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The Neighbor

The University of Chicago Press

Contents

Introduction.......................................................................................................1Toward a Political Theology of the Neighbor KENNETH REINHARD......................................................11Miracles Happen: Benjamin, Rosenzweig, Freud, and the Matter of the Neighbor ERIC L. SANTNER.....................76Neighbors and Other Monsters: A Plea for Ethical Violence SLAVOJ ZIZEK............................................134

Chapter One

Toward a Political Theology of the Neighbor

In The Concept of the Political (1932), Carl Schmitt writes: "the specific political distinction to which political actions and motives can be reduced is that between friend and enemy." However, in his book Political Theology (1922), Schmitt presented a quite different, even contradictory, logic of the political. There, the structural function of the exception-the sovereign's Godlike ability to declare a state of emergency and act outside the law-implies that the border between the law and lawlessness is permeable and, by extension, that the relationship of interiority (friends) and exteriority (enemies) is unstable. The fact that Schmitt's political theology generates antitheses that it cannot maintain should not invalidate what we can take as its fundamental insight, that the political order is sustained by theological concepts that it cannot completely assimilate. The friend-enemy distinction remains significant when we understand it as a symptom of political theology, an attempt to formalize the political against the threat of the theological-that is, as the political's defense against destabilizing aspects of its own theologism.

Rather than abandoning political theology because of these contradictions, we need to push it further. The structural analogy of sovereignty to deity that grants the sovereign God's authority to decree an exception also suggests that the sovereign's legitimacy derives in part from the divine claim to the fidelity of love: "you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart and with all your soul and with all your might" (Deut. 6:5). For the political theological tradition represented by Machiavelli, the key question may be whether it is better for the sovereign to be loved or feared. The theology of the Hebrew Bible, however, does not oppose those passionate relationships; God is to be loved and feared. In a famous midrash on the giving of the law at Sinai, God holds the mountain over the people and makes them an offer they can't refuse: "If you accept the Torah, it is well; if not, your grave will be right here." The legitimacy of the law established at Sinai is based on a consent in excess of freedom of choice and a love indistinguishable from fear. Hence, we find an affective correlate of the paradoxical topology of sovereignty in the ambivalence that underlies the commandment to love God-a commandment that, like all commandments to love, has at its heart the collision of autonomy and heteronomy. Insofar as this antinomy includes both sides of the double genitive of "love of God," we can propose it as the mysterium sanctum underlying political theology, the implicit credo of sovereignty that informs the hierarchy of relations within family, polis, and ecclesia.

But in both Jewish and Christian doxology, love of God is conventionally paired with love of the neighbor, as two essentially linked imperatives or theological-ethical principles. In this essay, I bring the psychoanalytic commentary on the neighbor in the work of Freud and Lacan into relation with the logic of political theology theorized by Schmitt, in order to begin to specify the conditions of a political theology of the neighbor. Freud's writing is centrally relevant to a political theology of the neighbor, as the other side of the political theology of the friend and enemy, most notably in his late works Civilization and Its Discontents and Moses and Monotheism. However, the neighbor and neighbor-love appear over the entire range of his writings, from his earliest unpublished drafts to Wilhelm Fliess through his last works. Although Lacan's most famous remarks on the neighbor appear in his seminar 7, The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, the neighbor and neighbor-love are frequent topics of his writing and seminars. In Totem and Taboo, Freud presents a mythical genealogy of the paternal law remarkably similar to Schmitt's theory of sovereignty. Like the sovereign, the father of the primal horde has the singular ability to transgress the law in the very process of embodying and enforcing it. Freud appropriates the narrative of the primal father in order to explain the genesis of the law and to stage a mythical "primal scene" of the origins of the superego's conflicting imperatives for and against enjoyment. In seminar 17, The Other Side of Psychoanalysis, Lacan introduces the "discourse of the master" in part as a formalization of the structure of Freud's narrative of the primal horde. And in the years between seminar 17 and seminar 21, Lacan rethought the discourse of the master in the language of symbolic logic and set theory as part of his "formulas of sexuation," where the structural parallels with Schmitt's political theology become most striking.

Indeed, just as Schmitt insists that what is at stake in sovereignty is the ability to decide when to declare a state of emergency, without needing any grounds or basis for the decision, so, according to Lacan, to participate in one of the two logics that define sexuation is, paradoxically, to have chosen to be a man or a woman. If Schmitt's account of the sovereign exception can be mapped onto the man's side of Lacan's formulas of sexuation, what, we might wonder, are the political implications corresponding to the other choice of sexuation, that of the woman? According to Lacan, the position of the woman entails a different logic, and implies an entirely distinct account of individual and group relations, under the aegis of what he calls the "not-all" (pas-tout). Whereas the position of man is held vis--vis a totality of Men, Lacan argues that women do not participate in a general category of Woman, but enter into their sexuality "one by one," as part of an infinite series of exceptions that form a radically open set, a "not-all." Can we locate in the not-all a political theology of the neighbor? That is, a mode of political relation that would not be based on the friend-enemy couple, but on the neighbor as a third term, one that is obscured by Schmitt's binary opposition, but that is no less central to religious discourse, sociality, and political theology? I do not mean to argue that we should replace the model of sovereignty based on love of God implicit in Schmitt's political theology with one based on love of neighbor. Rather, my argument is that a political theology of the neighbor must come as a supplement to the political theology of the friend and enemy. It is only by considering the principles of love of God and love of neighbor together, as two halves of the same thought, as is the case in both Jewish and Christian doctrine, that we can begin to imagine other possibilities for social and subjective organization.

Political Theology

The argument for the theological...