu’s position. What can we say? That the enormous work of refinement that Elihu’s theodicy produces seems unable to overcome Job’s reasoning? Quite the contrary. When Elihu speaks, we can imagine Job’s fully justified renewed protest and sarcasm in the face of the paradoxes that inevitably fill every theodicy. Just one example: what can be said of the justice with which God pretends to treat the powerful? Elihu infelicitously, or perhaps hypocritically, risks the following considerations: 16 “If you have understanding, hear this; listen to what I say. 17 Shall one who hates justice govern? Will you condemn one who is righteous and mighty, 18 who says to a king, ‘You scoundrel!’ and to princes, ‘You wicked men!’; 19 who shows no partiality to nobles, nor regards the rich more than the poor, for they are all the work of his hands? 20 In a moment they die; at midnight the people are shaken and pass away, and the mighty are taken away by no human hand.

68  C h a p t e r F i v e 21 “For his eyes are upon the ways of mortals, and he sees all their steps. 22 There is no gloom or deep darkness where evildoers may hide themselves. 23 For he has not appointed a time for anyone to go before God in judgment. 24 He shatters the mighty without investigation, and sets others in their place. 25 Thus, knowing their works, he overturns them in the night, and they are crushed. 26 He strikes them for their wickedness while others look on, 27 because they turned aside from following him, and had no regard for any of his ways, 28 so that they caused the cry of the poor to come to him, and he heard the cry of the afflicted— 29 When he is quiet, who can condemn? When he hides his face, who can behold him, whether it be a nation or an individual?— 30 so that the godless should not reign, or those who ensnare the people.” (34:16–30) What can be said of this? Elihu offers only one example, but it is pure and simple mystification. One can—quite rightly—laugh at such fables. Wickedness exists and nothing can justify it. One must now go further. Elihu helps us proceed despite himself. His argument has surpassed even the last possible level of rationalization. It is necessary to go beyond the justification of pain and comprehend the practical transfiguration of pain. There is no value—there is only the possibility of creating it. There is no judge—there is only the possibility of practicing justice. Thus Elihu accomplishes the first step on the way to a reconstruction of value within measure in which he denies any possibility to rationalization and transfers the problem onto a creative level. But this step is an ambiguous one—and in any case it is not Elihu who accomplished it; it is due simply to the implacable logic of the book of Job.

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Elihu’s arguments, by exhausting the last possibility of rationalization, offer us a terrain geared for a new launching of the problem. In truth, a revolution has taken place prior to Elihu’s intervention—a revolution that has already destroyed the vulgar but solid bases of religion, of the sense of measure, reward, and punishment, and of their rationality. Elihu turns his ingenuity to gluing back together the broken fragments, and seeks to show God’s actions within the history of man and his consonance with the law of nature. He proclaims an entirely new, transcendent form of divine wisdom—one that is no longer analogical. But Job refuses this compromise. His pain takes him beyond.

2  The Resurrection of the Flesh The beyond is the Messiah. The sense of the Messiah is present throughout the book of Job. Job, the new Adam, knows that only redemption can renew his hope. But this motif emerges with some difficulty—in truth it is a flux, a subterranean presence that gradually becomes evident until the point when it explodes. Redemption then appears as the completion of history. Taking up the commentaries of Terrien, Weiser, Irwin, Ravasi, and others, we note the crescendo of signs and the bursting forth of the explicit announcement of the Messiah. The beginnings can be found in 7:21; 9:30–33; and 14:13–15—in them the theme of redemption is simply that of mediation, the quest for something to help man in his work of justice. It is an appeal to God to not abandon humanity, but with the allusion to an other. The interpretation must penetrate the inessentiality of the text and break the rigidity of its meaning in order to glimpse these allusive sparks. But in 14:13–15 the appeal to the love of God is already pregnant with meaning, and this appeal is not lost in the sea of human desperation: there is no optimism of will, but certainly a strong optimism of reason. In 16:19–21 the idea of a divine conciliator finally appears fully formed: 19 “Even now, in fact, my witness is in heaven, and he that vouches for me is on high. 20 My friends scorn me;

70  C h a p t e r F i v e my eye pours out tears to God, 21 that he would maintain the right of a mortal with God, as one does for a neighbor.” (16:19–21) Who this Witness may be is in doubt. In all probability it does not appear to be God but rather a third entity who in the face of God will take upon himself the burden of the defense of he who has been unjustly punished—a being full of love, human in his behavior. The ambiguity of these passages is great, and man is raised to divinity as much as God deigns to become man. Love invests both sides of this relation. The definition of the go’el [Redeemer] thus explodes. We have already briefly considered this figure. Let us take up again the passage in the most explicit translation of the Vulgata: 25 “For I know that my Redeemer lives, and that at the last he will stand upon the earth; 26 and after my skin has been thus destroyed, then in my flesh I shall see God, 27 whom I shall see on my side, and my eyes shall behold, and not another. My heart faints within me! 28 If you say, ‘How we will persecute him!’ and, ‘The root of the matter is found in him’; 29 be afraid of the sword, for wrath brings the punishment of the sword, so that you may know there is a judgment.” (19:25–29) We can say that only at this point does the “second part” of the book of Job begin—that is, where the “vision” of God does not follow the “silence” of Job. On the contrary, the “vision” is perpetuated in the reconstruction that man makes of the world of value. The power of man escapes from Power. The idea of the mediator is that of a power that can only free itself from chaos without repeating Power’s destiny. The idea of the Messiah is that of an attempt to experience the relationship between man and God outside all determination, outside all teleology. The Messiah is a freedom placed upon the edge of nothingness, on the margin of destruction, a need that

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has become an event. It is the ontological urgency of a foundation, of a value that becomes presence. The moral discourse is traversed by the idea of the Messiah brought back to matter and filled with experience. Value is brought back to labor through the Messiah. Labor was measure—a measure that was not measurable other than by Power, a measure of exploitation. Now labor can become value without measure, as power. The theodicy concludes where the metaphysical justification of labor begins—when this constructs, it creates the world directly in the form of equality, in the struggle against exploitation, and by excluding all Power. Labor was one of the forms of cosmic evil, the destiny of suffering that is paid for the reproduction of the species. Labor is now configured as the expansion of free activities. Here then is the labor from which one must free oneself: 1 “Do not human beings have a hard service on earth, and are not their days like the days of a laborer? 2 Like a slave who longs for the shadow, and like laborers who look for their wages, 3 so I am allotted months of emptiness, and nights of misery are apportioned to me.” (7:1–3) Labor is tough; it is a humiliating and destructive corvée. Labor introduces death. Here we find labor that marks the Promethean adventure of man: 1 “Surely there is a mine for silver, and a place for gold to be refined. 2 Iron is taken out of the earth, and copper is smelted from ore. 3 Miners put an end to darkness, and search out to the farthest bound the ore in gloom and deep darkness. 4 They open shafts in a valley away from human habitation; they are forgotten by travelers, they sway suspended, remote from people. 5 As for the earth, out of it comes bread;

72  C h a p t e r F i v e but underneath it is turned up as by fire. 6 Its stones are the place of sapphires, and its dust contains gold. 7 “That path no bird of prey knows, and the falcon’s eye has not seen it. 8 The proud wild animals have not trodden it; the lion has not passed over it. 9 “They put their hand to the flinty rock, and overturn mountains by the roots. 10 They cut out channels in the rocks, and their eyes see every precious thing. 11 The sources of the rivers they probe; hidden things they bring to light.” (28:1–11) How then can labor be freed? It is only the Messiah who can lead us from this wicked planet, from this destiny of pain. Only winning back Intelligence and Wisdom, the origins and ends of Science, can enable us to give meaning to labor. Who else can lead us along this path if not the Messiah? Who else can give divine sense to labor and raise the flesh up to spirit? “[T]hen in my flesh I shall see God” (19:26)—“My heart faints within me” (19: 27). This is a decisive passage—and no one should be allowed to confuse it: it is through the body that redemption is accomplished, via that body that has been tormented and modified by labor. The resurrection of the flesh through the Messiah is the revolution that traverses real subsumption. Over the centuries so-called pity has attempted to wipe out natural, physical matter and the flesh from religious experience. When it has been unable to impose this frightening amnesia, it has affirmed the flesh in terms of maceration, as sacrifice. The book of Job has been manipulated for this filthy apologia. In contrast, in Job the Messiah is the sign of the resurrection of the flesh, just as within communism the Messiah is the sign of the resurrection of labor. Here the Messiah’s game is not dialectical—we are not reciting the comical trinities of classical idealism, of the Hegels and Schellings, of the young or old. In them we always find a small place for “flesh” and “nature,” but this place is soon negated, overcome, sublimated.

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No, here the drama of the Messiah does not unify, it separates—masters from slaves, the powerful from rebels—and redemption is on the side of the latter, of those who through suffering have understood the lightness of matter and the ingenuity of labor. As in chapter 28, it is from the deep mines of the Sinai that the prayer to Wisdom rises, because it is through the resurrection of labor that man can, like God—let us read again 28:23– 27—come to know Wisdom; because he creates and recreates nature and himself. “When he gave to the wind its weight, and apportioned out the waters by measure; when he made a decree for the rain, and a way for the thunderbolt.”*

3  The Solitude of Power [ potenza] Does the crisis of value leave us in a world without value? Without a measure of value, certainly, but not without value. We have already seen a path of value reopen in Job—a value that is incarnated and constructed through labor and the pain it undergoes. This reconstruction is, first of all, a separation. Job set off on a path of critique that took him beyond every conception—vulgar or refined—of the measure of value, and which put him in bitter conflict with all his friends, and finally, resulted in his expulsion from the community. He is now alone. This solitude is, however, the definition of a new human universality—Adam-Job is the man who, undergoing pain, disincarnating his experience, has glimpsed the Messiah and has, thus, incarnated his hope. Job is the universal, social, human Adam that awaits redemption. † Let us return to our problem. How can that theological narrative that, insofar as it affirms value, removes its measure—that fabric of an immensely powerful, creative ontology that emerges from chaos—how can all this give order in such a singular way to a new conception of value? How can one construct, starting from the motif of “human universality and community,” the theme of value and measure? How can one set out from * See Note E on page 76. † See Note F on page 77.  Norman C. Habel, The Book of Job.

74  C h a p t e r F i v e a universal and ineffectual solitude to the concreteness and effectiveness of value? Job’s definitive answer comes later. It is summarized in the “seeing” that concludes his dialogue with Yahweh. We find ourselves in a work in progress: the reconstruction of value is slow, it goes through all the steps that the critique of value had passed through, yet in reverse, in the work of destruction of every fetish. So the skepticism that destroys the conception of the measure of value now refers back to the inexpressibility of the ontological substrate of value, while the critique that unmasks the theological and rationalistic survivals of a nonetheless sophisticated conception of providence pushes us toward a pragmatic and constructive, convivial and relative notion of value itself. It is noteworthy that these aporias of measure are the same as those Plato observes with respect to communication—and in relation to measure as content of a science that must be communicated. While the Seventh Letter speaks to us of the inexpressibility of the ontological foundation of science, the ungraspable nature of the complexity of reality, and the un-reproducibility of its infinite variations, the Statesman proposes a definition of practical art, artisanship, and politics that adopts the relativity of what is “fitting” as its criterion. But what is it for Job that is as fundamental as it is for Plato? It is the practical conversion of the criterion, the rhythm of creation that alone is able to provide this dynamic with justice and reality. Skepticism and relativity will be definitively removed from “vision.” Here they are subjected to a sort of internal mediation, downward, toward that indubitable and indestructible practice that unfolds in pain. On the other hand, the project of the reconstruction of value can be confronted, even when its measure is unrecoverable. In his discussion of “charity” in the Summa Theologica, St. Thomas Aquinas comes to our aid. Setting out from the idea that the virtue of charity represents our extraordinary capacity to love God as he loves himself, Aquinas focuses his question on the measure of this love—and he tells us that it is beyond measure, not because its immeasurableness is chaotic but simply because it cannot  Plato, Seventh Letter, 342a–45c.  Plato, Statesman, 283b–87b.

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be measured; it cannot be measured because love, charity, creativity are not measured but are measuring, and are, therefore, superior to all other virtues whose mode of existence is to be measured. But charity cannot be measured because it allows us to participate in the power of creation. In this way the problem of the reconstruction of value can be placed on a new footing. When power opposes Power, it has become divine. It is the source of life. It is the superabundance of charity. The world can be reconstructed on this basis, and only what is reconstructed in this way will have value; it will continue to not have a measure, because the power that creates has no measure. We do not have the possibility of measuring value because the measuring and the measured are now inscribed within the same subject, exploitation has been destroyed, and there is no longer any master. (The scientific form that this truth takes in Marx completely fits the intuition developed by theological thought.) This is how that extremely singular subject that the experience of pain and of the crisis of value reorganizes through the Messiah within the perspective of the reconstruction of a redeemed value, of a new form of value, begins to come together. It is very important that we underline the convergence, through the revolutionary process, of materialist and religious thought in this reinvention of value. The Marxist thinkers of the 1930s, in the hell of fascism, the Christian authors of the 1970s, in the hell of underdevelopment, have rediscovered the same themes: it is no coincidence that Ernst Bloch has the same rhythms of the Job of the “theology of liberation.” But this is still insufficient. At the foundation of this new idea and form of the process of liberation there are two historically determined phenomena: the overcoming by capital of the basis on which the relations of exploitation are organized and, on the other hand, the proletarian denunciation of the paucity of that basis. The measure of value was useless for both sides. For this reason the remaining credibility that any theodicy of capital would need to be based upon falls away to nothing—whereas the destructive character of its grasp of the world is accentuated. Capital is truly Behemoth and Leviathan, Hiroshima and Auschwitz. And here we are on the other side, where the proletariat is able to directly construct value thanks

76  C h a p t e r F i v e to the accretion of pain that it has experienced. The book of Job says: it “sees.”

Note E The theme of the resurrection of the flesh has almost disappeared from contemporary religious practice. Its disappearance is probably contemporary with and complementary to the affirmation of the secular sense of the world, and to the bourgeois conception of the world. From the standpoint of the history of ideas, it seems right to assert—along with Oscar Cullmann—that the disappearance of the idea of the resurrection of the flesh is associated with the reappearance in the Occident of the “Greek” conception of the immortality of the soul. In the nineteenth century, however, Christian theological schools took up again the theme of the resurrection of the flesh, showing it to be absolutely connected to the eschatological dimension of Christ’s teachings and of primitive Christian theology. There is no need to underline here just how important this return to the motif of the resurrection of the flesh is, particularly from the standpoint of the ethical and political consequences of Christian teaching. With respect to the return to the eschatological debate of the nineteenth century, one should consider the positions that stem from the work of Albert Schweitzer down to that of Rudolf Bultmann. In relation to the topic of the “resurrection of the flesh” itself, one should look at the theological current that runs from Bultmann to Cullmann down to the “theology of liberation.” It seems to me that Cullmann rightly opposes, within the New Testament tradition, a materialist line that is profoundly creationist to an idealist, dualist one, of Greek derivation, that has never accepted that matter, bodies, concrete existence constitute not a remnant but a fundamental substrate of life. We must work on this opposition and see how it develops by the materialist pole and nourishes an alternative thread of materialism, which we have discussed elsewhere. This is a thread that opposes a material ontology to the ideal ontology of the  Negri, The Savage Anomaly, translated by Michael Hardt (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991).

