Cities on the Plains: Divinity and Diversity

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Author: Char Roone Miller

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Copyright material from www.palgraveconnect.com - licensed to Taiwan eBook Consortium - PalgraveConnect - 2011-03-03

Cities on the Plains

10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller



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Divinity and Diversity Char Roone Miller



Cities on the Plains

cities on the plains Copyright © Char Roone Miller, 2009. All rights reserved.

Where this book is distributed in the UK, Europe and the rest of the world, this is by Palgrave Macmillan, a division of Macmillan Publishers Limited, registered in England, company number 785998, of Houndmills, Basingstoke, Hampshire RG21 6XS. Palgrave Macmillan is the global academic imprint of the above companies and has companies and representatives throughout the world. Palgrave® and Macmillan® are registered trademarks in the United States, the United Kingdom, Europe and other countries. ISBN: 978-0-230-61355-3 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available from the Library of Congress. A catalogue record of the book is available from the British Library. Design by Scribe Inc. First edition: August 2009 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Printed in the United States of America.



First published in 2009 by PALGRAVE MACMILLAN® in the United States—a division of St. Martin‘s Press LLC, 175 Fifth Avenue, New York, NY 10010.

For my daughter, Calissa,


the most beautiful words in the book





Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: Cities and Gods: The Return of Political Theology

1

1

Sodom: Hospitality and Conflict

25

2

Athens: Demons of Decision

51

3

Rome: Demons, Destruction, and Difference

79

4

Córdoba: Belief and Belonging

109

5

Washington DC: Divine Desire for Destruction

123

6

Conclusion: Cities of Refuge

143

Notes

157

Bibliography

171

Index

183



Contents




Many people deserve my thanks for the inspiration, assistance, and the criticism they offered this book. I especially want to thank William Connolly, Douglas Dow, Robert Dudley, Mario Feit, Anthony Lang, Steve Johnston, Anthony Wahl, and Georgeanne Usova. I would also like to express my gratitude to Calissa, Dale, Georgeanne, Kai, and Louvena for providing everything I need.



Acknowledgments




Cities and Gods The Return of Political Theology

Consider what the Capitoline is now, and what It was before: You will say the latter belonged to some other Jove. —Ovid, Ars amatoria The case of this city is like the case with natural beings. —Averroes, Averroes on Plato’s Republic The question may be raised why we chose precisely the past of a city to compare with the past of the mind. —Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents

O

n the plains of Mamre, Yahweh visited five cities. His violent destruction of the city of Sodom, one of those cities, issued sulfurous warnings to anyone who would disobey social and divine standards—warnings that haunt our secular, disenchanted, relativistic, and disorderly age. Yahweh, apparently, had a lot at stake in the behavior of cities. So do we. Ancient gods continue to trouble modern politics. Structurally, theological conceptions continue to pervade political concepts. Gods continue to supply examples for conceptions of the individual human,



Introduction

CITIES ON THE PLAINS

particularly in accounts of “strength” and “will”—as illustrated by George W. Bush’s prayer for “strength to do the Lord’s will” in response to the destruction of the World Trade Center. His request for divine help and strength evoked conceptions of justice, strength, and purpose not simply rooted in Christianity but made possible by Muslim, Jewish, Roman, and Greek gods and their relations to the activities of human states or cities. Contesting with and against those gods, I argue, can transform ideas of purpose, strength, and justice to such a degree that we reimagine ourselves as people with a greater desire for greater difference. In spite of our lack of belief (or our belief), we still live with many of these gods and with their warnings—warnings that may concern their own destruction, not just ours. The gods return to politics and life, even without our belief. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra once remarked, “When gods die, they always die several kinds of death.”1 When gods live, I’d like to add, they live many kinds of life. It is no surprise that gods continue to play a role in contemporary politics, as we can recognize in the speculation concerning Barack Obama’s religious belief, Jacques Chirac’s defense of laïcité (secularism) in the French public schools, or the electoral victory of Recep Tayyip Erdogan as Turkey’s prime minister. Gods continue to order ideas of justice, strength, and purpose for many people in the Mediterranean and Atlantic worlds. That gods continue to live in popular political debate surprises no one. That gods continue to live within political theory may be more surprising. Political theory, in fact, seems in the midst of its own second, third, or even fourth coming. Liberals, Marxists, feminists, Lacanians, democrats, radical democrats, postmoderns, and other good (and bad) secular political theorists have recently turned to the role of gods in our political imaginations. As strange a set of pew-fellows as Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou, William Connolly, Jacques Derrida, Jacques Lacan, Gianni Vattimo, and Slavoj Žižek (particularly in their responses to Carl Schmitt, Leo Strauss, and Hans Blumenberg) have increasingly been read as theorists of political theology.2 Why do gods remain so lively within political theory? What do these different 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


2

3

approaches share that make gods such compelling objects? As Jacques Derrida asked in a late essay, “Why is this phenomenon, so hastily called the ‘return of religions,’ so difficult to think? Why is it so surprising?”3 For a genealogical exploration of the role of the divine in civic and individual subjectification (and to follow good example), Cities on the Plains visits five cities important to an excavation of possibilities for humans and gods, at least for conceptions tied to Mediterranean and Atlantic gods. The cities of Sodom, Athens, Rome, Córdoba, and Washington DC exemplify different religio-philosophical moments of cities accused of offending the gods. There is nothing timeless about gods, their behaviors, or their demands; they occur within a discourse, a discourse with a history. This book explores that history. In order to understand why gods continue to visit political theory (and, by association, political discourse) I examine the historical moments that produced the current debate about gods in political theory. This book examines how gods continue to bedevil political theory and political discourse. The surprise might lie in the return of supposedly deceased elements of even very ancient gods. In spite of our myths of a rational and secular society and of rational and autonomous individuals, concepts of rationality are structured, mortared, and imbricated with theological assumptions. Dead gods continue to live within our political thought and language. Gods were important elements in the development of political concepts, as well as ideas such as freedom or time (not to mention “sovereignty”); still carry connections to earlier concepts of gods. As Carl Schmitt has claimed (with some exaggeration): “all significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts” (Schmitt 2005, 36). These gods with their theological concepts may pass away, but their remains (the spaces they leave behind) still retain significance within the “form of life” that gave meaning to the languages in which the terms were deployed. Of course we continue to speak of gods, they are in the language; or, moreover, as Lacan suggests, it is not so much that we 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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speak the language as the language speaks us. This book explores how this language speaks us through a chapter-by-chapter examination of politico-theological accounts of humans and gods, beginning with the relationship between people and gods valued by the authors of Genesis. An exploration of Athens—as the relationship between the people and gods plays out in a new internal and individual place—complements the reading of Genesis. The polytheism of those voices is then explored with the discussion of “evil” in the chapter on Rome. The chapter on Córdoba follows with an examination of the role of “belief ” in the relationship between humans and gods for Abrahamic faiths. Finally, the book concludes with a look at how gods express our desire for our death and their death. Sifting through the language of ancient (and contemporary) texts, I attempt to find new ways for people to live with and without gods. Methodologically, Cities on the Plains is designed as both a response to theological concerns in contemporary political theory and as a more broadly accessible examination of familiar political issues touched by the divine—such as gay marriage, 9/11, or the recent tensions concerning religious tolerance and secularism. Concerns of difference and the divine are pursued through broadly familiar texts (the Bible and Gore Vidal), significant texts of political theory (Plato and Augustine), and less common texts (Averroes). I read these books hospitably—allowing them a certain respectful distance even as I read them in a context created out of engagement. That is, I read these books as William Connolly has suggested, “as if they were interesting strangers who have moved in next door (or down the hall).”4 The goal of this reading is a politically pluralist one—to expand not only the care and recognition we offer for the lives and ideas of others who appear very different from us but also to conceive of our needs and desires for such difference. Apollo’s command to humans on the pronaos, the inner portico, of his temple in Delphi to “know yourself ” turns out to be an invitation to learn about yourself by entering into the temple of a god. Thus gods, or the intellectual territory they occupied, become an almost essential 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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CITIES AND GODS

5

Cities “Hence, in so far as the general plan of the treatise demands and my ability permits,” wrote Augustine, “I must speak also of the earthly city—of that city which lusts to dominate the world and which, though nations bend to its yoke, is itself dominated by its passion for domination” (City of God, 40). The earthly city that Augustine described was never only of the earth—cities typically represent the divine baptism of place and people. The ancient city existed as a location made special by the gods—the earthly city was always a heavenly domain. For the ancient Mediterranean peoples, including Jews, Greeks, and Romans, the founding or maintanance of a city was a religious act. Cities confirmed the strength of the people and their gods. Psalm 48 exclaims, “what we had heard we now see in the city of the Lord of hosts, in the city of our God, founded to last forever . . . consider the ramparts, examine its citadels, that you may tell future generations: ‘Yes, so mighty is God, our God who leads us always!’” This city testified to the strength of the god.5 The earliest ancient Greek cities, marked by temples and agoras, were founded at the direction of oracles; as for example, in the command of the Oracle of Delphi that a Greek from Megara named Byzas travel to the Bosphorus and found a city that would eventually be called Byzantium. Even as Greek cities became more rationally ordered, they retained religious meanings. Hippodamus, according to Aristotle the creator of the first rational city plan, divided and geometrically ordered the city in the belief that the geometric knowledge acquired from the Egyptians had sacred meaning.6 Even the Romans, influenced by the Etruscans, designed and founded cities in order to attract the attention of the gods through an elaborate ritual of carving out the earth surrounding the city to distinguish the orderly 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


feature of the political; contesting with these gods can help us visit, defend, and desire (to paraphrase Deleuze and Guatarri) new cities and new peoples.


space of the city from the chaos of the wilderness. Attention from the gods, of course, is not always a good thing. The cities of Sodom, Athens, Rome, Córdoba, and Washington DC were, in many accounts, visited by divine punishment for the entire city because of the sins of a few members of the city, as most commonly exemplified by the city of Sodom. They exemplify moments important to the development of the language of politics, particularly by demonstrating the connections between conceptions of individuals, cities, and gods (the something outside of human materiality) that triangulate the intellectual territory called political. As a genealogical examination of contemporary political subjectivity, this book explores the political consequences of this intersection of city, god, and self. This exploration of the contemporary discourse of gods examines the historical deployment of gods around the construction or maintenance of the idea of a polis. These five cities, mostly capitals of kingdoms, republics, or empires, each illustrate different historical moments in the development of contemporary subjectivity. Every chapter focuses on a distinct element of these moments—particularly obedience, difference, belonging, and self-hatred—that was deployed in response to the political demands of establishing states. Examining the return of the gods within political theory helps to illustrate the utility of the gods, as well as the ideas of human subjectivity that they help maintain in light of the needs of political institutions, such as cities, states, or empires. This book approaches this utility with an interest in reimagining human subjects as more resistive toward and contestable with institutional and territorial power. Cities on the Plains attempts to excavate some alternative elements from these cities that may lead to a subjectivity that needs, recognizes, and defends a greater variety of difference at a personal and political level and is not so attuned to the demands of sovereign nations or absolute gods. The goal of this project is to exhume possibilities from the imperial metropolis. The life of the city involves knowledge, desire, memory, remainders, innovations, 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


6

7

and transformations moving through many different connections and conduits.7 Freud, in Civilization and its Discontents, suggested mysterious and ghostly forces of memory and presence with the metaphor of the city. He began his examination of civilization and its critics by modeling the mind on the city, which supplied him with a metaphor for the possibility that the mind retains terms and ideas from a past (Freud 1962, 16). Freud claimed “that in mental life nothing which has once been formed can perish—that everything is somehow preserved and that in suitable circumstances . . . it can once more be brought to light” (Freud 1962, 16). Although the problem was introduced as an issue of the individual mind, it suggests the similar problem of preservation of events, norms, and laws by civilization. “Now let us, by a flight of imagination,” Freud suggested as he turned to Rome as a model of the human mind, “suppose that Rome is not a human habitation but a psychical entity, that is to say, in which nothing that has once come into existence will have passed away and all the earlier phases of development continue to exist along side the latest one” (Freud 1962, 17). Not just alongside of but in the position of the latest development; that is, the older developments remain visible in the new. Freud imagined a depth of vision that enabled the viewer to see in any space the entire history of that space. “In the place occupied by the Palazzo Caffarelli would once more stand—without the Palazzo having to be removed—the Temple of Jupiter Capitolinus; and this not only in its latest shape, as the Romans of the Empire saw it, but also in its earliest one, when it still showed Etruscan forms and was ornamented with terracotta antefixes” (Freud 1962, 17). The entire history of a location, Freud imagined, as visible to the human eye. He played out this panoptic palimpsest for an extended paragraph until finally conceding that the city was not really a productive model for the unconscious. This visual blending of time and place, however, did complement his account of the blending of at least two versions of Moses in Jewish accounts of Moses’s relation to Egyptian monotheism.8 But in Civilization and Its Discontents, he didn’t elaborate on this doubleness.9 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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In this specific example, as in the larger attempt to compare the mind to a city, Freud simply made the suggestion and then abandoned it. “The question may be raised,” Freud admitted, “why we chose precisely the past of a city to compare with the past of the mind” (Freud 1962, 18). Why raise the comparison and when confronted with the fact that cities experience “demolitions and replacement of buildings” abandon it? After raising the destruction of cities as an objection to its value as a model for the mind, “we bow to this objection;” he wrote, “and, abandoning our attempt to draw a striking contrast, we will turn instead to what is after all a more closely related object of comparison—the body of an animal or a human being” (Freud 1962, 18). But like the ghost buildings of old Rome, Freud’s architectural suggestion remains in the mind of the reader. The answer to our question must be that his retreat from the example fails to remove the image from our minds. Like the spatial traces of ancient buildings in the morphology of a city, Freud’s suggestion remains as a ghost in the mind. Meanwhile, the body metaphor provides no greater success than the city: “But here, too, we find the same thing” (ibid.). The earlier developments of the body are not perfectly preserved; often they have disappeared or been absorbed into other forms. Both of these failed metaphors, however, point to some truths, including the possibility that “the earlier phases of development are in no sense still preserved; they have been absorbed into the later phases for which they have supplied the material” (ibid.). Freud puts the metaphor of the city and the body into play so that both examples remain in the mind of the reader even after they have been replaced. Furthermore, these images, Freud admits, at the least might provide a modification of his account of the permanence of mental phenomenon: “perhaps we ought to content ourselves with asserting that what is past in mental life may be preserved and is not necessarily destroyed” (ibid.). The past of the human mind, including the roles of ancient gods, may still be preserved in the forms that structure our thought and may continue to play dynamic roles in our thinking, I contend. 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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As Derrida’s account of Freud serves to remind the reader, it is the relationship of such forms that provides psychoanalysis with structure. “This unanalyzed will be, will have been that upon which and around which the analytic movement will have been constructed and mobilized: everything will have been constructed and calculated so that this unanalyzed might be inherited, protected, transmitted intact, suitably bequeathed, consolidated, enkysted, encrypted. It is what gives its structure to the movement and to its architecture.”10 Psychoanalysis creates its knowledge against a preexisting background that remains unsaid, in that it is the structure of the said, like the preexisting architecture of Rome. Freud’s retreat from his proposed metaphor for the mind exemplifies the role of the city in modern conceptions of mind, subjectivity, and even rhizomatic circuits.11 “There is clearly no point in spinning our phantasy any further, for it leads to things that are unimaginable and even absurd. If we want to represent historical sequence in spatial terms we can only do it by juxtaposition in space: the same space cannot have two different contents” (Freud 1962, 17–18). But as fantastic as it sounds, city space and mental space do have multiple contents; often it is the buried and forgotten contents that continue to structure the space of the city and of the mind.

People As I already mentioned, Freud’s next attempt to find a model for the mind by looking to the body (human or animal), which he called “a more closely related object of comparison,” failed to provide a firmer grasp on the mental processes. Fantastically, while bodies and cities provide inadequate models for the mind, they also provide very compelling ones. Freud did not elaborately develop the implications of the resonances he set up between the body, the mind, the city, and gods. In spite of this, however, one conclusion seems clear: none of these terms are known categories; they all create meaning through 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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metaphorical reflection, resonance, and hegemonic capture. After all, the body is a powerful resonating machine, an element of reflection, and a stabilizing reference for the buildings and design of a city. “Further, it was from the members of the body,” Vitruvius explained concerning the design of cities and buildings, “that they derived the fundamental ideas of the measures which are obviously necessary in all works, as the finger, palm, foot, and cubit” (Vitruvius 1960, 73). Members of the body provided the terms of order for cities, even as the city provided models for the body and the human. But Freud did not make these connections stable or structural, they were shadows of meaning and direction circulating and haunting place and mind. Tellingly, Genesis describes the gods as making man in their image. (Yahweh even suggests that in eating from the forbidden tree humans have “become like us.”12) The very words of this text have, in fact, made “men,” “women,” and “human,” in their image for untold numbers of people. In many different times and places in which gods have been figured as human (and not as some more radically other force), gods have played an important role in the consolidation and maintenance of what those people think of as the purpose of the human. The human body and elements of the mind have, in the texts approached by this book, been used to figure the contours of the gods. Freud wrote of people and their gods: “Long ago he formed an ideal conception of omnipotence and omniscience which he embodied in his gods” (Freud 1962, 38). Mostly, Freud claimed, people just imagined god “in the figure of an enormously exalted father,” a figure on whom they could project what they themselves only dreamed of achieving (Freud 1962, 21). God imagined as a powerful father figure maintained the boundaries between the human and the inhuman: “To these gods he attributed everything that seemed unattainable to his wishes, or that was forbidden to him” (Freud 1962, 38). More than that, however, gods mirrored conceptions of humanity. As we will see in the examples pursued in this book, gods reflected humanity and inhumanity. 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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Gods remain in our discourse because of the roles they have played and continue to play in the social construction of the human. In discourses that imagine attributes and values for humans, such as political theory, gods often return as the inhuman other of the human. Tellingly, few ways of speaking of them in contemporary political theory or public discourse evoke nonhuman images, such as water, fire, or whirlwinds. In fact, gods and people are linguistic terms so connected to one another that in much contemporary public and theoretical discourse it is difficult to speak of the one without evoking the other. Gods erupt as categories within humanity, functioning as something of monstrous doubles to the ideas of the human. “The Relationship is not symmetrical here,” Žižek writes, “but—to put it in Hegelese—that of ‘positing the presuppositions’: God is, of course, the impenetrable/abyssal Ground out of which man emerges; however, it is only through man that God actualizes himself, that he ‘becomes what he always-already was.’ What was before the creation of man an impersonal force becomes through man the divine person.”13 Man is the “ingodly” of gods, even as gods are an “inhuman” of humanity. Gods only become gods through the concept of “humanity.” Humanity, it must be heralded, also becomes humanity through the burden of divine significance. The claim in Genesis that the gods made man in their image takes on added currency in this context. “Religious tradition once again reveals more cunning in pointing to the truth,” claims Lacan of this passage, “than the approach of psychological philosophy imagines.”14 The truth is that linguistic conceptions of gods put pressure on our ideas of the human; some of what passes unnoticed about humanity in our language is carried in this relationship between the ideas of “humanity” and “gods.” The cunning of Christian theology confirms, according to Lacan, that “God made man in his own image.” Lacan admits that man made god in his image. But, more than that, “you can’t get away with answering that man no doubt paid God back in kind.” The kind of payment, in fact, is exactly what is at stake for Lacan. “The statement in question 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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is of the same inspiration, the same body, as the holy book in which is expressed the prohibition on forging images of God. If this prohibition has a meaning, it is that images are deceitful.” Images lie through their suggestion that the subject is not empty. Making god into an image suggests that the organizing viewer of our lives possesses the truth, and denies, according to Lacan, the emptiness of that position. “Moreover, man, too, as image is interesting for the hollow the image leaves empty—by reason of the fact that one doesn’t see in the image, beyond the capture of the image, the emptiness of God to be discovered. It is perhaps man’s plenitude, but it is also there that God leaves him with emptiness.”15 The image of man is captured as reflection of god; subjectivity occurs in the gap that the subject recognizes in the view from the god—an example of emptiness. Models of subjectivity (and subjectivity itself) are acquired from the encounter with the social commands (with their attendant subjectivities) predicated on the position of particular kinds of gods. The gods, however, in this account turn out to be empty. The gods do not posses the secret denied the people but merely reflect the empty flatness of humanity. In this way, among others, man is in the image of gods. These images, furthermore, construct social expectations of appropriate and acceptable behaviors. They also put into place conceptions of strength and weakness. That is, to put it more generally, what is projected as outside the social order has an ordering effect on the interior of the social space. How that outside is figured has important consequences on how power is figured, particularly whether the outside is conceived as totally immune from contestation or if it is contestable. An incontestable outside makes very strong demands for homogeneity inside—as can be seen in many debates over pluralism in even secular national identities. A contestable outside, still a command from the outside of the social landscape, opens the possibility for contestation of these norms as well as encourages a human subjectivity less inclined to obedience. 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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In a claim remarkably consistent with Carl Schmitt’s (and Max Weber’s) concerning the maintenance role of religious feeling in modern social arrangements, Civilization and Its Discontents explores the retention of religion, even among those who no longer believe. Freud’s account of the city and the body as models of the mind’s retention of earlier forms was part of his response to the suggestion that the religious feeling came from an “oceanic feeling.” Freud argued that the feeling must have arisen from an earlier stage in the ego’s development. “Thus we are perfectly willing to acknowledge that the ‘oceanic’ feeling exists in many people, and we are inclined to trace it back to an early phase of ego-feeling” (Freud 1962, 19). The “oceanic feeling,” Freud claimed, was an important element of the religious feeling, though not, he argued, the source of the feeling. Freud connected the source to a relationship with the father, but seemed far more interested in deploying the problem in order to explore the doubling of religious symbols and narratives—that is, the ghosts of earlier religious edifices that exist in contemporary thought. “Indeed, the same piece of ground would be supporting the church of Santa Maria sopra Minerva and the ancient temple over which it was built” (Freud 1962, 17). In Moses and Monotheism, Freud examined what could be described metaphorically as the construction of a synagogue over an Egyptian temple. Freud explored the multiple layers of gods in Jewish and Christian belief through an account of how the children of Israel originally rebelled against the religion of Moses (an Egyptian), killed him, and overturned his religious norms. These norms, however, eventually returned. The ancient Egyptian (monotheistic) god returned in the contents of Judaism. The children of Israel may have killed Moses but his ideas returned like a miracle. “Yet the religion of Moses did not disappear without leaving a trace; a kind of memory of it had survived, a tradition perhaps obscured and distorted. It was this tradition of a great past that continued to work in the background, until it 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


Gods


slowly gained more and more power over the mind of the people” (Freud 1939, 87). After the murder of the first Moses and the murder of his god, their ghosts remained and would slowly assert themselves as the active content of Judaism. Religions, apparently passing away into the remote and antiquarian past, return, in Freud’s account, in the ideas and beliefs of a people as anything but hollow shells. Žižek reads this return as the spectral supplement to Jewish theology that exists as the exception to the norms of Judaism, which eventually reappears as the meaning of Judaism. “What Freud endeavors to reconstitute in Moses and Monotheism (the story of the murder of Moses, etc.) is such a spectral history that haunts the space of Jewish religious tradition.” Žižek, in a development of the Schmittian exception, explores the exception that is the truth of the rule. “One becomes a full member of a community not simply by identifying with its explicit symbolic tradition, but only when one also assumes the spectral dimension that sustains this tradition, the undead ghosts that haunt the living, the secret history of traumatic fantasies transmitted, ‘between the lines,’ through the lacks and distortions of the explicit symbolic tradition—as Fernando Pessoa puts it: ‘Every dead man is probably still alive somewhere’” (Žižek 2003, 128). The tradition includes its essential exception. Moreover, for Žižek, the dead necessarily return as the groundless background of belief, action, and reason. Žižek finds the spectral meaning of Christianity in Christianity’s retention of its own negative set of values, that is, “to focus not on the explicit features that define its social and ideological edifices but on the disavowed ghosts that haunt it, dwelling in a mysterious region of nonexistent entities which none the less persist, continue to exert their efficacy” (Žižek 2000, 3). This persistent truth of Christianity is that there is no god, that is, no father who could protect you (see Žižek 2006, 171). The past that was hidden comes back to the world in such a manner that, for Freud, Jews are revealed to be the true children of Egyptian innovation. The first god of the first Moses returned, according to Freud, to posses the children of Israel, 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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transforming what they believed, their lives, and even the names of their god, “and at last succeeded in transforming the God Jahve into the Mosaic God and in waking to a new life the religion which Moses had instituted centuries before and which had later been forsaken” (Freud 1939, 87). The dead gods return in names new and old and their returns orient the political life of the people in new directions. The names of gods mark empty spaces, which may hold other empty gods. In Freud’s Moses and Monotheism, the old dead gods return in the life of the new people of Israel. The name of the god himself is taken over by the returning older god, just as the name of Moses was occupied by an earlier Moses, placing, as it were, a stranger in the center of the identity and connecting the positive content of a tradition with its essential negative content. That is, for Freud, Moses is replaced by another Moses with an antithetical account of god. Names serve to locate and assign identity and responsibility within systems of state power. Freud, however, replaced the nomos of the name with a ghost of its negative content. This assignment of name and self, and its legal recognition, is one of the great theological enterprises of the state. Freud reimagined names as not just marking a positive presence but also designating an alternative negative presence. And in the case of gods, that could mean that monotheisms are, in fact, polytheistic, that Judaism is secretly Egyptian and, perhaps, the meaning of the Christian god is haunted by the ghosts of Roman gods. Freud replaced Moses with a new Moses, even as Paul replaced Jesus with a new Jesus. Agamben has remarked on the political theology of the name in his attempt to read Paul’s writings as radically critical of the Roman Empire, and by extension the nation-state. Agamben finds the writings of Paul to call into question the ability of a name to assign a person to a group. Paul’s assertion that he was both of the Greeks and barbarians denies his position within any named group. The changing of his own name, moreover, represented his identification with the negative content of his own name. Agamben puts Paul’s name change into the Hebrew literary tradition of metanomasia (the divine 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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changing of names), with its most significant example in Abram, to whom Yahweh added an “am.” “Philo brings attention to the fact that this slight addition actually changes the meaning of the whole name—and, as a result, the entire person of Abraham himself ” (Agamben 2005, 9). Agamben reads Paul in this tradition but claims that in the instance of Paul, the very connection of the name has been transformed. “The messianic separates the proper name from its bearer, who from this point on may bear only an improper name, a nickname. After Paul, all of our names are only signa, surnames” (Agamben 2005, 10). Paul’s critique of legal institutional power, as explicated in Agamben’s critique of names, provides a possible transformation of the relation of the name to the person. Through his reading of Paul, Agamben finds a meaning for Christianity that disrupts the model of personal sovereignty in which the named person could only posses a single meaning (i.e., they were either good or evil). People, cities, and religions posses not just the meaning used in the contextual language game but they also carry traces of the displacement that occurred in their original entrance to discourse. The negative ghost, much like the dead father, continues to haunt the meaning of a name.16 Early gods continue to have a presence in theological and political concerns long after those gods appear to be dead. These historical connections between conceptions of the human individual, the city, and gods continue in the discourse of the human even after our belief in the god has passed. Our conceptions of the individual and the city rely on ideas about gods, often gods that only remain in the discourse as a ghost of their former power. Now we will examine at least some of the difference that dead gods make upon their return, particularly the way they direct and mobilize conceptions of strength.



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What we believe the gods want and need from us provides direction for our needs and desires. If people believe that the gods want them to meekly submit to higher powers, then accounts of strength invoke such obligations on the part of people and gods. On the other hand, if people believe that gods want them to make war and make love—as Thetis encouraged Achilles in the Iliad— then being strong will require such behavior, leaving aside, for the moment, the ways that divine prohibitions also serve to generate our desires. The motivations and secret desires of the gods configure what the gods want or need from people. For example, gods who created us for dramatic amusement will want different things from us than gods who created us to worship and submit to them. Models of strength can vary from those that require the removal or disappearance of the enemy to those that need a strong adversary to display their strength. That is, some conceptions of strength require strength in an enemy, especially in a world in which conflict is given value and in which we receive value from the status of our enemy. This concern is central to the rest of the book in its attention to different possibilities that exist in these old dead gods. In the Iliad, for example, Hector displays agonistic respect for his enemy Ajax, “But now we should exchange glorious gifts, so that the Greeks and Trojans will say of us, ‘They fought each other in soul-devouring strife, but agreed to part in the spirit of friendship’” (Iliad, bk. 7, lines 313–16). Such conceptions of respect as an element of strength and conflict appear foreign to the world of Augustine, which valued human submission (to a sovereign) and the absolute termination of an evil enemy, since his god desired no trace of evil. The enemy threatens identity in such a manner that no respect or future respect can be given. How people treat their enemies and what it means for them to be strong in response to the world are essential elements of subjectivity that position the self toward, against, and in need of others. These elements find their bearings in conceptions of 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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the gods—the beyond politics that structures how we imagine politics and power. Gods continue to provide purpose—or better yet, they continue to provide strength. Our conceptions of what it means to be strong or weak, a success or a failure find direction in notions of divine purpose. In making arguments about what must be done with our time, sources as varied as Charles Taylor and George Bush draw support from these conceptions of strength. Certainly gods were important elements in the development of political concepts, so that ideas such as freedom or justice (not to mention “sovereignty”), still retain some meaning from their connections to earlier concepts of gods. These gods may pass away, but their remains (the space they leave behind) still retain significance within the “form of life” that gave meaning to the languages in which the term has been deployed. In an effort to invigorate our need for difference—that is, to make us strong in the ways that require and respect difficult differences (echoing Abraham’s conflict with that god over his treatment of Sodom)—this book attempts an alternative genealogy of the ways in which gods configure our conceptions of strength. As a first step, this book raises concerns over why gods (in the case of the cities examined here) become angry toward cities, particularly when humans are figured as weak and insignificant in relation to an omnipotent god. When humans fill no need and when, at least to contemporary liberals, any problem a god might have would be with individuals, what inspires this anger? Why, as in the case of Sodom, should strong gods violently destroy the puny different, especially the puny that are only associated by city? Such questions of power reach to some of the unresolved contradictions within contemporary conceptions of subjectivity. These historical conceptions of divine power and purpose contributed to modern subjectivities, particularly in relation to conceptions of human strength, freedom, and purpose. Excavating these moments can denaturalize routine conceptions of strength that direct violence toward the weak. Yahweh’s weakness 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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may have led him to destroy the city of Sodom, and perhaps our strength requires opposition to such destruction. This approach highlights opposition and antagonism as a constitutive feature of human interaction. Every identity (even individual) is relational and derived and countered out of interactions with others. Hostility and antagonism arises from these interactions—and can arise at any level: national, economic, social, and personal. Any of these relationships can take on the characteristics of, what Schmitt called, the distinction between friend and enemy. As Chantal Mouffe has written, “any type of we/ them relation, be it religious, ethnic, national, economic or other, becomes the site of a political antagonism” (2006, 3). Violence, figured as directed from a god to a city, erupts, not surprisingly, around identities and is directed not to notions of individualized guilt but toward the identity or the city. The violence is provoked by social identities and is not the product of individuals but of the very existence of their identities. As a second step, this book explores desire. What do the gods want from us and how do their desires drive our desires? They reflect what we want to be, especially in terms of desire. Or to answer our question (which is just a version of the one Socrates asked Euthyphro) concerning what the gods need from us: in some way what the gods need from us is violence, reflecting, of course, our own desire for violence. This need for antagonism overlays the absolute demand of death, and the violence that often erupts around the divine in such a manner that the gods appear to desire violence and blood. Athena clearly needed blood when she drove Odysseus to slaughter the suitors: “Now Athena was not about to let the suitors Abstain from insults. She wanted pain To sink deeper into Odysseus’ bones” (Odyssey, bk. 18, lines 377–79). And Yahweh wanted something similar when he hardened Pharaoh’s heart against the children of Israel in order to punish Pharaoh. Gods do violence to people, and gods need violence from people, even as Yahweh favored the bloody sacrifice of Abel over the herbaceous sacrifice of Cain. In René Girard’s account, the sacred is always marked by violence. “Tempests, 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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forest fires, and plagues, among other phenomena, may be classified as sacred. Far outranking these, however, though in a far less obvious manner, stands human violence—violence seen as something exterior to man and henceforth as a part of all the other outside forces that threaten mankind. Violence is the heart and secret soul of the sacred” (Girard 1977, 31). This violence becomes particularly threatening as structures of meaning and difference appear to dissolve—that is, as differences reveal themselves to be fundamentally arbitrary, debatable, and open to challenge. How we understand and feel our relationships to these others and this outside can change as we reconceptualize the demands of the sacred, the importance of antagonism, and our conceptions of our own strength. Violence often orients conceptions of strength and weakness. For example, George W. Bush used the violent speed and force of others to make himself and his political community appear strong. War is about “strength,” as is the much more localized violence of a bully on a playground or the professor putting a student “in their place.” Strength and violence often pass as universal in objective and in appearance. Even sophisticated examinations of the production of social ideas whereby people come to accept the legitimacy of force (governmental or otherwise) regularly come to a moment when they suggest, often with a realist shrug, that if the terms of ideology do not work the ruling powers will just use force. Force here appears to need no further explanation, as if we all understand the naturalness of force as the means of securing identity and power in a chaotic world; as if, moreover, power and identity were themselves final explanations. Violence and force carry contemporary senses of the real, that is, of the nonhistorical and nonsocial reality of human behavior and need. Violence and its connections to our ideas of strength and weakness often appears as a universal fact of humanity, in part through its reliance on a constellation of ideas deployed in accounts of divine behavior. Accounts of gods and their desires organize assumptions about what humans should do in the world; that is, what the gods want from us. Strength can also be 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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demonstrated, in some of the material we will examine, by standing up to the demands of the gods (or social rules).

Sodom’s destruction still infuses political discourse as a metonymy for divinely inspired group punishment, even as Abraham (as the father of many Abrahamic faiths) structures group identity. What is often forgotten is that Yahweh praised Abraham for his ability to stand up for people and even needed Abraham’s agonistic response to divine plans to destroy Sodom in order to imagine the consequences of justice. Abraham on the plains of Mamre stood against Yahweh in defense of strangers, an event that contrasts with Kierkegaard’s evocation of Abraham on Mount Moriah, where Abraham failed to oppose Yahweh and agreed to sacrifice his son. Such powerful stories of divine behavior buttress and predicate our accounts of how humans should “be” and how they should “behave.” Our conceptions of gods and their needs (fleshed out against the background of their violent displeasure) contribute to our conceptions of subjects, subjectivity, and subjugation. Studies of political difference (social, racial, national, etc.) have, in recent decades, turned to an examination of the roles of theological terms and ideas in constructing subjectivity. Cities on the Plain adds to this discussion by examining the possibilities Abrahamic hospitality offers to a reduction in social and individual guilt and resentment.17 Beginning with an examination of the narrative in Genesis concerning the judgment of Yahweh on the city of Sodom, the chapters of this book explore the possible roles of gods in securing social power, order, and authority (and their ultimate failure to ever do so). Chapter 1 uses the material from Genesis to explore tensions within divine demands for social hospitality— even as hospitality must exist beyond the simple fulfillment of a transcendent command. The third chapter focuses on Socrates as a citizen placed in the city of Athens by Apollo, focusing on the divine demands that he care for the city and the gods. The 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


Cities and Chapters


fourth chapter focuses on Rome and on Augustine’s defense of Christianity from accusations that the success of his new god, Jesus, was the cause of the Gothic invasion of Rome and its subsequent collapse. This chapter also brings together the two preceding chapters by treating the material in Genesis and Plato as a common background for Augustine’s version of Christianity. Chapter 5 builds on the background of Christianity, Hellenism, and Judaism by using the writings of Ibn Rushd (Averroes) from Córdoba to explore the divine grounding for human conceptions of possession, particularly conceptions of the human possession of belief through confession and the ways this concept sustains other elements of human subjectivity, such as the possession of a past. Chapter 6 focuses on the human desire for divine punishment. Washington DC is used to explore the desire for divine destruction, particularly that promised by the return of Christ in many prominent accounts of American Christianity. As a summary of the death of the gods examined throughout this book, this chapter explores how we can give up gods without sacrificing them in a manner that reinscribes their power while learning how to give up earlier versions of ourselves (perhaps through mourning) without violently resisting, sacrificing, or enacting revenge on the presumed source of our own passing. Finally, the conclusion considers the possibility of conceiving of cities on the plains as cities of refuge, where the stateless and the nationless might find refuge from destruction. Gods return—not only for people who believe in them but also for all of us. Our modern political notions still rely on the ideas of power, individualism, justice, and obedience that were formed in relation to ideas of gods—ideas that were also formed in support of national and imperial power. In spite of assertions of our secularity, gods still structure politics. Restructuring politics along lines less destructive of difference requires evoking some gods, mourning for some gods, killing some gods, and allowing others to return to us. Neither Freud nor Žižek offer easy answers concerning how to keep the dead gods from returning. “The category of the ‘undead’ 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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is crucial here: those who are not dead, although they are no longer alive either, continue to haunt us. The fundamental problem here is how to prevent the dead from returning, how to put them properly to rest” (Žižek 2003,100). Perhaps we should ask an entirely different question: how should we, as people, raise the dead? How does a progressive politics activate and participate in the return of those dead gods? Human subjectivity (not just politics) has inherited terms of theology, and renegotiating these inherited terms as Abraham negotiated with Yahweh for Sodom can change our conceptions of strength and weakness in the face of difference and transform the ways these perceptions provoke resentment and violence. The Genesis story of Abraham on the plains of Mamre, which Derrida calls “the great founding scene of Abrahamesque hospitality,” provides answers to basic questions of how to deal with the gods and people that might visit us.



