Notes on Derrida's _The Beast and the Sovereign: Vol I_

I have started wading through the recently published assemblage of lectures given by JD over the course of 2001-2002 collected in _The Beast and the Sovereign_ . The series of talks from this seminar mark a continuation of many questions Derrida had been probing in the final chapter of his career: questions of sovereignty, decision, animality, force, law, friendship, and –of course—the enterprise of a “deconstructive” reading and its (always tenuous, yet I think, always interesting) connection to the issue of the political. Even for a reader not convinced of some of Derrida’s more elusive ethical-political (non)concepts—for example the old “democracy to come” idea that makes critics such as Terry Eagleton cringe—I would find it hard for any careful reader not to appreciate the rigorous, intelligent and fascinating performance of close reading here (this, for my money, is what makes Derrida such an important thinker and keeps me coming back to his texts). Luckily, _TBATS _ is full of several of these moments. Derrida performs careful and enlightening readings of a constellation of texts that probe the relationship between “the beast” and “the sovereign”, and the animal and the human: from Arostotle’s _Politics_, to Fontaine’s fable “The Wolf and the Lamb,” to Hobbes’s _Leviathan_, Machiavelli’s Prince with its elaborate comparison of princes and foxes, and Rousseau’s obsession with werewolves in _The Social Contract_.

Admittedly, I have only sampled about half of the lectures (the first, third, fourth, twelfth, and thirteenth sessions), but as is more generally the case, one can start to discern the general tenor of what JD is up to here. Beginning with La Fontaine’s fable “The Wolf and the Lamb” in the first session, Derrida uses the figure of the wolf in this text to open a discussion about how in several early modern texts the wolf is a literary figure man uses to tell himself the “story” of the origin and nature of political life. The figure of this “beast,” or similar manifestations of this theme in Rousseau and Hobbes, leads Derrida to posit that “man” becomes the middle term in a triad with the “sovereign” and “beast.” Picking up on a common strand of questioning of these figures initiated by Carl Schmitt and Agamben, Derrida describes how both figures are positioned outside the law: the sovereign as “above” the juridical order via “decision” (think Schmitt here), and the beast remains excluded from the law since his life (here, we can think of Agamben’s “bare life” of the homo sacer that can be killed but not sacrificed) is not protected by the legal order. Derrida calls for a re-thinking of these terms that eschews the binary opposition between nature and culture, man and beast, and nature and law. Here, I think we can see a place where the deconstructive practice of breaking down binary oppositions has direct political implications, as Derrida uses this framework to make explicit comments in response to Chomsky’s recent (2000) Rouge States. In the same way that calling one a “beast” excludes them from legal right and the protection of human “justice,” to construct a political program that labels the Other in such a way, has devastating effects:

“the Unites States, which is so ready to accuse other states of being rouge states, is in fact allegedly them most rouge of all, and the one that most often violates international right…[it is] the most perverse or cynical armed trick…the most inhuman brutality” (19).

He highlights, only briefly, our country's recent involvements in the Middle East and asks (what he explicitly calls the “subject of our seminar”) what is the relationship between “war” and “terrorism”? With an identification of the other that follows this strict opposition of “just” and rouge states (in which the enemy is figured as “beast”) how can one ever discern the difference? What Derrida wants us to see, is that this supposed non-identification (something like, “this other, this enemy, is not like me, therefore is not protected by the same laws that protect me) is actually a manifestation of identification. That is ,while beast and sovereign appear to be diametrically opposed—the former being excluded from what is proper to man, the later being above this through his decision without ground—each need the other figure in order to constitute their identity, and both share the similar position of being beyond the legal sphere.

The third session contains a very interesting reading of Rousseau’s sort-of-obsession with imagining himself as a “werewolf,” because his intensive reading and intellectual pursuits leave him excluded from civil society. What JD is up to here, I think, is another way in which we see the figure of the beast figured as one excluded from human society, but implicitly and always tied to that society—it is the pursuit of knowledge (culture) that paradoxically leaves Rousseau rejected from human society. Here we see another instance of how Rousseau’s text (think here of Derrida’s laborious reading of Rousseau in _Grammatoloy_) evinces that a hierarchy of nature vs. culture is always fissured.

