The Martyr and the Sovereign: Scenes from a Contemporary Tragic Drama, Read through Walter Benjamin and Carl Schmitt

In the site of a theater auditorium chosen by chechen terrorists as the location for their hostage-taking in Moscow, the significance of spectacular dramatization for the current politics of suicide attacks was symbolically condensed: the politics of violence as bloody theater. Unlike partisans and resistance fighters, who operate in secret and without recognition, in order, in targeted action, to strike the militarily superior enemy at a sensitive spot, the underground fighters of today prefer their actions to be played out in the full glare of the spotlights. In their mixture of theatricality and violence, the television images of the suicide attacks in Israel and Chechnya and those of the wars in the former Yugoslavia, in Afghanistan, and in Iraq have long since outstripped the Theater of Cruelty. However, what radically separates terrorist politics from theater is that the actions of the former do not just take place in front of a large audience; rather, the audience itself becomes a target. This is the reason for the controversy which flared up concerning the possible proximity between avant-gardes and terrorism after September 11, sparked by Jean Clair's statement that Surrealism (for example, André Breton's fantasy of shooting into the crowd of passersby) was to be seen as a precursor of terrorism.¹

For me, viewing the images of the attacks, other associations come to mind. The bloody acts of public violence, staged by preference in densely populated areas, the presentation of the victims and their dismembered bodies, the dramatization of the suicide attackers as martyrs, and the ritual display of the wounded and dead of military revenge attacks, borne through the streets by the combatants, all contribute to the impression that on the present political stage, the theater of the baroque has taken over the direction. In a reversal of Walter Benjamin's observation of the "radical adaptation of the theatrical to the historical scene" in the seventeenth century (Benjamin 1977, 64; translation modified), at a time when the name "tragic drama" (Trauerspiel) came to apply equally to both the historical events and the dramatic form (Benjamin 1977, 63), it seems that today politics is adapting to the media-fed craving for theatrical images.

Yet the contemporaneity of Benjamin's 1927 book on tragic drama goes further than this. Benjamin defines baroque theater as the drama of tyrant and martyr. It is not only because of its central figures (the sovereign, the tyrant, and the martyr) and their places (frequently in locations in the Orient, as the dramas of eastern rulers) that this book provides quite interesting frameworks for the present situation. More significant still, though, is Benjamin's discussion of the tragic drama in terms of a dialectic of secularization. In view of the political power of religion which has in recent times so forcefully reasserted itself, it is not very helpful to distinguish, as Jürgen Habermas did in his Paulskirche speech, between a "secularization which is elsewhere running off the rails" and a supposedly "post-secular" Western common-sense culture—to differentiate, in other words, between a bad and a good form of secularization. Far more useful for an understanding of the influential force of religion is to look at the long neglected traces left by the history of religion in our own culture. Many of Benjamin's writings have as yet not been explored for the light they have to shed on such a project. Notable amongst them is his reading of the baroque tragic drama as the search for worldly answers to religious concerns in a period for which, despite the unabated influence of Christianity, religion no longer held out any solutions nor offered the promise of redemption (Benjamin 1977, 79). It is, moreover, this dialectic of history, religion, and theater that distinguishes Benjamin's conceptualization of sovereignty from Carl Schmitt's sovereignty theory. For Carl Schmitt's idea of the political is founded in an analogy, rather than a dialectic, between theological and national-legal concepts. These differences can be...