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Sodom Hospitality and Conflict

When those [angels] came unto him and bade him peace, he answered, “[And upon you be] peace!”—[saying to himself,] “They are strangers.” —Qur’an LI, 25 No doubt the corpse is a signifier, but Moses’s tomb is as empty for Freud as that of Christ was for Hegel. Abraham revealed his mystery to neither of them. —Jacques Lacan, “Subversion of the Subject and the Dialectic of Desire” If every concept shelters or lets itself be haunted by another concept, by an other than itself that is no longer even its other, then no concept remains in place any longer. This is about the concept of concept, and this is why I suggested earlier that hospitality, the experience, the apprehension, the exercise of impossible hospitality, of hospitality as the possibility of impossibility (to receive another guest whom I am incapable of welcoming, to become capable of that which I am incapable of)—this is the exemplary experience of deconstruction itself, when it is or does what it has to do or to be, that is, the experience of the impossible. Hospitality—this is a name or an example of deconstruction. —Jacques Derrida, Acts of Religion



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hadowed by his tent flap, Abraham confronted his god.1 “And the Lord appeared to him in the Terebinths of Mamre when he was sitting by the tent flap in the heat of the day.”2 In the vocalizations of the Masoretic Text, Abraham addresses the visitors in the plural as “my lords,” and their appearance in the oaktrees of Mamre provoked not fear but hospitality, according to the book of Genesis. Abraham’s hospitable and brave approach to his god (or gods) on the plains of Mamre revealed a model of human subjectivity not predicated on obedience to the sovereign god. Abraham stood before Yahweh and defended the city of Sodom against the judgment of this god. He attempted to disrupt the sovereign’s decision, and he demonstrated a model of approaching others that actually foreclosed the demands for social purity so often evoked in our contemporary references to Sodom. In doing all these things, Abraham demonstrated appropriate behavior of the subject before the sovereign and how adjusting that behavior could transform our relations to others. This chapter examines the account in Genesis concerning the ways that gods symbolize a central problem of the human in politics: the problem of how people obey the decisions of the sovereign, particularly given that subjectivity is bound up in a sovereign command. I question, in this chapter, whether the theological model of the sovereign found in the Genesis stories of Abraham are as singular, unified, and especially, incontestable, as they are usually made to appear in, for example, Hobbes, Kierkegaard, or Schmitt.3 Because “the men of Sodom were wicked and sinners before the Lord exceedingly,” they were also visited by Abraham’s guests.4 Genesis barely suggests the sin of Sodom, but whatever brought the angels to Abraham also brought a rain of brimstone and fire from heaven upon the cities on the plains, turning their bodies into ash and Lot’s wife into a pillar of salt. Sodom’s destruction still infuses political discourse as the most prominent example of divinely inspired civic punishment. Such powerful stories of divine behavior buttress and predicate our accounts of how humans should “be” and how they should “behave.” Our conceptions of gods and their needs (fleshed out against the background

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Political Theology I: Sins and National Punishments “Sodom” typically designates a form of society (often referred to by the term “modern”) that fails to achieve the unity demanded by hegemonic conceptions of strength achieved through identity; in this way, Sodom haunts the enlightenment (secular) project of the nation, even as religious conceptions of strength, sovereignty, knowledge and power haunt political life. The anxiety surrounding Sodom resounds with the religious significance of the secular discourse of the nation where national anxieties of behavior (as acceptable to the rule of national law) replay the story of Sodom (explicitly or inexplicitly). Concerns about Sodom often exemplify a reactive or “weak” model of identity—that is, an identity in which differences present a challenge and must, therefore, be removed, destroyed, or punished. I argue that strength, often crystallized in conceptions of gods, can better be exemplified as desire for difference, even in gods. A commitment to an identity built out of the same, as often demanded by national drives, is common in law (also in social theory or evangelical sermons); the Supreme Court decision in Bowers v. Hardwick, for example, reveals elements in how drives to similarity can function in the context of concern for the constitutionality of a Georgia statute prohibiting sodomy. Chief Justice Warren Burger—the author of important U.S. Supreme Court decisions on obscenity and separation of church and state—signed onto the opinion in Bowers v. Hardwick in which the Supreme Court struck down a lower court ruling that prohibitions on sodomy violated the American civil right to privacy. “Millennia of moral teaching,” he asserted in defense of the regulation of consensual sexual activity, prohibited sodomy. His colleague Justice Byron White, for the majority of the Court, wrote that “proscriptions 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


of their violent displeasure) contribute to our conceptions of subjects, subjectivity, and subjugation. Yahweh’s treatment of Sodom has played large on these conceptions.


against that conduct have ancient roots,” revealing the assumption by the Supreme Court that a shared historical tradition is part of the glue that holds a national identity together.5 The adhesive of that glue was the prohibition against a specific sexual practice—that is, a specific physical contact between individuals. In this case people are held together in a group by a shared relationship to a series of events, icons, or texts from the past. In these accounts people are not connected to these facts through biology or genetics; they are connected through a shared intellectual exercise in which they think similarly about a similar set of elements. The “we” referenced in this opinion is both national (United States) and international (i.e., “Western”) pasts; referencing an “ancient” past, they assert the presence of a Western tradition that guides and defines “us.” Through ancient texts some readers claim to discern correct and shared ways of acting, a process in which they accept and reject a range of choices through preconceived expectations of what resides in ancient texts—thus rarely calling into question the emotional constitution of the god in terms of needs, wants, and what strength might mean as a divine category. That is, in spite of the Bible’s tolerance for an extreme range of behaviors in its central characters (e.g., characters take over towns, attempt to kill their own children, and seduce their own father), many readers look at the Bible as the moral touchstone that holds “us” together through a series of rules proscribing behavior—a series of commands issued by a complete self-contained law giver. In many ways their glance to the past only serves to harden them into immovable pillars of salt: salt lacking any savor, one is tempted to suggest, existing only through the canceling of other flavors. Looking to the text, they interpret difference as threatening and the god of the Bible as responding to threats through the violent destruction of those humans who fail to obey divine commands. Some of the comments surrounding the Supreme Court’s reappraisal of Bowers v. Hardwick in Lawrence v. Texas evidenced more of the work that the ideas of Sodom and sodomy do within contemporary political discourse to construct group identification. 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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Pennsylvania Senator and Republican Party leader Rick Santorum created a modest political tempest by linking homosexual rights to the possibility of many other sexual practices in a 2003 discussion of the validity of the Supreme Court’s ruling in Bowers. Unlike Justice White’s assertion of a shared historical tradition, Sen. Santorum used sodomy differently, to name behavior beyond the acceptable range within a group. If the Supreme Court overturned Bowers by framing the central question as the right of people to be left alone in the privacy of their own bedrooms to pursue their consenting sexual practices, then there was, he claimed, virtually, no boundary concerning what consenting adults could do there. In this case the problem is not one of a shared relationship to tradition; it is instead the claim that the activity of sodomy represents the outside of society. Santorum claims that beyond here there are monsters of guideless relativism. Again, it goes back to this moral relativism, which is very accepting of a variety of different lifestyles. And if you make the case that if you can do whatever you want to do, as long as it’s in the privacy of your own home, this “right to privacy,” then why be surprised that people are doing things that are deviant within their own home? If you say, there is no deviant as long as it’s private, as long as it’s consensual, then don’t be surprised what you get. . . . Because, again, I would argue, they undermine the basic tenets of our society and the family. And if the Supreme Court says that you have the right to consensual sex within your home, then you have the right to bigamy, you have the right to polygamy, you have the right to incest, you have the right to adultery. You have the right to anything. Does that undermine the fabric of our society? I would argue yes, it does.6

Santorum makes his case in defense of Bowers (to no one’s surprise), that in order for a society to exist—that is, for the fabric to hold—there needs to be moral boundaries, even, perhaps especially, in private activities. While in agreement with the Court’s decision in Bowers, Santorum utilized the result 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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somewhat differently than Burger or White. Justice White asserted that people engaged in sodomy were outside of a shared historical tradition, while Santorum claimed that if you allowed sodomy then you have to allow anything people want to do; such people are too different, according to Santorum, to maintain an “us.” Both of these accounts utilized Sodom to discuss the role of the state (or society) in regulating behavior typically considered to be private and behavior with no apparent harm—except, according to Santorum, to the structure of society and, it is fair to add, to the perceived command of god (the father). Such disobedience, given the position of the father in these biblical concepts, demands punishment from the father. Here the conception and condensation of biblical stories produce powerful demands for behavior among fellow group (in this case, national) members and, moreover, produce conceptions of authority, that is, god’s proper response to disobedience and disrespect will display how dissent and difference should be treated—and how dangerous it is, especially to the perceived unity of “one” god and “one” nation. The story of Sodom as set out in Genesis, however, offers little support for the consolidation of stable identities; it does present a wealth of details concerning the problems and possibilities of hospitality toward people who remain unknown, especially when they possess the possibility of elements that are foreign to the fabric of society. And such hospitality was frightfully absent in the comments of the U.S. Supreme Court and Rick Santorum, but not absent from the behavior of Abraham. Abraham knew how to treat strangers. He ran out of his tent in the heat of the day to meet them, bowed himself before them, begged them to stay with him, “hastened” to the tent to order food preparation, “ran” to the herd to choose a calf to slaughter, which he then “hasted” to dress, and then, finally, he fed the strangers without dining himself. Eastern Mediterranean concerns for hospitality and care of strangers, also exemplified in the Odyssey, pervade this text; Abraham’s “‘little water . . . morsel



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of bread,’ humbly contradict the elaborate feast that he prepares for these strangers.”7 Abraham extended great care toward the strangers before he realized that they might be his god—the realization that he was feeding and caring for his god led, remarkably, not to greater supplication but the confidence that the god could stand his approach and conflict.

Abraham, Strangers, and Knowledge As Abraham sat by the flap of his tent during the heat of the day, three strangers appeared to him. In a scene drawn from the Ugaritic Tale of Aqhat, Genesis transformed the rituals of obligations toward the gods into behaviors of hospitality toward strangers.8 Abraham treated the strangers like gods even though he knew nothing about them. “And the Lord appeared to him in the Terebinths of Mamre when he was sitting by the tent flap in the heat of the day. And he raised his eyes and saw, and, look, three men were standing before him. He saw, and he ran toward them from the tent flap and bowed to the ground” (Gen. 18:1–2). Abraham raised his eyes and saw three strangers. Abraham’s reception of these strangers occurred in three distinct stages: he saw them, he ran to them, and he bowed down to them. Abraham, faced with the appearance of three unfamiliar, unnamed, and unrecognized people, performed a denial of three ways to know them—by face, by location, and by socially recognized position. Abraham gave hospitality without interrogating the strangers in these three registers. This denial in Genesis of these three questions informs Derrida’s query of hospitality, “Does hospitality consist in interrogating the new arrival?” with a denial not so much of the question but of the desire to procure knowledge of the subject’s value to the inquisitor through ascertaining the family of the stranger, the place of the stranger, and most significantly, the secret desire of the stranger. Derrida elaborated on his question through a series of questions.



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Or else does hospitality begin with the unquestioning welcome, in a double effacement, the effacement of the question and the name? Is it more just and more loving to question or not to question? To call by the name or without the name? to give or to learn a name already given? Does one give hospitality to a subject? To an identifiable subject? To a subject identifiable by name? to a legal subject? Or is hospitality rendered, is it given to the other before they are identified, even before they are (posited as or supposed to be) a subject, legal subject and subject nameable by their family name, etc.?9

There is little attempt on Abraham’s part to question the stranger in any of these registers. The stranger is allowed in these stories to remain a stranger, without ever answering questions of placement. However, Abraham does eventually question the strangers’ conception of justice. He raises this questioning not through a request for the “true” meaning of the term but through a series of relational interrogations. Questioning, according to Derrida, is the very problem of hospitality, but answers do not come forth, in that answers establish rules that define what hospitality requires, which defeats the very gesture of hospitality as a gift that transcends requirements or duty. Elegantly, Genesis leaves questionable openings concerning the divine visitation to Sodom—displacing the clarity of Sodom’s violation (even in Yahweh’s own mind) in a manner that figures divine behavior as a predictable equation. Hospitality denies the question (in its absolutist appeal) and instead interprets the text, the command and the stranger. Abraham passed by inhospitable questions but he did set-up a richly interpretive landscape. Abraham’s sight of the three strangers reprised Yahweh’s original invitation to show things to Abraham. “Go forth from your land and your birthplace . . . to the land I will show you” (Gen. 12:1–2). In early interpretations of the text, the very Terebinths of Mamre, where Abraham was camped, symbolized an invitation to interpretation; Origin of Alexandria (185–254) interpreted the oak to mean “vision.”10 “Know that the three words 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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to see,” wrote Moses Maimonides, the medieval philosopher, in Arabic, “to look at, and to vision are applied to the sight of the eye and that all three of them are also used figuratively to denote the grasp of the intellect” (Maimonides 1963, 27). Maimonides claimed that the Old Testament injunctions to look are applied to the intellect, to interpretation, and to the process of apprehending and interpreting the divine—not, that is, to asking questions with knowable answers. The process of interpretation engages both subjectivities in mental interrogation, whereas questioning locates the questioner and the answer in an inhospitable position of authority and finality. Caesarius of Arles (470–543), one of the historically most important Christian bishops of Gaul, agreed and added “discernment” to the meaning. “Now where did this happen? ‘near the holm-oak of Mamre,’ which in the Latin is interpreted as ‘vision’ or ‘discernment.’ Do you see what kind of a place it is in which the Lord can have a feast? . . . so that he could see God.”11 The opening of the story near the sacred oak of Mamre has widely been read as an invitation to interpretation—in which there is not just one final true layer of meaning but multiple layers. Such an invitation to interpretation presents the structural relationship of the people to the stranger: knowledge is denied but interpretation is made possible. The scholar of Abrahamic mysticism Gershom Scholem suggested a connection between vision and depth of understanding, in mystical interpretation: “Under human eyes [the text] enters into significant finite embodiments which mark innumerable layers of meaning.”12 Abraham never attempted to know the strangers but did eventually challenge them. He attempted to create a novel interpretation of the gods’ destruction of Sodom—an interrogation that the god profited from and that even changed the god’s mind. Abraham’s interpretation caused his god to see his own behavior differently. “And he raised his eyes and saw, and, look, three men were standing before him.” And look, the text encourages the reader to pay attention to our own visual experience. Look here. Yahweh appears in many contemporary readings of this material to 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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care a great deal about the positioning and location of physical bodies (appropriately in a text that had such an impact on the accepted ways that bodies can touch); however, here readers are given reasons for reading narratives about human bodies as if those narratives were about something else—something more divine or mysterious. Maimonides interpreted the passages of the Bible that spoke of god as drawing near to people to mean that god came to their minds. “For in all these verses nearness through cognition, I mean cognitive apprehension, is intended, not nearness in space” (Maimonides 1963, 44). Looking here, the sustained interpretation of the word “know,” as if the most important meaning was the physical one—the one that emphasizes the truth of the body—seems misguided. Perhaps the most significant meanings of “know” in the story of Sodom are the meanings concerned with knowing someone as a requirement of hospitality. Hospitality, in Genesis, requires the offer of care before any question. The question attempts to establish knowledge of the position of the other before the law. Levinas, like Scholem, suggested connections between vision and interpretation of the other; leaving open the impossibility of fully interpreting the strangers (and strange text, such as Genesis) into preexisting frames—but, more than that, looking into the process of the construction of a subject through the glance at others, particularly the divine. In the case of Levinas, however, the other opens onto the infinitely other—which is beyond the senses but still suggested in the not-of-itselfness of metaphor and language. As suggested in Derrida’s examination of Levinas, “the infinitely other is the invisible, since vision opens up only the illusory and relative exteriority of theory and of need. A provisional exteriority, given only within sight of its own consummation, its own consumption. Inaccessible, the invisible is the most high. This expression—perhaps inhabited by the Platonic resonances Levinas evokes, but more so by others more readily recognizable—tears apart, by the superlative excess, the spatial literality of the metaphor.”13 The other in this sense is beyond other—is beyond knowing, is, in fact, unknowable, best evoked 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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by language as the other—and is evoked in the spatial literality of Abraham’s approach to Yahweh. This approach to the text, however, leaves an empty space of ignorance in the approaching other: Yahweh does not know the actions of the others that exist in relation to Abraham. Derrida suggested that Levinas’s evocation of the “face-to-face” can help explain the evaluation of the transcendental. “It’s not just that ‘I’ see the other, it is that I see the other looking at me—the gap in the other as complete with itself.”14 That is, the other appears complete to me through the other’s apprehension of me as a part of that completeness. My conceptions of “I” are bound up in what appears to me to complete the other. The other remains to me as a possessor of the secret knowledge of completeness, but Derrida and Abraham turn from the attempt to “know” the secret of the other, which might be the secret of my secret. Seeing the visitors did not reveal to Abraham who they were. Facing his god, Abraham is faced with the presence of an other obscured by the face of the other. The desire to see something behind the other is excluded by the very presence of the other. Derrida commented on a similar account in Levinas: “The face does not signify. It does not incarnate, envelop, or signal anything other than self, soul, subjectivity, etc. . . . the other is not signaled by his face, he is this face: ‘Absolutely present, in his face, the Other—without any metaphor—faces me!”15 Significantly, Abraham faces Yahweh—facing, the big Other—a god that often functions as the truth and desire of the social linguistic network. The text of Genesis displays an Abraham who never questions the strangers, who, in fact, keeps his distance from the desire to know the secret desire (or what is behind the face) of the strangers. This does not mean, however, that he stays away from the strangers. Abraham’s eyes lead him to the strangers. He went to them. He ran to them. Abraham moved from where he was resting under the shade of his tent flap out into the open sun to greet the strangers. “He makes haste in all things,” explained Origen.16 The distance remains even as Abraham moves. “His love for strangers was thus proved,” claimed Ephrem the Syrian, the fourth-century 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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Syrian hymn writer and theologian from Nisibis (the modern Turkish city of Nasaybin), “by the haste with which he ran to meet those strangers.”17 He ran to them to care for them as strangers without knowing them. This is ethics, according to Levinas. “For Levinas,” according to Derrida, “desire is the respect and knowledge of the other as other, the ethico-metaphysical moment whose transgression consciousness must forbid itself.”18 Desire is the approach to the other as different—the attractive prohibition of knowledge of the other’s desire. Desire and the possibility of ethics are a phenomenon of this prohibition. Levinas’s account where ethics is the prohibition on knowing the other transforms Kantian notions of ethics as forbidding the self of its own desires. The attempt to ascertain and control the unknown in the other exemplifies a reactive attempt to secure stability within the subject in an intellectual regime in which strength is figured as control and not a divine embrace of chaos. The story of Sodom reminds the reader, furthermore, that one of the ways to destroy strangers is to make them familiar. As the Zohar said of Abraham and the depths of wisdom, “He knew them but did not become attached.”19 Genesis’s use of the word “know” in this context highlights Abram’s hospitality to the strangers and how he did not attempt to know them. He cared for them but did not try to “know” them. Sodom, however, violently attempted to know the strangers; even as Lot’s wife was punished for attempting to know the actions of Yahweh in Sodom. As any reader of the King James Version of the Bible knows, the attempts by the residents of Sodom to “know” the strangers, that is, their attempts to reduce what is strange to something familiar—in Nietzsche’s formulation of what it is to know someone—exemplifies the inhospitality of Sodom. “Because the cry of Sodom and Gomorrah is great, and because their sin is very grievous,” Genesis 18:20 explains, Yahweh considered punishing them. This account offers little, however, to elucidate what the authors of Genesis specifically considered the sin of Sodom. The content of their sin is typically filled, at least since 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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the fifteenth century, with the sexual advances of the residents on the visitors; and this suggestion of sex does tell us something about the kind of questioning withheld from hospitality. “But before they lay down,” Genesis 19 says of the strangers after they had entered Sodom, “the men of the city, even the men of Sodom, compassed the house round . . . and they called unto Lot, and said unto him, where are the men which came in to these this night? Bring them out unto us, that we may know them” (Gen. 19:4–5). The Hebrew word Ya’da, translated as “know,” typically refers in Genesis to knowledge and not sexual intercourse—but here, and in two other Genesis locations, the meaning has possible sexual implications.20 The strangers, as everyone knows, are angels and not men—which makes later conceptions that homosexuality was Sodom’s sin a bit puzzling—and possibly a revealing bit of confusion. Moreover, the strangers are the “inhuman”—that is, following Kant and Žižek, they are the very “extimate” feature that marks the human as properly human—they are the foreign in the domestic that allow it its domesticity. “The judgment ‘he is inhuman’ means . . . that this person is neither simply human nor simply inhuman, but marked by a terrifying excess which, although it negates what we understand as humanity, is inherent to being human.”21 This brings us back to the knowledge and questioning that hospitality forbids itself as that knowledge can be figured as the secret enjoyment in the desires of the other, often symbolized in sex acts. There is knowledge forbidden in sex. That is, what is forbidden in sex is never the explicit touching of physical bodes but the enjoyment of that touching. Doctors, for example, can touch the physical body in many ways that in other contexts would be sexual. Its not the physical act that is itself forbidden, it is the secret knowledge of the other’s enjoyment. Abraham refused this sort of knowledge; Sodom did not. Abraham moved to the place the strangers were. He did not allow them to come to his place without first moving to meet them in theirs. He did not require that they announce the place to which they were connected by birth, property, possession, or passage. Abraham subverted in this gentle manner the inscription of 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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ownership associated with the role of the host—that is, he subverted the reaffirmation of ownership that arrives with the grant of hospitality. As Derrida warns, “the perversion and pervertibility of this law (which is also a law of hospitality) is that one can become virtually xenophobic in order to protect or claim to protect one’s own hospitality, the own home that makes possible one’s own hospitality.”22 Moving from his place, Abraham made a gesture to undercut the possessive powers of hospitality. Louis Massignon pointed out a similar element in Abrahamic hospitality: “Abraham deserved as his inheritance not only the Holy Land but also the entering in it of all the foreign hôtes who are ‘blessed’ by his hospitality. . . . Abraham’s hospitality is the sign announcing the final completion of the gathering of all nations, all blessed in Abraham, in this Holy Land that must be monopolized by none.”23 Abraham’s movement under that fateful sign of the father of nations affected confidence removed from the possession of place. Massignon suggested, moreover, that Abraham, the father of a certain form of group solidarity, prefigures the terms of a universal cosmopolitanism (as Alain Badiou would claim of Paul) in which everyone is blessed.24 Abraham faces these strangers with a remarkable display of strength—in that he scarcely looks to defend himself from the affective danger they may present to his intellectual world. Then Abraham spoke. Abraham did not ask the strangers to make an account of themselves on the bases of family, tribe, place, or desire (counter to the pervasive modern demands for identification). He requested an account of his appearance in the eyes of the stranger: “My lord, if I have found favor in your eyes, please do not go past your servant” (Gen. 18:3–4). Abraham looked for reflection in the eyes of the stranger—a process that opened up the powers of allegory and metonymy. This reflection is, of course, a misperception, but it is an allegory, in that, it is a description of a subject under the guise of some other subject of aptly suggestive resemblance. Abraham’s question is here directed to the perspective of the other’s gaze, not to a questioning that would serve to establish the legitimate position of the 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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interrogator. “Our fundamental striving,” writes Žižek, “is not to observe, but to be part of a staged scene, to expose oneself to a gaze—not a determinate gaze of a person in reality, but the nonexistent pure Gaze of the big Other.”25 Raising questions of how Abraham stands in relation to Lacan’s (and Nietzsche’s) assertions that the big Other—the position of the posited gaze—is an empty position. Abraham asks for the gods approval, which the god not only fails to provide but the god actually ends up disappointing Abraham as he realizes the god’s lack of understanding of justice. In fact, Lacan can add to an understanding here through his claim that the subject only exists in so far as the big Other is also barred from knowledge and completeness, illustrating the subjective importance of Abraham’s interaction with Yahweh—and Yahweh’s own lack. Exemplified in Abraham’s confrontation with Yahweh’s lack of knowledge concerning justice. The god’s lack of complete knowledge enables Abraham’s agonistic relationship with the system of commands in his world (i.e., God, the big Other)— the active defense of strangers and strange practices even against the Law. Abraham refused passive obedience to a juridical model of universal rules. The divine command is, itself, a contestable horizon in much of Genesis and is contestable both as an issue of perspective and one of knowledge—that is, as a question of god’s knowledge of the situation and his knowledge of the proper response to his own commands. Such an understanding of our behavior in the world and toward the unknown may help us resist—like Abraham, who looked, cared, and defended without attempting to know—the destruction of innocent, guilty, strangers, and ourselves. The relationship to the voice of command is agonistic in order to hospitably care for strangers—peace from war. “Peace!” the Qur’an says of Abraham’s response to the gods. “They are strangers.”



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Reapproaching the text of Genesis in this manner is not an attempt to rewrite the past according to more progressive lines— that is, this is not a politically correct attempt to write the god(s) of the Old Testament as more gracious, positive, and pluralist. It is an attempt to reexamine the traumatic event of the imposition of the law (as associated with the Old Testament). The law is, in this account, experienced as a radical imposition of force from the outside. Žižek explains, “The cause of this need for a violent imposition of the Law is that the very terrain covered by the Law is that of an even more fundamental violence, that of encountering a neighbor . . . when the Old Testament enjoins you to love and respect your neighbor, this does not refer to your imaginary semblable/double, but to the neighbor qua traumatic Thing.”26 The neighbor, in this example, is the trauma of the organizing command that comes as a violent imposition from outside. The authoritative lawgiver—the source of the resentful trauma—in Genesis is not a preconceived purely self-contained, perfectly self-willing subject, as Thomas Pangle would suggest in his reading of Genesis where he claims that the Bible counters philosophic insight that admits the contingent and accidental in the meaning of events. Genesis, he claims, demonstrates that “what is truly at work in every single thing we experience is the expression of an unfathomable and totally autonomous will.”27 Pangle sets up a transcendental that will bypass the illegitimacy of the system by occluding its internal contradictions. Revealingly, however, Yahweh’s will is not free of Abraham’s examination and criticism. Abraham, like Jacob after him, wrestles with this god. Abraham challenges Yahweh to reflect on his own behavior in terms of justice—a social idea that requires the interaction of a position that differs from Yahweh’s (a transcendental not altogether free of chance and riddled with negotiable ambivalence). This agonistic play of forces demonstrates a range of elements in the strength of Yahweh and Abraham—a strength that 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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models a nonessential identity—without (on both parts) rage or subservience directed at what is different. Sodom, the text clearly says, has oppressed people, and Yahweh has heard their cries. As Yahweh confessed to Abraham in Genesis 18, “The outcry of Sodom and Gomorrah, how great! Their offense is very grave. Let Me go down and see whether as the outcry that has come to Me they have dealt destruction, and if not, I shall know.” As Robert Alter explicates in his footnotes to this chapter, the Hebrew word for “outcry” in both the verb and noun form is tsa’aq or za’aq and is often used in the writings of the Psalms or the prophets to convey the cries of the oppressed.28 Yahweh is not policing the boundaries of his rules so much as defending the oppressed—the action mirrored by Abraham in his defense of Sodom. Central to these concerns of sovereignty is the moment of decision. Carl Schmitt, for example, has located the central moment of sovereignty, whether state-centered or self-centered, in the power to decide, particularly in the decision to go to war—the ultimate friend or enemy decision. Gods can model sovereignty for the political body, as Schmitt demonstrated; moreover, they often create expectations and understandings of human relations to authority. Conceptualizing the moment or force of decision as a force of indivisible sovereignty provides a model for human decision making that sustains models of self that experience their own pluralism as a threat to the demand for singularity. The sovereign conceived as the source of authoritative decision occludes the plurality of any decision-making subject. “Whether God alone is sovereign,” chimed Carl Schmitt, “that is, the one who acts as his acknowledged representative on earth, or the emperor, or prince, or the people, . . . the question is always aimed at the subject of sovereignty, at the application of the concept to a concrete situation.”29 This section examines the assumptions that the god or gods of Genesis desire the obedience of human subjects; obedience is much lauded as an important element of contemporary subjectivity particularly in response to elements of human life that are increasingly 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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figured as choices. But, in Genesis, Abraham did not simply obey the desires of Yahweh he intruded into the formulation of that desire. Abraham forced Yahweh to reconsider his desire to destroy the city of Sodom. Yahweh’s example challenges the conceptualization of Yahweh as a model for singular overwhelming sovereignty. Genesis, in fact, opens up the process of Yahweh’s decision. Yahweh pondered with himself about bringing another party into the decision. He did. The Schmittian point remains—that, in the end, not only does the sovereign decide what the problem is (i.e., Sodom), but he also can always decide without Abraham. But that misses the more telling point of the story—Yahweh can do what he wants—but he does not know what he wants until he disputes with Abraham. People who reflect Yahweh in some material ways provide purpose in the world. Yahweh has no “purpose” without people. There is no game to win if you just make up the rules—a divine terror. Gods need people to build limits. The world itself requires that Yahweh declaim with people. It requires that divine sovereignty be contestable—if singular and autonomous it does not mean anything. Meaning requires others. In Genesis, people participate and make boundaries and meanings in the world through contestation with the god. Furthermore, as Schmitt suggests, the question of the decision is central to conceptions of sovereignty, but Genesis exemplifies a decision that does not come out of singular unity but out of division and multiplicity. The decision, even as a miraculous event of divinity, occurs through the intersession of a human interlocutor. Yahweh makes a choice in Genesis, but that choice is open to contestation from other powerful people (such as Abraham); moreover, his power as sovereign is based on illegitimacies (since, at the very least, he establishes what is legitimate and cannot do it by those standards). The stranger’s life, as Abram (and Menelaus) knew very well, was a life of travel and struggle—and, as is often suggested, it is partially this struggle that gives it a mysterious attraction—even as Abraham struggled against Yahweh. If hardship and struggle were part of the life of the traveling stranger, it also became the 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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synecdoche of hospitality. For many ancient readers, even the making of bread by Sarah suggested a mystery. “Mix three measures of fine flour and make cakes,” explained Ambrose. “In Greek these are called enkryphia, that is, hidden things, to indicate that every mystery must remain hidden and as if covered by inviolable silence, so that it should not be divulged inconsiderately to profane ears.”30 “He serves therefore,” wrote Origen, “bread mixed ‘with three measures of fine wheat flour.’ He received three men; he mixed the bread ‘with three measures of fine wheat flour.’ Everything he does is mystical; everything is filled with mystery.”31 Mystery, from the Greek word musthrion, referred in the Septuagint, the Greek translation of the Torah often designated as LXX (in the book of Daniel and the Apocrypha), to secret purpose or counsel (to the struggle involved in all valuable counsel). The mystical and miraculous meaning of decision becomes important in the strange discussion Yahweh has with himself, pondering if he should tell Abraham of his plans to destroy Sodom. “And the men arose from there and looked out over Sodom, Abraham walking along with them to see them off. And the Lord had thought, ‘Shall I conceal from Abraham what I am about to do? For Abraham will surely be a great and mighty nation, and all the nations of the earth will be blessed through him’” (Gen. 18:18–19). Yahweh apparently decided to tell Abraham of his plans. Yahweh’s secret counsel or revelation of secret purpose—in a narrative example that connects mystery, secret council, and struggle—provoked Abraham to confront Yahweh with the apparent contradictions in his plan. The mysterious application of hospitality involved Abraham in secret counsels with Yahweh and in mysterious struggles—most specifically, the struggle to educate Yahweh concerning the demands for human justice, particularly that the innocent not be punished with the guilty. The stranger welcomed here with great hospitality was not slavishly obeyed—his understanding does not become Abraham’s understanding—their contestation created meaning. Hospitality, as deconstruction, according to Derrida, makes the 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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mysterious moment of human decision the metaphor for ethics. Hospitality thus extends the honor of conflict or agonistic struggle—and the connection between conflict and hospitality. The model of interaction here is one of conflictual difference, in which the possibilities of ideas like justice occur because of a challenge presented from outside the governing power—not as a gesture of regret but as a renegotiation of that “outside” as necessary for the production of justice “inside.” The task that this narrative achieves is, in the words of Judith Butler, “to refigure this necessary ‘outside’ as a future horizon, one in which the violence of exclusion is perpetually in the process of being overcome. But of equal importance is the preservation of the outside, the site where discourse meets its limits, where the opacity of what is not included in a given region of truth acts as a disruptive site of linguistic impropriety and unrepresentability.”32 Abraham stands outside the order demanding that the order of god and of justice be reimagined from the perspective, or horizon of possibility, and as the disruptive outside of the divine self-understanding. Moreover, the model of self presented here is one that requires contestation and is not presented as consistent; even Yahweh experiences his decisions as the consequences of a plurality of forces—some internalized, some externalized. Abraham, often praised for his obedience to Yahweh in sacrificing Isaac, received praise from Yahweh for his determination to defend others against the power of Yahweh.33 Yahweh was doubtlessly disappointed by Abraham’s failure to oppose his sacrificial request of Isaac. Abraham’s relationship to his god required more than obedience. As the Zohar makes clear, Abraham was not the supreme example of defense; that honor belongs to Moses, since Abraham did not bargain for unconditional mercy. “Even though all of them had sinned,” the Zohar claims concerning the behavior of Moses in Numbers 14:20, “he did not budge from there until He said I forgive, according to your word.”34 Moses demanded forgiveness based not on the legal demands of exchange or on his position but on the groundless request for a hospitable gift.



