Eclipse of Eschatology

7/28/2019 Eclipse of Eschatology

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[PT 11.1 (2010) 35-41] Political Theology (print) ISSN 1462-317Xdoi:10.1558/poth.vllil.35 Political Theology (online) ISSN 1473-1719

THE ECLIPSE OF ESCHATOLOGY:

CONVERSING WITH TAUBES'S MESSIANISM

AND THE COMMON BODY

Antonio Negri*Independent writer and researcher

Rome

ABSTRACT

In this article Jacob Taubes's idea of eschatology is examined. Taubes's ownunderstanding of eschatology has profound implications on the very expression of political theology and political practice. If politicsas a practiceassumes that time has a terminal point, than it will invariably change thispractice and encumber and even neutralize political action of a common-

body that gives voice to the oppressed. This article agrees with Taubes inthat eschatology must announce an end to itself, which is at once a birth of apostmodern possibility of the principle of immanence in which a common-body announces its infinite possibility. The end of eschatology is the end of transcendence and the beginning of a struggle for liberating the infinite possibility of a common-body of labor.

Keywords: eschatology, Jacob Taubes, multitude, postmodern, time.

Jacob Taubes has written only one book in his life. Or, rather, he has writtenmany, published between 1942 and 1996, but it is always the same book,or chapters or notes from the same book, or even plagiarisms of itself. Thetitle of this one book? I would propose "The End of the Modern." But no,someone could object, Taubes's book is a history of eschatology. Certainly:because the book on the end of the modern is a book about the survivaland metamorphoses, and even the soul and continuity of eschatology asthe essence of the modern. So, then, to speak of the end of the modernmeans also to speak of the end of eschatology. If, in the postmodern era in

which we are living, I were able to make any recommendations to studentswho seek to enter a department of philosophy that actually might concern


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36 Political Theology

thematics of modernity might be torn down and liquidated, I wouldpropose the three books by Jacob Taubes that I have in my hands in Italiantranslation: Western Eschatology (Escatologia occidentale, Garzanti, 1997),

Political Theology of Paul (La teologia politica di San Paolo, Adelphi, 1997), Diverging Agreement: Writings on Carl Schmitt (In divergente accordo. ScCari Schmitt, Quodlibet, 1996). These are books of exceptional eruditionand extraordinary intelligence, the fruits of untimely relations and a kindof academic attention aiming for the anthological, and at the same timethey are books that, like Chinese boxes, contain one within the other andthus end up representing the many facets of a didactic argumentation. Atleast, that is, if by didactic one understands the didacticism of the bestTalmudic schools and, on the other hand, that of the typical seminars of the nineteenth-century German university. Therefore, as a title for thisensemble I propose: "The End of the Modern."

Taubes would not agree. For him, this is not how things stand. It iscertainly true that the history of eschatology and that of modernity aresuperimposed and arrive at the same resultTaubes might admit thismuchbut he would add: the end of modernity does not contain that of eschatology. On the contrary, eschatology offers the essential problematic schema to philosophy and to thinking in general (also in its secular

and not only theological form), especially at the end of the modern.Eschatology abundantly exceeds the result of the modern and, in thissense, it is inexhaustible. To move beyond the modern could thereforeonly mean to assume, without mystifications, the unresolvable radicalityof the eschatological question. But what, then, is in question in eschatology? According to Taubesand I don't see why we would not agree withhim in this regardit is the question about the essence of history. Aquestion that assumes the eschaton (the end) as limit and overcoming of history, that is, as the point from where history can be unfolded as sub

jective possibility, as real event, as affirmation of freedom. This dialecticof possibility, event and freedom is therefore a search for meaning whichis situated between the possible and the real and which effectuates itself in the leap taken by whoever traverses their separation. Teleology, in theassessment of this leap, becomes apocalyptical. The enigmas of reason,the uncertainties of the will, the tensions of hope: all this requires aprinciple that might give it an eschatological solution. An opening principle that is an end, an end that is an opening principle. A God to come.

In this sense eschatology presents itself as the experience of coincidencebetween the "wherefrom" and the "whereto," as a question of the spiritabout the "what for " Eschatology always means revolution because it


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Negri The Eclipse of Eschatology 37

of revolution (which here consists in the becoming-people of a multitude grouping together, separating itself from every yoke, in alliancewith God), the apocalyptical element further unfolds itself in a worldly

realm: here it becomes the process of revelation of the spirit in history.In this process the spirit forms times and spaces, periods and figuresof liberationwhich is the realization of the divinity. To the religiousside of apocalypsis there thus corresponds an apocalyptical gnosis whichabsorbs the ontology of salvation into the dialectics of history. In everycase a teleology of revelation dominates the outlook onto history, all thewhile retaining the dualism of possibility and the real as insoluble exceptin the revelation of the divinity.

