Political Theology of Life

By Saitya Brata Das

Taking up the work of Meister Eckhart, F. W. J. von Schelling, and Soren Kierkegaard, Political Theology of Life formulates the task of an unconditional affirmation of life. Such a political theology consists of constructing a kenotic eschatology, which puts into question any political attempt to justify and legitimize any world-historical hegemony on a theological foundation. The work thereby argues that in today's neoliberal-secular world of narcissistic mass-consumption in the age of extreme capitalism, such an affirmation of life--released from the grasp of sovereign power--is the highest ethico-religious task of our time. The work shows that each of these thinkers--Meister Eckhart at the epochal closure of the medieval world, and Schelling and Kierkegaard from the heart of the epochal condition of modernity--has exposed open a dimension of infinitude and manifestation that can be truly inspiring for us; that is to say, in the abandonment of all worldly attributes lies a receptivity to the highest gift of beatitude, an opening to the infinitude that sanctifies our worldly existence, which is a radical gift arriving from an origin without origin and without foundation, a gift that does not have to be anchored in the nomothetic operation of worldly hegemonies.

Illumination Book Award winner in poetry
https://illuminationawards.com/20/2023-medalists

• Language: English
• Publisher: Pickwick Publications
• Release date: Feb 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9781666761559

Saitya Brata Das

Saitya Brata Das is associate professor at Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi. He is the author of the Political Theology of Kierkegaard (2020).

Book preview

Introduction

The Argument

What is the highest good of human life? In the responses to the question by Hellenistic philosophers as well as by modern philosophers of our contemporary times who are inspired by the Hellenistic philosophers, the question of the highest good/end is intimately linked with the question of life itself: the highest end is such happiness or joy—so joyous it is—that it is properly life itself, freed from the coercive forces of the world. In other words, the task to understand and also to realize what the highest end of human life is demands that we also understand what life in itself as such is. The task here is to link certain spirituality to knowledge, as expressed in the Greek thought of the care of the self ( hauto epimeleisthai ). Responding to the same question, however, St. Paul gives an entirely different answer: the fundamental task of human life does not lies in the care of the self but in the abandonment of the self to God. Christ’s last cry before he gave up his ghost, into thy hands I commend my spirit (Luke 23:46 ), sums up here the essence of the Pauline response. In this being abandoned—which is on the Cross—is given the radical gift of life itself, in the metamorphosis of the death into life, an eschatological event that is incomprehensible in human thought. In other words, St. Paul understands life eschatologically, as an eschatological gift, arriving from an immemorial origin, and utterly incalculable in human knowledge. It is this eschatological understanding of life that separates St. Paul from the Hellenistic philosophers as much as from modern philosophers such as Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault. It is only in faith which sees the invisible and hopes for the unhoped-for that life becomes the object of love and hope, wherein life becomes truly alive, as nonpossessed gift of creaturely life which is eschatologically open to an incalculable future. The introduction poses this question of life via a tentative introduction of the difference of life as such and the mere-being-alive (which is in the grip of the law), as the very task of this work: to pose and elaborate and develop a thought of life which is understood in terms of eschatology: life in the eschatological light of redemption, freed from the coercive powers of the law that renders life into the mere-being-alive. Such a task, then, becomes the very affirmative task of a political eschatology. It formulates itself in a style of a deconstruction of sovereign powers, that is to say: in the style of an eschatological suspension of the worldly law, the law that devaluates and depletes life by assimilating and incorporating the living individuals into the vast apparatus of distributed positions and points. Formulated in this way, the political eschatology of life puts into question the modern project of the kingdom of man, ¹ that is, the atheist humanism of modernity which conceives the human life biologically as mere-being-alive, as a quantity to be grasped in the cognitive constructions, or as logical attributes that can be verified. Taking the works of Meister Eckhart, Friedrich Schelling and Søren Kierkegaard for focused reading, the work argues that in these thinkers we find a radically eschatological understanding of life which exceeds the law of the world.

