[PT 11.

1 (2010) 35-41] doi:10.1558/poth.v11i1.35

Political Theology (print) ISSN 1462-317X Political Theology (online) ISSN 1473-1719

THE ECLIPSE OF ESCHAtOLOGY: CONVERSING WItH TAUBESS MESSIANISm AND tHE COmmON BODY Antonio Negri*
Independent writer and researcher Rome

ABSTRaCT
In this article Jacob Taubess idea of eschatology is examined. Taubess own understanding of eschatology has profound implications on the very expression of political theology and political practice. If politicsas a practice assumes that time has a terminal point, than it will invariably change this practice and encumber and even neutralize political action of a commonbody that gives voice to the oppressed. This article agrees with Taubes in that eschatology must announce an end to itself, which is at once a birth of a postmodern possibility of the principle of immanence in which a commonbody announces its infinite possibility. The end of eschatology is the end of transcendence and the beginning of a struggle for liberating the infinite possibility of a common-body of labor. Keywords: eschatology, Jacob Taubes, multitude, postmodern, time.

Jacob Taubes has written only one book in his life. Or, rather, he has written many, published between 1942 and 1996, but it is always the same book, or chapters or notes from the same book, or even plagiarisms of itself. The title of this one book? I would propose The End of the Modern. But no, someone could object, Taubess book is a history of eschatology. Certainly: because the book on the end of the modern is a book about the survival and metamorphoses, and even the soul and continuity of eschatology as the essence of the modern. So, then, to speak of the end of the modern means also to speak of the end of eschatology. If, in the postmodern era in which we are living, I were able to make any recommendations to students who seek to enter a department of philosophy that actually might concern itself with the postmodern, in terms of books in which the philosophical

* Translated by Bruno Bosteels, Cornell University Press.