More interesting, perhaps, than this reading is the section in this session where Derrida complicates the distinction between dictatorship and democracy (via an explication of Schmitt’s “decision”), and makes explicit comments on why a political program based on “universal human rights” won’t work. It is worth quoting at some length:

“it is also in the name of man, the common humanity of man, the dignity of man, therefore a certain proper of man, that a certain modernity has begun to question, to undermine, to put into crises nation-state sovereignty…After having asserted that humanity as such cannot wage war because it has no enemy at least in this planet. The concept of humanity excludes the concept of the enemy, because the enemy does not cease to be a human being…the concept of humanity cannot be a political concept or the concept for the basis of politics” (70-71).

What Derrida points out is the hypocrisy of imperialist missions (think, our own nation’s recent foreign affairs???) that operate under the umbrella philosophy of “spreading universal human rights,” which he sees an insidious act of cunning that allows “sovereign” states to treat the other as outlaw, in the name of a law only the former can enforce. I think the paradox is pretty clear: we treat men like “beasts” in a mission take them out of this “beastly-ness, ” in the name of a universal humanity. By identifying the other as less than human we claim to attempt to bring them up to the level of humanity, based on some universal humanity (which would ,in effect, be “natural”), though an imposition of specific cultural ideologies. Again, we see this dialectic between what is “nature” and “culture”—what is inside and outside—is ever-present. Derrida’s goal:

“a prudent deconstruction of this logic, and the dominant, classical concept of nation-state sovereignty…without ending up with a depoliticalization, a neutralization of the political, but with another politicalization, a repoliticalization that does not fall into the same ‘dishonest fiction’…a repoliticalizaton and therefore another conception of the political” (75).

Since a detailed explication of all of Derrida’s close readings and an elaboration of his major themes in these lectures ( I would suggest checking out JD’s ongoing critical dialogue with Lacan that he picks up in the Fourth Session) is far beyond the scope of this tiny blog, I would just also like to point out the (very fun) responses to Agamben that JD makes here (I think this is “fun” primarily because Agamben gives some--in my opinion of course—sloppy readings of Derrida and takes a few underhanded swipes at his corpus of work in _Homo Sacer_ and _State of Exception_, which I think belies the fact that he has simply not read JD carefully enough). In the third session, Derrida playfully remarks on Agamben’s constant desire to be or find “firsts” ( ie… “Schmitt was the first to do this”… “Arendt was the first who recognized that…”). We see Agamben complicit, then, in the tradition of a “metaphysics of presence” or a quest for an origin that we know Derrida will want to put into question. In the Twelfth Session, Derrida directly engages with the concept of “bare life” and the distinction Agamben famously draws between zoe and bios, and demonstrates how this strict binary that Agamben sets up will not hold. Gesturing back to his earlier comments on Agamben’s desire for “firsts,” Derrida points out how Agamben strangely omits Heidegger from his analysis. (We are not shocked, of course, that Derrida wants to bring ol’ Heideger into this discussion). Heidegger seems to avoid the strict dichotomy drawn between these two translations of “life” and what Derrida wants us to see is that Heidegger was on to the problem that an over- emphasis on rationality or biology (Kant’s nous and phenomena?) misses the humanity of man. The major issue Derrida takes with Agamben is his desire to term this “bio-politics” as a “modern” invention. For Derrida, this is the problem of metaphysics he has been throwing into question since the early writings—the problem with thinking the history of the event as a singular event, discreet and easily located on a linear temporal schema. While this aspect of Derridean thought is often difficult to get our heads around, what Derrida asks us to consider is that we need to re-think history as linear and that there can be one “founding decision.” In the experience of this doubt, then, we have a responsibility—a responsibility to question our own desire for this ground.

I might have more to say about this text later.