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Greek tradition. This opposition has also existed within Christianity, and Christianity has lost its revolutionary force to the extent that it has forgotten the eschatology and materialism of its origins. Of course, we are entirely in favor of the secularization of Christianity’s theology (from the creation to redemption and resurrection), but only on the condition that we do not lose, through this pseudorationalist conversion, the practical, ethical, and passionate content of religious truth. It is not mystery that interests us, but grace and charity. When we read the pages of the book of Job to which we refer above, let us think through again and comment upon Paul’s First Letter to the Corinthians (particularly 15:1–58): here and there the resurrection of the flesh introduces us again to the mystery of the truth of labor, to its redemption, and to the certainty in the victory of the revolution.

Note F Allow me a reflection—parallel to what we have been saying—regarding the page in the Grundrisse where Marx confronts the subject of the formation of the communist proletariat, of general intelligence and universal power beyond immediate labor and beyond the proletarian subjects that have embodied the preceding forms of exploitation. Even in this case, the proletariat, which capitalist development has—in the same way as the originary chaos—pushed toward the constitution of the individual social producer, is Adam. It is the depot of all the powers of science and of nature; it is the fruit of the broadest social cooperation and communication. It is the absolute power. Within it has been realized that revolution of productive forces in which immediate labor ceases to be the source and measure of all value and wealth—and that instead writes upon the body of the collective individual a new narrative of needs and desires, knowledges and capacities for enjoyment. And yet this power is confined to a condition of wretchedness and antagonism; it is always reduced to a mere means of reproduction of the given structures of power and exploitation. How long can this limited basis survive? When will it explode? Perhaps when our proletarian Adam is able to express a Messiah of liberation? As is widely

78  C h a p t e r F i v e known, for Marx the Messiah is defined, revealed, and put into motion by the same contradictions that have enabled the development of capitalism and unleashed its crisis. The process is materially determined and resolved for Marx. But what is the plot, the corporeality of the theoretical struggle promoted here? In my opinion the acknowledgment of the scientificity of Marx’s argument cannot remove the echo of the religious experience that underlies these pages and sets up the innovative, redemptive, and revolutionary event; we should, instead, insist upon it. Science takes away the mystery from the portentous event, but it cannot negate its passion; on the contrary, it must restore it to us.

Six 

The Constitution of Power

1  Amnesia and Seductions

J

ob, the patient one. What an extraordinary legend has been constructed around this rebel. A veritable exorcism. In truth, nothing is more different from what the text itself says. There is no argument of his interlocutors where Job is not accused of lacking patience. Just a few examples: 4:1–6; 15:1–6 and 12–16; 18:1–10; 34:31–37; 35; 36:1–4. “Now that you are struck by wickedness, you lose patience.” 2 “Should the wise answer with windy knowledge, and fill themselves with the east wind? 3 Should they argue in unprofitable talk, or in words with which they can do no good? 4 But you are doing away with the fear of God, and hindering meditation before God. 5 For your iniquity teaches your mouth, and you choose the tongue of the crafty. 6 Your own mouth condemns you, and not I; your own lips testify against you.” (15:2–6) 12 “Why does your heart carry you away, and why do your eyes flash, 13 so that you turn your spirit against God, and let such words go out of your mouth?” (15:12–13)  See Lawrence Besserman, The Legend of Job in the Middle Ages.

80  C h a p t e r S i x 31 “For has anyone said to God, ‘I have endured punishment; I will not offend any more; 32 teach me what I do not see; if I have done iniquity, I will do it no more’? 33 Will he then pay back to suit you, because you reject it? . . .” (34:31–33) “Have some patience and I shall instruct you.” As far as Job is concerned, he expresses his irritation, his impatience, his repugnance for virtues such as moderation and equanimity, and is against all compromise in terms that could hardly be harsher: “I loathe my life; I will give free utterance to my complaint; I will speak in the bitterness of my soul” (10:1). “Does it seem good to you to oppress, to despise the work of your hands and favor the schemes of the wicked? Do you have eyes of flesh? Do you see as humans see?” (10:3–4). 2 “How long will you torment me, and break me in pieces with words? 3 These ten times you have cast reproach upon me; are you not ashamed to wrong me?” (19:2–3) At the moment that precedes the announcement of the Redeemer, that sacred moment in which Job is overcome by expectation which is the heart of the book, he asks for pity: 21 “Have pity on me, have pity on me, O you my friends, for the hand of God has touched me! 22 Why do you, like God, pursue me, never satisfied with my flesh?” (19:21–22) At all other times his tone is one of invective, and he is accompanied by insults. To give just a handful of examples: 3:4–10; 9:5–14; 10:8–22; 12:2–12; 16. 14 “Those who withhold kindness from a friend forsake the fear of the Almighty. 15 My companions are treacherous like a torrent-bed,

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16 17 18 19 20 21

like freshets that pass away, that run dark with ice, turbid with melting snow. In time of heat they disappear; when it is hot, they vanish from their place. The caravans turn aside from their course; they go up into the waste, and perish. The caravans of Tema look, the travelers of Sheba hope. They are disappointed because they were confident; they come there and are confounded. Such you have now become to me; you see my calamity, and are afraid.” (6:14–21)

This is the high point of the invectives. Job is not patient, he is powerful. The same texts that we have recalled previously provide us with an image of a man who, through struggle and despite suffering and terrible misery, affirms his hold over being. Power [ potenza] is formed within pain but unfolds in the relationship with being. Job’s invectives appear to undergo perennial frustration, all the more so the more they are raised to the evocation of nature, of its spectacle of magnificence and violence. This, however, is wrong. This trajectory has a lower limit—a point of consolidation, of accumulation, of stability. A moment when Job’s hybris is defined as pietas, as the push toward the composition of a new totality and the constitution of a new nature. We can take chapter 31 as an example of this ontological will—all of this chapter, including the final verses that contain Job’s direct challenge to Yahweh, which we have already mentioned. In the preparation of the challenge, Job collects the ethical reasons for this expression of power. These reasons have an ontological foundation—the series of oaths and pacts, the social commitments, pity, fidelity, respect, charity, integrity, the laws and obedience to them; in other words, the Alliance that Job had established with God. Within this Alliance, the power of Job is that of man who constructs the world, society, interiority, removing them from the primordial chaos. God must make safe the fruits of this effort, of this painful and heroic set of events.

82  C h a p t e r S i x God’s injustice is, therefore, more serious because he has failed in his duty to guarantee this composition of being. With regard to patience, it is only recognizable in Job in the form of the eternal Adam who indefinitely constructs the human world. Job suffers another injustice at the hands of tradition: it presents him as a misogynist—which is justified through the notion of woman as evildoer, persecutor, and vulgar. Occidental iconography has taken up and proclaimed the antifeminism of the interpretation of the Fathers. It is St. John Chrysostom who supported the interpretation that Mrs. Job had wanted to accentuate his suffering. This is a caricature of the misogynist. In truth, this entire image is built around verses 2:9–10 of the narrative:

9 Then his wife said to him, “Do you still persist in your integrity? Curse God, and die.” 10 But he said to her, “You speak as any foolish woman would speak. Shall we receive the good at the hand of God, and not receive the bad?” In all this Job did not sin with his lips. (2:9–10) And here the more careful philologists radically modify the interpretation—because the term that Job uses to characterize his wife, “crazy” or “nonsensical,” means in all probability “rendered mad by suffering.” The other references to the woman that appear in the book of Job (e.g., 14:1; 19:17; 25:4; 31:9–12) are not particularly antifeminist: the impurity of being “of woman born” is a qualification that refers to the human race as such and is not an allusion or extension of the reference to the ritual impurity of woman. The reference to Lilith, to this ferocious feminine deity that brings destruction and sterility, is more ambiguous (18:15). But even here the meaning of the reference is entirely separate from a univocal antifeminist meaning. Why, then, when tackling the subject of Job the powerful, are we rehashing this tired, caricatured accusation? Because in reality this too is an exorcism, a way of overturning an interpretation that the orthodox fear. Because again the book of Job, against all malevolent readings, attributes  Samuel Terrien, Job, Commentaire de l’Ancien Testament, 60–61.

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to Job, precisely in these passages, that sweet, ontological, creative, and continuous action that symbolizes his power. Job is the power of man on earth: social, constructive power—he is production, collective labor that becomes value. But on closer inspection, the universality of man as genus emerges from female production, from maternity. The power of antisterility. This organic foundation of Job’s power, which dissociates him from Promethean symbolism, this alliance that draws God and man, man and women together, on the basis of creative power—all this is already established. Job’s so-called antifeminism is not then mere legend—it is an operation of mystification, intended to hide the definitive collocation of Job’s discourse on the terrain of power.*

2  The Measure of Power If it can be said that we rediscover here the dynamic of value, what can be said to be its mission? Or better still, given that the relationship between value and labor, between God and man, is in any case excessive [smisurato], in what way will it be possible, if it is possible, to conceive the relationship and the dynamic? What is the measure of power? What is the order of its immeasurableness? Man is within time. The alienation, or not, of time constitutes the terrain on which measure is or is not given—that is to say, measure is constructed as the activity of Power and, in contrast, power eliminates measure. Having said that, we must immediately add that the time-measure of Power, or the alienation of power, is in any case an objective reality: time of nature, of the world, of life. It is on the recognition of both the objectivity of time—but even more of the ontological inherence of time to every concretization of the lived—and of the multiplicity of uses that is made of them (and in this multiplicity, at least two uses are counterposed: the use of time for exploitation and the use of time for liberation)—it is on this dual recognition that the redefinition of value is developed and, consequently, this is the problem of its ordering. * See Note G on page 91.

84  C h a p t e r S i x The book of Job presents us with a double image of the idea of time. On the one hand, and above all, is the sense of time as a being toward death: 4 “When I lie down I say, ‘When shall I rise?’ But the night is long, and I am full of tossing until dawn.” (7:4) 6 “My days are swifter than a weaver’s shuttle, and come to their end without hope. 7 “Remember that my life is a breath; my eye will never again see good. 8 The eye that beholds me will see me no more; while your eyes are upon me, I shall be gone.” (7:6–8) 25 “My days are swifter than a runner; they flee away, they see no good. 26 They go by like skiffs of reed, like an eagle swooping on the prey.” (9:25–26) Numerous other passages confirm this sense of time, this pessimism of the will, the effort of pitting one’s existence against an absurd destiny. On the other hand, the sense of time defines itself as an ontological deposit, as a fullness and a state of happiness, like the time reappropriated by life against the alienated time of death. 2 “O that I were as in the months of old, as in the days when God watched over me; 3 when his lamp shone over my head, and by his light I walked through darkness; 4 when I was in my prime, when the friendship of God was upon my tent; 5 when the Almighty was still with me, when my children were around me; 6 when my steps were washed with milk, and the rock poured out for me streams of oil!” (29:2–6)

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Here life is for eternity, for the resurrection. In both cases, however, time is a reality—it is the profound and decisive ontological dimension of existence, of doing—it is content, element, part of existence. This conception of time, as a real function of both death and the resurrection, is characteristic for more than one reason. On the one hand it sublimates the ontology of time, the “Kairòs,” concrete temporality, time as lived; on the other hand it humanizes and brings down to the level of existence time as divine place, as the continuous, linear moment of the divine epiphany. Time is at once a reality, an event, and a praxis. But with this, for this reason, “history becomes theophany. The conception of mythical time and of the eternal return is definitively behind us. A great religious revolution has taken place here. . . .” Here, in the Old Testament. But in the New the situation is the same. The rhythmic time of the lived is opposed to the empty time of measure, the time of divine epiphany (and it does not exclude the crisis and changes of direction and the diversity of creative flows) is opposed to the rigidified time of the eternal return. Time is ontology. Finally, this ontological idea of time is also affirmed by the great classical philosophy of Greece. As is increasingly clear in the literature, the time-movement relationship constitutes inescapable ontological determination, as much so in Plato as in Aristotle. What is interesting above all is that, both on the theological terrain and on the philosophical, the deontologization of time and the deterritorialization of the categories that relate to time can be located in the Neoplatonist epoch—and find their apogee later, in the period of the dissolution of the classical image of the world. It is not by chance that this deontologization of time corresponds to the period in which Christianity becomes the dominant religion in the Occident and in which the distant but still efficacious sources of ideological legitimacy of theological, axiological, and juridical transcendence are formed. Time is separated from movement,  Mircea Eliade. [Trans: No title mentioned.]  See Oscar Cullmann, Christ et le temps.  See John F. Callahan, Four Views of Time in Ancient Philosophy; Gernot Böhme, Zeit und Zahl. Studien zur Zeittheorie bei Platon, Artistoteles, Leibniz und Kant; Remi Brague, Du temps chez Platon et Aristote; and other such works in the bibliographical appendix.

86  C h a p t e r S i x becoming its abstract image. Consequently, through this separation, this alienation of movement and of the labor that constitutes the movement, measure does not occur within the movement, not in labor, but is of movement and over labor. Time becomes a form of being—no longer a force constitutive of being. Theophany is no longer ascetic prophecy but transcendence and domination. It is against all of this, against this reversal, that the book of Job continues to act. The concreteness of time, pain declares it implacably. The more the link between time and death is decisive, the more solid is the reality of time. But not only. Death is so intrinsic to being, and to all beings, and to all Being, that it establishes the common measure, an internal reason for the ordered constitution of the world. On that tract that stretches from pain to death is constituted the possibility of an order that is not a transcendent measure but an interior activity of ordering. That is not enough. If the universality of death and suffering enables us to recognize time as a manifestation of the being and common reality of our existence, in contrast with what idealists of whatever hue would want, this recognition certainly does not do away with pain or death. Instead it founds the necessity, the desire to eliminate them. Being toward death is the basis of the will to power. Being in pain is the thrust toward the resurrection of life, it is the prophecy of the resurrection of bodies. We had started by asking ourselves what the measure of the excessive [smisurato] could be; what the order that we are seeking might be in the relationship between value and labor, between God and man. Here with Job we pose a first criterion: the criterion of power, of its internal drive, between being and death, between pain and resurrection. What is being proposed is a criterion internal to the vicissitudes of being. It is a dynamic criterion—it places itself forcefully in the struggle between Job and his God: 16 “Bold as a lion you hunt me; you repeat your exploits against me. 17 You renew your witnesses against me, and increase your vexation toward me; you bring fresh troops against me.” (10:16–17) Now Job has raised his head. It is only a start—but a powerful one.

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3  The Creative Ontology of Pain Power [ potenza] is time. From this point of view Job surpasses Spinoza— or rather, Job emphasizes the hidden though present, absent but creative aspect of Spinoza’s concept of time. For whereas, firstly, time in Spinoza is mere number, measure, “modus cogitandi,” it is also “imaginatio,” drive toward the eternal, indefinite movement. “Conatus, nullum tempus finitum, sed indefinitum involvit.” All this has led one commentator to suggest that we substitute thought for time as the divine attribute in Spinoza’s philosophy and thereby see whether this substitution saves us from all the traditional difficulties of pantheism. This is not a bizarre hypothesis; on the contrary, it enables us to elude an ontology that excludes time and to prevent the “conatus,” the passions, the “cupiditates” from being immobilized at birth. And it is from within this perspective that the ontology can both assume the metaphysical determination of its consisting as substance and develop the movement between being and non-being, between life and death, through pain and evil, joy and resurrection. In this way ontology becomes ethics. For an ethics to be given at Job’s level, it is not enough to refer to ontology. On the contrary, this same ontology, open to life and death, labor and value, pain and resurrection, is presented as a path—hence not a reference to ontology, but an ontological vicissitude. Ethics consists in its happening. Hence, for an ethics to be given it is necessary to travel a path; an outline, a subject, an ethical collectivity are required. The theologian Elihu provides this outline: 13 “Why do you contend against him, saying, ‘He will answer none of my words’? 14 For God speaks in one way, and in two, though people do not perceive it. 15 In a dream, in a vision of the night, when deep sleep falls on mortals,  See the texts edited by Emilia Giancotti Boscherini in “Tempus,” Lexicon Spinozanum.  Samuel Alexander, Spinoza and Time.