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thematics of modernity might be torn down and liquidated, I would propose the three books by Jacob Taubes that I have in my hands in Italian translation: Western Eschatology (Escatologia occidentale, Garzanti, 1997), The Political Theology of Paul (La teologia politica di San Paolo, Adelphi, 1997), In Diverging Agreement: Writings on Carl Schmitt (In divergente accordo. Scritti su Carl Schmitt, Quodlibet, 1996). These are books of exceptional erudition and extraordinary intelligence, the fruits of untimely relations and a kind of academic attention aiming for the anthological, and at the same time they are books that, like Chinese boxes, contain one within the other and thus end up representing the many facets of a didactic argumentation. At least, that is, if by didactic one understands the didacticism of the best Talmudic schools and, on the other hand, that of the typical seminars of the nineteenth-century German university. Therefore, as a title for this ensemble I propose: The End of the Modern. Taubes would not agree. For him, this is not how things stand. It is certainly true that the history of eschatology and that of modernity are superimposed and arrive at the same resultTaubes might admit this muchbut he would add: the end of modernity does not contain that of eschatology. On the contrary, eschatology offers the essential problematic schema to philosophy and to thinking in general (also in its secular and not only theological form), especially at the end of the modern. Eschatology abundantly exceeds the result of the modern and, in this sense, it is inexhaustible. To move beyond the modern could therefore only mean to assume, without mystifications, the unresolvable radicality of the eschatological question. But what, then, is in question in eschatology? According to Taubesand I dont see why we would not agree with him in this regardit is the question about the essence of history. A question that assumes the eschaton (the end) as limit and overcoming of history, that is, as the point from where history can be unfolded as subjective possibility, as real event, as affirmation of freedom. This dialectic of possibility, event and freedom is therefore a search for meaning which is situated between the possible and the real and which effectuates itself in the leap taken by whoever traverses their separation. Teleology, in the assessment of this leap, becomes apocalyptical. The enigmas of reason, the uncertainties of the will, the tensions of hope: all this requires a principle that might give it an eschatological solution. An opening principle that is an end, an end that is an opening principle. A God to come. In this sense eschatology presents itself as the experience of coincidence between the wherefrom and the whereto, as a question of the spirit about the what for. Eschatology always means revolution, because it seeks to reach a telos that would confer upon freedom the dimension of totality. Born in the domain of religion, identified in Israel with the place
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of revolution (which here consists in the becoming-people of a multitude grouping together, separating itself from every yoke, in alliance with God), the apocalyptical element further unfolds itself in a worldly realm: here it becomes the process of revelation of the spirit in history. In this process the spirit forms times and spaces, periods and figures of liberationwhich is the realization of the divinity. To the religious side of apocalypsis there thus corresponds an apocalyptical gnosis which absorbs the ontology of salvation into the dialectics of history. In every case a teleology of revelation dominates the outlook onto history, all the while retaining the dualism of possibility and the real as insoluble except in the revelation of the divinity. Taubes follows the definition of the eschatological demand and its formal characteristics with a history of the apocalyptical element which sees a place of origin in the conversion from the Old to the New Testament. Then, he defines the crisis of the principle of the modern era (between the Joachimite pre-Reformation and the revolutionary Anabaptist Reformation) as a place of renaissance. Finally, he identifies in the development of historicismbetween Lessing, Kant and Hegela central place of a new gnosis. Marx and Kierkegaard complete this history, transforming the crisis opened up, between the principle of incarnation in existence and that of the ecstasy of transcendence, into a definitive caesura. The ancient world of Christianity and the modern one, which had renewed eschatology in the coincidentia oppositorum, has come to a close. The world that opens up will not be able to renew eschatology, but it will renew its principle: a naked principle, a break between the no longer and the not yet in which we will have no other choice except to resist or to decide. The history of eschatology thus leads the demand for meaning into a definitive impasse, and negative theology has, as its corresponding gnosis, only a negative philosophy and a negative ethics. For Taubes, therefore, the definition and history of eschatology reach their conclusion in the end of the modern, but at the same time they restate the eschatological question as essential: to the latter it will be possible to give a negative answer, only a negative one, incarnated in decision and resistance. Resistance is religious, decision is secular and gnostic: both remain apocalyptical. It seems to me that the entrance into the postmodern negates this conclusion of Taubes and that eschatologyin all its formsis overcome and denied by the experience of the telos and the absolute in the way it presents itself after the end of the modern era. What is more: I believe that only the overcoming of the schema of negative thinking allows us to underscore all the way to the end that we are beyond the modern (in all its facets), enabling us to think in the present, radically.
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In what does radical thinking consist today? In eradicating every dualism, in accepting the horizon of absolute immanence as destiny. Ever since the modern, by transforming the transcendent into the transcendental, thereby once again mystifying the real, has forced us finally, in the crisis, to put our trust in those last specters of transcendence that we call resistance and/or decision, this nakedness has appeared to be immodest and unacceptable. A bizarre and ineffective mysticism has espoused this nakedness. The impotence of resistance and the cynicism of decision have joined themselves to the greatest dramas of our history: terrorism won on both sides. Resistance, decision: never did they seem so essential. But not in their nakedness! On the contrary, they are possible only when they are incarnated in real ontological assemblages. Not the void but plenitude is what they need. And in the postmodern, in the regime of immanence that it proposes, ontological radicality shows itself as constituent process, as the commonality that precedes and forms the condition of every resistance and every decision. It is not to God but to the plural and articulated ensemble of relations, of communication, of the formative processes of meaning that we answer; it is not to a limiting measure, but to an explosion of values, to a measureless excess of potentiality, that we remit ourselves. In the common context, which is where the postmodern manifests itself, precisely there where every transcendence has been eliminated. Nor is time anymore what modern eschatology wanted it to be; it is no longer the arrow that carries the value of life elsewhere. In the postmodern, time is an intensity, and every instant is eternal, charged with responsibility and constituent potentiality. There is no more transcendence. Let us assume, as an example of the end of eschatological thinking, the metamorphosis of the theological virtues: faith, hope and love. Who would any longer accept the way this problem is situated with the dialectic between justification by faith or by love? And yet we know, and Taubes insists on this, that at least starting with Paul of Tarsus, two different eschatological arrangements take shape around this alternative. These are spectral images in a worldour own postmodern worldin which faith in life (the adherence to eternity) is not possible without love of the other (without the constitutive consistency of the common). The theological end in this case is completely absorbed in a new ontological condition, in which the postmodern common radically grounds existence. And hope, who would accept to entrust it to the arrow of time? Time is no longer something inside of which action unfolds but it is constitutive of the action of the multitude. Hope is the actuality of life as lived; it is the overabundance of the potentiality of affects; it is freedom freed of the eschaton. The telos consists in the construction of community, in its absolute self-affirmation: not teleological but tautological. Rebellion