Taubes follows the definition of the eschatological demand and itsformal characteristics with a history of the apocalyptical element whichsees a place of origin in the conversion from the Old to the New Testament.Then, he defines the crisis of the principle of the modern era (between theJoachimite pre-Reformation and the revolutionary Anabaptist Reformation) as a place of renaissance. Finally, he identifies in the developmentof historicismbetween Lessing, Kant and Hegela central place of anew gnosis. Marx and Kierkegaard complete this history, transformingthe crisis opened up, between the principle of incarnation in existence and

that of the ecstasy of transcendence, into a definitive caesura. The ancientworld of Christianity and the modern one, which had renewed eschatology in the "coincidentia oppositorum," has come to a close. The worldthat opens up will not be able to renew eschatology, but it will renewits principle: a naked principle, a break between the "no longer" and the"not yet" in which we will have no other choice except to resist or todecide. The history of eschatology thus leads the demand for meaninginto a definitive impasse, and negative theology has, as its correspondinggnosis, only a negative philosophy and a negative ethics.

For Taubes, therefore, the definition and history of eschatology reachtheir conclusion in the end of the modern, but at the same time theyrestate the eschatological question as essential: to the latter it will be possible to give a negative answer, only a negative one, incarnated in decisionand resistance. Resistance is religious, decision is secular and gnostic: bothremain apocalyptical.

It seems to me that the entrance into the postmodern negates this conclusion of Taubes and that eschatologyin all its formsis overcome and

denied by the experience of the telos and the absolute in the way it presentsitself after the end of the modern era. What is more: I believe that only thef h h f h k ll d


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In what does radical thinking consist today? In eradicating everydualism, in accepting the horizon of absolute immanence as destiny. Eversince the modern, by transforming the transcendent into the transcen

dental, thereby once again mystifying the real, has forced us finally, in thecrisis, to put our trust in those last specters of transcendence that we callresistance and/or decision, this nakedness has appeared to be immodestand unacceptable. A bizarre and ineffective mysticism has espoused thisnakedness. The impotence of resistance and the cynicism of decision have

joined themselves to the greatest dramas of our history: terrorism wonon both sides. Resistance, decision: never did they seem so essential. Butnot in their nakedness! On the contrary, they are possible only when theyare incarnated in real ontological assemblages. Not the void but plenitudeis what they need. And in the postmodern, in the regime of immanencethat it proposes, ontological radicality shows itself as constituent process,as the commonality that precedes and forms the condition of every resistance and every decision. It is not to God but to the plural and articulatedensemble of relations, of communication, of the formative processes of meaning that we answer; it is not to a limiting measure, but to an explosion of values, to a measureless excess of potentiality, that we remit ourselves. In the common context, which is where the postmodern manifests

itself, precisely there where every transcendence has been eliminated. Noris time anymore what modern eschatology wanted it to be; it is no longerthe arrow that carries the value of life elsewhere. In the postmodern, timeis an intensity, and every instant is eternal, charged with responsibility andconstituent potentiality. There is no more transcendence.

Let us assume, as an example of the end of eschatological thinking,the metamorphosis of the theological virtues: faith, hope and love. Whowould any longer accept the way this problem is situated with the dialectic between justification by faith or by love? And yet we know, andTaubes insists on this, that at least starting with Paul of Tarsus, two dif-ferent eschatological arrangements take shape around this alternative.These are spectral images in a worldour own postmodern worldinwhich faith in life (the adherence to eternity) is not possible without loveof the other (without the constitutive consistency of the common). Thetheological end in this case is completely absorbed in a new ontologicalcondition, in which the postmodern common radically grounds existence.And hope, who would accept to entrust it to the arrow of time? Time is

no longer something inside of which action unfolds but it is constitutive of the action of the multitude. Hope is the actuality of life as lived;it i th b d f th t ti lit f ff t it i f d f d


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itself and its destructive capacity are absolute potentiality, end in itself,revelation of a common that preconstitutes its form and its figure. Paul'snegative nomos is not governed by expectant waiting but by the common;

the common body of believers is not mystical but productive.Why continue then with the anachronistic reading of Taubes? In part,we already gave a hint of an answer above: because his work is an excellentintroduction to the self-destructive definition of the modern. A didactic self-destruction. Perhaps Franz Rosenzweig did better for theology,Walter Benjamin for the theory of history, and Carl Schmitt for politicaltheology: but Taubes offers us the sum. And in his didacticism, apart fromthose great figures, he includes the general accomplishments of philosophical culture from between the two wars, seizing on the two namesof Marx-Kierkegaard as the apex of the crisis. True, the one excludedfrom Taubes's synthesis is Heidegger, who always appears marginally andsomewhat caricatured, whereas his historical place is actually that of thefinal destroyer of the modern-eschatological which Taubes exhumes asthe form of thinking to come. The exclusion is therefore appropriate. Infact, from this point of view, we can see the complete insanity of negative thinking from Heidegger on, which finally goes back to the mystical.No, Taubes suggests, this road is foreclosed, Heidegger is a tombstone on

the modern, and therefore, he adds, he wants to know nothing of him.Precisely, because from Heidegger no dialectical somersaults are possiblefrom crisis to mysticism; the nakedness of being in Heidegger is a deadlyrigidity. (It is useless to add that this deadly rigidity is certainly more alivein modern phenomenology than in the form of eschatology that persistsin Taubes.)

