anarchy

Following the heart’s voice. On Chaim Bialik’s Halakhah e Aggadah: sulla legge ebraica (2025). by Gerardo Muñoz

If the modern age is characterized by the triumphant claim to legitimacy thanks to some major forgetting, then there is much to learn from Chaim Bialik’s 1917 enduring essay on Jewish Law, Halakhah e Aggadah: Sulla Legge ebraica (Quodlibet, 2025), which has just been republished in a very timely fashion in Italian. Bialik in 1917 means being in good company of many other names: Franz Kafka and Gustav Landauer, Walter Benjamin and Martin Buber, Ahad Ha’am and Carlo Michelstaedter, and many other names that surely have been eroded by the dust of historical time. This very erosion is at the center of Bialik’s essay that in the thunderstorm of the First Great War, the imperial consolidation of political Zionism, and the disintegration of the Austro-Hungarian Empire where many Jewish marranos dwelled, decides to take a step back from the modern acceleration and ask about the two poles of Ancient Judaic Law: the Haggadah and Halakhah. Immediately taking distance from the modern scheme of positive law and natural law, norms and principles, Bialik reminds us that Haggadah and Halakhah are two faces of the divine dispensation of Judaic law, in which temporal continuity and the statute, the heart and the shelter appear to communicate each and every time through the life of a people (5). 

As someone writing in the waning of Halakhah due to modern secularism, Bialik’s essay is first and foremost invested in preserving the Halakhah as a living tradition, “an art of concrete life” that allows for the form of life of human beings in the world (7). It is from Bialik’s essay where Walter Benjamin in the 1934 Kafka essay would later incorporate the notion that Judaic law as void of content, open to the pure means of its own transmissibility. But perhaps in Benjamin’s materialist rendition Bialik’s central notion of the Hallakah is also blurred, since for the Jewish theologian what is central is the spiritual formation of the soul, a sort of subterranean facticity that is passed throughout the ages, just like that Chrisitan masons built major Medieval cathedrals across the centuries (11) (the metaphor is indeed his). The Halakhah insofar as it inspires the soul is an endless formation, although it is also “the imagination of becoming a living soul, with a body and a sense of beauty” (13). The Halakhah is a region of de-autonomized sublime that Bialik compares to a crossgenerational Shabbat in which a people are observant to a way of living in its own becoming (14). In other words, the Halakhah is not a moral principle for personal virtue as arete as in the ancient metaphysical ethics; it is the absorption of the life of the community into the “voice of the heart” that can regenerate forms of sensible wisdom (16). It is wisdom without a master or priest that teaches the law, since it is not a knowledge that must be interrupted through mental capacities. According to Bialik’s theory, once the Jewish people are thrown into a temporality of dilation, what appears to shine in a powerful light is the cultivation of a life against the abuse and corruption of historical obsolescence. As Bialik writes in one of the most striking passages of his essay:

“Che questi «vasi di vita» siano rimasti da parte per qualche tempo non significa che siano inutili. È una grande legge: ogni forma di vita durante la sua creazione, finché dura questo periodo, rappresenta a sua volta un contenuto nello spirito del suo creatore. Appena la sua creazione è compiuta, essa si separa, si confonde con le altre, e ormai priva di essenza propria decade a strumento: chiunque vi trova quel che vi mette ogni volta che la usa. Essa deve tutto all’uomo e allo spirito dell’uomo a cui tocca in sorte come un bene abbandonato. Se egli vi mette oro, troverà oro; se polvere, polvere. Se non sa cosa mettervi, può anche lasciare che questo strumento arrugginisca. Ma quell’uomo non deve dire: lo strumento è inservibile, da buttare; deve dire invece: io sono povero!” (19).

This means that for Bialik the theological conception of “creation” does not stand for a mythical origin unconcealed by some authority; rather, it is a “vase of life” that allows life to be attuned to the the spirit of the creator, and for the creator to be rendered unfinished because the texture of the form of life is always to be written. At bottom, this modal structure of theological interdependency is at the heart of Bialik’s underappreciated theory of the letter and spirit of law that still resonates in our days. It is not that there is unwritten tradition and then it becomes a written norm to adjudicate the force of law (as in the current American jurisprudential debates about the “History and Tradition” test); on the contrary, Bialik’s legal contribution, well beyond the confines of Ancient Judaic Law, is that there is an abyss in the soul in every enigmatic life because the legal force cannot yet (and cannot for a long time) adjudicate a resolute execution of judgment (23). Counterintuitively, we can thus say that to really “live in the Law” cannot be expressively taken to be to defend court orders and police powers, but rather to allow life to live concretely as enigmatic life that is deprived of temporary ad hoc fictions suited to social domination. That is to say, to live according to the law means coherently with the Hakkhalah entails to an awareness that the law remains fully unknown, in this way incapable of becoming a part of social and penal organization that in our days it has thoroughly transformed the legal systems of the West (37).