“Of inward selves make outward free ” : Hegel’s Beautiful Soul and Christ’s Non-Action in _Paradise Regained_

Since its first publication in 1671, critics have debated what exactly happens in Milton’s brief epic Paradise Regained. Scholars have especially found the poem’s climactic “pinnacle scene” problematic, in which Jesus refuses Satan’s temptation to prove his divine nature by risking his earthly body. At stake is the ambiguous relation between Jesus’ knowledge of his divinity and whether or not the hero’s action at the pinnacle reveals a truly human example of piety, or whether Jesus’ decision is informed by and guided by supernatural powers . Equally troubling for readers is the hero’s apparent non-action. That is, Jesus’ decision not to act throughout the poem has lead critics such as Northrop Frye to categorize Milton’s character as “a pusillanimous quietest in the temptation of Parthia, an inhuman snob in the temptation of Rome, a peevish obscuranist in the temptation of Athens.” Much critical attention lately has focused on offering possible solutions to this ambiguity of Milton’s treatment of Jesus as Theanthropos (“God-man”). Recent critical work has offered explanations of Jesus’ non-action in relation to Milton’s historical ties to the enthusiastic religious movements of the seventeenth century; his vexed affiliation with the defeated radicals after the collapse of the Good Old Cause; and Milton’s specific theological beliefs as evinced in religious tracts such as De Doctrine Christina. While these specific historical and theological relationships are of course important to bear in mind in any reading of Milton’s poetry, I would like to propose an alternate reading of Milton’s character of Jesus that situates the hero of Paradise Regained as a literary manifestation of Hegel’s concept of the “beautiful soul.”

Hegel introduces the concept of the “beautiful soul” in the final section of the “Morality” subheading in the Phenomenology’s description of “Spirit.” As a moment of the coming into existence of Absolute Spirit, the beautiful soul is a manifestation of the antithesis between thought and being, between immediate self-knowledge and external reality, and between pure internalized moral contemplation and its reciprocal actualization in the realm of finite human action. It is a form of moral consciousness that has absorbed a transcendental sense of duty into itself and it becomes a static and empty form of consciousness that refuses to commit to action. I read the conflict between internalized divinity and external action of Milton’s Jesus in Paradise Regained as one literary articulation of this phase of the emergence of Absolute Spirit. Such a reading is beneficial in both proposing a concrete articulation of Hegel’s concept the beautiful soul as he presents it in the Phenomenology , and in offering an original contribution to the ongoing conversation surrounding Jesus’ non-action in Milton’s ambiguous brief epic.

The beautiful soul is an articulation of “pure duty” that “retreats into itself, and is aware that being is its own self, in which what is actual is at the same time pure knowing and pure duty…and knows its immediate individuality to become pure knowing” (§632). In Hegel’s conceptualization, this is a “consciousness which thinks of duty and reality as contradictory” (§637). This “pure duty” is a wholly internal and solipsistic detachment from action in the world of external finite action. Hegel anthropomorphizes the beautiful soul as one who thinks, “ I act morally when I am conscious of performing only pure duty and nothing else than that; this means, in fact, when I do not act” (§ 637). As an “empty abstraction of pure thought” (§637),
“Its consciousness finds its truth in “the immediate certainity of itself” (§637), the beautiful soul divorces pure thought from being; or objective reality from subjective experience. As external reality and subjective relation to this finite world remain fissured, the “self does not attain to an actual existence. It lacks the power to make itself a Thing and to endure [mere] being. It lives in dread of besmirching the splendor or its inner being by action and an existence…it flees from contact with the actual world” (§658).