Bonum and Eudaimonia

This work deals with the age old question: wherein does consist the highest good—the summum bonum—of human life? If one associates this bonum with eudaimonia, as does the master of philosophers par excellence, namely Aristotle—then it appears that happiness (eudaimonia) is the highest good and the end (telos) of human life. Happiness is such good of human life, being its highest end, that there lies the very humanity of the human being: it is on this fecund soil that humanity flourishes in all its possibilities and capacities that it can attain. In this determination of bonum as the end of the human life (which, as we have seen, is none other than eudaimonia), there lies a certain understanding of what does it mean to be human and what does it mean to be alive. A certain metaphysical determination of humanity and life (or, rather, of human life) is here fore-grounded, a determination that is to remain decisive for more than two thousand years old history of philosophy. Here humanity is understood as primarily in terms of its natural possibilities and capacities: this bonum can be reached, attained and appropriated by the human out of the resources that are intrinsically given—and which we tend to neglect in the most proximate mode of our being—to us in such a way that it defines us as the human as such. As if, as it were, in the most proximate mode of our being we more or less live in a deficit way, and thus more or less we live a deficit life. Only by a movement of withdrawal from this most proximate mode of being we can have the possibility and actuality of attaining the bonum called eudaimonia wherein life realizes itself as its immanent possibility, as an intrinsic possibility of becoming life itself as life. In the most proximate mode of our daily life we get absorbed in manifold activities that demand our attention to such an extent that we are not even aware of the violence that we put into effect through our action, for example the violence that accompanies in our daily acts of transforming things into objects. That is why even though such possibility (of attaining the highest good) is immanent in us, living a life still demands a movement (of withdrawal—of the force of action, of the law of cognitive grasping) and an orientation to an end (telos) which can only be a methodical training in askesis. Here the given is to be understood as the immanent possibility of being human. This is important for us to keep in mind, since we will be interested in another mode of givenness which is not this one, which means, we will be interested in another concept of happiness (which we will call beatitude), and in another concept of life (to be understood eschatologically, and not on the immanent basis of human possibility).

In Aristotle’s ethics, this movement of withdrawal—which is also a movement ahead to its bonum—assumes the name and the task of contemplation. It is via such contemplative thinking such eudaimonia is attained, a kind of thinking with which the philosopher is primarily concerned, making it the privileged mode of her singular attention. This aristocracy of the philosopher has nothing to do with the privileges that come from the domain of oikonomia (household economy) or from politeia; it is rather an aristocracy of subtraction from the regime of forces and powers, the aristocracy of destitution of worldly privileges and honours. It is this aristocracy of destitution which is common to both the teacher (Plato) and the student (Aristotle), even though in other respects they differ from each other and even oppose themselves to each other: that is to say, destitution is a task in which contemplation assumes a singularly privileged position, a task out of which fundamental questions like what does it mean to be human? and what does it mean to live can be posed (and answered). The Greek ethics of life (Care of the self) cannot be understood without simultaneously posing and answering these basic questions concerning the human and life; they appeal to, or they presuppose a givenness which is an immanent possibility, intrinsic to the life toward which the attention of the philosopher is singularly directed and oriented, as the very telos of living and dying. It appeals to an art, an aesthetics, an education that is concerned with how to learn—living, finally; that is to say, it appeals to the work of appropriation of life—to itself, as it were to make life coincide with itself finally, and to make life touch finally at the extremity of its end, a possibility which is immanent to the one who is alive. In other words, the art, the aesthetics, the education, the hermeneutics of bonum (this bonum called eudaimonia) appeals to a certain metaphysics of life: that human being can indeed attain life as life out of its own-most possibility, the possibility that is inalienably its own, in such a way that it can also be its fundamental work, and this is because all its givenness is after all and before all an immanence. It is thus understood that the metaphysical essence of life resides in this most rudimentary and the most elementary mode (which is not a mode among others) which also is its highest (summum) end, its summit, its fulfilment (telos): that life opens itself in itself and ends itself in itself; and that life is nothing other than this passage between this in of the opening and the in of its end—that is, an immanent movement. The work or the task of life is thought to reside in realising, attaining and appropriating this in character of life: immanence is most proper to life itself, to the extent of constituting its own property, to be appropriated by the one who is alive. Not a fixed or static mode of being—rather immanence is not even a mode among modes or an attribute" among attributes—the metaphysical thought of life here as immanence rather implies the necessity of a movement of education (Paideia), a life-long work of askesis whose name is nothing other than philosophy itself, a task to give oneself a form of self (care of the self). The movement implied here does not take away the in character of life; rather it belongs to itself essentially in such a way the movement constitutes life’svery essence. In the Greek idea of the care of the self lies the self-sufficiency of the hauto that defines life itself; in other words, the work of life must model itself upon the hauto which appropriates life to itself and makes life self-sufficient. The stoics, basically Seneca in his letters to Lucilius, name this self-sufficiency of philosophical life—which the self accomplishes with its life-long philosophical work of askesis—as freedom which is to be won by the rigorous training that the self, without any exterior coercive power, gives to itself. Most proximally individuals do not realize that the essence of life is a self-relation and that it is its intrinsic possibility, implied in the very self-movement of living itself. This is why pedagogy (paideia) is necessary, training is an imperative, and a rigorous schooling is unavoidable. For Plato, for Aristotle too, this is the work of philosophical thinking and examining and orienting of the philosopher to himself to the accomplishment of the self-relation that constitutes life as life. The idea of philosophy itself—whether that is in Plato or in Aristotle, despite their irreducible differences—is indissociable from such a metaphysics and ethics of life based on the modality of the self-relation in the care of our soul, as though the essential determinates of life adhere themselves in our soul. Life as life, according to this modality, is life soulful. Here, the task of philosophy is seen to be intrinsically bound to the praxis of living itself: the task of philosophy is to free the possibility of the form of life from the constraints of external forces acting on it, to realize life in its most immanent possibility of a self-relation which makes life as life.

