Something conclusive

-->Last month, I posted the first draft of the introduction to my thesis on Milton's post-Restoration poetry and the theology of reading. Here, at long last, is the first draft of its conclusion. I cut some of the text from my intro and included it near the end, so some of my closing remarks may seem familiar.

From a contemporary perspective, the glaring irony of Milton’s “tolerationist” pamphlet is impossible to ignore. The 1673 tract’s title page is dominated by one word, which for Milton marks the limit of Protestant reading: “POPERY.” Of True Religion stakes its claims on Protestantism’s absolute opposition to the “Romish Church” and a distillation of the “main Principles of the true Religion: that the Rule of true Religion is the Word of God only: and that their Faith ought not to be an implicit faith, that is, to believe, though as the Church believes, against or without express authority of Scripture.” If Protestants were to adhere to these two principles, Milton continues, not only would they avoid the various “Debates and Contentions, Schisms and Persecutions, which too oft have been among them”; they would also “more firmly unite against the common adversary.” True heresy, we discover, lies not in differences of worship or in errors of doctrine, but is in the “Will and choice profestly against Scripture.” Reading scripture is a way of resisting spiritual idleness—that is, untested or “implicit faith”—which is as much an obstacle to salvation as it is a gateway for “popish” superstition.

But so long as all these profess to set the Word of God only before them as the Rule of faith and obedience; and use all diligence and sincerity of heart, by reading, by learning, by study, by prayer for Illumination of the holy Spirit, to understand the Rule and obey it, they have done what man can do.

Based on these qualifications such men, “the Authors or late Revivers of all these Sects and Opinions,” are not God’s enemies but should instead be considered “painful and zealous laborers in his Church.” Conscience appears throughout Milton’s writing as a space of negotiation and liberty, but in Of True Religion, we confront its limits, for “we have no warrant to regard Conscience which is not grounded on Scripture.” Thus Protestant opposition to Popery can dispense with notions of privacy and the supposed rights of the individual. The fundamental problem with Catholicism, explains Milton, is it always decides in advance of the individual; and thus, by its very nature, the institution cannot begin to understand or appreciate the realm of the conscience as a textual, interpretive space.

While Milton’s politics of reading turned from construction to destruction, following end of the England’s Commonwealth and Charles II’s Restoration, his preoccupation with textual interpretation remained consistent throughout his career. My first chapter explored how Milton’s early writing fashions reading as a form of labor that is necessarily unproductive. Not only does reading replace “work” as a means of attaining the free gift of salvation, it also has the potential to unite England in the collective labor of Reformation, a political project whose value exceeds any kind of mercenary exchange. Along with its vision of a unified nation of readers, Areopagitica clearly spells out why this labor of interpretation is an ethical imperative:

Good and evil we know in the field of this world grow up together almost inseparably; and the knowledge of good is so involved and interwoven with the knowledge of evil, and in so many cunning resemblances hardly to be discerned, that those confused seeds which were imposed on Psyche as an incessant labor to cull out and sort asunder, were not more intermixed.

By disrupting this process, the licensing of books would remove this “working out” of salvation from the purview of believers. It thus constitutes “a particular disesteem to every knowing person alive, and most injurious to the written labors and monuments of the dead . . . [and] seems an undervaluing and vilifying of the whole nation.” Reading is ennobling, in this sense, because it instills a sense of shared value, an anticipation of surplus in the form of Reformation, among its participants.

At this early point in his career, Milton’s anticipation of social capital was equivalent to the advance of England’s Reformation, a conspicuous cause, which he imagined as an international competition. “Let not England forget her precedence of teaching nations how to live,” he wrote in the parliamentary address of The Doctrine and Discipline of Divorce. With his divorce tracts, Milton’s conception of interpretive labor as unlimited and unregulated rests on a contradiction between private leisure and public vocation that only the “law of charity,” embodied in the interpretive posture of Christ, can resolve. Milton’s free market model requires that conscience be active in public life, but as Areopagitica reveals, some degree of leisure is necessary for conscientious activity in the first place. At the authorial level, the licensor represents the threat of an “unleisured” participant. Unlike those whose material labor is subsumed by unquestioning output of the printing house—a cause that unites author, publisher, and the wage-labor of the print shop—the licensor impinges on the process of production from outside of it. In this way, Milton’s logic of Protestant interpretation—his strong opposition to any kind of extra-textual authority—plays itself out in the material conditions of early modern book production, thus revealing the secret alliance between reading and commerce in the bourgeois individual.