The internal condition of pure duty’s truth is an unmediated relationship to this mental law. As such, the beautiful soul’s attachment to pure duty is a “pure self-identical knowing…the absolute universal” (§639). As an abstract universal, the beautiful soul’s enslavement to pure duty is an articulation of its internal unity with a transcendent God: “The ‘beautiful soul’ is its own knowledge of itself in its pure, transparent unity—the self-consciousness that knows this pure knowledge as pure inwardness of Spirit. It is not only the intuition of the Divine but the Divine’s intuition of itself” (§795). However, the beautiful soul’s unmediated relationship with the Divine lacks the necessary antitheses attained through mutual recognition with another external to this self-consciousness. “Being-for-another”, or acting in the finite world of human action, would allow the beautiful soul to move out of the sphere of mere abstract universality by engaging with the human world of action (§640). Hegel writes that this moral consciousness requires a “moment of enduring reality, the moment of being recognized and acknowledged by others” (§ 640). For Hegel in the Phenomenology up to and including this section, we have seen that the dialectic of the emergence of self-consciousness moves from universal and unmediated identity, to a relation to and recognition in/of an external Other, followed by a return to that initial universality that now contains the previous moment of opposition and recognition in the Other. In the case of the moment of the beautiful soul, the infinite Divine has to recognize and be recognized by the finite world of human action in order to return to its universality in an experience that is no longer solipsistic and abstract.

This mediation between the finite sphere of human action and the beautiful soul’s abstract, immediate identification with the Divine is necessary in order for pure duty to actualize itself in reality. In order to complete the dialectic and move forward to a manifestation of Absolute Spirit, this moral consciousness must synthesize abstract dogma with practical moral action through the recognition of itself in the wholly Other. Yet the moment of the beautiful soul remains static:
Here, then, we see self-consciousness withdrawn into its innermost being, of which all externality as such, has vanished—withdrawn into the contemplation of the I = I, in which this ‘I’ is the whole of the essentiality and existence…what it is for itself, and what is for it intrinsic and what is for its existence, have evaporated into abstractions…consciousness exists in its poorest form, and the poverty which constitutes its sole possession is itself a vanishing. (§657)

For Hegel, the beautiful soul’s unwillingness to taint the purity of its immediate identification with the Divine leaves this manifestation of consciousness in a precarious position of possible total loss of self: “In this transparent purity of its moments, an unhappy, so-called ‘beautiful soul,’ its light dies away within it, and it vanishes like a shapeless vapour that dissolves into thin air” (§658). Thus, in its refusal to tarry with external reality, the beautiful soul loses its being in- itself in its inability to enter into the fallen human realm of sin.






We see this moment of the beautiful soul in Paradise Regained, as Milton recounts the Biblically inspired story of Jesus’ temptation by Satan during his 40 days of fasting in the wilderness. The nature of Satan’s temptations continuously draw upon human weakness and natural impulses, especially the biological drive of hunger. However, Satan’s preoccupation with Jesus’ human needs and desires is in direct conflict with the hero’s habitual recourse to moral duty and an internalized direct relationship with Divine law. While Satan attempts to engage Jesus’ weakness as a human being, the real conflict remains in the realm of pure thought. From the initial invocation of Book I of the brief epic, Milton alerts his reader that the previous battle against evil manifest in his earlier Paradise Lost (1667), has now made a marked turn inward, shifting from the earthly world of Eden to “tell of deeds/ Above heroic” (I. 15-16). Jesus’ battle with Satan is not like the previous epic conflict of Paradise Lost, and the whole of the struggle is focused on the hero’s subjectivity, as in the real wilderness of the setting in Jesus’ conscience: “Into himself he descended” (II. 112).

The disparity between Jesus’ human and divine natures is continuously questioned by the infernal tempter. In Book I, Satan struggles to comprehend the dual nature of Jesus: “ Who is this we must learn, for man he seems/ In all his linaments, though in his face/ The glimpses of his Father’s glory shine” (91-93). In the poem’s final Book, Satan again skeptically questions the possibility that Jesus is singular in existing simultaneously as both man and God when he asks, “In what degree or meaning thou art call’d/ Son of God, which bears no single sense;/ The Son of God I also am or was” (IV. 316-318).

