Broken Hegemonies

CHAPTER 2: A Pathetic Differend

CHAPTER 2 A Pathetic Differend If Luther institutes the new fantasmic authority in declaring “only by faith,” he institutes it as immediately broken, declaring its subject “simultaneously justified and sinner.” After having seen the modern hegemony, it is now necessary to see what is the modern tragedy. Candor prior to the word is forever lost with the discovery of good and evil; we will even see, from the transcendental point of view, that it never really existed. Can we free ourselves from terror in the face of the law? Or be released from it? Luther indeed says that, as justified, we die to the law. Will the efficient word then install us in the consummated law as one raises a ward and installs the liberated one in his own right? Doesnʼt Luther speak incessantly about liberation? And what would a semifreedom be, a freedom under semi-tutelary surveillance, if there is no freedom at all? But it suffices to recall the inextricable anguish with regard to election, the polemic against the fiction of a constant presence, and above all the necessarily extrinsic character of the new freedom for understanding that nothing is ever left behind this freedom, neither the law nor its universalizing drive that posits it, nor its effects. It requires a saintly will to fulfill it—which visibly our will is not. In relation to the law, we remain minors. We will never get over the law as we get over a pubescent trauma. It has its own logic, and as is suggested by the bond of logos-lex, it is even the sphere of logic properly speaking. What then are its durable effects? Its “No” gives a content to the transcendental “I obey.” “You will not do it.” A statement that in the first place has a heuristic function. It “forces us to recognize our impotence” in producing our own justice (sch. 8,3, cor.), so much so that it “declares all men are unjust” (sch. 3,19), “accuses them of being sinners and renders them guilty” (sch. 4,14). But, as is wellknown to whoever passes from the self-aggrandizement prior to good and evil to the self-positing in the face of the law, this is exciting. It incites one to carry on regardless. Its “No” is acerbic, it wounds narcissistic innocence. Thereby it does more than reveal our culpability to us. It goads the self-affirmation that it nevertheless condemns and carries it to paroxysm. It exacerbates it. “Rather than strengthening the will against sin, the reign of the law incites it to sin” (sch. 2,12). The No that reverberates with the knowledge of good and evil proscribes what we desire and prescribes what we do Its Institution (Kant with Luther) 409 not desire. The No whips up the “desire for transgression” (sch. 8,15) in two senses of the word: it thrashes it and kindles it. How could it be otherwise as long as the law summons us to affirm ourselves as autonomous? But the summons perverts the “I obey.” It is not difficult to see where the logic of the law leads—straight to death. The law “worsened the sin as well as the deserved remuneration: death” (gl. 5,20). Worsened death? Yes, by annihilating all rational structures for circumventing it. Reassuring constructions did not remain the privilege of the Greeks. They even infiltrated the ancient Fathers who, according to Luther, nevertheless valued speech highly. Any serenity conceivable by reason is simply artificial. The law does not only reveal our impotence in the face of its prescriptions and proscriptions. It produces self-affirmation : the lesson of impotence, exacerbated guilt. In reducing to nothing the chances for immortality, the law thrust us headlong into death, without recourse. It produces death. It “reveals to man his death.”56 Negative experience no longer allows for the framing of other consoling experiences. Luther sees little more than a system of “snares” (where life and death occupy neighboring ranks serenely made up of material goods [sch. 8,7]) in a comforting enterprise like the anagogic schema that has, nevertheless, proved itself. The law as understood by Luther renders us, for the first time in the West, really mortals. The undertow created by naked death is a differend with the life granted from the outside. The modern tragedy that is born here opposes death to life without an arbitrating authority and in the form of...