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The text goes so far as to demonstrate that Abraham taught his god to reflect on his behavior—Abraham presented the very possibility of reflection, a voice that could respond to the god. Abraham called upon Yahweh to consider the consequences of his own pronouncements and his own behavior. Abraham’s god was strong enough to realize that people brought him a greater knowledge, and this awareness did not provoke resentment by the god. Even Louis Massignon, who described the interlocutors as bargaining, in his discussion of Abraham’s prayer for Sodom, assumed a justice for Yahweh that existed prior to Abraham’s defense. “Prayer of Abraham on behalf of the perverse Sodom threatened with just sanctions by the Lord, prayer by means of a sublime and famous bargaining, lasting ten verses (Genesis 18:22–32), with God himself, a very firm pleading in favor of Sodom before the Creator of the world, disputing about the notion of divine justice.”35 More than that, Yahweh needed an interlocutor. Abraham taught Yahweh, the text clearly illustrates, what it was to live in society with other beings—a mighty powerful example of what gods receive from people—that is, people are strangers to gods. In fact, it is this element of Abraham’s treatment of Yahweh that Yahweh claimed most impressed him about Abraham—Abraham stood up to him in defense of Sodom. Abraham used his guest’s interest in justice to mount a sustained and dangerous inquisition of the stranger. As we have seen, evocations of the dangers of sodomy often construct Sodomites as an outside to the social inside and as an outside of the history shared by the community. Sodom is, of course, a particularly useful device in this regard since the story of Sodom turns on the question of whether the entire city has to be guilty or if, in fact, some innocent can be punished along with the guilty because of their identification with the city. Sodom is often the referent, therefore, for a system of divine punishment



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in which innocent members of society stand to receive punishment in connection with the punishment that their fellow citizens justly receive from Yahweh. For example, a flyer recently produced and distributed by the American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property (ASDTFP) pleaded with readers to fight the Supreme Court’s decision in Lawrence v. Texas to overturn Bowers v. Hardwick.36 “Genesis teaches us that God was determined to punish Sodom and Gomorrah for their wicked ways,” the pamphlet points out under the rubric. “We should fear that God will withdraw His blessings from America.” It concludes, “Here is a lesson for us today. . . . If we love America, and we do, we must stand up and be counted by God. He must be able to find enough faithful souls who abide by His Commandments.” The guilt or innocence of individuals is not the point of their god’s wrath; for the ASDTFP, the question is of the relative guilt or innocence of the polis. The destruction of parts of the southern United States by hurricanes provoked similar interpretations. Rev. Bill Shanks, for example, a pastor at New Covenant Fellowship of New Orleans in Metairie, was quoted in a press release by the American Family Association concerning the destruction of New Orleans: “New Orleans now is abortion free. New Orleans now is Mardi Gras free. New Orleans now is free of Southern Decadence and the sodomites, the witchcraft workers, false religion—it’s free of all of those things now. God simply, I believe, in His mercy purged all of that stuff out of there—and now we’re going to start over again. . . . It’s time for us to stand up against wickedness so that God won’t have to deal with that wickedness.”37 Shanks relies on theological conceptions that structure the relationship between the polis and god in such a manner that gods require people to be obedient subjects of law. Lost is the biblical structure in which the sovereign needs more than obedience. The weak god of Shanks’s conception takes grave offence at the minor behaviors of the human body. Abraham guessed that Yahweh intended to crush the city of Sodom. Abraham stood in a relationship of agonistic struggle 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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with the hegemonic (divine) order. This suspicion led Abraham to explain to Yahweh that if he claimed to be a just god, then punishing the innocent with the guilty violated that claim. “Abraham stepped up and said, ‘Will you stamp out the innocent along with the guilty? Suppose there are in the city fifty who are innocent; would you still level the place, rather than spare it for the sake of the fifty innocents inside it?’” In a devastatingly presumptive argument he calls Yahweh’s claim to justice. Harold Bloom says that Abraham acted, “commensurate with the incommensurate” (Bloom 1990, 203). Abraham went so far as to explain and exemplify justice for Yahweh. “That be far from thee to do after this manner, to slay the righteous with the wicked: and that the righteous should be as the wicked, that be far from thee.” Then, in his conclusion, he raised a personal challenge to Yahweh: “Shall not the Judge of all the earth do right?” (Gen. 18:25).38 His god agreed.39 Yahweh acquiesced to Abraham’s argument. “If I find in the city of Sodom fifty who are innocent,” Yahweh agreed, “I will spare the whole place on their account.” Then Abraham followed through in his critique of social punishment. He pushed this point, however, very carefully. “Here I am presuming to speak to the Lord, I who am but dust and ashes.” He presumed to ask, “What if the fifty innocent should lack five? Would you destroy the whole city because of those five?” Again, Yahweh agreed with Abraham’s logic and accepted the new terms. But in one of the most spectacular interactions between god and man in the Bible, Abraham persisted. Martin Buber called it “the boldest speech of man in all Scripture, more bold than anything said by Job in his dispute with God, greater than any, because it is the word of the intercessor who is moved by the purpose of his intercession to lose even the awe of God.”40 This exchange, according to Buber, moves Abraham into a greater fullness of himself and humanity. It also, I would add, moves this god into a greater fullness of himself. “What if only forty are found there?” Again, Yahweh agreed, and again, Abraham carefully pressed his advantage. “Let not the Lord be 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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impatient if I go on: What if only thirty are found there?” Again, Yahweh agreed. Again, Abraham intervened: “Again I presume to address the Lord: What if there are only twenty?” Again, Yahweh agreed: “‘I will not cause destruction,’ came the reply, ‘for the sake of the twenty.’” Again, Abraham intervened: “Please, let not the Lord be angry if I speak this last time: What if there are no more than ten?” Yahweh agreed and, as Abraham had suggested, ended the negotiation. What if Abraham had pursued the bargain even further? Perhaps, he, like Moses, should have demanded forgiveness in exchange for nothing—the demand of hospitality from a strange god. Yahweh rewarded Abraham for his audacious and able defense of the lives of other people, with whom, presumably, Abraham shared little social similarity. Yahweh seems to have been educated by Abraham about the demands for justice concerning people, and in return Yahweh cared for Abraham as a person who speaks up and intercedes for unknown strangers. The moral position for people in this narrative is to defend each other and attempt to change the mind of God—not to change or bargain with one another. Yahweh’s strength was demonstrated in his ability, even desire, to live with difference, and with the challenges that difference made to his view of the world (one of the accounts Nietzsche offered of strength). Yahweh demonstrated agonistic value in valuing Abraham for exactly the capacity to confront him. Finally, hospitality between people enabled humans to demand fair treatment from the gods as much as each other. Abraham confronted Yahweh with his own promise of justice—challenging Yahweh to spare the city if fifty righteous people could be found. He clarified for Yahweh the connections between such destruction and Yahweh’s plans to be a just god. “That be far from thee to do after this manner,” Abraham said to Yahweh (Gen. 18:25). People, it appears in these eastern Mediterranean stories, must assert challenges to the rules of the order—exemplified in criticisms of god. Hospitality and mediation press desperately when the gods threaten brimstone and fire. “You must now return the 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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man’s wife”—Yahweh instructed King Abimelech concerning his possession of Sarah—“since he is one who speaks up, he will intercede for you—to save your life” (Gen. 20:7). Abraham had the strength to oppose the decision of this god, to interpret conceptions of justice, and, perhaps, to make his god anew.



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Athens Demons of Decision

Then holiness, since it is the art of attending to the gods, is a benefit to the gods, and makes them better? And you would agree that when you do a holy or pious act you are making one of the gods better? —Plato, Euthyphro The immortal gods alone have neither age nor death! All other things almighty Time disquiets. Earth wastes away; the body wastes away; faith dies; distrust is born. And imperceptibly the spirit changes between a man and his friend, or between two cities. —Sophocles, Oedipus at Colonus Plato on his back. He is a pain at moments, that one. He did not want to die. —Jacques Derrida, Postcard

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e brings a wonderful accusation against me,” Socrates said of Meletus, “which at first hearing excites surprise: he says that I am a poet or maker of gods, and that I make new gods and deny the existence of old ones; this is the ground of his indictment.”1 Meletus accused Socrates of inventing new gods and dispatching the old ones. This wonder-working power risked punishment to the city of Athens and to himself. Political theory, highly 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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conversant on issues concerning Socrates’s relation to the city of Athens, tends to ignore the sizable role of the gods in Socrates’s account of his obligations and allegiances to Athens.2 Not only do gods consolidate and dissolve that relationship, but they also play a very large role in his relationship with himself.3 This chapter examines Socrates’s relation to himself, or rather, his relation to his demon, daimon in Greek, especially as that relates to recent concerns about the political theology of the decision. It is fair to say, this chapter substantially agrees with Meletus and the city of Athens that Socrates was guilty of novelty in theology.

Political Theory II: Gods and Social Bonds The ancient Greeks are often made to be the people for whom alienation from their city and alienation from their city’s gods were unknown; Shklar, for example, says of Hegel’s understanding, “In Athens that consciousness was gained effortlessly. Its citizens lived in the secure certainty that the spirit of the laws was also their very own spirit and consciousness. They were free because they were not under the dominion of a master, either external or internal, man or god.”4 Such a statement really misses the constant fear in Athens that people were losing their belief in the gods. The gods, that is, seem to have been in constant danger of fading from Athenian horizons. If anything, in fact, Athenian texts distinguish themselves with their attention to the passing of the gods; notably, both Plato and Sophocles often structure their work around this problem. The contemporary political inheritance of Greek theology includes the fear that punishment could come to the city or state for the crimes of the individual—both Oedipus and Socrates exemplify concerns of divine punishment of the city for their crimes. As we have seen concerning the story of Sodom, this politico-theological narrative is not a feature of the Old Testament. For Athenians and other Greeks, however, it was remarkably common. Athenians set their most famous story of the punishment visited on a city in neighboring Thebes, a story of 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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punishment that begins, as does the story of Socrates, with a pronouncement of the god of Delphi. The gods punished Thebes for its impiety. In the persona of Phoebus (the possible remainder of an even older god), Apollo tormented the city for one man’s defilement.5 “Thebes is tossed on a murdering sea and cannot lift her head from the death surge. A rust consumes the buds and fruits of the earth; The herds are sick; children die unborn, And labor is vain. The god of plague and pyre Raids like detestable lightning through the city, And all the house of Kadmos is laid waste, All emptied, and all darkened: Death alone Battens upon the misery of Thebes.”6 Phoebus Apollo visited destruction on the city for the famous crimes of one man, Oedipus, who murdered his father and impregnated his mother.7 The story figures the violence of the god as a response to the failure to respect the gods and their prophets, and it reveals the extensive public tensions about the loss in belief in the gods. Oedipus’s mockery of (and crimes against) the gods threatens not just him but the entire polis. Teiresias, Oedipus asserted, was lying when he announced, after Oedipus bullied him, that Oedipus was the pollution that threatened the city. Oedipus accused the prophet of committing the murder himself, and of being in the employ of Creon. In his angry defense of himself, Socrates asserted that Teiresias and Creon wanted the throne and were using the skill of prophecy to disrupt the political regime. In what amounts to the competition of two forms of knowledge (one predicated on magical and devious signs and the other connected to the clever ability to unravel mystery), Oedipus understood the spokespersons for the gods to present danger to his rule. In pitting himself against Teiresias and Creon, Oedipus suggested the connection between Teiresias’s forms of knowledge and political power. In his anger and accusations, Oedipus compared his ways of revealing the truth to those of Teiresias and prophets: “Has your mystic mummery ever approached the truth? When that hellcat the Sphinx was performing here, What help were you to these people? Her magic was not for the first man who came along: It demanded a real exorcist. Your 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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birds—What good were they? Or the gods, for the matter of that?”8 The gods, Oedipus brashly asserted, with their mystical or magical knowledge, failed to provide protection for the city. Oedipus’s rage and argument culminate in the assertion that the gods themselves failed to help the city. At the end of the third scene, the Chorus ponders Oedipus’s ominous questioning of the gods’ utility. Shall we lose faith in Delphi’s obscurities, We who have heard the world’s core Discredited, and the sacred wood Of Zeus at the Elis praised no more? The deeds and strange prophecies Must make a pattern yet to be understood. Zeus, if indeed you are lord of all, Throned in light over night and day, Mirror this in your endless mind: Our masters call the oracle Words on the wind, and the Delphic vision blind! Their hearts no longer know Apollo, And reverence for the gods has died away.9

Iocaste, Oedipus’s mother and wife, attempted to comfort him with the assurance that the early reports and suggestions of his possible guilt should be discounted because the prophets had often been wrong, particularly in the prophecy that her first husband would be killed by her son. Her assertions that the prophets were often wrong revealed the fault lines of truth in the sand under Oedipus’s feet. Thus Apollo never caused that child To kill his father, and it was not Laios fate To die at the hands of his son, as he had feared. This is what prophets and prophecies are worth! Have no dread of them.”

The spokespersons for the gods are denied power by the very one for whom they have spoken of impending terror. Iocaste reaffirms 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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the gods in this light but not prophets. “It is God himself / Who can show us what he wills, in his own way.”10 Her words ring with the ominous tone of someone on the verge of hearing from the god in his own way. The gods of Thebes and Athens threatened punishment to the city for unbelief; Oedipus brought a terrible fate to Thebes, and Socrates threatened a terrible fate for Athens. Meletus accused Socrates of not believing in the gods and accused him of inventing new gods. As with the story of Oedipus, the state of Socrates’s belief is a problem for the city. Socrates made a counterclaim in the Apology, that the city should listen to the spokespersons from the gods since he himself was a gadfly sent by the gods and, furthermore, the city of Athens was in danger as a result of his persecution for impiety. “I would have you know, that if you kill such a one as I am, you will injure yourselves more than you will injure me.” He continued, Athenians, I am not going to argue for my own sake, as you may think, but for yours, that you may not sin against the God, or lightly reject his boon by condemning me. For if you kill me you will not easily find another like me, who, if I may use such a ludicrous figure of speech, am a sort of gadfly, given to the state by the God; and the state is like a great noble steed who is tardy in his motions owing to his very size, and requires to be stirred into life. I am that gadfly which God has given the state, and all day long and in all places am always fastening upon you, arousing and persuading and reproaching you. And as you will not easily find another like me, I would advise you to spare me.11

Socrates himself evoked these commonly understood relationships between the gods and civic punishment. Even as Oedipus became the great savior of the city in Oedipus at Colonus, Socrates prophesied his own transformation into a hero of the city. Socrates’s trial, in some likelihood, was the result of the city’s attempt to find a source of blame for the religious violations that they believed had led to their defeat in Syracuse. Alcibiades, the nephew of Pericles, and a man who, according to Plutarch, “feared and reverenced [Socrates] alone, and despised the rest of his 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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lovers,” was the foremost proponent for the expedition to Sicily.12 Before the expedition set out, however, some Athenians accused Alcibiades of profaning the sacred Eleusian mysteries. After the defeat, they blamed the destruction of their forces on this sacrilege and it provided the background for the accusations charged against Socrates of corrupting the youth. Because Socrates taught such impiety, many assumed, the gods punished Athens through their defeat in Syracuse. Even if Socrates bore no direct relation to the defeat, Socrates had provoked many Athenians with his continual inquiry into the relationship between gods and Athens. It was this inquiry that Socrates exemplified for most Athenians.

Business of the Gods In no dialogue does Socrates pursue this inquiry, the relationship of people to gods, more severely than in the Platonic dialogue with Euthyphro—a pursuit that demonstrated the relationship of words to piety and Socrates’s lack of knowledge concerning the foundations of those words. What does language have to do with the gods? Lacan writes that we are in language, or in a more Hegelian or Žižekian sense: we are in god. God, for Socrates, often represents or signifies the abstract representation of the order of language. Socrates understood that we think in language. He couples that, however, with the claim that it is the god in us—speaking against us—that is thought and decision. Our divinity is in language and opposes us. “And twice now I have attempted to think about my defense,” Xenophone records Socrates affirming to Hermogenes, “but my divinity opposes me” (Brickhouse 2002, 82). Socrates accosted Euthyphro, who was on his way to court to press charges against his own father. Socrates, astounded by Euthyphro’s prosecution of his own father, commented that he must have great confidence in his knowledge of piety in order to prosecute his father. That being the case, Socrates desired



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the teaching of Euthyphro concerning the nature of impiety. “I adjure you to tell me the nature of piety and impiety, which you said that you knew so well, and of murder, and the rest of them.”13 Socrates implored Euthyphro to teach him the true meaning of piety so that he could more accurately defend himself from the charges of impiety brought by Meletus and the city of Athens. Socrates, in his dialogue with Euthyphro, put the question of his relationship between the gods and humanity very sharply: how do gods and humanity do business with one another? Socrates’s request for instruction in piety initially elicits an example from Euthyphro. “Piety is doing as I am doing.”14 Confronted by Socrates with his failure to provide any knowledge beyond example, Euthyphro turned to the gods for support in the theological manner of a Hesiod or a Homer. The gods, in Euthyphro’s early response, are models for human behavior. Zeus provided an example of the piety of going against your father. “For do not men regard Zeus as the best and most righteous of the gods?—and even they admit that he bound his father (Cronos) because he wickedly devoured his sons, and that he too had punished his own father (Uranus) for a similar reason, in a nameless manner.”15 Zeus modeled piety for Euthyphro in a mythic narrative. That is, Euthyphro clarified his answer as obedience to divine models of behavior. In the light of the previous chapter, this initial answer by Euthyphro reveals an important difference in conceptions of gods in human consciousness. The god of Abraham provided Abraham with an interlocutor, in that, the relationship between people and gods was concerned with interaction not with modeling. Questions of ethics included questions of hospitality and contestation. For Athens, questions of ethical human behavior can be figured as similarity to the gods. The gods of Genesis provided an encouragement to hospitable behavior. The gods of the Iliad, in comparison, often provided models for human behavior—which Plato attempted to revitalize in the Republic.



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This exchange between Euthyphro and Socrates concerning the gods and piety provides two competitive conceptions of the divine. Euthyphro modeled himself on Zeus and confidently pursued a suit against his own father for murdering a slave. Socrates, I argue, transformed this simple mimetic relationship into something far more complex.16 With Socrates the gods appear as elements of subjectivity, not simply models or others, but as internal spirits that speak to the human; they are the human beyond or before rational debate and organization. The gods, somewhat ironically, model exactly what occurs without a model—the event of human inventive consciousness. Socrates, not satisfied by Euthyphro’s turn to the stories of the gods, asks him for an answer to the question concerning piety that is not simply an example. Socrates’s ironic demand for knowledge through the use of interpretation exemplifies the demand for stable knowledge that Abraham did not demand from the strangers. Socrates’s insistence on such an answer forces Euthyphro to attempt to produce the kind of knowledge about the grounds of knowledge that Socrates knows cannot be produced. Socrates insists that Euthyphro tell him the true meaning of piety—the concept the word points to—even as his questions come from an account of language aware of the absence of such knowledge. Socrates (consistent with his understanding of language) never loses sight of the fact that “piety” is a word and as a word it gets its meaning from its relation to other words. Socrates directs Euthyphro to supply him with the “one idea which made the impious impious, and the pious pious” (Plato 1978, 6). “Piety then,” Euthyphro responds, “is that which is dear to the gods, and impiety is that which is not dear to them” (Plato 1978, 6). Euthyphro transfers piety into “dearness.” Seemingly, “dearness” could be the value behind or above piety. Socrates plays with an advantage here. He knows that no one can know what is behind a word. This knowledge is, quite simply, the only substance of Socrates’s knowledge. The Delphic priestess did not proclaim Socrates as the wisest man because of his logical, 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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or elenctic, arguments; the priestess of Apollo announced that Socrates was the wisest because he knew that he did not know anything about the essential meanings of words—particularly words like “justice,” “the good,” or “piety.” In this case, Socrates knows that Euthyphro has not gotten behind the word “piety”; he has merely moved to a related word, “dear,” a word with all of the groundless problems of “piety.” “Is that which is holy (piety) loved by the gods because it is holy (pious), or is it holy (pious) because it is loved by the gods?” Socrates further demands.17 The move from “dear” to “love,” however, did change part of the linguistic puzzle in that the word is more powerfully one invoking agency. Socrates again questions Euthyphro concerning the relationship between the ideas or words—this time between piety and love. Socrates focuses on the exchange of the becoming relationship between words; in which Socrates asks what relation outside forces have on the status of the object. “I am trying to say this, that if anything becomes or undergoes, it does not become because it is in a state of becoming, but it is in a state of becoming because it becomes.” Or, as Socrates clarifies, “those who love it do not love it because it is a beloved thing, but it is a beloved thing because they love it?”18 Euthyphro confirms the obviousness of the statement that something be loved not because it is loved but is loved for another reason. Logically, there is a lot to recommend Socrates’s claim; however, Socrates put an additional problem into play with this exchange. He set up the problem that the ideas of gifts and love will present at the conclusion of the essay; he cornered Euthyphro concerning how a person could ever give anything to a god. Love, like a gift, as Derrida has suggested, evokes the opposite of exchange even as it consistently fails to achieve what it evokes. Euthyphro attempts to include piety as a part of justice—the part of justice, that is, that attends to the gods. “This then is my opinion, Socrates, that the part of the right which has to do with attention to the gods constitutes piety and holiness, and that the remaining part of the right is that which has to do with the service 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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to men.”19 Euthyphro hardly notices that the examination of these words in relation to “piety” or “holiness” only reveals more words, just as groundless as the ones that came before. Socrates is not drilling deeper into the meaning of a word with his questions; he merely travels through its related words, never moving above or below simple words. “Then will you be surprised,” he asked of Euthyphro toward the end of their exchange, “since you say this, if your words do not remain fixed but walk about, and will you accuse me of being the Daedalus who makes them walk, when you are yourself much more skilful than Daedalus and make them go round in a circle.”20 The words of Euthyphro and Socrates do not remain fixed, they move in relation to other words. They are not grounded or located by metaphysical reference (though they do suggest such connection); Socrates moves the words in relation to other words. Finally, Socrates demonstrates the implication of words in their opposite words, even the words “humans” and “gods.” Piety, Euthyphro ventures, is properly attending to the gods, which leads Socrates to question the meaning of “attention,” particularly highlighting the relation between attending and benefiting. How could people benefit the gods? “Then holiness, since it is the art of attending to the gods, is a benefit to the gods, and makes them better? And you would agree that when you do a holy or pious act you are making one of the gods better?”21 Euthyphro denied that he intended to mean that humans could improve the gods, but this problem haunts the entire discourse—what do gods need? How could they need anything from humans? What could human attention to the gods help them accomplish? “Then tell me my friend; what would the art which serves the gods serve to accomplish?” Socrates demanded.22 Socrates suggested an answer for his friend: piety is the art or science of asking and giving to the gods. In fact, Socrates adds dramatically, piety is how humans and gods do business with one another. “Then holiness would be an art of barter between gods and men?” (Plato 1928, 55) “Socrates rebuffs it brutally,” Vlastos explains. “He says that, if so, piety 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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would be ‘an art of commercial exchanges between gods and men’” (Vlastos 1991, 174). Here, Socrates and Euthyphro have traveled from one word, piety, to its opposite, or at least, what it cannot be: business. Piety collapses when the relationship between gods and humans is figured as a form of business; it has reached its own opposite. Socrates pursues the point that has lurked around much of this exchange: what could the gods get from such a business? To which Euthyphro can only return to his initial response to Socrates’s queries: what is dear or precious to the gods. “Or do you not see that our definition has come round to the point from which it started?” (Plato 1928, 57) More like Finnegan’s Wake than a sculpture by Daedelus or Phidias, we have returned to our starting point without ever getting behind the words themselves. Socrates’s dialogue with Euthyphro reveals a Socrates who finds language to be a groundless structure wherein words get their meanings from their relations with one another, not through their connections to a metaphysical truth. Importantly, this Socrates is not left silent. That is, Socrates’s awareness of the groundlessness of language does not lead him to a nihilistic denial of meaning in which no one can say or mean anything. He is even willing to die for the meaning he puts into the world. Moreover, he is willing to kill off some of the old gods for meaning. Gods do not stand outside of this language. Like humans they are in it. Moreover, they are bound in a linguistic relationship with their opposites: people. These opposites, as we saw with piety, experience their limits in each other.

Demonic Wisdom of Gods and Socrates Meletus’s wondrous accusation comes to a head (and a finish), of course, in Socrates’s defense before the city of Athens. The wisdom that Socrates claimed to posses was itself established on divine assertion: “For the word which I speak is not mine, but the speaker to whom I shall refer it is a person of weight. For of 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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my wisdom—if it is wisdom at all—and of its nature, I will offer you the god of Delphi as a witness” (Plato 1928, 81). The oracle of Delphi professed that Socrates was the wisest man. This statement initiated Socrates’s pursuits into the nature of knowledge; it also exemplified the miraculous event of knowledge—both in terms of our attachment to questions and also in the continuing role of the miraculous and the irrational in knowledge. That is, it was a moment of unplanned and unpredictable decision that directed Socrates’s attention to the problem of knowledge, even as the content of his knowledge turned out to be an awareness that language (the material of knowledge) was itself groundless (like the gods). Many, including Robert Nozick, admit the irony of Socrates’s decision for rationality arising from an oracle’s statement.23 Socrates never argued for a rational order in the world that would make human inquiry rationally self-generating. The moment of inspiration begins and remains, seemingly, in other hands. We credit Socrates with initiating an exploration into the foundations of knowledge, but the real credit belongs to Apollo. Socrates’s divine encouragement resembles Athena’s miraculous diversion of Achilles from his course of violence against Agamemnon in the Iliad; it captures the sense of the initial spark of human interest and decision as coming from someplace else, from some god. Gregory Vlastos makes a very careful distinction between kinds of knowledge that Socrates might be evoking in his discussions of knowledge. He does not pursue, however, the skepticism that Socrates expresses concerning the knowledge the gods might have and its similarity to his own in terms of its incompleteness. “Now, I suggest,” Vlastos concludes, “we can understand why Socrates is startled by Delphi’s accolade. He can hardly bring himself to believe that his own understanding of the good life, chancy, patchy, provisional, perpetually self-questioning, endlessly perplexed as it is, should have any value at all in the eyes of the god who enjoys the unshaken heart of knowledge [of the type Vlastos designates (c)]” (Vlastos 1994, 64). Vlastos misses the point—Socrates is surprised to discover the gods are a part 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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of that perplexity. That is, like words, gods do not have validation and the heart of knowledge is not just shaken but is shaking. His own demon (god) never gives clear answers from the heart of knowledge, but only initiates questioning—much as Socrates performed toward Euthyphro. Socrates took much time in the Apology to show that Meletus had both accused him of believing in the gods and not believing in the gods; it is easy to feel some sympathy with Meletus in the ambivalence of Socrates’s claims about death and the gods. “And so, Meletus, you really think that I do not believe in any god?” Socrates directly questioned his accuser. “I swear by Zeus that you believe absolutely in none at all,” Meletus apparently responded. Socrates pursued Meletus with his questions: “Has he not compounded a riddle, thinking to try me? He said to himself: I shall see whether this wise Socrates will discover my ingenious contradiction, or whether I shall be able to deceive him and the rest of them. For he certainly does appear to me to contradict himself in the indictment as much as if he said that Socrates is guilty of not believing in the gods, and yet of believing in them—but this surely is a piece of fun” (Plato 1992, 28). Socrates makes his own account of the relations between gods and his spirit an ironic joke. Socrates asserted a belief in a god. But in what sense did Socrates believe in the gods? For Socrates, these higher gods involve the relationship of the self to the words that form a social self. The imposed order of language seems to function as a connection to the gods and to the city for Socrates. “For if, O men of Athens, by force of persuasion and entreaty, I could overpower your oaths, then I should be teaching you to believe that there are no gods, and convict myself, in my own defense, of not believing in them. But that is not the case; for I do believe that there are gods, and in a far higher sense than that in which any of my accusers believe in them” (Plato 1992, 36). Socrates put his accusers on notice that he did believe in the gods, but he believed in them in an entirely different manner than they did. Higher, is, of course, a tricky claim, especially from a speaker 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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so aware of the lack of height and depth in language. It is misguided not to keep in mind the importance of Socrates’s assertions concerning his belief in the gods as very different than that of his listeners. The gods, for Socrates, more than the signs and significations of the forces of nature and priests in the temples, could also appear as the inner human voice of reflection. Socrates’s higher belief in the gods conceived of spirits as gods. “Now what are spirits or demigods? Are they not either gods or the sons of gods? Is that true?” (Plato 1992, 29) Socrates took the divine power of the oracular gods of Athens and transposed them into the premoment of human thought and decision. That is, Athens had looked to the world of physical signs and wonders for ways to make decisions and choose courses. Athenians did not conceive of themselves as the source of decision. For example, on August 24, 413 BC, there was an eclipse of the moon. In the face of a necessary retreat of Athenian forces from the plain of Syracuse, the commanding general, Nicias (a close friend of Socrates who was made the very definition of courage in the Platonic Laches), consulted the soothsayers who told him that the gods had signaled for a twenty-seven-day delay before the retreat. “Nicias, who was rather too given to divination and the like, refused,” according to Thucydides, to even discuss the question of the departure until 27 days had passed, as the diviners prescribed” (Thucydides 7.50.4). Gods spoke to humans and made decisions through birds, signs, and priests. Of course, in the everyday sense of things, people made decisions but they did not conceive of themselves as debating questions in their head in a manner to arrive at a decision. Socrates and his gods changed that—they visited him in a very personal sense. Hegel’s account of the pre-Socratic world of Athens finds a city in which human decisions are responses to the actions of the physical world. That is, Hegel’s account of Athens finds decision to be a process exterior to the human.



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It might be said that an organic, articulated, constitution was present even in the beautiful democracy of Athens, and yet we cannot help noticing that the Greeks derived their final decisions from the observation of quite external phenomena such as oracles, the entrails of sacrificial animals, and the flight of birds. They treated nature as a power which in those ways revealed and expressed what was good for men. At that time, self-consciousness had not yet advanced to the abstraction of subjectivity, not even so far as to understand that, when a decision is to be made, an “I will” must be pronounced by man himself. This “I will” constitutes the great difference between the ancient world and the modern, and in the great edifice of the state it must therefore have its appropriate objective existence. Unfortunately, however, this requirement is regarded as only external and optional.24

Socrates’s daimon moved the “I will” inside of him. Socrates’s criticism of the prophetic power of swans suggests Hegel’s point. “Will you not allow that I have as much of the spirit of prophecy in me as the swans?” Socrates asked of Simmias before his death. “And I too, believing myself to be the consecrated servant of the same God, and the fellow-servant of the swans, and thinking that I have received from my master gifts of prophecy which are not inferior to theirs, would not go out of life less merrily than the swans” (Phaedo 83–84). Socrates, at least as much as the Cygninae, had a sacred and divine voice that spoke to him. Socrates’s daimon was a sign or voice that spoke inside his head to make him question his course of action. This voice would often cause him to stand still for many hours as he carried on an inner discourse concerning his actions. It is the daimonion that, according to Euthyphro, was the reason for Socrates’s prosecution before the Athenians. Socrates’s daimon speaks to him, according to Gregory Vlastos, from “extra-rational channels” (Vlastos 1991, 167). This demonic voice supplies support for Socrates’s account of arguments and language. Socrates’s daimon is important, but too often contemporary readers assume that the daimon signifies



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self-reflection and miss the divine aspects of the daimon. I think the divinity that Socrates found there helps explain how Socrates valued life and politics. Dana Villa, for example, nicely signals the importance of the daimonion as an inner voice, but he does not consider the importance of the fact that Socrates calls it a deity. “When, in the Apology, Socrates appeals to his ‘inner voice’ (daimonion) and to his own practice of ruthless self-examination, he is appealing to the thinking individual’s capacity to generate such prohibitions—the core of any morality of abstention—not out of deference to such authorities but out of a nonexpert understanding of injustice. With Socrates, conscience (and morality) no longer depend upon the ‘leading strings’ provided by such authorities” (Villa 2001, 41). Villa correctly, and thoughtfully, points out the lack of authority under which Socrates’s daimon operated. But the voice did have divine authority—figured as a human event. The demon needed no other authority. Hegel connected Socrates’s conception of the god of the self with that voice of self-reflection. For Hegel, Socrates’s demon is a fundamentally important historical moment in which humans first confront their own power to decide—their own power to open up history to the contingency and caprice of human decision. “For the turning point in the whole world-famed change of views constituting the principle of Socrates, is that in place of the oracle, the testimony of the mind of the individual has been brought forward and that the subject has taken upon itself to decide” (1995, 425). Hegel argued that the spirit of reflection that Socrates participated in is a moment on the way to god’s self-reflection in universal history. I say that Socrates’s experience of self-reflection as a divine and human moment places indeterminacy, invention, and possibility in the place of the human and gives it the weight of the divine. Gods and cultural rules represent the foundationless rules that govern all of us; even the way rules that determine the possibility of an “I” or an “us” are thus experienced as an imposed command. Our removal from the gods is often figured as the experience of separation for these commands as “ours.” That is, often accounts 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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of earlier peoples and gods claim that the people experience those gods as a seamless part of the fabric that constructed their sense of “I” and “us.” “We,” it is further asserted, now experience the gods as doubtful and experience our “I” as somehow separated from society and the gods. Socrates’s knowledge, such as it is, is the knowledge of the lack of certainty the gods, like humans, posses. Socrates understood the gods in the manner that he understood language. More than that, for Socrates “god” was but a word with great power in the political life of the polis. Socrates believed in gods, as he says, in a new way; that new way was in much the same manner as he believed in other words that functioned within language. “God” is a word, and like other words that Socrates played with, such as piety in the dialogue with Euthyphro, he never falls for his own request to explain what higher essence the word refers. Socrates knows that god is a word that works within a language to establish and organize immanence and value.

Death of Gods and Humans Peter Euben has pointed out that philosophy began in mourning for Socrates; it also begins in mourning for the old gods. When death finally came for the old man, he famously asked Crito to sacrifice a cock to the god of medicine. Nietzsche read this as the secret proof that Socrates considered life a disease for which death was the cure. “Whether it was death or the poison or piety or malice—something loosened his tongue at that moment,” wrote Nietzsche with suspicion and awe, “and he said: ‘O Crito, I owe Asclepius a rooster.’” Nietzsche smelled a nihilism turned against life in the final words of the sage he revered for his joyful science of life. “This ridiculous and terrible ‘last word’ means for those who have ears: ‘O Crito, life is a disease.’ Is it possible that a man like him, who had lived cheerfully and like a soldier in the sight of everyone, should have been a pessimist? He had merely kept a cheerful mien while concealing all his life long his ultimate 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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judgment, his inmost feeling. Socrates, Socrates suffered life!” (Nietzsche 19474, 272) Nietzsche makes his own slight deception here—these are not exactly Socrates’s last words. Socrates, with his final words, asked Crito, “Will you remember to pay the debt?”25 Socrates put a debt into place—not totally different from the debt that Jesus would later institute—in which the god is owed for our life. Socrates asked his friend to remember to pay his debt. Asclepius, the god of healing, was killed by Zeus because Hades feared that if Asclepius was successful, people would cease to die.26 Socrates requested of Crito that he remember to thank the god for sacrificing his life to keep people alive. Socrates asked Crito to remember his debt to a god who died for human life. Socrates, like Zeus, had killed off some gods. The gods Socrates killed off lived in the physical world, like swans or the human body, but these gods returned to haunt the spiritual world that opened up for people. The god that Zeus killed enabled people to die; the gods that Socrates killed allowed people to live with death. He arranged the connections between gods and death in such a manner that they mirrored our dying state. Central to Meletus’s charges against Socrates, according to Plato’s Apology, was Socrates’s lack of belief in the gods of the city—that is, his murder of those civic gods. “Their ethical transformation,” Vlastos noticed, “would be tantamount to the destruction of the old gods, the creation of new ones—which is precisely what Socrates takes to be the sum and substance of the accusation at his trial” (Vlastos 1991, 166). The disappearance of earlier gods left traces in the fabric of life and language. Killing off the gods, as with killing off the father for Freud, left remainders and returns. Gods die but continue to leave traces within language for Socrates. Socrates earliest inquiries into the nature of ideas includes the suggestion that piety or perhaps the act of questioning piety is like a murder. Notice the surprising parallelism in his initial query of Euthyphro: “I adjure you to tell me the nature of piety and impiety, which you said that you knew so well, and of murder, and the rest of them” (Dover 1978, 4). Piety, impiety, and murder—Socrates’s addition of murder to the list adds a 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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surprising element to the question of piety. Socrates conceived of his own pious process of examining the meaning of words to be a form of murder. By asking too many questions, Socrates was killing off the gods. The deaths of the gods do not just remove enchantment from the world. The dead gods also take with them the rationality of language. That is, the confidence that grammar correctly structures our understanding of the world dies with the gods. Dead gods also take the position from which to judge, confirm, or value our actions in this world. People are left without an outside judge (either as god or divinely rewarded afterlife), then this life becomes difficult to value even as it becomes the only life to value. Socrates’s murder of the old gods produces trouble for the city. As we saw in the first part of this chapter, the city came into danger because of Oedipus’s murder of his father; Socrates comes into trouble from the city because of his murder of the gods. Oedipus’s murder of Liaos initiated the fulfillment of the Oracle’s prophecy. Causing the death of another, in this case, the father, brought punishment to the entire city of Thebes.27 Athens murdered Socrates for his divine neologisms. Thebes (and Athens) must punish (or accept) Oedipus for his crimes and the crimes against him. Socrates’s trial and punishment in the city of Athens happens as a result of the suspicion that Socrates is responsible for a fading of belief in the gods. One response to the perceived death of the gods is to violently exorcise the cause of their death—blinding and expelling Oedipus or killing Socrates. Athens, Socrates pointed out, would risk bringing the punishment of the gods for the death of one small, ugly man. Socrates, however, had already reformulated some of the elements deployed in this argument. To illustrate the level of ignorance the people of Athens acted upon, he exploited the fact that humans do not know if death is a good or bad thing. Additionally, he created an elaborate claim that death might be preferable to life. This innovative claim, with such profound historical consequences, also transformed the relationship between the gods and death. In shifting the meaning of death, Socrates also transformed how 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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death functioned in relation to desire. Socrates understood himself to desire death.28 “They will say that this is very true, and our people at home will agree with them in saying that the life which philosophers desire is truly death, and that they have found them out to be deserving of the death which they desire,” Simmias said, expressing to Socrates the popular perception that philosophers desire death. “And they are right, Simmias, in saying this, with the exception of the words, ‘they have found them out’; for they have not found out what is the nature of this death which the true philosopher desires,” Socrates explained, “or how he deserves or desires death.” They are correct in saying, according to Socrates, that the philosopher desires death, but they do not understand the nature of this death. They do not understand the meaning of the words they use. “But let us leave them,” Socrates suggests to Simmias, “and have a word with ourselves: Do we believe that there is such a thing as death?” asked Socrates. “To be sure,” replied Simmias. Socrates accepted this response and explained it: “And is this anything but the separation of soul and body? And being dead is the attainment of this separation when the soul exists in herself, and is parted from the body and the body is parted from the soul—that is death?” (Phaedo 61). Death, understood in Socrates’s terms, is merely the separation of the soul (or daimon) from the body. Socrates’s account of the soul, and by extension, the human, requires its reflection in an innovative account of the gods. “And which does the soul resemble?” Socrates asked of Cebes. “The soul resembles the divine, and the body the mortal,” answered Cebes. Socrates responded to Cebes’s confident answer with a question that would make the soul unchangeable and eternal in exactly the manner of the gods; but then in a perspectival move worthy of Nietzsche, he leveraged that connection back toward the soul and asserted its connection to death. The soul, he claimed, is like the divine and therefore possess the characteristics he assigned to the divine—immortality, immovability, and singularity. “Then reflect, Cebes,” Socrates instructed in Phaedo, “is not the conclusion of the whole matter this—that 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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the soul is in the very likeness of the divine, and immortal, and intelligible, and uniform, and indissoluble, and unchangeable; and the body is in the very likeness of the human, and mortal, and unintelligible, and multiform, and dissoluble, and changeable. Can this, my dear, Cebes, be denied?” (Plato 1992, 79). Cebes did not deny it, but, of course, it is a proof established by comparing two unknowns, exactly as words define themselves through the reference to other groundless words. Moreover, this argument enables Socrates to assert once again that the divine is an invisible and interior experience of the human. The distinction collapses in that it is the human that posses the divine. Socrates’s argument about people turned on his ability to formulate persuasive claims about the soul, which required formulating the unknown and the gods in particular ways. Socrates, to put it a slightly different way, kills off the gods from the world of materiality in order to imagine humans continuing to live after death; but, this maneuver taints the gods with death. Socrates’s actions are always about words. Gods are the definition of the divine. There is no truer definition toward which these words refer; they point to themselves and are located by other words. His accounts of the gods and death are rearrangements of the relationships between words. Socrates made use of the language of divinity to valorize the words that spoke to him in his head. This means he needs to retain notions of divinity, but he puts them to distinctive usage. It also means that he often finds himself making arguments he had rejected in earlier contexts, such as his rejection and then acceptance of the popularity of ideas as support for their validity. “And the same may be said of the immortal: if the immortal is also imperishable, then the soul will be imperishable as well as immortal; but if not, some other proof of her imperishableness will have to be given. No other proof is needed, he said; for the immortal, being eternal, is liable to perish, then nothing is imperishable.” If the gods die then everything dies—a fact brought to bear quite immediately on Socrates. Socrates responded with a gesture toward what all men know, which cannot fail to remind readers of what Socrates 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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had said time and again, especially in Plato’s Crito, about the opinion of the many—“But why, my dear Crito, should we care about the opinion of the many?” (Crito 44).29 After speaking so strongly against looking to the opinion of the many, Socrates surprisingly evoked the many to support a claim about gods and the afterlife (which he had in the Apology made the very example of the ignorance of the populace). “For this fear of death is indeed the pretence of wisdom, and not real wisdom, being the appearance of knowing the unknown; since no one knows whether death, which they in their fear apprehend to be the greatest evil, may not be the greatest good. Is there not here conceit of knowledge, which is a disgraceful sort of ignorance?” A refusal to believe he knows about death is exactly what makes him the wisest man: “And this is the point in which, as I think, I am superior to men in general, and in which I might perhaps fancy myself wiser than other men,— that whereas I know but little of the world below, I do not suppose that I know” (Apology 30). In the Apology, Socrates made his denial of knowledge of the afterlife the very cornerstone of his wisdom. When paired with his denial of any knowledge of meaning transcendent to language, Socrates appears very skeptical of gods as transcendent beings. These assertions of his lack of knowledge are difficult to square, however, with his occasional imagined assertions about the gods and afterlife. I argue that typically these suggestions should be read as ironically framed by Socrates’s assertion that these claims are beliefs held by most people. “Yes,” replied Socrates, “all men will agree that God, and the essential form of life, and the immortal in general, will never perish.” “Yes, all men, he said—that is true; and what is more, gods, if I am not mistaken, as well as men” (Phaedo 105). Put another way, all people agree that the word immortal means “will never perish.” These are just words (of course, the “immortal,” by definition, is eternal). Read in the light of Socrates use of language in the Euthyphro the agreement claimed here is much like the agreement over the usage of words. Socrates is 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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not just simply mocking the foolish belief of the people; he is shifting his discussion from the appearance of speaking about truth to speaking about belief, particularly meaning as revealed in language. Homer, Genesis, or Sophocles generally present versions of the afterlife as boring, banal, and free of the action that makes meaning possible. The chorus in Oedipus at Colonus, for example, explained, “The last attendant is the same for all. Old men and young alike, as in its season man’s heritage of underworld appears: there being then no epithalamion, no music and no dance. Death is the finish.” Socrates, however, imagined an afterlife connected to the invisible world of the gods as a paradise of thought, ideas, and speech. A soul removed from the body, in much the manner of philosophical discipline, would, Socrates argued, move toward the god that he imagined as similar to the soul in its purity, wisdom, and goodness. And are we to suppose that the soul, which is invisible, in passing to the true Hades, which like her is invisible, and pure, and noble, and on her way to the good and wise God, whither, if God will, my soul is also soon to go,—that the soul, I repeat, if this be her nature and origin, is blown away and perishes immediately on quitting the body, as the many say? That can never be, my dear Simmias and Cebes. The truth rather is, that the soul which is pure at departing draws after her no bodily taint, having never voluntarily had connection with the body, which she is ever avoiding, herself gathered into herself; for such abstraction has been the study of her life. And what does this mean but that she has been a true disciple of philosophy, and has practiced how to die easily? And is not philosophy the practice of death? (Phaedo 79–80)