88  C h a p t e r S i x 16 17 18

while they slumber on their beds, then he opens their ears, and terrifies them with warnings, that he may turn them aside from their deeds, and keep them from pride, to spare their souls from the Pit, their lives from traversing the River.

19 “They are also chastened with pain upon their beds, and with continual strife in their bones, 20 so that their lives loathe bread, and their appetites dainty food. 21 Their flesh is so wasted away that it cannot be seen; and their bones, once invisible, now stick out. 22 Their souls draw near the Pit, and their lives to those who bring death. 23 Then, if there should be for one of them an angel, a mediator, one of a thousand, one who declares a person upright, 24 and he is gracious to that person, and says, ‘Deliver him from going down into the Pit; I have found a ransom; 25 let his flesh become fresh with youth; let him return to the days of his youthful vigor’; 26 then he prays to God, and is accepted by him, he comes into his presence with joy, and God repays him for his righteousness. 27 That person sings to others and says, ‘I sinned, and perverted what was right, and it was not paid back to me. 28 He has redeemed my soul from going down to the Pit, and my life shall see the light.’ 29 “God indeed does all these things, twice, three times, with mortals,

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30 to bring back their souls from the Pit, so that they may see the light of life.” (33:13–30) Let us analyze this passage, bearing in mind—as we shall show later and as we have already mentioned—that Elihu’s speech is in no way theologically naïve. On the contrary, aside from the fact that Job refutes it, it is as though Elihu were attracted to Yahweh’s discussion and gives both an introduction and commentary to it. This discussion links Job and man’s suffering to the cosmological framework—death and resurrection constitute its two poles. It turns pain not into the price but into the destiny of man on his path to salvation. It presents the necessity for a mediator, a messiah, a redeemer, as the element which would solve a drama that would otherwise be excessive [smisurato] and insoluble. He considers this path as characteristic of human experience in its singularity and complexity. Finally, he communicates the experience of salvation, of victory over death, and of the triumph in the light of the living. Here then is the description of ethical being. But one might object that nothing guarantees, once I have traveled the path, that it will lead me to salvation through the collective; nothing assures me that the community is involved. And since, like the hypothetical objector, we too are convinced that there is no ethics without community, for this reason we pose this problem forcefully. Wittgenstein, a follower of Job if there ever were, asks: how is it possible to communicate pain? And his response is: “I cannot feel your pain.” It is true—no one is able to feel another’s pain. Even this awareness is drawn directly from the book of Job. But on the other hand, even if we will never know another’s pain, is it not precisely the conditions of verifiability of that pain that lead us, through compassion, the queen of ethical arts, to recognize the ontology of the ethical community? Is not the discourse of pain and compassion a value in itself?* * See Note H on page 92.  Wittgenstein and the Vienna Circle, conversations recorded by Friedrich Waismann, translated by Brian McGuinness and Joachim Schulte (New York: Barnes and Noble Books, 1979), 49.

90  C h a p t e r S i x 2 “How long will you say these things, and the words of your mouth be a great wind? 3 Does God pervert justice? Or does the Almighty pervert the right?” (8:2–3) We know Job’s answer: yes, God can falsify. But God is not only a falsifier—he is a falsifier in the same way an enemy can be, with the malevolence that leads to war in cases where the aim of the victory justifies the means. 11 “He has kindled his wrath against me, and counts me as his adversary. 12 His troops come on together. . . .” (19:11–12) This entire framework becomes meaningless. How can one exit from this meaninglessness? How, other than by overcoming the limits of the rational, of the time limited by alienated existence, from the limits of language—if not through that deep reference to being that ethical action represents, which is the presupposition of the community? Pain overflows logic, the rational, language. Pain is a key that opens the door to the community. All the great collective subjects are formed by pain— those, at least, that struggle against the expropriation of the time of life by Power; those who have rediscovered time in the form of power, as the refusal of exploited labor and of the orders that are established upon that exploitation. Pain is the democratic foundation of political society, whereas fear is its dictatorial, authoritarian foundation. Hobbes, and all the socalled realists in political philosophy, are above all immoral men, because they speak of fear—of the fear that they add to the pain of life—in villainous terms as a foundation. Pain is enough for life. It has no need of being overdetermined by fear. Pain and only pain can be authentically acknowledged as the basis of social life—the genealogy of society is fixed in pain, not fear, which is in fact its opposite, painful struggle. Power [ potenza] is established in pain, it is the power of non-being, it is the power of the community—an inconclusive essence within an indefinitely creative process. Power [ potenza] is the time of this passage, of the ontological transformations that are given along this path. This being together of life and

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death, of power and act, is a production of community, an extraordinary accumulation of possibility. The integrity of Job’s paradoxes can only be understood in this framework. Power [ potenza] and pain are the complementary dimensions of life. For this reason they open onto community and redemption. As far as the question concerning the reconstruction of value, we can say, following Job, that the theme of value should be related directly to that of power; that on this terrain power cannot be defined other than as temporality; but that, precisely for this reason, there is no measure of value on the plane of power; yet power, at the very moment that it includes pain, opens onto community; and that, lastly, this opening renders the community not only the seat of legitimation of the ethical, but also the base for a future, redemptive projection of man.

Note G The ontological consistency of power, which the entire book of Job illustrates, serves to exclude any relationship with “negative theology.” And it is obvious that we are not speaking of theology itself, a continent that is unknown to our hero’s practice, but of the virtues that can be linked to negative theology. I have in my hands Meister Eckhart’s Sermons allemands, with commentary by Reiner Schürmann: in the dialogue between the author and the illustrious commentator the definition of these virtues is developed. In order to voluntarily know God, man must go through the experience of disappropriation and become so impoverished as to be enabled with the most complete “Abgeschiedenheit ” (detachment)—a negative freedom that alone uncovers the interior freedom as a participation in the nature of the divinity. In practice this freedom in disappropriation produces a joy that can never be torn from man—but it is an “errant joy,” the impossibility of consistency. From speculative mysticism to errant joy: Heidegger, following perhaps Eckhart, speaks of “Gelassenheit,” serenity, letting-be, letting oneself go to the divinity. There is nothing of all this in Job. Here even the nonrational is positive, and the negation of divine rationality does not annul the ontological solidity of existence. Evil can

92  C h a p t e r S i x be the negation or privation of being, but the power that we have to undergo is nonetheless positive. Certainly Job cannot deny the experience of disappropriation or absolute impoverishment, but in recognizing misery and poverty Job recognizes a determination of being—precisely something of which one cannot let go—and it is from this that he suffers. And it is a suffering that he cannot negate but only scream. In contrast, when the dynamic of knowledge of negative theology is translated in “Abgeschiedenheit,” in detachment, we witness a sort of attraction of the act of knowing upon the subject, where the latter is defined passively, as abandonment, discharge, absence, which are the practical degrees of negative theology. In this way alienation negates the alienated, misery the miserable, impoverishment the poor person; and liberation leaves no trace of the liberated. In Job there is none of this—because his thinking is and remains ontological. Whereas negative theology, even when presented in the form of practice, is always a dialectic—a rough-hewn dialectic without solution, but nevertheless, a dialectic. And a dialectic, even if without closure, is something entirely different from a whole, a real, an instant of reality without closure. In Job, power, even the power of non-being, is a positive ontological determination. And for him, the continual deepening of the ontological question of power, in a situation overdetermined by irrationality and overwhelmed by nothing, never leads to nothingness but again, always again to power. When the extreme limit of the negation of being is touched, it is not through a dialectic that overturns the negative into positive that will enable Job to escape it—it is through the “vision,” through the new declaration of the concrete totality of being.

Note H In addition to the passage cited from the conversation with Waismann, the topic of “pain” and of its communicability are extensively developed by Wittgenstein in the Philosophical Investigations. The most important commentary on this theme is that of Saul Kripke, who interprets Witt Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, §243ff., 282ff., and passim.

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genstein’s theory of the communication (or not) of pain not in skeptical or solipsistic terms, but as a problematic dislocation: the representation of pain “is that it enters into the formation and quality of my attitude toward the sufferer. I, who have myself experienced pain and can imagine it, can imaginatively put myself in place of the sufferer; and my ability to do this gives my attitude a quality that it would lack if I had merely learned a set of rules as to when to attribute pain to others and how to help them.”10 In other words, understanding pain is not an intellectual act, or at least not merely so, but a pitying [compatire], a suffering with [ patire assieme], the exercise of compassion [compassione]. Kripke’s interpretation is particularly reliable when related to his Naming and Necessity11 and to the theory of the a posteriori embedded character of truth, and hence of the absolutely contingent nature of the relationship between sense and reference, and of connotation and denotation—so that the universality and necessity of knowing is determined not by the fixity of the rules but by the a posteriori nature of practice. And so in this way we again find ourselves within Job’s discourse. Here too pain is the path man takes, and it can only be defined through compassion and through the capacity to see pain clasp the human community in a great embrace. It is not the recognition of a behavior of pain nor the communication of a pain that provides us with the constitutive process of the social—pain is this constitutive process, and only by undergoing it, suffering [compatendo] with the world, can we reconstruct the world from pain. Compassion goes beyond recognition, beyond the concept, beyond representation. I am unable to represent pain to myself except by undergoing it. I do not recognize the suffering other unless I feel compassion [compassione] for him. But through this action of putting myself in his place via love, by feeling pity [di compatire], I proceed to construct the world. It is not the divinity, then, not a meaning that descends from above, but suffering and pain, which come from below, that construct the very being of the world. Spinoza also operates on this terrain and from this perspective. The universal and constitutive 10 Saul Kripke, Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language, 140. 11 Saul Kripke, Naming and Necessity (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1980).

94  C h a p t e r S i x function of suffering [ patire] can be found where passion becomes compassion, and sadness turns into the joy of communion with the other. The ontology of the community is uncovered through suffering together—a suffering that is, therefore, torn from passivity and becomes constructive. It becomes ethical. As far as Nietzschean scorn for pity is concerned, it is in reality directed toward the hypocritical expression of this behavior (to the commiseration that fails to become universal) and certainly does not wish to deny the importance of the collective (of the being together and the constructing together); rather, it rediscovers it, turning it into a path to be followed.

Seven 

Ethics as Creation

1  The Death of God 1 And the LORD said to Job: 2 “Shall a fault-finder contend with the Almighty? Anyone who argues with God must respond.” 3 Then Job answered the LORD: 4 “See, I am of small account; what shall I answer you? I lay my hand on my mouth. 5 I have spoken once, and I will not answer; twice, but will proceed no further.” (40:1–5) At this point Yahweh pushes Job toward the abyss of the cosmogonic chaos and toward the inexpressible marvel of creation. Job’s silence is accompanied by the immense roar of the formation of the universe. Behemoth and Leviathan form the backdrop against which epiphany becomes possible. God speaks here to the first man, to the Adam-Job who is himself formed by this monstrous process. But the creation is there, in this relationship, in the birth and rebirth of Job, in the hope of the redeemer that becomes the experience of the creator. The ontological immersion is total and the narration of being acquires the tone of an absolute natural epic. God and man become confused in this world, in its fullness, in its creative dynamic. The recognition of the infinite power of God leads Job to sight, to identification with him. After the monsters appear, Job again begins to speak:

96  C h a p t e r S e v e n 1 Then Job answered the LORD: 2 “I know that you can do all things, and that no purpose of yours can be thwarted. 3 ‘Who is this that hides counsel without knowledge?’ Therefore I have uttered what I did not understand, things too wonderful for me, which I did not know. 4 ‘Hear, and I will speak; I will question you, and you declare to me.’ 5 I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you; 6 therefore I despise myself, and repent in dust and ashes.” (42:1–6) “I had heard of you by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees you.” I saw you, I experienced you. Quite rightly much has been written about this phrase. I consulted Habel, Fohrer, Terrien, Ravasi, and other commentators. Common to all the religious critics is a reading that refers Job’s ability to see the divinity to the reflection of his own intuited wretchedness. The paradox of Job is turned into a dialectical movement, his ascesis into mystical illumination. But this reading is semantically and logically wrong because it supposes, in the “upward passage” from Job to God, the distinction between the experience of self and that of God, and transforms the antagonism into a projection of alterity, i.e., into a mirage; as for the “way down,” it supposes Job understands himself through the reflection and not through the direct experience of the divinity. In fact, Job speaks of grace, of the prophecy that anticipates the Messiah. “To see God” is certainly not a moral experience, nor is it merely an intellectual experience. Here the interpreters of the book of Job do what Job’s interlocutors, from Eliphaz to Bildad, from Zophar to Elihu, had done: they confine to a given form and measure his experience within the dimensions of the theologically known. And yet, what an incredible experience has unfolded to this point! I have seen God, thus God is torn from the absolute transcendence that constitutes the idea of him. God justifies himself, thus God is dead. He saw God, hence Job can speak of him, and he—Job himself—can in turn participate in divinity, in the function of redemp-

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tion that man constructs within life—the instrument of the death of God that is human constitution and the creation of the world. The materialist reading of the vision of God has, thus, the capacity to capture the creative moment of this ontological immersion of man—whether it be Adam or Job—in the relationship with the divine, and thus of linking ontologically—not morally, not merely intellectually—the human powers to those divine, that is, the singular in the universal.* In this light, the idea of power shows itself always to be better than the idea of creation. The ontological network within which this linking unfolds is not indifferent. The process is not without a subject. The deepening, the ontological immersion that the experience of the abyss has brought about, turns into the constitution of the subject through the emergence that the experience of the divinity has in its turn marked. Ontology is a net, an ensemble of echoing voices, a world of profound resonances. But all of this movement is begun and organized in a moment of extreme clarity, of the highest concentration of forces: the recognition of the divinity, the idea and identification with it as the ontological subject par excellence. The antagonism between life and death is resolved in favor of life. My life is the recognition of you—my eyes have seen you. I am. Man is. The backdrop is not modified. It is dominated by the great forces of destruction and death. But man reorganizes himself so as to resist this disease. Creation is the going beyond death. Creation is the content of the vision of God. Creation is the meaning of life. Prophecy is the mind that has become practical. Prophecy is seeing history as the occasion for the revelation of God, and the prophet is himself revelation. The divine epiphany announced by Job is the end of transcendence—and the revelation of the divinity within history. It is a realization that is struggle, antagonism, and destruction. Ontology is a battlefield, a terrain upon which each leaves his fallen ones. Job is the greatest thinker of ontology because he shows it to be something lying between cosmogony and redemption. Ontology cannot be defined in any other way. But precisely because of its complexity, it is not something that is seen. We do not go to the cinema when we speak of ontology. Subjectivity is com* See Note I on page 105.

98  C h a p t e r S e v e n pletely immersed in ontology, or rather, it organizes it. Between cosmogony and redemption. And yet ontology is not directed to subjectivity but is constructed by it, by antagonisms, machines, and functions. Job invites us, however, to choose our adversary, to pose constructive projects and dynamics—marked by hope and victory. Vision is redemption. God’s discourse and Job’s experience of it continually shift us across natural and historical horizons. The world is formed and reformed through the struggle against evil. A second nature—and perhaps others—follows from a first. Different orders of liberation are presented. This process is entirely unfolded in the discourse of the divinity. The struggle against the monsters is the condition for the ordering of nature. The order of nature is the condition for the order of the world, and this is the condition of redemption. But these passages are neither linear nor continuous. There is no objective; there is struggle, invention, victory, there is constitution. In all these verses the word “love” never appears—but the novelty, the gratuity, the power of this act are always and exclusively present. Only love is able to traverse war while maintaining power intact, and augmenting it. Only love is able to construct and reconstruct the world—and help us rise up again from defeat and reform existence. The return of the folkloric discourse at the end of this enormous, cosmic, theological, human adventure is like a shower, a bath, a rest after having traversed great mountains. Fresh water certainly—the hero returns to wealth and happiness, family and wisdom, but this is also the veritable constitution, determination, and formation of a second nature, however microscopic it might be. 12 The LORD blessed the latter days of Job more than his beginning; and he had fourteen thousand sheep, six thousand camels, a thousand yoke of oxen, and a thousand donkeys. 13 He also had seven sons and three daughters. 14 He named the first Jemimah, the second Keziah, and the third Keren-happuch. 15 In all the land there were no women so beautiful as Job’s daughters; and their father gave them an inheritance along with their brothers.

