INTRODUCTIONchurch ‘‘cannot not be’’ or ‘‘never dies’’ (ecclesia nulla esse non potest,ecclesia numquam
moritur).
The exclamation ‘‘Le roi est mort, vive le roi’’ echoes the insight that sovereignty is
not primarily tied to the individual king’s body (which may die, fall ill, etc.), but to the
political body, the body politic (which cannot die, even though it relies on serial incarna-
tion in one person at a time)—a situation, we might add, that has reversed itself in mod-
ern parliamentary democracy, where all too often the individual functionary (e.g., the
president) outlives the demise of his auratic authority and hence credibility well before
his mandate is officially over. Examples abound.^101 Then again, former presidents may
acquire universal admiration as elder statesmen, towering above all parties, after their de
facto tenure has expired.^102
Pranger takes up the Augustinian model, which, in a sense, extends to Shakespeare,^103
by focusing on its temporal dimension, thus relating (as Nancy does) the question of the
political, of politics, to that of ‘‘finitude.’’ Noting that autobiography and historiography
assume that ‘‘inside historical sources and throughout the succession of events and experi-
ences can be construed identities, both personal and corporate, that are capable of resist-
ing the disintegration of time,’’ Pranger zooms in on the specific ways in which the
ConfessionsandThe City of Godaddress transience, both as a theme and in their very
mode of presentation (p. 113). In both works, he notes, the individual self and its voice,
as well as the body politic and its institutions, depend for their shaky existence—
characterized by personal sin and skepticism concerning communal forms—on the suste-
nance of their Creator, that is to say, on grace and authority. In a nutshell, we find here
a disenchanted view of the foundations of the modern state, even of secularism, ‘in that
the institutions of the civil community are seen as infected with sin and merely as means
to overcome the state of nature and to ward off chaos.
Pranger suggests that it seems as if ‘‘the ghosts of the unresolved aporias of time,
discussed in book 11 of theConfessions, have come back to haunt Augustine’s attempts at
‘making history’ ’’ (p. 118). More succinctly, the relationship between the earthly and
heavenly cities is far from obvious. The latter is not simply the Platonic idea of which the
former is but a shadowy image: ‘‘It is time that prevents the city of God from materializing
as a lesser copy of a fuller original’’ (p. 119). History, including the history of political
institutions, is thus not so much ambiguous as it is fathomless. As Pranger rightly con-
cludes: ‘‘inside thesaeculum, we have no reason to expect the durability of a mystical
body’’ (p. 120). And yet the heavenly city, far from being a mere idea, may insinuate its
presence anywhere, anytime, as a ‘‘voice exorcising the invading, alien night’’ (pp. 120–21).
We would thus be dealing with an internal division of—a principle of contestation
within—the political-juridical realm, which allows sovereignty to come into its own, to
exert its power, precisely by withholding itself at an a priori indeterminable but nonethe-
less decisive point in time and space. The lofty essence of the political and the mundane
struggle of the politics of the everyday likewise draw their meaning and function from
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