The pure soul has abstracted herself away from the taint and blemishes of the body. Philosophy, abstracting from the connections of the body, is, according to Socrates in Plato’s account, training for death. The goal of philosophy, in Socrates’s immortal words, is death. Socrates switched the direction of immateriality from a 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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rich afterlife toward death. Words, themselves, are the immortal, one could add. Socrates considered the gods to be exactly like the dead; the gods may be the ultimate philosophers. “But he who is a philosopher or lover of learning, and is entirely pure at departing, is alone permitted to reach the gods” (Phaedo 81). Certainly, Socrates’s attempt to separate the body from the spirit was one of the foundational acts of the death of the gods, but there is also a direct connection between death and the gods. Death became communion with the gods, not, as in many earlier stories of death as separation from gods and from the life they created. Death could become communion with the gods because they were dead. That is to say, the old gods as outside authorities were dead. Their death opened up our life with the new divinity of the reflective self; formed out of the power of language to allow for conscious explanation of our actions. Simmias asked Socrates, “For what can be the meaning of a truly wise man wanting to fly away and lightly leave a master who is better than himself? And I rather imagine that Cebes is referring to you; he thinks that you are too ready to leave us, and too ready to leave the gods who, as you acknowledge, are our good rulers” (Phaedo 60). But Socrates assures him that he imagines better gods when he is dead; Socrates replaces the gods attended to by the living with gods attended to by the dead—dead gods. “For I am quite ready to acknowledge, Simmieas and Cebes, that I ought to be grieved at death, if I were not persuaded that I am going to other gods who are wise and good (of this I am as certain as I can be of anything of the sort), and to men departed (though I am not so certain of this) who are better than those whom I leave behind; and therefore I do not grieve as I might have done” (Phaedo 60). Socrates, as he did so often, planted the irony in the heart of his point, in this passage he makes it the central example of the gods’ lack of knowledge. Socrates describes the goal of philosophy as exactly what had typically been the one stable difference between humans and gods: death. “He who has lived as a true philosopher has reason 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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to be of good cheer when he is about to die, and that after death he may hope to receive the greatest good in the other world. . . . that do not perceive that his is ever pursuing death and dying; and if this is true, why, having had the desire of death all his life long, should he repine at the arrival of that which he has been always pursuing and desiring?” (Phaedo 61). In this reading, Socrates stands a bit like a cheerful Hamlet. He made the decision to kill off the gods and has been able to live with his decision and their death. The consequences of his murderous actions, suggesting perhaps reasons for Socrates’s sympathetic defense of Euthyphro’s father, will be explored more fully in the final chapter where we will have to confront more fully the structural consequences of the relationship between gods and death. But regardless of those problems, Socrates presented a powerful example of the daemon of decision; the divine nature of the human decision. Death and dying, as Socrates exploits the concepts, are words made sensible by their relation to their opposite—which is not just life but birth. Death of the old gods give birth to new. For unto us, new gods, like decisions, arrive on the scene with little proclamation of the coming. Socrates’s end of his time prophecies point to a new world in which the human is given divine value but does not overcome the human.

Political Theology III: Human Decision The demonic background of Socrates’s philosophic behavior reflects the groundlessness of philosophy; that is, philosophy, for Socrates, may ultimately be grounded in a miraculous divine event (about which one cannot actually “know”). If this is true, then Socrates supplies resources for thinking about our contemporary problem of how to value the world after the death of an overarching universal god. Socrates not only figures value and immanence in the gods as personally particular, but he also 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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placed them inside himself as a way to account for the miracle of his own decisions. Recently, the significance of the decision, with its miraculous nature, has received attention in political theory, particularly in response to Carl Schmitt’s account of the theological exception of the miracle, which he attributes to medieval Christianity. Simply put, Schmitt finds the “decision” in law and politics to be the structural equivalent of the miracle in theology.30 “The exception in jurisprudence is analogous to the miracle in theology” (Schmitt 2005, 36). Socrates and his gods provided an earlier source for a theologically modeled conception of subjectivity. Socrates and his gods also exemplify very human miracles. Unlike Schmittian models, Socrates’s gods do not present a model of subjectivity that is based on a singular sovereign transcendental god. Socrates’s treatment of gods as more deeply bound-up in the human enriches recent accounts of the political role of the miracle by providing ways to think of the miracle as “human, all-too-human.” The Socratic theological conception of the event of the decision makes possible the greater connection of the human and the miraculous, so that humans understand themselves to play a greater role in the miraculous. Schmitt occludes the plurality of miraculous theologies. Socrates’s account makes possible a stronger connection of the human and the miraculous. The decision is always an event that involves an inexplicable miracle interacting and moving with and against a series of rules.31 Socrates’s account of the miracle as an exceptional event, foreshadows Walter Benjamin’s account of the miraculous as part of the world of creatures. Benjamin, in somewhat covert dialogue with Schmitt, confronted Schmitt’s connection between transcendent miracle and sovereignty directly and made that miraculous decision more human. Giorgio Agamben demonstrates that Benjamin “shatters the correspondence between sovereignty and transcendence, between the monarch and God, that defined the Schmittian theologico-political.” Schmitt utilized a language of transcendent deity to inspire his notion of political sovereignty. 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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Benjamin, on the other hand, made the sovereign part of human life. “In Benjamin,” according to Agamben, “the sovereign is ‘confined to the world of creation; he is the lord of creatures, but he remains a creature’ (Benjamin 1928, 264/85)” (Agamben 2005, 57). Humans, their rules, and their miracles play a role in the creative event. Socrates, as Meletus claimed, invented new gods and killed off old ones. But Socrates, told the truth when he claimed that he believed in gods in a “higher” manner. The higher way in which Socrates believes in gods turns out to be a higher belief in humanity.



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Rome Demons, Destruction, and Difference

Now what are demons or demigods? Are they not either gods or the sons of gods? Is that true? —Plato, Apology How much more sensible and proper would it be to have Plato’s writings read in a temple dedicated to him than to have the mutilation of the priests of Cybele, the consecration of eunuchs, the slashing of insane men, in the temples of the demons, the perpetration of every cruel and foul, or foully cruel and cruelly foul, abomination that is wont to pass for a religious rite. —Augustine, City of God Such human beings of late cultures and refracted lights will on the average be weaker human beings: their most profound desire is that the war they are should come to an end. Happiness appears to them, in agreement with a tranquilizing (for example, Epicurean or Christian) medicine and way of thought, pre-eminently as the happiness of resting, of not being disturbed, of satiety, of finally attained unity, as a “Sabbath of Sabbaths,” to speak with the holy rhetorician Augustine who was himself such a human being. —Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

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has often exemplified the threat of divine punishment to a city (even though, as I argued in the previous chapter, this politico-theological formulation has more to do with Athens than Sodom). Alaric, a Christian reportedly encouraged by voices in a sacred grove of trees (not unlike the oaks of Mamre where Abraham heard the voice of his god), succeeded in defeating and sacking the eternal city.1 This, the first successful invasion of the city of Rome in almost 800 years, provoked extensive examination by Romans concerning their relationship to their gods. Many blamed the fall of Rome on the conversion of so many people to Christianity—a charge that Aurelius Augustine took seriously and that provoked his composition of The City of God Against the Pagans. Augustine’s defense of his god in the face of this defeat reflected concerns about how gods redress evil in a world in which the good suffer and the bad prosper. Augustine’s response to the problem condensed and reformulated earlier accounts relating gods to people, particularly Socratic, Platonic, Roman, Hebrew, and Christian accounts. Augustine imagined, following his unironic reading of Plato, that a god had to be absolutely just, which meant that his god had to punish every instance of bad and reward every moment of good. But, of course, the world did not exhibit this level of justice. Reconciling a just god with an unjust world required supplements, such as adding the idea of “evil” to the balance. “It is precisely this excess,” explains William Connolly of the excess and supplements that Augustine needed to maintain his conception of a just god and morally ordered universe, “this ‘unfathomability’—of the divine design over human capacities to recognize it that invests divine commands with unquestionable authority” (Connolly 1993, 43). The supplements were not incidental to Augustine’s account; they provided the space for the display of the divine power of command. Augustine supplemented his god’s system of rewards and punishments with an afterlife; he supplemented sin’s existence and significance as a perversion of the will with a malignant metaphysical “evil”; and, importantly, he supplemented his spiritual and individual account of sin with 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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mysterious “others” who provoked, haunted, and seduced the will of the subject. In spite of the broad historical interpretation of Augustine as a monotheist, Augustine did not really kill off the old gods. The old gods returned as demons. In this way, he supplemented that single god with other gods that haunted the individual and the world. Augustine, even in his attempt to destroy earlier gods, resurrected those gods as dangerous demons that magnified the fear of difference that continues to haunt political thought. Augustine’s supplements, especially “evil” and “demons,” expose an important concern of political theology, the existence of the other as a source of difference and danger. Evil, as evoked by Augustine, presents the other as the demonic destroyer of identity. Even as the “West” congratulates itself on being the source of a radical conception of human freedom that will come to dominate the earth, as, for example, in George W. Bush’s evocation of his foreign policy as the will of god. The negative content of this positive affirmation, however, arises, as the spectral component of that freedom that often appears as its opposite or its other. That is, Augustinian notions of freedom (including that of a subject with a radically free will) are the same as evil in the world. Evil is not created in some far away place and brought to our free lands; freedom is the very creation of evil, even as the will is the very creation of hell. Moreover, for the purposes of this chapter, “evil” means more than “bad”; it is that difference that makes “evil” such a corrosive and frightening concept to so many people. One is reminded of how seriously many people take the theology of the pulpish 1970s horror film The Exorcist, because it seems to be a little “evil.” This chapter is about the difference of “evil” evoked in demons and devils, and it is about the political difference this “evil” makes in our treatment of people who appear to posses a dangerous difference. Joseph A. Ratzinger (Pope Benedict XVI), speaking on September 12, 2006, in a reference to Islam, evoked evil as a signifier of destructive difference. Drawing from a book by Theodore Khoury, Ratzinger quoted Byzantine Emperor Manual II 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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Paleolous as claiming that Mohammad’s teaching only added “evil and inhuman” ideas to the world—specifically in terms of violence and destruction of others. In fact, Ratzinger, author of the Catholic Church’s most recent rules governing exorcists, evoked evil in a manner that parallels both George Bush and The Exorcist. Ratzinger used this example to suggest that Christianity is more tolerant than Islam of people of other religions (hence its production of “freedom”), but in doing so, he revealed the tremendous supplementary violence of his own evocation of “evil.” Evil, for Ratzinger, presented dangers of possession and control even to those who only happened to inquire concerning the evil. Ratzinger’s Ab Aliquot Annis (“On the Current Norms Governing Exorcism”), which he wrote in 1984, explained concerning exorcisms that “bishops are asked to guard lest those who lack the required power attempt to lead assemblies in which prayers are employed to obtain liberation from demons, and in the course of which the demons are directly disturbed and an attempt is made to determine their identity.” Determining their identity appears to be a specifically dangerous problem—of course, demons are problems of identity, especially, problems of protecting an identity from our own evil. Evil amplifies conceptions of bad with suggestions that an enemy exists to destroy the self or identity. This theologically grounded relationship of the self to others infuses certain models of politics with a fear of others as demonically evil. Samuel Huntington claims that in order to survive the United States must distinguish between levels of friendship and enmity, between “true friends” and “unrelenting enemies who will try to destroy us unless we destroy them first.” Huntington begins with the idea that conflict is about material or political difference but concludes that there are some differences that reach to the sheer desire to destroy (that is to say, are not about any other material or political advantage). Huntington evokes an evil that only exists to destroy the good, exactly the kind of difference that George Bush claimed in his evocation of the “axis of evil.”2 The theological supplement of evil to the distinction between 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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friend and enemy imagines an enemy deserving of eternal punishment; moreover, others present a threat of evil even to good people since evil is a perversity and power that actively seeks to destroy others, according to this account. Or, as Shakespeare (and Gore Vidal) would lyrically suggest, evil is thirsty.

Political Theology IV: Splendid Empire If god was just, as Augustine claimed, why was evil drinking so deeply in the world? Why, more specifically, was Rome punished when it became Christian? The answer, obvious to many Romans, was that the ancient gods were punishing Rome for the corruption of the Christians. In the City of God, Augustine actively countered this argument. (A connection made even more believable to many Romans by the fact that Alaric, a pious Christian, was responsible for the final destruction of many of the rituals and sacred precincts of the Olympian gods.3) First of all, Augustine asserted, the old gods possessed no power or will to protect their believers. “Yet, if those gods who were honored that they might make life prosperous here below willed or permitted a horrible fate to overtake one who scrupulously kept his oath, imagine what more frightful infliction they would, if angered, bring down upon the dead of a perjured man” (Augustine 1958, 50). Even though these gods were honored, in order to protect human life they had clearly allowed terrible events to occur to those who served them, and even less could they protect those who failed to honor them. Augustine’s god could and had displayed an ability, according to Augustine, to protect people in this life by protecting non-Christians in Christian churches when Alaric invaded. But this point merely deferred the more difficult fact that life for Romans had become less comfortable after the conversion of so many to Christianity. The real problem, for Augustine, was his own god. How could the Christian god allow Rome to fall, especially as Rome had become more Christian? How had the new god he had promoted, 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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as one that would make your life better (as he argued in the Confessions), have allowed the destruction of so much of society at a time when so many people had begun to believe in him? City of God Against the Pagans is Augustine’s address to the problem of how his just god could allow Christians to suffer. I still have something to say against those who hold our religion responsible for the disaster to the Roman state, because it has forbidden them to sacrifice to their gods. Here, I must remind you of all the grave calamities which have occurred (or of as many as will suffice for my purpose), and which the city itself, or the provinces subject to its rule, had to endure long before their sacrifices were banned. For, beyond all doubt, they would have laid at our door all of those miseries, if at that time our religion had enlightened their minds, and had forbidden their sacrilegious rites. (Augustine 1958, 64)

Augustine asserted the innocence of his religion and his god in response to widespread suggestion otherwise, because Rome had always had difficulties and dangers. Even when Rome sacrificed to the old gods, the city suffered occasional calamity. Only the fact that Christianity did not exist precluded people from blaming earlier sufferings on the Christians, Augustine bitterly maintained. His god had consistently rewarded Rome, he claimed, for its virtuous and moral behavior and had punished it also in accordance with his divine conceptions of justice. God made the empire succeed and fail according to his just will. “The cause, then, of the greatness of the Roman Empire was neither fortune nor fate . . . On the contrary, Divine Providence alone explains the establishment of kingdoms among men” (Augustine 1958, 99). God, Augustine argued, rewards and punishes kingdoms, even as he rewards and punishes people, even as he moves and regulates the world of appearance. “And above the beauty of sky and earth is that of angels and of man. How, then, can anyone believe that it was the will of God to exempt from the laws of His providence the rise and fall of political societies?” (Augustine 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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1958, 111). Very significantly, this relationship between political events and conceptions of god maintains understandings of order and purpose in the world. Politics, according to Augustine, is the reflection of the will of god. God rewards and punishes in this life, but without a transparent consistency. His claim that his god is a just god means that god is an accountant who keeps track of every right and wrong and logs precisely the credits and debts against his good will. God supplements these payments with an afterlife in which all the wrongs that go unpunished in this life are punished and all the rights are rewarded. The balance must be perfect. God often shows His intervention more clearly by the way He apportions the sweet and the bitter. For, if He visited every sin here below with manifest penalty, it might be thought that no score remained to be settled at the Last Judgment. On the other hand, if God did not plainly enough punish sin on earth; people might conclude that there is no such thing as Divine Providence. So, too, in regard to the good things of life. If God did not bestow them with patent liberality on some who ask Him, we could possibly argue that such things did not depend on His power. On the other hand, if He lavished them on all who asked, we might have the impression that God is to be served only for the gifts He bestows. In that case, the service of God would not make us religious, but rather covetous and greedy. (Augustine 1958, 46)

This supplementary system protects the relationship between gods and humans from becoming a simple relationship of selfinterested exchange. God wills the rise and fall of kingdoms, and he does so according to his strict account of justice. Even the rise of the Roman Republic could be interpreted as his god’s reward for virtuous Roman action. Rome was rewarded for the good they did, as justice required, even when they practiced un-Christian rites. God had rewarded the Romans in this time, because they had been virtuous and because they would not be rewarded in the afterlife. God gives out the good gifts to those who desire them so that people will know that god is just. Augustine confronted, 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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in his response, the more abstract Socratic problem, which I examined in my account of Plato’s Euthyphro, of piety as a payment to gods. His system of accounting for sin—its existence, punishment, and significance—required supplements in order not to collapse into a series of direct transactions that would have made his god a mere businessman of piety. Augustine’s god never pays directly, because if he did people would believe there was nothing left for the afterlife. Moreover, if god rewarded and punished people too directly, piety would become avarice. For these pagan heroes there was not to be the divine grace of everlasting life along with His holy angels in His heavenly City, for the only road to this Society of the Blessed is true piety, that is, that religious service or latreia (to use the Greek word) which is offered to the One true God. On the other hand, if God did not grant them at least the temporal glory of a splendid Empire, there would have been no reward for the praiseworthy efforts or virtues by which they strove to attain that glory. (Augustine 1958, 112)

The splendid empire that his god paid to the Romans would be their only reward. They would not receive eternal life for their efforts; in fact, their payment in the afterlife would be hell since they did not posses true piety. God rewarded the piety of the heathen with a state, which, moreover served Augustine’s god’s purpose by mirroring heaven on earth. Therefore, those who reflected on their love of the earthly city would come to understand the true love for the unseen heavenly city. “It was, then, not only to reward the Roman heroes with human glory that the Roman Empire spread. It had a purpose for the citizens of the Eternal City during their pilgrimage on earth. Meditating long and seriously on those great examples, they could understand what love of their Heavenly Fatherland should be inspired by everlasting life, since a Fatherland on earth has been so much loved by citizens inspired by human glory” (Augustine 1958, 113). The city of man is designed by god to educate its citizens concerning god’s love. The love and devotion that the city inspires 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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on earth teaches and builds the love and devotion that people should feel toward god. Thinking about the state and its arrangements would, according to Augustine, educate the citizen in the ways of the divinely designed universe. The state, in this regard, cultivates the desire for peace as the state of the subject. It also puts the state in the position of a guarantor of power. This state not only demonstrated on earth the beauty and peace of the eternal city of god but it also defended against evil. God and the state, according to Augustine, kept chaos from arising. The state existed as a source of protection; instead of life being valued for its action or conflict (which might have been the case in the world of the Homeric gods), it became more necessary to secure life entirely from threat, which reveals a great difference between the god of Augustine and the god of Abraham. As I claim in the second chapter, Abraham’s god needed conflict. Augustine’s god, however, needs peace. Abraham’s god needed difference in order to produce new understanding. Augustine’s god needs similarity in order to foreclose demonic perversity. Peace was the preferred state of the soul. This model of fear and security is fundamental to conceptions of the state, such as Hobbes’s, which emphasizes the roles of gods and states as protectors and imagines a subject that does not enjoy or glory in conflict. Conflict for Augustine and his followers symbolizes the collapse of the city. Moreover, this orientation of power and security is put into place as a support for a highly consolidated conception of authority—both internal to the individual and among the gods. Harmony is the necessary state of human and civic happiness, for Augustine. “The happiness of a city and the happiness of individual men spring from the same source, since a city is nothing else than a multitude of men in harmonious association” (Augustine 1958, 51). Augustine assumes that the preferred state for humans is not conflict and uncertainty but harmony and certainty; and it is the role of the gods to protect, create, and maintain that state. It is not only their role—they wish to maintain harmony for people—but people also can willfully sow 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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disharmony. Struggle and agonism are not values that Augustine’s god rewards. His conception of the world removes much of the value for conflict and agonistic struggle. Security and peace are placed as so essential and necessary to humans and to gods that Augustine is able to assume that the central role of any imaginable god would be protection. That the old gods failed to protect Rome (and Troy, he adds for good measure) exemplified Augustine’s chief complaints about the gods. “For what earthly reason was Minerva worshiped as the protector of the land and people,” he incredulously asked, “when she could not even protect the guards of her temple?” (Augustine 1958, 42). Protection of people generally becomes the reason for god’s interactions with people. “In fact, to worship fallen gods as patrons and defenders is more like having poor odds than good gods,” Augustine claims in what appears to be a play on a common Roman saying. “It is much more sensible to believe, not so much that Rome would have been saved from destruction had not the gods perished, but rather that the gods would have perished long ago had not Rome made every effort to save them” (Augustine 1958, 43). The state as provider of security and protection, in league with transcendent divinity, is a very important element of even contemporary political theology of the state. Carl Schmitt located the theological core of the idea of the state as a protector against destruction in 2 Thessalonians 2. Giorgio Agamben, writing in critical response, has concluded that the Pauline emphasis was not on the maintenance of the force of stability but as an appeal for its removal. “In a certain sense, every theory of the State, including Hobbes’s—which thinks of it as a power destined to block or delay catastrophe—can be taken as a secularization of this interpretation of 2 Thessalonians 2” (Agamben 2005, 110). Agamben, critical of Schmitt’s appropriation of katechon from 2 Thessalonians, persuasively identifies the lack of positive valuation in Paul’s letter concerning the katechon. Agamben finds in Paul a longing for the removal of the katechon; which he identifies as Roman law. Agamben reveals the revolutionary power of Paul’s writings. Augustine, not Paul, is the theological 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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underpinning of conceptions of state power as protecting from disorder and catastrophe. City of God Against the Pagans, however, provides the positive valuation Schmitt wants and makes a powerful account of the league of god and the state as protectors of weak subjects. Augustine’s god baptized the power of Rome as a force for order.

Gods as Models City of God Against the Pagans presents an Augustine disgusted with the behaviors of the old gods, particularly because he conceived of gods as models of human behavior. In fact, Augustine made the human desire to model themselves on gods a divinely created human desire. It was a fundamental grace of Augustine’s god to have made humans to desire to be like him. For Augustine, that desire is a god-given element in all people. Like Plato, Augustine found the old gods to be terrible role models. “Thus, we read in Terence how a dissolute youth looks upon a wall painting, ‘in which the tale was told how Jove sent down a shower of gold into the lap of Danae. He appeals to the authority of this weighty example to justify his own lust, with a boast that he did but imitate a god’” (Augustine 1958, 71). Augustine’s denial of the lusty humanity of the gods was a tremendous transformation of value. The values of the old gods— warfare, conflict, and strength—were replaced with the values of a single peaceful god that demanded submission and gentleness. Augustine killed off the older gods leaving only one—a god that would, of course, be a powerful model of sovereignty (both for kingdoms and for individuals). The old gods, in the Iliad, for example, were powerful and controlling but more contestable by both gods and people. Zeus could generally do what he wanted, but it might not be worth the trouble he would receive from the other gods. Augustine had no taste for this struggle. God, he imagined, must be singular in sovereignty and omnipotent in power. The universe of that god must be under the full control 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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and command of the god. Instead of the agonistic relationship between gods and people of the Iliad and the Old Testament (as we have seen with Abraham) in which people could struggle with gods and even change their minds. Questions of political theology extend beyond the immediate forces of the state—their significance reaches to the theological elements in our relationships to one another, that is, to our conceptions of one another. These questions reach to the very point of what we expect of ourselves and how we think our lives should be lived. The old gods taught people that human, even base, desires were part of the fullness of life. The god that Augustine proposed exemplified a much more limited set of behaviors that Augustine believed would encourage people to live their lives together in the city in a more harmonious and just manner. People needed these role models; no other possibility existed to restrain humans from their bad behavior. “I have also pointed out that, as long as these villainies are exhibited for imitation under divine sanction, so to speak, it is impossible to restrain weak humans from actually reproducing in their own lives the abominable acts committed by the gods” (Augustine 1958, 84). The ancient gods served as models and mirrors. They legitimized reprehensible behavior. Under the reign of Augustine’s god, human behavior could be submitted to a single, universal, and perfect model. Gods were models, and more nightmarishly, the old gods were, in reality, according to Augustine, demons. They had appeared as gods to the pre-Christians but now, according to Augustine, they were revealed as demons. “If any one does not realize what kind of spirits find pleasure in such obscenities, then he is either unaware that there are unclean spirits wearing the deceptive masks of gods, or else he is leading the sort of life that prefers the demons, rather than the true God, as gracious masters and angry foes” (Augustine 1958, 70). The old gods were, according to Augustine, demons in disguise. Thus, the old religions were not simply old empty idols, as Paul had generally considered them, which were wrong and foolish, but the old gods were active demons that willfully sought the destruction and annihilation of 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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human beings. Sin was amplified by the presence of these willing, malevolent, metaphysical beings.

What exactly was the sin in Augustine’s thought that the demons exemplified, and how could it even begin to approach equality with eternal punishment? Generally, sin is a category in Augustine’s writing that is not a substance or a specific action. Sin is a version of the mimetic problem of the gods—that humans use them as models concerning how to live. “I asked, ‘What is iniquity?’” Augustine reported in The Confessions. “And I found that it is not a substance. It is perversity of will, twisted away from the supreme substance, yourself, O God, and towards lower things, and casting away its own bowels, and swelling beyond itself ” (Augustine 1960, 175). Sin was not, for example, stealing or lusting. Sin is an action of the will, for Augustine. In fact, even good acts were sinful when performed from a perverted will. “Thus the soul commits fornication when it is turned away from you and, apart from you, seeks such pure, clean things as it does not find except when it returns to you. In a perverse way, all men imitate you who put themselves far from you, and rise up in rebellion against you” (Augustine 1960, 73). God, he argued in The Confessions, made all humans to want to be like him; sin is this desire put to selfish use. Even people who do good things in the world sin if they do those actions for themselves. For Augustine, actions must be given their worth because they are done for and through his god. The human self should fade away in importance. That is, the self should be denied to the point of invisibility. The only visible remains of the subject should be as a reflection of god. All action should be performed for god and through god. Value arrives through the human denial of their own human glory and worth. The world is filled with sin—sin for which Augustine’s god could bear no responsibility. People, Augustine asserted, were 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


Sin and the Imitation of God


singularly responsible for sin. “For, no one sins because God foreknew that he would sin. In fact, the very reason why a man is undoubtedly responsible for his own sin, when he sins, is because He whose foreknowledge cannot be deceived foresaw, not the man’s fate or fortune or what not, but that the man himself would be responsible for his own sin. No man sins unless it is his choice to sin; and his choice not to sin, that, too, God foresaw” (Augustine 1958, 110–11). Augustine separated gods’ knowledge from this control and responsibility even as he iterated his conception of choice as a central component of the human. Conceptions of sin lend power to concepts of choice. Augustine placed that choice in the will. His understanding of the organization of the human subject made the will an important interior element that could move and steer human action. “Our conclusion,” Augustine wrote, concerning the power of the will, “is that our wills have power to do all that God wanted them to do and foresaw they could do. Their power, such as it is, is a real power” (Augustine 1958, 108). It is in this power of the will that Augustine lodges the choice that makes humans responsible for sin. Because humans can choose one course over another, they bear the responsibility for that course. “The fact is that we do many things which we would most certainly not do if we did not choose to do them. The most obvious case is our willing itself. For, if we will, there is an act of willing; there is none if we do not want one. We would certainly not make a choice if we did not choose to make it” (Augustine 1958, 109). Circularly, Augustine deployed an account of human action (and by suppressing the mysterious ways that humans create the desire to choose one course over another) that conceived of action as the result of a “choice,” an account of the self that Nietzsche calls the “doubling of the deed,” since he found that evocations of a will only served to obscure the fact that we do not know from where desires and actions arise. Homer’s Greek gods often exemplified a kind of subconscious. For example, in the first book of the Iliad, Achilles is convinced 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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by Athena not to kill Agamemnon but to ridicule him. The appearance of Athena clearly marked what many later commentators would consider the appearance of a decision. Like a miracle, desires appear with no discernible predicates. Augustine’s conception of sin invents the machinery of that sin—it invents a will that possesses the seal of human responsibility and drives people in their actions. “A quantum of force is equivalent to a quantum of drive, will, effect,” explained Nietzsche. “It is nothing other than precisely this very driving, willing, effecting, and only owing to the seduction of language (and of the fundamental errors of reason that are petrified in it) which conceives and misconceives all effects as conditioned by something that causes effects, by a ‘subject,’ can it appear otherwise” (Nietzsche 1969, 45). Augustine’s account of sin created the category of the will central to many accounts of the modern subject. Here we can see how much Augustine’s conception of the sovereign subject resonates with his conception of his sovereign god; both require this linguistic seduction of cause and effect to secure their positions of power. “But there is no such substratum,” Nietzsche asserts. “There is no ‘being’ behind doing, effecting, becoming; ‘the doer’ is merely a fiction added to the deed—the deed is everything” (Nietzsche 1969, 45). The will, as an element of the subject related to choice, is Augustine’s attempt to unpack how people “will” or “want” actions or things. These accounts of sin, exceptionally well developed, still lack necessary weight when on the scale with eternal punishment. Hell not only required that the dynamics of human choice and willing received great weight (as was already somewhat the case, owing to the divine status of the willing agent for Socrates), but it also clearly demonstrated the structure of so many Augustinian arguments, in which the remainders and surpluses of this life would be balanced in the next life. Hell stabilized the notion of a just god but it put a lot of burden on sin. “When we arrive at that judgment of God, the time of which is in a special sense called the Day of Judgment, and sometimes the Day of the Lord, it will become apparent that God’s judgments are entirely just: not only 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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Their Worm Shall Not Die: Justice in Hell Augustine required perfect justice from this god. That meant, for Augustine, that all evil would be punished and all good rewarded. This interaction, however, as with Socrates, is an exchange that could not be an exchange. That is, he could not allow his god to pay people directly for their faith; in that, if you received such immediate returns, it would not require faith, and, as with Socrates in Plato’s dialogue Euthyphro, it would collapse justice into its opposite. Justice would be commerce. At the same time, in order for God to be absolutely just, a characteristic Augustine demanded, every debt had to be paid and every credit returned. Hell and the afterlife (as first evoked by Plato) facilitated Augustine’s construction of an absolutely faithful god who could sort out all the remainders in a grand adjudication in the afterlife. “One thing that will happen, and most certainly happen, is what God, through His Prophet, said concerning the punishment of hell being eternal: ‘Their worm shall not die, and their fire shall not be quenched’” (Augustine 1958, 502). In part, he argued that bad things were happening to the Christians in Rome because his god did not fully pay until the afterlife. In this regard, the Olympian Romans raised a significant issue for the Christian Romans; both believed that the gods pay people good and bad according to their behavior and belief, which meant that the Olympians could logically claim that the gods were simply punishing Rome for the ascension of Christianity. If anything, it was a bigger problem for the Christians, since the Olympians typically did not need their gods to be absolutely good or just. Augustine’s absolutely just god—with his necessary system of payment—needed payment to be supplemented with an afterlife that changed the worth of 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


all the judgments that will be given then, but also all the judgments given from the beginning, and all those which are to be given hereafter until that time” (Augustine 1998, 968).

