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197 The miraculous birth of the given Reflections on Hannah Arendt and Franz Rosenzweig daniel brandes in his Political Theology carl schmitt famously claimed that all significant political concepts are reinhabitations of theological concepts and that the power of the sovereign to declare a state of exception (that is, to interrupt and suspend the order of formal legality) was like a “miracle” as “the power of real life breaks through the crust of a mechanism that has become torpid by repetition.”1 schmitt’s recourse to the metaphor of the miracle was intended to capture the interruptive force of the sovereign decision, its introduction of a radical break in existing patterns of life. to this end, he repeatedly emphasized the gap separating the sovereign’s constituent power from the subsequently constituted and institutionalized powers of the juridical state, and he located the dignity of the political sphere precisely in the irreducibility of the former to the latter. in her own explicitly post-theological theorizing of the political, hannah arendt follows schmitt in appealing to the language of miracles. and schmitt’s emphasis on the unexpected and interruptive force of the “miraculous” instituting deed is also characteristic of many of hannah arendt’s best known invocations of the term. Thus, in “What is Freedom?” she claims that “every act, seen from the perspective not of the agent but of the process in whose framework it occurs and whose automatism it interrupts, is a ‘miracle’—that is, something which could not be expected.”2 or again, in The Human Condition, when distinguishing action from the related activities of labor and work, she notes that “just as, from the standpoint of nature, the rectilinear movement of man’s lifespan between birth and death looks like a peculiar deviation from the common natural rule of cyclical movement, thus action, seen from the viewpoint of the automatic processes which seem to determine the course of the world, looks like a miracle.”3 These passages suggest that what is miraculous in action is its interruptive force, its power to introduce a break in the “automatic processes” of everyday life,4 and they appear to support the impression of a strong affinity between the schmittian and arendtian conceptions of miracle. 7 198 | Daniel Brandes but there is good reason to resist this impression. in an important recent essay, bonnie honig has suggested that, notwithstanding initial appearances, arendt’s appeal to the metaphor of the miracle owes less to schmitt than to his near contemporary, the Jewish theologian and philosopher Franz rosenzweig.5 Whereas schmitt understands the miracle as an instantiation of sovereign power, a power to interrupt and suspend the present order, rosenzweig grasps the miracle not as a manifestation of divine power but as an ambiguous sign (“miracle is essentially ‘sign’”6) that confronts its witnesses with the responsibility to receive and interpret it. Thus, whereas schmitt’s appeal to the figure of miracle tends to entrench the division between the political exception and the juridical norm, between the extraordinary (the sovereign decision) and the ordinary (its subsequent normalization and institutionalization), rosenzweig’s semiotic conception emphasizes the reception of the miraculous deed, its impact and uptake, and the orientation that it provides for the community of its witnesses and interpreters. as rosenzweig writes, “The word is mere inception, until it finds reception in an ear and response in a mouth.”7 in the absence of this reception and response, the miracle—a sign or prophecy of revelation that is only knowable as such in the retrospective light cast by its fulfillment—will not have taken place. This means that the miracle takes place nowhere else but in the individual and communal practices by which it is received and enacted (for instance, in the redemptive ethical and liturgical practices of the faith community). turning to arendt, honig suggests that arendt “is as concerned as rosenzweig to theorize what he calls ‘the possibility of experiencing a miracle,’ that is, to think about the conditions under which people are oriented or open to the miraculous, to receive it, perceive it, and perform it.”8 Like rosenzweig, arendt attends to the “afterlife” of the word or deed, to the always unforeseeable and uncontainable chain of effects that it sets in motion once it is inserted into the “web of relations” that characterizes public life. Like rosenzweig, arendt refuses to separate the inaugural or founding deed from its reception, the spontaneous initiative from its worldly impact (“the story that an act...

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