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16 After this Job lived for one hundred and forty years, and saw his children, and his children’s children, four generations. 17 And Job died, old and full of days. (42:12–17) This is simply to allude, somewhat ironically, to the fact that by second nature we do not mean reproduction but redemption.

2  The Surplus of Being If we seek to interpret “seeing” from the subjective standpoint we are immediately referred to mystical experience, to the thought of innovation, to the thematics of intellectual or theological Blitz. We set them there haphazardly because we are convinced there are no differences of quality among these privileged experiences—or rather, that all these moments make up human nature with equal dignity; that the ideologies relative to their origin and to their value are, consequently, interchangeable; finally, that only practice is able to distinguish them. We are not interested in legitimating Job’s “seeing,” other than from the standpoint of practice— that is, identifying it as a creative experience. Job’s “seeing” modifies, transforms, innovates the ontological fabric of the world. And it does so practically—through an activity with immediate ontological relevance. Job’s “seeing” is like an explosion, an intense light that illuminates existence, that sheds light on the darkness at its edges, and that renders life powerful. It does not activate power—but makes power powerful. What is accumulated is not action’s dimension of finality, but its potential energy. Job’s “seeing” is the truth of existence—a truth that is made, that enables, that increases, unfolds upon the rhythm of the constitution of “new” being. “To see” is an act, an act that does not end but develops power, reproducing it, reinventing it as power. It is this incredible ontological power, which is absolutely interwoven with practice, that the book of Job shows us in motion. A series of ontological explosions—the horizon that frees itself beyond the pain of existence, and frequently does so in its name. (Were we to try to establish the commensurability of existence and value, this could not be achieved by examining the rhythms of worth, by accounting for commensurability in terms of equal distribution, but

100  C h a p t e r S e v e n only by thinking through desperation, crisis, and hence the joy of creation). There is what we might call a philological mystery (but also an ontological one) that runs through the final part of the book of Job. It is to be found in the continuity that exists between Elihu’s discussion and the first part (chapters 38–39) of Yahweh’s. The problem can be expressed as follows: why does Job accept God’s teaching (in that part that precedes the cosmogonic irruption and appearance of the monsters Behemoth and Leviathan) while he rejects Elihu’s, when both discussions repeat the same refrain and are made with the same ingredients? Why does providence become acceptable when Yahweh states it but not when Elihu does? What is it that breaks the continuity, the homogeneity of the two texts? First let us check the actual homology of Elihu and Yahweh’s utterances. On a first reading it seems entirely clear. Chapters 36 and 37 in particular contain Elihu’s hymn to God as the sovereign of the seasons that is echoed, in chapters 38 and 39 respectively, by a hymn to God as the lord of creation, of the earth and the sea, and of all the animals. The two parts of this hymn, which we can consider as one, flow toward a single outlet—a veritable natural epiphany of the divinity, the introduction of the historical event of Yahweh’s appearance. 14 “Hear this, O Job; stop and consider the wondrous works of God. 15 Do you know how God lays his command upon them, and causes the lightning of his cloud to shine? 16 Do you know the balancings of the clouds, the wondrous works of the one whose knowledge is perfect, 17 you whose garments are hot when the earth is still because of the south wind? 18 Can you, like him, spread out the skies, unyielding as a cast mirror? 19 Teach us what we shall say to him; we cannot draw up our case because of darkness. 20 Should he be told that I want to speak? Did anyone ever wish to be swallowed up?

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21 “Now, no one can look on the light when it is bright in the skies, when the wind has passed and cleared them. 22 Out of the north comes golden splendor; around God is awesome majesty. 23 The Almighty—we cannot find him; he is great in power and justice, and abundant righteousness he will not violate. 24 Therefore mortals fear him; he does not regard any who are wise in their own conceit.” (37:14–24) This is followed immediately by: 1 Then the LORD answered Job out of the whirlwind: 2 “Who is this that darkens counsel by words without knowledge? 3 Gird up your loins like a man, I will question you, and you shall declare to me. 4 “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth? Tell me, if you have understanding. 5 Who determined its measurements—surely you know! Or who stretched the line upon it? 6 On what were its bases sunk, or who laid its cornerstone 7 when the morning stars sang together and all the heavenly beings shouted for joy?” (38:1–7) And so these chapters keep on tirelessly. Given this unquestionable thematic unity, what is specific to God’s discourse? In truth, what we seek is not to be found in the words. The divine is not revealed in the words. The word is revealed only by vision. Visionprophecy. Now we find ourselves in the place of the divine. 17 For Christ did not send me to baptize but to proclaim the gospel, and not with eloquent wisdom, so that the cross of Christ might not be emptied of its power. Christ the Power and Wisdom of God.

102  C h a p t e r S e v e n 18 For the message about the cross is foolishness to those who are perishing, but to us who are being saved it is the power of God. 19 For it is written, “I will destroy the wisdom of the wise, and the discernment of the discerning I will thwart.” 20 Where is the one who is wise? Where is the scribe? Where is the debater of this age? Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the world? 21 For since, in the wisdom of God, the world did not know God through wisdom, God decided, through the foolishness of our proclamation, to save those who believe. 22 For Jews demand signs and Greeks desire wisdom, 23 but we proclaim Christ crucified, a stumbling block to Jews and foolishness to Gentiles, 24 but to those who are the called, both Jews and Greeks, Christ the power of God and the wisdom of God. 25 For God’s foolishness is wiser than human wisdom, and God’s weakness is stronger than human strength. (1 Corinthians 1:17–25) Paul’s quote from the book of Job is not incidental. With this quote he summarizes the experience of the epiphany that from the prophetic perspective of redemption Job calls vision, whereas Paul translates it as prophecy and perdition. And all of this (in the former and the latter) is understood as the articulation and apologia of a hope for liberation that is given its adequate image in the resurrection of the flesh. What is there left to say? The Messiah who is realized here transforms the order of creation into the order of creativity and establishes the new measure on this process—he destroys, that is, he recreates the measure of the world upon this rhythm. The Messiah is the second nature: a machine that produces and accumulates energy and applies it to materia prima so as to transform it; a power that is reborn of the ashes of his first consummation; a powerful innovation; a surplus of being, of materiality, that is original and outside all finality, diffused everywhere in the world. This is the Messiah. And such a measure of the world is always created anew. Nothing preexists it—it is reconstructed each time.

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3  The Value of Labor The book of Job is the parabola of modernity, of the forever unfinished dialectic of world and innovation, of being and relation, that characterizes it. And the problem of the book of Job is that of modernity—of the alternative between the totalization of the rule of science and technology over the world, and the liberation of new subjectivity. The tragedy that always constructs the passage from first to second nature; this is Job’s pain. It is only pain that is able to reveal this passage; only pain breaks its indifference and constitutes consciousness. This analogy is, therefore, particularly evident when we assume the set of conditions that define modernity—but it becomes all the more obvious when we touch upon metaphysical or ethical themes. We begin, for example, with the ethical theme par excellence—the problem of labor that becomes value and the crisis that derives from it when everything becomes value, when every significant practical horizon, every possibility of measure, all valorization appears to fail. In this case innovation seems to constitute a swamp, a place where the origin loses all meaning and labor all value. The pain that reveals itself in crisis is pain at its height. How can we escape it? What challenge can we launch? And toward whom? And how and where? It is impossible to transcend this situation. There is only the recognition of the destiny that it imposes upon us, as well as the deepening of the analysis and the consciousness of our destiny—until, singularly or collectively, we rise from the nothing in which the progress of value has constituted us, discovering in labor, in a new form of it, the foundation of a new destiny. We are able to change our destiny. Every form of value is a destiny—an origin and a prospect that is suddenly disturbed when labor comes to be defined as creation. Labor as creation, that is, as the subversion of existing forms and as innovation. But all this would be impossible if this passage were not given an adequate metaphysical foundation; that is, it would be impossible without the possibility of inscribing the form of value, in its new form, upon a subjective determination. It is impossible to conceive the materiality of the form of value and its capacity to free itself, to subvert and to innovate,

104  C h a p t e r S e v e n if it is not inscribed in a power. Power [ potenza] of a subject, power of subjects, collective power. This passage unfolds with a logical necessity—even when it undergoes the reservations of skepticism and the alleged difficulty of relating structures to subjects, still it would be imposed as a fact. When this passage is not given, its condition is posed—the condition of a necessity—and it is manifested as the presupposition of the investigation. This material datum is the condition of every genealogy: hermeneutics is the symptom and the exposition of this passage. Subjectivation is a fact.* In reality the problem of the link structure–subject, the ontological definition of this nexus in power, all this presents no difficulty when fixing the nexus does not pretend to be apologetic, to hypostasize, or to be the absolute animation of the subject. That is to say, the problem is not in the passage from the structure to the subject but in the nature of the ontology that sustains this passage. If there is an idealist ontology, the passage is absurd. But if the ontology is historical, if power has the weight of living and dying, and of their intertwining, if pain is the basis of invention—of the tear that constructs new being, of the subversion that creates—then there is no difficulty in establishing the passage from the structure to the subject. This passage is the always-unfinished verification of the wealth of human destiny that is shaken by the accumulation of inert being and its innovative opening—a network of forces that, at a certain point, is grasped as an innovative figure. Job lives this experience. We consider this fable happily, seeing inscribed within it the story of our pain and our passion. We can see no better way to periodize the time within which we live than through the analogy with the suffering and resurrection of Job. And it appears beautiful to us to conceive of redemption as the growth of our passion. Of course, it is paid for by an even higher possibility of suffering. But who, through historical avarice, would refuse us this happiness on the basis that its flower is full of thorns? Or refuse communism because the path that leads to it passes through Behemoth and Leviathan?

* See Note J on page 106.

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Note I It is must be underlined that Job’s conversion involves no repentance. Commenting on passage 42:1–6, which we mentioned earlier, Samuel Terrien rightly emphasizes that there is no repentance here. Job’s confession attains, in his language, that of Isaiah of Jerusalem when he connects the vision of the saintly King to the discovery of the destruction of his innocence. Job’s situation at this moment is qualitatively different from that which supposes a mere retraction or a simple expression of disdain or hatred of himself. It is instead the reaction of the man to the immediate encounter not only with the “sacred” but with the “Saint.” The creature is gripped by the sense of his own finitude at the very moment that the infinite that creates is revealed to it. Man thus discovers the fragility and greatness of his existence on that point of conjunction that, at once, separates and unifies being and non-being. . . . The idea is not that of repentance, the technical term of Judaic and Christian prophetic thought, because Job does not admit to having carried out crimes against morality. . . . Lastly, Job rejects the thesis defended by his friends in the course of the debate. . . . Job discerns a new dimension of sin, which is much more devastating than the offense against morality or ritual lack. . . . He is not absolved, nor does he ask to be. . . . He is freed from his anguish because he is no longer alienated from God. He does not repent for a moral wrong—he is converted from his metaphysical pride. . . . This he says speaking of the religious fable. But if we change our standpoint, and we adopt the metaphysical one of materialism, we can add a further observation. That is, not only does repentance not appear here as a specific moment in Job’s liberation (in the story as in the metaphor) but neither can it be assumed as an element or complement of the concept of redemption. Job’s conversion is a violent tension, directed not against the past but within the real. It is not a moral operation but a determination of being. Liberation is realized through an ontological mutation that excludes all repentance—because it is of a different nature, for repentance

106  C h a p t e r S e v e n is irrelevant from the standpoint of being. Job does not repudiate, nor does he retract—because he accepts his own dramatic destiny as something from which he was produced, and from which he was then freed after falling into the abyss of evil and pain. His confession is not one of repentance, for it does not reveal constituted experiences, but it constructs an absolute, it “sees.” Confession is redemption, that is, a process of transformation that is, at the same time, a process of the constitution of a new reality. All this takes place in being (and this is, incidentally, not only the rule of metaphysics but also that of poetry).

Note J Habermas’s Philosophical Discourse of Modernity falls short as a philosophical discourse on modernity. “Hegel hardly conceptualized the diremption of modernity before the unrest and movement of modernity was ready to explode this concept. The reason for this is that he could carry out his critique of subjectivity only within the framework of the philosophy of the subject.” But what else is Habermas’s “communicative transcendentalism” if not yet another formal reproduction of the subject within representation? The effect is to lose the subject. Whether the overcoming is dialectical or formal, the subject can no longer be found. Because it can always be found. Because it cannot be defined in relation to another. In contrast, the simple statement of possible existence is a tragedy for the subject, for the consciousness of pain, for the body of redemption. Hegel, like Habermas, shows us modernity transcending itself, like a packet moved from one shelf to another. But then this false overcoming is nothing but the demonstration of the impossibility of transcending modernity. In the failure of the task to which they have set themselves, the philosophers who appear between Hegel and Habermas who have attempted to solve the problem have offered us only one real solution: the implicit declaration that modernity cannot be overcome. But although modernity is insuperable, it is not for that reason immobile—what cannot be over Jürgen Habermas, The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity, 41.

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come can still be traversed. Where the philosopher fails, nomadic possibility appears. The subject is born again on the limit of this impossibility of overcoming and this possibility of movement. Deleuze and Guattari, in their formidable A Thousand Plateaus, describe precisely the dynamics that follow the metaphysical crisis (of overcoming the dialectic) within modernity. The utmost limit of the world, the assumed impossibility of overcoming, opens undefined horizons, substantial channels of flow. The method and the process, the rhizome and the flux become the keys to the discourse on modernity. There is no presumption to grasp immanent constitutions of subjectivity; on the other hand, we find the always-new presentation of ensembles, limits, refrains of being, of nodes of cooperation and expression that disincarnated, on the limit, on the crossroads, become reincarnated within the constellation—objectified, find a new subjective determination within tragedy. The philosophical discourse of modernity in this case becomes a practical, political discourse on modernity. Bataille and Foucault come to the same conclusion as do Deleuze and Guattari via other paths. These paths are rich—paths that lead not to undefined nothingness but to the fullness of destiny, to an objective and dramatic limit that will, through pain, become subject—a process of redemption.

Commentary 

Negri, Job, and the Bible roland boer 20 May 2008

The problem of salvation is all the more important for those who have been Marxists.—Negri, The Labor of Job, 9 What a sublime and, at the same time, sordid vocation this theological discipline has.—Negri, The Labor of Job, 29

F

our features of Antonio Negri’s The Labor of Job stand out, at least for one trained in that arcane discipline of biblical criticism: radical homiletics, philosophical commentary, revolutionary readings of the Bible, and the politics of cosmogony. Let me say a little more about each one as I follow the ropes that moor Negri’s The Labor of Job to the Bible and biblical criticism. At the heart of the book is what I would like to call a radical homi­letics. A discipline much neglected these days, homiletics is really the art of connecting a text like the Bible with the realities of everyday life, moving from the intricacies of textual analysis to the application to life. Negri’s homiletics is radical on two counts, one political, resting on Marx, and the other textual, reading Job as a preeminent document for our time. Job both describes our time and offers a way through the impasse of Left action. Further, this book is a philosophical commentary. Caught in the rough ground between two camps—radical philosophy and biblical criticism—it is not conventional biblical criticism, if such a thing actually exists, with its characteristic assumptions, methods, and skills. Is Negri then a lone  I read this text partly as a biblical critic, one who is quite familiar with Job, who has taught it and studied it at various times. Apart from the three major topics, I also leave aside two howlers—the resurrection of the flesh and the Messiah. The first simply does not appear in the belief structures at even the latest possible date of composition for the book and the second is a deeply theological argument that is difficult to locate in the text.