This is why Bialik also includes a strong warning towards the end of Halakkah e Aggadah: the rise of substantive qualifications of Judaic culture (Jewish art, education, work, nationalism, theology) bending towards identitarian abstractions amount to what he called “ethereal love” (38). This ethereal love not only dissolves into the solution of modern humanism, but betrays the enigmatic form of Jewish life in the time of dilated waiting. A time of dilation (Aufschub) that does not mean that there is nothing to do – consummated boredom and alienated experience – it is rather the opening to a whole field of possibilities and relations, of worlds and the attunement of the imagination in its exposure. This non-closure of the theological experience provided by the fine attunement of the heart cannot be properly called political; which is why Bialik understood the land of Palestine as a vitam nomoi and not one of nationalist settlement validated by the institutional authority of the modern state.

As Andrea Cavalletti records in his illuminating Postface Bialik telling Hannah Arendt: “La mia convinzione politica, se ve n’è una, è anarchica” (64). Like in Oskar Goldberg’s theology, what is at stake in Bialik is an anarchic Hebraism that allows the presence of God in the world to deter the emergence of poisonous deifications (the individual and the state). Far away instrumentally infused pseudo-messianic overtones of an “elected People” for historical assertion and depredation, Bialik understood that only in the free relation between Halakhah and Haggadah, could the gordian knot of life and law be considered if we are to avoid the slippage into the seductions of the ethereal forces.

On the Highest Office. by Gerardo Muñoz

The Supreme Court of Colorado has recently upheld the constitutional argument developed by two constitutional scholars, William Baude & Michael Paulsen, that disqualifies former President Trump from a presidential nomination under section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment of the US Constitution. According to this legal argument by one of the nation’s renowned legal originalists, any former public official who has taken an “oath” to the Constitution and engages in a rebellion or insurrection is disqualified from returning to public office as expressed in the letter of the Reconstruction Amendment. What is more, section three is ‘self-executing’, which means that it applies through adjudication by the courts without having to pass by legislative majority from Congress. Regardless of the future outcome of the contentious case, what is remarkable is how the development of American democracy – centered on the republicanist innovation of electoral power and voting, if we are to believe Sanford Levinson’s hypothesis – bends towards an executive constitutionalism that sits way above the political representation mediated by constituent power (Congressional authority) [1].

And insofar as to the normative nuances of the case are concerned, the application of section 3 of the Fourteenth Amendment does not express a constitutional crisis as much as it reveals the system of the constitution‘s arcana of power: “the officer” and the ‘highest office’. In fact, as many legal scholars have already noted, the center of the applicability of section 3 will be waged on whether the Presidential office qualifies as an “officer of the United States” or not [2]. Implicitly it should not be noted that this is the constitutional standard through which the case already presents itself. In other words, what is at stake in section is not only the betrayal of an oath, democratic legitimation, constitutional public meaning, or a violation of separations of power; what is at issue is the enduring force of an office and the command of the officer in a concrete institutional reality. 

And not just any office, but according to the opinion of the Colorado Supreme Court, it pertains to the “highest office” of the land, which is not lex scripta in Constitution but implicitly derived: “President Trump asks us to hold that Section 3 disqualifies every oath-breaking insurrectionist except the most powerful one and that it bars oath breakers from virtually every office, both state and federal, except the highest one in the land. Both results are inconsistent with the plain language and history of Section 3″ [3]. As in the allegorical ‘Commandant’ in Franz Kafka’s “In the Penal Colony”, the highest office follows the unwritten Executive office tradition in order to bar a former president (involved to some degree in an insurrection) for its own endurance: the being of command that must self-execute itself in order to be what it is, that is, the highest office [4]. The paradox, then, it is not just at the level of interpretative enterprises of a specific legal culture – in other words, what legal theory will allow judges to accept Trump as officer or non-officer of the executive branch, as Vermeule suggests – but rather, the fact that in order to preserve the veneer of democratic legitimation between the different conflicting public powers and its potential rise to “authoritarianism”, the highest office must rank at the center of the executive force of either general economy of deference and public legitimation [5]. This also speaks to the ‘royal’ tailoring of American republicanism (the monarchical force in the executive) in which the unbound dimension of the “highest office” also entails a constrained, impersonal, and thus anti-constituent dimension that shows its relief upsetting the modernist liberal forms of the separation of powers [6].

