A THEOLOGICAL POLITICS
Here, then, I thought, is a book that has long been crying out to be written. In Radical Sacrifice Terry Eagleton seeks to package, for the benefit of his friends of the political Left, two truths, drawn from the world of theology (of all places!), which he believes to be as indispensable to the success of revolutionary endeavour as they are unfamiliar to revolutionary ears. What, after all, has theology to do with revolutionary politics? Well, first, we have Eagleton’s curious claim that sacrifice in some form is integral to any conceivable social order. Second, the claim that that there is, at the heart of Christianity, a self-transcending transform of sacrifice with the power to turn the social order on its head. For the political revolutionary, therefore, two things follow. In its generic (not specifically Christian) sense the sacrificial phenomenon needs to be understood by anyone who is serious about revolutionary change; sacrifice is part and parcel of what they are up against. Moreover, in its specifically Christian sense, sacrifice is something with which the radical Left has a common cause. As Eagleton grandly concludes, sacrifice, in this self-transcending form, is ‘synonymous with revolution’. News to the Left, no doubt – and many Christians too!
In essence, this is John Milbank’s theological politics in digestible form. It is no discredit to Eagleton’s book to say this, since packaging Milbank’s big ideas for the wider audience they undoubtedly deserve is no easy job. The problem is not just that Milbank speaks as a theologian to theologians; his entire manner of presentation is through polemical engagement with other scholars. The essence of his thought needs to be extracted from the theological polemic so that their relevance and application can be made plain to those who haven’t the space and time in their lives to be bothered with where Milbank stands in relation to this or that contemporary thinker. This, then, is the hope I placed in Eagleton’s book. How far my expectations were met is a matter to which I shall return in a moment. But first I want to give you an impression of what these big ideas about sacrifice amount to in practice.
Human rights without political status?
The current European refugee crisis can help us to see this in concrete terms. It demonstrates – for all the rhetoric of human rights – how whatever rights people do or do not enjoy in practice are indexed to political identities that seem wholly contingent. I think that children see this straightaway – and I speak here from my experience of discussions with my own. From their naïve perspective, it is not obvious why the rights we possess as humans should depend on an accident of birth that makes us a child of English parents rather than, say, Syrian or Eritrean ones. Still more disquieting is the fact that these political identities, which in practice determine our rights and opportunities in the world, seem to be constituted by an a priori exclusion. So it is all very well to talk ‘human rights’. These ‘rights’ are in practice mediated through our belonging within a national state – a form of identity that is neither natural (e.g. being a women) or elective (being a Muslim), but constituted through the creation of an abstract space through the drawing of an arbitrary frontier. What, the child in us asks, would be left to the human who somehow fell between the cracks, and ended up deprived of state identity? The latter question has, in fact, been recently posed in real life by the case of ISIS terrorist who have effectively rendered themselves stateless: who are passed from one state or terrorist group to another, or are left to languish indefinitely in Guantanamo, or liquidated by drone strikes without any formal process of war or peace. Personally, I have little sympathy ISIS terrorists. But the point here is not the rights and wrongs of such cases, but the uncomfortable questions they raise about the status of bare humanity when considered apart from any of the privileges and protections normally guaranteed by a form of contingently assigned status. Does not the very existence of exclusionary identities such as those pertaining to the state raise, in and of itself, the question of what is owed to the ‘bare forked animal’? Do we possess no rights whatsoever by dint of simply being human?
The political scientist, Giorgio Agamben, poses this very question in terms of the homo sacer. This was a somewhat notional figure of Roman juridical mythology whose purely animal status outside the protection of the ancient polity, destitute of legal status, and exposed to whatever violence someone might choose to inflict, apparently served to manifest the role of statehood itself in elevating the ‘animal’ (Aristotle’s zoon) to the fully human status of the ‘political animal’ (Aristotle’s politikon zoon). It did this by demonstrating the power of the state to withdraw the status of humanity it had previously conferred, leaving a pitiable animal vestige with no claim to human dignity or respect.
For the theologian, John Milbank, this zero-status of the homo sacer – that of the ‘bare forked animal’ – is precisely the ‘status’ assumed by God in Jesus Christ, subject to a triple expulsion from tribe, state and empire. Hence it is also the status glorified at the Resurrection. God’s brutal inversion of worldly values poses a radical challenge, Milbank argues, to all those this-worldly forms of social order – ancient and modern – that create identity top-down through abstract definitions of social space which unify through exclusion (such as the state). But it also opens up a new space for alternative forms of social order constituted bottom-up through the free and creative associative exchange between human animals, now untrammelled and unconstrained by exclusionary identities. The citizenship of the city of God (which Milbank finds developed in Augustine and Aquinas) makes no distinction between the zoon (animal) and the politikon zoon (political animals) but accords full status to the human animal in its native condition.
Milbank’s big idea
So where does sacrifice come in?
Well, Milbank (following Agamben) aligns himself with the naïve perspective of the child, described above, for whom the acceptance of privileges conditional on the exclusionary social order of the state suggests the betrayal of an unconditional right deriving from some prior Edenic order of existence to which we all belong as children of God. There is something resembling a quid pro quo here. A Faustian bargain struck in primal time whereby a limited and temporary security is bought at the price of the forfeiture of something better that would have been ours, had we been less obsessed by fear and more trustful of divine Providence. It is this quid pro quo which Milbank terms sacrifice. He finds it reflected concretely in the symbolism of the multifarious sacrificial institutions of archaic polities in which something substantial is given up (in sacrifice) to propitiate the divine guardians of a collective exclusionary identity. In modern states we see the same sacrificial paradigm exemplified in the rendering up of real human flesh and blood on the field of battle in order to maintain the ‘fiction’ of state identity.