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this life and also changed the location of punishment. Hell was such a place. Augustine evoked the Platonic scene of hell to explain how people would eventually be punished and paid for their life on earth. More importantly, however, hell raised the stakes in terms of human good and evil. Greeks, it has often been mentioned, not least by Hannah Arendt, did not have the language to describe how people could willfully do evil in the world. As Socrates said concerning doing wrong to his neighbors in his defense before the city of Athens, “But either I do not corrupt them, or I corrupt them unintentionally, so that on either view of the case you lie” (Plato 1978, 27). He had no way to explain a third option: that he willfully corrupted them. Even without that knowledge, the city, in a representation of the importance of punishment in the development of subjective concepts, punished him anyway. As I suggest with the example of hell in Christian theology, the punishment would produce the object of that punishment—the subject as one possessing a sovereign will capable of choice. Similarly, Aristotle did not imagine that anyone would willfully do wrong. He began the Politics with the assertion that “in all their actions all men aim at what they think good” (Aristotle, Saunders, 1). In spite of the lack of language to explain how people could do evil, it was a Greek who offered an early realization of the political and religious possibilities of hell. Plato, it seems, provided one of the devices that would leverage evil into the world; hell, the possibility of eternal or even extreme punishment, prodded the imaginations of many to explain what kind of crime could deserve such hateful punishment. In Book 6 of the Republic, Plato tells a myth of hell to be used as a political device. The punishment, in this example, produced the spiritual and subjective account necessary to justify endless torture. Hell is not useful if it is too unrealistic a punishment; something would have to supplement our simple wrongdoing in order to deserve eternal torture. That is, hell made humans capable of “evil,” since they would have to be made to deserve such punishment. Hell provoked the necessary account of humans whereby 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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they could deserve such boundless punishment. Hell, I argue, was such a powerful concept that writers developed reasons for its existence. When Nietzsche wrote that pain was the most powerful aid to mnemonics, we should remember that the memory of pain serves its own inventive purpose (Nietzsche 1969, 61). Hell, the promise of pain, created a new creation. Hell, which Paul, the first Christian author, scrupulously avoided using in favor of “death,” appears in some of the gospels, notably that of Luke, but it was really later Christians, such as Origen, Turtullian, and especially Augustine, who would transform it into a central religious and social concept. Augustine made it central to his conceptions of a just and good god. Hell provided him with an extravagant lever by which to imagine a spectacular need for infinite punishment. The need for hell, Augustine decided, was the perverse willing of the will. It was perverse decision. People, given grace by Augustine’s god, have an autochthonous desire to be like god; they could perversely, however, will the desire to be like god in the manner of Satan. That is, they could desire to be like god in his capacity as powerful creator. This helped explain, for Augustine, how people could deserve such horrible punishments as offered by hell. Our experience of ourselves, as facilitated by the words “will” and “evil,” was in part made possible by Augustine’s exploration of hell, where “they will be received into ‘everlasting’ fire, there to be tortured ‘for ever and ever’” (Augustine 1958, 505). Socrates and Plato’s excessive concern with the afterlife bred a new “demon” in the life of Augustine; actually, it bred two demons: the willing human subject (related to Socrates’s demon) and the demon agent of evil. The eternity of the soul, as Plato had argued (and as examined in the previous chapter), functioned as proof that hell is eternal; for Augustine, even as the formula suggests the reverse, that the eternity of hell maintains proof of the soul. “It is absurd to say in one and the same sense: ‘Life everlasting will be endless, but everlasting punishment will come to an end.’ Therefore, since the eternal life of the saints is to be endless, there can be no doubt that eternal punishment for those who are to endure it will have 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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no end” (Augustine 1958, 506). Hell as a theological concept maintained a model of the political subject as a self-willing agent. Hell, made for the devil and his demons, according to Augustine, existed for all people who refused to put their faith in and to rely on the power of Augustine’s god. “The fact is that there is no way of waiving or weakening the words which the Lord has told us that He will pronounce in the last judgment: ‘Depart from me, accursed ones, into the everlasting fire which was prepared for the devil and his angels.’ In this way He showed plainly that it is an eternal fire in which the Devil and his angels are to burn” (Augustine 1958, 504–5). Sin occurs, or originates, in the willing and choosing subject. God will judge humans for the choices they make. Augustine, like Socrates, found choice to be a very difficult concept to internalize, and, again like Socrates, he found it to be a concept in which the self often appears to be in dialogue or debate with another. This other, for Augustine, is sometimes his god, sometimes himself, and sometimes a demon, which is to say that he begins by unpacking Socrates’s concept of the demon but did not stop there; he located choice as the fundamental moment of human action—the moment god will judge. “Now, what makes such evil possible is the fact that no created nature can be immutable. Every such nature is made, indeed, by God, the supreme and immutable Good who made all things good, but, by choosing to sin, such a nature brings evil upon itself ” (Augustine 1958, 508). This account of the willfulness of sinning (sin as the result of choice) is immediately linked to the fallen angels. “In the case of the deliberate falling away of some of the angels, God most justly imposed the punishment of an everlasting unhappiness. The other angels remained in union with God, their supreme Good, and to these God gave, as a kind of reward for their remaining, the certain assurance that this remaining would be without end” (Augustine 1958, 508). But what kind of being would choose eternal unhappiness? Unlike the gods of pre-Socratic Greece, Augustine’s god was free of all blame. He was good and perfect (as Plato had so deliberately imagined gods to be). That is, he did not make the people 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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desire eternal punishment. Augustine’s god did not carry any of the guilt for evil in the world—that guilt only belonged to humans on the basis of their choices. God is without blame; he is also just. The sins of humanity have to be punished. If his god does not punish sin, then his god is not just. Hell is, for Augustine, necessary for god to be just. Augustine added more; he supplemented this equation with the infinite evil of demons.

Demons Whom You Fancy To Be Gods How could people ever deserve hell? Augustine turns to evil in a different register—the malicious and metaphysical evil of the old gods. The old gods were not empty man-made ideas (or words); they were evil spirits that seduced and confused humanity. “They are not gods, but fiendish spirits, to whom your eternal happiness is a torment. Never did Juno so intensely begrudge the Trojans, your ancestors in the flesh, the battlements of Rome, as do those demons, whom you still fancy to be gods, begrudge an everlasting home to the whole human race” (Augustine 1958, 77). How did sin, a mere perversion of the human will, become worthy of eternal (typically conceived as physical) punishment? Demons. Demonic spirits were part of the answer: “the false gods which pagans worshiped in the open, and now worship undercover, were unclean spirits, malignant and lying demons.” Instead of a single god replacing an “imaginary” world of many gods, Augustine (in agreement with John, Tertullian, and Bishop Irenaeus) continued to believe that the old gods existed but were malignant gods over whom his god dominated. These other gods, especially Satan, countered Augustine’s god. The gods of the ancient Greeks become slanderously evil, to the point that the word “demon” refers to a boundless source of evil in the world— the desire to do wrong for wrong’s sake. Elaine Pagels interprets the continued existence of these minor gods as an accident or public maneuver by Augustine, in that it seems to compromise both his strict monotheism and his insistence on freedom as an 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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element of human guilt; but this is no secondary function of Augustine’s thought. Augustine brought a radically evil version of Satan to Greek conceptions of gods and to Jesus’s self-denying approach to human difference. After Augustine, we are haunted by a spirit that can make other people appear to be nonhuman possessors of evil that requires of us their disappearance and the disappearance of their difference altogether, since their very existence is a threat. Spiritual possession, which becomes imaginable in this haunted universe, pointedly raises the problem of how a person belongs to a god (good as well as evil). Most critics, like Pagels, who read the demonology of early Christians tend to write it off as leftover folk beliefs or just popular discourse that they adopted for convenience. Demons are seldom taken seriously as an element of Christian theology, especially as that might influence politics. Paul evoked demons as a tangent for human antagonisms (as a way to diffuse conflict); demons were not the source of that antagonism. Paul’s monotheism virtually excluded the possibility of conceiving of demons as important metaphysical players in the world. Demons, however, became central to the most politically powerful versions of Christianity. Many early Christian theorists, including Athanasius, Origen, and Augustine, worked out elaborate demonologies exploring the function of metaphysical beings in the universe.4 It might be proper to consider Paul the final Christian monotheist. The polytheisms of ancient Greece (and the Old Testament) after having been killed off to some extent by Socrates return in a new, more perverse, form with the Christians. Socrates, in the Apology, had pointed out the absurdity of believing in demons but not gods. But if I believe in spiritual beings, it is quite inevitable that I believe also in spirits; is it not so? It is; for I assume that you agree, since you do not answer. But do we not think the spirits are gods or children of gods? Yes, or no? “Certainly.” Then if I believe in spirits, as you say, if spirits are a kind of gods, that would be the puzzle and joke which I say you are uttering in saying that I, while 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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The polytheistic gods killed off by Jesus and Paul return with a demonic vengeance in Augustine in a way that suggests the return of monotheism that Freud discovered in early Judaism. Freud’s Moses and Monotheism explored in a fairly systematic way the return of an ancient Egyptian belief within Judaism. Freud explained that the children of Israel originally rebelled against the monotheistic religion of Moses, killed him, and overturned his religious norms. The first Moses’s assertions of monotheism eventually returned to displace the polytheism of the original children of Israel. “Yet the religion of Moses did not disappear without leaving a trace; a kind of memory of it had survived, a tradition perhaps obscured and distorted. It was this tradition of a great past that continued to work in the background, until it slowly gained more and more power over the mind of the people” (Freud 1939, 87). This alternate tradition eventually wins dominance in the beliefs of the people. Religions return, in Freud’s account, much as the commands of the murdered father return. Slavoj Žižek explores the importance of this ghostly symbolic tradition. “One becomes a full member of a community not simply by identifying with its explicit symbolic tradition, but only when one also assumes the spectral dimension that sustains this tradition, the undead ghosts that haunt the living, the secret history of traumatic fantasies transmitted, ‘between the lines,’ through the lacks and distortions of the explicit symbolic tradition—as Fernando Pessoa puts it: ‘Every dead man is probably still alive somewhere’” (Žižek 2003, 128). Or in the terms of this chapter, every dead god is probably still alive somewhere. For Žižek, the dead necessarily return as the groundless background of belief, action, and reason. The first god of the early Moses returned to posses the children of Israel, 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


I do not believe in gods, do believe in gods again, since I believe in spirits; but if, on the other hand, spirits are a kind of bastard children of gods, by nymphs or by any others, whoever their mothers are said to be, what man would believe that there are children of gods, but no gods? (Plato 1928, 103)

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transforming what they believed. “And at last succeeded in transforming the God Jahve into the Mosaic God and in waking to a new life the religion which Moses had instituted centuries before and which had later been forsaken” (Freud 1939, 87). The old political life of the people was oriented in a new direction as the old god reappeared. Augustine’s killing of the old gods could not liberate him from them. Those gods returned as a negative imprint on his beliefs. Killing the father, as Freud would remind us, does not free anyone from his rules or the guilt of his murder. Those rules are just more firmly in place. Like the gods and daimons of the Greeks many early Christian commentators associated demons with our secret desires—often as the source of initial interest in evil. Origen, betraying the connections between his demon and Socrates, commonly associated demons with human thoughts. Evil thoughts (dialogismoi), according to Origen, were often provided by demons.5 The inner location of demons also reworked early debates within Jewish communities—particularly in relation to dissension within those communities. “The figure of Satan becomes,” Elaine Pagels writes, “among other things, a way of characterizing one’s actual enemies as the embodiment of transcendent forces” (Pagels 1996, 13). Pagels particularly credits the Essenes for developing this demonological political strategy. Demons, for Christians, are close at hand, even to the point of being seductive voices in the imaginations. Seduction is a major part of their game. When the victim has been seduced by the desires of the flesh, the behaviors and habits they develop will enslave them. Evagrius, the fourth-century bishop of Constantinople wrote, The rational faculty, which is peculiar to the human soul, should not be impelled in a way similar to that of irrational animals; rather, it should discern the impressions [phantasiai] and not get carried away by them. The powers of which we have spoken [the demons] extend to the pliable soul impressions [phantasiai] of beauty, praise, adultery, pleasure, and other 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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such things, just as those who drive cattle hold out branches to them. Then, when they have outwitted those who are incapable of discriminating the true pleasure from the false and the perishable and contemptible beauty from the holy, they lead them away in slavery. Each deceit, through continuous pressing on the soul, imprints the impression on the soul, and the soul unwittingly carries around the image of the passion, the origin of which comes from the bait [of the phantasia] of our assent to it. (Brakke 2006, 41)

The human soul and its attribute of willing gets imprinted and deformed by its relation with demons. Our soul receives the evil of the demons, Antony (teacher of Athanasius) goes on to claim. “And if you seek, you will not find their sins and iniquities revealed bodily, for they are not visible bodily. But you should know that we are their bodies, and that our soul receives their wickedness; and when it has received them, then it reveals them through the body in which we dwell” (Bakke 2006, 17). Demons and the devil (sometimes conflated, sometimes distinguished) existed in a kingdom that inhabited the kingdom of Rome. Responding to the criticisms of Celsus (180 CE), who claimed that Christians were destroying the rule of law and threatening to “bring down the empire, and the emperor with it,” Origen wrote in Contra Celsus, a call to new political organizations (Pagel 1996, 139). “It is not irrational to form associations contrary to the existing laws, if it is done for the sake of the truth. For just as those people would do well who enter a secret association in order to kill a tyrant who had seized the liberties of a state, so Christians also, when tyrannized . . . by the devil, form associations contrary to the devil’s laws, against his power, to protect those whom they succeed in persuading to revolt against a government which is barbaric and despotic” (Pagels 1996, 139). Augustine’s usage of the language of demons and devils would be much more conciliatory to the state power of Rome.



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By the time of Augustine, many non-Christian Romans actually believed in a monotheism in which the many gods were just characteristics of a single god. Augustine’s monotheism did not appear distinctive on the Roman religious landscape. Christianity, in fact, at this time, was not perceived by many Romans as distinct in its monotheism. If anything, the opposite was true. Christianity, with its acceptance of the old gods as demons actually kept them from being figured as part of a single godhead, and so, Christianity appeared to many Romans as a polytheism. What was distinctive, according to Celsus, was exactly this Christian belief in the separateness of the devil (Pagels 1996, 143). The greatest error of the Christians, he maintained, was their attempt to “impiously divide the kingdom of God, creating a rebellion in it, as if there were opposing factions within the divine, including one that is hostile to God!” (Pagels 1996, 143). For Celsus, the polytheism of Christian demonology was the distinctive feature of Christianity. William Connolly correctly claims that “the Greek idea of demon is no more problematic than the Christian idea of will: It is just that the latter stands at the center of modern conceptions of intrinsic moral order and, therefore, needs to be problematized more actively today for ethical reasons” (Connolly 1993, 11). I would add that we should also problematize demons. As with Socrates’s account of his demon, the evil demons of Augustine’s imagination influenced his choice and decisions. Augustine’s evil demons could even subdue the power of his will. “The enemy had control of my will, and out of it he fashioned a chain and fettered me with it. For in truth lust is made out of a perverse will, and when lust is served, it becomes habit, and when habit is not resisted, it becomes necessity” (Confessions 188). The enemy provoked and seduced the will into sin and evil. As gods, they had put into place the demand to treat their evil as the good. “Let your freedom assert its rights against the unclean spirits who have placed upon you the obligation of solemnly exhibiting their shame as though it were a holy thing” (Augustine 1958, 77).



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People, however, have the freedom because of their will to choose a different behavior. Augustine set out the simple, even childish argument, that became central to Christianity—if you are bad, you will go to hell, but if you are good, you will go to heaven—in a manner that would consolidate his argument that the old gods were really demons that would drag people into hell. “Wherefore, if you long to reach that blessed country, shun the company of demons. Gods who are propitiated by infamous rites are unworthy of the worship of decent men. Deny religious rites to the gods, by a Christian reform, just as you denied civil dignity to the actors, by the censor’s decree” (Augustine 1958, 77). The resonance between demons and actors, which Augustine suggests here, revealed the status of staged plays as religious rites for the old gods. Plays are not just empty vessels to be filled with a new ethical content now that his new god has taken over; they were dangerous rituals that served to cultivate reverence for the old gods. They maintained the very specific cultural practice of performance—pretending to be someone else, and allowing your imagination to be captured for a while in such a manner that the affairs of imaginary people become more important than the reality of the individual’s soul—which reflected the unknown, possibility demonic interior of humanity. Like the gods themselves, the old stage plays filled humans with sympathy for their own sins. “The theater enraptured me, for its shows were filled with pictures of my own miseries and with tinder for my fires” (Augustine 1960, 78). Moreover, the plague did not abate when the wanton madness of the stage plays took possession of a warlike people, once accustomed only to the sports of the arena. It was the work of wicked spirits crafty enough to know that that pestilence would soon run its course. They seized the occasion, to their great delight, to inject a more deadly contagion, not into men’s bodies, but into their souls. This contagion so beclouded the wits of those wretches, so befouled and deranged them, that even now—for, 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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Stage plays became more popular in Rome, surprisingly, after the defeat by Alaric. Augustine despised these performances—in which people behaved immorally and pretended to be other people. Stage plays competed with Augustine in narrativizing people into a way to view the world. The demons were sometimes considered to be the viewers for human stage plays. Stage plays are a significant rite of the old religions, and Augustine condemns them as a major crime of the demons. Stage plays were a way for the demons to delight in the display of their own evil. “The false gods which pagans then worshiped in the open, and now worship under cover, were unclean spirits, malignant and lying demons. The truth of this is clear from the fact that these demons go so far as to take delight in their own villainies, to the extent of wanting them exhibited, either as facts or as fictions, in the festivals celebrated in their honor” (Augustine 1958, 84). Augustine argues that the state should intervene to ban plays in the same manner that they banned the religious rites associated with the sacred precincts, such as Olympia and Delphi. “You took civic rights away from performers of Olympian scandals. Now, beseech the true God to take away from you those gods who delight in immoralities—in lust, if the sins are facts; in lying, if they are feigned. You did well to ostracize the mimes and mummers from civil society” (Augustine 1958, 77). Augustine sought to ban acting from public life and the spectacle of the stage and the arena. But the spectacle returns in a powerful way in Christianity. Thomas Aquinas exaggerated Augustine’s return to spectacle when he proposed that the just would receive the special blessing of beholding the punishments of the wicked. Hell is, in fact, the triumph of the stage play in Christianity. “In order that the 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


future generations will scarcely believe the story if it reaches them—after the City of Rome has been laid waste, those who were so infected by the plague and were able to flee from Rome and Carthage were day after day stampeding one another in a mad rush after the clowns in the theaters. (Augustine 1958, 62)


bliss of the saints may be more delightful for them and that they may render more copious thanks to God for it, it is given to them to see perfectly the punishment of the damned.”6 City of God, with its constant demands that the city of man forbid dramatic acting and stage plays, also presents the Day of Judgment as the grandest performance. “In that day too, it will be made manifest by what just judgment of God it comes about that at this present time so many—indeed, almost all—of the just judgments of God are hidden from the senses and minds of mortals” (Augustine 1998, 968). The Day of Judgment is the public display of the hidden judgments of god. It carries with it the public display of the secrets perversely mirrored in the plays of the demons.7 Demons often symbolize a kind of stranger inside—an experience of others highlighted by actors in stage dramas who appear to be people they are not. Demonization often suggests that people are not who they appear or claim to be. During Barack Obama’s campaign for the presidency of the United States, many rumors circulated on the Internet suggesting that even though Obama claimed to be a Christian he possessed an inner secret Islam. An e-mail circulated the Internet during the 2008 U.S. presidential campaign that suggested Obama was secretly a Muslim with secret plans to take over the government. This e-mail campaign resonated with Augustinian fear of the demonic nature of actors, which mirrors not only the racist language of the Nazis in Germany but also Hobbes’s account of the Catholics in England. In Hobbes’s discussion of demons in the Leviathan, Hobbes compares the demons of darkness to the fairies of Rome that haunt the city of man in England. “The Fairies in what Nation soever they converse, have but one Universall King, which some Poets of ours call King Oberon; but the Scripture calls Beelzebub, Prince of Daemons. The Ecclesiastiques likewise, in whose Dominions soever they be found, acknowledge but one Universall King, the Pope.”8 Both Hobbes and the anonymous e-mail authors rely on conceptions of the demonic resonances of political actors who hide what they really believe 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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in order to undermine the state. This question of hiding belief gets reinvigorated in the next chapter. Augustines’s confessions are geared to a different register; he wanted confession in order to explore the evil forces working on and within the human will. Humans, he claimed, need to root out the true evil that they are and allow god to dominate that weakness. People, according to Augustine, need to submit to and be filled by god. Augustine’s conception of submission as strength needs to be opposed with conceptions of strength that do not demonize the enemy. Conceptions of strength can vary from models that require the removal or disappearance of the enemy to models that need a strong adversary to display their strength. That is, some conceptions of strength require strength in an enemy, especially in a world in which conflict is given value. In such a model our enemy can often be valued as a useful or stimulating competitor, or someone with whom we receive value, since they care enough to fight with us. Such conceptions of strength and conflict appear foreign to the world of Augustine, which valued human submission (to a sovereign) and the absolute termination of an enemy that is evil or beyond respect. Augustine expressed of the Olympian gods (with the allusion as well to their supporters) that they were totally evil demons that should be removed from the world. “But, they will not listen to you; they are demons, teachers of depravity, delighting in obscenity” (Augustine 1958, 97). Evil deployed in this manner reduces the space for conceptions of strength that need (or can ignore) differences; strength becomes the ability to make enemies disappear, or as he writes of the final judgment, “the good will be separated from the wicked” (Augustine 1958, 492). And, moreover, “one thing that will happen, and most certainly happen, is what God, through His Prophet, said concerning the punishment of hell being eternal: ‘Their worm shall not die, and their fire shall not be quenched.’ And it was to emphasize this further that, when the Lord Jesus was counseling us to cut off members that scandalize us (meaning that we should cut off people whom we love as we love our right hand)” (Augustine 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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1958, 502). The enemy in this account knows no ending; there can be no quarter made with the enemy. The enemy threatens an identity in such a manner that no respect or future respect can be given. How people are to treat their enemies and what it means for them to be strong in response to the world are essential elements of subjectivity that position the self toward, against, and in need of others; these elements receive much of their bearings from conceptions of the gods—the beyond politics that structures how we imagine politics and power. It is time to kill off Augustine’s gods, especially those that would make other people appear to be the possession of evil.



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Córdoba Belief and Belonging

Where is Cordoba, the seat of the sciences, and how many scholars of high repute remain there? Where is Seville and the pleasures it contains, as well as its sweet river overflowing and brimful with water? [They are] capitals that were the pillars of the land, yet when pillars are gone, it may no longer endure! The tap of the white ablution fount weeps in despair, like a passionate lover weeping at the departure of the beloved over dwellings emptied of Islam that were first vacated and now are inhabited by unbelief; in which mosques have become churches wherein only bells and crosses may be found. Even the mihrabs weep though they are made of cold stone; even the minbars sing dirges though made of wood! —Salih Abu ‘l-Baqa’ al-Sharif al-Rundi, “Lament for the Fall of Seville” No man putteth a piece of new cloth unto an old garment, for that which is put in to fill it up taketh from the garment, and the rent is made worse. Neither do men put new wine into old bottles: else the bottles break, and the wine runneth out, and the bottles perish: but they put new wine into new bottles, and both are preserved. —Matthew 9:16–25



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I mean that no man wants to be deceived in the most important part of him and about the most important things: that is when he is most terrified of falsehood.

L

ike Lot from Sodom, Maimonides (Abu ‘Imran Musa ben Maimon ibn ‘Abd Allah) fled the city of Córdoba; Averroes (Ibn Rushd) remained. This chapter examines the forces of belonging and excluding that operated in Córdoba in the twelfth century and applies some of the conclusions drawn from this examination to our problems of identity and belonging— particularly questions of how we possess a historical past and how we possess ourselves. Averroes (and Maimonides) explored many problems of belonging—who “belongs” to a religion, who belongs to which past, and who “belongs” to a political space (and how is that space possessed)? This chapter uses the writings of Ibn Rushd (Averroes) to explore the possibilities created out of alienation from “your” place—even the very place of “you.” This question of belonging is, furthermore, salient as an element in the maintenance of “Europe” and “America.” People within Europe and America argue about “our” society—“our” city—in the face of new integration and new immigrants. In France, for example, Parliament passed legislation in March 2004 forbidding female Muslims from wearing the hijab in school, in part because “our” society, for many French parliamentarians, is secular. Writers as cosmopolitan as Julia Kristeva, additionally, have argued for a particular kind of “Europeaness” (transitioned from “Frenchness” for Kristeva) to which the veil represents a challenge.1 This chapter pursues this question of possession—how does one posses one’s self—their body, their spirit, their beliefs and their ideas—how is the dwelling inhabited and possessed? Pursuing questions of possession, in this way, requires an examination of the conceptions of self that go into the possessive terms that we use to hold culture, religion, and past (i.e., our culture, my religion, my history). Averroes responded to the demands of a god that wanted belief and 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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confession by reconceptualizing the role of belief and confession on the basis of his avowal of ignorance concerning what it might mean for someone to possess a belief. This chapter attempts to use the writings of Averroes to unpack conceptions of possession that are reinforced by divine expectations and that contribute to restrictive conceptions of the self. In order to think about and understand the production of violence surrounding histories and pasts, this chapter explores the consolidation of identity around these elements (and around religious demands to articulate and stand by belief—a demand that consolidates a range of possible beliefs into an overidentification with a singular belief that is then said to belong to an individual). Examining a historical moment in which identity was not quite consolidated in this way might open up our conceptions of what can make up an identity and, moreover, help us to live in the world with less violent reactions against others who are different. Set in a landscape of routine feuds and fights between states and cities, the Almohad reform movement transformed Córdoba from an isolated kingship into the capital of al-Andalus. The Almohads took over Córdoba in 1171 through 1173. Previously, the city was held to some extent by León-Castile. León-Castile conquered the territory, which included Córdoba, from the Almoravids but left the city under the charge of the Almoravid governor.2 The Almoravid empire collapsed in part from struggling with the Almohads, which opened up the territory to the advances of León-Castile to establish itself as a superior authority to the Almoravid leader, Ibn Ghaniya. The Almohads did not last forever, of course; they lost Córdoba to invaders from León-Castile in 1212. The civil governors, qadis, of the cities under Almoravid rule exercised a great deal of power; generally, the qadis were in charge. In either 1142 or 1143, the Cordovans chose Ibn Hamdin as their qadi. In 1145 they went so far as to reject Almoravid rule—“the people of Cordoba, khassa and ‘amma alike, assembled in the mosque and took the oath of allegiance to Ibn Hamdin, not just as qadi but as ra’is, or secular head, of the city, taking over all the administrative functions 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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previously exercised by the Almoravid governor” (Kennedy 1996, 192). Soon thereafter, however, Ibn Ghaniya and the Almoravids retook the city. By 1155 or 1156, the Almohads had secured control over most of the major cities of al-Andalus and instituted as the governor of Córdoba a member of the family in charge of the Almohad empire. (In later years, one of these familiar appointments was likely recommended by Averroes.3) The Almohads moved the capital of al-Andalus from Seville to Córdoba. The city “belonged” to the Almohads. This was, to some degree, the political possession of the city in which Averroes resided and Maimonides left. The city belonged to the people, perhaps the people who lived there, the people who visited, the people from there, the people of al-Andalus, the people of Europe, the people of Islam, the people of the Magreb, the people of Spain, people of the West, lots of people. Who belongs to what place (geographically)? Who belongs to what history? Who belongs to what religion, and finally, who belongs to whom?

Political Theology V: Cities and Selves “The case of this city is like the case with natural beings,” Averroes wrote in his examination of Plato’s Republic.4 He proceeded to make sustained use of the connections between soul and city. Averroes’s conception of the city models the self—both exemplify the possession of multiplicity within a hypothetical singularity. “In general, the relation of all these virtues to the parts of this city will be [as] the relation of the faculties of the soul to the parts of a single soul” (Averroes 1974, 7). The city, as with the body and soul, brings forth actions and events that are not exclusively the truth of the city (or individual). It is a collection of a variety of forces, drives, and desires that possess a singular name—a name that creates the fiction of a unity. Such a diversity exists within the city, in fact, that the city could itself (and the soul) be many cities. “Moreover, many cities could be taken out 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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of this [one city] in accord with the proper size” (ibid., 45). For Averroes, as for Plato, such a city does not exist in the material world, but exists in the world of ideas or forms. “But the case is not as it might seem, for there is no city that is truly one other than this city that we are involved in bringing forth” (ibid., 43). The city and the self are vast confluences of forces, effects, and desires that interact, pass, and move but do not exist as unified and consistent possessors of identities. These differences are somewhat harmonized, in Averroes’s account, into a diversity that works because every element is contained in a Platonic or Aristotelian order. “This is commanded of the citizens’ offspring so that they might be one in nature, since every one of the humans in it [sc., the city] corresponds to one particular job, and that is the job for which he is naturally suited” (ibid., 46–47). The order establishes the very possibility of justice, in that justice only exists in the city when everything is in its proper place. In the name of Plato, Averroes applies this to the individual and the soul. “This is political justice; just as perversion in cities, which is the cause of injustice, is nothing more than each and every one of its citizens growing up in more than one thing and transferring ‘from thing’ to thing, from activity to activity, and from rank to rank—and this, notwithstanding that it is thought not to be harmful to the city in the practical arts” (ibid., 53). Individual possession of social place confirms order and justice in Averroes appropriation of Plato. The maintenance of a conception or argument in one part of the city or one part of the soul does not mean that the city or soul actually functions in those terms. Averroes, rigorous in his care concerning the separation between ideas and actions, seldom assumed that the acceptance of argument in one portion of the city lead to a belief by the city. The same holds true for the soul, where acceptance of argument does not necessarily lead to belief; furthermore, speech is not necessarily connected to belief: “We shall state through explanation the way in which each and every virtue comes to exist in the citizens’ souls and how to bring this about. You ought to know, besides, that 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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however possible it may be to formulate these in speech, that does not yet suffice to bring them about in deed in cities and nations until such time as the cogitative faculty is joined to it, as is the case in the art of medicine” (ibid., 9). The city, like the soul, does not guarantee speech and meaning. Abrahamic religions often required confession as the evidence of a belief that was the central demand of the god. Averroes used Plato to trouble the possibility of accurate confession. Against the background of this divine desire, Averroes explored the confusion and ignorance of what people talk about when they talk about belief. He also explored the connections between what are called beliefs and arguments—highlighting the ways that persuasive arguments do not necessarily lead to beliefs and vice versa.

Language and Belief Arguments can establish what we call belief, in some ways. Not only, however, do arguments often fail to establish belief, but arguments also must always come up against the capacities of the individual to understand. Moreover, the individual experiences some “beliefs” as nature—their own constituted perception. “We say that there are two ways by which the virtues in general are brought about in the souls of political humans. One of them is to establish the opinions in their souls through rhetorical and poetical arguments. This is limited to theoretical sciences presented to the multitude of humans, while the way by which the elect few learn the theoretical sciences are the true ways, as shall be stated later on. . . . as far as it is in their nature to believe, is useful with regard to the other moral virtues and practical arts” (ibid., 10–11). Averroes conceived of forces affecting the production of self and belief in a number of ways, all of which frustrate any attempt to connect something called an individual to beliefs they may have possessive power over (even as they have other beliefs). Love, for example, in many conceptions of the self and identity, functions with



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great reliance on possession. The idea of love is a common one in explaining the sort of responsibility that philosophers feel toward others of their city—following Socrates. But love as a possession is not a prominent idea in Averroes. Leo Strauss explained the deceptive nature of much philosophical writing in terms of possession of a people through love. Strauss claimed that the philosopher wrote to the people he possessed out of love. “All books of that kind owe their existence to the love of the mature philosopher for the puppies of his race, by whom he wants to be loved in turn: all exoteric books are ‘written speeches caused by love.’”5 Averroes, however, avoids the possessive imperatives of love by conceptualizing the relationship between philosophers and common people as one of justice— everything performing its proper function in its proper place. It is not love at all for Averroes, but justice. Justice requires the maintenance of diversity and the protection of different social positions (as it also does within the soul). When he had finished making known the nature of justice in cities, he set out to consider whether it is the selfsame thing in the individual soul. If this in fact corresponds to what was said of this in the city, then it is right. If not, then he would reconsider what was said of this in the city. For things differing [only] in smallness and greatness are of one class, and there is nothing in the one that is contrary to what is in the other. Hence whatever must necessarily be justice and equity in the individual soul is the selfsame thing in “the” individual city. (Averroes 1974, 54)

Justice functions as a conceptual device to understand how drives, desires, and beliefs exist within the self—a device that avoids the languages and tropes of possession.

Possessions What is the relationship between ruling forces and obedient forces within the city and the body? Possession is not a term that explains



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how things work for Averroes. Possession, goods and desires, destroy the viability of the just city. As he wrote of Plato’s guardians of the city, “Nor is it appropriate that they hear statements exhorting them to hold and acquire property, for more than anything else, possessions hinder these arts as is said hereafter” (ibid., 24). Or, more explicitly, “possessions, too, hinder them from the business of guardianship” (ibid., 39). The harmful and disruptive effects of meeting the world and the soul in terms of possession led Averroes to a criticism of possession that extended beyond guardians. Possession and property are harmful for everyone and for every part of the soul. “The acquisition of property is harmful to the guardians because if they acquire land and houses and money, each will appropriate for himself and want to isolate himself from the citizens by assembling as much property as is possible for him. . . . This is something that necessarily happens to them when they are propertied. Because of all this, if we wish the guardians to be in the best condition as guardians, it is obligatory that they have nothing at all” (ibid., 38–39). Workers and artisans, like guardians, began to damage the city when enabled of property ownership. “When it became clear to him, with respect to the guardians, that they ought not to possess anything, he also considered the case of the artisans and workers among the members of this city. Ought we to permit them possessions so that they receive wages for their word and [consequently] have possessions from it? He found this case identical with the other, since it was clear to him that nothing is more harmful to this city than the entry of poverty and wealth” (ibid., 40). Every part of the city should forgo possessions. It is not just the fact of possession; it is the structure of possession—that is, the relationship it sets up between forces. As reiterated above, possession is significantly a problem for the soul, even beyond its problems for the city. In Averroes’s case, this takes on a couple of interesting elements, including the difficulty in connecting him to his name and to his writings. First, his name was not Averroes. The texts written by Averroes were written by Abu ‘Imran Musa 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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ben Maimon ibn ‘Abd Allah. Furthermore, some of the books written by Abu ‘Imran Musa ben Maimon ibn ‘Abd Allah make it very difficult to determine when he wrote in his own voice and when he wrote in the voices of others. Often, the voice of the text slides across several registers; for example, the words of Plato seem to become the words of the author. “Averroes most evidently speaks in his own name when he speaks emphatically,” Ralph Lerner writes in the midst of his consideration of exactly which words or sayings Averroes really meant in his commentary on Plato’s Republic. Learner expresses frustration at his ability to decide which words are Averroes’s, which are Plato’s, and which belong to others. Which words really belonged to Averroes? This question points to the difference in possession between contemporary society and Averroes—this clarification of possession and self was not as necessary for Averroes. The very phrasing of the statement suggests a problem since it is not really clear in which “name” Averroes would speak, since Averroes is only the Latinized version of Abu’l-Walid Muhammad Ibn Ahmad Ibn Rushd. What name speaks here? What attributes are possessed by this name? Additionally, his commentary on Plato’s Republic is a book that we only have access to through a Hebrew translation, in which the original Arabic has been lost.