Since Stanley Fish, Milton has often been associated with a horizon of reading that is untranscendable. In Chapter 1’s analysis of Areopagitica, I sought to historicize this appeal to interpretation as an immanent requirement of bourgeois ideology, which, at the expense of material labor, draws on the tensions of Protestantism (a contradiction between grace and works) while adopting its aversion to extra-biblical mediation—usually in the form of custom or regulation. If critics like Fish fail to give proper attention to the material conditions of book production, many advocates of print history are equally at fault for adhering to narrative of modernization that treats the printed text as a complete or uniform object. The material irregularity of the 1671 edition of Paradise Regain’d . . . to which is added Samson Agonistes has for this reason been glossed as an error, the correction of which depends on the interpretive agency of astute readers. In my second chapter, I suggested that this depiction of the reader as a material corrector—that is, an extension of the print shop’s imperative to present a text available for purchase—must be considered alongside Satan’s method of reading, which not only confuses the Book of Nature with the Word of God, but seeks to arrive at a position of secure, extra-biblical knowledge. If the “paradise within” that Milton deploys at the end of Paradise Lost is depicted in Paradise Regain’d and hinted at in Samson Agonistes, it is anything but an inactive place. Instead, in Milton’s later works, readers encounter an expansive space of conscientious reading and “revolving,” a space that Samson violently opens and the Son actively redeems. As I have sought to demonstrate in the preceding chapters, the production of such space, in the act of reading, was also a political and theological strategy. The 1671 poems, in particular, work to reveal the contradiction between faithful reading and the mass resignation to history encouraged by the Restoration state.

Milton’s late poems attempt to make textual interpretation constitutive of the radical Protestant subject, a ground of potential for an undisclosed future. Both Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes reveal how the textual condition that Milton is trying to produce in his audience is a historically contingent production, one that is ultimately hegemonic. By drawing recent discussions of book history and print culture together with contemporary Milton criticism’s emphasis on the politics of reading, I have tried to show how the kind of interpretive agency emphasized by Fish and other reception theorists arises from a distinctly Protestant hermeneutic, which Milton assumes and alters to respond to the social, economic, and political conflicts of seventeenth century England. My third and final chapter focused on the disjunction between strategies of the state—premised on the visibility of its subjects—and Milton’s fit reader. In the shift from audience to reader in the poems of 1671, I located Milton’s attempt to retain the social (as it first appears in Areopagitica) as form of potential that depends on the willingness of his readers to inhabit a specifically textual space. The original edition of Paradise Regain’d . . . to which is added Samson Agonistes works to recondition readers for precisely this vocation. Samson Agonistes, in particular, draws the representational space of the public theatre into opposition with the textual space of the English Protestant subject. To explain this contradiction and its relationship to the brutal destruction of Samson’s final act, I relied on Walter Benjamin’s theory of divine violence and briefly touched on the material format of the first edition of Milton’s last poems. The point of this violence, I argued, is not simply to produce a moment of ethical ambivalence for the conscientious reader or to provide an instructive model of patience to Dissenting Protestants; it can also be found in the 1671 volume’s formal features. Samson Agonistes, in particular, delivers an interpretive situation that is radically incompatible with the immediate situation of his audience. It requires, in other words, something other than the visible forms of identity and commemoration that are relied upon by Israel and its Philistine oppressors. Part of what makes the poem so compelling is the way in which it works as a formal analogue to Samson, transforming a popular mode of entertainment from the inside out. In this context, reading becomes synonymous with iconoclasm, opening up new spaces of subjective freedom and deliberation. With this in mind, the Omissa assumes a new kind of significance.             