110  R o l a n d B o e r philosopher making a foray into biblical analysis? Without a sense of what may be called the “mega-text” of biblical criticism, is he bound to trip up? Not quite, for there is another patchwork tradition of what may be called philosophical exegesis or commentary. Some texts of the Bible—Genesis 1–11, the letters of Paul, Job—continue to call forth commentary from philosophers and sundry critics of other persuasions. Negri’s text falls in with this group. Third, there is a distinct nod to liberation theology and the work of Ernst Bloch, a nod that needs to be investigated further, especially when it comes into contact with the long tradition of revolutionary readings of the Bible. Finally, there is the strong organizing axis of measure and immeasure, an axis I want to reshape as the tension between chaos and cosmogony. Indeed, (im)measure is the way Negri reinterprets that biblical opposition, and he does so through the theme of the “creative ontology of labor.” I will want to explore the political possibilities and uncertainties that this biblical theme offers Negri.

Radical Homiletics The basic question for homiletics is: how does this ancient grab bag of various types of texts from very different places and times connect with our lives as we live them now? In other words, how does the text “speak” to us? I do not have in mind some theological agenda—the text becomes God’s medium of addressing us—except in the way such an agenda highlights the issues of relevance and application. We might equally argue that Homer’s Odyssey seems extraordinarily contemporary, as does The Epic of Gilgamesh, but one will be hard-pressed to argue that it is God who addresses us through these texts. (I am sure there are one or two who would do so, but we may conveniently ignore them.) Yet homiletics is above all a matter of technique: it brings together the skill in languages, the minute task of textual exegesis, the craft of writing for an audience, and the skill of an orator. It is the art of the sermon, except that “sermon” all too often has the sense of haranguing and hectoring. For that reason I have opted for the slightly archaic term, homiletics.

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As an example of what I mean, let me begin with the radical homiletics of another Italian, Pier Paolo Pasolini, who wished to make a film about Paul set in our current world. As Badiou reports it, on the basis of the full script of a film that was never made, Pasolini’s idea was to situate Paul in the modern world but keep all of his statements unaltered. Thus, while Rome becomes New York, Jerusalem becomes Paris, Damascus becomes Barcelona, and the early Christians become the resistance, Paul’s condemnations, attacks, pain, calls for repentance, and statements of love and acceptance all speak directly to our own situation. As Badiou puts it, “The most surprising thing in all this is the way in which Paul’s texts are transplanted unaltered, and with an almost unfathomable naturalness, into the situations in which Pasolini deploys them: war, fascism, American capitalism, the petty debates of the Italian intelligentsia. . . .” Another Italian radical with another biblical text attempts very much the same thing. Like Pasolini on Paul, Negri on Job offers a radical homiletics. Sprinkled throughout the book we find statements that bring Job into very intimate contact with today. On theodicy, he writes: “It was, of course, a very different route from that traveled by classical theodicy, and by Job in particular, but in the end it was all the same” (xix; my emph.). Above all, Job speaks directly to the question of a “theodicy of capital.” With neither bourgeois theory nor proletarian practice able to provide such a theodicy, everything becomes far more brutal: “Capital is truly Behemoth and Leviathan, Hiroshima and Auschwitz. And here we are on the other side, where the proletariat is able to directly construct value thanks to the accretion of pain that it has experienced” (75–76). Job and the proletariat mesh here, while capital goes the way of Leviathan and Behemoth. Or on the question of retribution, which is the theological position of Job’s three friends, we find that all the great systems have been fundamentally retributive: “The great historical time of the Occident has been dominated by empty retributive conceptions—from Aristotle, through Christianity’s reactionary accounts of it, to the more  Alain Badiou, Saint Paul (English edition), 36–39; Saint-Paul (French edition), 38–41.  Ibid., 9; ibid., 41.

112  R o l a n d B o e r advanced capitalist ones. Socialism is the apologia for a retributive theory of justice, human action, and social rewards” (36). Before Job’s withering sarcasm all of them are found desperately wanting. There are many more examples, such as the Church’s appropriation of Bildad’s “divine overdetermination” (it’s all due to God’s grace and power [39]), or Job’s very modern-seeming “cosmogonic materialism” that resists position like those of Bildad (48), or the critique of unexpected and overwhelming love, pushed by the last interlocutor, Elihu, rubbished by Job and targeted at the purveyors of “Christian love” (see chapter 5). At the end of the last chapter of the book Negri goes into overdrive. Job is nothing less than the “parabola of modernity”: “The book of Job is the parabola of modernity, of the forever unfinished dialectic of world and innovation, of being and relation, that characterizes it. And the problem of the book of Job is that of modernity—of the alternative between the totalization of the rule of science and technology over the world, and the liberation of new subjectivity” (103). The problem of the book of Job is that of modernity—radical homi­ letics indeed. But Negri goes on to sweep into Job’s modern agenda all of the subjects of the book: ethics, pain, labor, value, power, subjects, collectives . . . in short, ontology and metaphysics. Indeed, we can organize the very sense of modern time in terms of the great narrative pattern of Job: “We can see no better way to periodize the time within which we live than through the analogy with the suffering and resurrection of Job” (104). Or rather, this is the source of communist hope, which must pass through Behemoth and Leviathan in order to see the flowers that grow on the thorns. Both the figure of Job and the story that bears his name (Negri often elides the two) become the exemplum for Negri’s own practice. Job functions as the fulcrum between Italian revolutionary practice and French thought. (Negri escaped from one to the other while writing the book.) More than one reader may begin to ask the question Negri himself poses: why Job? Negri could have chosen any other great text to explore the same problems. Or, in terms of biblical interpretation, it is the old problem of exegesis versus eisegesis, reading (literally “leading”) out of a text over

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against reading “into” a text. Does not Negri engage in a heavy bout of eisegesis here? Is all this really in Job? As any first-year biblical student will tell you, biblical interpretation is neither one nor the other. Eisegesis and exegesis are inseparable: the heuristic framework with which one begins reading invariably wobbles and changes shape in the face of the text’s own words and sentences. More simply, what we bring in is altered, often drastically, by what comes out.

Philosophical Commentary However, the royal road to homiletics is the careful task of textual interpretation or what is usually (and misleadingly) called exegesis. My argument is that Negri takes up what can be called a philosophical exegesis or commentary: he reads Job as a work that raises profound philosophical questions. We need to be careful here, for such a philosophical commentary may run in two directions. It may follow the line of Agamben’s The Time That Remains, a book on Paul where we find precious little engagement with biblical critics and a cloud of philosophical witnesses and issues. Or, like Negri, it may put these philosophical interlocutors in the back room (the “Notes” as he calls them), where one might go for a smoke and chat, and keep the biblical text in the foreground. Pride of place is reserved for the text of Job and a small number of biblical commentators. Quite simply, he wants this to be a close engagement with the book of Job, which is the peg on which he wishes to hang some crucial matters. They may be philosophical matters (hence my descriptor as “philosophical commentary”) but he wants to work out those matters through an engagement with the text. The focus is the text and then its  Giorgio Agamben, The Time That Remains (English edition); Il tempo che resta (Italian edition). See also my discussion in Boer, “The Conundrums of Giorgio Agamben.”  So we find an exploration of the likenesses and differences between Spinoza and Job in Note A, a short and sharp engagement with René Girard’s mistaken reading of Job as scapegoat in Note B, a fascinating intense burst on laughter in Note C, the sublime in Note D, negative theology in Note H, pain, community, and communication in Wittgenstein in Note I, and then Habermas’s mistakes concerning modernity in Note J.

114  R o l a n d B o e r application—that is, homiletics—and not the thoughts of other philosophers. However, this desire for Job’s text leads Negri quite nicely into a problem that lies at the heart of biblical criticism, namely the tension between what is called historical-criticism and literary approaches to the Bible. The former may be more homogenous and the latter quite scattered, but in Negri’s discussion they take the shape of two options: either the text is a fragmented collection gathered over time, or it has a literary integrity that gives unity to a disparate piece. (Very roughly and for those not up to speed on biblical criticism, historical-criticism arose in the heady mix of religion and politics of Germany in the mid-nineteenth century and became the hegemonic method for a century or so; over against historicalcriticism’s search for the history of the literature of the Bible and the history behind that literature, the so-called literary approaches represent a breakout from historical critical orthodoxy from the 1970s onward, asking a whole range of different questions about the nature, ideology, and function of literature.) Even with the limited resources that were at his disposal, Negri is very careful to read both text and biblical commentators. In the process he replicates this tension between historical-criticism and literary approaches within his discussion. So, we find a careful representation of the historicalcritical assumptions concerning the structure and history of the text now known as Job. The prose prologue and epilogue (chapters 1–2; 42:7–17) become the most ancient layer of the text, after which we find the poem of Job’s complaint, the engagement with the three lawyers, Eliphaz, Zophar,  In this way Negri avoids the problem that bedevils the current efforts to engage philosophers and biblical critics on the letters of Paul. Biblical scholars, locked into their own history and set of assumed questions, tend all too quickly to dismiss the engagements of the likes of Badiou, Agamben, Žižek, or even Kristeva. Keen to learn from biblical scholars, these philosophers in the end despair of biblical scholars ever making a valid contribution to the issues that interest them. What we really have is a dislocation of two traditions of commentary with their different histories, speeds, and mega-texts. See also Boer, Criticism of Religion.  After a comment on the translations of Job that he used, Negri is careful to list the biblical materials first before adding the philosophical works with which he is more at home. Yet these works do not swamp the list.

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and Bildad, the subsequent additions of the mythical cosmogony and the monsters Leviathan and Behemoth, all of which we find in the famous voice from the whirlwind in chapters 38–41, the insertion of Elihu’s engagement, and finally the latest one, the “Hymn to Wisdom” (chapter 28). He even provides the obligatory “dates” that stretch from an unspeakably ancient and undatable basis through to the third or second century bce. Now, one would expect that such an approach to the book would produce an inevitable fragmentation, especially if it is coupled with an assumption (still far too strong in biblical criticism) that what is earliest is the most authentic and genuine. Indeed, fragmentation is one of the wellknown outcomes of historical-critical analysis. All we are left with is a text broken in little pieces. Another outcome is the interminable and irresolvable debate about precisely how to divide the text. Or rather, how many layers do we have and how do they relate to each other? For example, I was taught that the prose prologue and epilogue were actually later accretions to the poetic text. And in a typical twist, the folktale may be old (but then who really knows?) but was added at a later date. Negri neatly sidesteps the quagmire of such minute arguments, a quagmire that has swallowed up more than one promising biblical mind. Necessary as such engagements may be, they are also highly hypothetical. With nothing more than the text in hand (there is simply no external evidence as to how Job might have come together or when it was written), historical-critics have notoriously claimed a “scientific” status for their work. Even now, when it is on the defensive, I still hear all too often the claim that such an approach is “real” biblical criticism. For all his obligatory nods to historical-critical positions concerning Job, to the point of listing in his bibliography some of the main commentators, Negri is by no means beholden to them. In fact, when I first read his text I thought he was opting for a poetic-literary coherence characteristic of some of the newer literary readings. Influenced in part by the New Criticism, as well as a half-concealed reverence for the text that was proclaimed in terms of literary artistry and the compositional skill of the  For all of this see Negri, The Labor of Job, 2–3.

116  R o l a n d B o e r supposed authors, one branch of the newer approaches argues strenuously for a deeper coherence and integrity of the biblical texts that had been torn to pieces by historical-criticism. This seemed to be Negri’s path. Add to it the names of some of the commentators whom he invokes and the picture looks complete. We find Norman Habel’s commentary,10 a curious work that attempts to use narrative theory in order to interpret a poetic text, but a work that does argue for the composite integrity of Job. More regular than Habel is Samuel Terrien’s sensitive commentary.11 Terrien is no hack, having written some very fine work, but he is also a theologian. He has written variously an atlas of the Bible for children, works on music and worship, and two well-known books on biblical theology.12 From this background Terrien is keen to find texts from the Bible that are—to put it bluntly—good for you if you read them. For all my enjoyment of Terrien in the 1980s when his work was quite popular, he always struck me as a bit of snag. Despite the number of times Negri defers to Terrien’s judgment, he sidesteps those more snaggy bits. Indeed, although Negri initially seemed to me to be opting for a poetic-literary position of integrity and coher See Robert Alter, The Art of Biblical Narrative and The Art of Biblical Poetry, and Robert Polzin, Moses and the Deuteronomist, Samuel and the Deuteronomist, and David and the Deuteronomist. 10 Norman C. Habel, The Book of Job. 11 Samuel Terrien, Job, Poet of Existence. Terrien also provides Negri with useful surveys of positions and a rather full bibliography (for the time at least). He also relies heavily on Italian materials, especially when working with the text since he doesn’t have Hebrew. For example, in a note on page 41 he refers to Gianfranco Ravasi, Giobbe, Commenti Biblici (Rome: Borla, 1984), 527ff., and the summary of “the best of the research” he finds there. In a subsequent communication Negri points out that while in Paris writing his book on Job he made use of the Dominican Le Sauchoir Library, which assisted him in overcoming in some respects his sense of working in a field outside his own. I would actually argue that this situation is to Negri’s benefit, since he is not tied to the expectations and limits of biblical criticism, especially those critics with some religious commitment to the Bible as sacred text. 12 For example, see The Golden Bible Atlas with Relief Maps in Full Color (New York: Golden Press, 1972); Holy Week (Proclamation 3: Aids for Interpreting the Lessons of the Church) (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 1986); The Magnificat: Musicians as Biblical Interpreters (Mahwah, N.J.: Paulist Press, 1994); Till the Heart Sings: A Biblical Theology of Manhood and Womanhood (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2004); and The Elusive Presence: Toward a New Biblical Theology (New York: Harper and Row, 1978).

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ence, or even a theological assumption concerning the text’s deeper role for good, he does neither of these things. Instead, what we find is an argument for philosophical coherence. Let me give a few examples. When he broaches the supposedly final and late-layer addition of the “Hymn to Wisdom” in Job 28, he writes: “It is almost certainly a passage inserted very late into the book of Job—perhaps the very last of the additions to the text. But, like the other additions, it is a logical and fitting one—this, and only this, interests us” (45; my emph.). The issue with which the Hymn to Wisdom must deal is: who is God if he is not a just judge? Negri makes a similar move for philosophical integrity when he engages with the wonderful figures of Leviathan and Behemoth and related cosmogonic content (the supposed third layer): “There should be little doubt about where I place myself on the question of the interpretations of these passages: where we are led necessarily by philology we are also led by strictly poetic and philosophical considerations” (52; my emph.). Then again, in relation to Elihu’s speeches (fourth layer of the text): “In whatever manner things stand, I am interested in studying these discourses for what is said in them, for the further, strong variant that they insert in the philosophical architecture of the book of Job. These discourses are in fact far from being simply an internal articulation of the text; rather, they represent a new critical position” (63; my emph.). So we have a collection of observations—a logical and fitting addition, philosophical considerations, a new critical position within the philosophical architecture—that really point toward an argument for philosophical integrity. In fact, each new insertion or each new layer on the historicalcritical reconstruction of the text becomes an effort to deal with the problems that have arisen from the previous insertion or layer. In short, what Negri has done is absorb the historical fragmentation and layering of the text, bounce off the literary and the theological arguments for coherence, and then make his own argument for philosophical integrity. Not a bad way to move, if you ask me. To sum up, Negri’s philosophical commentary is the outcome of various efforts to deal with tensions in his reading of Job. His initial step is to focus on the biblical text and keep the philosophers in the background (the “Notes”). But this then leads him into an ongoing tension over method

118  R o l a n d B o e r within biblical studies: either the fragmented layering and insertions of historical critical readings or the poetic coherence of literary and indeed theological readings. Here he takes on board the first, listens closely to the second, and then argues for his own brand of philosophical integrity. What we end up with is a philosophical commentary that faces the text and mediates the critical positions it generates. Implicitly this position is also a challenge to the age-old assumption of the origins of theology: the Bible might have supplied the stories but the philosophy comes from the Greeks. The blending of the two in the first centuries of the common era produced that unique discipline known as theology. By contrast, for Negri a text such as Job is a fully fledged philosophical text.

