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RADICAL PHILOSOPHY 2.05 / Autumn 2019 Dimensions of the Schmittian Sovereign, Referring to It New Form of Power

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RADICAL PHILOSOPHY 2.05 / Autumn 2019 Dimensions of the Schmittian Sovereign, Referring to It New Form of Power The promise of a pantheist politics Saul Newman, Political Theology: A Critical Introduction (Cambridge: Polity Press 2019), 180pp., £15.99 pb., 978 1 50952 840 0 pb. In The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy, first published Newman’s central thesis is that ‘the problem of polit- in the midst of political turmoil in Weimar era Germany, ical theology is really the problem of power itself’. This Carl Schmitt attempted a theoretical amputation of lib- problem is approached through a staged confrontation eral parliamentarianism from democracy by excavating between conservatism and anarchism. On one side, the contradictory principles on which each was based. Donoso Cortés and Schmitt represent the conservative at- Some thirty years after Schmitt’s death, it would appear tempt to immunise the state against anarchism through his prophecy has been fulfilled. As Saul Newman writes, the sovereign moment of transcendent lawlessness. On today ‘a major rift has opened between liberalism and the other side stand Bakunin, Proudhon, Stirner and democracy’, a rift manifest in the prevalent demand for Agamben, who deny the need for transcendence and de- ‘closed borders and a strong state’, two marks by which mand an immanent anarchist politics. Yet, as Newman national sovereignty is known. Newman writes that the notes, these two positions offer a ‘curious mirror im- return of this ‘spectre’, the ‘phantasm’ of sovereignty, age’ of the state as an absolutist structure. While one is symptomatic of our ‘increasingly abstracted and vir- side affirms it, the other wants to abolish it. Newman’s tualised form of existence’. Yet, in his rejection of the core problem, then, is one that also plagues the works of abstract and virtual, (a rejection Newman finds in Max Agamben: how to provide an account for this alternative Stirner and anarchist thought), do we not hear, perhaps non-politico-theologico conception of politics? unexpectedly, a faint echo of Schmitt’s own demand for Central to Newman’s book is the ambition to ‘explore the concrete, for reale Möglichkeit? Rather than solv- the crisis of liberal politics and political theory through ing the ‘politico-theological problem’, Newman argues the problem of political theology’. The ‘problem of polit- (against Schmitt) for a profane politics that refuses to be ical theology’, or the ‘politico-theological problem’, as drawn towards political power, and instead works around Newman describes it, is ostensibly that political concepts and outside it. ‘are influenced, shaped and underpinned by religious cat- Newman’s Political Theology: A Critical Introduction egories’ – although precisely why and for whom this is a can be grouped with a number of recent texts offering ‘problem’ is at times difficult to grasp. Despite Newman’s contemporised readings of ‘political theology’, includ- univocal nomenclature, there seem to be a number of dis- ing recent works by Adam Kotsko, Elettra Stimilli and tinct problems that arise according to particular points Mitchell Dean, amongst others. These explore a number of view: for secularists, it is a problem that their con- of closely related questions on the theologico-political cepts are not secular enough; for Schmitt, it is a problem significance of contemporary issues, ranging from debt that secularists ignore the importance of sovereignty; and indebtedness to democracy, sovereignty and power. and, for anarchists, the problem is manifest as the per- While many of these works draw heavily from the same sistent demand of the general populace for substantial sources – Schmitt, Foucault and Agamben are central identity/unity in the form of transcendence. However, to most – Newman’s text is unusual in its attention to ultimately each of these points of view is equated with the anarchist theoretical tradition and includes signi- the ‘problem of power’. ficant discussion of Max Stirner and Mikhail Bakunin, This calls to mind Mitchell Dean’s The Signature of whose critical engagement with political theology is of- Power (2013), where, guided by Agamben, Dean attempts ten overlooked. In doing so, this work returns to ques- to develop an account of power encapsulating both sov- tions Newman had explored almost twenty years ago in ereignty (Schmitt) and governmentality (Foucault). New- From Bakunin to Lacan: Anti-Authoritarianism and the man, however, is concerned rather more with the former Dislocation of Power (2001). than with the latter. Newman emphasises the religious 98 RADICAL PHILOSOPHY 2.05 / Autumn 2019 dimensions of the Schmittian sovereign, referring to it new form of power. Through a series of short vignettes, as a ‘sacred concept’, the ‘redeemer and saviour of the Newman recounts the central debates of the twentieth people’. He acknowledges that ‘Schmitt is right in point- century on the subject of political theology, orienting ing to the structural recurrence of the problematic of each towards his question of power, and its vacant place sovereignty, which is revealed every time a social order in politics. The opening chapter alone includes a de- undergoes a crisis of legitimation.’ But for Newman, sov- tailed account of Schmitt, a commentary on Schmitt and ereignty is a phantasmic object of desire. It is a ‘para- Strauss and the conflict of reason and revelation based noid dream of identity – national, cultural, religious – largely on Meier’s reconstruction of their ‘hidden dia- asserted against any universalism’; a desirable but ul- logue’, and the theological responses from Peterson and timately unattainable moment of transcendence that Taubes. However, the real value of Newman’s work lies in arises whenever the present order is threatened. Today, his retrieval of a number of anarchist responses to prob- such a desire for transcendent authority derives from lems of politics. Eschewing Schmitt as a starting point, the demise of the technocratic neoliberal consensus, but he returns instead to Bakunin’s 1871 critique of Mazzini. in the 1920s it was the end of the nineteenth-century Bakunin’s criticism is that religion and idealist political aristocratic constitutional monarchies, and before that it theories begin by posing an abstract transcendent set was the disruption of political consensus caused by the of moral principles against the ‘materiality of life’. For Reformation. Bakunin, it is such pessimistic anthropologies that must A key premise adopted in Newman’s work is Claude be confronted with a materialist, atheist international Lefort’s claim that ‘modern democratic society ... is struc- socialism. tured by a symbolically empty place of power, left vacant This is followed by a rehabilitation of Max Stirner, by the absent body of the prince’. Utilising Lacan’s psy- who believes ‘the whole of secular modernity to be choanalytic nomenclature, Newman writes that religion haunted by the spectres of religion it had believed itself fills this structural deficit, no longer in the symbolic re- to be rid of.’ For Newman, the value of Stirner lies in his gister, but today in the imaginary. The result is a con- attempt to free ‘subjectivity from the fixed forms of iden- stant, insatiable desire for a point of transcendence, a tification’ which are characteristic of political theology, 99 but also contemporary ‘identity politics’. On this point, control’ is present on both the right and left; in the latter, the contemporary intervention intended by Newman’s as a demand for greater democratic control. The only work becomes apparent. In fact, one thread running exit is to be found, for Newman as for many others, in throughout the book deals with the logical proximity Benjamin’s controversial ‘divine violence’, identified as a of today’s identity politics to the Schmittian problemat- ‘pure means’, despite the fact that, for Newman, it offers ics of political theology. This critique of liberal identity a rather specific goal in the form of a ‘messianic promise politics is introduced through a rehearsal of Stirner’s cri- of the redemption of life.’ In any case, it is in Benjamin tique of Hegel and Feuerbach, culminating in Stirner’s that Newman finds the concept of a ‘spiritual anarchism’, distinction between insurrection and revolution, also central to his final vision of an escape. discussed briefly by Agamben in The Time That Remains. Shifting to the power located in government, New- Stirner fails to offer a ‘programme’ for politics, but he man turns to Foucault and Agamben. Foucault’s lectures does offer some ‘useful concepts’, Newman argues. Yet is on pastoral power lead to a conception of ethics as care Stirner’s critique of essentialism really valid as a critique of the self, while Agamben’s archaeology of economy of Schmitt’s conception of ‘the political’? provides a link with contemporary capitalism. These are One weakness of Newman’s text is its inadequate supplemented with Jacques Ellul’s writings on techno- attention to ‘the political’ as such. In particular, he logy and his religious mysticism. The aim is a rejection of neglects the relativised conception of politische Einheit technocratic visions of the machine-man of La Mettrie, (unity/entity) on which Schmitt’s works are based. In- which form the basis of the liberal technologist religion of stead, the field of possible positions is reduced to a dicho- progress. But here Newman struggles to align positions tomy between essentialist homogeneity, on the one hand, that remain in an uneasy tension. Newman embraces and radical singularity, on the other. This simplification the demand ‘to break down this economic-technical- overlooks Schmitt’s attempt to theorise a more flexible theological machine [of modernity] … and bring it back and relativised homogeneity, insofar as any distinction under human control’, but must distance himself from can be ‘intensified’ to the level of a properly political dis- any secular humanism of the kind criticised by Stirner tinction. For Schmitt, it is only this relative conception and ignore the fact that the demand for human control of identity that is necessary for the properly ‘political’ is itself a demand for a certain kind of transcendent sov- existence of population.
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