Theologizing Beyond State Violence (Part II)
On the Other Side of Critique: Stateless and Fugitive Possibilities
About the author: Christopher Choi is currently a postdoctoral research associate at the University of Virginia. His research engages modern religious thought, the philosophy of religion, and Black Studies. Most recently, his dissertation critically examined the intersection of philosophical and theological doctrines of state power with antiblackness and discourses on slavery. His scholarly interests include political theology, the theology of James Cone and Karl Barth, the thought of W. E. B. De Bois, German idealism and Romanticism, and modern Jewish philosophy.
This post is the second of a three-part series titled Theologizing Beyond State Violence. The series briefly gestures toward how theology might both critically engage and envision life beyond state violence. My previous post, “We have to talk about state violence,” highlighted the critical power of Karl Barth’s engagement with the state and its power of force. Confronting the destruction wrought by the militarism, revolutions, and reactionary violence in the wake of World War 1, Barth formulated a powerful critique of state violence as forged from humanity’s idolatrous rebellion against God and the result of a stolen right [Recht] to violence in the 1918 edition to his Epistle to the Romans.
The critical capacities of theology are in urgent need of reimagination and practice. As the incoming US presidential administration vows mass deportation, we must consider what it would mean for the state to seize, confine, and transport perhaps millions of bodies. We have to critically interrogate an already broken, violent, and antiblack carceral and police system, which we can anticipate will be further weaponized under the incoming presidential administration. Beyond our borders, theology is urgently pressed to address the continued slaughter and deprivation of stateless Palestinians in the ongoing decimation of Gaza.
In this post, however, I make the case that alongside that critique, theology has another, perhaps more important, task: to speak a positive word concerning the social lives lived beneath this violence. As Kant stated in his seminal theorization of critique, the crucial task is not merely “negative” but “positive” in function—to unearth what would otherwise remain buried “treasure.”1 The “treasure” I am speaking of are the futures envisioned at the extreme limits of violence, which find in the given sociopolitical landscape not a field of possibility but a death trap. Theology must protest the genocidal destruction of the Gazan landscape. Still, it must also speak about those possibilities of sociality, care, and survival that, finding no refuge on the hostile terrain, can only be stolen, hidden away. In its critique of the state’s violent grip and conditioning of the terrain, theology should also speak of possibilities and their eschatological content, which are not planted securely on the ground but take place in flight and fugitivity.
Barth insists that theological reflection must turn to the grounds of possibility, specifically how the ground is secured, stabilized, cultivated, and regulated by the state's sovereignty. In the face of mounting crises, Barth pronounces that the eschatological pressure of the resurrection propels the subject into a restless, critical engagement with this ground. “Grace digs sin up by its roots,” he writes in his 1922 Römerbrief.2 By the power of divine grace, we too “are set in motion,”3 “mov[ing] and tarry[ing] in negation.”4 In his tarrying in negation, Barth advances a theopolitical critique of the state, its claim to monopolized violence, and its sovereign management over the grounds of possibility. Barth argues that the state is the apocalyptic beast described in the Book of Revelation (Rev 11:7, 17:8), which emerges from the abyss. Problematizing the doctrine that the state secures and guarantees a stable basis for peaceable sociopolitics, Barth asserts that lying beneath this Beast is not a solid foundation but a flimsy surface suspended over a yawning chasm of nothingness.5
Barth’s capacity to speak about what exists beneath this foundation, however, is constrained by his understandable, concerned preoccupation with a contemporary phenomenon: revolutionary socialism. Particularly in his early writing, Barth developed his account of Christian political witness in conscious opposition to revolutionary ideology. While sharing Lenin’s contention that the state was a “machine for maintaining the rule of one class over another,” Barth diverged sharply with the former’s call to “place this machine in the hands of the [proletariat] class that is to overthrow the power of capital” and to “destroy all exploitation.”6 Revolutionary socialism for Barth was an act of human presumption, the wresting into human hands of what is God’s alone, namely the reversal and recreation of the fallen world. It aims to “remove the existing ordinances [Ordnungen], in order that he may erect in their place the new right.”7 As he writes in his 1922 Römerbrief, “We find in the Epistle a direct denial of Revolution.”8
Rejecting the presumptuousness of revolution, Barth proposes an alternative route, one he describes as the “NOT-break[ing]” of the state and the order it establishes and regulates.9 In light of the heavenly “state and revolution,” the current state, while evil, is granted a divine “function” [Amt] and “right of existence” [Daseinsrecht].10 Under the sovereign management of God, the “beast from the abyss” is simultaneously and, more importantly, a “minister of God” (Rom:13:4),11 representative of God’s justice and wrath.12 By the dialectic of divine grace, the state's coercive powers, initially in revolt against God’s kingdom, come to play a protective role, securing the requisite order and stability to guarantee the possibility of Christian witness.