On Liberation Theology, Revolution, and Reaction This philosophical commentary finds in Job the great opposition between measure (misura) and immeasure (dismisura). I can’t get out of my mind the image of a thread that strings all of the other topics together like some vast necklace. So we find value, labor, pain, ontology, time, power, evil, theodicy, creation, and cosmogony all linked in a circle. It is difficult to organize these topics in the conventional linear fashion of argument or narrative. Instead, I feel as though I am breaking into a close-knit circle and the point at which I break in affects my perception of what is going on. So I prefer to take a different approach: rather than try to perform some neurosurgery and enter deep within the workings of Negri’s mind, I will throw in a few spoilers, a few items that reorganize Negri’s own categories. There are two such spoilers. The first comes from one of Negri’s hints: he salutes liberation theology’s intersection with historical materialism. And the second is that Negri is hot on the trail of the revolutionary tradition of biblical narrative. In his treatment it takes the form of a celebration of chaos and re-creation. Let me take one at a time. As for liberation theology, a little background: out of the explosion of the 1960s that produced second-wave feminism, black power, indigenous movements for political rights, and a host of other strands, liberation

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theology also found its voice. The foundation text from 1969 is Gustavo Gutiérrez’s Theology of Liberation, where we find the articulation of the Bible’s “preferential option for the poor,” an attempt to identify a structural and collective notion of sin, some Marxist terminology, and an argument that salvation is not restricted to the spiritual realm but includes social and economic relations.13 However, the Marxism within liberation theology has always been held at arm’s length, useful perhaps for social and economic analysis but no more. And even that was contentious for a suspicious and often hostile Magisterium, so liberation theology in its Roman Catholic variety fell back on the ambiguous tradition of Roman Catholic social thought. Rather than enter these debates, Negri’s salute is directed toward the convergence of theological and materialist thought. He writes: It is very important that we underline the convergence, through the revolutionary process, of materialist and religious thought in this reinvention of value. The Marxist thinkers of the 1930s, in the hell of fascism, the Christian authors of the 1970s, in the hell of underdevelopment, have rediscovered the same themes: it is no coincidence that Ernst Bloch has the same rhythms of the Job of the “theology of liberation.” (75) These themes concern the convergence of salvation and liberation and a pattern that moves from misery to liberation. The second theme is ordinary and universal; the first is the great achievement of liberation theology. The allusion to Bloch is actually an allusion to his Atheism in Christianity, especially the section on Job where he argues that Job stands up to God and challenges the arrogant deity who refuses to answer and then finally tries to dismiss Job. The hero of this story is one of the bearers of the seed of atheistic rebellion, a standing on one’s feet against an oppressive God of the rulers.14 Negri will end up disagreeing with this position on 13 Gustavo Gutiérrez, Theology of Liberation. See also both his The Power of the Poor in History and We Drink from Our Own Wells. 14 Ernst Bloch, Atheism in Christianity (English edition); Atheismus im Christentum (German edition).

120  R o l a n d B o e r Job in some respects (the dismissive deity of chapters 38–41 is in fact one who has been called to account and squirms as a result), but he implicitly acknowledges the influence that Bloch has had among liberation theologians.15 As for the phrase “the Job of the ‘theology of liberation,’” I can’t avoid thinking of Gutiérrez’s book On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent,16 even though Negri never once mentioned it directly. For Gutiérrez the issue is undeserved suffering, both that of Job and that of the poor in Latin America. The answer, suggests Gutiérrez, lies in prophecy when Job moves beyond his own suffering and contemplation in response to God’s own appearance in the whirlwind of chapters 38–41. This discussion of liberation theology lands us squarely in the second spoiler—the revolutionary tradition of the religions that claim the Bible as their sacred text. This is an old theme of which we can find a hint in Marx with his comment that religious suffering is “a protest against real suffering” and that religion “is the sigh of the oppressed creature.”17 But it was Engels who would take this idea and run with it, to the point where he sits at odds with Marx. So in On the History of Early Christianity we find the argument that Christianity was originally a revolutionary movement among the poor and oppressed, one that eventually won over the Roman Empire, although it lost its revolutionary fervor on the way.18 Given the imprimatur of one of the founders, a number of Marxists have pursued such a theme, especially Rosa Luxemburg, Karl Kautsky, Ernst Bloch, and, most recently, Michael Löwy. Negri, I would suggest, wants to read Job in a comparable fashion: this is a revolutionary text, one that seeks nothing less than a re-creation of the world. Now for the spoiler proper: the Bible is not merely a revolutionary text, for it has plenty of material within it that may be described 15 See Tom Moylan, Bloch against Bloch. 16 Gustavo Gutiérrez, On Job. 17 Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, 175 (English edition); Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie, 378 (German edition). 18 Frederick Engels, On the History of Early Christianity; The Peasant War in Germany. See also Boer, Criticism of Earth.

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as reactionary. All too often we come across the call for obedience to an oppressive ruler or God, for the subservience of slaves, the groveling of repentance for the “sin” of rebellion, beginning with none other than Eve and Adam in the Garden. Even in the New Testament we find a profound tension between Paul’s doctrine of grace as an undeserved and unexpected irruption and the call to obey one’s rulers since they have been placed where they are by God. A comparable tension between rebellion and submission, between standing up for oneself and giving in to power, also appears in Job. Negri uncovers it, albeit despite himself. Negri does so by means of the tension between measure and immeasure. He argues that Job dismisses all forms of measure and comes out as a champion of immeasure. Translated, Job is not for reaction but for revolution. Translated again, Job is the purveyor of the chaotic mess of recreation out of pain rather than the measured order of an oppressive and unjust status quo. I am not so sure that Job—both character and book— can be enlisted all that easily with the revolutionary cadres. There is a little too much of reaction mixed in with the insurrection, a little too much measure mingled with immeasure. The treatment of (im)measure is an important philosophical question in The Labor of Job, yet it is not my task to tackle it front-on here, although I do so elsewhere.19 In brief, Negri wants to overcome a negative, retributive measure with a creative immeasure that eventually leads to its own new form of measure. Through this pattern he runs the key categories of value, labor, time, justice, good, and evil. What fascinates me is the way the valuation of measure and immeasure shifts: at first measure is negative and immeasure positive, but when we encounter a negative immeasure, a new, creative measure begins to appear. Be that as it may, I am interested here in the way Negri sinks himself into the matter of cosmogony and how the opposition of immeasure and measure becomes one between chaos and order. In the end, for all his celebration of the creative power of chaos, Negri comes out on the side of a new created order, a new form of measure that does not fall into the 19 See Boer, Criticism of Theology.

122  R o l a n d B o e r traps of the old one. With his reference to “a great chaos, a great immeasurableness,” we are in the realm of the myths of creation where order follows chaos (52). And the key to such order is creation. The creating deity wins a victory over chaos (variously a monster, the sea, a serpent, an older opponent) and then imposes order: the rhythms of the heavenly bodies, night and day, the seasons, social order, and often a city as the axis mundi. In other words, it is a new type of measure that overcomes the immeasure of chaos. Is this what Negri wants, at least in his book on Job?

The Politics of Cosmogony Beneath Negri’s discussion there surges what might be called the politics of cosmogony. The crucial questions are: is it chaos that is revolutionary or is it (re-)creation? Translated into Negri’s terms: is immeasure the truly revolutionary moment, or is that moment found in another form of measure? In the final run, Negri opts for the latter: the full victory over immeasurable evil comes through good measure, and that entails that the original bad measure has also been comprehensively driven from the field. Unless I am badly mistaken, this is a rather conventional narrative, found in one creation myth after another. Chaos and disorder are inherently bad, a threat to life itself, so the rescue must come in the form of the creation of order, which is of course good. We find it all in the flood narrative of Genesis 6–9: the initial creation (measure) has turned out to be flawed, characterized by extraordinary evil and exploitation. In order to begin again, God makes use of a beneficial chaos (the flood) to wipe out the old and begin again with a new, created order. Or, in Negri’s own words, when “measure fades into the disorder of the universe and evil is reflected in chaos, in the immeasurable,” (49) we need “the collective creation of a new world” that “is able to reconstitute a world of values” (14).20 So we arrive at a point where Negri’s reading of Job is not all that exciting. The revolutionary narrative is merely a variation on the timeless cosmogonic myth of creation out of chaos. There is, however, one significant variation on all of this: the creative activity comes not from God but 20 This comment relates to Job 28:23–27.

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from a paradigmatic man, Job. And that argument comes in a section of Negri’s commentary that is brilliant, the commentary on Job 38–41, the infamous “voice from the whirlwind.” “Then Yahweh answered Job out of the whirlwind,”21 it begins, and from there we get a grand tour of the created universe. The point of this exercise lies in a question tossed to Job: what is your suffering compared to all this? There are almost as many opinions on this whirlwind tour as there are commentators. Some find it a useful reminder of our weak status before such powers and wonders; others suggest that the only response can be thanks and awe; but others have argued that it is really a continuation of Elihu’s speech in Job 32–37 and that it doesn’t answer Job’s charge at all. God’s boasting doesn’t actually answer the question of Job’s thoroughly undeserved suffering. Yet Negri gives what is to my knowledge a unique reading; the very fact that God actually appears is the sign of Job’s victory. Up until this point God had remained conspicuously silent, not even bothering to answer Job’s increasingly bitter challenges. In God’s place we found the various arguments, such as retribution (Eliphaz and Zophar), mystical overdetermination (Bildad), and transcendent providence (Elihu), each of which Job rejects. Finally, Job stings God enough to make an appearance and actually respond to the accusation. At this moment, Job triumphs. The key verse is Job 42:5: “I had heard of thee by the hearing of the ear, but now my eye sees thee.” Job has seen God, an event that normally leads to instantaneous death. Even Moses was allowed only a glimpse of the divine derriere. Job has seen God, and he is not bowed. As Negri puts it: I have seen God, thus God is torn from the absolute transcendence that constitutes the idea of him. God justifies himself, thus God is dead. He saw God, hence Job can speak of him, and he—Job himself—can in turn participate in divinity, in the function of redemption that man constructs within life—the instrument of the death of God that is human constitution and the creation of the world. The materialist reading of the vision of God has, thus, the capacity to capture the creative 21 Job 38:1.

124  R o l a n d B o e r moment of this ontological immersion of man—whether it be Adam or Job—in the relationship with the divine, and thus of linking ontologically—not morally, not merely intellectually—the human powers [ potenze] to those divine, that is, the singular in the universal. (96–97) Somewhat ecstatic, is it not? In fact, the last pages of the book breathe a prophetic fire of ecstasy. Yet the point is clear: Job has reached up to God and has seen him, he has called God to account and forced him to justify himself. No matter how much God tried to belittle Job, he had been forced to do it. As brilliant as this reading of the last sections of Job might be, it faces at least two problems. First, this argument for the creative sun of human beings is not so new. Marx himself became quite ecstatic when, in the first flush of Feuerbach’s “discovery” that the gods and all that they entailed were projections by human beings, he proclaimed that “for man the root is man himself.” In contrast to the illusory sun of religion, man needs to “revolve round himself and therefore round his true sun.”22 And Ernst Bloch argued that in the Bible itself we find the “exodus out of Yahweh,” the seeds of a protest-atheism that would eventually depose God and allow the homo absconditus to emerge and stand on his or her own feet for the first time. The creative and powerful man without God would face the universe with confidence.23 What we have in Negri’s hands is a well-worn Marxist story, although he cranks it up to the mythical level of cosmogonic creativity. The problem is that I am not sure it is the best sort of political myth for Marxists to latch onto. The reason is that it overestimates the ability of human beings to engage in such grand creative tasks. My misgivings do not concern hybris (their efforts may indeed be seen as an effort to stare hybris in the face and say that it’s a worthwhile goal) so much as a need for some modesty and awareness of limits. Far too many projects of recon22 Karl Marx, Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law, 182 and 176 (English edition); Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie, 385 and 379 (German edition). 23 Ernst Bloch, Atheism in Christianity (English edition); Atheismus im Christentum (German edition).

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struction by the Right or the Left have ended in brutal failure for one to get too carried away by the re-creative potential of human beings. The problem I have just outlined feeds into the second trip wire with this argument of the re-creative power of human beings. Negri seeks a very different, re-created measure, where we find reconstituted labor, value, time, and so on. In refusing the vertiginous appeal of the abyss of chaos and immeasure, Negri is in the end a Marxist. And the hardnosed realists among us will agree: a chaotic, anarchistic agenda may be very appealing (it is for me to some extent), but no society can function without at least some sanctions, without some order. But there is a catch. In moving from bad order (measure) to good order via chaos, what is to prevent the next step from occurring (again): good order → bad order? It is the old revolutionary problem: how do you prevent the revolution from running into the mud?

Conclusion: Negri’s Aporia For these reasons I rather like the undercurrent of uncertainty in Negri’s text.24 He can’t actually close out his reading as he would like, stumbling over the famous verse: “therefore I despise myself and repent in dust and ashes.”25 As the last line of poetry before the prose epilogue,26 it is supposed to sum up the vast personal-cosmic struggle of the preceding two score chapters. As might be expected, commentators have been drawn to it like bees to a honeypot. Traditionally the idea that Job actually “repents” is enough of a sign that he has reconciled himself with his suffering and God and seeks forgiveness for his blasphemous challenges. Yet 24 I prefer this incompleteness to his effort to claim that Job has been misinterpreted. In each case—Job is patient, his hybris becomes pietas, the text is misogynist (Mrs. Job who wants him to suffer)—Negri argues that there is a poor misrepresentation or even amnesia in the tradition (see chapter 6). However, apart from the problematic separation between original text and misinterpretation, the text of Job is not quite so clearly in Negri’s favor. 25 Job 42:6. 26 An epilogue Negri describes brilliantly: “The return of the folkloric discourse at the end of this enormous, cosmic, theological, human adventure is like a shower, a bath, a rest after having traversed great mountains” (The Labor of Job, 98).