Not only does this material feature require the reader to become an active agent in the textual correction, echoing the call of Areopagitica to collaborative reconstruction of Truth; it also produces a space of interpretation that cannot be thought apart from the published text—that is, against the formal constraints and distractions of popular spectacle, the Omissa represents a strategy of containment for the reader, thus extending the interpretive situation that Samson violently delivers to Milton’s fit reader. More complicated, however, is the relationship between different texts, the priority of God’s Word over the Book of Nature, which is challenged in Samson Agonistes by Israel’s continual misreading of the occasion. For Milton, Samson’s moment cannot be properly messianic. Due to his historical circumstances, Israel’s liberator cannot possess an understanding of kairos necessary to distinguish between secular occasion (chronos) and divine guidance. In Paradise Regain’d, however, the Son resists Satan’s deployment of the familiar emblem of Occasion. Where the captive Samson understands time as punctured by moments of opportunity for collective action, the Son’s recalls his personal development as a sequence of events, which allows him realize the fullness of time at the moment he overcomes private temptation. The result is the beginning of his public ministry. Following Agamben, my final chapter understood kairos (or messianic time) not as an additional time, but instead as the negative relation between time and its end, a relation that reconditions all time. Agamben’s conception of time provides us with a new way of approaching the counter-intuitive sequencing of Paradise Regain’d and Samson Agonistes in the 1671 edition. Milton’s poem is not simply a classical tragedy, but a messianic revisioning of the Old Testament story, which responds to the limitations of Restoration England and points to the possibility of a future remnant of readers. By articulating this utopian valence within Milton’s 1671 poems, my aim has not been to evade the historical conditions of their material production and reception; it has been, rather, to historicize the sort of reading subject that Milton’s texts work to produce: a fit reader, perhaps best represented in the class potential of the “middling sort,” which rose to new prominence through the social and political crises of the mid seventeenth century.

Milton’s literary achievements rest upon his refashioning of Protestant hermeneutics into a condition of active dissent and revolt against a coercive state, but they also suggest the inextricable link between theology and radical politics in the early modern period. In closing, I want to suggest that this irreducible link is analogous utopian energy that Ernst Bloch famously located in the Radical Reformer, Thomas Muntzer. For Bloch, Muntzer’s theological basis of revolt “legitimize[d] the demand for communal autonomy, exemplified in the call for the right to decide issues of correct religious doctrine, to elect the minister and to allocate tithes; and it [was] ultimately made the yardstick of social and political order.” Bloch looks to Muntzer for utopian forms of immediate, non-alienated experience that could be produced by working through worldly relations. In his recent discussion of Bloch, Alberto Toscano concludes that one cannot simply reject theological positions as anachronistic. Instead, he writes, we need to understand and preserve the affective content that theology conditions, and the transformative collective energies that “drive the situated negation and transcendence of the social status quo.”  Against the background of Restoration, Milton’s multi-faceted consideration of reading in his late poetry similarly cuts in both directions. Milton, as Christopher Hill has repeatedly emphasized, “was not a modern liberal Christian.”

If reading constitutes an ethical activity, whether through the imagination of “alien subjectivities” or through the experience of self-contradiction, it remains an ideological practice, the value and form of which have changed over time.[1] Reading produces subjects because it is fundamentally responsive and conditional: that is, following the insight of Louis Althusser, like religious ideology, reading, in its modern guise, “is indeed addressed to individuals, in order to ‘transform them into subjects,’ by interpellating the individual.” Despite the vast difference of their historical circumstances, Althusser’s description of subjectivity is also the insight upon which Milton’s 1671 poems build: reading is the condition of production for free Protestant subjects.

In Milton’s increasing attention to “fit” readers, I located the potential of a non-identical collective, the subject of recent discussions by contemporary philosophers such as Giorgio Agamben (The Time That Remains) and Alain Badiou (Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism). St Paul represents for both critics a figure that demonstrated the ability to think the social or “universal” without recourse to some prior condition of belonging, whether a people, a city, an empire, a territory, or a class. Rather than objective victory, it is “subjective victory,” writes Badiou, “that produces hope.” A subject is born out of her commitment to what Badiou calls, a “truth event,” while the corresponding domain of ethics, in this program, is determined by a subject’s fidelity or faithfulness to such an event. According to Badiou, this is what the Resurrection of Christ means to St Paul. If, as I have argued, Milton can be said to oppose a certain “identitarian” logic in his conception of reading, it is only because he opposes such activity to government surveillance and state repression. This to say, the definition of reading that these chapters articulate is strategic and historically contingent rather than absolute. For Badiou, contemporary understandings of “identity” refer to a static condition of belonging, while “subjectivity,” by contrast, entails a responsive and excessive kind of agency.