Knowledge and Action This problem of naming and possessing nicely reflects Averroes’s project of making connections between belief and self more difficult. Averroes’s unpacking of the subject involved the split between knowledge and action that will be highly problematized by others for whom the correct beliefs become as important as the correct behaviors. “But at the moment of one’s acting on it, this definition is in need of particular conditions; otherwise it would be impossible to act [in accord with that definition]. The end of knowledge in this [matter] is only, as Aristotle says, that one should act, not that he should know” (ibid., 8). Sounding 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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much like Socrates, Averroes affirms a knowledge that is simply the awareness of ignorance concerning the inner workings of what we experience as ourselves. This ignorance functions at the level of the soul, for Averroes, and, importantly, at the level of the city. How the forces within the city function to make that city are unknown. The history, backgrounds, and cultures asserted as belonging to the city exert a hegemony that can be disrupted with a model of identity that rejects presumed knowledge of the truth of that identity in favor of a model that recognizes the amazing diversity that moves within the city. Forces (history or culture) that appear to name the city are really only the dominating forces at a particular moment. Possession and belonging dominate the field, as it does in the debate concerning the French ban on hijab in schools. Sometimes what appears most at issue in the veil debate, for example, is the removal of women from the commerce of excitement and the visible. “Let’s argue, then,” Alain Badiou wrote in Le Monde, “a strange point: the law on the hijab is a purely capitalist law. It orders the exposure of femininity. That is, the obligation to subject the female body to the market. For teenagers, i.e., the teeming center of the universe, the law bans any holding back.”6 The law orders the exposure of the body to visual commerce and, additionally, attempts to mark the body as the possession of the gaze. Averroes, hidden behind his own veil, destabilized notions of possession and belief as central truths hidden behind an act. Questions of public declarations of belonging were central to the al-Andulas (and many other places) during the period in which the Almohads were in power in Córdoba. Just what does our love for our fellow citizens require us to tolerate and to proclaim to them? If citizenship does require that we speak up and confront our fellow citizens, when do we speak up or step out onto the street in veils? When is it personally acceptable to keep quite about our beliefs? When is it acceptable that we do not confess everything to our fellow citizens and do not look to them to recognize all our differences? 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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Ibn Rushd lived in Córdoba from 1126 to 1198, under the patronage of the Almohad ruler Abu Ya’quib, and wrote extensively on questions of interpretation. Interpretation for the purpose of forming a particular type of community—a rather plural one. In which people could belong without having the same interpretation or understanding of the texts they were formed around. Averroes set out four modes of being that he explicitly tied to interpretation. “When a problem arises [concerning the interpretation of scripture], one considers which of the four modes of existence is more convincing for that class of people who find it impossible that such statements could denote the essential existence (the one that is external).”7 Difficult issues that arise from interpretations should be hidden from those to whom it would be offensive. “Representation should, then be couched in terms of the mode of existence that they believe is most likely to exist” (Averroes 2001, 130). In a separate treatise, we have already dealt with the harmony of philosophy and religion, indicating how religion commands the study of philosophy. We maintained there that religion consists of two parts: external and interpreted, and that the external part is incumbent on the masses, whereas the interpreted is incumbent on the learned. With respect to that part, it is the duty of the masses to take it at its face value, without attempting to interpret it. As for the learned, it is not permissible to divulge their interpretations to the public, as Ali [ibn Abi Talib], God be pleased with him, said: “Address people in a language that they understand; do you want God and his Messenger to lie?” Thus, I decided to inquire in this book into those external dogmas which religion intended the public to uphold, and to investigate in all this, to the degree to which my energy and capability permit, the intention of the lawgiver, god’s prayer and peace be upon him. (ibid., 17)

What is required in order to belong to a religious group? This question, which Averroes answers very broadly (and in a manner that holds similarities to Maimonides and the Zohar), he tricks in many ways—doubling the personal element—that 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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is, he operates with an awareness that “beliefs” are a trick of language. Instead of implanting the truth of religion in an internal register, Averroes focuses on external dogmas; he insisted on the importance of the external statements that were not conceptualized as revealing the deeply held truth of the person. Averroes insisted that the level of his investigation was at the external demands of religion, leaving private elements alone. “Thus, I decided to inquire in this book into those external dogmas which religion intended the public to uphold, and to investigate in all this, to the degree to which my energy and capability permit, the intention of the lawgiver” (ibid., 17). Averroes confronted questions of the reasonable and inspirational elements of belief in his pursuit of the external demands of religion. His evocation of “public” confirms that these are beliefs that are not necessarily to be trusted by the philosophers but are acceptable for the public—imputing to such beliefs a patina of falsity. Unlike Augustine or Aquinas, for example, Averroes did not conceptualize his god as needing correct belief. That is, he did not attempt to ascertain that the person had the correct belief or subscribed to the best argument for the belief. This conception was supported by a conception of the soul and self as mysterious and beyond human knowledge—like Abraham’s treatment of the knowledge of strangers (retrieved through questions) that should be passed by in favor of interpretation. What it means to “believe”—particularly as in the acceptance of argumentative points—remains beyond conception and beyond divine judgment. This further means that Averroes is able to expand a conception of community that allows for a wide range of beliefs. Averroes put additional weight on these arguments by evoking the simplicity of the sayings of the prophet as evidence that the internalization of arguments is not the requirements of god. “It is not open for someone to say: ‘If this were the duty incumbent upon whoever believes in God; namely, that no man’s faith will be acceptable unless he comes to know these arguments, then the Prophet, God’s prayer and peace be upon him, would not have 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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called anyone to Islam without first presenting him with these arguments’” (ibid., 18–19). Additionally, this question of representation and the self leads to a central question for this text: how are separations made between groups of people, including, in this example, Muslims, Christians, and Jews? One could assume that contemporary readers organize these categories according to culture—and clearly that is a difference with some life—but such organizations mostly serve to ignore the history of “culture” and the similarities of culture across the al-Andalus (or, alternatively, the diversity across any grouping). The division of Abrahamic peoples in medieval al-Andalusia into monotheistic groupings often follows what the modern author takes to be the ancient divisions. Maria Rosa Menocal has done a lot of work to challenge this conception—these divisions usually did not work for them the way they work for us. Part of the meaning must reside in what we take to be their “beliefs”—what they “believed” themselves to be. This is, in any world, a difficult thing to determine, let alone in the secretive world of the al-Andalus. The writings attached to the name Averroes illustrate the vacuity of connections between belief and identity (in which conceptions of possession are in play but not solidified into the truths they would become later) that challenge our routine terms of identity (social, cultural, religious, personal) based on possession. A question as banal as “what did Averroes believe?” becomes a difficult tangle of assumptions involving how a person “holds” and possesses beliefs, as well as assumptions bearing on the connections between written words and beliefs. Conceptions, such as possession, play important roles in stabilizing self and social identities; this stability, however, is not a given fact of identity but a historical accident that should be scrutinized particularly where it fosters violence in our interactions with others, as it is particularly apt to do in that it bears historical evocations of the Abrahamic god’s demands for belief and confession. This attempt to unpack some of the issues of possession and belief that circulate around the writings of Averroes offers the 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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possibility that less rigorous connections between belief and self may reduce the violence and anger we direct toward those around us. It is a surprising thing that gods want belief. Abrahamic faiths, particularly Christianity and Islam, conceive of their god as needing belief from followers. The gods’ demand for belief highlights the fact that Abrahamic faiths have done so much work in creating unbelief in the gods. Instead of attention to the content or rules governing the ethical teachings of the religion, these religions connect inclusion with “belief.” Examining a historical moment in which identity was not quite consolidated as tightly around possession might open up our conceptions of what can make up an identity and, moreover, help us to live in the world with less violent reactions against others who are different. In the next chapter I will examine how we can be less violent toward our own failures to posses the correct belief or behavior.



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Washington DC Divine Desire for Destruction

Other people are likely not to be aware that those who pursue philosophy aright study nothing but dying and being dead. —Plato, Phaedo Think not that I am come to send peace on earth: I came not to send peace, but a sword. —Matthew 10:34 Finally—what remained to be sacrificed? At long last, did one not have to sacrifice for once whatever is comforting, holy, healing; all hope, all faith in hidden harmony, in future bliss’s and justices? Didn’t one have to sacrifice God himself and, from the cruelty against oneself, worship the stone, stupidity, gravity, fate, the nothing? To sacrifice God for the nothing—this paradoxical mystery of the final cruelty was reserved for the generation now coming up: all of us already know something of this. —Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil

O

n September 13, 2001, Jerry Falwell appeared a little encouraged that his god had begun to judge Washington DC, even as gods had long ago punished Sodom, Athens, Rome, and Córdoba. “It was the kind of brokenness,” he said to Pat Robertson concerning American feelings following 9/11, “that no one could conjure, only God could bring upon us. And, that 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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is to me the most optimistic thing that I see today as I look across America.”1 The fundamentalist Abrahamic expectation of divine punishment for national sins (the true influence of Athens) is often coupled with an anticipation of rapture and tribulation. Almost twenty years prior, Gore Vidal had called evangelicals “Jesus Christers, who lust for rapture.” This chapter explores the lusts we share with Falwell for our own destruction in the return and punishment of a god—not just among those who profess belief but also as a broad social phenomenon. Exploring the ways our desires and hopes are not just directed toward freedom but may also strive toward subjugation and destruction is essential if we want to protect and foster individualism, social difference, and life. Manifested broadly in the culture—in, for example, our enjoyments of horror and fantasy movies—are ways we enjoy danger and fear, that is, an enjoyment of our own terror and destruction. This is not just a primal desire for stimulation, nor should we dismiss this enjoyment as bad taste. This drive resonates with our desire to end our own lives; it is our enjoyment of life turned against itself. Forces of enjoyment directed against life are given distinct resonance and energy from the longed-for return of a god to punish a corrupt world, even for those who do not profess belief in such a return. Gods act as models of subjectivity and strength for our understanding of what it is and is not like to be a person. The Christian god’s relationship to death—particularly in needing the death of his son and in the (Platonic) account of death as the goal of life—makes him a model of human subjectivity in which love and murder are closely connected and in which death becomes the essence of life (since, in many Aristotelian-influenced versions of Christianity, it becomes the very purpose of life). Gore Vidal’s novels and essays attempt to shift our value from death to life by interrogating our enjoyment of our own subjugation; a successful interrogation of value that might reduce our resentments against differences even as it reduces our fear of death. Vidal attempts to subvert the most reactive and destructive elements in this account. 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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“Long before the American empire was a reality,” wrote Vidal of Washington DC, “the city was turning itself into New Rome.” Not just through the gaudy proliferation of colonnaded marble buildings but through the recreation of the fall of the empire. “While the basilicas and porticoes were going up, one often had the sense that one was living not in a city that was being built but in a set of ruins. It is curious that even in those pre-nuclear days many of us could imagine the city devastated.”2 This vision of a destroyed city was made modestly manifested on September 11, 2001, and one that even on that day felt like the fulfillment of a secret wish for self-destruction (one that echoes in the persistant nostalgia for that day).3 People especially enjoy the destruction of Washington DC. Washington DC produces national and international resentments in that it often represents an outside oppressive and modernizing government. Rarely, for example, would even the most “patriotic” American politician’s reference to “Washington DC” be anything but a complaint about the power of the American national state.4 Certainly, watching Washington get destroyed by space aliens in Earth v. the Flying Saucer or Independence Day appeals to such political resentments. In both the attack on the Pentagon and in some responses to that attack, such as those of Pat Robertson or Jerry Falwell, Washington DC has represented the corruption brought to America and the world through modernity. Additionally, the city of Washington DC really has been devastated several times in the past, and the desire to reenact the destruction of Washington probably represents the desire to master traumatic experience. Falwell’s clucking about the city deserving the attacks on 9/11, however, demonstrated an additional element: the repercussions of a theology that often relies on the divine punishment evoked in the Genesis story of Sodom to assert the need for unity and purity. The establishment of unity at a national level requires certain feelings among the people. Feelings of community, of course, can be useful, but as useful are common emotional feelings such as 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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regret, nostalgia, and pity. Rousseau, in Emile, for example, has pointed out the central role of pity in building community; it could be that part of the enjoyment and nation-building power of our own self-destruction is in making ourselves objects of pity.5 Vidal parodies these elements of self-destruction in Judgment of Paris in which a man is accused of setting fire to his wife, but is excused because of her own secret destructive wish to be in the position of a martyr. “Who was responsible?” “Who can say? All I know is that, as the ladies were getting up from dinner to go into the drawing room, he picked up the candelabra and hurled it at her, shouting, ‘Be Joan of Arc, if you dare!’ It was the addition of the ‘if you dare’ which saved him from the more stern consequences since the phrase implied, you see, a certain choice in the matter. That she elected of her own free will to be Joan of Arc demonstrated a deliberate choice on her part and, as a result, he could hardly be held responsible for an act in which she so obviously concurred, perhaps even precipitated since it was well known that she had always expected some sort of martyrdom.”6

Her desire to occupy the position of a martyr led her to desire and, perhaps, even will her own destruction. Vidal, however, finds a more dangerous and extensive drive at work in our desire for death and destruction—a desire suggested by a character in his short story “Three Stratagems.” “There’s the possibility that they enjoy their own degradation; if that’s true, I pity them, and the game’s more sinister than one might at first suppose.”7 This sinister desire is displayed, for Vidal, in the desire by his fellow countrymen for the return of Jesus and the grand destruction (and degradation) promised by the return of that god. The desired return of the messiah will bring punishment against a world that has violated the god’s established demand for purity and singularity. Falwell’s enthusiasm for destruction, for example, was apparent to Vidal. “You know why I’m not worried?” queried a grinning Falwell to a Los Angeles Times 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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journalist, Bob Scheer, concerning why he was not worried about the destruction brought to the world with the return of Jesus. “I ain’t gonna be here.” To which Vidal rejoined in print: “A joyous millennium of no abortion, no sodomy, no crack, no Pure Drug and Food Act, no civil rights.”8 Vidal diagnoses a desire to destroy the world that is an extension of a more common desire to destroy diversity and difference, which resonates with the desire to unify the world into a singular purity, modeled on a singular pure god that achieves the desired removal of messy and uncomfortable pluralism. Vidal finds the past of this unique hatred of life in the very terms of monotheism and, moreover, in the specific content of American Christianity, including the influence of Clyde Ingerson Scofield’s Bible on American Dispensationalist conceptions of Christianity. “Although the three religions (Judaism, Christianity, and Islam) of the Book, as Moslems call the Old Testament, are alike in a common worship of a highly primitive sky-god (rejected by the more civilized Hindus, Buddhists, and Confucians) and variously adapted to different times, peoples, and climates, only Fundamentalist Christianity in our century has got so seriously into the end-of-the-world game, or Rapture, as it is described by the Dispensationalists.”9 Scofield, whose Bible greatly influenced the Dispensationalists movement (including contemporary evangelicals), directed attention to the prophesied return of Jesus Christ, who died, according to many versions of Christianity, for the liberation of humanity from sin; such a death made death and self-sacrifice the very value of life. This destructive desire appears not only in the popularity of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and David Koresh but also Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush (“the smoldering, if not quite burning Bush”— who conceives of his administration as signaling the third Great Awakening); but, furthermore, it appears in the broader organization of “secular” society.10 In his fantasy novels (or what he has called his “apres-poststructuralism”), Vidal redirects the Christian messianic desire for destruction and attempts to foster a desire for life, or at the 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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very least save the world from Jesus: “I don’t regret my career as a twentieth-century Zionist terrorist,” Saint Timothy reports in Vidal’s Live from Golgotha, “but I have decided that Jesus—or Marvin, as I usually think of him—must not be allowed to blow up the planet in the year 2001.”11 Monotheism and Its Difference

Scofieldian Christianity, like Augustinian Christianity, attempted, according to Vidal, to erase what the adherants do not value— erase or confine it to an eternal hell. This is very important: monotheism plays a central role in establishing the vehemence we direct toward differences. “Now to the root of the matter,” Vidal instructs. “The great unmentionable evil at the center of our culture is monotheism.”12 Monotheism drives a conception of society as always in need of unity, Vidal claims, and always failing to discover the essential unity that would bind us together. Vidal attempts to replace that with a notion of society as necessarily diverse. That is, he values diversity not on the basis of a possible future unity but as its own value. Vidal embraces pluralism with a grip that refuses the transference of difference into unity. In fact, in his approach to monotheism, he avoids routine salutations that we need to recognize our commonalities and unify around them. Vidal, remarkably, asserts that we should value our difference even in ways that separate us. He sermonizes, It is usual, on the rare occasions when essential problems are addressed, to exhort everyone to be kinder, gentler. To bring us together, O Lord, in our common humanity. Well, we have heard these exhortations for a couple of hundred years and we are further apart than ever. So instead of coming together in order that the many might be one, I say let us separate so that each will know where he stands. From the one, many, and each of us free of the sky-god as secular lawgiver. I preach, to put it bluntly, confrontation.13 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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Caring for others as we would care for ourselves does not allow, in Vidal’s account, the perception of others as versions of ourselves; they must remain different. Vidal proposes confrontation and difference to counter monotheism and its demands for singularity and unity; that is, Vidal preaches a stance that does not resolve differences into similarities but allows these differences to stand against each other (and to thus preserve them). And he prays for a social regime that does not find difference to be sin that must be made to disappear. Abrahamic religions exemplify the problems of monotheism, particularly the centralizing model of power, which organizes the world around central authoritarian commands—that is, around a model of singular sovereignty. From a barbaric Bronze Age text known as the Old Testament, three antihuman religions have evolved—Judaism, Christianity, and Islam. These are sky-god religions. They are literally, patriarchal—God is the omnipotent father—hence the loathing of women for 2,000 years in those countries afflicted by the sky-god and his earthly male delegates. The sky-god is a jealous god, of course. He requires total obedience from everyone on earth, as he is in place not just for one tribe but for all creation. Those who would reject him must be converted or killed for their own good. Ultimately, totalitarianism is the only sort of politics that can truly serve the sky-god’s purpose. Any movement of a liberal nature endangers his authority and that of his delegates on earth. One God, one King, one Pope, one master in the factory, one father-leader in the family at home.14

The monotheistic theology that Vidal finds endemic to the United States maintains, as Schmitt would also recognize, models of power here on earth. The totalitarian demands of the sky-god drive political action to absorb or counter the forces of that god. The character of the sky-god contributes to a wide range of social organizational problems, particularly the most pressing problems of how to be human. The god acts as a model presenting a powerful example of intolerance for difference, particularly differences 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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that might challenge his political authority. This monotheistic system of value, furthermore, shifts value from this world to the next denying the value of this life in a demand that it live up to the metaphysical worth given it by an imaginary outside. Vidal reports, “I said to Norman Mailer, ‘I think there should be a constitutional amendment making it impossible for anyone to be president who believes in an afterlife.’ Mailer said, ‘Well, that rules me out.’” Vidal’s astonishment met Mailer’s follow-up point. “‘If there isn’t an afterlife,’ he said, ‘then what’s the point to all this?’ Before I could answer, he said, ‘All right, all right. I know what you’re going to say. There is no point.’ A pride of exotic bishops separated us.” Mailer, like so many other people, points to an afterlife as justification for this life; the purpose for this world, for him, resides in another world. Vidal sees this justification as revealing a lack of care for this life. This deferral to another life for value greatly reduces the value of this life. Vidal did not respond to Mailer but he did later imagine what he should have said in response. That a president who does not believe in an afterlife sustains the greater need to protect the life we lead in the here-and-now. “Yes, that is what I would have said, and because there is no cosmic point to the life that each of us perceives on this distant bit of dust at galaxy’s edge, all the more reason for us to maintain in proper balance what we have here. Because there is nothing else. No thing. This is it. And quite enough, all in all.”15 There is, for Vidal, no other world—no world besides this one. This world possesses value, for Vidal, that it does not need to receive from some other place or purpose. Vidal’s fear of the destruction of difference extends to the fear that the world itself will be destroyed. In 1986, for example, he wrote against the cold war military buildups and the anticommunists: “By the same token, as our republic now begins to crack under the vast expense of maintaining a mindless imperial force, we might try to blow them up. Particularly if we had a president who really was a twice-born Christian and believed that the good folks would all go to heaven (where they were headed anyway) and the bad folks would go to where they belong.”16 A similar 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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story unfolds (or unravels) in Vidal’s Live from Golgotha, in which Saint Timothy sardonically claimed, “The Jesus story was never much of anything until Saint cooked up the vision-on-the roadto-Damascus number and then pulled the whole story together, a story which is now unraveling with a horrifying speed as the year 2001 A.D. approaches and Jesus—or who?—will return in nuclear judgment.”17 Death and Sacrifice

This imaginary other world turns against the actual world in judgment (nuclear, conventional, or brimstone) through its condemnation of the so-called failures of this world to live up to its imagined reason for existence; life itself, with its essential diversity, is taken to be the necessary object of removal, according to Vidal. And this has to be transformed. “That’s it: life is the villain to those who preach reward in death, through grace and eternal bliss, or through dark revenge . . . ‘Neither revenge nor reward, only the not-knowing in the grave which is the same for all.’”18 The desire to figure death as a payment or punishment for this life reduces the value of this life to less than zero—life itself becomes the enemy. The Abrahamic religions provide the model of a way to deal with differences—a particularly violent way to deal with difference. It is not enough in this monotheistic religio-political imaginary for one thing to be valued over another; the valued object must be the only object. All identities and allegiances must bow before God the Father; thus, a powerful political theology pronounces destructive judgment against the world. Christianity turns against many elements of life—even the role of death has to be overcome, according to Vidal; and thus, life turns against death but in doing so turns against the essential outside of life—that is, its “extimate” feature.19 Vidal has suggested that the desire to transcend death is one of the forces magnified by Christianity. “‘A lot of the old-timers,’ said Saint,” in Live from Golgotha, “‘our best customers in fact, are only in this 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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because we’ve promised—well, lard-ass promised—that He’d be back before they cooled it.’”20 Part of Christianity’s initial appeal was the promised return of a Jesus who would take people away from the world and from life before they were finally removed by death—one possibility of great excitement before the cessation of all excitement. More than that, it was a fight against death, in which Christianity achieved its rebellion in a spectacular sacrifice of the beloved. By attempting to extend life against death, Christianity turned against life, putting the weight of value on the next life. Life cannot be possessed or protected from its own demise. The Christian desire to transcend death renders life a worthless venture; thus, Vidal cannot just replace hatred of life with the love of life in that the love of life can attempt to transcend death, a central element in life. The desire to preserve—that is, possess—life can lead to its destruction. In Messiah, Vidal’s protagonist, Eugene, confronts his own violent attempts to retain life by stopping its passing when he plucked a flower he wanted to preserve. “Pausing only to break the stem of a white and pink peony, regretting immediately what I had done: brutally, I had wished to possess the summer, to fix the instant, to bear with me into the house a fragment of the day. It was wrong; and I stood for a moment at the French door holding the great peony in my hand, its odor like a dozen roses, like all the summers I had ever known.”21 Eugene’s desire to control and possess the moment of life destroys it. Life is change, speed, time, and passing—love of life requires the love of the passing moment. Even as differences should not be turned into commonalities (thus destroying the difference), life should not be turned into the self. Attempts to stop there—to hold it as a possession—manifests and magnifies a resentment against life. The very attempt to value it as a possession runs into a resentment against it. The trick is to pay attention to the orientation of the self—a self built on terms of possession instigates demands for permanence and resentment against inevitable loss. The self must be oriented, as Socrates so



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clearly suggested in his famous claim that philosophy is nothing but learning to die, toward its own demise. Permanent possession is, of course, impossible; the demand for it feeds a will to resentment, the nursing of wounds and losses that cannot be restored. Life as regency makes love not a demand for return of the lost but a giftlike orientation to what cannot be restored. Attempts to hold life breeds resentment against its eventual loss and against life. Peter, the protagonist of Washington, D.C., expressed such resentment, “but then he reminded himself that motion was life.”22 The self, for Vidal, cannot really be figured as possession with its attendant concepts of guilt and responsibility but as a phenomenon that cannot be possessed: “More to the point, if you have known one person you have known them all. Of course, I am not so sure that I have known even one person well, but as the Greeks sensibly believed, should you get to know yourself, you will have penetrated as much of the human mystery as anyone need ever know.”23 But even your self does not quite belong to you, as Vidal suggested in response to queries concerning his possible memoir: “I used to say, proudly, that I would never write a memoir, since ‘I am not my own subject.’ Now I’m not so sure. After all, one’s recollected life is just about all that’s left at the end of the day when the work is done and gone, property now of others.”24 We are not our own subject to hold and retain. Since we do not possess any particular thing, we therefore possess everything (or at least Vidal’s Emperor Julian did): “We have come a long way,” I said idly, looking down at the city, and the sea beyond. It is awesome to think that everything is one’s own, at least for the brief space of a life—which is why I have always the sense I must hurry to get things done, that there is hardly any time at all for a man to impress his quality and passion upon a world which will continue after him, as unconcerned as it was when it preceded him. Each day that I live I say to myself: the visible world is mine, use it, change it, but be quick, for the night comes all too fast and nothing is ever entirely finished, nothing.25



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Vidal knows it all disappears. The Christian world (and the world of the English language) he imagines in Live from Golgotha disappears in the end of the novel as everything changes into Chinese letters (without appearing resentful of that change). The world that is the object of love is always dying and disappearing. No one can hold onto their lives. Their lives, in fact, are never held by them. In addition to the dangers of attempting to hold to life too firmly; some versions of Christianity also put into place the desire to sacrifice the object of love, in a manner that reflects their gods sacrifice of his own son. This is a sacrifice in which what is most valuable is killed in order to please the gods. Christianity puts into place a desire to sacrifice our desires—this drive to sacrifice eventually turns on Christian love as possession itself. But Christianity and its demand to sacrifice leaves in place an identification with the force of destruction. We must be freed of the compulsion to sacrifice our lives in an attempt to achieve an even greater life. To empty the position of the cross of the power of love and death it orients and as a way to keep life from being turned into something so over powering that it possesses the weight of love that only a god can give it, Vidal attempts to save life from love as well as hatred. If life is worshiped as a god, then its constant proximity to death overpowers our ability to enjoy it—that is, by demanding that life be so valuable that it should last forever we set up the possibility that our own disenchantment with it will lead to nihilism—a powerful turning against life because it is not divine or perfect. Life is made evil when it fails to be perfect. Romanticized love relationships are mine fields of violence and sadism. There is the constant danger of loving life in such a manner that its failure to live up to that love can turn against it in a violent rage. In City and the Pillar, Jim is finally reunited with the great love of his youth. He is “overwhelmed equally by rage and desire,” and upon Bob’s rejection, “Jim threw himself at



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Bob” and raped him. This conclusion replaced an earlier one in which Jim, blinded by his romanticism for his early love for Bob, killed him.26 Fury at god or life for not living up to our romantic notions—which, like Jim’s murder of Bob—drives us to sacrifice it to our invented “god,” whether romance or the “more” for which Mailer pined. Sadistic desire also makes representative government a stimulating challenge for Vidal. “The United States,” he says in a post9/11 collection of essays, “was the creation of men who believed that each person has the right to do what he wants with his own life as long as he does not interfere with his neighbors’ pursuit of happiness (that his neighbor’s idea of happiness is persecuting others does confuse matters a bit).”27 Love and hate can often become indistinguishable in a landscape of desire in which our love of life can feed a desire to destroy it and in which god’s love of the world can lead to his destruction of his own son. In his novels, Vidal explores the emphasis in Christianity (and Socrates) on the human desire for death. Vidal, in his novel Messiah, imagines possible consequences for the Christian approach to death, specifically, that the positive pronouncements of death would be taken quite literally and result in mass suicides. In Messiah, Vidal imagines that the metaphorical power whereby Christianity facilitated the concept of death as a good could bear staggeringly nihilistic fruit. John Cave—“a pair of initials calculated to amaze the innocent”—captivates the world in Messiah, with the help of the narrator Eugene (Vidal’s own original first name).28 Eugene, a writer struggling to complete a novel about the Emperor Julian, assists Cave’s pronouncement to the world of his truth—a truth perceived to be the fulfillment of the teachings of Socrates and Christ. “I interrogated her then. ‘What did he say, Iris? What did he say tonight?’” Eugene asked his associate upon the completion of his first experience watching Cave preach his truth. “Her answer was as direct and plain as my question. ‘That it is good to die.’”29



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There still remains in all of this some of the mystery of our desire for punishment that resides in the preeminent Christian mystery, the trinity. Christian monotheism actually has three gods—God the Father, the Son, and the Spirit. This internal fracture within the single Christian god plays out a great violence—in which the father needs the sacrificial death of the son in order to offer forgiveness for humans (thus, in strict monotheistic terms, the god desires or requires his own death). For Vidal, this desire for sacrifice reveals a little more clearly the strange connection between love and sacrifice that Christianity activates, especially how that connection relies on the father’s demand for the death of his son. Writing about W. S. Maugham’s novels, Vidal quotes the sardonic Maugham: “‘Jesus Christ could cope with all the miseries I have had to contend with in life. But then, Jesus Christ had advantages I don’t posses.’ Presumably, Jesus was a six-foot-tall blond blueeyed body-builder whereas Maugham was slight and dark with eyes like ‘brown velvet,’ and, of course, Jesus’ father owned the shop. On the other hand, Maugham was not obliged to contend with the sadomasochistic excitement of the Crucifixion, much less the head-turning rapture of the Resurrection.”30 The sadistic need for the father to kill the son figures in the Christian desire for destruction—love gets figured powerfully as destruction. The father needed (that is to say, he wanted, since this god is omnipotent) to kill his son. Love becomes an element in why we must die and in the relationship of our death to any purpose life might project. The drive to please ‘God the Father’ moves us toward self-destruction: both to please him and out of our own guilt and embarrassment at working so hard to please him. What has to be reframed is the construction of human and divine subjectivity that energizes our desire to submit and sacrifice our lives to a god who wants us dead. This violent god with unquestioned authority demands and receives the death of his son (who is also himself). The return of Jesus promises more punishment, more tribulation, and more 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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death. Why such a desire for human destruction? Not surprisingly, the answer is often love. For example, Vidal described the answer offered by Jerry Falwell: “The answer glows with charity,” Vidal says of Falwell’s answer to why god would torture humanity with the tribulation: “He’s doing it mainly for his ancient people, the Jews. . . . He devised a seven-year Tribulation period mainly to purge the Jews, to get them to see the light and recognize Christ as their Savior. . . . Don’t you see? God wants them to bow down before His only son, who is our Lord Jesus Christ.” Anyway, forget the Jews because many, many other people will also be exterminated so that Christ may come again, in peace. Just why Jesus’ Dad should have chosen nuclear war as a means of universal peace is as rare and impenetrable mystery as the Trinity itself.31

Falwell’s god’s inability to be strong, except through coercion and overwhelming force, lurks within Falwell’s antagonism to the defiance of the Jews—even as the Jews continue to highlight Falwell’s humiliation at accepting the rule of such an overbearing god. The god revealed in Falwell’s sermon is a virulent and petulant god that kills and destroys in order to break resistance to his will. Humans are not valued by this god as alternatives and differences from himself—they are only valued to the degree they submit to his rules. But this model of self-love is a model of the self in which, like the model of the singular yet tripartite trinity, our love for ourselves is the love for parts of our selves acting in destruction of other parts of ourselves. Our love for ourselves is bound up in identification with the dominant forces within our multipart subjectivity. This identification requires the destruction of weaker portions, and it is with that capacity that we identify, in order to avoid the shame of identifying with the oppressed. Love for ourselves in this model is always attached to the dominant force that demands the destruction of our alternatives—even as the one Abrahamic god needs the destruction of himself (in his son). 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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Vidal is attentive to the moments, in particular, that reveal the hatred the faithful imagine their god to display toward himself and his own creation (themselves and their world). The enmity of God is, as Jacques Lacan reminds us, “the causa pathomenon, the cause of the most fundamental human passion.”32 Lacan’s examination of Martin Luther’s assertion that, in fact, god hates us, leads to the difficulties of sacrifice in a world where there are powerful drives to self-sacrifice at play in the social order from which the sacrifice is meant to provide an escape. How can one escape this drive without once again sacrificing the god, since it is the sacrifice that founds the order? “Luther writes of the following—Gods’ eternal hatred of men, not simply of their failures and the works of their free will, but a hatred that existed even before the world was created. . . . it is exactly what Freud deals with when the question he asks concerning the Father leads him to point out that the latter is the tyrant of the primitive horde, the one against whom the original crime was committed, and who for that very reason introduced the order, essence, and foundation of the domain of law.”33 The command of law issued from this sovereign is reworked by Vidal—not by saying that the father is actually kind and loving (and therefore human relations should also be kind and gentle), but by recognizing that the hatred this god feels for humanity gets transferred into our hatred for ourselves. The problem is how to avoid the repetition of the original crime in killing the idea of god active in the intellectual order. This is the danger in Nietzsche’s proclamation that we have reached a historical moment that demands the sacrifice of god to nothing. “To sacrifice God for the nothing—this paradoxical mystery of the final cruelty was reserved for the generation now coming up,” according to Nietzsche. “All of us already know something of this,” he claimed. Vidal avoids sacrifice and thus avoids the power exerted by the sacrificed god. Vidal suggests that sacrificing the god may not be the final cruelty, as Nietzsche claims; the final cruelty is to allow the god to die without sacrifice. So that we might not experience the overwhelming compulsion to 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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martyr ourselves for others, even if they are gods we have killed, Vidal takes the god off the cross. Vidal puts Judas on the cross. He transforms the fundamental event of Christian sacrifice and self-destruction by making it not only an accident but also a mistake, and, furthermore, he takes the foreigner, the stranger, the agent of evil, and places him in the center of the command to love. In this manner, the desire to sacrifice the son is shown to be a failure. Vidal attempts to activate the command of the god that remains after his death in a manner that subverts resentment. Jesus’s death turns out to be an accident, and, furthermore, it is not Jesus who experiences the accident but Judas. “If he was crucified,” Chet’s voice trembled. I must say I felt a cold chill. Is our entire religion based on a non-event? “If he wasn’t crucified, then who was?” As I spoke, I knew. Judas, fat Judas, had been crucified by the Romans, who thought that he was Jesus. But Jesus had, thanks to Cutler One, been brought from Gethsemane to General Electric as a computer analyst with a made-up resume. The daring of it all made my head swim. Chet had got the point, too. He was blunt. “As far as Christianity goes, it doesn’t make much difference who ended up on the cross as long as everyone thinks it was Jesus, which they do now, and did then, obviously.”34

Such disregard for the object of the sacrifice demonstrates that it is just the empty act of sacrifice that makes the difference. If it does not matter who is sacrificed, then sacrifice itself is an empty gesture. But, of course, it does make a difference if the son of god is on the cross or if a symbol of evil takes his place. Vidal subverts Christianity, in that the outside is not just inside but constitutively inside. Evil is put in the very heart of Christianity. Instead of sacrificing his son as just payment to himself, the sacrifice to god turns out to be a fraud—the act of sacrifice is made a pathetic event. The very mechanism of sacrifice is mocked in that the beloved object of 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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sacrifice turns out to be human, not divine. Paul wrote concerning the death of Jesus that “all things have been subjected, it is clear that it excepts the one who subjected them all to him.”35 Vidal refuses to accept the one who subjected them all to him. The figure on the cross becomes another man, a fellow subject, and is not excepted. Vidal subverts the mystery Paul announced in the climax of 1 Corinthians: “See, I am telling you a mystery: we shall not all die, but we shall all be changed, in a moment, in a blink of an eye, at the last trumpet; for the trumpet will blow, and the dead will be raised imperishable, and we shall be changed.” Paul imagined the victory over life as a victory over death. “Death has been swallowed by victory. Where, death, is your victory? Where, death, is your sting?”36 Paul triumphantly concluded 1 Corinthians with an announcement of the victory over death, a victory that imagines the complete disappearance of death. Vidal, by placing Judas on the cross, steals the victory from Jesus and from self-sacrifice. Death becomes victorious and brings its gadfly sting back to life. Death becomes, once again, victorious in life, in that death returns as a necessary component of life. Judas on the cross carries the guilt created by Jesus—the guilt of never living up to the god’s demands for a better world and, moreover, the guilt of attempting to obey the command of the god. With the sacrifice of Judas, Vidal successfully redeploys elements in Christianity that can help people live lives that are not bound up in their own secret wishes for self-destruction. Vidal’s response to the Abrahamic evangelical desire for the destruction and judgment brought with the god’s second coming, which he conceives as a denial of the rich diversity of life, attempts to subvert the resentment that plagues these conceptions by refiguring purposes of life in non-absolutist terms—so that value can be created in a number of venues, none of which promise absolute value. In this way, Vidal’s narratives value the messy short-term effects of life, which, in Vidal’s account, describe everything about this life, including ourselves, our 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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enemies, and our death. Perhaps we can feel (even in Washington) as the character Philip Warren felt sitting in the ruins of Rome in Vidal’s Judgment of Paris: “He would sit among the broken marble and recall Horace and Keats and think how good it was to live, or to die, for both seemed equally desirable, the dark and the light, one meaningless without the other, twins and opposites.”37 Perhaps we can feel this acceptance of life and death even before Washington is in ruins.



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Conclusion Cities of Refuge

And the towns that you give, six towns of asylum you shall have. —Numbers 35:13 We must today pose new questions concerning the destiny of cities and the role which they might play in these unprecedented circumstances. —Jacques Derrida, On Cosmopolitanism We throw open our city to the world, and never by alien acts exclude foreigners from any opportunity of learning or observing, although the eyes of an enemy may occasionally profit by our liberality; trusting less in system and policy than to the native spirit of our citizens; while in education, where our rivals from their very cradles by a painful discipline seek after manliness, at Athens we live exactly as we please, and yet are just as ready to encounter every legitimate danger. —Pericles, Funeral Oration in Thucydides, The History of the Peloponnesian War

Y

ahweh, a fiery desert god (“sky-god,” for Vidal), rained sulfur and brimstone on the five cities on the plains of Mamre; his double, Elohim, however, set aside, in the biblical book of Numbers, six cities from punishment and vengeance for those accused of crimes such as murder. In one of the most evocative passages 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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of the Old Testament concerning how to live with humanity, Elohim ordered the followers of Yahweh to designate six cities as cities of refuge for people accused of violence and in danger of vengeance, as well as those different from or outside the political order. The cities’ existence symbolized divine commitment to hospitality—inspired, I like to imagine, by the actions of Abraham. They existed for those exposed to the “bare life” of living outside the structure of the ethnic or national state. People, regardless of where they previously resided or to whom they previously belonged, possessed a right, as it were, to hospitable refuge, and in this theologically important example the right was formulated in relation to the city. Three themes have dominated this exploration of the theological structure of political concepts: the plurality and contestability of those theological conceptions, the pre- and non-Christian elements of much of that material, and the possibility that some elements of this tradition and some critiques of this tradition could transform drives toward similarity into desires for difference. All these themes examine the return of seemingly defeated narratives. Gods, like the Freudian Father, do not simply die. They return in later forms—in manners, tastes, behaviors, and commands. Defeated arguments return in even more powerful forms. In particular, political strategies that seem to perish may return; the original Moses’s attempt to transform the theological life of the refugees from Egypt failed, but it eventually returned spectacularly. Imagining the city as a more significant source of human power might, however, require faith in an intellectual life after death. This book has attempted to disrupt notions of sovereignty that form models of power as arising from a single source. Interrogations of sovereignty, strength, and difference discourage singular ethical and political pronouncements in the city or the world. Rather, by engaging with the theological grounds of political concepts, they create the possibility of imagining progressive transformations in these spheres. In light of these



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claims, I suggest that reimagining sovreignty, strength, and difference might invigorate our ability to build cities of refuge for those turned away from national means of political life— whether immigrant, refugee, or outcast. The city, as a conception of sovereignty, is not simply a building block for state power; cities can compete with the state and can present the possibility of a transformative politics, especially by providing a means of protecting the most vulnerable.