Implicit in the one already mentioned, there is another good reason forreading Taubes, which we can find by developing and bringing to theirconclusion two cues that he offers in his work for the definition of teleology. Now Taubes precisely recalls for us that teleology and axiology, thetheory of the end and the theory of value, always gp together. But, putdifferently, this connection which in eschatology is underlined in a specialway carries with it another connection: that which presses (and/or subordinates) the rhythm of time to a principle of value, which defines the limitprior to the development, and consequently puts the command (as scienceof the limit) before the action (as freedom in time). This description corresponds to modern philosophy which from Platonic transcendentalism

drawsby transforming it into a transcendental principlethe science of command, with the arche being the principle and the command and, thus,h d l P d i ll b i h l i b l l


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definitive critique of the ideological thinking of modernity. In sum, heposes eschatology against teleology: naked eschatology against the teleo-logical ornaments of the modern.

If these are negative reasons that justify the reading of Taubes, thereare also positive ones. First of all from a philological point of view. In theend, Taubes suggests that modern thought is none other than a formidablemetaphor of religious eschatologism. And in performing this philologicallabor of referring the secular to the religious, he opens crucial critical perspectives for us. These are useful as long as we do not forget that modernthinking is always a thinking of power, that metaphysics in the modernera is always a way of expressing the political. Such metaphors can aboveall be found in the meditations of those who, in the era of which Taubeshimself is a product, managed to intuit the crisis of the modern. They thusoften interpret the emptying out of the contents of eschatology exactlyin the way Taubes does, as an exaltation of its forms. And these formsdramatically present themselves to us as tragedy in the realm of ethics.Even those who prefer the harsh ontological school of Heideggerianism(or that formally colorless one of Wittgenstein) cannot remain insensitive to the poetry and the self-destructive precursors of the modern, in itseschatological version. It is true that this language has led many to a bout

of indigestion! And even the fascination of apocalyptical terms such as"foreign life," "stranger," "errancy," "nomadism," "awakening," "calling"and so on has invested the unhappy consciousness of the crisis. And thenthere are the words of rebellion, resistance, the affirmation of singularity:these too metaphorize the ancient dogma and its modern use in favor of control, but they open up spirals onto a life with no more teoleologicalillusion.

As for us, more so than to any of the above we turn our attention to twometaphors that may seem secondary, and perhaps they are, in the courseof the process of secularization and divestiture that the eschatological tradition of the modern undergoes and that can still be of use to present apostmodern thematic. These two terms are "body" and "the common."

The body, then. Perhaps this is one of the few elements in the eschatological tradition, in its matrix, that the modern has not been able to takeup and mystify. I have had this impression every time when, in the recitation of the Christian "Credo," I heard the verse about "the resurrectionof the dead." It is clear why modern eschatologism has not been able to

digest this affirmationwhich nonetheless might have been appropriateto some of the implications of its material axiology (for example, in theg i f it li ) Th Pl t i t i ti th G ti t d i


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coincidence that these always had something to do with materialism and,today, in some cases, they represent strong premises for the developmentof philosophical thought beyond modernity (Canguilhem, Foucault, for

example). Now it is precisely in the eschatological thought of the bodythat we find some metaphorical elements that are useful and adequate tothe advancement of thought in postmodernity. Because the eschatologicalbody is a full body, made up of all qualities and miseries, of each of thepassions and desires that pertain to it. What is more: for the same reason,by extending itself and becoming collective, the body remains fixed in itsmateriality. The mystical body of eschatology is a potent metaphor of thebiopolitical body of postmodernity. The transvalued body of labor.

All the more so when we push the metaphor of the body toward thenotion of the "common," or rather from the common to the "ecclesia." Inthis case too the modern has absorbed the ecclesia or the common as body,by castrating it: it could subsist and reproduce itself only by subordinat-ing itself to the Platonic principle of teleology. Only the principle couldallow the common to develop itself, only God could allow the intellect,the affects, the cooperation of the multitude, to become reality. State andChurch were born under the same Platonic cover. By contrast, the escha-tological common bore its own potentiality (potenza) within itself. We

will therefore be able to use the postmodernism if only to be summonsedby its metaphor. Because in it we capture the intuition ofthat principle of immanence that the postmodern assumes for the definition of its depar-ture from the nihilist tragedy of the modern.

Antonio Negri is an independent researcher and writer. He has beena Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Paris and a Professorof Political Science at the University of Padua. He is the author of manybooks including Time for Revolution, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the

Modern State, The Savage Anomaly, and with Michael Hardt, Empire, Multi-tude, and Commonwealth.


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Eclipse of Eschatology