The Daimon of Eudaimonia

It is this daimon of eudaimon which is hermeneutically articulated as heautou epimeleisthai (care of the self) that haunts some of the most significant modern and contemporary philosophers like Friedrich Nietzsche and Michel Foucault in their tendency to return to Greek spirituality and thereby bypass nearly two thousand years of Judeo–Christian spirituality. In this reaction to Christian spirituality, especially that of Pauline Christianity (especially for Nietzsche) which Nietzsche dabbed as the intensification of the resentment to the world of becoming and degeneration from health to sickness (a process that has already started with Plato, the process which Nietzsche’s genealogy is meant to uncover), a return to the tragic spirituality of Greek ethical thoughts (Pre-Socratic thinkers and Stoic/Cynic thoughts for Nietzsche and late Hellenistic philosophers for Foucault) has become manifest as an exigency not only of thinking, but also living and dying. The Nietzschean Ecce Homo (To become what one is) as much as the Foucauldian hermeneutics of the subject² is informed by this ethico-spiritual thought of life which is modelled on the hermeneutic self-relation of the hauto through which the coercive operation of sovereign powers and of the law on us are sought to be absolved from. In this way, in their very distancing from the philosophical discourses of Enlightenment (Kant) and that of modernity (Hegel), Nietzsche and Foucault retain from these discourses this one essential feature, which is also the fundamental task of Enlightenment and of modernity: the whole logic of auto-nomos, the work of giving oneself a relation which in a way must exceed the operations of the law that come from institutions of worldly sovereign powers. This spiritual task of thinking life as life, as an end without means, life that is absolved from the means and end structure of the law—this life, modelled on the hauto—demands the liquidification and neutralisation of transcendence, that is to say, neutralisation of the hetero-nomos that appears to be the governing principle of Judeo-Christian spirituality of life. In other words, the divine sovereignty of Judeo-Christian spirituality is understood here to be the transcendental model for worldly sovereign powers; and as a result, their (Nietzsche’s and Foucault’s) critiques of world-sovereign powers were grounded, as the very condition of possibility of their critiques, in their neutralisation of any traces of transcendence. In this way both political theologians who are apologists of worldly sovereign powers on theological foundations and their critiques (Nietzsche and Foucault) which neutralise the eschatological stings of transcendence presuppose the deductibility of worldly authority from the transcendental, that is, from the theological foundation. God is understood here ontotheologically, that is metaphysically: God as the ground or anchorage of beings; God as the ultimate fantasm on which hinges the hegemonic regimes of worldly nomos; God as the transcendental authority on the basis of which world-hegemonic authorities are legitimized; God as the ultimate arché (principle) of the world. In Martin Heidegger’s deconstruction of the ontotheological constitution of metaphysics, it is from this metaphysical conception of God (as the ground of beings)—the God whom one cannot worship—that one takes a step back in order to make a new inauguration, which is a leap outside metaphysics.³ The question of the possibility of thinking God will henceforth arise against this problematic field: that of the limit of metaphysics and of the possible uncoupling of God from the question of Being.⁴