 From this picture it follows that the so-called post-liberal and virtuous calls for a neoclassical regime change perhaps have failed to grasp that this regime has always been beneath their own noses: the ‘highest office’ dispenses the soulcraft that subsumes civil society to the functions of the administrative state bypassing practical spheres of separation. If the arguments and debates about section 3 matter, it is precisely because it reveals the esoteric arcana (the highest office) of American structure of government runs parallel to its exoteric liturgical arcana (voting rights) – and, precisely, it it comes to no surprise that executive immunity under section 3 comes into full tension with voting rights in an unprecedented theater of active operations in which both levels of the arcanni convergence and collapse. In a way, this validates Carl Schmitt’s assumption that decision over exception is constitutive of every legal system, and that every legal system (insofar as it does not want to crumble under the abstraction of a general norm) arms itself with a sovereign decision. The highest office in the American constitutional system is the institution for the self-executing force of sovereign immunity. 

In this legal landscape, a recently published book, Of Rule and Office: Plato’s Ideas of the Political (2023), by classicist Melissa Lane aptly analyzes the binding notion of political rule with the public office in Plato’s Republic. In another epoch, the publication of such book would have been taken as a theoretical touchstone for either side of the constitutional crisis, since Lane’s intricate argument illuminates the original tension between political rule and office in a democratic polis; a highpoint of intensity that fractures office-holding (anarchos) as in the account of the “democratic man”  in the parabola of the young lotus-eater goes: “intolerance good breeding, anarchy freedom, extravagance magnificence, and shamelessness courage”  [7]. Thus, as Lane observes, the attitude of the anarchos is not merely achieving the erasure of power or government, but more specifically the destruction of the proper constitution of the office. It is also telling that the energy of the anarchos is not against the state or a “leader” (archontes), but oriented towards the civil magistrates and bureaucratic power; or, to put it in the language of modern American public law, against the administrative state. At the end of the day, the elemental unit of administrative law is the autonomy of the command of an agency / office of regulatory power dispensed from the Executive branch. And is not in the modern opposition of movement – institution the very friction between office and anarchos? If politics is reduced to this polarity, then there is no longer any paradoteon, a complex term that Plato in his late work associated with restraint and prudence when regulating music for the fulfillment of the kallipolis through the generations [8]. The highest office constitutes, in this way, an ur-officium, the arcana that binds the political system when all there is a system of commands.  

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Notes 

1. Sanford Levinson. An Argument Open to All: Reading The Federalist in the 21st Century (Yale University Press, 2015). 

2. “Prof. Michael McConnell, Responding About the Fourteenth Amendment, “Insurrection,” and Trump”, The Volokh Conspiracy, August 2023: https://reason.com/volokh/2023/08/12/prof-michael-mcconnell-responding-about-the-fourteenth-amendment-insurrection-and-trump/ 

3. Supreme Court Case of Colorado, No.23S A300, 2023, page 84: https://www.courts.state.co.us/userfiles/file/Court_Probation/Supreme_Court/Opinions/2023/23SA300.pdf 

4. Giorgio Agamben. Opus Dei: An Archeology of Duty (Stanford University Press, 2013), 84.

5. Adrian Vermeule. “The Non-Originalist Decision That May Save Trump”, The New Digest, December 2023: https://thenewdigest.substack.com/p/the-non-originalist-decision-that 

6. Adrian Vermeule & Eric Posner. The Executive Unbound: After the Madisonian Republic (Oxford University Press, 2011), 5.