126  R o l a n d B o e r others have pointed out that the Hebrew is highly ambiguous and may well mean: “therefore I reject and repent of dust and ashes,” or even “regret” or “avenge myself on dust and ashes.” The key Hebrew words are “m’s,” the meanings of which include reject and despise, and “nhm,” which covers senses such as regret, repent, have compassion, comfort oneself, and avenge. With these possible senses of the two key words, a range of opposed meanings is possible: Job either despises himself and repents of dust and ashes (he gives in), or he rejects and avenges himself on dust and ashes (he does not give in). And so commentators line themselves up on either side: does Job actually give in and repent or does he stand up for himself? However, it seems to me that the ambiguity is crucial to this verse. It is unclear what Job the character does in response to God’s rant from the whirlwind. Does he crawl to God in abject submission and repent of his rebellion? Or does he turn his back on dust and ashes and stand up to the God he has called to account? To his credit, Negri reflects this uncertainty. It shows up first in his puzzlement over why Elihu (chapters 32–37) seems to say largely the same as God himself (chapters 38–41). Why, asks Negri, does Job reject what Elihu says but accept what God says? I would add to this something Negri, without the benefit of knowledge of Hebrew, does not pick up: the confusion in the textual status of Job. It has a very high number of hapax legomena, solitary Hebrew words whose meanings can be ascertained only through educated and not always reliable etymological arguments. Also, the further we delve into the book the more confused the speakers become. This is particularly true of the Elihu chapters (32–37), where Elihu’s words are apparently attributed to Job and vice versa. Translations and commentators do the same as the editors of Marx and Engels’ collected works—they correct these “slips” without comment. The text, then, is full of inconsistencies and ambivalences—Job, Yahweh, and Elihu meld into one another. Finally, Negri’s discussion of the crux in Job 42:6 shifts around a great deal. To begin with, the real problem is that Job seems to acquiesce to Yahweh. As we might expect, Negri must come to terms with this problem. He falls back on a long quotation from Samuel Terrien’s commentary,

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which argues that Job doesn’t repent. After all, Negri suggests, repentance is not needed for redemption or liberation. Not altogether happy with this, he then suggests that the answer is to be found not in the words but in the vision-prophecy. He goes on to quote Paul quoting Job in Galatians 1:17–25, and then, finally, he reverts to talking about the Messiah. This formal uncertainty on Negri’s part manifests the biblical text’s own ambiguity. It is as though Negri has picked up the ambiguity at a subliminal level and then replicated it in the form of his own text. In fact, this section of Negri’s text trails off, unresolved, open, with a little more chaos than he perhaps expected. That is how it should be, it seems to me.

Works Cited Agamben, Giorgio. Il tempo che resta: Un commento alla Lettera ai Romani. Torino: Bollati Boringhieri, 2000. ———. The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans. Translated by Patricia Dailey. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2005. Alter, Robert. The Art of Biblical Narrative. New York: Basic Books, 1981. ———. The Art of Biblical Poetry. New York: Basic Books, 1985. Badiou, Alain. Saint-Paul: la fondation de l’universalisme. Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 1997. ———. Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. Translated by Ray Brassier. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003. Bloch, Ernst. Atheismus im Christentum: Zur Religion des Exodus und des Reichs. Hamburg: Rowohlt Taschenbuch Verlag, 1970. ———. Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of the Exodus and the Kingdom. Translated by J. T. Swann. New York: Herder and Herder, 1972. Boer, Roland. “The Conundrums of Giorgio Agamben: A Commentary on A Commentary to the Letter to the Romans.” Sino-Christian Studies 3 (2007): 1–26. ———. Julia Kristeva, Marx and the Singularity of Paul. In Marxist Feminist Criticism of the Bible, edited by Roland Boer and Jorunn Økland. Sheffield: Sheffield Phoenix, 2008. ———. Criticism of Earth: On Marx, Engels and Theology, Historical Materialism Book Series. Leiden: Brill, forthcoming. ———. Criticism of Religion: On Marxism and Theology II, Historical Materialism Book Series. Leiden: Brill, forthcoming.

128  R o l a n d B o e r ———. Criticism of Theology: On Marxism and Theology III. Leiden: Brill, forthcoming. Engels, Frederick. The Peasant War in Germany. In Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 10. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1978. ———. On the History of Early Christianity. In Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 27. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1990. Gutiérrez, Gustavo. Theology of Liberation. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1969. ———. The Power of the Poor in History. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1983. ———. On Job: God-Talk and the Suffering of the Innocent. Maryknoll, N.Y.: Orbis, 1987. ———. We Drink from Our Own Wells: The Spiritual Journey of a People. London: scm, 2005. Habel, Norman C. The Book of Job. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975. Marx, Karl. Contribution to the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Law: Introduction. In Marx and Engels Collected Works, vol. 3. Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1975. ———. Zur Kritik der Hegelschen Rechtsphilosophie. Einleitung in Karl Marx/ Friedrich Engels—Werke, vol. 1. Berlin: Dietz, 1976. Moylan, Tom. Bloch against Bloch: The Theological Reception of Das Prinzip Hoffnung and the Liberation of the Utopian Function. In Not Yet: Reconsidering Ernst Bloch, edited by Jamie Owen Daniel and Tom Moylan. London: Verso, 1997. Polzin, Robert. Moses and the Deuteronomist. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980. ———. Samuel and the Deuteronomist. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1989. ———. David and the Deuteronomist. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1993. Terrien, Samuel. Job, Vol. 8, Commentaire de l’Ancien Testament. Neuchâtel: Delachaux, 1963. ———. Job, Poet of Existence. Eugene, Oreg.: Wipf and Stock, 2004.

Bibliographical Appendix

1

I

n the original Italian edition of this book, the Italian translation of the book of Job that I used was that of Gianfranco Ravasi: Giobbe, Commenti Biblici (Rome: Borla, 1984). [Trans: The British New Revised Standard Version is used for the English translation of the Bible. Punctuation and spelling, however, have been set to U.S. standards.] The other translations that I bore in mind were the new one by Stefano Virgulin, La Bibbia (Rome: Edizioni Paolina, 1983) (but see also Virgulin’s introduction to the 1980 Paolina edition of the Libro di Giobbe); the newly revised fourth edition of Il Libro di Giobbe by Guido Ceronetti (Milan: Adelphi, 1988); and that of Pio Federizzi, Giobbe, Italian translation of La sacra Bibbia (Turin and Rome: Marietti, 1972). A comparison with Samuel Terrien’s Job, Commentaire de l’Ancien Testament, vol. 13 (Neuchâtel: Delachaux et Niestlé, 1963) was also crucial. Each of these translators add a commentary to their translations. The one by Terrien, which we refer to frequently, was the most important. The following set of texts was also crucial for the attempt to explore the theological–critical debate around the book of Job. Fohrer, George. Das Buch Job. Gütersloh: Gerd Mohn, 1963. ———. Studien zum Buch Hiobs, 1956–1979. Berlin and New York: W. de Gruyter, 1983. “Giobbe e il silenzio di Dio.” Special issue, Concilium 19, no. 9 (1983). Glasser, Etienne. “Autour du livre de Job.” Esprit et Vie 8 (1971): 161–67. Gordis, Robert. The Book of Job and Man. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1965. Habel, Norman C. The Book of Job. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1975.

130  B i b l i o g r a p h i c a l a p p e n d i x Lévêque, Jean. “Le livre de Job.” Pages 1201–18 in Dictionnaire de Spiritualité Ascétique et Mystique. Vol. 8. Paris: Beauchesne, 1974. Moller, H. P. “Altes und Neues zum Buch Hiob.” Evangelische Theologie 37 (1977): 284–304. Pope, Martin H. Job. Vol. 15 of The Anchor Bible. Commentary on Job. 2nd ed. New York: Doubleday, 1973. Sagesse de l’Ancien Testamente, La. Leuven, Belgium: Leuven University Press, 1979. Weiser, Arthur. Giobbe. Brescia: Paideia Editrice, 1975 [1951]. These references can neither exhaust nor approximate the full bibliography of texts on the book of Job that we consulted.

2 I consulted the following texts closely in the course of my interpretation of the book of Job. Augustine. The City of God. Translated by Henry Bettensen. London: Penguin, 2003. Barth, Karl. Dogmatique. Vol. 2. Basel, 1947. Bloch, Ernst. Atheism in Christianity: The Religion of the Exodus in the Kingdom. Translated by J. T. Swan. New York: Herder and Herder, 1972. Cullmann, Oscar. Christ et le temps. Neuchâtel: Delachaux and Niestlé, 1947. ———. Immortalité de l’âme ou resurrection des morts? Neuchâtel: Delachaux and Niestlé, 1956. Deleuze, Gilles, and Félix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus. Translated by Brian Massumi. London: Athlone Press, 1988. Eckhart, Maître. Maître Eckhart ou la joie errante. Sermons allemands. Translated by Reiner Schürmann. Paris: Planète, 1972. Girard, René. La route antique des hommes pervers. Paris: Grasset, 1985. Habermas, Jürgen. The Philosophical Discourse of Modernity. Translated by Frederick Lawrence. Cambridge: Polity and Basil Blackwell, 1987. Hegel, Georg W. F. Wissenschaft der Logik. Edited by George Lasson. Hamburg, 1967. ———. La Théorie de la Mesure. Edited by André Doz. Paris, 1970. ———. Science of Logic. Translated by A. V. Miller. Atlantic Highlands, N.J.: Humanities Paperback Library, 1989. Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1987.

B i b l i o g r a p h i c a l a p p e n d i x  131 Kripke, Saul. Wittgenstein on Rules and Private Language: An Elementary Exposition. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1982. Leopardi, Giacomo. “Zibaldone.” In Tutte le Opere, edited by Walter Binni. Vol. 2. Florence, 1976. Maître Eckhart ou la Joie Errante. Sermons Allemands. Translated by Reiner Schurmann. Paris: Planète, 1972. Marx, Karl. Grundrisse. Translated by Martin Nicolaus. London, 1973. Matheron, Alexandre. Le Christ et la salut des ignorants chez Spinoza. Paris: Aubier, 1971. Negri, Antonio. Fabbriche del soggetto. Livorno: Leghorn, 1987. Nietzsche, Friedrich. The Gay Science. Translated by Walter Kaufmann. New York: Vintage Books, 1974. Schweitzer, Albert. “Colloque Albert Schweitzer.” Special issue, Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses 56, nos. 1–2 (1976). Spinoza, Baruch. Theological-Political Treatise and Political Treatise in Complete Works. Translated by Samuel Shirley. Indianapolis/Cambridge: Hackett Publishing Company, 2002. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. Translated by Gertrude Elizabeth Margaret Anscombe. Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1997.

3 The following is a list of books partially cited in the course of our commentary on the book of Job, which were mentioned to deepen some of the themes that were raised. On t h e q u e s t i o n o f t i m e i n S p i n o z a: Alexander, Samuel. Spinoza and Time. Arthur Davis Memorial Lectures. London: George Allen and Unwin, 1921. Barr, James. Biblical Words for Time. 2nd ed. London and Edinburgh: AllensonBreckenridge Books, 1969. Giancotti Boscherini, Emilia. Lexicon Spinozanum. Vols. 1–2. The Hague: Nijhoff, 1970. On t h e q u e s t i o n o f t i m e i n a n c i e n t philosophy and in biblical thought: Böhme, Gernot. Zeit und Zahl. Studien zur Zeittheorie bei Platon, Artistoteles, Leibniz und Kant. Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1974. Brague, Remi. Du temps chez Platon et Aristote. Paris: Puf, 1982. Callahan, John F. Four Views of Time in Ancient Philosophy. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1948.

132  B i b l i o g r a p h i c a l a p p e n d i x Petitjean, A. “Les conceptions vétérotestamentaires du temps. Acquisitions, crises et programme de recherche.” Revue d’histoire et de philosophie religieuses (1976): 383–400. ———. La concezione del tempo fra pensiero biblico e filosofia greca. Padua, 1985. On t h e pat r i s t i c r e a d i n g s o f J o b : Besserman, Lawrence. The Legend of Job in the Middle Ages. Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1979. Kannengiesser, Charles. “Job chez les Pères.” Pages 1218–25 in Dictionnaire de Spiritualité Ascétique et Mystique. Vol. 8. Paris: Beauchesne, 1974. On t h e q u e s t i o n o f t h e s u b l i m e : Burke, Edmund. A Philosophical Inquiry into the Beautiful and the Sublime. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998. Kant, Immanuel. Critique of Judgment. Translated by W. S. Pluhar. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1987. On t h e t h e m e o f l au g h t e r a n d t h e comic: Blondel, Eric. Le risible et le dérisoire. Paris: Puf, 1988. “Quatre essais sur le rire.” Special issue, Critique 44, nos. 488–89 (1988).

Index

abyss, 9, 12, 17, 23, 47, 54, 95, 97, 106, 125 Adam, 50, 67, 69, 73, 77–78, 82, 95, 97, 121, 124 adversary, 3, 19, 43, 45, 48, 57, 98 Aeschylus, 23, 51 Agamben, Giorgio, xxiii, 113, 114n6 alienation, 21, 83–84, 86, 90, 92, 105 alterity, 14, 96 antagonism, xiii–xiv, 10, 14, 77, 96–98 Aristotle, 36, 85, 111 ascesis, 6, 16, 17, 96 Auschwitz, 8, 11, 13, 59, 75, 111 Badiou, Alain, 111, 114n6 Bataille, Georges, 107 Behemoth, xiv, 2, 3, 51–52, 75, 95, 100, 104, 111, 112, 115, 117 being, xviii, xxiii–xxiv, 2, 5–9, 12, 14, 15, 16–17, 20, 24–25, 28–30, 44, 58–59, 62, 81–82, 86–87, 89–90, 92, 93, 95, 99, 102–7, 112. See also nonbeing Benjamin, Walter, xxiii Bible, the, xxiii, 4, 109–10, 114, 116, 118, 119–20, 124

biblical criticism, 109–16 Bildad, ix, 37–39, 40–41, 51, 96, 112, 115, 123 biopolitical production, xii, xiii Bloch, Ernst, 14, 21, 75, 110, 119–20, 124 body, xx–xxi, xxiv, 20, 30, 47, 51, 72, 76, 77, 86, 106, 122 book of Job, the, 5–8, 12, 16, 21, 24– 25, 50, 59, 72, 76, 77, 80, 84, 86, 89, 91, 99, 103; Boer on Negri’s interpretation of, 109–27; composition of, 1–3, 20, 23, 45–46, 48, 63, 70, 100, 114–16; Hardt on Negri’s interpretation of, ix, xiii Bultmann, Rudolf, 76 Burke, Edmund, 60–61 Canaanite, 3, 20, 23, 47 capital, x, xi, xiii, xv, xxi, 75, 111 capitalism, ix, x–xiii, xix, xxiiin10, 36, 77–78, 112 Ceronetti, Guido, 5 chaos, 13, 49, 52–54, 70, 73, 74, 77, 81, 95, 110, 118, 122–23, 125, 127 charity, 74–75, 77, 81

134  I n d e x Christ, xxiv, 13, 47, 76 Christianity, xxiv, 1, 16, 19, 36, 39, 76–77, 105, 111–12, 119–20 commodity, x, xii, 10 communication, xxi, 12, 77, 89, 93, 106 communism, xix, xx, 8, 72, 77, 104, 112 community, xiv, 73, 89–91, 93 compassion, 89, 93, 126 conflict, 28, 43, 48, 73 contingency: absoluteness of, 22–23, 24, 28–29, 30, 93 cosmogony, xix, xxii, 2, 3, 41, 52, 54, 95, 97–98, 100, 109, 112, 115, 117, 118, 121–22 Court of Yahweh, 18 creation, xx, 22, 59, 74–75, 95, 97, 100, 102, 120, 122–23; labor and, xv, 1–2, 14, 77, 103, 118 crisis, xxiii–xxiv, 50, 61, 100, 107; measure and, ix, xi–xiii, xix, 9, 15, 21, 28, 49, 52, 73, 75, 85, 103 Cullman, Oscar, 76 death, 9, 24, 43, 44, 51, 71, 84–91, 97, 123 Deleuze, Gilles, xxii–xxiii, 107 democracy, 16, 90 destiny, xviii, xix, xxi, 12, 16, 21, 24, 25, 44, 67, 70–72, 84, 103–7 destruction, 9–12, 22–23, 28–29, 52, 70–71, 74, 82, 97, 105 determination, 11, 21, 70, 85, 92, 98, 103, 105, 107 dialectic, 7, 8, 19, 21, 24–25, 28–29, 30, 32, 36, 59, 72, 92, 96, 106–7, 112 disorder, 49, 122 disproportionate [smisurato], xxi. See also excessive; immensity

