economic theology – Infrapolitical Reflections

It has been said repeatedly – in the best hyperbolic spirit, no doubt – that Chile always stands, regardless of the angle from which we are looking, for what is to come in our epoch. The Chilean laboratory prefigures the coming mutations and solidifies the effective tendencies of public powers. The 2019-2023 political cycle is no different: it began with the experiential revolt at the heart of the metropolitan center, and it culminated with yet another constitutional scene seeking to replace the “constitución tramposa” now at the mercy of those that hold a deep admiration for the post-dictatorship subsidiary state. The newly elected advisors and experts will place the final cap to the momentum of institutional transformation, which welcomes back the official garments of public legality, official languages, and grammars of public security. And even if it is true, as Rodrigo Karmy has argued, that the most recent electoral results confirm the exhaustion of the Chilean post-dictatorship regime, the question posed to us is what capacity can constitutionalism and the constituent scene contribute for any possible transformation. [1]. In other words, can a breakthrough be produced from within the conditions of constitutionalism? As Martin Loughlin has recently demonstrated, our historical epoch is one marked by the irreversible triumph of constitutionalism; a design that differs from the modern constitutional state of representation and legislative legitimacy, envisioning an encompassing “dynamic order of an evolving society rather than an authoritative text, the basic ideals of constitutionalism have been realized” [2]. Constitutionalism emerges in the wake of the end of the liberal presuppositions of modern political theology and everything that it implies for the stability, separation, and judicial control of public powers.

The system of constitutionalism presupposes a total governmental nexus whose legality (discretionary, exceptional, based on the application of general principles / ius) will be treated as “an order of values that evolves as social conditions change” [3]. The passage into an administrative system of legal order presupposes a suture between principles and political necessity, state and civil society, economic rationality and executive planning and oversight. The old paradigm of the modern “dual state”, theorized by Ernst Fraenkel in the 40s have now supplied an internal abdication of positivist jurisprudence and minimalist constitutional framework, paving the way for the total constitutionalization as a flexible art of governance. Although it has been said that the first constitutional drafting of the new Chilean constitution was confusing and overtly ideological (a “magical realist” menu of rights and everything under the sun, one contemporary jurist called it), there is still something to say about the veneer of “social rights” within the epochal system of constitutionalism [4]. It is at times forgotten that the abundance of enumerated social rights implies the infrastructure of constitutionalism to bind legal, political, and social spheres into a regulatory apparatus without fissures. To govern the social means steering over the abstraction of social values. There are good reasons to discharge skepticism against constitutionalism, and they keep coming. Of course, the argument of skepticism, alas, rarely has good press (it fails to provide an insight into totality, Max Horkheimer famously argued), but I do think it is necessary to reclaim skepticism in the wake of the systematization of public constitutional principles [5]. Skepticism demands separation from constitutional absolutism and the legal nexus in which social action interaction finds itself. The skeptical position in the face of constitutionalism at its most minimalist bearing insists in the separation of life from law, of experience from political order, of expression from the order of rhetorical mimesis. The skeptic might not want to negative law as authority; but it wants to refuse the post-authoritarian conflation of life and social rule underpinning political domination.

To be able to see beyond the framework of constitutionalism is the task at hand, especially when the old predicates around the political subject and the social contract make their way back from a position of weakness and desperation (another way of saying that morality returns as nihilism). But one does understand its success: it is a compensatory psychic mechanism for the ongoing existential pain under the abstract orderability of the world. And where there is pain, there is also an accumulation of experience that pokes through the fictive state of things, refusing the objective staging of phenomena. Simply, it refuses to be absorbed by what’s available. At this point it becomes impossible not to recall the October revolt for one particular motive: mainly, that its emergence did not favor social demands nor was it driven by the grammar of a political program. Every experiential uprising has an aesthetic dimension – or even better, pictorial set up, a canvas of everyday life – that we have yet to rediscover. Painting from real life is no easy thing, some painters have told us. And something similar goes for the revolt: an alteration of gestures, inscriptions, graffitis, and corporal tracings, dissonances and masks color the expressive discharge against the pledge of objective realism and the police of languages. Indeed, pictorial skepticism can only emerge when there is an excess to representation; that is, when there is a sensible stubbornness to enter into contact with the unfathomable of the world as such. The world and its others, one should say. This pictorial dislocation of reality dispenses a rhythmic structure of the senses that is neither chaos nor destruction, but an arrangement of a different sort: the communication between souls (from soul to soul, Rimbaud had said) without regulatory mediations through the tokens of recognition and filiation. The rhythmic movements provide a spatial continuation devoid of justifications [6]. This is why pictorial semblance tells us something that language or the science of politics cannot. How can we last together as a community that is not?