More than this though, Satan’s temptations and Jesus’ responses of non-action based on internalized moral duty evince this contradiction between the human and Divine. Capitalizing on his estimation of Jesus’ human hunger pains, Satan tempts Jesus, “ But if thou be the Son of God, Command/ That out of these hard stones be made thee bread” (I. 342-343). Jesus response negates his relationship to the fallen human world of biological instinct, and insists instead on a strict sense of duty to God’s law: “ Think’st thou such force in Bread? Is it not written/ …Man lives not by Bread only, but each Word/ Proceeding from the mouth of God” (I. 348-350). Similarly in Book II, Satan calls upon Jesus’ as a human subject “unknown, unfriended, low of birth,/ A Carpenter thy Father known, thy self/ Bred up in poverty/… Lost in a Desert here and hunger-bit” (413-416). After Satan tempts Jesus with wealth here, Jesus’ response again eschews the common human drive to garner riches--“ Extol not Riches then, the toyl of Fools” (II. 544)—and insists rather on a kingdom within, in congruence with his internalized and immediate faithfulness to moral duty:

…He who reigns within himself, and rules
Passions, Desires, and Fears, is more a King…
But to guide the nations in the way of truth
By saving Doctrine, and from errour lead
To know, and knowing worship God aright,
Is yet more Kingly, this attracts the Soul,
Governs the inner man, the nobler part,
That the other only ov’r the body reigns… II. 468-469, 674-679 [emphasis mine]

Here, and in other moments throughout the poem, Jesus evinces a direct, unmediated relationship with Divine law and a commitment to moral duty. He combats Satan’s temptations, “ The Law of God I read” (I. 207); consults only his own “ inward Oracle” in making his decisions (I. 463); completely abandons any human temptation of hunger when presented by Satan with a bounteous feast, because his “heart is set on high demands” (II.409); and decries the temptation of human knowledge as an “empty cloud” (IV. 321), because he has a immediate relation to the divine light of God’s knowledge, which transcends this fallen form of learning offered by the tempter.

Not only do Satan’s temptations highlight the disparity between Jesus’ as a human agent and his immediate sense of duty to himself as Divine, but the series of temptations leading up to the final enticement to prove his divinity through the sacrifice of his human body in the pinnacle scene are explicitly coded as temptations for Jesus to act. Whereas Jesus is continually represented as favoring passivity, temperance, and patience, Satan’s resolutions in the poem are specifically categorized by his decisive desire to act quickly and steadfastly. He advises his infernal counsel in Book I, “ And now too soon for us the circiling hours/ This dreaded time have compast, wherein we/ Must bide the stroke of that long threatn’d wound” (58-59). In Book II, he instructs (in marked contrast to the long debate with the fallen angels of PL Book II) that the fiendish angels have time for “no long debate” (95) and must act immediately, because “no time was then/For long indulgence to their fears or grief” (109-110).

Opposed to Satan’s repeated refusal of delay, Jesus’ responses to his tempter’s enticements highlight the hero’s refusal to act. Toward the climax of the poem, Satan questions Jesus’ repeated passivity and his refusal to be involved in the sphere of earthly action:

…thy Kingdom though foretold
By prophet or by Angel, unless thou
Endeavor, as thy Father David did,
Thou never shall obtain; prediction still
In all things, and all men, supposes means,
Without means us’d, what it predicts revokes. III.351-356 [emphasis mine]

Exasperated by the failure of each of his temptations, Satan grows more impatient as the poem reaches its close, and before his final attempt to force Jesus to act, demands proof that Jesus is the Theanthropos. He asserts that this final temptation will allow him, “Therefore to know what more thou art the man,/ Worth naming Son of God by voice of Heav’n” (IV. 539-540), and Satan’s conflation of “man” and “Son of God” here reinforces the ambiguity that runs throughout the poem and that will culminate in the climax to follow. His final enticement is for Jesus to prove that he is in fact the divine incarnation of God within an earthly body by destroying this human vessel, saving himself with his transcendent powers: “ Cast thyself down; safely if Son of God” (IV. 555-556). Milton describes Jesus immediate response: “ to whom thus Jesus: also it is written,/Tempt not the Lord thy God, he said and stood” (IV. 561-562). Jesus replies by quoting the written word of God in his reiteration of one the Ten Commandments given to God’s chosen people. This response indicates his sense of duty and adherence to the strict letter of the law. But this seemingly external law, given to Moses in the Old Testament, I argue is evidence rather of his immediate Divine intuition, because when Jesus asserts, “Tempt not the Lord thy God,” it is unclear whether or not he refers to “God” as his father who has decreed this duty or to himself as the incarnation of the Divine in flesh. Like Hegel’s beautiful soul, Jesus refuses to enter the earthly realm of sin and will not act. He preserves his immediate relation to the Divine by refusing to taint his perfection through action in the fallen world. In the poem’s great paradox that has troubled critics for four hundred years, Jesus stands upon the pinnacle unmoved, and his ambiguous response does not prove either his humanity or divinity, because he refuses to engage with the Other in Satan. There is no mutual recognition or dialectic between the finite fallen world and the divine. Jesus remains unmoved and in strict opposition to Satan, who “smitten with amazement fell/…Throttl’d at length in the Air, expir’d and fell” (IV. 563,569).