City on the Hill The cities on the plains, symbolic of divine civic punishment, are counternarratives to the popular American national story of a city on a hill. John Winthrop’s 1630 sermon, A Model of Christian Charity (popularly known as “City Upon a Hill”), with its implicit dread of becoming a city on the plains, as Genesis described Sodom, explored the founding of a city and how cities were held together. The fabric of the city was fraught with tension between the love for difference and the love for the same. Love of the same was the strongest bind in Winthrop’s account. Erotically charged examples supplied the content of that similarity (which, in their historical context, exemplified a separation from the heterosexual order).1 “That every man might have need of other,” Winthrop asserts, “and from hence they might be all knitt more ready together in the Bond of brotherly affeccion” (Warner 1992, 283). Winthrop developed this account of these bonds of brotherly affection with a more elaborate explanation of love: “Simile simili gaudet or like will to like; for as it is things which are carved with disafeccion to eache other, the ground of it is from a dissimilitude or [blank] ariseing from the contrary or different nature of the things themselves, soe the ground of love is an apprehension of some resemblance in the things loved to that which affectes it, this is the cause why the Lord loves the Creature, soe farre as it hath any of his Image in it, he loves his electe because they are like himselfe, he beholds them in his beloved sonne” (ibid., 290).



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Love arises, Winthrop explains, because of the similarity of the lovers. The bonds that hold society together are the bonds that hold lovers together—the recognition of self in the other. That similarity, for us, however, becomes a recognition of our own lack of self-unity. Winthrop used as his example exactly the kind of love that would represent disunity for his audience. “Jonathan a valiant man endured with the spirit of Christ, sue soone as hee Discovers the same spirit in David had presently his hearte knitt to him by this linement of love, sue that it is said he loved him as his owne soule, he takes sue great pleasure in him that hee stripps himselfe to adorene his beloved, his fathers kingdome was not sue precious to him as his beloved David” (ibid., 31). Winthrop fleshed out his understanding of what it is to be “knitt”— through the examples of several same-sex couples. Winthrop, through his assertion that Jonathan’s love for David was even greater than Jonathan’s love for the kingdom of Saul (his father), suggests a preference for the bonds between two people over the bonds of the political community. In this famous sermon, Winthrop conceived of the social bond of the polis as a bond of love modeled on the bonds of individual affection excluded from the social fabric. Winthrop cleverly introduced a story of Sodom that replaced the emphasis on hospitality to strangers with one on caring for people who are similar—though the similarities he described were quite foreign to Puritan notions of brotherly affection. In doing so, he made same-sex relationships that were clearly excluded from the community the model for his conception of the similarity that binds that community together. God made man in his image, but, as Lacan states, the meaning of this fact is not as obvious as it first appears. The claim that both gods and humanity desire others for their similarity does not fully capture how they are similar. The similarity between gods and humanity appears more obvious than what it turns out to mean. This similarity reveals the divine value of the disjointedness of humanity; gods desire disjointedness because humanity resembles the gods most when they are incomplete and disjointed. The familiar assertion that the gods have made humans 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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in their image should be read in its full strength. The human, as haunted by irrationality, pointlessness, and disjointedness, bears the image of the gods as equally disjointed, irrational, and empty. The gods are as impotent as are we humans. As Žižek explains concerning his account of Christianity, “The gap that separates God from man is not directly ‘sublated’ in the figure of Christ as God-man; it is rather that, in the most tense moment of crucifixion, when Christ himself despairs (‘Father, why have you forsaken me?’), the gap that separates God from man is transposed into God himself, as the gap that separates Christ from GodFather; the properly dialectical trick here is that the very feature which appeared to separate me from God turns out to unite me with God” (Žižek 2006, 106).

Scum of the Earth Winthrop’s sermon spoke to a stateless people headed into a frontier; perhaps this approach can speak to questions of statelessness and human movement. Hannah Arendt, in a chapter titled “Decline of the Nation State,” in The Origins of Totalitarianism, describes how the right to refuge has been eroded from its status as one of the Rights of Man. Between the transformation and destruction of World War I and that of World War II, Arendt argues, the idea of a right of asylum was replaced by the conception of the state as the unquestionable authority of every territory on earth. As the nation-state became the sole source of rights and political status, rights that addressed the human position of statelessness were conceived as anomalies and eventually decayed into historical relics. “The first great damage,” according to Arendt, “done to the nation-states as a result of the arrival of hundreds of thousands of stateless people was that the right of asylum, the only right that had ever figured as a symbol of the Rights of Man in the sphere of international relationships, was being abolished. Its long and sacred history dates back to the very beginnings of regulated political life” (Arendt 1985, 280). Its “sacred history” 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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was connected to the production of a divinely inspired history and purpose for humanity. Without the touch of the sacred, the nation-state became the sole source of legitimacy and became less subject to attack by references to the rights of humanity that had been excluded from it. “The world found nothing sacred in the abstract nakedness of being human,” Arendt concluded with grave authority (Arendt 1985, 299). Arendt’s account, in a way, attempts to motivate a return of this right of humanity, suggesting possibilities for protecting the stateless. The language of rights evokes (at least structurally) a divine command, even when the right arises from humanity. Her language references the importance of human divinity in the activation of this right of humanity. “We are confronted with one of the oldest perplexities of political philosophy,” she wrote concerning the role of gods and divinity in organizing value for humans, “which could remain undetected only so long as a stable Christian theology provided the framework for all political and philosophical problems, but which long ago caused Plato to say, ‘Not man, but a god, must be the measure of all things’” (Arendt 1985, 299). Arendt hints in this passage at loss of divine transcendental and the possible necessity of conceptions of eminence to take their place. Giorgio Agamban has compared the stateless to the musselmen of Auschwitz—naked and bare when removed from the field of political recognition. As the nation-state monopolized political space, the theologically grounded conception of the human as possessing rights either from god, nature, or from position within the order of things evaporated. People became politically valueless in relation to the nation if they did not belong to a state. “Once they had left their homeland they remained homeless, once they had left their state they became stateless; once they had been deprived of their human rights they were rightless, the scum of the earth” (Arendt 1985, 267). It is to the scum of the earth that cities could extend hospitality and protection. The importance of rights for the stateless becomes clearer as the nation-state has subsumed the state’s role as a legal structure 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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of right and identity. Governments that did not govern or regulate in the interest of nationality were replaced by those that did. “They thereby admitted—and were quickly given the opportunity to prove it practically with the rise of stateless people—that the transformation of the state from an instrument of the law into an instrument of the nation had been completed; the nation had conquered the state, national interest had priority over law” (ibid., 275). Stateless people lost political status, during the early twentieth century, to the rights and values of national groups. There is perhaps no more powerful demonstration of the terror of life removed from the realm of the nation than the persecutions of Jews and Armenians in the twentieth century, for whom rights and powers for the stateless seem absolutely necessary. The conception of the political person could be activated at the level of the city—without eliminating similar possibilities in state and trans-state institutions. Derrida admits that Arendt “does not speak of the city,” but her concerns, Derrida claims in On Cosmopolitanism, make it imperative that we “pose new questions concerning the destiny of cities” (Derrida 2002, 7).

Free Cities Cities could supply a source of political power and protection that have eroded in the nation’s consolidation unto itself of alternatives. Cities may be a source of combined political power that does not exert the same intensity of nationalizing effect, facilitating conceptions of political solidarity that are local but also possess cosmopolitan circuits from city to city. Even if one is not quite able to imagine a city, such as Washington DC, rising above the state (in this regard), one can quite easily imagine cities as appropriable arenas for politics. To separate cities from what Derrida calls the other form of the metropolis, the state. “If the name and the identity of something like the city still has a meaning, could it,” asks Derrida, “when dealing with the related questions of hospitality and refuge, elevate itself above nation-states 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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or at least free itself from them (s’affranchir), in order to become, to coin a phrase in a new and novel way, a free city (une ville franche)?” (Derrida 2002, 9). Derrida claims for the city important possibilities in relation to his attempts at rendering more powerful ethics of hospitality and refuge. Derrida proposes here to transform this relationship by putting the ethical weight on the moment of taking in what is not you and what may, in fact, appear dangerous. The city as something other than a building block for the state might transform the terms whereby we make sense of the sometimes possessive relations between people and their political communities. “We would ask these new cities of refuge to reorient the politics of the state. We would ask them to transform and reform the modalities of membership by which the city (cite) belongs to the state, as in a developing Europe or in international juridical structures still dominated by the inviolable rule of state sovereignty—an intangible rule, or one at least supposed such, which is becoming increasingly precarious and problematic nonetheless” (Derrida 2002, 4). Derrida’s attempt to change the conceptions of political belonging pivots around the concept of sovereignty. He attempts, it appears to me, to transform the theological concept of sovereignty in order to diversify politics and life. Among the theologies that haunt Derrida’s account of politics, particularly in relation to questions of sovereignty, Schmitt’s is a noisy spirit. “So long as even the ghost of an idea exists,” wrote Schmitt concerning the politics of Catholic theology, “so also does the notion that something preceded the given reality of material things—that there is something transcendent—and this always means an authority from above” (Schmitt 1996, 27). Schmitt makes the singular central sovereignty, modeled on the Catholic god, the essential model for politics. Derrida occasionally agrees that there is an element of command in any account of the transcendental or eminence, but he works hard to reorganize that account and to open possibilities of other orders of sovereignty. This book has attempted to reimagine the role of gods as elements within political thought as not just the source of 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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command. I have also attempted to suggest that the eminence or groundless ground of political thought is not a singular sovereign command. There are important reasons not to conceive of this outside only as a command. But Derrida’s account of the command as a double command nicely expresses the underside of the tradition that Cities on the Plains has attempted to extricate. “What does it mean to inherit when the heritage includes an injunction at once double and contradictory?” asked Derrida. To which he provides some key answers concerning “an injunction which it is necessary to reorient, actively and performatively to interpret, but in obscurity, as if we would have then to reinvent the memory, without pre-established norm or criteria?” (Derrida 2002, 35). Tradition functions as a contradictory command that opens up the rediscovery of the past. He highlights the impossibility of determinacy at the level of the establishment of rules and orders. Derrida implies three important elements or strategies in response to these ambivalent commands. Commands need to be reoriented. Interpretations need to be performed. Orders need to be reordered through the exploration of the order’s internal linguistic contradictions. This strategy exists at the level of the rules whereby the tradition is interpreted. Derrida, among others, makes a play at this indeterminate level of interpretive rules. That the cities of refuge, commanded by Elohim, exemplify a triangulated structure of power whereby the very founding of the city was given by divine command, but a command that orders a particularly hospitable relationship between people. This conclusion focuses on the command aspect of tradition, culture, or god, even though chapters, such as the Athens chapter, have conceived of gods as functioning in ways that are not just the commands of the father. When these chapters have explored the command of “the heritage,” they have always proceeded under the assumption that it was a double heritage. Social, traditional, ethical, and cultural commands speak in a double voice. The command to piety, as we saw with Socrates, was also a command to impiety. The command to hospitality, as Derrida points out, also secures 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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the appropriation of territory to the individual in defiance of the groundlessness of claims to individual property possession. As Žižek points out, even the Decalogue’s prohibition against killing contains the command to kill (Žižek 2003, 25). As every parent knows, the prohibition instills the possibility.

Stateless on the Plains Cities on the Plains concludes in this final chapter with a suggestion concerning stateless peoples, whether residents, transients, immigrants, and so on, the possibilities for imagining their rights, powers, and position as a possessor of political recognition. The theological demands explored in the prior chapters puts issues such as the U.S. government’s arrest of “illegal combatants” into a framework of hospitality and contestible strength, obedient to the command to treat strangers hospitably and with the strength to enjoy their difference. The historical, theological, and political resonances concerning the divine demand of hospitality in the major Abrahamic faiths (which dominate so much of the world), put into place powerful demands for the care for those who are figured as outside of political space. The second chapter’s attempt to locate within the writings of Plato an articulation of human eminence made active through the positioning of a divinity inside the individual human also presents the possibility of a significant component of the intellectual tradition of the world finding sources in that tradition for generosity and respect toward the fantastic (and even dangerous) diversity of humanity. It follows Derrida’s suggestion in “On Cosmopolitanism” that “we must today pose new questions concerning the destiny of cities and the role which they might play in these unprecedented circumstances.” “How can,” he continued, “the right to asylum be redefined and developed without repatriation and without naturalization? Could the City, equipped with new rights and greater sovereignty, open up new horizons of possibility previously 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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undreamt of by international state law?” (Derrida 2002, 7–8).2 Reimagining the gods of the city might help to realize demands and possibilities of politics built around a city in a manner that would provide stateless people with a position in the world of politics, as the book of Numbers suggests. This chapter warns, furthermore, at least in the case of sodomy, the very act of rejection is the act of participating in the term rejected—the rejecters may find themselves exactly what they attempt not to be, even as they reject their own interior social dislocation—a divine dislocation. That is, those who would reject Sodomites behave in accord with the sin for which the residents of Sodom were punished—the inhospitable treatment of strangers. The texts concerning sodomy push on this problem of difference with strong demands. Instead of simply arguing that one should be tolerant of difference, Genesis presents several demands for active protection of others; we find our highest obligation in protecting what is not us—what is not known. Even if sodomy is an “utterly confused category,” as Foucault claimed, then examining the narrative of the city’s destruction may tell us about our use of the concept and about its relationship to a series of social powers that we have missed, forgotten, suppressed, lost, or ignored. There are more things revealed in Sodom than are dreamed of in the minds of presidents, congressmen, and philosophers: “And therefore as a stranger give it welcome.”3 The stranger is, of course, some part of the forces, desires, and drives that move through and against us. Cities on the Plains has attempted to work elements of the “tradition” in such a manner to reveal that we are even more than we dream. Elements of the “self ” that we often take to be universal are, in fact, more than that; they are from a variety of ancient religious traditions. The common assumption that a religious heritage and background is composed of individual belief is called into question through an examination of the religious traditions that circulate in structures of contemporary secular behavior. Contemporary evangelical Christianity, for example, expresses itself 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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in conceptions of belonging that are constructed on accounts of humanity historically motivated by Islam in the fourteenth century.4 And non-theists, like myself, find our own nontheological ethical perspectives receiving support from earlier theological traditions. In Cities on the Plains I refuse to kill off the old gods. Like crosses made from Aspens, cutting them down just causes more to grow. Moreover, the gods, or trees, if you will, bear possibilities and fruits that should be exploited in order to transform the conceptions of power that would crucify so many to a tree. Oedipus, in Oedipus at Colonus, found himself in a sacred grove of trees as he is transformed from the source of the curse on Thebes into the possible salvation of the city of Athens. Cities could offer salvation for those, like Oedipus, without a place of their own. Cities could mobilize political life free of the usurpative sovereignty of the nation. Cities offer ancient and respectable models of social organization that might function as sources of recognition for the stateless against or above the neglect or denial of the nation-state. For example, Ho Fengshan, the Chinese consulate general in Vienna, sent Jews fleeing Nazi Germany to Shanghai, even against the orders of the state’s ambassador. The city of Shanghai, as a free port not requiring papers or passports, became a city of refuge for stateless people fleeing Europe. The city of Shanghai protected 20,000 to 30,000 Jews from 1939 to 1942. It seems possible, in light of this and other examples, that other cities could act to secure political rights for the stateless— both at a micro level of politics and at larger cosmopolitan levels. Cities should act to secure rights for those stateless treated at the extremes of sovereignty, such as the illegal combatants held in Guantanamo, whether they are the Haitian refugees held there in the early 1990s or the “illegal enemy combatants” held there more recently by the Bush administration. “And the towns that you give, six towns of asylum you shall have” (Nu. 35:13). In an effort to loosen the power of the avengers, this book has excavated out of the ruins of our cities’ 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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possibilities by which to reimagine ourselves, our cities, and our gods that might help us subvert the violence of the old gods and old states. By making elements of our subjectivity more contestable and contingent, perhaps we can treat strangers with greater hospitality. Perhaps these cities provide some divine supports for civic and individual subjectivity that could make us less supportive of state violence. Perhaps the five cities examined in Cities on the Plains could stand as cities on the hill for six cities of refuge.



CONCLUSION




Introduction 1. Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra, 373. 2. For recent provocative and thoughtful responses to Schmitt, see Agamben, State of Exception, A Time That Remains; Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism; William Connolly, Pluralism; Mouffe, ed., The Challenge of Carl Schmitt; Shapiro, Carl Schmitt and the Intensification of Politics; Taubes, The Political Theology of Paul; and Žižek, The Puppet and the Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity. 3. Derrida, “Faith and Knowledge,” 45. 4. Connolly, Political Theory and Modernity, vii. 5. A similar admonition in Gilgamesh to examine the ramparts and towers encourages a recognition of Gilgamesh’s strength. 6. Aristotle, Politics, bks. 2 and 4. Also see Vance, The Continuing City, 47. 7. The city is at least possibly figured as a field of nomos and not just polis, in the phrasing of Deleuze and Guatarri. “When the ancient Greeks speak of the open space of the nomos—nondelimited, unpartitioned; the pre-urban countryside; mountainside, plateau, steppe—they oppose it not to cultivation, which may actually be part of it, but to the polis, the city, the town” (Delueze and Guatarri 1987, 481). “The smooth spaces arising from the city are not only those of world-wide organization, but also a counterattack combining the smooth and the holey and turning back against the town: sprawling, temporary, shifting shantytowns of nomads and cave dwellers, scrap metal and fabric, patch-work, to which the striations of money, work, or housing are no longer even relevant” (481).



Notes

NOTES

8. See Benson, “Freud and the Visual,” 101–6. 9. Freud explored the return of religion in the supposedly secular world in a manner that often allowed him to explore the double religious meaning of symbols, images, and icons. For example, Paul, for Freud, as with Taubes, Agamben, and Žižek, appears as a political miracle in that religious pasts erupt in miraculously new forms from out of his actions. “He was a man with a gift for religion,” according to Freud, “in the truest sense of the phrase.” “Dark traces of the past lay in his soul, ready to break through into the regions of consciousness” (Freud 1939, 110). Freud’s language concerning the development of a new revision in the background of the norms sounds much like Schmitt’s. Paul, Freud argued, brought elements of the primordial human past to fruition. 10. Derrida, The Post Card, 519–20. 11. “The principal strata binding human beings are the organism, significance and interpretation, and subjectification and subjection. These strata together are what separates us from the plane of consistency and the abstract machine, where there is no longer any regime of signs, where the line of flight effectuates its own potential passivity and deterritorialization its absolute power. The problem, from this standpoint, is to tip the most favorable assemblage from its side facing the strata to its side facing the plane of consistency or the body without organs” (Deleuze and Guattari 1988, 134). 12. Genesis 2:22. Speiser explains some of the interpretive concerns surrounding the plurality of this passage. Since Elohim “is grammatically a plural, and may be used not only for ‘God,’ but also for ‘gods, divine beings,’ the context is sometimes ambiguous; nor is a modifying plural form, such as the participle ‘who know’ in the present instance, necessarily conclusive. In vs. 27 ‘one of us’ would seem to imply a celestial retinue, but there the speaker is God himself ” (1964, 23). 13. Žižek, “The Rhetoric of Power,” 100. 14. Lacan, “The jouissance of transgression,” 196. 15. Ibid. 16. This transformation alternates with an awareness that the name doesn’t name anything; it marks a certain instability or absence. 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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It holds space and connections in a network of words. Žižek has offered a similar account in a Lacanian reading of Paul: “We have reality before our eyes well before language, and what language does, in its most fundamental gesture, is—as Lacan put it—the very opposite of designating reality: it digs a hole in it, it opens up visible/present reality toward the dimension of the immaterial/unseen. When I simply see you, I simply see you— but it is only by naming you that I can indicate the abyss in you beyond what I see” (Žižek 2003, 70). The name, for Žižek, references not just the positive elements of an identity but also points to the empty self that exists beyond these specific features. Thus, the name always possesses its own negative supplement. Once again, the rule of the name exists in essential relationship with its negative or its exception. To borrow the background of Žižek’s claim, it might be possible to ask what happens when questioning the names of the gods. The abyss named by the name opens for the gods as well. What happens when gods name an abyss? 17. See, for example, Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism; Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist; Taylor, Modern Social Imaginaries; Vattimo, After Christianity; and Žižek, The Fragile Absolute.

Chapter 1 1. Cain’s sin was described in Genesis as haunting his tent flap. Yahweh responded to Cain’s offering of fruit from the earth with the enigmatic yet promising taunt: “Why are you incensed, and why is your face fallen? For whether you offer well, or whether you do not, at the tent flap sin crouches and for you is its longing but you will rule over it” (Gen. 4:6–7; translation by Robert Alter). 2. Genesis 18:1. 3. Hobbes claimed in the Leviathan that Abraham’s covenant with Yahweh was a central model of the sovereign political power. “Abraham promiseth for himselfe and his posterity to obey as God, the Lord that spake to him. . . . And though the name of King be not yet given to God, nor of Kingdome to Abraham and his seed;



NOTES

4.

5. 6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17.

18. 19.

NOTES

yet the thing is the same; namely, an Institution by pact, of Gods peculiar Soveraignty over the seed of Abraham” (Hobbes 1991, 281). Most quotations are from the 1611 King James Version (KJV) of the Bible. Its appropriation of the translation and style of William Tyndale and Miles Coverdale exemplifies a powerful moment for English prose. I find Harold Bloom persuasive when he writes that among prominent English translations the KJV most clearly echoes the early J (Yahwehist) text of the Old Testament: “Much of J’s strength (though little enough of her individuality) can still be felt in the text founded upon the Tyndale-Coverdale base” (Bloom 1990, 50). This chapter also makes significant use of E. A. Speiser’s translation of Genesis (Anchor Bible), Robert Alter’s felicitous translation (Norton 1996), and occasionally, for a novel approach to the J material, David Rosenberg’s translation of the material isolated as J’s text in David Rosenberg and Harold Bloom, The Book of J. Bowers v. Hardwick, 478 U.S. 186, 106 S.Ct. 2841, 92 L.Ed.2d 140 (1986). Associated Press Interview with Sen. Rick Santorum, taped April 7, 2003. Gordon, Homer and Bible, 34. See Pritchard, Ancient Near Eastern Texts, 118–22. Derrida, On Hospitality, 29. Origen, “Homilies on Genesis,” section 4.3. Caesarius of Arles, Sermons, section 83.5. Scholem, On the Kabbalah, 12. Derrida, Writing and Difference, 93. Ibid., 98. Ibid., 100. Origin, Homilies on Genesis, section 4.1 Ephrem, Commentary on Genesis, 15.1, in Fathers of the Church: A New Translation (Washington DC: Catholic University of America Press, 1947), 91:158. Derrida, Writing and Difference, 92. Zohar, [Paulist] 63. Zohar, the Book of Enlightenment, trans. Daniel Chanan Matt (New York: Paulist, 1983). 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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20. See a useful discussion in Speiser, Genesis: the Anchor Bible, 31–32. 21. Žižek, Introduction, in The Neighbor, 9. 22. Derrida, On Hospitality, 53. 23. Quoted in Rocalve, Louis Massignon. 24. See Alain Badiou, Saint Paul. 25. Žižek, The Neighbor, 177–78. 26. Žižek, The Neighbor, 140. 27. Pangle, Political Philosophy and the God of Abraham, 29. 28. Alter, The Five Books of Moses, 88 29. Schmitt, Political Theology, 10. 30. Ambrose, On Abraham, 1.5.38, in Mark Sheridan, ed., Ancient Christian Commentary on Scripture, vol. 2, Genesis 12–50 (InterVarsity, 2002), 65. 31. Origen, Homilies on Genesis, section 4.2. 32. Butler, Gender Trouble, 53. 33. See Kierkegaard, Fear and Trembling. 34. Zohar: Pritzker Edition, trans. Daniel Matt (Sanford, CA: Sanford University Press, 2004), 1:147. 35. Derrida, Acts of Religion, 370. 36. “Are We Still ‘One Nation Under God’?” The American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property (ASDTFP)— America Needs Fatima. http://www.tfp.org. Pamphlet on file with the author. 37. Brown and Martin, “New Orleans Residents.” 38. This, perhaps, foreshadows his grandson Jacob’s overnight wrestling match with Yahweh. 39. Judge in this context has little or no suggestion of judiciary, it refers, according to Speiser, to the one who makes a decision. “The basic sense of the stem spt is ‘to exercise authority’ in various matters, hence ‘govern, decide,’ and the like; and the noun signifies norm, standard, manner. The legal connotations are at best incidental” (Speiser 1964, 134n134). 40. From Buber, “Abrahem the Sear,” quoted in Bloom 1990, 301.



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1. Plato, in The Trial and Death of Socrates, 2. Harold Fowler’s translation calls the accusations absurd, not wonderful. “Absurd things, my friend, at first hearing. For he says I am a maker of gods; and because I make new gods and do not believe in the old ones, he indicted me for the sake of these old ones, as he says.” Plato, The Loeb Classical Library, 9. 2. The role of the divine and supernatural in Socrates’s philosophy has rarely been confronted in modern Platonic scholarship in philosophy. “Let us begin by facing a fact about Socrates,” wrote Gregory Vlastos, “which has been so embarrassing to modern readers that a long line of Platonic scholarship has sought . . . to explain away: Socrates’ acceptance of the supernatural” (Vlastos 1991, 158). For especially good recent examples of political theory’s use of Socrates to explore citizenship, see Euben, Platonic Noise; Ober, Athenian; and Villa, Socratic Citizenship. 3. Gregory Vlastos correctly notes that Socrates’s reliance on the divine often gets swept under the rug in modern accounts of his thought. I disagree with Vlastos, however, concerning separation of gods from politics. “Thus Socrates could only have been formally indicted on charges which either were not political at all—not believing in the gods of the state and introducing new divinities—or only indirectly political: corrupting the youth” (Vlastos 1994, 89). He maintains an ahistorical account of the difference between politics and religion. The gods, I maintain, were an important part of Athenian politics. 4. Shklar, Freedom & Independence, 85. 5. Homer used Phoibos to designate Apollo in a manner that seems to mean purity. This is the Apollo that typically demands the purification of a city or people. See Otto, The Homeric Gods, 62. 6. Dudley Fitts and Robert Fitzgerald, trans. Oedipus Rex in Sophocles: The Oedipus Cycle (New York: Harcourt, 1977), 4. 7. Darice Birge claims in Solomon, Apollo: Origins and Influences, that Apollo had the most sacred groves of any Olympic god (more than twice as many as Artemis or Demeter) because he was the god that tended to the boundary between city and wilderness; 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


Chapter 2

8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27.

28. 29.

30.

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since, she claims, sacred groves usually grew in suburban zones between the city and the wilderness (12). Fitts and Fitzgerald, trans., Oedipus Rex, 21–22. Ibid., 47. Ibid., 38. Plato, Apology, 31–32. Plutarch 6.1. Plato, Euthyphro, 1978, 4. Ibid., 4. Ibid., 5 The gods of Socrates are not conceived as separate enough from people to provide clear exterior encouragement or to model behavior from an “other” position; they became the exception to the rule of Socratic rationality, in such a manner that they are the exceptional truth of that rationality. Plato, Euthyphro, 1928, 35; modified by author. Ibid., 37. Ibid., 47. Ibid., 57. Ibid., 50–51. Ibid., 51. “(The first paradox is that the founder of Western rationality was set upon his course by an oracle’s statement.) Or is this Socratic irony” (Nozick 1995, 145). Hegel. Philosophy of Right, 288. Plato, Euthyphro, 1992, 115. Apollodorus 3.121. It is worthwhile to remember that Euthyphro’s exchange with Socrates concerning piety resulted from Euthyphro’s confidence in prosecuting his father for murder. Greek text from Plato. See Plato in Twelve Volumes. Or more strongly concerning the rare people with useful skills, “And he ought to fear the censure and welcome the praise of that one only, and not of the many?” (Crito, 47). This chapter holds off the question of what exactly Schmitt means by “analogous” or “structural” in describing how theological structures continue to structure “secular” politics. Hans 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


NOTES

NOTES

Blumenberg has written extensively on this problem, pointing out that Schmitt’s insights are mostly metaphorical (1991, 94). 31. Jacques Derrida more fully approaches the problem of the decision as recognized by Socrates: “The moment of decision, as such, always remains the finite moment of urgency and precipitation, since it must not be the consequence or the effect of this theoretical or historical moment, of this reflection or deliberation, since it always marks the interruption of the juridicoor ethico- or politico-cognitive deliberation that precedes it, that must precede it” (1992, 26). Derrida lays out the paradox between the thinking that occurs before the exception and the lack of correlation between that thinking and the event. Unlike Derrida (and Arendt), Schmitt tightens his conception of the miracle down to the point of the sovereign, which distances his broader and less authoritarian claims about the relation of the decision to an inexplicable miracle and to norms.

Chapter 3 1. “Break off all delays, Alaric” the voice in the trees said, according to a poem by Claudius Claudianus. “This very year thou shalt force the Alpine barrier of Italy; thou shalt penetrate to the city.” See Gibbon, bk. 30, vol. 2, p. 129. 2. See Scheuerman, “Carl Schmitt and the Road to Abu Ghraib,” 108–24. 3. Edward Gibbon described Alarac’s path of Olympian destruction: “From Thermopylae to Sparta, the leader of the Goths pursued his victorious march without encountering any mortal antagonists: but one of the advocates of expiring Paganism has confidently asserted, that the walls of Athens were guarded by the goddess Minerva, with her formidable Aegis, and by the angry phantom of Achilles; and that the conqueror was dismayed by the presence of the hostile deities of Greece. In an age of miracles, it would perhaps be unjust to dispute the claim of the historian Zosimus to the common benefit; yet it cannot be dissembled, that the mind of Alaric was ill prepared to receive, either in sleeping or waking visions, the impressions of Greek superstition. The songs of Homer, and the fame 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


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of Achilles, had probably never reached the ear of the illiterate Barbarian; and the Christian faith, which he had devoutly embraced, taught him to despise the imaginary deities of Rome and Athens. The invasion of the Goths, instead of vindicating the honour, contributed, at least accidentally, to extirpate the last remains, of Paganism; and the mysteries of Ceres, which had subsisted eighteen hundred years, did not survive the destruction of Eleusis, and the calamities of Greece.” (Gibbon, bk. 30, p. 125) 4. See Hans Lietxzmann, The Era of the Church Fathers, vol. 4 of A History of the Early Church (repr., Cleveland, 1961), 137. 5. Origen, Commentary on the Song of Songs 3.16, On First Principles 3.3. 6. Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, III, Supplementum, Q. 94, Art. 1. 7. Both the Day of Judgment and the devil often resonate with a sense of the human enjoyment of destruction and desire for death. “For ‘little children do not like it,’” Freud explained, “when there is talk of the inborn human inclination to ‘badness’, to aggressiveness and destructiveness, and so to cruelty as well. God has made them in the image of His own perfection; nobody wants to be reminded how hard it is to reconcile the undeniable existence of evil—despite the protestations of Christian Science—with His all-powerfulness or His all-goodness. The Devil would be the best way out as an excuse for God; in that way he would be playing the same part as an agent of economic discharge as the Jew does in the world of the Aryan ideal” (Freud 1962, 67). “But even so,” Freud reminds us, “one can hold God responsible for the existence of the Devil just as well as for the existence of the wickedness which the Devil embodies” (ibid.). Freud reminds the reader that the father is implicated in the sins of the children, particularly through commandments that punish disobedience with destruction. 8. Hobbes, Leviathan, 712–13.



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NOTES

1. Julia Kristeva, Nations without Nationalism. Trans. Leon S. Roudiez (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993), 38. 2. Kennedy, Muslim Spain and Portugal, 190. 3. Kennedy, Muslim Spain and Portugal, 235. 4. Averroes, Averroes on Plato’s Republic, 44. 5. Leo Strauss, Persecution and the Art of Writing (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1952), 36. 6. Alain Badiou, “Deux voix contre la loi sur le voile,” Le Monde, February 22, 2004. 7. Averroes, Faith and Reason in Islam, 130. Chapter 5 1. “Transcript of Pat Robertson’s Interview with Jerry Falwell,” in Lincoln, Holly Terrors, 111. 2. Vidal, “At Home in Washington, D.C.,” 1059. 3. Among the many examples of 9/11 nostalgia is John McCain’s speech at the Virginia Military Institute in Virginia (April 2007) in which he reminded his listeners that “in the early days after 9/11, our country was united in a single purpose” (Arianna Huffington, “Those Were the Days: Bush and McCain Use 9/11 Nostalgia to Sell the Surge,” Huffington Post, April 12, 2007). In September 2002, Time Magazine fretted of the commemorative events for 9/11: “Is it horrible to suggest that the coverage was a kind of 9/11 nostalgia—not for the murders themselves but for the feeling of unity that came afterwards?” (James Poniewozik, “9/11, 24/7,” Time, September 12, 2002), which begs the question of the necessary connection between the feelings of unity and the feelings of shock at dead bodies. 4. Though the disdain for Washington DC retains an appropriate place in international as well as American national politics, the political right often attempts to paint left critics of the nation as “haters.” Vidal has received his share of these accusations. See, for example, the not-so-subtle Daniel Flynn’s Why the Left Hates America: Exposing the Lies That Have Obscured 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


Chapter 4

5.

6. 7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15. 16. 17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24. 25. 26. 27.

167

Our Nation’s Greatness (Three Rivers Press, 2004). Flynn, in a passage that raises more questions than it answers concerning the connections between love and hate, associates Vidal with “the anticapitalist protestors who recently vandalized Seattle, Washington, and Genoa, Italy. . . . Multiculturalists seeking to promote every culture save our own, zealous atheists who resent the central role religion has played in American life, socialists who despise the free market, and moral-anarchists seeking to overthrow the social conventions of the West all display great contempt for the culture that offers their offbeat views the greatest tolerance” (4). “Thus is born pity,” Rousseau writes, “the first relative sentiment which touches the human heart according to the order of nature.” Rousseau, Emile (New York: Basic Books, 1979), 222. Vidal, Judgment of Paris, 17. Vidal, “Three Stratagems,” 159. Vidal, “Armageddon?” 1000. Ibid., 999. Vidal, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, 13; “In the World of Good and Evil,” 37. Vidal, Live from Golgotha, 216. Vidal, “Monotheism and Its Discontents,” 1049. Ibid., 1053 Ibid., 1049. Vidal, “Armageddon?” 1006. Ibid., 1015. Vidal, Live from Golgotha, 173. Vidal, Messiah, 110. See Žižek, Santner, and Reinhard, The Neighbor: Three Inquiries in Political Theology, 9. Vidal, Live from Golgotha, 73. Vidal, Messiah, 14. Vidal, Washington, D.C., 188. Vidal, Palimpsest, 5. Ibid., 5–6. Vidal, Julian, 344–5. Vidal, The City and the Pillar, 140–41. Vidal, Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace, 55. 10.1057/9780230623781 - Cities on the Plains, Char Roone Miller


NOTES

28. 29. 30. 31. 32.

33. 34. 35. 36. 37.

NOTES

Vidal, Messiah, 29. Ibid., 64. Vidal, “Maugham’s Half & Half,” 230. Vidal, “Armageddon?” 999. Jacques Lacan, The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, in bk. 7, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, 1959–1960 (New York: W. W. Norton, 1992), 97. Lacan, Ethics, 97. Vidal, Live from Golgotha, 180. 1 Corinthians 15:27. The Anchor Bible, trans. William F. Orr and James Arthur Walther (New York: Doubleday, 1976). 1 Corinthians 15:54–55. Paul appropriated and reworked the language of Isaiah 25:8 and Hosea 13:14 in this passage. Vidal, The Judgment of Paris, 8.

Chapter 6 1. The founding of the Puritan colonies in North American were themselves reverse tributes to Sodom. “The Puritans of the Great migration,” wrote Michael Warner, “relied on the myth of Sodom in their self-understanding to a degree that is probably without parallel in history” (Warner 1992, 20). 2. Derrida writes of Kant, demonstrating the usurpation of hospitality, in the assumption that it is my place from which to be hospitable. “In the case of natural law, one can recognize within it features of a secularized theological heritage. All human creatures, all finite beings endowed with reason, have received, in equal proportion, ‘common possession of the surface of the earth.’ No one can in principle, therefore, legitimately appropriate for himself the aforementioned surface (as such, as a surface-area) and withhold access to another man” (Derrida 2001, 20). 3. “And therefore as a stranger give it welcome. There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, Than are dreamt of in your philosophy” (Shakespeare, Hamlet, 1.173–75). 4. It is possible to make a sharp point that the noxious Christian evangelical concerns about the authenticity of Barack Obama (the gossiped suggestion that his religious convictions were



168

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hidden from public view) rests on theological conceptions formed in Islamic Spain. I make the claim here that the political and even religious beliefs that contemporary agents express are built on and even possess commitments and concerns of which they are not aware.