Even while critiquing the idolatrous and violent foundations of the state, his dialectic returns to the affirmation that the state is by divine decree both the normative order of ethical life and the structure in which political action is to take place. Ultimately, Barth’s “beast from the abyss” resembles Hobbes’ Leviathan, a centralized power whose monopoly of force serves as the precondition for civil society. While itself evil, the state secures a relatively stable and secure ground by suppressing and holding at bay what Barth claims is an inevitable tendency toward unchecked violence, chaos, and anarchy, a lordless disorder. “Injustice, capriciousness, and brutality from above must counteract injustice, capriciousness from below.”13 Protest and critique are essential elements of this proclamation. Still, these are to remain “healthy” and “restrained,” which is to say, within the field of sociopolitical possibility established under and according to state power.
Barth’s theological imagination was understandably preoccupied when writing the Römerbrief with the question of revolution. But his anti-revolutionary account of sociopolitics has unfortunate implications for my present concern: those sociopolitical possibilities that I have called “stateless” or “fugitive.” His insistence that the civil sphere is the prescribed locus of political action while excluding the option of revolution simultaneously seems to exclude what Saidiya Hartman calls “politics without a locus,” which finds no security or shelter on the sociopolitical landscape of the state but must be lived and practiced subterraneously or in flight.14 It seems that what lies below the ground remains for Barth a source of threat in need of the “governing, chastising, and bridling” [regiert, züchtigt und Zaume hält] of the state.
Frantz Fanon describes this underbelly of civil society as a “zone of nonbeing” or of “a real hell.”15 Seeming to anticipate the decimated and deprived landscape of the Gaza Strip, he writes, “[this] sector . . . is a disreputable place inhabited by disreputable people. You are born anywhere, anyhow. You can die anywhere, from anything. It’s a world with no space, people are piled on top of each other, the shacks squeezed tightly together . . . a famished sector, hungry for bread, meat, shoes, coal, and light.”16 But it is from this zone, this “hell” that “an authentic upheaval can be born.”17 Can theology articulate the possibilities of such an “upheaval,” of social life lived under but reaching beyond state violence? Can theology speak to these possibilities in terms other than as a pathologized threat of anarchy in need of policing, a social horizon unmoored from the supposed need for state violence? Perhaps we must look elsewhere than in Barth’s corpus for answers.18
Immanuel Kant, The Critique of Pure Reason, ed. and trans. Paul Guyer and Allen Wood (Cambridge University Press, 2013), BXXV.
Karl Barth, The Epistle to the Romans, trans. Edwyn C. Hoskyns (Oxford University Press, 1968), 190–191. Henceforward Römerbrief II.
Barth, Römerbrief II, 30.
Barth, Römerbrief II, 42.
Barth, Römerbrief II, 511.
Vladamir Lenin, “The State: A Lecture Delivered at the Sverdlov University, July 11, 1919,” in V. I. Lenin, Collected Works, Vol. 29, trans. & ed. George Hanna (Progress Publishes, 1974), 488.
Lenin, “The State”, 480.
Barth, Römerbrief II, 477.
Barth, Römerbrief II, 477.
Karl Barth, Der Romerbrief (Erste Fassung) 1919, ed. Hermann Schmidt, vol. 16, Karl Barth Gesamtausgabe (Theologischer Verlag Zurich, 1985), 42. Henceforward, Römerbrief I.
Barth, Römerbrief II, 475.
Barth, Römerbrief II, 475.
Barth, Römerbrief II, 502. [nach göttlicher Anordnung muß Ungerechtigkeit, Willkür und Roheit von oben der Ungerechtigkeit, Willkür und Roehit von unten.]
Saidiya Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-Making in Nineteenth-Century America (Oxford University Press, 1997), 50-51.
Frantz Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, trans. Charles Lam Markmann (Pluto Press, 2008), 2.
Frantz Fanon, Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (Grove Press, 2004), 4. “The colonized’s sector [la zone habitée] . . . is a disreputable place inhabited by disreputable people. You are born anywhere, anyhow. You can die anywhere, from anything. It’s a world with no space, people are piled on top of each other, the shacks squeezed tightly together . . . a famished sector, hungry for bread, meat, shoes, coal, and light.”
Fanon, Black Skin, White Masks, 2.
I recognize that in the limited space of this post, I have only covered a fragment of Barth’s corpus. But Barth’s theology regarding the state and state violence remained fairly consistent throughout his career, up until the end of the Church Dogmatics. In Volume 4 (The Doctrine of Reconciliation), for example, Barth describes the state as the “supreme guardian of all law and order,” which it both establishes and makes “valid.” The state guarantees the “place” of the Church and the sphere of its activity. “...as the possessor of sovereignty in its own sphere, and the supreme guardian of all law and order established and valid within it, the state guarantees an appropriate place to the Church.” Karl Barth, Church Dogmatics IV/2: The Doctrine of Reconciliation, ed. G. W. Bromiley and T.F. Torrance, trans. G.W. Bromiley et al. (T&T Clark, 2010), p. 691.