Early modern Protestant poetry highlights the subject’s reception of God’s free gift of grace as a political and theological problem. Against laws that divide, enumerate, and name, and against the sacramental tradition of Roman Catholicism, the fit readers of Milton’s texts work within defined limits to produce a space in which right reception (that is, free reception) can take place. Badiou’s analysis of St Paul’s universal subject locates a similar logic. In his reading of Romans 6:14 (“for you are not under law, but under grace”), Badiou understands a restructuring of the subject according to a logic of becoming: “For the ‘not being under the law’ negatively indicates the path of the flesh as suspension of the subject’s destiny, while ‘being under grace’ indicates the path of the spirit as fidelity to the event.” Here a potential dissolution of various identities is indicated first by a negative declaration; the “but,” on the other hand, “indicates the task, the faithful labor in which the subjects of the process opened up by the event (whose name is ‘grace’) are the coworkers.” As Terry Eagleton has recently suggested, Badiou’s work “grasp[s] the vital point that faith articulates a loving commitment before it counts as a description of the way things are.” Perhaps, then, Milton’s late poems can, in fact, be understood as signaling a turn to faith. We should, however, be careful not to dismiss such faith as a departure from politics. If, following Badiou, England’s Reformation can be considered a truth event for Milton, then the fit reader is one who remains open and loyal to its unseen potential. It is in this sense that the young poet’s stirring advice to his compatriots in Areopagitica, can again be imagined echoing throughout the spiritual darkness that, for Milton and other Dissenting readers, characterized the Restoration:

The light which we have gained, was given us, not to be ever staring on, but by it to discover onward things more remote from our knowledge. It is not the unfrocking of a priest, the unmitering of a bishop, and the removing of him from off the Presbyterian shoulders that will make us a happy nation. No, if other things as great in the church and in the rule of life both economical and political be not looked into and reformed, we have looked so long upon the blaze that Zwinglius and Calvin hath beaconed up to us that we are stark blind.

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[1] The argument for reading as constitutive of ethical activity remains prominent, despite the fact that contemporary readers have, for the most part, continued to treat books as objects for private consumption. The phrase “alien subjectivites” comes from Feisal G. Mohamed’s recent book, Milton and the Post-Secular Moment: Ethics, Politics, Terrorism (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011). In his second chapter, Mohamed treats the ethics of reading in Areopagitica as the product of rhetorical excess, “a cover for its ideology of hegemony of an emerging reforming class.” Against this, he follows Gayatri Spivak, who grounds the possibility of an ethics in unrecognized Other, and suggests that “Reading is not only an ethical activity, it is the ground of ethical activity in its initiation of the call by which positive political change can occur, because it is only through the kind of reading sometimes fostered in the humanities that we are invited to imagine alien subjectivities.” As much as reading might be an ethical activity, it is also an ideological procedure carried out on an ideological object. Although I find Mohamed’s attempt to “desecularize” Milton compelling, this appeal to an ethics of openness that is grounded on the practice of reading, often takes the neutrality of reading for granted. Any discussion of Milton’s ethics of reading must also contend with Of True Religion, where such ethics confront their limits. With Milton, in other words, we have seen that reading is not a posture of postmodern pluralism, but a formal practice that is conditioned by its opposition to other types of cultural consumption.

Introducing my thesis

I've been relatively quiet on the thesis front lately, but I've decided to break my silence and share the first draft of my introduction. Apologies for the inflated rhetoric. It's impossible not to be polemical when you're writing about a polemicist. With any luck, I'll be ready to post my conclusion later next week.