Eckhart, Meister, 91 eisegesis, 112–13 Elihu, 3, 63–69, 87–89, 96, 100, 112, 115, 117, 123, 126 Eliphaz, ix, 31–32, 34, 40–41, 96, 114, 123 epiphany, 85, 95, 97, 100, 102 epistemology, 7–8, 61 equality, 2, 71 ethics, xviii, xxi, 2, 14, 23, 25, 36, 76– 77, 81, 89–91, 94, 103, 112; Spinoza and, 6–8, 16–17, 87. See also Spinoza evil, xviii, 2, 8, 11, 13, 20, 32, 48–49, 52–54, 58, 71, 87, 92, 98, 106, 118, 121–22 excessive [smisurato], xxin7, 83, 86, 89. See also disproportionate; immensity exegesis, 110–13 exile, Negri in, xvii–xviii, xxii exploitation, x–xi, xiii, 2, 9–11, 14, 47, 52, 71, 75, 77, 83, 90, 122 Ezekiel, 20 fascism, 75, 111, 119 fear, xiv, 18–19, 21, 48, 82; Hobbes on, 90 Fohrer, George, 96 Foucault, Michel, xxii–xxiii, 107 freedom, xiv, xxiii, 25, 53, 70, 91 Genesis, 110, 122 Girard, René, 29–30, 113n5 God, xiii, xx, 3, 15, 24, 30, 34, 37, 100, 110, 112, 119–26; appeal to, 69; as avenger, 47; evil and, 2, 8, 13, 32, 53, 58, 98; as falsifier, 90; immeasurable and, 28, 41; injustice of, x, 22, 43, 47, 65, 81–82; Job’s conversations with, 29, 51–52, 57, 95; Job seeing, xiv–xv, xxi–xxiv, 55, 72, 74, 96–97,

I n d e x  135 99, 123–24; Job’s vision of, xxiii, 70, 74, 92, 97–98, 101–2, 105, 123, 127; as judge, 27, 31, 38, 43, 45, 48, 54, 67, 117; justice of, xi, 6, 39–40, 55, 96–98; labor and, 2, 21, 72–73, 83, 86; man and, 13–14, 20, 42, 63, 66, 70, 91; man before, 32, 35; measure and, 38, 44, 54; trial and, 18–19, 25– 28, 31, 50, 57–58. See also Yahweh Guattari, Félix, xxii–xxiii, 107 Gutiérrez, Gustavo, 119–20 Habel, Norman, 96, 116 Habermas, Jürgen, 106 happiness, 49, 84, 98, 104 Hardt, Michael, xxii Hebrew, 5, 116n13, 126 Hegel, Georg W. F., 106; on Spinoza and Job, 7 Heidegger, Martin, 91 Hiroshima, 8, 11, 13, 59, 75, 111 Hobbes, Thomas, xiv, 90 homiletics, radical, 109–14 hope, 14–15, 46, 49, 67, 69, 73, 95, 98, 102, 112 Hymn to Wisdom, 3, 45–46, 48, 72, 115, 117 idealism, xx, 6, 72, 76, 86, 104 ideology, x, xi, xx, 114 immaterial production, xii, xiii immeasurable, or immeasure, xxin7, xxii, 7, 9–10, 17, 28, 41, 49, 52–55, 59–60, 74, 83, 110, 118, 121–25 immensity [smisurato], xxin7, 6, 7, 8, 11, 52, 59. See also disproportionate; excessive injustice, x, 22, 43, 47, 65, 82 irony, xviii, 55–60. See also laughter; sarcasm

irrationality, 1, 5, 11, 15, 54, 60, 92. See also rationalism Isaiah of Jerusalem, 105 Job: conversations with God, 29, 51–52, 57, 95; seeing God, xiv–xv, xxi–xxiv, 55, 72, 74, 96–97, 99, 123– 24; visions of God, xxiii, 70, 74, 92, 97–98, 101–2, 105, 123, 127 John Chrysostom, Saint, 13, 82 Judaism, 5, 105 judge, 48, 68; God as, xiv, 27, 31, 38, 43, 45, 54, 117 justice, ix–x, 16, 27, 29, 31–38, 41–49, 65–69, 74, 90, 101, 112, 121; of God, xi, 6, 39–40, 55, 96–98 Kant, Immanuel, 60–61 Kierkegaard, Søren, 29 knowledge, 6, 11, 66, 77 Kripke, Saul, 92–93 labor, 1, 4, 21, 40, 59, 72, 112; creative ontology of, 2, 110; exploitation of, x–xiii, 9–11, 14, 47, 52, 71, 77, 83, 90; immeasurable and, xxin7, 10, 52, 83, 110, 121; measure and, x–xv, xix, xxin7, 10–11, 36–38, 71, 73, 77, 83, 86, 103, 110, 118, 121, 125; surplus value and, x, xiii, 14; value and, x–xiii, xv, xxin7, 9–12, 14–15, 36–38, 52, 71, 73, 77, 83, 86–87, 103, 125 laughter, 43, 55, 57, 58, 59–60. See also irony; sarcasm Leopardi, Giacomo, xvii–xviii, 29 Lévêque, Jean, 34–35, 46n7, 51n1 Leviathan, xiv, 2, 3, 51–52, 53, 75, 95, 100, 104, 111, 112, 115, 117 Lilith, 82 love, 14, 16, 55, 67, 69, 70, 74, 75, 93, 98, 111, 112

136  I n d e x Machiavelli, Niccolò, 8, 16 Marx, Karl, x, xi, xiii, xxiii, 8, 10, 75, 77–78, 109, 120, 124, 126 Marxism, x–xiii, xix, xxiin10, 9, 75, 109, 119–20, 124–25 materialism, xviii, xx, xxiv, 1, 8, 9, 14, 30, 47, 50–51, 75, 76–77, 97, 105, 112, 118–19, 123–24 Matheron, Alexandre, 16 measure, 13, 16, 43–44, 47, 85, 96, 102; immeasurable and, xxin7, xxii, 7, 9–10, 17, 28, 41, 49, 52–55, 59–60, 74, 83, 110, 118, 121–25; value and, ix–xv, xix–xxi, 11, 21, 36–38, 51–52, 68–69, 71–75, 77, 83, 86–87, 91, 118, 121–25 Messiah, the, 2, 6, 12, 21, 30, 69–73, 75, 78, 96, 102, 109, 127 metaphysics, xx, 5–8, 16–17, 23, 30, 50–51, 57–59, 61, 71, 87, 103, 105–6, 107, 112 multitude, xxiii mysticism, 39–40, 41, 51, 54, 63, 91, 96, 99, 123 myth, xviiin5, 3, 5–6, 9, 20, 23, 41, 85, 115, 122, 124 nature, 2, 10, 16–17, 21, 44, 48–49, 54, 57, 59–60, 69, 72–73, 77, 81, 83, 95, 98–99, 102–3, 114 negative thought, xxiii–xxiv New Testament, 76, 85, 121 Nietzsche, Friedrich, xviii, xxiii, 6, 94 non-being, 9, 87, 90, 92, 105. See also being Old Testament, 85 ontology, xxiii, 6, 9, 24, 26, 29–30, 73, 77, 85, 87–89, 94, 97–98, 104, 110, 112, 118

operaismo [workerism], xxiin10 overdetermination, 28, 37–40, 112, 123 pain, xvii–xix, 8–12, 15, 22, 26, 47, 51, 58–59, 60, 68–69, 72–76, 81, 86–87, 99, 103–4, 106–7, 111–12, 118, 121; community and, xiv, 73, 89–91, 93; Hobbes on, xiv, 90; Wittgenstein on xx–xxi, 89, 92–93 Pascal, Blaise, 60 Pasolini, Pier Paolo, 111 Paul, 1, 13, 77, 102, 110–13, 114n6, 121, 127 phenomenology, xvii, xviii, 8, 12, 45–46 philosophy, xviii, xxii, 7, 14, 25, 41, 51–52, 63, 85, 87, 90, 106–7, 109–10, 113, 117–18, 121 Plato, 74, 85 positivism, 30 poststructuralism, xxii power [ potenza], xiii–xv, xviin2, xxi, 2, 6, 15, 16, 29, 43–44, 59–60, 70–71, 75, 77, 81, 83, 86, 90–91, 95, 97, 98, 99, 104, 112, 118, 121, 125 Power [ potere], xvii–xviii, xxi, xxiv, 9, 15, 22, 29, 40, 66, 70–71, 73, 75, 81, 83, 87, 90–91, 104 proletariat, 75–78, 111 prosperity, 38 providence, 63, 67, 74, 100, 123 punishment, ix, xi, xiv, xviiin5, 19, 31–34, 38, 41, 69–70 Rabelais, François, 60; Rabelaisian experience, 58 Rahab, 41 rationalism, 5, 11, 27, 37, 63, 74, 77, 90, 91; rationalization, xi, 28, 68–69;

I n d e x  137 reason, 6, 8–9, 12, 15, 38, 54, 61–62, 69. See also irrationality Ravasi, Gianfranco, 69, 96, 116n11 realism, xix, 62, 90, 125 redemption, xxiv, 2, 13, 50, 69, 72–73, 77, 78, 91, 97–99, 102, 104, 105–7, 123, 127; redeemer, 46, 70, 80, 89, 95 resistance, xvii, xviii, xx, 7, 12, 26, 29, 30 resurrection, xi, 47, 51, 72–73, 76–77, 85–89, 102, 104, 109n1, 112 retribution, 28, 41, 60, 63, 111, 123; justice and, ix–xi, xv, 16, 31–37, 40–43, 65, 112, 121 revolution, ix, xxiii, 9, 14, 36, 61–62, 69, 72, 75, 77, 85, 109–10, 112, 118– 22, 125 reward, ix, xi, xiv, xv, 31, 34, 36, 46n9, 69, 112 Ricardo, David, x, xi Romanticism, xviii, 59, 60. See also laughter

Sophar, 96 Spinoza, xxiv, 5–9, 16–17, 87, 93. See also ethics Stakhanov, Alexey, xi, 36 Stalin, Joseph, 8 subject, the: absoluteness and, 29, 30; Deleuze and Guattari and, 107; ethics and, 87; existence and, 23–25; Habermas and, 106–7; irony and, 57; liberation of, 103–4; measure and, 13, 21, 43, 52, 75; negative theology and, 92; ontology and, 97–98, 104, 112; pain and, xiv, 12, 26, 75, 90; proletariat, 77; within representation, 8, 106; trial and, 26; value and, 75 sublime, the, 60–62 subsumption, real, 72 suffering, ix–xi, xiii–xv, xvii, xx, xxi, 4, 10, 13, 22, 24–26, 41, 61, 71, 73, 81–82, 86, 89, 92, 93–94, 104, 112, 120, 123, 125 surplus value, x–xi, xiii, 14

sacrifice, 10, 18, 30, 72 salvation, 6, 8, 9, 13, 16–17, 30, 37, 89, 119 Sapiential Books, 3, 45 sarcasm, xi, 36, 43, 55–60, 67, 112. See also irony; laughter Satan, 2, 8; God’s alliance with, 13, 19–20 scarcity, 36 Schopenhauer, Arthur, 29 Schürmann, Reiner, 91 Schweitzer, Albert, 76 science, 72, 74, 75, 77–78, 103, 112, 115 sin, xiv, 13, 18–19, 33–35, 38, 41, 56, 67, 105, 119, 121 solitude, 59, 73–74

Taubes, Jacob, xxiii teleology, 63, 65, 70 Terrien, Samuel, 46, 69, 96, 105, 116, 126–27 theodicy, xviii, xxi, 3, 8, 23, 29, 31, 32, 63, 67, 71, 75, 111, 118 theology, xviii, 3, 6, 8, 16, 19, 23, 29, 37–39, 63, 67, 73–77, 85, 87, 96, 98–99, 116–18; of liberation, 1, 13, 75, 76, 110, 119–20; negative, 12, 60, 91–92 theophany, 63, 85, 86 Thomas Aquinas, Saint, 74 time, xii, 66, 83–87, 90, 104, 118, 121, 125 trial, 19, 25–28, 31, 50, 57, 58

138  I n d e x unhappiness, 34–35, 43, 51, 55 universality, 16, 50–51, 73–74, 83, 86, 93–94, 97, 119, 124 value, 41, 60, 89, 99; measure and, ix–xv, xix–xxi, 9–15, 21, 36–38, 47, 51–52, 68, 70–77, 83, 86–87, 91, 103, 118, 121–25 voluntarism, 63 Waismann, Friedrich, 92 war, 26, 43, 90, 98, 111 wealth, xi, 2, 7, 10, 18, 40, 66, 77, 98, 104

Weiser, Arthur, 69 wife of Job, 20, 82, 125n24 wisdom, 13–14, 44, 55, 66, 69, 98 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, xx–xxi, 89, 92–93 workerism [operaismo], xxii Yahweh, 18, 46, 63, 74, 81, 89, 95, 100, 123–24, 126. See also God Zophar, ix, xi, 35, 39–41, 114, 123

Thanks to Timothy Edkins for compiling the index.

A n t o n i o N e g r i was formerly professor of political science at the universities of Padua and Paris viii. Of his many works, the following translations are available: Time for Revolution (2003); Insurgencies (1999); The Savage Anomaly (1991); Marx beyond Marx (1991); Politics of Subversion (1989); Revolution Retrieved (1988); with Félix Guattari, Communists Like Us (1985); with Michael Hardt, Multitude (2004), Empire (2000), and Labor of Dionysus (1994); conversation with Anne Dufourmantelle, Negri on Negri (2004); and conversation with Cesare Casarino, In Praise of the Common (2008). M i c ha e l Ha r d t is a professor in the literature program at Duke University. He is author of Gilles Deleuze (1993) and coauthor with Antonio Negri of four books: Labor of Dionysus (1994), Empire (2000), Multitude (2004), and Commonwealth (2009). M at t e o M a n d a r i n i holds a Ph.D. in philosophy from the University of Warwick and teaches in the School of Business and Management, Queen Mary, University of London. He has translated numerous books and essays by Antonio Negri, including, with Alberto Toscano, Political Descartes: Reason, Ideology and the Bourgeois Project (2007) and Time for Revolution (2003). He is currently engaged in a translation with Lorenzo Chiesa of Giorgio Agamben’s The Kingdom and the Glory. Ro l a n d Boe r is a research professor at the University of Newcastle, Australia. His many books include Political Myth: On the Use and Abuse of Biblical Themes (2009), Rescuing the Bible (2007), Criticism of Heaven: On Marxism and Theology (2007), Marxist Criticism of the Bible (2003), Last Stop before Antarctica: The Bible and Postcolonialism in Australia (2001), and Knockin’ on Heaven’s Door: The Bible and Popular Culture (1999). He is the founding editor of the journal The Bible and Critical Theory.

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Negri, Antonio, 1933– [Lavoro di Giobbe. English] The labor of Job : the biblical text as a parable of human labor / Antonio Negri ; foreword by Michael Hardt ; translated by Matteo Mandarini ; commentary by Roland Boer. p. cm. — (New slant) The English translation of this work is from the Italian edition: Il lavoro di Giobbe. Il famoso testo biblico come parabola del lavoro umano. Roma: Manifestolibri, 2002. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8223-4622-7 (cloth : alk. paper) — ISBN 978-0-8223-4634-0 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Job (Biblical figure) 2. Bible. O.T. Job. I. Hardt, Michael, 1960– II. Boer, Roland, 1961– III. Title. IV. Series: New slant. BS580.J5N4413 2009 223′.106—dc22 2009022398