This then is the generic sacrifice. The self-transcending sacrifice (which, incidentally, Milbank – unlike Eagleton – does not normally call sacrifice) finds its pattern in the yielding up by Jesus of his whole life. This action of Christ’s is not constrained by the need to obtain, at exorbitant price, some putative collective benefit, but freely grounded in the faith he has in the capacity of the divine generosity to guarantee us against all loss – a capacity that renders the quid pro quo of the traditional sacrificial pact utterly redundant. This model of Christ serves in Christianity as a paradigm of reciprocal exchange and conviviality. Liberated from the fear of scarcity, our gifts are free to respond creatively to the challenge of every occasion, without concern for the possibility of scarcity following potential default.
This theology of radical sacrifice is deployed by the leftist Milbank as a machine de guerre against all symbolic (i.e. exclusionary) social structures. The ideology of the ‘liberal state’ is, for him, just the latest manifestation of the idolatrous quid pro quo that substitutes exclusionary political identities for faith in the coming of the Kingdom of God.
This, then, is Milbank’s (and Eagleton’s) big idea. What interest it has for today’s political left-wing, I would not venture to judge, as I am not one of their camp – though the grandeur of the conception, and its linking-in with so many preoccupations of recent and contemporary theory certainly suggest a bridging of the divide some of us are tempted to posit between theology and radical politics. But how successful a job does Eagleton do in conveying all this?
‘Radical sacrifice’ – or ‘a certain ironic mode of living’
Here I have to acknowledge some disappointment – and if very few citations of Radical Sacrifice have so far figured in this blog, this is not, unfortunately, without cause. In fact, I can hardly remember a book where I have found the promise of world-shatteringly important content so belied by the actuality of an author’s text.
The problem is partly one of methodology. Eagleton’s manner of approaching his subject reminds me of rambling lectures by university English professors, or the more tediously academic essays sometimes featured in the Times Higher Education Supplement. On the author’s part they seem chiefly to serve the purpose of demonstrating a command of the subject-matter and the ability to weave a subtle intellectual dance. On the recipients’ side, they affirm the superiority of those of us who have ‘done the reading’ and are clever enough to follow all the speaker’s dialectical twists and turns. It is essential to both sides that the texts and theories which form the subject matter of these disquisitions remain unstated – or at least understated. The effect is rather like listening to a very complex musical theme and variations, or a subtle jazz improvisation, without any bald statement of the initial theme. If you haven’t identified that theme, the chances are you’re already lost! These lecture-room games are sort of fun. But they are entirely out of place in any book with a serious message to convey. And the fundamental nexus of ideas that constitutes the burden of Eagleton’s message about sacrifice remains inadequately articulated due to his constant flying off after outlying themes and relevant ‘intertexts’ that demonstrate connections with everything else he has ever read!
More serious, however, is the way that Eagleton actually ‘mashes’ the message. And this is the main reason why it has been difficult to cite passages from his book. The fault is largely due to the kind of literary eclecticism that tends to go along with the approach we have just described and positively eschews the clarity of crucial distinctions. It is also, as I shall presently show, something to do with Eagleton’s unfortunate predilection for dubious psycho-analytic explanations of the contemporary sacrificial quid pro quo over Milbank’s historico-political ones. (E.g. ‘The very structure of the ego is sacrificial, deferring gratification so that history might be borne.’) A combination of two leads to statements such as the following:
Psychoanalytically speaking, the act of disavowal involves both spurning and preserving, and this is also true of the scapegoat. The polis may be keen to cast this rough beast but it also wants to assimilate something of its uncanny power, one rendered all the more efficacious by its being thrust into the ambiguously death-dealing, life-giving borderlands of the political order.
Eagleton does not appear to appreciate that to assent to this view of the ‘scapegoat’ (here = homo sacer), as he appears to do, is to remain stuck in the archaic perspective of a pre-Christian, non-self-transcending sacrifice. One cannot follow Christ’s invitation to leave the city of the sacrificial quid pro quo behind and build in the new space opened up beyond the antique city by God’s elevation of the homo sacer, if one remains in the situation of Theseus’ Athens, ‘tapping into the formidable restorative power’ of an Oedipus venerated in one’s midst. There’s no getting round it, there really is a ‘crucial’ difference between the Kingdom of God and mythological Athens. You need to choose one or the other, you can’t have both – however you much you may appreciate both Jesus and Sophocles on a ‘literary’ level, they are really not saying the same thing in different ways! Christ occupied the role of the homo sacer once and for all, so that there would be no more homines sacri, not so as to institute some new posthumous cult of the homo sacer!
‘A capacity for the loss of humanity, then, is constitutive of humanity’, Eagleton grandly concludes. Yes, one wishes to add – but only when seen from the perspective of the non-Christian polity. For Aquinas, as Milbank demonstrates, such a ‘loss’ is simply not possible – or even seriously thinkable. Humanity is not ‘constituted’ but already given by God in the human animal, and its loss cannot therefore be ‘constitutive’.
The outcome of this deplorable fudge is that Eagleton’s ‘sacrifice’ ceases to be ‘radical’; it’s just the same old sacrifice that it always was! We end up with what he himself describes as ‘a certain ironic mode of living’, according to which ‘the point is … to acknowledge the precariousness of differences while continuing to hold fast to their necessity’, or ‘to shield one’s eyes from the terror of the sacred while at the same time tapping into its formidably restorative power’.
‘A certain ironic mode of living’: Wow! Now that really is radical!
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STEVEN PINKER: ENLIGHTENMENT NOW!
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