Pictorial dislocation wants to claim distance and separation the non-totalizable while being there. Let us take a painting like Nicolas Poussin’s The Abduction of the Sabine Women (1633-1634): here we have a complex composition ordered around rhythms and modes of figures and distances; the possibilities of communication between forms and the expressivity of the figures hold everything as if in a state of grace. What is striking in the picture is the subtle mounting of activities and gestures without ever falling into the sublimation of the concept. There are no guidelines, and yet we feel that everything communicates. Or to put it in Poussin’s pictorial terminology: “what follows is unlearnable” [7]. I do not think that the painter tried to posit a negative foundation of knowledge for an even higher learning; rather the unlearnable is a practical activity (a gesture, a word, a contact) that is both unique and indispensable; impossible to let itself be arranged into a set of alienated function for a task. Poussin reminds us of the unknowability of rhythms taking place: an uncompressed experience outside the force of systematization. We need thought to incorporate something like this exercise in rhythm.

It does not come as a surprise that a conservative scholar during the first months of the October revolt hypostatized the event as a “gnostic program” claiming that: “Plato’s philosophy offered a simple solution to the gnostic problem: instead of adapting the world to our desire, the task is to adapt the soul of the world…we now know that public order is the our most urgent occupation” [8]. Needless to say, and as Díaz Letelier noted at the time, this was a political Platonism devoid of chōra as a nonsite of our sensible imagination that allows the renewal of the creative experience with the world [9]. There is no ‘common sense’ as the pragmatists of realism assert with conviction; there is only the sensorial passage allowed by the chōra. This is what constitutionalism needs to pacify and incorporate: the battle over the status of the soul at a moment in which material goods and its economic arrangement (and in the Chilean case, its negative subsidiarity principle) becomes insufficient for the psychic production of a rectilinear subject (a masculine subject, Alejandra Castillo would claim) [10]. The postliberal constitutionalism as it stands (and it is postliberal because it cannot longer said to appeal to an internal principle of positive norm nor to a source of ‘Higher Law’, but to the executive command of the principle); a world legal revolution of governmental administration of anomia, amounts to a systematic offensive that exceeds mere material appropriation or personal liquidation. And this is so, because its ultimate mission is the “soul murder” (seleenmord) that currently stands as the basic unit of the ensemble to govern over socialization [11]. Constitutionalism now appears as the last avatar of Americanism. Perhaps there is no higher and modest task at hand than affirming the medium of the chōra that preexists the submission of life into the polis, and which retains, like the pictorial gesture, the unlearnable and the unadaptive. Only this could slowly render another possible sense in the relationship between liberty and law.

Notes

* This text was in preparation for the conversation panel on the current legal and political cycle in contemporary Chile with Alejandra Castillo, Rodrigo Karmy, and Philip Wohlstetter that took place in May 31, 2023 at the Red May Seattle Forum. The conversation is now archived here.

1. Rodrigo Karmy. “Ademia portaliana: algunos puntos para el “nulo” debate”, La Voz de los que sobran, May 5, 2023: https://lavozdelosquesobran.cl/opinion/ademia-portaliana-algunos-puntos-para-el-nulo-debate/05052023

2. Martin Loughlin. Against Constitutionalism (Harvard University Press, 2022), 11-12.

3. Ibid., 161.

4. Pablo de Lora. “Constitucionalismo mágico”, The Objective, May 2022: https://theobjective.com/elsubjetivo/opinion/2022-05-07/constitucionalismo-magico/

5. Max Horkheimer. “Montaigne and the Function of Skepticism”, in Between Philosophy and Social Science: Selected Early Writings (MIT Press, 1993), 265-313.

6. Rodrigo Karmy. “The Anarchy of Beginnings: notes on the rhythmicity of revolt”, Ill Will, May 2020: https://illwill.com/the-anarchy-of-beginnings

7. Avigdor Arikha. “On Nicolas Poussin’s Rape of Sabines and Later Work”, in On Depiction (Eris | Benakis Museum, 2019), 112.

