VIOLENCE IN THE STATE OF EXCEPTIONattempt to appropriate divine violence within the sphere of politics and law. Thus, while
Schmitt defends a sovereign decision, in which he recognizes the theologicalcreatio ex
nihilo, Benjamin attempts to expose this decision as an unjustifiable act of violence. Rep-
resentatives of this interpretation argue that Schmitt decides in favor of law and order, in
which he recognizes the hidden workings of salvation, whereas Benjamin sides with the
revolution, in which he sees the embodiment of a law-destroying violence that alone does
justice to the impossibility of anticipating redemption.^12
Representatives of the second interpretation (Suzanne Heil, Wolfgang Fietkau, Mi-
chael Makropoulos, et al.) suggest that Benjamin’s political theology is comparable to
Schmitt’s because he eventually risks abandoning his strict anti-theocratic approach for a
more positive ‘‘theologization of revolutionary politics.’’^13 According to this interpreta-
tion, Benjamin’s ‘‘theological-anarchistic program of abolishing the law’’ is in danger of
becoming the mirror image of Schmitt’s polemic against the law in favor of the exception,
onto which the promise of redemption is projected.^14 In the revolutionaries’ law-destroy-
ing violence, Benjamin recognizes the ‘‘sparks of a spontaneous ontological evidence,’’
which can only be explained as brief instances of a ‘‘theological revelation.’’^15 Thus, repre-
sentatives of this second interpretation suggest that Benjamin, like Schmitt, acknowledges
the possibility of a direct manifestation of divine violence in the juridico-political sphere.
The first interpretation fails to do justice to a certain conceptual ambivalence in
Schmitt’s political theology. On the one hand, Schmitt rejects the notion that after secu-
larization a juridico-political order can provide the justification for, or prove the necessity
of, its establishment in theological terms. Instead, the sovereign decision, which founds
and guarantees the juridico-political order, always extends beyond itself into a normative
openness. ‘‘The decision,’’ Schmitt writes, ‘‘is, considered normatively, born out of noth-
ing.’’^16 On the other hand, Schmitt recognizes the inclination of the political community
to represent itself in terms of a redemptive truth, which in fact denies this normative
openness. When, in the wake of secularization, awareness of a lack of legitimacy becomes
unbearable, the need arises for an embodiment of the community, which can again pro-
vide certainty. This need results in the tendency to reason away the normative openness
from which the sovereign decision, as well as the political, stems. The sovereign decision
can no longer be undetermined and open—can perhaps no longer be a real ‘‘decision’’ at
all—but appears as the actualization of a mystical unity.^17
Against this background, the first interpretation is not false but clearly one-sided: it
explains only the second aspect of Schmitt’s political theology, that is, his understanding
of the juridico-political order as the embodiment of a mystical unity. It ignores the first
aspect, that is, his conceptualization of the political as a normative openness, which no
worldly power can appropriate. The need for sovereign decisions and the inevitable return
of the political actually reveal the impossibility of forcing a mystical body into juridico-
political substance. Positive laws, Schmitt suggests, need sovereign decisions because they
fail to prescribe the rules unequivocally. This is no temporary failure, but a permanent
PAGE 191191.................16224$ $CH7 10-13-06 12:34:54 PS