In the Phenomenology, Hegel’s beautiful soul actualizes its purely internalized sense of duty through mutual recognition of its Other in external reality and the process of reconciliation and forgiveness. After this engagement with the Other through action in the finite world, the immediately divine returns to itself:

It returns from its external actual existence back into itself as essential being, and therein the universal consciousness thus recognizes itself. The forgiveness which it extends to the other is the renunciation of itself, of its unreal essential being which it put on a level with that other which was real action…Through this externalization, this knowledge which in its existence is self-discordant, returns to the unity of the self. It is the actual ‘I’, the universal knowledge of itself in its absolute opposite, in the knowledge which remains internal, and which, on account of the purity of its separated being-within-itself, is itself completely universal. (§670-671)

This “self-sundering or stepping- forth into existence” (§796) is the necessary step the beautiful soul must take in order to actualize what had previous remained merely abstract duty. Only in this way it “remains identical with itself, and, in its complete externalization and opposite, possesses the certainty of itself; it is God manifest in the midst of those who know themselves in the form of pure knowledge” (§671) [emphasis mine]. Yet, in Paradise Regained this “self-sundering” does not yet occur. In the poem, Jesus remains static in the moment of moral consciousness Hegel calls the beautiful soul. This ultimate moment of God’s manifestation on earth in the Divine’s recognition of the fallen world of sin and the reconciliation of the two will only be possible in Jesus’ death on the cross which awaits. This is the crucifixion of Jesus foretold by the Father in Paradise Lost, Book XII as the culmination of synthesis between the transcendent and earthly that “Shall bruise the head of Satan”(430). It is only through the mutual recognition of the finite world of the flesh in Jesus’ death and his infinite divinity revealed through his resurrection that makes possible the ultimate act of forgiveness that Hegel describes as the appearance of Absolute Spirit.

However, for Hegel, all stages in the coming-to-be of Absolute Spirit are necessary, and I argue we can read this manifestation as Christ as “beautiful soul” as such a necessary moment that initiates the actual engagement with humanity that will culminate in the crucifixion and resurrection to come. After the fall of Satan from the pinnacle, Milton describes the subsequent actions of Jesus in specifically human terms. He descends to a bounteous feast which satisfies the hunger and thirst Satan attempted to exploit throughout the poem. Then, the celestial choir sings of Jesus’ humanity and his destiny to soon be fulfilled: “ Hail Son of the most High, heir of both worlds,/ Queller of Satan, on thy glorious work/ Now enter, and begin to save mankind” (IV. 633-635) [emphasis mine].

Thus even though the character of Jesus manifests an articulation of Hegel’s beautiful soul that remains static in its immediate unity with the divine and strict adherence to internalized duty in the action of the poem, Milton foreshadows the reconciliation of pure Divine thought and being that will occur in the reconciliation of mankind’s sins in the crucifixion. As a necessary phase in the emergence of God in Absolute Spirit, in the poem’s final lines Milton provides evidence that Jesus will exceed this static articulation of moral consciousness as he leaves the pinnacle to begin his work that will allow him to engage with the fallen world—not trough his divine intuition of abstract duty-- but trough his explicit humanity: “ hee unobserv’d/ Home to his Mother’s house private return’d” (IV. 638-639).