           

This study of Milton's 1671 poems is an attempt to take seriously the activity of Milton’s “fit” reader. Over the course of the following chapters, it will become clear that, within Paradise Regain’d . . . to which is added Samson Agonistes, such activity is as much a strategy within a culture of domination as it is constitutive of Christian virtue. Although Milton’s remarks and appeals to the reader might suggest a “real” audience, the fit reader is a textual production through and through. Between approaches that emphasize the book as a determinate object of material history, on the one hand, and those that reduce reading to the operation of free, interpretive agency, I focus on reading as a materially dependent practice that is ideologically situated. Such an approach, I argue, is necessary to appreciate the production of Milton’s post-Restoration reader. This also means, however, that although interpretation, as a socially symbolic act, is finally answerable to history, the reading of literature must be treated as a specific kind of practice that cannot be simply reduced to the reader’s time, place, or interpretive community. In their reading, writes Fredric Jameson, works of literature produce “that very situation to which [they are] also, at one and the same time, a reaction” (46). Just as the 1671 poems work to produce specific kinds of readers, they also work to construct the enemies of such activity, which always appear for Milton as interpretive foils.

The politics of interpretation in Restoration England were, of course, a result of a larger social transformation that, for Reformers like Milton, remained unfinished. Chapter 1 sketches the dominant trends of early modern Protestant interpretation and thus locates Milton’s hermeneutic method in its historical and ideological moment. In this context, the poet-theologian figures as a harsh critic of extra-biblical authority and a vigorous advocate of further Reformation in England. Under this banner, Milton engages the limits of Protestant hermeneutics in order undercut the prohibition of divorce. In the tracts of his early career, Milton appeals to an audience for whom the bible is a “self-interpreting” text and builds his argument for divorce upon the “key of charity” and the “analogy of faith.”  Over the course of his argument, Milton suggests that an unhappy marriage diverts one’s labor from his vocation and prevents the leisure time necessary for one’s public work to be productive. Productive labor is defined less in terms of material wealth than it is by bringing a “helpful hand to this slow-moving reformation which we labor under” (963). In this way, Milton’s early published writing advocates for the labor of authorship and the labor of reading. While the activity of reading in this period is still associated with leisured classes, Areopagitica demonstrates how books are not only “published labors” but are also “as vigorously productive as those fabulous dragon’s teeth, and, being sown up and down, may chance to spring up armed me” (930). This chapter argues that the privilege of both authorial and interpretive labor must be thought alongside the material labor of textual production: the operations of the print shop and the circulation of the market.

           

The Licensing Order of 1643 signaled the revival of pre-publication censorship in England’s book trade. The ethical vision of this tract locates a free market system of exchange as the expression of the nation’s will towards Reformation, a sign of trust in its collective ability to “search after truth.” Freedom from external constraint here entails an opposition to licensing’s monopoly over the book trade. In treating the published book as the author’s property, Milton’s discussion prefigures the formal of material labor in the production process and follows what some critics have identified as “possessive individualism,” the objectification and instrumentalization of social relations. Where Areopagitica can be compared with Milton’s first post-Restoration tract, Of True Religion (1673), as establishing a more inclusive theory of toleration, I read this discourse on liberty as a depiction of an emerging capitalist appetite for socialized labor.

This optimistic image of a reading republic is effectively smashed in Milton’s 1671 publication, Paradise Regain’d . . . to which is added Samson Agonistes. Chapter 2 and 3 both show how Milton’s understanding of reading works within defined limits. In Paradise Regain’d the act of reading is productive and mobile, while in Samson Agonistes reading operates as a process of negation and iconoclasm. In both poems, the formal characteristics of the printed book are highlighted, first, as the contradictory ground of interpretive labor and, second, as a strategy of opposition to the spectacular representations of the Restoration. In my second chapter I look at the social and political context of the London book-trade following the Restoration. Key to this setting is what I call the “ideology of completion,” a strategy by which England’s restored government convinced its citizens of the necessity of monarchic rule and a centralized state church. Milton’s 1671 publication occurs in this context as a material disruption of fixed (or restored) categories. Arguing that Paradise Regain’d works to construct a mobile reader who appreciates the contingency of the material text, this chapter explores how the Son upsets the conditions of identity by dismantling the hermeneutical binaries—means/ends, internal/external, contemplative/active, private/public—through which Satan interprets God’s kingdom. Although both the Son and his adversary draw on verses from scripture in their debate, Satan is revealed to rely on extra-textual modes of domination, while the Son embodies an immanent relation to God’s Word. This Protestant approach to scripture is also reflected in Mary, whose memory practices are picked up by the Son, and later in the volume by Samson.