Thus, it is a misunderstanding if we think the Nietzschean and the Foucauldian return to the Greek heautou epimeleisthai as a simple rehabilitation, out of pure historical curiosity, of an ethical form of life that is more than two thousand years old; it is rather a transfigured model, a light transformed by having passed through the prism of a critical thinking which is political in nature: the necessity to think outside (or before) the resentment and degeneration of a metaphysics in which, according to them, the historical phenomenon (Christendom), and not just the religion called Christianity participates (Nietzsche); and the necessity to think outside the coercive operation of the law of sovereign powers (Foucault) that is manifest in certain instituted practices of the church (for example, confession). In the proximity of their thinking both Nietzsche the genealogical symptomatologist (the genealogy that diagnoses a sickness by examining its symptoms) and Foucault the hermeneutic critic of sovereign powers, return to a thought of immanence which offers them a possible form of life, a mode of being, which is modelled on a self-relation that is implied in heautou epimeleisthai. And we have seen that at stake in this return—which also is a transformation of certain spirituality—lies a certain deconstruction or critique of the politico-theological nexus which both these philosophers would attempt to uncouple by neutralising any traces of a transcendental model which would constitute as the ground of worldly sovereign powers. In this way both these philosophers, in their very respective critiques of the metaphysics of the Subject, remain faithful to the human, all-too-human project of immanence; they give themselves the task of the kingdom of the human uncoupled from any transcendence, that is, they envision an intra-mundane politics that would rehabilitate, while transforming it, the pre-Christian spirituality by linking it with something like truth. The declaration of the death of God thus precipitates the exigency of such an aesthetic of life, opening up a politics of affirmation at the end of a metaphysics, which they would find a remarkable affinity in pre-Socratic or in late Hellenistic ethos, without submitting such an aesthetic of life to any possible divine authority. In an entirely different register of thought, which we may call as phenomenological, such a self-relation of heautou epimeleisthai would also constitute the horizon of Patôcka’s phenomenological spirituality,⁵ although with a very different emphasis and projection, and for a very different reason.

What is common here among all these diverse thinkers such as Nietzsche, Foucault and Patôcka—to name only a few prestigious names—is an attempt to link knowledge to a certain spirituality which is philosophical in nature. It evokes a certain spirituality that the human being can achieve, attain and accomplish on her own as the essential work of her life without appealing to a being of transcendence that bursts into the order of our intra-mundane existence. It opens up the space for a certain askesis through which one may give oneself a form of life, a certain mode of being, a certain self-relation, and certain immanence: a creative becoming oneself. The Nietzschean and the Foucauldian (and also Patôcka’s spirituality)—despite the irreducible singularity that each one manifests—passes through these two thresholds: that of becoming oneself who nevertheless one already is. The hermeneutic self here—the hauto—pierces through these double thresholds, only to manifest its unitary structure, its immanence, which is that of giving a nomos of oneself to oneself. This self-giving nomos which is pregnant with explosive creativity (that Nietzsche would call, again appealing to the pre-Socratic thought, as Dionysian) and with an aesthetic plasticity that gives forms to oneself, this nomos is distinguished by them from the other nomos, this latter being that which forces itself from outside (hetero), or from beyond (trans), or from above (panopticon): all these (outside, beyond, above) being perspectives or positions through which the sovereign gaze of external institutions of the law looks at us, transforms us, interpellates us and subjectivizes us. Especially in the later Foucauldian hermeneutic of the subject such a deconstruction or critique of sovereign powers almost assumes, at least implicitly, something like a political spirituality, if not a political theology. It is remarkable that Foucault does not hesitate here to use the word spirituality to this task of linking knowledge to the care of the self. Foucault’s is a political spirituality in the sense that such hermeneutic or spirituality passes through the question of the (non)relation that life has with the law.⁶ Foucault’s, and also Nietzsche’s, return to the daimonic Greek thought of eudaimonia or to the Greek askesis of life—a return that has to make a tiger’s leap of two thousand years of this scandal and the foolishness called Christianity—cannot be understood without their confrontation with this immense, monstrous question of the law and its enigmatic relation both to theology and to politics. In their return to the Pre-Socratic or late Hellenistic thought, they thought they could skip the scandalous and foolish Paul’s Jacob’s struggle with the question of the law that has left in his very flesh an ineradicable thorn. And we will see soon that the question of the law constitutes such a thorn in the flesh in the whole Pauline theologia crucis as such. In the Nietzschean and Foucauldian return to the daimon of eudaimon there haunts such a Pauline thorn which is more explicitly visible in Nietzsche than in Foucault’s hermeneutics of the subject.

Let us now turn to Paul himself who links together life and the question of beatitude in a new manner, this time no longer on the modality of the care of the self, but on his kenotic theologia crucis: life must pass through the kenosis of God Himself, to find itself renewed through the event of resurrection.