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itself and its destructive capacity are absolute potentiality, end in itself, revelation of a common that preconstitutes its form and its figure. Pauls negative nomos is not governed by expectant waiting but by the common; the common body of believers is not mystical but productive. Why continue then with the anachronistic reading of Taubes? In part, we already gave a hint of an answer above: because his work is an excellent introduction to the self-destructive definition of the modern. A didactic self-destruction. Perhaps Franz Rosenzweig did better for theology, Walter Benjamin for the theory of history, and Carl Schmitt for political theology: but Taubes offers us the sum. And in his didacticism, apart from those great figures, he includes the general accomplishments of philosophical culture from between the two wars, seizing on the two names of Marx-Kierkegaard as the apex of the crisis. True, the one excluded from Taubess synthesis is Heidegger, who always appears marginally and somewhat caricatured, whereas his historical place is actually that of the final destroyer of the modern-eschatological which Taubes exhumes as the form of thinking to come. The exclusion is therefore appropriate. In fact, from this point of view, we can see the complete insanity of negative thinking from Heidegger on, which finally goes back to the mystical. No, Taubes suggests, this road is foreclosed, Heidegger is a tombstone on the modern, and therefore, he adds, he wants to know nothing of him. Precisely, because from Heidegger no dialectical somersaults are possible from crisis to mysticism; the nakedness of being in Heidegger is a deadly rigidity. (It is useless to add that this deadly rigidity is certainly more alive in modern phenomenology than in the form of eschatology that persists in Taubes.) Implicit in the one already mentioned, there is another good reason for reading Taubes, which we can find by developing and bringing to their conclusion two cues that he offers in his work for the definition of teleology. Now Taubes precisely recalls for us that teleology and axiology, the theory of the end and the theory of value, always go together. But, put differently, this connection which in eschatology is underlined in a special way carries with it another connection: that which presses (and/or subordinates) the rhythm of time to a principle of value, which defines the limit prior to the development, and consequently puts the command (as science of the limit) before the action (as freedom in time). This description corresponds to modern philosophy which from Platonic transcendentalism drawsby transforming it into a transcendental principlethe science of command, with the arch being the principle and the command and, thus, the end-goal. Paradoxically, by emptying the relation between teleology and axiology of all content and making it into a formal structure of consciousness, Taubes contributes to offering us, by way of a diagnostic, the
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definitive critique of the teleological thinking of modernity. In sum, he poses eschatology against teleology: naked eschatology against the teleological ornaments of the modern. If these are negative reasons that justify the reading of Taubes, there are also positive ones. First of all from a philological point of view. In the end, Taubes suggests that modern thought is none other than a formidable metaphor of religious eschatologism. And in performing this philological labor of referring the secular to the religious, he opens crucial critical perspectives for us. These are useful as long as we do not forget that modern thinking is always a thinking of power, that metaphysics in the modern era is always a way of expressing the political. Such metaphors can above all be found in the meditations of those who, in the era of which Taubes himself is a product, managed to intuit the crisis of the modern. They thus often interpret the emptying out of the contents of eschatology exactly in the way Taubes does, as an exaltation of its forms. And these forms dramatically present themselves to us as tragedy in the realm of ethics. Even those who prefer the harsh ontological school of Heideggerianism (or that formally colorless one of Wittgenstein) cannot remain insensitive to the poetry and the self-destructive precursors of the modern, in its eschatological version. It is true that this language has led many to a bout of indigestion! And even the fascination of apocalyptical terms such as foreign life, stranger, errancy, nomadism, awakening, calling and so on has invested the unhappy consciousness of the crisis. And then there are the words of rebellion, resistance, the affirmation of singularity: these too metaphorize the ancient dogma and its modern use in favor of control, but they open up spirals onto a life with no more teoleological illusion. As for us, more so than to any of the above we turn our attention to two metaphors that may seem secondary, and perhaps they are, in the course of the process of secularization and divestiture that the eschatological tradition of the modern undergoes and that can still be of use to present a postmodern thematic. These two terms are body and the common. The body, then. Perhaps this is one of the few elements in the eschatological tradition, in its matrix, that the modern has not been able to take up and mystify. I have had this impression every time when, in the recitation of the Christian Credo, I heard the verse about the resurrection of the dead. It is clear why modern eschatologism has not been able to digest this affirmationwhich nonetheless might have been appropriate to some of the implications of its material axiology (for example, in the genesis of capitalism). The Platonic contamination, the Gnostic trend in the reception of eschatology impeded this. Perhaps it is only in certain philosophies of medicine that this corporeal spirit reappears: it is not a
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coincidence that these always had something to do with materialism and, today, in some cases, they represent strong premises for the development of philosophical thought beyond modernity (Canguilhem, Foucault, for example). Now it is precisely in the eschatological thought of the body that we find some metaphorical elements that are useful and adequate to the advancement of thought in postmodernity. Because the eschatological body is a full body, made up of all qualities and miseries, of each of the passions and desires that pertain to it. What is more: for the same reason, by extending itself and becoming collective, the body remains fixed in its materiality. The mystical body of eschatology is a potent metaphor of the biopolitical body of postmodernity. The transvalued body of labor. All the more so when we push the metaphor of the body toward the notion of the common, or rather from the common to the ecclesia. In this case too the modern has absorbed the ecclesia or the common as body, by castrating it: it could subsist and reproduce itself only by subordinating itself to the Platonic principle of teleology. Only the principle could allow the common to develop itself, only God could allow the intellect, the affects, the cooperation of the multitude, to become reality. State and Church were born under the same Platonic cover. By contrast, the eschatological common bore its own potentiality (potenza) within itself. We will therefore be able to use the postmodernism if only to be summonsed by its metaphor. Because in it we capture the intuition of that principle of immanence that the postmodern assumes for the definition of its departure from the nihilist tragedy of the modern. Antonio Negri is an independent researcher and writer.He has been a Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Paris and a Professor of Political Science at the University of Padua.He is the author of many books including Time for Revolution, Insurgencies: Constituent Power and the Modern State, The Savage Anomaly, and with Michael Hardt, Empire, Multitude, and Commonwealth.

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