Parallel to the Son’s mode of reading, or “revolving,” I position the material format of the 1671 edition against the arguments of those like Walter Ong, who understand the advent of print merely as the further reification of the written word. Print, argues Ong, “is comfortable only with finality” (132). Rather, drawing on the material features of Milton’s text, I argue that the apparently “fixed” limits of print are mobilized and effectively opened through a process of reading and re-reading encouraged by the 1671 Omissa. We thus begin to see how Milton’s strategy of biblical reading, as developed in Chapter 1, informs the political, oppositional stance of the 1671 poems. The Omissa represents a crucial component of this study, not simply because it marks the material format of the text as irregular, but also because, along with Milton’s protagonists, it opposes the ideology of completion that conditions textual interpretation.

While Chapter 2 shows how the labor of reading is assumed and transformed through the Son’s posture of interpretation in Paradise Regain’d, my final chapter considers how Samson Agonistes puts this mode of reading into crisis. By focusing on the collapse of labor into idolatry, I argue that Milton’s tragic poem is positioned against those who would valorize human industry without thinking through its political and theological consequences. Israel’s captivity means that there is no “outside” of idolatry for Samson or his audience, except through what Walter Benjamin calls “divine violence.” Such violence operates outside of the visibility that constrains Samson and corrupts his people. Again, I try to demonstrate how Milton’s publication relies on its formal features to produce a particular kind of reading subject. Alongside Samson’s toppling of the Philistine temple, Milton positions his dramatic poem against popular entertainment: against the spectacle of theatrical production, and against pre-given modes of representation. The Omissa again functions as a built-in mode of resistance to an ideology of completion, but here assists in turning the poet’s audience from spectators to readers. With Samson Agonistes, in other words, Milton preserves the possibility of an audience by forcing his readers to pass through the violence of Samson’s destruction, marking a transition from theatrical spectacle to textual space. This chapter concludes with return to the problem of the vocation for early modern Protestants and its articulation through Max Weber’s theory of the Protestant work ethic. With the help of Giorgio Agamben, I suggest that Milton’s 1671 poems together establish a radical critique of identity politics, instead putting forward a notion of collectivity that is open to the future in the figure of the “remnant.”

Rather than the possessive individualist established in readings by Marshall Grossman, Christopher Kendrick, and John Guillory, we witness a poet whose post-Restoration publications find him still in search of a social potential that is not pre-determined by the formal or real subsumption implicit to capitalist modes of exchange. Neither do we see an affirmation of “free” textual or interpretive space in Milton’s late poems, but are engaged in a mode of reading that undertakes a formal opposition to the state. Recognizing the strategic positioning of Paradise Regain’d . . . to which is added Samson Agonistes is crucial to its politics, which, I argue, have been misinterpreted and underemphasized by critics that avoid the question of ideology and neglect the material contingency of text for early modern readers.

In Milton’s development of the “fit” reader, I locate the potential of a non-identical collective, the subject of recent discussions by Giorgio Agamben (The Time That Remains) and Alain Badiou (Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism). Paul represents for both critics a figure that demonstrated the ability to think the social or “universal” without recourse to some prior condition of belonging, whether a people, a city, an empire, a territory, or a class. Rather than objective victory, it is “subjective victory,” writes Badiou, “that produces hope” (95). A subject is born out of her commitment to what Badiou calls, a “truth event,” while the domain of ethics is determined by a subject’s fidelity or faithfulness to such an event. According to Badiou, this is what the Resurrection of Christ means to St Paul. If Milton can be said to oppose a certain “identitarian” logic, it is only because he opposes its use in government surveillance and repression. This to say, the definition of reading that these chapters articulate is strategic. For the philosopher Alain Badiou, the “identity” refers to a static condition of belonging, while the “subjectivity” entails a responsive and excessive kind of agency. In this study, Milton’s “fit” reader corresponds to the latter category. Against laws that divide, enumerate, and name, fit readers work within defined limits to produce a space of grace, which occurs without a condition of debt or duty. In his reading of Roman 6:14 (“for you are not under law, but under grace”) Badiou understands a restructuring of the subject according to a logic of becoming: “For the ‘not being under the law’ negatively indicates the path of the flesh as suspension of the subject’s destiny, while ‘being under grace’ indicates the path of the spirit as fidelity to the event” (63). Here a potential dissolution of various identities is indicated first by a negative declaration; the “but,” on the other hand, “indicates the task, the faithful labor in which the subjects of the process opened up by the event (whose name is ‘grace’) are the coworkers” (64). As Terry Eagleton has recently suggested, Badiou’s work “grasp[s] the vital point that faith articulates a loving commitment before it counts as a description of the way things are” (119). Perhaps, then, Milton’s late poems can, in fact, be understood as signaling a turn to faith. We should, however, be careful not to dismiss such faith as a departure from politics. As the young Milton once wrote, "if other things as great in the church and in the rule of life both economical and political not be looked into and reformed, we have looked so long upon the blaze that Zwinglius and Calvin hath beaconed up to us that we are stark blind."