The Other Thought

In the history of Paul’s reception not only Christ but Paul too has come to be seen as a scandal and a fool, an apostle who never met Christ and is not one apostle among others, but the one who is especially called upon to become an apostle (Rom 1:1).⁷ Paul is the separated one, the apart: the call sets him apart. This monstrosity of Paul of becoming an apostle without directly being an apostle of Jesus—this anathema has affected the reading of Paul’s epistles in Paul’s own times as much as our own, obscuring thereby the radicality of Paul’s subversion of the law: for the letter killeth, but the spirit giveth life (2 Cor 3:6). This radicality of Pauline spirituality lies in thinking spirit (Pneuma) eschatologically, that is to say, it does not merely replace or substitute an immanence (of the law) with another immanence (of life). This gesture of introducing an irreducible incommensuration between law and life cannot but be an anathema, not only to the philosophical rationality of the Greeks (with its care of the soul) but also to natural knowledge of the human individual that tends to understand itself on the basis of certain self-relation or self-sufficiency. This is because this paradoxical eschatology of Pauline spirituality puts itself on the cross of natural-human understanding, and out of this abyssal confrontation with the cross he wrenches for us an entirely new thought of what does it mean to be human and what does it mean to live life.

This new understanding of the human being as creaturely life is not understood in terms of the dominant metaphysical determination of life that is to be lived in the self-sufficiency that gives itself the freedom from the coercive forces of the world. The life that Paul himself lives is far distant from the philosophical life whose ontological structure can be called the self-relation of care. Paul, against this wisdom of the Greeks, exhorts us to live pneumatically which cannot be understood on the basis of the ontological structure of care: I am crucified with Christ: nevertheless I live: yet not I, but Christ liveth in me (Gal 2:20). It is not for nothing that this paradoxical saying which radically interrupts the symmetry of the self-relation (the symmetry wherein lies the wisdom, harmony and beauty of the Greek) and thereby opens us to the unthinkable diachrony of life that must pass through the abyss of death—this paradoxical salving, redeeming and saving life out of death (by an unthinkable event of metamorphosis of death unto life) is preceded by an equally paradoxical subversion of the law: For I through the law am dead to the law, that I might live unto God (Gal 2:19). Later on we will dwell more on this event of metamorphosis which will be an important way for us to think life as life, not on the modality of self-relation that constitutes hauto epimeleisthai, but in the eschatological light of the glory to come in the infinite sense of the verbal. We call this new thought of life that interrupts the symmetry of all self-care as creaturely life: it is the wounded life, exposed open to transcendence, always exceeding any self-relation, and beholding to the arrival of the end (eschaton) that arrives and catches us in surprise, for it comes to undo the operation of the worldly nomos.

The creaturely life, then, cannot be totalized by any constitution of self-relation. The verbality of the infinite to—the eschatological event of beatitude to come—that welcomes the event of metamorphosis has and will come to undo all symmetry that constitute the immanent foundation of all self-presence only in order to open us to a radical, incalculable arrival outside all totality of the world. This eschatological arrival is the coming of the Life itself that makes life truly alive in such a way because it is the essence of life itself. This life is not to be understood in a conceptual, essentialist, abstract, or even (Greek, but also of our modern) metaphysical sense but concretely, rendering each one life alive singularly, which demands that life must pass through the Cross of the immanence of self-sufficiency and of any possible aboriginal and autarchic self-relation. How to understand this?

Creaturely life is not its own origin and end. Non-autarchic and non-aboriginal, it is to be called creaturely, that is to say: it is created in a rhythm in which the radical gift—the gift of life itself—arrives. As the very event of gift, life is to be accepted by the creaturely being in gratitude, that is to say: in radical acceptance and recognition of its finitude, the creaturely being renounces the violence of possession, which is not the possession of this and that but the appropriation of the ground of its own being. The creaturely being, given in the gift as this finite being, is open to the infinitude—that is to say, to God—precisely by virtue of being finite, that is, by being the gift that it is: the gift of being. This is to say, if being could be possessed at all, then the creaturely life would not be what it is, that is—life. Only in the non-possession of its origin and end, and only in the grateful acceptance of the gift, life is truly what life is as this creaturely life: the image of God.

The creaturely life, then, is bound up with it being imago Dei: only as the image—nothing other, nothing else and nothing less than that of God—that creaturely life is creaturely life: the free, contingent act of God who, thereby, is free in relation to creation.⁸ There is nothing apart from the abyss of divine love—which binds the creaturely life to itself while setting it free to be alive, relatively distinct from Himself—that binds the created order to God: He binds the creaturely life with the bond of love so as to preserve it, as Bonhoeffer would like to say, for without this covenant of love, the creaturely life would immediately disappear without a trace.⁹ The divine love preserves the creaturely life from annihilation. To live creaturely life as the imago Dei then would mean something very different from what the serpent vainly promises (that is, to be Sicut Deus, to be like God). This is why Bonhoeffer juxtaposes the Sicut Deus with imago Dei: the Sicut Deus is the self-abnegation of the creaturely life, and constitutes the originary moment of evil. To be Sicut Deus is to make the violent claim on the part of creaturely life that it is