8. Manfred Svensson. “Una revolución gnóstica”, The Clinic, November 2019: https://www.theclinic.cl/2019/11/25/columna-de-manfred-svensson-una-revolucion-gnostica/

9. Gonzalo Díaz Letelier. “Un platonismo sin khorâ”, Ficcion de la razón, December 2023: https://ficciondelarazon.org/2019/12/04/gonzalo-diaz-letelier-un-platonismo-sin-khora/

10. Carlos Frontaura. “Algunas notas sobre el pensamiento de Jaime Guzmán y la subsidiariedad”, in Subsidiariedad en Chile: Justicia y Libertad (Fundación Jaime Guzmán, 2016), 123.

11. Ernst Jünger. The Forest Passage (Telos Press, 2003), 93.

The dispute concerning the legitimacy of modernity also implies the question of the reformation, which transferred the power away from the hands of priests into a new priesthood of everyman’s consciousness. This was the Lutheran self-affirmation of economic theology (it has been laid out by Monica Ferrando’s recent work). The new priesthood implied a consolidation of the power over interpretation, since the biblical sources were now opened to battle over meaning itself. The interests over the Hebrew sources were not new, as a contemporary scholar has shown, but it was of central interest to the hermeneutics of sola scriptura over the scrutiny of the canons [1]. If this is the case, how come Thomas Hobbes account of the religious sources point to a different dimension of revelation? As we know, Hobbes was not alien to the ancient Hebrew sources, but his treatment and conclusions were entirely misplaced. Here I want to briefly account for this divergence.

In reality, it was Carl Schmitt who best confronted this problem in a late essay form 1964, published in “Der Staat, “Die Vollendete Reformation” by asserting that Hobbes’ place in the constellation of the modern political theology of the reform was rooted in the invention of the autonomy of the political. Schmitt works his way through Hobbes’ second bibliography in a subtle way, reminding us that the theorem “Jesus is the Christ” meant the artificial creation of a political technique over the battle over “meaning and truth” that fueled the European wars of religion. Hobbes, contrary to the theologians, became the founder of a counter-power: the confrontation between Leviathan and Behemoth. Indeed, for Hobbes the “reformed theologian” stands as the Behemoth, but it has yet to come to terms with the question posed by Leviathan as who will decide. This is for Schmitt the kerygmatic theme of the New Testament, which will only be decided at the end of times, but meanwhile the decision through authority is the only way in which the problem of “civil war could be neutralized. As a commentator of his time, Schmitt was directing a direct arrow to Rudolf Sohm’s idea of reform, which ultimately coincided with an economic theology bypassing the fact that the era of concrete political theology had its ultimate principle in authority of the sovereign’s decision [2].

Although never registered directly, the lesson of Hobbes for Schmitt resided in circumventing the rationality of the scientist and the technocrat, going as far as to mention Simone Weil’s critique of the codependency of the total state with the essence of technology [3]. The question of decision was Hobbes’ metaphysical solution to an “intra-evangelical war”, which introduced the immanentization of indirect powers unto the flatten space of civil society. In other words, for Schmitt, the true father of the “spirit and letter” of the Reformation was neither Luther nor Calvinism, but Hobbes’ Leviathan insofar as it was able to offer a third option against the secularization of a universal priesthood of the autonomous economic theology. But this is only the beginning of the problems, since we know that Hobbes’ political philosophy was dependent on “civil society” preparing the conditions for the liquidation of anti-normative decisionism. Schmitt himself was aware of this towards the end of his monograph on Hobbes as a farewell to state form. Hence, the epoch of political theology was brought to an end not through reformation, but through the ever-expansion of the operative sphere of the concept of the civil. The triumphant economic theology that has only intensified well into our days adequates to the fullest extent to the infrastructure of Hobbes’s project.

If this is the case, the differentiation that Schmitt establishes in Political Theology II between ius reformandi and ius revolutionis collapses, given that the solicitation of the autonomy of the social requires an ever-expanding outsourcing of administrative apparatus that will turn legality into the bin of administrative application (Verwaltungsrechts einzufügen unwissenschaftlich) [4]. And in the face of administration political theology loses its grip, and economic theology silently takes hold. The subsequent internal triumph of the verwaltungsrechts einzufügen will bring to an end the epoch of political theology. The ideal of the Reform took this challenge and brought it to the very anthropological core of humanity.

Notes

1. Eric Nelson. The Hebrew Republic (Harvard University Press, 2010), 8.

2. Carl Schmitt. “Die vollendete Reformation: Bemerkungen und Hinweise zu neuen Leviathan-Interpretationen”, Der Staat, Vol.4, 1965, 51-69.

3. Ibid., 66.

4. Ibid., 67.