7. Melissa Lane. Of Rule and Office: Plato’s Ideas of the Political (Princeton University Press, 2023), 304-305.

8. Plato. The Laws (Penguin Books, 1970), 291, 802d.

The unperishable. On Ernst Jünger’s On the Marble Cliffs (NYRB, 2023). by Gerardo Muñoz

On the Marble Cliffs (1939), which appeared for the first time in Nazi Germany in 1939 (the new NYRB has just been published) offered a narrative of a thorough civilizational collapse of the West. I will side with many of the commentators that have reminded the readers that this novel doesn’t simply amount to an allegory of the rise of National Socialism or the reemergence of indirect powers of civil war in the European interwar years. By underlining “just”, I also mean to say that it is also very much about its epoch. Jünger was an insider of the German elite, and one of the most astute interpreters of his time as his theses on the dominion of the worker and the force of total mobilization were fully realized. It happens that On the Marble Cliffs introduces the civilizational collapse not through the allegorical reduction of the narrative procedure, but rather through a weaving, never truly resolved (much to Jünger’s own intentions), of temporalities that do not land in historical form. Circumventing the meanderings of a dreamlike stage and that of a thick and sensorial description, the novel diachronous movement resembles the stage of a vigil that retrospectively looks from page one at the advent of the disaster: “Only then do we recognize how fortunate we humans are to live from day to day in our small communities, under peaceful roofs, engaged in please conversation, and with the effective greetings morning and night. Alas, we always recognize too late that these simple things offered us a cornucopia of riches” (Jünger, 3). Granted, the vigil is an incomplete assessment of how (not so much as to why, which speaks to Jünger’s separation between his critico-politico essays and his narrative universe) the luminous community of brothers at Grand Marina entered the stage of destruction. During their peaceful time at Grand Marina, the brothers dedicate themselves to studying plants: a contemplative activity through an herbarium that becomes an exercise in clearing the mind and “draining time”. Botany has always stood as a minor activity to escape the realization of death, even if inevitable the cycle of temporal caducity.

But the ruinous time begins with the dominion of the Head Forester, an old governor of Mauretania region whose territorial ambitions are rooted in the domination of world affairs, and the willful defense of its doctrine Semper Vitrix (Jünger, 23). For those familiar with the worldview of Jünger, it is not surprising to find that domination does not begging at the original act of taking, but rather in the scheme of disposition that prepares the liquidation of the originary depth of the world’s opacity. Hence, imperii vitrix is always cartographical, and thus concerned with the the procedure of legible reduction: “For them [Mauretaninas] the world was reduced to a map like those thare engraved for amateour using little compasses and polished insutrmentions that are pleasing to hold. And so it seemed odd to come upon figures like the Head Forester in these clear, perfectly abstract realms freed of any shadows” (Jünger, 23). To dominate the world, one must first dominate over the ideals and images that unify a world. This is why Jünger, just a few years earlier in The Worker, had ended his treatise pointing at the passage from the classical social contract theories of social cohesion to the efficiency of planning of production in order to weaken any possible resistance [1]. This is another reason why On the Marble Cliffs fails at any allegorical instantiation, since allegory hinges upon the unfulfilled stage of historical consciousness, whereas Jünger levels his narrative with the metaphysical disposition that is accomplished in modernity. One could call this the triumph of nihilism and anarchy; the never-ending triumph of ‘barbarism and religion’ of the West since at least the Roman Empire to put in the terms of historian J.G.A. Pocock. This is the “line” of modernity, but it is also the line that is breached at the collapse of modernity staged On the Marble Cliffs.

Anarchy and nihilism – for Jünger these are for two routes for prompting a relation with the epochal collapse. More than clearcut positions to endorse, these are unbreachable counters of the limitless epoch. Jünger distinguishes them well through the character of Braquemart: “Suffice it to say that there is a profound difference between fully formed nihilism and unchecked anarchy. The outcome of the struggle will determine whether human settlements will become wasteland or virgin forest. With regards to Braquemart, he was marked by all the traits of full-fledged nihilism. His was a cold, rootless intelligence with a penchant for utopias…On seeing him, one inevitably thought of his master’s profound saying: “The desert grows – woe to him who carries the deserts within!” (Jünger, 76-77). The nihilist suffers from a rather coldness of intelligence, and what Jünger qualifies as the ill-fated adventure of the theorist, always unmatched with that of the pragmatist (Jünger, 78). Granted, everything depends on the internal capacities to react against the growing systematic devastation. On the other side, the anarchist cloaks his accomplice condition within the corruption of the law, where nothing is sacred. This is why the anarchist transforms the forest into an enclosed land for hunting and predatory practice where “cadavers left to rot in the fields spread pestilence, wiping out the herds. The downfall of order brings good to none” (Jünger, 62). On the Marble Cliffs is at times too emphatic with the reiteration of the order in opposition to terror: ‘Terror establishes its reign behind a mask of order” (Jünger, 38). And this speaks to National Socialism antipositivist attitudes to the rule of law, which Jünger seemed to have perceived clearly.