Adams, J. N. The Latin Sexual Vocabulary. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1982. Agamben, Giorgio. State of Exception. Translated by Kevin Attell. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2005. ———. The Time That Remains: A Commentary on the Letter to the Romans (Cultural Memory in the Present). Translated by Patricia Dailey. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2005. Alter, Robert. The Five Books of Moses. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004. ———, trans. Genesis. New York: W. W. Norton, 1996. Ambrose, On Abraham. Etna, CA: Center for Traditionalist Orthodox Studies, 2000. Anidjar, Gil. Acts of Religion. New York: Routledge, 2002. Antony. The Letters of St. Antony: Monasticism and the Making of a Saint (Studies of Antiquity and Christianity). Minneapolis, MN: Augsburg Fortress, 1995. Aquinas, Thomas. The Summa Theologica of St. Thomas Aquinas, 5 vols. Christian Classics, 1981. Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. ———. The Origins of Totalitarianism. New York: Harcourt, 1985. Aristotle. Politics, bks. 1 and 2. Oxford: Clarendon, 1995. Augustine. The City of God Against the Pagans. Translated by R. W. Dyson. Cambridge University Press, 1998. ———. The Confessions of Augustine. Translated by John Ryan. New York: Doubleday, 1960. ———. The Literal Meaning of Genesis, bk. 4, 14, in On Genesis, vol. 13, translated by Edmund Hill and Michael Fiedrowicz. 1958. Hyde Park, NY: New City Press, 2002. ———. City of God. Translated by Gerald Walsh, Demetrius Zema, Grace Monahan, and Daniel Honan. New York: Doubleday, 1958.



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182

Abraham, 16, 26, 30–33, 35–49, 57–58, 80, 90, 144 agonistic relationship to God, 18, 21, 23, 26, 39–49 covenant with Yahweh, 159n3 faces Yahweh, 35 and geography or place, 35–36, 37–39 god of, 87, 121, 137 interpretation, 33 knowing and knowledge, 31, 32, 33, 34–37, 39, 43, 120 prayer of, 45–49 promises, 159n3 Abrahamesque, hospitality, 23. See also Abrahamic, hospitality Abrahamic evangelical, 140 faiths, 4, 21, 122, 152. See also Abrahamic, religions god’s demands, 121 hospitality, 26, 30–33, 38 peoples, 121 religions, 114, 122, 129, 131. See also Abrahamic, faiths Abu ‘Imran Musa ben Maimon ibn ‘Abd Allah. See Maimonides, Moses accusations, 22, 51, 53, 56, 68, 162n1, 166n4 accusers, 63 Achilles, 17, 62, 92–93, 164n3 actors, 104, 106 affection, 145–46 afterlife, 72–73, 80, 85–86, 94, 96, 130 Agamben, Giorgio, 15–16, 76, 88, 158n9

agent, self-willing, 97 agonistic relationship, 21, 39–40, 46–47, 90 respect, 17 struggle, 88 value, 48 al-Andalus, 112, 121 capital of, 111–12 Alaric, 80, 83, 105, 164n3 alienation, 52, 110 Almohads, 111–12, 118 Almoravid governor, 111–12 Alter, Robert, 41, 160n4 Ambrose, 43 America, iv, 46, 110, 124–25 American Christianity, 22, 127 American life, 167n4 American national politics, 166n4 American Society for the Defense of Tradition, Family and Property (ASDTFP), 46 angels, 25–26, 37, 84, 86, 97 antagonism, 19–20, 99 Arendt, Hannah, 147–49, 164n31 Aristotle, 5, 95, 117 art, 51, 60–61, 113–14, 116 artisans, 116 Asclepius, 67–68 asylum, 147, 152 Athena, 19, 93 miraculous diversion, 62 Athenians, 52–53, 55–56, 64–65 Athens, 3–4, 6, 51–53, 55–57, 59, 61, 63–65, 67, 69, 71, 73, 75, 77, 123–24, 164n3 Athenian belief, 52 Athenian forces, 64



Index

INDEX

Athens (continued) Athenian politics and gods, 162n3 Athenian texts, 52 city of, 21, 52, 55, 57, 61, 69, 95, 154 punished, 56 Augustine, 4–5, 17, 22, 79–81, 83–100, 102–7, 120 Augustine’s defense, 80 City of God, 5, 79–80, 83–84, 89, 105 Confessions, 84, 91, 103, 106 evil demons, 103 gods, 108 monotheism, 102 supplements, 81 authority, 21, 30, 33, 41, 66, 74, 87, 89, 129, 150 Averroes, 1, 4, 22, 110–21 being, 93, 97, 119 belief, Egypitian, 100 beliefs, vii, 2, 4, 14, 16, 22, 52–53, 63–64, 68–69, 72–73, 77, 100–101, 109–11, 113–15, 117–18, 120–22 correct, 117, 120, 122 foolish, 72 groundless background of, 14, 100 leftover folk, 99 profess, 124 religious, 2, 169n4 believers, 83 believing, 55, 63, 65, 99, 162nn1, 3 Benjamin, Walter, 76 Bible, 28, 34, 36, 47, 127, 160n4 on American Dispensationalist conceptions of Christianity, 127 Anchor, 161, 168 birds, 54, 64–65 birth, 37, 75 bloody sacrifice, 19 Bloom, Harold, 47, 160–61 body, 8–10, 12–13, 26, 34, 70–71, 73–74, 102, 110, 112, 115, 118, 158n11 metaphor, 8 wastes, 51

boundaries, 10, 29, 41–42, 162n7 Bowers v. Hardwick, 28–30 bread, 31, 43 Buber, M., 47 buildings, 8, 10 Bush, George, 18, 82 business, 56–57, 60–61, 116 Caesarius of Arles, 33 Calissa, v, ix Cebes, 70–71, 73–74 Celsus, 102–3 chaotic world, 20 children, 13–14, 19, 28, 53, 100, 165n7 children of gods, 100 choice, 28, 41–42, 92–93, 95, 97–98, 103, 126 human, 93 Christ, 25, 135, 137, 146–7 Christ, Jesus, 127, 136 Christian, 79–80, 83, 96, 103, 106, 132, 136 belief, 103 demonology, 103 god’s relationship, 124 love, 134 sacrifice, 139 Christianity, 14, 16, 22, 80, 82–84, 94, 99, 103, 105, 122, 124, 127, 131–32, 134–36, 139–40 contemporary evangelical, 153 Fundamentalist, 127 medieval, 76 church, 13, 27, 109 cities, 1–23, 44–48, 51–56, 62–64, 68–70, 86–88, 94–98, 104–6, 110–16, 118, 124–26, 132–34, 143–46, 148–55, 157n7, 162nn5, 7, 164n1 ancient, 5 destiny of, 143, 149, 152 destroyed, 125 earthly, 5, 86 eternal, 80, 86–87 experience, 8



184

founded, 5 free, 150 Greek, 5 modern Turkish, 36 refuge, 144–45, 151, 155 citizens, 52, 86–87, 113, 116, 143 fellow, 46, 118 City of Rome, 104 civilization, 1, 7, 13 commands, 12, 27–28, 32, 39–40, 66, 80, 90, 100, 138–40, 144, 150–52 ambivalent, 151 authoritarian, 129 contradictory, 151 cultural, 151 double, 151 perceived, 30 communion, 74 community, 45, 100–101, 119–20, 125, 146 political, 20, 146, 150 concept, 3, 11, 25, 41, 58, 75, 81, 92, 96–97, 135, 150, 153 political, 1, 3, 18, 144 subjective, 95 unpacking Socrates’s, 97 conceptions, 3, 6, 12, 16–18, 20–23, 26–27, 30, 32, 87–90, 92–93, 106–7, 110–11, 113–14, 120–22, 145–50, 153–54 competitive, 58 consolidated, 87 contemporary, 18 grounded, 148 hegemonic, 27 historical, 18 human, 22 linguistic, 11 modeled, 76 radical, 81 religious, 27 restrictive, 111 confession, 22, 111, 114, 121 conflict, vii, 17, 25, 31, 44, 82, 87–89, 107 confrontation, 128–29

185

Connolly, William, ix, 2, 4, 80, 103 consciousness, 52, 158n9 human inventive, 58 Córdoba, vii, 3–4, 6, 22, 109–13, 115, 117–19, 121, 123 Corinthians, First, 140 corrupt world, 124 creation, 11, 68, 76, 81, 96, 129, 135, 138 creatures, 76, 145 Creon, 53 cries, 41 crimes, 52–53, 69, 95, 105, 138, 143 Crito, 67–68, 72, 163n29 cruel, 79 cruelty, final, 123, 138 culture, 110, 118, 121, 124, 128, 151, 167n4 Daedalus, 60 daimon, 52, 65–66, 70, 101 daimonion, 65–66 dangers, 45, 53, 55, 69, 81–82, 84, 124, 134, 138, 144 David, 146 Day of Judgment, 93, 105–6, 165n7 death, 4, 19, 22, 51, 53, 63, 65, 67–75, 96, 124, 126–27, 131–32, 134–37, 139–41, 144, 165n7 fear of, 72, 124 overpowers, 134 perceived, 69 sacrificial, 136 surge, 53 transcend, 131–2 debt, 68, 85, 94 decision, 26, 41–44, 49, 51–52, 56, 62, 64–65, 75–76, 93, 103, 161n39, 164n31 enemy, 41 final, 65 human, 41, 44, 64, 66, 75 miraculous, 76 perverse, 96 sovereign’s, 26 unpredictable, 62



INDEX

INDEX

defeated arguments return, 144 defense, 21, 27, 29, 44, 48, 56, 63, 95 degradation, 126 Deleuze, Giles, 157n7 deliberation, politico-cognitive, 164n31 delight, 104–5 Delphi, 4–5, 53, 62, 105 demands, 6, 20–21, 26, 30, 43, 48, 59, 110, 129, 137–38, 152–53, 162n5 political, 6 possession instigates, 132 religious, 111 demigods, 64, 79 demons, 52, 63, 66, 79, 81–82, 90–91, 96–99, 101–7 demon agent, 96 Demonic spirits, 98 Demonization, 106 demonize, 107 demonological, 101 demonologies, 99 evoked, 99 problematize, 103 denaturalize routine conceptions, 18 denial, 31, 72, 140, 154 human, 91 Derrida, Jacques, 3, 9, 23, 25, 31–32, 35–36, 38, 43, 51, 59, 143, 149–53, 164n31, 168n2 Acts of Religion, 25 examination, 34 On Cosmopolitanism, 149 query, 31 suggestion, 152 destroy, 19, 42, 47, 81–83, 116, 127, 135, 137 strangers, 36 destruction, vii, 2, 8, 19, 22, 39, 41, 46, 48, 56, 68, 79, 88, 123–27, 134–37, 165n7 city’s, 153 final, 83 grand, 126 human, 137

violent, 1, 28 visited, 53 deviant, 29 devices, political, 95 devil, 81, 97, 102–3, 165n7 devotion, 86–87 dialogue, 56–57, 67, 97 difference, 2, 4, 6, 18, 20, 22–23, 27–28, 48, 81–82, 87, 117–18, 127–32, 139, 144–45, 152–53 destructive, 81 human, 99 social, 124 stable, 74 direction, 5, 10, 17–18, 73, 101 disappearance, 17, 68, 99, 107 discernment, 33 discourse, 3, 11, 16, 44, 60 political, 3, 21, 26, 29 disease, 67 disharmony, 88 disjointedness, 146–47 disobedience, 30 display, 17, 30, 38, 80, 105, 107, 138 distance, 4, 35, 164 diversity, iii, 112–13, 115, 118, 121, 131, 140, 152 divine, 4, 15, 19, 33–34, 36, 47, 58, 66, 70–71, 103, 114, 134, 139, 145, 155, 162nn2, 3 commands, 39, 80, 148, 151 conceptions, 84 demands, 21 destruction, 22 justice, 45 models, 57 power, 64, 80 punishment, 22, 45, 52, 80, 124–25 self-understanding, 44 subjectivity, 136 value, 75, 146 divinity, 42, 56, 66, 71, 74, 148, 152, 162n3 human, 148 dogmas, external, 119–20 dwellings, 14, 109–10



186

earth, 5, 41, 43, 47, 53, 81, 84–87, 95, 123, 125, 129, 147–48, 159, 168n3 effort, 18, 86, 88, 154 Elohim, 143–44, 151, 158n12 eminence, 148, 150–51 empire, 6–7, 84, 86, 102, 125 emptiness, 12 enemy, 17, 19, 82, 101, 103, 107, 131, 140, 143 energy, 119–20, 124 England, iv, 106 English language, 134 enjoyment, 37, 124, 126 human, 165n7 erupts, 19, 158n9 escape, 138 eternity, 96 ethics, 36, 44, 57, 150 Euben, Peter, 67 Europe, iv, 110, 112 Euthyphro, 51, 56–61, 63, 65, 67–68, 72 accosted, 56 cornered, 59 implored, 57 Euthyphro’s confidence, 163n27 Euthyphro’s father, 75 Euthyphro’s prosecution, 56 evil, 16–17, 79–83, 87, 94–99, 101–3, 105–8, 123, 134, 139, 165n7 axis of, 82 demons, 107 drinking, 83 evoked, 81–82 forces, 106 gods redress, 80 greatest, 72 infinite, 98 inhuman ideas, 82 metaphysical, 98 spirits, 98 unmentionable, 128 evocations, 45, 82, 92, 120

187

examination, 4, 7, 20–21, 57, 60, 80, 110, 112, 153 exception, 14, 70, 76, 157, 159, 163n16, 164n31 exchange, 17, 44, 47–48, 58–61, 94 existence, 7, 19, 51, 81, 86, 96, 98–99, 115, 119, 131, 144, 165n7 Exorcist, 81–82 fabric, 29–30, 67–68, 145, 157n7 failures, 18, 53, 57, 122, 131, 134, 138–39 fairies, 106 faith, 51, 94, 97, 123, 144, 166n3 Falwell, Jerry, 123, 125, 127, 137 father, 13–14, 21, 28, 30, 38, 53–54, 56–58, 66, 68–69, 101, 131, 136, 138, 146–47, 151, 163n27 omnipotent, 129 Fatherland, 86 fathers kingdome, 146 fear, 26, 46, 52, 81–82, 87, 124, 130, 163n29 Foucault, Michel, 153 freedom, 3, 18, 81–82, 98, 103, 124 Freud, Sigmund, 7–10, 13–15, 22, 25, 68, 100–101, 138, 165n7 Civilization and Its Discontents, 1, 7, 13 language, 158n9 Moses and Monotheism, 100 Freudian Father, 144 game contextual language, 16 end-of-the-world, 127 gaze, 38–39, 118 Genesis, 10–11, 21–22, 26, 30–32, 34, 36–37, 39–42, 45–46, 73, 145, 153, 158n12, 159n21–2 gods of, 41, 57 stories, 26 story of Sodom, 125 text of, 35, 40 ghosts, 8, 13–16, 150 Gibbon, 164n3



INDEX

INDEX

gifts, 32, 59, 85, 158n9 Gilgamesh’s strength, 157n5 glory, 86–87 gods, 51, 158n12 absolute, 6 ancient, 1, 3, 8, 83, 90 approval, 39 city’s, 52 civic, 68 consolidate, 52 dead, 3, 16–17, 22–23, 69, 74 earlier concepts of, 3, 18 early, 16 false, 98, 105 Father, 147 immortal, 51 maker of, 51, 162 malignant, 98 name, 159n16 new, 51 old, 61, 67–69, 74–75, 81, 83–84, 88–90, 98, 101, 103–4, 154 oracular, 64 polytheistic, 100 return, 22 sacrifice, 134 Socrates, 68 sons of, 64, 79 strong, 18 Yahweh, 10 Golgotha, 128, 131, 134 Goths, 164n3 Greece, 164–65 Greeks, 5, 15, 17, 43, 52, 65, 95, 101, 103, 133, 164n3 ground, 13, 31, 51, 145 groundless, 60, 62 group, 15, 28–29, 121 identification, 29 religious, 119 guardians, 116 Guatarri, Felix, 5, 157n7 guilt, 46, 54, 98, 101, 133, 136, 140 human, 99 relative, 46 guilty, 39, 43, 45, 47, 52, 63

habits, 101, 103 happiness, 79, 87, 135 harmony, 87, 119 haunt, 1, 14, 16, 23, 68, 81, 100, 106 heat, 26, 30–31 Heavenly Fatherland, 86 Hegel, G. W. F., 64–66 hell, 86, 93–98, 104–5 being, 107 eternal, 128 Hellenism, 22 herbaceous sacrifice, 19 heritage, religious, 153 Hermogenes, 56 hijab, 110, 118 hill, 145, 155 history, 3, 7, 45, 66, 110, 112, 118, 121, 143, 168n1 sacred, 147 Hobbes, Thomas, 87–88, 106, 159n3 Leviathan, 159n3 holiness, 51, 59–60 holy, 51, 59–60, 102–3, 123 home, 29, 38, 70, 129 Homer, 57, 73, 162n5, 165n3 Homeric Gods, 87, 92–93 homosexuality, 29, 37 honor, 44, 83, 105 horizons, 44, 152 hospitable relationship, 151 hospitality, 21, 25–26, 30–32, 34, 37–38, 43–44, 48, 57, 144, 146, 148–50, 152, 155, 168n2 context highlights Abram’s, 36 denies, 32 social, 21 human, 79, 91, 158n9 action, 92, 97 body, 34, 46, 68 consciousness, 57 eminence, 152 event, 66 glory, 86, 91 habitation, 7 heart, 167n5 inclination, 165n7



188

inquiry, 62 mind, 8 position, 147 relations, 138 self, 91 soul, 102 human behavior, 20, 57–58, 89–90 ethical, 57 human subjectivity, 12, 22–23 model of, 26, 124 humanity, 10–12, 20, 37, 47, 57, 77, 98, 104, 127, 138, 144, 146, 148, 152–53 common, 128 confused, 98 lusty, 89 humans, 4, 10–11, 18, 20–21, 26, 28, 57, 60–61, 66–67, 76–77, 87–89, 91–92, 95, 113–14, 136–37, 146–48, 158n11, 168n2 enabled, 48 forbidden tree, 10 judge, 97 political, 114 restrain, 90 weak, 90 Ibn Ghaniya, 111–12 Ibn Hamdin, 111 Ibn Rushd, 22, 110, 119 identification, 15, 38, 45, 134, 137 identity, 15, 17, 19–20, 27, 41, 81–82, 107, 110–11, 113–14, 118, 121–22, 131, 149, 159n18 model of, 27, 118 national, 12, 28 securing, 20 social, 19, 121 stable, 30 structures group, 21 ignorance, 35, 69, 72, 111, 114, 118 Iliad, 17, 58, 62, 89–90, 92 illegal combatants, 152, 154 illegitimacies, 40, 42 image, 8, 10–12, 102, 145–47, 158n9, 165n7

189

nonhuman, 11 imaginary, 40, 130–31 religio-political, 131 world, 98 imagining, 144, 152 imitate, 89, 91 immanent value, 66 immortal, 71–73 imperial power, 22 impiety, 53, 55–58, 68, 151 impressions, 85, 101–2, 164n3 individuals, 6, 18–19, 28, 46, 89 inhospitality, 36 inhumanity, 10 innocence, 46, 84 intention, 119–20 interlocutors, 45, 57 interpretation, 32–34, 46, 58, 88, 119–20, 151, 158nn11, 12 interrogating, 31, 124 invisible world, 73 invitation, 4, 32–33 Islam, 81–82, 109, 112, 121–22, 127, 129, 154 Israel, 13–15, 19, 100 Jesus, 22, 68, 99–100, 126–28, 131–32, 136, 139–40 death, 139 Jewish, 2, 13–14 Jews, 5, 14, 121, 137, 149, 154, 165n7 Jonathan’s love, 146 Judaism, 13–15, 22, 100, 127, 129 Judas, 139–40 judge, 47, 69, 97, 161n39 judgment, 21, 26, 37, 68, 93–94, 97, 105–6, 131, 140, 165n7 justice, 2, 18, 21–22, 32, 39–40, 44–45, 47–49, 59, 80, 84–85, 94, 113, 115, 123 human, 43 political, 113 required perfect, 94 katechon, 88 killing, 22, 68–69, 101, 138, 152 King James Version (KJV), 36, 160n4



INDEX

INDEX

kingdoms, 6, 84–85, 89, 102–3, 146 know yourself, 4 knowledge, 9, 27, 31, 33–34, 36–37, 39, 45, 53, 56–58, 62, 67, 72, 74, 92, 95, 117–18 complete, 39 geometric, 5 god’s, 39 human, 120 magical, 54 secret, 35, 37 stable, 58 Lacan, Jacques, 11–12, 25, 39, 56, 138, 159n16 land, 32, 88, 109, 116 language, 3–4, 6, 11, 18, 34–35, 56, 58, 61–65, 67–69, 71–74, 76, 93, 95, 114–15, 119–20, 159n16 law, 7, 27, 34, 38–40, 46, 52, 76, 84, 102, 118, 138, 149 lawgiver, 119–20 league, 88–89 León-Castile, 111 Levinas, Emmanuel, 34–36 life, 2, 6, 15, 42, 49, 67–70, 72–75, 83–85, 90, 93, 95–96, 124, 127, 130–36, 140–41, 149–50 bare, 144 eternal, 86, 96 everlasting, 86, 96 form of, 3, 18 human, 41, 68, 76, 83 mental, 8 public, 105 recollected, 133 light, 6–7, 54–55, 57, 72, 137, 141, 144, 154 location, 5, 7, 31, 34, 95 lord, 5, 26, 31, 33, 38, 43, 45, 47–48, 54, 76, 93, 97, 128, 145, 159n3 love, 35, 40, 59, 86–87, 107, 114–15, 118, 124, 132–37, 139, 145–46, 167n4 early, 135 god’s, 86, 135 object of, 134 love of life, 132, 135

Mailer, Norman, 130, 135 Maimonides, Moses (ben Maimon), 32–34, 110, 112, 116–17, 119 Mamre, 1, 21, 23, 26, 32–33, 80, 143 martyr, 126, 138 masses, 119 Maugham, William, 136 Meletus, 51–52, 55, 57, 63, 77 memoir, 133 memory, 6–7, 13, 96, 100, 151 Messiah, 132, 135 metaphor, 7–9, 34–35, 44 mimetic relationship, 58 mind, 1, 7–10, 14, 32, 34, 48, 54, 64, 66, 84, 90, 100, 106, 153, 164n3 miracle, 13, 75–77, 93, 164n31 human, 76 political, 158n9 models, 8–10, 13, 16, 26, 41–42, 44, 57–58, 76, 82, 87, 89–91, 97, 107, 129, 137, 145–46 centralizing, 129 form, 144 inadequate, 9 juridical, 39 perfect, 90 of strength, 17 of subjectivity, 12 theological, 26 monotheism, 13–15, 100, 102–3, 127–29 moral relativism, 29 mortals, 70–71, 106 Moses, 7, 13–15, 44, 48, 100–101, 144 mosques, 109, 111 mourning, 22, 67 murder, 14, 53, 57, 68–69, 101, 124, 143, 163n27, 166n3 mystery, 25, 43, 136, 140, 165 mystical, 43, 54 name, 15–16, 25, 32, 112–13, 116–18, 135, 149, 158n16 narratives, 13, 34 nation-state, 15, 147–49, 154 nations, 5, 27, 30, 38, 43, 114, 148–49, 154, 166n4



190

nature, 62, 64, 68, 70, 73, 97, 113–15, 145, 148, 167n5 demonic, 106 neighbor, 40, 95, 135, 161 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 67–68, 70, 79, 92–93, 96, 138 nomos, 15, 157n7 nonhuman possessors, 99 norms, 12–14, 158n9, 161n39, 164n31 religious, 13, 100 nostalgia, 126, 166n3 novels, 134–35 obedience, 6, 12, 22, 26, 41, 44, 46, 57 oceanic feeling, 13 Odysseus, 19 Oedipus, 52–55, 69, 73, 154 Old Testament, 40, 52, 90, 99, 127, 129, 144, 160n4 Olympian destruction, 164n3 Olympians, 94 opinion, 27–28, 59, 72 opposites, 61, 141 oracles, 5, 54, 62, 65–66 Origen, 43, 96, 99, 101–2 ownership, 38 pagans, 80, 84, 89, 98, 105 pain, 51, 96 paradox, 163n23, 164n31 Paris, 126, 141 Paul, 15–16, 38, 88, 90, 96, 99, 140, 158n9, 159n16, 168n36 name change, 15 Thessalonians, 88 payment, 11, 85–86, 94, 131, 139 peace, 25, 39, 87–88, 119–20, 123, 137 person, 16, 37, 39, 48, 59, 62, 99, 120–21, 124, 133, 135 political, 149 Peter, 133 Phaedo, 65, 70, 72–75, 123 philosophers, 70, 74, 115, 120, 153 philosophy, 67, 73, 75, 119, 133, 162n2, 168n3 goal of, 73–74 political, 148

191

physical world, 64, 68 piety, 56–61, 67–69, 86, 151, 163n27 modeled, 57 nature of, 57, 68 pity, 126 plagues, 20, 53, 104, 140 plains of Mamre, 1, 21, 23, 26, 143 Plato, 4, 22, 51–52, 58, 60–64, 71, 73, 79–80, 89, 94–97, 100, 110, 113–14, 117, 162n1 Apology, 68 Crito, 72 Euthyphro, 86, 94 guardians, 116 Republic, 112, 117 Platonic, 80, 113, 124 scholarship, 162n2 polis, 6, 46, 53, 67, 146, 157n7 political, 129, 162n3, 169n4 difference, 81–82 events, 85 life, 27, 67, 101, 145, 154 miracle, 158n9 power, 149, 159n3 solidarity, 149 space, 152 strategies, 144 theology, 1–2, 15, 27, 52, 75, 81, 83, 88, 90, 112, 125, 131 theory, 2–4, 6, 11, 52, 75, 162n2 politico-theological accounts, 4 formulation, 80 politics, 6, 18, 23, 26, 66, 76, 82, 85, 108, 149–50, 153–54, 162n2 American national, 166n4 Athenian, 162n3 contemporary, 2 diversify, 150 influence, 99 progressive, 23 and religion, 162n3 secular, 163n30 transformative, 145 polytheism, 4, 99–100, 103



INDEX

INDEX

possession, 22, 37–38, 49, 82, 104, 108, 110–12, 115–18, 121–22, 132–34 possessive powers, 38, 114 power, 14, 16–18, 20, 22, 38, 41–42, 44, 65–67, 74, 83, 87–89, 92–93, 100–103, 129, 151–52, 154 absolute, 158n11 denied, 55 human, 144 metaphorical, 135 nation-building, 126 prophetic, 65 real, 92 revolutionary, 88 social, 153 wonder-working, 52 prayer, 45, 82 god’s, 119–20 president, 130, 153 priests, 64, 79 privacy, 27, 29 process, 28, 33–34, 38, 42, 44 prohibition, 12, 27–28, 36, 66 property, 37, 46, 116, 133 prophecies, 53–54, 65 prophets, 41, 53–55, 94, 107, 120 protection, 54, 87–88, 115, 148–49 punishment, 46, 52–53, 69, 80, 86, 95, 97–98, 105, 124, 126, 131, 136, 143 eternal, 83, 91, 93, 96, 98 qadis, 111 rapture, 124, 127 Ratzinger, Joseph, 82 reason, 12, 14, 57, 59, 65, 74, 88, 92–93, 100, 130, 138, 168n2 recognition, 146, 154, 157n5 political, 148, 152 refugees, 144–45 relationship, 4, 9, 11, 13, 19–20, 39, 46, 52, 55–57, 59, 61, 63, 69, 71, 85, 115–16

religion, 13–15, 25, 82, 84, 90, 100– 101, 105, 110, 112, 119–20, 122, 127, 139, 158n9, 162n3, 167n4 antihuman, 129 external demands of, 120 false, 46 monotheistic, 100 return of, 3 religious convictions, 168n4 edifices, 13 meaning, 158n9 tolerance, 4 traditions, 14, 153 remainders, 6, 53, 93–94 representation, 95, 119, 121 resentment, 124, 132–33, 140 political, 125 resonances, 10, 104 demonic, 106 political, 152 responsibility, 91–92, 115, 133 human, 93 return, 3, 6, 11, 14, 16, 22–23, 48, 61, 100, 124, 126–27, 131, 133, 136, 144, 148 righteous, 47, 57 rights, 85, 103, 147–49, 152, 154 human, 148 political, 154 Rights of Man, 147 rites, 105 religious, 79, 104–5 Robertson, Pat, 123, 125, 127 role models, terrible, 89 Roman Empire, 15, 84, 86 Romans, 2, 5, 7, 80, 83, 85–86, 103, 139 romanticized love relationships, 134 Rome, vii, 3–4, 6–9, 22, 79–81, 83–85, 87–89, 91, 93–95, 97–99, 101–7, 123, 140, 165n3 Gothic invasion, 22 punishing, 83, 94 rewarded, 84



192

Rousseau, J. J., 167n5 ruins, 125, 140–41, 154 rule of the name, 159n16 of Socratic rationality, 163n16 rules, 14, 27, 32, 41–42, 48, 53, 76–77, 82, 84, 101–2, 122, 130, 137, 151 ruthless self-examination, 66 sacred groves, 162n7 sacrifice, 21, 67, 84, 123, 131–32, 134–36, 138–40 sacrificial animals, 65 saints, 96, 105, 131 salt, 26, 28 salvation, 154 same-sex relationships, 146 Santorum, Rick, 29–30 Satan, 96, 98 Greek conceptions of gods, 99 Schmitt, Carl, 3, 13, 19, 26, 41–42, 75–76, 88, 129, 150, 158n9, 163n30, 164n4 models, 76 scum, 147–48 secret, 17, 31, 35, 101, 106, 125–26, 140 purpose, 43 soul, 20 secular, 1–2, 12, 27, 110 security, 87–88 self, 15, 17, 35–36, 41, 44, 63, 66, 82, 91–92, 97, 107, 110–15, 117, 120–22, 132–33, 137 destruction, 126, 136, 139–40 empty, 159n16 sacrifice, 138, 140 separation, 27, 66, 70, 74, 113, 121, 145, 162n3 sermon, 145–46 Seville, 109, 112 sex, 37 sexual practices, 28–29 Shanghai, 154 Shanks, Bill, 46

193

signs, 38, 64–65, 158n11 Simmias, 65, 70, 73–74 sin, 6, 36, 55, 80, 85–86, 91–93, 97–98, 102–5, 127, 129, 153, 159n1, 165n7 Sodom, 36 singularity, 41, 70, 126, 129 sky-god, 128–29, 143 society, 27, 29–30, 45–46, 67, 84, 86, 110, 128, 146 Socrates, 21, 51–53, 55–77, 93–97, 99, 101, 103, 115, 118, 132, 135, 151, 162nn2, 3, 163nn16, 27, 164n31 accused, 51, 55 credit, 62 daimon, 65–66 decision, 62 demon, 96 gods, 76 ironic, 58 killing, 69 knowledge, 67 murdered, 69 philosophic behavior, 75 philosophy, 162n2 wise, 63 Socratic, 80 irony, 163n23 Sodom, 18, 23, 25–27, 29, 31–33, 35–37, 39, 41–43, 45, 47, 49, 80, 110, 153, 168n1 city of, 1, 6, 19, 21, 26, 42, 46 destruction of, 33, 79 entered, 37 haunts, 27 punished, 123 residents of, 36, 153 story of, 27, 30, 34, 45, 52, 146 sodomy, 29–30, 45, 127, 153 son, 21, 54, 57, 124, 134–37, 139 songs, 165n3 Sophocles, 51–52, 73 soul, 35, 46, 70–71, 73, 87, 91, 96, 102, 104, 112–16, 118, 120, 158n9



INDEX

INDEX

sovereign, 26, 41–42, 46, 76, 93, 95, 107, 138, 159n3, 164n31 command, 26 sovereignty, 18, 27, 40–42, 76, 89, 144–45, 150, 152, 154 political, 76 space, 3, 6–7, 9, 14, 18, 34, 80, 107, 110, 133, 159n16 spatial literality, 34–35 speaker, 62–63, 158n12 spectacle, 105 speech, 55, 73, 113–14 Speiser, E. A., 158n12, 161n39 spirits, 52, 63–66, 74, 90, 99–100, 110, 136, 146 unclean, 90, 98, 103, 105 spiritual possession, 99 stage, human, 105 state lessness, 147 power, 89, 102, 145 violence, 155 stateless, 22, 148–49, 152, 154 sting, 140 story, 14, 32–33, 36, 42, 53, 55, 58, 74, 104, 131 strangers, 15, 21, 30–39, 42–43, 45, 58, 106, 120, 139, 146, 152–53, 155, 168n3 unknown, 48 strength, 2, 5, 12, 16–20, 23, 27–28, 36, 38, 40, 48–49, 64, 89, 107, 124, 144–45, 147 contestible, 152 human, 18 struggle, 42–43, 88–90 subject, 12, 21, 25–27, 32, 34, 36, 38–39, 41, 66, 81, 87, 91, 93, 95, 97, 117–18 decision-making, 41 fellow, 140 human, 6, 41, 92, 96 I am not my own, 133 legal, 32 modern, 93 obedient, 46

self-willing, 40 weak, 89 subjectification, 3, 158n11 subjectivity, 9, 12, 18, 21, 26–27, 33, 35, 65, 76, 124, 154–55 attendant, 12 contemporary, 41 elements of, 17, 58, 107 modern, 18 political, 6 subjugation, 21, 27, 124 submission, valued human, 17, 107 substance, 59, 68, 91 suitors, 19 summer, 132 supernatural, 162n2 supplements, 80, 95 Supreme Court, 27–30 surprise, 2–3, 29, 51 suspicion, 47, 67, 69 swans, 65, 68 symbolic tradition, explicit, 14, 100 Syracuse, 56, 64 Teiresias, 53 temples, 4–5, 64, 79, 88 tent, 30–31 flap, 26, 31, 35, 159n1 territorial power, 6 territory, 111, 147, 152 texts, 4, 10, 28, 31–35, 41, 45, 116, 119, 121, 153, 160n4 theaters, 104 Thebes, 53, 55, 69, 154 theological conceptions, 1, 46, 76, 144, 169n4 heritage, 168n2 structures, 163n30 theology, 23, 52, 76, 81, 125, 150 Thucydides, 64 torture humanity, 137 towns, 28, 143, 154. See also city traces, 13, 16–17, 68, 100 tradition, 13–16, 29, 46, 100, 144, 151–53 transcendent command, 21 transcendental, 35, 40, 150



194

trees, 154, 164n1 tribulation, 124, 136–37 tricks, 119–20, 132 trinity, 136–37 trumpet, 140 truth, 8, 11–12, 14, 34–35, 53–54, 73, 77, 102, 105, 112, 118, 120–21, 135 unbelief, 55, 109, 122 unify, 127–28 United States, iv, 28, 82, 106, 129 unity, 27, 112, 125, 128–29, 166n3 utility, 6, 54 value, 8, 11, 14, 17, 58, 62, 67, 69, 75, 88–89, 91, 107, 124, 127–28, 130–32, 148–49 vengeance, 144 demonic, 100 victory, 140 Vidal, Gore, 124, 126–40, 143, 166n4 Emperor Julian, 133 Judgment of Paris, 126 subverts Christianity, 139 Villa, Dana, 66 violence, 19–20, 23, 44, 53, 62, 82, 111, 121–22, 134, 136, 144, 154 direct, 18 human, 20 supplementary, 82 violent, 122, 132, 136 displeasure, 27 imposition, 40 intolerance, 27 reactions, 122 virtuous, 84–85 vision, 7, 32–34, 125, 164n3 visitors, 26, 35, 37 Vitruvius, 10 Vlastos, Gregory, 61–62, 65, 68, 162n2 voice, 39, 45, 65–66, 80, 117, 164n1 inner, 66 war, 17, 20, 39, 41, 79 warnings, 1–2

195

Warren, Justice Earl, 27 Washington, DC, 3, 6, 22, 123, 125, 133, 140–41, 149, 166n4 weakness, 12, 20, 23, 27, 106 White, Justice Byron, 27, 29–30 wickedness, 46, 102, 165n7 wilderness, 6, 162n7 willing, 13, 61, 91–93, 96–97, 102 wine, 109 Winthrop, John, 145–46 wisdom, 36, 61–62, 72–73 words, 32, 34, 36, 44, 47, 54–56, 58–61, 63, 67–73, 75, 96–98, 116–17, 121, 159n16 beautiful, v final, 67–68 groundless, 71 last, 67 world, iv, 17, 39, 42, 61–62, 69, 71–72, 74–76, 80–85, 87–88, 95, 98–99, 105–7, 125–35, 138, 152–53 World Trade Center, 2 World Wars, 147 worm, 94, 107 worship, 17, 88, 104–5, 123 Yahweh, 1, 16, 19, 21, 23, 26, 32–33, 35–36, 39–49, 143–44, 159nn1, 3, 161n38 claim, 47 confronted, 48 decision, 42 experiences, 44 forced, 42 plans, 48 reprised, 32 secret counsel, 43 strength, 48 treatment, 27 weakness, 18 Yahwhist, 160n4 Zeus, 54, 57–58, 63, 68, 89 Žižek, Slavoj, 2, 14, 22–23, 37, 39–40, 100, 147, 152, 159n16 Žižekian, 56



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