Works Cited

Alain Badiou, Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism. trans Ray Brassier (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2003).

Terry Eagleton, Reason, Faith, and Revolution: Reflections on the God Debate (New Hampton: Yale University Press, 2009).

T. S. Eliot, On Poetry and Poets (New York: The Noonday Press, 1961).

Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (London: Routledge, 1983).

John Milton, The Complete Poetry and Essential Prose of John Milton. eds. William Kerrigan, et al. (New York: The Modern Library, 2007).

Walter Ong, Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. (London: Routledge, 2002).

Common time: Benjamin, Agamben and the Messianic

While the historicist finds satisfaction with the establishment of causal connections between various events, suggests Walter Benjamin, the materialist historian “establishes a conception of the present as the ‘time of the now’ which is shot through with chips of Messianic time." Such a view of the past is inevitably bound up with redemption, and the Messianic promise of revolutionary act will, according to Benjamin, retroactively redeem and realize the muffled longings of the past—it will make good on the utopian promise of its failed revolutionary attempts. Therefore, our attempts to understand the past must take this negated longing into account. “Like every generation that preceded us,” writes Benjamin in his second of his Theses on the Philosophy of History, “we have been endowed with a weak Messianic power, a power to which the past has a claim. That claim cannot be settled cheaply. Historical materialists are aware of that."

In The Time That Remains, a commentary on Paul’s letter to the Romans, Agamben attempts “rescue” Messianic time from its common misconception as eschatology; this distinction, he argues, is essential to Paul’s letters. A Messianic conception of history does not wait for the Messiah to come (i.e., for the end of history), but is instead a paradigm of historical time in which we act as though the Messiah is already here. As Agamben has pointed out, this is not an apocalyptic vision of history; “the Messianic is not the end of time, but the time of the end.” Such time does not wait for a decisive moment but instead sees the present as "now-time." Another word for this is kairos (often translated as occasion, but in Paul’s sense, properly Messianic), which is traditionally opposed to chronos (chronological or secular time). Both concepts, Agamben points out, are necessarily interlaced such that “kairos is nothing more than seized chronos, a time remaining.” Messianic time, says Agamben, rather enigmatically, is the relation itself. The difference is minute, but it is also decisive. 

For Paul, this means that we will retain out distinctions (callings, vocations), but they will cease to divide us—such categories (circumcision, for example) become “nothing.” For Paul, the divisions of law are not forgotten or annihilated, but are rendered "inoperative." The community that Paul is attempting to assemble is both inside and outside the law.

Benjamin’s “real state of exception” coincides with the messianic interruption. As Agamben points out in Homo Sacer, “from the juridico-political perspective, messianism is . . . a theory of the state of exception—except for the fact that in messianism there is no authority to proclaim the state of exception; instead, there is the Messiah to subvert its power.” Benjamin emphasizes that a connection to the Messiah is not to be created from this side of history.

Benjamin's conception of messianic time (now-time) shows us that we have something in common with the past, and lives in the faith that we will have something in common with the future.