However, it is also true that Jünger’s insistence on order is not just about conservation in the abyss, but rather about how the civilizational collapse is expressed in the puncturing of indirect powers that will ultimately unify the anarchy of domination. To insist on nihilism means to de-hegemonize the indirect powers and factional domination against the visceral hatred of the gratitude of language and the mystery of beauty that burns the inside of demonic spirits (Jünger 39). The luminosity of Jünger’s style and symbolic nakedness speaks, in turn, to an attempt at a mythologization of beauty that emerges in a language devoid of parody. In this sense, Jünger displaces Gianni Carchia’s important thesis about the narrativization of the parody of mystery into the form in the bourgeois novel. Jünger’s beauty is mysterious because it exceeds signification and conceptual closure of the novel conflict, as what language does (or seems to do) on the line of nihilism. For Jünger the revocation of anarchy implies taking a distance from the subsumption of prose into narrative order. Thus, Jünger’s order is a primary order, one of retaining the reserves of sacred and the unfathomable character in the face of barbarism and the destruction of the world.

“We take leave more easily when things are in order” (Jünger, 59). This is the primary order of a plain state of the world, which does not presuppose the obsession with organization and management; it is what allows for the flourishing of contemplative life and the possibility of retreating to the density of the forest. But we know that this is, precisely, what comes crashing down in the rise of anarchy and nihilism, both working in tandem in modernity. Attaching oneself to primary order amounts to “concrete dreaming” at best, as the narrator says early in the book. And it is at this point that On the Marble Cliffs solves this conundrum: the idea of order must not be reduced to a nomos of the world, but rather the possibility of an outside from thinking that there is a finite and finished work of the world. This is where Jünger’s genius shines with usual intensity. It is the moment, towards the end, when the narrator admits: “the beauty of this world now enveloped, I saw, in the purple mantle of destruction” (Jünger, 102). The conflagration of the world, however, only undoes a new capacity for seeing that which had remained in the dense fog of consciousness and aesthetics. In other words, the total collapse brings forth the unperishable element between existence and the world. Jünger achieves the highest point of condensation in this elaboration:

“The harvest of many years of labor fell prey to the element and with the house, our work returned to dust. We cannot count on seeing our work completed here below, and happy is the man whose will is not too painfully invested in his efforts. No house is built, no plan created, in which ruin is not the cornerstone, and what lives imperishably in us does not reside in our works. We perceived this truth in the flame, and its glow was not devoid of joy” (Jünger, 108).

This is not joy or appetite for destruction, but more a joy about what remains unperishable in every destructive act that realizes itself just so that everything could be renewed more or less the same. At the narrative level the unperishable of every work is the mystery that cannot be fully captured either by the deployment of historical allegory or by the mimetic translation of the work of narrative. On the Marble Cliffs remains stubbornly an open novel, but in a very precise sense: it gestures to the divergence between life and the world is barely touched parabolically at a distance. This is why the character of On the Marble Cliffs reaches the end by stressing “the sight of it [an old oak grove] made us feel at home…”(Jünger, 113). Whereas sight is an index of landscape, of seeing beyond the abyss. This is a condition for living among the dead once again. Perhaps this is why Jünger felt the need to record in his French war diaries that Pablo Picasso had asked him if the novel was based on a real landscape [2].

Only a painter that had witness the crisis of modern space (beginning with the “Blue Room” of 1900) could directly engage with the trope of the ‘marble cliff’: it is here that the altar of a sacrificial history and political domination turns into the site of theoria. Now the faculty of seeing grows outside of itself, “to manifest freedom in the face of danger” (Jünger, 117). On the Marble Cliffs is an invitation to this interior unperishable landscape that removes us from idle fictions in the face of anguish if only we do not turn our back to it (in the name of science or technology or new idols). Given that the desert of nihilism can only grow, I wonder how many today could even stand on the cliff. I fear that the effort of raising the head and looking beyond is already too much to ask.

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Notes 

1. Ernst Jünger. The Worker: Dominion and Form (Northwestern University Press, 2017), 173-178.

2. Ernst Jünger. A German Office in Occupied Paris: The War Journal 1941-1945 (Columbia University Press, 2019), 78.