"Application" (from Kant to Schmitt) in Measure for Measure

In his introduction to Valences of the Dialectic, the Marxist literary critic Fredric Jameson uses the word "application" ironically (if not dialectically). This is because in the context of his system, such a term presumes an agency that is abstracted from the matter at hand, thereby distinguishing a unified inside from from a fragmentary outside (the common sense appearance of the separation of essence and appearance, which the classic dialectical operation upsets). But he goes on to show that this view itself belongs to an untroubled (undialectical) dialectic. For this reason, the properly dialectical (the dialectic as operation) can only name "application" insofar as it prefigures its negation.

The underlying logic of the dialect as a system that is "applicable to everything" (a mode of the dialectic which Jameson aims to dismantle) can perhaps be traced back to the Kant and his attempt to unite universal ideals and rational necessity. In his Metaphysics of Morals, Kant approaches moral law in much the same way that he did knowledge in the first critique: such laws "must be valid not merely for men, but for all rational creatures generally, not merely under certain contingent conditions or with exceptions, but with absolute necessity." Here we see Kant as a precursor to (or, getting a bit ahead of ourselves, an instrument within) Carl Schmitt's conception of the sovereign, whose power rests his ability to decide the state of exception and, consequently, to be "in force without signification." In Homo Sacer, Agamben quotes Kant from the Critique of Practical Reason: "Now if we abstract every content, that is, every object of the will (as determining motive) from the law . . . there is nothing left but the simple form of universal legislation." Because the pure will is unaffected by questions of freedom and self-interest, the law can be totally binding (as with Kant's other faculties). Here, law becomes indistinguishable from life, for individual motivation is shown to be "nothing other than the law itself through the respect that it inspires. . . . For once the content of free will is eliminated, the law is the only thing left in relation to the formal element of the free will."

In Measure for Measure, Angelo is the clear expression of this sort of moral necessity. Indeed, our "common sense" impression is that the Duke's moral laxity is what occasions the law's application in the figure of Angelo: in the interest of government, the Duke has "Lent [Angelo] our terror, dress’d him with our love” (1.1.20). Angelo first appears to embody pure identity (the unity of appearance and essence, application and law) with his role, while the Duke (along with the audience) is aware of the discrepancy that exists appearance and reality. In other words, the true sovereign has laid out a space of exception by giving over the pretense of the law to Angelo: the Duke does not transfer his sovereignty but its appearance. Thus while the Duke is able to negotiate between both spaces, Angelo is consigned to the realm of appearances (which makes his Kantian bent all the more fitting) and deals with subjects through a rigid logic of exchange value. For this reason, Angelo cannot even consider mercy or forgiveness but, instead, easily slips into the law's perverse underside (by trading Claudio's crime against wedlock in for Isabel's chastity). Angelo's rule can thus be characterized by a series of ultimately incomplete (that is, suspended) applications, which lay the groundwork for the sovereignty of the Duke to be reestablished and the bodies of his subjects redistributed.

Like Angelo for the Duke, Kant is merely a stepping stone for the true exercise of Schmittian sovereignty. As Agamben writes in State of Exception,

The concept of application is certainly one of the most problematic categories of legal (and non-legal) theory. The question was put on a false track by being related to Kant's theory of judgment as a faculty of thinking the particular as contained in the general. The application of the norm would thus be a case of determinate judgment, which the general (the rule) is given, and the particular case is to be subsumed in it.

Kant's mistake, suggests Agamben, "is that the relation between the particular case and the norm appears as a merely logical operation." Rather the passage of generic to particular always contains the practical activity of mediation: "Just as between language and world, so between the norm and its application there exists no internal nexus that allows one to be derived immediately from the other." Thus we might think of Angelo (as the Duke's instrument for enacting the state of exception and emergency, of applying the law by suspending his own authority) when Agamben writes, "the state of exception is the opening of a space in which application and norm reveal their separation and a pure force-of-law realizes (that is, applies by ceasing to apply) a norm whose application has been suspended."

The state of exception separates norm and application to the utmost limit in order to make its application possible. This is the only way that the Duke can hold Vienna's reality together with the appearance of governance; he therefore effectively suspends his own application of the norm by installing Angelo, whose "pure violence without logos claims to realize an enuciation without any real reference."